Tom: "CBS News boss: Tiger's return will be second-biggest media event of last 10 or 15 years."

Tom: "'I think the first tournament Tiger Woods plays again, wherever it is, will be the biggest media event other than the Obama inauguration in the past 10 or 15 years,' says CBS News president Sean McManus. Will his on-air announcers mention the scandal? 'I don't think there is a lot of reason to dwell on what has happened in the past because it is one of the most exploited and overexposed stories in recent memory.'"

Choire Sicha: Whoa. Sean McManus. The good news is that this "media event" will take place at the Masters, in three short weeks!

Tom: I can't really evaluate the truth or falsehood of this fairly false-sounding claim without knowing what a "media event" is.

Choire: Well? "Thing that the media covers"??

Tom: Does it mean "something for which people know in advance to send cameras"? Unlike 9/11, which did happen within this timeframe of 10-15 years? But people did know in advance that we were invading Iraq, and they sent camera crews there for that. You see my confusion?

Choire: I think you're confusing the invasion of Iraq with the "Mission Accomplished" press conference?

Tom: No, we had lots of footage of bombs and tanks and stuff.

Choire: Did we? I can barely remember.

Tom: You're confusing the present-day coverage of Iraq with the initial coverage of Iraq. We got live coverage of them struggling to slowly pry down that statue of Saddam. It was the only thing on TV.

Choire: Oh, when they stole all the paintings??? Right!

Tom: Weeks and weeks. But that was not a "media event," which is fine, because God forbid it should be compared to Tiger Woods playing golf. Still, then, why is the inauguration, which was an event-event, classified with the golf? And if pre-scheduling is what makes the difference, that would mean that O.J.'s Bronco ride was not a media event.

Choire: Well the inauguration has always been an event for display, but however, I think he's not talking about the inauguration. I think he means the actual event of the election?

Tom: He said "inauguration."

Choire: True he did! It's his word and he's welcome to it. [*]

Tom: You know what? If it takes this much work to try to figure out what he means by "media event," I'm going to go ahead and say he's full of shit. Tiger playing golf again is like the first episode of "Jon and Kate Plus 8" after they got caught cheating on each other.

Choire: It's less of a notable event even than a coronation–at least when there's a change in power, it's motivated by other forces than "Oh hey, I think I'll go out and do that thing I used to do every day again."

Tom: And that is nothing at all like the actual transfer of executive power in the world's wealthiest and best-armed nation. I am assuming that you have avoided the STR8 INTERNETZ enough to have missed the whole thing where Bill "The Sports Guy" Simmons declared that Tiger Woods' comeback was going to be tougher than Muhammad Ali's was.

Choire: I understood 6 of those words!

Tom: Lucky you. Simmons is a guy who built himself into a brand and got bought by ESPN as a regular-fellow sports analyst, which is to say he mixes sweeping, sometimes-interesting judgments about sports with middle-of-the-road pop-culture gags and a fascinating part-submerged and quasi-aspirational fear of women and nonwhites. Because that is how Guys are.

Choire: Well I know he is much-beloved by some friends, who consider him God-like. I still don't know who he is!

Tom: He says things about sports that are probably worth saying, and somebody could write a pretty good dissertation about what he deliberately and accidentally says about race and gender. But this thing he said about Ali and Tiger was incredible. The whole sports-reading Internet did a prolonged spit-take. And then he did a bunch of Googling or skimming of history books and tried to write a follow-up piece defending his insane claim that Tiger has it tougher than Ali did, which boiled down to the notion that today's athlete faces "pressure" unlike anything anyone could have imagined in the old days.

Tom: Eventually, I figured out that by "pressure," he meant "hype." The way George W. Bush kept saying "freedom" when he meant "us."

Tom: Probably that's what Sean McManus is talking about, too. But Sean McManus is making sure his announcers don't compound the hype by talking about Tiger Woods' ladyscandals. Bully for CBS.

Tom: I assume the CBS announcers will focus instead on Tiger Woods' relationship with Dr. Anthony Galea, the HGH-toting medical man who also helped Alex Rodriguez get over his hip troubles last year.

Choire: I'm sure they will!

Tom: That is a story that has been sadly overshadowed by all this jabber about cocktail waitresses. It will be great to see CBS go hard after the real news.

Tom: Unless…you don't suppose McManus is publicly promising Tiger Woods friendly treatment, to make sure that Woods returns to golf in time to give CBS boffo ratings for the Masters, do you?

Choire: I'm sure I wouldn't know. It is obvious that he is planning vast wall-to-wall coverage of Tiger Woods with a golf club in hand.

Tom: Oh. Perhaps "media event" means "something we can sell ads against." I can be slow sometimes.

Choire: Well, that's a given. Spectacle is ad-worthy.

Tom: But not the spectacle of the Iraq invasion. Or the Bronco chase, even. It has to be a spectacle where there's no leakage of bad feeling onto the advertisers.

Choire: Well you can't interrupt a Bronco chase for commercial!

Tom: OK. Now I know what business CBS News boss Sean McManus is in.

Choire: We need to discuss DAVID PATERSON: THE TOLD UNTOLD STORY but my mind is so blown by Sally Quinn that I can barely think.

Tom: I KNOW RIGHT??

Choire: I mean, for starters, I've never gotten over them naming their son Quinn Bradlee? This naming speaks either of WASP customs I don't understand or narcissism. (If those aren't the same two things.)

Choire: But not being a Washington insider like yourself, I was not aware of this controversy about the Bradlee clan's wedding dates, though I did just Google up a post from Politics Daily on the subject.

Tom: It is hard to know where to begin with this Quinn piece, but one way to begin is to pull back and take the wide-angle view, which is that she believes she has been given a column in the Washington Post Style section to deal with her personal business.

Choire: A WaPo Tumblr. About time!

Tom: I also had no idea that there was any controversy about wedding dates until Sally Quinn got into my morning newspaper and told me about it. I guess we, unlike Sally Quinn, don't have Google alerts for "Sally Quinn." But her column helps us make up for our failing.

Tom: Otherwise we might have missed the fact that anyone had something bad to say about Sally Quinn.

Tom: But. Could anybody have anything worse to say about Sally Quinn than Sally Quinn does? The column is like a particularly unhinged and confused letter to an advice columnist, only no advice columnist ever shows up to point out how self-deluded and wrong the letter-writer is. It is the Garfield Without Garfield to Ask Amy.

Tom: Sally Quinn is very upset that people have said that two sets of Bradlee offspring are having dueling weddings. She is so upset that she has gone to great lengths to explain the real situation.

Choire: Which is… that there are dueling weddings, I'm pretty sure?

Tom: The real situation, according to Sally Quinn, is that two branches of the Bradlee family hate each other so much–and one hates Sally Quinn so much in particular–that they have scheduled their weddings directly against each other, and the family is fully divided between the two occasions.

Choire: That's pretty much what I read!

Tom: That is what she describes!

Choire: Also that Ben Bradlee keeps the calendar, but not ably. (What is also fascinating however is that her husband, Ben Bradlee, goes unnamed throughout!)

Tom: Well, let's get to that in a moment.

Tom: Here's the background on the two weddings, as rendered by Sally Quinn: "Over Christmas, Greta's mother and I came to an understanding that, because of existing tensions, it would be best for all if none of us attended Greta's wedding."

Choire: An understanding, you say.

Tom: She doesn't specify how many people "none of us" embraces.

Tom: But Greta is the daughter of Ben Bradlee Jr., her husband's son. [CORRECTION: Due to the fantastic inability of the Bradlee clan to make any sense from the outside, it is only through diligent reporting that we have discovered that Greta's mother is not Bradlee's ex-wife, as we assumed; Greta is, apparently, Bradlee's granddaughter, descended from a previous wife (his first, we believe, but we will consult the literature further).]

Choire: (Who IS named!)

Tom: So the "us" seems to include the entire family unit created by Ben Bradlee Sr. after he got out of his previous marriage.

Choire: I… think so?

Tom: The perfection of the marriage of Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee is one of the central themes of the writing of Sally Quinn. It is odd that such a wonderful thing as this marriage would have created so much apparent emotional damage and resentment in its wake, lasting down through the years.

Tom: It is almost as if other people had different feelings about the marriage than Sally Quinn does.

Choire: It is known however that there are some deep-seated feelings within the family, that has created a rupture, related or not related to that marriage.

Tom: Now, you mentioned the calendar-keeping business.

Choire: I did. Personally, I would expect better household record-keeping from the former social secretary to a leader of the Algerian independence fighters.

Tom: Although it's not completely apparent from this installment, the official or ostensible purpose of Sally Quinn's Post column is to allow her to share her expertise about the handling of social functions.

Tom: This is her specialty.

Tom: Parties and special events and how to run them.

Tom: Yet she hands off the save-the-date card for this wedding to her husband, puts the date entirely out of her mind, and then blames him for forgetting it.

Choire: Do you find that implausible?

Tom: I do! It does not seem plausible to me.

Tom: It would seem to require an active act of forgetting and rejection on her part.

Choire: It is possible and also not likely.

Choire: And I say that as someone who is excessively, aggressively disorganized regarding dates.

Tom: Yes, I have a bad time keeping track of dates, too. But I do tend to remember at least the season of the year involved when someone tells me of an upcoming wedding.

Tom: It also occurs to me that people don't send out Save the Date cards to people whom they are not planning to invite to their weddings.

Choire: That would follow.

Tom: So this understanding that was reached between Sally Quinn and "Greta's mother"–why, Greta's mother, that would be Ben Bradlee's previous wife–this understanding amounted to the rescinding of an invitation.

Choire: A date had been saved!

Choire: Then a date was no longer to be saved.

Tom: "Happily, we did not have a single overlapping guest," Quinn writes. That is true, but it was not always true.

Tom: Except Quinn also writes there, "We had already decided not to go to the California nuptials." But "we" would seem to mean her and Ben Bradlee, which contradicts the earlier account of her non-attendance being settled by a discussion between her and Bradlee's ex-wife.

Tom: She didn't decide; she was disinvited.

Choire: And, correspondingly, or not, also clearly did not extend invitations the other way (by agreement?) in planning the wedding of her son. (Not a single overlapping guest!)

Tom: And then–because they were "thrilled to learn" that their daughter-in-law-to-be was pregnant–she moved up the wedding date to conflict with the California wedding.

Choire: Thrilled! Which I actually think is a nice way of discussing that. They should be thrilled. And forthright.

Tom: But Sally Quinn was restricted in her choice of wedding dates because of the liturgical calendar, she says.

Choire: Lent!

Tom: Plus the trouble of lining up the caterer and the band. But, you know, the courthouse doesn't close for Lent. And the church would be perfectly happy to sanctify and solemnize existing secular vows at a later date.

Choire: But that is not a proper wedding for these people. (Although the yoga instructor bride might feel differently?)

Choire: In the end I think this Quinn column actually just makes me feel bad for everyone involved, and by everyone, and involved, I even mean myself! Now I'm involved, and I'm sad about it.

Tom: Isn't that what science says the narcissists do to us?

Choire: It's sometimes hard to tell a newspaper columnist from a narcissist but there is a difference and in this case this is not particularly newspaper columnizing? My main objection being that the story presented makes no sense, because I suspect that Sally Quinn has no idea that anyone is reading this who is not a Matrix-double of herself.

Tom: It is based on the premise that there is nothing embarrassing about being Sally Quinn.

Tom: I am not sure that anyone on the planet besides Sally Quinn feels that way.

Choire: Well, and now we know that only somewhere between 1/5th and 1/3rd of the Bradlee family at large agree with that opinion as well.

Tom: Or they don't want to spring for cross-country airfare.

Choire: Sure. Weddings are annoying AND expensive!

Tom: Oh, my goodness. Only now did I bother finishing reading the original gossip item to which Sally Quinn had so helpfully pointed me. The church which she was having such trouble lining up seems to be the National Cathedral.

Choire: Oh yes, the little neighborhood church around the corner!

Tom: On behalf of all of us Episcopalians, I say Henry VIII would be proud.

Choire Sicha: Ah. The whole "black man has been in jail!" thing.

Tom: It's just like the McCain-and-lobbyist story.

Tom: I am not even using her name, because she didn't have an affair with John McCain as far as I could tell.

Tom: But it is the same deal. The Times becomes, through its strenuous efforts not to appear irresponsible, exactly as irresponsible as it is accused of having been.

Tom: It gets mau-maued into reporting that it doesn't have good evidence of the claims that people were criticizing it for reporting on.

Tom: John McCain's campaign staff had concerns about the appearance of possible closeness to a lobbyist.

Tom: David Paterson has a favorite aide who has a not obviously alarming amount of documented trouble with the law.

Choire: Here's what seems unelaborated to me.

