Entries associated with the tag "New York Times":

Barack Obama has made a campaign issue of his good judgment on the Middle East, and I'm beginning to wonder if that good judgment now has him exactly where John McCain wants him.

From the get-go Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq as the wrong war for the wrong reasons. McCain lined up behind his president. Now Obama wants to redeploy our Middle East forces. He wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times on July 14: "Ending the war is essential to meeting our broader strategic goals, starting in Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the Taliban is resurgent and Al Qaeda has a safe haven. Irag is not the central front in the war on terrorism, and it never has been. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently pointed out, we won't have sufficient resources to finish the job in Afghanistan until we reduce our commitment to Iraq. As president, I would pursue a new strategy, and begin by providing at least two additional combat brigades to support our effort in Afghanistan."

Famous last words -- "finish the job in Afghanistan." American and allied armies invaded soon after 9/11 and overthrew the Taliban in a few weeks, but it turned out the job wasn't finished. The Taliban leaked back in. Was the problem simply that we were two combat brigades short?

"The main reason we are losing in Afghanistan," Thomas Friedman wrote in the Times on July 30, "is not because there are too few American soldiers, but because there are not enough Afghans ready to fight and die for the kind of government we want." He approvingly quoted from a July Time cover story by Harvard professor and Kabul resident Rory Stewart: "A troop increase is likely to inflame Afghan nationalism because Afghans are more anti-foreign than we acknowledge, and the support for our presence in the insurgency areas is declining."

Friedman supported the Iraqi invasion in the beginning, though not for the reasons President Bush gave to the nation. Friedman sees the whole, vast Arab-Muslim world as a dysfunctional realm that has failed at modernity. Far more important than the assassination of Osama bin Laden, Friedman believes, is the creation of "islands of decent and consensual government" that offer young people an alternative to clerical nihilism. He thought Iraq could become such an island. He seems to think that again. "The reason the surge helped in Iraq," he said in his July 30 column, "is because Iraqis took the lead in confronting their own extremists -- the Shiites in their areas, the Sunnis in theirs. That is very good news."

So McCain, if he has his wits about him, can say this: "Thanks to the surge, whose effectiveness my opponent refuses to admit, the Iraqis now see a way forward to peace and democracy. If they are correct, Iraq will set an example for the entire Muslim world of a nation prosperous, pious, progressive, and free. This is an outcome my opponent was unable to imagine and cannot imagine yet. For some reason, he'd rather fight in Afghanistan, a primitive collection of clans and warlords on the fringes of Arabia that for centuries has defied every attempt to civilize and reform it, chewing up and spitting out every invading army that tried. Osama bin Laden is nowhere to be found in Afghanistan, and neither is the future of the Arab-Muslim world. My opponent is young and naive and doesn't understand any of this."

Maybe Obama does and maybe he doesn't, but as violence increases in Afghanistan the idea that it's the "good war" is being called into question even in precincts that might considered Obama's base. The leftist listserve Portside has just forwarded me a couple of articles that warn Obama to watch out. Conn Hallinan, a columnist for Foreign Policy in Focus, commented, "The initial invasion in 2001 was easy because the Taliban had alienated itself from the vast majority of Afghans. But the weight of occupation, and the rising number of civilian deaths, is shifting the resistance toward a war of national liberation. No foreign power has ever won that battle in Afghanistan."

The Supreme Court celebrated Independence Day a few days early by unshackling the Second Amendment, declaring the freedom of Americans to defend our lives, liberty, and property by keeping guns at home. Anyone who, like me, was viscerally dismayed by the 5-4 Roberts bloc (therefore doubly suspect) ruling, written by Justice Scalia (therefore triply suspect), could take comfort in critiques that emotionally dismissed it as "wrongheaded and dangerous" or coolly dissected it as ahistorically reasoned.

But what worked for me was a stiff dose of libertarianism. It's not necessary to agree with libertarians to appreciate the therapeutic value of their often contrarian perspective. So first I read the Tribune's Steve Chapman, one of my favorite pundits, who said the thing is, gun control hasn't worked, and who explained why Thomas Jefferson is smiling tonight. Then I moved on to reason.com, where the more doctrinaire Radley Balko mourned a "hollow" victory. Balko complained that Scalia's opinion was laced with "caveats, exceptions, and asides" and was so narrowly focused that "for practical purposes, the only people directly affected by the ruling are the 600,000 residents of Washington, D.C., and the handful of others living in protectorates of the federal government."

Balko was a tonic. In his grumpy, disapproving way, he reminded me that a constitutional freedom is a freedom our courts and our legislatures are under no obligation to regard as absolute. If it's wrong to shout fire in a crowded theater, it can remain wrong to sport a firearm there. No, despite the headline over the dismayed editorial in the New York Times, Scalia had not just told America to "lock and load."

Like Chapman, but giddily, Balko bolstered his argument by invoking Jefferson. Wishing Scalia had taken the opportunity to plug the 2nd Amendment "as a bulwark against government tyranny," Balko said the threat is real: "One needn't be a modern-day mountain militiaman to observe that authoritarian regimes often become tyrannical after first disarming the citizenry. As Thomas Jefferson put it, 'When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.'"

It should be half that simple. Sometimes when the government fears the people there is Zimbabwe.

Some articles lose us almost before they begin:

"On the day before the night he made history, Barack Obama shot hoops at the Back Bay Club in Chicago, and called the odd superdelegate or two . . . " from the front page of Wednesday's New York Times.

