Let's comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted

Sam Smith has no use for either of the Clintons -- hasn't for many years -- but he also has no use for the media piling on Mrs. C to get out of the race:

Under the rules of traditional journalism a fight is always better than its resolution. The former can last forever; the latter is stale news in a day or two.

But ever since the media became indentured servants of the powerful, this is no longer true. As soon as it seemed Obama would win the nomination, the media was out to show it recognized the fact and Clinton, like a bleeding, losing canine in a dog fight, was to be put to rest. Little things like the practice of democracy and the intrinsic purpose of even having a convention are placed aside out of respect for the presumptive winner.

You see this same creepy coddling of power in the way the media makes fun of third party candidates, worthy causes that lack major power, or singers who get kicked off American Idol. ...Let's hope the political media doesn't start covering sports events. You'd end up paying for nine innings and only getting five.

Media morass

Eschewing easy targets like presidential campaign coverage, the irreplaceable Mike Miner reads, and politely eviscerates, the abysmal coverage of recent mass murders: "Mad Gunman Triggers Healing Process."

The timidity of TV

TV "news" isn't liberal or conservative, it's stupid. John Hockenberry tells all in Technology Review:

In the spring of 2005, after working in television news for 12 years, I was jettisoned from NBC News in one of the company's downsizings. The work that I and others at Dateline NBC had done--to explore how the Internet might create new opportunities for storytelling, new audiences, and exciting new mechanisms for the creation of journalism--had come to naught. After years of timid experiments, NBC News tacitly declared that it wasn't interested. The culmination of Dateline's Internet journalism strategy was the highly rated pile of programming debris called To Catch a Predator. The TCAP formula is to post offers of sex with minors on the Internet and see whether anybody responds. Dateline's notion of New Media was the technological equivalent of etching "For a good time call Sally" on a men's room stall and waiting with cameras to see if anybody copied down the number.

Read the whole thing if your stomach is strong.

What if political reporters covered the NFL?

Thanks to Marc for calling my attention to Jim Caple at ESPN's page 2, who finds a new way to mock American political journalism. How it would look if sportswriters took the same approach to the NFL season as they do to presidential politics? Granted, the cases aren't perfectly parallel, but still...

July 20: The New York Times devotes 10 days of training camp coverage analyzing which teams have raised the most money in ticket and replica jersey sales so far.

Aug. 11: CBS declares that the Ravens are the new Super Bowl front-runner due to their convincing 29-3 victory over the Eagles in the first exhibition game. Analyst Jeff Greenfield, however, says the week's biggest winner is the Texans, who must now be considered a serious Super Bowl contender by coming out of nowhere for a surprisingly close 20-19 loss to the Bears. "They far surpassed expectations in this week's primary, and don't forget, five Super Bowl champions have come out of Texas," Greenfield says. "The biggest loser, meanwhile, is New England. The Patriots had the biggest war chest and they still lost."

The freelance state and the Reader's essence

The Reader got a fair amount of coverage for laying off four writers last week, myself included (there was some earlier when the creative and hard-working production department was outsourced and when the drivers were converted from employees to freelancers).

It's always nice to be agonized over; hear from long-lost friends, acquaintances, and colleagues; and mull over how on earth journalism is going to be paid for. But much of the paper has always been written by freelancers, and losing my job gave me a chance to chat with one of the best, Lee Sandlin, who has a gorgeous web site. IMO any list of the ten best stories the Reader ever published should include "The Invisible Man," AKA the cat story. You don't have anything better to do today than read it.

And while you're there, the site's dedication offers quite a different take on (a) the paper's currently embattled editor, and (b) the single quality that -- more than any individual writer -- has made it special over the years: the willingness to break our own rules if that's what it takes to bring you good reading.

It's not for me to say whether the Reader can get along without Conroy and Marlan and Bogira and me. But to the extent that it loses that willingness -- which has dwindled but not vanished in recent years -- it will be walking dead, no matter who's on the masthead.