Posted 7:47 AM by Peter Fallow
BLASTING THE BOSS: Howard Kurtz has a story today on The New Republic's bashing of Al Gore's recent controversial speech on Iraq, a speech that has been blogged to death. The interesting angle here is that Martin Peretz, owner of The New Republic, helped Gore write his speech. TNR editor Peter Beinart says he isn't worried about his job, even though Peretz fired Michael Kelly in 1997 for being too hard on Gore and Clinton.

"I didn't feel in an awkward position at all," Beinart says. "Anyone who's been reading what the magazine has been saying about Iraq wouldn't have been surprised at our analysis. . . . If that leads us to have disagreements with people we've supported in the past, we have to write about that."

And that's the way it should be. (Though far too often it isn't. People are people, after all.) I think it's a tribute to TNR that they published the editorial. It shows they can be liberal without being so partisan as to avoid uncomfortable truths.

Posted 8:02 AM by Peter Fallow
RACIAL DEMAGOGUERY WATCH: Check out this doozy from The Washington Post. During a gubernatorial debate at historically black Morgan State University in Baltimore between candidates Kathleen Kennedy Townsend and Robert L. Ehrlich, Townsend unleashed this calm, civil, measured response to her Republican opponent's views on affirmative action:

"He opposes affirmative action based on race," she said. "Well, let me tell you, slavery was based on race. Lynching was based on race. Discrimination is based on race. Jim Crow was based on race. And affirmative action should be based on race."

It's important to note that Ehrlich's running mate, Michael Steele, is black. But that didn't stop Townsend from placing Ehrlich in the same league as slave-ship captains and lynch mobs.

It's also important to note that by linking affirmative action to this country's often-shabby history of racism, Townsend ironically did conservatives a favor. She practically admitted that AA exists on a continuum with the kind of state-sanctioned discrimination based on race that this nation has comprehensively rejected.

After the debate, Townsend, the daughter of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, made her racial demagoguery sound as if she'd snatched the hood off of a Klansman:

Townsend was mobbed by well-wishers, campaign aides and fellow Democrats before she could get off the stage. "I thought it was important to get out what he really believes," she said. "He's been masquerading as a moderate. That's why it was important tonight to say, 'Who are you?' "

And I always thought it was the Republicans whose rhetoric sowed racial division. But this time, it was the Republicans sounding the notes that resonate more with the spirit of the civil rights movement:

"In this campaign there is no place for race; we have matured beyond that, Marylanders want something better," Steele said. "I am tired about it, it ends tonight. If you want to play the race card, do it somewhere else. ... African-Americans do not need to be dumbed down by race."

The above quote was from this story in the Baltimore Sun. Somehow the Post, which circulates extensively in Maryland, missed it.

Posted 6:56 AM by Peter Fallow
STUDYING THE OBVIOUS: Boy, here's a grabber of a study:

A new survey of newsroom executives finds that female editors are divided into two distinct camps - those confident and comfortable about their careers and those less satisfied and concerned about their futures.

Surely I'm not the only person to realize that "career-conflicted" and "career-confident" could apply equally to men in the workplace? Hell, there's been times I've vacillated between these two groups within the space of a week.

And I'm no statistical expert, but it seems to me that they've chosen a very small sample. Just 202 men and 71 women were surveyed at papers with circulations of 50,000 or more. According to this chart, in 1999 there were 239 dailies with circulation over 50,000. But there were 1,244 newspapers with circulations below 50,000. Obviously, they're missing a lot of newsroom managers, 35 percent of whom were women in 1998. I'm guessing that number is better than most industries.

Posted 6:20 AM by Peter Fallow
POWERS ON WELCH: As usual for Friday, I urge you to check out William Powers' National Journal column on the media. This week, he studies the media's former infatuation with GE chairman Jack Welch, an infatuation that came to a crashing halt:

To hear people talk about him then, Welch wasn't just an unusually sharp, aggressive business guy, but a kind of wise man or shaman. David Kirkpatrick, The New York Times' publishing reporter, snagged a telling quote from Maureen Egen, the head of the Time Warner publishing unit that bought the book: "He is an amazing teacher. Just in the time we spent with him we learned so much." ... From practically every corner of the media establishment came the same awestruck take. Questioning it seemed pointless. This many savvy, skeptical people just couldn't be wrong. Jack Welch really was the Light of World.

Until September 6, when the divorce-suit affidavit of Welch's wife, Jane, became public in The Times. As everyone now knows, that document revealed the goodies Welch had been enjoying at GE expense -- the $15 million apartment, the car and driver, the jets, the food. (Jack Welch disputes some of these claims.) In the two years since Welch hit his apex, the public had lost its tolerance for corporate greed. Meanwhile, in a stunning coincidence, the media found themselves in complete agreement with the public. Suddenly, a lightbulb went on over the culture's collective head. This peerless savant, this visionary, this great teacher of important truths was... just another pig.

Just go read the whole thing.

Posted 8:17 AM by Peter Fallow
WHY WE BLOG: Ever wondered about that? Well, turn to Page. She has the answers. It's the first in a series of interviews with bloggers about what motivates them to publish their thoughts and musings every day. Today, Page interviews Dave Copeland. Check it out.

Posted 8:10 AM by Peter Fallow
THE 'PRESS' GANG: If you've got some time on your hands, settle in, grab a cup of coffee and read this year-in-review piece on New York media in the New York Press. Among the subjects presented for praise or ridicule are: John Gotti; rock critics; cartoonists; rapists/essayists; bloggers, including Andrew Sullivan (ridicule) and a sexy lady from Brooklyn (praise); fad diets; Baltimore; and a whole lot more. For the most part, it's a highly entertaining read.

And then there was this item. At first I didn't know if it was serious or not:

Best Excuse to Dynamite The British Press

The Observer’s 9/11 Satire Issue

Was the Blitz This Hilarious? Oh, that dry British humor. It’s so droll, so hysterically funny, especially when it takes the 9/11 massacres as its subject. The Observer of London’s "Absolute Atrocity Special"–an alleged "satire" of the terrorist attacks published last March titled "Six Months That Changed a Year"–might be the most vulgar, vicious and stupid parade of garbage we’ve seen this year.

"Figures show that even as the second tower fell, people were switching off their televisions, complaining they’d seen it all before," quip Britwits Armando Iannuci and Chris Morris–the comic geniuses behind this appalling project. Much of this atrocity "hilarity" is predictably banal: the Bush-as-moron jokes. The Christopher Hitchens drinking jokes. And yet, some flashes of perverse nastiness stick in the mind. Take this representative entry: "New figures reveal that the number of people who perished in the attacks on 11 September may be as low as three. Counsellors are on standby to help New Yorkers deal with the trauma of being more upset than they needed to be. Pressure mounts on Mayor Giuliani–already criticised for his insistence that Ground Zero be kept shrouded in smoke–after the dust cleared briefly last week to reveal that the South Tower was still standing. Psychologists say original estimates of 6,000 were probably much larger due to ‘all kinds of shit.’"

Yes, indeed. The sound of shrill mocking laughter about mass murder from across the pond is remarkably therapeutic.

Surely the Press is making this up. Sadly, they're not. (I'm surprised this wasn't widely blogged when it came out back in March.)

Posted 7:30 AM by Peter Fallow
PRESS CRACKDOWN: Hugo Chavez, the Marxist dictator of Venezuela, is accused of inciting violence against the press. Hmmm. I wonder if FAIR, the left's media watchdog, has anything to say about it....Let's see. A quick search turns up 10 hits for Venezuela, most of which are about the U.S. role in the attempted coup against Chavez. Nothing about a press crackdown.

