Tag: new york times

#rsrh White House coffee klatch with lobbyists.

Hi!  This post is for the benefit of whomever, starting next January, is going to be in charge of soon-to-be Chairman Darrell Issa’s Oversight and Government Reform investigation team. I think that there’s a non-trivial chance that this New York Times report of the White House evading its own ethics rules by deliberately meeting with lobbyists off site (and thus, without having to to log in lobbyist visits) for ‘coffee’ may abruptly become not available after November, so I’m taking the time to reproduce the names of everybody in the article after the fold.

You know. Just in case anybody in the 112th Congress’s Oversight committee wanted to have a chat with any of them. Continue reading #rsrh White House coffee klatch with lobbyists.

Keli Carender & the faintest whiff of panic from the NYT. #rsrh

(H/T: Instapundit) The first paragraph sets the mood:

Keli Carender has a pierced nose, performs improv on weekends and lives here in a neighborhood with more Mexican grocers than coffeehouses. You might mistake her for the kind of young person whose vote powered President Obama to the White House. You probably would not think of her as a Tea Party type.

…and the Old Grey Lady pretty clearly was not in it.  They didn’t do a bad job of reporting this story, but very little of it fits their existing narrative of the Tea Party, and you can tell that the writer was somewhat aware of that. Continue reading Keli Carender & the faintest whiff of panic from the NYT. #rsrh

NYT: So, they had to shoot a guy. Please don’t ask any more…

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

I have some suggestions for the New York Times.  When you provide stories like this:

Federal agents on Wednesday fatally shot a man they described as the leader of a violent Sunni Muslim separatist group in Detroit.

The 53-year-old man, Luqman Ameen Abdullah, was killed in one of three raids conducted in and around the city, in which six followers of his were taken into custody.

…there are things that you need to mention.

Let’s be blunt: the FBI shut down a proto-cell* of radical fringe Black Muslim domestic terrorists – which is something that’s going to please everybody, with the possible exception of CAIR.  And as can be seen from the links, most news organizations are capable of reporting on this in a forthright fashion… but the New York Times takes until the second-to-last paragraph to even hint at it.  Which is problematical; after all, the idea here is for a newspaper to report on what happened.  Not to make its readers have to go out and find out what really happened…

Moe Lane

*They were still at the ‘criminal activities to fund illegal firearms purchasing’ stage.  I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t read of this particular organizational arc before.

PS: Glenn Reynolds wonders why we’re seeing more domestic counter-terrorism operations these days.  At a guess, I think that we got some very good intelligence a few years ago and started up a variety of investigations.  We are now rolling them up because the targets are starting to look like they’re ready to switch from rhetoric to action, now that Big, Scary Bush isn’t in the Oval Office any more…

Crossposted to RedState.

MM to NYT: Welcome to the jungle.

I prefer the term ‘Fishbowl,’ myself.

[UPDATE]: Welcome, Instapundit readers.

The New York Times, on its corrected coverage of the ongoing fall of ACORN:

ON Sept. 12, an Associated Press article inside The Times reported that the Census Bureau had severed its ties to Acorn, the community organizing group. Robert Groves, the census director, was quoted as saying that Acorn, one of thousands of unpaid organizations promoting the 2010 census, had become “a distraction.”

What the article didn’t say — but what followers of Fox News and conservative commentators already knew — was that a video sting had caught Acorn workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes. The young woman in streetwalker’s clothes and her companion were actually undercover conservative activists with a hidden camera.

Michelle Malkin grades them for the effort: short version is that they’re still flunking, and will continue to do so until they address the Anita MonCrief matter*. Michelle ended her article by welcoming the NYT to the ‘jungle.’ Personally, I prefer ‘Fishbowl:’ it’s more descriptive.  People notice these things now.  They notice, also, when newspaper websites do their best to avoid linking directly to conservative online sources; I’m pretty sure that Big Government wouldn’t have gotten that link if ACORN hadn’t pulled their own statement from their own website.

I don’t actually want to see newspapers go away, seeing as they’ve got structural advantages on news gathering that I envy.  Like actual budgets: when someone like Robert Stacy McCain** decides that he’s going to go down to Kentucky and cover the Bill Sparkman murder, he has to shake the tip jar, write a few posts highlighting the issue, and hope that somebody comes through for his expenses.  The equivalent NYT editor simply calls up the relevant department and has somebody set it up.  The ability to follow stories that easily is a powerful ability; would that the NYT was willing to take advantage of it.

Moe Lane

*Unless you consider one sentence sans link or details at the end of this piece ‘addressing.’  Michelle clearly doesn’t.  For that matter, I don’t think that I do, either.

**Otherwise known as R.S. McCain, Bob McCain, Stacy McCain, or Robert McCain.

Crossposted to RedState.

Unintended Kinsley Gaffe of the day.

From this Politico article on recent media failures (via Hot Air Headlines):

“For Glenn Beck to devote 45 minutes of his show to ACORN and Van Jones says more about his news judgment than mine,” said Dean Baquet, Washington bureau chief of the New York Times.

