February 2009 Archives

At thirteen, my boy Charles arrived at the conclusion that there was more to life than people have time for. Important things came in such rapid succession that he’d hardly begun to solve a problem before another arose and each day burning questions were crowded out by new ones and disappeared into the
past unanswered.
He began to realize he had some sort of mystic powers. He felt he was able to touch people, to contact certain souls in the next room or miles away or even those who had died. In later years he had this special kind of empathy with Farwell Taylor, an artist friend of his in Mill Valley, and they often experienced a mysterious awareness of each other while in different parts of the world.
Ever since Elsinore and the afternoon at Mr. Rodia’s, Charles had felt a telepathic communication with Lee-Marie. He was sure they were having the same dreams and thoughts and feelings at the same moments in time. So he wasn’t at all surprised when he boldly asked for her number and she answered herself and said immediately, “Oh, Charles, I knew it was you!”
As if it were the most natural thing in the world and they saw each other all the time, he invited her to go to the show at the Largo in Watts on Saturday afternoon. He knew she’d say yes and she did. The rest of my boy’s week was full of anxious calcula-tions. He’d already spent a nickel of his twenty-five-cent weekly allowance and he knew better than to ask for an advance. Admission price, a dime apiece. Ice cream sodas, fif-teen each. He rummaged in Daddy’s vest pocket, stuffed with Chinese lottery tickets and poker chips, found an extra quarter and copped it without a qualm. Total, forty-five cents. Five cents short can be as big a problem as five hundred dollars short, depending on circumstances. He knew he had to cut-rate his way in somehow. The kids told him Stewart Harrington, the Largo Theatre doorman and ticket taker, was beyond bribery, but you could get an usher to sneak you in the back door for a nickel. Then you’d go out front, ask for a return pass, meet your girl at the candy store, pay for the sodas, take her back to the theater and buy her a real ticket and you’re both safe inside. Total, forty-five cents.
All goes well. In the dark theater they sit side by side, full of the love they’ve saved so long, dying to kiss and touch and hold each other but scared of being noticed by Lee-Marie’s sister Patricia sitting close by with their little brother. They think she must be aware of their wandering hands and uncontrollable deep breathing and fraudulent con-centration on the movie screen they’re staring at but neither of them really sees. Charles’ hand, loving carefully, perfectly, slips into her sleeve to touch her naked little breast. Timid fingers feel around her nipple’s areola as it swells, hardens and throbs. His hand slides down and tugs and finally her blouse is pulled free of her skirt. She covers her lap and naked stomach with her coat as her slip is pulled away. His fingers crawl down the edge of her elastic panty band and press pleadingly. Her skin tightens to his touch, she bites her lips together with her teeth. Her stockinged foot caresses his leg. She spreads her thighs. Pains of delight crawl and squirm. Beads of warm perspiration seep into his palm as his fingers smooth the soft, fine little fuzz that grows from her navel down to her damp, hot pubis where a few scattered long hairs roll and twist around his fingers. This child, this woman, this wife! He holds her wrist as it slides inside his unbuttoned fly and his jacket covers her innocent, kneading hand. At last in a single thought together with little or no movement both reach a climax and turn to look into each other’s eyes, slowly nodding their heads as the gradual letdown comes. Their moist fingers untangle. They rise. Lee-Marie leans toward her sister and whispers, “Stay here. I’ll be back.” Together they go out to the unromantic theater parking lot. Without a word they open their mouths to each other, drink each other’s love taste, swallow, and in their magic oneness say at the same time, “I was you!”
“Is that what love is—being one, Charles?”
“I don’t know. But I felt your thoughts. I read your mind.”
“I did too!”
“We’ve always been like this, Lee-Marie.” Charles takes her little hands. “But we can’t do this again until we’re grown and old enough to be married. We’re going to wait.” And she cries, “But I love you, I love you! I’m yours and you’re mine now, tomorrow, for-ever!”
He buttons her blouse beneath the coat draped over her shoulders and they look deep into each other’s eyes, living for a brief moment on an isle of thought that exists until this very day.
Funny thing about love. My boy was thirteen years old and he understood that in the eyes of the world they were only two small children and their passion was against every rule of God and man. “Man” was the powerful and dangerous adults surrounding them.
He stayed away from her for five long years after this happened. Sometimes he’d ring her on the phone, listen to her voice and hang up quickly, or go all the way to Southgate to walk past her house hoping to see her moving about inside the imprisoning walls. Sometimes she waved from a window and he could see her smile and he wondered if there were tears in her eyes, for there sometimes were in his. But he felt she knew his love and it was only a question of time before her family would consent to their courting.

At thirteen, my boy Charles arrived at the conclusion that there was more to life than people have time for. Important things came in such rapid succession that he’d hardly begun to solve a problem before another arose and each day burning questions were crowded out by new ones and disappeared into the
past unanswered.
He began to realize he had some sort of mystic powers. He felt he was able to touch people, to contact certain souls in the next room or miles away or even those who had died. In later years he had this special kind of empathy with Farwell Taylor, an artist friend of his in Mill Valley, and they often experienced a mysterious awareness of each other while in different parts of the world.
Ever since Elsinore and the afternoon at Mr. Rodia’s, Charles had felt a telepathic communication with Lee-Marie. He was sure they were having the same dreams and thoughts and feelings at the same moments in time. So he wasn’t at all surprised when he boldly asked for her number and she answered herself and said immediately, “Oh, Charles, I knew it was you!”
As if it were the most natural thing in the world and they saw each other all the time, he invited her to go to the show at the Largo in Watts on Saturday afternoon. He knew she’d say yes and she did. The rest of my boy’s week was full of anxious calcula-tions. He’d already spent a nickel of his twenty-five-cent weekly allowance and he knew better than to ask for an advance. Admission price, a dime apiece. Ice cream sodas, fif-teen each. He rummaged in Daddy’s vest pocket, stuffed with Chinese lottery tickets and poker chips, found an extra quarter and copped it without a qualm. Total, forty-five cents. Five cents short can be as big a problem as five hundred dollars short, depending on circumstances. He knew he had to cut-rate his way in somehow. The kids told him Stewart Harrington, the Largo Theatre doorman and ticket taker, was beyond bribery, but you could get an usher to sneak you in the back door for a nickel. Then you’d go out front, ask for a return pass, meet your girl at the candy store, pay for the sodas, take her back to the theater and buy her a real ticket and you’re both safe inside. Total, forty-five cents.
All goes well. In the dark theater they sit side by side, full of the love they’ve saved so long, dying to kiss and touch and hold each other but scared of being noticed by Lee-Marie’s sister Patricia sitting close by with their little brother. They think she must be aware of their wandering hands and uncontrollable deep breathing and fraudulent con-centration on the movie screen they’re staring at but neither of them really sees. Charles’ hand, loving carefully, perfectly, slips into her sleeve to touch her naked little breast. Timid fingers feel around her nipple’s areola as it swells, hardens and throbs. His hand slides down and tugs and finally her blouse is pulled free of her skirt. She covers her lap and naked stomach with her coat as her slip is pulled away. His fingers crawl down the edge of her elastic panty band and press pleadingly. Her skin tightens to his touch, she bites her lips together with her teeth. Her stockinged foot caresses his leg. She spreads her thighs. Pains of delight crawl and squirm. Beads of warm perspiration seep into his palm as his fingers smooth the soft, fine little fuzz that grows from her navel down to her damp, hot pubis where a few scattered long hairs roll and twist around his fingers. This child, this woman, this wife! He holds her wrist as it slides inside his unbuttoned fly and his jacket covers her innocent, kneading hand. At last in a single thought together with little or no movement both reach a climax and turn to look into each other’s eyes, slowly nodding their heads as the gradual letdown comes. Their moist fingers untangle. They rise. Lee-Marie leans toward her sister and whispers, “Stay here. I’ll be back.” Together they go out to the unromantic theater parking lot. Without a word they open their mouths to each other, drink each other’s love taste, swallow, and in their magic oneness say at the same time, “I was you!”
“Is that what love is—being one, Charles?”
“I don’t know. But I felt your thoughts. I read your mind.”
“I did too!”
“We’ve always been like this, Lee-Marie.” Charles takes her little hands. “But we can’t do this again until we’re grown and old enough to be married. We’re going to wait.” And she cries, “But I love you, I love you! I’m yours and you’re mine now, tomorrow, for-ever!”
He buttons her blouse beneath the coat draped over her shoulders and they look deep into each other’s eyes, living for a brief moment on an isle of thought that exists until this very day.
Funny thing about love. My boy was thirteen years old and he understood that in the eyes of the world they were only two small children and their passion was against every rule of God and man. “Man” was the powerful and dangerous adults surrounding them.
He stayed away from her for five long years after this happened. Sometimes he’d ring her on the phone, listen to her voice and hang up quickly, or go all the way to Southgate to walk past her house hoping to see her moving about inside the imprisoning walls. Sometimes she waved from a window and he could see her smile and he wondered if there were tears in her eyes, for there sometimes were in his. But he felt she knew his love and it was only a question of time before her family would consent to their courting.

At thirteen, my boy Charles arrived at the conclusion that there was more to life than people have time for. Important things came in such rapid succession that he’d hardly begun to solve a problem before another arose and each day burning questions were crowded out by new ones and disappeared into the
past unanswered.

He began to realize he had some sort of mystic powers. He felt he was able to touch people, to contact certain souls in the next room or miles away or even those who had died. In later years he had this special kind of empathy with Farwell Taylor, an artist friend of his in Mill Valley, and they often experienced a mysterious awareness of each other while in different parts of the world.

Ever since Elsinore and the afternoon at Mr. Rodia’s, Charles had felt a telepathic communication with Lee-Marie. He was sure they were having the same dreams and thoughts and feelings at the same moments in time. So he wasn’t at all surprised when he boldly asked for her number and she answered herself and said immediately, “Oh, Charles, I knew it was you!”
As if it were the most natural thing in the world and they saw each other all the time, he invited her to go to the show at the Largo in Watts on Saturday afternoon. He knew she’d say yes and she did. The rest of my boy’s week was full of anxious calcula-tions. He’d already spent a nickel of his twenty-five-cent weekly allowance and he knew better than to ask for an advance. Admission price, a dime apiece. Ice cream sodas, fif-teen each. He rummaged in Daddy’s vest pocket, stuffed with Chinese lottery tickets and poker chips, found an extra quarter and copped it without a qualm. Total, forty-five cents. Five cents short can be as big a problem as five hundred dollars short, depending on circumstances. He knew he had to cut-rate his way in somehow. The kids told him Stewart Harrington, the Largo Theatre doorman and ticket taker, was beyond bribery, but you could get an usher to sneak you in the back door for a nickel. Then you’d go out front, ask for a return pass, meet your girl at the candy store, pay for the sodas, take her back to the theater and buy her a real ticket and you’re both safe inside. Total, forty-five cents.
All goes well. In the dark theater they sit side by side, full of the love they’ve saved so long, dying to kiss and touch and hold each other but scared of being noticed by Lee-Marie’s sister Patricia sitting close by with their little brother. They think she must be aware of their wandering hands and uncontrollable deep breathing and fraudulent con-centration on the movie screen they’re staring at but neither of them really sees. Charles’ hand, loving carefully, perfectly, slips into her sleeve to touch her naked little breast. Timid fingers feel around her nipple’s areola as it swells, hardens and throbs. His hand slides down and tugs and finally her blouse is pulled free of her skirt. She covers her lap and naked stomach with her coat as her slip is pulled away. His fingers crawl down the edge of her elastic panty band and press pleadingly. Her skin tightens to his touch, she bites her lips together with her teeth. Her stockinged foot caresses his leg. She spreads her thighs. Pains of delight crawl and squirm. Beads of warm perspiration seep into his palm as his fingers smooth the soft, fine little fuzz that grows from her navel down to her damp, hot pubis where a few scattered long hairs roll and twist around his fingers. This child, this woman, this wife! He holds her wrist as it slides inside his unbuttoned fly and his jacket covers her innocent, kneading hand. At last in a single thought together with little or no movement both reach a climax and turn to look into each other’s eyes, slowly nodding their heads as the gradual letdown comes. Their moist fingers untangle. They rise. Lee-Marie leans toward her sister and whispers, “Stay here. I’ll be back.” Together they go out to the unromantic theater parking lot. Without a word they open their mouths to each other, drink each other’s love taste, swallow, and in their magic oneness say at the same time, “I was you!”
“Is that what love is—being one, Charles?”
“I don’t know. But I felt your thoughts. I read your mind.”
“I did too!”
“We’ve always been like this, Lee-Marie.” Charles takes her little hands. “But we can’t do this again until we’re grown and old enough to be married. We’re going to wait.” And she cries, “But I love you, I love you! I’m yours and you’re mine now, tomorrow, for-ever!”
He buttons her blouse beneath the coat draped over her shoulders and they look deep into each other’s eyes, living for a brief moment on an isle of thought that exists until this very day.
Funny thing about love. My boy was thirteen years old and he understood that in the eyes of the world they were only two small children and their passion was against every rule of God and man. “Man” was the powerful and dangerous adults surrounding them.
He stayed away from her for five long years after this happened. Sometimes he’d ring her on the phone, listen to her voice and hang up quickly, or go all the way to Southgate to walk past her house hoping to see her moving about inside the imprisoning walls. Sometimes she waved from a window and he could see her smile and he wondered if there were tears in her eyes, for there sometimes were in his. But he felt she knew his love and it was only a question of time before her family would consent to their courting.

At thirteen, my boy Charles arrived at the conclusion that there was more to life than people have time for. Important things came in such rapid succession that he’d hardly begun to solve a problem before another arose and each day burning questions were crowded out by new ones and disappeared into the past unanswered.

He began to realize he had some sort of mystic powers. He felt he was able to touch people, to contact certain souls in the next room or miles away or even those who had died. In later years he had this special kind of empathy with Farwell Taylor, an artist friend of his in Mill Valley, and they often experienced a mysterious awareness of each other while in different parts of the world.

Ever since Elsinore and the afternoon at Mr. Rodia’s Charles had felt a telepathic communication with Lee-Marie. He was sure they were having the same dreams and thoughts and feelings at the same moments in time. So he wasn’t at all surprised when he boldly asked for her number and she answered herself and said immediately, “Oh, Charles, I knew it was you!”

As if it were the most natural thing in the world and they saw each other all the time, he invited her to go to the show at the Largo in Watts on Saturday afternoon. He knew she’d say yes and she did. The rest of my boy’s week was full of anxious calculations. He’d already spent a nickel of his twenty-five-cent weekly allowance and he knew better than to ask for an advance. Admission price, a dime apiece. Ice cream sodas, fifteen each. He rummaged in Daddy’s vest pocket, stuffed with Chinese lottery tickets and poker chips, found an extra quarter and copped it without a qualm. Total, forty-five cents. Five cents short can be as big a problem as five hundred dollars short, depending on circumstances. He knew he had to cut-rate his way in somehow. The kids told him Stewart Harrington, the Largo Theatre doorman and ticket taker, was beyond bribery, but you could get an usher to sneak you in the back door for a nickel. Then you’d go out front, ask for a return pass, meet your girl at the candy store, pay for the sodas, take her back to the theater and buy her a real ticket and you’re both safe inside. Total, forty-five cents.

At thirteen, my boy Charles arrived at the conclusion that there was more to life than people have time for. Important things came in such rapid succession that he’d hardly begun to solve a problem before another arose and each day burning questions were crowded out by new ones and disappeared into the past unanswered.

He began to realize he had some sort of mystic powers. He felt he was able to touch people, to contact certain souls in the next room or miles away or even those who had died. In later years he had this special kind of empathy with Farwell Taylor, an artist friend of his in Mill Valley, and they often experienced a mysterious awareness of each other while in different parts of the world.

Ever since Elsinore and the afternoon at Mr. Rodia’s Charles had felt a telepathic communication with Lee-Marie. He was sure they were having the same dreams and thoughts and feelings at the same moments in time. So he wasn’t at all surprised when he boldly asked for her number and she answered herself and said immediately, “Oh, Charles, I knew it was you!”

As if it were the most natural thing in the world and they saw each other all the time, he invited her to go to the show at the Largo in Watts on Saturday afternoon. He knew she’d say yes and she did. The rest of my boy’s week was full of anxious calculations. He’d already spent a nickel of his twenty-five-cent weekly allowance and he knew better than to ask for an advance. Admission price, a dime apiece. Ice cream sodas, fifteen each. He rummaged in Daddy’s vest pocket, stuffed with Chinese lottery tickets and poker chips, found an extra quarter and copped it without a qualm. Total, forty-five cents. Five cents short can be as big a problem as five hundred dollars short, depending on circumstances. He knew he had to cut-rate his way in somehow. The kids told him Stewart Harrington, the Largo Theatre doorman and ticket taker, was beyond bribery, but you could get an usher to sneak you in the back door for a nickel. Then you’d go out front, ask for a return pass, meet your girl at the candy store, pay for the sodas, take her back to the theater and buy her a real ticket and you’re both safe inside. Total, forty-five cents.
All goes well. In the dark theater they sit side by side, full of the love they’ve saved so long, dying to kiss and touch and hold each other but scared of being noticed by Lee-Marie’s sister Patricia sitting close by with their little brother. They think she must be aware of their wandering hands and uncontrollable deep breathing and fraudulent concentration on the movie screen they’re staring at but neither of them really sees. Charles’ hand, loving carefully, perfectly, slips into her sleeve to touch her naked little breast. Timid fingers feel around her nipple’s areola as it swells, hardens and throbs. His hand slides down and tugs and finally her blouse is pulled free of her skirt. She covers her lap and naked stomach with her coat as her slip is pulled away. His fingers crawl down the edge of her elastic panty band and press pleadingly. Her skin tightens to his touch, she bites her lips together with her teeth. Her stockinged foot caresses his leg. She spreads her thighs. Pains of delight crawl and squirm. Beads of warm perspiration seep into his palm as his fingers smooth the soft, fine little fuzz that grows from her navel down to her damp, hot pubis where a few scattered long hairs roll and twist around his fingers. This child, this woman, this wife! He holds her wrist as it slides inside his unbuttoned fly and his jacket covers her innocent, kneading hand. At last in a single thought together with little or no movement both reach a climax and turn to look into each other’s eyes, slowly nodding their heads as the gradual letdown comes. Their moist fingers untangle. They rise. Lee-Marie leans toward her sister and whispers, “Stay here. I’ll be back.” Together they go out to the unromantic theater parking lot. Without a word they open their mouths to each other, drink each other’s love taste, swallow, and in their magic oneness say at the same time, “I was you!”

“Is that what love is—being one, Charles?”

“I don’t know. But I felt your thoughts. I read your mind.”

“I did too!”

“We’ve always been like this, Lee-Marie.” Charles takes her little hands. “But we can’t do this again until we’re grown and old enough to be married. We’re going to wait.” And she cries, “But I love you, I love you! I’m yours and you’re mine now, tomorrow, forever!”

He buttons her blouse beneath the coat draped over her shoulders and they look deep into each other’s eyes, living for a brief moment on an isle of thought that exists until this very day.

Funny thing about love. My boy was thirteen years old and he understood that in the eyes of the world they were only two small children and their passion was against every rule of God and man. “Man” was the powerful and dangerous adults surrounding them.

He stayed away from her for five long years after this happened. Sometimes he’d ring her on the phone, listen to her voice and hang up quickly, or go all the way to Southgate to walk past her house hoping to see her moving about inside the imprisoning walls. Sometimes she waved from a window and he could see her smile and he wondered if there were tears in her eyes, for there sometimes were in his. But he felt she knew his love and it was only a question of time before her family would consent to their courting.

Recently I planted something new — something very new, as a matter of fact — and embarked on my most ambitious experiment to date. I planted a potato called “NewLeaf” that has been genetically engineered by the Monsanto corporation to produce its own insecticide. This it does in every cell of every leaf, stem, flower, root, and — this is the unsettling part — every spud.

The scourge of potatoes has always been the Colorado potato beetle, a handsome, voracious insect that can pick a plant clean of its leaves virtually overnight, starving the tubers in the process. Supposedly, any Colorado potato beetle that takes so much as a nibble of a NewLeaf leaf is doomed, its digestive tract pulped, in effect, by the bacterial toxin manufactured in every part of these plants.

I wasn’t at all sure I really wanted the NewLeaf potatoes I’d be digging at the end of the season. In this respect, my experiment in growing them was very different from anything else I’ve ever done in my garden — whether growing apples or tulips or even pot. All of those I’d planted because I really wanted what the plants promised. What I wanted here was to gratify not so much a desire as a curiosity. Do they work? Are these genetically modified potatoes a good idea, either to plant or to eat? If not mine, then whose desire do they gratify?

Certainly my NewLeafs are aptly named. They’re part of a new class of crop plant that is transforming the long, complex, and by now largely invisible food chain that links every one of us to the land. By the time I conducted my experiment, more than fifty million acres of American farmland had already been planted to genetically modified crops, most of it corn, soybeans, cotton, and potatoes that have been engineered either to produce their own pesticide or to withstand herbicides. The not so distant future will, we’re told, bring us potatoes genetically modified to absorb less fat when fried, corn that can withstand drought, lawns that don’t ever have to be mowed, “golden rice” rich in vitamin A, bananas and potatoes that deliver vaccines, tomatoes enhanced with flounder genes (to withstand frost), and cotton that grows in every color of the rainbow.

Certainly my NewLeafs are aptly named. They’re part of a new class of crop plant that is transforming the long, complex, and by now largely invisible food chain that links every one of us to the land. By the time I conducted my experiment, more than fifty million acres of American farmland had already been planted to genetically modified crops, had already been planted to genetically modified crops, had already been planted to genetically modified crops, soybeans, cotton, us potatoes genetically modified to absorb less fat when fried, corn that can withstand drought, lawns that don’t ever have to be mowed, “golden rice” rich in vitamin A, bananas and potatoes that deliver vaccines, tomatoes enhanced with flounder genes (to withstand frost), and cotton that grows in every color of the rainbow.

Welcome to my new blog powered by Movable Type. This is the first post on my blog and was created for me automatically when I finished the installation process. But that is ok, because I will soon be creating posts of my own!

The Washington Post has a great story today looking at how employers are fighting ex-employees' unemployment claims in record numbers. Why? To save a few bucks on their unemployment insurance.

More than one in four unemployment-benefits claims were disputed by bosses in 2007, well above the levels of fifteen or twenty years ago. Here's some background

Under state and federal laws, employees who are fired for misbehavior or quit voluntarily are ineligible for unemployment compensation. When jobless claims are blocked, employers save money because their unemployment insurance rates are based on the amount of the benefits their workers collect.

The Post scores a fantastic anecdote about how Gaylord Hotels, a public hotel chain, was trying to stop an ex-employee's meager $380-a-week benefits. First the sympathy setup:

"I couldn't believe it," said Kenneth M. Brown, who lost his job as a hotel electrician in October...

"A big corporation like that. . . . It was hard enough to be terminated," he said. "But for them to try to take away the unemployment benefits -- I just thought that was heartless."

Then the dropkick:

After a Post reporter turned up at the hearing, the hotel's representative withdrew the appeal and declined to comment. A hotel spokesperson later said the company does not comment on legal matters. Brown will continue to collect benefits, which he, his wife and three young children rely on to make monthly mortgage payments on their Upper Marlboro home.

Boom! SuperPost crusades for justice and scores one for the little guy. Or turns on the lamp and watches the rats scamper. Whatever.

Back to the story: Who knew about this cottage industry that's sprung up?

The cost of unemployment insurance has created an industry of "third-party agents" -- companies that specialize in helping employers deal with the unemployment insurance administration. These firms represent employers in disputes with former employees over jobless benefits.

The Post brings in the expert who has important data:

Wayne Vroman, a researcher at the Urban Institute, has documented the rise of challenges to unemployment claims using the Labor Department data. He found that the proportion of claims challenged on the basis of misconduct has more than doubled, to 16 percent, since the late 1980s. Claims disputed on the grounds that the worker simply quit represent about 10 percent of the otherwise eligible applications.

Even as more employers have alleged employee misconduct, their success rate has stayed relatively stable -- they lose on such issues about two-thirds of the time.

And I'm sure those numbers rose last year and will this year, too.

The story ends with examples of some of the claims employers are making to block unemployment benefits:

With employees and employers as adversaries, it's often difficult to determine the facts of a case, and just as difficult at times to separate misconduct from incompetence, which is not a reason to withhold the benefits.

During a day of hearings this week in Wheaton, human resources personnel sat across tables from former employees, and the discussion often turned to written warnings, company handbooks and who-told-what-to-whom.

A former assistant manager at Ri Ra, an Irish Bar in Bethesda, fended off complaints that, among other things, he'd failed to greet guests at the door and one time poured a beer for himself after hours.

A Verizon technician was charged with, in company terms, "detour and frolic."

And a former salesman at Ethan Allen complained that there was no way he could have made his $35,000 sales quota -- and that's why he quit.

Just a superb job by the Post here.

Martin Wolf of the Financial Times is on fire over the Geithner/Obama bailout plan.

I thought Wolf's lede was over-the-top when I read it; much less so after I wended my way through his entire piece.

Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed? In normal times, this would be a ludicrous question. But these are not normal times. They are times of great danger. Today, the new US administration can disown responsibility for its inheritance; tomorrow, it will own it. Today, it can offer solutions; tomorrow it will have become the problem. Today, it is in control of events; tomorrow, events will take control of it. Doing too little is now far riskier than doing too much. If he fails to act decisively, the president risks being overwhelmed, like his predecessor. The costs to the US and the world of another failed presidency do not bear contemplating.

What is needed? The answer is: focus and ferocity. If Mr Obama does not fix this crisis, all he hopes from his presidency will be lost. If he does, he can reshape the agenda. Hoping for the best is foolish. He should expect the worst and act accordingly.

It's difficult to find a bone to pick with Wolf's arguments, and his urgent tone, like Pearlstein's outrage this morning, is much needed.

All along two contrasting views have been held on what ails the financial system. The first is that this is essentially a panic. The second is that this is a problem of insolvency...

Under the first view, the prices of a defined set of “toxic assets” have been driven below their long-run value and in some cases have become impossible to sell...

Under the second view, a sizeable proportion of financial institutions are insolvent: their assets are, under plausible assumptions, worth less than their liabilities...

Personally, I have little doubt that the second view is correct and, as the world economy deteriorates, will become ever more so.

Nouriel Roubini made this case—that the banks are insolvent and need to be nationalized—yesterday, as well.

Here's Wolf's capper:

But it also seems it has set itself the wrong question. It has not asked what needs to be done to be sure of a solution. It has asked itself, instead, what is the best it can do given three arbitrary, self-imposed constraints: no nationalisation; no losses for bondholders; and no more money from Congress. Yet why does a new administration, confronting a huge crisis, not try to change the terms of debate? This timidity is depressing.

Martin Wolf is no paranoid gold bug or Wall Street-hating firebreather. He's a Davos-going, well-respected economics writer—and a Commander of the British Empire, for crying out loud.

I hope Mr. Obama is reading his FT.

Last night, a panel of distinguished science journalists and one social scientist discussed shifting norms in climate-change coverage at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

“Let’s assume that journalists didn’t do a flawless job covering the climate science debate over the last several decades – that we could’ve done a better job,” said moderator Bud Ward, of the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media. “What did we learn from that experience? And if the debate is now moving somewhat from the hard earth sciences to the policy, the politics, and the energy implications—what have we learned from our coverage of the science that would apply to and improve coverage of the so-called solutions to this challenge?”

Ward posed his question to his fellow panelists, including New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, ABC News reporter Bill Blakemore, former CNN science producer Diane Hawkins-Cox (who was laid off when the network axed its science team in December), and American University professor Matthew Nisbet (who runs the blog, Framing Science). Each one of them had a different and intriguing answer, all of which should be borne in mind by veteran and rookie climate reporters alike.

Blakemore started off, saying that since he began covering the issue four years ago, he has learned an “enormous amount” about the wide variety of psychological reactions to climate change. Though reporters have a responsibility to report both the best- and worst-case scenarios outlined by sound science, “many people are frightened by the fact that we even have to be dealing with information of this severity and reality.” But that is just one response among twenty-five to thirty that Blakemore says he has identified. For journalists and the public alike, he added, no two people “come at this story” with the same “medley” of psychological needs (denial, sense of responsibility, etc.) and scientific knowledge.

Revkin followed Blakemore, saying that he’s learned that journalists should not be seduced by the “story of the moment.” For example, he said, the question is not, “Will President Barack Obama be able to pass a climate bill?” but rather, “Is the atmosphere going to notice?” Likewise, as the climate story progresses from the causes of warming to the strategies for mitigating that warming, journalists must provide much needed reality checks on proposed solutions. The greenhouse gas emissions reductions mandated in California have not yet materialized, Revkin pointed out, and, in his opinion, we are “incapable of making the transition smoothly” to a low-carbon economy with our current energy options. As such, journalists and audiences alike “must have a show-me attitude” when it comes to de-carbonization. (Revkin also noted, as he has previously, his belief that sustainability writ large, rather than climate, is the true “story of our time.”)

Next to speak was Hawkins-Cox, who made the brief but important point that journalists should not shoulder all of the blame for poor public understanding of climate science. One thing we’ve learned, she said, is that there is a need for continuing education among reporters with regard to the science, and that editors and publishers must allow for such edification.

Last, but not least, was Nisbet, who argued that journalists, bloggers, scientists, academics, and the like all share similar climate communication goals. In order to achieve those goals, however, communicators need to develop new narratives and frames that address the “personal significance” of climate science. In particular, Nisbet advised, journalists can frame the response to climate change as a moral imperative, similar to World War II or Great Depression; they can focus on the “economic side” of the story (though they need to avoid hyping so-called “green jobs” and impractical technology solutions); or they can explore the local and regional public health impacts of a warming world. The last frame is a particularly effective one, Nisbet added, because it shifts the geographic focus from the polar regions, which have been the focal point of much the science coverage to date, to the cities and suburbs where people actually live.

Ward closed the discussion with the point that, “Climate change was clearly a hot issue in the news media [over the last few years]—it is no longer. It seems to have fallen off the radar in a lot of newsrooms. I hear people saying the public has ‘climate fatigue.’” The way for journalists to restore some the issue’s prominence, as the panelists uniformly agreed, is to expand climate coverage across the newsroom. “Show me a traditional beat that doesn’t cover an issue that affects the climate or is affected by the climate,” Ward challenged.

For its part, the American Museum of Natural History just launched its first ever blog as part of its current climate change exhibition, which closes August 16. After the panel, I asked the museum’s interim director of public programs, Ellen Silbermann, why the museum had decided to host a panel focused on climate journalism rather than the science itself.

“We always start with a program that creates a foundation of knowledge and comprehension, then move on to other issues,” she wrote in an e-mail. “During the research process, which coincided with the campaign for president, I was disappointed in the lack of discussion regarding climate change - and proposed a panel that would discuss how it is (or isn't) reported. We only scratched the surface last night - I'm still very interested in the ideas that were just touched upon.”

Indeed, climate journalists still have a lot of work ahead of them. As such, I’d love to hear comments from reporters and editors about things they’ve learned in the course of their work that can be applied to improve future coverage.

Yesterday, I wrote a short post about a few all-star science journalism events taking place this week in New York and Chicago. I missed another one, which bears mentioning and, unlike the others, this one is being webcast (is that an acceptable verb?) so anybody can watch.

Tomorrow morning, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars will host a panel discussion titled, "The Future of Science and Environmental Journalism." The plug from the center's Web site reads:

Even as interest in environmental issues skyrockets, the reporters who cover these topics are being laid off left and right. What does the future hold for science and environmental journalism, in print, broadcast, and online? Will the new administration repair the relationship between environmental agencies and reporters? Will the renewed focus on climate change lead to the rebirth of environmental journalism-but outside of the traditional media?

Those are some weighty and tough-to-answer questions. Fortunately, the Wilson Center has assembled a sharp and well-qualified group of panelists to address them. The group includes Peter Dykstra, a Wilson Center public policy scholar and former executive producer for CNN's science team; Seth Borenstein, a science reporter for the Associated Press; Jan Schaffer, the executive director of the Pew Center for Civic Journalism; and Elizabeth Shogren, an environment correspondent for National Public Radio.

Should be a lively discussion. I'll be sitting in the front row of the cyber audience!

Last November, Slate V started hosting a snappy, weekly screencast that served as a “science news roundup for the rest of us.” The three-minute show, Grand Unified Weekly, felt like a science-geek version of VH1’s Pop Up Video, with witty hosts, clever Mac-centric imaging, and quirky environmental, health, and technology stories. But just as the show was beginning to gain attention in iTunes podcasts and blogs (and, oddly enough, just as we began a review of it), Grand Unified Weekly’s test run ran out. The last episode before an unspecified hiatus was posted today.

“Grand Unified Weekly is beautifully produced and laboriously constructed, but it is therefore costly,” says Andy Bowers, Editor of Slate V. “Unfortunately, these are times when costs are of the essence.”

“We love making the show,” says John Pavlus, the Weekly’s creator, writer, and co-host. “I don’t want it to go away, but some hurdles have to be surmounted. We have to figure out how to make the show sustainable.”

The idea behind Grand Unified Weekly was promising. Producing short, downloadable, and energetic clips is an easy way to give busy people a jolt of science news. The show’s abundant pop-culture references and barrage of YouTube videos and Wikipedia pages to visually highlight the news were appropriately geared toward a younger, Internet-savvy audience that is, let’s face it, the least likely to read the original published articles.

“Everything about it just tickles us and we think it fits very well on Slate V,” says Bowers. “It is a unique and very current way of approaching science news … and these are the responses we are getting from the viewers.”

In the ten episodes produced and aired for Slate V, the show covered topics from President Obama’s science policy and funding aspirations to honey bees on cocaine. The only area in which the show faltered was its promise of a “roundup” of the week in science. From among the thousands of science and technology articles pouring through Google News alerts, was the show actually providing an comprehensive roundup of the most newsworthy stories, or just the most unusual ones? Was it giving its viewers the most important science developments, or just the conversation starters?

We wanted more packed into each episode. And we wanted more episodes.

Pavlus explains that while there has been only positive feedback from viewers, the window-popping, image-synchronizing production demanded a big commitment of time and, as Bowers mentioned, money. During the show’s hiatus, Slate V will look at ways to make it more cost-efficient and attract more viewers. Pavlus says part of the rethinking could involve looking for a new host for the show, one that wouldn’t jeopardize the production format.

At a time when media companies are increasingly willing to take risks with online news programs and special features, it is a shame to see a program with such potential and originality go dark. We hope Pavlus can get his Grand Unified Weekly back in the mix.

The New York Times reports:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates suggested today that he was open to allowing the media to photograph the flag-draped coffins of fallen soldiers as their bodies and remains are returned to the United States...

[Gates] said he was ordering a review of the military policy that bars photographers from taking pictures of the return of the coffins, most of which are coming from Iraq and Afghanistan and go through Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. He also set a 'short deadline' for a decision.

Gates's review, apparently, is a "separate undertaking" from the review being conducted by President Obama's "top foreign policy aides," a review the president referenced at Monday night's press conference in response to a question from CNN's Ed Henry as to whether the Obama administration will "overturn that policy, so the American people can see the full human cost of war."

Sometimes it’s better just to keep it simple, and in that spirit I give Fortune credit for profiling several unemployed people and illustrating the story on its cover with a photo of a downsized training-firm executive and his wife.

The photograph is quite arresting. The colors are all grays and browns; the husband is in sharp focus and closer to the camera, with the wife a few feet behind him and slightly out of focus, a bit like a specter. Yes, the symbolism relies on traditional gender roles (she depends on him, get it?), but the point is made. The expressions more or less tell the entire story—his is a combination of determination tempered by depression and worry. She’s just worried.

The introductory text is short and to the point. Here’s a bit of it:

Unlike previous downturns, this one is not confined to the tech or manufacturing sectors. It is the Equal Opportunity Recession, winding its way into every corner of the economy.

To put faces on the numbers, Fortune interviewed dozens of jobless people across the country. They are old and young, rich and poor, from rural Maine and urban California. They are your neighbor or your nephew. Or they are you.

Certainly, this is the story of the economy and will be for some time, so this was not a particularly daring choice for a cover. And certainly, the business press before too long will be struggling to tell the same story in different ways. Its creativity will be put to the test, I’m afraid. This is going to take a while.

But for now, the quotes of ordinary people help illustrate the uniquely isolating experience that a job loss represents as well as the disorientation that comes with it, particularly for people whose identity is closely linked to their work, which describes a lot of us, including this 56-year-old pig farmer:

"I grew up in this business," says Gutz, who was once recognized by the state as a Master Pork Producer. "I don't have anything else I can do. You feel like you've let your wife down, your family, your parents, you know? And you feel like other people are talking about you. It's embarrassing. This was my whole world."