Judging from first reports, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has little to say about the president that most of us didn't already know. That doesn't speak well of somebody, but I'm not sure whom. Maybe McClellan, for a so-called insider's account that reads as if it was written from news clips. Maybe George W. Bush, for being a man of so little complexity that what you see up close is pretty much what you can see from a mile away.

Or maybe the blame lies with the journalists who wrote those first reports on McClellan's memoir, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington's Culture of Deception. It might take a closer reading than they had time for to tease out what's actually new and important in it (if anything is).  A reporter on deadline would have skimmed the book for the seemingly good stuff, the passages that preach to the choir of Bush loathers who are McClellan's likely readers. 

At any rate, according to Mike Allen at politico.com, to Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, and to Ken Herman of Cox News Service, whose story appeared in the Chicago Tribune, here's what McClellan asserts:

That some of his own press briefings were "badly misguided" and that the media were "complicit enablers" as Bush primed the nation for war in Iraq. That the Bush administration used "innuendo and implication" to sell the nation on the idea that the U.S. needed to invade because Saddam Hussein had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction, when the real reason for the invasion was Bush's desire to transform the Middle East. The result was a war that "was not necessary" and a "serious strategic blunder."

That Bush suffered from a "lack of inquisitiveness" and a "resistance to reflection," and made decisions "based on his gut and his most deeply held convictions," not to mention "self-deception." That when Bush wanted to do something, "contradictory intelligence was largely ignored or simply disregarded" by the White House, which Bush had stocked with yes-men who made little attempt to get him "to pause long enough to fully consider the consequences before moving forward."

That when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, the White House "spent most of the first week in a state of denial."

Not exactly inside baseball, is it? The game McClellan got to watch from the dugout is the same one the rest of us saw from the bleachers.

The New York Times should have double-checked its year-old Three Oaks piece before running it, but that was just a glitch in the process. What happened when I tried to reach a Times editor to ask about it typifies the kind of behavior that can run great institutions into the rocks.

I had the name of a Times Escapes editor but I didn't have his phone number, so I did the obvious thing -- I visited the Times home page to find the paper's main number in New York, where a living person -- or, more likely, a disembodied voice -- could connect me to the editor. "Contact us" took me to plenty of e-mail addresses I didn't want and to extensions where I could record messages that would be read in due time by departments I had no interest in speaking with. But there was no number where someone could "put you through," as telephone operators used to say. No switchboard number at all.

I left a message with the public editor, Clark Hoyt, and sometime later his assistant, Michael McElroy, called back. "I know the number and so obviously it's easy for me," he said, in attempting to explain why the Times was too obtuse to put its main number where people would see it. (It's 212-556-1234, by the way.) "I'm looking right now," McElroy said as we talked. He rummaged around the Times site for a while and then gave up, allowing that he couldn't find it. "That's something I'll tell Clark. That's not a good thing." Human contact "certainly has been pared down a lot," McElroy conceded. "The biggest thing is more of a preference for e-mail. They try to make it where an editor's not having to answer phone calls."

Do you remember how newspapers used to make people feel welcome? And in return people made newspapers feel welcome! Those were good times. Now the drawbridge is up. "That's not quite true," McElroy protested. "We've made the drawbridge longer to walk across but we try to keep it down." He said that before he discovered  his newspaper hadn't put its home phone on its Web site.

The New York Times published a story this month about Three Oaks, Michigan, a weekend getaway spot about two hours east of Chicago. The story was a little bit off. "There's not a storefront available, and not a chain store in sight," wrote Meghan McEwen, a freelancer based in Detroit. She went on about the art festivals and gallery walks, the Vickers art-house cinema, Drier's Meat Market, "which the poet Carl Sandburg once patronized."

"I don't know many other small, getaway towns that are this progressive," Aron Packer, a Chicago gallerist who'd opened a place in Three Oaks, told McEwen. "I haven't had to change my focus here," he said. "It's just as contemporary, just as challenging as my Chicago gallery." And then there was the Acorn Theater, offering plays, concerts, and comedy in a renovated corset-bone factory. The Acorn's a story in itself -- the Times published that one last December.

But charm hasn't completely insulated Three Oaks from the national economy, which is bad enough, or the Michigan economy, which is even worse, and in fact a few of the storefronts are available. Like the one where Packer's gallery used to be. Last year wasn't good for him in Three Oaks, and when he saw in April what was happening to the price of gasoline, he decided this year would be worse. So he didn't open. And when he spotted the New York Times article on May 9 he shot an e-mail to friends and clients. "Sad but true to say that we have closed our Three Oaks Gallery Space," he said. "Oh the irony! Anyway, Three Oaks is wonderful as you know. . . . Come visit us in Chicago at your leisure."

It's not that McEwen got her facts wrong -- the Times didn't publish them while they were right. She turned in the story last spring expecting the Times to run it last summer in its Friday Escapes section. But a story about a different Michigan haven got into print first, which meant McEwen's had to wait. And rust, as they say, never sleeps.

I remember once diving into a piece in the New Yorker on a Chicago-based institution I knew something about and finding it bewilderingly askew in one niggling detail after another. Later I was told that the New Yorker had had the story in hand something like two years.

UPDATE: On May 23 the New York Times published (and posted online) the following correction: "The Havens column on May 9, about Three Oaks, Mich., described the area’s downtown business district incorrectly. There are a handful of empty storefronts; they are not all taken. The column also referred incorrectly to the Packer Schopf art gallery branch there. That branch has closed." 

