Here I go

This has run its course.


Let me introduce, however, to my favorite blog, called Unbiased Eye. Check it out.

Judgment Day Is Upon Us

The paywall approaches. Slowly, the New York Times has been changing the links on the website. It's just a naming convention that reflects the way the Times servers find the files that are displayed on your browser.

Web sites do this from time to time for various reasons, but you wouldn't be doing it when you're about to do another big change to the web site. They're doing it slowly, timidly lest something break. And there was the first vague target of after New Year's, which was moved to the end of the quarter -- just two or three weeks away.

I understand their desire to be cautious. Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation looked like bunglers when when their new online paper, the Daily, was delayed a few weeks. Consequently, it's reasonable that the paper is tight-lipped about the date, and about the terms. It was amusing to read the Times's public editor complain about the lack of news in his column a few days ago called "The News You Didn't Read Here".

Surprise! The Times is a for-profit corporation that doesn't want to screw this up. I also imagine it wants to make the most out of readers' habits. News reading, I'm afraid, is a habit for many. I don't know if user surveys and focus groups even ask if people read the paper because they always used to read it. If I were the Times, I wouldn't want people to think about it too much. They are going to allow casual readers see a few stories every day. They've got numbers to pore over, but I don't know if the numbers will tell them what passes through peoples' minds when they idly click on something. A click doesn't mean that the clicker is thinking, Sure, I'd pay 50 cents to read this (or whatever the cost would be).

What is surprising is that the Times's competitors don't say anything. This is a pretty good story, but no one is able to dig anything up. There's really not much to be done if the principals have no motive to say anything.

The outcome will be interesting. I think the decision is likely to bite the Times, but at the same time show how valuable the news is. That may sound paradoxical, but if the Times can't make this work, they will have to pull back, and then we'll all lose something, and we won't like it -- at least I won't like it -- but I can't afford to shell out $20 and $30 each month for all these businesses with their hands out. Of course, if they succeed, they'll be heroes to every publisher in the Western world.

Wall Street doesn't seem enthusiastic about this, either. After a spike in the stock price when the Times announced its quarterly results, the share prices has been sagging. To me, advertisers don't seem too impressed either. Some days there's a fair amount; other days it's almost all house ads.

It's been a long wait. Publishers have been considering this move for a very long time. In 1996, the Times ran a news story that said, "Recently, publishers including Time Warner, The Wall Street Journal, a unit of Dow Jones & Company and The New York Times Company have all said they would soon begin charging for some of their Web site information." Read it. What allowed the Journal to charge, and what stopped the rest of them?

I understand that no one can afford to keep a slew of people scattered around the world to report on civil war in Libya and the tsunami in Japan out of the goodness of their hearts. But no one is going to guarantee publishers a big profit just because they're publishers and once printed newspapers.

My hunch has always been that the news has tremendous value to many people, but that the newspaper is archaic. In almost 20 years, the publishers have been fooling around with putting a representation of the paper edition on the web, grudgingly accepting some Internet conventions. They're doing an OK job with the 24-hour idea, which of course the wires, radio and television have done for decades. But no newspaper has quite become an Internet operation.

In the past two months, I've read the paper closely, and I see that it's still much the same collection of news and features that cost 50 cents back then. I threw most of the pages out then unread, and it hasn't changed. Back then we didn't have a choice. It was all or nothing. The situation is much different today.

The most interesting thing about my experiment is how much I liked doing it. The focus on the one newspaper started to feel stale. My interest in what's happening in the world soared. I like writing these pieces, and I like researching them. I've decided to regroup and start a blog that's not constrained by one narrow question. My last piece, on Tuesday, had nothing to do with the Times, but a lot about the news. I'm preparing a couple of new pieces, and I'm setting up a new venue. I'll post a note here when the new site is ready, this weekend.

Oh, will I buy a Times's subscription? It depends. Does the Times have so much that is unique and important that I will need to read it in order to make sense out of events? What do you think?

On Selling One's Body

Something happens to a person when he or she has to sell himself in order to survive. They lose their dignity; they look wormy and ugly. They lose their moral compass. Even when it's all talk.

Today, I had the dubious pleasure of watching two videos showing middle-aged white men in suits panting at people with money, acting their seductive best. We saw it only last week in the famous Scott Walker telephone call.

The more recent video showed an NPR fund-raiser hustling a couple of fake Muslims from conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe's stable of actors in an expensive Washington restaurant. This one was all over the place by mid-day Tuesday.

The earlier one was a very short, surreptitious recording of Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown hustling David Koch for campaign contributions at the dedication of Koch's new cancer research center at M.I.T. This one had to be searched out from left-leaning sites and television shows.

In the edited down version of the video linked above, the NPR fund-raiser, Ronald Schiller, says a bunch of things that are basically true, though a bit startling. He says them in a way that would be palatable to people he thinks are a couple of wealthy Muslims. He's trying to sell them on NPR because they had dangled a $5 million contribution to NPR. (As a sidelight, it's weird why he doesn't ask why a rich Nigerian is tied up with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood.)

This sort of thing is what happens when public organizations have to hustle for foundation contributions to stay alive. Not just NPR, but every research lab, every college and university, every arts organization, all of them and more. (If you're not familiar with business lunches, take a look at the two-hour version of the video. They're dreadful.)

It's really no different than what you see in the few seconds of the other video -- on Scott Brown begging Koch for money for 2012. Unless a person has Bloomberg-scale millions of his own money, this is what he has do most of the time to keep his job.

The real moral of these two videos is that money talks.

I know that the debate is raging over the attack journalism tactics. Maybe they're not dignified but they're telling us something important.

I also know that more debate is raging over Schiller's words, especially what he said about racism on the right. That's another story, and I believe it is an example of what Eric Holder, the attorney general, meant when he said we don't really talk about race. People can behave racist, but no one speaks the word -- that's forbidden.

What's to be done?

I have two suggestions:

1. If you listen to public radio, or watch public television, send them a check. It's your station if you want it.
2. If you vote, avoid the guy who raised hundreds of millions of dollars to buy a lousy senate seat. It's your country if you want it.

Left Brain, Right Brain

The hoary distinction between the analytical and artist halves of our brain is having a field day.

Superfast computers seem to be challenging the very essence of humanity, brushing aside the classic debate about personalities and which kind you might be. The question has morphed into can a machine think? Does it have art?

The recent debut of Watson, IBM's game-show machine, has aroused a flurry of attention. Reading the Times closely, as I have been since January, gives us a stand-in for the larger debate out there.

On the one side, you have a cheerleading reporter like John Markoff, reveling in the triumph of Watson over a couple of human Jeopardy champions. Note that Watson doesn't play any television game show, but only Jeopardy. That's an important point. Markoff had another piece a few days ago in an intermittent series called Smarter Than You Think, this one about software that searches law cases, and therefore eliminates billable hours by law firms (sounds implausible, eh?). In both cases, he claims that the machine's accomplishment has something to do with human language understanding -- as in the movies, from HAL on through to the malevolent Skynet in the Terminator movies.

On the other side, you have philosophical objections like those from Stanley Fish, in the Opinionator, and his reinforcements, Sean Kelly and Hubert Dreyfus. Dreyfus wrote a famous critique of artificial intelligence 40 years ago, in which he argued that machines executing programs don't do what people do. These two supply some critical insights into artificial intelligence when they allude to the facts that machines do not have motivations, and that machines don't joke. Read Watson Still Can't Think to see how they put it.

The Times editors betray something of a bias here. While Watson's victories occasioned big coverage, there's no hint on the front of the digital Times of the existence of a short item in the Bits Column that a human has beaten Watson at Jeopardy. It was even a politician who did the trick, and a Democrat at that, Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey. Of course, in former lives, Holt was also a physicist at Princeton, but really more to the point, he was an actual Jeopardy winner -- five times in the 70s.

I say good for Holt, but he's a special case. My favorite Jeopardy player is the character played by Rosie Perez in the movie White Men Can't Jump. She plays the vodka swilling girlfriend of a two-bit basketball hustler, who spends her days memorizing the Almanac because Jeopardy is her "destiny."

Imagine your conversation with her, and then try to imagine a conversation with Watson. Play by Watson's rules: you always go first, and give the machine turned around Q&A's. Think Watson will figure out what's on your mind?

The Sixth Deadly Sin

If the New York Times is going to take Charlie Sheen at all, it is going to take him seriously.

The paper was not satisfied with the attitude toward Sheen, unlike its earlier coverage and unlike the rest of us. The only way to explain the near universal fascination with such a privileged and stubborn fuck-up like Sheen is the old sin number six, envy, which Dante called one of the forms of perverted love. And lest our efforts here be considered frivolous, we can remember that Dante was not talking about theology, but about his fellow man, real people, contemporaries, his enemies in Medieval Italy. I suppose we could find a scholar of Italian literature to explain the back-story to the cantos that touch on envy, but we'll be satisfied with just knowing that The Divine Comedy was catty.

The story with the headline of "Sheen Is Surrounded by a Coterie of Enablers" takes the high road of self-help. It discovers that a rich, handsome celebrity is surrounded by a group of money-grubbing hangers-on, or enablers in the parlance of self-help.

