Complex. I misplaced a point responding to Todd Purdum's Kerry piece yesterday, and I want to make it now because I think it goes to something larger about the Times' basic politics.

Quoting a statement in National Review Online that tries to smear John Kerry as an "angry antiwar protester" back in the day, Purdum demurs a bit in the next sentence, the one that begins his report proper: "The full picture is complex," he says. What I didn't note yesterday is what "complex," as Purdum uses it here, signifies in journalist-speak, outside its deployment in Kerry meme-building.

What the NRO says is bullshit [thinks Purdum]; Kerry wasn't some radical antiwar fire-breather. But I can't say it's bullshit, because then why am I writing this? "Complex" lets me off the hook—that puts the story firmly in good old-fashioned the-truth-is-in-the-middle territory, and from there I can run with all this rehashed thirty-year-old crap that doesn't lead anywhere.

[Hey baby, William Safire's not the only writer who can read minds.]

Why do I care about this? Purdum mentions later in his piece that Kerry's opposition to the war "arouse[d] intense passions" at the time, and still arouses them now. That's just another version of the "complex" dodge—and yet it points to an actual story that might have emerged from this assignment, one that would have examined the political passions animating attacks on Kerry, examined how opposition research fuels / is fueled by those passions, one that could have thought about the uses and abuses of Vietnam-era history and imagery in current politics. Purdum might, for example, have been led to notice the recent production of John Kerry-Jane Fonda photos, both the genuine one his story mentions and the parallel fake it ignores. He might have informed his readers about how right-wing attack politics works, and how it's shaping up to work in the current election cycle.

Of course, writing and running a story like that would have required imagination on the part of Purdum and his editors—neither side being apparently much given to the exercise of imagination, if the recent past is any guide. I offer the story-that-might-have-been as a kind of thought experiment: could such a piece appear on A1, or elsewhere in the Times as we presently know it? I don't think it could. The story I'm imagining proceeds from the assumption that the smear isn't just false, but that it's illegitimate: that the smear needs not to be reported for its content but to be examined, as evidence of a political pathology.

Purdum won't say that NRO is full of shit, not because he's a wing-nut himself but because, paradoxically, he's a liberal—a Times liberal. The political hallmark of Times-style Establishment liberalism—byproduct, perhaps, of the absolute value it places on consensus as the guarantor of social peace—is the automatic way it invests the holders of institutional power, governmental or corporate, with legitimacy. If you're in office, if you're somebody that somebody in office listens to and associates with, what you say is to be taken seriously on its own terms. Which is all well and good, I suppose, unless you're at a point where the people in office and their pals are crazies and liars and thugs whose chief desire in life is to take a sledgehammer to the joint before absconding with whatever loot they can collect.

Bereft equally of a theory of power and a theory of history (those are, perhaps, the same thing), Times liberalism can do nothing but naturalize the current political landscape, whatever it may be. The truth is always in the middle—but the center can't hold unless it blinds itself to the direction it's being shoved in. And that, kids, is one of the ways in which creeping fascism manages to creep.

posted by michael  3:26:21 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Be very afraid, part 2. As a follow-on to Tuesday's post about the Saudi oil story, I'll note this article from Power and Interest News Report ("China's Demand for Energy is Reshaping Power Structures Around the World")—thanks to Enduring Friedman for the link. The article doesn't address the concerns about Saudi production that Jeff Gerth wrote about in the Times, but it does mention the implications for the global energy system of China's rapid economic expansion. As of last year, China has surpassed Japan to become the second largest oil importer in the world.

The seemingly endless demand for energy has persuaded China to focus much of its attention on finding foreign sources of oil and gas. China sits on major deposits of coal, but the government is trying to move towards cleaner burning sources of energy for environmental and health concerns. Chinese crude oil imports rose by 31 percent in 2003, at an increased cost of 55 percent. The higher prices that Beijing was forced to pay last year have helped to focus China's efforts on establishing a reliable and steady source of oil.

posted by michael  1:51:03 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Greenspan and the Social Security swindle. Newspapers are usually weak on history, and coverage of Alan Greenspan's House testimony last week on tax policy and the Social Security system was no exception. Imagine my surprise when, a few short days after printing Edmund Andrews' see-no-evil coverage of Greenspan's appearance, the Times offers Week in Review space to David Cay Johnston ("The Social Security Promise Not Yet Kept") to put the record straight.

Since 1983, American workers have been paying more into Social Security than it has paid out in benefits, about $1.8 trillion more so far. This year Americans will pay about 50 percent more in Social Security taxes than the government will pay out in benefits.

Those taxes were imposed at the urging of Mr. Greenspan [em. mine], who was chairman of a bipartisan commission that in 1983 said that one way to make sure Social Security remains solvent once the baby boomers reached retirement age was to tax them in advance.

On Mr. Greenspan's recommendation Social Security was converted from a pay-as-you-go system to one in which taxes are collected in advance. ... This year someone making $50,000 will pay $6,200 in Social Security taxes, half deducted from their paycheck and half paid by their employer. That total is about $2,000 more than the government needs in order to pay benefits to retirees, widows, orphans and the disabled, government budget documents show.

So what has happened to that $1.8 trillion?

The advance payments have all been spent.

Congress did not lock away the Social Security surplus, as many Americans believe. Instead, it borrowed the surplus, replacing the cash with Treasury notes, and spent the loan proceeds paying the ordinary expenses of running the federal government.

Only twice, in 1999 and 2000, did Congress balance the federal budget without borrowing from the surplus.

Read the whole article to get a measure of the dishonesty implicit in Greenspan's recent testimony on the issue. [Good stuff elsewhere: Slacktivist usefully offers the Greenspan story in parable form; Billmon excerpts a CNN transcript in which Lou Dobbs, interviewing Johnston, experiences what looks like a Damascus moment, complete with graphs.]

A government that funds itself by taking disproportionately from the less wealthy is a government that in effect redistributes wealth upward. That seems a pretty simple proposition to me. I don't take it as shocking news, or as news at all: the fate of the so-called Social Security "lockbox" just illustrates the unexpected magnitude, in one dimension, of that redistribution. My question is, When are the Democrats finally going to learn how to talk about taxes and income in a way that makes this immediately apparent to the electorate? When are they going to learn how to tell people that private wealth is maintained at a social cost, as a social choice—and that the illusory (lottery-culture) freedom to get rich that Americans are supposed to value is paid for by giving up real and available freedoms: like, say, the freedom from fear of financial catastrophe that a universal health care system would buy?

posted by michael  1:22:58 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Shabby, mendacious typing from the Todd Purdum word processor splashed above the fold on A1 today ("In '71 Antiwar Words, a Complex View of Kerry"). (Purdum, it may be worth remembering, was recently seen in full feather rhapsodizing gauleiterishly over Dear Leader on the occasion of his SOTU speech.)

"Complex" is an interesting word: in the body of the article, Purdum uses it to mean, roughly, "not reducible to simple critique"—having introduced the subject of right-wing criticism of Kerry's antiwar work in the early '70s, Purdum follows with a demurrer to the effect that "the full picture is complex." Even here, though, the usage is suspect reporter-ese; the burden of what follows is that Kerry was a moderate in the antiwar context, and while charting a moderate course in a movement dominated by radicals may well have been a challenge, moderation isn't a "complex" phenomenon unless you've decided that the only operative political categories are left and right. But the headline usage really gives it away: "complex" is about Kerry, and about his character, not just about his thirty-years-ago political activity; it gravitates into the orbit of "slippery" and "untrustworthy," part of the Gore-ish meme the Republicans are disseminating as their chief line against Kerry. (Do you really want somebody that complex to be President? I just can't trust somebody who's not straightforward, you know, like good-ol' Flight-Suit Boy.)

Purdum is either so lazy, or has so little commitment to today's bullshit assignment, that he can't even be bothered to maintain his own rationalization for his article's existence. Kerry's activity against the war, Purdum tells us, "arouse[d] intense passions, then and now," and offers that it's an "open question" whether this past will hurt Kerry politically: then just a few grafs later, at the bottom of the piece, remarks how

a recent poll by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey found that Mr. Kerry's antiwar activity was mostly a concern to people who had already made up their minds against him, just as Mr. Bush's wartime service in the Texas Air National Guard was mostly a concern of those who already opposed him.

So I guess the passion is really just on one side of the fence, then, eh Todd? And the question isn't all that open after all? [By the way, how's that for a phony equivalence: Kerry has a wartime record of opposition to the war, and Bush has a wartime record of National Guard service. Never mind that the former record has been completely open for thirty years, and fully explored, while the former has remained to this day in the murk of coverup and partial disclosure—they're both Vietnam-related political footballs, what more do you need to know? Acknowledging any distinction between them, gosh, that'd be a sin against objectivity, wouldn't it?]

So why is this stale crap stinking up A1 today? Well, wingers are saying bad things about John Kerry's antiwar record! And if the Conservative Command Center is making a controversy about it, then it must be controversial, right? And in that sham logic the Times cedes, without even a whimper, its independent news judgement.

As both a veteran and anguished opponent of the Vietnam War, Mr. Kerry has spent years working to square the circle of a conflict that divided his generation, and the nation. Now, his old words have come back to haunt his presidential campaign, as conservative backers of President Bush question whether Mr. Kerry is "a proud war hero or angry antiwar protester," as National Review Online recently asked.

Let's take careful note of this graf. There was a point at which I thought that the Times might have reasons not to go a-Goreing on Kerry. Mea culpa. It's just the end of February, and A1 has already sunk so low as to admit, to the world and everybody, that it's taking its marching orders from National Review Online.

posted by michael  1:08:37 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Jodi Wilgoren : Howard Dean :: Congrats to David Halbfinger on his ascendancy, via John Kerry, to the top of the Times snark-heap. Just as Jodi announced that it was open season on Dean with her article on his weird wife, Halbfinger began a new work-the-perception campaign on Sunday when he wrote about Kerry's "X Factor" spouse ("Blunt and Influential, Kerry's Wife Is an X Factor"). (I couldn't post about it at the time; the thing just filled me with ennui. Anyway, Bob Somerby was taking care of business—and Tom at IMproPRieTies had a good post on the article, too, with a nice quote: "This is not news, it's a form of mongering. The purpose is not to convey information, but to broker viral foreboding.")

Having worked Sunday from the recently successful Wilgoren playbook, Halbfinger today runs the old phony-patrician play ("Kerry Is Borrowing Edwards's Common Touch") that performed so reliably for the Al Gore press pack in 2000. Halbfinger appears astonished that Kerry is actually using, God help us, techniques to attempt to connect with his audiences over their concerns:

To bolster his credibility with the working class, Mr. Kerry is trying everything: touring deserted mills and still-bustling ones, talking about the plight of struggling mill and factory workers, campaigning with them at his side, exchanging hugs with tearful laborers, and assuring the countless union members whose bosses are now backing him that he will fight to keep their jobs from disappearing overseas. On Thursday he campaigned at the side of striking California grocery workers.

Four paragraphs of Halbfinger's piece are devoted to making Kerry look ridiculous because he once said "man" (as in, "That's tough, man") when he offered sympathy to a locked-out steelworker.

To be fair, Halbfinger does take some pains to honor the workers Kerry is speaking to and for by giving space to their stories. Much of the piece reads like a fair summary of Kerry's current campaign direction and the tactics behind it, and Halbfinger ends with what does seem a real question for Kerry as his campaign rolls on, shrewdly (if a bit incoherently) put by Tony Coelho:

Many challenges are ahead for Mr. Kerry should he capture the Democratic nomination. He was assigned Secret Service protection last week, and has already disappeared to a degree into the protective bubble that insulates him from the up-close interaction he found so valuable in Iowa and New Hampshire.

"Now that he's in the cocoon, can he let it come out?" Mr. Coelho, the Gore campaign chairman, said. "If it's not real, it'll flip right back to where it was before, and he'll be in trouble."

But there are rules, it appears, about what will and won't play on A1: and the rule in evidence today is, you gotta Gore somebody. So even though the piece isn't really a hatchet job, Halbfinger has to sell it as if it were, no matter the insult to reason or seriousness that might result. So we get an accusatory lead and a fake controversy:

Senator John Kerry, who is not the son of a mill worker, is borrowing heavily from the message and manner of Senator John Edwards, who is.

Mr. Kerry is talking nonstop about job losses, about the "haves and have-nots," about hardship and heartache in the industrial heartland. He is even surrounding himself with mill workers to prove his point — and retelling their stories about as often as Mr. Edwards mentions that he grew up in a textile town and saw the broken spirits of those whom global trade left behind.

This is an "accusation" that neither requires nor even permits factual support; all you have to do is notice a similarity: mills! about as often! Halbfinger's so uninterested in the charge, such as it is, that he contradicts it in the very next sentence, noting that this "transformation" in Kerry's style "began months ago," when his campaign was down, and at a time when Edwards wasn't even on Kerry's radar. Clearly, as far as the A1 treatment goes, substance isn't crucial: it's enough that Halbfinger respect the form.

Technique bad! Look, we've found him out—Kerry's acting like a campaigner!

posted by michael  2:39:15 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

At least she's consistent. Not to turn this into the Robin Toner Watch, and it's not an A1 piece today—but when she pops up twice in two days on the marriage amendment issue, and after yesterday's post, it'd be churlish of me not to take notice, don't you think?

