Posted 8:26 AM by Peter Fallow
ON THE ROAD AGAIN: OK, folks, I'm outta here. I'll be visiting relatives for the next week, so posting may be light or nonexistent. I'm going to take this piece of $&@# laptop I own with me, but it can't be trusted. Anyway, take care.

Posted 8:22 AM by Peter Fallow
HOT OFF THE 'PRESS': The "New York Press" Billboard has a couple of notable items today:

Students are stealing newspapers on college campuses again, and John Strausbaugh is pissed off about it:

On Monday, black students at Purdue held a press conference to protest an Oliphant cartoon that ran in the campus paper, The Exponent. The issue, predictably, was identity politics and the perception that the paper had "disrespected" black students by running the cartoon, blah blah blah. In a rare show of balls from the usually mild-mannered editorial cartoonist, Oliphant’s strip makes rather wicked fun of both the slavery reparations movement and this year’s Academy Awards for Denzel Washington and Halle Berry—both surely fair and open targets for an editorial cartoonist. Two of these kids are sophomores, the other a junior. Maybe Purdue doesn’t get around to teaching the Constitution, and specifically the First Amendment, until senior year. I’ve got news for that Black Student Union president: In a democracy, the free and open expression of political and social opinions in a newspaper is not only "acceptable," it’s fucking essential. Only fascists, old-school commissars and college students have the power to demand that everyone else in the world "respect" them no matter how silly they act, or get to live in a world where the only opinions they hear on important topics of the day are ones they agree with. And as for the editor who apologized for having the temerity to publish a paper that upsets someone: you’ve got a job waiting for you at nytimes.com when you graduate, you scheming careerist you.

Then, check out William S. Repsher's take on the state of indie record stores:

Generally, when I walk into an indie store, there's some snobbish dweeb behind the counter wearing his limited taste in music like a STOP sign and snickering at any customer who doesn't buy CDs meeting his archaic "cool" criteria. Frankly, if your average indie-store worker suggested an album to me, I'd be prone to cracking open the jewel case and flinging the CD at his head like a frisbee. It's a rare record-store employer who sees the big picture musically—usually just the store owner, the rock of sanity in his ever-shifting sea of minimum-wage loser employees.

The article's best quote is from Mike Phillips, owner of six Schoolkids Records shops in North Carolina for more than 20 years: "We haven't gone the bong-and-belt-buckle route, but I will if that's how I'm going to pay my bills."

Buddy, we may all have to go that route, sooner or later, no matter what our line of work. I've already picked out a stars-and-bars belt buckle the size of a Doberman's head from the local Señor Frog, have this huge blue bong Mayor Bloomberg gave me on the subway this morning and got a VW van with a Molly Hatchet album cover painted on the side. Worst of all, I've figured out how to dub my old Ted Nugent and Uriah Heep eight-tracks to MP3. Woe unto the stiff suits of the music industry!

Posted 8:12 AM by Peter Fallow
COURTING THE BOBOS: William Powers at the "National Journal" writes about what recent changes at the "New York Times" and "Wall Street Journal" really mean:

The changes at The Times and The Journal may appear to be cosmetic and company-specific, but they are the latest emblems of a broad and significant shift in journalism and in society at large....Alas, we are in the realm of that increasingly popular brand of journalism I call "Lifestyle Voyeurism," the rules of which require a certain tantalizing opacity as to the nitty-gritty details of income and net worth. ...Welcome to the New New Journalism, which is all about pulling in the richest slice of American society -- the people who buy $60,000 cars without blinking, cook on Viking ranges, know an Opus One from a Chateau Ausone, and live a kind of good life that's unheard-of in most of the world. Thanks to the unmatched prosperity of the United States, there are now lots of these people, millions of millionaires, so many that they have begun to form a community all their own. ... It's the community that national advertisers are desperate to reach. Which is why our two most elite national papers are scrambling to reach them, too.... While the changes at The Times and The Wall Street Journal serve a number of purposes -- The Journal's renovations opened up more room on its front page for breaking news, for example -- the purpose they share is to keep this golden readership happy.

Posted 8:05 AM by Peter Fallow
'VELVET CONSERVATISM' IN PRINT: That's the thrust of this "American Prospect" article on the people behind the soon-to-be-launched "New York Sun." (They're also kind of taking over the "New Republic.") It's a position that Michael Tomasky dubs "velvet conservatism":

If one were to take Hertog, Steinhardt, Peretz, and Lipsky's politics and put them in a centrifuge, the substance that would emerge would be as follows: It would be explicitly neither Democratic nor Republican. It would be right of center, especially on foreign policy (and most especially on Israel). It would be right of center, too, on a good number of domestic questions. But because it would pay some obeisance to the New Deal and even (sometimes) to the Great Society, which neoconservatism refuted thoroughly, and because it would purport to care deeply about poor people of color -- Hertog is messianic on the topic of vouchers and calls urban education "the civil rights issue of this generation" -- it would stand quite apart from, say, the obstreperous conservatism of a Tom DeLay. Indeed, it would claim its roots in a historic pragmatic liberalism that today's wandering liberals, this gang of four would argue, have cashiered out of slavish devotion to quota queens and teachers' unions. So it would fancy itself a truer liberalism.

Posted 7:52 AM by Peter Fallow
QUICK HITS: Here's a series of links about newspapers, which is the primary area of interest for this blog:

-The "New York Times" is making its content available especially for bloggers. Fascinating story.
-Something called the Readership Institute has found that newspapers lack brand loyalty.
-I wish I had gotten one of these when I was in college (then again, I would have settled for ANY kind of internship). Knight-Ridder is establishing internships for copy editors.
-Steve Outing says newspaper Web sites are repeating their old mistakes.

Posted 7:29 AM by Peter Fallow
WAR & RUMORS OF WAR: I'm always surprised by the people who stumble across my humble blog. The latest is British journalist Brendan O'Neill of the excellent journal "Spiked-Online." (If you're unaware of it, it's one of the Recommended links on Arts and Letters Daily.) He sent me links to a couple of well-researched articles he's written "raising awkward questions about the war on terror," as O'Neill puts it.

The first is titled "When Nation-Building Destroys." Citing more than 40 news sources spanning the time frame of January-March, it points out huge contradictions between America's stated aims in a post-Taliban Afghanistan and the ways those policies are actually being implemented (or not implemented). Here's a relevant quote:

So what is the state of post-Taliban Afghanistan? Is it a human rights triumph where freedoms have been regained, or just a mess? A security nightmare that needs heavy policing, or a state with some non-threatening security issues? One thing is certain: the Bush administration's contradictory statements about Afghanistan over the past two months show that US policy is driven less by concern for democracy and human rights, than by political expediency.

O'Neill places great blame on the U.S. for instituting a government that emphasizes ethnic differences. He also includes this line about one of the most evil regimes the world has seen in recent history:

Whatever else the Taliban did, it at least brought a measure of stability to Afghanistan.

Needless to say, I disagree with most of this. To me, it seems that America's mission in Afghanistan was not nation-building. It was the removal of the Taliban, followed by some assistance in the establishment of an interim government. It's unfortunate that ethnicity seems to be the operating principle of Afghan society, but that's certainly not uncommon in the undeveloped world. It would take decades to implement the kind of change required to de-emphasize ethnicity in Afghanistan; it's been torn by these conflicts for centuries. And what if America did try to force a non-ethnic-based government on Afghanistan? That would surely be prima facie evidence of arrogant cultural imperialism, wouldn't it?

The next article, "The Strange Battle of Shah-i-Kot," again points out contradictions between what the U.S. military reported about Operation Anaconda and what the media reported. Again, O'Neill did his research: he cites 35 sources for his story (and not all from "The Guardian.") And again, I disagree with many of his assertions. It's true the U.S. military is heavily managing the flow of information from Afghanistan, but other reasons for the many contradictory reports on Operation Anaconda could be competing agendas between American forces and their Afghan compatriots( who seem to be largely motivated by tribal prejudices and may be eager to "spin" the news to their advantage) and the general "fog of war," where the initial report is often wrong. One thing is certain: even though it's unclear how many Al-Qaeda were killed in the operation, the fact is that the terrorist network no longer runs Afghanistan. At the very least, they've been forced to go into hiding or flee the country. It may not be a comprehensive victory, but it's better than doing nothing at all. After all, as the Bush administration has stated over and over again, this is going to be a long conflict that may take years to resolve.

I wish I had more time to examine each of the sources O'Neill cites, but I'm preparing to go out of town. Maybe someone out there with more time on their hands can address these stories in more detail.