I think it's an underrated problem that big shots are almost always surrounded by yes men, and if the big man stays drunk, does drugs constantly and loves whores, they are the last people on earth to be appalled. I've seen this dynamic in every office I've ever worked in, every classroom I've ever suffered through, every party I've ever gone to. Yes, people suck up.

If you ever need a boost, go to a clothing store that has salesmen and try on a few things. All men customers are suddenly handsome and women beautiful.

But we need significance, as usual. So the story explains, "While bad behavior by star performers is tolerated in a number of industries -- sports and high fashion, for example -- Hollywood has a longer public history of aiding and abetting addicts."

Indeed. A drunk can run a studio into the ground, but if he's an executive who makes decisions. No one calls upon actors for decisions (unless they're voters). They are symbols. They're not supposed to do anything but pose and make the rest of us envious. No one should have to explain why such employment can make a person self-indulgent and irresponsible.

Unless they're consumed by the seventh deadly sin -- pride -- and tend to put on airs and pretend to be above it all.

Sunday Under the New York Times

I tried several times to read the Times on the web, and I can't.

Was it Frank Rich's absence? He was supposed to be there this week and next before he jumps ship to New York, but there's a terse note that says he's taken the week off. Maybe I should, too.

First off, the news is too depressing. Strictly speaking this isn't the Times's fault. I'm overwhelmed by the fighting in the Mideast. To me, that part of the newspaper is the best. These are current reports of what might (but might not) be a monumental turn in history. Sure, I'm annoyed by some excesses, but over all, the effort is awesome. The only trouble is that the wires are doing similar things. It's difficult to rate the offerings against each other.

After the Mideast, the stories go downhill fast. It's disconcerting to read the Times on the web because all the lightweight features keep moving around the front page. It's now you see it, now you don't. The stories remain on the websites, but they are hard to find unless you've saved the URL.

I read about Mitt Romney early, and wrote about it. I don't want to read about a campaign so far in the future, and I especially don't want to read a stenographic account of a candidate's speeches to prospective donors.

Here are some of my rejects:

• Maybe Woody Allen needs to hear that psychiatrists have turned away from Freudian therapy and the talking cure, but I've known that for years. I also know that shrinks long ago turned to drugs, heavy-duty anti-psychotics and mild, soothing tranquilizers. I could look up in two minutes how many billions of these drugs the big drug makers have sold. The Times Story
• Ten percent of the people are left handed. Not much is known about this asymmetry. It's a good thing medical science is pursuing this because you never know where curiosity will lead. But I don't really want to read an update that quotes a 2007 study that says, "This is really still mysterious." The Times Story
• I caught a glimpse of a sports story about weighing high school freshmen for their professional sports potential. I'm not a sports fan, and I couldn't get a fix on the story's point of view, other than the suggestion that something's rotten here. Though I saw a line that Yahoo reported this first, and so I guess this is old news. The Times Story
• How about what Al Sharpton eats for breakfast? Need I say more? The Times Is On It
• One of the most amusing stories was about shark fin soup. The Chinese like the soup, but the sharks are suffering in a big way, and California state laws may be passed to save them. The Times likes these culture clash stories, and so do I, but they have to be exotic. The only trouble with this is that it's a month late. By waiting for the Times to deliver this tidbit, we on the East Coast are missing the beauty of the web to deliver the news from anywhere, in particular the San Francisco Chronicle. The Times Story

You can see how quickly a read can be worn down, but it's Sunday. We have the prime columns.

Maureen Dowd is there, dishing on "tiger blood and Adonis DNA" though she denies it, in a profile contrasting the old Jerry Brown with the new, as governor of California. Both Tom Friedman and Nick Kristof drop in with tortured discussions of what may or may not be wrong with Arab culture. They are more polite and more reasonable than the right-wingers, but even their instant expertise isn't really more helpful.

Long ago, when I bought the Times on paper every Sunday as if it were a religious observance, the Magazine was the prize when we separated the paper into piles of what would be read and what could be thrown out immediately.

The Magazine is under new management, but it sure looked the same as it did during last two new managements. There are a mess of short, chatty features, just like the ones they replaced. There were two long stories. I started the one about Lori Berenson, who was caught up in the troubles in Peru during the days of the Shining Path and the Túpac Amaru movements.

Those groups fought a murderous ideological war against Peruvian society, and Berenson was arrested and jailed for 15 years as a colloborator of the latter. She is cast as a gentle soul, a vegetarian since the age of 8. I don't know if an injustice was done to her, and to what extent she helped friends in the Túpac Amaru, but if the story of one middle-class American woman is worth this 10-page article, what should be written for the 70,000 Peruvians killed during years of violence?

My Secret Plan to Quiet Mitt Romney

I wonder if many of you remember Richard Nixon's secret plan to end the war in Vietnam.

Tricky Dick was going for his second term and campaigned hard on this secret strategy to bring the boys home from the jungle death trap. He couldn't say what it was because, obviously, it was secret and had to be kept from our enemies.

The silent majority must have felt sorry for Nixon because they gave him the benefit of the doubt and voted him back in over McGovern. Nixon, after all, had inherited the war from Johnson, who, by the way, was the peace candidate in 1964. It's confusing since everyone is for peace, just as everyone is for democracy, and just as everyone is for jobs.

What's all this got to do with today's headlines and the New York Times?

The Times is running its second, unless I've missed one, big feature on the candidates for 2012, those sad yet hopeful characters who will spend the next two years trying to figure out what we want. This one is on Mitt Romney, who the story says, is going to bet on jobs. He says he knows how to create jobs because he is a businessman.

The writer waves away last week's real jobs report, which shows solid growth, and quotes Romney saying, "I like President Obama but he doesn't have a clue how jobs are created." No one asks Romney how he explains this job growth.

I agree with him. I like Obama. And I don't believe Obama knows how to create jobs. But that's not where it ends. I don't believe anyone knows how to create jobs, and I don't think it's possible for a human being in the White House to decree an economic recovery and have one materialize. Economics give us a puzzle that remains out of reach for the human mind.

But Romney's logic is ridiculous. A businessman is someone who knows how to sell something and make a profit. He has to decide what to sell, figure out how to get it made and advertise it so that you and I will shell out real money to buy it. A businessman who tells you he is in it to give you a job is a liar.

In general the Republican argument for almost everything is ridiculous. The answer to every problem is always the same: cut taxes, and do some other stuff to repair the allegedly damaged moral fiber of the country.

The real problem is the media's refusal to do their jobs. Like most political reporting, there are a lot of words in a steady stream of sound bites but no attempt to make candidates say exactly what they mean.

You read halfway down the story and see that "so far Mr. Romney has offered few specific details beyond general Republican philosophies, saying only that the country needs 'to believe in free enterprise, capitalism, limited government, federalism.'" I decode statements like that into this: Read no further.

So here we are, almost two years away from Election Day, describing in great detail what Mitt Romney sounds like. At least I haven't read in the Times a lot of complaining about the early start to presidential campaigns.

To Quiet Critics, Romney Puts 2012 Focus on Jobs

Kochspeak in the Times

Journalistic coup or public relations placement?

What do you make of the Times's exclusive interview with David Koch, the friendlier, East Coast Koch? David Koch and his older brother Charles don't often appear in the news, and they don't often give interviews. They prefer to be known by their names appearing on the honor rolls of numerous big charities.

Yesterday, the Times scored a brief, and rare interview with David Koch at one of the socially desirable charity functions that rich people are wont to attend by virtue of their huge gifts. It sets them apart from you and me. Their peers, as well as the recipients of the largesse always applaud the featured donors. The story played on the top-level web page, but was on Page 12 of the paper version.

The occasion yesterday was the opening of a new research center at M.I.T. that will bear Koch's name. He gave the center $100 million. A trifle for a multi-billionaire, but vastly more than the $43,000 the Kochs' political action committee gave Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, which is why Koch is talking to the reporter. The Kochs' support of Walker, who's out to bust state employee unions in his state, became big news in the last few weeks, and the Kochs don't like it.

They counter by entertaining a few questions, the answers to which are recorded and published. The follow-up interviews in the article went to the doctors who benefit from the largesse. The doctors' work, of course, is a good thing, and it's perfectly understandable that the doctors are grateful. But something's amiss. It's rare that a single charity contribution gets 1,300 words in the Times.

As for Walker, oh, the Kochs don't really know what he's up to there "more than 1,000 miles away" from Cambridge, Mass., where the reporter caught up to Koch. The article doesn't dwell on the money that the Kochs gave to Walker, but quotes Koch as saying only a small portion of his donations goes to politicians. He complains in the article: "I read stuff about me and I say, 'God, I’m a terrible guy,' And then I come here and everybody treats me like I’m a wonderful fellow, and I say, Well, maybe I’m not so bad after all."

If you want to get a feeling for the big picture about Koch donations to all sorts of things, and the Koch's motivations, there was an excellent article in the New Yorker in August:

Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama. It was written by Jane Mayer, a former Wall Street Journal reporter now on the New Yorker staff. The Kochs refused to talk to her. I think they know how to choose their shots.

Maybe that's ancient history to the Times.

But Koch does respond to the famous phone call Ian Murphy, the editor of a tiny website in Buffalo, N.Y., who impersonated David Koch and got through to Gov. Walker when no one else could. Koch now says it was "identity theft".

