The Long Cut ...we'll get there eventually

Blue Sky Thinking

At the risk of becoming all Sky Blue Sky all the time, I'm going to pass this news along: Wilco is offering a third opportunity to hear their upcoming album throughout the day today. The other two opportunities were on weekend days, so if you mainly listen to music as a distraction from work, here's your chance to both brighten your Monday and hear a really great disc.

Hear it here.

[Wilco has also announced that once Sky Blue Sky does drop in mid-May, they'll be offering a deluxe version that will include a 45-minute DVD.  Says the band: "The film captures the band discussing and performing songs from Sky Blue Sky in Chicago." Sounds good to me.]

It Was Blinq, And I'll Miss It

About two years ago, back when I was still going to Philly Blogger meetups, an aspiring blogger named Daniel Rubin showed up at one of them - before he even had a blog - to get some tips from us more established bloggers. But Daniel wasn't your usual wannabe blogger. The Philadelphia Inquirer was giving him a blog, Blinq, on their website and was pretty much was letting him determine what it would be.

Daniel had worked for the Inqy as a globe-trotting reporter before starting the blog and just from talking to him that night at the meetup, it was pretty obvious to me that he was more than a little overqualified for blogging. And that wasn't just because he impressed me with tales of hanging out and talking music with Ed Ward while living in Germany.

But Blinq ended up being a nice mix of personal stories, Philadelphia history, current events, music talk, and frequent reports on what Philly bloggers were writing about. That last part was what I appreciated the most. Little ol' the Long Cut even showed up there once or twice. He seemed to enjoy reading the locals and always treated them with respect, no matter how small their audience (like, say, the audience for the Long Cut). He had a knack for writing about a bunch of local posts - each written on a different topic - and yet still finding a way to link them all together. It was like he was a professional writer or something.

Now Daniel's going back to the "dead tree" edition of the Inquirer, this time as a Metro section columnist. He'll be following in the footsteps of some seriously strong writers (like the much-missed Steve Lopez) and I don't doubt that he'll be great. On Blinq, he often only allowed himself to show just a hint of his own opinions (other than his thoughts on music), so it will be nice to finally see his views on some of the strange goings-on in the region.

So, Daniel, if you're still checking in on the blogs, good luck and congratulations. I'll miss the blog, but I look forward reading the column even more.

If It's Fair, It's Gone

I slam the Philadelphia Inquirer's (and ESPN2's) Stephen A. Smith a lot (here, here, and here, for example), so on the rare occasion when he writes a column that makes sense, I feel like I should call attention to it.

In today's column Stephen A. writes about Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, two journalists who work for the San Francisco Chronicle. Fainaru-Wada and Williams broke the BALCO steroid story that made Barry Bonds look really, really bad and shocked -shocked!- both Major League Baseball and Congress, both of whom couldn't believe that such things were happening in baseball and finally realized that enough was enough and that it was time to, um, find out what Curt Schilling thought about the whole steroids mess. Oh, and, uh, give players about twelve warnings that using a gray-market drug while on the job was wrong (but if they catch you a thirteenth time - you will so not playing the next year month week game).

So these two journalists not only do their job, they do Major League Baseball's job and the Government's job. And what do they get in return? Subpoenaed by a federal grand jury to reveal their sources. Mind you, nobody, not even Bonds, is really denying that what Fainaru-Wada and Williams wrote wasn't true, they just don't like that they got caught. Thankfully, we have a president who believes in freedom of the press and... ugh.

So that's about it, these guys did what investigative journalists are supposed to do, and now the federal government is putting them in jail for it. And it's such a goofy idea of justice that even Stephen A. gets it right:

Understand something right now: No journalist is better than his sources, specifically the credible information that any source provides. The world we live in, rife with ramifications that jeopardize one's livelihood on a daily basis - if not one's life on occasion - does nothing short of establish the importance of having sources in the first place.

At some point, the truth must be allowed to be revealed without severe reprisals. Particularly from those who'd make pathological liars look honest.

As glad as I am to see Smith write about Fainaru-Wada and Williams' plight, I think Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News does a much better job. He plainly states what Smith only hints at - that this is occurring at the federal level, and could be stopped at the federal level if a certain federal employee would just speak out against it (since it's his Justice Department pursuing this):

The government of George Bush, which will leak the name of a CIA operative named Valerie Plame when it suits its purposes, now wants Fainaru-Wada and Williams in jail because they won't reveal the names of the person or persons the government says leaked them grand jury testimony. It is always worth pointing out that if you ran the country the way Bush and his people do, you wouldn't want to encourage whistleblowers, either.

