No surprise; Obama picks second-best to lead HHS

Barack Obama has tabbed Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius as the new director of Health and Human Services. That’s no surprise, of course: It would have been more surprising at this point if he had chosen the best person for the job.

I suspect Sebelius will do a decent job, and she has a credible health care-related background. She also adds a bit more diversity to the Cabinet.

Still, I am sorry that Obama and his advisors weren’t willing to overcome their dislike of the man perhaps most responsible for Obama’s election, and the one probably most qualified to head HHS–Howard Dean.

Next-day update: Dean, who admits that he would have liked to have led HHS, on Sebelius: “I think she will be very good. She is a very nice person and I think she will be fine.”

Uh-oh–if a buddy gave you an endorsement like that about a prospective blind date, you’d run away.

Colorado Rocky Mountain sigh

Colorado saw two potential major changes today in media. One is sad and a reflection of many current media problems that bode ill for all of us. The other is overdue, and doesn’t yet go far enough.

First, the sad: The Rocky Mountain News, which began publication as Colorado’s first newspaper in 1859, put out its final issue today. You can see the final front page here:

“Rocky” won four Pulitzer Prizes in its history, the last of those for a photographer who helped produce best multimedia presentation I’ve ever seen about the human cost of war. The newspaper’s history, of course, began before the war that claimed the most American lives and probably the nation’s best president.

Now the newspaper shuts its doors during our most fiscally expensive war ever, and just after the departure of a commander in chief whom I think is destined to be ranked as one of the nation’s worst presidents (I will agree with George W. Bush, however, that it’s too early to rank him in historical terms).

Denver will now be like most American cities, a one-newspaper town (not counting free weeklies or suburban papers, which have different roles). The Rocky Mountain News was killed by the same thing that is killing and crippling newspapers (and now local television stations–I was interviewed on that topic by a wire service yesterday) all over the country: higher costs and lower revenues. One of my students has produced a blog that has chronicled many of the problems.

Ironically, as several media professionals pointed out to a group of students I took to New York and Washington, D.C., in January, the demand for news remains as high as ever. The problem is that people want to read (and now watch) the news on their own schedule, from a variety of sources, without paying anything for it. Few consider or care that the “free” news they read is subsidized by subscribers and advertisers for the non-web versions of those same media outlets. When the major newspapers and broadcast stations die, their web operations die, too. (For example, I have no idea whether some of the links above will work after today.)

The result of fewer and smaller newspapers is less potential oversight. We can’t go to all of the city council and county commission meetings and legislative hearings, even if we want to. We don’t have the time or knowledge to investigate unsafe business practices, government corruption, or the best and worst hospitals and schools. Increasingly we find that there’s no one else to do it for us, either.

Our own voice also shrinks, as newspapers disappear. I occasionally write letters to my local paper. More people will read that letter than will come to this blog in the course of an entire month.

Speaking of voices, that brings me to the second potential big media event in Colorado today: just potential, because James Dobson’s will not disappear from the airwaves right away, but he is stepping down as chairman of Focus on the Family. As I’ve written previously, I don’t understand why Dobson has the following that he does, considering his lack of qualifications. I hope his retirement as chairman is just a first step in the fading from view of the neocon of child development.

Soldiers still dying, but at least photos may be unburied

Defense Secretary Robert Gates announces today that the Pentagon is overturning a Bushian policy that pretends dead soldiers don’t exist. (The ban on pictures of flag-draped coffins actually started under George H.W. Bush during the Persian Gulf War–another war in the region, as I and others have pointed out–that might never have begun without a misleading public relations effort.)

There have been occasional breaks from the official ban, but its reversal is overdue. Those favoring rejection of the “Dover policy” included the Army Times and the National Press Photographers Association. Families, who are split on the issue but mostly seem to favor the ban (apparently trusting the government more than they do the media, despite their losses), will still be allowed to keep the press away from their own deceased loved ones.

