News Gems

Fourth of July

Brian and I are taking the day off from News Gems to celebrate our country's birthday. If you have a hankering to see some good journalism while we're gone, check out our archives on the left rail. We hope you all have a great holiday. See you back here for more Gems on Monday. 

Olympic Dreams

NPR is running some inspiring stories about athletes who hope to compete in this summer's Olympics. "Olympic Profiles: Bound for Beijing" stories describing the Iraqi sprinter who dodges sniper fire as she trains, a shot-putter experimenting with hypnotherapy, the tae kwon do hopeful who is trying to become Afghanistan's first medal winner and the Alabama boxer who rose from obscurity to Golden Gloves champion in three years. My favorite is Wendy Kaufman's profile of Melanie Roach, a 117-pound weightlifter and mother of three who draws special inspiration from her autistic son, Drew. www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91840044

For a touch of humor mixed with hope, try Steve Inskeep's charming "Reviving an Olympic Dream, 25 Years Later." Inskeep interviews Hodding Carter (son of the former assistant secretary of state and grandson of the legendary newspaper editor), a 45-year-old father of four who is determined to swim his way to the Olympics after his father made him give up competitive swimming more than two decades ago. www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91639310

Mid-East Media War

Craig Whitlock of The Washington Post has written a revealing two-part series on the Mid-East media campaigns of the U.S. government and al-Qaeda. It's fascinating to compare the campaigns' structures and their results.

The centerpiece of Washington's campaign is the Arabic-language TV network al-Hurra, which Whitlock describes in "U.S. Network Falters in Mideast Mission." Al-Hurra is a bureaucratic system plagued by inefficiencies and mistakes.

Since its inception, al-Hurra has been plagued by mediocre programming, congressional interference and a succession of executives who either had little experience in television or could not speak Arabic, according to interviews with former staffers, other Arab journalists and viewers in the Middle East.

It has also been embarrassed by journalistic blunders. One news anchor greeted the station's predominantly Muslim audience on Easter by declaring, "Jesus is risen today!" After al-Hurra covered a December 2006 Holocaust-denial conference in Iran and aired, unedited, an hour-long speech by the leader of Hezbollah, Congress convened hearings and threatened to cut the station's budget.

In part two of Whitlock's series, "Al-Qaeda's Growing Online Offensive," he outlines al-Qaeda's propaganda distribution network, which is decentralized and alarmingly effective.

Every three or four days, on average, a new video or audio from one of al-Qaeda's commanders is released online by as-Sahab, the terrorist network's in-house propaganda studio. Even as its masters dodge a global manhunt, as-Sahab produces documentary-quality films, iPod files and cellphone videos. Last year it released 97 original videos, a sixfold increase from 2005.  

For more on al-Hurra, see ProPublica's first big story, "Lost in Translation: Alhurra—America’s Troubled Effort to Win Middle East Hearts and Minds," written by Dafna Linzer and jointly produced with CBS and 60 Minutes.

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/22/AR2008062201228.html

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/23/AR2008062302135.html

http://www.propublica.org/feature/alhurra-middle-east-hearts-and-minds-622

Scenes From a Recovery

Bill Reiter, sports reporter at The Kansas City Star, visited storm-ravaged Iowa to report on the recovery efforts. The result, "Iowans Are Reclaiming Their Lives and Their Sports," uses scenes from Des Moines, Parkersburg, West Des Moines, Ames, Waterloo and Iowa City to show how "a state trying to put itself together has done so, in small but meaningful ways, through sports." In the following excerpt, the people of Parkersburg and its neighboring communities demonstrate the Iowans' spirit.

….The high school was gone. The football field, the one that had produced NFL players Casey Wiegmann, Aaron Kampman, Jared DeVries and Brad Meester, lay in shambles.

Then something beautiful happened.

Other teams — teams that had been roughed up and beaten by this perennial power, by those men who now make their living in the NFL — they came to what remained of the town.

They went to the high school football field.

They got down on their hands and knees.

Inch by inch, one blade of grass at a time, they crawled across the turf, picking glass and wood and debris from the ground….

