The injustice of dogs in the media

I think the media have a dog bias.

In the past few years, I’ve seen hundreds of news stories about cute pooches and all the crazy things people do with them. Birthday parties, outfits, etc. It’s kind of ridiculous.

A few months ago I was walking from my desk to the coffee shop down the hall at work. When I passed the entrance to the photo studio, I noticed there were at least 12 dogs inside. They were all dressed up in different outfits, for a story that one of the feature sections was doing on “spring dog fashions.”

I decided to do a little empirical research today, because I wanted to know just how deep this anti-cat bias ran. My methods may not be purely scientific, but I figure they can give us a small picture of how unfair the world of journalism is to the cat lovers among us.

• Since the Star Tribune electronic archives started on Jan.1, 1986, there have been 22,491 mentions of the word “dog” in a story and only 9,336 mentions of the word “cat.” Since Jan.1 , 2006, there have been 498 uses of the word “dog” in a story, and only 220 uses of the word “cat.”
  
• In headlines, there have been 48 uses of the word “dog” this year, compared with only 19 for the word “cat,” three of which were used for stories about an Arctic Cat snowmobile.

Now, I realize that using a word like “dog” or “cat” doesn’t necessarily show an affinity towards them. So I did a little cross-referencing.

• Since the beginning of the Star Tribune electronic database in 1986, 4,446 stories have used both the words “dog” and “love.” Only 1,947 stories have used the words “cat” and “love.”
  
• In a lead paragraph for a story, 143 stories have used both the words “dog” and “love,” and 37 has used the words “cat” and “love.”

This may be an institutional problem with the Star Tribune, and readers of more cat-friendly newspapers may not feel that their newspapers are quite so unfair. But for a cat lover like me to be subjected to a parade of dogs in cute outfits whenever I walk past the photo studio is just plain unfair.

Some may attribute the disconnect in the number of stories about dogs or cats to be indicative of a greater cultural divide. Not true, I say.

According to a 2003 survey by the American Pet Association, there are 62,965,000 pet dogs in the United States and 76,688,000 pet cats. Thirty-one million dog owners annually purchase Christmas gifts for their dogs, and 39 million cat owners purchase Christmas presents for their cats.

There are 13.4 million cat birthday celebrations a year and 9.8 million dog birthday celebrations a year. Clearly, there are more cats out there being loved than dogs, so it just goes to show how disconnected the mainstream media really are from everyday Americans.

I can’t deal with the injustice.

(photo credit: Star Tribune. How predictable.)

"Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose"

The last few weeks I have been kind of an emotional wreck because I was freaked out about Tom coming home.

He drove into town on Tuesday evening, and he’s living with me for the summer before he moves to St. Petersburg, Fla. for another internship. I’ve never lived with a significant other before, so I felt like I was getting short of breath every time I thought about it.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s great having Tom back. You forget how much you miss people until you get to hang out with them again. But those of you who know me know that I love my independence, and I’m scared to death of commitment. Living with a boyfriend is certainly more than I had planned for this time in my life.

At work on Tuesday, I killed time by doing Internet research on how to live with a significant other without killing each other or breaking up. I typed “how to live with boyfriend,” “scared of living with boyfriend,” “tips for living with boyfriend,” and all sorts of lame things like that into Google to see if I could get some advice on how to survive.

Funny thing, the Internet. The first article I found was about how cats have emotional issues when someone new moves in. It takes attention away from them, and they don’t get their mommy all to themselves anymore. The article said I should even bring my cat to the veterinarian after a few weeks to make sure she is OK. So now that’s on my to-do list.

There was also an article called “Boyfriend moving in? You’re going to be obese.” It said that women gain a ton of weight when a significant other moves in. They change their eating habits, sit on the sofa and don’t work out any more.

The other articles I found were actually helpful. One was about a woman who considered herself really independent. She didn’t think about the fact that her boyfriend was moving in until the day before the U-Haul showed up at her place. Then she started freaking out, it kind of reminded me of myself.

A lot of the serious articles said to clean out closet and drawer space so there’s room for him to put his stuff and he doesn’t feel like he doesn’t really have a place to live. After I got home from work on Tuesday, and only 20 minutes before he showed up, I really quickly started shoving all my clothes to one side of the closet and throwing some under my bed so there was space in the drawers.

When Tom showed up I joked around with him, showing him the closet space and bathroom counter space I had cleared for him. I kept saying, “You know, it’s like a metaphor for the fact that I’m making space in my life for you now that you’re back in town.” He looked at me like I was crazy, then I smiled at him and told him we’d have to take Sophie to the vet in a few weeks to check her emotional health.

Now he’s the one wondering what he’s gotten himself into.