And this 37-year-old mill worker and father of two:

"It hurts," he says, staring out the window at his sons playing in the snow. "You drive by and know you'll probably never drive in again, and that someday it won't be there at all."

That’s bad. Worse is the sense of foreboding Fortune’s subjects clearly feel as they calculate the odds of looking for work in an economy out of Mad Max. Those small humiliations are right around the corner, and these people know it.

Here is a 62-year-old former HR executive:

Career-counseling sessions, she says, are "like 100 unemployed 60-year-old people in a room looking at each other."

Depressing, right? But you gotta get out there, or so we are told.

She recently endured a series of nine interviews with a medical company, only to be told that it had decided not to fill the position.

Then there is the prospect of taking one of those fabulous temp jobs—call-center work, etc.—that the economy produced by the bushel in recent decades as high-paying manufacturing jobs disappeared:

Mackey volunteered for the Obama campaign; then, out of money, she and Corbin [a boyfriend] decided to take temp jobs at Amazon. They lasted only four grueling nights.

Not all the profiles work that well—one about an unemployed Lehman vice president somehow failed to evoke much emotion around here.

But it’s a good, simple story, done well.

After Tom Daschle asked to no longer be considered to become Secretary of Health and Human Services last week, reports indicated that his decision was prompted by a New York Times editorial calling for the former Senate majority leader’s withdrawal. With Daschle gone, it’s unclear whether there’s anybody left in the Obama administration who actually pays attention to newspaper editorials.

Within the last week, both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times wrote editorials calling on Attorney General Eric Holder and the new Justice Department to put Obama’s campaign rhetoric on accountability, transparency, and the rule of law into action. They seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

At issue was their Republican predecessors’ decision to invoke the so-called state secrets privilege in a case brought against a flight plan management company by five men who claim to be victims of the United States’ extraordinary rendition program. On Monday, a Justice Department lawyer walked into a San Francisco court, and under repeated questioning from federal judges maintained that the new Justice Department, despite the change in administration, would continue to claim a state secrets privilege in the case.

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has done solid work explaining what this means, but in some sense, it all started with a 1953 Supreme Court decision. As Gary Wills recounted in a recent New York Review of Books article, United States v. Reynolds began when a group of widows sued the Defense Department over the death of their husbands in a plane that crashed while testing secret avionics. When their lawyer sought the official accident investigation reports, the government claimed the files would reveal sensitive information about the experimental technology, and even refused to share them privately with the case’s judge. Eventually, the high court upheld the government’s right to do so. With key evidence unavailable, the widows settled out of court.

In 2002, the once-secret documents came to light, revealing a cavalcade of equipment failures and piloting errors that led to the men’s deaths, and nothing important—and certainly nothing that couldn’t have been redacted—about the once-secret avionics. So the case that birthed the state secrets doctrine is itself an excellent illustration of one of the doctrine’s greatest dangers: that, on nothing but the government’s word, it can be used to shield information that should have its day in court.

But the Bush administration, in Mohamed v. Jeppesen DataPlan, didn’t merely claim that certain documents that the plaintiffs wanted would jeopardize security. Instead they claimed that the very rendition program at issue was a state secret, and therefore any trial on the matter would be impossible. It was a dangerous precedent to set, one that damages transparency and legal accountability—key tenets of our democracy that the press should hold dear. Here’s how The New York Times explained the Bush approach in its February 5 editorial:

The Bush administration’s claim is that the “very subject matter” of the suit is a state secret. We can understand why the Bush team would not want evidence of illegal detentions and torture presented in court, but the argument is preposterous.

To begin with, there is a growing body of public information about the C.I.A.’s rendition, detention and coercive interrogation programs. More profoundly, the argument that any litigation touching upon foreign intelligence operations is categorically off limits to judicial scrutiny is an affront to the constitutional separation of powers.

The New York Times’s proscription couldn’t have been any clearer:

Mr. Holder should immediately ask the court for time to rethink the government’s position and to file a new brief. Instead of trying to automatically shut down any judicial review of these issues, the Obama administration should propose that judges examine actual documents or other specific evidence for which the state secrets privilege is invoked, and redact them as needed to protect legitimate secrets.

On February 7, The Los Angeles Times also called on the new administration to step back from the brink and work out a way for the trial to proceed:

...[W]e hope the Obama administration lawyers will show up in court Monday and reject the approach of the previous administration, letting the case go forward … the government should not be permitted to kidnap and torture and then simply declare those heinous activities to be "state secrets" and off-limits for discussion.

With the Justice Department’s actions on Monday, the Bush state secrets claim is, now, one and the same as Obama’s claim. Greenwald has presented a variety of reasons why this is, to put it mildly, odd. Past positions and statements from administration officials—including a newly-minted top Justice official and vice-president Biden, as well as Obama’s campaign Web site—make this policy look like a clear reversal. And Obama’s early executive order on detention programs essentially outlawed the program he’s now claiming is a state secret.

On Wednesday, after being rebuffed, The New York Times turned in a new editorial, calling the administration’s decision “indefensible.” The Los Angeles Times has not yet re-editorialized, but if they do, they could go a step further and encourage Congress to examine legislation (once co-sponsored by then-Senator Biden) that would limit broad applications of the state secrets privilege, by statute, no matter who the president is.

It’s a shame that Obama didn’t follow the course outlined in the earlier editorials. But it’s also too bad that no reporter thought to ask the President about his administration’s action at his debut press conference on Monday night. And the White House, presumably due to the President’s Florida trip, skipped Tuesday’s briefing with Robert Gibbs.

Before Monday’s events fade too far away, the press must get a high profile member of the administration on the record about this decision, in a way that probes and exposes the dangerous logic underlaying it. The anonymous sources quoted by The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder just won't cut it. Luckily, today’s press conference presents a chance to do better.

It’s not often that the media pay much attention to different versions of a bill when they emerge from the House and Senate and head toward a conference committee. But given the intense interest in health care this year, and the talk coming from the administration and others about the health care provisions embedded deep in the stimulus package, the press could do itself proud by keeping track of the changes and telling their audiences what the differences between the Senate and House versions mean.

The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal are starting to expose some of the differences relating to health information technology and stimulus spending for research that will tell which medical tests and treatments really work. The president wants every American to have an electronic medical record by 2014, and has said that science will again be the prime determinant of which medical treatments really work. Of course, all this is easier said than done. In the Post’s illuminating story, we learn that special interest lobbyists and their coalitions are at it again. What a surprise!

At issue is whether doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies will be allowed to profit from marketing patients’ medical records to drug companies without having to notify the patients. Also at issue is whether providers must obtain patient consent before using medical information for fundraising purposes. Suppose you had heart bypass surgery at Hospital A, and had a good outcome. The hospital development office just might want to know about that, in order to hit you up for donations down the road. The House bill would mandate such consent; the Senate bill would not. “The Senate really did address many of our concerns,” said Mary Grealy, president of the influential Healthcare Leadership Council, a group of hospitals, health plans, drug companies, and device makers.

The Wall Street Journal took aim at the bills’ differing stances on medical effectiveness reviews. Limiting tests and treatments to those that are effective and relatively inexpensive is crucial to controlling the country’s health care spending—and, in a sense, is the key to successful reform. The House bill assigns $700 million for health care “comparative effectiveness research.” The Senate version uses the words “comparative, clinical effectiveness.” Experts say there’s a big difference.

Comparative effectiveness means looking at the costs and benefits, so that if two drugs are equally effective, but one costs less, the cheaper drug should be recommended. The Journal reports that the industry “won a battle to add the word ‘clinical’ in describing the research” that the stimulus spending will fund. Comparative, clinical effectiveness implies that only efficacy should be considered, not the price of the treatment. So you can see why the language of the bills is contentious. It directly impacts the profits made by sellers of these technologies.

Although the differences that deal with privacy and which drugs doctors can use are sexier to write about, and perhaps pack more of an outrage factor, there are important differences when it comes to getting more people covered. Remember—increasing coverage was one of the president’s goals during the campaign. The House was more obliging to the president. By providing 100 percent matching funds, the House bill would encourage states to add people who have lost their jobs in the recession to their Medicaid rolls. Those who are out of work could have Medicaid coverage until 2011, without being subjected to the typical rules that require very low incomes and very few assets. This provision was stripped from the Senate version.

Over the last few weeks there’s been a lot of Washington chatter about using COBRA extensions to keep more people insured. It all sounded so logical—until the special interests weighed in. When employees leave a job, they are usually entitled to 18 months worth of COBRA benefits: they can stay on their employer’s policy, but must pay all the premiums themselves, plus a two percent administrative fee. The House bill also called for the government to subsidize people’s COBRA coverage during the first year of their unemployment. The subsidy would pay 65 percent of the premium costs. Whether a 65 percent subsidy is large enough to encourage out-of-work people who have no income to continue with COBRA may be problematic in the first place, as Campaign Desk pointed out recently. A trade bill in 2002 called for a 65 percent subsidy for those displaced from their jobs. But, even at that level, only 12 to 15 percent of those eligible took it. Nevertheless, the Senate bill calls for a mere 50 percent subsidy. The advocacy group Families USA found (pdf) that with a 50 percent subsidy, COBRA coverage would cost about 42 percent of the average family’s unemployment income.

The House bill allows people age 55 or older, or people who have been at the same job for ten years or more, to continue on COBRA at their own expense until they became eligible for Medicare. Some health experts saw this as a way to begin extending guaranteed coverage to those older people who weren’t yet 65, with the eventual goal of moving to a Medicare for All solution for reform. (Sen. Max Baucus, for instance, has proposed letting people age 55 to 64 buy into Medicare.) Perhaps opponents of this solution saw that too.

Employers objected to expanding COBRA, for which they’ve never had much love, arguing that keeping track of former employees was an “administrative burden,” and that costs would increase as these ex-workers got older and sicker, causing the premiums these companies pay for both current and former workers to rise.

The changes in the Senate version of the stimulus package show that health reform may have a tough time making it to the finish line. Journalists need to keep a sharp eye on the race.

Michelle Obama is on the cover of the March issue of Vogue which, of course, generates its own coverage (in part, I guess, because Obama is only the second American First Lady to appear on Vogue's cover; Hillary Clinton was the first, in 1998 ). André Leon Talley, who wrote the accompanying Vogue article, explains at one point that "being the focus of [Michelle Obama's] reassuring gaze is akin to hearing a chord from John Coltrane's A Love Supreme. Or maybe Ralph Vaughan Williams's The Lark Ascending: All is well and right and real."

Another Talley observation: "First Ladies have always been held like specimens under a media microscope."

Related headline: "Michelle Obama Looks Awkward On Her Vogue Cover."

Ken Auletta makes some sharp comments on the perilous state of the news industry in a Q&A with The Boston Phoenix.

Q. What about the broader question of paying for news?

A. I have two views. One is, the people who run newspapers have to start with the assumption that they’ve got to change, and that an online newspaper is different from a print newspaper. You gotta go in with an attitude, not of “I’m going to protect my turf,” but of “I’m going to change my turf to conform to this new medium that demands interactivity, which I’m not used to.” If they don’t do that--if they don’t say, “What are we doing wrong? How do we change?”--I think they’ll be in trouble.

But then the question is, are there things that the web culture has to get? The problem is, when you put stuff out on the web for free, and you can link to it, yes, it grants you more exposure for your stories. Many more people will see it, and maybe you can sell some advertising off it. But then there’s a basic question: if many more people are seeing it--as Jeff Jarvis for instance argues in his new book, What Would Google Do--and you can monetize it by selling ads off it, are the ads you’re going to sell going to make a profound difference?

I think that's right. The give-news-away-free model just is not going to get newspapers through the next ten years. And he makes some excellent points here:

The question for newspapers is, is there some way--be it micropayments, subscriptions, or something else--to make money from your content? I mean, I write a book, I’m not going to give it out. That’s how I live! Jeff Jarvis, who believes in free, got paid in advance for his book. Content people should be paid. They’re not going to work for nothing. A musician’s not going to work for nothing.

And if you say, “We’ll do it all through advertising”--well, what if advertising doesn’t cover the cost? Does Facebook make money? Does YouTube make money? Neither of them makes money. They have a great audience, great traffic, but don’t make money. You can build it, and they may not come; in this case, the money may not come. Now, maybe they will: they’re unbelievable sites, and they provide a great service to people. But they’re not making money. And they’re businesses.

(hat tip: Romenesko)

Brian Stelter reports in today's New York Times that an NBC News crew and a Rwandan prosecutor, as part of an NBC News investigation of possible war criminals, recently confronted a Rwandan professor working at a Maryland college "with charges that he had participated in that country's genocide in 1994," allegations the professor denies.

These investigations have raised concerns from The Department of Homeland Security ("a program of this kind cold negatively impact law enforcement's ability to investigate"), the executive director of Human Rights Watch, who phoned NBC Universal's general counsel (“I was worried that a journalist was making false accusations, due to some extent to his close collaboration with the Rwandan government”) and a Poynter ethics expert (“As journalists, we struggle to keep an arm’s length from all sorts of officials, whether they’re cops or prosecutors or diplomats").

While Stelter writes that "NBC is likely to bristle at any comparisons between the current investigation and the series of sex predator stings that it conducted in the last few years," based on Stelter's article, it's hard not to see shades of "To Catch a Predator" in this current NBC effort.

Douglas McCollam wrote a thorough critique of NBC News's "Predator" series for CJR two years ago.

Steven Pearlstein has an excellent column today ripping Wall Street for still not getting it. He leads with six columns dripping with contempt for the "Titans of Finance" acting like "spoiled, petulant children."

These guys won't be happy until the government agrees to relieve them of every last one of their lousy loans and investments at inflated prices, recapitalize every major bank and brokerage and insurance company on sweetheart terms and restore them to the glory days, so they can once again earn inflated profits and obscene pay packages by screwing over their customers and their shareholders.

For the Wall Street wise guys, bailout politics is just another game to be played, another market to be manipulated, another set of risks to be arbitraged.

Righteous indignation! More, please.

The rest of the column is great, too. Pearlstein profiles a community bank called Citizens South in Gastonia, North Carolina, that's a model for what banking should be. It didn't make crazy loans during the bubble and so its rate of non-performance is less than 0.5 percent. Its CEO makes less than $500,000. And he has found a plan, "ingenious" in Pearlstein's words, to use the government TARP money.

And that got Price to thinking: What if Citizens were to use its federal bailout money to offer below-market mortgage rates with no closing costs to consumers who would buy a house, or a house lot, from builders and developers who had borrowed money from Citizens?...

The builders and developers win by having a tool to help move their unsold inventory. The consumer wins by getting a cut-rate loan. And Citizens wins because it lowers the risk that it will have to write off even more of its commercial loans while taking a modest step to help stimulate the local economy.

And Pearlstein's kicker is a swift, well, kick in the pants to the Wall Street honchos who'll be on the hot seat today in Congress:

So here's a question the House Financial Services Committee might put to the Titans of Finance: How is it that Kim Price, a community banker with an undergraduate degree from Appalachian State University, a tiny executive staff and a pay package that you would consider insulting, somehow managed to come up with a more creative use for his government bailout money than any of you?

Right. And the big bankers moan about the compensation caps that will keep them from hanging on to their "talent"—you know, the same folks who ruined their companies and wrecked the economy.

This is just a superbly reported and written business column—with feeling!

Notes from No Man’s Land By Eula Biss | Graywolf Press | 244 pages, $15

"The day I moved into my first apartment, I discovered that the reason the kitchen had looked so big was that there was no refrigerator," Eula Biss writes in “Goodbye to All That,” an essay in her fine new collection, Notes from No Man's Land. What the young, just-moved-to-New-York Biss may have realized is that even the obvious is often not at all obvious; things look great, until you notice what’s missing. What the mature author culls from that earlier observation is that there are reasons we don't see the missing refrigerator, particularly when it comes to race.

Working diligently to parse those reasons, Biss poses a series of questions. How it is that a younger white generation might believe that racism has been conquered? What is implied by an educational mandate to not only teach students but to make them into "better people"? What does it mean to be white? Her argument, filtering into each essay, is that our country discusses race too predictably—we've learned how to tell the story, but it doesn't mean that's how it happened. Biss's technique, which is infuriating but effective, is to interweave her personal experiences with historical narrative and reportage to create a more finely striated version of that story.

A former journalist who teaches nonfiction writing at Northwestern, Biss is at her strongest when she delves into history, working the microfilm machine to construct her tale. In her introductory essay, she recounts the severe distaste many Americans felt for the first telephone poles to go up in their neighborhoods. By 1889, The New York Times was reporting a veritable anti-telephone-pole crusade: "Wherever telephone companies were erecting poles, home owners and business owners were sawing them down or defending their sidewalks with rifles." But once the poles were in place—wending their way across the American landscape and bringing, as Thomas Edison declared, "the human family in closer touch"—we the people used them as the means to a different end. "In 1898," the author writes, "in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi, a black man was hanged from a telephone pole. And in Weir City, Kansas. And in Brookhaven, Mississippi. And in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where the hanged man was riddled with bullets."

Biss enumerates twenty-two telephone-pole lynchings in that first short essay. "The poles, of course, were not to blame,” she writes. “It was only coincidence that they became convenient as gallows, because they were tall and straight, with a crossbar, and because they stood in public places. And it was only coincidence that the telephone poles so closely resembled crucifixes." This historical nugget, which Biss masterfully juxtaposes against the growth of national interconnectedness, conveys a terrifying truth: whatever we claim to remember, there are portions of our history that we have forgotten. It is, in effect, the missing refrigerator in the kitchen.

There are many other missing or unspoken “Notes from No Man’s Land.” (This phrase, both the title of the collection and of a longer essay that looks to Laura Ingalls Wilder and the pioneers to decipher the process of gentrification in Chicago, echoes throughout the book.) In San Diego, where Biss worked for an African-American community paper, the Voice and Viewpoint, there’s the story of a black woman with a ten-year-old felony conviction for discharging a gun with gross negligence. Despite having paid for her crime years before with a brief, incident-free probation, Eve Johnson's attempts to gain custody of her grandchildren were consistently thwarted by the system. "The gun in Ms. Johnson’s story was functioning, again and again, as an excuse for the inexcusable,” recalls Biss. Scarcely more excusable was the “gag order” from the presiding judge warning Johnson not to talk to the paper.

Of course, the observations that Biss makes are informed by her own story. Perspective is everything, and she spends a lot of time discussing her position as a white woman: its advantages and disadvantages, the assumptions it invites, the identity crises it provokes. In the balance between nature and nurture, Biss’s own complicated identity tilts toward the latter. Her mother, who for a time followed the traditions of the West African Yoruba, took the author and her siblings to religious festivities called bembés, where they “watched the drummers sweat” and sang “in a language we did not understand.” Her extended family, meanwhile, is an enviable model of diversity. Quoting Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote, “I remember the very day that I became colored,” Biss longs for a more malleable sense of self. “Perhaps my inability to pass is part of why I feel so trapped within my identity as a white woman," she concedes. "That identity does not feel chosen by me as much as it feels grudgingly defaulted to.”

Nothing if not self-aware, Biss does lay claim to some measure of difference from her demographic peers. She takes a distinct pride in loving “the New York of Harlem and Inwood and Washington Heights,” and notes in an aside that the word “gentrification” agitates her husband because it is used negatively by the very people—artists, students, and so forth—that benefit from it. Still, despite this desire to differentiate herself from other white folks who may be less preoccupied by how the other half lives, she understands that fairly or not, it is nature, and not nurture, that often plays the bigger part in defining what a person is.

And that, ultimately, is why Biss can write this book. Traversing an isthmus between white America and non-white America, she notes her own, ample opportunities, yet refuses to relinquish the struggle for racial identity to those that have traditionally been more oppressed. This willingness to walk back and forth on that thin strip of land is both her vulnerability and her greatest strength.

The concluding essay in the collection is called “All Apologies.” It’s a series of apologies (and non-apologies) issued throughout history: the Hartford Courant apologized for having accepted advertisements for slaves; Korean War veteran Ed Daily apologized for the massacre in the village of No Gun Ri, even though he hadn't himself participated; F.W. de Klerk apologized for apartheid; Reagan signed a bill apologizing to Japanese Americans for their internment during World War II, but resisted apology all the same, calling it a "mistake." At the end of the essay, Biss writes, “I apologize for slavery.” It’s less an admission of wrongdoing than a classic apologia—a formal defense, and implicit examination, of her own conduct, which is what underpins this entire book. The reader is once again reminded of those telephone poles at the turn of the twentieth century, which served as both gallows and technological thruway. That nexus implicates all of us, and Biss puts it in plain view: for a moment, at least, we see even what is unseen.

Few stories are as complex and cumbersome as the continuing friction in the Middle East. Modern history mixes with ancient history; boundaries are drawn and redrawn. There is no shortage of opinion or misinformation. Accusations of media bias abound. Yesterday's elections in Israel promise yet another dose of upheaval in the region, and additional uncertainty for Israel's neighbors.

For a dose of clarity, CJR spoke with Sydney Morning Herald foreign correspondent Paul McGeough, who has covered the region for twenty years, last reporting from Gaza in early 2007. McGeough is also the author of Kill Khalid, a book about Hamas, Palestine, and Israel, pegged to the story of the Mossad's attempted assassination of Hamas leader Khalid Mishal in 1997. The book will be published on March 24 by The New Press. McGeough spoke to CJR by phone from his home in Sydney.

Katia Bachko: Tell me about your background in covering the Middle East.

Paul McGeough: I've been a chief foreign correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald since the early 1990s. My first assignment as a foreign correspondent was to cover the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. I've covered every major crisis since then. I spend about six months a year in the region, and I've been on the ground for all key conflicts in the Middle East since then. I was in New York for 9/11 and since then I've pursued the broader post-9/11 story in Iraq and Afghanistan and in the broader Middle East generally.

KB: Can you describe the situation on the ground the last time you were in Gaza?

PM: When I was there last, described in the book as the “civil war of mid-2007,” Hamas was in full control of Gaza. Fatah had been routed and was almost underground. You could find people to talk to on behalf of Fatah, but all of their key leadership figures had fled. It was exceptionally grim; Gaza had been under economic siege and physical siege for more than a year at that stage. People were trying to run their cars on cooking oil. Men were desperate for cigarettes. There were medical issues; some people could get out to hospitals to Israel and Egypt for treatment, but a lot of them weren't allowed to move out of the Strip. One of the chapters in the book talks about how most of the women of Gaza who followed the Arab tradition of hoarding gold from their time had sold all of their gold.

KB: How drastic a change was that from the time before the siege?

PM: Things have been grim in Gaza for some time, but there are always variations on how grim it is. The factories that used to be able to operate by bringing in their raw produce, creating garments and shoes, other products for sale in Israel and elsewhere in the region were shutting down. Eighty-plus percent of them could not function. There was no guarantee of electricity. So it was exceptionally grim in terms of the ability of households to have any sort of cash income to sustain themselves.

KB: Reading about the current conflict in Gaza, it’s been difficult to understand the role of Hamas as an organization. Can you give us some sense of its role in Palestinian society?

PM: A hiatus in a crisis like this tends to get locked into broad scripts written by the various players. Now, if you take a helicopter view of the Middle East crisis, you see Hamas in a different light. People keep repeating that Hamas’s charter is opposed to the existence of Israel. Yes it is, but Hamas has not stood by its charter for the best part of the last ten years. Hamas has recognized the Oslo peace process, which it said it would oppose. It has taken part in democratic elections, which it has won. It has de facto recognized the two-state solution by seeking to be elected as the government of the Palestinian Authority. It has not struck outside historic Palestine; it never has. So to dismiss it as a terrorist group that has to be stamped out misses entirely the point of its position in Palestinian society.

Again, take the helicopter view of what’s happened in the Middle East since 1948, with the setting up of the state of Israel. In 1967, the Israelis could have negotiated with King Hussein of Jordan in the aftermath of the Six-Day War; they chose not to. Because they chose not to, Yasser Arafat and the Fatah movement and the PLO all got a huge head of steam [built] up. And because they weren’t negotiated with in a way that gave Palestinians an identifiable outcome, they fell by the way.

And now you have Hamas. Hamas came into being and thrived because there was no breakthrough. There was nothing in the land-for-peace basis—a foundation of the Oslo process—there was nothing in that for the Palestinians. They were negotiating on the basis of land for peace when their land was being consumed by Israeli settlements. So now Hamas is there, and if you take Hamas out of the equation, God knows what you get in its place.

KB: Is is accurate to say that Fatah wants Hamas dismantled as a part of this current conflict?

PM: That Fatah wants to have Hamas taken out? Absolutely. I think if you look at the history of the last twenty years of Palestinian affairs, Fatah is the faction that consumed itself. It thrived on corruption. It represented so much of what is bad about the exercise of power in Arab societies. It wasn’t democratic; it was bullying. It was venal. And Palestinians—who, you would have to say, are one of most democratically inclined Arab societies in the region—could see that. They could see that you didn’t get a job unless your family was Fatah. You didn’t get the house. You didn’t get the car. You didn’t get your snout in the trough unless you were Fatah.

It was so corrupt that Hamas was able to run on the ticket of anti-corruption, working amongst the grassroots of Palestinian society, delivering at a grassroots level, and earning political credibility not just in terms of handing stuff out, but also in terms of being disciplined, being controlled, being articulate, and standing up, and being seen to stand up for Palestinians when nobody else would.

KB: How should we reconcile Hamas as a force for change with the organization’s history of violence.

PM: Let’s not be churlish about this, call it terrorism. Rather than describe Hamas as a terrorist group, I would say they’re a group that uses terror as a weapon and I think there’s a significant difference there. You’ll find a lot of Israeli commentators, amongst others, can understand and make in their writing. There is a difference there.

But the Palestinian attitude to terror as a weapon is dictated by their sense of the ability to achieve a settlement. If they think there’s a chance that there can be a negotiated settlement, as they did in the aftermath of the Oslo accords in the mid-1990s, their view of violence falls. But it’s when they see their land being taken, when they see their water resources being consumed, when they see Gaza being converted into a prison, they believe in violence. It’s a part of the world where all sides are very familiar with the notion of revenge and vengeance.

One of the kernel issues in the Gaza crisis at the moment is the fact that Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal, is a prisoner of Hamas in Gaza. Palestinians laugh when they read or hear that Israel is going to war for one man when there are 11,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails. They understand they’re at war. Now how that plays out after this latest round in Gaza, we have yet to see, in terms of public and Palestinian opinion and attitudes to Hamas. They’re going to make a call on whether Hamas overplayed its hand. They’re going to make calls about the standing of Hamas vis-a-vis the standing of Hezbollah after the war in Lebanon in 2006. And that will feed into the political mix of the region.

KB: How should journalists balance these two aspects of the organization to help readers understand?

PM: It’s very difficult, in the helter-skelter, daily evolution of a story like this, to pull in all the relevant bits. And it’s very hard to pull them in particularly, as I said, when the parameters of the narrative are being constructed by the key players, be it the Palestinian leadership, be it the Israeli leadership, be it the regional heavyweights like Egypt, or be it Washington for that matter.

So what you have to be able to do is take the eyes of the big-picture story and be able to infer it, use them as counterpoints in writing. If you tell a foreign readership that this poor soldier is being held in Gaza and he’s been held for years, isn’t this shocking? It is shocking. But is it more or less shocking than the plight or circumstances of the 11,000 Palestinians who are being held in Israeli prisons?

KB: So, how should they describe those individuals? Are they civilian members of Hamas or militants?

PM: Half the elected Hamas government is in prison. So there are Hamas prisoners, there are Hamas sympathizers, there are Hamas militants. You name it, there is every range of them. They’re not all entirely Hamas, but there is a good number of Hamas representatives of the other Palestinian factions and also of Fatah. But every time Israel feels that it needs to make a gesture to the Fatah leadership, what they do is they release a handful of Fatah prisoners—never Hamas prisoners.

KB: My sense has been that everyone who is identified as a member of Hamas is automatically categorized as a member of the militant arm of the organization, as opposed to people who might be part of the public service branch.

PM: That’s very true. In the writing of the narrative, the objective of the spin on all sides is to cast the other side in simple, bad terms. Make it all black, make it all white, try to airbrush out the gray. Now there’s a lot of gray that has to be dealt with and has to be considered.

Look at some of the names of the people who before and after the recent Gaza crisis have said that Hamas has to be allowed a seat at the table, Hamas had to be brought into the negotiating process. You’re talking about people like Efraim Halevy, former head of Mossad. Not a fly-by-night or a shallow man. He makes a very clear and careful distinction between Hamas as national patriots, as opposed to an Al Qaeda-type terrorist group. People like Tony Blair this week, people like Colin Powell before this whole crisis, people like Prince prince Turki Al-Faisal, former head of Saudi intelligence, who is not a lightweight in the region.

These are people, and I’m giving you names from all sides there, who have weight and reputation and savvy in their sense of what’s happening on the ground or what needs to happen. But one of the things that has happened in the Middle East for the last sixty years is that people have been talking about what has to happen, and nobody has ever made it happen.

KB: What is the conversation like in Australia?

PM: It varies. There is a range of opinion and levels of sympathy for Hamas or for Israel. There’s an attempt to tell both sides of the story. I’ve had the luxury of writing a book and immersing myself in the twenty years of Hamas’s existence. So for me, I’ve been able to come to it with this broad sense of the history as opposed to the daily cut and thrust. And reporters and commentators, a lot of them writing about it these days get locked into that bigger narrative that is being crafted around them and, in quite in a deliberate way, for them.

KB: Talk about what it’s like to report in Gaza. What are the challenges for a reporter working there?

PM: I work with an interpreter, as do most of my colleagues. Gaza is, as a journalist, a rare place. Just because, because it’s so small, it’s very difficult for you not to find the people you want. It’s an easy patch to work for the journalists. People can’t leave. If you go to their office or you go to their home, chances are you’re going to find them. Because they’re all locked in, they’re happy to talk at length about their circumstances and the circumstances of the Palestinian people and what it means. There’s an incredible resilience of the people, and you would have to say that's one of the traits of the Palestinian people that we have seen over and over. I mean, look at what they have been through in sixty years and they’re still refusing to fall over.

There’s a quote in the book from Yasser Arafat before he died, a hundred years after the Balfour conference. It was a few weeks before he died, Arafat told a reporter, “One-hundred-seven years after the founding of the global Zionist movement at the Balfour conference, Israel has failed to wipe us out. We are here, in Palestine, facing them.” And then he added, and this is the line that would have had great resonance in the U.S., he said, “We are not red Indians.” And that’s what you see in Gaza, you see it in the daily lives, the daily existence of the people. They are still there, despite decades of privation. And they’re not going anywhere. Someday, they’re going to have to be reckoned with. That’s what their history says. One of the lines that many Israeli commentators use is that Israel is still fighting the seventh day of the Six-Day War, with good reason.

KB: I wanted to talk a little bit about the challenge journalists face when reporting on conditions in international affairs that are outside the definitions that are set forward by the governments where their newspapers are located. For example, the American government labels Hamas as a terrorist organization. Do you think it’s a challenge for journalists to throw off those labels that governments put on things and re-examine them, or do you think that it’s something they can’t overcome?

PM: Oh, they can, and they have to. Most journalists would tell you that it’s one of their objectives on a daily basis, to attempt to explain the story behind, the story that illuminates the policy position by various governments. Recently it has been very hard in some ways to do that, because you couldn’t get into Gaza. There was a deliberate decision to prevent the media from going into Gaza during the war. Reporters always need to be looking at the labels that politicians and policymakers use, and to be assessing them to see whether they are the only labels. Invariably, you hear of Mahmoud Abbas, the head of the Palestinian Authority, the Fatah leader, being described as a moderate. But he is a moderate in terms of what? He is a moderate in terms of the militants in Hamas, but in the eyes of the Palestinian people?

You have to come back to how Palestinians perceive his moderation, and how Palestinians perceive the militancy of Hamas. If you inject some of that into a commentary or an analysis piece, you leave your readers with a different sense. To simply state that somebody is a moderate or somebody is a militant, and expect the reader to use that as the sole description or descriptor of an individual or an organization, doesn’t deliver all that could be delivered. You’re talking about Hamas? Hamas are militants, yes, they are militants who appealed to Palestinians at an election that was supervised by Western observers and deemed to be fair, and Palestinians chose the militants not necessarily because of their militancy, but because of their belief in them on a whole range of issues. And then you have to ask, “if they’re militants, if they are terrorists, how did they get to be allowed to contest an election? Who let them contest an election?” Israelis allowed them to contest the election, Americans allowed them to contest the election, Fatah allowed them to contest the election.

Right up until that first election that Hamas contested in 2006, Hamas had been saying, “We represent about fifty percent of Palestinian public opinion, therefore we should be accorded that level of representation in various Palestinian forums.” And everyone laughed, and said no, that’s not true, that’s not right, and so they allowed them to contest the election. Even though they had refused to renounce violence. There’s not too many militant or nationalist or liberation groups that have been allowed to contest elections without renouncing violence. They were allowed to do so, and they won the election. That has to count for something in your assessment in where Hamas stands in Palestinian affairs, and in the region.

KB: In your reading, have you noticed any mistakes or shortcuts that reporters or publications have taken that you feel are steering the story in a wrong direction?

PM: You see it, and, look, my stance that I try to convey to you is that I don’t see it as a deliberate thing, I see it as one of the pitfalls of the cut and thrust of the daily story. You simply see that things are not being as fully explained as they might be. And some people fall into the black-and-white delineation without trying to grapple with the extensive grey in the whole crisis.

KB: Can you think of a handful of points that you wish were reiterated even in these kinds of from-the-frontlines reports, points that would sort of indicate to readers a greater subtlety in the situation?

PM: Well, the one thing that is not grappled with as often as it should be, and it's one of the gravest elements of the story from the Palestinian perspective, is the whole Fatah-Hamas conflict. It is reduced simply to moderates versus militants. How it plays out on the ground in the daily lives of Palestinians and what it means is something that needs to be articulated more clearly, much more clearly.

The history is there. The people are there to talk about it, and I’ve got a whole chapter on it. And to go and talk to not just the Palestinians about it but to talk to Palestinians, to talk to the Americans, to talk to the Israelis about what actually happened there, and whether it was a spontaneous conflict on the ground in Gaza, or whether it was something that was driven by Washington, by Israel, [or] by Egypt (who armed and trained the Fatah). The Fatah decided and said, ‘go get them!’ and were shocked to discover that they were defeated in less than a week. That week of violence is an amazing microcosm to sort of look at the Middle East crisis, and where it’s at, and who all the different players are, and what they have been trying to get out of it, and the same for all of their missions and objectives.

KB: My sense is that it’s very hard to write about Hamas and Gaza and not be accused of ignoring Hamas’s history of violence. As a journalist who has worked to expand the public's understanding of the region, how do you respond to that criticism?

PM: The Middle East crisis is a war, and war is a measure of failure, a point in human relations beyond which both sides have the capacity to do terrible things. That is the context in which, to use a cliché of the region, Hamas has become a fact on the ground—by dint of its own resourcefulness and determination as much as by the actions of others. To examine the movement is not to endorse its aims or tactics. It is a perfectly
reasonable and—I would argue—necessary role for journalists and authors to dig into, to explore and explain the internal terrain of such an organization. To do so certainly does not suggest to me either anti-Semitism or ignoring the role of violence and terror in the Hamas modus operandi.

To my mind, when an organization like this is at the crossroads of a conflict that hadsstraddled generations and drawn in superpowers, it is incumbent on us to attempt to understand exactly how it works and how it is changing or evolving—if in fact it is. In this context, I don’t see anyone in the media failing to observe or to examine the resort to violence by Hamas, either in its history or its present.

For a variety of voices on Gaza, Hamas, and the Middle East, check out Paul McGeough's recommendations for newspapers, books, and blogs about the region.

For readers interested in a diverse media diet of news about Gaza, Sydney Morning Herald correspondent Paul McGeough offers his selection of papers, books, and blogs that can provide the necessary background and variety of voices and perspectives for understanding the region. To read Katia Bachko's interview with McGeough, click here.