Posted 8:25 AM by Peter Fallow
AT LONG LAST: The spring issue of the invaluable "City Journal" is online. Just go read the whole thing. It is always excellent fodder for blogging.

Posted 8:20 AM by Peter Fallow
DIVERSITY UBER ALLES: Ahh, spring. Time for the print media to bash itself for not being more "diverse." The American Society of Newspaper Editors has released the latest study on newsroom diversity. As you might expect, the utopia of proportional minority representation has not been met:

Last year, the industry had a net increase nationwide of four minority journalists. Only because payrolls shrank in the recession, with more white journalists taking buyouts, did the percentage of minorities in newsrooms increase to 12 percent, compared with 31 percent of the US population. Nearly half of the nation's newspapers employ no minority reporters, editors, artists, or photographers.

First of all, it's not entirely clear that the nation is 31 percent minority. The Census states that White Persons make up 75.1 percent of the U.S. population in 2000. But because of the multiple racial entries available on the latest form, it also reports that White Persons not of Hispanic/Latino origin were at 69.1 percent. There were also these two fudge categories: Reporting some other race, 5.5 percent; and Persons reporting two or more races, 2.4 percent. By choosing the higher minority percentage, the situation may appear to be artificially worse than it actually is. But never mind that. Check this slanted passage out:

Editors offer many reasons why they cannot achieve diversity, but not all of those reasons stand up to scrutiny. For one thing, they say, size matters. It's harder for smaller papers with fewer resources to attract good minority journalists. Other editors say the opposite, that larger, more respected newspapers have less staff turnover and need to hire more experienced journalists, so they have fewer opportunities to diversify.

We'll give those reasons a little "scrutiny" later. Let's just say that there's a huge disconnect between this passage and the things that I and many others have observed. In my experience, the truth is this: Small papers simply cannot attract good minority journalists because the minute they graduate from UNC or Indiana or Columbia, they are hired by larger, more respected papers such as the "Charlotte Observer" or the "Indianapolis Star" or "Newsday." If you're black and have a degree from a J-school, you can pretty much write your own ticket. Hell, even if you don't have a J-school degree, big newspapers will call you. I've seen it happen. About 10 years ago, a black co-worker of mine at a very small daily paper put in one year of work before a 350,000-circulation daily contacted him out of the blue. He got the kind of job that I was told I might be ready for in four or five years.

''I think that increasing diversity is within the control of the editor,'' said Tim J. McGuire, president of the editors association and the editor of McClatchy's Minneapolis paper, the Star Tribune, which is at 89 percent of parity. ''We did it by sheer will.'' It doesn't hurt, he said, that 5 to 10 percent of his annual bonus is based on diversity. That's enough, he said, for a weekend in Las Vegas.

So it is clearly in the financial best interest of editors to achieve diversity. How come they're not making it happen? In typical fashion, the Globe buries the reasons in the 26th graph:

Many editors cite two systemic problems that make it difficult to meet diversity goals: retention and a lack of qualified minority journalists. Most editors can cite good minority journalists who have been raided by a larger newspaper or TV network, or who fled journalism for higher pay, opportunity for advancement, or a climate where their views are heard. Editors also refer to what they call the ''pipeline'' problem, saying that there are not enough minority journalists coming out of smaller newspapers and journalism schools. Indeed, the nation's newspapers would need to double the number of minority journalists, and distribute them much more evenly, for every paper to reach parity with its community.

After reading the opening paragraphs of the story, which not so subtly conjure up the image of racist newsroom managers conspiring to force the next William Raspberry into a job at McDonald's, you find the truth way down in the story. But there's an attempt to refute even these simple and reasonable explanations:

But it's also true that there are plenty of minority college students studying journalism and mass communications: 27 percent of students in those majors are minorities, or enough to double the number of minority journalists in about five years, according to the latest US study by the Grady College of Journalism at the University of Georgia. And journalism has never been a job that requires a major in a particular field. But not enough minorities are choosing print journalism, and instead are choosing broadcasting or public relations.

I can't find the University of Georgia study cited. But the fact that 27 percent of the current journalism and mass communication majors are minorities means next to nothing, fantasies of a five-year pogrom of white journalists notwithstanding. First of all, far fewer minorities currently enrolled in college will graduate than their white counterparts. In fact, at a lot of colleges, as few as one-third of minorities currently enrolled will actually graduate. That's true no matter what the major. Second, no mention is made of how many of those who make it through school actually choose to go into journalism. It's a notoriously low-paying field, and selling insurance for $30,000 a year can look infinitely more appealing than covering American Legion baseball for $18,000 a year. And finally, the Globe's story itself provides an entirely reasonable explanation in the 29th graph of a 32-graph story: More minorities are choosing the more lucrative fields of broadcasting or public relations.

Despite this, you can bet that this report will lead to more sophisticated diversity mau-mauing of media companies. And, if you believe William McGowan, there will be a corresponding decline in skeptical reporting about important issues that affect Americans of all racial groups.

Posted 6:36 AM by Peter Fallow
DRUNKEN JOURNALIST R.I.P.: Andrew Sullivan has a wonderful link today to an obit for British journalist Graham Mason, who died recently at the age of 59. Not to make light of alcoholism, but this guy sounds like someone I would have loved to get smashed with:

Graham Edward Mason was born on July 19 1942 in Cape Town, South Africa. He had been conceived on a sand dune, and to this, as a devotee of Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, he sometimes attributed his abrasive character...Mason was a fearsome sight at his most drunkenly irascible. Seated at the bar, his thin shanks wrapped around the legs of a high stool, he would swivel his reptilian stare round behind him to any unfortunate stranger attempting to be served, and snap: "Who the f-- are you?" Sometimes this prompted a reaction, and on one occasion a powerful blow to the head sent Mason flying, with his stool, across the carpet. Painfully clawing himself upright, he set the stool in its place, reseated himself and, twisting his head round again, growled: "Don't you ever do that again."

Just go read the whole thing. It's wonderful.

Posted 9:29 AM by Peter Fallow
'NEW YORK PRESS' ROUNDUP: Let's see what's new in the "New York Press." First, the Mugger has a wide-ranging column that leads off with strong words about the Middle East conflict:

The coddling of Arafat in the liberal media is astonishing. Any day, I expect a Times editorial to suggest that a delegation of Jimmy Carter, Janet Reno, both Clintons, Jesse Jackson, Jerry Ford, Madeleine Albright and Katie Couric be dispatched to wherever Osama bin Laden’s hiding out, and through dialogue and process and soul-searching, attempt to find common ground with this resilient warrior. This isn’t completely facetious: there’s no moral difference between OBL and Arafat, or, for that matter, our back-stabbing "allies" in Saudi Arabia. Yet Arafat, who’s proved 100 times he can’t be trusted, is given the unspoken status of most-favored-dictator.

Then, bellow out an angry "gimme a break" after reading Michelangelo Signorile's column on George Bush and his "born-again" foreign policy:

Mary McGrory in The Washington Post got it right last week when she observed that Bush has been "putty in [Ariel Sharon’s] hand." I’d go one better: Bush is putty in the hands of anyone–the faith-based cultists, the military hawks, the anti-environmentalists, the tax-cutters, the corporate interests–who can frame an issue to him in the language of Christian evangelism, as a struggle of "good" over "evil." (And you better believe that’s how Sharon described the Arab-Israeli conflict to him back in 1998, when then-Gov. Bush visited Israel and Sharon was his personal escort.)

The fact that the bit in parentheses is presented with absolutely no evidence whatsoever is telling. But it's important to note that while President Bush does indeed hold strong religious convictions, it seems to me that his beliefs are a couple of degrees removed from "evangelical" Christianity. He's a Methodist, for God's sake! The "evangelical" label is far too often a shorthand for the twisted religious fanaticism of the Jerry Falwell-Pat Robertson camp. Signorile admits as much later in the piece:

Talk to people in the rank and file of the Christian right–as opposed to its more calculated and powermongering leaders–and you often find simple, frightened people who see the world around them as an unstable place prone to depravity and injustice; many are struggling with their own or larger societal demons, whether they be economic problems or more personal ones, such as sexual issues (for example, feeling homosexual urges that they have been taught to believe are wrong), alcoholism, drug addiction, or some other problem. For many of these individuals passion of any kind is a sign of weakness and can trigger fears of being out of control. The only thing they feel they have a license to be truly passionate about is their faith itself. And that seems to describe Bush. Only when he can channel politics through his faith does he even remotely seem to have a passion for politics.