In discussing the call, Koch himself explains the reason all this is important. Although the writer of this story soft-pedals it by pointing out twice that Koch was joking, Koch's one sentence is the essence of the role of money in politics, and a rather clear contradiction of Koch's assertion that he has no idea about what these little politicians are doing.

He told the Times: "I was thinking to myself, My God, if I called up a senator or a congressman to discuss something with them, and they heard David Koch is on the line, they’d immediately say, 'That’s that fraud again — tell him to get lost!'"

Oh, if that were true, what a great public service Ian Murphy has done!

But don't count on it. Those senators and congressmen will
answer the call.

A New Strain of Smug

A gushing story on temperamental chefs appeared in the top center spot of the main web page yesterday afternoon, and was still clinging to the front page at the end of the evening.

It read as if written by a masochist who enjoys being sneered at by artistic cooks. As the story says, "New York has spawned a breed of hard-line restaurants and cafes that are just saying no." And then proceeds to listing a series of faux pas that make snobbish owners and chefs sneer at their customers.

Almost 20 years ago, Seinfeld made fun of the cringing esthetes buying soup in the famous "Soup Nazi" episode. Maybe some of the prohibitions make a sliver of sense -- like not offering takeout espressos. But most of these rules are beyond the pale, like policies of no substitutions and no instructions to the kitchen. So if you won't eat undercooked brussels sprouts for $50 a plate, you won't eat at all. The writer calls this accessorizing to the customer's taste.

This sensibility has gotten out of control. Successful people are ceding control of what they like to eat to obnoxious cooks who might turn you out into the cold night because they are offended by the appellation -- they are chefs, they will tell you angrily, and that means they are filled with artistic temperament. And if you don't like what they cook, they way they cook it, screw you.

The story celebrates a perverted pride in submitting to these petty tyrannies.

Am I overreacting? Do I miss the arch irony? I think not. The headline writer got it right: "Have It Your Way? Puritan Chefs Say No Way", which is a riff on a series of fast food ads from the not-too-distant past. It's your choice: McDonalds, or these heavenly cooks.

I say liberate your ketchup if you want.

At Home With Gail

I've been wondering for a long time just exactly what it is that makes me dislike Gail Collins's columns.

I admit that the wry, folksy tone is not to my taste, but I try to resist reacting on such subjective things.

But there is one thing that never fails to drive me up a wall: Nonsense.

After the first few lines of her last effort, Girls and Boys Together, I came across the line, "I got married when I was 25, and I felt as if that was extremely late in the game." I looked over at the head shot immediately to the left of this passage and saw a woman who's got to be a decade or more younger than I. I remember what she cloyingly calls the Mesozoic era quite well, and tbe reality was the exact opposite. Since she appears to be in her 50s, maybe even her 40s, her claim is pointedly nonsensical.

I checked and found that she is actually around my age. Still, she's a 60s kid. I also found that she has a good education and has worked in journalism from the beginning. She's clearly bright and liberal in politics and social values -- in other words a solid citizen of the East Coast intelligensia. And as such, this feeling weird about being an old maid when she was young is bull, unless she was completely out of it then. By 1970, the year she married, hardly anyone her age married, and the few that did split up right away. Gail and I were young at the same time and grew up in the middle of several social revolutions, all of which looked askance at marriage and other family values.

There's another too cute passage, but the rest of the column is an excellent, informative report on a federal government report on the status of women. I wish the news pages were filled with such clear, direct and economical stories.

I wondered what the readers made of all this, and I started reading the couple hundred comments. I was floored by a stylistic detail in them: Not only were they long and fulsome in their praise, almost all who addressed her, addressed her as Gail. That has such an odd ring in the Times, which may be the last English speaking place to use honorifics.

What then are her fellow columnists called? Her partner in something called "The Conversation", David Brooks. He is Mr. Brooks to his fans. Moving along to the others, Krugman is often Professor Krugman. Blow is Mr. Blow. Friedman is Mr. Friedman. Cohen is Mr. Cohen. For some reason, Douthat is Douthat. There are also variations and exceptions, but I'm not going to do a count.

Maureen Dowd, the other female columnist, would be the real test. Her fans hesitate, evade and avoid. When pressed against the wall, some call her by her full name, but it seems she isn't addressed directly very often. (Though, in truth, I noticed one Maureen in the latest batch, and there might have been one Roger among Cohen's fans.)

Maybe the readers, or at least the commenters among them, betray a subtle sexism. Maybe Gail invites familiarity with her warm and fuzzy intros. Maybe Dowd is more threatening. Not being a Times writer, I cannot read minds and cannot explain this.

The Winds of Democracy Reach the Magazine

I missed it, but what of it? Those magazine stories are so, so very long that I rarely can get to the end. I didn't see the editing credit and emails there.

It seems that the new editor, Hugo Lindgren, has changed the policy so that editors will get credit at the ends of articles, and that both writers and editors will have to provide email addresses.

I'm of two minds on the first reform. On the one hand, it's a bit of a revolution for all those nameless souls who toil as editors at all the lower levels, from the the copy editors on up to those functionaries who talk directly to the people at the highest levels. On the other hand, it sounds a bit like the film industry, which is so glamorous that even the people who fetch lunch are named in the end credits.

Thanks to Adweek for noticing this development in the previews to this Sunday's Magazine.

Long ago, I loved two publications above all others. One was the New Yorker before Tina Brown reversed the direction of the earth's spin to make Hollywood rise in the East every morning, and the other was the Sunday Times Magazine before Adam Moss turned it into a knockoff of every other glossy in the city. Thus began my retreat as a paying customer of journalism, way back in the early 90s.

Now, that I'm engaged in this exercise reviewing the daily newspaper for a few weeks, I've read that Lindgren was planning big changes for the Magazine and as the enemy of my enemy is my friend (symbolically, of course), I had hope.

Lists of people who will be leaving their posts are all over the place. All the departures seem like good ideas to me. I hope he's not going to be immersed in trivia such as email accounts that in all likelihood will never be checked. I mean what glam magazine writer wants his iPhone bonging away all through dinner at some trendy restaurant?

But wouldn't you know it. There's one email that I cannot seem to find anywhere in magazine articles: Hugo Lindren's.

Where Are the Popular Kids Now?

The Mideast coverage is dropping out of the top 10 lists at the Times, as was probably inevitable. The story is multifaceted, difficult, and above all uncertain. There is a probably a principle of diminishing returns in what readers get out of ongoing coverage of even the big stories, and maybe even an emotional reaction of "enough!"

When I noticed this decline in popularity of the Mideast story last night, I wondered whether newspaper audiences were the same all over the country. I was surprised that they are all distinct: It was worse inland from the coasts.

With a broad brush, I'll draw several very tentative conclusions. I'll give you the more detailed comparison down at the end of this post. They're fascinating.

• The New York Times, and the LA Times, are the only ones whose readers kept any Mideast stories in the top 10, not even the Washington Post has any.
  
  
• The readers of the Times favor more of a daily magazine, with more columns and more analytical pieces in the top 10, but a magazine with a Yuppie cast.
  
  
• The New York Times readers don't bother much with New York stories. In fact, I found the Long Island attempted murder story I wrote about earlier this morning in the Washington Post most-popular lists.
  
  
• Some of the smaller papers in between the coasts are like another kind of magazine in that their readers gravitate towards celebrities and sports topics much more.
  
  

Much of this might be expected, but my survey lacks a clear idea how the different publication do their tabulations. I don't have enough information to make sense out of any one paper's lists. I don't know what information they track and how they count it.

Without knowing the relative sizes, say of the number 1 story to the number 10, they are meaningless in terms of an internal comparison. Without the absolute numbers, there is no explaining why some stories seem to stick on the list for days and others come and go.

As far as the methodology, there are different ways to collect clicks and to count them. It looks like the Times collects detailed information, but there are many subtleties.

But interpretation is still difficult. For example, what happens if I start a story at one time and go back to it later? Under what circumstance does that count twice? What happens if I walk away with a Times page on my browser and don't return until after work? Does it imply that I read the story thoroughly and pondered it, or that I walked away with a shrug?

For one thing, the most-emailed list is worthless to me. I suppose the idea is that a story emailed from one reader to another has a special value. But the data are far too biased to have any meaning at all.

The Times has an "email this story" button, but there's no need to use it. It clutters up the email I send to friends so I use the browser function to email the link. If you don't use the Times's button, the Times's logs won't show it as emailed. And finally, no matter what level your technical sophistication, the Times has no clue about your motivation. Maybe the staticians tell the news executives those are inconsequential and will average out -- just the way the Wall Street quants knew the housing market would fall into the chasm that it did.

There's another important issue: Does popularity determine the play of the stories? Different papers say different things. I was thinking that this might be the time for me to get on the phone and ask them, but I that the Times did a good story itself in September on this issue.

The fact is that stories move around all over the front of the web page all day long. Stories appear on the web often hours before the print version is laid out. Does popularity matter?

I think we could answer that with a long-term statistical study of the most-popular lists and the play of the stories, but it would require a long time because we don't know the details of the lists. But if you read the story from September, the answer is clear that they do -- somewhat.

Read the Times's executive editor, Bill Keller: "The New York Times does not use Web metrics to determine how articles are presented, but it does use them to make strategic decisions about its online report," according to the story.

