Month: May 2003

One reason Hendrik Hertzberg is such a joy to read (even when you want to scream at him) is his use of metaphor. If you’ve read Tom Friedman for years, metaphors tend to put you into a defensive crouch. Sid Blumenthal served up a doozy in his book, “The Clinton Wars:”

Not only did [Clinton] have to navigate the vessel of state in a vast sea through unpredictable storms, but he had to build a safe harbor. His political ability to tack with the wind was usually interpreted as being rudderless. Even long-term policy gains – whether on the economy, crime or trade – were obscured because of short-term political losses. And Clinton himself, caught in the midst of howling winds, could not know whether and how much he was succeeding.

Sea-sick yet? Yes, there’s nothing so boring as a fully-extended metaphor. But Rick’s specialty is the meta-metaphor. He takes a hoary old saying and throws it around a little, like hackey sack. “Affirmative action is strong medicine, and, as with any strong medicine, no great distance separates the therapeutic dose from the toxic one.” Not bad. But this one’s a beaut:

In both cases [scandals at the New York Times and the Washington Post], the people at the top said the right things about accepting responsibility. At the Post, at least one head eventually rolled – but it rolled sideways, and it quickly rejoined its body and resumed its upward trajectory. (The head was that of Bob Woodward, who lost his job as metropolitan editor. He was immediately made assistant managing editor for investigations, the job he still holds.)

Hilarious. And at the same time, vicious.

One reason to suspect that affirmative action as such (as opposed to Raines’ guilt-complex) is not the main cause of the Jayson Blair affair: Macarena Hernandez, a Latina intern at the New York Times at the same time as Blair. She was the one who blew the whistle on her former colleague. And her story seems far more typical and encouraging.

A FIRST: Beagles are not exactly renowned for finding their way home. My own has no qualms about choosing between me and a potato chip. The chip wins every time. Which is all the more reason for giving thanks for this particular one. 800 miles?

Two new pieces – a review of Sidney Blumenthal’s new hagiography of Bill Clinton and of the role of the New York Times in American culture. Enjoy.

TESTOSTERONE TUBE: Yes, another T-product. Sales of testosterone jumped 52 percent last year. I was ahead of the curve, wasn’t I?

Bob Herbert writes an op-ed today about the Blair affair. No need to link, really. Like everything Herbert writes, the column was extravagantly crude, completely predictable and racially obsessed. In fact, the whole point of Herbert’s column is race. Maybe one in ten of his columns are not about race. But the Blair affair, Herbert insists, is not about race:

Now this would be a juicy story under any circumstances. But Mr. Blair is black, so there is the additional spice of race, to which so many Americans are terminally addicted. Listen up: the race issue in this case is as bogus as some of Jayson Blair’s reporting.

As Jonah Goldberg pointed out, if Americans are addicted to the issue of race, then Herbert is a major pusher. I’m skeptical that the Blair thing can be reduced simply to affirmative action. But I’m not skeptical that Blair’s race had something to do with Howell Raines’ treatment of him. Why am I not skeptical? Because Raines said so:

“Our paper has a commitment to diversity and by all accounts [Blair] appeared to be a promising young minority reporter,” Mr. Raines said. “I believe in aggressively providing hiring and career opportunities for minorities.” “Does that mean I personally favored Jayson?” he added, a moment later. “Not consciously. But you have a right to ask if I, as a white man from Alabama, with those convictions, gave him one chance too many by not stopping his appointment to the sniper team. When I look into my heart for the truth of that, the answer is yes.”

Herbert doesn’t mention this, but then he never mentions anything that might complicate his own self-righteous, racial preening. New York Magazine adds a nuance to this story-line:

“The two attitudes at the Times are Upper West Side liberal or southern guilt. Nobody knows how to deal with black as just neighbor,” notes one reporter. “The black reporters are really angry,” says one reporter. Because Blair opened the door to the idea that maybe they didn’t deserve to be there. Blair seemed to understand these issues, and turned them to his advantage. “There’s that perception that Howell has unique feelings in this realm, and the widespread perception is that this kid gamed the system,” says an editor. By all accounts, Blair was not hesitant to bring up race around the office. “As soon as we met, he wanted to know how I felt about him being a black man,” says a Times writer. “He was obsessed about how minorities were hired differently.”

