A NOTE TO READERS: Some of you may have noticed that I'm not posting as much as I was a couple of weeks ago. Or maybe you didn't notice. Whatever. Anyway, there's a very good reason for this: I've stopped posting from work. Here's why.

One of the copy editors I work with got caught working on a novel. On deadline. That's right; at times when we're really slammed and trying to get the paper finished, he's faking it and working on something totally unrelated to work. Now, the blogging I've done at work has been done exclusively during down times, which is generally the first hour of work. This guy wasn't doing that. He would pick up a story, not edit it at all, slap a headline on it and move it over to the slot (for those who don't know, that's the editor who gives a final read to stories and either OKs a headline or rewrites it) and then go back to work on the novel. Total bullshit ensued when he was called on it, the Human Resource department is involved, and now it's a big mess.

To make a long story short, the guy is very close to getting fired (I don't know why he wasn't fired outright, but that's another post for another day). And in light of that, I've ended my at-work blogging. It's a shame when people like that have to ruin the fun for the rest of us.

I do have a related story I'd like to share. This one's kind of funny.

One of my early bosses in newspapering used to tell this story. While working his first job at a small weekly paper, he noticed there was one older reporter who was always in the office at odd hours, typing away at the computer like a mad man. When asked what he was doing, he'd respond with a gruff "Uh, working on stuff for the paper." However, my old boss noticed that this guy only had one or two stories published a week in the paper, while other reporters were filing four or more. It was a puzzlement. Well, it turns out the old geezer was writing free-lance porn stories under a pseudonym! He had quite a profitable sideline selling these stories to men's magazines. As you might expect, he ended up getting fired. But as Page can probably tell you, it's a hell of a way to go.

A QUIET DAY TODAY: Not much going on here. The Amazing Techie Girlfriend and I are going out and about. Looks like a nice day outside.

Anyway, I did want to respond to a question raised by the post below about college enrollment being affected by the Enron crisis. A reader said that enrollment may be affected by the number of people who were thrown out of work and can no longer afford to send their kids to college. That's certainly possible, and I'm sure Enron's collapse did put college out of reach for a lot of families. That's a tragedy. However, this article never made that point. It made it sound like the city of Houston had suddenly become toxic because of the failing of one energy company. That's silly. And it's doubtful that a significant number of Enron employees in the Houston area would be sending their children to Houston-area colleges anyway. The vast majority of college students want to go to school away from their home towns - often as far away as possible.

Anyway, have a nice weekend.

ENRON'S TENTACLES REACH....COLLEGE? More college wackiness. An anonymous reader sent me this little gem. I don't think you can file it under "media bias," though. Maybe media stupidity. Here goes. In a simple, everyday story about colleges and their fears of falling enrollments, we find this:

"We are very aware that this is a year with more unknown variables than in the past," says Ann Wright, vice president for enrollment at Houston's Rice University, where the Enron debacle is adding another layer of uncertainty....In Texas, where the Enron scandal has hit hard, "I suspect many families will change their decisions as to where their children will attend," says Rob Sheridan, financial aid director at the University of Houston.

Now, I know the Enron scandal has bankrupted a lot of people. But are we seriously supposed to believe that it's going to affect college enrollment in the Houston area, one of the nation's biggest population centers and also the home to nearly 150,000 college students? (Hell, I'd think students would be more likely to stay away from Houston because of the presence of people such as Andrea and Russell Yates.) I mean, did Watergate affect Georgetown's enrollment? This is just silly.

CAMPUS FOLLIES: Romenesko has this link to a story about a journalism professor who is being forced to take down an antique gun that's been hanging in his office for years. The reason? It violates the Ohio University Workplace Violence Policy. Is any further comment really needed?

BOOK TIME: Now that #$*!*?@ Blogger is working again, I want to point out a couple of books that may be of interest to anyone who likes literature about the South and newspapering. First is the one I have read. Albert Murray's excellent "South to a Very Old Place" is a kind of literary travelogue through the South circa 1971. It features interviews with several Southern newspaper men. Wonderful writing and surprising observations from one of our greatest (and most overlooked) black writers.

Next is a book I haven't read, but eagerly want to. It's "Death By Journalism" by Jerry Bledsoe. It's the story of how stereotypical preconceptions about the South may have slanted the reporting on a Confederate history course at a community college in North Carolina. Here's a link to a story about the book from a newspaper in North Carolina. For those not familiar with Bledsoe, I consider him one of our best non-fiction writers. His "Bitter Blood" is an amazing book about a shocking crime. I've read it at least three times. And the Amazing Techie Girlfriend is possibly his greatest living fan. She's read all of his stuff multiple times.

Now I'm going outside. I'm off work today, and the weather's too nice to stay indoors.

HOWIE WANTS A NO-SPIN ZONE: Howie Kurtz opens his column today with a wide-ranging look at the various "spins" on the news that have been going on lately. As usual, he's got a lot of other stuff. But some of it I've seen on other folks' blogs already. Hmm......

POWERS TO THE PEOPLE: William Powers says journalists are as bad as Hollywood celebrities when it comes to awards.

Hah. When it comes to fixation on ego-stroking prizes, journalists take a backseat to no one, not even the Hollywood monsters we have such fun lampooning every year. In fact, there are striking similarities between the Oscars and the various awards that we journalists chase. Both are given for work that is performed in a very public way, and that doesn't necessarily need additional attention or validation. A reporter whose work was published in The New York Times is not in the same position as the academic scientist or the obscure poet who hopes a prize will bring his or her work to a broader audience. Both kinds of awards bring the winner more-tangible benefits than the prizes themselves would suggest: Like actors, journalists can see a nice boost to their market value after taking home a prize. And both have given rise to an unfortunate culture of prize-mongering, award-politicking, and formula thinking. Those endless, multipart newspaper series sometimes called Pulitzer Bait are the media analogue of the bombastic tearjerkers that always seem to win Oscars.

That bit about the "culture of prize-mongering, award-politicking and formula thinking" is absolutely spot-on. The intense pressure that newsroom managers face to win prizes and awards often drives them to do stupid, irresponsible things.

MACDONALD REVISITED: Well, I've re-read Heather MacDonald's assessment of an important study that aims to debunk the idea of racial profiling (highlighted earlier here). I tend to agree with the Opinion Journal's take on it; her language is a pretty overwraught, and all the evidence isn't in yet, so it's too early to draw any definite conclusions. Still, it's a good piece, as is her earlier work, which is also linked below.

MEDIA CRITICS ON EVERY CORNER: The "Weekly Standard" has a scathing piece on that controversial "San Francisco Chronicle" editorial where the paper used and abused quotes from Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz:

That would have been that--just another day at the office twisting the words of an official with whom the writer disagreed, but for the fact that the Pentagon now tapes all its officials' interviews with the press and makes the transcripts available to the public...The transcript gave Pentagon spokesman Victoria Clarke all the ammunition she needed for a stinging letter to the editor of the Chronicle two weeks ago, pointing out the obligation of serious journalists "not to put words in [a] person's mouth and not to misquote him or quote him out of context." The paper grudgingly conceded that "the editorial provided an inaccurate context for a Wolfowitz quote" and, further, that "Wolfowitz was misquoted" in one instance. It attributed these "discrepancies" to "errors in transcribing a tape recording of the interview." Further, it admitted that the editorial did not meet the paper's standards for presenting quotations. The back-and-forth between the paper and the Pentagon was well covered by Internet columnist Matt Welch a couple of weeks ago.

The piece goes on to describe how the Internet allows everyone to be a media critic, and that this may prompt a predictably elitist backlash:

We're going to see increasing public humiliation of incompetent and crooked journalism. Good journalists, it almost goes without saying, will welcome this and even enjoy watching it happen... But there will be a countervailing guild instinct to hunker down and reminisce about the good old days, when readers were powerless and we were as gods. In an online discussion of the Chronicle/Wolfowitz episode last Friday, a professor of journalism refers to "the new challenges that journalists face in a world of digital networks, where story subjects can disseminate their side of a dispute in ways the old print and broadcast media never allowed." Ah, yes: There's nothing like the new challenge of doing one's job passably well.

Good stuff.

RACIAL PROFILING DEBUNKED? I seemed to miss this yesterday (Mickey Kaus saw it) but here goes a potential blockbuster. The excellent Heather MacDonald of "City Journal" fame has fairly convincing evidence that racial profiling is a myth:

The anti–racial profiling juggernaut has finally met its nemesis: the truth. According to a new study, black drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike are twice as likely to speed as white drivers, and are even more dominant among drivers breaking 90 miles per hour. This finding demolishes the myth of racial profiling. Precisely for that reason, the Bush Justice Department tried to bury the report so the profiling juggernaut could continue its destructive campaign against law enforcement. What happens next will show whether the politics of racial victimization now trump all other national concerns.

