Tom Watson

Gail 'TMZ' Collins

As he so often does, Bob Somerby takes a two-by-four to the Times op-ed page today, swatting Gail Collins with the harshest possible language - that is to say, he judges Collins' recent work to be of the caliber of the NYT's resident conservative sex columnist, Maureen Dowd.

Dowd remains a simpering ninny, spreading around DSM diagnoses about Big Major Pols. And she has Gail Collins right there by her side! In case you haven’t been keeping score, her is the breakdown of Lady Collins’ recent columns—including the massive piece of self-parody she unloosed on the world today:

Gail Collins column topics, 2009:
June 20: John Ensign’s affair.
June 25: Mark Sanford’s affair.
June 27: Mark Sanford’s affair.
July 2: Mark Sanford’s affair.
July 4: Sarah Palin’s resignation
July 9: Michael Jackson’s funeral.

As your nation struggles with monetary heists, unemployment and national health care, Collins has three major things on her mind—celebrity, sex and gossip. This morning, though, she stoops to explain the thinking of her high class:

COLLINS (7/9/09): The media, for its part, plans to continue talking about Michael Jackson for quite a while—this is the first time since the election that we feel we have everyone's attention.

Yes, it's all about you, the insider commentariat. Always has been. It's been so unfair of us not to pay rapt attention to - oh, I dunno - the massive battle over our healthcare system or those millions of unemployed Americans. Collins is a fine writer who used to walk the municipal beat in New York, and she can still swing a roundhouse, especially when she turns her often insightful 'tude toward actual news and policy. Thankfully, Jacko's death has us paying more attention.

Good Grief?

The crescendo of grief and digital group hugs over the death of pop idol Michael Jackson took down some of the Internet's top search and social networks last night. Google struggled. Twitter crashed. Facebook spun out scripting errors. Wikipedia stammered. YouTube sputtered.

In short, Jackson's death was the biggest event in the short history of social media.

The mysterious and shocking (though not surprising) demise of the King of Pop seemed to dwarf even primetime sharing moments like election night and and uprising in Iran. Last week, media maven Clay Shirky said of the Iran reaction exploding on Twitter: "This is it. The big one." And he was right - for the Internet era that was last week. This one was bigger, and here's why.

First the obvious: dying iconic pop stars trump political street battles in countries halfway around the world, unleashing a massive community of grief that will never be matched by that some of us may feel for murdered street protesters. We may think that makes us something less than a responsible, attentive society. But it's not going to change.

So beyond the MJ icon thing, why did the news hit with megatonnage for social media? For one, the sudden spread of such cultural momentous news hit the network in the late afternoon and spread like wildfire. Huge events like the presidential election and the disputed Iran election unfolded; Jackson's death hit like a bomb.

For another, the rapid adoption of social networking among older users - ie, people who were Michael Jackson fans in his prime - made venues like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and news search sites like Google the media of first choice. I suspect that many people used their phones to tune in, or kept cable TV on in the background while jumping into the global conversation on the social networks.

So everybody had something to say - and they all wanted to say it at the same time. Then too, the very nature of sites like Facebook allow the easy sharing of media; Jackson videos were everywhere last night and the sheer volume of footage shared online had to set some kind of record.

But there's another reason as well - the personal nature of social media. I think my friend Peter Daou got at the core of it with his quick Tweet after the news broke yesterday: "With the loss of anyone famous what we're really mourning is the passage of our own lives, their death a marker on OUR journey."

A Truly Offensive Lineman

Oh that crazy Brad Benson and his brilliant one-liners about waterboarding the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.

If you listen to New York radio, you may know the name: a former New York Giant lineman (All Pro in the '86 Super Bowl year), Benson now runs stupefyingly stupid ads pitching Hyundais from his car lot in Jersey. Yes, I know that car spots featuring the owner do not exactly comprise an advertising category populated by evident intelligence, commercial wit, or even decent posture.

But even among his "Come awn down!" callin' peers, Benson has managed to find the low mud-sodden point on the field. The car dealer, whose previous spots bragged that he's sworn off sexual intercourse "until we're the number one dealer!" (a silver lining for someone, we're certain), is now joking about the definition of torture to move a few imports off the lot.

