Marilyn Monroe and the Real Value of Profits

An obscure 1951 film that fell out of copyright gained some new life in the home video market simply because a then practically unknown Marilyn Monroe had a small supporting role.

DVDs of Home Town Story, written and directed by Arthur Pierson, are sold with big photos of Monroe on the cover, as though it is a “Marilyn Monroe movie.” It isn’t, but even if a few thousand people are induced to buy it for that reason, that’s a good thing, because the film has an important lesson about business and economics.

The actual marquee star of the movie (which runs a short 61 minutes, more like a TV teleplay than a feature film) is Jeffrey Lynn, who plays Blake Washburn, a small-town newspaper publisher who has just lost his seat in the state senate to the scion of a local manufacturer, John McFarland (played by veteran character actor Donald Crisp). Monroe plays a secretary at the newspaper and appears on screen for no more than five minutes.

Washburn is bitter about his campaign loss and, when he takes over the newspaper from his uncle, he embarks on an editorial crusade against big business, in particular railing against the profits made by large industrial corporations. His sometime foil in this is reporter Slim Haskins (played by Alan Hale, Jr., best known as the Skipper on Gilligan’s Island), who tells his boss to tone down the rhetoric.

While I watched Home Town Story, I initially thought this would be a typical left-wing agitprop piece from the early Cold War era, where the crusading newspaper editor would be the hero and the capitalist businessman would be the villain.

I was wrong.

About halfway through the movie, the whole tone of the film changes as business owner John McFarland shows up in the newspaper’s office. He wants to talk to Washburn about his editorials and offer an alternative point of view. Here’s the dialogue from that scene (which can be watched in full on YouTube):

McFARLAND: I’m interested in profits, both for myself and the customer. My main reason for coming here was to see if I could perhaps interest you in printing something about a pet theory I have. I call it “Profits to the Customer.”

WASHBURN: What do you mean?

McFARLAND: As I say, it’s my own private little pet theory. It’s very simple, not very complicated. You see, I’m not an economist, I’m just a businessman. I have to make a profit to stay in business.

WASHBURN: Sure, we all know that.

McFARLAND: I make a profit on every electric motor I sell but the customer must make a larger profit, because if he doesn’t, he won’t buy my motors and I’m out of business.

WASHBURN (incredulous): The customer must make a profit?

McFARLAND: That’s right … Yes, the customer must make a profit. For example, you have some typesetting machines out there. The manufacturer who sold them made a profit on them. But your paper would never have bought them in the first place if they couldn’t deliver something beyond their original cost. They must continue to work for your paper to be worth more to you than you paid for them. As a customer, that’s your profit.

WASHBURN (skeptical): My profit?

McFARLAND: Yes, you sell your newspaper to a man for five cents. He gets news, advertisements, and all kinds of information for his home and business. He gets service beyond the value of his five cents. As a customer, that’s his profit. The same story for everything else: the light bulb, the refrigerator, the telephone. For this, we pay a few dollars a month. Our profits are enormous in steps alone. In case of an emergency, it’s value can’t be estimated.

SLIM HASKINS: That’s a different slant from what we’ve been printing.

WASHBURN, after a long pause: As you say, that’s just a theory. But you can’t deny that you are a big business.

McFARLAND: In your editorials, you’ve been insisting that because a thing is big, it’s bad. It takes bigness to do big things. Our industries turned out equipment for our armed forces in a remarkably short space of time. It was a big job and it was well done. It helped us to win the war and preserve our country. That’s what American industry with its bigness was able to accomplish. Was that bad, Blake?

The last fifty years, we’ve come a long way. It used to take a week to get a letter across the United States. Now we do it in one day. The difference in time alone could affect the happiness of a family. It might even mean a matter of life and death.

In my time, I’ve seen advances in industry that have added twenty years to the average span of life. My father died in the old country at the age of forty, an old man. His work was absolute drudgery, slavery, on his own farm from five o’clock in the morning until eight o’clock at night. But because I live in America, I feel like a young man, and I’ll be 65 in April.

WASHBURN, irked: Why are you telling me all this?

McFARLAND: Well, I thought perhaps you might be interested in both sides of this profit question, and print something else for a change.

WASHBURN, steaming: Mr. McFarland, I don’t tell you how to run your plant, so please don’t tell me how to run my paper. I’ll print my own conception of business profits. Good day, sir.

McFARLAND: Well, I just thought I’d come in and talk – which I have.

Remember, Blake, when this country was first discovered, there was nothing here. Now look around you, everything you see is profits. Our transportation, communication, household appliances, medical equipment. Notice them sometime, Blake. They’re the real profits.