Keller is quoted thusly: "We don't let metrics dictate our assignments and play, because we believe readers come to us for our judgment, not the judgment of the crowd. We're not 'American Idol.' "

Then the story says, "Mr. Keller added that the paper would, for example, use the data to determine which blogs to expand, eliminate or tweak."

I agree 1,000 percent, to borrow a quote from the 1972 presidential campaign. It's carefully worded. The metrics don't dictate, they influence. That's how I read it. It could be a politician talking about his wealthy contributors. I think these lists and the way it looks like the news is following such audience surveys can destroy the news and turn it all into the smiley banter of early morning TV.

I just hope they're god-damn careful about how they interpret the metrics. The consequences could be very bad for them, those people on the Times payroll, and for us.

Here is a most informal comparison done yesterday evening:

The New York Times:

1. Live Blogging the iPad 2 Announcement
   
2. Thomas L. Friedman: This Is Just the Start
   
3. Justices Rule for Protesters at Military Funerals
   
4. A Good Appetite: Once a Villain, Coconut Oil Charms the Health Food World
   
5. Op-Ed Contributor: Why Your Boss Is Wrong About You
   
6. Basics: Natalie Portman, Oscar Winner, Was Also a Precocious Scientist
   
7. Can Exercise Keep You Young?
   
8. Go Easy on Yourself, a New Wave of Research Urges
   
9. Jobs Returns to Introduce a New iPad
   
10. Rebels in Libya Win Battle but Fail to Loosen Qaddafi’s Grip
    

The LA Times

1. FDA orders 500 cough and cold drugs off the market
   
2. Senate approves stopgap funding measure
   
3. Yemen leader reportedly reaches tentative pact with opposition
   
4. Rights group takes a step-by-step approach on gay marriage
   
5. Lakers seeking payback against the dreaded Bobcats
   
6. Wisconsin recall efforts spread to Senate Republicans
   
7. California's Indian casinos slowly recovering from recession
   
8. Serena Williams has pulmonary embolism and 'unexpected scare'
   
9. With stopgap funding bill passed, budget sparring resumes
   
10. Serena Williams suffers pulmonary embolism
    

The Washington Post

1. Obama signs short-term spending bill, averting federal shutdown
   
2. Lt. Gen. John Kelly, who lost son to war, says U.S. largely unaware of sacrifice
   
3. Supreme Court rules First Amendment protects church's right to picket funerals
   
4. NY police: Gunman intended to commit mass murder
   
5. Obama's 'Where's Waldo?' presidency
   
6. iPad 2 specs announced by Steve Jobs today at Apple event
   
7. Charlie Sheen's Twitter following grows; actor reacts to losing custody of twin sons
   
8. Five myths about Ronald Reagan
   
9. The TV Column: Charlie Sheen keeps talking; CBS gets in on the conversation
   
10. Midwest union battles highlight debate over improving schools
    
    

The Miami Herald

1. Miami Heat finally conceding that Big 3 is not enough
   
2. Miami Hurricanes walk-ons are ‘heart and soul’ of team
   
3. After Kirby Hocutt’s departure from UM, only questions remain
   
4. Miami Police officer under arrest for alleged fraud involving non-profit education group
   
5. Miami Heat’s Dwyane Wade adjusts to lesser role late in games
   

The Dallas Morning News

1. Christina Aguilera
   
2. Charlie Sheen
   
3. Kamala Harris
   
4. Serena Williams
   
5. Ralph Macchio
   
6. iPad 2
   
7. Christina Hendricks
   
8. John Galliano
   
9. Bristol Palin
   
10. Josh Holloway
    

The Chicago Tribune

1. Live sex toy demonstration held on NU campus
   
2. Flee Partyers seem right at home behind Illinois' Jell-O Curtain (it's a column about the Wisconsin Democrats hiding out in Illinois)
   
3. More minorities moving to suburbs
   
4. Steve Jobs emerges from medical leave to unveil iPad 2
   
5. Serena Williams at home recuperating after pulmonary embolism, hematoma
   
   

The Many Degrees of Murder

All murders are not equal. In the news in general, and the Times in particular, only a few murders actually make it into public view. Murder, in general, implies some intention, a minimum of planning, that varies from one state's criminal code to another. Many kinds of killing by one human of another are not murder.

Most murders, I expect, are done by the criminal underclass, and are almost universally ignored in the media. On the other hand, you can understand that certain murders are automatically newsworthy, like murders involving celebrities, politicians and other headline names. And recently, all too often, murders with political motives, that is, terrorism.

But there are murders of a special class.

These are done by people who look so normal. Like the woman in a middle-class suburb of Tampa, Fla., who shot her two sweet teen-aged children to death in January. This one is worth good play and 1,600 words in the Times.

I wonder, then, why is this old murder worth attention? The standard editor's response begs the question: It's news judgment. But I think I can explain. A story like this sends a cheap shiver up the spines of other middle-class people because it could happen right there in their own peaceful communities, with good schools, maybe a golf course, just like Tampa Palms.

The point is not lost on book publishers and authors with vague literary ambitions. Together they turn out scores of these true crime titillating tomes.

I think the most economical way to convey the tone of the article is to quote chunks of it. I hope this doesn't run afoul of legalities of the Internet.

The community is stunned. The story says, "But in recent weeks, the residents have become all too aware of how deceptive surface appearances can be. On Jan. 28, the police arrived at a two-story house on a quiet cul-de-sac in Tampa Palms to find Julie Schenecker unconscious on the patio, blood on her white bathrobe. Inside were the bodies of her two children, Calyx, 16, and Beau, 13."

It goes on: "Since the killings, neighbors, teachers and others who knew the family have struggled to reconcile the outward trappings of a picture-perfect suburban life — the car pool, the soccer games and track meets, the Christmas card photos of a beaming couple with their two handsome, popular, high-achieving children, the family weekends spent boating or skiing — with an act so dark that, as one neighbor, ... , put it, 'there’s no words to describe it. It was stunning, unthinkable.'"

But no Times story about people is complete without a touch of psychology: "Yet such extreme violence rarely comes out of the blue, and since the killings, fragments of information have surfaced that hint that the family’s veneer may have covered a more turbulent reality." It turns out that the suspect had a car accident in November. (She drives a Mercedes, by the way.) Investigating officers noted signs of drug use.

Since there's a hint of some systemic oversight, for example, some failure by society to recognize the warning signs, it's typical to get academia involved.

The story continues, "Forensic researchers who have studied mothers convicted of killing their children said that such women often leave a trail of clues behind them." It continues quoting Cheryl L. Meyer, a professor at Wright State University, at length.

What does it all mean? The story says the suspect will likely plead insanity.

Suburb’s Veneer Cracks: Mother Is Held in Deaths

---

Meanwhile, much closer to home, and probably more than few steps down the socio-economic ladder, we have a most curious wire story.

A heavily armed man who luckily crashed his pickup truck on Long Island before he did too much damage. He shot an emergency medical technician who went to the accident scene, but was shot and killed by the police soon after.

The suspect was so heavily armed, with six weapons and ammo strapped to his body, that the police said he appeared to be on his way to carry out a mass killing.

From the map, it looks like he was on a local street, but like most of Long Island he was close to one of the highways leading into the city.

I checked the New York tabloids and they had the same scant wire story, which did not include the suspect's name. The tabloid did, however, allow comments, and some readers immediately suggested that the suspect had an Islamic name. The comments alone don't feed that anti-Islamic hysteria, but the uncharacteristic politeness of the media invites it.

Here's the Times editing of the wire.

---

A look at Long Island Newsday provides some answer: At least the motive and a name.

"The family of the man, Jason Beller, 31, of Commack, who was killed in a shootout with police, Wednesday night described him as 'extremely troubled.' They offered an apology to ... " the EMT worker who was wounded, Newsday said.

But few of us will know more, for Newsday sits behind a paywall that very few of us who don't have Long Island cable television ever pay to get behind. Newsday is owned by the cable company, which provides an online subscription to subscribers. Beyond them, almost no one else ever bought the paper that once advertised that it was dedicated to "truth, justice and the comics," when the paper's former owners had ambitions to compete in the New York. The Times respects that.

A precis from Newsday

To Greener Pastures

The news burst today that Frank Rich was jumping ship and heading to rejoin his old friend Adam Moss at New York Magazine.

By lunchtime, Google's index had located more than 400 stories in the media and on the Internet on the personnel move. That sounds like an outsized reaction for a story that didn't make much of a splash in the Times.

Rich has, for another two weeks, a prime spot for political pontificators in his weekly column on Sunday. He trades this for a monthly column and some indistinct role at New York.

Of course, Rich and Moss, New York's editor, are very old friends. In fact, it was Rich who introduced Adam Moss to Joe Lelyveld, the former executive editor at the Times, and got him hired as a consultant with indistinct responsibilities. Moss was out of work and couldn't find a spot in the magazine world of New York after he spent the two years leading a new magazine 7 Days into the ground in 1990. According to contemporary accounts, Rich rescued Moss, who then went on to head the Times Magazine and later to New York.

Now, the Times is certainly very much alive if not well. It's also doubtful that the motive is money, because there's simply not that much swirling around the publishing world. But money's not the only thing of value in the world.

A year ago, two of Rich's fellow columnists, Tom Friedman and Maureen Dowd, were identified as members of the faction that tried to hold off on a Times paywall. They didn't like the dramatic loss of readers that accompanied the Times's earlier experiment with charging for content.

