All the conventional wisdom that's fit to print

Remarkably, there is an entire article in the NYT about "party gridlock in Washington" that doesn't even contain the word "filibuster", let alone any explanation of its historically unprecedented abuse. It's "analysis" like this that prevents me from feeling all that bad when I hear that newspapers are going under.

NYT falls down again

This time on a Pentagon report that erroneously concluded that "1 in 7" prisoners released from Gitmo returned to the battlefield. The real number, once you factor out people who were not terrorists before their incarceration (but who became radicalized by the experience), is 1 in 20. Which is pretty striking, because it means that it is possible that we created more terrorists than we released, pretty well illustrating how it could be that the whole Gitmo project was counterproductive.* And yet, Cheney was able to quote this false statistic during the public debate between him and Obama on national security.

To the Times' credit, though, this story was written by their public editor.

* You can't necessarily conclude that anyone who was not a terrorist before Gitmo but who became one afterwards indeed became a terrorist because of their experience at Gitmo; it might have been the case that they would have become a terrorist even if they hadn't been incarcerated. You'd have to examine each case on its own. Still, though, I think there is enough circumstantial evidence in this to strongly suspect that their incarceration in Gitmo caused them to become terrorists--and this should have been the story.

NYT to add Twitter section alongside Sports, Business, etc.

Another Twitter article! But I take exception to this:

“Basically, for 99.9 percent of people on Twitter, it is about updating friends and colleagues about how the cat rolled over,” he said. “For a tenth of a percent it is a marketing tool.”

What about making jokes?

Only Nixon could go to China; only Rachel Swarns could mention Michelle's purple power suit

I was perusing The Caucus today, and came across this subtly tone-deaf bit of writing:

Michelle Obama stepped into the public-policy spotlight as first lady for the first time on Thursday, hailing a new law that will give women greater power to challenge sex discrimination in the workplace.

...

Mrs. Obama’s comments marked her first public appearance since she moved into the White House with her family last week. She stood in a purple power suit alongside Lilly M. Ledbetter, a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company plant in Alabama.

My first thought was that if you're talking about Michelle Obama's support of anti-sex discrimination legislation then you probably don't want to go out of your way to mention what she happens to be wearing. But then I noticed that the author of the post was a lady, so I thought, "Well that's okay then."

And, yes, this blog will now be devoted entirely to nitpicking the writing at the NYT. Because, you know, I'm in a position to make those criticisms.

Adobe plug

As a loyal Adobe employee, I am pleased to link to an instance of Flash being used for good instead of evil. Everyone's always saying how much they hate Flash, but 99% of the time what's really being hated is Flash content (i.e., ads).

Cowardice at the New York Times

The New York Times editorializes that "top officials" in the Bush administration should be investigated for their role in implementing a torture program, with the possibility of bringing charges--however, it somehow stops short of saying that Cheney and Bush should be held accountable as well:

Now, a bipartisan report by the Senate Armed Services Committee has made what amounts to a strong case for bringing criminal charges against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld; his legal counsel, William J. Haynes; and potentially other top officials, including the former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and David Addington, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff.

The report shows how actions by these men “led directly” to what happened at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in secret C.I.A. prisons.

It said these top officials, charged with defending the Constitution and America’s standing in the world, methodically introduced interrogation practices based on illegal tortures devised by Chinese agents during the Korean War.

It's all quite baffling. Why shouldn't Cheney and Bush be investigated along with Rumsfeld and other "top officials"? If the torture programs was somehow carried out without the knowledge or approval of the elected officials in charge, then an investigation should bear that out. And if the elected officials did approve the programs, then they should be held at least as accountable as their underlings, if not more so. It simply does not make sense to believe that we should consider bringing charges against officials as high ranking as the Secretary of Defense, and yet at the same time also believe that the President that Secretary served under should get a free pass.

Of course, the editorial doesn't explicitly state that Cheney and Bush should be exempt--but the omission is glaring. I imagine that there was quite a heated discussion amongst the editorial board about how high to set the target--whether it would be "top officials", or Rumsfeld, or all the way up to Bush. I imagine that they believed, in the end, that calling for the investigation of Bush and his possible arrest for war crimes would be going too far, banishing the paper to the "angry left" and polarizing a debate that can only succeeed if it remains unpolarized. Maybe they're right.

