Measure 49 info

Read this thoughtful article by one of my favorite environmental journalists for more information on measures 49, 37 and eminent domain/property rights issues:

Taking Liberties

More on this when I get time.

A conversation at the Campbell Senior Center

I am having a lot of fun covering my "beat" - four square blocks just North of downtown Eugene. Yesterday, I went to one of the buildings in this area, Campbell Senior Center. I wanted to just summarize one of my interviews there for my computer notes, but it turned into a semi-interesting short essay.

I wander down the hall to the "pool room," which contains two tables and a whole wall of windows with views of the park outside. Rain is pouring down, obscuring the river just beyond the grassy expanse and making the afternoon seem later than it is. In the room, three men are engaged in a billiards game. My presence doesn't interrupt the rhythm of their turn-taking much, but they do seem fairly entertained by me and my reasons for visiting. Ed Aragon is the most talkative.

Aragon lives in Goshen but comes to the Center every Monday through Friday to play pool in the afternoons. He appears to be in his early 80s, with a grizzled white beard and clouded brown eyes shadowed by a baseball cap. He’s wearing a red and blue checked shirt with red suspenders. When I tell him I’m here to get a feel for the community and see what is on people’s minds, he has one immediate thought: he’s voting no on Measure 49. The other two men agree. “It’s going to give the government too much authority on the land,” Aragon says. I ask if he owns property, he says no.

Aragon scratches after sinking the eight ball and loses the game. It’s getting near closing time, but there’s time for one more match.

The receptionist enters the room to collect money out of the box on the wall. A sign instructs users to pay 25 cents per day. She shakes the coins she found in the box in her open hand. “I got two quarters and three guys here, it just doesn’t add up,” she says. The men look at each other for a moment, then Aragon rummages in his pocket, admitting he hadn’t paid yet. I get the feeling this is kind of a routine that they go through.

I notice a bulletin board covered of pictures of elderly men playing pool, and I comment that there seems to be quite a lot of pool players around. “Some of ‘em died on us,” Aragon says by way of reply, and the others nod their heads in agreement. “We lost a couple this year.”

One of the men racks the balls, but makes a weak break. All three of them use a metal guide on a stick to steady their aims. The rules are lax – shaky hands sometimes inadvertently move balls. As Aragon says, “It don’t matter.” Win or lose, there will be another game.

Now that the afternoon is drawing to a close, Aragon grows sentimental for his home away from home. “I don’t know what I’d do if I couldn’t come down here,” he says, answering an unasked question. “I’d be an awful mess.” He says he stopped chasing girls 48 years ago, when he and his wife got married. They are still together, but she doesn’t spend time at the Center. “She hates this place,” Aragon says matter-of-factly.

At the moment, Aragon supposes, his wife is probably “getting the beans on the table” for dinner. She’ll come pick him up soon.

Before I go, he gives me a few more personal details. He was born in Idaho, but has lived throughout the west. He came to Oregon for the first time in 1946 and worked on the construction of the Fern Ridge Dam. He also helped build Eugene’s YMCA and was a logger for 12 years. “I worked anywhere I could find a job,” Aragon says.

He wins this game, just barely, all three men egging each other on light-heartedly. I joke that his opponents are trying to make him feel better for the previous loss.

No point to that, Aragon tells me. “I lost my ego a long time ago.”

Hm, might be a drought.

Here's an AP story that ran in the Oregonian on Wednesday:

Drought Tightens Its Grip on Southeast

This headline is different than the headline the Oregonian gave it in their print edition - "Drought Strangles Southeast States". I'm not sure who makes those decisions, but the second headline definitely adds more drama. I'd much rather have someone "tighten their grip" than "strangle" me, and I think it's amazing that the same story ran under such different names.

But that's not the only point where this story fails to make clear the true nature of the water crisis in the Southeastern US. It's not that they misreport the facts - it's that the facts are buried and then glossed over with false "advantages" to the drought.

