Posts Tagged ‘andy alexander’
Weekend in Review
Update: I have checked with all my sources in the local media scene. It appears that there was no fight in the Style section of the Washington Post this past Friday, so this coming week will be that much more routine.
Fenty, Barry, Weymouth—All in Weekend in Review
First, the retrocast: At last, a little bit of authentic summer weather for the region, though not quite as hot and humid as we've been trained to expect. Good old weather beat writer Martin Weil at the Washington Post is reporting that July thus far has been five degrees cooler than normal. We've already nailed this story, however---right here.
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Why Even Print the Washington Post?
The Post's Robert Wone controversy continues, at least in my mind.
Over the weekend, the paper's ombudsman, Andy Alexander, wrote in favor of the decision to go with a Web-only presentation of a two-part series by reporter Paul Duggan on the mysterious 2006 murder of Wone, a 32-year-old lawyer.
Weekend In Review: Nadal Loses!
Who knows what Andy Alexander was up to this week when he wrote his column as ombudsman of the Washington Post. As a vet with decades in the news biz, Alexander might be expected to, like, peg his column to a news event within, say, the past several years. But check this out----he writes about the Post's policies on demands from people not to publish certain stuff, yet cites no recent cases in point.
Lynchburg: Cultural Wasteland?
The Washington Post got itself in a teensy-weensy bit of trouble with a recent Travel section article on a fabulous regional escape. A piece by freelancer Pamela Redmond Satran touted the down-home joys of Lynchburg, Va., complete with recommendations on where to eat, drink, and shop. It ran a bit afoul of the neutrality police, however, in this graph (emphasis mine):
Milbank’s Response to Ombud: Weak
In a nice bit of ombudding over the Memorial Day weekend, the Washington Post's Andy Alexander looked at how columnist Dana Milbank mined perhaps the most famous statement of former Bush administration Press Secretary Ari Fleischer. You remember this one, coming right on the heels of 9/11, when Fleischer reminded "all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do."
Weekend in Review
Weekend weather retrocast: In this town, it always seems as if the weather gods want to give us a blast of summer before proceeding with primo spring weather. Don't have a big problem with that---but the pools are never open in April.
Speaking of pools, I continue to hear from people in the community about the strange axing of Clark Ray, the guy who ran the city's Department of Parks and Recreation, until he was unceremoniously fired by the Fenty regime. A couple of parks-oriented community types over the past several days have bent my ear, saying, hey, here was a guy who was actually working hard, trying to make things happen---and then comes the hook.
However, if you look at City Desk from late last week, our amazing Loose Lips columnist Mike DeBonis reports of mass firings at the rec department. Could this be what forced the reckoning---that Ray refused to clean house the way that Dan Tan and others were insisting? A possibility.
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Weekend in Review
The news for 'Skins fans is not just that your team has alienated Jason Campbell with its attempt to acquire Jay Cutler. It's also that Plaxico Burress could be there for the taking after he serves some kind of sentence on a gun possession charge in gun-unfriendly New York City. The New York Giants late Friday let the 6-foot-5 receiver go, apparently because he was still copping attitudes and generally evincing all kinds of citizenship dysfunctions. But he's still really tall, very good, and---this is the key for the Skins---has a record of absolutely destroying the Philadelphia Eagles.
Weekend in Review
Just some recap to get you feeling centered on this Monday morning: Washington City Paper's "Best Of" issue came out last week---it was a whopper, with a readers poll that pulled in 29,000 ballots and a huge editorial hole filled with picks on everything from Best Restaurant to Best Place to Buy a TV Stand.
Weekend weather was a mixed bag, with a wet Saturday and a schizophrenic Sunday. Yeah, I know---you know that. But I am trying to break the mold here, giving weather "retrocasts" instead of forecasts.
And what a snoozer this NCAA tourney is. No parity in that league, whatsoever. Too many blowouts to make for good watching, Villanova v. Pitt notwithstanding. Can't wait for the NBA playoffs, when teams that are well matched hit the hardwood.
Weekend in Review
How fast can MoCo close its schools? We're talking 4-8 inches here, a snow emergency declared by D.C. Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, and, no doubt, a run on milk at groceries everywhere.
But the big story of the weekend: Haynesworth? Is this guy worth $100 million? Will he finally be that one free-agent acquisition who actually makes a difference? At the very least, he'll psych up the fans. No matter what fan board you may have visited over the past month or so, NFL fanatics in all franchise cities wanted this guy. He was the answer to everyone's defensive problems. The standard line from Joe Fan: If we can get Haynesworth, plus a couple of second-tier free agents to fill in at [SOME KEY POSITION] and [SOME KEY POSITION], we'll be the team to beat. Not sure whether anyone's saying that about the Skins, though.
