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A quota of quotable quotes

Thursday, November 8, 2007

An essential part of a journalist's craft is to isolate from the flow of what you hear that one pithy phrase that sums things up. For some reason this week my head is full of selected zingers.

First there was the (ironically) Taiwan-born immigrant to America, Jerry Yang - co-founder and now back-in-charge boss of Yahoo! - apologizing on Capitol Hill for how his company aided and abetted the Chinese government in imprisoning Chinese citizens whose only offense was to attempt free speech.

Any Congressional reporter had a lot of verbatim material to select from as Yang and his General Counsel Michael Callahan gave their cringingly woeful testimony to Representative Tom Lantos' House Foreign Affairs Committee. After previous evasions, they finally fessed up to how Yahoo's China operation knowingly identified to prosecuting authorities both journalist Shi Tao and blogging dissident Wang Xiaoning, who were using Yahoo's service to communicate information to the world beyond China. (See previous MEDIA BEAT coverage of the case.)

Yang plaintively claimed that in becoming an American citizen and in running a huge American company he holds a belief in the US as a beacon of freedom to the rest of the world.

While expressing regret for his company's abandonment of that principle - but evidently winning over few people in the congressional committee room - he said Yahoo was now prepared to come to a legal settlement with the families of the two men, each sentenced (separately as it happens) to ten years' incarceration. The families were present in the room, and Shi Tao's mother broke down in tears (above right).

Among his often mumbled answers to many pointed questions Yang also said his company was now talking to Chinese officials in an effort to obtain early release for the prisoners, and expressed the hope that it could do more.

Chairman Lantos leaped straight into the book of quotes with his quick rejoinder: "Well, you couldn't do less."

Just for good measure, Lantos gave us another quote, all the more quotable as it came on the heels of Yahoo's Chinese outfit Alibaba.com going public (sort-of, in Chinese stock market terms) and pulling in $1.5 billion. He told both Yang and Callahan: "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are pygmies".



A HIGHLY UNUSUAL MEDIA EVENT HAPPENED THIS PAST WEEKEND, one that normally happens at the rate in any given year of only 3 times out of a hundred. And in the locality concerned, Atlanta, Georgia, it simply hasn't happened since 2001.

The rare happening? A National Football League game being blacked-out from local TV screens.

In this case it's the Atlanta Falcons, and the reason for the black-out is the dramatic decline of support among their fans, in the aftermath of their star quarterback Michael Vick (a) pleading guilty to dogfight-related federal charges, (b) facing a state trial later this month, and (c) being indefinitely suspended by the NFL because of the grim goings-on at Vick's oh-so-aptly-named Bad Newz Kennels.

The League, in its 34-year old television polices, still takes the firm line that Major League Baseball used to, that if tickets for a home game are not sold out, then the game can't be shown on local TV. By the deadline of last Thursday the Falcons were still 3,000 spectators short, and the local Fox affiliate WAGA-TV had do without the game, which pitted the Falcons against the San Francisco 49ers. Fox screened the Green Bay - Kansas City game instead.

Normally, at least since Vick (above left) joined the team in 2002, the Georgia Dome could expect to be filled to near-capacity - helped also by Falcons owner Arthur Blank slashing many seat-prices to a mere $10.

But the disillusion caused by the Vick dog-killing scandal is palpable, and in sales terms at least quite calculable. I've heard many people, including Georgians who follow the Falcons, ask in amazement how someone like this self-described "Superman" could put his own professional position, and the survival prospects of his sugar-daddy employers, at such risk.

Now, I yield to no-one in my admiration of the mental capacity for tactics and strategy that footballers often embody, but I think I've found a capacity-related answer to that apparent mystery.

The answer lies in one of those all-revealing quotes I cherish, and it comes from Michael Vick himself. I came across it in the latest of the "Anguished English" book series compiled by that ever-watchful monitor of assaults on the language, Richard Lederer.

Vick summed things up way back in November 2002. He said: "I have two weapons: my legs, my arm and my brain."




YOU MIGHT THINK DETERMINED ACTION TAKEN BY A CROWD OF WRITERS would yield up some pithy quotations. But so far the Writers' Guild of America, in striking against the motion picture and television industries for a better financial deal in digital distribution of its members' wares, has been verbally a bit pedestrian.

Honestly, what do you think of a picket chant like this?
"Network bosses, rich and rude
We don't like your attitude!"

Or this next one - which conceivably might seem a tad better, in that it contains a kernel of relevant truth:
"Hey hey! Ho ho!
Management can't write the show!"

I did, though, really enjoy noticing one slogan, as it emerged during the picketing of a location-shoot for ABC's Desperate Housewives. It doesn't aspire to Workers of the World, Unite! status, but it makes a fundamental point while nicely playing on a star-of-the-show's name:
"We write the story-a for Eva Longoria!"

I'm off now to Hollywood. I'll report fully on the writers' dispute for next week's THE MEDIA BEAT.