Newspapers

Haaretz

Jerusalem Post

Books

The Palestinian Hamas: Vision, Violence and Coexistence by Shaul Mishal & Avraham Sela

Hamas: A History From Within by Azzam Tamimi

Inside Hamas: The Untold Story of the Militant Islamic Movement by Zaki Chehab

HAMAS: Political Thought and Practice by Khaled Hroub

HAMAS: Politics, Charity and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad by Matthew Levitt

Blogs

Abu Aardvark

American Footprints

Anthony Loewenstein

Aqoul

Arab Media & Society

Bitter Lemons

Conflicts Forum

Cursor

Electronic Intifada

Foundation for Middle East Peace

Friday Lunch Club

Global Strategy Forum

Islamophobia Watch

Juan Cole

Just World News

KABOBfest

Lawrence of Cyberia

MERIP

Middle East Policy Council

MideastWire

Missing Links

MuzzleWatch

Peoples Geography - Reclaiming Space

Political Islam

Rootless Cosmopolitan

Sabbah's Blog

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Syria Comment

The Angry Arab

War and Piece

War in Context

Washington
Babylon

Update: Further reading, courtesy of CJR contributor Lawrence Pintak:

Egypt’s Al Masri Al Youm

London-based, Saudi-owned newspaper Alsharq Alawsat

Beirut-based newspaper Dar Al Hayat

The English version of Al Arabiya television’s Web site

Al Jazeera English's Web site, which also features streaming video from the TV channel

This one-source story in the NYT today bothers me.

It's got some analysis, but not much. Couldn't find one independent source who had something worthwhile to say?

ProPublica does some good bird-dogging of Sen. Christopher Dodd's Countrywide problem. Remember, Dodd was a "friend of Angelo" Mozilo, and he promised to reveal the details of his mortgage.

Dodd finally did. Sort of. Okay, not really. And ProPublica stays on the trail.

Hit up this NYT forum on how to save newspapers.

Finally, here's Steven Brill:

With the current model of free online content, newspapers have essentially turned themselves into shoppers — but, ironically, still with great quality, created by the same culture and people whose work consumers used to pay for. This is complete suicide. Newspapers should, in fact, be more profitable online — because it gets rid of the cost of paper, printing and delivery. This should be the golden age of journalism, delivered without the trucks.

Newspapers bought into the idea that the culture of the Internet is “free,” or maybe they thought initially that online content was just an add-on to attract subscribers, but it hasn’t turned out that way.

The funding debate continues. And the word du week, this time around, is an oldie-but-goodie: "micropayments." In the current issue of Time magazine, Walter Isaacson, echoing David Carr's request that someone "invent an iTunes for news," makes his case for "a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge."

Isaacson's proposal, like Carr's before it, has been roundly criticized. Clay Shirky—who takes exception to the term "micropayments" itself—pointed out that "that users don’t like being nickel-and-dimed." Andrew Sullivan argued that asking people to pay even incrementally for journalism won't work for the simple reason that "there is too much good content out there for free." Kay Stieger, writing for Think Progress, took issue with Isaacson's "disdain for the advertising dollar," writing that "it’s unreasonable to expect media consumers to take on the entire burden of the cost of information production." At Rough Type, Nicholas Carr called micropayments "a heck of a longshot and not worth pinning one's hopes on." Today's New York Times features an op-ed by Slate's Michael Kinsley declaring that "You Can't Sell News by the Slice."

Yet even those funding proposals that we don't end up adopting as A New Financial Model for Journalism can still be instructive, if only because discussing them helps clarify one's thinking about online business models. With that in mind, we want to hear from you: What are the problems with the micropayment model for funding news? In what context could that model work? Why do we keep coming back to business models that have failed in the past? And what, when it comes to online journalism, would you be willing to pay for?

From the newsroom at CBS, where I have spent the majority of my days since I took a desk assistant job here in November, I have an abundance of time to think about why I find the job so mind-numbing. Surrounded by the metal devices that take in and transmit satellite data, I gaze longingly at the leftmost in a bank of televisions that hang from the ceiling. This is the TV tuned to CNN: the only network that is, slowly but surely, embracing participatory journalism by incorporating their audience into their coverage.

I imagine the excitement that my counterparts in the CNN newsroom face as they field reports and comments from both their higher-ups and an engaged audience. When jerked back to reality by the ring of a telephone, my surroundings are an invariable disappointment. If traditional newsrooms like CBS’s don't embrace the culture of audience participation—not just acknowledging but also incorporating engaged news consumers—then not only will the audience lose interest, so will young journalists like me.

I was born late enough to have always used the Internet, and so my journalistic aspirations involve making waves on the Web rather than publishing the perfect print piece or producing a regular radio or television newscast. Because of this, I watch my colleagues at CBS with the same anthropological interest that they reserve for "the blogs." And I've come to realize that the torpor of the job elicits the same frustration in a few of them as it does in me, only for different reasons.

These broadcast veterans are not upset because listeners are left so thoroughly out of the newscast (why would this seem odd to them?). Rather, they're mad because the audience is not interested in the stories that they want to tell. A radio anchor storms out of his studio yelling: I can't do this anymore… I'm going home to bed if I have to lead another hourly with Chicago when there is an actual war going on in Afghanistan. When I receive a call from a stringer in India who wants to do a piece on three hundred Bangladeshis drowned in the Bay of Bengal, an assignment editor tells me No, Americans aren't interested in that, it's too far away. “How do you know?” I think.

Traditional news outlets aren’t yet taking full advantage of technology’s ability to shrink distances. It's shocking to me that the only way for a listener or watcher to make constructive criticisms or suggestions is to call the "angry listeners line"—really just a depository of unchecked voicemail messages. When an older gentleman calls, he catches my attention by asking: "Why are you guys all of sudden trying to entertain me with these American Idol type sound effects when all I want is the news?" I can only agree and hang up politely.

This man is one of thousands of news addicts out there, listening and watching. Wouldn't it be great if there were a way for their comments to reach the executive editors of a newscast, rather than just a lowly assistant like me? Granted, lucid suggestions will be peppered with crazed rants and everything in between, but does that diminish the need for a platform to absorb audience criticisms? This is, after all, the norm on any weblog.

News consumers aren’t as passive as they used to be. Eleven thousand people volunteered their time over the course of the election to complete unpaid assignments for the Huffington Post; in less than a year, CNN has recruited almost a quarter of a million IReporters; there are at least a hundred and twenty thousand new blogs started every day. "Lazy news consumption" has not, as Michael Hirschorn suggests in the February/March issue of The Atlantic, become the norm.

As a result of the online environment, the audience is more, not less, active—and that is the promise of journalism in the decade to come. Vibrant commenters, immediate coverage of breaking news by uncredentialed citizens, and the wilting force of the paper product are all just symptoms of a media environment that is increasingly, irrevocably, dependent on public participation. If one source lets you choose the stories that they cover, and the other doesn't, why would you pick the latter? I know I wouldn't.

To be sure, I don’t think that Rick Sanchez or Wolf Blitzer are changing the world when they point viewers to their Twitter feeds and Facebook pages. But the fact that I find myself gazing with awe at CNN’s coverage says something about the lassitude with which its competitors are responding to the new media environment. It will be a long time before CBS News catches up, and I’m not waiting around. Instead, I’m returning to the tools of the Web with the hope that one day I can use them to improve network news coverage from the outside in.

When Health and Human Services nominee Tom Daschle withdrew from consideration last week, the press began debating whether the Obama administration was observing the spirit of its ban against lobbyists in government, even if it was largely honoring its letter. After leading a recent column for Time with White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’s assertion, "If you're not registered to lobby, you can't be a lobbyist," Michael Scherer retorted: "Although he never registered [as a lobbyist], Daschle, in fact, made millions of dollars after he left government doing stuff that looks, smells, and tastes a lot like lobbying." Scherer's objection is that, while Daschle technically avoided the kinds of contacts with lawmakers that would require him to register with Congress as a lobbyist, he was working as a "policy advisor" for a lobbying firm that had several clients in the health care industry.

Daschle is not the only nominee whose appointment undermined the White House’s status as a lobbyist-free zone. Deputy defense secretary nominee William J. Lynn III was an indisputable lobbyist for the defense contractor Raytheon. And Mark Patterson, who formerly represented the investment bank Goldman Sachs, is working as chief of staff for the Treasury Department. (Watch your backs, guys—Chuck Norris took you to task in an "exclusive commentary" yesterday at World Net Daily.)

Even cynics who always thought Obama's no-lobbyist stance was more PR than substance have to be surprised at the number of nominations that so obviously contradict one of the new president's most high profile declarations. The press is calling out the new president for hypocrisy: "During almost two years on the campaign trail, Barack Obama vowed to slay the demons of Washington, bar lobbyists from his administration and usher in what he would later call in his Inaugural Address a ‘new era of responsibility.’ What he did not talk much about were the asterisks," wrote The New York Times's Peter Baker.

But those seeking a compelling explanation for these asterisks would do well to remember Bill Clinton’s slogan: it's the economy, stupid. Specifically, the realities of the job market for public policy experts who know how government works.

Although many Americans think that DC is brimming with craven, corrupt automatons, politicians and their staffers generally earn far less than they could in the private sector—in positions that have zero job security. When they leave office (or their boss does), some take sleazy lobbying jobs (I'm looking at you, congressman-turned-pharma-exec Billy Tauzin). But many who go into lobbying or private industry do so in order to continue to advance the same causes that they championed while in government. There's nothing surprising about, say, a former congressman with education policy experience taking a job with an ed policy lobbying firm—that's where their experience would be most generously compensated. It’s the free market at work.

It's hard to remember this, but politicos are workers, too. Some get fat off the system by peddling influence, but most do what workers in other sectors do: try to make a good living using the skills they've sacrificed to acquire. And unless the taxpayers are willing to balance the economic playing field by paying government officials and academics more (fat chance), there probably is no way to completely insulate government from the private sector.

On February 4, Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus bravely defended her city's untouchables:

Lost in the popular vision of martini-swilling lobbyists is the reality that, in a government grown so sprawling, lobbyists perform an indispensable mediating function, simultaneously translating the legitimate needs of the clients they represent to policymakers and vice versa.

Certainly, some would-be lobbyists see a government job as a ticket-punching stop on the way to riches on K Street; some current lobbyists see a stint in government as a way to enhance their billables on the other side of the revolving door. But Washington right now is full of people with seven-figure salaries elbowing to get administration jobs that pay a fraction of that. Most, I'd guess, aren't scheming to get rich later but are yearning to be inside the room, not lingering outside.

If Marcus is right, the problem isn't that Barack Obama lacks the resolve to resist lobbyists' charms. It’s that he has a practical problem. The jobs that give people the know how to run government are inherently insecure, and, as a consequence, many people inevitably spend time in the private sector. So maybe we're better off fighting corrution by judging the character of those who are appointed to top jobs and the interests on behalf of which they've worked, not through ironclad rules that lead to inevitable disappointment.

Americans are right to demand the highest standards of their policy makers, and I, like Marcus, support the lobbyist prohibition. But I wish the press did a better job explaining the trade-offs facing those in public service. Americans might be less frustrated if they understood that Washington is a far more complicated place than reporters often lead them to believe.

Have you ever, while watching cable news, felt embarrassed for (even, insulted by) an anchor and something he said or wore or a visual aid or prop he used to ostensibly enhance his reporting? Of course you have.

Today, CNN's Allan Chernoff decided his viewers might better understand some of that complicated ol' stimulus stuff-- particularly those "toxic assets" everyone seems to be focused on -- if he talked about it while holding aloft a small pink "I Heart New York" piggy bank and speaking in slow, child-friendly sentences, like so:

Let's use a little piggy bank as an example. I've been using this today. This little piggy has been a very bad banker. Filled with toxic assets, right? A lot of bad mortgage loans made. Well, we've got to get those mortgage loans out of the bank, out of the piggy. It hasn't happened yet, but the government is saying we're going to put private investors to work here, give them loans, give them an incentive to buy those rotten loans from the bankers. That will...

....at this point Chernoff pulled the plug on the piggy and change jangled out...

...free up the banks and then they'll be in much better shape to make new loans and to get the flow of credit running again.

Fellow anchor Kyra Phillips announced that she felt like she was "back in elementary school" but added that "now I can visualize the whole thing." If the pink piggy could help just one person, I guess...

Is Jake Tapper, ABC News's White House correspondent (and my vote for "Best Question" last night), the "Briefing Room Bad Ass" or an instigator of "pissy little spats?" At The Daily Beast Rachel Sklar gets some of Tapper's unnamed peers to weigh in on Tapper's approach and his motives (isn't he totally trying to be the next David Gregory?). And then there's the one who wouldn't play along, who kind of tells Sklar that her story premise is bunk:

And while more than one other person also used the word “showboating,” a briefing room colleague was a little more zen: "It's too early to judge anyone... And I wouldn't get too worked up over the press briefings. Judge all of us on the reporting, analysis, and packages.”

Megan recently wrote about The Huffington Post "crowdsourcing" its analysis of the stimulus bill and how that effort has worked out (pretty well, actually). Fox News, too, is calling on its readers to pore over the hundreds of pages of the bill (both versions) and send feedback, flag things of note, and the like.

So: How do you entice your readers into doing this for/with you? It's all in the pitch.

Huffington Post:

Please take a look through the bill and let us know if you find anything noteworthy or surprising. Specifically, search for anything a little out of the ordinary, such as the section on page 14 that makes sure no money goes directly to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. That provision was introduced earlier as an amendment and it has made it into the final bill.

Or read through the oversight sections and the authority (and money) given to Government Accountability Office. Is it real oversight or are there wide loopholes?

John Maynard Keynes famously said that burying bottles of cash under ground would be a suitable -- if not ideal -- way of reducing unemployment. One person's bottle-burying earmark is another's job-creation project.

Fox News:

"House and Senate 'Spendulus' Bills: Hunt for the Bacon!

At more than 1,500 pages, the House and Senate versions of the economic stimulus bill aren’t exactly a light read.

That’s why we’re counting on our FOX Forum audience to help us all get through it.

Join our challenge to find what’s right — and maybe not so right — with the working versions of the $850 billion plan, which will have to be mashed together into one piece of legislation before it goes to President Obama for his signature.

Tell us what you’ve found ... We’ll publish a sampling of your comments and observations over the coming days, and take a closer look at some of the more interesting discoveries.

If the comments section is any indication (and maybe it's not), the "discoveries" from Fox's "Hunt" have been few and far between.

I don’t generally announce upcoming science journalism events, mostly because my readership is spread out across the country. I might get in the habit, though, and now seems as good a time as any to begin because there are a couple all-star discussions happening in New York and Chicago this week.

The first, which I’ll be writing more about tomorrow, will take place Tuesday night at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan where the topic will be how the media coverage affects public understanding of climate change. The panel will include New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin, ABC News reporter Bill Blakemore, Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media editor Bud Ward, American University professor Matthew Nisbet, and former CNN producer Diane Hawkins-Cox. The event begins at 6:30 p.m. in the Kaufmann Theater; tickets are $15.

Two other events will take place Friday at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago. Cristine Russell, the president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing and a CJR contributing editor, will moderate a symposium titled “Hot and Hotter: Media Coverage of Climate-Change Impacts, Policies, and Politics.” Speakers will include the Yale Forum's Ward, Christian Science Monitor reporter Peter Spotts, BBC correspondent Pallab Ghosh, White House science advisor nominee John Holdren, and Stanford University climatologist Stephen Schneider. The event begins at 10:30 a.m.

At 4 p.m. that afternoon, Pulitzer prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum will moderate a press briefing organized by the World Conference of Science Journalists (which will hold its meeting in London in June). Responding to CNN’s elimination of its entire science and technology team and similar newsrooms cuts around the world, speakers will weigh in on whether or not science journalism is in a state “crisis.” Panelists include Russell and Ghosh from the earlier event, as well as Arab Science Journalists Association president Nadia El-Awady (whom I interviewed for CJR last year) and Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Lee Hotz.

Given the Obama administration’s commitment to “restore science to its rightful place” paired with the inauspicious deterioration of science reporting at mainstream news publications around the country, all of the above events are bound to produce interesting conversations. If you happen to catch any one of them, please weigh in with your impressions, observations, and comments.

Correction: The second paragraph of this post was changed to reflect that Diane Hawkins-Cox is a former, rather than current, producer at CNN.

LONDON-- From the other side of the Atlantic, Washington's myopia seems even more exaggerated than usual.

Two days ago in the Sunday Times of London, I learned from Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, that, on the twentieth day of the Obama administration, "the thrill is gone." Obama, Sabato declared, "will sustain his honeymoon for some time, but it won't produce the Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Jonshon-style reforms that he hoped for."

The basis for Sabato's stunningly premature (and utterly idiotic) conclusion: "They expected to roll over Congress, but Congress just doesn't do that."

Although Sabato is not especially smart or wise, he is one of those talking heads you see quoted over and over again out of Washington—simply because he has mastered the art of the quotable sound bite. (When Fred Thompson announced for president, Sabato declared it was a case of "Et tu, Brute, Fred.")

The truth is, Obama's early days are a gigantic success, a fact which is widely recognized over here, outside the pages of Rupert Murdoch's "quality" Sunday newspaper in London. For the first time in decades, Europeans are openly envious of our ability to elect such an intelligent and interesting president.

While narrow-minded Washingtonians focus on the fact that not a single Republican Congressman voted for the stimulus package, wiser observers understand that Obama only needed to compromise enough to get two Republican votes in the Senate in order to guarantee the practically instantaneous passage of his number one priority.

Obama was masterful at last night's press conference: sober, sophisticated and substantive—so naturally there were those who immediately denigrated him as "dull."

But just as they were during most of last year's campaign, Obama's people are still way ahead of the reporters who are covering them. As David Aelrod told Peter Baker of The New York Times, "one thing that we learned over two years is that there's a whole different conversation in Washington than there is out here."

Only E.J. Dionne seemed to get it exactly right in The Washington Post:

It took less than three weeks for the real Barack Obama to come into view. He turns out to be both a conciliator and a fighter.

These are not contradictions in his character. They represent different sides of a politician who sees some issues as more susceptible to compromise than others and who wants his adversaries to know that his easygoing style does not make him a pushover…

Initially, Obama hoped to win broad Republican support for his stimulus package, but most Republicans preferred to bloody up this new, young president. Obama adjusted. If the GOP wanted a fight, he would not back down… So Obama's decision to fight Republicans on the stimulus bill doesn't mean he's lost his conciliatory instincts. It means he's neither a chump nor a wimp. There are rank-and-file cultural conservatives willing to join Obama to end the feuds of the 1960s. But Washington conservatives, insisting that tax cuts are the one and only important matter in American life, are stuck in a 1980s time warp.

In Washington, I'm sure, Obama will be written off regularly over the first one hundred days of his administration. But over here, the celebration over America's transformation has only just begun.

CNBC paired noted bears Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Nicholas Taleb yesterday in what could have been a very good arrangement. But rather than fully explore their arguments on why the financial system is fundamentally screwed, the segment devolved into bear-bashing and nearsightedness.

Here's Michelle Caruso-Cabrera, not able to contain her disdain for the bearish Roubini and Taleb.

"When I hear that Bill Gates and Michael Dell are lining up to listen to these guys in Davos, to me that screams of 'market bottom'—like, peak of the hysteria."

It's interesting to see Caruso-Cabrera try to delegitimize these guys early on in the interview. The touts regularly featured on the network don't seem to come in for such tough treatment very often.

Here's another "what the heck?" moment: CNBC's Dennis Kneale gets riled up when Taleb criticizes Wall Street bonuses as a big part of the economic and financial problems:

Compensation is the smallest part of the problem. Compensation doesn't amount to one-millionth of the losses that we've taken on here. Compensation isn't the problem.

Taleb slaps that down easily:

That's not true...because the system was built...because bankers had an incentive to take hidden risk (that made the system) extremely fragile to black swans

Meanwhile, Roben Farzad of BusinessWeek, when not blathering about "cocktail parties," keeps badgering Taleb about how his talk about the failures of the financial system isn't "actionable" as an investment.

How do I sublimate that into action today? If I'm terrified; if I'm not getting anything on bond yields. Where do you put the money?

Taleb answers "I'm not here to give immediate investment advice, and Farzad interrupts in a further attempt to delegitimize him:

But you're here to proffer doom and gloom...

To be fair, Taleb wasn't answering the question, but anchor Bill Griffeth was able to step in and steer the conversation fairly and gets results.

Still, Josh Marshall has it about right on this display:

These two guys are talking about a deep structural crisis in the world economy. And these CNBC yahoos can't stop asking for stock tips. Really surreal.

I'm watching it again now. This is a seminal piece of video. You have to see it. I'm not sure I've seen anything that captures -- albeit unintentionally -- the vast disconnect over what is happening today in the US economy.

UPDATEPaul Krugman pulls out a hilarious Monty Python sketch after watching this gross CNBC segment.

That The Huffington Post Getting A Question at last night's presidential press conference would raise lots of questions was never in question.

President Obama called on The Huffington Post? Who knew they had a White House reporter (Daniel Drezner)? And, if the president called on them, what about me and my blog (Greta Van Susteren of GretaWire)? Also: what does it mean?

Greg Sargent's take on what to make of it:

But the real innovation isn’t in what Obama did. It’s in what outlets like HuffPo are doing. Places like HuffPo and my alma mater, Talking Points Memo, are striving to demonstrate that it needn’t necessarily be mutually exclusive to care along with your audience what happens in politics — to have a predisposition towards one outcome or another — while simultaneously doing real journalism.

Why is a huge headshot of Alex Rodriguez taking up half the above-the-fold space on page one of my Wall Street Journal this morning?

This is a Murdoch special—something you never would have seen on page one before he took over the paper. The photo even comes with a tabloidy confessional headline:

'I Was Young. I Was Stupid. I Was Naive.'

"I needed the money." Er...

With such a ginormous picture, you'd expect a great story inside, but the photo caption refers to an unremarkable 482-word news story on A4. Big letdown.

Lest you think I'm quibbling about, um, inside baseball here, take the word of a Journal reader who identifies himself (or herself) as Chris Heupel in an online comment:

The front page of the Journal, above the fold, is dominated by a 5X8 picture of Mr. Rodriguez but no article. Meanwhile the president's news conference gets 1/3 of the space as the picture of Mr. Rodriguez. It's hard to fathom how Mr. Rodriguez's use of drugs deserves this type of placement and column space on the front page of the Journal. If I wanted to read a paper written for 5th graders with lots of pictures I would subscribe to USA Today.

It used to be very difficult to get a story on to page one of the Journal (believe me, I know). Now a baseball player admitting the obvious can get serious real estate for a boring, generic wire photo. I just can't figure out what value this brings to business readers.

Is anybody picking the Journal up off the newsstand because of this? I don't think so. They'll pick up USA Today like Chris.

Now, I know that the Times has a two-column-wide story above the fold, too. You can argue about whether that's overplayed. But the Times is a general-interest paper. The Journal is not, despite Murdoch's shift toward more Washington news.

And anyway, there's some pretty interesting financial news going on these days, you know.

It's a signal that priorities are somewhat skewed over there.

On last night's Daily Show, Jon Stewart revisited Mike's Memorable Morning At The Bus Stop, a.k.a. his "O'Reilly Ambush." Stewart, too, appreciated O'Reilly's rant about "vicious paparazzi" and "privacy of Americans" coming, as it did, directly after the footage of an O'Reilly producer/cameraman pursuing Mike as he boarded the bus for his morning commute as though Mike were Britney heading into Starbucks.

The LA Times has a very interesting story about how the recession is causing a surplus of farm labor in California.

The collapse of the construction industry and a slump in the restaurant and food service sector have sent thousands of people back to looking for work on California farms, which not so long ago were hurting for workers.

The state's unemployment is near 10 percent, and workers who were getting better pay in better conditions have no choice now.

Farther north, in Yolo and Sutter counties, Charlie Hoppin is turning away workers.

"I feel bad I can't hire more," Hoppin said, adding that there was a good supply of equipment operators who had lost jobs grading housing developments and in other construction projects.

Sounds familiar.

I really like how the LAT gives the backdrop for why farm workers had been in such short supply: Low wages. Reporter Jerry Hirsch questions whether the conventional wisdom is correct (remember John McCain's canard that no Americans would pick lettuce for $50 an hour?):

At the time, farm interests held up Vessey's experience as evidence of how badly the nation needed both a guest-worker program and a way for illegal immigrants to gain legal status.

Whether there was a true shortage is still a matter of debate. The lack of workers could have been the result of a reluctance by farmers to raise wages enough to persuade people to do farm work, said Phil Martin, a UC Davis farm labor economist.

"You can't talk about need or shortage without talking about wages," Martin said.

Farmers and agribusiness interests generally say they can't afford to pay much more than the minimum wage because of international competition, Martin said.

Most reporters wouldn't have put that great context in there.

The problem with this story is it doesn't have a single quote from an actual worker. We should have heard from someone who's lost their better-paying job and is now doing stoop labor.

But the good outweighs the bad here.

Best Question: Jake Tapper, ABC News

TAPPER: “The American people have seen hundreds of billions of dollars spent already. And still the economy continues to free-fall. Beyond avoiding the national catastrophe that you've warned about, once all the legs of your stool are in place, how can the American people gauge whether or not your programs are working?

Can they -- should they be looking at the metric of the stock market, home foreclosures, unemployment? What metric should they use? When? And how will they know if it's working or whether or not we need to go to a Plan B?

Simple. Straightforward. Actually provoked an answer. (“Job creation… normalizing the credit … Have we stabilized the housing market? …Whether we stop contracting and shedding jobs, and we start growing again.”)

Best “Off-Topic (Non-Economic-Stimulus-Related) Question (or, Best Question You Didn’t Anticipate): Ed Henry, CNN

HENRY: There's a Pentagon policy that bans media coverage of the flag-draped coffins from coming into Dover Air Force Base. And back in 2004, then-Senator Joe Biden said that it was shameful for dead soldiers to be, quote, snuck back into the country under the cover of night.

You've promised unprecedented transparency, openness in your government. Will you overturn that policy, so the American people can see the full human cost of war?

(Response: The policy is under review.)

Best Tweet: Hyperfix:

CNN just did some weird double shot -- showed AP Jennifer Loven asking question from front and back...can the hologram be far behind!?

Moment Most Likely to Get Media Types Talking: The Huffington Post (The Huffington Post!) gets a question.

Greta Van Susteren on Fox News:

I did notice that the Huffington Post got a question, so why can’t Gretawire?

From The Caucus Live Blog at newyorktimes.com:

Huffington Post Gets a Question | 9:03 p.m. Sam Stein, who is covering the White House for the Huffington Post, was called upon by President Obama. It is almost certainly the first time that a Web-based publication was recognized by the president…

Harshest Assessment By Cable Pundits of White House Press’s Performance: Bill O’Reilly and Bob Morris on Fox News:

O’REILLY: What struck me about this was it wasn't a press conference. It wasn't. It was tee it up, ok and he had the little list of questioners. If O'Reilly or Morris were there, trust me, he wouldn't have gotten to us. And then he does ten, twelve minutes ruminating, and I want information. Look, I would have said, “Hey, Mr. President, you've got Nancy Pelosi loading this up with all kinds of global warming stuff. What was that all about?” How about that for a question?

MORRIS: He had ridiculous questions.

Highest Praise By Cable Pundit of White House Press’s Performance: Chris Matthews, as noted earlier, on MSNBC:

“Well, I think our breed looked pretty good tonight. I think the press looked very good tonight. They asked great questions. I would be very impressed with the press tonight. Mara Liasson's, Jake Tapper's questions, Chuck's [Todd] questions were sound. I thought they asked interesting questions. They covered a range of American topics from the stimulus package to the situation in Afghanistan and the Pakistan border even to the question of A-Rod. They were asking questions most people want answers to.

Creepiest Helen Thomas Discussion By Cable Pundits: Bill O’Reilly talking to Alan Colmes (also, Fox News):

O’REILLY: The White House press corps looked intimidated to me except the old lady, Helen Thomas, she was yelling, and he just ignored her. [Squawking noise ]

COLMES: Is that your Helen Thomas impression?

O’REILLY: It’s like the Wicked Witch of the East. I would have poured water on her. And she would have dissolved.

COLMES: It's not nice to do that.

O’REILLY: She actually asked a question, Do you think the Taliban's hiding in Pakistan? That was her question. [ed: No, it wasn’t.] So my question to you is why can't my mom ask a question? Why can't my mom…

COLMES: Does your mom have a 40-year journalistic career?

Creepiest Helen Thomas Reference In a Live-Blog: Daniel W. Drezner at foreignpolicy.com:

8:49 PM: Obama loses his Helen Thomas virginity.

Most Frequently-Heard Insta-Observation: His answers were so loooong….

Charlie Gibson on ABC News directly after the press conference:

First news conference since going into the White House. Taking only 13 questions over an hour. Seemingly treating each question almost as a teaching moment with long and expansive answers…

Keith Olbermann directly after press conference on MSNBC:

With the repeated promise that his stimulus program was not only necessary, urgent, but will produce 4 million new jobs… The bipartisanship or lack thereof seemingly the main focus of the reporters in the room. President Obama thus concludes the first news conference as the nation’s 44th president. And yes his answers to two of the first three questions, thorough and eloquent and crafted, were roughly seven minutes long. Each.

Bill O’Reilly, minutes after the press conference, on Fox News:

On a scale of 10 being the best, 1 being the worst, [President Obama] sold [the stimulus] 7.5. Number 1: he was boring. Number 2: He was too long-winded. His first answer was ten minutes long. It was like he was making mini-speeches. You don't learn a lot from that… If I were at home with a clicker in my hand, a tough hour to get through.

Most Frequently-Used Adjective To Describe Obama’s “Tone:” “Serious” (and its synonyms). Choose your favorite.

New York Times (straight news report): “Mr. Obama’s tone was for the most part serious and businesslike…”

New York Times (“news analysis”): “Authoritative and unsmiling, gloomy rather than inspirational…”

Washington Post: “Somber and focused”

AP (“analysis”): “determined, deadly serious,” “grim-faced leader, rarely smiling or laughing”

Time “a dour and downbeat press conference…”

One post-press conference observation from MSNBC's Chris Matthews:

Well, I think our breed looked pretty good tonight. I think the press looked very good tonight. They asked great questions. I would be very impressed with the press tonight. Mara Liasson's, Jake Tapper's questions, Chuck's [Todd] questions were sound. I thought they asked interesting questions. They covered a range of American topics from the stimulus package to the situation in Afghanistan and the Pakistan border even to the question of A-Rod. They were asking questions most people want answers to.

Read all 13 questions (including one from the Huffington Post's Sam Stein and that A-Rod question from The Washington Post's Michael Fletcher) and, the answers offered here.

I'd point to this second bit of Ed Henry's [CNN] question:

HENRY: There's a Pentagon policy that bans media coverage of the flag-draped coffins from coming into Dover Air Force Base. And back in 2004, then-Senator Joe Biden said that it was shameful for dead soldiers to be, quote, snuck back into the country under the cover of night.

You've promised unprecedented transparency, openness in your government. Will you overturn that policy, so the American people can see the full human cost of war?

OBAMA:...Now with respect to the policy of opening up media to loved ones being brought back home, we are in the process of reviewing those policies in conversations with the Department of Defense. So I don't want to give you an answer now, before I've evaluated that review and understand all the implications involved.

With President Obama's prime time news conference hours away, veteran political reporter Walter Shapiro ponders at The New Republic "what made [Pres. John F.] Kennedy's performances the gold standard for presidential Q-and-A's" and concludes:

John Kennedy was different for one transcendent reason--he actually answered the reporters. Sure, there were presidential evasions and a bit of politically convenient double talk. But, for the most part, Kennedy took the questions seriously and responded with bracing forthrightness... Kennedy's shimmering press-conference legacy is that truth-telling beats twaddle and trickery nearly every time.

My thanks to the Knight Science Journalism Tracker for pointing out a "mea culpa" posted today by The New York Times's Kenneth Chang regarding an error he made in an article last week about a new form of the element boron.

Responding to the Times's printed correction, Late Night television show host Conan O'Brien parodied the mistake, in which Chang reported that there are only three pure forms of boron, rather than four. After proclaiming that he is generally an "easy-going" guy, O'Brien goes into a hilariously irritated and remarkably detailed explanation of the element's four phases, complete with visual aid. "Stick to wine reviews and profiles of Liev Schreiber," O'Brien advises the Times, "because when it comes to science, you're nothing but a bunch of boron morons!" The clip is very amusing:

The New York Times's media reporter Richard Perez-Pena plows into the minefield to look at his own company's prospects for survival. Don't envy him this task. I'll bet you every editor in the building looked at that piece when it was in the can and had some quibble. This was probably the most edited story in the paper today.

There's some valuable information in it, and it contains some hits on corporate that most places wouldn't have run about themselves, but ultimately the piece is too sanguine about the prospects for the Times. Much as I want to believe it will fend off these markets, it doesn't look good right now.

First, the problems with this report. The headline reads like a corporate press release: "Resilient Strategy for Times Despite Toll of a Recession." I looked up "resilient" in the dictionary. See what you think:

1. Marked by the ability to recover readily, as from misfortune.
2. Capable of returning to an original shape or position, as after having been compressed.

I don't think so.

The company lost one in seven ad dollars just last year. It has lost one in five since the end of 2006. Anybody want to venture a guess on what 2009's decline will be? Let's be generous and say it's only 10 percent (2008 ads were down 14.2 percent). That would leave NYT Co. print ad revenues at about 72 percent of what they were in 2006 (A note: NYT Group ads were down 12 percent last year, while the Boston Globe's group was down 18 percent).

Don't look to the Internet to make up any of that loss: Ads are declining there, too, though only slightly, unlike the print freefall.

Keeping the paper afloat will mean increasing circulation revenues or cutting costs deeply. (I pay some $400 a year for my print subscription, and I'd pay more if it called for it. Of course, I'd rather the NYT force the freeloaders on the Internet to cough up $10 a month.)

Now, Perez-Pena is absolutely correct to say the Times Company recently has been preparing as best as it could (after years of errors, which he gets to later) for a bad couple of years. It—finally—slashed its dividend, It's doing a sale-leaseback of its share of its new building that will raise at least a couple of hundred million dollars. And it's borrowed money—though at usurious rates—from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim to cover it in case its cashflow dips into negative territory.

Perez-Pena writes that the company still operates at a profit, but its operating profit in 2008 was negative to the tune of $40.64 million. That was largely due to a one-time accounting charge in the third quarter, though, writing down the value of its New England papers. It appear the company did have positive operating cashflow last year, though I don't think fourth quarter numbers on that metric have been released yet (through the third quarter, the number was $144.2 million).

I'm not sure what this paragraph is trying to say:

But the company has also made a long chain of decisions that depleted its cash. Analysts who follow the company for the capital markets say that some of those moves look right even in hindsight, and others seemed right at the time.

What does that mean? The moves blew a bunch of cash out the window. It doesn't matter if they still seem right; they obviously weren't.

But Perez-Pena comes through with some very good points on how the Times got itself into such a pickle:

The company’s clearest and biggest mistake, analysts say, was spending $2.7 billion to buy back its own stock from 1998 to 2004, despite historic high prices. That figure is more than three times the company’s current market capitalization, it outweighs the prices of all the other second-guessed moves combined, and it would be more than enough to ensure the company’s security for years to come.

Six years ago, the company paid $65 million for the half of The International Herald Tribune that was owned by the Washington Post Company, taking full ownership of a money-losing paper. The Times Company does not disclose The Herald Tribune’s performance, but executives say that after significant investment, it still loses money.

In May 2007, the Times Company raised its quarterly dividend to 23 cents a share from 17.5 cents, though by then, the industry downturn had begun and the first signs of a credit crisis were rippling across the economy. Big investors applauded the move, but “it was a difficult thing for us to swallow,” said Mr. Puchalla, of Moody’s.

Last November, the company dropped the dividend to 6 cents. By then, the 2007 increase had cost more than $47 million.

The dividend increase was the clear signal that the company's management and owners just did not get it. But wait, there's more:

The biggest recent expense is the company’s new Midtown Manhattan headquarters, completed in 2007. The Times spent $600 million on the building, although the true net cost of the project is perhaps half that, taking into account the money the company made on the sale of its old building, income from leasing part of the new building and other factors.

The Times lost even more money here, though, by bad market timing. It sold its landmark headquarters in Times Square for just $175 million in 2004. Three years later, it sold again for exactly three times that price—$525 million.

And the report also says that even if the company won't run out of cash in the next few months, the environment over the next couple of years will be tough and after that is a great unknown.

Looking ahead, revenue is expected to keep falling this year, and the company will have to keep cutting costs. Most analysts think it will have positive cash flow in 2009, but not by much.

Beyond that, the company’s future rests on questions no one can answer. When will the recession end? When it does, will the decline of print advertising slow to a modest pace? Will Internet ads make a big comeback?

This isn't a bad effort, and it's not great, either. Give the Times a 'C.'

But does this mean that the Times shouldn't even take on its own story at all? The Deal's editor Robert Teitelman thinks not.

But the bigger question is not whether the story was decent or not, but why would the Times bother? After all, it's not likely that anyone in edit is going to take the kind of whack at the paper and its news-gathering army like Michael Hirschorn did in The Atlantic in January. And the story tempts the charge that it was a defense against the Hirschorn argument that the Times needed to cut a big chunk of the newsroom to survive. The truth is, the Times is conflicted on the story and probably should have either loudly admitted to its conflict or, better yet, shut up on the subject.

