Media Nation

Along with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, the Iranian regime is the scariest on earth. I’ll go so far as to say it’s scarier than North Korea. As best as anyone can tell, Kim wants nukes to ensure that the world will leave him alone. Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, seems like a dead cinch to nuke Tel Aviv as soon as he has the capability. We actually find ourselves in the rather excruciating position of hoping that Ayatollah Khamenei, the real power in Iran and not exactly a nice guy himself, is able to keep the Holocaust-denying hothead in check.

Which is why it was so depressing to read Seymour Hersh’s latest New Yorker blockbuster, this one reporting that the White House is increasingly talking about going to war against Iran, and is refusing even to rule out the use of tactical nuclear weapons to destroy Iran’s nuclear facilities. The generals, according to Hersh, are up in arms at this insane idea. The administration appears to have learned nothing from its tragic misadventure in Iraq.

Indeed, perhaps the greatest tragedy of Iraq is that it has completely hampered our ability to do anything about genuine threats such as Iran and North Korea. Who could trust the White House now? I happen to be one of those who believes that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney did not lie about Saddam Hussein’s weapons capabilities and ties to Al Qaeda; rather, they were the victims of their own insular beliefs. But, in the end, what does it matter? No matter what they say now, it will come off as Chicken Little warning us that the sky is falling. Again.

William Arkin, the Washington Post’s national-security blogger, referring both to Hersh’s story and to this front-page Post article, acidly observes:

A war with Iran started purposefully or by accident, will be a mess. What is happening now though is not just an administration prudently preparing for the unfortunate against an aggressive and crazed state, it is also aggressive and crazed, driven by groupthink and a closed circle of bears.

Sadly, “aggressive and crazed” sounds just about right.

Over at Slate, Fred Kaplan doesn’t seem too worried about the chances of Bush and Cheney nuking Tehran anytime soon, believing, instead, that they are merely trying to scare the Iranians, the Europeans both. But who knows with these guys? Indeed, here’s how Kaplan closes:

[M]aybe there’s no gamesmanship going on here, maybe Hersh is simply reporting on a nuclear war plan that President Bush is really, seriously considering, a “juggernaut” that might not be stopped. If it’s as straightforward as that, we’re in deeper trouble than most of us have imagined.

Did Hersh get it right? His story is, for the most part, anonymously sourced, and as Arkin notes, short on details. Still, who can argue with Hersh’s record? In the opening weeks of the Iraq war, he took a lot of heat for passing along the generals’ fear that the war was getting bogged down in unexpected ways — a concern that seemed greatly exaggerated after the first phase of the war was wrapped up quickly.

Several weeks ago, though, David Brooks of the New York Times wrote (sub. req.) a much-commented-upon column in which he noted that it’s now clear — and, in fact, it was clear then — that the unconventional resistance that U.S. troops encountered during those opening weeks was the beginning of the insurgency. And that the commanders on the ground understood it needed to be dealt with, even if Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks did not. Brooks does not name Hersh, but he should have. For it was Hersh’s journalism that proved particularly prescient.

Last night I caught a few minutes of Christopher Lydon’s “Open Source,” which devoted a full hour to the topic. It looks like mandatory listening. I’m going to grab the podcast and give it a listen tomorrow morning. As Lydon said last night, this is the only story that adults are thinking about at the moment.

Chris Gabrieli was obviously furious with Tom Reilly after Reilly dumped him as his running mate in favor of one-day wonder Marie St. Fleur. But I couldn’t quite understand why Gabrieli would respond by jumping into the governor’s race. Wouldn’t Gabrieli only wind up hurting fellow outsider Patrick and helping Reilly?

Now I get it. WBZ-TV (Channel 4) is reporting poll results showing that Patrick has zoomed from 10 points behind Reilly to three points ahead in the past month — and that Gabrieli’s the reason, as he’s hurting Reilly a lot more than Patrick.

The race is starting to get interesting. The first Democratic debate featuring all three candidates will be held on Channel 4 on Sunday, April 23, at 8:30 a.m. (Ugh.) But now moderator Jon Keller writes that it will be rebroadcast on April 24 at 7 p.m., when it is sure to generate much bigger numbers.

Looks like Adam Reilly is thinking about this, too.

