And They'rre-off!

Am I correct to detect just a whiff of hubris cockiness in Nate Silver's account of how he hires, which might perhaps be titled "why I will get everything right while everybody else gets everything wrong"--?    Me, I'm still a big Nate fan, but I'm also looking forward to the launch of Ezra Klein & Co. over at Vox.Com.  "Looking forward" with optimism, though not reassured by the way they've buried themselves in a steamin' heapo o' pre-launch hype: we can only hope that it is the fault of the publisher and that the Kleinsters can surmount it.

Meanwhile I can't escape the intuition that David Leonhardt back at the Times is playing a game he doesn't quite understand.  "Three full-time graphic journalists" and "I was a math major in college" smell suspiciously like a lack of focus.

Whatever.  For your entertainment, see if you can guess which of the stories linked above contains which quote:

"...some innovative new editorial products that let us deliver contextual information more cleanly, clearly, and regularly."

"...trying to help readers get to the essence of issues and understand them in a contextual and conversational way,”

"I’m a dork,"

This One's a Keeper

Syllabus for Journalism 101:

When a politician calls a scandal involving himself “sensationalized,” you know he’s in deep yoghurt. When he says “mistakes were made,” the passive voice is a tell for near-panic. When he starts firing subordinates, that means he knows he’s near the edge of the cliff. And when he says he wants to “turn the page,” it’s a good bet the story is far from over.

Link. 

Hey, Maybe I Was Right All Along

Those bogus Asiana pilot names: last week I said you ought to look for a vengeful ex-boyfriend. But I backed down as soon as I heard they came form an NTSB intern. But wait, no; evidently the intern did not provide the names;  but only confirmed (heh!) the namesat the request of the gullible marks at the Fox outlet.   So the question remains: who thought them up, and who set her up?  So far as I know that name hasn't been disclosed.  I do see that the (unpaid?) intern has been fired; smiley-faced, artlessly gullible talking head apparently still on the job.

In Which I Hate, Hate Hate a TV Show (And Watch it Anyway)

Against my better judgment, I just spent most of an hour watching the third episode of Aaron Sorkin's Newsroom. It was almost unbearably awful: a relentless drumbeat of cheap shots and preaching-to-the-choir that made Rachel Maddow look like Walter Cronkite.*  Mrs. Buce, not quite so revolted, said "Oh, it's Sorkin.  You saw the same thing in West Wing."  Well, sorta kinda, but not really. I liked West Wing, at least the early seasons. Of course you knew all along that Sorkin was the very model of beltway conventional wisdom and that Jed Bartlett's was the best government since Rome under the Antonines.  But mostly he didn't let his politics distract him from telling a good story.  This time, it seems, all bets are off.

This is a shame for more reasons than I can count, but one is surely this: American right-wing populism, whatever it horrors, is almost certainly a far more complicated and I suspect interesting story than anybody in Sorkin's inner circle appears to suspect.    I'm not sure that it is anywhere on TV yet: maybe Breaking Bad, although I haven't watched it.  But so far, the one thing you can tell before is that as an analyst of current American culture, Sorkin doesn't even get out of the gate.  

Happily for my blood pressure, I also today happened onto an approach far more interesting and far more likely to move the ball down field. It's Josh  Barro's new Business Insider piece on why Toronto's clown-show mayor  is almost worth taking seriously.  Here's a takeaway paragraph:

So in addition to producing a fountain of amusing news-of-the-weird stories, Rob Ford presents a useful cautionary tale for the often-cozy business, government and labor elites that govern large cities. If you allow people in the less-glamorous parts of town to come to believe that you do not care about their interests and needs, they may toss you out and replace you with a populist, “straight-talking” buffoon who energetically demonstrates that he does -- even if he is totally unfit to run a city, and might be the sort of person who smokes crack.

 Aaron, next time you set out to break a lance for good government, you might want to put Barro on your speed dial.  Might make for a far more interesting show.

*Afterthought: only after writing the above did I stumble on a snippet called "Aaron Sorkin has Answers for Haters of 'Newsroom.'"  Interesting, but I'm not sure it addresses the point I am trying to make here.

Second afterthought:  I'm getting some blowback from which I infer that some people thought I was actually expressing fondness for the Tea Party here.  Oh nonononono;  I think the whole enterprise is calamitously misguided, and the leadership mostly vile sacs of pestilence.  But it's interesting even so, and the mainstream incomprehension can be fatal.