So would we have been better off without this story? I don't think so. What kind of disclaimer does Teitelman think the Times needs on its story? The big flag on top of the paper saying "The New York Times" is somehow not enough? Give readers some credit.

When baseball season starts in just a few short weeks, the New York Yankees will have a new “stadium.” The New York Mets will have one, too. That’s two new “stadia” for the city.

Is that the sound of someone choking? What’s that? The plural of “stadium” is “stadiums”?

Not in New York City, which used to have a Department of “Stadia.” The Parks Department is in charge of each “stadium” now, though city documents still refer to them as “stadia.” In fact, both “stadiums” and “stadia” show up frequently in news reports, with “stadiums” outnumbering “stadia” by about 5 to 1.

Both plurals are considered “standard” English, part of the de-Latinization of our language. When, for example, was the last time you heard someone use “memoranda” instead of “memorandums”? Same deal; both standard English. And few would argue that “an agenda” should be “an agendum”; the anti-Latin crowd has Anglicized “agenda” into a singular with a standard English plural, “agendas.”

Then there are the ones stuck in the middle. “Data” is now acceptable by many usage authorities as both a plural and a singular noun, though others, including the Associated Press Style Book, accept “data” as a singular only as a collective noun. But they’re way behind common usage, as explained by the New Oxford American Dictionary: “Data is now used as a singular where it means ‘information’: this data was prepared for the conference. It is used as a plural in technical contexts and when the collection of bits of information is stressed: all recent data on hurricanes are being compared.” But no usage authority in its right mind condones the occasionally heard “datums.”

You know what’s coming next, and it’s the one nearest and dearest to journalists’ hearts: “media.”

Things were so much easier when it was just “the press.” But now, with so many different “mediums,” there are two distinct camps on how to refer collectively to journalists and their outlets—the traditionalists, who want “media” to be used only as a plural, and the rest, who believe that “media” has achieved the status of “data,” and should be used as a singular collective noun at the least, if not as a pure singular.

Among those in the traditionalists’ camp is Roy Blount Jr., whose delightful new book, Alphabet Juice, takes on word myths, shibboleths, and the plain weird. Of “media” as a singular, he says: “to treat all these media collectively as a monolithic institution is to create a bugaboo or punching bag.” In the other camp is Bryan A. Garner, who says in his Modern American Usage that while use of “media” as a “mass noun” “still makes some squeamish, it must be accepted as standard.” That’s how the New Oxford American Dictionary feels as well, and the momentum is in their direction. (Hmm, “momenta”?)

Still, the AP Stylebook holds the line: “In the sense of mass communication, such as magazines, newspapers, the news services, radio, television and online, the word is plural: The news media are resisting attempts to limit their freedom.” The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage is a bit chattier:

The term is often seen doing duty as a singular. But The Times, with a grammatically exacting readership, will keep it plural for now; the singular is medium. Ordinarily expand the term, at least to news media. In discussion of news and information outlets, the word is meaningless when standing alone; politicians and publicity people have stretched it to embrace soap operas, talk shows, encyclopedias, technical journals and everything in between. And since the things in between include The Times, the discomfort of the embrace should be evident.

You thought we would settle the argument here? Sorry. But if we asked a bunch of “mediums” to look into the future, chances are they would see a singular victory.

People send us their newspapers and magazines. Sometimes, we review them.

Oklahoma Today, Jan/Feb 2009

Oklahoma Today says it's been "The Magazine of Oklahoma Since 1956." And, according to the reader letters in its Jan/Feb 2009 issue, it's done a pretty good job. "Thanks for putting out such a proud-of-our-state publication." "You performed beautifully." To the editor-in-chief: "You're an amazing woman." "I love Oklahoma Today."

The pages that follow don't entirely live up to the high praise—but then again, it's pretty high praise. They're mostly short, cute, and Okie-centric, with an anthropological tinge that I assume I detect because I'm not an Okie myself. There's a story about the Great Backyard Bird Count, which apparently has detected a shift in the state's dove population—Oklahoma used to be mourning dove territory, but nowadays there's been a dramatic increase in Eurasian collared, white-winged, and Inca doves. There's an article about a boy and his dog—"Travis and Presley Brorsen"—who won the canine reality show competition Greatest American Dog. (In case dogs aren't your thing, there's a sidebar with other Oklahoma reality stars, including David Cook, who won season 7 of American Idol.)

Turn the page and you get a new-kid-on-the-block story—a Q&A with the grinning twenty-year-old Republican mayor of Muskogee, elected last May with 70 percent of the vote. (On his freetime activities: "I play Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Halo 3, and Kingdom Hearts video games." His favorite moment of the RNC: "Meeting Rudy Giuliani.")

The cover story tells the tale of Clayton I. Bennett, the chairman of the NBA's newest franchise, the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the magazine's Oklahoman of the Year. Bennett, responsible for relocating the team from Seattle (then-Sonics), is introduced as a "home-grown thunder god," conjuring the image of Zeus parking himself at the sidelines in the Ford Center.

The best thing about the magazine is undoubtedly its last page quiz feature, "Where Are You?", which asks readers to identify a different local historic building each issue. The previous issue's answer? "The National Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague." -Jane Kim

Playboy, February 2009

Let’s leave the question of whether pornography exploits women for another day. Playboy is a magazine with comparatively tame pictures of naked ladies, and plenty of smart writing to accompany them. Yes, you can read the magazine for the articles. I’ve been doing it for fifteen years.

For those who wail about the demise of long-form non-fiction, Playboy does its best to support the genre on a monthly basis. This month’s issue features a piece, from The Nation's Christian Parenti, about the growth of the drug trade in Guinea-Bissau. Like the situation in Mexico, journalists who cover trafficking are in danger:

In Bissau’s weekly newspapers and on one of its community radio stations, a few local journalists have had the guts to report on the government’s links to drug traffickers. But the price has been high. One writer, Allen Yero Emballo, had his home raided by the military. He was beaten, and his papers were seized. As the soldiers departed they told him, ‘Next time we’ll leave the papers and just take your head.’ Emballo soon decamped for France.

Playboy may be a men’s magazine, but there’s plenty to draw readers of both genders. This issue offers two Q&As, the first with House actor Hugh Laurie, and the second with Lost star Josh Holloway. There’s a requisite car article highlighting the best cars of 2009, but it’s pretty progressive—the compact, fuel-efficient Mini Cooper was chosen as the best family car.

In CJR's last issue, author Gary Andrew Poole urged sports writers to recapture the relevance of their genre. Playboy's, Steve Salerno delivers with a captivating look at the life and times of NFL officials. The piece is full of personality and on-the-ground action, and it’s fun to read, even for a non-football fan. Called “zebras,” professional football referees offer a fascinating perspective on the game:

With The Play developing between, Rose and Cheek search for their keys. So intent is Rose on wideout Plaxico Burress that he’s the only crew member unaware of the world of hurt Manning is in. Meanwhile, Cheek picks up Toomer, who just blew by Slaughter, in the process he spots Harrison closing on Tyree.

Suddenly Cheek sees Tyree jump. Man, he went up for that ball! Though Harrison is all over him, the play looks clean. Rose sees it too: The ball appears to be pasted cartoonishly to Tyree’s helmet. Rose thinks, If he hits the turf, I’m gonna say ‘Incomplete! Incomplete

One complaint is that many of the articles jump to the back of the book, which both interrupts the flow, and requires the reader to flip past the nude pages in the middle to pick up a story. Online, most of the magazine's content sits behind a pay wall, so the hard copy is the best way to enjoy it. Don’t be bashful. Good journalism awaits. -Katia Bachko

Cometbus, Issue #51: The Loneliness of the Electric Menorah

There is a serious book to be written about the history of independent bookstores in Berkeley, California. It would discuss the rise of the corporate bookstore, real estate manipulations, the declining population of Berkeley in the 1970s, and the free speech movement. "The Loneliness of the Electric Menorah", a history of the bookstores on Berkeley, California's Telegraph Avenue, is not that kind of history.

"Electric Menorah" is the latest installment of Cometbus, a punk 'zine published on and off since 1983 by the writer and musician Aaron Elliott. Conducting over forty interviews with East Bay businessmen, burnouts, and scenesters, Elliott has compiled a full, though largely personal, history of the Berkeley independent bookstore.

The conventional independent bookstore is, of course, run by a middle-aged woman with a B.A. from Mt. Holyoke and a husband who is a senior executive at a major company. The owner is pleasant and loves books, though her tastes may range toward the conservative: classic literature, coffee table books about English manor houses, etc.

As Elliott demonstrates, this was not the story of the Berkeley bookstore. With the notable exception of something like Mrs. Dalloway's, owned by an elegant daughter-in-law of McGeorge Bundy, Berkeley bookstores were owned by hard-nosed types. In 1963, Moe Moskowitz and Bill Cartwright opened the first of these bookstores, Rambam, on Telegraph Avenue. The pair soon split up. Cartwright opened Shakespeare and Co., and Moe, a cigar-smoking millionaire and former anarchist, opened Moe's Books on Telegraph Avenue. The two men, naturally, hated one another and their businesses were rivals.

Cometbus #51 spins out from there, telling the story of a few heavily competitive stores run by several highly eccentric men. It is a compelling story, particularly in the way that the author manages to place this narrow retail history in the broader context of the 1970s. Apparently Bob Baldock, who ran Moe's Books for Moskowitz, was involved in the Cuban revolution as a young man, and fought with Fidel Castro in Cuba's Sierra Maestra Mountains. Yes, that actually happened. And in between robbing a bank and setting pipe bombs in Los Angeles Police Department patrol cars, Kathy Soliah, a key figure in the Symbionese Liberation Army, worked at the Campus Textbook Exchange on Bancroft.

"Electric Menorah" is a fascinating resource for anyone interested in history of the Bay Area, but it helps a lot to be familiar with Berkeley (and even then, it's hard to follow without the benefit of Google and a map). "Electric Menorah" also does a lot of name dropping. Oddly, this doesn't come across as pretentious so much as just confusing, because none of the largely forgotten bookstore owners' names are familiar. Though the issue is less than 100 pages long, a diligent reader should be prepared to keep a running list of the people mentioned.

Still, the issue is entertaining and well structured, and Elliott is a likable narrator, low-key yet opinionated, determined to tell this story his way, no matter whom he might offend. When he describes Salman Rushdie's visit to one Berkeley bookstore, Elliott says:

Ugh. Hear him speak and you'll find out why he got what he deserved. The guy's a total ass.

This quotation is not defended and is maybe not terribly useful, but this unprofessionalism does not undermine the issue. "Electric Menorah" is a personal history. If you think the winner of the Booker Prize and the author of The Satanic Verses is an ass, go ahead and say it; it's your damn magazine. This is, perhaps, the entire point. Elliott not only wrote the entire issue of Cometbus, he apparently printed it, too, using a photocopier—as he has done for twenty-five years. The author's irregular language is a specific choice. He is embracing unprofessionalism, as did the bookstores he loves (for all their flaws) on Telegraph Avenue . -Daniel Luzer

News Photographer, January 2009

Well, the photos are good. When a magazine is called News Photographer (and when that title doubles as its target reader demographic), they'd better be. The images that anchor News Photographer—of Barack Obama on the stump; of a bed-ridden mother in Malawi; of children crowded in a Philippine jail; of a California wildfire—are the point of the publication. And they're peppered throughout News Photographer's sixty-one pages, in full-page spreads and smaller versions, glossy and varied, occasionally jarring, almost always riveting.

Most magazines treat their art as an afterthought to their text—and given News Photographer's (forgive the pun, but) focus, it could be excused for committing the reverse transgression: subverting its words to its images. It doesn't, though. Here's Rex Smith, editor of the Albany Times Union, writing a thoughtful essay about the paper's dilemma about whether to publish a photo of the corpse of a dog that had been hit by a car. Here's an exploration of the convergence of video and still photography. Here's an analysis of the rewards and perils of photo freelancing for NGOs.

They're compelling stories. They may not be written in lyrical prose, but what the articles here may lack in style, they make up for in substance.

Like most magazines, News Photographer features valleys along with its peaks. An editorial celebrating Pete Souza, Obama's newly appointed White House photographer, offers no perspective from Souza himself, and thus ends up feeling cold and detached (and that's even considering that it's written for an audience whose profession often demands remaining detached from their subjects). Overall, though, elevation is the order of the day at News Photographer. Here's another image-driven magazine that you really can, you know, read for the articles.

News Photographer is, for better or worse, a trade magazine, and, though it generally avoids both the jargon-happiness and the hyper-professional perspective that so often afflict members of that genre, it occasionally falls victim to another trade-mag tendency: a self-centeredness so tenacious that, were it not so clearly rooted in insecurity, would seem to border on narcissism. As Alyssa Quart noted in a CJR essay last year, photojournalism is as imperiled as its print counterpart, and, perhaps as a result, preemptive self-defensiveness—look at the work we do! amateurs could never do this!—permeates News Photographer's articles and even its images. ("DOING QUALITY WORK," reads the caption underlining a photo of AP photographer Evan Vucci, unsubtly.)

The assumption about media-based trade magazines implicit in that posture—that the trade in question is, overall, in such turbulent flux as to render the publications that would document and defend it increasingly irrelevant—is both understandable and all too justified by current events. But, still, good work should speak for itself. And in a magazine whose editorial content is generally so strong, it's unfortunate that the line dividing self-promotion from self-preservation would be blurred. -Megan Garber

Washingtonpost.com's Dan Froomkin compiled a list of questions he'd like to see asked of President Obama at tonight's prime time economic-stimulus-themed news conference, two of which are inspired by recent New York Times columns (Paul Krugman's today and Frank Rich's from Sunday).

Yesterday, "author and journalist" Liz Trotta had this exchange with Fox News Live's Eric Shawn (discussion topic: "How Has D.C. Media Handled Obama Administration?"):

TROTTA: So far the [White House] news conferences have looked like little British tea parties. I mean they're...all laughing with Mr. Gibbs, it's very jolly, and most of it isn't really very funny but it's that kind of forced Washington giggling. And the -- it's a happy little group. But nobody's laid a glove on him yet.

SHAWN: There have been sharp exchanges...

TROTTA: Very few. Very, very few. I mean the whole atmosphere is to just keep this magic kingdom going. I think the moment will come, though when -- I mean, after all, in the end, those people at the White House news conferences have to report to their bosses who are watching-- I think eventually once they decide that this guy might be as he, himself, in his own language said, "screwing up," then it's time to go after him...

(Go after him but not, of course, like that...)

Call it citizen journalism or citizen participation, but the Internet has been full of stories about Tom Daschle’s would-be replacement as Secretary of Health and Human Services. Daschle withdrew as President Obama’s choice after revelations surfaced that he didn’t pay all his income taxes. His financial disclosures also raised questions about his connections to health care interests, which might have hindered his credibility as the president’s point man in charge of reform. The wide variety of names being discussed underscores the different priorities people have for health reform—and the difficulties any HHS secretary will face in trying to address them all.

The Washington Post published an interesting feature—sort of a lengthy Q and A that asked the question: “Who Should Replace Tom Daschle? Ten people, mostly mainstreamers—or “Beltway observers”, as the Post called them—suggested names ranging from Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen and former vice president Al Gore. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, declined to name names, but instead offered his thoughts on qualifications for the job. The Beltway observers were all over the place.

Not so when it came to Facebook. Here, Howard Dean was the winner. One Facebook group, “Appoint Howard Dean to HHS,” attracted 4000 members; another, “Howard Dean for HHS Secretary,” courted some 1,600. Dean, who recently stepped down as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was once governor of Vermont, where he expanded childhood health care and mandated equal insurance coverage for mental health diagnoses and substance abuse. Dean is also a physician. A Dean supporter explained that the governor expanded health coverage to 99 percent of the state’s children: “That’s the kind of results oriented leadership President Obama has been looking for in his cabinet.”

In Tennessee, the Tennessee Health Care Campaign, a grassroots organization, has organized an e-mail, letter writing, and fax campaign opposing Gov. Bredesen. The group worked hard a few years ago to stop cuts in TennCare, the health plan that expanded coverage for lots of poor and sick Tennesseans at least for a few years, but then ran into serious money troubles. The governor took a knife to the program, and the Tennessee Health Campaign’s campaign to restore the coverage was not successful. People lost their health insurance. Many died from lack of medical care.

Tony Garr, who heads the group, is urging Tennesseans to contact the president. “You need to do this for your country,” Garr’s mass e-mail says. “Governor Bredesen has caused serious harm to thousands of people. We don’t want him doing this to the country.”

As you can see, popular opinion on Daschle’s replacement is mixed. Perhaps that’s what we can expect—after all, the masses don’t have to weigh political considerations when making their ideal Cabinet choice. Still, crowd wisdom can help guide the presidential selection committee. It’s clear the public has something to say about the President’s choice for health reform chief, and new forms of communication are making it possible to move the decision making process out of the back room. Who would say that is not a good thing?

Just moments ago, President Obama, in his town hall-style meeting in unemployment-battered Elkhart, Indiana, just fleshed out his views of what Recovery.gov, the administration's own stimulus watching Web site, will be designed to do.

"We're actually going to set up something called Recovery.gov—this is going to be a special website we set up, that gives you a report on where the money is going in your community, how it's being spent, how many jobs it’s being created so that all of you can be the eyes and ears. And if you see that a project is not working the way it's supposed to, you'll be able to get on that website and say, ‘You know, I thought this was supposed to be going to school construction but I haven't noticed any changes being made.’ And that will help us track how this money is being spent. ...The key is that we're going to have strong oversight and strong transparency to make sure this money isn't being wasted."

That's far more detail on Recovery.gov than is written into either congressional stimulus bill. And it's a vision that I'm sure many in the transparency community will first hail, and as $800 billion or so in federal funds are disbursed, will then hold Obama to meeting.

While quite naturally the president didn't get into the information architecture that would support such a system--will the underlying data be public and easily adaptable by third party innovators and watchdogs?--he's talking in terms quite similar to the techno-sousveillance community.

While any implementation remains sometime away, to hear this rhetoric coming from the mouth of the president is nothing short of remarkable.

The latest from new media guru Steve Outing's Twitter feed: "Isaacson, Brill, Mutter, et al. Tired arguments on failed micropayments model to save newspapers. Fail. Think different! They point to doom."

Earlier, I linked to Steve Brill's "secret" memo to the New York Times urging them to start charging online readers. Brill suggested, at one point, "a new marketing campaign ...'you get what you pay for.'" Here, TJ Sullivan of LAObserved suggests a sort of "you don't get what you don't pay for" approach that he hopes might convince readers of all online newspapers to pony up:

Now is the time for newspapers to do something proactive; time for them to demonstrate what life would be like without them.

It's time for every daily newspaper in the United States, in cooperation with the Associated Press, to shut down their free Web sites for one week.

Yes. Shut it down. Blank screen. Nothing.

Of course, news would still be reported daily in every newspaper's printed product. No editor, or reporter or publication would dare shirk their watchdog responsibilities. This isn't about stopping the presses.

But the Web? People can do without news on the Web for a week. They won't like it. They'll complain about it. But, that's exactly what has to happen before they can be expected to care.

Pulling the plug gets their attention.

So, here's the proposal: At the stroke of midnight on Independence Day, Saturday July 4, all daily newspapers ought to switch off their Web sites until Friday, July 10.

Call it "A Week Without a Virtual Newspaper." Call it crazy. Call it costly. Call it whatever you want, but it's no more drastic a measure than asking people to work for free...

...The point of pulling the plug for one week isn't to harm them, but to emphasize the origin of all that news content, and why everyone should care about protecting that source.

Pulling the plug is perhaps the only way to make people outside of journalism sit up and take notice that this isn't about jobs in journalism, but American Democracy.

Related petition. Watch Sullivan make the case:

So here's an email I wasn't prepared to receive last night:

Hi, Megan Garber (megangarber).

Dalai Lama (OHHDL) is now following your updates on Twitter.

Check out Dalai Lama's profile here: http://twitter.com/OHHDL

Best,
Twitter

Yep. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama--the fourteenth incarnation of a long line of Buddhist Masters, and the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhists and many others around the world--seems to have joined Twitter. Or, well, his office has (hence the "O" in His Holiness's acronym-tastic Twitter handle).

It makes sense: not only does his newfound Twit-hood add His Holiness to the list of other religious figures known by that name to have elected to spread the Word via the Web (recall the Vatican's YouTube channel)...but there's also something rather meditative--and if you're me, even mindless--about Twitter. So, hey, namaste.

Update: The OHHDL Twitter feed, per a message from the site, "has been suspended due to strange activity." Hmm.

As far as network morning news show viewers know, there is but one story in the news today. According to TVNewser, Good Morning America devoted its "entire first hour" today to Captain Chesley Sullenberger (of the Hudson River "splash-landing" fame); The Early Show made Sully's story "the focus of the entire show" (last night's Couric interview on 60 Minutes was just the beginning); and Today, "after being scooped" on a Sully interview, concentrated on Nadya Suleman, mother of octuplets, doling out more of Ann Curry's interview with her. TVNewser predicts "big ratings" for the shows.

The AP describes the "behind-the-scenes machinations" involved in Sully v. Sully v. Octuplets' Mom.

Someone emailed to Romenesko a "confidential memo" written by Steve Brill late last year urging the New York Times to "have the fortitude to get off the free-content treadmill" and offering the paper a "plan" for doing so. The tipster tells Romenesko that "Brill has discussed all of this in at least one meeting in-person with the hierarchy of the New York Times Co."

Beyond the how-tos and why-you-musts of Brill's memo, some random bits of interest:

In two or three years, as an experiment, the paper might not be printed on the lowest-profit print day.

And:

To encourage a sense of “membership” in a community committed to an informed society and participation in the world’s prime journalism organization, all annual subscribers would be given the chance to vote to approve the appointment of the ombudsman (whose role would be made much more independent for the same reason).

And:

A merger with CNN.com should also be explored as a way of completing the ultimate online paid package. (Cable networks, which depend on payments from cable systems and their customers, will soon need to face the consequences of giving their content away for free, too.)

UPDATE: Gabriel Sherman, at Slate, on "Why Steve Jobs and micropayments won't save the media."

The Journal is too contrarian for the sake of it in an Outlook column positing that the economy could be in for a sharp recovery.

The chance of any rebound in the current quarter seems far-fetched after last week's dismal reports on January manufacturing activity, chain-store sales and jobs. Still, if the government's coming stimulus package and bank plan are able to restore a modicum of confidence in the economy, recovery could come surprisingly quickly.

Yeah, yeah. Everybody's down on the economy nowadays, and it's good to break from the herd sometimes. But comparing this recession to the one in 1980 just doesn't make much sense.

For one thing that one was extremely short, in an inflationary environment, and due to the Fed sharply tightening interest rates to cripple that inflation.

This one's already gone on longer than the 1980 downturn, and we're pretty much in a deflationary environment now. Prices of assets are falling, and if you see that ending soon, you must be a Wall Street analyst.

What shall we add to the list? Oh, the massive overleveraging of the economy extended to consumers, of course, who've shut down spending. I come down on the side of those who think we won't see consumer spending hit 2007-type levels for a long, long time. That was mostly debt-driven anyway (except for the Gilded Age excesses on Wall Street and in Greenwich), and it's going to be much harder from now on—even with a recovery to get credit like that.

Which is a point the WSJ actually makes... in the last paragraph. Here are the last three graphs of the story, which sort of say "well, nevermind" to its whole thesis.

But recovery would need to be treated with caution. Recent research from economists Carmen Reinhart at the University of Maryland and Kenneth Rogoff at Harvard finds that in the aftermath of a banking crisis, a country's economy, on average, contracts by 9% over a period of two years, while its unemployment rate climbs by seven percentage points over four years. It's a drawn-out process often punctuated by false starts.

"You're still deep in the hole and there's this reprieve that makes it look as if things are getting better, and they roll over and die again," Ms. Reinhart said.

Here's the sobering lesson: The economic expansion that followed the 1980 recession was one of the briefest on record. Rampant inflation and overdependence on a manufacturing sector facing stiff foreign competition were still problems, and by mid-1981 the economy was careening into the longest downturn since the Great Depression. After years of heavy dependence on credit-fueled spending, a quick recovery for today's economy could also prove fleeting.

Read those last three graphs and forget about the top.

Jon Meacham, Newsweek's editor, describes the thinking behind the magazine's planned makeover:

"There’s a phrase in the culture, ‘we need to take note of,’ ‘we need to weigh in on.'... That’s going away. If we don’t have something original to say, we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.”

... Editorially, Newsweek’s plan calls for moving in the direction it was already headed — toward not just analysis and commentary, but an opinionated, prescriptive or offbeat take on events...

...Newsweek executives hope they are creating a new niche, but the magazine will not have the terrain to itself. To varying degrees, it will be plying turf already worked by The Economist, The New Yorker, The Atlantic and others.

Newsweek will focus on and attempt to "grow slightly" its "core of 1.2 million subscribers who are its best-educated, most avid consumers of news, and who have higher incomes than the average reader." Said Tom Ascheim, Newsweek’s chief executive, "If you can’t get people to pay for what they love, we’re all out of business.”

Stock analysts have been overlooked in this crisis, despite having a prominent role in the last stock crash just eight years ago.

So, good for The New York Times for catching up with these folks to see just how they've done. You can guess where this is going.

I like the lede:

Even now, with the recession deepening and markets on edge, Wall Street analysts say it is a good time to buy.

Still.

And here are the devastating stats:

At the top of the market, they urged investors to buy or hold onto stocks about 95 percent of the time. When stocks stumbled, they stayed optimistic. Even in November, when credit froze, the economy stalled and financial markets tumbled to their lowest levels in a decade, analysts as a group rarely said sell.

And last month, as the Dow and Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index suffered their worst January ever, analysts put a sell rating on a mere 5.9 percent of stocks, according to Bloomberg data. Many companies have taken such a beating in the downturn, analysts argue, that their shares are bound to bounce back.

Maybe. But after so many bad calls on so many companies, why should investors believe them this time?

Anecdotes are easy pickins for this story: The Citi analyst who upgraded Bank of America to a "buy" on October 8 and is down 77 percent—so far—on that one.

Here's the pitiful excuse from a guy who also upgraded BofA to a "buy" and doubled down by doing the same for Citigroup:

“Our ratings are based on 12-month price targets,” Mr. Harte said. “Given the nature of economic cycles and, really, the focus of the new administration, I did expect and still do expect that the sector will improve considerably over the long term.”

Define "long term" for me.

The Times uncovers something interesting here but doesn't follow through and explore it at all:

The actual investment recommendations coming from a sales desk can tell a different story from analysts’ publicly released research. To gauge what clients are actually hearing from their investment managers, the investment-tracking firm First Coverage collects buy and sell recommendations from about 1,000 analysts that serve independent and midsize firms.

At the end of January, 34.5 percent of the recommendations seen by First Coverage were for a sell or short call. That was up from 24 percent in December 2007. At the height of the market crash, in October and November, the proportion of sell calls reached about 45 percent.

Why is that number so much different than the 5 percent of the analysts? No hint here.

But the paper does write a bit about the structural reasons for why analysts are so bullish.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re in a bear market, a bull market, a flat market, you’re going to get 95 percent of the research coming out telling you to buy,” said Randy Cass, chief executive of First Coverage. “It’s just the way it’s always been.”

Although reforms after the dot-com bubble sought to make analysis more independent by separating it from investment banking, the broader culture on Wall Street still favors bulls.

Yet another institutional failure.

The past year’s health care discussion has been remarkable for the narrow range of ideas and opinions that have floated down to the man on the street. Journalists have sought out the same organizations and sources for their stories, offering up what has become the conventional wisdom for reform. To bring more voices into the conversation, our series, Excluded Voices, will intermittently feature health care experts who aren’t on the media’s A-list of sources. We want to offer journalists more options for their stories and encourage a deeper discussion. To that end, we’ve asked the experts featured in each post to respond to questions from Campaign Desk readers.

The Washington Post recently ran an utterly predictable and formulaic story about consumer driven health plans—those newfangled options that come with tax-advantaged savings accounts, and are, some would say, the future of American health insurance. Basically, policyholders shoulder more of their health care costs, relieving insurance companies from as much of the claims burden as possible. After getting beyond the requisite anecdotal lead, about a woman who is facing “steep increases in out-of-pocket expenses for health coverage this year,” we learn that employers are planning to shove more costs onto their workers. The consulting firm, Mercer, surveyed almost 2,000 large employers and found that 44 percent planned to make workers pay a higher portion of their health insurance premiums this year, up from 40 percent in 2008. Higher premiums often lead workers to clamor for lower deductibles. So there’s a need to understand just how these high deductible offerings work. To that end, Campaign Desk talked to comsumer-driven health plan expert Timothy Jost, law professor at Washington and Lee University and author of Health Care at Risk: A Critique of the Consumer-Driven Movement, published in 2007.

Trudy Lieberman: What do we mean by consumer-driven health plans?

Timothy Jost: It’s an imprecise term that means different things to different people. But at its core, it means an arrangement that transfers to consumers much of the responsibility for buying their own health care, just as they would buy cars or computers.

TL: How do the kinds of consumer-driven policies differ?

TJ: Health savings accounts, or HSAs, are savings accounts to which consumers or their employers can make tax-advantaged contributions. HSAs must be coupled with a high deductible insurance policy; in other words, a plan that covers catastrophic expenses. Consumers can use the money in the account to pay for medical bills they incur before they meet their deductible. Health reimbursement accounts, or HRAs, also come with a savings account, but only employers can make contributions. HRAs are usually linked to a high deductible policy, but they don’t have to be.

Balances in the HSA and HRA savings accounts can be rolled over from year to year. If you have an HSA and leave the job, you can take your money with you. If you have an HRA, the money usually stays with the employer.

TL: Are employers putting money into HSAs?

TJ: A lot of employers are providing high deductible policies. Some are contributing to the HSAs, and some are not. A study by the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association found that only 38 percent of consumers with HSAs received contributions from their employers in 2008, down from 45 percent in 2007. Other research shows that millions of Americans have high deductible plans, but no health savings accounts to help them pay for care while they are meeting the deductible.

TL: How high do these deductibles go?

TJ: The latest report from the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Education Trust found that the average family deductible for HSAs offered by employers was almost $4000. Deductibles for policies with an HRA can be much higher, and sometimes are. But under the law, deductibles for tax-subsidized HSAs can not exceed the maximum amount a person has to pay out-of-pocket, which is $5,800 for individuals and $11,600 for families.

TL: What’s the rationale behind these high deductibles?

TJ: Supporters believe that when consumers have to spend their own money, they will think twice before running off to the doctor. And when they do, they will shop for the doctor who will offer the best price and quality, much the way they shop for a TV set. They also argue that the high deductibles will cause the price of care to come down because these policies will offer skimpier coverage and consumers will use fewer services which, of course, keeps premiums down.

TL: Has that happened?

TJ: Insurers say yes, but we really don’t know. There is evidence that people with HSAs from their employers are more likely to participate in exercise, stress management, and nutrition programs. They are also more likely to seek out health information and keep track of their health care expenses. They are healthier and use fewer medical services. Advocates of these plans believe that people in consumer-driven plans spend less money, and their employers save money. But an employer’s insurance premium may just be lower because employers are simply shifting costs to their workers. One study showed that, on the surface, these plans saved employers a lot of money. But when you look harder at the data, you see that the savings were largely attributable to healthier workers signing up for the consumer-driven plans, leaving the less healthy workers in more traditional plans.

TL: Can consumers really bargain with doctors for cheaper services?

TJ: It’s silly to believe that consumers bargaining with doctors and hospitals can bring down costs. It makes no sense. Even the insurers don’t believe that. It’s not going to happen. Consumers aren’t going to the hospital to drive a hard bargain. Medicare and insurance companies will always get a better deal.

TL: Is it reasonable to expect that consumers can bring down health care costs?

TJ: Relying on consumers to put the brakes on costs is problematic. The information is not there to allow them to do that, and if it were, consumers often would not be in a position to rationally process information. Successful cost control is much more likely to come from the government, or private payers saying that they are not going to pay for medical products and services that don’t work.

TL: Have consumer-driven policies hurt people’s health?

TJ: People in high deductible plans have a harder time getting care. They are more likely not to fill prescriptions or go to the doctor, and less likely to get the health care they need. A study by the RAND Corp. showed that consumers could not discriminate between non-essential care and necessary care, and they basically saved money by not going to the doctor.

TL: Do HSAs further health care equity?

TJ: No. HSAs definitely favor wealthier people. There’s pretty good evidence that where people have an option of an HSA plan, HSA plans are chosen more by wealthier employees. A significant number of these people are using them as a tax shelter for retirement. These plans protect neither the health nor financial security of people who are poor.

TL: Do they further a two-tier health care system?

TJ: More wealthy people use these plans; they get tax benefits and generous contributions to their HSAs. Lower income workers get high deductibles. That means health insurance may be affordable, but when you get sick, health care is not. Just because insurance is affordable doesn’t mean that someone can get affordable care. Consumer-driven plans just postpone the question of affordability. The wealthy can always afford their care. Poor people can’t.

TL: How do these plans affect the doctor-patient relationship?

TJ: The relationship between the patient and physician has traditionally been viewed as one of trust. Patients entrust themselves to their doctors, who have an obligation to put the patients’ interests first. At least, that’s the ideal. The vision for consumer-driven health plans assumes that the physician and other care providers are merchants and patients are consumers. So let the buyer beware. This change threatens the welfare of patients who now cannot trust their doctors to look after their medical needs. Trust is an important aspect of healing. If you approach your doctor as you would a used car dealer, he or she probably won’t be able to help you as much.

TL: What legal issues do these plans raise?

TJ: They raise a host of legal issues that we have not even begun to sort out. Does the duty of a doctor to secure informed consent to treatment now include an obligation to provide information about cost as well as risks and benefits? Might a doctor who withholds medically necessary care because a patient cannot afford to cover deductibles, coinsurance, and copayments be liable for malpractice, or for breaching a fiduciary obligation? Do state managed care bills of rights apply to insurers when they are deciding whether or not the cost of a service counts against a deductible? Are there any limits on how much a provider can charge a patient who is paying for a service out-of-pocket if both have not agreed on a price beforehand? (They almost never do.) Are insurers liable to patients or providers if they provide incorrect information in their quality rankings?

TL: How important are these plans in the so-called individual market, where people have to assume the entire cost of the policy?

TJ: They will take over an even larger part of the individual and small group market if nothing is done to reform health care. They won’t be very important if Obama is successful in creating a public plan, like Medicare, that people can join. If that happens, nobody in his or her right mind would choose a high deductible plan if they can buy a comprehensive and cheaper policy through a public plan.

TL: How will this dynamic threaten sellers of these plans in the context of health reform?

TJ: If Congress can pass legislation offering Americans affordable care with reasonable cost-sharing, I would not expect Americans to choose consumer-driven plans instead of a public option.

TL: How robust is this market in general?

TJ: Both the employer and the individual have grown significantly since 2003, when these plans were first authorized on a large scale. But there are signs that growth has leveled off. Whether the market will continue to grow depends a lot on whether health reform is adopted and whether there will be a public plan. That will be a major sticking point in reform.

Karen Tumulty at Time posts this chart from Speaker Pelosi showing how much worse the job losses have been in this recession than in past ones, part of Pelosi's argument to pass the stimulus bill.

It's eye-opening, to say the least.

There is a lot of pain out, we haven't hit bottom by any means.

The top stories in both The New York Times and The Washington Post today focused on the bipartisan Senate committee that’s working to cut roughly $100 billion in spending from the economic stimulus bill. The Senate's bill is more than $80 billion more expensive than the $819 billion House package, passed last week, and both papers catalog the various programs that might get the ax, like $14 billion for education funding, or $1.5 billion to improve rural broadband access.

But why, you might ask, is the Senate package so much more expensive than the House bill?

It's got much to do with a single $64 billion tax cut benefitting the wealthiest 20 percent of Americans—a fact that was largely buried in reporting about the squabbling over which spending programs to cut.

As the Times notes near the end of its article (emphasis mine): "The cost of the Senate measure has risen substantially above the $820 billion House-passed bill, first with the addition of a $64 billion provision to spare millions of middle class Americans from paying the alternative minimum tax in 2009….”

Hold the phone.

$64 billion for the Alternative Minimum Who?

The so-called AMT is an annual headache for lawmakers. It originally was passed in 1969 to stop the super-wealthy from “hiding” their money in tax shelters by applying strict rules on deductions, and therefore ensuring high-income brackets would pay a minimum tax no matter what.

Not a bad idea for a bill, but the income brackets weren’t indexed for inflation. So while, in the swinging ‘70s, fewer than 500 people were affected by the AMT, nowadays it would apply to over 20 million upper income Americans. A political nightmare for both parties. Every year, Congress passes a bill that temporarily “patches” the AMT—the legislative equivalent of a Band-Aid—shielding most upper income bracket Americans from the bill’s reach. As a result of these "patches," about 20 million people have not had to pay an additional couple thousand dollars each year.