This is ostensibly reporting, not analysis, but it covers the same political-theater territory as her article yesterday, this time from the Democratic angle ("Democrats Join Fray on Marriage"). The headline echoes the odd conceit of the article's lead, that Bush's reluctant, much-belated announcement yesterday of support for a marriage amendment somehow started a debate to which the Democrats are only now adding their voices:

Democrats on Wednesday plunged into the volatile new debate over a constitutional amendment that would ban gay marriage, saying they were confident that voters would see President Bush's endorsement of the measure as an expression of political opportunism, not shared values.

But that's Toner's thesis in this piece, and no inconvenient reality is going to get in her way. Toner has decided that Bush's announcement yesterday seized the political initiative, and forced the Dems behind another excellent Rovian eight-ball:

In declaring his support on Tuesday for a constitutional amendment that would bar same-sex marriage, Mr. Bush called the union of a man and a woman the "most fundamental institution of civilization." He left Democratic candidates trying to walk a careful line, mindful that polls show that most Americans oppose gay marriage but are more closely divided on amending the Constitution to prohibit it.

See? Bush, for Robin Toner ever the Steely-Eyed Rocket Man of Principle, is talking about values, about civilization—and the Dems are just carping about process and looking for a "middle ground" where they can find room to maneuver. They just seem, well, small, don't they? [Does the fact that Congressional Republicans aren't looking all that quick to take the amendment bait themselves, as Toner's colleague Carl Hulse reports on the same page today, cast any shadow in her world? Not a bit of it—for Toner, only Democrats are creatures of ambivalence.]

As was true yesterday, and even though this article is ostensibly about the Democratic position, Toner remains faithful to her pattern: Democratic voices criticize, and are subject to Republican rebuttal—never the other way around. More remarkable, Toner's Democrats today have to concede the main points before they're even allowed to criticize—sometimes after, too, even if Toner has to push them a bit. While Bush's coming out (pardon the pun) for the amendment

may energize his base, [some] Democrats said, it will cost him support among the electorate at large.

"If we do our job right, it can be perceived as an attempt to divert attention away from the economy and the war and the lack of direction in the country," said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. [Seems like more of that Democratic unwillingness to talk about values, doesn't it? -ed.]

Still, Ms. Lake acknowledged that the gay marriage issue could trouble older, blue-collar voters as well as some Catholics otherwise attracted by the Democratic Party's economic message.

Who other than Robin was there to extract that final concession from Ms. Lake? That's Toner, always looking out for her GOoPer pals.

Toner even manages an opportunity to get straight-up RNC spin into the mix. She quotes Andrew Kohut of the Pew Center saying that Kerry and Edwards, both of whom "draw the line" at gay marriage, are claiming a position that draws that line "in a more reasonable, moderate way than amending the Constitution." And then, not bothering with Edwards, she trains her sights on Kerry:

But Republicans said Mr. Kerry was simply trying to have it both ways. Ed Gillespie, the Republican national chairman, told reporters that "Senator Kerry has had a number of different positions on this." Mr. Gillespie noted that despite his stated opposition to same-sex marriage, Mr. Kerry was one of only 14 senators who voted against the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996, which prohibits federal recognition of such marriages. Spokesmen for Mr. Kerry's campaign said he had voted against the legislation because he believed it had become a Congressional exercise in gay-bashing.

Which is, of course, the preferred Republican line of attack on Kerry—he wants it both ways! Says one thing, votes (years before, in a different context entirely, but this is Nit Picklering, remember) the opposite! Can't trust the man. (Even when Toner stoops to print the Kerry camp's demurrer, she makes sure it fits the pattern in which Democrats speak only to process. That there might be intellectual substance, even principle, in a position that resists amending the Constitution except as an extraordinary last resort, is an idea apparently too complex for Toner to get her head around.)

Much as I'd love to see her drop the pretense and just work directly for the RNC, Toner is obviously much more useful to them where she is. How many gold stars do you think are next to her name in Ed Gillespie's Rolodex?

posted by michael  5:38:05 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Robin Toner is a GOoPer hack. A1 today gives Bush's endorsement of the first discriminatory amendment in the history of the U.S. Constitution its mandatory Big Executive Moment treatment: putatively fact-based reportage, today from Elisabeth Bumiller (Fact-esque can fill you in on that one), paired with the always laughably so-called analysis piece, this one by Robin Toner ("Bush Keeps Faith With His Base"—get it? Keeps faith? You know, 'cause they're religious conservatives and all ...?).

Here's a question: the President has just come out in support, however hedged, of passing the first discriminatory amendment to the Constitution in history. Should your A1 analysis piece discuss the amendment currently before Congress, unpack its language, assess its probable effects and its prospects for passage? (David Kirkpatrick's piece, on the inside jump page, at least attempts however halfheartedly to document the debate over the Musgrave amendment's ambiguous language, a debate that has even conservatives roiled—and which has so far received only limited attention in the national press.) Or do you foreground an article where "analysis" means "completely uncritical recitation of Republican spin points till your readers' eyes bleed"?

OK, I guess the answer's pretty obvious. But really, I can't recall when I've seen any more egregious piece of horseshit on the Times' front page than this thing of Toner's. Read the article and notice the rhetorical structure: George Bush acts. Republicans explicate and approve his acts. Democrats carp (briefly, mildly and in ways already anticipated by Toner or her Republican sources), and Republicans rebut them. The initiative is all on the side of Republicans in Toner's world. Not only do they have first and last word, but their statements are always confident, and Toner loves to associate them with strong verbs and forceful adjectives: Bush's announcement isn't just an endorsement of a marriage amendment, it's an "impassioned" endorsement, his recess appointment of hard-right judges is a "classic exercise of presidential muscle," conservatives "hail" his efforts to accommodate them, are "euphoric" over his backing the marriage amendment. The one time Toner colors a Democratic talking point, it's to mention that Democrats "harken hopefully [em. mine] back to the 1992 election" as a precedent for the new culture war—about as weak an adverb as you could use in this context.

What really drops my jaw, though, is the narrative Toner's at pains to construct. It's one thing for the Times to maintain the rhetorical fiction—phony as it is in Dubya's case—that policy pronouncements emanating from the President, or offered on his behalf, are the result of the actual decisions of the man himself. It's one thing even for the Times to demand that its reporters render the Dear Leader's statements into coherence in the absence of genuine coherence, as Richard Stevenson had to do reporting on Shrub's MTP tête-à-tête with Pumpkinhead a couple of weeks back. But Toner's gone way beyond simply employing the standard rhetorical fig-leaves: she's off creating a whole celebratory mythology for Young Churchill. Watch as Bush, with his trademark steely resolve, swings into action to defeat the dark forces of despair:

The administration clearly recognized in recent weeks that it faced political unrest on its right, after what Mr. Keene described as "a short period of denying the problem existed." The soaring deficits, the growth in government, and most particularly the passage of a Medicare bill that amounted to the biggest expansion of that entitlement program in 38 years, all led to growing discontent among economic conservatives. Other conservatives were dismayed by the administration's immigration proposal, granting temporary work permits to illegal immigrants.

At the same time, in the wake of a Massachusetts court ruling declaring marriage a basic right that could not be denied to gay people, social conservatives were pushing hard for the president to embrace a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexuals. Still others were frustrated in the face of Senate filibusters of some conservative judicial nominees.

Mr. Bush began to respond. In a classic exercise of presidential muscle, he bypassed the Senate and installed two conservatives in federal judgeships, positions long denied them by Democrats on Capitol Hill. He issued a veto threat against a $318 billion highway and mass transit bill, cheering economic conservatives who have long demanded a harder line on spending.

Finally, after a long period of edging up to the amendment with qualifications and reservations, and after days of news dominated by gay couples getting marriage licenses in San Francisco, Mr. Bush made his intentions clear on Tuesday.

And just like that, a month and more of Administration fumbling, weeks of outright anger and threats of defection from the evangelical right, a reluctant and temporizing endorsement of a marriage amendment, becomes a sure and confident passage into the pre-ordained clarity of Dubya's intentions. [Need we note, by the way, that this pattern is classic Republican spin? It's always, for the BushCo shills, about Dubya's intentions, which are always big and bold and unambiguous and always, always save the day.]

And I'm not even going to try to cover Toner's other sins, say the way she consistently treats Republican spin as the mere statement of fact. [Though I can't pass up the moment where she helps Gary Bauer invent a whole spankin' new GOP-oriented social movement out of thin air: "Conservatives are also confident that their current causes are part of a new broadly appealing cultural populism [em. mine]. Unlike previous 'cultural battles,' said Gary L. Bauer, a longtime conservative strategist, 'this one is not much of a battle.'"] Honestly—at this point, why doesn't Robin Toner just spare us all and take a job writing for the fucking RNC?

posted by michael  5:04:45 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

In case there were any doubts about the Pentagon's colonial agenda in the Persian Gulf, let Gen. Jay Garner—as Bob Harris says, writing on Tom Tomorrow's blog, "until recently the U.S. occupation's Great Gazoo in Iraq"—deliver you the gospel:

"I think one of the most important things we can do right now is start getting basing rights" in both northern and southern Iraq, Garner said, adding that such bases could provide large areas for military training. "I think we'd want to keep at least a brigade in the north, a self-sustaining brigade, which is larger than a regular brigade," he added.

Noting how establishing U.S. naval bases in the Philippines in the early 1900s allowed the United States to maintain a "great presence in the Pacific," Garner said, "To me that's what Iraq is for the next few decades. We ought to have something there ... that gives us great presence in the Middle East. I think that's going to be necessary."

Amy Klamper, "Former Iraq administrator sees decades-long U.S. military presence"

No, of course it wasn't about oil ...

posted by michael  10:03:29 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Up through the ground come a-bubblin' crude ... Or through the water, in this case. And less than ol' Jed's gonna need to keep the cement pond in repair ...

Jeff "Whitewater" Gerth is back on A1 today with a report on Saudi oil production ("Forecast of Rising Oil Demand Challenges Tired Saudi Fields")—and welcome, when he offers reporting that's as thorough and well researched as this. And not at all welcome, because the implications of Gerth's report are deeply alarming, and all too real, in a way that shows up the callow apocalyptic of the Pentagon's recently hyped global climate change report.

[Saudi Arabia's] oil fields now are in decline, prompting industry and government officials to raise serious questions about whether the kingdom will be able to satisfy the world's thirst for oil in coming years.

Energy forecasts call for Saudi Arabia to almost double its output in the next decade and after. Oil executives and government officials in the United States and Saudi Arabia, however, say capacity will probably stall near current levels, potentially creating a significant gap in the global energy supply.

Outsiders have not had access to detailed production data from Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil company, for more than 20 years. But interviews in recent months with experts on Saudi oil fields provided a rare look inside the business and suggested looming problems.

An internal Saudi Aramco plan, the experts said, estimates total production capacity in 2011 at 10.15 million barrels a day, about the current capacity. But to meet expected world demand, the United States Department of Energy's research arm says Saudi Arabia will need to produce 13.6 million barrels a day by 2010 and 19.5 million barrels a day by 2020.

"In the past, the world has counted on Saudi Arabia," one senior Saudi oil executive said. "Now I don't see how long it can be maintained."

Gerth's article is long and detailed and deserves serious attention; it makes a strong case that Saudi oil production is near to peaking, if it hasn't peaked already. (It makes a secondary case that production from the oil field, Ghawar, that undergirds Saudi export capacity, might be at earlier risk of entering "uncontrolled decline" due to over-aggressive management.) It's a bit perplexing to me that the Times jumps this from A1 to C2: it takes a real lack of imagination to think that this is primarily a business story.

Gerth is a little too circumspect about just what his reporting means. Given the growing reliance of the global market on Saudi reserves, the figures cited above indicate nothing less than an expanding, structural gap in world oil production, one whose effects will be noticeable within a frighteningly short period. You don't have to be either an economist or a military strategist to be able to contemplate likely outcomes, and to feel sick.

It seems to me that we're balanced on the knife edge. High standards of living mean high levels of energy consumption. The world energy economy is just capable, at current rates of production, of keeping pace with existing economic growth. I've often wondered whether the global environment would be able to handle the consequences of another generation or two's accelerated growth in China and India, as those countries and their massive populations lever themselves toward higher and more energy-expensive and more CO₂-productive living standards. Now it starts to look like that question may be pre-empted by an equally harsh but more immediate equation: a world in which Persian Gulf reserves are in decline, with no real replacements in sight, is a world that simply won't be able to generate enough BTUs for all the fancy gizmos we're all used to.

A global industrial economy doesn't fit very well with a regime of permanent energy scarcity. Add competition between a vast, growing, relatively impoverished but technically competent population, and a richer, more technically advanced, but much smaller and relatively stable population that's used to hogging the lion's share of the available resources—that's a formula for a more brutal world than I care to imagine, even without the environmental-catastrophe variable added.

