Packing for the Airport (A Continuing Series)

No comment really needed about this week's TSA tally of guns found at airport checkpoints, except to point out that the average numbers are growing.

Here's the link to this week's TSA blog.

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"Visit Tucson" Ad Seems to Extol Putting Graffiti on Saguaros

Actual graffiti vandalism at Saguaro National Park (my photos)

Well, you do get what you pay for. But really, someone ought to be asking who paid what for a new "Visit Tucson" ad campaign, launched to much local media giddiness this week here in Tucson.

The ad campaign features concepts by a company called MMGY Global, including one (see center panel of above photo from yesterday's Arizona Daily Star) that depicts a saguaro cactus defaced with the inane slogan, in graffiti form,  "Go, I heard. And Go, I did."  Right, an ad showing a graffiti slogan on a saguaro.

That's a bad mistake, especially given recent publicity about odious vandals who damaged more than a dozen giant saguaro cactuses in Saguaro National Park, while park rangers were asleep at the switch (well, except one who did report the crime, a certain volunteer ranger who got fired for telling the media about the vandalism). Maybe the crack Keystone Kops who botched the actual graffiti vandalism incident last month and then tried to cover up their malfeasance by firing a volunteer for "approaching the media" can add the ad to their files.

Incidentally, here's an atta-boy or atta-girl to the Daily Star editor who clearly saw the irony in the photo they published, without comment.

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Packing for the Airport (Latest in an Evidently Interminable Series)

Today's report from the Transportation Security Administration on the number of our fellow citizens who try to take guns through airport security -- the tally from the past week: 43 guns, 36 of them loaded.

Here's a link to the always entertaining TSA Blog on the current week's haul of weaponry.

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Too Damn Much Local TV 'News,' But Gannett Is Watching

Media watchers are scratching their heads today over news that the Gannett company is buying a company called Belo -- which owns 20 local TV stations around the country -- for $1.5 billion.

Why would anyone want to buy assets of declining value like local TV stations, which used to be financial powerhouses but are no longer, now that cable is king. Oh sure, there is the value of retransmission fees from  cable companies that want buy programming, yada, yada.

But the real reason is simple, it seems to me, and I refer you to the post here the other day about there being "too damn much local news" on TV. 

Gannett has always been known not for any measure of quality, but for a constant drive toward monopolization, as has been its long and undistinguished record in the newspaper business. 

Buying Belo will make Gannett, which is already a major player in the local TV station market, into the fourth largest TV station operator. And it says it might become larger in that market with future acquisitions. And the race is on to merge. For example, Media General and New Young Broadcasting, two other major owners of local TV stations, announced a merger last week, which will give Media General ownership of 30 local TV stations in 27 markets. (Yes, that means three will directly overlap. Wonder what happens there?)

For Gannett, how does buying a new bunch of local broadcast outlets this fit with Gannett's well-establish taste for monopolistic behavior? 

Well, take those local TV stations (please!) Most of them have declining viewership, but are characterized by one thing: Seemingly endless local "news" programming. At some stations, the local news is on eight hours a day. That doesn't mean there is enough local "news," or sufficient staff, to cogently fill eight hours, or even a single hour, with actual news. It means that the local TV stations are ginning up hours and hours of desperate attention-seeking gimmicks -- shouts of "Late Breaking!" all the day long being perhaps the most pernicious, along with promotional features, video produced by outside corporate interests and presented as legitimate news, even blatant advertising that's presented as news. Yes, the actual commercial ad-time is sold cheap, but there is so much more to sell!

Nationally, local TV stations have been sharply increasing the amount of time in their broadcast days that's filled by local "news" programming. In 2011, according to the Pew Research Center, a leading media researcher, local TV stations in the U.S. devoted an average of 5.5 hours each weekday to local news. In 2004, the average was 3.6 hours. Obviously, that doesn't mean there is more local news to cover, or (God forbid) that your local TV station has developed a sudden interest in serving the public's need to know. It means there is more money to be made selling local advertising on tricked-up marketing and promotional programming disguised as news.

Meanwhile, there's another trend at work. The Federal Communications Commission and other supposed regulators long ago rolled over in favor of cartel behavior in broadcast news. Rolled over to the point where in some markets, Tucson being one of them, two supposed competing TV stations are jointly producing their local news programming under only the flimsiest covering pretending to indicate that they are in fact separate.

According to a report out of the University of Delaware public policy school (link), of the 1,300 commercial TV stations in the U.S. in 2010, 177 had "station duopolies" -- agreements on shared services such as providing local news programming. That trend has intensified since 2010. 

Ah, now we can see right up Gannett's alley. 

Gannett has pretty much given up on the newspaper business, which incidentally it did its best to diminish over many years. Its local newspaper operations are now called "community digital information centers" or something to that effect. And the longtime Gannett CEO and corporate pirate Al Neuharth is now pushing up the daisies (my suggested sunny USA Today-type hed on his recent obit: "Most in USA Still Alive Today, Excluding Al Neuharth"), USA Today is exposed as a revenue-suck. I give it less than a year of survival as a print paper. Al -- long retired but considered something of a guiding light in the company till his recent death -- at least was a newspaper guy, if a lousy one. But he is barely cold in the ground and Gannett is galloping elsewhere. You've noticed all of those buyout-takers at USA Today in recent months?

Gannett's move more forcefully into local TV stations can only be driven by one thing. It clearly believes that the FCC and the Justice Department will continue to encourage anti-competitive behavior in broadcasting. There are enormous opportunities to do in local broadcasting what Gannett has so assiduously done in newspapers: Squeeze out competition, maximize profits, cut costs to the point where the cheapest possible product generates the highest possible revenue with the least required corporate effort. That is the tried-and-true formula. (It's no great coincidence that this formula has certain similarities to that utilized by some sweatshop in Guangzhou producing cheap Halloween ornaments for the U.S. market.)

Voila! News at 4, 6, 8, 10, noon, 3, 6 and 10! Also on our sister station, same damn news!

