The long, hot Summers' story

The Times' front-page story on Larry Summers has something of a "Larry bites man" quality to it: Summers developed a reputation for belittling and ridiculing professors at Harvard before he was sacked as president, so his refusal to play nice with others isn't exactly news.

Furthermore, the fact that top Administration officials are unwilling to give anything but "it's all in good fun" on-the-record quotes about Obama's closest economic adviser, is equally unsurprising. This all seems like a less scandalous version of the McCain affair piece the Times ran last year. We have a man with a reputation for doing certain things, possibly some damning off-the-record conversations intimating that he is still doing those certain things, and a story with innuendo and a few pretty blase anecdotes. Is this really worth a spot on the front page?

It would be more illuminating to put Summers' abrasiveness in broader context. Summers -- much like Geithner -- is a Rubinite who made some pretty poor economic policy decisions in the not-so-distant past, and developed less regulation-friendly positions at what one might call a politically opportune time (ie the rise of Obama and the collapse of the financial markets).

The real story here is not whether Summers hurt Romer or Orszag's feelings. It's whether he's paying lip service to the idea of real reform and regulation in the banking industry while undermining the actual voices in the Administration who are calling for those things. The real story is that while a year ago liberals worried that Austan Goolsbee was too moderate and conventional an economist to be in Obama's inner circle, he's now the advisor trying to pull policy leftward.

In a nutshell, since we know Summers is a jerk, I'd like to see more on what that has to do with the price of eggs (literally). Mark Penn was such a jerk that Clinton's campaign devolved into civil war and public backstabbing (oxymoron alert!) even before her electoral chances disappeared.

Clearly, Summers is not that type of jerk. But the only evidence the Times offers that he's doing a good job are his efforts to join the "populist" side in a few losing arguments, vague indicators that the economy is bouncing back, and the standard line from anyone asked that Summers is a hardass, but brilliant. An excellent excuse to work in some insidery tidbits about birthday cupcakes and fly-swatting, but I'd like to see more meat in an article about a guy with a good deal of control over our economic future.

Some more books I won't read

THE SYLLABUS

A few weeks ago, prompted by the economic crisis, I tossed aside my previously compiled reading lists and posted some new persuasions. Picked in haste, the list was bound to grow. So here are a few additions. They were also picked in haste. Moreover, they are chance finds--in a display shelf, next to a book I was looking for, mentioned in a radio program. But all seem promising. In some cases, simply as models of an innocent, ignorant past.

BUSINESS AND FINANCE
Current Meltdown
Trillion Dollar Meltdown - Charles R. Morris
Dumb Money - Daniel Gross
Pre-meltdown
Good Guys & Bad Guys - Joe Nocera
Maestro - Bob Woodward
General
The Tyranny of Dead Ideas - Matt Miller
Not really related, but I just read it
Outliers - Malcolm Gladwell

Lots of Sunday confusion

CURRENT EVENTS

From today's New York Times article on how Sonia Sotomayor would be the Supreme Court's sixth Catholic:

A White House spokesman, speaking on background, put it this way: “She currently does not belong to a particular parish or church, but she attends church with family and friends for important occasions.”

Why is this on background? I simply do not understand. Is everyone forbidden to speak about her? Then why speak at all? Are even anodyne political justifications too hazardous? Why do newspapers put up with this?

And I simply do not understand, for entirely unrelated reasons, why this isn't seen as a profoundly ironic thing to say:

But legal scholars say that while Judge Sotomayor’s Catholic identity will undoubtedly shape her perceptions, they will not determine how she would rule on the bench.

Replace "Catholic identity" with "Puerta Rican background."

A meditation on the virtue of a vigorous national paper: On the day Obama announced the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court, the New York Times published, in addition to their straight-up news story and a analysis piece, a biography of her that ran six virtual pages. It also carried this insane credit:

Contributors to this article include Jo Becker, David Gonzalez, Jodi Kantor, Serge F. Kovaleski, William K. Rashbaum, Benjamin Weiser, Manny Fernandez, Karen Zraick, Colin Moynihan, Richard Pérez-Peña and Michael Powell and Tamar Lewin from New York; and Charlie Savage, Scott Shane and Neil A. Lewis from Washington. Kitty Bennett, Itai Maytal and Barclay Walsh contributed research.

Add the author, Sheryl Gay Stoleberg, and it was a 20-person effort.

What does an eighth-grader read?

ACADEMIC STANDARDS

When I started as a journalist, I was told to write to an "eighth grade reading level." Having no idea what was appropriate for an eighth-grader, I just wrote as simply and clearly as I could. At that time, I was more often graded up--experienced editors replacing my clumsy phrasing with one of those swift verbs journalists rely on (and sometimes overuse)--than down. With time, I've learned the key is consistency; if you're going to drop a ten-dollar word, you better spend heavily through the whole piece. That's why this lede perplexed me:

Even lionized super-presidents occasionally placed boneheads in prominent positions, and paid a price for it. A certain memo from Abraham Lincoln, donated to the National Archives by a private collector yesterday, reminds us of this. (my emphases)

I wager "boneheads" have never been so near to--or nearly--"lionized." I applaud the intent, but even ignoring the odd tense of the first sentence and the curious structure of the second, I find myself a bit bewildered. Will the tone be polished or populist? But then what follows for the next few grafs is merely Washington Post-pedestrian--flawless and sharp but lacking a distinctive style. Then we get a nutgraf that must have cost a fortune:

The memo seems a startling distraction to a president embroiled in a cataclysmic and bloody war. Thus it neatly illustrates one of the immutable laws of presidential politics then and now: Individual imbroglios fester at will, anytime, without regard for the deeper national crisis. (again, my emphases)

I know all these words. Heck, I would like all of them to come to tongue as readily as they seemingly do for Dan Zak. However, grouping them in one graf is like a linguistic firework finale. It sure as hell gets your attention--but it distracts from a fascinating story that is otherwise quite well-told.

AP Style Fact: Elementary school children and middle schoolers carry not just backpacks, but hyphens. From the moment they become "first-graders" to when they cease to be "eighth-graders."

Sotomayor, Sotomayor, Sotomayor and other Thursday readings

CURRENT EVENTS

Sotomayor is everywhere. What do we know about her?

