Tag: New York Times

The feeding frenzy is under way

The John McCain story has led to the media-ethics feeding frenzy of 2008. We’re going to know a lot more in a few days. Right now, we should just hang on. Still, I can’t resist posting a few tidbits.

The New Republic’s backgrounder, by Gabriel Sherman, is a must-read. It seems possible — even probable — that it was Sherman’s nosing-around that finally led the New York Times into running what it had. Bill Keller sounds really steamed. I’d love to hear a recording of him sarcastically spitting out the phrase “special correspondent.” Except that it was in an e-mail.

I and others have already speculated how miffed Mitt Romney must be that the Times waited until after McCain had all but wrapped up the nomination before dropping its bombshell. Well, Charles Kaiser of Radar now says one of the Times’ tipsters was former congressman Vin Weber, who just so happened to have been an official with the Romney campaign. Weber has denied it, but Kaiser’s not taking it back. So who knows?

Adam Reilly points out that the Boston Globe chose to run the Washington Post’s version rather than the Times’ more incendiary (i.e., sex rumors included played up) story, even though the Globe is owned by the New York Times Co. Interesting. But last night, I noticed that there was a link to the Times story featured prominently on the home page of the Globe’s Boston.com site.

Finally, no offense to Ryan Lizza, but I don’t think I’m going to get around to reading his New Yorker article on whether McCain can remake the Republican Party. Talk about bad timing.

File photo of Cindy and John McCain (cc) by Chris Dunn and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Making sense of the McCain story

Josh Marshall, fresh off his Polk Award, does a good job of putting into perspective today’s New York Times story on John McCain, which suggests, without quite saying out loud, that he may have had an affair with a lobbyist for whom he did favors during his 2000 “straight talk” campaign.

Word is that the McCain campaign tried to spike this story back in December. At Salon, Alex Koppelman recalls that it made a brief appearance on Drudge around that time, then went underground. Is it a legitimate story? Marshall thinks so, but hedges his bets:

I find it very difficult to believe that the Times would have put their chin so far out on this story if they didn’t know a lot more than they felt they could put in the article, at least on the first go. But in a decade of doing this, I’ve learned not to give any benefits of the doubt, even to the most esteemed institutions.

If this has legs, Mitt Romney clearly has plenty to howl about. It would have been the story of the campaign. Then again, Romney has merely “suspended” his campaign, hasn’t he?

Not that this can be compared to the Times’ mind-blowing decision to hold its story on the Bush administration’s no-warrant wiretapping program for more than a year, until after the 2004 presidential election. That still stands as some sort of record.

More: The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz offers some context.

Still more: Adam Reilly notes that Sam Stein hit the Romney angle last night. OK, let me try for something else original: Is this bad news for Hillary Clinton or what? For her to have any chance of staging a comeback in Texas and Ohio, she’s got to (a) get the media to subject Barack Obama to a raking-over of epic proportions and then (b) hope something turns up. Right now, thanks to the Times, (a) looks pretty unlikely.

Pictures from a polling place

I got back from voting a little while ago. While I was there, I took a few pictures to upload to the Polling Place Photo Project, started by Jay Rosen’s NewAssignment.Net and now hosted by the New York Times.

I zipped off four photos to the project, which you can see here. (At right is Salem News reporter Ethan Forman, who’s interviewing a voter outside Danvers High School.) The idea is to supplement election coverage with a little citizen journalism, combining professional with amateur contributions. When it comes to photography, I certainly qualify as an amateur.

Here is Rosen’s original essay on the purpose of the project.

The site is slow today — no surprise, given that it’s Super Tuesday. I imagine things will be quite a bit busier later today, when people start getting out of work.

Rosen and the other folks behind the project hope this will somehow lead to a better voting experience. Perhaps. Certainly there’s a possibility that some real problems will be documented by camera-wielding citizens.

If nothing else, though, the project shows that professional and amateur journalists can work together to produce something that’s both interesting and worthwhile.

The Clintons’ Kazakhstan problem

The New York Times fronts an absolutely brutal story today about Bill Clinton’s dubious dealings on behalf of a Canadian mining mogul.

According to the article, by Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr., the mogul, Frank Giustra, unexpectedly won a lucrative uranium-mining deal in Kazakhstan after Clinton flew to that country with him in 2005 and schmoozed the human-rights-abusing dictator, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Giustra then turned around and donated $31 million to Clinton’s charitable foundation, with a pledge to give $100 million more.

