Month: May 2003

“Mr. Blair’s Times supervisors and Maryland professors emphasize that he earned an internship at The Times because of glowing recommendations and a remarkable work history, not because he is black. The Times offered him a slot in an internship program that was then being used in large part to help the paper diversify its newsroom.” – from today’s New York Times. So what was it? Diversity or ability? And if his professors were so impressed, why didn’t Blair manage to graduate? Either the Times editors are completely incompetent at judging journalistic skills; or they judge reporters on the basis of their race. Neither conclusion is particularly edifying, is it? Coming Monday: “flood-the-zone” coverage of the Raines-induced meltdown at the New York Times.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “As a denizen of much-denigrated Fleet Street – and the tabloid end, too – I have only three initial things to say about this sorry episode: Ha! Ha! Ha! There’s got to be a great movie script in here. But it would never be made because Hollywood suffers from the same urge to mouth racial platitudes as the NYT does in its pages and hiring policies. It could never happen here in London. Why? Because other, scooped reporters who had been beaten on stories by what we call a “make-up merchant” would have grassed him up to organs like Private Eye. The whole thing has enabled us all to laugh heartily at the haughty Olympians of the NYT. And for that we should be very, very grateful.” – from a gloating British hack.

SUDDENLY: Being barred from writing for the New York Times by Howell Raines feels like a huge compliment.

I’ve just read through the seemingly endless litany of errors, fraud, plagiarism and lies from Jayson Blair. It strikes me that his offenses may be even worse than Stephen Glass’s. The most striking thing to me was how obvious the plagiarism was, and how many times Blair’s datelines were completely fabricated. Did no one use a quick Nexis search to check for plagiarism? Did any of the plagiarized complain? And how do you lose track of where your reporter actually is – not just once, but many, many times? This is surely far worse than anyone has hitherto realized: a web of deception that takes the Times almost 7,000 words to parse and correct. And the reckoning still may not be complete. I’d say it’s the biggest blow to the credibility of newspaper journalism since the Janet Cooke affair. But will anyone apart from Blair be held responsible?

“Would Jason Blair have been “caught” earlier if he had been white?-This is not something a liberal Southerner like Howell Raines would-ever like to admit, but it is a question that must-be asked. Indeed, Raines seems to be-hanging Blair out to dry all by himself-for what MUST be-an institutional problem. Students in my journalism class ask-the right question-right away: “Why wasn’t this pattern SEEN?”-When Terence Smith put that same question to Raines in his interview on the News Hour, Raines-sidestepped-it.-The editing process at the Times, he says,-is multi-layered and designed to ferret out deliberate deception. This does not answer my students’ question. It is juse an excuse.
-Entering this taboo territory of racial cutting-slack would make an interesting story for a journalism review: It would involve interviewing black reporters about-the pressures they may feel under, about the reluctance of white editors to call them to account (especially when they are charmers and suckups as Blair seems to have been), -about special pleading and special deals made for those whom Raines has called – and I paraphrase from Terence Smith’s quote on the News Hour interview – “just the sort of person the Times is looking for” as a reporter.- And it would involve some statistics checking: Has the Times dismissed anyone else with similar or higher records of inaccuracy?-Who?
-You cannot have 1,000 journalists in a building – people trained to sniff out problems – and-MISS this problem unless-there were-some kind of cultural blinkering going on.-
That’s the real soul-searching that needs to go on at the Times. From Raines initial comments, it’s not happening.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

To their great credit, the New York Times has responded today at length to the frauds perpetrated in their newspaper by one Jayson Blair. Money quote:

A staff reporter for The New York Times committed frequent acts of journalistic fraud while covering significant news events in recent months, an investigation by Times journalists has found. The widespread fabrication and plagiarism represent a profound betrayal of trust and a low point in the 152-year history of the newspaper. The reporter, Jayson Blair, 27, misled readers and Times colleagues with dispatches that purported to be from Maryland, Texas and other states, when often he was far away, in New York. He fabricated comments. He concocted scenes. He stole material from other newspapers and wire services. He selected details from photographs to create the impression he had been somewhere or seen someone, when he had not. And he used these techniques to write falsely about emotionally charged moments in recent history, from the deadly sniper attacks in suburban Washington to the anguish of families grieving for loved ones killed in Iraq.