UPDATE: In a credulous story in the Gannett-owned Arizona Republic in Phoenix today, Gannett says that buying the Belo stations will result in a "super group" of stations that could reach a third of all U.S. households, but not to worry! Even though both companies have broadcast operations with overlap in five markets, including Phoenix, they will nevertheless "compete head-to-head." 

Uh huh.

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Too Damn Much Local 'News'

A local TV station here in Tucson, a town that, to its credit, not much really happens in, airs eight hours of local news a day. The other stations have similar schedules.

And it does so with fewer than 10 reporters and a few exhausted anchors and weather people, all required to holler "Live! Local! Late-Breaking!" during these newscasts, all day and all night -- when "breaking" is defined as having some poor overworked reporter stand on an empty street corner where, hours before or hours in the future, some event of marginal or little note either happened or is anticipated to happen.

Having the poor reporter hustle back out to the "scene," you see, is how they make it "Live!"

By the way, I have news for you, o local TV station managers all across the country. "Local" is only a big deal when something of note is being shown.  "Late-breaking" is almost always untrue. And "live" is no big deal. TV was live in 1949. They since invented news film and then, lo, video tape and then digital video.

This constant exhortation to witness "breaking" news (when no news is actually breaking) is dangerous, as well, in that it baffles the sensible while encouraging the simple-minded in their delusion that the world is out of control. Each new phony news excitement fades, to be replaced by still another.

The other day, for example, local TV stations stayed live for an hour showing a Southwest Airlines 737 landing routinely in Phoenix and discharging passengers on the tarmac -- because some idiot had called in a bomb threat (which is something that happens with some regularity, causing planes to be diverted, in the U.S.). But to anyone chancing upon the breathless TV reports, it looked like a major news event was playing out. And to the simple-minded, it was seen, no doubt, as still another critical threat to the security they presume is constantly under attack. Not to mention as more evidence of the dark media conspiracy to cover up these constant threats, since the plane taxied away without incident and the matter was never referred to again once it had been milked for one morem ounce of phony drama on the night's ten o'clock news.

As a journalist, I originally came out of Philadelphia in the 1970s, when there were four daily papers (including the Inquirer and the Bulletin in a titanic struggle). There were two competing all-news radio stations. And all of the local TV stations had aggressive, savvy news operations that were, by way of both geography and of career paths for TV journalists, just a stone's throw from New York.

Those days are long gone in the big markets, but in the small and mid-sized TV markets, they never really were. And today, the local news reports are also laced with "news" segments that are sometimes nothing more than PR video from local enterprises (Raytheon PR video is always presented on the news as legit news footage here in Tucson, and you even see "news" segments built around advertisers, including car repair shops). The weather? Well, try keeping it local and compelling in a place where the skies are always blue and the weather is always nice, except sometimes it gets really hot and once in a blue moon it rains and everybody carries on about that for days.

The barrage of cooked-up local news is sad, but it's certainly not the fault of the TV reporters and anchors, who no longer make the dough that used to be available in local TV news and who far too often are working at an insane pace.

So. long story short ("Late Breaking!" but not "Live! Local!"), here's an interesting piece about burnout in local TV news.

  http://news.ku.edu/2013/06/10/professor-finds-increased-job-burnout-among-tv-journalists

Scott Reinardy, associate professor of journalism at the University of Kansas, has authored a study in which he surveyed hundreds of TV journalists about the changes in the business and found that more than 20 percent of respondents are showing classic signs of job burnout.

A 2012 study showed that TV news staffs had increased by 4 percent, revenue was up, and stations were producing more content than ever before, often as much as 5 1/2 hours per day.

That says "as much as five and a half hours a day." Late breaking update! Local! It's eight hours in Tucson, and that cannot serve the public interest well, though it certainly gives rapacious local TV station owners (almost always major national chains) more opportunities to sell cheap advertising against cheap programming.

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Air Travel Mess Ahead in Paris May Spread Through Europe

This is the notice currently posted on the Airports of Paris Web site, regarding flights at all three Paris-area airports starting tomorrow:

Due to French Civil Aviation Authority strike from Tuesday 11 to Thursday 13 June: 50% of flights cancelled. Contact your airline for more information.

That indicates that a major mess is brewing not only for air travel to and from France, but from the spillover in Europe and beyond. The cancellations are because of protests planned by air traffic controllers objecting to centralized control of air space in Europe.

The strikes may spread to other countries on Wednesday.

So plan ahead, of course.

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e

Duck Walk

I enjoyed the traditional March of the Ducks the other day while staying at the Peabody Hotel in Orlando. Nice hotel, nice touch (imported from the Peabody Memphis, where the tradition began).

Here's a video from YouTube.

Incidentally, duck is not on the menu at the hotel restaurant. I checked.

From the hotel Web site, the background. I can't attest to the accuracy of the numbers. Let's say I'm skeptical of the accounting on the $100,000 penthouse Royal Duck Palace, but hey, it's Orlando. At least the critters are actually alive, and not electronically animated. And you really don't get to hear a Sousa march much anymore these days.

Hotel web site:

"Since opening its doors on November 1, 1986, The Peabody Orlando has continued, in unbroken sequence, the traditional March of The Peabody Ducks which began at its sister property, The Peabody Memphis, many, many years ago. Each morning, promptly at 11 a.m., the hotel's atrium lobby is the scene of a remarkable ritual. In a special elevator, the five North American mallard ducks, four hens and one drake, comprising The Peabody Ducks, descend from their $100,000 penthouse Royal Duck Palace. When the elevator doors open, The Peabody Ducks, accompanied by their crimson-and-gold- braid-jacketed Duck Master™, take up their positions on a plush red carpet and begin The March of The Peabody Orlando Ducks to the strident tones of John Philip Sousa's King Cotton March. They waddle their way in formation through the hotel's marble halls, and when they reach the magnificent, orchid-crowned fountain, which takes center stage in the Atrium Lobby, the ducks mount three red-carpeted steps and splash into the fountain's waters. Tumultuous applause reverberates through the lofty, foliage-draped lobby, and standing ovations are the order of the day by the hundreds of onlookers who daily crowd into the hotel to see one of the greatest shows on earth. At 5 p.m., the procession is reversed, The Peabody Orlando Ducks marching back to their special elevator, then to their Royal Duck Palace for dinner and a quiet evening together. The Legend of the Ducks How did the tradition of the North American Mallard ducks in the lobby fountain of The Peabody Memphis begin? Back in the 1930s, Frank Schutt, general manager of The Peabody Memphis, and his life-long friend, Chip Barwick, returned from a weekend hunting trip to Arkansas. The men had had a little too much Tennessee sippin’ whiskey, and thought it would be funny to place some of their live duck decoys (it was legal then for hunters to use live decoys), into the black travertine fountain of the Peabody hotel. Three small English call ducks were selected, and the reaction was nothing short of enthusiastic. Thus began a Peabody tradition that was to become internationally famous. The original ducks have long since gone, but after 75 years, their progeny live on in the graceful, marble fountain in “The South’s Grand Hotel,” The Peabody Memphis, and also at The Peabody Little Rock and The Peabody Orlando. The Peabody Duck March takes place twice daily at 11am and 5pm."

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Saguaro National Park Vandalism: This Time, the Rangers Spin the Press to Lay Blame on 'Social Media'

For a journalist, it can be useful, if extremely distasteful, to find yourself on the other side of a story -- and the Saga of the Saguaros at Saguaro National Park in Tucson has been a case in point for me. It's astonishing to see how facts can be so malleable.

Here we have, in the New York Times no less, a spin job by the Keystone Kops at Saguaro National Park that gets much of its information from the very same park rangers who neglected to respond to reports of the incident for 24 hours after I dutifully reported it, including the ranger who failed to respond at all when I informed him of the vandalism when it was discovered one recent Sunday morning.

Ta-da: I give you Ranger Steve Bolyard, marching around on the front page dispensing wisdom in a story in which "social media" is unaccountably blamed for the vandalism. And I give you crack Ranger and "Chief Interpretation and Outreach Officer" Andy Fisher, hands proudly on hips, posed in the very media itself above a rock showing the very graffiti vandalism that she and others in the Keystone Kops at Saguaro National Park fired me for "approaching the media" about.  You can't make this stuff up.

Weirdly, the park service Tucson division is also evidently trying to make a case, with no evidence beyond speculation, that "social media" is to blame for the vandalism of those magnificent saguaro cactuses that the National Park Service is supposed to be protecting -- when in fact it's trying to cover up its own ineptitude in the incident. and you can blame anything on "social media," just as they used to blame everything on "rock and roll" in the 1950s. Those damn kids and their music  social media.

I found the lede on the report downright hilarious: "When Steve Bolyard checked out a report of black paint on some of the park’s majestic saguaros — cactuses whose towering bodies and upraised arms are as emblematic of the American West as red-rock buttes and skittering tumbleweeds — he did not expect to see ganglike calligraphy covering more of them than he could easily count."

Well, I'll take some exception to that, thank you. If Steve Bolyard finally "checked out a report of black paint" he did so quite a while after that report initially came to his attention and he failed to respond.  And it's untrue that he "did not expect to see ganglike calligraphy" on the saguaros, because I had fully informed him of the vandalism, and offered him all of the photos I had taken of it. He was not interested, at least when I informed him as part of my duties as a volunteer ranger.

As to his reported inability to "easily count" the defaced saguaro cactuses, assuming that he actually did in fact finally hike up the trail at some point to inspect the damage -- well, I leave that to your estimation. Myself, I counted 14.

But then, I was actually there.

Here is what happened at Saguaro National Park on the day the vandalism was first reported, by me, after I got off-duty from a shift as a volunteer park ranger. Ranger Bolyard figures prominently in the tale:

After being informed of the vandalism by other hikers early that morning, I hiked up the trail and checked it out myself, taking photos, during my four-hour shift as a volunteer park ranger.  I then made numerous phone calls that morning to various Park Ranger numbers (and also to 911 and the sheriff's department, which did properly respond, but the deputy sheriff who arrived told me he had no jurisdiction on federal land).  Finally, in an effort to make a full report, I managed to talk by phone with the elusive Ranger Bolyard, who was the ranger on duty, though I never saw him that day.  On the phone, he simply blew me off.   Bolyard wasn't interested in my report or in the photos I had. I told him that I would probably take them to the local media then, and he offered no objection.

So, after having assiduously followed all procedures, including calling 911 and other rangers and speaking directly to the ranger on duty, I went home after my four-hour shift ended and, hours later, concerned that the rangers seemed to be asleep at the switch, I contacted the local paper and one of the TV stations to tell them about the vandalism that every hiker on that trail was seeing that day.

The next day, after a story and photos ran in the paper, the Daily Star (and on the local TV station, KOLD, the night before), the Park Service suddenly went into full cover-up, defensive-crouch mode. To me, the message was: How dare you report vandalism that had not been properly vetted for release by the park's amusingly titled Chief Interpretation and Outreach Officer, Ranger Fisher (reporters accurately refer to her as the flack, incidentally.)

On Monday, the Keystone Kops Park Service hastily put out a day-late press release about the vandalism and released photos that were remarkably identical  similar to those I had taken of the damaged saguaros on Sunday. And then rangers spent the rest of the week trying to force me to "recant" for "approaching the media," including at a disciplinary hearing that I attended with some amusement on Thursday, in which Ranger Fisher and another ranger, Paul Austin, importuned me to admit fault and promise to sin no more in talking to the media. Finally, a day later, they had the ranger in charge of the Park volunteers fire me by phone on Friday after I refused to back down and admit guilt for refusing to renounce  Satan and all his sins "the media." One of the amusing sidebars, of course, is that I have been a journalist and hence a foot soldier in said media for 45 years.

In the lamentable week-long process, I received some good-natured razzing from friends in Tucson for managing to get myself fired from a volunteer job. It was also, as they say, a learning experience. But the truth is, I enjoyed my work as a volunteer on the trails and as a volunteer mounted ranger on horseback, and in days of sharp staff and budget reductions at the National Park Service, the agency needs unpaid volunteers more than ever to assist rangers in their important duties.

