September 2008 Archives

Talk about burying a lede. Some 1,100 words into his 1,400-word piece ("'Substantive' Press Is Taken for a Spin") in today's Washington Post, uber-critic Howie Kurtz writes, "While some journalists say privately they are censoring their comments about Palin to avoid looking like they're piling on, pundits on the right are jumping ship."

The news here is even buried within its own sentence. Again, just to be clear: some journalists say privately they are censoring their comments about Palin to avoid looking like they're piling on.

While Kurtz's article is chock full of great quotes from media members and the people who spin them--including, as Liz noted, this baffling one-liner from Andrea Mitchell--his revelation about self-censorship, it seems, should be just a tad higher in his story. As in, at the very top. Because, you know: Journalists censoring themselves for fear of appearing to bully Sarah Palin? Seriously? Um, paging Campbell Brown...

On MSNBC they keep calling today's market plunge "the biggest intraday point drop ever."

Which is, as The Audit's Dean Starkman just observed while walking by our office TV, if not pointless, not a particularly helpful way to be talking about all this. Biggest point drop in history? Does that mean Wall Street's Worst Day Ever? No. It does not. We should be talking percentage drop, not points drop. And percentage-wise -- and this makes for much less exciting TV -- today was not The Biggest or First or Worst.

Something which on CNN Wolf Blitzer at least mentioned between talk of Biggest Point Drop Ever.

Take a look at this, 688 points, 689 just went up. If this holds, if this holds, this will be the single largest point drop in the market's history, in the Dow Jones Industrials ever. The largest until now was on September 17th, right after the 9/11 attacks...when the markets reopened after 9/11, the markets went down 684 points that day. Right now, they're at 689 points. Ali Velshi is watching this for us. It's not the largest percentage drop because the Dow Jones is selling at a higher number. But in terms of the biggest point drop ever, if this holds, 689, this would be the biggest point drop in American history.

This Sunday, The New York Times turned in a 4,500 word investigation into John McCain’s relationship with gambling and the gambling industry. As it turns out, many of his close advisors and friends have worked as lobbyists and consultants to the industry, often for clients with business before McCain’s Indian Affairs Committee, the prime Senate regulator of tribal gaming.

The story lacks a dramatic smoking gun; the newsiest bit seems to be that people close to McCain say he viewed unflattering the stories about Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed that emerged from the Abramoff hearings as partial payback for past political battles. But the vast catalog of connections and attendant campaign cash certainly dull McCain’s anti-lobbyist patina.

What makes the article particularly interesting from a journalism standpoint, however, is a quote from McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds in response to a query on the article’s lede, a colorful story of McCain rolling craps at Foxwoods alongside the casino’s lobbyist until 2:30 in the morning. Bounds’s quote ran high in the article:

Mr. McCain’s spokesman, Tucker Bounds, would not discuss the senator’s night of gambling at Foxwoods, saying: “Your paper has repeatedly attempted to insinuate impropriety on the part of Senator McCain where none exists — and it reveals that your publication is desperately willing to gamble away what little credibility it still has.”

It’s not everyday that you see a paper run a quote that specifically impugns that paper’s reporting.

McCain—or his designee—is certainly entitled to give his side of the late night, high-rolling session. But the portion of Bounds’s quote that is actually responsive to that incident boils down to one word, a vague but blanket denial of “impropriety.” The rest is a broadside aimed at the Gray Lady.

Unresponsive responses are a hallmark of political journalism, and journalists must weigh whether or not a quote crosses a threshold of relevance and merits printing. So I asked Matthew Purdy, the paper’s investigations editor, if he thought this quote did.

“It did,” responded Purdy, who was polite but tight-lipped through our brief conversation.

I suggested to Purdy that the paper could have just as easily run a sentence like this, which, on the matter in question, would have been no different:

Mr. McCain’s spokesman, Tucker Bounds, would not discuss the senator’s night of gambling at Foxwoods, except to insist that the encounter reflected no “impropriety.”

So why run the full quote?

“We asked him about that incident in the lede, and that was his response,” Purdy said. “They answered it and they were entitled to their response.”

But given Bounds’s attack, this is more than a matter of non-responsiveness. Purdy made it clear he was not interested in addressing questions (one non-response begets another?) about how the paper’s decision to run the quote fit into the context of the McCain campaign’s recent strident attacks on the paper’s reputation and reporting.

“I’m sure there will be plenty of other people willing to opine on that,” Purdy said. “That’s all I want to say on that.”

One person who has opined on that in the past is the Times’s political editor, Richard Stevenson. As he told The Politico’s Michael Calderone, "I understand that for them we’re a prop … We’re a foil that they can use for their purposes.”

Given that context, what can we make of paper’s decision to run the quote as they did? Bounds can say whatever he likes, and as long as the paper quotes him accurately, the paper is free to run it. But the quote’s inclusion reads like the Times is happy to give space to Bounds in a way that makes him and McCain’s campaign look like bullies to the paper’s readers, and victims to his campaign’s partisans. Yes, again, it’s Bounds decision to respond however he likes—if he wants to stoke the base’s anti-Times fire, fine.

But by quoting his response in full, it looks like the Times is happy to help him pour the gas. There’s something admirable in retrenching under pressure. But there’s something disappointing in giving your sparring partner exactly what they want.

Just moments ago, House Minority Leader John Boehner offered this explanation for the plans failure to passage:

I do believe that we could have gotten there today, had it not been for this partisan speech that the Speaker gave on the floor of the House. I mean, we were—we put everything we had into getting the votes to get there today, but the speaker had to give a partisan voice that poisoned our conference, caused a number of members who we thought we could get to go south…

House Minority Whip Roy Blunt chimed in a moment later:

We thought we had a dozen more votes going to the floor than we had, no more than that, but we thought we had a dozen more. I think unfortunately, too many of our members were already on the floor when they heard that late speech by the Speaker.

And then Eric Cantor, a Virginia Republican who has been frequently quoted on the bill, brandished a copy of Pelosi's speech and summed up.

Right here is the reason I believe why this vote failed, and this is Speaker Pelosi's speech that frankly struck the tone of partisanship that frankly was inappropriate in this discussion.

Ok, so if that's true, it's time for reporters to start calling through the 133 Republicans who voted against the package, and see if they can find any representatives willing to say that they were ready to vote for the package—that is, until they heard Speaker Pelosi's "late" and "partisan" speech.

If they can't be found, well, Boehner will need to find a new explanation.

During Friday’s debates, moderator Jim Lehrer pressed the candidates to identifying which of their social programs they would cut, given the bailout plan that everybody thought was slated for approval this week. Seems like a logical enough question, and one that we here at CJR have wondered about ourselves. Unfortunately, it turns out to be a faulty premise, according to an informative piece in the Christian Science Monitor.

So, why doesn’t a $700 billion program mean $700 billion less for a new president to spend? The answer lies in accounting conventions that are often misunderstood - and, critics would add, not well suited to the nation’s current financial crisis.

“People will find it hard to believe, but the bailout will have very little impact on the budget or the deficit,” says Peter Morici, a business professor at the University of Maryland and the former chief economist at the US International Grade Commission.

Despite the gigantic price tag, the cost of the bailout—which would result from possible, but not inevitable, losses in the government’s buy-up of the mortgages—would be negligible and spread over several years to minimize the impact.

Let’s have more pieces like this. Let’s have the press step back from the fevered frenzy on Capitol Hill and the campaign trail rhetoric. Let’s have more neutral language, less panic, more explanation, less jargon. In a way, the press needs to assume almost a teaching role, explaining how we got here and what it means going forward, using concrete examples, moving between the micro and macro.

This piece underscores the complexity of the financial situation and how difficult it is to understand for journalists and readers alike. Take this analysis of public opinion polls on the bailout.

When, in a Rasmussen poll, the plan was referred to as an “economic rescue plan,” it was received negatively. But explain that “the government is potentially investing billions to try and keep financial institutions and markets secure,” as the Pew did, and the results are reversed.

On the one hand, these opposing opinions reveal the importance for neutrality when gauging public opinion. But on the other, if phrasing alone can have such a strong impact on the results, it means that the public—and, apparently, the House of Representatives—is still mightily unclear about the bailout and the financial crisis that necessitated it.

As a service to the business-news trade, The Audit would like to offer a few observations about the current financial crisis that may prove helpful in coverage going forward. Our list of some inconvenient truths:

1. Your beat just blew up.

From a journalistic standpoint, what we are experiencing today is the equivalent of the city hall reporter arriving for work one day to find the mayor and city council being led out in handcuffs. If the business press were, say, a nuclear industry reporter, this is having most of the reactors on your beat melting down to China. What to tell the boss?

The business press purports to cover business and nothing so closely as it does Wall Street. This is the area business reporters claim to understand. This knowledge is what separates a business reporter from other kinds of reporters. It is why there is a business press. So the beat covered by many publications and thousands of reporters and editors has collapsed.

2. To say, “your beat just blew up” is not to assign blame. It isn’t the end of the discussion but only the beginning.

3. The crisis presents a moment for reflection. For the business press, there are only two options when considering what has happened here, neither particularly good. Either the business press institutionally provided appropriate arms-length scrutiny of the financial-services industry, including investigative work, opinion, analysis and rigorous beat reporting that provided decision-makers, including readers, with fair warnings of the coming collapse, and it was ignored, or it didn’t do the work in the first place. We know that the answer is some combination of the two. But, if we accept the foregoing logic, then best case for the business media is that what it writes doesn’t matter, in which case, why bother?

4. As journalists, we have to believe journalism matters. Therefore, there is a high probability here of journalistic failure.

5. The current generation of business reporters is probably the best-educated and most sophisticated ever. Everyone knows it entirely capable of providing the needed scrutiny and requisite skepticism, if properly directed. So it seems we have a leadership problem.

6. That said, it is undoubtedly true that the ranks of business journalism have been thinned of its most experienced hands due to the media’s financial troubles, and investigative reporting has become the domain of a surprisingly small elite. There has been a price paid for this. Again, this is an issue for business media leadership.

7. Business media outlets that claim to provide authoritative coverage of Wall Street during good times should be first in line for scrutiny now. These would include any publication with the words “wall” and “street” in its name, as well as anything named “deal,” “New York,” “business,” “investors,” and for that matter, “times” and “day.” Bloomberg also apparently boasts supremacy in coverage of the markets that just melted. Oh well. And Forbes and Fortune, you’re in this, too.

8. For any one near Wall Street, including journalists who cover it, the need for a bailout, whether it eventually passes or not, should be the source of some embarrassment. For U.S. taxpayers to be responsible for one nickel of any of this is a disgrace. I know this is known in the business media but it needs to really sink in, to be internalized. Taxpayers had nothing to do with any of this. My impressionistic take is that coverage and opinion reads more like “it’s a disgrace, but we have to save the economy” or even “it’s a disgrace, but taxpayers might not have to pay as much as it first appears.” No, there are no buts. This is a disgrace.

9. Criticism of the financial media is already harsh and is bound to get harsher. In many cases, though I hope not here, it will be unfair, driven by ignorance, opportunism, anti-business bias on the left, anti-journalism bias on the right, what have you. On the other hand, as the messy process of finger-pointing begins, it is worth remembering that the bailout is only part of the hardship ordinary people must bear for the financial-services industry’s excesses. The first part comes in the yet-to-be-measured equity loss, not to mention mental anguish, borne by most of the four million or so foreclosees. In essence, this is a wealth transfer from the bottom to the top. The third part is the extended recession we are likely to enter. The fourth part is by pension and mutual funds hurt by what was essentially Wall Street’s sale of billions of dollars worth of defective products. It will be hard for the business media, but much harder for their readers.

10. Journalism is something but it isn’t everything. The last eight to ten years has seen dramatic decrease in journalistic resources just as journalism’s responsibilities have increased. The retreat and disempowering of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Office of Thrift Supervision, the Comptroller of the Currency, Fed bank examiners under Greenspan, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Justice Department, and other key federal agencies, piled more and more responsibilities on the press—responsibilities, I would argue, it did not recognize and was not culturally prepared to shoulder.

There’s more, but that’s enough for now.

If you were a Wachovia customer reading the top stories on The New York Times’s Web site this weekend, you might, naturally, have wanted to check the Wachovia site to see what the nation’s fourth-largest bank had to say about Citigroup’s purchase of its banking operations. You’d have been slightly disappointed. Wachovia’s landing page has a single line explaining the acquisition: “Wachovia announces bank subsidiary divestitures to Citigroup.” The link leads to a press release that spins the news: “Wachovia Corporation to become a focused leader in retail brokerage and asset management.”

Even if, as bank representatives are hasty to say, the average customer can, yep, go on with their daily lives, America’s rapidly-morphing banking institutions nonetheless ought to be more transparent with their customers. More than thirty percent of American banking deposits will now be controlled by three institutions, but the modest “Welcome to JPMorgan Chase” sign on the Washington Mutual Web site, leading customers to their new landing page, does everything it can to downplay the implications of the merger. And the images of cheerful children otherwise found on the site, as Virginia Heffernan bemoans in The New York Times Magazine this week, strike the wrong note. (“I’m spooked, honestly, by Merrill Lynch’s bull, just as I was by the daisy-smiley “Live Richly” ad campaign from the retail bank Citibank,” she adds.)

Heffernan, using Lehman Brothers as an example, notes that it’s “hard not to read its demise as that of a superman who survived war and disease . . . The Lehman Web site, which said nothing about the firm’s bankruptcy filing apart from one paragraph in a press release, did little to discourage such an understanding.” While Heffernan’s skewering of banking sites, entitled “Shiny Happy Bankers,” lacks depth, her larger point—that the rescue of a number of our largest financial institutions has in some sense occurred solely in the headlines—stands. Bank customers are more likely to learn things—what sort of trickle-down they can expect, how worried they should be about the F.D.I.C. running out of money—from personal finance columns and headlines than from their own affected banks. And while that speaks pretty well of the press’s attempts to break down the situation, it speaks pretty badly of the banks’ apparent satisfaction with framing the unfolding situation in as abstract a manner as possible. It’s all very Marie Antoinette, and the cake is a “smooth road ahead” proposition to the hoi polloi.

It’s perhaps trivial to judge burdened banks on their Web site content. But maybe it’s telling to note that marketing tactics like See our happy customers! float or sink on the tradability of a boast—that banks’ loyalty to their customers is reason for customers to in turn be loyal to their banks. Now, however, seems a clumsy time to keep hawking that boast. I doubt there are many shiny, happy customers out there. And regardless, they shouldn’t have to settle for reading JPMorgan’s Chase’s “Statement to Washington Mutual Customers” on The New York Times’s Web site.

The cable nets are carrying the House's bailout vote live--as the Nay votes tick up, the Dow drops down. It's very dramatic, and I'm not afraid to say, very frightening.

Of course, speculation immediately turns to Pelosi & Co. holding the clock open and twisting arms to get the bill over the top.

"So we should ignore that thing down in the corner that says zero?" asked a CNBC anchor, of the House's live camera feed, where the clock has, at least for appearances shape, run out.

"Yes!" responds John Harwood, the network's politics hand.

The market isn't ignoring it, though.

Howard Kurtz visits the spin room/media tent after Friday's presidential debate and gets this mind-boggling quote:

"The spin is something we should pay less attention to, but it's important because it can change the story line," says NBC's Andrea Mitchell.

And the one (attention paid by reporters) clearly has nothing to do with the other (perceived importance and ability to change the story line).

How does spin do it?

When facing a potential conflict of interest, in journalism, as in finance, it’s good to err on the side of disclosure.

The Financial Post, the business section of Canada’s National Post and that country’s answer to The Wall Street Journal, went the other way this summer and kept its readers in the dark about the paper’s relationship to the subject of two of its stories. That bad decision came back to haunt the paper and, in our view, hurt its credibility.

In late July, Diane Francis, a prominent Post columnist, wrote two columns that cast Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited, a Canadian insurance and financial-services company, in a positive light. One took Fairfax’s side in a long-running and controversial dispute the company has had with short sellers. The other was a largely uncritical question-and-answer session with Fairfax Chief Executive Prem Watsa.

Not mentioned: Fairfax owns a significant stake in the National Post’s parent company, Canwest.

Francis and her editor both say it wasn’t necessary to disclose that because Canwest’s voting shares are controlled by the Asper family. If only it were that simple.

The saga begins with a July 28 column by Francis headlined “Fairfax Financial beats bad markets.” In it she interviews Watsa about his successful bet against credit markets, which has resulted in a wave of cash for the firm this year. At the time, the shares were languishing (though they’ve jumped more than 20 percent since). The questions, except for one about an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission into alleged accounting irregularities at Fairfax, weren’t exactly hard-hitting, including this one:

What’s the latest with the short selling attack mounted a couple of years ago against Fairfax by several hedge funds in the U.S.?

Three days later, Francis mentioned Fairfax again in a column headlined “Wall Street shorts ruin markets” and took its side in a lawsuit against what it alleges was a conspiracy by hedge funds (the short sellers mentioned in the headline) and analysts to drive down its share prices with false rumors.

The column itself would have been fine as an opinion piece and fits into a larger school that opposes short-sellers, who borrow a company’s shares and bet that they’ll fall, so they can buy them at a lower price and collect the difference. (The fact that shorts lately have been proved right time after time during the current financial crisis is as beside the point as it is true.)

If Francis wants to hold that opinion, it’s okay with us. But she should disclose her paper’s connection to her subject.

True, disclosure can take some of the impact out of a piece, since readers might mentally discount an opinion that coincides with the interests of the publication’s financial backer. And true, disclosure is annoying. We find it annoying, for instanced, that we feel compelled to mention that we’re partly funded by a short-selling hedge fund, Kingsford Capital Management. We’re also funded by long investors, as well as people and institutions that aren’t investors at all, as well as Columbia. Unlike the situation with the Post writing about its part owner, Kingsford has nothing to do with this story. Still, there it is. Forget we mentioned it.

In an email exchange, Francis told us Fairfax’s stock ownership of Canwest was “irrelevant. The stake is tiny—the Asper family controls the empire through” multiple-voting shares. (Like The New York Times Company or the old Dow Jones, say, Canwest has multiple tiers of stock that allow the original owners to control the company without owning most of the shares. That’s because each of their shares gets multiple votes.)

Francis compares writing about Fairfax to writing about a company who advertises in the paper. “There is no conflict any more than there would be a conflict writing about a bank or other corporation that advertises in any of the Canwest media properties,” she says. She also says it isn’t necessary to disclose it because it’s so widely known. “Editors felt that biz readers know that,” she says.

Ian Karleff, the Financial Post’s managing editor, uses similar reasoning to explain why it’s not necessary to disclose Fairfax’s stake in his paper’s parent. “It’s a passive investment as far as we know,” he says. “I’d think there are a lot of individuals that own a stake in Canwest. If it got to the point where they actually had control or were on the board we would disclose it.”

Karleff says Post editors give her leeway on such decisions. “Diane—she’s been around a long time,” he says. “She knows the boundaries, she knows what would be crossing the boundaries and I would trust that decisions she makes in her position and years of being financial journalist, that she would know when she should disclose that. As editor at large, we do leave a lot of those decisions up to her.”

Still, Karleff acknowledges: “It’s a good point to raise and something we will consider in the future.”

In this case, the Post made a serious mistake.

Fairfax’s stake is neither “tiny,” “passive,” nor remotely comparable to that of an advertiser.

While Fairfax has little voting power, it owns about 10.5 percent of Canwest’s economic value (known as market capitalization). It beggars belief that Watsa and Fairfax don’t have clout, if for no other reason than their ability to push the stock price down by selling off their stake at a time when Canwest can ill afford it: Its shares are down 70 percent so far this year.

Tell us an advertiser that can do that.

Second, even before the Francis’s columns ran, Fairfax had a well-established history as an active, not to mention controversial, investor. For instance, it was among a small number of companies to sue analysts and short sellers for allegedly trying to take to take it down by spreading false rumors about its accounting—and soon thereafter announced—that’s right—a major accounting problem. For background, here is a good Fortune piece from last year, which has eye-popping details like Fairfax’s law firm allegedly hiring “tails” to follow hedge-fund workers.

Here's how the Post’s sister paper, the Edmonton Journal, described the company in August 2007 (before Fairfax bought its big stake in their parent):

Fairfax has been a tempting target for short sellers. The company headed by Watsa, who built his property-casualty insurer through acquisitions, has been plagued by erratic earnings and accounting errors.”

What’s more, Fairfax, much like Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway and unlike a mutual fund or other passive investors, has often built stakes in and bought companies outright (indeed, last week it bought a controlling stake in a Minnesota animal-feed company). And—wouldn’t you know?—the day after the second of Francis’ columns appeared, it emerged in the Globe and Mail that Watsa and Fairfax were in talks with the Asper family to take struggling Canwest private.

It is odd that Karleff would say—even today—that the investment is passive, when the “passive” investor was in talks to buy his paper’s parent. What’s more, the Post’s most recent news stories about Fairfax haven’t mentioned the relationship or the Canwest/Fairfax talks. How does that work?

And the “everybody knows that” defense doesn’t wash either. Everyone on earth knows Rupert Murdoch owns The Wall Street Journal, but that doesn’t prevent it from disclosing the relationship when it writes about News Corp. That’s just being fair to readers.

There is no suggestion Francis or her editors knew about the discussions, which had to be going on at the time of the columns—before they ran—but the turn of events illustrates why it’s important for the press to get everything on the table. It just looks bad to speak kindly of a company that owns a significant part of your parent without disclosing it. It looks much worse when that company is engaged in talks to bail you out.

James Fallows recommends Fareed Zakaria's interview on CNN with China's premier, Wen Jiabao. "Interview appearances by Wen or president Hu Jintao are so rare, let alone with the foreign media, that this session is noteworthy simply for its existence," writes Fallows, as well as for Wen's "openness and non-defensiveness." Fallows just wishes Zakaria hadn't called Wen "Your Excellency."

The interview transcript includes this bit from Zakaria:

There were some conditions to my interview with Premier Wen. My condition was that I be allowed to ask any questions I wished, which the Chinese accepted. One of theirs was that I not comment on or characterize the substance of the interview. So I won't - except to say that I thought it was the most open and frank conversation I had ever seen or read with a Chinese leader.

If that was "one of" their "conditions," I wonder what the others were?

UPDATE: Thanks to a CJR reader for pointing out my misspelling of "Zakaria" in the first sentence. Corrected.

While Sen. Joe Biden was omnipresent in the minutes and hours after Friday's debate, helping TV viewers understand what they just saw, Gov. Sarah Palin was nowhere to be found. Pity, per Time's Nancy Gibbs:

Post-debate spin would have been a natural for her; a chance to be sharp and funny and charming and not worry that some interviewer would ambush her, since any pointed questions aimed at her could be brushed back with a breezy, "Hey, I have to wait my turn; tune in next Thursday. Tonight was John's night."

The upshot? "[W]ith each passing day, Palin's road gets harder, the expectations higher, the margin for error smaller."

So, expectations for Palin are on the rise as Thursday's debate nears, per Time.

Or not, per a "Future Election Headline" imaged by Daily Show writers in EW:

PALIN EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS IN VP DEBATE: REMAINS UPRIGHT, DOESN'T DROOL

In case you haven't already seen it, here's a valuable run down of Obama's and McCain's more questionable debate claims from the folks at FactCheck.org, run by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

It's no real time crowd opinion-meter, but hey, different strokes for different folks.

Todd Gitlin, who writes our "Sunday Watch" column for Campaign Desk (check out today's, here), had a fantastic op-ed in yesterday's Los Angeles Times. Newspaper opinion pieces, for all their verbal verve or rhetorical punch, are rarely lyrical; Gitlin's piece is, thankfully, an exception to that rule. "This election campaign is about more than its issues, slogans, proposals, strategies, tactics, attacks or counterattacks," he writes.

Like most presidential elections, it represents a collision of myths. Every four years, various versions of America wrestle with one another, and through this combat, the nation inspects itself, turns itself over and over, striving to choose not only how it wants to be led but what it wants to affirm, how it wants to be known--really, what it wants to be.

The piece goes on to describe the competing, Joseph Campbell-esque mythologies each candidate embodies: McCain, "the known quantity, the maverick turned lawman, fiery when called on to fight, an icon of the old known American story of standing tall, holding firm, protecting God's country against the stealthy foe," and Obama, "the new kid on the block, the immigrant's child, the recruit, fervent but still preternaturally calm, embodying some complicated future that we haven't yet mapped, let alone experienced."

In all, it's lyrical, purposeful, and well worth a read.

Pity the pundits. Besides being charged with providing their audiences with highly valuable analysis about the major political events of the day, they're also charged with making that highly valuable analysis, you know, entertaining. Which is perhaps why those pundits and assorted other first-draft historians often resort to the same tired metaphors to describe political events. Political strategy is a chess game! The campaign is a horse race! The election is a card game! Whee!

So what was the media's Hackneyed Metaphor of Choice for Friday night's debate? See if you can guess:

- "There were no knockout blows in the first presidential debate of the fall." (David Broder, The Washington Post)

- "We’re left waiting for a knockout debate. On to Palin-Biden." (Maureen Dowd, The New York Times)

- "There was no knockout, and maybe no knockdown, but McCain was on the offensive throughout." (Bill Kristol, punditing on Fox News)

- "On foreign policy it all seemed a little clearer, although I should say Mr McCain won on points, without delivering anything remotely approaching a knockout blow." (Kevin Connolly for BBC News)

- "Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama landed some punches Friday night, but neither delivered a knockout blow in the first presidential debate featuring the two party nominees." (CNN)

- "The Friday night fight between John McCain and Barack Obama didn't change the dynamic of the race. No knockout punches, no embarrassing moments and no dominant performer." (Gromer Jeffers, Dallas Morning News)

- In a piece headlined "McCain fails to land knock-out blow": "John McCain delivered the punchiest lines and finished the debate on the offensive. Barack Obama was polished and, yes, presidential throughout and absorbed his opponent’s jabs without serious damage." (Andrew Ward, Financial Times)

- "CNN is reporting that poll it conducted after Friday night's debate indicates that Barack Obama came out as the winner over John McCain, but on points. No knockout recorded." (James Oliphant, Chicago Tribune)

And then there's this exchange on Hardball with Chris Matthews directly after the debate:

MATTHEWS: You know, Pat, you and Gene, I remember the boxing days--just to go for stylistic--I thought we saw Archie Moore out there tonight in the form of John McCain, the Mongoose. He's down there, crouched down, grumpy, angry and every once in a while he throws a jab up there at the guy and keeps his head down. I don't know if the other guy was Marciano or not, I didn't see him land any bee stings, either. Can one guy float like a butterfly and the other guy be the Mongoose and give us a fighting fight?

PAT BUCHANAN: I think it was Joe Frazier fighting Muhammad Ali. Remember "Smoking Joe"? He kept crowding him and getting in. Muhammad Ali was jabbing him and jabbing him and Frazier would get in close and hooking him with the left and hooking him and hooking him. Frazier won one of those three fights.

MATTHEWS: He looked like crap afterwards. He won the fight but his face looked like the face lost.

BUCHANAN: That's right.

Sheesh. It's ironic that a metaphor designed to, you know, literally punch things up can actually render a description more bland by the sheer gravitational pull of its own triteness. Cliches, after all, don't generally burnish descriptions; they most often dull them. Given that, it's remarkable how devoted the press and the pundits were to the tired debate-as-boxing-match trope—particularly since there were, in the final analysis, few jabs or punches or knockout blows actually thrown on Friday night. For a debate whose buildup was so dramatic—would McCain debate? would he not? ooh, what excitement!—most agree that Fight Night itself was exceedingly dull.

So it requires a special brand of pundocratic audacity to use the Fight Night metaphor to describe an event that had, in the end, so little punch. And it takes particular gumption to use an inappropriate metaphor simply because it's expected or safe or exciting...regardless of how well the description suits the reality. The overall takeaway of the Fight Night descriptions isn't just about the event itself, but about the press formulating those descriptions: It's not just there was really no fight, but it's also our predetermined metaphor didn't bear out in reality, but we're going to stick with it anyway, even if just to negate it. Because we're just that stubborn. To paraphrase Stephen Colbert: Events may change; the cliches we use to describe them, apparently, never will.

One more "wonder cover" worth noting: the current issue of The New Yorker, courtesy of Michelle-and-Barack-in-the-Oval-Office satirist Barry Blitt:

It's unfortunate that the nominations for Magazine Cover of the Year have already been set. Because, were they still in play, Entertainment Weekly's current cover--Stewart and Colbert recreating the infamous New Yorker tableau, or, satirists-mocking-the-satirists-mocking-the-satirists--should certainly get a nod. Meta-tastic.

P.S. The article inside--in which EW interviews Stew-bert about the role of satire in the campaign thus far, is nearly--if not equally--as brilliant.

Megan is working on a piece for Campaign Desk for later today about post-debate coverage/analysis. How much of it do you think looked something like that Gary Markstein political cartoon in yesterday's New York Times "Week in Review?" (I can't find the cartoon online to link, so:)

Man watching debate: "Are you scoring the candidates on their responses?"

Woman watching debate, with notepad and pencil: "Yep. Best quip, zinger, sound bite and who's more likable..."

The New York Times’ Gretchen Morgenson wrote a great piece yesterday on how a tiny unit of AIG led to the downfall of its entire empire.

But perhaps the most interesting part of her reporting was that Lloyd Blankfein, who took over as CEO of Goldman Sachs when Henry Paulson went to the Treasury, was in the group of bankers and regulators who met to discuss whether to bail out AIG. If the insurer collapsed, it “threatened to leave a hole of as much as $20 billion in Goldman’s side.”

Wall Street is a tangle of influences and conflicts, but no firm has its tentacles in everything like Goldman Sachs. That’s always a fertile topic for exploration for financial reporters, but especially now when hundreds of billions of dollars are on the line.

Was the denial of a bailout to Lehman Brothers a big boo-boo that sent the financial markets to the edge of the cliff? Well, ok, they were already on the edge—now they’re hanging by their fingernails.

The Journal in an A1 story all but says yes, and here’s how the chain reaction spreads, fueled by those “weapons of mass destruction,” credit-default swaps (emphasis mine):

The reaction was most evident in the massive credit-default-swap market, where the cost of insurance against bond defaults shot up Monday in its largest one-day rise ever. In the U.S., the average cost of five-year insurance on $10 million in debt rose to $194,000 from $152,000 Friday, according to the Markit CDX index.

When the cost of default insurance rises, that generates losses for sellers of insurance, such as banks, hedge funds and insurance companies. At the same time, those sellers must put up extra cash as collateral to guarantee they will be able to make good on their obligations. On Monday alone, sellers of insurance had to find some $140 billion to make such margin calls, estimates asset-management firm Bridgewater Associates. As investors scrambled to get the cash, they were forced to sell whatever they could— a liquidation that hit financial markets around the world.

The press hasn’t been skeptical enough on the government’s insistence that it might actually make money on the bailout, as seen in this WSJ story.

So taxpayers face the risk of losing some part of the $700 billion—but could also turn a profit if the U.S. ends up selling those holdings for more than the purchase price.

Joe Nocera in the NYT says “financial Armageddon was warded off” by news of the government bailout plan on September 18 and feared that if a deal wasn’t reached by this morning, it would send us over the edge.

I agree with Nocera on the direness of the situation but think we still need more reporting that explains why that is. This is a bitter pill for all of us, but especially for the 99 percent of Americans out there who don’t pay serious attention to Wall Street everyday and who were blindsided by this. A roadmap of the potential calamity that awaits without a government intervention would make it easier to swallow.

And arguing as this guy does that Congress is wrong for debating the biggest bailout in history rather than rubber-stamping the Bush Administration’s plan, is just plain wrong.

If you get your bailout news via other people's papers on the New York City subway, this morning you saw (along with the crying young Mets fan in the orange wig) a range of emotions and points of emphasis:

Excitement! The rescue is ready! "IT'S A DEAL! $700b Wall Street rescue ready for House ok today," New York Post

Ongoing schadenfreude. "Congress to the Lords of Wall Street...PARTY'S OVER!" (New York) Daily News

Caution, of sorts. "Bailout Plan is Set; House Braces for Tough Vote," New York Times; "Crisis Hits Europe's Banks As US Seals Bailout Deal," Wall Street Journal

Skepticism. "Cheque en blanco a los bancos," Hoy (Nueva York).

And, anger (if you looked hard enough). "Bailout bill vote today; NYers riled" AM New York (wedged between a "guide to handy and trendy totes" and the news that Scarlett Johansson got married.)

And you thought CNN's convention graphics were distracting? Did you (could you?) see Friday night's debate? The tri-lined reaction meter (Dems, Repubs, Indies) and those six (I think) circles of hell/insta-punditry?

From James Poniewozick debate live-blog at Time:

10:02: NBC wins for least distracting bottom-of-screen chyrons. After staring at that terrifying CNN screen, it's like a spa for my eyeballs.

In a democratic society, what is the point of questioning a candidate or any other powerful figure? When the network gets its “get,” what does the public get?

The purpose isn’t self-evident. The host of a Sunday morning show in particular—America’s bulliest pulpit—can’t justify him- or herself by serving as a “stenographer with amnesia,” as the late Jack Newfield said once, and memorably, about the general run of Washington reporting. The network higher-ups certainly crave a bump in eyeballs and eardrums, but that’s a private interest and cannot be the whole of the public’s due, either. The candidate may enjoy his or her minutes in the national spotlight, but the exercise is not intended for their pleasure.

To perform a public service, an interview ought to (in journalists’ jargon) “advance the story”—to move the candidate out of the zone of the known into the less known. It ought to display the candidate’s mode of thought, his or her tone and style especially frustrated—for politics is, among other things, a Mick Jagger world when you don’t always get what you want, and the public has the right to see how the candidate acts in that circumstance. The cause of public knowledge is not served if the questions crash into a familiar wall; if they elicit no more than the usual string of talking points; if they repeat what others have asked already in visible venues; if the answers only replicate the boilerplate in the stump speech or on the website.

Most of all, the public is not served when mistakes, distortions, and lies go uncorrected.

Politicians are more or less artful dodgers. To be useful, interviewers have to slip beneath their defenses. If they hear an evasion, they need to ask the question again. Fair’s fair: This gives the interviewee a chance to wriggle off the hook. And if not, it makes plain that they fail, or refuse, to talk straight. The cheap substitute for such explorations is the Gotcha moment. The more difficult way is to ask the question a different way, to root around, to explore motives and causes.

George Stephanopoulos’s best moment with John McCain this week came when the host asked McCain about what was, to me and several others (for example, James Fallows), the most peculiar and conspicuous physical fact of the debate.

Here’s how the moment went on ABC:

STEPHANOPOULOS: You know, during the debate, it seemed that you were reluctant to look at Senator Obama.

MCCAIN: I wasn't.

STEPHANOPOULOS: No?

MCCAIN: Of course not.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, we went back through the tape, and some people were saying that that was showing disdain for him. Is that fair?

MCCAIN: I was looking at the moderator a great deal of time. I was writing a lot of the time. I in no way know how that in any way would be disdainful.

Friday night, it was not hard to see many moments when McCain was refusing to look at Obama but was not looking at the moderator or writing. Many. He was staring at the audience or at the camera. When Obama approached at debate’s end, McCain glanced at him for a fraction of a second, then looked away. Did Stephanopoulos miss these moments? If he saw, why didn’t he challenge McCain? Instead, the interview veered away from verifiable fact and went to this odd locution about his intention:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Certainly not what you intended?

A strangely helpful way to put the question, starting with “Certainly”—putting exculpatory words in McCain’s mouth. Why didn’t Stephanopoulos challenge McCain about where he was looking when he wasn’t looking at Obama?

McCain contradicted himself a moment later: “I don't look at my opponents because I'm focusing on the people and the American people that I'm talking to.” So he was retracting his previous claim that he had been busy with the moderator and note-taking. Or, to be more generous, he was supplementing it. Perhaps he really didn’t know where he was looking. In any event, we lost an opportunity to hear McCain explain himself.

Here are some other roads left untaken during this interview:

• As during the debate itself, McCain made much of his antagonism to earmarks. Since the president’s only choice with earmarked bills is to sign them or veto them, was he pledging to veto every earmarked bill? More important, Obama made the case Friday night that earmarks amount to $18 billion a year, less than two months of the Iraq war, and a puny amount compared to the total budget, let alone the $700 billion figure tossed around as the cost of this week’s bailout. What does McCain make of that?

• “You made an extraordinary decision this week to suspend the campaign,” Stephanopoulos said. Many commentators have pointed out that, while he was supposedly suspending his campaign, his offices remained open, he fund-raised, and his ads ran. This is not opinion, this is fact. The proper way to broach the subject would have been: “You made a decision to say that you were suspending your campaign. But you did X, Y, and Z. What about that?”