What an amazingly mean-spirited passage. It's painfully obvious that Signorile hasn't talked to a whole lot of these people. (I have, because a lot of them are my relatives. As much as I disagree with them on a whole host of issues, the reasons for their beliefs are a lot more complex than what Signorile lays out.) The traits he ascribes to the "rank and file of the Christian right" could just as easily describe the demons that dog hard-core left-wing activists. Or deranged taxi drivers. Or soccer moms. Or any human being grappling with the problems of life anywhere, for that matter. Once he makes it clear that people who hold strong religious beliefs are perverse, emotionally tortured hypocrites, it's easy to paint Bush's policies as being driven by the same irrational beliefs. And it's also dishonest.

I never have held the hard-core Christian right in high regard, and I often wish they'd start their own political party and get out of mine. But this simplistic stereotyping of a huge swath of American society would be roundly criticized if Signorile were writing about blacks or Hispanics or homosexuals.

Posted 8:26 AM by Peter Fallow
LINKAGE: An excellent piece today in the "New Republic" that makes the connection between Islamic fanaticism and other forms of totalitarianism:

Comparing now and then, uncanny similarities abound. And this, as the Marxists used to say, is no accident. The new ideology of "jihadism" consists, partly, of the detritus of the worst European ideologies. Jihadism, like fascism and communism, has itself arisen in response to powerful currents--of modernization then, and globalization now. When I say "jihadism," I do not mean to denigrate the "jihad of the spirit," which is a profound concept in Islamic law and theology. And I'm not calling, God forbid, for civilizational war. Rather, I mean to give a name to a specific configuration of old beliefs and new ideologies arising in today's Middle East--a configuration that is not without precedent. Indeed, by glancing backward at the historical antecedents to our present predicament, we can focus on our long-term policy objectives and devise the best ways to achieve them.

Posted 8:17 AM by Peter Fallow
ANTI-ISRAEL BIAS: I found this down on The Corner. Dave Kopel writes a column on media bias for the "Rocky Mountain News." Here's his take on the blatantly slanted reporting about the situation in the Middle East.

Missing witnesses, bogus experts and speculation presented as fact -- a characterization of detective work conducted by the Inspector Clouseau? No, it's a description of too many of the terrorism and foreign policy stories from The New York Times and Associated Press that have appeared in both The Denver Post and The Rocky Mountain News.

Check it out.

Posted 8:06 AM by Peter Fallow
NUKES AND THE MEDIA: The American Enterprise Hot Flash has a piece today on how the press allows itself to be manipulated by questionable scientific findings:

From the “America as Nuclear Rogue” editorial in the Times that followed the leak of the Pentagon's Nuclear Defense Posture Review, to the political battles over Yucca mountain's fate as a nuclear waste repository, Americans have been treated to a crash course on how the media mishandles issues involving science. The problem is reporters do not speak the language of science, says Columbia University astrophysicist David Helfand. “Radiation is one of the most misunderstood words around,” he said in a recent interview.

Posted 7:49 AM by Peter Fallow
PULITZER BACKLASH: Andrea Peyser of the "New York Post" blasts the Pulitzer committee for its snub of that dramatic photo of firefighters raising the American flag over the wreckage of the World Trade Center (that seemed like a no-brainer to me, too). Here's some of what Peyser had to say (she also has the photos in question so you can decide for yourself):

The Pulitzer committee yesterday told the City of New York, our selfless firefighters, 3,000 victims of this nation's bloodiest terror attack, and the American flag to go to hell. Nice work. It isn't often that a photograph perfectly captures the courage and pain of a historic event. The Pulitzer-winning image of a fireman cradling a baby mortally wounded in the Oklahoma City bombing comes to mind...Was it the American flag that spooked the current gaggle of Pulitzer committee members? Or was it that the firemen were all white guys?

Posted 7:39 AM by Peter Fallow
ATHEISTS ON PARADE: Media critic Dan Kennedy of the "Boston Phoenix" recently attended a convention of American atheists. Here's some highlights from a piece that is just barely as critical as it could have been:

There is something incongruously amusing about listening in on several hundred atheists who have gathered to wallow in the exaggerated sense of grievance and persecution that is the hallmark of identity politics. Atheists, after all, think of themselves as superior beings, as rationalists who have succeeded in rising above the superstition and prejudice that so blight the lives of their fellow citizens. Shouldn’t such virtue be its own reward?

So maybe what surprised me more than anything about the atheists I met during the weekend was not that they don’t believe in God (well, duh), but that they are so upfront and in-your-face about it. After all, what percentage is there in giving offense to the righteous? During the convention, I heard atheists complain not just about prayer in the schools and public invocations of the Ten Commandments, but about crèches on government property, about prayers at public gatherings, even about the inscription IN GOD WE TRUST on money.

Identity politics can be dreary and smug and self-satisfied in its embrace of victimhood, but it has its uses. I’m unconvinced that the atheists are as persecuted as they think they are. Nor have they succeeded in making reality their exclusive franchise. But it’s not a bad thing that they’re here to blow away the hypocrisy and the icky piety of what passes all too often for religious discourse in this country.

Posted 7:12 AM by Peter Fallow
OFF THE RECORD: The Off the Record column in the "New York Observer" has a couple of good items today. The first is about the dominance of the Pulitizers by huge newspapers. (Just six papers won the 14 awards, only one of which was not among the top-10-circulating papers in the country.)

Dean Baquet, the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, former New York Times national editor and a Pulitzer juror this year, agreed that the New York Times entries warranted awards, but said he saw a danger in concentrating so many awards in just a few papers. “This was the year of the big papers. The only papers that could compete on Sept. 11 were the biggest papers,” Mr. Baquet said, fully aware that the top-10 L.A. Times isn’t exactly the Nantucket Beacon. “The troublesome thing is the dominance of a handful of big papers. I think it’s probably an aberration, but we should be worried.”

Off the Record also has a piece about the recent redesign of the "Wall Street Journal."

Invariably, some will consider the new-look Journal the newspaper equivalent of Jennifer Grey, post–nose job: Sure, now it looks more like everyone else, but dang, there was something sexy about the original.

I like what I've seen of the updated Journal. It retains the same classic look, just with a touch of color. Very nicely done.

There's reaction in the industry, of course. Here's Al Neuharth taking credit for the idea.

Posted 6:57 AM by Peter Fallow
SAFIRE/SHARON CONNECTION BLASTED: This is bizarre. "Boston Globe" columnist Mark Jurkowitz is accusing William Safire of the "New York Times" of serving as Ariel Sharon's "press secretary" and "stenographer." (Link via Romenesko.) In other words, Jurkowitz is unhappy that an opinion columnist holds an opinion:

Safire is clearly serving as an unabashed propaganda outlet for the hard-line Israeli leader. The more intriguing question is whether he's also presenting a sanitized - and more palatable - version of Sharon to the American public.

Countless media outlets present a sanitized version of Yassir Arafat's corrupt regime every day in regular news stories. But one conservative opinion columnist at the Times supporting Sharon, well, that's dangerous. In fact, one of Safire's sins appears to be his very failure to follow the party line at the Times:

When asked how his opinions match those of the Times' editorial page - which is considerably harder on Sharon - Safire says, ''I wouldn't go as far as to say diametrical. But we differ.'' Still, a Times editorial April 7 pointedly noted that Sharon ''recently told our colleague William Safire that he dreams of ending his political career as a statesman and peacemaker.''

William Safire is virtually the only voice on the highly influential editorial page of the Times expressing support for Sharon. How this is somehow dangerous is beyond me.

Posted 7:20 AM by Peter Fallow
PAPER STEALING CATCHES ON: At colleges, it's usually been the leftists who snatch a press run when there's a story they don't like. This time, it was fans of a track coach. Interesting. (Link via Romenesko.)

Posted 7:00 AM by Peter Fallow
9/11 DENIAL: In reference to that stupid French book that declares the attack on the Pentagon a fraud, James S. Robbins, who witnessed the attack, writes a piece today for the "National Review" equating 9/11 denial with Holocaust denial:

In both cases, the premises of their originators are indefensible, which forces them into a position where they have to throw the facts overboard to sustain their arguments. But notions like this are kept alive by people who have a predisposition to believe them, those who have pre-existing grudges and will engage in whatever reality-denying behavior justifies their baseline prejudices.

And after describing the horrific crash, Robbins says this:

So, of course, I take it personally when a half-wit like Meyssan comes along saying it did not happen. And he is so evidently at war with reality that one is tempted not to waste time with him...It would be easy to ignore him. But that would be a mistake. This is another front in what President Bush called "the war to save civilization itself." ... When such ideas are allowed to stand, they take root among the impressionable or those predisposed to think the worst. And especially now that communications technology has made it possible to give global reach to the bizarre and archive it forever, it is essential for men and women of reason resolutely to counter the delusions of the fringe element.

