Decided to make better use of the sidebars, so I’ve moved a few things around. Among other things, this allows me to get rid of the notes about t-shirts and booksignings and so on that were always stuck up above the blog. Which means you’ll have to retrain yourself to read from the top of the page, rather than skipping over the first few paragraphs. Hey, I’ve got your number.
I’m also considering accepting a limited amount of advertising, to help defray costs, but under very specific and arbitrary guidelines — for instance, it doesn’t feel right to me to accept advertising from specific political candidates, given what I do for a living.
This redesign does free up space for me to donate to worthwhile causes, such as the pro-choice march on April 25. I can’t make any promises, of course, but charities and nonprofits are encouraged to contact me (contact info now incorporated into the FAQ button over to your right).
Finally, my solemn pledge to you: as God is my witness, this site will never, ever feature blinking, flashing, animated advertising of any sort. I really hate that crap.
…on the radio network named after a clandestine CIA airline. I was dubious, but I’m enjoying it.
…don’t overlook Randi (sp?) Rhodes, after Franken. They’re not really promoting her, but she’s really on fire. I think she may be the breakout star of this thing.
If any of you are interested, Terry Gross has a pretty good (and I believe, pretty rare) interview with Neil Young up on the Fresh Air website (part one and part two).
I saw his Greendale show at Radio City Music Hall a few weeks back. I bought the CD some months before but promptly lost it in some stack of papers or something, so I was completely unfamiliar with the new music. It’s a rambling song cycle about three generations of a family living in a small coastal town, and he presents the music onstage accompanied by deliberately primitive video animation and live actors lip synching the lyrics. I’ve been listening to Neil Young for an awfully long time now, and I’ve seen any number of his self-re-invention tours — the synth/computer stuff, the various forays into hardcore country, the time at the Fillmore when he played an entire set of unfamiliar blues and rockabilly material, took an hour and a half intermission and then came back out and played the same set again (he was recording it for what would eventually become “This Note’s for You”). Anyway, I don’t go to a Neil Young concert expecting him to be Fat Elvis in Vegas, playing his Greatest Hits for the ten millionth time, but a lot of people apparently do — in between each song, as he set up the next one with a rambling narrative, there were morons in the audience screaming for “Down by the River” or whatever — to the point that he finally lost his patience and snapped, “Shut up, asshole!” Most of the audience applauded the sentiment, to their credit.
He had me for most of the set, though I have to admit my attention started to lag toward the end — it’s a lot, asking an audience to sit through an entire set of mostly-unfamiliar material. So by the time he did get to the greatest hits, my energy was drained. But that’s what I admire about Neil Young — he does what he wants to do, and you can either come along for the ride or not.
Why it is important that Tom Friedman post a correction
(Regular readers know what this is about. If you’re new to the party, you might want to go read this).
As a reader suggested, Friedman probably feels justified in not correcting his t-shirt anecdote because he’s simply relaying what someone else heard. If I write, “A man on the street told me that Tom Friedman’s columns are written by a team of trained monkeys,” then the only factual assertion is that this is what some guy on the street told me, and I guess I have no obligation to set the record straight. Even if it is repeatedly pointed out to me that Tom Friedman actually does write his own columns, and doesn’t even own a single trained monkey.
But do I owe my readers a correction when the demonstrably false anecdote I have broadcast becomes a widely-accepted urban legend?
Grubba had heard about the guy in a similar predicament who sold a T-shirt that said, “I lost my job to India and all I got was this (lousy) T-shirt.'’ The man reportedly made oodles of money.
Ironically, the story is about some workers whose jobs were offshored, who came up with the gimmick of selling themselves on eBay. Probably not the sort of triumphalist anecdote Friedman is likely to use.
At any rate, I really think Friedman needs to set the record straight on this one.
UPDATE: Rick Perlstein has an article on outsourcing in the Village Voice, which mentions the whole Friedman/t-shirt thing.
Not the old secret CIA airline, but rather, the new liberal talk radio network, which debuts today. (Sadly, my invitation to last night’s shindig must have gotten lost in the mail.)
Here’s the list of their launch stations. (It says they’ll be streaming too.)
And if you want to wish them luck, or suggest any, uh, guests, you can do so here.
