In the NYT today, Jeff Zeleny writes:

Mr. Obama, an Illinois Democrat seeking his party�s presidential nomination, said in a television interview broadcast Sunday that he supported “rolling back the Bush tax cuts on the top 1 percent of people who don’t need it.”

But surely he meant that he supports rolling back the Bush tax cuts on the top 1 percent of people, who don’t need it. The comma makes a big difference.

God that was a fascinating post.

This piece in the NYT today is pretty irresponsible: Iran May Have Trained Attackers That Killed 5 American Soldiers, U.S. and Iraqis Say. Yes, indeed. It may have done so. But good golly the evidence for that right now is thin. The authors of the piece – two of them beavering away at the story! – are unable to come up with very much to support the theory. The idea seems to be that the attack was pretty sophisticated, and Iran is sophisticated. Just put two and two together! I think this is my favourite part:

The officials said the sophistication of the attack astonished investigators, who doubt that Iraqis could have carried it out on their own — one reason a connection to Iran is being closely examined. Officials cautioned that no firm conclusions had been drawn and did not reveal any direct evidence of a connection.

The last sentence gives everyone involved – from the officials to the reporters to the bloggers who pick it up and move the story along without the qualifications – a cover if it turns out to be nothing.

This isn’t just idle speculation. The Bush administration very much wants to broaden the confrontation with Iran. I’ve put my money on covert operations against Iran, but no actual bombing of the country. But the plan is to be much more aggressive in the future, and an important contribution to that effort is to convince the public that Iran is the source of all evil in the world. In that context, it’s not right for the NYT to amplify and transmit the administration’s messages about Iran’s evil, evil doings without having solid, independent reasons for thinking that they’re true. And putting in a weasel sentence admitting that the piece is a baseless speculation doesn’t really get them off the hook for doing it.

I was in Fairfield, CT (median income: $113,429) over the holiday and picked up the latest issue of Westport Magazine. The cover article began with this:

Last August, weeks before the start of the school year, stories forecasting the approaching college-application season made it sound like the academic equivalent of Hurricane Katrina…As if Fairfield County high school seniors and their parents didn’t have enough stress without the media piling on more reading, more statistics, more pressure!…That so many high school seniors in hyper-competitive Fairfield County would turn out to be competitive high achievers should surprise no one. What has surprised even veterans of the college admissions war is how underexaggerated the news reports have been.

To be fair, there is nothing wrong with wanting very much to go to Harvard or Yale, and being disappointed that your chances are lower these days, even if you’re super privileged. And there’s nothing wrong with noting that high expectations can take a significant toll on students from relatively privileged backgrounds. But if you’re talking about kids from fucking Fairfield, CT and their academic plight, you better do everything in your power not to compare these “hardships” to Katrina.

The short format of this little forum really doesn’t allow much room for the contributors to develop their ideas. I gather, however, from what little they do say that a more expansive format wouldn’t have helped much. For me, it’s useful mainly as a way of documenting a) how bad a job the NYT opinion page does of representing a real range of foreign policy opinion; b) how truly fucked Iraq and the U.S.’s Iraq policy is now.

I’ve been too busy to take a close look at events or much commentary recently, but in the last week or so I’ve been coming to terms with the likelihood that the U.S. really is going to be forced out of Iraq, in a bloody, chaotic, and humiliating retreat. I hadn’t been able to accept that before. I could see a civil war coming a long way off, but not that the U.S. would be forced into a large-scale retreat. But consider: Any progress will lead to a renewal of larger ambition; any setback will be considered a further reason to dig in and stay. And so it will go until a mass uprising basically blows the whole thing to shit and the U.S. has to fight its way out of the country.

Reporters traveling with Condoleezza Rice briefly rebelled against their meaningless stenographic duties the other day after coming into possession of a tape of Rice sparring with the Russian diplomat Sergei Lavrov. The resulting story is a breathless account of Condi and Sergei’s bickering (“she said tartly,” etc. etc.), in stark contrast with official descriptions of smooth cooperation between the two.