In Parkersburg, they say, they'll play football on that field come fall.

http://www.kansascity.com/838/story/674073.html

Covert Action

Seymour Hersh has a long history of helping break important stories: the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the C.I.A.'s illegal spying against Americans, the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, and many more. In the July 7 New Yorker, Hersh returns with another scoop. His "Preparing the Battlefield" details how Congress has approved funding for a Bush administration secret request to escalate covert operations in Iran. With his usual meticulousness, Hersh reports that clandestine operations designed to destabilize Iran's leadership have been expanding since last summer as a possible prelude to war. The story is full of unnamed source (like most stories about covert actions), but given Hersh's track record, there's little doubt about its accuracy. www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/07/07/080707fa_fact_hersh?currentPage=all

In other covert action, Mark Mazzetti and David Rohde have a fascinating story in Monday's New York Times about how U.S. efforts to combat Al Qaeda forces in Pakistan have been delayed by political and bureaucratic infighting. Their "Amid Policy Disputes, Qaeda Grows in Pakistan " lets us know why Osama bin Laden and his allies have been able to regroup and regain strength in the mountains near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/washington/30tribal.html?_r=1&hp=&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1214832575-3xiSNODXs27PwzHNX3kx3A

Mortgage Mess

Black Americans are much more likely than whites to get stuck paying high interest rates for their mortgages than whites, according to a comprehensive investigation by Aliza Appelbaum and Alden K. Loury of The Chicago Reporter. Their "An Equal Opportunity to Pay More" reports that the disparity holds true in each of the 251 metropolitan areas studied, even when blacks make the same income as whites. Analyzing 8.5 million mortgages granted nationwide in 2006 (the most recent year the data was available), Appelbaum and Loury found that "African-American borrowers were nearly two-and-half times more likely than their white counterparts to get 'high-cost” home loans.'" They were also more likely to have high-interest loans than Asians, Latinos and Native Americans. This story is a great example of the power of computer-assisted reporting and sheds light on some of the reasons behind the country's foreclosure crisis. Appelbaum and Loury's work comes nearly 20 years after Bill Dedman's Pulitzer-winning "The Color of Money" unmasked deep racial disparities in mortgage lending. chicagoreporter.com/index.php/c/Web_Extras/d/An_Equal_Opportunity_To_Pay_More

For a more localized look at the mortgage crisis, check out The Columbus Dispatch's "Bursting Bubbles." Reporters Bill Bush, Geoff Dutton and Doug Haddix analyzed county property tax records and a federal database of 1.4 million mortgages s in Ohio to document how subprime mortgages are lowering property values in the Columbus area, hurting not only people with risky mortgages but also renters and residents who have not fallen behind on their payments. http://dispatch.com/live/content/insight/stories/2008/06/01/PROPDROP.ART_ART_06-01-08_G1_B5ABD2U.html?sid=101

Finally, a tip of the hat to Marcus Baram of ABC News whose "The VIP Treatment" disclosed how Democratic senators Chris Dodd and Kent Conrad got special breaks on their home loans from Countrywide Financial. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5062502&page=1

Do you know of any other great stories about the mortgage mess? Leave us a comment and let us know.

Just Wait....

Associated Press Texas sports editor Jaime Aron has written an excellent narrative about his premature twin sons' fight for life, "Born Too Soon." There's much to recommend this story – it has just enough details, it moves at a nice pace, Aron shares his thoughts at several key points – but the feature I like best is how he builds and sustains dramatic tension. He begins with a scene where he's giving a speech to parents of preemies.

Eyes widened when I held up red and blue Beanie Babies that were as big as the real boys. Heads nodded when I held up my wedding band — which a dime can just fit through — and described it circling one baby's arm like a hula hoop.

Then I got to the middle of page 3. To the paragraph I'd typed through teary eyes a few days before.

"I'm sorry,'' I said, my jaw quivering, eyes puddling. I reached for a tissue, trying to stall long enough to regain my composure.

"This,'' I continued, "is the part where I always give the update ...''

I tried again. And again.

But I couldn't get the rest out.

From here Aron flashes back to his sons' births. He doesn't reveal the ending until the end, and the photos of the twins show them only as infants.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25063903/

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25063900/

They Watch Every Blip

"The Flight Watchmen" by Laura Blumenfeld of The Washington Post is a fine example of how to tell a larger story be tracking a few people through an ordinary day. The day starts slowly as Chan Browne, 44, makes a sandwich for his girlfriend's daughter's lunch. The little girl goes off to school, and Browne goes to his job as an assistant special agent in charge at the Freedom Center, a counterterrorism compound in Northern Virginia. There the officers have one assignment: Stop another 9/11. Much of the day is "vanilla," but then there's a report of a suspicious airline passenger.

