Valentine's Day Arrow

Hey, I'm as interested in a good spitball fight as the next guy.

And we have one under way at the Los Angeles Times.

First, let me say that our country needs more women pundits. I've never quite understood why--unlike, say, boxing--it's a male-dominated field. Quick, how many female newspaper columnists can you name other than Maureen Dowd? They're out there, but not in great enough numbers.

Women seem to do better in management. The top editors at the Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer and Atlanta Journal-Constitution (and, until scandal hit, USA Today) are women. So are the Washington bureau chiefs of ABC, CBS and Fox. Not to mention the managing editor and editorial page editor of the New York Times.

But the op-ed pages of the major papers are mostly testosterone-laden. And that has prompted quite a blast from Susan Estrich, who has been more successful at punditry (she opines on Fox News) than she was in politics (Michael Dukakis's campaign manager).

Estrich is mad at Michael Kinsley, the former New Republic and Slate editor who recently took over the LAT opinion pages while commuting from Seattle. He doesn't run many women, she says, including, um, her.

The new paper in D.C., the Examiner, reprints a blast e-mail that Estrich sent out to a bunch of gal pals on Valentine's Day, saying "let's break some hearts":

"It is with great regret that I send you this message, asking you to help me in fighting blatant sex discrimination at the Los Angeles Times.

"What could be more important - or easier for that matter - than ensuring that women's voices are heard in public discourse in our community? For the last three years, my students and I have been counting the number of women whose opinion pieces appear in The Los Angeles Times, and the record is worse than dismal, worse than The New York Times (which has a woman editorial page editor), worse than The Washington Post, even worse than the Orange County Register (which has a woman editor). I have been trying, quietly, to force the editors there to address it - but things have gone from bad to worse under the leadership of the new opinion editor, Michael Kinsley, who replaced an African American woman, and now has three men in the top jobs, and 90 percent men writing for his section. Need I add that none of these men are from Southern California; Michael doesn't even live here. . . .

"A few weeks ago, I pointed out to Michael that they went looking for people to ask about their opinions on the war in Iraq: and found THIRTEEN MEN AND NO WOMEN."

Uh-oh, we're breaking out the capital letters.

What really got Estrich going was an article Kinsley ran in the Sunday opinion section: "FEMINIST FATALE. Where are the great women thinkers? Thinking so much about women has shrunk their minds. That was the headline and the whole top half of the paper ...The article last Sunday was penned by a feminist-hater I have never heard of, nor probably have you, by the name of Charlotte Allen."

Kinsley's reply:

"She is right that we should have more women writing for our op-ed page, and she is right that I am bad about answering e-mail, although she is wrong to think that this bad habit is gender-specific.

"What seems to have popped her cork, however, is an article by a woman that we did run. I'm sorry that she has 'never heard of' Charlotte Allen, but I think it may be possible to be a woman even if Susan Estrich has never heard of you. Even a member of the Independent Women's Forum can nevertheless be a woman, perhaps.

"If Susan wants to boycott media institutions that don't adequately reflect her progressive feminist values, maybe she should start by resigning from Fox News, where she is a commentator. Interestingly, her bio on the Fox News site credits her as a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Times."

Something tells me we haven't heard the last of this.

How's the nomination of John Negroponte as intelligence czar playing?

"The choice of Mr. Negroponte was widely hailed by Congressional leaders and others today as one that combined stature, toughness and independence likely to serve him well in a post that will inevitably involve jockeying with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and C.I.A. Director Porter J. Goss, among others," says the New York Times.

Daily Kos has a different, shall we say, emphasis:

"Mr. Negroponte was a key figure in the Iran-Contra affair. As Ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985, he helped direct the covert war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. He has also been charged as collaborating with the Honduran government in the training of so-called 'death squads' and in carrying out other human rights abuses. These charges have never adequately been answered."

Blogger Jake White at Primordium can't believe the House minority leader is praising the nominee:

"What he brings to the table is a history of human-rights abuses and deceiving Congress. And why is a career 'diplomat' being given such an important intelligence job? Negroponte is a bad, bad man, and Nancy Pelosi is clearly clueless."