• Stephanopoulos asked a good question about the Congressional bailout deliberations for which McCain “suspended” his campaign: “So what role did you play? How were you helpful, do you believe, in the process?” McCain: “I will let you and others…be the judge of that.” A repeat of the question suggests itself, since McCain blew it off the first time. But there was no second time.

• Stephanopoulos was pointed when he said: “[Y]our own economic adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, told The New York Times, said the campaign cannot yet project how many taxpayers might see their taxes go up, but for some, Mr. McCain's health care tax credits would not be large enough to compensate for his proposal to eliminate the tax breaks.” McCain responded: “Actually, my position is that it will be able to give people actually more money to go out and purchase tax -- health -- health insurance on their own.” But the next position ought to have been: On what basis? Your chief economic adviser says otherwise. Why do you hold your position?

• Finally, Stephanopoulos managed a valuable observation about McCain campaign proximity to the accursed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: “[Y]our own campaign chairman has taken millions of dollars from Fannie and Freddie Mae and their supporters. Your own legislative liaison, the man directing your transition, your senior adviser,…all of them have taken money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for several years, right up until last month.” McCain led with his standard what-do-I-care-what-the-peons-say response: “Anybody can make whatever charge they want….The facts are that none of my campaign people are lobbying or receiving a dime for lobbying and have not for a long period of time…they haven't for actually, I think, for two years, the latest one. Some of them have never been.”

This was a start, but only a start. “The latest one”—the latest campaign official to take Fannie Mae money—is his campaign manager, Rick Davis. But Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Holly Bailey report this week that “Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giant that was recently placed under federal conservatorship, paid [Davis’s] firm $15,000 a month between 2006 and August 2008….the payments to Davis's firm, Davis Manafort, are especially problematic because he requested the consulting retainer in 2006—and then did barely any work for the fees, according to two sources familiar with the arrangement who asked not to be identified discussing Freddie Mac business.” As David Kirkpatrick wrote in the NYT Sept. 23, “The disclosure undercuts a statement by Mr. McCain on Sunday night that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had had no involvement with the company for the last several years.”

It gets worse. Not only was Davis drawing money from McCain via his Davis Manafort company, but, according to Isikoff and Bailey, “another entity created and partly owned by Davis—an Internet firm called 3eDC, whose address was the same office building as Davis Manafort's—received payments from the McCain campaign for Web services, collecting $971,860 through March 2008.”

When McCain reverted to his claim that he’s as maverick as all get-out, Stephanopoulos stood by and watched.

Finally, Stephanopoulos did have one more good moment. He showed a video in which Sarah Palin “seemed to share Senator Obama's position” on “talking out loud about perhaps going into Pakistan,” saying in Philadelphia last week: “If that's what we have to do stop the terrorists from coming any further in, absolutely, we should.” McCain answered: “She shares my view that we will do whatever is necessary. The problem is, you don't announce it.” A moment later, after a follow-up, McCain was adding in extenuation: “She was in a conversation with some young man that - or whoever it was.” The problem McCain doesn’t recognize is that the American people have a right to know under what conditions their president thinks it right to commit acts of war on the other side of a foreign border. This very question is the gravamen, after all, of the Bush doctrine that Palin seemed never to have heard of in her interview with Charles Gibson.

By definition, it’s hard to confront people who make careers of evasiveness. But it can be done. Katie Couric showed the way when she refused to take flight in the face of Sarah Palin’s meanderings last week. Some journalists have gotten off the McCain bandwagon, realizing that Mr. Straight Talk, profane, gossipy, blunt, was taking them for one ride after another. Stephanopoulos himself has been tougher on him before. I can’t think of any good reason why he let up now.

P. S. The competition was no better. On Meet the Press, McCain operative Steve Schmidt declared that his candidate “called for the firing of Don Rumsfeld.” Tom Brokaw did not challenge this statement. Crooks and Liars gives several examples of McCain explicitly opposing Rumsfeld’s defenestration.

The same site also notes that Brokaw said: “[W]e continue to poll on who is best equipped to be Commander in Chief, John McCain continues to lead in that category, despite the criticism from Barack Obama, by a factor of 53 to 42 percent in our latest NBC/WSJ poll.” But the NBC/WSJ poll didn’t ask about being the commander in chief, claims Crooks and Liars. I checked; they’re right. What’s going on over at NBC?

Saturday Night Live keeps outdoing itself. The latest proof of that? Its brilliant send-up of the already-infamous Palin/Couric interview:

The narrative of the night on MSNBC seems to be that Obama didn't capitalize on the economy section of the debate. Will that thought last through the night?

Well. I await to see how the post games manage to tell us that that was sharp or engaging.

Am I wrong here?

To smile and convey anger at the same time is a thing achievable only by catastrophically irritated boyfriends and presidential debaters.

From NRO's The Corner blog:

Obama's Problem [Mark R. Levin]

What strikes me most about this debate is how often Obama dissembles — both about what he has said in the past and his policies. Say what you might about McCain, but you cannot say he dissembles.

OK, Barack Obama, a "suitcase bomb" doesn't actually fit in a suitcase. It's a figure of speech.

Who is voting on CNN's Peoplemeter?! Seriously. Yellow, cerulean, violet, periwinkle -- are the illegals voting??!

Props to McCain for pronouncing Timoshenko's name correctly. So-so on Yushchenko. Obama, unforch, bungled the bunglablest name in the debate: Saakashvili.

Vladimir Putin's eyes have got to be the most dreamiest on earth: what's IN there, anyway? A soul? Three letters? A mirror?

For all those people Russia-side that were hoping, audaciously, that Russo-American tensions would ease should Obama get elected, well, Obama's talking tough, too. A resurgent Russia, he said, is a threat. Just what the Kremlin hardliners want to hear. Good job.

As Neil MacFarquhar pointed out in the Times today, Ahmadinejad took a much more measured tone on Israel from the UN podium this time around. According to MacFarquhar, he mildly maintained that Israel would "collapse of its own perfidy rather than be wiped out." So go easy there, guys.

Let's get the CNN Peoplemeter on this: Should we have another Holocaust?

Obama laid out his position on the designating-Iranian-Revolutionary-Guard-terrorists bill in a very artfully written op-ed in the Manchester Union Leader.

Note how he opposes the bill (and therefore set up a dovish sounding counterpart to then prime primary opponent Hillary Clinton) and briefly--just six words!--agrees that they are actually terrorists.

"It's Whipped Cream And Other Delights by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. I play it in the mornings, when I'm trying to wake up. It's a classic of the genre. I love that record."

Wait, so as long as we don't rudely announce our intention to bomb Pakistan, we're good, right? Just do it and let the Times dig it up later. Just, for Pete's sake, don't say it out loud. So rude.

Senator, you just called Pakistan "PAH-kee-stahn." However, as Clint noted, PAH-kee-stan is already taken as an unconventional-and-semi-annoying-pronunciation. By Obama. (He's already got TAHL-ee-bahn, too, for the record.) Afghanistan is still open for semi-annoying pronunciation, though, if you want it (perhaps you could start calling it Ahf-GHAN-ee-stahn? AF-gan-ih-stan?). If not, there's also CHEE-na...or Cah-NAH-dah...

Self quoting Fred Kaplan summarizing NYU Professor and Afghanistan expert Barnett Rubin:

Iraq's insurgency is based in Iraq; Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents are based mainly across the border in Pakistan. Iraq is urban, educated, and has great wealth, at least potentially, in its oil supplies; Afghanistan is rural, largely illiterate, and ranks as one of the world's five poorest countries. Iraq has some history as a cohesive nation (albeit as the result of a minority ruling sect oppressing the majority); Afghanistan never has and, given its geography, perhaps never will.

Moreover, the Taliban's insurgency is ideological, not ethno-sectarian (except incidentally). Therefore, while some warlords and tribes have allied themselves with the Taliban for opportunistic or nationalistic reasons, and therefore might be peeled away and co-opted, the conditions are not ripe for some sort of Taliban or Pashtun "Awakening." Nor is there any place where walls might isolate the insurgents.

Lehrer just said something about all his "five minute things" having run over. He seems somewhat concerned about this point of debate procedural arcana.

And I'm pretty sure he's the only one in the country who know's what he's talking about.

It's a red-letter evening for everyone's favorite crotchety-oil-baron-turned-wind-power-advocate. Tonight, T. Boone Pickens will run his very own post-debate "Live Event"--an online chat he's moderating, on PickensPlan.com, which is currently comprised mostly of photos of Boone sitting in his office (lots of wood paneling, lots of flat-screen TVs, lots of incredibly supple-looking tan leather chairs, in case you're curious), which in turn were ostensibly taken by the site's heralded "Boone Cam." Currently the "chat" is one-sided--"Keep your questions coming! Boone will be answering your questions as soon as the debate is over," the moderator noted--and the results of the Boone-tastic commentary are, let's just say, mixed:

9:50 [Comment From eazye]: HEY BOONE HOW BOUT DEM OSU COWBOYS

10:18 [Comment From Winona]: Obama mentioned Pickens in Lansing, Michigan this summer!!

10:19 [Comment From Rich]: Drill, drill, drill

10:26 [Comment From Guest]: It is interesting to here pieces of the PIckens Plan used by Obama in his answers tonight...

What will happen when TB dons his new-media PJs? Find out here.

Let's be clear. There is a difference between strategy and tactic. To wit, OED defines tactics as "the art or science of deploying military or naval forces in order of battle, and of performing warlike evolutions and maneuvers." Strategy, on the other hand, is "the art of a commander-in-chief; the art of projecting and directing the larger military movements and operations of a campaign." Just saying.

This is the scene at CJR HQ.

McCain won't look at Obama--and not just when he's delivering his points. (Maybe he's too busy looking into Putin's eyes, but it's pretty conspicuous.)

Justin can have Warshington. I'm impressed with Paak-ee-stahn.

Or he must be feeling extremely tired, or grumpy, or disengaged, or something. Selections from his debate live-blog:

9:13 - Come on, guys. Let's pick up the pace. So far this isn't even as interesting as a stump speech.

9:22 - If the audience-o-meter is any indication, these guys are putting the entire country to sleep.

9:31 - This is just excruciatingly boring.

9:39 - McCain: I hate President Bush. I'm a maverick!

Getting your money's worth, Mother Jones?

McCain calls out Obama for admitting on "a television program" that the surge exceeded beyond his "wildest expectations."

He's got the quote slightly wrong. I'm pretty sure he's referring to Obama's visit to The No Spin Zone, where Obama said “I’ve already said it’s succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.”

So "a television program" is McCain's euphemism for The O'Reilly Factor. Why no love for Bill-O? C'mon McCain! That's no way to stoke the base!!

Obama: 1. McCain: 0.

9:40: Stripes versus solids. McCain is wearing a striped tie; Obama's is solid.

Who is gonna sink the eight ball?

This is the first time I've seen anybody press either candidate on how the $700 billion (or whatever) bailout is going to affect his overall budgetary plan. They're going to have to change, in serious and specific ways.

"Is there a word where if you say it, it's automatically not true?" asks Kathy (a.k.a. McCain self-references, calls himself a maverick).

McCain brags about how he hasn't been elected as the senate's Ms. Congeniality. No, he hasn't. But Sarah Palin was elected as Wasilla's Ms. Congeniality, which is kind of shocking, given the record as portrayed in stories like this one from The New York Times.

"Debate the debate," CNN promised when touting its online "CNN Forum" before the debate began. It's a decent idea -- let the public live-blog the debate. Initially, I couldn't access the site, presumably because it was overloaded. I finally connected, but I sort of wish I hadn't. A sampling of the forum's meta-debate:

svmaja // Green Cove Springs, FL

Obama is an idiot and a liar... we are NOT dependent on middlel east oil... we, the US get more than 60% of our oil from the western hemisphere.. what a huge crock...

ParkerBahai // Alpharetta, GA


It's pretty funny, Jim Lehrer is trying to be both a debate moderator and a marriage counselor.

Aeic25 // Dowagiac, MI


WOW I CAN SEE HOW THIS IS GOING TO GO... McCain is having a hard time to even look at Obama I mean he looks like he is trying not to look at him.

I mean, it's still better than what we're doing, but that really isn't saying very much...

9:33pm: Obama touts Google for Government. Yes, transparency. Is Sarah Palin listening?

McCain's "It’s hard to reach across the aisle from that far to the left" line just got a very audible chuckle from the famously staid Lehrer. A deviation from Lehrer's play-it-"absolutely straight" debate-moderation approach? Well done, Senator!

Just as a fact-checky like diversion, it's worth reading a bit more about how The National Journal (which is the 'study' that McCain cites) arrives at their definition of "most liberal."

In short, if you miss a lot of votes (which presidential candidates sort of do) the rankings come out all screwy.

One half hour in, barely 5-10 minutes on the CRISIS (right?), and zip on foreign policy. A lot on earmarks, though!

Jim Lehrer seems big on getting the candidates to, you know, talk amongst themselves. In this, he is ostensibly subscribing to the First Law of Second-Person Dynamics: the assumption that addressing someone directly will cause the address-er to be more diplomatic and, er, politic in his or her address. A noble strategy, but will it work? Doubtful.

9:20pm: Still? Earmarks?

Also, Obama is at least occasionally addressing McCain directly as "John." (For instance: "That's not true, John.") McCain is distinctly addressing Obama as "Senator Obama." Didn't Lehrer say he wanted the two to talk to each other?

Drinking games for the debates are nothing new. Here's a review of the various possibilities:

San Diego Union-Tribune
The Good: "Swig from a bottle of peach Schnapps when Georgia is mentioned."
The Bad: Requires too many types of liquor. We're in a recession. Come on.

Comedy Central's Indecision 2008
The Good: "Every time McCain refers to his running mate, stand up, face Russia and finish whatever bottle is in front of you."
The Bad: Requires drinking Everclear grain alcohol. Gross.

Huffington Post
The Good: "Every time John McCain says "my friends", spit out your drink and shout "I am not your friend" at the television."
The Bad: Again, we're not made of money. We can't buy twenty different kinds of booze.

Wonkette
The Good: "When Obama acknowledges that the financial crisis may limit the amount of Hope and Change his administration can afford: Immediately finish off the best bottle of liquor in the house, because who the hell is ever going to see that again."
The Bad: Relies too much on pharmaceuticals. With our current health care system, prescriptions are pricey.

Radar
The Good: "Barack Obama admits that he only hacked into Sarah Palin's e-mail account to see if there were bikini pics."
The Bad: None, this one's pretty good, actually.

Good luck!

I am very glad that, at long last, America has a candidate who is bound and determined to reform "Warshington."

9:08pm: CNN has an "Audience Reaction" meter on the bottom on the screen. And it's flat-lining the whole time. At least Lehrer is getting sassy.

9:05 - We're watching the presidential debate on CNN, which includes an "Audience Reaction" meter as a permanent chyron on the screen. Per the Reaction-o-Meter, one can track Republican, Democratic, and Independent reaction to the proceedings--via the dips and climbs of red, blue, and green lines, respectively. You can't help but think of a heart monitor...and, so far, the candidates are flat-lining. Oh, wait: except when Jim Lehrer talks, in which case the lines actually seem to dip.

A good portion of the CJR staff, plus assorted Columbia-affiliated interlopers, is gathered in the CJR offices to attempt a live-blog of tonight's debate. Likely, this attempt will fail, or peter out quietly sometime around 9:32. Nonetheless, we will try our best.

9:10pm: Let's talk about it -- we can negotiate it right here, Lehrer says about the bailout plan.

Does this mean no one had to go to Washington?

9:25- On second thought, I'll live blog with the same format as everyone else. Switching to single posts.

9:20- "Definition of rich"? Saddleback callback!

9:19- What's that classy backdrop? Why, it seems to be the Declaration of Independence! (A document which precedes the creation of the presidency by a dozen years.)

9:15- McCain goes into the bear DNA. Isn't that sort of outre after Palin's seal pup DNA thing? And why exactly is Jim letting them talk about earmarks at a foreign policy/financial crisis debate?

9:12- "I'm just determined to get you all to talk to each other. I'm going to try!" Jimmy Bo Bo asks Obama to address McCain directly, and takes these supposedly flexible debate rules for a test drive.

9:08- "Let's go back to my question..." An admirable redirect from Jimmy Bo-Bo.

9:06- Obligatory Kennedy shout out from McCain. Predictable.

9:02- Right up front Lehrer lays out that national security includes the global financial crisis. So that settles that....

Lazy pre-debate shot selection on CNN, where Michael Ware is busy adjusting his underwear. Much like America.

For months, the business pages and political pages felt so different in tone, content and intensity that reading them was like flipping between different movies.

The business pages have been an endless saloon fight, with screaming, shouting, tables being turned over, bottles being broken over heads.

The political pages were more like something out of a period drama, with people in waistcoats and breeches trading pointed ripostes and huffily challenging each other to duels. And even when some of the characters lost their temper, the argument had nothing, nothing at all, to do with the fight in the saloon.

Well, that’s over, of course. The saloon fight has finally broken through the fake wall that separates politics and policy from their economic consequences. Cowboys are sprawled over the harpsichord. People in wigs and buckskin are beating each other with candelabras. Spittoons and snuff are flying. Fuld, McCain, A.I.G., Chris Matthews, credit default swaps, Obama—finally, it’s all one movie.

And tonight we have a presidential debate.

There may be a temptation among some journalists and others to see tonight’s debate as trivial next to the great financial calamity now unfolding all over the newspaper and to wonder whether one has much to do with the other.

The debate may seem to some to be pure political theater, especially so on the same day as the news of the largest bank failure in United States history and after recent weeks that have seen the ad hoc nationalization of a large segment of the country’s financial system—an historic, costly, unplanned policy event the consequences of which are utterly unknown. Moreover, despite the costs, risks and hardship it represents, this massive and spontaneous socialization of private sector misconduct still hasn’t been enough to restore confidence to global financial markets, hence a likely bailout the likes of which we have never, ever, seen.

But to miss the connection or underplay the debate’s importance would be to make a common mistake, one that sees the financial calamity as beyond an ordinary person’s understanding, somehow inevitable, like a natural phenomenon, or part of a business cycle, or in any way unconnected to policy decisions made by political leaders.

In fact, the more we learn about this financial crisis, the more we learn how deeply embedded its roots are in policy, the fruit of politics. And I’m not just talking about laws passed by Congress and signed by presidents—Gramm-Leach-Bliley, which helped to super-charge the financial-services sector, and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which blocked regulation of the instruments that sank A.I.G., although those are vitally important. It is beyond the administrative rules issued and executed by agencies, regulations promulgated, appointments made and not made, judicial philosophies, though those are important, too. It is even beyond political ideologies, but that matters most of all.

The debate is where the connection is made for all of us between the political and financial narratives. And it will be one of these two debaters who will end up as president, the only actor big enough to dictate both of them.

Like the eye at the top of the pyramid on a dollar bill, the president radiates the culture that flows through the policymaking and regulatory apparatus of the government, who sends the verbal and nonverbal cues that signals to business and government how the game is going to be played, whether the people on the taxpayer and public side of the table will feel empowered, or undermined, when facing counterparts from Wall Street and the corporate sector. The letter of the law aside: Will regulation be drama or farce?

Historians, investigators and, hopefully, prosecutors, will spend many years plumbing the record of this great financial catastrophe. What they will find is it is in the person who won past presidential debates, in 2004, 2000, and yes, 1996, 1992, and before, where the narratives came together.

This week, the financial crisis dominated the headlines, and rightly so—it's a huge, history-making story. But the myopic financial focus meant that other worthy news items inevitably got lost in the shuffle. Below, a selection of those stories:

— Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin are in negotiations for military partnership, including the development of nuclear energy.

— Alberto Gonzales that President Bush personally directed him to John Ashcroft's hospital room in the infamous wiretap renewal incident—and that in another instance the President asked him to fabricate fictitious notes.

— A new US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Afghanistan, which reportedly describes the situation there as "grim", will likely be kept classified until after the presidential election.

— Newly released documents revealed that, as The New York Times put it,

Senior White House officials played a central role in deliberations in the spring of 2002 about whether the Central Intelligence Agency could legally use harsh interrogation techniques while questioning an operative of Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah, according to newly released documents.

— Todd Palin announced he will ignore the subpoena he received to cooperate in the TrooperGate investigation.

— Sarah Palin will conduct a separate probe in TrooperGate, run, according to the AP, "by people she can fire."

— Sarah Palin may have her own pastor problem.

— The National Enquirer is claiming that Sarah Palin had an affair with Todd's business partner, Brad Hanson, while she was mayor of Wasilla. Its sources include "no less than three members of the man’s family including one by sworn affidavit."

— Freddie Mac, one of the mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis, paid $15,000 a month between the end of 2005 and last month to John McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis.

— Some of Bush's intel professionals are now advising Barack Obama.

— Britain may change its rules of royal succession to allow Catholics and--gasp!--girls to take the throne.

— Editors from The New York Times conducted a long sit-down with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

— This thing called the General Assembly of the United Nations met in New York City.

During a presidential campaign—any presidential campaign—two candidates start out on opposing sides of the political spectrum. They disagree boldly. They promote distinctly different positions. And then, as election day nears, they abandon their bold proposals and adopt the Goldilocks approach. Not too left, not too right, just center.

This is how campaign rhetoric works, and campaign reporters have to look past this and evaluate the candidates’ positions based on their legislative records and their pre-presidential-campaign positions. This is how the public and the press avoid getting spun in the talking points tornado.

Today’s piece in the Los Angeles Times ignores these rules of engagement when asserting that McCain’s and Obama’s foreign policy positions aren’t that different.

Even as they campaign on their differences, John McCain and Barack Obama have been quietly recalibrating their messages on foreign policy in ways that often have moved them closer to the political center -- and to each other.

Well, yes, the candidates are tweaking their messages to appeal to the greatest number of voters so that they can, um, win the election.

In a strangely anonymous quote—couldn’t they get someone to say this on the record?—an unidentified political strategist says:

Everybody's trying to grab the same voters in the middle," said a Democratic strategist who was not authorized to speak for the Obama campaign and did not want to be identified. "They're reading the same polls and competing for the same voters.

Still, you can’t confuse “record” and “rhetoric,” “policy position” and “stump speech.” McCain and Obama do have substantially different ideas on foreign policy—differences that may come to the forefront in tonight’s debate, and ones that ought not be brushed over.

A few examples: Obama favors meeting with international leaders without pre-conditions; McCain does not. Obama is ardently committed to restoring America’s standing in the world damaged by the Bush presidency; this is much less central to McCain’s world view. McCain is more hawkish; Obama favors diplomacy. Obama called for restraint in the first days of the Russia-Georgia conflict; McCain proclaimed “We are all Georgians.”

The list is long and the differences are stark. If the candidates move toward the center at the stump, it is the media’s job to remind voters what roads they took to get there. And, if the highway and byways take the shape of hairpin curves and U-turns, the media needs to help voters, forgive the extended metaphor, read the map.

According to a September 22 article in the Army Times, the two soldiers whose photos were doctored by the U.S. Army were shot and killed by a fellow solider on Sept. 14.

The article reads:

A 1 a.m. counseling session at a small outpost in Iraq took a fatal turn Sept. 14, Army officials say, when the soldier being counseled opened fire with his M4 on a fellow team leader and their squad leader.

Kevin Larson, spokesman for the Fort Stewart Army base in Georgia, told CJR that the name of the shooter, a non-commissioned officer from the same unit, will not be released until he arrives in the United States and is officially charged. Currently, he is en route to the base from a detention center in Kuwait.

The victims, Staff Sgt. Darris J. Dawson, 24, and Sgt. Wesley R. Durbin, 26, were stationed a few miles south of Baghdad in the city of Tunnis. The Department of Defense classified their deaths as the result of “wounds sustained in a non-hostile incident.”

A CNN.com article from Sept 18 voiced the frustrations of Dawson’s family. According to the article, the family said “the military has told them nothing about the incident: no details on his death, no information at all.”

Details of the shooting will be confirmed depending on whether the shooter is charged, according to Larson. However, the Army Times reported the shooting occurred during a “counseling session,” while an article from the Pensacola News Journal states the soldiers were killed during a “performance review.”

When asked about the Photoshopped pictures of the deceased soldiers, Larson told CJR:

We trusted in the unit to provide [the photos of the soldiers]. We took them at face value and had no intent to deceive the public. We […] didn’t question the validity of the photos, since we [Army and Department of Defense] adhere to the same standards that journalists do, in that respect.

We’ll be following this story.

The New York Times's lead story this morning was, naturally, a summary of last night's dramatic meta-meltdown: the meltdown of Congressional negotiations over the meltdown of the U.S. economy over the meltdown of the credit markets over the meltdown of...well, you get the idea.

Anyway, the piece takes an unusual tack for a lead-story, breaking-news narrative: rather than simply present the takeaway of last night's West Wing-meets-General Hospital-esque escapades--that negotiations broke down--it presents a gripping tick-tock of the dramatic events that led to that breakdown.

Under most circumstances, tick-tocks in news stories have an air of cop-out, being, as they generally are, data-dumps masquerading as news stories. Timeline-driven narratives are the ultimate show-don't-tell conceit, and, as such, they're particularly convenient as a format for writers who'd prefer to avoid, you know, making a point.

However. In the Times's case, the tick-tock format works. Not only is a timeline the most straightforward way to negotiate the murky terrain that divides the meltdown's actual events from the politics that underline them, but it's also the most accurate way to do justice to a day that really did play out like a political soap opera. The narrative--reported by David Herszenhorn, Carl Hulse, and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, with a reporting assist from Elisabeth Bumiller, and written by Stolberg--is masterful, packed with equal parts detailed reporting and narrative tension.

Compare that to The Washington Post's take on the meta-meltdown, which, though informative and relatively nuanced, reads like pretty much every standard news story about back-room Congressional dealings.

Tick-tocks, however, don't always work so well. Take this long, meandering narrative, which aired on MSNBC this morning:

Let's take you through that tumultuous day yesterday. It was 10:00 when they began to meet the House and Senate negotiators. Senate Banking Committee member Chris Dodd came out and said they had a fundamental agreement on principles. Barney Frank chairman on the House side concurred. Robert Bennett, senator on the Banking Committee--the only reason Bennett was there was because the top Republican on that committee, Richard Shelby, did not want to participate--could not go along with the way this plan was shaping up. The last principal there was Spencer Baucus. House Republicans were very angry with Baucus after that meeting, telling me behind the scenes he had no business there representing the interests of the GOP conference to that group--put them in a very difficult position that they are still digging out of because now they are being portrayed as blowing up this deal.

Moving along the timeline, at 2:00, those people came out that we just talked about. at 4:00 they sat down in the White House in that Cabinet Room meeting, that dramatic meeting we talked about, senators Obama and McCain, all the principals from Capitol Hill, leadership and committee chairman, that ended in a deadlock when John Boehner insisted House conservative voices be heard in this plan and they weren't. They talked about some of the specifics. It was not received well. Congressional talks ended about 10:00 last night with Frank and Todd again excoriating Senator Baucus. He said he did not have authority to negotiate. Put down his white paper, House Republican principles and left the room.

The takeaway? There may be a time for tick-tocks. But it doesn't come often. And, when it does, it takes expertise to make the tock really tick.

[The New York Times] has been around a long time. They know their stuff.

So says Hulk Hogan, the now semi-retired professional wrestler and former WWF star, as quoted in the current issue of Us Weekly declaring the Times "winner" of the "Celeb Feud of the Week" that is Rachel Zoe (a Hollywood stylist with a reality TV show) v. the New York Times (which harshly reviewed Zoe's show).

So, New York Times, the McCain campaign may say you're no longer "a journalistic organization," but you've got The Hulk in your corner.

Meanwhile, I guess The Hulk isn't a grudge-holder. From the Times's unenthusiastic 2005 view of Hulk's own reality TV show, Hogan Knows Best:

But the challenge with a straightforward series premise of day-to-day family life is finding people who come off as either a little crazy (Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne and their children) or at least a little clever. (The world is still waiting.) The Hogans are neither, at least not on camera.

What’s the most common question currently being posed to the staff of the Oxford Eagle, the daily newspaper that serves the town of twenty thousand that’s been taken over for tonight’s debate? "Where should I eat?"

In fact, according to Eagle news editor Jon Scott, someone from Jim Lehrer’s staff called asking just that.

In addition to fielding calls from hungry visiting media, the staff has been covering the local angle: how the debates are affecting the community. “We know our readers, we’re glad that we have a unique role. While everyone else is covering this for the country, we’re interested in how local people are involved, how it’s affecting a town, and everyone else is covering the debates,” said senior staff writer Lucy Schultze. New traffic patterns and security measures have been of particular importance.

As the home of the University of Mississippi, Oxford is used to large crowds descending on the town. “It’s not worse than a typical football weekend,” says staff writer Melanie Addington.

But the visitors aren’t the typical football fans. Last week, Addington befriended a journalist from Norway who arrived without a car, and the pair have become carpool buddies. And she also spoke with a group of university students who were upset that a journalist wanted them to talk about racial tensions there—a non-issue, according to many on campus.

Other frustrations have been logistical: Although the Eagle’s office is located less than a mile from the Ford Center (where the debates will take place), the new traffic patterns mean that getting there requires an almost half-hour drive.

The paper’s photographer Bruce Newman learned what it’s like to be part of a media pack. The Commercial Appeal, from Memphis, caught Newman turning himself into a pretzel to get a shot at a press conference this week.

Schultze says locals are clamoring for celebrities: Tom Brokaw was seen at the Bottletree Bakery in town, and every seat in the cafe was filled with an Ole Miss student waiting for just such an encounter.

The town square is decked out in omnipresent red, white, and blue bunting, with signs welcoming the debate decorating store windows alongside student artwork. “Shop owners have been going all out to make their window displays make patriotic,” Schultze says. And a local artist created a window painting at a cafe which depicts Obama and McCain having coffee together. It’s called, “Strange, Indeed.”

Now that the debate is definitely on, both the town and the Eagle are breathing a sigh of relief. “For us in the newsroom and shared by journalists everywhere, we didn’t want to do it all over again, in the midst of our regular beats, other news still happens,” says staff writer Alyssa Schnugg.

For example, the local police set up a drunk-driving checkpoint last weekend and ended up making 100 arrests, exceeding jail capacity. “It could be related to the debates, though,” Schnugg says.

From McCain's most recent pool report:

McCain now boarding plane at DCA with Cindy, Salter, Rudy Giuliani, wife Judith, and other aides plus pool.

Heading to Memphis, 1:50 minute flight, then motorcade to site

General atmosphere is utter confusion.

The New Republic has compiled short videos highlighting some Obama and McCain career debate moments. Take a look if you can't wait until 9pm EST...

As a native of northern California, I can safely say that it’s easy to envy anybody living in or visiting the Bay Area this weekend. Tomorrow, the revamped California Academy of Sciences reopens in its historic Golden Gate Park home after a four-year hiatus. As a kid, I remember seeing a two-headed snake in the old museum, forever convincing me that biology is awesome (and, at the time, that monsters were real).

It was pleasing, then, to see the grand reopening get some attention in the national press. The coverage, not surprisingly, has focused on the architectural achievement of Renzo Piano, the high-profile Italian architect responsible for the $488 million structure, which is expected to earn a platinum rating—the highest designation—from the U.S. Green Building Council. Strangely, The New York Times’s review, published Tuesday, doesn’t mention that fact, despite beig one of the more well-written (albeit ethereal) critiques of the new building:

The idea is to create a balance between public and private, inside and out, the Cartesian order of the mind and the unruly world of nature.

A glass lobby allows you to gaze straight through the building to the park on the other side. Other views open into exhibition spaces with their own microclimates. The entire building serves as a sort of specimen case, a framework for pondering the natural world while straining to disturb it as little as possible.

The academy’s hometown San Francisco Chronicle published an architectural review of its own. Its best contribution to the overall coverage, however, was an excellent story about the turbulent planning process that began back in 1997. The piece leads with the wonderfully ironic observation, “It started with a bad idea.”

That inauspicious beginning is important to note when considering the great expectations that always accompany such projects, and it’s worth digging into some the academy-related articles that appeared earlier this year. Indeed, the Chronicle published a fascinating piece last November that described the motivations behind the ambitious remodel:

It's called the Bilbao Effect, in reference to the free-form Frank Gehry-designed art museum that opened in Bilbao, Spain, a decade ago and transformed an unremarkable river port town into a major tourist destination. In the first three years of its existence, according to the Financial Times, Gehry's titanium-clad magnet pulled in an estimated $500 million in new business and $100 million in taxes for Bilbao.

All around the world, cities were seized by major museum lust. They craved spectacular structures, preferably designed by big-name architects, that would repeat the 1997 Bilbao branding miracle of quality, prestige and revenue potential…

[Yet] Pleasing and gratifying as all this progress may be, it does come with certain disorienting costs and effects. To a greater degree than we may recognize at first, and for longer than we expect, new museums are an awful lot about themselves and less about what's inside. Call it the Bilbao Side Effect. By virtue of their own notoriety and splashy drawing power, these high-profile houses have a way of obscuring their presumptive prime function: of displaying art in the most felicitous and revealing ways possible. People come to see the building, in other words, and regard the contents as a secondary concern.

It appears, however, that Academy of Sciences is so far passing muster, even among the most skeptical critics. Earlier this month, Newsweek published an essay by Cathleen McGuigan that was likeable for its cynical, outside-the-fold attitude about the latest building fad:

I hate green architecture. I can't stand the hype, the marketing claims, the smug lists of green features that supposedly transform a garden-variety new building into a structure fit for Eden… Achieving real sustainability is much more complicated than the publicity suggests. And that media roar is only getting louder. The urge to build green is exploding: more than 16,000 projects are now registered with the U.S. Green Building Council as intending to go for a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)—or sustainable—certification, up from just 573 in 2000.

… So when I come upon a beautiful sustainable building that doesn't scream green, it cheers me up. The California Academy of Sciences, opening later this month in San Francisco, is a perfect example. It replaces the old science museum that was damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Its design is sensitive to its place and history: the new building doesn't gobble up more space on its spectacular site in Golden Gate Park, and its architect, Renzo Piano, was careful to go no higher—36 feet—than the original structure. The most obvious ecofeature of his elegantly simple glass-sided pavilion is the green roof: a rolling 2.5-acre terrain, inspired in part by the surrounding hills, it cleverly disguises, under its two biggest bumps, the domes of the planetarium and of the rainforest exhibit underneath.

To be sure, it seems that the new academy has not forsaken science in the pursuit of art. Last October, the Chronicle ran an article that focused on the planned exhibits rather than the architecture, concluding, “Take a deep breath, science buffs - and get ready to be blown away.” And, last March, The New York Times had a piece that described some the research-oriented lessons that have already been learned. Apparently, the penguin exhibit at the last museum was not terribly exciting because the amphibious creatures tended to “huddle on dry land” rather than engage in acrobatic swimming exercises that enthrall visitors. But:

Since 2004, when the academy moved to temporary quarters, scientists have used underwater jets to simulate currents in the penguin tank. Penguins like to swim in moving water, so the jets “completely changed their behavior,” said Pam Schaller, a senior aquatic biologist at the academy. The jets were such a success that they are being included in the penguin tank at the new museum.

All of this makes me very happy that the National Association of Science Writers’ annual meeting is taking place at Stanford this year, which will afford me some time to go see the new academy for myself. I know the albino alligator is still there; I wonder about the two-headed snake?

Over the last few years, the war along the Afghan-Pakistan border has progressed from scattered bombing incidents to almost daily reports of American incursions with Pakistanis returning fire—now, even without American troops having to enter Pakistani territory. Is the U.S. at war with Pakistan? If history is any guide, the answer is a resounding “not yet.”

The U.S. has launched attacks on al Qaeda and militant leaders in Pakistan since shortly after September 11, 2001. Whenever they could identify a known leader, or “person of significance,” an unidentified missile would blow up a compound, and blame would fall on the U.S. One of the earliest was a 2004 incident, in which the Pashtun tribal elder Nek Muhammed died in an alleged Predator missile strike. Since then, numerous unidentified missiles assumed to come from orbiting drones have exploded in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA. The use of drone-fired missiles is so popular—they are considered “clean,” inexpensive, and relatively low-risk by foreign policy experts—that reports of their usage are almost common (including one missile strike that barely missed Al-Qaeda’s number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri).

After a recent rule change authorizing cross border raids, U.S. Central Command, which oversees the war in Afghanistan, has supposedly attempted two incursions into Pakistani territory: a pre-dawn raid on September 3, and an unconfirmed report of a pair of helicopters driven back by ground fire from the Pakistani Army. The September 3 raid was the first since a quietly reported “hot pursuit” in 2006 that found several special operations solders inside Pakistan, pursuing militants who had crossed the border into Afghanistan to launch attacks.

