The Dish

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?

The Post’s Terry Neal defends newsroom affirmative action, if not the way the Times editors handled Blair. He makes some good points, I think. This debate is long overdue. Pity it took this incident to get it in the mainstream.

The New Republic weighs in:

The policy Howell Raines and other Times executives were administering when they overlooked these things wasn’t affirmative action; it was the fetishization of diversity, which is a complete perversion of affirmative action. And any fetish–any monomaniacal fixation on a single goal, whether the goal is diversity or proper grammar or having a certain type of Danish at editorial meetings–can be exploited by a pathological rogue looking to game the system … As one anonymous Times reporter says in today’s New York Post, “Howell didn’t listen … to anyone about anything.” Howell Raines was apparently practicing a form of authoritarianism that isolated him from his staff and reinforced his personal fixations. And it came back to haunt him.

Yes, the problem isn’t the policy as such. It’s the quixotic, arbitrary, dictatorial way in which the policy was abused.

From Paul Colford at the Daily News:

Meanwhile, staffers buzzed about whether Blair’s relationship with a woman who is a friend of Raines’ wife helped win him favored treatment. Sources said the woman, Zuza Glowacka, has worked in The Times’ photo department. The Times reported Sunday that Blair, when confronted with a charge of plagiarizing a story about a Texas family, was able to describe their house in detail, possibly because he had seen the paper’s “computerized photo archives.” Glowacka, 23, a Polish emigre who could not be reached yesterday, is said to be a friend of Raines’ Polish-born wife, Krystyna Stachowiak, whom the editor married in March. Stachowiak, a former journalist who later worked in public relations, and Glowacka’s mother, journalist Ewa Zadrzynska, were among three people who set up “Poland on the Front Page, 1979-1989,” a media exhibit in Warsaw last fall. Raines said through a spokeswoman last night that he never socialized with Blair.

This story isn’t even close to being through.

They’re bailing after the Iraq war. The problem for Bush and Rove is that, apart from the war, they have nothing to appeal to independent voters on. The tax-cutting and deficit explosion has turned off the fiscal conservatives. And the pandering to the religious right in judicial nominations and the rallying behind Santorum has alienated social liberals and libertarians. In fact, I can’t see any domestic policies designed to appeal to the center-right or middle. The mere mouthing of the phrases “compassion” and “inclusion” won’t hack it. But does Rove have any other suggestions that won’t alienate the theocons?

Jim Sleeper saw this coming. Heather Mac Donald describes the fundamental dilemma the Times found itself in:

Faced with the record of Blair’s monumental malpractice and its own persistent overlooking of that malpractice, the Times had a choice. It could admit that, at least in this case, the paper had indeed relaxed its ordinary standards of excellence to push a black reporter quickly up the ranks. Doing so would undercut its credo that an obsession with diversity never sacrifices quality. But the alternative response to the Blair affair would seem much worse: if race played no role in the Times’s tolerance for Blair’s errors, then presumably other reporters have received similar exemptions from journalistic canons. If management’s treatment of Blair was not preferential, but merely ordinary, we should expect similar devastating exposes of other reporters’ work in the future. In other words: If the Blair fiasco was the product of universally applied Times standards, then the paper has gone to the dogs.

Tell us something we didn’t know, Heather.

RACE OR SUCK-UP? However, I’m inclined to think that blaming all this on affirmative action doesn’t capture what was going on at the Times. It wasn’t hiring Blair that caused the disaster; nor even the way in which his editors supported and helped and monitored him. It was the favoritism and arbitrary management of the Raines regime that put Blair where he shouldn’t have been. Cynthia Cotts is persuasive about this:

One Times veteran suggests Blair received excess favor not so much because he was black, but because he was green. According to this source, Blair is typical of the latest crop of reporters anointed by the Raines administration. “They’re young, they’re energetic, they say the right things, they kiss ass-but they don’t have the skills to do the jobs they’re handed,” says the source. “This kind of favoritism is repulsive to people who have been there awhile.” Other insiders say the Blair case is symptomatic of a deeper issue: The Times newsroom does not operate as a meritocracy. Instead, sources say, Raines and Boyd pick their favorites for whatever reasons and become so invested in showcasing these reporters that they turn a blind eye to their flaws, which are said to range variously from inexperience and laziness to intellectual dishonesty and a high volume of factual errors.

Meanwhile, there are signs of a mutiny at the paper over the subtle but effective white-wash the paper published on Sunday:

“People felt that management had not been held accountable enough, and the story downplayed their culpability,” said the reporter, who singled out Raines’ high-handed management style as a key to why Blair survived at the paper for so long. “Howell didn’t listen … to anyone about anything.” Another staffer said “heads should roll … it happened on their watch and because of their watch.”

Amen.

It’s been something of a relief – although a somewhat strained one – to have redirected attention for a couple of weeks to domestic issues. The culture wars, journalistic scandals, and gambling moralists are all good, distracting copy. But the broader war continues. It’s clear now that we have seriously under-estimated the difficulties of imposing order on post-totalitarian Iraq. The shake-up in leadership there suggests at least that Washington is aware of the problem. But some of the damage has already been done. It’s hard to read stories about continued looting in Baghdad or dangerous chaos in the hinterlands, without wondering if the administration is as committed to the difficult task of reconstruction as they need to be. The real worry, it seems to me, is that some WMDs may have been transported out of Iraq, may be in the hands of terrorists, or simply on the market. We have thousands of gallons of anthrax still unaccounted for. This doesn’t retroactively invalidate the war. Such dangers would have existed – and would have been even more dangerous – if Saddam were still in power. But it does mean we cannot afford any lapse in vigilance. The papers don’t tell us who was responsible for last night’s bombings in Saudi Arabia, but we can be sure they aren’t friends of the United States. Islamist anti-semitism has not abated; in Britain, it may be capturing a new generation of young immigrants. That’s why it’s still critical to focus on the terror threat, to push reform further in the Middle East, to give the road-map a serious try, and to tighten our own homeland defenses. The list is long. Our attention span needs to be long as well.

THE WOLF GETS IT: Wolfowitz is reassuring today. No lack of focus or of realism there.