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It's the dark night of the soul here at The Lex Files -- literally. It's not quite 4:30 a.m. as I type this after having been rousted from my bed by kids and shoulder pain. And if you can't be honest with yourself at 4:30 in the morning, when can you? As the late, great Winston-Salem rock band The Right Profile put it in "God's Little Acre," at this time of night, you don't just see the truth, you see it double.

Which brings me to the double life of U.S. Rep. Edward Schrock, who, according to The Washington Post, has ended his efforts to win a third term in Congress after the Web site blogACTIVE claimed Aug. 19 that Schrock, whose district includes televangelist Pat Robertson's Regent University and nine military facilities, is gay.

Schrock is married, with kids. He has a 92% favorable rating from the Christian Coalition (or did; the page has been taken down), second only to House Speaker Dennis Hastert. He is a co-sponsor of the Federal Marriage Amendment and has voted against bills that would bar employment discrimination against gay people.

But he also, blogACTIVE claims, uses a gay personal-ads telephone service to meet male partners for sex. That's a double life to exceed that of Roger Dimmesdale, the minister and secret lover of Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.

Now, I'm not against secrets, on a personal level (government's a different matter). They make us more interesting. Even the bad ones can make us better people, if they are mistakes internally acknowledged and learned from and if any harm they have caused to others can somehow be remedied.

But when a secret forces a person to live life as a massive betrayal of who he/she really is, not much good is going to come from it, for that person and those to whom he/she matters. Just ask Ed Schrock's wife and kids, who are undoubtedly undergoing some serious heartache right now whatever the family's ultimate fate might turn out to be. For that matter, just ask his constituents, who, if they really want a representative with a 92% rating from the Christian Coalition, are constitutionally entitled to one and no doubt would prefer one who lives the values he professes.

And yet, for all the damage such secrets do, there is something about our society that frequently forces us, to a greater or lesser degree, to keep them secret, to betray our very essence. This is not a completely bad thing; to the extent that society forces some simple decency onto otherwise irredeemable sociopaths, via deterrence or incarceration, we're all better off. But we pay an incalculable cost, in economic inefficiency and existential misery, for many of our secrets. For everyone who is utterly fulfilled in both professional and personal lives -- and most days, I'm blessed to count myself in this group -- there are many who will never achieve the condition because they fear the cost of doing what it would take to do so would be too high. They include the guy who denies his inner rock guitarist to run the family manufacturing concern, the woman who marries a man she doesn't quite love and has kids she doesn't quite adore, simply because she thinks that's expected of her and that she must do what is expected.

We say that in America you can be anything you want to be, and legally that's pretty much true. But there's an unwritten, unspoken web of strictures and expectations that limit many of us, and if most of these situations are nowhere near as spectacular as soon-to-be-former Congressman Ed Schrock's, they're every bit as painful.

Per National Public Radio today, September is Be Kind to Writers and Editors Month. 'Course, technically it was still August when the mayor made his speech ....

I'm just back from a very long weekend and surgery, so I've got nothing. Fortunately, however, we have the Washington Post's "Below the Beltway" column to bring the funny, as in this item on toying with toll-free customer-service reps:

Bose Audio

Me: I was in the mall yesterday and saw your sound systems, the ones that basically look like $20 plastic clock radios but fill a room with rich, philharmonic sound?

Tim: Sure.

Me: My question is, could this technology be weaponized?

Tim: It has been.

Me: Excuse me?

Tim: It's called an acoustic wave cannon. It puts out a 120-decibel noise of a baby crying. It induces headaches and vomiting, in large crowds. It's a crowd suppressor.

Me:

Tim: So how can I help you?

Me: Never mind. I can't top that.

See you tomorrow.

... as I was in the previous post, here's something else I need to get me one of: the Ultimate Chicken-Chunk-Firin' Nerf® gun.

ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. (AFPN) -- Experts here are launching rectangular pieces of foam, traveling up to 1,500 mph, at the space shuttle's solid rocket booster to help NASA officials make sure the vehicle is ready to return to flight.

Arnold Engineering Development Center engineers and test operators in the ballistic impact range, affectionately known as the chicken gun, are launching hundreds of block-shaped projectiles. This will simulate pieces of external tank foam breaking away during flight and striking various parts of the space shuttle, such as the solid rocket booster.

The range got its nickname because, in normal use, experts fire chicken carcasses at a test target at varying speeds to simulate a direct bird-strike during flight.

UPDATE: And one more, courtesy of Mr. Sun!: the catapult watch. Maybe I should've been a physicist; for some reason, ballistics just rocks my world.

I imagine that if there were any great truths to be gleaned from The New York Times' lists of bestselling books, we'd have learned them by now. So what follows is (much) less cultural observation than random weirdness.

