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

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (1682)	5/30/2003 8:04:20 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 793824

I think you best take a week off, Nadine. I can't imagine the Times thing still bothers you. The Times has always been as much a bastion of the establishment in the US as, oh, say, the Council of Foreign Relations. They were. Now some elements in the establishment have moved rightward but the Time has hardly moved leftward. Raines, if you recall, spent almost all his capital as editor of the editorial page going after the Clintons. Almost as if one successful southern boy could not stand for another to be so. You may recall the times in the 50s and 60s the Times refused to print stories because they were asked to do so by government officials. Printing the Pentagon papers was somewhat compensation but if you've read some of the history of that you know it was almost forced down their throat. At the moment, I see two problems. Raines has a group of favorites of which Blair and Braggs were both members. Blair blew the structure straight up. Braggs got caught letting a stringer do a feature piece. It was not his use of a stringer; that apparently is not only common practice at the Times but other papers as well. It was, as Howard Kurtz said the other day, that it's everyone's understanding that when you do feature pieces, you do them yourself. Braggs did not. There will be other things some very small like the recent Dowd piece or debatable like the Kissinger bit. But those, I'm convinced, happen at every large newspaper and need to be treated as such. As for Raines' future, I have no idea. As Tony Blankley said, the product looks as good as ever and we should all pray it continues that way. Geez, the world is turning when I quote Tony Blankley in a favorable way.