January 2009 Archives

From the Forewords, described as "a musicless PowerPoint band" comes an excellent slideshow of obscure trade magazine covers. I'll say no more.

The Economist has the skinny and the tech-talk on President Obama's much-discussed, but not-so-slim BlackBerry:

President Obama may have surrendered his trusty BlackBerry, but in its place he’s acquired a lookalike that’s technically superior in every aspect, even if (at 12 ounces) it weighs three times more.

To make your phone as secure as Obama's, The Economist has some tips, but you'll only get so far: Obama's phone comes with 384-bits of encryption, compared with the everyman 256. What a gyp.

Answer: The Library of Congress.

The tech-savvy folks at the LOC have blogging for some time and now they've jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon. For now, it's a slow start, as these recent selected tweets show:

1:15 PM Jan 27th: Interest in upcoming Lincoln exhibit & Lincoln/Obama Bible is staggering. Many top-tier media here this week and next.

about 22 hours ago: 1,008 followers -- holy mackerel! You guys are the best!

Kevin Roderick at LAObserved reports that the Los Angeles Times is closing down its California section:

Publisher Eddy Hartenstein has ordered the California section killed, leaving the L.A. Times without a separate local news front for the first time since the paper's early decades. The publisher decided to fold local news inside the front section — which will be reconfigured to downplay national and foreign news — despite what an official of the paper confirmed for me was the unanimous and vocal objections of senior editors. Advertisers were informed on Wednesday, and word began to leak on Thursday. Hartenstein reportedly planned to delay an announcement until the close of business on Friday, fearing it will play as another black eye for the Times.

The LAT's own L.A. Now blog links to Roderick's post. Among the reader reactions? Reader AH thinks the paper is losing the one edge it has, commenting: "If I want world news, I'll read the NYT. The only thing the LAT offers me at all is the California section, and that's it. I'm out." Hear that, Eddy?

Reflections on the passing of John Updike abound this week, and here's a smattering of some noteworthy eulogies.

Granta collects the thoughts of literary heavy-hitters, including Edmund White, Jennifer Egan, and the ever-elegiac Garrison Keillor, who writes, "He was an uncomplaining writer, a genius but also a workman, and he seemed to pick up energy in his last decade, which is encouraging to the rest of us. The Centaur is still my favourite of his books, a work of filial devotion, with the Olinger stories a close second. God bless his memory."

Not to be outdone, The New Yorker presents its own star-studded list with Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jeffery Eugenides, who offers these words: "When a writer dies, a vote comes in. It usually takes a while, but not in this case. Updike’s death has revealed how many people, how many different kinds of people, felt a strong connection to his work. He was our great American writer. There won’t be another like him. How fortunate we were, and how lucky he was, to have come along in our democracy at the time he did. "

And from Harper's: "His reviews were generous, but not in the sense that he regularly mollycoddled mediocrity. He tried to take at books on the terms they set for themselves, then tried to evaluate how well they managed on those terms, then looked at whether those terms were themselves adequate, useful, or beautiful. This habit of mind alone is unusual in the practice of long form literary criticism, which in lesser hands attached to meaner minds devolves into a sport of knaves. “What can one say, critically, about a critic without seeming hypercritical?” asked Updike in his assessment of Cyril Connolly. Of Updike the critic I can say: he will be missed."

The package arrived two weeks ago, a bulging manila envelope with a return address in Decatur, Illinois. Inside was a mass of paper with a polite letter placed on top.

“Dear Mr. Silverman,” it began, “you have published a book on errors found in journalism and have a website devoted to the subject.” The writer, Robert S. Reed, continued on for two pages:

As a subscriber to the Herald & Review in Decatur Illinois, I have seen hundreds of errors in newspaper articles in addition to errors in the photo captions and the headlines/sub-headings. Most are misspelled words, missing words, extra words, wrong verb tenses, and, in some cases, factual inaccuracies.

Two of the articles from 2008 are attached to illustrate my point … I am also attaching 82 photo captions that appeared in the Decatur Herald & Review in 2008. All contain errors of one type or another. The corrections are indicated in ink. Also enclosed are 35 copies of headlines and sub-headings.

The more than 100 clippings were roughly an inch thick, and Reed was as good as his word. Each page correctly noted a copy editing or factual error from the paper. Red ink was everywhere, and in all the right places. The collection represented hours of work, not to mention the time spent photocopying them for delivery to me.

Some may wonder why anyone would choose to dedicate this amount of time to cataloging the errors in their local paper. But it’s no surprise to me at all. I’ve seen it before. (Plus, I’ve dedicated the last four years to reading hundreds of thousands of corrections and errors. I’m in no position to judge.)

My first encounter with a dedicated error-spotter came in 2006, when I received an e-mail from a man named Mark Powell. He informed that he had been spotting errors in The Washington Post for months. Powell sent me several Word files that listed hundreds of errors made by the paper. I also came to know a U.K. man named Aldous Russel because he never failed to spot my mistakes on the Regret the Error Web site. He reprised his role when I asked readers of my book to spot my mistakes. (You can read the resulting corrections here.)

Powell had for years been trying to turn his error-spotting prowess into a job in journalism. Both the Post and The New York Times have rebuffed him. Still, his work earned him a lengthy story in Seattle Weekly last fall. I also made mention of him in my book:

Powell lives in Virginia and his paper of choice is the Washington Post. As far as he is concerned, the paper’s corrections “represent a very tiny fraction of the paper’s ‘correctable’ errors. Fact is nearly none of the thousand-odd errors I’ve cataloged—probably less than 2 percent— were ever corrected.”

… [Powell] was as focused and dedicated an external fact-checker as I’ve come across, and no doubt a thorn in the Post’s side since he regularly e-mailed editors with his findings. I told him he struck me as the kind of person who would have been well suited to the job of proofreader. Too bad it no longer exists.

Though these pedantic readers often end up driving editors and reporters crazy with their constant emails, I’ve found that they’re right most of the time. (The people who scream bias over every article have a lower hit rate.) From the Seattle Weekly piece about Powell:

Mark Powell finds mistakes everywhere he looks. National monuments, scholarly texts, museums, The Washington Post, The New York Times: All have drawn the attention of Powell's rabid, error-spotting eye. Powell will leave you seven-minute voicemails about these errors. When you call him back, he'll tell you how good he is at finding them--in great detail. When after two and a half hours you finally manage to hang up the phone, you'll vow never to speak with Mark Powell again. Then he'll call, and you'll listen. Because the thing is, Mark Powell is always right.

External fact checkers often have different motives. Powell is looking to land a copy editing job. When I got him on the phone yesterday, Robert Reed, the man who recently sent me a stack of clippings, told me he does it because he wants his local paper to meet a higher standard.

Reed began tracking his paper’s errors two years ago after reading an editorial decrying a new practice that restricted press photographers to a specific area when covering high school athletics.

“[The paper was] criticizing this policy and they made it sound like readers were being deprived by not being allowed to see photos from the best vantage point,” said Reed, a former school teacher and retired mass transit administrator. “I thought it was ironic because readers are really being cheated on the quality of journalism in the paper due to all the typos and factual errors.”

Roughly every month, Reed, sixty-seven, sends editors at the paper his latest collection of errors and typos. He’s occasionally heard back from individual reporters and editors, but his missives are usually met with silence. No doubt people in the Herald & Review newsroom don’t look forward to receiving the monthly envelope from one Robert S. Reed. But he keeps sending them in the hope that the examples will help the paper improve its copy editing. He’d also like to see them correct their errors with more frequency.

How often does he see a correction for an error he’s spotted?

“They publish a correction probably less than one percent of the time,” he says. (That number isn’t too far off the findings of a landmark 2007 corrections study by Scott Maier at the University of Oregon.)

Reed says he watches TV and reads news online, but relies on the paper as his “primary source of information about what’s going on locally and internationally.” The Herald & Review is the only daily in Decatur. He’s got no other choice. So out comes the red pen…

“I’m doing it to make them aware of how they need to improve their proofreading and the quality of their journalism,” he says.

Of course, a careful reader like him is acutely aware of the likelihood of that happening at any newspaper in today’s economy. Reed starts talking about the falling share price of the paper’s owner, Lee Enterprises. He mentions the debt the company took on to purchase the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Falling advertising.

“With these kinds of financial pressures, I think we’re going to see less attention paid to quality and error checking,” he says.

That means more work for him.

“It is sort of a habit,” he says, “and it’s probably something I’ll continue to do.”

Correction of the Week

“This article was amended on Tuesday 20 January 2009. In our entry on Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon Days, we referred to a Prairie Ho Companion; we meant a Prairie Home Companion. This has been corrected.” – The Guardian (U.K.)

Phantom Source

“A story on residential schools payments that appeared in yesterday’s National Post, and was provided by the Canwest News Service, incorrectly attributed quotes to Brenda Reynolds. All of the quotes attributed to Ms. Reynolds, regarding deaths in British Columbia and recipients’ reactions to the payments, were made by Sharon Thira of the Indian Residential Schools Survival Society. Ms. Reynolds, a psychologist who works with former residential school students, did not make any comments for this story. Canwest News Service regrets the error.” – National Post (Canada)

Parting Shot

“FOLLOWING our article on 16 November which stated that Heather Mills had recently had a third boob job Heather Mills has asked us to point out that she has not had breast enlargement surgery. Furthermore, we wish to clarify that Ms Mills has not spent pounds 1million on a swimming pool and has not spent pounds 6million on other properties.” – Sunday Mirror (U.K.)

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's days may be numbered, but it's still got some scrap.

It put out a nice story the other day reporting how the FBI for years was very aware of the pervasive mortgage fraud going on across the country but did nothing to stop it, in large part because it didn't have the resources for white-collar crime after 9/11. After the attacks, the Bush administration reallocated resources into counterterrorism rather than giving the G-men more resources to do both.

"There were two hurdles," said the second retired FBI official, "not enough agents working in the criminal area and not enough (federal prosecutors) to prosecute these complex cases. You have to have investigators to follow the money, you have to follow the decision making to take it up to the corporate suites. And we didn't have it."

But the feds knew it was going on:

"We knew that the mortgage-brokerage industry was corrupt," the first of the retired FBI officials told the Seattle P-I. "Where we would have gotten a sense of what was really going on was the point where the mortgage was sold knowing that it was a piece of dung and it would be turned into a security. But the agents with the expertise had been diverted to counterterrorism."

This is very interesting:

Further complicating efforts to detect and prosecute mortgage fraud, banks and other mortgage lenders were making so much money from the constant churn of transactions and the continually escalating price of homes that the fraud that did arise simply didn't cost the industry enough money to raise their concerns.

"You had victim banks that would not acknowledge that they were victims," said the first retired FBI official. " 'We're not out any money,' they would say. Nothing has been foreclosed. The banks weren't reporting, the regulators weren't regulating and the FBI was concentrating on external mortgage fraud as opposed to the underlying internal problem."

Let's all hope the P-I gets a reprieve. We need papers that continue to push this story.

It is no secret that bailout transparency is a problem.

Now that taxpayers have become financiers, we have a right to know where the money is going. In search of organizations with the curiosity and resources to help figure that out, we trolled the Internet for good, easily available bailout information and came up with several sites worth looking at.

You can get charts describing the allocation of bailout money from a variety of sources. Some are easier to find than others, and we’ll leave it up to the reader to figure out what it means that the WSJ has a quick link for the Super Bowl but not the bailout.

But even after you find them, charts will only get you so far.

If you are looking to understand the big picture, you should go first to organizations that focus specifically on tracking the bailout. Not only do they piece together information from a variety of sources, saving you the trouble, but a few also do their own snooping around.

A good place to start is Open the Government, an organization devoted to greater government transparency in general, and with a specific page on the bailout. The page is a good launching pad because it compiles a lot of information—from government organizations, news outlets and watchdogs—as well as providing a calendar of relevant dates. In the spirit of common cause, Open the Government also links to other bailout watchdog groups.

We’ll get to those in a moment.

But before we leave the site, we want to note some of the key documents it provides: FOIA request papers from Bloomberg and Fox News, the draft of a paper by two University of Chicago professors who evaluate “the largest ever U.S. Government intervention in the financial system,” and a recent report by the Government Accountability Office that takes stock of problems with oversight of the bailout plan. All of these are worth reading.

Moving on to other organizations, our first stop is ProPublica. As we mentioned, you can find a list of bailout-funds recipients in a variety of places on line, but one of the things we like so much about the ProPublica list is that it links up with Taxpayers for Common Sense to provide biographies of each of the corporations. You will need these because, once you scroll past the behemoths, you won’t have heard of many of the others.

On a separate page, ProPublica offers rigorous analysis of the bailout. Moving beyond aggregating information, it offers excellent investigative reporting and commentary on the numbers.

Another important resource is Subsidyscope, a work-in-progress by The Pew Charitable Trusts and The Sunlight Foundation, whose aim is to track the bailout money in detail. They get the prize for the jazziest interactive subsidy-chart. They also provide a clear list of relevant documents.

A variety of institutional blogs address the bailout—The Sunlight Foundation and Nightly Business Report, for example. But the real bailout-obsessed blog is BailoutSleuth, which offers a blow-by-blow account of the process.

And don’t discount government sites entirely. For figures straight from the horse, look at the Treasury. And, more interestingly, there is the web page for the Congressional Oversight Panel, which has itself been frustrated by the bailout’s lack of transparency.

Finally, for some hindsight, you might want to take a look at the connection between lobbying money and the passage of the bailout plan, at Open Secrets and MAPLight.

If you have bailout sites that you like, let us know. If you have bailout sites that you like, let us know by writing Big Chief Audit, Dean Starkman, dean@deanstarkman.com.

I have a nit to pick with the Times's lead story today about Obama calling Wall Street's $18.4 billion in bonuses "shameful."

It has to do with its use of the word "populist", which The Audit has bemoaned before:

It was a pointed — if calculated — flash of anger from the president, who frequently railed against excesses in executive compensation on the campaign trail. He struck his populist tone as he confronted the possibility of having to ask Congress for additional large sums of money, beyond the $700 billion already authorized, to prop up the financial system, even as he pushes Congress to move quickly on a separate economic stimulus package that could cost taxpayers as much as $900 billion.

Let's face it: "Populist" is a pejorative adjective. It connotes that Obama is saying something he doesn't believe just to rouse the unwashed masses. But does anyone think that bankers paying themselves $18.4 billion while they take trillions in bailouts and government guarantees and while the economy collapses because of said bankers' actions is not "shameful"?

Please show yourself then, as long as your name isn't John Thain. In fact, I'd bet most bankers agree with what Obama said.

In my book, the pinstripes rule out populism.

It's time for a quote of the day.

This from a good Bloomberg story about Davos participants in denial about their culpability for the financial crisis. Ladies and gentlemen—private equity firm Carlyle Group's David Rubenstein:

“There are six billion people on the face of the earth, and probably about five billion participated in what went on,” Rubenstein said in an interview. “Everybody participated in some way or shape or form.”

Still clueless.

I love this story in the Journal's Currents section today.

My former colleague Ben Casselman traces the economic impact of one Dallas family suffering through a job loss. This is just really well-done writing and reporting on the economy here (while I'm at it, props to the Journal art department, which has really gotten better lately. The graphic here is great).

The collapse of housing snared Chuck Smith in May, when he lost his housing-consulting job. The Smith family sharply curtails its spending and the WSJ follows the impact as it branches out into the economy:

Mrs. Smith stopped shopping at Harold's, the upscale clothier that had been a favorite since her days at the University of Oklahoma.

Thousands of other shoppers were making similar decisions to cut back, and the drop in sales sent Harold's, already struggling to compete with larger rivals, underwater. The 60-year-old chain filed for bankruptcy in November, and this month closed all 43 of its stores in 19 states.

Among the 50-plus employees listening to the grim announcement at Harold's Dallas headquarters on Nov. 7 was Amanda Martin, a 27-year-old newlywed who had worked for nearly five years as a merchandise planner.

Ms. Martin knew Harold's had been struggling, but the news still came as a shock. Her husband, Kyle, worked for Belo Corp., the local television giant that has faced its own recent financial challenges, and was pursuing an M.B.A. -- a long-term investment they suddenly weren't sure they could afford. So the Martins, like the Smiths, sat down to figure out how to slow their spending.

Ms. Martin stops going out to a local restaurant, whose owner Casselman talks to about how he's had to cut back his orders of liquor and food, which have in turn, presumably, hurt his suppliers.

I'd quote the whole story if I could. Just go read it.

Stakeholders in government information policy—academics, lawyers, advocates, officials, and bureaucrats—gathered today at American University’s Washington College of Law to discuss how the Obama administration and the new Congress might lower barriers to information access.

Less than ten days after President Obama’s high-profile executive actions on openness, the general mood at the conference is somewhere between excited and jubilant. “This is an incredible, transformative opportunity for all of us,” says OMB Watch executive director Gary Bass, a dean of the community.

While the focus of the conference is what the Obama administration might yet do, the luncheon speaker, Gary Stern, general counsel of the National Archives and Records Administration, focused mostly on a bit of unfinished business from the Bush era: the Office of Government Information Services.

OGIS has a short but tangled history. In 2007, Congress passed legislation calling for its creation, which President Bush signed it into law. The law intended to create an independent office inside the federal bureaucracy to mediate disputes stemming from requests under the Freedom of Information Act—to rebuke agencies making indefensible decisions, and to help explain to users why unreasonable or poor requests were denied. Congress chose to place the office within the National Archives, viewed by the FOIA community as a relatively non-political agency.

In a massive budget bill signed on New Year’s Eve 2007, President Bush, in a small note tucked in a section focusing on Commerce Department appropriations, directed that OGIS’s responsibilities be handled by the Justice Department office tasked with defending other government agencies in FOIA court battles. The budget didn’t provide Justice with any more funding for the task, and OGIS proponents cried foul at the obvious conflict of interest.

According to Lucy Dalglish of the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press, the maneuver delayed the Archives from working on the office for about a year.

Over the clink of lunching forks this afternoon, Stern warned that it will yet be some time before OGIS will be up and running. It was only yesterday that the Archives released a job posting for the office’s director. After a thirty-day application period, the future ombudsman will then have to pass through at least four levels of review.

“It’s not going to be until the fall at the earliest that this office is going to be ready,” said Stern. “Give us the rest of this calendar year.”

In the past, the Archives made it clear that it was less than thrilled about hosting OGIS. According to Stern, the agency was worried that the office might be an unfunded mandate, to be saddled upon a workforce already struggling to keep up with the government’s ballooning records. The Archives regarded OGIS’s ombudsman mission as being somewhat afield of its core archival mission.

Despite that history, Stern reassured the crowd: “I’m here to say that NARA is ready to embrace OGIS.”

“That’s a turning point,” said Rick Blum, director of the Sunshine in Government Initiative, a journalist’s coalition that worked closely with Senators Patrick Leahy and John Cornyn to craft the legislation, and which has watchdogged the office’s status.

Stern offered some more information on what, in due time, the admittedly embryonic OGIS could resemble. The office’s director will report directly to the presidentially appointed National Archivist, similar to the director of the Information and Security Oversight Office, an independent office within the National Archives charged with monitoring the government’s classification system. The vast majority of OGIS’s initial $1 million financial appropriation will go to support a staff of six or seven, though Stern suggested that the office could eventually grow to match ISOO’s staff of over twenty people.

Two weeks ago, the National Archives was granted permission to make the OGIS director a member of the Senior Executive Service, a bureaucratic designation held by about 7,000 of the highest-ranking federal officials.

That ensures that the director will be a relatively senior official. “It’s really about the stature of the person and their independence and evenhandedness,” says Blum.

“Our plan is very simple. We’ll hire a director, and the director gets to figure out what to do with OGIS,” said Stern, who says that his agency has looked to state and foreign information ombuds as models. “That’s the plan, and there’s not too much more to it at the moment.”

So, yesterday, The New York Times's David Pogue spoke at a conference in Vegas. "The topic was Web 2.0," he writes, "with all of its free-speech, global-collaboration ramifications." Pogue figured that "the best way to explain Twitter was to demonstrate it, live, on the big screen at the front of the ballroom." So he typed the following Twitter message to his followers: "I need a cure for hiccups... RIGHT NOW! Help?"

"I hit Enter," Pogue continues. "I told the audience that we would start getting replies in 15 seconds, but it didn't even take that long. Here are some of the replies that began scrolling up the screen":

* florian: Put a cold spoon on your back - that's what my grandfather would do for hiccups.

* megs_pvd: Put your head between your knees and swallow hard.

* bethbellor: Packets of sugar.

* jfraga: BOOOOOOOOOOO! (How many of those did you get?)

[Answer: about 20.]

* michaeljoel: drop a lit match in a glass of water to extinguish it. take out match. drink water.

* jbelmont: Simple. Just hold your breath until Windows 7 is released.

* rgalloway: Have someone slowly & softly count backwards from 10-1 in Russian for you. Works every time!

* warcand: check your 401K. That should scare the hiccups right out of ya!

* drct: The cure for hiccups is simply to get the air out of your stomach. How is up to you.

* kashaziz: Take a glass of water, hold your breath and gulp it down. Distraction helps against hiccups.

* hornsolo: Stand on your head, drink water backwards, and gurgle, "Microsoft sucks!"

* aaaaiiiieeee: There's gotta be something in the App Store for it by now.

* garmstrong65: Sounds crazy, but it works. Take 9 sips of water then say, "January." Laugh now, but you'll thank me when the hiccups are gone.

* ransomtech: On Twitter, they are Twiccups.

* erlingmork: Peanut butter on a spoon.

* squealingrat: With a popsicle stick or something clean, touch the little thing at the back of your throat. This causes the muscles to change.

* bschlenker: hello from the back of the room ;-)

* amysprite: plug your ears and nose and drink seven gulps of water. Difficult, but do-able. Works like a charm EVERY time.

* SullivanHome: With right hand, reach around to behind left shoulder tightly and grab some back flesh, hold for up to a minute and no hiccups.

* jillgee: Promise yourself something you really, really want (and mean it) if you do hiccup again. It works!

* assignmentdesk1: Hold your breath and go slowly thru ABC's. Then at Z, take another deep breath without exhaling. Then slowly exhale.

* DavidWms: Drink out of far side of water glass (best done over sink). Works every time.

* enrevanche: Dry-swallow a spoon of granulated sugar. The trick is to overwhelm the overstimulated vagus nerve (causing hiccups) with new input.

* JuanluR: eat a full spoon of crushed ice.

* Chiron1: I take large sips of bourbon. It doesn't stop the hiccups, but I stop caring!

* chadrem: hold your breath until you pass out. Whenever you wake up, no more hiccups!

* tiffanyanderson: Rub both of your ear lobes at the same time. Hiccups will go away. :^D

* tommertron: The best way I've found is to just relax and try to forget about them. I find stressing out about them makes it worse.

* SocialMediaSabs: try drinking a cup of water with a paper napkin over it - I swear it works!

"Has there ever been a wittier, smarter bunch (or a better collection of hiccup cures)?" Pogue asks. "The audience and I were marveling and laughing at the same time. This was it: harnessing the power of the Web, the collective wisdom of strangers, in real time! The Twitterers of the world did not let us down."

Hey, all you journalistic procrastinators: the deadline for submitting entries for the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes is this Monday. And since this year, for the first time, the prizes (which are administered, full disclosure, by Columbia's J-School) will be accepting submissions from Web-only news outlets...your work no longer needs to be distributed via dead trees to be considered. (Hear that, VivaChuckTodd.com?)

So far, reports Editor and Publisher (via Romenesko), "at least five" Web-only outlets are expected to be submitting Pulitzer entries, among them The St. Louis Beacon, ProPublica, MinnPost, and the Voice of San Diego and Center for Independent Media. And "likely there are many others."

It'll be interesting to see whether any of these outlets make it to the top of the Pulitzer pile--but we'll have to wait a while to find out. Winners won't be announced until April 20.

It’s 3 p.m. and the phone in the White House press secretary’s office is ringing. It rings and rings and rings. Eventually, a recorded voice asks callers to leave a message—followed by a second voice saying the voicemail box is full.

After a full week of such calls, a human being answers. But Ben LaBolt immediately bristles when asked to spell his name, refuses to give his job title, and says he is going “off the record” until I stop him to explain that the reporter grants that privilege, not the other way around—a basic journalistic standard that LaBolt seems unaware of. He soon hangs up without even hearing what I called to ask about.

A return call is answered by Priya Singh, who spells her name when asked, but does not know (or will not say) what her job title is and several times describes requests for information about how the Obama administration press office is operating as a “complaint” which she would pass on. She says she is not authorized to comment, though she at one point tells me she is a spokesperson.

This might be the simply the problems of a new administration struggling to cope with a flood of calls and perhaps the complex machinery of the modern office. But it might also indicate that President Obama’s messages about open government have not reached press secretary Robert Gibbs and his staff.

While it is too early to judge just how this will work out, the early signs are troubling. And interviews with a dozen Washington reporters indicate that the Obama press operation tends to embrace friendly questions, while treating skeptical questions as not worth their time or, worse, as coming from an enemy.

I have called 202-456-2580, the main number for the White House press office, going back to the Nixon administration. Never has anyone in the press office declined to spell his name, give his job title, or hung up, even after the kind of aggressive exchanges that used to be common between journalists and flacks—and between journalists and high government officials, for that matter.

Former White House press secretaries, in interviews this week, said they would cut the office some slack. Each gave different reasons, from the complexity of modern office equipment to needing time to hire a full staff. Still, former press secretaries Ari Fleischer (George W. Bush), Joe Lockhart (Clinton), Jody Powell (Carter), and Ron Nessen (Ford) all said that they could not imagine any reason to refuse to give job titles or take umbrage at being asked to spell a name.

“I do have a lot of sympathy of them,” Fleischer said. “It is very difficult to come in and hit the ground running; it’s all new.”

While each of these former press secretaries thought some settling-in time was needed, none felt it should last more than a week or so.

Dana Milbank, the Washington Post reporter whose perceptiveness and independence infuriated the Bush White House, said he had seen problems in the new press office, but felt they were mostly due to getting a slow start (unlike the rest of the Obama operation). “If it goes on for a longer period of time,” Milbank added, “that view is subject to amendment.”

I worry that Milbank may be forced to do just that. My questions to LaBolt and Singh prompted a return phone call the next day from Nick Shapiro, who spelled his name, but had to be prodded several times to give his job title: assistant press secretary.

During our brief conversation, Shapiro, like LaBolt (whose name Shapiro did not recognize), started one sentence with “off the record.” Told that the journalist grants the privilege, and that none would be granted here, Shapiro expressed surprise. His surprise was double-barreled, at both the idea that the reporter issues any privilege and that any reporter would decline to talk “off the record.”

The reportorial practice of letting government officials speak without taking responsibility for their words has been an issue with the public and is being questioned now by some journalists, as shown by this article from Slate’s Jack Shafer.

Questions about whether Shapiro knows the difference between off-the-record, background, deep background, and on-the-record did not get asked, because Shapiro made it clear he had no interest in answering anything about how the Obama press secretary’s office is operating and what its tone will be. He said questions should be submitted in writing by e-mail to nshapiro@who.eop.gov. I sent Shapiro an e-mail outlining the contours of what would be covered in an interview, but have not received a response as of this writing, the following day.

Shapiro did say that there are press office numbers to call beside 202-456-2580, which has been the main White House press office number for decades. “You should have used one of them,” he said.

And those numbers are? Shapiro said these numbers would be made public soon. (Thoughts of the illogic made famous by Kafka, Catch-22, and Lewis Carroll’s King of Hearts come to mind here.)

But there is more to this than just the answering, or not answering, of telephones and questions.

The previous administration sometimes edited White House briefing transcripts to polish the record. Bloggers, and some working reporters, compared the transcripts to the video and audio to prove this kind of ham-handed disrespect for empirical facts.

The Obama administration is also editing briefing transcripts. So far it posts only snippets of some White House briefings at whitehouse.gov. Shapiro promised that would be corrected soon.

Politicians make choices and have to live with them. How they deal with journalists—especially whether they are candid and direct about dealing in facts—sets a tone that will influence the administration’s ability to communicate its messages, especially those Obama messages that run counter to deeply ingrained cultural myths about the economy, taxes, and the role of government.

Talking to working reporters is not the only way to communicate with the people. The Obama administration seems to be embracing direct delivery of its messages via the whitehouse.gov website and YouTube. They seem to be saying “We don’t need the press to communicate our messages to the people. We can talk to the people ourselves.”

That’s entirely appropriate. But it doesn’t mean that the press should be cut out of the loop—for one thing, most Americans still get their news via traditional sources. So far the Obama administration appears to be treating its political opponents with more grace, and smarts, than journalists.

As of now the Obama press office is effectively, if perhaps unintentionally, working against President Obama’s campaign promises of change and transparency. Will that change? Will the disdain of the Bush years give way to open government that understands, and appreciates, society’s watchdogs?

We’ll have to wait and see. In the meantime, I’m still waiting for Gibbs, or someone with authority to speak on the record, to call me back for that interview I wanted to start with—and now for a second one about how the White House press office operates. You can reach me at 585-230-0558.

Update, February 1: Transcripts of the daily briefings are now up at the new whitehouse.gov Web site. Despite another nudge on Friday, the White House press office has yet to get back to David Cay Johnston.

One of the things that history will remember about the coverage of climate change is that, not unlike the Iraq War, the press itself became an important part of the story, largely due to faulty reporting at its outset.

Over the last few years, many journalists and scientists have worked very hard to more accurately communicate the urgency of manmade global warming. A new book, based on a unique series of meetings between those two groups, which took place between 2003 and 2007, provides some of the collective wisdom of that effort. Published by the Metcalf Institute for Marine and Environmental Reporting, a non-profit journalism organization based at the University of Rhode Island’s Graduate School of Oceanography, Communicating on Climate Change: An Essential Resource for Journalists, Scientists, and Educators is a great primer for anybody new to the beat, to the lab, or to the general effort to better explain the scientific facts underpinning one of the most pressing and far-reaching issues of our time.

“Frustration was the impetus behind the workshops that form the basis of this book,” writes author Bud Ward, a longtime environmental journalist and educator who runs the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media. He and Anthony Socci, a senior communications fellow at the American Meteorological Society, organized and directed the five-year project, which was funded by the National Science Foundation.

The first five workshops, which took place at leading research universities around the country, were “unprecedented” in the science journalism community, Ward writes. Each two-day meeting attracted about two dozen participants, evenly split from a veritable who’s-who list of the nation’s most respected journalists and scientists. The sixth workshop was held at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. and was open to the public. A seventh meeting in the fall of 2007, which was not part of the National Science Foundation-funded series, brought together eighteen top news executives from the country’s largest daily newspapers and news outlets. I had the good fortune to attend the fourth workshop, in 2005, while I was a student at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, where the meeting took place. It was an incredibly engaging fly-on-the-wall experience (as I’m sure they all were) and the conversations that occurred there continue to inform my criticism of climate-change coverage. And, in some respects, the job has become a bit easier. As Ward notes in the new book:

A funny thing—rather a somewhat unexpected thing—occurred over the course of the workshops: Between the start of the first workshop at the University of Rhode Island in November 2003 and a related September 2007 workshop at Stanford University for news executives, the climate change issue gained some of the media traction and public interest judged to be missing at the outset of the workshop series.

That is undoubtedly true. I recently argued, happily, that journalists and politicians alike have accepted the basic science of global warming and are now more concerned with the economics of mitigation and adaptation. But, as CJR contributing editor Cristine Russell pointed out in a recent feature story, the fine points of science and technology must now be communicated to the political and business reporters who have been assigned to the coverage of climate solutions.

In that light, Ward’s new book is just as relevant and useful today as it would have been five years ago. Indeed, its strongest attribute is that it is not concerned with recent or specific scientific studies, but rather “how information about this work is communicated with the public, and how that communication process might be improved.” Referring to the rationale behind the workshop series as well as the book, Ward observes that:

When journalists and climate scientists speak with each other—usually over the telephone concerning a specific story the reporter is working on, or at a professional conference—their discussions generally involve a particular research project or matters related directly to climate change and climate change science. Seldom do they discuss at any length issues related to the communication of climate change information—either that from the scientist to the media or from the media to the public.

Communicating on Climate Change is thus rationally organized into eight chapters over seventy-odd pages, which offer something for everyone (even those concerned with scientific topics other than climate). For journalists, it provides a summary of the scientific method, scientific “uncertainty,” and the peer-review process. For scientists, it explains the basic ground rules for information gathering (including on- and off-the-record interviews) and why reporters do not always write their own headlines (which, more often than the stories themselves, tend to provoke scientists’ ire), and defines jargon such as the term “news peg.” It also covers some areas where science coverage should break with traditional journalistic norms, explaining why customary, reportorial “balance” is not a good fit with climate coverage and why it is permissible (and even desirable) for reporters to let scientists review selected excerpts of their copy.

Ward, who was recently named 2009 Climate Communicator of the Year by George Mason University, wraps up with a point-by-point list of ways that journalists, scientists, and institutions can better convey information to each other and to the public at large. It’s a long list, comprising solutions for those with resources to burn and those operating on shoestring budgets. The book can be downloaded and ordered in hard copy, free of charge, at the Metcalf Institute’s Web site.

One of the more fascinating--not to mention entertaining--aspects of Robert Gibbs's nearly daily press conferences has been the emergence of the HyperFix: the WaPo's Chris Cillizza twittering them, often to great effect. The tradition will continue this afternoon, at 2:15pm, as our latest political matinee--Gibbs v. Thomas Et Al: This Time, It's Personal--begins.

You can follow the HyperFix on Twitter or on Cillizza's blog.

We at The Audit continue to be impressed with Bloomberg News's aggressive accountability journalism. Its pursuit of transparency in the government bailout, for one, has been second to none.

Today it has two great stories on the murky nexus between government and business, including one that blasts at the excesses and opacity of the government's private contracting, which totaled $370 billion last year.

The news service found the government paying out huge bonuses to contractors whose services failed:

A year later, in July 2006, the U.S. Treasury Department abandoned the project. The computer didn’t work. The department had spent $14.7 million -- a 65 percent increase above the original budget -- for nothing.

There was a final ignominy: Under the terms of the contract, Electronic Data Systems Corp., the vendor, collected a bonus of $638,126...

In 2007, military radio maker Harris Corp. developed a hand- held computer for the 2010 census that failed to work in tests in a California heat wave. Still, the Commerce Department’s Census Bureau awarded Harris $14.2 million in bonuses in a contract that more than doubled in price to $1.3 billion from $600 million, according to federal investigators.

I like how Bloomberg is confident enough in its reporters to let them come out and say something's screwed up rather than making them attribute it to "experts":

With contracting, he faces a mismanaged system that accounts for almost 40 cents of every federal dollar spent outside of mandatory obligations such as Social Security and Medicare.

And this:

In many cases, bureaucrats are motivated to give millions of dollars in bonuses to contractors no matter how poorly a company performs because generosity with taxpayer money may help them land better-paying jobs after they leave the government.

Well, yeah! That's why we need serious restrictions on that revolving door. Obama's restricting his staff from every lobbying his administration is a great start.

Bloomberg's investigation also found that the public's right to know where its money is going is restricted:

Just as taxpayers can’t find out how the Treasury and the Federal Reserve used the first half of the bank bailout, Americans are often denied access to public records that provide details on how hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars are spent in contracts.

Bloomberg News filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the Treasury Department, the Commerce Department and the Fed asking for documents on the bailout and routine contracts.

As of Jan. 12, seven months after receiving the first request, the three agencies had provided incomplete documents with blacked-out words or nothing at all.

But I see this time and time again—Bloomberg's editing just can't keep pace with its good reporting. Hey, Pearlstein: Hire some editors over there!

That story is just choppy, but if you want a stark example of what I'm talking about regarding editing, read these three paragraphs in the second transparency story:

Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Arlington, Virginia-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, said “People are trying to get a handle on where the money went and how it’s being used. One would hope that we’ll get to see something. Personally, I want to know what my tax dollars are being used for.”

Consumer confidence fell in January to the lowest since records began in 1967, the Conference Board said Jan. 27. Home prices plunged 18.2 percent in November from a year earlier, the biggest drop since the data was started in 2001, according to the S&P/Case-Shiller index that covers 20 metropolitan areas.

$301 billion

Citigroup’s guarantee package, completed Jan. 16, totals $301 billion. It kicks in after the bank goes through its $9.5 billion in current loan loss reserves and the first $29 billion of losses. The government also gets $1 billion of the bank’s benefit from hedging contracts. The Treasury, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the Fed then assume 90 percent of losses from those assets.

What does that second graph have to do with the ones around it?

Look past that, though, because it's a worthy story challenging Obama's promised transparency. Bloomberg has asked the government to reveal exactly what kind of trash securities it has guaranteed for Citigroup and Bank of America (to the tune of $419 billion).

It's been three days and counting and no answer. Now it's filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the information.

For those of you who have forgotten, Bloomberg is no shrinking violet on this kind of stuff. It's suing the government to reveal which banks got $2 trillion in emergency loans.

Why should we care about what's in these guarantees? Here's your answer:

Merrill Lynch & Co., which was bought by Bank of America, was the underwriter for $49.4 billion in defaulted collateralized debt obligations, the most of any bank, since October 2007, according to data compiled by Standard & Poor’s and Bloomberg.

Merrill was the biggest CDO underwriter from 2005 to 2007, with more than $102 billion, said Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. research analyst Brad Hintz.

Since October 2007, Bank of America underwrote under its name $15.1 billion in failed CDOs, according to S&P and Bloomberg. Banks have so far understated losses on such securities, and “the tsunami is on the horizon,” Hintz said.

Past sales of CDOs valued them at pennies on the dollar. In July, New York-based Merrill sold $30.6 billion of the securities to an affiliate of the Dallas-based investment firm Lone Star Funds for $6.7 billion. Merrill provided financing for about 75 percent of the purchase price, and the sale valued the CDOs at 22 cents on the dollar.

“By June, it’ll become clear that these guarantees are being drawn and they’re going to be huge,” said Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics, a financial-services research company in Torrance, California. “Every day that goes by, Congress figures it out just a little more.”

The New York Times today reports: "ABC Said To Consider 'Kimmel' in 'Nightline' Slot," (that is, moving comedian Jimmy Kimmel's show, Jimmy Kimmel Live, which currently airs at 12:05am, to 11:35pm ). This, according to unnamed in-the-know people who "requested anonymity because the network was withholding all the details of the conversations."

An unsentimental assessment from James Poniewozick at Time's Tuned In blog:

If ABC is betraying journalism by considering getting rid of a late-night news show that it's aired for 30 years, then CBS and NBC are utter traitors to civilization since they never had late-night news shows in the first place. So let's string them up first.

The reason moving Kimmel is likely a bad idea is simpler: he does well where he is now, and so does Nightline. In an already oversaturated late-night-host market, Nightline is effective counterprogramming.

Chris Matthews sort of lost (or failed to take) control of Hardball last night . What happened? During a loud debate between former Republican Congressman Dick Armey and Salon's Joan Walsh over "Does Rush [Limbaugh] Rule the GOP?," an agitated Armey at one point said to Walsh: "I am so damn glad that you could never be my wife, 'cause I surely wouldn't have to listen to that prattle from you every day." While Matthews looked visibly uncomfortable, it took a guest on his next segment, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, to call Armey out. (h/t Michael Calderone)

Said Herbert:

I just would like to make the point Dick Armey was so far out of line in the last segment with his sexist comments and he owes Joan Walsh and your viewers an apology. I just wanted to make that point.

When it later, apparently, dawned on Matthews that he should have "made that point," Matthews said:

We had a pretty rough back-and-forth. Dick Armey, I like the guy, but I think he went way overboard going after Joan. You have to let the other person make their point without the reference to your wife or whatever this gender aspect that shouldn't have been brought up...

After February 15, the Washington Post will no longer publish Book World, its stand-alone print book review section. Books coverage, Howard Kurtz reports "will be shifted to the Style section and a revamped Outlook section." But:

Book World will live on in digital form, as a site on washingtonpost.com that will include not just an archive of reviews, but also reporting on publishing and a calendar of Washington area literary events. It will still be published occasionally as a special section, focusing on such themes as children's books and summer reading.

Steve Wasserman, onetime books editor at The Los Angeles Times (its stand-alone books section was folded into the wider paper in 2007), tells the New York Times today: "Maybe it’s just foolish and sentimental nostalgia on my part, but somehow one likes to think that the republic of letters actually deserves the recognition of a separate country." Wasserman argued that case -- worth revisiting today-- in the September/October 2007 issue of CJR.

Meanwhile, Terry Teachout sees no reason to "tear your hair because the Washington Post has decided to bow to the inevitable." Writes Teachout:

The point is that the Post is still covering books, and the paper's decision to continue to publish an online version of Book World strikes me as enlightened, so long as the online "magazine" is edited and designed in such a way as to retain a visual and stylistic identity of its own.

These are brutal times for the newspaper industry. Widespread buyouts, shuttered bureaus, diminished ambitions—in many cases, not even the physical size of the paper has been spared. May I suggest a balm for newsprint devotees? Watch some old episodes of Lou Grant, the late-seventies TV series about life at a newspaper, which has never been released on DVD but is now available on the streaming video site Hulu.com.

The show, which stars Ed Asner as an irascible city editor at the Los Angeles Tribune, a fictional version of the Los Angeles Times, is a time capsule of an era when circulation was up and anxieties about the industry’s future were down. In Lou Grant’s newsroom, the phones are always ringing, the typewriters clacking, the reporters free to spend days or weeks working a story, without fretting over ballooning expenses or the next round of layoffs. The Internet, of course, is a nonfactor; the most advanced technology is a Telex machine. In short, Lou Grant revels in the old-fashioned milieu of shoe leather and black ink.

In the current climate, a TV series based on a newspaper is almost inconceivable. Imagine if the show were filmed today—the dialogue would focus on declining ad dollars, not Pulitzers, and cynicism about the media is so prevalent that even the Lifetime channel would have difficulty creating sympathetic characters. Case in point: the final season of HBO’s The Wire, created by former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, depicts a dysfunctional newspaper beleaguered by cutbacks, its management callously using inexperienced reporters, one of whom becomes a Jayson Blair-like fabulist. A more likely series, given the popularity of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, would be an Onion-esque show about a fake newspaper.

A good Madoff scoop from the Times this morning is also interesting for how it came about: a collaboration with the Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore.

The story reports that JPMorgan had $250 million with one of the now-notorious Madoff feeder funds until early this fall as a way to hedge its exposure to a bet it was allowing customers to make on that fund, run by Fairfield Greenwich.

But the bank suddenly yanked its money out less than three months before Madoff was exposed:

A source close to JPMorgan Chase, however, recalled bank officials saying that the bank’s “due-diligence people had too many doubts” about the performance of the underlying funds.

“They felt the consistency of its performance wasn’t any longer credible” given the downturn in the overall market, the source said. He added: “Just three months before that, I remember that they were ready to issue more notes.”

The problem for JPMorgan is, it didn't warn the investors whose big bets on Madoff it was enabling.

This is good here:

Some investors now note that Mr. Madoff maintained several accounts with JPMorgan Chase, and wonder if the parent bank saw trouble brewing in those accounts and got its London affiliate out of Fairfield before the storm hit.

A more skittish editor might have chopped that out as innuendo, but under the circumstances I think it works, especially since it has an expert saying that doing so would be legal.

This anonymous guy had the wrong idea about Wall Street:

He said that when he saw JPMorgan Chase “put its brand name” on the Fairfield notes, “I thought that there was no more reason to remain cautious.” He added, “For me, the JPMorgan notes were the final imprimatur of Sentry’s financial soundness.”

This one could get very interesting.

Dart to the Cleveland Plain Dealer for failing to stick by its story. Last October, investigative reporter Bob Paynter, at the urging of Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg, produced “Justice Blinded: Race, Drugs and Our Legal System,” a series of articles that, through rigorous quantitative and qualitative analyses, illustrated that in Ohio’s Cuyahoga County, blacks arrested on first-time, drug-related violations “were 66 percent more likely to be saddled with a felony record than their white counterparts,” who were more likely to get treatment as an alternative to conviction. Paynter’s series also showed that whites were more likely than blacks to have their charges reduced to misdemeanors.

The stories, which were published after a six-month investigation, drew sharp criticism from Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Bill Mason, who alleged that they unfairly pointed a finger at his office for its involvement in deciding which defendants would be admitted into treatment programs. In an op-ed published by the Plain Dealer, Mason wrote that “the reporter left out significant facts or information.” He suggested that his office alone was not to blame for the racial disparity, because, in fact, the decision to recommend alternatives to incarceration rested with judges. This was territory that had been well covered in Paynter’s series; it was a key part of Paynter’s point. It’s true that, by law, oversight rests with the judges. But in practice, Paynter reported, the prosecutor’s office had come to exert significant influence over who would be admitted into treatment programs, according to dozens of interviews with county judges and defense attorneys. Goldberg says Mason was notified of the series’ findings before publication, but Mason chose not to go on record about the perception that his office had influence over the programs.

Before granting Mason space for an op-ed, the paper’s editorial board met with Mason to hear his grievances. The Plain Dealer also assigned reporter Leila Atassi to produce an article that further aired Mason’s objections. In that piece and others that followed, Mason’s aides attacked the series, but Paynter was never allowed to comment or respond. The Plain Dealer’s editorial page was silent. Paynter, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, took a buyout offer and left the Plain Dealer on the day after Mason’s op-ed and Atassi’s story appeared. He says he stands by his stories. Stuart Warner, an editor on the project, who left the paper shortly before the stories ran, says he has full confidence in Paynter’s reporting.

I saw the future through a two-way mirror in November 1990. I had just started a new job as a senior editor at Entertainment Weekly, a magazine then less than a year old, and I was sitting in a darkened room with nine or ten other members of the staff, watching a focus group. Page by page, an amiable, den-motherly facilitator led half a dozen of the magazine’s subscribers through a discussion of the latest issue, the cover subject of which was John Lennon, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death. (I would like to think of that cover choice as evidence of the young magazine’s mavericky resistance to the forces of hype, though the truth is that the top editors, veterans of People, thought of dead celebrities as good for newsstand sales.) Toward the end of the session, the focus group got to the back of the book, the pages devoted to reviews of movies, TV shows, CDs, and books—my chief area of responsibility—and I flipped to a clean sheet on my notepad.

The group was asked about the lead piece, a movie review by Owen Gleiberman, a transplant from the Boston Phoenix who was the magazine’s sole film critic at the time. I no longer remember what movie he had reviewed for that issue, or what the assembled readers said about it. What I recall most vividly from that day is what most surprised me: how the people in the focus group brightened when they came to a small box of type set in the corner of the first page of Gleiberman’s prose.

Identified as Critical Mass, the box contained a list of ten movies showing around the country, followed by grades (A-plus, A, and so forth, down to F) assigned to those titles by six movie critics polled by the magazine. Typically, the roll call included Gene Siskel, Roger Ebert, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, a couple of critics from the big-city dailies, and, always at the end of the list, Gleiberman. The grades tended toward the low side, and C’s were not uncommon. In fact, to check my memory for this article, I went through the EW archives online, and I found the grades to be even lower than I had expected. (Home Alone: two Ds, two C-minuses, a C, and a C-plus.)

Do you know this Lego woman? Look familiar, at all?

The LA Times explains. SF Weekly offers additional images. The (Columbia, SC) State reports on the real thing.

And the first formal interview of Obama’s presidency goes to… Hisham Melhem, Washington bureau chief for Saudi-owned, Dubai-based al-Arabiya television.

With his Middle East envoy George Mitchell beginning a several-country tour of the region, Obama told Melhem Tuesday that “the most important thing is for the United States to get engaged right away.” Of Mitchell: “What I’ve told him is to start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating – in the past on some of these issues… So let’s listen.” A call to dialogue, for sure—and also, perhaps, a yank on the reins of wildly galloping expectations. Specifically: “We cannot tell either the Israelis or the Palestinians what’s best for them.”

The dialogue-not-dictation overture isn’t just collegial. It represents a public ratification of what much of its Arab audience already knows (and has perhaps resented the U.S. for failing to acknowledge adequately), which is that we’re not in a position to dictate much of anything to Israel, Palestine, or neighboring nations who would play a role in any eventual settlement.

“It's impossible to exaggerate the symbolic importance of Barack Obama choosing an Arabic satellite television station for his first formal interview as President,” enthuses Marc Lynch, a public diplomacy scholar and a member of Foreign Policy’s new all-star cast of bloggers. Maybe so, but the choice is only symbolically important. Obama has given millions of interviews, and there’s no historic import attached to the venue a president chooses for his first post-inaugural sit-down—except to the media organization chosen.

Given that, Obama made one of the only possible choices that was newsworthy in itself. In doing so, he appeared to be reaching out to an entire region, rather than just, say, MSNBC. And Lynch, who did “some policy work” for the Obama campaign, has been arguing since at least 2003 that the U.S. needed to change its hectoring tone and begin “taking Arabs seriously.” He wrote then in Foreign Affairs:

The first step toward improving the United States' image… must be figuring out how to address Arabs and Muslims effectively… opening a direct dialogue with the Arab and Islamic world through its already existing and increasingly influential transnational media.

The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg caught up with Melhem yesterday to ask whether he thought the interview signaled a “shift in rhetoric or a shift in substance” from the Bush years. Melhem wouldn’t affirm the latter, but found it encouraging that Obama mentioned bettering the lives of ordinary Palestinians. He called the interview “a shift in approach on the tone vis-à-vis Palestinian suffering. He showed that he understands the need for dignity and a place to call their own.”

The Washington Post, also invoking the tone/substance motif, calls the Arab world’s reaction so far “largely positive”; Lynch continues to gather opinion from Arab commentators. It remains to be seen whether the interview was an unequivocal victory for public diplomacy. But it was hand extended to those willing to put down the remote.

Does the press have a lot on its hands these days, or what?

I've lost count of how many trillions of bailout money have been laid out (fortunately for all of us, Bloomberg keeps track: $8.5 trillion and counting). Layoffs are being announced in the tens of thousands in a single day. The housing market continues to collapse, as does the banking industry. We have a new administration, which has created a huge appetite for any shred of news from the White House. Those two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan still drone on. The news industry is collapsing. And Oklahoma is 20-1 in basketball (Beg pardon on this last one.)

But today, the heavy guns are out for the approaching-trillion-dollar stimulus package Obama is pushing through Congress. And it's an impressive performance.

First, The New York Times has a double-barreled effort with its lead stories on page one today, one about the unprecedented education spending in the bill and the other on the massive health-care expenditures it contains.

The Times is excellent on both counts. On education, it reports that fully $150 billion of the stimulus package is allocated for learnin'. It puts the numbers in great context:

...a vast two-year investment that would more than double the Department of Education’s current budget...

...would amount to the largest increase in federal aid since Washington began to spend significantly on education after World War II...

...New York would be among the biggest beneficiaries, at $760 per student, while New Jersey and Connecticut would fall near the bottom, with $427 and $409 per student, respectively. The District of Columbia would get the most per student, $1,289, according to the foundation’s analysis...

So the much-discussed GateHouse v. Times Company suit settled out of court earlier this week, and many media analysts met the news of the settlement with good riddance enthusiasm. Newspaper Death Watch's Paul Gillin proclaimed a "Merciful End to a Pointless Lawsuit." Jeff Jarvis's headline was more succinct: "Gatehouse link stupidity reaches settlement."

CJR's Megan Garber spoke with the Citizen Media Law Project's Dan Gillmor, who has been covering the GateHouse suit since it was filed in December, to get his quick reaction to the settlement.

Megan Garber: How do you interpret the text of the settlement?

Dan Gillmor: It looks like GateHouse basically prevailed in their argument, or at least in their settling of it. But I'd call it a Pyrrhic victory. I think Gatehouse was making a tremendous mistake in the suit, and though there's no legal precedent that's been set here, it's just not good for the Web. Links are the glue of the Internet. It's what this is all about.

MG: Jeff Jarvis called GateHouse's suit "a dangerous and hypocritical crusade against linking." Would you agree with that assessment?

DG: No, I wouldn't. I don't think it's a crusade against links. I think it's GateHouse wanting links, but only on their terms. Which, again, I think is a dramatic mistake.

MG: So the distinction GateHouse made in its suit--between deep-linking that requires human oversight and the mechanized headline/lede scraping Boston.com was doing--holds no water?

DG: Yeah. I think they're mistaken to take that stance.

MG: In a blog post you wrote in December for the Citizen Media Law Project, you wrote, "If Boston.com’s Your Town crawlers/scrapers are going around the technological blockades, that strikes me as — at the very least — poor behavior. I don’t know whether it’s legal, but it’s not honorable."

Have you lost some of that initial sympathy for GateHouse as it's pursued its case against the Times Company?

DG: I think they're mistaken, but I certainly have some level of sympathy for them, too. It would be one thing to precisely replicate a page that itself consisted of links and first lines. In other words, if GateHouse or anyone else had their own page full of links and just copied it directly, that would be an interesting question. Is that fair use? I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, so I can't say. But I think the suit was unwise of them, and I think in the end it's disturbing.

MG: Whatever one thinks of the suit, is it fair to see the GateHouse case, in broadest terms, as challenging the definition of intellectual property in a link economy?

DG: I think it's too early for people to predict some sort of sweeping problem here. But [copyright] is certainly a concern. It would have been nice, at some level, if the Times had said, 'Well, you're idiots, but we'll stop sending you traffic, if that's what you really want.' And that might have just ended that.

I don't think they're idiots, I just think they're mistaken. Attacking links is just a mistake.

MG: Is there anything we can learn from the suit at this point, any takeaways?

DG: I'm hoping there are no takeaways. I'm hoping that this just disappears, and that no one tries this again.

Anecdotal evidence gathered mostly via IM by The (New York) Observer suggests that... some of the Observer reporters' gay friends and acquaintances are Andrea Mitchell fans. Some more enthusiastic than others. (In other words: Mitchell, NBC News's Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent, is a "gay icon!")

From one IM exchange quoted in the piece:

I like [Andrea Mitchell]. She’s the Golden Girls rolled into one: the body of Sophia, the sassiness of Dorothy and probably a sex kitten like Blanche, and most likely from the Midwest, like Rose.

Any native New Yorker can tell you that the Empire State really has two domains: upstate and downstate (or, if you’re a Gotham dweller, there’s “the city” and there’s “everywhere else”). Governor Paterson’s recent selection of Kirsten Gillibrand for the U.S. Senate has thrown this divide into stark relief. Gillibrand, who yesterday became the youngest member of the Senate at forty-two, is a Democrat who hails from upstate Greenport. Media outlets across the state have taken drastically different angles on the story: upstate papers are cheering the appointment of a native senator and focusing on Gillibrand’s stance on the issues, while downstate outlets are reporting the effects of her selection on the state’s overall political climate. Take a look:

Albany’s flagship paper, the Times Union, welcomes the senator while weighing claims that the pro-gun rights Gillibrand is “too conservative” for New York Democrats:

Gillibrand attempted to steer aside complaints from fellow Democrats who say she is too conservative. "I will represent the many diverse views and voices of New York state," said Gillibrand, adding that she would work with Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy, a Long Island Democrat who has criticized Gillibrand's A rating from the National Rifle Association. "I will look for ways to find common ground between upstate and downstate."

Gillibrand will be the first upstater to represent New York in the senate since Charles E. Goodell of Jamestown was appointed to the post after Robert F. Kennedy's assassination in 1968. Goodell held the seat for two years.

Fellow upstate news outlet The Buffalo News:

While Gillibrand has a reputation as a personable politician and an excellent fund-raiser, several downstate politicians could challenge her next year. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-Mineola, is already threatening to run in a primary against Gillibrand because of the new senator's past opposition to gun control.

And Syracuse’s Post-Standard is eager to see how Gillibrand’s position on the issues will evolve:

Gillibrand, who hails from an influential political family, clearly knows politics. She was smart enough and adaptable enough to win twice in the state's most heavily Republican congressional district. Her apparent willingness to "reposition" herself on some issues now that she represents the whole state is intriguing. Which views will she bend on to satisfy her new constituency, and which ones represent her core values?

Come on up to Central New York, senator. Let's talk about it.

Meanwhile, downstate papers are focusing less on Gillibrand herself and more on how her selection affects the precarious process of New York state politics. John Riley of Long Island-based Newsday rather petulantly noted Gillibrand’s neglect of New York’s suburbs last week on her statewide listening tour:

Nothing yet has been announced for LI or Westchester or Rockland.... those suburbs where statewide races are usually won or lost. As a representative of an upstate district in a state where city Dems control the other levers of statewide power, she pays homage to the city first... Where do these people think statewide elections are won and lost?

The New York Times questions the integrity of Governor Paterson’s selection of Gillibrand for the senate. Continuing the theme of analyzing the “bigger picture” of state politics, the Times notes the effect of the selection on the public opinion of Paterson:

Two months later, some of Mr. Paterson’s own advisers say their worst fears have been realized. A process that they had hoped would elevate the governor, demonstrate his statesmanship and introduce him to the nation instead damaged his credibility and divided his party. Its final days were by turns intensely secretive and astoundingly public, culminating with personal attacks on Caroline Kennedy from the governor’s camp that astonished the state’s political establishment.

LoHud.com, the online presence of the lower Hudson Valley’s Journal News, also cites a decline in Paterson’s approval ratings:

Paterson has been roundly criticized for the way he picked Rep. Kirsten Gillibrand to take the Senate seat of Hillary Clinton, angering supporters of Caroline Kennedy, who wanted the job and was viewed as the front-runner for the post.

Voters told Siena pollsters that they preferred “someone else’’ for governor next year, over Paterson, 36 percent to 32 percent.

Yesterday, The New York Times brought readers the best kind of health story: a crisis that failed to show up. Despite hyperbolic headlines in the 1980s predicting a generation of inner-city children irreparably damaged by intrauterine cocaine exposure, the Times reports on new research showing that so-called "crack babies" are generally doing just fine. (It turns out alcohol is more dangerous to a fetus.)

The Washington Post published a far more typically discouraging health story on yesterday's front page. When lead levels in D.C.’s drinking water spiked between 2001 and 2004, public health officials assured residents "that they found no measurable impact on the general public's health." But a new study shows that hundreds of children in fact had unsafe amounts of lead in their blood.

The sad irony about these stories appearing on the same day is that lead poisoning in young children actually produces some of the irreparable cognitive and developmental damage that was once believed to be caused by exposing infants to cocaine. Lead poisoning also disproportionately affects the low income and African-American populations menaced by the crack epidemic. But while crack babies became a symbol of America's deteriorating inner city during the Reagan administration, President Reagan cut funding for lead screening and ordered the Centers for Disease Control to stop keeping lead poisoning statistics.

Reagan's drug war encouraged Americans to view the problems of the inner city as ones of moral decay, with no better example than the so-called "crack baby." When politicians and panicked public health officials started warning that cocaine would produce a generation of learning disabled, aggressive, and addiction-prone slum dwellers, what reporter could be expected to suggest they should be more worried about water pipes than crack pipes?

Of course, it would be ridiculous to suggest that there were no reasons to fear the impact of crack on children. Reading through contemporary stories from The Washington Post—a newspaper in a city so ravaged by the crack epidemic that even its mayor was not immune—is heartbreaking. Reporters delivered tales of infants born deformed and HIV-positive, older children forced into prostitution and abandoned in foster care, and victims of non-stop violence. Yet the stories’ scientific reports on cocaine’s developmental affects seem, in hindsight, to be more rooted in fear than in research. When Post reporters wrote about the long-term effect of early fetal cocaine exposure, they often treated speculation as fact and used language as alarmist as possible.

A column by Post reporter Courtland Milloy on a 1989 conference of doctors and educators was headlined "Time Bomb in Cocaine Babies." They were meeting, he wrote, for "a crash course on how this country can stop a potential human plague almost too horrible to imagine. It is the dysfunctional development of cocaine babies, or, as some have called it, the emergence of a 'bio-underclass.'"

Milloy continued:

President [George H. W.] Bush was photographed cuddling one such infant at D.C. General Hospital recently, which helped generate an outpouring of sympathy for the plight of the babies.

But a few years from now, the experts note, those infants won't look so cute anymore. Already, a few of them are turning up in first- and second-grade classrooms around the country, wreaking havoc on themselves and others. Severe emotional damage and even physical deformities not so readily apparent today may mushroom in the near future.

Milloy's story is largely based on quotes from a doctor named J. Harold Nickens, then-chairman of the D.C. Chapter of the American Society of Addiction Medicine. Though I'm sure Nickens's remarks were echoed by many other experts at this conference, Milloy never asks for specific studies that would substantiate that these kids' "emotional damage" was caused by prenatal cocaine exposure, instead of, say, the environmental effects of being the child of a cocaine addict. And Milloy does not point out that the doctor's prediction of a lurking danger in children without visible birth defects is based on speculation, not data. Milloy paraphrases: "Moreover, Nickens said, a time bomb exists even in those children who may appear 'normal' and are deemed medically ready for discharge from hospitals. They are, in effect, addicts unaware of the lifelong challenge of recovery ahead of them."

Compare this doomsaying with the rhetoric of a 2,400-word story on lead poisoning published two years earlier in the Post's A section. Though the experts quoted in the story make similarly dire predictions of widespread lead poisoning, the headline reads: "Persistent, Pervasive Pollutant; Found in Soil, Water and Food, Lead Increasingly Seen as Health Peril." The story is based on a report by the Public Health Service, which said at least 17 percent of preschool-aged children in metropolitan areas were at risk of some level of lead poisoning. (Two scientists resigned in protest over political tampering with the report, suggesting that the science was even more alarming than the public version suggested.) The story, citing the American Academy of Pediatricians, identified symptoms of lead poisoning that seemed tied to specific research: "partial loss of hearing and IQ, growth retardation, inhibited metabolism of Vitamin D and disturbances in blood formation."

Even more significant is that reporter Michael Weisskopf sought comment from someone who disputed these findings. "Lead was on earth before we people were," Weisskopf quotes Lead Industries Association spokesman Werner T. Meyer. "So, a certain tolerance for lead must exist in the human body." Readers may find his claims questionable, but at least the reporter flags the possibility that the science could be questioned, a caution missing from the crack baby stories.

While the Post deserves credit for its consistently strong reporting on lead poisoning, the asymmetrical rhetoric and uncritical acceptance of scientific claims reinforced the belief that the problems of low-income inner city communities were produced by bad choices of irresponsible individuals, most of whom happened to be black. Evidence that structural factors—like the fact that old housing stock put poor children at risk of lead poisoning—do not sink in as easily. (Even Milloy, who is African-American and whose columns seemed largely aimed at generating action within the black community, unfortunately contributed to this problem. A Lexis-Nexis search shows he did not write a column on lead poisoning until 1993, his tenth year as a columnist for the Post.) This is a reminder that the time to be most critical of data is when it supports easy explanations for difficult problems.

Talk about commodity news.

We've gotten on the Journal before for its weird Starbucks obsession obsession, but today it goes overboard again.

It reports that Starbucks is going to stop brewing decaffeinated coffee in the afternoons, forcing those who ask for it to wait a whole four minutes for their drink. Break out the siren, Drudge!

Okay, it's an anecdote of the cost cuts dripping through the economy, but not one that needed its own story, and certainly not one that deserves to be placed on B1.

I know journalists are coffee addicts, but let's have a little perspective here.

And the Journal's Marketplace section just is blah these days. Murdoch and his hand-picked ex-FT editor Robert Thomson seemingly are trying to imitate the FT's Companies & Markets section, with its emphasis on narrow scoops that don't say a whole lot.

Why he wants to imitate a paper that sells about one-fifth of the papers the Journal does, I'll never know.

LATE UPDATE:

This newsflash across the top of WSJ.com is more like it:

Starbucks will close another 300 stores and cut nearly 7,000 workers.

What's left to ask when you're conducting the 17th 14th (of 17, total*) interview with Gov. Blagojevich in 48 hours (per Campbell Brown's own tally)? Among the questions CNN's Brown came up with last night:

BROWN: How exactly are you explaining that [your side] to the people of Illinois when you go on a show like The View and you let the ladies run their fingers through your hair?

BLAGOJEVICH: Well, I didn't expect [Joy Behar] would do that. She did it on her own. How do you stop that when she does it?

(How do you stop that?) And:

BROWN: So I've got to ask one more thing. The poetry.

BLAGOJEVICH: Is that bad?

BROWN: What's with the poetry?

BLAGOJEVICH: Is that bad?

BROWN: I'm not suggesting at all it's bad. I think this is a pretty innocuous question. Well, just -- I'm curious. What's with the poetry?

BLAGOJEVICH: Well, here, let me set the record straight. I don't know a lot of poetry. There's a couple of poems I've learned ever since I was a little kid. ..

...The ones I know are motivators. Is that bad?

And, after so many interviews over the past two days, could Blagojevich be souring on reporters?

BROWN: The mayor of Chicago says you're cuckoo.

BLAGOJEVICH: Do you know the context?

BROWN: Please ...

BLAGOJEVICH: Of course not. You guys never do.

He was asked, the governor says they're trying to rush him out of office because he says his fellow Democrats are bent on a huge tax increase on the people before Memorial Day. He then said cuckoo. Now why did he say cuckoo? Because he's one of those Democrats who wants those tax increases that I promise you is going to happen before Memorial Day in Illinois. A tax increase on people, middle-class family, that I fought against for six years.

So again, you take that and you put it in a certain context. I understand your business, but see, that's inaccurate. That's what his response was to a question about taxes.

*The headline of this post has been updated ("#17" changed to "#14").

After two harried years on the trail, an endless stream of hotel rooms, fast food bolted on the fly, the same speeches day after day after day, journalists finally had time to curl up with a good book—or several good books. We asked a few campaign reporters what they chose to unwind with:

Candy Crowley (CNN): You Are Not a Stranger Here by Adam Haslett; In the Woods by Tana French; Never Too Late: A Prosecutor’s Story of Justice in the Medgar Evers Case by Bobby Delaughter

Don Gonyea (NPR): To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee; Seven Ages of Paris by Alistair Horne; The Road by Cormac McCarthy

“Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles!” That pretty much describes the media’s approach to coverage of new drugs and medical therapies. The Oregonian in Portland did not go in that direction this month when it ran a comprehensive and honest appraisal of new health technology. The story, by Joe Rojas-Burke, was so refreshing that we encourage other news outlets to use it as a model. The lede explained how a large independent study showed that computer-aided mammography did not significantly increase cancer detection rates. The process did boost the number of false positives, prompting a 20 percent increase in the rate of invasive biopsies. (Not to mention the cost of those procedures.)

The story then got right to the nut graph, which is worth repeating verbatim. It summarizes a major reason why U.S. health care is so expensive, and why reducing costs is an important reform objective—at least for some:

The finding is just one example of a widespread problem in the health care system; the tendency to embrace new technology without waiting for proof that it’s better than older, cheaper, time-tested solutions.

The Oregonian’s story described five medical interventions that support the nut graph’s thesis:

• Robotic surgery to minimize the side effects of cancer treatment

• Osteoporosis screening, leading to drug therapy—when falling is the real risk for broken bones among the elderly

• Fetal heart monitoring—which, studies show, is no better than an old-fashioned stethoscope when it comes to preventing brain damage from birth trauma.

• Blockbuster drugs, like the highly advertised Zelnorm, a drug for irritable bowel syndrome that was pulled from the market following questions about its safety and efficacy.

• Drugs to prevent diabetes, instead of lifestyle changes—which carry none of the drugs’ deadly side effects.

Stories like the The Oregonian’s are especially timely right now. The stimulus package moving through Congress will likely include billions for research on medical effectiveness. The Senate bill includes $1 billion for research on the comparative effectiveness of medical treatments, but that bill has already sparked concern that some patients may not get expensive treatments that they or their doctors want. The bill says:

By knowing what works best and presenting this information more broadly to patients and health care professionals, those items, procedures, and interventions that are most effective to prevent, control, and treat health conditions will be utilized, while those that are found to be less effective and, in some cases, more expensive, will no longer be prescribed.

Does this sound like a solution to the problem posed in The Oregonian’s nut graph?

The politics of medical effectiveness will be fierce, and the “firestorm” over the language in the legislation, as CongressDaily put it, is just the beginning. Dennis Cotter, who runs the Medical Technology and Practice Patterns Institute, a research firm that looks at all aspects of new and emerging health technologies, wrote to me not long ago sharing some important history about other government efforts to assess medical effectiveness. The history calls to mind the quote by American philosopher George Santayana: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Cotter’s history is worth passing on.

In 1978, the National Center for Health Care Technology, with a $4 million budget and a staff of twenty, was established as part of the Department of Health & Human Services to assess the value of old and new technologies and broadly disseminate its findings. The agency was short-lived, however; it died at the hand of Ronald Reagan’s Office of Management and Budget. “One should learn from the reasons for its demise,” Cotter told me. Cotter, who worked at the agency, said the AMA and a trade group, the Health Industry Manufacturers’ Association, argued that the Center was redundant because doctors were the ones best equipped to evaluate new technology. They also maintained that the Center was a cost control scheme.

Today, makers of diagnostic and imaging machines and other medical technology belong to a trade group called the Advanced Medical Technology Association, or AdvaMed. What its members do and don’t do could make a fine sequel to The Oregonian’s story.

In many ways, CleanSkies.tv, an online outfit offering “energy and environmental news, information, discussion, and commentary,” resembles other TV news operations. It has offices in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Oklahoma City, a multimillion-dollar budget, and twenty-five journalists on staff, some of them big-name television personalities. Clean Skies Sunday, for instance, is hosted by former CBS Morning News anchor Susan McGinnis and airs on WJLA-7, Washington’s ABC affiliate. But behind the journalistic veneer lies a tangle of energy interests that are not readily apparent to viewers or clearly acknowledged on the network’s Web site. CleanSkies’s parent group, the American Clean Skies Foundation, is funded by Oklahoma-based Chesapeake Energy Corporation, the nation’s largest independent producer of natural gas (a fossil fuel that is responsible for 20 percent of all U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions). Chesapeake’s founder, Aubrey McClendon, chairs the foundation board. The network itself is operated by Branded News, a subsidiary of Ackerman McQueen, an Oklahoma advertising agency that counts Chesapeake among its clients.

What’s more, CleanSkies has signed up a handful of “peer-group partners” to advise it on select programming, including Honda USA, Natural Gas Vehicles for America, and Clean Energy Fuels, another natural-gas provider.

Network officials argue that these ties don’t influence their news coverage, which they say is “insulated from potential outside influence” by an oversight committee, headed by Burl Osborne, a former editor and publisher of The Dallas Morning News and chairman of the Associated Press board. “We have a group of journalists with significant pedigrees,” says Kelley Rickenbaker, the general manager of CleanSkies. “The reason those people came to work for us is that we were able to guarantee their editorial independence.”

In October, community activists from around India gathered at the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in New Delhi to celebrate the third anniversary of the country’s Right to Information Act and assess the progress made under the landmark law. One speaker told how the law had produced a measure of belated justice after the 2002 riots between Hindus and Muslims in Gujarat state left more than a thousand dead and 150,000 homeless.

Dissatisfied with the pace of police investigations, a number of Muslims filed public-records requests to track the progress of their cases. Their scrutiny pressured police into arresting one hundred suspects.
Nikhil Dey, one of the champions of the law, choked up when he took the microphone to comment. “I’m sorry,” he said, bringing his hand to his face.

“Don’t be,” came a voice from across the hushed conference room. “We should all have tears in our eyes.”
Dey regained his composure and explained to fellow advocates why the Gujarat example was so poignant. “Completely non-accountable, brazen people who put the Constitution aside can be brought to book by their victims,” he said.

There’s no denying the emotional impact and political potential of India’s young law granting citizens the right to access government documents. For a nominal fee—in most cases, ten rupees, or twenty cents—an Indian citizen can step up to the scariest government agency and take his or her shot. The law applies to the bulk of paper and electronic information collected by public agencies, from federal ministries to the smallest rural village, as well as the files of private organizations that are “substantially financed” by the government. Citizens can even request samples of materials, like cement, used in government projects. The law contains a number of exemptions for records that, among other things, might compromise national security, endanger life and safety, divulge trade secrets, or that relate to the riot-prone state of Jammu and Kashmir. It gives an agency thirty days to either deliver the information or reject the request. And unlike the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, the Indian law comes with some bite: bureaucrats who stall, give misinformation, or refuse to hand over records without reasonable cause can face personal fines up to twenty-five thousand rupees, or $520.

