HOWLER ATTACKS 'COLORING': For the past three days, the estimable Daily Howler has been attempting to punch holes in William McGowan's excellent book, "Coloring The News." He hasn't been very successful. Let's take a look, shall we?

DAY ONE: The Howler highlights one of the first case studies in McGowan's book. It was a nasty incident at an Afrocentric, black-separatist charter school in Washington, D.C., where a white reporter from the "Washington Times" was assaulted by Mary Anigbo, principal of the Marcus Garvey School. McGowan criticizes the "Washington Post" for not giving the incident the kind of bare-knuckles coverage that would have surely been generated had a black reporter been assaulted by racist whites at, say, the Bull Connor School in, say, Roanoke, Va. Here's the Howler's summation of McGowan's thesis:

"The media’s minority critics…frequently assert that the press conspires to portray African-Americans in a negative light,” he says. But “the Washington Post’s coverage of the Marcus Garvey incident…suggests that the double standard runs much more often in the opposite direction.” According to McGowan, the Post’s treatment of the Garvey incident was typical of a kind of politically correct journalism which “represents a compromise of basic journalistic standards and practices. More importantly,” McGowan continues, “it represents a betrayal of the Civil Rights Movement and its core integrationist ethos, which many journalists of that day took considerable risks to advance.”

The Howler counters that, indeed, the Post did point out the absurdity of Anigbo's account. His proof? One rather mealy-mouthed editorial. Here's the excerpt he chose. I've highlighted in bold the pertinent passages:

Washington Times reporter Susan Ferrechio, who is white, said that when she went to Garvey to research an article on charter schools, [principal Mary] Anigbo, joined by some of her staff and students (all of whom are black), attacked her, took her notes, and cursed and referred to her race repeatedly as they physically removed her from the school building. Mrs. Anigbo and staff also reportedly engaged in a pushing contest with police officers who returned to the school with Ms. Ferrechio and a Washington Times photographer to retrieve her notes. Mrs. Anigbo denies either initiating the scuffle or seizing the journalist’s notes, and blames the whole thing on the reporter. Sorting out the truth about this outrageous incident shouldn’t be hard to do. It must be done quickly.

Note the language that is used here. The editorialist chose the passive "referred to her race repeatedly" instead of the stronger (and more accurate) "uttered racial epithets," which is exactly what the staff and students did. And the last bit about "sorting out the truth"? Come on. If anything, it sounds like the writer (of an opinion column, no less) is doing his or her damnedest to restrain themselves from anything that someone in a majority-black city might deem controversial. (Compare it to the much more hard-hitting editorial from the other day on the death of white supremacist William Pierce.) Again, do you really think there would be this kind of lame-ass editorial in the Post if the races of the participants had been reversed? Racism is certainly among the worst elements of our society. It should be purged in all its precincts, and the press has a responsibility to be just as hard on black racists as it is on those who are white. Unfortunately, as we shall see, it is often far too easy on them.

DAY TWO: The next day, the Howler takes McGowan to task for this:

In fact, in the first week after the confrontation at the school…the Post gave prominent space to black political activists like former NAACP president Benjamin Chavis and Nation of Islam activist Malik Shabazz who rallied to her side, blaming the white media and threatening racial violence.

And the Howler's response? He points out that the "political activists" were given "prominent space" just once. But the Howler's excerpt indicates that it was a Page 1 story. Sounds pretty "prominent" to me. And note another mealy-mouthed description of the activists from reporter Hamil Harris:

(second graf of story) Several activists with a history of employing racially charged rhetoric—including the Rev. Willie F. Wilson, pastor of Union Temple Baptist Church, and Malik Zulu Shabazz, head of a Nation of Islam offshoot called Unity Nation—appeared yesterday with principal Mary A.T. Anigbo at the Marcus Garvey Charter School. They defended Anigbo’s role in altercations at the school Tuesday—one with a reporter from the Washington Times and another with several D.C. police officers who accompanied the reporter back to the school.

(12th graf of story) Wilson and Shabazz on several occasions have drawn fire for statements or actions that critics called racist. Several years ago Wilson led a boycott of an Asian merchant who operated a store in predominantly black Southeast Washington, and Shabazz has appeared at several rallies during which antisemitic statements were made. Wilson’s church is large and growing, but neither Wilson nor Shabazz has drawn widespread support in recent political organizing efforts.

The Howler claims "this report was striking for the overt way it challenged the racial good faith of Anigbo’s supporters." What's striking about it is the half-assed way it does so. "A history of employing racially charged rhetoric"? "Statements or actions that critics called racist"? That's pretty weak, considering some of the outrageous statements these folks have made over the years.

Here's a quote from Rev. Wilson from an overwhelmingly glowing story on Page 1 of the July 7, 1996, "Washington Post." (It was also written by Hamil Harris.) This passage is found approximately halfway into the story, and again, note the lame way it kinda sorta touches on the views of Wilson, a Christian minister who is a supporter of Louis Farrakhan:

The result has its share of critics -- mainly members of Anacostia's older establishment -- who are put off by Wilson's melange of religion and pop culture and wonder what it really has meant for the beleaguered community. Others are uncomfortable with Wilson's racial consciousness, believing he too often tags color to religion. The criticism comes in murmurs from people -- both black and white -- unwilling to publicly take to task such a popular clergyman... "If you say Jesus has blond hair, blue eyes and rosy cheeks, then your mind concludes that Jesus is white, his Father is white," Wilson boomed from the pulpit recently. "And if God is great, then white people are great. The image of Jesus is for white supremacy, and it makes black people hate themselves."

Declaring depictions of Jesus as white to be endorsement of white supremacy is merely an expression of "racial consciousness" and tagging "color to religion"? Would some white racist from the Church of the Creator get a similar break in the pages of the Post? Of course not. So why the double standard?

Even more outrageously, the Post lumps certified nutbag Malik Zulu Shabazz in with "activists with a history of employing racially charged rhetoric." Here's some examples of Mr. Shabazz's "rhetoric" (note that these are words he actually uttered, and many pre-date the blow-up over the Garvey school), and here's Shabazz featured in the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Intelligence Report" for his possible role in the bombing of that Korean-owned store in D.C. The SPLC, the leading anti-hate watchdog group in the country, lumps Shabazz and his ilk in with the KKK. Why does the "Washington Post" simply refer to him as an "activist"? These are the kinds of double standards that McGowan attacks over and over again in his book.