There’s also an account of Bill Clinton’s and Giustra’s somehow not able to remember meeting with the head of Kazakhstan’s state-controlled uranium agency, Kazatomprom, at the Clintons’ home, in Chappaqua, N.Y., until confronted with evidence. Here’s a lowlight:

“You are correct that I asked the president to meet with the head of Kazatomprom,” Mr. Giustra said. “Mr. Dzhakishev [the head of the uranium agency] asked me in February 2007 to set up a meeting with former President Clinton to discuss the future of the nuclear energy industry.” Mr. Giustra said the meeting “escaped my memory until you raised it.”

That’s perfectly understandable, of course. I mean, any of us could forget about meeting with a former U.S. president and the guy who was about to make us many millions of dollars richer, right? Admit it: You probably can’t remember what you had for breakfast this morning.

The story raises the question of how happy Hillary Clinton is with this, as she has been an outspoken critic of Nazarbayev. But she certainly can’t distance herself from her husband’s shenanigans given that she’s ultimately responsible for unleashing him to attack Barack Obama during the past few weeks. It is the Clintons who’ve created the impression that they’re running for co-president, so his baggage is now hers as well. (Not that it ever wasn’t.)

But there’s an additional point of interest here, and that involves timing. This is, of course, a perfectly legitimate story, and the Times deserves a lot of credit for ferreting it out. Tonight we’ll see the most crucial debate of the campaign, as Clinton and Obama go at it one-on-one on CNN at 8 p.m. I suspect that this story will be a big part of the debate. And from there, it could dominate coverage right through Super Tuesday.

As we know, the Times has already endorsed Hillary Clinton. Today’s story may have far more of an effect on the outcome. Whether by accident or design, the news side has sent a clear message that it’s more relevant and more important than the paper’s opinionmongers.

More powerful than Googlezon!*

One of my favorite bomb-tossers, John Ellis, has uncorked a doozy. In a column for the Web site RealClearMarkets, Ellis proposes that Google make an offer to the New York Times Co. that it can’t refuse. Ellis’ arguments:

  • Mega-wealthy Google could easily afford to buy the Times Co., the price of which will only keep dropping.
  • Even though the Times Co.’s controlling stock is owned by members of the Sulzberger family, who don’t want to sell, there’s a point beyond which the family can no longer screw other shareholders.
  • Rupert Murdoch seems determined to transform the Wall Street Journal into a serious competitor to the Times on all kinds of news, not just financial — and he can afford to run the Journal at a loss.
  • Google, like Murdoch, doesn’t need to turn a profit with a small investment like the Times — but may make money anyway if it can leverage Times content across multiple platforms.
  • Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. isn’t getting it done, and has been in charge for so long now that it seems clear that’s not going to change.

Ellis, a former Boston Globe columnist, offers some provocation for us locals as well, suggesting that Google could get the price down to a mere $3 billion or so by selling off the Times Co.’s other properties, including the Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and its share of the Red Sox and of New England Sports Network. (If the right buyer for the Globe can be found? Go ahead, make my day. But that’s a big if.)

Ellis’ piece is a suggestion, not a prediction. Still, it’s worth noting that in October 2006, when it looked as though a group headed by retired General Electric chairman Jack Welch might buy the Globe, Ellis wrote: “Mr. Sulzberger would be a fool, of course, to sell the Globe to anyone at this juncture.”

He was exactly right. Which raises the question of whether Times Co. executives now would be fools not to sell the Globe.

Ellis’ proposal is logical, if unlikely to happen. But given that all of our great news organizations are going to have to find new, once-unthinkable ways of surviving, I can imagine a worse fate for the Times than landing in the arms of Google, which generally, though not always, lives up to its “don’t be evil” philosophy. Better Google than Murdoch, certainly. (Via Romenesko.)

*Click here for reference.

Hoyt’s mixed bag on Kristol

New York Times public editor Clark Hoyt’s column on the hiring of William Kristol is disappointing, but entertaining nevertheless.

It’s disappointing because he quotes the most unhinged, illiterate e-mails the Times has received so that he can claim that at least some Kristol-bashers are nothing but ignorant haters, and because he blows right past the criticism that Kristol “is an activist with the potential to embarrass The Times with his outside involvements.” Well, yeah. That’s disqualifying, or at least it ought to be.

But Hoyt is right on the money in flogging Kristol for publicly urging that the Times be prosecuted for committing the sin of journalism against the Bush administration. And he’s touchingly naive in saying that Kristol’s refusal to talk to him was “an odd stance for someone who presumably will want others to talk to him for his column.”

Does Hoyt really think Kristol is going to do any reporting?