Rich, who is perhaps more astute in office politics, wasn't mentioned in that context. But I don't imagine he relishes a dramatic loss of readers. And a second failure in an effort to wring subscription fees out of the Internet audience would look really bad. Bad for the writers; bad for the paper; bad for the stockholders.

Also by lunchtime, the Times issued its first quarter report to Wall Street. There was some slight improvement in financials (and the stock jumped over 3%, and the executives promised that the paywall is close, very close.

Perhaps what goes around ... and Moss is rescuing Rich.

Out of Its Depth

There's something sad about the Times when it tries to cover gossip. It cannot bring itself to be as sharp-fanged as gossip requires, but it has some vague sense that it must keep up with the competition. It gets caught crossing the road like a deer in the headlights.

So the big deal of the week is the fashion designer John Galliano, a 50-year-old man who may be the only man to wear his own clothes, and his dismissal by Christian Dior for a drunken rant or two against Jews. The story still on the front of the web page this morning is a think piece on whether Dior can weather this storm. It acknowledges the naked power of the actress Natalie Portman, who endorses or advertises, Dior's perfume; she said she was disgusted by Galliano.

Reader, forgive me but I don't quite get the fashion business. I have seen some high fashion on TV, and in the last two days plenty of photos of Galliano all dressed up for Halloween, but I have no clue about the connection between these and the Dior products I have seen in department stores. Fashion is something that governs how far off the ground are women's hems and how wide or narrow are men's lapels and ties. It changes mysteriously -- though the motivation is clear, for example in the plot of the movie Zoolander. The mechanism that governs these changes bears no relation that I can see to the costumes on the runway.

The sidebar in the Times to this looks like a fairly common type of story in the Times. With its headline At the Bar in the Galliano Case, Silenceit promises one of these floundering attempts to get underneath a juicy story, but no one will talk to the poor Times reporter.

The story strains a nuclear metaphor beyond the limit, though it doesn't work: "Nobody here was talking about it. Nobody would even talk about not talking about it. So radioactive was the atmosphere Tuesday at La Perle," it says.

But then the story moves on to quote three people, two by name, about the story. Technically these three were not inside the bar but sitting outside, where customers actually occupied the tables on a winter night. But then they didn't have much to say, either.

Compare all this the viciously catty piece that made up the the New York Post's Galliano offering today. The reporter unmasks Galliano for painting on big muscles on his body a few years ago when he was claiming to be a body builder and athlete. She writes: "... you know, when you use a darker shade of fake tan to do contouring. He wasn’t really buff or ripped — his arms were pretty spindly."

The moral at the risk of being Timesian myself: If you can't tell jokes, don't try.

---

Where Page One Meets Page Six

It's a gloomy late winter afternoon, when I turned back to the newspaper to see what was developing.

It was strange to see an Oscars story in the Science Section, and stranger to see it extolling Natalie Portman's high school science achievements: She was a semifinalist in the Intel science competition. Now in terms of high school parents ambitious for their children's future, victories in what the kids call the "science circuit" are a big deal. But in the grand scheme of things, I say, Big Deal. Portman became famous as an actress, starting her movie career in her preteen years. She also attended Harvard. It's a little unclear what she studied, or studies, and whether she graduated, but that's not important either. She's a very fine actress, and it's clear that's what she's chosen to do. And we're told, she's "gorgeously pregnant," which may be a little more than I needed to know.

But the story surges forward, not sure whether it's talking about actors with brains, or just about Hollywood. The standout scientific mind in Hollywood was Hedy Lamarr, who actually invented something, as the story mentions. It also a couple of lesser Hollywood figures, and finally getting around to Leonard Nimoy, who wasn't a scientist but played Mr. Spock on Star Trek.

---

Moving on to the Dining section, there's a story about junk food, with pictures of a 75-year-old man eating barbecue and a 92-year-old woman eating fried chicken.

But the Times's idea of junk food turns out to be peculiar: "We eat everything we like. Any kinds of eggs, blini, any good red or beluga caviar with crème fraîche, cheesecake, chocolate soufflé with whipped cream, crème brûlée, filet mignon, pasta with pesto. Aileen drinks Lillet, and I’m vodka and tonic. We drink as much as we can." The speaker is one Nancy Cardozo who shares a house with Aileen, and both are in their 90s.

The dubious assumption on which this story stands is that somehow one whiff of rich food can strike a person dead, while at the same time the existence of some individuals who eat, drink and smoke anything they want into old age negates the standard spartan medical advice.

---

Lastly, one story that clung to the front page of the web Times was the piece about the firing of John Galliano. I skipped this in my first read of the paper because I didn't know who he was, other than he had something to do with fashion since Dior had done the firing. Everybody had the story; most didn't give it this kind of attention.

The firing was about a drunken argument the designer had with a couple in a bar in Paris last year. Someone, of course, pulled out one of those odious cameras, probably in a phone, and recorded the scene, and later gave to the British tabloid, the Sun, dooming Galliano, who apparently tosses off anti-Semitic remarks with some regularity, most recently last week, which the Times and everyone else reported then.

In the video, Galliano says, "I love Hitler ... Your mother, your forefathers would be fucking gassed and fucking dead." (That's a composite quote -- the Times didn't have dirty words.)

What distresses me about this, in addition to the Times's fascination, is the absence of history in our culture today. This is not exactly the Times's fault, but it shows up in the serious stories, as well as stuff like this. Although it may well be the bottle talking, Galliano, who is gay in a business with many other gay men, perhaps should pick a different hero in view of the fact that the German Nazis killed the homosexuals first in their campaign for the master race.

---

Omniscience in Midtown:
Cudda, Wudda, Shudda;
Some, Many, Most

In all corners of the globe, the far-flung Times staff can tell us what might have been, what surely might happen. Me, I prefer what did happen.

When I look at a front page filled with that stuff, I find it easy to pass up, and I never compelling.

Here's a roundup, an old newsy term to be sure:

• We are told that's it's a good thing that a deal between the U.S. and Libya in 2003 eliminated the threat of Qaddafi building nuclear weapons. The very notion -- how good it is that a person of Qaddafi's stature doesn't have nukes -- is painfully obvious. I don't know, the only interesting thing in the story is unwritten. If only the U.S. had shown such perspicacity in dealing with Iraq in 2003. But that falls under the sigh-ful category of wishful thinking, and is not the problem at hand.
  
  
• We are told that the Chinese leaders have their own efficiency to thank for averting a democratic upheaval in their country. The story is basically built on two observations: 1. that there were Internet chats urging citizens to rebel, and 2. that Mid East events "have cast doubt on the staying power of all authoritarian governments." I don't know about you, but I have trouble discerning the motives and intentions of the handful of people with whom I am in close contact. A story of this type, with one wave of the hand, pretends to have a crystalline assessments of one billion individuals. Just think for a minute of the hysterical, foolish and anonymous comments that appear on the web, appended to many news stories and blogs. Do they all reveal the minds of all Americans?
  
  
• And we are told, in case we have forgotten the dreaded prospect of a government shutdown, that some Republican congressmen seem willing to shut it down. The story refers to 1995 when the esteemed Republican radicals did just that, saying that was "a memory many hoped to leave behind, along with beepers and episodes of 'Baywatch Nights'". This too cute flourish signals that we are in the presence of literature, but the article quickly devolves into an ordinary collection of quotes by politicians.
  
  
  For some reason, I was struck by the interview with Todd Rokita, a new Republican from a very safe Republican district in Indiana. Todd, it seems, thinks his 70 percent margin in a district that his party usually wins big, means people are clamoring for change. The thoroughly white district snakes around Indianapolis, and so is probably suburban and rural. I suppose he has never tried to apply his logic . If you shrink the government, you are going to throw some people out of work. If you throw someone out of work, he or she is not going to run out to Walmart to celebrate and buy a bunch of stuff. Walmart will, therefore, earn less. If enough people are thrown out of work, Walmart will have to throw some more people out of work, which it will do without nice political considerations. What then, Todd? But despite the hype in the paper, I don't think this shutdown will happen. I think that the more senior members of Congress like their jobs too much.
  
  

Safe Sex, Times Style

There's nothing like sex to liven up a story, or a stuffy, serious news report.

Usually, it's a politician caught with his pants down, a situation which often, but not always, is a career-ending event (and I'll never understand why a hooker can sink one official and not every official with whom they go to bed.)

Today, the Times devotes 1,300 words and two sort-of-sexy photos to Senator Harry Reid's suggestion that Nevada outlaw prostitution. This got scant attention when he made the remark several days ago. The big political story about Reid and and his home state was in November when the Tea Party failed to knock him off. As a state issue, it was dismissed out of hand. Whores pay taxes, too, people said.

The writer of the Times story says, "It is unclear what motivated Mr. Reid at this moment." I don't know either, but I'm more curious about why the Times is curious.

I just don't find his remark so stunning. Nevada politics is not exactly his turf. I would guess he spoke as just another Nevada citizen. I find his point of view reasonable. When one thinks of Nevada, one thinks of gambling, marriage and divorce, glitzy entertainment, and maybe the legal whorehouses. How does that compare to the finance and fashion image of New York City? Or Boston with its universities and technology industries, or Michigan with its auto industry, or Texas and its oil?