As for Ben Chavis (sorry, Ben Chavis Muhammad), the story the Howler cites so approvingly apparently fails to mention the former NAACP chief's highly publicized fall from grace when he looted the civil rights organization's funds to settle a sexual harassment suit. As Stanley Crouch noted in his excellent "The All-American Skin Game," Chavis blamed "right-wing Jews" for his demise and embraced Farrakhan's Nation of Islam cult. Don't the readers of the Post deserve to know this? As McGowan writes on page 26 of his award-winning, roundly praised but (according to the Howler) "absurdly misleading," "skewed" and "puzzling" book:

The sins of omission were as bad as those of commission, and brought to mind Orwell's famous observation that propaganda is as much a matter of what is left out, as of what is actually said.

DAY THREE: The Howler actually makes a good point here. It seems McGowan may have misread an editorial by Colbert King. Here's McGowan:

The most disturbing aspect of the Post’s coverage, though, was the response of the paper’s prominent black columnists. Colbert King, a member of the editorial board who writes a regular column under his own byline, dismissed the outrage of public officials who had condemned the incident and remained silent on the incendiary remarks of activists who had come to Anigbo’s defense.

And here's the Howler's response:

He did? King wrote about the incident on December 14, 1996. “As the night must follow the day and rhythm tracks the blues,” he wrote, “what’s a racial confrontation in this town without a strong dose of racial rhetoric? And not to disappoint, by Day Four of the altercation, a posse had rallied and, with cameras rolling, they commenced to lay it on thick.” That passage was, for all who read, King’s description of Anigbo’s supporters. Nor did King bow down to Anigbo. “Meanwhile, we keep learning, through various news accounts, just enough about principal Anigbo, her staff and our precious school board’s role in approving the Marcus Garvey charter, to reinforce all of the negative stereotypes about this city,” King wrote. And did King dismiss what officials had said? He wrote, “the mayor spoke for me when he said of Anigbo et al., ‘adults have a responsibility to serve as role models…We cannot tolerate this kind of violent behavior.’” For the record, the mayor, in speaking of “Anigbo et al.,” had not been speaking about Ferrechio, the reporter who had been assaulted (as a jury later found).

Reading King's column (unavailable online), I can easily see how the Howler reached his conclusion. But King's column seems to be a rather half-assed response to a more strident (and accurate) column from Richard Cohen on Dec. 10 entitled "Curriculum of Hate." (Also unavailable online.) In it, Cohen does some of the reporting about the true nature of the Marcus Garvey School and the actual views held by Malik Zulu Shabazz and Rev. Wilson that somehow failed to make the editorial cut over on the news side. Unfortunately, Cohen's column also failed to rate a mention in McGowan's book, as did the Donna Britt column the Howler points out. Does this oversight completely damage McGowan's credibility, as the Howler suggests? Hardly. The incident he's picked apart for three days covers four pages in a heavily footnoted 250-page book.

But the Howler missed the most important angle of the whole brouhaha. He only gives passing mention to Courtland Milloy's angry column of Dec. 18, 1996, noting that it was "controversial." Yet here's what McGowan wrote about Milloy's column, and it gets to the crux of his thesis about double standards in the media:

Ignoring the violence against Susan Ferrechio and the questions raised about public accountability, Milloy wrote: "The eagerness with which whites have seized on this case is astounding. Their outrage at the perceived slight against a white woman at the hands of a black is matched only by the sheer absence of any concern when whites do worse to blacks ... It's as if whites were engaged in a desperate bid to absolve themselves of racism by going to any length to prove that blacks are racist, too." He turned Ferrechio into a symbol of white arrogance, describing her as a white "Missy" tossing her hair into Mary Anigbo's face. Milloy closed his tirade by writing that if in fact Anigbo did tell Ferrechio to get her " 'white ass out of here,' then I think I know how she feels."

Many in the Post's newsroom, angered by the column's crude tone and racist language, thought Milloy had crossed a line. Had a white columnist written anything so racially blunt, those Post staffers held, he or she would have been fired, or at least severely chastised. But the Post's editors neither issued an apology nor disciplined Milloy. The only response to the column was a following piece by Geneva Overholser, the paper's ombudsmen representing reader's interests, which was a study in racial double standards. Overholser's column noted the furor Milloy's column had triggered, but somehow also managed to hold it up as a valuable contribution to "diversity." Quoting a white reader who was outraged, she took pains to note that black readers were elated at the presence of a black columnist who "can tell folks what they wouldn't otherwise hear."

Emphasis mine. Yes, some black editorial writers at the Post weakly declared that Anigbo should be punished for her outrageous actions. All well and good. But the fact that Milloy was allowed to write a racist screed that the paper defended as an expression of "diversity" is outrageous. It's not the net balance of editorial opinion; it's the blatant double standard regarding Milloy's over-the-top piece that is at the heart of McGowan's argument. Compare Milloy's kid-glove treatment to what happened to Paul Teetor, a reporter who lost his job for basically reporting the truth about a meeting in the black community of Burlington, Vt., that barred whites. (Teetor is featured later in McGowan's book.) I'm sorry the Howler failed to note that, just like he failed to note that the book has been positively reviewed by the same "Washington Post" he's so eager to defend as blameless in far too often foisting wrong-headed "diversity" on its readers.

'TIMES' DISCREDITS IRAQ ATTACK: Stephen Hayes of the "Weekly Standard" attacks the "New York Times" for a recent article suggesting that a U.S. attack on Iraq would wreck the economy.

This latest effort, by Times writers Patrick Tyler and Richard Stevenson, is striking both for what it includes and what it omits. The authors focus almost exclusively on what they suggest would be the damaging consequences of war. (For that reason, the use of the soft verb "affect" in the lede is an interesting--and misleading--choice.) Any serious look at the economic impact of war would include two key issues the authors choose to ignore: First, a discussion of the disastrous economic consequences of another, larger terrorist attack--the possible result of inaction with regards to Iraq. (A GAO report out yesterday suggests that New York City and New York state each lost $1.6 billion in tax revenues alone in 2002.) Second, what about the economic boon presented by a liberalized Iraq? The Times, however, appears less interested in a thoughtful discussion about the economic impact of war, and more interested in laying out obstacles to military intervention.