The Boston Herald may not be quite the solid local-news vehicle that it was during the 1990s. But it’s a better paper today than it was two years, the approximate moment that I think it hit its skin-and-sensationalism bottom. And it’s a better paper than I would have thought possible one year ago, when it was getting ready to shed about a quarter of its newsroom jobs.

One of the prime reasons that the tabloid is still worth a look will soon be leaving One Herald Square. Late last month the Herald’s assistant managing editor for business, Cosmo Macero, announced he was leaving to take a public-relations job at O’Neill and Associates. Within days, it became clear just how much Macero would be missed, when the Herald won the general-excellence award in its circulation category from the American Society of Business Editors and Writers. The Herald’s business team was also honored for its coverage of the Gillette sale last year. (The Globe competes in a larger circulation category, and Steve Bailey won recognition as the best business columnist.)

The Herald business section has several good, aggressive reporters, so I expect it will renew itself. Still, Macero was special, and he’ll be missed. I’m late to this, but I wanted to post something before Macero’s last day, which is coming this week.

As for the Herald itself — who knows? Investigative reporter Maggie Mulvihill, who left for a Nieman several years ago, surprised a lot of people by coming back. But now she’s leaving again, this time to go to WBZ-TV (Channel 4) — a huge loss. As we all know, publisher Pat Purcell has put the Herald and about 100 community papers he owns in Eastern Massachusetts on the market. After a flurry of speculation a few weeks ago that he’d decided to sell the community papers and keep the Herald, there’s been not a sound.

Yet the Herald perseveres, with a good sports section, solid business reporting and an occasional local news story that makes you sit up and take notice. (No, not Antonin Scalia’s chin flip. But this, from today’s paper, on ticket-happy troopers on the Massachusetts Turnpike, is definitely worth reading.)

With the Globe experiencing serious financial problems, it’s more important than ever that Boston remain a two-daily town. If the Herald weren’t around, the Globe’s owner, the New York Times Co., would be all the more tempted to hack away with reckless abandon.

My first thought about the New York Post gossip-column scandal is that Gayle Fee, Laura Raposa, Carol Beggy and Mark Shanahan must be eating their hearts out — or faxing their résumés to New York. Why shouldn’t they lust after some boodle of their own?

My second is that Jared Paul Stern, the gossip columnist charged with attempting to shake down billionare Ronald Burkle for $220,000, must feel like someone who’s been thrown into the volcano in a desperate attempt to appease the gods. It’s not that what Stern is accused of isn’t reprehensible — it is. It’s just that he doesn’t look a whole lot worse, qualitatively or quantitatively, than his fellow Page Six gossips. Especially his editor.

The Post’s archrival, the New York Daily News, broke the story last week (technically, the Post itself broke it on its own Web site), reporting that Stern and Burkle had met over Burkle’s complaints that Page Six was writing unflattering fiction about him. According to the Daily News, Stern responded that a $100,000 down payment and $10,000 in 12 monthly installments could ensure him all the good coverage he wanted.

But the thing is, no one is coming out of this looking good. On Sunday, for instance, the Daily News reported that Page Six editor Richard Johnson and his staff are regularly lavished with high-value gifts. The story continues:

Johnson was feted at a bachelor party last month that cost in excess of $50,000 hosted by soft-core porn king Joe Francis at his palatial estate in Punta Mita, on Mexico’s glorious Pacific coast. More than 2,000 miles from New York, the resort area boasts 343 days of 80-degree sunshine.

Francis, 32, producer of the topless “Girls Gone Wild” spring-break video series, flew the party from New York on his private jet. Francis appears regularly in the column, almost always in a positive way.

Johnson also got a free trip to the Academy Awards last month, paid for by ABC and Mercedes-Benz. The trip included first-class airfare, a three-night stay at the Four Seasons Hotel and a car and driver.

Johnson may not have taken money, but it sounds like virtually nothing else is out of bounds.

You might expect that the New York Times would react to all this with bemused attachment. Well, bemused, yes; detached, not at all. The Times has been riding this story since the moment it broke, and its editors appear to be enjoying themselves at least as much as Daily News editor Martin Dunn, who, by the way, was the Boston Herald’s editor for about 15 minutes during the early 1990s.

