Slate eBook Club - Best of 2003

by Slate. com

  But since square mileage probably doesn't give you a picture of how big the Ocean State really is, here are a few comparisons drawn from news stories.

  For example, you already know that Rhode Island is about the size of the area burned in the recent California wildfires. The New York Times also told us in February that Rhode Island is about the size of something else in California, Yosemite National Park.

  The Orlando Sentinel informs us that Rhode Island is about the size of the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, an underwater reserve off the Massachusetts coast—which means it's also NEAR Rhode Island.

  The Ocean State is about the size of an Antarctic ice shelf called Larsen B that disintegrated last year into small icebergs and fragments, according to the Washington Post. (International papers, of course, chose very different points of reference, as Slate's June Thomas noted last year.)

  Rhode Island is about the size of pieces of earth that slide off Hawaiian volcanoes every 300,000 years or so, causing massive tidal waves from California to Australia. Luckily, the New York Times article that mentions this also says such an event is not imminent.

  People in Texas seem to like comparisons to Rhode Island. For example, it's about the size of the area covered by Houston's bus system, and about the size of the King Cattle Ranch near Corpus Christi. And Rhode Island is a little smaller than Prince Edward Island in Canada, a little bigger than the Golan Heights, and about the same size as the citrus groves of Florida.

  Of course, these are all literal size comparisons. But Rhode Island sometimes finds its way into news stories in a more figurative manner. For example, a teammate once described the strike zone formed when 6-foot-10-inch baseball player Randy Johnson stepped to the plate as about the size of Rhode Island. And if you ever find yourself famished and in New York City, you might want to stop by Via Emilia trattoria on Park Avenue. A review once singled out the $12.50 pork chop, which it said is about the size of ... you guessed it.

  Smoke and Mirrors

  Stop calling firefighters "heroes."

  By Douglas Gantenbein

  Posted Friday, Oct. 31, 2003, at 12:05 PM PT

  When California Gov.-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger toured the state's catastrophic wildfires a few days ago, he uttered the phrase that now accompanies any blaze as surely as smoke: "The firefighters are the true heroes."

  It's understandable why he said that. As fires go, the California blazes are scary. They are moving incredibly quickly through dried brush and chaparral that practically explode when they ignite, threatening the life of any firefighter nearby. Steven L. Rucker, a 38-year-old firefighter and paramedic for the town of Novato, was killed working to save houses. Elsewhere, thousands of firefighters have worked for hours on end in 95-degree heat, dressed in multiple layers of fire-resistant clothing, sometimes without enough food or water because of the long and shifting supply lines.

  Given all that, it may seem churlish to suggest that firefighters might not deserve the lofty pedestal we so insistently place them on. We lionize them, regard them as unsullied by base motivations, see them as paragons of manliness (and very tough womanliness). They're easily our most-admired public servants, and in the public's eye probably outrank just about anyone except the most highly publicized war veterans. But the "hero" label is tossed around a little too often when the subject is firefighting. Here's why:

  Firefighting is a cushy job. Firefighters may have the best work schedule in the United States—24 hours on, 48 hours off. And those 24 hours are usually not terribly onerous. While a few big-city fire stations may have four, five, six calls, or more during a shift, most aren't nearly that busy, giving firefighters time to give tours to school kids, barbecue hamburgers, wash fire engines, sleep, and pose for "The Firefighters of [Your City Here], 2004" calendars. Indeed, fire officials devote much of their time to figuring out how to cover up the fact they're not getting the hoses out very often. So we have firefighters doing ambulance work, firefighters doing search-and-rescue work, anything but Job No. 1. Meanwhile, the long days off give many firefighters a chance to start second careers. That makes it easy for them to retire after 20 years, take a pension, and start another profession. I've known firefighters who moonlighted as builders, photographers, and attorneys.

  Firefighting isn't that dangerous. Of course there are hazards, and about 100 firefighters die each year. But firefighting doesn't make the Department of Labor's 2002 list of the 10 most dangerous jobs in America. Loggers top that one, followed by commercial fishermen in the No. 2 spot, and general-aviation commercial pilots (crop dusters and the like) at No. 3. Firefighting trails truck-driving (No. 10) in its risks. Pizza delivery drivers (No. 5) have more dangerous jobs than firefighters, statistically speaking. And fatalities, when they occur in firefighting, often are due to heart attacks and other lack-of-fitness problems, not fire. In those cases where firefighters die in a blaze, it's almost always because of some unbelievable screw-up in the command chain. It's been well-documented, for instance, that lousy communication was a huge reason why so many firefighters still were in the burning World Trade Center when it imploded, and well after city police and port authority police had been warned by their own commanders of an imminent collapse and cleared out.

  Firefighters are adrenalin junkies. I did mountain rescue work for several years and more than once was praised as a "hero." Oh, give me a break. It was fun and exciting. Firefighting is even more of a rush. Sharon Waxman, in an excellent article in the Washington Post, interviewed firefighters in California. Every one was in a complete lather to get to the next hot spot. "It's almost a slugfest to get in there," one told Waxman. This urge to reach the fire is not entirely altruistic. It sure beats washing that damned fire truck again, for one thing. Plus a big fire is thrilling, plain and simple.

