A quck contrast. Want to see the difference between lazy, by-the-numbers, pseudo-objective reporting and reporting that regards objectivity as something more than just a rhetorical stance? Compare Jim Rutenberg's "they all do it" piece from last Thursday on the state of the presidential ad campaigns ("Campaign Ads Are Under Fire for Inaccuracy") with what Dana Milbank and Jim VandeHei do today in the Washington Post:

Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented -- both in speeches and in advertising.

Three-quarters of the ads aired by Bush's campaign have been attacks on Kerry. Bush so far has aired 49,050 negative ads in the top 100 markets, or 75 percent of his advertising. Kerry has run 13,336 negative ads -- or 27 percent of his total. The figures were compiled by The Washington Post using data from the Campaign Media Analysis Group of the top 100 U.S. markets. Both campaigns said the figures are accurate. ...

"There is more attack now on the Bush side against Kerry than you've historically had in the general-election period against either candidate," said University of Pennsylvania professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson, an authority on political communication. "This is a very high level of attack, particularly for an incumbent."

Brown University professor Darrell West, author of a book on political advertising, said Bush's level of negative advertising is already higher than the levels reached in the 2000, 1996 and 1992 campaigns. And because campaigns typically become more negative as the election nears, "I'm anticipating it's going to be the most negative campaign ever," eclipsing 1988, West said. "If you compare the early stage of campaigns, virtually none of the early ads were negative, even in '88."

"From Bush, Unprecedented Negativity"

For Rutenberg, of course, it was sooo much easier—not to mention more friendly to the gods of the Administration, to whom Rutenberg has a history of bending the knee—to slip into a "plague on both houses" stance and avoid numbers or historical comparison—and with them a sense of dimension and proportion. [In general, Rutenberg doesn't seem to cotton much to that sort of truth-seeking objectivity. Much better when it's just a veneer. Rutenberg's also turned up here at Reading A1 flacking for the sort of media "analysis" perpetrated by Brent Bozell's wingnut Media Research Center.]

Go to the Daily Howler for a fuller takeout of Rutenberg's latest embarrassing, shabby excuse for media reporting. I just wanted to point up a contrast, and wonder, yet again, why the Times continues to allow jokers like Rutenberg consistent access to A1.

posted by michael  2:00:19 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

A lot of dish in Franklin Foer's New York Magazine piece on Judith Miller, less meat. [Link via Atrios.] In particular, the piece resists focusing on Miller's business and ideological relationship to the neocon establishment whose agendas (and players) she promoted. [It's an influence network that Miller was part of, for God's sake.] But the dish-to-meat ratio changes dramatically when Foer writes about the internal landscape at the Times. In particular, Foer makes it look as if Howell Raines' response to last Wednesday's Editor's Note is disingenuous, at best, and at worst something like a pack of lies: and that Raines bears primary responsibility for having set the Times marching to the beat of Miller's WMD drum. I'm going to break from usual practice and post a longish set of excerpts.

When the Times published its editor’s note last week, it read, “Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper.”

This was a bit too sweeping. While there were no heroes within the Times, there were editors who raised serious and consistent doubts about Miller’s reportage. During the run-up to the war, investigations editor Doug Frantz and foreign editor Roger Cohen went to managing editor Gerald Boyd on several occasions with concerns about Miller’s overreliance on Chalabi and his Pentagon champions, especially Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith. For instance, Frantz rejected a proposal for a story in which Pentagon officials claimed to have identified between 400 and 1,000 WMD sites, without providing much backup evidence to justify their claims. “At the time, people knew her reporting was suspect and they said so,” one Timesman told me. But Raines and Boyd continually reaffirmed management’s faith in her by putting her stories on page 1.

Raines had a clear reason to defend Miller. By early 2002, she had become one of the paper’s most valuable assets. The Times was being soundly challenged by the Washington Post in its coverage of the war on terror. ... For a man who made it his mission to raise the paper’s “competitive metabolism” and expressed his thoughts in sports metaphors, the defeat was especially painful. Judith Miller was the strongest card he had to play. No other reporter had managed to win the trust of the administration hawks and could so consistently deliver Post-beating scoops.

There were also ideological reasons for him to turn to Miller. During the summer of 2002, Raines had taken a beating for stories by Patrick Tyler that raised questions about support for the war among the Republican foreign-policy establishment. (To be sure, Tyler’s story had arguably attributed antiwar sentiments to Henry Kissinger that he didn’t hold.) The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol pummeled Raines for surrendering to his biases, placing the Times in an “axis of appeasement” that had “now mobilized in a desperate effort to deflect the president from implementing his policy.”

The Raines response was very un-Rainesian. Instead of “flooding the zone” and pushing ahead with a crusade, he told one close friend that he wanted to prove that he could cover a story straight. An ex-Times editor told me, “He wanted to throw off his liberal credentials and demonstrate that he was fair-minded about the Bush administration. This meant that he bent over backwards to back them often.” In October 2002, James Risen ran an authoritative story casting serious doubt on a purported Prague meeting between the 9/11 terrorist Mohammad Atta and Iraqi intelligence—a meeting that supporters of the war trumpeted as evidence of a Bin Laden–Hussein nexus. Because the story had run in the Monday paper, Raines didn’t have a chance to vet it over the weekend. After the fact, he complained to an editor that it had gone too far. A former editor says, “In the months before the war, Raines consistently objected to articles that questioned the administration’s claims about Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda and September 11 while never raising a doubt about Miller’s more dubiously sourced pieces about the presence of weapons of mass destruction.”

Another management problem was that Miller, like many in her profession, didn’t take well to editing. “Judy has never been shy about crawling over the heads of editors,” says one retired Times colleague. And Raines had crafted Judy’s assignment so that it became extremely easy for her to circumvent the desks. According to one of her editors, she worked stories for investigative one day, foreign the next, and the Washington bureau the day after. It was never clear who controlled or edited her. When one desk stymied her, she’d simply hustle over to another and pitch her story there.

As an example of Raines' blame-shifting tactics, by the way, take this from his letter to the LA Times:

In the years just prior to my editorship, it is my understanding that much of Ms. Miller's work was edited by Steve Engelberg, now of the Portland Oregonian. In his post as investigative editor, Mr. Engelberg reported directly to Bill Keller, then the managing editor of the paper and now its executive editor. When I was executive editor, her work flowed through various editors, including Mr. Engelberg ...

That "in the years just prior to my editorship" is as weaselly as it gets. The timeline, as it happens, doesn't break at all in Raines' favor, so he has to massage it. Foer, writing about the challenge Miller's aggressiveness and uncollegiality posed to her editors, quotes a source saying that only Engelberg "had the skill, energy and willingness" to harness Miller, and Foer goes on to note that "after Engelberg edited a series on Al Qaeda for which Miller and her unit won a Pulitzer in 2001 [actually taking his new post in June 2002, and thus before the most aggressive WMD period], he left the paper, leaving Miller without the strong hand capable of directing and containing her zealousness."

Leaving a reader to question whether it's possible to believe anything Howell Raines says about his tenure at the Times.

posted by michael  1:22:06 PM  
tell me about it []