Go on about oil as a factor in the Iraq war, and in our colonial engagement with the Persian Gulf in general (even without reference to specifics of the BushCo history with their Saudi clients), and you're likely to get fitted for a tinfoil hat. But isn't the strategic logic as clear as day? If you expect to be fighting wars over Persian Gulf oil reserves within a couple of decades, why not improve your advantage while you've still got it? [Please note that I'm not endorsing the policy: I just can't see why it's supposed to be so outside the bounds of reasonable discussion that the policy exists and is being exercised. Start from a few simple—if highly debatable—axioms, and who wouldn't come to these conclusions?]

posted by michael  7:17:15 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

First discriminatory amendment. Like it or not, the gay marriage battle has been well and truly joined. It doesn't matter that Rove is trying to finesse the issue by having Bush endorse a Constitutional amendment, while avoiding specific endorsment of the Musgrave amendment now before Congress. [I take that back: it does matter, as an acknowledgement of political reality: AP reports unnamed "White House officials" saying that support for Musgrave "has been unraveling in the Senate," and implies that the tap-dancing in Bush's announcement results from awareness of the fact. The delay in making any announcement at all is even more telling, I think: Bush's social-conservative base has been waiting weeks now for Dear Leader to step into the ring; I take that as prima facie evidence that Rove isn't nearly as eager for this fight as the more timid Democratic fawns are afraid he is, and doesn't at all see it as an out-and-out winner for the Thugs.]

First discriminatory amendment. This isn't about what's now on A1, it's about what needs to appear on A1, and everywhere else, in the coming months. These three words state, as compactly as possible, a powerful meme, one that I think will be overwhelmingly effective in the struggle over any marriage amendment, one we need to start propagating—"we" meaning not just lefty bloggers, but Democratic operatives at every level—relentlessly. The argument is simple and, on its own terms, all but unanswerable: the history of the Constitution is the history of increased enfranchisement, increased civil rights, increased liberty; the Thugs propose to reverse that history. The more aggressive and disciplined we are in maintaining this argument as our point of attack, the more we determine that the discussion over a marriage amendment is about civil rights and not about "sanctity." We force the battle to be fought, in other words, on our ground, not Karl Rove's.

Our side wins the rights argument: the social fascists have been trying for years to portray the question of gay civil rights as an issue of "special" rights, and look how far that's gotten them. First discriminatory amendment shames the other side. Tar the Thugs with discrimination, and they lose the middle. If I were Karl Rove, I wouldn't feel confident about this battle in the least.

Update: The more I think about this, the clearer it is to me that Rove has just made a huge strategic mistake. Josh Marshall has a post at Talking Points Memo that I think gets it exactly right. The last thing Bush needed was to be in the middle of a culture war and invoke the shades of Pat "Better in the Original German" Buchanan in '92. But he's stuck with it now, because his collateral has all but vanished, and he can no longer afford to string the base along with vague promises of "concern" on the gay marriage issue.

posted by michael  3:05:53 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Give 'em enough rope. The Times Sunday Week in Review section is usually pretty laughable, in large part because it regularly gives political correspondents like Todd Purdum an opportunity to opine—and in the process to reveal the sorry poverty of their intellects. Purdum's piece yesterday on the Dean flameout ("So What Was That All About?") actually manages to be even more vacuous than the headline suggests.

You know it's going to be a bad day when a by-the-numbers writer like Purdum (try this on for literary size: "Dr. Dean streaked across the political landscape like a comet") looks to position himself as a critic of the conventional wisdom:

In the beginning and at the end, the supposedly smart money in American politics missed much about Dr. Dean, from his stunning early potential to the accumulating missteps that started to spell his doom just as some of the biggest names in politics endorsed him. Odds are good that some early post-mortems predicting his lasting impact may be similarly shortsighted.

Purdum's agenda is to "analyze" Dean's defeat to discover the factors in it that militate against his having a long-term impact. (I'm being a bit generous in stating it quite that coherently.) His thinking, predictably, is fetishistic: Dean's defeat, and what his movement may mean in the longer run, have to do entirely with what Dean and his campaign can be made to represent—the real politics of organizations and of people in their masses are opaque to Purdum's view. (Even more the real politics of the media making and unmaking candidates and their movements.) So Dean failed, and his movement may falter, because in some way or other his message failed: Dean "lacked a broad public policy agenda that was sharply different from most of his rivals," says Purdum, blithely skating past self-contradiction (doesn't that mean his rivals lacked an agenda sharply different from his? and yet it doesn't seem to have hurt them); Dean's "message was strong and sharp, but more strategic than substantive"—meaning, as far as I can tell, nothing more than that Howard (once again) shouldn't have been so darned angry. (See how the voodoo thinking works? The campaign is the same thing as its message, and if the message is weak, so is the campaign.)

Dean, says Purdum, was an outsider candidate, which it's OK to be, more or less, if you're on the side of history, except that Howard isn't:

The Democrats' shattering divisions in 1968 led to reforms in both major parties that emphasized grass-roots power over party insiders and paved the way for Mr. McGovern's nomination in 1972. In 1976, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan both surged to prominence as outsiders, and four years later, Mr. Reagan and his conservative backers took over the Republican Party with effects that remain obvious today.

But those three candidates were riding historical forces - opposition to a years-old, stalemated war; the corruption of Watergate, and the sense that liberals had forsaken middle-class America - that, at least in hindsight, seem more powerful than the anti-Bush backlash that propelled Dr. Dean.

Exhibit One, this, in why reporters shouldn't be allowed to write about history. There's really more stupidity in this than I can reasonably hope to unpack in a small space. Purdum's "historical forces" are nothing but newsreel highlights at best, and his series isn't even gramatically, much less historically, parallel. (How is "opposition" equal to "corruption"? How is a "sense" a historical agent?) More important: has Todd got his hands on that back-to-the-future DeLorean? Because otherwise I have a hard time understanding from what position of "hindsight" he can judge that the "anti-Bush backlash" (and of course it can't be anything more than a backlash, can it?) has spent itself while we're still in the middle of the fucking election.

But as you might expect, Purdum really shines when he talks about the Internet. Dean lost, apparently, because he didn't blog enough:

Dr. Dean and his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, raised $41 million last year, much of it in small contributions through the young medium of the Internet. But they spent almost all of it on old media: direct mail and television, the medium that John F. Kennedy used to transform politics 44 years ago.

"He's going to be a milestone in the history of the Internet, but there's just no way of knowing how much farther we have to go," said Michael Cornfield, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University. "We can look at what he didn't do: he never got on his own blog. We have yet to see the J.F.K. of the Internet. It's going to be someone like Bob Graham, a compulsive diarist, who's going to be able to command a blog with a distinctive voice, either through a Cyrano staffer or himself."

(Give Purdum credit for not trying to hog all the laugh lines to himself;Michael Cornfield, that's one funny dude. Tomorrow belongs to the diarists!) I'm not sure what we're supposed to get from this: It would have been all OK for Dean if Trippi had spent that young Internet money on something other than old media (like buying a stake in Friendster)? I may not be a big-time political correspondent like Todd Purdum, but it seems to me that the chief reason Presidential candidates try to raise lots of cash is precisely to be able to sell themselves via broadcast, and that having lots of money from whatever source is very much the advantage everybody thinks it is. (An advantage is still an advantage even if you squander it, as Dean appears to have.) But practicalities like this are lost on Purdum, who sees a convenient antonym (young-old) and just can't resist it, coherence be damned. Besides, he's not really expected to produce thought, is he? If you can generate the appearance of it by moving your counters around the board, that's good enough for the Week in Review.

Update: If you want to see actual reporting about what went wrong in Dean's campaign, you won't do much better (at least for the time being) than this piece in USA Today (thanks to Value Judgment for the link). But the Times has always been much more interested in the Dean phenomenon as psychodrama—and in the psychodrama it can project on Dean—than in offering its readers, you know, genuine information about the practical politics of the campaign. Among other things, the USA Today report confirms my sense that Dean's failure as a candidate has approximately nothing to do with the role of the Internet in floating him in the first place.

posted by michael  6:34:57 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

New poem posted in the Poetry Corner this morning, for those of you who are interested in that sort of thing.


posted by michael  10:39:21 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Prior story inoperative. Abort! Abort! In which we discover that working the intel beat means never having to say you're sorry:

A bit over a week ago I tried to unpuzzle myself about the Times' effort to flog the story of a seized letter, purportedly by an Al Qaeda associate, attempting to enlist Al Qaeda in fomenting Shia-against-Sunni violence in Iraq prior to the scheduled sovereignty handoff. Billmon had serious doubts about the document's authenticity tout court, while Juan Cole offered some reasons why the attribution of the letter to the notorious Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi might be dubious. (Cole has since concluded that the letter is authentic and the attribution correct. His latter post links, by the way, to a very good piece by Time magazine's Tony Karon that clarifies Zarqawi's status while addressing what I was mainly concerned about in my earlier post, the agenda behind the effort to hype the captured letter.)

Well, Douglas Jehl informs us on A1 today that the story, whatever it was, is now officially, er, sort of revoked:

The most active terrorist network inside Iraq appears to be operating mostly apart from Al Qaeda, senior American officials say.

Most significantly, the officials said, American intelligence had picked up signs that Qaeda members outside Iraq had refused a request from the group, Ansar al-Islam, for help in attacking Shiite Muslims in Iraq. The request was made by Ansar's leader, a Jordanian, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and intercepted by the United States last month. The apparent refusal is being described by some American intelligence analysts as an indication of a significant divide between the groups.

A bit odd, isn't it, to read of Al Qaeda rebuffing a request that was intercepted and never sent? That's by no means the only sloppiness in Jehl's reporting: he treats the Zarqawi attribution as simple fact, rather than as an intelligence conclusion, and he likewise accepts as fact that Zarqawi is the leader of Ansar al-Islam, a point of Bush Administration propaganda (Colin Powell insisted on it in his Security Council presentation) that is currently in some dispute. Sloppier still, Jehl confuses the issue by letting the "significant divide" of the graf above slide into "divergence" in this passage just a couple of grafs later:

In an interview today, one official cautioned that it would be a mistake to see the two groups as having diverged, and that it was too soon to say whether Al Qaeda might support Mr. Zarqawi. This official described the fact that Mr. Zarqawi had appealed for help as a sign of "emerging links" between the two groups. "Maybe someone did say no, but that doesn't mean they'll say no tomorrow," the official said.

Jehl allows this flat-out spin ("It could too still happen!") more leeway than it deserves. The two groups can hardly be said to have "diverged" when the Zarqawi letter strongly implies (as pretty much everybody except William Safire accepts) that they were never together to begin with.

The real meat of the story, and what looks to be its real occasion, doesn't appear until the middle grafs:

But, officials said, there are growing indications that the two groups are distinct and independent, and are embracing different tactics and agendas. A recent report by the State Department's intelligence branch emphasizes those differences, according to American officials who have read the classified document. "Even among Sunni Muslim extremists and committed terrorists, including Zarqawi and Al Qaeda, there can be extreme discrepancies about strategy and tactics," one senior official said. "This is not a world of homogeneous bad guys."

I'd have missed what the graf really meant if Kevin Drum hadn't fortuitously posted an excerpt just this morning from an L.A. Times piece on the State Department intelligence bureau. These are the guys that the PNAC crowd didn't, and don't, want to listen to on the subject of Iraq: they were skeptical on WMD before the war, and State has a bad reputation among the fire-eaters as being soft on Islamofascism.

It seems clear enough what's happened: somebody in the State intel operation, somebody in a position to know, got hold of Jehl and clued him in that the Times had been played on the Zarqawi letter, and indeed that the intelligence community as a whole wanted to dissassociate itself from last week's hype. (When Jehl tells me that "officials declined ... to say how American intelligence agencies had learned" of Al Qaeda's rebuff to Zarqawi, I have to think that it's fig-leaf time. The best defense is a good offense, after all, and if you're going to climb down from something, you want to do it by claiming it's on the basis of unspecified new information.) Of course, Jehl's not going to come out and say that his paper got played, but his noting State as a source here is as close to an "oops" as we can expect to get.

And poor old Bill "Smoking Gun" Safire? I'd feel embarrassed for him if he weren't an Old Nixonian^TM, and thus professionally as well as morally incapable of embarrassment.

posted by michael  2:37:52 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

How to gin up a trend. Not content with having blown the lid off the whole computer-geeks-vs-clueless-users story, today the Times has this shocker for us: there are women making money in the sex industry (print-version title, "Sex Industry Is No Longer Men's World")!

Experts say demand by women—both heterosexual and lesbian—is driving the growth of all sorts of sex-related ventures, from stores, catalogs and sex toy companies to adult Web sites, pornographic films and cable television shows. At the same time, many women, they say, see the sex industry as a legitimate place to make a living.

And this after another hard-hitting A1 report just yesterday exposing the whole low-carb diet thing: "Low-Carb Boom Isn't Just for Dieters Anymore." My head is spinning.