Given that it can be safely assumed that Glenn Beck viewers were not surprised at either the Van Jones resignation or the Senate’s defunding of ACORN, and that it can be assumed that many New York Times readers were surprised – which, to be blunt (and cruel) about it, means that the former were better informed than the latter – well, put it any way that you like, Baquet.  You’re still suffering from the comparison.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Obama compared to… LBJ?

Ouch?

Ah, the first “Is [INSERT GEOGRAPHICAL LOCATION HERE] [INSERT PRESIDENT’S NAME HERE]’s Vietnam?” article written about a Presidential administration.  Always a magical time.

Could Afghanistan Become Obama’s Vietnam?

WASHINGTON — President Obama had not even taken office before supporters were etching his likeness onto Mount Rushmore as another Abraham Lincoln or the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Yet what if they got the wrong predecessor? What if Mr. Obama is fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson instead?

Naturally, the NYT is mostly concerned with Afghanistan as it relates to American domestic policy – the idea that the situation might have either national security or humanitarian implications that might affect the decision-making process is carefully ignored – but that’s not unexpected. As the article itself references (but does not admit), the Left has never been interested in Afghanistan as Afghanistan: it was a convenient club with which to try to beat the (Republican) President with, and now that there is no (Republican) President in office the progressive wing is abandoning the illusion of caring, with happy sighs all around. Continue reading Obama compared to… LBJ?

Layers of Editors and Fact-Checkers Watch: Political Geography 090.

I’m not going to ask, Can you tell me what’s wrong with the first map below? I’m going to ask you, How long did it take you to figure out what’s wrong with the first map below?

0823-biz-water-jp_full

Don’t worry if it took you a little extra time to find the second one; the fact that you got both still puts you two up on the New York Times.

Crossposted to RedState.

Hey, I made the New York Times. Sorta. Kinda. Not really.

Didn’t mention me by name, didn’t get my actual status on RedState quite right,* didn’t link to the original piece (or, indeed, to the the site itself), and for all I know it’s website-only** – but my wife seems to think that getting quoted still counts.  Even if it was sort of out of context.

Yeah, I know: overly fussy of me.  Particularly since a couple of people are probably grinding their teeth right now over the Old Grey Lady referring to RedState as ‘popular.’

Moe Lane

*They called me a ‘commentator’ instead of a ‘site moderator’ – or, as it says on my business cards, ‘Chief Protocol Officer.’  Although, honestly?  The correct title would probably be more like this.

**It’s rude to go through a paper at the store and see if an article made the print section.  As for buying a New York Times… well, what would I do with one, once I had it?  I don’t own a canary.

Crossposted to RedState.

The New York Times: Doomed, and deservedly so?

shrinkageI was looking for quotes from this highly enjoyable Vanity Fair article (via AoSHQ & And Still I Persist) that would illustrate the haplessness of Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. (“He is a lifelong New Yorker, but there is no trace whatsoever of region or ethnicity in his speech” was a good example*) – or at least complement the vicious, yet accurate analysis that the picture above represents – but these two paragraphs blew me away completely.  Particularly the second one:

Some at the Times anticipated this tectonic shift years ago, but Arthur wasn’t listening. Despite lip service about change, he presides over a slow-moving beast. Diane Baker, who was regarded as an energetic and forceful outsider, ran up against this in her years as C.F.O. When she took the job, in 1995, she was shocked to discover that the company was still doing all its accounting by hand. “They literally did not have the ability to produce spreadsheets,” she says. “They had not invested in the software you need to analyze data. It is a company run by journalists. The Sulzbergers are journalists at their core, not businessmen.”

Her biggest disappointment came when she crafted a potentially lucrative partnership with Amazon.com**, already the biggest bookseller on the Internet. The Times would link all the titles reviewed in the paper’s prestigious Sunday Book Review section, ordinarily a money drain, to the online bookseller and receive a percentage on every book sold. “We could have made the Book Review into a big source of revenue,” she recalls. Baker knew that Amazon.com planned to eventually sell everything under the sun, to become the first digital supermarket. Not only would the deal have produced revenue from book sales, it would also have cemented a partnership with a tremendous future. She envisioned the newspaper as a virtual merchandising machine. Instead of the old carpet-bombing model of advertising, it would in effect target ads to readers of specific stories. “You know what they said?,” Baker recalls. “They said, We can’t do it, because Barnes & Noble is a big advertiser.”

If you felt any sorrow for the New York Times‘ travails, stop right now.  Never mind that it’s a liberal-leaning paper that doesn’t want to admit it (the first part of that is no big deal, the second part of it is); never mind that it’s being run as essentially a vanity press (on an epic scale not seen elsewhere, to be sure); never even mind that the publisher’s so self-evidently a schlub that not even Vanity Fair could hide it.  All of these things are survivable. Continue reading The New York Times: Doomed, and deservedly so?

Ross Douthat to replace Bill Kristol at NYT.

Starting online, then going to print.

A year ago I would have called that a step down for Douthat. Then again, a year ago Andrew Sullivan hadn’t decided yet to start stalking Sarah Palin online. Since the Atlantic is apparently institutionally fine with that, hey, any port in a storm.

Via The Other McCain, who is even now discovering that God is an iron*.

Moe Lane

*Goes like this: if a felon is someone who commits a felony, then somebody who commits irony is an…

Crossposted to RedState.