CNN Blows Its Boston Bombing Coverage

I have always thought that breaking news was best covered by CNN, since it supposedly had the largest group of reporters all around the globe. But that view was radically altered this week by CNN's inept coverage of the Boston marathon bombing.

What happened was that Friday morning I got up and turned on CNN, and watched it for the better part of an hour. CNN showed the grainy pictures of the two bombing suspects, but had little info beyond that, and I finally turned it to MSNBC.

The difference was like night and day! MSNBC had all kinds of info CNN never presented: they said the two were brothers, that they lived in Cambridge, and that they were from Chechnya. They even had the name of the younger brother.

But beyond this difference in basic info, MSNBC provided important context which CNN neglected to share. For example, CNN kept mentioning the town of Watertown, without saying anything more about it. For all the viewer knew, Watertown could have been a town on the other side of the state from Boston.  But MSNBC, by contrast, provided great context, saying that Watertown was a bedroom community of about 32,000, located just west of Boston.

Part of CNN's problem, I think, is its silly insistence on having its anchors standing in a Boston street, instead of in a studio. News networks like to have reporters on the scene, because I guess they suppose it gives an air of immediacy to the reporting. But to have continuous, hour after hour, coverage being anchored by anchors on the scene makes no sense, and MSNBC's coverage was vastly superior as a result. Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist were superb, anchoring non-stop on Friday morning without a hitch. And let's not forget Pete Williams, the NBC reporter whose coverage was so insightful and clear as to outshine the whole CNN network all by himself.

CNN made specific factual errors, the most outrageous being John King's erroneous report that an arrest had been made, but in this post I wanted to highlight the coverage on the particular morning in which CNN's ineptitude was so clearly brought home to me.

2013 MLB Predictions

NL East -- Nationals, Braves, Phillies, Mets, Marlins

AL East -- Blue Jays, Rays, Red Sox, Yankees, Orioles

Blue Jays acquired high-priced talent in the off-season. This usually leads to achieving below expectations, but with the Sox & Yankees in obvious decline, I have to pick the Jays. The Rays have been  hurt by new rules on drafting, but they should hang on for a year or two before thre inevitable decline sets in.

NL Central -- Reds, Cardinals, Brewers, Pirates, Cubs.

First and last are easy, and the quality of the Cards' organization gives them second. A toss-up for 3rd & 4th.

AL Central -- Tigers, White Sox, Indians, Royals, Twins.

As with the NL Central, a toss-up here for 3rd & 4th.

NL West -- Dodgers, Giants, Diamondbacks, Padres, Rockies.

Dodgers spent big but still might lose out to Giants. A toss-up for 1st & 2nd.

AL West -- Angels, Rangers, A's, Mariners, Astros.

Same as NL West, Angels went all-in but toss-up for 1st & 2nd.

So there you have it. Let the games begin!

Memoir or Memoirs?

If you're like me, you have trouble deciding which of these is the right word to use in a particular situaion. I will offer some thoughts on this issue.

Memoir comes to us from "memoire", the French word for memory. Thus, memoir means one's memory of a particular event. The writer is not claiming to be presenting historical facts, but rather is relating the event as he or she remembers it at the time of writing about it.

"Memoirs", in the plural, would therefore make more sense when referring to an entire book, which presumably consists of a collection of many such remembrances.

It should be noted that memoirs is to be distinguished from autobiography in that an autobiography undertakes to tell about one's entire life, not just a particular group of experiences from that life, as one's memoirs would be. There is also the understanding that in an autobiography the writer has done research and fact-checking to ensure accuracy as much as humanly possible. With one's memoirs the writer is not expected to engage in this sort of research.

The 2013 Baseball Hall of Fame Vote

It is heartwarming that the three steroid cheaters on the ballot for the first time--Bonds, Clemens, and Sosa--all fell far short of the 75% needed for induction into the Hall in this year's voting. And it's not just that they were cheaters; more than that, they all fell short of the character requirements for induction into the Hall. Clemens is a known jerk, ever since he cursed out an umpire in the 1988 playoffs and then denied it afterwards. Sosa is a known cheater, who had the audacity to claim he only "made a mistake" when caught using a corked bat in a game. Bonds is a known anti-social personality, in a game which thrives on conversation.