Call today’s action a partial victory for reason. After 9/11, George W. Bush told us to “go shopping.” In the meantime, the real price for his ensuing folly has remained largely hidden. You can get a better picture of that cost with two databases from the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Same-day update: Those who would protest overturning the ban might want to check out how sensitive and sensible the media can be at times of tragedy. Pulitzer Prize-winning Rocky Mountain News photographer Todd Heisler and reporter Jim Sheeler produce “A Final Salute” about a fallen Marine. Unfortunately, the News is closing its doors tomorrow, another in a recent series of great newspaper losses. Web content may be fine, but the best of it is still produced by the mainstream news organizations that are now going under.

Pimping the blog, and flogging the chimp

While thinking about today’s post, I came across a piece on bloggingtips.com titled, “How to building traffic to your blogsite the natural way.” My assumption is that all of us who write these things do so because we want people to read–and perhaps respond–to our ideas; otherwise we’d keep diaries. But with several million blogs now on the web, it’s obvious that most blogs aren’t being read by many people. For example, despite the fact that I’ve written more than 250 posts, I’ve worked for a couple of newspapers that had more readers every day than the almost 37,000 total hits this blog has had in the almost 10 months I’ve been doing it.

The reason I bring all this up is because of a couple of comments I got yesterday. Since I’m guessing that most people don’t bother to read the comments (I admit that I rarely read them on other blogs, unless I intend to respond myself or just want to get a feel for the ideological range of an ongoing discussion), and because the respondents raised interesting points that I thought worth exploring and sharing a bit more widely, I thought I’d do so here. If you did read the comments, please forgive some repetition here.

Both comments (the first probably inspired the second) noted that I link to a high number of stories from CNN. One said she was somewhat skeptical of my use of those links, because she suspected I was “just trying to beat the system.” She was right about that–I’ll discuss how and why I’m letting CNN help me pimp my blog in more detail below.

The other respondent stated that I “didn’t seem to have a particular strong stand on things” and “kinda wander all over the place letting CNN, etc. power this blog”; she encouraged me to seek a wider range of sources. She also was at least partly right, in that often I do let mainstream news sites (and especially CNN–again, more on that below) set my agenda for the day.

I would note that there are some issues in particular on which I have taken a stand (prompting at least one reader to say I should be fired from my real job). You’ll find repeated complaints about Bush administration lies, the Iraq War, domestic spying, the Patriot Act, government secrecy, the Religious Right, John McCain’s dirty campaigning, voting irregularities, media lying (ranging from talk radio to bloggers to Photoshop), PUMAs, Sarah Palin’s hiding from the press, and Israeli military actions (Palin and Israel tend to draw more comments than most subjects, for some reason). The fact of the matter is, though, after the election there was less for me to complain about, at least temporarily (though I have criticized Barack Obama’s cabinet picks, his plans for Afghanistan, his “selective openness,” his generally conservative nature, and the way the switch to digital television has been handled).

Still, in general I agree that I do “wander” quite a bit within the constraints of “media and politics,” two subjects that allow a lot of latitude. When I’m busiest (as I am now, teaching three classes and advising a student newspaper, among other things), I tend not to do as much thinking or research for the blog as I do at times when I’m less busy. Also keep in mind that my Ph.D. was interdisciplinary (combining journalism, history and political science), so I like making connections between things that other people may not see.

One good thing about doing only one post per day is that there is no shortage of things related to media and/or politics that I find interesting, so on most days (including some days that I don’t initially intend to write anything) a CNN story will trigger something. I do think that CNN gives a more balanced perspective than perhaps any other site, anyway, and I still try to make sure I make posts clear and relatively complete (considering limited time and the relatively short space allowed by a blog post), though I do link to the New York Times, the Associated Press and even Fox News less often than I used to.

