Daily Archives: July 20, 2012

Eerie coincidence: Critic wrote of death threats related to “Dark Knight” BEFORE the shootings

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Publicity still from the official website.

This is downright eerie.

Joe Morgenstern wrote this postscript to his review of “The Dark Knight Rises” in the edition of The Wall Street Journal that was delivered to my home this morning — meaning it went to press well before the mass murder in Colorado:

A note about the perils of being a movie critic in the age of polarized fandom.

I may have saved my life without realizing it by liking “The Dark Knight Rises” sufficiently—or disliking it with sufficient restraint—to have my review categorized as “ripe” rather than “rotten” on Rotten Tomatoes, a popular website that aggregates movie and DVD reviews. For those of us who write about movies to provoke discussion, these reductive categories are awfully silly, but they’re also symptoms of the love/hate, either/or ethos of contemporary discourse. In the realm of the Internet, as well as talk-radio and politics, that discourse has been growing ever more poisonous, and now the poison has contaminated Rotten Tomatoes. Earlier this week the website was forced to shut down its user comments on “The Dark Knight Rises” when negative reviews—officially adjudged “rotten”—by two of my colleagues, Christy Lemire and Marshall Fine, provoked floods of vile responses that included death threats.

Batman movies may be a bit of a special case, what with fanatical fanboys trolling the Internet to root out negative opinions of their supersolemn hero. But the Dark Knight’s acolytes don’t have a monopoly on intolerance of dissent. They’re part of a rising tide that threatens to drown Internet discussion in shrill opinion. The editors of Rotten Tomatoes have the right to excise such clearly intolerable comments, and the responsibility to improve procedures for screening out new ones. Once that’s done, however, the comments function should be fully restored. Free speech for the many shouldn’t fall victim to abuse by the few.

Write to Joe Morgenstern at joe.morgenstern@wsj.com

Wow. If the shootings had NOT happened last night, I would simply have agreed with him about the decline of discourse, particularly on the Web.

As things happened, this is particularly startling.

By the way, the way I learned of this horror was particularly unsettling. I mentioned earlier today having trouble sleeping last night, worrying because my daughter was ill in a faraway country. What sleep I got was punctuated by the sound of my iPhone receiving bulletins about the shootings. The first bulletins confused me — how could there have been a shooting at a mall in the wee hours of the morning? It was only later — 5 a.m. or so — that the more complete bulletins mentioned the midnight showing of this film, so that I understood. To the extent that you can understand anything like this.

Playing the unemployment blame game

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On the national level, it’s the Republicans touting high unemployment and blaming it on President Obama.

On the state level, it’s the Democrats who eagerly greet each piece of bad employment news, only they blame it on the local Republicans:

Representative Leon Stavrinakis Statement on Spike in SC Jobless Rate
Charleston, SC – South Carolina’s jobless rate rose to 9.4% in June from 9.1% in May, while Charleston County’s unemployment rate rose significantly from 7.9% last month to 8.5% in June. Charleston State Representative Leon Stavrinakis released a statement in response:
“These unemployment numbers are troubling and unacceptable for the Charleston area and the state of South Carolina as a whole. As the nation’s unemployment rate continues to drop or hold steady, South Carolina’s rate is going in the wrong direction and at an alarmingly fast rate. Perhaps Governor Haley should stop her international travels and simply attending every press opportunity she can find so she can actually put real time and work into creating jobs in South Carolina. The last place potential businesses want to relocate is a state led by a Governor who is only interested in being a celebrity, cutting education, and refusing to invest in infrastructure. We can also be sure that Governor Haley’s recent budget attacks on existing South Carolina industry are not helping our ability to attract and recruit jobs to our state. It is time for Governor Haley to quit stalling and present the legislature with a comprehensive jobs plan. If she refuses to give us a plan, I suggest she take a look at the plan I released months ago,  which to date she has not indicated she has even taken the time to read.”
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Funny how things can look so different from Columbia (or Charleston) than they do from Washington.

Does Nikki maintain her Facebook page herself? I suspect so…

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Someone speculated earlier that Nikki Haley doesn’t maintain her Facebook page herself. I suspect that she does. Or at least that some of the posts, or status updates, or whatever you want to call them (I’m a Twitter man, and get impatient with Facebook) are written by her personally.

They are so emotional. And they are so carelessly written that I hate to think anyone was paid to produce them — unless the rough edges are part of the service being provided, to add authenticity.

For instance, there’s this:

SC Law Enforcement Dir. Chief Keel responding to The State Newspaper: “I have expressed my concerns, as of yesterday, that publication of info regarding minor children of elected officials creates problems for State Law Enforcement and its efforts to provide security for the children of this governor or any governor. In my 30 yrs plus of experience at SLED, the security or activities of minor children of elected officials is something that the media in general has taken a “hands off” approach to in reporting except as released by the elected official’s office.”

First, one wonders what she’s on about. I didn’t see anything in the paper about her daughter before this appears. That sort of airing of a background battle as though everyone knows what’s going on is so off, so unprofessional, that it really feels like it’s coming from her.

Also, it follows her pattern of embarrassing her appointees by enlisting them in her personal political battles. I feel for Mark Keel.

It’s probably a reference to this thing Will Folks wrote about. I suppose The State was working on the story (the MSM have this quaint habit of confirming things with on-the-record sources, which makes them lag the blogosphere), and that freaked Nikki out in a way that Will’s post did not.

There was an earlier post on the same subject that was more emotional, and blasted The State as a worthless, “biased” entity that was persecuting Nikki’s family, and that one really felt like her. Here it is:

Scrutiny of me comes with the territory of being governor. I expect it. But it’s a sad day for journalism in South Carolina when The State newspaper goes after my 14 year old daughter. Public officials have a right to expect that their minor children are off limits from political opponents and even from biased media outlets like The State. Its disgusting. Shame on them.

If a paid staffer wrote that for her, then I’m embarrassed for that person, too.