WELL, THAT SETTLES THAT: Howie Kurtz today profiles a piece by "Washington Monthly" editor Paul Glastris that Kurtz believes refutes the charge of "liberal media bias." The reasoning?

The conservative press is purely partisan, while the mainstream weenie press is concerned with issues like fairness and balance – and, in fact, often criticized Bill Clinton and other Democrats. That it's not really an even fight, heavyweight boxers versus high school debaters. That Democrats are actually hamstrung because they try to play to the major editorial pages, while the Republicans, with knives in their teeth, couldn't care less.

Here's some of what Glastris wrote:

The difference in partisan intensity also reflects the different media outlets to which the parties play. Democrats in Washington focus incessantly on the establishment press: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, CBS, CNN, NPR. That is where their worldview is shaped, and where they look for validation of their ideas and status. Republican leaders are hardly indifferent to the establishment outlets. But they increasingly take their cue from the expanding alternative universe of conservative media: The Washington Times, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, talk radio, Fox News Channel. Needless to say, these two media worlds are governed by radically different rules. Yes, there is a certain amount of liberal bias in the mainstream press. But on balance, the big national papers and broadcast networks take seriously the traditional journalistic strictures of fairness, accuracy, and independence of judgement. The conservative press, by and large, does not labor under these constraints. It does not pretend to be in the business of presenting all sides fairly, but of promoting its side successfully.

So when the conservative press fact-checks the "mainstream" media, it's tossing the "traditional journalistic strictures of fairness, accuracy and independence of judgment" out the window. Take that, Heather MacDonald.

And here's something Glastris doesn't even begin to touch on. Forget coverage of individual candidates and the scandal-mongering of the Clinton years. The mainstream media's daily, routine coverage of the agendas advanced by the core constituencies of the Democrats - minorities, women, gays - is invariably sympathetic. Democratic candidates are invariably presented as friends of these constituencies, while Republicans are invariably presented as the enemies of these groups. When it comes time to vote, emotional issues such as these easily trump questions about tax cuts or who did what with the budget surplus. There are books, Web sites, magazines and studies I could cite, but most people on the right side of the room are already familiar with them. Perhaps Glastris should look into them, too.

There's one other thing I didn't like about Glastris' column. He resurrects the myth of the right-wing "mob" that shut down the Dade County recount during the 2000 presidential election controversy. He pretends Gore was taking the higher ground because he allegedly "expressly ordered that unionists, civil rights activists, and other liberal ground troops should stay out of Florida." Well, Gore may or may not have said that, but I think the sorry spectacles that Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton put on day after day after day lingered in people's minds a lot longer than a one-day outburst of GOP "thuggishness." Then there's this gem: "(Gore representative) Warren Christopher sent lawyers to Florida. (Bush representative) James Baker sent lawyers---and press people, and political surrogates, and operatives to stir up Cuban street protests." That's laughable, to say the least.

COPY DESK VS. EVERYONE ELSE: Romenesko links to a funny column about the never-ending war between writers and copy editors. It's by Leon Hale of the "Houston Chronicle."

Few days ago I was on the front porch of the old country place at Winedale, and I wrote a simple little sentence. It said that I love the music that rain makes on a tin roof. A copy editor must have felt rain on a tin roof couldn't possibly make music, so he/she took out the word "music" and put in "beat." So when it got in the paper, my sentence said that I love the beat of rain on a tin roof. I don't love any such thing. I love the music it makes...I sort of like to fuss at the copy desk editors, even though they daily save some of us from disaster. However, I don't think they ought to take the music out of my rain on the roof.

That's pretty bad. I mean, "music that rain makes" is a tad tired, but it sounds infinitely better than the "beat of rain" on a tin roof. That's wooden, and that's the kind of unthinking "fix" that gives copy editors a bad name. I learned a long time ago that copy editors should follow the primary rule of medicine: "First do no harm." The second rule? "Fix all the mistakes you can, but check with the writer before monkeying with his or her prose."

A BLOG CRUSADE: The ever-popular Banana Counting Monkey (who has seen fit to say nice things about this site; thank you very much and I'm sorry I'm so late in getting around to acknowledging you) is launching a drive to raise funds to help the conservative "California Patriot" re-print an edition that was stolen by Berkeley Stalinists who didn't like the paper. This is a pretty good idea. We need to let those young folks know that they have support out here in the real world.

THE SPIN ON DISINFORMATION (?): The "Spin Control" column in today's "Hotline Scoop" has a nice debate about the Pentagon's decision to scrap the Office of Strategic Influence. "Hotline" is a nice little site. Click all over it and give it a look.

MEANINGLESS NEWS: The Opinion Journal points out something a lot of other people have pointed out: There are a lot of dubious statistics being handed out to journalists, and they're not checking them, and newspapers are publishing the results. Not good.

DIVERSITY DONE, WELL, OK: The Poynter Institute is crowing about a recent Newhouse News Service series that purports to show the diversity of black America. Unfortunately, it falls far short of that goal. A reporter and a photographer spent two years visiting thoroughfares named Martin Luther King throughout America. There are indeed some engaging portraits of black people who lead ordinary, yet fascinating, lives. But judging by this 14,000-word series, apparently there's still a whole bunch of black nationalists, Five Percenters and Nation of Islam types prowling the MLKs of America. They certainly interviewed a disproportionate number of these people, and as usual, their nuttily racist cosmologies weren't held up to any scrutiny at all. And apparently few members of the black middle class live on America's MLKs, even though they're now roughly two-thirds of America's black population. As for foreign-born blacks, there's an interview with one - an Ethiopian socialist (no mention of what happened to Ethiopia under socialist rule.) There's a lot of words devoted to the search for "blackness," but for these two white journalists, it still seems to reflect what Albert Murray noted more than 30 years ago in his excellent "Omni-Americans":

"Blackness as a cultural identity was all but replaced by blackness as an economic and political identity - or condition, plight and blight. U.S. Negroes, that is to say, were in effect, no longer regarded as black people. They were now the Black Proletariat..."

This is, however, much better than some series I've been associated with in my career.

SHE'S HOME: The Amazing Techie Girlfriend arrived home from Salt Lake City last night, but it was a bit of an ordeal. She had some eye irritation when she woke up Tuesday, and inadvertently scraped both corneas while rubbing them. This is quite painful, and causes the eyes to redden and swell and tear up. Well, when she got to the Salt Lake City airport she just couldn't take it anymore. She asked for help, and was plunged into our new "security arrangements." She was basically treated like a drug addict. She said the EMT people and the police were very rude to her, and kept asking her the same questions over and over and over again, like they do on "Cops" when they've got a drunk pulled over. After getting a saline eye wash, she flew on home. I met her at the airport and we went to an emergency room, where the diagnosis of corneal abrasions was made. (The hospital folks were very professional, by the way. The did a great job.) The put some antibiotic ointment in her eyes and covered them with some gauze. We're going to the ophthalmologist today. The upside to all this is she got a prescription to Percoset, even though she's no longer in that much pain.

BLACK AMERICA SPEAKS (OR AT LEAST THE FAR-LEFT ELEMENT): The Opinion Journal has this link to coverage of the Black America's Vision conference that was held in Philadelphia this past weekend.

Electricity charged the air as Harvard University scholar Cornel West said the terrorist attacks made every citizen feel the hatred and fear that black people have felt for years.

I watched some of this on Complaint-SPAN this weekend, and this story doesn't mention some other provocative statements. For example, leftist academic and best-selling author Michael Eric Dyson expanded on West's words, telling how the terrorist attacks had "niggerized" white America.

And then there was Lani Guinier's absurd assertion that the media only has five black names in its Rolodex, and three of those are conservatives. There was a lot more, such as this gem:

The Rev. James Forbes Jr., senior minister at the Riverside Church in New York City, shocked the audience when he described false patriotism as "pornographic."

One of the few voices of reason was Stanley Crouch, who caused a stir when he came out in support of racial profiling for Arabs and Muslims. This, of course, wasn't popular with the panel or the audience, even though a recent survey of blacks showed that something like 85 percent were in favor of it to prevent terrorist attacks. Crouch also reiterated something he pointed out in an "L.A. Times" column . I'll pull a quote from the column to give you a feeling for what Crouch said:

Between 1994 and 1999, 45,000 black men and women were murdered in this country. Do we ever hear the civil-rights establishment address this? Hardly. What we hear about is "warehousing" young black men in the penal system, the racist nature of our courts, "stigmatizing black youth" or "the stereotyping our young" by mass media. This suggests that the only lost black lives important to our professional protesters are those taken at the hands of white cops or white racists.

Crouch rightfully labeled this another form of terrorism, but this uncomfortable topic wasn't addressed by the rest of the panel.

THOSE PESKY INTERNS: FAIR has a link to a particularly silly piece from the twits at "Working For Change." It's about "right-wing ideologues" infiltrating "USA Today." The evidence? A column critical of both the recent "V-Day" celebrations and Eve Ensler's "Vagina Monologues." The perpetrator? An intern who is a member of a right-leaning campus group. But of course, the puppet masters are those wealthy foundations that seek to derail human progress:

Right-wing ideologues, for example, have been underwriting their own front organizations for decades in an effort to influence public opinion. Remember the phalanx of funders who fuelled a decade of Clinton investigations? Foundations bearing the names Smith-Richardson, Olin, Carthage, Bradley and Scaife are the masters of stirring the scandal pot to turn the public against policies and social trends they oppose.

