New York, D.C.-- You're on your own

Our souls shine through the little things. To wit: compare the Times' passive-voice/past-tense and the Post's active-voice/future-tense summary of the same story.

Homeland Security Grants to N.Y. and Washington Slashed
The cuts seemed at odds with officials' vows to steer a greater share of anti-terrorism money to the nation's highest-risk cities. (Times)

D.C., N.Y. Anti-Terror Funds Cut
DHS to grant less money to the two cities attacked on 9/11 so more can be given to smaller cities. (WaPo)

UPDATE: ABC News just obtained the form Homeland Security used to justify cutting New York's anti-terror funds by 40%. Among its whoppers, New York has no "national monuments [or] icons," a statement almost too laughable to dignify by acknowledging, were it not coming from the agency responsible for protecting us. The Post today mentions the finding but doesn't play it up. The Times posts a similar story.

Buried People, Buried Facts

Buried people, buried facts. The last paragraph of this morning's Times story on the murder of 24 Iraqi civilians by US Marines is this:

On Tuesday, the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, said President Bush first became aware of the episode after the Time magazine inquiry, when he was briefed by Stephen Hadley, the national security adviser. "When this comes out, all the details will be made available to the public, so we'll have a picture of what happened," Mr. Snow said.

This is a startling admission by the White House, shoved to the end of the story and ignored. It's public information now that the Marine leadership knew about the murders very soon after they happened (five days after, according to the Boston Globe). If it's true that the president was informed of military crimes which occurred in November of 2005 only by reading a March 2006 issue of Time magazine, today's statement by Tony Snow is evidence of the military's intention to at least minimize the investigation, if not cover it up completely. But if the president did know about the murders earlier than March 2006, why didn't he tell us? Would the public ever have known about the worst recorded US military atrocity since My Lai if it were not for Time magazine's report?

Party in the West Wing! You're not invited.

Is the New York Times shilling for SCOTUS? Back in 2000, a Los Angeles deputy prosecutor discovers dirty tricks used by his peers to achieve a prosecution; he complains, his concerns are dismissed, and he ultimately ends up testifying for the defense. As a result, the prosecutor's career is squashed and he sues, asserting that he was punished for his apostasy. Six years later, in a fantastic return on Bush's investment in Roberts and Alito, the Supreme Court defends the government's "right" to punish civil servants for speaking out about corruption. But it's not all bad, as David Stout of the Times points out:

The ruling noted the enormous variety of factual situations involving relationships between public employers and their employees, and it suggested that the particular facts of a case must be closely examined.

I bet it did. But the ruling's black ugly heart is this: "When public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, they are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline." Leave it to Justice Kennedy to put the "servant" back in "civil servant."

Fred Barbash of the WaPo rightly notes that:

The decision enhances the ability of governments at all levels to punish employees for speaking out, shielding officials in many instances from lawsuits for violating the right to free speech.

Neither paper, however, stops to wonder whether and how this ruling fits into BushCo's larger goal of stopping the release of any information regarding governmental behavior not already summarized in an official talking point. Unnoted by either story is the fact that even though the case involved a county-level prosecutor and his superiors, the Court deliberately chose to apply its reasoning to all levels and agencies of government. This is a massively important ruling for the development of free speech law and employer relations in this country, but neither the Times nor the Post seems very anxious to make that point.

Also important to note is that Supreme Court did not challenge the sequence of facts alleged by the complainant, i.e., that the prosecutor in question was punished for his decision to go public with what he saw as his colleagues' wrongdoing. With this ruling, the Supreme Court has explictly afforded government not only the right to disregard the First Amendment rights of its employees, but has allowed higher-ups to punish underlings using literally any method they see fit. The prosecutor was not formally censured or disciplined, merely relegated, with no explanation, to a less desirable position. No paper trail, no evidence, no solid ground on which to dispute.

Uh-oh, Harry Reid likes boxing!

WaPo's front page dumbly reprints John Solomon's tepid attack on Harry Reid for attending three boxing matches courtesy of the Nevada Athletic Commission (NAC). Timeline: Harry Reid sponsors legislation which would create more federal oversight of boxing, which the NAC opposes, worried about any weakening of their authority. They give Reid some ringside seats, which according to Senate ethics rules he is entitled to use, and then promptly votes in favor of the legislation the NAC opposes.

Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker has a good piece dissecting the non-scandal.
UPDATE: Media Matters releases a detailed list of John Solomon's omissions and deceptions.