God, it must be boring on those things. Anyway, here’s how the piece ends:

Reporters traveling with Rice transcribed the tape of the private luncheon but did not tell Rice aides about it until after a senior State Department official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity as usual, assured them that “there was absolutely no friction whatsoever” between the two senior diplomats.

Once the flabbergasted official learned of the tape, he continued the briefing. He paused repeatedly, asking before describing a discussion whether reporters had heard it.

Zing! They really got him, didn’t they?

Everyone expects official spokespeople to lie about these sorts of diplomatic matters. If an official came out and announced that Rice and Lavrov spent lunch sniping at one another, the official recognition of the tension would itself rachet up the tension – and it would be correctly interpreted by everyone as an attempt to do so. Official statements are moves in the diplomatic game, and everyone in that game interprets official statements as moves, rather than as attempts to make truth-functional assertions about reality. Spectators should do the same. (It follows that we reserve the right to laugh at anyone who expects us to believe anything that an official says in a diplomatic context.)

Anonymous briefings fall into a different category. Officials brief reporters on conditions of anonymity in exchange for more reliable information from those officials. At least that’s the theory. The statements issued off the record aren’t moves in a diplomatic game in the same way that official statements are. So there’s a slightly more realistic expectation that officials will tell the truth off the record. Or, at least, lying off the record ought to be seen as a different matter than lying in an official statement.

The author of the WaPo piece I just quoted, Glenn Kessler, seems to think he scored a really nice “gotcha!” on the anonymous official. But a really nice “gotcha” would have included the official’s name. Let me just quote Lindsday’s recent post on anonymous sources:

Journalists have a duty to expose anonymous sources who knowingly deceive them. Anonymity is a quid pro quo, and ethical journalists only offer it in exchange for valuable information that they can’t get any other way.

The promise of anonymity shouldn’t be absolute. Anonymous sourcing sacrifices some transparency for the sake of important information. A source who knowingly peddles forgeries under the cover of anonymity is abusing the reporter’s trust and the trust of his or her readers. That kind of behavior must have consequences.

The best remedy is to reveal the identity of the person who passed off the fraudulent information in bad faith. The only reason we tolerate anonymous sources is to get good information. By practicing deception under the cover of anonymity, dishonest informants thereby undermine whatever justification the reporter had for granting anonymity in the first place.

The public has a right to know who’s shopping bogus stories to the press. We also have a right to know who duped the reporter in question. Granting anonymity is a journalistic judgement call. When a source turns out to be a fraud, we need to know who that source was so that we can assess whether the journalist granted anonymity responsibly. If it turns out that the reporter has been granting anonymity frivolously, or to blatantly untrustworthy sources, he or she shouldn’t be allowed to simply blame the anonymous source and move on.

[. . . ]

Anonymous sourcing is a necessary evil. Enforcing consequences for those who abuse a reporter’s trust will improve the quality of anonymous sourcing overall.

I completely agree, and I think the point applies here.

It might be argued that anonymous briefings don’t fall into a different category, since if the U.S. press ran with a story about sniping between Rice and Lavrov, and attributed it to anonymous officials, the Russians would (correctly) interpret this as a quasi-official move in a diplomatic game. Otherwise, they might think, why would Rice have authorized the leak?

Notice that the anonymous briefer might simply have demurred from answering questions about the tone of the meeting, or might have noted that there’s a healthy back-and-forth that is always part of the process. Instead, the anonymous briefer actively lied to manipulate journalists’ perceptions of the meeting. At any rate, arguing this way is tantamount to accepting that anonymous briefings aren’t worth the cost of anonymity, at least in this sort of context, since they can’t be expected to yield any more truth than official briefings. If anonymous briefings are subject to the same rules rules of interpretation as official statements then they have nothing to do with the truth at all, and everything to do with diplomatic posturing, and they should be understood that way by everyone involved.

This leaves the press with a choice: It should either drop anonymous briefings altogether, or it should attempt to enforce the convention that anonymous briefings are more reliable. Journalists can start enforcing the convention by publishing the name of the lying anonymous official. They can continue to enforce it by explicitly noting the official’s tendency to lie in these cases the next time they get something on background from him or her.

I choose to celebrate Slate Magazine’s 10th year anniversary by pointing out that it’s really sucked the last few years, at least compared to the good old days. Say what you like about Kinsley, it was all downhill after he left.