Choire: "And several current and former administration officials said that Mr. Johnson’s dressing down of the governor’s Washington office in September contributed to the departure of several seasoned people from the office."

Choire: 1. Several?

Choire: 2. Who!

Choire: 3. Where are they?

Tom: That clause there sounds like a minor but interesting news story about the Paterson administration.

Choire: Doesn't it? What sort of dressing down? Also… how big IS the governor's Washington office???

Tom: I would gladly read 850 words that answered all the questions that are not answered in that sentence.

Tom: What happened, to whom did it happen, where did it happen, why did it happen, and how did it happen?

Tom: It seems possible to me that a crisply reported account of this incident, one that answered these questions, would help a reader decide whether David Paterson is presiding over a bumbling, incompetent administration or not.

Tom: That would be, happily enough, a subject of interest to the voters.

Choire: I would be interested in such.

Choire: Because, unfortunately, I already know that the United States puts more than 1/3rd of black men in state or federal prison at some time in their lives.

Tom: But Choire–this particular black man is "6-foot-7, with a booming voice." So you see, right there, people have something to worry about.

Choire: According to data from the late 60s to the late 70s, 51% of all non-white men can expect to be arrested for a felony in their lives. When you cross-reference that by "extremely large black men," I assume that percentage rockets up to something like 70%?

Tom: Look at you, worrying about identifiable action by the criminal-justice system.

Tom: "She said she did not file a formal report, but said she had filed an earlier domestic violence complaint to the police about Mr. Johnson. She declined to offer evidence of that."

Choire: I assume that is a different incident than the Halloween-costume-ripping incident??

Tom: Yeah, that's a different one.

Choire: It is hard to keep this relatively complicated personal life clear!

Tom: It is. And the Times is too busy smudging the dots to connect them.

Tom: It's pretty amazing when you get to the end and see the additional-reporting-by tag, which brings the total number of reporters on the story to six.

Tom: Maybe the story would have come out better with only one reporter on it.

Choire: Maybe? I wonder how Danny Hakim's meeting with Paterson was. I can't quite really picture it!

Tom: I can't picture anything in this story.

Tom: It's all shadow puppets.

Tom: The trouble here is that the Times is so annoyed and confused by having had its scruples questioned, it descends into this parody of scrupulousness.

Tom: The headline that loads above the browser bar says it all: "Paterson's Ex-Driver, David W. Johnson, Is a Top Confidant."

Tom: So this is just a profile?

Choire: That seems to indicate that the story is a profile of a person.

Tom: Yet the headline on the text itself is "Paterson Aide's Quick Rise Draws Scrutiny."

Tom: So it is a story about controversy. Or is it a profile? Perhaps the New York Times should have made up its mind before publishing it.

Tom: What's irritating about these botched takedowns, this and the McCain thing and all the other awful campaign stories, is that the Times pretends that it doesn't have a responsibility to decide what the stories are about. We're just reporting objective facts!

Choire: Why these facts and not others? What about the price of granite and stuff?

Tom: Remember that story about how Biden used official funds for landscaping at his house? And the landscaper had no idea whether or not the landscaping was in preparation for official events there? Facts! Here are some facts for the reader. We report! You… decide?

Choire: Actually I don't really remember that story, it turns out.

Tom: You may have forgotten it, because it said nothing. Like this story.

Choire: I have read this story a few times now. And in the end I came away with conflicting "icky" and "sympathetic" feelings? On the one hand, I think, "Hey, this guy is like me, he used to run into trouble all the time and now he's got a job and working hard." And on the other hand, I think, "What is this dude's problems with women? Jesus Christ!"

Choire: And then I don't know anything, so I finally decide IT IS NONE OF MY BUSINESS.

Tom: Yep.

Tom: "Draws scrutiny." From whom? From the New York Times, seems like.

Choire: From some quitters down in D.C.?

Tom: Well, yes.

Tom: The Times suffers from a fundamental confusion about how to do scandal stories.

Tom: The Times is not a passive observer of these things. This kind of reporting is a prosecutorial activity. That doesn't mean the paper is out to get someone. It means that the paper has, through reporting, come to a particular factual conclusion, and it needs to prove that conclusion to the reader.

Tom: It's a very scrupulous kind of prosecutor.

Choire: That is a useful act.

Tom: The thing about a prosecutorial approach is, it assumes a vigorous defense.

Tom: Is the evidence you're obtained solid and persuasive, or can someone contest the facts? Are there gaps in your logic that would allow someone to reject your conclusions? Is there exculpatory evidence that you're overlooking? Would your piece survive the most skeptical and uncharitable reading it could get?

Choire: You mean, basically, someone asking over and over again: why are you writing this?

Tom: Yes. Why are you writing this, and how do you know you're right?

Tom: That is what the editors' job is.

Tom: But what the editing at the Times does is it fudges the indictment.

Tom: "We ain't sayin' nothin', we're just sayin'…"

Tom: They try to hide behind Teaching the Controversy.

Choire: This is complicated because it's not a controversy that we would know unless we worked in Albany.

Choire: Which, however, IS their job!

Choire: I do want them to enlighten me on what people are actually talking about!

Tom: Here's the controversy: a bunch of people who are losing influence in the Paterson administration, or who are otherwise hostile or self-interested, are running around saying, "Paterson talks about how bad domestic violence is, and his No. 1 confidant is a straight ghetto drug-dealing thug who beats up women all the time."

Tom: See also: infighting McCain campaign staff.

Tom: So there is good reason to approach these rumor-stories with caution. People have agendas.

Choire: Sure! And I do think that Times reporters are pretty sensitive to disgruntlement and motivation.

Tom: But you can't just pick up the accusations with a long pair of tongs and wave them around at the reader.

Tom: The disgruntled people are making substantive claims. Is John McCain fucking a lobbyist? Is Paterson's right-hand man beating up women?

Choire: And is he doing this ten years ago or now?

Choire: And is that related to his "sudden rise"?

Tom: The Times thinks it's OK to answer these substantive questions through innuendo, hearsay and discussion of appearances.

Tom: "She said she did not file a formal report, but said she had filed an earlier domestic violence complaint to the police about Mr. Johnson. She declined to offer evidence of that."

Tom: She declined to offer evidence?

Choire: I mean, listen, I believe Anita Hill and all. But what?

Tom: Is there paper, or is there not fucking paper?

Tom: You have six reporters on this story, and you are just asking the woman to offer evidence herself? Get the fucking paper, or shut the fuck up.

Choire: I'd like to think a parenthetical was cut by the editors there about shoddy police record-expunging.

Tom: I'd like to think I've got a homemade ice cream sandwich right here, but I don't.

Tom: Whahuh, Clark Hoyt?
Tom: I don't….
Tom: Ha, wow.
Choire: Shall we turn first to the sad, sad story of the Times copy editor who wrote a Complaint Box column about Jet Blue, an airline that he'd sued after missing a flight because he couldn't find the gate?
Tom: Thirty minutes?
Tom: Dude showed up 30 minutes before a flight?
Tom: It's not about fairness to JetBlue.
Tom: it's about not letting the writer embarrass himself.
Tom: But also it is INSANE to compare that story to Hoyt's other example: a woman pimping her boyfriend's restaurant.
Tom: And then he gets to the recurring Times junket problem.
Tom: He concludes: "The Times is right to stick by the rules."
Tom: Have you read the rules?
Choire: I have read the rules!
Tom: "137. Before being given an assignment, freelance contributors must sign a contract with the Times Company or one of its units. Such a contract obliges them to take care to avoid conflicts of interests or the appearance of conflict. Specifically, in connection with their work for us, freelancers will not accept free transportation, free lodging, gifts, junkets, commissions or assignments from current or potential news sources. Independent broadcast producers, similarly, must comply with our ethical standards during their preparation of any news production that will bear the name of the Times Company or one of its units."
Tom: Taking it from the top: "Before being given an assignment, freelance contributors must…."
Tom: How does that happen? The freelancers sign the Times contract before the Times gives them an assignment?
Tom: Should everybody just sign on in advance, before they pitch the Times?
Choire: Sure!
Choire: WE ALL MUST OBEY BEFORE WE KNOW WHAT WE ARE DOING.
Tom: I believe what they mean to say is "Editors for the Times must obtain a signed story contract from a freelancer before any reporting or writing that may appear in the Times can be done."
Choire: Most likely.
Tom: "Well, the pitch idea sounds intriguing, but are you sure there's enough there for a piece?"
Tom: "Not yet."
Tom: "OK, let me send you a contract, then you fill it out and e-mail it back to us, and once that's all set, please do some more reporting and see if it's a story."
Choire: Heh.
Tom: As a freelancer, I sort of like it! Taken to its logical conclusion, the Times should be paying people to write pitches.
Choire: As if.
Choire: Yes.
Choire: Well.
Choire: Also?
Choire: Did you notice Hoyt mentioned that this particular freelancer sent FIVE PAGES of story ideas to this editor?
Tom: That's pretty great.
Tom: Then comes this: "in connection with their work for us, freelancers will not accept…"
Tom: So why does her previous junket automatically disqualify her in Hoyt's eyes?
Tom: "The paper has strict rules that freelance travel writers cannot have accepted free trips, rooms or meals."
Tom: That's how he puts it, but it's certainly not what that provision says. Now, the next provision says this:
Tom: "138. Assigning editors and producers who deal with nonstaff contributors should be aware that a freelancer's previous involvements and professional behavior can prove an embarrassment. They should make every effort to insure that a freelancer has no history or ties that would raise a real or apparent conflict of interest on a particular assignment."
Tom: But I don't see how that vague language comes out to a retroactive application of the no-junkets-on-Times-assignments rule to every assignment a freelancer took before taking a Times assignment.
Choire: The Travel section does have different rules: "No staff member of our company who prepares a travel article or broadcast – whether on assignment or freelance, and whether for us or for others – may accept free or discounted services or preferential treatment from any element of the travel industry."
Tom: But that doesn't apply to non-staff freelancers.
Choire: Right.
Tom: Just to moonlighters from the rest of the paper.
Choire: Correct.
Tom: I'm just reading the rules that Clark Hoyt linked to, within the sentence where he said that this writer was de facto ineligible to write for the Times.
Tom: And I see nothing in those rules that says freelancers "cannot have accepted" junkets, past tense, which is how Hoyt puts it.
Choire: Righty.
Tom: So let's recap.
Choire: Go for it.
Tom: First of all, Hoyt is equating a staffer who wrote a piece about a personal complaint, clearly identified as such, with a writer who recommended her boyfriend's restaurant in a piece with no disclosure in it.
Tom: Now, the complaint piece was dumb, but it was not the least bit unethical on the writer's side.
Tom: It was unconvincing and it should have been spiked by the editor once it emerged that the guy had inflicted the troubles on himself. And the Times' way of mixing staff contributions with public contributions in that space could be a problem for people who worry about the paper throwing its weight around—but those ethical judgments or misjudgments were made by editors.
Tom: From the writer's point of view, all his cards were on the table for the reader to see.
Choire: Yes.
Tom: In the end, I came away from the piece feeling sorry for JetBlue for having had to deal with such a mad-tempered pest of a passenger.
Tom: But again, that is an editor's failure.
Tom: But Hoyt is more or less calling the guy a crook.
Choire: Allow me to blather on for a bit!
Tom: Yes?
Choire: May we return to Clark Hoyt's November 1 column?
Choire: Then, he wrote: "Now, with an around-the-clock news cycle, reporters file throughout the day, and copy can be edited over a smoother cycle, she said. That is the goal, but the editing staff is dealing with much more copy than before, some online articles are now read by a single editor instead of four or five, and I hear regularly from readers complaining about errors in grammar, spelling and word usage."
Choire: That Hoyt reduces the serious changes in workload and workflow that have been going on at the paper over the last three years to complaints about grammar is absurd, if not wrong. What he addresses in this column today, though he doesn't mention it, are the real effects of what he wrote about on Nov 1.
Tom: Yes. This freelancer shouldn't have written about her boyfriend's restaurant, but she did tell them about it. She just mistook their inability to pay attention for permission to go ahead.
Choire: So, as you say, these instances of editors being too busy, or overworked, or ding-batty, or whatever they were, to pay attention to minor bad-goings-on, and therefore making some dumb mistakes are, at best, just a symptom of what's going on at the Times (which is what's going on everywhere else). This is a newspaper that, as we all know, is losing 100 staffers more right now. That means: more unread emails by editors in the case of the bad-choosing-girlfriend-freelancer, or more bad shoe-horned-in columns by a coworker who can't bother to get to the airport more than 30 minutes before his flight and then actually gets lawyery over it. That Hoyt is unable to make these connections, and that is his job, I think, is terrible.
Choire: And that it's THEN compounded with an untrue statement of the Times' own policies?
Choire: That's just derelict.
Choire: *Gets off soapbox*
Tom: Don't get off your soapbox yet!
Choire: I was just making room for you up here!
Tom: I'm trying to figure out how the Public Editor's weird and confusingly vague sideswipe into the forced-miscarriage story serves the readers of his column.
Tom: It was bound up in the initial discovery of the conflict of interest, sure.
Choire: Well, he has a strange obsession with how things are found out.
Choire: Here's how Clark Hoyt finds things out: he gets letters.
Choire: Meanwhile, NPR gave credit, without necessarily knowing from inside the Times that such credit was deserved, to NYTPicker for bringing up the issue of the Miami freelancer.
Tom: While Hoyt gives no credit to NYTPicker.
Choire: (Which, to NYTPicker's credit, they brought up on November 23.)
Choire: (And the Times editors note was published on Dec 6.)
Choire: Anyway!
Choire: But Hoyt got a letter from a reader in "Miami."
Tom: Hoyt's job here, this late in everything, is to be a quasi-judicial arbiter of the ethics questions.
Choire: Yes.
Tom: And the forcible-miscarriage thing reads as an attempt to disparage the character of the writer by association.
Tom: She didn't just write about her boyfriend, she wrote about her boyfriend the sensational criminal, because she clearly enjoys trafficking in wrong behavior.
Tom: When the sleazy behavior that matters here is the Times' ongoing notion that everyone who writes for it must abide by a monastic code of ethics, even as a greater and greater share of the paper is written by people who do not get to share in the institutional and financial strength on which that code of ethics is based.
Tom: You want ethically impeccable writers? Then don't expect them to have to hustle for a living.
Tom: Don't blame them for getting bought, let alone for the potential appearance of having previously been bought, when you're too cheap to buy them yourself.
Choire: Yes, this poor girl should know better than to date some terrible owner of a burger joint. Also she should know better than to write about him. Stuff happens. Her side of the story? "I told my boss up front!"
Choire: She may not be the sharpest whatever in the whatever? But these things happen, and her defense is reasonable.
Choire: As is her editor's! Whose defense is: I don't have time to read all these fucking emails.
Tom: There's more to it than that, even.
Tom: Here's a piece of reporting the Public Editor could maybe have tried to do: who on the ground in Miami could have done the job without ethical complications?
Tom: They won't pay to send a staff reporter to Miami.
Tom: They want somebody who already lives there and is intimately familiar with the dining scene.
Tom: And they end up with a person who is….intimately familiar.
Choire: Also, there is the issue of Miami.
Tom: Sure.
Choire: For instance, you can have Brett Sokol write about art collectors, as he recently did, from Miami, for the Travel section.
Choire: (DISCLOSURE: YEARS AGO I ONCE HIRED BRETT SOKOL AS A MIAMI-BASED FREELANCER AND I LIKE HIM THOUGH I DO NOT KNOW HIM.)
Choire: And that is well and fine. But you also have to know that he is the arts editor of Ocean Drive magazine.
Choire: Ocean Drive is owned by Niche Media, which owns Gotham, etc. And is what I consider one of the filthiest media outlets in terms of relationships between editorial, social status and the advertising department.
Choire: Does this mean Brett shouldn't write for the Times? No!
Choire: Does it mean it would take a team of editors about three weeks to thoroughly investigate, I guess, every party he's ever attended, every airplane he's been on, and every collector's house at which he's consumed a canape? Sure!
Choire: These towns, and these beats, are small.
Choire: You cannot go to a party in the art world in Miami without running into Rosa de la Cruz.
Choire: Of course, he hasn't slept with the de la Cruz's, THAT I KNOW OF, nor did he break up with them due to dubious tabloid incidents.
Tom: But if you won't send an outsider, you get an insider.

