Drowning the News

"The fact is, there are very serious questions surrounding Roberts record that go well-beyond just the fact that we are about to make a guy who has served less than 3 years on the bench the most important judge in America. For instance, he has very questionable and extreme positions on (among others) privacy, civil rights, and women's rights. . . .

"Then again, you might not know about Roberts' extreme positions both because of the sad state of American journalism, and the sad state of the Democratic Party. Both of these big players have largely given Roberts a pass on these questions and billed him as a 'moderate' because he is a smooth-talking, upper-class-emanating, Chamber of Commerce-oozing corporate lawyer from the Washington, D.C. suburbs, who really does have such a nice smile and such a gosh darn nice all-American family and boy is he just so smart and well-spoken . . . have you vomited yet? Probably."

I do feel like retching over the media's refusal to wise up and reflect Sirota's viewpoint.

Many people say that Slate's Jack Shafer has a thing about phony trend stories, based on the many pieces he has written in a growing effort to knock them down. Kind of like he does with this NYT front-pager, objecting "when a reporter pours a whole jug of weasel-words into a piece, as Louise Story does on Page One of Tuesday's New York Times in 'Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood,' she needlessly exposes one of the trade's best-kept secrets for all to see. She deserves a week in the stockades. And her editor deserves a month.

"Story uses the particularly useful weasel-word 'many' 12 times--including once in the headline--to illustrate the emerging trend of Ivy League-class women who attend top schools but have no intention of assuming the careers they prepared for.

"She informs readers that ' many of these women ' being groomed for the occupational elite 'say that is not what they want.' She repeats the weasel-word three more times in the next two paragraphs and returns to it whenever she needs to express impressive quantity but has no real numbers. She writes:

"Many women at the nation's most elite colleges say they have already decided that they will put aside their careers in favor of raising children. Though some of these students are not planning to have children and some hope to have a family and work full time , many others , like Ms. Liu, say they will happily play a traditional female role, with motherhood their main commitment."

The many critics of this article, some say, include new CBS blogger Vaughn Ververs :

"There are so many holes and oddities in this story it's hard to know where to start, so I'll start close to home. At home, in fact. My wife is both an Ivy League grad and a part-time worker (though you wouldn't know it from the hours she works). Was that Brown degree wasted because she gives her corporate masters three or four days a week, not five? Any objective observer would say that she contributes more to society than I do, though I work full-time. I coach soccer and drive car pool...

"And frankly, the same is true of educated mothers who don't work. The idea that their educations are being wasted is really too ludicrous to argue with. Isn't parenting somewhat important? Isn't education a good in itself, with all kinds of intangible social utility? The classic idea of liberal arts is not education for liberals, but education that is necessary for a free people. I'm writing about this in a journalism blog, however, because the story actually never shows there is any real debate about this alleged controversy -- no real person in the story argues that the Ivies should serve only worker bees. One Harvard dean waxes vaguely philosophic about it. Yet the author ponders possible solutions, like admissions screening. Perhaps the author was simply trying to dress up a trend story by inventing a non-existent controversy. Or maybe there was some other agenda."

The New York Times, Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News are all cutting jobs, which is depressing to Philly alum and American Journalism Review editor Rem Rieder :

"It's just so sad.

"Another round of punishing cuts at the Philadelphia Inquirer will leave the paper with 75 fewer newsroom staffers. That will bring the total to 425 -- about 300 fewer than it had in 1989, according to the Newspaper Guild.

"The paper's Rome bureau will be axed. In the 1990s the paper had four foreign bureaus. Now it will have one.

"The relentless dismantling of the once-great Inquirer has been one of journalism's truly distressing stories of the last decade. The whatever-it-takes ethos of the Pulitzer-machine years is a distant memory...

"Why the slash-and-burn? Are the Philly papers on the verge of bankruptcy?

"Not so much. Joe Natoli, head of the entity that publishes the papers, says their profits are in the 'low double digits,' a margin most industries would kill for. In 1995, in fact, that's where the margins were of Knight Ridder, McClatchy and Dow Jones (the New York Times Co. was in single digits at 9.6 percent). But in today's Wall Street-dominated newspaper world, that's chump change."