But the most fundamental way these three losers cheated the game is that they reduced it to something akin to a slow-pitch softball game, where batters tried to hit a home run every time up. No true baseball fan wants to see this malarkey. (Nor do we want to see this ridiculous home run derby which MLB serves up to us the night before the All-Star game.) MLB shares the guilt here in promoting homers as the be-all and end-all of the game, to the great detrment of a game many of us think is beautiful when played as it was meant to be.

The tragedy of this year's voting is that the one guy who is clearly deserving fell short, that being Craig Biggio. Biggio represents all that is right about the game, and all the skills we look for in a superstar--defense, speed, and batting skills. And he was a "team first" guy, playing three different positions as his team needed. Spending his whole career with the same team is a definite plus here. Not that I begrudge any player the right to change teams if he gets to the point where he earns free agency. But showing loyalty to the team which drafted and developed you is an admirable trait, one in short supply in this "me first"' day and age. The good news is that Biggio's percent of the vote was high enough that he will probably make it in next year.

The Rise and Fall of Howard Cosell

I am old enough to remember when, in the mid-1950's, Howard Cosell gave up his job as a successful New York lawyer and began his radio show, "Speaking of Sports". At the time he seemed like a breath of fresh air, trying hard to bring some real journalism to the world of sports. Prior to Cosell, "sports journalism" was an oxymoron, as there was no effort among reporters to be objective and avoid hero worship of the athletes they covered. Cosell later switched to television, and when ABC landed the "Monday Night Football" contract, Cosell was instrumental in making MNF the insitution it became.

Cosell had a running feud with the print reporters, and in fact the title of his third book, "I Never Played the Game", comes from the frequent criticism leveled at Cosell by the writers that he didn't understand sports because "he never played the game". When this book came out in 1985, Cosell was already in a steep downhill slide toward irrelevancy. He had become completely disenchanted with his favorite sports, boxing and football, for reasons he details in the book. In 1982 he announced he would never cover another boxing match because of boxing's inherent brutality, and in 1983 he left Monday Night Football, saying the games all looked the same to him.

As ABC had acquired rights to some major league games, Cosell switched to baseball and was part of ABC's world series announcing team in 1979, 1981, and 1983. I watched those telecasts and Cosell was just awful. He had no feel for baseball, and in his first two books he had made it abundantly clear that he thought baseball was boring and worthless, destroying any credibility he might otherwise have had as a baseball announcer. Mercifully to viewers, ABC took him off baseball in 1985 after this book came out, and replaced him with Tim McCarver, a wonderful announcer who has since become a superstar and is now in the Baseball Hall of Fame for his great broadcasting.

Cosell's shtick was that he felt that "what happened on the field" was not all that interesting. Rather, he prided himself on getting the "stories behind the stories", i.e., talking about what was going on in the players' lives. How ironic, then, that his replacement, Tim McCarver, along with Tim's longtime broadcast partner Joe Buck, has shown us that what happens on the field can be terrible interesting. There is a saying that "baseball is only dull to dull minds", and by his brilliant success McCarver has demonstrated the truth of this aphorism, and the falsity of Cosell’s position.

Also ironic is that Tim McCarver, as an ex-player, was part of the so-called "jockocracy" that Cosell always railed against; Cosell felt that broadcasting jobs should go to people with journalism training, rather than to ex-jocks. McCarver's success shows the shallowness of this strongly-held belief by Cosell.

I recall an interview with Barbara Walters that Cosell did toward the end of his life. Barbara asked him "How do you want to be remembered." Cosell answered, "That's easy, as a good husband, a good father, and a good grandfather." Barbara: "Nothing about career". Cosell: "No, it's not important."

This odd statement really seems contradictory to all the pompous pronouncements Cosell made during his career about how important what he was doing was for the development of sports journalism. If what he was doing was ultimately unimportant, then why did he make such a big fuss about it?