Politico tells us that she would likely be the poorest member of the Supreme's, she dislikes the selling of the presidency (and other offices), last year she won nearly $9,000 gambling, and Democratic strategists are pushing the "misspoke" strategy on the "wise Latina" comment.

The New York Times informs us that the selection process reached out to allies so she wouldn't "chewed up by friendly fire" and to Republicans on the Judiciary Committee. Then it tells us about the allies chewing her up and the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee who say it is "premature" to render judgement, but still find her comments "very troubling."

The Washington Post eschews actual news and has Eugene Robinson, Dana Milbank, Charles Krauthammer and Michael Gerson each say their piece.

So much ink.

###

It takes a fearless paper to run a front-page story on teenagers tendency to clasp one another with their arms. Yes, hugging is all the rage at the NYT.

Lewis and the Big Swinging Dicks

BOOK REPORT

In 1985, the most talented young trader in the most profitable division of Wall Street’s most profitable firm made a decision that would destroy the division and ultimately the firm. He decided to leave.

Howard Rubin, a former Las Vegas card shark, had been paid a $175,000 bonus the year before. It was the maximum allowed a second-year trader under the guidelines of his employer, Salomon Brothers. But while he had made a fortune--$30 million--for Salomon, as had his entire division, the firm as a whole had not done well. So, when Merrill Lynch (a happier, flusher vintage) promised him $1 million a year plus trading profits, he jumped ship. Over the next months, most of his shipmates did the same. Salmon never recovered.

Reading Rubin’s story earlier this year in Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’ two-decade-old account of his time playing “possibly the most absurd money game ever,” it was hard not to think of AIG. The companies’ situations are hardly comparable; Salmon was making a killing, AIG is smothering American taxpayers. Yet if a fresh initiate to the money culture was willing to leave the hottest department at the hottest firm on Wall Street (a firm that, according to Lewis, Rubin cared deeply about) for a few dollars more, then why should one expect anything else from the despised wretches at AIG.

There are a lot of comfortable truths in Lewis’ book. Wall Street’s herd mentality, rumor-mongering (in a two year span, he recalls, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Paul Volker resigned seven times and died twice), sexism, racism, and fundamental absurdity (“Why did investment banking pay so many people with so little experience so much money? Answer: When attached to a telephone, they could produce even more money”) are all well documented.

Lewis even decries the forgetfulness bred by bonuses, the receipt of which he likened to a meeting with the “divine Creator” to learn “your worth as a human being.” “On January 1, 1987”—the day of the meeting—“1986 would be erased from memory except for a single number: the amount of money you were paid. That number was the final summing up.” Hindsight can’t be monetized, it seems.

And, despite its vintage, the book provides some eerie echoes of the current crisis: the failure of ratings agencies, the biggest bonuses on the eve of the bust, and the separation of borrowers and lenders. The real shocker is his own firm’s role in the creation of most of today’s problems—mortgage bundling, mortgage securities, collateralized mortgage obligations, etc. But the less convenient implications of his tale are no less instructive.

Much of the book concerns the rise and fall of Salomon’s “marvelous money machine,” or mortgage department, which was responsible for the creations listed above. The division had made the bulk of the firms money for the better part of a decade, yet when it is dismantled near the end of Lewis’ short tenure there, we learn that upper management, including John Gutfreund, who at the time paid himself more than any other Wall Street CEO, needed a private seminar on mortgage-backed securities. If you believe Lewis on all other accounts, you have to believe him that sometimes management are a bunch of know-nothings.

This all gives no credit to Lewis’ writing itself, which deserves a post of its own, especially given this blog is dedicated to journalism, not financial matters. Suffice to say that the book is consistently funny, occasionally snarky, satisfying introspective without being solipsistic and always crystal clear. We don’t get MBA’s managing the capital flows and allocating resources, we get Big Swinging Dicks terrorizing geeks and waging war.

A strikingly similar perspective from... Gitmo

CURRENT EVENTS

Newt Gingrich's favorite target of late has been the group of 17 Chinese Muslims, known as Uighurs, being held at Guantanamo. In response to concerns that repatriating them to China would lead to them being tortured, he asked his Fox handler, "Why is that our problem?" And in a recent Washington Examiner op-ed, he charged, falsely, "[b]y their own admission, Uighurs being held at Guantanamo Bay are members of or associated with the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM), an al Qaeda-affiliated group designated as a terrorist organization under U.S law."

The Uighurs, who have say they were never members of the group, had a chance to respond recently, in what some are calling the "first quasi-interview with detainees imprisoned in Guantanamo." From the Huffington Post:

"Why does he hate us so much and say those kinds of things? He doesn't know us. He should talk to our attorneys if he's curious about our background," [their translator Rushan] Abbas relates. "How could he speak in such major media with nothing based in fact?...

The Uighurs are apparently under the misconception that American columnists are fact-checked for accuracy. "They just cannot understand," she says. "How come the media doesn't even verify the story? How could they just publish something like that without checking whether what he says is true or not?"

I often ask the same thing myself.

Upward mobility among bloggers

Big news yesterday in the blogosphere: associate editor and blogger for the American Prospect, Ezra Klein, officially made the switch to the Washington Post. He will of course still be blogging at WaPo, so it's not quite as dramatic a shift as 29-year-old Ross Douthat's jump from a similar dual post at the Atlantic to the op-ed page of the New York Times. Ezra is the second TAP editor/blogger to join the Post in as many years, following Garance Franke-Ruta, who left TAP to cover the 2008 campaign.

Fans of upstart young bloggers like Ezra (25) see this as a sign that WaPo and other traditional media outlets are recognizing the value of incorporating the type of coverage and analysis you see at sites such as TAP and TPM. The NYT seems to be recognizing this value as well, though they appear less inclined to pay for it than the Post does.

Of course, simply providing hip and dynamic online content doesn't solve the problem of how to get paid for that content, or how to replace advertising dollars lost to craigslist and websites of similar ilk. So it won't single-handedly revive a financially decrepit industry (darn!). It does address another concern, however-- when articles lean too heavily toward "just the facts, ma'am", and editorials devolve into party talking points or opportunities for unreflective snark and complaint, blogs can provide a flexible medium for a middle ground between the two, to supplement -- though not supplant -- the more traditional article/editorial dichotomy.