An officer named Lee starts typing, black letters crawling across a large white screen at the front of the room: "MIAMI SUSPICIOUS LEBANESE PASSENGER, CHECKPOINT/SECONDARY SCREENING. HE DISAPPEARED --"

"Hey, Lee!" Chuck barks. "He didn't 'disappear.' They tackled him! He left behind a bag."

As partners, Chuck and Chan know each other's tension ticks. Chuck gets loud; Chan gets quiet. Chuck slashes the air with his powerful arms, pointing. Chan paces like he's "on a dog run."

The two men are starting to slash and pace.

Chan's investigator, Mike, pulls up a picture of the 42-year-old suspect online, along with his real passport from Lebanon. He discovers in a commercial database that the suspect had bought his American Airlines ticket as well as tickets for two other men. Like him, the two men were flying from Miami to Los Angeles that afternoon, though, notably, on a different airplane.

Chan's agent pulls up a diagram of the Miami airport. Something about the police chase bothers Chan. The Lebanese man had fled the terminal, dashed outside. As the Miami-Dade County Police approached him, the man jumped from a second-story parking ramp. He hit the pavement and shattered his arm. Yet even with a broken limb, the suspect continued to struggle.

"Why jump?" Chan wonders. "Why so extreme?" He'd seen a lot before, but "we never have people running away." Abandon a bag? Leap off a ramp?

Chan says to an agent, "Send out an alert notification page."

Tom Shroder asks in his editor's note, is it now safe to fly? Blumenfeld's story helps provide the answer.

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/19/AR2008061902627.html

Drenched But Not Defeated

Two weeks ago News Gems applauded the work of The Des Moines Register as it covered the tornados that pummeled the Midwest. Today I want to give a special shout out to their fellow Iowans at The Cedar Rapids Gazette who are still putting out a newspaper and Web site despite the floods that devastated their city and ruined many staff members' homes. Like the New Orleans Times-Picayune and Biloxi Sun Herald after Hurricane Katrina, The Gazette has excelled under trying circumstances at giving its readers a comprehensive mix of stories, photos, videos, graphics and community bulletin boards. Erika Binegar's "A Different Downtown Scene" is an example of the detailed reporting that The Gazette continues to produce. Notice how she uses sight, sound and smell to describe the scene:

On Saturday, plastic bags lay piled on sidewalks, drenched scraps of wood inside spouting bubbles of condensation. Piles of foundation and discarded lumber lay along the road and in Dumpsters. Pistachios tumbled out of a bag, split open on the street.

Shards of glass sparkled in the sunlight, near sludge-covered file cabinets and toilets on the corner of Fourth Avenue and Third Street SE. An overwhelming smell of rotting garbage, sewage and gasoline floated in the breeze.

Generators thundered, powering pumps that sloshed cloudy water onto the street. Debris crunched under the wheels of construction vehicles, and semi-trailer trucks beeped as they reversed into traffic.

Outside Theatre Cedar Rapids, 102 Third St. SE, a mini mountain of black tulle, red lace and pink satin costumes lay crumpled, covered in sludge and beyond repair.

I also like The Gazette's "Random Acts of Kindness" bulletin board, which lets readers share stories about volunteer efforts that are sustaining the city. Is there other disaster coverage that you recommend? Leave us a comment if you'd like to make a suggestion.

www.gazetteonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080622/NEWS/152701406 and www.gazetteonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artikkel?NoCache=1&Dato=20080615&Kategori=NEWS&Lopenr=225362214&Ref=AR