So, what’s the problem with that? Well, there are several.

Most obviously, the AMT “patch” messes with Congressional budget projections. As The American Prospect’s Dean Baker noted way back in 2007: “Because the AMT is on the books but it’s never enforced, “…baseline budget projections assume tax revenues that no one expects will ever be collected.”

So budgets start to look screwier than they really are. And that’s one of the reasons why the House's stimulus measure seemed to be $80 billion dollars cheaper than the Senate's. It was really only about $30 billion cheaper—after you subtract the $64 billion revenue loss that happens every year when lawmakers curtail the scope of the AMT.

Billions, schmillions, right? When we’re talking about an $820 billion-plus package, why split hairs over a $70 billion revenue loss that occurs every year anyway?

For one, critics say the AMT “patch” probably won’t help stimulate the economy. The Brookings Institute gave it a D-minus—the lowest passing grade possible—on a stimulus package “report card” that rates which riders are most likely to actually jump-start the economy.

What's more, despite the Times's claim that the AMT exemption is aimed at the "middle class," the “patch” primarily helps the richest fifth of Americans. Tax Policy Institute charts illustrate that it does nothing for the poorest 40 percent, and hardly anything for the folks in the middle. In a nation that’s pricked by an increasingly populist, rage that’s not the kind of thing that will sit well in Middle America.

As I write, a senatorial scrum is working to cut $100 billion from the Senate's current spending proposal. The Post reports that they’re specifically looking to cut education programs and energy efficiency initiatives. (Check out the chopping block here.)

Increasing revenue by reversing tax cuts is not being considered at all. Reporters, and the American people, should be aware of the reasons why.

CORRECTION:
In this post I said the Madoff story got caught up in the "Journal's labyrinthine editorial structure." In fact, I didn't have enough evidence to support that. Subsequently, the Journal spokesperson got back to us, saying this: "As a general rule, we don't comment on our news gathering decisions, but the statements you are providing us are materially wrong and don't come from a person in a position to know our editing decisions."

I just screwed this one up. Mea culpa.

With the attention on the Journal missing the Madoff story, I’ve tried to show that the breakdown is not as cut and dry as some of us would like to believe, however inexcusable it is.

Earlier today, I approvingly quoted Gary Weiss’s best guess as to how it happened:

Since the Journal is unlikely to ever explain itself, I’ll try to offer my guess as to why a top investigative reporter and his editors dropped the ball so terribly:

They didn’t believe Markopolos.

But it appears that reporter John R. Wilke, at least, believed him—or at least thought it was intriguing enough to ask repeatedly if he could pursue the story.

I talked this afternoon with a person who worked in the Washington bureau with Wilke, the reporter who Markopolos corresponded with over three years in an attempt to get the Journal to expose the Madoff scam. This person says Wilke wanted to do the story but couldn’t get approval within the Journal’s labyrinthine editorial structure to proceed.

“Wilke was hot for the story but the editors had him on other things,” my source says. “The paper had been through cutbacks and didn’t have enough people to do everything at once.”

This person is sympathetic to Wilke, saying it’s unfair that he is being singled out in the coverage. I agree, though I’ll note that’s unavoidable since the emails are a part of the Congressional record now and Wilke’s name is the only one from the Journal in them.

But let’s also note that the way the Journal works, reporters have to pitch stories to editors before they can spend much time on them. It’s unclear how far up the chain this would have gone or if his immediate supervisors even allowed Wilke to get to the proposal process.

So as I’ve said before, nobody at the Journal squelched this story because they were afraid of Madoff or wanted into his fund or didn’t want to blow up the Ponzi scheme. Far from it.

The more likely explanation is that the moving parts of resource allocation, time management, and editorial priorities just didn’t align. Sometimes the machine breaks down, especially when it’s under the stress of having too few people to cover too many stories. That’s what likely gummed up the works, preventing the Journal from spitting out a Madoff blockbuster.

A Journal spokesperson couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.

Ken Paulson, ex-USA Today editor, imagines a world in which newspapers came after the Internet, rather than the other way around. Worth a read, via Romenesko.

Say what you will about the content of the column; Charles Krauthammer's WaPo op-ed today has an undeniably phenomenal headline.

Not cool, Mr. Gibbs. Witness the following exchange between President Obama's press secretary and ABC's Jake Tapper. Then recall the overtures toward transparency previously made by the Administration. Then cringe.

As the Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation (which, full disclosure, helps fund CJR's transparency coverage) writes,

Transparency isn’t just a bunch of web sites and data and releasing information online (although that’s all great, too), it’s also allowing conversations to be held with candor. Everyone knows the press wants to be adversarial, but the Press Secretary’s office should no longer continue with the tradition of stonewalling and evasion. Gibbs should be allowed to speak more freely and openly, and thus be more transparent.

Amen to that.

Monday's New York Times, as well as around 400 other newspapers and magazines, featured a full-page ad, its lettering yellow against a deep blue background: "More People Will Read A Newspaper Today Than Watched Yesterday's Big Game." In smaller lettering, the ad discussed newspapers' "supersized" readership, their audiences' reliance on the information they provide, and the journalism they produce--"the best journalism found anywhere," as the ad had it.

The ad was sponsored by the Newspaper Project, a grassroots coalition of newspaper editors and executives--Randy Siegel, president and publisher of Parade Publications; Brian Tierney, CEO and publisher of Philadelphia Media Holdings; Donna Barrett, president and CEO of Community Newspaper Holdings; and Jay Smith, former president of Cox Newspapers--intended, essentially, to defend newspaper organizations against the pervasive pessimism about their future. "While we acknowledge the challenges facing the newspaper industry in today’s rapidly changing media world," the Project's Web site declares, "we reject the notion that newspapers—and the valuable content that newspaper journalists provide—have no future."

CJR's Megan Garber spoke with Randy Siegel to learn more about the project.

Megan Garber: How are you defining newspapers in the context of the campaign?

Randy Siegel: It's really about newspapers both in print and, obviously, the newspaper Web sites. We're using "newspaper" as an umbrella term for all the news and information that newspaper companies provide, both in print and digitally. We're really looking at this both in terms of the print and the digital portfolios that newspaper companies will continue to build and evolve with.

You know, you get outside of New York, and in most cities and towns across America, all the good-quality journalism comes from the local newspapers. And in recent years we've seen the decimation of local television news, local radio news, etc. I enjoy bloggers' work--I read a lot of blogs, myself--but this notion that bloggers will somehow fill the void if local newspapers were suddenly to disappear--we reject that out of hand. We just feel that that's an overly simplistic solution, and some classic wishful thinking.

MG: So there's something inherently valuable about the infrastructure of news organizations?

RS: Absolutely. It's the infrastructure, it's the professional training, it's the ability to condense massive amounts of information into accessible prose for the reader and the online visitor. It's the editing. I mean, this notion that you don't need editors anymore is laughable. Editors make things accessible for readers and online users, and they help educate all of us about stories and issues that we otherwise might not see. I highly doubt that your favorite blogger, for example, is in a position to fly to Iraq and cover what's going on there, or to fly to the far East and decipher our relationship with China as an economic superpower, or to go into City Hall and expose instances of municipal graft and corruption, or to get behind the scenes of a major sporting event and help people understand why a game turned out the way it did. I believe that, in journalism, you get what you pay for. And quality journalists will always have a role in our society. And as newspaper companies evolve, great journalism will now be more important than ever. Across multiple platforms.

MG: I think most of us would agree that quality journalism depends on good reporting. Do you see a distinction between, say, The New York Times and Talking Points Memo, or between the Times and other Web-only outlets that do good, original reporting?

RS: Absolutely. The New York Times creates some of the most marvelous content in the world, both in print and online. And I think that a lot of online aggregators exploit Times content for their own gain. I know that some of the online aggregators purportedly drive a lot of traffic to certain Web sites, but I don't believe that newspaper companies are extracting maximum value from those aggregators, which sell millions of dollars of ads around the content created by hardworking journalists. And that's one of the issues that I think newspaper companies are starting to, thankfully, reevaluate.

MG: How so?

RS: I know that Eric Schmidt at Google says that "all information wants to be free." But it's easy for the folks at Google to say that, when they're making billions of dollars by selling ads around other people's content. And the content of news organizations, in particular, which have to incur the costs of the journalists' work, and of all the investment that goes into creating compelling journalism.

In just the past couple of days, there have been reports that The New York Times, the Dallas Morning News, other companies are starting to take a look at the liability of giving away all of their content for free, at the same time that they're trying to charge for it in print. And in this new world we all live in, that issue is in need of reevaluation.

MG: Are there any models you're particularly optimistic about when it comes to that?

RS: I don't have it all figured out. But what we're trying to do with our effort, newspaperproject.org, is to create as much productive debate and discussion over what the right models need to be to make sure that the marvelous news and information newspapers provide is both widely distributed and also valued by the people who receive it. And one of the things that I think the newspaper industry will need to ask itself is, "Are the online aggregators paying enough for what they receive?" We've created a classic free-rider problem. You can build billion-dollar companies around the quality content that other people invest in and pay to create. The value proposition is completely out of balance.

MG: Are you currently planning anything beyond the Web site and the ad campaign?

RS: We have our print ads that ran in Ad Age and The New York Times and The Washington Post--about 400 newspapers ran our first ad--and we have online banner ads that have been running on Web sites. And of course we have the Web site up and running. And we're going to be producing a series of print and online ads; I think the next round of ads will be more focused on consumers. We started off with a simple, straightforward message: "Newspapers have great reach and a lot of readers." That's a nice point of departure, but that's not the be-all and end-all of the campaign. What we hope to do is to create discussion amongst consumers about how people still depend on newspapers. It's a 55 billion dollar a year industry with 100 million satisfied clients who every day who read the paper. It's not going away overnight, despite the wishes of some of the pundits and prognosticators.

MG: What about op-ed pages and commentary sections--do you see those as integral components of newspapers, or could they ostensibly be ceded to blogs?

RS: I'm just speaking personally, but I think that op-ed sections, and the opportunity newspapers have to publish interesting voices from an audience, are really under-leveraged. There's a hunger among consumers to see wider ranges of viewpoints--and there are certain editorial pages and op-ed sections across the country that do a marvelous job of that. I feel that the elimination of op-eds, and the elimination of editorial pages, is a big mistake. Instead, they need to be a lot more interactive, and a lot more inclusive, with new, emerging voices, as well as older, established ones. They're still in a great position to thrive in print and online. And, online, there's a lot of exciting work to be done around social networking--particularly as it pertains to people who want to discuss and debate mutual areas of interest. A well-done editorial page and op-ed section can be a linchpin for newspapers to develop very effective social networking platforms that would be not only be very popular, but also very engaging for important subsets of their audience.

MG: Do you see local papers and national papers developing those platforms in ways that are fundamentally different--or fundamentally similar?

RS: At the end of the day, it's about how well papers can serve their readers, and how well they can build an audience, both in print and online. And once they build those audiences, whether they're able to sell advertising and subscriptions around them, with all the new products they're developing. I know from my travels at work that a lot of the mid-size and smaller-market newspapers are doing much, much better than their brethren in bigger, major metros. So it's hard to generalize about what the appropriate evolution will be. But at the end of the day, the question is how they can serve their communities with quality news and information, and make it accessible to those communities on all sorts of different platforms. And, in that respect, there are definitely many different formulas for success.

MG: How did the idea for the project come about?

RS: We discussed amongst ourselves, periodically, how there's this feeding frenzy of negative news about the future of newspapers. We felt that it was all out of proportion. The reality is that certainly newspapers have challenges--and we're not being Pollyanna-ish about them--but everyone in the media has challenges, whether it's at Yahoo, whether it's at CBS, whether it's at ClearChannel, whether it's at XM Radio, whether it's at a big consumer magazine. Everyone needs to innovate and evolve, because we're in the midst of a media revolution. And at the end of this, newspaper companies will be left standing, because I believe that they'll do the right things to evolve and thrive, both in print and digitally, that those innovations will help safeguard their future. People want quality information now more than ever. That's one foundation that newspapers are in a great position to build upon.

In terms of the project itself, this whole effort was created in the last four weeks. We pulled some staff together, and we update the content on the site every single day. And hope to build out a bigger staff for that. But this has really been done as a grassroots effort. It's a collective of newspapers. It started with four of us in Parade's office, on January 7. We had our first and only meeting, and then we've been calling each other and e-mailing each other furiously, and we just started emailing all our contacts and making phone calls. And our colleagues responded beautifully. Now we've got 400 of our colleagues involved.

I think people in our business realize that we've done a mediocre job of telling our story and communicating the viability of newspapers going forward, and there was a real hunger for this sort of effort. And that's what we're really excited about continuing over the days and weeks and months ahead.

As the Senate rips pages out of the prospective stimulus bill, the world seems focused on where the money is going to go. Will there be more aid to homebuyers, as Republicans have proposed? Will more infrastructure funding be added? Will direct aid to states be cut?

All of these are excellent questions for the press to watch as the bill moves towards passage. But as soon as Obama signs it, the questions will be a bit different: Where, exactly, did the money go? And how well was it spent?

In some ways, we’ve heard the opening bars of this song before. The massive federal interventions in the banking system have been roundly criticized—by the press, by the public, and by the TARP program’s own oversight board—as being unnecessarily and undemocratically opaque. The stimulus package offers a second take, under an administration that has promised, and in key ways delivered, a new tune on transparency.

“I think there’s a lot of attention on the stimulus funding, because the TARP money was about the same amount of money,” says John Wonderlich, a senior policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, which supports CJR’s reporting on government transparency. “That controversy has maybe poisoned the well.”

And it’s causing some to think big on what a transparent stimulus might look like. Imagine a Web site where citizens could type in their address and see what the stimulus was funding on their block, in their city, or across their state. What if it listed the number jobs a project was intended to create or preserve? And what if, in due time, that data could be compared with outcomes: Were the jobs filled, were the roads built?

Both the House bill, which passed January 28, and the pending Senate bill have some measures that provide transparency and accountability for what likely will be a messy disbursement of hundreds of billions of dollars. Both bills envision a Web site where all projects will be listed, along with “relevant, economic, financial, grant, and contract information.” And both contain the slim but hopeful phrase that the data should be presented in “user-friendly visual presentations.”

Although differences in the bills will eventually have to be resolved in a conference committee, for now the House bill is getting higher marks from transparency advocates, mostly because it carries stronger, more specific requirements for online disclosure of the goals and costs of each funded project.

That might change if Senate Amendment 196, as introduced by Claire McCaskill of Missouri, is adopted. It requires far more detail on projects’ estimated job creation numbers and start-to-stop times, along with more information on subcontractors and contracts issued by state and local governments. It would also provide about $30 million of funding for constructing and maintaining a stimulus accountability website, and impose a thirty-day deadline for its creation.

While the placeholder Recovery.gov site, established by the Obama administration, promises an “unprecedented” accountability effort, it remains to be seen what “user-friendly” means to the government, given that much of the language in the bills remains rather vague.

The thirty-plus groups in the Coalition for an Accountable Recovery have called on the government to ensure that the offical Web site include mapping and graphing functions, and to present the data so it can be downloaded for further analysis.

“We’d like to see some more stuff spelled out,” says Craig Jennings, a fiscal policy expert at OMB Watch, which is a member of the coalition. But so far Congress hasn’t done anything to forestall a more detailed site. “There’s nothing in the language that says this can’t be done,” Jennings adds.

In other words, the administration’s implementation of the transparency provisions will be key.

But the transparency community is interested in not only what data is released, but in how the data is released. If adequate spending data is released in an adaptable raw data format, the government’s presentation of the information may not be so important, because third party watchdogs can use and improve upon the information.

Jerry Brito, a regulatory and information expert at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, has already taken a stab at this sort of site. StimulusWatch.org scraped data from a national mayoral organization’s list of 11,000 “shovel-ready” city improvement projects scattered across the country—projects that, the mayors claimed, were ready to absorb federal stimulus funding. The site allows users to provide project details from local sources, expanding on the brief capsule descriptions provided by the mayors. It also allows citizens to rank and debate the worthiness of any given project.

“The debate aspect is what is the most attractive to most people,” says Brito, who plans to include whatever federal data is made available.

While there’s no guarantee that any of the mayors’ projects will end up funded by the stimulus, the Web site shows one way how stimulus projects might be tracked and judged by the public.

“Transparency is a means to an end, and that end is accountability,” says Brito.

DISCLOSURE: The Sunlight Foundation provides financial support to the Columbia Journalism Review’s transparency coverage.

For those of you who, like us, firmly believe that the term "Weekender" is a). incredibly annoying, b). appropriate as a name for an Amtrak train bound for Rehoboth Beach, perhaps, but little else, and c). eroding your faith in humanity, one perky infomercial at a time...then: today is your day! The 92nd Street Y, with assists from Michael Showalter, Paul Rudd, Michael Ian Black, and other assorted comedic geniuses, has given The New York Times's obnoxiously ubiquitous/ubiquitously obnoxious "Weekender" ad ("I saw these great boots in the Style section!") the satirical skewering it so richly deserves. Aaaaaaaaaaaah.

(Non-journalistic bonus: Paul Rudd in a pirate hat.)

It’s not easy to satirize President Obama. Without any significant blemishes on his young political career, nor even any distinctive physical characteristics (like former President Clinton’s Arkansas drawl, or Bush’s squint-and-pout), Obama has little material to offer to pop culture juggernauts Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show. But yesterday, a new comedic gem appeared on the web from, of all places, Newsweek. Yes, their web folk did, in fact, chronicle the story of the young, ambitious new president via MTV’s format of documenting all things young, ambitious, and new—by giving Obama his own urban-themed scripted comedy, “The District”.

New digs, attractive arm candy, a highly competitive job in one of the nation’s premier cities—who knew Barack had so much in common with Whitney Port? Newsweek promises another episode next week, hopefully with a less tedious intro and more awkward vacant stares. Now it won’t be long until the New York Times starts a vlog series staring Thomas Friedman a la Bromance.

Jason Linkins of The Huffington Post runs through the email correspondence between Madoff's would-be slayer Harry Markopolos and WSJ reporter John R. Wilke—correspondence that stretched over three years and led nowhere. Here's a notable email he pulls out:

By February 2007, Markopolos is sounding a downcast note: "The Wall Street Journal's John Wilke has been a huge disappointment. Obviously they were the wrong choice. Eventually Bernie will blow up and everybody will say, 'I told you so.'"

I think Linkins goes too far with the hyperbole here:

The Journal had this story in its pocket and could have ruled the street with it, but they passed? Why? Who knows. Maybe they thought that inaction would turn a corrupt Ponzi scheme into a good investment

Had the Journal really thought this was a billion-dollar Ponzi scheme, and one they could prove, they would have been all over it.

Gary Weiss of Portfolio gets it about right. Riffing off Linkins's piece, Weiss concludes that after all the rigamarole Markopolos went through, this is the likeliest explanation for why the Journal blinked at the softball over and over again:

Since the Journal is unlikely to ever explain itself, I'll try to offer my guess as to what why a top investigative reporter and his editors dropped the ball so terribly:

They didn't believe Markopolos.

It's that simple. I can't think of any other possible explanation, and I don't think that any other one has any chance of being credible

That sounds right to me. We all know who Markopolos is now. But who knew him then? Trust me, Journal reporters get a lot of cranks weaving elaborate conspiracy theories and trying to convince the WSJ to print them.

As I wrote yesterday, sorting the chaff from the wheat is part of the challenge of the job, and it's a critical one, but one whose difficulty shouldn't be underestimated with the benefit of hindsight.

According to Time, Markopolos testified that the Journal never even heard Markopolos out, supporting Weiss's theory that it suspected he was a crank.

"It is a sickening thought," but if the SEC or the Wall Street Journal "would have picked up the phone and spent one hour contacting the leads" provided, Markopolos said, Madoff would have been stopped in 2006, and "untold billions" would have been saved.

But I noted in my post yesterday there were some minor discrepancies in Markopolos's prepared testimony and his live testimony about the WSJ.

Still, the Journal just missed it on this one. There are no two ways about it.

The New Yorker's Elizabeth Kolbert spoke at Yale on Wednesday--discussing issues of climate change and of our porcine lifestyles...but also of journalism in general. Worth a read.

In 1935, Boeing Corporation almost went bankrupt after its Model 299 long-range bomber literally crashed and burned during a U.S. Army flight competition. Major Ployer P. Hill, the pilot, and one other crew member died in the crash. As a result, the Army contract went to a competing company, causing major financial difficulties for Boeing.

As a consolation, the Army ordered a few Model 299s for further testing. The question was how to fly them safely. The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande writes that the Army eventually “came up with an ingeniously simple approach: they created a pilot’s checklist, with step-by-step checks for takeoff, flight, landing, and taxiing.”

“With the checklist in hand, the pilots went on to fly the Model 299 a total of 1.8 million miles without one accident,” according to Gawande. The Army eventually ordered thousands of the aircraft, which became known as the B-17.

Gawande’s December 2007 story is a paean to the checklist, one of the simplest and most effective error-reduction tools. Checklists have been proven to work for pilots, doctors, nurses, and even people working at a nuclear power stations. For example, the use of a World Health Organization surgical safety checklist helped reduce inpatient deaths following operations by 40 percent, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Checklists also work for journalists. We just don’t use them.

One reason is that newsrooms often put too much emphasis on experience. The assumption is that a veteran reporter or editor will make fewer errors than a rookie. But research doesn’t support this idea. In a 2000 article for the British Medical Journal, James Reason, one of the world’s leading researchers of human error, emphasized that “it is often the best people who make the worst mistakes—error is not the monopoly of an unfortunate few.”

Gawande poses an intriguing question that relates to Reason’s point: “What do you do when expertise is not enough?”

Part of the answer is that you create and enforce the use of tools and processes that eliminate opportunities for error. You stop making people rely solely on experience. This is where a checklist is useful. It reminds us of the steps required to achieve the best result. It reduces the likelihood of a preventable error. Simply put, checklists work.

Over the years, some news organizations have used checklists. There are samples online from the Detroit Free Press and the San Jose Mercury News. The latter enforced the use of checklists among a group of reporters and editors over an eight-month period spanning 1999 and 2000. The result, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, was that the checklist group “had 10 percent fewer errors than a similar group not using the checklist.”

Even with that success story on the books, checklists are foreign objects to the vast majority of newsrooms. My constant endorsement of the checklist is usually met with blank looks. You want us to check off items on a piece of appear while we’re trying to do our jobs?! I know, it’s madness. This week I even created a free downloadable accuracy checklist for reporters (it will help editors as well). You can get your copy here. But wait, there’s more.

Here’s my Billy Mays pitch: commit to using a checklist on every story your work on for the rest of the month. It’s the shortest month of the year, and we’re already one week into it. Download my checklist or create your own and keep a fresh copy on your desk. Tape it to your monitor. Tattoo it on your hand. Whatever works. Then take ten or fifteen minutes at the end of the writing or editing process and use the checklist to go through your work.

Then, when March 1 rolls around, think back to all the times the checklist helped you catch an error. If you actually used the checklist, I’m sure that come Monday, March 2, you’ll print out a fresh one and get back to work.

For now, though, if you’re skeptical about the value of checklists, consider this: when flight 1549 lost both engines shortly after takeoff a few weeks ago, the co-pilot started going through an “engine restart checklist.” He also had a “ditching checklist” onboard for that exact situation.

Yet more evidence that checklists work.

Correction of the Week

“In last week's column about photographing snowflakes, I said I was delighted to learn about the delightful word "groppel," meaning little globs of ice that form on snowflakes.

A couple of readers promptly noted that the word might have seemed novel to me because it's actually "graupel," a German term transported into English.

As an ironic addition, a particularly astute reader (who didn't leave her name on my answering machine, or I'd give her a tip of the hat) pointed out that the term had been described in The Telegraph's Weather Trivia on Monday, two days before the column ran.



And it was spelled correctly!” – Nashua Telegraph

Resurrection

“Frankie Vaughan was not celebrating his 81st birthday yesterday. The singing legend died in September 1999 (Page 37, February 3).” – The Mirror (U.K)

Parting Shot

“Vice-regal vicissitude: Last June we showed a lack of excellence by changing Australia's first female Governor-General Quentin Bryceinto a man, calling her Mr Bryce. Now we've also managed to change the sex of Canada's Governor-General, Michaelle Jean. Her Excellency Mme Jean is a she, not a he as we published in late editions of the paper (Canada crisis adds fear to Labor hopes, Opinion, page 21, February 4). The error was made during the editing process.” – The West Australian

Correction: In the original version of this article, an accidental misspelling gave the impression that the Detroit Free Press was actually called the Detrout Free Press. It is not. CJR regrets the error.

The text of H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, is 647 pages long. The draft version of the bill currently making its way through the Senate is 736 pages long. Each document contains thousands of separate provisions, the result of multiple amendments, and each of those, in turn, is written in a pidgin form of legalese so dense and convoluted that it's easy to forget that the language the package is meant to be written in is, ostensibly, English.

Given all that—and given, as well, the fact that there are twenty-four hours in a day, and that caffeine can do only so much to increase the ratio of hours spent alert to those spent otherwise—how are journalists to fulfill their responsibility: distilling the bill, and filtering its most important components, for their readers?

The Huffington Post, for one, is turning to a method with which many other news organizations have already experimented: outsourcing. In this case, to their readers. In a January 24 post, the HuffPost's senior Congressional correspondent, Ryan Grim, linked to a copy of the bill, writing:

Please take a look through the bill and let us know if you find anything noteworthy or surprising. Specifically, search for anything a little out of the ordinary, such as the section on page 14 that makes sure no money goes directly to Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. That provision was introduced earlier as an amendment and it has made it into the final bill.

Or read through the oversight sections and the authority (and money) given to Government Accountability Office. Is it real oversight or are there wide loopholes?

It's the Talking Points Memo model of crowdsourcing—assigning readers to parse through textual information (what Josh Marshall refers to as a "document dump")—adopted by the outlet that some have dubbed "the newspaper of the future." And, in many ways, it's a strategy that has worked as well for the HuffPost as it has for its fellow experimenters in citizen journalism. Nearly 400 people signed up to participate in the project (signing up gets an email from "HuffPost Citizen Journalism," entitled "Taking on the Senate stimulus bill," which thanks the recipient "for joining our stimulus package research team" and provides instructions for reading through an assigned portion—about a fifth, or 100 pages—of the bill). And those volunteers' efforts led to hundreds of tips to Grim and his fellow reporters, in the form of individual emails and of comments on the HuffPost's article pages.

"We have readers who are highly intelligent, a lot of them are highly accomplished," Grim notes. And, while not all of the tips panned out—several readers assumed nefarious intent in the omission of references to recovery.gov in the Senate version of the bill (it turned out that the Web address "was stricken on the advice of legislative counsel, who advised that specifying a specific url wasn't appropriate in a piece of legislation," Grim notes) —occasionally, their contributions bore fruit.

Tim Dickinson, a politics reporter for Rolling Stone, "found that the Senate had increased funding for STD prevention to $400 million," Grim writes. "(Senate Republicans found that appalling and have succeeded in stripping it from the bill.)" And Timothy Jost, a law professor and health care author, "noticed that the Senate had removed the House provision that would allow people 55 and over who are laid off to continue COBRA coverage until they're 65 and eligible for Medicare. The House version also made folks who were laid off temporarily eligible for Medicaid; the Senate version strips that out, Jost found. Every one percent increase in unemployment throws more than a million people into the ranks of the uninsured." There are many more where those came from.

It makes perfect sense to have readers help out—with the stimulus package, in particular, whose content is as significant as it is dense. "People want to see these things come to light," says Matt Palevsky, who coordinates distributed reporting for the HuffPost, and worked on the stimulus project. "It's a feeling of interest," he says—the content of the package will affect all of us both profoundly and directly—“and also one of responsibility." There's also that fact that "playing the investigator is fun for a lot of people—it certainly is for me."

Soliciting and taking advantage of that help is nothing new, either—and not just for the HuffPost (the stimulus project is a direct outgrowth of OffTheBus, the outlet's popular—and, by most accounts, highly successful—citizen journalism project), but also for journalism in general. Crowdsourcing in this respect "is just an extension of what's always been done in the media world," Grim says. "People have always called into newspapers or network news shows with tips—and that's all this is."

While the Web may allow easy access to the text of the bill, beyond that bit of technological facilitation, the work the HuffPost's readers have been doing is a species of the kind of reader participation that has been a mainstay of hometown newspapers since the advent of contemporary journalism. It's now simply happening en masse, and at warp speed.

And in a way that turns the traditional structure of journalism—top-down—on its side, and that shifts the reporter/reader relationship from a vertical orientation to a horizontal one. "It's a two-way street," Arianna Huffington says. "We provide assignments--but we also listen to our community and see what they would like to report on, and follow up on what they send us."

And, though the stimulus bill is a logical choice for reader participation, the HuffPost's efforts at crowdsourcing aren't limited to legislative analysis. "We are doing it across all the verticals," Huffington says. "And we are finding that every day, there are more and more opportunities to use the wisdom of the crowd, to use our community--which is so large and active at the moment--to report stories."

Still, combing through nearly 1,400 pages of dense text is a long and often thankless task—which is why professional journalists get paid to do it. Volunteer reporters, for all their eagerness and their admirable sense of civic responsibility, lack the accountability that comes with a paycheck. "It's a running experiment," Grim says of the project--and one of the more interesting factors being tested in that experiment is the extent that intellectual interest, emotional investment, a sense of community, or some combination thereof, will yield valuable journalism.

Compare the HuffPost's crowdsourcing approach to The New York Times's combing of the stimulus package. Reading through the bill "is my job," says David Herszenhorn, the Times's Congressional correspondent. "I'm supposed to do that for the readers, not the other way around." While Herszenhorn shares Grim's respect for readers—"often our readers are smarter than we are about a given subject," he says, "so we're certainly paying attention" when a reader writes in with a comment or a tip—at the same time, "we're not going to count on them to do the scrutiny of the bill."

Instead, Herszenhorn and his fellow Times reporters are engaging in what he calls "a loosely coordinated, newspaper-wide effort" when it comes to parsing the stimulus package—"with some of us responsible for the whole thing from top to bottom, but then lots of different parts of the paper having particular interests in different aspects of it": Robert Pear is focusing on the health care provisions in the package, Sam Dillon is focusing on education, etc. They share tips among each other, and also use external resources—floor debates, press releases from lawmakers and interest groups—to help navigate through the most significant (which often means the most controversial) aspects of the package.

Like the HuffPost's approach, it's not perfect. Even experts—whether paid to pore through the bill, or volunteering to do so—may miss things. But what matters, when it comes to the stimulus package, is the aggregate of our knowledge about it. The ability to share news across the superficial divide of outlet title and brand name means that information, in cases like these, matters more than any single organization. And quantity breeds quality: the more people we have to read the through that text, regardless of whom they're working for, the better off we all are. The HuffPost may catch something the Times didn't, and vice versa. As far as the public is concerned, the only thing that matters is that someone's there to do the catching.

Mark Maremont is one of The Wall Street Journal's top investigative reporters (and a senior editor), focusing much of his efforts on executive compensation and accounting.

He led the team of Journal reporters who wrote the blockbuster stories in 2006* that led to the backdating scandal. The team used an ingenious technique that uncovered wild statistical improbabilities in executive stock-options timing and found that many companies fraudulently inflated executive pay. The eye-opening stories resulted in dozens of corporate earnings restatements, dozens of executive defenestrations—even a few convictions.

Among other notable stories, Maremont in 2003 co-wrote a major page-one Journal story that laid out the failings and weaknesses of the SEC—something that looks prescient in the wake of the scandal still unfolding on Wall Street.

Just last week, I praised a page-one story Maremont wrote finding that companies have inflated—and had long-concealed until they were recently forced to disclose—executives' benefit plans for years using favorable formulas they deny their regular workers.

The Audit caught up earlier this week with Maremont and talked about database trolling, “archaeological investigations,” and scaredy-cat CEO's.

The Audit: Tell me a little about your background; how you got on the path to be an investigative journalist at the Journal.

Mark Maremont: I had done some investigative reporting when I was in London for BusinessWeek. I'd done some digging into Robert Maxwell. He was a big fraudster, and I was very skeptical about him and had written some negative stories and dug into his finances. It was fun and interesting and like putting pieces of a puzzle together—particularly when people didn't want you to.

We exposed a huge accounting scandal at Bausch & Lomb that got the CEO fired. There was another one at Astra USA, which was a sexual-harassment scandal that got a bunch of people fired.

When I came to the Journal I had a more general-assignment type job but did do a number of investigative-type stories—mostly accounting-related.

One of the things I eventually came to realize is that the more complicated the financial area, the less likely it was that anybody else could understand it or was going to take the time to understand it and the easier it was for the bad guys to hide things. So accounting, taxes, compensation to some extent are the kind of areas where disclosures were murky or nonexistent, at least until recently. And the rules are very complicated and the numbers are daunting for people who don't have a numerical bent. I spend a lot of time plumbing those areas of business.

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 fifth of an occasional series of posts on the senator’s pronouncements and how the media has covered them. The first four are archived here.

Anyone who has ever covered Washington, or a state house, for that matter, knows that the pols don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say. The semantic games they play send signals to lobbyists, the press, and the public about this or that piece of legislation. And those pols who have been around a long time are very, very good at the game.

There seemed to be something for everyone in Max Baucus’s latest remarks to a group of health policy researchers this week about the future of health care reform. They reminded me of the old Clairol commercials: Does she or…or doesn’t she? (Hair color so natural only her hairdresser knows for sure.) Will reform happen this year, or won’t it? Only Max Baucus knows for sure…or does he?

A headline in a recent Washington Times story, “Health care reform not No. 1 on Hill”, signaled that maybe reform will be put on hold because, as Baucus said, “Why might reform not happen this year? As is often the case, the new administration and the new Congress face competing priorities. These priorities compete for time on the agenda and attention in the press and in public. The president’s dance card is indeed full.”

The Times reported that Baucus also said he is committed to passing legislation this year, although several obstacles remain; as examples he cited the bad economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the budget deficit, and efforts to wean the U.S. from foreign oil. But the senator said that, even if reform is pushed back to 2010 or later, voters did give Congress and the White House a clear mandate to change the system.

The Hill put another spin on the senator’s comments with this headline: “Baucus says healthcare reform will require more government spending.” The Hill quoted Baucus: “Getting health reform legislation this year is my top priority---No. 1. Certainly this session of the new Congress, not next session of this Congress, because we have to get momentum to really make this work.”

The Hill story went into some detail about what Baucus said on the topic of costs. “We cannot and should not anticipate savings in every year of the budget window, nor should we claim that we will be able to pay for healthcare reform,” he cautioned, while speaking of bending the growth curve of health spending. “If we can’t generate savings, then reform is not likely to happen.” No mention of the possible pushback to 2010 in The Hill. Instead, the story noted that “Baucus went so far as to describe the enactment of health reform in 2009 as ‘nearly inevitable’” but gave itself an out by saying that those remarks came before president's pick for health chief, Tom Daschle, resigned.

One thing Baucus has been consistent about is his aversion for a single payer system, and CQ presented that message to its readers. CQ reported that, when a questioner asked about single payer, Baucus said: “It may come later but it’s not going to happen in America [any time soon].”

“We’re a different country. We’re constituted differently than European countries,” Baucus said. “There’s more of an entrepreneurial sense [in the United States]. So we’ve got to come up with a uniquely American result. And a uniquely American result will be a combination of public and private insurance."

FYI: Bill Clinton also used the words “uniquely American” to describe his proposed reform plan in 1993.

Baucus isn't the only pol serving up tea leaves. I was thoroughly confused by a comment from Rep. Pete Stark of California, who chairs a crucial health subcommittee. A few weeks ago, when the House voted to expand the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the San Francisco Chronicle said that “Stark predicted the reform legislation would be enacted by September, despite up-front costs that could be as high as $150 billion a year.” But wait a minute. Didn’t Stark say in December that reform might have to wait until early 2010? At that time, he said lawmakers had too many pressing priorities on the economy and other smaller-scale health issues to move quickly on a large health bill in 2009—at least that’s what The Hill and other outlets reported.

There you have it—Baucus (and Stark) every which way, offering hope or despair to friend and foe of health reform. It sure would be great if the media could remind the health politicos what they have previously said and clue us in when the signals change.

The Big Money, Slate's business site, runs a nice appreciation of Michael Lewis by its reporter Chadwick Matlin.

Matlin not only is totally right about Lewis, his piece is also a nice essay about business writing and why it's so often so, well, bleh.

