Month: April 2005

   Angst and network news go together like—oh, like Simon and Garfunkel, whose popularity peaked around the same time that Walter Cron-kite was signing off with the comforting fiction “that’s the way it is.” For more than a quarter of a century, the audience for the three evening network newscasts has been both shrinking and aging, leading to widespread speculation that, someday, television news as we know it will cease to exist. Lately, though, angst has given way to full-scale, hyperventilating, stampede-the-exit-doors panic.

   At CBS News, whose “Tiffany network” reputation has been little more than a bitter joke since the 1980s, Cronkite’s successor as anchor of the “CBS Evening News,” Dan Rather, was hustled into retirement in March. Rather’s departure came not long after he’d been harshly criticized by an internal investigation into last fall’s flawed “60 Minutes Wednesday” report about George W. Bush’s National Guard service. His replacement, Bob Schieffer, is a capable, comforting presence; but he’s 67, looks at least 10 years older, and is no one’s idea of a long-term solution. CBS president Leslie Moonves has vowed to reinvent the newscast, and is bandying about ideas ranging from multiple anchors to a role for comedian Jon Stewart.

   ABC News, the ratings and quality leader not so long ago, has been shaken to its core in recent weeks. First, Ted Koppel, anchor of the late-night news program “Nightline,” announced that he would leave at the end of this year. Then, Peter Jennings, anchor of the network’s “World News Tonight,” revealed that he has lung cancer and will need a substantial amount of time off while he’s undergoing treatment. Koppel, a brilliant interviewer, may be the only television journalist of his generation to rank with the likes of CBS
legends Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow. Jennings—cool, deft, serious—has long enjoyed a reputation as the most cerebral of the network anchors.

   Only NBC News appears to have weathered the anchor storms in good shape. Late last year the network pulled off a seamless transition from Tom Brokaw to Brian Williams on “NBC Nightly News,” and has maintained its lead in the ratings. Williams, 46, and the omnipresent Washington-bureau chief and “Meet the Press” host, Tim Russert, 54, are young enough to be around for a while. The news division can spread its costs across two cable networks (MSNBC and CNBC) and “Today,” which enjoys the best ratings of the three network morning shows. (CBS News, which lacks a cable outlet, has long been thought to lust after a deal with CNN. ABC News announced recently that it will launch a digital cable channel.) But even NBC is not immune from the long-term cultural changes and media trends that threaten the entire genre of network newscasts.

   It’s true that, with as many as 30 million viewers tuning in to one of the three evening newscasts on a big news night, network news remains the closest thing we’ve got to a mass news medium. But according to Nielsen Media Research, only about 36 percent of households are watching—around half as many as a generation ago. Moreover, the networks insist on broadcasting their evening newscasts at 6:30pm, a time when most people are driving home from work (if they’re not still working), eating dinner, or helping the kids with their homework. The result: The average evening-newscast viewer is in his or her late 50s or early 60s, a demographic reality borne out by the ads for adult-incontinence protection, denture adhesives and various types of medicine.

   “Without the prescription-law change 10 years ago”—that is, a change that allowed drug companies to advertise products available only by prescription—“these shows would have been gone,” says Michael Socolow, director of the journalism program at Brandeis University and a former assignment editor for CNN.

   Nor have viewers gravitated to PBS (“The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer,” admirably serious if duller than any television newscast ought to be, is shown at 6pm) or the not-so-wonderful world of 24-hour cable news, which was originally touted as a news junkie’s dream come true. Compared with the network newscasts, cable audiences are tiny—even for the ratings leader, Fox News. Moreover, with a prime-time emphasis on talk over news (talk, you see, is cheap; news is expensive), the three major cable news networks—Fox, CNN and MSNBC—are simply not a serious alternative to anything.

   CNN’s “NewsNight with Aaron Brown” has long been the closest thing to a network-level cable newscast, but lately it appears to be getting caught up in new network president Jonathan Klein’s obsession with “storytelling” (and ratings). MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” has its moments, but the format (yes, it’s a countdown!) is contrived. And Fox’s prime-time line-up—“The O’Reilly Factor, Hannity & Colmes,” and “On the Record with Greta Van Susteren”—is a three-hour wallow in shouting and tabloid trash.

   Thus, more than 50 years into the television era, television news is at a strikingly low ebb. The medium that defined the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Vietnam War, and the first human steps on the moon has become an outlet for the elderly and the lonely. Yet broadcast news is actually as healthy as it’s ever been. It’s just that it’s gone low-tech.

very week, somewhere between 23 million and 29 million Americans tune in to National Public Radio. In the apples-and-oranges world of television and radio ratings, it’s hard to know precisely how to compare TV’s daily numbers with radio’s weekly audiences. But there seems to be little question that NPR is now the second-largest broadcast news source in the United States, still trailing the network newscasts, but catching up rapidly—and far ahead of the cable news shows upon which media critics regularly dump barrels of ink.

   NPR’s audience has at least doubled in the past decade. The only radio program with a larger audience than NPR’s two drive-time newscasts—“Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered”—is Rush Limbaugh’s talk show. The NPR audience tends more toward middle age than youth; in the past year or so, for instance, I’ve heard Lyle Lovett and John Prine come on “ATC” to plug their latest CDs. But that’s still a lot younger than the network news audience. And whereas the television news audience is shrinking because it defies cultural trends, the public-radio audience is growing along with those trends.

   In a media culture bogged down by charges of liberal (and, increasingly, conservative) bias, NPR largely succeeds in satisfying the broad middle—something even conservatives might realize if they’d listen. After all, Fortune 500 companies and other big underwriters would pull out if right-wing sneers about NPR’s being “Radio Managua” (to cite a chestnut from the 1980s) had any truth to them. You will hear liberal bias on many public stations, but that usually comes from the BBC World Service, whose content is used to fill many of the off-hours, not NPR. As for local programming, public stations in Boston, New York, Washington and elsewhere may have hosts who are liberal, but they’re more successful at offering balance than are their right-leaning counterparts on commercial radio.

   This is not a paean to NPR. Though much of the programming is pretty damn good, it’s gotten less edgy and far more mainstream in recent years as it has become the primary news source for many of its listeners. I’d like to hear more probing interviews, less deference to power and a political conversation that extends beyond commentators E.J. Dionne and David Brooks, a couple of centrists who try but don’t quite succeed at being ideological adversaries. And though I was not a huge fan of “Morning Edition” anchor Bob Edwards, he was a competent and serene presence, and I still don’t know why he got sacked. (Edwards now hosts a news and talk show on the XM satellite network.)

   It’s not that NPR is better than the network newscasts. Rather, it is that NPR reaches people where they are—in their cars, at home packing up lunches or making dinner, or while they’re working. Television demands that you look and listen, and, in the case of the network broadcasts, that you do so during a narrow, inconveniently timed half-hour opening. Radio accommodates the multitasking society we have increasingly become. Consider that according to the U.S. Department of Transportation, the number of workers commuting by private vehicle more than doubled, to 97 million from 43 million, between 1960 and 2000. Between 1980 and 2000, the proportion of workers commuting more than 45 minutes one way rose to 15 percent from 11 percent, and that of workers commuting less than 15 minutes dropped to 28 percent from 34 percent. What do they have to do when they’re stuck in traffic other than listen to the radio?

   People are working harder, too. According to the American Sociological Association, the average number of hours that men (43.1) and women (37) work every week actually dropped slightly between 1970 and 2000. But the rise of two-earner and single-parent households means that there is less time and more pressure at home than was the case in the stereotypical 1950s and ’60s household, with a working father and a stay-at-home mother. Sociologists Kathleen Gerson, of New York University, and Jerry Jacobs, of the University of Pennsylvania, have written, “Even if the length of the work week had not changed at all, the rise of families that depend on either two incomes or one parent would suffice to explain why Americans feel so pressed for time.” They note, for example, that the combined work week of two-earner households rose from 53 to 63 hours between 1970 and 2000.

   There’s just no time on the schedule for a half-hour with the network news. In such a time-pressed culture, radio not only makes more sense than television; it also has advantages over print, another medium that demands your undivided attention.

   Weirdly enough, NPR’s funding base is more secure than that of networks news, too. Though nominally a government service, public radio, starting in the Reagan era, has become largely privatized, living off listener contributions and corporate-underwriting announcements that sound more and more like commercials. NPR is also flush with a $236 million endowment from Joan Kroc, the widow of McDonald’s magnate Ray Kroc. The public stations that subscribe to NPR—including Charlottesville’s WVTF 89.7FM—also receives most of their money from listeners and underwriters.

   By contrast, the major networks are now all owned by corporate conglomerates: ABC is part of Disney, NBC is a subsidiary of General Electric, and CBS is an arm of Viacom. These conglomerates are invariably more interested in squeezing profit out of the bottom line than they are in reporting the news. And with cable and satellite channels increasingly taking audience share away from the networks, the very advertising model on which they depend is now threatened. The result, according to the American Journalism Review: Whereas the major networks once staffed bureaus around the world, today NPR’s 14 foreign bureaus outnumber those of ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox.

   “If you are a thinking person looking for the most intelligent coverage of world and national news in America, you would have to put public radio at the top of the heap. It has taken over the reign in broadcasting that institutions like CBS used to have,” says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. “Broadcasting’s crowning achievement at this point, in terms of the news, is far and away public radio.”

   Adds David Mindich, who chairs the journalism department at Saint Michael’s College, in Colchester, Vermont, and is the author of Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News: “You could certainly make the argument that among elites, people tend to listen to NPR in much greater numbers than television news.” And he offers a devastating comparison between NPR and the evening network newscasts. “People consume media that will help them in their conversations,” Mindich says. “People tend not to talk about the evening news, at least anecdotally. I’ve seen that. People don’t say, ‘Oh, did you see the report on CBS last night? Did you hear what Peter Jennings said last night on ABC?’ People tend to quote stories on NPR, at least among people I know who are seriously following politics and news.”

   It is more than a little strange that, for serious news, radio would be ascending and television would be in decline. Televised images can be incredibly compelling. Think of September 11, the opening days of the war in Iraq, the tsunami, or the funeral of Pope John Paul II. Television isn’t particularly good at context, at telling you what those images mean. But we are visual creatures, and it seems a little weird that we are increasingly turning to radio, the medium by which Edward R. Murrow informed our parents and our grandparents about the bombing of London during World War II.

   Which is why, more than anyone, Ted Koppel will be missed. Since the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80, which gave birth to “Nightline” (originally called “America Held Hostage”), Koppel has been bringing us the great stories of our time. He’ll be gone by the end of the year. He may end up at PBS; he may end up at NPR, which would be particularly fitting. From eviscerating Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign (“You just don’t get it”) to becoming an embedded journalist in Iraq, Koppel has brought a ferocious intelligence to whatever he does. Among other things, if Koppel switched to NPR, he would be united with Daniel Schorr, one of the great figures from CBS’s glory days.

   We all have our most memorable Koppel moments. For me, that moment came in July 1997, when “Nightline” broadcast a special report on the former Cambodian dictator Pol Pot, widely regarded as the mastermind behind the genocide made famous in the movie The Killing Fields. The story of Pol Pot’s “trial”—it was never clear whether it was legitimate or a show by his followers to impress the West—was broken by a journalist named Nate Thayer. But it was Koppel who brought it to a wider audience, and made you understand its importance. To see Pot—one of the worst dictators of the 20th century, on a par with Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, as Koppel observed at the time—being tried for his crimes was truly amazing.

   Yet, by 1997, the fracturing of the unified media culture that had once existed was already well under way. The trial of Pot, whether real or not, should have been as momentous, as riveting, as the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Instead, it barely cut through the cultural noise, and within a few days it was washed over by whatever the media became obsessed with next. “Nightline”’s ratings have been eroding for years, and Koppel was nearly bumped a few years ago when ABC made a run at David Letterman. ABC claims that Koppel’s time slot will remain dedicated to news after he leaves. But that promise is not likely to be kept.

   How much has the network news world changed? Michael Socolow, of Brandeis, observes that in 1972, Daniel Schorr delivered a report on Watergate for the “CBS Evening News” that had the Nixon administration “apoplectic.” Yet the trial of Pol Pot played out not on “World News Tonight,” but on “Nightline”—a more prestigious show watched by a more elite audience. Similarly, Dan Rather and producer Mary Mapes delivered their flawed report about President Bush’s National Guard service not on the “CBS Evening News” but on “60 Minutes Wednesday,” which, even though its audience is of roughly the same size (approximately 8 million viewers), has more viewers who are demographically desirable to advertisers and which enjoys the benefit of more promotional buzz. “The people who watch TV from 8 to 11pm are not the Geritol and Depends users,” says Socolow.

   What will the networks do? Rather himself has talked about a promising model: Instead of a half-hour at 6:30pm, why not try a one- or two-hour mixture of news and features during prime time? Or perhaps one of the three major networks will drop news altogether on the theory that cable and the Internet have made the 6:30 ritual obsolete.

   Syracuse University’s Robert Thompson likes to point out that the post-network era has actually been with us for a long time. Rather, Jennings and Brokaw never commanded the kind of monolithic audience that Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley did a generation earlier. (Huntley and Brinkley worked together at NBC; ABC was not a factor in those days.) “I keep hearing this cliché ‘the end of an era,’ but the end of an era happened a long time ago,” Thompson says.

   CNN came along in the early ’80s; the Internet, Fox, and MSNBC splintered the news audience still further in the ’90s. Then, too, the network newscasts rose to prominence at a time when there were not only fewer choices, but there was also a broadly liberal cultural consensus. By the late 1960s, that consensus had begun to unravel. But one of the reasons the newscasts were practically a national sacrament was that the charges of ideological bias so prevalent today were almost unheard-of back then.

   As an institution, the evening newscasts haven’t been around all that long—since the early 1960s, really, when the networks expanded their newscasts from 15 to 30 minutes. If they ceased to exist in their current form, well, what of it? Each era gets the news medium it wants. NPR may well be the medium of choice for an era that needs its news to be portable, multitask-friendly and easy to integrate into a work-intensive culture.

This article was originally printed in the Boston Phoenix. It was reprinted here with permission.

Ace, it’s not an emergency or anything, but I’m curious about this community phone system that can alert the community to crisis by calling everyone in an imperiled area. Who gets to use it and for what? Earthquakes? UFOs? A GOP invasion?—Chatty Cathy

Cathy, Cathy, Cathy, talking dogs are more likely to take over our fair city government than Karl Rove devotees! But should the impossible come to pass, it’s conceivable that Charlottesville’s desperate bobos, like latter day Paul Reveres, could turn to the City Watch System (as the community caller is officially known) to sound the citywide alarm.

   Indeed, that would be a desperate situation calling for desperate measures. According to Charlottesville’s go-to man for all questions concerning city minutiae, Director of Communications Maurice Jones, City Watch is set up for two purposes and two purposes only: To alert neighborhoods of danger or disaster and to tell individual neighborhoods about upcoming City meetings that concern their stomping grounds.

   For example, in the past City Watch has had residents hanging on the telephone for flood warnings, an escaped fugitive and a loose bear. Lately, it has dialed up the residents of North Downtown to alert them to a change in the Dogwood Parade itinerary and to tell neighborhoods about upcoming meetings for the City’s Comprehensive Plan that might concern their areas.

   It is not, however, to be used to alert all neighborhoods of more general City meetings. Thwarted City Council candidate and creationism apologist Ann Reinicke apparently didn’t understand this condition when she picked up her telephone and recorded a City Watch message reminding everyone in town of an upcoming election task force meeting. It was no biggie, though, says Jones. There’s no official punishment for misuse of the community caller, just a little “Don’t do that again, please” discussion.

   While anyone is eligible to use City Watch, you must first receive the proper training and authorization from the City, explains Jones. After that, you can activate the service from your home telephone.

   Finally, the system has access to all published landlines. But if you’re a cellphone-only type, you might be left high and dry in the event that aliens land in the Mas parking lot. If, that is, you’re also the type who avoids TV and radio and lives under one of those rocks in our rapidly disappearing woods.

Hey Ace: I just noticed that the crosswalks from the Emmet/Ivy intersection all the way to Jefferson Park Avenue are green and white instead of the customary black and white zebra crossing. I love the white/lime green combo—it really goes well with my wardrobe—but why the new style?—J. Crewe

Oh dahling, didn’t you know? Save for the occasional Truman Capote tribute, black and white is out and color is in! Even the usually fashion-oblivious City is catching on to the trend, hence the crosswalk in question. Before you know it, there will be all sorts of “Stop” and “Slow Children at Play” signs popping up in hues such as “charcoal gray,” “petal” and “azure.” The City, incidentally, studiously refers to the greenish color of the crosswalks around Ivy Road and JPA as “florescent yellow-green.”

   But the City is its usual pokey self, even in matters as crucial as style, which explains why the stretch of pavement that passes by the UVA tennis courts, Memorial Gym and the Newcomb Hall parking garage is the only place in town where crosswalks look so snazzy. That’s what Maurice Jones, Charlottesville’s dapper Director of Communications told Ace.

   To make matters worse for Ace, who knows a good fashion scandal when he hears one, the selection of “florescent yellow-green” was purely practical, Jones says.

   Seems UVA raised concerns to City leaders regarding the combined pedestrian and vehicular traffic and the accident history in the Ivy/JPA area. While the speed limit along there is 25 miles per hour, cars tend to whisk along at a brisker pace. No wonder there are five busy crosswalks in the stretch of a mile. After an assessment of the concerns, the City concurred with UVA and added the green color “to draw more attention to the crosswalks and therefore to the pedestrians that use them,” says Jones. Ace, on the other hand, thinks the best way to get more attention is to wear a tight-fitting pair of John Varvatos jeans. But Ace digresses…

   Jones says that the City plans on evaluating how effective the new crosswalks are and, if the City sees some success, it will “consider other intersections on a case by case basis.” In the meantime, if crossing those dangerous streets is making you nervous, stick to your car: If you can’t fight ’em, join ’em.

A recent online survey showed that more than one-third of us think that once we die, we end up in some kind of merit-based afterlife, like Heaven or Hell. Another 29 percent figure we go nowhere—we’re just dead.

   Well, yes and no. No matter where you think you’ll end up in the long run, you’re definitely going somewhere. In fact, our bodies—and maybe our souls—go on quite a journey from the time we flatline to the time we hit our final resting place. Depending on who you are, how you die, when you die and what you believe, your “life” after death is a veritable choose-your-own-adventure.

   Let’s say you’re a young, healthy, upper-
middle-class suburbanite who prematurely buys the farm in a car wreck. You’ll likely be heading to the medical examiner’s table for an autopsy. Perhaps you’re an old person who kicks it in your sleep. You’ll probably skip the M.E. and wind up in your $1,500 grave site, firmly ensconced in your $2,500 coffin—if you bargained, that is. Or maybe you were poor and black in the early part of the 20th century. You could have come to rest under
an unmarked stone in an unknown graveyard somewhere in Albemarle.

   Heaven or hell? We don’t know. The only thing we can say for sure is that it’s smart to hedge your bets. Build up good karma points, wear your seat belt, prepay your funeral costs and make the best out of every day.

Meet the medical examiner
Nobody makes an appointment for the cold, hard slab

Most of us find our way to the morgue. No longer alive but not yet returned to dust, in the morgue we are simply a “body,” chilled to ward off decay until the story of our demise can be told.

   The task of piecing our story together falls to medical examiners and pathologists who perform autopsies—the study of corpses to determine cause of death. Sometimes the answer is tragically obvious, as when police discover a lifeless teenager near a wrecked motorcycle.

   Other times, death is a mystery that medical examiners try to unravel with scalpels, bone saws and microscopes. The sleuthing element is compelling, and indeed a spate of television shows (“CSI,” “Cold Case”) cast medical examiners as Sherlock Holmeses in lab coats, always managing to find the right answer in 60 minutes or less.

   Local medical examiner Deborah Chute says the shows heighten people’s interest in her job, which she hastens to add is nothing like TV. The lesson she takes home is not one about the wonders of technology, but the frailty of human life.

   “I drive a lot more carefully,” says Chute, a 28-year-old who is finishing her second year of residency in pathology at UVA Medical School. “I’m more aware of all the things that can happen.”

   Chute volunteers as one of two local medical examiners for Charlottesville and Albemarle County. It means she sometimes gets paged in the middle of the night to establish an official cause of death, and sign death certificates. To figure out why someone died, Chute sometimes draws blood to test for toxins, or checks out medical history to look for clues.

   Chute does not solve crimes. That task falls to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in Richmond. If a person dies violently, if he dies suddenly despite apparent health, if the death is suspicious or occurs in police custody, Chute must refer the body to the Chief Medical Examiner, Dr. Marcella Fierro.

   Fierro is a something of a celebrity in the world of forensic pathology. She inspired novelist Patricia Cornwell’s character Kay Scarpetta, a plucky, crime-solving forensic pathologist who has starred in a series of best-selling thrillers. (The author worked as a computer analyst in Fierro’s office during the 1980s.)

   The majority of bodies who end up in Fierro’s morgue got there by accident. In 2003, the most recent year for which data is available, Fierro’s office investigated 5,821 deaths statewide. Accidental deaths accounted for 40 percent of the total; 37 percent died of natural causes, 8 percent were murdered and 14 percent committed suicide. In Charlottesville that year, 83 of 127 deaths were accidental; in Albemarle, 26 of 53 people died by accident.

   Despite the public interest in busting the bad guys with Hollywood-style forensics, when Fierro talks about her job, she speaks of helping families adjust to the sudden loss of a loved one.

   “When folks come to us, there has been no goodbye,” says Fierro. “Families are devastated. They haven’t had the opportunity to resolve whatever issues they have.

   “Families want to know what happened to their person. Why did they really die? How long did it take? Did they suffer? Is there an inheritable disease? If those questions aren’t answered, they don’t get to a point where they can grieve effectively,” she says.

   To answer those questions, medical examiners look for physical clues. For example, dead heart tissue or clogged arteries can be signs of heart failure. If police find someone dead of a gunshot wound to the chest, the medical examiner might look at how much blood accumulated in the chest—if there’s a lot, the examiner knows the person survived for a while after being shot.

   “Families are never the same” following an unexpected death, she says. There is no closure; the best that can happen is that families go through the grieving process, so that eventually people can remember their dead without pain.

   How we die says something about how we live. According to state medical examiner records, the largest single cause of accidental deaths is car crashes; the largest single cause of natural deaths is heart disease. Not surprising, perhaps, for a culture addicted to automobiles and fast food.

   Chute says her friends sometimes wonder how she copes with regular encounters with death; she says her spiritual beliefs help. “I feel like they’ve moved on to a better place,” she says.

   “In medical school, you learn how to deal with tough situations,” Chute says. “Telling someone they have brain cancer is more difficult than seeing a dead body.”

   It’s frustrating, Chute says, to see cases where something as simple as a smoke detector or a motorcycle helmet could have saved a life. In Fierro’s office, examiners confront not only the random and foolish nature of some deaths, but they must also face the reality of human evil. She says she doesn’t understand how people watch death, destruction and cruelty for entertainment.

   “The real thing is not entertaining,” says Fierro.

   Asked how the job has affected her, Fierro echoes Chute in saying it has made her more cautious.

   “When my kids started driving, they had so many rules it drove them nuts,” says Fierro. “Well, alright, I’m overprotective, but each day is a gift. None of the people who came to my office made an appointment.”—John Borgmeyer

Grave matters
Uncovering the forgotten burial sites of the poor

Most of our bodies go into the ground for a final resting place. Unfortunately, some of those resting places aren’t so restful—especially if you’re poor or black.

   Off Doctor’s Crossing near Stony Point there’s an unassuming patch of land on which grows a rose bush and a wild cherry tree. A chain-link fence covered in honeysuckle and sassafras used to separate the land from the unpaved road. Last year a logging truck knocked it over. Dirt piled up against the fence and pushed it back—into a row of easy-to-miss headstones.

   Joseph and Nelly Blue lie under the only inscribed stone on the plot. When they died in 1978 they were buried in the unnamed graveyard at the crossroads of Brook Mill Lane and Doctor’s Crossing; parallel lines of 15 unmarked stones—a few of them indistinguishable from regular rocks—hint at more bodies. Following the truck incident last year, road grading ate away at the small buffer separating gravestones from the thoroughfare and pushed the markers forward, as though in defeat.

   The road “just keeps coming this way,” says Bill Klem, a retiree who recently came aboard to take care of the land where his friends, the Blues, are buried. For 20 years, no one really looked after this falling-down place. Klem remains in a battle to win back precious inches for the dead here.

   Klem knows how hard it is to perpetuate a memory. Like others who step forward to care for a graveyard, Klem says he’ll be cremated.

   As does Dr. Lynn Rainville, a UVA professor of archeology and cemetery expert. More than a collection of holes for dead bodies, she says, cemeteries are museums. She’s spent hundreds of hours metaphorically digging up 60 different local cemeteries—she calls it a “hobby.” Mapping local cemeteries is key, she says, because work crews sometimes don’t know they are in a graveyard until a backhoe blade hits a coffin.

   Slave cemeteries are especially difficult to preserve because the graves are typically marked by fieldstones, maybe a foot high and almost never inscribed. Most sources document slavery in economic terms, showing what a slave cost or how many calories she ate. A graveyard offers a first-person reminder that these were people, not things, with real lives and bodies.

   Rainville collects information about graveyards on a website, the African American Cemeteries in Albemarle County Project (www.virginia.edu/woodson/ projects/aacac), housed by the Carter G. Woodson Institute at UVA. It preserves the history of common folks.

   “Five percent of human history is the elites,” she says, “the Thomas Jeffersons. Ninety-five percent of history is farmers, enslaved communities,” she says. Her project gives voice to those quieter histories.

   Ted Delaney also works at resurrecting history. At UVA, he researched the Daughters of Zion cemetery at First and Oak streets. Most people thought it was a segregated section of the Oakwood Cemetery. Even the name had been lost.

   In truth, the area was really a separate cemetery for elite blacks established as a statement of independence by the Daughters of Zion in 1873. Like Masons or Elks, Daughters of Zion offered benefits equivalent to modern life insurance: burial costs, a grave plot, and the apparently false security that they could care for a site far into the future. By 1950 the cemetery was pretty much abandoned.

   Delaney compares a good cemetery to a fine library. He is now the archivist at the Old City Cemetery in Lynchburg. Even a blank grave marker holds a wealth of information hidden in its material and form. “Granite was most popular from 1900 to 1950,” Delaney says. “You can date a certain cherub within five years of when it was carved.”

   Delaney thinks he’ll be cremated too. “It is a constant struggle to maintain immortality,” he says dryly, “especially when it comes to cemeteries.”—Lacey Phillabaum

Karma chameleons
For Buddhists, life keeps going and going and going…

Some of us go right back to living. If you’re a Buddhist, don’t expect to get much rest when you die. Buddhists believe in cyclic rebirth. And you won’t get by on your good looks or big bank account—good karma, the ticket to a good rebirth, is racked up by humanitarian actions.

   We can count loads of Charlottesville residents in the ranks of the quest for good karma. Thanks to a premier Tibetan rare book collection at UVA as well as world-famous abbots like Geshe Jampel Thardo at the Jefferson Tibetan Society, the Charlottesville Buddhist community has swelled since the 1960s. With about a quarter of Virginia’s Buddhism centers based in Charlottesville, local Buddhists have found a haven in Virginia to flex their karmic muscles and mull over what happens next.

   Buddhists don’t believe in a one-of-a-kind soul that crosses between this life and the next. According to Dr. Sandy Newhouse, the Buddhist representative to the UVA Hospital Interfaith Committee and a practicing psychologist, it’s the consciousness that transfers after death. “The death process goes on past the point where the heart stops beating—it’s not just the physical death,” she says.

   Buddhists believe it can take up to three days for the consciousness to leave the body. Over the three days, Buddhists continue to pray for and communicate with the dead to boost their chances for a good rebirth. If the consciousness leaves the body through the crown of the head or upper areas, it is believed that the dead will go onto to a higher karmic place. But watch out if the consciousness leaves through the lower areas—it could mean a karmic demotion (your consciousness can be forced into animal realms—where you become, say, a squirrel—or sent to a place of great suffering).

   After the consciousness bows out, Buddhists allow families to determine funeral specifics. Traditionally, Tibetans cremate the dead since it’s generally believed Buddha himself was cremated. Monks and nuns are often at funerals to lead prayers as families offer songs and thoughts about the dead. While some Buddhists might don black for a funeral, ceremonies celebrate rather than mourn the dead because everything is always changing in Buddhism—the end of one life is the beginning of another.

   According to the Buddhist tradition, it can take up to 49 days for the consciousness to find someplace new to hang its hat. Some Buddhists believe that during this time (bardo) the dead see the events of their life and long for a new body. The awareness of death pushes the consciousness into the third bardo—the final stage in rebirth.

   In Buddhism, practicing death is nearly as important as death itself. Buddhists are expected to spend time meditating about the death process—their fears, the physical sensations, entering a new realm—to lessen any anxiety that could complicate the death process. The more peaceful the mind is at the time of death, the better the rebirth will be. Some Buddhists do yoga that represents the sequential death process. It’s not that they’re emotional masochists—for Buddhists, realizing the temporary nature of life motivates believers to be more compassionate to others.

   Newhouse, co-founder of the Jefferson Tibetan Society, has practiced Buddhism for 30 years after converting at age 19. In her 10-plus years with the Interfaith Committee, she remembers one elderly man who seemed “blocked” from death. She says that the man was paralyzed by his fear of death. After she and several Tibetan monks visited with the man and prayed with him, he died a day or two later. She credits the prayers with pacifying his mind so that he could move on.

   The rebirth of consciousness can happen countless times for Buddhists—it continues until a person can control where he or she is reborn. On the road to liberation, Buddhists develop their capacity to help other people. As Newhouse puts it, “Just like anything in our lives, the more you practice something, the better you get at it.”—Jocelyn Guest

Paying the piper
At the funeral home, the dollars and cents add up after your death

You go six feet under, and if you’re not careful your family goes 6K in the hole. You may rest in peace, but your relatives are uneasy if they’ve been left with the decisions—and maybe the cost—of planning your last hurrah.

   According to Mark Ascoli of Hill and Wood Funeral Service on Market Street, the average funeral costs $7,500. That includes a service, and the embalming and preparation of your body, as well as a casket. If you opt for solid bronze on the latter, however, expect to pay $7,000 for the casket alone. Add on another $1,400 or so for a casket container, burial site and headstone at the cemetery, and cremation never sounded better. The cost for a no-frills cremation, complete with cardboard box for your burnt remains? $1,780.

   Dying is all too easy, but paying for it can be hard. Plan in advance, tell your family your wishes, and prepay what you can.

   As you aim to get the costs squared away, you’ll be faced with decisions. Doris McClenny, funeral director at McClenny Funeral Services on Henry Avenue, says many of them concern your personal style.

   Die-hard Wahoos, for instance, might want to spend eternity locked in the UVA casket, an option from high-end coffin designer Whitelight. (The company also makes a casket for NASCAR fans inscribed with the words, “The race is over.”) Being encased in the blue-and-orange box is like riding in a bumper sticker-plastered, pom pom-waving, football party-tailgating SUV to the Promised Land. And it will cost you $2,995. If you opt to enclose the thing in a concrete box for weatherproofing, add an additional $750 to $7,000. (Weatherproofing? Hello, you’re dead. Weather is not an issue.)

   Maybe this tally gets you thinking that you’ll leave the matter of your remains to the government. After all, you gave them plenty while you were around, didn’t you? Think again. The City’s Social Services Department will spend merely $650 to $800 to cremate you, and that’s only if the responsible party proves unable to pay
for it.

   Which brings us to Ronald Reagan. You might consider the $5,000 to $7,500 cost of a funeral to be excessive, but how do you feel knowing that taxpayers spent $400 million to memorialize and bury the former president? What’s that? You could keel over from the shock? No problem,
as long as you’ve made the proper arrangements with the funeral director.—Sarah Cox

“Freedom of expression cannot be limited without being lost.” Thomas Jefferson

Robert O’Neil takes TJ’s words very seriously. As executive director of the Pantops-based Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, each year he oversees the awarding of Jefferson Muzzles. The search for censorship in America brings a wide swath of culture within his purview, and now in addition to being able to recite Mr. Jefferson’s sage advice, O’Neil can also speak with authority on everything from the finer points of marionette sex to NASCAR and the pork industry.

   Handed out each year on April 13—Jefferson’s birthday—the Muzzles offer backhanded props to those figures and institutions that try to stifle free thought and expression. Now in their 14th year, the awards have run long enough to give O’Neil fodder for great stories and a sly grin beneath his all-business demeanor.

   You’ll notice some recurring themes in the 2005 awards. Muzzles go out to schools for reigning in freethinking kids. Terrorism controls are lampooned, with the iron fist of the Department of Homeland Security criticized. And while arbitrary rulings by local government officials are less prominent, O’Neil says, restrictive state legislation is on the rise as lawmakers in Virginia, Alabama and Georgia received nods this year.

   Not that the Muzzles are a bastion of left-wing liberalism: O’Neil has no problem defending kids who brandish Confederate flags, homophobes piping up at school or any of the other miscreants who push the boundaries of free speech.

   “High school students are inclined to be creative, and at times challenging of authority,” he says. “If you can silence the homophobic student, you have established a precedent that applies as readily on the other side. We welcome a chance to identify across the spectrum.”

   On that note, the 2005 Muzzle Awards go to…

The U.S. Marshals Service
For confiscating and erasing the audio recordings of a speech by Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

 Perhaps the U.S. Marshals, who provide security for the Supreme Court, need to pay closer attention to the Justices they protect.

   Deputy U.S. Marshal Melanie Rube apparently wasn’t listening to Justice Antonin Scalia as he delivered a speech on the Constitution on April 7, 2004. During Scalia’s talk to students at Presbyterian Christian High School in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, Rube interrupted the event when she noticed two reporters taping the event with audio recorders.

   The reporters—Denise Grones from the Associated Press and Antoinette Konz from the Hattiesburg American—were not informed before the speech that they could not use recorders. They erased their tapes when Rube confronted them—an example of how people’s sense of their own rights can go limp when somebody flashes a badge.

   Like many celebrities, Scalia often insists that his speeches not be recorded for television or radio, and TJ Center Associate Director Josh Wheeler agrees that it is Scalia’s First Amendment right to do so. However, that doesn’t give the Marshals the authority to seize private property.

   Scalia agrees. Notified of the seizure, he denounced the confiscation as excessive and wrote in a letter to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press that “you are correct that the action was not taken at my direction. I was as upset as you were.”

The U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
For undue limitation of access to the country by visiting international scholars.

The line between national security and personal freedom is often difficult to draw, but in this case the TJ Center found that the government erred on the side of too much restriction.

   Professor Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim scholar living in Switzerland, planned to start teaching at the University of Notre Dame in the fall of 2004. His furniture had been moved to South Bend, Indiana, and his children were enrolled in schools there when he learned that the State Department had revoked his work visa.

   The move was apparently ordered by the Department of Homeland Security, justified only by official reference to “public safety or national security interest.” The media, Notre Dame and Ramadan all failed to find out exactly why his visa had been denied, and he eventually withdrew his application.

   A few weeks later, the State Department barred 61 Cuban scholars from attending the Latin American Studies Association conference in Las Vegas. The only explanation offered by the State Department claimed that Cuban scholars must be treated differently because “the Castro regime [allows U.S. travel only for] those academics on whom it can rely to promote its agenda of repression and misrepresentation about Cuba and the United States,” although none of the banned scholars had been impeached on that basis. Some scholars in the group had lectured at American colleges in the past.

   In both cases, the absence of any reasonable national security rationale justifies a Muzzle.

The Virginia House of Delegates
For passing two bills, by wide majorities, that disregard the principles of free speech.

As 2004 drew to a close, it looked like Thomas Jefferson’s home state might be spared winning a Muzzle. At the last minute, though, the House of Delegates came through with a pair of bills that not only trampled on free speech, but made Virginia the laughing stock of the world. Thanks, guys!

   First was House Bill 2797, which would have required public libraries to install content-filtering software on every library computer with Internet access. The bill, sponsored by Del. Samuel Nixon (R-Chesterfield), would have required libraries to filter out “materials deemed harmful to juveniles” or face a loss of all State funds. It was unclear about whether library officials had the authority to disable the filters when requested by an adult library patron. The bill passed the House 78 to 16.

   Then Virginia became a worldwide joke when the House passed a bill drafted by Del. Algie T. Howell, Jr. (D-Norfolk) that would have criminalized low-rider pants. Exposing one’s underwear may not be the most dignified fashion trend, but a crime? Other legislators tried in vain to remind Howell and his supporters about their youthful experiments with bellbottoms, afros and lambchop sideburns, to no avail. When the bill passed 60-34 it immediately became international news, even becoming a joke on “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno.”

   Fortunately, the Virginia Senate killed both bills.

The Motion Picture Classification and Rating Administration
For its attempt to shield Americans from a sex scene between two wooden puppets.

The film Team America: World Police, created by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of “South Park” fame, mocks both the military’s action-hero posturing as well as the annoying celebrities who insert themselves into world events. Cast entirely with wooden marionette puppets, the movie depicts Susan Sarandon plunging from a skyscraper, the decapitation of Janeane Garofalo and Tim Robbins set on fire.

   It wasn’t the violence, however, that caught the eye of the Classification and Rating Administration (CARA), the people who rate movies. It was a sex scene. Between puppets. The marionettes didn’t even have genitals.

   CARA rated Team America NC-17—meaning no one under 17 would be allowed—which would have severely limited the film’s distribution. Parker and Stone submitted nine increasingly sanitized versions of the offending scene before CARA finally granted them an R rating.

   “We blow Janeane Garofalo’s head clean off, but it’s all about the positions of the dolls having sex,” says Parker. “It’s not funny. It’s tragic.”

   And it wins a Muzzle.

The National Stock Car Racing Commission (NASCAR)
For excessively penalizing a slip of the tongue.

When Dale Earnhardt, Jr. won his fifth race at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeed-way in October, he had just emerged from his car in Victory Lane when a reporter hit him with a question about what it felt like to have five wins at that racetrack. Only his father, the late racing legend Dale Earnhardt, has more wins at Talladega.

   “Don’t mean shit right now,” the younger Earnhardt said of his victory that day. “Daddy’s won here 10 times.”

   The comment was broadcast on national television, and so NASCAR hit Earnhardt with a 25-point penalty for violating the commission’s language policy. The deduction knocked Earnhardt out of first place in the Nextel Cup, an important NASCAR prize.

   As a private corporation, NASCAR is free to set policy and enforce their rules as they see fit. Although Earnhardt’s punishment doesn’t violate the First Amendment, NASCAR wins a Muzzle because, as the TJ Center’s Wheeler explains, “to punish Earnhardt in a manner so out of proportion to the offense sends a message far more dangerous than…the spontaneous expression of a relatively mild four-letter word.”

   Role models, after all, are only human.

The Federal Communications Commission
For substantially escalating sanctions for broadcasting “indecent” material over radio and television airwaves.

 It was the boob that rocked America.

   During the halftime performance of the February 1, 2004, Super Bowl, viewers across the country caught an all-of-half-a-second eyeful when pop superstar Janet Jackson flashed her breast to the crowd. The fallout from Miss Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” is largely credited for having triggered an FCC crackdown on the airwaves; namely, a rash of six- and seven-figure fines for “indecent” material on TV and radio.

   For the so-called Nipplegate, the FCC smacked Super Bowl broadcaster CBS with a $550,000 fine, the largest indecency fine in history. A month later, Fox Television usurped the dubious honor when the reality series “Married by America” drew a stunning $1.2 million fine. The FCC reportedly received 159 letters complaining about an episode that chronicled the bachelor and bachelorette parties of the newly paired-off singles, featuring “sexually explicit” footage such as bachelors licking whipped cream off strippers’ bodies. (It should be noted that 159 letters equaled less than one complaint per affiliate station that ran the show.)

   These fines, plus those leveled at perennial “shock jock” Howard Stern and his broadcaster, Clear Channel Radio, earned the FCC more money through indecency in 2004 than in the past 10 years combined.

   The chilling effect of the fines was revealed when ABC scheduled a broadcast of Steven Spielberg’s graphic WWII film Saving Private Ryan on Veteran’s Day. Citing the profanity and violence in the film, 66 affiliate stations concerned about FCC sanctions declined to broadcast the movie, effectively self-censoring themselves. The commission ruled long after the airing that the film’s violence and use of the F-word was safe for public consumption.

   It was a surprising ruling since, in 2003, the FCC declared that any use of the word “fuck” was indecent, whether used as a verb or an adjective. Instead of clarifying an already murky definition of “indecency,” the FCC has, in the past year, made things even more confusing.

The Democratic and Republican National Parties
For demonstrating little appreciation of the First Amendment during the 2004 presidential election.

In Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s own words, “a very small number of people got out of hand” while protesting the September 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City. What then to make of the 1,800 protesters who were arrested?

   Many of the arrests stemmed from mass detainments. In some cases, police indiscriminately arrested those legally exercising their right to free expression, or even people who simply happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. After the convention, in one instance 227 protesters were cleared of all charges after a videotape showed no illegal activity on their parts.

   The July 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston boasted fewer arrests, perhaps because protesters were confined to a pen that Judge Douglas Woodlock described as resembling an “internment camp.” Ironically dubbed the “Free Speech Zone,” the cage measured 300’x90′, was located under abandoned railroad tracks a block away from the DNC’s home base at Fleet Center, surrounded by an 8′ chain link fence topped off with razor wire and mesh netting and surrounded by armed law enforcement officers. Critics argued that the effect of protests within this “free speech zone” was comparable to protesting underwater.

   While it’s natural that security concerns are taken seriously in a post-9/11 world, in the words of Julie Hilden, commentator for legal commentary website FindLaw, “why would someone trying to change the system through protest be more likely than others to resort to violence to destroy the system? The person holding the placard is probably not the one we have to worry about.” Equating protesters with terrorists strikes at the heart of the First Amendment.

   Leaders of both parties failed to denounce the actions of their members that suppressed free expression. Some people, after all, like to think of America as one big “Free Speech Zone.”

Alabama State Rep.Gerald Allen
For proposing a bill that would prohibit the use of public funds for the purchase of textbooks or library materials that recognize homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle.

State Rep. Gerald Allen grabbed headlines this year when he tried to ban all books about gays. He told the Birmingham News that novels with gay protagonists and some college textbooks would have to be destroyed if his bill passed. “I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them,” he said.

   The director of the Montgomery County Library worried that “half the books in the library could end up being banned. It’s all based on how one interprets the material.” If Allen had his way, it would mean classics like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Chorus Line, The Color Purple and Shakespeare’s As You Like It could all end up six feet under. Mark Potok from the Southern Poverty Law Center called the bill censorship. “It sounds like Nazi book-burning to me,” he says.

Georgia State Rep. Ben Bridges
For pushing a bill that would permit the teaching in the state’s public schools only of “scientific fact,” and would specifically bar the teaching of the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Rep. Ben Bridges must have missed that day in fifth grade when they talked about the scientific method.

   The scientific method uses hypothesis, predictions, experiments and theories, but has no category for “scientific fact.” For example, the hypothesis that some fundamentalist Christian politicians can be morons is reliably predicted and experimentally sound—but still not a fact.

   Dr. Sarah Pallas, a Georgia State University biology professor, says, “The idea that matter is made of atoms is a theory. The idea that there is some kind of force that brings us back to earth if we jump up is a theory, it’s called gravitational theory.”

   Bridges is just one of many players trying to keep evolution from being taught in schools. Georgia’s Cobb County School Board tried to place stickers on science textbooks calling evolution a theory, not a fact. In pushing his legislation, Bridges insisted, “Let’s teach them the truth or don’t teach them anything.” Thankfully, Bridges’ fellow legislators were unswayed by his logic. Timmy and Tommy can still learn the theories of relativity and gravity in Georgia. At least, for now.

Berkmar High School (Georgia) Principal Kendall Johnson
For censoring two editorials from the student newspaper, and then censoring the word “censored.”

They sure do breed sensitive flowers in Georgia. Not only are Georgians worried about polluting their young tykes with the theory of evolution, but it’s not even safe to say “gay.”

   When Berkmar senior Fiorella Soto started a Gay Lesbian and Straight Society after-school club, parents first tried to force the school to close the club or change its name. One parent said the name alone was “very sexually explicit, provocative and inflammatory,” endangering “the well-being of the students.”

   Editors of the student newspaper, The Liberty, prepared a point-counterpoint debate on the club to run alongside a news piece. Principal Kendall Johnson censored the debate based on concerns that it would be disruptive during finals week. When The Liberty editors wanted to run a “censored” stamp where the debate would have appeared, Johnson censored that, too.

   That capricious decision didn’t deter the students, who eventually saw both editorials run in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “We knew it was controversial and we suspected it would be censored, but we have that feeling a lot and that doesn’t stop us from writing,” said Liberty editor L’Anita Weiler.

Poway High School in California, Climax public schools in Minnesota and Russell High School in Kentucky
For barring students from wearing articles of clothing that were deemed potentially offensive to other students.

It’s rough being a teenager. You still have to go to bed when you’re told to, eat what you’re offered and wear… only what your principal likes? That’s the way it worked for kids across the county last year, when the heads of their high schools played fashion police over their wardrobes.

   Jacqueline Duty was stopped by two police officers as she tried to enter her Russell High School senior prom in May 2004 because of her dress. The frock, featuring the pattern of a Confederate flag, was deemed potentially offensive by the school administration. (The bright red sequined dress is actually quite nice, described as a “a classically cut strapless sheath, ankle-length with a shallow slit on one side,” by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.) Duty is now trying to sue the pants off of the administration, asking for $50,000 in damages in federal district court.

   In California, Tyler Chase Harper was detained for a day in the principal’s office at Poway High School after he showed up wearing the slogan “Homosexuality is Shameful” on his t-shirt. Harper fashioned the shirt by scrawling the words in magic marker on duct tape and sticking it on. Other messages included “Be Ashamed,” and “Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned.”

   Harper wore the shirt on April 21, a national Day of Silence on college and high school campuses to protest discrimination against homosexuals.

   “I was appalled that my school would take such a controversial issue and only allow one side to be heard,” Harper told the Union-Tribune of San Diego. “I presented a message that was scriptural, biblical. I feel like my rights were violated and I had no freedom of speech.”

   Tyler is now suing the school district. “The district is asking students to be politically correct, the lawsuit asks that (the district) be constitutionally correct,” said his attorney, Robert Tyler.

   In Climax-Shelly, Minnesota, the district superintendent ruled that students should do as she says, not as parents do, when she prevented kids from wearing t-shirts with a town motto to school. The burg of 260 adopted the slogan, “Climax—It’s More than Just a Feeling,” during its centennial in 1996. Students had worn clothes with the slogan, excerpted from a Boston song, for years when the superintendent banned it in February 2004. Senior Bethany Grove was suspended for a day when she and 11 other students wore the slogan on a shirt at school. Grove was the only student who refused to turn her t-shirt inside out.

High School of Legal Studies in Brooklyn, New York
For refusing a class valedictorian her diploma because she made comments critical of her high school in her graduation speech.

Tiffany Schely lived her teenage rebellion on stage at her high school graduation ceremony, as she delivered her commencement speech.

   Schely was editor of the school newspaper, yearbook chairwoman, member of the student council and valedictorian at the High School of Legal Studies, and she used her commencement soapbox to comment on the school’s lack of textbooks, overcrowded classes, unqualified teachers and principal turnover (four in four years). School officials edited her speech beforehand and then cut off her microphone when she delivered it as originally written. She was escorted from the graduation ceremony and when she went to get her diploma, she was told she would have to apologize first. “It was the truth, and the truth hurts,” she said.

   School officials relented after Schely’s case became a cause celebre. “What bozo tried to hold back a diploma in a country where freedom of speech is so prized, I don’t know,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. In July, Schely was honored by the City Council for standing up for her rights. She is now studying at Smith College in Massachusetts on full scholarship.