Meanwhile, I'll drop my uniform off at the visitor's center, guys. Maybe you can find somebody as good who will mount up and be willing to work with you.

You could also try social media, but that's not so good at hiking a trail or riding a horse.

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More Vandalism at Saguaro National Park; This Time, the Rangers Respond to Media

My photos of graffiti vandalism two weeks ago at Saguaro National Park

More vandalism of cactuses was reported at Saguaro National Park, where odious graffiti vandals defaced giant saguaro cactuses two weeks ago.

Here's the link in today's Arizona Daily Star to the latest vandalism. 

This time, I see, the crack National Park Service PIO and rangers at Saguaro East actually responded to media inquiries on a Sunday -- rather than trying to cover up the vandalism, as they did two weeks ago when I first reported it to the local media hours after finishing a shift as a volunteer, during which the ranger on duty expressed no interest in my report until I later took it to the local paper and KOLD-TV.

(I was subsequently fired as a volunteer park mounted ranger for "approaching the media" and refusing to recant my sins, an act of official insolence and stupidity that created a considerable amount of hilarity in Tucson, including when the Park Service attempted to justify the firing by stating falsely that I hadn't followed unspecified "procedures" -- even though I had in fact spoken with the ranger on duty who blew me off and made a total of seven  fruitless phone calls to report the vandalism, including one to 9-1-1.)

Let's hope that this time, the rangers at Saguaro National Park decline to go onto their defensive crouches and perhaps redouble whatever efforts they have made to actually find the criminals, rather than trying to block the media and the public from knowing about the trouble. (Which, then as now, occurred in full public view, making the efforts of park rangers like Paul Austin and his trusty PIO Ms. Fisher look even more self-defeating). I also am somewhat surprised that, so far, Park Service headquarters in Washington has failed to take public notice of this disgrace.

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A Federal Agency Fires a Reporter for 'Approaching the Media'

One of the photos I took on Sunday of graffiti vandalism at Saguaro National Park

Here's a sad update on that awful graffiti vandalism incident last weekend at Saguaro National Park in Tucson (see previous post). Yesterday, I was fired as an unpaid volunteer National Park mounted ranger for my role in bringing this incident to the attention of local media after I saw the vandalism last Sunday while hiking a park trail. The vandalism included shocking graffiti defacement of giant saguaro cactuses.

During the five days' time between when I reported the incident on Sunday and when I was fired on Friday, Saguaro National Park rangers repeatedly tried to persuade me to admit that I was wrong in calling attention to the vandalism that I and many other hikers saw Sunday morning on the trail. In several conversations, including a bizarre disciplinary meeting on Thursday, I was asked to recant  and to agree never to "approach the media," whether on duty or off duty. Since I have been a reporter for 45 years, I informed the rangers that this was an absurd request to make of a volunteer who lives in the neighborhood of Saguaro National Park and is a frequent hiker and rider on those trails.

I repeatedly refused the weirdly Stalinist order to recant, including at the disciplinary meeting I was summoned to at the park visitor center on Thursday. That session was run by the supervisor Ranger Paul Austin and by Ranger Andy Fisher, who is the park's PR "interpretive" agent. They evidently didn't have the nerve to fire me to my face; the next day I was fired on the phone by the supervisor of the volunteers, Ranger Michelle Uhr, who told me: "We can't have you representing us as a volunteer anymore."

I resisted the inclination to inform her that I do not represent them. I represent the public, which owns the National Park and has a right to know what happens in that park.

Ranger Uhr is a decent woman, a hard-working law-enforcement ranger who was clearly acting under orders. Ranger Andy Fisher (who has been brazenly misrepresenting the facts to the media) is another story, a low-level PR employee -- a "flack," as we on the other side of the media call people like her  -- who seems not to appreciate the importance of veracity when speaking as a federal employee. She, Ranger Fisher, is an example of the insolence of office, and low office at that. If you wonder how Benghazi and the IRS and media phone-records scandals got out of control on an infinitely larger  scale, just have a look at this sorry performance by a few federal employees trying to cover their butts on the east side of Tucson.


Now, as I said, this was an unpaid, volunteer job, which I did because of my deep love for Saguaro National Park and my enjoyment at being able to meet and assist park users. The Park Rangers do not own the park. We citizens do. So my connection with Saguaro National Park remains unbroken.

Meanwhile, since the Park Service's amusingly clumsy attempt to cover its butt has bumped a weird local incident into national media streams, here is my statement for any media seeking it:

I was fired by park rangers as a volunteer mounted patrol ranger on Friday for "approaching the media" last Sunday afternoon -- hours after my shift as a volunteer ranger had ended. In other words, I was on my own time and acting as a private citizen when I notified the local media about the vandalism -- ONLY after having made numerous unsuccessful attempts to get the Park Service to respond and take my report and photos during the morning.

During my unpaid volunteer shift on foot at the Douglas Spring trailhead from 7-11 am Sunday, after other hikers informed me of the vandalism they saw, I reacted entirely appropriately. I made seven phone calls to the National Park Service and 911 to report the vandalism. In one of those calls, at 11 a.m. Sunday, I spoke directly with the park ranger on duty, Steven Bolyard, and he said that the visitors center had informed him of my earlier calls to them, and that he would "try to get out there this afternoon sometime." He exhibited no interest in the situation. This was after a county sheriff deputy had already been on the scene and spoken with me. The county sheriff's department responded quickly, professionally and correctly to my report. The Park Service did not respond, even after I spoke directly with them.

At 11 a.m. Sunday, as I went off duty, I personally informed Ranger Brolyard that I was considering taking my photos to the media, since no one at the Park Service seemed interested in the report. He raised no objection to that. Nor did Ranger Brolyard state that he himself was going to call an emergency number in Phoenix, for whatever reason.

