|
Media Infiltrations: Obama's Social Security Fine Print  The Wall Street Journal June 25, 2008 Commodity-Prices Scapegoats The Wall Street Journal June 3, 2008
"What has been your worst blogging experience? "That's a guy who actually stalks me on the Web and once stalked me personally." "I'm saying this...guy's a jerk."
 A Bound Man Shelby Steele What I'm listening to:  Langley Schools Music Project What I'm watching:  There Will Be Blood What I'm playing:  Speed Racer Order these from Amazon.com at Amazon's normal low prices... and a fraction of your order goes to help support this site. Thanks!
Thanks to Irwin Chusid, public editor. Some of the sites
|
Chronicle of the Conspiracy
Join us as we discover, document, expose and challenge the bad people, the bad institutions and the bad ideas that stand in the way of wealth creation -- and show you how to fight back!
Friday, July 18, 2003
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
"...the company stands to benefit from a federal tax-exempt bond program intended to help businesses devastated by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.This week, it was revealed that the Times Company's development partner for the headquarters project has asked city officials for $400 million in federally financed 'Liberty Bonds.' The federal program was meant for rebuilding in New York City's Sept. 11 disaster zone, not for subsidizing a private newspaper's long-planned palatial ambitions. ...After the newspaper's executives threatened to move their workers out of town, city and state officials coughed up a vast tract of land on the edge of Times Square for a shiny, new 52-story headquarters.
"Opposed to special tax breaks for everyone else, the Times' project comes lined with a handy $26.1 million in sales-tax exemptions on equipment and materials used for construction, a waiver of the mortgage-recording tax, and a discount on electricity rates....Buried in the 99-year lease agreement is an option provision stating that after 29 years, the Times may buy the site in exchange for one dollar.
"The paper's opinion pages have been filled for the past two years with liberal rants from the likes of Nicholas Kristof and Paul Krugman decrying corporate welfare schemes and accusing President Bush and Republicans of 'crony capitalism.' Kristof called a Texas Rangers baseball stadium land grab supported by Bush an 'avaricious bruising of the public interest.' Krugman carps about subsidies to the energy industry. The Times' editorial board lambastes government loan guarantees to special corporate interests as 'pork-barrel politics' that have no honest economic justification.
"All have been silent on their own employer's avaricious feasting at the public trough. Who wants to oppose 'crony capitalism,' after all, when a corner office with windows in the new publicly financed headquarters may be at stake?"
Thanks to reader Carole Graham for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:03 PM | link
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
Is this President Bush poring over the State of the Union before giving the speech... are are these the hands of Paul Krugman or some other liberal pundit looking for ammunition for the "Bush lied" smear campaign?
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 10:17 AM | link
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
Apparently Times Company CEO Arthur Sulzberger Jr.'s sympathy for defrauded Enron shareholders has its limits -- the limits are "talk is cheap." As with the issue of reporting stock options expense in financial statements, the Times preaches a version of business ethics that it does not feel obliged to observe when Sulzberger family wealth is at stake. Thanks to George Zachar for the link.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:33 AM | link
Wednesday, July 16, 2003
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
"A potentially major case is developing at the Federal Trade Commission. Brown & Toland, a San Francisco based physician group, rebuffed the FTC staff's efforts to shove a 'doctors can't jointly negotiate' consent order down their throats. As a result, the five FTC commissioners voted unanimously to issue a formal complaint against B&T, which means the docs will now face a hearing before an FTC-appointed administrative judge sometime in the fall.
"Under the current system, an HMO offers a contract to a bunch of independent doctors, and each doctor can say yes or no to the offer. Rarely can the docs individually force a change in a contract term. This is why they want to get together collectively to negotiate contracts—without having to either unionize as employees or integrating their practices. Here's one example: An HMO that insures most of the employees in a given town decides to cut reimbursements for a particular procedure. This makes the procedure unprofitable for the individual doctors. The doctors get together and tell the HMO 'raise the reimbursement for this procedure or we won't sign the contract.'
"The FTC considers that a violation of the antitrust laws. Specifically, they consider it a violation of an internal FTC-Department of Justice policy that was never approved by Congress which bans virtually all physician negotiating activity. The FTC only permits collective negotiations under a limited number of economic models--all of which are designed to maximize the physicians' financial risk while insulating consumers (i.e. the HMOs) from any significant losses. Often physician groups try the approved models, fail miserably, then try to implement a model to protect the viability of their practices, only to be prosecuted by the FTC for having the gall not to continue losing money.