MacDonald gets right at the heart of why this myth has had such a long shelf life:

Most of the studies that the ACLU and defense attorneys have proffered to show biased behavior by the police only used crude population measures as the benchmark for comparing police activity—arguing, say, that if 24 percent of speeding stops on a particular stretch of highway were of black drivers, in a city or state where blacks make up 19 percent of the population, the police are over-stopping blacks. Such an analysis is clearly specious, since it fails to say what percentage of speeders are black, but the data required to rebut it were not available. Matthew Zingraff, a criminologist at North Carolina State University, explains why: “Everybody was terrified. Good statisticians were throwing up their hands and saying, ‘This is one battle you’ll never win. I don’t want to be called a racist.’” Even to suggest studying the driving behavior of different racial groups was to demonstrate one’s bigotry, as Zingraff himself discovered when he proposed such research in North Carolina and promptly came under attack. Such investigations violate the reigning fiction in anti-racial profiling rhetoric: that all groups commit crime and other infractions at equal rates. It follows from this central fiction that any differences in the rate at which the police interact with certain citizens result only from police bias, not from differences in citizen behavior. Despite the glaring flaws in every racial profiling study heretofore available, the press and the politicians jumped on the anti-profiling bandwagon. How could they lose? They showed their racial sensitivity, and, as for defaming the police without evidence, well, you don’t have to worry that the New York Times will be on your case if you do.

An important work that, sadly, will be mostly ignored or downplayed by the mainstream media. Wait and see.

BAD SCIENCE REPORTING: Blogger Iain Murray of the invaluable Statistical Assessment Service has a piece today at the "American Enterprise Hotflash" about how the media (and others) bungled some simple information about anthrax in the early days of last fall's crisis. He's got a great suggestion on how to avoid that problem in the future:

Reporters trained in science are unlikely to make such basic mistakes...If the public is to be reliably informed of the risks it may be exposed to in the face of these new threats, then it may be time for science reporters to step up to the plate. A scientifically trained reporter or editor should be asked to look over any story with a scientific element, however casual the reference. We can expect resistance to this idea. The British scientist C.P. Snow, commented that there were “two cultures” in modern life – arts and science. That divide, the “gulf of mutual incomprehension,” still exists, and nowhere more so than in the newsroom, where the vast majority are liberal arts graduates. But science is increasingly a wholly integrated part of modern life, with technology, biology and their interactions affecting us every day. If the public wants to know the risks it faces in an ever more complicated world, the cultural gap must be bridged...Traditional newsroom practice cannot stand in the way of a modern approach to modern life.

Here, here. Unfortunately, you can count me among the scientific (and mathematic) clueless. But at least I didn't have a hand in this mess.

'1491': Here's a fascinating story from the newest issue of "The Atlantic."

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.

I read this article in the dead-wood edition. Check it out.

AFGHAN CASUALTIES WATCH: Some twit over at "Working for Change" is at it again - accusing the U.S. of killing hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians. In a column complaining about newspapers running Charles Krauthammer but not, say, Noam Chomsky, we find this little gem:

It's hard to know how to unravel such a pithy series of lies with equal pithiness, but for starters: the Taliban were not a major factor in the famine; drought, 22 years of war, and extreme poverty were. And not tens but hundreds of thousands of Afghans probably have died, before and after the beginning of U.S. bombing and the Taliban's unseating. Moreover, the criticism at the time, which is Krauthammer's subject, came in the context of a very real risk of the death of millions -- an outcome the United States was fully prepared to accept.

There's this doozy, too:

But all that can be, and is, forgotten. History is also a selective thing in these climes. Krauthammer, for example, derides Daschle, who asked why almost no Al Qaeda leaders have been captured or killed; but the columnist has been notably silent on the one world-class terrorist who has died in the last six months, Angola's Jonas Savimbi. Perhaps that's because when Savimbi, in the service of America's Cold War machinations, was leading campaigns that mutilated, tortured, and massacred countless Angolan civilians in the '80s, Krauthammer, taking his cue from the Reagan Administration, repeatedly praised him and his works.

Ah, yes, that murderous Reagan Administration. It's true we offered aid and support to Savimbi, but we didn't place 50,000 troops there like Cuba did. Those Cuban soldiers fought against Savimbi's forces and helped make it one of the most heavily land-mined countries on earth. (Note that most of those mines came from the former Soviet Union or its satellites.) Quoting Patrick Brogan's "The Fighting Never Stopped: A Comprehensive Guide to World Conflict Since 1945":

"They (Cuba) have invested billions in the MPLA (the Marxist party), far more than the U.S. has in UNITA (Savimbi's party), to no perceptible advantage..UNITA got about $15 million a year in weapons from the U.S...As in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, this small American investment caused an enormous expenditure by the Soviet Union to keep the Cubans and the Angolan army in the field; by the mid-1980s, the U.S.S.R. was sending Angola $1 billion in weapons every year. For the Americans, it was an exceedingly cost-effective way of putting pressure on the Soviets, the reverse of what happened in Vietnam.

Does "Working For Change" ever check any facts?

'THE ENRON TEMPLATE': A good piece today in the "National Review" on how the media framed the Enron debacle:

One of the reasons why Enron got so much play in the media is that it fit neatly into a standard template for reporters covering the story. It went something like this. Big businesses hate government regulation because it prevents them from making large profits. Enron is a big business that gave campaign contributions to the Republican Party. Therefore, Republicans were responsible for its collapse because they oppose government regulation. As simplistic as this is, it is clear that virtually all press coverage of Enron, at least in the beginning, followed this script. It doesn't seem to have occurred to most reporters that Republicans might support free-market policies simply because they think they are the right ones to follow. Thus, when Republicans resisted imposition of price controls on energy last summer, the media implied that this was only because Enron gave them campaign funds. The idea that Republicans might oppose price controls because of their unbroken record of failure was never seriously considered by most reporters covering Enron.

'BIAS' REVIEWED, PART 395: A couple of readers have sent me a link to another book review of Bernard Goldberg's "Bias." It appeared in the "London Review of Books." The reviewer, Thomas Frank, seems to be a Marxist who believes that American concepts of left and right are pretty much irrelevant. According to this thesis, American liberalism has been so debased by corporate power that it's little more than a set of pat social stances that are easily ridiculed by "the indignant rhetorical style of the culture-war Right," which speaks the "fulminating language of right-wing populism." But Jonah Goldberg had a great response to this attitude in his recent column about Jonathan Chait's "Bias" review:

But the idea that corporations are serious engines of conservatism, economic or cultural, is a conviction clouded by nostalgia for the days when Thomas Nast drew the captains of industry as fat pigs eating at the trough of the trusts. Corporations are worse than useless when it comes to fighting the culture war and only occasionally helpful in fighting regulations. ABC's parent company, Disney, is a huge champion of gay rights and a sparring partner of the Christian Right. The former owner of CNN, Ted Turner, is the U.N.'s biggest booster and fond of saying nasty things about America, the Pope, Christians, etc. Corporations, as a rule, are ahead of the U.S. government on affirmative action and give mightily to Planned Parenthood and PBS. These "heartless" multinational corporations swallow all sorts of regulations because they know they are barriers to entry from would-be competitors and they can pass the costs of these mandates to consumers.

Frank also makes the valid point that pre-1960s press criticism was predominantly from the left. Of course, when the target was William Randolph Hearst and his dictatorial control of the American press, it was a pretty easy argument to make. Hearst imposed his will on his newspapers in a way that would be unacceptable today. He was a nastier, meaner Richard Mellon Scaife, only with much more money and many more media outlets. Compare that to our current situation, where giant media companies are often just one part of a huge multinational corporation. There are a whole host of problems associated with that (in my experience, they mainly stem from absentee ownership), but the idea that the robber barons drop in on editorial meetings to slant the daily news product is ridiculous.

Frank also drifts into a fantasy world where Republicans have "annexed" the language of social class because "the Democratic leadership decided years ago not to talk class any more." Huh? Frank must have missed the recent presidential campaign, or ANY major Democratic campaign of the last 35 years, for that matter. Democratic positions on minimum-wage laws or tax cuts are ALWAYS couched in the "language of social class." Bernie Goldberg mocking the wine-and-cheese, limousine-liberal crowd doesn't change that one iota.

The Democratic spin on the Enron crisis must have escaped Frank's attention, too. Maybe it was that massive press cover-up of business malfeasance, which is the only logical outcome when the media are controlled by corporations. Puh-leez.

Of course, to a Marxist such as Frank, the whole argument about liberal media bias does seem silly. I'm sure he believes that people making more than $40,000 a year are de facto conservatives, no matter what their beliefs are on a host of issues. Frank even states emphatically that class is at the "centre" of the argument. But a quick check of the daily media output in America proves that Frank has far more allies in newsrooms than he does enemies. Does he really believe that the poor and minorities aren't portrayed in a favorable light in the American media? They are invariably cast in terms of the age-old Marxist melodrama: helpless victims battered by forces of wealth and power beyond their control.

And the bit about the "social disaster" caused by free-market economic policies is a bit rich coming from a Marxist. No mention is made of the "social disaster" caused by socialist economic policies in the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, North Korea, Cuba or anywhere else they've been implemented. Or the less disastrous effects of these policies in the sclerotic "social democrat" welfare states of Europe.

In the end, Frank's analysis only muddies the water. But then again, it was written for the "London Review of Books." I'm sure the Rococo Marxists on the other side of the pond found it delightful.