A lot of political books line the lists, but the top seller appears to be the 9/11 Commission's report; two editions can be found in the Top 10 paperback nonfiction list, one of them at No. 1. This is kind of surprising to the extent that 1) the book came out weeks ago and 2) you can download it for free, in your choice of *.pdf or *.html formats, here. Perhaps the upcoming third anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is sparking renewed interest.

One nonpolitical book that stands out from the others is "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star," by porn star Jenna Jameson, currently No. 6 on the hardback nonfiction list. I suppose some people will take this as a sign that the end times are near. But I suspect some of those people were standing in line in Dallas to pay $7.50 to see "Deep Throat" back in the day -- what was it, 1972? -- when $7.50 was real money. Like it or not, the adult-video industry is huge business, bigger than "legitimate" cinema. It can't be just a few isolated perverts paying this kind of money. If you're not already familiar with Ms. Jameson's oeuvre, then some of your relatives, friends or neighbors probably are. And unlike such other bestsellers as, say, Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time," I'm pretty sure that a significant percentage of people who buy the Jameson book really will read it. Cover to cover.

So on Wednesday, Greensboro Mayor Keith Holliday announces that he's got some kind of idea for a commission up his sleeve, but he's not going to tell any of us about where this idea came from until Monday.

The mayor has been at this gig long enough to know that telling a reporter something like that is kind of like throwing a big chunk of raw ground beef stuffed with Milk Bones at a starving, ill-mannered Doberman. Accordingly ... well, let's just say that the mayor's Circle of Trust already has escaped the Melvin Municipal Office Building to encompass two of the starving, if not ill-mannered, reporters temporarily entrusted to my professional care. (I didn't even tell 'em to pursue this. They just did. Kind of Pavlovian, don't you think?) Where the circle goes from there, I'm pretty sure you can guess. Hint: If you're not already a subscriber, we've got racks all over.

"The media like grief stories. Reporters interview the widows and ask that invasive, stupid question: 'How do you feel now?' Our most human, empathetic response to the terrible suffering of others is that of the three friends of Job. For a whole week they sat silently at his side. Silence in the face of huge grief is the best way to respect it."

--The Rev. Donald W. Shiver, Jr., President Emeritus, Union Theological Seminary in New York, on press coverage of the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. (Via Ted Pease, professor of journalism, Utah State University)

Job's friends had it right back in the day, and Shiver had it right in 2002: In general, the best response to enormous grief on the part of those close to the bereaved is physical closeness, coupled with a respectful silence.

The problem, for us in the media, is that we don't do silence well. Silence runs against our every professional instinct. We feel we have to fill the pages and screens. Yes, we have to be with our friends and neighbors, but we also have to talk about the circumstances that have led to the mourning and what will, or should, happen as a result.

Even under those circumstances, though, silence has its place. Many of the most striking newspaper front pages published after the 9/11 attacks consisted mainly of a single large photograph, accompanied by a 1-word headline and just a few text blocks referring readers to articles inside the paper. For all the hoopla surrounding former president Ronald Reagan's obsequies, the most memorable moment of the week might have been C-SPAN's shot of Nancy Reagan leaning over to kiss her husband's coffin, accompanied only by the sound of wind over the microphones.

Unlike in 2001 and 2002, I'm not involved in our 9/11 coverage this year. The journalist in me grumbles a bit about that, but the part of me that thinks Job's friends knew what they were doing is telling the journalist to be grateful for the opportunity to sit still and listen.

On Friday, a commenter at this post on Editor John Robinson's blog raised this question: Why risk having an incomplete story out there?

The context was the N&R's reporting on Mayor Keith Holliday's new race-relations initiative. The commenter was taking issue with JR's defense of our having published the story when we learned of it, rather than waiting until today's news conference, as the mayor had requested.

It's not clear to me whether the question was rhetorical. But whether it was or not, it's a good question and it deserves an answer.

The fact is, we risk having incomplete stories out there every day. And we do it for several reasons. In no particular order:

In the wake of bloggers' attack on the credibility of documents used by CBS News in its reporting, one Robert Strong wishes to make a point.

"Do you mean the Robert Strong whom CBS quoted as saying the documents likely were authentic?" you ask. Why, no, I do not mean that Robert Strong, and herein lies our story:

... I am indeed a college professor. I am not, however, the Robert Strong who spoke to CBS. I never met [the purported author of the documents], I never lived in Texas, and I never served in that state's Air National Guard. But on the Internet none of this matters.

Ever since the 60 Minutes broadcast, I have been getting angry e-mails from Bush supporters who are sure that I am a key player in a vast left-wing conspiracy bent on diminishing the president's not extraordinary record of military service. ...

CBS says that its Bush-bashing documents have been authenticated by Strong; Google tells everyone on the Internet that I am Professor Strong. That's it. I am guilty as Googled.