What does a Nevadan say about his home state? "I come from Nevada and we got whores," or, "We fleece tourists and send 'em on their way." In dismissing Reid's comments, many in Nevada seemed to say that legal prostitution is the one bright spot is a dismal employment picture. They sure do sound like a third world country, touting its tourism.

Meanwhile, I found an interesting, and serious, item about Nevada in the Las Vegas Review-Journal on voters who prefer taxes over budget cuts.

Here's the opener:

CARSON CITY -- Most Nevadans disagree with Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval's plan to avoid tax increases in large part by cutting education and social service programs, a new poll shows.

How's that for a cup of tea?

Take Julia! Take Julia!
Take Anybody!
Just Turn Off the Oscars!

Reading the news gets me down. It's depressing and distressing. I think a large part of that is because we read about horror, about injustice, about stupidity and cupidity, and we are powerless to do anything about it.

Then we get a strange interlude. We have this hateful thing I'll call the Oscars extravaganza. This is the side of the Times that tries to be all things to all people. To me, the Oscars phenomenon is best left to the bars, and wine-and-cheese-parties, to television and fan magazines (online or off), to Twitter, to Facebook.

Because it's in the Times, does it make the Hollywood hype intelligent? Perhaps the Times thinks you will applaud the message because you are faithful to the messenger.

Furthermore, do you need the Times to supply the fun break you crave from the terrible knowledge of the world outside?

I see in the Times the kind of thing we all admire right below the Oscars headline: A thorough look at hydrofracking, which is a controversial way for energy companies to get more natural gas out of the ground but perhaps only at a dangerous environmental cost. The Times shines when it uses its resources to obtain and digest volumes of federal reports and make sense out of them. But when the Times plays it second to the Oscars -- on the digital version -- it's telling you, "don't worry; be happy."

The Last Harumph on Libya
You Wish

Yet another in a seemingly endless series of news analyses about the Mideast.

I could do without this summary of fears, in particular about the violent upheaval in Libya. The facts, as we know them, have already been assembled in the Times, on PBS, in other papers: Libya is tribal, Libya's army is weak, and so on. Like many an analysis in the paper, it looks to the future to ask questions that cannot be answered. It is as if they are trying to write history before the event.

Besides being boring and tedious they consume the publishers resources and distract curious readers. Once again, the analysis is presented above real reporting that tells us something: Stranded migrants in Libya, an account of the people stuck in the crossfire of war. In this case, poor black African migrant workers who came to Libya to earn some money, and found themselves targeted because they look like the black African mercenaries hired by Qaddafi.

No, Not Gingrich

Treating Newt Gingrich with respect as "one of his party's most creative thinkers" is hogwash.

This Gingrich profile in the Times floats down on the readers from above with passages like this: "Rival Republicans marvel at his deep well of ideas, his innate intellect and his knowledge of government. They also point to the strategic approach taken by the Gingrich team in the 2010 elections, including holding training sessions for a new generation of elected officials." Does any of this perhaps relate to the debacles in Wisconsin and elsewhere?

The story does refer to Gingrich's hypocrisy and disgrace in 1998 over ethics, happening as he led the effort to impeach Clinton back then, but it doesn't mention that for all the illusory fiscal claims by Republicans since the 80s and 90s, their party has never managed to run the country in the black.

I think the timing and the placement of this story is part of a much larger sickness at the Times, and indeed, in all American journalism. We treat politics as a kind of celebrity auction, maybe even a reality show. OK, voter, will you choose bachelor number 1, or ... As the story says, Gingrich may well announce his long-delayed run for the White House.

For an antidote to this, in the very same edition, read the mild-mannered, fair piece about what happened in Indiana when Gingrich-like ideas were adopted.

A Scorecard

The Times is a feast today. There's a lot to read. Of course, much is on the cataclysms in the Mideast. The Times is covering it like a first-rate news service, but does it stand out? It's too early to tell.

A lot the news is being equally covered across the different wires. Everyone has something about Iran's reactor problems, the attack on Iraq's oil refinery, and so on, all the way down to Charlie Sheen's latest blowup -- which, by the way, is still the most popular story on the digital Times.

I'm trying to focus on what's different about the Times.

Here's a rundown. The first two are disposable. The second two are commendable. That's a pretty good summary of my thinking about the paper after a month of this ongoing review.

---

A story blowing the lid on the poor nutritional value of McDonald's oatmeal has been stuck on the most popular list for days, but gee whiz, how can this be news? McDonald's isn't supposed to have good food.

How to Make Oatmeal . . . Wrong

---

Hollywood's happy. More older people are going to the movies. But wait, there are more older people in the country, period. Whether they are "returning" to the movie theaters, as the story says, is murky. Those damn numbers. They can get in the way of a good story every time. We do know younger people are going to the movies less, and that is bad news for Hollywood. It sounds like hype; it looks like hype.

Graying Audience Returns to Movies

---

Here's an insightful story from the Metro Desk: Prosecutors in New York are getting evidence in domestic violence cases by listening in on phone calls from jail. It's fascinating.

Abuse Suspects, Your Calls Are Taped. Speak Up.

---

And a new angle, actually a few new angles, on that nagging question of why no one in the banking business had to pay for the near collapse of the U.S. financial system. There's no easy explanation, but this column illuminates and doesn't pontificate.

Biggest Fish Face Little Risk of Being Caught

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Quirky Does Not Equal Charming

Reporters often aim at some high literary standard. Editors have made innumerable speeches about attracting readers with bright writing. In practice, the results can be weird. We have here a tedious feature about a fascinating, but unimportant crank.

Julian P. Heicklen, was a chemistry professor at Penn State, retired and is now on a crusade to allow jurors to overturn laws, and determine guilt or innocence on their whims. His earlier crusade was to legalize marijuana.

It's hard to make out the story's point of view, but Heicklen is quite clear about who he is on his own website, which he calls, "jailed activist." He goes on to explain that as a boy, he was inspired by Victor Hugo and Ayn Rand. He claims credit for winning Israel's Yom Kippur war in 1973. At 78, he complains that his children want him in a nursing home. He says he prefers jail, where he's been numerous times. And he's totally wrong about the theory of the American justice system. You wouldn't like it if he got his way: trials would be popularity contests.

You can read the story if you want a blow by blow of one of his court appearances, but it's not worth it. And you won't find what I quoted above.

Jury Nullification Advocate Is Indicted

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Is It News Before It's in the Times?

Many big newspapers have an attitude problem. It's easy to confuse with arrogance or complaisance, but I'm afraid the attitude will spell the end of these news organizations. They hate to acknowledge that they might have missed anything.

There's a good article about a retreat by the U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Five people had a hand in writing and reporting it, and it's thorough and important.

The military is backtracking from its effort to subdue the wild country in eastern Afghanistan, as the article eventually points out, just like the Russians did 20 years ago.

But it is presented as something no one knew, as a surprise. A decision was made some time ago and the actual retreat started on the 15th. That much the article says. There is no earlier article in the Times on the subject -- according to the Times search. But the issue was discussed in public reports.

I found a web site that is dedicated to pursuing coverage of foreign places "to help fill the enormous void that has grown up in coverage of the world by US news organizations." It started up in 2009 and is online only, supported by Internet advertising.

This interesting venture posed the question on January 4: "Is the US giving up the northeast?" The story discusses the military's debates over such a move, and it sure sounded like it was all over but the press conference.

U.S. Pulling Back in Afghan Valley It Called Vital to War

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Always Behind the Times

The New York Times declared that Google has repaired ("a major change to its algorithm," says the story) to banish low-quality scam sites. There's a link to another story about two weeks ago explaining how the vaunted, superintelligent Google search algorithm can be manipulated. Both these stories were in the tech section.

One of the odd things is that the paper seems to have forgotten its story also about two weeks ago about how J.C. Penney received extraordinary treatment in Google search results. Penney blamed a search engine optimizing outfit for the scam, and Google retaliated by dropping Penney to below the horizon. Well, maybe reporters don't read much of the paper outside their own sections. The Penney Story was in the biz section.

Google Tweaks Algorithm to Push Down Low-Quality Sites

Anyway, what's the Times had to say.

I guess Google has more work to do. Abortion rights folks clued the web site Jezebel into the fact that if you search for the word "murder" on Google, the Number 2 result is a link to Wikipedia's nonpartisan, informational page on abortion.

It's a clear case of Google bombing -- which is general terms is to get enough people with websites, that is blogs, two-bit organizations, anyone with a few bucks and the patience to follow instructions to link to your site, someone else's site, a prank site. In this case, right-wingers getting Google to unwittingly make their lunatic point on abortion. It doesn't take a genius to know how to outwit the geniuses at Google, does it?

Anti-Choicers Link "Murder" to "Abortion" on Google.

Who wants to buy into a pool about how long it takes for the Times to run a story on how politics are being polluted by hi-tech tricks?

---

Sleeping Walking in Hollywood

Let's play a game.

Who brought snarkiness to Hollywood's awards extravaganza?

Would you even hesitate for a minute? Or do you live in a vacuum?

Of course the answer is Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes. If you look back at the coverage of the Golden Globes by Hollywood reporters, you will see a triumph of the new media over the old. You can even call it the overturning of authority.