Hey let's talk waterboarding! You know, Nancy Pelosi says one thing, the CIA says another - maybe we should just waterboard them all and get the real truth. And while there will be no waterboarding at Brad Benson Hyundai, I've taken a vow of celibacy until we become the no. 1 Hyundai dealer in the country.

What a card. Think I'll test drive a Sonata. Anything to help the former Giant out of a jam. This time, Benson assures listeners, he's "begging" for sales because "this celibacy is killing me."

In fact, ole Number 60 says he'd "rather be waterboarded by Nancy Pelosi herself than undergo another month of celibacy."

I bet he would! Two birds, one stone, methinks.

Ink-Stained Retching

For journalists of a certain vintage, these are the days on the digital horizon that were long-feared and yet somehow unanticipated. The newspaper world is slowly asphyxiating, starved for the oxygen of classified advertising and simultaneously kicked in the chest by a massive recession that is hastening the tombstones in the graveyard of newsprint. The 148-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer will publish its final print edition this week. Huge cutbacks were approved by the staff of the San Francisco Chronicle in an attempt to save the 144-year-old daily. The Rocky Mountain News in Denver closed last month. The publishers of the Minneapolis Star Tribune and both the The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News filed for bankruptcy. The Christian Science Monitor has abandoned print, for a small online operation that keeps the name alive - for now. The survival of even The New York Times is openly debated.

I could go on, but it's too painful. I come from a newspaper family, and worked as a reporter and editor for more than a dozen years, before peeling off for the allure of my own digital printing press in the 90s. I love newspapers, and I've always believed that they're central to the American version of representative democracy - a stalwart check on the power of government.

Yet even with ink in my veins and newsprint in my DNA, the patterns are changing 'round here. On the days that I commute into midtown on the train, The Times is an absolute and granite-carved morning habit. Liberated from its blue bag and advertising inserts at the station, the pattern is as unyielding as the order of the stations: the A section in the Bronx, sports by 125th Street, business in the tunnel, arts and lifestyle at a glance before hitting the platform. But on the days when I work from home - and even on Sundays - much of the paper arrives in the medium I'm typing into right now, and it often arrives via feeds or links from blogs and aggregators. Further, I'm often found reading commentary and reaction about stories in the Times before I've actually read the stories themselves.

Crowdsourcing journalism is all the rage, but the idea of its widespread ascendancy and competence is the exclusive province of either deranged optimists or ideological cyberlibertarians; the vast populace will never produce great journalism - or even sufficient journalism of the kind that has nurtured our republic - any more than it will perform surgery on a widespread amateur basis, or turn out competent oil paintings by the millions.

Yes, occasionally brilliant exceptions will be appear; the tools available for creating and disseminating great stories will be put to good use by people with the talent for reporting and telling those stories. But the journalistic print edifice will be not be replaced - in my view, there will be no great metro bureaus, no overseas reporting staffs, no full-time investigative teams, no cop house reporters, no City Hall beat. A network of thousands and thousands of young reporters taking notes and asking tough questions - and then writing up their reports in public, for the public - at thousands and thousands of school board and town council meetings on gray Tuesday evenings all around the nation will begin to fade.

The Internet has been a destructive force for many business models, but none threatens the basis of the  republic as much as the digital knife busily sawing at the fraying Achilles tendon of American newspapers.
As an editorial in the Spokane Review (rather plaintively) asked:

"So as newspapers die, it's worth considering the effects on society. Who will tell the people what their institutions are doing? Who will ferret out the corruption? Who will fend off the legal challenges to public information? If no viable alternative emerges, what does that mean for our representative democracy?

Author and NYU professor Clay Shirky wrote a grim and all-too-accurate assessment of journalism's dire strait, a piece that  really places no blame but captures well the doomsday formula now unfolding:

The unthinkable scenario unfolded something like this: The ability to share content wouldn’t shrink, it would grow. Walled gardens would prove unpopular. Digital advertising would reduce inefficiencies, and therefore profits. Dislike of micropayments would prevent widespread use. People would resist being educated to act against their own desires. Old habits of advertisers and readers would not transfer online. Even ferocious litigation would be inadequate to constrain massive, sustained law-breaking. (Prohibition redux.)