Blair, it seems, took advantage of Raines’ Guilty Southern White Boy syndrome. This is what happens when race becomes the criterion of any enterprise. The point of a newspaper is not and should never be diversity. It should be journalism. And the idea that you need minority reporters to tackle minority issues is itself racially blinkered, and condescending. It leads to unreadable columns like Herbert’s. It impugns the abilities and talents of the many excellent minority journalists who simply want to do their jobs well. And it makes possible disasters like the Raines-Blair mutual fixation. The real tragedy of the current crisis at the Times is that the one shibboleth that needs to be addressed – the diversity obsession – is the one shibboleth that is off-limits.

I think it’s pretty obvious by now that the Pentagon has seriously misjudged the post-war situation in Iraq. The good news is that the administration seems to be responding, with more troops and more attention. 160,000 troops for a country the size of Iraq is not sufficient, certainly not in the short term. Shinseki was right in this respect; and Wolfowitz was wrong. There’s no scandal in this. War-plans are designed to be flexible. And now we need to be. For the war on terror to be successful, achieving stability and some measure of democracy in Iraq is an absolutely vital objective. It isn’t anti-Bush to say so. It’s precisely so that the president’s broad eight-year campaign against terror can succeed that Iraq must be successfully managed now. Before it slips out of our control. Does that mean naiton-building? You bet it does. So let’s build one, can we?

The disgusting murders in Israel in response to the slim chance of serious negotiation over the roadmap has drawn the predictable and defensible response from the Sharon government. Abbas has only minimal control over the terrorists who undermine him; Arafat is clearly in no mood to restrain the carnage; and the roadmap is dead without serious engagement from the Palestinians. It’s yet another suicide mission from the Palestinian Arabs. With the removal of Saddam and the emergence of Abbas, there was a new chance for some sort of progress. Once again, it has been thrown away. Sharon is hardly a risk-taker for peace; but who, under these circumstances, could be?

IS ARTHUR THE PROBLEM? David Warsh wonders if Sulzberger’s job is safe.

How do you report the latest suicide bombings in Israel? How about with a headline like: “Israel tightens curbs on Palestinians”? You’ve got to keep the focus on the real criminals, after all. Meanwhile, the Tories are filing a formal complaint against the left-wing corporation for blatant bias in the recent local elections. As one leading Tory puts it: “Just look at the fact that the BBC recruits entirely from advertisements in the Guardian. Obviously, media jobs are advertised in the Guardian, but it says something about where the centre of gravity in the BBC is.” More important, just look at what the Beeb’s disgruntled hacks read every day. Meanwhile, the latest BBC smear is against Private Jessica Lynch. Glenn has the goods. I remember the reporter, John Kampfner, from my Oxford days. He was a unreconstructed far-lefty. No doubt these days he’s a reconstructed one.

THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE TO GERMAINE: Germaine Greer complains about the replacement in Tony Blair’s government of Claire Short with Valerie Ann-Amos, the first black woman in a British cabinet. Greer’s unforgettable line:

Short’s successor as Secretary of State, Valerie Ann Amos, a Blairite look-alike for Condoleezza Rice, was raised by Blair to the peerage in 1997, and subsequently appointed Foreign Office Minister responsible for Africa, on the sole ground that he trusts her – a presidential move if ever there was one.

Excuse me? I fail to see the resemblance.

HITCH VERSUS SID: One journalist fact-checks another.

HOW HIP WE ARE: Blogging dominated the NYT’s Sunday Styles section. We finally made it. But do I have to wear black now?

Patrick Ruffini and correspondents discuss why many leading blogs tend rightward. But many of us are far from conventionally “right-wing,” and differ in many ways from, say, Republican orthodoxy. The war on terror obscured and obscures these differences and now that domestic matters are returning, you’re beginning to see some nuances. I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative, for example, which is almost the opposite of the current Republican establishment, which is socially conservative and fiscally liberal (they dropped the fiscal conservatism as soon as a Republican won the presidency). It’s equally hard to pigeonhole Glenn Reynolds or Mickey Kaus, let alone the vast, diverse bunch with less bandwidth. And blogs definitely favor such idiosyncratic types – those who don’t fit into the kind of ideological conformity that lies behind, say, the Weekly Standard or the Nation, and so don’t have a magazine to support and promote them. As to the greater eclecticism of those broadly on the right, I’d say Patrick’s onto something. I’m forgetting who coined this phrase but I think it’s largely true that today’s right looks for converts whereas today’s left looks for heretics. That’s why the left tends to be duller, more self-absorbed and generally less entertaining than the right. The right is always trying to build an audience; the left is busy purging theirs’.

