Self-Absorption for $100
Early last month, 15 Washington political gabsters were invited to be contestants on a special, weeklong charity-benefit edition of Jeopardy, the venerable TV quiz show hosted by Alex Trebek. Tapes of “Power Players Week” have since been aired, and having watched a few installments, THE SCRAPBOOK can only marvel at the sophistication with which Jeopardy‘s producers selected their guests. Such a perfect reflection of modern America’s news-talk green room melting pot: Some were men, and some were women. Genuinely successful broadcast pundits like Tim Russert of Meet the Press were there. And so was Al Franken.
THE SCRAPBOOK’s personal favorite episode was the one featuring our old friend and WEEKLY STANDARD colleague Tucker Carlson, who was matched up against Washington Post eminence Bob Woodward and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, now a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Ms. Noonan was at her pixieish, subversive best–either that or she was on some especially powerful cold medication, we can’t be sure. At one point Noonan shouted out an (incorrect) answer without buzzing. At another, asked to name a 1960 gladiator movie starring Kirk Douglas, Noonan yelped, “Baryshnikov!”
Similarly peculiar was the trajectory of Carlson’s performance. He couldn’t do anything right at first. But then the questions–or “answers,” in Jeopardy-speak–turned to ballet, at which point Tucker’s fortunes skyrocketed. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Not that there’s anything wrong with the entire “Power Players Week” idea, in fact. It was for a worthy cause, after all. Each player had designated a charity to which his prospective winnings would be donated, and a fairly generous hunk of money was involved: Each first-place finisher’s charity would receive $50,000, with $20,000 going to the runners-up. Which brings us to the third member of the Carlson-Noonan-Woodward trio. Woodward, despite his reputation for being extremely well-informed, was bested by Tucker Carlson, though his choice of charity certainly stood out.
To whom did Woodward give away the resulting $20 grand? Here’s a hint: Education is important; the children are our future. That’s why, Woodward told Alex Trebek, he’d decided to sign over his Jeopardy prize to a needy “little school” in “Washington, D.C.,” called “Sidwell Friends.”
What a guy, huh? Now a whole new generation of needy children will be guaranteed access to the same Sidwell Friends education that needy children like Chelsea Clinton and Albert Gore III once received. Needy children like Bob Woodward’s own daughter, who now attends Sidwell’s elementary school.
Otherwise, the school would have had to scrape by on the proceeds of its pitiful $29,540,997 endowment.
The O’Failure Factor, Cont.
Wait, back up. Did somebody mention Al Franken?
It seems THE SCRAPBOOK has incorrectly interpreted–and consequently misreported–a series of recent developments involving Franken & Co.’s start-up liberal talk-radio network, Air America. We thought it was bad news for the project when, in lightning succession:
Air America first lost its signal and got kicked out of its offices in Chicago and Los Angeles; then announced that its CEO was resigning; then forced out and replaced its director of programming; and, finally, had its board chairman and vice chairman both quit on the same day.
But it turns out it wasn’t bad news. What’s happened, instead, as Air America president Jon Sinton explained to Sue Zeidler of Reuters last week, is that, well, “The business model has changed with our on-air success.”
That’s why Sinton has decided to abandon Air America’s attempt to secure replacement station leases in Chicago and Los Angeles, and has closed the network’s sales offices in both cities, laying off “15 to 20 people.”
THE SCRAPBOOK sincerely regrets the error.
How the News Gets Fit to Print
Reporter John Leland’s front-page New York Times story last Wednesday suggested that the Bush administration’s new prescription drug benefit plan is producing “chaos” for seniors on Medicare. Prominently quoted to that effect were two ostensibly average such seniors: a Mrs. Mildred Fruhling, 76, and retired Dr. Sydney Bild, 81. Fruhling’s complaints about the program’s discount cards, in fact, were the bulk of Leland’s four paragraph lead.
Twenty-four hours later, last Thursday, the Times ran the following “Editor’s Note” on page A2:
This is most interesting. Note what it is exactly that troubles the Times about Leland’s story: It isn’t actually the story at all, it’s the existence of a videotape that too obviously exposes the story’s biased construction. Only “had that been known” (Fruhling and Bild’s appearance in this videotape) would Leland’s story have been written differently. Otherwise, the inference clearly is, Leland’s story was fine. The fact that Leland was steered to Fruhling and Bild by a politically interested activist group but chose to present them, instead, as randomly typical seniors–and chose never to mention the activist group at all . . . well, that doesn’t seem to bother the Times‘s editors one bit.
These people are hopeless.
Prison Statistics Abuse
Also in last Wednesday’s New York Times, on page A17, was Fox Butterfield’s classically obtuse dispatch about a study recently released by the Sentencing Project, “a prison research and advocacy group.” It turns out that “almost 10 percent of all inmates in state and federal prison are serving life sentences,” a figure that represents “an increase of 83 percent from 1992.” Butterfield reports these data in a tone that suggests they are self-evidently distressing and unwelcome.
For instance: “The increase is not the result of a growth in crime, which actually fell 35 percent from 1992 to 2002.” This is rather like complaining that more and more people are getting flu shots even though fewer people are getting sick. Fox Butterfield is aghast! The possibility that longer prison sentences might be a reason for lower crime rates seems not to have occurred to him.
It also seems not to have occurred to him that some malicious person might have fun quoting the following sentence (only slightly) out of context: “The report did not suggest why inmates serving life terms have a lower recidivism rate.”
Hint: It might have something to do with the fact that when they finally get out of jail, they’re dead.
