God bless the New York Times Editorial Board and their new $50 Firewall of Sanity. The new paid service called Times Select keeps compulsive readers like me from accidentally reading Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, and other nonsense routinely featured in the Paper of Record. Whenever I read the RSS headers from the locked-out articles from these “stars” of punditry, it gladdens my heart to know that the Times has found it necessary to give us a $50 excuse not to pay attention to them.
Today’s Dowd column provides an excellent example of this dynamic. Her column, titled “Woman of Mass Destruction”, gets this one-line summary:
Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, Judy Miller was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers.
Excuse me, but Maureen Dowd wrote this about Judy Miller? With Dowd’s deliberate and chronic quote-mangling and irrelevancies, it hardly stretches the imagination that a reader could easily substitute Dowd for Miller in that sentence — and probably improve its accuracy. Ditto for Krugman, whose editors had to go public with his outright lies in order to get a half-assed retraction.
Times Select. It’s there for your protection.
“Firewall of Sanity”
For those of us who enjoy wisdom from writers like David Brooks and John Tierney, the new Times Select policy at the New York Times has been a frustration. Rather than see the cup half-empty, however, the Captain sees the
What more evidence do you need?
An absolutely fascinating New York Times piece, to be published tomorrow.
In the end, I just want to know if Judy Miller was fucking Scooter Libby. That’s it. That’s all I want confirmed. Because that’ll close the case quicker than it started. If he…
Hell Freezes Over; Gergen and I Agree
Oh my, David Gergen and I agree on something. In my posts about Miller and the Times I’ve said the newspaper’s credibility is directly tied to how they handle the Times situation. Some Times fans don’t see it that way.