The Ledes

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

New York Times: “The Rev. Jimmy Swaggart, who emerged from the backwoods of Louisiana to become a television evangelist with global reach, preaching about an eternal struggle between good and evil and warning of the temptations of the flesh, a theme that played out in his own life in a sex scandal, died on July 1. He was 90.” ~~~

     ~~~ For another sort of obituary, see Akhilleus' commentary near the end of yesterday's thread.

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Marie: Sorry, my countdown clock was unreliable; then it became completely unreliable. I can't keep up with it. Maybe I'll try another one later.

 

Commencement ceremonies are joyous occasions, and Steve Carell made sure that was true this past weekend (mid-June) at Northwestern's commencement:

~~~ Carell's entire commencement speech was hilarious. The audio and video here isn't great, but I laughed till I cried.

CNN did a live telecast Saturday night (June 7) of the Broadway play "Good Night, and Good Luck," written by George Clooney and Grant Heslov, about legendary newsman Edward R. Murrow's effort to hold to account Sen. Joe McCarthy, "the junior senator from Wisconsin." Clooney plays Murrow. Here's Murrow himself with his famous take on McCarthy & McCarthyism, brief remarks that especially resonate today: ~~~

     ~~~ This article lists ways you still can watch the play. 

New York Times: “The New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms, the company said on Thursday. The multiyear agreement 'will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences,' the news organization said in a statement. Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology. In 2023, The Times sued OpenAI and its partner, Microsoft, for copyright infringement, accusing the tech companies of using millions of articles published by The Times to train automated chatbots without any kind of compensation. OpenAI and Microsoft have rejected those accusations.” ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: I have no idea what this means for "the Amazon customer experience." Does it mean that if I don't have a NYT subscription but do have Amazon Prime I can read NYT content? And where, exactly, would I find that content? I don't know. I don't know.

Washington Post reporters asked three AI image generators what a beautiful woman looks like. "The Post found that they steer users toward a startlingly narrow vision of attractiveness. Prompted to show a 'beautiful woman,' all three tools generated thin women, without exception.... Her body looks like Barbie — slim hips, impossible waist, round breasts.... Just 2 percent of the images showed visible signs of aging. More than a third of the images had medium skin tones. But only nine percent had dark skin tones. Asked to show 'normal women,' the tools produced images that remained overwhelmingly thin.... However bias originates, The Post’s analysis found that popular image tools struggle to render realistic images of women outside the Western ideal." ~~~

     ~~~ Marie: The reporters seem to think they are calling out the AI programs for being unrealistic. But there's a lot about the "beautiful women" images they miss. I find these omissions remarkably sexist. For one thing, the reporters seem to think AI is a magical "thing" that self-generates. It isn't. It's programmed. It's programmed by boys, many of them incels who have little or no experience or insights beyond comic books and Internet porn of how to gauge female "beauty." As a result, the AI-generated women look like cartoons; that is, a lot like an air-brushed photo of Kristi Noem: globs of every kind of dark eye makeup, Scandinavian nose, Botox lips, slathered-on skin concealer/toner/etc. makeup, long dark hair and the aforementioned impossible Barbie body shape, including huge, round plastic breasts. 

New York Times: “George Clooney’s Broadway debut, 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' has been one of the sensations of the 2024-25 theater season, breaking box office records and drawing packed houses of audiences eager to see the popular movie star in a timely drama about the importance of an independent press. Now the play will become much more widely available: CNN is planning a live broadcast of the penultimate performance, on June 7 at 7 p.m. Eastern. The performance will be preceded and followed by coverage of, and discussion about, the show and the state of journalism.”

No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land. -- Magna Carta ~~~

~~~ New York Times: “Bought for $27.50 after World War II, the faint, water stained manuscript in the library of Harvard Law School had attracted relatively little attention since it arrived there in 1946. That is about to change. Two British academics, one of whom happened on the manuscript by chance, have discovered that it is an original 1300 version — not a copy, as long thought — of Magna Carta, the medieval document that helped establish some of the world’s most cherished liberties. It is one of just seven such documents from that date still in existence.... A 710-year-old version of Magna Carta was sold in 2007 for $21.3 million.... First issued in 1215, it put into writing a set of concessions won by rebellious barons from a recalcitrant King John of England — or Bad King John, as he became known in folklore. He later revoked the charter, but his son, Henry III, issued amended versions, the last one in 1225, and Henry’s son, Edward I, in turn confirmed the 1225 version in 1297 and again in 1300.”

