WP: Seeing Right Through The Times's Transparency

[DoYouEverWonder]

Thursday, October 20, 2005; Page C01

The age of the blogosphere has produced a new genre of mainstream journalism: fake transparency. The New York Times has become its foremost practitioner. The paper of record has been arraigned for arrogance so many times in the past three years that it has forgotten how useful arrogance can be. The Gulliver of West 43rd Street has gotten so spooked that now it preemptively lies down, affixes bonds to its wrists and ankles, and invites the Lilliputians of cyberspace to walk all over it.

After reading the 6,000-word takeout in Sunday's Times on the Judith Miller/I. Lewis Libby farrago in the Valerie Plame/CIA leak case, accompanied by Miller's own strangely cryptic narrative of her belated grand jury testimony, I know even less than I thought I knew before. Thinking I knew was actually more satisfying. It meant I could exude a vague insiderly outrage without having to penetrate the clues. For Arianna Huffington, the Miller story has been to her newly birthed blog, the Huffington Post, a miniature version of what O.J. Simpson was to cable news.

All the angst goes back to Jayson Blair. The fabrication debacle two years ago prompted the Times to sign on to the new censorious self-examining culture, in which journalistic institutions strive to be as transparent as religious and governmental ones (yeah, right). But not all stories are as Manichaean as the Blair debacle. The Miller epic is so complex and compromised it probably can't be truthfully told until after the special prosecutor has unloosed his thunderbolts -- and maybe not even then.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/19/AR2005101901963.html

[Cha]

1. And the washed out post should

talk because....????????????????????????

Not that they're not dead on about the nyt. It's the corporate media$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

[Demit]

3. That's a Tina Brown op-ed. Not an editorial speaking for the Post.

I think they probably know they're in a weak position to throw stones.

[Cha]

6. Sorry, see post #5!

I finally got it.

[Angry Girl]

2. About time! (Cowards! - They couldn't have said this earlier?)

[Loonman]

4. "All the angst goes back to Jayson Blair"

See, I told you so. Anyone who says the "Blair effect" hasn't demolished the New York Slimes rep is delusional. If you give them a free pass, you're willfully delusional.

[Cha]

5. I love this..

"IS THERE ANYBODY HOME?" and this..

"Such is the power of Dame Judith's mystique with Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. that his paper quotes him as saying it was Miller's "hand on the wheel" throughout the course of the legal decision-making even though his editors seem to regard her as a less malleable version of Madame Chiang Kai-shek."


That picture of miller is begging to be captioned!




No wonder..Tina Brown wrote it..sorry I didn't see that at first.

[Loonman]

7. Times lies as much as any newspaper

They're a frequent subject at Media Matters.

www.mediamatters.org