While we're at it, let's search FAIR for "Zimbabwe" and see what turns up. (In case you didn't know, Robert Mugabe has been carrying out his own crackdown on the media in his country.) ...Seven hits, a couple of which are "Counterspin" radio broadcasts. I listened to the March 2002 broadcast. The first part equally blamed Mugabe and his political opponent for shenanigans during the recent sham election, and then blamed American racism for focusing too much on the seizure of white farms. The fact that these white farmers produce a majority of Zimbabwe's food was not mentioned. Neither was the huge famine threat that has resulted from this action. Near the end, the broadcast does eventually criticize Mugabe's draconian laws restricting freedom of the press.

And that's it from FAIR. No staff-written articles, no links to other articles. Near silence. Somehow, I'm not surprised.

Posted 9:34 AM by Peter Fallow
WAY TO GO, GENIUS: Katherine Boo, a reporter for The Washington Post, is one of the recipients of this year's MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grants.

Boo, 38, whose work was singled out by the Pulitzer committee when The Post won the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000, is also a contributor to the New Yorker and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a D.C. public policy think tank. She is known for her graceful writing style. In the words of the foundation, Boo is "an investigative journalist who writes about the lives of the less fortunate with passion, conviction and clarity," and her "extended profiles of individuals struggling at the invisible margins of society open a powerful journalistic window into the obstacles faced by many."

I guess there's no conflict of interest in being an "objective" reporter and moonlighting for a organization that engages in political advocacy. And it's also interesting to note that one of New America's leading benefactors is...The MacArthur Foundation!

As for that New Yorker piece Boo wrote on the effects of welfare reform, it seems to be the basis for the book she's writing for the New America Foundation. Mickey Kaus, who specializes in welfare-reform issues, effectively dissected that New Yorker article well over a year ago. Check it out here.

One final note: I found Boo's reaction to winning the grant fascinating and revealing. I'm sure she means well, and I applaud her efforts to shed some light on our most unfortunate citizens. (Contrary to what many on the left seem to think, everyone -- conservatives included -- wants to see the lives of the poor improved. Conservatives just differ on the means of improving the lot of those trapped in poverty.) But check these passages out:

"It's totally extraordinary," said Boo, who received the call Friday from Jonathan F. Fanton, the foundation's president. She had just returned to her Logan Circle home from the Sooner Haven housing project in northeast Oklahoma City, where she was doing research for a magazine story. "I'd been eating dirt," she says. Boo struggled to find the right response. "The guilt, the discontinuity, the sort of sick irony of being with some exceedingly poor . . . ," she said, her voice trailing off. ... For Boo, the award "comes at the end of a particularly lousy year," she said. "I struggled not to lose faith in the ability of words to make any difference whatsoever." Such prizes, she said, "puff us up as writers but leave the situation that we are writing about more or less unchanged. That's pretty depressing."

Mind-reading is dangerous and often inaccurate, but it seems safe to assume that Boo's writing is motivated by a certain degree of liberal guilt. We can't underestimate the power of that guilt. It has often prodded Americans to do their very best by their fellow man, such as during the epic struggles of the civil rights movement. But far too often, journalism driven by liberal guilt makes the poor out to be either soulless automatons or noble savages with little control over their own lives. Such reporting may inspire pity, but it also makes it much easier to expect far less of them than we should.

Posted 6:52 AM by Peter Fallow
GOOGLE NEWS RULES: Have you checked this out yet? The new Google News button is a really fast and easy way to look up news stories. It's bound to become an essential link for bloggers.

But according to this article, it's already much more than that:

I've written before that one of the most significant developments of the Internet era was the development of the "global digital newsstand" -- the ability for news consumers to read media outlets around the world.

With the new Google News, I think I've seen the best implementation of the global newsstand to date. The service calculates what are the most significant stories being published at any given time, and ranks them according to time published, number of links to the story, and credibility of the publishing organization. It then presents them in a way that highlights news by its importance. The Google News main page is a sort of "front page" of a global online "newspaper" (or a more accurate analogy might be "wire service"), with stories placed in categories including top stories, U.S. news, world news, sports, business, science-tech, health, and entertainment.

Google News also has the potential to re-ignite the "deep linking" controversy:

If I'm right and Google News does catch on, it could change news reading habits for Internet users. Instead of the traditional way of choosing a media outlet and navigating its content, Google News users enter specific stories via a third party (Google) and bypass news organizations' home pages. While that's hardly new, what is new is the existence of a Web entity powerful enough to draw substantial numbers of users away from news sites' home pages.

Check out the whole article. It's fascinating stuff.

Posted 6:40 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE ON JOURNALISTS AND WEBLOGS: J.D. Lasica recently joined several other bloggers in a symposium on blogging and journalism at the University of California's Graduate School of Journalism. Here's the story.

Posted 7:48 AM by Peter Fallow
'NEW REPUBLIC' BLOGS: The New Republic now has a blog! Check it out.

Posted 7:02 AM by Peter Fallow
MAKING A MEDIA BIAS SPLASH: If you're interested in the issue of partisanship in the commentariat, here's a Web site that has done the heavy lifting for you. It's Lying in Ponds, and it's going in my perma-links right now. Lying in Ponds uses an actual Partisanship Index mathematical formula to determine which columnists toe the party line.

And who is currently the most partisan pundit? Paul Krugman of The New York Times. While Krugman is No. 1, there are plenty of right-leaning columnists who rank highly in partisanship (no surprise there). Lying in Ponds takes a fascinating approach to something that is often difficult to quantify. Give it a look.

Posted 6:50 AM by Peter Fallow
'SHOT BY BOTH SIDES': Here's a fascinating story I just stumbled across. It's about a journalist whose reporting from Kosovo is going to be used by Slobodan Milosevic as part of his defense in his war crimes trial:

During the 16-minute program, The Truth About Rajmonda: A KLA Soldier Lies for the Cause, CBC journalist Nancy Durham admits that she was deceived when reporting from Kosovo in 1998 - and unwittingly spread propaganda for the Kosovo Liberation Army.

But Durham says her work was also misused by the Serbian side to bolster claims that the West manipulated information.

The story meanders a bit, but it's well worth your time.

Posted 6:40 AM by Peter Fallow
WARTIME DISINFORMATION ON THE MARCH: According to this piece in USA Today, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says Pentagon leaks are royal screw-ups, but they're peddling bad information:

The people that are talking to the media about war plans are so far out of line and so disgracefully misbehaving," he said. "Anyone who knows anything isn't talking, and anyone with any sense isn't talking. Therefore, the people that are talking to the media are, by definition, people who don't know anything."

At least one journalist suggests that all the leaks are part of a disinformation program -- something bloggers have been saying for months.

"Is Rumsfeld engaging in some psychological warfare against the press, the leakers and Saddam Hussein, and maybe all three? I would say yes," NBC Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski says.

He says many scenarios out there are based on "common sense — you begin with airstrikes, then move to the ground, and if there's a regime change into the streets of Baghdad. If you're reading stories that have final war plans, then Rumsfeld is correct. But the ones I've read have lots of caveats."

Check it out.

Posted 6:18 AM by Peter Fallow
BLOGGING JOURNALISTS BEWARE: The New York Times has a piece today on the reporters who run Weblogs. A media ethics expert says blogs are a potential headache for newspapers. Hey, I better recuse myself from commenting on this story, lest I get in trouble. Jeez. (Here's the link; as usual, the furshlugginer Times makes you register to read.)