Born of a decade-long, Mahatma-like protest movement staged by peasants, the act, which took effect in 2005, has unleashed a surge of civic engagement in the world’s largest democracy. In the first three years, citizens have filed hundreds of thousands of requests with federal, state, and local agencies, shaking out everything from construction budgets and neighborhood maps to school exams and road surveys. Armchair reformers and nongovernmental organizations like Greenpeace have used the law to halt illegal commercial construction, expose embezzlement in poverty food programs, and track the development of genetically modified crops on the subcontinent. They’ve embarrassed leading politicians for such things as spending public emergency funds on mango festivals and wrestling matches. Most of all, the law is changing the zeitgeist in a society where people have participated in free elections for fifty-six years but have been otherwise shut out of the daily decisions by a notoriously secretive and corrupt government bureaucracy. “The one difference the RTIhas made is that a citizen who used to feel helpless when he approached a government department doesn’t feel helpless anymore,” says Arvind Kejriwal, an information-law activist and founder of the anticorruption group Parivartan in Delhi. “He can challenge the department. He can challenge the bureaucracy. He can challenge injustice.”

What is still unclear, however, is whether the law will live up to its potential as a game-changer by challenging the government’s systemic lack of transparency and accountability. Expectations are high for a measure that represents the most sweeping government reform yet in a country that still doesn’t require the disclosure of campaign contributions during political races or have a legal framework to encourage and protect whistleblowers. Despite the impressive testimonials and the isolated successes, fundamental change will come slowly, incrementally, and with plenty of setbacks. The information act has pried open the workings of government, instilling a fear in bureaucrats that their movements can now be tracked, but has yet to deliver the larger reforms its supporters envisioned. “Transparency? Yes,” says K. K. Misra, chief of the commission set up to oversee the act in southern Karnataka state, which includes the city of Bangalore, an outsourcing hub. “But accountability and a better government? The eradication of corruption? That is a more time-consuming process.”

Only 10 percent of India’s 1.1 billion people even know about the law, according to two recent studies. And those who do tend to use it do so to satisfy personal grievances, such as dislodging ration cards or passports without paying bribes. Some of the more aggressive users have been the bureaucrats themselves, who file requests to peek at civil-service exams and glean clues as to why they were passed over for promotions. Otherwise, the bureaucracy has given up ground grudgingly. It is estimated that only about half of all public agencies have made the proactive disclosures of basic information, like salaries and regulations, required under the law. Public-information officers, typically junior administrators, are poorly trained or are hidden from the public in anonymous offices. Reports persist of citizens being harassed when they attempt to file RTI requests.

These problems are compounded by the growing mountain of appeals from denied requests, which threatens to overwhelm the system. And the independent state and federal “information commissions” charged with hearing those appeals have been reluctant to fine uncooperative officials. The Central Information Commission in Delhi, which hears appeals involving ninety federal departments and forty-eight ministries and union territories, including the city of Delhi, has assessed penalties in fewer than 4 percent of the 6,400 cases it has considered so far in which fines were possible. Only a third of the 2.2 million rupees, or $46,500, in fines levied has been collected; a small portion of that has been put on hold, either because of new facts or through court appeals of commission decisions. But more than half of the fines are either scheduled to be deducted in installments from officials’ paychecks or remain seriously overdue, according to a Central Commission spokesman. The highest-ranking administrator tagged: the joint secretary in the Ministry of Environment & Forests, who was fined twenty-five thousand rupees in December 2007—and still hasn’t paid because she’s appealing the matter in civil court. The commission concluded she took a “very casual approach” to a subordinate’s request for twenty-year-old records relating to a court case the department initiated against him. The joint secretary took eight months to deny his request, then cited a nonexistent exemption in the RTI act to keep the documents secret, the commission found.

Meanwhile, the mainstream Indian press has been tentative at best in its use of the new tool. Reporters for native-language publications, especially those at rural papers with small circulations, have been using the act, but often as a way to keep local officials honest rather than to ferret out stories. The leading English-language newspapers and magazines—the publications that have the most influence on India’s power centers—have reported widely on the RTI law itself, but have not embraced it as an investigative tool. Reporters and editors say they simply don’t trust the information released by government officials. Narendar Pani, a former senior editor for The Economic Times and now dean of interdisciplinary studies at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore, suggested other, less noble explanations for the “patchy” use of the law. English dailies compete for upscale urban audiences that prefer feel-good, India-rising stories to articles about government corruption. Pani said another factor is that Indian reporters are culturally attuned to work through networks of informal sources, which would dry up with “a blunt-instrument approach, which is the RTI.”

The right to information act emerged out of a “people’s movement” in Rajasthan, a state in western India that borders Pakistan. The improbable crusade of impoverished peasants reframed a typically intellectual debate over good governance into a gritty struggle for survival. “The unique thing about India’s RTI is that it started with poor people, making a demand for extremely real issues,” said Aruna Roy, one of the country’s most respected social activists and the person most closely identified with the RTI movement. “It was not an academic issue at all.”

The issue was, and continues to be, official malfeasance. Billions of rupees disappear from construction and welfare programs. Civil servants and local officials do little without pocketing baksheesh. Transparency International estimates that Indians dole out a collective $4.8 billion in bribes every year for basic services, like filing a police report. In upholding the conviction of a police officer for taking a 3,500-rupee bribe, India’s Supreme Court lamented in 2006: “No facet of public activity has been left unaffected by the stink of corruption.” Hardest hit, advocates say, are the 450 million mostly rural villagers who subsist on less than $1.25 a day.

Their ranks include the feisty people of the Pali District in central Rajasthan. During the early 1990s, the region suffered through severe droughts. To help stave off famine, the government opened a number of small construction projects so the villagers could earn money to buy food. But when villagers had completed their work and showed up to collect their pay, they were shortchanged. The town official who controlled the money claimed the workers didn’t log nearly as many hours as they thought. The villagers demanded to see the timesheets, or “muster rolls.” The official refused, saying the rolls were confidential government documents under the 1923 Official Secrets Act, an anti-espionage measure left over from British rule.

As it happened, the irate villagers were members of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, or the Workers-Farmers Unity Union, which Nikhil Dey and Aruna Roy started in 1990. A small, severe-looking woman, Roy knew the bureaucratic game, having served in the most elite group of civil servants, the Indian Administrative Service, before quitting in 1975 over what she termed its “decadent colonial spirit.” She moved to Rajasthan to work directly with the poor. When the grievances over the famine work first bubbled up, the union staged hunger strikes but nothing happened. Let them die, local officials said. That’s when Roy and her compatriots seized on access to information as a way of fighting back. They convinced one local official to let them copy muster rolls, including related bills and vouchers for the construction projects. Insiders leaked other records. Then they went from village to village, confirming the information.

What they found was straight out of Chicago ward politics. There were dead people on the rolls, as well as names of villagers who had moved away—all “ghost” employees who never worked a day on the projects. Bills showed evidence of other fraud: the “purchase” of new stones when workers had used old ones from a torn-down building.

In December 1994, Roy and her cohorts convened a public hearing to discuss the findings. More than a thousand villagers, gnarled old men in turbans and women in colorful ankle-length ghaghras, sat under the shade of a borrowed parachute. With town chiefs looking on from a distance, peasants paraded to the mike to testify to the rip-off. After two years and two highly publicized sit-down strikes, Rajasthan officials grudgingly agreed to open all village records to inspection and photocopying. The union’s campaign became a phenomenon, with several village officials promising to pay back pilfered funds. Former Prime Minister V. P. Singh showed up at a subsequent hearing and the Brahmins of the national press offered to help. The burgeoning movement also prompted Rajasthan and eight other states to pass right-to-information laws, which spurred other transparency campaigns.

In conjunction with the Press Council of India, Roy and another union co-founder, Shekhar Singh, lobbied Parliament for a national law. The first attempt got enough votes to pass in 2002, but was never enacted due to a technicality. A second bill soon picked up a powerful ally in Sonia Gandhi, the president of the National Congress Party, who fashioned a coalition government after the 2004 elections. The coalition government, called the United Progressive Alliance, committed itself to passing a strong information law and the next year Gandhi pushed it through Parliament.

The information commissions were established to keep requests from getting bottled up in hostile bureaucracies. But as the number of requests mushrooms, the commissions at the federal level and in the larger states have themselves become a bottleneck. The Central Information Commission in New Delhi, for instance, is trying to dig out from nearly nine thousand appeals and the end may not be in sight. If things don’t change in a year or two, warns Wajahat Habibullah, the head of the commission, the whole system may collapse.

The law’s supporters vow to safeguard it, claiming the glut of appeals will subside once agencies have fully embraced the act. Indeed, they gained added influence when one of their own—Shailesh Gandhi, an RTI activist from Mumbai with eight hundred requests under his belt—was chosen to become the new federal information commissioner. He started hearing appeals in mid-September. Activists are also laying plans with federal authorities to establish a national RTI hotline that will allow citizens to place and pay for their requests via cell phone.

During the October gathering of activists, Roy, Dey, and thirty others gave an update on the nationwide study they are conducting of the RTI law’s impact. As part of the study, underwritten in part by $250,000 from the Google Foundation, the activists have compiled a database of case studies, some six thousand accounts of how the act has struck a small blow for poor farmers and other underdogs. The cumulative effect, Dey says, is a “class-action kind of thing” that he believes will shift India from an electoral to a participatory democracy. “You can’t say it’s tangible. It’s a change of culture,” he says. “It’s governance being turned around.”

The media are turning around as well, albeit slowly. English-language newspapers now regularly publish stories brought to them by RTI activists. Some have broken bite-sized exclusives stemming from their own requests. One Bangalore tabloid has carved out an RTI mini-beat. In November, Delhi’s largest television station launched a federal probe with its report—based on information obtained under the RTI law—that newborn babies were dying at a disturbingly high rate at a leading city hospital due to unsanitary conditions there. Within other newsrooms, editors and reporters accustomed to India’s smash-and-grab style of journalism openly acknowledge they need to find a way to harness the landmark law. “To be very frank, we have not understood the power of the Right to Information Act yet,” says Saikat Datta, an investigative reporter for the weekly newsmagazine Outlook, about the journalistic community. “We just haven’t figured out how powerful this tool is and what it can achieve.” 

MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, directly after her interview with Gov. Blagojevich last night, wondered on-air:

Did he just confess to me that he broke the law but that he thinks it's okay because he broke the law for a good reason? Second question: Is he mounting a Robin Hood defense for how he tried to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat? Third question: Did he just explain his state of mind for extorting the Chicago Tribune?

Might, as Maddow mused, "tonight's transcripts...end up in the criminal proceedings against him?" Maddow posed these questions to her guest, Scott Mendeloff (a former federal prosecutor), who explained how some of what Blagojevich said could hurt him.

That conversation:

On today's New York Times op-ed page, David Swensen and Michael Schmidt (an investment officer and a financial analyst, respectively, at Yale) call on "enlightened philanthropists" to endow "our most valued news sources" -- and, fast-- "or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance." Then they lay out, presumably for interested parties, what it might take to endow, just for instance, the Times:

How large an endowment would a newspaper need? The news-gathering operations at The New York Times cost a little more than $200 million a year. Assuming some additional outlay for overhead, it would require an endowment of approximately $5 billion (assuming a 5 percent annual payout rate).

How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on this Earth)
By Henry Alford | Twelve | 272 pages, $23.99

A self-described "investigative humorist," Henry Alford has seldom identified himself as such to his subjects, preferring the spontaneity of casual exchanges. But in the introduction to his first book, Municipal Bondage: One Man’s Anxiety-Producing Adventures in the Big City (1993), he shares his methodology with readers. “In almost every case," he writes, "the people with whom I interact in this book did not know, at the time of interaction, that I was preparing to write about them. Posing as an individual devoid of ulterior motive, I entered these peoples’ lives and allowed my innocent mien and neurotic stammerings to put them off guard.”

Both in this book and in its successor, Big Kiss: One Actor’s Desperate Attempt to Claw His Way to the Top (2000), Alford expends much of his considerable energy seeking points of comic departure. He assigns himself zany premises: watching an endless sequence of how-to videos, or chauffeuring the governor of Colorado around New York during the 1992 Democratic National Convention, even though he doesn’t really drive. These disingenuous exercises are, with few exceptions, as laborious and unfunny as they sound. Feigning innocence, the author peppers salespeople with oddball questions or tries to persuade restaurant managers to add his headshot to their photographic pantheon of movie stars. These people politely indulge him—it’s their job, after all. But the comedic returns are minimal.

Alford’s claim to investigative journalism is customarily delivered with a wink. But in his new book, he does break with his standard practice. In How to Live: A Search for Wisdom from Old People (While They Are Still on this Earth), he is upfront with his subjects. “I sent out hundreds of emails,” he writes, “presenting myself as a journalist hot on the path of wisdom.”

How to Live also benefits from a tighter focus and the author’s increased willingness to cede the spotlight to his subjects. Alford delights in his quest, dipping into wisdom-related texts at the library, phoning experts, and traveling around the country to interview the elderly. He meets both the famous (Edward Albee, Harold Bloom) and the obscure (including Alford’s mother and stepfather, whose separation the book chonicles), and several of his conversations reveal the hidden possibilities of old age. These are enough to shatter the scenario he airs early on: "We tend to think of life after seventy--outside of medical ailments, of course--as being soft and muzzy and fairly static: lots of cardigan sweaters and an increasingly housebound devotion to a small, irritable pet.”

If Alford accepts this dreary picture of old age too unquestioningly, at least at the outset, it is because the success of his book depends upon it. He is counting on surprising readers with the news that not everyone retires at sixty-five, that life goes on and may even improve.

As the data piles up, Alford is quick to acknowledge the difficulty of defining wisdom. This is fair. Yet How to Live boils over into such kitschy departments as deathbed confessions and near-death experiences. And throughout, Alford lays on the aphorisms in thick drifts; the book is an orgy of pithiness for all ages. “Yes, an interest in succinctness bespeaks a short attention span,” he writes. “But there’s nothing more powerful than the artful distillation of an entire philosophy down into a few words.” The irony is that How to Live is too long by half. Older readers, recalling the slog through Alford’s more unjustifiable inclusions, may find themselves wishing for some of their time back.

For all this distraction, Alford does eventually arrive at his definition of wisdom—249 pages after beginning, sixty-seven pages after Albee asks for it. Or rather, he identifies the five traits that comprise it: reciprocity, doubt, nonattachment, discretion, and acting for a social good. He also notes that being able to define wisdom is not the same thing as possessing it. “Knowing what to overlook, knowing when not to fixate, extinguishing the will--I’d love to be able to call any of these skills my own," he writes. "Not having them has certainly been its own toboggan ride. Man plans, and God laughs; but man fixates, and God writes and produces his own HBO comedy special.”

Alford, of course, is not the only one operating with a wisdom deficit. In the book’s final chapter, he visits Ashleigh Brilliant, a seventy-five-year-old published epigrammist, with ten thousand to his name. Alford rightly lets the interview stand without comment. What comes through, however, is that this man who spends his time cranking out aphorisms is no wiser than anyone else; he resides not in some enlightened paradise but in a cluttered Santa Barbara house in the company of his irritating wife. And just maybe, since life is short, the artful distillation of entire philosophies is not the best use of his time.

When President Nixon slunk out of the White House, he wasn’t exactly in a sharing mood. In his fight to keep his records under lock and key, he had history on his side: up to that point, presidential records, from George Washington's administration onwards, had been presumed to be the personal, private property of the ex-presidents, free to be donated, bequeathed, sold, or destroyed as they saw fit.

Nixon’s records were captured by a one-time act of Congress, but in 1978, a more permanent fix, the Presidential Records Act, was passed, establishing that the public would, via the National Archives, own and control the records of past presidents. While just a handful of presidents have been subject to the PRA, the law makes some records available just five years after a president leaves office, and nearly all must be opened after twelve years.

In his first year in office, President George W. Bush issued an executive order allowing presidents—and vice presidents—to claim privilege over their papers as long as they were still alive. It also gave past presidents' families, or a series of designated representatives, the power to withhold documents. The order seemed to make it possible for a president to deny access in perpetuity, effectively reducing the National Archives to a taxpayer-funded private gatekeeper.

While no other attack on the Act drew as much ire from archivists, historians, and open government advocates as President Bush’s 2001 order, the PRA—which, by its very nature, seeks to limit presidential power—has never been an executive branch favorite. From Ronald Reagan, the first president subject to its reach, onwards, every administration has acted to curtail the PRA.

That streak was broken one week ago, when, on his first full day in office, President Barack Obama signed a new executive order that wholly repealed Bush’s executive order, essentially reverting to the standard established as Reagan left office.

“It’s the first time a president has come out in support of the Presidential Records Act,” says Bruce Montgomery, an archivist at the University of Colorado who has written on the history of the act. “I think it is remarkable.”

The timing of the move is dramatic, but perhaps not so surprising. Obama’s campaign had promised to reverse Bush’s order. And on September 18, 2008, former Clinton Chief of Staff John Podesta, who had been rumored throughout the summer to be in line to run a potential Obama transition, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Podesta, long counted as a major governmental ally by transparency advocates, said that Bush’s order had “seriously undermined the intent of the PRA” and that the next president should act to revoke it.

Obama’s order undoes the Bush changes that most irked proponents of the act, like the familial right to privilege, and—to the sure chagrin of Dick Cheney—pointedly notes that the act applies to vice presidential records as well. Under the Obama rules, as under the Reagan rules, any past president seeking to staunch the release of a requested record ripe for release must have the consent of the current president, who, in turn, must consult the deputy attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel, as well as the president’s counsel. While events of the Bush administration have called the independence of these presidentially-appointed legal officials into question, the order nonetheless puts a few more people in the decision chain, and restores the presumption that only the sitting president can staunch the public’s access rights.

Experts point to one potential flaw in the order. Under the Act, before the Archives can release a requested record, thirty days notice must be given to both the current president and the ex-president who created the record. Obama’s order suggests that the incumbent president has just that month to invoke executive privilege over the record, or to agree with the ex-president's privilege claim. But there’s language that seems to allow the incumbent president to take more time—“a time certain and with reason”—without making a decision, merely by notifying the National Archivist that that’s his intention.

“It’s a little vague and mushily written,” says Meredith Fuchs, the general counsel of the National Security Archive, a private research organization based at George Washington University.

“Who decides what ‘time certain’ is? What if the president says ‘I need another year’?” asks Lee White, who leads the National Coalition for History, an advocacy group of over sixty-five historical and archival groups that has been trying to undo the Bush order for over seven years.

“There’s no redress for the person seeking the records, and the Archivist of the United States in an executive appointee, and can’t compel the president to do anything,” White says. “I could see the possibility of abuse there.”

Still, the openness community is extremely heartened. “This is a huge improvement,” says Fuchs. But as grateful as she and other advocate may be, a revocable executive order, like Obama’s, is not guaranteed to outlast the president who issued it.

“We lucked out because now we have someone who is totally supportive, but we’ve just been through eight years of hell,” says White. “We’d like to see legislation, simply because, as you just saw, a new president can come in and write a new order,”

The first bill passed by the 111th House, two weeks before Obama took office and issued his order, was a set of amendments to the PRA that would enshrine similar changes in statute, making it much harder for any future president to issue an executive order thwarting the Act.

But before the bill can arrive on President Obama’s desk, it must also clear the Senate. In 2007, a similar bill, S.B. 886, was reported out of the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee on a voice vote with bipartisan support. (Afterwards, holds were placed on the bill by Republican senators close to the White House, and it never came up for a full floor vote.)

It’s possible that, after Obama’s executive order, the Hill will not be in as much of a hurry to reform the Presidential Records Act. Senator Jeff Bingaman, the New Mexico Democrat who introduced last session’s bill, has not yet reintroduced the legislation, and his press office was unable to say before publication whether or not he would. A Homeland Security Committee communications staffer was also unable to say if Connecticut's Joseph Lieberman, who chairs the relevant committee and who championed the bill last session as a co-sponsor, would still support the legislation.

While the Bush administration suggested that Bush would veto the 2007 reforms to the Presidential Records Act had they passed, there’s no indication that Obama would do the same. As a senator from Illinois, he, too, was a co-sponsor.

The LA Times is excellent today on the dismal state of housing in California, the ground zero—one of them, anyway—of the housing bust.

The paper reports that more people lost homes in the state last year than in the previous nine years combined. More than 236,000 were foreclosed on and the number of defaults was 404,000.

And it's getting worse:

The wave of foreclosures, which began in early 2007, was initially triggered by falling home values and resets on adjustable-rate loans. But lenders and industry analysts say the trend is now being exacerbated by rising unemployment, which has shot up to 9.3% in California.

It's refreshing to see a story that doesn't do the ol' "blame the borrowers" schtick:

"The people who are defaulting now are not really people who recklessly got into loans they never could have afforded," said Evan Wagner, the communications director for IndyMac Federal Bank, a big mortgage lender that, having collapsed last year, is being bought by private investors. "These are people who have lost their jobs or who have had their hours cut back at work."

Wagner said that up to 80% of the borrowers seeking an easing of their loan terms are doing so because of the loss of a job or income.

Borrowers with good credit defaulted at a rate 4.5 times that of 2007. And the LAT says there's a lot more pain to come:

An analysis by investment bank Credit Suisse suggests that foreclosures will start to taper off this year because the number of subprime loans resetting to higher interest rates has peaked. But there is another potential time bomb: Resets on prime loans will peak at more than $40 billion in mid-2010.

And this is amazing:

The median price for a home in Southern California was $278,000 in December, down from $415,000 in January 2008.

In addition, most of the homes being sold now are foreclosures.

This is a good roundup by the LAT.

In "The Future of Reading," Ezra Klein gave a mixed review to the physical aspect of Amazon's Kindle. The screen of the device is "almost calming to look at," he noted, and "the collision between the artificial and the organic [in it] is remarkable." However,

The bottom third houses the world’s most unintuitive keyboard: the letters all jut out at different angles as if the designers had just figured out diagonals but hadn’t quite decided which was their favorite. Running up the right side is a “next page” button, conveniently placed so you accidentally press it whenever you pick the device up.

Well. If you're one of those savvy consumers who always waits for the updated, kinks-worked-out models of tech gadgets...your time may be coming. Specifically, on Monday, February 9--when Amazon is slated to introduce an updated version of the Kindle. The revamped device, apparently, will boast a more responsive and faster-loading screen: good for "book" reading, to be sure, but even better for Web use.

If you can't wait until the 9th, check out leaked photos of the new device--from the tech blog Boy Genius Report, via the Times's Bits blog, here.

So we've noticed that former New York Times reporter Judith Miller has been writing occasionally at The Daily Beast on foreign affairs. Last week, she reported on how some Obama advisors worry that Afghanistan "may be as much of a quagmire as Iraq"; in December, she wrote about the tortuous Israel/Gaza peace process.

Miller enjoyed a long and decorated career at the Times. But she left the paper in 2005, partially due to the controversy surrounding her discredited and inaccurate reporting on Iraq's pre-war WMD program—reporting that was cited by Bush administration officials in their effort to sell the American public on the Iraq war.

Nowhere does The Daily Beast mention the circumstances that led to Miller's departure. As a reader put it in an e-mail to CJR, "having Miller write on these things and not acknowledging her failure on Iraq is like seeing a surgeon who won't tell you he killed his last dozen patients."

Maybe Miller deserves a scarlet letter. Maybe that's justice. But maybe that's just vindictiveness, too. Acknowledging both her long and distinguished career and her colossally bad WMD reporting, does Judith Miller deserve this second chance? And, if so, to what extent should The Daily Beast acknowledge her past mistakes?

Maybe you're old enough to remember the media coverage of "crack babies" back in the '80s and '90s? Allow the front page of today's New York Times "Science Times" section to refresh your memory.

When the use of crack cocaine became a nationwide epidemic in the 1980s and ’90s, there were widespread fears that prenatal exposure to the drug would produce a generation of severely damaged children. Newspapers carried headlines like “Cocaine: A Vicious Assault on a Child,” “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View” and “Studies: Future Bleak for Crack Babies.”

Newspapers like… the Times, producer of the “Crack’s Toll Among Babies: A Joyless View” headline that today's Times mentions but doesn't cop to having authored. In this 1989 "Crack's Toll" piece, a research psychologist is quoted saying that "prenatal exposure to illegal drugs, particularly powdered cocaine and its smokable derivative, crack, seems to be 'interfering with the central core of what it is to be human.'" (Read: Epidemic!)

Turns out, according to today's Times, it's "The Epidemic That Wasn't."

Picking up where I left off in today's piece:

But now researchers are systematically following children who were exposed to cocaine before birth...So far, these scientists say, the long-term effects of such exposure on children’s brain development and behavior appear relatively small.

So, sounds like the headline should be "The Epidemic That Hasn't, So Far, (At Least Not The Way We Suggested It Might In Earlier Coverage)."

Back in 2004, Mariah Blake wrote for CJR about the "media myth" of the "crack baby" and detailed how the Times contributed to it over the years (even quoting from the "Crack's Toll" article). Blake wrote about "a group of doctors and scientists ...lobbying The Times to drop terms like 'crack baby' from its pages," because, the group said, these terms are "stigmatizing" and "lack scientific validity."

Reported Blake four years ago (emphasis mine):

While the [Times] hasn’t used “crack baby” in the last several months, it has referred to babies being “addicted” to crack, which, as the researchers told the editors, is scientifically inaccurate, since babies cannot be born addicted to cocaine.

Which leaves me wondering about the photo caption accompanying today's (print) Times piece (emphasis mine): "In a 1988 photo, testing a baby born addicted to cocaine."

The "researchers" who were lobbying the Times in 2004 included Barry M. Lester, a professor of Psychiatry at Brown University, who is quoted in today's Times piece and whose most recent research findings seem to be the news hook for the article.

I emailed Lester to ask him about today's Times caption, pointing out how it conflicted with what he and fellow researchers wrote in an "Open Letter To The Media" in 2004, namely:

Addiction is a technical term that refers to compulsive behavior that continues in spite of adverse consequences. By definition, babies cannot be "addicted" to crack or anything else. In utero physiologic dependence on opiates (not addiction), known as Neonatal Narcotic Abstinence Syndrome, is readily diagnosed, but no such symptoms have been found to occur following prenatal cocaine exposure.

Lester replied that "the information in the letter you refer to is correct."

So, in a piece that reminds us -- without, you know, naming names-- how news organizations' coverage of crack and babies hasn't been particularly careful (or, it's looking like, accurate), the Times isn't particularly careful (or accurate) in its caption?

Earlier this hour, the following weather-related headline appeared on the NBC News Washington Web site:

Moments after I took that screen shot, the headline became, "Drivers Beware, Snow Blankets DC Area." (Well, um, I guess it does say "beta" up there above the peacock logo...)

John Updike, celebrated novelist and literary critic, has died of lung cancer at 76. Updike's Wikipedia page was updated to reflect the news almost as soon as it broke (something that couldn't have happened as quickly, incidentally, under Jimmy Wales's proposed Flagged Revisions), and Twitter has been struggling to keep up with the "RIP John Updike" traffic. (Many "Twitter is over capacity" messages have been reported since the news broke about half an hour ago.) As Linda Famous (lfamous) put it, "shocked how many people are tweeting about John Updike. Must be a lot of readers on twitter."

Among the thousands of other Updike-mourning tweets:

HalSF: "John Updike's death makes me wonder what John Updike's precise, chilly, feuilleton take on John Updike's death would be."

tomster2: "Updike's now in the Big Bookstore in the Sky? Bummer."

jonnybunny: "john updike is dead! shed a tear for a man who understood rabbits. and wrote 28 of my favorite books."

rdhall (RD Hall): "'Tell your mother, if she asks, that maybe we'll meet some other time. Under the pear trees, in Paradise.' --John Updike"

oupblog (Oxford University Press Blog): "'The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.' — John Updike"

CJR reader Dan writes in with a tip about a recent Fox News segment called "Terrorists in Your Backyard," in which a correspondent gets some vital details wrong.

Reacting to President Obama's executive order to close down Guantanamo in the coming year, Pennsylvania Congressman Jack Murtha said that the Gitmo detainees could be relocated to prisons in his home state. To find out what residents of Murtha's district think of this proposal, Fox News headed to Pennsylvania.

They should've packed a map.

Our reader alerts to the actual boundaries of Murtha's district, which don't include Mel's Restaurant in Somerset Borough—which Fox said was in the "heart" of Murtha's district and popular with "constituents"—the pub where the reporter conducted his interviews.

Oops.

What's more, the piece teems with an unfortunate xenophobic edge. For instance, the correspondent approaches a local resident, shows him a photograph of a man in traditional Arab head dress and asks, "Would you want a guy like this living in your backyard?"—all without explaining that Guantanamo detainees were apprehended under a variety of circumstances, the charges against them have not been laid out, and they've never been convicted of anything. Yeesh.

Oh, and then there's that questionable practice of going to bars for easy interviews, where the socially lubricated are quick with a quote.

That's three strikes.

The Journal also has an excellent front-page "ahed" today—a first-hand, real-time look at the layoffs that are swamping the economy.

The paper got remarkable access to a small Ohio tile manufacturer as it went through the process of slashing its workforce by a third. The result is a picture of what American workers are going through right now.

Huddled around half-century-old kilns for warmth, some workers masked their anxiety with nervous optimism. "I'll go back to hang drywall," said Dustin Bourne, a lanky 22-year-old, chatting with three high-school buddies. Of course, they all knew the truth: Mr. Bourne took a job here last year because drywall work had disappeared.

Rosanne Dangelo, a mother of two grown children, was stoic at the prospect of unemployment. "I'll get by," she said, then quipped, "I don't need the Internet."

Dangelo actually survived the layoffs because her seniority rank was a few spots above the cut.

There's some great color, as well:

The 1970s and 1980s were glory days. The company employed 750 people at multiple plants. Traveling abroad, Mr. Johnson's father noted that one European ceramic maker used a castle as its guesthouse, so when he returned to Ohio, he bought a small, 19th-century inn with five guest rooms near his own factory, the Spread Eagle Tavern.

"That was its historical name," Mr. Johnson notes, somewhat emphatically. "Contrary to some people's thinking, it was not a house of ill repute."

And:

The morning of the meeting, the temperature outside was four degrees. The factory is a drafty place, so people gathered near the kilns. Mr. Johnson set his bullhorn on a pile of tiles and delivered the grim news.

We need more stories like this.

Then you'll want to pay the $30 subscription fee Reader's Digest is charging for Pastor Rick Warren's new quarterly magazine, Purpose Driven Connection, which, as the Wall Street Journal reports, also buys you "a bundle of multimedia products" including "access to a Facebook-like Christian social-media Web site and DVD guides for leading a prayer group."

Pastor Warren on his magazine:

There's a flat-out segment of Americans who are unashamed followers of Jesus Christ. We're not trying to make this a magazine for everybody.

I recommend (after a colleague recommended it to me) reading Nancy Franklin's "On Television" column in the current New Yorker about the experience of watching President Obama's inauguration on cable TV (an experience that so many of us shared). Franklin writes about what she got:

Bundled up in heavy coats and scarves and hats, Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Soledad O’Brien, and Roland Martin seemed mostly to talk about the weather, though we also got to hear that O’Brien had come down from New York on the same train as Beyoncé. Over on MSNBC, Chris Matthews was his usual combination of extremely embarrassing and kind of insightful.

What she didn't get:

Any viewers who were planning on attending had previously been asked by CNN to e-mail pictures of “the moment”—Obama raising his hand to take the oath of office—to the network, whose gadgets would then create a huge composite, three-dimensional-seeming photograph. As new as the ability to accomplish such a thing may be, it came across as a tired gimmick. History was happening; it was a day of ecstasy and gravity—and CNN wanted your cell-phone pictures. But the day simply couldn’t be captured that way.

And, what she missed:

The morning after the Inauguration, something felt wrong to me. I was sad and unsettled, as if I’d had a bad dream. Later in the day, I realized how far away I’d felt from the events of the previous days. I’d seen Obama become President, verified that—phew!—it had actually happened, but I hadn’t felt connected to it, except, oddly enough, when I watched scenes of other people watching it on TV, like elderly black men and women, who sat at home and wept as they saw something that they had never imagined would happen. I should have put the remote down and got myself to Washington and stood in the crowd, freezing and cheering, maybe even, for the first time, waving a flag. January 20th might have been the greatest day in my lifetime. By watching it on TV, I’d missed it.

From: The Executive Editor

To: All Hands

The first days of the Barack Obama administration would seem to provide a suitable moment to (assess our Washington coverage; announce a new round of layoffs and buyouts; hitch our buggy to that 70 percent approval rating).

As you know, the Washington bureau is (our pride and joy; shut down since about 20 minutes after the Inaugural Address; just around the corner from Ben’s Chili Bowl). Shortly before the election, we (replaced our veteran bureau chief with a former TV producer; jumped aboard the Fred D. Thompson bandwagon; saved a fortune bailing out of the Obama press plane).

More change is coming. Going forward, we must (give our readers what they need to make informed decisions; pander to our readers in a more digital manner; get me into the Gridiron Club).

Our readers can count on us to (beat the ‘team of rivals’ idea to a bloody pulp; obsess over the mother-in-law-in-the-White-House thing in a manner that would exhaust Jay Leno; continue to market our Jan. 20 commemorative edition).

We intend to treat the First Lady as (a serious player on the national stage; Diana Ross; mother of two of the cutest darn kids you ever did see). Her background (at Princeton and Harvard; doing legal baggage-handling for the Richie Daley crowd in Chicago; as mother of two of the cutest darn kids you ever did see) tells us she merits no less.

The past is prologue: Our coverage of the Clinton years was seen by many as (ground-breaking; bimbo-erupting; Newt-inducing). Over eight years, the Bush administration (presented unprecedented news-gathering challenges; told the truth about as often as a hedge-fund manager; played us like an ocarina).

But reliving the past (is more fun than we can allow ourselves to have; not popular with focus groups; would be bad news for Dick Cheney and Alberto Gonzales). I know I speak for all of us when I say that nothing is more important than that we (report the news without fear or favor; get some face time with Rachel Maddow; have someone in our bureau who can play basketball at least as well as David Axelrod).

It’s clear the Obama inner circle regards the working press as (an important constituency; an oxymoron; a gaggle of pushy wage slaves who aren’t on television). Early indicators suggest they view us as (not unlike a roving tribe of carny workers; guardians of the public trust; putty in their hands).

The truth is that our new president (has embarked on a historic and difficult journey; is more popular than Snuggie blankets and ShamWow combined; will pretty much do whatever he wants until the polls start sagging). We must (continue to play our historic, keep-them-honest role; bend to his steely-eyed will; make sure all our reporters are taking plenty of pictures when they report their stories). Speaking for myself, I look forward to a day when we (hold the new president accountable for his campaign promises; get Malia and Sasha on a postage stamp; are mentioned in a song by Bono).

It is not enough that we (meet our profit margins; gratefully accept profane, spittle-flecked abuse from the blogosphere; continue to showcase political columnists who were wrong about nearly everything). No, we must (generate pointless redesigns and “new” sections; adapt to a changing news environment; continue to alienate and ignore our base while reaching out to people who will never, ever buy our product).

None of this will be easy. Our Washington bureau, once more than a dozen strong, is (moving out of the National Press Building to an undisclosed location; Twitter-based; providing my nephew, Brandon, with some handy real-world experience).

But with (a clear consumer focus; an infusion of cash from overseas; a newsroom attitude adjustment, and I’m not kidding), we can, as the new president said, do the work that must be done.

Michael Goldfarb was the McCain campaign's deputy communications director-cum-media bodyguard, tasked by McCain's high command with bullying the press into covering things the "right" way. It's a role Goldfarb, a reporter and blogger himself, played with gusto—so much so that he generated controversy and became part of the storyline himself on occasion.

Now back at The Weekly Standard, he talked to Kate Klonick about the campaign’s flirtation with punishing The New York Times, the decision to pick Sarah Palin, and that memorable interview on CNN.

Kate Klonick: You spent the last six months as the official campaign blogger for the McCain campaign, taking leave from your position as Web editor at The Weekly Standard. What were you expecting when you made the switch?

Michael Goldfarb: [The McCain campaign] assured me that they were looking for someone to attack the press. And that struck me as a really bad idea, but when a presidential campaign calls up and offers you a job you take it. I didn't think they'd follow through on the claim the way they promised, and I expected to be reined in pretty quickly—end up working on statements and the like. I didn't expect to have free reign to do what I wanted

Occasionally they would task me with something and I wouldn't get to follow through. Like they were going to throw The New York Times off the plane, I wrote the memo explaining that [decision], and then they changed their minds. But day to day, in terms of picking lines of attack, I was giving a great deal of latitude. I was working with other communication guys—but there was a tremendous amount of latitude and that persisted well beyond the convention, which was surprising. I thought they'd end the blog after the convention. But it wasn't until about three weeks out from the election that I basically stopped blogging, because I decided it wasn't prudent to keep it going. There were other outlets for that. I decided to work on statements, and the blog just became a little bit risky because it didn't have to go through the normal channels. It left the campaign exposed and it left me exposed.

KK: Were you looking ahead to a possible McCain victory, and the possibility of joining his administration? Or did you not let yourself go there?

MG: I thought from the beginning that we would lose. I'm not a lunatic, the odds were always stacked against McCain. But there were a couple weeks there after the convention where [winning] looked like a possibility. People, for the first time, let themselves think that maybe it was possible that we could win. But then the markets collapsed, and everyone sobered up and realized it was an incredible longshot. But you don't do that because you think you're going to get some cushy job after. As a journalist you want the opportunity to see it from the inside out, and you have a candidate you really like, admire, and respect. You saw it with Linda Douglas and Jay Carney—there's no expectation that a journalist who gets that opportunity is going to pass it up. It's too interesting.

You see journalists from the other side, which is one of the most shocking things. You're the one giving things to the journalists, so you know when something is going to come out and where they're getting their info and when they're making it up.

KK: You were a long time proponent of McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his VP pick. Seeing how everything played out, do you still think she was the right choice?

MG: It's unbelievable the way the media has covered this and the way the media has been played—which is partly from the bullshit inside the campaign. When you have The New Yorker write a story about how Sarah Palin was selected… well, that was like Jane Goodall going in and writing about fucking apes mating in the jungle—they don't know what's going on. They're writing from another planet. I like Sarah Palin, I think she was a very attractive candidate, but I think she made a lot of mistakes. But so did Biden.

I am not convinced that Sarah Palin hurt the campaign. People think that this decision was made in some kind of vacuum. I'm not convinced that a McCain/Romney ticket would have outperformed a McCain/Palin. Well, maybe if we'd done Lieberman we would have been down fifteen points after the convention instead of up four. I'm not convinced that Palin, even with all her weaknesses, wasn't the most plausible ticket you could have put forward this year.

KK: What about all the talk about the acrimony between the McCain/Palin camps behind the scenes? What was the story with that?

MG: The reporters who produced those quotes weren't making them up. It was a disgrace to the campaign and John McCain, and I think the people who did that are going to pay a real steep price in the long run, because the media ate it up, the media loved it. Once you've lost the campaign, who holds responsibility for [publicly airing their grievances with Palin] and who escapes with their credibility intact won't be decided by The New York Times. Conservatives are not pleased by this.

KK: One of the most memorable moments in the campaign involving you was your much-watched interview with CNN’s Rick Sanchez, where you danced around naming Jeremiah Wright as an anti-Semite. When I Googled your name, links to that video were the first thing that popped up. The liberal blogs vilified you for that exchange, and I think there was a moment in the video where you suddenly recognized that the whole interview was going to be put on YouTube and go viral. What was the campaign's reaction to the clip? Did you get much response from it outside the communications office?

MG: I was summoned to the office of the campaign manager and given a slap on the wrist. We had a clear directive that we were not to discuss the name of Rev. Wright, and I tiptoed right up to it but I wasn't allowed to cross it. But when I walked back into the communications room I got a round of applause. There was a lot of support among the rank and file; I think it was obvious to anyone that seriously followed the campaign what was going on there. I can't tell if people were being willfully ignorant or if they generally don't believe that [Obama] associated with those kinds of people. But that was a mistake from a communications standpoint.

KK: Do you think McCain was wrong with that call?

MG: It's not for me to second guess how the candidate felt about any particular issue. There are obvious mistakes that were made throughout the campaign. The Rev. Wright issue is of some concern. It was frustrating, because if McCain never mentioned it, the media was going to act like it didn't exist.

KK: If you had to do it again, would you do it differently?

MG: It was what it was. I don't have any regrets about the campaign. It was a moment of incredible entertainment for my colleagues. I went home for Thanksgiving and everyone I know said they saw me on CNN. But this kind of shit happens to everyone in a communications position at some point.

KK: Did you think of going back on CNN and redeeming yourself?

MG: I don't think it would have been in anybody's best interest to go back on with that. I thought [Rick] Sanchez embarrassed himself, but the whole thing was great for him. That's the only time anyone has talked about his show outside of his show. Same thing with Tucker [Bounds] and Campbell Brown. Obviously, in retrospect, you wish Sarah Palin didn't do ten straight nights on the Katie Couric show, but you just move on.

KK: So now you're back at The Weekly Standard. Can we expect to see something from you with the inside scoop on the final days of the McCain campaign?

MG: I don't think there's an appetite for it. I think the truth will out at some point. If the media was remotely competent, it would have reported that story by now. It's a great process story, which is what the media loved most.

KK: Now that you're back in journalism, is there a conflict of interest in covering anything relating to the McCains and the campaign?

MG: We have an agenda at The Weekly Standard. It's overt. McCain was fairly well in line with that agenda, out of all the candidates. I think it's ridiculous when you see the stuff on the other side. Jay Carney is going to be the communications director for the vice president. I mean, Time is not supposed to be an ideological magazine. I don't have a problem with that, either, but when people got bent out of shape with me going over there—this wasn't a major shift for me. This was the same thing as before.

KK: Think you'd ever go back to a campaign?

MG: It was brutal work, but it's hard to say no to a presidential campaign. Plus it was something I was good at. I was a cudgel. I pissed off the media. They were furious about it. That was the effect the campaign was looking for.

The Journal dominates the John Thain/Merrill Lynch/Bank of America fiasco story today.

Thain fired back at B of A yesterday, defending himself by saying the bank knew about his plans for Merrill bonuses and about its massive losses. But the Journal has lots of inside detail on what's going on inside the companies, along with some plain old good analysis like this:

According to a securities filing last week, Merrill's overall compensation and benefit expenses were down by 5.7%, to $15 billion in the year ended Dec. 26, from $15.9 billion a year earlier. The average Merrill employee got $247,423 in compensation and benefits in 2008, down just slightly from 2007.

By contrast, Bank of America employees got $75,577 in average compensation and benefits in 2008, down from $89,420 in 2007.

No wonder Bank of America workers are so ticked off:

When Bank of America announced Thursday that Mr. Thain had resigned, a standing ovation erupted on the bank's equities-trading floor in New York. "It was like New Year's Eve," said one trader who joined in.

The jubilation was emblematic of a growing bitterness among Bank of America employees about the Merrill deal and the headache it is causing for the third-largest U.S. bank in stock-market value.

More good color:

Some Merrill employees are no less wary. When employees in New York are asked to visit Bank of America's investment-banking headquarters in midtown Manhattan, some joke they are heading for the Death Star, the hub of the evil empire manned by Darth Vader in the movie "Star Wars."

The paper also gets inside the boardroom, reporting that there aren't any plans to fire Ken Lewis and adds this interesting bit about the clash of cultures and the pay issue:

The soap opera is likely to take another twist on Thursday, when many Bank of America employees find out how much they are getting in bonuses. The decision won't be final until the bank's board meets Wednesday.

But I think the Journal has been underplaying the revelations about Thain's $1.2 million office redecoration—probably because CNBC's Charlie Gasparino broke the story. In this story, the news that Thain said he will pay the firm for the expense is in the third-to-last paragraph.

Andrew Ross Sorkin of the Times is better on that here, (even if he tries to give a pass to Lehman's Dick Fuld later in the column):

On Monday, Mr. Thain apologized for spending so much to decorate his office and said he would cover the costs. But the damage was done — and while he should be applauded for the gesture, the idea that he could try to buy himself some better P.R. seemed only emblematic of the larger problem. That commode — which, by the way, is a cabinet, not a toilet — may go down in the annals of executive gluttony along with L. Dennis Kozlowski’s $6,000 shower curtain.

The new reality is starting to slowly sink in. And it is not pretty. The celebrity financier has become the new celebrity villain. The switch is playing out on the blogosphere, where people have defaced pictures of Mr. Thain — adding horns and devilish tail — the way Perez Hilton’s celebrity Web site would mock Britney Spears’s body fat.

But the Journal's story is a good look inside the turmoil at Bank of America.

I am sure, though I can't find a link at this moment, that I have complained before about the "Tell Me Something I Don't Know" segment of The Chris Matthews Show. This is the part of Matthews's Sunday morning show when, each week, he promises viewers "scoops and predictions right out of the notebooks of these top reporters!" goes to commercial, returns from commercial, and then exhorts his reporter-panelists to, "Tell me something I don't know!"

Which is, simply, an invitation to speculate. A request to wow Chris Matthews with some tidbit of insider's gossip or some foretelling of future events or some half-thought based on, well, often based on very little. The reporters then try to one-up one another with some counter-intuitive or otherwise memorable nugget or prediction. And everyone knows that Matthews won't ask them how they know this "Something I Don't Know," that no one will ask for more or push for a source beyond the "some say" or "insiders believe" or "I hear" that typically precede these "Somethings."

This past Sunday, Bob Woodward was among Matthews' "top reporter" panelists and, when requested to "tell me something I don't know," Woodward gamely offered the following (h/t, Sam Stein via a CJR reader):

WOODWARD: This may be tantalizing, but vague. I don't think that...

MATTHEWS: Like Deep Throat.

WOODWARD: Like--I don't think the nanny and household tax problems and so forth are over for the Obama administration.

MATTHEWS: Well, it's already hit Geithner and Caroline. Anybody else?

WOODWARD: I say it's not over.

MATTHEWS: Murky.

Woodward says it's not over. Vague but tantalizing. (And boy Matthews did sound tantalized).

The next panelist, the Washington Post's Ann Kornblut was forced to qualify her own offering with "well, I can't top that, but I will, I'll go out on a limb and say the most exiciting political story for a few weeks...is going to be the race to replace Kirsten Gillibrand in New York." (The "keep an eye out for this story" or "this story is going to get a lot of attention" being a common way that some of Matthews's more restrained reporter-panelists handle the "Tell Me Something I Don't Know" segment). And, Newsweek's Howard Fineman felt the need to confess that his offering "is not tantalizing but it's specific," before advising Matthews to "keep your eye on [Richard] Holbrooke" who will be "focus[ing] immediately" on "those rough, wild territories in Pakistan" and "you'll hear a lot of news out of that."

Of Woodward's "murky" offering, HuffPo's Sam Stein writes: "It was the type of gossip ginning, insider reporting that makes D.C. journalism what it is." Or, it's the "type of gossip ginning" that journalists should be embarrassed to do, let alone on national television. As Stein points out, Woodward's "vague" tidbit doesn't even meet the reporting standards to which Chris Matthews (sort of) held another not-Bob-Woodward guest on Hardall earlier last week. "Earlier in the week," writes Stein, "Matthews had shut down similar banter on Hardball when the New York Daily News' Liz Benjamin noted that the unconfirmed rumor mill was saying that Caroline Kennedy had an 'affair issue.'"

But, looking at the transcript of that exchange, it seems to me like Matthews actually first invited that very speculation/banter before then "shutting [it] down" (italics mine):

MATTHEWS: First, Liz, the question is this. Did [Caroline Kennedy] withdraw because of a personal problem perhaps involving her marriage to Ed Schlossberg, or did she withdraw because she got word from the vetters that she had a tax problem or a nanny problem? Which was it of those two?

BENJAMIN: Well, there's a lot of subterfuge going on right now and a lot of spin on all sides of this story. Coming out of the governor's office is the story regarding the nanny problem and perhaps the tax problem, which ironically, would have surfaced in a vetting situation in a questionnaire -- I assume, but we've never seen them publicly -- that the governor had all these candidates fill out.

No one has confirmed and -- not publicly, at least, the affair issue, but that certainly is out there.

MATTHEWS: The what issue?

BENJAMIN: The affair question. I believe that was the question. [ed. note: I believe that was the question, too.]

MATTHEWS: What is the affair -- well, you have just something I did't know. What is the affair question?

BENJAMIN: There's some personal questions -- there`s some personal questions about relationships that are surfacing on blogs and on all sorts of things on the Internet, but nobody has talked about that.

MATTHEWS: Well, how about -- let`s stick to journalism. Let`s not -- I don`t do that here, Liz. Liz, if it`s just -- if it`s just blogging, let`s drop it. OK?

BENJAMIN: Right.

MATTHEWS: If you have got anything to report that`s hard, report it. Don`t -- don`t give me blog stuff here.

No "blog stuff here," but "Woodward stuff" is ok? "Let's stick to journalism" except when I invite you to "Tell Me Something I Don't Know?"

One morning in December 2007, a law-school dropout named David Shankbone sat on a couch in Shimon Peres’s office in Jerusalem. He’d been invited into the Israeli president’s inner sanctum for an exclusive interview with the elder statesman. Peres reclined on a velvet chair next to Shankbone, nibbling cookies while he talked in his soporific baritone about the future of nanotechnology, the likelihood of a first strike against Iran, and why Israeli youth turned to drugs. “He has a thick accent and he talks so low,” Shankbone recalled. “I couldn’t even understand him.”

Shankbone had flown to Israel earlier that week for a press junket on Israeli technology, organized by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. Along with half a dozen reporters from news outlets like BusinessWeek, USA Today, and Slate, he’d been shepherded on a whirlwind tour of the country’s tech industry. Before the trip, Shankbone had optimistically requested an interview with Peres, and was caught off-guard when, four days in, he found out one had been scheduled the following morning. “I flipped out,” he said. Shankbone scrambled to assemble a set of questions. “I think the Shimon Peres interview is one of my worst interviews,” he told me. “I felt like I had this responsibility to ask certain things . . . things he gets asked a million times. I wish it had been a much more philosophical interview. I would love to ask Shimon Peres how he would choose his own death.”

The strange thing about this whole episode isn’t that a little-known reporter landed an hour-long interview with Shimon Peres. It’s that he isn’t a professional journalist. Shankbone isn’t even his real name. It’s the nom de plume of David Miller, who until recently was a paralegal at Herrick, Feinstein, a top New York law firm. For the past year and a half, he’s been moonlighting as a reporter for Wikinews, a Wikipedia offshoot that’s languished in obscurity since its debut in 2004. Wikinews was created as the news equivalent of the encyclopedia: anybody can write and edit stories. It is an experiment in pure amateur journalism, and it functions a bit like a haphazard wire service. Most of the five to ten stories posted each day are cobbled together from mainstream sources; only two or three a week involve original reporting, the bulk of which is done by two dozen “Wikinewsies,” like Miller, who are accredited through the site.

Miller is Wikinews’ star reporter, and his niche is in-depth q&as. He’s interviewed nearly forty public and not-so-public figures, including the Reverend Al Sharpton, journalist Gay Talese, the editors of The Onion, and the owner of an S&M dungeon. He posts the mostly unedited transcripts on the site, along with a photo of the subject and the occasional snippet of audio. “I just wanted people to talk to,” the thirty-four-year-old told me over dinner at 7A, an all-night joint that’s one of his favorite places to eat near his apartment in Manhattan’s East Village. “I was curious about people who attained goals and how they felt about them.”

Miller’s journalistic sideline began in 2005 after he dropped out of Fordham Law School. He says he couldn’t afford the tuition for his final year because he missed a few credit-card payments and didn’t qualify for loans. His older sister gave him a low-end digital camera for his birthday (he’s since upgraded), and he began snapping photos around the city, which he’d then upload to relevant Wikipedia articles that had no images.

It was around this time he created his pseudonym. “Miller” was too generic, he said, and not easy to track online. (Type “David Shankbone” into Google, and he’s a top hit.) Miller liked the sound of “Shankbone” because of its masculine, slightly pornographic ring. The Israelis he met on his press junket thought it was Jewish, a reference to the beef shank bone used in Passover seders.

Eventually, Miller got tired of just taking photos. He’d always considered himself a writer—he wrote about the war in Iraq and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina for a student news blog at Fordham—and when a volunteer Wikipedia editor suggested he check out the fledgling Wikinews, Miller decided to broaden his journalistic repertoire. He had already begun contacting minor public figures, such as First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams and BBC America’s “Punk Professor” Vivien Goldman, offering to take free, quasi-professional portraits of them for Wikipedia. It seemed a natural step to interview them.
Miller put out dozens of cold calls. He called people like Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell because he considered them “cultural icons,” and others because he found their line of work interesting. (He interviewed German-American folk singer Antje Duvekot, for instance, simply because he wanted to interview a folk singer, and she was available.) Although Miller has managed interviews with a few high-profile subjects like Peres, he’s relatively unknown outside the Wiki community. Some of his pieces have page views in the single digits.

Miller’s interview style is conversational. His opening gambit is often arbitrary—for instance, he started his interview with Gay Talese by asking if it bothered him that his name has come to mean “homosexual.” (“No, it doesn’t bother me at all,” Talese responded.) Miller will often talk about himself. He says it’s soothing to share his experiences, particularly his sense of failure after dropping out of law school—and it seems to encourage his subjects to open up. “I’m telling you stuff I never said to anybody,” voice actor Billy West, who provided the voices for Ren & Stimpy and Bugs Bunny, told Miller after speaking about his alcoholism and being beaten by his father. Miller doesn’t play “gotcha,” but he does ask unusual questions and will push a bit—but not too much. “If I’m being combative, they can just end it on me,” he said. He once allowed Senator Sam Brownback to assert but not support his claim that God has a problem with homosexuality. “To really pin Brownback down,” Miller told me, “that’s a job for Chris Matthews.”

Not that Miller asks only softball questions. Here’s an exchange from his interview with Ingrid Newkirk, the co-founder and president of PETA:

David Shankbone: Do you have any regrets?

Ingrid Newkirk: Professionally? Because that’s what we are talking about . . . .

DS: Or personally.

IN: I’m not going to talk about personally!

DS: Just in general—in your life.

IN: These are just terrible questions!

DS: Sometimes terrible questions birth wonderful answers.

IN: Oh, pwah!

At their best, his interviews can make for juicy, revealing reads. Take this example from his interview with gay author Edmund White:

David Shankbone: You have an open relationship?

Edmund White: Yes.

DS: Do you think that’s a necessity in order to have a successful relationship?

EW: I wouldn’t preach for anybody else; I mean, everybody’s different. But for me, yes.

DS: Where do you tend to find your sexual partners?

EW: Online, now. Silverdaddies.com; daddyhunt. That’s where you go if you’re older. Or Manhunt and gay.com. Or slavesformaster. Those are all sites where I’ve met people.

DS: Are you a slave or a master?

EW: A slave, but I’m not much of one.

Miller is no provocateur or interrogator like Oriana Fallaci, who opened an interview with Yasir Arafat by asking him his age, twice, and who once asked the Shah of Iran if he would have thrown her in jail had she been Iranian. Miller prefers Terry Gross or James Lipton and cites them as influences. He wants to indulge his subjects, and delve into their personalities. He can be gentle and accommodating. He wants them to talk about their ideas and their craft. He typically tells a subject, “We don’t have an angle. It’s more of an information thing, just to get your thoughts and feelings.”

Miller told me he usually doesn’t do much research on his subjects. He credits his general knowledge for getting him through many interviews. Sometimes he’ll just read his subject’s Wikipedia profile to prepare. Still, he says, “I try to come off as someone completely knowledgeable.” He reads The Economist and checks Google News reflexively at work. He has e-mail alerts for keywords related to his idiosyncratic interests: rocker “Peter Doherty,” “Chinese credit,” and “world economy 2016” (interestingly, he told me early last year that he was convinced there will be a global economic collapse in eight years).

Miller can offer his subjects something the mainstream media often can’t: a chance to archive their words in the eternal Wiki-vault. Miller’s association with Wikipedia appealed to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, and one of Israel’s leading papers, Yedioth Aharonoth, lauded Shimon Peres for being the first leader to grant an interview to someone it described as a “senior” Wikipedia editor. Miller has other advantages: he has no professional duty to the public as surrogate or watchdog, and he isn’t trying to sell a product. He also doesn’t have an editor to contend with. This freedom can give his interviews, at their best, a disarming authenticity. They’re unpolished and earnest, if sometimes rambling. Miller tends to think of his work more as a personal art project than journalism. He may share a sense of curiosity with many professionals, but he doesn’t identify with them. In fact, he views the mainstream press with a bit of contempt. “The whole neutral media thing is just crap,” he told me during a short tirade. But he certainly doesn’t consider his work a substitute. “Someone who sits there and blogs about something will never replace a professional class,” he said.

When I asked Gay Talese what it was like to be interviewed by Miller, he told me Miller was polite and professional, but not distinguished in any way. Memoirist Augusten Burroughs, whom Miller also interviewed, praised him in an e-mail: “He has the mind of a lawyer. Which is to say, he’s extremely logical.”

In person, Miller possesses the self-assurance of a prosecutor and the practiced nonchalance of an arriviste. He dropped names as though he had a tick, and made it sound like he was chummy with many of his subjects. Maybe it’s true: on a blog he started this summer, he mentions that Ingrid Newkirk sent him a box of vegan food.

Miller’s work feels like a bit of a throwback to a time when Oriana Fallaci published long transcripts of her interviews in book form and David Frost broadcast a six-hour sit-down with Richard Nixon. Not that Miller is in their league as an interviewer, but there is something refreshing about the oral-history-like nature of his work. Bite-sized clips of recycled talking points dominate today’s media, but Miller strives in his interviews, however imperfectly, to be transparent and complete. He lets the subject’s voice come through. He gives the public his raw materials. He’s a conduit, without straining to be something more. 

True Crime: An American Anthology

Harold Schechter, editor

The Library of America

788 pages, $40

The teenage girl gave birth in a Delaware hotel room; she and her boyfriend would later claim that the infant was stillborn. But the coroner said the baby suffered blunt trauma to the head. This was 1996. The young mother and father, sweethearts from an upscale town, eventually pleaded guilty to manslaughter after one turned on the other.

Eight months later, another teenager gave birth, this time at her high-school prom, this time in New Jersey, and killed the baby in the ladies’ room. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter, too.

I was at the New York Daily News for both of these stories, and they were on the front page for days. What made them such big stories? Well, it seemed to me that scared young parents killing their own kids was pretty much as bad as it gets. To me, with ten years in the business at the time, this phenomenon also struck me as something new.

How wrong I was.

The very first entry in True Crime: An American Anthology, a sprawling, blood-soaked, alternately riveting and revolting survey of 350 years of American crime writing, concerns one Mary Martin of Massachusetts. In 1646, this young woman was “left . . . in the House of a Married Man, who became so Enamoured on her, that he attempted her Chastity.” One thing led to another, and with her third assignation, poor Mary became pregnant and had a baby, whom she promptly murdered “by her self in a Dark Room.” She was hanged until “she dyed.”

Times change. Crimes don’t.

Mary’s story is told in an execution sermon written by Cotton Mather. These speeches were delivered in no doubt ominous tones to expectant crowds before the condemned met their deaths, and were then printed and distributed. The editor of the Library of America’s fascinating if uneven collection, Harold Schechter, identifies these sermons as the first examples of true American crime writing, a genre that would appear in varying forms—articles, songs, newsreels, and door-stopping volumes like this one—throughout the country’s history.

Beginning in that dark room, True Crime ranges from one end of the country to another, from barren plains to urban alleys, from Hollywood to backwoods Kentucky. Within its pages, we encounter a good many famous Americans, including Abraham Lincoln. Even more numerous are the famous writers—James Ellroy, Truman Capote, Calvin Trillin—as well as journalists who might be better known to those in the business, such as Joseph Mitchell, Meyer Berger, and Dorothy Kilgallen.

This is not a book for the faint of heart. Victims are shot, stabbed, bludgeoned, mutilated, poisoned, drowned, electrocuted, bashed in the head with weights, and shot again, and their bodies are disposed of in a variety of creative yet rarely successful ways. Lovers turn on each other—just like those two teenagers in that Delaware hotel room. Read one after the other, the stories are both hard to put down and exhausting; there is so much inhumanity. But taken in smaller doses, True Crime is filled with dark pleasures and more than a few surprises.

It is also a great place to find succinct accounts of some of the most notable crimes in American history, crimes whose details have often been lost in the fog of legend. Jack Webb—yes, of Dragnet—outlines the particulars of the Black Dahlia murder from 1947 in suitably clear and crisp prose. And Damon Runyon brings his considerable linguistic gifts to the Snyder-Gray murder case, forever captured in James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity and the movie of the same name. “Now the woman and the crumpled little corset salesman,” Runyon writes, “their once piping-hot passion colder than a dead man’s toes, begin trying to save their respective skins from the singeing at Sing Sing, each trying to shove the other into the room with the little green door.” That would be the room where the electric chair is kept. A picture of Ms. Synder getting the juice (as Runyon might have put it) was soon splashed across the cover of the Daily News, after a reporter strapped a concealed camera to his ankle.

The surprises in True Crime are even more striking, and start early. The writer of the second piece, “The Murder of a Daughter,” engages in the worst kind of base sensationalism when he recounts how parents fed their girl excrement before killing her. (Parents beware: lots of kids die in this book.) The detail has no reason to exist beyond the author’s desire to shock the reader. If that story had come across my desk, I would have trimmed the excrement line in an instant. Its author? Benjamin Franklin.
A hundred or so pages later, one of the legends of the so-called New Journalism is deflated, at least in my mind. Truman Capote has been quoted as saying he wanted In Cold Blood to be a new genre: the first true-crime saga to use literary techniques to tell its story. But in the late 1800s, Celia Thaxter turned a double slaying off the coast of New England into a perfect little novella called “A Memorable Murder.” It’s all there: rich, novelistic descriptions of the sea and the barren island on which the killings took place, internal monologues from the characters (hypothetical, of course), and a remarkable feeling of suspense, especially considering that the author reveals the ending on the first page. (This is actually a quirk of many of the early selections here.)

Other high points in True Crime include Abraham Lincoln’s wry tale of three brothers accused of a slaying that apparently did not happen; a series of “Murder Ballads” that describe killings in song; an excerpt from Herbert Asbury’s evocative “Gangs of New York”; Jim Thompson’s Texas-spare “Ditch of Doom”; and Joseph Mitchell’s “Execution,” whose ice-clear prose throws some of the flowery language elsewhere into stark, unfortunate relief. And therein lies the biggest flaw in this anthology: it’s an anthology—its best offerings can’t help but put some of the lesser examples to shame, no matter how well they might have stood on their own.

I feel sorry, for example, for the anonymous author of “Jesse Harding Pomeroy, The Boy Fiend,” which recounts the crimes of a young torturer and murderer of small children (see note to parents above) in Boston in 1871. That selection just happens to come after an entry from Mark Twain, who describes a well-known Nevada desperado in the following manner:

When he moved along the side­walk in his excessively long-tailed frock-coat, shiny stump-toed boots, and with dainty little slouch hat tipped over left eye, the small-fry toughs made room for his majesty; when he entered the restaurant, the waiters deserted bankers and merchants to overwhelm him with obsequious service; when he shouldered his way to a bar, the shouldered parties wheeled indignantly, recognized him, and—apologized.

No matter how many times you’ve read Twain, his easy grace with words, his sense of humor, and his handle on details never cease to amaze. Mr. Anonymous didn’t stand a chance.

In one case, at least, Schechter puts the varying talents and viewpoints of different writers to good use. He has chosen two entries about the trial of Robert Allen Edwards, who drowned his girlfriend in 1915, a case remarkably similar to the one that inspired Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy.

Because of this similarity, in fact, Dreiser himself was hired to cover the Edwards trial for the New York Post, and a portion of his coverage is included here. It is ponderous, puffed up, and lacking in drama. Not so Dorothy Kilgallen’s coverage of the same trial, which follows Dreiser’s. Hers is shot through with suspense from start to finish. If her prose sounds a bit dated, with a distinctly pulpish accent, this was still a woman who didn’t let words get in the way of a great story. “Next on the stand for the prosecution was Rosetta Culver,” writes Kilgallen. “She was everything Freda was not—blond, attractive, poised. I wondered if handsome Bobby had ever tried to lead her down the cemetery path.”

Of course, both Dreiser and Kilgallen faced a challenge known to all crime writers (and all detectives) since time immemorial: they didn’t see the crime itself. So they spent a lot of time in court. Numerous entries here are actually more about court reporting than crime reporting, and much of what unfolds does so in front of a judge, jury, and press box. Kilgallen smartly used many direct quotes from the transcript to build tension. Not all the other writers are so canny. Some of the courtroom selections could have been trimmed, and the same thing could be said of Cotton Mather’s sermons, which run to thirty-one thunderous, exhausting pages.

In its closing entries, True Crime allows us to compare contemporary crime writing with its inarguably well-represented past. Gay Talese’s language flows nicely in his take on the Manson murders, “Charlie Manson’s Home on the Range,” even if his reporting seems lazy—he opens with a description of a ranch hand and his girlfriend sitting on a fence that, while nicely drawn, has nothing to do with the story, and is distracting. (It felt like this vignette was the first thing he saw, so it was the first thing he wrote.) Jimmy Breslin, writing in the Daily News, brings the harrowing streets of late-1970s New York alive in “Son of Sam,” making me shudder as I remembered the dirty city in those days, yet also making me imagine with a twisted journalist’s envy how exciting it would have been to cover this particular story.

But it is James Ellroy, in the third-to-last entry, who is the real emotional closer of True Crime. So many children have been slain before his “My Mother’s Killer” begins on page 707 that it is oddly refreshing to have, here, a child seeking the details of his mother’s death. Ellroy’s writing is sharp and spare in the extreme: the story is only thirteen rat-a-tat-tat pages long, without a wasted consonant or vowel. Yet the turmoil of this successful writer reimagining his childhood, peering through investigative details, and looking at grisly crime-scene photographs of his murdered mother, is brought remarkably, and awfully, to life.

I read the piece when it appeared in GQ some years ago. On rereading, I was better able to appreciate Ellroy’s language and skill, but was still as haunted by the story as I was the first time—perhaps more so. If True Crime doesn’t cause my bookcase to collapse, I’m sure I’ll pick it up again to reread Ellroy’s little masterpiece. It will come in handy whenever I require a jolt of cruelty to remind me that my life isn’t so bad after all, or need to be inspired by some genuinely fine journalism. 

Bloomberg comes down hard on Madoff's so-called feeder funds, which it correctly labels "enablers" in its headline.

If the 70-year-old money manager was running a con, then his marketers like Access International, wittingly or not, were part of the scam.

The purported mission of such feeder funds was to vet hedge funds for wealthy clients. Instead, the line between victim and perpetrator was blurred. Middlemen like Littaye funneled billions of dollars to Madoff, even, in some cases, when they suspected he was engaged in questionable trading practices. In return, they reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in client fees.

Bloomberg quotes a Swiss banker saying Madoff's touts knew his returns were too good to be true, but thought he was doing that by "front-running" share purchases, using the trading side of his company to make money off inside information on clients' trades that were big enough to move the market. That's way illegal, of course.

This banker straight-up admits to Bloomberg that he thought Madoff was front-running. And others have, too:

Other money managers made similar winks and nods about Madoff’s advantage, according to people who were pitched the funds. One Swiss bank, Geneva-based Union Bancaire Privee, which had $700 million invested with Madoff, told clients in a Dec. 17, 2008, letter that “in essence, the perceived edge was Madoff’s ability to gather and process market-order-flow information to time the implementation of the split-strike option strategy.”

This is an amazing number:

The most important middlemen were the feeder funds that enabled Madoff to evolve from a retail asset manager running money for individual clients to a wholesaler managing large pools of capital. At the end, seven of Madoff’s top feeders had a combined $25 billion in assets with him, led by Fairfield Greenwich Group’s $7.5 billion.

And Robert Shiller is interesting on the social psychology of the Ponzi scheme:

It’s the same mind-set that’s behind economic bubbles, which are “naturally occurring Ponzi schemes,” says Robert Shiller, a professor of economics at Yale University and author of Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University Press, 2000). Successive waves of investors generate gains for the last wave until the bubble bursts.

“The essence of a Ponzi scheme is a story that justifies these enthusiasms,” Shiller says, whether the phenomenon is Internet stocks or housing prices or Madoff. “The social feedback loop of other people making money causes people to suspend disbelief.”

Bloomberg is very smart to show how the feeder funds' managers ended up with most of their clients' money:

The feeder funds became Madoff’s ad hoc sales force. The payoff was the steady flow of fees. Every billion dollars invested in Madoff generated $150 million in paper profits a year for clients, based on a 15 percent return.

If a fund charged its clients 1 percent of the assets under management and 20 percent of the gains, as the largest one did, that translated into $41 million in annual fees.

Assuming Madoff didn’t do any investing on behalf of his clients, as investigators now suspect, the feeder funds were, in effect, being paid out of principal, which would have been depleted after 15 years.

In other words, much of the money invested in Madoff through feeder funds wound up in the pockets of fund managers.

This is a long but worthy effort by Bloomberg.

This past fall, I drove from St. Louis to Osage County, in central Missouri, to meet a hog farmer named Russ Kremer. As I pulled into the driveway of the white farmhouse where he was raised, Kremer ambled out in his rubber boots, offering me a hearty handshake. We got into his silver Chevy truck, a circa-1992 model caked with hog-infused dirt, and drove along the rolling roads of Kremer’s native countryside. He showed me the barns where he raises his herds, pointing out the deep straw, the roomy paddocks, and the many-hued, multi-sized pigs destined for sausage and bacon. As we walked up to one of the barns, Kremer started explaining that pigs raised naturally and allowed to root and run around taste better, in his opinion, than those raised in industrial operations. That taste, he said, is what has allowed him to make a living while other hog farmers are going out of business.

Then he said something that sounded startling coming from a farmer in the Ozark foothills. “I love chefs,” he smiled. “They’ve gotten into story pork.”

Story pork. Not just any old shrink-wrapped chop, but pork from a place, raised by a farmer, with a story. Meat with a narrative.

I don't know how Ken Lewis the man is holding up under the pressure, but I can tell you his Wall Street Journal stipple portrait is not faring well. Shades of happy/sad dot-drawings of Vikram Pandit and Hank Paulson last summer. This credit crisis is brutal, even on cartoons.

Here was the Lewis dot-portrait that accompanied a January 16 story headlined "Lewis Defends Merrill Purchase"
:

All good. But by the next day, the pressure was evidently taking its toll as the embattled Bank of America chief "went on offense":

Whoa, stipple Ken. Your dots are bunched way too tight. Relax those lines, man. Add some naphtha to the mix. Or have you considered acupuncture? At a minimum, the Audit recommends some stipple shiatsu and a long walk on a pen-and-ink beach landscape.

Monday morning, President Barack Obama signed two executive orders to spur an economic recovery plan founded upon clean energy and environmental protection. It is a move that is sure to please the many journalists who long ago realized that the success of sustainability goals would ultimately depend on strong financial incentives.

A poll released last week by the Pew Research Center found that addressing the nation’s energy problems ranks sixth among a list of twenty voter concerns, with sixty percent of those polled agreeing that it should be a “top priority” for government. On the other hand, concern for protecting the environment and dealing with global warming has declined precipitously in the last few years, with those issues ranking seventeenth and dead last, respectively. The takeaway message for journalists is that those “stewardship” frames will not be sufficient in terms of galvanizing support for clean energy. In the pursuit of public engagement, the press would be better advised to link sustainability issues to economic growth and “green” jobs.

Andrew Revkin summed up this idea—and presciently forecast Obama’s speech Monday—in an article that was unfortunately buried on Page A13 of last Friday’s The New York Times:

The declining interest in global warming and other environmental issues might be unsurprising at a time when Americans face far more imminent threats to their jobs and homes…

But some experts in climate and energy policy say, given Americans’ continuing concern about filling their gas tanks and lighting their homes, [President Barack] Obama might still succeed in shoring up public support by packaging his climate policy as part of a larger push for a safer, cleaner menu of energy choices.

Monday morning, Obama did just that. But media outlets have been employing a similar strategy in their own stories for some time. In the January 12 issue of The New Yorker, for instance, Elizabeth Kolbert had a long and fascinating profile of environmental activist Van Jones and his quest to “green the ghetto." Jones wants to ensure that the poorest orders of society profit from any shift toward a clean-energy economy. “That’s the only goal that’s morally compelling enough to generate enough energy to pull this transition off,” he told Kolbert. His persuasive logic led to the passage of the Green Jobs Act in December 2007, which targets low-income trainees.