As seems to be true for many bloggers, writing a blog also is partly a way of thinking out loud. For me it’s also a way to keep track of things that I think it’s my job to keep track of, some of which I’ll end up using in classes (and might someday use in a future book or chapter). And it’s a way of sharing knowledge with a general audience, something that I think academics don’t do very well–part of why we sometimes get well-deserved “ivory tower””criticisms. 

Though I sometimes make people angry, in general I’d far rather educate (or be educated), enlighten and entertain than to argue. I’ll let readers determine my success at those things. I certainly don’t do this just to irritate people (though I don’t mind doing so from time to time) or to scream at injustice in the world. As I wrote in the “About the Blog” section on my very first day back in April:

“A primary reason for this blog is the same as for many other things I do: my students at Whitworth University. As a teacher of media studies, media history and journalism skills classes, I want to use as many ways as possible to try to connect with and to learn from those students. I hope they–and you, whoever you may be–will join in the conversation.”

Regular readers will know that I also strongly agree with the idea about using other media and seeking alternative voices. That’s why the long list of links down the right side of this page includes links to various foreign newspapers (including al-Jazeera), and both liberal and conservative publications and bloggers. Even so, if I’m just commenting on something that happened, or using a news event as a starting point for discussion, I tend to trust CNN more than most.

There is another reason, I turn to CNN, though, and now I’ll reveal the secret that could in theory (assuming many people read this far) reduce my readership by increasing the number of people who start doing what I do. If you go to almost any CNN story, at the bottom you’ll see a line that states, “From the Blogs.” Click on that, and you’ll see two or three links to “blogs talking about this topic,” and, more importantly for my purposes, tow or three links to “blogs linking to this story.”

Perhpas because I try to combine clear but somewhat clever headlines with simple leads (simple for the computers to understand), I’ve been very successful in having my blog linked to CNN stories. Perhaps for the same reasons, a fair number of CNN readers then come to my site. Today is the 18th in a row that I’ve had at least 100 views, and on most of those days the majority of the visitors came via CNN.

My justification is that in this ongoing experiment I’m trying to boost “circulation” so that people might read a variety of other things that I have to offer. For example, a few days ago CNN stories apparently directly brought 145 readers to my site. Thirty-one more views seemed to come as a result of search engine search terms. But I had 266 page views that day, looking at 25 different posts, so apparently some of those readers hung around.

In addition, some of them come back. Today I’m over 115 page views so far, and only three people came directly from CNN links. For whatever reason, I seem to have developed a small but loyal following, and an unknown number of other bloggers–ranging from a blogger in Thailand to a reporter in South Carolina to a high school journalism teacher in Massachusetts  to a journalism student in Oregon–have permanent links to my site. I also get a fair number of hits from my own students looking for resources, and of course quite a few via search engines. For example, the 25 terms used so far today to find my blog include “famous journalist,” “faith hill made fat,” “crazy chimp,” “flag at half mast,” “khalilzad y obama,” “prediction 2012 election,” “japanese gay married,” “george bush anthrax,” “hannity colmes brother in law,” ” and  “james mcpherson” (I suspect most of those are looking for the famous Civil War general or the famous Civil War historian by the same name).

Increasing numbers isn’t the only thing that matters, of course, or I could simply keep doing what I did as an experiment back on Sept. 11. That day was my second-busiest ever in terms of traffic (topped only by the 876 views I got on Nov. 13, in that case with a lot of CNN help). The week of Sept. 11 and the next remain my busiest weeks, but the idea of repeating that titillating technique bugs me more from a moral perspective than does using stories that do relate to something I think worth saying, anyway. I’d obviously never make it in advertising or at Fox News (and I am frustrated to see CNN, Sports Illustrated and the Huffington Post, among others, also injecting more sex and sensationalism, no doubt for the same reason as my regular links to CNN–to attract readers). I will note that neither of my most popular posts overall–the Sept. 11 post and a July 3 piece about the flag been the most popular over time by quite a wide margin–links to CNN at all. 