Here's an example: Klein's specialty is health care policy. A weekly column is not a good medium for giving sophisticated, nuanced accounts of the state of health care reform. And while plain ol' articles on important events are good, you aren't really allowed to add context like, "Ben Nelson seems to understand little about what a public option for health care would entail other than the fact that he is opposed to any iteration of the idea" when you are reporting news. Enter the blog.

Most blogs acknowledge an ideological tilt up front, be it toward progressivism (Klein, Yglesias, TPM), conservatism (Red State, The Corner), or sensationalism (POLITICO!, Drudge Report!). But this doesn't stop the best blogs from doing what they can to empirically back up their assertions -- and there is an interactive community of peers and readers to call them out when they don't. In fact, Klein was one of the many bloggers to take issue with the stubborn inaccuracies in a couple climate change columns by his soon-to-be-colleague, George Will.

The Washington Post would do well to look for more Ezra Kleins and fewer George Wills. That's change we can believe in.

The importance of purple fuzz

ENGLISH DEPARTMENT

Around a decade ago, Brooklyn-born poet Steve Kowit received a call from a frantic friend. She was about to interview for a position teaching poetry in an MFA program and was "terrified" she might be asked about, well, the rules that guide the usage of the language she had been using--to some renown--all her life. In a word, grammar. He laughed and told her that teaching poetry (like doing good journalism, I must add) is not dependent on knowing the parts of speech (though it can't hurt if you do). After hanging up the phone, he wrote her this wicked villanelle:

The Grammar Lesson

A noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does.
An adjective is what describes the noun.
In "The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz"

of and with are prepositions. The's
an article, a can's a noun,
a noun's a thing. A verb's the thing it does.

A can can roll — or not. What isn't was
or might be, might meaning not yet known.
"Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz"

is present tense. While words like our and us
are pronouns — i.e. it is moldy, they are icky brown.
A noun's a thing; a verb's the thing it does.

Is is a helping verb. It helps because
filled isn't a full verb. Can's what our owns
in "Our can of beets is filled with purple fuzz."

See? There's almost nothing to it. Just
memorize these rules...or write them down!
A noun's a thing, a verb's the thing it does.
The can of beets is filled with purple fuzz.

She got the job. (And I got the story from Minnesota Public Radio's Grammar Grater.)

Health care industry wins another week's news cycle

CURRENT EVENTS

It was big news. It was really big news. Details were scarce and the source was anonymous, but it was Sunday and things were likely slow. Besides, that hadn't held them back before. So the Washington Post put it on Monday's front page: "Health groups offer $2 trillion in cost savings." They even matched it with an analysis piece that showed some admirable skepticism--just not about the leak itself.

If you picked up the paper the next day, Tuesday, you might have been excused for double checking the nameplate. It was a different paper. The doubts in a piece on Obama's full-throated endorsement of the pledge first sounded in a subhead ("Despite Fanfare, Experts Say Plan Lacks Key Details"), was echoed in the lede ("the industry's promises fell well short of the White House's expansive claims") and reached full pitch by the nut graf ("Many offered a cautionary note that warm words from the industry cannot be mistaken for enforceable policy changes"). And don't missthis gleeful quote: " 'An unrivaled set of abstractions and posturing,' said Alan Sager, a professor of health policy and management at Boston University."

Not content with a merely factual skewering, the editorial board also delivered the paper's opinion (half of which consisted of rehashing their reporters' criticisms without the qualifiers). But it wasn't until Friday that the whole mix-up confronted head on--in a completely different paper. The New York Times laid it out plain and simple:

Hospitals and insurance companies said Thursday that President Obama had substantially overstated their promise earlier this week to reduce the growth of health spending.

The article goes on to detail, point by point, how there are no points on which Obama's perceptions and the health care industry's intentions coincide. Plus, we see a little inside hardball:

Nancy-Ann DeParle, director of the White House Office of Health Reform, said “the president misspoke” on Monday and again on Wednesday when he described the industry’s commitment in similar terms. After providing that account, Ms. DeParle called back about an hour later on Thursday and said: “I don’t think the president misspoke. His remarks correctly and accurately described the industry’s commitment.”

Is the administration still trying to spin this into life? Or is the message just confused? And should a reporter just throw this into a story without noting that it flatly contradicts the actual state of affairs?

But let's step back. On Monday, as everyone ends their weekend and gets back to reading the newspapers (those few that still do), there was a big anonymous announcement that the health care industry is going to take one on the chin for the good of everyone. But by Friday it is revealed that the administration is only hearing what it wants too. Awfully convenient that it took the health care industry until the week's deadest news day to step up and say, 'Actually, you've got that all wrong.' Ugh.

"Experimenting with drug programs"

CURRENT EVENTS

Maybe my radar is oversensitive, but it seems the Murdoch-era Wall Street Journal gets a little weird when handling drugs. Writing up the new drug czar's expressed desire to quit using that tired, unhelpful, "bellicose" analogy--'War on Drugs'--we got the poor, partisan, punny and plaudit-worthy all in a bundle.

First there was the misleading headline (that got me briefly hopeful):

Whie House Czar Calls for End to 'War on Drugs'

Next there was the passive aggressiveness (my italics):

The administration also said federal authorities would no longer raid medical-marijuana dispensaries in the 13 states where voters have made medical marijuana legal. Agents had previously done so under federal law, which doesn't provide for any exceptions to its marijuana prohibition.

It seems this deserves a fuller explanation (are there other laws that are willfully ignored?) or a different handling. From the left (my territory), failing to explain this leaves an important issue without context. But from the right, the case is equally obvious for explaining why the feds can just ignore the law.

Maybe it is no wonder that things then got giggly:

Mr. Kerlikowske was most recently the police chief in Seattle, a city known for experimenting with drug programs.

Hey, how do you know what they're like if you don't, you know, experiment a bit?

But there is still some of that old sharpness:

"The average rank-and-file officer is saying, 'He can't control two blocks of Seattle, how is he going to control the nation?' " Mr. O'Neill said.

