Backing into Caldwell scandal story at The Oregonian

In a front page story on Monday, The Oregonian reported the death of its Editorial Page Editor Bob Caldwell. In the story, editors and publishers praised the popular 63-year-old editor, who had helped guide two Oregonian editorial writers to a Pulitzer.

Then, after the story appeared, the circumstances surrounding his death revealed another side to Caldwell. He had died after having sex with a 23-year-old PCC student in her Tigard apartment.

The Oregonian rightly printed a story today, but they did so in a manner that revealed how agonizingly difficult it was for the paper's staff to face and report the facts.

The story (shown here. Click on it to make it bigger.) painfully backs into the embarrassing news.

As they say in the business, the lead is buried.

The headline tells us that Caldwell died in a Tigard apartment. Is that news?

The subhead tells us that he died after “a woman called 9-1-1 to report he was unresponsive.” Is that news?

The lead tells us that Caldwell was in the woman’s apartment and that she was 23 years old.

We’re getting warmer....

Finally, in the second paragraph we learn “The woman called 9-1-1 to report that Caldwell, 63, was coughing and unresponsive after a sex act.”

Presumably with her.

The story goes on from there. “The woman told deputies she met Caldwell about a year ago at Portland Community College. Caldwell, she said, knew she didn’t have much money so he provided her cash for books and other things for school in exchange for sex acts in her apartment.”

Any freshman journalism student would recognize where the news is in the story and write a headline and lead to reflect it.

(A sodden thought: One wonders how Caldwell, once the paper's 'public editor,' himself would have written such a story involving a top Oregonian editor. Fate spared him the task. The public editor, by the way, often dealt with matters of journalistic ethics and definitions of "the news." The paper dropped the position some years ago. It seems to be time to restore it.)

The on-line commentary about today’s article raises the usual ethical arguments. “Let him rest in peace.” “Is this news?” “Is he a public figure?” “Does it matter?”

Yes, this is news, sad and embarrassing as it is. Yes, as one comment notes, the editorial page editor of the state’s largest newspaper is indeed a public figure. And, yes, it does matter.

There’s another story here and it has to do with PCC and, more generally, the plight of college students. For six years I taught journalism at PCC. Many of the students are in desperate financial straits. My guess is that this young woman was not — and is not — alone in her desperation. That's a story that still needs telling.

That Caldwell would take advantage of this student's plight is deplorable...and, yes, newsworthy.

The Jan-and-Dean surfer solution

What is wrong with this picture?

The Forest Grove News-Times reports that at Pacific University, women students outnumber men nearly two to one...and the admissions department is having trouble attracting male applicants.

How’s that?

In my pre-feminist youth, we belted out a surfer song, “Surf City,” which extolled the virtues of “two girls for every boy.”

The refrain went: “You know we're goin' to Surf City, gonna have some fun, now — Two girls for every boy!”

But for some odd reason, Pacific University, named after the very same ocean whose surf inspired that youth culture of yore, has decided the way to attract young men to its campus is to revive …

Football.

Huh?

And these folks are supposed to be smart.

No need to get on my soapbox about “clock-ringing” head injuries, later-life dementia and "career-ending" torn ligaments. Besides being dangerous, competitive collegiate football is not known for attracting the best and the brightest — at least to the classroom.

Still, as follow-up story in yesterday’s Oregonian pointed out, small liberal arts colleges “have enjoyed up-ticks in mile enrollment — or at least stabilized it — after starting football programs and have reaped revenue gains from tuition, ticket sales and concessions.”

Ah, revenue gains. It’s about the money. Bring in the jocks and we can pay the professors.

Pacific University administrators might want to talk to the faculty at the University of Oregon about its salaries. They are notoriously less competitive even as the university’s nationally-ranked football team becomes more so.

Could there be some connection here?

The Pacific University story raises all kinds of issues and questions: about the soaring cost of education (Could that be why men aren’t going to expensive liberal arts schools?), the poor academic performance of young males in general (Are young men increasingly modeling themselves after their moronic media stereotypes? Are they living in a virtual world of fantasy?), the priorities of post-adolescent males who choose a college for its football program and not for its academics, the muddled mindset of administrators who promote athletics over academics, the libido of young males (Why does “two girls for every boy” no longer work? Too sexist perhaps? Could suppressed libidos result from too many Budweisers in high school?), the impact on women students of having a dating pool full of tackles, tight ends and tailgaters.

No, if I were marketing Pacific University to young men, I’d turn back the clock and crank up those musical surfers Jan and Dean on behalf of the college.

You know we're goin' to Pacific University, gonna have some fun, now — Two girls for every boy!”

Outta Sitemeter

One of the wonders of blogging is having a sitemeter. The "visits" and "views" tracker tells you a lot. Some of it is more than you want to know.

But the “Referrals” feature offers intriguing information. Most folks just visit the site because they know it and want to see whether I still have a pulse.

But a few, it would seem, come here seeking kinky thrills. The best evidence of the intent is a post that I titled “Sonic Sex on a Sweat Towel.” There must be a whole community out there interested in “Sex on a Sweat Towel” because those words suck in an inordinately large readership.

The post isn’t even tagged with “sex,” which is usually good bet for a few dozen visits. The content is about what happens to the wires on my iPod and its headset when I throw them into my backpack on my sweat towel.

I speculate in the post that some audio intimacy takes place in the dark resulting in obscene tangling of the cords.

The actual tags are innocuous: “iPod” and “Steve Jobs.”

Among the other favored referral sites is the famous “Sarah Palin’s Glasses,” which at the time it was posted drew a record number of strangers to The Red Electric. Now, months later, it seems the fascination with the good governor (and her specs and her weird family values) is endless.

Another enticing post is “PCC lockdown,” which isn’t about a particular lockdown (alas there have been a few) but about the bureaucratic memo the PCC administration circulated to tell PCC students and faculty what to do in an “active shooter” situation.

The short answer: Lock the doors, pull down the shades, stop taking notes, and hide.

Posting this little ditty has meant that every time there’s a PCC lockdown (there was one today), Google sends anxious readers to The Red Electric and my parsing of bureaucratic prose.

Clearly I am not meeting news expectations, which explains why the sitemeter tells me that Red Electric visits are brief — a mere 41 seconds.

Then again, if you stare at a sweep second hand, a 41-second interval isn’t all that brief, especially when the topic is Sarah Palin’s glasses or Sex on a Sweat Towel. Web surfers seeking such subjects must be slow readers.

It figures.

Palin glasses hunters swarm to web site

My site meter went ballistic last night after I posted my little ditty about Sarah Palin’s glasses.

The Red Electric lopes along with between 40 and 50 visitors each day. The count consists of 30 of my nearest and dearest friends and relatives as well as a pack of search robots sniffing out tags (“McLuhan,” “glasses,” “Sarah Palin”) and product mentions.

At first I thought the ‘bots were out in force last night (and today) or somebody spotted something they thought worth linking to a better-read site than Red.

Since the post 23 hours ago, I’ve received 650 visits.

I should have known something was up when, oddly, no one has posted a comment. Not a single one.

Then it was brought to my attention that the site meter has a “references” section. What we have is nothing more than good old American consumerism run amok. Folks are gaga over Sarah’s frames and are searching “Palin” and “glasses” in droves. (Gee, what would have happened if I’d tagged the post “sex” and “Palin”? I've tried it with this one as an experiment. What happens if ANY post is tagged “sex”? Whole industries are built on the answer to the question.)

Frequent Red Electric reader Steve Brannon was the first to raise the possibility of the consumer connection and even pointed out press documentation of the consumer craze for Palin’s specs.

The good news that while the large majority visited the site to read about where to find Sarah’s glasses, more than 100 nosed around here and looked at other posts.

So, for those of you in the hunt for the Palin-look, look around. You aren’t likely to find what you were looking for, but you may like what you find.

If you actually are here for more thoughts about “cool” and the campaign, here’s one more observation grounded in McLuhan. I also should credit George Lakoff, who rightly takes metaphors seriously — very seriously. (He also writes a lot about frames — political, not optical, ones.)

The political metaphors for the past three decades have all been unabashedly about war. “Hot” war” not “cold war.” So we have “Attack ads,” “War rooms,” “Frontal attacks,” “Counter attacks,” “Air wars,” “War chests” etc.

If he were around, McLuhan (he died in 1980) might argue on behalf of a “cool war.” It would be absorbing and coolly nonconfrontational. It would certainly entertain and not take itself too seriously. Sure, it would take the issues seriously but never lose sight of both the sublime and the absurd.

John F. Kennedy was the first to master “cool.” His press conferences managed enlighten, inspire and, most importantly, engage. He was comfortable with his topic, with himself and with us.

Sarah Palin is no John Kennedy. But she does seem to bring to the podium some of these same qualities. For one thing, she is comfortable enough with herself to wear those marmish glasses. And she may just know that they draw us in to her persona and ultimately into what she is saying.

Whether we agree with her or not, she, unlike her running mate, old what’s-his-name, gets our attention.

Barack Obama shares a few of these qualities. For starters, he too is comfortable with who he is. He, at least, seems to have transcended race, something most of us, if we are honest, have not done but would like too.

How does he do it? And how does Palin get away with wearing those glasses? Of course in her case, she can simply take them off. That she doesn’t seems contrived yet curious.

Obama, with no choice about his skin color, has reached acceptance and moved on.

Would that we all could. This election may tell us if we can.