These events have gained a lot of attention—whether hyperventilating essays by Christopher Hitchens or analysts’ dour predictions of increased winter violence, concern seems to be at a fever pitch.

The depth of this concern is unwarranted. Missing from the excited calls for another “Awakening” movement is an understanding of Pakistan’s history before it was Pakistan. Tribal unrest, even Islamist-fueled tribal unrest, is a regular and cyclical occurrence. While it presents a danger that must be addressed, the recurrence of tribal unrest in the FATA does not warrant the panic currently gripping U.S. policy circles.

For well over 100 years, the central government that establishes some measure of control over the Pashtun tribal areas—whether British or Pakistani—has been caught in a cycle of violence and truces with the tribes along the Frontier. Tribal conflicts, often driven by radical and charismatic Islamic fundamentalists, have characterized this century of violence.

In 1897, a British fort in Malakand faced down a rampaging horde of 10,000 warriors led by Mullah Mastun, the “Mad Mullah of Malakand,” who roused his troops by proclaiming the Prophet’s desire to rid their homelands of the infidel British. After much violence, the British put down the insurrection, only to see another charismatic leader, the Faqir of Ipi, emerge in 1937. The British never defeated him, and 40,000 troops played a violent game of hide and seek in the mountains of Waziristan all the way until Partition in 1947. The Third Anglo-Afghan War in 1919 featured the Amir of Afghanistan inciting these same Pashtun tribesmen to abandon their posts as British foot soldiers to fight for a free Pashtun Afghanistan.

Just after Partition, the government of Afghanistan again stirred up the border tribesmen, attempting to split them from the newly formed Pakistan. In the 1970s, as the Balochi tribesmen further south were agitating for independence, the Pashtun tribes began to rebel against the central government in solidarity. Tribal violence in 1980s and 1990s was largely directed at Kashmir and a war-torn Afghanistan; only after September 11, when the U.S. supposedly pressured Pakistan’s military dictator Pervez Musharraf to take action against the tribal groups in the FATA, did this violence become a pressing matter of American national security.

Unfortunately, this sort of context is missing from almost all media discussions of the current spate of tribal violence. While it’s unrealistic to demand a detailed history of conflict cycles in every article on this topic, some recognition of how “normal” these sorts of uprisings really are would make an effective deterrent to the near panic now inching its way into the White House.

That panic has dramatic consequences. U.S. raids into Pakistan are a fool’s game if not carried out with the utmost care: the only entity more despised in Pakistan than Musharraf is the U.S. Reports that drone attacks are “shots in the dark” are not encouraging; neither was that September 3rd raid, which was sloppy in almost every way.

Normally, pre-dawn raids surprise the targeted compound’s occupants while they’re asleep, making a capture or killing much easier. But this raid happened during Ramadan, when people rise long before dawn to eat and drink before their daylight fast begins; nearby villagers rushed toward the waiting helicopters, shouting slogans of protest. Reports that the raid also might have caused upwards of twenty civilian deaths highlights the ham-fistedness of the move. As viscerally appealing as such actions may be back home—Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has promised to strike targets inside Pakistan if need be—it is impossible for the U.S. to come out of these raids looking good.

From this follows a fundamental tenet of counterinsurgency: a population-centric strategy. Current U.S. strategy does not focus on the FATA’s people; it only tries to kill its leaders. These routine insertions also carry the risk of American soldiers dying at the hands of the Pakistani Army—an event that would almost assuredly make matters worse. If the U.S. is to regularly violate Pakistani territory and preemptively strike targets suspected of having launched cross-border attacks, then the rules of the game change. The U.S. loses the right to complain about those militant raids; the danger of killing the wrong individual (or even tens of innocent civilians) assumes a whole new political dimension. Unless the U.S. has negotiated some sort of secret memorandum with the Pakistani government, these raids represent nothing more than a declaration of war. That is surely a path no one wants to walk.

With the economy going to pot, it’s not surprising that the presidential candidates haven’t devoted much time to issues of science—R&D funding, education, stem cells, oceans, etc.

Thankfully, that hasn’t stopped reporters from poking and prodding as much as possible. The most recent example of that initiative is the journal Nature’s attempt, published Wednesday, to get the candidates to answer a series of submitted questions on climate and energy. It is a commendable effort, but, unfortunately, at this point it seems that journalists are just reprinting the candidates’ same answers, unable to obtain new insights into their positions.

That isn’t necessarily reporters’ fault—after all, only Barack Obama bothered to respond to Nature; John McCain failed to reply—and it certainly doesn’t mean that the distinguished journal should not have published the information it had. Given the candidates’ reluctance to broach scientific topics on the campaign trail, it doesn’t hurt for publications to rehash existing material, whether or not they are able to contribute fresh information. Nonetheless, if a news outlet is going to bother submitting a list of questions to the candidates this late in the game, it should try to phrase its questions so that they stand the greatest chance of provoking a novel response. Take, for example, the following questions submitted by Nature:

• What methods would you support to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions? Are you in favour of a carbon tax, a cap-and-trade system, or some combination of the two?

• How much would you be willing to invest in developing and deploying alternative and renewable energy technologies?

• Where does nuclear power fit in with your vision for the US energy plan? And how do you plan to tackle the problem of nuclear waste?

Come on. Both Obama and McCain have reiterated their basic plans for cap-and-trade, renewable energy, and nuclear many times over, and this information is available at scores of news pages, in addition to the candidates’ own Web sites. These issues beg for more detailed exploration. Nature could have rephrased its questions to read something like this:

• We know your basic outline for cap-and-trade, but do you favor inclusion of any one of the so-called “safety valve” measures that would put a ceiling on the price of carbon? Or better yet, if cap-and-trade fails, do you support using the Clean Air Act and the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions instead?

• We know, broadly, how much you plan to spend (and not spend) on renewable energy, but there is a classic chicken-and-egg problem between producers and suppliers, which exists in both the transportation and utilities industries. The former want the latter to invest in storage and transmission capacity before they invest in research and development; the latter want the opposite. At the federal level, how do you plan to help break that impasse?

• We know your general feelings about the potential for nuclear’s role in our energy economy, and your plans for and concerns about waste. But financing has plagued nuclear development just as much as worries about security and disposal. In fact, it is likely that nuclear would need even more government support than technologies like wind and solar. How far would you go, as president, to help make nuclear financially viable?

Who knows? Politicians are, if nothing else, artful dodgers, and they might have ducked these questions as well. Indeed, one of Nature’s better queries— “Would you support a ban on new coal-fired power plants that do not incorporate carbon capture and storage,” which was a good twist on the more standard “What role do you see coal playing in America’s energy future”—failed to provoke an interesting response. What is certain, however, is that most of the questions, as Nature phrased them, were guaranteed to produce the same canned responses readers have seen before.

Another thing that surely thwarted a better response is that the journal posed the exact same queries to both candidates, which seems absolutely ridiculous. Henceforth, questions must be tailored to the individual candidates, taking into consideration their previous statements and different positions.

More interesting than Nature’s presentation of the candidates’ (that is to say, Obama’s) answers to its questions is a corresponding analytical piece on the challenges that either candidate will face in achieving his policy goals as president. It would have been interesting if, instead of posting the candidates’ positions in a different article, Nature had woven them into its analysis. The other thing the journal could have done to better serve readers (especially given the McCain’s camp’s failure to respond to its questions) would have been to spotlight a similar question-and-answer exercise recently published by Science Debate 2008.

The efforts by that group—which comprises a very impressive list of scientists, academics, journalists, politicians, and business figures—have been perhaps the most fruitful to date. Both Obama and McCain replied (though notably, McCain took two weeks longer than Obama to submit his answers). That said, the group’s campaign, in itself, shows just how hard it is to “get more” out of the candidates. Obama and McCain declined an actual debate, the group’s main goal, and Science Debate 2008 has lobbied for months to get responses to its fourteen submitted questions. The answers they finally received are detailed and worth reading, but close evaluation shows that even they don’t go too far beyond what Obama and McCain have already stated in online platform positions (though this is less true for McCain, whose printed material is not as comprehensive as Obama’s).

Again, none of this is meant to deride Nature or any other outlet that has struggled to pry more information from the candidates. But it should be a reminder that, with only a month left to go until the election, reporters should be careful to ask questions that are the least likely to produce the same old answers.

Did Katie Couric show more, you know, deference to Joe Biden than she did to Sarah Palin in her interviews with the two candidates? The American Spectator says yes:

CBS New anchor Katie Couric ordered staff to drop all references to "Governor" or "Gov." from her interview with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. When a staff member pointed out that in other venues, Couric and CBS News had referred to Governor Palin's opponent, Joe Biden, using his title of "Senator" or the abbreviation, Couric, according to a CBS News editorial aide, sought approval from CBS News management to drop the "Governor" reference during her broadcast interview with Palin that began on Wednesday night.

CBS denies preferential treatment. "It's not true," an unnamed network source told the Spectator. "We treat everyone the same."

And yet. On Couric's CBS blog, Couric & Co., the transcripts of the interviews suggest a different standard as far as honorifics go. Here's the transcript of Couric's September 22 interview with Joe Biden, emphasis mine:

Katie Couric: How is it preparing for the debates?

Sen. Joe Biden: Well, it's kind of hard to prepare because I don't know what she thinks. There's been no -- I don't know a lot about her, so I have to assume for purposes of the debate that she agrees with John on everything.

And here's the transcript of her interview with Sarah Palin, emphasis, again, mine:

Katie Couric: You've cited Alaska's proximity to Russia as part of your foreign policy experience. What did you mean by that?

Sarah Palin: That Alaska has a very narrow maritime border between a foreign country, Russia, and, on our other side, the land-boundry that we have with Canada. It's funny that a comment like that was kinda made to … I don't know, you know … reporters.

Hmm. I'd also point out that the discrepancy seems to bear out in Couric's own word choices. Take this sentence from her Biden interview: "Polls show that Sen. McCain and Sarah Palin are making inroads among white female voters who are less educated," Couric told him. Again: Sen. McCain. Sarah Palin.

Still. Coincidence? Yeah, probably. Slip of the tongue? Yeah, probably. And, either way, it may be a moot point. Couric's September 24 interview with Palin, whatever it lacked in special sauce, made up for in G-Love:

[h/t: Gawker]

One of Chris Cillizza's eagle-eyed readers makes a good catch: A Wall Street Journal story posted this morning (before, of course, the first presidential debate--indeed, before McCain had even announced that he will, in fact, be participating in it) features an ad declaring, "McCAIN WINS DEBATE!"

Below the ad's image of a smilingly victorious, flag-ensconced candidate, and the all-caps declaration of his victory, smaller text notes: "Paid for by McCain-Palin 2008."

The ad has since been removed from the WSJ page. See the screen shot of it here.

Well. Like a hover craft meeting the mothership, Mike Huckabee will finally, as has long been rumored, get his own show on Fox News. It will be called--wait for it--Huckabee ("I'm sure the name will make it easy for all of you to find it," Huckabee tells fans on his Web site), and will likely be chock full of delightfully folksy aphorisms involving farm animals. Huckabee's debut episodes will air this Saturday and Sunday at 8 p.m. EST.

[h/t: Michael Calderone]

McCain has just announced that he will be attending tonight's presidential debate in Oxford, Mississippi hosted by Jim Lehrer.

Seconds before cable outlets announced the news, I got off the phone with Anne Bell, a spokesperson for McNeil/Lehrer Productions, the business arm of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, who confirmed to me that, no matter what McCain decided, the debate--or something like it--would have proceeded under the auspices of the Commission on Presidential Debates.

“No matter what, there will be a program," she said.

"The Commission asked Jim Lehrer to host a debate, and the Commission is going ahead with the debate. Jim Lehrer will fulfill that obligation," she added. "There will be a 90 minute program. What shape it will be, we don’t know."

With McCain back on board, that question seems to be answered. The University of Mississippi's chancellor had proposed an Obama only town hall had McCain not attended.

On today's American Morning, CNN's Susanne Malveaux conducted the obvious ultimate person-on-the-street story, reported from the current Ground Zero of the American Political Media: Oxford, Mississippi. What do you think, she asked various species of POS, about the potential of John McCain not showing up to debate tonight?

"The consensus in the hometown of Ole Miss: sheer disbelief," Malveaux declared, a note of melodrama in her voice. Here's the evidence of that disbelief, courtesy of various Ole Miss street-people:

"We were just horrified."

"It was a shock. It was like getting kicked in the stomach to find out that McCain doesn't want to show."

"He did hurt my feelings yesterday."

And, finally, the adorably sassy Anne Morgan, a 9-year-old from Oxford, predicting the political fallout of a missed debate for Candidate McCain: "He's gonna lose the state's votes--half of 'em, anyway."

Well. Morgan will be relieved to know that McCain's campaign just announced: the GOP nominee is Oxford-bound! The debate's on! Students, street people, and visiting media of Ole Miss, rejoice!

Update: The NRO's Rich Lowry, via Michael Calderone, reports that:

One side effect of McCain's debate gambit is, I'm told, that everyone at Ole Miss now hates him. It will make for a very hostile audience tonight among those students and faculty attending. He might have to apologize for creating the uncertainty or make some explanation up front, which is never ideal.

The extraordinary times continue. Nobody’s really framing it this way, but a 1930’s-style run on the bank just felled the country’s sixth-largest bank, Washington Mutual. It’s by far the biggest bank failure in American history, and JPMorgan Chase immediately picked its assets up.

The Times has great detail, reporting that the government was slinking around behind WaMu’s back looking for rescuers and that the company’s board of directors didn’t know it was about to be seized. WaMu’s CEO, in the job all of three weeks, will get paid more than $19 million for his efforts.

Here’s the Journal on the health of the banks—the first time I’ve heard a statement this stark (emphasis is mine).

Faced with deepening losses on mortgages, credit cards and other loans, big and small banks across the country are struggling with what many bank executives say is a crisis far deeper than the savings-and-loan debacle.

Most of what I’ve read up to now has said the banking industry’s woes were less severe than the late ‘80s S&L crisis, with far fewer likely to fail. Makes me want an answer to my question No. 3 from yesterday even more.

Geoff Colvin at Fortune says this is not a financial disaster. I’ll take some of whatever he’s smoking.

Talkin’ about hedge funds yesterday—Roubini speak. You listen.

Roger Lowenstein at The New Republic says this is “the wrong emergency.”

America's economy does not face an emergency—only its financial system does. This is a distinction lost on the bankers in Washington, but it is one worth remembering. On Main Street, unemployment is 6.1 percent. Home prices are down close to 20 percent and presumably headed lower. These numbers are not pretty, but they do not add up to an economic Pearl Harbor or even close.

I think this argument is wishful thinking. If the financial system collapses, how will it not send our credit-addicted economy into a tailspin?

Here’s some analysis in the Times and the Journal of how the credit crisis is filtering down into the real economy. The Journal helpfully offers some scenarios about what might be in store.

If you’re still somehow not a believer of how bad the financial system is locked up, here’s a scary chart from Calculated Risk on the key TED spread. What’s that and why does it matter? Here’s an explanation from Kevin Drum when he was at The Washington Monthly.

Summing up a general confusion over what McCain actually means by the words "suspended campaign," last night Rachel Maddow quoted one of my very favorite lines from The Princess Bride.

Let's hope McCain doesn't fall victim to either of the classic blunders: getting involved in a land war in Asia, or going against a Sicilian when death is on the line. Wait... one of these sounds feasible.

Last night CBS showed Katie Couric asking the spectacularly unbriefed Sarah Palin about her Charlie Gibson-era claim that being able to see Russia from Alaska had something to do with foreign policy credentials. You can watch the clip below.

I can't believe that there's not a better answer than the one Palin gave here, and you'd think that she and her advisers would have mapped it out in the last two weeks. But maybe not.

Palin tries to play down the old remark:

"It's funny that a comment like that was kinda made to char... I don't know... reporters..." she starts, the train of thought breaking down at the end.

"Mocked?" helps Couric.

"Yeah, mocked. I guess that's the word, yeah."

Moving on, the most concrete example of experience-by-proximity that Palin offers is, quote, "We have trade missions back and forth..."

About that. Sasha Issenberg and Bryan Bender reported on September 4 in the Boston Globe that:

According to business leaders and academics familiar with foreign-policy issues and Palin's administration, she has demonstrated little interest in expanding the state's trade ties with Canada or Russia compared with some of her predecessors....

Among her predecessors, Walter Hickel, a Republican first elected in the 1960s who returned to office in the 1990s, proposed a "Multi-Modal Transport Corridor" across the Bering Strait, which he imagined would link the Trans-Siberia Railway to American train lines. Democrat Tony Knowles, whom Palin defeated in 2006, pursued expanded trade opportunities with Taiwan during the 1990s.

Russell Howell, director of the American Russia Center in Anchorage, said that while many Alaskan oil-exploration companies have strong interest in pursuing Russian partnerships, Palin has not played a noticeable role.

Howell's organization has helped facilitate contact between Russia and Alaskan business and government leaders during past gubernatorial administrations.

"I have not heard that Governor Palin has done anything like that and we have had no contact with her about visiting Russian officials," said Howell.

Couric doesn't follow up in the clip below ("Have you participated in the trade missions? What have they accomplished?"). But the Globe's reporting suggests the answer.

Or, you know, not.

According to figures released yesterday by the marketing info firm TNS Media Intelligence, "ad spending during the second quarter of 2008 was off 3.7 percent versus last year, the steepest quarterly drop since 2001."

All forms of advertising are affected. Specifically, per the TNS report,

- Magazine ads fell 1.8 percent. (Though, fascinatingly, Spanish language mags are up 7.1 percent.)

- Newspaper ads fell 7.4 percent.

- Radio ads fell 6.5 percent.

- Internet ads rose 8 percent (but that's a decline in growth from previous rates).

[h/t: New York Post]

On Monday's Campaign Desk, I suggested that mainstream journalists--who, in their zeal to provide balanced, sober, and non-panic-inducing coverage of the financial crisis, often erred on the side of callousness--would do well to take a cue from Bill O'Reilly. And, specifically, from the pundit's particular strain of impassioned, indignant populism.

Well. That strain has, apparently, mutated. Indeed, the form of Populismus indignus O'Reilly has been hosting, if yesterday's episode of The Radio Factor is any indication, seems to have evolved into some kind of ultra-resistant, mutant form that attacks its host's temper, judgment, and, quite possibly, sanity. (I'm not sure precisely how to distinguish the benign brand of populism from the mutant strain, but here's a good rule of thumb: when your voice cracks as you call a high-ranking member of Congress a "big fat toad," and when your voice cracks even more when you threaten physical violence against said high-ranking member of Congress, you're probably infected with the latter.)

So. For the record, I officially take back my previous praise of O'Reilly's populist approach to journalism whatever it is he practices. Instead, journos, build your resistance to it. And, in the meantime, listen to O'Reilly do it live, below.

[h/t: Johnny Dollar]

A front-page headline on Wednesday with an article about Warren E. Buffett’s plan to invest $5 billion in the Wall Street investment banking firm Goldman Sachs described that company as “ailing.” While its stock has been battered and it has agreed to tighter government regulation and wants to raise more capital from investors, “embattled” would have been a more accurate headline description of Goldman’s state than “ailing.”

The New York Times, Editors' Note: September 25, 2008

On the subject of whether the press is using language responsibly with regards the financial crisis, this editor’s note would be evidence not that it isn’t but that it certainly is.

I guess one can understand the difference between “ailing” and “embattled.” The first means Goldman is sick from the inside out; the other means it is under attack from outsiders, which is not necessarily Goldman’s fault.

What’s the record show?

Goldman just received a dose of money from Warren Buffett on terms that are universally accepted as extremely onerous to Goldman and that place Bufffett safely ahead of public shareholders.

Along with the rest of its ailing industry, it was given injections of Fed lending that it isn’t really entitled to; placed in the iron lung of a federal bank charter; and now, has access to the world’s largest publicly funded financial charity hospital in the form of the Wall Street bailout package. This is federal life support. It is the financial equivalent of open-heart massage.

All of this was necessary, of course, because the market really doesn’t know the health of the Goldman’s portfolio and understandably isn’t taking any chances.

What’s more, we know Goldman participated in the behavior that led to this crisis and itself ingested some of the toxicity it created. The only question is how much.

If you are an investment bank and are accepting handouts from strapped taxpayers in order to remain solvent, what are you?

Ever wondered how the campaign and the economy's woes intersect in any pragmatic way in the lives of average voters? The Times provides one answer.

Newsweek has a pretty interesting (although slightly peg-less, given its bare mention of the unmentionable Palin coverage) article on the National Enquirer's post-Rielle, post-Internet role in the media landscape. But this paragraph is just soo huffy:

Yet even when the mainstream media followed the Enquirer into the muck, it did so tentatively. Recall that in 1998, while this magazine was proceeding cautiously with what would have been the first story about President Bill Clinton's affair with a White House intern, the less discriminating Matt Drudge hijacked NEWSWEEK's reporting and broke the most sensational political-sex-scandal scoop in American history.

Though I suppose Drudge has suffered much worse than being labeled "less discriminating."

A few weeks ago, former Gallup Poll senior editor David Moore appeared on On The Media to talk about how "polls inaccurately portray a consensus on issues the public often knows little or nothing about."

When asking respondents to choose between two options, pollsters force people to make a snap judgment on subjects they may have never before considered, and then present the findings as if these on-the-fly assessments are actually deeply held beliefs, Moore explained.

So with that in mind, here's a hearty thumbs up for the recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll which asked Americans for their opinion on the bailout plan.

Here are the results:

33 percent disapprove of the plan.
31 percent approve of it
28 percent have no opinion

Well, everyone, looks like we have ourselves a bailout deal. The Washington Post reports,

House and Senate negotiators emerged from a closed-door meeting today and said they have reached agreement on basic principles governing a massive financial rescue plan that they hope to pass soon.

This is news that many Americans will be greeting with some combination of relief, frustration, and resignation. Which makes the picture the paper selected to accompany it—Doc Chris Dodd making the big announcement, with Grumpy Chuck Schumer, Sleepy Bob Bennett, and Dopey Judd Greg in the background—perfectly suited to its mood. Don't they look just thrilled?

Update: This one, courtesy of the Times, also speaks volumes about the mood of the thing. If he gets sick of the whole Congressional gig, Barney Frank could have a real future as a Greek tragedian...

Editor and Publisher reports this month that the ranks of ombudsmen are shrinking at newspapers across the country.

Since early 2008, a string of major news papers have seen their ombudsmen leave, either through layoffs, buyouts, or simple retirement. In many cases, cash-strapped editors have chosen to let those positions remain empty — or be eliminated. Among those that have lost their ombuds since January: The Sacramento Bee, the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, The Sun of Baltimore, the Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, the Orlando Sentinel, The Hartford (Conn.) Courant, and The Palm Beach (Fla.) Post.

Sad news.

Last night, President Bush did what he probably should have done two weeks ago: address the American people about the economic crisis facing the country. The speech he delivered was sober in tone, and both explanatory and rhetorical in scope: It both clarified the genesis of the current crisis and framed the administration's bailout proposals as an urgent and necessary short-term solution to that crisis. "Our entire economy is in danger," the president noted, before outlining his proposals for getting us back to economic safety.

Such an admission--in danger, yikes--is highly unusual coming from a sitting U.S. president; when the economy is floundering, we generally expect game-facing and sanguine-making from our public figures despite (and because of) that very floundering. See Jimmy Carter, who, when he delivered his (in)famous "Malaise" speech in 1979, acknowledged the nation's economic woes by implication rather than declaration:

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

See also FDR, in whose first inaugural--which, though it promised "a candor and a decision which the present situation of our nation impels," similarly eschewed declaration for suggestion when it came to the period's own economic crisis--his acknowledgment of the specifics of the Depression came down to his famous pronouncement that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Presidents, indeed, have always resisted full disclosure when it comes to financial crises, preferring instead to traffic in hopeful allusion and convenient metaphors when economic matters turn grim. So the fact that our current president last night used the words "danger" and "crisis" is notable. Perhaps that's why, following Bush's address, the nation's papers of record splashed their Web sites' homepages with the most ominous of his words.

Here's The New York Times:

...and The Washington Post:

...and the Los Angeles Times:

...and Newsday:

...and USA Today:

...and the San Francisco Chronicle:

...and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

...and the Detroit Free Press:

...and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Et cetera. An economy in danger! A long and painful recession! Oh, my!

On the one hand, these scare-making headlines are fair enough. Bush's admission of danger and the like when it comes to the economy is, in some sense, historical. The "danger" and "recession" lines were, you could argue, the emotional cruxes of his speech. Besides which, of course, the economy is in crisis.

Still, though. Context matters. And when taken out of context, as most headlines are, those same declarations of danger become not descriptive of Bush's rhetoric--the economy's in danger, but here's how to keep it safe--but, rather, evocative of fear. (Be afraid, Americans. Be very afraid.) It's not just a matter of the pesky panic thing we'd all prefer to avoid during times of economic trial; it's also more basic than that: The melodramatic "danger! danger!" headlines simply aren't faithful to the overall argument of Bush's speech. The ultimate message of last night's address was this: "Our economy is facing a moment of great challenge, but we've overcome tough challenges before, and we will overcome this one." It was not "we are facing a moment of great challenge," the end. It was not "Danger! Danger! Full stop!"

News outlets are, of course, at their discretion to decide whether Bush's optimism in this case skews more toward the genuine or the promotional. Just as they're at their discretion to decide whether his speech's text or its subtext is more worthy of readers' knowledge. Perhaps their "Danger! Recession!" proclamations were the result of their determination that there's really no place for optimism in the current crisis. Even so, melodrama rarely has a place in headlines. If news organizations have decided that their readers should be scared right now, fair enough. But that's a decision that deserves to be explained, at the very least, in full sentences.

From today's front page (online version) of the Anchorage Daily News:

1) "Legislators lock horns over Palin inquiry" (Highlight: Hmmm. The headline?)

2) "Palin blessed three years ago to be free from 'witchcraft''" (Highlight: The pastor, before so blessing Palin, preached that "We need God taking over the media.")

3) "Botanical garden closes after bear kills moose near fence" (Highlight: The lede. "A bear feasting on a moose carcass along the perimeter fence of Alaska Botanical Garden Tuesday morning has prompted officials to close the facility. The garden will be closed to public use until Oct. 10 to give the bear time to finish its carcass and move along.")

While the focus now is rightly on how to prevent a (possible) economic apocalypse, let’s not forget the key players who got us into this fiasco. Bloomberg keeps the spotlight on the credit-ratings agencies, which were essential in the making of this crisis, in an in-depth two-part series.

The lede is a terrific synopsis of how abysmal the ratings agencies were:

Frank Raiter says his former employer, Standard & Poor's, placed a ``For Sale'' sign on its reputation on March 20, 2001. That day, a member of an S&P executive committee ordered him, the company's top mortgage official, to grade a real estate investment he'd never reviewed.

The Times looks at just how hard it is to figure out a price for all this junk gumming up the financial works. It's a problem that could cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars in a bailout.

Harold Meyerson in this morning’s Washington Post, reminds us that despite the fact that all the politicians are scrambling on the regulation train, the parties’ fundamental philosophies belie the heinie-covering.

“…America may be a republic of amnesiacs, but deep in some seldom-used brain lobe, it does recall that its two political parties have differed on questions of regulation and stimulating the economy, a comparison that does not now work in Republicans' favor.”

In my post this morning, I listed five questions the press should be asking right now about the crisis and the bailout plan. Columbia Business School professor Amar Bihde sort of gets at the “too big to fail” question in Forbes, arguing that these behemoth financial companies need to be dismantled.

Politico also hits that angle, with a look back at the 1999 repeal of the Glass Steagall Act, which split up banks and investment banks. It quotes Rep. John Dingell before the vote, “in words that sound unusually prescient now”:

"[W]hat we are creating now is a group of institutions which are too big to fail," he said then in words that sound unusually prescient now. "Not only are they going to be big banks, but they are going to be big everything, because they are going to be in securities and insurance, in issuance of stocks and bonds and underwriting, and they are also going to be in banks.

Floyd Norris has a good rundown of yesterday’s hearings on Capitol Hill, and catches Sen. Elizabeth Dole blaming Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for the credit crisis, probably leaning on the work of people like Kevin Hassett, who co-wrote “Dow 36,000” a year before the tech bubble burst (and is now a senior McCain adviser).

UPDATE
Adding, this Jon Weil piece at Bloomberg on how the bailout plan is a big feint to inflate asset values is a must-read. Weil's framing of the issues throughout the crisis has been tremendous.

Early this week, McCain and his legion of loyal supporters reveled at yet another one of Senator Biden’s blunders after his primetime interview with Katie Couric, “Joe Biden Behind the Scenes.” Here's Biden:

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on television and didn’t just talk about the, you know, princes of greed. He said, "Look, here’s what happened."

And while reporters jumped at the chance to call Biden out on his poor history background (we didn’t have television in 1929, nor was FDR president), no one even mentioned Couric’s own historical deficiencies.

Instead of correcting Biden on his historical gaffe, Couric’s chronicle of her up-close-and-personal time with Biden goes straight from the slip-up to Couric’s narration (“Relating to the fears of the average American is one of Biden’s strong suits”) that’s sprinkled with impassioned sound bites of Biden tugging on the heart strings of blue-collar workers.

Maybe Couric didn’t want to embarrass Obama’s talkative running mate. Or, maybe she just missed history class that day, too. Either way, it doesn’t seem quite fair to let her off the hook.

’Tis a season of change. Summer shifted into fall. Lehman Brothers shifted from in business to not. And John McCain shifted from ardent de-regulator to Wall Street sheriff.

And with this last shift came an evident change in rhetoric. “Fiery,” said the Washington Post; “striking a more populist tone,” said The New York Times; “McCain has had to rapidly adjust his stance,” summed up the Boston Globe.

We come not to bury these national papers’ stories, but to praise them. Because each of these pieces not only noted that the candidate was up to something new, as a matter of campaign tactics, but also pointed out that it was new for him ideologically. They highlighted a core inconsistency between a career—including four years chairing the Senate’s Commerce Committee—that again and again favored deregulation (of our airwaves, of our banking system, and of our financial markets), and his newfound rhetorical pitchfork.

The press and its magnifying glass wearing ancillaries at outfits like Politifact can do a fine job of patrolling the candidates’ allegiance to the dry truth. It’s a relatively simple matter to hold a candidate to honest numbers or recitations of facts. (Although mileage may vary on whether or not they change what the candidates say.)

But McCain’s shift requires something different, something that you won’t see from the arbiters at Factcheck. It’s not a matter of finding a report or statistic that refutes a particular claim he's made; it’s about having the willingness to look back at his career and make a judgment about the full force and flavor of his record.

It’s the sort of judgment that reporters often resist making, for a host of reasons. It requires the willingness to think for oneself, and the recognition that analysis and independent conclusion is not the same thing as bias. But it’s also a matter of resources: to judge a candidate's record fairly, reporters must first be deeply familiar with it. And if they're not already, that familiarity can only be gained through thorough reporting, and through the time such reporting requires.

In this case, especially as the markets quiver and McCain swoops into Washington, journalists' willingness and ability to make those judgments is what best serves readers. This is clear if you take a look at a few local stories from early last week, early last week, as the crisis reached full boil and McCain began to whistle a new tune. Here’s one describing a Tuesday event from the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Republicans Sen. John McCain and Gov. Sarah Palin brought a populist message to the Mahoning Valley Tuesday, whipping up a rally with vows to fix Wall Street and help working-class Ohio families.

McCain promised stiffer regulations and more transparency in the American financial system if he is elected president.

After that lede are some quotes from the rally, followed by some balancing quotes from a Democratic conference call with Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown that the Obama campaign organized to rebut the visit. There’s no mention of McCain’s past record on deregulation, no clue to readers from either the voice of the reporter or a non-partisan source that McCain’s tune is something new, unexpected, and rather contradictory to what he’s made his career saying. Isn’t that the sort of information you’d want as a swing state voter?

If so, you’d have to find it elsewhere. Here’s the top from a Washington Post story, published the same day:

A decade ago, Sen. John McCain embraced legislation to broadly deregulate the banking and insurance industries, helping to sweep aside a thicket of rules established over decades in favor of a less restricted financial marketplace that proponents said would result in greater economic growth.

Now, as the Bush administration scrambles to prevent the collapse of the American International Group (AIG), the nation's largest insurance company, and stabilize a tumultuous Wall Street, the Republican presidential nominee is scrambling to recast himself as a champion of regulation to end "reckless conduct, corruption and unbridled greed" on Wall Street.

See the difference? Of course, The Washington Post has far more resources and experience to bring to a story than the Plain Dealer. And a campaign rally is a hard news story for a regional paper, perhaps warranting a different cast. But just because a news event happens in a paper’s backyard is no excuse for not putting that event in the proper context.

It’s not just Ohio. Take this story from the Sarasota Herald Tribune, from a McCain rally in Florida earlier the same day:

Republican presidential nominee John McCain lashed out Tuesday at Wall Street with a ferocity seldom heard from leaders of his party. He railed against corporate greed, called for more government regulations and vowed to stop CEOs from cashing in when their financial institutions falter.

And most of all, McCain tried to position himself as the best candidate to solve the financial crisis--not as one of the leaders who allowed it to happen….

While offering little detail, he promised to give full support to financial regulatory agencies and advocated transparency.

The article strikes a more skeptical tone than the Plain Dealer’s, certainly, but there’s still no mention of McCain’s past regulation-hostile philosophy.

Again: If you were a reader in swing state Ohio, or Florida, isn’t that information you’d want to have?

One of the main benefits campaigns get by stumping in swing states are the media echoes after the rally: the headlines in the next day’s papers, the segments on that evening’s news. This week, NPRs David Greene and Politco’s Michael Calderone had excellent stories teasing out this strategy. The bottom line is that this local coverage will reach more people than can be packed into even the largest stadium. And when those stories offer little more then stenography, and fail to question a candidate’s record versus his rhetoric on one of the campaign’s biggest issues, well, who’s to say that’s not part of the plan?

...is how New York Times TV ctitic Alessandra Stanley, in her mostly-positive review today of The Rachel Maddow Show, describes Maddow's peers at the cable network. Writes Stanley:

Her program adds a good-humored female face to a cable news channel whose prime time is dominated by unruly, often squabbling schoolboys; Ms. Maddow’s deep, modulated voice is reassuringly calm after so much shrill emotionalism and catfights among the channel’s aging, white male divas.

"Good debate," Stanley contends," isn’t just dueling talking points, it’s a clash of personalities and ideology in the same room." ("Good debate" on cable news?) Stanley points to a "bracing" exchange recently between ("aging diva") Pat Buchanan and Maddow ("one of the rare occasions when Ms. Maddow takes on an adversary"). I've often enjoyed the Buchanan v. Maddow moments during MSNBC's campaign coverage this year. They have been, sometimes, educational and entertaining and, yes, "bracing."

Michael Miner, the Chicago Reader's longtime media critic has a thoughtful piece today on the dilemma that The Chicago Tribune--under new Zell-tastic ownership--faces in either sticking with their unbroken record of backing Republican presidential candidates or endorsing Obama, a fresh-faced hometown pol whom they've strongly supported in the past.

I’m not at all sure the Tribune will endorse the Republican ticket. There are good reasons why it might not—but also reasons anyone who wants to respect the Tribune should worry about. ...

It may be that Sam Zell and company view the Trib’s political heritage as its seed corn. But as this is a brash, arrogant, desperate bunch with no background in the newspaper business and hundreds of millions of dollars of debt to dig out from under, it probably does not. “Is our POV blurred or dated?” asked innovations chief Lee Abrams in a staff memo in April. He suggested the company was operating on cruise control, “accepting that the look and POV are fine, when historically they might be, but the history may hold us back from competing and winning in today’s vastly changed and intense new environment.”

On September 29 the Tower will unveil a leaner, cleaner Tribune transformed for one big reason—the old one cost too much to produce. If Zell and Abrams and their buddies think endorsing Obama will give the retooled Tribune a leg up in this hazardous environment, they won’t let history stop them. Then it’ll be up to [editorial page editor Bruce ]Dold to persuade us that it’s still the newspaper of Lincoln talking, not the paper of—to quote the back of a T-shirt a Zell-hating Cubs fan was sporting a couple rows ahead of me at Wrigley Field last Sunday—a “money-grubbing old man.”

Read the whole thing here.

Since the federal bailout of Wall Street was proposed earlier this week, the press has done its best to try and contextualize its $700 billion sum. “What is $700 billion worth?” lists have popped up all over the place, in an attempt to bring meaning to a number that is difficult to comprehend in everyday dollars.