Posted 6:48 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE PULITZERS: Howie Kurtz has an excellent column today on journalism's most prestigious awards. He points out the objections that I have to the prizes: that only three or four newspapers seem to be allowed to win them year in and year out:

This is to take nothing away from the New York Times, which geared up its global news machine and did a fabulous job under its new editor, Howell Raines. But if one big, rich paper wins half the prizes – and four big, rich papers win just about everything – then are the Pulitzers getting more like baseball, where smaller clubs can no longer compete? Usually there are a couple of prizes for a Vermont editorial writer or a North Dakota newsroom covering a flood, just for geopolitical balance. Yes, in a year when Sept. 11 dominated the prizes, it helped to have big staffs, lots of dough and plenty of foreign bureaus. But if this is the trend of the future, maybe the Pulitzers should follow the National Magazine Awards and have different prizes for publications in different circulation categories. Otherwise it may be viewed especially by smaller and mid-sized papers – as an eastern elitist exercise.

Posted 6:32 AM by Peter Fallow
THE PULITZERS: You're probably aware that the "New York Times" won seven Pulitzer Prizes. Coverage of Sept. 11 dominated the awards. Here's the story.

Posted 9:31 AM by Peter Fallow
WE GOOFED: Check out this obituary gaffe from the "Baltimore Sun":

An obituary in Saturday's editions of The Sun reported the death of Ralph D. Chester of Millers Island. Mr. Chester is not dead. Mr. Chester was reported to have died by a family member, who called The Sun to provide material for the obituary. The Sun later determined that the family member who called has been estranged from Mr. Chester for several years. The Sun regrets the error.

Thanks to David Nieporent's fine Jumping to Conclusions blog for this item.

Posted 8:21 AM by Peter Fallow
COMPARE & CONTRAST: I just stumbled across these two pieces about the Oscars. The first is from Jonathan Last of the "Weekly Standard.":

And then there was Halle Berry. After winning Best Actress for her role in "Monster's Ball," Berry went on a long, hysterical, unhinged rant about the barriers she was breaking down for her race, the footsteps she was following in, and the discrimination that she encounters as a serious actress of color. Halle Berry, whose mother is white, was the Miss USA runner up in 1986 and a successful model before she turned to acting. She gets $2.5 million per picture and reportedly received a $500,000 bonus for taking her shirt off in last year's John Travolta disaster, "Swordfish." No doubt oppressed, serious actors of color everywhere were thrilled to see her carrying their banner. I imagine Andre Braugher cried.

And then there was this from Michael Eric Dyson in "The Nation":

Berry electrified her audience, speaking with splendid intelligence and rousing emotion of how her Oscar was made possible by the legendary likes of Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne and Diahann Carroll. And in a stunning display of sorority in a profession riven by infighting and narcissism, Berry acknowledged the efforts of contemporary black actresses Angela Bassett, Jada Pinkett Smith and Vivica Fox...On the night she was being singled out for greatness, she cast her lot with anonymous women of color who hungered for her spot, and who might be denied a chance for no other reason than that they are yellow, brown, red or black. Her achievement, she insisted, was now their hope.

Posted 7:26 AM by Peter Fallow
PRIOR RESTRAINT: Remember that story about U.S. soldiers murdering hundreds of civilians during the Korean War? It's still kicking around. One of the AP reporters who wrote the initial Pulitzer Prize-winning story has been trying to halt the publication of a book critical of the AP's findings. It's an interesting piece.

Posted 7:10 AM by Peter Fallow
MIDDLE EAST & THE MEDIA: A stunning piece of revisionist history today in the "Chicago Tribune." Columnist Salim Muwakkil blasts the American media for being pro-Israeli. His first "expert witness" is Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, who unleashes this inflammatory quote:

"The Israelis are becoming increasingly like the white supremacist South Africans, viewing the Palestinians as a lower form of life, not hesitating to kill a great many of them and justifying this on the grounds that they are being the objects of terrorism, which is true. But their reactions are all out of proportion . . . "

If I remember correctly, black South Africans didn't blow themselves up in pizza parlors in order to make a statement. They relied on international sympathy for their plight, which resulted in tremendous pressure on South Africa to change. And there are strong arguments that Israel has shown remarkable restraint in light of the outrages that have been visited upon it.

Muwakkil then rehashes Eric Alterman's dubious "I hold in my hand a list with the names of 62 reflexively anti-Israel American columnists" piece to prove that most major opinion writers hold opinions contrary to Muwakkil, an editor for the far-left "In These Times." He even goes on to lay blame for the Intifada on Sharon with these amazing words:

In September 2000, Sharon made a visit to the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa mosque, a venerated Muslim site. This deliberate provocation sparked the so-called Al Aqsa Intifada, dashed the peace talks and added a religious element into what had been largely a secular struggle over land.

I see. Sharon visits Al Aqsa and the Palestinians had no choice but to respond with an unending wave of suicide bombers. (No word on whether Sharon's visit could merely have been a convenient excuse for terrorism.) And before that fateful day, the Palestinian struggle had only been about land. Religious fanaticism never figured into the arguments advanced by Hamas and Hezbollah "activists." Glad we've cleared that up.

UPDATE: Howie Kurtz has a good piece today on the pitfalls for journalists covering the conflict in the Middle East.

Posted 6:40 AM by Peter Fallow
IDEOLOGY-FREE RAINES? "Editor & Publisher" has a long interview with Howell Raines, executive editor of the "New York Times." (Link via Romenesko.) In it, Raines describes how he guided his newspaper's remarkable coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks. But Raines also supplies a quote that perfectly illustrates how media bias is totally unrecognized by those who practice it:

"I'm aware of perceptions," he says, "but I'm aware of who I am, and I am not a highly ideological person. I've never belonged to any political party as a matter of principle."

Raines not ideological? Now THAT'S news.

Posted 10:36 AM by Peter Fallow
OFF THE BEAM: It looks like Alex Beam has decided to move into Blogistan. Welcome, Alex. Your new blog rocks! And I'm not just saying that because you linked to me! Honest!

Posted 10:32 AM by Peter Fallow
I SAY, IT'S MY BIRTHDAY: I turned 36 today. Woo-hoo! The Amazing Techie Girlfriend is giving me a couple of shirts and a nice dinner at a fancy restaurant. At this stage in my life, that's all I want. An added bonus? I'm off work today, but I'm not going to blog a whole lot.

Posted 1:36 PM by Peter Fallow
LEFTIST MORAL RELATIVISM WATCH: There's a whole lotta moral equivalency goin' on in this piece from AlterNet. The title, "The Suicide Bombers Lie," is a dead giveaway (pardon the pun). But it's truly a small classic of the genre:

One that I have been hearing more and more frequently is the idea that there is something uniquely horrible about "suicide bombings," that whatever the Palestinians' aims, this tactic must be condemned by all decent people.

The Palestinians' aims are clear: murder as many Jews as possible in as spectacular a manner as possible. Drive them into the sea and reclaim the land. It is not a protest, or the cry of the powerless and disenfranchised. It is not about a separate Palestinian state. It is clear what it is about: the murder of innocents. If you can't tell that there's something "uniquely horrible" about that, then any moral argument you make is pointless.

The message is clear: while the Israelis have killed far more people than the Palestinians in the recent conflict, they have done so in a civilized manner, while the Palestinian killing has been barbarous.

Notice how any dead Palestinian, whether a member of a Hamas terrorist cell or not, automatically gets lumped into the "civilian" category. That's convenient. "Activists" were killed, not soldiers in a fanatical army whose sole purpose is murdering civilians.

Whatever one may think of the larger claims advanced by either side, this is sick and dangerous thinking, a way of dehumanizing one side in the conflict. It recalls the dehumanizing of the suicidal, wild-eyed kamikazes, whose barbarous tactics justified the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, while the properly civilized German-Americans required no such special treatment. Not to mention the American fliers who dropped atomic bombs on Japanese civilian centers. Obviously, far more people -- virtually all of them civilians -- died in Hiroshima than from all the suicide attacks in history, but not even those of us who consider this a war crime think of the bomber pilots as maddened fanatics.