I hope Meghan McEwen has broad shoulders -- all the fault being put on her. Aron Packer promptly emailed the Times and asked for a correction of the correction. He felt the paper hadn't made it clear that his main gallery, in Chicago, remains open. His email said, "Already someone has called me to ask if I have closed today. In the gallery world.... Word of closing can be DETRIMENTAL to someone's business."

Conrad Black took plenty of notes during his long trial last year. He'd have thoughts and jot them down. It's what lots of defendants do while their lawyers try to get them off. Black wouldn't have made much of an impression on the jury if he'd sat there reading a book.

Black was a business executive accused of financial crimes. Reporters indicated that he was a colorful guy, but nobody tried to make anything of his note taking.

R. Kelly's a different matter. He's a singer up on sex charges involving an infamous video and an underage girl,  circumstances that bring out the virtuoso in a reporter. David Streitfeld wrote in the New York Times Tuesday that Kelly seemed to tune out the "wrangling" during jury selection. "Instead he spent most of his time intensely scribbling on index cards, taking dictation from a voice only he could hear." 

I’m not that shocked by the news that Roger Clemens and Barbara Walters had a secret affair. The way they never showed up together at nightclubs was the tipoff. Neither is it any big surprise that Hannah Montana is the love child of a former black U.S. senator – whose name I forget but I'm guessing Carol Moseley Braun. The news comes so hot and heavy you can’t catch it all, but I know there’s someone Northwestern U. disinvited to graduation, and nobody messed up that badly lately but Paula Abdul.

But what gets me is that everyone is so totally unrepentant. Nobody repents. Nobody even pents in the first place. Why are Americans so unpentable? Why build penthouses if nobody uses them? Is it because they’re so hard to get to? Is the trouble with this country that before you can pent you have to take an elevator? Sometimes the doorman won’t even let you on it.  Back in the 50s so much was written about pent-up Americans that everyone figured the problem was high priority and by now we’d all be penting our hearts away down at street level. Wasn’t there a huge government building just outside Washington dedicated to the problem? What a waste of tax dollars!

I want a president who says that if we’re going to have all this grab-ass at least people need to say they’re sorry. No more excuses unless they’re sorry excuses. My wife says that if I want a sorry excuse for a president it’s no wonder I bounce out of bed each morning whistling a happy tune. But that’s not it. I can’t wait to read the papers. Sure, the news is all online, but nobody confesses like a good old fashioned newspaper. Newspapers pent and repent and then they pent some more. Especially on Sundays.

The New York Times sets the standard for coming clean. This Sunday they had so much to admit to that at the end of the their usual list of corrections on page four the Times went on: "Corrections in other sections: Arts & Leisure, Page 4; Week in Review, Page 2; Travel, Page 3; Book Review, Page 5; Sunday Styles, Page 23." By the time I’d tracked down all the corrections I’d read the entire paper! 

Someone out at 26th and California tells me it'll be "a media circus like this building has never seen" if and when R. Kelly’s trial finally begins there. A  page-one story in Friday's Tribune examines the measures Criminal Courts judge Vincent Gaughan has been taking to keep the circus under his control. These include turning his courtroom into a kind of dumb show, with everything important hashed out with the lawyers in his chambers. He’s put the lawyers under a gag order and the court documents under seal. How many documents? The number’s secret too.

On April 22 the Sun-Times and Tribune jointly filed an emergency motion asking Gaughan to let them in on what’s going on. “The public has a nearly absolute right of access to Court records and proceedings,” the papers argued, and “absent specific factual findings that demonstrate in each instance how secrecy serves a compelling interest overriding the essential right to access and that no other less restrictive alternative is available, public access cannot be denied.” All in due time, Gaughan replied. At a hearing Thursday he refused to treat the motion as an emergency and set arguments on it for May 8. Jury selection in the Kelly trial is scheduled to begin the next day.

Kelly was charged with child pornography back in 2002 after someone sent a video to Sun-Times music critic Jim DeRogatis and he turned it over to the police. The story was dormant so long some journalists seem to think Kelly’s already put his troubles behind him. A New York Times story last November mentioned that Kelly faces child-pornography charges here "stemming from a widely circulated video that reportedly shows him with an under-age girl” but went on to say that although the scandal “once threatened to end Mr. Kelly’s career," the entertainer "survived it in spectacular form, mainly by refusing to be cowed. If anything, his raunchiest songs got even more outlandish in the years after the report broke; what else could fans do but shrug and grin and sing along?”

Maybe there’s something in the water at the Times. Last August its enraptured account of Kelly’s video series Trapped in the Closet called him "the funniest pop star on the planet" and noted his legal troubles only parenthetically to explain why he didn’t sit for an interview.

The video DeRogatis received does more than show Kelly with an underage girl; it reportedly shows him urinating into her mouth. And she isn't the only person whose privacy Judge Gaughan seems determined to protect. The Sun-Times reported on April 14 that prosecutors “want to introduce evidence of other crimes allegedly committed by the R&B singer.” 

What would these be? Blogger Bill Wyman, a former Reader staffer, recently posted this comprehensive report. "This is a compelling tale, but a little bit barfy as well," Wyman writes.