"The Brown & Toland action is a big step. Since Tim Muris took office as FTC chairman and implemented his policy of persecuting physicians, the FTC has basically settled every complaint against physician groups without challenge. If B&T sticks to its guns and fights to the end, things could get ugly for the FTC. This is also a transitional period at the Commission, as chief antitrust enforcer Joe Simons is leaving and yielding control to his deputy, Susan Creighton. The B&T case will be her first major assignment.
"The first problem from my perspective is that there's still no genuine media coverage of the FTC's activities. The Wall Street Journal's news section has become a cheering section for Muris, as they've run numerous slanted (and factually misleading) pieces about the FTC this year. Holman Jenkins on the WSJ editorial page has written some excellent pieces criticizing existing antitrust policy, but he has yet to discover the physician issue.
"The second problem is that we don't know how intertwined the FTC's physician policy is with other administration initiatives. Here's what I mean: Tom Scully, the Medicare administrator, has himself been on a big cost-cutting spree lately. I wonder if he's not working tacitly with Muris encouraging this recent spat of physician prosecutions. In a number of recent FTC physician settlements, the Commission states its view that the Medicare-determine reimbursement levels should be considered the 'market' rate, and that any physician group that negotiates rates substantially higher than the Medicare rate is violating the antitrust laws. This leads me to consider the possibility that Muris and Scully have been at least comparing notes on this issue.
"Also, I'm still pursuing the Justice Department over their decision to forcibly dissolve a physician group in North Carolina despite protests from local consumers. I'll have more on that in a day or so, as we're still reviewing the latest DOJ filings."
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:17 PM | link
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
Background... as it was explained in an entirely separate correction that appeared Monday on page two of the Times' front section,
"An article in Business Day last Monday about Steven Gottlieb, founder and president of TVT Records, discussed his involvement in a number of lawsuits and assessed the financial status of his company. The article's main premises — that Mr. Gottlieb had lost control of his company and had a reputation for being litigious — were based on fundamental misunderstandings of the subject, scope and status of the legal proceedings discussed."
The reporter whose story was "based on fundamental misunderstandings of the subject" was Lynette Holloway, who, according to the Post story, is an African American -- as is Jayson Blair.
"Like Blair, she had caught the attention of Raines, who put her in the media section of the paper, insiders said. She was a Howell appointment,' said one insider. 'He wanted to increase coverage of hip-hop music.' Investigators at The Times will find Holloway has had other problems with her reporting. She has worked the media beat for about six months, and was at the paper for about 10 years before that."
The Post story goes on to detail various errors that Holloway has made in the past.
Doesn't this reveal exactly what's wrong with affirmative action? If it's true that an unqualified reporter -- one who had "fundamental misunderstandings of the subject" -- was promoted too quickly because of her race or wasn't disciplined properly for her mistakes, think of all the people who have been harmed -- the subjects of her articles, the readers of her articles, Times Company shareholders, and all the more qualified reporters who were passed over. Holloway herself has been harmed -- now she's blown herself up publicly. And all African Americans have been harmed: the qualified ones, the unqualified ones, the ones in affirmative action programs and the ones not. All are now suspect (which ones are unqualified?...which one will be the next to blow up?). All it takes to be a suspect now is to be African American.
And who benefited from this? Only the managers -- the white managers -- who got to pat themselves on the back for being such open-minded, charitable, giving, generous, wonderful people. The white managers, like Howell Raines, who got to treat African American reporters like Holloway like cannon-fodder, sending her to her death in the pursuit of what Raines called a "business section that was much more competitive and much more hard edged." Don't be surprised. It's just another case of how what seems to be an attempt to help the disadvantaged is, in fact, only part of the conspiracy to keep you poor and stupid.
Thanks to Bruce Bartlett for the link to the Post article.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:56 PM | link
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
"Over these two and a half years of columns... It is simply astounding that not a single one of his 243 columns has been devoted mainly to criticism of Democrats or praise of Republicans. At first, Mr. Krugman wrote many witty, thought-provoking and completely apolitical columns about economics, but they have dwindled as the frequency of partisan screeds has increased. In 2000, 53 of his 98 columns contained no party references, but in 2002, only 8 of 99 did, and so far this year only one lonely column of 46 was non-political. Although Mr. Krugman himself has explictly denied the charge of partisanship, the data doesn't seem to support any of the proposed explanations for his one-sided punditry:
- "...Although Mr. Krugman's early criticism of the Clinton administration is often cited, there is little evidence of such independence in recent years. In his 2000 columns, he made over 140 negative references to George W. Bush, but only 13 to Al Gore and a grand total of 3 to Bill Clinton, who served as a high government official at the time.
