Dog Days Become Dogged Daze for 'E&P' Editor

By: Greg Mitchell Opinion

Don't look back, something might be gaining on you, the great baseball pitcher Leroy "Satchel" Paige once said, and last week it did seem that my past was starting to catch up to me. A number of disparate events conspired to make newly relevant several books I wrote anywhere from three to 11 years ago. Journalists called or e-mailed with questions. Damn reporters -- they just won't leave you alone. But after months of fielding questions about the war in Iraq, the rise of Jayson Blair and the fall of Howell Raines, it was nice to turn to a few timeless topics that also happen to involve wide press coverage.

Take the California governor's race... please. But stop treating it like an aberration. California had journeyed down this road before Ah-nold was even born. A 1934 race featured a far more distinguished star from another field who became a viable front-runner. That year Upton Sinclair, author of "The Jungle" and a lifelong socialist, swept the Democratic primary for governor and seemed headed for victory until big money interests basically invented the modern "media campaign" (run by advertising and publicity pros) to derail him. Hollywood had a big hand in this but the most effective, entertaining, unfair and outrageous opposition came from the press -- most notably from W.R. Hearst and his papers, and Harry Chandler and his Los Angeles Times.

Several years later came the first race for high office in California involving a famous actor: the 1950 Senate contest between Richard Nixon and Helen Gahagan Douglas (a star in her own right, and also married to Melvyn Douglas). So there is, in fact, a long tradition in California of celebrity candidates and dirty-trick campaigns. Have we forgotten the late great Sonny Bono already? Too bad the Arnold running is not Tom.

I got a couple of calls from nosy reporters last week when news emerged that the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb over Hiroshima, had finally been reassembled and in December would start to receive visitors at a Smithsonian site outside Washington, D.C. But apparently it will go on display with no mention of one small detail: the fact that this bomb killed at least 150,000 people, the vast majority of them women and children. With nuclear weapons so much in the news today -- from Iraq to North Korea and back to the U.S., with Pentagon plans to build a new arsenal of "small" Hiroshima-size bombs -- the press ought to ask why America is about to sanitize what happens when these weapons are actually used.

This month's Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa., inspired the usual broad attention. We got daily scores and stories in the newspapers, and dozens of regional and national games televised on ESPN. Twelve-year-olds now get more face time than Ernie Banks got in his prime. Little sluggers "style" their home run trots and are featured in slow-motion TV promos. No wonder kids lie about their age to compete. Somehow I was not surprised to learn that gamblers now offer odds on each game. At one Web site I visited they were complaining that one game had been cut short by the "mercy" rule, so their pick in that game, Saudi Arabia, did not get a chance to come back and "cover."

The New York Times ran a front-page story on Aug. 18 that touched on some of this, but it left out a major point. So I sent the paper a brief letter, which it published, reading in its entirety: "The Little League World Series may be a glorious event, but it's not surprising to read that ESPN cut away from a manager who was 'irate' over a close play at first base. Coverage of the event is meant to mythologize a world of patient coaches and caring parents, when the reality, at the grass roots, often includes abusive coaches and parents who scream at their kids when they wouldn't perform at an 'all-star' level."

I know something about this. Until hanging up my clipboard this year, I had managed in Little League for seven years. Last year, an all-star team of 14-year-olds that I coached went to the New York State finals where we got knocked out -- by a team using an ineligible player.