Some of the news that is fit to print

Another dumb DC radio move

One of the most popular radio stations here in DC is WTOP. It is the all news station, which is perhaps most famous for 'weather and traffic together on the 8s' -- meaning they do weather and traffic every 10 minutes. That is a big deal for DC jammed roads and often crappy weather.

WTOP has done very well in recent years to where it is now Washington's most listened to radio station. Not bad.

Well, today, the brain trust at Bonneville International Corp., WTOP's parent company, made the big announcement that they are moving WTOP from the frequency where it has lived since 1946 and thrived in recent years -- 1500 AM -- so they can create something called "Washington Post radio." Then they are moving their popular although un-listenable classical radio station, WGMS, to replace Z-104, which was a modern rock radio station. The moves are so confusing, they actually post a chart so you can keep track of it all!

All of this to make way for Washington Post radio?

Here is their release:

Washington Post Radio to Debut in Late March

Washington, DC -- The Washington Post said on Wednesday that it will develop programming content for a new radio station that will begin broadcasting in the DC region in late March. The newspaper said that it will work with station owner Bonneville International to develop programming for Washington Post Radio, which will broadcast on 107.7 FM and 1500 AM. The new station will occupy the location on the radio dial currently used by 24-hour news station WTOP, which will move to 103.5 FM. "This is a wonderful opportunity for The Washington Post to encourage the radio audience to read more of the newspaper," said Boisfeuillet Jones Jr., the paper's publisher. The new station will draw on content from The Washington Post and feature the paper's editors, reporters and columnists. The station will also broadcast news and commentary from journalists and others outside The Post.

My questions:
1. Why move a radio station which has been remarkably successful -- so successful that it has become a staple of Washington life?
2. Why move your shockingly popular classical music station? (Shocking because WGMS is unlistenable!)
3. If you are creating a new radio station, why not put that on the new frequency? Why shift the stuff that is successful where it is for something that may or may not be successful?
4. Why do I listen to anything but my XM Radio?

And they should listen to me. Remember last year when I crabbed last year when local public radio station WETA decided to dump its daytime classical music for all-news format? Well, guess what? WETA is finding out that the news format isn't working out all that well.

These kinds of things piss people off! You may decide that you have to do it, but you better have a damn good reason... and you should tell people your reason! Don't do this:

"These changes will help us meet the growing needs of the Washington community for news, sports, information, music and emergency services," said Bruce Reese, president and CEO of Bonneville.

Survey says -- BZZZZ! If this was true, they would have just moved WTOP's FM frequency from 107.7, where most people can't hear it anyway, to 103.5. (And yes, classical music fans, if you do listen to WGMS, the first question is why? But now it will be even more difficult to hear that station... although they are promising upgrades.) Moving the FM frequencies might make sense because WTOP is likely to get more listeners then WGMS. If you wanted to make these moves, I would have announced the WGMS-WTOP FM switch today and the upcoming WP radio deal, and then later, after people are comfortable listening to WTOP on the FM dial, later announce the WTOP AM switch.

So maybe I'll follow you over to the new frequency, maybe I won't. We'll just have to see.

Dis-information

This from the WSJ's morning e-mail newsletter:

U.S. Military's Secret Input in Iraqi Media
As part of an information offensive in Iraq, the U.S. military is secretly paying Iraqi newspapers to publish stories written by American troops in an effort to burnish the image of the U.S. mission in Iraq, the Los Angeles Times reports. The articles, written by U.S. military "information operations" troops, are translated into Arabic and placed in Baghdad newspapers with the help of a defense contractor, according to U.S. military officials and documents obtained by the Times. The operation, designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military, is taking place even as U.S. officials are pledging to promote democratic principles, political transparency and freedom of speech in a country emerging from decades of dictatorship and corruption, the Times adds.

How in the world does this happen? We are trying to teach them to be a democracy where there is a free flow of ideas -- by paying to put people's words in their mouths?

Don/Mike's solo

It was pretty amazing radio. Don Geronimo -- or by his real name, Michael Source -- returned to the radio Monday for the first time since the death of his wife, Freda, on the road returning from their second home in Ocean City, Md.