Sunday night gushing at the White House

ACADEMIC STANDARDS

This Monday the nation’s major papers all ran, as Politico’s The Huddle pointed out, “leaked” reports of a health industry pledge to limit rises in health care costs. Let me repeat: Just about every big-time reporter on the health care beat got a Sunday night head’s up on this story. I would think there was quite a gusher in the White House if I didn’t know better.

Basic political strategy dictates that whenever you want a story to get major play, you get it in the Monday papers. (Conversely, almost every piece of bad news is released late Friday afternoon.) They set the tone for the week. Thus leaks, more often than not, are about controlling the news cycle, both weekly and daily.

Should journalists note this? Thanks mostly to Judith Miller, they now take up an extra line with the reasoning of any anonymous source. Would it also be prudent to point out the dynamics of a leak? I understand that news is news and should be published regardless of the source’s motives. And I understand that space is limited. But perhaps a one-line acknowledgement of why everyone got so talkative right on a Sunday night would be in order.

Ruthless pragmatism, historic highs and other Sunday readings

CURRENT EVENTS

The NYT gives a lesson in how to, in under 1,800 words, write a wide angle feature on a sprawling topic (state benefits, in this case).

# # #

The mainstream media isn't known for its memory, at least among bloggers, but when an outlet puts its mind on the task, the results can be gratifying, like this fantastically contradictory history of Obama's record on judicial nominees.

# # #

The Washington Post takes a Safirian look at the word that has come to define Obama's ideology (hint: don't think hope). You've got to love the second and third paragraphs:

Everything Obama does is pragmatic. His adviser David Axelrod let it be known just after the election that Obama was a "pragmatist and a problem solver," which was a good thing, because, as Axelrod had said shortly before the election, "people are in a pragmatic mood, not an ideological mood." When Obama introduced his national security team, he declared that "they share my pragmatism about the use of power." And as he recently told the New York Times, the same goes for his economic policy, where "what I've been constantly searching for is a ruthless pragmatism."

Ruthless pragmatism! It sends shivers up the spine. But what does it mean, really, to have a "pragmatic" president?

Find out.

# # #

Even when I don't turn to its op-ed page, the WSJ still makes me depressed. "I wasn't surprised I didn't get those jobs in, like, museums," a Kenyon College history major tells the paper. "But I was surprised that no one was willing to hire me to do anything."

# # #

Momentous news: A blogger gets quoted high up in a story unrelated to blogging (or politics). Sure, it was in the Christian Science Monitor, but it is progress. On the other hand, the paper inexcusably failed to note either the ideological bent of his publication or why they were quoting him in particular (I suspect it had a lot to do with Google). And on an unrelated note, I commend their straight-faced humor, be it willing or unintentional:

"We are actually talking about historic highs [my emphasis] when it comes to public support of taxing and regulating marijuana for adult consumption," says Paul Armentano, deputy director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML).

# # #

Random news note: Is John Boehner's spokesperson really one 'e' removed from being the RNC chairman? I found out here.

The Globe's soulless use of third person

Journalists often go out of their way to avoid inserting themselves in their stories. Observe and report, observe and report. Which is how you get sentences like this from the Globe:

Brenner said she saw one person with a scalp laceration and, as she spoke to a reporter, she was on her way to get an X-ray at Boston Medical Center.

It is probably safe to assume that "a reporter" is one of the folks who wrote the story, not some random journalist who was also there. And while "a reporter" is better than say, "me", there is an easy way to avoid this awkward phrasing and ambiguity. Simply substitute the paper or institution in place of any potential first person references, like so: "as she spoke to the Globe". It's a pretty common convention, and I like it better than alternatives like "this reporter".

Obviously, this is a small quibble, but clarity is important! And in this case, it seems "a reporter" is heartlessly preventing an accident victim from receiving urgent X-rays in order to extract painful memories from said victim. Oh, the humanity. And to think I mourned the Globe's financial woes and uncertain future.

Who makes the list?

CURRENT EVENTS

Though Obama made masterful use of the third-person singular Friday in discussing his ideal replacement for Supreme Court Justice David Souter--no "he" or "she," just "they"--the papers still dominated their second-day stories with the names of possible leading ladies. But where did these names come from? The Los Angeles Times cites amorphous "political and legal observers," while both the New York Times and Washington Post magic away the sources with subject-less phrases. The Wall Street Journal goes much farther than its peers in exploring this (though it ultimately credits "court observers"):

The process for identifying a high court nominee began well before Mr. Obama became president, when a judicial-selection working group was set up in his transition offices to identify candidates for Supreme Court and appellate-court vacancies.

Mr. Obama, a former constitutional-law instructor, suggested names for consideration to the Supreme Court in December during working-group meetings in Chicago and Washington, aides said.

Now, I know these lists are nothing more than an amalgamation of the guesses of top legal experts, bloggers' hopes and reporters' hunches, but why not be more honest about that? Especially given how wrong these initial lists have proved in the past? Did anyone see Bush's Harriet Miers coming?

# # #

Idiot quote of the day goes to the Washington Post:

"He says he wants to appoint judges who show empathy, but what does that mean?" said Wendy Long, chief counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network. "Who do you have empathy for? If you have empathy for everybody, you have empathy for nobody."

Is that the most articulate conservative they could find?

Specter's Switch

Arlen Specter's defection takes me back to the days of the McCain campaign, observing how journalists decided what was mavericky and what was political opportunism. In the case of Specter, it would have been quite difficult for him to win the rematch of his close 2004 primary fight against right-winger Pat Toomey, given that as many as 200,000 presumably moderate PA Republicans switched affiliation to vote in the Dem Presidential Primary, and what's left of the GOP base was less than thrilled with Specter's stimulus vote. So the party switch seems to have been a move of political necessity.

Similarly, it can be tough to find the ideological continuity in some of Specter's votes and positions -- flip-flopping on EFCA, some rather extreme judicial appointment endorsements, and previous suggestions of making party-flipping verboten -- further boosting the claim that he's the "unprincipled hack" Jon Chait and other bloggers say he is.

However, the Republican Party has marched steadily to the right in the past 8 years (obligatory sentence for Martians), causing many conservatives to question how comfortable they feel remaining in the GOP. And in a two-party system, it's unclear what recourse there is for a Northeastern Republican.