[This is a good place to note, since we dragged Brett in without his consent or knowledge, that he is a CLEAN TEEN, who does not go on junkets, and never accepts comped services of any kind. We used him rather cavalierly as an example of a Miami freelancer—which was not to besmirch him in any way!]

Choire: Also: how would you FIND an outsider to write for you?
Choire: On… TUMBLR?
Tom: Probably yes, actually. But that would be work.
Tom: And they don't have time to do work.
Tom: But it's the sanctimony that gets me.
Tom: Here is what the Times has been doing: it has been adding coverage of lifestyle and travel–the areas where conflicts of interest are easiest to come by–and it has been cutting staff.
Tom: Both in response to economic imperatives.
Tom: We are in tough Times.
Tom: But stop pretending.
Tom: The Times has lowered its standards.
Tom: Lower standards are cheaper than high standards.
Tom: The Times has sacrificed integrity to save money.
Tom: So have lots of publications.
Choire: And also, and not to sound so terribly reactionary, but this is just another instance in which, if I were an editor at the Times, I'd be screaming "DAMN YOU CLARK HOYT" at my walls for the next 24 hours.
Choire: It's not that the ombudsman should be on the "side" of employees of the Times.
Choire: But that he should understand what's happening inside the paper. And this shows, in at least two ways, that he does not.
Choire: AND ANYWAY, PS: WEN HO LEE, THE END.

Previously: Wordplay Most Fouled: How Not To Write A Headline

Choire Sicha: Well it may just be the need for a Hot New Nonfiction Airport Book for fall, as Malcolm Gladwell only had a "best of" book. And I think David Sedaris is off this year.

Tom Scocca: Nice of J.S. Foer to swing over from the fiction team to fill the gap.

Choire Sicha: He took one for the team.

Tom Scocca: My advice to young would-be reporters is to write a novel, because once you've written a book-length made-up story, you're qualified to write about any sort of factual business you please.

Tom Scocca: Though you do have to be able to get your novel published, which raises a bunch of (sorry) chicken-and-egg questions about how one gets connected enough to get connected.

Tom Scocca: But at any rate, on the strength of two novels and sundry other connections, Jonathan Safran Foer is now an ethical philosopher.

Tom Scocca: He appears to belong to the I-Know-You-Are-But-What-Am-I tradition.

Tom Scocca:

Almost always, when I told someone I was writing a book about 'eating animals,' they assumed, even without knowing anything about my views, that it was a case for vegetarianism. It's a telling assumption, one that implies not only that a thorough inquiry into animal agriculture would lead one away from eating meat, but that most people already know that to be the case.

Tom Scocca: Now suppose we change the subject of the book from vegetarianism to nudism.

Choire Sicha: That sounds neat!

Tom Scocca: I am writing a book inquiring into the justifications for the practice of wearing clothes.

Choire Sicha: Why? Do you hate clothes?

Choire Sicha: I bet you hate clothes!

Tom Scocca: See? You recognize that you secretly hate clothes yourself, and that the wearing of clothing is indefensible. That is why you assume that I am writing my book in favor of nudism, rather than against nudism.

Choire Sicha: Well that would be my, you know, whattaya call it. Suspicion!

Tom Scocca: Does that possibly have anything to do with the fact that most people in most cultures all over the world wear clothing, with only minimal qualms if any about doing so?

Choire Sicha: My expectations are that most people either enjoy clothing or at least do not find clothing objectionable.

Tom Scocca: It is a funny way to ground an inquiry into behavior, this starting from the premise that the majority of people agree that the behavior is wrong, even though the majority of people engage in it.

Choire Sicha: Maybe everyone* has just been ruined by Christopher Hitchens books?

Choire Sicha: *that Jonathan Safran Foer knows.

Tom Scocca: That is an important footnote.

Choire Sicha: Well it always is. It's not like I'm a great pulse-taker of North Carolinian pig farmers or whatever.

Choire Sicha: JSF, having done some hog farm traveling, is probably slightly better off in that department!

Tom Scocca: Yet the hog farms present a whole different problem.

Choire Sicha: But they caused swine flu!

Choire Sicha: That is what JSF said on the Ellen DeGeneres TV show.

Tom Scocca: Foer is very bothered–and wants the reader to be very bothered–by the hideous quantities of untreated sewage that these hog factories produce.

Choire Sicha: I am bothered by those!

Tom Scocca: Natalie Portman was so bothered by reading it, she switched from vegetarian to vegan activist. and is now hectoring her friends to do the same. And the readership of the Huffington Post.

Choire Sicha: Well, it's not a terrible choice, all told! If you really like legumes.

Choire Sicha: And also becoming uninvitable to dinner.

Tom Scocca: But if the hogs are producing as much sewage as major cities, why do hog farms not have municipal-grade sewage-treatment plants attached?

Choire Sicha: I don't know, why!

Tom Scocca: We can probably come up with an answer involving inertia, the creeping innovations of megacapitalism, legislative cowardice, and so on.

Tom Scocca: It seems quite reasonable that they should treat their sewage. I support it wholeheartedly.

Tom Scocca: But what does that have to do with the question of whether humans should eat the flesh (or organs! I do love scrapple) of other animals?

Tom Scocca: Factory farming is disgusting and evil and should be fought.

Choire Sicha: Perhaps they are temporary vegans. Just until the farms are, like, better.

Tom Scocca: That seems not to be the case.

Choire Sicha: One plate of free-range bacon would fix most of them.

Tom Scocca: It is as if an author arguing for nudism were to devote much of his book to an expose of clothing sweatshops.

Tom Scocca: Or it is like the Spartacist Youth Club denouncing the Ku Klux Klan. Or the LaRouchies showing up at the antiwar rallies.

Choire Sicha: He's said that he wants people to "to think, to investigate, to question what's at the end of the fork before putting it in your mouth."

Tom Scocca: And yet he is against Michael Pollan.

Choire Sicha: That's where I get confused as well!

Tom Scocca: In Foer's analysis, that is because you and I are blinded by our sentimental attachment to meat, which is a sentimental attachment to murder, because Meat Is Murder. Q.E.D.

Tom Scocca: Again, it's a pretty bold tactic for the person arguing against eating meat to accuse the meat-eaters (including the non-argumentative ones!) of sentimentalism.

Tom Scocca: And it was pretty telling when he personalized it.

Tom Scocca: Setting aside the incredible condescension toward his grandmother, and by extension toward all peoples of the earth who have not been properly socialized to the most right-thinking norms of 21st-century collegiate-literary Brooklyn.

Tom Scocca: I was even more struck by this, about when a babysitter told him and his brother that chicken came from poor little chickens:

Tom Scocca: I put down my fork. Frank finished the meal and is probably eating a chicken as I type these words.

Choire Sicha: Ha! I think that's actually pretty funny.

Tom Scocca: Sure! Jonathan Foer is not a bad writer, at the level of putting words and sentences together, and he is clever about putting nice things in the foreground. It's down below, where the ideas and values have to go, that things get awkward and ugly.

Choire Sicha: I did get stuck at "The greatest chef who ever lived wasn't preparing food, but humans."

Tom Scocca: This needs to get a little ad hominem, because this is all about a particular homme inflating his own decisions into ethical pronouncements, at the expense of other people. Including his brother. So let's have a look at the Brothers Foer, here.

Tom Scocca: One brother cares deeply about the chicken. He cannot ignore moral issues.

Tom Scocca: The other brother is callous.

Tom Scocca: Now. One brother is Franklin Foer, editor of the New Republic.

Tom Scocca: I make fun of the New Republic a lot, and it deserves a lot of it, though less so under Foer than under Peter Beinart.

Tom Scocca: [DISCLOSURE: PETER BEINART COLD-CALLED ME TO INVITE ME TO INTERVIEW FOR A JOB THERE, THEN AFTER THE INTERVIEW HAD AN UNDERLING CALL ME TO TELL ME THEY WERE HIRING SOMEONE ELSE.]

Tom Scocca: But though the New Republic is over-serious and self-serious at times, it is nevertheless serious. What Franklin Foer does for a living is to weigh great global issues of war and peace, prosperity and poverty, etc., and to try to give voice to people who are trying to address those issues and influence policy, in ways that might make the difference between millions of people dying and hundreds of millions of people dying.

Tom Scocca: What Jonathan Foer does for a living is sit around and write twee lit-fic.

Choire Sicha: Well. Very laboriously!

Choire Sicha: I have a Foer brother sidebar?

Choire Sicha: Remember when Joshua Foer got an advance of $1.2 million for his book, "Moonwalking with Einstein"? That was in late 2006. That book is currently listed on Amazon with a pub date of "Dec 31, 2025."

Choire Sicha: Wouldn't that be wonderful? I am jealous.

Choire Sicha: Anyway, back to those two other Foers!

Tom Scocca: Gosh, yes.

Tom Scocca: So I have trouble digesting an anecdote which is designed to showcase Jonathan Safran Foer as the one of the two who is the more serious thinker about ethics or about the way the world should be.

Choire Sicha: Well, he's always been obsessed to the point of self-demolition with the evils of the world.

