quillnews

Are elite bias and a dying MSM security threats?

In the breezes swirling around the media campfires this week, a few items caught my eye as I, like the old linotypers, began assembling a few thoughts.  All related to the declining standing of trust of two key institutions: universities & the news media, where US obsessions with image and “pseudo events” are having real effects.  Items:

Universities: 

• Jihad Johnny a Yalie: Yale’s coddling of an unrepentant fascist propagandist as a “student” is beyond belief.  No wonder this is news!  John Fund’s WSJ article about the Taliban propagandist turned Yalie here is chilling enough, followed up by the unbelievable stupid responses from Yalies who ought to know better. (WSJ, WSJ2)  Since when does Yale reward sociopathic shape-shifters with the secret Buhla hand shake?  (BG)  Or is the current crop of Langley’s “slam dunkers” trying to rekindle New Haven’s OSS (Oh So Social) roots with a ham-handed recruiting of some amoral twit?
• Sixties Dead Enders: the answer to the “since when” question above, of course, is since the Sixties.  Check out David Horowitz’s Q&A at NRO, and his new book: The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.  The delusional Vietnam-era obsession of these academics on appearing on the side of diversity and peace and justice is giving aide and comfort to the forces of intolerance and war and slavery.
• Supremes have a clue: At least the US Supreme Court knows 8-0 that the nation has a right to defend itself. (WS) Yale and the other nation’s law schools apparently don’t want to taint themselves associating with those helping to defend military institutions.  They still want US tax dollars, thought.  Quillnews view: not another dime to ingrate anti-American schools!  More witch-hunting Congressional demagoguery on this issue, please!

News media:

• Say good night, K-R: Knight Ridder rides off into the sunset with the McClatchy merger, as more community-based newspapers hit the dust. (WSJ) This further demise of the independent news media comes as the Project for Excellence in Journalism issues its annual report on the media detailing the “seismic transformation” underway in news and journalism. (PEJ, Report) One factoid: newsroom jobs declined 7% since 2000. (WP)  Quillnews fond memories: when I was growing up, newspapers were my form and context of life.  My childhood days were informed and organized by reading the Hartford Courant daily and Shore Line Times weekly.  As I got older, major Boston, New York and DC dailies would organize my daily agenda, serving as a kind of civic mass to orient my thoughts and day.  Today, I don’t subscribe to a newspaper, and the freebies tossed on my driveway go right to the recycle bin unread.  The PEJ and CPJ have excellent summary sites on all this. Quillnews question: in the context of the universities, what eager bright graduate would choose a career in journalism anymore?
• Bush 43 speech acknowledges power of pictures:  In his excellent speech Tuesday at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Bush 43 said that last December: Americans were inspired by the images of Iraqis bringing elderly relatives to the polls, holding up purple ink-stained fingers, dancing in the streets and celebrating their freedom. By their courage, the Iraqi people have spoken and made their intentions clear: they want to live in democracy -- and they are determined to shape their own destiny.  The past few weeks, the world has seen very different images from Iraq -- images of violence, and anger, and despair. We have seen a great house of worship -- the Golden Mosque of Samarra -- in ruins after a brutal terrorist attack. We've seen mass protests in response to provocation. We've seen reprisal attacks by armed militias on Sunni mosques -- and random violence that has taken the lives of hundreds of Iraqi citizens. (Speech, Fact Sheet)
• Implicit in Bush 43’s assertions is the recognition that it is the images and their overriding emotional impact that we are responding to as the war in Iraq unfolds.  The facts are one thing, but it’s the reflections of those facts in media that matter!  Notwithstanding the horror and power of the individual destructive acts of war, should it be primarily he images that we are to respond to in deciding whether to pursue one strategy or another in the war on Islamofascists?  If so, who creates the images?  Facts are a factor, but as important as to facts’ effects on immediate public opinion are the editing choices, the context and content, manufactured by the media!  As the demise of the Knight Ridder and the PEJ implies, the capacity to create those images is falling into smaller and a more focused (biased?) professional class whose get-go ideas today reflect the teachings learned in the Sixties.
• Peters to the rescue: Lt. Col. Ralph Peters again points out the truth to power – in this case the overwhelming image power of the MSM and its ability to distort the reality of war for the American people.  His article about the media myths about the Iraq war is a tonic.