At the very least this will create even more political theater for journalists, as Specter could end up being the deciding vote on a few bills, one way or the other. And there may be opportunities for interesting dynamics on items like health care and climate change where a coalition of 60 will be formed with votes from Specter and one or two of the Senators from Maine, but without Democrats like Nelson or Bayh.

Byte-sized news

SUMMARY NOTES

McClatchy, a news organization with, in my experience, far from radical tendencies shows no qualms about that t-word (second graf, second line).... Ignoring the hullabaloo in the popular press, William Rivers Pitt at Truthout gets it right on Arlen Specter, though not without some heavy sampling from one of the best bloggers in the business. The essence? Specter changed parties--admittedly for campaign purposes--but he didn't change ideologies (case in point, sixth graf)... Or maybe not; did anyone report that, beside changing parties , Specter earned a byline this month in one of the left's leading intellectual magazines? ... The New York Times takes its magnifying glass to school cafeterias... The AP refuse to let the children of 'Slumdog' be forgotten, but if its own reporting is to be believed, it is a much more complex story then the lede suggests...

UPDATE: Specter's independent nature doesn't escape the Washington Post.

Look at the size of that byline!

MLA FORMAT, ETC.

Not long ago, on another blog, I wrote a post about the outsourcing of news. I was prompted by a parenthetical note I found at the bottom of an un-datelined Reuters story about a move in the Colombian peso. The note read: "(Reporting by Shivani Singh in Bangalore; Editing by Savio D'Souza)." Since then, I've always read these notes. Which brings me to this one, which I found tacked to the end of a TWO-page story on swine flu:

(Additional reporting by Maggie Fox, Steve Holland and Lesley Wroughton in Washington, Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago; Jason Lange, Alistair Bell and Helen Popper in Mexico City; Laura MacInnis and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva, Robin Emmot in Brownsville, Cynthia Johnson in Cairo, Phil Stewart in Rome and Yoko Nishikawa in Tokyo; writing by Andrew Quinn; editing by Mohammad Zargham)

Uh, whoa. I'm impressed by Reuters' reach, but most of these places aren't even mentioned in the article! For example, Reuters does have a separate article on Egypt slaughtering herds of pigs, but neither Cairo or Egypt is mentioned in this story.

The previous article made me think these disclosures were just that; an accounting, for readers who cared, of just how the story was put together. In recent years, the New York Times and others have begun similar practices. As news grows ever more global, these accounting methods become indispensable. And in an era of rising mistrust in media, their value is also great. But this laundry list technique seems to be nothing more than self promotion. It is a minor issue, but I'm still disappointed.

UPDATE: The New York Times nearly matches Reuters for size:

Reporting was contributed by Sharon Otterman, Liz Robbins and Sewell Chan from New York; James C. McKinley Jr. from Houston; Nicholas Confessore from Albany; Monica Davey from Chicago; Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington; Larry Rohter from Mexico City; Marc Lacey from La Gloria, Mexico; and Ian Austen from Ottawa.

However, I think most of their contributions actually showed up in the article.

Wrapping up Monday's weekend news summary

CURRENT EVENTS

If it were earlier in the day and my eyelids not so heavy and the night not so warm and my neutrons firing just a little more rapidly, I would write something profound to accompany this link. Instead, I'll just quote Roger McShane, who does a reliably lively job of guest writing Slate's Today's Papers: If using torture is a political decision to be left to policy makers, pundits and the public, "why does the Times trot out the word torture when describing the actions of other countries?"

# # #

Unmissable feature of the weekend: The Los Angeles Times dedicates a bunch of inches to an inventive, even radical antiabortion crusadette who poses as a 13-year-old impregnated by a 31-year-old boyfriend. Fascinating.

# # #

Portfolio magazine will print no more. It lasted two years on newstands and less than four months in my awareness--I first read it in January when an economist friend linked this story on his Facebook page. It instantly earned the mag a bookmark. Tuning into the website just now, I read this: "More than any other story, Michael Lewis' take on what went wrong with Wall Street defined what Portfolio was all about."

I will turn to the NYT to conclude:

Despite cuts at Portfolio, some of the old Condé Nast ways remained. To illustrate a November 2008 article arguing that credit derivatives were “the elephant in the room” at JPMorgan Chase, the magazine spent what one staff member, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said was $30,000 to procure the services of a real elephant to menace a model at a photo shoot.

“There was an atmosphere of unreality to some of it,” said a member of the magazine’s staff, who asked not to be identified in an effort to remain in the good graces of a company that might provide a job. “We did good work here, some of it great, but at a certain point you knew that it was going to end.”

This paragraph is intended for Martians

CURRENT EVENTS

Wire services serve one and all. From the umpteen-deals-a-second bond trader to the Joe Nobody reading the hardly-any-original-content Nowhere Times to the Martians. I love the paragraphs intended for Martians. Here is my most recent favorite, discovered in an article on the fallout from a poorly planned photo op by the Obama administration that involved a backup Air Force One and a fighter jet screaming low past the Empire State Building (the lede, by the way, noted that the stunt "reminded startled New Yorkers of the September 11 attacks"):

New Yorkers remain sensitive to any incident evocative of the 2001 attacks, which involved hijacked airliners that destroyed the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center.

A Post of compassion

CURRENT EVENTS

"Humanize" must be the staff buzzword at the Washington Post these days.

Amid the furor over earmarks, they took a compassionate look at a $1 million item to kill Mormon crickets, which had been blasted on both the Daily Show and Sen. John McCain's twitter feed (He wrote: "Is that the species of cricket or a game played by the brits?" I guess Congressional budgets don't include joke writers).

While everyone was denouncing the AIG bonuses, they huddled with the "most-talked-about employees in America" to learn that they were afraid of reprisals and felt "sold out" by Congress and Obama.

Now they're sympathizing Jay S. Bybee, federal judge and torture memo signee. (This being journalism, only three examples are needed to prove the trend). Like those preceding it, the Bybee article is an interesting look at a subject splattered in public bile. Unlike those preceding it, it gets the structure all wrong.

The long lede about a confession at a dinner does its best to demonstrate his regret, but the backing is thin. Of the 35 guests at the dinner, the Post can find just two people to say so--and they do so anonymously! Quoted up high is a "fellow legal scholar and longtime friend"--disconcertingly, the paper doesn't make clear whether this person is one of the two--whose blanket defense makes it seem suspect.