No money has yet been appropriated to support that legislation, but that seems bound to change rapidly. Obama urged Congress to pass the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, saying that the $825 billion stimulus package will create “millions” of jobs tied to energy efficiency and sustainability. Still, like most news accounts, Kolbert’s article contains a measure of skepticism:

[T]he basic premise of Jones’s appeal—that combating global warming is a good way to lift people out of poverty—is very much open to debate. Economists generally agree that the key to addressing climate change is to raise the cost of burning fossil fuels, either directly, through a carbon tax, or indirectly, through a cap-and-trade program. Low-income families are the ones that would be hardest hit by such a cost increase. They could be compensated through some kind of rebate, or a cut in other taxes; it’s been proposed, for example, that revenues from a carbon tax could be used to reduce the payroll tax. But it’s not at all clear that the number of jobs created by, say, an expanding solar industry would be greater than the number lost through, say, a shrinking coal-mining industry. Nor is it clear that a green economy would be any better at providing work for the chronically unemployed than our present, “gray” economy has been.

Perhaps such clarity is impossible at this point, but reporters might note that there is a growing consensus that the green economy will pay off. Friday’s Los Angeles Times carried an interesting op-ed column from Frank Luntz, a conservative pollster and political consultant who, unlike most Republicans, has warmed to the federal government’s economic stimulus package. According to a poll he conducted in December:

Fully 84% of the public wants more money spent by the federal government -- and 83% wants more spent by state governments -- to improve America's infrastructure. And here's the kicker: 81% of Americans are personally prepared to pay 1% more in taxes for the cause…

… And Americans understand that infrastructure is not just roads, bridges and rails. In fact, they rated fixing energy facilities as their highest priority. Roads and highways scored second, and clean-water treatment facilities third.

California is the first test case for such spending. On Monday, Obama ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider granting a waiver (denied under the Bush administration) that would allow the state to set automobile emissions standards that are stricter than those of the federal government. Obtaining the waiver would be a major step toward achieving the goals set out in AB-32, a 2006 California law that requires the state to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and many others think enforcing that law will be a boon for the economy, but there are still hurdles to clear. The most important of these is how we allay the burden of rising energy costs for the poorest orders of society.

Last Monday night, as President Obama celebrated his inauguration, PBS’s Nova broadcast a well-timed, hour-long documentary on California’s “Big Energy Gamble.” The piece opens by reporting that drought, fire, rising sea level, and other predicted impacts of climate change “seem particularly dire” in California. But that is just a reminder, really; that clean energy would help the environment is a given. What Californians really want to know is this: Will laws like AB-32 help the economy?

Van Jones, the subject of Kolbert’s New Yorker profile, also pops up on the PBS show. Jones, who is based in Oakland, takes Nova around Richmond, an impoverished city on the east side of the San Francisco Bay, and points out how retrofitting energy-inefficient small businesses and homes could save occupants hundreds of dollars per year on utility bills. Likewise, other sources, including Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, tell Nova that new technologies will provide California companies with “worldwide business opportunities.” The bottom line is always cost, however. While most efficiency improvements are guaranteed to pay for themselves, Nova talks to low-income homeowners and small businesses alike who say they cannot wait even a few years for the return on their investment.

The economics of sustainability is clearly a frame that is of particular interest to readers and audiences these days. Nova spends relatively little time discussing the impacts of global warming, which are presented only as contextual background. Though there remain many points of climate science that the media can and should explore, this seems a positive development because it implies that the press has accepted the basic threat of warming and is now prepared to address the cost and feasibility of various solutions. In an excellent analysis of the Pew Research Center survey, which found that Americans are far more concerned with energy than they are with the environment, Matthew Nisbet offered this advice:

It's time to turn the page on the "war on science," "inconvenient truths," and "denier" rhetoric that were battle cries for the Left during the Bush administration and 2008 election … It's also time to stop focusing narrowly on remote polar impacts, looming environmental disaster, or symbols such as polar bears. These exemplars are either not personally relevant enough to most audiences, are dismissed as remote and far off in the future, or easily re-framed as "alarmism" sending interpretations back into the mental box of lingering scientific uncertainty.

Nisbet’s message is not specifically intended for the press, however. “It’s time to stop blaming the public, journalists, and the media,” he argues, “The communication burden instead rests with political leaders, scientists, advocates, and policy experts.”

It is a very astute point. The media should not be held solely accountable, as they often are, for explaining why the world needs to manage its resources more efficiently. But part of the burden—indeed, a large part—is still theirs and cannot be passed off to other communicators. In particular, the press must improve its reporting of clean-energy economics. In the same way that early, science-oriented coverage swung between catastrophe and hoax, stories about the economics thereof gravitate toward extreme opinions. Journalists must stop quoting sources that say this transition can be achieved with no sacrifice as well as those who say that it will lead to economic ruin. Neither is true.

Furthermore, reporters must also not be fooled into asking themselves whether or not clean energy is worth pursuing. Obama’s speech Monday morning should have erased any lingering uncertainty: this is the plan, and it is founded upon mounting evidence that efficiency and sustainability can both save and earn money for individuals and businesses alike. “We owe [to the millions who have lost jobs in the last year] and to every single American to act with a sense of urgency and common purpose. We can't afford distractions and we cannot afford delays,” Obama said.

There will be financial strain, of course—but the question should not be can we manage it, but rather how we manage it and what policies and technologies we will need to do so. There is always room for disagreement, of course, and many individuals and industries will continue to resist this change. Currently, though, clean energy is our best (and perhaps only) strategy for working our way back to global financial solvency. Reporters should absolutely seek out those who disagree with that strategy, but they cannot keep regurgitating the simplistic free-market argument that it will leave the economy in tatters. It already is, and reporters must ask their sources, if not this plan, then what? Doing nothing is no longer an option.

Obama said it perfectly: “These are extraordinary times, and it calls for swift and extraordinary action. At a time of such great challenge for America, no single issue is as fundamental to our future as energy.”

From a recent Associated Press report:

The country's top chefs, several of whom traveled to Washington for Obama's inauguration this week, hope that Obama's flair for good food will encourage people to expand their horizons when it comes to what they eat...

These chefs tout locally grown, environmentally friendly and - most importantly - nutritious food...

Dan Barber, chef at New York's popular Blue Hill restaurant and a frequent critic of the country's food policy, says a few small gestures from the president and first lady Michelle Obama could accomplish what many of the chefs have been working toward for years.

...Barber said good food needs more publicity, and he hopes Obama and his wife will advertise what they are eating and what they are feeding their children, 10-year-old Malia and 7-year-old Sasha...

Wait: so maybe MSNBC, when it "reported" a few weeks ago what Malia and Sasha were being fed for lunch at their new school, was actually just… advocating, in a way, for healthier U.S. food policy?

Back to the AP report:

[Rick] Bayless, the Chicago chef, says the Obamas could make a world of difference if they just publish what they are eating every day.

"Everyone's going to want to be like the Obamas," he said.

Setting aside the assumptions being made here that "what they are eating every day" is always a role-model worthy menu: President (then, President-elect) Obama did pen that “Open Letter to My Daughters” for Parade magazine. Maybe he would be game for “publish[ing] what they are eating every day.” (An "Obama Family Food Diary" in Everyday With Rachel Ray?)

So now it's John Thain's turn to wave the knife.

The Financial Times leads its page one this morning with a report that Bank of America officials were involved with Merrill Lynch's now-infamous bonuses before they were enacted and paid.

However, a person familiar with Mr Thain's actions said the ousted chief had at least two conversations with BofA's chief administrative officer, J. Steele Alphin, one of the bank's most senior executives, before a December 8 board meeting at which Merrill's bonus payments were approved.

This person said Mr Alphin recommended, and Mr Thain accepted, a proposal to change Merrill's incentive compensation mix – 60 per cent cash and 40 per cent stock – to conform with BofA's system of 70 per cent cash and 30 per cent stock. The stock portion of the payouts was made January 2, the day after the deal closed, in BofA stock.

It looks like Thain has hired some top-notch crisis-management PR folks. Not only is he firing back quickly, he's defending (however weakly) his bonus moves by saying they were down 41 percent from the previous year, according to Dow Jones Newswires. He's also defending the $21 billion in losses his company developed suddenly last month.

Probably more importantly, he's decided to take a $1.2 million hit for that over-the-top Pimp My Office spree he went on as Merrill's new CEO.

"The expenses were incurred over a year ago in a very different environment," he said, but he called them a mistake in light of the current conditions.

Sure, Ken Lewis of B of A was trying to save his own skin by scapegoating Thain last week, but Thain made it easy for him by putting on the horns and bleating.

Time for them both to be put out to pasture.

Fox News's Geraldo Rivera was promised a "2:00 interview" with Gov. Blagojevich. Snubbed by the governor's "sleazy PR guy," Geraldo-- "rather than allow us to be victimized here at Fox News, where the first cable news interview was promised" -- went to "the parking lot of The View" to get that interview.

Highlights:

GERALDO: ....The problem is those tapes sound so tacky. They sound as if you're attempting to sell that office ...

All that was -- any guesses?-- "out of the proper context," said Blagojevich. (And no, Geraldo didn't ask the governor to supply the missing context).

GERALDO: Are you broke now?.... Are you destitute?....

Blagojevich declined to "whine" about his "fate."

Then, towards the end of the interview, after the governor observed that there haven't been a lot of nice things said about him lately, came this exchange:

GERALDO: I'll buy you dinner.

BLAGOJEVICH: Is that ethical?

So I couldn't help but notice, reading The Swan Song Heard 'Round the World just now, an odd collusion between ad and editorial. See if you can spot it, too:

Yeah. Kristol Swan Song, meet glass swan.

Which: Coincidence? Probably. But, then, it's not like ad-news synergy is anything new...

Very Significant Update: My colleagues and I have done some digging, and it turns out that the advertised swan in question--the "Love" swan, a "symbol of elegance, faithfulness, and monogamy" and part of "the Steuben collection of symbolic miniature animals known as Hand Coolers"--is, though manufactured by Steuben Glass...made of crystal. Which means that the Times's page places the Kristol Swan Song next to a Crystal Swan. Which means in turn that, in the matter of Synergy v. Coincidence, I'm leaning closer to Synergy...

During the question-and-answer section of Saturday night's Miss America pageant, Miss New York, Taylor Smith, fielded this question:

In Governor Sarah Palin's campaign for vice president, the media [ed. note: meaning, SNL?] made an issue of her having been a Miss America* contestant. Is that fair?

Miss New York mostly declined the invitation to criticize (or defend) "the media," using her allotted response time instead to stand up for "what the Miss America organization is all about." Have a look:

*wasn't Palin actually a runner-up for Miss Alaska and, thus, technically, never actually a contender for Miss America?

Now that Barack Obama is president, one columnist wanted to know, weren’t the late-night comedians, who had taken so many potshots at George Bush, “now soft-peddling ridicule of their golden boy?”

That’s a hard sell, because the correct phrase is “soft-pedaling.”

There is, though, a kind of twisted logic that could lead one to believe that “soft-peddle” is correct.

To “peddle” is to sell or market something. If you’re “soft-peddling,” that logic goes, you’re not selling it really hard; your heart’s not in it. The columnist was wondering if the comedians didn’t put their hearts into ridiculing Obama.

Sounds good, but, unfortunately, the dozens of news outlets that have used that spelling in recent months should be kicking themselves. They should have been “soft-pedaling.”

The phrase “soft-pedaling” has nothing to do with selling, and everything to do with feet. As we learned with crescendo, many English phrases have musical origins. Instruments like pianos, organs and harps have any number of “pedals” that are used to change the tone of the music. One of those on the piano is the “soft pedal,” and it does just that—softens the tone.

Thus, if you “soft pedal” something, you’re toning it down. The columnist was wondering whether the comedians were going easy on Obama, toning down the jabs. Sure, it’s not far from “soft peddle,” but it’s a homonymic—and etymological—error.

“Pedal” has the same root as “pedicure,” “pedicab,” and “pedipalp,” derived from Latin for “foot.” (And if you need to look up “pedipalp,” do so—it’s worth the effort.) “Peddle” apparently derives from a Latin term for a person of a lower rank, though its path, too, can be walked back to “foot.”

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the first use of “soft-pedal” as a verb to 1915, in The Saturday Evening Post. It took another thirty-seven years for it to transmute into a noun, “soft-pedaling.” (An alternative spelling is "soft-pedalling.")

So watch those homonyms, or you might end up with your foot in your mouth.

Those words have been "taken out of context" seems to be Gov. Blagojevich's go-to reply when asked by reporters about some of the things he's said or stands accused of saying.

For example, on The View moments ago:

BARBARA WALTERS: You've compared yourself to Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi. Are you really seeing yourself as one of great martyrs of history?

BLAGOJEVICH: No. In fact, that was taken out of context.

When I mentioned Mandela, Gandhi and Dr. King it was in response to a question about how I felt after I was arrested and what my thoughts were. And I talked about, I thought first of my two daughters. I thought of my wife. And then I thought about some historic figures who have experienced similar experiences. Under no circumstances am I comparing myself to Dr. King or Mahatma Gahndhi or Nelson Mandela. I must say all three were great men who have been an inspiration to me and I think about men like that always but certainly during a difficult time like I'm facing now.

The governor provides the missing "context:" he was not comparing himself to these men, just comparing their "similar experiences."

Another "out of context" moment:

WALTERS: Let's get to the big question...You've denied trying to sell Pres. Obama's senate seat but you've been wiretapped saying, "I've got this thing. It's golden. I'm just not giving it up for nothing" a lot of expletives in the way...If that's not selling a senate seat, what is?

BLAGOJEVICH: You have to understand these were private conversations taking place over a long period of time...These are snippets of conversation taken out of context...

WALTERS: But did you say these things?

BLAGOJEVICH: Well I think.... if you hear the whole story...under no circumstance was I trying to sell a senate seat...

WALTERS: Let me ask this one question. Did you say --in context, out of context, it's on a wire tape -- did you say those things... Here is your chance. No lawyers. You're talking to the public. Please answer that part of it. Otherwise why are you wasting time on these programs?

BLAGOJEVICH: Again...

WALTERS: Did you say those things?

BLAGOJEVICH: Whatever the tapes are, they're going to come out and they'll speak for themselves. The tapes will show the whole story. They will take all the conversations in the proper context....

WALTERS: I guess what I'm trying to say without pushing you again is that you do not deny, although those sentences may be in context with others, you have not now denied that somewhere along the line you said those things. If that's the case, I'll move on.

BLAGOJEVICH: I can't confirm or deny anything when I haven't had a chance to hear the tapes...

What might be a better way to handle Blago's "out of context" comeback (if, that is, you aren't too busy fixating on getting him to admit to saying things that there are tapes of him, allegedly, saying)? How about, simply, the way ABC News's Diane Sawyer did on Good Morning America earlier:

BLAGOJEVICH: ...again, they took snippets of conversations completely out of context. Didn't provide all the tapes that tell the whole story and when the whole story comes out you'll see that the effort was to work to have a senator who can best represent Illinois and one that can help us create jobs and provide health care..

SAWYER: Help me with context. Help me with the context that explains I've got this thing, it's bleeping golden. I'm just not giving it up for bleeping nothing..

BLAGOJEVICH: Again, I can't go into the details of that case and I wish they would allow me at this impeachment trial to be able to bring the evidence to show exactly what those conversations were....

Isn't that -- what's "the context" that could explain those "out-of-context" remarks? -- the obvious follow-up question here? (Not that Blagojevich answered Sawyer. But at least she asked.)

If you tuned in to CNN just now to watch President Obama take some first steps to reverse Bush administration climate policies (among other things), this is what you saw:

PRES. OBAMA:....now is the time to meet the challenge of this crossroad of history, by choosing a future that is safer for our country, prosperous for our planet, and sustainable. Those are my priorities, and they're reflected in the executive orders I'm about to sign. Thank you so much for being here.

And? A CNN expert walks us through what it all means? Or, even, a coherent recap from a CNN anchor? Well (keeping this in mind)...

CNN's HEIDI COLLINS: Once again, if you're just tuning in, I want to let you know what you're looking at here. President Obama signing executive orders. Just giving a speech about the economy, energy, and the environment as you can see on the screen. Talking a whole lot about the independence on foreign energy and the jobs that he says will be created by the recovery plan that he has been talking about, of course, with congressional leaders for quite some time now. We are going to take a quick break here...

...for an ad for Mercedes Benz's new $33,900 SUV.

So it ended before it began. GateHouse v. New York Times--the copyright and trademark infringement case filed by local-news behemoth Gatehouse Media against the NYT-owned Boston.com and its hyper-local Web sites (a suit that, among other things, challenged common assumptions about the definition of intellectual property in a link economy)--was scheduled to go to trial this morning. Instead, it was settled out of court in a last-minute agreement.

The details of the settlement are thus far unknown; I'll update this post once we know more.

Update: Actually, as MediaNation's Dan Kennedy points out, the case is moving toward settlement. Kennedy obtained the text of this morning's written order, issued by Judge William Young: "IT IS ORDERED that this action is hereby dismissed without cost and without prejudice to the right of any party, upon good cause shown, to reopen the action within thirty (30) days if settlement is not consummated."

So it's possible, Kennedy notes, "that this isn't over yet."

Update II: Nieman Lab's Josh Benton got the text of the settlement agreement, available here. I'm reading it now.

Update III: Okay, my first read on this is that the Times Company is conceding quite a bit to GateHouse in the settlement. Not only is it basically agreeing to stop using headlines and ledes from GateHouse's Wicked Local Web sites--the bulk of GateHouse's beef against Boston.com--but it's also agreed to remove those headlines and ledes retroactively: "Defendants shall take reasonable commercial steps to ensure that all headlines and ledes orginally published by GateHouse that are or have been existing and displayed on boston.com's yourtown websites, and all related source attributions, are removed from those websites and any related archives by no later than March 1, 2009."

Boston.com will also remove all GateHouse RSS feeds from the aggregation tool it's been using to copy GateHouse material to its Web sites.

The most interesting part of the settlement, though, involves section 1: the agreement that "GateHouse will implement one or more commercially reasonable technological solutions...intended to prevent Defendants' copying of any original content from GateHouse's websites and RSS feeds...which Defendants shall not directly or indirectly circumvent."

I'm assuming this aspect of the settlement addresses the portion of the GateHouse complaint alleging that Boston.com circumvented its security measures to copy GateHouse material to its Web sites. Per the complaint,

Lacking any cooperation from defendant, GateHouse implemented certain electronic security measures on Wicked Local, to prevent users with a certain Boston.com Internet Protocol (”IP”) address from scraping content from GateHouse’s website. Plaintiff’s security measures did not deter defendant in the least — defendant posted original content to the Infringing Website the very next day after they were installed.

As Dan Gillmor noted in his extensive coverage of the suit,

If Boston.com’s Your Town crawlers/scrapers are going around the technological blockades, that strikes me as — at the very least — poor behavior. I don’t know whether it’s legal, but it’s not honorable. Boston.com should take the hint and stop pointing to GateHouse.

Make no mistake: I believe that turning away page views that come from other sites is, in the end, a mistake. Even so, GateHouse should have the right to make that mistake.

The suit's settlement would seem to validate Gillmor's view. But its specificity about the barrier--once it's put up, you can't violate it--would also seem to validate, overall, the "shared and shared alike" aspect of the Web: "Notwithstanding the above prohibitions," the settlement says, "nothing shall prevent either party from linking or deep-linking to the other party's websites, provided that the terms and conditions set forth in this Letter Agreement and in the Definitive Agreement are otherwise fully complied with."

But it's worth remembering that, because all of the above has been determined out of court, the agreement won't have the capacity to set precedent for similar cases that might deal with linking, copyright, etc. So the settlement's impact, at the moment, is theoretical more than anything else.

While we await Gov. Blagojevich's appearance on The View (three minutes!), a selection of headlines out of Illinois today:

I am still not understanding a certain strain of business-press culture that seems inclined to run interference for investment banks rather than investigate them.

This would not be my reflex in the aftermath of a multi-trillion-dollar meltdown, but then I may not be as sophisticated as some.

Conde Nast Portfolio this issue uncorks a puzzling two-part feature, “Conspiracy Theory, Exposed,” and “The Usual Suspects,” that purports, in an ironic tone, to debunk unfavorable rumors supposedly floating around Wall Street about Goldman Sachs Group, the fabled investment bank/welfare case.

The subheadline is:

Blankfein. Steel. Thain. Paulson. Kashkari. See a pattern? The Goldman Sachs “conspiracy” to take over the U.S. financial system.

Pretty funny, so far.

This passage gives you the flavor of where this is going:

Now, with Goldman emerging from the financial crisis battered but still on top, the Street is seeing something more insidiously silly: a bona fide Goldman conspiracy. “A lot of people think that they must have gotten where they are because of some unfair advantage,” hedge fund manager Bill Fleckenstein says. “Nobody likes to think that someone flat out beat ’em.”

Beat 'em to what? The U.S. Treasury? And who is Fleckenstein, and why is quoted saying the same thing in both pieces?

“A lot of people think that they must have gotten where they are because of some unfair advantage,” hedge fund manager Bill Fleckenstein says.

Fleckenstein! We meet again!

The second piece lists eight rumors about Goldman, each more outlandish than the last. One rumor, for instance, is that Goldman engineered the collapse of Bear Stearns because it had held a "grudge" since Bear’s refusal to participate in the bailout of Long Term Capital in 1998. Another is that it saved Merrill Lynch out of concern for the reputation of Goldman alumnus and Merrill CEO John Thain. See if you can untangle this business-press sudoku:

The news: On the weekend that the government allowed Lehman to fail, Merrill Lynch, led by C.E.O. John Thain, sold itself to Bank of America for a tidy premium. Days later, the Britain-based bank Barclays agreed to buy Lehman’s core assets for pennies, wiping out Lehman’s shareholders.
The facts: Thain was a frequent adviser to Tim Geithner, who was then president of the New York Fed. Thain also worked as Goldman’s co-president under Paulson.
The conspiracy theory: To protect Thain’s sterling reputation (and Goldman’s too), Geithner and Paulson urged him to find a buyer immediately. If he hadn’t, Merrill would have followed Lehman Brothers into oblivion.

What is this, one wonders?

Here's the alleged rumor about why New York Fed President Tim Geithner and Paulson bailed out Citigroup.

The conspiracy theory: Geithner and Paulson came to the rescue of their friend. The bailout preserved Rubin’s big gig—he made more than $62 million from 2004 to 2007—despite claims he championed some of Citi’s riskiest strategies.

These rumors are pure straw men, allegations so ridiculous they have the net effect of marginalizing any suspicion of Goldman and its influence. And yet, of course, there are legitimate questions to ask about Goldman, its officers, and its ex-officers now in government. A better use of resources would be to explore these, in my view. But no.

In this way, this piece resembles another recent cover story by Fortune, which implied that anyone who saw the possibility of criminal prosecutions resulting from the credit crisis was part of an “angry mob.”

Now, remember, in the case of Goldman, this is a firm whose employees, from CEO to janitor to pastry chef, averaged $500,000 a year, or better, each, for years, until compensation was tragically cut last year to barely above the poverty line, then ended up as the eighth-leading recipient of government aid, underwritten, one should hastened to point out, by a strapped middle class that hasn't seen its incomes rise for eight years.

And in order to "earn" those paydays, as we've learned from serious reporting from Bloomberg, Goldman was a leading manufacturer of the same defective assets now collapsing the world economy. Not just any defective assets, but ones worse than most.

...Goldman still has on the market some $13 billion of almost $37 billion in bonds backed by subprime loans or second mortgages that it created while he was chief executive officer. Those bonds have an average delinquency rate of almost 22 percent, higher than the average of other subprime bonds from the period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Yet Portfolio chooses to spend its resources defending Goldman against charges that no responsible person is making. Strange.

And it gets worse. Here's Portfolio's treatment of the AIG. bailout, a real side-splitter:

The news: Officials agreed to extend A.I.G. an $85 billion loan—later upped to $123 billion—to prevent its collapse. Goldman C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein was (albeit briefly) the only investment-banking chief at a key meeting to discuss the deal.
The facts: Paulson installed Goldman vice chairman Ed Liddy as A.I.G.’s new C.E.O.
The conspiracy theory: Had the insurance giant failed, Goldman would have lost big. It’s said to have $20 billion in A.I.G. exposure. (Goldman says any exposure is offset by collateral and hedges.) Liddy was put in to protect Goldman’s interests. When asked why A.I.G. was bailed out but not Lehman, Dick Fuld, Leh­man’s C.E.O., told Congress, “Until the day they put me in the ground, I will wonder.”

Good one, right? But wait a minute. That's no rumor. It's a mangling of a live controversy over Goldman's interest in AIG at the time of the takeover, whether the bank was exposed to a loss poised for a gain.

What's more, Portfolio and the rest of us know that Goldman had any position in AIG only because of reporting by other business-news outlets that took the time, effort, and risk to pry loose critical facts about the secretive and unjust use of public funds to bail out AIG's counterparties, Goldman Sachs almost certainly among them.

The New York Times's Gretchen Morgenson wrote the groundbreaking story on September 27 that smoked out Goldman's interest in AIG, as well as Lloyd Blankfein’s long weekend at the New York Federal Reserve, during which he was indeed the sole Wall Street CEO present at a September 15 meeting on AIG's fate. Two days later, Bloomberg's Mark Pittman nailed down the fact that as much as $37 billion in AIG bailout funds "has gone" to Goldman and other Wall Street firms, who would have become one of the insurer's "biggest creditors" in the event of an AIG failure.

Goldman insists its exposure to AIG was "not material" and says its positions were fully hedged. While Goldman's statement may seem to be at odds with the news accounts, this is not necessarily so.

Point is: the fact that Goldman had a significant interest in a government bailout of AIG is far more than a rumor, as Portfolio would have it.

And, by the way, is it so ludicrous to wonder whether Blankfein would seek to protect his firm's interests during a meeting on that very subject with government officials? It would be strange if he didn't.

In fact, other fact patterns that Portfolio sees as an object of mirth can in fact be seen as a legitimate area of inquiry.

How about the September 19 ban on short selling?

The conspiracy theory: When Goldman’s competitors felt pressure from the shorts, regulators acted timidly. Once the short-sellers turned their attention to Goldman, the company used its influence to push through a ban.

I'm not saying it's true. I'm saying, it's a good question for journalists, even a business monthly.

If that makes me a conspiracy theorist, I guess I've been called worse.

Last week, my colleague Megan questioned Oprah Winfrey's inclusion on Forbes's list of the "25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media," writing:

...here she is, included in a list of people who, while some of them straddle the line between entertainment and journalism, are, fundamentally, journalists--and whose influence, even more significantly, falls into the realm of "civic engagement" rather than "pop culture." The two spheres are both significant, to be sure...but they are distinct. And we should be treating them that way.

Seems these spheres nearly became slightly less distinct. During his GMA appearance this morning, Gov. Blagojevich mentioned that he considered offering Ms. Winfrey Obama's senate seat. Per ABC News:

"She seemed to be someone who had helped Barack Obama in a significant way to become president," Blagojevich said. Blagojevich added that "she had a much broader bully pulpit than a lot of senators."

His consideration of Winfrey was tempered, he suggested, by the fact that "she probably wouldn't take it, and then if you offered it to her, how would you do it in a way it wasn't a gimmick to embarrass her."

The Washington Post's Gene Weingarten adds his two cents to the cacophony of voices ruminating the future of newspapers with a conversation with school chum and business theory professor Edward Rogoff.

His suggestions are hardly comforting:

Edward: Your delivery vans are ideally suited to be pet taxicabs. Pet-taxi franchises are a growing industry in large cities. Most cabdrivers won't take dogs and cats because they tend to puke in the back seat.

...

Edward: You could remove the computers in your newsroom and replace them with 1930s-era Underwood typewriters, and those big old sturdy black rotary phones. Then you could sell newsroom tours. The editors would swear loudly and smoke fat, stinky cigars and pinch gal reporters on the fanny and berate copy boys in bow ties, and there would be half-empty bottles of liquor all over the place. That could be very successful, a Colonial Williamsburg kind of attraction.

The nationalization argument keeps picking up steam, and it keeps making sense—at least compared the other harebrained schemes that have been tried or proposed.

Today, the Times lays out the issues facing the Obama administration on how to handle the financial crisis, which is worsening again despite hundreds of billions of dollars thrown at the banks in the last three months.

But if hundreds of billions of dollars of new investment is needed to shore up those banks, and perhaps their competitors, what do taxpayers get in return? And how do the risks escalate as government’s role expands from a few bailouts to control over a vast portion of the financial sector of the world’s largest economy?

We now have experts predicting Obama will have to nationalize:

“The case for full nationalization is far stronger now than it was a few months ago,” said Adam S. Posen, the deputy director of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “If you don’t own the majority, you don’t get to fire the management, to wipe out the shareholders, to declare that you are just going to take the losses and start over. It’s the mistake the Japanese made in the ’90s.”

“I would guess that sometime in the next few weeks, President Obama and Tim Geithner,” he said, referring to the nominee for Treasury secretary, “will have to come out and say, ‘It’s much worse than we thought,’ and just bite the bullet.”

As usual, Barry Ritholtz gets right to the heart of what is really a scandal:

Note that the money already dumped into the black holes of these two financial institutions far exceeds their net worth. And in exchange for this foolish investment, taxpayers have received just 6% of Bank of America, and 7.8% of Citigroup. This is absurd. How a 120% of a company’s market cap yields a single digit ownership stake is beyond my comprehension.

The solution to the banks problems, as well as this ridiculous investment posture, is relatively simple: Nationalize the banks, appoint new management, give them 6 months to spin out 10% of each of the separate viable pieces, with the taxpayer retaining the rest as passive investors....

Stock holders get nothing; Since bond holders would receive some pro-rata share in a liquidation, they get a convertible preferred in the new debt free firm, as well as an opportunity to lend to the new banks at an generous convertible rate.

Sounds about right.

The Times pretty much all but says that nationalization is the least worst option here, but the paper unfortunately gives credence to the argument on Wall Street that bonuses and the like have to be paid to keep workers on the job.

And how would the government attract the best talent if it demanded that they take minimal pay — a political reality in the current environment?

Hey, these folks are going nowhere soon. Where else are they going to earn, say, a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year? The days of bolting to start your own hedge fund are over.

But that's just a quibble. The piece is a solid bit of analysis overall.

One day in June 2005, my colleague Nell Henderson and I hiked over to the Bond Market Association to get ourselves educated on collateralized debt obligations and related products. I was editing The Washington Post’s Wall Street coverage, and Nell was covering the Federal Reserve, and we both had a feeling this might be a corner of the market in which troubles could occur. A couple of hours later our heads were spinning, but at least we felt like we had a better sense of how some of these increasingly complicated financial instruments that were flooding the markets worked.

What we didn’t have was a story to write, or so we thought. What would we have said? That there is a rapidly growing, unregulated market in these things that might turn out to be pretty risky? We had been assured repeatedly all afternoon that the people who dealt in these products were constantly on guard, looking for risks and figuring out how to defuse them. But more than that, we both knew that there isn’t much appetite for speculative stories about complicated issues in most newsrooms. Once the crisis occurs, once you can quote government officials referring to credit-derivative obligations and credit-default swaps as “toxic assets,” it gets easier.

Still, I wish I had gone further and considered other options. I wish I had walked downstairs to where the Real Estate section was segregated from the rest of the business staff to find out more about the connection between the subprime loans they were writing about and these new types of securities. I wish I had learned back then, instead of in the course of writing this story, that the market for asset-backed securities, loans secured by mortgages or other debt, had grown by 45 percent the previous year, mostly because of loans backed by housing, and had surpassed the market for corporate debt for the first time in history. And I wish I had suggested a meeting of the real-estate staff, the reporters who covered the economy, and those who covered regulatory agencies, markets, and banks to explore the connections.

The retrospective me also would have wondered more about other areas of the economy that were unregulated. And I would have been more intellectually curious about why such a creature of Wall Street as Securities and Exchange Commissioner William H. Donaldson would feel so strongly that hedge funds needed to be registered, and would pursue doing so at his own political risk.

But even in hindsight, I think it would have taken a miracle for business journalists to have foreseen the current crisis in its magnitude and depth. Beat reporters saw the pieces of it, and columnists who took a broader view warned about the buildup of risk. But even those who predicted disaster, I think it’s fair to say, didn’t know how widespread it would become or how unprecedented the government’s reaction would be. A New York Times editorial warning in September 2006 that “in a market so vast and dynamic, everyone knows that if mortgage defaults should rise, damage could reverberate throughout the financial system,” probably didn’t leave many readers thinking seriously that two years later we might be talking about a second Great Depression.

Nonetheless, there are certainly lessons to be learned about how to change some structural and cultural biases that might have gotten in the way—including the segregated silos we sometimes fall into in our beats, and a bias against speculative “this trend could be dangerous” stories. It’s not as sexy to prevent disasters as it is to cover them, but maybe we should rethink that, and learn to view warnings and prevention as one of the most important parts of our jobs.

One of the biggest obstacles to understanding, however, was out of our control: it was the decision to let major financial markets full of new types of housing-related investments expand with little or no federal oversight. No regulation means no transparency. Reporters and investors alike were kept from seeing what was going on behind the curtain.

What happened? In short, mortgage lenders began to pool and sell mortgages to raise more money to lend. Then those pools morphed into more complex products, which transferred the risk further and further away from the original lender. The original mortgage pools got packaged with others into collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) or collateralized mortgage obligations (CMOs) and sliced into different levels of risk, graded by rating agencies as safer than they turned out to be. Financial institutions like aig then issued credit-default swaps as a way for players to insure against losses. At each stage, investors borrowed, piling more debt on a slender reed of equity.

The quest for more mortgages to package led to the subprime market, which helped keep the housing bubble expanding—until it burst. Warnings of risks were met by assurances from Alan Greenspan, then the Federal Reserve chairman, and others that the smart, self-interested people would keep risks at bay. They didn’t, and here we are.

If you go back and read stories written over the past decade, you will find plenty of good reporting that pointed to emerging problems. The Economist warned in 2002, for instance, that “a housing bubble is more dangerous than a stockmarket bubble, because it is associated with more debt. A steep fall in house prices would harm the global economy far more than a slump in share prices.” And there were stories dating back to 1998 in The Wall Street Journal about Commodity Futures Trading Commissioner Brooksley Born’s warnings about risk in the unregulated over-the-counter derivatives markets and how her quest to regulate them was steamrolled.

Now that the economy is unraveling, there has been terrific forensic reporting, including This American Life’s brilliant radio segment “The Giant Pool of Money,” which took listeners through all the steps, from a U.S. marine facing foreclosure (his mortgage broker stated his income as $195,000 when it was actually about $37,000) to one of the companies that created CDOs. The New York Times contributed “The Reckoning,” a great explanatory series of articles that looked at pivotal events and players in the financial crisis.

Even if we couldn’t have nailed this story of a lifetime, many of us can think now of steps we wish we had taken. So the questions are: What can financial journalists learn from this, and what can we do better? What didn’t we see, and why didn’t we see it? And where should we have been looking?

First, some mitigating factors: while the problems that led to the current crisis were building, financial journalists had their hands full with other major stories. We were incredibly busy covering the fallout from the previous scandals, many of which involved cooking the books. There were trials and pleas all over the place: Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, HealthSouth, Adelphia, and Martha Stewart, just to name some of the more heavily covered legal proceedings. There were also stories to be done on the end of the tech bubble, the mutual-fund scandals, Richard Grasso’s departure from the New York Stock Exchange, fights between the regulators and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac over accounting problems, concerns about the growth in consumer debt and leverage in the markets, and the growing role of sovereign wealth funds. The “Maestro,” Alan Greenspan, was handing over leadership of the Fed to Ben Bernanke. And then came rising interest rates. In Washington, we also had the downfall of the city’s oldest and most respected bank, the Riggs, which turned out to be cozying up to money-laundering dictators. On the regulatory front, there was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a law designed to make sure corporate financial reports were more reliable in the wake of so much accounting fraud, and the transfer of the chairmanship of the Securities and Exchange Commission from Donaldson to the more hands-off Christopher Cox.

We were also personally busy refinancing and buying houses. I don’t want to overstate this, but the same housing boom and lower interest rates that helped create the heavy demand for more exotic, risky investments enticed us as consumers. At one point, four or five of us in the Business section at The Washington Post were using the same broker to refinance and reduce our mortgage rates, while other colleagues were rushing to buy houses before prices went up even more.

It may not come as a surprise that business journalists point to examples of things they got right. “I don’t think this is a case of financial journalists falling asleep at the switch,” says Jill Drew, who oversaw business coverage at the Post until 2006. “People were doing stories all around it,” she says, noting a three-part series by Alec Klein, a Post reporter, in 2004 about the conflicts of interest in rating agencies, as well as other stories about elements of the current crisis.

Among those in the media who raised alarms about the new debt market and rising levels of borrowing were columnists Floyd Norris, chief financial correspondent for The New York Times; Steven Pearlstein of The Washington Post; and Allan Sloan, now of Fortune. All three raised questions early and often about risks in the economy. Here’s Norris in August 2005, for instance:
If housing prices fall, will mortgages cushion the downfall, or make it worse? Put another way, will more overstretched homeowners be forced to sell? At issue is whether financial innovations that have made it easier for Americans to buy homes have also made the system less stable and more vulnerable to shocks that could drive many of them from their homes, having lost all they invested in them.

Still, Norris says he wishes he had done more. “I did not take the time to understand the intricacies of collateralized debt obligations,” he says. “What I should have known, and didn’t, was that this amounted to financial alchemy to turn risky assets into risk-free assets, or at least to mostly fund risky assets with risk-free assets.” Norris says that he assumed that the rating agencies were correctly assessing risk, and also that he didn’t understand the extent of fraud going on in mortgage lending, with appraisers being paid to come in with higher assessments. “I would have studied CDOs and CMOs and all those things much earlier than I did, and I would have understood them.” One other point he makes: “I think we were all a little too willing to assume Alan Greenspan knew what he was talking about. It seems pretty clear to me now that Greenspan worshipped free markets but didn’t understand them.”

Now that we can learn from looking backward, here are some suggestions for going forward:

Pay more attention to the credit and derivatives markets. Financial journalists focus too much on the equities markets—after all, they are easy to understand, and stock prices often tell you about the relative health of companies or industries. It may be that the equities markets are the financial equivalent of political journalists covering the horse race.

But here’s one fact to keep in mind: compared to the credit markets, the equities markets are puny. At the end of 2007, the global stock-market capitalization was $64.6 trillion, compared to the global bond-market outstanding of $79.8 trillion—or more than 350 times its size in 1990, according to the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association.

Convincing reporters to become experts on debt markets, or even convincing them just to read trade publications such as Inside Mortgage Finance and the Asset Securitization Report can be a hard sell. It’s just not sexy. “Credit markets tower over the equity markets in dollar value,” says James Grant, of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer and the author of Mr. Market Miscalculates. But he adds, “Credit markets, except for propeller heads, have very little entertainment value.”

Yet unregulated derivatives, including most recently credit derivatives, have been associated with financial disasters, including the bankruptcy of Orange County, California in 1984; the failure of Long-Term Capital in 1998; the problems at Enron culminating in 2001; and now the Big One. So it might be a good idea to cover them more consistently and less episodically.

Question what will happen when there are fundamental shifts in the rules of doing business, whether it’s Wall Street suddenly taking public tech companies with no track record or lenders giving up the concept of underwriting—i.e., looking at whether a borrower can make the payments—in favor of a belief that housing prices can go no place but up.

Don’t rely on self-interested experts. In the case of the unregulated collateralized debt obligations, derivatives, and swaps markets and the growing hedge-fund industry, most of the experts were also players. Though there are academics knowledgeable about these markets, too many reporters didn’t push for answers from anyone beyond the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, the rating agencies, or other self-interested participants.
Put me on this list, since my quest to know more started and stopped with the Bond Market Association.

When a huge new industry springs up, make sure you understand everything you can about it. It’s true that, with respect to the collateralized securities and derivatives markets and the hedge-fund industry, they were growing in the shadows, so it was harder to know what you didn’t know.
Grant describes his Interest Rate Observer as “focused pretty much single-mindedly on these mortgage contraptions.” But he says there “was not so much the general press could have known about. So much of the mortgage crisis was cooked up behind doors that were either closed by interested parties or doors that were closed except to the adepts and cognoscenti by virtue of the complexity of the structures.”

If AIG, whose business was assessing risk, couldn’t correctly calculate the risk of insuring in this market, says Grant, figuring it out in advance of a crisis may be “asking a lot of people who might have had an economics course on the way to a degree in journalism or social work.”

It’s not that the growth in these markets went unnoticed. There were multiple stories over the years remarking on their growth, the lack of regulation, and the possible risk. One Post story in 2000 noted that the market for over-the-counter derivatives had “grown 400 percent from a decade ago, 50 percent from five years ago.”

But most of us probably didn’t try as diligently as we should have to understand why they were growing and what the risks were. “To my mind, the beau ideal of a financial journalist would be modeled after the slouching and ill-dressed police lieutenant who kept saying, ‘Can you say that one more time? Because I’m not very smart,’ ” says Grant.

Look forward. It’s hard to do, especially when you’re still deep in the wreckage of the previous disaster. And it will be harder given the shrunken ranks of reporters and editors. One thing that might help is systematically discussing whether and how developments on one beat might relate to something happening on another beat. For example, in many newspapers, the real-estate section is considered separate from the main business section and more frequently viewed in terms of the local rather than the national economy. Maybe the real-estate reporters and the reporters covering national economic news should have been having lunch together, discussing what was happening at either end of the housing bubble.

The scramble over how to regulate financial markets is already under way. There will certainly be a major realignment. All players in the financial industry will be fighting tooth and nail to protect themselves as much as possible from regulation. That will include hedge funds, banks, and the rating agencies that decreed some of today’s toxic assets as reasonably safe. Huge sums of money are at stake and will be spent. That’s an obvious place to watch. The financial press should be all over that story, and should be putting teams of well-sourced reporters in place to cover the battle and the new regulatory agencies.

But even as the current crisis unfolds, something else, in some corner we aren’t watching, will be gathering.

“By their nature, crises surprise us,” says Greg Ip, now of The Economist, formerly of The Wall Street Journal. “But we should still try to report on risks even if the risks we choose to investigate aren’t the source of the next crisis. They might still be dangerous, and our reporting on them can mitigate that danger.”

Ip has a good idea about how to encourage such reporting. Noting that Pulitzers are awarded for work done in the previous year, he suggests a prize for prescience that would look back even further.

Just because something is unregulated or deregulated doesn’t mean that journalists should stop paying attention. Regulation is good for journalists because it guarantees that someone other than self-interested players will be watching and, even better, will have the ability to pry loose records that we don’t. In the twenty-five years after the Reagan Revolution, journalists got so accustomed to deregulation that we didn’t look hard enough at all the issues and problems it obscured.

We used to joke in the newsroom that we didn’t need an antitrust reporter anymore because there was no such thing as antitrust. In fact, we might have done better to ask ourselves whether any of the ills that antitrust regulation was supposed to prevent were occurring. For instance, were more and more companies “getting too big to fail”?

Even where there was regulation, there wasn’t always enough attention paid when it was relaxed.
In an excellent piece in “The Reckoning,” the New York Times series I noted earlier, Stephen Labaton took a backward look at an sec decision to loosen requirements on how much capital the brokerage units of investment banks needed to protect against risk. The banks wanted the money cut loose in order to invest in “the fast-growing but opaque world of mortgage-backed securities; credit derivatives, a form of insurance for bond holders; and other exotic instruments.” In return for loosening the rules and agreeing to use the banks’ computer models to monitor how risky investments were, the sec was supposed to get a stronger supervisory role and more insight into investments in mortgage-backed securities, although “the agency never took true advantage of that part of the bargain.”

In 2004, however, the press paid little attention to the meeting in which that decision was made. “The proceeding was sparsely attended,” wrote Labaton. “None of the major media outlets, including The New York Times, covered it.”

We probably should have shone the spotlight more brightly on de facto deregulation, such as cuts in spending for enforcement. And we certainly should have tried harder to keep tabs on industries created completely outside the regulatory framework.

Kudos, by the way, to Bloomberg News for filing suit in early November in federal court arguing that the Fed is required under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act to reveal more details about how it is spending the bailout money.

Some state watchdogs were able to step into the regulatory void during the past decade, as then New York Attorney General Elliot Spitzer did, uncovering unsavory practices by stock analysts and in the mutual-fund industry. And when they did pick up the regulatory slack, we remembered how wonderful it is for reporters (and for readers and investors) to have regulation.

I’ve had occasion to regret sunshine-meeting laws, forced to sit through some staggeringly dull committee meetings, when, in earlier times, I would have been outside the door joking and gossiping with other excluded reporters. But, by and large, sunshine laws are good for the press and the public—and so is regulation.

As someone who spent years watching airline bankruptcies, I can attest that the transition to deregulation has its own fun and excitement. But thoughtful regulation is good for industries, which sometimes are not the best judges of the consequence of certain practices. And it’s good for consumers and investors.

It’s as American as the Freedom of Information Act and the First Amendment. 

I nearly missed the six italicized words below William Kristol's column in yesterday's New York Times ("This is William Kristol’s last column"), so distracting was Maureen Dowd's confession:

I love Blago.

I love his beady little eyes. I love his Serbian shock of hair. I love his flaring nostrils. I love the way he jogs through the snow under indictment, like a stork in spandex trying to gallop. I love the way he compares himself in quick order to Pearl Harbor, Oliver Wendell Holmes and a dead cowboy.

I love the hurly-burly way the Illinois governor rammed through his choice for the Senate, compared with the namby-pamby way the New York governor strangled his best choice for the Senate.

Girly man. Manly man. Blame the Clintons... you know the rest of the column.

But, back to Kristol's final Times column: Kristol deprivation may not even have time to set in; he could be writing once a month for the Washington Post, according to Michael Calderone. And no one will feel deprived of Dowd's crush, he of the "beady little eyes;" Gov. Blagojevich is everywhere (following his NBC News interview yesterday, today he visits Good Morning America, The View, Fox News's Geraldo Rivera and CNN's Larry King Live).

Remedies for America’s diseased health system tend to come incrementally—an approach that doesn’t disrupt the status quo but never quite provides everyone with insurance. In 1965 came Medicare for old people and Medicaid for those poor enough to qualify; in 1985 came COBRA, a continuation of employer-provided coverage for workers losing their jobs; in 1997 came SCHIP for very poor children. Two weeks ago, a SCHIP expansion added four million more children to the rolls—leaving out a few million who will remain uninsured.

As the economic stimulus package makes its way to the President’s desk, the press needs to realize that the bill, despite the hype surrounding it, may end up leaving more people falling through the cracks. Conventional wisdom holds that people should keep their COBRA benefits a little longer, beyond the eighteen months that the law now allows. But because COBRA requires its beneficiaries to pay all the premiums plus a two percent administrative fee, most out-of-work people don’t join the program. Premiums, which average about $12,600 annually for a family, are impossible to pay when the breadwinner has no job. To quantify what health experts have known for years, a newly released report from The Commonwealth Fund found that in 2006, before the downturn, only 9 percent of those eligible signed up for COBRA.

In last Thursday’s piece about money troubles for state Medicaid programs, The New York Times simply reported that the House stimulus proposal would permit those unemployed who are at least age fifty-five or who have been at the same job for ten years to keep their COBRA benefits at their own expense, until they go on Medicare at age sixty-five, or get health coverage from another employer. But what about someone who is fifty-four, or someone who has been on the job only nine years? The Times said that, for the first twelve months of coverage, the federal government would pay 65 percent of COBRA premiums for those who have lost their jobs since September 1. But what about those laid off on August 15? And what if someone still can’t swing the rest of the premium? Do any of these people need health care any less than those who fall within the arbitrary boundaries for eligibility?

The Washington Post did a bit more dot-connecting than the Times. It consulted Urban Institute researcher Stan Dorn, who said that only 12 to 15 percent of dislocated workers took advantage of a similar provision authorized in trade legislation passed in 2002. Dorn predicted that a 65 percent COBRA subsidy could mean “there’s a very good chance the program will be a major failure.” The Post also quoted an analyst with the conservative Heritage Foundation, who said that, rather than let laid-off workers temporarily go on Medicaid (another proposed solution), the government might instead offer to help the states find private coverage for unemployed people—coverage which might be less generous and less expensive than they would get from Medicaid. Less expensive for the government, that is.

Opposition is surfacing to the proposed COBRA extensions. The influential National Business Group on Health (NBGH), comprised mostly of Fortune 500 companies and some large public sector employers, has sent a letter to House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel outlining its objections. President Helen Darling told Rangel that, although the group supports temporary subsidies, extending the benefits for such a long period would hurt employers. Darling said “costs would significantly increase if people could keep COBRA longer as they approach Medicare eligibility and their health care costs generally increase due to higher medical costs and higher rates of chronic conditions.” Geez, that’s just when they need insurance.

Darling added that employers would have to keep track of their former workers, “collect premiums and process COBRA payments for many years until their long ago employees either relinquish their coverage or it expires…. The administrative burden for former employees,” she said, “would become permanent…at the expense of current employees and their employers.”

Oh, oh—the equity issue again. Darling’s letter signalls what we can expect once the lobbying gets hot and heavy. If employers are objecting to COBRA extensions for the unemployed because they might cost too much, what will happen when there are proposals on the table to make all large employers like NBGH members pay for coverage for their workers? There are lots of threads to tie up here. It’s best not to let them dangle too long.

For a profession that lives by the cynical adage, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” journalism has been surprisingly lax in verifying one of its central claims—that it keeps government honest. But is it true?

Two economists, who went looking for proof, found little hard evidence—good or bad—of the effects of the press on democracy. So they set about establishing the truth of the claim themselves, in a new study that nails down the relationship between newspaper coverage and political accountability.

While previous studies have argued that the recipe for good governance includes knowledgeable voters and an active press, none have identified which comes first. In a working paper featured on the Web site of the National Bureau of Economic Research, MIT’s James Snyder Jr. and Stockholm University’s David Strömberg produce the most convincing evidence yet by identifying a chain of impact that starts with the press. Journalists, they say, kick-start a virtuous cycle by covering politics, which educates voters, who in turn put pressure on politicians, who then work harder and produce more constituent-friendly policies. House of Representatives members who aren’t scrutinized by hometown reporters, Snyder and Strömberg find, work less for their constituencies—they testify at fewer hearings, serve on fewer committees, and vote more often along party lines. As a result, federal policy tends to break unfavorably for their constituents, and federal spending is lower in their districts. When politicians do receive coverage, they offer testimony at almost 50 percent more congressional hearings and slice off 10 percent more pork for their districts—roughly $2,700 a person—than colleagues the press ignores.

The Journal this morning has some good reporting on the failure of TARP to stimulate lending, its second very good report in the last few days.

It says ten big banks that got money dropped their total loan balances by 1.4 percent, or $46 billion, from September to December despite getting $148 billion from the government.

The overall decline in loans on the 13 banks' books -- from about $3.36 trillion as of Sept. 30 to $3.31 trillion at year's end -- raises fresh questions about TARP's effectiveness at coaxing banks to reopen their lending spigots.

"It has failed," said Campbell Harvey, a finance professor at Duke University's business school. "Basically we have dropped a huge amount of money ... and we have nothing to show for what we actually wanted to happen."

But the Journal shows that it's not as simple as bankers sitting on their hands: This isn't exactly the best environment to lend money.

They say it takes time to make prudent loans and to attract new deposits that will allow them to lend out their new capital efficiently.

Demand for low-risk loans is also ebbing as consumers and businesses rein in their spending and try to conserve cash, according to bank executives. Even though mortgage rates are down, for example, applications in the week ended Jan. 16 declined about 10% from the previous week...

Still, the paper doesn't let the banks—or the government—off the hook for the failure of TARP to boost lending:

The fact that loan portfolios are shrinking at many of the largest TARP recipients underscores how few strings Treasury Department officials attached to the infusions. That has made it hard to prevent banks from using the money to pay dividends, make acquisitions and fund bonuses for top executives.

The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch

By Michael Wolff

Broadway

446 pages, $29.95

Michael Wolff’s prose style is sui generis. Unique. Which we know. Sort of. His prose is so hard-edged he uses Fuck You as an adjective. He breaks every rule, and with gusto. With sentences that consist of one-word exclamations. And longer, complex sentences—studded with dashes—which run on and on and never seem to end. Not now. Not ever. It shouldn’t work, but it does . . . well, often it does. Except when it doesn’t.

In choosing to write a biography of Rupert Murdoch—a sort of biography, anyway—Wolff has found his subject. Murdoch not only chose to sit for interviews, but arranged for the author to interview family members and business associates, creating a perfect storm of conditions for a wildly idiosyncratic, bizarrely organized (disorganized might be the better word), but never less than fascinating portrait of the press baron and his family. At the same time, Wolff crosscuts this biographical project with a blow-by-blow narrative of the deal that won Murdoch and his News Corporation control of The Wall Street Journal.

The deal forms the spine of the book and is recounted chronologically. In telling his tales of Murdoch, however, Wolff generally eschews chronology, making abundant use of detours, flashbacks, retrospectives, and frantic leaps from decade to decade, continent to continent. The constant shift in location does mirror the peripatetic quality of Murdoch’s life. (The poor man, we learn, is perpetually jet-lagged, which accounts in part for his fleeting attention span and often grumpy demeanor.) But the shifting time frames are neither necessary nor particularly helpful.

As a historian, I admit I am partial to chronological organization. Life is lived forward: what happens yesterday has an effect on today; one builds a business empire, a personal life, an identity over time. Wolff’s jumping around is irritating, and worst of all, confusing.

Meanwhile, his Murdoch remains pretty much the same, no matter the continent or the decade. There are surface changes, but nothing terribly significant until, perhaps, his third marriage, when he undergoes “a marked, odd, and possibly transformative shift” from the outsider persona he took on forty years earlier to “an official member of the glamour establishment,” who dresses in Prada suits, has dinner with celebrities, and dyes his hair a frightful orange.

Wolff displays little interest in Murdoch’s childhood and adolescence, scants his college years, and rips through the decade and a half he spent in Australia building a highly successful media empire. His biographical study effectively takes wing only in 1968, when Murdoch relocates to Britain, where, primed with borrowed money, he buys the weekly News of the World in 1968 and the daily Sun in 1969. The first of these purchases establishes Murdoch as a “new and unnatural character in British public life”: a transplanted Aussie sleaze merchant. But it is the Sun that makes him rich. “In addition to suddenly giving Murdoch a power base,” we read, “the Sun’s startling success turns Murdoch, in the establishment view, into England’s most disreputable and dangerous media figure.”

In 1973, he crosses the Atlantic to establish a beachhead in the New World. His first acquisitions are two San Antonio papers, which he buys because they are for sale. (There appears to be no other good reason for his decision to invade America by way of Texas.) Then, in rapid succession, Murdoch founds his own supermarket tabloid, the National Star, buys the New York Post, New York magazine, and The Village Voice (all in the late seventies), and then returns to England to purchase The Times of London and the Sunday Times. He keeps on buying newspapers throughout the 1980s, including the Boston Herald, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the South China Morning Post, while simultaneously expanding into trade magazines, television stations, book publishing, Hollywood film studios, and a satellite-based British network. By the mid-1980s, he has morphed from “a print publisher to the first truly all-media media company.” But the empire is built on debt—$7.6 billion of it, in Wolff’s reckoning. At the end of his own fabulous decade, Murdoch’s empire is on the verge of collapse.

Wolff (or perhaps his interviewees, on whose testimony so much of the book is based) loses interest here. After compellingly describing how Murdoch captured his prizes, he leaps past the potential debacle and never quite explains how Murdoch was able to pull back from the edge of disaster. We leave him “on the brink of ruin”—and return, one hundred pages later, to learn that he’s doing just fine.
Let me repeat: Wolff has no intention of writing a traditional biography. And there’s nothing wrong with that. His forté is the character sketch, the deal history, stories of bad guys going up against bad guys. There are no heroes here, certainly not the hapless Bancroft family, which, after definitively and repeatedly declaring that it would not sell The Wall Street Journal, changed its collective mind and delivered the goods. But there are no real villains, either, only flawed men and women unable or unwilling to acknowledge their flaws.

Murdoch is among the most flawed. He is variously described by Wolff as aloof, contained, preoccupied, crippled by shyness, gossipy, grumpy, penurious, remote, unfeeling, abstract, disembodied, puzzling, old and old-fashioned, a fifties guy, a guy’s guy, and a reluctant socializer. Murdoch is, we learn, “a brilliant and manipulative bastard” afflicted with frightening mood swings. He cares little for ideas, is no visionary, has no interest in culture, knows nothing about current technologies, and can barely operate a computer. But he is also a decent listener, a brilliant networker, and “one of the most politically influential men in the world.”

Murdoch, at least in Wolff’s telling, is best characterized by his antipathies and enemies. On returning to England, at age thirty-seven, and buying the News of the World and the Sun, he “becomes the bogeyman.” In his own eyes, he is simply an Aussie doing business abroad, an opportunist who has come to where the opportunities are. For this, according to Wolff’s narrative, Murdoch is lambasted, censured, humiliated in public.

Rather than retreat, he transplants his British-tabloid sensibility to the New World. And again, he is condemned, as he had been in London, for his rudeness, his crudeness, his nerve at taking two great New York institutions and transforming them into something quite different (which is true of the Post, but not of New York). “He’s the outsider. He’s the big guy picking on the little guy. He’s the thief. He’s the guy who forecloses on widows and orphans.”

Wolff, who admires no one, sympathizes with no one, pities no one, does not side with poor beleaguered Rupert in his battle with the establishments. Murdoch, he believes, has always been a bit of a fool for buying newspapers and losing money on them. Yet in Wolff’s view, those who condemn him are more worthy of scorn for not understanding that without fools like Murdoch, newspapers like the New York Post, The Times of London, and perhaps even The Wall Street Journal might disappear altogether.

The story of Murdoch’s pursuit of the Journal is a prime example of the sort of lose/lose scenario that, Wolff believes, is inevitable in newspaper takeover narratives. Nobody comes out well here. But there is something heroic about Murdoch’s foolishness, and something scandalously and stupidly shortsighted about the foolishness of those who profess a love of newspapers but oppose his attempt to purchase another one. Murdoch’s offer of $60 a share for The Wall Street Journal, Wolff argues persuasively, made no business sense whatsoever. But Rupert wanted the Journal and was willing to pay a premium to have it, then lose money (as he has at the New York Post and The Times of London) as its owner.

Why? Though he was, by 2007, a global media tycoon with interests larger and wider than any before him, Murdoch remained a newspaperman. And, Wolff surmises, what he desired more than anything else at the end of his career was to own a quality, elite, establishment newspaper. So he overpaid for a property no one was willing to bid on, believing himself to be “the real white knight of newspapers.” Would the men and women who work for the Journal, or its readers, or the community at large have been better served had Sam Zell or General Electric bought the paper? From the vantage point of the present moment, it appears highly unlikely.

The questions that get left out here are the larger ones that Wolff has no interest in asking. Must we put our hope for the future survival of newspapers in “white knights” like Rupert Murdoch? Is there no other alternative? Is the “news” business simply another business, deserving of no more regulation or regard or public subsidy than any other? Or is the existence of a free press, no matter how unprofitable it might be, critical to the proper functioning of state and society and worthy of special attention?

As I write this, there is an ongoing debate about a bailout of the Big Three automakers, following a similar debate about the survival of national banks, investment houses, and insurance companies. The argument made on their behalf is that their survival is of critical importance to the well-being of the nation. The same has been said, at different moments in our past, about family farms (no matter how many acres they might comprise) and sports franchises (no matter how many millions they might be worth).

But what about newspapers? There has been no call to rescue any of them, as far as I know. And this, despite the fact that this nation, in its founding state and federal constitutions, singled out the press for protection because it was, in the words of a resolution passed by the Virginia ratifying convention, “one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty.”

Constitutionally sanctioned guarantees of freedom of the press were intended to proscribe government interference, rather than warrant government support. Yet they bear repeating, because they highlight the singular and historic role of the press in American society. This role—and this significance—are neglected, then negated, when we regard the news business as just another business, its survival to be determined by market forces alone.

Wolff pays no attention, as I have already said, to such larger questions. And indeed, there is no requirement that he should. In the end, if we judge him by his intentions and review the book he has written, not the one we might have wanted him to write, we are obliged to give it, well, not three cheers, but a hearty two-and-a-half. It is fair to say, however, that for this reader at least, the questions he does not ask haunt his description of The Wall Street Journal deal and his portrait of Murdoch as newspaperman and businessman. 

Later today, reports Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici, U.S. News & World Report will be rolling out a weekly digital digest:

There's been a lot of talk lately about the decline and fall of newsweeklies, some of it fueled by the shift of U.S. News & World Report to biweekly, and then monthly, publication. But U.S. News hasn't given up on the idea of the weekly news digest. In fact, later today, in a soft launch, it will rolling out a new product: a "digital newsweekly" that reproduces, in pixels, what the magazine once did in ink and paper.

"We're creating a tailored product for readers that does what the old newsweeklies did, which was to stop time for people and say 'What the heck happened over the last week?' and make sense of it," says editor Brian Kelly.

The new "publication" will be less feature-y than the print U.S. News magazine, Kelly told Bercovici, and more focused on Washington events, politics, and policy.

And--TimesSelect alert!--the digest will be a premium product on U.S. News's Web site: A one-year subscription will cost $19.95 (although subscribers to U.S. News & World Report, Bercovici notes, will be able to download it for free). The digest, after today's late soft launch, will normally go online around noon each Friday.

So, over in the land of Freedom Fries and Jerry Lewis...there's a new news policy afoot. President Sarkozy is going where the U.S. government has thus far feared to tread: he's bailing out France's newspapers.

Well, kinda.

Sarkozy's plan has a two-pronged intervention strategy. First, the French government will increase its annual support for newspaper and magazine deliveries--from last year's 8 million euro (about $10.2 million) to a relatively whopping 70 million euro (about $90 million). It'll also spend 20 million euro (about $25.5 million) for advertisements in print publications.

Second, the government will begin providing, on citizens' eighteenth birthdays, a free, yearlong subscription to the news daily of their choice. (The publishers will give the papers away, and the government will pay the delivery charges.) Per the AP,

That initiative appeared designed to assuage industry fears that young readers don't share the same appetite for print media that their parents and grandparents have, denting current and future revenues.

"The habit of reading the press is learned very young," Sarkozy said, while insisting that the aid would only buy time for publishers to adapt to the new media landscape.

I'll be fascinated to see whether these initiatives--which are designed "to modernize and invest in the print media sector in exchange for important structural reforms" over the next three years, Sarkozy said--do indeed inject much-needed reform into the flailing French newspaper business. I'll also be interested to hear which newspaper (Le Monde? Le Figaro? Libération?) proves the most popular choice among French teenagers.

In the meantime, will any of this prove instructive for the U.S. government and its news industry? Probably not (socialism! socialism! socialism!). But vive la différence, and everything.

Tuesday proved, as expected, to be one of busiest days in history for Web traffic. And of the sites competing for the honor of Inauguration Day's most-visited...an old standby won the day. Per the AP,

The CNN Digital Network was the no. 1 online destination among current events and global news sites, according to the research firm Nielsen Online. It had 11 million unique visitors on Tuesday when Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president.

The MSNBC Digital Network followed with 10 million unique visitors and Yahoo! News took the No. 3 spot with 9.1 million. Rounding out the top five was the Fox News Digital Network and AOL News.

CNN, interesting, had partnered with Facebook to supply status updates from people's Facebook friends on its site--which possibly (hey, likely) accounted for its edge-out of MSNBC. And during the height of Inaugural events, in particular, CNN proved popular. Again per the AP, CNN.com "said it served more than 21.3 million streams globally that day between 6 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. EST. -- the most in its history by far."

Compare that to the AP, which on Tuesday provided comparatively few live video streams through its two-year-old Online Video Network. But...comparatively few: though the network failed to break the top five sites in traffic, the videos it streamed still numbered about 8 million.

Some tasty bits from today's WaPo's Web chat featuring Dana Milbank...

On yesterday's press conference:

New Jersey: Can I just blast the "big names" who spent prized news conference minutes on the second swearing-in, a procedure that all agree was precautionary and without consequence? There are world events that I am very worried about, and my "top name journalists" are attempting to construct complicated inquiries about TRIVIA. Are editors involved in these itsy-bitsy inquiries? STOP WASTING YOUR JOURNALISTIC TIME!

Dana Milbank:In fairness to my colleagues, they had already been through a "serious" briefing about Gitmo and interrogation, but the White House didn't want you to see that; the briefing was given off camera and on the condition we not identify the officials.

So by the time it was Gibbs' turn, it was more fun and games.

And by the time Obama himself made a surprise visit to the press room later in the afternoon, it was even fluffier.

On Twitter...

Bloomington, Ind: Hello Dana. During yesterday's press briefing, Chirs Cillizza was twittering and posed this question: "Where is Milbank? This briefing needs some get up and go. Milbank = instant excitement."

Let me tell you how excited I am to chat with Mr. Instant Excitement himself.

Dana Milbank: I think he meant that I am highly excitable.

Interesting, this Twitter thing. I asked the Fix about it and he told me I could find it somewhere on the Internets.

And--my personal favorite--on the deliciously weird naming trends going on at the Post...

Editor question: You used to work for a broccoli -- now you work for a currant? What next? Is the Post working through the alphabet?

Dana Milbank:

Yes, it is a movable feast.

The political editor is a Currant.

The executive editor is a Brauchli.

They are quite a pear.

Now lettuce move on.

Media guru Dan Gillmor, writing on TPMCafe, eviscerates the job the media did covering the financial crisis. Angrier in tone than our Dean Starkman's early take, but getting to pretty much the same place, it begins:

Our government's current operating principle seems to be bailing out people who were culpable in the financial meltdown. If so, journalists are surely entitled to billions of dollars.

Why? Journalists were grossly deficient when it came to covering the reckless behavior, sleaze and willful ignorance of fundamental economics, much of which was reasonably obvious to anyone who was paying attention, that inflated the housing and credit bubbles of the past decade. Their frequent cheerleading for bad practices -- and near-total failure to warn us, repeatedly and relentlessly, of what was building -- made a bad situation worse.

...and it goes on from there. Well worth a read.

The Daily Beast has a video clip of Maureen Dowd's Larry King Live appearance, in which The Redhead and The Suspendered One talk racism, Hillary, and dissent:

Sarah Lyall has got to be enjoying her job these days. Hot off the heels of reporting on the E.U. art hoax--easily one of the most delightfully entertaining news stories of early 2009--the Times's London correspondent strikes again, this time with hilarity of a slightly less mature variety. In a story datelined "CRAPSTONE, England," Lyall sings of the sad plight of citizens living in U.K. towns with off-color/innuendo-filled/inadvertently-hilarious names and places. Like, yes, Crapstone.

On the scale of embarrassing place names, Crapstone ranks pretty high. But Britain is full of them. Some are mostly amusing, like Ugley, Essex; East Breast, in western Scotland; North Piddle, in Worcestershire; and Spanker Lane, in Derbyshire.

Others evoke images that may conflict with residents’ efforts to appear dignified when, for example, applying for jobs.

These include Crotch Crescent, Oxford; Titty Ho, Northamptonshire; Wetwang, East Yorkshire; Slutshole Lane, Norfolk; and Thong, Kent. And, in a country that delights in lavatory humor, particularly if the word “bottom” is involved, there is Pratts Bottom, in Kent, doubly cursed because “prat” is slang for buffoon.

As for Penistone, a thriving South Yorkshire town, just stop that sophomoric snickering.

“It’s pronounced ‘PENNIS-tun,’ ” Fiona Moran, manager of the Old Vicarage Hotel in Penistone, said over the telephone, rather sharply. When forced to spell her address for outsiders, she uses misdirection, separating the tricky section into two blameless parts: “p-e-n” — pause — “i-s-t-o-n-e.”

In other words: Teehee!

But before you giggle too much...there's a deeply felt Human Interest story playing out in Wetwang. (Because it's not easy to call a place like Crotch Crescent home.) Lyall cites Rob Bailey, "who grew up on Tumbledown Dick Road in Oxfordshire," and Ed Hurst--co-authors of two books, Rude Britain and Rude U.K., exploring the country's unfortunate place names--who "got the idea for the books when they read about a couple who bought a house on Butt Hole Road, in South Yorkshire":

The name most likely has to do with the spot’s historic function as a source of water, a water butt being a container for collecting water. But it proved to be prohibitively hilarious.

“If they ordered a pizza, the pizza company wouldn’t deliver it, because they thought it was a made-up name,” Mr. Hurst said. “People would stand in front of the sign, pull down their trousers and take pictures of each other’s naked buttocks.”

The couple moved away.

Sad news for the couple, but good news for the Times: Lyall's story, unsurprisingly, is currently at the top of the paper's Most E-mailed list.

Reuters, via Atrios:

Nasdaq OMX Group (NDAQ.O) said on Friday it will launch options trading on its three-week old Government Relief Index, which tracks the performance of companies bailed out by U.S. taxpayers...

The Government Relief Index lists 24 companies that received at least $1 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, and other government aid plans.

No additional comment necessary.

So Forbes has put out the latest of its low-content-but-high-publicity lists, this one highlighting "the 25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media." The list includes most of the expected folks (Paul Krugman, Rachel Maddow, Andrew Sullivan, Jon Stewart) with a few wild cards thrown in (Kurt Anderson, James Fallows, Dave Shipley, the NYT's op-ed page editor). But there's one selectee whose presence on the list strikes me as a tad odd: Oprah.

I mean, yes, she campaigned for Obama...but has she done anything else to classify her as a "liberal"? And, for that matter, is she "influential" in the same way that, say, Dave Shipley is influential? Or that Maureen Dowd is influential? In some ways, yes. But, still--Oprah is an entertainer before anything else. Her influence is, though vast, cultural rather than political. And here she is, included in a list of people who, while some of them straddle the line between entertainment and journalism, are, fundamentally, journalists--and whose influence, even more significantly, falls into the realm of "civic engagement" rather than "pop culture." The two spheres are both significant, to be sure...but they are distinct. And we should be treating them that way.

ABU DHABI – Surf the blogs in the Arab world and you find a common theme: the Bush administration has blindly supported Israel’s Gaza war and the U.S. media has been shilling for “the aggressors.” Ask the average American and it’s a good bet that you will hear the opposite view: Arab governments all support Hamas and the Arab media is militant group’s mouthpiece.

The truth is somewhat more complex. Neither the Arab world, nor the Arab media, is a monolith. Saudi Arabia and Egypt have sought to prevent Hamas from scoring political gains at the expense of the more secular Palestinian authority led by Fatah, while Qatar is leading a Gulf bloc that equates support for Hamas with support for the Palestinian people. The fault lines have produced a media war in the Arab world. “What journalism we have today!” a leading Saudi columnist declared in print, charging his colleagues with “marketing the idea that any anger at the Israeli bombardment is unjustified and that any support for resistance is incitement for terrorism.”

The rift is most evident on the broadcasts of the region’s bitter television rivals. During the three week conflict, Al Jazeera, owned by the government of Qatar, focused on vivid images of bloodshed accompanied by commentary thick with moral outrage. Rival Al Arabiya, owned by Saudi interests close to the royal family, chose to avoid the most graphic footage and take a more measured tone. The contrasting approaches reflect both the very different perceptions of the role of Arab journalism in the two newsrooms and the political rift between their respective patrons.

“Our coverage was closer to the people,” Al Jazeera’s news chief Ahmed Sheikh told me. While he said the channel was “impartial” in that it gave airtime to Israeli officials, “we are not neutral when it comes to innocent people being killed like this. The camera picks up what happens in reality and reality cannot be neutral,” he said, adding that, as with U.S. network coverage of Vietnam, Al Jazeera showed graphic images in order to turn public opinion against the war. “The goal of covering any war is to reveal the atrocities that are carried out.”

“We belong to two different schools of news television in the Arab world,” countered Al Arabiya news chief Nabil Khatib, the target of death threats on Islamist websites for banning on-air reporters from using the word shaheen (martyr) to describe Palestinian dead. “There is the school that believes that news media should have an agenda and should work on that agenda for ideological and political reasons, which is Al Jazeera’s. We are in the school that believes you need to guarantee knowledge with the flow of news without being biased and by being, as much as possible, balanced.”

Just days into the conflict, in a linguistic play on the name of Al Arabiya, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called the channel “Al Ibryia,” which roughly means The Hebrew One. The resulting campaign against Al Arabiya—fed, Khatib believes, by Al Jazeera—has brought into the open long-simmering resentments between the two networks.

Al Jazeera was “satisfying the mob” and “led a campaign for Hamas,” Khatib told me. “They chose to highlight the dead bodies and bloody scenes in close-up, thinking this will create shock. We were cautious with this out of respecting our viewers and our code of ethics.”

