Measures of contempt. Jodi Wilgoren's contempt for any politician (any Democratic politician, at least) that crosses her path is well documented—let's recall the way she gloated on A1 back in January after what she seems to have regarded as her own personal triumph taking down Howard Dean. So it was no surprise—dispiriting, but no surprise—to be confronted this morning with another of Wilgoren's "I'm-the-brattiest-little-girl-on-the-playground" exercises planted squarely top left, above the fold ("Part Butler and Part Buddy, Aide Keeps Kerry Running"), in what is fast becoming the Times' canonical space for John Kerry-taunting. I'm not going to bother running this one through the snark-o-meter: because it tires me, and because anyway why repeat what the Daily Howler's already incomparably done for Wilgoren? Nobody brings the outrage like Bob Somerby, who, I'm not kidding, must have an extra spleen or something.

Here's the thing that struck me, though, that the Howler doesn't comment on. Look closely at the article's Graf of Justification, Wilgoren's version today of the standard journalist's ploy of informing readers why the article was written and what they should take away from it:

To spend a day in ["chief of stuff" Marvin] Nicholson's shadow is to see the minutiae underpinning the multimedia production that is a modern-day presidential campaign. It also gives a rare look at a candidate entering an increasingly scripted and sheltered phase of the campaign. Mr. Kerry is comfortable being catered to. He has his moods and his myriad personal needs. A social loner, he is happy with an aide half his age.

The highlighted bit is what Wilgoren is formally supposed to be interested in—you know, something resembling her job. The bolded stuff, on the other hand, is what she's actually interested in. Notice the gap between them, which is a different measure of contempt: not for John Kerry, in this case, but for Wilgoren's audience and for her profession.

The "minutiae" line is strictly a sop: something for the rubes (be they readers or editors) who think journalism is supposed to be about matters of public significance, and who might (quaintly) find the display of relentless fucking triviality in her article somewhat troubling. Wilgoren couldn't care less about such stuff. In her world—a world she shares, sadly, with the Times' designated Kerry-plaguer, David Halbfinger—snark is practically self-justifying.

Actually, strike that. Wilgoren, like Halbfinger, does seem to have a justification for her snark: the quoted graf is hiding it in plain sight. She and Halbfinger both are animated by a really poisonous class resentment: simply put, "How dare that rich nerd Kerry lord it over me? When I'm so smart and clever!" That, for Wilgoren, is the substance of her anti-politics, which is very much the anti-politics of the larger press corps. Wilgoren and Halbfinger are, of course, as top political correspondents for the NY Times, just about the most privileged of their tribe: but whatever privileges they have, they're not enough—and you're really not good enough to deserve Jodi, whether you're a candidate or one of her unfortunate readers. (Which, I guess, makes Wilgoren a natural Republican, doesn't it?) Of the process that socializes such venom in people like Wilgoren, and installs them in places where they can do damage, I don't have much insight, having never worked myself as a journalist. I just know that when I read the Times, I'm surrounded by them, and it's getting harder and harder to take.

posted by michael  5:26:29 PM  
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Okrent's Law. That's what Lambert at Corrente calls it:

The pursuit of balance can create imbalance, because sometimes something is true.

Danny Boy's quoted making that statement in a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece detailing the involved (and completely ridiculous) process by which the Times has now decided, for good and all, that the 1915 genocide of Armenians may, as a point of style, now actually be called a "genocide" in the august pages. Thus is the shape of history determined.

Neither Lambert nor the New Yorker mention the thing that leaps out at me from the Okrent quote, which is that Dan's obviously been studying lately at the Donald Rumsfeld Institute of Poetics.

posted by michael  3:45:03 PM  
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Rip Van Risen. Josh Marshall has a somewhat milder reaction to James Risen's below-the-fold article on the alt-intelligence shop run by neocon jihadist Douglas Feith ("How Pair's Finding on Terror Led to Clash on Shaping Intelligence") than my own:

I must confess to being slightly baffled by James Risen's piece in Wednesday's Times on Doug Feith's Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, the shop which had Michael Maloof and David Wurmser trying to find ties between terrorist groups across sectarian lines as well as ties between al Qaida and states like Iraq.

You can color me drop-jaw flabbergasted. As Josh goes on to note, the story—most of whose substantive reporting has already been presented by Knight-Ridder's Washington Bureau—offers "almost entirely the [Feith] group's apologia for their own work." "It's rather like writing a narrative about interagency battles in 2002 in which those claiming the most maximal views about Iraqi WMD are valiantly fighting the forces of bureaucratic fuddy-duddyism to bring the truth light"—without much bothering to take note of the fact, again in Josh's words, "that the fuddy-duddies turned out to be right."

Valiantly, indeed. Check out the panting, spy-novel scene-setting grafs in which Risen introduces what (with studied cuteness) he calls "Mr. Feith's little intelligence shop":

Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, a two-man intelligence team set up shop in a windowless, cipher-locked room at the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups and host countries.

The men culled classified material, much of it uncorroborated data from the C.I.A. "We discovered tons of raw intelligence," said Michael Maloof, one of the pair. "We were stunned that we couldn't find any mention of it in the C.I.A.'s finished reports."

They recorded and annotated their evidence on butcher paper hung like a mural around their small office. By the end of the year, as the rubble was being cleared from the World Trade Center and United States forces were fighting in Afghanistan, the men had constructed a startling new picture of global terrorism.

Old ethnic, religious and political divides between terrorist groups were breaking down, the two men warned, posing an ominous new threat.

As the rubble was being cleared ... Adverbial phrases like that are never used innocently: Risen wants to make sure we regard the labors of our Feithian warriors in their "windowless, cipher-locked room" as of a heroic piece with the 9/11 aftermath—thus demonstrating rhetorically his underwriting of the (as we all know, completely unproven and presumptively false) conclusions reached by Maloof and David ("Dean") Wurmser that "connected Iraq and Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden."

Reading Risen this morning, it's as if the last eighteen months had never happened. If I hadn't seen Risen recently bylined, I might have imagined that he'd been writing this piece in late 2002 when he fell into a coma: waking up just a couple of days ago and finishing it under pressure before really getting a chance to blink and look around a bit at the changed landscape. But no, it seems he hasn't been sealed in a time capsule all this while. So, James, have you got any other explanation for this piece of crap?

posted by michael  11:52:29 AM  
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