Funny how quickly New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt can turn up to criticize the paper… after it has taken a lopsided public shellacking over its anonymously sourced innuendo regarding Sen. John McCain and a female lobbyist:
But in the absence of a smoking gun, I asked (Executive editor Bill) Keller why he decided to run what he had.
“If the point of the story was to allege that McCain had an affair with a lobbyist, we’d have owed readers more compelling evidence than the conviction of senior staff members,†he replied. “But that was not the point of the story. The point of the story was that he behaved in such a way that his close aides felt the relationship constituted reckless behavior and feared it would ruin his career.â€Â
I think that ignores the scarlet elephant in the room. A newspaper cannot begin a story about the all-but-certain Republican presidential nominee with the suggestion of an extramarital affair with an attractive lobbyist 31 years his junior and expect readers to focus on anything other than what most of them did. And if a newspaper is going to suggest an improper sexual affair, whether editors think that is the central point or not, it owes readers more proof than The Times was able to provide.
(There is a possible slip in that exchange, as the original smear was attributed to “advisers” and “former associates,” not staffers. But I digress.)
Keller’s claim that the story was about McCain’s recklessness with appearances, rather than the implication of a sex scandal dressed up in rags from a another unproven scandal about lobbying, does not pass the laugh test.
Anyone who studies basic journalism knows that newspaper stories are written as an inverted pyramid, in which the most important information is placed in the lead. In this case, the lead was about the anonymous, unproven sexual allegation.
Here are more terms to know from basic journalism:
5W1H: Always answer the who, what, why, where, when, and how of the news article.
Lead: The opening of a story, usually a summary of the most important information.
Headline: A title or attention grabber above the body of an article. The author of the story usually does not write the headline.
Angle: A particular point of view or way of looking at a subject.
Fact-checking: Checking that your facts are correct. Amy, Aymee, and Amie are all pronounced the same way and can be easily misspelled. Look up the names of specific people and places and anything else you are presenting as fact to be sure you are stating the truth.
The NYT story had all of those up front… except the last one.
It appears that the reporters’ failures to get juicy dirt on McCain (sexual or otherwise) caused Bill Keller to demand they dress it up as a story about the appearance of impropriety, and to run it before The New Republic published its own story about the struggle inside the paper.  Given that Hoyt’s main criticism of the paper is what the McCain story failed to say, his avoidance of what has been hashed out in TNR and the Washington Post is every bit the scarlet elephant as those in the original story.
I think John Cole — true conservative — might call you a wanking rightwing keyboard commando, Karl. And his having served gives him absolute moral authority to do so.
Shockingly, the followers of “true conservatism” who comment on his site — like a chorus of Edmund Burkes, the are — would agree with his assessment.
Believing a Pentagon spokesman is believing the military industrial complex — the MAN. Of which John was once an employee.
His blog is performative penance for that, I suppose.
Oh, and maybe we should lay out odds on how long it takes him to attack the wanking rightwing noise machine character assassins who hate for noting that some Democrats are a bit uncomfortable about some of Obama’s associations with leftwing radicals and convicted domestic terrorists.
Which is, of course, nothing more than an attempt to SMEAR!
YOUR FACTS ARE AN ABOMINATION TO TRUTHINESS, WINGNUTS! STOP POINTING TO THEM! IT’S UNSEEMLY! AND NOT VERY AUTHENTICALLY CONSERVATIVE!
(followed by a congratulatory linking from Greenwald and Sullivan).
Also . . . JUICY DIRT? Ugh.
Yeah. Maybe “dirty juice.”
Well, no.
Pointing out leftist/media perfidy, in all its forms … it is a full time job.
the Times’ usual authoritative voice.
~ New Republic ~
Is that the same voice that, during Desert Storm, captioned Bradleys in Kuwait City as “tanks?”
Above the fold on the front-page.
JG,
Re the Pentagon spokesman. I guess true conservatives like Cole might see it that way, because it would involve missing the point. I am not arguing for the truth of what a Pentagon spokesman says, merely pointing out the Marshall apparently believes there is something untoward about him speaking.
As for the “point” of Cole’s post, he seems to be stuck on the “source repeats himself=truth” argument, which is about the level of thinking that seems to go on over there most of the time.
All:
“juicy dirt” was chosen specifically for its unloveliness, so I am pleased it had the appropriate effect.
