The Dish

I’m delighted that Jonah Goldberg and his wife, Jessica Gavora, have such a cute kid who’s the spitting image of her dad. I’m delighted that many NRO readers are equally chuffed. But next time I mention my boyfriend, would you please spare me the emails telling me I’m pushing my sexual orientation in your face? What has Jonah just done but declare his heterosexuality loud and clear? And good for him. But what’s sauce for the, er, well, you can fill in the rest of the metaphor yourselves.

HILLARY STIFFS GAYS: And activists are surprised? Were they alive during the Clinton administration? Yes, the Clintons sounded good, but, to echo Bob Geldof, on gay civil rights, they did fuck all.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: “Have you noticed that the NY Times is running banner ads at the top of The Onion’s website? I’m most annoyed at this. I read The Onion to laugh at made-up stories with forged datelines and invented quotes. Wait, no, maybe that’s the Times. I’m getting confused.” – more feedback on the Letters Page.

I’m inundated with readers’ claiming false facts, shady reporting and phony by-lines at the NYT. I tell them to send their complaints directly to retrace@nytimes.com. On one issue, Adam Cohen has emailed to insist he did too visit Cass Technical High School in Detroit. Cohen’s piece had used the dilapidated state of the school to argue that predominantly minority schools were under-funded. But right next to the school was a new one, built to replace the old one at a cost of over $100 million. Cohen never mentioned what seems like a pretty pertinent fact. The reader went on:

After a few minutes of research on Nexis, I learned that the new facility is budgeted for $114.5 million. To put things in perspective, only two other high schools in the entire United States have ever been built in the $100-million range. The new building is a six-story, air-conditioned glassy building that is laboratory-intensive, with music, art and dance studios. How, I wondered, could Cohen have missed the gigantic construction site right next door to the school that he visited, or the sign prominently announcing that the building under construction is the new Cass Tech? In fact, much of the new building is already standing. How could the prospective move not have come up in conversations with administrators that Cohen supposedly interviewed? … I don’t suppose it is possible, is it, that Mr. Cohen never visited the Cass school in Detroit? It seems worth investigating, doesn’t it? The only other explanations I can think of are (a) incredibly slopply reporting, or (b) blatant bias. Which is it?

Cohen emailed me to say the following:

Re: Your “Email of the Day,” Saturday May 24, 2003: I certainly did personally visit Cass Technical High School in Detroit to report my Editorial Observer, a fact the school principal or the guidance counseler I quoted in the piece can readily confirm. I did all of my own reporting. I wish you had made an attempt to contact me–I’m reachable through the New York Times switchboard–before printing an anonymous letter attacking my professional conduct.

The email attacked no-one. It asked a simple question about what could explain this weird lacuna in Cohen’s reporting, which in the current atmosphere at the NYT is understandable. Cohen still doesn’t respond to the notion that he ignored a huge aspect of the story in order to promote his own liberal bias. As I’ve said before, at the NYT these days, you get to pick between frauds and ideologues. Cohen’s the latter. That’s now what passes for good news at the Times.

NYT CRAPOLA II: “The New York Times reported today that UM president Donna Shalala ‘received authorization Wednesday morning from the executive committee of the university’s board of trustees to negotiate the Hurricanes’ membership in the ACC.” However, a source with knowledge of the discussions said Wednesday night the executive committee did not vote Wednesday, nor did it give Shalala the green light to finalize a deal with the ACC. The source said Shalala and UM athletic director Paul Dee briefed the executive committee on the status of the ACC issue, got feedback and were told to continue their fact-finding.” – the Miami Herald, yesterday.

Here’s an email I just got from a former Bragg intern, who thinks the New York Times reporter has gotten a bum rap. For fairness’ sake, here’s the text:

I was Rick’s intern during the Spring of 2002 here in New Orleans. As someone who hopes to go into journalism, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to work with such a gifted writer.
As Rick’s intern, I would receive a call from him a couple of times each month about a story he was working. He’d have me do some background research and do a few interviews, mostly with peripheral people to the story. I would call and email him with my information in whatever city he was in working the story. When he filed his stories, I’d read through each one eagerly, hoping to spot a morsel I was able to get. Occasionally I would find a reference, and once or twice I even saw a quote I gathered. Imagine that, one sentence of something I did… in the New York Times! Usually there wasn’t much of a sign of the work I’d done, and that was okay with me. But, his stories always surprised me… how he got the details and the quotes from the people that really mattered. How they opened up to him. How he shaped and colored the story, how it jumped off the page and came to life. I’m not someone with stars in my eyes. I just recognize what a gifted reporter and writer he is. And he wasn’t making it up. Many don’t like the fact that he’s so good, but they’ve never been able to prove he lied. They never will.
You’ve painted him as a low life, abusive jerk – allegations that couldn’t be further from the truth. He never ripped me off or mistreated me. Yoder has never made such a claim. It was clear from the beginning that the internship was unpaid, and that the NY Times would not give bylines or credits to interns or stringers. It wasn’t Rick’s policy, it was the Times. If I had a problem with that I wouldn’t have accepted the position. What I got out of it was valuable experience researching and doing interviews for a top reporter. I never liked doing interviews all that much, but the experience working for Rick made me much more comfortable with the process. After all, isn’t this what internships are for? To help us people hoping to be journalists to get experience that will get us a job and make us better at what we do?
All of that to say that the Florida oyster story is by all accounts, an aberration from the norm. I’ve heard from another one of Rick’s interns that his tasks were pretty much the same as mine. There are no other charges that he relied on a stringer to this extent, and evidence points to the fact that he didn’t intend to when he started work on the story about water usage. Yeah, looking back, that decision wasn’t a great one for him. But it’s also negligent not to look at the NY Times official policy that prevented Yoder’s credit on the story (a credit he has said he never expected or even asked for). It’s also negligent not to acknowledge that news organizations (both print and broadcast) and blogs like yours, rely on legwork of others. That Wall Street Journal piece did an excellent job discussing this, using examples like the AP and magazines such as Newsweek and Time. They credit their workers, and haven’t run into this problem.
Rick has been working at the NY Times since 1994, and of course Raines wasn’t the editor then. Maybe he is one of the current editor’s favorites, but that favoritism would’ve had to have spanned various editorships to explain some sort of special treatment or conspiracy. Clearly, using interns and stringers in the manner in which he typically used them is a standard practice in various media, and hasn’t been frowned upon by the higher-ups.
Sincerely,
Erin Williamson

In my defense, I haven’t characterized Bragg’s character in this way. I don’t know him from Adam. I’ve merely characterised his reporting methods. They remain dubious, to my mind, however kind or supportive he was to young and impressionable interns.

It appears that tackling Iran is the last thing the State Department wants to do. But the Brits are beginning to be concerned with Iran’s mullahs meddling in Iraq. As Michael Ledeen explains, they have good reason to be concerned:

Inside Iraq, there are thousands of Iranian agents at work: radical Iraqi mullahs who were trained in Iranian mosques since the early 1980s, top officers of the Revolutionary Guards, various thugs and killers, and even the head of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry, Ali Panahi, who was dispatched to Karbala to organize the anti-American demonstrations after the fall of Saddam, and then to Baghdad. The new American in charge of Iraq, Jerry Bremer, was so alarmed at what he saw in Iraq that he has been peppering the intelligence community for more information on Iranian operations ever since he arrived.

Iran’s deep connections to Hezbollah are also a key reason for the intractability of Palestinian terror. There’s much we can do short of military intervention: financial and logistic support for the student and opposition movement; aggressive attempts to monitor Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction; outreach to dissidents through the Internet and Iranian exile radio; and so on. But military power shouldn’t be ruled out either. We are still at war. Iraq will never be successfully pacified or reconstructed without regime change in Iran. The connections between Iran’s ruling Islamofascist elite and al Qaeda need to be the subject of intense and sustained intelligence work. I suspect that we might find greater links between Tehran and al Qaeda than with any other terrorist-sponsoring state. Yes, we need to focus on Iraq right now. But not at the expense of the real source of trouble in the region.