Once George Bush told baseball to get rid of steroids in a State of the Union address. Fainaru-Wada and Williams, through their reporting and later their book "Game of Shadows," did their part. They took the President at his word, obviously unaware that this President will say anything in a State of the Union, about weapons of mass destruction or anything else.

Bush won't do anything to keep Fainaru-Wada and Williams out of jail. Maybe Sen. Arlen Specter can. Specter, a tough Republican and tough cancer survivor out of Pennsylvania, keeps moving forward with a new law that would protect journalists like Fainaru-Wada and Williams from having to choose between going to jail and revealing their sources, especially in cases that have absolutely nothing to do with national security.

Okay, that part about Arlen Specter being a tough Republican is a bit off the mark (Specter's only tough until the White House calls him on it, then he folds like the '64 Phillies), but Lupica shows some guts by not being afraid to mention politics on the sports page.

So a tip of the cap to all the sports writers out there who are writing about this mess, and the sports page editors giving them the space to do so. Here's hoping that they keep it up until people start to notice just how stupid this whole situation is.

[Post title taken from the home run call of the great Dodger announcer Vin Scully. Lupica column found via Talking Points Memo.]

You Don't Work For Paul Tagliabue

I was going to start this by saying that almost all of the Philadelphia Inquirer's (and ESPN2's) Stephen A. Smith's columns contain contentions that can be shot down with one sentence. But now I see that it doesn't even take a whole sentence, just a post title: You Don't Work for Paul Tagliabue.

Today Stephen A asserts that if NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue can think about firing Bryant Gumbel (whom the NFL Network has recently hired to call games) simply because Gumbel criticized Tagliabue on national television, then what's to stop the commissioner from muzzling other fine sports journalists - or even journalists like Stephen A?

Here's what stops him: You don't work for Paul Tagliabue.

Some backstory: Tagliabue is leaving office shortly and has already named his successor. Gumbel, on his HBO show Real Sports, opined that Tagliabue should be sure that he hands over to the new commish the leash on which he keeps the head of the players union. Ouch! The head of the players union is apparently incompetent because he was "only" able to get the each team's salary cap raised by $67 million in the last 17 years.

Gumbel was hired by Tagliabue not to be a journalist but to call games for the pay-cable-only NFL Network. Tagliabue (rightfully) said that Gumbel's comments were "uninformed" and questioned whether the league should keep Gumbel on their payroll. This isn't a case of a whistle-blower being punished, it's an employee slamming his bosses and possibly paying the price for doing so. I would expect the same if I were to do that to my executive director (which I wouldn't because he's the greatest boss in the world and he might even read this blog - Hi!).

Stephen A seems to think we all have a God-given right to "objective entertainment," whatever that is. In reality, pro sports can run their leagues however they choose precisely because in the end it is just entertainment. If journalists think that something the league does weakens the integrity of the sport, then they should stop covering that sport. It's why pro wrestling doesn't get on the front page of the sports section very often. You can complain about league actions all you want, and give your opinion about things, but in the end these organizations don't really owe us anything.

I'm not saying it doesn't suck when your favorite sport does something that hurts the game (otherwise I wouldn't hate Bud Selig as much as I do), but as long as they're not breaking any laws they can run their business anyway they like. And when a league does hire journalists, like some do for their websites, then the usual journalistic freedom to speak the truth (or what the writer see as the truth) should be expected. That's not the case here.

Stephen A trys to imply that even the NFL players are muzzled by the league by bringing up Warren Sapp's old (and rediculous) description of NFL rules as "slavery." But if the players' speech is truly restricted, how do you explain loudmouths like Terell Owens or, well, Warren Sapp?

Stephen A believes that Tagliabue's actions are "designed specifically to keep us uninformed and controlled." But the NFL Network isn't a newspaper and Gumbel (in his NFL Network role) isn't a journalist. Nothing stops any other journalist from slamming the NFL. It's that simple. A real journalist should remain "in hot pursuit of the truth" (although this is football we're talking about guys, not Watergate or anything), and you shouldn't have any problem doing that as long as... you don't work for Paul Tagliabue.

[The Washington Post's Michael Wilbon, a sports journalist whose opinion I do respect, seems to agree with Stephen A, citing Gumbel's journalistic legacy. I still say he wasn't hired as a journalist, and don't think, as Smith does, that Tagliabue's actions could impede a sports writer in doing his job.]