Andrew Sullivan goes after the hyperventilating dupes of the Baghdad museum-looting hoax. But he's quite gentle compared to David Aaronovitch in, yes, The Guardian. Aaronovitch's whole story is worth reading, but here's the conclusion:
This indictment of world journalism has caused some surprise to those who listened to George and others speak at the British Museum meeting. One art historian, Dr Tom Flynn, now speaks of his "great bewilderment". "Donny George himself had ample opportunity to clarify to the best of [his] knowledge the extent of the looting and the likely number of missing objects," says Flynn. "Is it not a little strange that quite so many journalists went away with the wrong impression, while Mr George made little or not attempt to clarify the context of the figure of 170,000 which he repeated with such regularity and gusto before, during, and after that meeting." To Flynn it is also odd that George didn't seem to know that pieces had been taken into hiding or evacuated. "There is a queasy subtext here if you bother to seek it out," he suggests.
On Sunday night, in a remarkable programme on BBC2, the architectural historian Dan Cruikshank both sought and found. Cruikshank had been to the museum in Baghdad, had inspected the collection, the storerooms, the outbuildings, and had interviewed people who had been present around the time of the looting, including George and some US troops. And Cruikshank was present when, for the first time, US personnel along with Iraqi museum staff broke into the storerooms.
One, which had clearly been used as a sniper point by Ba'ath forces, had also been looted of its best items, although they had been stacked in a far corner. The room had been opened with a key. Another storeroom looked as though the looters had just departed with broken artefacts all over the floor. But this, Cruikshank learned, was the way it had been left by the museum staff. No wonder, he told the viewers - the staff hadn't wanted anyone inside this room. Overall, he concluded, most of the serious looting "was an inside job".
Cruikshank also tackled George directly on events leading up to the looting. The Americans had said that the museum was a substantial point of Iraqi resistance, and this explained their reticence in occupying it. Not true, said George, a few militia-men had fired from the grounds and that was all. This, as Cruikshank heavily implied, was a lie. Not only were there firing positions in the grounds, but at the back of the museum there was a room that seemed to have been used as a military command post. And it was hardly credible that senior staff at the museum would not have known that. Cruikshank's closing thought was to wonder whether the museum's senior staff - all Ba'ath party appointees - could safely be left in post.
Furious, I conclude two things from all this. The first is the credulousness of many western academics and others who cannot conceive that a plausible and intelligent fellow-professional might have been an apparatchiks of a fascist regime and a propagandist for his own past. The second is that - these days - you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 10, 2003 • Comments
I have a short (very, very short) piece in the new issue of Wired on the growth of aesthetic jobs.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 10, 2003 • Comments
InstaPundit's Paris correspondent Claire Berlinski defends spam. She's got a point--when you want it, it's not spam. Hence the success of the "Deck of Weasels" card deck, which was sold via millions of spam messages.
But I don't want it, and I get hundreds and hundreds of spam messages a day. I'd like to have a way to charge for this junk--especially since my hard disk is already too full to download the newest upgrade of OS X. The combination of SpamAssassin at the server and Entourage's next to highest setting mostly works, except Entourage still misclassifies a lot of my NYT reader mail as junk.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 10, 2003 • Comments
Boom-time thinking got state and local governments into a lot of fiscal trouble. Here's an example reported by the San Jose Mercury News
Five years ago, a campaign to rescue cats, dogs and even pot-bellied pigs from a hasty death in animal shelters sailed through the Legislature. Now, the state is on the hook to pay at least $79 million for the housing and medical care of strays at a time when California faces a multibillion-dollar budget gap.
The animal shelter tab is just one of 85 state mandates on local government that exacerbate California's financial crisis. In flush times, the state picked up the cost for such mandates. This year, faced with a mounting pile of IOUs, Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature are considering shelving dozens of these demands on cities and counties to try to close a $38.2 billion shortfall.
The costs generated by the requirement that animal shelters keep strays for two or three extra days -- ranging from computer software in Palo Alto to a new shelter in San Jose -- illustrate the hidden costs of state-mandated programs. How many and which programs are rolled back will be part of the debate when budget writers meet this week.