Unlike typical Don & Mike shows, it was just Don -- actually he said it was Mike, going by his real name.

As the WP reports this morning, Geronimo was quite moving.

In a remarkable 75-minute monologue that was part love letter and part eulogy, Geronimo spoke movingly of the woman he married nearly 24 years ago and who became an unlikely star of his nationally syndicated "Don & Mike Show."

Listen to interesting radio...

I am a huge fan of radio. I just love the medium. And I listen to a lot of radio, as you know if you have read this site at all. A few weeks ago, I posted about the death of the wife Don Geronimo, one half of the Don & Mike radio show, which is a DC-radio institution and is syndicated around the country. Much like Howard Stern's wife -- now ex-wife -- Geronimo's wife Freda was a regular part of the show. In fact, she was an important part of the show.

Don and Mike have retooled their show following the Jackson Super Bowl FCC crack-down and it isn't quite as good as it was -- you always get the sense that Don and Mike are not putting on the show that they really want to do. It still is very good and very fun and is a CJD-fav.

Perhaps the best part of the show, much like Howard's show, is when they talk about their own stuff, whether it be their lives or their work or their vacations... or whatever. It may just be stick, but it works. It sounds real. And it makes them a part of your life -- the true power of radio.

Geronimo has been off since his wife was killed in a car accident. Today -- this afternoon starting at 3p ET -- Don returns to talk about Frida in what will be pretty amazing radio. Here in DC, the show can be heard on WJFK-FM at 106.7 FM, but they also stream the show from the station's home page at http://wjfk.com. Geronimo is a pretty amazing radio guy and, if his radio personality is real at all, the only thing he loves more than his radio show is/was his wife. I think it will be amazing stuff.

Freda Wright-Sorce, RIP

Part of my afternoon routine is the Don & Mike radio show, heard in Washington, D.C. on WJFK-FM. Pre-FCC crackdown, the show was essentially a afternoon drive shock-jock show akin to the Howard Stern show. The team, which are now syndicated nationally from here in DC, have toned down their on-air humor, she show is still a lot of fun. And much like Stern's on-air relationship with his then wife, Don Geronimo regularly featured his wife on the program. The best parts of the show are Don & Mike talking about their lives -- personal or professional. That included his relationship with his wife.

Today, I was expecting Don and Mike to be back on the air after a two-week vacation. Instead, there is this news:

Freda Wright-Sorce, the wife of radio personality Don Geronimo and a frequent contributor to the popular nationally syndicated "Don and Mike" show, died in a traffic accident Sunday.

Wright-Sorce, 50, often called in to the comedy show on Washington radio station WJFK known for its outlandish humor and pranks, said Michael Hughes, the station's general manager.

State police said her vehicle was struck head-on Sunday afternoon by a vehicle that crossed the median on Route 90 in an attempt to avoid a pile-up. She died later Sunday at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, hospital spokeswoman Cindy Rivers said.

      The pile-up temporarily closed westbound Route 90, state police said.

It is so strange when somebody dies that I don't know at all yet who I feel like I know. And you can just tell that Don (real name Michael Sorce) and Freda had a very special relationship and that they loved each other. Don had just bought Freda that car as a birthday present for her 50th birthday... something that she blogged about it on the Don & Mike Web site (but which may have been pulled down).

Godspeed, Freda... and Don.

Update: From the Don and Mike Web site... In lieu of flowers please make a donation in the name of Freda Wright-Sorce to the Worcester County Humane Society. It has a form you can use to make contributions... or here is the address:
Worcester Humane Society
P.O. Box 48
Berlin MD 21811

All cards and letters may be sent to
Sorce Family
10800 Main Street
Fairfax, VA 22030

Judith Miller held hostage, Day 3

New York Times reporter Judith Miller is serving her third day in jail for refusing to sell out her sources. I have to say that I was no impressed with her reporting on the pre-Iraq war WMD debate. That being said, she has acted absolutely beyond reproach in this here. There is nothing more important for journalists to have sources that tell them what is going on and they have to trust that they aren't going to be sold out.

