Month: May 2003

Now he’s deporting journalists in handcuffs.

All the signs are pointing to a serious screw-up. Patience is one thing. But the reporting from the country, including this devastating account from a pro-war writer, suggests that the state of affairs there is spiraling out of control. Even if the voters won’t punish Bush for finding no WMDs, they sure as hell will hold him responsible if Iraq collapses into chaos or civil war. And they should.

THE BOYD ISSUE: Mickey Kaus’s New York Times mole ends his/her latest missive with these words: “Here’s the moose in The Times newsroom: Gerald Boyd.” So far, Boyd, who has distanced himself from Jayson Blair faster than Rupaul from Rick Santorum, is indeed an interesting case. Given what has happened, it’s amazing no one has taken responsibility and quit at the Times. Usually, the head-guy gets his underling to walk the plank, which, in this case, would be Boyd. But the Times can hardly be seen to fire not one but two black staffers, so Boyd stays. (I’m not saying he’s more responsible than Raines, just that he’d be the usual scapegoat guy.) The result, I think, is the worst of all worlds for the Times. The current leadership is the problem; everyone knows it; but no one will budge. There’s an obvious solution: bring in the remarkably sane Bill Keller to replace Raines; and promote the hero Jonathan Landman to replace Boyd. But pride won’t let Sulzberger do what has to be done to save the Times from itself. And that’s the real moose in the room.

A WEBSITE FOR HOWELL: A solution to his condescending diversity obsession?

A STIFF UPPER LIP: A British golfer gets hit by lightning – twice in one round. He’s not taking it personally.

How to explain tha lack of WMDs in Iraq? Were we lied to? Is our intelligence flawed? Were the weapons destroyed? But if Saddam had no such weapons, why didn’t he simply open up his country to the inspectors? Jim Lacey posits another theory: that Saddam was conned by his own underlings into believing that the WMD program was working:

In the event that we do not find the WMD smoking gun this is the only explanation that would make any sense. Saddam wanted the program and was willing to endure crippling sanctions to have it. However, his henchmen were unable to deliver and, unwilling to be on the receiving end of Saddam’s zero-defects program, they faked it. In the process of making Saddam believe he had a functioning program they could easily have sucked U.S. intelligence into the deception. In fact, deceiving U.S. intelligence in this way would have been important to them. It would not have been conducive to a long life if the United States had come to Saddam and told him they had discovered he had no WMD program and all of his most trusted advisers were lying.

Ingenious, methinks. But the bottom line of Lacey’s argument is that our intelligence caused Bush and Blair to commit extraordinary errors in front of the entire world. Where is the accountability for that?

Two days after he quit the New York Times, Jayson Blair, whose credit cards were all maxed out and who used national editor Jim Roberts’ card for expenses, somehow paid off a $3853 American Express bill. Whence the sudden infusion of money?

Whatever you think about the president’s tax proposals (I think they’re too expensive right now, without more spending cuts), you have to hand it to him. He keeps on message; he plays hard; he keeps it simple; and, generally speaking, he wins. If he gets a tax bill anything like the one the Senate just passed, he will have shown a mastery in Washington unknown for a very long time. For economic good or bad.

WHEN IT RAINES, IT BORES: The boyfriend has ordered that I cease and desist all further mention of the Raines-Blair scandal, so I’ll just give you the link. The scandal could be widening. And Seth Mnookin clearly wants to make this story his own.

GAYS AND REPUBLICANS: The conventional wisdom on the far right is that the Republicans shouldn’t be afraid to be the anti-gay party, because that’s where the votes are. The assumption is that support for gay equality is a huge political loser. That might have been true in the past, but it’s changing swiftly. Check out yesterday’s latest Gallup poll on attitudes toward homosexuality. To the question: “Do you think homosexual couples should or should not have the same legal rights as married heterosexual couples regarding healthcare benefits and Social Security survivor benefits?” 62 percent answered yes. The country is split 50-50 on whether gay couples should have civil union rights equivalent to marriage, erasing a 12-point advantage to the anti-gay forces only three years ago. On the generic question of whether homosexuality should be considered “an acceptable lifestyle,” the percentage approving has gone from 34 percent to 54 percent in twenty years, while those opposing have dropped from 51 percent to 43 percent. 88 percent believe gays should have protection from being fired for their sexual orientation (a federal protection the religious right has withheld from gays). And on what you might call the Santorum question on whether gay sex should be legal, the split is 60 to 35 percent in favor of legal gay sex. There is no question which way the middle of this country is moving. None whatsoever. Santorum, Delay, Robertson, Bauer, Connor, and the rest, represent an increasingly isolated, bitter and angry constituency that is fast losing the argument. The question for the GOP is whether it wants to reach out to a growing and increasingly accepted community, or whether it wants to tie its fate to a group that is out of step with basic standards of American tolerance, equality and compassion.

A SUGGESTION: The president may not want to endorse gay marriage; but there are concrete measures he could take to strike a centrist position. The most obvious would be to endorse the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which would give gays the same workplace protections as other minorities. 88 percent of the country endorses this. It’s a simple case of workplace fairness. It doesn’t involve any approval of homosexual sex, since this is about public workplaces. It could and should exempt religious groups. And it would be a huge sign to the center of the country that Bush is actually an inclusive and compassionate president. I’ve had my libertarian doubts about such laws in the past; but I cannot see any reason why they should apply to every other group – including religious denominations – but not to gays. Memo to Rove: get on the right side of history and the right side of fairness. If a Republican president signed a measure no Democrat managed to, you will destroy in one swoop the Democratic grip on a key and influential constituency. Gays represent 5 percent of the vote or more. You’ve got a quarter of them already. Do this, and you’ll make huge gains. You’ll soon need to show the country you’re capable of reaching out beyond the far right. This is one way you can do it.

