Questions Worth Asking (Maybe)

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

Is USA Today going all-digital?

This sounds ominous.  Note on sourcing – @Sullview is the WaPo’s media critic; and @Poynter is a major journalistic think tank.

So, is @Netflix doing great? Or is the steaming giant in trouble for not meeting goals?

Depends on who you ask:

vs.

How are kids outsmarting parental ScreenTime controls on their iPhones?

Pretty much the same way they got past the V-Chip 20 years ago. In tech wars between parents and children, children almost always win.

Which also brings up another question: Whatever happened to the V-Chip? 

Has it saved us from bad language, violence or Janet Jackson’s nipple?

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Biggest bias in the media? Making Money! (China Edition)

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

I know, I know, the big news lately that everyone’s been paying attention to is the presidential impeachment investigation here in the US. But there actually is a lot of other news going on, including protests in Hong Kong about crackdowns on liberty by the Chinese government.

Want a quick update on the topic? The BBC News web site has a 100-word and 500-word summary to catch you up. Go ahead and read up, we’ll wait for you.

Ok, you’re back. So you would think that everyone in the USA would be all about standing strong with the Hong Kong protestors who want freedom from China’s totalitarian government, right?

Not so fast.

On Friday, October 4th, Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey sent out what should have been a relatively uncontroversial tweet:

Daryl Morey’s controversial tweet about Hong Kong, since deleted.

(In case you don’t know, the Houston Rockets had been the most popular NBA team in China because Chinese basketball star Yao Ming played for the Rockets at the start of the century.)

The tweet generated an immediate backlash from China.  Chinese fans demanded that Morey be fired.  The Chinese media company Tencent and many Chinese sponsors cut relations with the Rockets. Morey eventually deleted the tweet.

The NBA itself, issued the following statement hoping to sooth things over with China:

In short, instead of standing up for the Hong Kong protesters and for Morey’s tweet, the NBA was apologizing to the Chinese government. Which is interesting, given the woke reputation the NBA generally has on social issues throughout the United States. As columnist Jerry Brewer wrote in the Washington Post:

In simple comparison to other major American sports leagues, the NBA has acquired a reputation for progressivism that, while accurate, shouldn’t be taken too far out of its context…

That is not meant to minimize the laudable efforts the NBA has made to promote diversity, empower its employees to speak freely, champion gender equity and support gay rights. But it is a business above all, a multibillion-dollar powerhouse. While it has a heart and listens to its conscience, it is no less concerned with the bottom line than its peers. You cannot praise it as America’s most progressive sports league without acknowledging that is a tricky thing to be known for and a difficult reputation to uphold.

Eventually, NBA president Adam Sliver issued another statement saying that while the NBA valued it’s relationship with China, they would not be telling owners, managers or players what they could or could not say:

“It is inevitable that people around the world — including from America and China — will have different viewpoints over different issues. It is not the role of the NBA to adjudicate those differences. However, the NBA will not put itself in a position of regulating what players, employees and team owners say or will not say on these issues. We simply could not operate that way.”

The tweet and its fallout has had an impact on the NBA.

The immediate and strong Chinese reaction to the NBA soon started influencing major American media. Take for example ESPN. The Disney-owned sports network has been criticized for not discussing the politics of the controversy between China and the NBA.  ESPN defended itself by simply saying that the network has a policy of covering sports and not politics.

That policy at ESPN dates back to 2018 when new network president Jimmy Pitaro said that he wanted less politics and more sports on the network.

But avoiding politics when talking about taking North American professional sports to China is almost impossible.  The mere act of showing a map becomes a political statement. Ignoring politics is by default a statement of support for the status quo.

Remember how I mentioned that ESPN is owned by Disney? Disney has been working since 2004 at increasing its presence in China with sponsorship of the country’s first NBA games.

And Disney has been working hard to appease China with its non-sports properties as well. The New York Times noted in an article from 2018 that the Ancient One in Doctor Strange moved from being a Tibetan lama to a Celtic mystic to avoid offending the Chinese government. That was a lesson Disney learned the hard way back in 1997 when the Brad Pitt movie Seven Years in Tibet and the Martin Scorsese movie Kandun ticked off the Chinese government.

