DC Porcupine

• 2012-05-30

  Post Blog Runs Discredited Prom Figures

  

  Post “On Parenting” blogger Janine D’Arcy, last seen grousing that people can be parents and have threesomes, found a new scandal yesterday: American parents are spending, on average, $1,000 on prom.

  The most obscene story, though, might be an economic one. At a time when our country continues to reel from sluggish job growth, Visa is reporting that parents plan to spend, on average, $1,078 each on the prom.That’s more than a third than what was spent last year.

   That’s so much money. Or is it? On May 10, the Today Show’s Moms blog disproved the prom study, which had gone out on PR Newswire. While the study purported to be based on 1,000 phone interviews, it had actually ruled out 741 people who didn’t have children attending prom and 85 people who didn’t know how much they were spending.

  Incredibly, the study’s organizers also threw out 55 people who had children attending prom, but weren’t spending any money on it. Those people might have been useful to include in the survey, given that organizers were allegedly trying to figure out how much parents were spending on prom. 

  As the Today Show’s blog points out, that means the survey’s based on just 119 people, which is a pretty thin number to extrapolate the country’s spending habits on.

  This prom poll, now 19 days since discredited, is the foundation of D’Arcy’s post. Is it so much to ask that she or her editors do a quick Google search before running press release stories? 

  Via the Examiner’s Jenny Rogers

• →

  Times Tries Its Hand at Bike Baiting

  Washington Times columnist Charles Hurt, like Courtland Milloy and Petula Dvorak before him, that accusing bike riders of smugness is a guaranteed formula for clicks. Here’s his contribution to the genre, on Washington’s shared bike program:

  Having people pedal around on these bikes, they say, means fewer people riding pollution-emitting city buses and fewer cars clogging the roads. And healthy riders means less of a burden on socialized medicine. These people get very excited talking about all the upsides.

  Oh, and the smugness with which these pedaling heroes pump away! I have seen proud drivers of Priuses look away in shame as they ease by in their bio-electric and sometimes spontaneously combustible vehicles.

  It’s fine stuff, but then Hurt tips his hand:

  The bikes are shaped like the old-timey “girl bikes” without the crossbar, making them suitable for un-liberated women in skirts as well as these so-called “metrosexual” males everybody keeps talking about in these parts.

  Metrosexual? Where’s the subtlety? Hurt might as well have put SHARE THIS ON YOUR BICYCLE LISTSERV.

• →

  New Republic Relaunches “The Plank” Blog

  It’s a new Facebooky era at the New Republic, but some things apparently never change. In a post last night, the magazine announced the relaunch of its “The Plank” group blog, dormant since 2009.

  If, like me, you wondered “The Plank’s been on hiatus since 2009? But I didn’t miss it at all” I guess that explains the relaunch. 

• 2012-05-25

  How Ron Moten’s Show Deals With Equal-Time Rules

  

  Ron Moten

  Despite all the excitement about Ron Moten’s new DC politics radio show on, some killjoys pointed out that Moten is running for the Ward 7 council seat against incumbent Yvette Alexander. How can Moten’s station, We Act Radio at 1480 AM, avoid violating equal-time rules that require stations that give time to one candidate to offer the same amount of time for other candidates that request it? 

  Essentially, by being open to the Yvette Alexander Radio Hour. If any other Ward 7 candidate wants to be heard on the Anacostia-based station, they’re welcome to it, writes station co-owner Alex Lawson in an email to DC Porcupine.

  “I can assure you that we will provide a completely equal opportunity for any qualified political candidate running for the same office if we receive an inquiry,” Lawson writes.

  Please, Councilmember Alexander, make our radio dreams come true and demand a show. Or, better still, a co-host position on Moten’s.

• →

  Post Botches State Dept. ‘Hacking’ Story

  For all the corrections that run in the Post, it’s rare to find a material error that would really change the story for the reader. Post reporters Karen DeYoung and Ellen Nakashima scored one of these more drastic corrections today for a Thursday story on Hillary Clinton saying the State Department “hacked” an al-Qaeda in Yemen forum.