This frame can seem trivial in the somber light of the crisis. Some seek to sensationalize the $700 billion with irrelevant contrasts (how many ice cream spoons would it buy?). But others draw legitimate comparisons (how many times would it have rebuilt Katrina?) that clarify the scale of the bailout. Check out both types, here, here and here. With varied levels of success, these are attempts to unpack the $700 billion in ways that make the most sense to average Americans, and they’re good-faith efforts.

The “what’s it worth” question ultimately seeks to lend credence and shape to popular outrage, reframing the proposed sum as a series of knowable quantities rather than as a lump-sum solution being pushed through Congress. But even as we note these efforts, we might also argue that some blame for this crisis can be attributed to the decline of truly populist reporting in the first place—the kind of reporting that, glibly put, would have better connected what was happening on Wall Street to what the residents of Main Street could expect further down the road.

Since Monday, when Megan wrote about the missing rage in journalists’ accounts of the financial meltdown and proposed bailout, many news outlets have begun to take up the populist cry that rightly argues that this isn’t the taxpayers’ fault. And for now, the press should continue to ground coverage in context and a healthy skepticism, as Ryan argues, thereby decreasing the likelihood of under- or over-estimation of the bailout cost and how the process will play out.

How? Continue to unpack the hugeness of the number, which raises some of the legitimate reasons for the public anger evident in editorials and comment sections of the papers’ news sites. Specify ways that the number is misleading: the government, and taxpayers, will probably get something return on their money in due time. Some reporters are trying, rightly, to push the notion that it isn't $700 billion or nothing. Check out two good examples here and here. And, last but not least, allot some extra space for personal finance reporters, as many papers have done, to answer questions from curious or panicked readers. Personal finance Q&As might not be directly related to the cost of the bailout, but in a trickle-down sort of way, they can provide background information that is very helpful.

Everyone's talking about what David Letterman said about John McCain last night. Nutshell: McCain canceled his scheduled Letterman appearance at the last minute to, per Dave, "race back to Washington," only to then sit for an interview with CBS News's Katie Couric, snippets of which Letterman aired --including bits of McCain having his TV makeup applied -- while shouting things like, "It's as if [McCain] went off to get a manicure or somethin' [instead of doing my show]" and wondering aloud whether McCain "suspended his campaign" because of the economy or because of his slipping poll numbers.

Letterman's (substitute) guest last night, MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, made this contribution to the bitter-fest (after McCain asked him, basically, Why do you think McCain told me he had to go to Washington to fix the economy and then made time for Katie Couric?)

OLBERMANN: I think [McCain] dissed you...Or the other possibility is that [Couric] has all the money that's required to fix the economy.

Perhaps Olbermann and Letterman should switch jobs?

Last year, New York’s state legislature, which has historically led the nation in passing pro-consumer credit legislation, approved a pair of bills aimed at protecting residents from questionable lending practices, the kind that have come back to haunt the economy. One of them would have put the brakes on the “universal default” provision, which lenders use to jack up the rates on credit cards if a cardholder misses a payment on a card issued by another lender. This practice has caused credit-card rates for some people to soar into the 20 or even the 30 percent range, far surpassing what once was considered criminal usury and helping to pile on debt that has contributed to mortgage foreclosures. But then-Governor Eliot Spitzer vetoed the bill, arguing that it would force lenders to increase interest rates or fees for all credit-card holders, even those with good credit records. Spitzer also claimed that the law wouldn’t do any good anyway because federal law would preempt state law, and federal law allows banks to bypass state usury laws by setting up shop in states with lax regulation.

Whatever the merits of Spitzer’s argument, it was an important discussion for New York and the rest of the country. But his veto was like the proverbial tree falling in the empty forest. The AP’s Albany bureau sent out no story, and the news editor does not recall why. A Nexis search found only one brief mention of the veto, in the Albany Times Union. Spitzer sided with the banks and the media were silent.

This would not always have been the case. What happened in Albany is just one piece of evidence of the decline of the consumer movement, the rise of consumerism to replace it, and the media’s role in both trends. The consumer movement that rose in the 1960s pushed for laws and regulations to protect buyers from the excesses of the marketplace. The press aided both its creation and its demise, then helped to replace it with consumerism, which serves the individual shopper but not systemic reform that might benefit everyone.

The current financial crisis is a matter not only of economics, but of journalism, as
well. As reporters and commentators scramble to shed light on the meltdown—its causes
and its effects, in both the short term and the long—they're doing so in the shadow of
an administration that has declared its desire for more opacity, not less, in its future
financial dealings. The secrecy inherent in Hank Paulson's proposed bailout plan should
raise serious questions among people who believe, as we do, that the free flow of
information is vital for our democracy.

— The Editors

Only a few days ago, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson asked Congress to pass legislation that would allow his department to use $700 billion to purchase mountains of bad debt. That's 5 percent of the nation's total annual economic output, or to put it another way, that's even more than what has been spent on the war in Iraq. The magnitude of the funds requisitioned is matched only by the administration's requested level of unchecked power and opacity in how it would execute this historic market intervention.

We do not pretend to know whether a bailout is needed or, if one is needed, what size and scope it should be. But most assuredly, whatever solution is pursued should include vigorous, timely, and accessible disclosure of all details surrounding any government decisions in response to financial market problems. Paulson's initial request to Congress would have hidden the actions of the Treasury not only from the sight of the public, but also from Congress, the courts, and the media. Sec. 2(b)(2) of Paulson's legislative text would give his department authority to enter into contracts "without regard to any other provision of law regarding public contracts." Sec. 8 would make "[d]ecisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act … non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency." Paulson has agreed to modify these provisions, but their proposal is a clear indicator that the administration has its sights set on virtually unchecked authority—much like what happened after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The type of opacity sought by Paulson should be especially troubling to journalists and other members of the media. More than anyone, journalists understand the power and importance of information. From repeated experience, journalists know that often, when government throws up walls of secrecy, that is done to protect not the people, but rather ineptitude, corruption, conflicts of interest, and questionable decisions on the part of the government. Time and time again, journalists have fought past government secrecy to bring to light occurrences of mismanagement, fraud, and abuse of power. The current debate over solutions to the fiscal meltdown on Wall Street should be no different, both in the process Congress uses to develop a solution and in the implementation of the solution itself.

Congress would be wise to ensure that significant oversight and accountability structures be put in place in whatever solution they adopt, including disclosure requirements that make information available to the public and the media. If Paulson or his successor can make unilateral decisions about contracts, for example, that power will likely raise conflicts of interest that will remain unknown without journalistic scrutiny. The firms most able to help the government dispose of toxic assets are likely the same companies that are seeking the government bailout, and the public has a right to know which firms are benefiting and why. Congress must be wary of ceding authority to an autonomous actor with no assurances of safeguarding the public from conflicts of interest.

Journalists know that secrecy worsened this crisis, and as such, they have a responsibility to help ensure that the solution Congress adopts avoid additional secrecy. Otherwise, the taxpayers could end up spending $700 billion just to see the same disasters repeated.

There are few coastal media elites who would admit on purpose to genuine contempt for the entire middle and south of the country. It just isn’t sporting.


But then there’s Matt Taibbi. He’ll admit it, on purpose and at great length. He really does think he’s better than you. And he’s really, really pissed off. Again. Taibbi’s prose - be it about Tom Friedman, the 109th Congress, or the Pope - lurches over an arid emotional range between umbrage and fury. But this time, it’s not them - it’s you.

Taibbi’s latest tantrum in Rolling Stone, though titled “Mad Dog Palin,” is actually an attack on the voters themselves. (This would be a good place for a link to the article. It's not on the Rolling Stone Web site yet, but you can read it here.) In a way, Taibbi’s just keeping it real. He’s not into paternalistic, passive-aggressive hand-wringing about why voters just won’t acknowledge their own best interests and get liberal already. Taibbi knows why:

Here’s the thing about Americans. You can send their kids off by the thousands to get their balls blown off in foreign lands for no reason at all, saddle them with billions in debt year after congressional year while they spend their winters cheerfully watching game shows and football, pull the rug out from under their mortgages, and leave them living off their credit cards and their Wal-Mart salaries while you move their jobs to China and Bangalore.



And none of it matters, so long as you remember a few months before Election Day to offer them a two-bit caricature culled from some cutting-room-floor episode of Roseanne as part of your presidential ticket. And if she’s a good enough likeness of a loudmouthed Middle American archetype, as Sarah Palin is, John Q. Public will drop his giant-sized bag of Doritos in gratitude, wipe the sizzlin’ picante dust from his lips and rush to the booth to vote for her. Not because it makes sense, or because it has a chance of improving his life or anyone else’s, but simply because it appeals to the low-humming narcissism that substitutes for his personality, because that image on TV reminds him of the mean brainless slob he sees in the mirror every morning.

The main problem Taibbi sees with Palin isn’t that she’s an “obviously unqualified, doomed-to-fail joke of a bible-thumping buffoon.” It’s what the Palin nomination - and its spectacular success so far - represents about what Americans value, which is apparently “being a fat fucking pig who pins ‘Country First’ buttons on his man titties and chants ‘U-S-A! U-S-A!’ at the top of his lungs while his kids live off credit cards and Saudis buy up all the mortgages in Kansas.”

The spluttering gist is that Palin is a caricature of America - the American Right in particular, though Taibbi’s rancor is as bipartisan as that resolution establishing July 2007 National Watermelon Month. (Seriously. That passed unanimously. Yes we can.)

It’s ironic, though, that Taibbi himself is an even better, more thorough caricature of the supposedly America-hating left. Taibbi actually does hate America and Americans, and he makes no apologies for it. It's refreshing to see someone explicitly insult every citizen of every red state while other coastal "elites" like Brooks and MoDo (cf. Campaign Desk circa April) pretend in their even more condescending way to “get” them.

But as CJR has pointed out before, Taibbi’s vituperation is not ad hominem. It’s ad everyone.

1. What happens if nothing happens?

If the government doesn’t bail out Wall Street and the banks, will we all be in bread lines and Hoovervilles, planning our trips west to Californy? Or will we just face a deep recession or something more moderate even?

I’m not asking for fortune-telling here, just some scenarios.

2. How better could that $700 billion be spent?

Why not spend it on shoring up shaky homeowners, who are ultimately the wobbly foundation causing the debt edifice to collapse? More like this type of reporting, from yesterday’s Washington Post, is in order—and fast.

3. Whither the banks?

It wasn’t so long ago we were hearing about what bad shape the banking industry was in—Citigroup, Wachovia, Washington Mutual, etc. Now they’re being presented as pillars of strength and saviors to Wall Street’s investment banks. Wachovia is in merger talks with Morgan Stanley and the latter and Goldman Sachs have converted to commercial banks, effectively meaning the end of Depression-era law that split I-banks from commercial banks.

But surely the Big Bailout is more about rescuing the regular banking system than it is about anything else. Banks aren’t lending to each other. We’re officially in a Panic of ’08. Why is it now considered good that Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will now be able to spread their risk to consumer deposits, rather than relying on short-term borrowing?

How does such a model endanger commercial banks and the deposits of Americans? We’re all ears, biz media—and no, this WSJ story isn’t good enough.

4. Why have politicians and regulators let institutions get “too big to fail, and why not put such firms on a diet?

The press should ask why companies whose collapse would threaten economic apocalypse aren’t being slimmed down and split up until they’re not so scary. Instead, we have Bank of America, the nation’s biggest commercial bank, swallowing Merrill Lynch, the second biggest investment bank with nary a peep from the press about whether this is a good idea. B of A was already too big to fail. Now it’s something worse.

Why isn’t anyone writing about slimming these companies down? Bigger is not better here.

5. What happens if hedge funds and private equity fall, too?

The hedge fund and private-equity industries are on the verge of collapsing like the late great investment-bank industry, says none other than Mr. Been Right All Along, Nouriel Roubini. What will that mean for markets and the economy?

Hedge funds and private-equity use tons of debt to goose returns, but aren’t regulated at all and are serious dangers to the financial system and to the economy. Seems like a good time to do a story on how the next regime will regulate them.

Katie Couric asked a follow-up question.

When Gov. Sarah Palin, Couric's interviewee on CBS Evening News tonight, failed to answer the question before her ("You've said, quote, 'John McCain will reform the way Wall Street does business.' Other than supporting stricter regulations of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac two years ago, can you give us any more examples of him leading the charge for more oversight?"), Couric did what reporters too often don't do: she asked again.

COURIC: But [McCain's] been in Congress for 26 years. He's been chairman of the powerful Commerce Committee. And he has almost always sided with less regulation, not more.

(Yeah, that was a question.) And when Palin again failed to answer ("He's also known as the maverick though..."), Couric... asked again.

COURIC: But can you give me any other concrete examples? Because I know you've said Barack Obama is a lot of talk and no action. Can you give me any other examples in his 26 years of John McCain truly taking a stand on this?

And when that version, too, went unanswered, Couric -- this time, almost apologetically -- asked again.

I'm just going to ask you one more time - not to belabor the point. Specific examples in his 26 years of pushing for more regulation.

At which point Palin promised, "I'll try to find ya some and I"ll bring them to ya."

Kudos to Couric for continuing to ask (that is, for doing her job) rather than giving up and moving on. Couric followed up. (Will Palin?)

Overall, solid work on Couric's part. She kept focused on the economy; she didn't let a vague talking point/assertion go unchallenged (when Palin said, "Americans are waiting to see what John McCain will do on this proposal. They're not waiting to see what Barack Obama is going to do. Is he going to do this [Palin licks finger and holds it aloft] see what way the political wind's blowing?" Couric asked what she was talking about, particularly in light of recent poll numbers hinting otherwise); she maintained her gravitas face, for the most part, (even when Palin used the m-word!).

We'll see what happens when more of the interview airs in the coming days.

Watch CBS Videos Online

This week, GOP strategists seem intent on replacing the image of Sarah Palin gazing knowingly onto Russia from her front porch with images of her having tête-à-têtes with Hamid Karzai and Henry Kissinger, all in an effort to dispel concerns about her foreign policy inexperience.

The press, barely privy to these proceedings and making do with what they’re given, were in a tricky spot, forced to turn photo-ops into news stories.

The Wall Street Journal slugged its story with the headline “Palin Uses U.N. Session to Bolster Her Resume." Other outlets avoided such assertive verbs in their heds, treating the day more directly: “Palin gets an introduction to foreign policy,” said the L.A. Times; “Palin's U.N. Crash Course,” reported CBS News. The Washington Post created a stark numerical juxtaposition using numbers with “Palin Sits Down With 2 Foreign Leaders” in the headline, and a mention of the 150+ leaders Biden has met in the article's body.

But cleverness aside, Palin’s inexperience on the foreign policy stage is real and cannot be shored up by a few drop-in visits with heads of state, and the media ought to do a better job of pointing this out. Where’s the open skepticism? Where are the questions? The Wall Street Journal’s headline implies that Palin has a foreign-policy resume that can be “bolstered,” which she doesn’t.

Let’s be clear on something. Being able to make conversation with a head of state for one half hour does not equal foreign policy expertise. Since we don’t actually know what was said in these exchanges, (because reporters weren’t allowed in, and because Palin didn’t speak to reporters afterward), the press can’t run stories that allow the GOP to sell the idea that Palin can get up to speed with foreign policy with a some briefings and few handshakes. The fact is Palin’s foreign policy expertise remains unchanged from two days ago and any story that alleges otherwise is wrong.

The Associated Press came out strongly when reporting Palin’s around-the-world-in-three-hours:

Palin is studying foreign policy ahead of her one debate with Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden, a senator with deep credentials on that front. More broadly, the Republican ticket is trying to counter questions exploited by Democrats about her qualifications to serve as vice president and step into the presidency at a moment's notice if necessary.

There was no chance of putting such questions to rest with photo opportunities Tuesday.

More outlets need to follow the AP’s lead when reporting on Sarah Palin’s Excellent Foreign Policy Adventure. While the visuals might be convincing, we need thousands of words to dispel the story the pictures are telling.

Just minutes ago, John McCain issued one of his campaign’s classic media-cycle-grabbing gambits. He’s announced that, as of tomorrow morning (so there’s still time to get out a digging press release or two), he’ll be “suspending” his campaign to return to Washington to work on the economy.

And that, of course, means that we’ll have to skip that pesky presidential debate upcoming in Oxford, Mississippi. So sorry, Mr. Lehrer!

Here at CJR, we often fault our political press for over-analyzing the political dimensions of the presidential campaign—what voting bloc is this policy tailored to, who likes this color necktie, etc.—rather than discuss how the programs proposed by the candidates would affect voters (read: news consumers).

But sometimes that kind of coverage is valid, and if there were ever such a time, now is it. Yes, McCain does have an important role to play in this crisis—if he doesn’t endorse the eventual bailout or rescue package, it’s unlikely it will garner enough Republican votes to pass. But there’s no reason he can’t (like Obama did this morning) lay out a few basic principles such a bill would have to meet before it would garner his support. But instead, he’s "suspending his campaign," and, in the process, putting Obama into a damned-if-he-does, damned-if-he-doesn’t position.

This move is so transparently political that covering it as a transparent act of politics is pretty much the only approach. And again, it’s the right one.

The stakes are especially high because McCain’s hostage in this crisis is one of the most treasured institutions of the media-politico season. The debates aren’t flawless, but they are the method by which millions and millions of voters get vital information on the major candidates and their plans for the country. (It is, in fact, the debates’ very prominence and importance, and McCain’s willingness to scrap one, that is meant to demonstrate how seriously he’s taking the crisis.)

Unfortunately, right out of the gates, cable’s framing was credulous.

“I don’t want to debate John McCain’s motives,” said Norah O’Donnell on MSNBC just after the news moved. But just a half hour later, she’d come around. “Do you think McCain be criticized for doing this, even though he says he wants to suspend politicking, that he’s doing it for pure political reasons—whether he’s looking at pools that show him dropping because of the focus on the economy…”

McCain is saying, essentially, one simple phrase to Obama: “Your move.”

He’s saying it to the press too.

In anticipation of Friday night’s first presidential debate (which, if John McCain has his way, might be postponed), the campaign press and the candidates are focused, in their own ways, on the impression that Senators McCain and Obama will make on the American people. Both sides are setting and managing expectations; talking about what this candidate needs to do (and avoid doing).

Jim Lehrer, the journalist moderating the debate, is thinking about appearances as well.

Leher recently told the Baltimore Sun (italics mine):

Fairness and the appearance of fairness are critical because everything must appear to be absolutely straight and driven by the views of these people who want to be president rather than by some agenda that the moderator may have. This is not me saying, 'Hey I want to reveal this or I want do that.' This is a different purpose.

A higher purpose, presumably. Which sounded good (reasonable and serious and sincere and maybe just what we need in this age of hysterical barking punditry). Until I looked again.

- "Fairness is critical." OK. Great. Be fair. (Although… fair to whom? Voters seeking information? The candidates?)

- “The appearance of fairness is critical." Critical to what, exactly? To avoiding accusations of bias and the inevitable, ensuing distraction from that? (And such accusations do have a way of sucking up all the attention, no doubt).

- "Everything must appear to be straight and driven by" candidates' views and not some moderator "agenda." This focus on not appearing to have an agenda—the appearing to have being as bad or worse than any actual having? And: Are all agendas bad? What if your agenda is truth and information? Does maintaining “the appearance of fairness” trump informing people (say, holding a candidate to his record?) What happens when being fair to voters might not look fair to candidates (“fair” here meaning treating both candidates equally on an issue in which an inequality exists.)

Could this focus on appearances stem from all the “working the refs” the campaigns have done this election season? It could. But it also reminded me of an exchange I had with Lehrer during a Q&A in 2006:

ME: How do you approach reporting when a public official has said something that is blatantly untrue?

LEHRER: I don’t deal in terms like “blatantly untrue.” That’s for other people to decide when something’s “blatantly untrue.” There’s always a germ of truth in just about everything … My part of journalism is to present what various people say about it the best we can find out [by] reporting and let others — meaning commentators, readers, viewers, bloggers or whatever … I’m not in the judgment part of journalism. I’m in the reporting part of journalism. I have great faith in the intelligence of the American viewer and reader to put two and two together and come up with four. Sometimes they’re going to come up with five. Best I can do for them is to give them every piece of information I can find and let them make the judgments. That’s just my basic view of my function as a journalist.

ME: That goes beyond presenting a claim and several counter-claims that appear to call into question the original claim?

LEHRER: That’s part of it. Absolutely that’s part of it. I mean, if somebody says — doesn’t matter if it’s the president or who —if somebody says, “It rained on Thursday,” and you know for a fact it didn’t rain on Thursday, if the person was of a nature that you felt you should quote him, “It rained on Thursday.” Second paragraph, third paragraph — or in television terms second or third sentence — you would say, “However, according to the weather bureau it didn’t [rain Thursday].” But you don’t call the person a liar. The person who would call that person a liar would be the person who’d read that story and say, “My god, Billy Bob lied.” But I’m not doing that. I’m providing the information so that the person can make their decision. People might say, “Well the weather bureau has lied. Or I was out that day and it was raining …”

ME: Is there any place for writing, “Billy Bob said it rained Thursday. The weather bureau said it didn’t. I was out that day and I say it didn’t.”

LEHRER: I would never do that. That’s not my function to do that.

ME: Is it a newspaper’s function?

LEHRER: Look, I’m just telling you what I do, ok? I’m an expert on the NewsHour and it isn’t how I practice journalism. I am not involved in the story. I serve only as a reporter or someone asking questions. I am not the story.

Back to Lehrer's words this week (to the Sun):

It isn't about pressing the candidates. It's to make it possible for the people who are running for president to exchange their ideas rather than to bounce off mine.

Hey, I complained about all the "Russert-based questions" in a 2007 primary debate moderated by Tim Russert. I hear Lehrer's it's not about me point.

And yet Lehrer's vision of A Presidential Debate ("the people who are running for president exchange their ideas") sounds like an event at which a moderator would be superfluous, and one that therefore works well only if "exchange their ideas" is really, in earnest, what "the people who are running for president" aim to do at the debate. Is it?

After the New York Times wrote about how John McCain's campaign manager Rick Davis had been paid some $30,000 a month for five years as president of the Homeownership Alliance, McCain explained that Davis has not been involved with the company for several years and invited the press to look into Davis’s record, while his campaign slammed the Times for being “150 percent in the tank” for Barack Obama.

Today, the Times called McCain's bluff. Turns out that, while it is technically true that the Homeownership Alliance has not paid Davis any money recently, it is also true that Freddie Mac paid Davis's lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, up through last month. The Times reports that its sources:

[D]id not recall Mr. Davis’s doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than to speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections. They said Mr. Davis’s firm, Davis Manafort, had been kept on the payroll because of his close ties to Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, who by 2006 was widely expected to run again for the White House.

Actually, Freddie Mac continued to pay Davis Manafort until it was taken over by the government this month, along with Fannie Mae. According to the Times:

Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for the McCain campaign, did not dispute the payments to Mr. Davis’s firm. But she said that Mr. Davis had stopped taking a salary from the firm by the end of 2006 and that his work did not affect Mr. McCain.

Well, no kidding it didn't. Note that the problem here is not, strictly speaking, a matter of special interests having too much power over government (of either party). It seems that the McCain campaign, like so many people in America, didn't really understand how the mortgage giants worked. By underwriting high-risk mortgages, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac gave housing loans to people with bad credit (some 70 percent of new mortgages in recent months were given by the two companies), both exacerbating the housing crisis and hurting themselves in the process. But McCain’s campaign (like Obama’s campaign, the Bush administration, most homeowners, and pretty much every member of Congress) ignored the hazardous nature of subprime mortgages, and did little to prevent the disaster.

If only Rick Davis had some influence with the mortgage company, then someone from the McCain campaign might have been paying attention. Instead what we've got is something weirder and very Washington: "Don't blame me, I just cashed the checks."

But let’s be honest about this already. Attacking the media for reporting the truth—however embarrassing that truth might be—is not just unseemly, it's irresponsible. Did the McCain campaign think no one would figure this out?

When Andrea Mitchell reports on the current financial crisis—or on anything that relates to the crisis, which is, these days, a lot—there is an excessively large elephant in the control room. Its name is Alan Greenspan.

That Greenspan is Mitchell's husband doesn't, under normal circumstances, warrant disclosure or special treatment. Mitchell is a career journalist who knows what conflict of interest is—and how to avoid not only its appearance, but also, one hopes, its effects. Under normal circumstances, it would be unfair to hold her husband against her.

Under normal circumstances. But the credit crisis—and the current meltdown we're facing, whose effects, assuming we can find a way to stanch them in the short term, will likely be with us for generations to come—is not normal circumstances. Greenspan, by virtue of his nearly-nineteen-year chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board, is, to some extent, culpable in the crisis we're facing. Critics have accused the Greenspan-led Fed of inflating the housing bubble by keeping loan rates too low for too long, encouraging reckless lending and borrowing. Greenspan himself has admitted as much, telling CBS last year, "While I was aware a lot of these practices were going on, I had no notion of how significant they had become until very late. I really didn’t get it until very late in 2005 and 2006.” And as The New York Times put it in a December 2007 article headlined "Fed Shrugged as Subprime Crisis Spread" (emphasis mine),

Until the boom in subprime mortgages turned into a national nightmare this summer, the few people who tried to warn federal banking officials might as well have been talking to themselves.

Edward M. Gramlich, a Federal Reserve governor who died in September, warned nearly seven years ago that a fast-growing new breed of lenders was luring many people into risky mortgages they could not afford.

But when Mr. Gramlich privately urged Fed examiners to investigate mortgage lenders affiliated with national banks, he was rebuffed by Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman.

The degree of Greenspan's culpability in the current meltdown is certainly debatable. One could argue, as he does, that its root cause wasn't the interest rates of the mortgages themselves, but their repackaging. What isn't debatable, though, is the fact that, as chairman of the body that presided over the economy while it began its slow-before-sudden descent into Dante-conomic hell, the legacy of Greenspan's Fed chairmanship is intimately entwined in the crisis. (If the awkward evasiveness he and Mitchell exhibited at the opening-night gala for the New York Philharmonic last week is any indication, the couple is acutely aware of that.) The oft-repeated comparison of the credit meltdown to September 11 is flawed in many respects, but it's valid in the sense that we had warning signs of this crisis long before it exploded last week. There's a reason that "asleep at the switch" has become a truism in the treatments of the crisis; and one of the people manning that switch was Alan Greenspan.

None of which is to say that Andrea Mitchell is culpable for her husband's credit-crisis connection. She isn't. But nor does that mean that her reporting isn't, to some degree, compromised by Greenspan. Take Mitchell's commentary on today's episode of Morning Joe, in which—wearing a pundit's hat more than a reporter's—she tried to find a silver lining to the Paulson plan's $700 billion investment request (emphasis mine):

Once there's some stability in the market, then the real value of these mortgage loans will become apparent, and then people will get back in.

And, by the way, there's some really interesting data that is just beginning to surface in these hearings. Lockhart, the regulator of Fannie and Freddie, testified to this yesterday, largely overlooked. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal, an op-ed, by a Columbia professor and by Peter Wallason, who has done some advising for McCain, but is a former treasury official and a former White House counsel. And what they said is that there was a domino effect.

What happened was, the Bush Administration started threatening to regulate Fannie and Freddie and to take away some of their special, implicit benefits where they got cheap money, where they got special implicit subsidies in their interest rates, they could get money at a lower cost. And during that period, they had to prove—and Congress was pressuring them—both parties—pressuring them prove that they were fulfilling their commitment to low-income housing.... And all of the sudden you saw a surge in what they were putting into these subprime loans. And it practically doubled in the last couple of years, in what they were putting into those subprime loans. This was between 2006, 2007—that's when you saw the big increase in bad loans. So there's a lot of blame here to go all around, but they've got a lot of answers to deliver, as well.

Again: this was between 2006, 2007. And Greenspan resigned from the Fed's chairmanship on January 31, 2006.

Which is troubling. Mitchell may be making a fair historical comparison to add context to the current crisis; but the fact that it's a comparison that would also partially absolve her husband from guilt in that crisis means that it's probably a point another reporter should be making. While the shades of populism in Mitchell's concern for blame assignment may be legitimate, they could just as easily be the symptoms of a wife wanting to protect her husband's reputation, now and for the future. It's one thing for Mitchell to report the facts of the credit crisis, but venturing into commentary is a precarious trek. So is reporting on the Fed itself, as Mitchell did last Monday:

I'm Andrea Mitchell, live in Washington today. The Federal Reserve has agreed to lend one of the world's largest insurers, AIG, $85 billion to stave off financial crisis in exchange for a major stake in the company. Let's get right to CNBC's David Faber, who's been reporting this all night and all day. David, the Fed said just two days ago they would not be in the bailout business. Now they are taking over, practically, this business by converting these shares and having such a big stake in AIG. What changed?

A fair question, in every sense. But when Mitchell asks another reporter about the Fed—and, really, about anything related to the economic crisis—it's not so much a question of fairness as it is one of accuracy. While Mitchell may be able to be balanced and sober in her own assessments of the crisis, or in her ability to ask good questions about it, she's not the only player in her reporting. She has sources and interviewees. And it's debatable whether those sources and interviewees would be similarly able to answer Mitchell's questions fully, given the ties of the person who's asking them.

NBC News doesn't share that doubt. As Allison Gollust, NBC News's Senior Vice President for Communications, told me via e-mail:

We make decisions about Andrea's reporting on the current financial crisis on a day-to-day, case-by-case basis. There are countless aspects of the story that present absolutely no potential for conflict whatsoever. In cases where we feel the focus of a given storyline may present a problem, we assign those stories to another correspondent. We are 100 percent comfortable with all of her reporting thus far.

Still, though. I worry that, to the extent that TV segment interviewees are sources, and to the extent that they provide useful information and analysis, rather than just, you know, "good TV," an interview with Mitchell might constrain their honesty. You wouldn't want Laura Bush asking you about the federal government's reaction to Katrina. You wouldn't Maria Malan interviewing you about apartheid. And so on. Those interviews would be awkward, but, more to the point, they would be unproductive. They'd yield, at most, partial truths. It'd be naive to think that an interview with Mitchell would be any different.

In reporting on the financial crisis, journalists need to help viewers and readers and listeners fully understand what we're facing right now. (And to fully understand what, exactly, our tax money will be paying to bail out, assuming that the Paulson plan passes.) "What went wrong?" should be a standard question Mitchell and other journalists are asking right now. When one potential answer to that question is "Alan Greenspan," there's a conflict. A big one.

Mitchell—who's recently been doing the work of a national political reporter, though her official title at NBC News is Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent—has been, like a select smattering of NBC's on-air talent, pretty much omnipresent during the campaign season. As MSNBC has pushed to make itself worthy of its self-supplied tagline ("MSNBC: The Place for Politics"), it has put its most respected personalities—Tom Brokaw, David Gregory, Chuck Todd, and Mitchell—on the air as often as possible. Mitchell regularly guests on Morning Joe and on the evening juggernaut that is Countdown with Keith Olbermann. She anchors the 1 p.m. hour of MSNBC Live (Mika Brzezinski joked on today's Morning Joe that that hour should be called, simply, Andrea). She's been a correspondent and commentator during the network's live evening coverage of political events: primary nights, the conventions, etc. On MSNBC, Mitchell is everywhere.

But maybe she should be a little less everywhere while the financial crisis is at its height. Maybe MSNBC should consider whether its viewers are served by an anchor and reporter who is, in so many ways, so close to the story she's covering. That isn't to say that Mitchell should be simply taken off the air right now. That would be a loss to MSNBC and to its views; Mitchell is not only one of the best reporters NBC News has, but also a gravitas-giving presence on a cable network that is desperately seeking, among other things, gravity. But it is to say that, when it comes to covering the financial crisis, the expanse of Mitchell's space in "The Place for Politics" is worth questioning. Particularly since whatever space she occupies must also accommodate her elephant.

When I first met Nancy Hicks Maynard, she had just been appointed as a co-director of the Media Studies Center at Freedom Forum during its first year outside of the Columbia School of Journalism.

I knew Nancy by reputation as a reporter and, of course, as the former owner of the Oakland Tribune, which she ran with her husband, the late Bob Maynard.

As I got to know her, I realized that she was not only a pioneer for women journalists. She was a risk taker—an ingredient that's all too rare in today's journalism.

Nancy worked as a reporter at The New York Times during the days when there were few women reporters, let alone African-Americans, in the newsroom.

Her marriage to the late Robert Maynard led to another risk—the purchase of the Oakland Tribune. Their decision to publish the paper put them in the history books as the first African-Americans to own a mainstream newspaper. From her vantage point, Nancy became keenly aware of the news industry’s struggles to sustain itself, and during our Freedom Forum year she spent a great deal of time investigating and promoting innovative ideas on the future of the news media. The result was her book Mega Media: How Market Forces Are Transforming News.

But perhaps the most lasting legacy of her forceful pursuit of journalism excellence was the journalism training institute that bears the Maynard name.

Thousands of journalists of all colors and backgrounds have benefitted from the vision that Nancy and Bob put into that training program. As an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer, I sent many minority journalists to Maynard, confident that they would get the training and assistance that would help them move into top reporting and editing positions. Eventually, I brought the institute to the Inquirer, to help the paper thoroughly examine the diversity of its coverage.

On a personal level, Nancy was an important ally in my efforts to realize what was then considered a revolutionary idea—a text book, complete with a supplementary CD and Web site, on how to cover race and ethnicity. This was 1996, and most people had no idea what multimedia was all about, let alone how to use it as a teaching tool on race.

Somehow I knew that Nancy would take a risk on me, even though I had neither academic credentials nor teaching experience. By helping me attain a Freedom Forum fellowship, Nancy gave me the confidence and intellectual support I needed to create a unique text book on how to cover race and ethnicity.

It took more than ten years and a lot of help to get my project—The Authentic Voice—done and on the shelves at journalism schools around the country. It is just one of her lasting legacies. Nancy Maynard, a woman of many achievments, left her mark on this world. Above all, she believed in the necessity of fearless reporting on the complexities of how race and demographic change were transforming America.

We've still got a long way to go, but we are closer to the goal because of Nancy Hicks Maynard.

As far as the Chicago Tribune is concerned, Hillary Clinton is still in contention for the presidency.

According to this roundup of "Profiles of 2008 presidential candidates," the gang consists of McCain, Obama, and Hillary. And Clinton's face, alphabetically I presume, sits above Obama's.

Oops!

Despite the buzz surrounding the current presidential campaign, historical trends suggest a sizeable portion of the American public will not vote this year. Journalists can claim a good deal of the credit for the public’s disconnection to national politics—a 2007 Pew poll (PDF) found that a majority of those surveyed, while still holding an overall positive opinion of the press, nonetheless thought the media was biased, often inaccurate, and unlikely to report on things that readers cared about.

A survey of just about any paper’s political coverage leaves little mystery as to why. Today’s top headlines in The New York Times’s politics section: “McCain Aide’s Firm Was Paid by Freddie Mac,” “Pinpoint Attacks Focus on Obama,” “Obama and McCain Stand Firm on Bailout,” and so on. The Chicago Tribune: “Wal-Mart shoppers: McCain's battlefield,” “Biden hits coal-country nerve,” “Obama, McCain: Economy lifts Obama.” The Dallas Morning News: McCain, Obama in virtual tie for women’s votes, new poll finds,” “Palin meets with Kissinger, presidents of Afghanistan, Colombia,” McCain, Obama tread carefully on the economy.”

This is not another complaint about our focus on “horse race” coverage—many of these stories are unquestionably news, and some horse-race coverage is necessary. The problem is that political reporters follow the campaigns as closely as an EKG monitors a patient's heart rate. We get a lot of coverage about what candidates do and what the campaigns think is important. But that is not the same thing as covering what voters would like them to do and what Americans care about. A campaign might choose to talk about abortion, for example, even when the economy and health care are more important to most voters, because it mobilizes a key constituency to go to the polls.

The press spends far too much time "following" the campaigns, instead of emphasizing neglected issues and rooting its coverage in the experiences of actual communities. This is not a job solely for papers in local markets—the national debate would be enriched by real news about how the presidential contest is playing out across the country—especially since swing states have a disproportionate impact on national politics. Trudy Lieberman has done a great job of this in her Health Care on the Mississippi series for CJR. But there’s always room for more.

What if, instead of shelling out to send legions of reporters to the conventions, The New York Times, the cable news networks, and other national news outlets simply assigned a pair of reporters to every swing state for the 2008 election cycle assigned to get to know the states’ voters and their concerns? They would not cover the machinations of the campaigns’ state operations, but rather drive coverage to issues the campaigns might not have an interest in talking about. They would be advocates for the voters, not a means for the campaigns to get out their “message.”

