Sarah Palin uses Twitter to slam her critics

Here's the above-the-fold view of today's Washington Times. As you can see, the top story isn't simply that Sarah Palin attacked her critics — it's that she did it via Twitter.

The newspaper editors evidently thought enough of the medium to put it in the headline.

If Palin had issued a press statement or made a radio/TV appearance, would it have appeared in the headline?

The declining value of moral values

Graphic taken from Business Week. Click to enlarge.

Given the sorry state of the economy, it's no wonder that voters have shifted their priorities.

The number saying moral values is the most important issue in a presidential election fell from 27 percent in November 2004 to 10 percent in April 2009. The number who said Iraq/Afghanistan dropped from 22 percent to 4 percent.

Down with NAT$ BUCK$

Last year, I documented my many problems trying to buy Washington Nationals tickets from their downtown store.

Well, they've closed that store.

But it's a new season, so I have some new complaints pertaining to the NAT$ BUCK$ system:

• Not all vendors accept NAT$ BUCK$. For instance, they cannot be used at Dip 'n Dots. Or many of the beer kiosks.
• The cashiers hand the used NAT$ BUCK$ back to you after a purchase and mix them together, meaning you don't know which ones have money left and which ones are used up.
• Prior to a purchase, the cashiers cannot tell you how much money is left on your cards. You have to commit to the purchase first.

Marnie passes along a complaint of her own: the team store has only one small mirror. This is a huge store, mind you, that holds over 100 shoppers who are all sizing up shirts and hats. Would it kill them to put up a few more mirrors, she would like to know.

Finally, a complaint about the Gray's Grill food stand, which sells a "crab cake platter" (a crab cake plus french fries) for $12.50. They do not offer a crab cake by itself. In fact, if they run out of fries even while still having a crab cake available — as was the case when I tried to buy one — the policy is to throw the superfluous crab cake in the trash can rather than selling it.

Cris Carter: African-Americans, unlike other people, dislike being bored

A couple years ago, I wrote about the dearth of black baseball players. There were more black players on the Dodgers in 1950 than there are today, I wrote.

On ESPN’s “Mike & Mike” show yesterday, legendary NFL wide receiver Cris Carter tried to explain:

Mike Greenberg: How much attention to you pay to baseball, generally? As a general rule? You watch a lot of baseball or not so much?

Cris Carter: It’s too boring. It’s too slow. And I think it’s a lot of the reason why we don’t see a lot of African-Americans playing baseball. Or they stop at a very young age. Because it’s a slow game. And the other games — football and basketball — are far more exciting.

Greenberg changed the subject, so we never learned why Carter feels that a "boring" game like baseball attracts Hispanics but repels African-Americans.

The Brookland Metro mourns the King of Pop

With all the talk about newspapers versus blogs, it didn't occur to me that I could just get my news from the concrete wall accross from the Metro tracks.

Way to stay timely, graffiti artists.

Repeating a falsehood about George H.W. Bush

Today, the New York Times celebrates the 35th anniversary of the bar code.

Unfortunately, the article's third paragraph repeats a common misconception: In 1992, then-President Bush saw an ordinary grocery scanner and was surprised by the amazing technology.

Not only is that story false, but the New York Times has already issued an apology for originating the bogus report.¹

I suppose this is what happens when newspapers lay off newsroom staffers.


¹According to Snopes, the myth originated in a front-page New York Times story written by Andrew Rosenthal — a reporter who hadn't been present at the event. According to the lone reporter at the 1992 event, Gregg McDonald of the Houston Chronicle, the president was looking at a new type of scanner that could weigh groceries and read mangled and torn bar codes. Newsweek viewed a tape of the event and wrote that Bush appeared "hardly amazed."

A victory for newspapers

How did Gina Smith of The State newspaper know to show up at the Atlanta airport at 6:15 a.m. yesterday to meet Mark Sanford as he walked off an airplane arriving from Buenos Aires?

This tip from an airline passenger on Sanford's aircraft: “We’ve seen your governor on an airplane. He’s not on the Appalachian Trail.” According to the New York Times, the tipster mentioned that Sanford would be returning from Argentina.

Aha! A fellow passenger turned him in — possibly while the airplane was still at the gate in Buenos Aires, given that there was no WiFi on the flight itself.

The type of person who sends out Internet messages while an airplane is preparing for departure but still at the gate, it seems to me, would be more likely than the average person to get news from blogs.

And yet this tipster sent the message to a newspaper, not a blog.

Score one for the legacy news industry!

According to sources in Afghanistan, here's the latest Favre news

Yesterday, a sports blog called ProFootballTalk¹ published an article about Brett Favre secretly signing a contract with the Minnesota Vikings in which the author credited low journalistic standards for his news scoop. The writer bragged that the rumor comes from the troops in Afghanistan: "We can (and will) post rumors, without adhering to the two-source nonsense that paralyzes the flow of information about sports."

Sigh. This is precisely why it is upsetting that newspapers are folding.²

I'm not here to defend the print medium's print medium. Unlike others, I don't care whether the news is printed on paper or distributed online. But we need a legitimate news gathering-and-reporting mechanism.

The United States has a free press, sure, but we also need a credible press. That is, even though newspapers are laying off journalists, we still need the same amount of news.

The Huffington Post, which gets more than 5 million unique visitors per month, has 61 full-time paid staffers.³

If newspaper journalists can find jobs with blogs, great. But a new medium need not have weaker journalistic standards. Facts still need to be checked, for instance.


¹It's a blog, yes, but it struck a partnership earlier this month that makes it part of the NBC empire.
²For much more on why we need newspapers, or at least the journalism that newspapers have provided for over a hundred years, click here.
³According to an article published today on Advertising Age's Mediaworks blog.