Sad news ...

Today was a really depressing day at work.

The daughter of one of the long-time photographers at work was killed on Sunday. She was a student at Boston University, but she was killed in a bus crash while studying abroad in Peru. Everybody at work is shocked by it.

I came into work today and there was a company-wide e-mail about it in my inbox. My editor instantly called his daughter and asked her to go out to lunch with him, and another editor was telling him that it’s definitely a “hug your daughter” day.

My parents are on a two-week cruise of Italy and the Greek Isles right now, so I certainly can’t go hang out with my Dad, which would probably make me feel better about the whole thing. But it’s depressing because everybody at work is about the same age as my parents, and they keep talking about how it’s “a parent’s worst nightmare to lose a child.”

I agree. It’s awful. And I feel really terrible for this guy. I found out today that his family has another kid too, one other daughter. I was thinking about sending her a card, even though I don’t know her.

http://www.startribune.com/462/story/434615.html

http://www.startribune.com/326/story/41222.html

I'm not surprised that I'm here ...

A few months ago my mom and I went to hear Jodi Picoult speak at the Barnes and Noble in the HarMar Mall.

For those of you who don't follow chick literature, Jodi Picoult is a famous author who writes books that somehow seem only to attract women. I think she's really good, and my Mom likes her 'cause she written about families with sick kids.

Anyway, she's a millionaire and she's written a ton of great books. After she read part of her new book, "The Tenth Circle," she had a question and answer session.

Always curious, I had to get a few questions in. One of them was how did she get the motivation to actually sit down and write her first book from start to finish.

She said that she's been writing forever, and started getting short stories published in literary magazines when she was in college. "I'm not surprised that I'm here," she said, referring to being an author. "What surprises me is that you're all here. I knew that I would be writing."

I wanted to get that thought across as the reason I started another blog. I stopped writing my other blog - which I had kept for almost two years - because it became too much of a liability. My parents were going to find out about it, and I was stressed that people at work would too.

I didn't actually think I'd miss blogging though. I write all day at work, but it's never very theraputic and it's not exactly free flowing. I found that even when I wasn't writing blog entries, I kept coming up for ideas for them in my head and writing them when I was running.

This just provides a way for me to purge some of the craziness from my head every night before I go to bed and write about something other than public education.

So in the words of Jodi Picoult, an author that everybody should read, "I'm not surprised that I'm here."

Scary!

Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling
May 15, 2006 10:33 AM

By Brian Ross and Richard Esposito

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.

Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. The CIA asked for an FBI investigation of leaks of classified information following those reports.People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.

Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.

The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.

A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.

The Chronicles of Life and Death

I've decided I kind of like writing obituaries.

It sounds like an awful thing to do, and usually I procrastinate doing it as long as possible. I'm assigned to do one obituary every other week. I sift through the paid obituaries, and look for somebody for our coverage area.

It seems kind of odd to look for somebody who's life was interesting enough to "merit" doing a staff-written obituary.

Then I have to call up some family members, usually a spouse or a child. I have to give them the traditional talk "Hi, I read your father/brother/wife's obituary in the newspaper, they sounded like a really interesting person. Do you have some time to talk?" Obviously I say more than that. Usually, people are really receptive to the idea.

You'd think they would hang up on you right away, or call you an idiot. But most people are really dying (pun intended) to talk about their loved one, and an obituary in the newspaper is essentially a final account of somebody's life that the public sees. And ironically, obituaries are often much more about people's lives than their deaths.

So, to interview someone for an obituary you usually just need to ask one question. "Can you tell me a little about their personality?" you ask, and then you listen to them talk for 45 minutes. It's as if you can hear the person going through the grieving process over the phone. You hear them talk about everything they admired about whoever died. You hear stories of crazy stuff they did - like an 80-year-old grandpa jumping out of a tree in the back yard or a house wife that liked to play pranks on her neighbors.

I talked to a man once whose wife had just died of cancer. She knew she was going to die, so they had set up a bed on the main floor of her house so she could die at home. For Christmas, a group from her church decided they were going to go caroling at Joyce's house. More than 100 people volunteered to go, so the group had to sing to her from the backyard. Joyce had to stay in her bed, and it was facing away from the window. So her husband and children grabbed a really large mirror and held it up for her, so she could watch the refelction of the 100 carolers while she stayed in bed.

So here's the slightly morbid part about writing obituaries. It's almost as if listening to these people grieve over the phone helps me deal with some pent up grief of my own. I can listen to these other people talk about how their lives are never going to be the same and I don't feel so alone in all of it. It's like I'm getting some sort of twisted therapy from these people I just randomly decided to call up on the phone.