Let's be fair to Jodi Wilgoren, whose piece yesterday on John Kerry's Nantucket getaway ("Rich Bastard John Kerry Lives Like a Rich Bastard") has excited much commentary, including an incomparable takeout in the Daily Howler. Wilgoren spends pretty much the entire piece putting price tags on everything John Kerry comes in contact with during his brief Father's Day weekend—including my favorite item, the "sauteed yuzu-dusted day boat sea scallops" at the Pearl, where Kerry and his family ate Saturday night with Ted Kennedy & co., said scallops running a cool $36. (No word from Wilgoren on whether the scallops were an entree or an appetizer. If the latter, I may just have to vote for the other guy after all. I mean, there are limits.)

Bob Somerby's noticed a small gap in Wilgoren's Price Is Right roundup: there's one item on display without a sticker.

The weekend was Mr. Kerry’s first real holiday since the week he spent at his wife’s Sun Valley, Idaho, home in March, where he was widely photographed snowboarding. It was reminiscent of President Bill Clinton’s vacations in borrowed houses on nearby Martha’s Vineyard, and a sharp contrast to President Bush's frequent brush-clearing forays on his sweltering ranch in Crawford, Tex.

Bob says that the Bush ranch, "to all appearances,"

must have come free. [Wilgoren] sticks price tags on everything else. But Minnie Pearls always know their crowd—and this one knows you don’t mess with Bush.

Which makes it sound as if Jodi's withholding information, motivated by her awareness that Bush (like all his clan) is a pretty mean customer when crossed. And I'm sorry, Bob, but I consider that a slur on Ms. Wilgoren's good name.

Jodi's not withholding anything: she simply doesn't have the information. To have got it, she'd have had to do research [the way Digby did, for instance, on the price tags for things to be found around Dubya's recent weekend at Kennebunkport]—which would have interfered with Jodi's own enjoyment of Nantucket over the weekend! (Who said the life of a big-time journo had to be all drudgery and reporting and stuff?) The only reason the Kerry price tags are all over the story is because they were helpfully provided Wilgoren in the RNC oppo research she was fed, and from which her story was unabashedly steno'd. I'm sure that if the property value of the Bush ranch had been offered her in the same package, she'd have been happy to share it. Blame the real authors, the RNC, for the oversight, Bob, and leave our gal Jodi out of it.

posted by michael  4:26:34 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Patent absurdities. When Michiko Kakutani slammed the nearly-released Bill Clinton autobiography for all the world to see on the front page of last Sunday's Times, I didn't blog about it. For one thing, I figured that the review would receive due attention from the larger Times-critical mammals; besides which honestly I couldn't bring myself to care enough to make a response. My feelings about the Big Dog are sufficiently jaundiced that even abundant bad faith on A1, otherwise the central topic in this space, can't much rouse me from my own lefty version of Clinton Fatigue. [Brief side anecdote: I started teaching as a for-real English prof in the fall of '92, at Louisiana State. I recall a class shortly before the election where a couple of my students, as a diversion from Wordsworth or whatever the hell I was making them read, asked about my take on Bush v. Clinton. Since I've never not worn my politics on my sleeve, they had some idea where I could be expected to come down, and one of them said, "So I guess Clinton's your boy, huh?" I'll never forget the looks in the room when I started my reply with something like, "Well, Clinton's a lot further to the right of me than I'm really happy with ..." If I'd ripped off my flesh mask to reveal the alien exoskeleton underneath I doubt that I could have produced substantially more horror in the poor kids. It was my first really vivid indication of what a long tough haul Baton Rouge had in store for me ...]

Bad faith there was, of course, in Kakutani's review, and Eric Boehlert documents it ably in Salon today ("Still smiting Slick Willie"). Here's the passage that caught my eye this morning:

Kakutani ... belittles Clinton for his lack of candor, but fails to inform readers that "My Life" reportedly contains strong criticism of the New York Times, and specifically its Whitewater coverage. As David Brock's Web site Media Matters for America notes, Kakutani did the same thing in her unflattering review of Sen. Hillary Clinton's 2003 memoir "Living History," failing to inform Times readers that the book contained accusations that the Times practiced dishonest journalism. ...

Asked about the omission, [executive editor Bill] Keller responded, "I can't imagine where this question leads that isn't patently absurd."

Clinton Fatigue or no, Bill Keller's bad faith never fails to be noteworthy (or motivating). Boehlert doesn't have any further reaction from Keller to report, but I'd love to know just what "patently absurd" direction the Times editor thought Boehlert was about to try to lead him in.

• Is it "patently absurd" to suggest that the Times, in promoting a review by its staff book critic (whose middle name, incidentally, seems to be "feared") to the front page of the week's most significant edition, is investing that review with the paper's full institutional authority? Or that readers will understand the gesture to mean, "This is the official word from the Times"?
• Is it "patently absurd" to suggest that it's standard practice, indeed in common understanding an ethical requirement, for a reviewer to inform her readers when some conflict of interest might exist—as, for instance, the text under review containing frequent, sharp criticism of her employer—that could compromise the fairness of her review? So that readers can judge the issue for themselves, with reasonably complete knowledge?
• Or perhaps it's "patently absurd" to think that, given the timing and placement of the Kakutani review, the Times might have felt an extra measure of editorial circumspection was called for in avoiding even the appearance of a conflict of interest? And to avoid creating the impression that the paper is bartering yet another piece of its august reputation, this time for the dubious reward of damping the book sales of a political antagonist?
• Or is it just "patently absurd" for readers to imagine that the Times has any real contract with them that it feels bound to enforce on itself?

The simple expedient of a paragraph or two, mentioning the Times' own part in the Whitewater controversy and Clinton's criticisms of it, would have pretty thoroughly inoculated the paper against charges of unfairness in the Clinton review. Surely Michiko Kakutani isn't so feared by her own editors that they couldn't have asked for such a thing? But then, even that much acknowledgement must seem to Bill Keller like the nearest thing to accepting another "patently absurd" demand, namely that the Times review and recant its credulous and false reporting of the Whitewater scandal-that-wasn't. That door is, and will remain, stuck shut. Keller's reaction in the Boehlert piece today is a demonstration, if any more were needed, that in the wake of last month's editor's note on the Times' Iraq WMD coverage the experiment in glasnost on W. 43rd has gone as far as it's ever going to.

posted by michael  2:01:55 PM  
tell me about it []