Posted 6:08 AM by Peter Fallow
A NEW PAPER IN TOWN: Washington is getting a new daily publication. It's called the Federal Paper, and it's geared toward members of the Executive Branch. And if publisher Daniel Leeds is any indication, it could become a newspaper full of puffery:

"When you look at government as a whole, there has been no weekly newspaper for the top decision-makers within the government," Leeds said. "There has been no publication for the most politically powerful."

We'll have to see how this paper does. I wish them luck.

Posted 7:42 AM by Peter Fallow
JOURNALISTS & CHURCHILL: William Powers has another fine National Journal column today. It's a look at the reasons Winston Churchill is still widely quoted in the media, decades after his death:

Churchill is a modern habit, of course. Even in normal times, not a day goes by when some media person somewhere isn't recycling a line from the endlessly pithy former prime minister. But as the war debate has ramped up in recent weeks, the media have been on a real Churchill jag. In the first 10 days of September 2001 -- just before the terror attacks -- the name Winston Churchill appeared 50 times in major world newspapers, according to a search of the Lexis-Nexis database. In the first 10 days of September 2002, there were more than twice as many hits.

Check it out.

Posted 7:27 AM by Peter Fallow
BOB GREENE, THE LAST WORD: Here's a piece from Salon (a Web site I don't read much anymore) on the former Chicago Tribune columnist. There's a passage far down in the article that caught my eye. While pondering various reasons for Green's firing, the author points out a fact I was unaware of (it's highlighted in bold):

Was it because he then wrote about his little missy in his column? That would be more in keeping with the Trib's recent high-profile moralizing. The paper had refused to even look at the photos of a photographer at ground zero after learning he had accepted a free T-shirt from Chicago firefighters. That set people's heads shaking -- we've come a long way from the days when City News reporters occasionally kicked in the basement windows of a crime victim's home to steal a photograph of the deceased off the mantle. They couldn't let the path to coverage in the Tribune lead through Bob Greene's bed.

I can understand the Tribune being queasy about Bob banging one of the subjects of his column, but rejecting Ground Zero photos over a T-shirt? That's taking journalistic ethics to ridiculous extremes.

Posted 6:35 AM by Peter Fallow
'NARROW BRAND OF LIBERAL BIAS': Susanna Cornett, proprietor of Cut on the Bias, has turned up an article about a Dartmouth professor who has studied media bias. The professor's conclusion?

...the news media ignore far-left, moderate and conservative viewpoints in favor of a "narrow brand of liberal bias."

Susanna's got the whole story. Go check it out.

Posted 6:26 AM by Peter Fallow
DUMPING ON THE ALTERNATIVE PRESS: There was a delightfully snarky article at Romenesko yesterday that tweaked the nose of the so-called "alternative" media -- you know, those free shoppers that feature a couple of Marxist-leaning articles. You generally find them piled by the front door of your favorite diner. Anyway, the article, in the SF Weekly (itself a member of the alternative press), blasts one of the sacred cows of the alterna-media: Project Censored's annual list of "the top 25 stories the mainstream media purportedly overlooked or undercovered in their mindless kowtowing to government and corporate control over the preceding year." Apparently, Project Censored's list is a lot of hooey:

Some of the stories on the list may deserve wider and more thorough coverage. But to label any of the subjects "censored" is either flat-out deception or an admission of astonishing ignorance. A quick stroll through the Nexis database reveals that nine of this year's top-10 "most censored" stories have already turned up in the New York Times, many of them with prominent placement, considerable depth, and angles not far off from Project Censored's leftist slant.

The SF Weekly piece points out that even lefty stalwart Mother Jones has found fault with Project Censored's work. But the SF Weekly isn't content to just point that out. These smart alecks published their own list: "The top 10 stories whose importance has been ridiculously distorted by near-hysterical, brain-numbing repetition in the alternative press." If you're familiar with these publications, some of these items are really, really funny. Here's two I especially liked:

8) Why [insert name of local citizen] thinks [insert name of obscure bureaucratic agency] is up to no good. And why [same local citizen] isn't going to take it anymore. An irate resident, pictured on the cover with arms folded in front of a flag-draped City Hall (slightly out of focus), says the County Mosquito Abatement Commission has been spraying where it shouldn't. This is his/her story.

And this one:

3) How a big media company imposed its CEO's ideology on every single employee of every single affiliate (even janitors). Once a corporation takes over your formerly independent media enterprise, look out! Everyone will drink Starbucks, listen to Jewel, and forget everything he's always believed about editorial free will. Because, as we all know, that's how journalism works: Every story idea and editorial angle is dictated from the top, and even the most experienced editors, station managers, and columnists are powerless to resist.

Just go read the whole thing. It's well worth your time.

Posted 8:04 AM by Peter Fallow
MEDIA BASHING: Susanna Cornett and Glenn Reynolds have turned up a doozy of an article on the media. It appeared in The Telegraph. Check out this quote:

Why did I insist on taking the Guardian seriously? As one correspondent put it, these were people who talked only to and for each other. (I particularly enjoyed one correspondent's description of the Guardian as a "subversive, institutionally racist, politically correct, anti-American, pro-Sinn Fein/IRA, anti-royalist, pro-EU, atheistic broadsheet, written by holier-than-thou sanctimonious prigs for others of a similar persuasion".)

Maybe, but the people they talk to and for happen to constitute a large proportion of the academic, arts and media establishment of the country, who propagate their views with bombastic confidence in virtually every venue that caters to the educated young. They do not see, or represent, their own antipathies as prejudices: they dispense them as enlightened truth.

Amen to that. I've seen a lot of left-leaning bloggers complain that they're being unfairly lumped in with the "loony left" when right-leaning bloggers ridicule some person's idiotic statements. "I'm a liberal, and I don't know anyone who holds these extreme views," they sniff. "You guys are only picking the very worst examples and using them to tar all of us." But during the past year we've been reminded, over and over and over again, that most of the people making these idiotic comments that get such wide circulation aren't nutbag college students from the Indymedia fringe; they're among the brightest stars in our intellectual and artistic culture, and far too often, they're given a bullhorn by their sympathizers in the Western media. And I'm glad Janet Daley has pointed that out.

Posted 7:42 AM by Peter Fallow
BRENDAN O'NEILL HAS MOVED: He's here now, and his new site looks good. (But he's still a stealth lefty.) Adjust bookmarks accordingly.

Oops! I almost forgot. Shiloh Bucher is back blogging at a new address. Go there today!

Posted 7:10 AM by Peter Fallow
FAKING THE NEWS: Remember that story about the reporter from the Associated Press who was fired for fabricating quotes in some of his stories? The New York Press has its take. Pretty funny.

Posted 6:40 AM by Peter Fallow
KEEP YOUR THINGEE CLEAN: Matt Labash of The Weekly Standard has the scoop on "wellness" advice for porn workers. Check it out.

Posted 8:45 AM by Peter Fallow
DON'T GO HARD ON RAINES: The American Prospect is claiming that conservatives are imagining things when they accuse Howell Raines of manipulating coverage in The New York Times to influence the nation's politics. While Nicholas Confessore makes some good points, others are desperately in need of context:

What's striking about all this criticism is its superstitious quality. None of Raines' critics actually knows whether he opposes invading Iraq, because none of them has bothered to find out. Rather, when the Times' reporting sets back some conservative crusade, it's simply assumed to be the work of Raines' invisible hand.