- "...Although he has called Democrats 'hapless' and 'ineffectual' on his website, Mr. Krugman has praised them consistently in the Times, with positive references exceeding negative references by a 3-1 ratio in 2000, 4-1 in 2002 and increasing to 5-1 this year.
- "...Mr. Krugman wrote many columns on non-economic topics in 2002, but they're just as partisan as the economics columns. There was an anti-Republican screed on the church and state issue, an anti-Republican screed on Trent Lott, an anti-Republican screed on climate policy, an anti-Republican screed on forest policy, an anti-Republican screed on drilling in Alaska, an anti-Republican screed on French elections (huh?), and many more."
I encourage everyone to visit Ken's site. There's lots more on Krugman there, but it's also a treasure trove of hard facts revealing bias and partisanship in the media on both the left and the right. All Ken seems to want is America's pundits to get partisanship out of their own way -- and serve their readers better by giving them valuable insights instead of a party-line hustle. What he says of Krugman could go for many of the others, as well:
"...a thoughtful opinion from someone with Mr. Krugman's background would be invaluable, but after slogging my way through 243 columns without a single substantive deviation from the party line, how could I expect to learn something about which party's position is better on any issue, when I already know what his answer will be? "
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:21 AM | link
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
"Back in the mid-1960s, it would be fair to say that the student newspaper at Serra High School in San Mateo was in good hands. Very good hands. Two of the key editors of the Friar were Bill Keller and John Lescroart. Both have gone on to impressive professional careers in the field of writing and communication... Keller said he and Lescroart and their Serra peers formed what amounted to an informal journalistic 'cabal' to produce their newspaper on a regular basis. 'No one was really in charge,' he recalled. 'It was a group effort.'
"Keller, who did not attend journalism school during his college days, does have one piece of advice for those studying in that discipline now: 'Every journalism student should have the experience of being written about.' That way, those young people, whose careers are in the formative stage, can gain some appreciation for what it feels like when the shoe is on the other foot... Incidentally, Keller, when contacted by us by telephone out of the blue Monday morning, answered the call himself -- in spite of the obvious nonstop crush of national attention. Talk about open access to the boss. So much for that fabled Times bureaucratic labyrinth."
Thanks to Bruce Bartlett for finding this.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:06 AM | link
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
So I'm easing in to this. I've been traveling on biz, too, so this post on his Tuesday column will be just a couple links to stuff my fellow Krugman-watchers have already put up. He'll get the full treatment from me on Friday's column (if Keller hasn't fired him by then).
Robert Musil, on the Man Without Qualities blog, leads off with an hilarious welcome back to Herr Doktorprofessor. Read the whole thing, but here's a sampler:
"The column is nothing more than a desiccated rehearsal of the inadequately supported anti-Bush, 'he lied,' 'Blair lied,' 'the intelligence services lied because Bush and Blair made them lie' memes that have been cluttering the media for the last week or so. Those charges have already been answered by various people in the Administration, the Blair administration and the media.
"Herr Doktorprofessor adds nothing new. His arguments are but Ka hovering among funerary models of real world objects. We are moved to leave him to his eternal peace.
"Herr Doktorprofessor does emit one tentative sign of life at the very beginning of the column, where he notes ambiguously:
"More than half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now bogged down in Iraq ... We have lost all credibility with allies who might have provided meaningful support ... All this puts us in a very weak position for dealing with real threats. Did I mention that North Korea has been extracting fissionable material from its fuel rods?
"At first this might be read as arguing that Herr Doktorprofessor thinks the U.S. Army's combat strength may be needed soon to strike at North Korea. Herr Doktorprofessor seems as though he wants to say (the way frustrated spirits want to send messages to us from the afterlife) that the new Korean War he thinks that we need is just not possible because the strength of the U.S. Army has been bogged down and our former allies will just not help now that we have lost 'all credibility.'
"But, since Herr Doktorprofessor doesn't complete the thought that almost emerges from his pretty damn peculiar semi-suggestion, we are left to conclude that this was no sign of life after all. Just some burp resulting from inadequately purged decomposition gases, perhaps."
