"Ministers reaching out to Catholics"

A small sign of the Rainesification of The Boston Globe?

"Rainesification"? Read "Raines-ification". Or, how about "Rainesization"? Read "Raines-ization".

Amy calls our attention to this BG article.

Believe it or not, I find the most interesting and notable aspect of the article to be this notation at the bottom: "This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 12/8/2002."

Got that? On the front page. On a Sunday.

P.S. See Domenico's concluding remark.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 12/08/02 09:38:19 PM
Categorized as Media.

"Local Dancer Following Dream to Broadway"

By Joanna Blair in the Tribune-Review.

A friend of mine writes today about another friend of mine:

Maria Gismondi, a fixture in the theater department at California University of Pennsylvania since her first "Nutcracker" performance in 1996, will leave for New York City next month, hoping to perform on Broadway.

"I'm going with the attitude that I'm taking over the city," Gismondi said. "I'm going to New York completely fearless, which is a great feeling." ....

Gismondi saw the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater production of "The Nutcracker" at age 4 and knew then she wanted to be a ballerina. However she had to wait a year to start taking lessons.

"I couldn't wait," she said, "I was counting the days. I knew even at that age that ballet was going to play an important role in my life. Ballet is my beginning; it's the deepest part of me, the most sincere part of me, my foundation." ....

I have known Joanna for a few years; I've known Maria since she was a little girl; her parents live on the next block over from me.

I got to take some pictures at The Nutracker last year. Here are two of them: the first, of Maria on stage as the Sugar Plum Fairy; the second, of Maria (right) with her friend Kris Pramuk, who danced the Snow Queen.

I know few words to adequately describe Maria, as a person and a performer: splendid and spectacular come immediately to mind, though.

See also Ballet theater to stage ‘The Nutcracker’ performances.

P.S. I also have a couple of pictures of Maria (as the Sugar Plum Fairy in the Homecoming Parade) in The View from the Core 2.10.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 12/08/02 08:06:27 PM
Categorized as Other & Photos.

"Liberals have lost their media monopoly"

By William Rusher.

I can never find William Rusher's columns anywhere on the Web. (If anybody knows where they are, would you clue me in?) This one ran in the local newspaper, Dec. 6.

Liberals have lost their media monopoly

It is a truism that whenever an established orthodoxy detects a rival, it goes through three well-defined stages. First, it ignores its challenger as long as possible. This is called “the silent treatment.” Then, if and when the rival’s growing success makes that no longer possible, it will be subjected to ridicule. Only if that doesn’t work will the Powers That Be unleash a really vicious campaign of denunciation. That will last until the rival is either totally destroyed or succeeds in overthrowing the established orthodoxy.

As the longtime publisher of National Review (1957-1988), America’s first and for years the only journal of conservative opinion, I had a front-row seat at one spectacular example of this process.

When Bill Buckley founded the magazine in 1955, to challenge the previously undisputed dominance of America’s liberal establishment, the liberal intellectual pooh-bahs of the day took one sniff and dismissed it as having nothing to contribute to the national colloquy. Silence, total and contemptuous, descended. In the next five years, during which time the magazine almost single-handedly managed to unite the right in a conservative movement and seriously challenge the regnant liberals, it earned exactly two brief references in Time and two more in Newsweek — publications that purported to inform Americans of all important news.

By 1960, the growth of the conservative movement made the silent treatment no longer possible. After a brief attempt to ridicule conservatism as a pathology rather than a serious political movement (i.e.: Richard Hofstadter’s book, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, (first published in the early ’60s), the liberals, beginning in late 1961, took out their meat cleavers and did their level best to destroy the conservative movement root and branch.

Carefully avoiding any mention of National Review or other responsible conservatives, they smeared the movement as typified by the John Birch Society and the Minutemen. Thus was the battle joined. When the smoke blew away 20 years later, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States.

Liberalism, as the dominant force in American politics, is long gone. But in two protected enclaves — the media and the academy — it has largely managed to preserve the monopoly it once enjoyed in the nation’s politics. All three of the major television networks, as well as almost all of the nation’s most influential newspapers and newsmagazines, hew diligently to the liberal line. Here and there — notably in newspaper columns (like this one), on talk radio programs, and now on one small cable television network (Fox News Network) — conservatives can be found. But the major media, for decades, have done their best to ignore or ridicule them.

Until now. Reeling from their recent election debacle, a number of liberals believe they have identified the problem. It is, in the words of Time magazine, “a new reality: conservative bias in the media.” Or, as Jonathan Chait explained in The New Republic, the Republican party “enjoys allied media outlets like Fox News and talk radio, which disseminate its message to its base in a way that Democrats can’t duplicate.” Give me a break! All they have is The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC ... and on and on.

Liberalism’s political leaders have been in the forefront of this new attack. Soon-to-be Senate minority leader Tom Daschle charged that he has been receiving death threats from overheated listeners of Rush Limbaugh, whose incisive, but never irresponsible, radio commentaries are heard by 20 million people per week.

In other words the liberals — who totally dominated the media until talk radio provided a brand new way to reach the American people and technology gave birth to a cable TV network they didn’t control — have moved to stage three in the battle to preserve their journalistic fiefdom. Make no mistake about it: it’s going to get dirty. Daschle’s vicious smear is proof enough of that.

But I have a hunch this battle isn’t going to take 20 years. In truth, the liberals have lost it already. Big boys, your monopoly is over.

William Rusher is a Distinguished Fellow of the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship and Political Philosophy.

The Blog from the Core asserts Fair Use.

FWIW, I think Rusher leaves out another important factor: the Internet, including websites writing original news stories, websites disseminating local news and columns to an incomparably wider audience, and blogging. You might not have been able to read this column, for instance, were it not for the Internet.

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 12/08/02 08:07:29 AM
Categorized as Media.