And foundations bearing the names Carnegie, Ford, MacArthur, Pew and Robert Wood Johnson are the masters of funding a vast array of dubious left-leaning causes, including the "Vagina Monologues" and the radical-feminist "V-Day" victimization holiday.

Feminists and multiculturalists have been fighting "offices of strategic influence" like this for decades.

Yes, they have. They've established hundreds of their own "offices of strategic influence," which can easily reach journalists who carry far more influence than an intern. Of course, NOW would never call it "strategic influence." It's "speaking truth to power."

The ISI and the IWF, et al, are the groups that brought us the "political correctness" wars; the "stolen feminism" hoax; the media myths and ideologically-driven legends that have made life miserable for those fighting sexism and racism on campus and elsewhere.

Translation: "Mommy, that mean right-wing woman challenged my personally held beliefs! She pointed out that some of my sisters are engaged in stupid, ill-conceived crusades to demonize men! Make her STOP!"

REMEMBERING PEARL: The New Republic has an excellent editorial on the murder of Danny Pearl:

The slaughter of Daniel Pearl did not make a mockery of what his slaughterers believe. It was the perfect expression, the inevitable consequence, of what his slaughterers believe...To regard Daniel Pearl as a martyr--a martyr for Judaism, a martyr for America, a martyr for modernity, a martyr for democracy--is to concede too much to the perpetrators of his death. Holy victimizers will not be defeated by holy victims. Instead the notion of sacred historical necessity must be repudiated. This will not be easy in some parts of the world, where politics is still eschatological (and therefore not, strictly speaking, politics at all). History is once again choking on God. But the murder of Daniel Pearl was not a martyrdom, it was an atrocity. Is that not stirring enough? And the beauty of his life is reason enough to lift his memory high. Martyrdom is not the only way of dying not in vain.

BROCK REDUX: Howie Kurtz has a longish interview with former right-wing hit man David Brock today. I'm sure this will bring the expected response from the usual suspects, but just in case, here's a Jonah Goldberg column about Brock from June 2001.

SOMEBODY GET ME A DOCTOR: City Journal (which now updates more often) posts an article by Theodore Dalrymple about "the most politically correct magazine in the world." No, it's not "The Nation." It's the venerable "British Medical Journal."

Fortunately for the world, the BMJ has discovered the causes of war. They are the same as the causes of all the other evils in the world: inequality and poverty. Just eliminate these, and universal peace will reign. It seems to have escaped the BMJ’s notice that attempts during the 20th century to achieve radical equality were not themselves entirely pacific or good for the health.

The BMJ’s procrustean theory of war is the liberal theory of crime writ large and applied on a global scale. Poverty makes men desperate, and desperation drives them to crime or (if they happen to control an army) to war. It is therefore up to us--the rich and contented portion of humanity--to prevent crime and war by paying more: for social welfare programs in the case of crime, for foreign aid in the case of war. It is within our power, and it is therefore our duty, to eliminate the causes of crime and war. It is a tribute to the distorting power on educated minds of an abstract theory that anyone could believe such rubbish. Only someone with long years of formal training could deceive himself in this comforting fashion.

(Eds. DELETES extraneous matter in second graf. No pickup.)
I, CLAUDE: Fritz Schranck over at Sneaking Suspicions has devised a novel way to gauge the cluelessness of stories and/or headlines that appear in newspapers. He calls it the "Claudes," in honor of movie great Claude Rains. He's got some good examples, but some of the most Claude-worthy headlines or stories usually come from some kind of study or research that merely confirms something your mother told you years ago, such as "Report: Smokers, alcoholics more likely to develop health problems." Or "Sexually active teens at greater risk for pregnancy." At least Fritz doesn't blame us copy editors:

Accordingly, when deciding how many Claudes to give to unintentionally ironic journalism, please be careful to distinguish between a thuddingly dense headline and the story running below it.

Ain't that the truth.

FISKING FISK: Robert Fisk, beloved punching bag of Afghanis and bloggers alike, explains why Danny Pearl was murdered. It was the clothes:

It was in Vietnam that reporters started wearing uniforms and carrying weapons – and shooting those weapons at America's enemies – even though their country was not officially at war and even when they could have carried out their duties without wearing soldiers' clothes. In Vietnam, reporters were murdered because they were reporters.

And here I thought journalists were killed in Vietnam because they were allowed to operate with relatively few restrictions. (After all, that's why we know so much about that war and all its dirty secrets, isn't it?) George Esper, who was actually there, writes: Vietnam was an open war -- no restrictions on the media. It was the most accessible war in our history. If you had the stamina and courage, you could go anywhere you wanted, and a few places more.

And then Fisk strikes out at those who coined the term "Fisked":

I was astounded last December when an American newspaper headline announced that I had deserved the beating I received at the hands of that Afghan crowd. I had almost died but the article, by Mark Steyn, carried a headline that a "multiculturalist (me) gets his due''. My sin, of course, was to explain that the crowd had lost relatives in America's B-52 raids, that I would have done the same in their place. That shameful, unethical headline, I should add, appeared in Daniel Pearl's own newspaper, The Wall Street Journal.

Well, let's look back at what this "objective" reporter wrote back then that sparked the ire of so many:

But what happened to us was symbolic of the hatred and fury and hypocrisy of this filthy war, a growing band of destitute Afghan men, young and old, who saw foreigners -- enemies -- in their midst and tried to destroy at least one of them...I had spent more than two and a half decades reporting the humiliation and misery of the Muslim world and now their anger had embraced me too...And -- I realised -- there were all the Afghan men and boys who had attacked me who should never have done so but whose brutality was entirely the product of others, of us -- of we who had armed their struggle against the Russians and ignored their pain and laughed at their civil war and then armed and paid them again for the "War for Civilisation" just a few miles away and then bombed their homes and ripped up their families and called them "collateral damage".

Robert, your fellow journalists criticized you (on the editorial page, of all places!) because you wrote words that were stupid and silly and just plain wrong. You blamed your own culture for a vicious mob's attack on you, and in one stroke denied the humanity of that culture while accepting the moral superiority of people who wanted to murder you simply because you looked Western. The argument that it's completely understandable for people who are attacked to strike out at those who "look like" their attackers sounds like a racist's justification for violence against Muslims in America. But that's all water under the bridge. Back to why Danny Pearl was killed:

But we are all of us – dressing up in combatant's clothes or adopting the national dress of people – helping to erode the shield of neutrality and decency which saved our lives in the past. If we don't stop now, how can we protest when next our colleagues are seized by ruthless men who claim we are spies?

Hear that, journalists? Go forth and report in foreign lands, but don't try to blend in. Let everyone know you're a Westerner. Wear a three-piece suit, or a windbreaker and blue jeans, and those good, decent Muslim terrorists you're covering will leave you alone. Of course, you might get your head bashed in by a mob, but at least they won't suspect you of being a spy. Just tell'em Robert sent you.

UPDATE: Bill Quick dispensed his own Fisking of Fisk on Saturday. I just now noticed it. Go check it out.

DEFACING THE NEWS: Romenesko reports that a bunch of anti-globo loonies printed up 20,000 satirical counterfeit editions of the "Vancouver Sun" and distributed them. They even put up a Web site. The thing is, their material really isn't that funny. Then again, that's a big problem with the left in general: no good jokes. Michael Moore is the best they've got.

DISSING THE DISINFO DISSENTERS: Vaughn Ververs of "Hotline Scoop" takes apart the media hand-wringing over the Pentagon plan to sow disinformation in the foreign press.

If the idea of "planting" stories favorable to one's position is a sin in the world of journalism, particularly here inside the Beltway, then the confessionals ought to be plenty busy. Coming from a town that invented phrases like "plausible deniability" and "wag the dog," and that thrives on "leaks" and "trial balloons," all the outrage comes off as manufactured at best.

Ververs continues:

Similar games are played out throughout official Washington. Members of Congress or an administration carry out feuds between themselves by placing stories selectively in the media. Proposals said to be "under consideration" are leaked by opponents in order to undermine them. The New York Times story that has caused such an uproar may even be one of them. As NBC military analyst William Arkin so aptly put it: "The Office of Strategic Influence failed its first test, which is to have an article on the front page of the New York Times which essentially says the United States is now going to lie and manipulate the news." Could there be a better way to deep-six it?

And then this great conclusion:

Is a military disinformation campaign really such a shocking outrage, or does the media just feel that way when they're not a part of it?

STATS JUST WRONG: Glenn "Tha Bloggfatha" Reynolds steered me to a column in today's "Tech Central Station" that's written by blogger Iain Murray. Murray, who works for the Statistical Assessment Service, has an article about the ways journalists abuse statistics. I visit the STATS Web site regularly; you should, too.