None of this pandering to China by sports teams and big US media is being done because they particularly support totalitarian governments.  Instead, they are interested in doing business with more than 1.3 billion potential Chinese fans.  And that is the real bias we see in American media – How can they make the most money.

And finally… NBA star LeBron James weighs in on the NBA/China controversy, on the side of China…

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Media Twitter: News Anchor Shepard Smith Leaves Fox News

Posted on October 12, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

News anchor Shepard Smith has been with Fox News since it first went on the air in 1996.  By all accounts, it was his choice to leave the network. Here’s his farewell:

People who pay attention to the good reporting coming out of Fox are lamenting his departure.

Those who are fans of the Fox evening commentary shows, not so much:

WaPo media critic Erik Wemple on Shep’s departure:

And finally, I have long counted myself a fan of Shep Smith’s style.  Here’s when he gave the most amazing reaction to a statement from Mitt Romney when Newt Gingrich dropped out of the 2012 presidential race:

 

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Death at the Fried Chicken Restaurant – How a story today echos Edna Buchanan’s most famous lede

Posted on October 8, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

One of the things that I really like about living in central Nebraska is that we don’t get a lot of people being shot and killed. It happens, but it’s not a routine part of our lives here on the prairie. So it was a bit of a surprise when a story came across Twitter this afternoon out of Lincoln, Nebraska about a customer going wild with a pickup truck at a Chik-Fil-A restaurant and then reportedly getting shot and killed by uniformed BNSF Railway officer who was coming through the drive-through:

The Journal-Star’s Chris Dunker took a solid, standard approach to the breaking news story that was a bit of a shocker for the Nebraska state capitol:

A disgruntled customer who left a busy Chick-fil-A restaurant in south Lincoln, then drove his pickup into the building Tuesday afternoon, is dead.

Officer Luke Bonkiewicz, a Lincoln police spokesman, confirmed the person who backed their pickup into the restaurant about 1 p.m. had died and that there is no ongoing threat.

Thomas Arias, 15, was working behind the counter when he heard a commotion in the dining room, looked out and saw a customer flipping tables and throwing food.

“He was yelling, ‘It’s just a f—ing sandwich.’”

But when I saw the news, I couldn’t help but be reminded a classic story of death at a fried chicken restaurant written back in the 1970s by legendary  Pulitzer-Prize winning Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan.  We’ll let the New Yorker’s Calvin Trillin tell the tale with this excerpt from his 1986 profile of Buchanan:

The fried-chicken story was about a rowdy ex-con named Gary Robinson, who late one Sunday night lurched drunkenly into a Church’s outlet, shoved his way to the front of the line, and ordered a three-piece box of fried chicken. Persuaded to wait his turn, he reached the counter again five or ten minutes later, only to be told that Church’s had run out of fried chicken. The young woman at the counter suggested that he might like chicken nuggets instead. Robinson responded to the suggestion by slugging her in the head. That set off a chain of events that ended with Robinson’s being shot dead by a security guard. Edna Buchanan covered the murder for the Herald—there are policemen in Miami who say that it wouldn’t be a murder without her—and her story began with what the fried-chicken faction still regards as the classic Edna lead:

“Gary Robinson died hungry.”

He wanted fried chicken, the three-piece box for $2.19. Drunk, loud, and obnoxious, he pushed ahead of seven customers on line at a fast-food chicken outlet. The counter girl told him that his behavior was impolite She calmed him down with sweet talk, and he agreed to step to the back of the line. His turn came just before closing time, just after the fried chicken ran out.

He punched the counter girl so hard her ears rang, and a security guard shot him – three times.”

I am often sad that Buchanan did all her newspaper writing before the internet era because there is no easy way to find her articles online. But she did do a couple of books about her experiences that I highly recommend:

She also wrote a host of mystery novels after leaving the Miami Herald, but it was her work as a police beat reporter that really made her stand out.

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Return to “Is There Ever Grace For Being Stupid on Social Media?”

Posted on October 1, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

Carson King and his sign asking for beer money.

You may have seen the heartwarming story about  Carson King, a young man who held up a sign at a recent University of Iowa / Iowa State University football game soliciting beer money. The sign, seen on ESPN’s GameDay, went viral on social media, and King ended up bringing in at least $600. (But stay with us, that number’s going to grow. And this story is going to end just fine for Carson King, but not for everyone involved.)