As Shirky says, this is not something that proprietors of professional journalism failed to see coming - and they've tried almost every model for revenue generation that came along over the past decade and a half. All have failed. Case in the point: the Times, which gets an amazing 20 million visits to its website every month and still can't come close to touching the revenue of its wounded print sibling. And aggregators from Google to the Huffington Post shave that slim online revenue even further.

The models just don't work - nothing online sustains a newsroom of 100 reporters and editors working in a beat system. Cut and paste works online. Endless commentary works online (but only pays the aggregators, in most cases). Endless links work. Newsrooms do not. As Shirky writes (correctly in my view) the casualty isn't so much the newspaper (and the companies who operate them), as it is the journalist - and professional journalism itself. And that is a huge loss for society that no one should be welcome with glee (though some digital triumphalists cannot seem to restrain themselves):

Print media does much of society’s heavy journalistic lifting, from flooding the zone — covering every angle of a huge story — to the daily grind of attending the City Council meeting, just in case. This coverage creates benefits even for people who aren’t newspaper readers, because the work of print journalists is used by everyone from politicians to talk radio hosts to bloggers. The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model. So who covers all that news if some significant fraction of the currently employed newspaper people lose their jobs?

I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’re collectively living through 1500, when it’s easier to see what’s broken than what will replace it. The internet turns 40 this fall. Access by the general public is less than half that age. Web use, as a normal part of life for a majority of the developed world, is less than half that age. We just got here. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen.

Craig Newmark, creator of the ubiquitous classified network that has hurt the newspaper model, argues that "we need to experiment a lot more" on ways to support the kind of journalism now getting pink-slipped. But I have to say: we've all been making that argument since the mid-90s. The experiments are legion. Yet the corps of full-time paid journalists is shrinking rapidly, and their work cannot be replaced by bloggers or posts on Facebook, as much as may enjoy those social media forms. I was talking with James Wolcott about this earlier this week and he made a great point - who's going to churn out all those important but relatively small-scale exposes on bad government contracts and neighborhood graft, the kinds of pieces regularly published by the tabloids and small city dailies? As Bob Stein writes, apropos of reporting's demise: "For journalism, the goal has never been cosmic verities but everyday truth."

Last year at the Personal Democracy Forum, NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen gave a talk about the rise of semi-pro journalism that took in some of the still-arrogant attitude of "old journalism" and its resistance to going to way of the dinosaur. He adapted the talk for his blog:

We are early in the rise of semi-pro journalism, but well into the decline of an older way of life within the tribe of professional journalists. I call them a tribe because they share a culture and a sense of destiny, and because they think they own the press— that it’s theirs somehow because they dominate the practice.

The First Amendment says to all Americans: you have a right to publish what you know, to say what you think. That right used to be abstractly held. Now it is concretely held because the power to publish has been distributed to the population at large. Projects that cause people to exercise their right to a free press strengthen the press, whether or not these projects strengthen the professional journalist’s “hold” on the press.

That hold is slipping every day. Yet some of Rosen's set piece, his construction of the central tension in the story, now seems quaint, only nine months later. The attitude of recalcitrant old print journalists doesn't matter any more in this season of shuttered newsrooms. It's not about old journalists versus the rising amateurs. It's about the disappearance of one of the carrying beams of our democracy and what, if anything, will replace it - and the loss of that "everyday truth."

UPDATE: Over at the WiredPen, Kathy Gill has a thoughtful response. She agrees that there is nothing on the horizon to replace newspaper, even while arguing that newspaper-owning companies aren't generally motivated by the public good (true) and that democracy hasn't exactly thrived under the model now disappearing (true, to a degree). These viewpoints are also echoed in some the comments here. Yeah, newspapers aren't public and the big dailies are indeed run by large corporations. But my response is this: that in no way mitigates the loss. Small-scale experiments in online reporting - and we're in 2009, a full 15 years into the mainstream commercial Internet - seem more like the exceptions that prove the rule. What we lose with newspapers is the commonality - that "place" in cities and towns where a good percentage of citizens gathered around news and opinion and recipes for pork chow mein. And Clay Shirky is right - it's a big loss, and there's nothing that can be done about it.