Choire Sicha: This is a not-unreasonable quality.

Choire Sicha: And I think this is him actually finally trying to grapple with it.

Choire Sicha: Instead of being paralyzed by it. Because paralysis is something that is natural to him. He's a very anxious critter!

Tom Scocca: Maybe he should have done a little more grappling before he wrote a book.

Choire Sicha: One thing I'm pretty sure of: their kids are going to be sneaking off all through high school to Keens Steakhouse at every opportunity.

Tom Scocca: It's not a very interesting arc of moral inquiry: am I right? Am I really right? Are people who disagree with me really wrong? Why, yes, I am right, and other people are wrong.

Tom Scocca: Oh, the children. That also bugged me.

Tom Scocca: He's going vegetarian now because, how did he put it?

Tom Scocca: The shame of parenthood – which is a good shame – is that we want our children to be more whole than we are, to have satisfactory answers. My children not only inspired me to reconsider what kind of eating animal I would be, but also shamed me into reconsideration.

Choire Sicha: That confused me! But then I don't know anything about parenthood.

Tom Scocca: Here parenthood seems to be a process in which a person who has spent 20 or 30 years perfecting the art of being a child decides it's his child's duty to start off life from that point of perfection.

Tom Scocca: I don't want my child to be more whole than I am.

Tom Scocca: In some sort of endless process of improvement of the line.

Tom Scocca: I just want him to hang in there.

Choire Sicha: Do you think about the meat you put in it?

Tom Scocca: And not to have contempt–loving, delicately hedged, anxious contempt–for his grandparents and great-grandparents.

Choire Sicha: I also did not get the contempt thing for his grandmother?

Tom Scocca: Well, she's wrong and he's right.

Tom Scocca: I don't see how to un-split that.

Choire Sicha: Well some of my grandparents were probably wrong about the blacks!?

Choire Sicha: But that's not equivalent.

Tom Scocca: Right. His grandmother is still serving chicken.

Choire Sicha: I think he respects her greatly though!? But she is still wrong.

Tom Scocca: Well, he likes his brother, too! But he's inciting Natalie Portman against him.

Choire Sicha: Well you know how SHE gets! She's a monster!

Choire Sicha: (Kidding! Don't hurt me everyone!)

Tom Scocca: Well, I fed the kid stir-fried chopped green beans with ground pork and salted duck eggs yesterday.

Choire Sicha: Oh you're the monster!

Tom Scocca: The ground pork was from Whole Foods, for whatever marginal upward pressure that puts on the standards of the meat industry, even at the cost of empowering a rich Ayn Rand nut to meddle in our political system. There are ethical decisions everywhere.

Choire Sicha: Yeah, I did stop shopping there actually, as an ethical decision, despite other good things about that company.

Tom Scocca: And when we leaf through his big book of animal pictures, I point out which ones we've eaten.

Choire Sicha: Ha! "That's a capybara; it's tasty!"

Tom Scocca: I put off shopping at Whole Foods for a little while, and started steering more dollars to the farmers' market, but Whole Foods does have good meat. And when that whole business about the ammonia-treated meat slurry in the industrial beef chain showed up in the Times, I dropped any trace of reluctance.

Tom Scocca: But you and I have different available shopping options, so the cost and benefit of dealing with Whole Foods is different for each of us.

Tom Scocca: And that's fine.

Choire Sicha: Yes!

Tom Scocca: I'm not going to write a book about what a self-righteous asshole your shopping habits reveal you to be.

Choire Sicha: I have RADICALLY different food choices from you.

Choire Sicha: As I live ever so much closer to Park Slope than you.

Tom Scocca: Everyone has principles! I try not to go to Starbucks, and when I do end up having to go to Starbucks, I don't buy their coffee.

Choire Sicha: And everyone has availability. For instance, I can go up and be lectured by those damned sanctimonious brothers at Blue Hill anytime I feel like losing a week's pay on a product that is literally going to be crap in 12 hours.

Tom Scocca: Starbucks used its market power to buy out a much better coffee chain in Boston, then broke its word about keeping that better coffee available. I resented Starbucks for that, and I felt it represented the great dishonesty of consumer capitalism run amok: the allegedly all-knowing free market allowed bad coffee to replace good coffee, and there was nothing customers could do about it, except quietly hate Starbucks.

Tom Scocca: But if you say, hey, let's meet up at Starbucks, that's fine. I'm not going to lecture anybody about anything. They're convenient!

Choire Sicha: But there's a difference between issues of choice–often I am in a town with no decent coffee, the best coffee is Starbucks, though I would rather not–and issues that give rise to abstinence.

Choire Sicha: But I don't know. I guess I appreciate that JSF treats this as a personal issue. For instance, I won't eat ducks. I think they are pretty and I can't eat them.

Choire Sicha: But I ate the holy fuck out of some quail last night.

Tom Scocca: Again, though, if it's a personal issue, why is there a book about it? Michael Pollan is trying to work through the answers for people other than himself. Foer is saying, well, do whatever you want, though in your heart, you know that what you're doing is wrong and indefensible.

Choire Sicha: I think that has to be true. The book seems to be: "I have figured out this is wrong."

Choire Sicha: Not like Pollan, which was: "You are eating like shit!"

Tom Scocca: And let's talk for a second about other ethical lifestyle choices a person makes.

Choire Sicha: Uh oh.

Choire Sicha: Is it.. breeding???

Tom Scocca: Yes!

Choire Sicha: Oh I'm always game to go to town on this.

Tom Scocca: He is passing his righteous vegetarian values on to his two children.

Tom Scocca: Now, I'm not personally going to get high and mighty. I've got one kid, for now, and who knows what the future holds.

Choire Sicha: DON'T SAY THAT.

Choire Sicha: I'm getting you snipped.

Tom Scocca: See? This issue arouses passions.

Tom Scocca: Once you are arguing about greater ethical effects of your household practices, the breeding is a valid subject.

Choire Sicha: Oh it's always valid.

Choire Sicha: Because I have to walk the streets of this world while I dart about, looking for meat to consume.

Tom Scocca: Well, you're also gonna need somebody to change your bedpan. And pay taxes into your Medicare. And good luck finding any immigrants, the way policy is going!

Choire Sicha: Whereas your hog shit pits and your dinner? Not in my face.

Choire Sicha: That is true.

Choire Sicha: Please to make me some dependents.

Tom Scocca: But overall, there is a lot of overlap between the people who argue that meat-eating consumes an unjustifiably disproportionate share of the world's resources and the people who argue that breeding does exactly the same thing.

Choire Sicha: I think Andrea Dworkin and I ended up there!

Tom Scocca: So it would be more interesting to see Jonathan Safran Foer defending his decision to breed than to see him defending his decision to stop eating meat.

Tom Scocca: Or we could consider real estate!

Choire Sicha: Which is theft, as I recall from the 80s.

Tom Scocca: Jonathan Safran Foer lives in a very large house in an urban neighborhood. Apparently his back yard runs the length of a block and is big enough to hold a whole extra house.

Tom Scocca: He has the kind of house that is frequently subdivided into apartments.

Tom Scocca: It is 7,000 square feet.

Choire Sicha: Well, that's about what I'd want for two kids.

Tom Scocca: So he and his family are taking up housing that could hold another five or six households.

Choire Sicha: Though to be fair to your point: even the Pulitzer Mansion was divided into apartments in the 1930s.

Tom Scocca: Because people needed the living space!

Choire Sicha: Well there are always thorny issues of choice in my mind. People don't need to live in Brooklyn! They can go to, I don't know, wherever poor people go now.

Tom Scocca: And this house of Foer's is in a city center, where transit and other density-promoting amenities are available.

Choire Sicha: My carping aside: I think his real estate choices would be ethically troublesome for me, by which I mean, were I him.

Tom Scocca: So five or six families who would otherwise live in the middle of Brooklyn are forced to live further out, which forces other people to live further out, which eventually leads to five or six families settling in crappy townhouses or garden apartments out on the edge of things, in land previously occupied by birds and rabbits, from which they have to travel by fossil-fuel-burning car.

Tom Scocca: All because Jonathan Safran Foer has some vain fantasy of being a "city person" which he insists on clinging to, even as he demands a living space (for his growing family) more consistent with living on a rural manor.

Choire Sicha: Or those people could take the train! Which is, you know, subsidized by the state. Which is to say, taxes.

Choire Sicha: But… yeah.

Tom Scocca: At some point, they've sprawled past the reach of the train.

Tom Scocca: And Natalie Portman!

Choire Sicha: Wait. She has to take the train?

Tom Scocca: You and I could eat at Keens every day for the rest of our lives, and we would not do even a measurable fraction of the damage wrought on the planet by three Star Wars movies' worth of plastic merchandise.

Tom Scocca: And they weren't even good movies.

Choire Sicha: Yeah but I think she sends that money to like Africa or something.

Choire Sicha: Though also to her representatives at ID PR.

Choire Sicha: For a monthly fee that is easily double the monthly rent that you and I pay. But!

Tom Scocca: Well, she makes her choices.

Tom Scocca: But if she's choosing to be a "vegan activist," well, then she's getting prescriptive, and there are other prescriptions to consider.

Tom Scocca: And speaking of lifestyle decisions and Foer's readers, someone at the New Yorker really should have stopped Elizabeth Kolbert from identifying herself in print as yet another chicken-owning staff ladywriter.

Choire Sicha: Ha! That is going around.

Choire Sicha: Well. Ethics. These friends of mine in brownstone Brooklyn have a saying, that resulted from a heated conversation at a dinner party about Iraq and Armenia and Sarajevo and whatever, a conversation that was interrupted and finally terminated by a woman yelling, "WHAT ABOUT THE KURDS!"

Choire Sicha: So now whenever I am in one of these comparable ethics situations, I just scream "WHAT ABOUT THE KURDS!" and then I get to walk away.

Tom Scocca: Or in this case, "WHAT ABOUT THE BEES?"

Choire Sicha: Yeah what the fuck! Remember when everyone cared about the bees for five minutes?

Tom Scocca: Colony-collapse disorder should have finished off veganism as an ethical proposition. Though Elizabeth Kolbert herself didn't quite remember it in her own Foer review.

Tom Scocca: Your vegetables are pollinated by animal slaves being worked to death.

Tom Scocca: The life of an industrial bee colony is far more of a cruel perversion of its natural way of life than the life of a free-range chicken is.

Tom Scocca: There isn't any opt-out.

Choire Sicha: Well aren't YOU a bummer.

Tom Scocca: You are what you eat!

Choire Sicha: Well. I think I'm going to get a sandwich. Which is intensely problematic here in the East Village on a few levels.

Tom Scocca: Maybe I'll dig out some leftovers.

Choire Sicha: Do you think the lobsters at Luke's Lobster Shack died happy?

Tom Scocca: Happier than the ones who died out at sea died?

Choire Sicha: I don't know why I eat those disgusting sea spiders anyway. But that's not ethics; that's just being ruined by "civilization."

Tom Scocca: David Foster Wallace thought pretty hard about it.

Choire Sicha: Well he ended up fine.

Tom Scocca: From a prescriptive-ethics standpoint, he did. No more chickens are dying for him.

Choire Sicha: I would like to be an absolutist. But here I am in my clothes made by slaves and whatnot, heading out to look for something that isn't made of animals that were tortured before they became food product. So I think I'm not going to become a vegan!

Tom Scocca: Because why pretend your work is done?

Tom Scocca: It's a full-time job, ethics.

Choire Sicha: And then you die.

Tom Scocca: And try not to leach too much formaldehyde into the soil when you're done.

Tom Scocca: Wow, this n+1 thing is PROFOUNDLY ARGUABLE.

Choire Sicha: Uh oh.

Tom Scocca: "No change was more momentous and utopian than that men could choose men for love objects, and women choose women, to remake the sexual household." In the 20th century, he says. No change more momentous.

Tom Scocca: * Female suffrage

Tom Scocca: * Rise and fall of Communism and Fascism

Tom Scocca: * Jet travel

Tom Scocca: * Consumer capitalism

Tom Scocca: * Widespread use of automobiles

Tom Scocca: * Computing and the Internet

Tom Scocca: * Total warfare made impracticable by invention of nuclear weapons and ICBMs.

Tom Scocca: * Antibiotics

Tom Scocca: * Television

Tom Scocca: * Abortion and hormonal birth control

Tom Scocca: Was this person even BORN in the 20th century?

Tom Scocca: What the fuck is this?

Tom Scocca: "If the household organization of three thousand years of recorded history could be altered simply in the interest of what people wanted, in the interest of desire, then anything could be changed."

Tom Scocca: Um, the very institution of anyone choosing anyone else as an individual with whom to make, let alone "remake," something that could be thought of as a "sexual household," which would be synonymous with "household organization"–he thinks that sort of thing has been around for 3,000 years?