Bad days at gawker.com, the prominent New York-based media-focused blogging site. Reporter Hamilton Nolan files on an unfortunate speech that Village Voice Media press lord Mike Lacey delivered a few days ago at an awards dinner in Phoenix: diners "were less than amused when (the white man) Lacey referred to his deceased friend, Pulitzer Prize-winning black journalist Tom Fitzpatrick, as 'my nigger.'" No doubt they were, but Fitz's many old friends in Chicago, where he won a Pulitzer in 1970 with the Sun-Times, will be surprised to hear that when he changed cities he changed races.

Mistakes happen. Inanity is never an accident. In his commentary on the Pulitzer Prizes that were announced Monday, gawker.com managing editor Nick Denton made the observation that "Pulitzer-chasing is most damaging because it distracts newspapers from their real challenge. Rather than impress colleagues with the seriousness of their reporting, US newspapers need to engage a readership that is drifting off to television and the internet." 

As if it's either/or.

There's a lot that might be said about the Pulitzers this year. Prizes were awarded in 11 writing categories in journalism and the Washington Post won six of them. The New York Times won a couple more, and was a finalist in three more categories. Maybe the Post, for all of its own cost-cutting woes, had a hell of a year. But if you want to argue that the Pulitzers are turning into a cozy old-boys club, or that so many papers have trimmed so much of their product that only a handful are even competitive any longer, the 2008 Pulitzers will help you make your case.

Denton tried to make his by invoking The Wire, which "made one of the last season's villains an editor who boasted of his understanding of Pulitzer judges, because he had once been one." Open and shut, I guess, and Denton noted that British papers are better than ours and don't take their awards so seriously. Cause and effect, I guess.

The Tribune won a Pulitzer for investigative reporting into the slipshod regulation of toys and other children's products. James Janega's story on the award observed that the experience of business writer Michael Oneal, one member of the reporting team, illustrated the "juxtaposition of journalism and the nervousness that surrounds the industry." Oneal covered the sale of the Tribune Company to Sam Zell, and Janega said he "described having to write stories one day bemoaning the future of journalism and newspapers and turning the next day to a series that he felt underscored the best newspapers had to offer."

It must have been uncomfortable for Oneal having two big ideas in his head at the same time, but with all due respect to Denton, I doubt if it was impossible.

I never had the pleasure of William F. Buckley's company. As a kid in the midlands immeasurably distant from Buckley's brandy and cigars, I had no way to measure him but by what he wrote. And as the New York Times recalled in its long obituary, the National Review, which he launched in 1955, asserted itself "by lining up squarely behind Southern segregationists, saying that Southern whites had the right to impose their ideas on blacks who were as yet culturally and politically inferior to them." This was not a momentary position. Let me quote myself in 2005 quoting the National Review of the next decade:

"In the 60s [federalism] grew fat on segregation, taking up the states' rights argument for allowing jim crow to die in bed. The Tribune couldn't countenance the [1963] Birmingham bombings, but William Buckley's National Review, which would champion Barry Goldwater for president the following year, was able to. 'Let us gently say,' it said, 'the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur--of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro.' The magazine said some evidence supported this possibility.

"'And let it be said,' the National Review declared, 'that the convulsions that go on, and are bound to continue, have resulted from revolutionary assaults on the status quo, and a contempt for the law, which are traceable to the Supreme Court's manifest contempt for the settled traditions of Constitutional practice. Certainly it now appears that Birmingham's Negroes will never be content so long as the white population is free to be free.'

"Fourteen months later the National Review weighed in on the murders of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney in Mississippi. It noted that a federal grand jury in Neshoba County had returned indictments against local police officers. 'It is everyone's impression, including ours, that some, at least, of the Neshoba police are a crummy lot,' said the magazine airily. 'But we pause for reflection. Are "violation of the Civil Rights Act" and the even more tenuous "conspiracy to violate" going to become a catch-all charge by which the Federal Government can get its hands on nearly any citizen?'

"In the view of this conservatism, which has slowly taken over the country, the cure for jim crow was far worse than the disease."

The Tribune's editorial Thursday saying farewell to Buckley observed that "he tutored and inspired numerous young conservatives, including George Will, David Brooks, and Jonah Goldberg." As chance would have it, on the next page was a column by Goldberg, today an editor-at-large at the National Review. Goldberg was pondering  "loose ties" reported between Barack Obama and former Weatherpeople William Ayers, now a professor of education at UIC, and his wife Bernardine Dohrn, now director of the Northwestern University Law School's Children and Family Justice Center. "What fascinates me," wrote Goldberg, sniffing at the company Obama was keeping, "is how light the baggage is when one travels from violent radicalism to liberalism." Ayers and Dohrn had planted bombs and were unrepentent! "Shouldn't this baggage cost something?" Goldberg wondered, and he urged reporters to ask "America's foremost liberal representatives [Obama and Hillary Clinton] why being a radical means never having to say you're sorry."

Even before Buckley died an argument was being waged over whether he'd ever said he was sorry for his magazine's support of jim crow. Ezra Klein of The American Prospect offered a March 2006 interview with Buckley at Bloomberg.com as evidence that he'd admitted his mistake: "Buckley said he had a few regrets, most notably his magazine's opposition to civil rights legislation in the 1960s. 'I think that the impact of that bill should have been welcomed by us,' he said."

Biographer John Judis tells me that Buckley "did specifically say that he was wrong," and gave as a reason for his segregationist views his southern mother and winters in South Carolina. An exchange of e-mail with Michael Kinsley of Slate in 2001 shows Buckley parsing his folly. Buckley said of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, "I'd have voted against the bill, but if it were out there today, I'd vote for it. . . . I'd vote with trepidation, however, for the obvious reason that successful results cannot necessarily legitimize the means by which they were brought about."