The plot soon turns to a school field trip, where Washburn’s young sister is trapped in an abandoned mine. With the help of equipment made by McFarland’s factory, and because McFarland has a private airplane he offers to Washburn to take the girl to a hospital in Capital City, the little girl’s life is saved. As a topper, as the girl is wheeled out of surgery, McFarland notices the motor operating a respirator helping the girl breathe: “Hmm,” he says quietly. “That’s one of ours.”

As a result, Washburn’s next editorial has a different approach.

“You know, Slim, seven hours ago, John McFarland with a pet theory I didn’t think was worth printing. Theories have a funny way of becoming facts.”

Curious about the writer and director of Home Town Story, and wondering where he might have come up with the ideas that inspired the film, I did a bit of research.

Arthur Pierson only directed two other feature films. Most of his work was in television, and he ended his career as an executive at Hanna-Barbera, the animation company best known for producing The Flintstones and The Jetsons.

Something early in Pierson’s career stood out, however. It turns out before he became a director and screenwriter, he was an actor. Between 1929 and 1940, he appeared in eleven Broadway plays.

In fact, in 1935, he was in the original Broadway cast of The Night of January 16th, written by Ayn Rand.

Now, you don’t suppose that Arthur Pierson, Hollywood director, got some of his ideas about business and profits from the Goddess of the Market herself, do you?

'How Many Shopping Days Until Christmas?'

If you landed here because you asked your search engine, "How many shopping days until Christmas?," the answer as this went to press was "27."  If you've landed here after November 27, you can check out this handy countdown clock to find out the accurate answer.

The reason for the headline is more to explore the origin of the phrase "only x shopping days until Christmas."

The conventional story of the origin of "shopping days until Christmas" is that the phrase was coined by Wisconsin-born retailer Harry Gordon Selfridge, founder of Selfridge and Company in Oxford Street (London).  There is renewed interest in Selfridge's life and work due to a popular British TV series about him, starring Jeremy Piven, that has also been broadcast on public television in the United States.

It is clear from both factual and fictionalized portrayals of Selfridge that he was an innovative merchant, but research I have done suggests that he is unlikely to have been the coiner of the now-ubiquitous countdown phrase.

According to Selfridge's Wikipedia entry, which lacks a citation for the point,

While at Marshall Field, Selfridge was the first to promote Christmas sales with the phrase "Only _____ Shopping Days Until Christmas", a catchphrase that was quickly picked up by retailers in other markets. Either he or Marshall Field is also credited with popularizing the phrase "The customer is always right."

The UK-based web site "The Phrase Finder," citing the Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins, repeats the same information:

American retailer H. Gordon Selfridge (1856-1947) coined this expression - " __ shopping days until Christmas" while working for Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago. Later he coined the slogan "the customer is always right" when he opened Selfridge's in London.

An Australian web site, WordBooks.com.au, acknowledges that Selfridge may have heard the phrase somewhere else before he used it in marketing his own store's products. Writer Michelle Holland cites another book (Who Said That First?, by Max Cryer) as her source:

The idea of reminding people how much shopping time is left before Christmas is not new. On 19 December 1900 the Los Angeles Times displayed a reminder: ‘There are only (counting today) five more shopping days till Christmas.’ Four days later the Washington Post took up the cry: ‘Only one more shopping day until Christmas.’

At the time Gordon Selfridge was working with Marshall Field and Company in Chicago. He may have picked up the idea from the newspapers mentioned, but certainly he soon instructed his staff to drive the same slogan, which put a real sense of urgency into the shopping lead-up to Christmas. Before long it was used worldwide.

A careful search on NewspaperArchive.com turns up several uses of the phrase several years before the 1900 citations from the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post. The earliest usage I can find was in 1891 but it was frequently used in the 1890s in locations as various as Boston and Cedar Rapids and in various small towns in the Midwest (Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and Mansfield, Ohio, for instance).

The earliest example I can find from Gordon Selfridge himself comes from 1909, the first Christmas season that Selfridges was open:

London Standard, December 16, 1909

Yet I was not able to find any uses of the phrase in Chicago newspapers during the time that Selfridge worked for Marshall Field. The earliest instance appears to be from the front page of the Chicago Heights Star on December 17, 1908 -- about two years after Selfridge had moved to London to build his own department store.

Chicago Heights Star, December 17, 1908

One Illinois newspaper used the phrase in 1897 -- but that was in Jacksonville, a central Illinois city some 235 miles southwest of Chicago and unlikely to be familiar to Selfridge.

Jacksonville (Ill.) Daily Journal, December 8, 1897

Four years earlier, a Massachusetts merchant, Hollander Bradshaw Folsom, used the phrase in a large advertisement for a variety of products it had on offer:

Boston Sunday Post, December 10, 1893

That Boston Sunday Post advertisement may be the first time the phrase "only __ shopping days before Christmas" appeared in print.