 Finally, a note about one other recent comment: In talking about the “crazed chimp” and an offensive New York Post cartoon, one respondent wrote: “How many of you honestly believe they were trying to be racist with the cartoon? If they did make a mistake, are they not allowed to simply apologize for it? Do we as people not forgive people for making honest mistakes anymore?”

Well, as I noted in the orginal post, I’m willing to accept that the cartoonist didn’t have a racist intent, even if he and his editors are fairly clueless. And I fully agree that we should be able to accept apologies and move on–even if that’s not good enough for Al Sharpton, according to today’s reports. But if Reverend Al were the only one offended I wouldn’t have bothered writing about the incident.

Nonetheless, I also believe that those who are quick to be offended should also be quick to try to forgive and move on. That will do more to promote better race relations than probably anything ever done by Sharpton. Let’s move on from the cartoon, trying to learn from it. And please, can we move on from stores about the attack chimp himself? The media have flogged that story long enough.

Optimistic groundhogs, governors and economists: Jindal’s losing presidential campaign to begin after Obama address

CNN reports that President Barack Obama will try to “mix sober talk with an upbeat bottom line” in an address to a joint session of Congress tonight. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has been tapped to provide the GOP answer to Obama’s and thereby take another step toward launching his own losing 2012 presidential bid–assuming his speech tonight doesn’t kill his hopes by falling as flat as Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius’s Democratic response to George Bush’s State of the Union Address back in January 2008 (a speech the dropped her from serious vice presidential hopeful to possible second or third choice for secretary of Health and Human Services).

Though it’s too early for presidential predictions, I don’t see how Jindal can win. He’ll either be seen as a GOP attempt to “copy” a successful Obama, and will therefore lose the general election to Obama, or, if Obama falters, Jindal will be rejected in the Republican primary because he reminds voters too much of Obama. We can’t know what Obama’s future will look like four years from now, but we can guess that Jindal’s doesn’t look good for 2012.

However positive Obama’s tone, the news he delivers tonight likely will make Punxsutawney Phil look like an raging optimist. After all, the groundhog predicted “only” six more weeks of winter. The economic winter will continue much longer (despite some optimistic predictions by economists), with the Dow yesterday falling to about half of its high point. All in all, Phil might have some good advice to Jindal: Keep your head down.

Incidentally, if you want to see where the stimulus money is scheduled to go, and when, the government has launched a new website, www.recovery.gov with a timeline. You can also read the entire bill for yourself, if you have the time and determination to get through it. One weird thing about Recovery.gov–after you click on a link to exit the site and read the bill, you’re greeted with a message saying, “Thank you for visiting our site. … We hope your visit was informative and enjoyable.”

Two things bug me about that message. First, it’s not “their” site; it’s ours. They work for us. Second, the visit is unlikely to be “enjoyable,” at least for anyone who isn’t getting a bunch of money in a hurry. For the record, I’m not. And probably you aren’t, either.

Next-day update: Maybe Jindal won’t be a candidate in 2012 after all, after last night’s dismal speech. But American attention spans are short, and he does have plenty of time to recover.

Bollywood films, like phone center jobs, likely to stay in India

Today CNN asks in a headline, “Is Bollywood coming to Hollywood?” It is a natural question, after the success of “Slumdog Millionaire” in the Academy Awards last night, but my answer, in a word is “no.” In more than a word, “perhaps, but not for long.”

In fact, “Slumdog” is like the main character within it: a one-time phenomenon who happens to be in the right place at the right time. Two years from now people will have a tough time remembering that it was ever named “Best Picture.” And besides, though it boasted Indian actors and locales, it wasn’t a true Bollywood-style film. The only dance number existed just to keep us around for the closing credits.

It is perhaps inevitable that we’ll see a spate of movies intending to capitalize on the success of “Slumdog.” But the novelty will be gone, and most of those films won’t be as well made (even if they have more logical endings). A few years ago some predicted that “Moulin Rouge!” and “Chicago” would “bring back the musical.”

