New York Times Edit On Immigration Unrealistic

Andrew Rosenthal, editorial page editor of the New York Times, is not paying sufficient attention to rising opinions of the American people that too many illegal immigrants are entering the country, and that not enough controls have been placed on the estimated 12 million already here. Once again, we see yesterday an editorial that is not at all realistic.

Under the title, "The Immigration Wilderness," the Times calls for reforms that have already been soundly rejected in Congress. It pays lip service to the idea of stricter border controls, but it continues to adhere to policies that have been abandoned and discredited, such as New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer's unpopular proposal to issue state drivers licenses to illegals.

The editorial also chastises Sen. Hillary Clinton for waffling on her own position on the drivers licenses and finally coming out against them. This part of the editorial completely fails to recognize the position in which Mrs. Clinton finds herself: Her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has been threatened by her initial willingness to give some support to Spitzer on this issue.

There is a shrillness in New York Times editorials generally these days that can only hurt the Democratic party, the party the newspaper ostensibly backs for return to the White House.

Under Rosenthal's guidance, the paper has been carving out a position close to the McGovernite faction of the party -- surrender in Iraq, weakness in Pakistan (also the subject of an editorial yesterday), and sympathy with the illegal immigrants.

It can only help the Republicans the newspaper is against.

Changes in the immigration laws are going to have to await a new administration and a new Congress. There is clearly no majority support for them now, and we are about to see that demonstrated in the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses.

I share to some extent the New York Times' observation of concern that "Bias crimes against Hispanic people are up, hate groups are on the march. Legal immigration remains a mess."

But the way to challenge this is not to buck public opinion in the country. It was Abraham Lincoln who once said that no massive majority can safely be ignored.

The Times only exacerbates the feelings it opposes when its editorials are too shrill.

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The Los Angeles Times Web site again failed to meet its responsibilities again this morning on a timely basis. At 7 a.m., with both CNN and Yahoo carrying prominent stories on a new wildfire in Malibu that forced the evacuation of scores of homes, the L.A. Times had yet to mention the fire. Later, however, the L.A. Times Web site recouped, putting on a substantive story by Bob Pool and Molly Hennessy-Fiske, its lead. By 10 a.m., 35 structures had burned.

On another disaster in the news, when the Canadian cruise ship Explorer, carrying 91 passengers and a crew of 63, struck an iceburg and sunk off Antarctica, with everyone rescued, the L.A. Times used a Washington Post story, while the New York Times, under the bylines of Graham'Bowley and Andrew C. Revkin, apparently writing from New York, had its own story. No one covers a remote disaster story better than the NYT. It goes back to the Titanic.

One of the two ships involved in the rescue of the Explorer passengers and crew was the National Geographic ship Endeavor, upon which I sailed calmly in the same waters in 2005, but quite a bit later in the summer.

New York Times, Tribune Co. Report Good Profits

After all the pissing and groaning they have done over recent months about their languishing fortunes, it is noteworthy that both the New York Times and the Tribune Co. surprised Wall Street in recent weeks by reporting returns that were better than expected. Both institutions easily made a profit in the third quarter.

At a time when the sub-prime mortgage crisis has sent many other big corporations reeling, such as Merrill Lynch and Citibank, both of which dismissed their CEOs in the last two weeks, the results at the two big newspaper companies look pretty good.

To deal with the one closest to home first, the subdued headline back in the Business section of the L.A. Times on Oct. 25 read,"Tribune profit falls less than expected."

Net profit at the Tribune Co. in the third quarter was $152.8 million, down from $164.3 million from the same period a year ago, but still 38 cents a year, beating the 26-cent average of stock analysts' estimates. The figures sent Tribune stock higher, and were hailed as meaning that the deal with real estate Sam Zell was surer to go through (although Tribune is still awaiting a decision by the FCC whether to allow the company to continue to own both newspaper and TV outlets in the same city, as is presently the case in Los Angeles).

Newspaper advertising sales did fall 9% below the levels of a year ago at the Tribune, but since the subprime crisis sent housing ads plummeting 26%, this was not perhaps so bad.

And now, with a sale of the Chicago Cubs supposedly pending in the next few months, and the sale of Tribune papers in Greenwich and Stamford, Ct., already announced, the income at the Tribune Co. seems headed for a better balance still. I'm not ready to call CEO Dennis FitzSimons by nice names, but he may not have been quite as inept in the third quarter as in the past.

Over at the New York Times Co., a slight gain was posted over a year ago, also bettering the estimates of Wall Street analysts. Its stock price also rose, as a result.