WAR, RUMORS OF WAR: Jack Shafer has a story on leaked Iraq invasion plans. They don't concern him too much, and with good reason:

To interpret what the disclosed plans really mean, one must understand that the Pentagon is a plan-happy enterprise. If it was in the bridal business instead of the war business, the Pentagon's strategizers would have plans to cover every contingency from shotgun weddings to stadium-marriage orgies of the sort staged by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Plans to invade Mexico, drop the bomb on European allies, and perhaps even fight Martian invaders currently gather dust on Pentagon shelves. The existence of a plan is not a sure predictor that it will be used. And, as one Washington reporter explains it, not all "plans" are created equal. Some of the plans being bandied about might be old war games pulled down for review or "concept of operations"—essentially riffs on a military theme that aren't excruciatingly detailed, as a real war plan is.

'DREAD' REVIEWS: Andrew Stuttaford has a less-than-enthusiastic review of Martin Amis' "Koba The Dread." And keep your eyes peeled for the September online edition of "The Atlantic Monthly." Christopher Hitchens, to whom Amis directs his anti-Stalin book, has a generally positive review of "Dread." (Our copy of "The Atlantic" arrived in the mail yesterday.)

JOURNALISM SCHOOL BLUES: Tunku Varadarajan has a great, snarky piece on the debate over the future of the journalism school at Columbia University. He nails the crux of the problem:

If a virus were to strike our universities tonight, wiping out--by tomorrow--all schools of medicine, would the sudden disappearance of med-school graduates throw America's hospitals into crisis? Of course, and you'd better believe it. But if, instead, the virus were to kill off all our schools of journalism, would America's newspapers seize up? Of course not--in fact, you'd probably find distinguished observers who'd be prepared to celebrate the J-schools' demise.

So true. J-school is fairly irrelevant to learning how to do newspaper work. (Though it will get your foot in the door a little higher up the food chain.) I didn't go to J-school, and I'm proud of that. It means I got here through my own hard work, and not because one of my professors is a former colleague of someone who might hire me. (For the record, I went to a small college you've probably never heard of unless you follow I-AA football.)

COMING HOME: Staffers for the "Wall Street Journal" are beginning to return to their old offices, which were heavily damaged in the World Trade Center attacks. Welcome back, folks.

TV TROUBLE: This may seem like an incredibly mundane story, but it's serious stuff to folks who work at newspapers. There's so many cable channels now that most papers have trouble squeezing them into the weekly TV book. I used to occasionally handle the TV book at my last job, and boy, did people call up to complain about the listings. The Journal story reports that 45 percent of Americans still depend on the TV listings in newspapers to decide what to watch, but if you've got cable, you've more than likely got the Preview Channel. I probably watch that channel more than any other.

I predict that the TV book will die out in a few years because of the cost of newsprint. And good riddance.

BUSH BASHING: Howard Kurtz has a piece today on the media's relentless search for something, anything with which to tar President Bush's administration:

"There are probably a fair number of people in the press who don't think he deserves to be that high," says Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol. "There's a real eagerness to find any straw -- or invent a couple of straws in the wind -- to claim it's all falling apart for him." Newsweek's cover -- "Like Father, Like Son?" -- questioned whether the younger Bush would also be a war hero and domestic flop. " 'Crime in the suites' is finally stripping some of the Teflon off this president," the magazine says.

There's probably some truth to that. (God knows my colleagues are liberals; there was blatant cheering and booing in the newsroom on Election Night 2000 as the results kept shifting from Bush to Gore, and you get one stab at guessing who they were cheering for.) But we can't overlook the media's thirst for any kind of scandal.

One thing that leaped out at me was the ideological fairness of this article. Beside Kristol, "Nation" executive editor Katrina vanden Heuvel is quoted, as is Jonathan Alter, the co-author of the "Newsweek" cover story in question. If only more "news" stories could be that balanced. And it has a great headline: "Egg on his Teflon?/For Bush, an increasingly sticky situation." (They should have gotten the word "media" in there somewhere, but space is often a problem on news pages, and few newspaper Web sites bother to change heads in the transition to the Net.)

POWERS' POINT: William Powers has another excellent piece today in "National Journal." (Somebody needs to hire this guy. I know "National Journal" is a prestigious publication, but this guy should be reaching a wider audience.) It's about how the press is enjoying the corporate scandals about as much as Garth Elgar enjoyed climbing the rope in gym class:

There's a gigantic culture gap between the news tribe and corporate America, one that comes down to different views of money. Basically, we subscribe to the biblical view that money is the root of all evil, and our job is to expose that evil through news stories about bad companies such as Enron and WorldCom. ...When Alan Greenspan said last week that "an infectious greed seemed to grip much of our business community," he touched the media in a very special place, and days later we were still shuddering with delight. The phrase was used in hundreds of articles and broadcasts. National Public Radio invited an ethicist to comment on the infection. "Some attribute the recent corporate scandals to a widespread culture of greed, and others say it's just the misbehavior of a few bad apples," said the host. "What do you think?" Citing Greenspan, the ethicist said we're not just talking about a few scoundrels here; corporate greed is a "more systemic" problem.

JOURNALISM SCHOOL FOR RIGHTIES: Romenesko has a link today to a story about the National Journalism Center.

The idea, organization leaders say, is not to indoctrinate anyone, but to foster fairer and more balanced reporting. After all, they note, they don't want to create a counter bias to the one they argue already exists. "The guiding philosophical light with these people is not to bring in a conservative world view; it is to bring in a broader perspective to the issues. Which is why there are some people who have gone through some of these programs who are not at all conservative," says Mr. Bozell.

CONSERVATIVE 'DISMAY': I've got to run right now, but check out Jonathan V. Last's piece in the "Weekly Standard" on a "blockbuster" of a story: religious conservatives "criticizing" John Ashcroft. Imagine that. Those on the right don't all march in ideological lock-step. Put it on the front page of the "New York Times"!