I liked both films, and also enjoyed “Little Shop of Horrors” and “Grease,” but in fact  in fact I liked all four as much in spite of the fact that they were musicals as because they were musicals. I think most other people feel the same way, which is why if you want to see something like “Chicago” today, you do as I did last month–go see it on Broadway .

“Bollywood is not for everybody,” said one Indian film expert quoted by CNN. “People who love to see Adam Sandler movies are not going to line up to see Bollywood films.” That’s a good point, though of course there are a lot of us who are not generally inclined to see either one. 

After I saw the definitely non-musical “The Wedding Singer,” I told my wife, “Life is too short for me to ever sit through another Adam Sandler movie.” I hear he’s done some good work since then, but so have a lot of other, more talented people whose films I haven’t yet seen. Some of those films have even won Academy Awards, a fate unlikely for either Bollywood or Adam Sandler.

That’s Hollywood: A game show contestant, a homosexual politician, and a Nazi pedophile

I doubt that many people were surprised by tonight’s Academy Award winners, in which “Slumdog Millionaire” cleaned up. Sean Penn won best actor for playing a gay politician in “Milk”–a character that some conservatives might have disliked as much as they dislike Penn himself–and Kate Winslet won for her portrayal of a former Nazi prison guard who has an affair with a teenager.

I saw “Slumdog” and thought it was a good film, though the ending bugged both my wife and me (and I’m not referring to the dancing). I won’t spoil the finish, but for those of you who have seen it: Considering the importance of a cell phone (and earlier, of the main character’s job in a phone center), and with how widely recognized the main character is before he goes on TV for the final time, and thinking about where the bad guys nabbed the heroine when she tried to escape, does the ending really make sense?

I haven’t yet seen “Milk” or “The Reader.” Every time I see Meryl Streep in a film I think the Academy should just mail her another Oscar, but Winslet is also a very good actor. I was pleased to see “WALL-E,” my favorite film of the few nominees I had seen, win for best animated feature. I thought Heath Ledger and “The Dark Knight” both were overrated, but I expected him to win as best supporting actor.

Watch out Mr. President, they’re polling again

A new CNN poll shows President Obama with an approval rating of 67 percent, down 9 percent from early this month. Most of the losses came from Republicans, who apparently during the past month figured out that their side lost, that Obama isn’t a Republican, and that he wouldn’t bow to their every whim. Still, even about a third of Republicans (along with 92 percent of Democrats) still approve of the job Obama is doing–after he’s been on the job all of one month. George Bush needed a terrorism attack to get numbers that high from the other side.

Put another way, the poll numbers are essentially meaningless at this point. There are several more big issues for Obama and Congress to tackle in the coming months, and Obama’s approval rating means almost nothing for most of the next two years–and only then to other Democrats who are running for election.

What will matter is the shape of the economy, and perhaps the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, some time down the road. Most Americans are willing to give the president they just elected a chance–after all, they waited out the Bush years without storming the White House, indicating a certain level of patience. What happens over the next few years, not what happens in the first 100 days of the Obama presidency, will determine whether he is later viewed as an FDR or a Hoover.

The CNN poll even shows that 60 percent of Americans approve of the just-passed stimulus bill–despite two Fox News lead story headlines today that read, “Resentment grows overpaying for others’ foreclosure misery,” and  “Watch out Mr. President, because we’re mad as hell!” The latter is an opinion piece written by Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute, an organization you’ve probably never heard of but which has an advisory board that includes representatives of the National Taxpayers Union, the Galen Institute, and Cato Institute, the founder of TechRepublican.com along with the author of a blog titled “The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid.”