Jayson and his Enablers

Others can probably say better than I why I read every word of last week's three-part series in the University of Maryland's student newspaper on their notorious grad, Jayson Blair (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,). You remember Jayson, fired ten years ago last week from the New York Times after it became clear that his whole career was just a boatload of lies.  About his Times years it didn't tell me much that was new--I had followed the story when it was new, fascinated by Blair himself, even more fascinated by his handlers at the Times: one would have thought them the least gullible people people in the world, but here they were, sucked into the Blair fantasy as tightly as if it was a Nigerian 419 scam (or did I just put my own gullibility on display?).

The part that I didn't know was the prequel (see especially Part 2 of the series), about his years as a student at UM, where the same MV seems to have been on display from the beginning.  You've got to admire the professionalism of the student editors and their sources for seeking to manage the mix of schadenfreude and and sheepish embarrassment over the evidence that Blair could have gotten away with so much and for so long.

The paper also touches on, but doesn't really embrace, what is perhaps the most interesting lesson of the whole episode: i.e., new evidence for the ancient insight that you can't cheat an honest man.  We've had years to meditate on why the bigfeet at the Times--notably editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd, who lost their jobs in the riptide--were so eager to let themselves be hypnotized by Blair's poppycock.  What was new and even more interesting to me was the student paper's dissection of the role played by the various enablers at the J-school.

There's a fair amount of oh-what-a-shame  gee-we-just-wanted-to-help on display here.  But near the end of the third installment, somebody let slip what strikes me as a more promising theme.  "maybe they simply didn’t want to see the signs [a UM professor] said. Maybe they allowed the allure of Blair’s promising future — and the ways it could boost the college’s national profile — to obscure their judgment."

Unh hunh.  Read the whole thing and you can't escape the inference that a whole lot of people wanted Blair to succeed because they had skin in the game: that they hang onto his coattails and go along for the ride.  Please God let him burnish the reputation of the school where I work; and while we are at it, God, would it kill you to let him help me get a better job?

Aside from clothes-ripping self-mortifying confession, I suppose you can never really nail anybody on this kind of a charge.  I suppose there were some people who were, despite the warnings, genuinely taken in by Blair's schtick (but if so, for cryin' out loud why were they teaching in a journalism school)?   Easier to surmise that there were some who believed because they wanted to believe--which certainly puts them in good company, alongside Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd.  And I think it is fair to wonder how many knew perfectly well that the wheels would come off the Blairite bus, but just hoped that they could enjoy the ride and get off safely at their own stop.  If I'm right on that last, the cynicism on display would be something appalling.   But maybe that is the lesson the kiddies are supposed to learn?

Journalism, Lamentable and Otherwise (Herein of "Curation")

Mrs. B and I  were chatting at lunch yesterday about the lamentable state of mainstream journalism and the possible alternatives, if any. We were wondering if perhaps mainstream journalism is no worse than it was a couple of years ago, but more easily discredited because more exposed, more subject to instructive criticism.  

Criticism by whom?  Why, the blogosphere, of course.  All those people who really cannot imagine why Thomas Friedman and David Brooks get a steady paycheck and a bully pulpit for purporting to expound on topics that the critic might (no snark here) very well be able to expound upon better.

Which moves the spotlight to the other side of the stage, with a more provocative proposition: maybe journalism is in many ways getting better--more room for more voices, letting a hundred digital flowers bloom, you actually generate a lot of really interesting stuff.  It may be more than lucky accident that the New York Times gives Krugman a platform, surely far more remarkable that Glenn Greenwald gets so powerful a megaphone--surely in an earlier time he would have been relegated to some lefty backwater.  Or the really extraordinary range of semi-journalists, never quite rooted in the old school, busy defining a new home of their own--I think of Josh Barrow, David Weigel, Felix Salmon, David Frum, Dan Froomkin, Doug Henwood, Bruce Bartlett, Ezra Klein, etc., with apologies to the near-numberless voices I have forgotten to include.  And how is one to classify the really original and ingenious bloggers like Barry Ritholtz, Steven Ray Waldman, Daniel Davies, Noah Smith?

Well yes, says Mrs. Buce, but don't you want some form of curating here?  With a hundred flowers blooming, how do you know which to pick?    She's got a point but  there are responses.  For one, you could say that with old-school media, the curating is precisely what they got wrong (yes, I'm looking at you, little Freddie Hiatt).  Second, the new digital potentates--Huffpost, Daily Beast, do a kind of curating and it may be a disputable point whether too much or too little.

