I clicked, because I wanted to see what Joe Biden had to say under the snazzy headline "Obama: On the way to a failed presidency?" The link goes to a Washington Post column with that headline — but it's by Katrina vanden Heuvel ("editor and publisher of the Nation" who "writes a weekly online column for The Post").
Can anyone explain why the automatic aggregator Memeorandum would have picked up that column and attached Biden's name to it? I'm guessing the answer is pretty boring: "Joe Biden" appears in a line above the column, near the top of the page, that begins "Hot Topics." That does give rise to a new puzzle: What's hot about Biden? Clicking on his name, I see that he "heads to the Hill to talk taxes" today. Sizzling!
"... screaming 'Tahhd! Tahhd!' at her husband, piercing the tranquillity of the Alaskan paradise?"
The Washington Post staff writer — Hank Stuever — doesn't know what to make of Sarah Palin's reality show.
You're flipping channels and you randomly land on "Sarah Palin's Alaska"... It's a show about . . . hmmm.
About a busy mom with a sporty husband. Their many offspring run from a soldier son in his 20s down to a mentally disabled adorable toddler and an unexpected grandson with curly blond hair. But quick enough it seems to be a show about a woman who fancies herself as something of a nature enthusiast who wants to take advantage of the short-but-sweet Alaskan summer. So is it about the li'l town where she lives? Is it about flowers and birdies and double rainbows? Is it like "Northern Exposure" meets "An American Family?"
You still don't know....
Stuever is imagining "you" flipping channels and arriving at this show, but for "you" to have this reaction, "you" would need not to recognize the celebrity or the celebrity-at-home genre of reality show. Maybe 10 years ago, this hapless "you" would have puzzled over a show like that, back before "The Osbournes" was the next big thing. But now? Come on, "you" is dumb!
Reporters [have] asked me what this meant for the death of print or the decline of The Post. I pushed back, as I happen to believe that newspapers are going to be around for a long time. Let's not get carried away here.... Still, there's an awful lot of energy and excitement in the Web world.
I'm wondering, after reading this hyperventilation in the always-awful "On Faith" section of the Washington Post. The author is Gustav Niebuhr:
In the United States, short of causing arson, you can burn a book, just as you can America's most sacred symbol, the U.S. flag. It's Constitutionally guaranteed. Free speech.
The moral question here is, how do we handle our freedom, which permits us appalling, anti-social acts?
As an American who deeply believes in free speech, I regard burning a book as a nearly unspeakably terrible thing. It is an assault on knowledge, and the societal value of allowing people to read and decide for themselves whether what they read has meaning to them. Torch a book and you at least symbolically deny your fellow men and women that freedom.
What's more, you replicate images of a political brutality--book burnings in Germany in the 1930s--that will haunt our planet for generations to come.
Good lord. There's an immense difference between burning your own book as a way of saying "I hate this book" — which adds more expression to the marketplace of ideas — and the confiscation and destruction of other people's books — which is about depriving people of access to expression that they want to consume.
It's offensive to say "I hate this book" about a book that some people revere, but that's the point. It's a vigorous, vicious expression. Burning your own copy of a book is the same thing. Unless you possess the only copy of the book — or, perhaps, an artistically or historically distinctive copy — the burning is just a way of being showily expressive and getting a big audience. It's absurd that any clown who wants attention can light a tiny fire and become world famous. Get a grip, people.
I find it hard to believe that Niebuhr and hyperventilators like him are big readers of important books, because their minds seem pretty feeble to me. "Torch a book and you at least symbolically deny your fellow men and women that freedom." At least symbolically. Or, to put it another way, i.e., truthfully: You don't deny other people anything. You give them something: the information that is your hatred of a book. And as they "decide for themselves whether what they read has meaning," they can take into account that you hate the book. It's not going to be a very influential piece of information, because you're just some attention whore who burned a book instead of articulating a pithy critique of it.
Yes, conceivably, a private group burning its own books might be intimidating, but that would only be because we have other, much greater reasons to fear that group or the movement it represents. And yes, when you burn a book, you adopt an image associated with the Nazis, but that marginalizes you. We don't cower every time some marginal idiot draws a swastika or does the Hitler salute. You're free to express yourself, but I think lavishing outrage on some nobody empowers him. Why not ignore what is worthless? It's a marketplace of ideas. Why are you even browsing the crap?