Sitting in the newsroom of Abu Dhabi TV, Director of News Abdulraheem Al-Bateeh says that’s all nonsense. “Come on, it’s obvious. Al Jazeera is showing that it is pro-Hamas and Al Arabiya shows that it is pro-Fatah.” His channel, he insists, sits in the middle, in keeping with Emirati government policy. “We are with Hamas on the humanitarian side, but politically we are with Fatah.”

Those same political prisms are reflected across the region’s media. The fears of the anti-Hamas bloc were summed up by Dr. Ali Al-Tarrah, a regular columnist for the UAE newspaper Al-Ittihad. “We believe that the biggest winner in this war is the radical religious movements, which will find itself inundated by large groups of young Arab volunteers who can no longer stand what is happening,” he wrote this week.

The rift between the two regional political camps was highlighted by the convening of a series of rival summits as the conflict ended. Both sides met this week at yet another summit held in Kuwait, where Saudi Arabia flexed its political and economic muscle to impose a temporary inter-Arab truce. Newspapers aligned with Saudi Arabia and Egypt have been busy downplaying the divisions.

“It is indeed heartening to see the Arab leaders finally close their ranks at the Kuwait summit,” said Abu Dhabi’s Khaleej Times in an editorial.

“Thus a new Arab era dawned on us all. What joke is this?” countered a columnist in Lebanon’s Al-Akhbar, which supports the so-called “rejectionist” front. “The blood of one Palestinian child, killed by the attacks of the occupation to which some of you gave cover, is purer and more noble than you and all your thrones.”
The reality is that Arab leaders remain so divided they couldn’t even agree on to whom the more than $1 billion for Gaza reconstruction should be given, Hamas or the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority.

“Gaza’s curse will haunt many, especially the eminences, the highnesses and the excellencies” who gathered in Kuwait, predicted Adel Bari Atwan, editor of the London-based Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi.
But one Gulf paper expressed a sentiment that most journalists in the region can agree on: “The Arabs can never prevent another Gaza if they do not speak in one voice and act as one bloc, if not as one nation.” Judging from the region’s media, that is not likely to happen soon.

Today is the World Day of Communications. To mark the occasion, and to foster its own communications, the Vatican has established, like Buckingham Palace and the White House before it...its own YouTube channel. Which, unsurprisingly, slang-happy media members have already deemed the "PopeTube."

Speaking from the Vatican earlier today, Pope Benedict XVI called social networking technologies like YouTube, Facebook, and Myspace a "a gift to humanity," saying that they reflect and respond to people's "fundamental desire" to communicate with each other. But he also warned against "obsessive" virtual interactions, saying, per the AP, that the Web can "isolate people from real interaction and deepen the digital divide by excluding those already marginalized."

Check out the channel--which is currently available, rather tellingly, in Italian, Spanish, English, and German versions--here.

First, allow me to confess my sins. For the last eleven years, I have made my living practicing the dark art of journalism, and while perhaps not a full-fledged member of that nefarious institution known as the msm, my byline has on occasion been spotted on the pages of such well-known offenders as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Slate.  I’ve even been known to pal around with members of those organizations. To make matters worse, somewhere in my closet is a sheepskin from an Ivy League university, and while I do not patronize Starbucks, I did for some years own a Volvo and reside within the boundaries of the District of Columbia. In short, I could loosely be labeled a member of the liberal media elite. In mitigation, I can offer that I currently live south of the Mason-Dixon line and own a handgun—though it was made by a Communist government.

Nevertheless, many of you have no doubt already guessed the ugly truth: on the morning of Tuesday, November 4, 2008, I stepped behind a closed curtain and cast my vote for Barack Hussein Obama. While that may not seem like much of a transgression to some, in conservative political circles, the perceived widespread support for Obama among journalists was one of the defining aspects of the Illinois senator’s historic run for the White House. In part, this is nothing new. The right has been complaining about liberal bias in the media since at least the early 1960s, when Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater made press-bashing a central part of his campaign. These days, railing against the liberal media is a mandatory applause line at any conservative rally.

To be sure, liberal partisans have their own concerns about an increasingly corporate media, but surveys of journalists consistently show that those involved in gathering and editing the news are somewhat more liberal, at least on social issues, than their fellow citizens. For example, a 2004 survey of 547 journalists commissioned by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center for The People and The Press found that only about 7 percent of journalists identified themselves as conservative. By contrast, in a Gallup poll that same year, about 20 percent of the public identified themselves as liberal, as compared to about a third of the press corps. Obviously, such numbers shift with the political winds and generalized labels are of limited utility, but it seems ridiculous to deny that those who choose journalism as a career skew more liberal than the population as a whole, just as those who get an MBA or enlist in the military skew a bit more conservative.

The real issue is how and whether that political inclination translates into biased coverage. Traditionally, the dominant “ism” of the trade wasn’t liberalism or conservatism, but skepticism. In the 2008 presidential race, however, there was no doubt among conservatives that journalists abandoned any semblance of skeptical detachment. Mark Salter, an aide to Republican nominee John McCain, conceded that his candidate faced an uphill climb, but told Time magazine after the election, “I do believe, and will never be dissuaded otherwise, that the media had their thumb on the scale. Maybe if the media had been fair, we still would have lost. But there were two different standards of scrutiny for us and Obama.” Other conservatives were less restrained. Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly stated that the standards of the news media were “collapsing” in an effort to support Obama and called the press bias the worst “ever in the history of broadcasting in this country.”

But it wasn’t just conservative talking heads or GOP operatives bashing the coverage. Mark Halperin of Time magazine decried the “extreme pro-Obama coverage,” calling it “the most disgusting failure of people in our business since the Iraq war.” Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell said she agreed with readers that the paper had demonstrated a tilt toward Obama. Howard Kurtz, the Post’s veteran media critic, scolded “hyperventilating” in the press over Obama’s win and looked forward to seeing reporters “wade back into reality” after the inauguration day. Not everyone shared this view, of course. Jack Shafer, the media critic at Slate who rarely spares the rod when he catches scribes peddling hokum, isn’t buying the media-conspiracy talk. “I just don’t see it. Certainly the reporters that I’ve talked to who cover Obama don’t give me the sense that they are in love with him,” he told me.

As these dueling viewpoints illustrate, when discussing something as inherently subjective as bias there is a depressing lack of objective measuring sticks. However, that didn’t stop the Project for Excellence in Journalism from giving it a go. Researchers analyzed 2,412 campaign stories from forty-eight news outlets published in the six weeks between the Republican convention in early September and the last presidential debate in October. The analysis showed not so much a bias in favor of Obama as pervasively negative coverage of John McCain. While Obama stories were about evenly distributed among positive (36 percent), negative (29 percent), and neutral (35 percent), McCain stories ran 57 percent negative and only 14 percent positive. 

So, case closed? Not quite. The study included some telling points. For example, McCain’s coverage in the week coming out of the Republican convention was very positive—much more positive than Obama’s coverage. That turned sharply the following week, when the financial crisis blew up and McCain reaped the whirlwind by proclaiming that “the fundamentals of the economy” were strong. He followed that up by announcing later in the week that he was suspending his campaign to help Congress address the crisis, and might not attend the first presidential debate. The result? Both his poll numbers and his press coverage took a nosedive. Obama, by contrast, kept a lower profile, and his coverage remained a mix of good, bad, and indifferent. 

Another point in the PEJ study worth chewing over was that, contrary to received wisdom, McCain’s attacks on Obama on issues like his association with former sixties radical Bill Ayers did succeed in driving up the negative coverage of Obama—they just drove up McCain’s negative coverage even more. In the end, the PEJ study could not provide a conclusive answer to the question of whether the press had a rooting interest in electing Obama. But the findings do make one thing clear: campaign coverage is largely momentum driven. As horse-race stories about who is up and why predominate, the better you poll, the better your coverage, a virtuous cycle likely only to be broken by a dramatic event. The inverse, of course, is also true.

And that’s what is so baffling about much of the carping in conservative circles. Commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Joe Scarborough talked repeatedly about what a rotten campaign John McCain ran and what a great campaign Obama ran; but in the next breath they griped about how differently the press treated the candidates, without ever seeming to make the obvious connection between the two points. 

Though it is beyond me to bridge the gulf between conservatives and the MSM on the bias question, I will offer a few ideas for how to approach this issue when it arises—as it surely will—in future elections:

Check Your Sources If the MSM didn’t say it, don’t reflexively blame them for spraying it. For example, conservatives complained bitterly about the unfair treatment Sarah Palin received in the press, but they usually weren’t referring to pesky questions about the Bridge to Nowhere or “troopergate,” but rather to Internet speculation about her family or wicked depictions of Palin by Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live. No doubt these things helped shape the public’s impression of Palin, but you can’t lay them at the feet of the working press. If anything, as post-election reports by Fox News’s Carl Cameron revealed, the press actually refrained from reporting damaging stories about Palin coming from inside McCain’s own campaign.

Look Who’s Talking An interesting note buried inside the PEJ study was that researchers excluded talk radio in their assessment of the tone of coverage. One can only hazard a guess at how many hours of Obama-bashing were beamed out to the millions of listeners of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and the other conservative yakkers who dominate the dial. Ditto with their cable-TV counterparts, such as Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck. Surely, MSNBC can’t balance them all out.

The New News Game Many of the bias complaints were actually thinly disguised laments about the lack of “standards” in modern journalism. This was often expressed as a nostalgic desire for some golden era when the front page was comprised exclusively of inverted pyramids and just-the-facts news writing. But as the Internet has taken over information-dispersal, newspapers and newsweeklies have necessarily become more like feature-driven magazines. That’s not due to the personal predilections of a cabal of lefty editors; it’s the marketplace that’s driving them to redefine their role in an effort to remain relevant and survive.

Absence of Evidence Can Be Evidence of Absence Another frequent conservative complaint was that the press was not letting the public in on the “real” Obama. Where was the blockbuster photo of Obama and Bill Ayers in a Hyde Park hot tub? How about a smoking-gun canceled check from Tony Rezko buried in the Cook County conveyance records? Surely, the conservative critics seemed to be suggesting, this type of damning evidence must be out there. In fact, Ayers, Rezko, and other potential Obama campaign detonators (Reverend Wright?) got plenty of page-one coverage—it just didn’t change the public’s perception of Obama or the trajectory of the campaign, much as the revelation of George W. Bush’s DUI arrest didn’t change the 2000 campaign. As a friend of mine in politics used to say, sometimes where there is smoke, there is fire, and sometimes there’s just a smoke machine.

Open Your Ears, Your Mind Will Follow This is equal-opportunity advice for liberals and conservatives. One of the less-savory aspects of media proliferation is that, if we choose, we can get our news exclusively from outlets that reflect our own views back at us. This should be resisted. As a center-lefty, I nonetheless spent a lot of time during the campaign watching Fox News, browsing The National Review Online, and grazing daily at The Drudge Report. Sure, it was tedious at times to sit through Sean Hannity’s nightly “a noun, a verb, and Bill Ayers” routine, but more often than not, plugging into the conservative media reminded me that facts, in addition to being stubborn things, are unpredictable in their associations and sometimes even wind up housed in the pie hole of a beefy Irish blowhard.

The urge to dismiss news simply because it originates in a hostile precinct may be human but it’s also shortsighted—and it leads to a kind of informational provincialism in which anyone not from your ideological tribe is viewed as irredeemably untrustworthy. In a country founded on shared ideas, not a shared identity, I can’t think of a bias more un-American than that. 

Credit The Wall Street Journal for some good number-crunching and analysis today on a hidden facet of executive pay, which—guess what?—allows execs to take more of their shareholders' money.

Mark Maremont, one of the Journal's top investigative reporters (he's also an editor), finds that some companies have been secretly "turbocharging their executives' pensions" by using a formula that skews too much toward the benefit of the executives— a fact that's only been uncovered because of a 2007 regulation requiring more disclosure on executive pay.

The companies, including United Technologies and Hartford Financial, which is in line for government handouts (it's a long line these days), use an artificially low interest rate to calculate how much loot to give their executives when they cash out their pensions in a lump sum.

Bravo to the Journal for pointing out the rank hypocrisy of these firms, who squeeze pennies from the proles while stuffing millions in the fat cats' already flush pockets:

Business groups have successfully lobbied Congress to be able to use a less-generous formula when it comes to paying out pensions for regular workers. Pensions for most workers are federally regulated, and corporations argued that their coffers were being depleted by large lump-sum distributions.

That's neatly juxtaposed in the next graph with this pathetic excuse from the companies:

In defending the way they calculate pension enhancements for executives, some of the companies, including United Technologies Corp. and Dun & Bradstreet Corp., say it's partly aimed at compensating executives for higher taxes they owe when they take their retirement benefits in a single payment, instead of spread out over their remaining lives. Just-retired executives often owe taxes at a higher average rate than they would years later when their income is down, according to this argument.

I would've liked the Journal to explicitly point out that regular workers who retire are also in a higher tax bracket than they will be twenty years down the road, but I'll take what I can get.

The story is just good explanatory journalism, too. It takes this complex and still pretty-much-hidden issue, explains the formula inolved clearly and shows how it's been used to fleece investors.

The Journal editorial board will slap back at the news side in 3...2...

All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page

By Jerelle Kraus

Columbia University Press

260 pages, $34.95

On September 21, 1970, The New York Times unveiled a new kind of page called the “op-ed,” displacing the obituaries that had long been printed opposite the editorials. This novel forum was open to nonstaff writers—and to freelance artists, who have since supplied thirty thousand or so pictures for the page and for the adjacent letters column. Jerelle Kraus, a Times veteran of three decades, served as art director for the page from 1979 to 1993. And in this generously illustrated volume, she shares the work of 134 of those artists. She also provides an intensely personal history of the page as it weathered tempests and tinpot tyrannies at the Times. Her deepest loyalty, of course, is to her artists, who set the tone of seeming ferocity: headless figures, rude caricatures, grotesque animals. These images gave the op-ed page its air of radicalism, although, as Kraus observes, “since no one knew for sure what [the art] meant, it couldn’t be proved controversial.” Most of the drawings that were censored—and Kraus offers an assortment of them—were killed on grounds of taste. Male editors were given to seeing faux breasts and phalluses, or took politically correct offense at innocent drawings. Meanwhile, a female editor, Charlotte Curtis, vetoed David Levine’s nude Kissinger because it made the globetrotting diplomat look too fat. In any case, a glance at the current, slicker version of the Times op-ed page shows that those rampant days are gone. “No cultural movement,” Kraus concludes, “survives long beyond its initial impetus.”

Last Sunday’s New York Times was a treasure trove of accuracy-related information, and I don’t mean the paper’s corrections column.

Readers were treated to a pair of articles that offered an impressive amount of insight into mistakes. One was a rare look back at the causes of recent mistakes made by the Times; the other piece seemingly had nothing to do with the press, yet it was just as valuable to journalism.

In the first story of note, Clark Hoyt, the public editor, dedicated his column to walking back the cat on three Times errors.

“Last month,” he wrote, “because reporters and editors in three different parts of the paper did not take enough pains to verify information, The Times reported as fact a political telephone call that didn’t happen, fell victim to a faked letter to the editor, and published a sensational anecdote about a college football recruiting battle that the paper cannot be confident is true.”

Hoyt took the time to go to the editors and reporters involved in the mistakes and ask them how and why the errors occured. The reasons included failing to follow the paper’s existing verification policies (the fake letter) and poor communication (the phantom phone call). The “sensational anecdote” was published due to the combination of an uncooperative and unreliable source, an editor working on Christmas day, and a high school English essay that included a reference to women “romancing each other.”

To those who think accuracy is boring stuff, eat your hearts out.

Hoyt’s article provides a rare peek at why errors occur. It’s essential information for journalists trying to prevent future mistakes, but you rarely see this kind of content in a newspaper. The average editor would probably say that it’s impossible to investigate the cause of every journalistic error, as that would require a full-time person, or even a department. But that’s the standard in other organizations.

Though the $106,641 salary made some people blush, the Bush administration hired a “director of lessons learned” to examine mistakes and come up with ways to avoid them. They also hired a director of fact checking. (Yes, I know, the jokes write themselves.) The U.S. military has an entire “lessons learned” department.

An ombudsman or public editor is the natural person to assume this role. But ombudsmen are often too busy with (important) tasks—such as responding to readers, writing corrections, and preparing a regular column—to take on the “lessons learned” role.

This brings me to the other notable Sunday Times story, "Making the Most of Your Workplace Mistakes". It offered a wonderful range of advice about how to handle and learn from mistakes. One of the best pieces of advice came from Carol Tavris, the co-author of Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me), and another expert:

The best companies make it a policy to show gratitude and reward employees for revealing their mistakes, Dr. Tavris said. Workers and managers need to view a mistake “as an inevitable human step on the path to improvement,” she said.

David D. Woods, a professor of human systems integration at Ohio State University, said managers need to make clear that “it’s more important to share the information than it is to identify the culprit.”

Perhaps those comments seem too general to directly apply to journalism. If so, I offer this comment from a Harvard professor:

Because layoffs have shrunk the staffing of many businesses, “we need to recognize that we’re more vulnerable than usual to mistakes,” she said. “We should be encouraging people to speak up sooner rather than later.”

Hopefully, that’s a lesson we don’t have to learn the hard way.

Correction of the Week

“Shane Watson wrote How to Meet a Man After Forty, not How to Meet a Man Over Forty (Digested Read, 20 January, page 19, G2).” – The Guardian (U.K.)

Notable Misquote

“A news in brief item on 9 January referred to the politician Imran Khan who was speaking to the court from Pakistan by video link during the trial of two London-based Baluchi defendants who deny charges of assisting terrorism. We have been asked to point out that Mr Khan was giving evidence as to the security and political situation in Pakistan, and that he did not ‘defend terror suspects’ but in fact told the court that in his view there was ‘no place for terrorism in a civilised society.’” – The Independent (U.K.)

Parting Shot

“Reginald Perrin visualised his mother-in-law, not his mother, as a hippopotamus (The strange afterlife of Reginald Perrin, 15 January, page 3, G2).” – The Guardian (U.K.)

In the weeks following the election, the debate over the issue of media bias, and of whether the press was overly kind to Barack Obama, has continued to swirl. Much less attention has been paid to another, more troubling aspect of the coverage, and that’s the relentless and malevolent campaign that the right-wing media waged against the Democratic candidate. Few people who did not regularly tune in to the vast, churning combine of bellowing radio hosts, yapping bloggers, obnoxious Web sites, malicious columnists, and the slashingly partisan Fox News have any idea of just how vile and venomous were the attacks leveled at Obama. Day after day, week after week, these outlets worked determinedly to discredit and degrade Obama, accusing him of being a Muslim, a Marxist, a radical, a revolutionary, a socialist, a communist, a thug, a mobster, a racist, an agent of voter fraud, a black-power advocate, a madrasah graduate, an anti-Semite, an enemy of Israel, an associate of terrorists—even the Antichrist. Supplemented by a flood of viral e-mails, slanderous robocalls, and Internet-based smear campaigns, these media outlets worked to stoke firestorms of manufactured rage against Obama and the Democrats in what was perhaps the most concerted campaign of vilification ever directed at an American politician.

In light of Obama’s victory, one might be tempted to let it all pass. That would be a mistake. For the effects of that campaign remain with us. What’s more, the campaign itself is still going on.

Any inventory of the right’s media bombast must begin with talk radio. In reach and rancor, it had no equal. Leading the way was Rush Limbaugh. An estimated fourteen to twenty million people tune in to his show every week, and he treated them to nonstop character assassination, calling the Democratic candidate the Messiah, a revolutionary socialist, a liar, “Osama Obama,” a man with a “perverted mind” who wants to destroy America and the middle class, a front man for terrorists who wants to turn the country into a version of Castro’s Cuba or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. According to Michael Savage (eight million listeners), “Barack Madrasah Obama” was “hand-picked by some very powerful forces both within and outside the United States of America to drag this country into a hell that it has not seen since the Civil War.” Laura Ingraham (5.5 million listeners) spent her nights fuming over Chavez, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, Hezbollah, Ayers, Wright, ACORN, and, in the campaign’s final days, the “racist-terrorist” Rashid Khalidi. She urged listeners to call a toll-free number with any information they might have about the “terrorist party tape” that showed Obama at an event honoring the Palestinian professor.

The noxious clouds emitted by these national windbags were further fed by gassy eruptions from scores of local and regional radio hosts. As documented in a recent report by the group Media Matters, these hosts harped on the notion that Obama is a Muslim whose true loyalties lay outside the United States. “Let’s ask Obama how many prayer rugs he has,” sneered Neal Boortz of Atlanta. “Gunny” Bob Newman of Denver called Obama a “blowhard, make-believe thug” and a “far-left terrorist-hugging politician” whose election would lead to “an invasion of Muslim terrorists.” Cincinnati’s Bill Cunningham stated that Obama wants to “gas the Jews,” while Minneapolis’s Chris Baker called him a “little bitch” who “won’t even stand up to a smoking-hot chick from Alaska.”

The vitriol circulating in the blogosphere was no less extreme. "Terrorist Bill Ayers Votes in Obama’s Neighborhood," proclaimed the endlessly strident Michelle Malkin on her site on Election Day. Nearby, she offered a helpful link on Ayers’s “relationship to Cuban intelligence.” Obama’s message, said the mephitic Monica Crowley, “is a thoroughly negative one: America stinks, the economy stinks, Iraq stinks, our efforts around the world stink, coal stinks, wealth stinks, plumbers stink, conservatives stink, religion stinks . . . .” But “confiscatory taxes, socialism, domestic terrorists, anti-American racist rants, and convicted felons are swell, apparently.” Ayers and Khalidi, insisted the hardcore Hugh Hewitt, were not simply associates of Obama’s but actual advisers. Far-right Web sites like World Net Daily and Newsmax.com floated all kinds of specious stories about Obama that quickly careened around the blogosphere and onto talk radio. One particular favorite was the claim that Bill Ayers ghost-wrote Dreams From My Father.

As for columnists, one could read Michael Barone warning about “The Coming Obama Thugocracy,” Jonah Goldberg jeering about Obama’s “pals from the Weather Underground who murdered or celebrated the murder of policemen,” and Charles Krauthammer lambasting Obama for being a celebrity, a narcissist, a rigid ideologue, a cynical pragmatist, ambitious, mysterious, and underhanded. “By the time he’s finished,” Krauthammer fumed, “Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.” The National Review Online came to resemble a barnyard, in which strutting roosters spent their days hooting and hollering while littering the ground with manure.

In the end, no institution devoted more energy to assailing Barack Obama than Fox News. Any pretense that the network is anything other than an arm of the most rigid reaches of the Republican Party was dispelled by its relentless campaign against the Democrats. On The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly offered nightly reports on Bill Ayers, including one “exclusive” in which a reporter staked out the Chicago professor’s house for days, then confronted him so aggressively that Ayers had to call the police. Greta Van Susteren, when not gushing over Sarah and Todd Palin, seemed to offer up a series of Republican talking points. “Next: Who Is Rashid Khalidi?” went a typical teaser. Appearing regularly on the network were a series of professional Democrat detractors, including architect-of-the-most-unpopular-presidency-in-American-history Karl Rove, onetime-Bill-Clinton-adviser-disgraced-after-having-been-found-consorting-with-a-prostitute Dick Morris, and the always-welcome-on-Fox-no-matter-how-foul-her-views Ann Coulter. “I feel,” she said on one show, “like we are talking to the Germans after Hitler comes to power, saying, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t know. I had no idea he was going to be like this.’ ”

When it comes to Obama-bashing, however, Sean Hannity was in a class by himself. Consumed with a hatred for Obama that at times seemed pathological, Hannity waged a nightly campaign to depict him as a treacherous enemy of the people, who, if allowed to take office, would subvert every value and tradition Americans hold dear. The centerpiece of this effort was an hour-long special, “Obama & Friends: History of Radicalism,” that drew on a series of marginal and shadowy writers and researchers to offer up a series of allegations and half-truths about Obama’s supposed ties to Tony Rezko, ACORN, Louis Farrakhan, Muslim fundamentalists, black-power advocates, and, of course, Bill Ayers. In one especially lunatic segment, Andy Martin, a writer with a history of making anti-Semitic statements, claimed that Obama, in deciding to work as a community organizer in Chicago after college, had “probably” been recruited for the job by Ayers, who was seeking to test his suitability for joining his radical political movement, the aim of which was to bring about in America a “socialist revolution.” Martin offered not a shred of evidence to back up this charge. Nonetheless, the image of Obama-as-Ayers-front-man became a staple on talk radio and in the blogosphere.

For years now, Fox has tried to promote the idea that, while its prime-time lineup of O’Reilly, Hannity, and Van Susteren might have a conservative bent, its newscasts are fair and balanced. Fox’s campaign coverage revealed the utter emptiness of that claim. Over the final weeks of the campaign, for instance, the network offered near-hourly updates on acorn and what Fox insinuated was its campaign to steal the election for the Democrats.

During the campaign, of course, MSNBC emerged as a left-leaning counterweight to Fox, and the two were often discussed as somehow balancing or canceling out each other. This is a false analogy, for while MSNBC was highly partisan and even shrill at times, it did not try to portray John McCain and Sarah Palin as anti-American figures determined to destroy and destabilize the nation. More generally, the Republican candidates (especially Palin) were subjected to often brutal and sometimes excessive criticism in the mainstream media, but they were never called thugs or accused of trying to turn America into a fascist state. After weeks of watching Fox, of listening to Limbaugh, and of surfing the Internet; after hours of hearing repeated references to terrorists and thugs, radicals and revolutionaries, Muslims and madrasahs, I came away feeling that these outlets were helping to foment such hatred and fear of Obama that some members of their audience might feel justified in resorting to violence to stop him. The climate seemed no less toxic than the one that arose in Israel in the months leading up to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

That climate still exists. The election of Obama has done nothing to diminish the frequency or zeal of the attacks against him. As I write in late November, you can turn on Sean Hannity and see him still raging about Obama’s ties to Ayers; you can tune in to Rush Limbaugh and still hear him decrying the radical socialist regime Obama is seeking to impose. These outlets have stoked the politics of personal destruction in America, promoting a mindset in which opponents are seen not merely as fellow citizens to be debated and persuaded but as members of a subhuman species who must be isolated and stamped out.

So what is to be done? The excesses of talk radio have fed support in some quarters for bringing back the fairness doctrine, the legal provision that required broadcasters to provide equal airtime for opposing sides of an issue. Such a move, however, would likely result in the presence of less rather than more speech, and the right is already using the prospect of such a policy change to incite and mobilize its constituents.

A more effective approach, I think, would be to use the tools of public suasion. For too long, moderate voices—not wanting to appear intolerant, perhaps, or to be attacked themselves—have shied away from speaking out against these hatemongers. Mainstream news organizations, when not ignoring them, have tended to coddle them. Last July, for instance, The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on Limbaugh that read like an ad for his show. Calling him an “American icon,” it commended his “basically friendly temperament” and quoted Ira Glass as saying, “Rush is just an amazing radio performer.” Not to be outdone, Barbara Walters included Limbaugh on her “ten most fascinating people” list for 2008, an honor Limbaugh promptly trumpeted on his show. This seems unaccountable. Rather than celebrate such extremists, the press should seek to expose their xenophobia, intolerance, and fanaticism.

Moderate conservatives should join in as well. Speaking out against the malignancy in their midst would be not only moral but also astute, for these zealots have done nearly as much harm to Republicans as to Democrats. During the primary season, Limbaugh, Hannity, and the rest spent months attacking John McCain as a phony Republican and apostate conservative. When McCain received the nomination, they did a quick about-face and redirected their fire at Obama, but by then McCain had been so bloodied that many Republicans decided they could not vote for him; millions, in fact, stayed home on Election Day. It’s time for reasonable Republicans to step forward and denounce the Limbaughs and Hannitys for what they are—un-American.

No doubt the thunderers on the right would respond by pointing to their huge audiences. “We’re just giving people what they want,” they would say. On one level, the millions who tune in to these messages would seem a powerful rebuttal to any argument for restraint. Throughout history, though, demagogues have never lacked for an audience. That, in fact, is what makes them so dangerous.

And so now we have our Dennis Kozlowski, our Leona Helmsley of the current crisis.

Thanks to Charlie Gasparino of CNBC (cross-posted at The Daily Beast), John Thain will go down in infamy as the poster boy (at least until someone more gluttonous comes along) of the Wipeout of '07, '08, '09, and however many more years it takes to hit bottom.

Until now the bad guy has been Bernie Madoff, which just hasn't been quite right. Madoff is an old-style con man. He just straight-up stole money from folks.

The current problem is more insidious. It's the credit-ratings agency that rubber-stamped "AAA" on mounds of subprime mortgage securities because, after all, they were being paid by their creators on Wall Street. It's the mortgage companies who foisted those subprime notes on unsophisticated borrowers. It's the Wall Street executives who destroyed their shareholders' wealth with a second Gilded Age of astronomical bonuses that skewed incentives to the short-term.

And while Angelo Mozilo or whoever the head of S&P was might be a more accurate figurehead, this is what gets on shows like "Extra" and seeps into the public consciousness:

According to documents reviewed by The Daily Beast, Thain spent $1.22 million of company money to refurbish his office at Merrill Lynch headquarters in lower Manhattan. The biggest piece of the spending spree: $800,000 to hire famed celebrity designer Michael Smith, who is currently redesigning the White House for the Obama family for just $100,000.

Big ticket items included $87,000 for an area rug, four pairs of curtains for $28,000, a pair of guest chairs for $87,000 and fabric for a "Roman Shade" for $11,000.

The other big ticket items Thain purchased include: $87,000 for an area rug in Thain's conference room and another area rug for $44,000; a "mahogany pedestal table" for $25,000; a "19th Century Credenza" in Thain's office for $68,000; a sofa for $15,000; four pairs of curtains for $28,000; a pair of guest chairs for $87,000; a "George IV Desk" for $18,000; six wall sconces for $2,700; six chairs in his private dining room for $37,000; a mirror in his private dining room for $5,000; a chandelier in the private dining room for $13,000; fabric for a "Roman Shade" for $11,000; a "custom coffee table" for $16,000; something called a "commode on legs" for $35,000; a "Regency Chairs" for $24,000; "40 yards of fabric for wall panels," for $5,000 and a "parchment waste can" for $1,400.

The documents also show that Thain signed off on the purchases personally. "Labor to relamp the six wall sconces" cost $3,000, and Thain authorized the payment of another $30,000 to pay the expenses Smith incurred in doing the work.

The commode on legs may well become this era's $6,000 shower curtain or Helmsley shrimp:

A liveried servant bearing a silver platter of freshly-cooked shrimps would be required to attend Leona's early morning sessions in the swimming pool; at the end of each lap the servant would hand her a shrimp to swallow ("Feed Mama," she would cry, as if she were a performing marine mammal).

Thain does have some competition: Remember Stephen Schwarzman's $3 million birthday party? But Schwarzman at least used his own money and, anyway, didn't even have public shareholders at the time.

Not coincidentally, Gasparino's story came out just hours before Bank of America pushed Thain from its derailing train.

The Wall Street Journal gets inside the C-suite to report how it went down:

The conversation lasted less than 15 minutes. Mr. Thain agreed to step down as head of the combined company's global banking and wealth-management operations. "Ken would not have left that meeting without a resignation," said one person familiar with Mr. Lewis's thinking...

Mr. Thain lost Mr. Lewis's confidence, this person says, beginning in early December, when Mr. Lewis learned of big fourth-quarter losses at Merrill from a transition team handling the merger, rather than from Mr. Thain himself.

A special tip of the hat to the Journal and its Susanne Craig, who put a nail in Thain's coffin last month when they first reported Thain's machinations to get a $10 million bonus for the year. And, hey, why not in his mind? He'd just sold a dog of a company to a "healthy" bank, saving his shareholders billions of dollars. What's a few million bucks for that?

The problems for Thain will now become swiftly apparent. Ambitious attorneys general will be salivating over getting him in the hoosegow. And how might they do that? You think they might wonder if there was some misrepresentation on the part of Thain and Merrill in their negotiations with Ken Lewis and Bank of America? Just a little bit? I mean, the company lost $21.5 billion in the fourth quarter alone and dragged B of A in just three months from healthy to "help me!"

Already, New York's Andrew Cuomo is investigating Thain's acceleration of bonus payments to get them in before B of A took over, the WSJ reports. Expect that probe to widen very soon.

Thain's company's problems (which admittedly, he didn't cause—he'd only been there a year or so) have cost the taxpayers billions of dollars and nearly wiped out Bank of America. He's made himself a target now.

The AP describes the "wild scene" that took place during Obama's first tour of the White House press digs. Some of the highlights:

Obama asked about the reasoning behind why certain media outlets had work space where they did. When he got an answer involving the intricacies of press corps protocol, Obama responded: "This is worse than the Middle East here — who's sitting where and all that stuff."

When a reporter tried to quiz him about a lobbyist chosen for a top Defense Department job, Obama begged off. "I came down here to visit. I didn't come down here — this is what happens. I can't end up visiting you guys and shaking hands if I am going to get grilled every time I come down here."

Obama was willing to field some lighter questions. Yes, he's discovered the gym in the White House residence. No, he hasn't played basketball yet on the outdoor White House court because it's been too cold.

As he walked through the area where journalists have lunch, Obama noticed a pair of vending machines that dispense soda and junk food.

He told those gathered that perhaps they ought to have "some healthier snacks."

Then he walked through the basement quarters, where several other news outlets set up shop.

"We will try to have a relationship that's respectful and where you guys feel like you're actually getting answers," Obama told the media.

Update: Here's video of Obama "flashing irritation" during the press room visit, via Politico:

As chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Senator Max Baucus holds the keys to health-care reform; any health-care legislation must pass through his committee. So what he says or doesn’t say is important to those following the twists and turns of the congressional effort to fix our health-care system. This is the fourth of an occasional series of posts on the senator’s pronouncements and how the media has covered them. The first three are archived here.

ABC Nightly News’s The Money Trail segment, which has intermittently appeared during and after the campaign, captured some remarkable remarks from Sen. Max Baucus at one of this week’s inaugural parties. Brian Ross took his camera crew to a shindig thrown by some lobbyists and corporations, which, as he explained it, wanted to “impress Montana Democratic Senator Max Baucus, who is the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which writes the tax laws. Baucus says lobbyists just want the best for America.” On camera, Baucus offered this opinion of them: “They really care about our country,” he said. Was this a modern day riff on the infamous Charlie Wilson quote?

A brief digression into history: Wilson was president of General Motors during World War II and Secretary of Defense in the Eisenhower Administration. During his confirmation hearings in 1953, when asked, given his investments in the company, whether he could make a decision that would hurt GM, Wilson replied, “I cannot conceive of one, because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” Shortly afterward, his words took on a translation all their own, and Wilson was forever linked to the misquotation “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.”

It’s fair to ask whether what’s good for the lobbyists is good for the country, especially when it comes to health care. That, dear readers, is exactly what the senator from Montana must decide as health reform makes its way to his committee. After all, history shows that even before Wilson’s time, special interests and their lobbyists stymied major reform that would have brought national health insurance to America. Of course, we won’t know Baucus’s decision until the back room deals are in hand, the committee mark-up is over, and the long legal document shows up on the desks of health care reformers and others who have (and don’t have) the public interest in mind. Then it may be clear what role lobbyists, their campaign contributions, and their inaugural parties had in the process—and, ultimately, the outcome.

One thing that is transparent, though, is the amount of campaign dollars the senator received from health care special interests this past year for his easy reelection race. According to Opensecrets.org, the website of the Center for Responsive Politics, Baucus raised about $11.6 million, mostly from PAC and individual contributions. Insurance companies, health professionals, HMOs, hospitals, and nursing homes gave Baucus almost $1.8 million. Throw in another $1 million from lawyers, law firms, and those who work for lobbying firms, some of whom may represent health care interests, and you can see the senator’s dilemma.

We hope ABC continues to report on the money connections—such reportage has been woefully absent. Maybe The Money Trail will even serve up more illuminating quotes like the one from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who invited a bunch of lobbyists to his own inaugural reception. Reid says that he will do lots of business with them, and President Obama will too. “People should understand that lobbyists, per se, are someone’s father, mother, son, daughter. They work for a living,” he said. Just plain folk indeed.

Alan D. Mutter is a veteran of the ink-stained days who in the two decades since he left as No. 2 editor of the then-mighty San Francisco Chronicle has helped create a large cable-TV company and several start-up tech firms. He is now a managing partner at Tapit Partners, which advises startups, and writes a blog called Reflections of a Newsosaur, which is widely read in journalism circles.

So Mutter brings to his writing the perspective of someone who's run businesses and run newsrooms. He does his own original reporting and digs into the numbers to ferret out trends and ideas on the business and what to do about its ongoing collapse.

The Audit talked to him this week about the dismal outlook for this year and what comes next.

The Audit: So is there any good news out there?

Alan Mutter: If good is talking about things that will preserve the old way of doing things, then I guess the answer is no. But I think a time of ferment and great change is at once challenging and disorienting and downright scary but it also affords the opportunity of doing new things in new ways and everybody growing as a result of this.

If you're all about preserving the old way of doing things, then this is a very difficult time. And of course one of the problems of change is that while new opportunities arise, certain opportunities go away and that's why you're seeing so many people losing their jobs. So I'm not going to minimize the stress and inconvenience and sheer economic terror that a lot of individuals are feeling, but I have to say there are a lot of opportunities out there, some of which haven't been ascertained, but there are a lot.

Dan Kennedy, journalism professor and MediaNation blogger, has a fantastic profile of the Christian Science Monitor and its Web-bound future in the current issue of Commonwealth magazine. (Per Monitor editor John Yemma, the outlet's much-buzzed-about move away from daily printing “gets us in the game of being relevant. We’re online when an event is happening with the news and the analysis, and with that particular Monitor perspective. We are in the moment of the event happening, of the news breaking.”) Kennedy's thorough reporting and analysis are packaged, thankfully, with a forward-looking, what-can-we-all-learn-from-this tone. All in all, well worth a read.

Digg is following up on its (questionably named) Digg Dialogg series--crowd-sourced, Web-based "press conferences" with leaders such as, previously, Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore--with another presser: featuring, this time, John Boehner. Digg users submit questions, the Digg community votes on them...and the top-voted questions will be asked of the House Minority Leader. (Leading the list as of 4p EST: "Why is it that drugs (alcohol, tobacco) that kill thousands of people each year are legal, yet other drugs (marijuana) which are used for medical purposes and do far less harm and don't cause death, are illegal?" In second place: "How can the republican party reclaim it's old positions of small government, low taxes, and personal responsibility?")

Digg is taking question submissions now (video questions can be submitted via Digg's partner in pressers, CNN's iReport); the Boehner interview will be streamed on CNN.com Live--and, sans visuals, on Digg's Twitter feed--around 11:00am EST on Friday.

The WaPo reports on the plight of Obama's tech-savvy staffers...who, yesterday, found themselves consigned to offices that are, technology-wise, so 1998. Not good. On the bright side, though, (kinda), the staff members' riches to rags tech transition yielded what has to be one of the best quotes of the day, courtesy of Obama spokesman Bill Burton: "It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari."

Watching coverage of the inaugural balls Tuesday night was at times like eavesdropping on a table of gushing bridesmaids at a wedding. “I was struck when they did something that I remember from high school, which is the two arms around the neck and two arms around the waist and sort of swaying side to side,” former Wonkette Ana Marie Cox told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. “And I think that’s a sign that it’s a very happy marriage. They are literally behaving like teenagers in love.”

To which Maddow responded, “I know this not the most momentous news of the day, but our new president is a good dancer.”

Other starry-eyed news accounts echoed the sentiment: The couple “glided confidently through their first dance last night at the Neighborhood Ball, showing the world that they’re as light on their feet as they are eloquent with words,” declared the New York Daily News (via Factiva). “If this White House endeavor hadn’t worked out so well, the Obamas could have been shoo-ins for ‘So You Think You Can Dance.’”

Hang on a second. That might be taking it a step too far. Surely Nigel Lithgoe wouldn’t have been impressed with the monotonous swaying back and forth—which, after all, did have more in common with an awkward first dance at a wedding. In spite of our years of dance training, we began to doubt our assessment: Were the commentators simply watching through the rose-colored glasses of Obamamania, or were the President and First Lady actually dancing well?

To find out, we consulted three dance experts to get their take on the performance. While everyone seems to agree that the Obamas were charming to behold as they swayed their way through ten inaugural balls, the dance experts wouldn’t exactly go along with Keith Olbermann’s characterization of the forty-fourth president’s dancing as “precise.” Indeed, if one were to seriously judge the first couple’s dance prowess, they would have lost major points for technique.

“They were both on time and they make a good dance couple, but he could use a little more variety, and he could’ve dipped her a little bit,” said U.S. Latin Dance champion Melanie LaPatin, who appeared with her partner, Tony Meredith, as a guest choreographer on season three of So You Think You Can Dance.” “And their hand-hold position, although very sweet and loving, was not exactly correct.” (The couple had their fingers intertwined—a big no-no.) “Once they have some time, they should definitely take some lessons,” added LaPatin, who also runs the Dance Times Square studio in Manhattan.

Even the most adoring newscasters commented on the President’s habit of treading on the first lady’s gown. “There is an element of upper body-lower body coordination required in the first lady’s dress,” Maddow said. “She’s having to move it around to avoid walking on it, and several times he stepped on her dress when he was dancing, and then she is teasing him about it.”

Dance Magazine editor-in-chief Wendy Perron said Mrs. Obama would have benefitted from a dress rehearsal. “She didn’t realize that this was a dress where she had to pick up her train,” she says.

In spite of the gaffes, the critics were forgiving in their assessments; after all, the Obamas danced at ten balls in three hours—after a very big day. “I think he has a natural grace and … a fine rhythmic acuity,” says Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt. “Rhythmically they were sharp. The swingouts with Michelle were rather clumsy, but endearingly so.”

What Obamas lacked in technique they made up for in charisma. Indeed, the couple’s little trip-ups only made them more lovable. “That’s an incredible scene to behold,” Today correspondent Natalie Morales told the MSNBC crew. “When the … President twirled Michelle onstage and did a little dip … everybody here couldn’t believe their good fortune to see a more personal side of this couple. Clearly they share so much love.”

Or, as the Daily News’s fairytale account so colorfully put it: “The vision of the First Couple dancing joyously was a romantic, storybook moment. They embraced, gazed into each other's eyes and whispered words while millions watched.”

When it comes down to it, the world’s greatest dancers become so not only for their technique but for their ability to project emotion and to connect with audiences. So maybe the media wasn’t entirely off the mark. “I think what was endearing was that they love being close to each other, and I think that’s what a lot of people were seeing,” says Perron. “They just love being near each other. It’s not like they’re just posing, and I think that’s what makes them look like they’re good dancers—like Fred and Ginger.”

The AP, Reuters and AFP refuse the White House's handouts:

Three news agencies refused to distribute White House-provided photos of President Barack Obama in the Oval Office on Wednesday, arguing that access should have been provided to news photographers.

The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse said the White House was breaking with long-standing tradition in not allowing news photographers to capture the president at work in the Oval Office on his first day.

"We are not distributing what are, in effect, visual press releases," said Michael Oreskes, managing editor for U.S. news at the AP...

...Vincent Amaluy, director of photography for North and South America for AFP, said he suspected first-day confusion was more at play than an attempt to clamp down on access.

Hopefully, Amaluy's generous reading of the situation turns out to be the correct one. The Obama camp has done the "we'll provide photos" thing before. (Of course, that was an entirely different situation in that the images in question were not of official business but the business of Obama's children going to school and news orgs were still able to capture their own images if they so chose).

The Journal has some excellent reporting today on TARP and how political influence is playing out in who gets money.

It focuses on the powerful Democrat Barney Frank, the Massachusetts congressman and chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who intervened to get a home-state bank called OneUnited $12 million in TARP funds despite the fact that it didn't fit the requirements for that money.

Longtime Democratic congresswoman Maxine Waters also comes in for scrutiny:

A OneUnited lawyer, Robert Cooper, says he called Rep. Frank and Rep. Maxine Waters of California, both Democrats, to complain that the Treasury's move had hurt the bank.

Rep. Waters heads the House Financial Services subcommittee on housing, and until last spring her husband, Sidney Williams, was a OneUnited director.

And the bank had been in trouble recently:

On Oct. 27, the FDIC and Massachusetts bank regulatory officials, alleging poor lending practices and executive-compensation abuses by OneUnited, slapped it with a strong enforcement action, a cease-and-desist order. Among other things, the officials told the bank to get rid of a 2008 Porsche for executives.

The WSJ shows how arbitrary the allocation of bailout funds has been. Take Ohio, for example:

A political firestorm erupted in Ohio when it became clear the government had turned down National City, a 163-year-old bank with deep roots in Cleveland. Ohio's congressional delegation sent dozens of letters to Messrs. Dugan and Paulson and threatened to hold hearings on how the Treasury had supposedly wrecked a bank they said wasn't in immediate danger of collapsing...

In addition, Ohio banks are now faring better. Twelve Ohio banks have subsequently received a total of $7.7 billion in taxpayer funds. In neighboring Michigan -- like Ohio, hurt by the auto-industry slump -- only two banks have had federal infusions and a third has preliminary approval, for infusions totaling $638 million.

The press needs to be lifting up the TARP where it can to see what the government's got going on under there. The secrecy is impossible to defend, especially when hundreds of billions of our dollars are going to bail out the bankers who created this crisis—and who are still paying themselves richly. Hell, it's so bad that even the bankers are complaining:

Bankers, regulators and politicians complain of a secretive and opaque process for deciding which banks get cash and which don't. The goal of aiding only banks healthy enough to lend -- laid out by the Treasury when the program began -- clearly seems to have shifted, but in a way that's hard to pin down and that the Treasury has declined to explain. Part of the problem is that some powerful politicians have used their leverage to try to direct federal millions toward banks in their home states.

More like this, please.

In Sri Lanka, violence is so endemic that it begins to feel routine. Since I arrived here four months ago to work as a reporter for a local newspaper, there have been at least half a dozen bombings, an aerial bombardment of a power plant by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) secessionist group, and a suicide bombing that killed three people and injured thirty-six.

This was just in the capital of Colombo, hundreds of kilometers from the battlefront, where the military has banned journalists from documenting its offensive against the LTTE rebels.

Since 1983, it’s estimated that as many as 80,000 people have been killed in the ongoing civil war between the largely Singhalese government and the ethnic Tamil LTTE, commanded by Velupillai Prabharakan. In recent months the Sri Lankan government has claimed victory after victory in the north and east of the country—but it’s unclear if these victories will be decisive after decades of bloodshed.

Despite all this, I have only felt unsafe in Sri Lanka on two occasions: attending a three-day conference celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Colombo Declaration—a document bringing Sri Lankan media together in support of press freedom and media responsibility—and attending the funeral of Lasantha Wickrematunge, the newspaper editor who was assassinated in Colombo on January 8.

The editor of the Sunday Leader, Wickrematunge had a reputation as a provocative, muckraking journalist, unafraid to criticize the government’s bloody military response to the LTTE. He also decried human rights offenses, against both Singhalese and Tamil citizens, committed by the LTTE and the military.

For writing these things, Wickrematunge was threatened throughout his career, and was even warned on January 8 by a household staff member that there were several suspicious looking characters on motorcycles lurking outside the house. Nevertheless, Wickrematunge decided to drive himself to work that day. Along the way, the motorcyclists surrounded his car and shot him multiple times at close range.

“I feel like I’m about to see what a bomb blast looks like first hand,” muttered another journalist as we watched nearly 10,000 people gather for Wickrematunge’s funeral procession. Some of the participants at the procession burned tires, others symbolically gagged themselves with red strips of cloth. Many held photographs of the editor lying dead on a hospital bed, after doctors had tried for three hours to save his life. As the procession neared Borella cemetery, where Wickrematunge’s body would be interred, mourners released hundreds of black balloons, staring at the sky to watch their ascent.

The intimidation, harassment, and killing of journalists here is common; fourteen have been murdered since 2006. A decade of government impunity, stemming from unchecked emergency regulations and sustained wartime nationalism, has caused countless other journalists to leave the country. In the aftermath of Wickrematunge’s murder, several more boarded planes or went into hiding.

But Wickrematunge’s assassination garnered a relatively incredible amount of foreign press coverage—partially because of a posthumous editorial written by Wickrematunge himself, in which he predicted his own death.

Entitled “And then they came for me,” Wickrematunge wrote that journalism was a profession whose “calling” is above “high office, fame, lucre and society. It is the call of conscience.” Addressing President Mahinda Rajapaksa directly, he wrote: “For truth be told, we both know who will be behind my death, but dare not call his name. Not just my life, but yours too, depends on it.”

The editorial led to international headlines like these: “Sri Lankan editor points finger from the grave” (Ravi Nessman, AP); “Chronicle of a death foretold” (The Economist); “If you write you’ll be killed” (Amelia Gentleman, The Guardian).

National Public Radio’s Philip Reeves reported that Wickrematunge hoped fellow journalists would see his death not as a defeat of freedom but an inspiration to intensify their efforts to expose the truth.

In the foreign press, Wickrematunge became a symbol of press freedom; his life a testament to the terrible costs journalists living in struggling democracies and oppressive regimes must sometimes pay when they “speak truth to power.”

In the Sri Lankan media, Wickrematunge was no less than a fallen warrior.

“Thus ended the saga of one of the bravest human beings I have ever known,” wrote D.B.S. Jearaj, a columnist for The Daily Mirror. “Thus ended the life of a fearless scribe, crusading for justice and peace. An irredeemable loss for journalism and Sri Lanka. Cry, the beloved Country!!”

Vijitha Yapa, a former newspaper editor and owner of the country’s largest bookstore chain, wrote in The Sunday Times: “When they shot him, did they not realize that it is not red blood which would pour out of his body but blue ink.”

Several journalists described the armed men on motorcycles who surrounded Wickrematunge’s car and shot him as the “four horsemen of the Apocalypse.” The columnist Ayoma Wijesundera wrote, “Today, the fire of insatiable journalists who do not succumb to greed of bribes or the fear of threat is finally doused by the bullets.”

Commenting on the flood of impassioned remembrances, editorials, and tributes to Wickrematunge in the local media, one editor explained to me that, in Sri Lankan culture, when somebody passes away they immediately become “the best person who ever lived and who will ever live on this earth.”

But some worried that such treatment inevitably buried a deeper conversation—about journalistic standards, truth, politics, and objectivity—that could have been instigated by his death.

For instance, Wickrematunge’s sustained political connections to Sri Lanka’s opposition party, the United National Party (UNP) have been largely overlooked in the press.

Wickrematuge had once been a parliamentary candidate for the UNP, and was on the phone with the party’s ex-chairmen when he was shot. “He liked to be in the thick of the policy-making and decision-making process of the UNP, and had his own likes and dislikes among the hierarchy,” said one anonymous political column in The Sunday Times.

These connections served both to make Wickrematunge a glaring target for the Rajapaksa government and, in the eyes of some journalists, to cast a measure of doubt on the editor’s motivations for exposing corruption and criticizing those in power. In a recent column for The Daily Mirror, M.S.M. Ayub wrote: “…journalists have not only to be balanced but also to be seen as balanced. That is not only to uphold their professionalism, but also to protect their lives.”

To some journalists with whom I spoke, Wickrematunge’s political connections, compounded by his outspokenness, amounted to foolery that resulted in an unnecessary martyrdom, possibly risking the work and safety of fellow journalists by raising the stakes in the ongoing hostilities between the government and the media.

“When the playwright and journalist Richard de Zoysa was abducted and his body finally found,” said one journalist to me, speaking carefully, “there was a sense of relief among some. Not because he was dead but because the risks he took…” The words trailed off.

Nothing can minimize the horror of Wickrematunge’s death and the situation faced by journalists here, where free speech is often suppressed at the barrel of a gun. But it does raise some bleak questions that can transcend the Sri Lankan context: Do political convictions have a place in one’s work? Are truth-telling fellow journalists at risk? Are there stories worth giving one’s life for?

No matter how these questions are answered in the future, the media in Sri Lanka has been dealt a violent blow—one that has worsened an already dire situation. As journalist Jehan Perera wrote for The Daily Mirror, “[Wickrematunge’s] long survival as a journalist, while breaking his stories and expressing his views without inhibition, gave rise to an illusion. This illusion was that there were indeed broad parameters of freedom within which the media could function.”

Merrill Lynch paid out about $4 billion in bonuses just days before Bank of America took it over, the Financial Times says this morning.

What raises the eyebrows is the timing: Merrill paid its bonuses before the year was even up, "an unusual step" because bonuses in past years weren't paid until late January or early February.

Within days of the compensation committee meeting, BofA officials said they became aware that Merrill’s fourth-quarter losses would be greater than expected and began talks with the US Treasury on securing additional Tarp money.

But they went ahead and paid big bonuses anyway, despite losing $21.5 billion in the fourth quarter.

Despite the magnitude of the losses, Merrill had set aside $15bn for 2008 compensation, a sum that was only 6 per cent lower than the total in 2007, when the investment bank’s losses were smaller.

The FT doesn't mention it, but the company's employee count was also smaller after thousands of layoffs. So total pay pool dropped only 6 percent last year even though there were fewer people taking that pay.

The timing is notable because the money was paid as Merrill’s losses were mounting and Ken Lewis, BofA’s chief executive, was seeking additional funds from the government’s troubled asset recovery programme to help close the deal.

Merrill and BofA shareholders voted to approve the takeover on December 5. Three days later, Merrill’s compensation committee approved the bonuses, which were paid on December 29.

That looks really bad.

Of the reporting, which began late yesterday (first from the New York Post and New York Times), that Caroline Kennedy had removed herself from consideration for Hillary Clinton's now-vacant Senate seat, MSNBC's Chuck Todd this morning offered this criticism:

The AP at about 11:00pm first went with she's getting out, ended up coming back and reporting, she's getting in...

I'll just say this, you know, last night, the most frustrating part of this, watching it, was how many of our media friends were doing this based on one source, you know. The fight for two sources, I think, is what at least got us, I think, having the story correctly. I'm not trying to pull a muscle patting ourselves, but the drive for two sources shouldn't be such a bad thing in American journalism.

ANDREA MITCHELL: How old fashioned of you.

MIKA BRZEZINSKI: The first thing we noticed was that, we were like, is there any other source? There was one source for a long time. We ought to think about that.

TODD: There's no reason...you can sometimes wait a couple hours to get it right.

(Or, news organizations can continue to rush their reporting of ClintonSenateSeatStakes. And continue to to publish embarrassing corrections.)

But whose back is Todd "not trying to pull a muscle patting?" Because MSNBC did report the single-sourced Kennedy's out news last night, with this handy disclaimer:

KEITH OLBERMANN: The New York Times is reporting that [Hillary Clinton's] replacement will not be Caroline Kennedy, the paper saying Mrs. Kennedy called Governor Paterson to ask that her name be withdrawn from consideration. That is a one source story and has not yet been confirmed.

Given the Times' track record on Caroline-for-Senate reporting, perhaps MSNBC should have done their own reporting before going on-air with anything.

MSNBC also later last night reported the wait, she's still in stuff for which Todd, in his above criticism, singled out just the AP:

KEITH OLBERMANN: Breaking news at this hour and it concerns the New York Senate seat. A Kennedy family source is telling David Gregory that Caroline Kennedy has not withdrawn her name from consideration. Two sources have now hinted to NBC News there is some indication there may have been a miscommunication between Kennedy and Governor David Paterson's office and the initial reports of her withdrawing are simply incorrect. To repeat, a Kennedy family source telling David Gregory Caroline Kennedy has not withdrawn...

When Gregory phoned in to Rachel Maddow's show a bit later to report the she's still in news, he admitted that "the facts of it aren't entirely solid" and "we're in a fairly murky situation at the moment." Why go on-air with something not "entirely solid," something "fairly murky?" What of Todd's "you can sometimes wait a couple hours to get it right?"

UPDATE: An illustration of the trouble with reporting something based solely on a tip from "a person close to" the person in question.

The Associated Press, at 10:22pm (SHE'S OUT!):

A person close to Caroline Kennedy's decision said she's withdrawing from her effort to join the U.S. Senate in the seat once held by her slain uncle, Sen. Bobby Kennedy. The person close to the decision made Wednesday evening spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak for Kennedy. Spokesmen for New York Gov. David Paterson and Kennedy have refused to comment.

And the AP an hour or so later (SHE'S IN! Or:"Person close to Kennedy decision: She's in race" ):

After wavering briefly, Caroline Kennedy renewed her determination Wednesday to win appointment to the U.S. Senate seat once held by her slain uncle, Bobby Kennedy, a person close to the decision said.

After her surviving uncle, Sen. Edward Kennedy, suffered a seizure on Inauguration Day, Caroline Kennedy had misgivings about taking on the new job, the person said, speaking to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak for Kennedy.

And, most recently from the AP (OUT! And allow a "person close to" to tell us why):

A person who worked closely with Caroline Kennedy on her bid for the Senate says a pressing personal matter unrelated to her uncle's health prompted her to tell the governor she was withdrawing from consideration.

The National Security Agency spied on journalists, according to former NSA analyst Russell Tice. Part of Keith Olbermann's interview with Tice last night (h/t, Michael Calderone):

OLBERMANN: I mention that you say specific groups were targeted. What group or groups can you tell us about?

TICE: Well, there's sort of two avenues to look at this. What I just mentioned was sort of the low-tech dragnet look at this. The things that I specifically were involved with were more on the high-tech side. And try to envision, you know, the dragnets are out there, collecting all the fish and then ferreting out what they may. And my technical angle was to try to harpoon fish from an airplane kind of thing. So it's two separate worlds. But in the world that I was in, as to not harpoon the wrong people in some -- in one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations just supposedly so that we would not target them. So that we knew where they were, so as not to have a problem with them. Now, what I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7, and you know, 365 days a year, and it made no sense. And that's -- I started to investigate that. That's about the time when they came after me, to fire me. But an organization that was collected on were U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists.

OLBERMANN: To what purpose? I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every e-mail sent by all the reporters at the New York Times? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York? Is it like that?

TICE: If it was involved in this specific avenue of collection, it would be everything. Yes. It would be everything.

With the dispatching of Sir Win Bischoff from the chairmanship of Citigroup, following the dismantling of its financial supermarket model earlier this month, The Wall Street Journal proved right as rain on two scoops it ran back in November in the face of a flat denial from the bank that it was considering changing chairmen and a report from rival New York Times that said a breakup was not on the table.

To be alone on a story for weeks, as was the Journal’s David Enrich, is a lonely feeling indeed.

Naysayers included myself. In a long critique of the paper’s crisis coverage I said a misplaced emphasis on scoops led to stories that turned out to be “wrong.”

Historians might wonder about the degree to which the world changed since the Journal’s November stories and to which radical changes at Citi were the result of what amounted to a federal diktat that came more recently, as the Journal reported earlier this month:

Starting in December, federal officials expressed concern that Mr. Pandit lacked a sufficiently drastic strategy to stabilize the company. They instructed his team to come up with a new downsizing plan, say people familiar with the talks. The looming fourth-quarter loss has added to the sense of urgency inside Citigroup, with executives and directors reaching a similar conclusion during the past two weeks.

But what we know today is that my saying the stories were “wrong” was wrong. The larger argument about the Journal’s coverage is for another day.

In November and December 2005, The Washington Post and The New York Times published two groundbreaking national-security stories that revealed controversial and possibly illegal behavior by the Bush administration in its conduct of the “war on terror.” In November 2005, the Post published Dana Priest’s piece about a previously undisclosed, CIA-run, overseas prison network for off-the-books terror suspects where “enhanced interrogation techniques,” including waterboarding, were employed. Six weeks later, in December 2005, the Times ran James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s story on the Bush administration’s secret authorization of the National Security Agency to monitor some domestic-to-international telephone and electronic communications and mine communications transactional data without a court warrant. Both stories received the Pulitzer Prize. Both stories were decried by the Bush White House as irresponsible and even unpatriotic for revealing sensitive government programs whose exposure, it said, would compromise the government’s ability to fight terrorism. And both stories prompted expressions of concern about the policies from some members of Congress, giving rise to the expectation that, as in the past, the revelations of controversial and possibly illegal government programs would lead to congressional investigations and a public accounting.

But that didn’t happen.

Congress did not hold extensive public hearings on the black-site prisons, torture, or the domestic-spying program. Instead, there was a smattering of public hearings, some closed hearings, extensive stonewalling by Bush officials of Congress’s requests for documents and administration testimony on the legal decisions authorizing the programs, and vows from the administration to hunt down the journalists’ sources for the stories. “Compare the current situation to the famous front-page story in 1974 on domestic surveillance,” notes Steven Aftergood, a government-secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. “It led to the establishment of the Church committee, a classic in-depth investigation. By contrast, the Times’s NSA article has led to lawsuits that have been stymied by claims of state secrets and congressional steps to grant immunity to industry participants. Meantime, many of the most basic questions about the surveillance program have gone unanswered: How broad was the surveillance? What number of U.S. citizens were swept up in it? What has been done with the information gathered?”

Ultimately, Congress caved, sanctioning slightly modified versions of the domestic-surveillance program and passing laws that effectively preserved the administration’s right to have the CIA employ harsh interrogation techniques that are prohibited under international law. While there were a few fulminations on some liberal blogs that congressional Democrats (including then-Senator Barack Obama) had voted with the majority of Republicans to pass the new foreign intelligence surveillance law that gave retroactive immunity to the telecommunication companies, by and large the public didn’t seem terribly interested in the issue. For the majority of Americans, the issues of government-authorized torture and domestic spying seemed to fall off the radar, and it was hard not to sense that the Democrats, ever afraid of being portrayed by the White House as soft on terrorism, were just as relieved as the Republicans to see the issues go away.

But it didn’t go away for everybody, not least for the reporters who broke the stories and for many of their sources and contacts. The Bush administration has left in its wake a demoralized national-security press corps, battered by leak investigations, subpoena-happy prosecutors, and a shift in the legal and wider culture away from the previous understanding of journalism’s mission and First Amendment protections. A 2007 study by The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press found a five-fold increase since 2001 in subpoenas seeking information on a media outlet’s confidential sources.
While the NSA and black-site stories exposed previously unknown Bush administration policies that some observers believe could be illegal and unconstitutional, the administration, in highly coordinated campaigns, tried to turn the onus of the revelations on its head, accusing the newspapers that exposed the information of treachery. “There can be no excuse for anyone entrusted with vital intelligence to leak it, and no excuse for any newspaper to print it,” Bush said in St. Louis on June 28, 2006. That same week, at a fundraiser in Nebraska, Vice President Dick Cheney said: “Some in the press, in particular The New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national-security programs.”

The Times’s Risen, in particular, is still haunted by an investigation that has been turned upside down and in whose crosshairs he now finds himself. In January 2008, Risen received a federal subpoena, issued by a grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia, which demanded that he testify about the identities of his confidential sources for a chapter in his 2006 book, State of War. Though the chapter for which Risen was subpoenaed described a botched CIA operation designed to foil Iran’s nuclear program—information that never appeared in the Times—Risen’s book also contained the information about the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program that he and Lichtblau had reported but that the Times had sat on for more than a year at the administration’s request. Risen’s decision to publish the information in his book was a prime impetus for the Times’s decision to revisit the issue and ultimately publish the domestic-snooping information in December 2005.

Risen has said he will resist the subpoena, even if he has to go to jail. And though he has some of his profession’s highest achievements to show for his work—the aforementioned Pulitzer and several nonfiction books on intelligence matters—they have done little to ward off the sense of anxiety and anger over his Kafkaesque predicament: “I do think one of the great ironies is that I may be the only one who goes to jail out of all this,” Risen said in May, “while Congress is trying to give immunity to the telephone companies.”

Even before the subpoena was delivered to his lawyers this past January, some of Risen’s contacts were being subpoenaed to appear before the same grand jury. “The intimidation begins with the document itself,” says one Risen contact, who was subpoenaed and who asked to remain anonymous. “ ‘You are commanded to appear’—that will get your attention. It’s delivered by a couple FBI guys.”

The leak investigations, concern about government scrutiny of them and their contacts, partisan attacks on their ethics and patriotism, and hours huddled with lawyers have taken a toll on reporters. “It is certainly something you worry about every day,” says Lichtblau, who covers the Justice Department for the Times. “It has an effect on how you do the job, an effect on the people you talk to.” In his book Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice, Lichtblau amplifies this point with a story of a very close friend who worked in the government. After Lichtblau’s domestic-spying piece and a subsequent, related piece on the swift banking-transaction network appeared, his friend’s bosses “told him that he would either have to end his friendship with me, or leave the government,” Lichtblau says.

“It’s a witch hunt,” Risen says. “They are trying to shut us down. It’s the most secretive administration in modern history.”

Perhaps nothing is more demoralizing, though, than the sense that journalism’s most groundbreaking investigations did not yield the kind of public accountability, congressional investigations, and reform that past eras have seen—that the system of democratic checks and balances, of which the press is only one part, is broken. Most of the abuses of the last eight years were pursued and exposed not by Congress, but by the press. “I have found that the stories which most anger and haunt journalists are not necessarily the ones with the most violence,” says Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. “They are the stories in which we felt our intervention to have accomplished nothing. What’s really striking with the Risen story is precisely that sense of powerlessness: they committed this great act of journalism, and broke a story of a violation of federal law that raises fundamental questions about abuses of power in our society. And then the great institutions of society don’t respond, but instead turn around and say, ‘Fuck you.’ That is a huge invalidation of all the work, and further betrayal of our sense as journalists of what’s right.”

The system did not work, and is still not working. When the stories on black-site prisons and domestic wiretapping broke in late 2005, the Democrats were still a minority in Congress, and Republicans largely protected the administration from scrutiny. But even after the Democrats won majorities in the House and Senate in the 2006 midterm elections, their interest in high-profile investigations of controversial administration behavior on the national-security front remained muted. Part of the explanation, says Dana Priest, who wrote the Post’s CIA-prison story, is that the information in her piece and the Times’s NSA report is “all classified. For an informed member of Congress, if they had a secret briefing and read my story, they are still hamstrung from discussing it, because they had the secret briefing.”

But past instances of journalistic revelation of secret government programs also involved sensitive or classified information—the Pentagon Papers, for instance, or the story in the 1970s about how the federal government was engaged in domestic spying, which led to the Church committee hearings in 1975 and the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requiring court warrants for domestic surveillance. So what’s different today? Why is fear of discussing press accounts of classified programs, even among powerful members of Congress, seemingly greater now than in past eras? “What’s different now is that they are still partly worried about looking soft on Al Qaeda,” Priest says. “Al Qaeda got put in such a bogeyman box. And everybody is afraid they could be accused of being soft on terrorism. That is the death knell for people.”

This fear factor has been central to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 strategy on any number of fronts, but arguably none more so than in its efforts at secrecy. All administrations want to keep some information secret, Seymour Hersh, the veteran investigative reporter, tells me. But the Bush-Cheney White House is “more secretive. They are better, smarter; they do much more stuff and hide behind jingoism,” he says. “There’s been an incredible diminution of Congress. The truth of the matter is it is different now. It is different under these guys.” Bureaucrats who in the past would have resisted leak-investigation demands from the administration, Hersh says, are today “more compliant.” Hersh says that back in the 1970s, when he broke the story about the government spying on Americans, a top Justice Department official (Gerald Ford’s attorney general Edward Levi) told those in the White House (including Ford’s chief of staff Dick Cheney) who were seeking to pursue a leak investigation against Hersh, “Are you kidding? Get the hell out of here.” Not any more. And that sense of fear and intimidation has seeped into the DNA of media institutions as well, Hersh says. In the climate that prevailed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “newspapers decided they were on the team. And that set off a chain, an attitude, that chilled the First Amendment right away.” It contributed, he suggests, as well to the media’s insufficiently skeptical reporting on the Bush administration’s prewar claims concerning the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

The chill is still evident. One top national-security reporter, whose reporting led to an internal-leak investigation at a federal agency and therefore requested anonymity, says such investigations can remain open, inhibiting sources and follow-up reporting even if the investigations don’t lead to criminal charges. “You have to be aware of your sources,” the reporter says. “What are you going to do? You have to lay off. They leave them open for a purpose.”

The reporter says federal officials had also been effective at inhibiting follow-up reporting by other journalists on controversial subjects by implying, sometimes falsely, that some of the information reported by their colleagues was wrong. The reporter cited as an example the allegations in Risen’s book regarding the CIA and Iran. “The agency was very successful in convincing other reporters that Risen’s report was wrong,” the reporter says.

What remains unclear is whether the new legal precedents and interpretations established by the Bush Justice Department—which contend that the press has no fundamental privilege to protect the identities of confidential sources in fulfilling its mission to ensure the public’s right to know—will swing back now that the Bush administration’s reign is over. Though there are reasons for optimism on these issues under the Obama administration—from its stated intent to close Guantánamo to signals that it is considering establishing a commission to examine government conduct in the “war on terror”—it is unclear how much can be easily undone; or how much of a priority that will be for the administration.

Given the massive, urgent problems confronting the new administration (the economy, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.), it could be forgiven for preferring to look forward rather than back. Beyond that, it also isn’t clear that congressional Democrats have an appetite for a thorough excavation of the Bush administration policies.

One congressional staffer, who works on national-security issues and who asked to speak on background, suggests that one reason Congress has not been more aggressive in following up on the domestic wiretapping story, for instance, is that there was a sense, even among many Democrats in Congress who had been briefed on the program, that the administration was pursuing these programs not for “nefarious reasons, but to catch bad guys”—that it was not using the program to spy on domestic political enemies, for instance, as had occurred in the 1970s.

Furthermore, the staffer says, there has not been until now much political incentive or evident public appetite for pursuing these issues. There was an attitude, he says, when Democrats took control of Congress, of “Let’s not be seen as the party that wants to prosecute. And a lot of this stuff has been accepted by the general public.”

In the meantime, the press is finding new ways to fight back, regaining some of its assertiveness that had gone missing in the years following 9/11. Lucy Dalglish, from The Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, notes, for instance, that some news organizations have added provisions to their contracts with telecom service providers demanding that they not give the government any of the organization’s records without first informing the company, or unless under subpoena.

It’s a start. 

The Washington Post has a very good story this morning on bank regulation.

It found that at least thirty banks have escaped impending consequences from the feds by switching to state charters, something that, inexplicably, is legal. Here's the excellent second graph:

The moves, known as charter conversions, highlight the tremendous leverage that banks hold in their relationships with government supervisors.

Yes, they can do this:

Federal regulators, for instance, came down hard on Commerce Bank/Harrisburg last February, ordering the Pennsylvania lender to limit its dealings with companies owned by its officers and directors. The bank submitted an application to be chartered and supervised by the state of Pennsylvania, which was granted in November. As a result, the company said, the federal limitations no longer applied.

And this isn't an isolated incident.

About 12 percent of the banks that moved to state charters escaped federal regulatory actions, and experts on bank oversight say such cases are the tip of a broader pattern. They note that some banks convert in anticipation of a public enforcement action, or after persuading federal regulators to terminate an action.

Other banks may have converted after being subjected to less serious regulatory actions, which are typically confidential. Only the most serious problems draw a public order, such as indiscriminate lending, flawed accounting or refusing to make requested changes voluntarily.

And this is disturbing:

Regulators are funded by assessments on the banks they oversee, so the agencies tend to treat the banks as customers because they end up competing for their business. Critics have long complained that the system allows banks to play regulators against one another, creating what former Federal Reserve Chairman Arthur Burns memorably described as a "competition in laxity.

I like a lot about this story, including how it says point blank what the problem is and doesn't pussyfoot around proffering the obvious solution. The Post gave it considerable space and put it on page one, too.

Good work.

A welcome break from all the discussion of What The First Lady Wore: Wired on who could have designed President Obama's reportedly bullet-resistant inauguration wear.

Also, Howard Kurtz's Fashion Do's and Dont's for Female Reporters Covering Formal Events:

Inaugural Ball Attire: Mr. Kurtz, What's your opinion of news reporters wearing formal gowns to cover the various balls? I understand not wanting to stand out, but the "participation" of reporters -- genuine news reporters, rather than entertainment reporters -- dressed to the nines really made me wonder if the press has become too much a part of the story in this situation.

Howard Kurtz: I think formal gowns are okay if they're not too low-cut.

It's important that journalists, even those covering the parties, not be seen as part of the celebration. But just as you don't wear the same thing to cover a hurricane as you do to a news conference, it's okay to vary the attire (as Ed Henry did with his board shorts during Obama's Hawaii vacation). Also, let's face it, some of the women wear these gowns, as they do at Oscar time, because it's all about looking good on TV.

In 1835, a New York dairy farmer sent President Andrew Jackson an unusual gift: a wheel of cheese weighing nearly a ton. After letting the cheese age for two years—in, yes, the Entrance Hall of the White House—Jackson invited the entirety of the American public to come to the People's House to eat and enjoy it. And on the appointed day, come many of them did: within two hours, all 1,400 pounds of cheese were gone.