Two years before that, the same retailer posted this reminder in the Boston Globe: "NOTICE--Please bear in mind that only 16 SHOPPING DAYS now intervene to Christmas, and that during the last ten days all of our floors are jammed."

Boston Sunday Globe, December 6, 1891

I believe that Boston Sunday Globe ad is the earliest use in print of anything close to "shopping days until Christmas," although it is expressed in more flowery language.

In 1894, the Herms Dry Goods Company advertised in the Portsmouth (Ohio) Daily Times, admonishing readers to "Do Your Xmas Shopping Now" because there were "Only 18 Shopping Days Before Christmas."

The Daily Times (Portsmouth, Ohio), December 4, 1894

On the same page in that same newspaper was the beginning of the serialization of Stephen Crane's novel, The Red Badge of Courage, up to chapter III. The Daily Times was one of 200 small town dailies that serialized Crane's story that month and helped establish his fame as a writer. Now a high-school lit-class staple, The Red Badge of Courage wasn't published in book form until the following year. (Charlottesville connection: Crane's handwritten manuscript is preserved in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.)

Advertising in the Boston Sunday Globe in 1895, Jordan, Marsh, & Co. claimed to have "the Grandest Aggregation of Holiday Goods in New England" and reminded readers there were "Only 8 More Shopping Days Before Christmas":

Boston Sunday Globe, December 15, 1895

By the turn of the century, the phrase was ubiquitous. Here are some examples:

The Daily Northwestern (Oshkosh, Wisc.), December 11, 1899

Mansfield (Ohio) News, December 12, 1899

Cedar Rapids (Iowa) Republican, December 23, 1900

Washington Post, November 27, 1904

That last example, published exactly 110 years ago today, is puzzling in that it warns about "only 24 shopping days until Christmas," when it should be 27 days.  The advertiser, Galt & Bro. Jewelers, was at one time the oldest continuously operating business in Washington, D.C.  It closed in March 2001 after nearly two centuries of operation.  It was once managed by Edith Galt, who became the second Mrs. Woodrow Wilson and effectively president after her husband's debilitating stroke.

To summarize:  The claim that Harry Gordon Selfridge coined the phrase "___ shopping days until Christmas" rests on flimsy ground.  Knowing that Selfridge was a notorious self-promoter, the assertion that he first used it while he was at Marshall Field & Co. in Chicago in the late 19th century may originate with him in one of his expansive chats with journalists (like this 1932 interview with The Milwaukee Journal, in which he lays claim to "the customer is always right").

The earliest near-usage I was able to find was in the Boston Globe in 1891.  (I searched as far back as 1860.)  The earliest precise phrasing I found was two years later, in the Boston Sunday Post. The phrase became common in the 1890s in New England and the Midwest but I found no evidence of Selfridge using it before 1909, even in Chicago newspapers that would have published ads for Marshall Field. That doesn't mean no evidence exists -- just that I could not find it.  If anyone can find an earlier usage attributed to Selfridge, I welcome feedback.

Stating the obvious in a single newspaper headline

Charlottesville's Daily Progress wins the prize for stating the obvious in its banner headline on Sunday, October 12.

There, above the fold, was this shattering piece of news:

That's right:  "Not all churches open to same-sex marriage."

Next week we'll learn that "Not all halal butchers sell pork" and "Not all Unitarian-Universalists believe in god."

To be fair, the web version of the newspaper's article has a better, more explanatory headline -- but most readers of the Sunday Daily Progress read what's tossed on their lawns in the pre-dawn hours.

Daily Progress to Charge More for Thanksgiving Day Edition

Today I received this message in my email box from Lawrence McConnell, publisher of the Charlottesville Daily Progress:

On Thanksgiving Day, we will deliver to you the biggest newspaper of the year! As always, it is loaded with information you can use and valuable advertising to get your holiday season off to the right start. Because of its sheer size, the Thanksgiving Day newspaper is one of the most expensive to produce and difficult to distribute. And many of our carriers must use additional help to complete deliveries in a timely manner.

Effective this year, we will charge a premium rate of $2.50 for the Thanksgiving Day newspaper. This charge will be debited to your newspaper account on Thanksgiving Day. The small increase in the rate for the Thanksgiving Day newspaper will result in a slightly earlier expiration date for your current subscription term.

We hope you can appreciate the value of the Thanksgiving Day newspaper and the necessity for the premium charge to partially cover our added expenses and those of your carrier.

Thank you for reading and supporting the Charlottesville Daily Progress.

