Tag: New York Times

Look out below

For the newspaper business, it suddenly feels like September, when huge chunks of the financial services industry collapsed after many months of teetering on the brink.

Since this morning, bankruptcy for Tribune Co. has moved from theory to reality. The New York Times Co. is borrowing against the ill-timed monument the Sulzbergers built to themselves several years ago.

And a post I wrote this morning already seems out of date.

You have the sense right now that anything is possible. Anything bad, that is.

O, the injustice of it all

From today’s New York Times story on the town of Mountain View, House, Calif., which has the highest percentage of underwater mortgages in the nation:

He has cut his DVD buying from 50 a month to perhaps one, and is waiting until the Christmas sales to buy a high-definition television. He does not indulge much anymore in his hobbies of scuba diving and flying. “Best to wait for a better price, or do without,” Mr. Rogers, 52, said.

I’m sure there is real pain in Mountain House. Let’s just say this is not a compelling example of that pain.

Explaining an unexplained dip

The New York Times’ Steve Lohr today writes about the growing furor over executive pay, and the widening disparity between what top company officials make as compared to average workers.

But the story is accompanied by a chart, based on statistics from the Economic Policy Institute, that shows a huge dip in the disparity earlier in this decade. Today, according to the chart, the disparity is rising once again, though it has not yet reached the heights of 2000.

Nowhere in Lohr’s story is the blip explained. (Not that I’m blaming him — he probably had no idea that particular chart would be used to accompany his reporting.)

What’s the explanation? According to an Economic Policy Institute report from June 21, 2006:

The ratio surged in the 1990s and hit 300 at the end of the recovery in 2000. The fall in the stock market reduced CEO stock-related pay (e.g., options) causing CEO pay to moderate to 143 times that of an average worker in 2002. Since then, however, CEO pay has exploded and by 2005 the average CEO was paid $10,982,000 a year, or 262 times that of an average worker ($41,861).

OK, I suppose we could have figured that out. But someone at the Times should have seen that the chart did not perfectly match Lohr’s reporting that chief-executive compensation has risen from 35 times to 275 times that of the average worker since the 1970s. It’s true, but stuff happened in between, too.

On (not) building for the future

What a strange sentence Richard Pérez-Peña wrote in describing the problems faced by the Chicago Sun-Times in finding a buyer. From tomorrow’s New York Times:

The Chicago Sun-Times is the kind of trophy that once appealed to deep-pocketed buyers. It has a big audience in a big market, a storied name, and stars like Roger Ebert and Robert Novak.

Ebert, as you probably know, has been battling brain [sorry; that was his on-air reviewing partner the late Gene Siskel] cancer for many years, and can no longer speak, though he continues to write. Novak, who’s 76, just announced that he has a brain tumor.

It’s not disrespectful to point out that no newspaper executive would buy the Sun-Times thinking he’d have Ebert and Novak in his stable for any length of time. Pérez-Peña knows this. What were he — and his editors — thinking?

How stupid can the Times get?*

Very. Walter Brooks explains. And the New York Times, in what may have been a misguided attempt to give Barack Obama some cover, has managed to turn his innocent wave to the Berlin crowd into a Nazi salute. Good grief.

*Correction: I take it back. The front of the Boston Globe shows Obama waving with his right hand, but the “Angola” sign is still backwards. Clearly it was just turned around. How stupid can I get?

McCain’s factually inaccurate op-ed

The John McCain op-ed piece that was rejected by the New York Times contains at least one bit of factually inaccurate information about Barack Obama. That alone is sufficient reason to send it back for a rewrite. Instead, McCain has chosen to go public and claim that the Times refused to publish what he had written despite having run a commentary by Obama last week.

Here is the inaccuracy:

The success of the surge has not changed Senator Obama’s determination to pull out all of our combat troops. All that has changed is his rationale. In a New York Times op-ed and a speech this week, he offered his “plan for Iraq” in advance of his first “fact finding” trip to that country in more than three years. It consisted of the same old proposal to pull all of our troops out within 16 months. In 2007 he wanted to withdraw because he thought the war was lost. If we had taken his advice, it would have been. Now he wants to withdraw because he thinks Iraqis no longer need our assistance.

To make this point, he mangles the evidence. He makes it sound as if Prime Minister Maliki has endorsed the Obama timetable, when all he has said is that he would like a plan for the eventual withdrawal of U.S. troops at some unspecified point in the future.

The truth, of course, is that Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has indeed endorsed Obama’s 16-month timetable for withdrawal. Republicans are now spinning like mad to make it appear that Maliki’s remarks had not been properly translated. But this Josh Marshall post makes it clear that Maliki said what he meant and meant what he said.