Above all, Michael Lewis is a man obsessed with characters. Business journalists are often left with a false choice between writing about inanimate objects—collateralized debt obligations are always a hit—or about stuffy corporations and CEOs—scions, Pfizer, and Bear Stearns, oh my! Lewis has managed to chart a third course. Instead of detailing financial instruments, he finds characters within the underbelly of the market and lets them do the hard work for him. At least hundreds, often thousands, of words in his magazine pieces are spent describing Lewis' characters to set some type of financial and psychological scene. For Lewis, stakes are established by outlining a character's motivations and then detailing the reactions when the principles and artifacts of Wall Street interact with those desires. This process allows his subjects to become emblems of broader economic themes. In other fields, this technique is the norm; it's called storytelling. In business, however, Lewis' type of narrative yarn is rarely pulled off deftly.

Very well put.

If you haven't yet read Lewis's masterful Portfolio effort on "The End" of Wall Street, read it now or print it out and take it home.

The financial press way underplays a report by the TARP oversight panel that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson lied to the public—and to Congress—about the price he paid for banks' preferred stock*. And no surprise, the panel suggests he paid tens of billions more than he should have.

The oversight panel is headed by Harvard's Elizabeth Warren, who's written extensively on the middle-class squeeze, and is one of Audit chieftain Dean Starkman's favorites.

Warren says this, which the Journal drops in the second-to-last graph of a C3 story:

She said the report suggests Treasury paid $254 billion for preferred stock* and warrants that may be worth approximately $176 billion, a shortfall of $78 billion.

Let's spell that out: Paulson overpaid the market price for those assets by 31 percent. $78 billion used to be a lot of money, and it still is a lot of money. It's outrageous. And Warren's not out on a limb here: The Congressional Budget Office estimated a similar amount recently.

And the Journal story (actually a Dow Jones Newswires story added to by a WSJ reporter) somehow doesn't mention at all that Warren said Paulson misled the public and Congress. Hello?

The Times is not much better, running a Reuters wire story inside its business section, but at least it reports Warren's important testimony:

But in buying those securities, Henry M. Paulson Jr., then the Treasury secretary, misled the public about how it was going to price them, said Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard law professor and head of an oversight panel for the bailout, known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.

“Treasury simply did not do what it said it was doing,” Ms. Warren said at a hearing before the Senate banking committee.

But even it doesn't note that if Warren is correct, Paulson not only misled the public, he misled the Congress, which last I knew was a crime.

The Washington Post is much, much better, putting the $78 billion figure in the lede—and on A3.

My quibble with the Post's story is that it doesn't air the whole "lied to the public and Congress" news until the seventh graph:

Warren replied, "Senator, Treasury simply did not do what it said it was doing."

"In other words, they misled the Congress, did they not?" said a visibly flustered (Senator) Shelby.

To put this starkly, we are subsidizing the shareholders and executives of the very firms who have done us in.

According to the analysis by the oversight panel, the Treasury invested $40 billion in American International Group, the insurance giant, and received shares of equal face value but worth only $14.8 billion, or 37 percent of the price it paid. It said the real value of the $10 billion in Morgan Stanley that the government purchased was only $5.8 billion, or 58 percent of what it spent.

The study was conducted for the panel by the international valuation firm Duff & Phelps, which analyzed the 10 largest bailout investments and then extrapolated. For the eight banks it studied that were relatively healthy, the Treasury received assets worth $78 for every $100 it invested. In the two transactions for the riskier firms, the government received preferred shares worth $41 for every $100 it invested.

Forty-one cents on the dollar*. Heck of a job, Hanky.

* Updated to correct the number and to say more precisely what Treasury bought. I originally referred to it as "debt", but preferred stock is a sort of debt/equity hybrid, though some say in this case the purchases are effectively of "subordinated debt."

Happy Friday, everyone. Below, The Daily Show on President Obam-ea Culpa's most recent media tour (worth watching all the way through, to catch Stewart discussing Robert Gibbs's increasing resemblance to one of those "dick high school principals" in a John Hughes movie):

I guess A-List Hollywood has not yet caught the Twitter bug. How else to explain the appearance of CNN's Rick Sanchez on the (New York) Daily News's list of "Top 10 celebrities on Twitter" (to say nothing of MC Hammer or Beyonce's sister, Solange Knowles who, the News reports, recently Twittered: "I feel and look homeless. At least the weather is nice.")

And speaking of Sanchez and Twitter, I could do without his and his viewers' Tweets taking up a portion of CNN's screen during the White House press briefings; I've yet to notice one that really enhances the experience.

In the midst of the debates leading up to the recent presidential election, the governor of Alaska said something to the effect that she understands middle class values and struggles because of her experience “in the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been, you know, all of our lives." Although earlier the Anchorage Daily News revealed the Palin family's net worth at about $1.2 million, Palin's statement wasn't strictly criticized. Social class has long been a matter of faith rather than a strictly verifiable fact; if Sarah Palin wants to call herself "middle class," she can go right ahead and do so.

But this makes the recent task of Palin's erstwhile opponent, Vice President Joe Biden, all the more interesting. President Obama recently announced that Biden will chair a new White House task force on the middle class. The press seems to be oddly uncritical of this new venture. David Stout at The New York Times did point out that:

The president and vice president did not precisely define the “middle class,” a term used in conversation and politics to describe aspirations as well as income levels. But it was clear that they were not speaking of the Wall Street people who shared in the enormous bonuses that Mr. Obama denounced on Thursday.

The coverage didn't get much more critical than that. But perhaps it should have.

First of all, the name itself. According to the White House Web site, the committee is called White House Task Force on Middle Class Working Families. The committee treats "middle class" as if it were merely an adjectival phrase to describe "working families." If so, this is a dramatically new use of the term "middle class." The trouble is that the middle class and the working class are different things, and are, in fact, historically at odds.

The "middle class" includes professionals, highly skilled workers, and lower and middle management. "Working class," in contrast, is typically synonymous with the proletariat, and refers to the segment of society dependent on physical labor and compensated with an hourly wage. The middle class is concerned with things like paying for college. The working class worries about its jobs moving overseas. The interests of the two classes may sometimes overlap, but they are not the same.

Does this sort of thing matter? Well, maybe. Today, in an economic downturn, when most people are feeling recessionary pressure, the interests of the middle and working classes may be congruent. Both are worried about their financial futures. But this is not always true.

The committee's goals are vague, and the first event scheduled for Biden's task force is “Green Jobs: A Pathway to a Strong Middle Class.” Perhaps they are, but it is unclear what the Biden task force is supposed to accomplish. Is the task supposed to a) expand the middle class, b) improve what it means to be middle class, or c) condense the middle class (since one could argue that the primary reason for the latest financial crisis was the promotion of one of the very worst of middle class characteristics, namely the unnecessary acquisition of possessions)?

The discussion of this new task force is often fused with a discussion about labor unions, as if strong labor was synonymous with the middle class. Lou Dobbs, supposedly a big defender of the "middle class," makes this mistake, too, saying in 2006 that:

Our country's middle class is not just collateral damage in what has become all-out class warfare. Political, business and academic elites are waging an outright war on working men and women and their families, and there is no chance the American middle class will survive this assault if the dominant forces unleashed over the past five years continue unchecked.

This is despite the fact that, historically, the middle class—small business owners and company managers—are opposed to the interests of organized labor.

The Biden task force may be simply an exercise in public relations, an effort to appear to do something for people who want help, as both the middle and working class do now. Its vague name reflects this rather vague mandate. For obvious reasons, the "White House Task Force on the Proletariat" is an unworkable title. But it's odd that a committee charged with addressing the financial problems facing many American families is hampered by a title that would seem to obscure the actual economic interests of the different groups it purports to serve. And it's unfortunate that the press hasn't shown much interest in pointing that out.

From a Journal story about how Wall Street is canceling junkets to luxury resorts.

The Morgan Stanley decision comes as so-called incentive conferences meant to reward and motivate employees have dropped off significantly, hotel owners say. "The troubling matter from a hotel owner's perspective is that populism is demonizing having a meeting at a resort property," said Jon Bortz, chief executive of LaSalle Hotel Properties, which owns 31 upscale hotels.

Indeed, I am troubled by this turn of events. It could put a damper on awesome trips for reporters, as well.

But seriously, these guys are on the taxpayers' dime now, and the video-conferencing technology they've got these days is really something to see.

And not to worry, hoteliers, the Wall Streeters will be back when nobody's looking. In the meantime, this means vacations are on sale for the lucky among us who still have jobs.

And now for a much-deserved break from all the bad news.

The Journal runs a terrific "ahed"—the name for the paper's classic offbeat front-page stories— this morning, about an Aussie pro bowler taking the sport by the storm by rolling the ball with two hands (disclosure: the reporter, Adam Thompson, is a pal of mine from my WSJ days).

The ball can top 600 revolutions per minute, up to 17% more rotation than the nearest elite one-armed competitor and twice what some other top pros generate. Ideally, the approach sends the ball flirting with the right edge of the lane before hooking sharply into the center and creating an explosion of pins. "When he hits the pocket, it's curtains," says John Jowdy, a coach since 1948. "The ball is very destructive."

And the tension, of course, is that the revolutionary is ruffling feather amongst the old guard (who fear the fact that he can get much more spin on the ball than they can):

Some see parallels in the unorthodox two-handed approach to track-and-field's Fosbury Flop -- named after the Olympic gold medalist whose backward leap permanently changed high jumping. But Mr. Belmonte has faced doubters on many sides. Some bowlers scoff at what they see as the PBA's favoritism toward him. Some think his little-studied form could injure young bowlers as they get older. And Mr. Belmonte has crossed paths with some old-timers who simply don't like the new style.

The WSJ has a video report embedded in the Web page if you want to check out his style.

On the other coast, the Los Angeles Times's Column One is also a great read, this one about a tiny Alaskan fishing village whose police blotter has become must-reading around the world for some. Here's why:

A literate, witty and often hilariously calm voice of reason in this outpost of human foibles, the Unalaska police report documents what happens when thousands of fishermen from all over the world descend on one small port for shore leave:

Bunkhouse roommates throw lamps and nightstands at each other. Ethiopian and Somali immigrants engage in raucous but obscure tribal disputes. Drunks pass out -- in ditches, on bar stools, in other people's bunks and in unfamiliar living rooms.

Here's my favorite bit:

Of course, the locals manage to get into their own share of scrapes. Names aren't included in the blotter postings unless someone has been charged with a significant crime. Still, most residents are able to read between the lines. Who was the woman who phoned the police and said her armchair was trying to kill her? That one was easy -- her furniture's always after her. Who was the trawl fisherman arrested for driving while intoxicated after pulling out of the Harbor View Bar's parking lot with a teacup Chihuahua in his lap? Do you have to ask?

Finally, this one's for you New Yorkers (and those of us who miss New York): The New York Times posts a tribute to the city created with Legos by the artist Christop Niemann. It's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. My favorite is "Many on Subway Platform, Seeing a Critter on the Tracks" or maybe "Plastic Bag, Caught in Tree Branch". And I think we can all agree about that terrible Verizon monstrosity—a cancer on the Brooklyn Bridge skyline. Mr. Bloomberg (or Mr. Seidenberg), tear down this building!

Hey, for a few minutes theses pieces helped me forget about the 626,000 jobs lost last month. Thanks, guys.

Winners: Barack Obama, and the American people, for not getting Tom Daschle as their new Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Like many advocates of national health insurance, FCP was initially enthusiastic about Tom Daschle's appointment as HHS secretary, and as director of a new White House Office of Health Reform. If the main reason national health care reform failed in 1993 was the inexperience of Hillary Clinton in the ways of Washington, wouldn't a former Senate Majority Leader be the perfect person to shepherd it through Congress in 2009? But news of Daschle's failure to pay taxes on the free car and driver with which he had been provided provoked a flood of other disturbing disclosures.

In the gentle words of the New York Times editorial which appeared the day that Daschle withdrew himself from consideration:

Mr. Daschle's financial ties to major players in the health care industry may prove to be even more troublesome as health reform efforts proceed. Like many former power players in Washington, Mr. Daschle cashed in on his political savvy and influence to earn $5 million in recent years, including more than $2 million from Alston & Bird, a law and lobbying firm; more than $2 million from the private equity firm, InterMedia Advisors, which provided the car and driver; and hundreds of thousands of dollars for speeches to interest groups, including those representing health insurance plans, medical equipment distributors and pharmacy boards.

And in the never gentle words of Glenn Greenwald:

Daschle's expertise and insights, gleaned over 26 years in Congress, earned him more than $5 million over the past two years, including $220,000 from the health-care industry, and perks such as a chauffeured Cadillac, according to the documents.

Other than his ability to know how to swing doors wide open in Congress, what "expertise and insights" worth that level of compensation does Tom Daschle have? It's pure legalized influenced peddling, and -- upon being booted out of the Congress -- he ran right to it as quickly as he could and engorged himself at the trough as hungrily as possible. In doing so, he followed perfectly in the footsteps of his second wife, Linda, who served as the Clinton administration's Acting Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, and then, once she left her position running the agency that regulates the airlines industry, returned to her extremely lucrative lobbying practice with her largest clients being American Airlines, Northwest Airlines, Boeing, Lockheed and various airports and airport executive associations -- the very companies that she had been regulating. …There's no need to withhold judgment on Daschle himself. He embodies everything that is sleazy, sickly, and soul-less about Washington. It's probably impossible for Obama to fill his cabinet with individuals entirely free of Beltway filth -- it's extremely rare to get anywhere near that system without being infected by it -- but Daschle oozes Beltway slime from every pore.

FCP doesn't know whether the words of the Times or Greenwald had any effect on Daschle or Obama. If they did, at least in this instance, the press is actually helping to make the system work again.

Sinner: Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, for opposing the prosecution of any Americans responsible for torture, and repeating the favorite tale of torture apologists, about Philippine agents who supposedly got "Abdul Hakim Murad to reveal a plot to blow up 11 American airlines over the Pacific" after being "beaten nearly to death"—although, even in this story, it was not the torture which supposedly got Murad to talk, but the threat of being turned over to Israel's Mossad. Then Cohen says "the conventional wisdom that torture never works" is "so counterintuitive as to be an absurdity."

Beyond the fact that torture is illegal, immoral, and inhuman (which Cohen naturally glosses over), whether torture has ever worked is an idiotic question. The intelligent question is, What works best most of the time? And about that there is no doubt at all: non-coercive interrogation is invariably more effective than torture at eliciting genuine, actionable intelligence. This is what more than forty retired generals and admirals have been arguing for years—including all the ones standing behind President Obama when he signed the executive order outlawing American torture in the first week of his administration.

Winners: Newsweek's John Barry, Evan Thomas, Ron Moreau, and Sami Yousafzai for a superb cover story detailing all the ways that Afghanistan resembles Vietnam, and all the reasons why Obama needs to quickly grasp the lessons from that comparison.

Sinner: Fareed Zakaria, for another piece in the same issue, in which he manages to sound like every journalist who, thirty-five years ago, argued that just a little more intelligent effort could guarantee American success in Vietnam. Except that Zakaria was writing about Afghanistan.

Winner: Steve Weissman, for an even pithier summary of why our involvement in Afghanistan is doomed to failure.

Winner: Philip Bennett, who resigned at the end of last year as managing editor of The Washington Post after winning the hearts and minds of most of those who worked for him. Journalists often reserve their most evocative words for beloved colleagues. Here is how Washington Post foreign correspondent Anthony Shadid remembered Bennett, in a tribute that was read aloud at the editor's farewell gathering:

I first met Phil in November 2002. I'll remember that date because it's when I became a journalist. I had written plenty of stories. You do that spending 10 years as a reporter at the Associated Press. But only at that lunch with Phil did I understand what we can do as journalists. For an hour, I sat there, wide-eyed, shaking my head, as he seemed to reach inside my mind and pull out every ambition, hope and frustration I ever had. For the first time in my career, maybe my life, I was inspired.

"You've done everything you can do where you've been," he told me as he asked for the check. "Now it's time to become something more."

I joined the Post because of its editors, and in Phil, I got the best there is.

In Baghdad, a few days into the invasion, he noticed the texture of the street conversations at the bottom of the story. To me, it was throwaway color. To him, it might be the essence of the invasion. In a story that was burdened by clichés, here was ambiguity and ambivalence. That might be your theme, he told me.

On one story, a long sketch about a family burying a young boy, he did something that no editor had done before and none has since. He cut the nut graf. He just cut it. There was a lyricism to the gesture, a move that was subtle and grand.

And as Rajiv and I tried to make sense of the chaos around us, we turned time and again to Phil. Let the reporting tell the story, he said to us. Lose our preconceptions. Get rid of the ideas we brought. Understand the story. That was our job. Phil never told me what he thought. He never insisted what the story should be. He never suggested there was an answer out there. Report the story, and in the end, we'll have done right by ourselves and by the people and conflicts we cover.

He never flinched, not once, in letting us do that.

In writing this, I'm overwhelmed by how many lessons I've learned the past six years. I feel like everything I believe as a journalist has come from Phil. Through him, I learned to speak truth to power. I learned to fear assumptions and the chauvinism and bias they bring. I learned to embrace the gray in stories that are always too black and white. Perhaps most important, I learned to be quiet. It was another lunch, a few months into the war, and Phil scolded me for stories that had too much drama. There was too much shouting, too much gunfire. They were too loud, he said, and I realized then that quiet journalism is often the best.

When that year ended, I remember feeling overwhelmed by the attention. I felt undeserving, a little unworthy. Phil took me to the side. He seemed to sense what was on my mind. It's not about you, I remember him telling me, it's about your work, and the work can stand on its own. On that day, he had become a friend.

The work that I and other foreign correspondents do is going extinct. Sitting in southern Iraq tonight, trying to make sense of another story, I realize that. The same could probably be said about American journalism, at least as we've understood it. And at perhaps its most critical time – when we have to rethink it and reimagine it – we have to face the fact that we've lost its most courageous, brilliant voice. Journalism feels a little untethered to me, and the Post feels a lonelier place.

There's something missing from the top of this New York Times story on how "competing ambitions" for "Washington's financial rewards" and for "public life" shaped Tom Dashcle's post-Senate career.

When Tom Daschle said he was quitting his lucrative consulting job to become President Obama’s health secretary, an old Republican rival from the Senate, Trent Lott, teased him about giving up the good life.

“Tom is a believer,” said Mr. Lott, who led the Republicans when Mr. Daschle was Democratic leader. “He was very serious about wanting to take on that cause. I couldn’t even get him to joke with me about it.”

For four years, ever since voters in South Dakota turned him out of office, Mr. Daschle has seemed to yearn for the power and prestige of his public life. He vowed not to become a lobbyist, telling friends that salesmanship was beneath him. He spent as many as two days a week working without pay at a liberal research institution on issues like health care and climate change. He had contemplated a run for president in 2008.

“He loved public service,” said his friend Tony Coelho, a former House Democratic whip, “and he always looked at, was there an opportunity to get back in.”

But Mr. Daschle was also eager for Washington’s financial rewards. He had benefited from his wife’s pay as an aviation lobbyist; they share a $2 million home in a fancy Washington neighborhood. But with three children from a previous marriage, he aspired to some wealth of his own “to leave his kids and grandkids,” said Mr. Coelho, who made his own move to Wall Street.

After passing on the scuttlebutt that Daschle saw salesmanship as "beneath him," the story fails to contrast that assertion with the fact that Daschle made most of that $5 million in in four years by acting as a "rainmaker"--a rose is a rose is a rose--for Alston & Bird (a well-connected law firm with registered lobbyists on staff) until the story's 14th paragraph. If you're reading on paper, that's past the jump.

Until that point, readers are left with the impression that along with his pro-bono policy work, that his biggest concession to the Washington money machine was merely being married to and cohabiting with a lobbyist. Along the way to the first mention of his actual job, we're treated to a bunch of quotes from friends who put great stock in the legal distinction between registered-lobbying and the type of un-registered cashing in on influence and connections that brought in the bucks.

Things shape up in the story's latter section, where we get more detail on exactly what Daschle, who has no law degree, did at Alston & Bird (hitting up Democratic donors for business, plotting "legislative strategy" with lobbyists and clients). It's good that it's there, because it's vital to understanding what Daschle did for the last four years. And that's why something about the job should have come at the top of the story.

Whose In Defense of The Stimulus Bill, Which Republicans Have Given A Bad Name-themed op-ed today do you prefer: E.J. Dionne's in the Washington Post or Gail Collins's in The New York Times? I'm partial to Collins's (it's the Pong reference or, the use of a Pong story in the service of larger lessons such has How Press Coverage Happens).

Of the bill Collins writes, "By now, the public has gotten the idea that it's all a big waste." And how has the public "gotten" this idea?

[T]he [bill's] opponents focus on things with names that sound frivolous or funny. This is an old game that works for almost any form of human communication. Let me explain with a story. When I was beginning my career as a reporter, I once covered a shooting in which the victim was gunned down while playing an arcade video game. This was so long ago that the game in question was Pong.

It was not a very interesting crime, and under normal circumstances it would have vanished in the daily ebb and flow of New York City police reports. However, the shooter made the terrible mistake of including a colorful detail, and he became the Pong Slayer, whose every court appearance merited additional coverage...

...If you’re walking around and happen to see a very large but very battered stimulus bill hobbling by, give it a pat on the back. It’s been Ponged within an inch of its life.

In the Post, Dionne writes:

Republicans -- short on new ideas, low on votes and deeply unpopular in the polls -- have been winning the media war over the president's central initiative...

In just two weeks...Obama and his advisers have been forced to learn basic lessons on the run. For starters, the media cannot be counted on to be either liberal or permanently enchanted with any politician. Arguments left unanswered can take hold, whether they make sense or not...

At County Fair, Eric Boehlert details how "arguments left unanswered" have "taken hold" (that is, the role the press has played, as he writes, "in tilting the stimulus 'debate' in the GOP's favor."), something he criticizes Dionne for not detailing.

.

The Journal has an excellent tick-tock on the deal between Merrill and Bank of America, showing how the government stared down BofA when it was considering backing out of its agreement.

Mr. Lewis had had enough. On Wednesday, Dec. 17, he flew to Washington, ready to declare that he was through with Merrill, people close to the executive say...

Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke forcefully urged Mr. Lewis not to walk away, praising the bank's earlier cooperation -- but warning that abandoning the deal would be a death sentence for Merrill...

Two days later, in a follow-up conference call, federal officials struck a harder tone. Mr. Bernanke said Bank of America had no justification for ditching Merrill, according to people who heard the remarks. A Federal Reserve official warned that if Mr. Lewis did so and needed more government money down the road, Bank of America could expect regulators to think hard about their confidence in management. Mr. Lewis was told that the government would consider ousting executives and directors, people close to the bank say.

But why Lewis went through with this dog of a deal is still a mystery to me. BofA was supposedly "healthy", right? It said it didn't need that multi-billion dollar capital infusion in October but took it for the team.

The story is apparently the first in a series called "USA Inc.: The State of Capitalism" looking at how:

Six months into the great bailout of U.S. finance, Washington's rescue attempt has helped shore up the system. But that emergency effort, planned on the fly, has taken the government on a risky journey deep into the heart of American capitalism.

Bureaucrats are calling the shots behind the scenes at some of the nation's largest enterprises. Critics of the bailout program say its rules are opaque and its execution ad hoc, leading to a lingering lack of confidence in the financial system. Some lawmakers are scrambling to steer funds to favored lenders.

This is something the press needs to devote serious resources to, and it's excellent that the Journal gives this crucial story the full page-one "leder" treatment with the promise of more to come. And the paper continues to crush the BofA/Merrill story.

Would we be better off now if the government hadn't hardballed BofA into taking on billions in capital-sucking losses, instead nationalizing Merrill like it did AIG? Seems likely to me.

Another piece of big news here is how much BofA knew about Merrill's problems before it submitted the deal to a shareholder vote without telling shareholders about the $13 billion in losses at Merrill it already knew about (that number would rise to $21.5 billion):

On Dec. 5, the deal was approved at separate shareholder meetings in Charlotte and New York. Nothing was said about Merrill's problems. "It puts us in a completely different league," Mr. Lewis said about the deal's completion.

It sure did. You got bumped down from the majors to single A, Kenny. Those shareholder lawsuits are going to be very difficult to fight.

Great work by the Journal

"...has quit subscribing to the New York Times, because if it doesn't see fit to charge for its content, I'd feel like a fool paying for it." So Isaacson (former Time managing editor, current CEO of The Aspen Instiute, and a self-described "old print junkie") writes in a Time piece titled, "How To Save Your Newspaper."

The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment. We need something like digital coins or an E-ZPass digital wallet — a one-click system with a really simple interface that will permit impulse purchases of a newspaper, magazine, article, blog or video for a penny, nickel, dime or whatever the creator chooses to charge.

More:

Charging for content forces discipline on journalists: they must produce things that people actually value. I suspect we will find that this necessity is actually liberating. The need to be valued by readers — serving them first and foremost rather than relying solely on advertising revenue — will allow the media once again to set their compass true to what journalism should always be about.

Head over to our News Meeting to discuss another idea for "Saving Your Newspaper" -- endowments-- that has been a hot topic of late.

A month ago, Foreign Policy magazine debuted a new cast of bloggers at its Web site. It’s a pretty dramatic Web-forward manifestation of a publication that spent the first thirty years of its life as a quarterly academic journal. Not until 2000 did editor-in-chief Moises Naim re-launch the publication as a bi-monthly glossy with wider appeal; in 2006, the editors added the Passport blog to the magazine’s Web site.

As of January 5—exactly one month ago—they’ve added ten more blogs, a step that was planned since the Washington Post purchased the magazine from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in September. The new site brings together luminaries from the disparate worlds of academia and journalism—a service the print magazine has performed for a long time.

“There were two core ideas that I had at the beginning,” explains executive editor Susan Glasser of the redesign. “One was to add coverage of the people and institutions that make up foreign policy as well as the ideas.” Secondly, “We were very lucky in this sphere relative to other kinds of coverage areas, that there are so many wonderful writers and thinkers,” many of them already blogging on their own.

The Web site is now home to, among others, longtime professor-bloggers Marc Lynch (aka Abu Aardvark) and Daniel Drezner; national security affairs reporter (and CJR contributor) Laura Rozen, formerly of Mother Jones; and a group blog called Shadow Government, staffed by several former Bush administration policy advisors.

Lynch thinks the new FP site might be part of a larger trend of Web publications bringing together formerly independent bloggers in one place. As writers and academics started joining sites like the Atlantic, the American Prospect, and Huffington Post, Lynch says, “I was starting to feel like an endangered species.” But he was also getting tired of doing Abu Aardvark on his own, so when he saw news of Daniel Drezner’s move to Foreign Policy in his Facebook status, he asked Drezner to get him in touch with Glasser. Lynch is pleased with his new URL, but does find it interesting that “there’s been this trend toward consolidation. There aren’t that many academic foreign policy bloggers who are still working independently.”

Glasser, too, notes that the new FP has been compared to the Atlantic, but hopes to showcase more original reporting than that site does. It was to that end that she recruited Rozen, as well as her former Post colleague Tom Ricks.

Ricks’s blog, “The Best Defense”, represents a kind of hybrid between arms-length analysis and ground-level beat reporting, as Rozen points out. Ricks covered military affairs for The Washington Post, wrote two books on Iraq (Fiasco and the forthcoming The Gamble), and is currently a senior fellow at a national security think tank.

And, though it’s relatively new to him, he loves blogging. “I never really felt comfortable with the newspaper medium,” he says. He admits that after twenty-five years in newspapers, he still has difficulty writing a lede. In late January, he experimented with an investigative report in blog format, a seven-part anatomy of a battle gone wrong in Wanat, Afghanistan. He linked to documents and used reader comments as “navigational guidance” for later posts in the series, out of his conviction that the “magisterial voice” of newspaper reports is part of “what really pisses people off about journalism.” Ricks doesn’t see blogging’s ascendance as a threat to enterprise stories; he maintains that blogging's interactivity “actually makes for sharper journalism.”

Rozen, meanwhile, came on about a week before the official January 5 launch of the new Web site, which allowed her to cover the Presidential transition. Her blog, “The Cable,” has already established itself as a go-to site for diplomatic scoops and national security staffing developments in the new administration. Rozen was happy to have a built-in audience waiting for her when she made the move to FP:

There's something very satisfying about being able to write for the audience that most cares about the issue I cover. You don't have to do anything to make them want to read foreign policy news. You don't have to make these issues sexy for this audience. You don't have to do a lot of explaining and boilerplate.

Glasser promises more improvements to the site in the future. Meanwhile, Lynch is offering up preliminary analysis to Iraq’s Saturday provincial elections, while Ricks is taking some time to digest before he writes anything. “Why wait?” he wrote on the blog. “Because, unlike my former colleagues in the newspaper racket, I can.”

Last week, National Geographic magazine announced the formation of a new, specialized editorial team that will focus on “deepening” and “sharpening” the publication’s coverage of energy and environmental issues. Dennis Dimick, executive editor for the environment, will lead the effort. Robert Kunzig, a longtime science journalist and author, who joined the magazine last week as environment editor, will assist him. Dimick and Kunzig will also work closely with Tim Appenzeller, the executive editor for text, and Chris Johns, the editor in chief. CJR’s Megan McGinley spoke with Dimick—a member of the National Geographic Society since 1980 and a key force behind many of the magazine’s award-winning packages since 2003—about how the new team plans to cover the vast field of environment and energy.

Megan McGinley: When and why did you decide to launch this new energy department?

Dennis Dimick: We talked about this idea last fall when we decided to search for a staff text editor for environment. We’re trying to recognize and acknowledge that our coverage of environmental issues has been a significant part of what we do. So this is just building a formal team and leveraging some of the expertise we already had. With Robert Kunzig [joining me and Tim Appenzeller], we now have three people on the beat, where before we had two. That positions us to be able to think more strategically about what we want to write about and cover. The three of us are trying to imagine and orchestrate a long-term agenda for the kinds of environmental stories we need to be looking at and presenting to our readers.

MM: What will your readers see change, both in print and online?

DD: There might be a modest up-step [in coverage]. We have significant planning in the works. We already cover energy and environmental issues heavily and will continue to improve upon that coverage. For example, we already have two stories on energy in the upcoming March issue, two more on climate change in the upcoming April issue, and several more are in the offing. We’ll devote a full issue to global fresh water in early 2010. The new editorial team really just means that … we’ll have more horsepower in-house to be able to think up and produce these stories. As for major changes on the Web, we continue to work on building a deeper, more cross-disciplinary environment section for our Web site. How fast we can build depends on limited resources.

I’d say our team goal is to stay on top of emergent research, issues, and trends, build a long-term strategic plan for environment coverage, sharpen the discussion, and make sure ideas and angles we pursue provide fresh, useful insight and context for our readers. Whether we are able to commit more resources to the environment is a balancing act. How much we do depends on available resources and the magazine’s need to cover other topics like archaeology, history, cultures, habitats, natural history, and science. We already heavily depend on freelance photographers, writers, and graphic artists. Our work is not just writing; it is a multimedia orchestration that combines words, pictures, graphics, type, and maps. This approach gives us a unique platform for vividly communicating these complex issues.

MM: What, in your opinion, is the current “state” of the energy story? In other words, what are the most important or missing angles that you hope to tackle?

DD: Well, I think most of the carbon dioxide story is little understood. I think the part that is least understood is the longevity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and what it really will take to remove it from the atmosphere. It’s a tough story to tell. But it’s something people need to understand. It’s not so simple—there’s this idea that raising carbon dioxide emissions makes the planet hot and simply lowering them cools the planet down, which isn’t the case. Instead, you need to figure out a way to get it out of the atmosphere before you can start to see a cooling. It’s like a bathtub that you’re putting more water in than is actually draining. We’re a long way from being able to drain the water, and then getting rid of what we’ve already put in. We’re actually exploring some of these issues at our forum with the Aspen Institute in March.

MM: How much is National Geographic investing in this effort?

DD: We have already been investing a significant amount of editorial coverage in these issues. This [new editorial team] is just a realization that these are key issues that we need to continue to focus on and make sure readers in the United States and overseas are given a chance to be exposed to, through the explanatory journalism we produce. This is important, especially in the United States, where we see a diminishment of coverage in newspapers and broadcast journalism, such as with the closing of CNN’s science team. But these issues need to be explained to the public, and we’re just trying to do our best to inform and educate the public on all of these things that are happening. Essentially, we’re telling the story of human aspiration and the planet’s ability to try to support that.

MM: Along those lines, your press release mentioned that the new focus on environment and energy issues is not only editorial in nature, but will also involve National Geographic’s Speakers Bureau and education groups?

DD: Actually, I’ve been involved in the Speakers Bureau for about a year. I have an illustrated slideshow that I show all over the country. So, I think that the person-to-person outreach is all a part of this. This is an ongoing educational effort. We’re only at the beginning. There’s a long process ahead of us in terms of trying to help raise public awareness to understand the need to make changes in the energy, so we might have a chance to take control of the climate.

MM: How will you environment and energy coverage differently than, say, The New York Times, which recently launched its own, specialized team dedicated to environmental coverage?

DD: Well, it takes us months to a year, even, to organize ourselves and get our fieldwork done and get our stories edited and represented. I think the upside for us is that we can provide long-term context on many of these environmental and energy issues and trends. I think what we’re able to do with the kind of explanatory journalism we provide is help people understand why they’re reading certain things in the newspapers. We’re trying to go after the “why” as much as anything. We can’t compete on timeliness, so we have to take the longer view. Can there be a new green revolution for example? Or, we’ll look at the effects of long-term temperature changes or the melting of Arctic ice caps. We can’t respond with the same rate of speed as daily newspapers do, but these are stories for the millennium, for the ages and the generations.

The New York Times takes a good look this morning at the excessive executive perks yet to be wrung out of the banking system.

It had an executive compensation firm do an analysis of financial industry perks and found this:

Of 200 of the largest publicly traded banks that have received taxpayer money, about 61 percent, or 121 banks, paid an average of $10,835 in country club dues for their chief executive in 2007.

Nearly three-quarters, or 147 banks, spent an average of $20,668 in car and parking expenses. Corporate jets, now one of the biggest targets of Washington’s ire, were financed by 36 banks, or 18 percent of those now receiving taxpayer funds. More often than not, the banks let their leaders use the corporate jet for personal travel, at an average cost of $102,216. And regardless of size, many banks said they were “required” for the safety of the chief executive.

Check out the justification from the flack:

But others, like Regions Financial of Alabama, which posted an unexpected $6.22 billion loss in the fourth quarter and accepted $3.9 billion of taxpayer money, spent more than $23,000 on air travel in 2007 for its chief executive, C. Dowd Ritter. Like many banks, Regions requires its top official to avoid commercial aircraft for safety reasons. “You have far greater control of your environment in a private aircraft setting,” said Tim Deighton, a spokesman.

The Times says lots of the companies say they're not changing anything—yet. Good quote here:

“The party may be over but there is still a lot of cleaning up to do,” said Paul Hodgson, a senior research analyst at the Corporate Library, a governance and shareholder advisory group. “Particularly in this climate, change is very seriously needed”...

“The banks don’t seem to have adjusted to the new paradigm they are operating under,” said Mark Borges, a compensation consultant. “They haven’t yet appreciated that when you take public funds, you now have a new class of shareholders that are going to be more vocal and impatient with the way you operate.”

It's always amazed me that executives who make so much money can't pay for things like their own gym membership:

Another small lender, UCBH Holdings, which caters to the Chinese-American business community, paid more than $43,700 in 2007 for a car and driver for its chief, Thomas S. Wu. It also covered nearly $20,000 in travel expenses for his wife to accompany him on business, and more than $3,300 in fitness club fees. Steve DiMattia, a spokesman for UCBH, which received $299 million in taxpayer funds after a plunge in its shares, declined to say if the bank would modify its perquisite program.

Let's hope the days of looting the company are over (for a while anyway):

Great Southern Bancorp, with operations in three states, recently jettisoned a lake house that the bank had owned since the 1980s that was used by its longtime chairman, William V. Turner. The bank is also seeking buyers for a bank-owned boat, and it is looking for a partner to split the use of its Cessna jet.

Kelly Polonus, a spokeswoman, said Great Southern put its plane, boat and lake home up for sale a year ago to reduce expenses. The bank’s share price dropped 48 percent last year and it accepted $58 million of taxpayer money.

GMAC has also grounded the private plane it had provided for Alvaro G. de Molina, the chief executive. Since receiving funds from the government in December, he and all senior GMAC executives now fly commercial.

It's, ahem, interesting to see Hero Harry Markopolos's take on Murdoch as the Journal takeover was proceeding. This in an email to reporter John Wilke (warning: big PDF):

Murdoch would be poison for the paper. As far as editorial freedom, the WSJ's editorials are so bad right now I actually think Murdoch could only improve them. It's the WSJ's unsurpassed content outside of those whack-job editorials that I worry about. WSJ reporters are the world's best business reporters bar none. If the WSJ falls prey to Murdoch, that'll leave only the FT and the Economist as world-class repositories for serious, insightful financial journalism. You guys really need to start slamming Murdoch on the front pages.