Maybe you'd like to be like professional Times reporter Mireya Navarro, and make a flashy new trend yourself out of just-a-bunch-of-stuff-that's-actually-kind-of-been-happening-for-a-while-already. It's easy and fun! Here are some pointers:

• Take all your "evidence" from people who have a profit motive in hyping the trend. From the start of the piece, which introduces us to a couple of aspiring grrrl pornographers, Ms. Navarro never lets this rule out of her sights.
• Hitch your wagon to a press kit. [Closely related to the first rule.] You might have seen some godforsaken local TV news outlet run a "report" this past week on Passion Parties, the sex-toy version of the Tupperware gathering. In all likelihood, that report was fed to the station by a public relations outfit, an arrangement that spares the station the expense of hiring and retaining actual reporters. Though she's a good deal more subtle about it, odds are that Ms. Navarro was also the recipient, from Passion Parties and probably elsewhere, of some handy PR materials that helped her flesh out her trend.
• Present statistics in isolation. Remember, context is your enemy. "Surveys by Nielsen/NetRatings, which measures Internet audiences, have found that women account for more than a quarter of all visitors to sites with adult content, with more than 10 million women logging on to such sites in December alone. ComScore Media Metrix, an Internet research firm, has found even higher female demand for adult sites—42 percent of all visitors in January—with the highest rates among women ages 18 to 34." Notice that neither of these sentences actually support the notion of a trend, since they offer no baselines for comparison, either with earlier female behavior on sex sites or with general tendencies in Internet usage. But they sure sound impressive, don't they? Ten million, that's a big number!
• In trend reporting, one = many. [Closely related to the rule above.] "Many new sexual entrepreneurs say they are filling a void, supplying female-oriented products that did not exist before. Last month, Robin Adams, 32, and Micole Taggart, 29, published the first issue of 'Sweet Action,' a pornographic magazine billed as 'the official guide for the boy-crazy gal.'" Well, that's the only example the article gives of a "female-oriented product that did not exist before," (and there's the little matter of Playgirl, isn't there?), but look how just saying many gives the impression of many-ness anyhow!
• The Internet: Friend of the trend! Man, that Internet thing is all the rage, isn't it? And Ms. Navarro has a killer move here for us: when you have to gesture toward the common-sense rebuttal to your new trend, dazzle 'em by tossing in the Internet! That way they won't notice that you're talking pure horseshit. "While women have long been involved in the sex industry as providers and consumers, their participation now has become more of an economic phenomenon, largely because of the Internet. In fact, experts say, the Internet has been a major factor in unleashing women's interest in all things sexual." See, women have "long been involved" economically in the sex trade (at least I assume that "providing" and "consuming" are economic activities), but now it's all somehow more economic, all thanks to that Internet. Ooh, see, Internet ... phenomenon ... sexxxy ...
• Remember, explanation is for suckers. Your job as a trend reporter is to imply, without saying anything that you could be pinned down on. Are women buying more porn now than before, or producing/distributing/selling more of it? Or all of those? Have new entrepreneurial avenues somehow opened up for women in the industry? Are women changing their porn-consuming behavior (if they are) because they have more opportunities to buy porn from women, or to buy female-targeted porn, or because the availability of online porn is changing men and women's behavior both? Ms. Navarro is too smart a trend reporter to let those questions rear their heads. Maybe women are just somehow hornier than they used to be! That'd be cool, huh?

OK, I think that's enough to get you started. One more quick guideline: if you want to make A1, your best bet is to hype a trend that'll remind readers that they're consumers first and foremost. A trend just isn't trendy if it doesn't stand a chance of moving some product, or at least of creating some anxiety that'll move some product. Now get out there and find out why cats are the latest thing in pets, or something!

posted by michael  7:07:31 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

When it wants to, the Times is capable of putting on a full-court press that justifies its position as the pre-eminent national newspaper. The Times has wanted to in the case of Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan and his nuclear proliferation network. Numerous hands—David Rohde in Pakistan is one, Raymond Bonner reporting from Malaysia another—have been at this story over the last several weeks, since the pathetic little shadow drama that played out between Khan and Pervez Musharraf, but I'll let yesterday's piece by Craig S. Smith ("Roots of Pakistan Atomic Scandal Traced to Europe") stand in for all. Smith writes that although Khan "has been demoized in the West for selling atomic secrets and equipment around the world, ... the trade began in Europe, not Islamabad," and he offers an account of how the European uranium enrichment industry conspired to flout the non-proliferation regime:

Many of the names that have turned up among lists of suppliers and middlemen who fed equipment, materials and knowledge to nuclear programs in Pakistan and other aspiring nuclear nations are well-known players in Europe's uranium enrichment industry, a critical part of many nuclear weapons programs. Some have been convicted of illegal exports before.

The proliferation has its roots in Europe's own postwar eagerness for nuclear independence from the United States and its lax security over potentially lethal technology. It was abetted, critics say, by competition within Europe for lucrative contracts to bolster state-supported nuclear industries. Even as their own intelligence services warned that Pakistan could not be trusted, some European governments continued to help Pakistan's nuclear program.

Really an exemplary piece of reporting, factual and well contextualized. It's nice to have something like this to praise the Times for—I just wish the paper's national political desk had anything like the reportorial vigor evidenced on the international side.

posted by michael  9:52:47 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Fronting the TerraWar. Miserable news judgement giving Sarah Kershaw's story ("Guardsman Charged With Trying to Spy for Al Qaeda") A1 play. A member of the Washington State National Guard was charged a week ago (a fact made public only yesterday) with an attempt to "supply information" to Al Qaeda. The story is introduced by a very nearly sensationalist, and rather misleading, opening graf:

The Army has charged a member of the Washington State National Guard with attempting to supply intelligence of Army organizations and weapons systems to the Qaeda terrorist network, Army officials said on Wednesday. The intelligence included details about military personnel, troop movement, tactics and "vulnerabilities," the charges said.

The soldier, Specialist Ryan Anderson, actually supplied intelligence to no one: he was caught in a sting, apparently a collaboration between the FBI, the Justice Dept. and the Army, apparently Internet-based, though the article offers no clear picture:

Specialist Anderson was taken into custody at Fort Lewis last week after an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Justice Department and the Army found that he had used a computer to try to contact Qaeda cells in the United States, Army officials said.

According to the charges made public on Wednesday at Fort Lewis, Specialist Anderson provided extensive information to military personnel posing as members of Al Qaeda, both in person and via the Internet.

I find it hard to square "found that he used a computer" with the mention of in-person contact. The whole article is vague and, beyond the bare minimum represented here, nearly information-free. Did Specialist Anderson know anything that might have been significant to Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group? Did he somehow originate his contacts with the undercover agents, or was he targeted for the sting? The report offers "military experts" claiming the arrest as a result "of the kind of sting operation not seen since the cold war"—does that mean anything in particular, or is it just a way of hyping the charges? (Given that the piece ends with "legal experts" saying the charges are "among the most serious they had heard of since the cold war," my vote is for hype.)

And then there's this sentence, which practically made me choke on my lunchtime spicy tuna roll:

Specialist Anderson's case is the latest example of an American military soldier being formally charged with espionage ...

Remember Captain James Yee, the Guantanamo Muslim chaplain? Ms. Kershaw apparently doesn't, or it's of no importance to her to place the military's record of success in its terror-espionage hunts against the new claims in the case of this kid from Washington. (Here's a hint, Sarah: You could start with your own paper's December editorial about the Yee case ...)

What we have here is murk, murk, murk, and no suggestion of anything important having been, or likely to be, at stake: if not for the hint that some massive sting operation is underway (we'll hear a lot more about that, I'm sure) this would be a story of merely local import. Even with that hint, it's a story of merely local import. Except, maybe, I don't know, for the fact that the soldier (whose photo is available in the print edition but not, for whatever reason, online) is a Muslim convert, and white.

So is the Times simply succumbing to prurience, and in the process tabloidizing its front page? That'd be bad enough: but in a week where the paper sees fit to disappear a story involving serious allegations of misconduct in the DoJ anti-terrorism effort, this comes awfully close to the Times going out of its way to pimp for the domestic TerraWar cops.

posted by michael  3:45:02 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Mergermania! More gee-whiz biz coverage on A1 today, this time of the Cingular acquisition of AT&T Wireless. The headline hypes the takeover, which saw AT&T welshing on its handshake agreement with Vodafone at the eleventh hour, as "early-morning drama," a point reinforced by the three-column, top-left graphic illustrating (on a clock face, no less) the gripping minute-by-minute round of late-night conference calls that sealed the deal. (And if you don't think a bunch of corporate execs and their lawyers conferencing over take-out Chinese to figure out how to screw some other corporate execs and their lawyers is drama, buddy, check your pulse.)

The story, by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Matt Richtel, gets off to an appropriately breathless start:

One of the most frantic takeover battles in recent times ended in the early hours of yesterday morning as a legion of bankers and lawyers for Cingular Wireless scurried on foot through the near-empty streets of Midtown Manhattan to hand-deliver a $41 billion bid that snatched AT&T Wireless from the hands of Cingular's rival.

As strenuous a lead as that is, it's a wonder Sorkin and Richtel didn't give themselves coronaries just typing it. (Though their enthusiasm carries them away a bit, rhetorically: it doesn't really work to imagine legions, masses of troops, scurrying—not to mention scurrying on foot, as if there were some other way to scurry?)

A great deal of the article is like this, and I won't bother to repeat the points I made about this sort of rah-rah coverage last time it came up. A couple of inadvertencies did catch my attention, though:

While the acquisition of AT&T Wireless will not have an immediate effect on the price of cellphone calls, which have dropped sharply in recent years, it could slow further declines because, with fewer players, there will be less competitive pressure to win customers. The deal is also a major setback for Vodafone ...

Isn't that great? The deal will cause less competition, which may in the long run screw cellphone customers ...and also it's a setback for Vodafone? How exactly do those two sets of interests come to be rhetorically equated?

But the real triumph of unthinking corporatism is in this perfectly bland sequence a couple of grafs later, where we learn that it's not only customers and Vodafone who'll have some adjusting to do:

The combined Cingular-AT&T Wireless, which will take the Cingular name, will have wireless networks that cover 49 states and will have annual revenue of more than $32 billion. Cingular estimates that the merger will save the combined company $2 billion to $3 billion a year starting in 2006, in part through thousands of layoffs of overlapping positions. Those cutbacks will perhaps be most felt in Redmond, Wash., where AT&T Wireless is based.

Executives said they did not expect any regulatory obstacles to the deal, noting that the combined company would have less than a third of the market.

And that's all for that part of the story. Thousands of people—you know, the occupants of those "overlapping positions"—are likely to lose their jobs, incidentally in the midst of one of the most depressed labor markets in memory, and that rates as no more than one in a list of accounting checkoffs. After all, the subject is merger drama, right? Giant companies, captains of industry! We can't be bothered about a few bit players—that'd make it a labor story, god forbid.

Keep this in mind the next time you hear some winger screaming about the "liberal" NYT.

posted by michael  4:59:10 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Tanking it? A federal prosecutor who won the only convictions to date in a post-9/11 terrorism prosecution—convictions that seem on the point of being overturned in a tangle of charges of impropriety on the part of the prosecutor, the Justice Department, and the FBI—decides to sue his boss, the Attorney General of the U.S., alleging DoJ mismanagement of its part of the domestic anti-terror effort, and alleging that he himself has been targeted as a whistleblower by a punitive internal investigation.

Although there have been numerous complaints from civil liberties groups since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the lawsuit marked the first time that someone inside the government's war on terrorism had publicly stated that there were problems within the Justice Department's terrorism and violent crimes division.

Sound newsworthy?

The L.A. Times thinks so; the quote above is from Richard Serrano's article. CBS/AP think so, too, as does Newsday, and Fox News (in, I have to say, a laudably clear and information-laden piece). So, in fact, do a bunch of other news organizations, most of whom appear to be picking up original reporting from LAT or the AP. And for our so-called Paper of Record?

<crickets />

The sole, sad paragraph posted yesterday on the NYT site remains the only notice the Times has taken to this point, a day after the story broke. Here I was wondering whether they'd keep the thing off A1—they've managed to keep it out of the paper entirely.

Which begs the question, does John Ashcroft have something on Bill Keller?

posted by michael  9:49:21 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Intervention oopsies. Monday's front page ran a couple of while-our-attention-was-elsewhere stories side by side: Lydia Polgreen's report from Gonaïves, Haiti on the anti-Aristide takeover there ("Chaos Becomes a Way of Life in a Rebel-Held Haitian City"), and Steven R. Weisman's (bylined Washington) on a couple of little problems with the scheduled elections in Afghanistan ("U.S. Aides Hint Afghan Voting May Be Put Off"). Let's see, that makes two democracies-that-never-quite-were, installed at the point of the American spear, collapsing into civil war or general disarray:

Political strife has gripped [Haiti] since a disputed parliamentary election in 2000, and huge opposition marches over the past several months have intensified calls for Mr. Aristide to leave office. Earlier this month, the crisis boiled over into violence as armed rebel groups attacked police stations in as many as a dozen cities across the country. [big snip ...] With a demoralized police force of fewer than 5,000 men, Mr. Aristide has struggled to retain control of the country and relied heavily on armed gangs loyal to him to retain control in places where the police have been unable or unwilling to do so. The weakness of the police and the violence of the street gangs have diplomats here concerned that all order could break down very quickly.

Administration officials said in recent days that security conditions remained dangerous or at least uncertain in a third of [Afghanistan], hampering registration so badly that only 8 percent of eligible Afghan voters have been enrolled. Among women, only 2 percent have registered. The United Nations has said at least 70 percent of eligible voters should be registered for the elections to be considered successful. That leaves only four months to achieve a daunting objective at a time when registration workers are avoiding large swaths of the country that are considered unsafe.

Anybody want to try for a third?