I'm sorry, but the Palestinians choose to dehumanize their own people when they turn them into walking time bombs. And the stupid analogy with kamikaze pilots shows the writer's ignorance (willful or not) of history. The kamikaze pilots were used in the dying stages of World War II; Japanese-Americans were wrongfully interred during the nation's hysteria in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. As for Japan in World War II, its government sought to impose, through military force, a explicitly racist totalitarian regime on the whole of Asia. I think putting a stop to that was a pretty good thing. Furthermore, our rebuilding of Japan and Europe may have been an even better thing. In fact, it's probably without precedent in world history. Flawed as it is, I'll choose a culture that uplifts its defeated foes over one that teaches its children that blowing themselves up in supermarkets and on school buses is a noble calling.

In closing, there's a passage in Patrick Brogan's excellent "The Fighting Never Stopped" that I'd like to cite. It nicely sums up the case against Mr. Wald's argument:

The chief reason for distinguishing between the actions of governments, however reprehensible, and those of self-constituted organizations, is to escape the relativism of the terrorists' apologists who insist that state terrorism is far more serious. They allege that the United State (or Britain, France or Israel) have engaged in state terrorism, and conclude that the terrorists are no more guilty than those governments. It is a transparently dishonest argument, a means of avoiding the issue, and a justification for murder. Governments should be judged by their actions - and so should terrorists...Murder is not justified by sticking a different label on it.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg writes about "The Myth of the Suicide Bombers" today at NRO. Excellent column.

Posted 11:56 AM by Peter Fallow
DO REPORTERS NEED BLOGS AS JOB SECURITY? The "American Prospect" raises that question in this interesting piece. Just go read it. It would take too long to explain it all.

Posted 7:38 AM by Peter Fallow
FACT-CHECKING HIS FAT ASS: A lot of people have already linked to this, but I'm going to do it anyway. Here's Spinsanity's deconstruction of Michael Moore's voluminous lies. Well done.

Posted 7:08 AM by Peter Fallow
ARAB PRESS GOES NUTS: The latest crisis in the Middle East is, predictably, producing howls of outrage in the Arab press:

The use of hostile labels and historical parallels to mock the Israeli leader in order to express popular anger at the predicament of Palestinians is not new, but in the current crisis it is feeding a surge of anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment in the Arab world. One cartoon in Al Hayat, the London-based Arabic-language newspaper, yesterday showed Sharon in ancient Roman garb happily setting fire to the foundations of a city as the leaner, fitter President Bush watched from a nearby steep cliff, playing his harp in accompaniment. One of the most shrill critiques of the U.S. president came from Al Hayat columnist Abdul-Wahab Badrakhan, who accused Bush of viewing recent events as just another "episode in America's revenge for September 11." All Bush sees in this crisis are "acts of terror" regardless of the sacrifices of Palestinians, Badrakhan wrote. He charged that Bush had "blessed and encouraged" Sharon's "crimes" against the Palestinians. "The virtuosos of the U.S. administration forget or feign forgetfulness that their criminal of choice, Sharon, is acting according to his own agenda, not theirs," Badrakhan wrote.

This "Washington Post" article also notes competing voices. For example, the "Jerusalem Post" made a wonderful point about the "ideological side of the terrorist infrastructure":

"Imagine that the Ku Klux Klan or the Aryan Nation were suddenly to come into possession of unlimited wealth and used it to establish a network of schools and colleges all over Christendom peddling their brand of Christianity," the piece said. "Wahhabism [the Islamic sect prominent in Saudi Arabia] would have been a lunatic fringe in a marginal country. Because of oil it's become a world force. "None of this could have happened without the consent of the Saudi government and it cannot be reversed without holding that government fully responsible. The cleric who gives his blessing for mass murder is central to the infrastructure of terrorism. The war on terrorism cannot be complete until the regimes that tolerate the funding of such clerics are threatened by the same punishment as those who harbor the terrorists themselves," it added.

Posted 7:01 AM by Peter Fallow
KEEPING REPORTERS SAFE: David Ignatius raises some important questions about the safety of journalists during the war on terror. It seems the U.S. government was aware of a threat against journalists in Pakistan, but may have failed to alert media organizations:

The rumor is even more specific: The al Qaeda operatives reportedly discussed luring their quarry into a trap with the promise of an interview about terrorism. They planned to videotape the journalist's interrogation and eventual murder -- and then make this gruesome videotape available to the media.

We all know what happened to Daniel Pearl. Ignatius says its a tough call that would involve a compromise of American journalism's values, but the safety of journalists is paramount:

Journalists prize their distance from government, and no American editor would accept the kind of close, confidential briefing arrangements that are typical between the British government and the press there. American newspapers want to be free to publish information their readers need to know, even if the government objects. Part of that deal, inevitably, is that the government won't share everything it knows with the press. But the murder of Danny Pearl and the deaths of eight journalists covering the war in Afghanistan have made the news business think again about its ground rules. Serious news organizations remain committed to covering even the riskiest stories, but they are also working harder to keep their correspondents as safe as possible. What would we do, as editors and government officials, if we knew someone was in danger? In the end, the "professional" answer matters less than the human one: We would try to protect that person's life.

Posted 6:22 AM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA MINDED MILESTONE: Sometime early this morning, I went over the 10,000-visitor mark. I guess that's fairly significant. Numberwise, I can't really tell, because I set up a Bravenet counter to record visits, but sometimes it seems like it's recording hits. Anyway, I'm pretty pleased. I've been doing this for just under three months, and I've been linked and praised by a lot of great bloggers. I've gotten something like 60 e-mails, almost all positive.

I just want to thank all the readers who've stopped by. Please continue to do so, and I'll keep checking out your blogs, too.

Posted 8:18 AM by Peter Fallow
THEY'RE HIRING AGAIN: Thank God. It looks like newspapers are emerging from the recent economic slump and are starting to fill some long-vacated positions:

Scott Bosley, executive director of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Reston, Va., says newspapers are slowly hiring again, but mostly for entry-level positions, to help daily operations run more smoothly. His organization sponsors journalism job fairs and turnout reflects the market, he says. "More recruiters seem to have come out during the last few fairs. The numbers aren't off the charts, but it's better than it was six months ago," he says.

Please send some of these people our way. We could use the help.

Posted 8:15 AM by Peter Fallow
HITCHENS ON BILLY GRAHAM: I like Christopher Hitchens. He's a wonderful writer, and one of the few leftists who has been absolutely right about the threat of Islamic terrorism. But his latest "Nation" column, in which he uses nasty attacks on Billy Graham as a springboard to discuss the separation of church and state, is a bit overblown. To Hitchens, Graham is nothing but "a gaping and mendacious anti-Jewish peasant" who is an "avid bigot" and a "cheap liar" because of anti-Semitic comments he made in a private conversation with President Nixon 30 years ago. And then there's this incredibly nasty bit:

After all, in the National Cathedral after September 11 he was allowed in the presence of our country's elite to assert that all the murder victims were in paradise and happy to be there--a wild outburst of evil and stupidity that implicitly copies the fantasies of bin Laden.

You don't have to be an overly religious person to realize that there's a world of difference between comforting words uttered to ease the grief of those who lost loved ones in the most horrendous manner imaginable and a theology that sees murder and suicide as the highest religious calling. The former is a triumph of the human moral instinct; the latter is a debasement of it. I don't know what to make of this piece. It could be an outburst of Hitchens' well-known atheism, or it could be some shameless trawling for hits for "The Nation." The faith-based bloggers out there should have a field day with it.

Posted 7:35 AM by Peter Fallow
COVERING A DANGEROUS WORLD: We all know that newspapers love stories that feature death, serious injury or bizarre acts of nature. Thank God for the "New York Press" for providing a little levity:

On amusement-ride tragedies: Things got under way early this year at a makeshift carnival in South Ozone Park, Queens, as last night 10 children were sent to the hospital after the inflatable trampoline they were cavorting upon tipped over and deflated—dumping some children 15 feet to the ground and trapping others beneath what the New York Post called "a blanket of rubber." Nobody was seriously hurt—just minor cuts and bruises—but believe you me, everyone was pretty badly shaken there for a while. And what was the name of this fun kiddie ride?...The Titanic. It was shaped like a giant fucking ship, and they called it The Titanic. Well, what in the hell did they expect? Smooth sailing?...Like I said, though, they were lucky this time, and no one was hurt too badly. In fact, after being comforted by their parents, those children who weren’t sent to the hospital ran off with money enough left in their pockets to ride on The Mangler, The Nauseator, The Eye-Poker, The Bone Chipper and The Child Abductor.

On that "mysterious "blob" off the Florida coast: It’s all very disconcerting. But even more bothersome is the news, tossed off quite casually there near the end, that new satellite photos reveal that the Blob is dissipating. These men with their haircuts and Mr. Fancypants degrees may call it "dissipating," as if that’s supposed to be a good thing. Well, I’ll tell you what I call it—I call it "breaking up into smaller Blobs"—each independent of the other, each with the ability to spread about and grow into new giant Blobs. Haven’t these people ever seen The Green Slime, for godsakes? Haven’t they seen anything?