'NATION' TWEAKS CONSPIRACY-THEORY BOOK: Here's an interesting read from the "Village Voice" on the internal debate at "The Nation" about "Forbidden Truth," a book that asserts that "secret diplomacy between the Bush administration and the Taliban" may have led to the Sept. 11 attacks. "The Nation," which published the book, did some editing:

As proof, authors Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié point to a July 2001 meeting of a UN initiative known as Six Plus Two, formed to discuss Afghanistan's future and to offer incentives for building a Central Asian oil pipeline. The group that met in July included two former U.S. ambassadors, ostensibly chosen to float ideas that could not be traced to the U.S. government. At the meeting, according to one participant, one of the Americans informed the group, "Either you accept our offer of a carpet of gold, or we bury you under a carpet of bombs." And when news of this unusual military threat reached bin Laden, the authors imply, he launched a preemptive strike on the U.S.

With an outrageous premise like that, it's no wonder that chapter six of Forbidden Truth has been touted as the smoking gun that proves Bush's indirect responsibility for 9-11—or that Nation Books, the publishing arm of The Nation, has just published the book in English. What's really interesting is that after The Nation's hard-nosed Washington editor, David Corn, denounced the authors as conspiracy theorists, Nation Books neatly excised the smoking-gun allegations from the text.

The smoking-gun claim first appeared in the foreword of the book's original edition, in which the authors dubbed the 9-11 attacks "a foreseeable" and "tragic" "outcome" of the UN initiative. But the foreword in the Nation Books edition merely states that the 9-11 attacks were "possibly the outcome" of the UN initiative, and soberly calls for "further investigation." A similar text massage was performed at the end of chapter six.

Here's an exchange between Corn and his detractors that the Instapundit highlighted the other day, and here's a story from "The American Prospect" that comprehensively debunks the "Afghanistan attack was about oil" thesis.

ETHICAL PET PEEVES: Here are a couple of good reads from Poynter about journalistic ethics. Some are funny, some are serious. Here's one that echoes my experiences at my last newspaper job:

"I'm never crazy about the disingenuous practice of some media outlets covering an 'uproar' or 'furor' that they have themselves created. 'There has been a lot of hype and controversy about such-and-such' - when the source of the hype is nobody but the media." (Monica Moses, Poynter visual journalism faculty.)

Amen to that.

PRESS CHICANERY: Here's a startling story:

The New York Times waited six months after gathering all the key information before publishing a report this week on allegations that Iran masterminded the 1994 bombing of the Jewish communal center in Buenos Aires, according to sources in Argentina who were interviewed by the Times for its report. The front-page report, which generated headlines around the world, also alleged that former Argentinean president Carlos Menem had negotiated a $10 million payoff to divert the investigation away from Iran. The allegations were based largely on a transcript of secret testimony given by an Iranian defector, a former senior Iranian intelligence officer known as Abdolghassem Mesbahi. But two sources in Argentina who were interviewed by the Times that the newspaper of record received the transcript at the beginning of 2002. In addition, the Times completed most of its supporting interviews within a few weeks after that, according to most of those named in the story. Observers noted, moreover, that all the information in the Times article had been published elsewhere months earlier, both in Argentine newspapers and in a series of investigative articles in the Forward. Such assertions are sure to fuel already rampant speculation in Argentina that the Times had timed publication of its version in order to maximize political damage to Menem, who announced last week that he was running for president again. Elections are scheduled for next March.

Check it out.

RUBIN NOT SCANDAL-WORTHY: Tim Noah has an excellent piece in Slate today. He wonders why Robert Rubin is getting a free pass in the current corporate scandals. But he refuses to call it "liberal media bias," though he does suggest a different kind of media bias:

Chatterbox expects that, in the face of this pressure, financial reporters will make at least passing reference to Rubin in future stories. It's pretty appalling, though, that they've protected him so blatantly thus far. Chatterbox chalks it up not to liberal media bias, but rather to Rubin's membership in the bipartisan Society of Media Darlings, whose other members include James Baker and John McCain.

LIBEL OR SATIRE: Here's an interesting story. Courts in Texas have cleared the way for a libel case to proceed against the "Dallas Observer," an alternative weekly, because it printed a satirical story but failed to label it as such.

The Observer filed two motions to have the case thrown out before trial. Conceding that the story was fiction, it argued that, just as with the infamous Campari advertising parody that lampooned the Rev. Jerry Falwell in Hustler magazine, the average reader would never have thought that the article stated facts about the plaintiffs. Obviously, a reasonable person would understand that it was satire. Not in Texas, apparently. In May of this year, the Second District Court of Appeals in Fort Worth unanimously affirmed the trial court's decision to allow a jury to hear the case. Finding that parody or satire about a public official is not absolutely protected by the First Amendment if it can be taken as fact, Judge Anne Gardner's opinion chided the Observer for running Farley's article without a label to indicate that it was satire, as Hustler magazine had done with the Falwell ad parody. She wrote that the piece appeared in a news column, included truthful details from the Beamon case and was accompanied by Farley's reporting credentials. Those factors misled "even intelligent, well-read people," Gardner wrote. And if the Observer knew or suspected that the article would be taken seriously, then it would have published with actual malice and could be held liable for damages.

Hmm. I'm no legal expert, but reading the story in question, it seems to me that there's really no obvious tip-off that it's satire until six graphs from the end, when the "spokesperson" from the ACLU talks about singing "Marijuana, marijuana, LSD" when she was six years old. I think the libel suit is ridiculous (Texas judges should grow thicker skins, especially when it comes to small-circulation weeklies) but the "Observer" could have completely avoided this mess by putting a small disclaimer at the end of the story. Or they could have made it funnier. Here's some questions that aren't answered by the AJR article: Does the "Observer" regularly publish satirical pieces in the same space that this story appears? Was the story adjacent to other satirical or humorous articles? I guess a jury will have to sort it all out.

SICK MAN: Chris Matthews has malaria. How in the hell did that happen?

Doctors aren't sure when he picked it up, but suspect it was on one of his trips in recent years to Africa, Vietnam or the Middle East. Malaria can incubate for four years.

Wow. I never knew malaria could lay dormant for that long. Freaky.

MORE ON 'COLORING': Tapped is jumping on the anti-"Coloring The News" bandwagon. They call the award-winning book "atrociously bad" and point out what they call an "excellent review" by Seth Mnookin in the "Washington Monthly." However, McGowan issued a stinging rebuttal to Mnookin's review -- virtually the only negative review of the book I've found -- in which he questions Mnookin's ability to check even basic facts:

You gave Mnookin’s review the headline, “Yellow Journalism.” In terms of Mnookin’s dubious sense of honesty and accuracy, you got at least one thing right.

Just go read the whole thing.