The Times hasn't been exactly front-and-center wrt either Haiti or Afghanistan, but today's placement suggests, again, the possibility of the paper slowly developing a critique of PNAC-style bomb-em-into-democracy neocolonialism. Which would be a good thing. But I wonder: Why the hell is it that the Times produces an A1 report about the likely postponement (read: failure) of Afghan elections only when Administration officials decide it's time to do damage control on the story? The piece itself is balanced and doesn't read like a Bush apologia, but why does a story like this need "the Bush administration has begun suggesting ..." as cover?

posted by michael  5:40:34 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Let's see if it makes the jump. CBS News is reporting that Richard Convertino, the Assistant U.S. Attorney in Detroit who prosecuted the first major post-Sept. 11 terrorism case, is suing John Ashcroft, "alleging the Justice Department interfered with the case, compromised a confidential informant and exaggerated results in the war on terrorism." Convertino, says CBS, "is seeking damages under the Privacy Act, alleging he has been subjected to an internal investigation as retaliation for his cooperation with the Senate [he testified last summer on war-on-terror issues] and that information from the internal probe was wrongly leaked to news media." (I came to the story, oddly enough, because I started to see a little spate of hits in the last hour from people Googling Convertino's name.)

The Times' Danny Hakim had a next-to-the-obits story at the end of January on the unraveling of the Detroit prosecution; I felt at the time that it was a significant error in news judgement not giving the story A1 play. As of this posting, the NYT website has a paragraph by Hakim on the story under the heading "National Briefing: Midwest." The obvious question: will the Times promote this story to A1 in tomorrow's edition, or continue to cut Ashcroft undeserved slack?

Update: Just wanted to note the rather, shall we say, poetic irony of a terrorism prosecutor suing for injury under the Privacy Act.

posted by michael  1:25:53 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Blogging on. I'm happy to report that my new niece seems like a delightful little person, though her conversation is a bit limited. She looks kind of like a cross between Harpo Marx and a koala bear—though, come to think of it, isn't that true of pretty much all one-year-olds?

Anyway, I'll be catching up (since St. Louis, from my perspective of the weekend anyway, was something of a news blackout zone) and posting again once I can clear my various work-related program activities.

posted by michael  12:21:20 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Blogging off. I'm driving home this weekend to visit my new (adoptive Chinese) niece—along with select other members of my family. Out of posting range, in other words; I'll be back on Tuesday with more nuggets of Times-y goodness.


posted by michael  7:10:08 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Big business, big men. If business news makes you nostalgic, by all means pick up a copy of the Times today: Comcast's hostile bid for Disney is casting a glow like January 2000 over A1, with two articles and a big revenue-breakdown graphic splashed across three columns, and it's as if the bloom never fell off the AOL/Time Warner rose.

The tone of the coverage is all but palpitating, in a vaguely Ayn Rand-ish way. This may be business, but business in the Times' telling ("Cable Giant Bids to Take Over Disney") is essentially a conflict of persons:

Comcast is an upstart compared with the storied Disney entertainment giant. ... But Brian L. Roberts, the current chief executive and the founder's son, has made no secret of his desire to add entertainment programming to the company's cable systems. ... By contrast, Mr. Eisner has said he believes that branching into cable or satellite delivery systems would divert Disney from its strengths as a creator of entertainment.

It's all about strength, all the moves are big and bold and strenuous, the Comcast bid is "audacious," "expected to ignite a takeover fight," Disney "scrambles to mount a defense," the company "plots strategy" while its executives "battle an insurrection led by Roy E. Disney," Roberts "is putting enormous pressure on the [Disney] board," even the news conference at which the Comcast bid is announced has to be "crowded."

The overview piece is accompanied by Sharon Waxman's profile of Michael Eisner, whose agenda is completely expressed in its headline ("Facing a Battle, Disney's Chief Is Known to Fight Back, Hard").

On Wednesday [following the Comcast announcement], the battling Mr. Eisner was little in evidence. ... But few Disney watchers expressed doubt that the gloves would soon come off ... "I think he's a fighter," said Graef Crystal, who advised the Disney board on Mr. Eisner's compensation in the 1980's and 1990's. "He's probably deciding which wine bottle to break the head off of to go after Comcast. And not a bottle of Bordeaux. A cheap California wine will do very well for that purpose."

The really priceless moment in the article is when Waxman recurs to the story of Eisner having called his one-time protege Jeffrey Katzenberg "a midget" after their falling-out, and then begins the next graf by saying, "Mr. Eisner, a towering six-foot-three, has long been one of Hollywood's most powerful men." Did all the Times' business reporters learn capitalist iconography from The Fountainhead?

See, this is why we call it ideology. On A1 today, the business news is news about the chiefs, about their power and their personalities. The overview article does slip in one lonely little graf right in the middle, to give us a glimpse of what might have been, right after Michael Powell assures us (answering a question from John McCain) that this one will get FCC scrutiny, really for true:

Still, several public advocacy groups derided the deal yesterday.

"It's clear that Brian Roberts knows no limits to his media ownership ambitions," said Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, an advocacy group. "That Comcast would make the announcement the same day that a federal Court of Appeals in Philadelphia is holding a crucial hearing on new F.C.C. media ownership policies suggests that they are out of touch with how millions of Americans—who opposed the recent ownership changes—feel about further media consolidation."

I guess it's nice of the Times to throw those "advocacy groups" (plural, though Center for Digital Democracy is the only one the article bothers to mention) a mention, though they really don't seem to have come dressed for the party. But the quote reminds you that the Times could have taken an approach that discussed actual issues raised by the merger, might have acknowledged that corporations are, you know, corporate entities, that they exist within a wider political and economic nexus—even that other interests than those of the egos of the big chiefs might be in some way involved in any of this.

Nah. Media consolidation? The Times has never heard of it. Hey, is that Michael Eisner strapping on boxing gear? ...

posted by michael  6:52:13 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Meme rising. On Saturday, we had this in a front-page piece rehashing John Kerry's 1996 campaign against William Weld:

How John Kerry bounced back from being declared dead in 1996 provides valuable insights into him as a campaigner, his combative instincts and how he deals with adversity. People on either side of the 1996 race say these same qualities propelled the come-from-behind victory over Howard Dean in Iowa ... Aides say that it took Mr. Kerry's seeing his career flash before his eyes in the 1996 race for him to focus and fight.

Today, Todd Purdum offers a version of the same thing in a back-page Political Memo ("For Kerry, More to Gain in Leading Than Winning"):

Mr. Kerry might also benefit from the competition in another way. He has been at his best this political season when battling back from being far behind Dr. Dean in the polls, and he still lacks some of the strengths that come through adversity ...

This should make for an eminently adaptable story point, whether Kerry's ahead or behind; look for it in the weeks to come.

posted by michael  5:38:55 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

William Safire explains it all for you. In which we observe the Times selling A1 for a mess of pottage:

I found myself puzzled a bit by Dexter Filkins' story on Monday ("U.S. Says Files Seek Qaeda Aid in Iraq Conflict") revealing the existence of a seized document, purportedly authored by an Al Qaeda (or Al Qaeda-associated) operative in Iraq, urging the organization's assistance in waging "sectarian war" in the next few months before the planned sovereignty handoff. Mostly I was puzzled by the question of news value: though Filkins claims that "if it is authentic, [the document] offers an inside account of the insurgency and its frustrations," the reported contents seemed pretty Outside Scoop-ish to me. That Al Qaeda might want to foment Sunni-against-Shiite civil war is hardly a startling or novel idea, given that hatred of the Shia as infidels is the primary plank in the Al Qaeda platform, before even hatred of the United States. (As Michael Scott Doren writes in Foreign Affairs this month, "Al-Qaeda's basic credo minces no words on the subject: 'We believe that the Shi`ite heretics are a sect of idolatry and apostasy, and that they are the most evil creatures under the heavens.'") And it's not like it takes deep tactical insight to see that the period before June 30 marks a window of opportunity for destabilizing violence in Iraq. (Not to mention that the doc's expressions of frustration at the tenacity of the American occupiers seemed, well, a little too convenient to be entirely convincing.) I couldn't see from the report what value the document would have had to Al Qaeda, or why it would have much value to American intelligence. Filkins' exclusive aside, there didn't seem a lot of oomph in the story to justify it playing on A1.

[I also have a hard time squaring attribution of the document to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian frequently described as a "senior" Al Qaeda operative and a "close associate" of bin Laden, with language like this:

"You noble brothers, leaders of the jihad, we do not consider ourselves people who compete against you, nor would we ever aim to achieve glory for ourselves like you did," the writer says. "So if you agree with it, and are convinced of the idea of killing the perverse sects, we stand ready as an army for you to work under your guidance and yield to your command."

Does that sound like someone long known intimately to Al Qaeda at the senior level, or like a freelancer who's trying to get a little love? The latter possibility would seem to further diminish the news value of the story.]

Since Filkin's report appeared side-by-side with a rather more newsworthy piece by Edward Wong on the reluctance of Iraqi militias to disband, I put it down to the Times using A1 to emphasize a commitment to pursuing the Iraq internal-strife story. But I was puzzled again on Tuesday, when Douglas Jehl's A10 story ("U.S. Aides Report Evidence Tying Al Qaeda to Attacks")—flogged, somewhat unusually, with a top-left box on A1—once more pushed the al-Zarqawi angle, right next to another internal-strife piece ("Rifts Increase Iraqis’ Fear for the Future"), this one by Neela Banerjee. It was like deja vu all over again, especially since Jehl's article returns to the seized document, and the raid that produced it, to remark once more on their surpassing intel value. And yet I'm still given no clear idea why—to quote the WaPo this time, from their Monday article about the document—the thing is being promoted as "a breakthrough in U.S. investigations" into the violence in Iraq.

But Day 3 unpuzzled me. Safire's op-ed column yesterday ("Found: A Smoking Gun") was ready to give us all religion, in as portentous a tone as the old Nixonian could manage:

In the town of Kalar, about a hundred miles northeast of Baghdad, Kurdish villagers recently reported suspicious activity to the pesh merga.

That Kurdish militia has for years been waging a bloody battle with Ansar al-Islam, the terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and supported by Saddam Hussein in Iraq. It captured a courier carrying a message that demolishes the repeated claim of Bush critics that there was never a "clear link" between Saddam and Osama bin Laden.

The terrorist courier with a CD-ROM containing a 17-page document and other messages was Hassan Ghul, who confessed he was taking to Al Qaeda the Ansar document setting forth a strategy to start an Iraqi civil war, along with a plea for reinforcements.

The document, of course, is about the furthest thing from clear, or evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Safire's dishonesty on this subject is already such a matter of record, and so transparent, that it's not worth the effort of detailing it here. (Though there's some incidental pleasure in watching the old megalomaniac chide the CIA for "blowing off" his earlier groundbreaking reporting on the Saddam-bin Laden link. Yeah, the CIA and the rest of us on planet Earth.) It's this graf in the column that's the real kicker:

The Times reporter Dexter Filkins in Baghdad, backed up by Douglas Jehl in D.C., broke the story exclusively. Editors marked its significance by placing it on the front page above the fold. Although The Washington Post the next day buried it on Page 17 (and Newsweek may construe as bogus any Saddam-Osama connection) the messages' authenticity was best attested by the amazed U.S. official who told Reuters, "We couldn't make this up if we tried."

Things become clearer now. This story was supposed to move: it was supposed to gain back crucial ground in the Saddam-Osama insinuation that's been lost over the last few months, and Safire's handlers are in a snit that it hasn't taken. So they've wound him up and set him off on the op-ed page to peddle the story one last time.

And indeed if you read the WaPo version ("Insurgents Attempting to Ferment [sic] 'Civil War' in Iraq Sought Al Qaeda Help"), and even more Jim Krane's stalwart AP report ("Letter shows difficult task for al Qaeda"), what you notice is a parade of CPA and Administration flacks hawking the document story for all they're worth. Kimmitt, the U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Dan Senor, a CPA spokesman, right on up to Colin Powell and Scott McClellan, who trots out the document as support for the old "Iraq is the central front in the war on terrorism" wheeze.

Where are those flacks in the Times? They're nowhere to be found. That's because if the Times reported what they were saying, and that they were saying it to anyone they could manage to buttonhole, it'd be apparent that the document story isn't a pure result of enterprising journalism. It's the product of an Administration propaganda campaign. The "exclusive" here is merely technical—everybody and his brother gets the story, Filkins just gets bragging rights for being the only journo to actually clap eyeballs on the document—but apparently that's enough to completely shut the Times up about the actual provenance of, and official motives behind, the story. This is a form of structural deceit—the Times is lying to its readers by omission.

And the twice-repeated pairing of the story with genuine reporting on internal instability? Now it looks to me like a typical, cynical Times balancing act: never allow too much honesty or aggressiveness on the front page; make sure that if you run one story to piss 'em off you throw 'em a bone with the next.

Update: Billmon over at the Whiskey Bar has had a look at this story, too, and uncovers a decided fishy smell ...

posted by michael  10:09:43 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Outsourcing. I'm really beginning to think the Times should just contract out its Washington reporting to Knight-Ridder, whose writers actually seem to remember what journalism is supposed to look like. (They're the only members of the corps who come in for praise in Michael Massing's ass-kicker of a piece in the NYRB on pre-war intel reporting.) Joseph Galloway can remember back a whole year (unlike Neil Lewis of the Times, who can't remember to three weeks ago), to when Paul Wolfowitz "predicted that securing postwar Iraq would be an easier job than the United States and its allies faced in Bosnia or Afghanistan ... [since] there's no ethnic tension in Iraq." Galloway depicts a Defense Department "running for cover" from the storm their own heedlessness has brought down:

"Iraq is now a contaminated environment and Rumsfeld and his people want out," said one senior administration official. "They can't wait for July 1 when the CPA (Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority) turns into the U.S. Embassy and the whole mess they have made becomes Colin Powell's."