First of all, no editor is going to come right out and tell a reporter, "Yeah, I'm against this issue and I'm going to do everything in my power to make sure we slant our news coverage." Most likely, they'd just say something about, "This is a hugely important story for the American people, and they deserve to hear other aspects of the story beyond what the administration is saying." Or, if the editor is smart, he simply won't say anything -- which is what Raines seems to do when almost any journalist comes calling:

Through a spokesman, Raines declined to speak to me.

Driving on:

And instead of, say, picking up the phone and calling reporters and editors at the Times, these would-be media critics prefer a kind of phrenology, stroking the contours and bumps of a particular article -- verb choices, story placement, who gets quoted and how -- to arrive at an ill-informed picture of the reporting process.

This is a joke, right? Confessore is comparing the honest, fact-based analysis of the actual words that the Times puts in front of readers to a 19th-century junk science. Hey Nick, I don't know if they told you this in college or not, but "Who gets quoted" is not just some journalistic sideshow -- it's often the heart of a news story. Those "people" who just happen to get "quoted" are called "sources." You know, as in the "sources" for your whole story.

Confessore does make a few good points. For example, he's correct that there is not some conspiracy among newsroom liberals to deliberately slant the news. (But he fails to acknowledge that this is the exact argument made by the vast majority of conservative critics of media bias.) And his description of the process for selecting which stories get placed where in the paper also rings true:

Most of the Times staffers I spoke to were bemused by, if not contemptuous of, the complaints. "The place is much less organized than people give it credit for," says one reporter in the newspaper's Washington bureau. "A front-page story goes through a very open process. No one sits in a closed office muttering, 'My God, we've got to stop this war!' or 'How can we help the Democrats today?'"

I've taken part in "budget meetings" (the name for the daily meeting where editors decide which stories go where) for years, and this description of the process is fairly accurate. There often is a great amount of debate about the relative news value of stories. However....it's also been my experience that "the big guy" generally gets his way about 75 percent of the time, and an aggressive editor such as Raines probably gets his way 90 percent of the time. In other words, Raines probably doesn't have to twist arms to sway people to his news judgment; he just has to say, "I think that's a hell of a story. How about you guys?" In a meeting with a bunch of like-minded editors, finding a consensus on what makes a story important (such as Republican dissent regarding an attack on Iraq) probably doesn't require pounding your fist on the table. Just fix each subeditor with a level gaze as you comment favorably or unfavorably on stories. (Or, threaten to "aggressively affect people's lives" so the Times can have a "fast-metabolism reaction to news." Read all about it here.)

Confessore then claims most conservative pundits don't have actual newspaper experience, but he doesn't seriously examine the reasons why. (He just suggests they're sucking off the teats of think tanks and foundations, a description that could also be applied to the staff of The American Prospect.) Could it be that those who hold conservative views aren't welcome in newsrooms? That's certainly been my experience in 12 years of newspapering.

That doesn't mean that the Times' critics are all mindless partisans. But most of them are divorced from the professional culture of journalism in general and large metropolitan newspapers in particular. Like most conservative activists, they tend to think of mainstream and establishment media organizations, such as the Times, as less professional and more nakedly partisan than they actually are....To generalize, conservative pundits assume that establishment media such as the Times are partisan because that's how their own journalists are expected to operate. They believe Howell Raines runs The New York Times the way they know Wes Pruden runs The Washington Times.

We'll leave aside the arrogance encapsulated in a statement such as "divorced from the professional culture of journalism." It pretty much speaks for itself. And once again, Confessore muddies beyond recognition the conservative critique of media bias. For the umpteenth time, here it goes: The mainstream media claim to be objective, but far too often are demonstrably not so. There's no conspiracy, it's just apparent that in too many newsrooms, default liberalism represents the perspective of an "objective" journalist. It's dishonest to compare that to the advocacy journalism in political mags such as National Review or The American Prospect .

Confessore then launches into a discussion of The Washington Times and its editor Wes Pruden, who has been accused of meddling with stories and headlines to give them the proper conservative slant. It's a process that some Washington Times staffers refer to as "Prudenizing." Again, Confessore makes valid points, but he closes with this:

Quick: Name a reporter who's quit The New York Times because an editor slanted his or her stories. Ever heard of a Times staffer complaining about "Howellizing"?

Well, according to this piece from New York magazine, Raines himself told Washington staffers that he would be "Howellizing" their stories:

For his part, Raines has told staffers that he didn't work long and hard to get to where he is just so he could be a passive leader, according to people present at a recent bureau meeting in Washington; he added that he would "aggressively affect people's lives" by changing copy, rotating assignments, and generally shaking things up.

Confessore then draws a fairly reasonable conclusion:

Mainstream newspapers are prejudiced, but not in the way the right thinks. Most reporters do vote Democratic, and that can influence the stories they choose to cover and the kinds of questions they ask. But the deeper biases of the professional journalist are not those of the professional ideologue. Journalists, especially at the elite level, labor under only one diktat: Break news. The reporter who lands a big scoop wins promotions and accolades. In the absence of hard material, such as a leaked document, reporters often turn to soft scoops -- for instance, a spate of op-eds by prominent Republicans dissenting from the White House's plan on Iraq.

That certainly seems to be right. As Andrew Cline has pointed out, there's more to bias than politics. And too often, conservative commentators go too far in searching for media bias in coverage. (Here's a perfect example.) But Confessore seems to think it's beyond the pale to even raise the question because, well, it's the New York Times, dammit!

Journalism seeks to "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." In terms of influence, no newspaper in the world is more comfortable than the New York Times. So why is there such strong resistance in certain liberal quarters to the serious scrutiny of this American institution? Or do I even have to ask?

Posted 8:17 AM by Peter Fallow
BASHING BLACK CONSERVATIVES: Henry Hanks alerted me to an excellent article from The Wall Street Journal on the different ways right-leaning and left-leaning blacks are portrayed in the media. It's written by the always engaging John McWhorter, and his subject is the vastly different tone in two recent articles in the Washington Post -- a profile of Clarence Thomas and a profile of Cornell West:

Ms. Washington paints Mr. West as a man of confidence, ending with him crowing: "If they wanted to get someone they could crush, they got the wrong Negro." Messrs. Merida and Fletcher quote similar statements by Justice Thomas but can't let him speak for himself, instead asking: "If Thomas is unbothered by the harsh judgment of him, why does he spend so much time talking about it?"

I get it: Mr. West, whose response to a tough session with his boss was to turn tail, is a Strong Black Man. Justice Thomas, who has withstood years of withering profiles like this one, is a weak sister.

McWhorter gets right to the heart of this particularly ugly form of media bias:

Worse is that this bias is largely unconscious. The journalists and editors behind such pieces are neither rabid ideologues nor committed advocates. Guided by a tacit sense that the "authentic" black cries victim and the "compassionate" white plays along, they inevitably see dumping on Justice Thomas as neutrality incarnate, although they would surely bristle to see black public figures like Anna Deavere Smith or Randall Robinson submitted to such treatment in print.

It's a strong piece from one of our smartest writers about race. For more, check out McWhorter's work for the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.

Posted 8:03 AM by Peter Fallow
SUING BLOGGERS: The National Review reports today on a case that all bloggers should watch closely: a libel suit against a blogger.

The Rose vs. Johansen dispute demonstrates how quickly passionate polemics undertaken by ordinary people on the Internet can unintentionally become a serious legal matter. Sandra Baron, a lawyer and executive director of the Libel Defense Resource Center in New York, says amateurs voicing their opinions on the Internet have brought on an "astronomical" rise in civil libel suits in recent years.

"It's obvious that individuals are unaware of the risks of libel and invasion of privacy, and don't realize that what they're saying on these websites could set themselves up for libel lawsuits from individuals and entities from around the world," Baron says. "We've gotten a number of calls here, either by or on behalf of individuals who had no idea that what they were saying on these chat boards and blogs could subject them to litigation."

