May 2003 Archives

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

May 27, 2003

It's never fun to see someone destroy his or her life, and the New York Times-Jayson Blair affair has done even more: It's damaged the reputation of not only a newspaper, but a whole industry.

Blair is the young man who built a career in journalism on fakery and fraud, and used a system, designed to help talented minorities move into major positions in the news business, to avoid being held to account for his misdeeds.

He claimed that personal problems caused him to commit these acts, but he has a record of such acts dating back to 1999, and other newspapers that employed him are now taking a second look at stories he wrote for them.

Journalism is a field that punishes such behavior harshly — and rightly so. The system, though, is highly susceptible to manipulation and the results have been devastating. In the time before a writer is caught, he or she can cause irreparable damage to a publication and its reputation.

The rest of us in the news business pay even more for the actions of the cheaters, and see our own reputations and credibility sullied.

Stephen Glass falsified stories for several magazines. As a reader, I remember reading those stories and enjoying them, finding them interesting and off-beat. I feel "taken" to learn that they were — for the most part — fakes.

Glass recently wrote a book, a work of fiction like many of his articles, and pulled down a nice six-figure advance from some publisher. Personally, if the book was on fire, I wouldn't spit on it.

As for Glass, well, Tony Soprano once said about a fellow mobster he despised, "If he was drowning, I'd throw him a cinderblock."

Just as Glass recently did "60 Minutes" to tout his book and mouth psychobabble about why he did what he did and how sorry he is, Blair will turn up on some show to whine about how tough and competitive it was in the news business, and maybe throw in how everyone despised him because he was African-American.

The New York Times is at fault, too, for not acting on one editor's recommendation that Blair stop writing for the paper immediately, and then making Blair the lead reporter on the sniper case, allowing him to spread falsehoods about the investigation and deceive millions of readers.

Truth to tell, I envied Blair. Young, connected to the top levels of the Times, his job was the dream of many of us who labor in the trenches at small papers and maybe have decided that that's where we'd rather stay.

He ruined his career, though, and has made everyone else's job a lot harder. For that, his punishment is harsh, and it must be maintained. Like Janet Cooke, Blair should never darken the door of a news media outlet again, if only to protect the credibility of the news business, or what little is left.

He'll say he's sorry, but sometimes it's too late to say you're sorry, and this is one of those times.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


--------

By Vincent F. Safuto staff writer

May 25, 2003

The government raised the terror threat level to orange the other day, concerned about a possible terrorist attack.

But for many Americans, there's another threat level, not measured by the Department of Homeland Security but potentially just as devastating to our nation.

It's the economic threat posed by corporations eager to export jobs overseas. In the realm of economics, the terror threat level is at red-plus.

My work e-mail has been filled of late not only with ads for herbal Viagra, but also tales told by working Americans of jobs lost and indignities piled upon indignities.

These are knowledge workers, information systems workers and other white-collar Americans. Well-educated people from Florida, from North Carolina, from New Jersey, from other places, too, some retrained from previous lost jobs into the "hot" field of computers and the Internet, who now find themselves retraining Indian replacements brought to this country on L-1 visas.

These Americans tell me corporations are using the L-1 visa to hire Indians in India, bring them to the United States, train them for the jobs Americans are soon to lose, and then send them back to India with both the work and the Americans' jobs.

One correspondent is about to lose his third job, and the coda of his employment this time is the same as the previous two: Train your Indian replacement, or else.

These are people, Americans, who have been ordered to train their replacements for a final few months of employment — and train them correctly — on threat of immediate termination and loss of severance.

These are Americans who were filled with rage and anger when the twin towers fell and the Pentagon was partially damaged, wept at the horrible loss of life and counted themselves fortunate to have avoided the wrath of evil terrorists, and supported our troops in the war with Iraq.

Now they're frightened again.

Not just of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden and the possibility of another terrorist attack, but for their future, the future of their children and the future of their nation, which they love dearly.

These are the people politicians don't want to hear from or talk to, the ones who wonder how their wife will get her cancer treatment after the insurance ends, or whether their child's diabetes will be treated after they lose their health coverage.

These are articulate folks. They make Web sites about their plight. They write to the news media, and their sometimes uninterested congressional representatives, who reply with letters touting the wonders and benefits of international trade for Americans.

They ask not for a handout, but for a fair shot at making a living. They ask their employers to not just wave the American flag and then wave goodbye to the American jobs they send overseas, but for a little corporate loyalty to the red, white and blue.

Sadly, it seems, the only color that matters to American corporations today is green, so even if it destroys the nation, and the lives of many of its people, nothing matters but those little green pieces of paper.

Wall Street doesn't believe in tears, and the weeping over lost jobs never makes it to the executive suite or the Beltway.

