Brian Williams

Not that long ago, I worked in journalism. I worked for a newspaper, and before that a different newspaper, and before that (skipping over a stint at Sears) I was a journalism student in college. Although it hasn't come up that much in my professional career (I mostly did layout and copy editing, with some reporting thrown in), I remember vividly a class on ethics in journalism. Although it placed an unswerving focus on telling the truth, most situations are more complex than doing just that. Ultimately, the point of the class was that each of us has to make our own calls; there are very few hard-and-fast rules in ethical reporting.

And that's part of why I feel more than a little defensive of Brian Williams, the embattled face of NBC's news division. Unlike, I think, most of his ersatz detractors on the Internet, I actually watch his program with fair regularity and have for years. (Full disclosure: I'm subtracting out the years where I couldn't afford cable and lived in locations where antenna reception wasn't possible.) I saw the broadcast that got him in so much trouble, and I saw it live. And I don't think he should lose his job over it.

Let's cut to the chase and assume the worst is possible, as NBC has already done by putting Williams on a six-month suspension. The report in question was about him reuniting with a veteran he'd previously met on active duty in Iraq. Most of the report was Williams thanking this man, and there was video of the two of them appearing at a sporting event together. The part that may end up costing Williams his job: He claims to have been in a helicopter that was hit by rocket fire. Members of the military chimed in and said they remembered it differently. In a recanting of the story that aired a few days later (which I also saw live), Williams said it was a helicopter ahead of his. This too is being challenged. The truth or something like it will probably out eventually.

To assume the worst is to assume that Williams lied deliberately to make his participation in the event seem more exciting. (To be clear, this is an assumption; Williams maintains it was a mistake as of this writing, to the best of my knowledge.) So what?

Whether deliberate or accidental, this is a grave lapse in journalistic rigor. However, if one scrutinizes it based on ethics, it's virtually meaningless. The worst-case scenario, based on current available facts, is that Brian Williams juiced up the backstory for a news piece about honoring a veteran.

For context, the last major scandal in network news was "Memogate," which destroyed Dan Rather's career in 2004. Memogate started with a piece on CBS' 60 Minutes in which longtime news anchor Rather presented a series of documents purporting to show that then-President George W. Bush had been a substandard member of the Air National Guard in the 1970s. The problem was that the documents were almost obviously fake (click the link and you'll be taken to the relevant Wikipedia article, where a two-frame GIF shows how the purportedly vintage documents clearly use the same default settings as Microsoft Word.)

Rather got fired for failing to research a very big story, which in my book is the best reason to fire a journalist. The piece was aired less than two months before the 2004 election and cast aspersions on the character of a sitting president - those are extremely high stakes, and they weren't treated with proper caution. Right now, the charges against Williams are much less significant. He wasn't trying to take on a world leader. He was, at worst, trying to make himself look too significant in a story about somebody else.

I might feel defensive, but I'm not defending Williams; what he did was wrong. That's a question of what kind and how much, distinctions that matter a lot. However, even if it's concluded that the error was deliberate, I don't think Williams should lose his job for this. Making yourself seem closer to the action in a war story is a far cry from trying to bring down a president.

If you've read this far, please consider reading this article - from improbable hard news bastion Cracked - that discusses the subject further.

Libraries I Have Blogged From

Here in Lebanon, New Hampshire, you get two basic choices for "library," and they are both ridiculous. The first is the Lebanon Public Library, which is built primarily out of marble and, even with a new wing, is so tiny that the books have to really be packed in there. This is the children's room:

See, that's what I imagine a children's room in a library looking like - a congenial mess. My wife and I spent a fair amount of time there because 1) usually there aren't actually that many children, and 2) the adult section had the one obligatory creepy guy who never left. Later on we found out that there was some extra space on the second floor, which you can get to with this elevator:

Which contains this phone:

The piece of paper taped to the handset says "Call 911."

and then be left alone to browse the Internet in peace.

Your second choice is the Kilton Public Library, which was finished in 2011 and feels remarkably like an airport concourse. This is what the inside of Kilton looks like:

That's... not actually that many books. "Spacious" isn't a word you normally associate with libraries, either. How many people did it take to bankroll such a majestic public structure?

This many:

Holy living fuck. That board is four feet wide and contains 526 plaques. BUT - does Kilton have this poster?

My wife says this is the "2000s-est thing ever." She's not wrong.

Nope, that's the proud property of Lebanon Public. This is too close to call. Let's go to the grid.

Criterion	Kilton PL	Lebanon PL
Books?	Some	Lots
Wi-Fi?	Y	Y
Sells coffee?	Y	N
Bathrooms?	M + F	Unisex (2)
Bathroom smelled like weed smoke at least once?	N	Y
Will sell you photocopy of NYT crossword?	Y	Y
Spells "public" as "pvblic"?	N	Y
My Little Pony-themed Obama-style poster?	N	Y
Donations board the size of a flatscreen TV?	Y	N
Confernce room with moving walls?	Y	N
Microfilm machine?	?	Y
Share a website?	Oh	yeah.