Tom Scocca: His plural is creeping me out. "We" and "us."

Tom Scocca: Fucking swingers, man.

Tom Scocca: How old is he? His abortions-should-be-fun passage can't really be written by anyone who knows any women over the age of 30.

Choire Sicha: Mark is Harvard '97.

Tom Scocca: So the women he knows should be in their mid 30s.

Tom Scocca: The body only has X many times it's going to cooperate and make a viable baby. Sometimes X = 0!

Tom Scocca: This is the underdiscussed constraint on and flaw in the concept of "choice."

Tom Scocca: It's not like choosing to take a year off between high school and college.

Tom Scocca: It's a tricky and mostly blind risk calculation, which has much less to do with autonomy that we'd all like it to.

Tom Scocca: This guy is such a sad little SHOPPER.

Tom Scocca: Marriage is "no longer even the privileged secular space for intimate confession and support, as this modern necessity is increasingly outsourced, well down the class ladder, to therapists, gurus, and members of all the helping professions."

Tom Scocca: O RLY?!?

Tom Scocca: "We now resist atomization and anomie with the wide range of unusually warm, non-exclusive and simultaneous friendships, often verging on erotism but not compelled to it, both across and within the sexes, and among straights and gays-this extraordinary birthright the '60s gave to all those of us born, say, after 1969."

Tom Scocca: What is this CUDDLE-PUDDLE BULLSHIT?

Tom Scocca: "For better and worse (and for richer and for poorer), marriage is also almost inevitably intolerable to any post-'60s individual who counts the accumulation of strong experience and passionate feeling as the sine qua non of meaningful existence."

Tom Scocca: Jesus, are you offering to show folks your ETCHINGS?

Tom Scocca: This essay crawled down some sort of terrible time-tunnel from 1952.

Tom Scocca: Actually 1953; its original subject was not gay marriage but Playboy.

Tom Scocca: Holy shit.

Tom Scocca: This guy.

Tom Scocca: His editors.

Tom Scocca: Their planet.

Tom Scocca: "It says that your desire is not for pleasure or fun, it is for fitting in."

Tom Scocca: These are the two purposes of life, between which one must choose: pleasure, or fitting in.

Tom Scocca: I assume the purpose of this essay was the latter.

Tom Scocca: Sorry, but you are still all alone on Moist Nitwit Kidult Island.

Tom Scocca: I'm going to stop fighting "kidult."

Tom Scocca: People like him deserve a word from New York magazine to describe them, because their lives and thoughts occur on the level intelligible to New York magazine.

Tom Scocca: "Kidult" was New York, right?

Tom Scocca: Or did they confect some other word for it? Oh right. "Grup." "Grup" is still unusable.

Tom Scocca: "the sperm left in a condom or wiped on a masturbator's handkerchief."

Tom Scocca: "Wiped" on a "handkerchief"?

Tom Scocca: Diff'rent strokes!

Tom Scocca: Oh mercy, now he is going on and on and on about abortion. And he does count how many chances a woman has to make a baby. It's "a possible thirty or so." So give yourself over to pure pleasure in the moment, ladies!

Tom Scocca: "You have to defend sex because we still have no better model than the actual, concrete sexual relation for a deep intuitive process opposed to domination. We have no better model for a bodily process that, fundamentally, is free and universal. It does not produce (there is no experiential remainder but pleasure) nor consume. It is cooperative (within the relation of the lovers) and, in that relation, seems to forbid competition. It makes you love people, and accept the look and difference of their bodies."

Tom Scocca: Has this person ever HAD sex?

Tom Scocca: Again, this person and the plurals. It makes you love people, plural? It makes you accept the look of people's bodies, plural?

Tom Scocca: "Desire, the endless rising or falling feeling of desire"

Tom Scocca: Endless, but rising? Or endless, but falling?

Tom Scocca: Is it a sine wave?

Tom Scocca: He says "face-to-face relation."

Choire Sicha: Perhaps he's not sure what sex is?

Tom Scocca: He really isn't.

Tom Scocca: N plus one is to thinking as a Renaissance Festival is to warfare.

Tom Scocca: Maybe the piece works for him in person.

Tom Scocca: Why should I destroy my beautiful love by tying it down? Why should I cheat the world out of the pleasure of sex with me by restricting myself to one person?

Tom Scocca: God [wrings hands], I sometimes wish I were gay, so pure pleasure and love wouldn't be bound up in all this…this hegemonic, patriarchal structure of authority that man-woman relations are always suffocated by. [Clasps hands, stares at place wall meets ceiling.] You know? To just love a person for love's sake. Gay people, they've been cast out by society, but that's, that's like being cast out of PRISON, in some ways, really, isn't it?

Tom Scocca: Sometimes I feel like we're the ones trapped inside, looking out, and I almost wish I could be gay. But [lowers eyes, glances up] I do love women. [Holds eye contact.] I mean, look at you, look at your…your body. [Lowers eyes, raises eyes. Spreads hands.] Your body is just…so, so…beautiful. [Reaches out, touches shoulder.] It is like a temple, that's so old-fashioned to say, isn't it, God, it's so embarrassing, but, really [runs hand downward from shoulder, along outside of arm, slowly] it is, I think, as close as someone like me in this world now can get to having anything to worship. This beauty.

Previously: Less Talkin', More Townin'

Choire Sicha: So you have just seen a truly hair-raising thing, I take it!

Tom Scocca: The pages are a little loose in this issue, because I flung it away from me and it hit the wall. I am not a satisfied customer.

Choire Sicha: The McKinsey consultants aren't going to like hearing that.

Tom Scocca: On page 61 of this issue there is a tiny bit of type. A photo credit. The photo credit reads "MATT NETTHEIM / WARNER BROS."

Choire Sicha: Is it a still from a forthcoming film?

Tom Scocca: Or is it the illustration for the week's short fiction? Why, it is both. The New Yorker is running a publicity still advertising a motion picture, as if it were content.

Choire Sicha: Wow, who's Renata Adler now?

Tom Scocca: No one is Renata Adler there, it seems. Remember when the question about the integrity of the New Yorker's editorial content was whether it would stoop to running photographs as illustrations at all? Me neither. What a boring thing to argue about.

Choire Sicha: I remember that, a little!

Tom Scocca: Now it can be argued–more now than ever!–that from a certain critical perspective, publishing a photograph by Annie Liebovitz is one kind of marketing proposition, and that it represents a degree of engagement with commerce.

Choire Sicha: I would argue that!

Tom Scocca: The same kind of critic could argue that the fiction section of the New Yorker is not unfamiliar with a kind of product placement, in that Literary Events are not infrequently preceded and heralded on their way to the commercial marketplace by the publication of an excerpt in the New Yorker in the form (or guise) of a short story. But this is not an example of the funny symbiosis between the purposes of the New Yorker and the purposes of the publishing industry.

Tom Scocca: This is actual marketing: a marketing-department image which is part of the marketing campaign for a mass-market movie, occupying most of a page in the editorial hole of the New Yorker.

Tom Scocca: And the next nine pages, not counting the cartoons, are devoted to a piece of "short fiction" by one of the Warner Bros. movie's screenwriters, which is a novelization of the Warner Bros. movie's story.

Tom Scocca: This is a big, long step beyond using the fiction space to give everyone a preview of the new Jhumpa Lahiri. It is a step that carries the New Yorker off the sidewalk and into a deep ditch bubbling with raw sewage.

Choire Sicha: That's not a very nice thing to say about Hollywood.

Tom Scocca: Hollywood, or Hollywood marketing departments?

Choire Sicha: Like there's a difference!

Tom Scocca: Anyway, we have not gotten to the particular substance of the story, yet, because I am trying to keep these issues separate. For the moment, it is only worth stipulating that it is a lousy story.

Tom Scocca: It is an adaptation of an adapted screenplay–a derivative work of a derivative work–and is completely without the sort of artistic merit that would allow someone to rationalize the marketing package on literary grounds. At least, the pages I read before hurling the magazine against the wall were clearly worthless, and someone who read the whole thing confirmed that it just kept on going that way.

Choire Sicha: I'll report back to those that are concerned about stapling that the magazine only holds up so-so against hurtling.

Tom Scocca: So let's pause here and finish with the magazine: this package, particularly the publicity photo, represents a gross lapse of ethics and taste by the fiction department of the New Yorker, and the magazine owes the readers an apology for printing it. And an editor might think long and hard about why he employs a fiction editor who would think this was an OK thing to put in the magazine.

Choire Sicha: To her credit, she did publish a wonderful Chris Adrian story–a sometime McSweeney's author, by the way–back in April! But.

Tom Scocca: Now, this story (now: this story!)–this story does have a name-brand literary figure attached to it. Actually, it has two, but the second one doesn't get his name on it. The name on it is "Dave Eggers." One of the nice things that the semi-commercial publishing-promotion excerpt tradition of the New Yorker did do for me, long ago, was it allowed me to read enough of A Supposedly Fun Work of Heartbreaking Genius that I didn't have to go read the whole book.

Choire Sicha: I read the whole book.

Tom Scocca: How was it? I didn't mind the excerpt.

Choire Sicha: Capsule review: it had its ups and downs?

Tom Scocca: We are brave. Brave are we. We are going to hide in the hills, like desperadoes, and take Tiger Mountain by strategy. Etc. But Dave Eggers is not the real literary brand being monetized here, although his literary brand is being used to add value in an extremely irritating way.

Tom Scocca: The story is called "Max at Sea," and the "Max" of the title is the character Max–or Dave Eggers' and Warner Bros.' commercial reconceptualization of the character Max–from Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak.

Tom Scocca: Where the Wild Things Are is a masterpiece. I have read it many, many, many times in the past two years and two months.

Choire Sicha: It is a masterpiece!

Tom Scocca: It is a masterpiece of children's literature. What Dave Eggers and Warner Bros. have done is turned the plot of a masterpiece of children's literature into a creepy, idiotic piece of Young Adult Fiction.

Tom Scocca: When I read it, I was literally ready to punch Dave Eggers in the face, except he was nowhere around. Now that I have simmered down, it remains possible that if I ever do find myself in a room with Dave Eggers, I may throw a drink in his face, probably including the glass or bottle.

Choire Sicha: You know, violence is never the answer.

Tom Scocca: That's more or less what an editor told me many years ago when I wanted to review a Soul Asylum album by, rather than listening to it, borrowing my neighbor's shotgun and blasting it to bits and writing about the aesthetic experience.

Choire Sicha: Well that's not violence. It's a terrible capitalist construction that violence against objects is actually violence.

Tom Scocca: I don't hate writers anywhere near as passionately as I hate what they write. But, you know, we all have a dark streak. Unless we are characters written about by Dave Eggers. His innovation in this story is to supply Max, who "wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind / and another," with a sad Back Story just full of Problems. According to the oily world view of Dave Eggers, he has a broken home. Father gone.

Tom Scocca: Mother tired…. no, wait, that's Curtis Mayfield. Max Eggers is only a child of the EMOTIONAL ghetto. Would you believe his mother has a boyfriend he doesn't like? Would you believe his older sister is mean to him?

Choire Sicha: Oh boy.

Tom Scocca: If you ever read any of the books in your middle-school library, you probably could believe that. So Max Eggers is angry. He acts out. Dave Eggers is the voice from the world in which "acting up" has been replaced by "acting out."

Tom Scocca: Maurice Sendak's Max is from a stable, loving home. He is allowed to run around in a wolf suit, which belongs to him. He is sent to bed without any dinner, but in the end dinner is waiting for him.

Tom Scocca: But then why does Max go wild? Why does he chase the dog with a fork? Why does his nice tidy bedroom have a wild forest grow up through it, as he laughs?

Choire Sicha: About the 17-year-old boxer who was allegedly run down by the police, whilst on his dirtbike? Yes I did!

Tom Scocca: That was as bad as a newspaper story ever gets. There was no epistemological effort put into it at all.

Choire Sicha: There was a claim, and a weak denial, I believe.

Tom Scocca: The reporter spent maybe half an hour getting a story told by the lawyer. But the claim was–well, it's not even weak, because it simply exists outside the spectrum of persuasion. How good is the boxer? How bad are the injuries? Who saw the incident? Are there other dirt-bike riders who report a pattern of being menaced by the police?

Choire Sicha: According to the lawyer, yes!

Tom Scocca: Exactly. The reporter abdicated any responsibility for getting the story. And this is a story alleging a serious crime–a hit-and-run–by the police, and it ran I believe on page A3 of the daily newspaper, fairly large. But it contains nothing that's not being claimed by an interested party.

Choire Sicha: Well, I'm not sure there are technically any non-interested parties?