Cosell died in 1995, a recluse during his last years, which seems odd for a person who always prided himself on what a close relationship he had, or at least claimed to have, with some of the people he covered. Sadly, he seems to have revealed himself in his later years to be a complete fraud. One suspects he would have been happier in life had he stuck with his original choice of profession.

A Different Kind of Mandatory Sentencing

The numerous mandatory sentencing laws, under which judges have no flexibility in sentencing defendants, have caused the prison population in the US to balloon to seven times what it was in 1980, so that now the US imprisons its citizens at a higher rate than every other country in the world. Judges hate these mandatory sentencing laws, because it ties their hands, and a fair number of judges have resigned in protest at the injustices they are required to perpetrate. A common example is the girlfriend of a drug dealer, who gets decades in prison along with her boyfriend, even though her involvement in his criminal enterprise was minimal, or tangential, or perhaps even coerced.

One problem mandatory sentencing has caused is the  high cost of this ridiculous level of incarceration. In California it is estimated that it costs $70,000 a year to incarcerate an inmate. The Ohio legislature has taken a novel approach to reducing the runaway cost of all this incarceration. A year ago a new law was enacted which *prohibits* judges from sentencing first-time offenders to prison, when the offense is a low-level felony. As a result, the prison population has already shrunk to the 2007 level.

I sometimes think that whenever a judge sentences a defendant to prison, that judge should be required to give a statement setting out the projected cost to the state of the incarceration. It seems absurd for judges to be able to incur, on behalf of the state, these tremendous costs, with no accountability or consequence. When a judge runs for re-election, the burden his sentencing decisions have placed on the state could then be part of the public record, just like all other government financial information already is public record. Maybe then this "tough on crime" mantra that we constantly hear from candidates could properly be interpreted as "tough on taxpayers' pocketbooks".

Sentence Adverbs

In school I learned that adverbs can modify verbs, adjective, or other adverbs. Never did I hear the term “sentence adverbs”, and it was only recently that I first heard of this concept.

As the name suggests, it is an adverb that modifies the whole sentence, and not a particular word in the sentence. An example is, “Fortunately, Hurricane Isaac missed Tampa and the GOP convention was able to proceed with its business last week. Unfortunately, all decisions had already been made beforehand, and there was no real business to conduct.”

Here the adverbs “fortunately and “unfortunately” are used as sentence adverbs, modifying the whole thought. One could use “It is fortunate that”, or “I think it is fortunate that”, instead of “fortunately”, but obviously the use of one word is preferable to the longer and more awkward phrase that would be needed as a substitute.

So far so good. But the problem comes in when such words are used improperly. A news anchor said “X allegedly killed Y.” Here the use of “allegedly” right before the verb makes it look like it is the verb that is being modified, and this makes no sense, for one cannot be “allegedly killed”. “Allegedly” here is being used as a sentence adverb, and needs to be set off with a comma (if at the beginning of the sentence), or two (if in the middle).

An even worse misuse of “allegedly” occurred in a news report which stated that “X was being charged with allegedly killing Y”. This is total nonsense; X was not being charged with allegedly killing Y, he was being charged with killing Y. The concept of “allegedly” is contained in the verb “charged”, and no further modification is necessary or at all useful. News people seem to be so obsessed with being politically correct that they continue to make these glaring errors.

The number one problem in this area is of course the word “hopefully”, whose careless use is widely castigated. I could say, “Hopefully, you will find this explanation of sentence adverbs helpful”. The problem here is that “hopefully” does not modify anything found in the sentence; it is thrown into the mix solely to convey the writer’s point of view. It is not a real adverb here, and should be replaced with “I hope”, or something similar.

(Some may complain that “hopefully” is a weasel word, in which the writer of speaker uses the passive voice in order to avoid responsibility for the matter at hand. An example is when a president responds to a scandal in his administration, as Reagan once did, by saying “Mistakes were made”. But this is not the real crux of the problem with ”hopefully”.)

While some grammarians have come to accept the use of “hopefully”, the best advice is still to avoid it unless you know your audience is accepting of such casual use of the language. One need not resort to awkward and wooden alternatives like “It is to be hoped”, or “One hopes”, as there are more natural-sounding options available like “Let’s hope”, or “With luck”. Let's hope you can learn to use them instead.