This one on a NYT blog. (Previous sighting on Slate)

Look, not to be a dick about this, but isn’t that like saying “Jewed,” except, of course, that you’re trading on stereotypes about the Roma?

Update: They’ve deleted my comment on the NYT blog pointing this out and changed “gypped” to “cheated” in the body of the post. (I have a screen shot, in case you think I’m hallucinating all of this.) An email from the NYT Deputy Dining Editor tells me that they thought they had made the change shortly after posting, but that it hadn’t gone through. If it were my blog I think I would have noted the change and kept the comment, but it’s probably unreasonable to hold everyone else to Explananda’s incredibly high standards. It’s no biggie, and I swear I’m not auditioning to be the head of the language police.

I swore I wasn’t going to watch the SOTU tonight. I might not. But I’ve got NBC on right now, and Brian Williams just had a doozy. [Paraphrase:]

And there we have the newly minted Supreme Court Justice, Samuel Alito…Many say that, second maybe only to declaring war, appointing members to the Supreme Court, one of the great powers of the presidency.

Oy.

Miller:

Miller said that as an investigative reporter in the intelligence area, “my job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

Via Atrios, Bill Keller on why the Times held off on publishing the domestic spying story:

Officials also assured senior editors of the Times that a variety of legal checks had been imposed that satisfied everyone involved that the program raised no legal questions.
…
First, we developed a fuller picture of the concerns and misgivings that had been expressed during the life of the program. It is not our place to pass judgment on the legal or civil liberties questions involved in such a program, but it became clear those questions loomed larger within the government than we had previously understood.

Some tumors, they grow back.

UPDATE: It’s worse than you thought.

Matthew Yglesias quotes a bit of Jonathan Chait’s latest here. This is the part I found especially odd:

The sad thing is that there is, or was, a prospect to get Democrats onboard with the war effort. I believe that liberals loathe the war because they loathe Bush, rather than vice versa. What they want above all is for Bush to admit he made some huge mistakes in Iraq. It’s not a big thing to admit; everybody knows it’s true.

A simple admission of the obvious would sate his foes � or enough of them, anyway. That would also let Bush make the honest case for carrying on in Iraq.

Um, well, I do think that it’s a bit irritating of Bush and Co. to refuse to admit to mistakes. Also, some critics of the administration do occasionally suggest something along these lines, since they tend to be a bit dramatic when they discuss the importance of apologies and admissions of error. But, really, we (should) know how this game is played: Most critics who take this line really want the Bush administration to be honest about mistakes so that the press can drop the he said/he said routine on issues that are pretty much beyond debate. It’s an important fact about the conventions governing our political discourse that the press can’t report a fact as a fact as long as it’s “controversial,” i.e., disputed by one side. So that’s what the plea for honesty is (mainly) about. Serious critics of the administration are not really pleading for respect or sincerity from the Bush administration – they know they’re never going to get it. Rather, they’re angling for advantage, and pleading for a little more honesty is a nice rhetorical gambit.

Chait misses that and I think it’s revealing that he does. The real problem with the war is not that it was sold dishonestly or that it continues to be sold dishonestly. As an increasing number of people are coming to see, it’s flawed from top to bottom. And the pressing credibility problem is not with Americans, it’s with many Iraqis, whose cooperation in this venture is rather important. That Chait focuses in this way on the issue of honesty suggests to me that (in addition to missing a fairly obvious point about the way media conventions work) he probably still hasn’t listened carefully to what critics of the war are saying. For most of them, the fact that a deeply flawed foreign policy venture was sold dishonestly at most adds insult to injury. It’s not as if they’ll come around to embrace the injury if the insults stop.

We watched Koppel’s last NIGHTLINE last night. I’m sure he was a standup guy, though I really haven’t spent much time watching his work. I do, however, remember the way in which he cut through the money, power, and DLC-sanctioned issue-evasion in one of the Democratic debates:

This is question to Ambassador Braun, Rev. Sharpton, Congressman Kucinich. You don’t have any money, at least not much. Rev. Sharpton has almost none. You don’t have very much, Ambassador Braun. The question is, will there come a point when polls, money and then ultimately the actual votes that will take place here, in places like New Hampshire, the caucuses in Iowa, will there come a point when we can expect one or more of the three of you to drop out? Or are you in this as sort of a vanity candidacy?