Of course, there has been some very good political reporting this cycle, even of the kind I'm describing. My favorite story remains Katherine Q. Seelye's October, 2007 report on what patrons of South Carolina's black beauty parlors thought about the Democratic primary. The article communicates a sense for the texture of the political debate, and how it filters into voters' daily lives. Her reporting turned up a widespread "almost maternal concern for Mr. Obama's safety," an element that would be hard to elicit from polling.

Of course, Seelye was apparently tipped to the story because the Obama campaign had organized a beauty-parlor outreach campaign. But political discussions happen in community gathering spots—and, for that matter, Internet chat rooms—that no politician or journalist ever thinks to visit. Seeking out these stories without help from the campaigns is obviously a resource-intensive task. But it’d be much more informative than poll analyses that take up an unjustifiable amount of space when millions of Americans are making up their minds in a way that is infinitely more interesting than numbers can illustrate.

The alternative press has led the way on the story of Phil Gramm and the policy roots of the financial crisis, beating the mainstream business and other media rather badly about the face and neck.

Why this would be so is a subject for group psychologists, anthropologists, social workers, ethnographers, drug counselors, and media critics like us, and certainly another day. But with an election around the corner, we would suggest only that it is as much a mistake for journalists as it is for voters to assume that past policy decisions are unrelated to our current predicament.

So, let's accentuate the positive and offer an Audit Credit to Mother Jones for more excellent reporting on the ever-widening ripples from the deregulation of the American financial system, which allowed, as it invariably does, the bad money to drive out the good.

James K. Galbraith examines the bubble effects of this deregulation, looking beyond the obvious one in housing, already burst, to the other ones in energy and food. As his colleague David Corn did last summer, Galbraith lays considerable responsibility for financial deregulation at the feet of former Senator Phil Gramm. But, unlike Corn’s also Credit-worthy piece, Galbraith shifts his focus to a specific result of that deregulation: the speculation that has resulted in high commodities prices.

Galbraith’s analysis is nuanced. He does not blame high energy and food prices solely on speculation, but he does expose as a myth the idea that high prices are the result of tight supply and high demand alone. He states bluntly:

Yes, Virginia, speculators can affect the price—if they are large and relentless enough to dominate a market, and especially if they can store the commodity and keep it off the market as the price rises.

Here is where deregulation comes in, because it has given speculators their outsized power. Deregulation has meant that speculation is not a fringe activity, but has rather become a mainstream investment strategy. Here is Galbraith:

Thus today, when officials like Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson say that speculation is not a factor in the commodity markets, they’re not counting hedge funds and investment banks as speculators—even though that’s what they really are.

Galbraith is hardly the only one to raise the issue of speculation and high oil prices, but he distinguishes himself by looking at the larger picture: energy speculation as one facet of broader, and disastrous, deregulation.

In Galbraith’s and Corn’s pieces, Mother Jones makes it clear that if you are looking for someone to thank for this situation, you wouldn’t be wrong to send your regards to Phil Gramm.

Gramm threw his weight behind the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000, which, among other things, paved the way for a boom in those nasty credit default swaps that are coming back to haunt us all. Writes Galbraith:

This, combined with other deregulatory moves by the CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission], broadened the ‘swaps loophole,’ an enormous backdoor into the commodities markets, basically permitting speculators making bets off the commodities exchanges to be treated as ‘commercial interests’—like say, farmers—and hence avoid the scrutiny (including limits on the size of their bets) normally applied to financial players.

And, as is better known, Gramm also co-sponsored 1999 legislation—backed by the Clinton Administration—that collapsed the distinction between investment and commercial banks.

For a view of where both pieces of legislation fit into the financial crisis, take a look at this clear timeline that appeared in Mother Jones last summer.

In the interest of credit where credit is due, we note that Mother Jones, while notable for its force and persistence, was not the first publication to have looked closely at Gramm’s history. Credit also goes to The Texas Observer, where a rigorous article by Patricia Kilday Hart, from last May, pinpoints Gramm as an architect of the financial crisis. Here is Hart on the circumstances of the 2000 legislation:

In the early evening of Friday, December 15, 2000, with Christmas break only hours away, the U.S. Senate rushed to pass an essential, 11,000-page government reauthorization bill. In what one legal textbook would later call ‘a stunning departure from normal legislative practice,’ the Senate tacked on a complex, 262-page amendment at the urging of Texas Sen. Phil Gramm.

There was little debate on the floor. According to the Congressional Record, Gramm promised that the amendment—also known as the Commodity Futures Modernization Act—along with other landmark legislation he had authored, would usher in a new era for the U.S. financial services industry.

And did it ever.

In a reminder that the core circle of Gramm critics is a somewhat select bunch, the Texas Observer quotes both Galbraith and former government regulator Michael Greenberger, another name that appears prominently in what there is of Gramm coverage. (We’ve flagged an interview with him further down.)

But we can also see the widening influence of these ideas in pieces like this one from last July. Dave Davies, of the Philadelphia Daily News, chose to spend his “few minutes with McCain” asking about

the fact that his campaign co-chair and economic advisor, former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm, was co-sponsor of the 1999 law that allowed commercial banks to get into investment banking. And the fact that Gramm was a prime architect of a 2000 bill that kept regulators’ hands off ‘credit default swaps.’

McCain’s answers are unenlightening. But what is important is that this local reporter asked the question. What inspired him? Well, he didn’t mention any publication by name, but he appeared to give Mother Jones and The Texas Observer a nod when he explained, “Liberal writers raised this issue a month ago.”

The fact is, both the Mother Jones pieces and the Texas Observer piece are part of a small but important batch of articles appearing over the past several months that examine Gramm’s place in financial deregulation, and the resulting effects of that deregulation on the economy. Mother Jones and the Observer stand out for their depth and focus, but other pieces that at least place Gramm in context include an excellent April 2008 interview on Fresh Air with Greenberger, and a March 2008 New York Times piece that focuses on deregulation more broadly but does mention the former senator.

As a side note, press criticism of Gramm has not gone unnoticed in Washington. On Sept. 17, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders demonstrated that politicians—or at least their aides—do scan the press. He went to the trouble of reading to Congress a Sept. 15 post by blogger Peter Cohan criticizing Gramm’s deregulatory schemes, and he also mentioned The Texas Observer. In addition, Democrats have compiled an information sheet on Gramm that is based in substantial part on press coverage.

In other words, information is out there for those with the motivation to look for it.

The effect of these articles in the political arena remains to be seen. But it is worth noting that the current crisis is not the first time the press has focused on Gramm and deregulation.

To bring in recent history: Gramm and his wife, Wendy, did get some high-profile attention—from an eagle-eyed Public Citizen, then The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune (“Sen. Gramm and Wife Deregulated Enron, Benefited from Ties,” Jan. 18, 2002, Robert Manor), The Washington Post (“For Gramms, Enron Is Hard to Escape,” Jan. 25, 2002, Dan Morgan and Kathleen Day)—several years ago, after the Enron debacle and California energy crisis, for their roles in energy deregulation. But, as will happen, the hubbub died down.

Before it did, some reporters—in the NYT and the WSJ (“Out of Reach: The Enron Debacle Spotlights Huge Void In Financial Regulation,” Michael Schroeder and Greg Ip, Dec. 13, 2001), for example—widened their view, to address the problem of deregulation beyond the energy market. But the job of piecing together Gramm’s role in broader financial deregulation would largely fall to later reporters. Like Hart in The Texas Observer and Galbraith and Corn in Mother Jones.

All this is to say that while Gramm’s role in deregulation has not received the attention it deserves, neither has it gone away. Rather, it forms an undercurrent to the press’s effort to present the larger story of financial collapse.

And lastly, we come full circle: Another place the story has popped up again in recent days is on Mother Jones’s website, where David Corn returned to the topic September 15. He elaborated on suspicions about an ongoing connection between Gramm and McCain:

Gramm is responsible for the rise of the wild and wooly $62 trillion swaps market. And he was chairman of the McCain campaign and a top economic adviser for McCain—until he dismissed Americans worried about the economy as ‘whiners.’ After that comment, McCain dumped Gramm. But was Gramm truly excommunicated from McCain land?

This is pretty much a rhetorical question. And to back up his point, Corn goes on to offer evidence that Gramm appears to be “back in the good graces of the McCain campaign.”

All the more reason why the press needs to keep Gramm in its sights.

Hey, Ron Fournier! You know that whole "accountability journalism" thing you're trying? Well, there's a fine line between accountability and mockery. Take this little gem of a lede (h/t: TNR) from your organization's assessment of Sarah Palin's most recent TrooperGate turnabout:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Less than a week after balking at the Alaska Legislature's investigation into her alleged abuse of power, Gov. Sarah Palin on Monday indicated she will cooperate with a separate probe run by people she can fire.

First of all: Zing. Second of all: It's an open question, I think, whether Fournier's foray into "accountability journalism" is, indeed, beneficial to news organizations that rely on AP copy--or, put another way, whether "oh, SNAP!" is really a reaction AP stories should be evoking among readers. But it's hard to argue with the fact that the AP's single-sentence assessment here--which Eve Fairbanks called "the most dryly contemptuous lead sentence I've read in a political news story in a while"--is perhaps the pithiest summary of this latest irony in the irony-laden TrooperGate affair. Because, after all, the line between objectivity and accuracy is a fine one, as well.

We at CJR have long urged news outlets to consider at how the candidates’ proposals will affect real people. To that end, we have been running our own series, Health Care on the Mississippi, which has discussed how John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s health plans would affect various residents of a small Arkansas town on the Mississippi River. So we were pleased to see that the Columbus Dispatch has gone beyond the standard treatment of the candidates’ health proposals and asked some deeper questions about what those plans would do.

The paper used a local family, the Wirebaughs, to illustrate just what it means to have insurance, lose it when a job is outsourced, and get on Medicaid, only to be kicked off when the breadwinner gets a new job with insurance but with a three-month waiting period, during which the family is uninsured again. While the family had no insurance, they delayed getting medical care—regular check-ups for the pregnant Barbara Wirebaugh and her young sons. When a pre-employment physical revealed that her husband had an enlarged heart, he, too, delayed treatment, and worried that his condition would disqualify him under the new employer’s plan.

The paper has the candidates’ campaigns discuss how the Wirebaughs would fare under their proposals, and quoted a number of independent health care gurus, many from Ohio, who moved beyond the boilerplate comments we have been hearing from many in the health policy establishment. The head of the Ohio State Medical Association said that neither plan reduces health costs, neither offers universal coverage, neither offers a financing method, and neither addresses the inadequate primary care work force. He is spot on.

The president of a public-private partnership called Access HealthColumbus zoomed in on the overarching problem, saying that neither candidate sets a course for health-care policy. “The longer we avoid talking about this underlying policy issue the worse it becomes. Some of these ideas are good Band-Aids, but they’re still Band-Aids,” he said. Blogger Robert Laszewski, who also heads a Virginia consulting firm, noted that both plans call for the “same relatively uncontroversial and incremental cost containment ideas.” He called them “cost containment lite.” Laszewski also reiterated a point he has been making for awhile: that neither candidate’s plan is likely to pass.

Laszewski may be right, but it would be a shame if editors got the idea that they should forget about health care. There’s too much at stake, and the public is looking for leaders who will address this issue. Just ask the Wirebaughs, the people we’ve been profiling in Arkansas, and countless others whom newspapers should be writing about. With the election quickly looming, it’s beyond time to put Obama’s and McCain’s proposals to the sniff test.

Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezenski, and the Financial Times's Chrystia Freeland on MSNBC this morning:

SCARBOROUGH: Chrystia, let me tell you what I would love for you to have somebody write an article on. I'm serious. I would like to have a study of all of the CEOs who were fired over the past eight years for not growing their businesses at 28% a year...

BREZENSKI: And how much they made when they walked out the door...

SCARBOROUGH:. No. No. And I'll give you a great example, General Electric. We always, Why isn't it growing at 48%? Why isn't it growing at 78%? You must be failing. And not just General Electric...

FREELAND: There was a lot of pressure on lots of companies to lever up their balance sheets. What you're saying is the paranoid and prudent are suddenly looking great...

SCARBOROUGH: The prudent? But guess what? The prudent have been fired. Again, a list of all of those CEOs who didn't grow at the rate of these companies that have now gone belly up. Because they are all out there. There are guys out there saying, "Yeah, I got fired, I got kicked around because I wasn't growing my company as fast as Lehman Brothers or...

At which point Scarborough swiveled in his chair, placed his long-idle coffee mug into the GE microwave beside him, and pressed "reheat" as the camera pulled in tight, to an audible groan from Brezezinski?

Oh, that's that sitcom.

It's actually an interesting angle that Scarborough raises. Still. Shades of 30 Rock.

One thing forgotten by the business press in the debate over the $700 billion bailout, I think, is that this is not the first but the second blow dealt ordinary Americans in the credit scandal.

Forcing taxpayers—who had nothing to do with any of this—to buy the world’s most mysterious securities, that’s only the van backing up over the body.

The first blow was already delivered in the form of wildly unsuitable—indeed, trick—mortgages sold as the lending industry, starting around 2004, descended into what can only be described as breathtaking corruption to meet Wall Street's rising demand for mortgages. If that sounds strong, I'd submit it's only because the business press has done a poor job assembling what is in fact a very rich record, indeed. This initial accident is the one the Justice Department and FBI are investigating, and the one that California, Illinois and other states are suing about. Read all about it in CJR’s print edition (subscribe, for Pete’s sake, or okay, read it for free here).

The first blow is in fact far more damaging to the millions of those involved since it involves an equity loss and wealth transfer from homebuyers—non-combatants in the financial-services marketplace, and a particularly vulnerable group at that—to the professional classes of mortgage brokers, lenders, bond salesmen, etc.

The third blow is yet to come as the economy slows, and may trough for years, as a result of a crisis purely, solely, of the financial-services industry’s making.

As I’ve said, I really don't think it's possible to understand the credit crisis and bailout without fully appreciating the extravagant crookedness that underlies it. My former colleagues in the financial press, I think, are getting there. The political press is just getting started and, at this rate, may never make it.

In other news:

David Leonhardt of The New York Times asks the right question: how much is the U.S. going to pay for these securities, the value of which is utterly unknown? He says the value ranges from 25 cents to 75 cents on the dollar.

I say, Merrill Lynch sold its junk to a private equity firm back in July for 22 cents, and gave such generous terms that the real number is actually lower.

Leonhardt is wrong that it’s the only question people should focus on in this rush to passage. Still, it’s a good question, also asked in this Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:

First, there is the central issue of how to price the assets. When the subprime crisis hit in the summer of 2007, the Treasury's first response was to encourage the private sector to create a fund -- the so-called "Super SIV" (structured investment vehicle) -- to buy mortgage-related assets. This proposal foundered due to the difficulty of setting a price for these assets which come in complex and incomparable varieties.

And in this Journal editorial:

Private capital is vital but won't be forthcoming as long as no one knows what those assets are worth and which firms might fail.

And by Bill Gross, the king of bonds, who seems to be offering the rosiest scenario of all time:

I estimate the average price of distressed mortgages that pass from "troubled financial institutions" to the Treasury at auction will be 65 cents on the dollar, representing a loss of one-third of the original purchase price to the seller, and a prospective yield of 10 to 15 percent to the Treasury. Financed at 3 to 4 percent via the sale of Treasury bonds, the Treasury will therefore be in a position to earn a positive carry or yield spread of at least 7 to 8 percent.

Easy for him to say. If it’s such a great deal, why doesn’t he take it?

This Journal news story tries to explain the mechanics of how the government would hold some sort of auction to determine values. It is not very comforting:

One concern raised by members of Congress and others is the potential conflicts of interest among the asset managers who would be hired to run the program. Some critics worry that the program would create incentives for asset managers -- or a future Treasury secretary -- to benefit institutions with which they have financial or personal ties.

I’m sure that will never happen. This is Wall Street we’re talking about. But even assuming good faith how are our buyers going to know the value and overcome the advantages the sellers have in all of this? Unknown.

Other recommendations:

Liberal opinionist Tom Frank in the Journal:

The philosophy of government that has dominated Washington for almost three decades is now in ruins, and it is up to Mr. McCain to find out exactly why we believed it in the first place. Why did government stand back and permit all the misconduct that generated all this bad debt? What particular ideas led us to believe that government should just keep its hands off and let markets run their course?

(On a related topic, check out this brilliant piece by The Audit's Elinore Longobardi on the press and Phil Gramm.)

Harold Meyerson in the Post calling for taxpayers to get an equity stake for its riskiest ever investment:

And having endorsed the Street's version of socialism -- the American public picks up the tab for the financial sector's mistakes, no questions asked -- Paulson and the administration and the Republicans remain opposed to the more democratically socialist, or democratically capitalist, proposition that the public should get something for its investment. China, Singapore and the oil emirates cut a deal for their people. Why won't Hank Paulson cut one for his?

And George Will:

The essence of this crisis is lack of knowledge, including the inability to know who owes what to whom, and where risk resides. In such a moment, government's speed should not vary inversely with its information.

That’s not the essence, but it’s a good point.

(Voice of police dispatcher): “Calling all cars! Calling all cars! Be on the lookout for escaped commas. Last seen after years that follow dates, and after state names that follow cities. Can be recognized by their downward curves. Please recapture and replace immediately. Reward is clarity of meaning.”

We're talking about a parenthetical comma, which sets off information: “She was born July 20, 1995, and went to school in Springfield, Ill., where she graduated at the top of her eighth-grade class.” The loss of all those commas may not be a crime, but it certainly is a mystery.

The parenthetical comma isn’t an optional comma. It serves two purposes: the first is to set off the year/state from the date, and the second is to set off the year/state from the rest of the sentence. Without it, readers can be momentarily distracted into thinking that the year/state is part of phrase by which it is followed.

Here are some examples. Not too long ago, a CNN news crawl read: “A judge in Alexandria, Virginia ruled yesterday that ...” Was the judge in Alexandria named Virginia? Of course not. (We will not discuss why CNN chose not to abbreviate Virginia in this case.) And the cornerstone laid at the base of the Freedom Tower at ground zero reads: “To honor and remember those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001 and as a tribute to the enduring spirit of freedom.” In both cases, the first comma, following the city and date, is missing its mate, which is supposed to follow the extra information of the state and year.

So far, I have not found a single grammar book, style guide, or other advisory that approves the omission of that second comma. And much of the time, that comma is missing even if followed by an independent clause that would have been set off by a comma anyway. Yet time and again, in court documents, news stories, and books—not to mention granite—that comma has gone missing.

If anyone has an explanation for this phenomenon, please forward it. And if you recognize yourself, please turn yourself in, and reward your readers.

From Katie Couric's blog:

Friends come up to me wondering if I'll ask [during an interview with Sarah Palin this week] about the rumors online, all the gossipy stuff that seems to sell magazines and mean so little in terms of Palin's preparedness for the job.

This election is too important, and we have only a few precious weeks left to get to know who these candidates really are. With 7 percent of women undecided, I want to serve the sisterhood (and the brotherhood, too, btw) by helping all of us make informed choices.

Couric is, however, taking question suggestions.

Here's one: Remember when, during your 60 Minutes sit-down with then-candidate Hillary Clinton, you asked, "Someone told me your nickname in school was Miss Frigidaire. Is that true?"? No need to similarly "serve the sisterhood" this time. (Sarah Barracuda. We know.)

It may well be true that the U.S. Supreme Court is losing its influence in the wider world. But you won’t find much evidence for the proposition in the latest (and probably last) installment of Adam Liptak’s generally praiseworthy “American Exception” series in The New York Times.

The article, headlined "U.S. Court, a Longtime Beacon, Is Now Guiding Fewer Nations" and published on page one of the September 18 edition, argues that "a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices," while attempting to link this trend to the domestic debate over whether the Supreme Court should ever cite foreign law. But in 2,500 words, the piece gives only two concrete pieces of evidence for the apparent trend—statistics about declining court citations in Canada and Australia.

Meanwhile, the article proposes at least six possible causes, without doing much to demonstrate the validity of any of them. Perhaps American legal influence is declining because the new authority of the European Court of Human Rights has rendered U.S. Supreme Court decisions irrelevant in certain crucial areas; or because “new and sophisticated” constitutional courts elsewhere have little regard for the old ways; or because slightly older constitutional courts are maturing and developing their own bodies of precedent; or because the unpopularity of the Bush administration has led foreign courts to snub American judgment; or because the Rehnquist and Roberts courts’ conservatism is out of sync with the prevailing international liberalism; or because some U.S. Supreme Court justices vocally oppose citing foreign law, making foreign judges want to return the favor.

This last suggestion is the most innovative. And while the article devotes nearly 1,000 words to a largely familiar discussion of the pros and cons of citing foreign law, it is strangely nonchalant about establishing a connection between the U.S. Supreme Court’s resistance to foreign citations and a reciprocal neglect by foreign judges. As Michael Stokes Paulsen, a professor of law at the University of St. Thomas, writes on the Balkinization law blog, “What unites the two phenomena, loosely, is the idea of some sort of U.S. balance-of-trade in the export-import market for constitutional interpretation.”

Even the two pieces of evidence the article manages to muster for its central claim seem shaky:

From 1990 through 2002, for instance, the Canadian Supreme Court cited decisions of the United States Supreme Court about a dozen times a year, an analysis by The New York Times found. In the six years since, the annual citation rate has fallen by half, to about six.

Australian state supreme courts cited American decisions 208 times in 1995, according to a recent study by Russell Smyth, an Australian economist. By 2005, the number had fallen to 72.

Are these numbers significant or not? At least the Canadian statistic consists of nineteen data points. But do the two data points borrowed from the Australian study demonstrate a meaningful trend?

Russell Smyth, the economist who performed the study, wanted to analyze citation patterns over a century, so he counted citations from one year in each decade as a representative sample: 1905, 1915, 1925, and so on, through 2005. He found that between 1905 and 1975, the number of American citations never rose above sixteen; in both 1965 and 1975 the number was twelve. But ten years later, in 1985, it jumped all the way up to 105. In 1995 it jumped again, to 208.

Why the large increases in 1985 and 1995? And is the decline in 2005 significant? “I think Adam Liptak has used my study in a slightly misleading way,” Smyth told me over e-mail. The 2005 decline should be considered in light of the 1985 and 1995 increases, he said, which followed directly from the passage of the Australia Act of 1985-1986, severing the remaining legal ties between Australia and the United Kingdom. It was, Smyth said, “the beginning of attempts to forge a national legal identity” and led to greater citation of foreign, but non-British, jurisprudence.

As for the 2005 decline, Smyth doubts its significance as an indicator of American legal influence. Australian state courts cite relatively few foreign decisions, period: those 208 citations from 1995 were only 1.37 percent of the total citations, foreign and domestic. (The seventy-two from 2005 were 0.47 percent of the total.) The Australian High Court may well still be citing as many American cases as ever, Smyth said. (A study of High Court decisions shows a continuing upward trend in various sorts of American citations through 2000.)

Are the Canadian numbers more persuasive? Peter McCormick, a Canadian political scientist and the author of a statistical analysis of Canadian Supreme Court citations, told me that in Canada, too, there was a large increase in American citations in the 1980s and 1990s that makes the decrease of the 2000s seem less significant. Looking at a graph of the past century, he said, “the general feeling is a long-term level at 3% or below, with a temporary ‘blip’ of a dozen or so years centered on 1990.” His best explanation for the blip is the passage of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, combined with the presence in the 1980s and 1990s of several Canadian Supreme Court justices who earned graduate law degrees in the United States. (The last of this group left the bench in 1997.)

Based on his research, McCormick found it particularly unlikely that Canadian judges were hesitating to cite the U.S. Supreme Court because of its current conservatism. “The citations are splendidly scattered across a very extended period, and across a very broad range of judges,” he said. “So if I am a [Canadian Supreme Court] judge who knows the US jurisprudence and I feel like citing that Court even though I don’t like its current or recent direction, I can just keep looking until I find a judge (or at least a finding or a rationale) that I do like.” The most frequently cited U.S. Supreme Court justice, through the 2000s, was Byron White, who served between 1962 and 1993. Justice Horace Gray, who served from 1882 to 1902, was in the top ten.

Despite its flaws, Liptak’s article collects a number of strong quotations and makes some worthwhile points. In one of the article’s most persuasive moments, we are reminded why the worst fears about foreign citation are overblown:

The controversy over the citation of foreign law in American courts is freighted with misconceptions. One is that the practice is somehow new or unusual. The other is that to cite such a decision is to be bound by it. … Indeed, American judges cite all sorts of things in their decisions—law review articles, song lyrics, television programs. State supreme courts cite decisions from other states, though a decision from Wisconsin is no more binding in Oregon than is one from Italy.

But the extended discussion of the controversy over foreign citation mostly serves to muddy the article’s core argument. Indeed, no one quoted in the article asserts the connection that Liptak wants to make between American justices being reluctant to cite foreign precedent and foreign judges declining to cite them in return. (Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor comes the closest when she says, “When U.S. courts are seen to be cognizant of other judicial systems, our ability to act as a rule-of-law model for other nations will be enhanced.”)

At a crucial point early in the article, a misleading arrangement of quotes gives the incorrect impression that Australian High Court Justice Michael Kirby is making this connection. The article quotes former Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak as saying that the U.S. Supreme Court “is losing the central role it once had among courts in modern democracies,” and then immediately quotes Kirby as follows:

Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia said that his court no longer confined itself to considering English, Canadian and American law. “Now we will take information from the Supreme Court of India, or the Court of Appeal of New Zealand, or the Constitutional Court of South Africa,” he said in an interview published in 2001 in The Green Bag, a legal journal. “America” he added, “is in danger of becoming something of a legal backwater.”

Kirby’s final pronouncement sounds like it means that the Australian High Court no longer has much use for the U.S. Supreme Court. But in the full interview, it is clear that what Kirby means is that by ignoring the rest of the world, America is impoverishing its own legal imagination:

The best thoughts, the most creative thoughts, will come from outside of your magic circle. It’s therefore important to stimulate your mind with analogous reasoning. … One problem in the United States, in my experience, is that lawyers are not as stimulated as in other countries by external forces that really challenge their thinking. England, which is the source of the legal system in both our countries, is being fundamentally challenged now because of its association with Europe and the civil law system. Other countries, similarly, are being challenged by the forces of globalism. America is in danger, I think, of becoming something of a legal backwater in a world of such radical global changes, and it’s not good enough simply to go to a lawyers’ conference in London and feel like you’ve been globalised. You’ve got to realize that the legal systems of Asia, Latin America and Africa are speaking to us as well.

This notion that attention to foreign jurisprudence can stimulate good legal thinking, which Barak also asserts, is an interesting one, and Liptak might have written a more focused article about whether, as some believe, U.S. Supreme Court decisions are becoming increasingly narrow and esoteric, and the causes and implications of that trend for both American and foreign jurisprudence.

An article that considered how the quality and substance of U.S. Supreme Court decisions have changed over time might have left room for another reason that foreign judges may be less inclined to cite American decisions. As Mark Tushnet, a professor at Harvard Law School, wrote to me in an e-mail,

High court judges around the world are now talking not about U.S. Supreme Court influence, positive or negative, but regretfully about the failure of U.S. constitutional jurisprudence to contribute to thoughtful reflection on what those judges see to be common problems of constitutionalism. It’s not just statistics about citation, but a considered judgment that U.S. constitutional jurisprudence is not useful in a way that it had been earlier.

I’d like to read that article.

The litany of media screw-ups in the UAL affair—that financial news blip before the current deluge—was well documented. Except, that is, for one thing: Bloomberg somehow escaped much scrutiny, despite having a key role (for better and for worse) in the fiasco.

It’s worth another look, even if the markets weren’t suffering from a combination of nervous exhaustion, hysteria, depression, bipolarity and the vapors, which they certainly are now.

On reflection, the events of September 8 were less about the dangers of junk information on the Internet, and much more about the power of the Bloomberg terminal and the extent to which it functions as the financial markets’ nervous system. The bad information came from elsewhere, but it was “the Bloomberg” that amplified the information enough to crash the price.

Meanwhile, and paradoxically, Bloomberg News, a segment of Bloomberg and an integral part of the Bloomberg product, was first to get the story right (though in the mayhem, it later got it wrong, too), and for that we offer two-and-a-half cheers to the newsroom across from Bloomingdale’s.

Let’s walk through it again: In the wee hours of Sunday, September 7, a Google News “bot” found a 2002 story on the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s site and slapped a 2008 date on it. That was bad, but the junk appears to have sat out there benignly for about thirty-three hours until a researcher for a firm called Income Securities Advisors unthinkingly picked it up and sent it out to subscribers via Bloomberg terminals at 10:53 a.m. EDT on Monday, September 8, with a headline saying “UAL Corp.: United Airlines files for Ch. 11 to cut costs”, according to the Chicago Tribune. UAL shares plummeted 76 percent, wiping out more than a billion dollars of shareholder value, until Nasdaq halted trading at about 11:07.

Here's a not-very-easy-to-read chart (courtesy of Bloomberg, of course) of September 8 trading at five-minute intervals. Note that the stock had done very little for the hour and twenty-three minutes that the market was open until the bad information appeared on the Bloomberg.

Bloomberg News (whose stories are clearly identified on the terminals) wrote headlines about the plummeting UAL stock at 10:59, but provided no other information (and certainly nothing erroneous). Then at 11:06 it broke the news that the bankruptcy story was wrong with a headline saying “UAL HASN'T FILED FOR BANKRUPTCY, SPOKESWOMAN SAYS.”

So, Bloomberg’s terminals, not the Internet, basically spread the fire; its news service was the first to put it out, providing proof that you can be fast and good.

Though, of course, nobody’s perfect.

Bloomberg News muddied the waters by issuing an erroneous headline at 11:07, a minute later, citing the Tribune saying UAL had filed for bankruptcy. Fortunately for Bloomberg News, that came a few seconds after Nasdaq shut down trading in UAL and it didn’t affect the stock.

In any case, from a journalistic and a market perspective, the focus should really be on Bloomberg LP’s model.

Bloomberg’s amazing terminals—those $20,000-a-year machines—are delivery vehicles for an incredible amount of information, including its own news service, but also third-party news and research, such as information from Income Securities Advisors, whose stories are available with an add-on subscription fee to regular Bloomberg service. Those and all other outside submissions are clearly marked as being from a non-Bloomberg source.

“That was also lost on so many people,” says Judith Czelusniak, a Bloomberg spokeswoman. “We provide proprietary news, data, and analytic tools and are also a delivery mechanism for independent news and research.”

The error gave Bloomberg competitor Dow Jones the opportunity to whack an unnamed “major financial news service” a couple of days later with a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal that sounds like it was written by Rupert Murdoch himself:

Old news is bad news: Dow Jones delivers credible, timely, and accurate news you can trust.

A Dow Jones spokeswoman says it doesn’t distribute third-party content on its wire that hasn’t been edited by Dow Jones journalists. A Reuters representative didn’t get back to us.

It’s a bit silly, though, to blame Bloomberg because its terminals carried erroneous information from a third party. That would be sort of (but not quite) like blaming Google and YouTube for this guy. A Bloomberg is an information conduit; it offers a variety of sources, and that is part of its strength. Dow Jones here is merely criticizing Bloomberg for offering more information, which should give you an idea why DJ had so much trouble with Bloomberg over the years. (Background available here:)

The more things you offer, the more mistakes you make. Put another way, and as every bad editor knows: if you don’t do anything, you’ll never screw up.

Still, though (and unlike YouTube), Bloomberg LP isn’t entirely blameless since it performs a journalistic function by controlling who is and isn't allowed to post on its terminal. Thus it is ultimately responsible for any bad information that makes it on there.

There were a litany of breakdowns in the new media newsgathering process with the UAL story, but the role of the powerful Bloomberg terminal in amplifying the bad information should at least be considered. It’s not to say the model is flawed, but, again, without the terminal, nothing much happens here. Something to think about in these nervous times.

Also notable was the fine performance of Bloomberg’s news staff, which provided its readers better information, quicker than others, and helped correct the record.

Ah, yes:

CNN: "McCain drifts away from legacy of deregulation."

"Drifts away" sounding more benign than, say, "slinks away" or "would rather you not focus on." (Personally, I'm hearing Christopher Cross's voice: "Sailing! Takes me away! And soon I will be free" of my deregulation legacy.)

CNN might then have done a bit more to call the drifting McCain back in the ensuing article (to account for his record or, at least, to remind readers of that record in any specificity before enabling the "drifting away" from it.)

How many politicians wish they could "drift away," with reporters' assistance, from suddenly unwanted "legacies?"

After Charlie Gibson's infamous interview with Alaska governor Sarah Palin, much was made of her confused look and pause when Gibson asked her: "Do you agree with the Bush Doctrine?"

But Gibson's own understanding of the Bush Doctrine was slightly confused:

The Bush Doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense; that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us.

A version of this question (and this definition) is bound to reappear in Friday’s foreign policy-focused presidential debate, so we might as well clear this up right now. Gibson was trying to say that the Bush Doctrine equaled the right of the United States to wage preventive war—which means that State A attacks State B because, sometime in the future, State A believes State B could pose an immediate threat. The initial "shock and awe" campaign of 2003's Operation Iraqi Freedom was a classic example of preventive war.

But by calling the initial attack a "preemptive strike," Gibson confusingly equated the Bush Doctrine with preemptive war—or the right of State A to attack State B when there is evidence State B is actively preparing to attack State A. In 2006, the RAND Corporation reported (PDF) that most commentators on international law believe preemptive war is only legitimate when an imminent threat exists, "most often a visible mobilization of armies, navies, and air forces preparing to attack."

The Bush administration's claims that the Iraq war was preemptive never really matched such scholarly consensus, and were wholly discredited when no weapons of mass destruction were discovered. A precedent for a legitimately waged preemptive war does, however, exist: Israel's first strike against Egypt in 1967, which began the Six Day War.

Although Gibson's gaffe may seem like a minor mistake, it's not, for one big reason: preemptive war is legal, preventive war is not. While it's unlikely any American official will or would ever be held accountable for waging preventive war in Iraq or anywhere else, RAND does describe the consequences of waging war in contravention of international law:

[T]he perceived illegality of an action affects perceptions of its legitimacy, and that may affect the success of the action through its influence on other nations either as a help or a hindrance. Moreover, even though the perceived illegality of an action alone may not bar that action, striking first when that attack is believed to be illegitimate will entail costs, even if they are difficult to measure ...

Understanding the difference between the two rationales for the use of force could help Americans understand how U.S. foreign policy has changed since the preventive war doctrine was enunciated in 2002; it could also help Americans understand the widespread foreign opposition to the invasion and occupation of Iraq. More immediately, though, it could help the public and politicos alike understand future questions about the Bush Doctrine—questions that, as it turns out, can be just as awkward for the interviewer as for the subject.

From the pool report* from Gov. Sarah Palin's "meeting" with Afghan president Hamid Karzai in New York today:

Palin, her legs crossed and at one point patting her heart, was leaning in eagerly and smiling. Karzai, wearing his traditional clothes but without his trademark karakul hat, was also grinning while discussing [his] child. His remarks were unintelligible as the noise from the clicking cameras drowned them out. This was the only exchange that was heard:

“What is his name?,” Palin asked.

“Mirwais,” Karzai responded. “Mirwais, which means, ‘The Light of the House.’”

“Oh nice,” Palin responded.

“He is the only one we have,” remarked Karzai.

At this point, the pool was hustled out the room and down to the hotel lobby.

Pool was in the room for a grand total of 29 seconds.

Palin spokesperson Tracey Schmitt gave a statement to reporters in the lobby as to why print pool and wires were not allowed in:

"The decision was made for this to be a photo spray with still cameras and video cameras only."

I'm not familiar with the term "photo spray," but I do think it's more apt that "photo op" in that it doesn't imply that something is being given (the campaign provides the press an opportunity to photograph the candidate... in a specific, controlled manner) so much as something is being forcefully dispensed, like pesticide on a pest.

* Better than nothing? This 29-second pool report, from CNN producer Peter Hamby, apparently exists only because CNN threatened to pull its cameras when initially told by Palin's people that only cameras (no print and wire reporters in the press pool) would be admitted to the meeting. Other media orgs, too, complained. A "media rebellion," per the New York Times.

UPDATE: Maybe reporters would have better luck with this Sarah Palin?

While Secretary of State Hank Paulson pushes for the government to issue a $700 billion bailout, most of us in the media are still trying to comprehend just what that sum translates into.

For a better perspective on just how massive this bailout really is, check out Zephyr Teachout's post yesterday on techPresident:

It is $140 billion more than has been spent on the Iraq war since the invasion.