It used to be that only leaders could be demagogues. They were the only ones with access to mass communication, which allowed them to manipulate popular prejudices in pursuit of power. Now fast computers and the World Wide Web have democratized demagogy. Today anyone can sit at his or her terminal, spew hatred, issue false accusations and become a virtual Sen. Joe McCarthy.

And although I've spent 20 years in the mainstream media, I've never been especially fond or respectful of my business's "gatekeeper" role. I got involved in the Internet mainly because I thought it could expand democracy at home and abroad by democratizing journalism. I started blogging for the same reason.

But Professor Strong's concerns about the dark potential of the Internet in general and blogging in particular are valid. I don't think even the most enthusiastic fan of blogging thinks the scenario he describes is a good thing.

Via Boing-Boing:

SIOUX CENTER, Iowa (AP) -- More than a thousand pounds of pork processed at a Sioux Center meatpacking plant was recalled Saturday because a microchip could be embedded in the meat.

The Sioux-Preme Packing Co. recalled 110 pork shoulder butts -- about 1,100 pounds of meat -- that could contain the metal devices used to measure scientific data in hogs.

The animals, processed September 10, were part of a research herd that had been sent to slaughter without the proper notification that they had the chips implanted, said Sioux-Preme Vice President Jim Malek.

You know, I could post a lengthy, thoughtful post today about news coverage, journalism ethics, politics, broad trends of culture or any number of other meaty issues.

I could do that. But, as the great and wise philosopher Richard M. Nixon once said, that would be wrong.

Because when there's a new film version of Sophocles' greatest drama, "Oedipus Rex," shot entirely with vegetables, that's got to take precedence.

"Sex, violence, and cauliflower abounds!" says writer/director Jason Wishnow, who adds that the film is "performed by vegetables -- in the tradition of BEN-HUR. See a potato as it was meant to be seen, 15 feet tall!"

(courtesy of Boing Boing)

OK, now that the 15-foot potatoes are out of the way, journalist and documentarian Bill Moyers reflects on the state of journalism and the challenges facing it. He's not very optimistic.

A profound transformation is happening here. The framers of our nation never envisioned these huge media giants; never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing and big broadcasters ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news second to their own interests -- and to the ideology of free-market economics.
Nor could they have foreseen the rise of a quasi-official partisan press serving as a mighty megaphone for the regime in power.

Unlike some of my peers, I've never tried to claim a privileged status for working journalists. I think there's a reason that the framers of the Constitution didn't really define "the press" when they included freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights: In the society they envisioned, I think, they figured that at some point almost any/every citizen might have to function as a journalist.

That's not to say there aren't some boundaries. Andrew Cline, a journalism professor and rhetorician at Southwest Missouri State and the publisher of the excellent Rhetorica blog, frequently talks about the "discipline of verification" involved in journalism. In practical terms, he says, "You don't write what you can't prove."

An essential part of proving or disproving a factual claim is knowing what questions to ask, and among the bigger failings of journalists who have covered the White House in my lifetime (I was born during Ike's second term) is their reluctance to ask the kinds of questions that truly hold government leaders accountable to the people who elect them. In fact, some days I've thought anyone off the street could ask better questions than the group that bloggers of both the Left and the Right frequently refer to as the White House Press Corpse.

Well, earlier this week, that's basically what happened: The whitehouse.gov Web site held an "Ask the White House" session with the president's communication's director, Dan Bartlett, and in one way or another, almost all the questions were seeking to hold the administration accountable for something or other:

The pseudonymous Greensboro blogger Mr. Sun* had an interesting observation the other day (if, by "interesting," you mean, "cuts me to the quick"):

I stopped reading the News & Record a while back. I subscribe for the advertisements, but I get my news online. I scan the News & Record for can't-miss items, but I no longer read it. The thing that has struck me about the News & Record blogs is that they reveal the personality of the writers. I never miss them. I read them daily. I look forward to finding out what the writers think about things. I wonder what they will say about current events. The content in the newspaper, by contrast, is stilted and dry. I never find myself anticipating anything in the print version of the News & Record. ...

In the orgy of self-analysis overcoming the traditional and online media, I hope this point isn't lost. I like hearing the voice of actual human beings who know more about things than me. Right now, all of the emphasis is on the knowledge, but let's not forget the voice. ...

I think my editing peers would agree with me when we say that we put more emphasis on the knowledge rather than the voice for a reason: Screwing up the voice can get you ignored, as Mr. Sun observes, but screwing up the knowledge can get you sued. Mr. Sun also says specifically that he wants to hear voices of people "who know more about things than me," and the way a writer gets to know more than Mr. Sun is by reporting.

Too, for the past century or so, newspapers have tried to be "objective," a description that extends not only to what they cover but also how. In some stories, the weight of facts is enough to satisfy the reader. But most readers, most of the time, are looking for something more.

This basic tension between fairness and flair underlies the problem Mr. Sun describes, and few reporters (or editors) can balance those competing needs successfully.