And as a reporter there at the time, I can tell you nine out of ten news staffers agreed with every word of that.

Gary Weiss is all over a bit of news this morning that Harry Markopolos, the Madoff whistleblower tried to get The Wall Street Journal to cover the story more than three years ago, to no avail.

Here's Weiss, a contributing editor at Portfolio:

It seems that the Journal missed an opportunity to achieve one of the biggest scoops in financial history, win a Pulitzer Prize and all that other good stuff--and extinguish the biggest fraud in financial history.

As Weiss reports, Markopolos said this in his prepared testimony before Congress:

[Pat Burns, communications director at Taxpayers Against Fraud] put me in contact with John Wilke, senior investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau. Mr. Wilke and I would become friends over the next three years. Unfortunately, as eager as Mr. Wilke was to investigate the Madoff story, it appears that the Wall Street Journal's editors never gave him approval to start investigating. As you will see from my extensive e-mail correspondence with him over the next several months, there were several points in time in which he was getting ready to book air travel to start the story and then would get called off at the last minute. I never determined if the senior editors at the Wall Street Journal failed to authorize this investigation.

Markopolos, via Weiss, also said this, in live testimony to Congress today:

"I believe that senior editors of the Journal respected and feared Mr. Madoff" and wouldn't let him "get on the plane" and meet with him on the fraud.

Now, it's certainly regrettable that the WSJ had an opportunity to blow up this fraud and didn't take it, especially since this tip seems to have come well-packaged and from a credible (albeit then unknown) source.

On the other hand, reporters get tips all the time and can't follow them all. Reporters must juggle competing priorities on long-term projects: time involved; likelihood of nailing the story down to where it will pass lawyering; credibility of the source—all these moving parts have to be balanced, and it's a very hard thing to do. Wilke is a good reporter and broke some great stories in the time he was talking to Markopolos. That's not to excuse missing the story, but it does explain why it's not as simple as it may seem.

But journalism is, after all, about resource commitment and deciding between competing priorities. If Markopolos is right that Wilke was hot to do the story but top editors shot him down, then the circumstances surrounding that decision are worth exploring. This isn't about finger-pointing, but about all of us learning the chief journalistic lesson that the events of recent months have taught us: business-news organizations must bolster their investigative capacity and must recommit themselves to their investigative mission (Updated on 2/5 to fix copy).

Wilke didn't respond to a request for comment. A Dow Jones spokesman declined comment on Markopolos's testimony but called "absurd" the idea that senior editors laid off the story because they "respected and feared Madoff."

We agree, especially since Markopolos's own prepared testimony said "I never determined if the senior editors at the Wall Street Journal failed to authorize this investigation," but note that the question of a news organization's commitment to investigative reporting is a separate matter.

Let's see how it unfolds.

ADDING:

I would note also that the Journal's cousin Barron's was one of the only news outlets to write skeptically about Madoff, way back in 2001.

Last week, a New York Times op-ed proposed a novel way to save newspapers: “Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities.” Claiming that endowments would “enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down," Yale professors David Swensen and Michael Schmidt wrote:

By endowing our most valued sources of news we would free them from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society, like that of America’s colleges and universities. Endowments would transform newspapers into unshakable fixtures of American life, with greater stability and enhanced independence that would allow them to serve the public good more effectively.

The New Yorker’s Steve Coll liked the idea:

How did we end up in a society where Williams College has (or had, before September) an endowment well in excess of one billion dollars, while the Washington Post, a fountainhead of Watergate and so much other skeptical and investigative reporting critical to the republic’s health, is in jeopardy?

But others worried that endowments would both compromise newspapers’ neutrality and keep them from having to adapt to the changing news environment. Former McClatchy exec Howard Weaver said the endowment enthusiasts "have the musty smell of the mausoleum all about them," while Jack Shafer warned against "stroking philanthropic billionaires or foundations in what my colleague Adrian Monck calls the ‘holy search for “enlightened” money.’"

But. There has never been a system of financial support for journalism that didn’t involve tradeoffs. And “enlightened money” is still money, which is in short supply at newspapers these days. Let's say a billionaire of moderate political leanings establishes a fund to endow the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. What would the consequences be, both good and bad?

This morning, MSNBC asked (via chyron), whether President Obama is "Losing His Luster?"

And if so, CNN -- via its own chyron just now -- may have located a reason: "Too Much Pres.?"

President Obama is, apparently, over-exposed. There he was, said the CNN anchor, "interrupting your Super Bowl party on Sunday" and then, yesterday, he was just everywhere. He's been, said the anchor, "hogging the spotlight" (I mean, he made Anderson Cooper sit, against his will, in the Oval Office yesterday and interview him; and CNN has had no choice but to re-air segments of that interview hourly ever since).

To support the suggestion that Americans may be seeing "Too Much Pres." for their tastes, CNN references Peggy Noonan's January 30th Wall Street Journal column (written before Obama "interrupted" our Super Bowl Sunday and before yesterday's five-anchor relay). Noonan wrote, in part:

In the time since his inauguration, Mr. Obama has been on every screen in the country, TV and computer, every day. He is never not on the screen. I know what his people are thinking: Put his image on the age. Imprint the era with his face. But it's already reaching saturation point. When the office is omnipresent, it is demystified. Constant exposure deflates the presidency, subtly robbing it of power and making it more common.

(Because "demystifying" a powerful "office" is a bad thing? Better that Obama answer fewer questions, then? Play hard to get?)

CNN's other supporting evidence: US Weekly cropped Pres. Obama out of a recent cover image in order to feature just the three women of the family. (Which they clearly did because they and their readers are so over Barack Obama, already and not because the cover story was titled, "Secrets of a White House Mom.")

Monday’s Washington Post had an oddly long take on “bipartisanship” gracing its front page. Is bipartisanship about the act of reaching out, the article asks, or is it about results—in this case, about getting some Republicans in Senate to support the stimulus bill?

This, of course, comes in the midst of serious push-pulling on the stimulus package as it goes to the Senate. (The current Senate proposal, released online yesterday, is 736 pages and estimated at nearly $900 billion.)

Recent reports on the bill have stressed that it is “facing considerable Republican resistance in the Senate,” and warned, like a label on Pandora’s box, that its final draft may “ultimately emerge through possible amendments, concessions and lingering disagreements.”

With this backdrop firmly in place, Washington Post reporters Alec MacGillis and Paul Kane give the floor to legislators and representatives of the White House, in an attempt to flesh out the B-word that is supposed to bolster the entire process.

And there’s no shortage of opinions. Rep. Zach Wamp (R-Tenn.) is quoted in the article as saying of Obama, "We got the sense that he was very genuine…[but] if he comes and meets with us like that and it doesn't have an impact, it begins to hurt his credibility,” while House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), hurled back: "Being bipartisan does not mean having to lay down and say we'll do whatever you want.”

Meanwhile, press secretary Robert Gibbs spouted, “This can't be a one-way street. The president has done a lot to reach out.” And a White House aide defensively retorted: "There can't be this absurd test on Obama that you try to be bipartisan, but you only got however many votes you get, so you failed.”

And Obama, for his part, said circumspectly: “…my attitude is that this is the first major piece of legislation that we've been working on the Hill and that over time some of these habits of consultation and mutual respect will take over.”

On the one hand, the article is an expected and even welcome contribution to the fold. Reporters and politicians alike use the word “bipartisan” to refer to anything from individual flexibility to large-scale teamwork and everything in between, so unpacking it is an interesting exercise. And the Post article cleverly uses it as a way into the style-over-substance debate that surfaced throughout the election cycle—the question about whether Obama would be able to back up his fluid rhetoric with concrete action. (Note the first verb in the headline, which evinces some healthy skepticism on this front: “As Obama Talks Of Bipartisanship, Definitions Vary.”)

For that very reason, it’s also a bit contrived to frame “bipartisanship” as a semantic issue when it’s really about process. But if we were to take a moment and play with the former, we’d still find evidence of the latter. Merriam-Webster defines “bipartisan” as “marked by or involving cooperation, agreement, and compromise between two major political parties.” Let’s see, so meetings between Obama and Senate Republicans (cooperation), reworking the bill (compromise), getting Republican votes (agreement), are all part and parcel of working the bipartisan process.

Of course, some of those things haven’t happened yet, and even with time, maybe they won’t. But it still looks like, despite the dichotomy MacGillis and Kane set up, Rep. Wamp, House Leader Hoyer, and the president himself are all at the variegated split ends of a single definition.

Steven Pearlstein has a good take in the Washington Post on the reckoning that's starting to dawn on the power elite, smartly tying together the fall of John Thain with the demise of Tom Daschle.

Pearlstein writes about the entitlement and hubris that led to the $1.2 million office renovation, the $18 billion in bonuses Wall Street still think it deserved, and shows how that mentality has infected Washington, too.

Tom Daschle's problem wasn't that he didn't pay his taxes. It was that he -- along with those who vetted his nomination as health and human services secretary and many of his colleagues in the Senate -- found it perfectly ordinary and acceptable that he would be able to cash in on his time in the Senate by earning more than $5 million over two years as a law-firm rainmaker, equity fundraiser, corporate director and luncheon speaker, all the while being driven around town in a chauffeured town car. Not exactly Cincinnatus returning to the plow.

Zing!

For the American public, Daschle became the latest symbol of everything that is wrong with Washington -- the influence-peddling and corner-cutting and sacrifice of the public good to private interest. Now that this system has let them down, and left them poorer and anxious about the future, people are angry about it and no longer willing to accept the corruption of the public process and the whole notion of public service.

This is right, of course, but it's also just an example of good column-writing, tying Daschle to Thain as the (current) leading example of rot in the culture:

This goes beyond mere greed. As with Daschle, it springs from a deeply felt but rarely articulated sense of entitlement that now warps the judgment not just of those on Wall Street -- from top executives to hotshots on the trading desks -- but of those throughout the upper reaches of corporate America. And over time, it has filtered out to law firms and consulting firms, where freshly minted MBAs and legal associates came to expect starting salaries of $150,000 and partners thought it their God-given right to draw $1 million a year.

All that is history. It turns out that those inflated pay stubs weren't really a measure of genuine economic worth but manifestations of the mirage that was the bubble economy. Economically, they are no longer sustainable; socially and politically, they are no longer acceptable.

Unfortunately for focus, the column doesn't end right there. It goes on to make some suggestions of how other folks need to change, but doesn't convincingly show why he's tying them to Thain and Daschle.

Is it too much to ask those college presidents who are about to be the beneficiaries of big increases in student aid and tuition tax credits to use this crisis to finally embrace the productivity revolution and find a way to use technology and new teaching techniques to lower the cost of education?

Huh? Where'd that come from?

But forget about the last four paragraphs. The top stands alone.

Of the five TV interviews President Obama sat for yesterday, two involved, toward the end, what the anchors described as "lightening rounds," or a series of rapid-fire questions. Here is what that looked like on CNN:

ANDERSON COOPER: Final questions, just a quick lightning round, just a couple of fun questions. What's the latest on the dog search?

OBAMA: We are going to get it in the spring. I think the theory was that the girls might be less inclined to do the walking when it was cold outside.

COOPER: Portuguese water dog? You don't know yet?

OBAMA: You know, we're still experimenting.

COOPER: Coolest thing about your new car?

OBAMA: You know, I thought it was the phones until I realized that I didn't know which button to press. That was a little embarrassing.

COOPER:: Have you had a cigarette since you've been to the White House?

OBAMA: No, I haven't had one on these grounds. And I -- you know, sometimes it's hard, but, you know, I'm sticking to it.

COOPER: You said, "on these grounds." I'll let you pass on that...

So, with Cooper it was dogs and cars and cigarettes. And here, on Fox News, was Chris Wallace's "lightening round" with the president:

WALLACE: So let's do what we can, sir -- I used to do this with you as a candidate, but I'm going to ask you as president -- do a lightning round of quick questions and answers about specific changes [to the stimulus bill].

You reportedly told Senate Democratic leaders, when you met with them yesterday, that you want some changes in the bill.

Tax credits for people who buy homes or business? Good or bad?

OBAMA: I think it has some potential, and I'm willing to take a look at it.

WALLACE: Lower, federally-financed -- let me rephrase. Federally-guaranteed lower mortgage rates?

OBAMA: I think that we've got to take a look at the whole package of housing. Now, keep in mind that our intention has always been that, in addition to this recovery and reinvestment package, that we're also going to have a housing bill, that we have also got to fix the banking system, that we're going to have to make sure that, for example, issues like executive compensation for banks that are getting money through the TARP, that that's dealt with.

So we're moving on parallel tracks on a whole host of issues.

How much of the housing issue is dealt with in this bill, versus a separate bill, I think is something that we have got to discuss. But I actually agree with Democrats and Republicans that we've got to do more to provide relief to homeowners to prevent foreclosure.

WALLACE: Strip out the "buy American" provision for steel and iron in the bill, which a number of our allies are saying is too protectionist?

OBAMA: I agree that we can't send a protectionist message. I want to see what kind of language we can -- we can work on this issue. I think it would be a mistake, though, at a time when worldwide trade is declining, for us to start sending a message that somehow we're just looking after ourselves and not concerned with world trade.

WALLACE: When you see how well the Iraqi provincial elections went last weekend and how sharply the violence in Iraq has fallen, could the 16-month time line for getting our combat troops out slip?

OBAMA: Well, you know, I've been meeting with the joint chief of staff and Bob Gates, who I think is outstanding, one of my appointments. And the interesting thing I think there's a greater convergence than you would think watching the news media or having listened to us during the campaign.

Part of it is because of the outstanding work that was done by our military. But violence has gone down. You saw an election that was successful and peaceful and we've got to continue to give support to Iraqi security forces.

But I actually think that we can create a situation in which it is possible for us to draw down our troops in a responsible fashion, that meets my criteria for putting more troops into Afghanistan, but also meets the criteria of all of us to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraqis (inaudible)

WALLACE: But is your job now in this office as commander in chief, a general (inaudible) says to you, we're going to do it, but it's going to take a little more than 16 months.

Are you open-minded on that?

OBAMA: I've said throughout that I have a conversation with my joint chiefs of staff and commanders on the ground. That's what I did the day after our the day I was sworn in and we are going to make sure that we have the best possible plan to achieve America's national security interests.

So: Which "lightening round" was tougher? Which will make more "news?"

On Morning Joe earlier, MSNBC's Joe Scarborough spoke admiringly of the Wallace interview (both anchor and subject):

The Obama administration put the president out to talk to Fox News and Chris Wallace went after him. Really tough. Barack Obama is not hiding from anybody. He's going out there and answering the tough questions.

More of Wallace's "tough questions:"

WALLACE: Since you became president, you have warned Republicans, quote, "You can't just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done."

OBAMA: Now, how do you know that's a quote?

WALLACE: Well, I read it in the media.

OBAMA: Yeah.

WALLACE: Did you not say...

OBAMA: I just wanted - I'm not sure that was the exact quote.

WALLACE: Let me throw another one at you and you tell me whether this is an exact quote. You were widely quoted, when you met with the House GOP caucus saying, go ahead, (inaudible) I'll watch Fox News and feel bad about myself.

OBAMA: That one I did say.

WALLACE: Is perhaps -- let me just raise the possibility -- are you a trifle thin-skinned?

OBAMA: No, no, no. I said it in good humor. I think everybody understood that that was a joke.

No, I think, Chris -- I think it's fair to say that I don't always get my most favorable coverage on Fox, but I think that's part of how democracy is supposed to work. You know, we're not supposed to all be in lock step here, and you've always been very gracious to me and...

(CROSSTALK)

WALLACE: ... improves or hurts my stock at Fox.

OBAMA: But they heard it.

Those five interviews:

ABC News
CBS News
CNN
Fox News
NBC News

The AP finds a similar refrain throughout President Obama's five TV interviews yesterday. Regarding his handling of the Daschle nomination: :

President Barack Obama to CBS: "I screwed up."

Obama to CNN: "I think I screwed up, and I take responsibility for it."

Obama to NBC: "Did I screw up in this situation? Absolutely. And I'm willing to take my lumps."...

Obama to Fox: "I take responsibility for this mistake." He vowed his best effort to "make sure we're not screwing up again."

Obama to ABC: "This is a self-induced injury that I'm angry about, and we're going to make sure we get it fixed."

The mistake, he said repeatedly in interviews with Charles Gibson of ABC, Brian Williams of NBC, Anderson Cooper of CNN, Chris Wallace of Fox and Katie Couric of CBS, was in seeming to give credence to the notion that one set of rules exists for VIPs and another for average Americans.

More:

The audacity of acknowledging - even emphasizing - poor judgment came in marked contrast to his predecessor. George W. Bush pronounced himself stumped when asked, midway through his presidency, to name mistakes he'd made. Much later, he thought of some.

It's all too rare to see skepticism of free trade in the business press, much less a full-throated attack on it. So, applause to The Big Money, Slate's business site, which today goes big with a book excerpt about the downside of free trade.

The author, Matt Miller, tries to puncture some of the conventional wisdom about trade:

Ralph Gomory and Willian Baumol make the argument that globalization is not free trade—it is free trade plus productivity changes, which they term "a whole new ball game." When the United States trades semiconductors for Asian T-shirts, that is trade in the old-fashioned sense, in which both countries plainly benefit. "But when U.S. companies build semiconductor plants and R&D facilities in Asia rather than in the U.S.," Gomory and Baumol write, "then that is a change in productive capacities ... and there is nothing in either common sense or economic theory which says that improvement in the productive capabilities of other countries is necessarily good for your country."

And here's the basic problem with free trade/globalization:

Another point Gomory makes seems obvious but is widely ignored: Under globalization, the interests of companies and of countries can now dramatically diverge. Offshoring jobs and know-how to developing countries is generally smart and profitable for American-based firms even if such moves ultimately hurt the United States. This tension between their fiduciary duty to shareholders and their broader loyalty as citizens makes American executives profoundly uncomfortable.

China, India, and just about every other ambitious developing country has a national economic strategy, and one of the chief aims of that strategy is to get major corporations to transfer new technologies to and locate high-value jobs in their country. It's basically a deal: Companies want profits, countries want GDP, and countries figure out how to strike a bargain that gives both sides what they seek. In the old days, profits and GDP mostly went together in America for U.S.-based firms; nowadays, profits are increasingly found elsewhere, and that is costing America some GDP.

This is a good explanation for why economists are so one-sided about trade, and helps explain why the press is, as well:

Which brings us to the heart of darkness, so to speak. Most economics professors will tell you that trade's inevitable creation of winners and losers is the second thing they teach, after first lecturing on comparative advantage and the gains from trade. So why don't economists acknowledge trade's downside more readily outside the seminar room? The answer has more to do with paternalism than with social science. Economists would really prefer that "the kids" (that is, we the people) didn't know about all this, because if we did, irresponsible barbarians might seize on these facts to push protectionist agendas that cascade into trade wars that harm the entire world, as happened in the 1930s. It's a slippery slope out there, and economists are keeping us in the dark for our own good.

"Of all the policy-relevant aspects of economics," says Princeton economics professor Alan Blinder, "the one on which there is the closest to total unanimity among economists is that free trade is good. The result is that anyone in the fraternity who says anything that could even obliquely give aid and comfort to the enemies of free trade is considered traitorous."

Good for The Big Money for running this.

On January 1, the Daily Tech, an online magazine, published a somewhat misleading blog post about the “rapid recovery” of global sea ice, based on research released by the University of Illinois's Arctic Climate Research Center.

The research, based on satellite observations of the northern and southern hemisphere polar regions, didn’t get much pickup. And the Daily Tech story may be getting a bit stale now, but it bears mentioning because it illustrates a common a mistake in science reporting: confusing the relevance of global versus regional climate trends.

The piece starts off accurately enough by reporting that:

Each year, millions of square kilometers of sea ice melt and refreeze. However, the mean ice anomaly -- defined as the seasonally-adjusted difference between the current value and the average from 1979-2000, varies much more slowly. That anomaly now stands at just under zero, a value identical to one recorded at the end of 1979, the year satellite record-keeping began.

OK so far, but two paragraphs later the post suddenly flips to a confusing discussion of Arctic (northern hemisphere) ice levels. “Earlier this year,” wrote reporter Michael Asher, “predictions were rife that the North Pole could melt entirely in 2008. Instead, the Arctic ice saw a substantial recovery.”

That is patently misleading. The predictions Asher refers to were for a complete melt of summer sea ice, not of winter sea ice, to which the “substantial recovery” applies. And there was, indeed, a lot of melt last summer. According to the National Snow and Ice Date Center, “[2008] continued the negative trend in [Arctic] summer sea ice extent, with the second-lowest summer minimum since record-keeping began in 1979.” So far, it is not at all unusual for sea ice to make a full recovery during the winter. (The San Francisco Chronicle and The Associated Press succumbed to a similar, seasonal confusion two years ago.)

Worse still, Asher’s failure to include such key details leads the reader to believe that recent recovery has brought Arctic sea ice extent back to 1979 levels. That is simply not true. Asher is clearly mixing up global and regional trends. In response to his post, scientists at the University of Illinois's Arctic Climate Research Center issued a letter (pdf) clarifying the significance of their data:

Observed global sea ice area, defined here as a sum of N. Hemisphere and S. Hemisphere sea ice areas, is near or slightly lower than those observed in late 1979, as noted in the Daily Tech article. However, observed N. Hemisphere sea ice area is almost one million sq. km below values seen in late 1979 and S. Hemisphere sea ice area is about 0.5 million sq. km above that seen in late 1979, partly offsetting the N. Hemisphere reduction.

Although Asher does not mention climate change specifically in his post, his muddled coverage leaves the impression that the sea-ice data somehow refutes other evidence of global warming. Maybe that was not his intention, but scientists at the University of Illinois were clearly worried about that possibility. In their clarification letter, they noted:

One important detail about the article in the Daily Tech is that the author is comparing the GLOBAL sea ice area from December 31, 2008 to same variable for December 31, 1979. In the context of climate change, GLOBAL sea ice area may not be the most relevant indicator.

Much like droughts, floods, and other patterns of impact related to climate change, the extent of sea-ice melt varies by region. In other words, even if only one pole (the Arctic) is melting, we still have a problem. (And, in fact, referring only to the net ice gain in Antarctica belies the fact that its western half is warming and melting much more quickly that its eastern half.)

The relevance of global versus regional trends is confusing, however, because the applicability of either one depends on what the story is about. For example, last December, CJR and a number of other outlets blasted Politico for an article which reported that there is mounting scientific evidence for global cooling. The reporter cited data that shows only a meager rise in average temperature in the United States since 1930. Unlike the Daily Tech piece about sea ice, however, it was the global trend (i.e. in mean temperature) that Politico should have paid attention to. Unfortunately, the same kinds of mistakes are still far too common, as evidenced by a naïve column published last week in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that suffered from all the same flaws as Politico’s piece. (It’s a mystery how this column ever made it past the P-I’s editors, who are usually more astute about environmental coverage.)

The only way for reporters (and columnists) to avoid making these mistakes in the future is to pay more attention to detail. When reviewing scientific data, it is imperative to note whether the data reflects trends that are global, regional, seasonal, annual, perennial, etc. Such nuance is as fundamental to good science journalism as an understanding of the difference between weather and climate.

Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line
By Martha Sandweiss | The Penguin Press | 384 pages, $27.95

Passing Strange is one of those books with precisely the right title. It is indeed a story about passing, in every sense of the term, and historian Martha Sandweiss tells it with a scholar's rigor and a storyteller's verve. More specifically, it is a story about a white. nineteenth-century scientist and explorer, famous in his day, who both hobnobbed with the most prominent figures of his era and created a second, secret identity for himself as a working-class black man. In a word: strange.

Shockingly—at least from the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, with all of its peering eyes--the twain never met. Not, at least, until the prominent white man who passed as an obscure black one was on his deathbed. Knowing just this much, the reader will be asking a good many questions, chiefly variations on the basic How? and Why? Sandweiss rewards us with answers. Not to every question, of course, given the number of details that have slipped between the cracks of time. Still, the author builds the solid framework of two lives: that of Clarence King, the explorer, and Ada Copeland, the black woman he loved, married, and all the while deceived.

The story of King and Copeland, who lived together as James and Ada Todd, is a blessing for a curious, talented writer like Sandweiss. Not only are its details fascinating in and of themselves, but they advance a larger social understanding. By tracing the curves and improbable intersections of two extraordinary lives, Passing Strange offers a fresh look at the racial and cultural landscape of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.

In many ways, the picture is disheartening. The late nineteenth century, the Gilded Age for some, also marked a nadir in U.S. race relations. And it was an age of deep anxiety about national identity. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously announced the closing of the frontier in 1893, causing widespread concern over what would replace the expansionist itch that seemed so central to the American character. Furthermore, a collapse shook the U.S. financial system that same year.

None of this is new information. What is novel, however, is the way that these two lives play out against the period backdrop. With considerable finesse, Sandweiss embeds Clarence King and Ada Copeland in their time. That way, we see how such an elaborate deception could have seemed, for a while at least, like a release from the constrictions of contemporary racial protocol. The author also, at least tentatively, navigates the inner terrain of her subjects. Her simultaneous investigation of both inner and outer worlds makes this strange story understandable—which is to say, human.

For example, Sandweiss makes it clear that Clarence King cultivated a kind of double life long before he met Ada Copeland. As a young man, he was already “divided”—not between two racial worlds, but between what we'll call for the purpose of shorthand the wild West and the civilized East. He was, Sandweiss writes, “tempted by risk and attracted to the exotic but fearful of loosing the social prerogatives that defined his place in the world.” And so King already had a model for the bifurcated life that his racial passing would create.

Furthermore, King lived in a society that disapproved of interracial marriage. If he had made his union with Copeland public, he would have risked destroying “the web of friendships, familial connections, and business relations that sustained his world.” Equally at risk would be his wife’s ascent from slavery through Southern poverty to the Northern middle class. As Sandweiss smartly notes, the contemporary system of racial hierarchy and segregation was full of unexpected pitfalls: “To look white was good; it was more problematic to be white. The white boarders next door might harbor the common social prejudices against interracial marriage, and blacks might respond with equal discomfort.”

In part, insists Sandweiss, we are all social creations. She makes this argument extraordinarily well, in a sophisticated work of scholarship. There are only a few places where I wished she had pushed a little harder on received ideas: for example, King’s attraction to what his friend Henry Adams called “the archaic female, with instincts and without intellect.” We wince now at such a description of women of color. But this stereotype was deeply embedded in American culture, and I would have liked Sandweiss to tease it out a bit more.

On a similar note, the author describes “slumming” as a century-old sport of the middle class. But how did this search for authenticity among the poor, and often non-white, relate to fantasias about women of color? And how did both of these cultural constructions relate in turn to something like minstrelsy, the popular entertainment of the day in which whites (and sometimes blacks) covered their faces in burnt cork and trafficked in a dizzying assortment of racial stereotypes?

Minstrelsy might seem like a bit of a departure from the narrative. But surely passing as black, even with the most respectful of intentions, has something in common with the practice of blackface. In any case, these caveats are a testament to the broad and deep resonance of Sandweiss's story, which sets the mind whirring, even as we continue to struggle with fundamental ideas about race and culture.

Passing Strange is not only a lesson in the intricacies of class, race, and gender relations. It also demonstrates how to write a particular kind of history—how, that is, to reconstruct lives in the absence of historical records.

This absence is glaring in the case of Ada Copeland, whose very birth was never recorded. Yet it also exists, albeit more subtly, in King’s life. Sure, Clarence King was a public figure with a generous paper trail, but what of James Todd? The great care King took to obscure that part of his life reverberates down the years, so that even an assiduous researcher (take a look at the rigorous footnotes) finds only small shards of information.

And so Passing Strange is dotted with lacunae, many of them marked with such phrases as, “No anecdotal stories from Ada’s own childhood survive,” or “It is not entirely clear just how Clarence King’s double life began.” Sandweiss fills in at least some of these gaps with careful speculation. In other words, she takes us to the point where facts disappear, and then offers well-researched possible scenarios. (It's the research, and the disavowal of omniscience, that divides the historian from the novelist.)

The larger point, though, is that society, and thus history, values certain lives over others. Some are chronicled in newspapers, biographies, and archives; others pass into obscurity. The challenge to the present-day historian is to resurrect as much as possible of those rich, yet undervalued lives—and in Passing Strange, Sandweiss more than rises to the challenge.

Earlier today, former senator Tom Daschle—embroiled in controversy over $128,000 in unpaid taxes—withdrew from consideration for the Secretary of Health and Human Services post, after several days of persistent reporting on the tax issue by news organizations across the country. Calling for Daschle to step down, a Times editorial today dedicated its first six paragraphs to Daschle’s accounting errors, and the last three to the ultimately more important and more questionable issue of Daschle’s financial relationships with various health care organizations. Yet these relationships were the best reason to question Daschle’s nomination, regardless of the tax issue.

In a front page article on Monday, the Times traced Daschle’s tax woes to the unreported use of a car and driver provided to him by a company for which he consulted. These unpaid taxes are the direct cause of Daschle’s withdrawal today.

But the article also outlined the murky relationships that the former South Dakota senator had with health care companies, his not-quite-a-lobbyist status, and the speaking fees that he earned from lending his expertise to United Health Group and the Mayo Clinic. These relationships—and not just the unpaid taxes—were worth questioning, our Trudy Lieberman pointed out yesterday.

As Katrina Vanden Heuvel wrote in the Editor’s Cut blog at The Nation: “After all, while the former Senator's failure to pay substantial back taxes raised questions about his suitability for the job, it was Daschle's ties to health care firms—payments of some $300,000 in income from companies that he might have regulated as HHS Secretary—that was most troubling.”

This isn’t to say that Daschle’s checkered tax history is water under the bridge. But in actuality it may have little bearing on how he would perform while in office. It is, however, something that’s easy to explain to readers. Financial ties to the industry one is about to regulate (something George W. Bush was criticized for), while a bit more complicated to explain than tax fraud, are nonetheless much more relevant to the question of Daschle’s fitness for Cabinet office.

On the campaign trail, Obama promised to change Washington and eliminate the influence of lobbyists. His willingness to nominate and stand behind Daschle is further confirmation of the murky policies that the President seems intent on employing—Obama says that members of his administration won’t be able to come back and lobby his government in the areas where they worked, but allowed “lobbyists on his transition team as long as they work on issues unrelated to their earlier jobs,” The Boston Globe reported. (It parallels the Bush administration's circular logic on torture: “The U.S. doesn’t torture, therefore those things-that-seem-like-torture that we do aren’t torture.”)

Accused during the campaign of being 'in the tank’ for Barack Obama, the press didn’t shy from pursuing the Daschle investigation. They should be commended for not backing down. But the press’s focus on Daschle’s unpaid taxes—only Fox’s Major Garrett asked about Daschle’s relationships during yesterday’s White House press briefing—deomnstrates their unfortunate tendency to go after the simplest story instead of the best story. Unpaid taxes are a personal—if criminal—matter, and thus don't directly affect how someone might perform while in office. But relationships with lobbyists do matter, and reflect the nominee's singed integrity.

As the nomination-and-confirmation process continues, the press must commit to a more thorough public vetting of the nominees, beyond the tax question. The Obama administration certainly doesn’t seem up to the challenge. Neither does the Senate: in hearings last month, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee essentially gave Daschle a free pass to confirmation; reports today indicate that, if he hadn’t withdrawn his name, Daschle would have been confirmed by the Senate.

And, in the course of that vetting, perhaps the press can ask itself some hard questions as well: Why do unpaid taxes disqualify a nominee from office while financial relationships with the industry he’s being asked to reform do not? And if Daschle’s tax troubles had never surfaced—or if he had actually paid his taxes—would the Times editorial board and the rest of the media have remained silent?

After Daschle’s withdrawal, the Times updated the online version of its editorial with this somewhat smug preface:

After this editorial was published, Tom Daschle did the right thing – for himself and more important for the Obama administration – and withdrew his name from nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services. He may have been propelled to do so by the news that Nancy Killefer, who was appointed by Mr. Obama to the newly created position of White House chief performance officer, had also withdrawn – citing her own tax troubles. The withdrawal of Ms. Killefer had left a lot of people, including us, scratching their heads and wondering what had become of President Obama's high ethical standards. It should not be hard for the new president to find high-quality appointees to both of these posts. Before he names them, he might have his team do a little more thorough scrubbing of their tax returns. Americans have the right to know that their appointed leaders pay their full share of taxes.

Yes, Americans have the right to know that their appointed leaders pay their full share of taxes. But they also have the right to know the full extent of Cabinet nominees’ connections to lobbyists and entanglements with industry. And they deserve a press corps that knows which is more important.

Reports MSNBC:

[W]hile blunders and bloopers have ever exasperated the spelling snobs and grammar grunions of the world, our recent woes — housing foreclosures, massive layoffs, rising debt and war — may be ratcheting up the pressure some feel to seize control of something (anything!), even if it’s just a properly placed comma.

Can I get some anecdotal evidence with that?

Dale Siegel, a financial expert from White Plains, N.Y., whose spelling is routinely corrected, says she’s definitely noticed a change in people.

“In general, I think people are getting a little bit meaner about correcting others or sharing what they call their ‘observations,’ ” she says. “They’re uptight and stressed out about losing their jobs. And if it makes them feel better to tell me I have a string hanging off my skirt or I used the word ‘your’ when I really meant to use the word ‘you’re,’ then fine.”

We're all victims of the economic downturn, somehow (be we recipients of pink slips, mean "observations," or... tenuous reporting).

As the economy continues to unravel, editors at The New York Times are keeping close tabs on how wealthy people are weathering the recession. But in three recent stories, the paper failed to consider how the other half is living through the financial decline.

Yesterday’s Times put a silver-lining spin on the recession with a rosy story about falling rents in New York. Renters are getting unprecedented perks, such as discounts for renewed leases, and one-month-free incentives in buildings whose landlords are scrounging for tenants. In fact, the three couples or families mentioned in the story were able to get handsome savings. A two-bedroom apartment listed for $4200 was rented for $3215; a three-bedroom/three-and-a-half-bath went for $7400, after an initial price tag of $8500. One modest two-bedroom in Brooklyn was scooped up for $1900 (original price $2000).

New York real-estate prices have always been notoriously steep, and a little bit of give in a ruthless market is a good thing, right? Well, sort of. What the story doesn’t bother asking is what effect these rent concessions will have on poorer families. These so-called discounted apartments are still exorbitantly expensive by the standards of the Times’s readers, but the headline implies that these rent breaks are available to everyone, not just the super-wealthy who can afford these luxury apartments. What’s more, the piece shows a lack of awareness of its own bias toward the very wealthy, by neglecting to consider the consequences and implications of the much-touted discounts.

As the city continues to lose jobs—and not just those on Wall Street—what will happen to those who can barely afford housing? Will landlords convert their properties to low-income housing to benefit from government subsidies and guaranteed tenants? Or will poor families have nowhere to go? Will cash-strapped landlords stop making necessary repairs to their properties? As wealthy New Yorkers abandon their high-priced digs for (relatively) cheaper apartments, will they start to push out middle- and lower-income families living in the boroughs?

These are questions that the Times does not answer. Given the affordable housing crunch that plagues this city, a headline and a story that allege the availability of cheaper apartments blatantly clash with the reality faced by many New Yorkers. Unless the headline “A Month Free? Rents Are Falling Fast” is changed to include the clause “On Originally Over-Priced Luxury Apartments,” the statement simply does not reflect the reality on the ground.

The circumstances associated with wealthy couples’ divorces must have also been jarring for most low- and middle-income Americans in the middle of their own divorce proceedings. At the end of December, the Times published a piece on divorcing couples who are struggling to sell their shared homes:

In a normal economy, couples typically build equity in their homes, then divide that equity in a divorce, either after selling the house or with one partner buying out the other’s share. But after the recent boom-and-bust cycle, more couples own houses that neither spouse can afford to maintain, and that they cannot sell for what they owe. For couples already under stress, the family home has become a toxic asset.

“It’s much harder to move on with their lives,” said Alton L. Abramowitz, a partner in the New York firm Mayerson Stutman Abramowitz Royer.

The three couples interviewed for the story own homes that were, at the time of purchase, appraised at $2.3 million, $1 million, and $1.5 million. No one takes lightly the loss of wealth that many homeowners have experienced as a result of of the current housing slump. Still, couples who were able to afford such expensive homes in the beginning of their relationships are likely to pull through just fine in the aftermath. But what about low-income families in which pooled incomes barely provided for necessities? Faced with divorce, lost jobs, and falling home prices, these spouses are much less likely to part ways with “starter money” in the six-figures.