In a more comprehensive Oct. 24 article, also in its Business section, the New York Times reported that profits ran $13.4 million in the third quarter, up 6.7% from a year ago. The New York Times executives, customarily not as greedy as the Tribune executives, ready to keep more news personnel working and the news hole bigger, have traditionally been accepting of smaller profits. Still, the New York Times Co., which also owns other papers such as the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune, reported it had been able to pare operating costs by 1.5% under a year ago, payroll costs were down 4.6%, and the company said it expected to spend at least $14 million on further buyouts in the fourth quarter.

At the same time, the Morgan Stanley firm on Wall Street, which had been pressing the Sulzberger family to reduce its voting control of the New York Times company, has now sold its 7.2% share of NYT stock, and will not continue to pressure the company to reduce the editorial quality of its product. Good riddance!

It's worth noting that while Tribune and NYT were up, Gannett newspapers and McClatchy newspapers were down, Gannett by 10.5% and McClatchy by a whopping 54.7% in the third quarter compared to a year ago. (Maybe FitzSimons has been freelancing at McClatchy, and not paying so much attention to Tribune).

The New York Times Co. realized profits of 9 cents a share, while the analysts had expected only 5 cents. Operating profit rose 57.1% to $28.1 million for the quarter.

Advertising revenue actually rose at the New York Times Co. 5.5% for the quarter, stopping the slide that had been taking place there. Ads particularly rose for new films and fashions. And the successful New York Times magazine reported the highest number of pages of advertising since 1984.

Advertising revenue overall at the International Herald Tribune was up 3.7%, but it continued to fall, 5.7%, at the Boston Globe. The subprime crisis hurt New York Times papers in Florida and California, where advertising was down 11.6%.

In part by reducing page size, the New York Times was able to reduce its newsprint expenditures by 22%, and it said that cost savings realized by finishing its new headquarters building on New York's West Side would contribute to $230 million in smaller expenditures in the next two years.

Altogether, the picture for both Tribune and NYT indicated newspapers are not dead yet, thank goodness. Maybe, the pessimism in the business is overblown.

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It's never too bad a day when both Muslim fundamentalists and lawyers are being smashed, as is reported in Pakistan today. Also, it's reported that the U.S. will keep up foreign aid to the Musharraf regime. The bottom line in Pakistan is that it's never been anything but autocratic. Better that the autocrats in this case are on our side rather than al-Qaeda's. And that Pakistan's atomic weapons stay out of the extremists' hands.

Press Best If It's Independent And Unpredictable

Time magazine has lost credibility by slipping too far to the left, as this week's edition demonstrates. The New York Times, wisely, runs many independent columns and articles which are not as predictable as those in Time magazine. This is helping to preserve the NYT as the nation's leading newspaper at a time of ideological fervor and bias in much of the American body politic. Yes, the New York Times has a fervently liberal, and sometimes too shrill, editorial page, but it offers other views besides -- on the Op Ed pages, in the New York Times magazine and in the news columns, among other places.

The L.A. Times could learn a lesson here. The Times has independent columnists not afraid to occasionally stray from liberal orthodoxy, such as Tim Rutten and Steve Lopez. But its new metro and investigations editors, David Lauter and Marc Duvoisin, based on their past records, might be too bland and predictable, respectively. The paper has to take care to preserve its credibility, and the best way to do that is to strengthen its dedication to independence. Since, Lauter and Duvoisin are fundamentally talented, maybe they will be more provocative, better questioners, and less inclined to conventional liberal wisdom in the future, now that they have more authority.

Columns in the L.A. Times, Time magazine, and the New York Times over the weekend led me to think about independence and its advantages.

First, Saturday morning, came an outstanding column in the L.A. Times Calendar section by Rutten, the paper's media columnist. He looked back on the trip to the United States last week of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. the president of Iran, who Rutten unreservedly depicted as "one of the world's truly dangerous men...a man who hopes to see Israel 'wiped off the face of the Earth, 'has denied the Holocaust and is defying the world community in pursuit of nuclear weapons."

Warning of the dangers of consorting with dictators, as Columbia University did in inviting Ahmadinejad to speak, and a bevy of the nation's leading media, including NBC's Brian Williams, did last week at a New York dinner with Ahmadinejad, Rutten asserted, "...the totalitarian impulse knows no accommodation with reason. You cannot change the totalitarian mind through dialogue or conversation." It was particularly useful for Rutten to go back into Columbia University's history and show how it had cuddled up next to the Fascists of the 1930s. Now, it has invited another fascist, Ahmadinejad, to appear before the student body. The fact that Columbia's president read him the riot act doesn't erase the stain of doing so.

Rutten concluded. "After being duped by the Bush administration into helping pave the way for the diastrous war in Iraq, few in the American media now are willing to take the Iran problem on because they don't want to be complicit in another military misadventure. Fair enough -- but that anxiety doesn't exempt the press from being realistic about who Ahmadinejad really is and the danger he really does pose to all around him."

