Month: May 2003

“For years, many governments played down the threats of Islamic revolution, turned a blind eye to international terrorism and accepted the development of weaponry of mass destruction. Indeed, some politicians were happy to go further, collaborating with the self-proclaimed enemies of the West for their own short-term gain – but enough about the French. So deep had the rot set in that the UN security council itself was paralysed… Our own Prime Minister was staunch and our forces were superb. But, above, all, it is President Bush who deserves the credit for victory…There are too many people who imagine that there is something sophisticated about always believing the best of those who hate your country, and the worst of those who defend it.” – Margaret Thatcher, in New York yesterday. God I miss her.

It was, by all accounts, an extraordinary outpouring of anger from the staff of the New York Times at the mercurial, arbitrary and incompetent management of executive editor, Howell Raines. He was asked directly if he would resign. As predicted in this blog, Arthur Sulzberger said he would refuse such a resignation. Since Raines’ policies – “diversity” at all costs and left-liberal spin in every important story – are indeed Sulzberger’s own policies, Raines’ departure would have left Sulzberger badly exposed. The mea culpa from Raines, however, was remarkably candid:

“You view me as inaccessible and arrogant,” Mr. Raines said, ticking off a list he had compiled from his own newsroom interviews in recent days. “You believe the newsroom is too hierarchical, that my ideas get acted on and others get ignored. I heard that you were convinced there’s a star system that singles out my favorites for elevation.” “Fear,” he added, “is a problem to such extent, I was told, that editors are scared to bring me bad news.”

Then Raines essentially conceded that his own obsession with racial diversity had been a factor in the Jayson Blair affair:

“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.”

That resolves the question of whether race was a factor. Yes, it was. Of course, the issue was not just the appointment as such, but how information about Blair’s past record had been withheld from his subsequent editors. One brave soul ventured the following:

“I believe that at a deep level you guys have lost the confidence of many parts of the newsroom,” said Joe Sexton, a deputy metropolitan editor, according to notes taken by an audience member. “I do not feel a sense of trust and reassurance that judgments are properly made.” “People feel less led than bullied,” he added.

The ruling triumvirate deserve credit for opening themselves up to this onslaught from within, and for publishing it, but it seems they had little choice. Their strategy is a smart one: by complete candor and remorse, they hope to stave off the obvious response to a failure of this magnitude: their own departures from the scene. Whether this gambit will work is now up to the Times’ board, shareholders, and staff. I have a feeling this story is not over yet.

My review of Sidney Blumenthal’s epic on the Clinton presidency (yes, I read 800 pages and wrote the piece in two days) is now up at the New York Observer. I’ve always liked Sid, but the book is unbelievable. I hope he forgives me for an honest review.

UDAY’S BAD DAY: It seems that the $1 billion looted money for Saddam and his family has been recovered. One reason I’m not too gloomy about Iraq is that so many of the worst stories – the looting of the museum, the $1 billion theft – turn out to be much less worrying in retrospect.

Now, here’s a tax bill I could get behind.

WHEN BADGERS ATTACK: Not a Fox special. Yet.

WHO READS BLOGS? Here’s an academic questionnaire designed to answer that question. It takes about 20 minutes.

POSEUR ALERT : “Samuel Pepys, the famous 17th-century diarist, mentions crumpets in his diaries. Crumpets are imported from England by Starck & Sons, a company based in tree-lined Garden City, Long Island. I would stand leaning on my off-white Formica counter and watch, bleary-eyed and depressed, as the large aluminum toaster glowed brighter and brighter like a sunrise in palm-tree-lined Sevilla, where I spent my junior year abroad, and met Carmencita, my first serious girlfriend, whom I have been reluctantly seeing in an addictive, destructive, co-dependent relationship, on and off, for 23 years. And then – zing! – the crumpets would pop up, ready to be eaten.” – Lee Siegel, in a passage he claims to have decided not to publish, in a “matutinal fit of frustration and despair.” The guy is beyond parody.

