Aren't troubled economic times usually marked by a flight to escapist entertainment, like James Bond films or cable shows about gangsters? And don't the best-selling business books tend to be bought by people looking to turn a profit, like say from the insights and life of Warren Buffett, now hitting shelves after the writer was already paid a $7 million advance? The number of freelance speculators tends to fall dramatically during a downturn. And if there's a miraculous economic recovery, no one's going to want to read about the bad old days.

The economic panic has been well timed, at least, for ink-stained wretches able to take some more profits before the slow-motion meltdown in their own industry is complete. The winners, per the Observer:

• Cocky Joe Nocera of the Times and Bethany McLean of Vanity Fair (formerly Fortune) got the $1 million advance they dreamed of over wine, plus "a few bits" more. And they're going to take their merry time, publishing sometime in 2010.
• Andrew Ross Sorkin of the Times (pictured) — who called out those nasty rumors about trouble at Lehman Brothers not three months ago — topped both Nocera and McLean, individually, with his $700,000 advance for an insidery "Woodward-style" account of the panic.
• Roger Lowenstein of the Times magazine, will focus on the week Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy, AIG took a federal bailout and Merrill Lynch sold itself to Bank of America.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson must craft and execute the bailout in a way that persuades Wall Street and the global financial system that they will be saved while protecting the American taxpayers’ $700 billion investment.

The Times' finance reporter, Andrew Ross Sorkin, writes frequently from the perspective of business executives and could hardly be called a populist. But his own Tuesday column on the bailout is scathing, going much further than the editorial:

The hypocrisy is thick... the most amazing power grab in the history of the American economy...

There is nothing in the bill that will prevent these problems from happening again...

The sickest part is that Wall Street is lining up at the trough for a piece of the action, lobbying to run some of the $700 billion fund — and take huge fees — for their own mess.

The Wall Street Journal held its fire Tuesday after a lengthy editorial Monday recapping the many alleged ways government intervention has screwed up the economy — and stopping short of applying this lesson the biggest intervention yet.

It took a British paper, the Financial Times, to speak baldly. Like the Times, the paper went after the lax oversight in Paulson's legislation, which literally said his decisions "are non-reviewable... by any court of law or administrative agency." But the paper's editorial also went after the meat of the plan itself, saying it "had deep inherent flaws" in how it will determine prices and concluding with a call for a more powerful "alternative option quite soon."

Paulson is pressuring Congress to accept extraordinary amounts of debt extraordinarily quickly. America's newspapers, or what's left of them, should at least be keeping up. (Or maybe everyone would feel more comfortable leaving the analysis in James Cramer's trusty hands?)

And this morning it was worth watching the money network for rare footage of the laissez fairest of all making such uncharacteristic proclamations as: financial stocks shouldn't trade higher than six or seven times earnings, Alan Greenspan was a fuckup, no one has any clue what the hell is going to happen and the whole thing was the inevitable result of a trillion ton stockpile of hubris. Rare real (and real tired) talk from Bush's old plutocrat tax slasher Larry Lindsey, former Salomon Brothers chief and Liar's Poker excessophile John Gutfreund and market-friendly finance journalists like CNBC's David Faber and the Times's Andrew Ross Sorkin when you click the video.

Oh also some people wanted to blame CNBC for Bear Stearns' implosion but it is clear from their coverage today that CNBC would never do such a thing on purpose.

You wouldn't know it from reading Sorkin's column, which coddles Rattner while filleting his nemesis, but the cuckolded husband, Tommi Cosgrove, alleges much more than a simple affair on the part of Rattner and his wife

Sorkin omits most of Cosgrove's allegations from his column even though the banker himself told the Times, "everyone has heard... the damage is done." It's worth noting that Rattner tells Sorkin "most everything Mr. Cosgrove claims is either untrue or a gross exaggeration," but no details are provided.

Here's the smear "everyone has heard:"

Steve Ratner, of 11 Madison Avenue New York, and business partner of Donald Trump, friend of Bloomberg and rich kid has paid my wife $500,000.00 to leave me.

He further promised a Ferrari, house and more cash.

He met my wife when she was working as a high class escort in London through Bella's escort services, where he finds all his girlfriends and where all his rich mates shop.

He has had me followed, investigated and threatened and continues to send text messages bragging about his victory.

This guy couldn’t get laid if he was good looking, but uses his money to get what he wants

There are photos, emails, letters and even photos taken in Kirsty Alley's house in LA.

Rich People, they think they can buy anything. This guy’s favourite movies are "Pretty Woman" and "Indecent Proposal", jeez what an idiot.

I warned you MR. RATNER, I would not let this rest. I am coming for you big time.

To be featured on FACEBOOK & MYSPACE very soon

Also featured in the book, "the coffin maker", a true story.

Mr. Ratner keeps getting my posts removed as he is very embarrassed to have to admit to buying his girlfriends and having to pay for sex, but if you met him, you would understand why.............

Mr. Ratner - the story doesn’t end until i say so. have a nice life. Everyone will know Steve Ratner pays for sex and stole my wife with $500,000.00 and a car.

Even as his column bemoans the negative impact of these allegations on Rattner, Sorkin omits them in their particulars. He mentions only a nebulous "affair," doesn't press Rattner for a detailed denial of the other allegations and paints Rattner as a repentant, reformed husband and father. "This ought to be a story that, while painful, remained private," Sorkin scolds.