So far, around half of Blair’s 73 articles have been found to be tainted in some way. I think Howell Raines has behaved impeccably in response to this, just as Charles Lane at The New Republic became a real hero in his confrontation with the last fabulist, Stephen Glass, in similar circumstances. The truth is: if someone truly is committed to perpetrating fraud, it’s hard to prevent it. You can’t have minders for every reporter in the field. All you can do is correct, apologize, and then figure out some ways to tighten the net. Affirmative action might have had something to do with Blair’s long run of error; but it didn’t explain Glass. Charm can be these fraudsters’ strongest weapon. Unfortunately, it seems that some of this in Blair’s case was preventable:

The Times inquiry also establishes that various editors and reporters expressed misgivings about Mr. Blair’s reporting skills, maturity and behavior during his five-year journey from raw intern to reporter on national news events. Their warnings centered mostly on his struggle to make fewer errors in his articles. His mistakes became so routine, his behavior so unprofessional, that by April 2002, Jonathan Landman, the metropolitan editor, dashed off a two-sentence e-mail message to newsroom administrators that read: “We have to stop Jayson from writing for the Times. Right now.”

The Times will now have to figure out why it took them another year before that happened.

THE GOP CHOICE: Two stories: one about Log Cabin Republicans meeting the administration, engaging the Bushies and affirming the right of gay Republicans to be in the party. Meanwhile, RNC Chair Marc Racicot, who definitely is an inclusive man, has to endure a religious right inquisition, in which he has to tell his questioners about his precise views on gay male sex. The divide couldn’t be starker. Or harder, at this point, to bridge.

AN A.P. CORRECTION: This one’s a beaut:

In a May 6 story about Arabs’ “right of return” to Israel, The Associated Press erroneously reported that 4 million Arabs fled the war that followed Israel’s creation in 1948. About 700,000 to 750,000 Arabs are believed to have fled or were expelled from the territory that became Israel in that war, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Today, surviving refugees together with their descendants are estimated by UNRWA to number about 4 million.

How many treasures were stolen from the Baghdad museum again?

“RECKLESS” NUDITY: A new British legal standard.

Marguerite Kelly writes a column so honest, so humane, so moving, it makes you realize why her son was as good a writer as he was.

An amazing Freudian slip from the New York Times’ executive editor. He even held Jayson Blair up as an exemplum of the New York Times’ priorities. Ouch.

An interesting take from a blogger on the politics of inconsistency. He really goes for Jonah and argues that Burke would be on my side asking, at least, for some kind of practical reason why gambling is much less socially destructive than, say, private gay sex or (another Bennett bugaboo) watching “The Simpsons”:

Goldberg’s Burkean argufying is wrong-footed. Burke objects to mysterious, metaphysical crashlandings from outer space into the organic lives of peoples. For example, ABSOLUTE RIGHTS. His point: just look how these huge, rigid things will fit in, or, rather, will not. I think this Burkean impulse to reject such things can be construed as a serious (if not decisive) objection to, say, Dworkinesque ‘taking rights seriously’. But this has nothing whatsoever to do with the case at hand. In the case at hand, there are certain primary attitudes – ABSOLUTE WRONGS, which amount to metaphysical principles at best; biases at worst – against homosexuality, but not gambling, so forth. And you have folk like Andrew Sullivan taking, in effect, the Burkean line. They are saying: look at how all this fits in with the lives of people. Why should that guy, gambling, be worse than me, having sex with other guys. Just think about it; by which he means, not, ‘become a completely barking mad metaphysician’ but, ‘put these forms of life in the context of “the proliferating variety and mystery of human existence.”‘ You will see that it makes no sense to maintain these harsh, humanly hurtful exclusionary principles. And the answer comes back: but we must. These absolute differences came from outer space and crashlanded on our planet long ago. There is no earthly reason to accept them but here they are. So if Burke supports anyone in this dust-up, it’s Andrew Sullivan against those inhabiting a cloud cuckooland of metaphysical pieties about which things are OK to put into which slots, which cranks are OK to pull, which not.

Quite. Burke, of course, was extremely consistent in many ways – and fought hard against the conservative grain in his own culture, on independence for Americans, for example. (Can you imagine what an eighteenth century John Derbyshire would have said about that?) But then, as some American conservatives seem to have forgotten, Burke was a Whig, not a Tory. I like to think that if were around today, Burke would be an “eagle.” And certainly not a theocon.

How’s this for a classified ad: “”Hyperactive kid for sale, good at vacuuming, not great at washing dishes because he’s too short. Guaranteed to annoy. $5 or nearest offer.” Yep, the police investigated.