It is $120 billion more than that spent on social security benefits.

It is almost 3 billion nonrefundable bus fares from Durham to San Francisco, leaving tomorrow.

It is nine times the amount spent on education in 2007.

It could pay for 2,000 McDonalds apple pies for every single American.

That's a lot of pie. Here are some more numbers that we came up with to help you wrap your head around how much money $700 billion really is:

- It would reimburse banks, home owners, and local governments for nearly 9 million foreclosures
- It could prevent over 200 million foreclosures
- It could buy 8.6 billion monthly Metrocards
- The government could rebuild Katrina-ravished New Orleans and Gulf Coast … three and a half times
- Roughly 538 Yankee Stadiums could be built
- 5.4 million students could be sent to a public university
- It equals nearly 520 times the amount of Amtrak’s current operating budget
- It is $14 billion more than the U.S. spent during the Vietnam War

This morning, Fox personality and self-impersonator Bill O’Reilly went on Good Morning America to peddle his eighth book, which goes on sale today. Modestly titled A Bold Fresh Piece of Humanity, the memoir traces O’Reilly’s modest Levittown beginnings and the etiology of the face that launched a thousand jokes. Or, as he told GMA’s Robin Roberts, the book is “kind of like going into Frankenstein’s laboratory - how’d that monster actually rise from the slab?!” Gooood question.

His ballyhooing about the book—wanting to sue the nun who taught him in third grade for smacking him with a ruler, wanting to smack everyone who wants to know what happened to that cute little boy on the cover (“I don’t want to hear it anymore, ladies and gentlemen. I’m nine, all right? Now I’m eighty!”)—quickly transitioned into something grander, an O’Reillian philosophy of life: “I believe that overcoming fear is the key to a useful and honorable life.”

This pugilistically innovative life method explains how America has gotten through everything ever, how it will get through this now, and how Robin Roberts got through cancer. (Chemo? Overrated.). Roberts, bored, flustered, or transported by the lecture, decided to wrap up by saying “Bill O’Reilly. You should really have your own show - oh, that’s right! You already have your own show!”

“I do have my own show, Robin,” the Philosopher King groused. Indeed.

When Sarah Palin joined the Republican ticket last month, according to the LA Times's Faye Fiore today:

a fickle press corps deserted [Senator Joe Biden] for Alaska. Palin's campaign plane was so full that they had to kick people off, Biden's so empty that reporters had their choice of rows to stretch out and take a nap.

But in recent days something changed.

A "sign of the fading Palin mystique," per Fiore? Katie Couric's presence at a recent Biden campaign event in Ohio.

(So: Nap-time's over?)

Thanks to Fiore's presence on Biden's trail we now know that Biden is a close-talker (which made Fiore uncomfortable but, she observed, seems to work well with real people in Ohio). And, that Biden talks a lot about his working class roots -- which, again, the crowds like --but Fiore couldn't help but notice that "for a regular guy, Biden is very well-tailored," that "the break in his gray slacks is exquisite."

Everyone loves to talk about John McCain's complicated relationship with the media. CJR has previously considered The New York Times’s relationship with the McCain campaign. The latest news from the campaign trail is that McCain, the Silent Generation's noisy spokesman, has fired back. Michael Scherer over at Time’s blog, Swampland, wrote about the McCain campaign's attack on the Times and the paper's article yesterday on McCain campaign manager Rick Davis. Scherer writes that McCain senior adviser Steve Schmidt:

[T]urned this public shaming up a notch by condemning the New York Times, easily the most influential newspaper in America, as a partisan rag in unusually blunt and categorical language.

"Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization," Schmidt announced on a well attended conference call. "This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate."

Forget about the mathematically questionable 150 percent for a minute. Discussions of purported liberal media bias can be valid ones and it might be legitimate to question whether the Times’s political coverage has been unduly pro-Obama. But Scherer doesn’t really address that question. Instead, he offers this:

This may be a nifty bit of misdirection. It may be a legitimate complaint. It may be a play to rile up the Republican base. (One of the McCain campaign's best fund-raising days of the spring came the day after the New York Times suggested--without definitive evidence--that McCain had an inappropriate relationship with a lady lobbyist.) Whatever it is, it's [sic] certainly will get the talkers talking, which is most definitely Schmidt's intent."

Whatever it is? The talkers are talking, but, evidently, Time is not; Michael Scherer’s analysis here is almost laughably incomplete. Schmidt's complaint is pegged to yesterday’s Times story about McCain campaign manager Rick Davis’s ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Here’s the story’s lede:

Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.

Schmidt made the point that there were Obama donors and advisors connected to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, too. Technically, the Times acknowledged that very point (“[McCain] and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, have donors and advisers who are tied to the companies.”). But the article was, after all, about Davis and his relationship with the mortgage giants—specifically, his efforts to help them avoid further government regulation.

No one from Barack Obama's campaign was paid tens of thousand of dollars a month to head an advocacy group set up to protect Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from regulations. While both presidential candidates are closely connected to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it looks like McCain's campaign was more closely (and more sinisterly) connected. So while it is likely that Times story is more damaging to McCain than to Obama, the story is also a reflection of reality.

This is what makes the Time piece so regrettable. The McCain campaign looked at a damaging story and proclaimed media bias, to deflect attention from the fact that the story is true. It's just not good enough to for commentators to say "this could be one thing or it could be another." It's actually entirely valid—indeed it's a journalist's job—to assess whether the attack is misdirection or whether it’s a legitimate complaint. Do some reporting and pass an informed judgment. If that's not a possibility, then don't write about it in the first place.

And I was hoping I could ignore O.J. Simpson Trial, Vegas Edition.

The New York Times reports that a key witness, Thomas Riccio, yesterday testified that ABC News paid him $15,000. ABC News said it paid not for the interview but for "other materials."

Mr. Riccio’s recording of the planning and execution of the meeting — and the fact that he sold it to TMZ.com before sharing it with the police — had been widely reported, but until Monday he had not publicly disclosed that he had also been paid by mainstream news organizations. Under cross-examination by one of Mr. Simpson’s lawyers, Yale Galanter, Mr. Riccio described his negotiations with ABC News and “Entertainment Tonight.” He said that producers from both had told him they could not pay him for an interview, but that when he said he would not cooperate without pay, they offered money for photographs of Mr. Riccio with Mr. Simpson and rights to use the audio recording.

A spokesman for ABC News, Jeffrey Schneider, said the network never paid for interviews. What it paid Mr. Riccio for, Mr. Schneider said, were rights to broadcast parts of the audio recording on “Good Morning America” and to show several photos of Mr. Riccio and Mr. Simpson together on the day of the hotel-room meeting. He said Mr. Riccio had been interviewed to clarify parts of the audio that were difficult to hear. The interview was broadcast on “Good Morning America.”

CJR has praised it before, but the best explainer I’ve seen—scratch that—the best explainer I’ve heard on the how the world’s financial system became mired in bad mortgage debt was a May episode of Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life, co-produced with NPR News.

The hour-long piece entitled “The Giant Pool of Money” was reported and assembled by Alex Blumberg, one of the program’s regular producers and once my radio professor, and Adam Davidson, NPR’s international business and economics correspondent. And it’s excellent: understandable, comprehensive, and engaging.

Last weekend, Blumberg did another great spot looking at the role of Securities and Exchange Commission chair Chris Cox and his agency in the crisis.

And Davidson is now doing extra innings, conducting interviews and answering listener questions on the crisis on a newly minted emergency NPR podcast named “Planet Money,” which, in under two weeks, has become iTunes’s second most popular offering. If you are confused by the crisis and a podcast listener, ad this to your mix. And if you're confused by the crisis and not a podcast listener, well, now might be the time to start.

Davidson and producer Laura Conaway strike a conversational tone, which goes a long way towards blunting the often-anxious news. And as a reminder to how often that news changes, the team is careful to mention the exact time they start recording—because who knows what could happen in a couple of hours...

There’ve been several articles recently about the Minds of Voters—some good; others quite bad. (Gawker has a roundup here.)

A Salon piece from yesterday presumably wanted to add to this discussion. The article, by neurologist Robert Burton, argues that overconfidence in one’s beliefs can lead to “the inability to consider how new facts might alter a presently cherished opinion,” and offers a philosophical mandate, couched as a solution: “…if we, as a country, truly want change, we must be open-minded, flexible and willing to revise our opinions when new evidence warrants it.”

Good, good, yes. And? But no, that’s essentially where it ends.

Burton’s commentary is based on a paper published in 1999 by two Cornell psychologists, called "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” which studies “our ability to judge ourselves and others”—an ability that is unsurprisingly decreased when we ourselves are incompetent.

Burton uses the paper to explain why voters might be bad at judging the capabilities of the candidates they support, even when alerted to misinformation or false statements. Unfortunately, his efforts just add another ____-ological explanation for why individuals don’t always vote rationally, without advancing a particularly new insight. If that’s the deal, then I vote to pass on this brand of commentary.

The article exemplifies how unconvincing this type of psychology-behind-the-electorate commentary can be at times. (From a Newsweek piece about a possible biological basis for conservatism and liberalism: “The research…attempts to connect the dots between a person's sensitivity to threatening images—a large spider on someone's face, a bloodied person and maggot-filled wound—and the strength of their support for conservative or liberal policies.” Analyzing voter predilections with physiology makes for an entertaining read, but that’s about it.)

Articles like this (and the Salon piece, which remains infuriatingly vague about whose voting psychology it is parsing), remind us that voter-psych studies are most useful when balanced with a more logistical approach to voter mindsets. For instance, an analysis of existing structural problems in the voting system might arguably explain some of the historical voting trends as well, if not better, than many psych studies ever would.

It’s an interplay that a recent New York Review of Books piece tackled skillfully, looking at both the psychology of white voters and the logistics of black voter registration to analyze the possibilities of the Bradley Effect. (Writer Andrew Hacker advises the Obama camp: “ALWAYS SUBTRACT SEVEN PERCENT!”)

Hacker’s article, weaving practical and theoretical issues to confront a difficult topic, is a rarity in the Inside the Minds of Voters slalom. Many other writers have succumbed instead to Analysis by Archetype, treating voting blocs (and their resident psychologies) like so many lump sums to add to or subtract from the candidates’ respective totals. The Salon piece likewise suffers from a vague and belittling analysis (you know who I’m talking about, so I won’t be so indelicate as to call Sarah Palin fans incompetent), and an unproductive shout-out to the necessities of testing executive response:

It is not enough to hear each candidate regurgitate memorized and rehearsed policy statements; we must know what they will do and how they will act in situations for which they have not been adequately prepared. Leadership is measured by the best decisions during the worst times.

It’s as if in addition to not providing any specific, useful voter analysis, Burton is a bit behind on recent headlines. Physician, heal thyself.

Bono (of U2 and the One Campaign) and Jeffrey Sachs (of Columbia's Earth Institute) are blogging for the Financial Times this week (on the occasion of the the Millennium Development Goals summit). Bono describes himself as the FT's

roving reporter in the canyons of Manhattan. While the world upends on Wall Street, I’ll be mostly midtown at the UN and the Clinton Global Initiative talking about the resilience of the world’s poor while the world’s rich find out how fragile life can be.

Bono promises to blog about doing "judo in a suit" with McCain and Palin later this week ("judo in a suit" being Bono's description of what happens in the meetings he has with world leaders and the like.)

If I were a newspaper editor right now I’d be ordering more stories like this Bloomberg piece, which gropes for historical comparisons to where we are now and finds one in Scandinavia’s financial crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Ridiculous? Sure. How can you compare this $700 billion catastrophe (and that’s only the taxpayers’ stake; never mind the borrowers’ loss of equity) to one in Sweden, Norway and Finland that cost only $14 or so billion to fix?

But I wonder if I’m the only one who wonders whether we are stumbling through a storm—as “unprecedented,” “momentous,” and historic” as it may be— that previous generations have experienced before. Some of us readers vaguely remember from school that U.S. history was pockmarked with financial crises for most the 19th and early 20th centuries, culminating in the one in 1929, and that those stopped for a while.

Wikipedia provides a list:

--Panic of 1819: pervasive USA economic recession w/ bank failures.

--Panic of 1837: pervasive USA economic recession w/ bank failures; a 5 yr. depression ensued.

--Panic of 1857: pervasive USA economic recession w/ bank failures.

--Panic of 1873: pervasive USA economic recession w/ bank failures; a 4 yr. depression ensued.

--Panic of 1893: pervasive USA economic recession w/ bank failures.

--Panic of 1901: limited to crashing of the New York Stock Exchange.

--Panic of 1907 - pervasive USA economic recession w/ bank failures.

Coincidentally or not, the period following the New Deal did not suffer from financial shocks perpetrated by Wall Street. Those came after the deregulatory movement begun in the 1970s. (A PBS documentary last night showed Ronald Reagan finding his voice opposing big government while working for General Electric from 1954 to 1962. Watching it, I could only wonder:
What part of that period’s broad-based economic expansion—the one that essentially created the American middle class as we know it—didn’t he like?)

In any case, Bloomberg’s Scandinavian tale contains many parallels to our own:

At the end of the 1980s, the economies of Sweden, Finland and Norway had surged after deregulation and low interest rates encouraged banks to lend more. Finnish house prices jumped 80 percent in real terms, and its stock market soared 164 percent in five years, according to JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The byproduct was a mounting debt burden. As policy makers sought to slow inflation and protect their fixed exchange rates, banks found their balance sheets decimated by nonperforming loans amounting to 10 percent of the region's gross domestic product.

The Scandinavians acted swiftly, like U.S. policymakers are doing today, and received wide applause:

The response to the subsequent financial crisis was one of ``rapidity and vigor,'' said then-Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan in a 1999 speech. Sweden guaranteed bank obligations against losses and established a $14 billion restructuring fund to provide failing banks with capital in return for equity. In addition to taking over Nordbanken AB, the government created a ``bad bank'' that bought troubled assets at a discount, while leaving financial institutions to manage their more-liquid holdings.

Norway's government took similar steps by insuring savings and seizing control of the country's three biggest banks. Finland merged more than 40 banks, including Skopbank Ltd., into a government-run entity and moved nonperforming assets to management companies run by its central bank.

And yet, even still, the result was unbelievably destructive (the emphasis is mine):

While the interventions ``were sweeping and ultimately a success,'' they didn't bring immediate relief to the three countries' economies, as banks cut back on lending and companies and consumers spent less, said Lauri Uotila, chief economist at Sampo Bank, a unit of Danske Bank A/S in Helsinki.

The Finnish and Swedish economies contracted in 1991, 1992 and 1993. Norges Bank calculates that during the early 1990s, output fell 12.3 percent in Finland, 5.8 percent in Sweden and 4.1 percent in Norway. Unemployment didn't peak in Finland until May 1994, when the rate reached 19.9 percent, having fallen as low as 2.1 percent in 1990. Sweden's jobless rate averaged 9.9 percent in 1997, up from 1.6 percent in 1990.

The Wall Street Journal makes a stab at historicism here:

Some politicians and bankers say the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, also known as the Financial Services Modernization Act, and other deregulatory measures set the stage for today's mess. They argue that the mortgage-lending frenzy was fueled by companies like Citigroup, which raked in huge profits by repackaging mortgages into securities and selling them to investors around the world.

Good job. More please.

Other recommendations:

Read Barry Ritholtz’s 13 questions for Paulson and Bernanke, including my favorites:

1. You two gentlemen have been wrong about the Housing crisis, missed the leverage problem, and understated the derivative issue. Indeed, you two have been wrong about nearly everything since this crisis began years ago. Why should we trust your judgment on the largest bailout in American history?

4. In the nationalization of AIG, the US taxpayer received 80% of the company. What is the taxpayer getting for their money in this $700B bailout?

7. In 2004, your former firm, Goldman Sachs, along with 4 other brokers, received a waiver of the net capitalization rules, allowing these firms to dramatically exceed the 12-to-1 leverage rules. How much was this waiver responsible for the current situation?

The business press is still trying to get its arms around the utter immorality and scandal that the credit crisis represents. Here’s the The New York Times’s attempt via interviews with economists.

“It absolutely has to be punitive,” Mr. Baker said. “If they sell us the junk, then we own the company. This isn’t a way to make these companies and their executives rich. This should be about keeping them in business so the financial system doesn’t collapse.”

The Times also offers a roundup of conservatives bridling at the bailout, which, they don’t seem to recognize, is regulation after-the-fact, sort of like fixing your car at 65 miles an hour:

Mr. Shelby, of the banking committee, said: “Congress must immediately undertake a comprehensive, public examination of the problem and alternative solutions rather than swiftly pass the current plan with minimal changes or discussion. We owe the American taxpayer no less.”

Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, said he expected Republican lawmakers to oppose the plan in increasing numbers. “I think this is going to be a much bigger fight than he expected,” Mr. Gingrich said, referring to President Bush.

Andrew Ross Sorkin makes a good observation about the bailout as proposed:

The passage is stunning.

“Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency,” the original draft of the proposed bill says.

And with those words, the Treasury secretary — whoever that may be in a few months — will be with vested with perhaps the most incredible powers ever bestowed on one person over the economic and financial life of the nation. It is the financial equivalent of the Patriot Act.

Finally, the Journal is inadvertently funny with a story about counselors at business schools besieged by panicked MBAs.

"We're like a tennis player on their toes," she says.

That MBAs have to find another line of work, away from Wall Street, I'd say qualifies as the least of our problems and may be the beginning of a solution.

Washington Post:

As of this writing, it has been 39 days and 22 hours since Sen. John McCain last held a news conference (despite having promised to hold weekly Q&A sessions with the press if he's elected). According to the Democrats, it's been 24 days and 11 hours since his running mate, Sarah Palin, held But like her running mate, Palin is AWOL from the media (although she did go to Media, Pa., on Monday, where she quipped: "I want to ask you a few questions, Media." To cheers from the crowd and jeers toward the media, she said: "Let me ask YOU a few questions." Huge cheers.one.

Not the most important issue of the day, perhaps. But maybe the most ironic, given where McCain and Palin were Monday: In Media, Pa.

Where they didn't take questions.

Does that pledge to have weekly press conferences as president still hold? No answer, yet.

UPDATE: From Joseph Curl's Washington Times blog:

But like her running mate, Palin is AWOL from the media (although she did go to Media, Pa., on Monday, where she quipped: "I want to ask you a few questions, Media." To cheers from the crowd and jeers toward the media, she said: "Let me ask YOU a few questions." Huge cheers.

One of the three questions [McCain took from the audience] Monday came from a very angry woman... "I want to take the opportunity to ask the media, where's your 30 investigators over in Chicago! You gotta' start doin' your job and stop picking on little children because of their age and their pregnancy! Shame on you!"...

[I]t would have been nice -- and honest and fair -- had McCain said to the angry mob: "Now wait a sec, they're not all bad guys, and they're just doing their jobs."

Dexter Filkins has been covering the biggest story of the last ten years for the last ten years. A good argument can be made that this New York Times reporter has seen more war than any other journalist working today, not to mention any soldier or marine. From Kabul to Kandahar, Baghdad to Ramadi, Falluja to Haditha, Filkins has been bullets and blood and copy-inches deep in these wars that have fatigued, befuddled, and killed sheiks and politicians, snipers and supply officers, civilians and insurgents. His need to be there for the story and his seemingly indefatigable ability to sip tea and dodge bullets whizzing by his ear are a pointed corrective to the blather of the blogosphere and the nauseating (and lethal) know-nothingness inside the Beltway and, more often than not, the Green Zone.

Sublime and tenacious, The Forever War takes us from Kabul in 1998 through the summer of 2006 in Iraq. In the course of this journey, Filkins reminds us that there is still some way of comprehending man's worst undertaking, a messy war: getting dirty (and sometimes bloody and beaten) while asking tough questions of everyone involved.

In Iraq, for example, things sometimes fall apart before the reporter is able to ask questions. One morning Filkins is drinking his coffee when an explosion goes off near enough to the Times compound that "the walls of the house swayed and the windows rattled." A car bomber in an ambulance targeting the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross had been cut off in the road by another driver—a Good Samaritan, as Filkins calls him, who paid with his own life, "his hands on the wheel, his head arched in a final fiery grimace."

The American Society of Magazine Editors has named the finalists for its annual magazine cover art contest. "Cover of the Year" finalists below; full list of finalists here.

Of the many images of Hurricane Katrina that endure in the mass consciousness, one of the most indelible is that of CNN's Anderson Cooper, moved literally to tears at the destruction he witnessed in the days after the storm. His reporting from New Orleans and other areas of the Gulf Coast was raw and urgent and absolutely right for the moment and the mood of the country. It transformed Cooper, formerly an obscure CNN field reporter, into not only an overnight celebrity, but also a representative of a media that was squarely on the side of the people, sharing in their pain and feeling their anger. In his shunning of objectivity for connectivity, Cooper became the voice and the vessel of the widespread outrage over the government's handling of Katrina—and his impassioned indignation wrote itself into Katrina's story as a rare moment when Americans and their media were, in many ways, one.

Well. The devastation currently upon us may be taking place on Wall Street rather than Bourbon Street, and its impact may be financial rather than physical in nature—but, all in all, much of the current situation feels familiar, even redundant. Another case of American citizens being betrayed by a government that's supposed to act in their interest. Another case of wide-scale distress that could have been prevented had the government been more diligent in its duties. It's deja-screw, all over again.

So, then: Where's our Anderson? Where's the vessel for the indignation and confusion so many Americans are feeling right now? Where's the voice that merges anger and accountability in its treatment of the credit crisis? As Howard Kurtz asked in yesterday's Reliable Sources, "Where is the sense of outrage in journalism that we saw after the Enron scandal and the other accounting scandals of a half dozen years ago?"

Missing in action, I'd say. Indeed, in the week since the current meltdown transpired, we've seen journalists express shock at Wall Street's implosion (whoa, what just happened?). We've seen them express awe (wow, that just happened). We've seen them engage in intellectual inquiry (how did that just happen?) and explanatory exposition (here's what just happened) and forward-looking analysis (how can we fix what just happened?) and political analysis (how does what just happened relate to the campaign?) and blame-gaming (who's responsible for what just happened?). We've seen a lot of level-headed, even-handed treatment of the crisis. And, as Dean noted last week, much of that treatment has been commendable. But what we have yet to see, in that sober and balanced and occasionally noble coverage, is indignation. Anger. Outrage.

Take a piece that ran in the Media & Advertising section of today's New York Times—"Amid Market Turmoil, Some Journalists Try to Tone Down Emotion"—which analyzes the connection between overly "emotional" reporting and market panic. The emotion in question is not, to be clear, journalists'. Rather, it's words'. (Yep, because everyone's favorite topic of inquiry during moments of national upheaval is semantics.) "For most of the country," the piece begins, "the financial crises of the last few weeks have offered an education in economics. For journalists, they have been a lesson in semantics."

A lesson in semantics? That's what the crises have meant to reporters? "Journalists say there is a narrow gap between their duty to convey the extent of what is happening to banks and markets and causing panic," Richard Perez-Pena writes. And, later,

Each day presents new evidence that finance companies are uniquely vulnerable to a loss of confidence among creditors, trading partners, investors or customers. As a result, rumor, speculation and fear can cripple a bank with shocking speed. That has reporters and editors, so often accused of hyperbole and sowing alarm, parsing their words with unusual care.

Which, hey—this is good stuff, overall. And the fact that the piece verges on stating the obvious (journalists should choose their words carefully? You don't say!) is forgivable in light of the very real journalistic challenge it discusses: navigating the often fine line between reporting on financial turmoil and exacerbating it.

And yet. In the larger context of crisis, the piece's tone—indeed, the entirety of its content--seems slightly off-base at best, hopelessly out of touch at worst. Words, words, words...is that really what journalists should be focusing on while the economy's in a meltdown? On the one hand, sure: Words are what they do. But on the other, the focus on semantics Perez-Pena describes paints a picture of a press corps that, like the government did, misses the point. The piece depicts journalists as, above all, cool and calm and collected—so detached from the magnitude of the economy's difficulties that they can calculate with minute precision the words they should be using to tell their tales of woe. (Deck chairs and the Titanic come to mind.) Compare that sense of semantic separation to, again, Anderson Cooper, whose anger was, among other things, a tacit admission—and even, in some ways, a celebration—of the fact that words, when in it comes to crisis reporting, aren't always enough.

But for Perez-Pena's journalists, it's not merely a matter of words overcoming outrage; in his framework, those journalists don't feel outrage in the first place.

Which is not to say that those journalists—Perez-Pena's or their professional analogues—should lose their tempers as they tell their tales, or that audiences want their journalists to burst into tears—rhetorical or otherwise—when relating new developments of the financial meltdown. Of course not. Nor should the media be engaging in finger-pointing and blame-gaming at this point. The press is right to be looking forward rather than backward, and to be focusing, along with the government, on finding solutions...and, as they do so, to be choosing their words carefully.

It is to say, though, that a little empathy would go a long way in this case. Journalists, after all, like most Americans, must be feeling some sense of anger that the government has, in so many ways, and for so long, put corporate interests ahead of average poeple's. They must be at least a little bit miffed that a portion of their taxes, assuming Hank Paulson gets his way, will go not toward updating the country's infrastructure or improving its public education system, but toward bailing out mortgage companies. They must be feeling some sense of resentment at the fact that Richard Fuld, who helmed Lehman Brothers into its bankruptcy, is walking away with an estimated $65 million in severance pay. They must be just a little bit pissed off about all this. Everyone else is. So why not let that show? Why not bring a little dose of accountability journalism into their reporting? And why not bring a human element into their narratives?

It's not often we get to say this, but mainstream reporters could take a cue, in this case, from Bill O'Reilly. On The Factor last week, the self-styled populist declared, "Every American should be furious about the economic meltdown. It's not your fault, ladies and gentleman. Not my fault. OK? It's the federal government's fault."

This is classic O'Reillian hyperbole, yes, but there's something refreshing in its authenticity. Something, indeed, reminiscent of Cooper's Katrina coverage: something urgent and candid and real. When the public trust has been violated, we want our news reporters to be angry about it. Just like we are.

If I were to write a formula representing the two presidential candidates’ reactions to the impact the federal bailouts to the financial sector would have on their proposed social and economic programs, it would look like this:

Obama: Progressive Tax + Universal Health Care + More Funding for Education = Progressive Tax + Universal Health Care + More Funding for Education + $700 billion

McCain: Tax Cut + Open-Market Insurance + Semi-Privatized Social Security = Tax Cut + Open-Market Insurance + Semi-Privatized Social Security + $700 billion

Try to solve for the variable and you get a mathematical impossibility: 0=$700 billion!

In other words, in interviews with the New York Times, both Obama and McCain refused to admit that the cost of bolstering the system requires them to rethink their proposals for tax cuts and other government programs.

It is good and necessary that the Times is asking the candidates to make the connection between the current financial debacle and the broad sweep of promises made in the heat of the trail. But, it’s bad and disappointing that the Times didn’t push Obama and McCain harder on their stances.

When McCain insisted that he would be able to preserve the Bush tax cuts despite the recent expenditure and still balance the budget, by some magic trick of restrained spending, the published article didn’t offer any analysis about the feasibility of this proposal. McCain’s recent mantra about cutting spending and reducing the size of government may play well on the campaign trail, but in this context, not pushing for specifics is practically criminal.

Obama’s calls for close scrutiny over financial institutions strikes the right note in the current climate, but it also merits more probing questions about precisely how much regulation he proposes and with what powers will the regulators be endowed.

John Harwood, the reporter behind the piece, has done good work during the campaign, and it’s clear that he’s aware of the disconnect between the economic situation and the candidates’ proposals. But his failure here to push more aggressively for specifics leaves voters to wade through the morass.

To help voters evaluate the candidates more closely, articles like these need to ask specific questions, like “Senator McCain, do you really think it’s fiscally responsible to cut taxes after spending $700 billion on a banking bailout? How, exactly, will you balance the budget after doing so?” At the very least, these articles should enlist the expertise of economists and historians to gauge the feasibility of the candidates’ claims. Or just ask a seventh-grader. ‘Cause the equations don’t add up.

60 Minutes last night featured "a revealing side-by-side look at the candidates and their positions" (Steve Kroft interviewed Obama; Scott Pelley interviewed McCain). The results were better, journalistically-speaking, than the "side-by-side look" 60 Minutes gave us of Obama and Clinton back in February (Kroft on Obama, Couric on Clinton) in that actual issues were actually discussed. Here are some press-centric moments:

PELLEY: Senator Biden, Senator Obama's running mate, has done 84 interviews and news conferences by our count. And Governor Palin has done two. And I wonder why that is. There's a perception that you might be nervous about what she might say, that you're not putting her in front of reporters.

McCAIN: She's gonna be doing more all the time. She's, as you know, been introduced to the country. We're campaigning hard. Look, everybody that has met her and known her and the enthusiasm of these crowds, the American people are vetting her. And they're liking a lot what they're seeing.

And:

(VOICEOVER): Early in the campaign, McCain told a reporter that the economy wasn't his strong suit. The Obama campaign picked that up. Pelley didn't ask about that quote, but it was clear in this interview that he's still sore about it.

PELLEY: You're not an expert on the economy. Senator Obama is not an expert on the economy. So let me ask you what traits would you bring to the Oval Office that would help navigate this country out of the current emergency?

MCCAIN: Never complain, but maybe I can explain. That statement about me and the economy was made in the context of a long conversation. Moral of the story is, don't have long conversations, especially with 60 Minutes. Point is, no seriously, is that I understand the economy as chairman of the Commerce Committee...

Both candidates were asked whether we're in a recession. Can you match the answers below with the candidate who gave them?

Oh, I think there's no doubt that we're gonna see, when the numbers come out, that we are officially in recession. I think, for a lot of people, they've been feeling like we've been in a recession for years now. When their wages and incomes don't go up, and the cost of gas and groceries and home heating oil and prescription drugs are all going up, that feels awfully like a recession to them.

And:

Sure. Technically I don't know. Unemployment is up. Wages are down. Home foreclosures are incredibly high. Those people, they don't care whether technically we're in a recession or not. The fact is they're hurtin'. And they are hurting very, very badly.

(HINT: The first answer was delivered to Kroft; the second answer was delivered to Pelley).

The "press tent was a lonely place to be" at last night's 60th Primetime Emmy Awards, reports Variety, due "the distance between the [Nokia] theater and the press tent, which was perched on the roof of a parking garage some distance behind theater" such that "more than two hours into the show, only a half-dozen winners had come back stage" to talk to reporters.

More:

[T]he fact that it took an elevator ride to get to the press area had reporters delivering a harsh critique of the press digs for the Nokia's first outing as Emmycast venue.

By contrast, at the Emmys' longtime home at the Shrine Auditorium, the press tent was only steps away from the backstage area, and winners often came back stage with a little sweat still on their brow or flush in their cheeks.

And the reviews of the show (its suddenly unfortunate-seeming 60th anniversary theme: diamonds) are in!

"Cable dramas dominate what seemed like the worst award-show ever," Dallas Morning News

"Emmy show a big snoozer," (San Jose) Mercury News

"If they ever give an award for the telecast of 2008 that was the most flat, boring and strangely off-kilter, we may have a winner..." Detroit Free Press

"Emmy awards, deserving winners, awful show," San Francisco Chronicle

"Show that celebrates TV is itself a crashing bore," MSNBC

"Lamest Emmys Ever?" Salon

(I know, I know. Probably many of the above reviewers were nowhere near that press tent. Probably the show really was uniquely bad...)

Breaking: "Presidential candidates air attack ads," reports the AP's Nedra Pickler. Pickler's report, in full:

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain are criticizing each other in new television ads.

McCain portrays his Democratic opponent as a product of corrupt Chicago machine politics. Obama says McCain's proposal to deregulate health care could have disastrous effects like deregulation of Wall Street.

The negative commercials announced Monday come as the two candidates are locked in a tight race with six weeks until Election Day.

The campaigns "announced" new attack ads. Which Pickler then quickly summarized.

Thanks for that?

As conditions in the economy continue to worsen, it can only be expected that unemployment rates, especially here in NYC after the Wall Street fiasco, will continue to rise. This comes just two weeks after the nation’s unemployment rate reached its highest level since 2003—a whopping 6.1 percent—according to the Department of Labor.

But, as Katherine Aaron of the Center for Public Integrity reported here, those statistics don’t accurately represent the reality of the situation. According to Aaron, the official unemployment rate publicized by the Dept. of Labor, as well as most of the media, doesn’t account for three sects of workers.

One group, known as “discouraged workers,” is comprised of workers that are neither employed nor looking for work because of a “job-market related reason.” In other words, these “discouraged workers” have given up the job search because they’ve had no luck in the hunt.

These workers are then clumped into a larger category known as “marginally attached workers,” defined by the Dept. of Labor as:

Neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the recent past.

The last unrepresented group is made up of individuals working part-time out of necessity, not choice. When all three groups of workers are added into the equation, the unemployment rate skyrockets to 10.7 percent, which is up from 8.4 percent last August.

Hopefully, this broader definition of unemployment will be of concern to public officials, and reporters, when it comes to addressing issues relating to the economy. (Hint, hint, Jim Lehrer. We hope you haven’t finalized your questions for Friday yet.)

Take a look at other Dept. of Labor statistics here.

On October 16, 2006, despite expectations that she’d be absent, Sarah Palin showed up. The occasion was a candidate’s forum sponsored by the Alaska Associations of Elementary and Secondary School Principals, taking place at their annual convention at the Anchorage Sheraton.

The state was in the end weeks of a topsy-turvy campaign that would eventually install Palin in the governor’s office. Public polling had showed her with a steady lead after trouncing incumbent governor Frank Murkowski in her party’s primary.

But Alaskan polls can be volatile, and the campaign of her Democratic opponent, former governor Tony Knowles, hinted that its internal polls were showing a much closer race. That day, Knowles and independent candidate Andrew Halcro planned to hold a joint press conference criticizing Palin’s pattern of avoiding public appearances. In late September, she missed a Chamber of Commerce debate, making a last minute decision to attend a National Guard ceremony instead. The next week, she withdrew from an event hosted by Alaska Native business leaders on the very day it was to be held, again claiming a scheduling conflict. (An email by a campaign advisor later surfaced that made it clear she’d withdrawn because her handlers felt the questions would be too difficult, and that they hadn’t had adequate time to brief her.)

The joint press conference was to take place just after the schools forum, but Palin’s unexpected appearance forced her opponents to cancel. In the end, the Associated Press described the forum as a “low-key question-and-answer session.”

But “low-key” would not be the first words evoked by a campaign document distributed by Palin that day, and obtained by CJR. Here’s how it begins:

‘Who’s Your Daddy?" Great question! I see that I got a “thumbs down? On the Anchorage Daily News Sunday scoreboard with an accompanying insinuation that I may not have the appropriate dad to allow me a particular public service role.

And so it goes on for two full pages, without a single mention of education policy. Sarah Palin, writing in the first person, defends her father against this alleged attack from the Anchorage Daily News, the state’s largest paper. In a sincere but defensive tone, she cites his volunteer work, the strength of the family he raised, his outdoorsmanship, and, key for an education crowd, his longtime service as a science teacher and high school coach in Wasilla.

Chuck Heath does sound like a good guy, and you can’t blame anyone, gubernatorial candidate or not, for sticking up for their dad when the paper takes a swipe. But what, exactly, had the Daily News written about Palin’s father?

Sarah Palin’s first foray into state politics came in 2002 when she narrowly lost a Republican primary for lieutenant governor. Senator Frank Murkowski, who had represented the state in the Senate since 1981, had returned to head the ticket as the party’s gubernatorial nominee.

After winning the election, Murkowski resigned his Senate seat, was sworn in as governor, and then faced the privilege of selecting his own successor. After announcing twenty-five Alaskans he said he was considering (a list that included Palin), Frank Murkowski chose his daughter, State Representative Lisa Murkowski, for the seat. He later appointed Palin to the state’s Oil and Gas Commission.

Amid charges of nepotism, Frank Murkowski quickly became one of the nation’s most unpopular governors; in a pointed rebuke two years later, a ballot initiative removed the position’s right to fill senate vacancies. By the summer of 2003, Palin and several others were being mentioned as potential intra-party challengers to Lisa Murkowski, who would face election to a full term in November 2004.

On July 17, 2003, the Anchorage Daily News fronted a story highlighting Murkowski’s campaign war chest, which, only seven months into her senate term, held a healthy $934,000.

The following weekend, the Anchorage Daily News ran its regular Sunday feature, “Who’s Up, Who’s Down,” a cheers and jeers style charticle. Here were the first three items that day:

UP - Scott Gomez: A second tour with Lord Stanley's Cup brings heavenly days for our hometown Devil.