Contrast this with the foolish column in this week's Time magazine by the magazine's political colunnist, Joe Klein, who railed against those who have the temerity to compare Ahmadinejad with Hitler.

"The neoconservative campaign to transform Ahmadinejad into Hitler or Stalin, to pretend that he has the ability to destroy the world, to make a hoo-ha over letting the little man speak, is a cynical attempt to plump for war," Klein wrote. He insisted that, "The Iranian President's words (last week) had no practical, only symbolic, global import. He has very little real power in Iran, none over foreign policy or the nuclear program."

But, it seems to me, since Ahmadinejad has been allowed by the Mullahs who really rule Iran to be their point man throughout the world, it may well be too sweeping to say he has "very little real power," and, before dismissing comparisons with Hitler, Klein should have considered that, if his country obtains nuclear weapons, Ahmadinejad and Iran will have more actual power to disrupt the world than even Hitler ever had.

This was not the only place, where Time magazine fell into a swoon last week to the far left. The magazine introduced a new foreign affairs columnist, Samantha Power, who the Time managing editor, Richard Stengel, described surprisingly as an "unpaid adviser to Sen. Barack Obama." In her first column, Power castigated the Bush Administration on the old ground that it has failed to admit to the U.S. many refugees from the Iraq war. She began with the statement that Iraq is generating 60,000 refugees a month, who "are voting with their feet against the surge of U.S. forces by fleeing their homes."

Wrong. Iraqis are fleeing the country to escape sectarian violence generated by our enemies in Al Qaeda and other groups. The American surge, in fact, has stablized at least some Iraqi neighborhoods, and allowed people to return to their homes. In any case, after spending billions of dollars and thousands of lives on this God-forsaken country, why should we admit its citizens to this country, where they might cause trouble?

This was not an auspicious start for a new columnist. And the question arises, have they hired someone with an agenda?

Time also had a pointless piece about how Laura Bush had snubbed Ahmadinejad at the United Nations, devoted a shamefully small article to the rebellion last week in Burma, and ran another article to deploring half-heartedly that Obama is not making more headway against Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

It is sad what this magazine, thinned badly in recent years by its inability to sell advertising, has already become, and the 2008 presidential campaign has not even fairly gotten underway. At a time when journalists should be keeping their heads clear, Time is often adopting knee jerk positions in its columns and articles.

In the New York Times, by contrast this morning, the normally liberal columnist, Frank Rich, has a trenchant piece critiquing Hillary Clinton and expressing concern that a Democratic victory is by no means a sure thing next year. The headline on the column asks, "Is Hillary Clinton the New Old Al Gore?"

Rich's article follows one in the New York Times magazine recently that raised questions about Clinton's innate caution on Iraq war issues, and truthfulness about some of the positions she has taken in the past. These articles are doing a public service, exploring in depth a candidate before the primaries begin and she is thrust even more into the spotlight.

Meanwhile, the NYT's "public editor," or ombudsman, Clark Hoyt discusses reader reaction to his revealing piece last week -- see my blog of Sept. 23 -- about how the Times had undercharged the antiwar organization "MoveOn.org" for an ad depicting General David Petraeus, U.S. commander in Iraq, as "General Betray Us," and raising the question whether this attack ad was a slander out of accord with Times policy against not accepting personal attacks in advertising.

Hoyt says frankly that most of the 350 readers who responded to his article disagreed with him and supported the ad. But he still defends the position he took.

"Many readers felt I wanted to limit a robust public debate on the war in Iraq," Hoyt writes. "Far from it, I believe deeply in free speech and that there can't be too much debate about a war that so divides the country. But there's an important distinction between the right of people or organizations to say something and what The Times is willing to accept in its pages.

"The Times has an entire manual devoted to guidelines for ad acceptability. The newspaper won't take ads from Holocaust deniers, or racist ads or even advocacy ads it deems in poor taste. Yet they're all protected speech. Another guideline bans 'attacks of a personal nature.' Did the words 'General Betray Us' in the MoveOn.org ad violate that standard? I think they did, but many of you disagreed."

He then goes ahead in his column to run a sampling of letters, and refers readers to more of them on the Times Web site.

To carry on its pages a column reflecting negatively on a probable Democratic presidential nominee, and one the New York Times would certainly endorse, and to employ a truly independent Public Editor like Hoyt fortifies the newspaper's credibility and induces, I think, readers of all political stripes to take it more seriously.

Other papers, and Time magazine, should follow the Times example. The American people, if they do, will be better informed.

NYT Admits It Gave MoveOn.org Special Price

In what is one of the clearest examples of the New York Times admitting a left wing bias, members of the newspaper's staff are quoted this morning by the paper's "public editor," or ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, as confessiing that they gave the far left, antiwar MoveOn.org group a special price for a Sept. 10 full-page ad smearing Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, as "General Betray-Us."

