Editorial Board Wish List

Why don't Reason, Townhall or Q and O have editorial boards, as do, to name just a few, Redstate, National Review, the Weekly Standard, Human Events and the New Republic?

Editorial boards aren't right for every publication—for instance, I don't think they would benefit the Politico, the American, Slate or the Huffington Post—but I'd be very interested to read official opinions from the aforementioned libertarians and conservatives.

Related: Should pundit Web sites engage in activism?

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Quote of the Day

"Trust me when I tell you, You're looking for a mistake. And you won't find it, because it's all good news. As much as you maybe hate it, but it's good news."

—California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, to a reporter, on whether his state's response to the wildfires in Southern California has been inadequate.

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The Daily Digest

Quin Hillyer elucidates Rudy's success vis-a-vis the religious right.

Kos traffic number inflated by 60%, reports Patrick Ruffini.

Google's growth is prompting the usual antitrust hysteria: "[B]y acquiring DoubleClick, Google will jump so far ahead of the pack with the technology and knowledge to be the only place marketers have to go to reach you and just about anybody else."

Clark Hoyt, the NYT's ombudsman, details how good journalists can and should call someone a "lair" without employing that epithet.

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George Will: America's Most Widely Read Columnist

Editor and Publisher reports:

George Will's column runs in more newspapers than any writer in the nation, according to a new study by a liberal media watchdog group that concludes conservative voices such as his dominate editorial pages.

Will's syndicated column runs at least once a month in 368 newspapers with more than 26 million in total circulation, said the Media Matters for America. The organization surveyed 96 percent of the nation's 1,430 English-language daily newspapers.

"He reaches half of the newspaper readers in America," said Paul Waldman, the study's author. "He has a huge megaphone, probably bigger than anybody else in America". . . .

Will, 66, distributes two columns each week to newspapers through the Washington Post Writers Group and writes every other week for Newsweek, a unit of the Washington Post Co. He's been a columnist since 1974, when newspapers began searching for conservative voices after the Nixon administration complained about a liberal bias. . . .

Alan Shearer, editorial director and general manager of the group that syndicates Will, said he thinks the column is popular because it contains original reporting and is not just opinion. Will can also be unpredictable, and predictability is the death of columnists, he said. . . .

The five most popular columnists include another conservative, Kathleen Parker, and two liberals, Ellen Goodman and Leonard Pitts Jr. David Broder of the Washington Post, who is third, isn't assigned an ideology by Media Matters.

The top 10 is rounded out by Cal Thomas, Charles Krauthammer and three from the New York Times: Thomas L. Friedman, Maureen Dowd and David Brooks.

Start catching up on Will's archive here.

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For Shame, GQ

Ron Rosenbaum, who now writes a longish column for Slate called the Spectator, puts GQ magazine in its place:

GQ commissioned Joshua Green, a serious political reporter on the staff of the Atlantic, to do a piece on infighting within Hillary Clinton's campaign. . . .

Green was a good choice: He knew the turf, having written a much-admired cover story on Hillary for the Atlantic last winter. But in the course of reporting, Green had dinner with a Hillary mouthpiece. Next thing we know, one of Bill Clinton's aides is in the GQ editor's office telling him there'd be a "problem" with granting access to Bill Clinton for GQ's "Man of the Year" issue if GQ ran a muckraking Hillary story.

Of course, any editor with a backbone would say, "Thank you, your crude effort to kill this story will be included in the story. Goodbye."

Instead, the GQ editor killed the story. Profile in courage!

What is even more reprehensible is that GQ's editor then began to claim—in a cringe-inducing, unconvincing way—that the visit by a Clinton consigliere had nothing to do with his killing the piece. Instead, unforgivably, he turned on his own reporter and in a spectacularly demeaning way suddenly claimed there were "problems" with the story unrelated to Clintonian pressure.

Here's what reporter Joshua Green told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post: "GQ told me it was a great story and a hell of a reporting job, but they didn't want to jeopardize their Clinton-in-Africa piece. GQ told me the Clintons were unhappy and threatened to revoke access to Bill Clinton if the Hillary story ran."

And here's what GQ editor Jim Nelson said: "[T]he story didn't end up fully satisfying. . . . I guarantee and promise you, if I'd have had a great Hillary piece, I would have run it." He added that there was no connection between the two Clinton stories.

Who do you think is telling the truth here, and who is shamefully prevaricating? I know who I believe.

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The Daily Digest

At the end of the day in one of the Swedish Riviera's tranquil nature reserves

Senator Tom "Coburn feels about pork spending the way liberal environmentalists do about greenhouse gases," writes Stephen Moore: they're both a gateway drug, to deficits and global warming, respectively.