The article also steers readers to sites where bloggers can get bare-bones advice on libel laws.

Posted 7:50 AM by Peter Fallow
'THE LEFT & 9/11': Here's an interesting article from The Nation. It's a thoughtful study of the confusion that has swept the Left in the wake of last year's terrorist attacks. The Weekly Standard noted this piece the other day, and Lee Bockhorn wrote an equally thoughtful column on The Nation's article. Here's an excerpt:

As a conservative, I'm certainly not shedding any tears over the left's post-9/11 crisis of belief. Yet I'm almost--almost--compelled to sympathy when reading Shatz's tortured chronicle of leftist angst and confusion. It's not everyday that an event occurs that is so consequential that it literally pulls the rug out from under one's essential beliefs about how the world works. (Of course, you might think that leftists would have been prepared to deal with such an intellectual crisis, having had to confront the ignominious collapse of communism barely more than a decade ago. But why confront such challenges, when you can retreat to the snug ramparts of tenure?)

The first generation of neoconservatives was famously described as "liberals who had been mugged by reality." Unfortunately, even the most honest of today's leftist thinkers seem prepared to endure many such muggings, even on the massive scale of September 11, rather than admit what the neocons eventually realized: On almost every important question--whether touching upon the unchanging limitations of human nature, the fragility of social institutions, or the messy necessities of a serious foreign policy--the left was (and is) just wrong, plain and simple.

Both articles are well worth your time.

Posted 7:22 AM by Peter Fallow
SO LONG, BOB GREENE: I'm sure everyone has heard that Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene, owner of one of the worst toupees in the history of journalism, was forced to resign after admitting he'd had improper sexual contact with a teenage girl a couple of years ago. Well, here's a follow-up that says he'll probably have a tough time finding another newspaper job. (You've got to wade through virtually the entire article to get to the "nut graf.") And I liked this comment from a Chicago radio personality who was running an "audio blog" about Greene's newspaper work:

Popular radio host Steve Dahl, who, with Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg, made comic fodder of Greene's often-sentimental columns in a weekly "Bob Greene Watch" segment on WCKG-FM (105.9), said he was surprised by Sunday's announcement.

"I always thought he'd get fired just for being a bad columnist," Dahl said.

If I remember correctly, wasn't Dahl one of the guys behind the "Death to Disco" rally at Comiskey Park in 1979 that turned into a riot?

Posted 11:56 AM by Peter Fallow
HELP FIGHT BREAST CANCER: My mother died of this terrible disease several years ago, and science is still a long way from a cure. But you can help. Susanna Cornett will be taking part in the Race For The Cure this weekend, and she needs donations. Please give. It's a most worthwhile cause.

Posted 9:31 AM by Peter Fallow
DIVERSITY UPDATE: The Las Vegas City Life explores the lack of diversity in Sin City newsrooms. It's the same stuff we've been hearing for years -- lack of skin-tone diversity is a bad thing. But the mind-set that animates that idea, which has been elevated to sacred-cow status in our culture, is flawed. Let me attempt to explain why.

To believe the diversity experts, journalists "of color" bring a unique set of experiences that differ so radically from the experiences of white Americans that the presence of minorities in the newsroom is vital.

Now, no one is arguing that we should block minorities from newsrooms. I simply want the hiring process be fair to everyone involved, and too often it is not. The heart of the matter is this: What is the essence of that mythical, elusive, "African-American experience"? Far too often, it simply boils down to any experience or tenuous connection to a history of discrimination. Now, this may have been true 30 years ago, but in our modern world, where racism is the gravest American sin and our society has been radically changed and improved by the civil rights movement, this is a simpleminded approach. Albert Murray nailed the evolution of this victimist attitude more than 30 years ago in The All-American Skin Game:

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

It's been my experience that many white newsroom managers still seem to regard all black people as part of this mythical Black Proletariat, even if the minorities they try so strenuously to hire are invariably from middle-class or upper-middle-class backgrounds that differ very little from their own. They are black people who we can safely assume have not faced the obstacles that were placed before their parents and their grandparents, so they bring very little in terms of experiences with brutal racism to the table. They are expected to simply express a monolithic "blackness" that echoes the sociological certainties of white liberals and their black allies.

But what about the "cultural diversity" aspect of the argument? It seems to me that the best aspects of the black American experience are already the heritage of all Americans. Indeed, they define what it means to be an American of any color in many important ways. Stanley Crouch wrote about it eloquently in his excellent The All-American Skin Game:

Just as it is quite easy to see how Negro style has affected our music, our language, our humor, our dance, and even our ways of walking and performing sports, we cannot deny the impact Afro-Americans have had on this country's movement toward the realization of the ideals that cluster in the heart of our democratic conception. In a long and tragic series of confrontations, black Americans have had to scale, bore through or detonate the prejudicial walls that have blocked access to the banquet of relatively unlimited social advancement that we acknowledge as the grand inspirational myth of American life.

Crouch also takes a shot at the idea that newsroom diversity is required to "inspire" minorities:

Nothing in my own experience or in the experience of Afro-Americans I have met or read about corroborates the idea that, to any significant extend, people of color are capable of being inspired only by their own race or sex. To suggest that is to distort the heroic engagement that defines Negro history, a good measure of which has always been about struggling with any exclusive conception of human possibility or human identification.

And there you have it. Mainstream American culture is already staggeringly diverse, largely because of the 400-year presence of Africans on these shores. The drive for "diversity" actually has more to do with the redistribution of wealth than anything cultural, and those who claim otherwise are simply being dishonest.

Posted 8:18 AM by Peter Fallow
'A DAY LIKE ANY OTHER': Andrew Cline, proprietor of the excellent Rhetorica blog, points out a Richard Cohen post-9/11 column that is very moving. Check it out. And please add Cline's blog to your links. He brings a scholarly perspective to the issue of media bias, particularly when he points out that there's more to bias than mere political inclinations.

Posted 7:52 AM by Peter Fallow
STILL MORE ON 9/11 AND THE MEDIA: Yesterday, Jay Nordlinger spoke at a conference in Greece on the media in the post-9/11 world. National Review published his remarks today. Here are some of the best excerpts:

Above all, I think that covering and commenting on this war has meant an end to pretending — an end to pretending that everyone's a friend, or potential friend, that every grievance is just, that a certain kind of hatred can be appeased, that America is to be blamed for humanity's woes, that radical Islam is just another viewpoint, that there is never right and wrong, only personal subjectivity. When the prime minister of Italy said that a free, open, pluralistic society is better than a closed, stifled, lied-to one, everyone professed shock and indignation. This is the kind of pretending that gets harder to do.

And this:

I must say that I've become less patient in the last year — less patient with an unthinking anti-Americanism; less patient with an absurd moral equivalence, or abdication, in the mainstream media. Shortly after September 11th, the head of ABC News declared that it wasn't for him to say whether the attack on the Pentagon was justified. (After criticism, he backtracked.) The New York Times published an article about a homicide-bomber and one of her victims: "Two Young Lives," said the headline, "United in Tragedy." Famous intellectuals like Guenter Grass declared that 9/11 represented the comeuppance of the rich.

This is the sort of thing for which all my patience is spent. I think a robust — even bristling — impatience is now the appropriate stance.

Just go read the whole thing.

Posted 7:35 AM by Peter Fallow
MORE 9/11 FOLLOW-UPS: Jonathan V. Last of the Weekly Standard looks at some of the best -- and worst -- writings that came out on the anniversary of Sept. 11. He's got the links to prove it. Well worth your time.