Posted 7:19 AM by Peter Fallow
RACISM FOREVER: That's apparently become the rallying cry for the so-called civil rights establishment. Sensitive to perceived racism everywhere, it is not afraid to throw rocks at the glass house of its best friend, the American media. That explains why the "Knoxville News-Sentinel" is getting blasted for failing to get the historic Oscar wins for Halle Berry and Denzel Washington in the paper, even though the simple explanation is that those awards were handed out after the paper's deadline had passed. There was no conspiracy to "whitewash" history. But this kind of cheap mau-mauing can still cause liberals to flail themselves over their lack of "sensitivity":

The late running Oscars, of course, are a press run deadline nightmare for all newspapers except those on the Pacific Coast. But critics were quick to shout "racist!" Lara Edge, managing editor of the Knoxville paper, said no insult was intended. "We need to be more sensitive about benchmark events in the minority community," she told E&P. "In past years, we've not been able to get all the Oscar results [due to press run deadlines] in all editions, and we've lived with that. ... But in our planning, we did not take into account the potential reaction from our African-American community if Berry and Washington both won." In summation, Edge called it just right: "We didn't do anything wrong. But we could have done better. ...We do need to find a way to communicate to readers how our newspaper works. After all, we work for them."

That's interesting. It's an admission that the "potential reaction from our African-American community" to news coverage could be more important than the facts of the matter, no matter how unpleasant (or mundane) those facts may be. It certainly wouldn't be unheard of.

Posted 6:37 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON THE BLOGGING BACKLASH: Via the Instantman comes this piece from the "L.A. Times." Norah Vincent is a bit too screechish for my tastes, but she makes some valid points:

Web logs are infuriating because they are thoughtful alternatives to the self-important New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and their toady satellites, much of whose reporting has become hardly less biased than the bloggers'. Bloggers at least have the honesty to admit their biases up front. They don't pretend to be objective. But they do provide a healthy criticism of the liberal establishment's hopelessly arrogant monotone. What's more, they make news interactive, so that we can all stop yelling at the television and actually do something. Readers can opine, as well as argue, grapple or exchange expletives with their host. That's something you'll never get in print.

Posted 6:26 AM by Peter Fallow
THE POLLS ARE IN: Howie Kurtz takes on presidential polling in his media column today. Personally, I think polling gets way too much media coverage. I can't tell you how many times the results of this or that poll has been the lead story on Page One of whatever paper I've been working for. Howie explains why:

The media, of course, are voracious for this stuff and pay big bucks to cook up poll stories. If a president is treading water in the polls, reporters describe him as struggling. If a president is rising in the polls, journalists say he's on a roll, like a baseball manager on a winning streak. In other words, it's okay for us to use polls; it's suspect for them to use polls.

Posted 6:19 AM by Peter Fallow
#@*%?& BLOGGER! I hope to hell that Blogger doesn't start kicking my posts into the "future" file. Apologies for the double post of the "New Republic" piece. This thing better be working right today.

Posted 1:04 AM by Peter Fallow
THANK YOU, JAMES LILEKS: Stepping back into Alex Beam's "echo chamber of self-regard," I'd like to say thanks to James Lileks for his kind words about this site yesterday. I've now made that quote the motto of my page. That's more praise than I've received in three years of work at some places. And it would be a gas to work for the "Lileks Daily News."

Posted 12:53 AM by Peter Fallow
'A RIOT IS AN UGLY THING': Remember that line by Inspector Kemp (Kenneth Mars) in "Young Frankenstein"? Michelle Cottle of "The New Republic" expresses the same sentiment after getting caught up in the near-riot in College Park, Md., after the Terrapins won the national basketball championship Monday night. What she saw was disturbing enough, but what really upset her were the double standards of the police:

Still, you have to wonder why we tolerate--condone even--this kind of destructive B.S. from coddled, affluent suburban kids, many of whose only encounter with "social injustice" was when Daddy refused to buy them a new Land Rover until their seventeenth birthday.

First of all, the idea that big segments of society condone this kind of behavior is a fantasy - indeed, these hijinks are often roundly denounced in the media, as they should be. But apparently the students are ripping shit up for the "wrong" reasons. Cottle seems to be suggesting that rioting is OK if you're a victim of "social injustice." Middle-class, mostly non-malevolent college kids getting a little rowdy during a victory celebration, well, THAT'S an outrage. But it's not like the cops weren't out in force:

If the urban assault vehicles seemed a bit much, you still had to feel for the cops. This white-collar breed of rioting puts police officers in an uncomfortable position. They are expected to prevent raging students from completely destroying local homes and businesses--but without getting too rough on the perps. It's true that officers are less likely to be seriously injured in these situations than, say, last spring's race riots in Cincinnati.

No kidding. Because of that, perhaps the administration was wise to suggest that the police take it a little easy on the students. But what's missing here is a little perspective on another, more important reason why the P.G. cops might have used less forceful techniques. The county's police force has been subjected to a series of investigations into allegations of police brutality by the media, led by the "Washington Post." What turned up was not pretty. Suffice it to say that the Prince George's police force has been a little trigger-happy in the past. With that in mind, when the whole country is watching what's happening in your county after the final notes of "One Shining Moment" fade away, it might be wise to tell the local gendarmes to go a bit easy on the kids. Of course, the cops weren't happy about it:

But many of Prince George's County's finest made it clear that they resented having to stand around while snot-nosed college kids trashed their town and threatened their colleagues. One officer--we'll call him Bert--expressed disgust that, in all of last weekend's chaos, one arrest was made. "One." He shook his head in disbelief.

Again, given this police force's shoddy history, shouldn't they be applauded for showing restraint? Unless you think "coddled, affluent suburban kids" deserve to get a truncheon upside the head for dropping trou. I certainly hope Cottle isn't suggesting there's a moral equivalence between College Park pranksters and the monsters in L.A. who pulled Reginald Denny from his truck and tried to smash his head in with a brick merely because he was white and in the wrong neighborhood. Oh, did I just needlessly inject race into this story? Well, she started it:

Trudging back to my car--which had fortunately been neither burned nor towed--I kept thinking back to something a young, black kid had muttered to a friend early in the evening. "You should have seen it here Saturday," he said in obvious wonder. "These white folks was out here just burning shit in the middle of the street." ...The kid was clearly amazed that young people would be allowed to run wild like that with virtual immunity. With the sounds of shattering glass and howled profanity echoing in the street behind me, I had to wonder the same thing.

Ah yes, the imputation of official racism. No mention that the P.G. police force is 41 percent black; more importantly, no mention of the actual diversity of the students at Maryland. This is from the university's own Diversity News Bureau:

About 25 percent of the university's almost 32,500 students are minorities. More than 2,300 foreign students, representing over 100 countries, attend the university.

Now suppose the P.G. cops went in and started busting heads like they clearly wanted to do. Do you think the image of cops bashing up one of the nation's most racially diverse student bodies would have been applauded in the pages of "The New Republic"? Do I really even have to ask?

Posted 11:22 AM by Peter Fallow
'A RIOT IS AN UGLY THING': Remember that line by Inspector Kemp (Kenneth Mars) in "Young Frankenstein"? Michelle Cottle of "The New Republic" expresses the same sentiment after getting caught up in the near-riot in College Park, Md., after the Terrapins won the national basketball championship Monday night. What she saw was disturbing enough, but what really upset her were the double standards of the police:

Still, you have to wonder why we tolerate--condone even--this kind of destructive B.S. from coddled, affluent suburban kids, many of whose only encounter with "social injustice" was when Daddy refused to buy them a new Land Rover until their seventeenth birthday.

First of all, the idea that big segments of society condone this kind of behavior is a fantasy - indeed, these hijinks are often roundly denounced in the media, as they should be. But apparently the students are ripping shit up for the "wrong" reasons. Cottle seems to be suggesting that rioting is OK if you're a victim of "social injustice." Middle-class, mostly non-malevolent college kids getting a little rowdy during a victory celebration, well, THAT'S an outrage. But it's not like the cops weren't out in force:

If the urban assault vehicles seemed a bit much, you still had to feel for the cops. This white-collar breed of rioting puts police officers in an uncomfortable position. They are expected to prevent raging students from completely destroying local homes and businesses--but without getting too rough on the perps. It's true that officers are less likely to be seriously injured in these situations than, say, last spring's race riots in Cincinnati.