Now the Park Service, having become defensive because of adverse local and even national media publicity over their failure to respond to the situation on Sunday, is claiming that I did not "follow procedures" in reporting the incident, in that I did not call an additional number in Phoenix that I had been previously told was only for serious emergencies, notably serious injuries or in-progress crimes.

This is what is called a "red herring."

To repeat: I made seven phones calls to the Park Service that morning, and on two occasions spoke with Park personnel, including Ranger Broylard. I also met with and personally spoke with a Deputy Iverson of the county sheriff department, who did take my report. Hence the Park Service had access to all of my phone calls, including those to the visitors center, to Ranger Brolyard and to 911 by 11 a.m. on Sunday.

It is clear to me that the Park Service is saying that I had no right to report the ugly vandalism on Sunday. It is also saying that I failed to follow "procedures," and that I have no right to "approach the media" under any circumstances. This is an absurd thing to say to a journalist.

Besides me, dozens of park visitors saw and photographed the vandalism on Sunday morning. Many of them expressed relief that I was there to make my reports. All of them were horrified.

As a journalist with wide experience for over 45 years in many different roles, including covering law enforcement, I am astonished that the Park Service in Tucson is asserting that it had had the right to try to keep this obvious public display of vandalism from the media, and to try to muzzle a private citizen. What possible explanation can the Park Service offer for foolishly hoping to cover up such an incident?

On Monday morning, when the Park Service in Tucson did finally respond, the response was to issue a report and photos of the vandalism, no different than the ones I had offered them a day earlier.

I have never been fired from any job, let alone an unpaid volunteer one.

But it had been important to me that the principle be affirmed, despite the unpleasantness that taking this stance has caused me personally. as a reporter, I have no desire to be part of the story. But it's important to reaffirm that our national parks belongs to us citizens, not to hired bureaucrats, defensive because they dropped the ball, who seek to block the public right to know.

If the Park Service at Saguaro National Park East wishes to rectify this situation, here is what they can do:

Admit they made a mistake and that they issued incorrect statements. Admit they dropped the ball on Sunday. Apologize to the public, but don't bother with me.  There are lots of honorable volunteer organizations in Tucson.

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Vandalism At Saguaro National Park

More than 15 saguaro cactuses were defaced by vandalism at Saguaro National Park in Tucson

I

What's "Soma?" See below.

[UPDATED]

For over a year, my wife and I have been volunteers with the Saguaro National Park mounted ranger patrol, meaning we ride on horseback in our volunteer park ranger uniforms along the trails and washes of Saguaro National Park on the east side of Tucson.

Usually, the job consists of simply being visible, while being available to give directions or other information to the occasional lost hiker, or prepared to provide water, assistance or simple first aid to hikers who run into trouble, most notably during the brutally hot season in the Sonoran desert of southern Arizona.

Occasionally, I also volunteer to be basically the Park Service's version of a Wal-Mart greeter, stationed on foot at one of the popular trail-heads, where I enormously enjoy meeting people bound for the trails, and providing useful information (we had mountain lion sightings last month, and you need to warn some people who don't look like regulars about snakes, bee-swarms and other potential perils to the unwary).

I was doing this starting at 7 a.m. yesterday when a hiker came back from the Douglas Spring Trail and told me that he had seen widespread vandalism. After a few other hikers reported the same, I hiked up a couple of miles myself -- and was appalled at what I saw (see my photos above).

Some moron or morons, with base malice, painted graffiti on rocks, signs and even on saguaro cactuses. I saw big saguaros defaced by these criminals, and I made some calls to various Park service numbers and 911 -- but the only response I got was from a county deputy sheriff, who arrived at the scene and was sad to explain that, while he did not have jurisdiction on federal land, he'd look around on the periphery. Which he did.

I went back onto the trail and took photos of the damage and, after my shift as a volunteer had ended,  I notified some people in the local media in Tucson.  KOLD, one of the local television stations, sent  a reporter and a cameraman to my house near the park, and I took them up the trail for a detailed report on what was obvious to anyone on the trail, which they ran last night. The local paper, the Arizona Daily Star, also asked for my photos and ran a front-page story this morning. At least one other local television station is following up today. [UPDATE: And the story went national after people got back to work and started returning phone calls on Monday]

Listen, I'm just a volunteer. I don't speak for the National Park Service. Staffing at the National Park Service is scandalously tight -- Park Rangers work hellacious hours, and they do it from a deep sense of duty.

This might be a very good opportunity, then, to address some of the effects on beloved institutions like the National Parks created by the budget shenanigans perpetrated by the now-thoroughly-disreputable U.S. Congress, specifically sharp budget cutbacks caused by sequestration at government agencies like the National Park Service. If the National Park Service is upset about not getting out front on this story yesterday, when the media interest became intense, the opportunity exists today and beyond to address the very real consequences of severe budget cutbacks in our glorious national parks.

[Updated: Dismayingly, I found on Monday and later in the week, the official Park Service response was focused way too much on the media -- as if the media could somehow be held back on Sunday till a "press release" had been prepared and cleared through burueaucratic channels, on an incident that had been in full public view, to anyone hiking those trails, for over 24 hours before the Park Service acknowledged it. The reaction of the National Park Service Tucson branch was depressingly of a cover-your-butt bureaucratic nature, mainly because the park dropped the ball on Sunday and didn't try to address the story till Monday, after it had been in the local and even national media.]


There have been other instances of vandalism in national parks, most recently at Joshua Tree National Park in California, where graffiti criminals defaced boulders. The vandalism at Saguaro National Park was less in scope, but rather more striking because as many as a dozen magnificent saguaros were defaced. Just look at those saguaros in the photos above. Some of those very saguaros, stately icons of the Old West in southern Arizona, have been standing in those spots literally since the days when Wyatt Earp and Geronimo roamed this desert landscape.

Incidentally, what's the significance of  "Soma" -- the graffito so unartfully scrawled on several of the cactuses and many of the rocks?

Well, it's probably futile to waste too much time trying to understand the mind of a moron. But one  potential explanation is that our criminal vandal[s] might be making a probably unintended literary allusion -- which I hope will be of good use to them once they are caught and subsequently enrolled in one of those arts classes that are taught in our state prison systems.