Front-runners are cautious, which is probably why Rudy has yet to setup a blog. Yet for whatever criticism his reluctance generates, the fact remains, He's winning. On the other hand, his continued frankness on the war is beginning to alienate his supporters.

Howard Kurtz names an unpleasant truth: "Everyone who is defaulting on a home mortgage is not necessarily a victim. I feel sorry for anyone in that situation. Losing a home is an awful thing. Some were undoubtedly pressured into buying by unscrupulous lenders. Too many greedy players on Wall Street got away with making shaky loans for too long. They sliced and diced mortgage debt into increasingly exotic paper and lost sight of the risks involved, figuring the Fed would bail them out if things got out of hand. But let's face it: Most of the people who took out home mortgages for no money down knew that this was a roll of the dice. Who gets to buy a house without a down payment? And most of those who took out adjustable-rate mortgages knew that their rate would balloon in a couple of years, and could do so at a level that would be hard to afford. They took the risk anyway. No one forced these folks to take on big mortgages they could barely handle."

Why do we call those who write about the media and movies "critics" instead of something more neutral-sounding, like "observer," "analyst" or "reviewer"?

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How to Read a Beltway Book

With an eye toward who looks good and who's absent without leave.

Mike Lux, of Open Left, explains (in a review of Matt Bai's Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics):

A love for his best sources. One of the most disturbing things that strikes me when reading books by big media journalists about the inner workings of the Clinton White House is how different some of the meetings were in the book to the meetings that I was actually in on. Certain people described in those meetings seemed so much more clever, more insightful, braver, funnier, etc. than I remembered. And others' roles, usually the ones arguing the opposite of the clever-sounding staffers, were downplayed or even distorted. . . .

It's all about the stars. I know we're in a winner-take-all culture, and maybe to sell books in general you have to focus on the best-known personalities. But again . . . a longstanding problem I have with a lot of traditional journalists [is] . . . their focus . . . almost entirely on the biggest names. This again felt like the case here. In the Democracy Alliance, there was a ton of information about founder Rob Stein, deservedly so. But Kelly Craighead (to take just one example), the calm, steady presence who helped hold the entire organization together at times when it was on the verge of completely melting down, got one throw-away line at the end of the book. In terms of bloggers, Bai spend a lot of time profiling Jerome and Markos, again deservedly so. But the brilliant Digby didn't get a mention, nor did John Amato and Crooks and Liars. Atrios got one, I think. Jane Hamsher and Firedoglake got a couple of quick mentions, both of them negative. Stoller and Bowers, who in my own obviously biased opinion, have done so much to organize the blogosphere, a couple quick mentions, one a very cynical one about Matt. Very few other bloggers, even some of the most influential, got even a mention.

Update (10/15/07): Reviewing Jeffrey Toobin's new book about the Supremes, David Margolick comes away with the same conclusion:

[T]o anyone who watches the court, or watches those who watch it, Toobin’s descriptions afford . . . the chance to ponder which of those justices talked to him for this book, and which did not. And talk to him some of them clearly did. Without their off-the-record whispers, there would be no “inside” story of any “secret” world to tell in The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court. . . .

First there’s Stephen Breyer, wtih what Toobin calls his “gregarious good nature.” Odds are he spoke, a fair amount. Then Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “frail” and “shy” and, Toobin says, with only marginal influence on her colleagues. Maybe, but she’d have said precious little. Clarence Thomas, we learn, had gotten old and fat since his famously bloody confirmation battle. No way. David Souter “detested Washington” and “cared little what others thought of him.” Probably not, but he’s quirky enough to have tossed off a tidbit or two. Then Anthony Kennedy, far more worldly and influential than the “conventional, even boring” burgher he first appeared to be. Almost certainly yes.

Antonin Scalia looked “lost and lonely” that day: absolutely not. Then Sandra Day O’Connor, about to entrust her seat to President George W. Bush, whom she considered “arrogant, lawless, incompetent and extreme.” Her fingerprints—or voice prints—practically leap off the page: how else could Toobin write something so incendiary so confidently? And finally there’s John Paul Stevens, “respected by his colleagues, if not really known to them.” Highly unlikely.

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The Daily Digest

Belize, 2005

I'm always skeptical when someone says that Saudi Arabia is modernizing, just slowly. (I guess it depends on whether your definition of "slowly" means at the pace of a snail or turtle.) And yet, an op-ed in yesterday's Christian Science Monitor, which argues that King Abdullah is "sidelining the traditional clergy in favor of the merchant classes and more progressive religious voices," merits consideration.