You know this because although Gervais seems to have become unmentionable in the media, his viperish jokes live on Youtube and innumerable little websites that snared the video.

Here are a couple of quotes:

• About the movie I Love You Phillip Morris: "... two heterosexual actors pretending to be gay - so the complete opposite of some famous Scientologists, then."
  
  
• "It seems like everything this year was three-dimensional... except the characters in The Tourist."
  
  
• "It's gonna be a night of partying and heavy drinking. Or as Charlie [Sheen] calls it: breakfast"
  
  
• Introducing Bruce Willis as "Ashton Kutcher's dad".
  
  

(Thanks to the Telegraph for the wording. My memory's not that good.)

Then yesterday, the LA Times wrote this headline: "Are the Oscars copying the Golden Globes' cyber strategy?"

The story quoting an anonymous reporter said this: "'Why are the Oscars going so crazy using social media to promote the show?' another Oscar reporter asked me yesterday. 'Are they just trying to reach a younger, hipper audience?'"

It's funny that they don't mention Gervais at all.

The NY Times inches closer in its echo of this today: "In one of the latest promotions for the Oscar telecast on Sunday, the hosts, James Franco and Anne Hathaway, do something almost unheard of: they spoof the self-seriousness of the whole endeavor." And in the whole long story, not a word about Gervais.

I guess if you offend the stars and the studios, you will be cut off from all the staged interviews, manufactured leaks and even press releases.

And one more thing: The headline says "snarky", and so I think you can safely assume that the hip kids of today have abandoned it completely.

Serious? Snarky? Oscar Courts a Social Medium

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The Times Gets Down and Dirty

The Times pulls off a media coup and brings back the story of "the fallen media queen" to take a swipe at Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News. The detailed story delves into the complicated legal battle between Judith Regan and Fox, which fired her from her glamorous spot at HarperCollins five years ago.

Fox wanted to protect Bernie Kerik's nomination as homeland security chief, a close friend of Rudy Giuliani, who wanted to be president. Regan says a Fox executive called her to ask her to forget Kerik when the FBI came around to do its background check. Regan and Kerik had a fling sometime before. This is only the surface. I don't have the space to go into more detail. I always check Gawker on smutty news stories because it always gets to the heart of the matter. In this case, Gawker sent me to Vanity Fair, which did a very long piece in 2005, about Regan, a phosphorous-burning publisher of books like a memoir by a Ballet dancer who liked anal sex, or a guide to sex for men by the porn star Jenna Jameson.

So you get the idea. It's hot stuff for the Times.

Anyway, since Fox fired her, there's been a labyrinth of lawsuits in the tens of millions of dollars. Many thousands of words have been written about this in the Times and elsewhere in the last five years, while Regan has drifted down to daytime TV appearances. The one missing gold nugget in the story was the name of the Fox executive who called her. Regan never said.

With various settlements, the court files were supposed to be sealed but somehow one was not sealed, and a Times metro desk reporter who recently was covering the snow storm, got wind of it. In that file, the Times found Ailes name. Voila!

The bottom line: who told the Times? Who gets something out of this one? That's the story. And the Times is such a tease, at least for those of us with noses pressed up against the window.

Records Say Fox News Chief Told Employee to Lie

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The Thing Whose Name Must Never Be Mentioned

I finally got around to reading Tom Friedman's column for Wednesday, and his main point is dead right. It's sad that he even has to say it. Politicians should be falling over themselves to line up for energy independence.

When I say energy independence, I don't mean the Sarah Palin, Koch Industries, Halliburton kind. Their program, if you can call it that, is stupid. We don't have the oil in the ground to do it; we cannot continue to foul the air with the exhaust. We need safe nuclear power; we need decent rail; we need electric cars; we need solar power; we even need windmills, and perhaps things we haven't heard of. We'd be better off engineering those things, rather than the next generation jet fighter. We might very well start with Friedman's suggestion of a huge tax increase on gasoline. Why not?

It's too bad he clutters up the column with other dubious notions about the western world's accommodation with the Middle Eastern tyrants. The West certainly accommodates them, but he posits a version of the white man's burden to think we made them as they are, or that we have the power to make them something other than they are. We certainly will not control what they become. We certainly don't control which Middle Eastern individuals hate us and which do not.

If Not Now, When?

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Red Alert in Wisconsin

By Wednesday afternoon, the Wisconsin story was submerged into a roundup covering the spread of state employee union protests to other states where right wing, tea party-ish governments are in control of the state houses.

The story got a jolt of caffeine when a gutsy editor of an online Buffalo news site got a bright idea to talk to the Wisconsin governor, Scott Walker, by posing as one of the wealthy Koch brothers, who spend lavishly to promote right wing politicians and ideas. Walker is one of their beneficiaries.

The news site, the Buffalo Beast, nothing to do with Tina Brown's Daily Beast, had a 20-minute talk with Walker and then presented the audio to the world.

It took the Times a while to stick this in the paper in Timesian language. No matter what the ultimate import of the story, it attracted readers: The Beast's website was inaccessible for hours, overwhelmed by requests.

Finally something appeared in the middle of a comprehensive Milwaukee story that said "suspicions" that Walker "was out to bust the unions ... were increased after the revelation of comments Mr. Walker made during what turned out to be a prank phone call from a blogger ..." Oh, come on. The story has more juice than that.

During the conversation Walker, talking to the caller he thought was Koch, praised the Times for an article on a decided lack of union solidarity. It was a good story, although it didn't give much background into the dire straits unions are truly in.

Walker also said he was not worried about all the attention by reporters because "sooner or later the media stops finding it interesting."

The governor was superficially gullible, but to me, he sounded beside himself to actually be talking to the man who bestows such good fortune on selected extreme right wingers. Walker often sounds uncertain, careful not to offend this man. Neither Walker nor any of his staff seems to recognize Koch's voice.

Of course, the importance of the episode is not the prank, not Walker's gullibility, not the obvious fact -- not suspicion -- fact that he is out to make public sector unions irrelevant. The episode is just an eloquent demonstration of the role of big, very big money in politics.

Walker's last point about the media's short attention span is pitiful. He's right.

Koch Whore: Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker answers his master’s call

And one of three stories on states' politics:

Indiana Democrats Leave State to Avoid Union Vote

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Dining With the Koch Brothers

Maybe I'm delusional, but after reading so much about the anger over poverty and repression in much of the world, I was feeling especially lucky to have lived my life here. A quick calculation showed me to be a thousand times wealthier than billions of human beings on earth, not without a shadow of guilt about my good fortune.

Then the Times pulls through with something from the soft sections, the society sections and women's sections of past generations. In this case, it's "Dining & Wine" and a review of the Ai Fiori Restaurant. It's in a hotel, and it's so elegant that the you'll find the forks turned down on the thick tablecloth when you first sit down.

As the words roll on, the reader learns, "For those with a taste for offal and seafood, there is a soft-poached egg served with crisp sweetbreads, braised lobster knuckles, more of that black truffle and some tarragon."

And a warning. The headline is not to be taken literally. I have no idea where the billionaire Koch (pronounced "Coke", maybe so you don't think they're Jewish) brothers eat, but it might very well be in places like this where the bargain meal is $80 sans tip and wine.

For a social critic, stories like this are shootin' fish in a barrel.

But I have to wonder. At first, I thought the headline writer was being ironic (in the strict sense of the word), until I saw that the reviewer invoked the New Yorker cartoonist William Hamilton and his funny depictions of joyless rich people.

Money Should Be Fun

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Let Me Count the Ways

Everybody knows sex sells. It's all over television, magazines. Music videos are often soft-core porn. Sex sells newspapers, and sex makes people read articles. I'll bet my Google ranking just went up 10 percent by writing sex three, no four, times.

Science is a tough game. Even the soft sciences, like psychology, sociology and the like. Tenured jobs are scarce in academia; the competition is fierce. Once in a tenure track job, the new professor has to negotiate department politics and hustle for grants. To qualify for grants, he has to publish. And to publish, it pays to choose topics carefully.

It's not a big leap of logic to see that some enterprising scientists can make hay with studies somehow involving sex. Enter the Findings column at the Times. Which of the thousands of tenure track offerings would you choose? Bingo. The current Findings got on the "most e-mailed" and "most viewed" lists with a piece on the sexual attractiveness of fertile women -- or is it the other way around?

Let's get serious. Any article about science has to look at stuff like this with some skepticism. Not witless skepticism, but in terms of "publication bias" and "media bias". These are well-studied phenomena that explain the erratic behavior of these studies, where dramatic and bizarre results cannot be duplicated.

To have any idea if the premise holds, a reader must go back to the original. In this case, there is a link (not always in the Times), but the link is merely to an abstract and the careful reader would have to shell out money to read it. No thanks.


The Threatening Scent of Fertile Women

But the Times is vast. Compare this sexy piece with the report on a study of cell phones and brain activity. That story has perspective, and of course, a summary of the statistics behind it, the dreaded numbers.

Cellphone Use Tied to Changes in Brain Activity

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The Value of Competition

If for no other reason, the Times is valuable because it represents competition in the diminishing number of enterprises engaged in the news. Too often in the news, competition is no more than duplication, but once in awhile, something comes of it.

I'm talking about the pirate story. Four Americans sailing on a private yacht were seized and later killed, along with a couple of pirates. The U.S. Navy was following the boat, and in the end, more than a dozen pirates were nabbed.