I doubt if these second thoughts come anywhere close to the order of hand-wringing Goldberg has in mind for Ayers and Dohrn. Not that a comparison should be forced. Ayers and Dohrn opposed a war that deserved opposing, but did so egregiously, violently, and ineffectually. To whom should they apologize -- the members of the nonviolent but equally ineffectual resistance whose name they sullied by association? Buckley supported the greatest institutional evil of 20th century America, however only with words and money. To whom should he apologize -- God? The truth is, Americans aren't much for apologizing -- in large part, I'll surmise, because the demand for an apology is so often so patently political. What we do instead is move on, and in the end the obit writers kick us around just as little or as much as they want to. Buckley took a fair number of odious positions in his life, but eulogists are reminding us he was fervent and nonpartisan in friendship. In the end the pleasure of his company won out and the baggage of segregation cost him nothing at all.

The Tribune editorial on Buckley acknowledged his warts but framed them oddly, allowing that "like any long-lived commentator, Buckley took positions that today are hard to excuse, such as his indulgence of Southern segregation in the 1950s, his defense of Joseph McCarthy and his proposal, during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, that the infected be required to get tattooed to alert potential sexual partners."  Buckley was 82 when he died, but his long life had nothing to do with his support of McCarthy and Jim Crow -- those were positions he took when he was a young man making his presence felt. The editorial insulted all long-lived commentators who never did anything of the sort.

A cliche is a figure of speech you get by without. If you use it yourself it’s vernacular.

At the end of every year the rhetoricians are heard from, and I was troubled to see it is what it is show up in a couple discussions about phrases it was time to let be. According to an Associated Press report carried in the Tribune, it was just chosen by Lake Superior State University for its annual List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-Use, Over-Use and General Uselessness. But then so was waterboarding. The AP says the LSSU choices are taken seriously enough that a previous year’s were posted on an Arizona Supreme Court bulletin board as language for attorneys to avoid. The U.S. Supreme Court faces a landmark ruling concerning habeas corpus and Guantanamo, and if the justices banished waterboarding from the discussion they’d be sneered off the bench.

Even if it is what it is says nothing at all (and I don’t think it does), it says it in a nicely Zen-like way. Consider the case made against it by columnist Rem Rieder in the December/January American Journalism Review. Rieder’s theme is the need for frank talk in hard times; he scorns publishers who order cutbacks and promise inanely that their papers will "do more with less." He rightly salutes a Spokane editor who warned his staff that cuts were coming and told them bluntly, "Doing more with less is corporate-speak BS and you won't hear it from me. There is no way to make this pig look like anything other than a pig.”"

But then Rieder digresses. "While we’re banning expressions, how about adding 'It is what it is' to the dustbin? Is it just me or is this suddenly ubiquitous catchphase truly annoying? First of all, what does it even mean? Are there lots of people out there who think it is what it's not? Second, it carries the connotation that we're stuck with the status quo, no matter how melancholy, and nothing can be done about it."

Not true. It simply means "a pig is a pig." Rieder has missed his own point.

Whatever. (Most nominated word for LSSU’s 1997 list. Yet still useful for making abrupt transitions.) The word of the year for 2007, as chosen by the New Oxford American Dictionary, is locavore. It wouldn’t be my choice. I propose the fast-finishing transformational. Here’s Thomas Friedman in the New York Times on December 19: "I still don’t know what Bali was about, but I do know that it was incremental, not transformational--and incrementalism, when it comes to clean energy, is just a hobby." Here’s Mary Schmich in the Tribune on December 2: "Sixteen. It’s a transformational age. . . . Between the ages of 16 and 19, moral codes are fixed and futures are charted."

I began seeing transformational everywhere after Andrew Sullivan sensitized me to it with his fine essay in the December Atlantic on Barack Obama. Sullivan sees Obama’s faults acutely, but he supports him for president because, in Sullivan's view, Obama's candidacy is "potentially transformational." Sullivan thinks America is in dire need of transformation, and my guess is that in their bones most Americans agree with him. No American under 30 has lived through a presidential election without a Bush or Clinton on the ballot.

I hadn't realized anyone there was capable of such nuanced thought. Editor & Publisher reports that the White House is protesting a front-page story in Wednesday's New York Times -- well, not the story, exactly, and not the main headline to the story, but the subhead, which in the view of the White House makes an "inference" that is "pernicious and troubling."

The Times story reports that at least four White House lawyers were involved in talks with the CIA over what to do with those videotapes of interrogations of two Al Qaeda members, the tapes the CIA eventually destroyed. The Times says that its sources "indicate that the involvement of White House officials in the discussions before the destruction of the tapes in November 2005 was more extensive than Bush administration officials have acknowledged."

The headline: "Bush Lawyers Discussed Fate of C.I.A. Tapes." The pernicious subhead: "White House Role Was Wider Than It Said." In a statement, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino says the subhead's inaccurate, not because the White House role wasn't wide, but because the White House never claimed it was narrower. Says Perino, "We have not publicly commented on facts relating to this issue, except to note President Bush's immediate reaction upon being briefed on the matter. Furthermore, we have not described -- neither to highlight, nor to minimize -- the role or deliberations of White House officials in this matter. The New York Times' inference that there is an effort to mislead in this matter is pernicious and troubling, and we are formally requesting that NYT correct the sub-headline of this story."