N.Y. TIMES DISCOVERS BLOGNOSCENTI: The "New York Times" has a story today about the blogosphere. It's a fairly unremarkable piece that covers ground that's already been covered before. What's notable is what it leaves out; the only blogs it sees fit to mention are My Blue House and the lefty Tom Tomorrow:

Before changing to the Weblog, the site attracted about 40,000 visitors a month. Now, it is nearly 100,000.

Now hold on. What about Andrew Sullivan? Or Glenn Reynolds? Or Mickey Kaus? I would venture to guess that Sullivan, Kaus and Reynolds reach far more than 100,000 people a month. Why this glaring omission?

A SLEEPER HOLD ON 'COLORING': Complex liberal Jim Sleeper has written a terrific review of William McGowan's "Coloring The News." (Link via Arts and Letters Daily.) Sleeper, who devoted a chapter of his excellent "Liberal Racism" to the media, begins with an anecdote that sounds painfully familiar:

There it was: that look, on the face of a member of Harvard's prestigious Society of Fellows, as I told him over coffee in 1996 that the "epidemic" of racist arson against black churches headlined on the nation's front pages was a fantasy...My new acquaintance gave me the easing-toward-the-exit smile of one who's found himself at the wrong table. Like many busy people, he relies more than he realizes on editors' news judgments to take his bearings amid racial, sexual and other social changes. Keeping his political and moral equilibrium sometimes involves being notified when to be outraged.

I wonder if that was Cornel West? Anyway, Sleeper explains how "readers tire of forced marches through stagy morality plays," and he elaborates on the problem of enforced "diversity":

He (McGowan) argues that--in sectors such as college admissions and journalism, where nonwhites are sought avidly--affirmative action, which was supposed to counter discrimination, has been superceded by a color-coded "diversity" to keep up the appearance of full racial integration even when pools of fully qualified applicants are thin. Instead of helping the disadvantaged, "diversity's" claim that serious deficiencies are really just cultural "differences" reflects a fudging of entrance and performance standards to deflect political or bureaucratic presumptions of racism and to enhance a company's niche marketing efforts.

Sleeper ends on a strong note:

This country's vast race industry of activists, consultants, foundation officers, civil rights lawyers and government monitors enhances its funding, job lines and moral cachet by playing up bad racial news and discounting the good. Whatever his mistakes, McGowan is right to argue that journalists should be investigating the race industry, not working for it.

Arts and Letters Daily also links to a less-than-enthusiastic review of "Coloring The News" that I've already dissected .

QUICK ON THE CASE: Bill Quick has a discussion about recent findings from the Media Research Center. An MRC study indicates that the media has been spending most of its time bitching about President Bush's "axis of evil" comment instead of seriously analyzing the threat actually posed by these countries. Bill uses that as a springboard to an astute observation about campaign finance reform:

I'm of the school that believes the average news-wrangler really doesn't understand the implications of leaving the media as the sole major conduit for opinion and "reportage" in the weeks leading up to major elections. They support CFR because they - and everybody else they know in the BosWash corridor - have the vague notion it is a Good Thing. Those of us who understand the meaning of numbers like these should be shaking in our boots. If CFR become law, It will be through "objective, unbiased" filters like these that most of the country will be interpreting the news of the day.

A QUICK TV NOTE: I was flipping channels this weekend and stopped at Complaint-SPAN for a moment. There was a big townhall-type meeting involving some Important Black Leaders. (Hold on; here it is.) Anyway, I only stayed long enough to see Lani Guinier say something to the effect that "ABC, NBC and CBS only have the names of about five black people in their Rolodexes. Three of those names are black conservatives." This drew a standing ovation from the crowd, but it made me think: what in the hell is she talking about? Are Armstrong Williams, Walter Williams or Larry Elder on TV more often than Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Johnnie Cochrane, Dr. Alvin Poussaint, John Hope Franklin or any other left-leaning blacks? I don't think I've ever seen Thomas Sowell on TV, and I've only seen Shelby Steele on air once in the past 12 years.

A MEMORIAL TO PEARL: The Opinion Journal dedicates its entire space, appropriately enough, to the murder of Daniel Pearl. There is so much good stuff there, just click and read. I really don't think I can add anymore to what others have written. I don't pray often, but I am praying for Pearl's family.

'STARBUCKS AND YOGA JUST DOESN"T DO IT ANYMORE': William Powers of the "National Journal" has an interesting article on how the media is returning to more trivial matters as Sept. 11 fades in memory. Powers hits Lexis, and finds that the war on terror is being cited in newspapers less and less. At the end of December, Powers thought we were headed into a period of more serious media coverage (the "Starbucks and Yoga" statement is a quote from a young woman that Tim Russert had noticed).

CFR WINNER? THE MEDIA: Tom Dalton of "Hotline" has some succinct observations on campaign-finance reform:

If any group stands to gain from campaign finance reform, it’s the media. After all, those kooky pro-lifers and gun-totin’ NRA members won’t be able to run issue ads within 60 days of a general election, but the good, decent middle-of-the road, common sense, moderate New York Times editorial page can tell you what to think, thank you very much. This is the same media, mind you, that would be the first to protect the free speech of groups demonstrating against racial profiling or a ban on flag burning. Even so, they support a bill that would deprive voters of receiving information from issue ads of various organizations, liberal and conservative, during the very period of time when most of the public is just beginning to focus on the election.

If any good comes from books such as Bernard Goldberg's "Bias," perhaps it'll be this: forcing the media to be more evenhanded in a post-CFR world.

FAREWELL, DANIEL PEARL: I was at work today when word came over CNN that kidnapped "Wall Street Journal" reporter Daniel Pearl had been murdered (the TVs stay on in the newsroom). The place fell silent, and then came the gasps, the "oh, no's." I hope to God the bastards that did this get repaid 10 times over.

BAD 'NEWS': Dan Kennedy, the media critic of the "Boston Phoenix," has penned a review of Len Downie and Bob Kaiser’s book "The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril." It is a stinging critique of corporate journalism:

Cost-cutting and dumbing down the product, as it turns out, is a formula for short-term success and long-term failure. But media executives operate in an environment in which the short-term is everything. In a particularly chilling passage, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings tell the authors that, just 20 years ago, their bosses looked at the ratings perhaps every week. Now they study them every day — and they even examine them minute-by-minute to determine which stories pushed younger viewers, say, or women over 50, to change the channel.

.

WATCH WHAT YOU SAY: Speaking of wrongheaded diversity, Christopher Hitchens weighs in on the "N-word" today in the pages of "The Nation." Specifically, he's writing about Randall Kennedy's new book "Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word." The book is an attempt by Kennedy to mainstream the most unacceptable racial slur. As usual, Hitchens proves himself to be the thinking man's leftist:

It is not just a term of hatred...but a grim, sneering reminder and an attempt to put certain people "in their place." ...But would we have emancipated ourselves from "all that" if the word "nigger" became, in general, a backslapping, denatured term of genial mockery? Assuming this achievement to be either desirable or feasible, it would come at a huge cost.

And then this wonderful summation:

"As nigger is more widely disseminated and its complexity is more widely appreciated," Randall Kennedy concludes, "censuring its use--even its use as an insult--will become more difficult. Still, despite these costs, there is much to be gained by allowing people of all backgrounds to yank nigger away from white supremacists, to subvert its ugliest denotation, and to convert the N-word from a negative to a positive appellation." This strikes me as the reverse of the "transgressive" achievement for which its author may decently hope. What is needed is not more complexity but more irony. To maintain that the word may indeed be employed but must never be used literally is neither to ban it nor to rob it of its meaning. It is, rather, to pay it our respects, as indeed we should.

NEED TO SNEAK INTO CUBA? WATCH CNN: The folks over at the Media Research Center have this link to a "Miami Herald" story that castigates CNN for telling Americans how they can travel to Cuba illegally. Among the tips? Pay with cash:

''What you're doing down there is trading with, supposedly, the enemy, and it's illegal,'' he said. He (travel consultant Chris McGinnis) failed to mention that violators can be fined $55,000, a fact that might have caused even (early-morning anchor Robin) Meade to de-perkify.

As Herald TV critic Glenn Garvin points out, this is unprecedented stuff:

Plenty of news organizations have done stories on U.S. tourists illegally visiting Cuba; that's a legitimate story. (And, certainly, from those stories, a reader or viewer could figure out how to do it.) But helping them to break American law crosses a line into something that's not journalism. I've been watching television for more than 40 years, but this was the first time I've ever seen a network provide a detailed blueprint on how to violate the law.

Then, Garvin gets on a roll:

Turner and CNN are not the only ones to turn lapdog in the presence of Castro. CBS President Les Moonves went to Havana last year for four days of partying and came back with Castro's autograph on a cigar box. 60 Minutes once ended a piece on Castro with tape of Dan Rather escorting him to his limousine and calling out, as it sped away, ''Goodbye, Mr. President, take care!'' (Contrast that with the insults Rather shouted at George Bush during that infamous live 1988 interview.)

