PREVIOUS NEWS • NEXT NEWS

November 13, 2001

I THOUGHT IT might be interesting to demonstrate how our nation's current war strategy can be completely summarized by two comic book covers.

War is Heck by Frank Rich, New York Times Justifying War by Alan Keyes The Political Clock is Ticking by Kevin Phillips, Los Angeles Times The above links are to articles that the operator of this website believes are interesting and which contribute to the national debate.  He does not necessarily agree with all or any of what they say...and you won't, either.

THE BIG PRESS RECOUNT of the Florida vote has come and gone without us learning much about anything.  Most of the stories in the "consortium" papers didn't seem to think much of their own survey, and didn't seem to know what was so newsworthy that it justified the time and trouble.  (The fairest story seemed to me to be the one moved by Associated Press.  Here's a link.)

Watching the partisans frantically spinning, one got the feeling they weren't too thrilled with the thing, either.  The pro-Gore folks seem disappointed that it did not yield hard evidence that Gore clearly got more votes than Bush, but was cheated due to thuggish Republican tactics.  The pro-Bush folks seem frustrated that it pretty well establishes that substantially more Floridians who cast votes were trying to cast them for Gore.

Personally, I think more folks on both sides should be outraged at how sloppy the whole voting/counting procedure was.  Can anyone doubt that, using that system and those machines, we've had a number of wrong guys declared the victor in elections past?  And probably not just in Florida?  But of course, no one in the public discourse gives a fig about voting accuracy if it doesn't lead to their guy getting in.

The reportage with which I would most disagree is that the claim that, had the recounts gone forward, Bush would probably have won; ergo, the Supreme Court decision is somehow vindicated.  I think it proves the opposite.  Ostensibly, they were arguing the application of the law, not that they were finding a justification for installing the correct guy.  A lot of press reports (including The New York Times) have come perilously close to saying, "Well, the right man got in; ergo, the decision was sound."  Clearly, a fallacious court decision can, via the old stopped-clock theorem, yield the correct result.  A proper decision would have stood the test of either outcome.

Moreover, the press recounts show that "recoverable overvotes," (i.e., ballots that had two votes for president, both the same) could easily have altered that outcome.  The Supreme Court decision was ostensibly about "equal protection" but its result was that such overvotes were counted in some Florida precincts and tossed in others.  And, despite the screw-ups of Gore's lawyers, which now look more formidable than ever, more votes could have been counted and should have been counted.  Ultimately, the decision of who won Florida — and, therefore, the presidency — turned on which voters had their ballots tallied and which ones didn't.  And it all came down to a court decision that sought to prevent "irreparable harm," not to the voters but to the candidate who'd triumphed in the first, incomplete counts.

That America is not more outraged at the Supreme Court is, I suspect, indicative that we have come to regard that institution as just another partisan body, with no wisdom to rise above the fray.  We're used to our legislative and executive offices occasionally going foolishly liberal or conservative on us, depending on who happens to comprise them that week.  Now, more than ever, we track control of the Supreme Court with the same expectation of power shifts that accompanied one recent Senator switching political parties.  We are no more surprised when the highest court in the land is "wrong" (as per our views) than we are when we lose a skirmish in a Congress or Senate.

The theory behind appointing Supreme Court justices for life was to remove them from the political fray.  Sure ain't worked out that way, has it?

(For more on all this, check out this recent piece by Mickey Kaus, who seems to have been the first commentator, many moons ago, to zero in on the significance of all them overvotes.)

A NOT-INSIGNIFICANT percentage of America watches its TV shows without at least fully hearing them.  They read them via closed-captioning, which puts the text on the screen, often inaccurately.  Vast howlers have emerged when speech-to-text conversion devices have been used on live events, since the devices "mishear" and do not distinguish between homonyms — "frees" and "freeze," for example.  But even shows that are captioned in a more leisurely, stenographic manner sometimes promulgate altered or truncated dialogue that way.

A few years back, folks at the Writers Guild were briefly considering raising a creative rights stink about them.  For some reason, on a flurry of shows, whoever was doing the closed-captioning was taking great liberties with what WGA writers wrote, doing major paraphrasing and condensation, often for no visible reason.  A couple of members wanted to lodge a protest and/or a lawsuit; others feared that it would somehow look like the Guild was making it more difficult for hearing-impaired viewers to be serviced.  Eventually, the issue was dropped due to a disinterest and because the captioners seemed to be getting more faithful.