THE PUBLISHER RUNS FOR GOVERNOR: Here's a doozy. Jerry Brady, the publisher of the Idaho Falls "Post Register," is running for governor. It's created an ethical nightmare for the small paper:

"Everything we do now is second-guessed," Managing Editor Dean Miller said. Roger Plothow, general manager and acting publisher, said: "I wouldn't wish it on anybody. I don't like notoriety for this reason." Brady, a Democrat whose great-grandfather James H. Brady was governor of Idaho in the early 1900s, has taken a paid leave from the newspaper. His office is dark and will be turned into a nursing room for new mothers. Brady said the paper will cover him like any other candidate, and he will treat the Post Register as he would any other paper.

Here's the funny part. The paper almost didn't find out their publisher was running:

In fact, Brady did not tell his own newsroom he was running. "We were damn near scooped!" Miller said. The paper stumbled upon the story when an opinion writer was researching an unrelated story. "It was not my job to give them the tip," Brady explained.

And they are going to extraordinary lengths to maintain a hands-off policy:

After the initial shock, Miller said he tried to think of a way to talk Brady out of running. Then he decided he had to come up with a game plan.Miller consulted journalism experts around the country. From their responses, the paper drew up an eight-page coverage plan and a script for receptionists to use when they get calls about the campaign.The paper has hired an ombudsman to monitor its election coverage. Lee Warnick, head of the Brigham Young University-Idaho communications department, will write columns between now and the election. His contract stipulates that the paper can edit his writing only for grammar and style.

CHOMSKY ON STAGE: Some Stalinist theater group in Milwaukee called "Theatre X" has turned its agitprop on a local theater critic. Damien Jacques of the "Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel" is featured prominently in the group's new play, "Chomsky - 9/11." As Jacques says:

The unusual show applies the political and social theories of American linguist and activist Noam Chomsky to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "What is motivating this is a desire to join the audience in a spirit of inquiry," Theatre X producing director David Ravel told me in an interview a couple of weeks ago. "How do we understand what happened? What can we do to ensure it never happens again?"

And then we find out why Jacques is being held up to ridicule by the proletarian theater:

The global leap from Sept. 11 and Noam Chomsky to me will probably puzzle many who see the production. As a critic, it is my job to put things like this into context. Theatre X and I have had a chilly relationship during the 22 years I have been the theater critic for The Milwaukee Journal and the Journal Sentinel. I have often found its productions to be tedious, self-indulgent and inscrutable, and that has been reflected in my reviews.I understand that much of its work is driven by the strong social and political views held by the members of its tightly knit ensemble, and they might be surprised to know how close those convictions are to mine. But good intentions and being on the "correct" side of issues have little to do with producing compelling theater.

Amen to that. With a few notable exceptions, most politically inspired art is tedious. It drains the humanity from characters and turns them into stereotypes. The best example of this would be Richard Wright's "Native Son," a novel I used to admire greatly. (I still think his writing style is outstanding; I just disagree with the message. Go read Wright's autobiography "Black Boy" and its unpublished second section, "American Hunger." Far superior.) The depiction of black Americans as a people so damaged by racism that they are little more than animals may have inspired pity, but among well-meaning liberals it has lead to paternalistic attitudes that mimic those of the racists.

APOLOGIES TO BEN: Ben Sheriff of Layman's Logic took exception to my characterization of British newspaper the "Mail" as "soft-core porn." Here's what he said:

Now, I might, might, accept that about the Mirror. But either I'm completely misunderstanding, or he hasn't seen a copy of the Mail, well, ever, or some US bloggers need to get better quality porn...

A quick explanation: Someone stuck a copy of the "Sun" tabloid in the slot at work where the "Mail" goes. I took a quick peek at a screaming, 900-point all-caps headline with a photo of someone with their mouth wide open and assumed it was the "Mail," which is apparently much more staid. Sorry about that. As for porn, well, who needs porn when you've got the Last Page?

Seriously, though, I didn't mean to lump excellent British papers such as the "Times" in with the tabloids. Those serious papers have served the British people - indeed, Western civilization - fairly well over the centuries, too.

COPY EDITORS ARE PUNNY PEOPLE: "Editor & Publisher" steered me to this link that describes how us copy editors are the most polysemous people in publishing. (And alliterative, also!) That means we're fond of puns and wordplay when we write headlines and such. This is an informative and enjoyable read.

TRIVIAL PURSUITS: The "New Republic" has a really silly story on the control-freak Bush administration's manipulation of the media. The latest outrage? It seems Karen Hughes is determining which White House officials can attend a banquet with reporters! Inside baseball....the horror...the horror. And this right after I posted something about how serious we American journalists are.

LOMBORG IN THE NEWS AGAIN: The "Columbia Journalism Review" weighs in on the Bjorn Lomborg story. He's the author of the "Skeptical Environmentalist," which has debunked many of the gloom-and-doom theories of the green movement. CJR points out the controversy surrounding the book, and says the U.S. press "puffed" Lomborg merely because he was a contrarian.

This credulity gap largely stems from a growing impatience within the mainstream media with what some view as the perpetual pessimism of environmental scientists. In fact, environmental coverage has been dwindling steadily the last few years, including at The New York Times, the arbiter of so many standards. The trend is not surprising: the business tends to tire of the same old problems that won't go away. As we've all heard editors say, "That's not news." Meanwhile, by definition, anything contrarian or unexpected is news.

The thrust of the article is that Lomborg's book drew attention merely for taking a "contrarian" position to the accepted wisdom of the environmental movement. It doesn't even touch on the hysterical reaction of "Scientific American" to the report. (They threatened to sue Lomborg if he used too many quotes from their attack on him.) Well, I've done some link-searching over at Arts and Letters Daily and compiled stories about the Lomborg controversy that have appeared on that weblog in recent months. Here they are:

"San Francisco Chronicle" pro and con
Arts and Letters Daily editor Denis Dutton's review from the "Washington Post" and a Letters to the Editor exchange.
A story from "The Economist" on the controversy.
Canada's "National Post" weighs in.
A piece from the "Dartmouth Review."
Lomborg's own Web page.
"Policy" magazine reviews the book.
"Grist" magazine offers a critical review of the book.

BRITS VS. YANKS: I'm a little late getting to this, but I wanted to comment on it anyway. Tunku Varadarajan wrote an interesting piece Friday on the differences between British and American newspapers.

The British school regards journalistic output as perishable, and a tabloid hack's role as essentially disruptive...British-style tabloids tend to go for impact, at whatever cost, and the cost is often high in terms of collateral damage. These battle conditions require tough, leathery soldiers who will wade through minefields in the daytime and drink the fatigue away in the evening. Ergo Aussies and Brits. This kind of journalism is stacked against those who worry about special interests, and who are forever nervous about the consequences of a story on a particular group, be it ethnic, sexual or religious. The British school, whatever its failings, is good at giving offense. Americans, by contrast, are good at not giving it. This makes them better people, for sure. But does it make their papers better?

I'll agree that the British press is a lot of fun compared with our own. I'd love to be able to write some of the headlines they get away with. But imperfect as American newspapers may be, I think their seriousness has served our democracy pretty well. We all know American journalists bring their biases to their reporting, but at least that reporting is not delivered with a sneer or a wink. That's an important difference. It means we (generally) take our readers seriously and consider them to be involved citizens who care about what's going on in the world. And while false genuflecting before the cult of "journalistic standards" is often the source of embarrassment for American reporters when their biases are revealed, at least the idea of objectivity is in the air. (And that objectivity is apparent in about 80 percent of your everyday, garden-variety, meat-and-potatoes American newspaper stories - the board meetings, the police blotters, the workings of the government. Of course, we've still got to keep our eyes on that other 20 percent, because those are often the most important stories.) Those standards are a restraint on the lowest-common-denominator pandering that is all too common in British newspapers. Compare the average daily fishwrap in Dayton or Peoria with the soft-core porn of "The Mail" or "The Mirror." Boring? Sure. Necessary? Absolutely.

I'M BACK: Resume regular blogging....now. OK, I watched the Oscars last night (well, I kind of had to at work). Boy, did it suck! Not the awards themselves; they were fine. I mean the bloated four-plus-hour telecast. As a distraction, I followed the action on the Oscar Blog. It was yet another example of the power of this Web medium. The blog's numerous participants were able to post snarky or celebratory comments about fashion or an award winner almost immediately. Very cool.

SO LONG, 'HOTLINE': Romenesko has a link today reporting on the demise of the "Hotline Scoop." That's a pity. I only recently discovered this little gem, and had particularly enjoyed their Friday point/counterpoint columns on media bias.

ERIC ALTERMAN WATCH: The media columnist for "The Nation" gave himself a hernia today heaping invective on Andrew Sullivan. It's the kind of piece that seems to be written for people who have never read, or ever will read, Sullivan's works. (Funny how the "progressives" can be far nastier than the "hard right" they're always railing against.) I wish I had more time to write about it, but I think this library will be kicking me off this terminal in a little while. All I can say is that if someone like David Horowitz had written something like this, there would be howls of outrage all across the media spectrum.

THIS IS PRETTY COOL: I am now posting from a public library 400 miles from home base. The Internet rules!