Matthew Hoy, on the HoyStory.com blog, speculated last week that Krugman was not on vacation at all, but had been "designated an unlawful combatant and shipped off to Gitmo -- I was apparently incorrect." Now that Krugman's back, Hoy is all over him as usual. There's lots more in his full post, but here's a sampler:
"Normally I wouldn't be skeptical about solid numbers (with the exception of some poll numbers), but with Krugman, experience has taught me to be wary. According to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on yesterday's 'Meet the Press,' the number of troops we currently have in Iraq is about 147,000. Now, not all of those are 'combat' troops, though everyone over there, even the supply clerk, has a firearm. According to the Defense Department, the total number of Army personnel as of April 30 (the latest figure available) is 491,309. There is a stop-loss order in effect, so that number isn't going down. That leaves 344,309 Army personnel who aren't in Iraq.
"In fact, a May 7 report by the Christian Science Monitor has the Army deploying 'more than one-third' of its combat troops in Iraq. Journalists like easy fractions -- 1/4, 1/2, 3/4, 1/3, 2/3 -- you'll seldom see them use any others. And they always pick the nearest one to the ratio they need to report.
"Is Krugman exaggerating for effect? Well, lessee 'bogged down?' Yes, I'd say that Krugman is exaggerating. In fact, if I were Krugman and Krugman was (God forbid) the president, then I think I (Krugman) would accuse him (the President) of lying."
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:41 PM | link
Monday, July 14, 2003
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:42 AM | link
|
Get new major postings to this weblog via email -- free. Click here to sign up! |
"I should have been quicker to recognize that I was moving this new – one, putting tremendous work pressures on the staff, which responded wonderfully. I worked them too hard and didn't rest them enough. And also I moved in terms of the culture of the Times newsroom, I moved the newsroom too far, too fast."
How did Rose react to that kind of blame-the-victim cover-up? Rose's follow-up questions did not confront Raines with testimony or evidence of his reckless management style and his lapses of journalistic ethics -- such as the claim in David Margolick's article on Raines in the latest Vanity Fair that he forced reporters to add known falsehoods to their stories. And not a word about the paper's out-of-control liberal bias, its political correctness, or its disastrous affirmative action policies. Instead, the follow-ups were little more than open-ended "oh really's" and "tell-me-more's" that gave Raines the opportunity to just keep piling the self-justifications higher and higher. Here's an exchange -- if you can call it that -- in which Raines cited his absurdist flood-the-zone coverage of the Enron story as an example of something he did right (while the Times has since had to recant some of its hasty accusations).
"CHARLIE ROSE: Do you look back then and say, you know, I didn't -- I see my management style, which seems to be at the core of what happened in that explosion after Jayson Blair? You have no regrets about it and you find no fault with it and it was necessary to do what you wanted to create for the New York Times?
"HOWELL RAINES: I’m saying something more nuanced I hope. But one thing I am saying -- I have been criticized for using sports metaphors – and I’ll use one now -- I have always believed that if you are a fastball pitcher, you have got to throw heat. You’ve got to do what do you well. And --
"CHARLIE ROSE: And that means -- that metaphor means in terms of running the Times, what?
"HOWELL RAINES: That I have a certain management style which involves moving forward into the news and answering the information needs of our readers -- the most sophisticated readership in the world, I think -- over a broader range of subjects than just foreign policy, than just Washington, than just New York City Hall – but over the range of high culture, over the range of popular culture, over the range of sports, over the range of business. I'm proud of the fact that after Glenn Kramon and I devised a new strategy for the business section, which was very different than what had prevailed before, we moved from a business section that didn't get mind getting beaten by the Wall Street Journal on mergers and acquisitions, from a business section that was written for consumers rather than for our downtown professional financial community, to business section that was much more competitive and much more hard edged in the business and financial content that it produced. As a result of that, Glenn took that department -- and its his achievement -- not mine -- and dominated the Enron story, and to my knowledge that is the first business story in living memory where the Times has been in the front or in the hunt, along with the Journal and Business Week, and the other business publications..."
And here's a gem... Raines got a little too comfortable at one point, and made the error of raising an issue about which he had not been asked -- the matter of his running a "star system" in which is pet reporters for the best jobs and the best ink. Look how Rose helps Raines get out of it:
"HOWELL RAINES: I don't know how to be much clearer than that. I mean, perhaps I can think of an example in a moment. All right. I can. Let me demystify that, if I may. I have been accused of running a so-called 'star system.'
