Media Nation

The Boston Herald’s Jay Fitzgerald has an entertainingly unoriginal story today. Here’s the lead:

A San Diego blogger has already proved that many of Raytheon chief William Swanson’s “Unwritten Rules of Management” had previously been written down in a 1944 book.

Now it turns out other folksy business adages in Swanson’s booklet were also previously written — by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and newspaper humorist Dave Barry.

Are there no new rules out there?

Speaking of unoriginal writing, I guess this is just about a wrap for Harvard typist Kaavya Viswanathan.

Update: The Herald ran a graphic comparing Rummy to Swanson and Dave Barry. Pretty amazing.

The Boston Globe’s Michael Levenson reports this morning that an art exhibit by Palestinian children has been removed from the Brandeis University library because of objections at the largely Jewish institution that the work was one-sided in its portrayal of Palestinian suffering at the hands of Israel.

One-sided though the exhibit may be, this reeks of artistic censorship — lamentable in any situation and just plain wrong in an academic environment. Still, there’s an interesting bit of context that Levenson alludes to but doesn’t expand on. He writes:

The controversy occurs at a sensitive time for the campus, which has angered some students and Jewish groups with the appointment of a prominent Palestinian scholar and with a partnership with Al-Quds University, an Arab institution.

Intrigued, I headed over to the Web site of the Justice, the Brandeis student weekly, and found an article by Hannah Edber that begins thusly:

The University has once again drawn the ire of Zionist Organization of America President Morton Klein — this time for its partnership with Al-Quds University, a Palestinian institution in Jerusalem.

The ZOA accused Al-Quds University of denying Israel’s right to exist and praising suicide bombers on its Web site in an April 4 press release.

“[Al-Quds University President Sari] Nusseibeh has actually demonized Israelis, praised jihad fighters and justified the killing of so-called Palestinian ‘collaborators,'” the press release said.

John Hose, the executive assistant to University President Jehuda Reinharz, said Klein’s allegations are “farfetched in the extreme.”

Edber notes that the ZOA has also criticized the university for naming a Palestinian pollster, Khalil Shikaki, as a senior fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, claiming that Shikaki has ties to the terrorist organization Islamic Jihad — a claim the administration rejects.

I know nothing about the ZOA; a Google search suggests that it’s mainstream, though very conservative. Or, as the Philadelphia Jewish Voice put it, the ZOA is “so right-wing extremist a group that it denounced Prime Minister Arik Sharon for selling out Israel by withdrawing from Gaza.”

I did manage to find on the ZOA’s Web site a statement denouncing the Brandeis art exhibit. The headline: “New Anti-Israel Horror At Brandeis U. — Ghastly ‘Voices From Palestine’ Art Exhibit.” Which raises at least the possibility that the Brandeis administration is starting to buckle under the ZOA’s relentless pressure.

It sounds like there’s a lot going on at Brandeis these days. I don’t see how the administration can defend censoring art, whether it’s offensive, one-sided or, for that matter, inept. But there’s a bigger story to be told in Waltham. The Globe has run a couple of squibs on this in recent months, but it’s time to dig deeper.

There’s a headline on Romenesko right now that reads “Colbert ignored the cardinal rule of Washington humor.” And what would that rule be? “Make fun of yourself, not the other guy.” True enough. But the folks to whom Jim links either don’t understand or don’t appreciate what Colbert was up to. His goal wasn’t to have them laughing in the aisles. He was quite obviously trying to make them squirm. And he succeeded.

I’m giving in to the urge to compare Colbert to the late Andy Kaufman, even though I never thought Kaufman was funny, because there is a key similarity. Kaufman’s whole shtick was about making his audience feel uncomfortable, presumably for his own amusement. Colbert’s performance was somewhat more conventional: he clearly wanted the folks watching at home to laugh. But the idea was to get them laughing at the assembled politicians and media folks, not with them.

No, Colbert’s routine wasn’t self-deprecating. It was smug, arrogant and utterly self-righteous in its brutal mockery of the spectacle he had come to lampoon. (That’s why the comparisons to Imus’ performance 10 years ago don’t wash. His flop-sweat-drenched performance was all about self-deprecation.) And even though Colbert didn’t rely on old standbys such as warmth, empathy or even much in the way of jokes, it was also brilliant.

Great game, obviously. David Ortiz’s heroics aside, this would have been an automatic “L” if Theo hadn’t gotten Doug Mirabelli back. But the only reason to overlook this is if you think the Red Sox have, you know, too much pitching.

Oh, wait. Obviously I’m wrong. David Wells says he feels better. Problem solved!

If you’ve only read the transcript of Stephen Colbert’s appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner, you’ve got to stop what you’re doing right now and watch it. The squirming among the press corps and the near-total lack of laughter — despite the fact that Colbert’s monologue is absolutely hilarious — make this one of those priceless oh-my-God moments. And check out Colbert’s collaboration with Helen Thomas.