The ad, which ran the morning before Petraeus was to testify to Congress on the status of the U.S. effort in the Iraq war, has been roundly denounced, even by the antiwar U.S. senator John Kerry, as "over the top," and was condemned, by a vote of 72 to 25, in the whole Senate. This condemnation was supported by more than 20 Democrats. President Bush, for his part, publicly called the ad "disgusting,"

Now, it turns out, according to Hoyt's article, quoting a company spokesman, that the Times charged MoveOn.org only $64.585 for the ad, when it should have charged it $142,063.

(Sunday, after Hoyt's article appeared, MoveOn.org announced it would wire the difference to The Times Monday. This was seen as an attempt to reduce its embarrassment over authoring such a sleazy ad. Between the Hoyt article and the MoveOn.org agreement to pay more, these were precedent-setting occurrences at the New York Times).

In addition, Hoyt writes, "The ad appears to fly in the face of an internal advertising acceptability manual that says, 'We do not accept opinion advertisements that are attacks of a personal nature."

Moreover, Hoyt quotes Catherine Mathis, vice president of corporate communications for the newspaper as saying, "We made a mistake," and that the advertising department representative failed to make it clear that for the rate charged, the Times could not guarantee the Monday placement, but left MoveOn.org with the understanding that the ad would run then, as it did. Mathis added, "That was contrary to our policies."

Hoyt says that "Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of The Times and chairman of its parent company, declined to name the salesperson (making the mistakes) or to say whether disciplinary action would be taken."

Sulzberger is the weak-kneed publisher who fired the Times' outstanding executive editor and managing editor, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd, several years ago under pressure from left wingers on the Times reporting staff. And recently, the Times editorial page under Andrew Rosenthal has become more and more shrill at demanding that the U.S. withdraw its forces from Iraq.

As Hoyt writes this morning, "By the end of last week the ad appeared to have backfired on both MoveOn.org and fellow opponents of the war in Iraq -- and on The Times. It gave the Bush administration and its allies an opportunity to change the subject from questions about an unpopular war to defense of a respected general with nine rows of ribbons on his chest, including a Bronze Star with a V for valor. And it gave fresh ammunition to a cottage industry that loves to bash The Times as a bastion of the 'liberal media.'"

Liberal is too kind a term to describe the New York Times these days. It has become a vitriolic exponent of the McGovernite left in the Democratic party, and is regularly smearing the Bush administration in its news pages. The staffers who once assailed the independent and honest Raines and Boyd are in full charge.

Hoyt reports that more than 4,000 e-mail messages have come in from "people around the country" who "raged at the Times with words like 'despicable,' 'disgrace' and 'treason.'"

The Times did run an ad from former New York Mayor and Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani assailing the MoveOn.org ad and charged Giuliani the same low price. But, Hoyt reports, it wouldn't give the guarantee of when an another ad would be placed at the low price to a second organization which wanted to run one also opposing the ad by MoveOn.org. That second opposition ad did not run. When MoveOn.org agreed to pay the full price for its ad, it demanded that Giuliani pay the full rate for his.

"For me," Hoyt writes, "two values collided here: the right of free speech -- even if it's abusive speech -- and a strong personal revulsion toward the name-calling and personal attacks that now pass for political dialogue, obscuring rather than illuminating important policy issues. For The Times, there is another value: the protection of its brand as a newspaper that sets a high standard for civility. Were I in Jespersen (Steph Jespersen, the executive who approved the ad), I'd have demanded changes to eliminate 'Betray Us,' a particularly low blow when aimed at a soldier."

This is Hoyt at his finest. He leads his article this morning with this damning statement: "For nearly two weeks, The New York Times has been defending a political advertisement that critics say was an unfair shot at the American commander in Iraq."

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Some 20,000 persons, led by gallant Buddhist monks, marched in Rangoon today in protest against the brutal military junta which has kept Burma enslaved for 45 years. And yesterday, a few hundred of the monks were able to pass through police lines to greet the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Daw Aung San Suu Kwi, long under house arrest, and support her opposition to the government. The London Times called the past few weeks of demonstrations "the Saffron revolution" after the monks who have led it. It was the number one story Sunday afternoon on the New York Times Web site, but, as usual, the L.A. Web site dropped the ball, not mentioning it on its front page.

San Suu Kwi, 62, winner of a massive majority in 1990 elections ignored by the junta, made her first public appearance in four years in front of her house Saturday, crying with emotion, but appearing, observers said, "fit and well."

San Suu Kwi, leader of the people of Burma, must now be brought to power and the junta deposed. She is truly, for people throughout the world, "the woman of the hour."


































































































































































In one of the clearest examples of the New York Times admitting a left wing bias, the newspaper's leaders are quoted by their "public editor," or ombudsman, Clark Hoyt, this morning as confessing that they gave the far left, antiwar organization MoveOn.org a special loaw price for its Sept. 10 ad smearing Gen. David Petraeus, comman U.S. forces in Iraq, as "General Betray us."