What about conservatives? "When one rereads this Michael Rubin piece on some of the bad decisions made in after-the-fall-of-Saddam Iraq, one can't help but be a little underwhelmed by the Negroponte choice," says National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez. "He's also a State Department kinda guy--does that put him in the position to be able to shake up the intel world? I always thought it had to be a real heavyweight for the DNI position to mean much."

In writing about Howard Dean yesterday, I forgot to include a flap over a joke he had told--one that Washington Monthly's Kevin Drumdoesn't take too seriously:

"Howard Dean, speaking to the Democratic Black Caucus on Friday:

"'You think the Republican National Committee could get this many people of color in a single room?,' Dean asked to laughter. 'Only if they had the hotel staff in here.'

"All the blacks who were actually in the room at the time seemed to get a kick out of Dean's remark, but a couple of black Republicans tried to crank up the wheezing old conservative outrage machine one more time over his 'racially, insensitive and intolerable remarks.' I shall allow nonwhite conservative writer Ramesh Ponnuru [of National Review] to answer them:

"Give me a break. Dean is saying, hyperbolically, that there aren't many blacks or other nonwhites in the Republican party. He's right. I've been to many, many Republican dinners where most nonwhites present have been serving the food. (Or giving the keynote.) If Republicans are bothered when people make that observation, they should try to make it less true.

"I especially liked the 'or giving the keynote' parenthetical. Way to twist the knife, Ramesh."

Several blogs have noted a column by former New York magazine editor Kurt Andersen:

"Now our heroic and tragic liberal-intellectual capaciousness is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration's awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might -- might, possibly -- have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq. . . .

"Each of us has a Hobbesian choice concerning Iraq; either we hope for the vindication of Bush's risky, very possibly reckless policy, or we are in a de facto alliance with the killers of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. We can be angry with Bush for bringing us to this nasty ethical crossroads, but here we are nonetheless."

Dan Kennedy goes negative on Bob Novak:

"Now that New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Time magazine's Matthew Cooper have been dragged another step closer to jail, it's time for the media community to rise up as one and call out the Prince of Darkness, syndicated columnist Robert Novak.

"It is Novak, as much as anyone, who knows the answer to the question that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is asking: Which 'senior administration officials' revealed that Valerie Plame was an undercover CIA operative? Novak was the first to reveal Plame's identity. Yet we still have no idea what, if anything, has happened to him.

"Was he subpoenaed? Did he cooperate? (If so, why harass Cooper and Miller?) Has Novak not been subpoenaed? If not, why not? Might he be the subject of a separate criminal investigation? (On one of the very few occasions that he's addressed the subject, he's said that he isn't.) Or is he getting off easy because he's a Republican hatchet man?. . . .

"As a public gesture of solidarity with Cooper and Miller, newspapers ought to boycott Novak's column until he explains what his role has been. CNN ought to keep him off the air. "

Kos has a C-SPAN screen shot of Jeff Gannon in the White House briefing room two years ago, and Salon's Eric Boehlert picks up the ball and runs with it:

"There's now documented evidence that Guckert attended White House briefings as early as February 2003. Guckert, using his alias 'Jeff Gannon,' once boasted online about asking then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer a question at the Feb. 28, 2003, briefing. The date is significant because in order to receive a White House press pass, Guckert would have needed to prove that he worked for a news organization that, in the words of White House press secretary Scott McClellan, 'published regularly,' in itself an extraordinarily low threshold. Critics have charged that while Talon may publish regularly, it boasts a nearly all-volunteer news team that includes not a single person with actual journalism experience. (The team does, though, have quite a bit of experience working on Republican campaigns.) In other words, the outfit is not legitimate or independent, two criteria often used in Washington to receive press credentials.

"But what's significant about the February 2003 date is that Talon did not even exist then. The organization was created in late March 2003, and began publishing online in early April 2003."

Someone's got some 'splaining to do.