Rick Bragg’s self-righteous and self-pitying defense of his dubious journalistic methods appears to have been the last straw for some others at the NYT. Here’s an email penned by Times veteran reporter Todd Purdum that sums up the mood:

“Of course, we use stringers on fast-breaking stories in multiple places: school shootings, natural disasters, political campaigns. Of course, we use stringers to baby-sit at long trials, listen to procedural motions, fetch documents and monitor routine press conferences, especially if other, more important elements of a story are happening elsewhere and the principal reporter has to monitor those developments. Of course, when we do roundups, we take feeds from all over. But nobody, and I mean nobody that I’ve ever heard of (besides Rick Bragg!) farms out the chance to spend a day on an oyster boat (eating some of the nation’s best oysters, by the way!) for a wholly leisurely, discretionary, writerly feature story! These stories are why journalists are lucky to get paid for our work! … Any correspondent, editor, manager or reader who thinks this remote-control method remotely reflects the way we do our jobs is living in a dream world. I’m terribly sad that our family problems have become fit fodder for the world to pick apart. But Rick Bragg’s method is not typical. It’s aberrant and repellent. Some of our colleagues have known this for years. Now the world knows it, and we’re all the poorer.”

Notice the penultimate sentence: Some of our colleagues have known this for years. What he means is that Bragg’s high-living, corner-cutting excesses have been an open secret at the Times for the past two years. Heck, as soon as the Blair story broke, I was inundated with tips about Bragg. I didn’t use them because I had no hard evidence. But his colleagues knew all along; and Howell Raines knew all along. Bragg was Raines’ man. He was allowed to do what he did on explicit orders from Raines. This is now the latest of a series of debacles that Raines has inflicted on the Times by his management style. And when you read the kind of comments picked up by the indispensable Seth Mnookin, you wonder how on earth Raines can continue in his job.

ANOTHER FREUDIAN SLIP: One of the emails Mnookin unearths is particularly interesting. It shows that one reason many NYT scribes are mad at Raines and Bragg is that this scandal has severely dented the Times’ ability to spin the news in a left-liberal direction while hiding behind the veil of the “paper of record.” Once that reputation has been trashed, how can they keep that game up? They’ll be seen as just another biased news outlet, if much bigger and better than many others. Here’s the money quote from Tim Egan – yes the Tim Egan who lied on the front page about rising temperatures in Alaska:

What will come of this infighting, cannibalism, and soul-searching? Hopefully, we’ll go back to valuing what we have: people who care about the drift of this country, and are given the time and respect to tell it right.

Hmmm. What does he mean, “the drift of this country”? I think we know – it’s headed rightward. And the job of the Times is not to give us all the news that’s fit to print, but to haul it to the left. On the one hand, Bragg and Blair. On the other, Egan and Hedges. The choice at the Times is between frauds and ideologues. (Of course, there’s also Paul Krugman, who manages to conflate the two.)

“I am one of those insecure people that drag the “luggage that needs wheels” onto the plane. Clearly, you are fortunate enough to make a living writing little snippets on a computer in the comfort of your pajamas at home, and have no need to travel on a regular basis. But a big chunk of travelers out there are like me: people who have to commute cross country on a regular basis, who have to spend 10 to 40 hours a month on an airplane or in airports. To us, its game of odds. If one travels 10 times a month, its pretty likely the airline will screw it up at least once and destroy your plans for that day or week. And even if the airline does not lose your luggage, the extra 30 minutes to an hour to stay on the longer line to check in your luggage (even the gate checks can be pretty painful nowadays) and the extra 15 to 30 minutes to pick up the luggage adds up. And you only need one time a month, when the line goes out the door to learn to bring your bags on board. On average, a 2 hour flight becomes a 3 hour flight, and if you make the trip twice a week, you are talking a lot of hours. The fact is, being able to pack a week’s clothing into a carry-on is a godsend, and well worth it. One hour of a road warrior’s time is worth 5 minutes of a wait for the Memorial day traveler, even if he has a blog to bitch on.” – more feedback on the Letters Page, edited by Reihan Salam, who gets a credit and a small amount of your cash.

THE TRENT LOTT DEFENSE: Rep. Chip Pickering, Charles’ son, is trying to rally local black leaders behind his father by promising that he would lobby for a “diversity candidate” to replace his father on the federal court in Hattiesburg. More consistency from Republicans on race. From a cynic’s perspective, it looks as if they’re against affirmative action if it hurts white people; but in favor of it if it indirectly helps white people, especially old white people from the South. I’ve now read several long stories about Charles Pickering. The intricacies of his treatment of a delinquent racist cross-burner have left me queasy and with an unfortunate impression: that this relic of an old South still feels the need to cater, even mildly, to white prejudice. Why on earth is the Bush administration going to bat for this guy a second time around?