The White House wants its props for clamming up and saying nothing at all.

The new leaner, meaner, more melancholy Reader has come in for a little sympathy from New York Times media writer David Carr. A former editor of the Reader's sister paper in Washington, D.C., the Washington City Paper, Carr's Monday column tells the story of the Reader's devastating layoffs last week (City Paper took the same kind of beating) by focusing on John Conroy, one of the four writers dismissed here. Last week, after the city of Chicago reached settlement agreements with four men who had accused its police officers of torturing them, Conroy received a note that may have given him some consolation. It said:

“My son, Aaron Patterson, tortured by the Chicago Police Department, would not be alive today, I believe, without your articles about police torture in the City of Chicago. You documented and wrote the realization of police torture, of which we will never forget. You help save my son’s life for which I thank you.”

Letters like that don't pay the doctor's bills, but they make it easier for an out-of-work investigative reporter to manage a decent night's sleep. Under journalism's new business model, Carr broods, "the newsroom is no longer the core purpose of media, it’s just overhead," and he observes, "Thousands of bloggers could type for a millennium and not come up with the kind of deeply reported story that freed innocent men."

The other three writers that the Reader let go last week are Tori Marlan, Steve Bogira, and Harold Henderson, whom the Reader billed as "the world's first blogger" and who will continue blogging offsite. Given the circumstances, Harold has done something remarkably gracious: on his new blog he's posted a link to the Web site of Reader contributor Lee Sandlin, and urged his readers to go there and read Sandlin's tribute to this paper's "currently embattled editor." That's Alison True, who under a cost-slashing mandate from the new owners, Creative Loafing of Tampa, Florida, executed last week's massacre. She's taking a beating for that -- but read what Sandlin has to say.

Wednesday news: Scientists report they've developed a way to convert skin cells into embryonic stem cells without the morally controversial use of embryonic tissue.

New York Times, lead story, page A1, Scientists Bypass Need for Embryo to Get Stem Cells

Chicago Tribune, lead story, page 1, Major leap for stem cells

USA Today, lead story, page 1, Stem cell discovery hailed as milestone

Wall Street Journal, page A1, Advance in Stem-Cell Work Avoids Destroying Embryos

RedEye, page 3, Stem cell breakthrough reported by scientists (pdf)

Sun-Times, page 28, "It's a win-win"

Now, if those had been Drew Peterson's cells, they might have made it onto page one.

Kurt Eichenwald may be the most baffling figure in American journalism. While an award-winning business reporter for the New York Times, he paid at least $2,000 to a teenage Internet porn purveyor he eventually wrote about at length in the Times in 2005. Eichenwald says he was trying to lead the boy out of the life and gave him money to help earn his trust, but the payment violated Times policy and Eichenwald didn't mention it to his editors. When they finally found out, long after Eichenwald had left the paper, it was obliged to publish a long, embarrassing acknowledgment. What was left unexplained was what had really been going on?

I blogged at length about Eichenwald last March and mentioned him in July, both times presenting him in the context of his most expert and hostile critic. That's Debbie Nathan, a former Reader reporter whom Eichenwald has threatened to sue for $10 million. Now New York magazine has published a long, sympathetic, but unsparing portrait of Eichenwald. Here's a sample:

"The fight he’s found himself in has wreaked havoc on his life. He’s teary, volatile, largely unable to work. He left the Times, then walked away from a large contract at Portfolio. His career is in tatters. For this, he blames a campaign by the convicts he’s exposed, other child molesters he doesn’t even know, random anonymous bloggers, and journalists, specifically the advocacy journalist Debbie Nathan, who has written several long pieces questioning his reporting methods and whom he calls 'the high priestess of pedophilia.' He believes they are acting in concert to destroy him, professionally and emotionally."

For what it's worth, there's not a lick of evidence in the article that Nathan is the high priestess of anything. The quote appears because of what it says about his state of mind, not hers.

Should the Bible be taught as a secular course in public high schools? Not a bad idea, concludes David Van Biema, Time magazine's senior religion writer, in a recent essay. But not such a good one either, responds professor Stanley Fish, recently of UIC, in an op-ed in the New York Times. In order to disagree with Van Biema, Fish first quotes one of his witnesses, Stephen Prothero, chair of the department of religion at Boston University. "The academic study of religion provides a kind of middle space . . ." Prothero says in Time. "It takes the biblical truth claims seriously and yet brackets them for purposes of classroom discussion." And Fish snaps, "But that's like studying the justice system and bracketing the question of justice. (How do you take something seriously by putting it on the shelf?) The truth claims of a religion -- at least of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam -- are not incidental to its identity; they are its identity. . . . 

"Of course, the 'one true God' stuff is what the secular project runs away from, or 'brackets,'" Fish asserts. And he wonders, "If you're going to cut the heart out of something, why teach it at all?"

Fish writes as one who respects religion too much to allow it to be debased in a classroom. A couple of years ago he argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "It is one thing to take religion as an object of study and another to take religion seriously. To take religion seriously would be to regard it not as a phenomenon to be analyzed at arm's length, but as a candidate for the truth."

Is he saying religion is too important to be studied? In fact the question of justice is bracketed in law schools, which aren't called schools of justice. But the idea of justice survives. Brackets aren't the devil's tool. Furthermore, Fish is misrepresenting what the "secular project" can accomplish. When he argues that to teach the Bible as a "secular text" is to miss its point, he himself is missing the point that it's not simply the text but the truth claims made by it and of it that command our attention. Who in his or her right mind would propose studying the Koran in our schools as a secular text? It needs to be studied because it commands the devotion of hundreds of millions of people. 