Here is the NYT editorial:

Judith Miller Goes to Jail

  

This is a proud but awful moment for The New York Times and its employees. One of our reporters, Judith Miller, has decided to accept a jail sentence rather than testify before a grand jury about one of her confidential sources. Ms. Miller has taken a path that will be lonely and painful for her and her family and friends. We wish she did not have to choose it, but we are certain she did the right thing.

She is surrendering her liberty in defense of a greater liberty, granted to a free press by the founding fathers so journalists can work on behalf of the public without fear of regulation or retaliation from any branch of government.

The Press and the Law

Some people - including, sadly, some of our colleagues in the news media - have mistakenly assumed that a reporter and a news organization place themselves above the law by rejecting a court order to testify. Nothing could be further from the truth. When another Times reporter, M. A. Farber, went to jail in 1978 rather than release his confidential notes, he declared, "I have no such right and I seek none."

By accepting her sentence, Ms. Miller bowed to the authority of the court. But she acted in the great tradition of civil disobedience that began with this nation's founding, which holds that the common good is best served in some instances by private citizens who are willing to defy a legal, but unjust or unwise, order.

This tradition stretches from the Boston Tea Party to the Underground Railroad, to the Americans who defied the McCarthy inquisitions and to the civil rights movement. It has called forth ordinary citizens, like Rosa Parks; government officials, like Daniel Ellsberg and Mark Felt; and statesmen, like Martin Luther King. Frequently, it falls to news organizations to uphold this tradition. As Justice William O. Douglas wrote in 1972, "The press has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme, not to enable it to make money, not to set newsmen apart as a favored class, but to bring to fulfillment the public's right to know."

Critics point out that even presidents must bow to the Supreme Court. But presidents are agents of the government, sworn to enforce the law. Journalists are private citizens, and Ms. Miller's actions are faithful to the Constitution. She is defending the right of Americans to get vital information from news organizations that need not fear government retaliation - an imperative defended by the 49 states that recognize a reporter's right to protect sources.

A second reporter facing a possible jail term, Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, agreed yesterday to testify before the grand jury. Last week, Time decided, over Mr. Cooper's protests, to release documents demanded by the judge that revealed his confidential sources. We were deeply disappointed by that decision.

We do not see how a newspaper, magazine or television station can support a reporter's decision to protect confidential sources even if the potential price is lost liberty, and then hand over the notes or documents that make the reporter's sacrifice meaningless. The point of this struggle is to make sure that people with critical information can feel confident that if they speak to a reporter on the condition of anonymity, their identities will be protected. No journalist's promise will be worth much if the employer that stands behind him or her is prepared to undercut such a vow of secrecy.

Protecting a Reporter's Sources

Most readers understand a reporter's need to guarantee confidentiality to a source. Before he went to jail, Mr. Farber told the court that if he gave up documents that revealed the names of the people he had promised anonymity, "I will have given notice that the nation's premier newspaper is no longer available to those men and women who would seek it out - or who would respond to it - to talk freely and without fear."

While The Times has gone to great lengths lately to make sure that the use of anonymous sources is limited, there is no way to eliminate them. The most important articles tend to be the ones that upset people in high places, and many could not be reported if those who risked their jobs or even their liberty to talk to reporters knew that they might be identified the next day. In the larger sense, revealing government wrongdoing advances the rule of law, especially at a time of increased government secrecy.

It is for these reasons that most states have shield laws that protect reporters' rights to conceal their sources. Those laws need to be reviewed and strengthened, even as members of Congress continue to work to pass a federal shield law. But at this moment, there is no statute that protects Judith Miller when she defies a federal trial judge's order to reveal who told her what about Valerie Plame Wilson's identity as an undercover C.I.A. operative.

Ms. Miller understands this perfectly, and she accepts the consequences with full respect for the court. We hope that her sacrifice will alert the nation to the need to protect the basic tools reporters use in doing their most critical work.