I'M OUTTIE: OK folks, I'll be out of town for a couple of days, so posting may be light or nonexistent until Sunday or Monday. Take care!

WE'RE ALL NO. 1: This is funny. Romenesko has a link to this story from the "Detroit Free Press." It seems that "Maxim" magazine likes almost every city in North America. It named several of them the Greatest City on Earth:

The magazine's editors also named Miami the Greatest City on the Earth. And Philadelphia. And San Francisco and Dallas. By the time Maxim's serial city-lovers got done, they had named 13 North American cities the greatest on the globe. To make their game complete, they printed 13 versions of the magazine, each touting a different city as the greatest. About 75,000 magazines named Detroit No. 1 and were distributed throughout Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.

Talk about trawling for circulation numbers.

BIAS WATCH: Susanna Cornett of Cut on the Bias opens a "New York Times" article on teen suicide and finds an anti-gun tirade inside. A top-notch analysis. Check it out. Also, a story that's going to get a lot of play in the media bears watching. There's a new report out that purports to prove that racism is keeping minorities from the same quality health care given to whites. Here's the Post's headline:

Report Says Minorities Get Lower-Quality Health Care (subhed) Moral Implications of Widespread Pattern Noted

And here's the second graph:

Although it was not possible to quantify the inequities, researchers identified language barriers, inadequate insurance coverage, bias among doctors and nurses, and a woeful lack of minority physicians as reasons why nonwhite patients received fewer tests and inferior treatment.

Note that first phrase. Despite the fact that the inequities could not be quantified, I suspect that this report (which, according to "USA Today," was done at the request of Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr., D-Ill. - no vested interest there) will become very influential. And if it ever gets debunked, that news will be buried. Just watch.

GOOD SENSE ON NUKES: The "National Review" has a well-reasoned response to the media's recent hysteria over the leaked Nuclear Posture Review:

Targeting those installations doesn't make nuclear war more likely, as the Times would have it ("menacing to the security of future American generations"). Instead, it makes it less likely by potentially deterring rogue states from developing and using mass-destruction weapons (or, in an extreme circumstance, making it possible for us to preempt their use). This is Deterrence 101. The Times and other liberals liked it when it was called MAD. It is mystifying why they would now find targeting rogue-state weapons sites so problematic, when they were happy to target entire Russian cities during the Cold War...The high-profile targets of the Nuclear Posture Review — Iran, Iraq, and North Korea — are all already signatories of the vaunted Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. They just aren't serious about abiding by it. This fact, inconvenient though it may be, cannot simply be ignored. And here is where the example of the U.S. is truly important. The U.S. can shape the international environment by forthrightly declaring certain practices unacceptable, and making it clear that it will prevent and punish them — with any weapon that may be necessary to the task.

PALESTINIANS AREN"T TERRORISTS IN CHICAGO: Here's a column from the "Chicago Tribune" explaining why that paper doesn't often label Palestinian suicide bombers as terrorists (link via Romenesko):

A computer search of the newspaper's stories containing the word "terrorist" for several recent dates showed a highly consistent pattern: We routinely refer to the attacks of Sept. 11 as acts of terrorism, but withhold that designation from other actions in other places (mainly the Middle East) where some people argue it is warranted. How to justify the difference? Well--and this is just one journalist's view--the Tribune is an American newspaper written principally for an American audience and owing its existence and independence to the American Constitution. Our perspective is inescapably American (which is not to say it is necessarily the same as that of the U.S. government). Inevitably, as the news of Sept. 11 is reported and interpreted, that perspective is reflected in the product. Indeed, it almost has to be if we are to speak intelligibly on those events to our audience. Our perspective on events in the Middle East also is American, which is to say it is not identical to that of any of the contending parties. To faithfully report and interpret the events there for our American audience, we must refrain from consistently labeling either party as terrorists, because to do so is, in effect, to declare it illegitimate.

In other words, the American media, because it is American, has no business commenting on current events in another part of the world. Don't expect us to distinguish between those who blow up innocent civilians and the sometimes harsh military actions undertaken to make those terrorist (there, I said it) outrages stop. After all, there's two sides to the story! Sheesh.

BIAS: MYTH OR FANTASY? That's all I can say about this item sent to me by an anonymous fellow journalist. Here's my tipster's story:

Not long after the news that Andrea Yates had murdered her five children broke, my tipster was in a daily planning meeting at his media organization. During the course of the meeting, discussions of various sidebars to the main Andrea Yates story came up. One person suggested a short story pointing out the difference between post-partum depression and post-partum psychosis. (Makes sense.) But then a newly hired minority executive (who used to be my boss) piped up with his own idea: How about a sidebar discussing how infanticide is almost exclusively a "white" phenomenon? "Minorities never do this, because minority cultures value their children much more than white cultures do. We need to get that story out there." The tipster said no one had the nerve to point out what a ridiculous idea that was, but, to their credit, they also didn't go out and write that story. Again, this was not the suggestion of a low-level editor new to the job; this was the word from a man who had been trusted with a couple of executive editorships during his long career.

This kind of twisted "multiculturalism" appears in newspapers all over the country. Again, see William McGowan's "Coloring the News" for a more thorough discussion.

QUICK HITS: Remember the "digital divide"? It was the idea that poorer Americans would become segregated from a technocratic elite. Well, that concept is getting debunked. Here's the report from "The Washington Post."

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That "Seattle Times" series on a cancer-research facility that an editor at the "Wall Street Journal" criticized yesterday is stirring up more controversy. Here's a story from the "New York Times."

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The media is still bitching about press access during the war on terrorism. Here's the story from the "Boston Globe."

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Want more information on the launch of the "New York Sun"? Go here and here.

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Harvard students are upset that law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote an incendiary editorial for an Israeli newspaper calling for the destruction of Palestinian villages in order to curtail terrorism. They're protesting. Hmm. I wonder how many of them protested today's suicide bombing that killed seven innocent Israeli bus passengers? Or protested the Sept. 11 attacks on America? Just wondering.

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Here's a bit of hopeful news: "A prominent Saudi Arabian editor Tuesday criticized and disavowed an article that appeared recently in his own newspaper, Al Riyadh, that repeated the century-old fiction that Jews use the blood of Christians and Muslims to make holiday foods." We need to applaud things like this. Loudly.

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The new Mugger column from the "New York Press" is up.

UNARTISTIC MICHELANGELO: If there are any doubts that Michelangelo Signorile is a shoddy columnist, they should be erased by his piece in today's "New York Press." It is a tour de force of intellectual dishonesty from a man whose sole claim to fame is his attempted high-tech lynching of Andrew Sullivan. Signorile's thesis is the "arrogance" of the Bush administration. First, he starts with the torpedoing of the Charles Pickering nomination:

The clear and simple reason is that Pickering is an extremist who cannot be trusted to uphold civil rights–a choice that the Bush administration, in its arrogance, thought it could push through as another sop to far-right conservatives.

It has been well documented that Pickering's views are right-wing, but not extreme. Of course, to someone like Signorile, that's the same thing. (Even the liberal "Washington Post" editorial page said attacks against him were unfounded.) He was confirmed by a unanimous Senate vote for his current job, and the American Bar Association declared Pickering qualified for the appeals court. Furthermore, black leaders in Mississippi went on record that he is no racist. No matter. Signorile smears him as an "extremist who cannot be trusted to uphold civil rights." Why couldn't he just say Pickering's views weren't palatable to 10 Democrats on the confirming committee? Bush's "arrogance" in pushing for Pickering had nothing to do with it. But "arrogance" is the thesis here, so we must plow on:

The same arrogance that had the administration create a shadow government unbeknownst to the rest of us. The same arrogance that didn’t let New York officials know about a possible impending terrorist attack involving nuclear material. The same arrogance that drew up a Pentagon plan to create an office of lies and disinformation. And the same arrogance that may have created a seismic shift in world politics, perhaps bringing us into an era of nuclear proliferation once again.

Ah, sweet parallelism. Was it arrogance or prudence to create a shadow government considering the awful possibility of a nuclear attack on Washington? Was it arrogance or prudence to avoid mass panic in our largest city? Was it arrogance or prudence when we engaged in propaganda and disinformation against the Nazis or Soviets? Was it arrogance of prudence when Clinton began the nuclear contingency plans that Bush is merely continuing? Never mind all that, though:

It was while Dick Cheney was in flight, on his way to London the weekend before last, that the Pentagon’s secret wet dream to lower the threshold for launching "mini-nukes" against a good chunk of the planet–China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya–got leaked to the press. While Cheney was in the air the world was finding out that the U.S. was ratcheting up the nuclear arms race, planning to create so-called smarter nukes that will no doubt be copied by every country on that list (and others) in time. Already, North Korea has hinted that it may make more bombs in response.

Where to begin? The image of generals ejaculating over nuclear war isn't just a grotesque caricature; it's so 1960s, it's almost an antique. Again, the "lower threshold" for launching mini-nukes is nothing but a contingency plan. Does Signorile really believe that his "good chunk of the planet - China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lybia" - doesn't have similar plans in place? As for an arms race, let's let backward, impoverished countries like North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya try to keep up with us in one. It took us 50 years to bankrupt the Soviets that way. We should be able to put those five out of business in about a month. Next, Signorile moves to the war in Afghanistan and immediately qualifies himself for one of Andrew Sullivan's Sontag Awards:

With the Northern Alliance as human shields, U.S. forces overtook the Taliban more quickly than anyone imagined.