Third, there are any number of other improvisational curators.  I get my daily dose pre-gummed and pre-salivated from The Browser which is somebody's guess of what is worthwhile.  I frequently click on links from Longform or ProPublica.   And I skim half a dozen daily newsletters, from foreign policy through banking to bankruptcy, all curation of a sort.  

In the end, of course, this is a game nobody can win.  You have to delegate the job of selection. But once you delegate, it's an agency problem: you're subject to the whims and prejudices of the delegatee.  Perhaps the best we can said is that for the moment we live in a kind of sweet spot.  Old-fashioned curators--Times/Post/WSJ, suffer(ed) from too much of a bully pulpit, too easy to dominate, with too much power to exclude.  Grant that these days a huge chunk of the audience will never turn the dial away from Roger Ailes. Still, for a remarkable chunk of the audience, there may never have been a better time to be a news consumer: illimitable amount of stuff, quasi-illimitable range of sluices and channels, a genuine possibility for constrained and intelligent choice.  Can't last, of course, good things never do.

Anecdote: In my morning news feed, I see a summary (with links) of a new proposal on what to do about Cyprus.  The authors are longtime sovereign debt guru Lee Buchheit at Cleary, Gottlieb, and Mitu Gulati of Duke Law School. Their proposal comes in the form of a paper published at the Social Science Research Network,the number one Serengeti watering hole for policy wonks of all stripes.   Where this lies on the continuum between scholarship and journalism--and what it says about curation in the news biz--are questions I am just beginning to sort out.

Etymological Footnote:  Curious word, "curate."  Without hitting the books, I assume it is cognate with  Κύριος and Κυρία, (Old fashioned? Formal?) forms of address for "Mr." and "Mrs." in modern Greek. Also "Kyrie," as in "Lord have mercy on my soul."  Also "curia regis," the king's court.  But not the same as "cure" in what you do to a patient or a parishioner or a ham (cf. "care").

Update:  David shows me that I could have saved myself a bunch of time if I just read Slate.  Cf. link, link (could be my unaccountable unwillingness to read Matt Yglesias, about which I really must speak to my therapist).

The Further Deconstruction of Bob Woodward

Two interesting pieces this week about American journalism's most visible gaseous afflatus, Bob Woodward. 

One, Tanner Colby's extraordinary account of Woodward as seen from a vantage that only Colby can occupy.   Woodward wrote a book called Wired: a character assassination in the form of a biography of John Belushi.  Years later, Colby wrote (with Belushi's widow) another biography of Belushi--pretty clearly with the intent to set the record straight.   Unexpectedly, the task positioned Colby to develop genuinely unique insights into Woodward's modus autoritatis.  It's a marvellous piece, highly recommended, not easy to summarize.  I'll add only that while his details are devasting, his general attitude seems a lot more benign than think Woodward deserves. Go read it, you won't be sorry.

And two, Max Holland asks: "Why is this man an Americsn idol?"  It sounds like the voice of mystified perplexity. No surprise, then, that most of the piece comprises a--thoroughly competent and worthwhile--review of the evidence indicating that Woodward is an empty suit, floating on a cloud of false promise.  So, why an idol?  Actually, Holland answers his own question about three quarters of the way through the piece, although I'm not sure he grasps the fact he has done so.  He says:

The other powerful fact in his life was the unceasing adulation that came his way from within the journalistic community and without, from the Washington elite down to perfect strangers. Woodward was the white-hatted journalist who brought down a president. It didn’t matter that this was exaggerated—it was the public shorthand. When Woodward himself tried to correct the misimpression, which he often did, his modesty only seemed to make him that much more appealing.

 Read it again, Max. What you are saying is it doesn't matter aka nobody gives a damn. It's not about reporting, right or wrong.  We wanted a young Lochinvar to bring down the leader of the free world.  We want him to be tight with the powerful, and we want him to be buds with us.  In short, it's theatre, entertainment.    Woodward left journalism at least as early as the moment when he morphed into Robert Redford on the big screen.  Points like Holland's might have been relevant while he still belonged to journalism but that is all so 1972. 

Oh, and I meant to add:  If you really want to know the truth about Watergate, the real place to start is Nightmare by J. Anthony Lukas, a fine book by a fine journalist (here's my Amazon review) .  Lukas died way too young, a suicide.  I don't suppose his death was really an utterance of despair at the current state of journalism, but then again...

Update:  Ken in the comments gets the money shot on Colby's fine piece but that's the problem: I think Woodward's deficiency goes far deeper than a mere tin ear.  He's also a fantasist, and he needs a whoppin' full platter of "it's not all about you"   And BTW, who the hell is Albert Goldman?