The Red Sox just acquired a solid number-three starting pitcher. His name: Tim Wakefield. Click here to see what I mean.

The New York Times and the Boston Globe yesterday both published chilling stories about the Bush administration’s attitude toward freedom of the press and the rule of law. Unfortunately, for all their digging, the papers were unable to determine the administration’s intentions. But the signs are ominous, to say the least.

In the Times, Adam Liptak reported that the White House is looking into the possibility of using the Wilson-era Espionage Act to prosecute journalists for revealing national-security secrets. In the crosshairs are newly minted Pulitzer Prize winners James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of the Times, who revealed the existence of the NSA’s no-warrant wiretapping program, and Dana Priest of the Washington Post, who blew the whistle on undercover CIA prisons in Eastern Europe.

Liptak observes that the government in recent years has put more and more pressure on journalists to reveal their confidential sources. Most notoriously, former Times reporter Judith Miller went to prison last year rather than tell prosecutors what she knew about the Valerie Plame investigation. But Liptak adds:

It is not easy to gauge whether the administration will move beyond these efforts to criminal prosecutions of reporters. In public statements and court papers, administration officials have said the law allows such prosecutions and that they will use their prosecutorial discretion in this area judiciously. But there is no indication that a decision to begin such a prosecution has been made. A Justice Department spokeswoman, Tasia Scolinos, declined to comment on Friday.

Certainly it would be no great shock if the White House decided to travel down this road. I believe the first to raise the possibility of criminal prosecution was Boston lawyer Harvey Silverglate, writing in the Boston Phoenix earlier this year.

Even so, it could well be that if the administration decides not to prosecute, the rumblings surrounding these cases could serve their intended purpose. Scaring the media into acquiescence may prove to be just as effective for the president’s purposes as dragging the Sulzbergers and the Grahams into a criminal courtroom. What’s especially frightening about this is that if the Times and the Post broke the law, it was in the course of revealing government operations that were almost certainly illegal in and of themselves. The idea that the government can prosecute journalists for exposing official wrongdoing is something that should have been settled with John Peter Zenger. We may be learning that each generation gets only as much freedom of the press as it is willing to fight for.

Meanwhile, Globe staffer Charlie Savage, who has consistently come up huge on the national-security beat, reported yesterday that Bush “has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.”

Savage notes that the practice of issuing such presidential “signing statements” goes back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan (whose statements were drafted by a young legal adviser named Samuel Alito), and that George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton issued them as well. But President Bush’s use of them is reportedly unprecedented both in terms of quantity and substance: Bush has gone so far as to sign legislation banning torture and then quietly issue a statement that he didn’t have to obey it.

As with Liptak’s story, it’s hard to tell exactly what’s going on here. Bush critics claim that the president is using these statements to do exactly what he wants — essentially abrogating the rule of law and setting up something akin to a presidential dictatorship. His supporters say the president is merely placing his interpretation of the law on the record so that it can be considered if and when it’s reviewed by the courts.

Yet, as Savage points out, we already know that the Bush supporters’ contention is not entirely true. Savage writes: “[W]ith the disclosure of Bush’s domestic spying program, in which he ignored a law requiring warrants to tap the phones of Americans, many legal specialists say Bush is hardly reluctant to bypass laws he believes he has the constitutional authority to override.”

Here is the heart of Savage’s piece:

Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation’s sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.

Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files “signing statements” — official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.

In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills — sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.

“He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises — and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened,” said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.

This is truly chilling stuff, and gives us an entirely new understanding of the president’s record of never having vetoed a bill (something that’s often held against him by his conservative critics, especially when it comes to spending). Given Bush’s defiance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which requires warrants to engage in the kind of wiretapping exposed by the Times’ Risen and Lichtblau, it suggests that there is nothing even remotely benign about Bush’s signing statements.

Bush’s attitude seems to be that he will follow the law — but that only he has the right to decide what the law is.

Is there a larger meaning to President Bush’s decision to name Tony Snow as his new spokesman? If you subscribe to the theory — as I do — that the Ari Fleischer/Scott McClellan era was defined principally by an attempt to marginalize the national media and downgrade their perceived importance, then I think the answer is yes.

The Washington Post, not surprisingly, appears to be more surefooted than the New York Times in analyzing the Snow appointment. The Times’ Jim Rutenberg is quite taken with the fact that Snow, a high-profile Fox News pundit, has been known to criticize the president. Rutenberg writes:

Mr. Snow is something the White House briefing room has not yet had at the lectern: a star of the opinionated cable news era. But he is also something Mr. Bush has never had: a free-wheeling outsider in a very public position, and one with a history of sharing critical opinions of the president.