  Turns out, Clinton didn’t say State hacked the forum, just that they posted information about al-Qaeda’s casualties on it using the same posting access anyone has to the site. The original version of the story uses variation on “hacked” in the headline, the lead, and throughout the rest of the article.

  The article doesn’t have any quote from Clinton where she explicitly says the site was hacked. Here’s the correction that’s been appended to the story:

  Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that cyber experts had hacked into al-Qaeda’s sites to replace its rhetoric with information about Yemeni civilians killed in terrorist strikes. U.S. officials did post such information, mimicking the format used by the group, but they did so on publicly accessible forums. They did not gain unauthorized access to sites, and they did not alter content already on the sites. This version has been corrected.

  The Christian Science Monitor explains the difference that adding “hacking” to the story makes:

  Even so, early media reports of Secretary Clinton’s speech created a buzz because they mischaracterized State’s move on the Yemeni tribal sites as a hacking attack on a rogue website. That would have been novel since cyberwar hacking – taking over, spying on, or attacking a computer network or website – has been the province of intelligence agencies and US Cyber Command.

• →

  Texas Forever, Mayor Gray

  

  Embattled Mayor Vincent Gray tosses a football to City Paper Loose Lips writer Alan Suderman at the opening of Rosedale Community Center.

  A tipster was struck by the picture’s wistfulness:

  It had a real “Vince and Alan in happier times…” vibe

• →

  Handbook: No Interviews in DC Fed Court Hallways

  Remember when the Post’s Mike DeBonis got bounced earlier this month from DC’s District courthouse for trying to ask a question to disgraced councilmember Harry Thomas Jr. as he left court? Security officers at the court told DeBonis that interviews weren’t allowed in the courthouse and escorted him out.

  Apparently, they were right, at least according to the very enjoyable “Journalists’ Handbook to the Courts in the District of Columbia” (PDF):

  Interviews may be conducted in the press room, or at designated sites outside the courthouse. Interviews in the courtrooms or hallways are prohibited.

• →

  WaTimes’s Miller Responds, Sort Of, On Court Picture

  

  The Washington Times’s Emily Miller didn’t get back to me about running a forbidden photograph from Superior Court in an article yesterday, but she did send out the above tweet about it that suggests that she or someone else at the Times took it.

  It’s not like Miller took a picture of a witness at a homicide trial. But it does seem like remarkably high-risk/low-reward move for Miller and the rest of the Times’s reporters. The picture’s junky, and doesn’t add anything to the story. Did readers need photographic proof that the hearing took place?

  —

  Can Miller just cut the charade and come out against Home Rule? Her story, about a veteran who had his DC home raided by police for having unregistered guns after he called a suicide hotline, laments that someone who knowingly broke DC’s laws was arrested:

  Sgt. [Matt] Corrigan had three personal guns for protection and for competition in his home. He had recently moved from Virginia to the District, but had not registered them because he thought the process was too convoluted and risky.

  “It didn’t sound right that I could just carry my guns to the police station and not get arrested.” He recalled thinking that, “I’ll just wait for them to clear up this complicated process and do it then.” 

  Miller’s story suggests that Corrigan was mistreated by Metropolitan police, which may be. But the central premise of her story—that a vet shouldn’t be arrested for having unregistered pistols and a rifle—is paper-thin. 

  In related Miller news, she recently won a Clark Mollenhoff Award for Investigative Reporting from the righty Institute on Political Journalism for her series on trying to register a gun in the District.

• 2012-05-24

  WaTimes Runs Photo from Inside Superior Court

  Bold move by the Washington Times’s Emily Miller today. In a story about an Iraq vet who was arrested for having unregistered guns in the District, Miller ran an iPhone picture from a hearing at Superior Court, even though court photography is forbidden.

  There aren’t any photos credits in the online version, so it’s not clear whether someone from the Times took the picture or it was provided to them. 

  Via Mike DeBonis

• 2012-05-23

  Post Digital News Director Leaving

  Post executive director for digital news Katharine Zaleski is leaving the paper, Poynter reports. Zaleski’s joining video start-up Planet Daily.