Media Nation

I’m late to the party in commenting on Ken Auletta’s article about the corporate wars being fought at the Los Angeles Times. The New Yorker chose not to post Auletta’s story on its Web site, though it should show up eventually at Auletta’s own site. Editor & Publisher posted highlights earlier this week. But it wasn’t until last night that I finally had a chance to read the entire article for myself. So I don’t have much profound to add to what’s already been said.

I don’t read the L.A. Times except for an occasional article on its Web site, and only then because a blogger – usually Romenesko – has pointed to it. Still, there’s no doubt that the Times is one of our great papers, and I’ve taken some interest in it since reading David Halberstam’s “The Powers That Be” in the 1970s.

Auletta, in his patented polite, understated manner, details the clash between the Times’ top two editors and the Tribune Co., whose executives appear to be suffering from a combination of profit-crazed greed and journalistic envy. The problem is that Tribune’s flagship, the Chicago Tribune, is both a bigger money-maker and a lesser newspaper than the Times. The ostensible good guys in this piece are Times editor John Carroll, who recently left, and Dean Baquet, who moved up from Carroll’s second-in-command to the top post following Carroll’s departure. But Carroll and Baquet, in Auletta’s telling, come off as editors with some flaws of their own.

Auletta is sometimes criticized for excessive delicacy, but I think that criticism is wrong-headed. People say things – sometimes outrageous things – to Auletta, and if he refrains from plunging in the knife, he nevertheless affords them every opportunity to perform ritual suicide. My favorite moment comes from Baquet, commenting on his and Carroll’s efforts to staff up the Times with talent from across the country, often at the expense of building a local identity. Baquet told Auletta that “we still haven’t mastered making the paper feel like it is edited in Los Angeles.”

Good grief. Is this really the man who is Los Angeles’ best hope to stave off the bean-counting barbarians from Chicago? As Mickey Kaus – entirely up to the task of offsetting Auletta’s bile deficit – observes, this lack of a local sensibility is so pervasive that the Times this week didn’t even manage to report that Al Qaeda may have targeted Los Angeles’ tallest building. This Kaus post on Auletta’s piece is worth reading, too.

Though Auletta’s article is ultimately about a great – or perhaps potentially great – newspaper’s soul, what really struck me was its end-of-an-era feel – not just for the L.A. Times, but for the newspaper business in general. For years, everyone has predicted that the Internet would eventually kill the newspaper industry as we know it. Lately, though, it seems that it’s finally happening.

Auletta writes, for example, that even as newspaper circulation is falling, the L.A. Times’ Web site attracts 4.6 million unique visitors per month, the Washington Post’s 10.4 million and the New York Times’ 12.5 million. These sites are loaded with advertising, and though their content is free (except for N.Y. Times columnists), their corporate owners also do not have to pay for printing and delivery. Somehow, though, the Web versions of these papers have not been successful enough to relieve the financial pressures on these papers. And, as Auletta notes, the industry is going through another round of cost-cutting, with the New York Times Co. recently announcing reductions at its flagship, the Times, and at its second-largest paper, the Boston Globe.

Theoretically there’s no reason why large daily newspapers can’t make the transition to the Web. I suspect that the biggest problem right now is that newspapers have been forced to invest in their Web sites even as they continue to pay for printing and distribution of the paper product. Eliminate that enormous production cost, and the bottom line might look a lot better.

Still, there’s a real question as to whether large, centralized newsgathering operations can survive the transition to an online world. They’re needed as much as ever, but the Web – and blogland, the sexy subset of the moment – favors opinion over fact, speed over depth, emotion over analysis.

Blogs – good ones, anyway – are wonderful in many ways, but they’re no substitute for the fair, neutral reporting that is the central mission of newspapers and other mainstream outlets. Ultimately, Auletta’s article is a meditation on whether that mission is on the verge of being abandoned.

Boston lawyer Kevin P. Martin, a former clerk to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, offers a novel argument as to why we shouldn’t worry about White House counsel Harriet Miers’ dubious credentials: Being a Supreme Court justice isn’t all that hard. I’m not making this up. Writing in the Boston Globe, Martin asserts:

MARTIN: The qualities needed by a Supreme Court justice are not necessarily those needed by an advocate or scholar. By the time the court agrees to take a case, it has already been the subject of rounds of litigation in the lower courts. Indeed, the court generally will not even take a case unless the issues it raises have already been addressed by several federal courts of appeal and state supreme courts. When the court takes a case, the issues it raises have already been well developed and the arguments on each side honed.