The aged dairy was meant, in this case, to symbolize the synergy between collective ownership and participatory democracy—the notion that what transpires in the White House is and should be meant for public consumption. Sometimes literally.

Well. Yesterday, at 12:01 p.m. EST, Jackson's latest successor placed before the American public his own wheel of cheese: a refurbished version of WhiteHouse.gov, the People's House writ digital. Come in! it seems to say. Take a few bites! Chew things over! This is your White House, too!

The site's, um, inaugural blog post—written by Macon Phillips, the White House's Director of New Media—explains how "Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov" and highlights the three-pronged (and 2.0ed) goals of the revitalized site: Communication, Participation, and Transparency.:

President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history, and WhiteHouse.gov will play a major role in delivering on that promise. The President's executive orders and proclamations will be published for everyone to review, and that’s just the beginning of our efforts to provide a window for all Americans into the business of the government. You can also learn about some of the senior leadership in the new administration and about the President’s policy priorities.

Reaction to the new site ('new' in relation to the Bush administration's version of the site; much of the policy-focused content of Whitehouse.gov is carried over from Change.gov, Obama's transition Web site) has been, generally, glowing. Particularly so among media critics and transparency advocates, each group having been chastened from eight years of Bush-Rovian secrecy.

The updated site "is expected to be the window for what is being touted as a bold experiment in interactive government based largely on lessons learned during the most successful Internet-driven election campaign in history," Agence-France Presse put it. Today's Washington Post quoted YouTube's news and politics director, Steve Grove, similarly applauding the site: "By bringing the White House onto YouTube just moments after the inauguration, the Obama administration has demonstrated a commitment to a transparent government that connects directly with citizens," he declared. PBS MediaShift's Megan Taylor concluded, "It could portend unprecedented transparency in the American government."

Such rosy-hued assessments of the day-old Web site often frame the current version of WhiteHouse.gov as a foil to—and, indeed, a rebuke of—what it was before 12:01 yesterday: a site run by an administration that (in)famously curtailed/thwarted/mocked transparency. The previous site's occasional blog posts had a pulling-teeth quality to them, perfunctorily cheery in tone, and generally reading like press releases. If the Bush site's goal was dialogue, then it was a one-way dialogue—not so much Arthur Miller's vision of "a nation talking to itself" as Orwell's vision of a nation speaking, unilaterally, for itself. The Bush Administration's online White House had no space for public commentary, in every sense.

But comparison, taken too far, can also be misleading. Many of the media's early assessments of the new WhiteHouse.gov framed their treatments according to some iteration of, wow, this site is so much better than it was before!. Which is somewhat akin to deeming a Quarter Pounder to be a good meal choice because, wow, it's so much healthier than a Big Mac!. Relying on a Bushian metric for transparency doesn't just set Obama's bar too low; it sets the standard so low as to invalidate pretty much any bar in the first place.

We need, then, to redefine transparency for the digital age—or, better, to return to an older definition of what transparency means to our democracy. Being better than Bush when it comes to transparency isn’t good enough. Celebrations of Obama's inauguration—and the Web site that came with it—as ushering in a New Age of Transparency are premature at best: as we've seen again and again, talking about transparency does not transparency make. And while there are plenty of reasons to be hopeful--including Obama's signing, this afternoon, of two transparency-friendly executive orders--as Saul Hansell put it yesterday on The New York Times's Bits blog, "Like so much else on this hopeful day, there is the lingering question about how many of the Web site’s lofty aspirations will survive the rough work of governing in a complex world and cynical capital."

Indeed, WhiteHouse.gov's many claims about the priority Obama will place on transparency are offset, somewhat, by a glaring absence on the site: its grand plan for renewed transparency doesn't mention the press. At all. (We get only a tangential reference to the Office of the Press Secretary, listed with, among others, the Office of Presidential Personnel and the Office of Social Innovation--offices that, as yet, lack their own Web pages, or even explanations about what they are, on the Whitehouse.gov site. Several other offices, meanwhile, including the Council on Environmental Quality and the Civil Liberties Oversight Board, have customized pages.)

WhiteHouse.gov presents itself as a kind of social networking portal in which citizens can essentially "friend" the government—and it frames the ensuing dialogue as one that takes place directly between the people and the government. The press, it suggests by way of omission, need not be part of the exchange. One hopes—hey, one even dares to assume—that the conspicuous absence of the press from Obama's transparency agenda is due to his conclusion that the democratic vitality of the Fourth Estate is so obvious as to render explanation or elucidation of that fact unnecessary.

And yet. It's worth remembering that, though Team Obama's facility with social networking and other forms of online organization are nothing short of legendary, their relationship with the press is much less exemplary in terms of that old, simple standby: access. During the campaign, reporters' access to Obama was severely limited. On-the-record conversations with the candidate were even more so. Indeed, Obama's overall treatment of the press—not just in his general rejection of the day-to-day news cycle, but also in his tendency to shun his national traveling press corps (remember when said press people were "hijacked" so Obama could meet in private with Hillary Clinton this summer?)—created the impression that its members were, to him, a buzzing nuisance. Instead of the voice of the people.

It remains to be seen how the man that many have dubbed the "YouTube President" will treat the various forms of information-dissemination that don't fall under the convenient rubric of "direct democracy." There's a thin line, after all, between transparency and advocacy—and, for that matter, between information and propaganda. The goal can't simply be transparency itself—how can we hold anyone accountable to something so self-referential—but rather transparency that is processed through a journosphere that is diligent, curious, and skeptical. Otherwise, "direct democracy" easily veers into "direct publicity." And success must be measured not just in terms of words on a Web site, but also—and much, much more so—by the new administration's treatment of the Fourth Estate. Will Obama regularly grant interviews to reporters? Will his Cabinet and other staff? Will he allow those conversations to take place on the record? Will he, in short, allow reporters to do their jobs and inform the American public?

We are at a pivotal point—in this country's history, to be sure, but also in the role the media will play in that history. And our politics have certainly grown too complex for a Jacksonian block of direct democracy to be either entirely legitimate or entirely effective. As Jay Rosen pointed out in a Pressthink post yesterday, nothing is solid—or, really, sacred—when it comes to the relationship between the president and the press. That relationship is consistently in flux, and is often subject to the whims of the president himself in terms of how much—or how little—power the press will wield in the transaction. The Bush administration may have spent eight years attempting to delegitimize the people who would tell its tales; the only thing worse than abusing the press, however, is ignoring it altogether.

Damon Weaver, the 10-year-old reporter who interviewed Joe Biden back in October, revealed to MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell just now his top two questions for President Obama, should he land such an interview.

1) What are you going to do about violence to keep me safe?

2) Will you make Joe the Plumber fix the toilets in the White House bathrooms?

Also, asked how he thought his Biden interview went, Weaver said: "It went very well. He's a long-winded person." (And gaffe-prone! You forgot gaffe-prone.) O'Donnell concurred, calling Biden "verbose."

From Robin Givhan's Washington Post piece about Michelle Obama's Inauguration Day wardrobe (and her fashion choices more generally):

The bill for the entire inaugural trousseau was paid by the Obamas, [Katie] McCormick Lelyveld [Mrs. Obama's spokeswoman] said.

Would this sentence exist but for WardrobeGate?

Addressing his new White House staff in a ceremony this afternoon, President Barack Obama spoke repeatedly of the importance of open government to his new administration. “Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones,” he promised, shortly before signing several new executive orders, two of which were specifically designed to increase access to government information.

One will require Obama and past presidents to consult with the solicitor general and the attorney general before they claim privilege over information. I’ll be interested to learn the details on that one, once the White House updates its online listing of executive orders. (Currently, the site anachronistically claims, as it has since 12:01 on inauguration day, that “The President has not yet issued any Executive Orders.”)

Judging from Obama’s description, the second transparency-related order seems designed to reverse President Bush’s widely reviled guidelines on how information officers should respond to Freedom of Information Act requests. In the early days of the Clinton administration, Attorney General Janet Reno issued guidance encouraging disclosure of information upon request under FOIA, unless “foreseeable harm” would result. Attorney General John Ashcroft, early in the Bush administration, issued new policies that encouraged information officers to search the full reach of FOIA exemptions before releasing requested records, a signal that many interpreted as license to deny worthy requests as long as a technical excuse for a denial could be found. By 2006, a study of Justice Department data by the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government found that FOIA requests were taking longer and were less likely to be fully fulfilled than at any point since 1998, when the relevant data started being archived.

It looks like the Obama administration, with the swoop of a pen, has quickly restored the old Clinton rules.

Both the Clinton and Bush executive branch FOIA implementation instructions were issued by their attorneys general via memos, not by a Presidential executive order or directive. Alas, pending Eric Holder’s confirmation, America is running without an appointed attorney general, and that absence would be enough to explain why Obama made the FOIA change via an executive order.

But it’s worth remembering that an executive order or directive is quite a different thing, both in force of law and in symbolic importance, than a memo from a cabinet official. “An executive order is much stronger medicine. It is a directive from the president to government to do the following unless you’re otherwise prohibited by law,” says David Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown who has litigated many FOIA cases, and who says he has discussed the administration’s FOIA plans with members of the transition.

The Ashcroft and Reno memos had great impact, but they merely outlined the extent to which the Justice Department would go in court to defend other branches’ FOIA decisions. And those two yo-yoing memos show how easy it is to revoke guidance via memo.

Rolling back Obama’s new executive directive on FOIA will be harder, if only because it’s a step that would bring far greater attention. “This is something he wants the next president to have to rescind,” says Vladeck. “He takes this very personally, and he wants his name on this, not Eric Holder’s.”

In restoring the Reno standard—a move that CJR, among many other voices, called for—on his first full day in office and via such a high profile legal instrument, Obama has struck a quick and prominent victory for government openness. Let’s hope it’s one of many to come.

Updated with new information at 3:15pm and 4:45.

In today's New York Times, Deborah Needleman has an interesting, if sort of fluffy, column about how the Obamas should redecorate the White House. It's called "Free the Blue Room." But the accompanying picture?

Um, that's the Green Room.

Hey, at least they didn't run a photo of the Oval Office.

In The Economist's "The world this week" news briefs, we get an update on the bailout heard around the world:

Barack Obama began drumming up public support for his stimulus package, and also pushed Congress to release funding for the second half of the $700 bail-out programme that it agreed to last October. Politicians in both parties want to expand the programme's remit beyond banks.

Wait, "the $700 bail-out programme"? Where'd the billion(s) go?

You know things are bad when an assertion like this doesn't seem that surprising at first glance:

U.S. financial losses from the credit crisis may reach $3.6 trillion, suggesting the banking system is “effectively insolvent”

That from star economist Nouriel Roubini, whose extremely bearish calls have often proved prescient in this crisis, via Bloomberg. In my book, just about anything he says is worth a second look.

Here he is again:

“The problems of Citi, Bank of America and others suggest the system is bankrupt,” Roubini said. “In Europe, it’s the same thing.”

It sure seems that way, but a lot of people want to act like it's not. Roubini suggest Obama will have to put $1 trillion in capital into the industry to recapitalize it, meaning to make it solvent with money to lend.

Here's why:

“I’ve found that credit losses could peak at a level of $3.6 trillion for U.S. institutions, half of them by banks and broker dealers,” Roubini said at a conference in Dubai today. “If that’s true, it means the U.S. banking system is effectively insolvent because it starts with a capital of $1.4 trillion. This is a systemic banking crisis.”

Political cartoonist Daryl Cagle, in the (Midland, TX) Lone Star Iconoclast on "How to Draw President George W. Bush:"

Another cartoon characteristic that has grown from years of drawing President Bush are his eyes, two little dots, close together, topped by raised, quizzical eyebrows. The close, dotted eyes are an interesting universal phenomenon, shared by almost every cartoonist, that doesn’t relate to the president’s actual features. Over time, most cartoonists will draw a character with eyes that grow larger, but President Bush’s eyes shrink, while his ears grow. There may be a political message in that, but I can’t figure it out.

The WSJ reports:

The Wall Street Journal has received more than a dozen envelopes containing an unknown white powder, and New York City police and hazardous materials crews are investigating the matter, a spokesman said.

The mail was addressed to several New York-based executives at the newspaper published by News Corp.'s Dow Jones & Co. At least 10 of the envelopes are being held in the mailroom of the Journal's Lower Manhattan headquarters, while at least three others have been distributed throughout the building, the spokesman said.

The floor shared by newspaper executives and editorial-page employees has been evacuated.

A Dow Jones executive sent New York City-based Journal employees an email cautioning them not to open any mail. "While we don't think there is cause for alarm at this time, we are asking everyone not to open any mail while we investigate," Dow Jones vice president of communications Howard Hoffman said in the email.

Scary. And reminiscent of harrowing powder scares in the days after 9/11. Our thoughts are with our friends downtown.

Crain's reports today the latest -- and, for my money, the creepiest, to date-- Malia and Sasha news: the maker of Beanie Babies, Ty Inc., is selling Malia and Sasha Obama dolls. "Marvelous Malia" and "Sweet Sasha" sell for $9.99 each and look very...grown-up. To the point where if they were plastic rather than plush, you'd expect them to have Barbie (ever-stiletto-ready) feet.

We have a new president. And after yesterday's inaugural festivities, op-ed columnists set to work to define what it was that they saw. Some focused on Obama—his speech, his promises, his overwhelming responsibilities. The New York Times's Thomas Friedman hopes "he will swing for the fences" and "remember to run the bases." David Ignatius at The Washington Post parses the speech and likes that the "new president didn't pull out the rhetorical stops." "It was a plain speech, like those of early American presidents, better savored in the reading than in the listening," he writes.

Harold Meyerson, also at the Post, bids farewell to the age of Reagan, and says that "Obama's speech was the first presidential inaugural to address the narrowing of American prosperity and to announce the intention to broaden it again." Doyle McManus at the Los Angeles Times writes that Obama was "anything but aloof" and had the guts to ask "Americans to sacrifice for the common good." And the NYT's Maureen Dowd (who took a break from party-throwing to write a column), downplays (at least some of) her sass and pens a few solid lines about Bush's departure and Obama's inaugural speech:

I’ve seen many presidents come and go, but I’ve never watched a tableau like the one Tuesday, when four million eyes turned heavenward, following the helicopter’s path out of town... It was like a catharsis in Greek drama, with the antagonist plucked out of the scene into the sky, and the protagonist dropping into the scene to magically fix all the problems. Except Barack Obama’s somber mien and restrained oratory conveyed that he’s no divinity and there will be no easy resolution to this plot.

She and John Kass (of the Chicago Tribune) also both pick up on the main Bush-directed dart in Obama's speech: "As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals...Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”

But any parsing of Obama's speech and his promises is really talk of what they meant and continue to mean for the crowds—those that voted him into office, those that filled the National Mall, those that he described in his speech. So even as the above columnists peer at Obama's words (former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, for one, opines, "Yuck, in so many ways," and deems the speech "rhetorically flat and substantively interesting"), they also cede some ground to their own—and the country's—reactions.

Kass, with impeccable comic finesse, writes about his foot:

It was so cold Tuesday that my toes curled in my black oxfords like boxed shrimp in your grocer's freezer. Yet as I listened to him, my foot got warmer, and so help me, so did the rest of me. So go ahead, accuse me of being a Hopium Eater, but it was one heck of a speech. It was clear, a thoughtful man talking, a man hoping to unite his country even as he could feel the weight of the Earth settling upon his shoulders.

He also remembers to investigate that thing called perspective: "From where I was sitting, less than 100 feet from him, I turned around and looked out into the National Mall, where more than a million of our countrymen stood, compelled to witness, and I felt guilty that I was so close and they so far, in that rippling sea of believers."

Not so Dowd, whose eyes looked forward (while maintaining peripheral vision), enabling her to note that "under the platform, near where I sat, Denzel Washington, Beyoncé, Jay-Z and P. Diddy looked on proudly" as Obama was being sworn in. Well, celebrities are citizens of hope too.

In contrast, Yvonne Abraham writes about people who couldn't make it to the inauguration—or even to a viewing of it. Describing "vast swaths" of her city that stood still at noon yesterday to congregate at house parties and bars, the Boston Globe columnist took a moment to describe "another Boston [that] could not witness this remarkable moment":

None of them, not the laborer, not the security guard, not the construction foreman, not the lunch cart worker, could see our new president promise them the nation would endure the storm together, because they are in the midst of it.

Despite the cloying rhetoric, Abraham serves up a reminder that not all is celebration and speeches.

Post columnist Ruth Marcus tries, awkwardly, to sum up her reaction to having a black president: "I understood, on an intellectual plane, the significance of electing the first black president. Yet, until he was sworn in, I don't think I fully absorbed its overwhelming emotional force." She lists some snapshot moments she's amassed over the past few months: noticing an Obama poster on the wall of a classroom full of black children; reading obituaries of folks who lived in our country's segregationist past; standing next to the lunch counter (which has been transported from the Woolworth store in Greensboro, N.C. to the National Museum of American History) where in 1960 four black students sat down and asked to be served; hearing Aretha Franklin sing "Let freedom ring."

It's a well-intentioned attempt to flesh out the significance of the moment, but with its earnest list of Reasons Why Having A Black President Means So Much, it also illustrates what MSNBC's Rachel Maddow recently called "a racial awkwardness grace period" wherein it's "OK to stick your foot in your mouth if you have your heart in the right place.” Ruth Marcus (and ahem), Roger Cohen, join the party.

“You sing it with us: we’ll give you the words.” –Pete Seeger, Washington, D.C., January 18, 2009

"Years from now, you'll look back and you'll say that this was the moment—this was the place—where America remembered what it means to hope." Barack Hussein Obama, Des Moines, January 3, 2008

Yesterday’s inauguration was, indeed, a triumph of youth: Youthful intelligence fused with extraordinary focus, and a temperament so mature it is unlike any I have ever seen in a presidential candidate.

Yesterday finally brought the celebration that people like me—teenagers forty years ago—had expected at the end of 1968. We had no idea that we would have to spend forty years in the desert before we could experience it.

In 1968, a generation of idealists invested all of its hopes and dreams in Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy. For one brief, shining moment, everything seemed possible: even a country of courage and decency and equality, one that would finally live up to the dreams of its founders.

Then two assassinations, followed by Richard Nixon’s election, paralyzed most of us for years to come. Only if you are old enough to remember what we imagined might be possible forty years ago can you really understand how hard it became for any of us to hope again.

When Barack Obama, with all his extraordinary promise, first captured the attention of a new generation of idealists, I identified with all the feelings of his fervent young supporters. And when Bob Dylan’s son Jesse produced a music video called “Yes We Can,” I suggested this might actually be a song that could change the outcome of an election.

But because of that part of me that I had lost forty years ago, I never really allowed myself to believe in the possibility of his victory. Even after his overwhelming success at the polls, it still didn’t feel real.

So after I watched the new president’s inaugural address live, I turned the television off until evening. Then I finally watched the rest of the day in rerun. This time, I knew, I wouldn’t be able to enjoy any of it until I was certain of a happy ending.

Years from now, people will look back on this inaugural address as a triumph of substance over trivia, of hope over fear, and idealism over folly. These two passages gave me the greatest pleasure:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

Our founding fathers faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

and

At a moment when the outcome of our revolution was most in doubt, the father of our nation ordered these words be read to the people: "Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it."

There were dozens of moments over the last three days that restored my faith that hope and virtue may yet survive. But to a ‘60s apostle, nothing could match the youthful power of the climax of Sunday’s inaugural concert: a beatific, eighty-nine-year-old Pete Seeger, joined by his grandson, Tao Rodriguez-Seeger, and introduced by Bruce Springsteen as “the father of American folk music.” He was there to sing “perhaps the greatest song ever written about our home.”

“This Land is Your Land” was written in 1940 by Woody Guthrie, the most important troubadour of the working man during the Depression, a pal of Seeger’s for a time, and one of Bob Dylan’s two most important inspirations (Little Richard was the other one).

With Abe Lincoln surely smiling silently behind him, this survivor of the 1950s blacklist interrupted his banjo plucks to triumphantly raise his arms in front of a joyous, gigantic throng.

Almost no one remembered that this had also been Bobby Kennedy’s campaign song in 1968.

This land is your land, this land is my land From California, to the New York Island From the redwood forest, to the gulf stream waters This land was made for you and me

For this brief shining moment, that finally feels like our truth again.

Winners & Sinners

Winner: Francis X. Clines of The New York Times, the best reporter in America.

Scanning (courtesy of The Newseum) today's front pages, of the headlines that include a quote from yesterday's inauguration address, "Hope over fear" seems to be by far the most often-used quote (as in, "On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord...") Other phrases from Obama's speech that made several headlines: "New era of responsibility" and "Remaking America."

A selection of front pages:

The most pressing question for the new administration is what to do about the banks, which are again threatening to go off the cliff.

The Journal puts the prospect of nationalization in the lede of its page-one story. The NYT and Bloomberg mentions it too, further down.

The Times point-blank says Obama is "not yet prepared to address" the financial crisis, but the Journal says:

The hours-old administration of President Barack Obama is expected to move swiftly to try to stabilize the financial system by pumping more capital into weakened banks and buying bad assets. Nationalization appears to be a last resort, but other options on the table move the U.S. in that direction

And Bloomberg says this:

While full details of the rescue haven’t been settled yet, people familiar with the deliberations said the package is likely to include a $50 billion-plus program to stem foreclosures, fresh injections of capital into the banks and steps to deal with toxic assets clogging lenders’ balance sheets.

That sure sounds like we're a little better off than "not yet prepared", as the Times would have it.

The Journal makes the point that investors are bailing out of financial stocks again because they fear that the new administration is going to take measures that will dilute shareholders' holdings. A better way to look at it is that the markets have had a "Paulson put" that put a floor under prices because the Bush administration was willing to fork over hundreds of billions of dollars to banks without wiping out their shareholders.

As the Times says:

If policy makers were even remotely honest, analysts said, they would force banks to take huge write-downs and insist on a high price in return for taking bailout money. For practical purposes, that could mean nationalization or partial nationalization for many banks.

And:

William Seidman, a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation who was closely involved with the bailout of savings-and-loan institutions in the 1990s, said the government should simply take control of the banks it tries to rescue. “When we did things like this, we took the banks over,” Mr. Seidman. “This is a huge, undeserved gift to the present shareholders.”

One big difference between today and the 1990s is that the government back then was seizing entire failed institutions. On paper, at least, the banks in trouble today are still viable.

How are banks viable on paper in ways the ones taken over in the S&L crisis weren't? The Times doesn't say. It should have explained that rather than just asserting it. It certainly doesn't seem that way. Indeed, just four graphs later, the paper says this:

Banks may not want that kind of openness, because accurately valuing the toxic assets could force many to book big losses, admit their insolvency and shut down.

Otherwise, these stories are pretty good at laying out the options awaiting the president. None of them are great.

Only Fox News carried live last evening President Bush's arrival in Midland, Texas and his remarks to the crowds there. Per the LA Times Show Tracker blog:

Late Tuesday afternoon, Fox News was the only major national TV outlet that carried a live telecast of former President Bush's homecoming speech to cheering supporters in Midland, Texas.

"Sometimes what I did wasn't popular," a smiling Bush told the crowd. "But that's OK. I always did what I thought was right."

The rest of the networks, however, did not see the Bush address as news fit to broadcast. At 6:40 p.m. EST, MSNBC was in the middle of "Hardball," with host Chris Matthews and guests batting around the meaning of Obama's swearing-in. CNN was carrying live ongoing coverage of the final moments of the inaugural parade, with the Obamas beaming from the White House reviewing stand.

The broadcast networks likewise did not cover the Bush speech.

As the inaugural crowds pack their bags and head home from Washington, suffused with the sense of having been part of history, the time has come for the media to pack away their superlatives and start treating Barack Obama like a president, not a monument. As Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin wrote yesterday:

We must assertively question Obama about what he's doing, why he's doing it and how he's doing it. We should insist on answers to our questions. And we should aggressively examine those assertions that strikes us as dubious….

Obama's promise to focus more on what's best for the country obliges us to at least consider how he's doing by that standard. We should hold Obama to his bold pledges. And if he keeps them, we should rise to the occasion. Rather than be too cynical, or focus too much on the superficial and the political, we should embrace an opportunity that we haven't had in quite some time: To publicly explore the important issues and decisions facing our nation and our world.

In the spirit of exploration, we offer seven tough questions on seven perhaps-overlooked issues, questions that the press might consider asking in the weeks and months to come.

Will Obama be bold in his efforts to fix the economy?

Even casual business press readers are aware that the fate of the real economy hinges on dispelling the deep uncertainty that hangs over the banking system. A series of emergency measures by the Bush administration, bailouts in different forms, have failed to instill confidence that major institutions are, in fact, solvent. The question for the financial press is whether a bolder stroke—nationalization—is required, and whether the Obama administration is prepared to administer such a remedy. Calls for a temporary government takeover of big institutions have begun to come from influential columnists, including Paul Krugman in The New York Times
and Willem Buiter in the Financial Times. Will a consensus on bank nationalization form as it did, so quickly, on the need for a large economic stimulus? Stay tuned. –Dean Starkman

Will he ignore immigration reform?

A recent AP article quoted Mexico expert George Grayson, a professor at the College of William & Mary, as saying, “The chance of having immigration reform is like having it snow in the dessert.” With two wars abroad and a tanking economy, the once-timely issue has, it’s true, taken a bit of a back seat. Pres. Obama’s agenda on immigration includes creating secure borders, bringing people “out of the shadows” and onto a path to citizenship, and working with Mexico to decrease illegal immigration. (His underreported meeting with Mexican president Felipe Calderon last Monday covered these points of discussion, alongside trade and drug violence.) The danger is that, in the face of more pressing issues, immigration reform will be neglected. That would be a mistake: immigration affects and informs too many other things, from labor economics to the war against drugs to education reform. So while the press should, obviously, monitor the administration’s stated goals, it should also—and perhaps more importantly—keep the discussion on the table by monitoring and reporting out the consequences of action (or inaction) through those other, more high profile lenses. –Jane Kim

Will he follow through on his promises to fund early childhood education?

On December 17, the New York Times reported on A-1 (headline: “Obama Pledge Stirs Hope in Early Education”) that “many advocates are atremble with anticipation over Mr. Obama’s espousal of early childhood education.” As I wrote back then:

It’s potentially a very big deal (“the $10 billion Mr. Obama has pledged for early childhood education would amount to the largest new federal initiative for young children since Head Start began in 1965.”) One can understand the hopeful anticipation that the Times reporter, Sam Dillon, found among those involved in early childhood education. To Scarborough’s point (I think) [On MSNBC, Joe Scarborough took the Times to task for the lack of skepticism in this piece], where’s the buzzkill “to be sure” paragraph in this piece? Where the reporter reminds readers that These Are Promises. Made By a Campaigning Politician (albeit one who truly does seem to hold early childhood education as a high priority). Confronting now a recession and so many larger (adult) hands also held out hopefully ($700 billion for banks. $10 billion for babies…) Hopefully the Times will also front-page what becomes of these promises. Keep in touch with these “advocates atremble with anticipation” and report back.

All of which bears repeating now. This, Obama’s pledge to invest $10 billion in early educational programs for children between zero and five, is one of many hundreds of campaign promises on which there has been “no action” to date, according to PolitiFact. We’ll be watching for Dillon and his peers on the education beat to follow when, whether, and how that changes in the months ahead.

As NPR reported earlier this month: “Obama’s education wish list may have to wait.”(“With the economy on life support and just about every state now slashing education funding, President-elect Obama is likely to focus less on his wish list and more on the political consensus he says he wants to build around education…”) And the $10 billion figure does not appear in the just-published-online official White House “Agenda”.

In other words: children between zero and five (not to mention those early childhood education advocates “atremble”) should probably anticipate less. On this issue, the press should be asking for more. –Liz Cox Barrett

Will he stand up to the teachers’ unions?

During the campaign, Obama suggested that he might, as many have urged him to do, "take on the [teachers’] unions." His talk of performance pay (as opposed to tenure-based pay), in particular, hinted that the candidate, were he to become president, would risk angering—perhaps even alienating—one of the most powerful factions in Democratic politics. Once elected, Obama's choice for Education Secretary—the reform-minded Arne Duncan—reiterated this inclination. And yet the vision for education that the new administration lays out now is...vague. While the plans specified—reforming NCLB, recruiting more teachers, and ensuring that they're prepared for the challenges of the classroom—are commendable, those plans are also incredibly unclear about whether Obama and Biden will focus on teacher accountability, or whether the unions will remain an entrenched force in public education. As we're seeing, it's proving to be nearly impossible to have it both ways. And the dicey issue of merit pay gets the new administration's most awkward dance-around treatment:

Obama and Biden will promote new and innovative ways to increase teacher pay that are developed with teachers, not imposed on them. Districts will be able to design programs that reward with a salary increase accomplished educators who serve as a mentors to new teachers. Districts can reward teachers who work in underserved places like rural areas and inner cities. And if teachers consistently excel in the classroom, that work can be valued and rewarded as well.

This may mollify teachers—particularly the more established ones, whose long tenure has ensured them steadily increasing (though still often woefully low) salaries—but it should raise many questions in the minds of the media. Increased teacher pay, developed with teachers, not imposed on them, valued and rewarded as well, etc. are all well and good—but will the Obama administration value teacher merit enough to fight unions who want salary based on tenure, and tenure alone? Or to fight contracts that demand keeping even the most ineffective teachers in school systems until they retire (a good thing for those teachers, to be sure, but an incredibly bad thing for the kids they teach)? All questions in need of answers—and in need of asking. –Megan Garber

Will he reform drug policy?

Talk about the war on drugs was largely absent from campaign speeches, but it ought not remain so in the press during the next four years. Obama himself said he wanted to “give first-time, non-violent drug offenders a chance to serve their sentence, where appropriate, in the type of drug rehabilitation programs that have proven to work better than a prison term in changing bad behavior.” What’s more, a recent editorial in The New York Times pointed out that white teenagers’ use of cocaine exceeds that of black teenagers by a factor of four to one. But a letter responding to the piece mentioned that the incarceration rates for drug offenses were inversely proportioned, with more blacks serving prison sentences than whites. The Plain Dealer of Cleveland recently exposed this disparity in an investigative series focused on convictions in Ohio’s Cuyahoga county. CJR urges reporters to follow in the Plain Dealer’s footsteps to pursue regional and national stories that assess the efficacy of current drug policies and seek expert input on how they can be reformed. —Katia Bachko

Will he mention the downsides of health IT?

In his inaugural address, the president did not talk about bringing health care within the reach of every American—a moral issue, according to some, akin to the civil rights struggle that made it possible for Obama to reach the highest office in the land. In his lone reference to health care, Obama said we would “wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost.” During the campaign, he hailed health IT as the savior for America’s health care dysfunction, touted it as if it were unvarnished goods, and promised that it would not only improve medical quality care but lower the price of health insurance by precisely $2,500.

The peril and the promise of health information technology cry out for careful scrutiny, an examination yet to be done by the press, of whether IT can really lower health care costs at what price to consumers who may have lots to lose from its implementation. It is a big story. In the first of our Excluded Voices series, Yale professor Ted Marmor, an expert on U.S. health care, said “No other industrialized democracy has hit a cost control home run with information technology, and it’s provincial of us to think so,” adding it “might cost a fortune and become a boondoggle.” Indeed, New York Times reporter Robert Pear made that point Sunday, when he wrote “So far, the only jobs created have been for a small army of lobbyists trying to secure money for health information technology.”

Pear went further and described the coming battle between technology proponents hungry for profit and patient and consumer groups worried about a lack of privacy controls. For example, will insurers check a person’s pharmaceutical history and reject those who use too many expensive drugs? Will those using costly drugs be easy prey for companies wanting to sell the expensive stuff because they will now know exactly who their customers are?

For those eager to wade into this thicket, here are some more questions to explore:

• What privacy provisions are needed?

• How will those opposing such provisions wage the war?

• How will the different systems now on the market talk to one another? If your electronic medical record at the doctor’s office doesn’t work with the one in the ER when you’re brought in with a heart attack, what good is it?

• Who is making money from health IT? That journalistic maxim “follow the money” is important here.

• How will IT really lower costs without serious cost control measures used in other countries?

• What will make the nation’s autonomous and independent-minded health-care providers embrace the helpful aspects of the new technology?

Finally, let’s start by explaining to our audiences just what we mean by health information technology. Perhaps a lexicon is in order. –Trudy Lieberman

Will his “clean energy revolution” be a practical one?

Science and environment writers have long worked in relative newsroom obscurity, disconnected from mainstream politics, business, and culture. It is for their beat, more than any other, that Barack Obama’s inauguration signals a new prominence and relevance. The new president’s commitment to a clean energy revolution is one of the most expansive and challenging stories of our time. It will be science and environment reporters’ responsibility to inject more practicality into their coverage of that effort, however.

First and foremost, reporters must identify the tools that we have and the tools we need to accomplish such vast change in the global energy economy. Time magazine, for example, recently published a persuasive piece arguing that the United States could make significant progress by simply using efficient technologies already on the market. Its only shortcoming was that it did not address the opinion of many well respected scientists—including the new Energy Secretary, Steven Chu—who believe that the world needs new technologies to get the job done.

When covering those tools that still lie on our energy horizon, however, reporters must be careful to avoid sensationalism and defeatism alike. We recently criticized CNN for overselling an immature and fringe energy technology, but, likewise, outlets must not be afraid to revisit new and better generations of previously disappointing technologies like ethanol and batteries. In addition to these sources of energy, journalists must also pay more attention to our energy infrastructure. A “smart” national energy grid and an efficient passenger rail system are two of the obvious components of that infrastructure. A more inconspicuous, but no less important, piece of that infrastructure is our educational system and the need, as The New York Times has incisively put it, to inspire a culture of “innovation.”

Along the those lines, science and environment reporters need to communicate all of this practical information to their colleagues in politics, business, and other departments. Indeed, energy is revealing itself to be the most common denominator in the newsroom, crossing nearly every beat from healthcare to national security. President Obama seems to get that. As always, it is the press’s job to make sure. –Curtis Brainard

The MSNBC crew offered this commentary on President and First Lady Obama dancing at The Youth Inaugural Ball (4th of 10) last night:

KEITH OLBERMANN: We don't want to interrupt this because it has already been commented on that he's an exceptional dancer. I'm going to suggest that one of reasons he is is that he is a precise dancer. Precision does not mean slow, it means precise. He is a precise dancer, is he not, Chris?

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I wouldn't know. [ed. note: No, he wouldn't.] I think it's different what he's doing. It's kind of an interesting style. I don't think ...

OLBERMANN: It's precise...

MATTHEWS: It's what my wife calls...She has a term for it. I can't think of what it is now. It's different than that. But I must say something, James Carville said politics is Hollywood for ugly people. These people, the actors they hired to play them couldn't be better looking. I can say that of both families today. This is an incredibly glamourous bunch of people we watched in the reviewing stand today. Extraordinarily so. This picture would be hard to beat if Hollywood replicated it...

RACHEL MADDOW: They are modeling a married romance, that is moving...

MATTHEWS: Looks like two people on top of a wedding cake. Look at this stuff...

MADDOW: They are teasing each other. They are tender -- beautiful.

MATTHEWS: This is not a political marriage, per se. No comment further...

Was Matthews suggesting that some other recent occupants of the White House had "a political marriage?"

Unlike one MSNBC talking head, I can't claim to identify a non-political marriage (by its dance moves). But, scanning Fox News's transcripts of everything President Obama said at all of last night's balls, I did notice that the very first and last things out of the president's mouth pertained to his wife.

Ball 1: Neighborhood Inaugural Ball, 8:30pm

OBAMA: Hello America. First of all, how good-looking is my wife? (crowd cheers)

Ball 10: Eastern Inaugural Ball, 1:30am

OBAMA: This is our last event of Inauguration Day. And so since the First Lady of the United States has been doing the same thing that I've been doing except backwards and in heels, let me ask her for one last dance.

(Awwwww...)

CAIRO – In television terms, Gaza has been déjà vu all over again. U.S. television has been dominated by talking heads parroting Israel’s talking points, the wide shots of bombs exploding and smoke pillars that have become the white noise of Middle East conflict, and the occasional glimpse of a body bag.

Here in the Arab world, it is all blood and outrage. Coverage has been dominated by gruesome scenes of dead and wounded civilians (many of them children), angry commentators, and demonstrations on the streets of many Arab capitals.

It is the same kind of distorted prism through which Americans and Arabs have been viewing events in this part of the world since 9/11.

Standing somewhere in the no man’s land between these starkly different visions are the three main English-language broadcasters seen in this region, the BBC, CNN International, and, most importantly, upstart Al Jazeera English (AJE).

Balance is the goal of any quality news organization. But in the U.S., the quest for balance in this complex and highly-charged conflict has sometimes seemed contrived.

Take ABC anchor Charles Gibson’s lead-in to a “children of war” piece on the January 8 World News Tonight: “Youngsters on both sides of the border are being killed, injured, and traumatized by the fighting in Gaza,” he reported. But is that strictly true? By the day the piece aired, according to UNICEF, 292 Palestinian children had been killed, with hundreds more wounded. The number has since grown. Of the three Israeli civilian deaths at that point, none were children. There is certainly no doubt that the last few weeks have been traumatic for Israeli children living in towns near the border, but in the shorthand of U.S. TV news, their suffering and that of Palestinian children in Gaza became indistinguishable.

In contrast, coverage generated by the major trans-border broadcasters has been far more nuanced and comprehensive. London-based Tim Whewell’s in-depth and carefully reported five-and-a-half minute piece, “The case for war crimes,” on the BBC’s Newsnight, is not something likely to have been aired on U.S. television, while Palestinian producers, such as the BBC’s Rushdie Abualouf, have supplied a steady stream of original footage and reporting from inside Gaza.

Like the BBC, the staff of CNN International is drawn from many countries. As a result, it has been producing coverage markedly different from that seen on its sister channel in the U.S. An American diplomat here in the Middle East told me that he and a colleague were working out in the embassy gym one day with the television on. The embassy gets a feed from Armed Forces Radio and Television, so diplomats have access to CNN’s domestic service. Out of curiosity, they started switching back and forth between CNN Domestic and CNN International. “We couldn’t believe it,” he recalled. The domestic CNN was dominated by commentary supporting Israeli actions, while the international feed was focused on the devastation on the ground.

But with its mix of Arab and Western correspondents, news executives from Canadian, British, and Arab networks, and access to the regional infrastructure and expertise of Al Jazeera Arabic, AJE is a channel born to cover this conflict.

Two correspondents from AJE were in Gaza when Israel sealed the border in mid-December: Ayman Mohyeldin, an American who started his career as a producer for NBC and CNN, and Sherine Tadros, a British-Egyptian former staffer at Al Arabiya who was sent to Gaza as a producer but moved on camera when the fighting began. Their reporting has been nothing short of riveting.

But it is the comprehensive nature of the coverage, the seamless integration of news and programming, which has resulted in a body of work that not only brings viewers into the heart of the conflict, but sets the war in its political, geographic and historical context.

Whether in the field or in the studio, AJE’s coverage has been cool and collected, largely free of the emotion that is often in evidence on its sister Arabic-language network; and the word “martyr,” used by Al Jazeera Arabic and many other Arab news organizations to describe Palestinian dead, has not crossed the lips of AJE’s staffers.

The overarching title of AJE’s coverage, “War On Gaza,” telegraphed the channel’s perspective—“on” not “in” was a conscious choice. The reporting reflected a distinct attitude; an implicit sense of identification with the Palestinian victims—the civilians, not the Hamas fighters—evident, for example, in a crawl at the bottom of the screen listing the names and ages of some of the more than 300 Palestinian children killed.

But it is an engaged journalism borne of empathy that, to this viewer’s mind, stopped short of betraying an overt bias against Israel—much to the disappointment of some Arabs, such as a guest columnist in Qatar’s As Sharq newspaper, who charged that “the English-language channel either consciously or unconsciously is moving within the orbit of the Israeli approach.”

AJE’s correspondents inside Israel—veterans of the BBC, ITN and CNN—have been aggressive in their approach, as in reporter James Bays’s questioning of Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, but they have also not shied away from reporting on the impact of Hamas missiles on Israeli citizens.

AJE, which is currently advertising to hire more than forty additional staffers, is aggressively stepping into the breach left by the American networks, which have largely abandoned the Middle East. A few weeks before the Gaza crisis broke, CBS News fired most of the staff of its Israel bureau. ABC recently cut a deal to use the BBC’s reporting from Baghdad. The evening newscasts of ABC, CBS, and NBC together gave just 434 minutes of airtime to Iraq in 2008, according to the Tyndall Report, and there were days in the first two weeks of the Gaza war when the networks did not bother to air a piece on the conflict.

They are, essentially, ceding reporting of the region (and much of the world) to others. Ironically, in the long run, given the U.S. networks’ track record in recent years, that may be a good thing—if these alternatives become more available to the average American. For the moment, BBC America is seen on some cable systems, CNN-I cannot be viewed inside the U.S., and, with a few localized exceptions, Al Jazeera English is only available streamed online via Livestation and YouTube.

The kind of borderless journalism these channels increasingly offer creates the potential to replace the myopic coverage that has fueled misunderstanding since 9/11.

It is a style of journalism in which worldviews are not quite so fixed, audiences are exposed to more than just their own preconceived notions, and a new definition of balance just might be found.

Sly, snotty, and often irresistible, snark has been flourishing in the petri dish of the American media for decades now. The Internet, however, has spread the contagion faster than ever. And according to New Yorker film critic David Denby, we may be reaching a new level of toxicity. That's the gist of his slender new polemic, whose tongue-clucking subtitle pretty much says it all: Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. In a phone interview with CJR's James Marcus, the author discusses his motives for writing the book, the epidemic of unease among established journalists, and the faint hope that the runaway train of snark can be slowed to a respectable crawl.

Let me begin with a question about the genesis of this project. If modern, American-style snark has been around since the heyday of Spy in the eighties, what made it imperative to write this book now?

As I mentioned in the acknowledgements, the specific genesis was a dinner with [Slate founder and freestyle pundit] Mike Kinsley last March. We both had the same idea, and I think he was going to do it for Time magazine, but he ceded the turf to me. What was really getting to me, though, was the thought that Barack Obama might be done in by coded racist comments. Snark was the vehicle for those attacks: an appeal to "understood" notions among Republicans that this guy was alien, un-American, not right for leadership. Now, it turned out I was wrong. Obama was our Democratic Prince! And a lot of people, including Republicans, wanted to protect him in a way that most of us won't be protected.

Were you returning fire in any sense?

There was no personal motive. I mean, I've been snarked like everybody else, but no more than other people. I just kept seeing the same kind of formulation in all sorts of places, including The New York Times. I sensed that Gresham's Law was beginning to operate: because everyone wants to be funny in this country—which is actually very hard—the bad stuff was driving out the good stuff. And there's going to be more and more of this, particularly because everyone in journalism is anxious. Older journalists are terrified of being left out of it, of not seeming hip, while the younger ones are battering at the gates trying to get in.

You write that one of the optimum cultural conditions for snark occurs when "a dying class of the powerful, or would-be powerful, struggles to keep the barbarians from entering the hallowed halls." Are traditional journalists such an embattled class?

I think so. I just feel this tremendous collective anxiety among established journalists that somehow they'll be left out. There will be a game of musical chairs and they're not going to get a chair. So one way of seeming to embrace new media, one way of staying in the game, is to get snippy and sarcastic and snarky. They're certainly not encouraged to be more analytic, more intelligent. I adore Josh Marshall—he's the best thing to come along in years. But for every one like him, there are five who are just fucking around, trying to grab a little piece of our attention.

Snark, as you note, is not always easy to pin down. Its main identifying marks seem to be reflexive contempt and what you call "the little curlicue of knowingness." Does that sound accurate?

Yeah. It's not hate speech, it's not trolling, it's not simple insult. What I'm getting at is contempt, and a signal sent to a member of a club (which can be enormous or tiny) in which a certain kind of reference is understood, and stands in for an attitude that one wants to put down.

You do provide a potted history of the form, starting with Juvenal and the other great snark merchants of the classical era.

It's a bit of mock scholarship. But I wanted to suggest that there's a certain sensibility that grew, and to contrast the formal rules of invective in the ancient world with what we've got now.

Of course, Nick Denton of Gawker seems to have his own rules of invective: no think pieces, and no more than 200 words.

I had assumed that Nick Denton's people would put me on a spit and roast me, but I haven't heard a thing. I'm amazed only because they've gone after me in the past. Maybe I missed it. I don't spend a lot of time relentlessly looking—if you do, you're going to drive yourself nuts. I love the Internet, and I depend on it, but I don't live in it, as many younger people do.

You make the point that in many cases, being beaten up on the Internet has a strangely unreal quality to it. If you don't look, it's hardly there.

Unless your helpful friends tell you, "Oh, that was awful." Sometimes people do look at you weirdly, and you realize that something has been said and you don't know what it is. We can certainly toughen up and shrug it off. But the old notion of personal honor is something that we're going to have to jettison in the digital age.

So the traditional idea of reputation is going down the drain?

Yeah, you can't just escape the way you did in America in the nineteenth century. Just pick up and go somewhere else. It's crucial not just for people my age, but for kids. A lot of stuff they put on social networking sites, or on this scummy Juicy Campus site—it may pop out ten years later, when you're applying for a job in a conservative profession.

Let's return for a moment to your history of snark, in which Tom Wolfe occupies a pivotal spot. You discuss both his amazing talent and the sense that there's really nothing at stake. What we see in a piece like "These Radical Chic Evenings" (1970) is like a higher form of dandyism.

When he was young, Wolfe was celebrating and discovering aspects of American culture that had been buried or hidden. But then he turned to things like this, and if you examine that piece closely, there's nothing in it but contempt and rage. He seems to be angry not just at the Black Panthers, but at the mainstream civil rights leaders. He makes fun of the way they dress, how boring and middle-class they are. There's a strain of anti-Semitism, too. All of these rich Jews trying to maintain their credibility in their twelve-room apartments. But in retrospect, it's Wolfe who looks like a schmuck, not the people who went to that party. The piece now seems to me incredibly well composed and incredibly sour and nasty. He's got nothing, no reforming instinct, just his taste against theirs. It doesn't sit well anymore. And it was a transit point for Wolfe: he went from being an exuberant cultural celebrator to being a right-wing sourpuss.

At one point you note the so-called "Pacemaker Principle," whereby the old "get their slowness clocked, their verbal flummoxes written down, their sags and humps measured." Among your examples is a shaft fired by Charles McGrath at Jim Lehrer, which seems a little paradoxical, given that McGrath himself is in his early sixties. Is snark now so reflexive that we're all devouring our own peers?

That's a classic example of what I was talking about at the beginning of our conversation—the anxiety that you're not keeping up. You're getting old, you're not hip enough, so you make fun of somebody who's slightly older. I was shocked to hear that Lehrer was deeply wounded by that comment. They do the same thing they've been doing for thirty years on that show; it does have a kind of reliability. Why put it down?

I found an additional irony in the fact that the Times Book Review was notably un-snarky under McGrath's tenure, but has become more so under that of Sam Tanenhaus.

They want to get your attention. They've published some good pieces and some awful things, which should have been much more tightly edited. It's going for impact. But if you're going to do a tough, nasty piece, you have to edit it very carefully, and you've got to have a great writer doing it.

Let's return to something we touched on earlier. You're at pains to separate yourself from such articulate Luddites as Lee Siegel, who insists that the Internet is destroying our humanity. But could you say a few words about the Web's role as snark's mightiest megaphone?

Lee's book [Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob] seemed to me excessively gloomy, an attempt to be eloquent about very small issues. Look, we've had a democratic revolution. Millions of people have gotten access to the presses, which were formerly controlled by the owners of the presses and their hirelings, like me. Suddenly, everybody can join. And that's an incredible event in the history of democracy. But in the wake of any democratic revolution, you're going to have an explosion of egotism and anger and pent-up rage. There's an awful lot of that. You can ignore it, of course, unless you're in a conversation about something that matters to you.

So where is this post-revolutionary hangover leading us?

I think our excitement over the Web should probably subside in another ten years. And we can already see that it's really more useful if it's tightly refereed. Everyone can speak, but there should be standards of common sense and civility. That's a widespread feeling now: people have had enough of this annihilating crap, which seems to screw up so many conversations. I mean, just recently, Annette Insdorf did a piece about Holocaust movies on the Newsweek Web site, and within just a few exchanges, the comments fell into Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism. That was the end of that conversation.

The other thing, as I said before, is that everyone wants to be funny, because comics are culture heroes. So there's a tendency to turn to snark as a way to make a character out of yourself, to create a kind of Internet doppelgänger. It's anonymous writing, and you can cut yourself loose if anybody gets too close to you. But anonymity is a double-edged thing. It's absolutely necessary for dissidents and whistleblowers. If you're just attacking your neighbors or friends on campus without taking responsibility, it's cowardly. And the fact that kids don't see any moral issue there is kind of shocking.

In the book, you dwell on anonymity as a generational litmus test. You also note that for kids, "privacy doesn't much register as a spiritual value and a sanctified space anymore." Is this a reversible trend, or is privacy truly on the verge of extinction?

They want attention just like the rest of us. But they don't realize that privacy is one of the great triumphs of bourgeois civilization: your own bedroom, your own diary, your own love affair. You have a sacred space in which you can say whatever you want, do whatever you want, but only for yourself, or for somebody you're very close to. If you're a seventeen-year-old posting the details of your love affair on a social networking site, you're more or less joining the snark culture. It doesn't induce empathy, it induces sarcasm.

Reviewing your book in New York magazine, Adam Sternbergh defends snark as "the angry heckler at the back of the room."

And what use is the heckler at the back of the room? He's not saying something very important or interesting. Sternbergh doesn't want his pieces interrupted by angry hecklers, and neither does anybody else at New York magazine. There was a point-by-point refutation of that piece by Edward Champion, by the way, which was incredibly thorough.

A book about snark is bound to beget more snark.

There's a lot of stuff floating around already. It's inevitable. When you stick your chin out, it's going to get hit. That's fine. It's part of saying something, not just doing the old soft-shoe down to the bottom of the page. My idea was to get a conversation going. Pile on!

Finally: do you think your book will have any effect on the runaway train of snark?

I doubt it. Although we may be entering a different era. There've been a lot of lies over the past eight years, and maybe snark was one way of dealing with lies, by turning everything into a joke. But if we're not going to be genuinely witty, which is hard, we might as well talk sense to each other. And perhaps an anti-snark tract will help in that respect. Maybe not. It's the media juggernaut: you can comment as it goes by, but derail it? No.

The FT has a confused story this morning on the newspaper industry. Its headline says "Newspapers turn into rich mens’ toys," but the story's primary example is The New York Times and its financing deal with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim.

Now, far be it for me to be naive enough to say that it doesn't matter who owns you, but I'll give the Times more credit than that—and as the FT concedes, papers have "long been the playthings of wealthy men." Slim will have no voting rights, just the right to make near-usurious interest off of his investment (the potential ex-KGB agent buying London papers is more worrisome).

And this paragraph makes no sense:

Newspapers have long been the playthings of wealthy men but a seemingly endless decline in advertising revenues is raising the question of whether private ownership or the shelter of sitting within diversified empires is now the industry’s only valid business model.

Which is it?

That said, the story does have an interesting point today about the newspaper industry:

The $5.6bn Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp paid in 2007 for Dow Jones, owner of the Wall Street Journal and several local papers, would now be sufficient to buy Gannett, the New York Times, McClatchy, Media General, Belo and Lee Enterprises, even at twice their current share prices.

That's incredible.

Typos are a common occurrence in online journalism--particularly the quick-turnaround, deadline-oriented stuff that's been making its way through the Interweb this afternoon. Normally, we wouldn't quibble about, let alone bother to point out, individual errata. Nature of the beast, and all.

However, sometimes errors and their makers can be ironic--like the kid who, writing his college application essay, declares, "If there's one thing you should know about me, it's that I'm a profectionist." And today the HuffPo, citing McClatchy, gave us such an error:

Yeah: oops. I mean, ops.

...that we all get to read! The letter this time appears in the Wall Street Journal rather than Parade, comes from Barbara and Jenna Bush rather than Dad, and concludes as follows:

Our Dad, who read to us nightly, taught us how to score tedious baseball games. He is our father, not the sketch in a paper or part of a skit on TV. Many people will think they know him, but they have no idea how he felt the day you were born, the pride he felt on your first day of school, or how much you both love being his daughters. So here is our most important piece of advice: remember who your dad really is.

PBS's Online NewsHour has--what will surely be one of several--tag clouds of this afternoon's Obamaddress. Perhaps yet another case of the media blindly falling in love with technology, but kinda cool and instructive nonetheless:

In the current issue of CJR, we challenged Barack Obama to eschew the furtive secrecy that characterized the Bush administration—"an administration in which the executive’s lust for power outstripped the public’s right to know"—and conduct his presidency in an open and transparent manner. We argued that, among other things, the new president should:

* Instruct the attorney general to restore the presumption that exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act are designed to prevent “foreseeable harm,” rather than to be used as expandable excuses to deny requests.

* Issue an executive order restoring the intent of the Presidential Records Act, making the government the owner and executor of past presidents’ papers, rather than a mere custodian for as long as an ex-executive or his heirs want certain documents under wraps.

* In his first budget, restore, as Congress intended, the Office of Government Information Services to the National Archives and Records Administration, and remove it from the Justice Department, where conflicts of interest on transparency abound.

We proposed several other ideas (found here), but we'd like to hear some of yours. What measures should Barack Obama take to promote openness and transparency in government? What should he avoid? We'll pool these suggestions with the ones from our editorial and deliver the final list to the Obama administration in Washington, D.C.

A selection of deep thoughts from Chris Matthews, on MSNBC, on Inauguration Day (so far):

Upon the appearance of Vice President Cheney in a wheelchair:

MATTHEWS: What a metaphor. What a metaphor. What a metaphor.

Upon the appearance of Malia and Sasha Obama:

MATTHEWS: My daddy is president!

On the crowds on the mall:

MATTHEWS: What are those things you buy, you send away for and they grow, they fill in?

KEITH OLBERMANN: The Chia Pets? Where are you going with this?

MATTHEWS: The Chia Pets, that's what the mall looks like, it's grown overnight....

As President Bush departed in a helicopter:

MATTHEWS: I was thinking besides seeing so many teeth of happy people smiling today, I allowed myself to float in the mystery of our nationhood...

Float on!

Following the new president's speech about unity and overcoming our differences and setting "aside childish things"...Matt Drudge prioritized the morning's news in this way:

Yes, as in: the headline that first catches the eye on the current loading of The Drudge Report has nothing to do with Obama's speech or the crowds that witnessed it or the history that's just been made. It reads, rather, "OBAMA FLUBS THE OATH." Classy.

Update: Drudge has now amended the initial "Obama flubs oath" headline to reflect the fact (sorta) that it was Chief Justice Roberts who initially misstated the pledge. It now reads, "OBAMA & CHIEF JUSTICE FLUB OATH OF OFFICE."

Michael Gerson, who authored President George W. Bush's first and second inaugural addresses, offered on Fox News this critique of President Obama's speech:

It is pretty amazing that this man's presence filled that extraordinary rhetorical stage, the main rhetorical stage in American life when he is just a few years from giving speeches on the floor of the Illinois State Legislature. He has an extraordinary presence when he delivers speeches. I thought thematically it had a lot of outreach, a lot of strengths. It was part of that great tradition of American inaugurals that says we find renewal by returning to the great values, the transcendent values of our nation including responsibility and care for one another...

The surprising thing about this speech, however, is its extraordinary moments, the speech was actually quite ordinary, from a literary perspective. There were too many raging storms and gathering clouds and other things that any writer could consider cliched. I do not understand, given Obama's literary ear in so many past speeches, how some of these things got through into an inaugural address. I think it's a mystery.

A Fox News voice I couldn't immediately identify agreed, adding "I kept looking for the line that I thought was going to be engraved in granite...I found precious little."

Already, Fox News tells us how we might "Get Michelle's First Lady Style For Less," suggesting "J.Crew has a similar green dress" to the one Mrs. Obama wore today. ("Similar" is a stretch. Particularly since the dress was actually "gold" or "yellow," according to many other accounts, the designer's included.)

"...pillory Bush one final time," reports Reuters.

Last week, the House passed a long-awaited bill that would increase the number of kids covered under the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). The coverage was predictable. Republicans grumbled, making the same arguments they made when Congress tried to expand the SCHIP twice before: The Democrats were promoting government-run health care; the program was too generous, covering kids from families with higher incomes. The Dems countered with a sound bite calling passage a down payment for further health reform. The AP passed the sound bite along. The President-elect himself said this after the vote:

In this moment of crisis, ensuring that every child in America has access to affordable health care is not just good economic policy but a moral obligation we hold as parents and citizens.

A lot of the coverage, though, missed a more important point. The bill omits about half of the children who have no health insurance. The Los Angeles Times and Reuters got it, noting that covering four million new kids would “nearly halve the number of uninsured youngsters in the country,” but too many stories failed to offer that context.

In 2007, when SCHIP reauthorization first surfaced, the House had intended to cover five million of the approximately nine million uncovered kids, two-thirds of whom were eligible for either Medicaid or SCHIP. But when it became clear the Senate wouldn’t go along, the House bowed to the Senate’s version, which called for covering only four million. At the time, a spokesperson for the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities remarked: “It’s very frustrating to see a phenomenal House bill and then move toward the Senate bill.” It was essentially the Senate bill, twice vetoed by President Bush, which sailed through the House last week.

The Washington Timesraised another question: How much of a down payment is really being made? The paper reported the Democrats’ claim that “under the bill no new waivers to cover parents of children that receive SCHIP benefits would be issued. And childless adults who are covered under the program no longer would be eligible.”

OK, here’s the translation—and why it’s important for health reform. In order to encourage more kids to apply for SCHIP, some states learned over the years that offering coverage to their parents was a big enough carrot to get them to apply for kids’ coverage too. Through waivers encouraged by the Bush administration for alternative uses of SCHIP money, eleven states covered parents, four covered childless adults, and eleven covered pregnant women through an option to define the fetus as an unborn child. The Deficit Reduction Act, passed three years ago, put an end to new waivers for childless adults.

So does the SCHIP bill mean that those childless adults still covered will now lose their insurance? And what about the stimulus package? “People who lose their jobs might be able to go on Medicaid,” says Marilyn Moon, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research and an expert on Medicare and Medicaid. “Those people are likely to be childless adults.” During the campaign, the new president and his surrogates talked a lot about building on the public/private arrangement that characterizes U.S. health care. That is what states were trying to do. Do provisions tucked into the bill soon to land on the President’s desk (and overlooked by the media) mean that, instead of building, a dismantling is taking place? Says Moon: “We may not get to universal coverage right away, but the first principle should be: Do no harm.” Health reporters, take note.

On Jan. 6, The New York Times published an editorial called “Incursion into Gaza,” in which it argued for media access into the Gaza Strip. “Israel must immediately allow foreign journalists access to Gaza, as the Israeli high court ruled on Dec. 31,” it read. “As in every war zone, reporting by journalists — and human rights monitors as well — can discourage abuse and is essential to full public understanding of the conflict.”

Stephanie Gutmann, writing yesterday at the National Review Online, thought the Times’s argument “sounds impeachable--until you learn what reporters are up against in the course of trying to do their job in the Gaza Strip.”

Gutmann’s argument is two-pronged: that Gaza is, in fact, very dangerous and journalists should think twice about demanding all access, and that irresponsible journalists can compromise war efforts. To illustrate both points, Gutmann delineated kidnappings of reporters in Gaza since 2005, and examples of “bad behavior” by reporters (say, releasing a video that messed up an IDF raid effort). Gutmann argues that, for both these reasons, Israel has been right to deny entry, and that the press “will have to suffer the indignity of restricted access.”

The argument that Gaza is too dangerous for journalists doesn’t hold water. Journalists who report from war zones put themselves at risk on a daily basis. No one denies that. But it’s foolish to portray the press corps as an entity that isn’t aware of those risks, as Gutmann seems to do in her proselytizing about reporter kidnappings in Gaza. And it is even more foolish to suggest that those risks justify Israel’s media ban. “The danger is not Israel’s problem,” Ethan Bronner, the Times’s Jerusalem bureau chief, wrote to us in an e-mail a day after finally gaining entry into Gaza.

The second argument that Gutmann presents—that past irresponsible behavior by reporters legitimized Israel’s media ban this go-around—makes only a little more sense. But even if journalists are a handful—and perhaps, in isolated moments, irresponsible—that fact doesn’t justify the complete clampdown on media access. “I could accept the idea that during war, the number of journalists needs to be limited for military operational reasons.” the Times’s Bronner wrote, “but the Israelis barred all journalists and did so for 7 weeks before the war.”

Gutmann also suggests that there was a false focus on Israel’s Erez checkpoint, underplaying the fact that journalists could have gained access to Gaza another way. “Reporters can also enter from Egypt, but most haven’t, presumably because they think they shouldn’t have to travel that far,” writes Gutmann. She makes it sound simpler than it is: Rafah, the Egypt border crossing, was closed for much of the time, and even when it cracked open last week to let some journalists through, there were others that were still turned away. To say that “most haven’t, presumably because they think they shouldn’t have to travel that far” is both unfair and misleading. (Talk to the BBC’s Christian Fraser.)

Gutmann does allow that there are “good arguments on the other side,” noting in particular that keeping reporters out of the Jenin refugee camp in 2002 did more harm than good. And she admits: “In the end, the quality of the reporting all comes down to the experience, the ethics, and, yes, the courage of the reporters in the field. There are many reporters working the Israel/Palestine beat who have these qualities.” It’s too bad that, for Gutmann, experience, ethics, and courage apparently aren’t enough to argue for allowing those very reporters access.

A selection of newspaper front pages from around the world today:

CJR staffers will be reading a selection of today's inauguration live blogs so that you don't have to, and will be live blogging those live blogs in the comments section of this article. (Got that?) Starting here around 11 AM. All are welcome to participate.

Wolf Blitzer narrating the Obamas' arrival at the White House just now:

They're supposed to spend 40 minutes inside for this coffee, as it's called, David [Gergen]. They call it a coffee. I don't know if they're drinking coffee or what they're drinking. Maybe hot chocolate. Maybe tea. But it's called a coffee. And they'll just sit around and have a conversation. One family moving out of the house, another family getting ready to move in.

Could be cocoa. Sanka. Maybe with some Splenda. I don't know ...

Luckily, CNN's on-screen fact-box knows:

FACT: The Obamas and Bidens are having coffee with the Bushes at the White House.

David Gergen then provided some historical context:

Well, coffee has been a long tradition. There was a time when there was brandy. But that was early on, and we had a vice president back in 1865, Andrew Johnson who woke up feeling sick, got heavily into brandy and got totally drunk, gave an acceptance speech and they almost had to kick him out of the whole thing...

Justin Fox at Time hits the right notes in a piece on “Bush's Economic Mistakes”.

Fox lists eight big ones, but he does well to note that not all of the problems on Bush's watch were his fault and that presidents aren't all-powerful economic string-pullers like many think they are (and that Clinton's deregulatory pushes were responsible, too), caveats I've seen missed elsewhere.

But Fox is right to point out the significant errors of the administration, many of which contributed to the severity of the current mess, including soaring budget deficits cause by tax cuts for the wealthy and the war in Iraq, and generally denying reality. He's dead-on here on regulation:

The really big regulatory changes being pointed to now as possible culprits for the crisis date back to Bush's predecessors: Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, even Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford. So the popular Democratic refrain that "Bush-era deregulation" is to blame for our troubles is a little hard to square with the evidence. What is true is that most Bush-era financial regulators were less than enthusiastic about the very act of regulating, and that Bush's "ownership society" push glossed over a lot of potential dangers. Bush didn't cause the financial regulatory breakdown, but he didn't jump in to fix it either.

This is a good, quick primer on the failures of the Bush economic program.

As a side note, what's up with Time's links below each paragraph? On the page on Bush's regulatory mistakes, it links to “pictures of the top 10 scared traders.”

The next one, about how Bush erred in pushing consumerism (by the way, the weakest point on the list), encourages us to “See pictures of expensive things that money can buy.”

Alrighty, then.

Radio talk show host Laura Ingraham on Fox News this morning:

I do find at some point this over-the-top adulation, people [at] other cable networks have run out of adjectives [for Obama's inauguration]. They are like, Rojet's Thesaurus, looking through it, How do I say euphoria a different way? I mean it's great, obviously, historic, historic, historic...

...significant, consequential, notable....

Bob Garfield, from Friday's On The Media:

...[F]or the past eight years this White House has mainly given the Fourth Estate and the First Amendment the finger.

When/how did the Bush administration give the tall man salute? Garfield counts the ways. (h/t Romenesko)

Paul Krugman's column yesterday deserves not to get lost in the holiday/inauguration shuffle

He fires back at the “bad bank” TARP-lite scheme being put forth by people like FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair, who was promoted by Krugman's colleague Joe Nocera in a front-page column on Saturday. Here's Krugman:

Instead, they’re reportedly gravitating toward a compromise approach: moving toxic waste from private banks’ balance sheets to a publicly owned “bad bank” or “aggregator bank” that would resemble the Resolution Trust Corporation, but without seizing the banks first.

Sheila Bair, the chairwoman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, recently tried to describe how this would work: “The aggregator bank would buy the assets at fair value.” But what does “fair value” mean?

“Fair value” would, of course, mean paying too much for crappy assets and socking the taxpayers with the hundreds of billions of dollars in (additional) losses.

As Krugman says, many of these banks are insolvent and the only way to fix that with a plan like Bair's is to way overpay for these junk assets. In the process, it will bail out the banks' shareholders. But if any bankrupt company's shareholders deserve to lose their entire investments, it's these.

But not everybody thinks that way. Felix Salmon over at Portfolio points out the NYT's Joe Nocera making an appalling nod to the banks about nationalization. Here's Nocera:

Though this cuts against the American grain — and leaves shareholders with nothing — it does make it easier for the government to get the banks back on their feet, and presumably, once the crisis ends, to hand them back to the private sector.

Nocera, presumably, isn't taking that side. But he's giving too much credence to an utterly bogus argument. Salmon takes care of this nicely:

I'm not sure what the American grain is, but it's hard to see how nationalization cuts against it while a trillion-dollar bailout doesn't. And yes, shareholders of insolvent banks should be left with nothing: that's capitalism, that is.

Unless they're lucky enough to get other dumb banks to buy them out, like Merrill Lynch was with Bank of America. And B of A and Citigroup are who we're really talking about here. I haven't understood why the press wasn't taking a more skeptical approach to the Bank of America story, which it essentially played along the lines of “CEO Ken Lewis Saves the Day”.

In part, the answer is because of the business press's institutional bias—yes, bias—toward deals. But the press is also oriented toward finding a narrative, sometimes at the expense of sound reportorial skepticism, which is what I think happened here. It was always too neat a story that “healthy” Bank of America would swoop in and clean up Countrywide's mess and take on Merrill Lynch's, too. But I digress.

It's pretty clear a significant number of other banks are insolvent, as Krugman and Salmon say. The system and thus the economy won't recover until these “zombie” companies are culled. It's hard to see how they're wrong that the fairest way to do that is to nationalize them, wipe out the shareholders and, while we're at it, clip some of the junior debt holders, too.

That's the real American way: the vicissitude of the market, this time with a government push. Creative destruction, as they say.

Over many years, Americans have come to embrace the idea that democracy suffers when the work of government is excessively secret—the people are shut out, corruption and cynicism thrive, and accountability wanes. Yet President Bush and Vice President Cheney have run an administration in which the executive’s lust for power outstripped the public’s right to know. One of the most troubling aspects of Bush’s campaign against government transparency was the ease of its advance. Battles were won with brief memos, unilateral executive orders, and signal flags from on high.

Here is an arena in which President Obama can forcefully demonstrate, as he indicated on the campaign trail, that he will turn the lights back on in the White House. Some steps would be relatively easy. The president should:

• Instruct the attorney general to restore the presumption that exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act are designed to prevent “foreseeable harm,” rather than to be used as expandable excuses to deny requests.

• Issue an executive order restoring the intent of the Presidential Records Act, making the government the owner and executor of past presidents’ papers, rather than a mere custodian for as long as an ex-executive or his heirs want certain documents under wraps.

• In his first budget, restore, as Congress intended, the Office of Government Information Services to the National Archives and Records Administration, and remove it from the Justice Department, where conflicts of interest on transparency abound.
  

Other steps will be more challenging. Modernizing the government’s information procedures will require effort beyond undoing the excesses; it will require making the government’s information policy anew. To that end, Obama should:

• Get a handle on “pseudo-secrecy”—the wholesale marking of documents with secret-ish labels outside of the official classification system—by reducing its use, establishing a system for appeals of such labels, and forbidding their use in FOIA decisions.

• Revise outsourcing contracts to ensure that records generated by private companies doing government business will be treated like any agency-generated document.

• Make it clear that government scientists, experts, and researchers have a right to express their knowledge and opinions to the press, the scientific community, and policymakers.

• Encourage the development of systems that proactively release government information, and build databases so they can be accessed and adapted by innovators outside government.
  

Finally, we come to the vast opaque effort to revive the economy. With so much taxpayer money at stake, Obama should:

• Require full disclosure of all bailout funds, including collateral posted in exchange for access to the expanded lending programs.

• Ensure that federal regulators ban all off-balance sheet activity—completely. All financial transactions should be included in publicly filed financial statements. Until this happens, investors, the public, and the press will not have the information they need even to ask questions about the activities of financial institutions and other corporate actors.
  

The National Security Archive, the Sunshine in Government Initiative, and the 21st Century Right to Know Project have produced thoughtful recommendations for the next president and Congress, which we’ve drawn on in compiling this list. The rest of their proposals are online and deserve a good look.

Meanwhile, we are posting this editorial on CJR.org, and inviting readers to add their own thoughts to it. We will then send the document on to the Obama administration. 

The Meridian Star—the 110-year-old daily in Meridian, Mississippi—offers a somber apology for oversights in coverage during the civil rights era, and sets a hopeful agenda for the future.

There was a time when this newspaper—and many others across the south—acted with gross neglect by largely ignoring the unfairness of segregated schools, buses, restaurants, washrooms, theaters and other public places.

We did it through omission, by not recording for our readers many of the most important civil rights activities that happened in our midst, including protests and sit-ins. That was wrong. We should have loudly protested segregation and the efforts to block voter registration of black East Mississippians.

Current management understands while we can't go back and undo some past wrongs, we can offer our sincere apology—and promise never again to neglect our responsibility to inform you, our readers, about the human rights and dignity every individual is entitled to in America—no matter their religion, their ethnic background or the color of their skin.

The Meridian Star's gravity sets a marked counterpoint for the celebrating masses portrayed on cable news, and a welcome moment of reflection amidst all the glee.

h/t The Morning News.

English has no grammar police to prevent someone from taking a word and putting it to work with another meaning, though teachers armed with rulers often act as auxiliary police officers. As a result, secondary meanings often creep into the language, usually through specialized groups that co-opt terms for their own jargon.

Education and human resources are among the groups most often ridiculed, er, prone to coming up with terms only insiders will understand. (Whoever thought up the term “career banding” to describe job and salary classifications should not be surprised to hear that it evokes images of metal bands placed around the ankles of employees to track their migration habits.)

The problem comes in when the audience isn’t in on the definition. For example, if someone told you that your comments were “actionable,” you would be forgiven if you were then in fear of being sued. “Actionable” has been used in legal contexts for hundreds of years to mean “furnishing ground for a lawsuit”—the Oxford English Dictionary traces its first use to 1591.

But as it’s being used more and more, “actionable” also means “ready to go or be put into action.” So someone who tells you that your comments are “actionable” is actually paying you a compliment—you said something that you or someone else can act upon.

The OED traces that usage to 1915, and has drafted a 2004 addition to the 1989 edition, which includes a secondary definition of “actionable” as “able to be acted upon or put into practice; useful, practical.” Of the other major dictionaries, only the New Oxford American Dictionary and Random House Webster’s Unabridged include the secondary definition, with Random House’s example: “to retrieve actionable copy from a computer.”

More frequently, “actionable” is used in business or training contexts to mean coming up with ideas that can actually work. It’s been showing up a lot in press releases and trade publications, and has been creeping into mainstream news reports, especially in legislative contexts. But when it’s used as jargon, or in an unfamiliar place, it can confuse a reader. “Under recreation and culture, councilors want a comprehensive strategic plan for the parks system pursued so that an actionable vision is developed,” one news report said, in a perfect example of jargony babblespeak.