UPDATE II: Will Bunch gets to the heart of an aspect of the "distributed, super-wired world of citizen journalists with blogs will replace newspapers" argument that has been bugging me as well: it's anti-blue collar to its core. Posits Bunch: "I'm trying to point out the unique challenge of preserving journalism and the vital exchange of public information in a Rust Belt city like Philadelphia. A Web-only newspaper might work in the home city of Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Starbucks. In the home city of....lots of civil servants? Not as much. I agree that printed news is a little like dirty bathwater these days, but you can't throw the baby -- a unique, non-transferable readership -- out with bathwater.

Dow-Bound Train

Last Friday as the public markets completed a 40-percent loss year over year in reaction to the still-roiling worldwide credit crisis, some observers took the Wall Street cataclysm as an opportunity to play a little politics. Witness the sage editorial writers at Investors Business Daily who used their years of market savvy and investing experience to pinpoint the real reason for the collapse....wait for it...a near-certain Democratic victory in three weeks.

...right now it looks like the U.S., which built the mightiest, most prosperous economy the world has ever known, is about to turn its back on the free-enterprise system that made it all possible.

It isn't only that the most anti-capitalist politician ever nominated by a major party is favored to take the White House. It's that he'll also have a filibuster-proof Congress led by politicians who are almost as liberal.

Throw in a media establishment dedicated to the implementation of a liberal agenda, and the smothering of dissent wherever it arises, and it's no wonder panic has set in.

No wonder indeed. It's creeping socialism that sowed the panic, not over-leveraged mortgage securities toppling into the crater of a real estate valuation sinkhole. Oh, noooooooo. That bunch of energy-saving bulbs at IBD have it pegged to worries about electing a liberal, never mind that the supply-siders themselves threw unfettered, unregulated capitalism under the bus these last two weeks.

Cue one Jonah Goldberg, as ever a leading crankonomic indicator of dwindling blogospheric consumer confidence. Under the headline, The Obama Discount, Goldberg soared to his usual standards of reportage:

I have no idea whatsoever if there's merit to this, and if there is how much merit, but lots of email like this:

When are people going to start talking about the REAL reason the markets are down - Obama up in polls. If I was McCain, I'd start telling people, "If you want to lose more money, vote Obama."

Of course, as Glenn Greenwald points out today, none of these loonball Obama/Dow theorists are crediting today's all-time stock surge to the continued high polling of the Democratic ticket.

Could it perhaps have just a leeeetle bit to do with the leadership of one massively-noggined Brit, the dour Prime Minister Gordon Brown (and by the by, this fancy Cameron chap seemed dashed cranky about it), who went all Keynesian on George Bush's ass with a limited nationalization of the British banking system - a move now being parroted by the rest of Europe and by the Americans as well? Yes, the threat of socialism really tanked things today, old sod.

And what a cherry on everyone's economic sundae this morning: the news that the bold Paul Krugman had won the Nobel Prize for Economics. The Hillary-loving enemy of the supply siders wins world acclaim in the year of Obama, and just keeps on blogging. Good on 'im.

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Old Media Habits Never Die, They Just Fade Away

Several years ago, I found myself across a table from Chris "Mad Dog " Russo and Mike Francesa wearing headphones and speaking into a microphone about baseball. The setting was their annual charity fundraiser and our company was involved in online fundraising, but for a moment or two Russo and I got into a bit of  patter about his beloved San Francisco Giants and my New York Mets (as I recall, Bonds & Company had just left town after losing two of three at Shea). The friendly sports banter - I think I actually said the words, "first time, long time, Dawg" - was enjoyable and the duo kept it moving along.

In truth, Mike and the Mad Dog, which ended its 19-year run on WFAN in New York last week after Russo left for satellite lucre, was a fixture in the daily lives of thousands of listeners like me - background spoken-word sports song over five or six hours every day - so when I sat down across from them, I knew the drill. Besides, how shall I put it ... Francesa and Russo are, ah, without evident talent. That's not to say they're not good. They are. But it is to say, they come across as regular sports fans - the guy you argue with on the coffee line, the guy in the seat next to you. They are approachable; a bit more versed in statistics and match-ups, sure. But in general, not stars.

Yet together, they formed the highest-rated sports talk show in radio, virtually inventing the form over their sometimes rocky partnership. They were a habit: Russo, the scattershot nasal whine, and Francesa the dese and dems New York growl. Their best moments were either interviews with newsmakers, their effective double-team in play, or when they talked about subjects unrelated to sports - often with hilarious results. Who can forget, for example, Russo's earnest questioning of Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, who he repeatedly referred to as "Jose."