And ABC's Barbara Walters, in a stunt so stupid it sounded like a right-wing conspiracy nut's fantasy, once helped Castro host a dinner party for a group of powerful executives from Time, Newsweek, ABC, NPR, The Washington Post and other elite news media. I can't imagine an American journalist offering Alberto Fujimori a free satellite dish, or calling ''take care!'' as Augusto Pinochet's limo pulled away, or hosting a dinner party with Papa Doc Duvalier. I look forward to the day when the network explains to me why the rules are different for Castro.

And people in the media wonder why they're accused of a liberal slant despite the fact that they were hard on Gore during the last election. Obviously, it goes a lot deeper than the the simple Republican-Democratic dichotomy.

DREAD IT INNA ZIMBABWE: The Associated Press is reporting that Zimbabwe is banning some foreign reporters from covering the upcoming presidential elections. Robert Mugabe had this to say:

"The independent media are most of them liars, downright liars. They fabricate news, exaggerate news, they manufacture news," Mugabe said on state television Sunday night. "The independent papers publish stories criticizing me, demonizing me. Why don't we arrest them?"

This press crackdown has been going on for months, and FAIR, which is so sensitive to the slightest whiff of censorship by the corporate-controlled media, hasn't said a word about the situation in Zimbabwe. The major newspapers haven't said a whole lot about it, either, though they get all worked up about the Pentagon potentially planting the occasional red herring in the foreign press.

'MANAGING THE NEWS': The "New York Times," which first reported that the Pentagon may try to manipulate foreign news during the ongoing war against terror, has weighed in with an editorial. As expected, they're against it:

Such a program would undermine rather than reinforce the government's broader efforts to build international support...Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should call a halt to this misguided experiment in news manipulation.

Well, at least we told people ahead of time that we were thinking about doing this. We didn't have to do that. (It sounds more and more like a leak.)Maureen Dowd also weighs in:

Our cause is just. So why not just tell the truth?

Because our opponents, who are also convinced that their cause is just, will not fail to conceal the truth at every turn. As Charles Johnson has been pointing out for the past few months, the media in the Middle East isn't exactly objective; they print the most vicious slanders imaginable against Jews and Americans. If we can steer them to report that, say, Osama bin Laden molests goats, what's the harm in that?

UPDATE: Andrew Sullivan succinctly explains why we need to do this:

I wonder what Dowd would have thought of FDR's calculated public lying during the Second World War and before it. Or what she would have made of Churchill's misinformation and propaganda efforts against the Nazis. Perhaps we should have told Hitler when we were planning to invade Normandy. Hey, our cause was just, wasn't it? So why fib?

CORPORATE MEDIA GIANT FIGHTS DIRTY: Ouch. This is rough:

More Blue Ball Three developments: Gannett Co. is appealing the unemployment benefits awarded to fired USA Today sports department staffer Karen Allen, who has found temporary work with the International Olympic Committee in Utah. We hear that last week, as the appeal was being filed, Allen had a wordless encounter in the Olympics press room with sports editor Monte Lorell, who had sacked her and two colleagues in December over minor damage they did to a spherical blue Lita Albuquerque sculpture at Gannett's Tysons Corner headquarters. Allen's attorney, Steve Hoffmann, told us yesterday: "To go after unemployment benefits -- that's a level of malevolence I don't often see." Our call to Gannett's media relations department was not returned.

(link via Lloyd Grove's Reliable Source, found at Romenesko)

THE ULTIMATE POLICE BLOTTER: "Arts and Letters Daily" has a link to one of the most enjoyable reads I've stumbled across in quite a while. It's the police blotter of the "Arcata Eye" in Arcata, Calif. Written by Kevin L. Hooper, it is absolutely hilarious. Here's a sample from just one week of blotter items (there's nearly two years of this stuff posted on the paper's Web site):

Wednesday, January 23
12:20 p.m. Who needs a road? Parking lots are perfectly suitable rage-o-ramas. When someone speeds, spirited verbal exchanges follow, right when, in this case, a cop is passing by.

5:02 p.m. There was something dopey about that package, as Maggie, the happy little drug dog, verified at the Post Office. Narcotics investigation initiated.

7:46 p.m. Accounts differed so vastly – one claimed the other had tried to whap him with a crutch, while the other said the first one had tried to handcuff him – that nothing could really be done, and everyone just wanted to drop it.

Thursday, January 24
12:29 p.m. Motion sensors on Diamond Drive can't distinguish between evil intruders and family dogs.

3:34 p.m. Her purse was missing, but the car had been left unlocked at numerous Arcata locations and maybe even McKinleyville, so who knows where it disappeared?

Friday, January 25
8:29 a.m. If you saw a yellow and brown 1979 Mercury with no license plates and full of men and dogs parked outside your window, you'd surely feel the same sense of comfort and serenity that led a Fifth Streeter to dial APD. Police found the scuzzmobile and initiated a sprightly conversation which included topics like illegal camping, animal ordinances and trespassing.

2:08 p.m. Three travelers were warned about sitting or lying down upon a public sidewalk, curb or street, which in this case happened to be the 600 block of G Street.

3:06 p.m. That I Street supermarket is cooperative, but not when it comes to pocketing unpaid-for groceries.

3:31 p.m. Seen arguing on Janes Road, their stories were as different as are men and women. He said their romance was on the rocks. She said he was a grabby stalker. Separate directions were charted for the two, and she was satisfied.

Saturday, January 26
2:28 a.m. Time to steer a couple tons of steel around City streets – think I'll consume excessive amounts of brain-scrambling elixir. Police took him from the 900 block of I Street to the Pink House.

12:24 p.m. Four fans of the TH and C
Thought the park was a swell place to be
And smoke without danger
Oh shit, there's the Ranger!
Hi folks, may I see your I.D.?

5 p.m. He came in through a bathroom window
Sometime around the hour of noon
And who it was they have to wonder
'Cause her purse vanished from her room.
Didn't anybody catch him?
Didn't anybody see?
Now she's out a chunk of money
And on the phone to APD. Oh yeah.

10:04 p.m. Let's go out to the closed boat basin where police will be immediately interested in us. I'll bring the dope, you bring the open container of hooch.

JOURNALISTS AND PATRIOTISM: Here are two journalists with two very different takes on patriotism and their profession.

Here's Salim Muwakkil of "In These Times," in a guest column for the "Chicago Tribune:"

How can one claim to be an impartial chronicler of events in a conflict while loudly proclaiming allegiance to one of the parties?

Later, Muwakkil writes:

The Justice Department's announcement that the Wall Street Journal had shared intelligence with the U.S. government by turning over the hard drive files of a computer formerly owned by Al Qaeda throws doubt on the fairness of some American journalists.

Their fairness? Should the WSJ have just sat on the computer until a judge stepped in to order them to hand it over? What kind of havoc could the terrorists have carried out in the interim? I'm sorry, but this is taking objectivity to ridiculous levels.

Slate's Scott Shuger supplied the perfect answer to this silliness. In a fascinating story about a UPI correspondent assisting a U.S. operative, Shuger writes:

Reporters and editors are citizens too, and sometimes the responsibilities of citizenship trump those of guild membership.

Amen to that.

DISINFORMATION: The "New York Times" has this interesting story:

The Pentagon is developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations as part of a new effort to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries, military officials said.

This is part of our efforts to improve our image in the Middle East and make the war on terror more palatable, and it will be far-reaching:

One of the office's proposals calls for planting news items with foreign media organizations through outside concerns that might not have obvious ties to the Pentagon, officials familiar with the proposal said. General Worden envisions a broad mission ranging from "black" campaigns that use disinformation and other covert activities to "white" public affairs that rely on truthful news releases, Pentagon officials said.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. Part of me wants to say "this must be done to battle an amorphous enemy that hides in many places." Another part of me sees a dangerous slippery slope ahead. Hmm....Considering the extraordinary threat we're facing from terrorism, I think a reasonable, controlled disinformation program would be a good thing, as long as there's some accountability guiding it. Of course, in a world of "hypermedia," where the Web sends news stories ricocheting around the globe faster than gatekeepers can control them, this could lead to some informational blowback, as the Times article pointed out. Seems like another one of those difficult trade-offs we are forced to make in the post-9/11 environment.

POP-UP VIDEOS ON CAPITOL HILL: Howie Kurtz has more on Enron today. The funniest part is his speculation on what would happen if little factoids popped up on screen every time a congressman's face was shown during televised hearings (a la the VH1 show "Pop-up Video," which Howie erroneously credits to MTV).

What if every time the Agriculture Committee chairman appeared, the television screen would say: "Largest recipient of farm contributions, supports keeping subsidies while attacking out-of-control overspending"? What if Congressman Bloat was railing against pork and the caption said, "Secured $1.2 million grant for district to study why people litter"? What if Senator Snidely was denouncing a boost in the minimum wage and viewers were told, "Voted to Raise Own Pay Five Times in Eight Years"?

Apparently, something like this was actually going on during the recent Enron hearings. I wish I had seen that.

DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE? Blogger Dan Hartung sent me an e-mail steering me to a very interesting discussion over at MetaFilter. It seems the online "New York Times" swapped out a bin Laden story published on Sept. 9 with a somewhat different story published on Sept. 12, but kept the URL the same. A pro-Democrat site smelled a conspiracy, which, if you read both articles, is a ridiculous charge. But the MetaFilter discussion raised some issues that I don't think have been fully addressed by online newspapers, which, after all, will form a huge part of the historical record.

I really don't think the government leaned on the NYT to redo the story. I don't see why they would; both stories seem fairly similar to me, only with the immediacy of the WTC attacks emphasized in the 9-12 version. This "switcheroo" is analogous to dead-tree newspapers updating and swapping out stories between editions when new information arrives or when mistakes are pointed out. That doesn't seem to raise too much of an Orwellian stink, and papers, especially the sports pages, do it every single day, generally without saying "Hey readers, this differs somewhat from the historical record that appeared in the edition with the 10 p.m. deadline." The problem, though, is URLs, which don't disappear as easily as your daily fishwrap. I think newspapers should do more to let readers know that an online story was updated. I notice a lot of newspaper sites have a "last updated at 10:33 p.m. 02-16-02" tag in stories. More of that would be helpful. Perhaps creating completely different links would be the answer; perhaps it would add to the confusion. I really can't say. (My daily job is exclusively on the dead-tree side of things. Generally, our dot-com operation picks up the stories that we've edited and slaps them online as is.) It's clear that dodgy newspaper URLs could definitely give bloggers fits, if Blogger isn't giving them enough already.

STATISTICS & UNTRUTHS: Rand Simberg points out a FoxNews link about advocacy groups, distorted statistics and the journalists who love them both. The article, written by Wendy McElroy, provides examples, including this doozy:

Consider a "fact" popularized several years ago by feminist Naomi Wolf: 150,000 American women die each year of anorexia. According to the Center for Disease Control , this would make anorexia the fourth leading cause of death in both males and females. Yet the CDC missed that data. The grossly-inflated number had been taken from a newsletter of the American Anorexia and Bulimia Association which claimed 150,000 to 200,000 women "suffered" from anorexia nervosa. The actual death rate is closer to 100.

Of course, part of this is sheer bias. But a lot of it is sheer laziness, too. (And it doesn't help that newspapers are trying to do more work with smaller staffs.) It goes a little something like this: Press release is faxed to a newspaper. Editor hands off press release to reporter, says "Give me 20 inches on this. I need it in a couple of hours." Reporter re-writes press release (perhaps working in any pertinent "local angles"), makes a couple of phone calls to sympathetic parties to add some quotes, and it gets published. This happens a lot more often than journalists will ever acknowledge.

GOLDBERG'S ALLIES: Romenesko reports that Bernard Goldberg of "Bias" fame has some friends in the media. Speaking on CNN's "Reliable Sources," Goldberg said:

"Many people at the networks -- and I know this for a fact -- at CBS, NBC, and ABC -- agree with what I've said. I know this for an absolute fact. I've been told this by people at all three networks. But none of them either are stupid enough or courageous enough, or however you want to look at it, to come forward and say anything."

But Romenesko provides links to two stories that, once again, try to refute "Bias." One is by Danny Schechter of the lefty Mediachannel.org. Schechter starts right in:

Bias is a hot-button word. In veteran TV reporter Bernard Goldberg's hands, it is a cudgel, a weapon to strike out at the people at CBS News who rejected him after a lifetime of service, and more broadly, to advance an ideological agenda dressed up in the appealing clothing of media criticism.

I'm sure we all aspire to the lofty, non-partisan, unbiased media criticism offered by the Danny Schechters of the world. If it weren't for him, how would we find out that Goldberg's book is "published by Regnery, a long-time home for right-wing polemicists and propagandizers"? 

To (Goldberg), distortion is, it seems, any perspective not certified by the conservative policy pushers at the Heritage Foundation.

And to Schechter, any position to the right of Noam Chomsky is distortion. (Here's a revealing bio of Schechter. I'll leave it to the reader to decide what to think of a media critic who once wrote that America was like Hitler and Mr. Magoo all rolled into one, or who believes that a government-funded conservative think tank has taken over PBS.) Here's more from Schechter:

My book Mediaocracy ... on the 2000 election found the media quite hostile to liberal values and tilted toward Bush. (This conclusion was drawn by the nonpartisan analysts at MediaTenor in Germany.

Well, Danny Boy, I clicked all over MediaTenor's site (here it is) and for the life of me, I could not find much proof of this "tilt." Here's a quote from MediaTenor's analysis of the crucial final month of the campaign:

Gore had an advantage when policy issues were covered. Bush could profit from positive statements about his personality... Media Tenor Internet Analysis shows that both Bush and Gore were still heavily criticized in a very negative language.

Gore, in my view, was ultimately damaged by his association with Clinton, the first president to be impeached since the end of the Civil War. This is the reason that I believe the media was generally unenthusiastic in its coverage of Gore. But my personal problem with media bias is not the ups and downs of the political scene. It centers on coverage of certain social issues, which are invariably reported from a left-of-center perspective. Schechter doesn't even touch that. Instead, he launches into a debate about what is "liberal" and what is "conservative" that reveals his true colors. For him, today's "liberals" have been co-opted by "corporate agendas:"

The problem with "Bias" is that Goldberg doesn't seem to recognize that today's opposition movements don't even talk about liberalism or identify with its traditions. They organize against what they call "neo-liberalism," the appropriation of liberal rhetoric by conservative institutions like the World Bank or WTO to impose corporate agendas on developing countries. There is little that is liberal in neo-liberalism. Goldberg and the journalists he attacks are ALL conservative by global standards.

As I noted the other day, Harry Stein has the perfect response to this argument:

Anti-WTO types certainly aren't given much of a forum, nor are hard left critics of American foreign policy. Ralph Nader was excluded from the presidential debates with nary a whimper of protest. The difference between his beef and conservatives' is that, as even he would almost certainly acknowledge, the radical (or, if you prefer, radically populist) thinking he represents has only a tiny following. Conservatives are more or less half the population.

Finally, Schechter arrogantly tries to pass off his far-left views as somehow representing the only serious intellectual position:

It is the job of serious media scholars and analysts to debunk this pseudo-critique and replace it with a real one. Someone should explain to Goldberg about the more insidious problem of media consolidation and the pro-corporate bias that flows from it. He would probably dismiss me as a liberal if I try. And yet as a former network producer, I do agree with him on one point: "People don't trust us. And for good reason."

I have no problem with Schechter being a leftist; I just wish he wouldn't insult the rest of us by pretending that his position is that of a reasonable, objective observer.

TO PUBLISH OR NOT TO PUBLISH: Howie Kurtz is reporting today that "Washington Post" executives Len Downie and Robert Kaiser have written a book titled "The News About the News: American Journalism in Peril." Among the items of note: At the height of the 1996 presidential campaign, the "Washington Post" sat on a story about an affair Bob Dole had 28 years ago.The story was leaked to the press anyway.

The book gives broadcast journalists a lot of grief (not that they don't deserve it).

"The decline of serious, ambitious television news over the last two decades of the 20th century cannot be called surprising," they write. "Ours had become a celebrity-besotted culture, with television the single most powerful promoter and ratifier of celebrityhood."

But they also reveal how out of touch they are when it comes to what nearly every journalist inside their own newsroom is reading:

They're also dismissive of Slate, Salon and the Drudge Report.

Obviously, we're not getting the whole story here, but that's a fairly bold head-in-the-sand position to take in the year 2002.

GETTING IN TUNE: Fritz Schrank has a link that's been circulating among members of the blognoscenti, wherein you gauge your musical hipness by seeing how many albums from a preordained list you have in your collection. (As for the "Guardian" list, the Amazing Techie Girlfriend and I have U2, Dido, Alanis Morrisette, David Gray, Oasis and Bob Marley. That puts us halfway down the road to the Dido Demographic. Hmm.) Anyway, here's my short list. The Amazing Techie Girlfriend, who is a little younger than me, might call this a checklist for the Hipster Doofus Demographic. These entries are not listed in any particular order.

REM, "Murmur": I was in high school when this album, REM's first, came out. It was unlike anything I'd ever heard. I still play it a lot. "Pilgrimage," "Talk About the Passion," "Laughing." As the kids say, it's all good.

The Clash, "London Calling": Another album from my youth. As far as I'm concerned, side two of the first album of this collection is one of the finest vinyl sides in history. (That's tracks 5-10 on the disc.) "Spanish Bombs," "The Right Profile," "Lost In the Supermarket," "Clampdown" and "The Guns of Brixton" knocked me on my 14-year-old butt. In some important ways, I haven't gotten up yet.

Toots & The Maytals, "Funky Kingston": I was into reggae as a young man, and this was the first reggae album I ever bought. "Got To Be There" is among my all-time favorite songs. "Time Tough" is up there, too.

Oasis, "Definitely Maybe": Like millions of drunken football hooligans, I, too, fell for the hype surrounding this band. I've been progressively disappointed by their output, but this album has some fantastic tunes. If you can get past Liam Gallagher's nasal whine, "Live Forever," "Cigarettes & Alcohol" and "Slide Away" are great songs. "Live Forever" is one of my all-time favorites. In late 1994, I probably played it on my car stereo like 800,000 times.