Tom Scocca: Let's start with the lead. "Two months ago, 17-year-old Deon Johnson was among the top-ranked boxers at a junior national championship, he said." "He said"?

Choire Sicha: Oh boy.

Tom Scocca: USA Boxing
One Olympic Plaza
Colorado Springs, CO 80909
Phone: (719) 866-2300
Fax: (719) 632-3426
I bet someone there could help you understand how good Deon Johnson is.

Choire Sicha: I'm finding it hard to look him up online without knowing what weight he fights in.

Tom Scocca: It's not even about whether the claim he's an Olympic-bound boxer is true or not. It's about the reporter and the editor being too lazy to even bother getting firm information. Why not say how he did in the tournament? It's a better lead that way.

Choire Sicha: Or, for instance, what tournament it was? Because I cannot raise records of any of this.

Tom Scocca: And this guy fights out of the Umar gym. I have a long and affectionate history with Umar. If the reporter had simply gone to Umar, they could have hooked him up with specifics about the boxer's record and history. They would probably have known somebody who knew something about the dirt bikes.

Choire Sicha: But that's like in West Baltimore. And like, this Deon Johnson person is… oh wait… on a "Pennsylvania Avenue."

Tom Scocca: Looks like Umar's current headquarters is about two blocks from where Pennsylvania crosses North Avenue.

Choire Sicha: And this lawyer's office is on N. Calvert St. It's in the Equitable Bank Building! 10 N. Calvert St.

Tom Scocca: Google Maps: Directions.

Tom Scocca: The Sunpapers is an 8-minute walk from the lawyer's office.

Choire Sicha: Do you think he walked?

Tom Scocca: It's easier than driving. Calvert is one-way going north, I believe. So you gotta get turned around, and then you gotta park. Even on a hot day, I'd walk it. So, in fact, I'm going to bet that this reporter didn't get into a car at all on this one. If you go down to the bottom, I think he refers to this session with the lawyer as a "news conference."

Choire Sicha: Which was attended apparently by others. Although: barely! WJZ; "Investigative Voice." Doesn't Baltimore have some version of Gothamist that should have been there?

Tom Scocca: Evidently not. I don't know why The Sun even pretends to publish a newspaper anymore.

Choire Sicha: Well this is sort of like a pretend-newspaper piece!

Tom Scocca: It is completely a pretend newspaper piece. The various people who assigned, reported, wrote, edited, and placed the piece were all pretending to do their jobs.

Choire Sicha: Perhaps they were busy with something else.

Tom Scocca: I can't imagine what. There's nothing in the paper.

Choire Sicha: I mean, their night jobs.

Tom Scocca: Tending bar. Washing cars. I have great sympathy for the handful of surviving journalists in the building. I guess if they want to keep taking Guild paychecks from Sam Zell's money, they should go on ahead. But I wish they would just fabricate the news entirely, and make something that at least reads like it's not an insult to the customer. If you don't have the time or energy to drive out to West Baltimore and talk to some people, gin up a scene. Here's a starter kit: boarded-up rowhouses, check-cashing shop, Formstone churches, ailanthus trees. Use Google Street View and have a look around. If you get caught, you'll never work in journalism again. That's a win-win.

ADDENDUM: A reader notes that Justin Fenton has done more legwork on other stories–one of which we also happened to have discussed over the weekend!

Tom Scocca: Did you know 12 people were shot at a cookout in Baltimore last Sunday?

Choire Sicha: How would I know that? Who would cover such a thing?

Tom Scocca: I think none of the shootings were fatal. So in fact if you count the pregnant lady who got shot and went into labor and had the baby, I guess it was a net gain for life?

Choire Sicha: *Googles* OMG it was a MEMORIAL cookout too?

Tom Scocca: Yes!

Tom Scocca: The Sun has a huge package under the headline "Hope and the abyss" and it contains almost no usable facts. For instance it says that the day's shootings–there were 18 overall, with I think two fatalities not at the cookout–had something to do with a feud between drug families. But it doesn't, say, identify or characterize them in any way. Were the shooters from the same group of people who were responsible for there being a memorial in the first place? Can't tell from the story. But also, you know: 12 people get shot and it's not national news? Are you trying to read the story?

Choire Sicha: Trying….

Tom Scocca: It's completely unreadable. I really wanted to know what was going on and I got nothing. If you go all the way to the end, there's a guy who drove himself to the hospital with his eye shot out? I think. Maybe he was a passenger?

Choire Sicha: "Map: Party turns to panic" Why would i want a MAP?

Tom Scocca: There's no explanation of how many gunmen there were, how the shooting started, who got hit where and when–actually, pretty much any who-what-where-when-why question you might want to ask about the shooting of 12–or is it 18?–people.

Choire Sicha: Yes I wanted to know, if it was one person, with what weapon do you shoot so many people?

Tom Scocca: Right? Did some people shoot back? Was there crossfire?

Tom Scocca: I'm thinking maybe Monty Cook heard about The Wire and didn't understand that it had a master narrative structure at all times. This thing happened! This person was here! This other person was there! Somebody had an asthma attack! Yes, a big-city emergency room is a confusing place to be on an evening when a mass shooting happens. But that doesn't mean you write a big long story that makes the reader feel as confused as an E.R. nurse.

Previously: Memoirs! Leer at Yer Crazy Memoirs! From a Circus of Times Employees, a Thousand Magazine Excerpts Bloom

Tom Scocca: See! The Ghastly Addict & His Frostbitten Tots!

Tom Scocca: Smell! The Uncontrollable Vomiting of the Food Expert!

Choire Sicha: And let's not forget: Marvel! At the Guy Who Can't Stop Doing Other Dudes!

Tom Scocca: You mean: The Guy Who Can't Stop Doing Other Dudes Because, Gosh, They Just Keep Telling Him How Smokin' Irresistibly Hot He Is!

Choire Sicha: Or: I Blew Off A Wedding To Get Laid (Um Just Like Every Other Gay Dude.)

Tom Scocca: Uhrkf, all these terrible details flooding back.

Choire Sicha: They are not necessarily a homogeneous lot, apart from the memoirness. Some are good! Some are not!

Tom Scocca: Ponder! The Former Executive Editor's Mother's Suicide Attempt of Long Ago!

Choire Sicha: Oh, I done forgot that one! I wonder how this "first serial" stuff works out. For instance: how did WaPo win out on getting the Francine du Plessix Gray excerpt? Was it too high-brow, or just too non-staff-written, for the NYT mag?

Tom Scocca: I do not have a clue.

Choire Sicha: I do not either! Oh also let us not forget: Oh Holy Shit, This Dexter Filkins Excerpt is Really Good.

Tom Scocca: When was that?

Choire Sicha: August 24, 2008!

Choire Sicha: Now, everyone referred to "I Am Feeling Kind Of Down: The Daphne Merkin Story" as a book proposal. But I am not sure it is. It might have just been… a magazine piece? A magazine piece that read like a memoir excerpt.

Tom Scocca: Right. Except–or especially!–it made it sort of impossible to imagine slogging through a book's worth of more of the same.

Choire Sicha: Well, it's… depressing! Plus Andrew Solomon has already Done That.

Choire Sicha: The whole David Carr, Frank Bruni, Benoit Denizet-Denizet-Benizet, Dexter Filkins memoir thing is like an unruly game of Fuck, Marry, Kill and Something Else.

Choire Sicha: Hey wow, on second thought, let's not go there.

Tom Scocca: Ha!

Choire Sicha: Mmph. But here's my other question: Don't you think this all makes Jenny 8. Lee feel bad?

Tom Scocca: Why?

Choire Sicha: WHY NO EXCERPT OF HER BOOK? Was it not depraved enough?

Tom Scocca: Well, Jenny made the mistake of writing about other people and other things.

Choire Sicha: Or something. I wonder what Times-people memoirs we have to look forward to. Too bad they fired Judy Miller.

Tom Scocca: Did they let Howell Raines write about fly-fishing in the magazine?

Choire Sicha: Oh, hello, 1993.

Tom Scocca: Howell Raines was such a terrible writer about fishing.

Choire Sicha: Yes but he is more interesting on the Hoover Cabinet! Also this is impressive: "Sounds like you bent a shaft when you went aground," the President said. A president, who knows about boats! Too bad that was all he knew about.

Tom Scocca: Wait, I'm losing count of how many different trivial cultural practices Howell Raines declares were responsible for the defeat of Jimmy Carter.

Choire Sicha: Oh those were the days!

Tom Scocca: He is quite the expert on the fatal follies of powerful men, Howell Raines is.

Choire Sicha: Also, 11 years ago? Now that is an opening sentence for a memoir excerpt! Although it does not deliver. But you know: interesting!

Tom Scocca: Yeah, I got all confused by the non-delivery.

Choire Sicha: That wouldn't be allowed nowadays! He'd have to have children and confess his hatred toward them for being Jew children.

Choire Sicha: I am merely interested, of course, of GETTING IN ON THIS.

Tom Scocca: What about, as an excerpt, a chapter from my new memoir, ME THE PEOPLE, by Daffy Benzene-Merkur?

Tom Scocca:

CHAPTER ONE: I have always aspired to be an angry Negro. All down through the years of my lives, the labels of my many feuding selves—dutiful daughter, opera critic, television addict (even now my palms twitch at the sight of a multi-function remote), second-string fullback, copy-store clerk (the smell of the toner!)—have all seemed to be crude and awkward attempts to achieve the simple sort of clarity that would be mine if only I were, on top of everything else, an angry Negro. I tell this to Dr. W, on the couch in his office, leaning my aching head against the smooth leather, and Dr. W. says to me, But I am an allergist, and I have never laid eyes on you before this afternoon.

It occurs to me that my lack of anger, of good Negro anger, should itself make me angry, that it represents in itself the sort of cosmic injustice that affirms one's rightful place in opposition to this glib universe and its indifferent offerings, IN ITSELF, but my attempt to harness my anger-about-anger only ever succeeds in making me sad. Or in simpler words, it fails. I am sad. The universe does not care about me, not at all, not even to beat me up. I cannot even beat myself up, but can only sort of shove myself up against the lockers, jostling myself contemptuously. These reflections bumping around inside my head, I square my shoulders—my narrow and unchangeably pale shoulders—and trudge through the door of the New York Times, where I earn $80,000 a year.

Posner: A way to save newspapers is to outlaw linking
Becker-Posner Blog
Richard Posner suggests expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent.

Choire Sicha: Wow, that is so sufficiently idiotic that it might actually undo anything right that Richard Posner has ever accidentally thought.
Tom Scocca: Has he ever accidentally thought anything right?
Choire Sicha: I don't know but wow, that is AMAZING.
Tom Scocca: It's classic Posner, because he's one of those assholes who thinks the superior force of his reasoning allows him to get to the essence of any topic better than the poor dimwits who actually think about it. So he's like, after consideration and analysis, I have concluded that newspapers need to force people to pay for online content. Problem solved!
Choire Sicha: Also to…. make it illegal… to notify online readers that something exists?
Tom Scocca: The idea of outlawing paraphrase is unbelievable.
Tom Scocca: I mean, I actually cannot believe it.
Tom Scocca: And I say this as someone who thinks HuffPo is a nest of thieves.
Choire Sicha: Chris Anderson would have a hard time believing it, since chunks of his book are badly paraphrased rewrites of Wikipedia.
Tom Scocca: Why does that story not have legs? It seems unambiguous.
Choire Sicha: Say you were the editor of Wired. And one of your reporters filed a story that had chunks of barely-rewritten Wikipedia. What would you do?
Choire Sicha: Would you, A, accept their apology?
Choire Sicha: Or, you know, B, ANYTHING ELSE.
Tom Scocca: Hm? Sorry, I started imagining and then I was imagining using my imaginary paycheck as imaginary editor of Wired to pay my bills.
Choire Sicha: Oh that sounds fun. But really it's not the editorship that pays the bills; it's book advances and speaking fees.
Tom Scocca: Yeah, I'd fire somebody. Why doesn't he speak for free?
Choire Sicha: I believe he does sometimes. But you see his speaker's fee APPROACHES zero. Slowly approaches. But compared to Bill Clinton? Definitely closer to zero.
Tom Scocca: And as long as the book's for sale, I think he doesn't have much room to tee-hee about a negative review being posted online for free.
Choire Sicha: I think you can get a free ebook of Free! Which you can download onto your free iPhone! (You got your iPhone for free, right?)
Tom Scocca: My iPhone?
Choire Sicha: Yes, those tin cans with a sticker from an actual Granny Smith on them?
Tom Scocca: I seem to have misplaced my iPhone. I think I left it in my weekend house.
Choire Sicha: Your weekend house that costs something approaching zero?
Tom Scocca: Oh, wait, I don't have a house.
Choire Sicha: Oh well. You should give more speeches. For money.
Tom Scocca: I should! They would be dynamic.