As long as the use of “actionable” is clear in the context, there should be few objections to its use. Just make sure the comments are not “actionable” in the original sense.

This just in from the Department of Good Gets: Josh Marshall has snagged Matt Cooper, currently of Portfolio and formerly of Time and Newsweek (as well as many other mags), to edit Talking Points Memo's new Washington-focused blog, TPMDC.

As Cooper writes in his first post, which doubles as an inauguration of sorts for the work of TPM's DC "bureau,"

I've been a fan of Josh Marshall and the site for a long time and it's nice to be a part of it. I continue to write for Conde Nast Portfolio, where I'm a contributing editor, as well as its website, and other publications. But I'll be doing a lot here, trying to make sense of this new era and what it means.... Like so many people I'm deeply interested in two questions: How will Barack Obama solidify his political power and pass his agenda and will it work to address both the financial crisis and the country's longer-term problems. I don't know what the answers are but hopefully in a dialogue with you, the readers of TPM and its off shoots, and through reporting and thinking hard we'll begin to get them. It's good to be with you.

First thoughts: the Cooper-Marshall union seems to be the kind of symbiotically charged coup that we saw with the HuffPost's snagging of Tom Edsall: the Web-based news operation validated by the name-brand, traditional-media-oriented journalist; that journalist, in turn, validated by the name-brand, non-traditional outlet. The organization gets clout; the journalist gets freedom (and the distinction of being "forward thinking" in his approach to journalism). If Cooper's hiring at TPM ends up being that kind of win-win...it could actually end up as a win-win-win. Because there's another group that tends to benefit from this merging of traditional and new media: readers.

Expectations for Barack Obama's inauguration speech tomorrow are, apparently:

"Monumental," CNN

"Great," ABC News

""High", Detroit Free Press

"Lofty", San Francisco Chronicle

Pressure's on. MSNBC has even rolled out (insta-gravitas!) cursive-font'd graphics for its reporting of "The Inauguration of Barack Obama."

So, better be good (as Malia Obama reportedly told her dad last week).

Providing yet more evidence of photojournalism's pro-am trajectory...the Newseum is partnering with the nonprofit org FotoWeekDC to sponsor FotObamaWeek, "an international photography contest celebrating the Presidential campaign and the Inauguration of Barack Obama." The contest is "worldwide" and "open to anyone, including professional photographers, amateurs, students and children."

Per the press release,

You may not have a front row seat to the Swearing-In Ceremony, but what about that impromptu moment captured at a campaign rally, or election night at your own private party? Iconic impressions are yours for the taking, wherever you are, here in Washington or abroad.

FotoWeek is accepting entries (digital photos; film photos; camera-phone photos) until March 15; the top 100 winning images (selected by a Newseum panel of judges--though there will be a separate People's Choice vote) will be exhibited at the Newseum. And grand prize winners will receive cash prizes of $5,000 each.

In other words: laid-off photojournalists of the world, in particular...get thee to D.C.

Busy weekend for Maureen Dowd: Column to write; Pigs-in-blankets to heat up...

The DC Examiner reports
that "nearly all 400" invitees showed up for Dowd's party last night, "which quickly became buzzed about as the party to go to that evening" (unlike, apparently, Todd Purdum's party). More:

Lots of folks just ended up mingling outside Dowd's home, including actor Tom Hanks, Larry David, Diane von Furstenberg, Sen. Bob Casey, George Lucas, Ron Howard, Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw (who was none too happy with the packed house).

From Steve Clemons of Washington Note :

Dowd was the perfect hostess. The fanciest treats she had were pigs in a blanket -- but she knew that the real treats were face time with herself and the power guests she assembled. She constantly worked through all of the rooms of her very crowded place and kept folks moving and milling and meeting each other...

Sounds like the sort of scene Dowd might (had she not, you know, created it) skewer in a column.

We have before commented on expressions of dubious creativity on The New York Times Op-Ed Page, and today we have another entry to that pantheon, Roger Cohen's cringe-worthy rewrite of the lyrics to Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," which he says is "tribute to a president, Barack Hussein Obama, representing a new post-cold-war generation of 21st-century Americans."

We Didn’t Start the Fire (2)

Bill Clinton, Tina Fey, capitalist China, O.J., Asia rising, Facebook, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ugg boots, Seinfeld West Bank, Gaza City, Tupac Amaru Shakur

Mohamed Atta, W.M.D., Harry Potter, Reality TV Tom Cruise, American Beauty, MP3, Oprah Winfrey

Schwarzenegger, YouTube, America’s got organic food Armstrong, blogosphere, Monica Lewinsky

We didn’t start the fire It was always burning Since the world’s been turning We didn’t start the fire No we didn’t light it But we tried to fight it ...

My colleague Liz points out that Cohen is not the first to use this gimmick; philosophy professors ("Russell's denotation scheme, Godel crushes Frege's dream"), radio jocks, web nerds, and finance humorists (“We didn’t kill the market; when the prices bend, you can find the trends!") have been in on the joke, too, but that didn't stop Cohen.

Since The New York Times declined to make comments available on their site, we invite readers to dust off their inner Paula Abduls and Simon Cowells and give Mr. Cohen some feedback. I'll go first.

"Mr. Cohen, what were you thinking?!"

P.S. Here is Joel's original masterpiece, which is, ironically his own takeoff of R.E.M. "End of the World as We Know It"—how meta:

To repeat or not to repeat?

It’s a simple question, yet it has vexed editors and correction writers for decades. Is it nobler to restate the error in a correction, or to offer a basic description of the mistake?

Derek Donovan, the reader’s editor of the Kansas City Star, adheres to a policy that proscribes restating the error in a correction. In a recent blog post, he offered a hypothetical scenario:

For example, let's say a story refers to Jamie Smith, but she really spells her name Jamie Smyth. The correction should not say: A story in the Nov. 26 Local section misspelled Jamie Smyth's last name as Smith.

That's a bad idea because it puts the mistake in the paper a second time. Better simply to write: A story in the Nov. 26 Local section misspelled Jamie Smyth's last name.

The goal of not stating the error is to prevent the paper from compounding the offense. It’s similar to the policy of not repeating a libelous statement.

On the other side of the divide, The New York Times always restates the error. In 1993, Max Frankel, the paper’s executive editor, explained the proper way to correct a factual error:

We say Mickey Mantle was a rookie in 1951, not 1953. Good enough, if that was just a random statistic. But if the original article said he played for 15 years, we should now say he actually played for 17. Or if it said he came up the same year as Whitey Ford, we should now say that, too, was wrong.

That memo excerpt was included in Allan M. Siegal’s introduction to Kill Duck Before Serving, the collection of Times corrections. Siegal, the eminent former standards editor, addressed the issue of error repetition.

Editors once feared that if the specifics of an error were detailed in a correction, the repetition would somehow heighten the damage. They have come to understand that readers want to know just how wide of the mark the story fell, and how the misstep affected the wider point.

The desire to avoid repeating an error is understandable, but identifying the mistake can help people understand the nature of the original error. Not repeating the error can raise questions in the reader’s mind. Siegal is also right that readers expect a full accounting of the mistake.

The “don’t repeat the error” dance performed by some papers often results in maddeningly vague corrections, such as this 2005 example from The Times (U.K.):

Nine of the 366 firefighters with the Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service are women and not as we reported (May 21).

I also fear that this policy opens the door to useless corrections, like this May 2008 offering from the London Free Press (Canada):

A photograph of Gary Kerhoulas incorrectly appeared in yesterday’s Business section. The Free Press regrets the error.

Then again, some would argue that an apology last week from British tabloid The Sun would have done a better job of repairing the damage if the writer had chosen to omit her nasty allegations:

IN my column on August 22 I suggested that Sharon Osbourne was an unemployed, drugaddled, unfit mum with a litter of feral kids. This was not intended to be taken literally. I fully accept she is none of these things and sincerely apologise to Sharon and her family for my unacceptable comments. Sorry Sharon…

Unacceptable, yes. Worth repeating?

Almost always.

Correction of the Week

“During the editing of this Review of the Week by Richard Smith (BMJ 2008;337:a2719,doi:10.1136/bmj.a2719), the author’s term “pisshouse” was changed to “pub” in the sentence: “Then, in true British and male style, Hammond met Ian Hislop, editor of Private Eye, in the pub and did a deal.” However, a pisshouse is apparently a gentleman’s toilet, and (in the author’s social circle at least) the phrase “pisshouse deal” is well known. (It alludes to the tendency of men to make deals while standing side by side and urinating.) In the more genteel confines of the BMJ Editorial Office, however, this term was unknown and a mistake was made in translating it into more standard English. We apologise for any misunderstanding this may have caused.” – British Medical Journal

Off On a Few Points

“A headline on Page 2 of Wednesday’s Local & State section incorrectly reported that a 4-year-old girl had been thrown from a truck. The girl was riding in a car, not a truck; her father was thrown from the vehicle, but she was not. Their car collided with a pickup.” – Fresno Bee

Parting Shot

“No, computers aren’t regarded in the chess world as the “silicone monster” that can beat the world’s best players and thus presents the potential for cheating at top-level chess matches. The phrase uttered by international chess referee Hal Bond of Guelph, which was used in a story in Tuesday’s Trib, was actually “silicon monster.” Silicon is a chemical element with semiconducting properties, used in making electronic circuits. Silicone is a durable synthetic resin, used for sealing cracks and sometimes for breast implants. We goofed. We’re sorry.” – Guelph Tribune

"Inaugural Week Street 'Newscasts' Lure Onlookers," reports the AP, of the gawkers gathering "to watch network and local television anchor" deliver --note the scare quotes-- "'newscasts'" from various inauguration event sites. Per the AP:

Newsmen and women bundled in heavy winter coats, scarves, hats and gloves engaged in brisk banter on location while onlookers stood by at some of the inaugural day venues.

While the "banter" on CNN (which I happen to be watching) may not always be "brisk..."

KATE BOLDUAN: Of course, we have no clue of how many people will show up, but we expect it to be much busier than the space I'm standing in today.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN: Yeah, looks kind of empty by you, but I've got to tell you, it's starting to get filled up where we are..."

...the hats of CNN make up for -- or at least, distract from-- that:

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts....Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage--torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial,...assassination, the bombing of civilians--which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side....The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

– George Orwell, "Notes on Nationalism," May, 1945

The big news about torture last week was the declaration by Susan J. Crawford to Bob Woodward that the Bush administration had tortured Mohammed al-Qahtani, the man who allegedly planned to be the twentieth hijacker on September 11, but who was denied entry to the United States at the Orlando airport by an alert immigration inspector.

Not only was this the first on-the-record admission of torture by a current official of the Bush administration; Crawford’s words carried extra power because she is the person in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo Bay detainees to trial. Crawford is also a former general counsel of the Army in the Reagan administration, and a former Pentagon inspector general when Dick Cheney was Secretary of Defense.

This disclosure led to a series of journalistic blunders. First, in an interview with Jim Lehrer on the NewsHour on Wednesday, Cheney said, “It's entirely possible there was a problem in terms of how one specific prisoner was handled,” and, referring to the torture of prisoners (which Cheney still calls “enhanced interrogation”), the vice president added, “A great many Americans are alive today because we did all that.”

A more alert interviewer than Mr. Lehrer might have asked, if only one prisoner has been abused, how is it possible that at least 160 others prisoners have died  in U.S. custody during the Bush administration, including more than seventy whose deaths were caused by “gross recklessness, abuse, or torture,” according to the ACLU?

As for the claim that a great many American lives have been saved “because we did all that,” Lehrer really should have mentioned the fact that FBI Director Robert Mueller told David Rose, in an article for VanityFair.com in December, that he does not believe any attacks on America have been disrupted thanks to information obtained through so-called “enhanced techniques.”

When Bill Glaberson repeated these statements from Cheney to Lehrer in The New York Times the next day, also without mentioning any of the counter-evidence, I decided to ask Glaberson  whether he was more aware than Lehrer was of why the vice president’s views were subject to challenge. Unfortunately, the Times reporter was not very enlightening. Here is the transcript of our entire conversation:

FCP: This is Charles Kaiser at the Columbia Journalism Review. I have a couple of questions about your q-head [news analysis] about torture.
WG: Yeah.
FCP “A great many Americans are alive today because we did all that,” Cheney said. Now I assume you’re aware of what Robert Muller, the director of the FBI, said about that.
WG: What do you mean?
FCP: About whether or not torture has saved any lives?
WG: Oh, yeah yeah yeah.  I mean, I know.  Yes.
FCP: What did he say?
WG: Whaaa..Am I being interviewed?  What’s going on here?
FCP: Yes, you’re being interviewed.  Yes, you are. Yes.
WG: Thank you, I decline.
FCP: That’s it?  You have nothing else to say?
WG: Correct.
FCP. OK, fine. Thanks a lot.

Meanwhile, the campaign to make America “look forward,” to prevent these crimes from being investigated or prosecuted, continued unabated, with those who are conducting the campaign taking comfort from Barack Obama’s statement to George Stephanopoulos last Sunday on ABC’s This Week:

OBAMA: We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, no 9/11 Commission with independent subpoena power?

OBAMA: We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation's going to be to move forward.

With so much talk about “moving forward,” FCP decided to consult Marcia Chambers about this very unusual reluctance to hold law breakers accountable. Ms. Chambers has taught journalism at Columbia and Yale, and she has written for The New York Times as a reporter and a contributor for more than three decades. She also has the highest standards and the best instincts of any criminal justice reporter FCP has ever known. This is what she said:

In the old days there wasn't all this angst about investigating public officials. It was understood that elected officials who hold the public trust are held to a higher standard than others, even others who commit crimes. When New York City cops were accused of corruption in the 1970's, the Knapp Commission was formed to investigate. It was also routine for special grand juries to investigate public officials, and if there wasn't sufficient evidence to indict, the panel might issue a report on its findings in order to examine a system or a process. The idea was accountability, an idea so obvious that it is difficult to understand why people are having such trouble with it now.

On the federal level, there were a number of investigations of the Iran Contra scandal that engulfed the Ronald Reagan presidency. The purpose of the 1986-87 Iran-Contra inquiries was to investigate possible crimes. It would have been unthinkable back then to say, let's just move on, let's put it behind us. We didn't do it then. We shouldn't do it now. The purpose of the law hasn’t changed.

Amen.

"If the power of journalism is measured by its ability to spark anxiety in government officials, it’s hard to imagine a more relaxing time to hold public office," wrote Maura J. Casey in a December 31st "Editor's Notebook" for the New York Times, observing the "sour" economy's "choking" effect on "local newsgathering," the towns and cities of New Jersey and Connecticut, in particular. (Readers get numbers and details for staff cuts at a host of publications but, of the Times itself, only that its "regional coverage has been reduced, too.")

On Saturday, the LA Times's James Rainey described the situation where he sits:

A slow plague has reduced the corps of journalists who cover [L.A.] county government to four. That's just four reporters (and one of them has other responsibilities) who focus a critical eye on the biggest local government in America -- a $22-billion behemoth that provides policing, healthcare, welfare and more to a county of nearly 10 million people.

As concern about the economic crisis spreads, everyone should be alarmed that the ranks of the watchdogs assessing the fallout for government have been cut to shreds...

And don't think opportunists haven't sensed an opening...

Another New York Times piece on the business of newspapers:

USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Baltimore Sun, The San Jose Mercury News and The Kansas City Star have something in common, aside from some of the biggest names in an endangered industry.

By the start of February, not one of them will have the same top editor it had when 2008 began. Most of them will have different publishers, too.

More:

The chief executive of one newspaper company, who was granted anonymity to avoid antagonizing colleagues, said, “This business was too gentlemanly, filled with people who don’t know how to claw for every dollar, which is what’s needed now.”

This weekend, SNL captured perfectly the inanity of the 'regrets' line of questioning, as "Diane Sawyer" interviewed "Dick Cheney" one last time.

SAWYER: "In June of 2007, Republican Senator Larry Craig was caught in Minneapolis airport washroom soliciting sex from an undercover policeman."
CHENEY: "Right."
SAWYER: "Is that something you regret?"
CHENEY: No."

For more of Cheney's non-regrets, see below:

An Audit Credit to The Weekly Standard for helping to fill one of the business press’s yawning reality gaps: the space between "Detroit," the metaphor, and Detroit, Michigan.

In a recent cover story titled “Down & Out in Detroit,” The Weekly Standard brilliantly, painstakingly, sometimes hilariously explores the city’s crumbling infrastructure, neighborhoods and institutions, and introduces us to some of its angry, struggling, stoic and resilient residents. This sprawling piece leaves no doubt about the reality of life in Detroit and leaves readers better off for having stumbled upon it.
Moving against the media traffic, the Standard reminds us that Detroit is a city first and a metaphor for the U.S. auto industry second. For the mainstream business press, Detroit is a metaphor first and last. Business coverage is all about "Detroit," almost never about the city, which is what a hollowed-out economy like ours looks like in extremis.

For a graphic demonstration on the differing perspectives on "Detroit," note how the Standard cover contrasts with two related cover stories from about the same time.

First, The Weekly Standard:

Then Fortune:

And Time:

Fortune and Time took the standard approach. And if you search the past several months of news coverage for the word "Detroit," once you exclude the Tigers, Lions and Red Wings, you will primarily find articles on the car industry and its tribulations.

That “Detroit” has become a metaphor is neither surprising nor inherently problematic. But that said, there is a problem here: that the national press has allowed the metaphor not just to enlarge reality—which is the point of metaphors—but to substitute for it. Detroit the city becomes a shadow, an afterthought, a non-thought, really, creating a key instance of that “reality gap” we mentioned above.

And this gap is a shame, because if the press told us in detail how “Detroit” and Detroit are interconnected—the ways in which American industrial and economic policy shape and reshape our cities—we would know a lot more than we do about our current predicament.

After all, the financial crisis comes after a long and painful period of globalization, deindustrialization, and financialization, one result of which has been a poisonous wage stagnation for the middle class, even as it has relentlessly increased its productivity.

Once a cradle of the middle class and a bastion of industrial productivity, Detroit is now a primary example of the unraveling of both, a nexus of failed economic policy. It is, alas, a gift to journalists trying to understand how we got here from there. It is, for all of its neglect—and even, to some extent, because of that neglect—an important place.

Thus a cheer for the Standard’s Matt Labash for getting on an airplane, for wandering around Detroit, for telling us with clear eyes and at great length what he saw. So simple and yet so rare!

The piece owes much of its impact, energy and even humor to the author’s skillful channeling of Detroit-area native and former New York Times reporter Charlie LeDuff. Labash’s introduction to LeDuff is so good, we’ll give it to you whole cloth:

For many, Detroit is identified with cars or soul music, with the novels of Elmore Leonard or the architecture of Albert Kahn. If they really hate Detroit, they might recall that its suburbs coughed up Madonna. But for me, Detroit has become synonymous with one man: Charlie LeDuff.

Currently a metro reporter at the Detroit News, Charlie crossed my path in 2003 when he was a hotshot national correspondent for the New York Times. Stuck on a press bus trailing Arnold Schwarzenegger in the last days before the recall election, I spied a madman a few rows ahead banging on the window as a jubilant crowd in Bakersfield mistook ours for the candidate's bus. Pounding away, Charlie fed back their mistaken adulation. ‘I'M THE MEDIA! YOU LOVE THE MEDIA!’ he bellowed.

I errantly asked someone what motorcycle magazine he worked for, thinking him an out-of-work biker/pirate since he looked like the bastard spawn of Sonny Barger and Jean Lafitte—I described him at the time as ‘a leathered scribe with bandito facial hair.’ Part Cajun, part Native-American (he says his Indian name is ‘White Boy’), Charlie was as much performer as reporter, walking around in sleeveless New York Post baseball jerseys, once breaking a wine glass on his head to keep campaign staffers off balance. ‘It's a trick,’ he told me quietly, ‘the glass is thin up at the top.’

But Charlie was also writing some of the best newspaper feature stories in the country. His beat involved covering what he calls ‘the hole,’ forgotten people in forgotten places.

This weekend kicks off the beginning of the much-anticipated inaugural celebrations in Washington, DC. But it appears that television coverage of the events will not be quite universally accessible.

The headlining swearing-in ceremony is set to take place at 11:30 am on Tuesday, January 20, a rather awkward time during the weekday 9-5 routine, which prompts the question: why so early? (If NBC could convince the IOC to schedule swimming events for early Beijing mornings for the convenience of our American prime-time audiences, perhaps the big media outlets could shift the inauguration to a more convenient 8/7 Central?) As it turns out, there is an authority that can override the interests of network executives—the U.S. Constitution (Amendment XX, Section 1):

The terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January, and the terms of Senators and Representatives at noon on the 3d day of January, of the years in which such terms would have ended if this article had not been ratified; and the terms of their successors shall then begin.

So, while every network will be tuned in to the activities on the Capitol steps Tuesday morning, the weekend-long inauguration celebration won’t be able to be viewed on every channel. CNN reports on the varied coverage:

HBO paid for exclusive rights to televise Sunday's [free, star-studded concert at the Lincoln Memorial], but its feed will be free to all cable and satellite viewers from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. ET. It cannot be seen through local broadcast television stations.
The Disney Channel will carry Monday night's big event -- "Kids' Inaugural: We Are The Future" -- from 8 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. ET. Those who don't have cable will be able to hear it live on Radio Disney or watch it online later at Disney.com.

Meanwhile, the Presidential Inauguration Committee website states that the “first ever” Neighborhood Inaugural Ball will be broadcast live on ABCfrom 8-10 PM EST. To everyone who (like us) won’t be able to witness the inaugural events firsthand: best of luck tuning in this week.

"Who are the real Nazis?" read a recent op-ed headline in the Los Angeles Times. The column it announced, penned by Jonah Goldberg, railed against sign-bearers at a recent New York protest against Israel's offensive on Gaza. The signs, Goldberg noted, included the following language: "Israel: The Fourth Reich" and "Holocaust by Holocaust Survivors." Citing these and other examples of inflammatory hate language, Goldberg reversed the charge. "Hamas has an avowedly Hitlerite agenda," he wrote.

The reversal of the “Hitlerite” charge--the casting of Hamas as the new Nazis, as Goldberg's title trumpeted--is disturbing, for a reason that Goldberg himself expounded upon:

Critics know such charges are painful to a country largely born of the Holocaust and marked by its scars. It also grabs attention, galvanizes radicals, vents legitimate frustrations and anger and helps demonize the enemy.

Goldberg was referring to how hurtful such labels are to Israel. But he—and others who have taken up what seems at least in part to be a retaliatory offensive of comparing Hamas to the Nazis—should be reprimanded for returning fire using that same mode of accusatory discourse, a rhetorical low-blow that Goldberg acknowledged "grabs attention, galvanizes radicals" and "helps demonize the enemy."

It certainly does. So why is Goldberg himself trafficking in such demonization? The problem with his column—which ran not only in the Times, but also in such venues as The Dallas Morning News, the Nashville City Paper, and the National Review Online—lies not in its response to the anti-Israel protests and their incendiary posters. The problem, rather, is broader and in some ways more insidious: Goldberg is not only employing irony (it’s Hamas that’s Hitler-esque!) in a situation where irony has little place, but he’s also diminishing the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis. The acts of Hamas, an extremist but isolated group, are simply not comparable to the mass murder of six million Jews, which embroiled the world in war for the better part of a decade. To treat the groups’ “agendas” as comparable dilutes both the meaning of the word “Nazi” and the immensity of the Holocaust. It’s an affront to history.

So I was initially comforted when I read the opening lines of a recent post by Ron Rosenbaum, on Pajamas Media, which stated that he wished to lay out “a clarification” about all this—namely, “the analogies between Hitler, the Nazis and Hamas.”

Kudos, right? Clarification is good. Well, not exactly. Rosenbaum criticized the Hamas-Nazi comparison, but not for its inflammatory-rhetoric aspect (the crime of passion that Goldberg might be accused of committing). Rather, he thought the analogies weren’t going far enough in painting a portrait of Hamas. Taking the comparison a step further than Goldberg, Rosenbaum declared that “Hamas was more extreme than the Nazis”—for the specific reason that “the Hamas founding covenant explicitly calls for the extermination of all Jews,” while “Hitler never made total extermination an official plank of the…Nazi party platform,” and for the broader reason that “the exterminationist anti-semitism of Hamas is more excessive than Hitler's.”

Some might argue that the “Hitlerite” talk is something of a case study in framing, in which commentators’ biases and personal points of view determine how a conflict is angled and spun—in headlines, on blogs, at dinner tables. A recent segment of “On the Media” visited this idea of linguistic framing in the headlines emanating from various news outlets—“Confronting Hamas” from The Jerusalem Post, for example, as opposed to “War on Gaza,” from Al-Jazeera English. The nature of the discussion—forthright, punctuated by admissions of the difficulty of providing evenhanded coverage—between co-host Bob Garfield and his guest, Paul McKinney, executive producer for news at Al-Jazeera English, underscored the complexities (and power) of the framing issue.

But in the work of Goldberg and Rosenbaum, the problem isn’t one of framing. It’s a problem, rather, of proportionality—and, in their cases, ignoring it. Certainly, as a rhetorical exercise, one can find analogies between Nazi Germany and Hamas—just as one can find analogies between Nazi Germany and Israel, or between Nazi Germany and the United States. Comparisons can be teased ad infinitum—or, perhaps more precisely, ad nauseam.

What’s relevant here, however, are the specific facts about the current situation in Gaza—the details and realities that transcend glib (and in some ways, come-hither) comparisons. And while there have been arguments for and against the idea of proportionality in the coverage of the current conflict (for every article that cites the disproportionate number of Gazans versus Israelis dead, there’s been an op-ed rejecting such comparisons as misleading and not context-driven), it’s ironic that some of the critics of the proportionality argument are just as willing to embrace language that conveniently forgets that there’s a bigger sphere of proportionality as well—not just concerning death tolls on opposite sides, but also with respect to historical accuracy. Hamas, the political entity, doesn’t correspond in size, degree or intensity with the Nazis; in this context—with a distorted characterization that seeks to qualify as well as quantify—proportionality does matter. And a headline like “Who are the real Nazis?,” with its bombastic sense of rectitude, does a disservice to the critical discourse about both the Gaza conflict and the events that engendered it—and irresponsibly turns a painful historic event into an attention-seeking label.

“Will Obama be able to kill popular Advantage plans?" Whoa! The headline sounded ominous and signaled that the new president might be ready to sock it to Medicare benies who have been reaping fruits from the controversial Medicare Advantage (MA) plans. Sacre bleu! Imagine incurring the wrath of old people in Florida! The story, which read like an industry press release, went downhill from there. The lede:

“More than 855,000 Medicare patients in Florida will see their health coverage change if President-elect Barack Obama follows through on a statement he made Sunday.”

Sunday on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, the president-elect said again what he said during the campaign: that he favored cutting the federal overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans, an alternative to traditional Medicare pushed by advocates of privatization. The government pays the plans to provide benefits but has been paying way more than it costs to provide the same benefits under regular Medicare. The fastest-growing MA plan, the Private-Fee-For-Service (PFFS) option, gets 17 percent more. Obama said that eliminating the overpayments and cutting other programs could possibly save $200 billion that, in turn, could be used in ways that could make people healthier. The savings from MA plans alone is actually closer to $91 billion, according to the GAO.

The story continued. It quoted an executive from a health plan trade group who said “to get rid of them would be a mistake” and a broker/agent who predicted that “the outcry would be unbelievable if they were to take away Medicare Advantage.” The story recited the advantages of Medicare Advantage—the free eyeglasses, dental coverage, refunds of Medicare’s Part B premium (which pays for doctor visits) if the plans don’t need all the money they get from Medicare, full drug coverage with no donut hole, and gym memberships--all paid for by taxpayers, millions of whom have no insurance at all, let alone gym memberships.

Except for a passing reference that the fact that Medicare Advantage requires people to stick with network doctors, the story didn’t mention the significant downsides of the program--PFFS plans, in particular, with their hidden fees and large copayments that people don’t learn about until they get sick. "Some of the benefits may be illusory,” says Bonnie Burns, a training and policy specialist with California Health Advocates. “Benefits for out-of-pocket expenses are invisible until you use them, and when you do, you may find they are less than they would be in another plan that didn’t offer the premium refund.” But to hear the agents tell it during the sales pitch, people never get sick. Bottom line: For many people, MA may not be better or more cost effective than regular Medicare with an old-fashioned Medigap (supplemental insurance) policy.

The bottom line for insurance companies is to keep the gravy train roaring. MA plans are hugely profitable--so profitable, in fact, that last month the GAO said that sellers earned greater profits and spent less on medical care than they had projected. It doesn’t get much better than that. No wonder the industry reps quoted in the News Service story were exuberant. Insurers have lobbied hard to keep the extra payments, beating back one attempt to cut them in 2007 and getting away with only a partial cut in the last session of Congress. This year’s battle is looming, and the News Service story gave the industry some ammo.

Note: A check of the News Service web site now shows a toned-down version of the circulated story I have described. The hed is softer, and there’s an attempt to say that Obama may not really have meant he was going to cut Medicare Advantage entirely but only what the story calls “excess payments.” But as the carriers know, cutting the extra payments dooms the most lucrative options. The new version still did not describe any of the pitfalls of Private-Fee-For Service plans which Florida seniors might want to hear about.

We suggest the News Service try again, and while they’re at it, take a look at what the overpayments will eventually do to jeopardize the Medicare program itself. Overpayments raise overall costs at a time when there is serious concern about Medicare’s long-term finances. That means benefits might be drastically cut and more costs shifted to those now on Medicare, speeding up the drive to privatize the system. A good story, no?

Charles Krauthammer, speaking and joshing on a panel about the coming presidency with fellow Fox-friendly commentators Fred Barnes and Mort Kondracke:

You see that since [Obama's] election he has kind of reached out to people that may not be ideological allies, to Rick Warren, the pastor who will be at his inaugural, to John McCain, whom he has treated with a lot of dignity and respect, and to a bunch of right wing columnists last night, in part, because I think he is a guy who is intellectually curious and wants to exchange ideas, but also in part he wants to co-opt the vast right wing conspiracy.

And I'm here to tell you that, speaking for myself, he has succeeded. I am brainwashed entirely. I'm in the tank, and I am a believer of hope and change and, above all, audacity.

The controversy over Apple CEO Steve Jobs' health is all over the press, and with it, questions about how the media have handled.

Brian X. Chen posted a piece at Wired.com Wednesday with a headline “Steve Jobs Probably Won't Come Back to Apple”. Beyond the poorly supported headline, the piece is problematic in choosing to quote a tech analyst on Jobs' health (Disclosure: I own Apple shares):

"My bet is he's not coming back," said Roger Kay, an Endpoint Technologies analyst. "Despite all the protestations, I think he has cancer. They talk about digestive this and digestive that, but ... forget all the buzz you're hearing. Just look at the photos."

All right, Kay thinks he has cancer. Is that worth quoting? I assume this tech analyst doesn't moonlight as an oncologist. This is reminiscent of Bill Frist's infamous misdiagnosis of Terry Schiavo via video from the House floor—but at least Frist was a doctor.

I'm sure the analyst quoted in the next paragraph isn't an oncologist either, and the imprecision of the language here is questionable:

ThinkPanmure analyst Vijay Rakesh said it's been obvious for some time that Jobs' health condition is critical.

"What he's indicating is it needs more urgent attention," Rakesh said.

“Critical” is a medical term for a patient's condition and it's just wrong here. Something has clearly been up with Jobs for several months, but during that time he's done keynotes, run the company, etc. He hasn't been in a hospital bed near death.

On the other hand, the press is right to come down hard on Apple for apparently misleading reporters and shareholders about Jobs' health. Joe Nocera, who had a run-in with Jobs last summer when the Apple CEO called him a “slime bucket” and told him off the record the ailment he had (which Jobs said wasn't cancer), today writes that Apple's credibility is just about gone.

I knew at the time I was being spun — he’s Steve Jobs, after all — but I didn’t think I was being lied to. Now, in the wake of this latest news, I’m not sure what to think. It is certainly possible that Mr. Jobs had the condition he described to me last summer. It is also possible that, more recently, he discovered he had a hormone imbalance. And that a week later, he certainly could have returned to the doctor and learned that his problem was bigger and more serious than that. I’ve talked to enough doctors who have dealt with pancreatic cancer to know that the operation Mr. Jobs underwent is life-altering. Simple medical problems can have debilitating effects on someone who has had his operation.

But at this point, Mr. Jobs has very little credibility when it comes to his own health. For years, he hid the fact that he had been treated for pancreatic cancer — and that Tim Cook, who is now going to run Apple while he is on leave, ran it then too. Although Mr. Jobs disagrees with me on this, that strikes me as a “material fact,” at least as the Securities and Exchange Commission defines the term. And his recent health revelations — such as they are — have only further impaired his credibility.

I think the press, including Joe Nocera's original column in which he made clear he questioned what Apple was saying, handled this difficult story okay for the most part. If you read John Markoff's piece, for instance, in the Times last July as the tech world was abuzz about Jobs' gaunt appearance at an Apple presentation, it now looks like Markoff was spun. But what was the reporter supposed to do? Get Jobs' doctor to go off the record? Charm his secretary into copying his charts? Report speculative innuendo like many of the big tech blogs did? And, of course, it's possible that the CEO's condition has truly gotten worse since Markoff's anonymous sources assured him that everything was okay.

But there is one reporter who comes off looking pretty bad in this: CNBC's Jim Goldman, who for weeks has been hawking Apple's company line for weeks that Jobs is not sick. He got smacked around by Newsweek's Dan Lyons, aka the former “Fake Steve Jobs” blogger, on his own network the other day, something the Guardian says got Lyons banned from CNBC.

Here's the meat of what Lyons said on the air:

There's two kinds of reporters that cover Apple, the kind who realize they're getting snowed and getting bullied and getting blocked out and realize that a lot of what they're being told is not true, and the other kind, who suck up in order to get access, and end up getting played and punked like your Valley bureau chief [Jim Goldman] has been played and punked by Apple."

Sure, Lyons is being a jerk, but it's hard to disagree with him here. He notes that CNBC's former Silicon Valley bureau chief is now Apple's head of PR, and it appears that Goldman has relied too much on his insider sources to the point of being blinded by the obvious: Jobs, the most important CEO in the world, was a sick man, his company was misleading its shareholders, and Goldman was helping them do it by categorically reporting that Jobs was fine.

Sometimes you trust your sources, and sometimes you get burned.

I'd thought Chris Matthews, via his excitement over the election of Barack Obama, was currently filled with Hope. But apparently he's also filled with Bitter Resentment--this latter, unsurprisingly, toward the outgoing president. Matthews, punditing about President Bush's farewell speech last night--as a commentator, not an anchor, so he can say whatever he wants!--told his own, vitriol-dripping version of the Bush Creation Myth:

He was a rich kid driving his father's car. He got to be President because of his father, let's face it, the same way he got into school and everything else, the same way he got his car probably. But the scary thing about Bush is somewhere he came to meet people like Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby and Paul Wolfowitz and Feith and the rest of them....

The scary thing about Bush is he picked up on--almost in the way that a hermit crab does--another identity in becoming President....He became this new scholar of freedom, and he's going to spend the rest of his life selling this stuff. This stuff cost the lives of 100,000 Iraqis, it cost the lives of 4,000 U.S. service people....

The idea that we have some brand new neo-conservative ideology of freedom that's going to bring peace over in that part of the world is not true, and he's still selling it, and that's the tragedy of the last eight years.

Thanks for your restraint, Chris.

A Fortune piece this week shows how editorial tastes can differ, to say the least.

When it chooses to explore the extent to which the credit crisis will produce criminal prosecutions, the business magazine looks for reasons why it shouldn’t, rather reasons than why it should.

That’s why there’s strawberry and vanilla, I suppose.

One can see, of course, obstacles to criminal prosecutions of bankers, bond salespeople, mortgage brokers, and senior financial executives.

But given what Fortune itself describes as a $9 trillion wipeout of investor capital, including a $1 trillion raid on the U.S. Treasury, my first thought would be to imagine that a wealth destruction and transfer of such magnitude might indeed have been amplified by criminal conduct along the way. If I had 4,800 words to explore the question, that’s what I’d look for.

But, again, that’s just me.

In fact The Audit's Ryan Chittum, in a post yesterday, commended the piece for exploring the subject at all.

I say the piece went out of its way not to see potential criminality in a situation that most non-business reporters would find rich with it. In this sense, the Fortune cover story may be unintentionally revealing about a business-press culture that identifies too closely with the people and institutions it covers.

The salient fact of this afternoon's Hudson River water landing is that it involved no casualties. So far, US Airways Flight 1549's 153 passengers and crew have survived--and the majority of people who emerged from the chilly waters this afternoon, shaken and shocked but intact, seem to be physically unscathed.

This is a story that, considering how tragic its outcome could have been, has a happy ending.

So the word "crash"--which literally means violent collision, and figuratively implies much, much worse--really has no place in the coverage of the US Airways story. On the one hand, it's an inaccurate depiction of this afternoon's water landing (which was hard, according to passenger interviews, but nothing worse). On the other, the panic and fear inherent in the word--particularly when it's used in relation to the word "plane"--miss the main point of this story completely. "Crash" suggests death, when the lede, here, is survival.

To many, that's an obvious point. Online, in particular, the coverage of this afternoon's breaking news--coverage that requires the act of writing, which in turn requires some degree of thoughtfulness--has featured a conspicuous lack of the word "crash." The Washington Post's write-up, headlined "US Airways Plane Goes Down in Hudson River," doesn't use the word once, choosing instead the more accurate--and more palliative--terms "went down" and "controlled landing in the water":

A US Airways flight from LaGuardia Airport in New York went down in the Hudson River this afternoon, and rescuers moved quickly to remove passengers from the plane.

Authorities said there were no fatalities.

Flight 1549, an Airbus A320 with nearly 150 passengers on board, appeared to make a controlled landing in the water shortly after takeoff from New York bound for Charlotte, N.C.

The New York Times chose an even more things worked out fine tone in its write-up, headlined "Jet Ditches in Hudson; All Are Said Safe":

A US Airways jetliner with 148 passengers and 5 crew members plunged into the icy Hudson River on Thursday afternoon five minutes after taking off from LaGuardia Airport, and a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration said everyone on board escaped safely.

Moments after the plane, a twin jet Airbus A320 bound for Charlotte, N.C., landed on the river near the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel, at least a half-dozen small craft rushed to aircraft to rescue the freezing passengers and crew.

All in all: Pretty sober. Pretty reassuring. Pretty accurate.

Not so cable. Here's just a small sampling, courtesy of the transcript database TVEyes, of the coverage TV news provided this afternoon:

MSNBC: "You will see a lot written about this crash as a miracle."
CNN: "Brian Todd is taking a look at what apparently was the cause of the crash: birds."
Fox: "This pilot is a walking miracle himself, if he survived this plane crash."
CNN: "The crash happened in the Hudson River around 48th Street, but the plane is now drifting or being towed, that's unclear, moving down the Hudson River."
MSNBC: "...one of four here said to be prepared to care for any of the survivors of this crash."
Fox: "The FBI is saying it has no information that this New York plane crash--that this crash was an act of terrorism."
MSNBC: "Right now, looking at this live picture, we can report that New York waterway ferries helping make rescues following the plane crash in the Hudson River."
CNN: "There are some amazing stories coming out of this crash."

Et cetera.

Television coverage occasionally acknowledged the inappropriateness, in this context, of the word "crash"--"the landing or crash landing or splash landing," CNN put it, indecisively, at one point; the plane "was going to make an intentional water landing, which I guess it did, but not a crash landing," said MSNBC--and yet network anchors and commentators continued to use the word. Repeatedly. Precisely (again, per TVEyes) thirty-one times on the three major cable networks between 3:30 and 6:00 today.

Part of this is explainable by the fact that "crash," as a word, simply flows more easily in speech than, say, "water landing"--and that it's much more common than the NYT's relatively obscure "ditch." Cable's "crash"-ophilia, in this instance, isn't likely a case of conscious sensationalism so much as it's a case of the unconscious: TV, in breaking-news coverage, traffics in spur-of-the-moment commentary from its narrators, and therefore is more susceptible than print to the vagaries of human emotion. (Were I talking to my friends about this afternoon's event, I'd call it a crash; were I writing about it for public consumption, I would not.)

That's an explanation, though--not an excuse. Any event that combines the terms "plane" and "New York City" and "crash" is bound to create panic, even if, in the next moment, the real situation--apparently-casualty-free water landing--is revealed. Those relating the story of that event, therefore, have an even greater responsibility than they usually do to be both accurate and sensitive in their narratives. Here's yet another area where TV news can take a cue from its fellows in print: before you share information with the public...choose your words carefully.

There is currently a commercial airplane in New York City's Hudson River (it looks to be a small regional jet, which generally carry about thirty passengers and three crew). The plane is intact, its fuselage only partially submerged--a hopeful sign for its passengers. No word yet on what caused what seems to have been an intentional water landing.

I've argued before that cable news shouldn't be in the business of breaking news, since it's generally less nimble than the Web--but I'm noting that, while MSNBC began airing ongoing coverage of the story about five minutes ago, the NYT, the WaPo, and Drudge still have no mention of it.

Update: MSNBC is reporting that the plane--a US Airways flight from LaGuardia, bound for Charlotte--had, in fact, 146 passengers and five crew members onboard. They're being evacuated from the plane; no word on any casualties, but the rescue effort looks calm. Reports are also saying the water landing was brought about by the plane's collision, just after takeoff, with a flock of geese. (And the NYT's City Room blog now has the story, teased on the paper's homepage. And Drudge and the WaPo are now each leading with it.)

Update II: MSNBC reports: all passengers have been evacuated--alive--from the plane's fuselage.

Update III: At 4:21, about fifty minutes after the plane went down--and about forty-five minutes after the first cable coverage--the NYT put the story in the lead slot on its homepage.

Salon's Rebecca Traister "scour[ed] periodical racks" and reports back on how "an industry built on a meringue of material aspiration adjust[s] to the fast-deflating circumstances of its readers." Asks Traister, "Do they gingerly attempt a journalistic triple axel: simultaneously delivering dank reality, aspirational fantasy and useful analysis of what it all means?"

Double axels, maybe, in more cases -- or, the "split-personality" approach of a dash of reality followed by aspirational fantasy ("outfits for under $50," in Elle, for example, "pages away from... 'patent leather open-toe shoe with black socks attached, Proenza Schouler, $1,815.'") That third axel? I'm not sure Traister found much "useful analysis of what it all means" in the glossies she surveyed.

And here is how Traister describes New York magazine of late:

Picking up New York these days...feels like talking to a relentlessly upbeat friend who has suddenly gone off her meds. The hand-wringing and self-flagellating begins on the Letters to the Editor page...

Per Reuters:

An explosion blasted a tower block in the city of Gaza on Thursday that houses the offices of Reuters and several other media organisations.

Colleagues said a journalist for the Abu Dhabi television channel had been wounded.

Reuters journalists working there at the time said an Israeli missile or shell appeared to have struck the southern side of the 13th floor of the Al-Shurouq Tower in the city centre.

Reuters evacuated the bureau, though a live camera feed that has been providing images from Gaza throughout the war continued to function. Live television images from another site showed smoke pouring from the upper floors of the 16-storey building.

McClatchy's Dion Nissenbaum reports on the same, plus more from Daniel Seaman, head of Israel's Government Press Office, who last week told the New York Times that international reporters in Gaza are a "fig leaf" for Hamas. Seaman told Nissenbaum:

My job is not to be objective. From my perspective, the lesser of two evils is not to have international media inside.

There is an unequal war going on there between a power and a terror organization, and the only way to hurt us is to get those images to hurt us in the battlefield of public opinion. In that sense, the less pictures coming out helping them the better.

Writes Nissenbaum, "Seaman was most concerned about limiting TV footage from Gaza that 'takes on a life of its own' and drowns out Israel's reason for launching the attacks."

Fortune's cover story this week looks at something I've been wondering about for, oh, a year or so now: Who's going to jail?

As Warren Buffett famously said, "You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out." And the tide is most assuredly going out.

So Fortune's Roger Parloff assembles a list of the biggies who are under investigation or are likely to face intense scrutiny, including AIG, Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers.

So there's an angry mob with pitchforks assembling, and they want to see some heads on pikes. While former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling could at least try to have his case transferred out of Enron-devastated Houston, the credit-crisis targets will have no such card to play. This time the corporate shenanigans have wrecked the globe. "This is the ugliest enforcement environment I've ever seen in my professional career," says one criminal- defense lawyer, who also asks for anonymity.

The mag has a nice sidebar with examples of ill-timed statements and doings by the chieftains of some of the companies under scrutiny.

This is an interesting quote:

But if you ask a lawyer who advises corporations, you'll get a very different answer. "The reality is, you've put your finger on one of the most difficult situations that will come up in counseling executives of corporations," says one who does that for a living and insists on anonymity. "You can't lie," he says. "You're trapped between serving the best interests of shareholders and the legal requirement not to lie. You need to thread the needle." (Now you see why he wants anonymity.)"

It's surprising Fortune got someone to admit that on the record, even if anonymously. And the magazine throws out my favorite example of the crisis, Bear Stearns CEO Alan Schwartz insisting on CNBC just hours before the bottom fell out that his company was just fine:

A tougher case is presented by his successor, Alan Schwartz, who was saying much the same thing as late as the morning of March 12, 2008, just 36 hours before seeking emergency funding. "Our liquidity and balance sheet are strong," Schwartz told CNBC's David Faber. "We don't see any pressure on our liquidity, let alone a liquidity crisis.

Lehman also comes into focus for touting its turnaround just days before it filed for bankruptcy.

Among other things, Fuld assured investors that "we are on the right track to put these last two quarters behind us," while Lowitt stressed, "Our liquidity pool also remains strong at $42 billion." The question today is essentially, How does $42 billion vanish in five days, and did Lehman officers know then of any harbingers of doom that they weren't sharing?

The Manhattan federal prosecutor's office, meanwhile, is focused on whether Lehman was overvaluing its commercial real estate holdings shortly before bankruptcy (even though it had already marked them down significantly), according to a person familiar with the situation. The former head of Lehman's global real estate group, Mark Walsh, is therefore among the executives coming under the microscope.

Fortune explains the nuances and the difficulties of prosecuting these executives, and I like how it lays out the terrain for what's likely to come in the next year. It's going to be interesting to watch it unfold.

David Milibrand, Britain's foreign minister, argues in today's Guardian that "'war on terror' was wrong," that "the phrase gives a false idea of a unified global enemy, and encourages a primarily military reply." (h/t, Kevin Drum).

I'm sure that was in here somewhere...

I'm watching Jim Lehrer interview Cheney (from last night's NewsHour), and highlights to me, so far, include the moment when Cheney dodges a Why didn't your administration see the economic crisis coming-type question by saying, "Did you see it coming, Jim? You're an expert" (Lehrer managed to get a follow-up question out after that, if not pin Cheney down on the administration taking some responsibility); and Cheney's response to a Did you make any mistakes question:

Well, make mistakes - I can think of places where I underestimated things. For example, talking about Iraq, the extent of which the Iraqi population had been beaten down by Saddam Hussein was greater than I anticipated. That is, we thought that the Iraqis would be able to bounce back fairly quickly once Saddam was gone or the new government established and step up and take major responsibilities for governing Iraq, building a military and so forth and that took longer than I expected.

I guess I've never thought of things this way: if Jim Lehrer couldn't see the catastrophic economic writing on the wall, how could we expect the Bush administration to see it? And, why didn't the Iraqis "bounce back" as quickly as Cheney anticipated?

Now, back to the video (I haven't even reached the torture exchanges Megan teased last night...)

It may be a while before the people who run the U.S. House of Representatives’ Web service forget the week of September 29, 2008. That’s when the enormous public interest in the financial bailout legislation, coupled with unprecedented numbers of e-mails to House members, effectively crashed www.house.gov. On Tuesday of that week, a day after the House voted down the first version of the bailout bill, House administrators had to limit the number of incoming e-mails processed by the site’s “Write Your Representative” function. Demand for the text of the legislation was so intense that third-party sites that track Congress were also swamped. GovTrack.us, a private site that produces a user-friendly guide to congressional legislation, had to shut down. Its owner, Josh Tauberer, posted a message reading, “So many people are searching for the economic relief bill that GovTrack can’t handle it. Take a break and come back later when the world cools off.”

Once people did get their eyes on the bill’s text, they tore into it with zeal. Nearly a thousand comments were posted between September 22 and October 5 on PublicMarkup.org, a site that enables the public to examine and debate the text of proposed legislation set up by the Sunlight Foundation, an advocacy group for government transparency (full disclosure: I am a senior technology adviser to Sunlight). Meanwhile, thousands of bloggers zeroed in on the many earmarks in the bill, such as the infamous reduction in taxes for wooden-arrow manufacturers. Others focused on members who voted for the bill, analyzing their campaign contributors and arguing that Wall Street donations influenced their vote.

The explosion of public engagement online around the bailout bill signals something profound: the beginning of a new age of political transparency. As more people go online to find, create, and share vital political information with one another; as the cost of creating, combining, storing, and sharing information drops toward zero; and as the tools for analyzing data and connecting people become more powerful and easier to use, politics and governance alike are inexorably becoming more open.

We are heading toward a world in which one-click universal disclosure, real-time reporting by both professionals and amateurs, dazzling data visualizations that tell compelling new stories, and the people’s ability to watch their government from below (what the French call sousveillance) are becoming commonplace. Despite the detour of the Bush years, citizens will have more opportunity at all levels of government to take an active part in understanding and participating in the democratic decisions that affect their lives.

Log On, Speak Out

The low-cost, high-speed, always-on Internet is changing the ecology of how people consume and create political information. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that roughly 75 percent of all American adults, or about 168 million people, go online or use e-mail at least occasionally. A digital divide still haunts the United States, but among Americans aged eighteen to forty-nine, that online proportion is closer to 90 percent. Television remains by far the dominant political information source, but in October 2008, a third of Americans said their main provider of political information was the Internet—more than triple the number from four years earlier, according to another Pew study. Nearly half of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds said the Internet was their main source of political info.

Meanwhile, we’re poised for a revolution in participation, not just in consumption, thanks to the Web. People talk, share, and talk back online. According to yet another study by Pew, this one in December 2007, one in five U.S. adults who use the Internet reported sharing something online that they created themselves; one in three say they’ve posted a comment or rated something online.

People are eager for access to information, and public officials who try to stand in the way will discover that the Internet responds to information suppression by routing around the problem. Consider the story of a site you’ve never seen, ChicagoWorksForYou.com. In June 2005, a team of Web developers working for the city of Chicago began developing a site that would take the fifty-five different kinds of service requests that flow into the city’s 311 database—items like pothole repairs, tree-trimming, garbage-can placement, building permits, and restaurant inspections—and enable users to search by address and “map what’s happening in your neighborhood.” The idea was to showcase city services at the local level.

ChicagoWorks was finished in January 2006, with the support of Mayor Richard Daley’s office. But it also needed to be reviewed by the city’s aldermen and, according to a source who worked on the project, “they were very impressed with its functionality, but they were shocked at the possibility that it would go public.” Elections were coming up, and even if the site showed 90 percent of potholes being filled within thirty days, the powers-that-be didn’t want the public to know about the last 10 percent. ChicagoWorksForYou.com was shelved.

But the idea of a site that brings together information about city services in Chicago is alive and kicking. If you go to EveryBlock.com, launched in January 2008, and click on the Chicago link, you can drill down to any ward, neighborhood, or block and discover everything from the latest restaurant-inspection reports and building permits to recent crime reports and street closures. It’s all on a Google Map, and if you want to subscribe to updates about a particular location and type of report, the site kicks out custom RSS feeds. Says Daniel O’Neil, one of EveryBlock’s data mavens, “Crime and restaurant inspections are our hottest topics: Will I be killed today and will I vomit today?”

EveryBlock exists thanks to a generous grant from the Knight News Challenge, but its work, which covers eleven cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., offers a glimpse of the future of ubiquitous and hyperlocal information. EveryBlock’s team collects most of its data by scraping public sites and spreadsheets and turning it into understandable information that can be easily displayed and manipulated online.

It may not be long before residents of the cities covered by EveryBlock decide to contribute their own user-generated data to flesh out the picture that city officials might prefer to hide. EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty tells me that his team is figuring out ways for users to connect directly to each other through the site. Forums that allowed people to congregate online by neighborhood or interest would enable EveryBlock users to become their cities’ watchdogs. If city agencies still won’t say how many potholes are left unfilled after thirty days, people could share and track that information themselves.

Such a joint effort is no stretch to young people who have grown up online. Consider just a couple of examples: since 1999, RateMyTeachers.com and RateMyProfessors.com have collected more than sixteen million user-generated ratings on more than two million teachers and professors. The two sites get anywhere from half a million to a million unique visitors a month. Yelp.com, a user-generated review service, says its members have written more than four million local reviews since its founding in 2004. As the younger generation settles down and starts raising families, there’s every reason to expect that its members will carry these habits of networking and sharing information into tracking more serious quality-of-life issues, as well as politics.

Cities Lead the Way

Recognizing this trend, some public officials are plunging in. In his “State of the City” speech in January 2008, New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg promised to “roll out the mother of all accountability tools.” It is called Citywide Performance Reporting, and Bloomberg promised it would put “a wealth of data at people’s fingertips—fire response times, noise complaints, trees planted by the Parks Department, you name it. More than five hundred different measurements from forty-five city agencies.” Bloomberg, whose wealth was built on the financial-information company he built, says he likes to think of the service as a “Bloomberg terminal for city government—except that it’s free.”

Bloomberg’s vision is only partly fulfilled so far. A visitor to the city’s site (nyc.gov) would have a hard time finding the “Bloomberg terminal for city government” because it’s tucked several layers down on the Mayor’s Office of Operations page, with no pointers from the home page.

Still, the amount of data it provides is impressive. You can learn that the number of families with children entering the city shelter system is up 31 percent over last year, and that the city considers this a sign of declining performance by the system. Or you can discover that the median time the city department of consumer affairs took to process a complaint was twenty-two business days, and that that is considered positive! Another related tool, called NYC*scout, allows anyone to see where recent service requests have been made, and with a little bit of effort you can make comparisons between different community districts. New York’s monitoring tools still leave much to be desired, however, because they withhold the raw data—specific addresses and dates-of-service requests—that are the bones of these reports. This means the city is still resisting fully sharing the public’s data with the public.

Compare that to the approach of the District of Columbia. Since 2006, all the raw data it has collected on government operations, education, health care, crime, and dozens of other topics has been available for free to the public via 260 live data feeds. The city’s CapStat online service also allows anyone to track the performance of individual agencies, monitor neighborhood services and quality-of-life issues, and make suggestions for improvement. Vivek Kundra, D.C.’s innovative chief technology officer, calls this “building the digital public square.” In mid-October, he announced an “Apps for Democracy” contest that offered $20,000 in cash prizes for outside developers and designers of Web sites and tools that made use of the city’s data catalog.

In just a few weeks, Kundra received nearly fifty finished Web applications. The winners included:

• iLive.at, a site that shows with one click all the local information around one address, including the closest places to go shopping, buy gas, or mail a letter; the locations of recently reported crimes; and the demographic makeup of the neighborhood;


• Where’s My Money, DC?—a tool that meshes with Facebook and enables users to look up and discuss all city expenditures above $2,500; and


• Stumble Safely, an online guide to the best bars and safe paths on which to stumble home after a night out.

The lesson of the “Apps for Democracy” contest is simple: a critical mass of citizens with the skills and the appetite to engage with public agencies stands ready to co-create a new kind of government transparency.

Under traditional government procurement practices, it would have taken Kundra months just to post a “request for proposals” and get responses. Finished sites would have taken months, even years, for big government contractors to complete. The cost for fifty working Web sites would have been in the millions. Not so when you give the public robust data resources and the freedom to innovate that is inherent to today’s Web.

The Whole Picture

So, how will the Web ultimately alter the nature of political transparency? Four major trends are developing.

First, the day is not far off when it will be possible to see, at a glance, the most significant ways an individual, lobbyist, corporation, or interest group is trying to influence the government. Here’s how Ellen Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation and a longtime proponent of open government, sees the future of transparency online: “If I search for Exxon, I want one-click disclosure,” she says. “I want to see who its pac is giving money to, who its executives and employees are supporting, at the state and federal levels; who does its lobbying, whom they’re meeting with and what they’re lobbying on; whether it’s employing former government officials, or vice versa, if any of its ex-employees are in government; whether any of those people have flown on the company’s jets. And then I also want to know what contracts, grants, or earmarks the company has gotten and whether they were competitively bid.”

She continues: “If I look up a senator, I want an up-to-date list of his campaign contributors—not one that is months out of date because the Senate still files those reports on paper. I want to see his public calendar of meetings. I want to know what earmarks he’s sponsored and obtained. I want to know whether he is connected to a private charity that people might be funneling money to. I want to see an up-to-date list of his financial assets, along with all the more mundane things, like a list of bills he’s sponsored, votes he’s taken, and public statements he’s made. And I want it all reported and available online in a timely fashion.”

This vision isn’t all that far away. In the last three years, thanks in large measure to support from Sunlight, OMB Watch (a nonprofit advocacy organization that focuses on budget issues, regulatory policy, and access to government) created FedSpending.org, a searchable online database of all government contracts and spending. The Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.org), meanwhile, has developed searchable databases of current lobbying reports, personal financial disclosure statements of members of Congress, sponsored travel, and employment records of nearly ten thousand people who have moved through the revolving door between government and lobbying. Taxpayers for Common Sense (Taxpayer.net) is putting the finishing touches on a complete online database of 2008 earmarks.

The National Institute on Money in State Politics, headed by Ed Bender, is filling in the picture at the state level, aiming to give the public “as complete a picture as possible of its elected leaders and their actions, and offer information that helps the public understand those actions,” he says. “This would start with the candidates running for offices, their biographies and their donors, and would follow them into the statehouses to their committee assignments and relationships with lobbyists, and finally to the legislation that they sponsor and vote for, and who benefits from those actions.”

The incoming Obama administration, meanwhile, has expressed a commitment to expanding government transparency, promising as part of its “ethics agenda” platform (change.gov/agenda/ethics_agenda) to create a “centralized Internet database of lobbying reports, ethics records, and campaign-finance filings in a searchable, sortable, and downloadable format,” as well as a “ ‘contracts and influence’ database that will disclose how much federal contractors spend on lobbying, and what contracts they are getting and how well they complete them.”

To insure that all citizens can access such a database, we can hope that Obama pushes universal Internet access as part of his investment in infrastructure. As Andrew Rasiej and I argued in Politico in December, “Just as we recognized with the Universal Service Act in the 1930s that we had to take steps to ensure everyone access to the phone network, we need to do the same today with affordable access to high-speed Internet. Everything else flows from this. Otherwise, we risk leaving half our population behind and worsening inequality rather than reducing it.”

3-D Journalism

A second trend propelling us toward a greater degree of political transparency is data visualization. The tools for converting boring lists and lines of numbers into beautiful, compelling images get more powerful every day, enabling a new kind of 3-D journalism: dynamic and data-driven. And in many cases, news consumers can manipulate the resulting image or chart, drilling into its layers of information to follow their own interests. My favorite examples include:

• The Huffington Post’s Fundrace, which mapped campaign contributions to the 2008 presidential candidates by name and address, enabling anyone to see whom their neighbors might be giving to;
• The New York Times’s debate analyzer, which converted each candidate debate into an interactive chart showing word counts and speaking time, and enabled readers to search for key words or fast forward; and
• The Sunlight Foundation and Taxpayers for Common Sense’s Earmarks Watch Map (earmarkwatch.org/mapped),which layered the thousands of earmarks in the fiscal 2008 defense-appropriations bill over a map of the country allowing a viewer to zero in on specific sites and see how the Pentagon scatters money in practically every corner of the U.S.

The use of such tools is engendering a collective understanding of, as Paul Simon once sang, the way we look to us all. As news consumers grow used to seeing people like CNN’s John King use a highly interactive map of the United States to explain local voting returns, demand for these kinds of visualizations will only grow.

Little Brother Is Watching, Too

The third trend fueling the expansion of political transparency is sousveillance, or watching from below. It can be done by random people, armed with little more than a camera-equipped cell phone, who happen to be in the right place at the right time. Or it can be done by widely dispersed individuals acting in concert to ferret out a vital piece of information or trend, what has been called “distributed journalism.” In effect, Big Brother is being watched by millions of Little Brothers.

For example, back in August, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom was having coffee at a Starbucks in Malibu when he was spotted by a blogger who took a couple of photos and posted them online. The blogger noted that Newsom was “talking campaign strategy” with someone, but didn’t know who. The pictures came to the attention of San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci, who identified that person as political consultant Garry South. Soon political bloggers were having a field day, pointing out that the liberal mayor was meeting with one of the more conservative Democratic consultants around. This is sousveillance at its simplest.

The citizen-journalism project “Off the Bus,” which ultimately attracted thousands of volunteer reporters who posted their work on The Huffington Post during the 2008 election, was sousveillance en masse. Much of their work was too opinionated or first-person oriented to really break news, but Mayhill Fowler’s reporting of Barack Obama’s offhand remarks at a San Francisco fundraiser about “bitter” blue-collar workers at least briefly changed the course of the campaign. And there are numerous examples of bloggers and their readers acting in concert to expose some hidden fact. The coalition of bloggers known as the “Porkbusters” were at the center of an effort to expose which senator had put a secret hold on a bill creating a federal database of government spending, co-sponsored by none other than Barack Obama and Tom Coburn. Porkbusters asked their readers to call their senators, and by this reporting process, discovered that Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska was the culprit. Soon thereafter, he released his hold. Likewise, Josh Marshall has frequently asked readers of Talking Points Memo to help him spot local stories that might be part of a larger pattern. It was this technique that helped him piece together the story of the firings of U.S. Attorneys around the country, for which he won the Polk Award.

The World’s A-Twitter

The final trend that is changing the nature of transparency is the rise of what some call the World Live Web. Using everything from mobile phones that can stream video live online to simple text message postings to the micro-blogging service Twitter, people are contributing to a real-time patter of information about what is going on around them. Much of what results is little more than noise, but increasingly sophisticated and simple-to-use filtering tools can turn some of it into information of value.

For example, in just a matter of weeks before the November election in the U.S., a group of volunteer bloggers and Web developers loosely affiliated with the blog I edit, techPresident.com, built a monitoring project called Twitter Vote Report. Voters were encouraged to use Twitter, as well as other tools like iPhones, to post reports on the quality of their voting experience. Nearly twelve thousand reports flowed in, and the result was a real-time picture of election-day complications and wait times that a number of journalistic organizations, including NPR, PBS, and several newspapers, relied on for their reporting.

Nothing to Hide

The question for our leaders, as we head into a world where bottom-up, user-generated transparency is becoming more of a reality, is whether they will embrace this change and show that they have nothing to hide. Will they actively share all that is relevant to their government service with the people who, after all, pay their salaries? Will they trust the public to understand the complexities of that information, instead of treating them like children who can’t handle the truth?

The question for citizens, meanwhile, is, Will we use this new access to information to create a more open and deliberative democracy? Or will citizens just use the Web to play “gotcha” games with politicians, damaging the discourse instead of uplifting it?

“People tend not to trust what is hidden,” write the authors of the November 2008 report by a collection of openness advocates entitled “Moving Toward a 21st Century Right-to-Know Agenda.” “Transparency is a powerful tool to demonstrate to the public that the government is spending our money wisely, that politicians are not in the pocket of lobbyists and special-interest groups, that government is operating in an accountable manner, and that decisions are made to ensure the safety and protection of all Americans.” In the end, transparency breeds trust. Or rather, transparency enables leaders to earn our trust. In the near future, they may have to, because more and more of us are watching. 

The Journal is excellent today covering Mary Schapiro, Obama's pick to head the SEC.

The pick never engendered much enthusiasm, but however much it did is vanishing quickly, at least outside Wall Street C-suites. That's in large part because Obama has picked the head of the industry's “self-policing” arm Finra to tackle the biggest cleanup job on Wall Street in nearly eighty years. Let's look at what the Journal has to say about her.

First of all, I like the headline, which calls it like it is:

Obama's Pick to Head SEC Has Record Of Being a Regulator With a Light Touch

Second, the story backs it up—it's just as tough, showing she didn't do much policing of the industry:

Finra levied fines against financial firms totaling $40 million in 2008, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis. That was the third straight annual decline in fines levied by Finra or one of its predecessor agencies, the NASD. The total was 73% below the $148.5 million in fines collected in 2005, the year before Ms. Schapiro took the helm of the NASD.

That in the midst of the biggest bubble in history.

We hear from one of the few heroes this crisis has produced, Harry Markopolos:

Harry Markopolos -- a money manager who provided information on Mr. Madoff to the SEC and repeatedly urged it to investigate Mr. Madoff -- says he avoided taking the same information to the NASD. Mr. Markopolos says he and his brother, then a trader, had taken other issues to regulators at the NASD but it had never responded. He says he also assumed his concerns wouldn't be pursued because both Mr. Madoff and his brother, Peter, had served as officials of NASD and its trading arm, the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Yeesh.

And it gets worse. The paper says Schapiro and Finra were laggards on the auction-rate securities mess (remember that one?):

Finra also appears to have lagged behind in a Wall Street mess that affected thousands of individual investors in early 2008 -- a freeze-up in the market for what are known as auction-rate securities. These are long-term debt securities whose interest rates are supposed to be reset at weekly or monthly auctions. When the auctions failed, investors were stuck and couldn't sell the securities.

Finra and other regulators launched probes of the matter. But Finra, along with the SEC, was beaten to the punch by state regulators and Finra was largely left on the sidelines.

The WSJ calls Schapiro out for trying to wash her hands of the Lehman collapse:

But Lehman's problems ran far deeper: not having enough capital and apparently carrying its huge holdings of complex mortgage securities on its books at too high a value.

People close to Ms. Schapiro say the Lehman mess and the broader mortgage meltdown occurred outside of what Finra inspects: brokerage accounts. But firms were selling the mortgage securities in brokerage accounts, to investors large and small. Finra is also responsible for seeing to it that the valuations of securities sold in brokerage accounts are accurate.

Joseph Mays Jr., a consultant to small broker-dealers and a former NASD examiner, says Finra should have scrutinized the mortgage-backed securities at the root of the crisis. "If I had to assign blame, I'd blame Finra and the SEC, but I'd blame Finra first because it's the first line of defense," he said.

And as recently as May, Schapiro was touting the ratings agencies, which most people think need to be put out of their misery or radically altered, as a good enough line of defense for investors in the complex securities that led to the crisis.

The Financial Services Institute, a trade group, was meeting, and Ms. Schapiro addressed the crowd about Finra's efforts to fight frauds aimed at senior citizens. Frank Congemi, a financial adviser, asked what Finra was doing to regulate "packaged products" such as complex mortgage securities. Mr. Congemi says that Ms. Schapiro replied: "We have rating agencies that rate them." The credit-rating agencies, by this time, were being heavily criticized for having given triple-A ratings to mortgage bonds that became unsalable as foreclosures rose.

Fantastic piece of reporting by the Journal.

Journalists, these days, have little reason for cheer. At a time when Romenesko's updates increasingly read as real-time obituaries for journalists' careers and craft--and at a time when terms like "slashed budgets," "fighting for their lives," and "bloodbath" permeate media reporting, likening newsrooms to war zones with a remarkable absence of irony--defeatism is often the order of the day. Foxholes may have no atheists, but they don't tend to have optimists, either.

Save for this week, that is, when GlobalPost, the Web-based, international news startup, debuted to much--much, much, much--fanfare. And to much--dare we say?--hope. Indeed, it's hard to remember a time when an online news organization has, at its outset, gained so much glowing attention from a world-weary media: Innovation! Ambition! New financial model! (New financial model! New financial model!)

Given the breadth of the coverage it's received, the basic elements of GlobalPost's story are, by now, familiar: that it was founded by veteran journalists Phil Balboni and Charlie Sennott; that it currently employs seventy freelance correspondents covering nearly fifty countries, seven of them dedicated to transnational, idea-based beats; that these correspondents are supported by fourteen U.S.-based staff members focused on editing and multimedia production; and that the outlet's three-tiered financial structure relies on advertising, syndication (in print and online), and--this is the biggie--reader subscriptions. (TimesSelect Redux it's not: the "media transformation" maven Ken Doctor compares GlobalPost's $199-a-year ($50 for students) subscription fee not to the Times's failed venture in Web monetization, but rather to the subscription model of MinnPost--a site, he points out, "which has something more than 1,000 members after a year.")

The subscription service in question, Passport--whose $199 price tag, it's worth noting, is an "introductory" rate for "charter members"--promises not merely access to "premium content" (podcast-y "conference calls" with correspondents, "newsmaker interviews," a monthly digital newsletter and a weekly editor's brief), but also access to the ears of GlobalPost's editors. Passport members will have a say as to which stories correspondents are assigned: editors will choose their top story ideas, and paying readers will get to vote for their favorites. Those readers will be able, in other words, to take part in crowdsourcing that is editorial, rather than reportorial, in nature. GlobalPost's is a model driven not only by the core premise that good journalism should be paid for, but also by the hope that the promise of investment on an editorial level will engender investment on a financial one as well.

GlobalPost's editorial agility--you decide, we report--is echoed in its anatomy. A lack of legacy infrastructure (foreign bureaus, printing presses, print distribution costs, etc.) means that, while "a lot of newsrooms are struggling to retrofit.....[w]e can create this for the web right from the start," Sennott told NextNewsroom's Chris O'Brien. And also that individual GlobalPost correspondents--armed with portable video cameras, still cameras, and audio recorders in addition to their pens and notepads--will be able to offer "a sui generis take on the wider world," as The Phoenix's Adam Reilly had it. Resources both physical and financial can thus be channeled directly toward GlobalPost's primary goal: being there, and telling people what it's like. "It’s a different structure than most traditional media outlets," Beatblogging (NewAssignment's beat-focused blog) notes. It's "a flatter, nimbler structure that should allow the Global Post to add more correspondents where demand is high."

What that structure will mean to journalism--GlobalPost's own efforts, and those of the wider media world--remains to be seen: coverage of GlobalPost is, by necessity, consigned to the future tense. The general consensus, however, early on, is that the outlet has a solid business plan...which has, built into it, some obvious X-factors. (The most glaring of these is the audience itself: are there enough people interested in foreign coverage, especially in the U.S., to justify GlobalPost's existence?) Whether those variables will affect GlobalPost's final analysis--and with it, to mix a metaphor, the outlet's bottom line--is itself an unknown.

And yet obscurity affords opportunity: rarely do media-watchers have such an obvious occasion to track the evolution of a news outlet from its inception. Unlike The Huffington Post or The Politico, slow-starting-to-suddenly-successful sites that seemed to spring, like Athena from the head of Zeus, fully-formed into our lives and laptops, GlobalPost is an effort whose nascent days have been, and will no doubt continue to be, under intense scrutiny. It's an optimistic strain of scrutiny, though: even among those who have been critical of individual components of GlobalPost's business model or editorial aims or audience goals, the overall sensibility that has permeated its coverage so far has been: Go get 'em, guys. We're pulling for you. Because if GlobalPost is successful in the way that it's currently defining success--essentially, if it can manage to turn a profit by producing quality journalism--then its accomplishment will benefit journalism generally. GlobalPost's experiment in many ways brings a new dimension to the we're-in-this-together mentality of the Web: if it succeeds, then, in some measure, we all do.

Foreign Correspondent for a Digital Age

GlobalPost, as an idea, is thirty-seven years old. It was born here at Columbia University, while Phil Balboni (a former member of CJR's Editorial Advisory Board) was a Ford Foundation Fellow in international reporting at the Graduate School of Journalism. "During the course of the year," Balboni told me, "I developed an idea to create an international news service to supplement what was then, in my view, the meager reporting from overseas. We're talking 1970, '71," he laughs. "And I developed a plan--I actually, eventually, lined up about thirty-five correspondents--and I had a very distinguished advisory board...but no money. I didn't know anything about business." Balboni decided to establish his new organization as a nonprofit--and getting 501(c)3 status, then as now, required government approval. "It was the Nixon administration," Balboni says, "and the word came back: 'We don't need any more international news.'"

His lawyer wanted him to fight that decision, Balboni recalls, but, again, there was the matter of money. Specifically, not having any. "I didn't even have any money to pay his bill--which he was nice enough to forgive--and my wife was pregnant, my daughter was about to be born, and I needed a job."

So, a job Balboni got--one that would launch a thirty-plus-year career in broadcast journalism. And that, for the time being, was that.