I think Signorile's got it backward. U.S. forces provided the shield that allowed the Northern Alliance to roll to victory and avoid even more casualties than would have been incurred if we hadn't been there. And what about the Taliban and Al-Qaeda? They used the entire nation of Afghanistan as human shields for murderous plots against the civilized world. But back to the arrogance watch. Now we're in Israel:

It’s quite clear now that the Bush administration doesn’t care a whit about a peace plan, neither for the sake of ending the bloodshed nor for the U.S.’s long-term interests. Everything it has done in this regard–the waffling Israel policy it has demonstrated, including sending special envoy Anthony Zinni back and forth to Israel like a yoyo–has all been to serve the administration’s short-term interest, which is also the only foreign policy it seems to know: war.

Wow. Two Sontag-worthy lines in one column. The sum total of U.S. foreign policy under Bush is war. Not an attempt to make the world a safer, more prosperous place. Just war for war's sake. How can Signorile stomach living under such a murderous, barbaric regime?

Forget diplomacy. Just rattle those sabers, build those all-new mini-nukes and do whatever it takes to get us on the road to Baghdad. Saddam Hussein may indeed be a danger to his people, to the U.S. and to much of the rest of the world, and military action may be necessary to stop him. But threatening nuclear strikes against Iraq and others willy-nilly is just plain stupid.

Let's see. Signorile agrees that Saddam is dangerous. We all know that he has chemical and biological weapons that he's used against his own people, and he is actively developing a nuclear program. But letting Saddam know that there will be a terrible price to pay if he uses these weapons is "just plain stupid." Thanks for clearing that all up for us, Siggy.

'BIAS' ATTACKS: Bernard Goldberg is interviewed today in the "New York Press." He says some good stuff, but I like the lead-in by Celia Farber. She encapsulates the kind of bias that I think is much more damaging than whether people are labeled "conservative" or "far right" in the horse-race coverage of politics. It's a bit overwrought, but here it goes:

I think it’s very simple: The nearly two-decade-long phenomenon known as Political Correctness created a rigid template for the mass homogenization and banalization of all discourse and thought in America. Every story–poltical, economic, medical, social–was pressed through this warping ideology that eliminated complexity and shattered the very principle of fact-based reportage. Every story took on the same familiar gloss of a fixed set of emotions–an ideology–that wasn’t so much "left’’ as it was centrist, or Correct.

As for the interview, here's what Goldberg says about "New York Times" columnist Frank Rich:

I think Frank Rich is very intelligent and very corrupt. I think he’s the kind of guy who is very ideological and works for an institution that’s very ideological. The New York Times is an excellent newspaper. I want to make that clear. Excellent newspaper with bureaus all over the world. But it’s a very ideological newspaper. And Frank Rich is the kind of guy who has always been a slave to his master, willingly.

Rich's biases are also given a thorough analysis in Jim Sleeper's "Liberal Racism." Sleeper compares Rich's writings on Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March (favorable) with what he wrote about a Promise Keepers rally in New York's Shea Stadium (extremely unfavorable). Sleeper points out that Rich never questioned the underlying racist ideology of the Nation of Islam, while he characterized the Promise Keepers' rally as resembling a gathering of a far-right militia group. Actually, it was a multi-racial event dedicated to many of the same principles espoused at the Million Man March, but Rich could only see an army of Angry White Males. (For the record, I don't see a whole lot wrong with the Promise Keepers, but I'm not a member or avid supporter. I'm not an overly religious person.)

THEY'RE HERE: Romenesko links to a press release announcing staffers for the "New York Sun," which will be competing against, and debunking, the "New York Times." It looks like a solid and diverse group. On a personal note, I like the classic masthead they've chosen.

BLAMING THE MESSENGER: One line used to paint conservatives as anti-Arab bigots is the charge that they only point out the most inflammatory examples of anti-Jewish or anti-Western sentiment in the Arab press. Here's a response to that charge from the "Weekly Standard." Claudia Winkler has found numerous examples from MEMRI of "constructive soul-searching" in the Arab world. And she has a word for MEMRI's critics:

If the pro-reform postings that make Arabs look good in the West are, for the time being, outnumbered by the anti-American rants and foul incitement to hatred, that doesn't justify blaming the messenger.

DANA DOES DALLY: Dana Milbank, the White House's least favorite reporter, shows why he earned that title with this sarcastic piece from the "Washington Post." The fact that Bush has hired a speechwriter who one criticized Bush's endorsement of a Palestinian state and is one of many White House staffers connected to William Kristol is proof of....well, that's not immediately clear. Wait, it's coming in now. Milbank seems surprised that vendettas from the last presidential campaign aren't being ruthlessly enforced:

"An entire (Kristol) cell -- right under the nose of Rove!" exults Marshall Wittmann, a McCainiac and Kristol ally who works at the Hudson Institute. He is amazed that "this control-freak administration has allowed this infiltration."

Now it's clear. This is about the "control-freak administration." In other words, instead of passing along some routine inside-the-Beltway news tidbit with a slightly interesting angle, Milbank uses the opportunity to get in some cheap shots at an administration that he obviously holds in contempt. Way to go, Dana. You bring honor to our profession.

NOBILE VS. BERGER: This is good stuff. Remember that Natasha Berger piece attacking bloggers and journalist Philip Nobile that I highlighted earlier? Well, Nobile has demanded a retraction from Berger, who in the "American Prospect" doesn't really give one.

'BIAS' DEBATE CONTINUES: Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center takes down that Jonathan Chait analysis of Bernard Goldberg's "Bias" that I highlighted earlier. Some choice lines:

Chait thinks conservative media criticism is weak because the job of criticism requires "Olympian detachment." But what it requires is evidence, patiently recorded instead of imagined. If Chait had done that, he wouldn't have written the empirically false statement that "we invariably see more stories about poverty and environmental despoliation during Republican administrations, and more stories about government bloat and military unpreparedness during Democratic ones." I challenge Chait to produce all the "military unpreparedness stories" the networks reported in the Clinton years. He might locate one, somewhere. There wasn't much talk of government bloat, either, just salesmanship for "reinventing government" initiatives.

TOM'S NEW LOOK: Fellow copy editor Tom Mangan has renovated his site, and it's looking good. Check it out.

SLATE DISSES THE 'TIMES': Here's a great line from today's Slate Papers:

A NYT editorial nails a double-whammy, simultaneously failing to make an original argument while also serving as a mash-note to the paper's news side. The editorial, headlined, A REVEALING TROVE IN AFGHANISTAN, states, "Reporters from The New York Times have discovered thousands of pages of documents in the remains of the Afghan camps and buildings of the Taliban and al-Qaida that provide a surprising portrait of an army and how it was trained. What is revealed is a fighting force of unexpected scale and sophistication. The documents also show the degree to which the army mustered by the Taliban and al-Qaida was driven by religious fervor."

BAD MEDICIINE: Romenesko has a fascinating link today. A "Wall Street Journal" writer is highly critical of an award-winning "Seattle Times" series on botched medical trials. The author finds a lot wrong with the series:

I believe that the Seattle Times portrayal of events, while it certainly made for a dramatic tale, is fundamentally false. Rather than racking up prizes, it should be used as a textbook case on how the media can convey biased and misleading information about biomedical research. It left out crucial facts, distorted others and ignored everything that didn't fit its sensational thesis...the Seattle Times committed the sin journalists are often accused of, and must always be on our guard against: disregard for the complete story in the interest of the most dramatic one. Perhaps the media needs to adapt its own version of the Hippocratic oath for investigative medical reporters: First, do no harm.

NEWSPAPER PUBLISHES SHIT: Folks claim we do that every day, but a newspaper in San Diego actually did it. Because of an editing mistake, the word "shit" appeared in some issues of the "San Diego Union-Tribune" recently. Here's how:

The memo went on to say that during the proofing process, the word "pooh-butt" had been marked "stet," a proofers' term indicating it should remain in the copy. But a layout designer working on a Macintosh computer misunderstood. "A macker read [the] word as 'shit,' and corrected the Mac proof accordingly."

Whoops! (Link vis Romenesko.)

PLUG FOR 'BIAS,' 'COLORING': The "Miami Herald" pens a positive book review/analysis of Bernard Goldberg's "Bias" and William McGowan's "Coloring The News." Here's the killer quote:

University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato says the public's concern over bias is directly connected to the decline in credibility and ratings, and that mainstream journalism is in serious need of a wake-up call: "Journalists would be much better off admitting, `Yes, I'm human, I have opinions, they influence me, they're bound to slip out from time to time. When they do and you catch it, you tell me. We'll try to control it.' People would appreciate that candor.''

CJR WRITES ABOUT MRC: There's an interesting piece in the current issue of the "Columbia Journalism Review" about the growing influence of the Media Research Center. (These are the folks who hunt for examples of liberal bias in the media and find a boatload almost every day.) Apparently they're having some success in helping keep journalists on the straight and narrow during the war on terrorism:

"Senior network executives tend to dismiss the center a bit too reflexively," said Howard Kurtz, media reporter for CNN and The Washington Post. "This is clearly because the organization has such a conservative agenda, but that doesn't mean their barbs aren't hitting the mark sometimes."