Moreover, cases argued before the court are the subject of extensive briefing by the well-qualified members of the Supreme Court bar and the federal and state solicitors general. Each justice also has a staff of four experienced law clerks, top graduates of the nation’s most prestigious law schools, to assist them in synthesizing and analyzing the pertinent lower-court opinions and briefs as well as the court’s own precedents.

In other words, if President Bush had appointed Miers to, say, the First Circuit Court of Appeals, she’d be in over her head. But the Supreme Court? No problem – most of the legalistic heavy lifting has already been done, and the rest can be handled by the kids.

Somehow I don’t think Team Miers is going to be showing Martin’s piece to skeptical senators.

Media Nation was in the midst of a convoluted and boring post this morning when deliverance struck: Firefox encountered a site it didn’t like, leading to an error that caused the program to quit, destroying said post. I think it was a sign.

So let me briefly call your attention to this story in today’s Boston Globe, about Cameron Walker, a Fisher College sophomore who was expelled for posting unflattering information about a police officer on TheFacebook.com, a social-networking site popular among students that has absolutely no affiliation with Fisher.

I’m withholding judgment because, as you’ll see, the ACLU is still investigating. But it sounds like this has the potential to become a major free-speech issue.

That doesn’t mean students shouldn’t be careful about what they choose to reveal about themselves online. Just last week, the Globe published an article on the consequences of being too open on sites such as TheFacebook.com and MySpace.com.

As Walker has learned, anything you say can and will be used against you.

That said, the Fisher College administration owes the community an explanation for why it took such drastic action against what was apparently nothing more than a student’s exercising his free-speech rights.

The mild-mannered blogger starts slowly, arguing that the Washington Post has eclipsed the New York Times as our best daily newspaper. Given the Times’ woes in recent years – Wen Ho Lee, Jayson Blair, Howell Raines, the run-up to the Iraq war – it’s a reasonable position to take. Even if the Post doesn’t quite bring the same journalistic resoures to the table as the mighty Times, there’s no question that the House that Ochs Built has repeatedly squandered its readers’ trust.

But Rosen’s essay soon veers off into more satisfying territory: yet another blistering critique of how the Times, as an institution, has placed itself at the mercy of Judith Miller. The other day Rosen wrote about “Judith Miller and Her Times.” Now he expands on that theme, saying:

ROSEN: With many unanswered questions, some of which only the Times can address, being itself a huge actor in the drama, the newspaper has gone into editorial default, as if a plea of nolo contendere had been entered at Supreme News Court in the matter of Judy Miller, prosecutor Fitzgerald and the sputtering New York Times.

Notice that in her first few days out of jail Miller could not manage to: 1.) compose a statement for the Times that reveals anything, 2.) answer a single question from reporters that reveals anything, 3.) say a thing about her grand jury testimony that reveals anything, although it is legal to do so and Matt Cooper of Time magazine did, or 4.) admit that Lewis Libby was her source, even though letters from her lawyer to his lawyer were posted for all to see by the New York Times! (She did it admit it Monday, four days after the whole world knew. This is journalism?)

From what I understand of the code that binds reporters, if you have big news because it happens you are a participant in the news, then you phone the desk because you think of your colleagues and they deserve the scoop. Of course you answer questions from the press when it’s time for that because you’re a source and they can’t write their stories without you. You behave with an awareness that you’re usually in their position, trying to squeeze information out of harried people, who sometimes just want to go home and have a quiet meal. You remain a journalist, even though you have to operate as a source, and defend your interests.

Judy Miller has behaved like she understood not one word of this.

This is very rough and very smart. And it exponentially raises the pressure on the Times to come clean, once and for all, if and when it publishes its promised comprehensive article about Miller and the Plame case.

The first take on Harriet Miers is that President Bush’s counsel and longtime crony is, uh, lightly qualified for the Supreme Court. Slate’s Emily Bazelon does a good job of explaining precisely why Miers fails to measure up.

Bazelon’s comparison is with the woman Miers hopes to replace, Sandra Day O’Connor, who was also seen as possessing a thin résumé when she was appointed by Ronald Reagan. The difference was that O’Connor was actually quite accomplished in arenas that normally escape the notice of Washington insiders. But not Miers.

In Salon, Michael Scherer has a useful roundup of liberal and conservative reaction to the Miers appointment, which can be summarized as befuddled and angry, respectively.

Finally, everyone’s talking about why Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, is wild about Miers. Rick Klein reports in the Boston Globe:

KLEIN: Reid, a frequent Bush critic who voted against Roberts, had asked the president to consider Miers. Reid appeared alongside Miers at the Capitol to tout her qualifications. “I have to say without any qualification that I’m very happy that we have someone like her,” said Reid, Democrat of Nevada.