Until this week, when GlobalPost's launch brought to fruition the years-old idea that seems, however, particularly suited to the infancy of the Internet. Indeed, the Web's ability to collapse space and time--and to bring stories alive in ways that even the most exciting prose cannot--makes it a logical locus for foreign reporting. As Amy Jeffries, GlobalPost's senior multimedia producer, puts it, "Integrating multimedia with other content, so it's not off in a corner somewhere, so it's not divorced from our mission--that is our mission."

To fulfill it, Sennott (who personally recruited a high percentage of GlobalPost's editorial staff) and Balboni have assembled a crackerjack crew of reporters: award-winners, experienced shoe-leatherers, former editors and bureau chiefs. They tend to fall into one of three categories: young-and-hungry; mid-career-and-looking-for-a-change; and seasoned-and-looking-for-an-adventure. The correspondents are generally paid $1,000 a month--without benefits--for four 800-word stories, with blogging and multimedia work currently unpaid and (depending on whom you talk to) falling somewhere on the scale between "encouraged" and "expected." Many of the correspondents, especially the younger ones, are doing their GlobalPost reporting in addition to other freelance gigs in journalism (Jason Overdorf, GlobalPost's India correspondent, freelances for Newsweek) and other ventures (Matt Beynon Rees, who covers Israel, is doing his reporting while writing the next of his Gaza-focused mystery novels). Many of the correspondents are journalistic refugees, bought-out or laid-off casualties of journalism's war with itself.

And many of them are indignant about the low priority the journalistic community, as a whole, has given to international coverage at a time when familiarity with world events is more vital than ever. "The fact that our industry is so badly managed is not our fault," GlobalPost's U.K. correspondent, Michael Goldfarb, told me. "Clearly the big organizations aren't nimble enough to react to this new reality that we're facing."

The success Sennott had in recruiting what Goldfarb calls "a pretty ace team" of correspondents, Goldfarb thinks, indicates their dedication to good journalism. "It's a measure of how much the reporters in the field want to do the job," he says. "No matter how much all of us have taken a kicking...we come back, excited to work."

Given their shares in the company's spotlight and its stock, the correspondents are players in a game whose stakes are high: if this crack team of reporters and business-side operators can't make international reporting profitable, it's hard to imagine that anyone else can. Still, they believe, the high stakes are worth the gamble, in part because it's a gamble whose winnings can be shared. "We must--must, must--create new, for-profit models of journalism," Balboni says. "The best way to ensure long-term sustainability is by having a real business that is fired in the marketplace, and that has revenue that's generated by consumers and other means that will sustain it for the long term." He respectfully disagrees with those who have argued that journalism's economic future lies in the nonprofit world. "Nonprofit is great--we have NPR, which is one of the great journalism organizations created in the last 100 years--but it's an unusual phenomenon. And even NPR, as we've seen, has financial problems," he notes.

For Balboni, quite literally, it's profit-or-bust. "I believe that this is the best way," he says of GlobalPost's model. "I don't believe it's the only way, but if you want to look at the overall future of journalism--we have to have for-profit models if we're going to have a future. That's why we're going down this road."

Beyond Funding

It's fitting that the attention GlobalPost has received this week--and, indeed, the attention it's been receiving since the organization announced itself last March--has focused on the financial-model aspects of Balboni and Sennott's venture: at a time when journalism as we've known it is [insert your favorite dying-a-slow-death euphemism here], the need for financial sustainability is literally vital.

And yet. In all the Will This Save Journalism? flurry, less attention has been paid to the editorial aspects of GlobalPost's plans for innovation. Which are in some ways just as significant as the financial. "We always said that GlobalPost is not a breaking news organization," Balboni says. "Our correspondents are not primarily focused on reinventing the wheel"--they have no interest in changing a reporting model that the AP, the BBC, and other organizations already use to great effect--but aim rather to add new dimensions to the breaking-news stories that other organizations write. In that, the journalism GlobalPost plans to produce--contextual, narrative, with an emphasis on good writing and, as Sennott is fond of reiterating, "good storytelling"--promises (or threatens, depending on your point of view) to shift the balance of power between breaking-news and more context-driven stories in international coverage. By focusing on the latter, GlobalPost is effectively rejecting the view of a world whose contours are shaped and shaded by breaking news's general tropism toward tragedy--a view that not only tends to lump the world beyond our borders into the euphemistic blur of "foreign countries," but that also broadly conceives of those countries as plagued by explosions and floods and angry riots, and populated by militant men, sexually oppressed women, and bulge-bellied, empty-eyed children.

While to an extent, of course, there's some accuracy to those sweeping depictions--and while the international wire services' breaking-news coverage is, it should go without saying, immensely valuable--our general emphasis on breaking news, rather than contextualizing it, has in this case brought with it the subtle suggestion that "foreign countries" are little more than backdrops for ongoing catastrophe. Without countervailing coverage--coverage, for example, of other countries' cultures and politics and sports teams and education systems and leisure pursuits, coverage tuned to the humming frequencies of everyday life--American audiences are generally left with a doom-and-gloom impression of the world that is neither accurate nor necessary. And that impression, in turn, leads many members of those audiences to adopt that classically American posture of self-defense: isolationism via apathy. Not in my backyard, and all that.

The newsroom culture of traditional media organizations has itself helped to enforce that cycle. As Matt Beynon Rees, GlobalPost's Israel correspondent (and formerly the Jerusalem bureau chief for Time magazine), points out, "There's a tendency among news people to assume that if they're not doing so-called 'hard news,' then they're not showing a talent to be tough--so then they're not real journalists." Pretensions to "toughness" can lead journalists to suppress their own voices in favor of hard news's peer-approved vernacular. "The big newspapers and magazines, no matter how hard they try not to be, always tend to become a little bit stodgy," Overdorf, GlobalPost's India correspondent, says. "One of the keys to succeeding in this thing will be to avoid that."

Voice--though not bias--is encouraged, and not just in reporters' blogs, but in their stories, as well. The point of hiring correspondents who live in the countries they're covering is to avoid parachute journalism, to be sure, but it's also to publish pieces of writing whose assertions are bolstered by their reporters' daily experience. "Voice" suggests authenticity, but it requires authority to be truly effective. The logistical challenges faced by parachute correspondents--developing sources; learning which of those sources to trust; navigating, in every sense, new locales--won't be as common for GlobalPost correspondents who, even when they're not in their home cities, will be reporting from their home countries. Those correspondents, the thinking goes, will legitimize themselves and their stories--and the way they tell those stories--not just by being there, but by living there.

An American Focus

If living there is a standard for foreign coverage, though, then the obvious question is: why not hire local journalists--the true experts--as your correspondents? Indeed, the most common criticism GlobalPost has received in the run-up to its launch has concerned its unapologetically America-centric approach to foreign affairs. "I still think that in the current climate a more sustainable model for an international news bureau would be one that cultivated local journalists," Georgia Popplewell, managing director of Global Voices, told PBS's Brian Glaser in an e-mail. But some countries simply won't allow their own journalists to report for a site like GlobalPost. "Chinese nationals are not allowed to work as foreign correspondents for foreign news organizations," Kathleen Mclaughlin, one of GlobalPost's China correspondents, pointed out in an e-mail. "The sad fact is that local journalists in China (and there are a lot of damn good ones) are constrained by government oversight and censorship, whereas foreign reporters have more freedom and protection."

Even in countries that have no such constraints, though, Balboni and Sennott are envisioning their outlet's distinctly American perspective as an asset--and even as a kind of journalistic currency. GlobalPost aims to establish "a new voice in international news," they write in its mission statement, "a voice that is consciously attentive to an American audience." As Mclaughlin put it, "American journalists understand Americans--their interests, their worldview, what they care about."

The American focus represents a marriage of sorts between Purpose and Profit: if a core element of GlobalPost's business plan is to attract and retain audiences for world news, and if audiences want coverage that is attuned to their sensibilities, then...everyone wins. "The world knows a lot about us, but we don't know a lot about the world," Seth Kugel, GlobalPost's Brazil correspondent, told me. "Americans tend to have a caricatured view of Brazil--and Brazilians know that and feel that and are to some extent frustrated by that." His goal for his work at GlobalPost, says Kugel, is analogous to the goal he's had for the travel writing and city reporting he's done for The New York Times: "to present the complete picture of what this country is like--to Americans and to anyone else around the world."

That's a job a local reporter simply can't do as well as an American, Kugel says--or at least as intuitively. "My friends here in Brazil, in the Brazilian press, are going to be reading my stories," Kugel says. "And in a lot of cases, they're going to be saying, 'That's not a story. What are you talking about? That's something we've known forever--it's just basic.'" But to American audiences, the basic facts of Brazilian life can be--are--a story, Kugel believes. He points to a piece he wrote that explores a choice Brazilians are faced with at the gas station every day: whether to fuel their cars with regular gasoline, or with ethanol. "To Brazilians, that's like choosing between Diet Coke and regular Coke or something," Kugel says, "but for us, the idea of having to go to a gas station and calculate the prices and decide which kind of fuel to fill your tank with is a foreign thought. It's such a non-story to Brazilians, but I think it will be a very interesting story to Americans, who think of ethanol cars as a far-off, distant, futuristic thing."

American journalists also understand the layer of mistrust that has slowly seeped into the spaces between Americans and their media. Many Americans approach even the most straightforwardly narrated news story, Michael Goldfarb points out, with skepticism. He describes a common reaction to his work: "God, that was an interesting story. But, tell me, what was it really like?"

What they mean, Goldfarb says, is: Beyond the basic facts, what was it like to be there and bear witness?

"That," he says, "is the kind of reporting that we hope to do."

Back to Bylines

There was a time when foreign correspondents--David Halberstam, Vincent Sheean, Ernie Pyle--transcended their publications, rather than the other way around. It was their glamour, to be sure, and their breezy sense of adventure, that made them attractive to audiences. But it was also their writing. Foreign reporting lends itself particularly well to the craft element of journalism, to rendering art in the service of information. (Consider how many canonical authors of fiction--Hemingway, Greene, Garcia Marquez--started their writing careers as foreign correspondents.) Audiences may want, on the one hand, quick-hit takes on the news occurring in other countries, but they also want to be led through that news and those countries guided by a trusted scout. We read Halberstam and Sheean and Pyle not for their pith or their balance, but because we want to know what Halberstam and Sheean and Pyle, personally and particularly, have to say about where they've been.

As foreign coverage has moved, broadly, toward news and away from analysis, however, shorter takes, bylined by nobody in particular, have become increasingly common. There are exceptions to this, of course: The New York Times's international section, for example, has produced deeply reported and quite remarkable stories, their authors prominently featured; so have NPR and many other organizations. And one need only say the name "Dexter Filkins" to stop a sweeping no-more-name-branded-correspondents argument in its tracks. Still, in terms of most Americans' news consumption--and to the extent that journalism is a product as much as a practice, it's that metric upon which we can measure journalism's job performance--international news has taken on a decidedly impersonal cast. And detachment easily veers into apathy.

On GlobalPost, however, the aim is global engagement partially by way of personal engagement. Bylines are prominent. They're listed above the text of each article, next to a relatively large headshot of the author in question. Perma-placed to the right of each story's text is the personal blog of its author. GlobalPost is, by all indications, attempting to engender anew the cultural cachet of the foreign correspondent. And it's doing so by following the brand-making currents of the Web--building up its correspondents' stories and celebrating (or, more cynically, capitalizing on) their voices. As Beynon Rees, the Israel correspondent, notes, "Some people will be coming to the site to find out what's going on in the world today--but because people who aren't traditional newspaper readers might be coming to the site, they might also be coming to see, 'What's that crazy bastard Matt Beynon Rees saying today?'"

This kind of institutionalized branding is one sign of the synergy GlobalPost is trying to effect between its business and editorial sides. Because if there's one thing the Web has shown us, it's that the charismatic voice of a single individual can lure large crowds into listening—and even into caring.

In his iconic 1922 book, Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann wrote of the average American: “He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen,” and “he lives in a world which he cannot see, does not understand and is unable to direct.” Lippmann also accused that same average American of being “slow to be aroused and quickly diverted" and "interested only when events have been melodramatized as a conflict.”

Nearly a century later, Lippmann's indictment still stings. Even in an age whose technological progress has promised unparalleled connectivity with the rest of the world, Americans remain, in many ways, isolated. It's an isolation partially of our own making--we simply haven't cared enough to learn about other countries in the same way that they've cared to learn about us--but it's also been inflicted by a journalistic infrastructure that has routinely snubbed foreign coverage, dismissing it as a luxury rather than a necessity. GlobalPost is putting its faith and its future in Americans' interest in the world beyond our borders, in our desire to know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen. It's a gamble, but one in dire need of being taken. "The world is dramatically undercovered by the American news media," Balboni says. "And it's time to do something about it, goddammit."

The XX Factor's Emily Bazelon on Barack Obama's "Open Letter To My Daughters" in the current Parade magazine:

Why is Barack Obama writing an open letter to his daughters? I guess when you become president, you talk to your kids via Parade magazine.

Parade magazine, with its 30-plus million circulation, is where Dad Lays Out His Lofty Expectations For His Daughters:

I hope both of you will take up that work, righting the wrongs that you see and working to give others the chances you've had. Not just because you have an obligation to give something back to this country that has given our family so much—although you do have that obligation. But because you have an obligation to yourself. Because it is only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you will realize your true potential.

No pressure, though.

These are sentiments, Bazelon rightly notes, that Obama "could get across at a family dinner or bedtime." Bazelon asks: "By doing it in public, doesn't he put a huge burden on them, adding to the one they're already shouldering? And isn't he using them, too?"

Yes. And, yes.

And, I'd add, isn't Obama also making it more likely that things like What's For Lunch In The Sidwell Cafeteria (Upper and Lower Schools) will continue to be served up as news? After all, if we don't air this bit about the Obama girls' private lives-- and air it now --we might get scooped by Dad.

Obama sat down this morning ("there weren't refreshments") with some left-leaning pundits (or lefter-leaning-than-last night), reports Michael Calderone.

The group included the Washington Post's E.J. Dionne and Eugene Robinson, the Wall Street Journal's Gerry Seib, National Journal's Ron Brownstein, the New York Times's Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd, The Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, among others.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell will be named Sen. Barack Obama’s vice presidential running mate, a high-ranking source in the administration told the Patriot-News.



That was my lede after being tricked into believing Rendell was Obama's No. 2 man by a famed newsroom of top-flight state government correspondents in the Harrisburg state capital.



This isn't the story of the Pennsylvania governor being named Obama's running mate. This is the story of how the economy is in free fall, newspapers are on life-support, and yet they still can't get rid of me.  

I am a 23-year-old underemployed freelance journalist. A college news service listed me among the one-hundred most promising young journalists in the country last year. I have covered courts and business for publications in major markets. I was my university's commencement speaker.



Yet I have $6 in my savings account. Editors won't return my calls or e-mails. Those who do apologize and say things like, "good luck out there." I wake up to an industry that was losing jobs long before the economy went south. I get pitches rejected like freelance writers before me, but now I'm competing with slashed budgets and a deluge of underemployed reporters.



What young person would voluntarily join a profession that keeps asking, “Why do you want to do this?” 



Last August, I was finishing a post-graduate internship with the Pennsylvania Legislative Correspondents' Association, covering the state capital for six media outlets on a rotating basis. I shared a water cooler with members of the oldest American journalism society of its kind, covering the largest full-time state legislature in the country and being mentored by a group of reporters with more than two centuries of journalism experience among them. I had to wipe the newsprint off my hand after shaking theirs.



I sat in on boring committee hearings and leafed through hundreds of pages of reports. I developed relationships, pitched stories, and found angles. The only thing I proved more completely than that I was determined to take on the craft was how new I was to it. 



Newspapering has been a reliable craft for at least a century and a half. So there's no way to stop this new generation of reporters raised online from trying to save the newspaper universe, because everyone wants to save something, and newspapers need lots of saving right now. Maybe that's why there were almost 10 percent more journalism students in 2007 than in 2002, and 2.5 percent more than the year before. According to the latest annual report by the Cox Center at the University of Georgia, there are more than 200,000 journalism and mass media students in the country. Why couldn't one in that number be the newsprint messiah?



"Did you hear that?" Harrisburg Patriot-News capital correspondent Jan Murphy asked me on the morning of August 15, 2008. A Rendell official who was a former Patriot reporter dropped a bombshell on Murphy in the newsroom: Rendell, the official whispered, is going to be named Obama's running mate, a highly suspect but then still possible scenario since we were a week from Joe Biden's appointment. Murphy was wading through statewide school test results. "You can handle this," she asked me. "Can't you?"



If there is a 22-year-old reporter on the planet who would say no, he needs to find a new career goal.

What I felt then was a rush I never felt so strongly, not on different continents or jumping out of airplanes. I was in possession of the single-most meaningful political story in the world and not another soul on the media planet knew it.

 I caught the state's Democratic party executive director on her cell phone. “Next Monday could be a very exciting day for Pennsylvania,” was all she would say on record. I actually got goose bumps. After some persistence, a Rendell spokesman seemed to all but confirm the rumor. “I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened,” he relented. A spokesman for Obama in Pennsylvania refused comment, but let on that an announcement was coming next week. A state Republican spokesman told me he heard the Rendell rumor too and wanted me to confirm it.



I was going to break one of the biggest stories of the 2008 presidential campaign.

 ... And then the Patriot cubicle flooded with about every other reporter there. "Burned!" Murphy shouted at me, the other reporters laughing. The entire newsroom, state representatives, and political operatives across the state were part of the most elaborate prank I ever faced.

"Iknew Rendell would be a stupid choice," was all I could offer.



Who else does that at work? Why wouldn't young people be drawn to that, as it becomes rarer still? 

I get to tell stories. And call people on the phone and ask them questions. I write. A lot. Every day. Sometimes people even pay me a little bit of money to do it.



Interest in media has blossomed with its coverage of itself. Media columnists and blogs have made eroding advertising in newspapers a top story, and this has strangely become an advertisement for the profession.



But there's more, I think.



I know what that old gray reporter in the corner represents: He is drenched with information, and we haven't found out how to wring him out online like we once could onto a broadsheet. So for now, he remains a damn good party guest, filled with the types of stories that only journalists can acquire. The sex appeal of something once standard is never higher than when it's nearest to its demise.



So I and a quarter million others want in—even if they tell us not to, or perhaps because of it.



News will be created in much the same way in the future. I have learned skills from legends and have no plans of abandoning what I have been taught is good and right in journalism. What will change is how news is disseminated. More and more it will come to readers through RSS feeds and podcasts on mobile devices.



The duty of every young reporter with dreams of saving journalism is to merge the two: the lessons of the old and the technologies of the new. As long as the current generation is here to pass the search of justice onto its successor, the rest is just details we'll sweat over for the next few years. Newspapers will consolidate and newsrooms will shrink, but we'll be left with what we have now, creatures of the news, however their numbers are diminished.



That's why I'm here fighting for bylines in shrinking publications during the worst economy in a generation or three—to become another battle-tested, truth-seeking storyteller, like every other young journalist before and after me.



From Dana Milbank's "sketch" of Clinton's confirmation hearing yesterday:

The questioning of Clinton, who sat at the witness table in an olive-brown jacket that brought to mind military fatigues, brought out a full complement of media heavies, including Joe Klein, Maureen Dowd and Andrea Mitchell.

(And you, Dana Milbank! And you.)

Thank goodness Dowd was on hand so that Times readers might today benefit from her first-hand report. In part:

Hillary showed the reasons she could be a star at state and queen of Obama's hot nerds.

Come again? "Hot nerds?" Yes. According to Dowd, Tim Geithner is "the hot nerd tapped by Obama" for Treasury secretary. (You think Dowd fancies herself the "hot nerd" tapped by the Times for its op-ed page?)

Here's how Joe Klein, another of the "media heavies" present, distilled the day and the nominee ("hot nerd," in so many words):

I spent the day at the Clinton confirmation hearings and came away impressed, as always, with the woman's sheer ability to process information. Not a missed beat...

... Wow. We've got people who are really interested in governing--who really love public service, who understand that foreign policy means more than simply issuing threats--coming back to your nation's capital! Enthusiasm and care don't always result in wise policy-making, but we've seen how fecklessness and carelessness works.

...Clinton will be confirmed, of course. And, I predict, she will be excellent in this role. (I am finding it fairly hard to play the role of cynical journalist these days. It may well be a transitory phenomenon--but it's kinda fun to be hoping for the best rather than fearing the worst, for a change.)

UPDATE: Apparently, the whole hearing was too "dull" for Howard Kurtz's taste, in large part due to Clinton's voice ("there is something about Hillary's monotone -- as she droned on about 'partnering with NGOs' and 'a global education fund to bolster secular education around the world' -- that brings on the need for a nap.")

Not sure how to square that with Dowd's voice-related observation of Confirmation Hearing Clinton that "not many women can talk about 'the pathogen area' with such authority and yet femininity."

“The silence has been deafening in regard to the possible sale of the Rocky Mountain News -- at least officially,” writes Michael Roberts on his Westword blog, surveying recent press coverage of what is or might be going on and then tapping the “off-the-record” grapevine for a bit more.

Read the editorial that Lasantha Wickramatunga, the editor of the Sri Lankan newspaper the Sunday Leader who was killed last week on his way to work, wrote in anticipation of his murder. The beginning of Wickramatunga's "Letter From The Grave" (which is what Steve Coll dubs it in a blog post at the New Yorker offering some background on all of this):

No other profession calls on its practitioners to lay down their lives for their art save the armed forces and, in Sri Lanka, journalism...

There's a lot of work going on inside the Bush Administration before it scoots out of office in less than a week, records wise. But this morning a federal judge has just added one more item to the list: handing over all personal digitital devices--thumb cards, CDs, DVDs, personal computers, etc.--that might contain some of the 5 million emails that are estimated to have gone missing after 2003 from the White House.

"No doubt the White House is going into a tizzy and freaking out," says Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a research organization based at George Washington University, which won the victory.

For now, the Archive has a brief press release up on the ruling, and a helpful timeline to understanding the long saga of the missing messages. The wheels of justice turn slowly, but the ruling, if it nets emails, could shed light on some of the most contentious episodes of the past administration, including the U.S. Attorney firing scandal.

"I'm just hoping it's not too late," says Blanton. "It could be closing the barn door after the horse is out."

HuffPo reports Barack Obama ate dinner at George Will's house last night, along with "several of the nation's most prominent conservative pundits" (William Kristol, David Brooks, and Charles Krauthammer).

It was actually hard to watch when Patrick Buchanan's MSNBC colleagues were razzing him a little on Morning Joe earlier about how he wasn't invited.

Also: The Nation's Katrina Vanden Heuvel wants a turn at the table.

It’s not everyday that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) cracks down hard on one of its clients; that is, one of the private insurance companies Congress allowed and encouraged to provide benefits to Medicare recipients. Bloomberg News published a story Monday that told a sorry tale of the country’s second largest insurance carrier (revenue-wise) and how it treated seniors who depend on coverage from the company to pay for their drugs. CMS gave Bloomberg a copy of the letter it sent to WellPoint which said the carrier has “demonstrated a longstanding and persistent failure to comply with CMS’ requirements for proper administration of its Medicare Advantage Prescription Drug Plans (MA-PD) and Prescription Drug Plans (PDP).”

The letter went on to say that the noncompliance has resulted in thousands of Medicare beneficiaries being denied access to “critical medications” that included cardiac drugs, anti-seizure drugs, anti-clogging drugs as well as medicine for asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. “WellPoint failed to follow through on its assurances to CMS that the problem was immediately and fully corrected,” the letter explained. CMS spokesman Peter Ashkenaz told me that the Medicare regulator had gotten a spike in complaints from WellPoint customers last week when new drug plans took effect. In December, he said, the agency received “under 100 complaints” and in the first week in January “we had more than 500. People were not getting their drugs.”

So the agency slapped a penalty on the carrier: effective immediately, it cannot market Medicare Part D plans, which provide pharmaceutical benefits to seniors, nor can it enroll new plan members. Even though the general Part D open enrollment season just ended, carriers can still sign up seniors with low incomes and people turning 65 who need to find a drug plan. Seniors enrolled in the controversial Medicare Advantage plans whose sellers are being overpaid by the federal government, can still switch plans until the end of March. So it’s fair to say the sanctions are likely to pinch WellPoint’s profits. WellPoint said in a statement that it had made significant progress in addressing problems cited by CMS and that since it had been working with the agency, it was “surprised by this recent action.”

Not many reporters cover insurance these days. But this is a good story, as Bloomberg knows, and a good company to keep an eye on. There are several ways to go. There are the usual business stories that quote stock analysts lamenting a fall in the company’s share price. The Bloomberg story went there. Carl McDonald, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., told Bloomberg that the CMS sanctions are “definitely not a good thing.” Then there’s the consumer story which tells people what to do. Bloomberg pointed out that people can stay with the carrier, or if they choose to drop out, they can call 1-800-Medicare and ask about a special enrollment period to select a new plan by the end of the month. Much less transparent to journalists is the health reform story and where WellPoint fits in. The insurer is a lobbying force. It helped to defeat Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneggar’s health reform drive in California in 2007 with a series of TV ads raising doubts about the plan, and it was prepared to spend millions to keep reform from happening. WellPoint has staked out a lucrative market selling bare bones policies, the kind that many politicians see as the solution for covering everyone. It could benefit handsomely from many of the reform proposals now on the table if they require people to buy health coverage from private insurers.

In case you think WellPoint is alone in designing questionable insurance practices, take note. Yesterday the nation’s biggest carrier UnitedHealth Group agreed to pay a $50 million settlement after New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo accused the insurers of overcharging millions of customers when a research firm owned by United manipulated the numbers so that the carrier underpaid policyholders when they filed claims. Said Cuomo: “This is a huge scam that affected hundreds of millions of Americans who were ripped off by their health insurance companies.”

All this should prompt reporters to investigate whether these kinds of insurance shenanigans are what Americans prefer when they say they want universal coverage. For example, what will prevent WellPoint from continuing the same practices for policyholders under 65 that CMS has said it engaged in for seniors on Medicare? What will stop insurers from paying as little as possible and shoving more costs of medical care onto unsuspecting policyholders? And while they’re at it, a hard look at whether regulation can really discourage such practices is in order. Remember, the president-elect said during the campaign that he would tightly regulate health insurance. The case of WellPoint and UnitedHealth Group invites scrutiny of this campaign promise.

The Journal fronts some interesting news this morning: Global trade is tanking, showing just how bad the U.S. economy is suffering and how much that will hurt all these hangers-on who depend on us to buy their stuff.

Overall U.S. trade is down 18 percent (good news for us, exports are falling more slowly than imports). Japan's is down 27 percent. China's is off 12 percent. Those are big numbers, but this really puts them in context:

While the growth of global trade generally slows during recessions, it doesn't usually contract world-wide; the last time it did was 1982.

But this reminds me of an interesting point BusinessWeek's chief economist (who knew magazines had such a thing) Michael Mandel made the other day comparing China's export-dependent situation to that of the U.S. in 1929.

Here’s one clue. If we look back at the Great Depression, we see that the U.S. was hit harder than virtually any other European or Asian country. For example, between 1929 and 1932, industrial production plunged by 45% in the U.S., compared to 41% in Germany, 26% in France, and 11% in Britain...

Why the disparity? There’s all sorts of reasons, relating to monetary policy and other factors. But in part, the U.S. was hit harder because it was a ‘trade surplus’ country—that is, a net exporter of goods. By contrast, Great Britain (for example) was running a sizable merchandise trade deficit in 1929, so cutbacks in spending would be felt more outside of Britain.

I think the press has done a good job so far keeping an eye on China.

I'm hopeful that will continue.

Back in October, Katia wondered, "Did the New York Times intentionally construct a brilliant juxtaposition of wealth and poverty on its front page this morning?" (referring to an above-the-fold story about people passing on essential medications "in sour economy," and a below-the-fold piece about a socialite with terminal cancer whose family "booked her a suite on the eighth floor" of her favorite hotel so that "At The End, [She Might Enjoy] All The Comforts Of The Carlyle.")

Looking at today's Times, I have to ask: Another purposefully jarring juxtaposition on the front page? Or, happenstance?

Above the fold: "Afghan Girls, Scarred by Acid, Defy Terror, Embracing School"

Below the fold: "Love the Long Eyelashes. Who's Your Doctor?"

(And the online juxtaposition? On the Times' home page, "Love The Long Eyelashes" currently sits directly above "Afghan Girls, Scarred by Acid...")

Let's compare ledes:

One morning two months ago, Shamsia Husseini and her sister were walking through the muddy streets to the local girls school when a man pulled alongside them on a motorcycle and posed what seemed like an ordinary question.

“Are you going to school?”

Then the man pulled Shamsia’s burqa from her head and sprayed her face with burning acid. Scars, jagged and discolored, now spread across Shamsia’s eyelids and most of her left cheek. These days, her vision goes blurry, making it hard for her to read.

But if the acid attack against Shamsia and 14 others — students and teachers — was meant to terrorize the girls into staying home, it appears to have completely failed.

And;

First it was frozen foreheads. Now it's Betty Boop eyelashes.

Allergan, the company that [brought us] Botox...plans to introduce Latisee, the first federally approved prescription drug for growing longer, lusher lashes....David E. I. Pyott, Allergan's chief executive...suggested that many women would not blink at spending $120 for a one-month three-milliliter supply of the drug.

Let's belabor the point and compare kickers as well.

After class, Shamsia blended in with the other girls, standing around, laughing and joking. She seemed un-self-conscious about her disfigurement, until she began to recount her ordeal.

“The people who did this,” she said, “do not feel the pain of others.”

And:

Some doctors, meanwhile, are wondering whether Latisse could be used on hair elsewhere...."For a lot of women, the eyebrow is every bit as important as the eyelash," [said Mr. Pyott, the CEO of Allergen].

I've got bone to pick with the coverage this morning of Citigroup's dismantling of itself.

Nowhere in Bloomberg, the Journal, or the Times is there the slightest nod to the fact that some of the key units the bank is selling off are the subprime meat grinders or otherwise shady firms that Sandy Weill built the empire out of. And while the stories mention that Citigroup's size made it too unwieldy to manage, no one mentions that its size endangered the entire U.S. economy by being "too big to fail." It would have been nice to have a graph or two about these major issues.

Here's the Journal on the businesses Citi will unload:

A long list of additional Citigroup businesses is likely to eventually end up on the block, according to people familiar with the plans. They include two consumer-finance units, Primerica Financial Services and CitiFinancial. The company's private-label credit-card businesses also are marked for disposal.

Funny, here's the lede of a piece our pal Dean Starkman wrote more than a year ago:

A long time ago, before the turn of the century, subprime lending was a marginal business—economically, ethically, every way. The business was basically left to the hustlers. Financial carrion. Birds of prey.

Let’s face it, only the likes of Commercial Credit Corp., of Baltimore, would sell 40 percent loans to barely literate residents of Mississippi’s Noxubee and Lowndes* counties, tacking on credit insurance to bring the rate up to 70 percent. (Never mind what credit insurance is. Just don’t buy it.) Or maybe Primerica, of Atlanta, which Tennessee regulators accused of “seeking to deceive and confuse” customers through “a system of deliberate evasion.” Or maybe the truly rancid Associates First Capital Corp., of Irving, Texas, so corrupt that it employed a “designated forger,” an ex-employee told ABC’s Prime Time Live. I mean, who would go near a bunch like that?

Whoops! My bad. Sanford I. Weill, the former chairman and CEO of Citigroup Inc., Fortune’s third-most admired megabank last year, got his start buying Commercial Credit in 1986, then bought Primerica in 1988 before merging with Citicorp a decade later.

And Associates First Capital? Yup, Citi bought it in 2000. The Citi never sleeps.

Associates was so bad it had to be renamed and folded into CitiFinancial. Didn't read anything about that in today's coverage, though. That's not surprising. We haven't read much about this period. Dean's piece made that point, noting that reporter Michael Hudson wrote a piece in 2003 exposing Citi's subprime foundation in a small publication called Southern Exposure (read The Audit's interview of Hudson last month here).

And I've given up on reading good reporting or analysis on the "too big to fail" problem. The pieces today report that the government is prodding Citi to break itself up but don't say whether that's because the government now realizes it's bad to have entities that are so large that they know they can get into trouble and the taxpayers will come clean up their messes.

This is a critical issue and we really need some muckraking journalists to give it a look.

Bree Nordenson, who writes for CJR, is mentioned in "Wonks Gone Wild," an article in this week's New York magazine, in which assorted "pressing problems" are listed and then an "unconventional solution" is located for each.

Problem: Newspapers are dying.
Solution: Offer them a Swedish-style bailout.

The Tribune Company has declared bankruptcy, the New York Times has mortgaged its headquarters to raise cash, and nearly every day another newspaper announces another round of cutbacks and layoffs. If Detroit and Wall Street can get bailouts, shouldn’t the free press get one, too? Last fall, in the Columbia Journalism Review, Bree Nordenson suggested that Congress take a gander at Sweden, where, in 1971, the government set up a system of subsidies to newspapers, allocated based on circulation and revenue data...

(Actually, Bree wonked this one out in the fall of 2007.)

And although it contains no CJR shout-out, I found fascinating another article in the issue, the one about the "cybergeeks" who are currently at work "goosing the Gray Lady," helping along -- with online efforts like "The Word Train" -- what New York's Emily Nussbaum describes as

a radical reinvention of the [New York] Times voice, shattering the omniscient God-tones in which the paper had always grounded its coverage; the new features tugged the reader closer through comments and interactivity, rendering the relationship between reporter and audience more intimate, immediate, exposed.

Despite the swiftness of these changes, certainly compared with other newspapers’, their significance has been barely noted. That’s the way change happens on the web: The most startling experiments are absorbed in a day, then regarded with reflexive complacency. But lift your hands out of the virtual Palmolive and suddenly you recognize what you’ve been soaking in: not a cheap imitation of a print newspaper but a vastly superior version of one. It may be the only happy story in journalism.

Pat Dougherty, editor of the Anchorage Daily News, posts on his "Editor's Blog" a recent email exchange he had with Gov. Sarah Palin. Subject line of Palin's email: "More 'Mistakes?'" (h/t, Andrew Sullivan).

President Bush's final press conference yesterday got a lot of press coverage. Less attention has been given, however, to the various exit interviews of Dick Cheney--who, whatever you think of him, is generally acknowledged to have been the most powerful second-in-command in U.S. history.

On tomorrow's NewsHour, Jim Lehrer will be conducting his exit interview with Cheney. So we ask you: What questions should Lehrer ask the outgoing Veep?

Every Tuesday, CJR outlines a news-related question and opens the floor for debate. For previous News Meeting topics, click here.

Unless I'm missing it, it doesn't look like Helen Thomas got to ask a question during Pres. Bush's final press conference yesterday. She was there. (Front row. Center. In red.) I wonder what she would have asked if she'd gotten one last crack...

David Carr makes a point that's so obvious but so anti-conventional wisdom that I think it bears a closer look: Newspapers (and magazines and other sources of reporting and editing) need to charge for their work.

The online-ad model doesn't work, won't work for at least several years, and may not ever work well enough to support the level of reporting we have now (not to mention that of a decade ago). Print-ad revenues are tumbling at somewhere near a 20 percent year-over-year clip, and online ad revenues are now flat or even declining.

Carr points out that Apple had to step in to save the music industry from itself and illegal downloading, showing that a micropayment system was possible—in its case, at 99 cents a song on iTunes. His message is that consumers will pay for content, despite all the "information wants to be free" blather.

Remember that when iTunes began, the music industry was being decimated by file sharing. By coming up with an easy user interface and obtaining the cooperation of a broad swath of music companies, Mr. Jobs helped pull the business off the brink. He has been accused of running roughshod over the music labels, which are a fraction of their former size. But they are still in business.

Those of us who are in the newspaper business could not be blamed for hoping that someone like him comes along and ruins our business as well by pulling the same trick: convincing the millions of interested readers who get their news every day free on newspapers sites that it’s time to pay up.

They'll even pay for content that's not "art" (I'm looking at you, Jeff Jarvis). They have been since the printing press was invented, and they still do online. Carr uses Cook's Illustrated as an example.

When the Illinois House of Representatives voted to “impeach” Governor Rod Blagojevich, a number of blogs carried public comments like “thank heavens he’s gone!”

Of course, he’s not gone, at least not unless he’s convicted by the Illinois Senate or he resigns. And fortunately, most news outlets recognized that “impeachment” is only the first step to removing a public official from office.

So it’s puzzling why so many people equate “impeachment” with an official’s removal, or a least a verdict of guilt. After all, it’s not as if no one has been “impeached” recently. Bill Clinton was “impeached” just ten years ago, though the Senate narrowly acquitted him, and he seems to have survived quite nicely, thank you. Richard Nixon was about to be “impeached” in 1974, but quit first. Even so, a large part of the citizenry thinks someone who has been “impeached” has been run out of office in disgrace.

“Impeachment” derives from the French empêchement, which roughly translates to “an unexpected obstacle.” (While some claim “impeachment” comes from the Latin impetere, meaning attack, the Oxford English Dictionary says there is no etymological evidence for that.) For a governing body, an official accused of misuse of public office, criminally or otherwise, is indeed “an unexpected obstacle” and must be dealt with.

“Impeachment” doesn’t just show up in governmental circles, however. It’s most often heard—with a positive spin—as “unimpeachable,” meaning “above suspicion,” “not to be called in question” or “exempt from liability to accusation.” Among its synonyms are “blameless.”

Thus, any public official who is not blameless is, in theory, “impeachable.” And if every public official not without blame were “impeached,” perhaps there would be less public confusion over the process.

"The current crisis in global banking, markets and economies has reminded us all of the importance of financial and business journalism. It has also raised a set of profound questions as to the quality of that form of reporting. Why didn’t we know this was coming? Did the journalists fail to put the financial system under proper scrutiny? Are they equipped to deal with the continuing complex story? Is this representative of a wider problem with the news media?"—From "What Is Financial Journalism For?” a study published in November by POLIS, a joint public policy research project of the London School of Economics and the London College of Communication.

Those are good questions. The financial press doesn’t get much study from academic types, but if it ever was going to, now would be the time.

Two years ago, Damian Tambini, a senior lecturer on media and communications at the LSE, launched a project to examine financial journalism's role in the wake of new challenges: technological changes, increasing complexity of the subjects it covers, a British media/insider-trading scandal, eroding media finances, and the rising clout of financial public-relations operations.

Then the financial crisis hit, making a systematic study of the financial media, if anything, more urgent than ever. The result is a useful 33-page paper that looks at the financial media's place in the financial system and calls, at least implicitly, for higher standards.

A quick comparison of some of the coverage of yesterday's presidential press conference. The Washington Post and LA Times saw things much the same way (emphasis mine):

The Post's lead:

A wistful and introspective President Bush devoted a valedictory news conference yesterday to a robust defense of his "good, strong record," going further than he has gone before in conceding errors -- but making it clear that he has few major regrets about his handling of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the other major events of his eight years in office.

The LA Times (note the emphasis, right up top, on the legacy-building aspect):

By offering a wistful and introspective closing argument to the American people who elected him twice but then lost confidence in him, retiring President George W. Bush is attempting to write the first draft of his own history.

First came a sober public confession of mistakes and disappointments in his final news conference Monday -- a remarkably personal moment for a president never prone to self-examination or questioning under the klieg lights. He also offered a robust defense of his administration, including its response to Hurricane Katrina, and a defiant insistence that he waged a necessary war in Iraq and should not be judged too quickly for it.

The AP also saw "wistful" (and emphasized the legacy-building at play):

With rare public emotion, George W. Bush sat in judgment on his controversial, consequential presidency on Monday, lamenting mistakes but claiming few as his own, heatedly defending his record on disasters in Iraq and at home and offering kindly advice to a successor who won largely because the nation ached for something new.

By turns wistful, aggressive and joking in his final news conference, Bush covered a huge range of topics in summing up his eight years in the White House - the latest in a recent string of efforts to have his say before historians have theirs.

The WSJ employed noticeably fewer adjectives in its lead (I've added [ ] where adjectives might have been used/where other news accounts used them):

[ ] President George W. Bush called a surprise farewell news conference Monday to give an [ ] accounting of his [ ] time in office, making new concessions to his critics while offering sometimes-emotional defenses of his [ ] handling of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and the war against terrorism.

And, the NYT:

President Bush held what he called “the ultimate exit interview” on Monday, using the final news conference of his presidency to dispute the idea that the nation’s “moral standing has been damaged” by his actions and to warn President-elect Barack Obama that, despite the turbulence in the economy, his most urgent priority must be fighting “an enemy that would like to attack America and Americans again.”

Looking back over the long arc of his turbulent presidency, Mr. Bush was by turns impassioned and defiant, reflective and light-hearted, even as he conceded that some things “didn’t go according to plan.” He confessed a litany of mistakes, refused to talk about pardons, cautioned the Republican Party to be inclusive and wondered aloud what it would feel like to make coffee for his wife, Laura, at their ranch in Crawford, Tex., on the morning after Mr. Obama takes his place.

A gripe: each of the above accounts mentions Katrina in the lead (by name or obvious reference) and devotes multiple paragraphs to Bush's responses to Katrina-related questions -- which, to me, represented some of the more telling/frustrating/memorable moments of yesterday's press conference ("Don't tell me the federal response was slow...," etc.) -- while "Katrina" first appears in the Times's account toward the very end of the piece and is handled in just two sentences.

Familiar sorts of final-days-of-an-administration presidential press coverage: legacy-tending; exit interviews; and, side-by-side My, how the president has aged images. On the front page of today's Wall Street Journal, "Then and Now" photos of President Bush, from January 2001 and from yesterday's press conference.

Meanwhile, the New York Times presents on its front page today six shots of Bush all from yesterday's press conference, featuring an array of facial expressions (caption: "In 47 minutes, passion, defiance, reflection, light-heartedness, and finally, a thought on coffee"), and does the "then and now" thing in the text ("At 62, he is grayer and a bit more wrinkled now...")

More on how various news orgs covered the press conference to come...

On Thursday, The New York Times will launch a new, crack environmental reporting unit that will pull in eight specialized reporters from the Science, National, Metro, Foreign, and Business desks in a bid for richer, more prominent coverage.

CJR received a copy of an e-mail that the Times’s executive editor, Bill Keller, sent to staff in mid-December announcing the newsroom reorganization, in which he describes the paper’s rationale:

The Times has a long and distinguished record of covering the complex of issues loosely described as “the environment:” climate change, pollution, endangered land and species, the husbanding of the earth’s resources and all the related questions of business, politics, lifestyle and health. For some time we’ve been plotting a way to pull together the various reporters who work on aspects of the subject, under an editor who will wake up every day thinking of ways to push the story forward, to give it greater energy and focus.

That editor is Erica Goode, a former behavior and psychology reporter turned Health editor who has been at the Times since 1998 and spent her last year in Baghdad covering the Iraq War. Her impressive team comprises Andrew Revkin and Cornelia Dean from Science, Felicity Barringer and Leslie Kaufman from National, Elisabeth Rosenthal from Foreign, Mia Navarro from Metro, and the Washington bureau’s Matthew Wald, who writes for the paper’s Energy Challenge series (another multi-department project).

“I’m going to have a group of seven reporters who are totally focused on this and they each bring their own area expertise to the table,” Goode said in an interview. “And we have the advantage of being small enough that we can develop a really collaborative team.” In addition, she will work with liaisons at every desk, first and foremost being the “energy cluster” in Business Day, which, along with the recently launched Green Inc. blog, is overseen by editor Justin Gillis.

One of the primary goals is to get more interesting, “big-thought” environment articles onto the front page, according to assistant managing editor Glenn Kramon, to whom Goode will report. That means more investigative work, he added, and sifting through reporting and storytelling approaches that resonate with readers. “My goal is to make ‘em angry enough to do something,” Kramon said.

The approach is well adapted to the current necessities of covering the environment, which has grown and unfolded into a broader and more complicated story than many would have expected even a few years ago. Much of that is thanks to the intense coverage of global warming--and to the journalists who have slowly but surely revealed its threads in science, technology, business, politics, health, travel, fashion, and more.

As gas prices soared last summer and the cost of powering homes and cars became a central issue in the presidential campaign, journalists seemed to clue into the fact that the climate story is really an energy story at heart. What most do not realize—and what makes the Times’s arrangement so progressive—is that behind energy lies human behavior and whether or not we efficiently manage all our natural resources, from power, to food, to habitat, and beyond. Times reporter Andrew Revkin, a member of the environment team, has written about this extensively on his blog, Dot Earth. In a recent interview, Revkin explained to CJR why he thinks it's not climate that is the “story of our time,” but rather sustainability in a world moving toward nine billion inhabitants.

Along those lines, Goode hopes that the Times’s more strategic, coordinated approach will capture the variety of ways in which a single environmental issue can touch people’s daily lives. As an example of the type of coverage she hopes to do more of, she pointed to a December article by team member Elisabeth Rosenthal about the “passive house,” a new class of cheap and ultra-efficient home being pioneered in Germany.

“I can’t emphasize enough how much interest in this subject there is among readers,” Goode said. “That story immediately went to the top of the most e-mailed list and stayed there for quite awhile. It’s clear that people are really hungry to hear about this stuff. And that was a story that combined some science, some business, some home, and some lifestyle—it went across the traditional boundaries of news departments.”

Unfortunately, as newsrooms around the country shrink and close, such dedicated focus and coordination is becoming increasingly challenging. When I asked Kramon whether the Times’s reorganization had anything to do with cutting costs, he replied that it is “just the opposite.” He has been agitating for the team for a couple of years and sees it as a “dream come true.”

“We’ve had a lot of other things on our minds, what with the economic meltdown and the two wars,” Kramon said, “so I admire Bill Keller for having the vision to do something like this at this time.”

Indeed, only a handful of papers could even conceive of pulling off such a maneuver. But there is still something to be learned for even the smallest outlets. Most importantly, the Times’s connect-the-dots approach represents the right way to think about and report on the environment--whether that reporting is the work of an individual or a team effort.

In the September/October 2008 issue of CJR, Ann Cooper explored in an essay ("The Bigger Tent") the questions of who is a journalist and -- as she argued, more importantly-- what is journalism?

On Friday came news updating one of the examples Cooper raised in her essay: the NYPD issued press credentials to three bloggers (Rafael Martínez Alequin of Your Free Press, Ralph E. Smith of The Guardian Chronicle, and David Wallis of featurewell.com), who sued the city after having been denied such credentials.

Per the New York Times's coverage:

The Police Department issues two kinds of credentials: working press cards, for a “full-time employee of a news-gathering organization covering spot or breaking news on a regular basis,” and press identification cards, for journalists who are “employed by a legitimate news organization” but who do “not normally cover spot or breaking news events.”

The working press card ostensibly allows the journalist to cross police lines at emergencies and at nonemergency public events, like parades and demonstrations; the press identification card is “issued as a courtesy” but does not carry such privileges. Each card must be renewed annually.

The three bloggers got the latter sort of card. The Times quotes their lawyer, Norman Siegel, saying:

“This step recognizes that bloggers are 21st-century journalists. It’s an important first step, but only a first step, because we still need to address the constitutional problem of who gets press credentials in New York City. The Police Department should not be in the business of determining who’s a journalist."

The Journal reaches too far for a silver lining this morning, writing that, hey, even if tons of people are out of a job, productivity may go up and increase corporate profits.

In the long run, strong productivity growth should drive profits, and, potentially, real wages higher.

Productivity gains this decade haven't driven real wages much higher for the middle class. Most of the wealth created by this increased productivity this decade has gone to the top 1 percent of earners.

Here's what the Financial Times had to say about the problem in October:

“You have to question whether conventional measures of economic growth mean anything when most people’s incomes have either been stagnating or declining for many years,” says Jared Bernstein, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute and an adviser to Mr Obama. “The fact that wage earners are no longer getting the benefits of their improving productivity in the workplace is something we have never experienced [before] in modern America.”

The data are stark and go some way towards explaining why so many Americans felt so disaffected even during the most robust years of economic growth under the Bush administration. Between 2000 and 2006, the US economy expanded by 18 per cent, whereas real income for the median working household dropped by 1.1 per cent in real terms, or about $2,000 (£1,280, €1,600). Meanwhile, the top tenth saw an improvement of 32 per cent in their incomes, the top 1 per cent a rise of 203 per cent and the top 0.1 per cent a gain of 425 per cent.

Part of this was because the latest period of economic growth failed to create jobs at nearly the same rate as in previous business cycles and even led to a decline in the number of hours worked for most employees. Unusually for a time of expansion, the number of participants in the labour force also fell. But mostly it was because the fruits of economic growth and soaring productivity rates went to the highest income earners.

At least the Journal notes the obvious: That squeezing more out of workers by laying them off and making the holdovers work harder is bad for workers:

Mass layoffs, fewer overtime hours and eliminated production shifts are fundamentally bad news because they mean workers are suffering. But it also means the economy is adjusting to the shock of the financial crisis -- and the crisis can't end until an adjustment has taken place.

Just to prove that real middle-class income is not on the paper's mind, the last paragraph (which, by the way, implies that Bush is to blame for a recession that was already under way when he took office) doesn't mention it in its list of woes:

A rise in productivity would be a potentially positive mark on the economic record of President George W. Bush, who has presided over two recessions, a dismal stock market and a housing bust. In the 30 full quarters that Bush has been president, through the third quarter of last year, nonfarm business productivity grew on average 2.6% at an annual rate. That is compared with 2% for Bill Clinton and 1.6% for Ronald Reagan.

That's what you call bending over backwards for a positive angle.

Advocates for open and transparent government are quick to note that no American presidential administration has, in practice, been enthusiastic about reducing secrecy in the executive branch—for some obvious and sometimes quite legitimate reasons. There are secrets that almost everyone agrees should remain secret. But secrecy must be balanced with the citizens’ right to examine the operations of their government—to learn, to improve, to enforce, and sometimes to shame. That’s especially true when there are political or bureaucratic incentives for secrecy that deserve far less respect than true matters of national security. And despite the bipartisan resistance from those in power, the arc of history has trended, if unevenly, toward openness. Claims of excessive secrecy have become a tried and true political battering ram, easily wielded by the party in opposition. Technological evolution has not only made the dissemination of information easier and faster, but also has heightened our appetite for disclosure. The trend isn’t confined to the political sphere. Betty Ford’s frank discussion of her struggles with cancer and alcoholism in the 1970s marked a new era of openness in our personal medical lives, and the invention of the personal video camera spawned a cottage industry around moments—gaffes, goofs, tragedies—that were once private.

Against that backdrop, there is wide agreement among journalists and openness advocates that the administration of George W. Bush was an aberration, at least in the modern era. Bush and his advisers came into office with a broad vision for a more powerful, less accountable executive branch—a vision that has long been popular in conservative legal circles. Presidential power ebbed after Watergate, when some of the strongest laws promoting transparency were adopted by Congress, reducing the executive branch’s ability to do its work in secret. Even before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration—and especially Dick Cheney, who assumed unprecedented power as vice president—enacted policies and waged court battles to roll back what they saw as unjustified infringements on presidential power, and to reduce the oversight and transparency that had been forced upon the presidency.

Then, just eight months into Bush’s first term, September 11 gave the administration what became its defining rationale for a draconian clampdown on the free flow of government information to the public. Presidents traditionally act with the freest hand in matters of national security and, following the attacks, secrecy became both a means to an end and a goal in itself. Information on transportation and energy infrastructure, once easily accessible on government Web sites, was removed. The Justice Department invoked a state-secrets privilege in an extraordinarily wide range of cases. The administration and its conservative allies waged a rhetorical war on journalists who worked to learn and disclose the government’s secrets. Legal justifications for the administration’s detainee and warrantless wiretapping polices remain shrouded in secrecy today.

Legally, some of the administration’s greatest incursions against transparency were made with remarkable ease, only requiring executive orders or directional memos from senior White House staff—a fact that should hearten open-government advocates who are optimistic about the potential of Barack Obama’s administration to redress these grievances. To take but one example, though it is one especially dear to journalists, much of the damage done to the Freedom of Information Act under Bush could be undone with the stroke of a pen, and Obama, in the campaign and the transition, has suggested he’ll do just that. Other changes abetting excessive secrecy that resulted from court rulings or emerged from bureaucratic traditions are far more entrenched, and will not afford easy or quick fixes. Indeed, the struggle between openness and secrecy will continue in the coming years.

One ruling that will be hard to reverse has roots reaching back before 9/11. In February 2001, shortly after Bush’s inauguration, Vice President Cheney formed a task force to help develop a new energy policy. Even before the policy was announced that May, environmental groups worried that the policy proposals would tilt heavily toward industry concerns. At the request of two Democratic members of Congress, what was then known as the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), a nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, asked Cheney for basic information on the task force—who it met with, where and when, and for minutes and other records of its work. Cheney, through his counsel David Addington, denied the request, claiming that the GAO did not have the authority to request the documents, despite a history of previous administrations responding to similar requests.

That year, Judicial Watch, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Sierra Club filed two suits seeking the same records, one under the Freedom of Information Act and another under the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), a 1972 law requiring that materials generated by public-private advisory committees be available for general inspection. After a nearly four-year-long court battle that included a stop at the U.S. Supreme Court, federal courts upheld Cheney’s right to withhold the records and also denied the groups’ challenge under the Advisory Committee law.

The environmental groups ultimately secured most of the documents by a circuitous route—from the Energy Department through Freedom of Information Act requests. But the case was considered a major blow to the Advisory Committee Act, which had already had its reach trimmed by a series of rulings that culminated in the Cheney decision. “It’s just been shredded,” says David Vladeck, a veteran public-interest lawyer who teaches at Georgetown. “Read the statute and you’d think one thing; and you read the way the courts have interpreted it, and it’s no longer an effective safeguard.”

In hindsight, it’s easy to see how the task-force battle was a deliberate attempt to expand the executive branch’s ability to operate in secret, rather than a simple political tussle over energy policy in the wake of Enron’s collapse. As Bruce Montgomery, an archivist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who has written widely on presidential materials, wrote, “The case marks one of the Bush administration’s most significant victories not only in reasserting the prerogatives of the presidency, but also in cloaking the executive in greater secrecy.”

President Obama, in the course of his election campaign, promised that as many meetings “as possible” between federal agencies and lobbyists would be available as Web videos. But he’s had little specific to say on FACA, or how his administration might treat advisory commissions with private members who don’t happen to be federally registered lobbyists.

Another major setback for the interests of openness, and again one with roots that clearly reach to a time before 9/11, was Bush’s executive order concerning the Presidential Records Act, passed in 1978 to ensure public control over the records presidents create while in office. (So enshrined was the principle of private ownership before the Records Act was adopted, that past presidents sometimes destroyed their papers or willed them to their heirs, who were free to sell them for a profit.) Presidents from both parties have been, to varying degrees, unenthusiastic about the law, and it has suffered from a string of court challenges and executive orders restricting its authority. The Clinton administration, for example, continued a legal effort initiated by George H. W. Bush to limit the disclosure of Bush’s records. It lost that battle in 1995, in a decision that seemed to clearly state that ex-presidents surrendered control of their administration’s records twelve years after they left office.

When George W. Bush took office twelve years after the end of Reagan’s presidency, however, White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales sent the national archivist a note instructing him that the new president wished to delay the release of any Reagan files. The closing line? “This directive applies as well to the Vice Presidential records of former Vice President George H. W. Bush.” Then, in November 2001, the administration issued a new executive order that declared that records from prior administrations would not be released unless the sitting president expressly approved it. But that order went even further: endowing past presidents with the power to keep their documents from being released even after the twelve-year threshold. Vice presidents, too—a category that included Bush’s father at the date of the order and now includes Dick Cheney—were given the authority to hold their records. As if that weren’t hubristic enough, Bush’s order allowed past presidents and vice presidents—or their heirs—to pass on their withholding privileges to representatives in perpetuity. “It was essentially overturning the Presidential Records Act,” says Thomas S. Blanton, the director of the National Security Archive, an independent research institute at George Washington University. Obama has promised to nullify the Bush order, which he could do with a simple executive order.

The National Security Archive and a coalition of sixty organizations that work on transparency and openness issues have proposed another executive order that Obama could issue early in his term—one that would create a task force to determine how to rein in the worst excesses in the information-classification system, the federal government’s primary tool for official secrecy. Over many years, a perennial series of blue-ribbon commissions has suggested that over-classification is a serious problem in the federal government, not only for the public’s historical interest but also for data-sharing among agencies. For one, the 9/11 Commission warned that such “secrecy stifles oversight, accountability, and information-sharing.” Former congressman Lee Hamilton, who was vice-chairman of the commission, estimated that about 70 percent of the information he viewed was “needlessly classified”—a shockingly high portion given the sorts of records the commission needed to do its work.

Officially, federal law only describes three levels of classification: “top secret,” “secret,” and “confidential.” The process is statutorily overseen by the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives, which collects data on the quantity of classified information, monitors agencies’ compliance with classification rules, and handles appeals of classification decisions. A limited number of agencies and individuals are authorized to classify material, and while there are widely used provisions for exemptions and extensions, classified information is supposed to be automatically declassified after ten years.

The amount of classified information, and the number of people authorized to deem it classified, have been expanding since 2000. The departments of Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, were authorized to classify for the first time early in the Bush administration. In 2007, the most recent year for which records are available, a report by the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO) catalogued more than twenty-three million classification actions government-wide; in 2000, the number was just over eleven million, although some of this increase can surely be attributed to the growth of digital communication.

In 2003, classification’s durability and reach were extended by another Bush executive order that mandated a three-year moratorium on many automatic declassifications, allowed the CIA director to overrule declassification decisions made by the Oversight Office, and expanded classification for information provided by foreign governments—a category that could include such historical treasure troves as diplomatic cables and the like. It also made it easier for agencies to reclassify information that they had previously declassified, as long as there was some plausible way to retrieve the documents from the public realm.

In one incident that illustrates the reach of this order, federal agents removed documents from the personal papers of the late Senator Scoop Jackson, housed at the University of Washington. Far more troubling was the revelation in 2006 that more than twenty-five thousand documents had been pulled from the stacks at the National Archives and Records Administration, which are open to the public. Matthew Aid, a part-time historian who first noted the disappeared documents, catalogued a bizarre list of what had gone missing: cables documenting a widely known intelligence failure from the Korean War; a 1948 message chastising the State Department for not predicting riots in Bogotá; talking points on how to handle questions about Japanese peace offers before the end of World War II; etcetera. Archive officials conducted an audit and determined that a third of the documents that had been pulled were not eligible to be reclassified, even under the new Bush standards.

Alongside the official classification system exists a murky system sometimes called “pseudo-secrecy.” More formally known as “sensitive but unclassified” or “controlled unclassified” information, it functions with little regulation, monitoring, or clear force of law. Attempts to fully measure the use of this category are frustrated by the fact that there is no single definition for what qualifies as sensitive-but-unclassified (SBU) information.

Concerns about sensitive-but-unclassified information date back at least to 1972, when a House committee held hearings deploring the ways that similar labels were being used to keep information from coming to light under the Freedom of Information Act, which carries an exemption for properly classified documents. Explicit presidential support for such pseudo-secret labeling dates to a 1977 presidential directive on telecommunications technology by Jimmy Carter, and it has been used in every subsequent administration.

In 2007, a Defense Department official charged with improving interagency information sharing estimated that there were 107 different labels in the category—from “Official Use Only” to “Sensitive Internal Use”—and none is monitored by the Oversight Office, which means that there are no official numbers to describe the trend. But openness advocates and some journalists have suggested that the Bush administration has significantly expanded both the number of such labels and the volume of documents being labeled. For example, in April 2002, officials at the Department of the Interior instructed their employees that “all unclassified DOI systems” should be “considered SBU.” The 2002 law authorizing the creation of the Department of Homeland Security specifically said that all scientific research produced by the department, wherever possible, should be unclassified, but President Bush used a signing statement, which spells out how the executive branch will interpret and implement a law, to make clear that he intended to mark much of that information as sensitive. In 2006, when the National Security Archive conducted a study, via FOIA, of the use of sensitive-but-unclassified labels at thirty-seven major government agencies, it found that roughly two-thirds of the SBU programs were operating without any statutory justification. Only one program had an automatic procedure for removing the designation, as is required by law with classified information. According to Barton Gellman, a reporter with The Washington Post, Vice President Cheney’s office routinely took to stamping papers with “Treated As: Top Secret/SCI,” a designation some classification experts believe Cheney invented. “At least with classification, you have ISOO overseeing what gets classified and what doesn’t get classified, keeping track of how much is classified,” says Rebecca Carr, who covered access and First Amendment issues for Cox Newspapers from January 2005 to May 2008. “The pseudo-classification category is like the Wild West. There’s nobody watching the store.”

The administration’s secrecy-related policy that most alarmed the journalism community was a memo issued by Attorney General John Ashcroft a month after the 9/11 attacks. The memo suggested that information officers at executive-branch agencies could deny FOIA requests as long as there was a “sound legal basis” for doing so. This represented a fairly regressive shift. Under the Clinton administration, requests were only to be denied if there was “foreseeable harm” in releasing the documents. Ashcroft’s memo sent a clear signal that information officers should feel free to expansively deploy FOIA’s nine exemptions to deny whatever requests they could. And the letter assured agencies that they would have the full backing of the Justice Department in fighting any lawsuits that resulted from such denials.

In 2002, the National Security Archive sought to clarify what effect the Ashcroft memo had on FOIA compliance and sent FOIA requests to thirty-five major agencies asking for documents that would illuminate how they’d handled Ashcroft’s new directive. The responses confirmed that most branches of the armed forces and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had taken strong steps to expand the use of exemptions; that about a quarter of the agencies surveyed had taken some steps to implement the changes; and that just over half had disseminated the policy to their employees. A GAO study that interviewed 183 FOIA officers at twenty-five agencies found that 31 percent said their agencies were less likely to release documents sought by FOIA requests following the memo.

Whatever the practical effects of the Ashcroft memo in the early days of the administration, to the open-government community the memo had great symbolic importance, especially when it was combined with a separate memo issued in the spring of 2002 by Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff. The Card memo requested that agencies take, for obvious reasons, special care in disclosing any information related to weapons of mass destruction, and encouraged information officers to use the nooks and crannies of existing law and executive orders to limit the release of classified information that was scheduled to be declassified due to its age.

But Card’s memo did not stop at classified information. It also invoked sensitive-but-unclassified information, which has no specific legal recognition under FOIA’s exemptions. The memo suggested that information officers assess any requests for such information in light of the earlier Ashcroft memo. In other words, if information officers could shoehorn sensitive-but-unclassified information under one of the existing exemptions in the FOIA law, they could deny its release. Together, the two memos provided a legal framework for denying access to sensitive-but-unclassified information of any kind. “It really turned the concept of open government on its head,” says Andy Alexander, who was the Cox Newspapers Washington bureau chief for ten years and serves as co-chair of the American Society of Newspaper Editors’ Freedom of Information committee.

The Freedom of Information Act, adopted in 1966, is in many ways the lodestar of the open-government movement. Its premise is simple enough: that the work product of government is the property of its citizens. The history of the act’s implementation, however, shows how law in practice can be quite different from law as written. Anyone who has used the FOIA law knows that the mandated twenty-day window for an official response is a cruel joke. The National Security Archive periodically conducts audits—via FOIA—asking agencies for their oldest outstanding FOIA requests. In 2007, it found a handful of requests across five agencies that were more than fifteen years old. One had been outstanding for twenty years, or roughly half the life of the law itself. These superannuated requests are the exception, but that doesn’t mean the norm is compliance.

These problems predate the Bush administration, but there’s little doubt that they’ve grown over the last eight years. A 2007 study of the FOIA records of twenty-five agencies by the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government discovered a number of disheartening truths. The data suggested that many agencies took longer to respond to requests in 2006 than they had in 2000, and that at least half of the requests at fourteen agencies received a response after the twenty-day window the law requires. In 2006, only 60 percent of FOIA requests processed netted a full or partial response; only 36 percent netted a full response. Both were the lowest numbers since 1998, when the relevant data first were collected. Given that trend, it’s not surprising that the overall number of FOIA requests at these agencies also fell by 25 percent since 1998. “A lot of young reporters, especially, know that there’s something called the Freedom of Information Act, but that’s pretty much the extent of their knowledge,” says James McLaughlin, an associate counsel at The Washington Post. “Often, reporters file FOIA requests and if they get anything, then the feeling is ‘Wow, I got something; that’s really cool.’ And if they get it seven months later, they’re still happy. The expectation is not that this is your statutory right. The expectation is that it’s a bonus.”

Despite this woeful picture, FOIA remains one of investigative journalism’s most-favored tools, especially when it can be paired with lawsuits to shake loose information. Journalism’s emotional attachment to FOIA might have something to do with the industry’s intimate history with the passage of the act. In the 1950s and early 1960s, a coalition of journalists that included Washington Post executive editor J. Russell Wiggins and Clark Mollenhoff, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The Des Moines Register, worked closely with the act’s congressional sponsor, rallying public support, writing editorials, and even lobbying public officials to ensure first its passage, and then that Lyndon Johnson signed it.

Journalistic norms of objectivity usually forbid advocacy. But freedom of information is an issue for which exceptions have been made. So when some forty years after its passage FOIA seemed threatened, journalists again devised ways to systematically address the relevant issues of openness and transparency in the federal government. Sunshine Week, launched in 2005 by the American Society of Newspaper Editors, was the first major effort by the journalism community to counter the encroachments on openness in the early days of the Bush administration. The goal was, and remains, to spur a national conversation about access issues via a week of news coverage; in 2008, Sunshine Week had about a thousand participants, including radio, television, and Internet outlets.

But there still was no coordinated effort by the various strands of the journalism industry to address openness issues. Protest petitions circulated frequently, and some press associations mixed transparency advocacy with more parochial concerns like postage rates. “It wasn’t sufficient,” says Rick Blum, a former director of OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of groups interested in governmental transparency. “There was a moment when the press-freedom groups and the freedom-of-information groups said, ‘We’re going to get clobbered if we don’t start cooperating.’ ”

In June 2003, media and advocacy groups met in Washington. Pete Weitzel, who as managing editor of The Miami Herald had organized Florida newspapers to lobby the state legislature on access issues and defend access rights won in court, proposed an analogous national organization. With that goal in mind, and a grant from the Knight Foundation, the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government was founded. Made up of about thirty press associations, large and small, the coalition sponsored sign-on letters protesting encroachments against openness and commissioned several detailed research projects to examine the damage done to transparency under Bush.

The coalition spurred the major industry associations—representing newspaper editors, publishers, alt-weeklies, and broadcasters—to come together with The Associated Press in 2005 to form their own outfit, the Sunshine in Government Initiative. As the coalition’s grant winds down, the Sunshine Initiative has emerged as the preeminent press voice in Washington on open-government issues, complete with its own lobbyist and an active and regular presence on Capitol Hill.

The timing of the Sunshine Initiative was fortuitous, as over the course of the next year the press would face some of its greatest challenges of the Bush era. Several high-profile stories—especially The Washington Post’s piece on secret CIA prisons, The New York Times’s exposé of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping, and a series of reports in The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal on government monitoring of international financial transactions—raised hackles in the Bush White House. “Those stories really fueled congressional criticism of the press and reporting of unauthorized disclosures of classified information,” says Blum, now the director of the Sunshine Initiative. “And we were spending a lot of time defensively trying to ensure that Congress did not pass new, overly broad revisions to the antispying-espionage laws.”

It was a trying time. In May 2006, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales hinted to ABC News that prosecutions were possible for journalists who disclosed classified information. That summer, seventy-one congressional representatives asked the Speaker of the House to strip The New York Times of its press credentials in retaliation for reporting on surveillance programs. Others wanted to go beyond the symbolic and pass new laws restricting publication or making prosecution easier. SGI’s members took to Capitol Hill, meeting with legislators and offering testimony. They credit this educational effort with helping to forestall legislation that would have upset the delicate legal balance that has governed reporting on national security for decades and made it harder for the press to report and publish important stories.

A lot of the Sunshine Initiative’s battles have, in fact, been defensive, but the group has been able to play offense on FOIA, as well. It worked with senators John Cornyn and Patrick Leahy, as well as many others in Congress, to help pass a bill creating an independent ombudsman for the act that could help referee long-delayed requests and improve the monitoring of FOIA compliance government-wide. Bush signed it in on New Year’s Eve 2007, but in the following year’s budget, he inserted language in a section dealing with Commerce Department appropriations that would move the FOIA ombudsman’s office from the National Archives, where it was authorized by the bill’s plain language, to the Justice Department. Since that’s the very department charged with defending the government’s FOIA decisions, it seemed designed to neuter the ombudsman. The Sunshine Initiative, and many others, have called on Barack Obama to move the ombudsman back to the National Archives; it is part of a four-point agenda on transparency that the Initiative put together for the new president—whether he wants it or not. Similar white papers are circulating in Washington from the broader transparency community.

There are signs that Obama could be an ally. He hit most of the right notes during his campaign, and his transition Web site suggests that there will be an executive order to roll back Bush’s changes to the Presidential Records Act. It also promises greater disclosure of the sort of public-private communications that Cheney fought so hard to keep secret. The mood is cautiously optimistic, but many of the veterans of the transparency movement aren’t about to let their guard down. “As we look ahead to the Obama administration,” says the ASNE’s Andy Alexander. “I’ve been in a few meetings where people almost say, ‘Happy days are here again.’ And I have to caution them and say, ‘You know, let’s wait and see.’  No one likes being overseen.”

Thanks to the Fund for Investigative Journalism for its support for this article.

On its website today, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel refers in a sidebar to a photogallery the paper's site posted back in April 2008, a collection of 50 of the Worst Album Covers Ever.

This is a much more thorough version of an email forward you may have received a few years back. Basically, the slideshow is a lot of repackaged material of dubious provenance -- a naked ploy for clicks. But, you know, more with less.

And fake or no, old or no, the display brings home with the piercing immediacy of the best photojournalism the all-too-recognizable issues of modern apathy and disaffection (Cody Matherson's "Can I Borrow A Feelin'?", #1); loss (Freddy Gage's "All My Friends are Dead," #45); and, in more than one case, the corporeal constraints that are both partners and adversaries in our drive to transcend mortality through art ("The Braillettes," # 13; "The Handless Organist," # 6).

And here words fail.

The New York Times has issued a letter to The Atlantic's editor in response to Michael Hirschorn's controversial The-Times-May-Stop-Printing-by-May article. It begins, "Your article 'End Times,' which speculates on whether The New York Times can survive the death of journalism, leaves a lot to be desired from the standpoint of . . . well, journalism."

And it goes on from there.

Read the rest of the letter on Poynter's forum.

Now that the war in Iraq is won, according to journalist-bloggers like Michael Yon, we can expect to see a virtual horde of journalists and pundits descending on America’s other war—the one in Afghanistan—seeking continued employment as instant experts on every conflict the U.S. military chooses to fight.

Yon, for example, has decided the good news out of Iraq means he will be moving on to cover the military in Afghanistan. But Yon is only one of a growing number of journalists who are vacating Iraq in order to focus on America’s so-called “good” war, now in its eighty-ninth month. This is something Finnish journalist Jari Lindholm predicted on his blog this past summer:

With [U.S. General David] Petraeus now running the show from Tampa, the U.S. and NATO will intensify their information operations, launching a counter-narrative, which will include the “they’re stepping up” theme already tried and tested in Iraq, and will inevitably try to brand all opposition forces “al-Qaeda”.

This will not require much effort, as most journalists relocated from Iraq to Afghanistan will know very little about the country and will gladly consume any nuggets of upbeat information thrown to them by the revitalised OEF and ISAF press centers.

This process is already in place. Many of the U.S. Army warrior-scholars who wrote the Counterinsurgency Field Manual (also called FM 3-24) are now glaring down on an Afghanistan that is suddenly the incoming administration’s new focus. These men—they are almost all men, and highly educated, lest that be forgotten—all built up their experience with counterinsurgency in Iraq. It is a perfectly reasonable place to learn such a thing, since it was counterinsurgency on a scale not seen since Vietnam. Iraq became a think tank of sorts for gauging the efficacy of tactics and strategy.

But that think tank effect does not exist in Afghanistan. As the years drag on, long-term watchers of the country see each incoming Army Division make the same mistakes and host the same gee-whiz embedded reporters (last year it was about how great paved roads are). Many reporters, such as Anna Mulrine and Philip Smucker, seem to write the same five articles about tribal society and the military’s brave attempts to engender Coalition support there every time they go on Afghan embed-tours—and have been doing so since 2001. In the interim, both were busy covering Iraq along with the same foreign correspondent crowd.