In fairness, it should be noted, as Time’s Joe Klein does, that McCain’s piece was rejected last Friday, and Maliki’s remarks were not reported until the next day. But Klein goes on to observe that the McCain campaign still refuses to acknowledge that Maliki said what he said. In any case, there’s no doubt McCain’s op-ed would need to be revised in order to avoid making a false statement about Obama (and Maliki).

According to the Times, the newspaper has published at least seven op-eds by McCain since 1996. I can’t imagine that it won’t be publishing another one or two before this campaign is over.

But if McCain wants his words published without any editing or vetting whatsoever, then he ought to buy an ad.

Correcting a correction

Can’t editors at the New York Times check their own archives before subjecting one of their reporters to the ignominy of a published correction? On May 14, Times sportswriter William Rhoden wrote a column about the New York Knicks that contained the following passage about former coach Isiah Thomas:

No coach in recent Knicks history was treated as harshly as Thomas. From the moment Thomas was named team president to the moment he was forced to coach the team he assembled, Thomas was the object of an intense dislike that, near the end, bordered on hatred. Some old-timers in the news media never forgot his comment about Larry Bird (if Bird were black, he would be regarded as just another player).

But you’ll no longer find the passage about Bird in the online version; it’s been expunged, as though the Times fears you’ll go blind if you read it. There’s now a correction at the bottom that says:

The Sports of The Times column on Wednesday, about the harsh environment surrounding the Knicks while Isiah Thomas was the coach, erroneously linked Thomas to a racially charged comment about Larry Bird when both men were top N.B.A. players. It was Dennis Rodman — once a teammate of Thomas’s — who famously suggested that Bird would have been regarded as an ordinary player had he been black.

Trouble is, Rhoden got it exactly right. After the Detroit Pistons lost to the Boston Celtics in the 1987 playoffs, both Rodman and Thomas, then the team’s star players, made the incisive observation that Bird was, you know, white. Here’s how the Times’ Ira Berkow described it on June 2, 1987:

In the visiting and losing team’s locker room Saturday afternoon in Boston Garden, Isiah Thomas, the Detroit guard, said he didn’t want it to sound like sour grapes, and that there was no question that his team got beat, and that they came up short, but he harbored a resentment.

In regard to Bird, he [Thomas] said, ”I think Larry is a very, very good basketball player. An exceptional talent, but I’d have to agree with Rodman. If Bird was black, he’d be just another good guy.”

Dennis Rodman, the teammate to whom Thomas had referred, had said that Bird was ”overrated,” and that the only reason he had won three straight league most valuable player awards (until this year, that is), ”is because he’s white. That’s the only reason.”

So, yes, Rodman spoke first. But Thomas agreed with him, and used language that was just as offensive, if you’re inclined to be offended. Rhoden was not using quotation marks, so there was no reason for him to capture Thomas’ quote word-for-word. But it strikes me that Rhoden’s construction comes closer to Thomas than to Rodman. Gee, he must have done his research.

The simple fact is that Rhoden got hung out to dry by editors who apparently couldn’t have been bothered to dig out what really happened 21 years ago. Heck, I remember it, which is why I started diving into the archives. Anyone who was following basketball in 1987 remembers Thomas’ crass comments — more so than Rodman’s, since Thomas was a nationally known celebrity.

Rhoden should demand a retraction.

Greenhouse effect doesn’t exist

Here’s what happens when newspaper-business cutbacks finally reach the New York Times: A legend like Supreme Court reporter Linda Greenhouse takes early retirement. (Via Romenesko.) Who will Nina Totenberg hang out with?

More important, what will become of the so-called Greenhouse effect — the tendency of justices to move to the left in order to be thought well of by the dean of the Supreme Court press corps? Good grief. This could be bigger than another judicial vacancy.

Rumors, and rumors of rumors

Michael Kinsley mocks the New York Times’ attempts to, uh, recontextualize its John McCain story:

What I wrote was that some people had expressed concern that the Times article might have created the appearance of charging that McCain had had an affair. My critics have charged that I was charging the Times with charging McCain with having had an affair. Such a charge would be unfair to the New York Times, since the Times article, if you read it carefully (very carefully), does not make any charge against McCain except that people in a meeting eight years ago had suggested that other people eight years ago might reach a conclusion — about which the Times expressed no view whatsoever — that McCain was having an affair.

Compare Kinsley to this actual excerpt from an online conversation with readers that Times executive editor Bill Keller and other editors and reporters conducted last Thursday:

The point of this “Long Run” installment was that, according to people who know him well, this man who prizes his honor above all things and who appreciates the importance of appearances also has a history of being sometimes careless about the appearance of impropriety, about his reputation. The story cites several examples, and quotes friends and admirers talking of this apparent contradiction in his character. That is why some members of his staff were so alarmed by the appearance of his relationship with Ms. Iseman. And that, it seemed (and still seems) to us, was something our readers would want to know about a man who aspires to be president.

The similarities are striking, no?