Tag: New York Times

The New York Times Is Dreaming

Via National Review comes this excellent gaffe from the New York Times that is further evidence of their Raines-era fall into kneejerk American-style liberalism.

The British milieu that the Clash emerged from called out for punk. When the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten, draped on his microphone, intoned, “No future,” it was the cry of youth coming out of school to discover that there were no jobs in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain and refusing to accept that as reality.

Ah yes, if young Brits were pissed off, it had to be Thatcher’s fault. Of course, as National Review points out, the Sex Pistols predated Thatcher’s election by three years. The bleak future Johnny Rotten faced was the UK’s declining welfare state led by a Labour government.

Source:

No Second Acts in Punk? Ed Ward, The New York Times, December 29, 2002.

Whatever Happened to Paul Krugman?

Like a lot of people, I used to be an admirer of Paul Krugman. Even where I disagreed with his books and articles, he generally wrote from a level-headed, principled position and was not prone to distorting the position of his opponents. All of that changed, however, when Krugman started writing a regular column for the New York Times. There, Krugman seems to style himself as a Democratic attack dog in the vein of Paul Begala or Joe Conason.

Take the recent row over Trent Lott’s praising of Strom Thurmond. This should be an easy home run for Krugman, but in today’s column, Krugman commits a gaffe worthy of the Thurmond-admirerer himself. Krugman asserts that Republicans have a “Southern strategy” of appealing to Southern white racists. Krugman writes,

Of course, Mr. Lott isn’t alone in that role. The Bush administration’s judicial nominations have clearly been chosen to give a signal of support to those target Southern voters. A striking example has just emerged: We’ve learned that Mr. Lott supported the right of Bob Jones University to keep its tax-exempt status even while banning interracial dating; supporting his position was none other than Michael McConnell, a controversial figure recently confirmed as an appeals judge.

This is absurd. Lott’s brief in United States vs. Bob Jones University cannot possibly be construed as “a striking example” of the Bush administration’s judicial plans, given that the case was decided by the Supreme Court in 1983 and the last time I checked, George W. Bush didn’t actually take office until almost two decades later. Yet Krugman clearly intends the reader to lump together Lott and McConnell’s actions almost 20 years ago with the Bush administration’s current slate of judicial nominees.

Krugman commits these sort of distortions on a regular basis, which has gradually transformed him from an interesting, lively observer to a second-rate hack which is really a shame since the old Paul Krugman would have a lot of interesting things to say if he wasn’t constantly lowering his standards to those of the likes of Begala and Conason.

Source:

The Other Face. Paul Krugman, The New York Times, December 13, 2002.

Show Me the E-Mail

Henry Hanks sent me a link to a lengthy response from Salon.Com regarding freelance journalist Jason Leopold’s longwinded article claiming his story about Thomas White is indeed accurate that that he’s the subject of some New York Times/Salon.Com pro-Bush cabal. On the one hand, Salon.Com’s editors deserve some credit for being honest about their own bungling. On the other hand, well, they certainly are world class bunglers.

Leopold’s story included a lot of claims, but in the end it was the fact that Leopold claimed to have dug up an e-mail showing White ordering Enron insiders to cover up losses that separated his stories from other stories about White. Here was a smoking gun against White, courtesy of journalist Leopold.

The scary thing is, however, that Salon.Com did almost nothing to verify that the e-mail was genuine. They simple took Leopold’s word for it,

Our initial review of Leopold’s White story included detailed verification of many of the documents Leopold alludes to relating to Enron Energy Services’ Lilly and Quaker Oats deals. Nothing in our review then or thereafter has raised questions about the authenticity of those documents or the accuracy of Leopold’s reporting of them.

However, no Salon editor actually saw, before publication, the e-mail mentioned in the story — purportedly from Thomas White to a colleague, reading “Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q.” We recognize now that this was a mistake, and we regret it.

Even that German magazine that fell for the Hitler diary hoax at least made sure that there really was some sort of diary before running a story on it. I just can’t believe Salon’s editors didn’t want to see that e-mail.

Anyway when the Financial Times accuses Leopold of plagiarizing seven paragraphs in his Salon.Com story from an FT story, Leopold apparently makes up a story that the FT actually plagiarized from one of his stories. The only problem is that the story Leopold claims he worte for Dow Jones doesn’t seem to exist, and Leopold digs himself in further by claiming that Dow Jones simply purged the story after he left (which the news service denies).

So now Salon’s editors demand to see the e-mail, and find a couple of problems.