NPR lists all of the 2025 Pulitzer Prize winners. Poynter lists the prizes awarded in journalism as well as the finalists in these categories.

 

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Saturday
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The Commentariat -- Sept. 7, 2014

Defunct videos, photo removed.

"Stop & Seize." Michael Sallah, et al., of the Washington Post: "After the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, the government called on police to become the eyes and ears of homeland security on America's highways.... The effort succeeded, but it had an impact that has been largely hidden from public view: the spread of an aggressive brand of policing that has spurred the seizure of hundreds of millions of dollars in cash from motorists and others not charged with crimes, a Washington Post investigation found.... Behind the rise in seizures is a little-known cottage industry of private police-training firms that teach the techniques of 'highway interdiction' to departments across the country.... A thriving subculture of road officers on the network now competes to see who can seize the most cash and contraband, describing their exploits in the network's chat rooms and sharing 'trophy shots' of money and drugs. Some police advocate highway interdiction as a way of raising revenue for cash-strapped municipalities." ...

     ... CW: Of course there couldn't possibly be any racial profiling here.

Ed O'Keefe of the Washington Post: "Among undocumented immigrants and activists working on their behalf, President Obama's decision to wait until after November's elections to make promised changes to immigration policy provoked raw anger. One group called the president's decision 'an affront' to migrant families. Another said Obama had 'prioritized politics over reform.'"

Dan Roberts of the Guardian: "As the US military returned to combat in Iraq this summer, a group of jurors in Washington DC were hearing arguments over a dark chapter of the last war. Though some elements of the 2007 killing of 17 Iraqi civilians at a Baghdad road junction by Blackwater private security guards remain shrouded in mystery even after a trial that lasted 10 weeks, prosecutors provided overwhelming evidence that the tragedy was one of the most one-sided encounters of the US occupation."

Ellen Nakashima of the Washington Post: "The Justice Department released two decade-old memos Friday night, offering the fullest public airing to date of the Bush administration's legal justification for the warrantless wiretapping of Americans' phone calls and e-mails -- a program that began in secret after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The broad outlines of the argument -- that the president has inherent constitutional power to monitor Americans' communications without a warrant in a time of war -- were known, but the sweep of the reasoning becomes even clearer in the memos written by then-Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith, who was head of President George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel." ...

... The memos are here & here.

Manny Fernandez of the New York Times: Texas state senator Wendy Davis, the Democratic nominee for governor, "has revealed her own deeply personal abortion story, writing in a memoir that in addition to the ectopic pregnancy in 1994, she ended a second pregnancy for medical reasons in 1997. Ms. Davis's descriptions of the abortions -- she and her then husband named the second unborn child Tate Elise Davis, who had a severe brain abnormality and to whom Ms. Davis dedicates the book in part -- have rallied Texas Democrats to her campaign."

 

It Takes a Village Idiot to find something to complain about in President Obama's brief side trip to Stonehenge. (As I recall, you can drive there from Newport, Wales, the site of the NATO meeting, in less than two hours.) I give you ...

... Maureen Dowd goes to a screening of the first episode of the upcoming season of Showtime's "Homeland." The first thing she thinks of: "The murderous melee that ensues [in the "Homeland" story] is redolent of President Obama's provocative remark at a Democratic Party fund-raiser in New York, talking about the alarming aggressions flaring up around the world and alluding to the sulfurous videos of the social-media savvy ISIS fiends beheading American journalists." It's a shame she has such a whiney voice. Otherwise, she would have been perfect for Chuck Todd's new panel of petty pundits.