LOOSE LIPS: James Robbins has an excellent piece in today's "National Review" on leaked military secrets and the press. Give it a read.

NEW BLOGS, AND WHY I'M NO LONGER A LIBERAL: I'm adding the Politburo and David Horowitz's blog to the perma-links. Go check 'em out.

The Poliburo is a well-organized, wide-ranging discussion of many different issues. It's edited by Michael Moynihan. Horowitz, of course, is a writer and political commentator who has recently jumped on the blogging bandwagon. I don't always agree with David, and sometimes I think he goes too far on racial issues, but his writing is enjoyable (especially "Radical Son," "Destructive Generation" and "The Politics of Bad Faith") and his position as a former radical faintly echoes my own left-to-right conversion.

Emphasis on faintly. My youthful "radicalism," such as it was, never came close to Horowitz's lifelong involvement with leftist politics. When I was 17, I tried to write a novel about a small-scale communist revolution led by poor blacks in my dad's hometown in South Carolina (which I quickly abandoned after about 10 pages; even at that young age I was embarrassed by it) and I made inquiries into joining the American Civil Liberties Union. In college, I used to read "In These Times" and "The Nation" and "Mother Jones" regularly. I signed some no-nukes and anti-Contra petitions and got into many bitter arguments with my Republican-leaning friends. (This was the height of the Reagan era, after all.) I voted for Clinton in 1992, but I had been feeling The Doubts for a couple of years before that because of some personal experiences. By 1996, I considered myself a conservative. (This was before I discovered Horowitz's writings.) Now, I'm a full-fledged member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy.

THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE UGLY: The Darts and Laurels feature in the "Columbia Journalism Review" is online. The leading laurel: The media's debunking of the Jenin "massacre."

'COLORING' BACKLASH: Minority journalists are outraged that William McGowan's "Coloring The News" won an award from the National Press Club.

Richard Prince, a Washington Post editor and member of the National Association of Black Journalists, said the book is full of ''half-truths, spin and inaccuracies and is not worthy of an award from a journalistic organization.'' Juan Gonzalez, a New York Daily News columnist who heads the National Association of Hispanic Journalists, said, ''This insulting book is a poorly argued indictment of the need to ensure diversity in America's newsrooms, in the pages of its newspapers and magazines, and in the images on the nightly news.''

This doesn't really surprise me. In fact, I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a backlash. I've been tracking the progress of this book since it came out a few months ago, and I've found very few serious critiques of the substance of its arguments. Instead, there's been an emotional reaction from the usual suspects, who seem shocked that someone would dare question the "diversity uber alles" worldview. That only serves to confirm a central irony of McGowan's book -- members of the media, traditionally skeptical of groupthink, now willingly engage in it on a massive scale.

STUPID STUFF I'VE OVERHEARD AT WORK: OK, I can't find much I want to blog about, so I've decided to start a new series, "Stupid Stuff I've Overheard at Work." All quotes and comments are certified 100 percent accurate. Read 'em and weep:

REPORTER: "I've got to go to Louisiana next week for a story. Do I need to get malaria shots?" (She wasn't kidding, either.)

# # #

REPORTER: "All this patriotism crap scares me. It's just going to give all the rednecks an excuse to rub the flag in our faces." (Overheard on Sept. 17, my first day back at work after the terrorist attacks.)

# # #

(After a lunch date with a black reporter and his sullen girlfriend. Both are of a middle-class background.)
ME: "Your girlfriend's kind of a quiet one, huh?"
BLACK REPORTER: "No, she just has problems with white males." (Offered matter-of-factly, with no sense that such a position might be a little troubling to the white male he just dined with.)
ME: "Oh ... Any reason? I mean, I don't mean to pry, but did something bad happen to her personally in junior high or something?"
BLACK REPORTER: "No. She was just a history major in college, so she learned a lot about how racist this society is." (Delivered in same, matter-of-fact monotone.)
ME: "Oh."
(Long, nervous silence as I ponder whether to raise some objections, and whether raising said objections would only serve to label me as a racist in a workplace where said black reporter was one of our black publisher's pets.)
ME: "Uh, OK. I'll see you later."

More updates will be posted as they come back to me.

WHEN CELEBRITIES ATTACK: This is one of those snarky stories that's just fun to read. A group of Chicago-area journalists recently interviewed Harrison Ford, who acted like he really didn't want to be there.

Ironically, we are facing Ford's churlishness because we're helping him publicize his upcoming movie. Here's how the Hollywood publicity machine works: A star makes a movie. Then he or she embarks on a tour to promote it, which means talking to the press. This is why people like Ford and Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt appear on "The Late Show with David Letterman" and "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno." Stars don't appear on these shows for fun; they go because they want people to see their upcoming films. After all, the bigger the audience, the bigger the paycheck. And so, essentially, we are helping Ford get richer while he slowly reduces us to the size of tsetse flies.

(Link via Romenesko.)

MARXISTS AND ISLAMISTS, LIVING TOGETHER: In an excellent column, Jonathan Rauch points out similarities between Marxism, the most destructive political and social force of the 20th century, and Islamism, potentially the most destructive political and social force of the 21st century. Check this out:

Marxism and Islamism are utopian, promising a future in which harmony, equity, and altruism will replace conflict, unfairness, and corruption. Both embrace historicism, the doctrine that ineluctable historical laws -- economic in one case, divine in the other -- make eventual triumph inevitable. Each is fundamentally anti-nationalist, hostile to the very notion of the nation-state; today's states and borders are illegitimate artifacts of an oppressive order, ultimately to be replaced by Communism or a Caliphate. Accordingly, both movements conceive of themselves as inherently internationalist, operating across borders as readily as within them. Though these movements regard seizing and using state power as essential, they do not want control of any particular government; they want control of the world.

And this:

For ultimately, both have as their greatest asset -- and perhaps their deepest similarity -- a genius for disguising a brutal and self-serving political agenda as a quasi-religious mission of world salvation. Both claim not only to solve all political and social problems, but to answer all questions worth asking. Both thus inspire fanatical devotion worldwide. Each movement's local varieties are always idiosyncratic, but everywhere the followers recognize a commonality of interest. That shared interest is to tie down and harass the United States, to destabilize pro-American regimes, to foment class or religious conflict, and to weaken the capitalist West.

Just go read the whole thing.