Sacramento already owes cities and counties $700 million for bills from mandates the state put off last year when California's budget woes first emerged. The Davis administration estimates the cost will swell to $876 million before next June. The legislative analyst and Republican leaders peg the number closer to $1.2 billion if the state continues to allow IOUs to local government to grow.
Local officials would welcome the outright repeal of many mandates instead of amassing IOUs. Suspending the requirements another year just means cities and counties continue to offer services without being paid.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 10, 2003 • Comments
The season four DVD of Buffy the Vampire Slayer is now available. In its honor, I've added the full list of Buffy DVDs to the Amazon links to the left. When you order any of these books or DVDs--or when you just go to the Amazon site via one of the links and order something else--I get a percentage of the purchase price.
For the non-commercial significance of Buffy DVDs, see Emily Nussbaum piece from Sunday's NYT: "Using such tools, viewers can delve into 'Buffy' the way we dig into a novel like 'Great Expectations' (which was also originally distributed in installments)--without the cliffhangers, the larger themes rise to the surface." I did my first serious Buffy DVD watching while researching my forthcoming Reason piece on the show, and Nussbaum is absolutely right (though I far prefer Buffy to Dickens, especially Great Expectations).
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 10, 2003 • Comments
In case you missed the entry below, here's another encouragement to take design student Erich Stein's online quiz. It's quick, fun, and easy. For his undergraduate thesis research, Erich is looking to see whether there's any systematic correlation between individuals' temperaments, as classified by the Meyers-Briggs typology and aesthetic preferences.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 10, 2003 • Comments
With U.S. soldiers still being killed in Iraq, readers may want to contribute to the Fallen Patriot Fund, established by Mark Cuban to help families of military personnel killed or seriously wounded in action. Cuban's foundation matches contributions up to $1 million. Here's a story on one of the disbursements, with some basic background.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 10, 2003 • Comments
Just in time for summer reading, Brink Lindsey posts his reading list of the past 12 months (unfortunately without comments on the books). It's mighty eclectic.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 10, 2003 • Comments
The blogosphere is full of recommendations for the nonexistent slots open for NYT op-ed columnists, with Mark Steyn firmly in the lead. I'd be as happy as the next person to read Steyn's lively voice on the Times op-ed page, and I'd bet he could successfully handle the length (650 words is damned short) and a reasonable frequency. (As regular readers know, I don't think anyone can be consistently good at more than once a week.) To throw another name into the pot, I'd like to see Jonathan Rauch, one of the best columnists working, on the page as well (though Jonathan is best at a longer length--as are most writers).
But ideological diversity aside, there is a huge, gaping hole in the Times opinion lineup--and, for that matter, on the news pages. The Times lacks a genuinely sophisticated, Washington-based political writer, someone who understands both the mechanics of practical politics and the nuances of the many components of both the liberal/Democratic and conservative/Republican coalitions. The Times alternates between casting politics as an utterly cynical contest between phony image consultants and as a battle between the monolithic Forces of Light and the Forces of Darkness. Neither view is accurate, and both portraits make the nation's leading newspaper look like its political reporters just rolled off the cabbage truck. The Washington Post is, not surprisingly, far more sophisticated. But so, though not at the Post's level, are the WSJ, the LAT, and the politics-loving Boston Globe. So is USA Today.
If I were the boss of the Times, I'd try to remedy this egregious failing by hiring not one but two smart, sophisticated political columnists: Michael Barone of U.S. News and Ron Brownstein of the LAT. Michael is what passes for a conservative in Times Square--I'd say he's more accurately called a dynamist centrist--while Ron's a liberal. But what they have in common is more important to remedying the Times's current weaknesses than their differences in politcal views: They're both independent thinkers who don't simply repeat Upper West Side prejudices. They both understand that the political landscape is complex and interesting. They both write well. They both live in the political world of the present day, not some fabled past. And they both say what they think, not what they think someone thinks they should think.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 08, 2003 • Comments
In all the coverage of the NYT imbroglio (here's Howard Kurtz's latest), nobody to my knowledge has bluntly stated what most journalists know: The New York Times is a miserable place to work. That was true before Howell Raines, though he apparently made things worse, and it will be true now that he's gone.