True enough. But the key to the Snow appointment, it seems to me, is that Snow is a player who actually believes the mainstream media have an important role to play in keeping the public informed. Here is the lead of Jim VandeHei and Michael Fletcher’s piece in the Post:

President Bush’s decision to hire conservative commentator Tony Snow as his chief spokesman reflects a consensus among the president and his top advisers that his White House operation has been too insular and needs to be more aggressive in engaging with the news media and other Washington constituencies, according to Bush aides and outside advisers.

Last week, Jay Rosen marked McClellan’s departure by arguing that McClellan had been put in place as part of Bush’s policy of “strategic non-communication.” Rosen wrote:

McClellan was a necessary figure in what I have called Rollback — the attempt to downgrade the press as a player within the executive branch, to make it less important in running the White House and governing the country. It had once been accepted wisdom that by carefully “feeding the beast” an Administration would be rewarded with better coverage in the long run. Rollback, the policy for which McClellan signed on, means not feeding but starving the beast, while reducing its effectiveness as an interlocutor with the President and demonstrating to all that the fourth estate is a joke.

I think Rosen’s on to something, although I disagree with his contention that McClellan represented a departure from Fleischer, who, Rosen claims, was unwilling to play the role of being “the jerk at the podium” — and who, besides, had an unacceptable (to the White House) “twinkle in his eye” when dissembling. I don’t see how you can say that McClellan’s act was much different from Fleischer’s, just a whole lot less competent.

Still, there may be something to the notion that the White House couldn’t truly express the depth of its contempt for the media until it had appointed an utterly incompetent spokesman. After all, the very fact that the White House would hire someone with Fleischer’s smooth performance skills suggested that, on some level, the administration took the media seriously.

As it has been forced to do again. Media Matters is very excited about what it calls “The many falsehoods of Tony Snow.” And, yes, David Brock and company have compiled quite a dossier. But this appointment is about music, not lyrics. And the music is that Snow is someone of substance who sees the care and feeding of the national press as a job that’s actually worth doing.

Last Sunday, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” former Newt Gingrich spokesman Tony Blankley, now editorial-page editor of the Washington Times, defined what the problem has been for the past five-plus years:

I think it is a mistake of a White House press operation not to engage the press corps here. I think that it can be done effectively and honestly, and in a serious way. You’re going to get hit a lot, but to put up the shield and have no communication is going to induce future administrations to get into the same kind of — they exaggerate the mess they’re going to get into when they have no communication back and forth.

By the way, one of the good things that a White House gets from talking to the press is, is reconnaissance of how the press and to some extent the country is feeling. I think it’s — that two-way exchange is really vital to the process.

That’s the shortcoming that the White House undertook to address with the Snow appointment. The question is whether Snow is the decider-in-chief’s idea or someone whom new chief of staff Josh Bolsten imposed on Bush at a moment of presidential weakness, and against whom Bush will soon rebel. We’ll find out.

And here’s where it could get dicey for Bush: Snow strikes me as eminently likely to resign and pop off if he finds himself getting marginalized. Fleischer and McClellan would never do such a thing. Which is why this could turn out to be a pretty interesting appointment.

The Book Standard recycles its Feb. 15 review of Kaavya Viswanathan’s “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,” calling it a “clone” of the film “Mean Girls.” Here’s how it ends:

But the plot … often seems plucked from a teen movie. Once Viswanathan, currently a Harvard sophomore, figures out how to integrate her lively voice into a more original story, she’ll be on her way.

Pretty close, I’d say.

The Harvard Crimson catches up with plagiaree Megan McCafferty, who’s not talking.

That’s what Samuel Freedman of the New York Times calls Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore now in the midst of a plagiarism-fueled meltdown over her (or should that be “her”?) novel, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life.”

Freedman’s not so much commenting on Viswanathan’s sticky-fingered writing style, but, rather, the fact that she paid some $10,000 to $30,000 to a consulting outfit in order to help her get into Harvard — the equivalent, he says, of the steroids that Bonds claims he didn’t take in order to boost his home-run output.

Still, given that Viswanathan is now being accused of having lifted more than 40 passages from Megan McCafferty’s first two novels (Harvard Crimson coverage here; Boston Globe coverage here; Boston Herald coverage here), it would seem that Barry Bonds’ single-season home-run record of 73 is within her grasp.

Globe columnist Alex Beam, who dubs Viswanathan the “Queen of Schadenfreude,” predicts that the agency that helped her “conceptualize” the novel is going to wind up being accused as the guilty party. But if Beam is right, wouldn’t that mean that Viswanathan didn’t write any of “Opal Mehta”?

McCafferty herself is reported to be devastated by all of this, but she comes off as rather jolly on her blog. I would think she would be.

Meanwhile, the Weekly Dig has some fun today with my deathless prose. I admit to being dense enough not to have gotten it until I’d read a couple of paragraphs.