But has anyone pointed out that Reid, despite being a partisan Democrat, is also a longstanding opponent of abortion rights? Not the Globe, not the New York Times, not the Washington Post and not the Wall Street Journal. A puzzling omission, given that it may explain Reid’s supposedly puzzling positive reaction.

From today’s Washington Post update on the Judith Miller saga:

POST: In a Sept. 15 letter, Libby tells Miller how much he admires her “principled” stand but urges her to testify about their conversations and get out of jail. “For my part, this is the rare case where this ‘source’ would be better off if you testified,” he wrote.

“You went to jail in the summer. It is fall now,” he continued. “Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work – and life.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that Miller will tell all, perhaps as soon as this weekend. And not a moment too soon.

In a post headlined “Judith Miller and Her Times,” Jay Rosen writes:

ROSEN: In the mystifying drama of Judith Miller and her Times, I am as clueless as the next person about what’s really going down. But it seems to me we’re watching just that – the actions of Judy Miller’s New York Times. It’s kind of staggering, the way she has hijacked the institution by staging an “epic collision” between herself and the state….

Here, I believe, is the error the Times made. Civil disobedience succeeds when there is clarity in purpose, cogency in argument, and transparency in action. None of which has been apparent in Judy Miller’s epic.

This story is getting stranger and more impenetrable by the day. But now we have two moments to look forward to that might clarify things: the Times’ own coverage, possibly as soon as this weekend, possibly written by Miller herself; and special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald’s final report, which presumably will be issued not long after the grand jury on the Valerie Plame matter expires, on Oct. 28.

Today’s Washington Post account of Judith Miller’s and Scooter Libby’s testimony before the grand jury would appear to undercut the Arianna Huffington theory – that is, that Miller was actually Libby’s source in the Valerie Plame matter.

POST: Sources familiar with Miller’s testimony say her account of two discussions with Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, that July are similar to the account Libby reportedly gave the grand jury last year. Both said they spoke about Plame’s husband, administration critic and former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, on July 8 and again on July 12 or 13. On at least one of those occasions, Libby told Miller that Wilson’s wife worked at the CIA, the sources said….

According to a source familiar with Libby’s account of his July 2003 conversations with Miller, the two first met for breakfast on July 8, when Miller interviewed Libby about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. At that time, she asked him why Wilson had been chosen to investigate questions that Cheney had posed about whether Iraq tried to buy uranium in Niger. Libby, the source familiar with his account said, told her that the White House was working with the CIA to learn more about Wilson’s trip and how he was selected.

Libby had a second conversation with Miller, a telephone call on July 12 or July 13, the source said. In it, Libby said he had learned that Wilson’s wife had a role in sending him on the trip and that she worked for the CIA. Libby never knew Plame’s name or that she was a covert operative, the source said.

Following Miller’s testimony yesterday, Huffington called on Miller and the Times to go public with everything they know, which strikes me as an eminently reasonable request. In fact, the tone of this Adam Liptak article in today’s Times sounds like there are at least some folks at the Mothership who’d love nothing better than to get this all out in the open.

The most worthwhile speculation online right now is contained on David Corn’s blog. Corn, who covers Washington for the Nation, was almost alone in dogging this story more than two years ago. He writes:

CORN: [Y]ou don’t have to look too far between the lines to discern Libby’s cover story. It goes something like this: Wilson wrote his Times article. All hell broke loose. The White House asked, “Who authorized this trip?” Someone called the CIA for information. The CIA reported back that Wilson was contacted by the counter-proliferation office, where his wife Valerie was working. But – and here’s the crucial “but” – the CIA did not tell the White House that Valerie was undercover. Thus, if any White House officials – say, Rove or Libby – repeated this information to reporters, then they may have been engaged in leaking classified and sensitive information to discredit a critic but they were not committing a crime. And who was at fault? George Tenet, the CIA director at the time.

How convenient. Tenet has already taken the fall for Bush’s decision to launch the war in Iraq. He reportedly told Bush that the WMD case was a “slam-dunk.” And subsequent investigations – from the Republican-controlled Senate intelligence committee and an independent commission that only looked at the intelligence community, not the White House – have excoriated Tenet’s CIA for botching the WMD job. (Still, Bush saw fit to give Tenet a nice medal.)