To be frank, this is far from an ideal case. We would not have wanted our reporter to give up her liberty over a situation whose details are so complicated and muddy. But history is very seldom kind enough to provide the ideal venue for a principled stand. Ms. Miller is going to jail over an article that she never wrote, yet she has been unwavering in her determination to protect the people with whom she had spoken on the promise of confidentiality.

The Plame Story

The case involves an article by the syndicated columnist Robert Novak, who revealed that Joseph Wilson, a retired career diplomat, was married to an undercover C.I.A. officer Mr. Novak identified by using her maiden name, Valerie Plame. Mr. Wilson had been asked by the C.I.A. to investigate whether Saddam Hussein in Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger that could be used for making nuclear weapons. Mr. Wilson found no evidence of that, and he later wrote an Op-Ed article for The Times saying he believed that the Bush administration had misrepresented the facts.

It seemed very possible that someone at the White House had told Mr. Novak about Ms. Plame to undermine Mr. Wilson's credibility and send a chilling signal to other officials who might be inclined to speak out against the administration's Iraq policy. At the time, this page said that if those were indeed the circumstances, the leak had been "an egregious abuse of power." We urged the Justice Department to investigate. But we warned then that the inquiry should not degenerate into an attempt to compel journalists to reveal their sources.

We mainly had Mr. Novak in mind then, but Mr. Novak remains both free and mum about what he has or has not told the grand jury looking into the leak. Like almost everyone, we are baffled by his public posture. All we know now is that Mr. Novak - who early on expressed the opinion that no journalists who bowed to court pressure to betray sources could hold up their heads in Washington - has offered no public support to the colleague who is going to jail while he remains at liberty.

Ms. Miller did not write an article about Ms. Plame, but the prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, wants to know whether anyone in government told her about Mr. Wilson's wife and her secret job. The inquiry has been conducted with such secrecy that it is hard to know exactly what Mr. Fitzgerald thinks Ms. Miller can tell him, or what argument he offered to convince the court that his need to hear her testimony outweighs the First Amendment.

What we do know is that if Ms. Miller testifies, it may be immeasurably harder in the future to persuade a frightened government employee to talk about malfeasance in high places, or a worried worker to reveal corporate crimes. The shroud of secrecy thrown over this case by the prosecutor and the judge, an egregious denial of due process, only makes it more urgent to take a stand.

Mr. Fitzgerald drove that point home chillingly when he said the authorities "can't have 50,000 journalists" making decisions about whether to reveal sources' names and that the government had a right to impose its judgment. But that's not what the founders had in mind in writing the First Amendment. In 1971, our colleague James Reston cited James Madison's admonition about a free press in explaining why The Times had first defied the Nixon administration's demand to stop publishing the Pentagon Papers and then fought a court's order to cease publication. "Among those principles deemed sacred in America," Madison wrote, "among those sacred rights considered as forming the bulwark of their liberty, which the government contemplates with awful reverence and would approach only with the most cautious circumspection, there is no one of which the importance is more deeply impressed on the public mind than the liberty of the press."

Mr. Fitzgerald's attempts to interfere with the rights of a free press while refusing to disclose his reasons for doing so, when he can't even say whether a crime has been committed, have exhibited neither reverence nor cautious circumspection. It would compound the tragedy if his actions emboldened more prosecutors to trample on a free press.

Our Bottom Line

Responsible journalists recognize that press freedoms are not absolute and must be exercised responsibly. This newspaper will not, for example, print the details of American troop movements in advance of a battle, because publication would endanger lives and national security. But these limits cannot be dictated by the whim of a branch of government, especially behind a screen of secrecy.

Indeed, the founders warned against any attempt to have the government set limits on a free press, under any conditions. "However desirable those measures might be which might correct without enslaving the press, they have never yet been devised in America," Madison wrote.