As the questions surrounding the Dow Jones story began to multiply, we felt we had no choice but to review every aspect of Leopold’s original story for us, again. It was only at this stage of our investigation, Sept. 20, that Leopold finally provided us with the evidence supporting his story’s account of an e-mail from White. What he provided was a fax of a printout of an e-mail exchange. We noticed immediately that the wording on the e-mail — “Close a bigger deal. Hide the loss before the 1Q” — was different from the wording in Leopold’s story (“Close a bigger deal to hide the loss”). When we published our correction notice concerning the Financial Times plagiarism on Sept. 23, we also corrected that wording, as we continued to investigate the e-mail itself.

The faxed e-mail contained no e-mail addresses or other headers, and that raised our concern, as did a published denial from White in a letter to the New York Times, where columnist Paul Krugman had picked up Leopold’s story. We told Leopold we needed to authenticate the e-mail. He told us the name of his source for it, and Lauerman told Leopold he was going to call the source to verify the e-mail. The source denied ever having spoken to Leopold.

So Salon’s editors finally call Leopold’s source who denies ever talking to Leopold. Leopold tells his editors not to worry since his cell phone records will show he called the source and talked to him. Leopold drags out sending the cell phone records and at one point has someone who supposedly works for his cell phone company join a conference call and list off numbers, dates and times for phone calls. But the numbers the company representative reads off are not the phone numbers to this source. And what happens when Leopold finally sends Salon his cell phone records (emphasis added),

When we reviewed this phone bill early Tuesday it contained numerous calls to the “other source” phone number (the same one the phone-service rep had cited the previous evening), but only one call to the number of the source Leopold originally named as the supplier of the White e-mail. The call was only one minute long, indicating that it was possibly unanswered, and in any case hardly long enough to conduct any sort of interview or obtain a fax of a sensitive e-mail. In any case, the call had taken place five days after Leopold had filed an early draft of the story that already quoted the e-mail.

Now that’s a neat trick — reporting on a source almost a week before actually talking to that individual.

Jason Leopold & Thomas White — The Condensed Version

Glenn Reynolds says he hasn’t been following the whole Jason Leopold, Thomas White, Paul Krugman debacle and links to Leopold’s pathetic defense of his reporting. So, for those wanting to keep score, here’s the brief rundown.

1. Until April 2002, Leopold was a reporter for the Dow Jones Newswires. He claims that he quit to write a book about Enron, but, in fact, he quit right before DJN published the second of a set of corrections to a story Leopold had written about Enron’s executive compensation system.

2. After quitting DJN, Leopold takes to writing stories focusing on whether or not Thomas White — a former Enron executive and current Secretary of the Army — will be forced to resign. These are stories like White Should Go–Now for The Nation and White out? for Salon.Com.

3. In late July, Leopold claims he “hit the jackpot” when a source, former Enron executive Jeff Forbis, gives him highly incriminating e-mail supposedly sent by White to other Enron insiders ordering them to hide losses. Salon.Com runs the story which gets little notice until Paul Krugman also cites the e-mail in a column attacking White.

4. Salon.Com issues a correction noting that seven paragraphs in Leopold’s story were plagiarized from a Financial Times article — inadvertently according to Leopold.

5. Salon.Com pulls Leopold’s article saying that, “we have been unable to independently confirm the authenticity of an e-mail from former Enron executive and current Army Secretary Thomas White that was quoted in the article.”

6. Paul Krugman retracts his use of the alleged White e-mail as well.

7. Leopold writes a long, self-serving defense which claims that the New York Times and Salon.Com are part of some vague conspiracy to protect a Bush administration official. (Because both of those publications are such pro-Bush lapdogs).

Frankly, Leopold is simply not credible. He admits that a) he’s misread Enron documents before, b) he “skirts” the edge of journalism to get his Enron stories, c) the second he saw the e-mail his initial reaction was “jackpot.”

This reads like nothing more than a freelance journalist eager to work his way back into a permanent job who gambled everything on a single sensational and potentially career-making story and, in the process, cut corners and skirted one too many journalistic corner in order to get his story.

Sources:

Web Article Is Removed; Flaws Cited. David Carr, The New York Times, October 4, 2002.

A note from the editors
Why we took down the Tom White story. Salon.Com, October 1, 2002.

White Out? Jason Leopold, Salon.Com, July 15, 2002.

White Should Go — Now. Jason Leopold, The Nation, May 27, 2002.