From the Wikipedia entry (full link here):

"Soma (Sanskrit सोम sóma), or Haoma (Avestan), from Proto-Indo-Iranian *sauma-, was a Vedic ritual drink[1] of importance among the early Indo-Iranians, and the subsequent Vedic and greater Persian cultures. It is frequently mentioned in the Rigveda, whose Soma Mandala contains 114 hymns, many praising its energizing qualities. In the Avesta, Haoma has the entire Yašt 20 and Yasna 9-11 dedicated to it. It is described as being prepared by extracting juice from the stalks of a certain plant. In both Vedic and Zoroastrian tradition, the name of the drink and the plant are the same, and the three forming a religious or mythological unity.

"... From the late 1960s onwards, several studies attempted to establish soma as a psychoactive substance. A number of proposals were made, including one in 1968 by the American banker R. Gordon Wasson, an amateur ethnomycologist, who asserted that soma was an inebriant, and suggested fly-agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, as the likely candidate. ..."

"...Soma is [also] the name of a fictional drug in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, Brave New World. In the novel the drug produces both intoxicating and psychoactive properties and is used in celebratory rituals. It is described as 'All of the benefits of Christianity and alcohol without their defects." Another drug derived from mountain growing mushrooms is featured in his 1962 novel, Island, in which it is used in a Hindu-based religious ceremony worshipping the god Shiva. Called moksha medicine it is portrayed in a positive light, as a key to enlightenment.

"In the books Junkie and Naked Lunch, author William S. Burroughs refers to soma as a non-addictive, high-quality form of opium said to exist in ancient India.

"In Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods, soma is referred to as "concentrated prayer", a drink enjoyed by the gods (who feed on people's worship), such as Odin.

"The single "Soma" by the indie rock band The Strokes focuses on soma and its effects."

Well then, some mystery clues for the constabulary to pursue.

Less grandly, Soma is also an old street nmame for the drug PCP.

But let's forget the fancy allusions. Probably "Soma" is just the name of some moron's gang girlfriend.

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Guns At the Airports (Continued)

Guns found at T.S.A. checkpoints this week

Ho-hum, another week, another haul of handguns that our fellow citizens insist on trying to take onto airplanes.

This week's haul, incidentally, is a record, the T.S.A. says in its weekly blog.

No one in the media pays any attention to this except at the start of a new year when little news items appear noting that a current year's gun-haul at the airports outpaced the previous year's.


Note, incidentally, that the vast majority of the guns being found in passengers' carry-ons are loaded.

And, given these numbers of guns being found, the obvious question is, how many guns, loaded or otherwise, are actually being carried onto airplanes, and not found by the T.S.A.?

Ho-hum?

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Cruise News

Another good reason for me to maintain my record of never having taken a cruise, or considered the idea:

Argentina has been accused in Britain of trying to ‘strangle’ the Falkland Islands by intimidating cruise ships. "At least 12 incidents of luxury liners being targeted have been reported to Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office since November. ...Protesters or industrial action by militant unions are disrupting vessels that have a stopover in islands on their itinerary. ..." (According to a report in the Daily Mail via etrurbonews.)

Only a Brit newspaper, incidentally, would use the term "luxury liner" to describe a cruise ship.

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US Airways Raises Fee for Changing Flights, Matching United Move

US Airways has raised the penalty fee for changing most restricted coach tickets from $150 to $200,  just as United Airlines did last week. The other major airlines are likely to follow, with the exception of Southwest, which doesn't charge fees to change a ticketed itinerary.

The $50 extra fee applies to newly purchased tickets only.

Fees for changing tickets on so-called nonrefundable coach fares are a major source of extra revenue for airlines. In 2011, U.S. airlines raised an extra $2.4 billion in revenue from such fees, according to the Transportation Department's Bureau of Transportation Statistics. Full-year numbers for 2012 haven't been reported yet, but the revenue seems to be increasing. In the third quarter of 2012 (the last period that the agency has reported data for), the total raised by domestic airlines on such fees was $652 million, compared with $602.9 million in the third quarter of 2011.

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Hysteria in the Hub

The main headline on the Boston Globe Web site on Saturday was this, "Let the Healing Begin ... Hub Moves Forward."

The issue of fatuous insult to those who lost lives and limbs in that horror aside (what "healing" are we so easily proclaiming, exactly?), and forgetting the annoyance of the Boston media's chronic use of that silly word "Hub" to describe a city of a mere 600,000 (the allusion is to "Hub of the solar system," per Oliver Wendell Holmes, who was evidently drunk when he wrote that about Boston in 1858), I take issue with the questionable notion that the "Hub" should be so ready to move "forward."

Not so fast, Hub of the solar system. Actually, and especially now with the passage of a little time, there might be compelling reason to move backward a bit over last week, to impose better sense about just what the hell happened in Boston, where an entire metropolitan area was shut down while police massed to search "house to house" -- immobilizing the citizenry and businesses to look for a 19-year-old killer who, as it turns out, was found cowering in a boat stored in some guy's yard. As we know,he hid on the boat after somehow managing to escape during the previous night when police, guns blazing, had cornered him and his killer brother.

Wait a minute. Can we ask a few rude questions now? First of all: The guy got away with all those police guns blazing? Nobody is questioning the police performance? Before that, the finish-line mob scene at the Marathon last Monday was also evidently inadequately secured by the police. And nobody is questioning that? (Well, some are, but not in the media. Officers at the NYPD, which knows how to secure a crowd scene, are definitely scratching their heads over how two low-level schmucks with big plans for fame and huge backpacks managed to leave unattended packages, which happened to be bombs, in clear sight on the sidewalk, right at the feet of those crowds.


To its great credit, Salon had this to say on Saturday: "... this week’s spectacle in the Boston area was a testament to the kind of political and media hysteria that, ironically, makes crimes of this sort more likely to happen in the future. ..."

