Category Archives: Readings

Shorter William Safire:

The Floo Floo Bird. Please stop asking questions about what the Bush administration has been doing on foreign policy, terrorism, and 9/11 for the past three years because I will not like the answers.

Shorter William Safire, The Bond Across the Pond

Even though the quality of this column is in decline, I have absolutely no intention of retiring. Any editor thinking of firing me better understand that it would kill me.

Brad DeLong pens (keyboards?) another one of his great rants about the failures of our modern press corps in the face of mendacity: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Special Richard Cheney 'Opinions About Shape of Earth Differ' Issue).

Brad's description of the problem — one offered by most serious students of the press who are not actually members of it — is IMHO spot on: there's something wrong when obvious falsehoods get equal time with obvious truths. But is his solution really what we want?

If Bumiller doesn't feel that at this stage she has enough information to (at least privately) conclude that Cheney is either senile or a liar, she needs to get a different job in a different profession. And once she has reached that (private) conclusion, her duty is clear. She needs to include more quotes from different people contradicting Cheney—people like Tenet, Powell, Armitage, Hadley, and other senior administration officials who are already on record praising the work done by Clarke and his centrality to the Bush administration's pre-911 counterterrorism effort. She needs to signal her readers that Cheney is all alone on this: completely off the reservation, making claims that are so false that nobody else will touch them.

So I called Bumiller, and asked her why she had made it into a “she said, he said” article rather than into a Cheney-said-something-so-bizarre-that-nobody-else-will-endorse-it article. Her replies seemed, to put it politely, incoherent. The reasons that she didn't stack five contradictory quotes from five different sources against Cheney—and so make him look like the liar or idiot that he is (as Dana Milbank would probably have done)—appear to be that she “doesn't write opinion,” that “the news was Rice contradicting what Cheney had said to Rush Limbaugh,” and that she “only had 300 words.” My assertion that whether Clarke was out-of-the-loop or was the loop itself is a matter of fact, and that a reporter has a duty to ascertain and to report to her readers such matters of fact, did not meet with a response.

Here's the problem: I don't think I'm going to be happy in a world in which reporters slant their stories to hint real real hard as to who they think is lying. I am OK with a nakedly partisan press in which reporters wear their biases on their sleeves — I like Brad's rants, don't I? — partly because biases (unlike prejudices) can be the reasoned result of thought and education. But I don't want a norm that says reporters should try to manipulate the reader.

It's bad enough having to read the NYT every morning and Kremlinoligize the stories as it is. It used to be you knew that certain reporters were so-and-so's leak, so that if X had a scoop it probably came from State. But now when I read, say, a Judith Milller or a Katherine Seelye story, I have to be on guard for the slant. I don't like that.

In fact, I wonder if what Brad is advocating wouldn't legitimate what Miller and Seelye do. I bet that Miller believed Chalabi. I bet that Seelye believed all those anti-Gore falsehoods she peddled. (See the Daily Howler for chapter and verse). I think I want LESS of that sort or reporting, not more.

So I guess my vote is to allow more editorializing: “Cheney's comments appear to conflict with every known fact on the subject” or something like that….

Last week I was in the airport for the first time in a while, and with time on my hands had a look at the magazines. I noticed one called “Lucky: The Magazine About Shopping,” and thought that it must be the dumbest idea for a magazine out there. Boy was I wrong. Not only is it selling 900,000 copies per issue, but the dumbest idea for a magazine was just around the corner: Cargo.

Here's how the Post's reviewer describes it:

Cargo is a shopping magazine for men. It contains no stories, just pictures of stuff you can buy — or, as one of Conde Nast's vast army of publicists puts it, “no articles, all products.”

Cargo might be the worst idea for a magazine in human history. It's certainly the worst idea for a magazine since December 2000, when Conde Nast launched Lucky, a shopping magazine for women. …

Lucky's success inspired Conde Nast to launch Cargo, originally dubbed Lucky for Men. That name was accurate: Cargo's premiere issue contains features on such guy-friendly stuff as hot cars and power tools, but it also has plenty of stuff about, yes, shoes and makeup and handbags and hairdos. …

But never fear. There is, yes, actual content in Cargo. The inaugural issue contains … wait for it … “fully illustrated advice on 'How to Roll Up Your Sleeves.' Step one: 'Undo all the buttons on the sleeve.'” Who woulda guessed?

Michael Winerip's On Education: At Poor Schools, Time Stops on the Library's Shelves is a deeply depressing story, and the sort of journalism we need but don't get nearly as often as we need.

It seems that in poor neighborhoods — predominantly black neighborhoods — the schools have been starving the libraries. The books in the school library mostly date from before the schools were integrated. Not only do they lack the biographies students need for Black History Month, but they are innocent of four decades of modern technology, politics and literature. They don't even have Harry Potter — the books that are credited with sparking a new generation of readers.

What better example of our national shame of unequal class-based (which often in effect means race-based) public education?

That said, I do have one tiny criticism of the article: do not make fun of Freddy the Pig.

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