Annals of "Journalism," Ctd. Whatever Happened to Jason Blair? Edition. Caroline Bankoff. of New York: "Just a little over a month after being fired for at least 41 instances of plagiarism, former BuzzFeed viral politics editor Benny Johnson has been hired as the National Review's first-ever social media director. He'll begin his new job on Monday.... The National Review also just happens to be one of the many publications Johnson plagiarized from while he was at BuzzFeed. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!"

News Ledes

AP: "The U.S. military said Sunday it launched airstrikes around Haditha Dam in western Iraq, targeting Islamic State insurgents there for the first time in a move to prevent the group from capturing the vital dam. The strikes represented a broadening of the U.S. campaign against the Islamic State militants, moving the military operations closer to the border of Syria, where the group also has been operating."

New York Times: Serena Williams won her 18th Grand Slam singles tennis title today. "The top-ranked Williams defeated Caroline Wozniacki, 6-3, 6-3, to capture her third United States Open final in a row and sixth over all."

New York Times: "The United States launched a fresh series of airstrikes against Sunni fighters in Iraq late Saturday in what Defense Department officials described as a mission to stop militants from seizing an important dam on the Euphrates River and prevent the possibility of floodwaters being unleashed toward the capital, Baghdad."

Guardian: "Ukraine's ceasefire was breached repeatedly on Sunday as shelling was audible in the port city of Mariupol, and loud booms were also heard in the regional centre Donetsk. The ceasefire, agreed on Friday, held for much of Saturday, but shelling started overnight."

Guardian: "A doctor who became infected with Ebola while working in Liberia is sick, but in stable condition at the Nebraska Medical Center, officials said Friday. Dr Rick Sacra, 51, is being treated at the largest of the United States' four special isolation units. It was built to handle patients with highly infectious and deadly diseases, according to Dr Mark Rupp, chief of the infectious diseases division at the center."

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Reader Comments (4)

Andy Borowitz heplfully points out that McCain is unhappy because Obama didn't bomb Stonehenge. That may be Dowd's problem too.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/mccain-rips-obamas-failure-bomb-stonehenge

September 6, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJames Singer

I learned an interesting bit of history today reading the obituary of Lillian Gobitas Klose, who as a young student in 1935 refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in her public school classroom. As a result of her actions, her family - Jehovah's Witnesses - were persecuted. The story is fascinating, especially in light of events happening right at that time in Nazi Germany, where the Jehovah's Witnesses were among the first people to be sent to concentration camps for refusing to pledge allegiance to the Nazi state. This is a fascinating and courageous story.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/lillian-gobitas-klose-90-dies-stood-against-mandatory-pledge.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&version=HpHedThumbWell&module=well-region&region=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0

I am not a Jehovah's Witness, but I have refused to say the pledge since high school. First of all, I like to think for myself. Secondly, I've often wondered how seriously people consider the words "with liberty and justice for all." Certainly not when they attack children for not reciting the pledge! And teach their own children to hate nonconformists.

An interesting aside is that the author of the pledge was a . . . . socialist!

September 7, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterJanice

I notice there is a link under "Infotainment" to the very amusing "musical impressions off" featuring Adam Levine and Jimmy Fallon, which has already gotten 8 million hits on YouTube. A few days later, Fallon featured Meghan Taylor sing her hit song "It's All About That Bass" with the Roots and Jimmy playing school instruments. It has already received over 3 million hits and I confess to re-watching it when the news gets me down:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc9MzCcmNCU
(I've watched it a lot!)

September 7, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterVictoria D.

In case anyone thought the omnipresence of John McCain on the Sunday morning shows was a figment of the imagination - au contraire:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/upshot/looking-for-john-mccain-try-a-sunday-morning-show.html?_r=1&abt=0002&abg=0

September 7, 2014 | Unregistered CommenterVictoria D.
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