One of the highlights of that blog is a “joke of the day,” on which currently posted  jokes include versions that are anti-Obama, anti-Clinton and anti-Muslim. Despite that, author Donald Luskin still manages to get far too much air time as a talking head on various networks (including Fox, but also the so-called “liberal media.” Another indication of Fox writer Gainor’s political perspective is that his own organization’s biggest ad is one urging people to “join the fight” against the Fairness Doctrine (a fictional threat, as I’ve noted here and here).

Somehow I don’t think Gainor, BMI or Fox will become fans of Obama whatever he does. Having those folks “mad as hell” should be viewed as a good thing. So would a cessation of news organizations creating news through polls, though I don’t think that’s likely, either.

One other interesting note about the BMI, in light of the controversy over the New York Post monkey cartoon. Below is the cartoon (dated Feb. 11) that is now on that organization’s front page:

Catholics and conservatives campaign against mythical threats

You might think that with various economic crises, a housing crisis, worsening unemployment, rampaging monkeys and race issues, there would be enough to fear in America today. Obviously if you thought that you’d be wrong. A couple of days ago I wrote about Sarah Palin (who apparently pays taxes as if she were a Democrat) grabbing a bit of face time on Fox News (the sort of time she has billed Alaskan taxpayers for in the past)  to warn against the Fairness Doctrine. Now Time reports that Catholics are waging a lobbying effort and national postcard campaign against the Freedom of Choice Act.

The problem, of course, is that there is no such Freedom of Choice Act, just as–despite the wails of right-wing fear-mongers (including some who cloak themselves at “think tanks“–there is virtually no chance of the Fairness Doctrine ever returning. So why the campaign against them? Mostly, in my view, to keep “the base” (particularly the more ignorant parts of the base) constantly fearful. The Fairness Doctrine and the Freedom of Choice Act seem to be just the latest monsters under the conservative bed, keeping key parts of the base shivering under the covers.

As I wrote in my most recent book, conservatives gained power in part because they were so effective at engaging in scare tactics. Fox News and conservative talk radio often get the credit for bringing Republicans to power, but in fact direct mail was the most important medium in the conservative resurgence. Direct mail was most effective because, like the Internet today, it could reach people one-on-one and scare them with threats of what they feared most, even if the scaring often veered into exaggeration or outright dishonesty. It also was largely ignored by Democrats and by the mainstream media (and scholars of media and politics, for that matter), which is why so many of them were surprised by increasing conservative influence that often seemed to run counter to what most Americans said they believed.

Apparently one can’t have too many threatening bed monsters, so I’ve decided to do my bit to help conservatives in their cause. With my blessing, they can now start warning their followers about the following seven fictional threats that Congress may consider:

The First Peoples Trump Trump Act: Now that Native Americans have proven to be better at business than Donald Trump, all gambling properties in America–along with the entire states of Florida, Nevada and Arizona–will be given back to the Indians. Texas, New Mexico and California will be given back to Mexico. The non-gambling portion of New Jersey will be given to anyone willing to take it.

The Workers of Color Act: If two people want the same job, that job will automatically go to the person with the darkest skin. The exception is in the case of a conservative black person, who will be treated under this act as if s/he were white.

The Make Up for Slavery Act: Once promised “40 acres and a mule,” the descendents of slaves will finally be granted those awards, with interest. Because of the state of the economy, the interest will include the entire states of Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, both Carolinas, and any part of Virginia ever owned by George Washington or Thomas Jefferson.

The Congressional Clone Act: Any clone created from the DNA of a member of Congress will automatically be entitled to claim that Congressional seat when the original holder dies. Once Republicans have lost the remaining seats they now hold in Congress, the CCA will be the only means by which a new Congressman or Senator can be appointed, except via normal elections.

The ACORN Elections Act: Since normal elections will still take place, this bill will do away with the Federal Elections Commission and put ACORN in charge of all electoral activities at the federal and state levels.

The Test-Tube Voter Act: Any person who develops out of an implanted embryo that might instead have been used for stem cell research shall be denied all voting rights on account of selfishness.