Van Biema argued in Time that when the Bible is taught in school it's "harmful as well as helpful uses must be addressed" and it needs to be "twinned mandatorily with a world religions course." Fish is right if he thinks it's a stupid idea to let the "camel's nose" of religious instruction into our classroom simply because the Bible's the surprising source of a lot of familiar quotations. But that's not what Van Biema is advocating. He seems to think high school upperclassmen can handle an inquiry into the world's ultimate expressions of the human need for meaning. 

On December 19, 2005, the New York Times carried two compelling pieces on child pornography by reporter Kurt Eichenwald. One was the story of an 18-year-old boy who'd become a kind of star on porn video sites. The other was an essay explaining how Eichenwald got in contact with the boy and eventually persuaded him to leave the business. 

On August 20, Eichenwald wrote again. This Times story was about Web sites that feature prepubescent children scantily attired in an attempt to get around child porn laws. Five days later freelance writer Debbie Nathan responded on Salon. "The kind of looking [Eichenwald] did can get a journalist arrested," she wrote, and she was "irked" that during an exchange of e-mails with him he hadn't taken that danger seriously. "When I stumbled on similar material earlier this year doing my own research," she explained, "I was terrified I'd be busted simply for doing my job as a member of the media." Despite laws forbidding the public to even visit child-porn sites, journalists must be able to, Nathan argued, to test "government claims about how prevalent child porn really is. . . . Otherwise the government can use our fear and loathing of kiddie porn to make false political claims. And to terrorize people like me." If there was no way Nathan could have legally visited child-porn sites -- well, of course that meant there was no legal way Eichenwald could have done so either.

Nathan's story had barely been posted when Salon repudiated it and took it down. "In fact," the site explained, "federal law does offer some legal protection for journalists and other researchers. An 'affirmative defense' may exist that would protect such work under certain circumstances, and the opinion asserted by Nathan that her work, and the work of other journalists, would constitute a violation of the law was inaccurate." 

Readers and bloggers were outraged. "Salon's editors only allege that there may be an affirmative defense, not that there is one," one poster argued. "So Nathan's article can be disclaimed to express her concern that it could be a violation and it still stands. This is not a legitimate correction. It is overt censorship." 

Here's the law. Decide for yourself.

Salon didn't yield. Instead, it ran a second, much more elaborate correction, in a format that didn't allow for responses. This time it didn't just say Nathan was wrong about the law, it explained how nimbly and responsibly Eichenwald and the Times had stayed within it. "The Times reported to federal authorities all of the potentially illegal content it inadvertently viewed and made it clear that the paper did not copy or retain any illegal images. Salon has no reason to doubt Eichenwald's and the Times' account of these actions." For good measure, Salon repeated itself: "The assertion that there was no law regarding inadvertent discovery with which the Times could comply was incorrect. Any implication that the conduct of the New York Times or Mr. Eichenwald was illegal was also incorrect."

When journalists throw up their hands like that and say they were wrong, wrong, wrong, it means one thing -- lawyers told them to. Sure enough, the January/February 2007 issue of Extra!, a journal published by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, says Eichenwald read Nathan's piece and threatened to sue both Nathan and Salon for libel. According to Extra! a passage in Nathan's story claiming Eichenwald had "looked at a lot of kiddie porn" sent shivers down his spine. "There could be, by necessity, a referral to Child Services and the removal of children from my home," Extra! had him explaining. Eichenwald's admission would seem to reinforce Nathan's argument about the law, not contradict it--but whatever. The Salon piece had disappeared and it wasn't coming back, and there was nothing Nathan could do about it except fire off e-mail to people who might be interested in what she'd been through. I'm a friend from her days long ago at the Reader, so I was one of them.

Jump to the present: On March 6 the New York Times ran an unusually long correction of the original story and essay Eichenwald wrote about that 18-year-old boy back in 2005. It was actually more of a confession than a correction -- the Times admitted that Eichenwald (who's no longer at the Times) had at one point sent the boy a $2,000 check and should have said so: "Times policy forbids paying the subjects of articles for information or interviews."

News of the check came out as a trial got under way in Ann Arbor, Michigan, of a man charged with criminal sexual misconduct involving the youth. On March 7 Eichenwald took the stand, and a tart account of what he had to say promptly showed up on the New York magazine Web site. "It could have been renamed '$2,000 Check v. Journalism 101' -- and Eichenwald's testimony showed he knows he broke the rules," New York reported. "Fearing [the youth] was under 18, Eichenwald offered to send $2,000 but only if [the youth] provided a full name and a mailing address," New York went on. "He got both and sent the check but opted not to turn the information over to the police. Instead, [Eichenwald] said today, he made a date to meet [the youth] at Los Angeles International Airport." That's where, according to Eichenwald's testimony, he told the youth he was a straight reporter and explained that "he paid that money to save your soul." 

When the youth said he wanted out of the porn business Eichenwald pitched a story to his editor, and soon the "incredible story" was told. "But," New York admonished, "one detail got lost: the check. And now, in the Michigan courtroom, Eichenwald said he knew the payment was 'a little bizarre,' and that in issuing it, he'd 'gone off the deep end.'"

The New York piece was signed by its reporter, Debbie Nathan.