Quillnews observations:  Free people are in the midst of a war against their liberty and – for reasons of market changes, technology and ideological bias – we are not getting all the facts from our established institutions of communication and education.  How are free people to make informed judgments about the course of their war actions if we don’t have the issues organized in a coherent way from trusted and unbiased sources?

A "Hoe-Ax" to the truth -- a rumination

In the tab trades, where I worked happily for years, the colors of black and white, and values of right and wrong were clearly drawn; there was a term for a bogus story that all pronounced as a "Hoe Ax".  The word of course was hoax, and it would refer to a story that The News printed that was either a fraud or a con artist's handiwork or other misfire of tab journalism that required immediate remedy.  The news editor, upon learning that the offending news item had been printed and circulated as part of the regular New York Daily News product, would yell across the city room at the top of his lungs: HOE AX.  This public display of mass contrition required that all involved in the news production from that point forward make sure that the correction box admitting the hoax or error be printed in the most appropriate position possible in the next edition so that the loyal readers of The News knew that its editors stood behind their stories, which back in the day many was considered as close to scripture as believers might see outside of Sunday.

I always thought the city room ritual of the Hoe-Ax (a Plains Indian farm tool pictured above) was a bit overdrawn but upon reflection I believe it describes precisely the kind damage that can be done to the trust between reader and writer when a lie is told and how seriously a journalist must be in protecting and/or rebuilding that trust. Because in all communication, there is nothing more important than the bond on trust between the written voice of the writer and the perceiving ear of the reader. Since the days of classic Greek theater, much of our storytelling falls into the fiction (made up events that represent a reality) and non-fiction (truth as told), and blends of comedy and tragedy. This has been the accepted narrative structure of storytelling from the get go, but with the advant of new communications technologies, particuarly film and video, a very close story telling version of the truth can be created by actors, film production techniques (camera angles, focus, edits, music, sound, pace).  The docu-dramas, instant TV dramataries that use real names and recreate notorious events for fun... this entire new area of entertainment has exploded.  Then we had the adoption of these TV narrrative techniques in the news rooms of our broadcast networks. The high culture guru of this news telling technique for broadcast news - Reuven Frank - architect of the anchor careers of Huntley, Brinkley, Chancellor and Brokaw and others, just passed away recently. Frank's original vision and discipline (from the Camel News Caravan through Huntley-Brinkley Report, through The NBC Nightly News) have been overtaken into something that today is unrecognizeable from its original intent. The New York Times, TV Week and the WSJ knew a giant has passed from the media scene.  Before Frank, TV drew its news DNA from newspapers radio.  According to a note in the Feb 7 WSJ:

Among Mr. Frank's most durable contributions to television news was his emphasis on the nascent medium's basic advantage over radio and newspapers: that it could impart information through a palette of visual techniques. "Pictures are the point of television reporting," he once wrote, as recounted in a profile of him posted on the Web site of the Museum of Broadcast Communications. He is also credited with helping imprint on the DNA of the earliest television journalists, to say nothing of their descendants, the notion that their nonfiction reports must borrow the most time-tested techniques of good narrative storytelling.

What Frank started has become so morphed in the current broadcast and 24-7 cable world, that today's "news" is vitually a new narrative form -- It ain't truth and it ain't fiction.  Who are the principles of today's news story - the celebrity achors, the audience or the so-called politician?  It's all a muddle.  It's TV in what I call: Media-ville. And its pervasive mixing and bluring of the lines between fact and fiction, truth and art, logic vs. assertion, accusation vs. proof, comedy vs. tragedy. vs. irony vs. satire and on and on and setting it all to a malange of image non-sequetors, disconnected video and out of context talking heads has become such a feature of modern communications that an old fashioned hoaxer would tell the world he made up the facts in his non-fiction narrative and believe it was all right!  In the lastest case of this sociopathic savant -- James Frey and his bid for the Clifford Irving Award for hoax bestseller, Random House sells millions of Frey's non-fiction stories to an audience hungry for authentic stories of redemption, Oprah gets knocked off her high horse for a spell when her crusading steed stumbles in what anyone with common sense could see was must a modern version of story telling's oldest cons - saying something is so when it ain't. Random House finally pulled the plug today.