However, at the end of the day, the press isn't doing its job if it refuses to take risks in speaking truth to power when the stakes are highest. I understand that a newspaper can only be persuasive to a large number of people if it remains, by and large, comfortably within the mainstream. But what is the point of saving up all that "persuasion capital" if you don't spend it on something as important as holding an American president responsible for war crimes? Maybe Barack Obama cannot let himself be perceived as trying to take down the soon-to-be ex-President, but there is no reason why the New York Times should have any reticence.

By refusing to "go there", the NYT reinforces the conventional wisdom that to hold President Bush himself accountable for war crimes is outside the mainstream and not a view that Serious People hold. But this conventional wisdom will have to be overturned if America is to even begin to rectify the abuses that have been going on since September 11.

The AP will be here all night, ladies and gentlemen

My sister pointed me to this AP article in the NYT, which is just a bunch of Yugo jokes. As she says: "WTF? Why was that in the NYT????"

EDIT: Possible explanation, again from my sister: "Have since found a separate article explaining that Yugos are not going to be made anymore. Maybe it was supposed to be a little sidebar to run with that article in print, and it wasn't supposed to get picked up on it's own. That's what my editor brain thinks." I think that's right.

It reminds one of T. Herman Zweibel

There is a wonderful feature over at that pro-Garfield rag, the New-York Times News-paper. You should check it out.

Showing a little leg

Check out the weird language in this NYT article about Obama's even-keeled temperament:

At the town hall debate Tuesday night, Mr. Obama largely stuck to facts, figures, and programmatic detail as he talked about the economy and domestic issues. He didn’t take advantage of the town hall format to show a bit of leg, humanity-wise.

Yeah, Obama should really be showing off those gams--empathy-wise.

The press: still not capable of calling a lie a lie

The headline in the NYT is "McCain Barbs Stirring Outcry as Distortions"; it should be, "McCain Distortions Stirring Outcry". But at least the McCain-has-a-truth-problem narrative is beginning to take shape.

What is this guy doing?!

It looks like he's just aimlessly firing a machine gun in some field:

Get back to work, guy!

When gentility breeds inaccuracy

So, the news story is: a hot mic recorded Jesse Jackson saying something bad about Obama. Now, of course, the New York Times, being a "family newspaper", will not actually just print what he said (notwithstanding the fact that anyone can find out what he said via simple Google search), so instead the Times beats around the bush:

Mr. Jackson’s words, which included a vulgar reference, were recorded by a live microphone on Sunday.

And:

The comments, which came when Mr. Jackson thought he was speaking privately, were brought to light on Wednesday when Bill O’Reilly, the host of “The O’Reilly Factor,” announced his intention to play the exchange. At least one of the words had to be blocked out.

Frustrating, right? The reader is left with a burning question at the end of the article: just what the hell did Jesse Jackson say? Just spit it out already! And the information is not trivial: just exactly what vulgarity was used sheds a lot of light on what Jackson's real opinions are, as well as how offended Obama and his supporters ought to be. And from all the circumlocution, you get the idea that what Jackson said was the worst of the worst. But of course, we don't want to poison the mind of avid New York Times reader L'il Timmy--L'il Timmy who, if he is above the age of 6, knows full well how to find Jackson's comments--and worse--using a new-fangled invention called "the internets". And so the vital information remains obscured.

My question to these Times editors is: just whose sensibilities are you protecting by not just printing the damn quote? My guess: a whole lot of ninnies who take pointless umbrage at any kind of break with tradition, no matter how much sense it makes.

Less squeamish sources, such as Fox News (whose own Bill O'Reilly broke the story), have the whole thing:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson apologized Wednesday for saying Barack Obama is “talking down to black people” during what Jackson thought was a private conversation before a FOX News interview Sunday.

Jackson was speaking to a guest at the time about Obama’s speeches in black churches and his support for faith-based charities. Jackson added before going live, “I want to cut his nuts off.”