Frank Rich weighs in on Gannongate with great fervor:

"The 'Jeff Gannon' story got less attention than another media frenzy - that set off by the veteran news executive Eason Jordan, who resigned from CNN after speaking recklessly at a panel discussion at Davos, where he apparently implied, at least in passing, that American troops deliberately targeted reporters. Is the banishment of a real newsman for behaving foolishly at a bloviation conference in Switzerland a more pressing story than that of a fake newsman gaining years of access to the White House (and network TV cameras) under mysterious circumstances?"

Would it be rude of me to point out that until Rich and Maureen Dowd ("How often does an enterprising young man, heralded in press reports as both a reporter and a contributor to such sites as Hotmilitarystud.com, Workingboys.net, Militaryescorts.com, MilitaryescortsM4M.com and Meetlocalmen.com, get to question the president of the United States?") jumped on the saga, their newspaper had run only a nine-paragraph, Democrats-call-for-investigation story?

The blogosphere debate rages on, with this missive from the Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan"The MSM isn't over. It just can no longer pose as if it is The Guardian of Established Truth. The MSM is just another player now. A big one, but a player.

"The blogosphere isn't some mindless eruption of wild opinion. That isn't their power. This is their power:

"1. They use the tools of journalists (computer, keyboard, a spirit of inquiry, a willingness to ask the question) and of the Internet (Google, LexisNexis) to look for and find facts that have been overlooked, ignored or hidden. They look for the telling quote, the ignored statistic, the data that have been submerged. What they are looking for is information that is true. When they get it they post it and include it in the debate. This is a public service.

"2. Bloggers, unlike reporters at elite newspapers and magazines, are independent operators. They are not, and do not have to be, governed by mainstream thinking. Nor do they have to accept the directives of an editor pushing an ideology or a publisher protecting his friends. Bloggers have the freedom to decide on their own when a story stops being a story. They get to decide when the search for facts is over. They also decide on their own when the search for facts begins. It was a blogger at the World Economic Forum, as we all know, who first reported the Eason Jordan story. It was bloggers, as we all know, who pursued it. . . . It's a story if they say it is. This is a public service.

"3. Bloggers have an institutional advantage in terms of technology and form. They can post immediately. The items they post can be as long or short as they judge to be necessary. Breaking news can be one sentence long: 'Malkin gets Barney Frank earwitness report.' In newspapers you have to go to the editor, explain to him why the paper should have another piece on the Eason Jordan affair, spend a day reporting it, only to find that all that's new today is that reporter Michelle Malkin got an interview with Barney Frank. That's not enough to merit 10 inches of newspaper space, so the Times doesn't carry what the blogosphere had 24 hours ago. In the old days a lot of interesting information fell off the editing desk in this way. Now it doesn't."

Boy, she makes it sound like we're carving hieroglyphics into the cave wall--and maybe in a sense we are.

"Bloggers are certainly not as rough as the splenetic pamphleteers of the 18th and 19th centuries, who amused themselves accusing Thomas Jefferson of sexual perfidy and Andrew Jackson of having married a whore...I have seen friends savaged by blogs and winced for them--but, well, too bad. I've been attacked. Too bad. If you can't take it, you shouldn't be thinking aloud for a living. The blogosphere is tough. But are personal attacks worth it if what we get in return is a whole new media form that can add to the true-information flow while correcting the biases and lapses of the mainstream media? Yes. Of course."

Finally, the Des Moines Register explains what happened to a columnist at another Iowa paper who was deemed too opinionated:

"On Monday, Mike Corum, who writes the From the Left column for the weekly Pella Chronicle, stopped by that office to welcome the new publisher to the community...The publisher's first official act related to the newsroom was calling up the editor and ordering him to scrap Corum's column. "The editor, Hal Hatfield, refused, and resigned in protest. The publisher, Sandy Selvy, didn't try to change his mind.

"Corum calls it all a slap in the face of the First Amendment, and says his left-leaning views are being censored. Hatfield thinks the publisher's move is a nod to conservative advertising and business interests. "But Selvy denies that either is the case. She says the paper doesn't have enough local content, and that 'no one cares about what Mike thinks about Bush and what's going on in the war.'"

Why do I have the sinking feeling that none of this would have happened if Corum had supported the war?