n&o

The N&O and the Dome are all a twitter today with the story of L.F. Eason, a career state employee who decided he didn't want to lower the flag to honor Jesse Helms at his lab in Raleigh, as directed by the Governor. Here's the story as it ran in the newspaper, and as written by Ryan Beckwith.

L.F. Eason III gave up the only job he'd ever had rather than lower a flag to honor former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. Eason, a 29-year veteran of the state Department of Agriculture, instructed his staff at a small Raleigh lab not to fly the U.S. or North Carolina flags at half-staff Monday, as called for in a directive to all state agencies by Gov. Mike Easley.

When I first heard that McClatchy was going to own both the Charlotte Observer and the News and Observer, my enthusiasm was muted. That was almost two years ago, and most of the impacts predicted have come true. Here's a memo from the Big Cheeses to employees of the N&O and the Charlotte Observer on the heels of McClatchy's recenty announced layoffs.

To: Employees, the Charlotte Observer and the News & Observer of Raleigh
Subj: New areas of collaboration
Date: June 16, 2008

The newsrooms of the Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News & Observer have worked well together during the two years since the Observer became part of the McClatchy Company. That collaboration clearly has benefited readers of both newspapers.

Over the past two years, the Art Pope Puppetshow has served as an exceptional lightning rod for galvanizing progressives against the toxic agenda of North Carolina's free-market extremists. With a multi-million dollar budget to oil their influence-buying machine, the Show has clearly had some measure of success in shaping the agenda with small town newspapers in general and with the Raleigh News and Observer, in particular.

The fondness of the N&O's political reporters for all things Pope has been well discussed, as have the water-carrying activities of Rick Martinez, an opinionator at the N&O whose wife Donna works backstage at the Show. And while I'm reluctant to boost his readership by linking to his columns, today's piece in the N&O shows Martinez at his worst.

My friends are sick of me talking and writing about the lottery. And when one of my fellow front-pagers recently won a thousand bucks on a $20 ticket, I confess to thinking, "awwww, maybe it's not so terrible." But the truth is, the lottery IS so terrible, as Steve Ford, the editorial page editor at the N&O. wrote today.

To pirate a line from "All the King's Men," North Carolina's state lottery was conceived in sin and born of corruption. We may never learn all the gory details surrounding its passage, but to say that its supporters in the General Assembly finagled it through by hook and by crook pretty much conveys the spirit of the thing.

A smattering of opinion from hither and yon . . .

The Old Reliable has not much of interest to say:

This old world has had a tough year, from the war in Iraq to natural disasters to assassinations to continued tensions in a hundred or so of what the experts call "hot spots." Somehow, and they deserve credit, people in those hot spots manage to find a few joys and a few hopes here and there to keep them going, because they do carry on. And the world keeps spinning. Perhaps that's why, after so many challenges, so many really dire things facing this planet, we trust that it, and we, will endure -- because we have.

We'll endure because . . . we have? Tell it to the dinosaurs, Steve.

Rob Christensen's December 2 column has an analysis of what he considers the state of civics education in the United States, based on a test created by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Christensen's column wraps with a link to this test, which I found hard, somewhat bizarre, and dramatically tilted in favor of knowing all about the kind of dead white men these people adore.

And what does Christensen have to say in the interest of full disclosure?

ISI is a conservative-leaning organization founded in 1953.

If you follow my link to the ISI website, you will discover that "conservative leaning" describes ISI about as well as "objective reporter" describes Christensen himself. The website features The Conservative Mind as part of its top-level navigation, Clarence Thomas, as an honored lecturer, with links throughout the site to Townhall.com.

My old friend Ted Vaden interviewed the new executive editor at the N&O and wrote a Q&A for publication this morning. Some of what Mr. Drescher has to say seems promising, some not so much

Q Do you have longer-term vision, expectations, hopes for The News & Observer?

A When you look at both the short term and the long term, you have to think about how we're going to succeed online, and we have a lot of momentum there. The new triangle.com site is really innovative. It shows that we're not just a newspaper anymore; we're a news and information company. You'll see us putting a lot more databases online, a lot more useful information online, calendars and things like that.

From a news standpoint, you'll see us break more and more news online. Three or four years ago we were probably doing five updates a day. Now we're pretty consistently getting 30 to 40 news updates a day, and that will continue.

This is good news if the old guard at the N&O can deliver. Ryan Beckwith at the Dome seems to be feeling his way along and I'm mostly encouraged by his progress. It takes time to build a blog, and doing it during the heat of a contested primary season is probably harder than usual.