As a laborer in the vineyards of the literary form called memoir, I'm sensitive to the nuances of the rules of engagement between the writer and readers of this genre. Much of my literary output in the NewsWalker series featured at columns to the right and left is memoir.  As a matter of full disclosure, these memoirs acknowledge from the outset that the words that follow represent the author's (my) best memory of events, and if there are unproven assertions, name changes, or switches in time and sequence, as the writer I know it is my obligation to say so either in the narrative itself or in the title page where all such disclaimers are placed.  Which is what I have done.  You can't make something up and say it is so when it isn't. And I never did.  I never had a problem with these rules of engagement and was simply amazed that so many of our currrent Media-ville elites like Oprah and Random House and all of Frey's addiction recovery enablers were willing to give this hoaxer Frey a pass (at least for a while).  Usually the rules for a memoir and for fiction and non-ficton are fairly well understood.  The current rules can more than covers any writer's creative muse, and give the writer enough latitude to tell his version of his story and at the same protect the reader from the assumption that everything being read is guaranteed acurate. That Frey was able to ride the current fashions in Media-ville about what goes and what doesn't just reinforces -- to me -- the wisdom of the old tabloid editors who insisted that all errors be called to account publicly, promptly and decisively.  It also points how low editing disciplines have fallen in today's Media-ville dominated by the the for-profit corporation communications enterprises. Shame on all associated with the Frey debacle.

World War II - when reporters got it right

A quote from Ralph Peter's WS account about the performance of today's media really got to me: 

We got it right in World War II, but today we cannot count on patriotism among journalists, let alone their acceptance of censorship boards. Our own reporters pretend to be "citizens of the world" with "higher loyalties," and many view patriotism as decidedly down-market. Obsessed with defending their privileges, they refuse to accept that they also have responsibilities as citizens.

His reference to World War II brings to mind the fantastic journalism that was produced by Allied reporters in World War Two and that is available from the Library of America in two volumes titled Reporting World War II: American Journalism. Vol 1. Vol 2. I began reading these books after Sept 11 when American volunteers were doing the military work I believed was absolutely necessary, but which would no doubt be difficult to sustain because of its horrors. The accounts published in these volumes about the troops in WWII are truly great. The editorial voice of virtually all of the writers stands in stark contrast to the editorial tone and content of the journalistic output by today's MSM. Amazon links are here here. 

News from the front?

AEI's Karl Zinsmeister has done it again: report facts and context on the war in Iraq that completely puts the lie to the notion that the for-profit corporate MSM are doing the job for the American people. Zins' earlier books and essays for AEI have been excellent.  Like the Civil War-era reporter pictured at left, Zins has come back to tell what he's found. Check out Zins's Q&A from his last Iraq trip. (HT: IP) Terrific.  Retired Army strategist and incorrigable staff pain-in-the-neck, Ralph Peters, continues to do his duty. This time his cover story in WS is provocative, and should cause the Pentagon planners and their commanders to go through a few more rewrites on future military strategy. Quillnews has long believed that a delusional social science cult has emerged to grip the news and production assignment desks of the major newspapers, magazines and broadcast news outlets. In my view, MSM editing judgment has bordered on sedition. Peters' focus on the dangers of the secular bias of the anti-faith global media is what I find so telling.  Choice quotes:

