Eat your heart out, Bill Keller! From David Carr's report on the Pulitzer awards, which netted the Times exactly one prize while the LA Times walked away with five:

The [LAT's] big win comes on the heels of its strong showing in the awards last year, when it won three Pulitzers. The two-year showing in journalism's most prestigious awards suggests that the newspaper has more than recovered from a 1999 scandal stemming from its sharing advertising profits from a special issue of the paper's magazine with the subject of the issue: the newly completed Staples Center.

After its purchase by the Tribune Company in 2000, The Times hired [John S.] Carroll from The Baltimore Sun, and he has been widely credited with the paper's turnaround.

"It is one of the most impressive performances by an editor I have ever seen," said Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists. "It took him just two years to establish this paper as one of the best by giving it a sort of jet-propelled assist. To have two years in a row of multiple Pulitzers is amazing."

Ouch! That's gotta hurt.


posted by michael  3:12:52 PM  
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Not playing well together. David Sanger and Douglas Jehl appear to think they're working on two separate stories in today's lead article ("Generals in Iraq Consider Options for More Troops"): one about the possibility of more American troops being sent to Iraq in the wake of the new wave of Sadrist violence, the other about whether the June 30 date for the handover of sovereignty to an Iraqi authority can hold. And rather than make an effort to find a thread, they just figure they'll munge the two stories together and call it a day. So they type up two leads:

American commanders in Iraq are developing contingency plans to send more American forces to the country if the situation worsens, and administration officials said Monday that the new surge of violence by Shiites represented a worrying challenge to their plans to turn over power in less than 90 days.

President Bush, speaking in Charlotte, N.C., said he intended to stick to the June 30 date for giving control of the country to an interim Iraqi government, even as he conceded that the new government's structure had not been settled. He vowed that the violence — which he said was being instigated by Moktada al-Sadr, a young Shiite cleric — would be put down, saying, "We just can't let it stand."

The whole article follows this non-direction, bouncing repeatedly and arbitrarily between the two topics as if the reporters just found the whole assignment tedious and unnecessary. In the face of the urgency of these issues, and given how honorably the Times Iraq-based staff acquits itself today, this sort of lazy, uncommitted effort (another mark of which is the exclusive reliance on background quotes from Administration and military officials) seems particularly shameful.

And you know what? The through line ain't that hard to come by. Writing for Knight-Ridder, William Douglas and Matt Stearn could offer Sanger and Jehl a clinic ("Shiite uprising challenges central premise of U.S. policy"). They lead with Dubya's vow in the Charlotte speech to "stay the course" in Iraq, and then develop both sides of the story as necessary, and uncomfortable, constraints on that insistence. Here's the takeaway graf (and note, incidentally, the well rationalized grant of anonymity):

Some senior U.S. officials now say that with both Sunnis and Shiites rebelling against the occupation, they see no way out of Iraq, no way the United States can oversee a smooth transition to Iraqi democratic rule in the foreseeable future and little chance that U.S. forces in Iraq can restore security without more troops.

"The last thing you want in the months before the (American presidential) election is escalation," said one senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because his remarks were unauthorized and pessimistic. "But seeing Iraq descend into civil war probably would be even worse."

Difference being, for Douglas and Stearn there's a logic that ties domestic political stances to their consequences in Iraq, and vice versa; acknowledging that logic also implies an acknowledgement of the history involved. Where Sanger and Jehl are happy to accept mere wishful assertion uncritically as a description of reality,

Senior military and White House officials said the attacks by Mr. Sadr's forces did not represent a full-scale Shiite uprising, or portend a broader civil war. Still, a senior military official described the violence led by Mr. Sadr's militia, the Mahdi Army, as part of "a power grab at a very difficult time," and one that administration officials said could interfere with their efforts to reduce the number of American troops as the presidential election approached,

Douglas and Stearn are willing to do that inconvenient remembering thing:

Talk of additional forces in Iraq is a major departure from White House predictions that the U.S.-led invasion would be hailed by Iraqis. "I really do believe we will be greeted as liberators," Vice President Dick Cheney said on NBC's "Meet the Press" in March 2003. A month later, Wolfowitz told foreign journalists that the U.S. entered Iraq "as liberators, not as occupiers."

Knight-Ridder reporters continually clean the Times' clock on military and intelligence affairs. If I were Arthur Sulzberger, I'd Steinbrenner the lot of them over and fire the timeservers and the neo-con tools currently mucking up my pages.

posted by michael  1:33:05 PM  
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