Now, I am aware as much as anybody of the challenges the legacy media face these days. Revenues are down, expenses are up, subscriptions are down, newsstand sales are down while competition proliferates in the form of cable and satellite TV stations, talk radio, blogs, Facebook and Twitter, and web-only news sites.

But think about this for a moment: Just why is the Thanksgiving Day edition of the Daily Progress so big? Or that day's edition of any newspaper?

The answer should be obvious. It's because that day's newspaper carries more advertising than any other day of the year, with the possible exception of December 26.

In other words, the Daily Progress is saying, "Subscriber, we are charging you more because we are making more money that day."

I hope I'm not the only Daily Progress reader who noticed this attempt to turn us into Thanksgiving turkeys.

Replying to Critics of My RTD Piece on Theodore Roosevelt

Over the weekend, the Richmond Times-Dispatch published an opinion piece I wrote with the headline, "Why does Obama channel racist TR?"  It ran in six columns across the top of the Op/Ed page on Saturday, accompanied by a photo of Teddy Roosevelt.

In the article, I take note of President Barack Obama's recent speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, a small town that had been the location of an earlier speech (in 1910) by former President Theodore Roosevelt, in which he introduced the phrase "a square deal" as the theme of his upcoming campaign to regain the presidency.

Roosevelt split the Republican party in 1912, forming the Bull Moose party as a vehicle for his planned return to office, while the GOP nominated the incumbent, Roosevelt's hand-picked successor, William Howard Taft.  The divide between factions of the Republican party led to the election of Woodrow Wilson.

The key paragraph in my Times-Dispatch piece was this:

The sad fact is, Theodore Roosevelt was an unabashed racist who celebrated genocide. He was a Nobel Peace Prize winner who glorified war and facilitated the Japanese conquest of Korea. He was a eugenicist who thought only fit people (as he, or the government, defined them) should be able to reproduce.

My point in bringing this up was that it is strange that the country's first African-American president would want to wear the mantle of a man who, according to most accounts (and his own words), held non-white races and non-Anglo-Saxon ethnic groups in contempt.


For my article, I drew on the works of scholars like Thomas J. Dyer, author of Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race. (The fact that a book with a title like that exists should be an indication of Roosevelt's problematic views.) Another historian I cited was Nancy Carnevale, who cited Roosevelt's disdainful views of immigrants from southern Europe in her book, A New Language, A New World: Italian Immigrants in the United States, 1890-1945.

Even the Miller Center at the University of Virginia noted that Roosevelt

did little to preserve black suffrage in the South as those states increasingly disenfranchised blacks. He believed that African Americans as a race were inferior to whites

I also quoted directly from Roosevelt's own writings.

Although I have written articles for the Richmond Times-Dispatch in the past (for instance, "Third Party Resurgence Seems Unlikely," published on August 7, and "America Could Use a Good Dose of Calvin Coolidge," published on July 4, 2010), none has received the kind of reaction that this one has.

There were comments left on the Times-Dispatch web site (and propagated through Facebook) and I also received several emails, some critical, some congratulatory, in reply to my piece.

What follows are replies to most of the comments I received, either directly or through the RTD web site.  If you haven't read the original article yet, it may be helpful to do so before tackling the responses.

One of the emails and one of the commenters took me to task for misrepresenting how Texas came to be part of the United States.

The email correspondent wrote:

Not to make a big issue, but Texas was not 'annexed' by the USA. Texas was an independent nation in 1936 and joined the Union later.

Similarly, a published comment stated:

Texas was a republic, a separate country, from 1836 to 1845. The United States annexed Texas in 1845. Do your homework!

I did, of course, do my homework before mentioning "the annexation of Texas and other territories formerly belonging to Mexico" in my article.

In fact, the United States annexed Texas in 1845. The governing law passed by the U.S. Congress to join Texas to the United States, passed March 1, 1845, was entitled "Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States." The controlling legislation from the Republic of Texas, passed in convention on July 4, 1845, was called the "Ordinance of Annexation." (The texts of both those laws can be found on the web site of the Texas State Library and Archives Commission.)

Another email came from a self-described "retired history teacher."  Given the lapses in grammar, spelling, and punctuation in the message, I print the text in full (first paragraph omitted here but shown later in this post):

Obama our nation's first Black president is trying to say that Teddy Roosevelt was a Republican, who was " progressive" and willing to move forward instead of being like the Republicans today who only move backward or not move at all. It is not about race? Its about vision of the future.

Teddy Roosevelt preached against greed of big business and worked hard to break up monopolies.

No where in your article do you mention that. If Obama understands that, why can't you?

In order for him to be re-elected our country will have to get over the race issue. Too much anti-Obama is about race. For this southern white male, and retired history teacher who supports Obama and will vote for his again no matter who the Republican is. If you think about it, it may be that your article; why would this Republican newspaper use it? To tell everyone not to forget that Obama is Black. You did it for them. Thanks alot.