Magazines Ahead of the Game

Would I be right that the coolest magazines in anything like mass-market distribution today would be Foreign Policy (aka FP) and The Atlantic--not necessarily the best, but the ones who best understand how to marshal the resources of the intertubes, and to capture the new reader sensibility?  Or at the very least, that they leave, e.g., Time and (the late) Newsweek more or less bewildered in the dirt?  I suppose the other end of the continuum would be the relentlessly unhip New York Review of Books (of which chez Buce is a paid up subscriber)?  Which makes you wonder about Rolling Stone, which exemplified hipness in another time but seems now to have settled into the nostalgia gig, like those Peter, Paul and Mary concerts that have become so familiar on public TV?

Margaret Sullivan Doesn't Get the New Journalism

TPM nails it:  the NYT gains more from Nate Silver than Silver gains from the NYT.

Inside out: if Margaret Sullivan thinks it is Nate who needs the Times, she hasn't got the memo on the changing structure of journalism.   But has anyone noticed: this is at least the second time in her  brief career that Sullivan has tried to project the power of the Times from  her bully (heh!) pulpit. Go here to see how she deals with Andrew ("freelancer" as in "you can be replaced") Goldman. 

Goldman isn't Nate Silver, and in his case, I suppose it is true that he does need the Times more than the Times needs him.   But may I forgiven is I surmise that Ms. Goldman emits the whiff of management here--someone who (as a former editor) has probably had more than her share of occasions to tell the whippersnappers that they aren't as big as their heads, and that there are kids down at the J school who blah blah you get the idea.

It's a complicated issue, one that no doubt requires disposition on (as the lawyers like to say) a case by case basis.  But six months ago, Margaret Sullivan was in Buffalo: with her new brief, she's shot up the glitterati ladder far enough for a nosebleed. That is, if anybody gains from the bully pulpit that is the NYT, I'd say it is the new public editor.

Margaret Sullivan Moves into the Center Ring

--"Now there are two Irish women," Mrs. Buce remarked over breakfast.

--Two what? 

Oh, right. She's reading the Sunday New York Times, in particular Maureen Dowd, whose weekend offering often provokes at Chez Buce a fullscale dramatic oral rendition.  But, two?

--Ah.  Mrs. Buce had happened on Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times' new public editor, who has already proven she is her own woman, in a kerfuffle last week about indecorous tweets.     Here is Ms. Sullivan today, trolling for much bigger fish: in particular the creepy/unsettling story of the drone attacks, and the general question of whether our President has, or ought to have, the right to knock off  targets or bystanders at the end of the earth on his own say-so. 

Sullivan starts small with a crisp summary of the (reported) record to date: between 282 and 535 civilians, including more 60 children.  She reviews the journalism, including the masterly report last spring by the Times' own Scott Shane and Jo Becker.  

But then--but then the point is not to pat two Times reporters on the back for a piece of work they signed off on nearly five months ago.  Sullivan's real point emerges as twofold: one, this is a hell of a story, not nearly fully enough explored; and two, the Times is one of those not on it:

Since the article in May, its reporting has not aggressively challenged the administration’s description of those killed as “militants” — itself an undefined term. And it has been criticized for giving administration officials the cover of anonymity when they suggest that critics of drones are terrorist sympathizers.  ...

With its vast talent and resources, The Times has a responsibility to lead the way in covering this topic as aggressively and as forcefully as possible, and to keep pushing for transparency so that Americans can understand just what their government is doing.

All this is on point and worthwhile but conceptually, it's not a lot different from clucking about the misspelling the name of the mayor of Pokipsie Pookepsie, Phoughkeepsie.  Far more interesting are ten intervening paragraphs in which Sullivan takes it upon herself to summarize just how creepy/unsettling this whole drone business is: not only an underreported story but rather also a story that would be a lot more unsettling if it got the kind of coverage it deserves.   Here if not before, Ms. Sullivan makes clear that she has got a bully pulpit and is going to use it.  

How long is her term of office, is it two years [no, it's four--ed.]?  My guess is there is someone in the bowels of the Times' overstuffed management echelon who is already marking dates on his calendar.  Meanwhile for Sullivan's full "drone" column, go here.

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Clown

Things happen in threes, right?