Any libertarian can tell you why farm subsidies are egregious, but few do it so plainly, so concisely and so cogently as John Stossel.

Karl Rove once said that the press is "less liberal than it is oppositional." Exactly.

Reason's Jacob Sullum concretizes the McCain-DeMint consensus about Congress's recent ethics reform: "If a pickpocket becomes a mugger, he becomes more open and honest, but that doesn't make him more admirable."

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The Daily Digest

The Washington Monthly spotlights Manny Miranda and his latest venture, Families First on Immigration. In 2005, the New Republic profiled Manny's previous project, the Third Branch Conference.

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has long been living off the largess of his multimillionaire dad, whether via a partnership in his real-estate firm or a huge apartment on 5th Avenue. Less quietly, the father has also been bankrolling his son's political career.

The MSM is often accused, rightly, of being insufficiently skeptical in the run-up to the Iraq war. But as Matthew Yglesias points out, the same charge can be leveled at Washington's think tank establishment.

Earlier this year, the Cato Institute inaugurated a department of bioethics studies. The department's director, Sigrid Fry-Revere, explains the connection between liberty and the life sciences: "There is nothing more fundamental to being an individual than maintaining control over decisions related to one's physical and mental well-being. It is our personal vision of who we are, who we could be, and who we want to be that defines us."

How does this translate into practice? One example is a market-based solution to the perennial shortage in human organs. "The only real answer in a country as pluralistic as the United States is to allow individuals to decide for themselves what is and what is not denigrating," says Fry-Reverse. "Ultimately, freedom and self-ownership go hand in hand. If individuals don't own their body parts, who does? Anyone who believes that selling organs is an affront to human dignity doesn't have to do it."

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The Daily Digest

Everyone talks about (and bemoans) judicial activism, but few realize, as Robert McCloskey shows in The American Supreme Court, that the Supreme Court has historically followed the political winds. As FDR put it while trying to pack the Court in 1937, the American people expect the unelected third branch of government to fall in line behind the elected other two. Today, this ironic notion is given life by Anthony Kennedy, about whom law professor Michael Klarman observes, "Any court on which [he] is the median voter will never do anything to provoke dramatic backlashes, because Justice Kennedy has his finger on the pulse of Middle America."

Since 1937, the Supreme Court has comprised nine justices. But as Jean Edward Smith argues, "there is nothing sacrosanct" about the number nine. To the contrary, "Roosevelt’s 1937 chicanery has given court-packing a bad name, but it is a hallowed American political tradition participated in by Republicans and Democrats alike," including Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and Grant. Note: I'm blogging Smith's op-ed not because I condone court-packing, which politicizes and destabilizes the law, but because of its interesting history.

Ward Churchill, aka Chief Lies-alot, is unrepentant. Of his "little Eichmanns" essay, he declares, "The only thing I regret is that I didn't take a harder line." Note: Churchill was fired not for this essay, which academic freedom protects, but for academic fraud in his "scholarly" work.

Who says reporters have to be poor? Salaries for top journalists at the Atlantic range as high as $350,000.

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Dead Trees vs. Computer Screens: Which Is Right for You?

The print medium appeals to an older generation and can be archived in libraries and its covers displayed on walls. Additionally, people will always want to hold the paper they’re reading, and bound material, especially if it has an elegant and sophisticated design, is vastly preferably to single, black-and-white pages of computer paper.

On the other hand, electronic media is cheaper and faster to publish, and can attract a broader readership. E-media is also easy to update, whether it’s a correction or a link to the relevant letters to the editor, and does not contain space limitations. Finally, e-media offers options to engage readers, like interactive polls and contact forms for reporters, and options to track the popularity of one’s content (e.g., a list of most e-mailed articles).

The challenge is to determine what content is best suited for print (e.g., long, reported pieces that won’t be obsolete after they arrive in mailboxes) and what’s best for online publication (e.g., shorter pieces, like opinions or scoops).

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The Subtle Bias of "Loophole"

Another word has lit up press critic Jack Shafer's radar for loaded locutions: "loophole." Shafer concedes the word's utility—it "compresses interesting findings from the complex worlds of campaign finance, taxation, or regulation"—but argues that it's often used to editorialize rather than report. He cites three recent examples, from the Post, Times and Chicago Tribune, respectively.

Headline: "Loophole Lets Candidates Skirt Donation Limit." Story: Presidential candidates are legally collecting contributions for both their presidential campaigns and for re-election to their incumbent office, thus allowing supporters to make double donations to them. To wit: "Candidates Exercise Maximum Fund-Raising Rights."