The Happy Cheerful Gay Marriage Act: No person shall be allowed to marry unless both parties seem appropriately happy. Any two creatures judged to be appropriately happy can marry, regardless of sexual orientation, race, age or species. “Appropriate happiness” will be judged by a Congressional subcommittee chaired by Barney Frank–or his clone.

Stimulus prompts cartoonish monkey business

I haven’t understood why the story of a crazy chimpanzee has been worth days of coverage on virtually every news site. In fact, until today I had not read any of the stories, and have managed to tune out most of the television discussion of Gonzo Bonzo.

Now there’s another reason to hate the fact that the media have gone ape, so to speak, over the story: It helped prompt a cartoon that some perceive as racist, on the same day that attorney general Eric Holder calls the United States “a nation of cowards” on the issue of race. Ah, remember the good old days, when all we had to worry about with the attorney general was his unwillingness to follow the Constitution, and his inability to remember if he had followed it?

Syndicated columnist and regular TV talking head Roland Martin is among those now arguing that a New York Post cartoon offers a racist portrayal of Barack Obama. For its part, the Post, drawing international attention, pleads innocence. It claims that the dead stimulus-writing monkey in the cartoon simply represents the widely reported chimp gone crazy, which police shot and killed, while making fun of the flaws in the stimulus bill.

The Post argument would be more convincing if it weren’t known as a conservative anti-Obama newspaper. It also doesn’t help that today’s first story highlighted on the Post Web page is titled “From baby to beast,” while the second is headlined, “Bam’s $75B house call.” (The site also prominently carries a “pop video quiz” titled “Wet hot swimsuit models”–those conservatives do like their T & A.) And while the first complainant about the cartoon was publicity hound Al Sharpton (and no, Rev. Al, I’m not comparing African Americans to dogs), who would call someone a racist for commenting that a plane crash occurred on a dark night, Martin is not the same kind of loony that Sharpton is.

Even if we give the Post the benefit of the doubt–and I think that when it comes to matters of race we should be as gracious as possible in assuming the motives of others–we also shouldn’t automatically ignore the aggrieved parties, either. Regardless of any racist intent, the cartoon still represents a cluelessness on the part of the newspaper, because in fact African Americans have been negatively compared to apes throughout history. Not long ago a Voguemagazine cover featuring basketball star Lebron James drew similar criticism. Much longer ago, noted sportscaster Howard Cosell referred to black wide receiver Alvin Garrett as a “little monkey,” drawing considerable criticism (despite the fact that at one time Cosell may have been one of the best friends that black athletes–especially boxers, and especially Muhammad Ali–had in any press box).

Still, the racial aspect that probably bothers me most about this incident is one I’ve noted before, that any dead or missing little white girl or pretty white woman will get far more attention from the media than a missing or dead black or Latino child–and now it is clear that a dead chimpanzee can get more ink, as well.

Next-day update: The New York Times reports that even employees of the New York Postapparently are among those troubled by the cartoon, which ran one page after a large photo of Obama signing the stimulus photo. Ted Rall, president of the Association of Editorial Cartoonists also dislikes the cartoon, but not because he thinks it’s racist (he doesn’t). According to a Poynter piecewell worth reading, Rall calls the cartoon “a cheap form of editorial cartooning,” in which a not particularly ambition tries to combine two unrelated news events into a cartoon that is “rarely clever” and typically “doesn’t mean anything.”

Another cartoonist, Chip Bok, also didn’t consider the cartoon to be racist–just “in bad taste” because the chimp had seriously injured a woman. As Rall noted, however, there are almost no cartoonists who aren’t white men, so their depth of understanding as a group may be a bit limited.

Next day update #2: The Post now “apologizes for” and defends the cartoon, after singer John Legend urged people to boycott the newspaper.

The new cartoon, followed by the Labron Vogue cover and one of the comparisons from various sites: