Indymedia Times? Slime Out, Doctoring the Numbers

Indymedia Times?

In its Feb. 2 "Metro" section, the New York Times ran a full-color, detailed "Field Guide" to the hotels hosting GOP convention delegates next August. Anyone looking to disrupt the official business or social calendar of convention attendees?now, who'd want to do that??need look no further than page B1 of that day's edition. The map is easily the most slyly subversive thing the Times has done since running that Molotov cocktail recipe above the fold back in '68. Or was that the New York Review of Books?

In case anyone was wondering, delegates from Texas, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania will be staying at the Hilton on 53rd St., while Schwarzenegger and the rest of the Cali crew will be holed up at the Marriott Marquis. Georgia will get the Ritz Carlton in Battery Park all to itself. And be sure to look for a rousing 9/11 speech from a Rhode Island, Puerto Rico, Utah or Delaware Republican. The Millennium Hilton, which will house those delegations, reportedly offers unmatched views of Ground Zero.

Slime Out

This week's "Let's Make Fun of the Negro" award goes to Margeaux Watson, who interviewed Ol' Dirty Bastard for the Feb. 5 issue of Time Out New York. Not once, but twice did the writer (or her editors) fail to correct a malapropism by Mr. Bastard, instead inserting [sic] to indicate that the funny way of speaking was not their own.

First, on the difficulty of parole and drug tests:

"Being clean?that's not difficult. It's easy. I just cut it off. But curfews and all that urine testes [sic] and stuff. It's hard."

Second, on his career:

"So I'm all about the money and shit. I'm a entertain [sic] regardless and shit."

Oh, how they must have laughed and laughed at the silly, under-edguhmuhcated rapper.

There's something to be said for retaining an interviewee's conversational tone, sure, but there's also nothing wrong?in terms of journalistic ethics?with correcting your subject's grammar and word choices, especially when the malapropism is made humorous from a position of superiority.

Lately, Time Out has been making an effort to add more, um, color to their pages?an ethnic diversity of cover models and the like. Perhaps the ODB interview was part of this editorial push to shake off their mag's image as the softest piece of whitebred shit on the newsstands. We're sorry to inform them that poking fun at rappers doesn't help skew the demographic away from the Delta Delta Delta end of the bell curve.

Doctoring the Numbers

In the second paragraph of the press release that accompanied the Dept. of Health's latest Summary of Vital Statistics, there's an odd little aside. After DOH Commissioner Thomas Frieden crows that the number of deaths in the city (59,651) was the lowest since 1986, and after detailing a few other cold, hard facts, he tosses out this non sequitur:

"Nearly one out of every six New Yorkers who died was killed by tobacco."

Excuse us? From what part of his ass did he pull that, exactly, and why?

Maybe it was just a slip, we thought, and kept reading. Further down the page, we learned that 5,000 of the 18,000 New Yorkers under the age of 65 who died had succumbed to some form of cancer. One thousand of those had died of lung cancer. And suddenly, there it is again: "80-90 percent of lung cancer is the result of tobacco use."

What?! There's not a peep about AIDS prevention, nary a word about how diet and exercise can help lower the risk of heart disease and other forms of cancer, nothing at all about how most gunshot deaths were the direct result of firearms.

Nor is there anything about how asbestos, air pollution and other environmental factors can contribute to lung cancer. Yet there in the midst of all the numbers and statistical breakdowns is that damned cigarette bugaboo.

Numbers are one thing. How those numbers are interpreted and skewed is another. In this case, we're given crass, brownnosing politics, intended to feed and justify one mayor's personal hysteria.