Times staffers are willing to put up with the paper's ridiculous hours and extreme office politics for the same reason I put up with the paper's demand for all rights to my articles: Because the benefits outweigh the costs. As long as the staff felt proud of their work, and of working for the Times, they put up with abusive management. But when the Times became a laughing stock, the tradeoff was no longer worth it, and a revolt was inevitable.
As befits a business paper, Friday's WSJ report (subscription necessary) emphasizes how bad management stifled needed internal feedback and led to a degraded product:
In less than two years as executive editor -- the second-shortest tenure in the Times's 152-year history -- Mr. Raines did two things that in hindsight proved to be a volatile combination. He consolidated power and control within a coterie of confidants and pet reporters, intensifying a culture that discouraged dissent and occasionally gridlocked the paper's operations. At the same time, he pushed his 1,000-person news staff to move faster and more aggressively to get stories into the paper -- raising its "metabolism," he said. Mr. Boyd was a close lieutenant of Mr. Raines and was widely seen in the newsroom as the executive who enforced his boss's demands.
The newsroom's unhappiness wasn't a priority for Times management until the paper wrote in painstaking detail on May 11 about how Mr. Blair, a rising star, repeatedly made up facts and plagiarized. Two weeks later, Pulitzer Prize-winner Rick Bragg quit after being suspended for taking credit for a story with substantial reporting by his unpaid intern. Messrs. Blair and Bragg were vilified internally. But because they were seen as favored by Mr. Raines, their resignations crystallized complaints about his leadership and systemic problems at the paper -- including some that predate the Raines regime.
"There is an endemic cultural issue at the Times that is not a Howell creation, although it plays into his vulnerabilities as a manager, which is a top-down hierarchical structure," Linda Greenhouse, a veteran Times reporter who covers the Supreme Court, said in an interview last month. "And it's a culture where speaking truth to power has never been particularly welcomed."...
Mr. Raines's activism included picking and assigning stories for the front page very different from the Times's usual serious fare. Both editors and reporters alike were reluctant to report back that the story wasn't correct or interesting, staffers say. One staffer dubbed Mr. Raines's interest in pop culture as "charge of the lite brigade." Two reporters spent five days reporting Mr. Raines's contention that Britney Spears's career was over without feeling confident they could prove his hypothesis, according to a person involved with the process. The resulting story ran on the front page on Oct. 6 headlined, "Schoolyard Superstar Aims for a Second Act, as an Adult."
Mr. Raines's management style and that of Mr. Boyd have "created an environment where it is often seen as more important to get the story when and how you want it rather than to get it right," deputy investigations editor Julia Preston told Times staffers at last month's mass meeting.
One beneficiary of Mr. Raines's support was the paper's chief correspondent, Patrick Tyler. The Times hired him in 1990 at Mr. Raines's recommendation, and when Mr. Raines became editor he gave Mr. Tyler choice assignments. Recently, his stories have drawn some high-profile corrections. An Aug. 16, 2002, story, which Mr. Tyler wrote with Todd Purdum, said many senior Republicans, including Henry Kissinger, opposed a war in Iraq. Mr. Kissinger hadn't said that. Mr. Tyler says the story should have elaborated Dr. Kissinger's position further and that he agreed with the correction that appeared in the paper.
Maybe the next executive editor of the Times should take Andrew Sullivan a bit more seriously. Definitely the next executive editor of the Times should take Andrew Grove seriously. Read Only the Paranoid Survive. Pay attention to what Grove says about internal email and what the guys in the field knew that headquarters missed until it was almost too late. And realize that the news business is at an inflection point. If the Times is going to remain the Times, its management will have to change in ways that make the organization nimbler and the product better.
Posted by Virginia Postrel on June 08, 2003 • Comments