John Coltrane, "Giant Steps": On the jazz tip is this classic by the sax icon. I like "Cousin Mary" and "Naima." Music to read a book by.

ZZ Top, "Fandango" (Side 2 only): Yee-haw! I'm not a huge fan of the live first side, but Side 2 has the classics "Tush," "Heard It On The X" and "Blue Jean Blues." My favorites are "Nasty Dogs & Funky Kings" and the politically incorrect "Mexican Blackbird." Unfortunately, this band's suckiness appears to be proportional to the length of their beards, which were down around their testicles by the early 1980s and the "Eliminator" album.

Bruce Springsteen, "Darkness on the Edge of Town": That rarest of albums in which every song is great. "Badlands," "Candy's Room," "Promised Land." As an album, this beats the crap out of "Born To Run," and that's saying something.

The Replacements, "Let It Be": Discovered these guys, appropriately enough, in college. "I Will Dare" still sounds great after, what, 15 years? (Jesus, has it been that long?)

Steely Dan, their entire catalog: They're kind of the "quiet storm" of ironic jazz/rock.

The Rolling Stones, "Some Girls": This had the hit "Miss You" but I like "Some Girls," "When The Whip Comes Down," "Just My Imagination" and one of my all-time favorites, "Before They Make Me Run." (Not to mention the country-fried "Far Away Eyes.") Mick & The Boys sounded a little drunk when they recorded this, which makes it that much better when you're drunk.

The Allman Brothers, "Brothers and Sisters": This has "Ramblin' Man" and "Jessica." The latter was co-opted by some car company a couple of years ago, but it's still the perfect driving-through-the-country-on-a-sunny-day-while-drinking-a-beer-from-a-paper-bag song. (Not that I do that sort of thing anymore.)

The Who, "Live at Leeds": "Young Man Blues" is the best live rock song ever. It's so good, I think it's been banned by all Holiday Inns around the world.

Boston, "Boston": This came out when I was in like the fifth grade and I STILL like it. I'm a little ashamed to admit it, but when I hear "Peace of Mind" on the car radio and I'm nearing the house, I drive around the block an extra time so I can listen to it all the way through.

BoDeans, "Thick as Thieves: Best of the BoDeans": I'd seen these guys live like five times before I bought this disc. I promptly played it to death. "Idaho" and "You Don't Get Much" are overlooked classics.

Nick Lowe, Basher: The Best of Nick Lowe: I was aware of this guy from "Cruel to be Kind" and from his production work for Elvis Costello, but his material just blew me away when I got this disc about eight years ago. Sorry I missed out for so long. Choice cuts: "When I Write The Book," "The Rose of England," "Heart of the City," "Switchboard Susan," "Cracking Up."

Wynton Marsalis, J Mood: This was one of the jazz maestro's first albums, and it's one of his best. It's worth buying the disc just to read the liner notes by Stanley Crouch. An excerpt: For Wynton Marsalis, the J Mood expresses everything from gutbucket to ethereal passion. On one hand, it is the ruminative repose that follows the intimate dialogue of actual romance, the sweet silence and soft breathing after the act of love. On another, it is the kind of clarity that comes of solitude and provides the resolve that makes for refinement. The bittersweet knowledge of the aches and pains of life is also part of the J Mood. Raw or smooth in intensity, J Mood is the suave soul at the center of swing. Further, J. Mood is finesse, proof that elegance is the most sublime manifestation of vitality. Put this disc on before you go to sleep. You'll be out by the end of "Presence That Lament Brings." But in a good way.

Randy Newman, "Good Old Boys": A collection of songs both funny and poignant. From the decidedly un-PC "Rednecks" to the touching "Marie" and the hilarious "Naked Man," this is a great all-around album.

The Police, "Zenyatta Mondatta": I'm a big Police fan, but I like this one the best. After 20 years, "Voices Inside My Head" is still stuck in my head.

UPDATE: The Amazing Techie Girlfriend wrote in and demanded a clarification. The Oasis albums are mine, not hers. She just wants everyone to know that. (By the way, watch for more "Albums I Like" on days when there's not much going on.)

ABC SEEKS DIVERSITY UBER ALLES: Late-night surfing reveals that ABC News will be adapting tougher diversity rules for on-air sources:

ABC News has compiled a database of 480 people — all minorities — to turn to for on-air or taped comments. Employees have been told evaluations will be based in part on how many of these sources they call. "The goal here is to make sure that when we are seeking experts outside the news division to help explain stories we're working on, we include in the group we're considering a wide variety of possibilities, rather than simply going back to the same, limited group," ABC News president David Westin wrote in an e-mail to staffers Jan. 19.

This is exactly the kind of arm-twisting diversity that is already practiced at far too many media conglomerates. The underlying assumption is this: White journalists can never see beyond their own cultural blinders, therefore they must be forced to seek out experts of color. It may lead to a greater variety of faces on the air, but the net result will be that, in certain fields of expertise, many of the same minority experts will appear over and over and over again. (Does the name "Dr. Alvin Poussaint" ring a bell?) And what will ethnically diverse but philosophically homogenous experts bring to the field of social sciences? Will quoting Derrick Bell more often than Andrew Hacker really elevate the debate about race in America? Or will it just make certain members of the audience feel better about themselves?

WAR COVERAGE GOES NEGATIVE: Howie Kurtz is reporting on the negative turn in the war coverage from Afghanistan in recent weeks. After wading through graf after graf of bitching by professional journalists, you get this kernel of common sense from an NBC pro:

Jim Miklaszewski said the media is still getting a good picture of the war: "A complete picture? We'll never get that. There's still information being released about secrets kept during World War II."

WHY THE PUBLIC DISTRUSTS THE MEDIA: Jeffrey M. Landaw, an editor at the "Baltimore Sun" and a self-described "lifelong Democrat," sums it up nicely:

As the mainstream media strain to get the "right" mix of color, religion and gender into their newsrooms, they've stopped representing their readers' political and cultural views. Thomas Edsall of The Washington Post makes this point in the July/August Public Perspective magazine, put out by the University of Connecticut's Roper Center for Public Opinion Research... "The media," Mr. Edsall wrote, "do not have good antennae to detect conservative forces at work in the electorate." Mr. Edsall points out that "the press ... has been blindsided by some of the most significant political developments because so few members of the media share the views of the voters who have been mobilized by these movements.

WHY COPY EDITORS ARE HEROES: Fellow copy editor Tom Mangan has a post that encapsulates why copy editors are the "straw that stirs the drink" at newspapers. When his paper found out about the death of Waylon Jennings, they kicked it into crisis mode and triumphed:

We got the news of his death at about 4:15 p.m. Pacific Time yesterday, which was an hour and 15 minutes before our page deadline for the Thursday Arts & Entertaiment section, whose main section had a story on, of all people, Willie Nelson performing in the Bay Area next week...That decision was made less than an hour before our deadline. We had no story, no photos, no headlines, no captions at 4:30 but had it all within 60 minutes in time to make our deadline. A fun hour, one of the things that keeps people working in the news biz (while slowly driving them mad, of course).

I don't think people outside of newspapers (and a whole lot of people INSIDE newspers, too) can really appreciate what it takes to pull something like that off in such a short amount of time. But things like this happen every day, at newspapers all over the country. Well done, Tom.

THE CORRECTIONS: There's a new book coming out about funny corrections that have appeared in the "New York Times." It's called "Kill Duck Before Serving: Red Faces at The New York Times." Here's how the book got its name:

The correction that gives the book its title admitted that the paper had "incorrectly described a presentation of Muscovy duck by Michel Fitoussi, a New York chef. In preparing it, Mr. Fitoussi uses a duck that has been killed."

And from London, Andrew Sullivan has posted a funny correction that appeared in "The Guardian." (I pointed out the witty corrections from "The Guardian" earlier.)

'NATION' BUILDING: Elderly red-diaper babies and their fellow travelers are under withering assault in Cincinnati. They're forced to huddle in safe houses and read samizdat copies of "The Nation" together to steel themselves from the post-9/11 right-wing putsch. That's kind of the thrust of this link I found over at Romenesko. As you might expect, there's a "politically aware" member of the intelligentsia in the group:

David Sterling, professor emeritus at the University of Cincinnati and a member of the discussion group, has witnessed the ups and downs of living here. "I've lived in this town over 30 years and I'm still surprised at the complacency of its citizenry," Sterling says. "The idea that Cincinnati is a great city is pure hype. The people who run this city are not willing to even entertain any need for change."

Thirty years in that fascist hellhole? Such stoic resolve! If only there were more brave Dave Sterlings on the left! But let's not forget fellow academic Carol Rainey:

Carol Rainey, an adjunct English professor at several schools, enjoys sharing her views with the group. "In particular, I was feeling the need to become more politically active," Rainey says. The readers' group gives her a chance to meet people whose political leanings are more to the left and to get a perspective different from the mainstream media. "The media now is so right-wing," Rainey says. "I feel much more isolated now than I used to. The group was a way of getting to know other liberals in the city."