Detainees

Two stories in the past week have taken us deep inside the war against terrorism to show us the people, places and techniques that the U.S. government has tried to keep hidden. In Sunday's New York Times, "Inside a 9/11 Mastermind's Interrogation" by Scott Shane introduces us to the CIA interrogator who was in charge of getting the truth out of Al Qaeda's "engineer of mass murder," Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Shane's story is a fascinating look at how CIA interrogations work and the improvised nature of the spy agency's handling of terrorism suspects. Shane does a masterful job of sourcing this story to get information that is rarely disclosed. But it is sure to ignite controversy because it names the CIA interrogator. What do you think?  nytimes.com/2008/06/22/washington/22ksm.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Last week McClatchy Newspapers' D.C. bureau presented "Guantanamo: Beyond the Law," the most comprehensive investigation I've seen about what America does with terrorism suspects. The series concludes that the U.S. has held and abused dozens and perhaps hundreds of innocent men at Guantanamo, bases in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. Reporters Tom Lasseter and Matthew Schofield reviewed thousands of pages of U.S. military tribunal documents and traveled to eleven countries to interview former detainees and local officials. They also talked with Guantanamo guards, detainee lawyers, and White House and Pentagon officials. Lasseter and Schofield found that U.S. policy often backfired by making the prisoners more militant: 

Mohammed Naim Farouq was a thug in the lawless Zormat district of eastern Afghanistan. He ran a kidnapping and extortion racket, and he controlled his turf with a band of gunmen who rode around in trucks with AK-47 rifles.

U.S. troops detained him in 2002, although he had no clear ties to the Taliban or al Qaida. By the time Farouq was released from Guantanamo the next year, however — after more than 12 months of what he described as abuse and humiliation at the hands of American soldiers — he'd made connections to high-level militants.

In fact, he'd become a Taliban leader.

In addition to a dozen stories, the project comes with photo galleries and data bases of the detainees, links to documents from the investigation and video interviews. Travis Heying of The Wichita Eagle contributed photos and Darren Abrecht was the lead Web producer. www.mcclatchydc.com/detainees/

A Sharp Eye on Mass Transit

Miami-Dade County commissioners are considering tax hikes to fund their crumbling mass transit system. County taxpayers have been there before. In 2002, after rejecting four previous proposals for transit tax hikes, they approved a sales tax. Now, in an outstanding series called "Taken for a Ride," Larry Lebowitz of The Miami Herald examines the results.

In 2002, voters were promised up to 88.9 miles of new Metrorail lines, stretching to every corner of Miami-Dade County. As it stands, you'll be lucky to get 2.4 miles.

County leaders promised 17 million miles of new bus service. They never got close.

Promising "New Money for New Projects,'' the 2002 campaign, led by former county Mayor Alex Penelas, vowed to bring Miami-Dade Transit into the 21st century if voters approved a long-sought sales tax.

But five years and more than $800 million later, the county has spent more than half the new money on routine Transit operations and maintenance while adding 1,000 jobs to the payroll.

…. Metrorail runs fewer trains than it did in 2002. Half the bus service that was added has been subsequently cut. And studies indicate that your commute is no brisker than it was five years ago.

Meanwhile, county managers have decreed that they can spend transit-tax proceeds in hundreds of ways -- buying everything from paper clips and polo shirts to cockroach extermination. The tax even paid for $2 million in office furniture for Transit's new headquarters in Overtown.

Links to the series' main sections are near the top of the home page, http://www.miamiherald.com/multimedia/news/transit/index.html

Government Screw-Ups

I've seen a couple of great examples recently of television networks serving as watchdogs when the government acts with complete insensitivity toward some of its most vulnerable citizens. Brian Ross and Vic Walter of ABC News, in conjunction with Audrey Hudson of the Washington Times, describe in "Disposable Heroes" how the Veterans Administration recruited mentally distressed veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan war to test drugs that have been linked to violent side effects, including suicide. In some cases, VA doctors waited more than three months to warn the veterans, many of them already suffering from depression, about the potentially lethal side effects, according to Husdson, Walter and Ross. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5180437&page=1 and www.washingtontimes.com/news/2008/jun/17/test-nearly-lethal-veteran-says/

Abbie Boudreau and Scott Zamost of CNN report that while some people who lost their homes because of Hurricane Katrina still struggle to find basic household supplies, the U.S. government has given away millions of goods that were supposed to help them. "FEMA gives away $85 million of Supplies for Katrina Victims" reveals how "cots, cleansers, first-aid kits, coffee makers, camp stoves and other items" that were bought or donated after the hurricane ended up being sent to other state and federal agencies instead of to the storm's victims in New Orleans. One of the states that took a pass on getting the goods: Louisiana. The story includes this perfect example of a bureaucratic response from a FEMA spokesman:

"Upon review of our assets and our need to continue to store them, we determined that they were excess to FEMA's needs; therefore, they are being excessed from FEMA's inventory."