One:

Mitt Romney was Joking about Airplane Windows

Two:

Columnist's Satire of Paul Ryan Fools Journalists

And now, I think I have my third:

Iranian News Agency Reports Onion Story as Fact

I suppose one inference you could draw here is that the  Romney campaign is as foreign to the American chatterati as the Onion is to the Ahmadinejad regime.  Another spin: I confess that with each of the three, a part of me is asking, "but what if it is really true?"

Update:  Whether this is a joke is left as an exercise to the reader:

Bachmann: ‘We Must Ban Falafel’ in School Lunches

H/T: Steve R.

Count No Man Fortunate Until he is Dead

Why I'm glad I got out of journalism:

Mike Trimble, Denton Record-Chronicle Opinion Editor, 
Fired After Clash with Publisher

Link.  He's 68.  He's been at it for 48 years.  He had he bad foresight to put himself in the hands of Bill ("My way or the highway") Patterson, who knows that if you buy ink by the barrel, you're in a different league from people who buy it by the bottle.   It's not really clear from the linked account what part of "my way" he did not understand.  He seems to be taking it all with saintly patience; supporters told him they would cancel their subscriptions but he told them not to.  I wonder how much he has in his 401k.

On the other hand,

Bob Caldwell was with 23-year-old Tigard woman 
when he went into cardiac arrest

Link.  He was editorial page editor of The Oregonian.  Pictures show a jovial man.  Red-faced.   Roundish.  He probably should have taken better care of himself.  On the other hand, he won't have to worry about his 401k. 

I Could Swear I Saw This Coming...

..Murdoch's closing of News of the World is just a quicky way of downsizing, and first chance he gets he'll be back with the Sun on Sunday.  I could swear I said it.  Unfortunately I seem not to have written it down.  You'll just have to take my word for it, now won't you?

You Gotta Hand it to the New York Times

I mean, say what you like about those guys-- a couple of weeks back, there was that boffo, longform granular account in which Charles Duhigg and David Barboza introduce us to the Steve Jobs China factory (and see also link). Yo, harsh working conditions in China--who knew?  No, that's too snide: sure we knew, but they  spelled it out with a richness of illustrative detail that brought it home to us in a way we won't forget.  And here's the Times blog, with blowback.

Now today, we've got with the pendant story -- Binyamin Appelbaum and Robert Gebeloff  serve up the cognitive dissonance of the folks in tea party country as they confront (or fail to confront) to the fact that it  is they (and not just the undeserving poor)  who are  hurtling down into the safety net.

It doesn't take great reflective power to grasp that  these two stories are parts of the same story, like one of those multivolume novels where each volume tells of the same events from a different point of view.  Or in this case, like listening in at opposite ends of a vortex from which emanates the great sucking sound. 

Of course it is tempting to feel a certain amount of schadenfreude about people who spend all their time howling about taxes while keeping one hand firmly ensconced in the cookie jar. Tempting, but unkind and unfair: humans are complicated and politics is complicated and there really isn't that much all that inconsistent about wanting a well-run lean-and-mean government and wanting to make sure that there's somebody to bail you out when you need it.

One superficial point that caught my eye in the safety-net story is the sheer bleak marginality of it all.  The NYT describes the locale as "cheap housing for commuters" (i.e., to Minneapolis)--which I think means "a place that nobody wants to live but is as close to the city as they can afford."  The Times also says "no poverty," but what do we have?  A tee-shirt retailer (in Minnesota in the winter? John asks).  A tattooist who is worried about losing his arm control.  A meat raffle?  I confess I am so sheltered I don't exactly know what a "meat raffle" is (though sure, I can guess).  But I suspect it is not what our ancestors had in mind when they came to a Land of Opportunity where the Streets are Paved with Gold.

One thing I liked in both stories: the sheer density of detail.  And the safety net story in particular: I surmise that Gebeloff is part of some sort of data-crunching unit at the Times, and from a scan of his CV (sic?), I'd say they are making good use of his time and talent.

I don't want to sound too gushy here.  The Times can give me a conniption fit when it wants to (for a recent, egregious example, go here).  But as long as they do stuff like the China piece and the safety-net piece, they are worth letting in through the velvet cord.

Update: Mrs. Buce reminds me I shouldn't overlook Jim Yardley's superb Christmas week piece on how people survive in a Mumbai slum. Well no, she didn't remind me because somehow I misssed it in the first place, but she's right, it's another bell-ringer.  

Update II: You think you know cognitive dissidence? Go here.