Says the Washington Post, a propos of the Pew poll. Well, can we have a poll about whether Americans believe that admitting to peeing in pools is a belief? I say it's not, but maybe that puts me in the 20% of Americans that WaPo would like us to be seen as marginal.
Asserts David Broder, and I have to laugh. 1. There's the inane elevated tone of the writing: "impending elevation," "capstone of the judiciary." You know you're reading bullshit, so, thanks for that. 2. Who can possibly believe the people of Washington are abuzz over the effect Elena Kagan will have on the Supreme Court? 3. Didn't everyone figure out many weeks ago that Kagan, replacing Stevens, is only going to keep things the same?
To his credit, Broder proceeds to posit the theory that is my question #3. He puts it in the mouth of a former attorney general next to whom Broder was seated at a dinner party the other day. Gotta put in the seat-work at those D.C. dinner parties to dig up ideas for WaPo columns, you know. Broder decides this is "probably the conventional wisdom," then begins his next paragraph: "That is what they say, and I have no legal credentials to challenge their conclusion." Yes, but you are some kind of journalist — right? — so you could have asked some more people before you took what that one fellow/lady dribbled out at the dining table as what everyone was saying.
But, as I told my dinner companion...
Oh, lord, the thrill of being transported to this scintillating dinner party, in Washington, with an ancient pundit extracting conventional wisdom from a once-powerful lawyer!
... I suspect that he is wrong and that Kagan's joining Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor on the bench will change the high court in ways that no one foresees.
Quelle riposte! Oh! Would that I could be in such company! The elderly lawyer manages to say something mind-crushingly obvious, and the old pundit, keeping the colloquy going, with no legal knowledge, disagrees.
I say this based on what I saw happen in The Post's newsroom and many others when female reporters and editors arrived, in increasing numbers, starting in the 1970s and '80s.
Now, our trusty columnist does the hard work of dredging up memories from 30+ years ago. I saw those female reporters in the 70s... humming "I Am Woman" as they changed the world of men for the better... And yet you still have your job, cluttering up the pages of the Washington Post with this self-indulgent nonsense. Why hasn't some brilliant lady ousted you yet? I mean, this column has you recounting a conversation that — if I'd participated in it — I'd have gone home feeling ashamed that I'd been so dull at the dinner-table. Yet you serve it up as leftovers in a Washington Post column. And now you are feeding me this warmed over Women's Liberation stuff that is refuted — refudiated! — by the fact that you are still here writing this column.
They changed the culture of the newspaper business and altered the way everyone, male or female, did the work.
And this has something to do with Elena Kagan, coming onto the Supreme Court, where there isn't ONE Justice who hasn't shared that bench with a woman. Stevens — have you noticed? — was the last Justice who served on an all-male Supreme Court.
The women who came onto the political beat asked candidates questions that would not have occurred to male reporters. They saw the candidates' lives whole, while we were much more likely to deal only with the official part of it. So the scope of the candidate profiles expanded, and the realm of privacy began to shrink.
They saw the candidates' lives whole... Broder's elevated diction goes wild. The realm of privacy began to shrink... Please don't reveal your shrinkage problems, Dave! I don't want to hear about your realm... your domain....
He's dredging up material from the 80s "In a Different Voice" Women's Studies era, and it's borderline insulting. It's Broderline insulting.
They also changed the rules for reporters themselves. When I joined the press corps in the 1960 presidential campaign, I was formally instructed by a senior reporter for the New York Times on the "west of the Potomac rule." What happened between consenting adults west of the Potomac was not to be discussed with bosses, friends and especially family members east of the Potomac.
Look out! The floodgates have opened! Broder's going back to 1960!
It was a protective, chauvinistic culture, and it changed dramatically when more than the occasional female reporter boarded the bus or plane.
Hey, Broder. Remember the 90s? How'd you guys do with the Clinton sexual harassment story? Are you keeping up with the allegations against Al Gore?