ORWELL’S RELIGION: It turns out this famous atheist had a supernatural side. Voodoo, to be precise.

ANOTHER LEAKED MEMO: This time, from yours truly.

POSEUR ALERT: “But as ballsy belligerence gave way to millennial flakiness, so cleansing emerged as the cosmetic ceremony du jour, with its modish connotations of purifying, stripping bare and revealing the inner outer self. If moisturiser is the double espresso of the beauty world, then cleanser is its camomile tea… something I look forward to, a cathartic close to the end of the day. Besides, it’s so now, so this time of the year.” – Hannah Bett,s the Times of London, as reported in Private Eye.

The British satirical and gossip magazine, Private Eye, reports in its print edition that there are some strange discrepancies in Robert Fisk’s datelines:

As British hacks return from Baghdad, they have been belatedly catching up on what their rivals wrote during the war. -They are surveying the dispatches of the Independent’s Robert Fisk with particular interest – and some amazement. On 2 April, three busloads of foreign hacks were taken by Saddam’s spin-doctors to the town of Hillah to interview wounded Iraqis in the hospital. -all of them –including Fisk – duly filed pieces on what they had witnessed. But the Indie’s living legend sent a second report that day, datelined “from Robert Fisk in Musayyib, Central Iraq.” Very vivid it was too. “Cafes and restaurants were open, shops were selling takeaway meatballs and potatoes,” he wrote. “This was not a population on the edge of starvation; nor indeed did the people appear to be frightened.-If the Americans are about to launch an assault through this farmland of canals and forests of palm trees and wheat fields, it looked at first glance yesterday like a country at peace.” How had all the other hacks missed this? They were under the distinct impression that they had been ferried straight from Baghdad along the motorway to Hillah and then straight back again. They remembered no detours, no stops en route and no visits to Musayyib; they thought they had been allowed to leave the buses only for their chaperoned tour of the casualty ward. How had Fisk managed to visit Musayyib? And how come the picture he gave in the Indie did not quite tally with the fact that by the time he wrote his report the Americans had taken control of the main bridge at Musayyib, and hundreds of US military vehicles were already crossing the Euphrates?

Good question.

PROPHETIC ELLIS: Some of the best commentary on the Blair affair came a year ago on John Ellis’s blog:

The Rainesian management model resembles a kind of anti-network; in which an ever-smaller number of people are engaged in the guidance and definition of the enterprise. As the network narrows, the center (Raines and his management team) grows in importance. At its worst, this kind of management leads to the Sun God management system, in which The Great Leader is surrounded by adoring sycophants. Raines is a prime candidate to fall into this trap, since his ego needs greatly exceed his management skills.

Prescient, no?

GLASS HALF EMPTY: Rich Blow eviscerates fabricator Stephen Glass’s novel, “The Fabulist.” Money graf:

Glass’ ability to apologize while simultaneously insisting that his wrongs were trivial; his sneering portrayal of journalists even as he begs our forgiveness; his insistence that his book is fiction even as he asks you to believe that his repentance is real; all this goes beyond chutzpah into self-delusion. Part of Steve Glass wants to give the world the finger; an equal part just wants to be hugged.

And the important thing now is that he be ignored.

Newsweek makes this blog look uninterested in the Jayson Blair affair. Alter makes a good point:

I hate to admit it, but Matt Drudge put it well a few weeks ago when he said: “The statue of Peter Jennings has been pulled down.” The whole authority structure of mass media is being undermined by the ability of news consumers to move from passive to active, from accepting everything they read in the Times to searching and finding http://www.I-know-I-read-it-somewhere-on-the-Internet-so-it-must-be-true.com.

Or checking in with bloggers for fresh angles and info. But I don’t see how the Blair affair shows this particularly strongly. What the web has done is show how the media operates; bloggers have helped point out that, say, the increasingly left-liberal slant of the Times is a conscious decision by a single man. We’ve pulled the curtain back at Oz. But we certainly didn’t create the Blair scandal, which would have broken regardless of the Internet. All we did is make the reading public less shocked by what goes on inside the Times: we lowballed expectations. Which, in some ways, alleviates Howell’s problem, rather than intensifies it.