Other writers (e.g., Jim Powell and Gene Healy) have addressed Roosevelt's domestic policies with regard to business and economics; that wasn't the point of my article, and that's why I did not "mention that."  I chose to write about a different topic.

What I find most odd about this emailer's complaint, however, is that he seems to imply that my article decrying racism had a hidden racist message. If so, he finds more irony in what I wrote than what I found in Barack Obama's wish to emulate a racist politician.

And, if there are Americans who are unaware that President Obama is African-American and need my reminder... well, those people shouldn't be voting in the first place. Ignorance has no place in the voting booth.

Another email correspondent writes:

This morning I read your piece on Teddy Roosevelt. It was an interesting read. Near the end you referenced two quotes from letters Roosevelt wrote, one to Charles Davenport and another to an unnamed recipient. It's my opinion that neither of these quotes supports your argument that Roosevelt was a racist as he not once makes mention of race as a factor in his breeding philosophy. You offer no additional support for how these quotes demonstrate TR's rascist views.

To a certain extent, this point is valid. The quotations about Roosevelt as a eugenicist to not, in themselves, prove he was a racist. But what I was trying to do by citing them is to prove he was a eugenicist, and eugenics was largely (but not entirely) based upon racist beliefs. Prominent eugenicists like Margaret Sanger were not shy at all about expressing the racist (mostly anti-black) roots of their aims.

In that regard, a third correspondent, unaware (I believe) of the others, wrote this:

A year or so ago, I read the book "The Imperial Cruise" by James Bradley, which detailed much of what Roosevelt believed and stood for, his speeches and his actions. He was truly a bully and his beliefs concerning Eugenics, interracial marriages and his encouragement to Japan to become the dominant force in the Pacific were horrifying. By the time I finished the book, I have been wondering how we could blast his face off Mt. Rushmore without damaging any of the remaining three.

One of the commenters on the newspaper's web site seems not to have read the article I wrote because he assets:

TR was no racist. In fact, his views on race unusually progressive just like his politics in general. He believed all people should be treaty like human beings. As for his war record, there was none. In fact, he won a Nobel Peace Prize. Your reading of American history is flawed and biased. He was a patriot.

My high school debate coach taught that "he who asserts must prove." I provided evidence for my contentions, but the commenter does no more than gainsay my argument. This is not argument at all, just contradiction. The fact that I mention the dubious circumstances under which Roosevelt received the Nobel Peace Prize apparently slipped this commenter's grasp altogether.

Other correspondents and commenters rationalize Roosevelt's racist attitudes by suggesting that he was a man of his time or that he was no different than other public figures before or since.

Said one, in an email with the subject line "Your RTD Blog on TR" (has the line between blogging and newspaper opinion-writing become that porous?):

All heroes have feet of clay………………… Grow up………………………. Martin Luther King was a huge racist and adulterer…………………. Why don’t you ponder that for a while.

And another:

The same column could be written about Abraham Lincoln by harping on his placing preservation of the Union above freeing the slaves.

And the same has been said many times of Ronald Reagan, and that is far more relevant to today's political discourse.

And this one, which arrived in my email box after I began composing this blog post:

Mr Roosevelt was a product of his times; employing the teachings of evolution and carrying them out in his beliefs! Evolution teaches that life came from a simpler life form to a more larger and stronger life form. That only the strong survive and the weak fail to continue. Obama simply has no clue about the historical facts of the presidents he desires to emulate and should perform more research before he comapres himself to one of the characters of history.

Finally, the "retired history teacher" cited above began his email to me with this:

By our standards today every white male would have been racist in Rossevelt's time. By that same standard today every Black male would be racist towards whites.

I actually reject that thought. While the turn of the 20th century was no picnic when it comes to race relations -- the reprehensible Virginia state constitution of 1902 is evidence of that -- there were, in fact, principled individuals who believed fully that "all men are created equal" and who worked hard to achieve racial harmony in the face of great odds.


This was the time, remember, when groups like the NAACP had their beginnings. It was also the time, to be sure, of D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation, which inspired a resurgence of the KKK in the North as well as the South, and the time during which Woodrow Wilson ordered the re-segregation of public facilities in Washington, D.C.

Had it not been for those early pioneers in civic activism, law, and the humanities who fought against racism, jingoism, and eugenics, the accomplishments of the later "civil rights era" of the 1950s and '60s would have been that much harder to achieve. Were it true that "every white male" was racist toward blacks and "every Black male" was racist toward whites in 1900 and the years that followed, the civil rights movement could never have reached the launch stage.