Here’s another story about how the wealthy are dealing with this economic downturn: “As the Rich Get Poorer, Teenagers Feel the Crunch,” which catalogs how teens from affluent families are now getting after-school jobs to pay for their own expenses. One student makes $150 a week through tutoring and baby-sitting jobs, another $80 a weekend taking care of animals at a vet’s office. Allowances that were $100 a week have dropped to $60.

The absence of the low- and middle-income voices in these stories is unfortunate. Wealthy teens who are saving for “a ring, a necklace, a handbag” are now competing for jobs with poorer teens whose incomes are necessary to keep families afloat.

To be fair, the Times have covered at how lower-income families are doing, such as this piece on how the poor are scaling back on medications they can no longer afford, or this recent analysis of how some states’ welfare agencies are cutting their rolls despite growing unemployment. And its The Neediest Cases series is excellent. But stories like these make the omission of their voices in other stories ever more noticeable.

One explanation for the disparity between the two sets of stories may be the sections which assigned them and the reporters on the job. Stephanie Saul, who covers the pharmaceutical industry, medicine, and regulation, penned the story on scaling back on medication, and Jason DeParle, author of a book on the welfare system, wrote about the welfare crunch—while rock critic and former Details editor John Leland wrote the divorce piece. Elizabeth A. Harris, who wrote the rent piece, frequently writes for the real-estate section. It’s possible that reporters who cover “softer” beats may need to be edited more closely by the hard news side to ensure more rigorous reporting.

When the stories are taken as a whole, the Times’s coverage seems to draw distinctions between “wealthy” stories and “poor” stories, drawing artificial lines of income where commonalities may provide a thread of mutual understanding. Rent, divorce, and raising children are shared experiences, regardless of income level. But to only include the few wealthy individuals unnecessarily segregates the stories about these two interrelated groups of people, relegating lower-income stories to welfare lines.

Simultaneously, the disparity in stories highlights, but doesn’t address, the disparity of conditions between those rich and poor. While those New Yorkers who can afford $8500 rents are saving $1100 per month, those who can only pay $1100 may be getting squeezed out. Brave reporting could confront those differences, but divided storytelling creates a further rift.

The fascination with wealth is an affliction that spares no one. On MTV’s ultimate wealth bonanza, “My Super Sweet 16,” prodigal sons and daughters are celebrated for their extravagant birthday parties. And, on the other side of the spectrum, the business press makes heroes of CEOs. But the tough times ahead call for sober assessments of the quality of life of all Americans, not just the rich.

Watching CNBC, I was about to get ticked about the incessant reporting over the Michael Phelps smoking dope story.

Who cares whether a 23-year-old kid partakes a little bit? You certainly can't say pot has made him unmotivated or unhealthy, since he has enough gold in his Olympic swimming medals to gild Trump lobbies from here to 2019 (which is about when the next building will be built).

So I was pleasantly surprised to see CNBC had a business angle—corporate sponsor is keeping its deal with Phelps. And co-anchor Dennis Kneale made much the same points I did above after the report, also noting that tens of millions of Americans also smoke weed (transcripts courtesy of TVEyes):

Bravo, Visa. Thank you for being reasonable and not destroying the kid's life over something that 40 million kids have done.

Then... dude! Co-anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera let it all hang out, calling for the legalization of marijuana—much to the obvious surprise of her co-anchors.

it should be legal, by the way, anyway.

Hey, good for her. Maybe she was promoing the CNBC special report "Marijuana Inc.: Inside America's Pot Industry" that runs tonight at 9. The ad called it the "most watched documentary ever" on the network.

Meanwhile, Jerry Levin, the ex-CEO of Time Warner who sealed its disastrous merger with AOL, came on the air to talk about media stocks and blaming CEOs.

Funny, but the CNBC folks were much more sympathetic to the CEOs than Jerry Levin, who once was one. In fact, Levin started talking more like a Zen master than a titan of industry:

Of course it affects you. But the lessons are really remarkable and important. Part of the problem is when you're in office, slowly but surely, you lose your sense of identity. By the way, all the perks that you have become addictive. Whether that's the office, the entourage, the planes, you get isolated from yourself, from your family and who you really are. You forget that it's transitory; that there is a next chapter. You put aside the important things like, why are you here? and what about your family?

Yes, when all that is taken away, you finally realize that a lot of the coverage -- by the way, we've made celebrities out of CEOs. We take them up and take them down... it's important for us to understand that that's not the true identity of the person. You know, to be a CEO is actually an important assignment. But it's only temporary.

One of the co-anchors asked Levin how John Thain and Dick Fuld must feel now, and he responded:

John Thain and Hank Paulson (i think he meant Dick Fuld), these are good people that become intoxicated with self worth. it develops into a power or hubris.

If man's search for meaning is getting good airtime on CNBC, you know times are bad.

The WSJ's David Enrich and colleagues Matthew Futterman and Damian Paletta uncork another valuable scoop from deep inside Citigroup's boardroom this morning, this time on the fact that the subprime leader is considering backing out of its misbegotten $400-million Mets marketing morass.

Citigroup Inc., eager to quell the controversy over how lenders are using government bailout money, is exploring the possibility of backing out of a nearly $400 million marketing deal with the New York Mets, say people familiar with the matter.

A sense of the inside discussion is here:

Within Citigroup, some officials believe the company should try to void the Mets pact in order to distance itself from unnecessary controversy. But other executives argue that trying to wiggle out of the contract will set a bad precedent. "If we cave for political reasons, it will have enormous implications for our ability to contract with third parties," said an executive who has been briefed on the discussions.

While of course one never knows where the discussions will lead, all i can say is that I've doubted Enrich & Co. before and been wrong.

So don't be surprised if CitiField is called FlushingField on opening day.

My usual bus-stop companions are an Irish man with an interesting cap and a tall young Indian woman with a shy smile. Our formula is to exchange a few words about the weather—the Irishman generally has a more negative take—and then enjoy the silence. This is a 7 a.m. bus, after all.

My companions weren’t around last Friday, though, to see what I saw coming hurriedly down the icy sidewalk—a three-man camera crew. I am about to be interviewed, I thought, perhaps about mass transportation or some facet of life in northern New Jersey. But no, the one with the microphone was calling out my name. He introduced himself, “Dan SomethingOrOther, Fox News.” Oh, I thought.

Not that I had been expecting to be interviewed on the streets of Teaneck, but I had a clue why they were there. Earlier in the week I’d exchanged e-mails with a producer from The O’Reilly Factor, who “really just wanted to get me on with Bill.” I had written back: “Hi Ron. While I genuinely appreciate this, and would be happy to come on the show some other time if that works, I have zero time to prepare for this due to multiple deadlines, so I'm going to pass.”

This was apparently his accomodation to my schedule, to come to my bus stop at sunrise. How nice.

The subject of the interview was an article from the January/February issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, about how some right-wing media attacks on Barack Obama, rather vicious ones, are continuing well past his election. The piece was written by Michael Massing, one of our contributing editors, and it argued that loyal opposition is one thing but character assassination is quite another. I thought it was persuasive.

We didn’t talk much substance, however, Dan and me. We talked labels. His line of questioning was, How could your magazine of journalism criticism hire a writer from the “radical far-left” magazine, The Nation, to attack Fox and other conservative outlets? How is that fair and balanced?

I am a morning person, and, with a little caffeine, usually kind of Zen at that hour. I said that Massing was an excellent and highly respected reporter and critic who writes for many outlets. And, more to the point, what about his argument and his examples? What part of the piece, exactly, are you challenging? I thought I did OK at the bus stop.

I did a little less well after the bus came and Dan and his crew followed me into it, amping up the aggresssion somewhat. That was a little disconcerting, to my bus driver as well, who can be heard in the background urging Dan and crew to exit. This, of course, is the part of the interview O’Reilly chose to air on Monday night.

In cases like this you often think afterward of what you wish you had said. I wish I had pointed out that The Nation is a fine magazine of the political left, just as magazines like The Weekly Standard are fine political journals of the right (perhaps noting that CJR praised the Standard for its excellent cover story on Detroit just last week). And that, anyway, Massing has written just once for The Nation since 2003, and writes all over the place for the best publications in America. Or that among his best work is a book on American drug policy that credits Richard Nixon; or that his blockbuster critique of the press coverage of the runup to the war in Iraq irritated The New York Times a lot more than it irritated Fox; or that he’s working on a history of the Protestant Reformation. And etc.

Or, more to the point, I might have cited chapter and verse from the article in question: how Massing and CJR documented instances of radio yahoos calling the president a Marxist, a radical, a revolutionary, a communist, a thug, a mobster, a racist, an agent of voter fraud, a black-power advocate, a madrasah graduate, an anti-Semite who wants to “gas the Jews,” a Muslim whose true loyalties are outside the U.S, an associate of terrorists, a “little bitch”— even the anti-Christ. Massing suggested that this bordered on being un-American, and I agree. If Dan had mentioned he might be coming to Teaneck, I might have carried a handy underlined copy of the piece.

But hey, it is what it is. My wife and children find it hilarious, in a supportive way. The woman who cuts my hair says she wishes she had been able to do something prior to my TV experience. Personally, even uncut, I think my hair compares well with O’Reilly’s. It seemed to be not a really big deal, all in all. By noon the day of the interview I had received three e-mails from strangers about the segment. I wished two of them good luck with their anger-management courses, and with the more reasonable third, I will try for a dialogue worthy of our new bipartisan era.

You can watch the video here.

On MSNBC earlier this afternoon, Andrea Mitchell described her phone call with Tom Daschle today and how he came to withdraw as nominee for head of the Health and Human Services Department (h/t, Michael Calderone):

MITCHELL: I just got off the phone with Tom Daschle. It was an emotional conversation. He was clearly -- sounded as though he were tearful, over-wrought. He said, "I read The New York Times this morning and I realized that I can't pass health care if I am too much of a distraction and when I saw what the Republicans were saying, and read The New York Times, I called the president this morning." And then he said "I've got to go." It was a difficult conversation.

From today's Times: an editorial, "The Travails of Tom Daschle," (currently the "most blogged" story) which reads, in part, "We believe that Mr. Daschle ought to step aside and let the president choose a less-blemished successor;" and, on the front-page: "Obama's Promise of Ethics Reform Faces Early Test."

The New York Times's Baghdad Blog surveys Iraqi newspaper coverage of the provincial elections. While official election results are not yet in:

Iraqi newspapers have spent the time since voting booths closed trying to squeeze early indications of the result from their journalists and sources close to the election authorities...

The newspapers are heralding a drift - or perhaps a more emphatic move - away from overtly religious parties and toward a more secular brand of nationalism.

And, while the election dominates the front pages in Iraq:

On the back pages the election does nothing to dislodge the Iraqi newspapers’ usual extensive coverage of the loves, lives, doings, events and non-events in the alternative universe inhabited by Hollywood starlets, models, Egyptian actresses and Lebanese singers.

UPDATE: Based on interviews and first-hand experiences, Suadad al-Salhy, an Iraqi employee of The New York Times in Baghdad, offers some notes of caution:

I was sure before the election that people would move away from their old sectarian political loyalties.

But when I went to Dora on Election Day I was shocked to find that of 12 or 15 people I spoke to only one or two had put aside their sect and voted for qualified people. Everyone we asked said they voted for the Sunni slate Tawafiq, and when we asked why, they had no idea about the people they had voted for...

...I think we need more time, maybe dozens of years, to understand that we are Iraqis and we should choose our governors according to their programs, not their sects, sex, color or whatever...

...There is much talk about non-sectarian parties doing better in the election. But do not make a mistake: these sectarian feelings have not gone away.

During the campaign, Barack Obama promised his cheering crowds that, when he rolled up his sleeves to work on health care, he would “have insurance company representatives and drug company representatives at the table. They just won’t be able to buy every chair.” Now is a good time to take a look at just what kind of seats special interest groups will have at Obama’s table, and what they’re doing to bring the public around to their ways of thinking. This is the fifth of an occasional series of posts that will analyze their activities and how the media are covering them. The entire series is archived here.

Jeff Hansel of the Post-Bulletin in Rochester, Minnesota, has given us some insights into the lobbying that has begun around health reform, chronicling the visit Rochester’s large employer, the Mayo Clinic, recently made to Washington. Hansel’s piece is especially enlightening in view of the confirmation troubles faced by Health and Human Services secretary-designate Tom Daschle, and the questions surrounding his activities on behalf of health care institutions after he left his post as Senate majority leader in 2004. One of those activities was serving as a director on the board of the Mayo Clinic.

Hansel’s piece began: “Mayo Clinic officials are making headway in their quest to shape the future of U.S. health care.” The story went on to explain that the head of Mayo’s Health Policy Center and other hospital bigwigs traveled to Washington in January to meet with members of Congress and new administration officials, no doubt to make their case for health reform as the hospital and its Policy Center see it. The Center, according to the Post-Bulletin, has developed four “cornerstones” of reform:

• Creating value for patients through better quality at lower cost

• Coordinating care, especially for those with chronic and multiple conditions

• Rewarding value with new payment methods

• Finding basic health insurance coverage for all Americans

Now who can oppose goals like these? Just about every special interest group has similar language on their Web sites. As the Washington cognoscenti know, such boilerplate really doesn’t mean much when it comes to the legislative maneuvering. The devil is always in the details. For example, what exactly are Mayo and other hospitals willing to do in terms of cutting costs? Hospitals account for about one-third of the U.S. health care tab, and, as Maggie Mahar has pointed out in her healthbeat blog posts, they have embarked on building sprees all over the country that can’t help but increase costs down the road.

Hansel’s piece showed that the Mayo delegation had extraordinary access on their trip. They met with “more than 15 key leaders,” according to the Policy Center, including Daschle’s deputy Jeanne Lambrew, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Max Baucus, and Rep. Pete Stark. Key leaders indeed! “They all want to hear more from us as they move forward on reform,” Mayo’s national CEO Dr. Denis Cortese said, in what the paper called the Center’s update. “We must keep the momentum going by sharing our perspective as policy positions are put forth.”

We don’t know whether Daschle had a hand in arranging any of these visits, but we do know that directors of companies—whether engaged in health care or not—and advisers—whether technically lobbyists or not—do open the doors for such meetings. Commenting on the Daschle mess, Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics, told the San Francisco Examiner that Daschle “is in some sense no different from a registered lobbyist. He has been a strategic adviser serving in that same capacity. While not technically a lobbyist, he can still influence legislation by advising lobbyists on what strategies to pursue.”

No matter who is running the administration’s reform effort, we hope Hansel will continue to give us a peek at what going on behind the closed doors.

I'm no Maureen Dowd fan (and even less of a Tom Friedman one), but I have to applaud her column on Sunday, which is something of an anthem for readers outraged by what's been going on on Wall Street and in Washington.

The president’s disgust at Wall Street looters was good. But we need more. We need disgorgement.

Disgorgement is when courts force wrongdoers to repay ill-gotten gains. And I’m ill at the gains gotten by scummy executives acting all Gordon Gekko while they’re getting bailed out by us.

Here's Dowd hitting on the theme of financialization, the idea that too much of our economy and our brainpower has been allocated toward finance:

At least the old robber barons made great products. When you make money out of money, unmoored from morality and regulators, it must unhinge you. How else to explain corporate welfare queens partridge hunting in England, buying French jets and shopping for Lamborghinis?

She raps Obama for being too demure with his "shameful" remarks, and nails Rudy Giuliani for his idiotic defense of the bonuses:

Rudy Giuliani resurfaced Friday to defend corporate bonuses, telling CNN that cutting them would mean less spending in restaurants and stores.

Stupid. Even without bonuses, these gazillionaires can still eat out. It’s like Rudy’s trickle-up Make Work Program: Make Leisure.

And Dowd approvingly quotes Claire McCaskill's full-throated condemnation of Wall Street:

Claire McCaskill popped out a bill to limit the pay of anyone at firms taking federal money to no more than the president makes — $400,000.

“These people are idiots,” she said on the Senate floor. “You can’t use taxpayer money to pay out $18 billion in bonuses. ... Right now they’re on the hook to us. And they owe us something other than a fancy wastebasket and $50 million jet.”

Now that's populism!

Senator Chuck Grassley gives the quote of the week:

Senator Chuck Grassley urged the administration to snatch back the bonuses. “They ought to give ’em back or we should go get ’em,” the Republican told me. “If this were Japan and a corporate executive did what is being done on Wall Street, they’d either go out and commit suicide or go before the board of directors and the country and take a very deep bow and apologize.”

Finally, she ends with this refutation of all those who've put forward the canard that the banks need to give bonuses to retain employees:

Some Obama policy makers still buy into the notion that if they’re too strict, these economic royalists, to use F.D.R.’s epithet, might balk at the bailout, preferring perks over the prospect of their banks going belly-up.

The president needs to think like Andrew Cuomo. “ ‘Performance bonus’ for many of the C.E.O.’s is an oxymoron,” he said. “I would tell them, a) you don’t deserve a bonus, b) where are you going to go? and c) if you want to go, go.”

Note perfect.

UPDATE:

Adding, Paul Krugman's column yesterday is also a home run. He slams Obama for being mealymouthed toward the banks:

When I read recent remarks on financial policy by top Obama administration officials, I feel as if I’ve entered a time warp — as if it’s still 2005, Alan Greenspan is still the Maestro, and bankers are still heroes of capitalism.

“We have a financial system that is run by private shareholders, managed by private institutions, and we’d like to do our best to preserve that system,” says Timothy Geithner, the Treasury secretary — as he prepares to put taxpayers on the hook for that system’s immense losses.

Meanwhile, a Washington Post report based on administration sources says that Mr. Geithner and Lawrence Summers, President Obama’s top economic adviser, “think governments make poor bank managers” — as opposed, presumably, to the private-sector geniuses who managed to lose more than a trillion dollars in the space of a few years.

Krugman is right on to say if taxpayers are going to funnel cash into the banks and guarantee their debt, we ought to wipe out their shareholders and give control of the institutions to the taxpayers.

Here's where the ball goes over the fence:

Meanwhile, Wall Street’s culture of excess seems to have been barely dented by the crisis. “Say I’m a banker and I created $30 million. I should get a part of that,” one banker told The New York Times. And if you’re a banker and you destroyed $30 billion? Uncle Sam to the rescue!

Amen.

From today's New York Times:

An unusual number of journalists from prominent, mainstream organizations started new government jobs in January, providing new kindling to the debate over whether Mr. Obama is receiving unusually favorable treatment in the news media.

(Speaking of, why not revisit this CJR essay, "In The Tank").

Among the new hires: Douglas Frantz, a former managing editor of and investigative reporter at The Los Angeles Times, who is now Sen. John Kerry's chief investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Mr. Frantz, who left The Los Angeles Times as it was changing owners in 2007, said he was ready for a career change. But he acknowledged, “If the newspaper industry were more robust, I would hope to still be managing editor of The Los Angeles Times.”

With a press aide for Mr. Kerry monitoring the interview — the sort of arrangement that annoys reporters — Mr. Frantz said he did not view his new job as promoting any partisan aim.

“Pursuing the truth is apolitical,” he said.

More such hires may be in the works. Per the Times, "Administration officials report they have had discussions with other print journalists looking for work as their news organizations begin to shed jobs."

The Times has an amusing story this morning on what it's like for Wall Streeters now that they're goats instead of heroes, and less paid ones at that. It's chock full of schadenfreude moments and pictures of bankers still in utter denial.

Here's one of the former:

“For a long time, it was kind of glamorous and I had friends who’d ask me ‘Can you get me a job there?’ ” says Ms. Chau, 35, who was part of a recent round of layoffs at the firm’s Manhattan headquarters. A few weeks ago, she mentioned her work to a photographer she’d met through a friend. “And he looks at me and says, ‘Oh, you’re one of them.’ ”

And here's some denial:

Financiers tell their not-for-attribution account of the mortgage crisis like this: Americans undersaved and overspent for decades, relying on rising property values to bankroll their lifestyles. But nobody on Wall Street forced United States homeowners to take out loans on houses they couldn’t afford, or refinance mortgages to spend money on cars they shouldn’t have bought.

The esoteric securities underneath the current mess are, to the people who invented and marketed them, analogous to pharmaceutical drugs. Used correctly, they can enhance your life. Abused, they are lethal...

You hear a lot about the failure of regulators, too. But it’s difficult to find anyone in the financial trenches who thinks the problem is Wall Street itself.

I don't think this kid is the type of guy we need in Congress, do you?

Of course, mistakes were made on Wall Street, says Emanuel Pleitez, a 26-year-old former Goldman Sachs employee who resigned from his job a few months ago to run for Congress in his hometown, Los Angeles. But to a great extent, he says, those mistakes were born of misplaced trust.

“Look, you can talk about collateralized debt obligations all day long,” he said, referring to a type of asset-backed security that has turned famously toxic. “But there were ratings agencies that were supposed to tell us how risky these securities were. We essentially closed our eyes and said, ‘O.K., you say this is rated triple-A, fine, I believe you.’ ” In hindsight, he said, “Everyone should have been more skeptical.”

And more schadenfreude:

At JPMorgan, Ms. Chau said, management clamped down on office supplies to the point where employees now need to ask a secretary for the key to the supply room for pens.

At the San Francisco branch of Goldman Sachs, the days of free soy milk and Diet Cokes are over, and one day, the water cooler was wheeled right out of the office. “Word went around pretty quickly,” says Mr. Pleitez. “Bring your own water.”

The Times ends the piece with the Big Point that's rapidly becoming consensus: We've had our best and brightest shuffling paper around, making money out of money, instead of making products or ideas for the last two-plus decades. It starts with this clueless quote from a muni finance banker:

“If you just take your base home, the question becomes, why not just work at a nonprofit from 8 to 4 instead of a bank where you’re expected to work weekends and every night till 10 or 11?” she said.

Or, conversely, why work every night till 10 or 11 for anything when you could work at a nonprofit from eight to four? Go out and have a life. Get your priorities in order.

But the kicker is this nice bit from the ex-chief of the NYSE:

Robert J. Birnbaum, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange, sees an upside to Wall Street’s diminished reputation.

“It’s taken a hit, but so what?” he said. “We don’t need all the bright people going to Wall Street, chasing money. There’s a lot of things bright people can do. Like find a cure for cancer.”

The times, they are a-changin'.

What news was made during Matt Lauer's Super Bowl Sunday interview with President Obama on NBC? What's the headline? Depends, of course, on who was watching:

USA Today: "Obama: Substantial number of troops will be home by next Super Bowl Sunday"

ComputerWorld: "Obama still won't say whether he's using a BlackBerry or something else"

Reuters: "Audio issues interrupt NBC's Obama interview"

Politico: "Obama: Reelection rests on stimulus"

US Weekly: "President Obama Jokes About Getting Bumped From Us Weekly Cover"

But Lauer also managed to tease out some news on the all-important What The Obamas Eat front (in a section of the interview that didn't make the Super Bowl Sunday cut but aired this morning on Today):

MATT LAUER: There's been a massive peanut-butter products recall in this country over the last several weeks. Most of the products track — trace to one plant down in Georgia that has a bit of a history of sending out products even though there have been traces of salmonella found. The question, the obvious question people wanna know, is the FDA doing its job?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I — I think that the FDA has not been able to catch some of these things as quickly as I expect them to catch. And so we're gonna be doing a complete review of FDA operations ... at bare minimum, we should be able to count on our government keeping our kids safe when they eat peanut butter ... that's what Sasha eats for — for lunch — probably three times a week. And, you know, I don't wanna have to worry about whether she's gonna get sick as a consequence to having — having her lunch.

Of his daughters, President Obama also told Lauer: "If there is a pair of kids who can handle this weird fishbowl, it is those two." And, "Nobody's cooler than my two girls."

Nobody? What about Peter Orszag, the administration's head of the Office of Management and Budget?

For Vanity Fair, Maureen Orth asks of Orszag and all of his new colleagues: "Can Obama's New Team Make Government Cool Again?" (In the same issue Orth also asks the equally urgent question: "Can [White House Social Secretary] Desiree Rogers Make Washington Fun Again?") Of course, Orth's reports are really just "text" to accompany Annie Leibovitz's photos of Obama's team (check out the "news-tracking team.")

Last week’s posting discussed sound-alike words that are often mistaken for one another, despite their different meanings.

That brought a comment from heisenberg76:

It is ironic that the author of this ‘Language Corner’ column does not know the correct use of the technical term at the center of this article—it should be ‘homophone’, not ‘homonym’.

First, please congratulate Mr. or Ms. Heisenberg76 (can we just call you 76?) on the proper use of “ironic,” though let’s save that discussion for another day.

Second, our friend 76 is both right and wrong.

Generations of schoolchildren learned that a “homonym” was a word sounding the same as but spelled differently from another with a different meaning (pedal and peddle, for example, or to, too, and two). Others learned that words that sounded alike but were spelled differently were “homophones,”, and words that were spelled the same but had different meanings were “homonyms” (bear the mammal and bear the verb, for example).

And if you haven’t learned by now that dictionaries shouldn’t be used to settle these kinds of arguments, here’s more evidence, this time using the definition of “homonym.”

The New Oxford American Dictionary’s first definition is “each of two words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling (e.g., to, too, and two); a homophone,” and then “each of two or more words having the same spelling but different meanings and origins (e.g., pole and pole); a homograph.”

That dictionary’s big daddy, the Oxford English Dictionary, favors 76’s camp: a “homonym” is “the same name or word used to denote different things” and “homophone” is “applied to words having the same sound, but differing in meaning or derivation.”

American Heritage takes LC’s side—a homonym is “one of two or more words that have the same sound and often the same spelling but differ in meaning, such as bank (embankment) and bank (place where money is kept)”—as does Webster’s New World, kind of: “a word with the same pronunciation as another but with a different meaning, origin, and, usually, spelling (Ex.: bore and boar); homophone.”

Finally, there’s Merriam-Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary: “1a: homophone; b: homograph; c: one of two or more words spelled and pronounced alike but different in meaning (as pool of water and pool the game).” Its definition of “homophone” is enough to twist yourself into knots: “one of two or more words pronounced alike but different in meaning or derivation or spelling (as all and awl; to, too, and two; rite, write, right, and wright) — called also homonym.” And “homograph”? “One of two or more words spelled alike but differing in derivation or meaning or pronunciation (as fair, market and fair, beautiful; lead, to conduct and lead, metal) — called also homonym.”

Backword reals the mined.

Sew watt halve wee learned?

When a dictionary uses one word to define another, they’re acceptable as synonyms. “Homophone” can, indeed, be used for words pronounced alike but spelled differently, as 76 prefers, especially when precision is required. And if you want to further split that hair, the less-familiar “homograph” could differentiate the “homophones” that are spelled the same but have different meanings. But they’re all part of the “homonym” family, and there’s nothing wrong with calling them that.

There's a movement afoot in the financial press, especially in globalist publications like The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, to warn about the supposedly rising threat of "protectionism".

Now, I'm a long-time skeptic of the free-trade religion, which is a branch of the now-discredited free-market one but on a global scale. I've long thought the U.S. gives access to its priceless markets too cheaply and at a dire cost to our own manufacturing base.

That said, I understand the economic problems that would be presented by a Smoot-Hawley-style tariff, especially one enacted during the middle of a maybe-depression. And I understand why the press would raise this issue now.

But I question whether the examples in this page-one Journal story rise to the level of protectionism.

A "Buy American" drive in the U.S., spreading protests against foreign workers in Britain and various countries' efforts to prop up their own beleaguered industries are fanning fears of a rise in economic nationalism that could deepen the global recession.

The "Buy American" bit is a move in Congress to have the money stimulus bill go toward buying American products if at all possible. This should be uncontroversial. After all, we're spending our taxpayers' billions to try to stimulate our own economy, not Mexico's or China's.

The protests in Britain are by unions against the practice of corporations bringing in foreign workers to do jobs needed by, you know, Britons.

In Britain, hundreds of workers at U.K. oil refineries and power plants walked off the job Friday as part of protests against the use of foreign labor, a sign of how deepening hardship is prompting a backlash against economic openness. Local contract workers at more than eight sites in Scotland, Wales and parts of England joined a wildcat strike that began earlier this week at the Lindsey oil refinery on the U.K.'s eastern coast.

The workers were protesting a decision by the refinery's owner, French oil company Total SA, to award a £200 million (about $290 million) construction contract to an Italian firm that planned to use foreign workers.

Good for them. This strike probably isn't controversial to anyone but economists and multinational corporations because it goes to the core of what's behind their drive for free trade: access to cheaper labor.

And I don't think that saving the auto industries in a time of economic free-fall is a threat to the global economy:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel Friday bluntly criticized the U.S.'s efforts to prop up its beleaguered auto industry. In a speech to economic and business leaders gathered in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss the global economy, she said the U.S. measures "quite frankly, constitute protectionism" and should be temporary.

The U.S. has committed more than $15 billion to rescuing General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC. But it's no longer alone: The U.K. is providing debt guarantees for its auto industry. The French government said earlier this month that it is prepared to inject as much as €6 billion to jump-start French auto makers. Ms. Merkel's own government, after initial resistance, has promised GM's German-based Opel unit conditional bailouts of €1.8 billion (about $2.3 billion).

At least the Journal points out Merkel's hypocrisy. But it certainly doesn't say there might be a good reason for the U.S. to have its own auto industry and especially not to lose its millions of jobs in the current environment.

The only real evidence I can see of protectionist measures here are some Indian tariffs on steel and Russian ones on cars. Those kinds of trade restrictions rise and fall all the time, though, not just in times of economic peril.

There's no room given to free-trade skeptics in the piece, of course.

There should have been. There are arguments to be made that the crisis could lead to a long-overdue rationalization of our trade policies.

Audit Financial Journalism Ethics Quiz: Advanced Placement Final.

1. A newspaper that accurately quotes someone saying something that is almost certainly complete b.s. about a third party has:

A. Done its job.

B. Done a bad thing.

C. Earned an honorable mention from the American Stenographic Society.

D. Put itself in a spot where it might later have to clarify the record.

2. Accurately quoting the third party denying the thing said about it and claiming it knows nothing about the outfit that is talking about it:

A. Solves the newspaper’s problem.

B. Is an occasion for reflection.

C. Further enhances stenography credentials.

3. Running with the allegation after the sole source cannot be reached a second time and his organization leaves a message on an answering machine saying it has suspended operations due to an “extreme situation” is:

A. Wise.

B. Unwise.

C. Neither.

D. Both.

4. Declining to correct the record after a famous financial newspaper, which had run a similar story, publishes a correction on its story the size of a softball:

A. Is a sign of steadfastness.

B. Is a sign of stubbornness.

C. Is another occasion for reflection.

D. Is why all newspapers should be wiped from the face of the earth for all time.

This is not the biggest deal in the world, but the Ventura County Star, an E.W. Scripps Co. paper in Camarillo, California, ran a story under the headline “Madoff fallout cancels local folks’ D.C. trip,” reporting that residents had bought packages to the Obama inaugural from a Chicago charity, known as December Rain, but later learned that the charity had shut down and that they were out of luck.

The trouble is Madoff almost certainly had nothing to do with the local folks’ losing their tickets. The only support for the claim was the word of a person who was actually caught reneging on his promise to provide tickets and then disappeared.

Looks like Gen. Beauregard Lee has finally found a way to get out from under Punxsutawney Phil's shadow:

"Georgia groundhog uses Twitter, says spring's almost here," reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Among Beau's tweets: "[L]ots of people yelling outside; must be time.” And, for the record, Beau did not see his shadow; Phil did, as did Ohio's Buckeye Chuck.

UPDATE: Woodstock Willie of Illinois? Shadow.

UPDATE II: Charles G. Hog of Staten Island, NY saw his shadow...and bit Mayor Bloomberg. The Staten Island Advance has the footage.

Only the naïve would expect a public official to be pure as an angel these days, what with today’s megabuck campaigns and the cash dangled before legislators by special interests which have much to gain (or lose) from governmental decisions. In health care, it’s especially tricky since the entire system has been morphing into a money-making machine for its many stakeholders. The outcome of this latest drive to overhaul the system will depend a lot on how loudly that money talks.

Thanks to The New York Times we now hear that Tom Daschle, the president’s choice for Secretary of Health and Human Services, had neglected to pay some taxes on the free car-and-driver services provided by a prominent businessman and Democratic fundraiser. He is the second cabinet appointment to forget about his taxes—but in the euphoria generated by a new administration, apparently neglecting one’s taxes is forgivable as long as they eventually get paid.

So perhaps the most significant revelations from the newspaper were those that came at the end of its story. Daschle, who has worked for the law firm Alston & Bird as a special public policy adviser with an emphasis on health care, received “more than $390,000 for speeches to groups like America’s Health Insurance Plans,” the Times reported. AHIP will be a key force in determining whether reform ever actually happens. Daschle also “received more than $5,000 for giving ‘policy advice’ to the insurer United Health.” UnitedHealthcare, one of the nation’s biggest health carriers, has a big stake in reform.

All this is a bit unsettling. In our profession, most media outlets long ago cracked down on speaking fees paid to journalists who sometimes addressed similar groups. The justifiable fear was that reporters who took speaking fees might be subtly—or not so subtly—biased toward those who gave them money, and that would affect how they reported on their benefactors when it came time to do the tough story. How could a journalist who has taken money from, say, UnitedHealthcare report critically on the subsidiaries in its empire that cherry-pick the healthiest people and leave the rest stranded without coverage; or the unsavory sales practices that might accompany its growing Medicare prescription drug business; or the high deductible health plans it markets that leave some policyholders underinsured when serious illness strikes; or its health IT business that could profit from mining patients’ medical records?

The same questions can be asked of Daschle, and Fox News Sunday did that yesterday. A company press release shows how important these lines of business are to United. In Daschle’s hearing before the Senate Health, Education Labor, and Pensions Committee in early January, senators dodged the hard questions and essentially gave Daschle a free pass to confirmation, which we noted on Campaign Desk.

We would like to know just what kind of advice Daschle gave United and how, for example, he might square such advice with the looming fight over cutting the federal government’s overpayments to sellers, including United, of the now infamous Medicare Advantage plans. And what’s his position on a public, Medicare-like insurance option—which is sure to be opposed by United and AHIP? The media need to find out and prod the Senate Finance Committee for answers. The public deserves no less from the man who will help decide whether or not they have health care in the coming years.

...said Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Novaya Gazeta, "an independent newspaper that has established itself as one of the Kremlin’s sharpest critics and that 10 days ago lost a 25-year-old reporter in what apparently was a contract killing." Medvedev made this comment during a meeting he requested last Thursday with the paper's editor.

During the meeting, per the New York Times:

Mr. Medvedev...expressed his “deepest sorrow and compassion” over the death of the reporter, Anastasia Baburova, who was shot as she walked down a Moscow street with a human rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov. Mr. Markelov, who was also associated with the newspaper and was thought to be the primary target of the attack, was also shot dead.

To the frustration of human rights advocates, the Kremlin had not previously released any comment about the killings.

Mr. Medvedev’s gesture — which [Novaya Gazeta's editor, Dmitri A.] Muratov described as “absolutely sincere” — comes on the heels of several other unexpected moves by the government in Moscow.

Earlier this week, Mr. Medvedev moved to scale back a bill that would expand the definition of treason, saying he had been influenced by the outcry “in the media and society” against the proposed change...

...Liberal commentators on Friday were split on whether Mr. Medvedev was signaling a departure from the policies of his predecessor, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.

A related Novaya Gazeta column.

The Times on Sunday tossed off a variation of that old journalism standby, "The Death of the Mall," going to the Mall of America to get the pulse of the consumer economy.

THERE are roughly 1,500 malls in the United States, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, many of them ailing, some of them being converted into office buildings, and others closing their doors for good.

At Web sites like deadmalls.com, the carcasses of these abandoned buildings are photographed and toe-tagged, along with tributes from former shoppers. All this as the worst retail environment in decades continues to sag in a sickly economy.

I know a little bit about the mall industry from my days covering it at the Journal. Lots of malls have closed over the last ten or fifteen years, but that's mostly because the industry just plain overbuilt during the 1980's and early 1990's. The mall isn't going away anytime soon, however much we might like it to. Owners can adapt them more rapidly than you might think.

And the Times uses shopkeepers to question the Mall of America's claim that its sales were up 2 percent in 2008. But that likely means total sales, not average sales per square foot. The mall had more stores open up last year:

Sitting in her office in the basement, she is explaining how it’s possible that total sales at the mall were up 2 percent in 2008. Even she seems a little amazed by the number, in part because a major highway nearby was shut down during some crucial days in the holiday shopping season.

Yes, 11 stores closed in 2008, including Hot Dog on a Stick, a clothing retailer named Big Dog, and Wilsons Leather. But 31 new stores opened, among them American Apparel, True Religion and Best Buy...

The mall will survive.