The Dish

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.

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.