Progress requires a core group of people of good faith who are also kind, thoughtful, fair-minded, and intelligent.  That people like Roosevelt and Wilson lacked those qualities is a good reason for us today to reassess their political legacies.

I am looking forward to any letters to the editor that appear in the Richmond Times-Dispatch in reply to my article. Once they are published, I will post links as an update, below.

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Today's RTD: 'Third-Party Resurgence Seems Unlikely'

A couple of weeks ago (July 26, to be precise), Coy Barefoot invited me to be a guest on his WINA-AM radio program, "Charlottesville Right Now."  The topic we agreed to discuss was the prospects for a third-party presidential candidate in 2012. (Podcast here.)

In preparing for the show, I realized that, despite the wishful thinking of pundits who -- as they have prior to so many elections in past years -- predict that a "third-party moment" is upon us, owing to the deep dissatisfaction of American voters with the two major parties, the Democrats and Republicans.

What has sparked this latest round of prognostication was the "dysfunctionality" perceived in the long congressional debate about raising the debt ceiling, an issue that has largely gone unnoticed in the previous dozens of times it's come under legislative consideration.

I realized that the pundits are going to be wrong once again when I examined the facts about Virginia's "off-year" elections in 2011.  (We election officials cringe at the use of "off-year" to describe Virginia's elections, because every year is election year in the Old Dominion, and every election is equally important in the effects it has on the lives and governance of our citizens.)

What I found out is that there are only about a dozen third-party and independent candidates for the 140 seats up for election in the General Assembly -- 100 in the House of Delegates and 40 in the Senate.  I also discovered that the majority of those seats will be fully uncontested -- there is only one major party candidate in 62 of the House elections and in 15 of the Senate elections.

If there were really a strong desire for third-party representation in government, we would see demand for third-party and independent candidates to emerge in this year's Virginia elections.  But we don't see that.

This is all a long way of getting around to pointing out that, once I got my thoughts in order, I put them on paper and submitted them as an op-ed to the Richmond Times-Dispatch, which published the piece in Sunday's commentary section under the headline, "Third-party resurgence seems unlikely".

The article's central argument is this:

Because Virginia holds its state elections in odd-numbered years, out of sync with most of the rest of the states, it is widely seen as a bellwether of the country's political mood.

In 2009, for instance, Republicans swept the top three statewide offices here, anticipating the landslide return in 2010 of a GOP majority to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Four years earlier, Democrat Tim Kaine won the governor's mansion, followed in 2006 by the Democratic Party regaining control of both chambers of Congress.

In 1993, Republican George Allen's come-from-behind victory in the governor's race portended the first GOP takeover of Congress in 40 years.

If the electorate's mood really favors a third-party surge, we would be seeing it in Virginia. There would be a demand for third-party and independent candidates for the General Assembly, and candidates would rise to meet that demand.

Yet according to records available through the Virginia Public Access Project (VPAP), there are only seven independent candidates seeking election to the 100-member House of Delegates this year. There are four independent candidates for the 40-member state Senate.

Check out the Times-Dispatch today at your local newsstand or look it up online. Comments and questions are welcome, there or here.

I just hope that nobody thinks the photo accompanying the article in the RTD is a picture of me.

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Homophones

The New York Daily News today has an article on its web site about Vice President Joe Biden using "colorful" language in introducing President Obama at a public ceremony.  (I do not know if this article appears, or will appear, in the paper's print edition.)

Reporter Michael Sheridan writes:

Health care reform isn't just a big deal, it's a "big f---ing deal."

At least, that's what Vice President Joe Biden thinks.

The 67-year-old former senator introduced President Obama prior to his signing of the historic health care reform bill into law on Tuesday, and let the colorful word slip while shaking the commander-in-chief's hand.

"You did it," Biden told his boss. "It's a big f---ing deal."

What caught my eye -- and what makes this article fodder for this blog -- is the penultimate paragraph, which says:

Fowl language may be a favorite for vice presidents. Ex-Veep Dick Cheney famously used the infamous phrase on several occasions during his two terms.

Something tells me that Sheridan did not want to suggest that Biden and Cheney talk like our avian friends. He meant to say "foul language," not "fowl language."

A good copy editor would have caught that.

Of course, it might be that the Daily News is trying to suggest that Biden (and, by extension, Cheney) are "chicken s--t."

Crossposted from Where Are the Copy Editors?



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Survey Says? Bloggers Shape Opinion

The second of two (so far) annual surveys by the Society for New Communications Research has found that professional journalists have a stronger, more positive opinion about social media that both leads those journalists to use social media as a tool to disseminate information and also to rely on social media -- including Facebook and Twitter, for example, but also blogs -- as sources of information.

The survey was conducted by Jen McClure, the founder and president of the Society for New Communications Research (also CMO and director of community development for Redwood Collaborative Media), and Don Middleberg, CEO of Middleberg Communications. The survey included 341 journalists from around the world, with 54 percent from the United States. Among the survey's findings:

* Nearly 70 percent of journalists are using social networking sites, a 28% increase since the [previous] 2008 study

* 48 percent are using Twitter or other microblogging sites and tools, a 25% increase since 2008

* 66 percent are using blogs

* 48 percent are using online video

* 25 percent are using podcasts

* More than 90 percent of journalists agree that new media and communications tools and technologies are enhancing journalism to some extent

The most intriguing finding (to me, at least) was this:

Nearly 80 percent of respondents agreed that new media and communications technologies allow them to report with greater accuracy, and 80 percent of journalists believe that bloggers have become important opinion shapers in the 21st century and many are increasingly incorporating citizen-generated media into their reporting.

Paolina Milana, executive vice president for Marketing/Editorial Operations/Media Relations at Marketwire, a corporate sponsor of the study, said:

Social media is immediate, it is accessible, and it has irrevocably changed the relationship between makers, reporters and consumers of news. The more that all journalistic participants understand each other's needs, how they use various media channels at their disposal, and how they want to work with PR professionals, the better the entire communication process will be.

H/T Joe Ciarallo



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Congressman Rob Wittman at Blogs United

Anticipating by just a couple of hours the appearance of two potential opponents at the Blogs United conference last weekend, U.S. Representative Rob Wittman gave a well-tailored presentation about the "new media" and politics to the participants, who were mostly bloggers and political activists. Wittman represents Virginia's first congressional district, which stretches from the Hampton Roads area in the south to Fredericksburg and its suburbs in the north.

As noted by Anita Kumar of The Washington Post, Wittman is a member of the Republican New Media Caucus.

Wittman spoke for about 20 minutes, followed by about 15 minutes of questions-and-answers with the audience. The video recording of his remarks (including the Q&A) is divided into five segments on YouTube.

In Part I, Congressman Wittman is introduced by J.R. Hoeft of Bearing Drift:

Part II:

Part III:

Part IV:

Part V (Conclusion):

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Journalists' Panel at Blogs United

Political candidates were not the only special guests at the Blogs United conference held at Christopher Newport University in Newport News last weekend.

Blogs United organizers also invited some journalists who cover Virginia politics for established news media outlets and who also blog as part of their jobs.

The participants in this lively panel discussion, which lasted for almost a full hour on the morning of November 21, were Anita Kumar of the Washington Post, Ryan Nobles of NBC12 in Richmond, Kimball Payne of the Hampton Roads Daily Press, and Julian Walker of the Virginian-Pilot.

In fact, Walker wrote about Blogs United on his own "Pilot on Politics" blog after returning from the conference:

In a role reversal of sorts, bloggers from across the ideological spectrum quizzed a panel of state government reporters who also blog: Anita Kumar of The Washington Post, Kimball Payne of the Daily Press, Ryan Nobles of NBC12 in Richmond and this Virginian-Pilot scribe.

Among the bloggers lobbing questions during a lively, engaging back-and-forth at Christopher Newport University were J.R. Hoeft and Brian Kirwin from Bearing Drift, Vivian Paige, Shaun Kenney, Lauren Victoria Burke at Crew of 42 and Article XI's Eileen Levandoski.

For her part, Anita Kumar wrote on the Post's "Virginia Politics Blog":

Did you know there's a Republican New Media Caucus in Congress? Neither did we.

But one of the group's chairmen -- Virginia's own U.S. Rep. Rob Wittman (R) -- was on hand to speak to dozens of bloggers today at the Blogs United conference at Christopher Newport University in Newport News.

I'll be posting the video of Congressman Wittman's remarks soon. For now, however, we can look at the video of the panel discussion featuring the journalists/bloggers. It is divided into eight segments.

The four panelists are introduced by blogger Vivian Paige in Part I:

The conversation continues in Part II:

Part III:

Part IV:

Part V:

Part VI:

Part VII:

The final segment is introduced with a question from newly elected Fluvanna County Supervisor Shaun Kenney, who also has a well-known blog. In Part VIII, Kenney asks about the Washington Post's nearly unique emphasis in covering gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell's graduate-school thesis:

More video from the 2009 Blogs United conference will follow.



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Asking for Whom the Bell Tolls?

Forget about the sacking of its top three business-side executives, or the "resignations" of executive editor John Solomon and editorial page editor Richard Miniter.

If you want the strongest sign that The Washington Times is teetering on the edge of self-destruction, consider this: The paper has dropped its comics page, which has not appeared in the past two days.

When a whole section of a newspaper disappears without comment, you know that trouble is at hand.

At least Mallard Fillmore -- which, oddly enough, started at the Daily Progress in liberal Charlottesville -- remains on page A2 of the Times.




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Watch Your Language!

A couple of items from today's Daily Progress deserve comment because of their infelicitous use of the English language (which, as Henry Higgins put it, is the language of "Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible").

First, a Media General News Service article on page 2A about the new U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia, Timothy Heaphy, refers to Heaphy as "a former federal prosecutor and most recently a white-collar criminal defense attorney in Charlottesville."

This is, as an attorney might say, facially false. The same article notes that Heaphy was sworn in on October 16, which makes him the current federal prosecutor. It would be better to say something like this:

Heaphy most recently worked as a white-collar criminal defense attorney and, before that, served as a lower-level federal prosecutor...

By the way, the article does not appear on the Daily Progress web site (or at least it cannot be easily located there), but the same report can be found on the web site of the Lynchburg News & Advance, dated October 27.

Second, in a letter to the editor aimed at discouraging votes for gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell, John M. Bowman of Charlottesville uses the hamhanded and demeaning phrase, "gay and lesbian lifestyle," a formulation that betrays what might be called "soft bigotry."

I have a message for Mr. Bowman. I resent his condescension and can assure him that, as a gay man, I do not have a "lifestyle," I have a life.

Would Mr. Bowman talk about the "straight lifestyle" of opposite-sex married couples? I think not. He would, if he gave it the slightest thought, identify such a phrase as bizarre and insulting.

I frankly do not need ill-informed letter-writers deigning to speak on my behalf. If I want your "help," I'll ask for it -- but before that, take a look at a calendar. It's the 21st century now.

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WaPo Endorses Four GOP House Candidates

In its endorsements for about two dozen races for the House of Delegates in Northern Virginia, the Washington Post has selected just four Republicans that its editorial board believes are worthy of election. One is an incumbent; one is challenging an incumbent; and two are running in open-seat races. Two are candidates in territory familiar to me, Arlington County.

The incumbent is Thomas Rust. This is what the Post says about him and his race:

District 86: Thomas D. Rust, the incumbent, is one of the more effective lawmakers in the General Assembly, a pro-business Republican who has also gained backing for some of his initiatives from environmentalists. Mr. Rust has enacted important legislation that will ease the way for more toll roads to be built, and he's played a constructive, responsible role in securing funding for education and other priorities that many in his own party opposed. His Democratic opponent, Stevens Miller, is a capable lawyer who's served for two years on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors.

The GOP challenger to an incumbent is Aaron Ringel:

District 48: Robert H. Brink, the Democratic incumbent, has held this seat for a decade, and in that time he's barely faced a serious challenge. This year he has one in the form of Republican Aaron Ringel, a bright young combat veteran of the war in Iraq who works for a defense contractor. Mr. Brink is a competent legislator but he has opposed widening Interstate 66. That wins points with some homeowners who'd be directly affected but does little for the tens of thousands of commuters who suffer that road daily. Mr. Ringel takes a broader regional view of that issue.

One of the open-seat candidates is Eric Brescia, who is seeking to succeed Al Eisenberg in Arlington's 47th District. I posted a video interview with Brescia back in August. Here is what the Post says about him in Sunday's edition:

District 47: Two excellent candidates--Republican Eric Brescia and Democrat Patrick Hope -- are competing for this open seat. Mr. Hope, a health-care lobbyist, has 10 years of experience as a neighborhood activist and even longer expertise involving Medicaid and mental health issues. By contrast, Mr. Brescia, an economist who's just 24, is a relative newcomer. However, he is exactly what the Republicans need in Northern Virginia: an independent-minded thinker who has fresh and specific ideas for how to save money in health care and make government work better. A Green Party candidate, Joshua F. Ruebner, has a long record of civic engagement but has not mounted a serious campaign.

The Post endorsed Danny Smith, another open-seat candidate, on Friday:

District 38: Danny R. Smith, the Republican candidate, is a bright, independent-minded civic leader who cares about promoting affordable housing. A Realtor and corporate executive, he would bring a refreshingly bipartisan sensibility to Richmond. He's a better choice than his opponent, L. Kaye Kory, a sincere but lackluster Fairfax school board member who beat incumbent Robert Hull in a Democratic primary.

The Post's criteria may not be clear (why Brescia, for instance, but not Rich Anderson or Rafael Lopez?) but its endorsement is sure to carry weight in the near suburbs of Washington. In a race with three candidates like that in the 47th, the Post's endorsement may be enough to carry Eric Brescia over the finish line.

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