Thank you to Investigative Reporters and Editors for recommending this story. www.cnn.com/2008/US/06/11/fema.giveaway/index.html

The Housing Bubble

"Anatomy of a Meltdown: The Credit Crisis" by Alec Klein and Zachary A. Goldfarb of The Washington Post is a comprehensive, readable account of the housing boom and bust.

In the first section of this three-part series, they trace the bubble's roots to fiscal and monetary policies adopted after the collapse of the Internet bubble.

The government's efforts to counter the pain of that bust soon pumped air into the next bubble: housing. The Bush administration pushed two big tax cuts, and the Federal Reserve, led by Alan Greenspan, slashed interest rates to spur lending and spending.

Low rates kicked the housing market into high gear. Construction of new homes jumped 6 percent in 2002, and prices climbed. By that November, Greenspan noted the trend, telling a private meeting of Fed officials that "our extraordinary housing boom . . . financed by very large increases in mortgage debt, cannot continue indefinitely into the future," according to a transcript.

Klein and Goldfarb use several lively scenes to describe the ensuing frenzy that gripped the housing market.

The young woman who walked into Pinnacle's Vienna office in 2004 said her boyfriend wanted to buy a house near Annapolis. He hoped to get a special kind of loan for which he didn't have to report his income, assets or employment. Mortgage broker Connelly handed the woman a pile of paperwork.

On the day of the settlement, she arrived alone. Her boyfriend was on a business trip, she said, but she had his power of attorney. Informed that for this kind of loan he would have to sign in person, she broke into tears: Her boyfriend actually had been serving a jail term.

Not a problem. Almost anyone could borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars for a house in those wild days. Connelly agreed to send the paperwork to the courthouse where the boyfriend had a hearing. As it happened, he was freed that day. Still, Connelly said, "that was one of mine that goes down in the annals of the strange."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/business/creditcrisis/

 

posted by BrianSummers | 0 Comments
Filed Under: Narratives , Business Stories, Newspaper Stories

Iraq Today

For a terrific overview of the current state of Iraq, check out this week's issue of The Economist. In "Iraq: Is it Finally Turning the Corner?" the magazine puts the country's political, military, economic and social situations in clear perspective. While noting the mountains of trauma and difficulties that still exist in Iraq, the article finds reasons for optimism:

Iraq's future is still full of pitfalls. The sectarian chasms remain deep, the wounds of strife raw. But for the first time since the insurgency against the Americans took off, the tide, which may quickly ebb, is flowing in the direction of the new order.

www.economist.com/world/africa/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=11540858

For a more disturbing look at what's happening in Iraq, check out Mark Benjamin and Christopher Weaver's "Killing by the Numbers," which appeared in Salon. The story describes the pressure put on U.S. soldiers to shoot Iraqis, whether enemies or not, in order to inflate body counts and make their commanders look good. www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/05/09/snipers/

Undercover in Myanmar

More than a month after Cyclone Nargis killed tens of thousands of people in Myanmar, the military regime continues to deny unhindered access to the disaster zone. To reach the affected regions, a Los Angeles Times staff writer hid in the holds of riverboats as they traveled through the Irrawaddy River delta. The writer, who is unidentified to protect those who worked with him, shares his findings in "In Myanmar, a Times Reporter Worked in Secret to Cover the Story." Here's what he found in Kong Tan Paak:

The younger of the two monks, U Nya Tui Ka, 53, approached our boat, one of four I hired to take me to the delta during a month of visits, and was shocked to see a foreigner poking his head from the hold.

He assumed that help had arrived. His despair gave way to a broad smile, and then to disappointment as the interpreter explained that I was a reporter.

There was an unsettling silence. Not a birdsong, a dog's bark or a crying child could be heard -- only the wind and a few buzzing flies.

Standing in the blazing sun, chewing on a mouthful of betel, the senior monk, U Pyinar Wata, patiently answered our questions. The monks could make do with the little food they had, he said. After all, Buddha had taught that without craving, there is no suffering.

But the monks were worried about a few homeless children in their care. Together, the monks and boys were the only people on their side of the river for miles. Without fresh water, the monks feared, the boys might not last long.

latimes.com/news/la-fg-secret13-2008jun13,0,2065923.story