Tag: Paul Krugman

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.

The Leftist Lament — Where Are All the Lefty Blogs?

Richard Poe notes that in the 1980s the American Left wondered why talk radio was dominated by conservatives, in the 1990s they wondered why the Internet was dominated by conservatives, and now they’re starting to wonder why the most popular political blogs are all conservative.

Of course these are vast overgeneralizations that are often the result of selection bias. Yes, on a national basis talk radio was dominated by conservatives, but there were plenty of local left-liberal talk radio shows and stations. Leftists seemed to think the Internet was dominated by conservatives, but I never understood that argument (I attended a speech by a woman in the mid-1990s who was appalled that a conservative group had been able to register the TownHall.Com domain name). Same thing with right wing weblogs — I read plenty of liberal/left weblogs, so I know they’re out there.

Still, writer James Crabtree has a point when he writes,

Two bloggers in particular have astonishing influence: the journalist Andrew Sullivan with his eponymous site; and a formerly obscure Tennessee law professor called Glenn Reynolds, who runs Instapundit. There are no equivalents on the left; indeed, there are precious few left-wing blogs at all. Both Reynolds and Sullivan are libertarian, rather than conservative. And both despite [British newspaper] the Guardian. As Wyeth Ruthven, publisher of a rare centre-left American blog, says: “no one here had even heard of the Guardian until Sullivan began his personal jihad.” In a country with no recognizable left of its own, blogger have made a British newspaper the pantomine villain of the right.

First, if I were Wyeth Ruthven I’d be a bit embarrassed to have Crabtree letting the world know that he’d never heard of or read The Guardian prior to Reynolds or Sullivan writing about it. Yeah it’s a rag, but come on — is it Reynolds’ fault he reads more widely than does Ruthven?

Second, notice that while Sullivan and Reynolds are on the right, this is not your father’s conservatism. For example, I often get tagged as a conservative, but I’m anti-death penalty, pro-abortion, pro-gay rights, and an atheist — oh yeah, Orrin Hatch is just waiting with open arms to welcome me into the Republican Party.

In many respects the conservatism of many political webloggers is simply good old fashioned American liberalism minus the socialist/progressive baggage (which, in Crabtree’s European frame of reference, is a far right viewpoint).

Most of the left-liberal logs I run across, on the other hand, are either Democratic Party apologias or warmed-over New Left doctrinaire sites. Booorrriinng.

Even luminaries such as Paul Krugman (who is leftist by US standards) can’t escape blog wrath. Sullivan and his acolytes glory in highlighting the small inconsistences in Krugman’s popular New York Times.

Luminaries? Where did that come from? For all of its egalitarian sentiments, the Left is afflicted by a persistent cult of celebrity. Leave it to the decidedly non-egalitarian right wing webloggers to treat Krugman as if he is just another person with an opinion (which he is in his New York Times op-eds). In fact, as Krugman’s recent problems with poorly sourced e-mail reveals, Krugman is actually deficient compared to many of the webloggers criticizing him in their spare time.

Same thing with right wingers. As I’ve made clear on this site, I don’t have much use for Sullivan and could care less that he thinks he’s some bigshot journalist.

These blogs do not have large direct readerships: Instapundit clocks only 40,000 readers a day. But many readers run their own blogs; others are political or media professionals. So a growing community is aware of whatever most irritated Sullivan today.

Instapundit has only 1.2 million readers a month? That puts it head and shoulders above most of the leading left and right wing magazines in the United States. Is suspect more people read Instapundit every month than read the Weekly Standard, National Review, The Nation and Mother Jones combined. And all without a budget or major donor to be accountable to.

This in turn creates what the legal theorist Cass Sunstein calls “cybercascades,” reaching millions of readers with ideas, in this case associated almost exclusively with the right. They are democratic dynamite: private networks of information, unchecked by sensible debate. The aftermath of 11 September increased the cascades. Blogging became warblogging; the community became indignant cheerleaders for any madcap Bush anti-terrorism scheme. Attempts to question were given a vigorous fisking.

Sunstein is a moron who actually wrote as an example that when pro-gun rights folks debate online that they never link or provide information about their opponents’ position. In fact pro-gun rights folk incessantly link to essays and studies by their opponents, unlike Sunstein who seems to have walled himself off in left-liberal land and shielded himself from any other ideas.

The interesting thing about this claim about “democratic dynamite” is how the Left argument about the press keeps evolving. The claim used to be that the United States did not have genuine free speech since the right to a free press was limited to those who could afford them. But beginning in the early-1980s, the costs of publishing and disseminating ideas has fallen through the floor. Now everybody and their brother can start a blog at no expense, and all of a sudden the problem is that too many people are speaking their mind without proper supervision.

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.