I don't know how having three strong-minded female justices serving simultaneously for the first time will change the world of the Supreme Court. But I will not be surprised if this small society does not change for all its members.
That's right. You don't know whether 3 women with 6 modern men will be different from 2 women with 7 modern men, and you haven't gotten up out of your antique comfy chair to do one thing to find out. Yet Broder, at this point, has run out of material on his subject. Go to the link and you'll see that he pads out his column with 200+ more words on other Kagan-related stuff that was casually rattling around in his... eminent dome... his venerable cranium... his... nugatory noggin.
By "appeal," of course, they don't mean that voters find them appealing. I know that without reading the article. Is anyone clueless enough to think otherwise?
First paragraph:
President Obama is declaring his stake in the November midterm elections, as his Democratic Party prepares to announce an ambitious strategy to appeal to independent voters in its quest to maintain control of Congress.
Could you please settle down and become a newspaper?
Obama plans to issue a call-to-action video message to his supporters on Monday. Democratic officials called the video the first in a series of personal efforts designed to rekindle the grass-roots momentum that propelled Obama to the presidency -- this time, in a way that will benefit his party's congressional and gubernatorial candidates.
Let me try to understand. The Washington Post, which aspires to prestige in journalism, is front-paging the news that the President of the United States is going to release a campaign video and that he wants his party to win in the November elections? And it presents this non-news in cheesy PR language? Do the editors have no shame?
And what the hell does "designed to rekindle the grass-roots momentum" even mean? A presidential video is the opposite of grass roots.
Also, it's a mixed metaphor. Kindle... grass. Are we growing grass or burning things? Or did you mean to make me think of a prairie fire? Remember "Prairie Fire: The Politics of Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism" (1974) by Bill Ayers, et al.? ("We are a guerrilla organization. We are communist women and men, underground in the United States for more than four years.")
This is the report that is dominating the news coverage of yesterday's protest at the Capitol. I have no idea who was the source of any saliva and nasty words, but it's important to realize how easy it is for someone who isn't typical of the group or who is even its adversary to do things like this. It's one of the oldest dirty tricks.
It's also important to distinguish "angry protesters" from particular individuals who cross the line into the kind real ugliness or violence that should be condemned. There's nothing wrong with showing anger at the thing that motivates you to protest. That's what protests are for! The members of Congress have a lot of power, and they ought to have to hear the anger their exercise of that power is causing. It's outrageous for them to pose as victims without very good cause. So what if some idiot said a bad word? That's a trivial distraction compared to the power they are about to exercise in the face of such strong opposition to what they are about to do. [ADDED: I'm not approving of ugly epithets, just emphasizing the comparison between an individual ordinary citizen, who might not be very sane/smart/educated, and a member of Congress, who wields great power. The member of Congress should not pretend he's weak, when he is in fact strong. It's also exceedingly lame — and, frankly, racist — for white people to be so quick to think of powerful black politicians as vulnerable and besieged. I assume the black politicians laugh at them in private. The willingness of black politicians to make power moves in racial terms suggests to me that they know exactly what they are doing: leveraging patronization.]
From what I heard — from Meade, who was there — the people at yesterday's protest were unusually nice and friendly and well-behaved. Still, the Washington Post uses the term "angry protesters." That's a journalistic device to delegitimitize the demonstration by merging everyone into the few persons who said something racist/homophobic. That's not fair and it's not accurate, but it has been the stock MSM treatment of the Tea Party movement all along.
ADDED: Here's the video I'm seeing. Is there any more video than this?
Because what you hear there is: 1. Booing, and 2. the chant "Kill the bill." Playing the race card for nothing? Shame!
ADDED: A member of Congress said he was spit on? Guards were right there. Was no one detained? Show me the person who was arrested. Otherwise, I'm assuming it's a lie. UPDATE:
Tea Party protesters [say] they never heard racially charged language in the crowd. The man detained for allegedly spitting at Cleaver was also let go after, according to Capitol Police, Cleaver was unable to positively identify him.
As one of two managing editors, he’s responsible for The Post's features content and oversees its Web site. But he also sits in on news meetings and occasionally gets involved in “hard” news.
Narisetti said today he now realizes that his tweets, although intended for a private audience of about 90 friends and associates, were unwise.