It's Not What You Know But Who You Know

 They say the reason to go to Harvard or Yale is to develop a fancy address book.  Maybe, but perhaps it works also at the University of Illinois.  This from the New York Times death notice of Hal Bruno, late Director of Election Coverage for ABC:

He graduated from the University of Illinois, where he was a sportswriter for The Daily Illini, an experience he recalled in a 2008 speech as he was inducted into the Society of Professional Journalists Hall of Fame.

“My classmates on the Illini sports staff included Hugh Hough and Bud Karmin, who went on to win Pulitzer Prizes,” he said, “and Robert Novak, who proudly became famous as ‘the Prince of Darkness.’ Our sports editor was Gene Shalit, and we had occasional cartoons by Shel Silverstein — my wild and multitalented fraternity brother — who also drew for the campus humor magazine. It was called Shaft, and the editor was Hugh Hefner, an ex-G.I. from Chicago.”

Link (But hey, Buce, that headline is a lazy cheap shot.  Bruno may have had connections; he may or may not have used them.  But the real bottom line is that he was an immensely well-informed journalist who built up his knowledge base by his own hard work.).

Greatest Headline Ever?

This one?

Afterthought: perhaps surpassed by

Woman from Decatur
Attends Theatre

Nick Davies on the Death of a Friend

Fascinating piece about the death of a News of the World reporter, made not less interesting by the fact that the author of the piece is the man who more than anyone else exposed the corruption at the News of the World.

Smithers Apologizes to Mr. Burns for All the Heartache he has Caused

Les Hinton, longtime dogsbody and sandwich-getter to Rupert Murdoch, ends 52 years of loyal service by taking one for the team:

Dear Rupert,

I have watched with sorrow from New York as the News of the World story has unfolded. I have seen hundreds of news reports of both actual and alleged misconduct during the time I was executive chairman of News International and responsible for the company. The pain caused to innocent people is unimaginable. That I was ignorant of what apparently happened is irrelevant and in the circumstances I feel it is proper for me to resign from News Corp, and apologize to those hurt by the actions of the News of the World.

When I left News International in December 2007, I believed that the rotten element at the News of the World had been eliminated; that important lessons had been learned; and that journalistic integrity was restored.


My testimonies before the Culture Media and Sport Select Committee were given honestly. When I appeared before the Committee in March 2007, I expressed the belief that Clive Goodman had acted alone, but made clear our investigation was continuing.

In September 2009, I told the Committee there had never been any evidence delivered to me that suggested the conduct had spread beyond one journalist. If others had evidence that wrongdoing went further, I was not told about it.

Finally, I want to express my gratitude to you for a wonderful working life. My admiration and respect for you are unbounded. You have built a magnificent business since I first joined 52 years ago and it has been an honor making my contribution.

With my warmest best wishes,

Les

Link.I assume he leaves well provided-for, at least well enough to buy his silence. I suspect he knew all along that it would end like this someday.

Shifting Fortunes: Be Careful How You Treat People on the Way Up ...

I was telling Joel this morning that Barry Ritholtz tops the most-read stats on my Google reader--"uncomplicated, no bullshit, ornery," I gushed.  And then in a horrified afterthought, "or did I just describe Bill O'Reilly."

Prompting Joel to wonder:

What will Bill O'Reilly be like when Fox folds and he goes to work for PBS or NPR. Like David Frum?

Ooh, that's harsh. I remember Stalin's nightmare that he is in Hell where Quakers feed him cocoa and read him tracts.

BTW count me as one who is not much impressed by all the clucking about an implosion in Murdochiana. My guess is that vaporizing the NOW just paves the way for a Sun on Sunday, and engineering (sic) the arrest of Rebecca Brooks just immunizes her from a parliamentary inquiry.

How could I be wrong? I could be wrong if Rupert has, in truth, at last grown old and outlived his natural mojo--without having passed any of the mojo genes to the kinder. Be careful how you treat people on the way up, old man: you may meet them on the way down.

... Then came wand'ring by
A shadow like an angel, with bright hair
Dabbled in blood, and he shrieked aloud,
'Clarence is come -- false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,
That stabbed me in the field by Tewkesbury:
Seize on him, Furies, take him unto torment!'
With that (methoughts) a legion of foul fiends
Environed me, and howlèd in mine ears
Such hideous cries that with the very noise
I, trembling, waked, and for a season after
Could not believe but that I was in hell,
Such terrible impression made my dream.

Link.

Felix Nails It

Felix really hits one out of the park this weekend with his Fisking of the New York Times and its egregious attack of bunker mentality.  I'd say any institution so beleagured,  insulated, isolated, has some serious management issues.  Like think Dick Fuld hunkering down in Club 31.