Headline: "Mexico Moves to Cut Back Tax Loopholes for Businesses." Story: The Mexican government wants to collect more taxes, so it's rewriting the tax laws. To wit: "Mexican President Calls for More Taxes."

Headline: "House Blocks Stores' Bank Bid; Senate May See Closer Vote on Bill Closing Loophole." Story: Under current law, firms can own and operate "industrial loan companies," a limited type of bank that competes with established banks, who fear the competition and are thus calling for restrictive laws. To wit: "Banks Make Progress in Winning Protection from Competition."

Shafer's argument is wonderfully libertarian, but he ignores the distinction between "natural" loopholes and man-made ones. "Natural" loopholes are unsolicited and arise after-the-fact. A typical example is so-called 527s, tax-exempt organizations named after that section of the United States tax code. Such groups emerged from a campaign-finance law that capped political contributions by individuals, while left non-PAC organizations, like 527s, free to raise unlimited amounts of money. The 26 U.S.C. § 527 loophole was thus a benign happenstance.

By contrast, man-made loopholes are lobbied for and deliberately slipped into legislation. These are the infamous loopholes—the myriad special preferences, credits, exemptions and deductions that make laws unbearably complex—and unlike their coincidental cousins, they're fully deserving of opprobrium.

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The Daily Digest

Choose your URL carefully. A site called Who Represents, where you can look up agents who represent celebrities, is available at www.whorepresents.com. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at www.penisland.net. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at www.therapistfinder.com. More examples here.

Jonathan Martin and Dave Keene read Bob Novak's memoirs so you don't have to.

Is Bill Richardson the much-hyped but little-confirmed libertarian Democrat? Dave Weigel investigates.

Mickey Kaus "hears rumblings" that the NYT will soon scrap its TimesSelect experiment.

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The Daily Digest

I'm unsure which is more horrifying and revolting: that a mother of two young children would turn herself into a bomb, or that her country's laws forced her to do so, lest she face execution for adultery. Time's Tim McGirk reports from Jerusalem on the Sophie's Choice for Palestinians. Related: in 2004, I asked, "Is there no shame?"

Amnesty International recently added to its catalog of human-rights abuses the denial of access to abortion. But as the Weekly Standard reports, the members-only part of its Web site discloses an interesting nota bene: "This policy will not be made public at this time. There is to be no proactive external publication of the policy position or of the fact of its adoption issued."

As a former journalist, one of the blogs I read everyday is FishbowlDC, a gossip blog about Washington, D.C., media. Fishbowl is part of the Media Bistro empire, which, on Tuesday, was sold for a cool $23 million. What is Media Bistro, you ask? Rachel Sklar, of Eat the Press at the Huffington Post, offers an insider's history.

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The Daily Digest

The WSJ documents how different presidential candidates are using Google AdWords. For instance, John McCain buys ads on queries for "president," his name and the names of his main opponents, among other things. Mitt Romney, who employs Google for a "couple hundred" words, which change daily, targets locutions like "Olympics," "health care" and "cutting spending."

Continuing the CEO campaign theme, Jonathan Martin reports that Romney's organizational structure in Iowa—20 full-time staffers, coordinators in most of the state's 99 counties and a group of about 50 "super volunteers"—has virtually locked up the state for him.

The newly renovated White House press room will open on Wednesday. Mike Allen provides a vicarious tour of the new facility and of its storied history.

Check out the Capitolist, an anonymous, uncensored message board for congressional staffers (to post, you must use a computer with a Capitol Hill IP address).

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In Praise of the Boston Globe

Unless RealClearPolitics links to an article there, I don't read the Boston Globe. Three recent articles, however, impressed me that this is a very much a serious newspaper:

"Giuliani Watchers Wonder if He Will Overplay 9/11 Card" examines Rudy's exploitation of our national tragedy.

"Not All Would Put a Heroic Sheen on Thompson's Watergate Role" investigates Fred Thompson's role as minority counsel during the Watergate hearings.

And "The Making of Mitt Romney" is the most comprehensive and fascinating profile thus far of the Mormon from Massachusetts.

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The Daily Digest

The New York Times recently published an op-ed by a spokesman of Hamas, which the United States government classifies as a terrorist organization for its oft-repeated commitment to annihilate "every inch" of Israel. The paper's op-ed editor defends the publication as newsworthy, and its public editor recites the sunlight-as-disinfectant argument, but as I observed a couple years ago about a similar situation, the bigger issue is the use of "scarce and prominent" resources. "A commitment to free speech—even an absolute one—does not require" a newspaper to publish the work of terrorists, whether they're domestic, as in the case of the Unabomber's manifesto, or foreign, as in the case of Hamas.