1. A paradox of our time is that the overwhelmingly secular global media--a collection of natural-born religion-haters--have become the crucial accomplices of the suicide bomber fueled by rabid faith. Mass murderers are lionized as freedom fighters, while our own troops are attacked by the press they protect for the least waywardness or error. One begins to wonder if the bomber's suicidal impulse isn't matched by a deep death wish affecting the West's cultural froth...  Both the suicide bomber and the "world intellectual" with his reflexive hatred of America exist in emotional realms that our rational models of analysis cannot explain. The modern age's methods for interpreting humanity are played out. We live in a new age of superstition and bloodthirsty gods, of collective madness. Its icons are the suicide bomber, the veil, and the video camera.
2. Many of us have struggled to grasp the unreasonable, even fanatical anti-Americanism in the global media--including the hostility in many news outlets and entertainment forums here at home. How can educated men and women, whether they speak Arabic, Spanish, French, or English, condemn America's every move, while glossing over the abuses of dictators and the savagery of terrorists? Why is America blamed even when American involvement is minimal or even nonexistent? How has the most beneficial great power in history been transformed by the international media into a villain of relentless malevolence? There's a straightforward answer: In their secular way, the world's media elites are as unable to accept the reality confronting them as are Islamist fundamentalists. They hate the world in which they are forced to live, and America has shaped that world.
3. It isn't that the American-wrought world is so very bad for the global intelligentsia: The freedom they exploit to condemn the United States has been won, preserved, and expanded by American sacrifices and America's example. The problem is that they wanted a different world, the utopia promised by socialist and Marxist theorists, an impossible heaven on earth that captured their imagination as surely as visions of paradise enrapture suicide bombers.  The global media may skew secular, but that doesn't protect them against alternative forms of faith.
4. We have reached the point (as evidenced by the first battle of Falluja) where the global media can overturn the verdict of the battlefield. We will not be defeated by suicide bombers in Iraq, but a chance remains that the international media may defeat us. Engaged with enemies to our front, we try to ignore the enemies at our back--enemies at whom we cannot return fire. Indeed, if anything must be profoundly reevaluated, it's our handling of the media in wartime. We have no obligation to open our accounts to proven enemies, yet we allow ourselves to be paralyzed by platitudes. This doesn't mean that all of the media are evil or dishonest. It means we need to have the common sense and courage to discriminate between media outlets that attempt to report fairly (and don't compromise wartime secrets) and those whose track records demonstrate their hostility to our national purposes or their outright support for terrorists.
5. We got it right in World War II, but today we cannot count on patriotism among journalists, let alone their acceptance of censorship boards. Our own reporters pretend to be "citizens of the world" with "higher loyalties," and many view patriotism as decidedly down-market. Obsessed with defending their privileges, they refuse to accept that they also have responsibilities as citizens. But after journalistic irresponsibility kills a sufficient number of Americans, reality will force us to question the media's claim that "the public has a right to know" every secret our government holds in wartime. The media may constitute the decisive element in the global counterrevolution in military affairs, and the video camera--that insatiable accomplice of the terrorist--the cheap negation of our military technology.

Quillnews pal Debra Burlingame again has brought common sense back to the debate about the media bias during the post Sept 11 war.  Her recent column in the WSJ nails it.  Michael Barone also has his interpretation about the narrative bias that has dominated the news judgment today.   CIA chief Peter Goss's assessment of the "very severe" damage done by the disclosure in the NYT of the NSA al-Qaeda snoop program.  (Powerline, Yahoo)  Arguments in support of the NSA program are made  but get short shrift in the NYT.  (Hayden Powerline, Gonzalez Powerline, NYT Powerline)  Finally, some serious legal talent is getting into the conversation arguing that the NYT's irresponsible story and anti-Bush campaign committed the crimes by violating the espionage laws during war time. (Commentary, WS, Powerline) Now we're talking!  Jail 'em.   

Quillnews assessment:  Don't dispair. I'm convinced that the media rules of the New Battlefield for the post Sept 11 War are changing -- for the better. James Taranto of the WSJ's Opinion Journal optimistically argues that despite the perfidy, incompetence and outright sedition shown by the elite MSM during the post Sept 11 War, the American people are in good hands: their own!  Free information, new technology, new voices and the collapse of the MSM hegemony on the pubic agenda ensures that the anti-military, pro-scandal, for-profit gossip peddlars will fail. The corrupt social science cult that has come to grip the professional journalists community in this era will be exposed for the delusional political hacks they are.  Check out Taranto's assessment of Newsweek's Howard Fineman's column on what Fineman called the American Mainstream Media Party:

Howard Fineman of Newsweek got at it in a provocative essay he wrote in January 2005, after CBS News released the findings of its independent investigation of the phony "60 Minutes" story about President Bush's National Guard service. Mr. Fineman argued that the journalistic establishment had, in effect, transformed itself into a political party; he called it the American Mainstream Media Party, or AMMP. Mr. Fineman wrote, "The notion of a neutral, non-partisan mainstream press, (was) pretty much dead... The seeds of its demise were sown with the best of intentions in the late 1960s, when the AMMP was founded . . . (ironically enough) by CBS. Old folks may remember the moment: Walter Cronkite stepped from behind the podium of presumed objectivity to become an outright foe of the war in Vietnam. Later, he and CBS's star White House reporter, Dan Rather, went to painstaking lengths to make Watergate understandable to viewers, which helped seal Richard Nixon's fate as the first president to resign. The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans. The problem was that, once the AMMP declared its existence by taking sides, there was no going back. A party was born."