Undoubtedly, as many commentators said last week, they won't enjoy the success separately that they did as a team. But it's okay. Nineteen years is a good run. And besides, my media habits are changing - the order is rapidly fading.

At WFAN, Imus referred to Francesa and Russo as "Fatso and Fruit Loops," and it was the I-man who fell from my dial first. After his disastrous rant last spring, I lost the habit of cranky and offensive morning humor - leavened with grasping, ass-kissing media and political figures - and didn't lock in his new slot on WABC. Maybe it was the incessant promotional spots for Rush and Sean Hannity. Or maybe I was sick of the shtick and my own willing blinders. The habit faded.

Next up was MSNBC, long the favored cable outlet of liberals. But a clear bias against Hillary Clinton in her historic run for President, a gleeful rooting against the most prominent woman politician of our times, and repeated sexist jibes had an eventual effect on my clicker. Chris Matthews' spittle-flecked lips and Keith Olbermann's clownish and unhinged Edward R. Murrow imitation had their inevitable effect. The habit faded.

The Times op-ed page is now fading fast. Time was, that was real estate worth investing in. But the paper's right-wing sex columnist Maureen Dowd proved far too offensive over the long haul, and Frank Rich grew theatrically cartoonish in growing into a mere Clinton-hating imitator of Dowd. Then they hired William Kristol. I still look for Krugman and the occasional Gail Collins. But the habit is fading.

So I spend time with memeorandum and the blogs, more time with recorded music and less with radio - except for the brilliant In Our Time with the BBC's Melvyn Bragg. For the longest time, I ran my media consumption vehicle through the same rutted lanes every day. Then, things shifted and I went off road. And we're back.

New York Times Right-Wing Sex Columnist Maureen Dowd Is Censured

Last November, I wrote to the public editor of The New York Times about the sickening behavior of one its star op-ed columnists, Maureen Dowd:

Mr. Hoyt,

I am well aware that opinion columnists in The Times are granted  more leeway in their writing than reporters. Even so, tomorrow's Maureen Dowd column on the sexual roles of the major Democratic candidates for President is well beyond the pale for a family newspaper, and for any paper of national repute that claims to be a major voice of the republic.

Her explicit and wholly imagined "account" of the sexual motivation behind how the candidates behaved in a televised debate brings nothing but shame to the Times, and betrays the newspaper's long-held responsibility for public discourse. Her two-bit "analysis" of a specific sexual fetish as the reason for the candidates' lively give-and-take during the CNN debate coarsened that discourse and the reputation of The New York Times.

How can a paper like The Times continue to run these strange sexual imaginings week after week and refer to them as political coverage? What a disgrace.

Sincerely,

Tom Watson
Mount Vernon, NY

I got no response - until Sunday. As Greg Sargent at TMP said, "it was pretty gratifying to see that Times public editor Clark Hoyt weighed in yesterday with a piece aggressively attacking Dowd's coverage of the Dem primary." Hoyt's attack on Dowd was tough, to the point, and stingingly effective - how can her letter of resignation not be on editor Andrew Rosenthal's desk this morning, after the thorough ethical knee-capping her own paper delivered?

Dowd's columns about Clinton's campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.

"I've been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years," Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as "Obambi" and has said he has a "feminine"management style. But the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton - in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 - left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective.  

Over the course of the campaign, I received complaints that Times coverage of Clinton included too much emphasis on her appearance, too many stereotypical words that appeared to put her down and dismiss a woman's potential for leadership and too many snide references to her as cold or unlikable. When I pressed for details, the subject often boiled down to Dowd.

[snip]

Politically correct is never a term one would apply to Dowd’s commentary. Her columns this year said Clinton’s “message is unapologetically emasculating,” and that she “needed to prove her masculinity” but in the end “had to fend off calamity by playing the female victim.” In one column Dowd wrote, “She may want to take a cue from the Miss America contest: make a graceful, magnanimous exit and wait in the wings.”

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.”

Aulisio, the reader who wanted a review of Times coverage, asked if a man could have gotten away with writing what Dowd wrote. Rosenthal said that if the man had written everything Dowd had written over the years and established himself as a sardonic commentator on the sexes, “I’d say the answer is yes.”