Why should you believe that Rudy will implement his "12 commitments to the American people" if elected? Because "[h]e already has," observes Deroy Murdock. "As mayor of New York, Giuliani used similar reforms to reverse the city’s decline and rejuvenate its finances."

Jim Geraghty cuts to the essence of the rhubarb about Rudy and the right: "[F]or certain Republicans, Rudy will always be untouchable—be it his stands on abortion, gay marriage, or gun control, or his messy marriages, or his in-your-face abrasive leadership style, etc. But... when Rudy gets going on an issue you agree with him on... he’s really, really good. Maybe unequaled."

A new book argues that something I've long known to be true from firsthand experience: napping enhances productivity, especially in the midafternoon.

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The Daily Digest

Twins

Jennifer Rubin, who recently skewered Fred Thompson, hearts Mike Huckabee.

Onion-esque headline: CIA to Vindicate Conspiracy Theorists. Subtitle: Agency cops to quarter-century of drugging American citizens, opening our mail, and wiretapping and kidnapping us. Serious details in today's Post.

Demonstrating why he was the president's former chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson defends John McCain with eloquence, erudition and pith. "On occasion, Senator John McCain seems like a martyr anxious for the stake, offering his own lighter to get the proceedings started. His flamboyant heresies on campaign finance reform, global warming and immigration have left conservatives suspicious that he has a mild form of Chuck Hagel's disease: an uncontrollable moral exhibitionism designed to please the liberal media. . . . [But] [t]his is not moral exhibitionism; it is just morality. And my respect for McCain, it turns out, is less and less grudging."

Ron Rosenbaum wants to know the last time you read a celebrity profile that was disparaging? While you're thinking, chew on this: "The rules of the game, as established by the glossy magazines and the stars' PR reps, ensure that 'access' (well, a half-hour chat in a restaurant that enables the magazine to proclaim it has an 'exclusive' interview) and the all-important exclusive cover shot are granted only to those magazines and journalists who will refrain from anything but fawning prose. It works out well for everybody. Celebrity journalists who play along get a good payday, magazines get newsstand sales bumps, and the rest of us are inculcated into the received myths of Celebland, the legends that sustain the illusion that it is somehow truly important."

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Power Journalists

cover Wall Street, not the White House.

From Howie's Kurtz's book, The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation (2000):

When journalists cover politics, their outsider role is clearly defined. No single reporter can affect White House policies or a candidate's campaign through mere analysis or commentary. True, if several news organizations pound away in unison, they can put an issue on the national agenda or throw a politician on the defensive. But such efforts can be measured only roughly, through the fleeting snapshot of opinion polls. Much of the public distrusts the press, muting the impact of a concerted editorial attack on the president or other national figures. In this realm, journalists are scorekeepers and second-guessers and naysayers, and their influence is ephemeral and diffuse.

In the business arena, however, financial journalists are players. They make things happen instantaneously, and their impact is gauged not by subjective polls but by the starker standard of stock prices. A single negative story, true or not, can send a company's share price tumbling in a matter of minutes. A report about a possible takeover attempt can immediately pump up a stock, adding billions of dollars to a company's net worth. The clout of financial journalists affects not just the corporate bottom line but the hard-earned cash of millions of average investors. In business, unlike politics, the reporting of rumors is deemed fair game, since rumors, even bogus ones, move markets. And in an age of lightning-quick Internet reports, saturation cable coverage, and jittery day traders, moving the market is a remarkably easy thing to do.

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The Daily Digest

Whatever happened to Ward Churchill, the professor who analogized the victims of 9/11 to Nazis? Last week, a five-member panel representing the University of Colorado Faculty Senate Committee on Privilege and Tenure voted 3-2 for the chickens to come (half-way) home to roost, and that Churchill be suspended rather than fired.

James Antle puts his finger on why religionists should practice toleration rather than resorting to regulation: "[F]aith depends on a choice: the choice to receive salvation by accepting Jesus Christ. The most important thing evangelicals believe God asks of them—in their view, the most important thing of all—is something they must choose freely. For evangelicals, God does not coerce people into being saved and accepts their decision in the matter as final."

Tim Carney continues to expose the unholy alliance between big business and big government: "Taxes are too complex for the good of the economy, too complex for families, and too complex for small businesses. For big business and for Washington lobbyists, complexity means profit."

If you're one of the 700,000-plus people who have viewed the John McCain "Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran" video, you'll want to read Michael Scherer's expose on how this little-noticed ditty wormed its way into the nightly news on each major television network. If none of this rings a bell, read Scherer's piece to understand the relationship between opposition-research peddlers and their receivers on the Web.

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