Now in the post Sept 11 War, I believe we all are watching the demise of the AMMP, and its manipulators who seek to dominate the Democratic Party.  It is messy, ugly, and upsetting to those who grew up confident in the world they could see by reading newspapers and watching the daily 30 minute nightly news casts. Today our way to interpretating the world through our trusted newspapers and anchorman are gone. Like believers who watched the Great Schism when the Orthodox and Romans split, or the faithful who witnessed the post-Luther reformation, free people all are struggling to find our feet in this new media world.  The demise of the great newspapers as trusted outlets for community conversations, and the collapse of judgment and committment to balance at the major broadcast nets has been heartbreaking. But a cleansing of our communications institutions is necessary so that free people can triumph in the New Battlefield.  Stay tuned...

Message to Big Media: it's over. Question for Free People: now what?

That the elite institutions of Big Media have lost hegemony over the public debate is beyond dispute. The evidence of this breakup over who decides what should be placed on the public's agenda for discussion and what ideas and positions on these issues were respectable is evident every day and has been gathering for years.  Ratings, earnings, ad revenues, circulation figures, classified inches, stock prices all indicate declines in the forture of the corporate communication enterprises; and this says nothing about the incompetence and bias that is increasingly evident every day in the journalistic output of these enterprises. The failure of the professional jouralists employed in the Mainstream Media to comprehend and communicate the community's peril in the Post Sept 11 World only crystalized the public's growing rejection of the practices and output of the broadcasting news networks, major daily newspapers, and weekly news magazines. Today innovations in technology, new business models, changing demographics and consumer preferences have allowed new media - among them, 24-7 cable and web news, talk radio explosion due to satellite radio and pod casting, web logs, and the emergence of pop entertainers (Dennis Miller, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Oprah et al) as preferrred political and social commentators and debate arbitrators - to occupy ever more influence on the course and content of the public debate. Quillnews has been hammering this theme since its inaugural posts in 2004. Much of the energy I have brought to this site has come from my belief that this change in our communication world will have profound consequences during the War on Islamofascism and created, in effect, a New Battlefield that we as free people have yet to recognize and understand. I believe that the communications world has been so altered by technology and commerce that free people must review their assumptions about what constitutes responsible and acceptable behavior by professional journalists and their corporate employers in today's environment. (Editor's aside: My commentary on these subjects are in catetories labeled Big Media's Meltdown, News & Media-ville, and The New Battlefield at left.) Excellent posts in recent days elsewhere are Roger Ailes essay in the WSJ about the top five books on the news media, and Hugh Hewitt's essay on Columbia Journalism School in the WS. Stay tuned...  (Update: Lifson in AT) (Update2: RCP blog) (Update 3: Jack Kelly of Irish Pennants has two excellent posts of the changing newspaper market and journalism profession.)

Whose side is Pinch's New York Times on?

An earlier Quillnews post said The New York Times under Pinch Sulzberger has lost the people's trust because it no longer has the capacity to identify the people's enemy. (QN) Little did I know that Times editors and reporter James Risen would provide proof two days later: the NYT story Friday about Bush 43's approval of NSA wiretaps on Al-Qaeda after Sept 11. (NYT)  As the Times itself reported:

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

Bush 43 to his credit in an address Saturday offered this comment: 

This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security. Its purpose is to detect and prevent terrorist attacks against the United States, our friends and allies. Yesterday the existence of this secret program was revealed in media reports, after being improperly provided to news organizations. As a result, our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk. Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and endangers our country.  (Byron York NRO Corner, LGF, Powerline)