Tenet is finished in Washington. (Paul Wolfowitz got a medal and was given the top job at the World Bank.) Is Libby looking to point to the dead body in the room and say, “It was him!”? If Libby or any other top White House aide wanted to know what had happened at the CIA regarding Wilson’s trip to Niger, what would he or she have done? The obvious answer is that he or she would have called Tenet and demanded answers. And if Tenet – when he or an aide reported back – did not tell the White House Valerie Wilson was undercover, that would not be the White House’s fault, right? In this scenario, the CIA outed Valerie Wilson.

The David Dreier story seems unlikely to develop any further. A Google News search this morning shows that the question of whether Dreier’s apparent homosexuality cost him Tom DeLay’s job has still not spread beyond the gay and alternative press. And, of course, the blogs.

Did anyone see “Charlie Rose” last night? Dreier was a scheduled guest, but there’s no transcript available yet. I would think that if the topic came up, there’d be an account of it somewhere this morning. So apparently Rose failed to raise the subject. Dreier is supposed to be a guest on Sean Hannity’s radio show today, which, because of Jay Severin’s continued absence, can be heard on WTKK Radio (96.9 FM) from 3 to 6 p.m. (Thanks, Jay!) But I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Finally, I recommend Robert David Sullivan’s response to my post yesterday. Click here and scroll down.

I’m hardly the first person to find something awfully strange about Lewis “Scooter” Libby’s sudden decision to let New York Times reporter Judith Miller testify about whatever conversations they had regarding Valerie Plame, the CIA operative whose cover was blown by syndicated columnist Robert Novak in July 2003.

Miller had been in prison for 85 days because of her refusal to reveal the identity of her confidential source. She knew, of course, that Libby, who is Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, had signed a waiver allowing reporters to identify him. But it wasn’t until very recently, according to today’s coverage, that she was personally assured by Libby that he had not been coerced into signing that waiver and that she was therefore free to testify.

In light of that, this section from today’s Washington Post seems especially puzzling:

POST: Joseph Tate, an attorney for Libby, said yesterday that he told Miller attorney Floyd Abrams a year ago that Libby’s waiver was voluntary and that Miller was free to testify. He said last night that he was contacted by Bennett several weeks ago, and was surprised to learn that Miller had not accepted that representation as authorization to speak with prosecutors.

“We told her lawyers it was not coerced,” Tate said. “We are surprised to learn we had anything to do with her incarceration.”

“We are surprised”? This makes it sound like it was all a big misunderstanding. But Miller had been behind bars since June. How is it possible that Libby didn’t know, or that Miller and her lawyers didn’t move heaven and earth to get Libby to step forward before yesterday?

Mickey Kaus picks up on the Times’ own coverage, which includes this tidbit: “Other people involved in the case have said Ms. Miller did not understand that the waiver had been freely given.” Kaus: “That has to be disingenuous. You mean she was sitting in jail all because she never bothered to inquire and find out that the waiver that would free her was genuine?”

Kaus also recommends Arianna Huffington’s latest. It’s totally speculative, but in the absence of any other information, it’s worth reading. Earlier, Huffington wrote another much-blogged-about piece of speculation guessing that the real reason Miller didn’t want to talk was that she was Libby’s source. That, Huffington wrote, would explain why Miller never actually wrote a story about the Plame matter.

Huffington’s theory was that Miller had as much motive to hurt Plame’s husband, former ambassador and Bush critic Joseph Wilson, as anyone in the White House did. After all, it was Miller’s spectacularly wrong pre-war reporting on Iraq’s weapons capabilities and terrorist ties left her looking as bad as the White House itself.

(A little back story: Wilson wrote an op-ed piece for the Times in July 2003 criticizing the administration for ignoring a mission he had undertaken to Niger, a mission that led him to conclude that Saddam Hussein had not sought to obtain uranium from that country. One theory is that Karl Rove and Libby blew Plame’s cover to Novak and other journalists in order to retaliate against Wilson. Then, too, it later turned out that Slick Wilson didn’t tell the whole truth in his op-ed. Search these incomparable archives if you don’t know what I’m talking about.)

At this point, I’m in a state of mild despair as to whether we’ll ever know the whole truth about this weird chapter in high-stakes political gamesmanship. Short of a truly revealing final report by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, or a leak from Miller’s grand-jury testimony, this is likely to remain as impenetrable as it has from the beginning.

Judith Miller of the New York Times has been released from prison after saying that her source in the Valerie Plame matter has given her permission to testify before the grand jury. The source was Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.

Given how closely Miller is said to have relied on Cheney’s office in her flawed reporting on Iraq’s weapons capabilities and terrorist ties, this is pretty much what everyone had figured all along. In fact, Libby and Matthew Cooper’s source, Karl Rove, were always the leading suspects in the guessing game as to who had blown Plame’s CIA cover.