Fact-checking
If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.
Karl – Exactly. When convenient for the Left, the same source speaking to another media outlet constitutes proof. When it is pointed out that is a flawed metric, they turn to look how mean you are to military members chickenhawk, or something comparably childish.
OT – Obama got lots of free airtime on ESPN tonight commenting in a segment on the 23 year anniversary of Air Jordans. Cuz he is the definitve expert on all things MJ. It was a free pop culture commercial for barry O.
Well, he’s black. So he must know basketball and basketball shoes, right?
Ah, liberal elites. They’re so cute when they go for earnest.
Mike C,
Get it right, dammit.
Eighmi
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its lede in the parlance.
I work at a major MSM competitor to the NYT. To a man and woman, every person who read the McCain piece realized that the NYT had rock-n-rolled right through the lowest points in its history. There is absolutely no brief to be had for it.
Actually, I was at a party last night with 7 NYT reporters. They were livid about it. Or, whatever the state is that equals livid plus embarrassed.
Jeff, was looking at the Cole link and can’t see where he’s terribly wrong.
He’s an insufferable prick about making his point, and is really the sort of conservative that exists only to criticize conservatism–without, you know, actually ever being conservative–but he’s spot on on the troop level bit.
50 years from now the Iraq adventure won’t look as bad as people think, but how Bush/Cheney tried to pull it off on the cheap, without bulking up the armed forces, will show them to be complete and utter jackasses.
McGruder,
Bullshit.
Turn that upside down and look at it from the other POV — that is, from outside “the box”.
US expenditures on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as a percentage of either GNP or Government spending are about, proportionately, what a middle-class family would spend on entertainment, or what many of my trailer-trash neighbors shell out for Bud Light “suitcases” and NFL season tickets on their wide-screen TVs.
Saddam Hussein had the biggest, baddest army in the Middle East. He bragged about it a lot, and used it to cow his neighbors into cooperating with him when they might have preferred not to. The United States went through that army like a semi through a fog bank, then turned the country upside down and shook it — and did it all on pocket change. What does that mean, in terms of what we might do if we did get serious?
The point is not as lost as you might think. It is — just as it has always been — behind the continual attempts to impoverish the US in the name of “international justice” (for which read, “subsidizing the Socialists”) of which Kyoto/Glowball worming is merely the latest manifestation. It’s just that nobody discusses it in exactly those terms.
All part of the didactic purpose. Enjoy it.
Regards,
Ric
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18. But we havent got serious, have we? Doesnt that say something? we will be at 4000 dead within the month and the argument about getting serious is still on the table…come on. Half a trillion dollars isnt serious…Saddam Hussein’s army? jesus.
we took on a multi-theater war with a military that was anything but designed for it. we may eventually pull all this out, stabilize Iraq into a free-standing republic and see Afghanistan transformed after Zawehire and Bin Laden hang. But I’m really not thinking serious historians are going to be name-checking Kyoto and the ICC as reasons why, as of March 2008, absolutely none of those things occurred. and that was my point.
but then historians lack that…nuance.
we took on a multi-theater war with a military that was anything but designed for it.
Dude, were you paying attention at all when the actual combat was going on? We stomped their ass. One of the reasons reconstruction has been difficult is because we so utterly destroyed the established powers. Very convincing arguments have been made on this blog and many others by real soldiers, soldiers who have been over there, that more troops in the aftermath would have just meant more targets. Reconstruction takes time. It always has, it always will.
But I’m really not thinking serious historians are going to be name-checking Kyoto and the ICC as reasons why, as of March 2008, absolutely none of those things occurred. and that was my point.
but then historians lack that…nuance.
If you are looking for people to defend historians over here, you have really come to the wrong place.
#20
And who was responsible for the military prior to Bush taking office? Contrary to what you might think historians say, if they’re honest, they’ll say that the Bush administration did more with less than any other military campaign in history. Counter insurgencies take time.Sometimes decades. Any historian worthy of the name knows this already. And for your information both countries have already been transformed. It is the first time in Afgahnistan’s history that it has been invaded and the invaders welcomed. There have been free elections in both countries. The US has another country friendly to its interests in the middle east. The changes that have taken place in both countries are watershed. They will never be like they were, even should we just up and leave.
Admit it. You just don’t like Bush. Had he done nothing you’d still complain.
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