Galloway's article is chock-full-o-nuts, and it's a cinch you won't see anything like it in the Times. But at least they're better informed now in Fort Wayne. Thanks to Atrios for the link.


posted by michael  9:39:32 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Meet Adam Nagourney, new voice of the Democratic Establishment. Certainly in Adam Nagourney's own self-understanding, as it would seem. Having firmed up the Times' commitment to John Kerry yesterday, today Nagourney issues A1 marching orders to the laggards ("Southern States Are Set to Shake Democratic Race"):

The voting [in Tennessee] and in Virginia could help to shake out the race, Democrats said. The chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party, Randall A. Button, said Monday that General Clark, who is from neighboring Arkansas, and Mr. Edwards, who is from neighboring North Carolina, should quit if they could not beat Mr. Kerry on their home turf, an outcome some polls released Monday suggested.

"They are both Southerners that have a message that resonates with Southerners," Mr. Button said. If they lose, he said, "it's gotten down to this: Let's move ahead to our objective, and our objective is unseating George W. Bush."

A senior national Democratic Party official made the same argument, saying that General Clark and Mr. Edwards would have difficulty raising money to push on should they lose to Mr. Kerry in the South. "The voters will have spoken: Let's get on with it," this official said.

A case in which reporting the thing is equivalent to requiring it. Typically and tellingly, Nagourney slips in the moralizing language when he addresses the possibility that his advice won't be heeded: "Mr. Edwards and his aides rejected admonitions [emphasis mine] from some Democrats that he step aside if he loses."

Imagine the perversity! Sen. Edwards, don't you realize you've been admonished? You don't want Nagourney putting you on report, do you?

posted by michael  5:21:51 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Scales, falling ... It appears that A1 has finally noticed that there were some shenanigans going on in the outing of Joseph Wilson's wife as a CIA agent ("Top Bush Aide Is Questioned in C.I.A. Leak"):

President Bush's press secretary and a former White House press aide testified on Friday to a federal grand jury investigating who improperly disclosed the identity of a C.I.A. officer, the press secretary and a lawyer for the aide said on Monday.

The appearances of the press secretary, Scott McClellan, and the press aide, Adam Levine, reflected what lawyers in the case said was the quickening pace of a criminal inquiry in which a special prosecutor is examining conversations between journalists and the White House.

As Josh Marshall notes, "it's sort of astonishing that this story has still received so relatively little attention given that ... mutliple White House appointees have been told they are 'subjects' of a criminal inquiry." Or it would be astonishing, except that the wall of silence thrown up jointly by the Times and the WaPo on this has discouraged most other mainstream news organizations from mounting an aggressive pursuit on their own initiative. But hey, better late to the party than never arrived, yes?

Meanwhile, look what turns up today on A17 ("Democrats Suggest Inquiry Points to Wider Spying by G.O.P."):

Senate Democrats who were briefed Monday about an investigation into how Democratic strategy memorandums dealing with judicial nominations ended up in the hands of Republican staff members said they now believed the problem was far more extensive than previously thought.

Some of the internal memorandums appear to have been used to prepare one or more of President Bush's appeals court nominees to answer specific questions from Democratic senators during their Judiciary Committee hearings, Democrats said Monday.

Funny. Is the Neil A. Lewis who wrote today's article the same Neil A. Lewis who told us, not three weeks ago, that the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms was about to end his investigation, and strongly implied that he could barely stifle a yawn from the triviality of the whole thing? Nothing said today in correction of the earlier piece, of course, which in my reading was positioned (cf. above, re: wall of silence) to shut the lid on an aggressive Boston Globe article on the investigation that had appeared a day earlier. In January, Lewis quoted Republican staffer Manuel Miranda (quoted him generously and without rebuttal), who's emerging as the fall guy for this thing, assuring us that "There was no systematic surveillance, no hacking, no stealing and no violation of any Senate rules." Today's report notes that William Pickle, the Senate investigator, "said the breach in security was the result of a person 'hacking' [love the scare quotes there], or working to gain entry into the Democrats' files."

Neil Lewis apparently has some sort of memory impairment, otherwise he'd certainly have realized that between January and now he'd caught Mr. Miranda in a bald lie—instead of just quoting the man's latest round of evasions. After all, that's the kind of thing reporters are generally keen on discovering, isn't it? Glad I could be here to lend him a hand.

posted by michael  4:08:46 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

An early clue to the new direction. I'll say this about Adam Nagourney's A1 article today: the fact of this piece, let alone its placement (running right alongside the A1 column devoted to Shrub's "Meet the Press" farrago of evasions interview), may say something of longer-range importance about how the Times intends to handle the 2004 election. In fact, the more I think about it the more remarkable it seems. I can't recall seeing the paper make anything like this nice to the Democrats at anything like this length, in recent memory or in my memory of 2000: Nagourney lets everybody from Terry McAuliffe to Joe Trippi talk about how much energy there is in the party and how much they like their prospects now that the Dems, against all odds, are coalescing early around the Kerry candidacy. (OK, Trippi doesn't quite say that, but he doesn't quite not, either.) There's not a Republican within hailing distance, nobody at all to rain on the parade.

I'll leave aside Nagourney's evident desire, as signaled in his choice of quote to cap the piece ("The Democrats can show a sign of strength by coalescing around Kerry," says Joe Liberman's pollster), that the coalescing reach its appointed conclusion. (I've noted Nagourney's committment to what I call normative journalism before.) What grabs my attention are these two-plus paragraphs near the end of the article:

Over the past three weeks, at the very time that Democrats were voting in caucuses and primaries, a series of polls, including one released Sunday by Time magazine, showed Mr. Bush as vulnerable to defeat, and Mr. Kerry as being the Democrat best positioned to beat him.

In an election that is so much about unseating Mr. Bush, those kinds of high-profile reports, including magazine cover stories, may have done more for Mr. Kerry than any speech he gave or advertisement he ran, Democrats said.

And an environment where Democrats seem to have a real chance of winning the White House has complicated the task for Mr. Kerry's opponents, who in normal times would want to act aggressively to knock him down.

In an election that is so much about unseating Mr. Bush. I'm flabbergasted by this. Over the last few weeks the press has determined (probably correctly, not that the demands of story require it to be correct) that Democratic voters are more interested in beating Bush in November than in who exactly gets to administer the beating. But Nagourney's language is absolute: the election itself is about whether or not Bush will be unseated. It's as if the electability meme that brought Kerry forward against Dean is mutating before our eyes (and Adam Nagourney is nothing if not an efficient deliverer of the latest conventional wisdom), and the imputation of weakness on the other side of that meme is beginning to attach to Dubya. Bush has been having a rough enough time lately, but if this is what's happening to the CW, he's in for a rougher still: the press is merciless once it gets the stench of failure in its nostrils. If the election turns into a referendum on whether Bush is worthy of being retained—I don't say it's a race he can't win, but certainly it's a race whose narrative is structured against him.

[As support for my idea here: don't by any means miss the implication of Sunday's extraordinarily respectful treatment of Kerry's Senate career by David E. Rosenbaum and Robin Toner ("In Senate, Kerry Focused on Inquiries, Not Bills"). A day after GW announces a patched-up, unindependent "independent investigative panel" intended to whitewash so-called intelligence failures in the run-up to the Iraq war, the Times produces a gilt-edged treatment of Kerry as—yes—the Great Investigator of the U.S. Senate.]

I'm sure there's something of a honeymoon effect here: you get the impression that the Times is just-so-grateful right now that the Dean bullet has been successfully dodged, not to mention that one of its own Establishment types is comfortably ensconced as the Dem front-runner. But we shouldn't underestimate prospects for the long term in the implicit cravenness of the Nagourney quote: as long as it looks like Kerry could win this thing, says the Times, we're gonna play it respectful.

posted by michael  8:10:14 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Left hand, meet right. An interesting schizoid quality to A1 today. The left three columns above the fold (under a photo of Prince Charles[!] in military fatigues arriving in Basra) are devoted to two stories from Iraq: an evidently thorough, reasonably tough-minded account ("Iraqi Militias Resisting U.S. Pressure to Disband") by Edward Wong of the prospect of what amounts to creeping warlordism in Iraq, under the pressure of BushCo's accelerated schedule for sovereignty transfer; and a striking if somewhat puzzling article by Dexter Filkins ("U.S. Says Files Seek Qaeda Aid in Iraq Conflict") on a recently recovered document, alleged to have been written by an Al Qaeda operative in Iraq, advocating internal destablization through a program of terror attacks on the Shiite majority. Take the two pieces together (particularly following Saturday's account of the assassination program targeting Iraq's professional elite) and it looks very much like the Times is betting on violent internal struggle as the dominating story out of Iraq in the next several months, and is committed to pursuing it. I suspect they're making a good bet—and given how plausibly an uncomfortable foreign story like this could get swamped or ignored, when its scale alone makes it difficult to manage, I'm glad it looks like the commitment is there.

And down the right-hand two columns, absolutely the dullest, rote-est examples of rote apparatchik writing the Times can dredge up (and that's saying something). Adam Nagourney retails a few inches' worth of establishment Democratic spin about how great it is that we're all lining up behind John Kerry ("Democrats See Unified Party for November"), and Richard W. Stevenson dutifully pretends that the Boy Emperor gave a coherent account of himself and his tenure in office in yesterday's "Meet the Press" thang ("Bush Offers Defense on Iraq and Economy in Interview"). I don't have the energy or the heart to pick through Stevenson's treatment of whatever the hell it was Shrub and Pumpkinhead were doing as they sat within footsie distance of each other (could the setup have been more awkward?)—in a way I feel for him; he drew the worst assignment of the day and produced exactly the colorless and constricted and convictionless piece his editors undoubtedly mandated.

It's the bigger picture mapped by today's front page that seems significant to me. This is the current state of our great national paper: on the foreign-war side, intellectual energy, a sense of responsibility, an intimation that the paper has found a story of real moment and will invest its prestige and resources in developing it. And on the domestic-political side: dry rot. Caution and conformity. The System is good, the System gives us all that we need, we are one with the System, God save the System.

Honestly, if the Times sacked its entire 2004 election lineup, would you miss any of them?

posted by michael  6:33:47 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Not quite what I thought. Setting the record straight: It appeared to me yesterday that Douglas Jehl had broken a story of considerable importance on the subject of pre-war WMD intelligence, and that the Times had placed it in such a way as to downplay its significance. The significance of the story isn't in doubt, and is worth emphasizing: although it's been known for some time that defector-based intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons program was, to put it charitably, faulty (to put it uncharitably, a con job)—a story of Jehl's written last September revealed that the Defense Intelligence Agency's internal review had pretty thoroughly trashed the intel—the new story offers the first instance of a contemporaneous debunking of defector intelligence (related specifically to the allegation that Iraq possessed mobile bio weapons labs) during the runup to war, and shows further that the DIA assessment was overlooked or ignored higher up the intelligence chain. Nor do I doubt about the Times editors gave the story much shorter shrift than it deserves.

Jehl didn't break the story, though. A report written by Jonathan S. Landay in the Philadelphia Inquirer ("Key source on Iraqi bioweapons was deemed dubious, agencies say") is datelined Friday, the same day as Jehl's piece, and covers exactly the same ground. (It may have been posted on the Inquirer site before the Times published Jehl's article; it's a little hard to tell.) Placing the two pieces side by side makes it apparent that they're not the result not of reportorial initiative but of a bureaucratic maneuver. The occasion was George Tenet's speech Thursday on pre-war intelligence at Georgetown, and the leak about the DIA "fabrication notification" was coordinated to amplify on a point that Tenet merely alluded to. Jehl and Landay both quote the relevant text in Tenet's speech ("We recently discovered that relevant analysts ... missed a notice that identified a source we had cited as providing information that, in some cases was unreliable, and in other cases, was fabricated"), but where Landay serves it up straight ("CIA Director George Tenet referred to the issue in his Georgetown speech yesterday"), Jehl obfuscates the occasion:

In his speech at Georgetown University on Thursday, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, provided the first hint that the prewar intelligence on Iraq had been tainted by evidence previously identified as unreliable.

Apparently alluding to the Iraqi military defector, Mr. Tenet said ..., [etc.]

The soft-pedalling here seems of a piece with Jehl's apparent acceptance of the notion that the failure of the DIA assessment to propagate through the intelligence process was simply the result of "mistakes"—a claim incidentally that appears nowhere in Landay's story.

Jehl very usefully gets the history of the bioweapons claim (and the failure of the weapons to materialize) into his article, where Landay ignores it, but Landay is considerably more honest about the bureaucratic context for the story. He manages, for instance, to say-without-saying that this is a CIA-provided leak when he notes that the issue of the DIA assessment "was among a number of problems uncovered by a Tenet-ordered internal CIA review of Iraq intelligence led by Richard Kerr, a former deputy agency director." Jehl seems to be actively trying to cover the institutional tracks. And Landay's piece handily illustrates the difference I talked about earlier between a just-doing-business assumption of source anonymity and an honorable accounting for it. Unlike Jehl, Landay goes to the (relatively small) trouble of explicitly justifying the anonymous attribution in his piece and of providing the necessary caveats about his sources:

The charge that Iraq had mobile biological-warfare research laboratories came solely from a defector provided to U.S. intelligence officials by Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi, said senior U.S. officials, revealing the oversight for the first time yesterday. The officials, some of whom are critics of Chalabi, spoke on the condition of anonymity because the intelligence remains classified.