Denny told him where he could put his dime-a-dozen political insights:

Ted, you know, we started at the beginning of this evening talking about an endorsement. Well, I want the American people to see where the media takes politics in this country. To start with endorsements, to start talking about endorsements. Now we’re talking about polls. And then we’re talking about money. Well, you know, when you do that, you don’t have to talk about what’s important to the American people…Ted, I’m the only one up here that actually, on the stage, that actually voted against the Patriot Act. And voted against the war. The only one on this stage. I’m also one of the few candidates up here who’s talking about taking our healthcare system from this for-profit system to a not-for-profit, single-payer, universal health care for all. I’m also the only one who has talked about getting out of NAFTA and the WTO and going back to bilateral trade conditioned on workers rights, human rights and the environment. Now, I may be inconvenient for some of those in the media, but I’m, you know, sorry about that.

Via Atrios, Bill Keller says he now believes that:

there is, or should be, a contract between the paper and its reporters. The contract holds that the paper will go to the mat to back them up institutionally — but only to the degree that the reporter has lived up to his or her end of the bargain, specifically to have conducted him or herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards, to have been open and candid with the paper about sources, mistakes, conflicts and the like, and generally to deserve having the reputations of all of us put behind him or her.

Keller says that now that he knows that Miller was involved with the Plame affair, he regrets having gone to the matt for her. Is that what it takes? So I guess Keller believes that Miller conducted “herself in a way consistent with our legal, ethical and journalistic standards” when, confronted with the charge of being a pre-war mouthpiece for the administration,she said:

my job isn’t to assess the government’s information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq’s arsenal.”

Sadly, it’s not just that that’s what Miller’s all about; it seems to be what the Times is all about.*

*Don’t get on my case that this is one instance and that one instance does not a pattern make. You know that I’m right.

POSTSCRIPT: Oh, and I guess it’s relevant that Miller just took Scooter’s word for it that the Oct. 2002 NIE conclusively showed that Iraq was a WMD threat. Of course, that was not the case, as the State Department dissented, the Energy Department dissented, and the Air Force dissented.

The New York Times: Mubarak’s Victory Orderly, but Opposition Is Still Angry

The Washington Post: Mubarak Wins Easily, but Vote Fails to Engage Egypt

These headlines make a pretty little show of hinting at the truth, which is that the elections were really a big sham, but they don’t really do it for me. After all, if it’s a sham election, then it may have been a “victory,” but it wasn’t really an electoral victory, as you might suppose from reading the first headline. And saying that the vote “fails to engage Egypt” is a pretty weak way of saying that only 23% of the electorate turned out to vote, and that they voted in oppressive and unfair conditions.

I understand that headline writing is a tricky business and that headline writers can’t fit everything relevant to a story into the headline. And I don’t belong to that school of media criticism which complains whenever journalists present the facts and then leave their readers to draw their own conclusions. Still, the headlines here provide a sort of frame, which help to orient the reader in the story before he or she even begins to read the piece. And the frame both newspapers provide in this case gets the coverage off to a terrible start.

Let’s play the alternative headline game. We’re looking for something that is a) accurate; b) neutral between legitimate disagreements about the issue, if there are any; c) isn’t too heavy-handed, i.e., demonstrates a certain amount of faith in a reader’s ability to draw conclusions for herself. Here are a few: “Mubarak wins deeply flawed election,” “International observers criticize Egyptian vote,” “Anger at flawed vote in Egypt.” Those aren’t great, mainly because they’re perhaps a bit heavy-handed, but they’re better than the headlines quoted above. Note that all would be controversial, in the sense that Egyptian officials wouldn’t like them, but they still get past requirement b), since no sane, disinterested person could fail to draw the conclusion that the vote was deeply flawed.

Finally! Boy, that took forever, didn’t it?

Let me reach across the partisan divide for a moment here: I’m very sorry to hear about the difficulties that Druge is reportedly having with his personal life.