  Firefighters have excellent propaganda skills. Firefighters play the hero card to its limit. Any time a big-city firefighter is killed on duty, that city will all but shut down a few days later while thousands of firefighters line the streets for a procession. In July 2001, I witnessed the tasteless spectacle of Washington state firefighters staging a massive public display to "honor" four young people killed in a forest fire (one absurd touch: hook-and-ladder rigs extended to form a huge arch over the entrance to the funeral hall). For the families of the four dead firefighters—three of whom were teens trying to make a few bucks for college—the parade, the solemn speeches, and the quasi-military trappings all were agony. "It's just the firefighters doing their thing," one bystander said to me later with a shrug.

  Firefighters are just another interest group. Firefighters use their heroic trappings to play special interest politics brilliantly. It is a heavily unionized occupation. Nothing's wrong with that, but let's not assume they're always acting in anything but their own best interests. In Seattle not long ago a squabble broke out between police and firefighters when both were called to the scene of a capsized dinghy in a lake. The firefighters put a diver in the water, a police officer on the scene ordered him out to make way for a police team, and all hell broke loose (yes, the cops were at fault, too). The dispute wasn't over public safety, it was over who got the glory. New York firefighters, admittedly deep in grief over lost co-workers, exacerbated the challenge of body recovery operations after 9/11 by insisting on elaborate removal procedures for each firefighter uncovered, an insult to others who died there. Not long before that, in Boston, a special commission released a scathing report that detailed a 1,600-member fire department up to its bunker gear in racism, sexism, and homophobia. Since then the department has bitterly resisted reform efforts.

  None of this is meant to dispute that firefighters are valuable to the communities in which they work. They are. But our society is packed with unheralded heroes—small-town physicians, teachers in poverty-stricken neighborhoods, people who work in dirty, dangerous jobs like coal-mining to support a family. A firefighter plunging into a burning house to retrieve a frightened, smoke-blinded child is a hero.
But let's save the encomiums for when they are truly deserved, not when they just show up to do their job.

  The Access Trap

  How anonymous sources tie reporters in knots.

  By Jack Shafer

  Posted Tuesday, Sept. 30, 2003, at 3:53 PM PT

  The biggest news story in Washington this week is the identity of the two White House leakers who blew the cover of Valerie Plame—a covert CIA employee and wife of Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV—by revealing her identity to columnist Robert Novak, who published it in a July 14, 2003, column.

  The Novak-Wilson-Plame story is so huge because 1) the leak appears (to some) to be a dirty trick designed to punish Wilson for going public on the July 6 New York Times op-ed page with his version of the Niger yellowcake uranium story; 2) it's against federal law ($50,000 in fines and 10 years in prison) for a government official who has access to classified information to disclose a covert agent's identity; 3) it indicates the extent to which the Bush administration will dissemble to sear its version of the war on terror on the public consciousness; and 4) we haven't had a good scandal joy ride in Washington since Monicagate.

  But Novak can't shed any light on the leakers' identities, of course, because he promised them anonymity in exchange for the information. Nor can the six unnamed reporters who, according to the Washington Post, were peddled similar information by two White House officials but who never used the information in their journalism. Ambassador Wilson told the Post yesterday that four reporters working for three TV networks told him in July that administration officials had contacted them to plant news stories that would include his wife's covert identity. One presumes that the pledge of confidentiality binding Novak also gags these reporters, preventing them from pursuing the big story of who leaked, who played the dirty trick, or who may have broken federal law.

  The hard-and-fast rules that govern confidential sourcing leave a half-dozen news organizations in a position where they know the leakers' identities as institutions but can't force individual reporters to reveal their names without violating the journalistic taboo of "burning" a confidential source. If the journalists in the know were to surrender the names of their White House sources, they'd be shunned by their peers and (more important) frozen out by future confidential sources because they're untrustworthy. They might as well move their butts over to the obit desk. (One state court has even found that a confidentiality agreement with a reporter is contractual, enforceable by law.)

  But it's not like Washington journalists like to play "get the leaker" in the first place. They don't even like to examine the motives of the confidential sources who appear in their own newspapers or the pages of the competition. It's considered poor form in Washington to uncover another reporter's confidential sources, but not because it's bad journalism. Confidential sources are the grease that makes the wheels of Washington journalism turn, and anybody who disturbs the cloak of anonymity undermines what 80 percent of the reporters in town do. Because Washington reporters outnumber worthwhile confidential sources by a ratio of 10 to 1 (or greater), confidential sources can usually pick the most advantageous (to them) terms for dispensing information. For that reason alone, most Washington reporters would rather acquire the other guy's confidential sources than expose them.

  This may explain why none of the reporters who talked to the White House sources filed the more newsworthy story: namely, that the normally leak-free administration was attempting to put Ambassador Wilson in an unflattering light by connecting his Niger mission in some nepotistic fashion to his wife's position as a CIA employee, and damage her cover in the process. Any of the reporters could have published a story about how an administration source was talking trash about Wilson without naming Valerie Plame or violating their confidentiality agreements. So, why didn't they? I can only assume that the reporters calculated that with confidential administration sources being so rare these days, they shouldn't do anything that would deter a future leak. So, they ignored the tip and declined to expose the leakers' skulduggery in hopes of getting a different—and perhaps less dicey—story leaked to them later.

  The Novak-Wilson-Plame story illustrates in creepy fashion what happens when reporters, especially Washington reporters, become