Once King realized how much money he had collected through the online money transfer service Venmo, he decided he needed to do something good with his windfall.  When he announced he was going to donate the money to University of Iowa Stead Family Children’s Hospital, Anhauser Busch and Venmo both pledged to match the money he had raised. Contributions then poured in, and although reports aren’t completely clear on this, it seems that the total amount raised rapidly exceeded $1 million. (But stay with us, that number’s going to grow.)  AB also was discussing using King as some kind of influencer, perhaps even putting his face on beer cans.

Here’s a story from ABC News that ran when the story was new.

The Des Moines Register had written about the King story when the story was breaking, and there was so much interest in King, the paper decided to do a full on profile.

As reporter Aaron Calvin worked on his article, it was mostly complimentary, but toward the end of it, he discussed a pair of racist jokes King had posted as a teen-ager.  Before publishing the story, Calvin called King to talk about the tweets.  King expressed regret to the reporter, and before the story was published, King had spoken with local TV stations about the tweets.  Interestingly enough, King did not complain about how he had been treated by the Register.

It’s worth noting that the offensive tweets, though written about in the Register, got very little play in the paper.  The TV stations running King’s apology, however, gave them big attention.

There were, of course, consequences to this story, but they weren’t necessarily predictable.

  • Not surprisingly, Busch Light distanced themselves from King, although they still agreed to make their pledged contributions to the children’s hospital.
  • Iowa Oktoberfest held in Waterloo, Iowa, removed Busch Light from their tap list for the annual festival in response to the brewer’s rejection of King.
  • Iowa’s governor Kim Reynolds declared Saturday, Sept. 28th to be Carson King Day. “Carson King can showcase who we are as a people, not only by selflessly donating to a worthy cause, but spreading the message of generosity,” the governor’s proclimation  said.
  • And the reporter who wrote the story for the Des Moines Register left the Register after the paper received hundreds of complaints about the story. (It also turned out that the reporter had had a few questionable tweets of his own year ago in his feed. These tweets were widely publicized by “influential right-wing media figures.” Soon after, Calvin started getting death threats.  The story about Calvin from BuzzFeed says he was fired from the Register.) You can get a feel for what the online environment was like by reading the comments from the television reporter’s tweet above.

There are a host of questions raised by this cautionary story:

  • When should reporters dig into a subject’s social media history?  And what should they do with what they find? Josh Blackman, writing for the libertarian law blog The Volokh Conspiracy gives an in-depth look at the issue, considering a couple of cases.  Blackman concludes:Regrettably, the norm today is predictable: whenever anyone is thrust into the spotlight, for even the most insignificant reasons, an army of social media spelunkers climb through every crevice of the insta-celebrity’s timeline to find something–anything–to embarrass him. Conservatives do it to liberals. And liberals do it to conservatives. This circular firing squad needs to end–eventually, everyone can be cancelled. He that is without without social media sin among you, cast the first tweet.
    What, then is the relevance of old, offensive tweets? To be sure, these posts shed some light into a person’s views at an early juncture of his life. But I am generally skeptical they provide much insight into how they currently approach the world–especially when the postings are old, and were published before a person’s professional career began.How should our society weigh these old postings? I do not propose some sort of statute of limitations, in which past writings are off-limits. Rather, I suggest a different test: when a person’s established body of work is entirely inconsistent with, and indeed in tension with earlier postings, such nascent musings should be entitled to less weight. Under the opposite rule, everyone will be forever tainted by their worst moments. Our society should afford those aspiring for higher status the opportunity to grow, reflect, and recant.
  • Did people over-react to the story about King’s two offensive tweets? Remember, while Mr. King did not get to continue to have a relationship with Busch Beer, he was lionized by Iowans and had the governor proclaim Carson King Day.  The Des Moines Register had people saying the paper should be driven out of business; the beer company was boycotted; the reporter got death threats.  My friend communications professor Brian Steffen, a life-long Iowan has posted his thoughts about this on his Facebook page:I should not have to say this, yet I will, again: The Register screwed up horribly re Carson King. Yes, it deserves criticism, plenty of it. But, no, no one deserves to die over this. And the Register certainly shouldn’t be pushed out of business after serving the city and state for the past 170 years.Cancelling your subscription to show your moral outrage — if you ever had a subscription to start with, by the way — will do nothing for you other than further push your communities and state into the cultural and inequality backwaters.
  • How does the story end? The Cedar Rapids Gazette reports that Carson King raised more than $2.9 million for University of Iowa Children’s Hospital. He donated all the money he raised, except for enough to buy one case of Busch Light.  What should be a happy ending.  If only it hadn’t made quite so many people quite so angry.

