Seems Robert Murrow of the Baltimore DPW is no Limbaugh Fan
May 10th, 2007
Laura Vozzella and Nicole Fuller have a story in the Baltimore Sun about how Baltimore has had 15 minutes of national spotlight fame…
Meanwhile, it seems that Baltimore Department of Public Works employee Robert Murrow is no Rush Limbaugh fan.
Gee, imagine that. In Baltimore. In cobalt-blue Maryland. Oh, I’m shocked.
In a town so tough that most murders get just a few paragraphs in the paper, somebody called The Sun about 8 a.m. Thursday with a tip about a vandalized billboard.
By noon, the story was all over the Internet, Rush Limbaugh was kicking off his national radio show with it, and City Hall was fielding calls from as far away as California. By 5 p.m., the story had become one of the three most popular individual articles in the history of the paper's Web site, with nearly 200,000 page views.
There's a reason the story had legs. The paint-splattered billboard featured Limbaugh's mug. And the tipster was a spokesman for a city agency -- the one responsible for cleaning up graffiti -- who let it be known that he was no "dittohead."
I was amused with the quip:
Sometimes public officials have second thoughts after they say something on the record and try to take it back. And sometimes, especially if the officials aren't very high-ranking and the news value isn't that great, reporters will let them off the hook.
Since when has a Baltimore Sun reporter had the humanity to not punch-up a story with a trivial off-moment at someone’s expense?[1]
"Something can go from zero to a million miles an hour in a couple of clicks," said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project. "That makes us sort of a hair-trigger world."
With the increased mercurial nature of “news” these days (especially when it represents a manifestation of the coarsening of the public dialogue) comes an increased responsibility. Always think before one engages the mouth and taps on the keyboard and contemplates hitting the “send” button.
In the words of one of my liberal critics, who has never seen fit to follow his own advice, “Words have meaning.”
In the past, words only had meaning if you were a conservative. Liberals were exempt and seem too frequently to get the benefit of “reporters will let them off the hook.”
Aside from how repugnant Imus’ words were about a class women’s basketball team, was the fact that Imus was often considered the darling of the left - - and many of us conservatives were dumbfounded to watch the likes of the Reverend Al Sharpton and the Reverend Jesse Jackson go after him with such alacrity and success.
For many, the differences between the mouths of Rev. Sharpton, Rev. Jackson and Imus are relatively indistinguishable. At least so I am told. Imus was never my cup of tea and I don’t believe I ever listened to a minute of his show. And I have always avoided bestowing any credibility to Rev. Sharpton or Rev. Jackson.
Often the relatively unspoken cynical humor when someone like Imus commits a faux paux is to suggest they change parties and everything will be forgiven.
But apparently Mr. Murrow’s taste for Mr. Limbaugh did not get him a pass from the Baltimore Sun either.
I pay little attention to the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Rosie O’Donnell, or Ann Coulter – except for the occasional humor factor.
And at the kitchen table level of most American families the red-blue thing is not real and only fodder for cable news and partisan newspapers who masquerade as neutral news providers…
I thought Alec Baldwin’s vituperative outburst was a private matter and should not have been fodder for “news.” As was also Senator Barack Obama’s recent gaffe about “10,000 dying in the Kansas tornado…
So is the mercurial nature of what some folks consider to be “news” these days really doing the public a service?
Perhaps what is “news” these days is the level of unchecked violence in Baltimore City with seemingly no hope for an end…
Many folks have suggested that as a result of the last election which saw the Democrats re-take the Maryland Statehouse and make gains in the Maryland General Assembly; the Baltimore Sun would have to start going after liberals… Too few conservatives to misrepresent…
Well, maybe yes and maybe no. Many of the recent dynamics in Maryland politics that would have caused uproar when there were conservatives in decision-making roles have barely been mentioned since last November’s election…
So should have the Baltimore Sun identified Mr. Murrow and gained fifteen minutes of fame off the back of an otherwise hardworking city employee who is actually a human being?
You be the judge. He is – for the most part - not a spokesperson for the Baltimore Public Works Department; Kurt Kocher is.
Mr. Murrow’s chief sin was being a paper cut in shark infested waters.
Unfortunately the Baltimore Sun was rewarded for it and that only encourages more folks to lose their voice when working with a Baltimore Sun reporter. One doubts that the Baltimore Sun thought of that as accountability is not in the lexicon of that august Calvert Street institution.
Mr. Kocher’s response did not surprise anyone. For those of us who have worked with him for many years, he is well known for being a squared-away kinda guy.
Of course, the other relatively un-discussed portion of this story is the fact that anyone would find Rush Limbaugh threatening enough to feel the need to deface his picture. And that is a subject for another moment of stolen time at the keyboard.
Meanwhile, yes, Mr. Kocher’s admonishment was appropriate. Now that we’ve covered that base; let’s give Mr. Murrow a raise… for being a real person.
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[1] Then again, maybe I should take that back… After a disastrous string of reporters in Carroll County who would bash their mothers in order to hype a misleading story – and attempt to get reassigned away from the Carroll County beat; recently folks are saying that they are getting to a comfort level with Laura McCandlish, who seems to be human after all. Ms. McCandlish seems to be overcoming the distrust the Carroll County office of the Sun took years to earn. Nevertheless, there are still folks who avoid the Carroll Sun like the plague and that is really not fair to Ms. McCandlish, who seems to be trying hard Hiring an actual human being to be the lead on the Carroll County beat must have been a mistake. But I digress.
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