MORE CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The "Boston Globe" reports on journalists who have donated money to Democrat Robert Reich's campaign for governor of Massachusetts. This would be a violation of the ethics agreement I have to sign every year at my paper, though I personally don't see what's all that wrong with giving money to the politician of your choice.

THE MEDIA'S STOCK-OPTION 'DILEMMA': Howard Kurtz has a useful column today on on media companies practicing the same financial shenanigans that they're getting so outraged about. The headline writer charitably calls it a "dilemma." Check it out.

ANTHRAX UPDATE: The "Weekly Standard" has found an interesting, and vastly underreported, angle on the anthrax investigation. It's a Pakistani man in New Jersey who used fraud to purchase a $100,000 "fine particulate mixer" last summer. The Pakistani man fled the country, and the expensive mixer can't be located. Check it out.

PRIOR RESTRAINT: A reporter for the "Forward," a Jewish newspaper, was intimidated into leaving a meeting at the American Muslim Council's headquarters in Washington. He was warned that it would "not be good for your health" to be here.

Could you imagine, I asked him, the outrage that would have followed if an official at a Jewish organization had kicked a reporter from an Arab paper out of an event? He apologized, saying he retracted any comment that I may have found threatening. "Sometimes people flare up," he told me, referring to the crowd. "I just wanted to protect us, the council, and you from that."

Here's the whole story.

CLINE ON THE CASE: Andrew Cline of the excellent Rhetorica.net points out a Howard Kurtz column in the "Washington Post" that makes the same point about a "Washington Post" piece that I did yesterday. It's simply ridiculous to think that a presidential speech will mystically send the stock market soaring.

THE SULZBERGER-BUSH DIRTY LAND GRAB: Slate's Jack Shafer points out similarities in two allegedly "shady" real estate deals involving President Bush and ... "New York Times" publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. Check this out:

If the Bush deal is, as (Nicholas) Kristof wrote in his conclusion, "a sordid tale of cronyism, of misuse of power, of cozy backroom money-grubbing—a more pressing threat to American business than outright criminality," then what is the Times Co. deal? Watch the Times op-ed page for the answer.

RED INK IN THE 'TIMES': Andrew Stuttaford points out a disgraceful article that appeared in the "New York Times" recently: A Q&A on the recent corporate scandals -- with a member of the Communist Party USA! That's a fair and balanced perspective. There's not much more I can add to Stuttaford's excellent piece. Just go check it out.

MORE ON THE PRESIDENT: Here's another "Washington Post" story that grabbed my attention:

BIRMINGHAM, July 15 -- For the second time in as many weeks, President Bush offered reassuring words today about the nation's economy. And for the second time, investors drove stock prices steeply down just after his address.

My God! Bush failed to utter the magic words to save our vastly complex, multi-trillion-dollar economy from catastrophe! What a buffoon! Later, the president failed to cure a country ham, noting that the ham was fine just as it was:

Today, Bush again belittled "number-crunchers" who "talk about this number here, and that number there." But then, suggesting Americans "build on the good statistics we're beginning to see," he rattled off several: 6 percent first-quarter growth, higher durable goods orders and retail sales, low inflation and interest rates, and higher productivity. "In spite of the fact that we've been in a slump for a while," he said, "this economy is coming back. . . . Our economy is fundamentally strong."

If you don't believe Bush, then maybe you'll believe this guy.

THE MEDIA & THE PRESIDENT: A story in today's "Washington Post" about President Bush and his involvement in the Harken Energy Corp. raises more questions than it answers.

When President Bush was recently questioned about Harken, he told reporters to "go look at the minutes" of the board of director's meeting. But Dana Milbank complains that White House officials then "failed" to provide the records. Check out this, and pay attention to the language used:

But Bush's aides quickly rescinded the invitation. A couple of days later, Dan Bartlett, Bush's communications director, said Bush would not ask Harken for the minutes. "He personally would not have access to them," Bartlett said. "These are company documents. I can't release something I don't have." Curiously, the about-face repeated the rationale Bush's then-spokeswoman, Karen Hughes, used in October 1994 in Bush's first gubernatorial run in Texas. "He has no way to make a company release records," Hughes told the San Antonio Express-News. So while Bush himself says, "You need to look back on the directors' minutes" to settle the matter, his aides for eight years have said they will not provide the minutes.

Questions: What's so outrageous about White House officials basically saying "Go do your own homework"? Serious reporters would do the research required to find the Harken minutes instead of waiting for a handout from the administration. So Dana Milbank has got to do a little extra work. Boo hoo hoo. After eight years of the Clinton administration obfuscating its scandals, why are we suddenly so surprised when a president is less than forthcoming with information that could be used to smear him? Sad to say, but this seems to be business as usual in Washington and not a sign of a hyper-secretive White House. It's spin control, and it's been practiced by Democrats and Republicans alike for decades.

THE MEDIA & LEAKS: A memo from Donald Rumsfeld on security leaks in the Pentagon ... has been leaked to the press. Rumsfeld's memo, attached to an unclassified CIA report, calls for Pentagon staffers to keep their mouths shut about secret attack plans. Apparently, the Iraq attack plan that was recently obtained by the "New York Times" "infuriated" Rumsfeld.

It infuriated me, too. For about a minute. Then I started thinking: What if that leak was disinformation? And what if Rumsfeld's leaked memo urging that the leaks stop is part of that disinformation campaign? Hmmm.

But seriously, this is a potential problem. Here's the excerpts from the story:

Intelligence officials were furious in September when Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) said after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that the United States had intercepted a call between two associates of Osama bin Laden suggesting their involvement. Intelligence officials said later that the release of the highly classified information caused Al Qaeda operatives to stop using telephones. According to the CIA report distributed by Rumsfeld, captured fighters have stated that Al Qaeda operatives are extremely security-conscious and have altered their practices in response to what they have learned in the press about Pentagon capabilities.

You can't really blame the media for Orrin Hatch's goof. But leaks such as the Iraq attack plan shouldn't have been reported. Where was a responsible editor to say, "Hold on, this is real national security issue. We can't run it." If the "Times" had acquired information that the D-Day invasion in World War II was going to take place on June 6, 1944, in Normandy and not Calais, would they have published it? I don't think so.

PEARL'S MURDERERS CONVICTED: The Last Page weighs in with what she considers to be a fairer sentence than hanging. I tend to agree.