Want more on offensive social media posts coming back to haunt someone? See the story on Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn.

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Media Tweets: Joseph Maguire Edition (with a T.S. Eliot shout out)

Posted on September 26, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

A brief roundup of media news on the Twitter machine. The main focus today is on talk about Acting Intelligence Chief Joseph Maguire’s testimony because the House Intelligence Committee:

Don’t assume that a reputable newspaper’s/outlet’s editorial page automatically shapes the quality of its news. The editorial page may shape the organization’s world view, but it shouldn’t shape it’s commitment to the news. A good reminder from Professor Michael Socolow.

A great reminder from Professor Jeremy Littau about the role of the watchdog press with Justice Potter Stewart’s comment from the Pentagon Papers case.

In addition to talking about media in general here, every once in awhile we talk poetry.  Great T.S. Eliot quote from Little Gidding.

 

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How Should Brands Remember 9/11 in Social Media?

Posted on September 13, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

The events of Sept. 11, 2001, have left scars on the United States, and indeed the entire world.  And it is only natural to respond to those intense feelings every year on what is now observed as Patriot Day. The question then becomes: What is the appropriate way for companies and organizations to respond?

AT&T made what is considered one of the worst branded tweets on 9/11 in 2013 when they posted an image showing a phone being held up to take a photo of the pillars of light rising up from the site of the original Twin Towers. (It seemed just a bit too much like product placement.)

AT&T Never Forget tweet 2013

The post was widely mocked and criticized on Twitter; the following day AT&T gave a full-throated apology:

We’re big believers that social media is a great way to engage with our customers because the conversation is constant, personal and dynamic.

Yesterday, we did a post on social media intended to honor those impacted by the events of 9/11. Unfortunately, the image used in the post fell woefully short of honoring the lives lost on that tragic day.

I want to personally express to our customers, employees, and all those impacted by the events of 9/11 my heartfelt apologies. I consider that date a solemn occasion each year, a time when I reach out to those I was with on that awful day, share a moment of reflection for the lives lost and express my love of country. It is a day that should never be forgotten and never, ever commercialized. I commit AT&T to this standard as we move forward.

Journalist Megh Wright collected a number of examples this year of images appropriate and not, starting with these two.  Are Betty Boop and a flat pizza from a pizza shop appropriate commemoration or exploitative?

I like Funko figures as much as the next guy, but I’m sure I understand the connection between this image and 9/11. (Yes, I know the flag is flying at half staff.)

And I’m really not sure about images of Before, During and After images of the World Trade Center painted on guitars. (Actually, I’m quite sure about them…)

Fast Company had a good analysis of the problem. Companies that send out too blatant of messages can be accused of exploiting people’s feelings about this tragedy, while ignoring the day while going on with your usual twitter feed can open your organization to charges that you just don’t care. The best posts were “neutral — a flag, a solemn photo from the say, a meaningful graphic. Absent were cheap tie-ins and corporate logos imposed over September 11 imagery.”

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Remembering 9/11 – In the movies and on the road

Posted on September 11, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

Today is the 18th anniversary of the attacks of September 11th. In memory, here are a couple of posts I’ve put up in the past. 

The first is a look at cameos the Twin Towers made in numerous Hollywood films:

The second has nothing to do with the media. It’s a brief story about a ride I took on my motorcycle to the United 93 Memorial on a rainy June day back in 2004. It was written shortly after I had recovered from a fairly serious illness, and I was happy just to be back on the road. I’ve taken to posting every year on 9/11.

Me and my old KLRTook a short ride last Saturday. The distance wasn’t much, under 200 miles, but I went through two centuries of time, ideas, and food. Which felt really good after having been ill for the last month-and-a-half.

Headed out of Morgantown about 7:30 a.m. on I68. Stopped at Penn Alps for breakfast. Nice thing about being on insulin is that I can include a few more carbs in my diet these days. Pancakes, yum! (Penn Alps, if you don’t know, runs a great Pennsylvania Dutch breakfast buffet on weekends that is well worth riding to. Just outside of Grantsville, MD.)

Then off on the real purpose of the trip. Up US 219 toward the Flight 93 Sept. 11 memorial. The ride up north on 219 is beautiful; I’ve ridden it before. I always like when you come around the bend and see the turbines for the wind farm. Some people see them as an eye sore; for me they’re a potential energy solution and a dramatic sight. Chalk one up for industrial can be beautiful.

Continue on up to Berlin, PA, where I take off on PA 160 into Pennsylvania Dutch country. I start seeing hex signs painted on bright red barns, or even hung as a wooden sign. Not quite cool enough to put on my electric vest, but certainly not warm. Then it’s heading back west on a county/state road of indeterminate designation.

Now I’m into even more “old country” country. There’s a horse-and-buggy caution sign. Off to the left there’s a big farmstead with long dark-colored dresses hanging from the line, drying in the air. They may not stay dry, based on what the clouds look like.

The irony of this ride hits pretty hard. I’m on my way to a memorial of the violence and hatred of the first shot of the 21st century world war, and I’m traveling through country that is taking me further and further back into the pacifist world of the 19th century Amish and Mennonites.

A turn or two more, following the map from the National Parks web site, and I’m on a badly scared, narrow road that is no wider and not in as good of shape as the local rail trail. (Reminds me why I like my KLR!)

It’s only here that I see the first sign for the memorial. No one can accuse the locals of playing up the nearby memorial. Perhaps more flags and patriotic lawn ornaments than usual, but no strident statements. And then the memorial is off a half-mile ahead.

The crash site is to the south, surrounded by chain-link fencing. No one but families of the victims are allowed in that area. Off a small parking area is the temporary memorial, in place until the National Park Service can build the permanent site. There’s a 40-foot long chain-link wall where people have posted remembrences, plaques on the ground ranging from hand-painted signs on sandstone, to an elaborately etched sign on granite from a motorcycle group. The granite memorial is surrounded by motorcycle images.

The messages are mostly lonely or affirming. Statements of loss, statements of praise for the heroism of the passengers and crew. But not statements of hatred. It reminds me in many ways of the Storm King Mountain firefighter memorial. Not the formal one in Glenwood Springs, but the individual ones out on the mountain where more than a dozen wildland firefighters died several years ago.

It’s time to head home. When I go to join up with US 30, it’s starting to spit rain, so I pull out the rain gloves, button down the jacket, and prepare for heading home. It rains almost the whole way back PA 281, but I stay mostly dry in my Darien. The only problem is the collar of my too-big jacket won’t close far enough, and water dribbles down inside. It reminds me that riding in the rain, if it isn’t coming down too hard, can be almost pleasant, isolated away inside a nylon and fiberglass cocoon.

I’m home before 1 p.m.. I’ve ridden less than 200 miles. But I’ve ridden through a couple of centuries of people’s thoughts, actions, and food. And I’m finally back on the bike.

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Guest Blog Post: World of Warcraft Classic Sinks its Claws into Twitch and Ninja

Posted on September 6, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

Today’s guest blog post comes from occasional contributor and friend-of-the-blog Aaron Blackman.  Aaron often streams video game play on Monday nights at 7 p.m. at https://www.twitch.tv/flagg05 and he can be found on Twitter at @flagg05.

On August 26th 2019, Blizzard Entertainment did a curious thing. After announcing it two years prior, the company rereleased their monumental Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), World of Warcraft. Dubbed World of Warcraft (WoW) Classic, the game strips away all of the game’s seven expansions, reducing most of the content and rolling back the gameplay to a place the game was in back in August 2006.

Diehard fans of the game had been craving a return to this experience. Nostalgia mixed with the original game mechanics and grind that made its debut in November 2004 brought a lot of players back to the fictional world of Azeroth. Blizzard vastly underestimated how popular WoW Classic would be, forcing the population into a handful of servers. These realms filled up so fast that a queue to get into the game would kick in, and with several thousand gamers waiting for their chance to play. My own main character is on the heavily populated Faerlina server, and I sat in queue with 18,706 players ahead of me in line the day after release.

During that first week of WoW Classic, streamers also flocked to the game, pushing their bodies to the limit with 24-hour streams. The audience was there too, over 1 million viewers were watching on launch day, and 47.1 million hours of the game were watched in the first week according to The Esports Observer.

Popular streamers like Shroud, TimTheTatman, Cloakzy and DrLupo all temporarily abandoned their main games to ride the WoW Classic hype train. What’s curious is that they all did so organically, they weren’t being paid as sponsored streamers to showcase the game. It was fascinating to see, as they enjoyed the game and a possible break from the games that bring them the highest number of viewers, and in turn, revenue. It seemed inevitable that World of Warcraft Classic would eventually pull Ninja into its orbit.

On Tuesday, I watched Ninja stream WoW Classic on Mixer  for around 45 minutes. I guess I was just curious. Would he like the game? Would the random passerby recognize him in-game? Would fans get upset that he wasn’t playing Fortnite?

The answer to all of those was a resounding yes. The game has its quirks, but Ninja seemed to be enjoying it quite a bit that first night he streamed the game. He even came back the next day for a 10-hour stream. Players followed him around the world like a lost puppy, hoping for a chance to see their character on his screen or for a shot to talk to the legend. As for the viewers on Mixer, Ninja had plenty of supporters excited for him changing things up, but others were vocally bored not shy to let everyone know that WoW wasn’t nearly as action-packed as Fortnite.

Prominent streamer Ninja playing the original World of Warcraft.

In World of Warcraft, players can group up into a party of five while wandering the lands of Azeroth, tackling difficult enemies or quests together. With Ninja’s character name “Ninjathewise” plastered on the top-left of the game, it’s easy for fans to search him out in the game and bombard him with party invitations. The constant stream of party invitations started to annoy the streamer, who eventually had to toggle the option to allow invitations off just so he could play the game.

Being famous also altered how Ninja approached the game, as his inventory was filled with large backpacks that are quite difficult to come by for such a low-level character. At Level 15, he was challenging enemies a few levels above him, but often found support from random viewers that were tagging along.

At other points, he still experienced what makes WoW Classic so special: the spontaneous community that is temporarily created while questing. Some quests require a special enemy to be defeated, who then drops a unique item needed to complete the quest. In current versions of WoW, anyone attacking that enemy could then pick up a copy of that item. In WoW Classic, only the first person or party to hit the enemy could get a copy (this is called tagging an enemy).

One way around this is to invite nearby players also on the same quest so more people can complete their tasks and move on, and ideally avoid waiting in line.

I’m curious to see how long streamers continue to play WoW Classic post-launch. Depending on what streamers look to do once they hit the max player level of 60, we’ll likely see a cycle of excitement as each phase of content is released, and then an inevitable decline over time. Until then, we’ll see that shift in video game focus like Ninja is having this week.

 

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Return to Bed Bugs, NYT & Thin-Skinned Columnists

Posted on September 4, 2019 by Ralph Hanson

When last we met, NY Times columnist Bret Stephens was being mocked on the Internet for complaining rather publicly about Dr. David Karpf, a relatively unknown associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University making a mostly unseen joke comparing Stephens to the crop of bed bugs found in the Times’ newsroom.

Don’t know this story? Follow the link above back to my previous post to catch up.  It’s ok. We’ll wait.

So at this point we have a ticked off columnist for one of the most important papers in the country and a professor behaving analytically.

And then I saw this tweet from Mike Godwin (yes, that’s the Godwin of Godwin’s Law of Nazi Analogies…)

Bret Stephens was so irate  that he wrote a whole column for the Times essentially comparing Karpf’s bed bug joke to the Holocaust. And it is worth remembering that no one would have ever noticed Karpf’s joke had Stephens not blown it up.

Lehigh journalism professor Jeremy Littau was surprised the Times let Stephens take out his anger at Karpf with his column:

Washington Post columnist (and international affairs professor) Dan Drezner had a thoughtful critique of Stephens behavior:

The lesson the Stephens just hasn’t seemed to learn is that although he has a big, big pulpit, he cannot beat up on lower figures without impunity now. Here is how Dr. Karpf responded through a commentary on Esquire’s site:

I think my favorite comment on the whole affair game from TCU’s Dr. Emily Farris:

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