That wasn't so hard, was it?

posted by michael  3:42:59 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

NY Review of Books has a comprehensive critique of the shameful job of reporting and analyzing WMD intelligence the mainstream press did in the runup to the Iraq war, with considerable focus on the Times and its reporter Judith Miller, by far the worst of the bunch—certainly the most arrantly, and arrogantly, uninterested in the real requirements of her job. Try this on for size:

Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, "my job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal." Many journalists would disagree with this; instead, they would consider offering an independent evaluation of official claims one of their chief responsibilities.

Necessary reading. Thanks to Atrios for the link.


posted by michael  4:00:09 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

A few begged questions. Hmmm ... I praised Times reporting in my last post, and now I'm starting to get all itchy ...

By way of scratching that itch, here are three begged questions in each of the articles I commended, in ascending order of beggedness:

• Jeffrey Gettleman ("Assassinations Tear Into Iraq's Educated Class") can find only a single American official willing to comment for the record, Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, identified as "a spokesman for the occupation forces." He says about what you'd expect a military flack to say, "the guerillas are waging war on Iraq's fledgling institutions and progress itself," and that old standby, "foreign terrorists may be behind the attacks." I profess myself unconvinced that foreign terrorists are likely to have either the ground-level intelligence or the compelling motivation to target the Iraqi professional class for destruction. I'd like to have seen Gettleman challenge Kimmitt a little on this boilerplate, either that or exclude it from the story altogether. More important, given that Kimmitt acknowledges that the assassination program "works against everything we're trying to do here," why does Gettleman let it pass when he later reports Kimmitt saying that the American military isn't involved in investigating the crimes? Is this really something that should be left exclusively to the Iraqi police, such as they are?
• Douglas Jehl ("Agency Alert About Iraqi Not Heeded, Officials Say") says that an Iraqi military defector's bogus claims about mobile weapons labs "were mistakenly included" in the October 2002 NIE, and quotes his sources describing it "as a mistake" that the defector "was among four sources cited" by Colin Powell in his U.N. Security Council presentation last February. Jehl's language makes it seem that he accepts the "mistake" claim, but how are he and his sources in a position to affirm this? I find it difficult to believe that the "fabrication notification" issued by the DIA on the defector was simply, innocently overlooked by parties (I'm glancing in your undisclosed direction, Dick Cheney) that were promoting both the INC and the most affirmative possible treatment of Iraq WMD intelligence.
• David E. Sanger ("Administration's Message on Iraq Now Strikes Discordant Notes") critiques the fact that Bush's intelligence panel includes only one member with actual technical knowledge of intelligence-gathering, and finds the panel's makeup "in sharp contract to the last major investigative panel that the administration appointed," the panel on the Columbia disaster, which included "specialists on composites and propulsion, organizational dynamics and safety, along with experts who spend their lives thinking about the future of the space program." Good enough. But if Sanger is going to gesture toward the politics of composing the intelligence whitewash panel, why does he not address the career of its Republican co-chair, Laurence Silberman? Actually this isn't a begged question so much as a completely ignored question, not just by Sanger but by the entire mainstream media. In case you're unaware of it, Silberman is a radical right-wing pit bull who masquerades for fun and profit as a Federal judge, and David Neiwert of the invaluable Orcinus is precisely on target when he says that the appointment of Silberman to the intelligence "investigation" is even more egregious than Bush's attempt at appointing Henry Kissinger to head the 9/11 commission. The bloggers have got Silberman down cold; why can't the Times with all its resources do the job?

posted by michael  2:55:44 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Printed to fit? Give the Times some love: today's A section offers the strongest work I've seen assembled at one time in the paper in a long while, certainly since I started this blog. Let's go to the highlights:

• A sobering report on A1 by Jeffrey Gettleman that discusses an apparent program of assassinations in Iraq targeting the educated, professional elite—the backbone, in other words, necessary to the development of any genuine civil society in the country. "Hundreds of intellectuals and mid-level administrators ... have been assassinated since May in a widening campaign against Iraq's professional class."
• An A6 piece by Douglas Jehl ("Agency Alert About Iraqi Not Heeded, Officials Say") that offers details about the gulling of U.S. intelligence by an Iraqi defector, whose false claims about mobile biological weapons labs made it into the National Intelligence Estimate and ultimately into Colin Powell's big pre-war presentation to the U.N. Security Council. "A classified 'fabrication notification' about the defector, a former Iraqi major, was issued by the D.I.A [Defense Intelligence Agency] to other American intelligence agencies in May 2002, but it was then repeatedly overlooked, three senior intelligence officials said. ... Intelligence officers from the D.I.A. ... concluded [the defector] had no firsthand information and might have been coached by the Iraqi National Congress ..."
• A sharp and genuinely analytic piece of news analysis by David E. Sanger ("Administration's Message on Iraq Now Strikes Discordant Notes") on A6 that comes uncomfortably close to honesty in an Executive Moment. This is as much reporting as it is analysis, in fact, and offers context that might well have been included in Douglas Jehl's front-page news piece about the Bush intelligence whitewash panel and wasn't. "People close to Mr. Bush say he has been frustrated that Mr. Kay's assessment rekindled all the arguments that dominated the news over the summer ... Mr. Bush certainly was in no mood Friday to entertain many questions on the issue of intelligence. He announced the commission's formation in a five-minute statement. He barely introduced its co-chairmen, former Senator Charles S. Robb of Virginia and Laurence H. Silberman, a senior federal appeals judge in Washington. He left the room without taking questions. More to the point, Mr. Bush never explained whether the charter of the commission would extend beyond intelligence gathering to the politically crucial question of how the White House had used the intelligence it received."

And for those keeping track at home, the first two items are national stories actually broken by Times reporters, a thing that as far as I can tell happens all too rarely these days.

But see, here's the deal. I can understand that Jehl's defector piece doesn't make it onto A1—what the story points to, that phony intelligence was fed by the INC to willing clients within the Bush war party, isn't much of a surprise, though I've never seen it documented to this degree before. And it's reasonable to want to set some limit on front-page coverage having to do with Iraq, and if it's a competition between Gettleman's assassination story and Jehl's report, I'd have gone with Gettleman too.

But the Jehl piece isn't an Iraq story, it's a Washington story about Iraq-war intelligence: and on a day when an inquiry into that intelligence is the lead item, why does the defector story wind up on A6, with a brace of articles datelined in or near Iraq, and not on A8, devoted to coverage of the intelligence panel, where it would seem to belong? Maybe that looks like nitpicking. But notice as well that, in its placement of Sanger's article, the Times has broken with its usual practice, in the case of a major Presidential announcement, of locating an analysis piece on A1 in direct apposition to the straight-news report. In the slot where you'd expect Sanger's article to have gone appears instead—bizarrely—a tepid rehash of John Kerry's 1996 Senate campaign against William Weld. (The author, Kate Zernike, gambits for relevance by saying that "how John Kerry bounced back from being declared dead in 1996 provides valuable insights into him as a campaigner," but you can tell from the article her heart's not really in it.)

To me, the Kerry piece is the giveaway. I can only come to the conclusion that, on a day when their reporters aren't pulling enough punches, the Times editors'll make up for it by pulling a few of their own. The Dear Leader and his Great Crusade may be hurting a bit right now, but please, let's do what we can to minimize the damage, OK?

posted by michael  1:30:39 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Nobody here but us chickens. Commenter mf had a problem with my Wednesday post about Steven R. Weisman's all-anonymous article on prospects for U.N. involvement in the Iraq sovereignty handoff:

I don't get it. Isn't it the case that the level of anonymity of the source is determined by the source? I.e., that Weisman doesn't reveal because he cannot? How can we fault him for that?

I'd have responded in the comments, but the point seems important enough to be made here, especially since I may not have communicated it sufficiently well in the previous post. It's not the case that I'm faulting Weisman simply for using anonymous sources. My gripe is with his article's virtually exclusive reliance on anonymous sources, and even more with Weisman's blanket unwillingness to provide any middle ground of identifying context. A skilled journalist ought to be able to give effective cover to his sources while at the same time allowing his reader some measure of insight into what their institutional or policy allegiances might be.

Yes, a source can require anonymity, but that doesn't mean that a reporter has to accept the deal willy-nilly. The use of anonymity is a choice, and it imposes a cost. The more a story tips toward anonymous sourcing, and the more complete the anonymity afforded, the more difficult it is for readers to judge the reliability and worth of the information the story offers, the more readers have to presume on the mere integrity of the writer. Fully anonymous attribution isn't something that should get handed out like free passes to the Tilt-a-Whirl. Anonymity justifies its cost when it's the only way for a reporter to secure information that's required to advance a story, and when the person providing the information would suffer some sort of harm from being identified.

A reporter owes his readers at least some minimal justification for a reliance on anonymous sources. Look again at the article in question, and ask yourself about the quality of the information that emerges from behind Weisman's "some officials" scrim. Is it, in fact, valuable enough for him to have offered complete anonymity in exchange? Is there any reason even to believe that these sources have a material need for the cloak of invisibility? No, and no. Like most of the official Washington press corps, Weisman distributes anonymity as a favor, as a calling card, letting his sources play their behind-the-scenes games on the front page, and playing the game right along with them. If the interests of his readers aren't served in the transaction, well, they're not in the game, are they, so why should Weisman care?

This isn't anonymous sourcing to further the public's right to know. This is anonymous sourcing as a courtier's practice, and it's corrupt.

posted by michael  11:09:14 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Elbow room. Reporting on SecDef Rumsfeld's testimony to Congress yesterday (and on the prospect of George Tenet's speech scheduled at Georgetown today), Douglas Jehl and Eric Schmitt ("Rumsfeld and Tenet Defending Assessments of Iraqi Weapons") want to make sure they give Big Don Vader all the space he needs so he can really stretch out and do that voodoo he do. In the ten grafs the piece devotes to that testimony, seven are offered for the Don's convenience in telling us his latest version of the known knowns, the known unknowns, and the unknown knowns, or whatever. You've heard it all before, no need for me to summarize it here.

Apparently Rummy "faced sharp questions from Democrats" about manipulation of pre-war intelligence, but apparently the questioning wasn't of so much consequence. After all, this is as much attention as Jehl and Schmitt think it warrants:

"The debacle cannot all be blamed on the intelligence community," said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts. "Key policy makers made crystal clear the results they wanted from the intelligence community."

Mr. Rumsfeld told Mr. Kennedy that his assertions were baseless. "You've twice or thrice mentioned manipulation," Mr. Rumsfeld said. "I haven't heard of it, I haven't seen any of it, except in the comments you've made."

Ouch! Guess Rumsfeld got the better of that one, huh?

Of course, when you look at the transcript provided by the WaPo, you see that quite a distance separates what Kennedy's quoted as saying, which comes early in his prepared remarks, from what Rumsfeld says later in his exchange with Kennedy, after he's spent a bit of time trying to tap-dance away from what looks like some aggressive questioning. Which is not to suggest that Jehl and Schmitt are engaged in misrepresenting the confrontation, exactly, but they do seem to have decided to spice it up just a bit for the home audience.

And if, in the process, they rip the substance out of it and out of Kennedy's position? Well, we all know about collateral damage. The actual point Kennedy makes in his remarks, little attested in the latest flap over the Iraq intelligence and completely glossed over here, is that "many in the intelligence community were right," that in the atmosphere of certainty required by the Rumsfeld-Cheney cabal (my phrasing, not Kennedy's) "warnings from the intelligence community [of the unreliability of the most affirmative intelligence] ...were not noted or [were] glossed over." What Kennedy grills Rumsfeld about, in fact, isn't simply "manipulation" of intelligence but the possibility that dissent within the intelligence community was suppressed, specifically that Rumsfeld failed in his responsibility to report that dissent to Congress.

Since I wasn't reading the transcript for the drama, what caught my eye was this Rumsfeldian jaw-dropper:

I never have gone around the intelligence community. The intelligence community doesn't always agree, and you have hundreds of people and they have footnotes and they have different opinions, and you develop a consensus.

Sometimes I really don't know if I inhabit the same planet that Times reporters do. Because in my world, Don Rumsfeld is the guy who created his own personal intelligence analysis shop in the runup to war for the sole and exact purpose of going around the (established) intelligence community and subverting its consensus! But that mustn't have happened on planet Jehl/Schmitt, because if it did how the hell does this flat-out contradiction not rate even a mention? Or do Jehl and Schmitt just think that context is for suckers?

Update (2/06): Looks like Sidney Blumenthal would agree with the point Kennedy was making. Why is Blumenthal's piece appearing in a UK paper and not here?
posted by michael  7:36:22 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Department of Huh? I need to add some kind of WTF count to the blog. There's not a week that goes by that A1 doesn't flat mystify me with at least one story whose very existence, never mind its being allocated front-page real estate, is impossible to account for. (My impression—completely unsupported by research and so probably unfair—is that these WTF moments have become much more frequent during the Bill Keller regime.) Today in the Times, the letters W, T, and F are brought to you by Amy Harmon ("Geeks Put Clueless on Notice: Learn or Log Off"), who brings us the shattering news that technically adept computer users (who sometimes go by the term "computer geeks") get impatient with less technically adept users, who are often intimidated by the complexity of personal computer software.