I don't doubt that he expressed some regret. And the piece, for its faults, is worth reading. But I shouldn't have to read three-quarters of the text to find out that friends and former roommates never heard him express regret.

Reports of their deaths were greatly varied

CURRENT EVENTS

Swine flu mortality seems to depend on which newspaper you read.

A skeptical Wall Street Journal reports that "Mexican health authorities" say 20 people have died and that "they are continuing to investigate whether" more than 1,000 others have been infected. The paper even finds a quote to match its mood: "We're Aztecs. It takes a lot more than a flu to slow us down," a "chubby 25-year-old business consultant" says.

By the Washington Post's count "at least" 68 people have died and "at least" 1,004 "have been sickened." In case that didn't seem serious enough, a mother of two gets quoted up high: "We are very worried. This is bad." Whether she was clutching her young children at the time is unknown, as it was a telephone interview. Apparently the writers were afraid of infection.

The Los Angeles Times' numbers were the most circumspect, quoting Mexican Health Secretary Jose Angel Cordova that 20 deaths have been confirmed and 40 others are still being investigated. It notes another 1,004 are "reported to be ill with flu symptoms," a nice way of communicating both the symptoms of the group and the uncertainty of diagnosis.

On the other hand, the papers all report eight swine flu cases at home. So, does this reflect a more coordinated U.S. public health system or the journalists' greater creedence in American officials?

"Chinese" spies hack Journal's cred

CURRENT EVENTS

When I came across this story Tuesday, I wondered why it wasn't getting more play. "Computer spies" had broken into "the Defense Department's costliest project ever." The attacks, which "appear to have originated in China," allowed the hackers to "copy and siphon off several terabytes of data." And the infiltration came on the heels of the revelation that "computers used to control the U.S. electrical-distribution system, as well as other infrastructure, have also been infiltrated by spies abroad.

Well, for all my concern, I never did my due diligence. I didn't follow up with the New York Times, the Washington Post, or even a web search. Luckily, Slate's Jack Shafer did. He points out that the only information the intruders accessed concerned maintenance details about the planes. He also links to the NYT, which pisses all over the Journal, to borrow Jack's language. The Washington Post does too, by the way.

What is Murdoch's model for the WSJ? The Washington Times? Or maybe The New York Post?

Torture and omission

CURRENT EVENTS

Sometimes omission is as fascinating as inclusion. This has been especially true in following coverage of the torture memos' release.

• Stories have frequently neglected to mention that details about most of the techniques in the memos were already revealed in International Committee of the Red Cross documents leaked to Mark Danner and published by the New York Review of Books. This is vital! If a reader doesn't know this, they'll think there was no public record before.
  
• Rarely is it noted the government faced an ACLU court deadline to release the documents. Yes, Obama's campaign promises suggest he would have released them eventually. But the timing relies on this. And I have yet to read any analysis of whether the administration could have stalled or denied the court's request.
  
• When outlining claims that the memos' release will allow potential terrorists to prepare for interrogations and thus harm intelligence gathering, articles faithfully note the tactics have been banned. However, there is seldom mention that the U.S. Army Field Manual--which includes interrogation limits--is posted online. While I hope we never use these tactics again, I think rhetorically it is worth asking: If the Army can get away with telegraphing their moves, what's the problem if the CIA does so?
• Almost never are the Geneva Conventions guidelines on torture mentioned. Given prosecution is an underlying theme of all stories, this would seem to be a must-have.
  

I have found the coverage of the torture memos both inspiring and infuriating. Omission is not the only frustration. One story will lay to rest a claim or myth with a sharp bit of evidence, then the next day the claim will resurface. Often this will happen within the same newspaper. Perhaps it is the rush, the deadlines. These issues, of course, seem more navigable at leisure. But it is still disappointing.

# # #

One evening in Guatemala nearly a year ago, my sister and I caught a ride in the back of a pickup. The truck bed quickly filled with people, yet in the warm darkness our fellow passengers were no more than indistinct outlines. City lights turned the strangers into faces. One man, I noted in curiousity, held a long glinting cylinder. As we disembarked, I realized it was a pump-shotgun.

My fellow passenger was one, as Anne-Marie O'Connor writes in today's Washington Post, of the nearly 100,000 "poorly educated, badly paid -- but well armed" private security guards in Guatemala. "As in the rest of Central America, they outnumber the police and army," she writes. It is a classic foreign feature--opens and closes with an anecdote; quotes experts (including one from the UN), shopkeepers and the Guatemalan president, and drops a wage comparison (to the "hotel across the street)--but wonderful nonetheless. O'Connor, who is, fascinatingly, both a "veteran Latin American correspondent" and a former Los Angeles Times entertainment writer, wins feature of the day.

# # #

Quote of the day:

"They don't come in to consult," Pelosi said of administration officials. "They come in to notify. They come in to notify. And you can't -- you can't change what they're doing unless you can act as a committee or as a class. You can't change what they're doing."

--A defensive Nancy Pelosi in the last graf of a Washington Post story on the awkward, toe-trodding dance between Congressional Democrats and the Obama administration since the torture memos were released

A diet pill in the pantry

CLASSROOM RESOURCES

No other news website can match it for design efficiency, but I still think of nytimes.com as an overstuffed kitchen pantry. Most of the time, I open it up and just grab something from one of the front, middle shelves. If I have a few minutes, I might scan the items on the upper and lower shelves for some variety. A bit more time and I might even peer in a bit deeper. And occasionally--to overwork this metaphor--when I need something particular, I'll dig to the recesses to pull it out. But most of the time, an untold hoard of goodies goes unseen, unused and unappreciated (at least by me).

So allow me to dust off my latest find: After Deadline. Now, I don't read the AP Style Book for fun, but I do enjoy some bite-sized (I promise that's it) advice on cutting the overused and the unnecessary and the just-plain-wrong constructions from my prose. Thus I find this blog, which "examines questions of grammar, usage and style encountered by writers and editors of The Times," a touch addictive. Try it.

A growing opinion among the anonymous

CURRENT EVENTS

If "a growing number of U.S. intelligence, defense and diplomatic officials have concluded" something, I would assume it would be pretty easy to find a few of them to say so on the record. Not so.