They were “personal” observations, he said. “But I also realize that... seeing that the managing editor of The Post is weighing in on this, it’s a clear perception problem.”
He has closed his Twitter account.
What were Narasetti's tewible tweets? Stuff like:
“We can incur all sorts of federal deficits for wars and what not... But we have to promise not to increase it by $1 for healthcare reform? Sad.”
“Sen Byrd (91) in hospital after he falls from ‘standing up too quickly.” How about term limits. Or retirement age. Or commonsense to prevail.”
He hopped on some sensitive toes. Or he expressed himself — gasp! — personally — in a medium that is all about the personal touch. But he wielded the corporate media label, and his being opinionated undercuts his corporate media function.
In today’s hyper-sensitive political environment, Narisetti’s tweets could be seen as one of The Post’s top editors taking sides on the question of whether a health-care reform plan must be budget neutral. On Byrd, his comments could be construed as favoring term limits or mandatory retirement for aging lawmakers.
Could be seen? Well, duh! His ability to ignore that (and the Post's continuing ability to toy with the possibility that he didn't express an opinion) could be construed as believing that we readers are naive and dumb.
Many readers already view The Post with suspicion and believe that the personal views of its reporters and editors influence the coverage. The tweets could provide ammunition.
Ha ha. So you were hoping to fly under the radar, but you've started to worry that we're on to you? And so, you need to take precautions. But of course, you not only have opinions, you want to take advantage of the promotion that can be wrung out of Twitter and other new media that threatens to get out in front of you. What a dilemma!
Narisetti’s decision to stop posting coincides with today’s release of new Post newsroom guidelines for using Facebook, Twitter and other online social networks.
Oh, no! The party's over! The web, for all it's wild, casual fun must be taken seriously. But I wanna run wild and free over here and still command all the authority of my profession!
The truth is, there is a price to be paid for speaking freely. You get things and you give things up. You need to think about what you want, make decisions, and deal with the consequences. I know: I — a law professor — have been doing that for years.
When Narisetti heard about the coming WaPo crackdown, he tweeted:
“For flagbearers of free speech, some newsroom execs have the weirdest double standards when it comes to censoring personal views.”
Ah, but now Narisetti has folded his wings and supports the new guidelines. Here, read them:
When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism.
And I thought that even in the newspaper, items labeled "opinion" or "analysis" or whatever could range well beyond pure fact and objectivity and could get creative with language and tone. How does tweeting under an individual name break these journalistic principles?
I'm guessing that the real problem is not that we learn that the editors are real people with their own ideas and that they are not neutral to the bone. I think it's that the transparent revelation of personal opinion would allow us to see that the editors all or almost all slant in the same political direction, and that's something the newspaper would like to hide. If gulling us into thinking the paper is written by neutral editors is a journalistic principle, it's not one I care about.
The guidelines continue:
What you do on social networks should be presumed to be publicly available to anyone, even if you have created a private account. It is possible to use privacy controls online to limit access to sensitive information. But such controls are only a deterrent, not an absolute insulator. Reality is simple: If you don’t want something to be found online, don’t put it there.
That's true — so don't confess to crimes and misdemeanors — but does it refer to the expression of political opinions?
Post journalists must refrain from writing, tweeting or posting anything – including photographs or video – that could be perceived as reflecting political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility.
That could be perceived... But, good lord, any criticism of the President is, these days, perceived as racial bias.
And shouldn't there be a comma after "political"? Maybe not, these days....
And God forbid you should show any religious bias. That means that every journalist who wants to keep his job will have to shut up about the fact that he actually believes his religion is the true one or that he thinks religion is a big lie.
Let's all be decorous little nobodies here in this newspaper we're afraid no one's going to want to read anymore.
Per Politico, WaPo describes "the transformation of [Khalid Sheik Mohammed] from an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States into what the CIA called its 'preeminent source' on al-Qaeda":
This reversal occurred after Mohammed was subjected to simulated drowning and prolonged sleep deprivation, among other harsh interrogation techniques.
Critics of "harsh interrogation techniques" — they, of course, call it torture — bolster their moral arguments with the pragmatic argument that it doesn't even work. How unusual it is for the media to disillusion us about that and force the moralists to get by on moral ideals alone!