But we ignore the economic threats to our nation at our peril. What does it profit us to gain hegemony over the world if we lose our economic souls?

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).

--------

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

May 19, 2003

The Federal Trade Commission recently held a big meeting to discuss the scourge of unwanted advertising e-mail, known far and wide as "spam."

Electronic mail used to be considered one of the greatest gifts of the new era, but thanks to undisciplined use by advertisers, it is now a burden. When I come to work, especially after my days off or a vacation, my first job is to plow through up to 100 junk e-mails.

The public is demanding action on spam, and the government is responding with laws and requirements that may punish those who flood Internet e-mail users with thousands of advertising messages a day, but I worry that the innocent will be punished for the sins of the guilty.

A small part of the advertising e-mail I receive is wanted, believe it or not. I am on the mailing lists of companies that sell products that I'm interested in, including cars, computers and software. Even if I'm not about to buy their product or service, I'm interested in what's new, or what's soon to come.

I call the ones who send out millions of e-mails an hour and flood my mailbox with offers for junk or outright scams "wildcat" e-mailers. They're the ones whose behavior is giving electronic mail a bad name. While I'd like to see them forced to stop flooding the network with messages, I don't want to see those who are using the system the right way punished or eliminated.

A good case in point is a publication called the WinXPnews. It's a free newsletter e-mailed to people who have voluntarily submitted their e-mail addresses and want to receive tips, ideas and advice on using the Windows XP operating system.

A recent issue detailed a problem: Some subscribers complained that they weren't receiving their issue. The company investigated and found that the subscribers' information was current, and the newsletter had been sent to them.

So what had happened? Spam filters, either at the recipients' employers or Internet providers, were deleting the newsletter.

My provider was passing it through to me, but it was being deleted as it was downloaded. I found out that one of my rules for e-mail messages on my home computer was that anything with the word "Win" in the subject line should be deleted to rid my e-mail of the innumerable "contests" that are advertised online.

But the filter is not smart, and it was dumping my newsletter along with the junk. In the same way, solving the problem of spam may turn out to be worse than the problem itself.

Companies that are using — and not abusing — e-mail should not be punished, even if it means letting the senders of countless weight-loss and credit repair e-mails go unpunished.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).


--------

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

May 16, 2003

They're closin' down the textile mill

'Cross the railroad tracks.

Foreman said "These jobs are goin', boys,

And they ain't comin' back."

— "My Hometown"

Bruce Springsteen

We've patted ourselves on the back here in Florida of late, but we've had our share of economic pain.

The textile mills of New England, the Carolinas and even our state's Panhandle have shut down, and their work has gone overseas, where the minimum wage and pensions are the random rantings of socialists and trade-union types.

We benefit by being able to buy cheap undershorts and socks, and the loss of manufacturing and its well-paid jobs may seem very remote. It all happened somewhere else, we say, so we can go on living in the sunshine and watching the pelicans float by.

News that another factory or call center has up and gone to Mexico, China, India or the Philippines sounds like good news. Who could be against paying less for a washing machine, power tools or a car?

The tech industry, where all the jobs were supposed to be, is looking with longing at low-wage frontiers, where tech-support people and programmers can be hired by the dozen for what it costs to employ one American.

Microsoft is leading the charge in the outsourcing realm, I've read, and is pushing its subcontractors, which provide tech support for its products and services, to head for India.

We're told this is a good thing, one that will lower prices and create scads of American jobs. But there's a catch.

Those formerly productive, wage-earning American workers, having lost their well-paying jobs, health benefits and vacation time, won't be coming to Florida with their children to visit Mickey, see the other tourist attractions, eat, sleep and pay sales taxes on mouse ears.

Multiply that by the millions of jobs lost — and to be lost if the trend continues —and you have a hefty hole in our state's sales-tax dependent budget.

And when those good people stop coming to our state, Floridians in the tourism industry suffer. Those losses ripple through the economy, as unemployed workers still need schools, police, fire and other taxpayer-provided services, plus help with training and finding new jobs.

With our state budget in the hole, such services are being reduced, leaving Florida in a downward economic spiral.

Those without health insurance, and their children, insist on getting sick. They turn up at the emergency room or at the charity hospitals. The medical community needs to be paid, so if the financially bereft can't pay for services, the cost is passed on to the rest of us.

Someday, we who are now working and have health insurance may join those unfortunate Americans in the ranks of the unemployed, bankrupt and uninsured.

And we'll have those wonderful CEOs and other top executives — and their toadies in Congress — to thank for our fate.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com.)


--------

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

May 14, 2003

News that Air France and British Airways will be ending service on the Concorde and retiring the planes is the sign of yet another era ending in commercial aviation.