That's the way to become "politically active," Carol. Sit around with 20 people who think EXACTLY THE SAME WAY YOU DO, wrap yourself in an invented victimhood and pat yourself on the back for being morally superior to your fellow citizens. Now THAT'S dissent.

UPDATE: Ken Layne read this same article, and offers his own unique views.

RANTING FROM THE RIGHT: Also at Romenesko today is this link to a column from the "Los Angeles Times" by Norah Vincent. In it, she rants about how the media kowtow to special-interest groups (NAACP, NOW, GLAAD, etc.) with nary a flicker of dissent:

Few creatures are more detestable, more verminous, than the special interest bureaucrat. He is the banal quintessence of evil. With his sniff of sedentary power, he is that most craven of all schlumps, always and everywhere just following orders, mindless and industrious as a louse, implacable as a meter maid. When challenged on his fierce illogic, he merely parrots the shopworn slogan, "I just work here." Today in America, such flacks are almost exclusively the property of the complainant left, which has homogenized and mass-produced them, wound them up and marched them, like Energizer bunnies, into the loop of public discourse.

Tammy Bruce, who has written "The New Thought Police," a book critical of the Stalinist tactics of these groups, tells Vincent how she's been "blacklisted" since joining the "enemy" camp:

"Aside from her spot-on assertion that left-wing McCarthyism and Nixonian scare tactics are standard fare among advocates of the so-called disenfranchised, what's interesting about Bruce's book is the lack of attention it's getting in the liberal-leaning mainstream press, which goes a long way toward affirming the thesis of Bernard Goldberg's new book, "Bias: A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distort the News."
When I was with NOW, I could get an interview on anything anywhere. With the media's complicity, I knew I could move any issue and make it work. Now they don't even return my phone calls. I've found out what it's like trying to get your message out when you're on the 'wrong' side of an issue."

Bruce's book, Vincent notes, has been widely ignored by the mainstream media, and she smells a conspiracy. Well, I've got Bruce's book, and I've read much of it. I hate to break it to her, but she's not exactly reporting anything new. While it's true that the media will give certain special-interest groups almost unquestioning coverage, much of the book rehashes arguments I've read in a dozen other places. Bruce's personal experiences with the illiberal tactics of the liberal left are enlightening, but in the end the book doesn't add a whole lot to the debate. Here I go again: Go read William McGowan's "Coloring the News" for a much more thorough discussion of these issues.

MEA CULPA: Romenesko reports today on a sports columnist from the "Denver Post" apologizing for making fun of Utah in a piece on the Olympics. I don't see what the big deal is here. This is pretty much a formulaic column for sports hacks. Here's the script: Major league expansion brings a new city into the fold? Rip that town a new one and portray it as a provincial backwater. (Charlotte, N.C., comes to mind here. It got some merciless mocking from a lot of big-city sports guys after landing NBA and NFL franchises.) Atlanta gets the Olympics? Call it "Spartanburg (S.C.) with skyscrapers" in your nationally syndicated column. And of course, there's always the "my town is better than your town, and here's why" dueling columns in the run-up to most major sporting events.

The "Denver Post" piece does go a bit overboard. (Decide for yourself: here's a link to the original column.) But again, it's not like this is something new. Get over it, Utah. You're getting world-wide media attention, and Colorado isn't. Enjoy it.

THE PERFESSOR'S ON IT: Glenn "Tha Bloggfatha" Reynolds points out a subtle little piece of bias slipped into a passage from "Roll Call."

ONLINE NEWSPAPERS: A good article at "Editor & Publisher" on how newspapers dropped the ball during the first wave of the Internet revolution. It was written after a recent conference on "new media." Here's an excerpt:

Futurist Paul Saffo summed things up nicely. His message:
* The newspaper industry failed miserably in its first go-round with the Internet -- indeed, newspaper executives' performance in figuring out a credible, profitable model to participate in the Internet boom was "criminal." "There's a whole generation of newspaper executives who should be fired," said Saffo, because they could only see new media through an old-media lens.
* We (in developed countries) are well on the road to the point where digital consumption of information will be greater than consumption of printed information. No, paper isn't going anywhere, but it will soon be overtaken. (As Saffo put it, horses didn't disappear when automobiles were introduced, but they weren't used as much for transportation.)
* The newspaper industry, in particular, is well positioned to take advantage of the next wave. But it will require taking risks and striking out to find what's on the horizon -- and embracing it.

HARRY STEIN, MEDIA CRITIC: For a good discussion of media bias, check out this Q&A with Harry Stein, author of "How I Accidentally Joined the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy" and a member of the Poynter Institute's advisory board. (Link via Romenesko.) It reiterates several points I've been making on this Web site for the past month. Choice quote:

Many, many, many people, literally millions, have grown accustomed to seeing their values and beliefs routinely caricatured and belittled by the media. They also resent being endlessly preached to about tolerance and diversity by a media that conspicuously fails to practice the former and defines the latter as encompassing skin tone but not thought.

And check this gem out:

Q: Critics from the left, such as Noam Chomsky, deride the news media as champions of the status quo. They argue that the media limit the public debate to the narrowest range of opinions. Do they have a point?

A: Absolutely. From Chomsky's perspective, the media indeed are exclusionary. Anti-WTO types certainly aren't given much of a forum, nor are hard left critics of American foreign policy. Ralph Nader was excluded from the presidential debates with nary a whimper of protest. The difference between his beef and conservatives' is that, as even he would almost certainly acknowledge, the radical (or, if you prefer, radically populist) thinking he represents has only a tiny following. Conservatives are more or less half the population.

Well said, Harry.

EAGLE-EYED READER: An alert reader sent me this little tidbit from Slate's Papers section.

As happened on Monday in another report on an errant missile strikes, all three papers carry similar quotes from many of the same sources. Today each is datelined: THORAI, Afghanistan. It doesn't seem like all three papers just stumbled upon this place. As the LAT notes, "Both homes [attacked] are in the middle of fields, inaccessible even by car." So unless the NYT, WP, and LAT spontaneously decided to go on a hiking trip together, somebody seems to be organizing a Collateral Damage Tour. If that's the case, the papers should simply say so.

Very true. Who IS organizing a Collateral Damage Tour? Robert Fisk? Ted Rall?

PRESS CORPSES? Tony Adragna of Quasipundit fame points out a story I missed: Dana Milbank's scary rides on presidential press corps charter flights. Apparently these planes are often quite rickety. Milbank sees sinister motives:

Is the Bush administration trying to kill the White House press corps? No doubt such an action would be politically popular. But members of the press corps, not surprisingly, view this possibility in a different light. Hence the concern over what seems increasingly to be a potential murder weapon: the dreaded press charter.

The question of presidential murder hangs in the air until the ninth graph:

White House spokeswoman Anne Womack said the administration is not culpable in the attempted murder of the press corps; previous administrations had their own dubious charters. The travel office solicits bids from a number of airlines and charter companies -- she did not know which ones -- and then sends a list of bids to the White House Correspondents' Association, which makes the choice. "It's ultimately a decision the correspondents' association makes," she said. But members of the association said they feel pressure from the White House to select cheap bidders -- in part because the government pays for a number of stenographers and aides who travel on the plane.

It's interesting that this Milbank piece was published on the same day that the "American Prospect" article on the Bush "blacklist" came out (see below). In it, Milbank is mentioned prominently as one of the White House reporters crushed under the jackboot of the all-powerful Bush spin machine. Coincidence? I think not!

THIN-SKINNED WASHINGTON MEDIA: Here's a story from "The American Prospect" that's actually kind of funny. Apparently the White House press corps thinks the Bush administration has a "blacklist" (great word choice, that) for reporters who don't give glowing reports on the President's doings.

What strikes many journalists, though, isn't so much the Bushies' toughness but their unnecessary roughness -- the administration's oddly methodical, oversensitive, and aggressive responses to minor, unimportant, or thoroughly imagined slights. "Everyone expects them to be vigilant, to protect their boss -- that goes with the territory," says one correspondent. "But there's an over-the-top quality here." ...Journalists working on projects that fit the White House line...enjoy the royal treatment: spoon-fed chronology, high-level interviews, and juicy anecdotes galore. Reporters deemed disrespectful of the party line...get a different kind of treatment: angry calls to the boss, lack of cooperation on routine requests (such as travel schedules), and other petty -- and not so petty -- reprisals.

Doesn't that sound a lot like complaints people had about the Clinton administration? I realize that TAP is an ideologically driven liberal publication, but this really strikes me as whining. It's rare for presidential administrations (or any public figure, for that matter) to be overwhelmingly accomodating to adversarial reporters. As an example of the blacklist in action, TAP declares Bob Woodward's recent "10 Days in September" piece "interminable" and suggests it was nothing but an elaborate exercise in spin:

In the Post's breathless account of the days after 9-11, the president and his staff are always resolute, action is always decisive, and pressure is always met by grace.

Nowhere does TAP suggest that administration officials might be leery of the media because, pre-9/11, they largely portrayed Bush as right-wing buffoon who stole the election. Also, you would barely know that this administration is involved in the most serious challenge to face the nation since the height of the Cold War. All you hear is whining, whining, whining.

