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Looking Back to '9/10 Rudy,' and Ahead to 11/'08
The video, produced by an Apple team as part of a series of corporate profiles, sounds very much like a product endorsement for a company that is covered by The Washington Post. But Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com, says that was not the intent. He says he agreed to the Apple video as a way of touting The Post's Web site, and that the Apple team chose to highlight brief comments about Apple products that his staffers made during long interviews. Brady calls the video "out of whack" but did not say he regrets doing the interviews.
"I realize it gives people the impression there was some kind of relationship there, but there's not," Brady says. The video, he says, was "a good opportunity to talk to a Web-savvy audience. The Post covers a lot of companies that it interacts with. This wasn't about Apple. If someone came to us and said, 'We want to do a four- or five-minute piece about how The Washington Post uses Apple products,' we wouldn't have done it."
  Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has fervent detractors in the city's press corps. (By Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post) |
And what does Apple get out of it? The company does the weekly "customer profiles," says Apple spokesman Steve Dowling, to "show how top creative professionals are using our products in their everyday work."
Bloody Metaphor
John Harris, editor-in-chief of Politico.com, has admitted authoring the latest Republican talking point. Quite inadvertently, of course.
While editing a story on Democratic strategy for Iraq, he junked the lead as "too bland" and wrote a "snappier" one: "Top House Democrats, working in concert with anti-war groups, have decided against using congressional power to force a quick end to U.S. involvement in Iraq, and instead will pursue a slow-bleed strategy designed to gradually limit the administration's options."
Republicans, and several news outlets, seized on Harris's "slow-bleed" phrase, using it to brand a plan by Democratic Rep. John Murtha to place restrictions on President Bush's ability to send additional troops to Iraq.
Harris expressed some "remorse" in his Capitol Hill newspaper, saying: "This was a decision -- made on the fly and under deadline -- that I would have taken back in the morning." While Murtha can defend his own proposal, says Harris, "I'd prefer not to hand his opponents ammunition in the form of evocative but loaded language."
It was loaded, no question about it. But Harris deserves credit for fessing up.
Naked Truth
Talk about not protecting your sources! Women's Wear Daily reports: "Jane editor in chief Brandon Holley said the magazine has apologized to 53 young women who volunteered to be in an anonymous photo shoot of their breasts for inadvertently exposing their identities in an e-mail."