PRESS FREEDOM IN ZIMBABWE: An American reporter has been found not guilty of knowingly publishing a false story about a political murder in Zimbabwe. However, he's been deported. While many elements of the left see "repression" in strongly expressed contrary opinions, there's little condemnation of Robert Mugabe's totalitarian crackdown on the media. I guess being a Third World socialist gives you a free pass to practice actual censorship.

POWERS THAT BE: Another useful column by Bill Powers of the "National Jounal." This one takes journalists to task for a failure of original thinking in reporting on the scandals of the day:

The media can't and shouldn't control the fatuities of pols who wander into our space, but we can control our own impulse to turn all news into a rerun. Is it really necessary for every media person from Maureen Dowd to Bill O'Reilly to trot out the robber barons of a hundred years ago, whenever Enron, Martha Stewart, and WorldCom are under discussion? Are the constant references to the Gilded Age (or the "second Gilded Age," as Robert Novak called it) doing anything to make this story more compelling or understandable?

To me, they're doing the opposite. To label the current global political situation "the Great Game" -- a phrase coined by Rudyard Kipling to describe a completely different world -- as The New York Times did recently in a headline is to cover it with dust and cobwebs. Aren't writers supposed to invent new ways of describing the world? Every time I see one of these creaking references, I get the same sinking feeling I have when a historian comes on TV to observe, with studied sagacity, that if you think the current scandal is wild, you don't know about Teapot Dome. It's all happened before, you see.

Just read the whole thing.

FAKING THE NEWS: A group of anonymous leftists has placed fake issues of the local newspaper in the boxes of the "Seattle Times." The fakes are titled the "Seattle Crimes." Police are unsure if a crime has actually been committed. In an e-mail exchange, the editors of the "Crimes" reveal why they released their fake paper, which focuses on racial issues:

"The mainstream media... do not cover these issues adequately." said the Crimes' editors. "If they cover them at all, they do so with a bias, one that is very often racist. And the best way to call out racist media seemed to be to go right into their turf." The Crimes went into that turf with its own bias: The editors say there is police brutality and institutional racism at the Seattle Police Department. And they think the message got across to those who read the paper. "People seem to love it! Some of us have sat on buses or in restaurants or at our jobs watching people crack up as they read it. That's pretty cool," the editors wrote. "We've also watched people start up some pretty dope conversations about racism, police brutality, and related issues. Everybody should be talking to each other about these issues."

I wonder if those "dope conversations" include this uncomfortable topic. It certainly touches on the issues the "Crimes" raises.

MORE ON THE LEFT: I must rush out and purchase the latest book by Martin Amis. It's called "Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million." Here's what the "Los Angeles Times" says about it:

Koba the Dread ("Koba" was Stalin's childhood nickname) is about what Amis calls the "chief lacuna" of the 20th century: the failure of Western intellectuals to condemn the grotesque horrors perpetrated in the USSR even as they were happening, and their reluctance to fully repudiate some of their communist sympathies since. (To put this in perspective, the horrors include the murder of some 20 million people and the misery of almost everybody else.)

And this:

...the book does a brilliant job of rubbing the left's face in the mountains of corpses that resulted from its favorite political philosophy. That it has been done more thoroughly before isn't quite the point, since those who did it, most notably Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and the historian Robert Conquest, are still sometimes seen as reactionary while a Marxist historian like Eric Hobsbawm is given an adulatory press.

ACTUAL PROOF OF SLANDER: Just when I thought Ann Coulter was being a tad overblown about liberals slandering conservatives, here comes a story that at least partially confirms her charges. (Link via Romenesko.) NPR tried to connect the Traditional Values Coalition to last fall's anthrax attacks? I mean, I can see connecting the racist Christian Identity movement to the attacks, but the Traditional Values Coalition is fairly mainstream (even though I don't agree with many of their positions). This story ought to resonate with all the lefties who bitch and moan about their views being unfairly lumped in with radicals.

On second thought, it probably won't resonate at all.

SUMMER IN THE 'CITY JOURNAL': The ever-useful "City Journal" has finally posted its summer issue, and Heather MacDonald is on the case. This story is about black police officers who don't think media charges of "racist police brutality" hold much water. And check this passage out:

The long-running race racket that has so distorted our national discourse shows no signs of letting up, but that is only because we have been listening to the wrong people. For every Al Sharpton or Eric Adams, there is at least one Carl McLaughlin or Tony Barksdale, who speak of American opportunity and fairness. There is no inherent reason why only the victimologists should be granted legitimacy as representatives of black interests, especially since so few of them are elected. Why not at least give equal time to a Wilbur Chapman, say, when he argues that the “biggest impediment to minority advancement is white guilt” and asserts that, whatever the remaining problems in American race relations, “the bottom line is: no one can stop me from getting my piece of the American dream”?

Just go read the whole issue. There's a ton of good, blog-worthy material in there.

MISSING MCGOWAN: This is interesting. The "New York Review of Books" has a review round-up of several recent books on journalism. It's written by the estimable Russell Baker. But noticeably absent is William McGowan's "Coloring the News." That's pretty ironic in light of the National Press Club award it just won (see item below). A couple of months ago, the "New York Times" said it wouldn't review McGowan's book because it is critical of the Times. (Here's a letter on that, and here's Nat Hentoff on the Times' refusal to review the book.) Draw your own conclusions.

DEBATE ABOUT THE FUTURE OF PRINT: Arnold Kling sees newspapers slowly dying out as the Internet assumes even greater dominace. Sidney Goldberg disagrees. Joe-Bob says check it out.

A POSITIVE SIGN: I was giving a quick look to this list of National Press Club award winners, and I noticed that William McGowan's "Coloring The News" won the Rowse/Press Criticism - Single Entry - Book award. That's good news. It means that the journalistic establishment is willing to seriously consider criticism of that most delicate newsroom subject - race relations. Frequent readers of this blog know I've been hyping this book for months as far more important than Bernard Goldberg's "Bias." For more on McGowan's book, check out his Web site.

'FATHER, SON AND HOLY GOAT': I saw this on TV while on vacation, and I'm glad to see someone has commented on it. If you're just tuning in, it seems a goat was born in Florida with what appears to be a white No. 3 on its side. Now, for those of you who don't follow NASCAR, No. 3 was the late Dale Earnhardt's number. (I'm not a NASCAR fan, but being a Southern boy who worked in the sports department at three newspapers in the South, I'm familiar.) Apparently, people are flocking to see this magical goat named Lil' Dale, thinking that it is some kind of beyond-the-grave message from The Intimidator. (You'd think he'd have chosen something more intimidating than a goat.)