(…honestly, if I can’t even get in as a guest on the liberal talk radio network, I might as well pack it in.)
(…their site may not be, you will pardon the expression, ready for prime time quite yet — the links above seem only to work sporadically.)
Ted Rall and I wrote very similar cartoons this week. And we both came up with the concept independently, all by our lonesomes. Sometimes these things happen. (More frequently with the mainstream daily political cartoonists, who often come up with the same idea in herds of ten and twenty.)
After the Friedman business, I had a brief email exchange with the fellow who answers Okrent’s email. Once it had been established beyond any remote possibility of doubt that the anecdote Friedman relayed was utterly fictional, I asked, “Can I tell my readers that a correction will be forthcoming?”
The reply, unfortunately, vanished in my email meltdown earlier this week, but to the best of my memory was as follows: “You may tell your readers that Mr. Okrent will address the issue of columnist corrections within the next two months.”
Of course they don’t make the stuff up (at least the good ones don’t). But many do use their material in ways that veer sharply from conventional journalistic practice. The opinion writer chooses which facts to present, and which to withhold.
For instance, Tom Friedman chooses to withhold from his readers the fact that his little story about the guy who lost his job and then made a fortune selling t-shirts joking about how he lost his job…was complete and utter bullshit. Never happened.
And this just leaves me scratching my head:
But if Safire asserts that there is a “smoking gun” linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein, then even David Corn’s best shots (which include many citations from Times news stories) aren’t going to prove it isn’t so. “An opinion may be wrongheaded,” Safire told me by e-mail last week, “but it is never wrong. A belief or a conviction, no matter how illogical, crackbrained or infuriating, is an idea subject to vigorous dispute but is not an assertion subject to editorial or legal correction.”
In other words, Safire just makes shit up, and the facts someone like David Corn may produce simply don’t matter.
(My opinion is that Safire’s head is embedded up his ass. Literally. Guy stumbles around doubled over, bumping into things all the time. Has to wear custom suits tailored to accomodate his peculiar condition. And since it’s my opinion, it may be wrongheaded, but it can’t be wrong.)
Shorter Times columnist correction policy: we don’t have to, nyaah nyaah nyaah.
…from Okrent’s sort-of-blog, here’s what appears to be the official policy:
None of this is meant to suggest that columnist can pick or choose which errors to correct. They are expected to correct every error. Anyone who refused to fulfill this critical obligation would not be a columnist for The New York Times very long. And none of this is meant to suggest that the editorial page editor can use the policy to duck responsibility for inaccuracies on the page. Whenever an error is brought to the attention of one of the Times editors, it goes to me, and through me to the columnist in question. These are some of the top writers in American journalism. They take their reputation for accuracy very, very seriously.
Go read this, and decide for yourself if Friedman is “ducking responsibility for inaccuries” in his column. (He has yet to issue a correction, though I am reliably informed by two different sources that he is fully aware of this little post of mine.)
Then write Okrent. And op-ed editor Gail Collins. And tell them what you think of New York Times op-ed columnists who do not, in fact, seem to “take their reputation for accuracy very, very seriously” at all.
I’m confident Ms. Collins will be sympathetic, given her own statement of principle: “It is my obligation to make sure no misstatements of fact on the editorial pages go uncorrected.”
…good email from a reader:
Agreed that the Safire assertion is bizarre. To say, “I believe there’s a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein,” or even simply, “There’s a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein” can probably meet Safire’s ‘can’t be proven wrong’ test.
But everyone knows what, “There’s a ’smoking gun’ linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein” means. “Smoking gun” is taken by any reasonable reader to be a journalistic term of art that means there’s some objective fact or even piece of physical evidence out there that anyone could examine. And that’s just not something you can state as a mere “belief” or “conviction” with nothing whatsoever to back it up.
These people are playing a cute little game with words wherein Mr. Okrent and Ms. Collins can claim concern journalistic “misstatements of fact.” But by the terms of the Safire Rule - which I take Okrent’s statement to mean it’s a view the Times endorses - hardly anything in an op-ed piece would rise to the level of a “statement of fact.” Oh, I suppose “the sun rises in the east” would constitute a statement of fact.