Salon, Plagiarism, Paul Krugman, and an Unsubstantiated Smear: The strange case of SalonÂ’s Thomas White scoop. National Review Online, October 2, 2002.

Jason Leopold – Shafted By The New York Times. Jason Leopold, Scoop.Co.Nz, October 9, 2002.

Weblogging and Journalistic Standards

Yesterday I spent about 20 minutes on the phone with a reporter from the local Newhouse paper for a weblogging feature that I assume will appear sometime next week.

It was a pretty enjoyable experience, though to be honest I don’t do well in spontaneous interviews — there’s a reason I write a weblog rather than doing a radio show (which I also did for a couple years).

One of the issues we talked about were journalistic standards vs. that used by webloggers. I explained that, for the most part, I don’t see many webloggers trying to fill the shoes of reporters. Occasionally I see webloggers at universities reporting on events there, but most of what I read is commentary on items that appear in traditional media.

What I forgot to point out was that traditional media are occasionally (and sometimes it seems more frequently) duped by fake stories. Look at all of the American news outlets that fell for the “blondes are going extinct” hoax last week. Or this incident where New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pretty much lost what little credibility he still had by citing an e-mail allegedly sent by Secretary of Army Thomas White which now appears to be a likely hoax/forgery. And, of course, the Times also fell hook, line and sinker for the Kaycee weblog hoax.

What I find especially disturbing is Krugman’s explanation of why he cited the e-mail,

I didn’t press for validation because it was consistent with everything else.

But that is exactly when reporters/columnists should ask for validation. Such claims are like people selling Rolexes on the corner for a hundred bucks — things that appear too good to be true usually are. A quote from Caesar that just happens to fit the current situation, a story about blondes going extinct are just too pat to be taken at face value without corroborating evidence, or an e-mail from a Bush administration official that is essentially the admission of a crime are just too pat to accept without corroboration.

The people who take these things at face value are in the same league as the Detroit woman who embezelled millions of dollars and turned it over to the perpetrators of a 419 scheme. Krugman and Salon hav become so obssessed with attacking Bush that they didn’t perform due diligence to see if an e-mail offered by a reporter with numerous ethical problems was accurate. The e-mail fit their preconceived notions of the Bush administration in general and of White in particular, and so they ran with it.

This of course is a very human reaction, and it is one that afflicts traditional media as well as webloggers.

Misleading WHO Study on Violence

Last week many news outlets reported on a study by the World Health Organization that blondes were becoming extinct — that turned out to be a hoax. No such study existed. But now WHO seems to be using a genuine report to distort the rate of homicides by intimate partners.

The New York Times summarizes the WHO report on intimate murder this way,

The study found that violence against women by their male partners occurs in all countries, regardless of economic class and religion. Data from Australia, the United States, Canada, Israel and South Africa show that 40 to 70 percent of female murder victims were killed by their husbands or boyfriends.

But the situation is not the same for male murder victims. In the United States, for instance, only 4 percent of men murdered from 1976 to 1996 were killed by their wives, ex-wives or girlfriends.

The problem with this statistic is that it makes it appear that the odds of a man being murdered by a girlfriend, wife or ex-wife is far lower than the risk that a woman will be killed by a boyfriend, husband or ex-husband.

But in the United States, the actual annual figures break out to something like 1,300 women killed by male intimates compared to about 600 men killed by female intimates. In most years, about 1/3rd of all murders by intimate partners are committed by women.

But at the same time, it is correct that only 4 percent of men who are murdered are killed by women they have an intimate relationship with. But this is because men are so much more likely to be murdered than are women. As WHO notes, men constitute approximately 3/4 of all homicide victims (in the United States, about 80 percent of murder victims are men).

Another major problem with WHO’s study on violence is that it lumps in suicide as an act of violence. Yes suicide is a problem and needs to be addressed, but somebody who wants to kill himself is not the same sort of social problem as somebody who wants to kill other people. Out of the 1.6 million victims of violence annually that WHO cites, well over 1 million of those deaths are the result of suicides.

Finally, WHO has lowballed the number of people who died as a result of violence at only 191 million in the 20th century. The complete report isn’t available online, but that figure is way too small unless WHO is playing with politics with who counts as a victim of violence.

Sources:

First ever Global Report on Violence and Health released. World Health Organization, Press Release, October 3, 2002.


War, Murder and Suicide: A Year’s Toll Is 1.6 Million. Sheryl Gay Stroberg, New York Times, October 3, 2003.