How do we fix this problem? I have a few half-formed ideas I'll throw out.

To start with, voices usually are made, not born, and they're usually not made right away. Rather, writers tend to develop their own distinctive voices only after years of practice and reading other writers' work. There are some exceptions, of course, but few work in the newspaper bidness and those who do tend to gravitate toward the largest markets pretty quickly. So we could:

My colleague Stan Swofford had a story in today's N&R about the state of the criminal investigation of defunct housing nonprofit Project Homestead and its finances. Short version: It's about a year old and might last another three months.

For me, this story was deja vu all over again, as Yogi Berra is reputed to have said. I spent the better part of three years covering PTL for the N&R, starting just weeks after Jim Bakker's resignation (which happened on my next-to-last day at my previous paper) and continuing through Bakker's indictment, trial and sentencing to the civil suit that disappeared a Big 8 accounting firm and left tens of thousands of PTL donors holding nothing but pixie dust.

The parallels are obvious: A charity, founded by a charismatic religious leader with political influence (fun fact: during Reagan's second term, then-V.P. George H.W. Bush sought Bakker's support for the 1988 GOP presidential nomination), veers off into error as donors' funds -- private money in the case of PTL; taxpayer money in Homestead's case -- are misspent. Finally, it all becomes public just months before the charity would have collapsed financially anyway because of the insatiable greed of its leader. The ensuing financial investigation goes on for many months before being resolved. The only real difference is that with Homestead, the dollar amounts had one or two fewer zeroes on the ends.

One of the more educational spectacles of Bakker's criminal trial was the sight of former PTL board members, some of them celebrities, called to testify that, in fact, they had no idea what Bakker was up to or how well or poorly money was being managed. These witnesses were, in effect, lectured by the prosecutors that it was their job to know.

I bring this up because this town has a lot of charitable nonprofits, and all (presumably) of these nonprofits have boards. If you're not on one, you probably know someone who is. How many of these board members understand their legal obligations, their fiduciary responsibilities? And of those who understand, how many actually are carrying them out? I'm not trying to scare off any current or would-be board members. But you need to understand what you're getting into.

If you're on a nonprofit board and you think you might not know everything you need to know, a good starting point is the BoardSource Web site. Educate yourself, and then hold your nonprofit's CEO accountable. A tax exemption is a public trust. It's up to you to see that it gets used accordingly, because if it turns out that your nonprofit's CEO is taking money or doing something else illegal, and you didn't know because you weren't asking the right questions and looking at the right paperwork, your subsequent conversations with government representatives are going to be extremely unpleasant.

Via Romenesko, here's one college student who gets it:

... the journalistic ideal of balance, while noble, too often gets in the way of truthfully reporting a story. Framing news in terms of two supposedly equal but opposing viewpoints ignores the reality that the facts are not always balanced between parties, and thus legitimizes factually inaccurate opinions. Daily Show "correspondent" Rob Corddry's satiric definition of a reporter's role makes these problems clear: "My job is to spend half the time repeating what one side says, and half the time repeating the other." Instead of repeating each side's claims, mainstream media need to start reporting the reality.

The war in Iraq. Terrorism. The deficit. The economy. Education. Health insurance.

But what does Congress focus on? Getting us a national tree.

UPDATE: Edited for clarity.

I don't write about national politics, so I won't be covering tonight's debate between President Bush and Sen. Kerry. (Given my fatigue level, I might just tape it and go to bed early.)

But I've covered such a debate before, in 1988, when George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis met at Wake Forest University. Afterward, I got my first and what I hope will be my last exposure to Spin Alley, the place where each candidate's backers gather immediately after the debate to "spin" the results to journalists. The only good thing about the experience was that there was free food and beer.

There are so many problems with the whole notion of Spin Alley that I hardly know where to begin describing them. Fortunately, Jay Rosen of PressThink already has done so. He also reports the heartening news that at least one reporter for a major media outlet, Adam Nagourney of The New York Times, won't even be attending the debate in person but will be watching it on TV in Washington, so as to play hooky from Spin Alley. I wish every journalist would do the same.

In fact, I wish every voter would do the same, because Spin Alley isn't set up to benefit voters or the news media or anyone else except the candidates. Indeed, turn off the picture on your TV and just listen to what the two candidates say. Then, once the debate ends, turn off the TV and think back on what you heard. Which candidate's arguments were more factual? (You might want to spend some time online with Google to determine who was telling the truth and who wasn't on any particular subject.) Which candidate's argument was more logical? Which candidate sounded better prepared? Given the stilted format -- more joint press conference than debate -- it might be tough, but give it a shot.

Then, when you've done all that? Come to your own conclusions. Trust your own judgment. You're a citizen in the greatest republic in history. Spin Alley is not qualified to tell you what to think, so don't even give it the chance.