Al Qaeda’s latest barbarism begins to receive hostile coverage in the Arab press. Get a load of this editorial from the Saudi Arab News:

We have to face up to the fact that we have a terrorist problem here. Last week’s Interior Ministry announcement that 19 Al-Qaeda members, 17 of them Saudis, had planned terrorist attacks in the country and were being hunted was a wake-up call – particularly to those who steadfastly refuse to accept that individual Saudis or Muslims could ever do anything evil, who still cling to the fantasy that Sept. 11 and all the other attacks laid at the doors of terrorists who happen to be Arab or Muslim were in fact the work of the Israelis or the CIA. For too long we have ignored the truth. We did not want to admit that Saudis were involved in Sept. 11. We can no longer ignore that we have a nest of vipers here, hoping that by doing so they will go away. They will not. They are our problem and we all their targets now… There is much in US policy to condemn; there are many aspects of Western society that offend – and where necessary, Arab governments condemn. But anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism for their own sake are crude, ignorant and destructive. They create hate. They must end. Otherwise there will be more barbarities.

Those who said that deposing Saddam would only make the U.S. more isolated in the terror war were wrong.

In case you thought the Blair debacle was the only indicator of the Times’ slide, you obviously haven’t been reading Maureen Dowd. Today featured a classic, well, distortion. Here’s Dowd’s dumb-as-a-post take on Bush’s conduct of the war on terror:

Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. “Al Qaeda is on the run,” President Bush said last week. “That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated… They’re not a problem anymore.”

Here’s what Bush actually said:

Al Qaeda is on the run. That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly, but surely being decimated. Right now, about half of all the top al Qaeda operatives are either jailed or dead. In either case, they’re not a problem anymore.

It’s perfectly clear that the president is referring, sardonically, only to those members of al Qaeda who are “either jailed or dead,” not to the group as a whole. Everything we know about this president tells us that he has always warned of the permanent danger of groups like al Qaeda, has always talked of a long war, and would never say the words that Dowd puts in his mouth. So this is a wilful fabrication. Will they run a correction? Don’t count on it.

BLAIR, GLASS, SHALIT: A perceptive email from John Tabin, whose review of Stephen Glass’s novel can be found here:

You say, “comparing Shalit’s errors to the vast, conscious fraud of the Blair or Glass cases seems to me to be a very big stretch.” Actually, comparing even the Stephen Glass case to Jayson Blair is a stretch– a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card for the management, who can just say, “people determined to lie are hard to catch, no matter what your fact-checking system.” The problem with this is that Glass was a lot more careful than Blair about not getting caught. In his book (which I reviewed for TechCentralStation.com Monday), his fictional alter-ego goes to great lengths to thwart the fact-checking system; because he knows how it works, he makes sure never to raise any red flags (faking notes, etc.). That this is true-to-life is corroborated by his 60 Minutes interview, in which he both talked about this and pointed out that, since his sources were fabricated, they never complained.
In contrast, Blair quoted real people, did many more stories (big, important stories, in the case of the sniper investigation), and his editors knew about his problems a long time ago. Unlike Glass, Blair had raised many red flags that were consciously ignored– indeed, he was promoted.
If Blair had been as crafty as Glass, Raines might have been forgiven for overlooking his problems. But he wasn’t that crafty– he was caught, and promoted anyway. I’d say it’s well past time for Pinch to start “demonizing [his] executives.”

Shafer, who’s been spinning for Raines for a year now, needs to face reality. One more addendum: Shafer continues to imply that my criticism of the Raines Times was due to my being fired. That’s the opposite of the truth. My criticisms began when I was still under contract. I felt I owed my blog readers the truth, not my attempt to suck up to the Times’ new management. I was sent veiled warnings to stop the criticism or face the music. I kept criticising. Raines fired me. And the obvious truth is that I was right from the beginning, and saw this problem sooner than most others. Shafer, purportedly a media critic, missed the boat on this huge story. So he’s lashing out at those who didn’t.

Former NFL star, Pat Tillman, who quit football to serve his country, is still in Iraq. And doing fine.

THE LATEST NEWS FROM THE NYT: More humor to lighten the day.

The New York Times poll today must be welcome in the White House. Most people, like me, still find this president strong, likable, and focused. But there are two issues on which, in my opinion, the administration is in some denial about its vulnerability. The first is the question of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Where are they? It’s possible they have been destroyed, or smuggled out, or sold. It’s possible the program was far less ready-to-go than we were led to believe. But we were led to believe that there were large quantities of dangerous materials that posed an imminent threat. If they are not found, the public needs an explanation. We need to be told what exactly, for example, was true in Colin Powell’s December address to the U.N., and what was not. We need to know that we were not deceived or that the intelligence services are not wildly incompetent or politically manipulable. I don’t know the answer; but I do know we need one. Personally, I support the war more fervently now for humanitarian and broader security reasons. But that’s beside the point. Was Powell accurate? If not, why not? I understand if a definitive answer to that is not yet available, but that’s not a reason to defer or forget the question.