The hysteria had reached full cry after the bombings with the police and political authorities essentially proclaiming martial law in Boston and its suburbs, a stunning move the import of which still seems not to be appreciated in the mainstream media. What kind of a precedent, for example, has this set for the next time there's a nasty bombing or other attack on American soil. Is "lockdown" the new response to danger? What, specifically and legally, does "lockdown" mean, anyway. And why are we so willing to cave to fear and allow constitutional rights to be readily violated?

Besides the dangerous precedent set in Boston by the "Shelter in Place" shutdown and the media

acquiescence, there's another potential disturbing consequence. The right-wing-loon world, always operating in a frisson of anti-government paranoia, has of course seized on the Boston-area police overreaction as an example of what the government is capable of doing with very little provocation to proclaim an emergency. In this case, it was a 19-year-old murderer on the loose. The next time, the way the right-wing media loom-universe is portraying it, this is how the government comes for ... your guns.
 
The atmosphere of hysteria can enable dangerous psychological reactions among unstable but influential lunatic-fringe nut-cases, rabble-roused by  worthies like Glenn Beck, who quickly sprang into action overthe weekend peddling a delusion that the Obama Administration is shielding a Saudi national who was the true mastermind of the Boston bombings.       

And the paranoid conspiracy right-wing extremist site Infowars, which one of the Boston terrorists happened to be a fan of, as it turns out, has genuine photos and video to show graphically just what a government assault on the citizenry looks like.  Here's the link.


Did we really want to provide actual indisputable evidence -- with video -- to fuel these anti-government paranoid fantasies? Did we really want to send a message to two-bit would-be terrorist bombers everywhere: Look how easy it is to shut down a major metropolitan area, terrify the population, and cause staggering financial losses?

Really?

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Most of Us in USA Still Alive, Excluding Al Neuharth

I had a couple of encounters with the legendary Gannett corporate pirate and USA Today founder Al Neuharth over the years, but my favorite occurred sometime in the late 1980s, when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter covering the then gala annual meeting (those were the days) of the American newspaper publishers association.

At the closing reception, I was talking with the late Katherine Graham, the publisher of the Washington Post, when Al Neuharth sailed up, dressed in his signature black, white and gray ensemble (he always styled himself with that color pattern) -- with open shirt-collar and lots and lots of fancy jewelry. Al loved bling.

Kay Graham shook Al's hand and gave him her best patrician look.

"My, Mr. Neuharth," she said appraisingly, "you're so shiny."

It was hard to knock Al Neuharth off balance, but Kay did it. After some perfunctory pleasantries, he skulked off with his handlers fussing alongside him.

On the Poynter Institute site, Roy Peter Clark has a piece that takes a refreshingly dim postmortem view of the legacy of Al (whom Ben Bradlee despised as a "mountbank') and his invincible "pursuit of mediocrity."  Clark alludes to an old insiders' joke about Al and his style. It went this way, "When Al shows up in his sharkskin suit, it's hard to tell where the shark ends and Al begins."

Coming as it did at the height of the Boston bombings coverage, Al Neuharth's death at age 89 last week received respectful but restrained coverage. Yes, yes, yes, the serious obits all agreed. The man did certainly have an effect on ... uh, newspaper design. Why, he introduced spashy color and ... uh. well, he was pretty good at hiring women and minorities, that's for sure. And well, he invented USA Today, one of the greatest acts of sheer newspapering audacity since Pulitzer and Hearst arrived on Park Row. You must grant him that.

Well, one other thing that Al introduced and invented was sham circulation-reporting standards, after he pressured the main industry circulation-verification agency to accept the idea that "bulk circulation" -- that is, copies of newspapers that are essentially given away free through barter deals with advertisers, or at huge discounts off the cover price -- could be claimed as actual paid circulation. Since the yellow journalism heyday of Hearst and Pulitzer, many newspapers have always hyped their circulation figures, but Al Neuharth refined the hype into art. The obituaries dutifully stated that USA Today was the largest-selling newspaper in America, even though everybody in the industry has known for decades that about half of the stated circulation of USA Today was give-aways at hotels and in other places where travelers have long been accustomed to getting the paper for free.

Under Neuharth, the Gannett media empire grew tremendously, as Gannett rapaciously snapped up prosperous newspapers in monopoly markets (or engineered deals where the markets would soon become monopolies). In over 40 years in the business, incidentally, I have never once heard anyone say that Gannett improved any newspaper after buying it. Just the opposite.

USA Today, alas, has been on a steady decline that's accelerated in the last year, especially as hotels and other places where the paper traditionally has been handed out for free are turning it down because more often than not, USA Today sits untouched in the morning outside hotel-room doors. Still in at least in some areas of coverage, it used to be a contender, and in a few areas like sports, it still is.  My own guess now is that within a year, USA Today will no longer have a print newspaper and will be concentrated, as so much of the Gannett news product now is, in a centralized online operation. My guess is that it will become the great mothership in the cloud from which will rain most editorial functions for the national network of 85 local Gannett papers (which the Gannett company is already referring to not as newspapers but as "community digital information centers.")

That'll be Al's legacy. And all the "Newseums" in the world won't matter. (The Newseum, that preposterous gillion dollar monument in Washington to Al's stupendous ego, his ability to channel huge sums of money, and his disdain for the English language, has devolved mostly into what it was essentially created as: a venue for swanky media parties and corporate events).

And oh, there's also this part of the Al Neuharth legacy, which was curiously unmentioned in the respectful obituaries.

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Correction: An earlier version of this had a typo and stated that the incident with Kay Graham and Al Neuharth occurred in the late 1990s. It was the late 1980s.  Oh and, um, of course, it was Ben Bradlee, not (uh) Ben Brantley! Who says we don't need copy editors?

TSA Caves on Small Pocketknives

TSA Announcement in March. Uh ... never mind

A coalition representing flight attendants unions is hailing a decision by the T.S.A. to postpone its plan to allow passengers to carry small pocketknives with blades smaller than 2.36 inches on planes starting Thursday.