But then, Friedman is already clever enough to get around that problem. Thus, if he writes:
Yamini Narayanan . . responded with a revealing story: “I just read about a guy in America who says that starting next year, the sun will rise in the west. That means it will be daytime in America sooner, giving American workers a head start on the rest of the world (America being the ultimate ‘western’ country!) and thereby increasing the wealth of all Americans and erasing the hardship of any loss of jobs through offshoring!”
— then the “statement of fact” isn’t about the sun rising in the west, is it? It’s only about Yamini Narayanan having read about the guy who says it will be rising in the west. Nor would we even know whether it’s Narayanan or the “guy in America” who’s making economic claims for this geophysical shift. And that probably gets to be a pointless argument pretty quickly, doesn’t it?
The bottom line is, if this is indeed the Times’ last word on this issue, then they need to run a big disclaimer above every op-ed piece that states something like:
EDITOR’S NOTICE: Even though some of the things in the following column may sound to any reasonable reader like statements of objective “fact,” everything that follows is actually nothing more than a statement of the author’s “beliefs,” which, while they may be illogical, crackbrained or infuriating, are nevertheless exempt in every respect from the Times’ error correction policy.
Now, I should think that will give every Times columnist all the latitude they could ever hope for. Of course, I won’t bother reading them anymore - except to see what kind of BS the Trolls are currently feeding on.
The link in a previous post to the Philadelphia Magazine article factchecking David Brooks inspired writer Rick Perlstein (who is an acquaintance of mine) to send the following note to Daniel Okrent at the Times. Since it is unlikely to ever see print there, I thought I’d at least reproduce it here:
Dear Mr. Okrent:
I ask that you read through this entire article, “Boo Boos in
Paradise,” by Sasha Issenberg, in the April issue of Philadelphia
magazine. It’s actually a remarkable piece of journalism criticism:
The mistakes the author reveals in David Brooks’ (non-Times) articles
are bad enough. Worse, though, is Brooks’ reaction when caught. To
wit:
I went through some of the other instances where he made
declarations that appeared insupportable. He accused me of being “too
pedantic,” of “taking all of this too literally,” of “taking a joke
and distorting it.” “That’s totally unethical,” he said.
Now, to be fair to Brooks, Issenberg doesn’t situate the context for
the “unethical” quote. I think it would be appropriate for you to ask
David Brooks to clarify exactly what this writer did that was
unethical. And, weighing that’ response in the balance with Brooks’
apparent defense of jokes as reportorial method, it would be salutary
if you could work through the puzzle of whether Brooks has a point, or
if he is just thrashing about trying to defend the indefensible.
The integrity of the Times would certainly appear to implicated in the
answer.
…is that they’re not going to pursue these perjury charges against Clarke. They’ll find some excuse not to declassify his earlier testimony — if only we could, the American people would understand the truth, but you see, we just can’t endanger national security — and hope that the idea of Clarke the Liar will take hold in the public mind, without any real evidence. Remember, they’ve been fighting declassification of parts of that earlier report tooth and nail — there’s something there that could cut both ways.
Of course, we must also consider the possibility that Clarke did previously lie — on behalf of the Bush administration. Government officials have been known to do this on occasion. The only way someone is ever in a position to write a tell-all memoir is to have been a team player at some earlier point.
Nonetheless, Clarke’s basic allegation, that the Bushies were too fixated on Iraq at the expense of the war on terror, is backed up by numerous sources. Via Paul O’Neill, we know that an invasion of Iraq was a priority from day one. And then there’s Clarke’s friend, former counterterrorism advisor Rand Beers, who resigned after 35 years of civil service, disgusted with Bush’s I-lost-my-keys-in-the-alley-but-there’s-more-light-under-this-streetlamp foreign policy. Which is why he now works for John Kerry, according to the Washington Post::
He had briefly considered a think tank or an academic job but realized that he “never felt so strongly about something in my life” than he did about changing current U.S. policies. Of the Democratic candidates, Kerry offered the greatest expertise in foreign affairs and security issues, he decided. Like Beers, Kerry had served in Vietnam. As a civil servant, Beers liked Kerry’s emphasis on national service.