Clearly, this is still too close to call. Such are the bountiful options if you are in Lebanon, N.H., and need a place to read/blog/get high.

Curiosity of Politics: Vermont

I'm in the middle of packing my life into boxes, but there's something I've been meaning to share. I don't have as much time or battery life as I'd like, so I'll have to be quick, but I want to show you something strange: This.

That is the list of presidential election results, by state, for every election ever held in the United States of America. There was a version of this chart in one of my history books in college and then, as now, it fascinated me. See, the state I'm currently moving out of is Vermont, and Vermont has the longest party loyalty streak of any state for any party: from 1856 through 1960, Vermont voted Republican. In case you were wondering, this is what the electoral map of 1856 looked like:

There were 31 states that year. And Vermont remained a Republican stronghold for 104 years. Even when the cool states were voting Democratic, Vermont voted Republican. Even when it was FDR in World War II, Vermont voted Republican. In fact, even after going for LBJ in 1960, Vermont went back to being Republican until 1992. Now, it's one of the bluest of the blue states, with there being no indication of anything about that changing in this election. Why?

It's complicated in ways I wish I had the time to get into. The Republican and Democratic parties performed a very slow waltz over the course of the 20th century in which the two traded places as the liberal and conservative voices, and that had a lot to do with race. In the last few years, the remaining handful of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans have either jumped ship or died from old age.

One might think that that's what happened with Vermont: The conservative generation has passed on, giving way to liberals. But what I, personally, have seen is nothing like that: I went to an Occupy march last year at about this time and most of the people there had probably been college kids when Vietnam was happening. The liberals here are young and old.

More than that, however, is that the Republican Party here in Vermont looks nothing like the Republican Party nationally. There are different strains of Republicanism nationally - the Reaganites, the neo-cons, whatever Mitt Romney is classified as - but I'd say the Republicans here are Coolidge Republicans, taciturn to the point of being spartan and concerned with function over style for everything. At the height of Tea Party mania during the midterm elections of 2010... nothing happened here.

I'm too young to really know if they've stuck by their guns the whole time or if they've retracted from the high-water mark of Reagan flamboyance in the 1980s, but either way, they're not the rest of the party is nationally. Just a thought worth sharing as we head into an election in which both sides are convinced the other party's candidate will run the US into the ground.

Thoughts for Your Pennies

On March 29, 2012, the Royal Canadian Mint announced that it would discontinue the country's penny. In part, it reads "'The Mint will continue to develop new strategies and technologies to meet current national and world market demands,' said Ian E. Bennett, President and CEO of the Royal Canadian Mint. 'The Mint's Winnipeg facility has produced coins for over 75 countries in the past 35 years; therefore we have a solid reputation on which to build a future without the penny.'" That's sort of a ridiculous basis for reassurance - in effect, "We've given you useful things for a long time, so you won't mind if we take one of those things away" - but Canada is moving forward into a penniless future. Will the United States follow?

The last generation of Canadian pennies is being struck out of copper-plated steel. The American penny is made of a similar structure, copper-plated zinc. In both cases, the corrosion-resistant copper is used to shield a less durable metal from the dangers of the outside world. The problem is that it now costs both the Canadian and American governments more than a cent to make a cent. According to the report cited above, the Canadian government pulled the plug when it cost 1.6¢. However, the US mint is grimly plugging along when it costs 1.92¢ (as of 2010). They're also losing money on the nickel (9.22¢ to make), something the Canadian government proudly boasts is not a problem.

The US mint is looking at again reformulating the penny, which was 95% copper until 1982, when it switched to copper-plated zinc. Meanwhile, there are people hoarding the old pennies, waiting for the day they can legally melt them down for the copper content.

Zinc is a light white metal usually used in galvanized steel, bulk castings and roofing. Both zinc and steel are used as fillers in pennies because there's more than a penny's worth of copper in a copper penny. While zinc is used to protect steel as a sacrificial coating (think the short-lived shininess of new guardrails on the interstate), it is not particularly durable in and of itself, and will develop a crusty white coating of zinc oxide. For that reason, pure zinc wouldn't work for a coin that's handled regularly. Nor would pure steel or regular iron. That leaves only one metal cheap enough: Aluminum.

That's what an aluminum penny would look like. A test series was struck in 1973 when copper became too expensive. If the US Mint hangs onto the penny much longer, it will probably have to resort to something like this again, although it's hard to say. The problem with the nickel might be a bit easier to solve; the nickel could just be made from zinc and nickel plated.

For now, it's all talk. But sooner or later, something is going to have to give. The Canadian method, interestingly enough, is to leave the pennies as legal tender and let people decide what to do for themselves.