No kidding. Because of that, perhaps the administration was wise to suggest that the police take it a little easy on the students. But what's missing here is a little perspective on another, more important reason why the P.G. cops might have used less forceful techniques. The county's police force has been subjected to a series of investigations into allegations of police brutality by the media, led by the "Washington Post." What turned up was not pretty. Suffice it to say that the Prince George's police force has been a little trigger-happy in the past. With that in mind, when the whole country is watching what's happening in your county after the final notes of "One Shining Moment" fade away, it might be wise to tell the local gendarmes to go a bit easy on the kids. Of course, the cops weren't happy about it:

But many of Prince George's County's finest made it clear that they resented having to stand around while snot-nosed college kids trashed their town and threatened their colleagues. One officer--we'll call him Bert--expressed disgust that, in all of last weekend's chaos, one arrest was made. "One." He shook his head in disbelief.

Again, given this police force's shoddy history, shouldn't they be applauded for showing restraint? Unless you think "coddled, affluent suburban kids" deserve to get a truncheon upside the head for dropping trou. I certainly hope Cottle isn't suggesting there's a moral equivalence between College Park pranksters and the monsters in L.A. who pulled Reginald Denny from his truck and tried to smash his head in with a brick merely because he was white and in the wrong neighborhood. Oh, did I just needlessly inject race into this story? Well, she started it:

Trudging back to my car--which had fortunately been neither burned nor towed--I kept thinking back to something a young, black kid had muttered to a friend early in the evening. "You should have seen it here Saturday," he said in obvious wonder. "These white folks was out here just burning shit in the middle of the street." ...The kid was clearly amazed that young people would be allowed to run wild like that with virtual immunity. With the sounds of shattering glass and howled profanity echoing in the street behind me, I had to wonder the same thing.

Ah yes, the imputation of official racism. No mention that the P.G. police force is 41 percent black; more importantly, no mention of the actual diversity of the students at Maryland. This is from the university's own Diversity News Bureau:

About 25 percent of the university's almost 32,500 students are minorities. More than 2,300 foreign students, representing over 100 countries, attend the university.

Now suppose the P.G. cops went in and started busting heads like they clearly wanted to do. Do you think the image of cops bashing up one of the nation's most racially diverse student bodies would have been applauded in the pages of "The New Republic"? Do I really even have to ask?

Posted 9:44 AM by Peter Fallow
TURN TO PAGE: Remember that Frenchman who wrote a book claiming the Pentagon was never attacked on Sept. 11? Well, the Last Page provides powerful testimony that the attack did indeed happen. She witnessed it. A remarkable personal essay by an excellent blogger. Please go read it, and keep the memory of what happened on that day alive.

Posted 9:39 AM by Peter Fallow
LEFT-WING PARANOIA ALERT: Alternet has a book review of something called "Into the Buzzsaw," a collection of stories from disgruntled journalists who had their works marginalized or criticized by a massive conspiracy in the mainstream media. Here's what the book is about:

Edited by ex-CBS producer Kristina Borjesson, "Into the Buzzsaw" is a collection of essays, mostly by serious journalists excommunicated from the media establishment for tackling subjects like the CIA's role in drug smuggling, lies perpetuated by the investigators of TWA flight 800, POWs rotting in Vietnam, a Korean war massacre, the disenfranchisement of black voters in Bush's election, bovine growth hormone's dangers and a host of other unpopular issues.

And the fate of those brave souls who fight the power is eerily similar to what happened to John Nash in "A Beautiful Mind":

Borjesson describes "the buzzsaw" as "what can rip through you when you try to investigate or expose anything this country's large institutions -- be they corporate or government -- want to keep under wraps. The system fights back with official lies, disinformation, and stonewalling. Your phone starts acting funny. Strange people call you at strange hours to give you strange information. The FBI calls you. Your car is broken into and the thief takes your computer and your reporter's notebook and leaves everything else behind ... The sense of fear and paranoia is, at times, overwhelming."

Despite the fact that most of these stories have been thoroughly debunked, here's Alternet's blurb-worthy conclusion about "Buzzsaw":

An otherwise appallingly convincing book, a book that suggests that the truth about our media-military-industrial complex might go beyond even our paranoid imaginings.

Posted 9:25 AM by Peter Fallow
HEADLINES I'D LIKE TO WRITE: Not that I have anything against Naomi Campbell, but it would be fun to get away with stuff like this. It's from the "Mirror":

"JUDGE GIVES LYING DRUG ABUSER £3,500 (But, shh .. don't tell anyone. You know how Naomi likes to keep these things private.)"

Here's the rest of the story from Slate. Again, I missed it the other day. It's an interesting look at the press and privacy in Britain.

Posted 9:11 AM by Peter Fallow
PRANKING THE PRESS: This is funny. For 17 years, members of the New York media have fallen for a bogus press release about the upcoming April Fools' Day parade. It happened again this year. (CNN was among those suckered in.) The "New York Press" wonders why:

The really funny thing is, it’s hard to imagine why anybody would fall for it anymore. Not only because he’s been successfully pulling the same damn prank for nearly two decades now, but because even a cursory glance over his press release—you’d think—would make at least a few people suspicious. There’s just something a little hinky about it.

This Daily Billboard feature from the "New York Press" is an insanely funny blog. Here's a recent selection of funny lines:

On TV cancellations: The networks have began announcing their canceled shows, and the big story is that not even teen lesbianism could save Once and Again.

On country music: Country radio caters almost exclusively to an upwardly mobile class of suburban white women. The Lifetime network crowd. The women who tape Rosie and Oprah so they can watch them when they get home from work. In other words, women who have made it virtually impossible for any sane, nondesperate, heterosexual man to want any sort of a relationship with them, much less one of a romantic nature. And you know what that means: a bunch of made-to-order male-bashing songs for them to cry over their light beers and wine coolers to with the other girls at TGI Friday's.

Posted 8:57 AM by Peter Fallow
SOCIALISM, R.I.P.: Roger Kimball writes an obit for socialism in the latest "New Criterion":

It is one of the great ironies of modern history that socialism, which promises a more humane, caring, and equitable society, has consistently delivered a more oppressive and mismanaged one. Socialism’s motto...turns out to be: “If you build it, they will leave.” If, one must add, they are allowed to leave.

Posted 8:32 AM by Peter Fallow
REPARATIONS RESPONSE: Something else I missed from the other day: The excellent John McWhorter addresses the beginning of the slavery reparations battle:

Real civil rights will mean standing down this misguided manipulation and devoting our efforts to the less glamorous efforts of fostering concrete change for people who need help....What ails the black community today is the very illusion that holds the reparations gang in thrall — that serious black achievement is impossible except under ideal conditions, that white neglect must be at the root of any black-white disparity, and that only the actions of whites can significantly improve the conditions of blacks.

Speaking of reparations, here's a book review of David Horowitz's latest book on the issue.

Posted 8:27 AM by Peter Fallow
RACIAL PROFILING DEBATE ROLLS ON: You take it easy on blogging for a couple of days and you miss some good stuff. Remember that Heather MacDonald piece celebrating the demise of the racial profiling myth? Some readers may recall that the Opinion Journal offered a rebuttal. MacDonald has now rebutted the rebuttal. Media Minder says check it out.

Posted 8:10 AM by Peter Fallow
IT'S EASY BEING GREENE: Bob Greene has a nice column today on the nature of news. Here's the part I like:

The good news is that the news-is-old theories are dead wrong -- the good news is that there is nothing fresher, nothing more vibrant, nothing that overrides everything else in the world more than news does. Yes, there have been times when the tellers of the tales have attempted to make themselves more important than the tales themselves; yes, there have been times when we who report the news have not exactly covered ourselves with dignity and decorum. But that's us -- that's our problem to repair. The news itself -- in each of its many forms, written or spoken -- is, by definition, brand-new, every day. It can't be preempted -- it's preemptive. It can't be made obsolete -- it's the antithesis of obsolete. It is the story of our world, our country, our town, our block, and the details of it today didn't exist when the sun went down last night, and the details of what it will be tomorrow don't exist even now. The news grow old? The sun will go black before the news becomes old.

Posted 8:03 AM by Peter Fallow
CONSERVATIVE MEDIA BIAS? The "Columbia Journalism Review" has posted its entertaining "Darts & Laurels" section. The lead items, however, aren't that funny. They're about the allegedly fawning coverage President Bush has received from the press.

CJR is not amused.