The current meme du jour is the idea of “arming the tribes” to fight the Taliban. One year ago, when British forces in the south propsed this, Major General Robert Cone, who was in charge of training the Afghan National Police, resoundingly rejected the idea. In 2006, Sher Mohammad Akhunzada, the former governor of Helmand province (where the British attempted their 2007 outreach) recruited several hundred tribesmen to provide security for the province. Within months, that tribal force, along with similar forces in Uruzgan, Kandahar, and Zabul, defected to the Taliban. Other attempts to raise tribal militias to fight the insurgency in Kunar and Kapisa have been failures (pdf) as well.

In other words, the previous attempt to begin a “Sons of Afghanistan” force (a play on the “Sons of Iraq” tribal militia movement) backfired in a major way—before the idea had even been tried in Iraq. This sort of context is missing from almost all coverage of the current policy debates over the future of America’s involvement in Afghanistan.

The way “arming the tribes” is being handled, by both the military and the press, has distorted the public discussion of the idea. Context-free media reports present a misleading picture of what the program actually is, and of its previous catastrophic failures. Similarly, the vast majority of top-level military thinkers gained all of their experience in Iraq, not Afghanistan—which is fine, but their discussions of how to move forward also seem to lack that same context.

For example, U.S. General David Petraeus, the new commander of CENTCOM, the military command responsible for both Iraq and Afghanistan, seems convinced that arming the tribes is a great idea. Gen. Petraeus is an incredibly smart man—as reported countless times, he wrote his Princeton dissertation on counterinsurgency, and his ideas about counterinsurgency as commander of U.S. forces in Iraq have helped conditions there improve over the last two years. But as Spencer Ackerman recently reported, the current push to arm tribal militias in Afghanistan seems out of step with those who are closest to the country. In December, it seemed the preference for tribal militias was overriding the concerns of both General David McKiernan (who openly expressed skepticism of the idea in October), the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who just three weeks ago was similarly critical of the idea.

None of this means that arming the tribes is necessarily the wrong idea. And it is to Gen. Petraeus’ great credit that he has backed away from the thought that ideas and tactics can be exported from Iraq to Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the discussion of how to proceed in Afghanistan is increasingly dominated by thinkers and soldiers who made their names in Iraq, and the theme of exporting good ideas from Iraq into Afghanistan is almost universal in their op-eds, speeches, and magazine profiles. That doesn’t mean their ideas are necessarily wrong; it just means they seem not to have done enough homework yet to be controlling U.S. policy. But, it seems the journalists who cover them (with a few notable exceptions) haven’t done their homework, either. The result (for now, at least) is a very public discussion about repeating a failed policy—surely the one thing Afghanistan does not need.

Sally Quinn on MSNBC talking about press coverage of the smallest soon-to-be residents of the White House:

People are so hungry for details about the First Family that it's going to be difficult for them to try to keep all of these little private facts to themselves. I think they're just going to have to dole things out to the press like little dog bones to keep everybody satisfied and, you know, there's nothing more heartwarming than a dog in the White House. So I suspect that this is going to be a big story and we'll be reading a lot about the dog and the children as well.

Nah.

Last week, Megan highlighted an exchange between Fox News's Bill O'Reilly and his new-book-peddling guest, Ann Coulter, which was essentially a squabble over who sells more books. Over the weekend, Coulter appeared on Mike Huckabee's Fox News show and another squabble broke out (h/t, Media Matters).

The Washington Post is brutal this morning, as well it should be, in its post-mortem on eight years of the Bush economy.

Here you go:

The number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush's tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans' incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush's father.

The paper has Bush's own people disparaging his record:

"The expansion was a continuation of the way the U.S. has grown for too long, which was a consumer-led expansion that was heavily concentrated in housing," said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a onetime Bush White House staffer and one of Sen. John McCain's top economic advisers for his presidential campaign. "There was very little of the kind of saving and export-led growth that would be more sustainable."

"For a group that claims it wants to be judged by history, there is no evidence on the economic policy front that that was the view," Holtz-Eakin said. "It was all Band-Aids."

And Kevin "Dow 36,000" Hassett, also a former staffer:

The highest praise Hassett offers for Bush's economic legacy is that "the economy was caught up in a storm while he was president, but it wasn't his fault."

"In the end, to the extent there ends up being a defense of the Bush presidency" on economic issues, "that's about the best you can get."

Ladies and gents: The rats are abandoning the ship. Should be an interesting next couple of years of memoirs.

There's no doubt that Bush's economic record has been terrible, just look at the soaring deficits caused by its huge tax cuts and multiple wars. But I think the Post should have better explained that presidents aren't all-powerful when it comes to the economy. In fact, the Fed chairman usually has more influence than the president does.

And the paper is not fair to Bush in not explaining clearly that he took office during a recession that had nothing to do with him. That recession resulted in a jobless recovery that dragged on for a couple of years, weighing down his numbers. The paper should have made that clear when it cherry-picked this number, for instance:

For example, for the first seven years of the Bush administration, gross domestic product grew at a paltry 2.1 percent annual rate.

But the Post is correct to point out that the "good" economic years of Bush's presidency, from 2003 to 2007, were due in large part to the massive credit bubble, which swelled the ranks of financial firms and created lots of well-paying jobs in construction, mortgage brokering, and real-estate agencies.

And I like this:

Bush did not steer the country toward a more sound long-term fiscal position.

Simple, unsourced, and undeniable.

It's a good story overall by the Post, calling it like it is.

Joe (the Plumber) Wurzelbacher helps Reuters and others find "a good story" in Sderot, Israel. (Hint: he is "not the story." Really.)

Where could Joe go next to help reporters find stories?

Is how President Bush described the White House press corps to the White House press corps this morning at his final press conference. Politico has some footage (though not of all the questions and answers).

An exchange with ABC News's Jake Tapper:

BUSH: What have you been doing since 2000?
TAPPER: Working my way to this chair.
BUSH: So, are you going to be here for President Obama?
TAPPER: I will.
BUSH: Pretty cool job.
TAPPER: It's not bad.
BUSH: Yeah.
TAPPER: Yours might be better.
BUSH: What, retirement?

UPDATE: Here's a rush transcript of the press conference. When asked about Gitmo and torture and invading Iraq and other things that "have damaged America's moral standing in the world," Pres. Bush replied, in part:

Do you remember what it was like right after September the 11th around here? In press conferences, in opinion pieces and in stories that sometimes were news stories and sometimes opinion pieces, people were saying, "How come they didn't see it? How come they didn't connect the dots?"

Do you remember what the environment was like in Washington -- I do -- when people were hauled in front of Congress and members of Congress were asking questions about, "How come you didn't know this that or the other?"

And then we start putting, you know, policy in place -- legal policy in place to connect the dots, and all the sudden, people were saying, "How come you're connecting the dots?"

And -- so, you know, I've heard all that. I've heard all that.

There are a lot of folks who deserve some time in the public stocks for their doings during the housing bubble, and one is David Lereah, the much-scorned former chief economist for the National Association of Realtors.

We're a bit too civilized these days for the stocks, but we do have the press to heap scorn on our miscreants.

This morning, it's page one of The Wall Street Journal for Lereah, who gets this headline:

Realtors' Former Top Economist Says Don't Blame the Messenger
Mr. Lereah Called 'Soft Landing' in 2006; It Didn't Come, and Now His Portfolio Stinks

The Journal story points out that Lereah was beyond bullish and let's him imply that he was because of who he worked for. But the paper let's the issue pass too easily: Here's Lereah last week admitting what he did explicitly to Money:

Q. Were you wrong to be so bullish?

A. I worked for an association promoting housing, and it was my job to represent their interests. If you look at my actual forecasts, the numbers were right in line with most forecasts. The difference was that I put a positive spin on it. It was easy to do during boom times, harder when times weren't good.

That's gross.

The Journal story has some tough quotes:

Soon, mainstream economists and the press were calling him out. "I thought it was criminal that he kept saying we'd reached bottom," says Ivy Zelman, former housing-market analyst at Credit Suisse and now head of her own housing-sector research firm. She says she dubbed Mr. Lereah "Mr. Liar-eah."

But ultimately lets him off a bit too easy. The Journal inexplicably misses that in addition to writing his ill-timed book pumping housing, he also wrote a book called The Rules for Growing Rich : Making Money in the New Information Economy at the height of the dot.com bubble.

This isn't the first time Lereah has come in for tweaking from the Journal, which gave him a prominent spot in a story more than two years ago about renters laughing at those who bought into the housing bubble hype. It included a mention of the David Lereah Watch blog, which today's story for some reason doesn't.

What else isn't mentioned in the story? How much the press, including the Journal relied on Lereah as an "expert" source, or at least as the representation of a major interest group. Here's an embarrassing example from July 2006, after the bubble had already started to deflate. The WSJ put this on A2:

A gauge of future home sales turned upward, indicating the market is stabilizing, an industry group said Thursday.

The National Association of Realtors' index for pending sales of existing homes increased at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.3% to 113.4 in May from April's 111.9.

The index was 10.1% below the level of May 2005.

"The slight change in pending home sales indicates the market is beginning to level out," said David Lereah, NAR's chief economist. "This is consistent with our forecast, which is showing a soft landing for the housing sector."

I count that the WSJ mentioned Lereah's name eighty-two times during the prime bubble years of 2003 to 2006. That did include James R. Hagerty's mostly derisive review of Lereah's disastrous 2005 book "Are You Missing the Real Estate Boom?", but almost all of the eighty-two used Lereah as a source, including a commercial real-estate story from 2005 by one Ryan Chittum. Ahem (editors took a Dow Jones wire story about housing and pasted on three paragraphs to the end of my story. Honest!).

Now, the Journal wasn't alone. The New York Times quoted Lereah (somewhat more skeptically) twenty-two times in those same years, while The Washington Post gave him space thirty-eight times.

This isn't to say that reporters should just ignore somebody who represents a major force in the industry they're covering. But we do need to carefully evaluate the credibility of who we talk to and anyone covering real estate who was half awake in those years should have known Lereah was a shill and not a good source of information.

As any reporter knows, there are lots of ways to tip off the reader that what a source says may need to be taken with a grain of salt.

With just seven days left in our eight-year-long national nightmare, nearly everyone is holding their breath while praying to their favorite gods, hoping against hope that after two disastrous wars and the worst economic devastation since the Depression, the most incompetent administration of the modern era will leave office without causing any additional catastrophe.  Everyone, that is, except for the 27 percent of the adult, telephone-owning population, which continues to tell CNN that George Bush has done a good job.

We may now count Newsweek editor-in-chief Jon Meacham among these Undoubting Thomases.

Those of us outside this magic minority have been cataloging the huge questions facing Barack Obama. Will his economic stimulus plan be enough to jump start a devastated economy?  Will he keep his promise to make a prompt exit from Iraq?  Will he come to his senses and reverse his disastrous campaign pledge to add tens of thousands of new combat troops to the quagmire of Afghanistan?  How quickly will he close Guantánamo?  And finally–and to many of us, most importantly--will his oft-repeated promise to end American torture to restore us to the community of civilized nations become a resounding passage in his Inaugural Address?

However, in Jon Meacham's judgment, none of those questions matters as much as the one he has placed on the cover of the magazine sitting on thousands of news stands across America this morning. That question is: "What Would Dick Do?"

Still confused?  Here is Mr. Meacham's explication of that cover line inside the magazine: "the urgent question now is whether President Obama...confronted with the realities of office, will begin to see virtue in the antiterror apparatus Cheney helped Bush create."

It is true that Newsweek's cover story makes New York Timesmen Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane look like two of the most sophisticated torture reporters in Washington. And Champagne corks are surely popping on every floor of the CIA's Langley headquarters to celebrate this extraordinary triumph of disinformation. However, the story's "virtues"  end there.

Written by Newsweek veteran Evan Thomas and National Journal contributor  Stuart Taylor Jr., this article has no connection to serious journalism whatsoever.              

Let us examine a few of its highlights:

The issue of torture is more complicated than it seems. America brought untold shame on itself with the abuses at Abu Ghraib. It's likely that the take-the-gloves-off attitude of Cheney and his allies filtered down through the ranks, until untrained prison guards with sadistic tendencies were making sport with electric shock. But no direct link has been reported.

Leave aside for a moment the comforting image of "making sport with electric shock." (The ACLU has documented the deaths of at least 160 prisoners in U.S. custody during the Bush administration, of which more than seventy were caused by "gross recklessness, abuse, or torture": an unfortunate side effect of that "sport," I suppose.)  Let us focus instead on that tossed-off assertion of "no direct link" between Cheney and his allies and what happened on the ground in Iraq and Guantánamo.

The truth is, we know for a fact that all of the most heinous methods of torture used by this administration were aired at White House meetings attended by Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Attorney General John Ashcroft, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and CIA Director George Tenet. George Bush confirmed that those meetings took place in an interview with ABC correspondent Martha Raddatz last year. And just one month ago, Cheney boasted to ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl that he had personally approved of the program which led to waterboarding of alleged terrorists.

McClatchy reporters Tom Laseter and Matt Shofield have written that

the framework under which detainees were imprisoned for years without charges at Guantánamo and in many cases abused in Afghanistan ... was largely the work of five White House, Pentagon and Justice Department lawyers who, following the orders of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, reinterpreted or tossed out the U.S. and international laws that govern the treatment of prisoners in wartime, according to former U.S. defense and Bush administration officials.

British human rights lawyer Phillipe Sands, meanwhile, wrote in "Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memo and the Betrayal of American Values" that

the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions "was not a case of following the logic of the law but rather was designed to give effect to a prior decision to take the gloves off and allow coercive interrogation; it deliberately created a legal black hole into which the detainees were meant to fall. The new interrogation techniques did not arise spontaneously from the field but came about as a direct result of intense pressure ... from Rumsfeld's office. The Yoo-Bybee Memo was not simply some theoretical document ... but rather played a crucial role in giving those at the top the confidence to put pressure on those at the bottom. And the practices employed at Guantánamo led to abuses at Abu Ghraib.

"The fingerprints of the most senior lawyers in the administration were all over the design and implementation of the abusive interrogation policies." Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Richard Addington, former Justice Department lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo, Alberto Gonzales, and former Defense Department counsel James Haynes "became, in effect, a torture team of lawyers, freeing the administration from the constraints of all international rules prohibiting abuse."

Finally, there is the summary of the Senate Armed Services Committee released last month: "The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees. Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority."  (For a video summary of this history from Human Rights First, go here.)

Proceeding briskly from unconscionable ignorance to outrageous conclusion, Newsweek's Taylor and Thomas praise Bush for vetoing the law that would have required the CIA to use "no investigative methods other than those permitted in the Army Filed Manual" because "these are extremely restrictive."  Indeed, they are restrictive: they are the rules that every previous administration has adhered to since World War II, because they prevent Americans from committing exactly the same kind of war crimes we prosecuted at Nuremberg.

For the record, this is the truth about the torture authorized at the very top of the Bush administration. There is no evidence that it ever produced any useful information, except for the uncorroborated boasts of Cheney and his henchmen. There are more than forty retired Admirals and Generals who have lobbied Congressmen and Senators continuously because they know that these methods are not only immoral and illegal but also completely counter-productive. And every experienced Army interrogator agrees that non-coercive methods produce more reliable information than the ones Cheney plucked from the "dark side" in a criminally misguided effort to protect America.              

And then there are these words from the American who conducted 300 interrogations in Iraq and supervised 1,000:

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there's the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives. I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me – unless you don't count American soldiers as Americans.

That still leaves the administration's final defense: the fact that there has been no additional terrorist attack on American soil since 9/11. The trouble is, this claim obscures the fact that every other administration since Pearl Harbor can boast of the same accomplishment, without having committed any war crimes–the war crimes that the Bush Administration is certainly guilty of, according to retired Major General Anthony Taguba, who authored  the official Army study of the American outrages committed at Abu Ghraib.

What actually distinguishes this administration from all others is the fact that it is the only one in sixty years that allowed a massive foreign attack on American soil, after repeated and explicit warnings that such an assault was imminent.

Despite the beseeching of Mr. Meacham, FCP remains optimistic that Barack Obama will resist the temptation to emulate any part of this example.

Bono, as Megan anticipated Friday, made his first appearance in yesterday's New York Times as a guest columnist. Rather than filing the piece we probably all expected (a global poverty/AIDS activist's rallying cry), Bono did it his way and wrote about "malt joy and ginger despair" in a Dublin pub and Frank Sinatra and "sentimentality" and "duality."

Is it, to quote two of the many online comments on the column, "poetry" or "a load of pomp?" (I can see a bit of both in the column, but more of the former, context and company considered).

UPDATE: So, would you pay 99 cents (or pay, at all) for a newspaper with Bono's byline? In today's Times, David Carr calls on someone to "Please Invent iTunes for Newspapers." (And: ready, set, react!)

The headline on a New York Times story Friday piqued my interest and probably that of health care mavens who scour the paper for clues to the Administration’s current thinking. “Daschle Lays Out a Plan to Overhaul Health Care,” the headline read. So maybe, I thought, the health chief and his team had come forth with some SPECIFICS about what they really had in mind for reform. I was especially hopeful because a Times story the day before had made me think that senators who are confirming Daschle for Secretary of Health and Human Services were planning to ask some hard questions. At least that’s what the headline said: “Daschle to Face Tough Questions on Competition in Health Insurance.”

But when push came to shove, there was no pushing and no shoving. The second Times story reported that the senators gave Daschle a “friendly welcome,” listened to him tell stories about people who had no insurance, heard him say that he wanted to work with Republicans and that he would not rush through legislation under fast-track budget procedures. Daschle repeated parts of the Obama health mantra: greater use of health IT, more emphasis on disease prevention, speeding up approval of generic drugs. Nothing new here. Where was the plan for the “overhaul,” a word that implies big changes a coming? As every reporter knows, headlines can be misleading, and that’s what happened here. As Politico reported, “the expected questioning over some of the more controversial aspects of Obama’s health care reform plan never materialized, and Daschle did not offer policy specifics, or even a timeline for action.”

Senators didn’t pin him down on the public plan option, the key to significant reform, nor did they ask how the president-elect planned to pay for some of these health initiatives that include raising Medicare fees to family doctors. The Times said that Daschle himself didn’t get into that. He didn’t talk about Medicare, but maybe he will do that at a Senate Finance Committee hearing where the Times said he could face tough questioning. But, geez, he was supposed to face hard questions this time.

U.S. senators can throw soft balls; journalists should not. So we were pleased to see a Times editorial with its own headline: “Cuddly Welcome for Mr. Daschle,” which was more on point than the senators. The editorial called the confirmation hearing “mostly a love-fest” and then raised a few knottier issues like paying for the Obama health care plan and cost containment. It reported that Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi, had issued a press release warning against insurance coverage through government-run bureaucracies and insisting that coverage expansion come through private insurance. Enterprising reporters should connect the dots between the Enzi camp's approach and Daschle’s professed aim to be cooperative with Republicans. What does that mean for reform?

In February 2007, newly elected House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed the Internet as an “incredible vehicle for transparency” and declared that she looked forward to hearing how the House could be “as open and accessible to citizens as possible.” Three months later, a bipartisan report suggested one way to achieve that: post all legislative information online, including all roll-call votes—ballots cast on the record.

Sounds obvious enough. But while building glass houses of honesty may be an oft-touted goal, it seems that legislators aren’t quite ready to dwell in such structures themselves. Neither house of Congress nor any council of our twenty-five largest cities makes an individual legislator’s votes—on the floor or in committee—available in a simple, downloadable format. Only ten of the ninety-nine state legislative houses provide such records for votes on the floor. More widely available are roll-call votes by bill—as opposed to by specific lawmaker. Admittedly, this can be useful. But it’s rather like publishing school attendance records by day rather than by student. Checking up on your man or woman in Washington via the House or Senate Web site would mean trawling through more than five hundred bills for just one term—the typical number of items that congressional and state legislators deal with during that time.

In recent years, Washington journalists have helped plug this information hole by providing an online roster of roll-call votes by legislator. Congressional Quarterly, National Journal, and Gallery Watch (owned by the publisher of Roll Call) each charge for their data, enriching raw roll-call figures with expert judgment. OpenCongress.org, GovTrack.us, and WashingtonPost.org, meanwhile, offer roll-call-by-legislator data for free. We tried it. It’s easy. All three sites provide politicians’ full voting records, as well as analysis of where the representatives’ votes place them in relation to their parties, to political values, or to other members of Congress. The Washington Post also offers a list of “key votes,” explaining briefly what they mean and why they matter.

People send us their newspapers and magazines. Sometimes, we review them.

Mother Earth News, December 2008 / January 2009

For a grizzled urbanite like me, there is something strangely appealing about Mother Earth News: The Original Guide to Living Wisely, whose editorial offices are in Topeka, Kansas. The cover lines beckon with the promise of a healthful, rustic existence: “Back to the Land,” “Easy Crusty Bread in 5 Minutes a Day!” “How To Grow Potatoes,” and “Anyone Can Raise Chickens.” And, unlike slick lifestyle books like Real Simple or Ready Made, there’s nothing intimidating about the magazine. It won’t judge you even if you have never grown a garden, let alone a “Bigger, Better” one. In the movie Funny Face, Kay Thompson, playing Maggie Prescott, editor-in-chief of Quality magazine, says that a magazine is like a person who comes into your home every month. Well, if Mother Earth News were a person, it would be your lovable, plaid-wearing family friend Sally from Indiana who just loves Prairie Home Companion.

But your nice friend Sally also has an interesting political streak: In the “News From Mother,” which is like an anonymous editor’s note (but signed “Mother”), the author writes that the world faces three challenges in route to sustainable living. Number two? Population control.

We must choose to stabilize human population, or we’ll make more of a mess of our habitat and then nature will exert the control we abdicated.... To slow our rapid population growth won’t require Draconian measures. Consider what would happen if the international moral consensus were that each human being should reproduce himself or herself once — two children per couple? That’s all it would take for populations to begin slowly shrinking. It’s a simplistic solution, but the ultimate solutions are often the simplest. We’ll have to negotiate some difficult routes through political conflicts to reach the top of this mountain.

Not a commonly discussed aspect of environmentalism, that’s for sure.

The rest of the magazine offers some advice that even city dwellers can use—like how to stop unwanted junk mail (hint: use a Web site called Catalog Choice. or how to cook with a forgotten grain, millet—and some stuff that’s interesting, but too far into the whole country living thing for me—a feature on farming in the wilderness. But even if the content about “rotational grass farming” is too much, there are cute pictures of llamas and cows to sustain interest.

I was tempted by the teaser line about raising chickens, but got turned off by the line about “pasty butt,” a condition that can develop if chick droppings cling to their booties and clog the anus. Yuck. (Also, I had always thought ‘pasty butt’ was an insult used against very pale people.)

As a whole, Mother Earth News has a lot to offer. Recipes based on small-batch farming are accessible for city slickers with backyards and country folks alike, such as the adorable burr gherkin. And the lifestyle stories steer readers toward a less frenetic, more reflective lifestyle by spending time outdoors or baking your own bread.

The articles aren’t preachy or judgmental; the tone is positive, but not unrealistic. It won’t be easy, but you can do it, the magazine says. And the photography is good, without being too alienating and slick. For families that find lifestyle magazines too consumerist in flavor, Mother Earth News would be a welcome bi-monthly visitor. - Katia Bachko

The Bark, January/February 2009

Though The Bark bills itself as “the dog culture magazine,” you won’t find any glossy features on the latest in collar trends or the most chic cuts for your Shih Tzu; instead, the “culture” being referenced here is that of the human-canine relationship.

Take, for example, the column “Both Ends of the Leash,” by Patricia B. McConnell, PhD. In the current issue, McConnell examines the phenomenon of dog owners who are unable to verbally communicate with their pets. Anyone who has ever faced the infuriating predicament of house-training Fido knows that the words “Outside! Outside!!” carry no meaning for a new pup. But McConnell lauds the benefits of the non-verbal bond between man and dog, saying the relationship is “a connection beyond speech, born of primal emotions and a deep-seated understanding shared by two mammals living together in a cacophony of sights and sounds and smells.” In the article, she urges her fellow homo sapiens to write down all the things they wish to say to their dogs in a letter, and to be more conscious of those feelings when interacting with man’s best friend.

Then there is “Fair Share,” by Amelia Glynn, which dissects the role of dogs in the breakup of human relationships, and attempts to navigate the uncharted territory of shared-pet-custody among exes.

Another good read, “The Making of a Guide Dog,” by Jane Brackman, PhD, gives the reader a rudimentary understanding of the traits and training of service dogs, with tidbits such as “The cornerstone of the training work is to, through repetition and praise, teach the dog to learn to judge a barrier or dangerous situation—for instance, the speed and distance of moving vehicles.” But it, like the other feature articles, leaves something to be desired in its brevity. Still, The Bark proves its worth in the blurbs of dog news that pepper the magazine, such as the popularity of facilitating animal adoption via Twitter, and the recent use of DNA technology to identify uncollected feces and fine dog owners in the town of Petah Tikva, Israel (watch out!).

For any serious dog lover, The Bark is worth the single-issue price of $4.99. However, the magazine could use a layout makeover. Several articles sported uneven columns, and the graphics department would be well advised to feature fewer, larger images instead of the myriad thumbnails that are too small to leave much of an impression. Until then, hold off on the subscription and use the money to shell out for Fido’s gourmet kibble. - Sara Germano

Baltimore City Paper, December 31, 2008

The solid year-end issue of the Baltimore City Paper devotes its cover story to “People Who Died” in 2008 (shunning The New York Times Magazine’s euphemistic year-end convention, “The Lives They Lived”). The story is billed as a collection of “alt-obits,” and starts out somberly enough with a roundup of 2008’s catastrophes: “Genocide, war, terrorist attacks, disease—yikes.” Among the ten “semi-famous, semi-obscure folks” here memorialized is Larry Harmon, who didn’t invent Bozo the Clown but “standardized his visage, manner, and blue and red costume,” and whose “size-83AAA shoes will be hard to fill.”

Fans of The Wire will want to check on the “Mobtown Beat” section—this edition features postal pooches fighting crime the Western District way. Specifically, drug-sniffing “K-9s” Britta and Ozzy found several pounds of marijuana in packages en route to ostensible stash houses. Agents also found 519 grams of opium hidden in a magazine mailed to Baltimore from Mumbai. The section also includes a murder blotter that tracks Baltimore-area murders by the week (five this week) and by the year (232 in 2008).

The Arts and Entertainment section profiles avant-garde Indian musician Ami Dang, whose music writer Michael Byrne calls a “synthesis of classically trained, traditional Indian vocals and nimble, adroit sitar playing.” Byrne’s a fan, though he reserves a special place in “the hell of torturous instruments [for] the 20-plus stringed, mutant guitar-looking thing.” Incidentally, another notable 2008 passing the paper mentions but doesn’t detail is that of Transcendental Meditation Guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, whom George Harrison encountered through his own fascination with Indian culture and the sitar.

Some fun, if anodyne, ’90s-era social science research is brought to you by Brian Morton in the “Political Animal” column. Morton argues that “conservatives, by dint of media saturation and message discipline, managed to change the accepted norms of policy discourse.” Social scientist Joe Overton claimed that there is a range or “window” of policies that are acceptable on any given political spectrum. Morton says that Bush “moved the Overton window” further right by “mak[ing]… ideas that are so far off the edge part of the discussion,” thereby making “ideas that were once mildly unpalatable seem reasonable.” Luckily for the alt-weekly demographic, universal health care, also outside the window at one point, is poised to climb in. - Kathy Gilsinan

2000. The European Journal, December 2008

“Dear Colleagues,” writes Vincenzo Merolle, editor of 2000. The European Journal, a biannual newsletter printed on thick yellowish paper, “We have finally crossed the Rubicon, putting to the internet –with many imperfections to be corrected – the part of the European Dictionary which we have compiled up to now. It is a small part, indeed, but has cost us a lot of work.” A visit to the European Journal’s Web site shows that, indeed, a portion of its European dictionary project is available in PDF form, hatched from what Merolle calls the need for demonstrating “the substantial unity” of European history and creating, “where it is lacking, the consciousness of such a unity.” Merolle notes that several well-known publishers “accepted the cultural aim of our project. Nevertheless they were not ready to invest the sum necessary even for the first of these volumes… They did not believe that these dictionaries would sell enough to reward the investment.” Merolle’s response? “Wir werden sehen.” To Merolle: Viel Glück!

For dedicated readers, the rest of The European Journal is comprised of four articles, two in English and two in French. The first, written by an F. L. van Holthoon, compares David Hume’s History of England against Thomas B. Macaulay’s The History of England, From the Accession of James the Second with the hope that it would be “useful for asking how near they approached historical truth,” and more importantly, to see how each fits “with our view of English history.” Whose? European posterity’s, I assume. In the parsing, there are some fun turns of phrase: “Hume regarded Charles I as basically a sincere and virtuous prince. In this he was undoubtedly wrong and Macaulay right.” And from Hume himself, a sentence (describing the reign of Charles II) that I dare Maureen Dowd to serve up:

Thus the two parties, actuated by mutual rage, but cooped up within the narrow limits of the law, leveled with poisoned daggers the most deadly blows against each other’s breast, and buried in their factious divisions all regard to truth, honour, and humanity.

It should be noted that, in his day, Macaulay himself quoted the above sentence “with approval.”

On page three, we find the presumptive reason this pluckily didactic publication reached the CJR offices: an article about Johann Peter Friedrich Ancillon, tutor to the Prussian crown prince and later Prussian Minister of Foreign Affairs, who in 1816 wrote a mostly-forgotten defense of press freedom. Cheers for history-of-press-and-the-law articles! The author, John Christian Laursen, a professor of political science at UC Riverside, argues that Ancillon has been misunderstood—in fact, miscast—as a conservative reactionary (and remembered in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie for his receptivity to “the needs of the tender souls of court ladies”). The proof, Laursen writes, is in Ancillon’s text, “On Press Laws,” which begins by “noting that abuse of the press is bad for a country,” and ends with the strong conclusion that “there should be the least restraint on the press as possible, giving liberty the greatest latitude.” Reactionary, schmreactionary. Laursen’s kicker? Don’t trust secondary sources.

The two other articles are printed in French. One puts aside (for a second) Montesquieu’s theory of separation of powers and chooses instead to shine some light on his contributions to international politics—writings on the dangers of overextension, the importance of respecting natural boundaries and the benefits of governmental alliances—as they pertained to despotisms, monarchies and republics. The other proposes that dictionaries be considered literature, with the alphabet serving as the skeletal framework—the squelette—and the quotations in the entries themselves the narrative meat. The author applies this idea to Diderot and D’Alembert’s Dictionnaire raisonne des arts, des sciences et des métiers,” and finds that the quotations accompanying the definitions are inspired, naturally, by the clichés and myths of the day—such as in the characterizations of the English and the Germans, respectively. That was 1751. This inspires me to go check out my Merriam-Webster.

Everyone else: go check out the European Dictionary. - Jane Kim

Corky Simpson is seventy years old. As if to prove it, he refers to himself as “a stubborn old mule” and uses words like “whippersnappers.”

Simpson uses other words, too, though: a veteran sports journalist, he is known for the kind of colorful, evocative writing that the best sportswriters produce, writing that, in 1988, led him to be named the AP’s Sportswriter of the Year. Simpson’s name is so well known—especially around his current home of Arizona—that the headlines of the columns he wrote, until recently, for the Tucson Citizen were preceded by only his first name. (E.g., “Corky: Olson’s woes will play out in the spotlight”; "Corky: Tucson High marks 100 years of sports glory.") Retired as of 2006, Simpson writes a weekly column for the News and Sun of Green Valley, a small retirement community in southern Arizona.

Corky Simpson is also a voting member of the Baseball Writers Association of America, which each year decides the new crop of inductees to the Baseball Hall of Fame. In a recent column, Simpson published his list of the players he’s voting to the HOF. The list included such players as Bert Blyleven, Andre Dawson, and Don Mattingly. It did not, however, include Rickey Henderson, baseball's all-time leader in stolen bases and runs scored—the guy whose “numerous accomplishments,” SI.com declared in December, “should make him an overwhelming choice for the Hall of Fame next month.” ("Somebody asked me did I think Rickey Henderson was a Hall of Famer,” baseball statistician Bill James said back in 2001. “I told them, 'If you could split him in two, you'd have two Hall of Famers.'")

Well, enter the Outrage. Many baseball fans—who found their way to Simpson’s column via links on ESPN, Deadspin, The Big Lead, and other sports blogs—were (choose your adjective) shocked/appalled/indignant/just-plain-pissed at Simpson’s omission of Henderson from his list of eight picks. (BBWAA voters are allowed to choose up to ten.)

And, this being the Web and all, those fans made their anger known. Here’s Richie Rich of Home Run Derby (motto: “Not nearly as Yuppie as other baseball sites”):

I’m really struggling to understand how an Award-Winning writer like Corky Simpson leaves Rickey Henderson off his ballot. Did Simpson think Henderson was too cocky and didn’t show enough “reverence for the sport?” Did he not realize he was on the ballot? Does he think no one should be voted in unanimously?

Either way … it deserves an explanation. Our efforts to contact Mr. Simpson have been unsuccessful.

Or could it all just be a big publicity stunt. Nothing draws attention like leaving a sure-fire Hall of Famer off your ballot.

HRD’s assumption of nefarious commercial/PR motives for Simpson’s omission is, it turns out, generous. Because the consensus among most sports bloggers who addressed Simpson’s column was that the award-winning journalist must be stupid. Or lazy. Or forgetful. Or full-on senile. Here’s Deadspin’s Rick Chandler:

Time to end this farce, OK? How do you look at a Hall of Fame ballot and not vote for Willie Mays? If you're doing that, your so-called career needs a laugh track. Of course, dementia could be an issue: Simpson is retired, and writes a weekly column for the Green Valley News and Sun, which serves a retirement community in Arizona. Their lead photo on the front page today is a kid with a chicken on his head (this is true).

The Web site of the paper in question, the News and Sun—which gets an average of 1,500 to 1,800 hits a day, its lifestyle editor, Regina Ford, told me (Simpson’s column alone, as of yesterday morning, had gotten 7,200)—bore the brunt of the baseball blogosphere’s vitriol. To wit, a small sampling of the comments left for Simpson:

Reeds Johnson wrote on Jan 2, 2009 1:29 PM:

" Are you stupid or just senile?

Rickey Henderson is the greatest leadoff hitter in the history of the game and one of the 20 most valuable players…EVER. ”

KillThCork wrote on Jan 6, 2009 2:20 AM:

" Where is Rickey?

This writer is a joke. Old people should not be allowed to vote for the HOF. "

Jeff W wrote on Jan 6, 2009 8:16 AM:

" What in the h___ is wrong with someone for them not to think Rickey Henderson is a Hall of Famer? "

John wrote on Jan 7, 2009 8:44 AM:

" You are a disgrace to Journalism as well as Baseball. This is an obvious attempt to draw attention by omitting Henderson. ”

paj wrote on Jan 7, 2009 9:01 AM:

" Who are you Corky Simpson? Do you know ANYTHING about baseball? Your exclusion of Rickey Henderson is indefensible and frankly embarassing for you. "

wamski wrote on Jan 7, 2009 9:08 AM:

" Are you kidding me? This guy should NOT be voting for the Hall of Fame. He is a joke. "

Dave wrote on Jan 7, 2009 9:09 AM:

" Morons like this should have their votes taken away. "

There’s much more in this vein. (One of the more eloquent, from a commenter who dubbed him/herself “SimpsonSucks”: “Cork is a dork.”)

So…what's it like to see your vote—and a column whose traditional audience is generally limited to retirees—met with such Web-based outrage?

Not so bad, actually. “It doesn’t bother me,” Simpson told me, “because, one, I’m too old, and my skin is too thick, and I’m a stubborn old mule from Missouri.”

And also because Simpson simply doesn’t spend much time on the Web, he says, so is pretty much immune to the heated rhetoric that often permeates its (virtually anonymous) conversations. “I think of the literature on the Internet in the same way that I think of the literature on the walls of public bathrooms,” Simpson says. “With the exception that the literature on the walls of public bathrooms is a little higher class.”

Simpson readily admits that the Henderson omission was an oversight (but: not a snub!). “I picked eight guys,” he says. “My mistake is that I could’ve picked two more, and I didn’t. And had I really used my brain, I would’ve picked two more guys, and I would’ve put Rickey Henderson on there for sure.”

Still, though, Simpson thinks, the anger directed at him is ridiculous. He’s just one guy, he says—his vote isn’t going to keep Henderson out of the HOF, so why make such a big deal about it? “No one in the history of baseball has ever gotten into the Hall of Fame on a unanimous vote," he notes. "I mean, we’re talking about Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb and Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Jackie Robinson—nobody. And if anyone out there thinks that Rickey Henderson can carry one of those guys’ shoes, he’s crazy.”

And he laughs off charges that the Henderson omission was a publicity stunt. “You couldn’t possibly sit down and say, ‘How could this ballot be controversial?’” Simpson says. His Rickey-less slate was a simple slip-up, nothing more. And the attempts to read more into it—publicity, senility, whatever—only validate, as far as Simpson is concerned, his take on the Web: "The Internet is like a sewer. It's very necessary, but you wouldn't want to spend a lot of time there.”

The Politico’s Michael Calderone brings the news that the battered Politicker network of sites is abandoning its last remnants outside the New York metro area, and shuttering its network.

Back in the site’s heady, mid-Presidential campaign days, I had the chance to spend a testosterone-laden night with a few of the boys (at the time, only two of the site’s twenty reporters were women) who ran the bloggy state-based political news network:

… Just after Guiliani wrapped up his barnburner of a convention speech, Danny Reiter, Politcker’s Maryland correspondent, turned his computer screen to flash Jamie Klatell, his editor, a Los Angeles Times write-up of the ex-mayor’s speech.

Klatell, thirty-two, started to read and paraphrase in a mock stentorian voice. “Rudy Giuliani stood before the convention…” He let up.

“Pathetic,” he said. And then he pretended to masturbate over his keyboard.

It was a fun, earnest bunch, to be sure, and one that was quite confident of a future filled with rapid growth and booming traffic, funded with steady revenues from ads targeted to politically sophisticated readers (lobbyists, legislators, political professionals) who would find Politicker's obsessive state-by-state, minute-by-minute micro-coverage a must-read. They’d just lured an associate publisher away from Politico to implement the ad strategy, an indicator of ascendancy which drew admiring attention from The Wall Street Journal.

Things obviously didn’t work out, which is a shame not only for the many young journalists who took a flyer on the very new, and very orange, outlet, but for anyone who hoped that Politicker might mature into a serious journalistic outlet that could fill gaps in statehouse coverage. Just this month, Governing magazine, the trade magazine of those that rule, shined a hopeful spotlight on the effort. “Perhaps the most-watched experiment,” Rob Gurwitt wrote in a solid piece on the decline—and hoped for Web rebirth—of statehouse coverage, “is Politicker.”

He quoted James Pindell, Politicker's national managing editor:

"What everyone is trying to figure out is, are we in a moment of pure transition on the way to figuring out the model and regaining the glory days of statehouse and political coverage … or are we at the beginning of the end? Of course, people will continue to cover state government, but the question is, Who? And how many? And how good will they be?"

Now we know one thing: Whoever they are, they won’t be from Politicker.

Fourteen days into the Israeli offensive in Gaza, opinion writers and op-ed columnists have spent no deficient number of inches weighing in on the conflict—what Israel/Hamas/the U.S./peacemakers should do, how history should inform the present, why the offensive won’t work, why the offensive will work, what we can learn from the re-eruption of violence, why the cease-fire is the only option, why continued war is the only option, what 2006 has to do with it, what 1993 has to do with it, and what Israel’s upcoming February elections have to do with it. And, of course, there’s more. Here are just a few responses we’ve seen coming from the editorial and opinion pages in the past week.

Calling for a cease-fire

The New York Times’s Nicholas Kristof took the middle ground (“When it is shelled by its neighbor, Israel has to do something… But Israel’s right to do something doesn’t mean it has the right to do anything”) and called on Obama to speak out more forcefully:

As the ground invasion costs more lives, [Obama] needs to join European leaders in calling for a new cease-fire on all sides — and after he assumes the presidency, he must provide real leadership that the world craves.

Former President Jimmy Carter revisited the six-month cease-fire, writing in The Washington Post:

The hope is that when further hostilities are no longer productive, Israel, Hamas and the United States will accept another cease-fire, at which time the rockets will again stop and an adequate level of humanitarian supplies will be permitted to the surviving Palestinians, with the publicized agreement monitored by the international community.

The Economist’s Gideon Lichfield wrote in the NYT that Israel needs to abandon the military concept of deterrence in favor of a “more pragmatic political” plan:

What Israel should do now is work for a cease-fire on terms that allow both sides to save some face. It should then do something it has done far too little of in the past: improve Gazans’ living conditions significantly. The aim should be to construct a long-lived state of calm in which Hamas has more to lose by breaching the cease-fire than by sticking to it.

An editorial in The Boston Globe called the bloodshed “needless”:

In the long run, popular anger at the suffering of Gazans will play into the hands of extremists. That anger will also make it harder for the 22 states of the Arab League to keep the pledge of their Arab Peace Initiative: to establish normalized relations with Israel once it reaches a two-state peace agreement with the Palestinians. Israelis and Palestinians desperately need a new truce in Gaza.

On numbers and proportionality in war

Bret Stephens, in his “Global View” column at the The Wall Street Journal, made a case for proportionality:

Israel will also have to practice a more consistent policy of deterrence than it has so far done. One option: For every single rocket that falls randomly on Israeli soil, an Israeli missile will hit a carefully selected target in Gaza. Focusing the minds of Hamas on this type of ‘proportionality’ is just the endgame that Israel needs.

But author Etgar Keret, writing in the Los Angeles Times (translated from the Hebrew), wryly expressed his frustration at the media for perpetuating arguments of proportionality in war coverage:

There is something soothing in the proportionality debate because it takes unquantifiable parameters such as anxiety, pain and even human life and seeks to introduce them into a seemingly objective equation. Similar to Newton's laws or the second law of thermodynamics, this is an a priori law of nature: an equation that contains the suffering and victims of Israel's southern settlements on one side and produces a reasonable number of corpses on the Gazan side. Something like 23.5 (the half could, perhaps, stand for a particularly serious injury or the death of an elderly person or an infant).

Reacting to the anti-Israel rallies

Writing about anti-Israel demonstrators in Fort Lauderdale and in Copenhagen and Amsterdam, The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby said that we should call it what it is—anti-Semitism:

Let's say it for the thousand-and-first time: Every negative comment about Israel is not an expression of bigotry. Israel is no more immune to criticism than any other country. But it takes willful blindness not to see that anti-Zionism today - opposition to the existence of Israel, rejection of the idea that the Jewish people are entitled to a state - is merely the old wine of anti-Semitism in its newest bottle.

Letting the war play out

Charles Krauthammer stated in The Washington Post that the French-Egyptian-engineered cease-fire would be “a terrible mistake”:

It would have the same elements as the phony peace in Lebanon: an international force that abjures any meaningful use of force, an arms embargo under which arms will most assuredly flood in, and a cessation of hostilities until the terrorist side is rearmed and ready to initiate the next round of hostilities.

In The Wall Street Journal, Edward N. Luttwak, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, outlines how Israel can win in Gaza:

What Israel can do is weaken Hamas further in its current ground operations by raiding targets that cannot be attacked from the air – typically because they are in the basements of crowded apartment buildings – and by engaging Hamas gunmen in direct combat…. If their target intelligence remains as good as it was during the air attack, they will run out of targets in a matter of days. That is when a cease-fire with credible monitoring would be possible and desirable for both sides as the only alternative to renewed occupation.

The Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum renamed the peace process “a war process”:

Further negotiations will make sense only when Hamas's leaders -- currently emboldened by a combination of popular indignation and Iranian support -- finally arrive at the same conclusion as their secular counterparts, and a new generation of Israelis is persuaded to believe them. Until then, there is no point in bemoaning the passivity of the Bush administration, the silence of Barack Obama, the powerlessness of Arab leaders or the weakness of Europe, as so many, predictably, have begun to do.

Lessons for Obama

There’s a silver lining to the current conflict, writes Jackson Diehl, the Washington Post’s deputy editorial page editor:

The war against Hamas is proving – once again – that the Middle East's extremist movements cannot be eliminated by military means. If the incoming Obama administration absorbs that lesson, it will have a better chance of neutralizing Iranian-backed groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, and of eventually brokering an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement… Though Israel must defend its citizens against rockets and suicide bombings, the only means of defeating Hamas are political.

Humorous(-ish)

Rosa Brooks aimed for humor-in-a-somber-situation in a column that delineates “how to be stupid…Hamas style” (refuse to recognize Israel)…“Israeli style” (complain about unfair media coverage, but don't let any Israeli or foreign journalists into Gaza)...and “Bush style” (let the new guy handle it).

As the foreign press continues to fight for access to the fighting in Gaza, personal blogs offers a glimpse into the dire conditions on the ground. Here’s a collection of excerpts from recently updated blogs from the region. None present a full and complete picture of the situation, but they do reveal scenes of every day life inside a war zone.

bint battuta in bahrain

The author is based in Bahrain, but she’s publishing dispatches from “Hasan in Rafah,” received by text message, possibly.

January 5: 9.45 pm: "I am carrying my son. five minutes at home and five minutes in the alley outside my home. The red cross warned the people that a house of a Hamas man is a target. Its only 3 metres from my home. The neighbour are carrying some blankets mattresses etc and running with their children in different direction. the kids are shouting. Today they struck 4 houses in Rafah. Apache came first then F16 struck. Apache came and shoot 3 missiles. we are waiting F16"

10.45 pm: "We are ok. But still all of us are in one room but our doors and windows are open. we are still waiting hope nothing is going to happen. I heard that complete families are killed in Gaza [City]. Do you watch aljazeera. We still have no electricity"

Tales to Tell from Gaza 2008

Tales to Tell is written by a human-rights worker in Gaza and has pictures and video, with regular updates.

January 9:I covered another ambulance shift Wednesday night, working with two guys who might turn out to be my favourites. S is a sweet EMT driver with good English, very helpful for me, with the ambition to have a baby born in his ambulance since so far he only knows the theory of the process. EB is a dad of three, with a wife who he insists doesn’t mind the idea of him having a second wife at some point. S is scathing about the concept of multiple wives.

EB is happy for me to work as his assistant so that’s pretty cool. I can actually be useful especially when a medic is outnumbered; last night at one point we took on four injured people after a rocket blast near Palestine square, all from the same family home. A little boy with a head wound, two adult men, one with a head wound and the other with a leg wound. A young woman who hadn’t any visible bleeding waited uncomplainingly til last, at which point we found that under her shirt, glass or shrapnel had entered deep beside her spine, so she got sent off for an x-ray on arrival to Al Shifa.

I’d heard word that Hassan was here in Al Quds, but by the time I got here he’d been sent home, which was encouraging in terms of his wound, and certainly good for his family who hadn’t seen him since the strikes began I think. I’ve since glimpsed the footage A took of his shooting, presented on AlJazeerah, so at least it’s got that far, and I had reports of it being on New York TV.

Dr Halid’s house in Khan Younis was destroyed yesterday. So was EB’s. So was Dr Basher’s, and his next door neighbour’s. He showed me the usual photos of rubble, his personal rubble. Three more homeless families taken in by relatives, whose houses also may be under threat. Is anyone’s home going to be left standing?

Fares Akram

Akram is a reporter for Britain’s Independent newspaper and he writes plainly and clearly about his family’s experiences.

January 8: Everyone looked relieved and we're hoping the temporary ceasefire will be repeated. But it's a sad reminder of the time when Gaza was occupied by Israel before the creation of the Palestinian Authority and we had curfews that the Israelis would lift for two hours so that people could go to the market. Gaza is supposed to be free and unoccupied but in fact Israeli soldiers still have the power to keep us in our homes or let us go to the market.

In any case, the three hours passed quickly. We bought cans of fish, beans, cheese, eggs. I went to see my pregnant wife Alaa who is staying at her mother's house, and then rushed back at five minutes before 4pm, afraid that heavy bombardment would resume suddenly.

Our biggest need is still for cooking gas. We're finding ways to adjust; my mother remembered an old brass stove her father used 30 years ago. It's working well. But the smell of burnt kerosene, mixed with the smell of the food being cooked, and the sound of the burner, leave you thinking we have moved out of the 21st century. Waiting for the tea from this old cooker and holding the laptop in my arm, the two things didn't seem to go together.

Raising Yousuf and Noor: diary of a Palestinian mother

According to the bio on the site, the author is based in Canada but in touch with friends and family in Gaza, and she posts their updates.

January 9: You don't know anymore; you don't know who is alive, you feel you are in a trap, you don't know who is a target" said my friend and neighbour in Gaza city, journalist Taghreed El-Khodary, the fear resonated in her voice, over the phone to Aljazeera. Taghreed lives on the street over from my parent's.

"Where to? Where can I go seek refuge to?" she continued. "I live next to the parliament which was destroyed; next to the police station, which was destroyed; next to the hospitals, which were bombed; and the Israeli navy is shelling from the sea, the F-16s from the sky, the tanks from the ground...where to?" she repeated again and again.

"First your house shakes, and the windows break, and the fear...the fear. And when you see all these children around you in the hospital. Some can draw-and what they drawing is unbelievable. A six-year old boy in my house drew a picture of boy that was alive, and another that was dead. he said the dead boy was his friend, whom the Israelis killed. And the father is unable to protect his child. And the mothers are trying to hide their fear from their kids."

Life must go on in Gaza and Sderot

A blog written by two friends, a Palestinian and an Israeli, (recently profiled by NPR). The site is supposed to be an exchange of ideas, but, recent updates deal with practical matters, too.

January 7: It is hard to describe what is going on in Gaza, a terrible disaster, where the aircraft do not distinguish between civilians and military and children, no water ,electricity and difficult to get your needs .

We didn't have electricity since 6 days, and today was the first day to have it, that’s why I have chance to write this quickly.

We have said from the beginning that violence will bring more violence. I hope the world will understand that’s there people want to live safe with dignity and peace .

I hope I will have the chance to write you again.

Zoriah

Zoriah is an independent photojournalist, and although he’s not currently located in Gaza, his blog features some older images that are nonetheless important. This collection of photographs of the Hamas tunnel system is a must-see:

January 8 In August I was granted access to descend into and photograph a Hamas tunnel system, something that few local journalists, much less foreign press are allowed to see or document. Palestinians risk their lives working in the tunnels both for monetary reward and basic survival, so for me it was interesting to document the risks they take in order to dig and operate these tunnels. They have always been a risky operation and many people have lost their lives. Three people died in a tunnel collapse the day before I arrived to shoot this story and the tunnel I was supposed to visit collapsed on my trip down to Rafah from Gaza City.

Though it takes up a relatively small amount of real estate, a newspaper or magazine’s letters to the editor section punches far above its weight when it comes to errors and corrections.

Just over the past couple of years, there have been plagiarized letters that made it into print, letters that included egregious factual errors and accusations, letters that were attributed to the wrong person, and letters that were significantly altered due to sloppy editing. Last month alone there were two notable letter errors.

The Press of Christchurch, New Zealand published a correction to a rather scandalous December letter to the editor:

On December 6 we published a letter signed by A J Bennett that suggested Mayor Parker was a friend of David Henderson and that the Mayor had been photographed brandishing dildoes and “doobies” or marijuana joints. Through his legal counsel Mayor Parker has confirmed, and we accept, that he is not and never has been a personal friend of Mr Henderson and has never been photographed holding a dildo or a doobie. It was, in fact, a thin raffle ticket. The Press apologises to Mayor Parker for any embarrassment resulting from publishing those errors.

Also in December, The New York Times published an editor’s note admitting that it had published a hoax letter:

Earlier this morning, we posted a letter that carried the name of Bertrand Delanoë, the mayor of Paris, sharply criticizing Caroline Kennedy.

This letter was a fake. It should not have been published.

Doing so violated both our standards and our procedures in publishing signed letters from our readers.

We have already expressed our regrets to Mr. Delanoë’s office and we are now doing the same to you, our readers.

This letter, like most Letters to the Editor these days, arrived by email. It is Times procedure to verify the authenticity of every letter. In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the email and did not hear back. At that point, we should have contacted Mr. Delanoë’s office to verify that he had, in fact, written to us.
We did not do that. Without that verification, the letter should never have been printed.
We are reviewing our procedures for verifying letters to avoid such an incident in the future.

The Times note reveals the basics of the verification process used at most publications. Letters arrive and are sifted through. The lucky ones that will be considered for publication are usually edited, given a quick check for glaring factual errors, and sent back to the submitter for approval. Most publications also contact a letter writer by phone to verify their identity and ask a few other questions. (For an example of the back-and-forth that occasionally takes place between letter writer and editor, read this 2006 article on CJR.)

Thomas Feyer, the Times’s letters editor, explained the need for a phone call back in 2004:

We reserve the right to edit for space, clarity, civility and accuracy, and we send you the edited version before publication. If your letter is selected, we will try to reach you and ask a few questions: Did you write the letter? (We're not amused by impostors.) Is it exclusive to The Times? (It should be.) Do you have a connection to the subject you're writing about? (Readers should be able to judge your credibility and motivation.)

Obviously, the Times’s mistake regarding the Delanoë letter was that it failed to follow its own policy regarding the need for a phone call. In his treatise on letters, Feyer also addressed the issue of fact checking:

Letter writers, to use a well-worn phrase, are entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts. There is, of course, a broad gray area in which hard fact and heartfelt opinion commingle. But we do try to verify the facts, either checking them ourselves or asking writers for sources of information. Sometimes we goof, and then we publish corrections.

Those goofs and corrections range from the amusing to egregious. Sometimes, the names of letter writers are inadvertently switched (from the Arizona Daily Star):

The letter to the editor "Human body not an example" Wednesday on B7 was written by Robert H. Tucker of Tucson. It was not written by Garland E. Twitty of Marana and it is not his viewpoint.

Other times, errors are introduced in editing (San Francisco Chronicle):

Because of an editing error, a letter by Hal Rowland on Sept. 22 read “yellow citizens” when it should have read “fellow citizens.”

False accusations are made (Hamilton Spectator):

A Dec. 4 letter to the editor described Gary McHale in a way that was not accurate. The Hamilton Spectator withdraws any suggestion that Mr. McHale has perpetrated violence in his activities at Caledonia. The Hamilton Spectator apologizes for the error.

Plagiarism is committed (The New York Times):

On Aug. 7, we published a letter from Zachary Townsend, a student at Brown University and a columnist for the student newspaper, about Japan’s role in sex slavery in World War II, and slavery in the world today. We have now learned that the letter included material taken without attribution from an article in the November/December 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, “The New Global Slave Trade,” by Ethan B. Kapstein.

The student newspaper, The Brown Daily Herald, said in an editors’ note on Monday that it had discovered after a review that several of Mr. Townsend’s columns had included material taken from other sources without attribution and that he had been dismissed as a columnist.

Reached by e-mail on Tuesday about his letter in The Times, Mr. Townsend said he had read the Foreign Affairs article but had not intended to plagiarize from it.

Had we known of the unattributed material, we would not have published Mr. Townsend’s letter.

To my knowledge, the Times hasn’t made an announcement about the results of its plan to reexamine its verification procedures, so we’ll have to wait and see what solutions, if any, the paper can come up with. It’s admittedly a unique challenge to read, fact check, edit, and verify the authorship of such a large number of letters.

One useful strategy, since so many letters now come via e-mail, would be to create an online form for letter writers similar to the Chicago Tribune’s error report form. This form would require people to fill out information such as their name, home/work and email address, home or office phone number. It would cut down on the number of people who send in letters and offer nothing more than a singlefella96@yahoo.com e-mail address.

The form would speed up the process of gathering identifying information, and enable an editor to quickly check if the phone number matches the address or affiliation given. Of course, one of the best ways to verify authorship is decidedly old school: pick up the phone and call them.

Apart from that, any letter that accuses someone of “brandishing dildoes and ‘doobies’ or marijuana joints” requires a genuine fact check, however painful it may be.

Correction of the Week

“Due to space restrictions, the word “vegetarian” was omitted from the description of Rabbi Arie Chark’s favourite Chinese restaurant (”It’s a tough time to be Jewish,” Jan. 2). Rabbi Chark would like to assure readers that he does, in fact, keep kosher.” – Winnipeg Sun

“A STORY in The Advertiser yesterday stated that 9030 interstate visitors spent a night holidaying in SA in 2007, with that figure forecast to drop to 8699 this year.
The correct figures were 9,030,000 total visitor nights spent in SA in 2007, to drop to 8,699,000 during 2009.” – The Advertiser (Australia)

Parting Shot

“The article “Unified standard seen linking mobile world” published yesterday incorrectly stated that telecommunications executive Craig Ehrlich is married to Christine Loh Kung-wai. Statements attributed to Mr Ehrlich that he used the term “wife” to describe his relationship with Ms Loh were in fact not what he said. We apologise for any embarrassment this has caused.” – South China Morning Post

As of this writing, it looks like Roland Burris, appointed to the Senate last week by embattled Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, will eventually be allowed to take his seat. There was never much doubt about this outcome—but you wouldn’t know that from reading the newspapers. In covering the saga of the potential U.S. Senator from Illinois, the national press has shown a substantial taste for drama and limited appetite for fact.

They have reported on the rules and conditions that Sen. Harry Reid and colleagues are invoking to block Burris's swearing-in as if these rules are clear-cut and rational. For example, a New York Times article on Wednesday, reporting on the conditions that Reid and Sen. Dick Durbin set out for recognizing Burris's appointment, said:

They said that Mr. Burris, whose appointment was challenged because of the federal corruption inquiry surrounding Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, has to win the signature of the Illinois secretary of state and persuade a state legislative committee considering Mr. Blagojevich's impeachment that there was nothing untoward about his selection.

The Washington Post similarly goes on and on about race and the Senate's great power, quoting various lawyers and politicians—and only near the end of the article bothering to mention that Supreme Court has already ruled on this issue in a way that renders all of Reid's maneuverings a little silly.

Actually, it appears that the "conditions" imposed by the Senate Majority Leader have no valid legal or historical precedent., and that this little obstacle course is just something Reid and Durbin staffers made up in order to buy themselves some time. Even Jesse White, the Illinois Secretary of State being held responsible for this conundrum, said that his signature is largely ceremonial, and not required to make the Burris appointment valid. (In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, an angry White complained that Reid was “strapping me in a wheelchair and pushing [me] down four flights of stairs. I don’t like that.”)

No matter what Blagojevich did, the Illinois secretary of state doesn't actually have veto power over the governor’s actions. The whole thing is sort of like a pharmacy saying that a prescription from a doctor is void because it wasn’t signed by the nurse.

The Senate's imaginative state legislative committee requirement is just asinine. Blagojevich is presumed innocent, has not been indicted, and remains the governor of Illinois, invested with all the powers of that office. No one actually thinks that Burris paid Blago for this appointment. The Senate can't just choose to impose ridiculous and haphazard conditions for gaining admission, as if the swearing-in process were an episode of Double Dare.

While it appears there is some precedent for Sen. Reid's gamesmanship, it is a decidedly sordid one. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the Southern states elected many people prominent in the Confederacy back to Washington. Republicans refused to seat them. This gross abuse of power senatorial is the origin of the idea that the Senate has some vast power over its own membership.

Reid’s gamesmanship has also been explicitly repudiated by the Supreme Court. In 1967, the House voted to deny Rep. Adam Clayton Powell his seat because he was rumored to have misappropriated some committee money for personal use. Powell sued, and, in 1969, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that the House had acted unconstitutionally:

Unquestionably, Congress has an interest in preserving its institutional integrity, but in most cases that interest can be sufficiently safeguarded by the exercise of its power to punish its members for disorderly behavior and, in extreme cases, to expel a member with the concurrence of two-thirds. In short, both the intention of the Framers, to the extent it can be determined, and an examination of the basic principles of our democratic system persuade us that the Constitution does not vest in the Congress a discretionary power to deny membership….

Qualification for the Senate is determined by age, citizenship, and residency. Exclusively. In covering the admittedly bizarre Burris saga, the press needs to refrain from validating the game the Senate is playing, and report the actual facts. This is not government. One can understand Read’s uncertainty, and why he might want to buy himself some time and political points with nonsense about rules and paperwork. But that's exactly what it is: nonsense. And the public is better served when the press calls that out.

Gretchen Morgenson is a leader of what might be called the accountability school of business journalism—a school with, in our view, all too few members. Luckily for readers, however, Morgenson has an usually prominent platform: As an assistant business and financial editor at the The New York Times, she writes both a weekly column and news and investigative stories under a regular byline.

Her skeptical and arms-length approach to financial institutions is by now well-known among regular business-press readers, and her work can be said to have set the public agenda on issues ranging from executive compensation to Countrywide Financial. One trait that sets her apart, we think, is that she grabs hold of an issue and doesn’t let go. We think drumbeat investigative coverage is an effective but underused journalistic tool.

A Times staffer since 1998, Morgenson won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for beat reporting for coverage of the dot-com crash. Previously, she wrote and edited for Forbes, Worth and, surprisingly, Vogue, for five years at the start of her career.

The Audit caught up to her this week:

The Audit: How do you think we did covering the run-up to the crisis before 2006? And take that as broadly as you want.

Gretchen Morgenson: I think one of the things that's very difficult for financial reporters is that they can cover things that they can see and that are measured by [something], like the Dow Jones Industrial Average or home-price appreciation. They can cover that stuff fairly well because they see the daily close or month-to-month changes or the quarterly changes, earnings, etc.—things that are supposedly measurable, right? It's the horse race, and that's the kind of thing that everybody is pretty good at.

But I think that when it comes to the bond market, which is far more opaque—difficult to follow, difficult to track—but way more monumental and significant, then we kind of fall down on the job because it doesn't have a daily market mechanism that we can measure “ooh, it's up!” or “ooh, it's down!”—that kind of thing.

So anything that involves fixed-income is just by its nature more difficult for people in our business to cover. And that is really what is central to this thing.

... I think people covered the house-price appreciation, the bubble, the boom—I think people covered that pretty well. There were a lot of stories about “this can't go on,” everybody knew it was almost like the new dot.com. People at cocktail parties were talking about the value of their home. That's a dead give away that it's a mania.

So I think that was well-covered and certainly by real-estate reporters. But what I don't think was well reported was the Wall Street-enabler aspect of it, and the role of securitization, and certainly the questionable practices. I don't think people understood the degree to which mortgages were being given to people just as long as they were ambulatory or breathing. That was something I think that could have used a lot more coverage earlier on in the game.

TA: One of the questions I get from readers a lot is, How much responsibility does the press have? The press couldn't have prevented this....

GM: No, no no no…. I get some of this from readers, but I end up emailing them the stories that they either never saw or forgot about. I think there's a lot of that: “Oh, you're so smart. Where were you?” There were some reporters doing pretty in-depth and questioning, probing work on this stuff, but I think it's very easy to say that nobody was on the scene. The press can't prevent these kinds of things. Yeah, they can expose the practices and that should have been done more assiduously. But it was this huge momentum that was fed by this demand from investors and this fee machine on Wall Street and among the mortgage brokers and bankers and lenders. So, I can't imagine how reporters would stop that.

TA: When you find an issue or something that's not right, you keep pounding on it. I'm thinking of Countrywide, executive compensation, going back years and years.

GM: This [mortgage crisis] was a very complicated story from the very beginning, not only because it was about bonds, which are more obscure and difficult to follow and track and mortgage, which are difficult to hedge and predict. But you had all these different players. You had subprime first, then you had Alt-A, then it infected prime, then you had the securitization and the different aspects of that that made this far more complicated than just a dot.com story where it was companies that were able to tap into the capital markets with no product, no earnings, no nothing. That was a pretty straightforward story.

This was a story with so many different facets, and then on top of that you layer on the credit-default swaps and you layer on the CDOs and the CDO-squareds that were putting synthetic mortgages into securities. I mean, this was just a complex story to the max. And so, you couldn't possibly do it one time or two times. You had to stay on it to explain to the reader why it wasn't going to go away, why it was going to be with us for a very long time.

So, it's now official: Bono, long rumored to be replacing Bill Kristol on The New York Times's op-ed page, has been invited to write columns (and produce podcasts) for the paper. Starting with a column this Sunday (bloody Sunday).

Whether or not the singer/rocker/activist is actually taking the conservative pundit's Times slot, we can expect Bono's contributions to the paper to be more Kristofian than Kristolian. As the Times had it in a press release this morning, "Bono has been a leader in the fight against AIDS and poverty in Africa since his initial involvement in the debt cancellation campaign of 1998, when he began lobbying governments across the G8 to free poor countries from odious debts so they could spend more on health and education."

So: does Bono deserve his elevation--is today a beautiful day? Bono's promotion (in every sense of the word) will likely get some push-back as too gimmicky for the pages of the paper of record...but let's see what he writes before making an assessment. For my money, anyone who can keep world poverty in the minds of the American public deserves the benefit of the doubt. There's a good chance that the Times, in an activist like Bono, has found just what it's been looking for.

Economist, author and Audit pal Jeff Madrick has a piece on the Daily Beast that I've been hoping someone would write:

How the Entire Economics Profession Failed

Not a bad topic, right?

Here's a partial list of misguided and dangerous notions to which mainstream economics and economists have lent their considerable academic and intellectual heft:

Wall Streeters paid themselves enormous bonuses based on rising market values of investments, not on revenues actually made. The bonus system has been based on the preposterous assumption that the value of an investment set by traders in financial markets rationally reflects the true future value of that asset almost all the time.
...

Investment banks took on $25 to $40 of debt for every dollar of capital in order to maximize their returns. It was assumed that these smart people wouldn’t do this if they didn’t know how to manage their risk.

...

Average Americans took on record amounts of debt compared to incomes, which was said to be just fine because it was supported by high stock prices and, when that bubble burst, by high house prices.

...

Financial deregulation freed MBAs to make the brilliant technical innovations. I could find no single mainstream academic economist who criticized financial deregulation in a systematic way since the 1990s until only very recently. Two veteran Wall Street economists, Henry Kaufman and Al Wojnilower, were partial exceptions.
...

Low rates of unemployment were proof the American economic model was working. In light of this, stagnant or falling wages in the 2000s was not an indication of economic failure—just a reflection of American competitiveness.

The Federal Reserve can always save the day, as Milton Friedman taught us. Just add more reserves and believe in Ben Bernanke, whose mentor was Friedman. So now Bernanke is adding reserves far beyond anyone’s imagination, just like Friedman said he should do, and the economy is in ever-deeper trouble.

And check out this figure. Unbelievable:

The earnings of financial institutions rose to more than one-third of all American profits. This only proved how valuable finance was to the economy and that manufacturing was simply old hat.

Madrick then skewers the profession's pretensions to scientific objectivity:

What most economists can't seem to acknowledge is that they have been overcome by free market ideology over the past thirty years. Such ideology is especially beneficial to wealthy vested interests. But economists are purportedly dedicated to objective empirical and statistical analysis. Ideology has little part in the work of these serious empiricists, but surely there was no buttering up of the rich and powerful that provide jobs and grants.

Only with the near collapse of the economy are economists changing their tunes slightly, accepting the need for regulation and Keynesian stimulus. But they will probably not change their deepest assumptions about how markets work, or about when they should and should not be given free reign. They will make no bigger place for government than to adjust a little more for “market failures.” They will go back to tinkering with those models, not transforming them, and even make them fit the current crisis without blinking an eye.

Economics is probably unique among academic disciplines in the extent to which its academic debates end up affecting the lives of everyday people. Put it this way, art historians, comp-lit scholars, and anthropologists may be susceptible to the same academic pitfalls as economists—group-think, a focus on minutia, the lack of interaction with humanoid life forms, poor hygiene, etc.—but it doesn't matter because policymakers don't actually rely on them to make policy.

That's not true with economics. This is a profession that could stand for some soul-searching, and some scrutiny. Come to think of it, that's not a bad story idea for a business-news outlet. There you go, an Audit Freebie.

The week before Christmas, I wrote a column about the poor state of consumer reporting in the United States. Imagine my reaction, then, as I read a December 23 New York Times article aboard a plane from New York to Oakland, which asserted that passengers are learning to “live” with baggage fees.

I almost choked on my cocktail peanuts. On my previous trip, I’d waited four days for luggage that I had paid $25 to check. The idea that customers are somehow “enamored” (yes, the story actually leads with that adjective) of paying more money for the same lackluster service is simply preposterous.

One may wonder how Times reporter Susan Stellin came up with this nonsensical conclusion about bag fees? You’ll love this. The airlines told her. It’s like asking the lion if the lamb likes to be eaten.

The first person Stellin quotes is Tim Smith, a spokesman for American Airlines, who told her that, “By all accounts it’s gone smoother than we anticipated … Our biggest concern was that we might see people trying to take things that were inappropriate as carry-ons, but it hasn’t been a big problem.” To be fair, Stellin notes that there have been “cries of protest” and “bumps in the road." But her approach to reporting epitomizes one of the worst trends in consumer reporting—emphasizing businesses (read: advertisers) rather than customers, a deplorable practice that David Cay Johnston discussed at length in an article he wrote for CJR last fall.

Stellin’s thesis that “bag fees proved to be less of a headache than many expected” is nothing more than abject pandering to the airlines. In fact, before she gets around to actually quoting a member of the flying public, her piece devolves into a glop of free advertising for the industry, and even specific companies:

Most airlines waive their luggage fees for elite frequent fliers, passengers in first or business class, customers who purchase full-fare economy tickets and those traveling on government or military fares.

In addition, Continental gives customers who use its co-branded Chase credit and debit cards one free checked bag, and that benefit is extended to anyone listed in the same reservation as the card holder who checks in at the same time.

Nowhere, of course, does Stellin mention that choosing one of those options will cost you far more than the bag fee. This kind of feckless, pro-business reporting is what CJR contributor and consumer affairs reporter Trudy Lieberman calls “consumerism,” in which journalists try to teach readers to be “better buyers” rather than identifying problems in the marketplace. To paraphrase a quote Lieberman used in a recent feature for CJR, it’s all about telling individuals how to find the safest and tastiest tomato for themselves, rather than how all tomatoes could be made safe and tasty.

If Stellin had wanted to ask some all-tomatoes questions, she might have gone with: Why haven’t cost savings generated from bag fees been passed on to customers or re-invested in improvements to baggage handling services? Or, why do customers not get automatic refunds on those fees when their bags don’t arrive with their flight?

When Stellin finally gets around to mentioning some actual customers, she interviews a man named Brian Lynch, who says he has gotten used to packing light. Fair enough. But wait! There’s more. “Since he has elite status,” Stellin writes, “Mr. Lynch’s packing light has nothing to do with fees, but with fear. In 2004, his checked luggage was lost 17 times.”

Let’s rewind that and read it one more time in slow motion, shall we. A man whose travel habits have “Nothing. To. Do. With. Fees.” is being quoted in a story that is about fees. So, the only relevant thing about him is that he thinks baggage-handling sucks.

And others agree. At the end of her story, as if reality was peaking out from behind the clouds of lousy reporting, Stellin finally quotes a few ungrateful deviants who—get this—are not so thrilled about paying more for the same crappy service. One guy now forks out hundreds of dollars a trip to ship his heavy travel bags with FedEx. The airline bag fees are far cheaper, but the service is poor and unreliable. A married couple say that, even though they have elite status and can check bags for free, they carry-on because checking them is “a nightmare.” And a spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants informs Stellin that cabin crews have had to work harder to accommodate the uptick in carry-on luggage.

So, basically, everybody that Stellin talked to, except the airlines, complained about bag fees and baggage handling services. Yet the headline of her story is still that people are “living” with the fees and possibly even “enamored” of them.

Hogwash (and you know which word I’d rather use). The only thing that kept me sane after reading Stellin’s bilge was a wonderfully nostalgic column on the Times’s opinion page from Ann Hood, an author who was a T.W.A. flight attendant for eight years. In it, she bemoans the frustrations of holiday travel and writes poignantly about a bygone era “when to fly was to soar. [And] The airlines, and their employees, took pride in how their passengers were treated.”

I know what she means. Journalism used to be more helpful, too.

In response to The Atlantic's controversial New York Times Deathwatch column, the deep journalistic thinkers at 23/6 have formulated the definitive funding model for saving the apparently imperiled life of the Grey Lady.

[h/t Editor & Publisher]

Editor & Publisher provides the transcript of the intellectual discussion that took place earlier this week between Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter. Presented without further comment, because, just...there's really nothing more to add:

O'Reilly: Bernie Goldberg has some advice for you. Should I not go there?

Coulter: Uh, my general policy is to take advice from people who sell MORE books than I do, not fewer books than I do.

O'Reilly: Oh. You take advice from me then.

Coulter: No! No! I said more books.

O'Reilly: Yeah, I sell more books than you do.

Coulter: No you don't.

O'Reilly: Yes I do.

Coulter: No you don't.

O'Reilly: But we don't want to get in an argument about that.