(Interestingly, Clarke was also close friends with John O’Neill, the FBI agent who resigned in disgust because he couldn’t get anyone to take his concerns about al Qaeda seriously. O’Neill, as longtime readers of this site may remember, took a job as head of security at the World Trade Center one week before September 11, 2001, and was killed in the attacks.)
And of course, Clarke’s story is also backed up by reality. The Bushies were fixated on Iraq at the expense of an effective counterterrorism strategy. Consider this nugget:
The fact that the Pentagon pulled the fighting force most equipped for hunting down Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan in March 2002 in order to pre- position it for Iraq cannot be denied.
Fifth Group Special Forces were a rare breed in the US military: they spoke Arabic, Pastun and Dari. They had been in Afghanistan for half a year, had developed a network of local sources and alliances, and believed that they were closing in on bin Laden.
Without warning, they were then given the task of tracking down Saddam. “We were going nuts on the ground about that decision,” one of them recalls.
“In spite of the fact that it had taken five months to establish trust, suddenly there were two days to hand over to people who spoke no Dari, Pastun or Arabic, and had no rapport.”
Along with the redeployment of human assets came a reallocation of sophisticated hardware. The US air force has only two specially-equipped RC135 U spy planes. They had successfully vectored in on al-Qaida leadership radio transmissions and cellphone calls, but they would no longer circle over the mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.
One question I have is: why has the Bush team’s response to Clarke been so haphazard? They’re obviously making it up as they go along — it’s as if they had no idea Clarke was about to go public with these charges. Which is bizarre, given that his book had to be vetted by the government before it could be published — in fact, the timing of the book’s release is apparently due to the fact that the vetting process held it up for an additional three months. They knew this was coming, and this hastily cobbled-together mudslinging fest is the best they could come up with?
I think it must be due to the insular world in which they operate. Going back to that Post article above — Beers was reluctant to discuss the inner workings of the White House, but his wife was more forthcoming:
“It’s a very closed, small, controlled group. This is an administration that determines what it thinks and then sets about to prove it. There’s almost a religious kind of certainty. There’s no curiosity about opposing points of view. It’s very scary. There’s kind of a ghost agenda.”
I think they are so out of touch with reality that they simply had no idea that Clarke’s charges would resonate with the public. And when they realized that they had made a terrible miscalculation, they had to scramble. The Bush administration is, at the moment, an desperate animal with its back to the wall — and facing down such a creature can be a very dangerous way to spend your time. I suspect that Richard Clarke’s rough ride is only beginning.
(Editing: the name of the FBI agent was, of course, John O’Neill, not Paul O’Neill.)
There’s just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false. According to Amazon.com sales data, one of Goodwin’s strongest markets has been deep-Red McAllen, Texas. That’s probably not, however, QVC country. “I would guess our audience would skew toward Blue areas of the country,” says Doug Rose, the network’s vice president of merchandising and brand development. “Generally our audience is female suburban baby boomers, and our business skews towards affluent areas.” Rose’s standard PowerPoint presentation of the QVC brand includes a map of one zip code — Beverly Hills, 90210 — covered in little red dots that each represent one QVC customer address, to debunk “the myth that they’re all little old ladies in trailer parks eating bonbons all day.”
“Everything that people in my neighborhood do without motors, the people in Red America do with motors,” Brooks wrote. “When it comes to yard work, they have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens.” Actually, six of the top 10 states in terms of illegal-alien population are Red.
“We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books,” Brooks asserted. A 2003 University of Wisconsin-Whitewater study of America’s most literate cities doesn’t necessarily agree. Among the study’s criteria was the presence of bookstores and libraries; 20 of the 30 most literate cities were in Red states.
“Very few of us,” Brooks wrote of his fellow Blue Americans, “could name even five nascar drivers, although stock-car races are the best-attended sporting events in the country.” He might want to take his name-recognition test to the streets of the 2002 nascar Winston Cup Series’s highest-rated television markets — three of the top five were in Blue states. (Philadelphia was fifth nationally.)
(By the way, the David Brooks piece from the Atlantic Monthly which the author dissects also serves as a launching point for a scathing essay by Thomas Frank in the new Harpers.)