This article is a classic example of an issue getting boxed in as "environmental" news and thus treated with frightening levity. The truth is, droughts affect more than crop yields and fishing. Four paragraphs into this story, we're hit with a scary sentence: "But little rain is in the forecast, and without it climatologists say the water source for more than 3 million people could run dry in just 90 days."

Wait, what?

In 90 days, 3 million people will be without water, unless rainfall starts compensating for the extreme drought that has been taking place in the last few months. Which it isn't likely to.
Shouldn't more people be frightened about this?? Isn't this already a catastrophe? Even if it does start to rain and the people of the Southeast scrape by, it's sure to be worse next year. It's a documented weather trend. Not only that, but aquifers are running dry, and the population is growing.

So why does the AP lead the story with an anecdote about a lake and make it seem like the biggest concern is that people can't put their boats on it anymore? Any why does it completely leave out the above information about the real seriousness of the situation?

It doesn't get better from here. "Sweltering temperatures and a drier-than-normal hurricane season contributed to the parched landscape," the story says. It would have been so easy right there to refrence the general upward trend of temperatures and the certain human causes of those temperatures. Instead, the writer implies fate and bad luck to be the root causes of all this misery, basically throwing his hands in the air (and causing readers to do the same).

The conclusion to this article barely deserves mentioning for its obvious stupidity, but I'll say it anyway: Get 'em while you can, Mr. Biggers. The AP won't tell you, but next year those fish will be drying up and blowing away in the wind.

Lokey Donation Coverage

This morning, I recieved an email from UO President David Frohnmayer, announcing the largest ever donation to the university's academic departments - $74.5 million.
Lately, one of my biggest gripe points has been how Phil Knight (the UO graduate who co-founded Nike) seems to own a disproportional amount of my school with his almost complete sponsorship of its athletic program. (Not that this is a bad thing, but now that he sells racially profiled shoes, it starts to feel that way.)
Anyway, I was excited to hear about Lorry Lokey's donation. Maybe now UO's academics can share the limelight with athletics, at least until Knight trumps Lokey with a larger donation.

The announcement also brought up an interesting point of comparison between two local papers. I've been reading Slate Magazine's column "Today's Papers" in an attempt to stop failing the news quizzes in my Journalism class, and have found it fascinating to compare what papers run what stories and where. When I looked into the Lokey donation story a bit more, I realized that the same comparison can be made at a local scale, with revealing results.
My first questions when I heard the news about the donation were "What is the largest amount that has ever been given to non-academic purposes (ie athletics)?" and "What is the largest academic donation the University has ever received?" I pulled up the Oregon Daily Emerald's site. The campus paper ran the story at the top of its web edition (well, under two banner ads), with an image of the now-renamed Lorry I. Lokey Science Complex. When I skimmed the story, however, I didn't find the information I was looking for. It did say that Lokey has given a total of $132 million to the University, and gave a breakdown of where the funds would go, which was nice. But I left the very short story hungry for more information.
Next, I tried the Register Guard. Their story was also on top (no ads) and almost twice as long as the Emerald's. It gave more context, including some of the information I was looking for: Knight's got Lokey beat for a single-donation record with a $100 million athletic donation made earlier this year. Still, I don't know what the previous record was for strictly academic donations, and I'd have to do a bit more digging to find out. But the Guard's article did a much better job of covering the whole story, from the controversy over athletic donations to Lokey's plans to donate more in the future.
There are certainly a whole list of factors that make the Emerald's coverage so different from the Guard's coverage of the same story, and I won't try to name them all. Obviously, the Guard has much more space to work with. The Emerald is probably making the assumption that students are familiar with the controversy over athletic donations, and wanted to cover Lokey's act for what it was: not a jab at Knight or an attempt to end the argument, but an honest gift to the University that rises above athletics vs. academics fights.

Put that in your shoe and smoke it, Phil!

WSJ Article analysis

The assigned purpose of this blog was to break down some news articles, to deconstruct the writer's thought process and, most likely, learn something in the process. This article is from the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ is my absolute favorite daily newspaper (Well, until Rupert came along... but that's another story), and with good reason. Take this story, for example.