"What September 11 has done," says one White House reporter, "is heightened their arrogance."

And this from a reporting pool that voted something like 90 percent for Clinton? No wonder the media is in such ill repute these days.

ANOTHER BIAS UPDATE: Michelangelo Signorile of the "New York Press" gives a semi-review of Bernard Goldberg's "Bias" and raises an already tired complaint: What about conservative commentators such as Alan Keyes? They're all over the TV.

True enough. I agree that conservative pundits get a fair shake on the news shows. But that still doesn't address the bias in a lot of the reporting. Consider this item from the Media Research Center. Two prominent talking heads (Dan Rather and Katie Couric), two solidly biased takes on campaign finance reform. Hell, click all over the MRC's site. There are plenty of other examples.

But Signorile is after bigger fish:

That gets at what is the real bias in television media: money. At this point, producers slap on anything if they think it’ll bring in viewers. And if it doesn’t work out, it hits the trash bin.

Well, duh, Michelangelo. It's called the "market." It works well, too. Look into it sometime. FInally, there's this "puhleeze" moment:

In one particular anecdote that has received a lot of attention, Goldberg quotes an unnamed CBS staffer on a conference call labeling former Family Research Council head Gary Bauer "the little nut from the Christian group."...What counts is this: Has Gary Bauer gotten his mug on tv and put forth his agenda? You better believe it–nauseatingly so, and a lot more often than those of us left of center have.

Forget that much of the coverage of people like Gary Bauer (whose views I don't agree with or care for) is disparaging; the fact that Bauer is allowed to speak AT ALL is an affront to a hard-core ideologue like Signorile. Furthermore, it's hard to believe he can't see that coverage of some important issues (race, crime, welfare, homosexuality, immigration) almost always comes from a left-of-center point of view. But then, that's where the good liberal gatekeepers believe the "center" is, anyway.

KOOKY MEDIA MEGALOMANIAC ALERT: Ted Turner tells students at Brown what he thinks of the 9/11 hijackers:

“I think they were brave,” Turner said of the 19 men involved in the terrorist acts, adding that they “might have been a little nuts.”

He also had this dire warning:

“The environment will collapse in your lifetime,” he said.

According to this story, Turner also praised Fidel Castro. The Projo story also has this tidbit. After saying that the 9/11 hijackers were brave, Turner did this:

He asked for a show of hands of people who would act as suicide bombers for their country and got none.

Thank God for that. (And thank God for Jim Romenesko, who provided these links and many of the other ones I publicize.)

SNARK ATTACK! Peter Carlson of the "Washington Post" has penned a snarky commentary on a John J. Miller article from the "National Review" that reports on editorial changes at the "Reader's Digest." Carlson sarcastically massages a couple of liberal soft spots, among them guilt by association with Joe McCarthy and a not-so-subtle sneering at the Cold War-era anti-communist slant of "Reader's Digest." (As if that were a bad thing; after all, didn't Susan Sontag once say that the average reader of "Reader's Digest" knew more of the awful truth about the Soviet Union than did the average reader of "The Nation"?) But the real thrust of the article is conservative hypocrisy about media bias:

The problem began, Miller says, when the magazine's tough old conservative editors left in the 1990s and were replaced by people such as top editor Eric Schrier, a man with mysterious political views. "Each of his predecessors . . . was a known conservative," Miller writes. "Yet Schrier is a political mystery. People who work with him daily don't know his views on fundamental issues." Well, you can imagine the chaos caused when writers don't know their editor's political views! Why, they just don't know what to think. Or worse, they start thinking for themselves. ....Outraged, I called Jacqueline Leo, the magazine's new editor in chief, and asked her about Miller's story. "It's silly," she said. "One of the things that amused me is that this is the very same group that is always beating their breasts about press bias, and now they're complaining that we don't have enough of it."

Let's see if Carlson's reasoning passes what Stanley Crouch calls the "flip test." Imagine if, say, the "Utne Reader" (the closest lefty equivalent to "Reader's Digest") switched editorial staff; suddenly, articles from "National Review" or the "Weekly Standard" start showing up alongside the obligatory paeans to the vegan lifestyle. Do you really think media critic Eric Alterman of "The Nation" wouldn't write a scathing piece bemoaning Utne's abandonment of "progressive" journalism? And after said Alterman piece was published, could you really picture Peter Carlson dissing Alterman for advocating blatantly biased journalism? I rest my case. And the argument that it's only conservatives screaming about media bias? Liberals deny that it even exists and won't seriously analyze it. That's a form of hypocrisy, too.

I haven't read Miller's article (it's not linked at NRO yet) and it certainly could be a flawed piece. But it doesn't really strike me as overly hypocritical that movement conservatives would want to hold onto one of the few mainstream, high-circulation magazines with a rightward tilt. Here's what you didn't get from Carlson's article: Magazines are all about "niche audiences." "Reader's Digest" is an entirely different animal than "Time" or "Newsweek" or the "Washington Post." It's doesn't carry breaking news, and it has traditionally served a niche that is older and more conservative, just as "Utne Reader" serves a niche that is more liberal. If "Digest" is abandoning its core audience, it's eventually going to show up in the bottom line.

UPDATE: The NRO boys are down on "The Corner" talking about Carlson's article here and here. And here is Miller's original article.

'60 MINUTES' UNFAIR TO KUWAIT? Also in the "Weekly Standard" is this piece about how "60 Minutes" misportrayed Kuwaiti sentiment toward America in the post-9/11 world. The author, Claudia Winkler, makes a good case that Mike Wallace & company only put Kuwaitis who were anti-American on camera, when in fact there is much greater diversity of opinion in the country we liberated from Saddam Hussein in 1991. Winkler's story also shows that Islamists are putting a lot of pressure on moderate government officials in Kuwait.

I did a quick search over at Little Green Footballs (the Media Minder of the Arab press) and found a couple of examples of Kuwaitis defying the Islamists (here and here). It's a hopeful sign.

JOURNALISTS....PRAYING? Fred Barnes of the "Weekly Standard" has this story today about an upswing in religiosity among the Washington press corps. It seems that the number of journalists attending an annual dinner for Christian journalists given by columnist Cal Thomas has increased in recent years. (I personally think more journalists showed up because the original gathering was held in the bar of the Washington Hilton.) But it wasn't all seriousness. At the end of Tony Snow's speech, there was this little exchange:

His final point was that we must pray for our enemies because even in them we "see the face of God." At this point, he looked at Sam Donaldson of ABC-TV in the audience. "Sam, you're the face of God." Donaldson snapped back, "That's a terrible thing to say about God." Snow got the last word. "Sam," he said, "I said God has a sense of humor."

KINSLEY LEAVING: Romenesko is just now reporting that "Slate" editor Michael Kinsley will be stepping down (Romenesko links to a WSJ story that requires registration). Kinsley has been battling Parkinson's for several years now.

MEDIA CRITICS STAY IN THEIR SAFETY ZONE: Matt Welch points out that media critics who lambaste the "Houston Chronicle" for not doing enough serious reporting on Enron have completely overlooked the Houston newspaper that has been on Enron's case for a long time: The "Houston Business Journal."

DEJA VU: It appears that Howell Raines is doing more shaking up at the "New York Times." According to this story from "New York Magazine" (link via Romenesko) Raines is yanking people out of bureaus and shuffling responsibilities, leading to turmoil and resignations. Sounding like Dilbert's Pointy-Haired Boss, Raines says it's all being done so the Times can have "a fast-metabolism reaction to news." Raines also says he's going to "aggresively affect people's lives." (Maybe all the well-deserved criticism of the Times is having an effect on Raines, who feels he has to "shake things up" to show he's in control, Captain Queeg style.)

People already don't like it:

In contrast, staffers feel that Raines (who declined to comment) is looking for "unencumbered" reporters. "I don't think Howell wants people bitching about how they can't spend time on the road," says one reporter. "He's looking for 30-year-olds with no spouse and no children, people who can file from four datelines in five days. It's the model of what a national correspondent was like when Howell was on the national staff."

THE DEAD ZONE: If you've ever wondered about how the obituary department works, read this column by "Washington Post" ombudsman Michael Getler (link via Romenesko). The Post obviously takes obits much more seriously than just about any place I've ever worked. The last paper I worked for would print almost anything the family of the deceased wanted as long as they paid for it. We got some doozies, and I wish I had kept some. They ranged from very touching to very silly.

UPDATE: Here's a poignant nuts-and-bolts story about what a news/obit clerk does every day. (Link via Romenesko.) These people are really the unsung heroes of the newsroom, because anytime they pick up the phone, there's no telling what kind of world they're going to get plunged into.

HOWIE'S BEEN BUSY: There's just a boatload of stuff in Howie Kurtz's columns today (they're here and here.) Kurtz says many major media outlets are using Enron as a springboard to call for greater reforms and more regulations. He also gives the "Houston Chronicle" a fair amount of grief for treating Ken Lay with kid gloves. But there's so much more: Mormons, "Dilbert"-esque media layoff memos, another book about Bush that paints him as clueless. Just go check Howie out.