The Latest in Vatican Revisionism

The head of the Catholic Church on Sunday visited Auschwitz, a site synonymous in most minds with the near-extermination of European Jewry, to deny the existence of anti-Semitism. While standing literally in the shadow of the ovens, the former member of the Hitler Youth asserted first that, in the face of the Holocaust's horror, only one response is possible, that of "dread silence-- a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God." Taking care to avoid ascribing any responsibility for the Holocaust to either the Church or the German people, Josef Ratzinger's query, "[w]hy, Lord, did you remain silent? How could you tolerate this?" not only reinforces the obedient believer's duty to be silent in the face of earthly corruption, but also neatly removes human agency from the equation. According to Ratzinger's formulation, the Holocaust was a problem with God, not with humans.

The Pope's second and far more insidious claim is that the Nazi's goal was not so much to kill Jews, but to "tear up the taproot of the Christian faith," to "kill the God called Abraham, who spoke in Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide to mankind," and to prove "that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone." Such asinine and offensive arguments go unchallenged by either the Times or the Post. For Ian Fisher of the Times, the Pope's "visit thus marked one more milestone of reckoning,"

And the images, beamed around the world, were striking: the pope in pristine white walking alone under the infamous iron lie promising freedom through work; a kiss on the cheek to a Jewish survivor; dark rain that gave way to sun and then, somehow, a rainbow as he finished prayers.

Craig Whitlock's story in the Post blithely quotes Ratzinger as saying that "[t]o speak in this place of horror, in this place where unprecedented mass crimes were committed against God and man, is almost impossible." But it is never "almost impossible" to raise your voice against horror, all that is necessary is that you do it (a choice the Vatican declined to make during the war) and second, those "unprecedented mass crimes" were not "committed against God and man," they were committed against Jews.

UPDATE: The Anti-Defamation League protests the Pope's omissions here.

Those Pesky Persians

Welcome to the party, Steven Weisman! The New York Times has finally deigned to acknowledge Iran's recent and unprecedented diplomatic overtures to the United States, but instead of framing them as an opportunity to start repairing thirty years' of mistrust and mutual invective, or even accurately backgrounding the story by examining Iran's massive policy realignment, Weisman's piece tells of yet another pesky argument in the White House, with the Troika + 1 (Bush/Cheney/Rummy/Rice) dead set against anything requiring words, arrayed against most of the United States' career foreign policy establishment, which sees this, at minimum, as a chance to peacefully end a confrontation over nuclear weapons.

One reason senior administration officials do not like the idea of talking with Iran, many of them say, is that they are not certain Iranian leaders would respond positively. A rebuff from Iran, even to a back-channel query, is to be avoided at all costs, various officials agree.

No such similar commitment, however, has been expressed by the Bush administration to avoid war at all costs.

The Times' other top Iran story today is the ominous "Iran Chief Eclipses Clerics as He Consolidates Power," which paints the picture of a "clumsy" leader heading "'a government with no experience running a country and dealing with foreign policy,'" "without a strong grasp of economics" pursuing a "risky strategy" to "consolidate power in the office of the presidency in a way never before seen in the 27-year history of the Islamic Republic." Well, gosh, that sounds awful! It sounds like a government run by bunch of crazy villagers who don't know what they're doing! Why are we even pretending to bother with diplomacy? Thanks, Michael Slackman, for setting us straight.

Bush & Blair's Dog & Pony Show

Like starving pets grateful for a bit of bread, David Sanger and Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times seize upon Bush's expressions of "regret" that he was "misinterpreted" over his famous cowboy talk, and his sorrow at how Abu Ghraib soiled the reputation of the United States, as representing "the crossing of a major threshold" in contemporary American politics. Sanger and Rutenberg describe Bush as "subdued, chastened," his admissions as "unusual," the occasion as "notable for the contrite tone of both leaders," and summarize the "overwhelming sense" of the Bush/Blair publicity stunt as that of "two battered leaders who, once confident in their judgments on Iraq, now understood that misjudgments had not only affected their approval ratings, but perhaps their legacies."

Most egregious is the Times' willingness to assume that Bush took responsibility on Thursday for the behavior of the American military at Abu Ghraib. This is incorrect. Bush expressed frustration merely at the way the United States "has been paying for [Abu Ghraib]" around the world. The president gave no indication that he considered his role as Commander in Chief of the armed forces as extending so far as to encompass personal responsibility for the programs of torture enacted by his Marines, or their subsequent (and failed) coverup. The Post's Dan Froomkin makes this point well.

Update on Iran coverage

Via David Ignatius, the Post argues yet again for a U.S. response to Iran's recent diplomatic overtures, rightly concluding that "[o]penness isn't a concession by America, it's a strategic weapon." What does the Times give us in the way of new Iran coverage?

Iraqi Minister Backs Iran on Nuclear Research
Iran: Clashes at University over Clampdown

Were one interested in making a case for military confrontation with Iran, the Times' reporting on the subject would fill a fat and helpful dossier.