(1) Is beating a detainee to death with a metal flashlight torture? Or merely a "harsh interrogation technique"? (2) Is beating detainees with butts of rifles torture? Or merely a "harsh interrogation technique"? (3) Is choking a detainee with your bare hands until he almost passes out torture? Or merely a "harsh interrogation technique"? (4) Is threatening to rape wives and murder children torture? Or merely a "harsh interrogation technique"?
These questions are about the definition of "torture," but my point is that the Washington Post has said that the techniques — whatever you want to call them — were effective, and, if this is true, it means that people who oppose their use are deprived of a pragmatic argument they normally make. I'm not saying anything about the choice of which term ought to be used, but I do observe that it is the usual practice for people try to make arguments by labeling. Saying "torture" to argue against the techniques is like saying "death panels" to alarm people about the experts who, under ObamaCare, will (it seems) decide who will get which medical treatments. I don't approach these issues by asking what does the word "torture" mean, with the assumption that if it is within that definition, then we should never do it. I would look directly at the question what should we do and not do. I'm not going to weight the issue one way or the other by deciding first whether to say "torture." Let's look straight at the issue and not get abstract and linguistic.
I want to apologize for a planned new venture that went off track and for any cause we may have given you to doubt our independence and integrity. A flier distributed last week suggested that we were selling access to power brokers in Washington through dinners that were to take place at my home. The flier was not approved by me or newsroom editors, and it did not accurately reflect what we had in mind. But let me be clear: The flier was not the only problem. Our mistake was to suggest that we would hold and participate in an off-the-record dinner with journalists and power brokers paid for by a sponsor. We will not organize such events.
My lawyer's eye fixates on one word — in that last sentence: will.
You start out with your terrible, suggestive flier. And just when my mind is screaming quit putting all the blame on the damned flier, you're all let me be clear: The flier was not the only problem.
Okay, so you will confess that you did plan to sell access to power brokers in Washington through dinners that were to take place at your home?
Then on to the crisp declarative We will not organize such events. You skipped a step!
I know you won't organize "such events" now — now that you've been publicly humiliated. You're glossing over the key thing you ought to apologize for: that you did organize a series of dinners at your home to make money giving access to Washington power brokers.
Like other media companies, The Post hosts conferences and live events that bring together journalists, government officials and other leaders for discussions of important topics. These events make news and inform their audiences. We had planned to extend this business to include smaller gatherings, a practice that has become common at other media companies.
From the outset, we laid down firm parameters to ensure that these events would be consistent with The Post's values. If the events were to be sponsored by other companies, everything would be at arm's length -- sponsors would have no control over the content of the discussions, and no special access to our journalists.
If our reporters were to participate, there would be no limits on what they could ask. They would have full access to participants and be able to use any information or ideas to further their knowledge and understanding of any issues under discussion. They would not be asked to invite other participants and would serve only as moderators.
When the flier promoting our first planned event to potential sponsors was released, it overstepped all these lines. Neither I nor anyone in our news department would have approved any event such as the flier described.
Gah! Must I sort through that? Will anyone sort through that? What are "firm parameters"? And how firm can they be if they don't work? And what are "The Post's values" — other than what The Post actually does? And how does the flier come into existence when nobody could possibly have caused it to exist? There's some abstruse theology here, and it's annoying me.
We have canceled the planned dinner. While I do believe there is a legitimate way to hold such events...
We all make mistakes and hope to be forgiven for them. I apologize to our readers for the mistakes I made in this case.
Which mistakes did you, specifically, make? I can't figure it out from this letter.
We remain committed to you, our readers.
Well, of course. There isn't even any influence to sell if you don't have readers. There's no dilemma here at all for you.
We remain committed to the highest standards of integrity. And while we will continue to pursue new lines of business, we will never allow those new avenues to compromise our integrity.
So you're still doing something — ambling down "new avenues" — but you will will will will will will will do it with integrity this time. And if you get caught again, if somebody somehow — not you — stumbles over the firm parameters on the new avenues, then we dear readers will surely hear that you will get it right in the future.