Journalists talk about these issues a great deal, and they can seem abstract. The test comes when a colleague is being marched off to jail for doing nothing more than the job our readers expected of her, and of the rest of us. The Times has been in these fights before, beginning in 1857, when a journalist named J. W. Simonton wrote an editorial about bribery in Congress and was held in contempt by the House of Representatives for 19 days when he refused to reveal his sources. In the end, Mr. Simonton kept faith, and the corrupt congressmen resigned. All of our battles have not had equally happy endings. But each time, whether we win or we lose, we remain convinced that the public wins in the long run and that what is at stake is nothing less than our society's perpetual bottom line: the citizens control the government in a democracy.

We stand with Ms. Miller and thank her for taking on that fight for the rest of us.

 

Subtle like a hammer

They say that timing is everything. Well, in the print world, placement is damn important too... as you can see from the cover of the most recent issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Is this an accident? I can't imagine!

Subtle... yet not!

New news

My boss always says, "You can't spell news without new. Therefore news must be new."

Somebody should let the WP know. Just today (second item), the paper has a item about the Amsterdam gay beating of Washington Blade executive editor Chris Crane and his boyfriend. He posted his item on the Blade's blog on May 6. Even I posted on May 9. Hmmmm.

Star Wars: I'm feeling better now

Yes! I'm feeling guilty about having failed to resist the Star Wars hype -- even proclaiming that I would not even see episode III because I was so disgusted with episode II. And I feel guilty that I am just too weak to resist. I'm so weak that I'm now seeing  midnight showing.

But that is why it is always good for there to be people out there who are even freakier then I am. (Thus explains the existence of Jerry Springer.)

This from the WP's Star Wars blog -- yes, you heard that right, a Star Wars blog, which they creatively named the 'Sith' Sense. What a great idea is that?

The line for "Star Wars" at Washington's Uptown Theater has begun. I spoke this morning with line organizer Adrienne Maul-Sari.  That's right, her last name used to be Maul until she got married and decided to hyphenate. She legally changed it after developing an attachment to Darth Maul from "The Phantom Menace."

Ahhh! I'm feeling much better about myself, thank you very much.

AI filibuster

Some press releases are just too good to be true... such as the following from the Concerned Women for America...

What if They Filibustered American Idol?

Washington, D.C. – Concerned Women for America’s (CWA’s) chief counsel Jan LaRue, with tongue firmly in cheek, compared the Senate Democrats’ refusal to give the President’s judicial nominees an up or down vote to the Fox hit TV show, American Idol, in her description of this nightmarish scenario:

Paula Abdul, Simon Cowell and Randy Jackson, the regular judges on Fox’s American Idol, were replaced for one night by none other than Sens. Ted Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and the Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada).

If you think Simon is cold, you should have seen these guys. There was only one contestant on the show. Even though he was a smash hit, millions in the audience were denied the right to vote on the performance of an Italian-American singer named Francis Albert Sinatra.

REID: Why is Fox picking a fight by sending us contestants like this? Why are they refusing to move on to less controversial contestants? They want to make us look like obstructionists. … He’s just giving a big wet kiss to Italians on the far right. AUDIENCE: Shut-up and let us vote!

SCHUMER: Well, his voice is clearly out of the mainstream. The extreme way he expressed the lyric—the extreme snapping of the fingers on his extreme right hand—he’s sending an extremist message to the far-right-handed…He’s obviously pandering to the far-right extremists who want to force extreme music on the rest of us in the mainstream. I mean, how extreme—“The Lady is a Tramp”—a not-so-subtle extremist attack on women’s rights.

AUDIENCE: Shut-up and let us vote!!

KENNEDY: We fought the, ah, Revolutionary War, or, ah, the Civil War or some, ah, war, I didn’t fight but heard about it, so that all singers would finally be protected by the Constitution. But this nation will never be America until we free ourselves from the domination of Italian singers… I have here in my mainstream left hand the lyrics of songs this Sinatra person has sung that reveal a narrow intolerance for the rights of others… That’s Life is clearly an attack on choice.

I'm not exactly sre I could put my tongue into my cheek so easily. After all, it isn't as if the American Idol serves a life term or anything, but one shouldn't focus on specifics in these kinds of things. It's just fun! We'll just leave it at that.
Creativity: B+
Factuality: D-