Posted 7:30 AM by Peter Fallow
9/11 WRAPUP: Editor & Publisher has a roundup of how the nation's major newspapers handled the Sept. 11 anniversary. Check it out. I read the special section the Los Angeles Times published yesterday, and thought it was very well done. (It was in one of the bathroom stalls at work, which was strange; usually, there's a New York Post.)

Posted 7:19 AM by Peter Fallow
BEAM HIM UP: Alex Beam (no, not this guy....I think) jumps on the "conservative pundits have more fun" bandwagon with this piece.

Is it true, to paraphrase the famous Clairol marketing campaign: Do conservatives really have more fun? The answer is yes, incontrovertibly so. Who would you rather be? Me, plodding through errands on my bicycle, sporting my pathetic ''One Less Car'' T-shirt, or one of the many SUV drivers who blast exhaust in my face as they roar off to fill up on cheap gas?

Of course, the rest of the piece is predictably snide. Beam suggests that conservative pundits are having more fun because they're not doing any serious work, and he has nothing to say about their liberal counterparts who do the same. In particular, he makes Paul Krugman out to be a paragon of journalistic virtue, when there are a couple of bloggers who have made it a part-time job to regularly dissect his offerings. But Beam makes it a fun read nonetheless.

Posted 7:47 AM by Peter Fallow
THAT FATEFUL DAY: I don't have any dramatic stories about running from a building in flames or anything. My story of Sept. 11, 2001 echoes those of the vast majority of Americans.

I was on vacation with my family in Cherry Grove, S.C., a beach town on the quieter north end of South Carolina's Grand Strand (that's Myrtle Beach, if you're unaware). The Amazing Techie Girlfriend couldn't make this trip; she was working in Arlington, Va. -- approximately 1 mile from the Pentagon.

I awoke at a little after 9 a.m. on that fateful day. I staggered into the den of our vacation house and, out of force of habit, clicked on the TV. There, on every channel, was the World Trade Center on fire. It was difficult to tell what had happened, because news anchors were talking via phones with eyewitnesses. My sister came into the den a few minutes later, and I said, "Hey, check it out. A plane hit the World Trade Center." She looked at the screen and said, "MM...that says planes hit World Trade Center. Planes. More than one."

That's when the knot began to turn in my stomach.

A few minutes later, a news flash said the Pentagon had been hit.

The knot grew even tighter, because my girlfriend was way too near to that site. I immediately tried to call her, via office phone and cellphone, but had no luck getting through because the lines were overloaded. I wouldn't get through to her for another six hours.

When the first tower collapsed, my stepmother and her daughter began to sob uncontrollably. My stepsister's husband, a police officer, seemed deep in thought, perhaps realizing that his job would have required him to be in that building. My father, sister and I simply stared in disbelief. When the second tower fell, amid TV discussion that 200,000 people worked at the World Trade Center complex, I knew that this would be the most horrific event in our history. It was certainly the most terrible thing I'd ever seen. We all thought that there were 50,000 bodies buried under that rubble, and perhaps 1,000 more at the Pentagon.

We continued to stare at the TV in shock for a couple more hours, and I kept trying to call my girlfriend. Couldn't get through. My sister, who lives about 35 miles from Cherry Grove, suggested I take a ride out to her house to help her feed her dogs. I went, because she has a computer, and I would use it to try to e-mail my girlfriend.

The drive over was surreal. The weather that day on the South Carolina coast was not like the perfect morning we had seen get defiled along the upper East Coast. It was overcast and gray. But what was really bizarre was the radio. There were no commercials. There was no music. Every station had gone over to news coverage, either their own or one of the TV networks'. That's something I've never experienced in my lifetime, and hope I never experience again.

When we got to my sister's house, I continued to try to call the girlfriend. Still no success. I jumped on my sister's computer and sent out e-mails to my girlfriend's various accounts, and waited an hour for a reply. There was none. I tried to assure myself that she was safe, and that she was simply quite busy.

We drove back to Cherry Grove, and no one in the house had left their spots in front of the TV. I went straight to the phone, and finally reached my girlfriend. She was fine. She was very upset, and understandably so.

She saw the Pentagon explode.

She had co-workers who were on the freeway that runs next to the Pentagon when they saw the plane slam into the building. Flying debris had damaged a coworker's car.

I told her to be strong, and that I was coming back there tonight. She insisted that I stay with my family. (I stayed that day, but ended up cutting the vacation short because I was worried about her.)

After a couple more hours of TV watching, the family decided to go out to eat. We went to a cafeteria that specializes in the comfort food we'd known our whole lives -- fried chicken, turnip greens, macaroni & cheese, fried squash and okra, corn bread, iced tea and pecan pie. The place was full of diners, but very quiet. It was like a dinner party after a funeral.

It was 7 p.m. It was the first food I'd eaten all day, but it provided little comfort. The knot in my stomach wouldn't go away for several days.

It's back again today.

But it won't be for long. We have rebuilt the Pentagon. We have defeated the Taliban. We have killed or arrested hundreds, maybe thousands, of potential terrorists. We're stronger and more united than I can remember in my 36 years.

We will triumph. It won't be easy, but we will.

God bless America.

Posted 8:04 PM by Peter Fallow
HIGH-TECH MOONING YIELDS MORE THAN 2,500 HITS: Earlier today, I posted a gag photo of myself bending over a la Dawn Olsen in an attempt to show off my, uh, assets and garner more hits. And I'll be damned if it didn't work. Some bloggers, including Glenn Reynolds (who steered the vast majority of those hits my way), questioned whether this stunt was going to damage my credibility. (Being an anonymous blogger, I have next to none of that anyway, according to a lot of people out there.)

I think they're missing the point I was trying to make.

What I was trying to do was tweak Dawn's nose over the suggestion that male bloggers harbor some sort of sexist bias against female bloggers, and also to remind her and other bloggers not to take themselves and their blogs so seriously. Allow me to explain.

One of Dawn's complaints was that the big-time male bloggers didn't link to her and drive more traffic in her direction. I found the charge doubly ironic considering 1) she posts nude and semi-nude photos of herself regularly on her site, virtually GUARANTEEING that people who aren't linked to her are going to stop by and look on a regular basis and 2) her statement that her blog averages something like 600 hits a day WITHOUT the benefit of an Instapundit link. By way of comparison, I'm linked on Instapundit and only average about 200 hits per day. I think the main reason I'm not getting more hits is because I'm not posting as much as I was when I started this thing back in January, and I quit blogging for a while back in April. In fact, I nearly gave up blogging.

That's where the "don't take yourself too seriously" part comes in.

I ceased blogging because I was burned out on it. From January to April, I posted 7 days a week. Lots of long essays and such. I enjoyed it, but I came to realize that it felt too much like a job -- and my regular job is stressful enough. So I quit. I posted an announcement to that effect, put together a "best of" post, and went back to living.

But then something wonderful happened. After a couple of days away from blogging, I got a ton of supportive e-mails from fellow bloggers saying, "Come back." Glenn Reynolds wrote, basically saying "Don't give up yet; I've just added you to my blogroll!" I rescinded my blogging resignation, but I decided to post less material, and to post less often. Now, I post just a couple of items a day, and I only blog 5 days a week -- Monday through Friday.