BUSH IS VULNERABLE II: The second matter is the federal deficit. The Rovian base may not give a damn, but this issue helped torpedo Bush’s father’s re-election and has major appeal to independent voters. Why do the Republicans think this is no big deal? When I see the president campaigning for another huge tax cut, while the deficit heads into the clouds, I have to ask whether this administration is serious about economic and fiscal responsibility. And, hey, I loathe taxes. If the Bushies are losing me on this issue, they’re screwed. Here are a couple of quotes from independents in the Times today:

“We need to lower the deficit,” said Ed Petrone, 73, an independent voter from Boca Raton, Fla., in a follow-up interview. “Reducing taxes is only a short-term bump in the economy. Lowering the deficit will help us down the road. Reduce the deficit and we can put more money in the economy.” Carroll Smith, 76, an independent voter from Gallipolis, Ohio, said, “If they would balance the budget, the country would be in better shape.”

Yes, the president can say that the war ate my surplus. But he knows that’s only partly true. The huge spending record of this administration could make a Lieberman or Graham candidacy look a lot more palatable. I raise these questions not because I want this president to fail. On the contrary. I want him to succeed. But for the right reasons.
(P.S.: A reader rebuts my notion that independents are “bailing” on Bush on the Letters Page.)

ANOTHER PROTESTOR ARRESTED: This is getting creepier all the time.

QUOTE FOR THE DAY: “Look, I’d much rather put my cards on the table and let people know where I stand in a clear editorial, than insidiously imply it in what’s supposed to be a straight news story. And by the way, you sanctimonious twit, no one – no one – tells me what to say. I say it. And I write it. And no one lectures me on it. Save you, you pretentious charlatan.” – Neil Cavuto, responding somewhat intemperately to Paul Krugman.

SICK OF NPR ON ISRAEL? Then join a protest scheduled for today.

TWO NEW PIECES: A round-up of what Hillary might be up to; and a reply to Dennis Prager’s arguments about homosexuality. Enjoy.

David Letterman has some fun at the expense of the old Gray Lady.

CAN RAINES SURVIVE? The short answer is that it’s up to Arthur Sulzberger who has a record of deferring to Raines when under pressure. But from what I’m hearing about the mood among Times reporters and editors, Raines is on the brink of being unable to effectively continue. Yesterday afternoon, as the backlash grew, the ruling triumvirate of Boyd, Raines and Sulzberger, abruptly canceled small meetings and announced a big “town hall meeting” to address the crisis for today at 2.30 pm. There are whispers of a work slowdown to force Raines out. And the whole notion of a criminal investigation into the Jayson Blair affair is truly bizarre. What is this about? Is there more that we do not know?

Jack Shafer, in an attempt to defend Howell Raines, dredges up from the past my own experiences as an editor with Ruth Shalit almost a decade ago. Yes, there sure were problems, although the case was a good deal more complicated (and strange) than Shafer alleges. It was about a series of incidents when Shalit interpolated shards of boilerplate newspaper prose from others into her own stories. It took us a while to realize what was going on; but as soon as we figured out the problem, we corrected, exposed, apologized and closely monitored Ruth to prevent further errors. I wanted to give her a chance to recover. When further errors emerged, she took leave. Soon after, I quit. I still regret not handling it better. I was on a book tour when the affair first emerged and didn’t focus on the issue or realize its seriousness soon enough. I definitely screwed up. I apologize again, all these years later. And that experience led me to sympathize with and endorse Raines’ initial response to the matter (before the full extent of the affair became known last Sunday). That said, comparing Shalit’s errors to the vast, conscious fraud of the Blair or Glass cases seems to me to be a very big stretch. Shafer’s editor, Jake Weisberg, explains the difference. This is from the City Paper of four years ago:

Jacob Weisberg, a columnist for Slate, left the New Republic in 1994 after a brief period as Shalit’s colleague. He thinks she got screwed. “I’m sorry she isn’t going to get a second chance. I think the Steve Glass thing just sort of snowballed onto her when, in fact, they had nothing to do with each other … It’s like comparing a parking ticket to a war crime,” he says, adding, “The punishment didn’t fit the crime. I think there was a lot of piling on.”

I agree with Jake, although I think, in retrospect, my own punishment was not severe enough. Ruth took the brunt of the criticism but I deserved to take more. But does that make the current Blair meltdown at the most prestigious institution in American journalism any less significant? Or my arguments about it any less valid?