I don't think there's any more that I can add to this.

PALESTINIAN BABY KILLERS: This will probably be blogged everywhere today, but the "New Republic" has an excellent column on that infamous picture of the suicide-bomber baby that surfaced a couple of weeks ago.

After first denying relation to the infant shahid, Redwan Abu Turki acknowledged both his grandchild and the authenticity of the photograph, even as he claimed the get-up was nothing but a joke. "The picture was taken just for the fun of it," he shrugged. After all, in the streets of Gaza and Jenin, suicide bombers are heroes. Wondered the baby's uncle, "What's all the fuss about?" Now, cultural humor is an elusive and arbitrary phenomenon. In the West, Stalinist atrocity is recalled far more blithely than Nazi horror ... Jewish culture--and Israeli culture in particular--has some spectacular black humor ... But in the Jewish case, the engine of laughter is the bleakest moment of victimhood, survival from which engenders humor as a coping mechanism. The Abu Turki family, by contrast, is having a chuckle over murdering Jews in bus shelters, supermarkets, nightclubs, and pizzerias. They laugh to celebrate murder--and the consequent death of their own child--not to overcome it.

And this:

It doesn't surprise me," Palestinian Labor Minister Ghassan Khatib enigmatically remarked about the picture. "I know exactly the mentality of the Palestinian people, and I know exactly the way they think." Khatib reveals the true horror of the photograph: its normative place in the Palestinian mind, at least as Khatib understands it. A baby set to detonate in a Jerusalem sandbox in order to establish a fundamentalist nightmare between the river and the sea is a punch line in Ramallah, to the eternal sorrow of Hanan Ashrawi and Sari Nusseibeh. Khatib's blasé testimony suggests, in a nauseatingly profound way, the depths of Palestinian acclimation to suicide bombing.

WATCHDOG WATCHES HIMSELF: Via Romenesko comes this story of a newspaper hiring a city council member to cover the city council and the subsequent resignation of two of the paper's three full-time employees. It's a serious conflict-of-interest story, but one of the publishers is MAYOR of a neighboring town:

Barbara Bobo, who is in her fifth term as Millport mayor, said politics and journalism often "dovetail" at small weeklies such as the Northport and West Alabama newspapers. She said she believed Allison could remain unbiased in his coverage of town business. She cited herself as an example. "I write the town’s news. I don’t have a reporter there," she said of Millport. As a mayor-reporter, she said, "you have to use common sense in your coverage. It’s not like there’s a whole lot going on."

Readers are right to worry about examples of bias in the "New York Times" or the "Washington Post." But remember, there's a huge swath of the country that gets its news from podunk papers such as these, and they are absolutely loaded with their own bizarre biases. In the early days of this blog, I wrote about my how the powers that be at my first newspaper deemed the monthly meeting of a small civic club to be front-page news. Now, this wasn't a tiny weekly paper. This was a daily with a circulation of about 25,000 that had a heavy wire-service presence on its front page. However, every month, stripped across the top, would be that club's meeting, right above the latest news from the Middle East and the president's speech to Congress. And why? Because the publisher was a member. Unbelievable, but far too common.

YENTA SANS STREISAND: Here's is a blog that is well worth your time. Check out the Media Yenta, who is "a mensch who works within the Hollywood system. Enjoy the commentary with creative typos." Funny stuff.

'CREATE TWO, THREE, MANY TED RALLS': Sorry to paraphrase Che Guevara's famous call for a multiplicity of Vietnams, but that seems to be the point of this story from "The Nation." In the apparent atmosphere of incipient fascism goin' down in John Ashcroft's Amerikkka, brave editorial cartoonists of Rall's ilk are needed more than ever. Rall himself is trotted out to complain about "censorship" after many newspapers dropped his cartoon in the wake of his outrageous "Terror Widows" cartoon and people criticized him for his gross insensitivity. (There's that "strongly voiced criticism masking as oppression" argument again. As I've written before, many on the Left are really starting to sound like Ann Coulter.)

FUN AT SPINSANITY: While I was on vacation, Henry Hanks e-mailed me a link to this Spinsanity story that attacks both FAIR and the MRC, media watchdogs of the left and right, respectively. Today, a reader criticizes Spinsanity for the piece, and Spinsanity responds.

MEDIA BIAS AND THE MIDDLE EAST: Here's a long piece from the "American Journalism Review" on perceptions of either pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli bias in the coverage of the Middle East conflict. I tend to agree with the author's conclusion that the "bias," such as it is, isn't a deliberate thing. It's more a function of ignorance:

"I think bias is a strong word and term to describe what's out there," says Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "There are problems – problems of ignorance, of lack of perspective. There are problems of people with no knowledge being parachuted into a situation and producing incomplete coverage.... But I am certainly not one to say that the American media is biased against Israel."

AJR also includes this related column on Mideast media bias. As I've written before, sometimes what the public perceives as "bias" in coverage choices is often the result of some entirely plausible breakdown in the newsgathering process - an assignment gets switched to another reporter or photographer, or an editor handling a certain beat is absent from work and another editor unfamiliar with that beat steps up to fill in. These snafus happen all the time.

'EMBRACE THE BLOG': Here's an interesting story from the "American Journalism Review." It tells journalists to view blogs as another avenue for disseminating information to the public. Here's some excerpts:

The simple, linear structure of Weblogs has long served the narrative needs of software developers and teenage diarists alike. Now blogging is confronting journalism, with the rise of current-events blogs that deconstruct news coverage, spew opinion and even scoop the big media from time to time. The best news bloggers are articulate, independent thinkers. In some ways, they are the antithesis of traditional journalists: unedited, unabashedly opinionated, sporadic and personal.

And this:

Blogs can be a rich resource, an easy publishing tool and a repository for notebook overflow. I seriously doubt they'll usurp online newspapers in five years--but newsrooms could borrow a few tricks from today's bloggers to make their own journalism better.

BACK TO THE GRIND: After a delightful week's vacation, I'm back to work. A splendid time was had by all. I'm sorry to say I didn't miss the blogging all that much.