"Do people in the media crit game really think editors are supposed to be desk jockeys who never go get a sense of the story? (When I was a correspondent I had visits from Max Frankel and Joe Lelyveld, among others, and welcomed them as a chance to share my enthusiasm for the beats I covered.) Or is the idea that when a big, exhausting news breaks visiting editors should hole up in the hotel and let the reporters do all the work? Weird."

Tom Scocca: Um, there's a difference between dropping in on the bureau and commandeering the Page One news analysis hole.
Choire Sicha: Also? Isn't he actually holed up in a hotel? Didn't he write a whole thing about that?
Tom Scocca: The one about how Google didn't work?
Tom Scocca: "I think they welcomed having an extra pair of hands. Among other things, it meant that while Nazila and Bobby (and Roger) followed the main event in Tehran, I could go check out conditions somewhere else (Isfahan), which other news organizations lacked the resources to do."
Tom Scocca: I mean, look, more reporting is a good thing.
Choire Sicha: Yes, I want more reporting!
Tom Scocca: But if we can acknowledge up front that there are many problematic elements of cultural politics and professional envy in the use of the term "danger slut," he's still a danger slut, or something related, but with cap-H History in place of danger.
Choire Sicha: Lots of reporters are built that way, though.
Tom Scocca: And perhaps one of them would have been eager to go to Isfahan.
Choire Sicha: I think that if I were the executive editor, I would send myself out on a story like this once a year. I also think I would do a bad rusty job of it however.
Tom Scocca: And who would edit you?
Choire Sicha: No one! WHO WOULD DARE. Nah. Some total bitch who works for me would do it.
Tom Scocca: That is the other problem when these warhorse reporter-editors, Keller and Remnick, hear the rumble of History's cannon in the distance and feel their blood quickening with the memory of what it was like to Be There as the Soviet Union fell. Who's going to say, actually, let's get the News Analysis piece written by one of the guys who was working the capital?
Tom Scocca: "Isfahan is nice color, Bill, but it doesn't feel right out in front like that."
Tom Scocca: "Actually, David, I'm not sure we need another big piece on Obama and race, reported off Inauguration Day—it might feel a little stale and redundant, at this point."
Choire Sicha: I'm not sure Bill Keller brought that much (anything? Did he ever file?) home from Des Moines, back in 2007, either, that the folks who were out there weren't getting.
Tom Scocca: I'm sure they have people they think they trust to make editorial judgment calls about their reportorial work. I bet Kim Jong-Il asks people for feedback on his screenwriting, too.
Choire Sicha: Well they are very good reporters!
Tom Scocca: They have proud records of accomplishment. And Mao was a good poet, when he was young.
Choire Sicha: I have never read the early works of Mao.
Tom Scocca:

Alone I stand in the autumn cold
On the tip of Orange Island,
The Hsiang flowing northward;
I see a thousand hills crimsoned through
By their serried woods deep-dyed,
And a hundred barges vying
Over crystal blue waters.
Eagles cleave the air,
Fish glide in the limpid deep;
Under freezing skies a million creatures contend in freedom.
Brooding over this immensity,
I ask, on this boundless land
Who rules over man's destiny?

Choire Sicha: Oh! That is pretty damn good.

Tom Scocca: But then he wrote stuff like this:

On this tiny globe
A few flies dash themselves against the wall,
Humming without cease,
Sometimes shrilling,
Sometimes moaning.
Ants on the locust tree assume a great-nation swagger
And mayflies lightly plot to topple the giant tree.
The west wind scatters leaves over Changan,
And the arrows are flying, twanging.
So many deeds cry out to be done,
And always urgently;
The world rolls on,
Time presses.
Ten thousand years are too long,
Seize the day, seize the hour!
The Four Seas are rising, clouds and waters raging,
The Five Continents are rocking, wind and thunder roaring.
Our force is irresistible,
Away with all pests!

Choire Sicha: Eep. Well, you know, sometimes our ideas change as we age.
Tom Scocca: Yes. And sometimes the quality of feedback we get changes.
Choire Sicha: Although I don't know if regimes of terror are quite the right analogy!
Choire Sicha: Although I have heard not dissimilar terms from inside both headquarters!
Tom Scocca: Nevertheless, it's not possible for people to treat the top boss as a normal reporter. So the reason that Bill Keller may be feeling "bizarre vibes" is that this littlefoot/bigfoot dance makes people feel weird.
Tom Scocca: "I'm just a regular reporter! Who assigned myself to the story!"
Choire Sicha: Sure! Never not awkward!
Tom Scocca: And I am personally quite strongly against making writing and editing into mutually exclusive career tracks.
Choire Sicha: That's because you're an opportunist. Oh no wait: because you're poor.
Tom Scocca: Yes. It's because it's never clear to me which one of those two things, if either, I'm more able to make a living at.
Choire Sicha: Also editors I think forget something about how to write. They have work lives where they say things like "Well that won't play in Nassau county!" Their job is to make reporting, in a way, less specific. Which is the opposite of the writer's job.
Tom Scocca: Maybe Keller should have sent A.G. Sulzberger to cover Iran.

Previously: Matt Taibbi Has A Bad Pottymouth

Tom Scocca: Let's pause for a moment before we turn to the very interesting and curious choice of the year 1954 as a punctuation point in Judicial Activism.

Choire Sicha: Oh boy.

Tom Scocca: And first ask simply whether any other things about the United States have changed in these time periods, besides the business of the Supreme Court. For instance, the number of state laws overturned. May I ask: at what various rates have state laws been passed? How many states have there been, at different points on this timeline? How populous have the states been? How many different forms has the commerce of the various states taken?

Choire Sicha: *starts Googling really hard*

Tom Scocca: I am going to guess that the switch from overturning one state law every two years to overturning 10 state laws a year might conceivably coincide with a twentyfold increase in the number of state laws being passed. But now let's consider the 1954 question. More Douthat:

The right tends to blame the left for the Supreme Court's expanded ambit, and not unjustly. The modern Court's most enduringly controversial power grabs – with Roe v. Wade leading the way – were usually the work of liberal justices.

Tom Scocca: "Roe v. Wade leading the way" is an important locution. Was Roe v. Wade decided in 1954?

Choire Sicha: Um, no! That was in 1973!

Tom Scocca: This may be the single most important fact in understanding why and how conservatives–including Mr. Reasonable, Ross Douthat–talk about the Supreme Court. That span starting in 1954 included a lot of decisions. There was Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. That one did happen in 1954.

Choire Sicha: ACTIVISM!

Tom Scocca: There was Loving v. Virginia. There was Miranda v. Arizona. There was Griswold v. Connecticut.

Choire Sicha: Oh boy.

Tom Scocca: There was, in short, a series of decisions that overruled state law to establish that segregation was illegal and that all Americans–whatever their race and regardless of whatever cruel backwater jurisdiction they may have been born into–were entitled to equal opportunity, free expression, civil liberties, privacy, and dignity.

Choire Sicha: All very bad things!

Tom Scocca: Terrible. A white person could marry a black person (provided they were of opposite sexes) and could then use contraception in the home (as needed, since they were of opposite sexes)! What was America coming to? And both of them could vote!

Tom Scocca: The people on the losing side of these decisions–the segregationists, the anti-miscegenationists, the people who favored cops beating confessions out of people, the people who wanted to outlaw nonprocreative sex among their married neighbors–became the base of the radical-evangelical arm of the Republican party. Yes, at the time, some of them were staunch registered Democrats, which is a popular talking point among certain shouters. They switched over long ago.

Choire Sicha: Oh my.

Tom Scocca: Nixon and Reagan brought them over.

Choire Sicha: From the work of the Harvard Law School guy that Douthat quotes, Jed Shugerman: "Over the past eight years, the Rehnquist Court has waged an activist revolution that is unprecedented both in scope and in conflict." That Rehnquist Court and its activism!

Tom Scocca: Well, that is not exactly the pox-on-both-houses message that our Reasonable Conservative is giving us, is it? Anyway, but so: 1954. So what happened was, at the tail end of this series of humiliating and richly deserved defeats for the bigoted American right wing, the Supreme Court handed down another upsetting decision, about abortion.

Choire Sicha: Twenty years later.

Tom Scocca: And this one was seen less as a ringing blow for freedom. This one, people could object to in polite company, and could keep on objecting. Because Americans oppose abortion in principle, though they support it in practice. And so abortion became the defining moral issue for the right. Because on the other moral issues, they were wrong and defeated. But the pure, perfect innocence of the fetuses was the innocence they themselves wished to recover. The world was now divided between baby-killing monsters and people who loved babies. And if they fought hard enough for the babies they loved, they could get back on the right side of history. This is why Ross Douthat describes Roe v. Wade as "leading the way."

Choire Sicha: R. v. W. is the perfect rally-er.

Tom Scocca: But to what are you rallying? If you want to roll back the Roe v. Wade-style judicial activism by pointing your time machine back to 1954, then many more things than the unborn are in play.

Choire Sicha: With regard to the growth of laws over the years, from The Heritage Foundation:

So for the past twenty-five years, a period over which the growth of the federal criminal law has come under increasing scrutiny, Congress has been creating over 500 new crimes per decade. That pace is not steady from year to year, however; the data indicate that Congress creates more criminal offenses in election years.

Tom Scocca: Imagine that!

Choire Sicha: "More than 40% of the federal provisions enacted since the Civil War have been enacted since 1970," says The Heritage Foundation.

Tom Scocca: So perhaps the Supreme Court is being too lazy about striking them down.

First, I'm on vacation. Second, what Dowd did, while clearly an embarrassment, hardly falls into the same category as the serial fabrications of Jayson Blair that I exposed six years ago. Third, Maureen quickly admitted her mistake and is running a correction.

Tom Scocca: That's Kurtz. Still tooting his horn about Jayson Blair.
Choire Sicha: 1. Oh, Jayson Blair. 2. I did not realize Maureen Dowd was in charge of corrections at the Times!
Tom Scocca: Yes, well, No. 1 is a sore subject for me. Seeing as I was Erik Wemple's editor at the time. At least on the media beat; otherwise, he was my editor.
Tom Scocca: Erik's story was ready to go more than an hour before Kurtz's appeared, but Washington City Paper was owned by the Chicago Reader at the time, and nothing was allowed to be published to the Web without specific clearance from the overbosses at Reader HQ, whose entire attitude toward the Web was petulant denial. Their "Internet strategy" consisted of jamming their fingers in their ears and hollering "LA LA LA LA WE CAN'T HEAR YOU." You might recall that these are the same clowns who sold off their papers–to a trust-fund brat from West Catfish Hump, South Nowhere–because they just couldn't find a way to make a go of it in the Internet Era.
Choire Sicha: I remember that!
Tom Scocca: Yeah, well, they sat through a full round decade of the Internet Era refusing to try anything at all, then cashed out and quit.
Choire Sicha: Seems sensible.
Tom Scocca: Unfortunately the kid from West Catfish Hump didn't have a theory of weekly alternative journalism beyond "Superchunk at the Civic Center next Thursday!" and promptly went bankrupt trying to run papers in actual cities. Seriously, he makes those cowboy-hat dudes who wrecked the Village Voice look like William Randolph Hearst.
Tom Scocca: But: Howie Kurtz, and the Em Ess Em!
Choire Sicha: Oh right, that!
Tom Scocca: The Jayson Blair case is interesting to me, in retrospect, because though Howie published 20 minutes earlier (with less information), in fact the entire Blair-Howell Raines saga could have and would have happened without him writing anything at all. Howie Kurtz has always been a terrible bigfooter, who never credits anyone if he can possibly avoid it.
Choire Sicha: It's been a good tactic for him!
Tom Scocca: The facts are the facts, and if he can call the same people and get them to say the same things, then the story belongs to Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post and CNN's Reliable Sources, and the fact that someone else reported it first doesn't matter.
Tom Scocca: There's a beautifully revealing moment in his Maureen Dowd discussion, in that regard:

But again, it would have been a snap to rewrite that sentence, so it does seem to me to fall into the category of an inadvertent mistake.