I'm glad I stepped away from life-or-death blogging. Yeah, I still check my hits a few times a day, but I've come to realize that blogging is just a hobby -- nothing more. Sharp political and social commentary is wonderful, and I've enjoyed all the great writing I've read over the past year, but you can't take yourself too seriously. Hence, a couple of beers with the Amazing Techie Girlfriend and a discussion of Dawn's outburst led to some high jinks with a cheap-ass digital camera and the plumber's-buttcrack shot that graces the post below.

And that's all I have to say about that. Regular blogging resumes tomorrow, a somber anniversary of one of America's darkest days. Go forth and blog appropriately, but remember -- on Thursday, life returns to what now passes for normal. Blog accordingly.

Or not.

Posted 8:21 AM by Peter Fallow
SHORTEN YOUR REPUTATION-SAVING LETTER, PLEASE: The "Weekly Standard" has an excellent, in-depth piece on the New York Times' coverage of anthrax "person of interest" Stephen Hatfill. David Tell looked through some of the documents Hatfill's lawyers have to back up their client's claim of innocence. Besides time cards proving Hatfill was working in Northern Virginia on the days the anthrax letters are believed to have been sent from New Jersey, the most interesting documents are the letters to the Times' editorial department. Hatfill's lawyers tried repeatedly to get column inches to rebut the accusations of Nicholas Kristof, only to be met with silly pronouncements to the effect that "sorry, we don't allow letters to the editor to exceed 150 words."

Amazing. Here's a guy accused of a heinous, unprecedented crime that had the entire nation on edge last fall, yet his efforts to refute those charges are treated in the same manner as a crank who is complaining that they took "Apartment 3-G" out of the funny pages.

Posted 8:04 AM by Peter Fallow
'ASS' THEORY PROVEN CORRECT: I was right. If you post a picture of your ass on your blog, you can get linked to the Instapundit and your hits will go through the roof. Thanks for the inspiration, Dawn! Now it's your turn. More ass shots, please!

Posted 9:22 PM by Peter Fallow
EQUAL BLOGGING OPPORTUNITY: In light of today's recent debates regarding sexism in the Blogosphere, I felt it only necessary to provide a little balance in the coverage -- or uncoverage, if you will.

Yo, Dawn! Puffy ain't never had any of this either.

Posted 7:18 AM by Peter Fallow
BRAVE JOURNALISTS: I know it's not something you hear about every day, but Deroy Murdock honors the brave men and women who ran toward the World Trade Center disaster to report it to the world. It's a good piece; check it out.

Posted 6:42 AM by Peter Fallow
FUGITIVE UPDATE: "Editor & Publisher" plays catch-up on the story of the controversy that engulfed the Philadelphia "Daily News" after it published photos of fugitives wanted for murder and all of those wanted turned out to be minorities.The new angle: a "Daily News" columnist criticized the paper for twice apologizing for reporting the truth:

In an ironic turn, the Philadelphia paper received criticism from one of its own columnists -- not for running the photos but for apologizing. Michael A. Smerconish wrote, "The capitulation of the Daily News does nothing but prove that, as a society, we remain unwilling to broach any subject that involves substantive dialogue about race." Smerconish also called the resulting discussions and protests over the photos "a bogus debate" because it ignores the issue of why so many of the fugitives were black.

And why are we unwilling to talk honestly about tough issues such as race? Because it is exceedingly unpleasant to be called a racist, and calling people racists while avoiding painful solutions seems to be the main thrust of the modern civil rights movement. This echoes a Stanley Crouch column that I blogged way back in February. In a piece published in the "Los Angeles Times," (sorry, link has expired) Crouch wrote:

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

Amen to that.

Posted 6:18 AM by Peter Fallow
A ROUGH YEAR: The "American Journalism Review" looks at the amazing roller-coaster ride of "The Wall Street Journal" over the past year. The paper's headquarters, located across from the World Trade Center, was so heavily damaged that the staff were forced to work in temporary offices for months. Then came the murder of Daniel Pearl. Then came a wave of corporate scandals.

It's time for a vacation.

Posted 6:54 AM by Peter Fallow
GREAT POWERS: I'm swamped with duties today, including tending to an ailing car, so I've got just one item. As usual for Friday, it's William Powers' "National Journal" column on the media. This week, he looks at the "Sept. 11 fatigue" that seems to be gripping many journalists, and he tells them to get over it:

Skepticism isn't just a personality quirk of journalists; it's a core value, the wellspring of all our best work. But there's smart skepticism and dumb skepticism, and as we near the fateful date, let's try to keep them straight. In one sense, we media people have an unusually clear understanding of the coverage -- it's our stuff, after all -- and are uniquely qualified to condemn it. We know all too well the motivations, including competitive and monetary ones, that lie just beneath the surface of everything we do. Let's face it, for us, Sept. 11 is more than a historic event. It's one of those rare, world-changing stories that can make a career -- a potential source of rich prizes, book and movie contracts, and all the other goodies that add up to media fame and fortune. In short, it's a professional opportunity. This crass reality is no secret, but we're more aware of it than most people, because we live with it every day. And it colors how we view our own work. When hundreds of people are crawling over each other to sell their Sept. 11 product, as they are now, a little jaundice is healthy.

But just a little. The problem with much of the Sept. 11 queasiness is that it's based on a false model. I refer to the O.J.-JonBenét-Princess Diana Theorem, which says that the greater the mass appeal of a story, the more likely it is journalists will cover it to excess. A corollary holds that all such stories inevitably become larger than they deserved to be.

This model holds up pretty well when you're talking O.J. and JonBenét, but Sept. 11 is an entirely different kind of story. Some news events are so enormous, so rich in authentic human significance, that it's actually not possible to exhaust them. They include all the great wars and revolutions, some natural disasters, and a handful of other events in which good and evil seem to be vying in various guises, with the fate of huge numbers of people, even entire civilizations, hanging on the outcome. Why, after all these years, do people still snap up books and watch movies about the Civil War and the Holocaust? A first-class story always remains a first-class story, no matter how many times you come back to it.

Y'all have a good day. And pray that I don't need a new alternator.

Posted 8:03 AM by Peter Fallow
SOUTHERN HYPER-LIBS: I've been following Andrew Sullivan's discussion of Howell Raines as an example of a Southerner who tries to be "more left than left" to fit in with his northern colleagues. I don't know if that's necessarily the dynamic here.

Most liberal Southerners (and I was one of them for many years, as was my mother) tend to overcompensate in one specific area: race. Given the shameful history of the region, it's understandable, but it can be cringe-making to observe.

The best response I've seen to Sullivan came from Geitner Simmons, proprietor of the excellent Regions of Mind blog. (I'll be adding it to the blogroll momentarily.) In this post, he brings up an important point: The presence of Raines and others could also be attributed to a long and honorable history of crusading Southern journalists. He cites Hodding Carter, Ralph McGill and Jonathan Daniels. To that list, I would add a name that is generally associated with just one influential book: W.J. Cash, author of "The Mind of the South." Beginning in 1935, Cash worked for several years at the "Charlotte News." In the introduction to the 1991 Vintage edition of "South," Bertram Wyatt-Brown writes:

The Charlotte News was one of the South's most liberal-minded papers. Cash's lively articles exposed the depravity of lynchings, the appalling record of poor policing, homicide, and poor health conditions in Charlotte's African-American slums...Moreover, he favorably reviewed the fiction and poetry of authors associated with the Harlem Renaissance as a way of challenging white notions of black intellectual inferiority...Recognizing his talent, the owners of the News promoted him to associate editor in 1937.