McClatchy released a story Thursday positing that "Pakistan is on course to become Islamist state" and asserting that experts were aligning on this conclusion. Yet just two of them are willing to confess their belief. And guess what? Both do so anonymously. Not that this stopped them from getting top billing.

Half of the story's first six paragraphs come right out of the mouth of "U.S. intelligence official," including the article's second. And in a seeming effort to bolster this hollow voice, the quotes from the official are wrapped around a descriptive, almost unrelated quote by Obama counterinsurgency consultant David Kilcullen. Legitimacy by proximity.

The article alludes to the "experts McClatchy interviewed," but doesn't even hint at a number. Instead, we have a "Pentagon advisor" backing up our friend the official, with the only other support--besides Kilcullen's portrait quote--being a few-days-old statement from John Kerry, which menaces but stops well short of endorsing the article's premise.

A little comma counting

CURRENT EVENTS

The number of commas in the first and second paragraph of this New York Times story: 12
The number of commas in the first five paragraphs of this Los Angeles Times story: 10

Somini Sengupta certainly writes with a pleasant, if typically NYTimesian, rhythm. But there are certain expectations for the opening grafs of a story. I submit that having less than 12 commas is one of them--even if you're trying to cram in "weathered peasants," "baked planes" and a "fourth-generation scion."

P.S. Add "monthlong" to your non-hyphenated list. Thanks LAT.

Good side-by-side reading

CURRENT EVENTS

Thursday was a good day for some compare and contrast reading. What happened? President Obama released the Justice Department memos detailing the CIA interrogation methods used against terrorism suspects and said that he wouldn't pursue charges against CIA officials. But the different accounts of his thin slicing on the second point made for interesting reading. The Los Angeles Times, judging from other accounts, gets it plain wrong, or at least misleads:

At the same time, Obama assured CIA employees and other U.S. counter-terrorism [my emphasis] officials that they would be protected from prosecution for their roles in running a network of secret prisons set up in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

No one else suggests he included anyone beyond rank-and-file agents--not that they hit all the key points either. The Wall Street Journal, which was the only one of the four to open the story with the immunity declaration, goes to pains to explain who will be protected, but leaves it to the ACLU's executive director to note who wasn't:

While Mr. Obama promised not to prosecute CIA officials, Mr. Romero said the president should consider whether the authors of the memos and Bush administration officials who approved the techniques should face criminal charges.

One better is the New York Times, which enunciates what was and wasn't said, but the best writeup--at least of this aspect of the announcement's significance--was by the The Washington Post, who convey both who is left out and the administration's :

Authorities said they will not prosecute CIA officers who used harsh interrogation techniques with the department's legal blessing. But in a carefully worded statement, they left open the possibility that operatives and higher-level administration officials could face jeopardy if they ventured beyond the boundaries drawn by the Bush lawyers.

On a separate note, every paper but the LAT trumpets the CIA's plans to use an insect against a detainee within the first three grafs, while only the LAT and the WSJ mention the tactic was never used. Classic case of jumping on a catchy detail, despite it being minor and unrepresentative. Not to say that the tactics weren't brutal, or even constituted torture, but why shout about something that never happened when so much wrong did?

NYT runs front-page, article-length correction

CURRENT EVENTS

On Nov. 8, 2008, Joy and Jim Pruett, owners of Jim Pruett's Guns and Ammo, received some big-time free publicity. It wasn't with their core customer audience, but few businesses will turn down an A-20 photo and second graf quote in the New York Times. I doubt, however, that they were pleased to find a photo from that same shoot--or at least the same photographer--spread across the flap on the front page this week, above a caption all but accusing them of fueling the drug trade in Mexico:

"Jim Pruett's Guns and Ammo, one of 1,500 licensed gun dealers in the Houston area, easily accessible to Mexico."

But more interesting than the plight of the Pruett's is the New York Times' belated realization that drug lords and gun runners may have fueled the post-election sales spike, not Americans who 'cling to guns' in hard times. And not only did the first article neglect to mention Mexico, it also acknowledges that the statistics may be utterly misleading. The main premise of the story--besides anecdotal evidence--are some peaking October sales, yet sales also spiked in May 2008. But that doesn't stop the Wall Street Journal from weighing in way late on the story, again with no mention of Mexico.

Score one for the Somali government flack

CURRENT EVENTS

I expected a healthy dose of reality, if not irony, to follow this Los Angeles Times headline: "Somalia says: Let us handle the pirates." I mean, they might as well title it: "Utterly powerless bureaucrats in most corrupt country on earth say: Give us money and we promise we'll fix your problem." Yet, the LA Times' story mentions "corruption" just once, and even then stuffs into a list. We do find out, eight grafs in, why the country hasn't been included in the international community's anti-piracy coalition:

That's largely because the Somali government, which has no coast guard and no money to pay its disintegrating 3,500-person army, is barely holding its own against insurgents in Mogadishu.

Oh yes. That does seem pertinent.

[Did you think it was 'flak', not 'flack'? If so, check out this marvelous mnemonic: She said she'd rather catch "flak" (censure) as a "flack" (a press agent) in the newsroom than be known as a "flake." (eccentric person)]

Just call him Obama

CURRENT EVENTS

'Has the Obama cult of personality reached even the hardened copy editors at the Washington Post?' I thought this afternoon as I reached the third graf of a WaPo piece on the economy. I had just read:

"President Obama and--"

Wait! No Barack? Or are presidents free of first reference rules? Opening my AP Stylebook, vintage 2004, I found: "In most cases, the first name of a current or former U.S. president is not necessary on first reference." One more copy rule learned.

Where are you standing? And for how long?

CURRENT EVENTS

It seems trivial to quibble over a misplaced comma, yet more than any misspelling, an errant pause can leave one nonplussed, especially when it comes in the story's nutgraf.

These changing expectations have made the soldiers now on the ground a bridge from the older war to a fight that stands to become more invigorated, and hopeful, albeit perhaps more bloody as American units push into longstanding Taliban sanctuaries.

Huh? Maybe it supposed to go like this:

These changing expectations have made the soldiers now on the ground a bridge from the older war to a fight that stands to become more invigorated and hopeful, albeit perhaps more bloody, as American units push into longstanding Taliban sanctuaries.