"CHARLIE ROSE: Exactly.
"HOWELL RAINES: The star system is a pejorative term for a system that seeks out the talented people on the staff, matches them up with the big stories, demands hard work and gives them rewards. That's what the 'star' system is. It replaced a system that was the buddy system. Where people were rewarded according it merit but also often got assignments or rewards based on who they knew or how well plugged in they were to the old boy network around the current executive editor or some other subeditor. How did this manifest itself in ways that hurt the paper? When I became executive editor, John Burns was sidelined as a foreign correspondent. He has won two Pulitzers. I think in the history of journalism he will go down as one of the great foreign correspondents in the post-war era.
"CHARLIE ROSE: And did a brilliant job in Baghdad.
"HOWELL RAINES: So when the – and did a brilliant job in Baghdad. And when the Iraq War -- I mean when the Afghan War came along, I didn't know why John had been sidelined. I didn't know why he was frustrated; I knew he was; he told me he was. I knew he wasn't being used correctly to his maximum. I simply said we have got the best guy around; let's send him to the war. To me that's the 'star' system, is matching up reporters –
"CHARLIE ROSE: And you brought Patrick Tyler over from Moscow and put him in Washington, --
"HOWELL RAINES: Right.
"CHARLIE ROSE: -- and people thought he was the bureau chief in waiting, but he was the guy you wanted to see on the best stories because he was the guy that you had confidence in, --
"HOWELL RAINES: Yes.
"CHARLIE ROSE: -- and you believed that the Times would get the best stories, and so that's what you did."
The only thing even resembling a tough question was this rambling, nearly incoherent challenge to Raines' assertion that it was Raines' vision -- rather than his obnoxious management style -- that did him in. And even this ended up being just another opportunity for Raines to stay on-message:
"CHARLIE ROSE: And all these things that came out of that meeting, I mean you had people -- were -- having to do with dictatorial style, autocratic – centralized power – contemptuous, dismissive, sarcastic; people felt devalued, all of that. That's not about, it seems to me, people responding to – so they are saying the wrong thing – responding to being pushed to be better than -- and setting the level of expectation too high.
"HOWELL RAINES: Yes. That's language that I submit suggests a discomfort with the cultural change that was going on inside the paper and the movement from a very comforting, undemanding culture of complacency to a performance culture. Now, I don't know every person's opinion and perception is something that can't be argued with. What I do know is that for every person who said those kind of things in that meeting I got ten or twenty letters and e-mails saying I don't agree with that at all; we're on the right track; the newspapers that we have produced over the past 20 months are the best in the history of the Times. So, you know, there are two bodies of opinion there."
Perhaps the most revealing moment was when Raines chose to take on the oft-repeated criticism that he cheapened the Times by moving sleazy pop-culture stories to the front page. Raines has been mocked repeatedly for defending a Britney Spears front-pager as a "sophisticated exegesis of a sociological phenomenon," and it's tragically revealing that -- after all that has happened -- he is, in essence, repeating that same defense now. Surely he knows he is being mocked for this kind of pompous self-justification, and surely it profoundly wounds him -- but his fragile self-conception permits him do nothing better than just keep leading with his chin...
"HOWELL RAINES: ...I want to bring up something that is often cited as -- in articles. The Britney Spears story on the front page.
"CHARLIE ROSE: That you wanted Britney Spears on the front page.
"HOWELL RAINES: What no one has reported is what the story was actually about, which is I wanted a story about the sociology of a -- that's going on in the country where we have an industry that picks a sexually precious looking young woman, lifts her out of obscurity, elevates her to a level of wealth and acclaim far in excess perhaps to her talents and then drops her like that. That says something about the sociology of the country. It says something about the business of this country -- the record business, the entertainment business -- and it speaks to -- it speaks a language the language of style and culture that the people in this country under 35 are speaking. They know a world that a sophisticated reader of the New York Times need it's be exposed to, so the Britney Spears was a sociological story..."
It's hard to know what we're dealing with here. A slick self-promoter with Clintonesque audacity and a limitless ability to bull through the most humiliating defeat by an act of sheer shamelessness and on-message willpower? Or are we looking at a broken man...? Either way, it's no surprise that Raines would want this interview to be conducted by a friend. Soon he'll run out of friends, and then there won't be any more interviews.
Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 12:11 AM | link