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  
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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  
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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  
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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  
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