 Acording to a T.S.A. spokesman, “In order to accommodate further input from the Aviation Security Advisory Committee (ASAC), which includes representatives from the aviation community, passenger advocates, law enforcement experts, and other stakeholders, TSA will temporarily delay implementation of changes to the Prohibited Items List, originally scheduled to go into effect April 25.  This timing will enable TSA to incorporate the ASAC feedback about the changes to the Prohibited Items List and continue workforce training."

 
The group, the Flight Attendants Union Coalition said today it would continue efforts to maintain a

permanent ban on knives. The vociferous opposition from unions, which received strong support among some Democrats in Congress, was based on assertions that small knives would constitute dangers to flight crews. The T.S.A., in announcing the decision in March to allow the knives and other items such as hockey sticks, stated at the time that similar items,  such as knitting needles and screwdrivers, have been allowed for years, with no problems.

In caving to union pressure after insisting it would not, the T.S.A. appears to raise questions about its determination to revamp security protocols more toward risk-based intelligence and less on having screeners search for things in carry-ons. At the heart of the T.S.A. rationale about allowing pocketknives (which many travelers use as tools, like small Swiss Army Knives, when on the road) was an assertion by T.S.A. director John Pistole that a small pocketknife poses no danger in the era of reinforced cockpit doors and passenger vigilance about any kind of onboard threatening behavior.

Incidents of unruly or disorderly conduct on board airplanes have fallen sharply in recent years, although many in the media persist in credulously writing about "air rage."

Here's a link to the Web site of the union coalition that argues for continuation of a ban on knives. 

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American Airlines Flights Grounded Today

UPDATED

If you were flying or scheduled to fly American Airlines this afternoon you already know this, but:

American grounded all of its flights this afternoon because of some unspecified computer foulup.

From the American Web site: 

American's network system is experiencing intermittent outages. At this time, we are holding all flights on the ground until later this afternoon, when we will provide another update. We are working to resolve this issue as quickly as we can, and we apologize to our customers for this inconvenience.

If your travel plans are flexible, there will be no charge if you would like to change your reservation and we will provide full refunds if your travel plans are not flexible. However, we are unable to make changes to current travel plans until we have resolved this issue.

We will provide another update as soon as we have more information.

Oh yes, American. Please do just that.

UPDATE -- As of 4 p.m. eastern time, the American system was lumbering back, but thousands of passengers were still stuck on planes that hadn't been able to take off. The mess was especially pronounced at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport --not that the Dallas newspaper was of any use. As of 4 p.m. eastern time. Central time, the Dallas News had not a word about the American mess -- in American's home town. The Fort Worth paper did a little better informing the locals.

UPDATE -- Somebody unpleasantly and anonymously pointed out (sorry, lost the comment) that the Dallas News aviation "blog" had updated news on this throughout. Dunno. It sure wasn't part of the general news coverage one could find on the online site, indicating that it was aimed at travelers who are already primed to consult it. The Fort Worth paper, on the other hand, had readily accessible news. I guess my point is that an event like this is general news, not niche news. The same anonymous commenter said that the web site Joesentme.com had timely updates, which was beside the point. I'm sure it did. That's a subscription site with updates and commentary specifically marketed to frequent business travelers, and I am not a subscriber. My point was that this kind of event -- major airline delays caused by a computer problem -- ought to be treated as general "run of the paper" news. It isn't niche news, and some people who make a living in the intensely narrow field of airline news forget that airlines are a major component of the national transportation network. Sometimes airline news is inside-baseball. Sometimes it's actual news. This blog is not aimed at the aviation and business-travel community, except sometimes.


Also, I have always made it very clear here that I am a self-employed freelance writer, and have been for 25 years, and that this blog is a probably insane personal initiative with no relationship whatsoever to any news organization. I'm the sole reporter, writer, columnist, editor and publisher and capital investor. And I don't care at all for "ombudsmen" with slight journalism credentials separating flyshit from pepper, so that position remains unfilled.

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Perspective and Proportion in Security

Hysteria always follows a terrorist attack of any sort. Proportion can get lost in crowd-induced (and media-induced) panic.  


In my opinion, the most sane and sensible security expert in the country is Bruce Schneier. So I recommend his essay today on the Atlantic web site. Here.

Security in Boston?

Boston media sometimes hilariously refer to that city as the "Hub," as if it had a universal importance far in excess of its actual minimal importance in the country or world. But it is a big city, and one would assume (with scant evidence, incidentally) that its police department is up to the job.

But in all of the (often very weak) reporting coming out of yesterday's horrific bombings at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, some obvious questions are not being asked.

Here's a big one, in my opinion: Did Boston police prepare for this event the way a big-city police force should have? Did the Boston cops make serious attempts to fully secure the area of the finish line in the days and hours before the Marathon? Did they perform at international big-city standards?  (Or did they fail to prepare adequately for this event and then, afterward, charge around grabbing   people who looked Middle Eastern, just like in the old days when they used to charge into Mission Hill to toss black kids on the street whenever a big crime occurred?)

In New York for a major public event that draws tens of thousands into a confined urban area like that, the N.Y.P.D. would have assiduously secured the location beforehand. For example, trash cans would have been inspected and secured. Surveillance cameras would be deployed.  Officers trained to identify suspicious behavior would have mingled in the crowd. Disasters might still occur, but the likelihood would be greatly diminished, and the culprits would be likely grabbed.


The bombs that caused death and injury yesterday appear to have been fairly crude, breathless accounts in the media about "powerful bombs" aside. All bombs are powerful, by definition. But anyone who has even been in the proximity of, say, a 500-pound aerial bomb that hits the ground knows the difference between a huge, sophisticated blast and a crude improvised explosive blast -- and these in Boston appear to have been the latter. Deadly, but simple. That is, exactly the kind of bomb that can be placed in a street trash receptacle, or hidden in a package on a corner.

The sort of crude bomb that the despicable Irish Republican Army used to deploy to terrorize London back in the days.

And they should know something about the IRA in Boston, where bars that supported fundraising for the terrorist group used to sell drinks called the Irish Car Bomb.

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