The Media Discover the Poor

Now, apparently, he wants to buy the Los Angeles Times.

Small problem: Tribune Co., which bought the paper and the rest of Times Mirror five years ago for $8 billion, says it's not for sale.

The Times reports that Geffen expressed his interest over the summer in a meeting with Tribune Co. chief executive Dennis FitzSimons, only to be told no dice. Geffen, who promoted the Eagles and other music acts and helped found the DreamWorks SKG movie studio, wouldn't comment to the paper he seems to covet. Maybe he just wants to stop all those Times stories on the battle for public access to the beach at his Malibu estate.

Note to other rich guys: While circulation has slid from 1,018,000 to 902,000 since the Tribune purchase, the Times estimates that it's worth about $3 billion.

Moving right along . . . The aforementioned Byron Calame , the NYT's public editor, is blowing his whistle on one of the paper's top columnists:

"Two weeks have passed since my previous post spelled out the errors made by columnist Paul Krugman in writing about news media recounts of the 2000 Florida vote for president.

"Mr. Krugman still hasn't been required to comply with the policy by publishing a formal correction. Ms. Collins hasn't offered any explanation. As a result, readers of nytimes.com who simply search for 'Krugman' won't find any indication that there are uncorrected errors in the columns the query turns up. Nor will those who access Mr. Krugman's columns in an electronic database such as Nexis or Factiva. Corrections would have been appended in all those places if Mr. Krugman had complied with [Editorial Page Editor Gail] Collins' policy and corrected the errors in his column in the print version of The Times . . .

"All Mr. Krugman has offered so far is a faux correction. Each Op-Ed columnist has a page in nytimes.com that includes his or her past columns and biographical information. Mr. Krugman has been allowed to post a note on his page that acknowledges his initial error, but doesn't explain that his initial correction of that error was also wrong. Since it hasn't been officially published, that posting doesn't cause the correction to be appended to any of the relevant columns."

The issue: "The problem was this sentence: 'Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. [Al] Gore.' It was basically a sloppy generalization about a vote count that remains a hot-button issue for many readers. It turns out that both of the news media consortiums did statewide manual recounts with varying standards, and some of those scenarios made George W. Bush the winner."

We anxiously await Mr. Krugman's response to Mr. Calame!

Proof that the liberal media don't all think alike: The Washington Post endorses John Roberts ("overwhelmingly well-qualified, possesses an unusually keen legal mind and practices a collegiality of the type an effective chief justice must have"), while the New York Times urges a no vote ("not because they know he does not have the qualities to be an excellent chief justice, but because he has not met the very heavy burden of proving that he does").

The Huffington Post is well-wired in places like Aspen, which is how it picked up this cocktail chat: