Dr. Willie W. Herenton, the mayor of Memphis, is often referred to as “King Willie,” and not just because of the strong likelihood that after holding the office for an astonishing 16 years, he will be reelected in 2007 and will add another four years to his reign.

Memphians don’t use the term just because of Herenton’s nonchalance in the face of rampant crime and poverty rates, our status as the infant death capital of the world, some of the highest sales and property tax rates in the state and nation, failing schools, public works mismanagement on a massive scale, a growing number of elected officials under indictment for bribery and other criminal behavior, and a city that among similar metro areas consistently ranks last in terms of healthiness.

Herenton didn’t earn that moniker just because of his apparent penchant for cronyism, because of the way he seems to exploit the city’s racial divisions for personal gain, because he spends more time promoting boxing matches than he does actually managing the city, or because he claims to have been appointed mayor by God himself.

Our mayor isn’t “King Willie” just because of his special ability to jolt the city with audacious ideas such as consolidation (which could place the controls of both Memphis and Shelby County in the hands of one person — hmm, d’ya wonder who?), or the more recent one: “hey, guys, let’s build a new $100 million football stadium to replace the perfectly fine, and perfectly empty, one to which we just committed $15 million for upgrades!”

And “King Willie” did not receive this honor just because the city has prepared an elaborate, and well-deserved burial place for him, finding no better use for the Memphis Pyramid.

No, Willie is “King” because of the way he lords over the city like a mafia boss and keeps the public, and the media, at several arms’ length (keeping in mind, of course, that Herenton has the wingspan of an amateur boxing champion).

So it was with incredible irony (and my own personal delight), that Mayor Herenton would be invited to give the opening speech of the Media Reform Conference last weekend.

No single person I can imagine (with the possible exception of Vice President Cheney, perhaps) could be less suited to the task. Herenton has turned secrecy and media combativeness into its own sport.

It’s with my sincere pleasure that I bring you the remarks (see video starting around 4:39) of one John Nichols of the Nation magazine, who introduced Herenton thusly:

You know, in this country, it is not easy to be a mayor of a big city. The media does not cover big cities well. The media is not generous to mayors; if it was, if it was, the mayor of Memphis would be a serious contender, not merely for reelection, but for the presidency of the United States. Because big city mayors know how to handle big problems, and sometimes, despite the challenges they face from big media, they know how to succeed. Please welcome, the mayor of Memphis, Dr. Willie Herenton.

There was an audible gasp in the audience after that beautiful comment, and I certainly wasn’t the only one there from Memphis who, right then, considered making a break for the nearest exit.

Consider, for example, Richard Thompson of Mediaverse, a Democrat and journalist who has described the moment well:

“Clearly, the out-of-towners were clueless. They don’t know [Herenton] like we do. If they did, they would understand that he often demands a respect that he doesn’t always bestow. Nevertheless, they clapped blindly and that kind of thing disturbs me. No one questioned him.”

Thompson later added some context, describing the whole thing far better than I could. Excuse the long quote, but this is just priceless:

I’ve been on edge since Friday, the precise moment occurring when Free Press co-founder John Nichols said Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton could have had strong consideration to be President of the United States if not for the media attacking him all these years. No, he wasn’t laughing at all.

Granted, Nichols backtracked a little later, but the damage was done. His kotowing [sic] to a mayor with self-inflicted media scars is no different than the much levied accusations from reformers that Big Media tends to overlook the faults of POTUS and others in the power structure in order to advance their own agendas. And despite the Pepto of successful independent media models, acknowledgement of the erosion of diversity from newsrooms, the caution of media consolidation and more, I still felt uneasy by the star-gazing and double talk. The NCMR says its [sic] non-partisan but it isn’t.

This conference has been a pseudo-Democratic convention, complete with a party presidential hopeful dropping in for a “surprise” appearance. (Do you think I’m that gullible?) I’m a lifelong Democrat, but as a journalist I can step outside of that allegiance because at times it’s necessary for the sake of credibility.

Saturday’s spoof of Bush, while funny, really showed that “media reform” is really just a code word for Democrats to control their own message — one disguised as being for the people, but it’s really not and it can’t be as long as the media is supposed to exist separate of the political paradigm. Media reform, in my mind, is supposed to ensure that separation.

This conference was about elections, not newspapers and TV stations.

Read the whole thing.

As for Nichols, with that sycophantic, ignorant introduction, he inadvertently summed up the entire Media Reform conference before it even began. Instead of calling for serious reform, he opened with a plea for the local media to turn a blind eye to the Mayor’s failures, and to be “more generous” and less challenging — exactly the opposite of the intended plea for a media that is an untiring watchdog and public advocate. For his part, Herenton followed with a few of his standard jabs at his media critics, and little else.

Read part 3.

If you believed the speakers at the Media Reform Conference this weekend, you would have discovered that our media are dominated by conservatives, and that alternative viewpoints (here referred to simply as “the truth”) never get heard or printed.

It’s an alternative America (the other of John Edwards’ “two Americas,” perhaps) wherein the only news media available are the Fox News Channel, conservative talk radio, and right-wing blogs, while all the other major outlets cater only to the whims of big business and are somehow beholden to the White House and its neo-conservative cabal. With this scenario firmly in place, the American public is spoon-fed lies and led into the wars of blood-thirsty tyrants — the dictators of a democracy gone bad. Meanwhile, as their mantra goes, unemployment is rising, our free market economy is a conspiracy to keep the poor man down, and nobody has any access to healthcare. Oh, and God forbid you’re black, gay or female — in which case you have no rights, no voice, and no vote, whatsoever.

Fighting against these sinister forces of neo-slavery, a band of 3,000 converged in Memphis. They are the few, the proud, the “nut-roots.” These brave souls risked life and limb by meeting together in public, in broad daylight, in a red state like Tennessee. At any moment, conservative shock troops might have stormed through the doors to arrest everyone on site.

With tremendous courage they assembled a crack team of actors, pundits, celebrities, socialists, Leftist think tank activists and media critics to combat the problems of media bias and journalistic malpractice: Danny Glover, Phil Donahue, Bill Moyers, David Brock, Jesse Jackson, Jane Fonda, Geena Davis, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, just to name a few.

In short, they were just the right people for the task at hand, the perfect team to reform media. How better to illustrate the complete liberal voicelessness in media than to invite an obscure figure such as Jesse Jackson, someone who is rarely seen or heard on television? And who best to explain the conservative stranglehold on media than Bill Moyers, whose long career of taxpayer funded public tele-journalism can only represent the exception to the rule?

Free Press, the group behind the conference, put its grievances on the table: our media are too conservative, too consolidated, too private, too profitable, too white, and too free.

Its proposed solutions were just as clear. Rephrased for brevity, they include:

1. More government funding for public stations like NPR and PBS
2. More government funding for other media
3. More government intervention in the media business
4. More government-enforced racial quotas
5. More government oversight of media
6. More government involvement at the local level
7. More government-enforced giveaways to political candidates
8. More government funding for community broadcasts
9. More government intervention on an international scale
10. More government oversight of the internet

And so, with any luck, the conference would accomplish one thing: media would stop being a whore to big business and would start being a whore to big government, instead.

Of course, to do so, they would first need to break through the news media filter, and somehow bypass the big business conservatives who run the show. In Memphis, the results were mixed, as expected. While the Memphis Flyer, an alternative newsweekly, had given the conference prominent ad space for the last couple months, as well as a cover story the week of the conference, plus a handful of front-page website updates, the coverage at the major daily was a bit lacking; The Commercial Appeal ran only 13 or so stories over four days, in addition to a column by the editor in chief, a staff editorial, a video spot on AppealTV, and coverage by the staff blogs. Other than that, and up-to-the-minute coverage on talk radio and the daily TV broadcasts, the conference was hardly covered at all.

See Part 2

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Former Shelby County Commissioner John Willingham spoke at the Dutch Treat Luncheon on Saturday and said he is holding a meeting Wednesday with his exploratory committee, looking into another run for Mayor of Memphis.

Willingham is extremely knowledgeable, and he’s tenacious. Two very admirable qualities. The man has plenty of good things to say, to a fault, because you can hardly get him to shut up; he’s like an encycopedia on tape with no pause button — lots of helpful information, but you don’t necessarily want to read it from cover to cover. My only other complaint about Willingham is that, while he knows what our problems are and is almost unique among Memphis politicians in wanting to address and fix them, his proposed solutions tend to be unconstitutional — turning the Memphis Pyramid into a casino, and instituting a payroll tax being two big examples of that. God bless him, though.

Below is a brief, two-minute video from his very long-winded speech. It’s poor quality, taken with my Canon PowerShot A60, as usual. But it’s cool, and it’s free, so you don’t get to complain. (more…)

Scanned in below is the much-fabled “God exists” flowchart I’ve joked about before. This was a handout in an “Evidences of Christianity” class, and was said to be an almost foolproof way to prove that the God of the Bible exists. For a test, we were forced to explain in written form how the flowchart works, though it was never really explained to us in the first place. But even if it had been “explained,” I’m not sure it would have helped much. My favorite part is how “meaning, value, purpose” appears twice, as if it wasn’t clear enough the first time around (it wasn’t!). So now instead of talking about God, explaining to people how He has changed your life, and living in a way that allows others to see Christ in you, all you need to do is save this flowchart to your hard drive and forward it to all your atheist contacts. I’d say if you get this going in an e-mail chain, everyone with an internet connection will believe the Gospel by around Valentine’s Day.

A first brush with celebrity came quickly tonight after picking up my Media Reform Conference registration. We spotted him in the Marriott hotel bar across the street from the Cook Convention Center. Moyers was kind enough to pose for a photo with a coworker of mine who adores him, which I may be able to post or link to later.

So far, the conference hosts seem nice, but the well-positioned exhibit hall is a little on the kooky side. Up front and center, of course, is MoveOn.org’s booth. Then there’s the usual mix of Leftist propaganda vendors, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, race-based and gender-based independent media outlets, and peddlers of single-issue bumper stickers: pro-abortion, church-state separation, Bush hate, Rightwingers are stupid, Americans are arrogant, Who Would Jesus Bomb, etc. Most of the people milling about are either unshaven, grizzly young Marxists who could seriously use a bath, aged hippies wearing cowboy hats covered with a dozen anti-Bush buttons and other flair, balding, brooding Alan Ginsberg clones with black-rimmed glasses to match their all-black wardrobe, or cyper punks with orange goatees, knit hats, trench coats and “free our media” bumper stickers affixed to their laptops. Likeable people, really, and I think I should be able to blend in fairly well.

Some of you didn’t get the hint, but it can’t be my inability to drop a sufficient number of them, or leave few but quality ones. It must be your inability to read between the pixels. (more…)

I’ve decided to discontinue Fishkite, but while I’m preparing a new shell to slouch into, here’s a nice, positive story for you: (more…)

We’re celebrating the arrival of the New Year in Destin, Florida, with Mike and Diana, and I’m sure we’ll remember this one for years to come. This is a far cry from previous years, spent sitting inside watching a dumb ball drop on TV while the people out there seem to be having a wonderful time.

Last night, at about 10 minutes to midnight, we decided to walk down to the beach to mark the occasion.

I came up with a unique way to say goodbye to 2006, and began writing the year in the sand, for the ocean to wash away. I wrote it a half-dozen times, only to see the numbers washed away within seconds each time. Finally I backed up to a spot where the waves weren’t reaching. With four or five minutes left of the old year, I wrote it one last time, in an area of dry sand, up further from the water line. The waves came in and out several times, nowhere close. We all thought it would be cool if, somehow, the waves were to build up and wash away the writing right as the new year arrived. For the next few minutes, we stood around, took pictures, watched some people on the beach setting off fireworks, as others looked on from their hotel balconies.

Then with just seconds to go, sure enough, there was a surge in the water, and “2006″ was washed away right as the clock hit 12:00. We all laughed and cheered in amazement.

Diana took these pictures of Alison holding a cellphone with the time displayed:

Goodbye 2006. Hello 2007.