Tom Scocca: "Rewrite" is such a funny verb, there.
Tom Scocca: Long ago, when information resided in things made out of paper called "reference books," the technique he's referring to might have been called the "Britannica and thesaurus method." And it would have been regarded as a form of plagiarism.
Choire Sicha: Things that you do not have, becoming things you do have.
Tom Scocca: Critics would have viewed it as a kind of plagiarism.
Tom Scocca: See what I did there?
Choire Sicha: HA I DID!
Tom Scocca: Exact same idea, slightly different words.
Choire Sicha: You… rewrote… someone else's… idea! Why would you do that?
Tom Scocca: Because I didn't have an idea of my own.
Choire Sicha: That is so sad. What happened to your ideas?
Tom Scocca: I used them up on my CNN TV show, maybe.
Choire Sicha: Maybe you were too chatty at a dinner party and had nothing left to say.
Tom Scocca: But you see, what we are getting at here is a fundamental confusion about what it means, in journalism, when a writer's name is attached to a story, preceded by the word "by," or perhaps by a stylish little hyphen, or maybe just offset between rules. There are different beliefs about this, the byline, and what it really means.
Tom Scocca: One theory is that it is a mark of literary authorship–the creative brand identity of a Writer who puts words together in a novel and artistic way.
Choire Sicha: Sure. That's a hybrid of some old and some new ideas.
Tom Scocca: This is what Howard Kurtz means when he suggests that Maureen Dowd should have taken the time to "rewrite" the passage. This is what the theory was when Rick Bragg sent J. Wes Yoder out to go see scenes and interview people–Yoder's labor would produce "material" that would be "written" into a story under the byline of Rick Bragg.
Choire Sicha: Not a crazy system, in some ways!
Tom Scocca: It is a long-established system, but I think it is the wrong system for journalism.
Choire Sicha: I don't care for it much myself. The problem comes in because if you are back at home base, you are then telling a story that someone told you
Tom Scocca: Exactly. When I'm writing or editing, and especially when I am working in that middle ground in between writing and and editing, what I care about is epistemological responsibility.
Tom Scocca: Who says this is so?
Tom Scocca: The reporter says it.
Choire Sicha: Ha, you sound like a seder.
Tom Scocca: Bitter herbs all around!
Tom Scocca: The name on the story should be the name of the person who has the strongest firsthand connection to the facts and the reasoning.
Choire Sicha: That's a sensible idea. As far as "ideas" go.
Tom Scocca: This is one of the several places that Times editorial page editor Andrew Rosenthal went wrong about the Dowd incident:

Journalists often use feeds from other staff journalists, free-lancers, stringers, a whole range of people. And from friends.

Tom Scocca: "Feed" in this case seems to mean "unverified information."
Tom Scocca: Or "unaltered text."
Tom Scocca: And that stuff needs attribution.
Choire Sicha: Well of course people would use things from people who work for them. Because they are employed, for better or worse, to provide information! Professionally! Unlike friends.
Tom Scocca: It needs attribution not because the author of each little gem is owed literary credit, but because the reader deserves to know what's firsthand and what's secondhand. I grant a big exemption for jokes and funny lines, because, really, who cares? The old "as one wag put it" device is as bad as a sitcom laugh track.
Choire Sicha: It seems to me, maybe incorrectly, that I care more about that in the news section than I do in the op-ed section.
Tom Scocca: It is true that Frank Rich's assiduous hypertext source-citing comes off a bit sandblaster-y. But it might not seem that way if he were only ranging over 750 words' worth of material.
Tom Scocca: But, yes, op-ed. Therein is the problem.
Choire Sicha: There's a problem????
Tom Scocca: You're damn right there's a problem. Howie Kurtz had to interrupt his vacation!
Choire Sicha: What is "vacation"?
Tom Scocca: It's like being unemployed, except you get a paycheck.
Choire Sicha: Oooh that sounds great!
Tom Scocca: Anyway, you see, it's perfectly acceptable to publish under your byline certain facts, observations, and ideas that did not originate with you. Also jokes! The people with whom that supplemental material originates are called "editors." "Hey," the editor says, "where you talk about X, here, it seems a little thin–shouldn't we put in something about Y, also?" A good editor should make sure that the writer is comfortable with the truth and accuracy of the additions.
Choire Sicha: Ideally!
Tom Scocca: "A good editor," I said. Like "no true Scotsman." But Maureen Dowd writes for the New York Times op-ed page, which means that–as a point of institutional practice and pride–she does not have an editor.
Choire Sicha: Right! Freedom!
Tom Scocca: In many respects, the job of writing op-ed columns for the Times is one of the sweetest rackets in the business. I'd sure take it! You write 1,500 words a week, with a full-time assistant.
Choire Sicha: Unlike the rest of us, who wrote 1500 words before lunch, with no assistant.
Tom Scocca: And no paycheck!
Choire Sicha: Well details, whatever. The thing is, people become op-ed columnists because they are very good at what they do! Columnizing. Opinionizing. For instance, Gail Collins, who has been a surprise to me.
Tom Scocca: Gail Collins is really good.
Choire Sicha: She makes me LOL.
Tom Scocca: But now that we have seen Gail Collins' funny, incisive sensibility in action–how much better would the op-ed pages have been if Gail Collins had been responsible for actually editing the columnists, when she ran the editorial page? As in saying, "You know, David, you're trying to make two opposing points at once here," or "Tom, why don't we pare down this metaphor a little?" and sending the copy back to them for another go-round?
Choire Sicha: That sounds wonderful.
Tom Scocca: The idea behind not doing this seems to be that the columnists are such august and dignified thinkers that it would be rude to interpose an editor between their thoughts and the public.
Tom Scocca: But what was Maureen Dowd doing, in the most plausible and intelligible account of how a paragraph from Joshua Marshall ended up in her column?
Tom Scocca: She was using a batch of friends to do the job an editor wasn't doing for her.
Choire Sicha: Who would ever do that? *Laughs nervously*
Tom Scocca: Again, she has a fabulous racket, and I am harsh on plagiarists, and it would be just and satisfying if she got fired and they gave us her column instead. I am not playing my tiny little violin for Maureen Dowd.
Tom Scocca: But the Times could have avoided this problem–and many other problems, including the whole Bill Kristol debacle–by hiring an editor to edit the columnists.
Choire Sicha: Why wouldn't they do that? Would the columnists all huff off and quit?
Tom Scocca: All the more reason to try it!

Previously:
· Who Is Michael Wolff Smarter Than Today?
· The Los Angeles Time

Choire Sicha: Says who???

Tom Scocca: Says Michael Wolff's daily spam: Who Is Michael Wolff Smarter Than Today? Previous winners have included Rupert Murdoch, Barack Obama, and the Pope.

Choire Sicha: I enjoyed The Daily Spam today, because previously Michael Wolff has not gone so far as to call any important rich people nitwit retards, as he did with the New York Times writer David Carr.

Tom Scocca: Well, you know, Carr is an ignorant dillweed who knows nothing about business. Unlike Michael Wolff, who has been a fabulous success at every media business he has founded.

Choire Sicha: According to Michael Wolff, he is working at a very successful business for Patrick Spain, the former CEO of Hoover's.
Did you know that Newser has three directors on its board?

Tom Scocca: What is "Newser"?

Choire Sicha: "Newser is an online news service that adds human intelligence to machine-driven aggregation."

Tom Scocca: Huh. The more I look at that sentence, the more I suspect that Wolff has in fact done the opposite, and is farming out these daily ego-commentaries to some sort of demented version of ELIZA that runs custom scripts.

Choire Sicha: That may be? Also did you know that it is based in Chicago?

Tom Scocca: Oh, i know that it is based in chicago. (That was ELIZA. See? Wait, let me try it on Wolff.

David Carr, who writes about the media for the New York Times, and who I've never personally liked very much (we were colleagues at New York magazine, where he would stand too close and bray rhetorical statements and open-ended questions), wrote another in a series of columns yesterday about how important newspapers are-even as his own company is threatening to close the Boston Globe.

Eliza: Can you elaborate on that?

Choire Sicha: Heh. You're in luck Eliza—he sure can!

Tom Scocca: "It was quite a long and digressive piece with a variety of stray points, but two seemed particularly revealing." Eliza: Please go on.

Tom Scocca: "We need newspapers because people who haven't had the benefit of newspaper training-people, for instance, trying to be citizen journalists on the web-might not know how to 'make the calls, hit the streets and walk past the conventional wisdom.'" Eliza: Do any other reasons not come to mind?

Tom Scocca: "(How can people write such stuff with a straight face?)" Eliza: Does that question interest you?

Tom Scocca: OK, enough from the bots! I think we've found Michael Wolff's ideal reader.

Choire Sicha: Skynet?

Tom Scocca: This makes sense, on reflection, since ELIZA was originally meant to mimic a therapist.

Choire Sicha: I was going to suggest–there is something about treatment and pathology in Wolff's columns no?

Tom Scocca: Something? There is nothing but pathology. Michael Wolff is lost in the No-Fun House.

Choire Sicha: I am being overly polite because I am trying to not be snippy.

Tom Scocca: Last month, the Wolff-bot sent us a spam announcing that "The Wall Street Journal is Really, Really Mad at Us":

Robert Thomson, Murdoch's editor of the Wall Street Journal, thinks Newser is a tapeworm. Newser and other news aggregators are "parasites or tech tapeworms in the intestines of the Internet," he told The Australian newspaper.

And when you clicked through to the story from The Australian, it turned out that Robert Thomson was actually talking about Google News.

Choire Sicha: Yes, in fact, he did not mention Newser at all, did he!

Tom Scocca: No, he did not.

Choire Sicha: But I'm sure he meant to. After all, Michael Wolff is very important.

Tom Scocca: In Michael Wolff's epic mind-war with Rupert Murdoch, it was clear that's what was being discussed. Murdoch is like Michael Wolff's white whale, except rather than getting on a whaleboat Wolff is just sitting in a bathtub in the middle of the continent–Chicago!–pushing around little origami boats he folded out of the page proofs of his book, his book about Rupert Murdoch. There's not even any WATER in the bathtub.

Tom Scocca: I liked the column in which he wrote about how buying the Journal showed Murdoch was washed up, because newspapers were dead, etc. Funny, I thought the idea of his book had been that the Journal purchase showed how very vital Murdoch was. Not that I read the book. But I read some reviews! Say, who reviewed that book for the Times?

Choire Sicha: Oh did you? Hmm I cannot remember! Was it this one?

Tom Scocca: Oh, David Carr! Weren't we just talking about him?

Choire Sicha: Well it's a VERY small world. After all, as Wolff points out, he and David Carr "worked" at 'New York' magazine together! Though according to their archives, David Carr wrote.. a few articles in 2001? Between October and December?

Tom Scocca: Clearly that's the most important connection between him and Michael Wolff. That and that they write about the media business. "It's always been amazing to me how little Carr knows about business," Wolff writes.

Tom Scocca: Wolff is not wrong when he suggests that people who write about business don't always know what they're talking about. Think about what sort of clown it would take to write a sentence like this: "News Corp., for its part, has, with its acquisition of the Wall Street Journal, effectively rebranded itself as a newspaper company-a kiss of death."

Choire Sicha: That does sound sort of bad–but perhaps time will make a fool of us! Of course, the two met again last summer. They were on a panel!

Michael Wolff began a denouncement that would last throughout the hour, asserting that the "New York Times is in a large part getting its news off the internet."

Wolff later said, "the truth is, that out there is the perception that you're not really offering all that much value. It doesn't make any difference if you believe you are." David Carr retorted that the claim was "a bunch of shit" and pointed to "really great metrics in…the growth of our online audience."

But then Wolff said all the Times traffic was from About.com, which was a particularly shoddy website!

Tom Scocca: "The truth is, that out there is the perception"–I think you could put that on the Newer banner.

Choire Sicha: It's punchy!

Tom Scocca: Hey, speaking of Web sites, I just took a look at the site of News Corp, which has effectively rebranded itself as a newspaper company. If they really want to rebrand, they should move the "Newspapers and Information Services" tab over from its current spot, sixth from the left. After "Filmed Entertainment," "Television," "Cable Programming," "Direct Broadcast Satellite Television," and "Magazines and Inserts." But before "Books" and "Other Assets."

Tom Scocca: Oh, hey, there's a big picture of Hugh Jackman with blades coming out of his hands. Rupert owns that, doesn't he? Did the Friday Wall Street Journal make $35 million last week? Because Wolverine did.

Tom Scocca: Maybe Michael Wolff should tape a set of steak knives to the back of his fists. Rupert might pay more attention. If your whole life is gonna be a superhero fantasy, you might as well go all the way.

Choire Sicha: Now is a good time to mention that I am on book contract for a fine News Corp. product! Also I might note that News Corp. will announce their quarterly results tomorrow at 4 p.m., though I'm sure Michael Wolff will deliver that information to us in our inboxes. Anyhoo! So you're comparing Murdoch and Wolff, and noticing that this supposed newspaper business is actually very diversified–and inter-folded, whereas Wolff has a blog.

Tom Scocca: Yeah, but besides that, they're basically rivals. At least they're both banging the help.

Choire Sicha: !!!

Tom Scocca: Although Rupert put a ring on it.

Previously: The Los Angeles Times.