Granted, supersonic travel never caught on amongst ordinary fliers, mainly because of the very high prices and limited destinations. But leaving faster-than-sound flying to the Top Guns is a crimp in aviation's progress.

As an airplane fanatic growing up in New York City, the SST (supersonic transport) was touted as the future of flying. I admired those subsonic airliners that flew over my house on their way to LaGuardia Airport, but the prospect of a streamlined plane racing through the upper atmosphere caught my imagination.

On my first trip to Florida, in 1975, my parents took my two brothers and me on Amtrak to Disney World, and I prevailed upon them to visit an aviation museum whose brochure was in the hotel.

I don't even remember its name, but do recall that the main attraction was a mockup of what would have been the American SST.

I could have spent all week in that museum, and saw not only the mockup of the plane that would never be, but planes that were, including a B-25 Mitchell bomber from World War II (doors locked, sadly) and an old twin-engined taildragger that was open. My parents snapped pictures of me in the cockpit as I looked around from the best seat on any airplane, the left one, upfront.

The museum may have been a tourist trap, but to me it was the coolest part of the trip to Florida. It was, I dare say, even better than the Eastern Airlines "To Fly" ride at Disney.

One time, I was riding in a car near JFK Airport in New York and saw the Concorde, in its trademark high flare, coming in to land. It looked like something out of a futuristic science fiction film.

Another time, when I was flying out of JFK, our airliner taxied past the terminal where Concorde flights were loaded and the other passengers and I gazed out the windows as a sleek Concorde being readied for another fast flight in the thin air.

I've heard all the reasons why the Concorde shouldn't fly any more: It's '60s technology, it's noisy, it burns too much fuel, it's uncomfortable and it's an extravagance few can afford. I'll grant all those, plus the fact that the brutal realities of commercial aviation make it impractical, but we should never lose sight of the fact that for a time, if you had the money, you could go faster than sound.

When the Concordes are retired, let's hope they are all put in museums all over the world so people can see them and walk through them.

Hey, maybe an aviation museum somewhere in Florida could have one. Place it in a hangar with some nice exhibits, and I'd gladly drive for several hours to stand next to — and in — a piece of aviation history.



Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com.


--------

By Vincent Safuto staff writer

May 3, 2003

A common complaint is that Americans are mostly ignorant about geography, and that we don't know much about other countries and only become interested when we're mad at them or at war with them.

One country, though, has become well known in America, but not for the reasons mentioned above.

Nigeria is a major topic of conversation for Americans who retrieve their e-mail, because of the infamous scam that started before the Internet became a big deal and has spread to other countries.

Nigeria does have a major export that doesn't land in your e-mail: oil. There's also a lot of political corruption, and economic disarray that has turned sending junk e-mails promising big bucks into a family industry.

You might say that the family that spams together stays together.

An article in the July 2002 issue of Wired magazine told the story of "Taiwo," an articulate and crafty young student who wrote "URGENT BUSINESS PROPOSALS" for eight years.

His family has been sending out such letters for 15 years, and the profits from the money-transfer scam enterprise have enabled them to live well.

"Taiwo" is no longer in the family business, though, which hasn't stunted the creativity of his fellow Nigerians.

Indeed, what is striking about the letters is their excruciating formality and soap-opera style, which "Taiwo" said was deliberate and meant to impress recipients that the person sending the letter was a high-ranking person above the masses of people in Nigeria.

But that exaggerated style is what gives it away, I think, as a fraud. Most spam e-mails for printer ink, Viagra or other "extension" services and weight loss are very informal.

The excessive formality in e-mail is almost mocking, in a way. The closest comparison I know if is the occasional telemarketer who affects a British accent in an effort to sound like he or she is anything but a cubicle-dweller in a cyber-sweatshop somewhere in the Midwest.

One of my favorite telemarketing calls of all time was a woman who greeted me by letting out several hacking coughs, then began her pitch in the finest BBC accent.

Since many Americans associated a British accent with honesty, integrity and class, it's easy to see why so many telemarketers try that mode of speech.

And it's easy to see why Nigerians view the money transfer as a ticket out of their economically desperate lives. Any spammer will admit that all it takes is one bite on an e-mail to pay the costs — and leave a tidy profit — of tens of millions of e-mails.

All a Nigerian has to do is convince one gullible American a year that he'll get "12 MILLION, THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE DOLLARS U.S." and wait for the bank account number — and cash — to roll in.

Not surprisingly, the Nigerian government, which can barely do anything, hasn't done much about the e-mail scams. For now, all anyone can do is just keep that delete button finger limber, and beware of strange e-mails bearing business proposals.

Vincent F. Safuto is a copy editor for the Press Journal. Reach him at (Vincent.Safuto@scripps.com).

--------