Some media-watching observations from the Tuesday AM shift:
1. Love the irony on lots of different levels (liberal vs. conservative, using the formerly "non-hometown paper" as the example) of the Fox News morning show holding up a copy of the Tampa Bay Times/Politico wraparound front page. That and the fact that neither the newspaper nor the show host went up in flames.
2. Tampa took a slogging from The New Yorker in a piece published Monday. Reporter George Packer writes:
It’s not a great downtown in the best of times, combining the charm of urban renewal—highway overpasses crisscross the area where the convention is being held—and all the convenience of the largest metropolitan area not to have commuter rail. It’s also one of the two most lethal cities in the country for pedestrians and bicyclists. (The other is Orlando.) In other words, it’s all cars. Half of downtown Tampa is parking lots, and anyone with enough money to own a car drives to work (there aren’t many other reasons to go downtown). Usually you see a handful of pedestrians on the sidewalks, but this morning, downtown Tampa was weirdly deserted. Between the convention and the hurricane, which hardly materialized, the locals had all got the message to stay away. For that reason, it was even easier than usual to park.
Maybe my mood, and, by extension, the account that I’m giving, were colored by the very first conversation I had on what was supposed to have been the first day of the 2012 Republican National Convention. As I got out of my rental, the door tapped the side of the car that had just pulled in beside mine and left only a few inches to spare. My discussion with its owner was testy but commonplace until he suddenly threatened to punch me in the face. I looked at his jacket and noticed that he was employed by a private security company. That set the tone for the rest of the morning.