For more on the Southern-lib newspaper tradition, I recommend Albert Murray's excellent "South to a Very Old Place." It's a delightful, stream-of-consciousness travelogue through the American South circa 1970. During his journey, Murray swings by Greensboro, N.C., to talk about Jonathan Daniels with Edwin Yoder (who later moved on to the "New York Times" and greater fame). He goes on to visit journalists in Atlanta, where Ralph McGill crusaded for desegregation. Later, he visits Greenville, Miss., to meet Hodding Carter. It's an immensely enjoyable book, all the more so because Murray, a black man, joyously embraces the universality of his Southern heritage, a heritage he rightly views as mulatto rather than strictly segregated despite a history rife with violence and injustice.That aspect of Southern life -- the cultural miscegenation that went on for years, and continues to this day -- gets lost when the focus is solely on the horrors of slavery and discrimination, but it's very humanizing, and it should be remembered and celebrated.

Posted 6:44 AM by Peter Fallow
RIPPING THE 'TIMES': Michael Ledeen blasts the "New York Times" for clueless reporting on the fragile political situation in Iran.Check it out.

It should not be necessary to remind our leaders, in government and in the media, that Iran is the mother of modern terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah, the protector of al Qaeda, the engine of Islamic Jihad, and the supporter of Hamas. The president has given three magnificent statements about the evil of the Iranian regime and the bravery of the Iranian people. Both as a matter of national strategy and as a question of national honor, we should be helping the Iranians battle their oppressors, just as we supported the Yugoslavs against Milosevic and the Poles against the Kremlin.

Failure to do so will cost us heavily in the coming war. In the past few days, an additional 200 al Qaeda terrorists entered Iran via Zabol. The Iranians are providing them with false passports, with which they will travel to Lebanon to join their comrades. Their intentions are not known, but they will swell the growing ranks of a terrorist army in Lebanon that can be deployed against American armed forces, or against Israel. The Iranians have provided their new ally, Saddam Hussein, with a substantial number of missiles, and they have recently opened a new front company in Dubai to lease about two dozen Bell helicopters which, when cannibalized, will provide spare parts for more than a hundred Iranian helicopters that have been grounded for years.

Yet the American government contents itself with occasional speeches from the president, and the New York Times regales us with fairy tales about a make-believe Iranian pol.

Faster, please.

Posted 6:37 AM by Peter Fallow
BREAKING THE LAW: The "Boston Globe" has a follow-up to one of yesterday's most interesting news stories: the smuggling of weapons onto airplanes by reporters from New York's "Daily News." There's some tut-tutting from airline representatives (big surprise there) and a journalism-ethics-type person (who cares).

Personally, I think this is a great story. Obviously, surreptitious newsgathering should only be done in extraordinary circumstances, but after Sept. 11, we should all realize the danger that hijacked jumbo jets can pose. Here's what "Daily News" editor-in-chief Edward Kosner said:

''There's a compelling national interest in doing this,'' he said. ''Technically, you're breaking the law, but there's no intent to break a law. This is a serious issue and a serious moment, and, all things considered, this is the right thing to do.''

Obviously, different people will have different ideas about what a "compelling national interest" is. But the weapons-smuggling story, in my opinion, fulfills the media's watchdog function. By forcing the airline industry to be accountable for their security issues, it could lead to safer flying in the future. And that's good journalism.

Posted 6:17 AM by Peter Fallow
THEY WERE THERE: "Editor & Publisher" has first-person interviews with journalists who were in close proximity to the World Trade Center attacks last year. It's a powerful testimony to the horrors of that day.

Posted 7:52 AM by Peter Fallow
A NEW BLOG: Welcome the Sabertooth Journal. Check it out.

Posted 6:59 AM by Peter Fallow
WE'VE GOT PAGES TO FILL -- FIND THAT BACKLASH! The "Wall Street Journal" has a piece on the media's obsession with the mythical "Arab backlash" that is expected to break out any day now. And he points to a far-too-typical double standard that has surfaced:

Soon after Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were identified as the culprits in Oklahoma City, they were linked with the far-right militia movement. And that in turn sent the press baying after conservatives, religious fundamentalists, anti-big-government libertarians, Rush Limbaugh and anybody else with whom they disagreed. ...The media can claim that they were only doing its job after Oklahoma City by investigating the possibility that the bombing may have had a broader social significance. Just three of America's leading newspapers, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, have run at least 400 articles chronicling the militia movement since that attack, according to one quick search of the Lexis/Nexis database.

But would the Times, or any other paper, turn the ... formula around to ask what they might have missed by focusing so intently on the "nuts" during the past eight years? It has been no secret, for example, that many Arab-American groups were maintaining close ties with Palestinian and Muslim terror groups, yet not much was written about it. And you might think last week's indictments would trigger some sharp questions about how four young Arabs could operate so freely in America, much less inside the secure area of a major metropolitan airport....Yet on the same day the indictments were announced, one Detroit daily gave equal play to a story headlined "Metro Arabs Question Charges," quoting an array of local Arab-American leaders who worried that the grand jury's action "wrongly fuels hostility against Arabs," in the paper's words...But if four members of the militia movement had been indicted for plotting attacks on innocent civilians, it's unlikely their friends would have been able to find space anywhere in the American media to lament the "discrimination" against them. The right wing, as well all know, is paranoid. All others are potential victims of plots to take away their civil rights.

Posted 6:43 AM by Peter Fallow
THE REAL BEVERLY HILLBILLIES: Here's a story I missed the other day. It seems CBS is planning to create a reality-TV version of "The Beverly Hillbillies." Rod Dreher of the "National Review" heaps some well-deserved (and deliciously politically incorrect) invective on the idea:

How charming. Ship the toothless poor white trash in from Appalachia, set them down amid immense luxury, and watch the dopes make inadvertent fools of themselves in front of the rich and beautiful. The Real Beverly Hillbillies they're calling it. Some fun that'll be. Yes sir, southern white people — the kind who tend to own guns, believe in God, love their country and vote Republican — are Hollywood's niggers.

As a Southerner working in a northern environment, it continually amazes me how prevalent these attitudes still are. When I first started my job, I had several co-workers comment on my accent or come over and ask me really silly questions. For example, they assumed I was an expert on country music (I'm not; I like it more than I used to, but don't know a whole lot about it) or that I was intimately familiar with huntin' & fishin' & shootin' (I've never been hunting, and I've only been fishing once or twice in my life; I don't own a gun, and can count the number of times I've fired one on my right hand). When I'd tell them that I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in a large Southern city, they seemed disappointed rather than surprised. It's not as if they aren't aware that such places exist. Instead, it's almost like they were hoping I'd have been raised in the kind of colorful small town they've read about in novels. Sorry, folks; I'm more "Brady Bunch" than "Dukes of Hazzard."

Posted 6:45 AM by Peter Fallow
WE'RE SORRY WE REPORTED THE TRUTH PART II: Here's a story I missed the other day before I started my long weekend. Remember last week's story on the "Philadelphia Daily News" apologizing for reporting the unfortunate fact that all of the city's current fugitives wanted for murder are minorities? Well, the paper has done it again. This time, it came in the form of a formal apology from managing editor Ellen Foley that appeared in the paper's news pages. (It was published amid pressure from something called the Coalition for Fair News Coverage.) Check out this surreal passage:

The front page photos from last Thursday sent the message to some readers that only black men commit murder. That was a mistake.

In addition, the stories didn't address a key question: Why are there no white suspects on the loose? That also was a mistake.

Our first story should have looked harder at this question. The Daily News apologizes for the error.

So now we must have affirmative action for murder suspects so that minorities don't get their feelings hurt. And once again, the message is clear: Never underestimate the power of white guilt. For the umpteenth time, take it away, Bill McGowan.