On Enron, the Post Nails it

As Kenny Boy and the Teflon Skillet are packed off to legal purgatory, WaPo once again demonstrates a level of discernment the New York Times refuses to match. Carrie Johnson's breaking story in the Post on Lay and Skilling's conviction by a Houston jury rightly notes not only that they face life in prison for their role as "ringleaders" of one of the world's largest corporate frauds, but that

Enron's bankruptcy filing cost thousands of workers their jobs, spooked investors into doubting the integrity of the stock market and spurred lawmakers to enact the most significant changes to corporate practices in more than 70 years. The verdict comes at the very moment business groups are seeking to overturn those changes in the courts and within federal agencies.

No statement approaching this level of analysis is included in the Times story on the subject. Instead, we get the far more banal insight that the jury's decision "represents a legal judgement about what went wrong."

For Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling, the convictions represent a legal judgment about what went wrong with their transformation of a once-sleepy natural gas pipeline company into an energy-trading dynamo that at one point achieved the status of the nation's seventh-largest corporation.

According to this version of the narrative, the verdicts have nothing to do with the theft and lies of these two convicted criminals, but simply point to "what went wrong with their transformation" of Enron. And is it significant that the Times flatly describes the jury as deliberating for "more than six days," while the Post notes that the jury "took less than six full days to issue its verdict, after hearing evidence over 16 weeks from 56 witnesses"?

Also quoted in the Post's story but left out of the Times' is Skilling's lawyer's cool appropriation of FDR's "We have just begun to fight," a classy move for someone just convicted, among many other crimes, of duping thousands of employees out of their retirement.

WaPo: 1 - NY Times: 0

What's going on with Iran today, and are readers of the New York Times getting the reportorial shaft? WaPo's above-the-fold lead is Karl Vick and Dafna Linzer's richly-sourced story on Iran's attempts to open direct talks with the United States on its nuclear program, a result of a "profound change in its political orthodoxy." Not only are these overtures sanctioned at the highest levels of Iran's religious and poltical hierarchy, the article makes clear, but are being sent through a variety of diplomatic channels around the world, are buttressed by similar requests to our European allies, and are privately supported by a variety of U.S. government officials, who are working overtime to convince the Bush cabinet to take this moment seriously.

Which makes the Times' silence on the subject that much more contemptible. A quick browse to today's World News/Middle East section of the Times' website yields these stories on Iran:

Iran Shuts Down Newspaper over Cartoon
Iran: Gulf States Want Talks on Nuclear Plans
Concern in Iran after a Scholar is Held 3 Weeks
Western Powers Disagree on Some Elements of Iran Proposal

A buried story about the diplomatic flurry, a quick AP piece called "Diplomats Meet in London on Iran" makes no mention of the revolution in Iran's diplomatic behavior toward the United States.

The irony of the Times' studied ignorance of the political sea-changes going on in Iran is that there is a case to be made that the invasion of Iraq has made the U.S. threat of force with respect to Iran that much more credible; that Iran is sincerely scared in a way that could only have been achieved with the Iraq invasion; and that only a muscular, "forward-leaning" America has the ability to remake global security in a manner of its choosing.

This, of course, is the public face of the neoconservative agenda, the bold-faced type in the talking points. One would think that the Times would leap on the chance to vindicate its previous reporting, and that the Bush administration would seize on Iran's behavior over the past couple of weeks as a way of buttressing its strategic authority. So why do both George W. Bush and the New York Times dismiss Iran's overtures as "posturing", or simply make no comment? As far as I can tell, the Times has published zero editorials on the subject since the letter from President Ahmadinejad to President Bush was made public, while WaPo has printed at least two op-eds urging the U.S. to drop the silent treatment, in addition to its excellent reporting on the subject.

(h/t to Vahid Brown.)

The Neocon Soul

Harold Myerson, bless his pen, devotes his WaPo column today to decrying the myopia of the neoconservative architects of the Debacle in Iraq, but misses a crucial point. In describing the roots of neoconservative discontent in the failures of postwar domestic policy, and thus locating neocon foreign policy as a more recent development, Myerson gives the neocon soul too much credit. Perpetual war as foreign policy has been and always will be the root of the neoconservative agenda. They, in fact, could care less about domestic policy; their obsession has always been with preserving America's role as a "benevelent global hegemon" (read the highly influential 1996 call to arms by Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan for this idea's first and fullest expression).

