SHOVELING COAL FOR SATAN

Matt Taibbi’s furious rant about journalists taking potshots at Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11 is well worth reading, more for what it says about journalism than its offhand defense of Moore:

If journalists had courage, they would form unions and refuse to work for any company that made decisions about editorial content based on the bottom line, on profit. Are there individual instances of reporters who quit over this issue? Sure, there are a few. Lowell Bergman walked out on 60 Minutes over this one. And there were those Fox TV reporters in Tampa, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, who famously (and expensively, as it turned out) fell on their swords rather than broadcast a bunch of cuddly bullshit about the Monsanto corporation.
Yes, there are a few isolated vertebrates out there in our business. But it wasn’t like the whole staff of WTVT in Tampa walked out in support of Akre and Wilson. Janitors stick up for each other. Steelworkers stick up for each other. Even camera operators and soundmen stick up for each other. But journalists just sit still in their cubicles with their eyebrows raised, waiting for it all to blow over, in those very rare instances when a colleague walks the plank.

The Pot & The Kettle

This letter ran in Sunday’s Washington Post:

Bradbury vs. Moore
Sunday, June 27, 2004; Page B06
Style’s June 4 Names & Faces column reported that novelist Ray Bradbury is upset about the title of Michael Moore’s new documentary, “Fahrenheit 9/11.” He says that the filmmaker “stole” the title from his novel “Fahrenheit 451.”
Is this the pot calling the kettle black?
The titles of several of Mr. Bradbury’s greatest books are “stolen” from works by other authors, in a manner far more direct than Mr. Moore’s allusion-to-but-not-complete-appropriation-of the Bradbury title.
Cases in point: “Something Wicked This Way Comes” (William Shakespeare); “I Sing the Body Electric!” (Walt Whitman) and “Golden Apples of the Sun” (William Butler Yeats).
ANNIE HUDSON
Austin

Crime Rebate

I was thinking about the criminal behavior of the Bush administration, and its opposition to the International Criminal Court, and it occurred to me that the average American should get some of the benefits of this tilt toward lawlessness. A kind of crime rebate: say two felonies and five misdemeanors.
How would you use your crime rebate?