So the Times held back "some" of the information that could be useful to terroists, but admitted printing some information that was helpful to terrorists.  Okay, noted. But here's some information also held back by the Times that readers might have found of interest: that the reporter had written a book about US surveillance techniques against terrorists, and this "news" story just happened to appear in time to help promote sales of his book, being published by The Free Press, whose parent also owns CBS. (Can a 60 Minutes story be far behind?)  (Malkin, Drudge)  The "news" story coincidently also appeared on the Times front page just as Congress was considering renewing parts of the Patriot Act which Pinch opposes -- an appearance that enabled partisan pandering pols in Congress to go in high drama Friday to wave the NYT front page, demogogically demand investigations and special prosecutors and also stop renewal of the Patriot Act.  Oddly, this show of massive denial by the NYT, its echo chamber in the media and Congress, was done on a day - Friday - when administration programs had not only continued its success in preventing a second Al-Qaeda attack in the US, but also had assured the freest, fairest and most hopeful election in the history of the Middle East.   Quillnews asks: whose side is the NYT on?  Or asked another way: is the problem that the Times simply does not have a "side" in the war on terror - except its own private self-interests?  I'm serious.

Is this the end of Rico, er, Pinch?

Falling circulation, tanking stock price, product fraud and scandal, union health plans going bust…  In corporate America, such a litany of ills would be a perscription for a board rebellion, a change in executive management, a new CEO, a hostile take over...  But this is The New York Times under legacy owner, Arthur "Pinch" Schulzberger, Jr.  The must-read for the smart set this week is Ken Auletta's piece on Pinch in The New Yorker.  Zowie!  Manhattan luncheon clubs, board rooms, salons and cafes will be buzzing about this pathetic look at the entrails of the icon of Manhattan cultural and social sensibilities. Quillnews has sniffed out the Pinch Problem in previous posts. The guy is simply not up to it.  Like many a legacy prince throughout history, Pinch is proving to be, well, a problem.  As Gay Talese, author of the awesome history of The Times, “The Kingdom and the Power,” told Auletta: “You get a bad king every once in a while.” My personal favorite indicator of NYT management meltdown came during the drawn out but oh-so-justified demise of Howell Raines, a Pinch appointee.  I've sat through many a corporate session with hired company head scrinkers who attempt all manner of pop psychology tricks to get stoggy managers to deal with various business or management dysfunctions.  Some of the trendy lingo of these consultants is valuable; but most is expensive drivel. One develops a feel for what is real and what is not. Quillnews tip: A moose doll isn't real. So Pinch pulling a moose doll out at a high tension meeting between Raines and staff (to recall consultant lingo about how management needed to reform) sealed it with me. Friends of the NYT weep at this cruel turn of events for such a magnificent institution.  And it comes just at the time when the people needed clarity and vision in creating the context of public understanding post-Sept 11.  Having this twit in command of the NYT at this time of national peril has created a genuine American tragedy: the NYT has lost the people's trust because it no longer has the capacity to identify the people's enemy.

NYT & Miller: Time for a "time out"

Okay, after the Mo Dowd piece and the assorted reports about Bill Keller's admissions and confessions in employee memos... this is really out of hand.  Can the NYT have its own nervous break down in private, please?   Its one thing for wisenheimers like Quillnews, onetime competitors and full-time buttinsky's to mouth off about the NYT and its management, but for the employees and managers to go after the colleagues while they are still on the payroll and part of the company's family...?  Will you guys just handle your business, please?  Ouch!  Whose in charge here, anyway? (NYP, CQ) 

Is Judy a NOC?

That’s it: Judy Miller is a non-official cover agent!  NOCs are never outed, and always live a shadow life whose motives are never revealed.  Miller being a NOC would explain the whole – what the hell is going on here – thing: 1) Miller’s claim to have “security clearance.”  2) The ending of a CIA turf war with White House critics with key Bush and Cheney ops in the prosecutor’s cross hairs.  3) The NYT’s inability to find a story in their own news room. 4) The inexplicable admissions by legacy bosses at Times about their lack of management chops and imprecise grip at the helm.  5) Joe Wilson speaking at the SF State (!) about retreat and heroism, and admitting, as a child of the Sixties he can have no plans to run for higher office: “(I had) too many wives and taken too many drugs. And, yes, I did inhale.'”  Possible conclusion: Maybe Judy is just doing a NOC’s job of disrupting the DC political classes (including many Sixties Dead Enders and who are management morons) with mind-bending trivia while the volunteers charged with defending their country are preparing for the next battles in the Post Sept 11 War (Iran and Syria)…  Quillnews view: I dunno, of course. Just asking… It also could be that the elite institutions of Media-ville are simply run by clowns.  I used to think the root of this affair was about Yellowcake Joe’s narcissism… Now I’ll just have to add Miller’s wimpy bosses who could not supervise, as she called herself: Miss Run Amok.  (PT, WP, PL, IBA, RCP)

Wilson, Miller et al: yellowcake, schmellowcake!