As ever more evidence piles up that war in Iraq was an obsession for the neo-cons and the Bush administration long before 9/11, their hatred of Bill Clinton starts to make more sense. Their fear of another Clinton presidency is precisely because America was too peaceful during the Clinton years (Kristol and Kagan describe 1992-1996 a "tepid time" for US foreign policy.). They were hammering on Clinton to invade Iraq at least as far back as 1998. And whatever happened to China's imminent invasion of Taiwan, predicted in August of 1999 by these two to happen within "a few weeks"?

Silverback Frist

These days, it seems that too many journalists are afraid to show us the beating heart of their own passions, which is why I applaud WaPo columnist Laura Blumenfeld's courage in letting us know just how badly she wants to drop everything and play "patient" to Bill Frists's "doctor."

We learn not only that Frist's marriage began with a tender murder of a dog ("It continued to beat for a slippery minute" may not make it into the next edition of Profiles in Courage, but it'll be fun to watch that sentence die a slow political death), but that,

One day, he hopes to cure AIDS or cancer. He sucked on the stem of his glasses: "The typical person around here may not understand."

Bill Frist: now a megalomaniacal eight-year old. We're treated also to a vision of Frist in scrubs, with his "pair of hairy, toned biceps," and to a parallel between Frist and his patient:

He was the Senate majority leader of the gorillas, who negotiated disputes, back-slapped the ape boys and owned exclusive mating rights with the females.

This article is part of a series called "Off Camera." Let's hope that in the future it stays that way. My already-troubled nights can't handle the idea of Bill Frist smiling beatifically from the senate lectern, "reeking of silverback testosterone."

The Hayden Hearings

Were the confirmation hearings for General Michael Hayden really the snorefest that David Brooks insisted they were, and that readers of the Times and Post stories (here and here, respectively) probably concluded they were?

Stay tuned. Coming soon, a few revelations made during the hearings by General Hayden that went unmentioned by the Big Two.

"Commander in Chief"

It may seem petty to criticize the Post for something that appeared in the Style section, but a paper generally gets just one chance to get its word in on a given subject, which is why I’m disappointed in their choice to report on the demise of ABC’s “Commander in Chief” not as a study in the intersection of popular culture, gender, and politics, but as a weekly docudrama on women’s fashion.

Left untouched by Robin Givhan's 700 word encomium to Davis' committment to staying within her gender box are any of the intriguing issues raised by the idea of a female chief executive. What strategies would a female president employ in order to assert her authority over powerful, male-dominated institutions such as the Joint Chiefs, her own cabinet, the party apparatus that helped elect her, not to mention the challenges of working with Congress, the judiciary, and the media?

According to Givhan, for whom it was "more intriguing to see what this fictional female president would look like dressed for a day's work in the Oval Office" than how she would actually perform her job,

Davis constructed a convincing archetype. The actress is six feet tall and able to look men directly in the eye, in some cases even tower over them. She has a low, well-modulated voice. She is attractive but not a pinup. Her character, President Allen, wore her hair in a simple "That Girl" flip. It looked timeless and easy and did not suggest excessive maintenance... She wasn't trying to negate her gender or put up a sexless facade.

Thanks, Robin, for bringing the Post that much closer to Cosmopolitan.

The Case of Mr. Masri

Khaled al-Masri, the German vacationer secretly kidnapped by the CIA, transported to Afghanistan where he was imprisoned and tortured for five months, then quietly released on a backcountry Albanian road after the agency realized their mistake, had his legal case against the government dismissed on May 18.

Masri's denial of justice merits 460 words here by the Times, where Neil A. Lewis takes care to note that, while dismissal of the suit was justified on the basis of security concerns, Masri's allegations have long been acknowledged by US intelligence officials.

Jerry Markon at WaPo, who wrote 570 words on the subject the next day here, fails to mention that the facts of the case are not under dispute, and thus obscures the full (and rather dastardly) import of Judge Ellis' decision to deny the possibility of legal remedy to Mr. Masri.

Let's remember that Masri's story made hundreds of headlines when it was first revealed a year and a half ago, but the Times and the Post apparently see no need to do more than mention under their breath (page A13 of the print edition of WaPo) the story's ignomonious end. Both stories don't mention that Masri was held for weeks following the government's discovery of their mistake, and also fail to report that the CIA is currently investigating up to three dozen other "erroneous renditions." Odd, considering that the Post's own Dana Priest wrote a story on the subject six months ago.

Would not an article on the dismissal of Masri's case be an opportune time to raise larger questions about the fate of others who have been, and will be in the future, wrongly-kidnapped by our government? Has Masri's case set a precedent in which the torture of demonstrably innocent foreign nationals by the CIA or its contractors is to have no chance of legal remedy? Apparently neither the Times nor the Post saw it that way.

Perhaps we could all benefit from a little Torture Awareness this month.