Now, Times, was that really so bad?

Epilogue: Is it just me, or is that a weirdly intense thing to say? It'd be like if I said, "Man, that roommate of mine got chunky peanut butter again--I'M GONNA CUT HIS NUTS OFF!!!" I mean, I just don't see how Obama's run-of-the-mill pandering could give rise to such visceral imagery. And if you look at the guy Jackson's talking to, that guy is, to his credit, clearly weirded out as well.

The war-free evening news

An article in the Times today talks about dwindling coverage of the wars on the major networks:

According to data compiled by Andrew Tyndall, a television consultant who monitors the three network evening newscasts, coverage of Iraq has been “massively scaled back this year.” Almost halfway into 2008, the three newscasts have shown 181 weekday minutes of Iraq coverage, compared with 1,157 minutes for all of 2007. The “CBS Evening News” has devoted the fewest minutes to Iraq, 51, versus 55 minutes on ABC’s “World News” and 74 minutes on “NBC Nightly News.” (The average evening newscast is 22 minutes long.)

It is a little surprising to me that at this point in the year the networks have devoted less than an hour to reporting on the Iraq War (the fact that I get virtually zero of my news from the evening news notwithstanding). It is very surprising to me, however, that reporters are having trouble getting their stories out. I mean, I understand that 22 minutes is not a lot of time, but it's not as though television is the only possible outlet for news. There is an invention called the internet which allows limitless content to be delivered to the viewer--why not have the reporters make their stories available online?

The thing is, you hear a lot about how the internet is causing old media to go extinct--TV news divisions are whithering, newspapers are folding or reducing staff--but what hasn't changed is the real value of original news reporting. Without reporters out in the world writing stories and giving first-person accounts, there would be no news content to blog about or analyze endlessly on television. Reporting is still the fuel that runs the news-media engine. And so I think that not distributing these news stories--if not on TV, then on the internet somehow--amounts to throwing away something valuable for no good reason.

One innovative thing TV news organizations could do is start posting their reports on YouTube and embedding advertisements into the video itself to raise revenue. That way, the video would be searchable and easily embeddable in in the blogs, and gain far more exposure than if it sat on some little-visited proprietary news site somewhere.

Another thing the news organizations could do is start desanitizing their war reporting. As it is now, there is a general aversion to showing real violence and blood and gore--especially when it is American soldiers who are bearing the brunt of it. The genteel standards of evening TV news--and TV news in general--forbids much of this, but I think the same limitations do not apply on the internet (you could simply have a disclaimer that warned the viewer of graphic content). So you could have really gritty, real reporting, with people cursing and dying and everything.

I would add also that it's not just the genteel standards of TV that bar a lot of the grittier coverage of the war--there is also the residual effect of the pseudo-patriotic self-censoring mode that causes the media to suppress "negative" images of the war. When was the last time we saw a casket on television? The last time we saw a dead American soldier? This is a war, no? These things do happen, right? Maybe one reason people aren't very interested in the war coverage is because the war coverage typically omits the most important and visceral part of the story.

PS: It's kind of interesting to note that much of the substance for this NYT story comes from an interview on the Daily Show. Indeed, the Daily Show interview is so central to the article that it seems if it weren't for the Daily Show, the article never would have been written. I'm not sure if this means that the Times sucks or that Jon Stewart is awesome.

"Race is over", NYT meta-declares

There is a NYT front page article that says that the punditry says that--with Obama and Clinton splitting North Carolina and Indiana yesterday--the race is over:

Very early this morning, after many voters had already gone to sleep, the conventional wisdom of the elite political pundit class that resides on television shifted hard, and possibly irretrievably, against Senator Hillary Clinton’s continued viability as a presidential candidate.

The moment came shortly after midnight Eastern time, captured in a devastatingly declarative statement from Tim Russert of NBC News: “We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it,” he said on MSNBC.

The comment was echoed on Drudge and soon repeated by many others.

Of course, the pundits will inevitably start talking about the NYT article...it's turtles all the way down, I'm telling ya.