Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

So much for independence at the new Journal

Remember the promise made by Rupert Murdoch that the Wall Street Journal’s independence would be protected? Remember that special committee that was supposed to act as a firewall between News Corp. and the Journal’s newsroom?

Read this (thanks to Steve at The Opinion Mill for catching this):

Instead, questions were immediately raised about the Special Committee when Reuters reported that one appointed member was not only a personal friend of Murdoch’s, but he also ran a computer education foundation that had received $2.5 million from Murdoch’s News Corp. That represented a rather obvious conflict of interest for someone who was supposed to be independent from News Corp. (More on that later.)

Worse, the Special Committee is going to be chaired by a far-right GOP yes man who not only faithfully regurgitates Republican talking points in print for a living, but who in early 2003 predicted the fighting in Iraq would be “relatively inconsequential,” and who months later declared that America had won the Iraq war in “a cakewalk.”

That’s who Murdoch has tapped to protect the Journal’s editorial integrity? Good luck. I mean, was Sean Hannity not available?

What’s more:

And sure enough, as currently spelled out, the committee’s duties seem to be mostly toothless. The committee will have only a “say” in the hiring of top editors. And as Editor & Publisher’s Mark Fitzgerald pointed out last week, “it appears that the [committee’s] enforcement amounts to the power to write a report and publish it in the Journal.” Fitzgerald also “didn’t see any mechanism that would permit a lowly reporter to approach this august committee with a complaint — let alone any guarantee that the journalist would not suffer any reprisals for being a whistle blower.”

What this means for the Journal is unclear, but doesn’t appear good. Murdoch may be willing to dump cash into the franchise, but it remains unknown how he actually plans to use his new toy.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Dispatches: Bonds says ‘king me’

Dispatches is up on the site — a contemplation of Barry Bonds, the record and the Hall of Fame.

Speaking of Bonds, today’s L.A. Times editorial offers one of the fairest takes on Bonds and the state of baseball I’ve read.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.

Runner’s diary, Thursday

My legs are now sore and I’m not sure that my heart rate has returned to normal, but I’m still riding that rush that comes from pushing the body to its maximum. It has been a long time since I ran seven miles, but I need to start lengthening my long runs so seven it was today (in an absolutely silly 79 minutes).

I felt good for the first four, winded for the fifth, began struggling for the sixth and labored badly for the final mile.

But I finished, making it 17 miles this week across three runs (I did 17 last week in four) with at least one more run on tap.

I’d like to work up to a 10-mile run by the end of the month and then a 15-mile trek toward the end of September. The LBI race is Sunday, Oct. 8.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

The Blog of South Brunswick

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War’s damaging effects

I’ve been meaning to recommend this Nation article by Chris Hedges and Laila Al-Arian on the stories being told by Iraq war vets. I almost forgot to pass it along — that is, until I saw this on Truthdig — an interview with Hedges about the piece (there is both a transcript and audio available). Check out both pieces and then tell me that the war in Iraq has not been a disaster.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Opening up the closet door

Glenn Greenwald has it in for the so-called experts who have made such a mess of our foreign policy. His critique — that these guys and gals have a set of ossified and obsolete rules that determine what can be discussed, under what circumstances and how the issues should be framed — is spot on.

An interesting aside from today’s post, however, concerns Barack Obama’s comments about Pakistan. Readers of this blog know I found them irresponsible, but Greenwald notices something else, as well:

Most of the recent “controversies” involving Barack Obama’s foreign policy statements — including his oh-so-shocking statement that it would not make moral or political sense to use tactical nuclear weapons to bomb isolated terrorist camps as well as his willingness to attack Al Qaeda elements inside Pakistan if the Musharraf government refuses (as they did for some time) — were not “controversial” among the Establishment on the merits. They were “controversial” (and “naive” and “irresponsible”) because they breached the protocols and orthodoxies imposed by the Foreign Policy Community governing how we are allowed to talk about these issues.

This was vividly illustrated by the sharpest exchange from last night’s debate, where both Hillary Clinton and Chris Dodd excoriated Obama for his comments on Pakistan, not on the ground that Obama’s statements were wrong on the merits (i.e, not that we should avoid military action inside Pakistan under those circumstances), but instead on the ground that he committed the sin of actually discussing with the American people what our foreign policy would be.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, when you get down to it, but one that has some potentially dangerous consequences for the nation.

As Powers points out, the Foreign Policy Community has proven itself to be reckless, irresponsible and deeply unserious. These “scholars” have lost the right to judge anyone or to declare anyone else unserious. It is long past time to aggressively challenge their most precious orthodoxies.

Leave aside whatever views you may have about the wisdom of attacking Osama bin Laden or other Al Qaeda elements inside Pakistan because that is a separate question entirely. There are few issues more vitally important than destroying the supremacy and monopoly of our Foreign Policy Community and forcing a re-examination of our most fundamental assumptions about America’s role in the world. To the extent that Obama’s campaign will continue to challenge not only the establishment’s orthodoxies by the Establishment itself (and whether he will remains to be seen), that can only produce vitally needed outcomes.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

E-mail me by clicking here.