NYT Internet To Be Free To Everyone

In a move toward the Internet future, the New York Times announced today that henceforth its Web site will be free to all who look at it, with the exception of some archives prior to 1986. The NYT has been making about $10 million a year from 227,000 of its readers who were willing to pay to read Times columnists.

But in a Business section story today by Richard Perez-Pena, Times spokesmen said it had been determined the Web site would be more lucrative simply by opening it to everyone for free, and selling more advertising.

This very much follows the Google and Yahoo examples. Oftentimes, subscribers get those Web
search vehicles free of charge, but Google and Yahoo earn very large amounts simply from selling ads, and that is their main revenue base. It has also become evident, even by studying where readers are coming from on a blog as small as this one, that a sizable proportion of readers come from Europe, the Middle East and the Far East, spreading the influence of both blogs and newspapers far and wide.

The New York Times Web site, by far the best read of any newspaper, is already drawing 13 million hits a month, many of them references from Google, Yahoo and other Web sites through links. Regular Times subscribers were allowed to read everything for free, but only those non subscribers to the print edition who paid could read the columnists. This, as the article says today, was satisfactory neither to the non-payers nor to the columnists (who were losing millions of readers).

The Times article this morning notes that the Wall Street Journal currently has nearly a million subscribers to its Web site, and is drawing revenue of $65 million a year. However, the new WSJ owner, Rupert Murdoch, has declared he is considering making that Web site free too, and for the same reasons, that he believes it may draw many additional readers and be able to sell advertising far exceeding the $65 million.

The L.A. Times for a short while charged Web site visitors to view articles in its Calendar sections, but dropped the practice and went free when it noticed a sharp drop off in viewers. The lackluster L.A. Times Web site managers have managed so far to sell comparatively little advertising for the Web.

It is increasingly clear that a large proportion of a newspaper's total revenue can be obtained through selling online advertising of all kinds. This could even revive total Classified sales. The decline of Classified, or its siphoning off to various other Web sites, has been one of the factors leading to a decline in overall newspaper revenue across the country.

Despite statements earlier this year by L.A. Times publisher David Hiller that the L.A. Times was going to invest more in an improved Web site, so far the L.A. Times site has been improving only slowly. It trails far behind the New York Times site both in the number of stories featured on its home page, and the frequency of changes of news presentations made on it. The New York Times is thus far more proficient at showing the latest news, and it has many more opportunities for readers to comment and give their own views than the skittish L.A. Times editors provide.

Just Tuesday night, the L.A. Times Web site was still running a headline that the Los Angeles Dodgers had lost the first game of a doubleheader to the Colorado Rockies, two hours after they had also dropped the second game. The story referred to said the doubleheader had been swept by the Rockies, but not the headline that reefered to it. It has long been clear that the LAT Web site does not have enough employees to put out a consistent product.

In addition to subscribing to the New York Times, I look at that newspaper's Web site five or six times a day, and also have become fond of looking at the Web sites of the Jerusalem Post, the London Times and the Washington Post. It has allowed me to partake of a much greater range of public opinion and what the press is doing. Also, I frequently look at Yahoo, which has links to many European publications.

It does take a sizable staff devoted to that purpose to have a good Web site, and, so far, the Tribune Co., owners of the L.A. Times, has been unwilling to invest any substantial funds into improving the L.A. Times product. This is similar to the Tribune's reluctance to spend money on promoting circulation for the print edition.

Altogether, it is high time that the L.A. Times put the thought, money and effort into the newspaper's Web site that the New York Times does, rather than just talk about doing so. This may well be a substantial portion of tomorrow's newspaper business.

In another ambitious step toward the future, two Murdoch-owned publications, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, have announced plans for weekly magazines at a time when the L.A. Times has been sharply cutting back the frequency of its West magazine.

Murdoch may be politically reactionary, but he does appear to be a far better businessman than the inept Dennis FitzSimons, CEO of the Tribune Co. He appears to recognize much more clearly than the Tribune executive just what a glossy Sunday magazine can do for a newspaper.

Only occasionally now, not weekly, the L.A. Times is running West magazine. There was one on Sunday featuring exotic travel that was quite good. But West has never had the lengthy perceptive political pieces that the highly successful New York Times magazine has had, including splendid recent analyses of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani.

The New York Times editors, unfortunately, are better thinkers than the L.A. Times editors, and their Tribune owners. But that does not have to be a permanent condition. The prospective new owner of Tribune, Sam Zell, could assert himself by firing FitzSimons and Times publisher David Hiller, a Chicago transplant, and hiring new, intelligent leadership.