UPDATE: The saga continues. Eichenwald responded to Nathan's New York article with a long, angry letter to Romenesko that attacks the press in general for not telling his story accurately and Nathan in particular, describing her as someone "who has been nursing a deep and public anger against me following a ugly confrontation in the fall." Eichenwald announced, "I have instructed my attorney to file a $10 million libel suit against her immediately, involving both her original and more recent libels." According to gawker.com, the suit's going to be filed in Dallas, in either state or federal court. Eichenwald lives down there. 

UPDATE: As of Wednesday, March 14, there was still no sign of a suit. By now some long, analytic responses to Eichenwald's letter had been posted at Romenesko.

In his elegiaic meditation in Thursday's New York Times on Scooter Libby and the White House he served, David Brooks, a conservative, showed he'd like to think the best of both of them. He managed that with Libby -- "You can convince me that Libby is guilty, but I’ll always believe he’s a good man." The White House was a harder nut to crack, and the best Brooks could do was try to mitigate its behavior by recalling its upbringing: "When you think back to the White House of 2003, the period the trial explores, you will discover a White House consumed by a feverish sense of mission. Staff members in those days went to work wondering whether this would be the day they would die. There was a sense that any day a bomb might wipe out downtown Washington. Senior officials were greeted each morning by intense intelligence briefings. On June 14, 2003, for example, Libby received a briefing with 27 items and 11 pages of terrorist threats. Someone once told me that going from the president’s daily briefing to the next event on Mr. Bush’s schedule, which might be a photo-op with a sports team, was like leaving '24' and stepping into 'Sesame Street.' No wonder administration officials were corporate on the outside but frantic within."

You have to wonder--how many of those threats covering 11 briefing pages on June 14, 2003, were real and how many were rubbish, either the usual rubbish that every administration has to wade through or rubbish buffed and massaged and passed upward by subordinates who knew it was wanted at the top? How many of those threats would have seemed not nearly so threatening to a White House with more wise old hands than those President Bush assembled? 

Last October I wrote a column about John Mueller, a professor of political science at Ohio State who reasoned in a Foreign Affairs essay that government is incapable of keeping terrorists entirely at bay, that since they haven't struck the U.S. since 9/11 it's likely there are none trying to strike us. Mueller proposed that the terrorist threat "has been massively exaggerated." 

It's old hat to accuse the White House of scaring the bejabbers out of us just to keep us in line. But even if Mueller's right, nobody in the 2003 White House that Brooks described would have thought so at the time. Mitigation of the Bush presidency begins with the generous idea that the people making the terrible decisions were terrified themselves.

Pundits determined to protest the media's indulgence of the heedless, lotus-eating masses as civilization collapses around us have a new symbol of their concern in the mortal remains of Anna Nicole Smith.

Bob Herbert, New York Times: "Ms. Smith may be dead and rapidly decomposing, but there's too much fun still to be reaped from her story to let it die yet. . . . There are other stories out there, but they aren't nearly as much fun."

Matt Taibbi, alternet.org: "Most of the rest of us, apparently, would rather sniff Anna Nicole Smith's corpse than find out what our tax dollars are actually paying for."

Frank Rich, New York Times: "Cable surfers have tuned out Iraq for a war with laughs: the battle over Anna Nicole's decomposing corpse."

As you can see, these sharp social critics are just as eager as lesser commentators to deal with Ms. Smith as not merely a corpse but one in an actual state of decay. As of Monday morning, here's the count from Google:

"Anna Nicole" and "corpse": 486,000 citations.

"Anna Nicole" and "rapidly decomposing": 48,500 citations.

"Anna Nicole" and "former topless dancer's rapidly decomposing corpse," a stretch of bravado writing by JIm Loney of Reuters in a story used around the world: 64 citations.

If you're a journalist, do you remember what you thought when you found out that Stephen Glass had been making up those amazing stories he used to publish in the New Republic? Did you think, well, boys will be boys, especially when they're young reporters on the make? No, me neither. What's more, Shattered Glass, the movie made about that sorry episode, may be the best movie about the press I've ever seen. So I guess I've got two points of disagreement with New York Times movie critic Manohla Dargis.

One's that film. She thinks it was a little silly. This I just learned by reading her review of Breach, the new movie by the director of Shattered Glass, Billy Ray. "Mr. Ray's unapologetic seriousness is one of the film's strongest assets," writes Dargis of Breach. "Even so, only a filmmaker with a naive, blinkered view both of journalism and human nature, and with so little grasp of what can happen when youthful ambition meets institutional self-importance, could have been surprised by a Stephen Glass or reached such dizzying heights of outrage."

The other point of disagreement is over the business Dargis happens to be in. She should find someone to walk her through the Times newsroom and introduce her to a world of people capable of being surprised and outraged by a Stephen Glass--or by any impostor. 

Tribune arts critic Alan Artner is the go-to guy on James Wood, and when the former head of the Art Institute of Chicago was named president of the J. Paul Getty Trust last week, Artner’s the one major newspapers turned to. The New York Times quoted from Artner’s 2004 evaluation of the Art Institute, written when Wood retired after 25 years there: “Long the home of outstanding collections, the place now speaks of integrity where once it was caprice.” And the Los Angeles Times, the Getty’s hometown paper, interviewed Artner on Wood’s Chicago years.

Who didn’t go to Artner? His own paper. The Tribune picked up the LA story but chopped off the part where Artner was.