UP - U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski: Almost $1 million in the campaign kitty already, and ready to roll.

DOWN - Would-be Murkowski rivals: Jerry Hood? Johnne Binkley? Sarah Palin? Who's your daddy?

The chart closed strong by noting that the Denali tourist trade was “EVEN … Freak July storm disrupts travel, but the visitors get it: Hey, this is Alaska!”

Given its tone, location, and context, the “Who’s your daddy?” line is clearly a joke. And not only that, it’s a joke at the expense of Palin’s potential opponent, pointing out the nepotism tainting the younger Murkowski’s appointment.

It also ran three years before the Anchorage schools forum, when Palin handed out her cri de coeur. Though the letter is undated, details make it clear that it was written long before the forum, probably shortly after the original item ran. For one, in a section where she describes her siblings and their spouses “all happily doing our thing serving Alaskans,” she mentions a brother in law who works as a state trooper. Palin’s sister would file for divorce from state trooper Mike Wooten in April 2005, and the rest, as they say, is history. By the time of the schools forum, Palin had told police that Wooten made violent threats against her sister and her father, Wooten had been subject to a domestic violence protective order, and a contentious divorce trial was underway.

The letter seems to mock how she had been depicted in the press, claiming that she’s become a “media-stamped ‘hard core conservative Republican.’”

Conversations with media observers in Alaska suggest that Palin had very friendly relations with the state’s journalists, and didn’t run against or belittle the press as the McCain camp has repeatedly done on her behalf in recent weeks. The letter seems to be a rare, early, exception to her old approach.

After recounting a time her father asked her to hold still-warm moose eyeballs, and listing the names of his grandchildren, Palin closes with a final dig at the paper.

So seeing the “thumbs down” on the newspaper editorial scoreboard with the suggestion that my dad may not be the right dad to allow me to progress towards some political position that may not be in the cards for me right now anyway . . . gave me the opportunity to think about just who my dad is today. I thank the ADN for that.

‘Who’s Your Daddy?” My dad is Mr. Heath, and he’s a teacher. In my book he is rich because he continues to share the wealth. I’m proud of him and thankful for his love for Alaska and for teaching others about this Great Land. In fact, the next time my name is in that newspaper, they should go ahead and use my full name: Sarah Heath Palin.

The paper has only used Palin's full name once, when quoting from a congratulatory press release issued by the Miss American Organization after she was named as John McCain's running mate.

This is the seventh in a series examining how the candidates’ health care proposals will affect ordinary people who live in the river town of Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, and how the press could cover that angle. The entire series is archived here.

Sidney Randle

Sidney Randle, sixty-nine, has lived with Medicare for a long time. He worked twenty-one years for the Mohawk Rubber Company, until 1979, when it closed. Then he worked at a service station until his back and shoulder went out of whack, and his diabetes, which he has had for nearly thirty years, worsened. “I got so many problems, I don’t know which ones put me on disability,” he says. Randle has been receiving Social Security disability payments since 1987, and got his Medicare card a couple years after that. It’s his lifeline to medical care.

He takes seven medications—for high blood pressure, diabetes, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder), an enlarged prostate, and heart disease. Surgeons have placed a stent to open a blocked artery, and a stroke two years ago made it harder for him to walk, although Randle told me he is exercising at a gym and losing weight—“twelve pounds lately,” he says proudly. Like many seniors, he has had trouble paying for his prescriptions; the $1249 monthly check from Social Security doesn’t stretch far enough to cover them all. You could say that it was a godsend when Medicare Part D, providing seniors with a prescription drug benefit, took effect in 2006. But that benefit came with a catch—a big one, too.

After people on Medicare accumulate $2510 in drug expenses (most of which, after a deductible and coinsurance, are covered by the government), they hit the infamous “donut hole.” Congress knew that the government couldn’t pay for all the drugs someone might need, so it funded only a portion of seniors’ medication expenses during each year. Once in the donut hole, a person is on the hook for the next $3,216 in prescription costs. Then Medicare returns with another layer of coverage. After drug costs total $5,726 for the year, catastrophic coverage kicks in, and a senior’s Part D drug plan pays all but 5 percent of the cost.

Sicker people like Randle hit the donut hole each year. In a report released in August, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that, last year, one-quarter of those with Part D coverage (some 3.4 million people) fell into the gap. Four percent eventually qualified for catastrophic coverage. That leaves a lot of people on fixed incomes scrambling to pay for their medicines. Kaiser said that people in the donut hole had devised ways to compensate once they had to pay the full price of their prescriptions. Some stopped taking their medicines, some switched to a similar but cheaper drug, and others simply reduced the number of drugs they were taking.

When Randle hit the donut hole, he went to the Delta Area Health Education Center, where Cal Woodridge, the prescription assistance coordinator, found drug company programs that give him free medicines until his benefit renews. Woodridge told me that his clients are hitting the donut hole a month earlier this year. “That tells us that the prices of medicines are going up and some of the coverage is not as good,” he said. “They are spending more money quicker.” While more people are using generic drugs, drug makers are raising prices for brand-name drugs, propelling seniors into the donut hole even faster. Those increases are also reflected in higher drug benefit premiums, which will rise 12 percent next year.

How Randle would fare under the candidates’ proposals

Neither candidate has talked much about Medicare; nor have the media pressed them for their solutions to the looming financial problems facing the system—solutions that may involve raising taxes so that current benefits can continue. When Newsweek asked Joseph Newhouse, a Harvard professor and Medicare expert, why this is, he called Medicare “an issue that will only lose you votes.” Since a lot of elderly people on Medicare vote, Newhouse said, “it’s very heavy political lifting to cut benefits or services.”

John McCain has proposed revamping Medicare’s payment system to reward doctors who produce better health outcomes. But for the most part, the candidates’ prescriptions for Medicare nibble around the edges of the drug benefit instead of addressing the system’s long-term sustainability.

John McCain’s proposal

McCain, who voted against the drug benefit in 2003, would accelerate the introduction of generic drugs and allow the re-importation of U.S.-made drugs that are sold more cheaply in other countries. Before Part D, savings-conscious seniors bought drugs in Canada and Mexico. Today, re-importation means very little, since Part D has taken some of the sting out of high prescription costs.

The faster introduction of generics will hardly help Randle. He takes mostly brand name drugs; when they are too expensive, the free medicine he gets while in the donut hole continues to tie him to drug companies’ more expensive brands—which, of course, means higher mark-ups and market share.

Barack Obama’s proposal
Obama would promote the use of generic drugs. OK, maybe Randle can go to Wal-Mart and cheaply fill some of his prescriptions with generics. Doctors would have to agree the generics would work well for him. Plus, he would need some consumer education to make the switch, and must be willing to give up the free drugs while he is in the donut hole. It would be a cost/benefit calculation. Obama would allow the federal government to negotiate prices of pharmaceuticals used by Medicare recipients. When Congress established the drug benefit, lawmakers banned the government from negotiating cheaper prices, as it does in the VA system. So far, Congress has failed to overturn the ban. If the new Congress can do that, the price of drugs for Randle might drop, and he wouldn’t reach the donut hole as fast. But it’s unclear whether price negotiation will affect the system’s long-term fiscal health.

Since we don’t know where the candidates stand on fixing the overall finances of Medicare, it’s hard to say which candidate would help or hurt Randle the most. Cutting benefits to shore up the system would certainly pinch, since he would have to finance more care from his own slim income. Increasing premiums and copayments for certain Medicare services would also hurt him. One solution on the table is making wealthier beneficiaries pay more for their benefits, either through higher premiums or higher coinsurance, a move that some say leads to the further privatization of Medicare. Even if Congress defines “wealthy” as incomes around $50,000, which a few experts think could happen, Randle’s very low income keeps him safe for now.

This weekend, On The Media hosted Audit boss Dean Starkman to
speak about the heroic efforts of the business press to explain and
explore the current financial meltdown, and the not-so-heroic
oversight effort by the business press of the regulatory climate and
business practices that got us here.

This morning I've been thinking that being a business press critic right now is sort of like being a critic of the London fire depart during the Blitz. The city is on fire and they are scrambling as fast as possible and that's all you can do at this point.

It's how we got here that's the question.

You can read at the transcript at the program's website, download the mp3
file, or listen to the segment using the below player.

On Tuesday, I wrote a column about the media’s failure to cover the opening of the world’s first coal-fired power plant with a fully integrated carbon capture and storage system. Given the adolescent nature of the technology it might not have been such a big deal, I reasoned—but the fact that both U.S. presidential candidates have made CCS a central promise of their campaigns makes the plant all the more relevant.

A lot of people argue, quite correctly, that “clean coal,” a nickname for CCS systems, is an oxymoronic advertising ploy. Part of the reason for that, as one savvy reader noted in a comment under my column, is that, “This unproven technology does nothing to stop the enormously destructive operations of coal mining.”

“Agreed,” I replied in a second comment. “CCS has nothing to do with the mining of coal, only the processing thereof.”

It turns out that while that is still largely true, it may not always be so. Last Monday, The Wall Street Journal published another of its excellent Journal Reports on energy, the paper's seventh pullout section on the subject. Among other gems, it contained a very intriguing article about underground coal gasification (UCG), a different type of CCS (the new German plant uses oxyfuel combustion and other demo plants are using pre- and post-combustion methods) that burns coal without mining it. According to the article, “India and China are at the forefront” of developing the technology:

The Asian giants are investigating large-scale commercial projects that would produce energy by burning the coal where it lies, deep below the Earth's surface. Building on pilot projects in the U.S. and elsewhere, the two countries are also looking at the possibility of capturing and permanently storing underground the gases produced, like carbon dioxide, which scientists believe cause global warming.

The underlying technology is one pioneered by the Soviets during the 1930s, called underground coal gasification - a way to tap energy from coal that was impossible or too costly to bring to the surface. A borehole is drilled down to the coal seam, which is then ignited. Oxygen is forced down through the borehole to feed the combustion. Gases produced by the combustion are then forced out a second borehole to the surface, where they are harnessed to turn turbines or for the production of chemicals. A power plant in Uzbekistan has been using the process for nearly 50 years. But elsewhere the practice was largely abandoned as increasing reserves of oil and natural gas were discovered, providing a cheaper alternative.

Because UCG was not cost-effective, it also faded from news pages after some early coverage. In 1980, Canada’s Globe and Mail ran a interesting article (unavailable online except through Lexis-Nexis or Factiva) about UCG with the soon-to-be-moot headline, “U.S. leads in underground coal gasification.” It reported that “three dozen companies - ranging from oil giants to local power companies” had expressed interest in a Department of Energy program to share UCG with private industry. It then went on to give a fairly detailed description of the burning process, and, despite the fact that cognizance of global warming was still many years off, noted that other environmental concerns were already at play:

Little pollution will escape into the atmosphere (coal acts like a charcoal filter, trapping many waste combustion products), but water supplies may become contaminated by trace elements and heavy metals released from the coal. If a coal field is exploited economically, drilling rigs, air compressors and pipework will litter the landscape.

Indeed, in 1984, just before UCG all but disappeared as a topic of conversation, The New York Times published an article with the headline, “Proposal to burn coal underground stirs protest in Pennsylvania town.” The project’s opponents feared that “the coal could burn out of control, ruining their homes and their valley, like the [mine] fire that has been burning for 20 years only 10 miles away and is now forcing the evacuation of the town of Centralia.”

Last week’s Journal article mentioned that groundwater contamination is a lingering concern, as is the possibility that UCG could “cause serious incidents of subsidence, which involves land sinking into the cavities created when the coal seams are drilled and burned out.”

Back in 1988, The Independent in London published an article (unavailable online except through Lexis-Nexis or Factiva) about UCG that expressed similar concerns, while noting that the dangers involved in sending miners underground could be avoided. The headline referred to the technology as “Mining by Remote Control,” and concluded with the unrealistically optimistic paragraph:

The idea of UCG may have had a disappointing first century. But it is increasingly likely that within 20 years a working coalfield will look like an oilfield. Later, we may be getting energy from the vast coal reserves that lie six miles under the North Sea, and which are the source of the gas that is causing such problems for the coal industry today.

After that piece, however, little was even heard about UCG (at least from the press) for more than a decade. In the last two years, however, it has come up frequently in the Indian and Australian press, where UCG projects have been a more conspicuous part of domestic energy markets.

It was refreshing, then, to see the Journal reintroduce underground coal gasification into the American media conversation last week. It is still a problematic technology, of course, just like every other carbon capture and storage scheme out there. But as long as politicians are promising people that CCS will be keystone in their energy future, journalists have a responsibility to explain every option on the table.

"Presidential debates should be a little more like [Bravo reality TV show] Project Runway," argues Time TV blogger James Poniewozik," in that:

[T]he best way to test someone's ability to do a job is to get them to do it, not to talk about it. They're about applying knowledge, not regurgitating it. Whereas a Presidential debate is like a job interview—a tepid one, with time-delimited answers—an episode of Project Runway is like a job tryout...

And so, he continues, the debate moderators should "focus more on hypothetical scenario-playing... like how [the candidates] would handle, say, a military conflict between China and Taiwan." Because:

[S]houldn't Jim Lehrer be able to elicit at least as much information about a candidate's future job performance as Heidi Klum?

Fierce!

...The Wall Street Journal! Per the paper's analysis of the Bush administration's proposed $700 billion mortgage buyout plan, currently under review in Congress: "The debate could expose a peculiar irony in the government's rescue planning, because taxpayers are now both creditors and debtors in the housing mess."

Both creditors and debtors. Peculiar irony, indeed.

Today The Politico issued a press release announcing its post election plans.

Bottom line? They plan to grow, not shrink, after November 4, with more print editions, at least 15 new staffers, and expanded coverage of the executive branch.

To read CJR's convention interview with Politico editor in chief John Harris, where he presaged some of the changes, click here.

The business press has done its usual thorough job of explaining the whos, whats and wherefores of this historic weekend, but I’m not sure anyone’s been able to convey the disgrace, the scandal in all its fullness, of the fact that U.S. taxpayers—innocent bystanders, by any account—must pay for bailing out Wall Street.

The most outraged, embarrassed voice seems to be that of Henry Paulson on the talk shows:

And, again, it pains me, it pains me tremendously to, to, to have the American taxpayer be put in this position…

He said that on his way to saying that there’s no alternative, but at least it’s something.

Also out there:

Evidence that the business press has work to do can be found in this walk-and-talk in this morning’s Washington Post, which found respondents understandably vague about what’s happening, with most seeming to believe this is about bailing out irresponsible borrowers:

"I'm not overextended," Merkle said. "I didn't buy a large home that I can't afford. I'm not behind on any of my payments. I'm not sure I want the government to take my tax dollars and buy someone else's house for them."

The Wall Street Journal does well, however, at conveying the enormity of the import that the last two independent Wall Street firms will convert to bank holding companies:

The headline

Goldman, Morgan Scrap Wall Street Model,
Become Banks in Bid to Ride Out Crisis

And the story:

With the move, Wall Street as it has long been known -- a coterie of independent brokerage firms that buy and sell securities, advise clients and are less regulated than old-fashioned banks -- will cease to exist.

It's worth pondering that for a minute.

The New York Times does less well in its account:

It also is a turning point for the high-rolling culture of Wall Street, with its seven-figure bonuses and lavish perks for even midlevel executives. It effectively returns Wall Street to the way it was structured before Congress passed a law during the Great Depression separating investment banking from commercial banking, known as the Glass-Steagall Act.

The last historical comparison may be true, but it’s meaning is not explained. More please.

The Journal’s editorial page, meanwhile, is starting to resemble some mad Shakespearean character, blaming everything, including—get this—the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, instead of the deregulatory philosophy it has been promoting for lo these many years..

Nice try. Much more on this as we go

Krugman provides an actual suggestion: give the taxpayers a stake in the upside:

And if the government is going to provide capital to financial firms, it should get what people who provide capital are entitled to — a share in ownership, so that all the gains if the rescue plan works don’t go to the people who made the mess in the first place.

That’s what happened in the savings and loan crisis: the feds took over ownership of the bad banks, not just their bad assets. It’s also what happened with Fannie and Freddie. (And by the way, that rescue has done what it was supposed to. Mortgage interest rates have come down sharply since the federal takeover.)

And this also strikes me as valuable:

But I’d urge Congress to pause for a minute, take a deep breath, and try to seriously rework the structure of the plan, making it a plan that addresses the real problem.

Evidence that government should get a stake for being force to lend on and buy securities of utterly unknown quality is found in this Journal account of how American International Group shareholders are desperate to avoid having the once-hugely profitable insurers taken over the United States for $85 billion.

Shareholders who are dissatisfied with the deal are exploring ways to quickly pay off the loan, which gave the federal government the right to take 80% of the insurer. Under this scenario, AIG would not only sell assets, but also raise capital in other ways, potentially leaving shareholders better off. AIG had no choice but to accept the federal help last week, when large sums of private money weren't available.

Private money wasn’t available for good reason. This is the mother of all subprime loans.

Robert Samuelson reminds us of a stunning fact:

As is well known, the crisis began with losses in the $1.3 trillion market for "subprime" mortgages, many of which were "securitized" -- bundled into bonds and sold to investors.

He is actually minimizing the figure to make some other point, but the idea that so much money was lent into what was once, quite properly, a marginal business is, for me, all you need to know about level of regulatory breakdown that brought us to this.

Also recommended:

Gretchen Morgenson calling for disclosure of what taxpayers are actually buying:

Now, inquiring minds want to know, whom did we rescue? Which large, wealthy financial institutions — counterparties to A.I.G.’s derivatives contracts — benefited from the taxpayers’ $85 billion loan? Were their representatives involved in the talks that resulted in the last-minute loan?

And did Lehman Brothers not get bailed out because those favored institutions were not on the hook if it failed?

We’ll probably never know the answers to these troubling questions. But by keeping taxpayers in the dark, regulators continue to earn our mistrust. As long as we are not told whom we have bailed out, we will be justified in suspecting that a favored few are making gains on our dimes.

And Kevin Phillips talking to Bill Moyers about how the financial sector, instead of financing the economy, came to dominate it.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: But what's here that doesn't get the attention is the United States in the last 20 years undertook an enormous transformation of itself with no attention paid. And what it means is and what makes all this so frightening is the country is at risk because of the size of the financial sector that has never been graded on its competence and behavior in any serious way. They are the economy at this point. And we are now seeing what happens when a 20 to 21 percent of GDP financial sector starts to come unglued.

…
BILL MOYERS: But there are people, Kevin, who disagree with us, who say that this financial industry has created great wealth for America in the last 25 years.

KEVIN PHILLIPS: Oh, it's created great wealth for a small slice of America. But if you go back and we remember the manufacturing heyday, the auto workers in Michigan had fishing cabins up on the lake. And the middle class had been fattened by the rise of the blue-collar middle class. Well, there's no rising blue-collar middle class now. The middle class is shrinking.

The pie in a financial economy goes to the one or two percent — or even less- that have capital skills and education. We have never had so much polarization and wealth disparity and just groaning wealth right at the top of ladder as we have now under finance.

…
You had essentially a financial sector that, let's say, was sort of neck and neck with manufacturing back in the late 1980s. But they got control in a lot of ways in the agenda. Finance has been bailed out. I mean, everybody thinks this is horrible now what we're seeing in terms of bailouts. Even a lot of the people who do it think it's bad.

This has been going on since the beginning of the 1980s. Finance has been preferred as the sector that got government support. Manufacturing slides, nobody helps.

“It began,” Secretary of the Treasury Czar Hank Paulson told George Stephanopoulos, “with excesses in the system, irresponsible behavior and practices in financial institutions.” On Meet the Press, Paulson again alluded to “excesses”—“excesses building up for sometime in this country”—and elaborated a bit: “bad lending practices, irresponsible borrowing, irresponsible lending…. We have overcomplexity. Mortgages are now securitized, sliced and diced, put into tranches, sold all over the world.” “What has gone on here,” he told Tom Brokaw, “is terrible, it's unexcusable [sic].” Mistakes were made. And that was all that Czar Paulson had to say about the origins of the grandest, most devastating financial crisis in three-quarters of a century.

At least that was all Paulson declared in so many words. What he did not declare was that America has been led to believe, by him and his friends, for several decades now, that markets are essentially self-regulating; and that what we have learned this week, as if we needed to learn it, is that this proposition is sheer nonsense.

Indirectly, however, Paulson said a good deal more, or so I read in one of his later remarks. About the Federal Reserve’s decision to bail out the American International Group last week, he added this: “This is a situation where there are fifty different insurance regulators, very little oversight at the holding company, a hedge fund on top of insurance companies.”

If I understand this remark properly, Paulson was acknowledging that AIG, a private insurance company, functioning with “very little oversight” at the federal level, had grown into an indispensable lubricant of the world financial system. “I can't explain how we got there,” Paulson said, meaning either that the situation is inexplicable, or that it is inexplicable to him, or that it is nothing he can explain in TV-sized sound bites. If it is inexplicable absolutely, or inexplicable to him, isn’t this an intellectual earthquake at the high end of the Richter scale? Don’t the week’s events discredit the decades-old lecture about the self-regulating splendors of markets?

To George Stephanopoulos, Paulson did declare that he might well have (1) an explanation and (2) a remedy up his sleeve: “I've spent a lot of time, well before this problem, developing a regulatory blueprint, looking at our outdated, outmoded regulatory system that doesn't fit the modern financial world, looking at how policies and practices need to be changed.” He said the same to Tom Brokaw, adding: “we very much need new regulations, new policies.”

In that case, why not ask Paulson why he kept his regulatory blueprint to himself? Did he tell the president of the United States, or did he anticipate the need to update “our outdated, outmoded regulatory system” only to find that the president wasn’t interested? For many months, economists have warned about the dire consequences of the housing bubble. How can any official be kept accountable when journalists don’t inquire into the sources of their errors?

To be clear: I’m not proposing an escalation of gotchas. I’m proposing an escalation of intellectual curiosity in the interest of accountability. I’m talking about the fifth W—Who, What, Where, When, Why. As in, why didn’t you act earlier? Why did your government minimize the significance of the housing bubble?

Secretary Paulson is busy these days. Yet one might have hoped the Sunday morning interlocutors would ask him about alternatives to the trust-me receivership into which he proposes to cram the global financial system. Paulson kept framing the problem in chocolate-vanilla terms: Either implement his plan or do nothing. One might have hoped to find an economically-literate critic or two around the network news round tables: Paul Krugman, say, an actual economics professor who has been blogging to beat the band all day at his NYT site; or Robert Reich, who has published a most specific list of conditions for bailout; or, from a different angle, Washington Post columnist Sebastian Mallaby.

On ABC’s round table, there were harsh words for what is laughably known as our political and financial leadership. Cokie Roberts, if I heard her correctly, said she’d like to see the financial chiefs marched down Wall Street in “sackcloth and ashes.” (Maybe she meant tar and feathers?) She approved of Obama’s comforting advisers, the likes or Robert Rubin, Warren Buffett, and Paul Volcker. George Will agreed that Obama sounded calm, at least, while McCain “showed his personality in this last week and made some of us fearful.” McCain, he added, “substituted vehemence for coherence,” having “discovered his inner William Jennings Bryan.” Cokie Roberts, channeling her inner David Stockman, wondered if there was some malevolent purpose to a budget-busting measure that would leave the next president without options. Sam Donaldson unhelpfully declared that we’ve got to “do something quickly, do something now.”

All entertaining, especially the spectacle of Cokie Roberts finding her inner Mme. Defarge. Especially entertaining if you think such bagatelles are what America’s broadcasters owe the people who grant them television licenses for zero dollars a year.

In yesterday's New York Times "Week in Review," Patrick Healy wrote a piece headlined, "Let's Call a Lie A Lie...Finally. " It was not, however, a piece by a political reporter urging his peers to call a lie made by a candidate a lie (I, too, was fooled by the "Let's"). Rather it was a piece by a political reporter observing that "once considered politically out of bounds, the word 'lie' --stated blunty and unapologetically -- has had its unveiling in the 2008 campaign" by, largely, the Obama campaign asserting that the other guy is lying, often.

Healy does not directly address what a campaign repoter's role should be in dealing with candidates' lies and/or accusations that their opponent is lying (what can we possibly do?) but he does, I suppose, show us what he considers his role to be:

On Thursday, for instance, an Obama spokesman denounced, as "another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign," a McCain television advertisement citing a newspaper report that Franklin D. Raines, the former leader of now-disgraced Fannie Mae, was advising Mr. Obama on housing issues.

I'm just giving you a "for instance." You know, of how one campaign responded to a claim made in an opponent's ad. You know. One campaign ran an ad claiming one thing. The other campaign called it a lie. On to my next paragraph...

Healy did find an expert who addressed the obvious "What now?" aspect of Healy's overall observation that, Wow, the "L-word" is getting used a lot lately by one of the campaigns:

"When politicians ignore a lie and it doesn't go away, they can be tainted, and when they deny it, they can sound defensive," said Geoff Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and an informal adviser to Mr. Obama. "Americans need someone who many people watch who has credibility and can be an independent arbiter -- a Walter Cronkite, say -- and there isn't one."

Today's Murrow or Cronkite... Someone who many people watch who can be an independent arbiter. Riiiight. But... who?

A few pages further along in the "Week in Review" (in a column by Frank Rich):

You know the press is impotent at unmasking this truthiness when the hardest-hitting interrogation McCain has yet faced on television came on The View. Barbara Walters and Joy Behar called him on several falshoods, including his endlessly repeated fantasy that Palin opposed earmarks for Alaska. Behar used the word "lies" to his face."...In our news culture, Behar, a stand-up comic by profession, looms as the new Edward R. Murrow."

For anyone who has ever asked himself, "What's David Brooks thinking?"

Brooks...admits he is something of a throwback. "This is going to sound pretentious, but I try to be a 1950s public intellectual in 2008, in 800 words."

Just for fun, fill in the blanks, but imagine it's Brooks's co-New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd talking: "This is going to sound ____, but I try to be a ____, in 800 words."

Here’s props to The Washington Post for an article today that substantively reports on Sarah Palin’s executive style.

Starting with Palin’s inappropriate culling of e-mail addresses from a Department of Commerce directory (in order to promote a favorite piece of legislation), the article examines Palin’s time in executive office to make the case that, while she is skilled at gauging and responding to the public will, she isn’t very interested or involved in policy details. The piece compares her official record alongside her day-to-day interactions with legislators to gain insight into her modus operandi as governor.

Palin has promised that she would shake up Washington (touting it as a two-reformers-for-the-price-of-one kind of thing), and the story both recognizes her achievements and questions the claim. The article quotes Stephen Haycox, a historian at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, in an oft-heard criticism of Palin: "She seems as if she is incurious about the mechanism of government." It’s a sobering assessment of Palin’s talent as a politician, and one that the rest of the article seeks, successfully, to evaluate and contextualize.

Take Palin’s approach to the development of Alaska’s natural gas pipeline. The governor’s role in getting the pipeline built is a pretty familiar campaign story by now. The article explains Palin predecessor Frank Murkowski’s role in the pipeline plan, details Palin’s efforts to seek competitive bids on the project and thereby increase state leverage, and notes the public popularity of her efforts. But then it unfurls the example of pipeline legislation—a cornerstone of Palin’s argument that she is an independent-minded reformer—into a small character portrait:

Still, Palin struck some lawmakers as curiously detached from the process. In early March 2007, she invited the state Senate's leaders to her office for a preview of the pipeline legislation. To the astonishment of the five senators and their aides, she barely said a word for the hour. As staff members explained her signature plan, the governor was preoccupied with her two BlackBerries.

"It was so bizarre. We all talked about it afterwards," said a legislative source, one of three participants in the meeting who recounted the governor's silence. "We all said, 'What was that? Was she even paying attention?' "

The anecdote—set up by the history and changing structure of the legislation—lends credibility to Haycox’s characterization of Palin, and to the article’s argument.

Specifying a politician’s strengths and weaknesses (absorbing policy minutiae from experts? speaking off the cuff? instinctively quelling public worry?) fairly and informatively can be a difficult task. But if show-don’t-tell is the way to avoid both cinematic grandiosity and easy caricature (and a difficult mantra to follow in campaign reporting), the WaPo story is an A-1 example of how to do it well.

In the article, Haycox says this of Palin: “She hears the mood of the electorate very, very well.” It’s a very relevant assessment of talent—especially in the middle of a campaign that has emphasized the Alaskan governor’s instinctive talents rather than her capabilities—and the article provokes a worthy follow-up question: “At what cost?”

If Campaign 2008 is a china shop and discussions of race are the china, then the media are the bull. Which is another way of saying what should be obvious at this particularly contentious juncture in this particularly contentious campaign: that accusations of race-baiting against either presidential candidate should be handled with the utmost care—because, when the media buck around with those accusations willy-nilly, they have the tendency to pulverize pretty much everything they touch.

Well, metaphorical Fragile Object, meet metaphorical Bull. Today, race-baiting accusations are again upon us, according to the banner headline currently emblazoned on the home page of The Huffington Post:

The story? John McCain has a new attack ad out, in which he implicates Barack Obama in the implosion of Fannie Mae. "Obama has no background in economics," the ad intones.

Who advises him? The Post says it's Franklin Raines, for "advice on mortgage and housing policy." Shocking. Under Raines, Fannie Mae committed "extensive financial fraud." Raines made millions. Fannie Mae collapsed. Taxpayers? Stuck with the bill. Barack Obama. Bad advice. Bad instincts. Not ready to lead.

The problem, allegedly? Franklin Raines is black.

The ad juxtaposes images of Obama and Raines, two black men—which one could read, if one chooses, as an insidious pander to people's insidious fears about black men. "This is hardly subtle," Time's Karen Tumulty writes. "Sinister images of two black men, followed by one of a vulnerable-looking elderly white woman."

Let me stipulate: Obama's Fannie Mae connections are completely fair game. But this ad doesn't even mention a far more significant tie—that of Jim Johnson, the former Fannie Mae chairman who had to resign as head of Obama's vice presidential search team after it was revealed he got a sweetheart deal on a mortgage from Countrywide Financial. Instead, it relies on a fleeting and tenuous reference in a Washington Post Style section story to suggest that Obama's principal economic adviser is former Fannie Mae Chairman Frank Raines. Why? One reason might be that Johnson is white; Raines is black.

The AP, to some extent, corroborates Tumulty's reading of the ad in its reporting. It also challenges that reading:

Obama's campaign says Raines is not an Obama adviser and that McCain's campaign knows it because Raines said so in an e-mail earlier this week to Carly Fiorina, a top McCain adviser. Obama's campaign provided The Associated Press with a copy of the e-mail.

"Carly: Is this true?" Raines asks above a forwarded note informing him that Fiorina was on television saying he was an Obama housing adviser. "I am not an adviser to the Obama campaign. Frank."

Obama's campaign says Fiorina did not respond.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said he was not aware of the e-mail to Fiorina, but noted that the Post reported on three occasions, between July 16 and Aug. 28, that Raines was advising Obama.

"If he was not advising, obviously someone somewhere along the way should have corrected the record," Rogers said.

Tumulty may have a point in sounding the race-baiting alarm. And if indeed a campaign is engaging in race-baiting tactics, that needs to be called out. But today's blog-post-to-banner-headline trajectory once again highlights how quickly the fire of Racial Tumult (no pun intended) can spread. There's a thin line between exposure and exacerbation when it comes to talk of race-baiting. If we're going to engage in accusations and discussions of race-baiting, it's worth stepping back for a moment and asking who, in the end, is being baited.

An ad for a panel hosted by Mediabistro:

Call it the Goldilocks approach to political journalism. Many campaign-related articles we read are too cold (informative, maybe, but not terribly readable); many others are too hot (readable, maybe, but not terribly informative). The ones that strike a balance in their temperature--like "Moo," Timothy Egan's masterful treatment of Sarah Palin's gubernatorial record, currently the most-emailed story on nytimes.com--are, to borrow a description, just right.

The Associated Press retracted two government-issued photographs last night after a photographer in Texas alerted the agency that the photos in question appeared to be doctored.

Bob Owen, chief photographer of the San Antonio Express-News, notified the AP that the photos of two deceased soldiers, who died in Iraq on Sept. 14, were nearly identical. Upon examining the photos, Owens noticed that everything except for the soldier’s face, name, and rank was the same. The most glaring similarity, Owen told CJR, was that the camouflage patterns of the two uniforms were “perfectly identical.”

After inspecting the photographs, the AP confirmed that the images were, indeed, Photoshopped, and issued eliminations on the two photos.

The elimination reads:

The content of this image has been digitally altered and does not accurately reflect the scene. No other version of the photo is available.

The photos were released by the U.S. Army at Fort Stewart in Georgia. Officials at the base could not be reached for comment.

“I’d like to think that the media holds itself pretty accountable and we try really hard to keep high standards,” Owen said. “Obviously the army, and the government, doesn’t see anything wrong with that [photo altering] at all.”

Newly posted on Slate is an essay--a kind of analysis-meets-memoir--about Growing Up Alaskan. It's a nice piece, evocative and full of rich detail, that paints a portrait of both the particularities and peculiarities of a culture that, apparently, it's now our patriotic duty to be fascinated by. The essay is by turns touching and probing, and certainly worth reading.

Which is perhaps why Slate's editors slotted the essay as today's lead story, giving it prominent play on the site's homepage, complete with a massive photo and a snappy, attention-grabbing headline:

Except...all the promises of "weirdness"(!) and "strange"ness(!) and all that are a little too snappy. The piece doesn't, in the end, mock Alaska; its point isn't to point out "how strange Alaskans really are"; rather, like an episode of Northern Exposure that plays out in prose, its point is to celebrate Alaska's quirkiness. And ultimately to celebrate what the essay's author, Jim Albrecht, deems a cultural "sense of responsibility for the welfare of one's neighbors."

And yet: "Bridge to Weirdville" (ha!). And the glib pronouncement that "you have no idea how strange Alaskans really are" (ha!). Followed by another telling tease: "All the Juiciest Bits from the New Dick Cheney Book" (ha! and: ooh...!).

From a marketing perspective, anyway, this is great packaging. How could any reader not give the piece a click? What red-blooded American wouldn't want to learn more about the kookiness and laughable craziness of our tundra-dwelling countrymen?

Except, of course, the piece doesn't match the packaging. The home page promise of Alaska-attacking hilarity is greeted by, alas, a relatively sober, if occasionally amusing, essay on the landing. Looks like we might have another case of page-view sellout on our hands.

Writers are often instructed to avoid the use of vague or contentious words. Immediately following September 11, 2001, some editors even told journalists to eschew the word terrorist, as it is an ill-defined and pejorative term.

But what about modern? In conversation, people often use “modern” to mean "the way things are right now," but in an historical sense the word is confusing. The modern era begins with the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, so "modern" starts in (roughly) the middle of the eighteenth century.

The problem is that people often use "modern" to mean "compared to some earlier time" in history, like when The New York Times said in 2005 that:

The design of the modern workplace is a product of a long-gone era. Enter in your 20's, work at breakneck speed until your 50's, supervise until your 60's and then retire; that map is an artifact of a time when most workers (read: men) had support staff (read: women) back home.

Now the long-gone era to which the Times referred—say, the 1920s-1950s—was also "modern." What the author meant was the contemporary workplace, or, better yet, the technological workplace where both employees and employers don’t expect long term commitments.

Usually the reader can figure this out through context. This is not, however, always the case. On Saturday, CNN reported that:

"We will take no lectures from John McCain, who is cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton. "His discredited ads with disgusting lies are running all over the country today. He runs a campaign not worthy of the office he is seeking."

Is Burton right? Well, it's sort of hard to tell. While a case can be made for the existence of a postmodern presidential campaign, there is, strictly speaking, no such thing as the pre-modern or early modern presidential campaign—elected government being itself modern. One wonders to what Burton is comparing the McCain campaign. All American presidential elections have been modern affairs.

Of course, Burton meant to say that McCain's campaign is "really sleazy," and he was using "modern" in the colloquial sense of the word, meaning "involving recent techniques, methods, or ideas." But when one looks at the history of the American presidential campaign, what recent techniques, methods, or ideas are up for discussion? Is Burton talking about the use of television? Is McCain's the sleaziest and least honorable campaign since 1960's Kennedy vs. Nixon? Or is Burton talking about, say, universal suffrage? Is this the sleaziest and least honorable campaign since 1920's Harding vs. Cox? Or does he mean something else altogether?

Actually, he doesn't really mean anything with the word "modern." It's filler. Without modern, the sentence becomes "John McCain, who is cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in presidential campaign history." This statement is clearly false, considering some of the nasty rumors thrown around by those shadowy nineteenth-century presidential candidates. But if Burton were to define the statement further—"John McCain, who is cynically running the sleaziest and least honorable campaign since the presidential campaign of 1848"—this would require research, and leave the speaker open to error.