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If there is any ray of light at all in the tragic air crash at Phuket, Thailand, it comes in a report on Associated Press today that Iranian and Israeli forensic experts and diplomatic envoys have met and are cooperating in identifying the victims, of which there were at least six Israelis and 18 Iranians.

The best news the whole world could get these days would be of any overtures for any reason between Iran and Israel..

NYT Military Correspondent Defends His Story

It is somewhat buried today, but the New York Times has been commendably fair to its outstanding military correspondent, Michael Gordon, by allowing him to respond publicly, in a letter published in the newspaper, to a critique of the placement of one of his recent articles by Clark Hoyt, the Times' "public editor," or ombudsman.

Hoyt, like the New York Times editorial page, has been a strong critic, or foe might be a better word, of America's involvement in the Iraq war. Hoyt has questioned some Times reporting in the past as too passively acceptive of Bush Administration claims about the war. Gordon, the military correspondent, on the other hand, has been willing to allow the Administration's viewpoint to be given credence in some of his articles when he has found evidence supporting it.

The issue here is a Gordon article of Aug. 8, written from Iraq, that reported a rise of the use of explosively formed penetrator roadside bombs (E.F.P.s) against U.S. troops, and cited evidence that Iran has been supplying components of the bombs which have been used by Shiite militants against the troops. The article, which ran on Page 1 of the NYT, supported Administration claims of mounting Iranian involvement in the Iraq war.

Hoyt questioned in an Aug. 19 column he wrote in the paper's Week In Review Sunday section, whether Gordon's article should have been run on Page 1, a play that was defended by Bill Keller, the Times' executive editor, as a "slam dunk." Now, Gordon has defended the play in a letter that Hoyt runs today as one of a number of letters, mainly by readers, responding to issues he has raised in his columns.

Hoyt had earlier questioned Gordon for saying on a television interview show last spring that he felt the "surge" of troops President Bush ordered to Iraq was a tactic worth trying that might work. He suggested Gordon should keep such opinions off the air.

A divergence between the New York Times' dovish positions editorially against the "surge" and its military correspondent's more hawkish views is nothing new at the newspaper. In the Vietnam war, the same divergence was evident, when the Times questioned editorially the Johnson build up of U.S. troops and other steps against North Vietnam, while the newspaper's military correspondent at that time, Hanson Baldwin, openly saw their utility and even went so far as to suggest that stronger steps should be undertaken.

It should be pointed out that both Baldwin and Gordon, unlike many military correspondents for newspapers critical of American war policies, have been able to maintain military respect and, accordingly, their access to military thinking. The reason is that the military has confidence that it can get a fair hearing from these reporters. The result is that both Baldwin and Gordon have been able to regularly report inside military thinking and strategy.

Because Gordon has been fair to the Administration and to the military at a time when some reporters have not, explains why Gordon has often been welcomed to what would otherwise have been confidential discussions, even sometimes attending conferences between official Washington emissaries and military commanders in Iraq. This is "embedding" of a particularly high order. (Gordon has a typically evenhanded piece in today's New York Times magazine on Iraq developments).

A reporter who becomes to such an extent an insider, privy to matters kept from other reporters, often is accused of being too friendly to the government, or to specific politicians. This happened occasionally in my own political reporting career, especially when I quoted anonymous insiders, and it has certainly happened to Gordon, whose reporting of the war has generated what Hoyt in a Web site blog termed overly vitriolic criticism of Gordon by some antiwar readers.

The question, I think, is whether the reporter tries to do an honest job of finding the best information, and then giving it to readers in his articles. I believe Gordon has done this, and that while he is anything but a toady to the Adminstration, he has appropriately recognized the validity of Administration views in his articles when he has found credible evidence for them.

The tension here is between getting close to news sources, so as to find out what is really happening, as compared to what is often put in propagandistic press releases, and the feeling that some readers express that you are actually in bed with those sources. Since it is naturally the government that has the most inside information, this may mean having some trust in that information.

Gordon's Aug. 8 article tended to support the Administration's claims that Iran has been intervening in the conflict in Iraq. Hoyt, who has questioned many Administration claims about the war, questioned Aug. 19, whether this was Page 1 news, and now Gordon has responded in his letter, upholding his own view that it was.

In the letter, as published today, Gordon writes, notably: "The Aug. 8 article I wrote from Iraq disclosed that attacks with a type of roadside bomb known as an explosively formed penetrator reached an all-time high in July. This was an important news development for several reasons.

"First, E.F.P. strikes accounted for a third of the American-led coalition troops who were killed in action in July.

"Second, the July figures were not a one-month statistical blip, but the culmination of a disturbing trend. In March, American military officials expressed the hope that E.F.P. attacks were on the decline.