No, I'm not kidding, that's the story. The whole thing. It's full of gems of social observation like this:

For years, many self-described computer geeks seemed eager to usher outsiders onto their electronic frontier. Everyone, it seemed, had a friend or family member in the geek elite who could be summoned—often frequently—in times of computer crisis.

But as those same friends and family members are called upon again and again to save the computer incompetents from themselves, the geeks' patience is growing thin. As it does, a new kind of digital divide is opening up between populations of computer users who must coexist in the same digital world.  ...

Many of the computationally confused say they suffer from genuine intimidation and even panic over how to handle the mysterious machines they have come to rely on for so much of daily life

A new kind of digital divide? Mysterious machines? Harmon fakes up a news peg for the story by calling on the recent MyDoom outbreak, but this piece of cheese was moldy back in 1988. Aside from the typing (or the getting of the previously typed thing from the file cabinet), all the work Harmon put into this story was the effort of phoning around for illustrative quotes from random computer users—friends of yours, Amy?

We're supposed to believe that Harmon's noticed a trend, I guess, because of this:

Some in the technocamp imagine requiring a license to operate a computer, just like the one required to drive a car. Others are calling for a punishment that fits a careless crime. People who click on virus attachments, for instance, could be cut off by their Internet service providers until they proved that their machines had been disinfected.

Ah, the "some are saying" maneuver, a favorite of I-can't-be-bothered journalists everywhere. Really, Amy? Who, exactly, is suggesting that people be licensed to drive computers, or cut off by their ISPs after they succumb to virus attacks? Because I sure as hell haven't seen such proposals being floated, and it's not like you actually source anybody for them. Are you discussing something real at all, or just making shit up?

It's not just the intellectual laziness on display here that bothers me. What's really sad is the implication that the Times editors are themselves so clueless about technology issues (not to mention standards of argument) that they actually thought there was something—anything—of substance in this piece.

posted by michael  5:54:36 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

It's fine, just run it through the de-informationizer for us. Some people attached somehow to the government think some things about political transition in Iraq, but if Steven R. Weisman told you any more ("Bush Urges U.N. to Help Fix Iraqi Clash on Rule") he'd probably have to kill you.

President Bush pressed Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary general, on Tuesday to have his aides mediate among quarreling factions in Iraq and forge a consensus behind a plan that would allow the transfer of sovereignty to a government in Baghdad by June 30, administration officials said.

They said that without rapid progress on the political issues, the White House might agree to postpone Iraqi self-rule, but several officials said such a step would be a "last resort."

"Administration officials said," and they keep on saying, at exactly that level of attribution, throughout the entire article.

• Mr. Annan has been given a dozen options for the transfer of sovereignty, the officials said ...
• "We are trying to put this issue in Kofi Annan's lap and let him run with it," one official said.
• Officials said Mr. Annan would have wide latitude to present Washington with a plan for Iraq's future governance ...
• But other officials warned that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld were still likely to oppose giving the United Nations virtual supervisory control over the political future of Iraq
• [T]op American officials say the situation pulls the secretary general in several directions.
• Some administration officials said Mr. Bremer was relieved ...
• But some officials say there is also fear at the Defense Department that a sweeping victory by Shiites will deepen the problems American forces have had ...
• The administration official said the hope was ...
• "There are more than a dozen different possibilities that have been floated at one time or another," an administration official said.

And there you go. Except for one unnamed "European diplomat familiar with the negotiations" and a former CIA Middle Eastern specialist and American Enterprise Institute fellow (other than Kofi Annan, the sole named source in the piece), the entire information content of the article is based on stringing together quotes and paraphrases from anonymous "administration officials."

Just whose purposes does this level of anonymity serve? It sure as hell isn't the reader's. Is there any actual need for everything to be hidden behind this scrim, or is it a mere product of reflex? Do these sources have any unexpressed agendas, are they trying to push the story in any particular direction, are they players in the current internal policy struggle? (Since I gather from the article, dimly, that there is some internal struggle or at least debate going on about the U.N.-takeover policy.) Who lines up where in the struggle? I'm guessing that Steven Weisman knows—naive of me, though, to think that it's his job to report what he knows. It's OK, Steven, I'm good so long as I can tell that you're in the loop ...

posted by michael  3:10:09 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Is it my imagination, or have I been detecting a shift in the way the Times treats the Executive Moment lately? David M. Sanger on the Kay WMD revelations last week, and today Richard W. Stevenson on the new BushCo federal budget ("Bush, in Budget, Seeks Increases Tied to Security"). Far be it from me to praise Stevenson (or Sanger) for incisive reporting, or award them style points—and by the adequacy test Brad DeLong offers, reacting to budget coverage in today's Washington Post, Stevenson isn't much of an improvement over his WaPo counterpart. But in apparatchik reporting like this, nuance is everything. The shift I mean is actually embodied, in my print edition, in the difference between one of the secondary headlines and the first graf of the piece itself. The subhead labels the budget "A Plan to Reduce Deficit," and here's the graf:

President Bush submitted a $2.4 trillion budget on Monday that would substantially increase spending next year for national security and give the administration a claim to reducing the deficit but would also cut or strictly limit money for most domestic programs.

Give the administration a claim. By the rigid laws of deference, which prescribe that the first few paragraphs of an article about an Executive initiative must report the Executive's own self-assessment of said initiative, this is practically a thunderclap. The subhead sees "a plan," but skepticism has infected the first graf, which while it follows the letter of the law still manages to drip with cynicism.

And the piece goes on in that vein. Democratic criticism is mentioned high in the article, third graf, and is offered again at several other points, including a quote from John Kerry (as the nominee-presumptive). Stevenson notes the White House's failure to "provide figures on what would happen to the deficit in the years beyond the next half-decade," after the now-permanent tax cuts start their shredding action. He mentions as well how "deficit reduction" is massaged by the omission of certain inconvenient spending categories, like money for the occupation of Iraq and for the Afghanistan adventure. He has the audacity—a real stretch in this kind of piece—to call the budget "a bit of an oddity" for an election-year plan.

And then there's the little matter of the photo: Josh Bolten, the Budget Director, is quoted in the article (after the jump, i.e. not directly pointing a contrast with the pic) as saying "the numbers are highly realistic," but this really doesn't look like a guy who's about to strike up the band for the Dear Leader, does it? More like Bolten's got his "Hey, I just stand up here and say the stupid shit they make me say" face on. I can't think the choice isn't deliberate on the part of the Times, another scarcely concealed expression of skepticism. [I love the finger placement, by the way. I think he's checking to see if his implant's still in place—the one they gave him when he signed on so his head shouldn't explode from defending the completely fucking indefensible.]

posted by michael  4:25:33 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Diversionary tactics. Katharine Seelye don't need no stinkin' facts, not where the Presidential campaign is concerned. In her overview piece on Monday, she leads with and devotes her first ten grafs to the challenge Terry McAuliffe issued on Sunday's "This Week" against Dubya's so-called military service record. (This despite the fact that McAuliffe, last time I looked, was not himself a candidate for the Democratic nomination, and that none of the actual candidates appears to have discussed the issue this last week.*) Seelye has a practiced hand in these sorts of maneuvers, and you kind of have to admire her skill in making an issue disappear while seeming to foreground it. Here's what you'd "know" about the Bush-AWOL issue if you relied on Kit for your information:

• The issue of Bush's absence during his Air National Guard service "arose briefly at the end of the last presidential election."
• McAuliffe, "revisiting" the issue now, claims Bush was "AWOL," that he "never served in our military in our country," that "he didn't show up when he should have showed up." Ed Gillespie, his Republican counterpart, claims the accusation has "no basis in fact" and that making it as McAuliffe did "on national television ... is despicable."
• The AWOL issue has emerged this time around as a result of Michael Moore calling Bush a "deserter" at a Clark rally last month.

And that's it! Since Seelye herself adduces not even the most elementary facts about the AWOL charge, how can Ed Gillespie's reaction seem anything but reasonable? The charge made a brief appearance late in the 2000 campaign, and it's been revived by that noted rabble-rouser Moore, and we know how much his opinion is worth—never mind that the "brief" appearance in 2000 was confined to those obscure rags, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post and the New York Times (see this good backgrounder at The Daily Howler), or that even the most cursory look would reveal that the charge can hardly be said to have re-emerged because it never went away in the first place, having been extensively documented and debated on the Web for the last three years.

Actually, we're not quite done yet. The real art of Seelye's piece is in the framing. We might wonder, why is McAuliffe "revisiting" this bit of 2000-era trivia? Seelye starts her piece by calling Terry Mac's statement "a signal of the ferocious campaign ahead once the Democrats finish with one another," and rounds back on that assertion as she concludes the discussion:

Mr. McAuliffe's attack on Mr. Bush seemed partly pre-emptive, suggesting that the Democrats would swing back hard if the Republicans tried to portray Mr. Kerry, decorated for his service in Vietnam, as weak on national security because in his Senate career he has voted against increasing the Pentagon budget.

It might also have been a diversionary tactic by Mr. McAuliffe, who has watched with dismay as the Democratic candidates deliver increasingly harsh blows at one another. If that was the case, it failed.

Howard Dean continued to blast Mr. Kerry on Sunday, saying Mr. Kerry had taken more money from lobbyists than any other senator in the last 15 years.

See, it's all just tactics. The charge itself is unimportant: the crucial datum, as any insider would know, is how it's going to be used. And why bother with facts when, like Kit, you're gifted with second sight? For she has seen the dismay in McAuliffe's soul, and with her mystic discernment (nothing else is offered to explain it) has divined the real purpose behind his outburst: he wants his beloved Democrats to stop fighting with each other already! (I guess it couldn't be as simple as that McAuliffe thinks the issue actually deserves some scrutiny, could it, Kit?) And then she hits you with the pathos: it didn't work; there's that nasty old Howard Dean "blasting" again, just like his angry self.

And without missing a step we're back in that normative territory so beloved of the Times political pack, where it's all about whether or not the candidates are willing to behave themselves. Was there any substance in that AWOL thing? The way Kit Seelye writes, if you blink you missed it.

Update: I missed this campaign roundup from the Boston Globe, which notes Max Cleland addressing the AWOL charge at a Kerry event—a report that actually manages, in the space of a mere half sentence, to allude to the substance of the accusation. Kit Seelye, of course, as a Times correspondent, has more important things to worry about. Those tea leaves don't just read themselves, after all.

posted by michael  11:00:17 AM  
tell me about it []  

 

Poison-pill phrases. Josh Marshall is right about the phrase "weapons of mass destruction":

All WMD are not created equal. Indeed, the catch-all phrase ‘weapons of mass destruction’ obscures much more than it clarifies. It groups together things like mustard gas, which is really a battlefield weapon, with nuclear weapons, which really are weapons of mass destruction.

"Weapons of mass destruction" is a phrase that emphasizes the viral aspect of memes: working in the guise of a neutral term of policy analysis is a kind of destructive RNA. Accept "WMD" as a term of art, and you weaken your ability to make the actually analytic distinctions on which a genuinely thoughtful and critical consideration of war policy depends. Josh falls into the trap even while exposing it: he's forced into an awkward attempt to distinguish "real" WMD from battlefield weapons, and the difference doesn't quite take—nukes, after all, can have a battlefield use, and a "not really WMD" weapon like mustard gas can certainly inflict mass death. Abandon the poison-pill term, though, and it's easy enough to nail it down: we condone mass death when armies inflict it on each other, but not (with a sorry history of exceptions) when states inflict it on civilian populations. What "weapons of mass destruction" obscures is that it's the character of the "mass" of people affected by the weaponry that determines whether or not we worry.

"Special interests" is another poison-pill term that should have been banished long since from Democratic rhetoric. It has an honorable Progressive history: in the turn-of-the-20th-century agitation against the trusts, the term "the interests" was synonymous with "big capital." Now, though "special interests" has so lost its context that it's just an invitation for stupid Republican shills like Robin Toner in yesterday's Week in Review ("Embracing the Common Man in a Time of Recovery") to play gotcha:

Senator John Kerry has taken to warning "the special interests who now call the White House their home: We're coming, you're going and don't let the door hit you on the way out!" Gen. Wesley K. Clark argues, "We need a leadership that puts the national interest above special interests." And Howard Dean has asserted, again and again, "It's time to take our country back." Alluding to the case against special interests, Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster who advises the Kerry campaign, said, "There's little doubt in my mind that this will be a part of the critique that any Democrat would make of George Bush." But there are dangers to this approach, many analysts say,  ... Moreover, some Republicans suggest that the Democrats are not immune to the charge of coddling their own special interests—like trial lawyers and unions.

See, it's just the other guys' special interests they're against!

By now, the special in "special interests" implies special access—I'd be surprised if the term didn't come up most often in connection with lobbying. But the genuinely populist critique, which Toner artfully directs her piece toward obscuring, is a critique of corporate interests, of the anti-popular self-interest of our latter-day versions of the trusts. Unions may indeed have special access to Democratic politicians, because they're a source of financial and moral support: but the self-interest of working people who have banded together to protect their livelihoods is in no meaningful respect to be compared to that of, say, Viacom and Time-Warner. Saying "special interests" when we mean "corporate power" just ends up playing rhetorically into the hands of the very power we're trying to fight.

posted by michael  12:13:48 PM  
tell me about it []