Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (933)	5/12/2003 9:45:34 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 794557

Safire sums it up well - Absolutely. Well written and well said. You can get some argument on that, John. Here is Kaus's take from "Slate" this morning. >>> William Safire's famed skills as a New York P.R. man fail him in Monday's column. He comes to the aid of his paymasters, but his entire defense to the "affirmative action" charge is the following sentence: Now about the supposed cost of diversity: A newspaper is free to come down on the side of giving black journalists a break if its owners and editors so choose. Even Safire knows this is a weak hack flack's line. Nobody's saying what the Times did was unconstitutional or illegal. If "its owners and editors so choose," the Times is perfectly free to intentionally run itself into the ground and destroy its reputation. The question, given that this is not the owners' and editors' intent, is why they are nevertheless doing it<<<<<<< >>>The NYT story does have Blair threatening to take a disagreement over his own sloppiness up the chain of command to "the people who hired me--and they all have executive or managing editor in their titles." But the Times doesn't tell its readers to what extent Blair was bluffing and to what extent he really could call on a friendship with Executive Editor Raines or Managing Editor Boyd.<<< >>>>>twice in the past year, Raines has led their paper to disgrace --first, with the comically overdone crusade against the Augusta National golf club, in which dissenting opinions by veteran columnists were spiked, and now with the huge and preventable Blair scandal. ....<<<<<< >>>It's a "communications" problem! Why isn't the basic, underlying Jayson Blair story obvious from the NYT's lengthy account --namely, an underperforming and unready reporter was promoted in January, 2001, over the objections of one of the editors who knew him best, because of his skin color. The key grafs: January 2001, Mr. Blair was promoted to full-time reporter with the consensus of a recruiting committee of roughly half a dozen people headed by Gerald M. Boyd, then a deputy managing editor, and the approval of Mr. Lelyveld. Mr. [Jonathan] Landman [the NYT 's metropolitan editor] said last week that he had been against the recommendation ? that he "wasn't asked so much as told" about Mr. Blair's promotion. But he also emphasized that he did not protest the move. The publisher and the executive editor, he said, had made clear the company's commitment to diversity ? "and properly so," he said. In addition, he said, Mr. Blair seemed to be making the mistakes of a beginner and was still demonstrating great promise. "I thought he was going to make it." Mr. Boyd, who is now managing editor, the second-highest-ranking newsroom executive, said last week that the decision to advance Mr. Blair had not been based on race. Indeed, plenty of young white reporters have been swiftly promoted through the ranks. "To say now that his promotion was about diversity in my view doesn't begin to capture what was going on," said Mr. Boyd, who is himself African-American. "He was a young, promising reporter who had done a job that warranted promotion." [Emphasis added.] The NYT story's party line -- that the underlying problem "appears to have been communications" -- is a defensive euphemism worthy of Nixon. Everyone at the paper seems to have communicated quite clearly in January, 2001. Rather, the Blair disaster appears (in large part) to be a fairly direct consequence of the Times's misguided race preference policy. Plenty of other factors were involved, but without "diversity" it wouldn't have happened.<<<<http://slate.msn.com/id/2082661/