Even then, what is a 'hopeful fight'? And how does something "become more invigorated"? Or, leaving that aside, isn't an 'invigorated fight' inherently a bloodier one?

Moving to a geographically higher, if lower-valued piece of punctuation, I notice the article goes with "longstanding" (seen above) and "yearlong" two paragraphs further down. Searching nytimes.com, both appear to be the paper's standard style. A search of Google News--my favorite style reference--reveals a number of upstanding papers (Dallas Morning News, Atlanta Journal-Constitution AFP) using "long-standing." And my New Webster's Dictionary lists only the hyphenated version, but it is a bit outdated, having been published 20 years ago.

New persuasions

THE SYLLABUS

Even a great series can get blown off the front page by a breaking story.* Thus, I am discarding--but only for now!--my painstakingly compiled but never actually blogged about reading lists of four months ago to indulge some new passions. I promise this time there will be blogging. Starting tomorrow.

*In this day and age, this really ought to read "home page," but for today I'll leave my analogy in the inky past.

BUSINESS AND FINANCE

Eighties' bonds, etc.
Liar's Poker - Michael Lewis
The Money Culture - Michael Lewis
The Predators' Ball - Connie Bruck
Den of Thieves - James B. Stewart
(The Bonfire of the Vanities - Tom Wolfe)
Enron
The Smartest Guys in the Room - Bethany McLean, Peter Elkind
Dot-com boom
The New New Thing - Michael Lewis
dot.con - John Cassidy
The New Gilded Age - New Yorker collection

Mortgage meltdown
House of Cards - William D. Cohan
The Reckoning - New York Times series

Assorted crises
Panic - edited by Michael Lewis
The Ascent of Money - Niall Ferguson
The Shock Doctrine - Naomi Klein
The Return of Depression Economics - Paul Krugman

FOOD AND DRINK*

Fast Food Nation - Eric Schlosser

Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan

In Defense of Food - Michael Pollan
Botany of Desire - Michael Pollan

*Yes, at present this list might be better titled "Pollan, complete works, plus FFN". Bear with me. More will likely be added. Your recommendations, as always, are welcome.

Cantor the rising meteor

CURRENT EVENTS

Glenn Thrush and Patrick O'Connor at Politico need to re-read Orwell:

But the GOP’s meteoric star has slipped a bit this month — and his enemies couldn’t be happier.

Astronomers and copy editors should agree that stars cannot slip. My reflex rewrite would read that subject Eric Cantor's "ascent has slowed" or his "rise has been checked," but even that would miss the point. Anything meteoric is by definition brief and, even more to the point, a fall, not a rise. (Incidentally, their story's headline--likely written be a copy editor--got it right: "Budget, Britney dim Cantor's star.")

But Thrush and O'Connor are not the first to forget their astronomy. A "meteoric rise to fame" is quite the well-tongued phrase. Perhaps it is time to bid it goodbye?

Crisis watch

CURRENT EVENTS

From today's WP:

Liddy said he asked Financial Products employees who received at least $100,000 in bonuses to relinquish some of the money. But from the testy mood in the House hearing room, to the White House and the New York attorney general's office, it was plain that AIG's strategy was not containing the crisis.

We are in the midst of a financial crisis, but it is overheated to call the AIG affair a crisis. 'Not dampening the anger' or 'not deemed a sufficient response' would both work, but there is no crisis, just a public relations disaster.

By the way, do you understand that whole sub clause? "...to the White House and the New York attorney general's office..." Maybe the Washington Post team just hasn't been sleeping enough.

Bernie Madoff from all sides

CURRENT EVENTS

Bernard Madoff pleaded guilty yesterday--and provided a sterling example of the value of multiple national newspapers. I normally wouldn't read every account, but the night before I made it through Mark Seal's long Vanity Fair chronicle of the Madoff victims, and I was hungry for more dirt.

Far and away the most complete was the WSJ's write-up, which even got the details on Bernie's new accommodations: "Mr. Sussman said typical cells at the corrections center house two inmates and are 7 feet by 8 feet with a bunk bed, sink, desk and toilet." More importantly, the paper systematically reviewed contradictions between the prosecutors' and Madoff's accounts--whether the fraud started in the 1980s or early nineties, whether the whole business relied on the Ponzi scheme's profits--differences most other papers omitted. (Perhaps the Journal is trying to make up for christening Madoff "the broker with the Midas touch," as the WP reports.)

The NYT's otherwise pedestrian (and poorly copy edited: "lost most everything") piece managed to muse on the absence of Bernie's wedding ring in the lede, but then never said another word about it. It did helpfully note that Ruth, his wife, will be battling to retain some $65 million, but did no speculation.

In truth, the wedding ring anecdote was simply the most prominent of a theme all papers played with but offered no real elaboration. "No relatives stepped up to say goodbye" before Bernie was lead away, noted the LAT. "His wife, Ruth, an employee with his firm, did not appear at the hearing," wrote the WSJ. And...?

I found the LAT's rapid background--"A onetime chairman of the Nasdaq Stock Market, he was viewed as a reformer whose electronic stock-trading firm competed with the entrenched New York Stock Exchange and helped reduce trading costs for investors."--the best, but perhaps that was because I hadn't been following the story too closely till today.

While the rest of the press herd crowed about the guilty plea, the Washington Post offered up an atmospheric, outside-the-courtroom look at the mess, using the day's events as merely an entree into reviewing Madoff's methods. For those who haven't spent an afternoon working their way through Seal's 12,000-plus word behemouth, it is a treat.

Most disappointing to me was the apparent misunderstanding of Ponzi schemes by all the papers. All put ink into wondering where all the money went, neglecting to note that it is possible--not definite, but possible--that almost all those billions were ultimately paid out to feed the new investors. Only the LAT tempers the questions with some real thinking, courtesy of an expert:

"I wonder practically whether there's money squirreled away all over the world," said Steven D. Feldman, an attorney at Herrick Feinstein in New York. "If there was, why wouldn't he have run off to a country where the United States doesn't have an extradition treaty and lead the good life? Instead of retiring to Florida, he would have retired to the Swiss Alps."