Peter Beinart should have the last word on Bill Bennett. (Oh, and I’ll be defending the empowered gambler on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” this weekend. I gave up being a talking head a while back for my mental health. But I figure if I can defend Bill Bennett’s privacy on cable, I should get a few days off Purgatory.)

THE ORIGINAL: Of course, the tradition of war-leaders in military garb isn’t just restricted to Bill Clinton, Hillary or Dubya. Here’s one for the ages.

THE FRENCH START TO PANIC: My trusty correspondent reports on the latest front page headlines in yesterday’s Le Monde:

“Iraq: a stabilization force is studied.”- It’s not clear exactly who the attendees at the London conference on post-war Iraq are, but the “unique certitude” is that France, Russia and Germany are not there.
“The UN Fears its Marginalization.”- Well, the title of this one says it all.
“The end of the experience.”- What’s ended is the “internationalism” of the 20th century and all that goes with it, including the UN.
“Powell’s last chance.”- Powell is portrayed as conducting a last-ditch stand to save diplomacy from a regime that “respects only war.”-On Iraq, says the article, Powell was able to “hang tough right up until the moment where he was dropped by France, whose foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, declared on January 20 at the UN that ‘nothing’ could justify a war against Saddam Hussein.”
“The US’s poisoned present to Poland.”- Poland has a zone in Iraq; now let us see if they can handle it, says the article.- Left unsaid:- how can little Poland be in the game when France is not?
“A turn to (economic) rigor” is today’s lead editorial, and it’s all the US’s fault for beating France on Iraq.- Really:- “So now, after a year of laxness, France goes on a diet of stale bread.- Why this new Chirac zigzag?-It does not result from a long period of reflection on the economy but rather from the war in Iraq.-The Anglo-American campaign against Saddam Hussein exploded Europe, shattering hopes of building anytime soon a common EU foreign policy.-The victory of the coalition has not erased the divisions between the war camp and the peace camp – a division where France was the pivot.-Paris cannot take the risk of provoking another rift, this time on the economic front [by unilaterally breaching EU-imposed deficit limits].”

They truly are screwed, aren’t they? Couldn’t happen to a nicer country.

THE HUMORLESS LEFT: Why won’t Naomi Wolf allow HBO to run an Ali G. interview with her? C’mon, Naomi. I know you have a sense of humor. And there’s no better sense of humor than one directed at oneself. (Thanks to Jonah).

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “The Left wants a world where there are no rules, no morality, and no personal responsibility.” – Meghan Keane, National Review Online.

POLLITT 1, HITCH 0: Katha Pollitt’s screeds win her a National Magazine Award. Hitchens gets nominated for three but gets nothing. These media elites aren’t biased, are they?

TINA’S MUM: A charming – and, I’d say, revealing – tribute from Ms Brown to her mother.

FRUM ON THE BRITS: Don’t miss this insightful little piece by David Frum about the differences between Americans and Brits (scroll down to the bottom to find it). I like to think of myself as an American by now, at least culturally and psychologically. But I may be more British than I’d like to admit. Here’s how David sees the difference:

Don’t misunderstand: I love Britain and I love the British – and I love them just the way they are: blunt, expressive, emotional, highly sexed, indifferent to rules and protocol. I love their informality of dress and their preoccupation with good food and fine wine. I only wish the British would overcome their prejudices and learn to value Americans as they are: polite, formal, stiff upper-lipped, sexually restrained, and imbued with the idealistic spirit of reform.

How about some kind of middle ground between the two?

STILL SPINNING: You have to hand it to the Nation. One of the biggest embarrassments for the Saddam-appeasers on the left was that a Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, was one of its leading proponents. They kept quiet for a while. But now they’re gloating about poor election results in Britain for Blair’s Labour Party:

The parliamentary elections in Scotland formed one part of the first political test for a member of Bush’s “coalition of the willing.” Blair’s Labour party also battled on May 1 to maintain its control over local governments across Britain. There too, Labour suffered serious setbacks. The party’s percentage of the vote fell from 41 percent in the 2001 general election to just 30 percent in the May 1 voting. Labour lost more than 800 seats on the local councils that govern British cities and regions. Most of those seats went to the traditional opposition party, the Conservatives, but a substantial number went to the Liberal Democrats, a third party that was highly critical of Blair’s alliance with Bush before the war.

Don’t you love that qualification: “most of those seats went to the traditional opposition party, the Conservatives”? And what, pray, was the Tory position on the war? Even more positive than Tony Blair. Yes, Labour did poorly. Most governing parties do in mid-terms. But to describe this as payback for the war is truly stretching it.