The article is reasonably balanced, though there is an undercurrent that the Center is engaging in censorship masking as criticism.

BIAS WATCH: Susanna Cornett over at Cut on the Bias has been busy today. She's found several examples of the ways bias percolates through the journalism industry. Here's one. And here's another. That last bit picks up on some of the themes about politically correct stylebooks that I pointed out below. Good stuff.

GIVE 'EM GUNS: Bo Crader of the "Weekly Standard" makes an argument for arming journalists who go into war zones. Of course, there's someone from the Committee to Protect Journalists to suggest that reporters shouldn't take up weapons:

Even then, Simon explains, arming journalists might not be in their best interest. "A journalist is recognized as a civilian under the Geneva Conventions," he warns. "Our concern is that journalists should be very careful when taking any action that could compromise that perception. They could be mistaken for a spy or combatant." In theory, if hostile forces view journalists not as objective observers but as soldiers, they might become targets themselves. Carrying a gun "could make them safer but it could make them more vulnerable" than they already are, Simon continues. Of course, the Geneva Conventions didn't do much to protect Daniel Pearl or the eight other journalists murdered in the Afghan conflict.

IT'S ALL ABOUT STYLE: The ombudsman of the "Atlanta Journal-Constitution" says the newspaper doesn't use the term "illegal alien" to describe illegal aliens because of a change in the paper's style book:

Among other reasons, the newspaper's style committee decided that the term "alien" was no longer descriptive because by the 1990s it had become more synonymous with creatures from outer space than people in this country who were born somewhere else.

Come on. People know the difference between aliens from outer space and aliens who are here illegally. I guarantee that it was changed as a sop to political agitators in the Atlanta area, which has seen a huge influx of immigrants both legal and illegal in the past 15 years. (That was the reason it was changed at a small paper I worked at several years ago. We had been accused of "stigmatizing" these people.)

These "style changes" aren't always motivated by a desire to help the reader. For example, at the last place I worked it was decided that we were to start capitalizing Black and White in references to a person's race. The reason given? Because "Hispanic" and "Indian" were capitalized, and we had to be consistent. (The only places I've seen this style followed is in far-left academic journals.) Many of us thought capitalizing Black and White just served to overemphasize ethnicity. But that's what multiculturalism is all about, isn't it? For more on politically correct style changes, check out The World's Worst Editing Guide from Arts and Letters Daily.

NEWS BURIED: Here's a potential blockbuster of a story that got stuffed way inside in today's "Washington Post." (It looks like that placed it on page A12.) Al-Qaeda has been running an extremist group in Iraq's Kurdish territory? Wow. You have to get right to the end of the story to find this:

The New Yorker quoted a PUK captive, a veteran Iraqi intelligence officer named Qassem Hussein Muhammad, as saying that Ayman al-Zawahiri, an Egyptian who is bin Laden's top aide, visited Saddam Hussein and other top Iraqi officials during a lengthy stay in Baghdad in 1992. PUK officials assert the top leaders of Ansar are operatives of Hussein's intelligence service and that some received training in bin Laden camps in Afghanistan, the magazine said.

This story probably got buried because it's considered a scoop from a rival publication, but it's still important. They could have played it low on the front.

WHITHER KINSLEY: Sometimes I can't tell when Michael Kinsley is trying to be funny or serious. In his recent column in the "Washington Post," he takes the "Wall Street Journal" to task for publishing a guest column about the Pickering nomination by Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Here's Kinsley's quote:

Thomas, as you will recall was pummeled so brutally by vicious gangs of Democrats and liberals -- who accused him of being a right-wing ideologue with a closed mind about abortion rights, among other vicious lies -- that he now lies comatose in the Supreme Court, able only to issue reliably right-wing opinions and vote against abortion rights. Naturally his wife is bitter, and self-righteous bitterness on behalf of an embattled spouse is forgivable, even appealing.

Again, is he trying to be funny or disingenuous? If I remember accurately, they accused him of a little bit more than that. Try sexual harassment and sexual perversion. That's got a tad more sizzle than whatever his views on abortion rights may be. Kinsley then writes this:

Virginia Thomas is also "director of executive branch relations" at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing propaganda machine that masquerades as a tax-exempt nonpolitical research institution. That a Supreme Court justice's spouse could write this article, and the nation's most influential conservative opinion forum could publish it, illustrates that, for all the talk of the insular liberal culture of Washington, the conservative Washington culture is large enough and insular enough for its members to live within an echo chamber of their own views.

I guess foundations with the names Ford, Carnegie and MacArthur don't count as "left-wing propaganda machines" which fund organizations that place hundreds of news stories - not opinion pieces - in the American press every year. While I kind of agree with Kinsley on the "echo chamber" theory, he completely overlooks the fact that there are basically three large conservative newspapers in the country: The "Wall Street Journal," the "Washington Times" and the "New York Post." (And the circulation of the "Washington Times" is one-seventh that of the Post's. Here's a useful link to circulation figures.) They are fighting an uphill battle against the three major networks, CNN, MSNBC, The "Washington Post," the "New York Times," the "Los Angeles Times" and virtually every other major daily newspaper in the country.

I agree with Kinsley's assessment that each side bitches about "politics" when their nominees face a tough confirmation process. But claiming that the Thomas nomination fight was more about "issues" than destroying a man's reputation is unbelievable. So, too, is the claim that the "conservative Washington culture" gets equal access to major media outlets.

WHEW, I'M BACK: Damn, that was a long hike! But seriously, sorry for my lack of posts over the past couple of days. I've been on the road. The out-of-town trip the Amazing Techie Girlfriend and I were going to take last week ran into the kind of complications last seen in Barbra Streisand's "What's Up, Doc?" So, we went this week and had a wonderful visit. Lots and lots and lots of good food.

Anyway, I wanted to point out a couple of items really quickly. Susanna Cornett of the fine Cut on the Bias blog has a nice takedown of the latest Hotline Scoop media bias column. I commend it to your attention. Also, Jonah Goldberg gives a semi-Fisking to Johnathan Chait's recent analysis of Bernard Goldberg's "Bias." (Link found via Glenn "Tha Bloggfatha" Reynolds.) In another act of shameless self-promotion, I'm going to point out that I did a mini-takedown of Chait's piece the other week. Also, Matt Welch eviscerates the "San Francisco Chronicle" for that shoddy editorial about Paul Wolfowitz that I highlighted below. Talk about fact-checking your ass. Hoo-wee!

That's it for now. Regular posting resumes tomorrow. But I may start posting less often. This blogging thing is beginning to feel too much like work, and since I'm not getting paid for this, why waste material?

I'M OUTTA HERE: Hotline Scoop has their weekly media bias column up. Y'all check it out. I'm going outside for a while. The weather here is beautiful, and I'm going hiking.

'STANDARD' PROCEDURE: The "Weekly Standard" goes after Nicholas Kristof of the "New York Times" for flaws in coverage of Sami Al-Arian, the Florida professor alleged to have links to terrorism groups.

NOMINATION CONDEMNATION: Howie Kurtz has a good column today on the Charles Pickering nomination fiasco. He sees lots of blame to pass around to both sides:

Should the Democrats be able to bottle up a nomination -- refuse to bring it to the floor -- by killing it in committee? That is, of course, anti-democracy and something of an outrage. Just as it was an outrage when Republicans did this sort of thing to Clinton nominees. GOPers have been complaining about stalling tactics on judicial nominees by the barely-in-control Democrats. Which would have a lot more resonance if the Republicans hadn't spent years delaying votes on Clinton nominees. This is a game in which, when the tables are turned, the combatants make the opposite arguments without missing a beat. When their man holds the White House, the in-party says the president is entitled to a vote on his nominees. The out-party plays up the advise-and-consent role of the Senate -- and complains about what the in party did when they were the out party. Puh-leaze.

Howie barely touched on the attempt to smear Pickering as a racist, which, to their credit, the Post's editorial board condemned.

BIAS SURPRISE: The "Columbia Journalism Review" has another article about media bias. It's based on a survey that yielded some surprising results. Apparently, media bias isn't that big a deal for a lot of Americans:

A Gallup poll in the spring of 1998 asked respondents to judge the bias of seven types of news organizations -- ranging from network news to local newspapers. On average about 27 percent saw a bias in favor of liberals and 19 percent in favor of conservatives. Thirty-six percent rated the media as fair and impartial, while 18 percent had no opinion on the subject. Two years later, Pew found only slightly more Americans saying that the media coverage of George W. Bush's election campaign was unfair (30 percent), than thought that about coverage of Al Gore's campaign (24 percent). The majority said both campaigns were treated fairly by news organizations. Gallup even found that 63 percent thought that coverage of the hyper-contentious Florida recount was unbiased.

But there is still a perception of a different kind of bias - the bias of media self-interest:

The media are seen as exploitive, as needlessly stirring political controversy and offering too much contentious punditry. Surveys taken for the ASNE Journalism Credibility Project in 1998 found that 71 percent thought that the cause of bias in television news was a desire for higher ratings, while only 10 percent thought it was due to political bias. Similar answers were given about bias in newspapers.