Republicans Grow Skeptical on Free Trade

As a side note, I want to mention that this story was in the top right of the main page in Thursday's issue, which some may find surprising. After all, isn't the WSJ (I like to say that "Wuss-juh", but you don't have to) a business publication and therefore conservatively biased? Many of my Eugene friends and acquaintances believe this and frown upon me for my devotion to the paper. My response is that, first off, there's nothing wrong with exposing yourself to political views you might not agree with. Secondly, given the corporate conglomeration that comprises the mainstream media today, why not read a paper that is open about its bias toward business news?
Actually, this newspaper is fairly even-handed in its coverage. Yes, the opinions page is another matter. But there was actually a study done on newspaper objectivity and the WSJ came out as being one of the most unbiased in the nation. If I could ever figure out where I heard of this study so that I could actually cite it, this argument would be a lot stronger. But anyway, let's get back to the task at hand.

So, the breakdown:
The story starts off with the dateline giving us the "where" - Washington. The lede then repeats what was said in the headline with a few additional facts: how many republican voters ("who") said that they were skeptical of free trade when polled, and what is their ultimate concern (the health of the U.S. economy). It also gives the "so what" - that this change in opinion could make foreign trade deals more difficult in the future.
The writer then goes on to detail the results of this poll, and we learn the other "W"'s of the story. When: Not as relevant, so he just says that the poll is "new". The important thing is that this is a dramatic change from the results of previous polls, where republicans have traditionally supported free trade.
A little further down, the author quotes his second source (the first being the poll itself). The quote simply confirms the "so what," as does the next sentence, which adds another element of timeliness by mentioning an upcoming political debate.
This bit of context allows the author to shift the focus of the article from the poll (which doesn't provide a lot of room for analysis) to the upcoming election and the condition of the Republican party in general. The next couple of paragraphs compare Democrat and Republican approaches to free trade, and the shift in opinion from the Republican party since a previous poll in 1999.
The author then uses a subhead to demarcate some background on what's going on with free trade deals currently being written. The next subhead launches further discussion of the Republican party's approach to the presidential race, touching on national security, tax cuts and healthcare.
The last paragraph brings the discussion back to free trade, with a somewhat surprising quote from Republican candidate Mike Huckabee that does a good job of summarizing the article. "If Republicans don't stop it," he says, referring to deals that ship jobs overseas for the benefit of CEOs, "we don't deserve to win in 2008."

This article, like many in this paper, doesn't stick to any traditional format. It's a pyramid structure at first, but the extra analysis at the Republicans' chances in the presidential race makes it kind of a bloated pyramid. A pyramid with an addition on the side, maybe a sun room or a pool.
Uh, anyway, the point is, it's an interesting, much more useful way to tell the news, and that's why I picked the article. I also picked it because the ideas in it bring up some interesting questions. I've been taught in the very basic economics classes I've taken that free trade among nations is, theoretically, always to the benefit of every party involved. If Canada can make snowshoes more efficiently than it can grow bananas, and Panama grows bananas more efficiently than it can make snow shoes, it makes perfect sense for those two nations to trade those products. (Actually, it doesn't at all, because Panama has absolutely no use for snowshoes, but that's beside the point.) The problems with free trade, then, don't have anything to do with efficiency or pure financial cost. I think this is where many Republicans get hung up. Why not produce a product as cheaply as possible? Who cares where we have to go to get the things we want? Why would Canada grow its own bananas?
On the other hand, I think Democrats get hung up on the external costs of free trade, those that have nothing to do with prices in the store. Exploitation, loss of jobs for Americans, quality (the lead thing will be with us for a long time, I'm sure). Maybe Canada should produce its own bananas because it would create many jobs, prevent Panamanians from unfair treatment by banana plantations, and keep the darn lead off the skins.
Who's right? I suppose they both are, and I don't know nearly enough about it to analyze any further. The important thing is, other people are making this analysis too, and it might result in more sensible international trade policies from the U.S.'s end of things. Thanks, Wuss-jah.