First, the "Washington Post" gets ripped for putting Bush's response to Tom Daschle's criticism of his economic polices on Page 1 while shoving Daschle's speech inside. I don't know if this is a sign of bias or not. It could have more to do with timing. It's possible that Daschle's criticism was all over the TV in the early part of the day and Bush's response come later in the day, thus making it more timely for a morning newspaper. But you'd never know from this item. CJR just seems pissed that the Post didn't automatically assume the role of media attack dog. Then there's this item:

The Associated Press, in a dispatch about a White House meeting between Bush and Republican and Democratic congressional leaders, accorded powers to Bush that were downright kingly: he had “summoned” the leaders, ran the AP report, and given them “marching orders.” As every middle-school student knows, the separation of powers, a constitutional principle that has served democracy well for lo these two hundred years, allows the executive branch to exercise no such authority over the legislative branch.

Now this is just silly. You could easily argue that, in a democracy such as ours with clear separation of powers, painting President Bush's meeting with congressional leaders in "kingly" terms is a liberal attempt to subtly smear Bush. And tired as the phrase "marching orders" may be, it has entered common usage as meaning a strongly worded command, request or charge, not actual orders that carry any legal weight.

The rest of "Darts & Laurels" this time around is uniformly excellent. If you ever want to learn about the follies of journalism as it is practiced in smaller media markets, this is an invaluable resource.

Posted 7:39 AM by Peter Fallow
DIVERSITY UBER ALLES: Thanks to Susanna Cornett for pointing this piece out to me yesterday when I was too busy to do much blogging. Stanley Kurtz gives an overview on three recent diversity-related news stories, and a slim reason for hope:

The diversity wars drag on, and it isn’t easy to tell who’s winning. Three incidents in recent days drive home the embarrassingly flimsy nature of the diversity movement’s pronouncements — and the maddening success the movement has nonetheless enjoyed in foisting its bogus claims on the American public. Yet all is not lost. The last two weeks saw flare-ups in long-running battles over alleged racial profiling by police, alleged discrimination against female professors, and the alleged stifling of the “female voice” by an oppressive and patriarchal Western culture. The parallels between these three cases are striking. In each instance, the same sort of blatantly unscientific methods have been used to validate claims of discrimination, and in each case, a similar (and not entirely discouraging) pattern of response has emerged.

It's my sincere hope that "diversity fatigue" is spreading among Americans of all persuasions. Sure, Sept. 11 threw the irrelevance of the diversity industry into stark relief, but there's some simple facts that far too many people overlook. The great Albert Murray said it best when he pointed out that the so-called whitebread "mainstream" of American society is already one of the most diverse cultures the world has ever produced. It's difficult to imagine a society as open to "foreign" influences as this one. Here's more of what Murray had to say back in 1970 in "The Omni-Americans":

"..in spite of their common destiny and deeper interests, the people of the United States are being misled by misinformation to insist on exaggerating their ethnic differences. The problem is not the existence of ethnic differences, as is so often assumed, but the intrusion of such differences into areas where the do not belong. Ethnic differences are the very essence of cultural diversity and national creativity."

Amen to that.

Posted 7:15 AM by Peter Fallow
LOST IN 'BLOGISTAN': Alex Beam of the "Boston Globe" wanders into the world of blogs, takes a look around and decides it's not fit for the likes of a serious journalist such as himself. Unfortunately for Beam, he dissed James Lileks. Bad idea.

The main problem I have with this piece is the writer's lack of knowledge of his subject. Noting blogger Bjorn Staerk's "bizarre recommitment to left-wing raving," he fails to realize that it was an April Fools' Day joke. And he fails to acknowledge that there's already a blog called Blogistan. (Pardon me while I wander into the "echo chamber of self-regard," but thanks for the perma-link, Justin. I don't think you're "outre," no matter what Beam says. In fact, one of the reasons I like you is because you and other bloggers would never use the word "outre.")

One of Beam's bravest lines is the very last. After sarcastically naming a couple of bloggers who expressed some jumping-on-the-bandwagon sentiments, he writes this:

Maybe you will even be mocked in a medium that people actually read.

Is Beam referrring to the rapidly declining print medium, which fewer people are actually reading, or the Web? Echoing a recent piece in the "Weekly Standard," It seems to me that blogs are going to help newspapers, including ones that publish tripe such as this. The circulation of this link among the blogosphere will increase Beam's Web readership, undeserved as it is.

I found this link over at Romenesko, but I see that Glenn "Tha Bloggfatha" Reynolds saw it, too. I would say go check it out, but I'm sure that you already have. After all, Beam nailed us on this, too:

Another cloying attribute of bloggers is their intense admiration for other bloggers.

And a cloying attribute of snide, elitist opinion columnists is their casual dismissal of any grass-roots challenge to their perceived authority. Bloggers may be unaware of a lot of things, but they've been all over that.

Posted 6:35 AM by Peter Fallow
WAY TO GO, TERPS: Congratulations to Maryland for winning the national college basketball championship last night. They were deserving winners. If I'm not mistaken, Maryland now is one of a handful of schools to have won national championships in both football and basketball (the Terps were national football champs in 1953). The only ones that come immediately to mind are UCLA, Michigan State, Ohio State and Michigan. (I'm not counting those football championships from the 1920s and 1930s.) Pretty good company.

Posted 6:49 AM by Peter Fallow
THOSE DAMN FROGS: The French are at it again. Some "respected left-wing think tank" is pushing the bizarre theory that the Sept. 11 attack on the Pentagon was a hoax:

Thierry Meyssan's book ''The Frightening Fraud'' has topped best-seller lists. Meyssan, president of Reseau Voltaire, a respected left-wing think tank, theorizes that American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, killing 189, did not exist and that the crash was staged by the government. ''I believe the American government is lying... No plane crashed into the Pentagon,'' he told France 2 television. Meyssan did not provide an alternative theory for what may have damaged the Pentagon.

I guess the hundreds of people stuck on that freeway that runs beside the Pentagon hallucinated the whole thing.

To their credit, the mainstream French media is scoffing at this crap. But the fact that the books is flying off the shelves is a little disturbing.

Posted 8:55 AM by Peter Fallow
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 were 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 old 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.

Posted 9:06 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 2:18 PM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 2:04 PM by Peter Fallow
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?

Posted 10:10 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 7:44 AM by Peter Fallow
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......

Posted 7:36 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 3:56 PM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 7:07 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 6:43 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 6:27 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 6:11 AM by Peter Fallow
'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.

Posted 9:18 AM by Peter Fallow
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?

Posted 8:36 AM by Peter Fallow
'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.

Posted 8:30 AM by Peter Fallow
'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." Are you kidding me? 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 whole 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.

Posted 9:12 AM by Peter Fallow
REPARATIONS WATCH: Here it goes. The first salvo in the slavery reparations fiasco has been fired. The initial targets are Aetna, CSX and FleetBoston. This story received a big push via some slanted, unquestioning coverage in "USA Today" last month. At least the latest story dryly points out what a shameless shakedown this whole "movement" is:

Separately, Paellmann's lawyers are sending letters to 13 other companies, as well as trade groups representing the tobacco and shipping industries. The letters warn the companies they will be sued unless they fund a historical commission examining slavery and give money to an "interim humanitarian fund" to improve health, education and child development among blacks.

One question: What's the skim on an "interim humanitarian fund" for "lawyers, historians, activists and state and local governments"?

Posted 7:56 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 7:17 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 6:53 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 9:20 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 9:12 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 8:30 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 7:55 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 6:39 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 10:23 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 10:20 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 10:11 AM by Peter Fallow
THIS IS PRETTY COOL: I am now posting from a public library 400 miles from home base. The Internet rules!

Posted 7:24 AM by Peter Fallow
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!

Posted 7:23 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 7:19 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 6:50 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 6:26 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 9:51 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 9:33 AM by Peter Fallow
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."

# # #

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."

# # #

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

# # #

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

# # #

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.

# # #

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.

# # #

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

Posted 8:56 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 7:32 AM by Peter Fallow
'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.)

Posted 9:34 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 9:28 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 8:25 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 7:54 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 7:05 AM by Peter Fallow
'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.

Posted 6:58 AM by Peter Fallow
TOM'S NEW LOOK: Fellow copy editor Tom Mangan has renovated his site, and it's looking good. Check it out.

Posted 6:53 AM by Peter Fallow
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."

Posted 6:38 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 7:15 PM by Peter Fallow
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.)

Posted 7:07 PM by Peter Fallow
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.''

Posted 6:59 PM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 9:08 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 8:54 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 8:29 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 8:11 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 7:59 AM by Peter Fallow
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.

Posted 3:06 PM by Peter Fallow
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?