A fact check of Burton's statement would be nice, but I’m not really sure what he means. Even in the colloquial sense of the term, meaning “recent,” where do you draw the line?

Modern is a word that’s sometimes appropriate, but more often it's just a catch-all junk word used when one is unclear about definitions and trends. Or, as in the Burton case, when the speaker thinks a sentence needs a little more drama without much work.

The McCain campaign has a new ad out attacking Obama's legislative record. It begins with a voice-over:
"On the biggest financial issue of the day," the phantom voice declares, "Barack Obama would not say if he supported or opposed the government-backed rescue of insurance giant AIG."

Well. The voice, it turns out, belongs to Fox News's Major Garrett. And, this morning, Politico's Michael Calderone reports, the network sent a cease-and-desist letter to the McCain campaign:

"We demand that you immediately remove Mr. Garrett's voice from this ad. As Mr. Garrett is a non-partisan news correspondent covering the Obama campaign for Fox News, it is highly inappopriate [sic], among other things, of your campaign to use him in your ad."

One could point out a strain of irony in the indignant tone of the letter, particularly given the fact that the line between "accountability journalism" and anti-Obama bias is a fine one in the Garrett comment in question. Still, though, kudos to Garrett et al for taking a stand against campaign stooge-ery.

Just before midnight of Friday September 12th, the police in Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan, began an all-night shootout with a group of radical Islamists. Saturday morning’s reports said twenty policemen died in the fight, indicating that the energy-rich Central Asian state might be turning into a new front in the war on terror.

Except it wasn’t true. While the Ashgabat police certainly got into an hours-long gunfight, and while somewhere between ten and twenty policemen might have died, they were fighting criminals, not terrorists. Such news carries altogether different implications—both about Turkmenistan and the way some news agencies covered the situation.

Most of the earliest wire stories reporting on the situation quoted Gundogar, a Web site run by Turkmen exiles, and the various RFE/RL correspondents in Ashgabat as the source of the radical Islamist charge. The AP and BBC dutifully ran the story, posting Gundogar’s allegations without examining their trustworthiness, and the story made its way into the broader news world (the BBC has since corrected its story).

Though the RFE/RL story was laden with skepticism of the Islamism charge, the AP repeated the charge as fact. While it is a Muslim country, Turkmenistan is known more for its strategic energy and personality-cult tyrants than Islamism or even violent crime. Why so many news agencies would rush to blame the violence on purported Islamic militants—based on information from a Web site run by a few dissident exiles—is puzzling and troubling. Is the need to insta-publish so great that these outlets ran unvetted stories?

But the story is stranger than that. On Sunday, August 14, Al-Jazeera noted that the U.S. Embassy in Ashgabat had warned American citizens to avoid the northern districts of the city. This would be the Khitrovka district, where the gun battle occurred.

It is also where an armed gun battle took place on September 8, according to a U.S. Embassy press release from September 12. Two criminal suspects, the embassy release says, shot and killed one soldier, wounding another soldier and a policeman. The embassy also noted that the two men are suspected of being involved in a gas station robbery during late July or early August (despite being one of the most energy-rich countries in the world, in February Turkmenistan began rationing gas, which led to some violence at gas stations).

The moment the most recent gunfight happened, the embassy stepped up its warnings about travel to the Khitrovka district, noting the “continued confrontation between law enforcement and armed suspects.”

Realizing he had a public relations boondoggle on his hands, on Monday, September 15, Turkmeni president Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov berated his own police for the weekend’s violence, claiming the battle was with “drug traffickers.” This explanation, again, was accepted wholesale by regionally focused news agencies like IWPR and RFE/RL (the latter even repeated a rumor from a Russian-language Web site, claiming the skirmish was a botched attempt to overthrow the government). And again, this narrative has entered the mainstream thinking on the incident—what little there is.

In all of this, an unanswered question looms: What’s with the rumors? After the incident on September 12, RFE/RL correctly reported that one must be vigilantly skeptical of any news coming out of the area. The fact that the U.S. Embassy was on alert for days before the battle indicates the violence wasn’t a surprise, and didn’t warrant the breathless coverage it received. Yet many respected and otherwise excellent and trustworthy news agencies relentlessly broadcast rumor after rumor, as if they were confirmed, vetted truths.

Missing in all of this, too, is what the news means for Turkmenistan. While the allegations of drug violence are certainly plausible, as Turkmenistan is a major corridor for opium smuggled out of Afghanistan, before September 12 the running theory was that unrest was related to gas rationing. Not until days passed did the government leak news of its battle with drug lords—forgetting to mention that, originally, the danger was over some robbers stealing gas and killing soldiers.

In other words, there is a good deal more to this story. Even if those reporting on it aren’t exactly saying so.

PEJ releases research results that are fairly shocking: In the nine months leading up to the current Wall Street crisis, coverage of the economy—"which includes themes such as gas prices, banking industry troubles, the housing crisis, and retail sales"—filled only 9.3 percent of the total news hole. And—even more shocking—in the month leading up to the meltdown, "press attention to the U.S. economy was at a low point for the year." That low point would be 4.8 percent of the media newshole.

By comparison? The week of August 18-24, Veepstakes speculation—empty conjecture that, as Clint noted on Campaign Desk, was essentially meaningless in the end—filled a whopping 42 percent of the news hole.

If you, as I did, thought that John McCain's appearance on The View last week was as awkward as the show's "Red, White & View" segments could get...well, think again. Because, this Monday, the Ladies of the Curved Couch will host...Bill Clinton.

Yep: Barbara and Bubba, side by side! Watch out, Senator McCain...your Awkward Moments Per View Segment world record could be in jeopardy!

Clinton will ostensibly be guesting on the show to talk about the Clinton Global Initiative. (Remember that? The organization that's fighting AIDS in Africa and developing microfinance to fight poverty and founding schools in developing countries and generally making everyone forget about Monica Lewinsky? The organization that had everyone thinking Clinton was saving the world, or at least his own legacy, before 2008 primary antics made them think he might actually be more angry and petulant and possibly racist than he is messianic? Yeah, that thing.)

But--this being The View, and all--Clinton probably won't end up spending much time talking about developing nations while on the couch with the Viewers. He will probably end up talking about Barack Obama. And, if the ladies are feeling extra-sassy, about where he stands on the "boxers or briefs" debate.

Either way, we can pretty much be assured that Monday morning will bring some combination of: awkward flirting from Joy, indignant interrogation from Elisabeth, and at least one pointed, South Carolina-related question from Whoopi. Sweet. If they bring the awkwardness, we'll bring the mimosas.

Jon Stewart wasn't too impressed by the Hannity/Palin interview, either.

What can Plato's cave dwellers tell us about journalism? More than you'd think, says Bill Grueskin. Speaking to the incoming class of students at Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism on September 2, Grueskin compared current journalists to Plato's allegorical prisoners, who see fleeting shadows without, necessarily, seeing the fuller picture:

Many journalists are sort of like those prisoners right there. And I think all of us are a little bit like that. We sort of see little glints of what's happening. We see online growth, we see problems in the print industry, we see all these layoffs and you can kind of come up with conclusions that fit the data. But the truth is, nobody fully understands where this is going.

Grueskin should know. As deputy managing editor for news at The Wall Street Journal, he oversaw the development of the Journal's Web site, wsj.com. Now the newly appointed Academic Dean at the Journalism School, Grueskin spoke to students about the importance of adopting a new media mindset while preserving the journalistic standards that have withstood the test of time. "You have a responsibility, now, to our industry," Grueskin said. "Democracy works badly when the press is not healthy and vigorous. Create models that will make it vibrant and healthy for a long time."

Watch the video of Grueskin's talk below.

Low resolution:

High resolution:

For a full-screen version of the high-resolution video, click here.

Readers who joined the business press conversation only recently must getting a headache by now.

Wall Street is imploding, and what’s all this about short sellers? Are they really naked? Is “marking to market” really bad? It sounds so good. We just had to learn what a credit-default swap was. Help!

Audit prescription: Take one Weil, one Eisinger, and call us in the morning.

Basically, all the smart kids are saying that you can bone up on the “uptick rule” all you want, but it has nothing to do with the price of A.I.G. in China or the problems on Wall Street.

Weil:

American International Group Inc., Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. -- lobotomized, in one form or another. And all Cox and the SEC can come up with this week is a new ban on ``naked short selling,'' like that has anything to do with the world's financial problems.

Cox is SEC chairman Christopher Cox, who, to plagiarize myself, long ago became the Mr. Bill of the financial crisis. There goes Lehman. Oooo! Similarly, Andrew Cuomo is vying to become the Inspector Clouseau.

But back to Weil:

Maybe naked shorting is a huge problem somewhere. Maybe it's not. Who knows? The SEC has never given us any evidence that it is. And the practice has had nothing to do with the meltdown of big companies like AIG and Fannie, shares of which never were hard to borrow.

Meanwhile, we're staring into the abyss. Mr. Market doesn't believe any major U.S. bank's balance sheet, partly because the SEC has done all it can to buy them time…

What's taking down these grand financial icons such as Lehman and A.I.G.? It couldn't possibly be that the companies themselves made stupid and shortsighted decisions. So it must be a conspiracy of the short-sellers. It must be some wrong-headed accounting rules and bad regulation.

Read the whole thing, but don’t skip the end:

If we're ever going to get investor confidence back, what we need at the SEC is a Wyatt Earp. Naked short sellers? How about doing something useful, like sending subpoenas to Lehman Brothers and its auditor, Ernst & Young LLP, and making sure the world finds out about them. Or take a hint from Marvin K. Mooney, the Dr. Seuss storybook character who overstayed his welcome.

The time has come. The time is now. Just go. Go. GO! I don't care how. You can go by foot. You can go by cow. C. Christopher Cox, will you please go now!

Pretty funny. Who does Weil think he is? The Audit?

Jesse Eisinger of Portfolio says the same thing, and he’s just as right:

What's taking down these grand financial icons such as Lehman and A.I.G.? It couldn't possibly be that the companies themselves made stupid and shortsighted decisions. So it must be a conspiracy of the short-sellers. It must be some wrong-headed accounting rules and bad regulation.

Read that whole thing, too.

And if you really must know what the uptick rule is, read this WSJ editorial, which, it kills me to say, is quite good.

Then there's Mr. McCain's tirade against the "uptick rule," a Depression-era chestnut that investors could only short stock after a rise in that stock's price. The SEC staff studied the effect of the uptick rule on prices for years, in a controlled experiment involving thousands of stocks. It found the rule had no effect. Other studies, including those that examined the uptick rule's effect on stocks disclosing bad news, also found that it "protected" no one. The SEC's permanent staff has long supported repeal and the SEC's commissioners voted to do so unanimously in June 2007.

So, there: one less thing you have to learn about.

ProPublica has a detailed article about the $26 million construction of the Gravina Island Highway, the road that was supposed to lead to the infamous Bridge to Nowhere, even though Palin (as we all know) ultimately said “no thanks” to the bridge itself.

The fact checks on Sarah Palin’s statements about the Bridge to Nowhere were valuable because they called out the candidate’s false rhetoric. But exactly how much value is added in reporting the details of the Road to Nowhere (as the highway has been tagged) and the various construction alternatives being considered by the Alaskan Department of Transportation? Here are some of those details:

Alaska's Department of Transportation is currently analyzing nine different alternatives (six bridges and three ferries), only one of which connects with the recently completed Gravina Island Highway. The only other proposed solution that would use a substantial portion of the road is a bridge with a price tag of about $254 million, said Malcolm Menzies, an Alaska DOT official. The alternatives range from a low cost estimate of $80 million for one of the ferry proposals to about $360 million, Menzies said. CLICK HERE for a map of the access road, the original "Bridge to Nowhere" design and the alternatives being considered by the DOT.

You heard that: nine different alternatives. (Which one’s the best choice for America?) An AP story similarly notes the details of a bridge being considered for construction in Wasilla:

A $600 million bridge and highway project to link Alaska's largest city to Palin's town of 7,000 residents is moving full speed ahead, despite concerns the bridge could worsen some commuting and threaten a population of beluga whales.

That deserves a reread: “…despite concerns the bridge could worsen some commuting and threaten a population of beluga whales.” More importantly (my emphasis): “A Democratic council member in Anchorage will try Tuesday to spike the city's sponsorship of the project, which Palin supports with some reservations.” Somebody, alert the American public: Palin is such a frigging bridge supporter (with some reservations)!

The problem with these articles is, of course, not that they concern the details of Alaska’s transportation infrastructure; it’s what the details say, or in this case, don’t say about Palin the VP candidate. The articles are clearly meant to fit into the realm of the campaign (with detour to Alaska) beat, which means that the sole point of reporting them was to say or illustrate something new about Palin as she takes the national stage.

But for all its thoroughness, the ProPublica story doesn’t do that in any significant way. And the AP story, for its part, is just plain gimmicky. The Bridge to Nowhere was newsworthy not because earmarks are the campaign’s hot topic, but because Palin lied about her position on them. Hunting down other bridges in Alaska is kind of like getting mixed up about which trails are most important to sniff.

These stories feel off-point because they rely on superficial similarities (Bridge—now Road—to Nowhere; Another Bridge) to create their relevance to the campaign. Palin’s record in Alaska is worth investigating, and there are plenty of legitimate issues to dig into. But reporting on bridges for the sake of reporting on Palin just sort of seems like a road that’ll take the public nowhere new.

You know all the work and all the worrying and all the strategy and all the tragedy and all the sturm and all the drang and all the sound and all the fury that have, together, comprised the epic Campaign of 2008?

Well. All the diffuse drama will itself diffuse, on November 4, into some combination of machines, paper, and people. Each of which, in various ways, has been known to break down.

Fabulous.

As the financial markets lie in ruins, Obama-Biden and McCain-Palin are taking plenty of time on the campaign trail to assign blame and issue their prescriptions for what ails the economy. Both Obama and McCain are calling for more oversight of the markets, though the Arizona senator has previously been a strong supporter of deregulation.

Many papers around the country are taking the time to parse the candidates’ rhetoric on the issue—including an analysis of McCain’s struggle to command the economics debate and close reporting of Obama’s renewed focus on the topic. But the Chicago Tribune political staff’s coverage of the economic meltdown has been limited to a series of He Said/He Said articles that report the debate while neglecting the substance.

There are several elements involved in reporting from the trail. Part 1 is what the candidate said. What the opponent said in response is Part 2. But, arguably, the most important component for readers, and the task that falls to journalists, is Part 3: what does it all mean?

So on Tuesday (“Obama, McCain debate economic crisis”), Wednesday (“Obama, McCain exchange blows on economic woes”), and Thursday (“Rivals taking populist turn on economy”), Jill Zuckman and John McCormick dutifully filed dispatches from the trail:

Like the war in Iraq, Obama's campaign believes it can tie McCain to a struggling economy overseen by a Republican White House. "Too many folks in Washington and on Wall Street weren't minding the store," Obama said.

"Guys and gals, our regulatory system is outdated and it needs a complete overhaul," Palin said. "Washington has been asleep at the switch and ineffective and management on Wall Street has not run these institutions responsibly and has put companies and markets at risk."

"I'm here to send a message to Washington and to Wall Street," McCain told autoworkers at a GM plant in Lake Orion, Mich. "We're not going to leave the workers here in Michigan hung out to dry while we give billions in taxpayers' dollars to Wall Street. We're going to take care of the workers.... They're the ones that deserve our help."

"My opponent is running for four more years of policies that will throw the economy further out of balance," Obama told an audience at Colorado School of Mines. "His outrage at Wall Street would be more convincing if he wasn't offering them more tax cuts. His call for fiscal responsibility would be believable if he wasn't for more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans."

"The focus of any such action should be to protect the millions of Americans who hold insurance policies, retirement plans and other accounts with AIG," McCain said in a statement. "We must not bail out the management and speculators who created this mess."

So we have: “not minding the store,” “asleep at the switch,” “hung out to dry,” and so forth. But what, if anything, do these hoary clichés actually mean? Whose economic proposals are endorsed by non-partisan economists? Which candidate has provided a specific plan that can even be evaluated in the first place? How will these proposals impact most voters?

The problem is that questions like these can’t be answered when the story centers on the debate and not on the underlying issues. During a time of crisis, reporters must must must do more than perpetuate the false balance created when two sets of arguments are presented side-by-side with no evaluation whatsoever. It’s journalistically irresponsible to, over and over, write this kind of story: “Here’s what the candidates are saying, you decide what’s right.”

Deciphering complicated matters like the current financial requires reporting steeped in issue expertise and historical context. McCain’s record in the Senate and his reversal on the regulation issue require close scrutiny, as does Obama’s lack of experience on economic matters. Why not implement a tag-team approach, where trail reporters collaborate with in-office writers who can dedicate their time to calling economists, historians, and or others who can offer legitimate insight on the crisis?

America’s financial situation is dire and confusing, and it probably won’t get substantively better before the new administration takes office. And the current New York Times/CBS poll shows that voters are becoming more interested in measuring each candidate’s economic expertise.

This is why it’s essential for all publications—but especially papers-of-record like the Tribune—to dedicate time and inches to actual issue-based reporting, and get beyond the chatter of the debates.

From the blessedly staid souls who brought you last month's blessedly staid Convention Hubs--online coverage of the DNC and GOP conventions--comes a new feature: Debate Hub. Yep, C-SPAN is at it again! Detailed, sober, generally gimmick-free coverage of our upcoming national mud-wresting matches political slap-fests presidential and vice presidential debates!

Per the press release,

Debate Hub will feature an interactive timeline that allows users to identify and watch the questions from the debates they find most interesting. Users will also be able to share this video with others using C-SPAN's Video Library embeddable player.

It will also feature complete video footage of each debate, as well as aggregated blog and Twitter coverage of each debate.

The Hub (yep, we're so on a one-name basis) will go live on C-SPAN's Politics page later his month. When it does, it will also feature--this necessitates a special notation--a word tree. Yep, again: a word tree. A "visualization of each candidate's responses."

Which will be--and I write this without any sarcasm--awesome.

In fact: if C-SPAN can find a way to team up with these guys, their debate coverage might just be complete.

And now we have CNBC's Erin Burnett questioning short sellers' patriotism.

This, we overhead this afternoon. Not believing our ears, we cleaned them with Q-Tips, Tivo’d the segment, transcribed it, and there it was.

"We're getting to the point where some of the activity in some of the [stock] names out there causing all investment banks in this country to be wiped out in a week could be considered to be unpatriotic."

The remark was made shortly after news broke that Britain's financial regulator outright banned bets against financial companies in the United Kingdom. Britain's radical step provided the context for the discussion.

So there’s that.

Adding to the nuttiness, Jim Cramer came to the defense of shorts, sort of—by raising the prospect that terrorists might be behind it.

We aren’t kidding.

Talking to Burnett about her patriotism comments Cramer said some people he's talking to are wondering whether what's going is "financial terrorism."

"Obviously the financial terrorism thing to me has to be put on the table just because the regular short sellers are not doing this. They're not doing this."

He added:

To ban short selling is wrong. It's just wrong. Unless, If you have reason to believe that it was a force that would normally use physical terrorism that is using financial terrorism—if you have reason to believe that."

Even as we agree with Cramer on the issue of not banning shorts, we’re not sure this kind of talk is helping matters, generally.

A CNBC spokesman said he's reviewing the segment.

Look, we know this deepening crisis has everybody, including financial commentators, spooked. And understandably, so.

But this is stuff you normally find in the darkest corners of Yahoo Finance chat boards, not supposedly reputable financial journalism broadcasts.

Time to take a deep breath.

Looks like Al Gore, whose global reach encompasses the Nobel Foundation, hipster television, and, you know, the actual globe, will soon add one more territory to his empire.

Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici reports that Gore will soon be buying a stake in Plenty, "a four-year-old title about environmentally-conscious living." The former Veep's exact stake--and exact role--in the bimonthly mag are still to be announced. But influence is suggested in the current issue's cover art, which features, in the background, a line of orange-lit wind turbines--and, in the foreground, a similarly citrus-hued head shot of...Al Gore.

It's talking about Obama.

The New York Sun ain't dead yet, and reports an ex Securities and Exchange Commission official says a boneheaded SEC rule change in 2004 let the investment banks load up on much more debt (twice as much) and is to blame for their downfall.

What happened to AIG? The Journal's behind-the-scenes experts Monica Langley, Deborah Solomon, and Matthew Karnitschnig tell us in an excellent first draft of history, as do the Times's Eric Dash and Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Roger Cohen in the NYT writes one of the best step-back columns we've seen on the crisis (even if he does quote Coldplay). It's part of the growing perception (a correct one) that too many of our best talents have been tied up shuffling money around instead of creating stuff.

The Washington Post's Dan Balz puts aside false balance and notes correctly that anti-regulation McCain has a big problem with the deepening of the financial crisis, which clearly calls out for more and better regulation.

Presidential leadership in a (financial) hurricane? Bloomberg writes, astonishingly, that President Bush has "publicly uttered 160 words about the worst Wall Street crisis since the Great Depression." Its headline also avoids false balance: "Bush Absent on Financial Crisis as Paulson Leads."

The Post's Steven Pearlstein blames the bust on Americans living far beyond their means and financing it with foreign investment, the removal of which pulled the bottom out of the house of cards. He calls the crisis the "greatest destruction of financial wealth that the world has ever seen—paper losses measured in the trillions of dollars. Corporate wealth. Oil wealth. Real estate wealth. Bank wealth. Private-equity wealth. Hedge fund wealth. Pension wealth."

The NYT looks at Fed Inc., the unprecedented transformation of the central bank into the "investor of last resort." We might call it the "nationalizer of last resort."

Say what you will about Charlie Gibson's interview of Sarah Palin last week (we certainly did). At least it was journalism. Last night's exchange between Palin and Sean Hannity—the second interview granted by the would-Veep to a television news network and, as a BREAKING NEWS chyron repeatedly reminded its viewers, HER FIRST INTERVIEW ON CABLE TV—was something else entirely. A chat between pals? Mutual back-slapping? Proto-propaganda? Some combination thereof? I'm really not sure.

Palin, for her part, did well. Though she answered Hannity's questions with a frustrating lack of specificity, she also did so with a great deal more assuredness and fluency than she'd exhibited in the Gibson interview. She discussed her stances on drilling in ANWR and on energy independence with authority. As Karl Rove put it, commenting on Hannity & Colmes after the interview aired, "I thought that really was a compelling and very credible performance." In many ways, it was. After last week's showing, it was a relief to see Palin looking both confident and, more importantly, competent.

But, then again, she was in her element. Hannity wasn't just a friendly adversary in the interview; he was a full-on cheerleader. While he asked the vice presidential nominee substantial-if-fairly-predictable questions about the economy and energy—never following up on her well-presented but generally vague talking points—he spent just as much time asking Palin about the campaign itself. And about, for that matter, why Obama and Biden are so wrong about so many things...and why McCain and Palin are, in so many ways, so right.

Wait, you missed the interview last night? And you think I might be overstating the case? Well, this being about Fox News, and all: We report. You decide. Below, a selection of the questions Hannity asked of Palin last night:

HANNITY: Explain when you were governor and, as governor of Alaska, how you took on your own party. There's this — you know, you still have a very high approval rating, but there are people that still weren't happy about it. How did you take on your own party, specifically? And do you think you'd be able to do that, as well, in Washington?

HANNITY: Senator Obama on the campaign trail — and Senator Biden as well — they often criticize John McCain, that, well his plan is — he's going to continue the policies of tax cuts for the wealthy. For those that maybe buy into that class warfare agreement or think, why shouldn't the rich pay more? My question to you is the converse: why does everyone benefit if the rich pay less or if everybody pays less in taxes? Why is that good for the economy?

HANNITY: Is Senator Obama ... using what happened on Wall Street this week — is he using it for political gain? Is there a danger of a presidential candidate is saying to the world that America's situation of economic crisis is the worst that we've seen in decades — which was words that he was using yesterday — is there a danger in terms of the world hearing that?

HANNITY: Things have gotten pretty heated on the campaign trail and especially in the last two days. There were two weeks where I think you were the focus of the attack. Now it seems that the focus of the attack is Senator McCain.

Do you think these attacks, ratcheting up these attacks by Barack Obama — I don't know if you had a chance to see the speech yesterday — and by Senator Biden, do you think these attacks will be effective?

HANNITY: Well, let me ask you, Americans have heard, for example, a lot of information, false information, misinformation or incorrect information on ANWR. Some have said the drilling there is going to hurt the animals, it's going to ruin the environment, it's going to hurt the environment and hurt the landscape. You know, it's clear I've heard you talk passionately about your love for your state of Alaska. You know, why then why then would you support drilling in Alaska? Why would that be a good thing?

My read on all this: With few exceptions, last night's interview was essentially a push poll with visuals. (Governor, why is your ticket's economic plan good for the economy? Governor, why are Obama and Biden so mean to you? Governor, why are you so awesome?) Which isn't surprising, I realize. Hannity was granted the interview precisely because of the loudly prophetic nature of his partisanship: He sings the good news every night, and the McCain campaign calculated that Hannity, above all, shares in its conviction that the good news is, indeed, named Sarah Palin. As the Los Angeles Times put it, Hannity, "a conservative commentator, underscores her appeal to the party's base, which has been energized by her selection."

Still—call me naive—I actually expected more from Hannity. Not a lot, but certainly more than he gave us. I thought that the pundit might use the "Palin exclusive!" to show viewers both loyal and new that Fox News can be better than its common caricature as a partisan spin machine. That it is, fundamentally, a news organization, capable of real journalism (as the network shows itself to be, again and again, in its straight reporting segments). I expected that Hannity himself would take advantage of the opportunity to transcend his own ideology.

Instead, he wallowed in it. Hannity's demeanor last night often seemed—as had Gibson's, but for an entirely different reason—smug. "I'm Sean Hannity," he announced by way of introducing the Palin interview. "We get right to our top story tonight: She is the politician who has taken America by storm and who has changed the very dynamic of the presidential race. Governor Sarah Palin has been the target of left-wing smears and conservative adoration as she was introduced as Senator McCain's running mate nearly three weeks ago."

Sheesh. Compare that tone of dogmatic, defensive devotion to what we saw in Keith Olbermann's recent interview with Obama. Yes, Olbermann’s interview was softer than it could have been—but at least its tone was sober. At least Olbermann occasionally challenged the senator on his answers; at least he asked follow-up questions; at least the goal of his interview seemed to be, you know, the extraction of information from the candidate.

But Hannity wasn't, in the end, seeking information. He was seeking spin. He wasn't lobbing journalistic softballs at Palin; he was forfeiting the whole game.

There has been precious little reaction to the Hannity interview in the mainstream media today. Which is partially because the Palin Novelty is wearing off, but partially because the interview was conducted by Sean Hannity. Many critics and commentators tend to dismiss pundits like Hannity and Olbermann and their ilk as journalistic Crisco: flabby, bloviating blobs too slippery to adhere to rigid journalistic standards. I see the pragmatism of their assumptions (square pegs, round holes, all that), but I'd argue that it is precisely that mindset of defeatism that people who care about journalism must try to defeat.

The simpering smugness Hannity demonstrated last night is both a specimen and a symptom of the above-the-law mentality we see so often in politicians and, increasingly, the press—one that, at its worst, treats the truth as inconsequential. It's the same mindset that leads members of the McCain campaign to keep repeating the "thanks but no thanks" line when discussing the Bridge to Nowhere—despite the fact that, as has been documented again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again, that line is a lie.

We’re giving those partisan pundits a free pass when we allow them to abdicate journalistic responsibility. And we're also tacitly approving their spin-uber-alles mentality—that cynical and destructive mindset that has hijacked so much of our discourse. Though we might think we're upholding journalistic tradition by ignoring those who so clearly thwart that tradition, we're not. On the contrary, we critics enable these figures expressly by withholding our criticism of them. We’re defining the standards of journalism so narrowly as to exclude even highly influential outliers—and, in doing so, we're providing them with a journalistic frontier in which they can conduct their gun fights and bar brawls and the like with whimsical abandon. And with an audience, often, of millions.

"Now Thursday night, by the way," Hannity noted as he closed last night's segment,

I'm going to bring you part two of Governor Palin and our interview here. Now, well, we'll find out if she thinks the media is trying to elect Barack Obama, her strategy for repairing our relationships abroad and her thoughts on the mini army that's been sent to Alaska to look into her personal life.

In other words: a valid—and urgent—topic of inquiry, sandwiched between a piece of spin and another of distortion. If Gibson had said something like that in his interview, he'd be a laughingstock. But who's holding Hannity accountable? We can say that applying journalistic standards to people who clearly aren't interested in being journalists is worth neither the breath nor the ink required in the effort. But we'd be wrong. It's the people who fancy themselves above the law who create the need for laws in the first place. And it's the people who care about journalism's standards who should be stepping up to enforce them.

This week, National Review published an article by Byron York with the simple headline “On Sex-Ed Ad, McCain Is Right.”

Too bad that’s not what York’s article proves.

You’ll recall that last week the McCain campaign, to much opprobrium, released an ad spotlighting a sex education bill that Obama supported while an Illinois state senator. Here’s the full script:

Education Week says Obama "hasn't made a significant mark on education".

That he's "elusive" on accountability.

A "staunch defender of the existing public school monopoly".

Obama's one accomplishment?

Legislation to teach "comprehensive sex education" to kindergartners.

Learning about sex before learning to read?

Barack Obama.

Wrong on education. Wrong for your family.

There are a slew of problems with this—the ad’s tortured definition of the word “accomplishment,” for one. The bill didn’t pass, and Obama wasn’t a prime author, co-sponsor, or sponsor. Given that characterization of “accomplishment,” it’s even more absurd to believe that the failed bill could be described as his “one accomplishment.”

There have been several valuable fact checks on this point, and on the nitty gritty of what the bill, should it have passed, would have actually done. All have found, essentially, that the ad’s central, nasty claim—that Obama voted to “teach ‘comprehensive sex education’ to kindergartners”—is bunk.

But York, in brave defense of the ad, and in defiance of common sense, does his best to prove otherwise. He suggests that there’s something rotten about all this fact checking, and about the “’McCain-is-a-liar’ storyline” that came from this ad. “But before accepting the story at face value,” he writes,

it might first be a good idea to examine the bill in question, look at the statements made by its supporters at the time it was introduced, talk to its sponsors today (at least the ones who will consent to speak), and find answers to a few basic questions. What were the bill’s provisions? Why was it written? Was it really just, or even mostly, about inappropriate advances? And the bottom-line question: Is McCain’s characterization of it unfair?

Agreed! The bottom line question is whether or not McCain’s description of the bill is fair. (Hint: It isn’t.) But reread the italicized sentence about “inappropriate advances.” By including that question, York, like a magician trying to distract his audience, introduces a side issue—namely, the validity of Obama and his campaign’s explanation for why he backed the bill. Perhaps that’s a worthy question, but not one that has anything to do with the truthfulness of McCain’s ad, ostensibly the subject of York’s piece.

Obama’s favorite retort, when confronted with this matter, is to note that the bill would have sanctioned warning young students about inappropriate sexual contact and rape. He mentioned this in 2004, when his GOP senatorial opponent, Alan Keyes, tried the attack in a debate. Here’s what Obama said in response:

We have a existing law that mandates sex education in the schools. We want to make sure that it’s medically accurate and age-appropriate. Now, I’ll give you an example, because I have a six-year-old daughter and a three-year-old daughter, and one of the things my wife and I talked to our daughter about is the possibility of somebody touching them inappropriately, and what that might mean. And that was included specifically in the law, so that kindergarteners are able to exercise some possible protection against abuse, because I have family members as well as friends who suffered abuse at that age. So, that’s the kind of stuff that I was talking about in that piece of legislation.

His basic point—that the bill would have required sex ed to include age appropriate discussions of inappropriate touching—is sound. Was it the sole focus of the bill? No, but it’s still there, and its presence is hardly inconsistent with Obama’s 2004 statement describing the predator issues as “an example” of the “kind of stuff” to be found in the legislation.

After McCain’s ad slammed the bill, Obama spokesperson Bill Burton issued this statement:

It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls—a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds.

Burton’s flackery, claiming that the bill “was written to” address the predator issue, could read as false if you take the phrase to mean that predation was the bill’s only or main purpose. But if you take it to mean that the bill was written in a way that would sanction teaching kindergartners about predators, then there’s no problem here. The crime, in York’s eyes, seems to be that Obama and his staff, when called to account for a controversial bill, chose to cite a section that’s a good illustration for why some types of sex education are appropriate at the kindergarten level. Outrageous, I know.

But again, the question is dilatory. Despite York’s feint, the framing and nuance that Obama uses to respond to the attack really doesn’t address the truthfulness of the attack itself—which, if you look at the ad, is that Obama supported “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners. But York’s claim is also shaky on that front.

To understand, you’ll need some background on sex ed in Illinois. As Matt Vanover, a spokesperson for the Illinois State Board of Education, explained to me, Illinois does not require that formal sex education be taught in any grade. Rules broadly related to sex ed are found in three sections of the Illinois school code. One decrees that schools offer a “Comprehensive Health Education Program” in all elementary and secondary schools. The program is a bit of a grab bag, requiring that health courses include some information on abstinence, nestled alongside instruction on public health, first aid, nutrition, tobacco, alcohol, drug use, and a host of other loosely related subjects. In sixth through twelfth grades, some instruction on AIDS is required.

The other two sections of the school code broadly relating to sex ed only apply if a local district or school should choose to offer a full sex ed course, or a full family life course. If they do, state statutory requirements outline what material must be included. For example, the sex education statute requires instruction in “honor and respect for monogamous heterosexual marriage” and “alternatives to abortion,” and stressing that “abstinence is the norm.” It includes no language on contraception.

Senate Bill 99, the bill cited by McCain’s ad, would have amended all three relevant sections of the code. The bill’s amendments required that curriculums be based on peer-reviewed science. The scope of instruction was expanded to include information on sexual predators, sexual harassment, sexual peer pressure, counseling, and contraception, clearly stating that the topics were to be covered in an age-appropriate fashion. By amending the mandatory health course statute, the bill, in effect, would have created a mandatory statewide sex-ed program.

So where does kindergarten come into this? Two of three sections of the school code—the mandatory health section, as well as the sex education section, which only applies to districts choosing to offer such courses—already used language envisioning some sort of instruction in elementary school, which could include kindergarten. But all three sections specifically mandated that AIDS prevention instruction be included in the sixth through twelfth grades.

The Senate bill would have amended all three sections of the school code to expand AIDS instruction down to the kindergarten level. In two of those instances—one in the only-if-locally-decided-upon family life section, and one in the state required health section—the revision was weakened by very clearly being paired with a phrase saying that it only be done where “age appropriate.”

In other words, districts that wanted to offer some AIDS education before 6th grade had a clear green light, but wouldn’t be required to do so where they didn’t feel it was age appropriate. (York even quotes the head of the Illinois Education Association, who said that lowering the potential age for beginning AIDS instruction was a goal of the legislation. “What might be appropriate in an urban inner city might not be appropriate in a rural community,” he said.)

There was only one instance—again, only mandating instruction on HIV and other STDs—where the words “age appropriate” were omitted. Guess which of the three York quotes in full?

Yes, Obama and the committee majority voted for the bill without the “age appropriate” clause in that one section. Considering that the same language appears in two other nearly identical revisions, it has the flavor of oversight rather than intentionality. And the two other instances, including the one in the more serious, state-required, health course section, would explain the legislators’ intentions vis-à-vis kindergarten.

Even so, using York’s cramped, hyper-literal, and extremely ungenerous reading of the text, Obama is guilty, at most, of voting a bill out of committee that, had it passed unamended, would have required that local districts continuing to provide sex ed courses to their kindergartners (separate from the revamped health courses) not fail to mention HIV, other STDs, and appropriate means of prevention. I don’t know Illinois well, but I can guess that that would be a pretty narrow sample size.

Still, this is how York concludes:

The fact is, the bill’s intention was to mandate that issues like contraception and the prevention of sexually-transmitted diseases be included in sex-education classes for children before the sixth grade, and as early as kindergarten. Obama’s defenders may howl, but the bill is what it is.

Well, yes, the bill is what it is. And York’s piece is what it is.

I missed the Todd Palin broadcast debut, but as Megan and Liz have pointed out, that's no great loss. For a flavor of the interview (which didn't include a single question on Sarah Palin's questionable firing of the state's public safety commissioner, an issue that, by all indications, Todd was well involved in) you could do worse than this Talking Points Memo compilation of inanity. (Stray thought: remember when Van Susteren was, like, a legal correspondent or something?)

Totally funny! And despicable! At the same time!