Of course, there is no such man, and I do not think another one could have used Dowd’s language. Even she, I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.

That folks, is utter editorial slaughter - the destruction of the columnist's reputation within the halls of the very newspaper she writes for (and it did no good for editor Rosenthal's rep, either). But, as Digby said so well, Dowd had it coming - and for a long, long time:

...the question isn't whether she should have treated Clinton any differently. It's that her entire worldview is toxic, both culturally and politically. She uses explicitly sexist and homophobic imagery that favors traditional authoritarian leadership to explain politics. She gets away with it because she has a rapier wit and is a physically beautiful person, thus insulating herself from the kind of criticism others would receive for writing this crud. But in truth she's a walking anachronism, more like a character in Mad Men than a modern sophisticate.

She is considered by many to be the top political columnist in the country (and her columns are often the most emailed articles in the Times.) Certainly she is Village Royalty. And that is undoubtedly one reason why people like Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson felt that it was perfectly acceptable to say the things they said during this campaign. She's their misogymuse.

It's long past time Dowd was called on this by someone other than filthy bloggers like me. This is a decent start, but until people realize that her "twisting of gender" is anything but benign good fun, we're going to be stuck battling this nonsense back no matter what kind of appendages our candidates might (or might not) be sporting.

This is a welcome development in the nation's leading political newspaper. As long-time commenter Bruce B. says, Dowd's behavior toward Senator Clinton was "despicable."

UPDATE: As Bob Somerby notes, Hoyt gets results. But what a take down!

My Alma Mater Is Sold...

My degree is postmarked Morningside Heights, but I really went to school in the Bronx. As the greenest of rookie reporters, I found myself at a gun metal desk next to a chain-smoking managing editor one warm day in the summer of 1984, supplied by the proprietors of The Riverdale Press with a notebook, a telephone and a typewriter - and a small stipend they creatively labeled a salary. In truth, I could have paid them to work at The Press and still remained ahead in the bargain, for it would be difficult to find a better education in the practice and ethics of journalism than to toil as a youngster in that smoke-filled room, and on the streets of Riverdale and Kingsbridge and Marble Hill in the northwest Bronx.

But more even than journalism and its practice, that education stamped me with the permanent ink of experience in the whirling struggle of  real people, from mayors and prosecutors and party bosses to teachers and cops and business owners. After a year or two in the newsroom of The Riverdale Press, nothing in life was sociological theory ever again. Everything was real. And that was the great lesson: as a journalist, you were playing with real people's lives - and those lives, by and large, were a struggle, whether they lived in a mansion overlooking the Hudson River in the landmark district or in a drab apartment off a graffiti-stained hallway stinking of stale urine in the housing projects.

Lord, the times we had! As my friends know, I sometimes sound like Scrooge recalling Old Fezziwig's when I start in on those Bronx years - but could there have been a better place to report politics in the late 1980s than New York's only mainland borough? It was a world of picaresque venality and larger-than-life personality. And that was just the politicians: our crew at the paper had some cherished characters as well. And I recalled some of my friends from an earlier age when I read this week that The Press has been sold, particularly Ceil Stein, who founded the paper with her husband David in 1950 and passed it to her sons. I remember Ceil, who worked at the paper till she as 90, standing in front of the charred offices that terrible day in 1989 when the newspaper was firebombed by terrorists into smoldering ruin. Offices destroyed, computers melted, morgue a smoking cinder. And we didn't miss an issue. I always chalked that up to Ceil Stein's evident willpower.

Buddy Stein won a Pulitzer for his editorials a decade ago, and he and his brother Richard have always kept the paper to the highest standards of community journalism - and it was they who provided that education to this green-gilled amateur a score and some years ago. So when I read about The Press being sold to Richner Communications, a fine outfit based in Garden City also run by two brothers who carried on their parents' tradition, it was like the last notes of a long song finally fading into the dusk. But what a song.

Now This Is Funny

Via hilzoy:

And yes, they were serious. The Lincoln-Douglass debates - hee hee.

Wolcott v. New York Times

It's Jim, for the win:

Shorter New York Times editorial: Hillary Clinton's ruthless insistence on winning big-state primaries with traditional Democratic voters only hastens and strengthens the case that she drop out of the race and let Barack Obama finish his waffle.