DA MAN: “Your quote of the day from Neil Cavuto shows why, no matter how hard I try, I just can’t take any commentator on Fox seriously. Cavuto is the typical Fox anchor – he puts on this macho-look-how-big-a-populist-I-am he-man image; but as soon as someone criticizes them they act like a bitchy sorority girl who has just found out that one of their sisters has been spreading rumors that she is not a real blonde.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

Howell Raines has written about journalistic lapses in the past. Here’s his August 13, 1998, jeremiad after the Mike Barnicle affair:

At this newspaper and others, people have been dismissed for making things up. The Times, The Globe and The Washington Post have all given lesser punishments to reporters for failing to attribute material first used in other publications’ news articles. The Globe’s vacillation in a case that combines borrowing and lack of candor with the editors illustrates a general rule. Public respect for newspapering is wounded when rules that would be enforced with doctrinal ferocity among the mass of journalists are lightened for a star who has great value to the paper. The damage is internal as well. It says to young journalists that the contract of trust that we ask them to sign – about what they write and what they tell their editors – is not really absolute or equally enforced.

This brings us to an important point about the sociology of journalism. Mr. Barnicle is an immensely popular figure in Boston and in the journalistic world. In the last few days, he has been the beneficiary of a vigorous public-relations campaign among the profession’s old-boy network. Important broadcast journalists have promoted the idea that Mr. Barnicle was being sacrificed for minor mistakes so that The Globe could get by with firing a black woman. His middle-aged white male colleagues at The Globe have rallied around.

I am haunted by something I know in my bones. If you take Mr. Barnicle out of the picture and imagine instead Ms. Smith being brought up on the charges of using unattributed material and misleading her editors, she would not have such prominent and persistent defenders. That is because Mr. Barnicle, like this writer, is a product of a male-dominated, mostly white tribal culture that takes care of its own. A great deal of effort has been expended throughout journalism over the past 20 years to make sure the newsroom tribe includes every color, gender and sexual orientation. Long after Mr. Barnicle settles back into his column, the historical bottom line of this event will be that a white guy with the right connections got pardoned for offenses that would have taken down a minority or female journalist.

You’ll buy my position, of course, only if you believe in strict enforcement of rules about borrowing, lifting and leveling with colleagues, and if you believe, as I do, that if you have to choose between a worthy but erring colleague and the newspaper itself, you choose for the paper. After all, all the members of this profession know the rules when we sign up. They are rules based on a tradition of trust that cannot be ignored without stirring anxiety in the newsroom and suspicion among the readers.

The critical question, of course, is: why do the firm rules that apply to “leveling with colleagues” not apply to Raines himself? Why, when he has conceded that he is responsible for a fundamental breach in the “tradition of trust,” does he not live by the rules he enforces for others? Is he too benefiting from a “a male-dominated, mostly white tribal culture that takes care of its own”?

Josh Marshall has the goods.

Howie Kurtz focuses on the critical issue this morning:

The most difficult exchanges came when the metro desk’s Sexton asked why no action was taken after the strong challenges to Blair’s reporting in the sniper case – including from the paper’s own Washington bureau. The U.S. attorney in Maryland disputed a Blair article that said suspect John Muhammad’s interrogation was cut short just as he was about to confess, and a Fairfax County prosecutor called a news conference to denounce a second piece as “dead wrong.” Raines and his team “did nothing” to verify “the authenticity or quality of his reporting,” Sexton said. Why, he asked, did no senior editor demand to know the identities of Blair’s unnamed sources? Raines said it was his failure not to ask about the sources. He said he had “a political reporter’s DNA,” not “a police reporter’s DNA.” But he also said that after examining Blair’s story and a Washington Post account, he believed the story about the truncated interrogation was at least partially true.

Is there a company on the planet where an executive who had made such a decision would still be in place? If an Enron executive had made a similar decision, do you think Raines would be calling for him to stay in place? (My favorite Raines line: “Don’t demagogue me.” And if Ken Lay had said that?)

“Think of [the New York Times’ affirmative action program] in a nonracial context: Suppose the owner of a big company sends his kid to learn the business and tells low-level managers to treat him just like anyone else. The managers curry favor with the boss by reporting that his son is doing great and is a natural genius for this business. So the kid keeps getting praised and promoted, until one day he is actually put in charge of something he has no ability to run. That is cruel. And it’s the story of Pinch Sulzberger, isn’t it?” – Ann Coulter.

THE RAINES REGIME: Don’t buy the “I’m a humble new man” spiel of yesterday. While Raines was spinning his way out of real responsibility for the Blair mess, the Boston Globe (owned by Sulzberger) was spiking a column critical of the Times. Dictators don’t reform. They have to be deposed.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY II: “The issue in advancing newsroom diversity is that you have to get people into gate-keeper roles. You have to force your hiring managers to find talent and demand that every pool of applicants for any job includes at least one woman and one minority.” – Arthur Sulzberger Jr., on how he imposes racial preferences in every single job at the paper (except his own), August 8, 2002.