From Newsday, an analysis of how the Times has been brought down to earth by the Internet and blogs:

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said that at the Times, “nobody had a very good explanation why those who helped Bragg report aren’t bylined in the story. It’s sort of institutional confusion.” Rosen said that more broadly, the traditional acceptance of authority in newspapers is coming under greater question in the Internet age. “Bragg is probably kind of an arbitrary victim of that,” he said. “For a long time journalists haven’t had to explain very much how they do things,” Rosen said. “The Internet has created the expectation that news organizations can be interacted with, can be questioned.”

Imagine that. News organizations questioned. Next up, we’ll be demanding that Howell Raines actually talk to the press! My only quibble with Rosen is his notion that Bragg is an “arbitrary” victim. Far from it. He was a slipshod crony waiting to be exposed. The scandal is not that it happened. But that for so long, he went unexamined.

Yep. That deceptive quote you first read about here is now being looked into by the Times. Let’s see if they make her run her own correction. (And, no, running a correct version of the quote in a subsequent column is not a correction. It’s a pathetic ruse to avoid responsibility for a simple and deliberate lie.)

GELDOF ON BUSH: Finally someone says it who might get taken seriously by the usual suspects. On AIDS, president Bush’s commitment simply out-classes Bill Clinton’s. By a mile. So too does his actual commitment to Africa, for all Clinton’s grandstanding. Here’s Bob Geldof on the current president: “You’ll think I’m off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical – in a positive sense – in its approach to Africa since Kennedy.” Another great quote from a British AIDS activist: “Clinton talked the talk and did diddly squat, whereas Bush doesn’t talk, but does deliver.” Therein the precise difference between this administration and the last.

Another Raines favorite, Rick Bragg, quits after being suspended for having an unpaid intern report most of a piece with Bragg’s byline. (Great scoop, Howie.) The Wall Street Journal piece on Bragg is full of interesting nuggets (I read it on the plane back from Chicago.) The Apalachicola story wasn’t the only time Bragg essentially passed off others’ work as his own: a Miami intern, Ms Maribel Morey, claims “there were articles at the tobacco trial that are all of my quotes.” Bragg concedes “a couple of stories where she did ‘most’ of the reporting, including conducting a long interview in Spanish with plaintiff Guillermo Saa for a June 3, 2000, story.” We also learn that Kevin Sack, not a Raines crony, had far higher standards for his own stories, refusing to pass off interns’ work as his own. Bragg’s defense is that what he did was normal journalistic practice. But it wasn’t. The Apalachicola piece was written vividly as if the writer were really there, as Jack Shafer notes. It was, by any reasonable standards, a fraudulent piece of journalism. And there’s a difference between using interns and colleagues for nuggets of news or facts or preliminary interviews, and using their work as the flesh and bones of a story and putting your own name on it. The question this raises, of course, is whether Bragg got away with pushing the limits of journalistic ethics because he was a favorite of the big guy. The Journal lets us know that Bragg had dinner with Raines and the ripped-off intern, Wes Yoder. Money Yoder quote: “It wasn’t like Rick was hiding anything from Howell, or anyone else at the Times.” So what did Raines know, as the Mickster asks? It seems to me that the story is pretty obvious: a Raines favorite, a Southerner, was given to believe he could do no wrong. He pushed the envelope. Raines covered for him, as he covered for Blair. These two journalistic departures – Blair and Bragg – have only one thing in common: Raines’ cronyism. If they have gone, so should he. When will he step down?

A parish in Lansing, Michigan, gets a married priest. He is a convert from, well, I don’t know, because the church won’t say and he has been forbidden to talk to the media. He’s not just married: he’s been married for 25 years and has three sons. There are, apparently, 200 married priests in the United States, proof that there is no good reason that married men cannot be good Catholic priests. So why continue the mandatory celibacy policy which has led to such a collapse in vocations in our current world, and has successfully selected some of the most sexually-screwed-up people on the planet to be priests? There’s no good answer – none, except bloody-mindedness from reactionaries and institutional inertia. Meanwhile, the Church is dying in this country for lack of good priests. And the Vatican would rather see the American church die than ever concede it could change its mind.