By mid-afternoon, the Times had a fleet of reporters out and they found out lots about the victims, a group of evangelical Christians who were spending their retirement sailing and handing out Bibles. Meanwhile, the wire service Reuters also showed initiative by telephoning the pirate leader, who vowed to avenge his men. The Times story was a bit murky and rambling at 1,500 words. The Reuters story much tighter and clearer. Put them both together and then edit it down, and that's news reporting.

Four Americans Held on Hijacked Yacht Are Killed

The value of competition is evident in two other mega stories: The Times's Mideast pieces were terrific, and it was nice to have the variety, to add to the Times's coverage info from the wires. Collectively the stories are making some important points clear: the importance of tribal loyalties in Libya and the religious divide in Bahrain.

Chaos Grows in Libya; Defiant Qaddafi Vows to Fight On

In Bahrain, Protesters’ Calls for Unity Belie Divisions

The payoff from competition shows up in the Wisconsin story, too. The Times has a neat piece on members of other unions who are divided on the state employees' fight -- not to mention the later story on the right-wing Koch brothers.

Union Bonds in Wisconsin Begin to Fray

Billionaire Brothers’ Money Plays Role in Wisconsin Dispute

In both cases, the wires had stuff that either the Times didn't know about or dropped for one reason or another. We, the reading public, are lucky now, because we have all this available. I can see what CNN got, and the BBC, and Reuters in the space of a few minutes. They all have informative extras in both these stories. But this situation won't last, will it? It's sad.

And lastly, on its home turf, the Times did an excellent job on the story about the health industry's ties to a close adviser of Gov. Cuomo. I don't know how many states still have newspapers with the resources or the taste for this sort of thing, but it's important. This is how money is made in politics and how policy is perverted. And although the stories are not often exciting, no one else will ever do them, or do them well.

Cuomo Adviser Takes Pay From Health Industry

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Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

As the uprisings in the Mideast moves into Libya, no one seems to think it's important to mention that Qaddafi was a bitter enemy of the United States, and indeed, of the West, and that he received no support from the American military.

In talking about the uprisings, all the reporting seems to accept unanimity, a feeling of a universal yearning. There are stray quotes about differences between the rulers, but every news purveyor never misses the chance to talk about the ill effects of American support for dictators -- from the Associated Press to Al Jazeera. (I confess that I don't bother with Fox News. They almost never say anything that makes sense.)

Please, do not confuse what I just said. I do not advocate support of dictators. The history of conquests (not just by westerners) and colonizers (also not just by westerners) is long and involved. But the short story is that there is really no easy exit from the mess.

So as we watch the violence in Libya, it just occurs to me that maybe the United States government isn't the epitome of evil, that it is not all powerful, and that it has really no more ability to predict the future than an ambitious reporter. Just a thought.

I kept up with the main story through the day, and some of the competition as well. Reuters remains impressively quick with developments, certainly faster than the Times. One thing the wires have been discussing are the rumors of Qaddafi's exit, possibly to Venezuela. The Times is temperate and not jumping to conclusions on that detail.

Qaddafi’s Grip Falters as His Forces Take On Protesters

A story about Bahrain explores the role of the United States, and is a fascinating read. Like most news stories, it is basically a "he said, she said" account. But from the beginning, the story has chosen sides.

For better or worse, the United States has a big military base in Bahrain. The story asserts that the military has messed things up: "The United States military undermined efforts to improve relations with Bahrain’s Shiite majority and understated abuses by the Sunni royal family."

Since the American military doesn't run Bahrain, it has to figure out how to get along, which means to choose sides. An opposition leader would like American help: "The United States should assertively emphasize the Bahrain Shiites should get their rights." But the story also points out, "The royal family has long worried that Bahrain’s Shiites could be agents of Iran."

The story quotes a former American official, Gwenyth Todd, who very well may be right, but I'd like the story a lot better if it didn't choose sides.

Dim View of U.S. Posture Toward Bahraini Shiites Is Described

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Senile in the White House

The news media rarely gives a president a break any more. For most of my adult lifetime, the White House has been the enemy, with one exception that has always astounded me. I never got how Ronald Reagan was the Great Communicator.

The story is about Reagan's son's memoir, which is being promoted now. There's a line in it raising the question of whether Reagan's Alzheimer's might have started while he was president.

I certainly don't know about Reagan's medical condition, but this story surely reminds me of the kinder, gentler coverage he got than anyone else I know about first hand.

In fact, Reagan is often given credit for prescience in his jingoistic Soviet policy, which people claim bankrupted the Soviets an led to the collapse of their empire. In 20 years, what will they say about the West's policy in the Mideast?

When Alzheimer’s Waited Outside the Oval Office

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Speaking of Publishing

If one of you readers from another country wouldn't mind, please file criminal charges against me in some other country, because then the New York Times will write it up.

A bi-weekly column on the law, "Sidebar", writes of a convoluted case brought in France by an Israeli writer against a German for a short review of her book on an American web site. It's a kind of libel case, but I don't know French law.

Weird man, huh?

Expert comment was sought. A law professor pointed out that the writer did more damage to her own reputation than the man who wrote the review.

I would point out that the article with an Amazon link to allow the curious to buy the book is an advertisement you can't buy with mere money.

From a Book Review to a Criminal Trial in France

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Tina Brown's New Persona

The NY Times pulled off a coup and got an interview with Tina Brown, the celebrity editor who managed to parlay a strings of media flops into a $700,000 job running a merged Newsweek and the Daily Beast. It should be interesting.

The Times article might be on to something but it's hard to discern. It ran a big story on how "quiet" she has become and how low key the merger is, in contrast to the typical Tina Brown extravaganza. She gave away nothing to the reporter from whom she turns to peer into her Blackberry continually.

This story doesn't mention it, but a couple weeks ago, the Times itself ran a story about Brown hiring two new writers, Wayne Barrett, who used to be at the Village Voice if you remember it, where he wrote very dense stories about New York politics, and Peter Boyer who was at the New Yorker for 19 years, and wrote very long, understated articles.

On being hired by BeastWeek, Boyer said this in Women's Wear Daily.:

"Once I saw Tina, talked to Tina, thought about jumping onto this ride — whatever it was going to be — it was just so exciting. (Women's Wear Daily) I asked my wife, she said I could, and I was gone."

It doesn't sound like the flamboyant talent Tina Brown used to hire.

Still, the story just struggles to find something to say. They talked of a redesign in the making, but Brown was not forthcoming, and the best they got was an advertising guy who said it would use thicker paper. So we know it will look fat and substantial.

The Times's competition didn't seem impressed either. I couldn't find any mention of this article in the usual suspects.

The best coverage of this media event comes in the New York Post. They're on top of the layoffs and buyouts of the old Newsweek staff.

Tina Brown’s Quiet Restart of Newsweek

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The Futility of Blogging

The Times, and indeed most of the news media, love polls. They sound so scientific. And so, the online edition gives big play to a story about how the young are flocking to Facebook and Twitter.

The article has everything: quotes and percentages, age ranges and a comparison with the similar poll two years ago.

Didn't the Times, and everyone else, just finish breathlessly covering the latest infusion of billions of investment cash into Facebook? Isn't it painfully obvious that these social sites are the big thing? Doesn't everyone know that Twitter allows at most 140 characters in a post, including white spaces?

The story celebrates its wide-eyed amazement by pointing out that successful blogs have grown and are "indistinguishable from more traditional news sources." Meanwhile, the writers of blogs chronicling the emotional upsets of high school fail to inspire their authors because of a lack a readers.

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter

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A Luddite Lament

At the top of the online edition, bumping down the Tina Brown story which is now stuck on Page 1 of the paper edition, is a story about the fact that without paper books, no one will be able
to scribble notes in the margins.

If you think about it, the fact that historians have to spend years of their lives in library stacks reading scribbles made history an exclusive gentleman's club that few people aspired to join. But I digress.

The article quotes a professor who notes, "People will always find a way to annotate electronically." (Why didn't I think of that?) He goes on to say, "But there is the question of how it is going to be preserved."

We are truly at the very beginning of a cultural revolution of the magnitude of the invention of moveable type. You can understand that some people are just standing there dumbfounded, blinking in the glare. He's not thinking about the preservation of the artifacts of our civilization for a far distant future, anymore than he's thinking about the near destruction of western culture when the libraries at Alexandria were finally destroyed in the seventh century during the Muslim conquest. (They were damaged earlier by Christians and by pagans at war.)


Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margins

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Overwhelmed in the Middle East

I'm not ignoring the cataclysm in the Arab world. It's frightening and awesome at the same time. The events are so far-flung and vast that even the swarm of western news people seems to be losing its grip. Many of the latest turns are happening where the reporters ain't, either they just didn't get there or they're not allowed in -- as I imagine is the case in Libya and Iran. In many ways, I like the reporting better when there's some distance. And the big story is the speech by Qaddafi's son in Libya warning of a civil war.

The best is the story from Tunis that starts out talking about how the army was called in to protect the legal brothels from "a mob of zealots." Reading it makes it clear how different things are from one country to the next, and how dumb it is to make sweeping pronouncements, and to try to predict the future.

Next Question for Tunisia: The Role of Islam in Politics

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