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?"

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.