WE GOOFED: Here's a doozy. Victoria Clarke, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs at the Pentagon, wrote a letter to the "San Francisco Chronicle" pointing out several blatant errors in an editorial about Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. The Chronicle, to its credit, owns up to the mistakes. (Link via Romenesko.)

CAREFUL WHAT YOU WRITE: You know those employer-evaluation surveys you're asked to fill out from time to time? Watch what you write in them. Romenesko has a link to a story about a reporter from the "Orange County Register" who says she told the truth about a bad situation and was fired. Obviously, there's two sides to every story. So we'll link and let you decide.

I've always been leery of those things. The times I've done them, I've been careful not to name names (kind of like when I post something negative about former employers here).

ANOTHER PLUG FOR BLOGGERS: Jonathan V. Last of the "Weekly Standard" praises bloggers:

Blogging is returning us to a time when the written word was supreme and for that we should be grateful to the bloggers. Despite everything...Instead, we have an exploding universe of blogs and the one thing they all rely on is news. And not just any news, but printed news. As the media giants become more heavily invested in the web, the amount of content they are producing has grown to the point where it is difficult and time-consuming for an average person to sift through it all. Enter the blogger. The blogger sifts through the news for the reader and points out stories of note, providing a valuable service. Without the New York Times or the Associated Press, the bloggers wouldn't have much to contribute, and without the bloggers, Big Media would be contributing too much. The blog is the killer ap for Internet news, and it runs on the printed word.

A very good piece. Go check it out.

'A DISMAYING MORASS': The Hot Flash at the American Interprise Institute posts a letter from Ben Stein to the "New York Times" protesting a recent column by Paul Krugman. Krugman had attacked economist Milton Friedman. Good stuff.

PAPER-THIN PAPER TRAIL: Romenesko has a link to a flimsy story about Israeli espionage in the U.S. It seems there's a belief among certain quarters (Lyndon Larouche fans, conspiracy theorists, the "Arab street") that these Israeli spies knew about the impending attacks of Sept. 11 and didn't share the information with the U.S. (Funny. I seem to remember a report that these folks may have been involved in industrial espoinage. And according to this transcript of Carl Cameron's reporting, which is the basis for this conspiracy theory, there's evidence that Israeli intelligence did supply the U.S. with a warning of an impending attack. Mossad just wasn't overly specific.) This guy from "Creative Loafing" (a free weekly "alternative" chain paper) chastizes the American press for ignoring the story. The writer, John Sugg, wears his biases on his sleeve:

In an era where CNN CEO Walter Issacson says it would be "perverse" to televise Afghan babies killed by U.S. bombs, it's not surprising some stories go unnoticed by a press that embraces "patriotism" by ignoring sacred cows. One of those cattle is what's happening in Israel and Palestine. Reporters know that to criticize Israel -- to point out, for example, that wanton killing of innocents is equally devilish whether committed by Ariel Sharon's soldiers flying U.S.-made helicopters, or by a Hamas suicide bomber who pushes the button -- is to risk being called an anti-Semite.

And failing to distinguish between terrorists who murder innocent civilians and targeted military actions aimed at making those outrages stop is to risk being called an idiot. But let's move along. According to Sugg's "intelligence sources," "counterintelligence officials,"American intelligence officials" and, of course, "speculation," the fact that Israeli companies are involved in the telecommunications industry is the smoking gun in the whole affair. Meanwhile, our media watchdogs have conveniently ignored the story. (Damn Jews! They control the media AND the telephones!)

In the rest of the world -- Europe, Arab countries and Israel, especially -- the story made headlines. Even the official Chinese news agency perked up. Not in our well-defended (against disturbing news) homeland, however.

Well how about that? It was big news in Europe! God knows the press over there has been so right about so many things lately! And in Arab countries! Yeah, they're reliable. And the official Chinese news agency! Oh, you mean the one that did this?

I can't believe Romenesko put up a link to this unsubstantiated garbage.

SHUGER STRIKES BACK: I've been waiting and hoping for this. Scott Shuger of "Slate" has written a piece attacking the hysterical reaction of the press to reports that the Bush administration is working up contingency plans for the use of nuclear weapons. Here's some pertinent excerpts:

U.S. military plans have, for instance, long contained specific scenarios in which nuclear weapons would be used against China or North Korea. Would you want it any other way? When the president looks across the Situation Room table at the chairman of the joint chiefs during a major military crisis with China and asks, "General, what are you going to do if they go nuclear?" you don't want the response to be, "Gee, sir, I have no idea."

The NYT similarly suggested that the Bush administration might not stick with what the paper called the "longstanding policy" of not using nuclear weapons against countries that don't have them or nuclear-armed allies. There's only one problem here: This hasn't been the U.S. policy since at least 1997, when the Washington Post broke the story that a classified document issued by President Clinton stated that the use of chemical or biological weapons against American forces might draw a nuclear response from the United States.

And then there's this level-headed conclustion:

No one on the outside yet knows if the Bush administration is thinking along these lines or has some darker, more aggressive scheme in mind. The press seems to have jumped to the latter conclusion on the assumption that thinking more widely about nukes leads to using them more widely. But this view completely ignores the past 57 years, which have been both nuclear-research-intensive and nuclear-war-free. And it doesn't give proper credit to the logic of deterrence—the logic that says a credible U.S. nuclear threat makes the world more stable.

CHECK THIS OUT: For a stunning example of ACTUAL governmental press censorship in action, check out this "Weekly Standard" article. It's a transcript of President Bush's recent speech in China that highlights the parts the Chinese government cut out. Maybe those lefties who bitch so much about "censorship masking as criticism" will learn something about the real thing. On second thought, I doubt it.

BARKLEY UNCHAINED: Today's Off the Record column in the "New York Observer" leads with a report of employee discontent at "Sports Illustrated" over that controversial Charles Barkley cover. Apparently many minorities were offended by the cover shot of Barkley in chains. (No comment on whether any employees were offended by Barkley's ill-informed caricatures of the racial attitudes white Americans hold in the year 2002.)

'BIAS' REVIEWED: Speaking of Bernard Goldberg's "Bias," there's a review of the book over at the Columbia Journalism Review. It's negative, but at least the reviewer doesn't lurch into ad hominem mode. It must be noted that CJR reviewed William McGowan's "Coloring the News" last month, and it was generally favorable.

BLACKLIST FOR MEDIA BOOKS: Romenesko has a link to a story about media critics getting the shaft. Apparently, William McGowan of "Coloring the News" fame (regular readers know I've been plugging this book like mad) hasn't been interviewed on TV or by the "New York Times":

McGowan quotes a Chronicle reporter anonymously about the paper's liberal bias in covering past statewide initiative battles (although he also praises the paper for some examples of fairness as well). McGowan gripes that he has been disinvited from some journalism seminars and conferences, and that his book -- published by San Francisco's Encounter Books -- has been ignored in the New York Times, the nation's most prestigious newspaper. The Times comes in for heavy criticism in McGowan's book. "The Times blackout is something I'm concerned about," McGowan said, noting later that diversity "is a topic that they've been very, very out in front on. They claim it's bettered their journalism. I claim it hasn't. I have evidence to back it up. I make very grievous accusations about them."

Also, Bernard Goldberg complains that he hasn't been interviewed by the major networks, though he's done 330 radio interviews and 20 cable TV interviews. I don't think he's got much to complain about, though. His book was No. 1 on the best-seller list for a while. McGowan, though, has a legitimate beef:

McGowan said he's getting painted as a conservative, in part because he works for a conservative foundation and his book has a conservative publisher. But he said he sought support from more moderate groups and publishers but couldn't get it. One interviewer was hostile, McGowan said, even though he admitted to not having read the book. "The worst was, he had a whole lot of preconceived notions about what the book was, and what it should have done and didn't do," he said. "I think there's a story there in terms of the press' resistance to criticism of itself on this extremely controversial issue."

CROUCH'S LATEST: Staney Crouch weighs in on the Chante Mallard case with another strong column. He makes the point that I made the other day:

We know, of course, that if the situation were reversed, we would see all the civil rights establishment speaking on somebody's steps somewhere in the area. We would see a march, a candlelight one if by night.There would be loud talk about hate crimes, and someone would say predictable things about the white woman who ran that black man down and refused to call for help while he bled to death. She'd be accused of locking hands with all those white women in the past who've been central to the murders of black men. The incident would be described as another example of the war against black men.

But as usual, he makes another point that is smart, and surprising:

In this latest case in Texas, someone who almost surely is black tipped the police after the accused woman supposedly was overheard talking about the dead homeless man at a party. Let us see if the civil rights leadership celebrates that person.

BIAS? WHAT BIAS? A quick excerpt from today's Slate Papers:

The WP stuffs a report that the Bush administration's nuclear weapons policy review, which has caused an uproar, "follows a pattern set five years ago by a nuclear directive signed by then-President Bill Clinton." The paper explains that the previous plan also envisioned scenarios in which the U.S. would launch nukes at "rogue" states using weapons of mass destruction. "Nothing has changed," said one former Pentagon official.