"Third, E.F.P. attacks are a concrete indicator of Shiite militia activity as the weapon has been used almost exclusively by Shiite militant groups.

"Fourth, the attacks are a measure of Iranian support for Shiite militant groups as American intelligence reports indicate that key E.F.P. components have been supplied by Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

"You believe (Gordon tells Hoyt in the letter) that the first and second points were not sufficient reason to have played the story on Page. 1. I disagree. The article underscored the military significance of the weapon, and the substantial number of American casualties E.F.P.'s have unfortunately caused is an important and newsworthy development."

A longer version of the Gordon letter is played on the New York Times Web site today.

Overall, by printing his letter, as I said above, I believe the New York Times is demonstrating commendable fairness to its own reporters. As Hoyt himself remarks on the Web site, Gordon is a respected military correspondent.

Gordon's views of what is news have to be taken seriously, and the New York Times must maintain its credibility as a newspaper of record and not in its news pages at least simply be a polemicist against the Iraq war.

This does not mean I don't recognize the responsibility of editors to edit, and, occasionally to reject a story if they feel it is biased or incomplete. This happened recently at the L.A. Times when then-managing editor Doug Frantz refused to run a story then-reporter Mark Arax had written on the Armenian genocide.

Just last week, I thought an editor at the L.A. Times, Marc Duvoisin, should have demanded that reporter Noam Levey ask a few more questions than he did of a former soldier he wrote about who has turned against the Iraq war. That Page 1 article was blatantly one-sided, and Duvoisin should have toned it down. It comes down, finally, to a matter of judgment. I believe the New York Times was correct in running the Gordon story on Page 1.

New York Times Has Shameful Editorials On Iraq

Written from Ashland, Ore.--

I wonder if the goofy and finally ousted L.A. Times editorial page editors Michael Kinsley and Andres Martinez have migrated to the New York Times or are exerting undue influence there. What else can explain the New York Times editorials on the war in Iraq?

Surely, it cannot be the son of A.M. Rosenthal, Andrew Rosenthal, now editorial page editor of the Times, who is fully responsible for some of the recent shrill and defeatist editorials. A.M. Rosenthal, a fighter devoted to American interests, must be rolling over in his grave at what his son is running in his newspaper now.

I was particularly struck by the beginning of yesterday's lead editorial, "No Exit Strategy."

"The American people have only one question left about Iraq," the editorial started out. "What is President Bush's plan for a timely and responsible exit? That is the essential precondition for salvaging broader American interests in the Middle East and for waging a more effective fight against Al Qaeda in its base areas in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And it is exactly the question that Mr. Bush, his top generals and his diplomats so stubbornly and damagingly refuse to answer."

This has the same hectoring tone that the New York Times has been using these days toward the Bush Administration, and it is entirely wrongheaded. If followed, it would not only surrender Iraq to the enemy, but it would hand Al-Qaeda a victory that would redound to its benefit throughout the Middle East and Europe. It would paralyze any American determination to fight Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where just yesterday they murdered an innocent South Korean hostage.

Do we want the terrorists to rule the Middle East? Do we want to hand victory to the suicide bombers, the kidnappers and the murderers, and give them carte blanche to spread their policies of religious dictatorship and enslavement of women elsewhere in the world? Because that surely will be the consequence were our forces to bug out of Iraq.

The New York Times has been joined by the Los Angeles Times and implicitly by Time magazine in calling for a U.S. phased withdrawal from the war. The Washington Post has a little more fortitude. But, generally, too much of the American press is ready to turn tail and run.

And this is just at a moment when our skillful generals, buttressed by the special forces we have sent to Iraq, the Green Berets, the Navy SEALS, Army rangers, the Marines, are turning the tide in large portions of Iraq, certainly in Anbar province, but in other provinces as well, and even have reduced the shameful killings in the city of Baghdad.

Whatever has happened to the dovish wimps in the press? Why don't more of them absorb the lessons of history and realize that great nations have fallen before because of their unwillingness to fight for their freedoms? Where is their devotion to American freedoms? Why don't they realize that freedom is never free, and fall in behind those volunteer soldiers who are fighting for it?

And how ironic it is that President Bush and Vice President Cheney, who avoided personal combat in the Vietnam war, have turned out now to have absorbed those lessons and be willing to fight? Yes, some will say, they are willing to fight with other Americans' blood, but this does not do them justice. They have put their personal reputations and their positions in history on the line, they have stubbornly pursued the national interest, without stinting. For that, they deserve, at this difficult time, our support and respect. We cannot overly focus on their youthful mistakes.

And it would be a good thing for the New York Times to cease thinking that it alone knows what's best for the country.

--

I was disappointed in Greg Kirkorian's recent article in the L.A. Times about the trial now beginning in Dallas of leaders of the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim group accused of aiding the terrorist Hamas organization.