In this Times account of Stern’s being caught on tape, Stern told Burkle that a business executive (reported elsewhere as Ronald Perelman) bought himself good coverage by hiring Johnson’s fiancée (now wife) — and that media mogul Harvey Weinstein had helped himself by publishing books written by Page Six gossips and had put Johnson to work on a screenplay.

OK, Stern’s not the greatest source. But the bit about Burke’s fiancée is true. And it ought to be easy enough to verify the Weinstein stuff — as I hope the Times did before publishing it. Otherwise, the Times would be no better than a blog.

Seen in this light, Stern’s claim that he was not soliciting cash but, rather, an investment by Burkle in his clothing line strikes me not as sleazy behavior that makes him different from Johnson but, rather, sleazy behavior that makes him very much like Johnson.

If Stern is telling the truth, then I see no particular reason why he ought to be singled out. I say the gods at the bottom of the volcano ought to demand the whole lot of them.

Journalists and math: Not a good mix. An earlier error has now been fixed. Thank you, Mike.

Please pardon the lack of recent entries — there have been too many other things on my plate. As Mark Twain would have said, it’s better not to blog and be thought stupid than to blog and remove all doubt.

So nothing too heavy this morning, except to note that Apple announced yesterday that its new, Intel-based Macs will semi-support Windows, letting users boot up either OS X or WinXP.

Such a machine would obviously solve the multimedia problem I was whining about a couple of weeks ago. But I wonder. Even though Apple claims it’s not going to give Microsoft its unconditional love, doesn’t the mere existence of a Windows option reduce the incentive for software companies to write Mac versions of their products?

“You don’t need a Mac version — just run Windows” is not the sort of advice I want to hear.

So much so that he’s canceling his New York Times subscription and going all-digital.

Does anyone know of a reasonably well-done one-hour (or less) documentary dedicated to the proposition that the media are hopelessly suffused with liberal bias? I’d like to show it to my History of Journalism students before the semester ends. Thank you in advance.

I wouldn’t bother to quote this stuff, except that Aaron Margolis has a really good-looking blog design and even manages to attract comments. So I guess he’s fair game. Anyway, I briefly alluded to his attack on Jill Carroll yesterday, and now feel compelled to follow up. To wit:

The real story that is being avoided is that Jill Carroll read a script at the terrorists’ gun point that could just as easily been written by Sen. Harry Reid, Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Ted Kennedy, DNC Chairman Howard Dean, George Soros, Sen. Russ Feingold, or Michael Moore. You may also to that list: Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Saddam Hussein, and all the cowardly masked terrorists you see in videos released by al Jazeera. The real story here is that the terrorists used Jill Carroll to spread their propaganda, the same propaganda that is commonly professed by the anti-war left wing of the United States, including prominent Democratic members of Congress.

Yes, that’s right. The “real story.” Absolutely amazing.

The New York Times today unveils a complete redesign of its Web site. It looks great. The best part is that it has a new feature called “Today’s Paper,” which gives you the digital equivalent of what you might otherwise have delivered to your doorstep in the morning.

Before, the Times site only gave you the front page. When you’d go to the other sections, it was hard to tell whether you were looking at something from that day’s paper, an article that wouldn’t appear until the next day or just a wire-service update that would never find its way into print. For someone old-fashioned enough to want to read that day’s paper, even if I didn’t get to it until evening, I like the new arrangement much better.

Two suggestions:

• It looks as though there are no story descriptions for “Today’s Paper” except for material appearing on the front page. Bring them back.
• Offer a week’s worth of “Today’s Paper.” That’s what the Wall Street Journal does for paying subscribers. It would be a great feature to offer TimesSelect customers who, say, missed the previous day’s edition and want to page through it quickly.

Overall, though, this looks like a big step forward for a newspaper Web site that was already among the best.

Update: I missed it at first, but there is indeed a feature called “The Times in Print from the Past 7 Days.” Thanks to Geoff for pointing it out.

This looks like the best news from Bruce Springsteen in years. I’m not a Pete Seeger fan, but I like bluegrass, and I’ve always loved Springsteen’s treatment of old-time material such as the classic Woody Guthrie songs he performed on “Folkways: A Vision Shared.”

So “We Shall Overcome” strikes me as a good bet to be his best album in ages — including the tolerable-but-overrated “Devils & Dust” and his hideous 9/11 album, “The Rising.” It’s about time.