A NYT editorial doesn't mention Clinton's nukes policies, and slams Bush's revised vision:

If another country were planning to develop a new nuclear weapon and contemplating pre-emptive strikes against a list of non-nuclear powers, Washington would rightly label that nation a dangerous rogue state. Yet such is the course recommended to President Bush by a new Pentagon planning paper that became public last weekend. Mr. Bush needs to send that document back to its authors and ask for a new version less menacing to the security of future American generations.

SHE REALLY DOESN'T WANT THE PAPER: A newspaper in Pennsylvania has been fined for delivering its product to a woman who didn't want it. It was one of those piece of crap "total market coverage" thingees. (You've probably gotten these before. In bigger markets, it might be an abbreviated edition of the paper. In smaller markets, it might be the entire paper. That's what we did at a 12,000-circulation paper I worked at long ago. Every Wednesday, every household in this small county got a copy of the paper.) But the woman tried to take it even further:

However, the judge dismissed a private criminal complaint of "defiant trespass" that the local woman, Tina McCarthy, had filed against the paper's vice president of circulation, Susan Kahlau. The private criminal complaint was believed to be an unprecedented tactic in protesting delivery of an unsolicited newspaper.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST: There's an interesting link over at Romenesko about a conflict-of-interest issue at the Louisville "Courier-Journal." It seems that Keith Runyon, the paper's editorial page editor, is married to Meme Sweets Runyon, the woman heading up opposition to the construction of bridges across the Ohio River:

That personal fact was not mentioned in last Sunday's front-page, in-depth news story that profiled River Fields, its players and its rise to prominence. And some readers called or e-mailed to question us about that omission. Their calls and letters alone demonstrate that the Runyon marriage is no secret in the community.

It's a good piece. Go read it. I especially like the lead:

Journalism distinguishes itself from fiction-writing and rumor-mongering with a set of standards and practices that acts as a stern taskmaster, an idealistic yardstick and a reachable bar. Every day, good journalists work hard to clear that bar, to practice their craft alongside that yardstick and to complete the tasks that are part of a demanding profession. This is hard. It is joyful. It is rewarding. It is exasperating. And it is full of judgment calls and second-guessing.

BRING OUT THE DEAD: Wendy Kaminer pens a bizarre piece on the Georgia crematorium fiasco in the "American Prospect." Kaminer asks, "What's the big deal?"

The betrayal of trust and the disrespect of grief are despicable -- in that betrayal lies sin -- but the lack of sentiment about dead bodies doesn't reflect a moral lapse so much as a sentimental one. We're unsettled by the cool rationalism that treats a corpse like landfill instead of like a holy relic. We fetishize bodies and praise ourselves for doing so. We tell ourselves that the rituals by which we preserve or destroy corpses reflect moral seriousness, the strength to acknowledge death and integrate it into our lives, and respect for the deceased. We presume that the failure to value a dead body implies a failure to value the person who once enlivened it.

"Cool rationalism" in stacking bodies up like cordwood? I don't mean to get "sentimental," but I think we're unsettled by the shocking disdain for what was once a human being, the heartless contempt for what was someone's mother, brother, father, son, husband or wife or best friend. Kaminer agrees that its "despicable" to leave bodies rotting in your back yard but it's not a "moral lapse." Kaminer apparently can't see the "linkage" between the feelings of loved ones for their deceased and the callous disregard for those deceased. She then seemingly sneers at rituals and customs that have served humanity fairly well over thousands of years. Sorry, Wendy, but those rituals do "reflect moral seriousness." Indeed, I'll argue that they are triumphs of moral seriousness. Unlike animals, we don't eat our dead, or leave them to rot in the sun. We care about each other, and those rituals honor what Gerald Early has called "the tangled, strange, yet poignant and immeasurable record of an imperishable human presence." That said, what does your little piece reflect? The column, which seems to be a regular feature, is titled "On the Contrary." Apparently, that's what it is: pure contrarianism, argument for argument's sake.

I don't mean to denigrate the impulse to sanctify corpses, but I do wonder at it. If you believe in immortality, as most people apparently do, why worry about an empty vessel that the soul or spirit leaves behind?

Thanks for your concern, Wendy, but it's showed up a little too late. If you believe human beings are nothing but especially bright animals, fine. Just pile 'em up and burn 'em. Hell, it's just bodies of no particular importance to anyone. Who cares about things like simple human dignity?

Someday, the pile of bodies in Marsh's backyard will be fodder for satirists.

Why not? It's already fodder for crassly insensitive moral relativists such as Wendy Kaminer.

NYT OP-ED CATFIGHT: This is great. The New York "Daily News" points out that there may be a behind-the-scene feud in the "New York Times" editorial department.

Those who parse editorials and op-ed opinion in The New York Times heard an echo yesterday when columnist William Safire referred to "undelivered royal speeches taking rehashed extreme positions" on the Middle East. The staunch defender of Israel was criticizing Prince Abdullah for the second time in two weeks. Specifically, the Saudi ruler said last month that he drafted a speech proposing full Arab recognition of Israel if the Jewish state withdrew to its pre-1967 borders. The first time, Safire noted fellow Times columnist Thomas Friedman was the conduit for the crown prince's proposal, which conveniently mirrored Friedman's own peace-making proposition.

Interesting.

A HOWLER FROM THE 'HOWLER': The pedantic 'Daily Howler' goes after Andrew Sullivan and media bias today in a totally unconvincing column. Sullivan is attacked because he wrote this on March 6:

LIBERAL MEDIA BIAS WATCH: Frank Rich recently described the notion of liberal media bias, as documented by Bernie Goldberg as "ludicrous." That’s the kind of remark one simply cannot find an adequate response to.

The Howler then excerpts Rich:

The night before the world got the news of Daniel Pearl’s death, you could hear another reporter describing the perils of his profession in a talk carried on C-Span. The journalist was Bernard Goldberg, formerly of CBS News and author of the best-selling "Bias," and his story was tragic. Mr. Goldberg, you see, had once written an op-ed piece in The Wall Street Journal criticizing his network for what he saw as its liberal bias, and the price he paid for this act of courage was steep. His fellow employees considered him radioactive. They treated him like a pariah. And then came the ultimate indignity: Dan Rather stopped talking to him! Mr. Goldberg might still be telling his tale of woe, had not terrorism intervened and rendered his tale of self-martyrdom on behalf of Mr. Pearl’s newspaper ludicrous.

So then the Howler wrote this:

We’ve asked you before—can Sullivan read? Those who can will note what Rich said; he said that Goldberg’s "tale of self-martyrdom" was ludicrous, not the notion of liberal bias. Those who can read will note that Rich didn’t state his view on that topic.

I think it's the Howler who can't read. What in the hell was Goldberg's "tale of self-martyrdom" in the first place? That writing a piece criticizing CBS for bias had struck so close to home that it made him a non-person at the network. The sarcastic tone makes it clear that Frank Rich thinks it's a "ludicrous" proposition, so Sullivan writing these words - "Frank Rich recently described the notion of liberal media bias, as documented by Bernie Goldberg (emphasis mine) as 'ludicrous' " - is in no way dishonest or wrong. After all, the thrust of Rich's column wasn't media bias. It was how "there is still scant evidence to suggest that (President Bush) condones the idea of a free press." That's beyond biased; it's ridiculous. And Rich does have this view on bias: "The White House is betting, not incorrectly, that the overall news culture is swinging back to its pre-9/11 bias — which is resolutely in favor of fun. Gary is back. Monica is back. Even Bernard Goldberg, for all his public griping, is back from his gulag, working as a correspondent for HBO Sports. Only Daniel Pearl is gone." It's clear that Rich is trying to club conservative media critics over the head with the murder of Daniel Pearl in order to make their positions appear ridiculous, but you'd never know that by the Howler's selective excerpting.

Next, the Howler dissects a quick study by blogger Patrick Ruffini in which he searched for the terms "right-wing extremist" and "left-wing extremist" as used by the "New York Times" and the "Washington Post." Ruffini found that both papers use the term "right-wing extremist" far more often than "left-wing extremist."

The Howler did his own research at the "Washington Times," and found that they, too, use the term "right-wing extremist" far more often than they do "left-wing extremist." I think that here the Howler is essentially correct. It's not a good way to search for bias, because you can't tell whether the terms were applied to rebel groups in far-away Slobodistan or to members of the U.S. Congress. But the Howler uses it as an excuse to essentially tell people to ignore Sullivan. Meanwhile, the Howler completely ignores this:

Ruffini then tries another experiment. How do these papers characterize famous conservative, Jesse Helms, and famous liberal, Ted Kennedy? Drum-roll, please: At the New York Times, 28.1% of the stories mentioning Jesse Helms also mentioned the word “conservative” while only 11.3% of the stories with Ted Kennedy in them mentioned the word “liberal.” At the politically savvier WaPo, both figures were higher, but there was still a disparity: 30.6% for Helms, 18.8% for Kennedy.

The Howler accuses Sullivan of being unable to read. Apparently the Howler stops reading when he finds a very specific example of bias that's not easily refuted.

Here's the pertinent link to Sully's page. We report, you decide.