There are complicated issues in this trial, but Krikorian lost no opportunity to shade his article toward the Foundation's side, and against the U.S. government. It would be better to report things more straightforwardly, and reserve judgment until the verdict is in.

New York Times Raps Murdoch, And Itself

Sunday, June 10, was an unusually candid day for the New York Times. In an outspoken editorial, it defended a-competitor, the Wall Street Journal, against the Rupert Murdoch raid, speaking up against a sale of the Dow Jones Co. to the right wing newspaper and television magnate.

Then, in the same Week in Review section, the new public editor of the Times, Clark Hoyt, indicated that the editors of the paper might well have been wrong last weekend to play the news of an alleged Islamic plot to burn facilities at the John F. Kennedy Airport on Page 30 rather than on Page 1. It's an auspicious start for Hoyt.

The L.A. Times fitfully sometimes runs adverse stories about itself, or rather the Tribune Co. ownership that has brought so much ruination on the newspaper. On the other hand, the LAT
ran just three paltry letters protesting the termination of longtime Times columnist Al Martinez, when it had received hundreds, maybe as many as 2,000. The New York Times is prone to go deeper with self-criticism, and the "public editor" often provides the means.

The NYT is on its third public editor, and I don't imagine any of them have been all that popular with the regular editors. After all, many news reporters and editors are very defensive. They are used to dishing it out to all types of public figures, but they don't enjoy being criticized themselves.

Hoyt, on Sunday, elicited an admission from John Geddes, a NYT managing editor, that if he had to do it all over again, he might have put the Kennedy plot story on Page 1, even though he did feel federal prosecutors may have overplayed the threat.

Hoyt remarked in the conclusion of his column, "Domestic terrorism is a frightening -- and now very political -- issue. Newspapers cannot take sometimes overheated rhetoric from public officials at face value. But they have to be careful not to appear indifferent to plots that, allowed to mature, could pose real threats of death and destruction."

It was striking that the NYT played the Kennedy story on Page 30, while the Washington Post, published in a city 240 miles away, published it as the lead story on Page 1. And, I think, the L.A. Times did too.

As for the Murdoch bid for the Wall Street Journal, the NYT editorial said, "Editorial pages generally do not compliment the competition, but today we write in praise of The Wall Street Journal."

Murdoch, it accurately noted, as media columnist Tim Rutten has in the Los Angeles Times, "reneged on his vow to leave news operations alone, such as at The Times of London (after he bought that paper), or when his conglomerate canceled a book and stopped carrying the BBC news by satellite to curry favor in China." The Times editorial made it clear, the NYT editors hope the Wall Street Journal will not be sold to Murdoch.

Amen!

--

I haven't been very impressed with the revamped Los Angeles Times Sunday travel section, which has seemed to represent another Tribune Co. cutback at the paper. But fair is fair and the travel section's page devoted to Seattle's Pike Place Market yesterday provided an excellent map and description as to what is to be found there, at one of the world's great markets.

The graphics, the page said, were prepared by Eric Lucas, "Special to the Times," which meant that Lucas is not on the regular staff.

New York Times Design Changes Mean Softer News

Under Bill Keller, the New York Times is not the paper it was. And that was only further confirmed this week, when the NYT announced "design changes," that mean, so far as I can understand them, that we are going to get less hard news, in favor of analyses, profiles, appraisals, memos, and so forth.

The strength of the NYT over the years has been that it has been a newspaper of record. It's always had features, but, of late, these features have been taking over. The newspaper also has become too introspective, constantly explaining why it has presented news the way it has. Its "public editor," now, Byron Calame, is at the forefront of such efforts to rationalize what the Times is doing. He is often guilty of misjudgments.

The overall result often is that the Los Angeles Times, while it has cut back its news hole substantially under the Tribune ownership, often does a more straightforward report on a specific story than the NYT. This used not to be a common case, but it is now.

The explanation of the design changes on Page 2 ot the NYT of Wednesday, Sept. 20, was a confusing description of articles under different names, both for the news and opinion sections.

The paper used to be a better news operation. Now, it has become liberalized and flabbier. It hasn't got a successful Pentagon correspondent, despite the fact the country is involved in two wars at once. It has columnists like Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert and Frank Rich who are dreary and predictable. They give us a constant dirge of criticism of the Bush Administration, without making any constructive suggestions for a new policy. The paper has taken to concentrating overly on shortcomings of U.S. anti-terrorist interrogations, which make it seem dubious of the American war effort. It's become like the ACLU.

The paper was liberal under the former executive editor, Howell Raines, but also much more informative. The papers after 9-11 were filled with pertinent information published, for weeks, under a special section. Since Raines was ousted, when he should not have been, it has deteriorated.

The paper now needs a rejuvenation. It might start with a new, harder-nosed publisher, and a new executive editor.