For some time, it has been — well, not exactly a secret but something that no one mentioned out loud — that a few shows would censor/bleep spoken words but leave them in the captioning.  David Letterman's was among them.  Recently, this was the case with a joke about Gatorade.  Letterman's speech, which was bleeped, said something about the product including "5% gator urine" but these words turned up in the closed-captioning.  (The procedure is now being changed.  For more info, as well as a good explanation of different captioning procedures, check out Joe Clark's explanation here.)

Here is a possibly-interesting aspect to this issue: What if the Gatorade people decided to sue for slander?  They almost certainly won't but what if they did?  I'm a layman but, as I understand it, to win a defamation case, you generally have to prove (1) that the statement was false, (2) that the conveyor(s) of the statement knew it was false or should have known, (3) that it was defamatory and (4) that they acted either with malice or with a reckless disregard for accuracy.  It would seem to me that by cutting the joke, the producers are admitting the first two and would have a hard time defending the third.  After all, someone at the network made the decision to delete the reference for most of America.  That person would be put on the stand and asked why it was cut.  A reply like, "Well, we knew it wasn't defamatory but someone was afraid someone might think it was unfair to Gatorade" would not likely sway a jury.

That would leave (4) as the last line of defense and that would seem shaky to me.  It's easy to imagine some well-dressed Johnny Cochran-style barrister packing the courtroom with deaf people the day of his summation, gesturing to them and proclaiming, "These people make up X percent [whatever it is] of the American population.  Is the defense claiming that they don't exist?  That these people are so insignificant that we don't acknowledge them as a part of society?  That it isn't worth the twenty seconds it would have taken the producers to phone the closed-captioning company and have the offending line deleted?"  And so on, establishing some approximation of reckless disregard.

This is moot in the case of Letterman/Gatorade since, as I say, the company is unlikely to sue, if only because it would only prompt more (and worse) Gatorade jokes elsewhere.  But it has often dawned on me that the networks' Standards and Practices departments, in their never-ending quest to stop their networks from getting sued, often achieve the opposite; that they make their companies more vulnerable by admitting — and even arguing — that a given line which ultimately gets on the air is actionable.  I can't count the number of times a Censor Person told me that a given joke might be cause for legal action.  The joke usually aired anyway and nothing happened...but the Standards 'n' Practices person always wrote a cover-your-ass memo to say, "I warned him this was defamatory" and if someone had sued, that memo would likely have been subpoenaed and offered as some sort of admission on the network's part.

Just something to think about.

By the way: If you have know someone who is hard-o'-hearing, you might consider touting them on closed-captioning — and they don't have to be deaf to find it of value.  My father never went deaf but his hearing deteriorated to the point where he was having trouble watching television — especially shows with a lot of crowd noise (like sports) or background music intermingling with dialogue.  At the time, closed-captioning was not standard on TV sets, so I went to Sears, which was then the leading vendor of them, and bought a device to attach to his Zenith.  He left the sound on and was still able to distinguish about 85% of what was said...but the captioning helped him with the other 15%.  That 15% was the difference between enjoying a show and constant frustration.

When he passed away, my mother had me take the machine off his set and I stuck it in the trunk of my car, figuring I might someday find a home for it.  Six months later, I was at a San Diego Comic Convention, talking with a lovely man named Dick Giordano, who was then the head honcho at DC Comics.  Dick has a hearing problem and we somehow got to talking about closed-captioning.  He said he'd never tried it, and didn't know where to purchase one of the decoders.  I said, "Wait here a second..." and ran out to my car.  Dick used it for years, all the time wondering how it was that I just happened to have a spare closed-caption device with me.

WE'VE SPOKEN HERE here before of Brad Oscar, who is subbing (matinees and some evenings) for Nathan Lane in The Producers on Broadway.  Brad is now getting reviewed by the New York critics and, so far, they love him.  Here's one review and here's another.

JUST ADDED a column about my little buddy, Billy Barty.  Read all about him here.

Click here to read the previous NEWS FROM ME