Quillnews quick thoughts on Miller:

• Miller is an unusual reporter: she feels it appropriate to let her publicist handle press queries.
• Miller's handwritten notes that identified Wilson's wife contained four words: Valerie Flame Victoria Wilson... two of the four were wrong.  Hmmm.
• The Miller episode represents a failure of management at The New York Times. Miller was a difficult employee who - for some reason - Times executives refused to or could not manage and who was allowed to operate with a special hands-off status. This wasn't her fault alone - her performance and behavior was enabled by Times executives, who are led by a legacy family exec who is proving he isn't up to the job.

Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine has an excellent wrap and links on l'affair Miller. (BM)  Quillnews has never quite understood this story - we don't know enough, yet. The narrow issue of Saddam hunting for yellowcake in Niger or other locations is hardly proof of anything, and certainly was not material to any executive decision to get rid of Saddam. The entire question of Iraq's WMD procurement program, whether it really existed or was just a ruse Saddam wanted the West guessing about, was hardly the reason the US decided to get rid of him. The arguments itemized in the Senate Iraq war resolution stand; as does the obvious geostrategic imperative that the US needed to remove Saddam's unacceptable level of leverage during the war on jihadist terror over the petroleum reserves in Iraq and nearby Saudi Arabia. Left in power, Sadddam's murderous hands would hold a knife to the throat of economies of the world as China and India demanded more and more oil, and as access to Middle East petroleum became more and important, and upward pressure on world oil prices grew.  Saddam's 12 years of defiance of UN resolutions and aggression post Gulf War more than justified his removal from power.  Now in the wake of the Sept 11 jihadist attack, the US knew that Saddam's removal also could provide the US and Free World with access to adequate supplies of non-Saudi oil and that could be protected while the US and Free World paced their actions over the coming years -- waging hot and cold war in battles of our choosing -- on the Wahabbi-inspired Jihadists sustained - for now - by Saudi Arabia, upon which the world's economies already depended.  After the Sept 11 attacked linked this lethal threat by stateless jihadists with the chocking knot of geopolitical economic and security  interdependence on oil from the terrorists' home region, the peace of the world required that Saddam be removal from power.  Simple. Yellowcake in Niger?  Puh-lease!  Who cares...  (QN)

After Fitzgerald comes up with his report a lot of the preliminary chatter about what has been going on will be rendered moot. Meantime, this episode remains a convenient vehicle for the weekend food fights in Media-ville to retell the narrative that Bush 43's second term is in shambles. Again, the actual truth is another issue. For me the entire affair has always looked like the big Joe Wilson story anyway. I'm familiar with this type of guy, having watched some colleagues lose their balance and fall pray to an obsessive narcissism that can strike when careers come up short and end prematurely. (Editor's aside: I admit, this is all a bit too close to home for me. The age of downsizing got many of us boomers a bit early in the schedule. For me, writing books for RavensYard and posts at Quillnews has been enough - so far.)  Joe Wilson had his intense highwater mark in the foreign service in the 1990/91 Iraq assignment, but his career went downhill from there for some reason. His early end at State must have been hard to swallow for a flamboyant guy who had stared down Saddam and saved lives. Now in a forced, premature early retirement, Wilson just couldn't keep himself out of it, signing up clients during a K Street consulting gig, taking a make-work assignment from his wife, and then using it to inject himself center stage as a Bushie his age had his round with Saddam, about whom Joe Wilson (as evidenced by his former glory) felt a proprietary knowledge and insight. Take a close read of Wilson's role in the Kerry campaign, its abrupt end, and the 9/11 Commission report on his behavior.  For now, the MSM is focused on the unfortunate Rove, Libby, Miller, Cooper, Novak, and assembled bit players in the wake of Joe Wilson's publicity campaign about his own importance.  Quillnews prediction: when this story is finally finished, it will be about Joe Wilson wanting somebody to just pay attention to him... (Update: Excellent wraps WS, PL) (Update 2: HE) (Update 3: WP, WS)