Cosgrove, meanwhile, is repeatedly implied, without any real evidence, to be mentally imbalanced, a liar or both:

To be honest, it’s hard to read Mr. Cosgrove’s florid account without concluding that he has, at a minimum, a vivid imagination. In one of my conversations with him, he alleged that he had “threats on my life by underworld associates;” that he was living in his car for a while; and that Mr. Rattner had been willing to pay him, through his ex-wife, $70,000 to disappear.

...Asked whether he was happy that Mr. Rattner resigned from his job, Mr. Cosgrove, reached on his mobile telephone Monday, said, “He should have thought about that before he did what he did to me.” Moments later, Mr. Cosgrove claimed he didn’t even know Mr. Rattner, which didn’t exactly heighten confidence in his accusations.

Sure, it's hard to trust a guy who, rather randomly, invokes Kirstie Ally in the sad saga of his wife's cheating, and then spams that story onto news websites, compounding his own humiliation. And it would be prudent to assume most of Cosgrove's wild allegations are false without evidence to the contrary.

But that doesn't mean the Times has license to paint Rattner as an all-but-innocent victim, swallowing his claim that he was literally "helpless against the destruction that can be wrought by aggressive campaigns on the Internet" and asserting in the headline that "On Wall St., Reputation Is Fragile," as though executives in other industries would somehow be left unscathed by tawdry escort-wife-stealing smears spammed to friends and associates via email and blog comments.

As a high-powered Wall Street executive, Rattner surely had the financial resources to mount a libel suit, as complicated as one might be across international lines, against Cosgrove.

But Rattner also could have fought back swiftly online, calling out lies while acknowledging those accusations that were true. A new website can be had for free at blogger.com or wordpress.com. The real cost would have been the pain of admitting to whatever actual, real wrongdoing he committed against his family and possibly others. That must be a brutally painful thing to do, particularly when the private lives of others remain just that. But it is far from a "helpless" situation.

Perhaps Sorkin slanted his story the way he did because he sensed his own role in this drama. His column, in the end, is what made Cosgrove's revenge complete, humiliating Rattner not in the sewers of the internet but from a distinguished platform on his home turf. And no amount of disdain can undo that.

[Times]

(Photo via TheDeal.com)

31-year-old Sorkin, part of a new generation of Times reporters, has been permitted opinion before. "Mr. Murdoch may be the perfect publisher of The Wall Street Journal." Let's take another example: Alessandra Stanley's front page indictment of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's troublesome pastor. Stanley’s review called Wright “the compelling but slightly wacky uncle who unsettles strangers but really just craves attention... [Wright] doesn’t hate America, he loves the sound of his own voice."

Sorkin's slam on Ballmer is a sign of a livelier Gray Lady. The challenge from web news sites, the threat of layoffs—and now competition from Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal—have lifted the metabolism of the newspaper in a way that the exhortations of earlier executive editors never could. An intelligent or provocative slant is one way that a newspaper can differentiate its story from the thousand other rehashes of the same information. British hyper-competitive newspapers have made an art of such spin; as America's media becomes more competitive, outlets are following Fleet Street's example.

It's not only the news pages that are livelier. The Times' City Room blog led the pack in covering the sudden death of movie star Heath Ledger: they were quick with the breaking news, information from the scene and background on the Dark Knight actor's bouts of depression. During the Eliot Spitzer scandal, the paper's website broke the first pictures of the governor's call-girl, Ashley Alexandra Dupré. And the newspaper's opinion writers like Frank Rich have led a devastating intellectual charge against George Bush and the Republican administration.

So what's the problem? All this messy modernity compromises the Times' prissy self-image. The newspaper's proprietors and editors are obviously moderate liberals, and the conservative columnists are either watered-down or compromised, as token as the useless liberals allowed to whine on Fox News—but the Times can't acknowledge that it's partisan. On the web, the Times has opted for speed and sensation, passing on a false detail that Ledger's apartment was owned by Mary-Kate Olsen—but the newspaper still maintains it applies the same standards of accuracy as in print. (It's still scarred by the fabrications of Jayson Blair, five years ago.)

Most painful of all to behold is the editors' contorted defense of an outmoded notion of objectivity. Here's the summary, it's fine for opinion to be expressed on the opinion pages, and in columns on the news pages, but only so long as those columns are written by designated columnists and not by multitasking reporters, who are only allowed to express "points of view" and not opinions, as if there were any way to distinguish between the two.

The mandate of columnists in the news pages “is fundamentally analytical,” executive editor Bill Keller told the paper's public editor. “They may have a point of view on an issue, but they are not partisan or ideological. They don’t endorse candidates. They don’t prescribe outcomes. ... They are free to express opinions of a certain type that grow out of a particular expertise and a body of reporting.” His deputy, Jill Abramson, was equally opaque when defending Alessandra Stanley's put-down of the attention-craving Reverend Wright. On May 4, in another column by the public editor, Abramson was quoted saying, “She had a lot of interesting things to say that didn’t go over the news-opinion divide." (So how interesting would one have to be to go over that line?)

You know what? Screw the news-opinion divide. When the Times was still pure, reporters would simply trot out some tame expert to give the story the slant they planned; it's less convoluted—and wordy—for writers like Sorkin and Stanley simply to express their own views. Readers can get raw information from wire services and press releases; the only value the Times can add is time-saving summarization—and attitude.

The Times is the closet-case of newspapers. Everybody knows that the political bent is liberal; that the newspaper's reporters have opinions; and that they're hungry for a juicy story, even if the rush to publish can introduce mistakes. None of these are crimes; they only become embarrassments because of the paper's official position. Bill Keller needs simply to come to terms with the nature of modern newspapers. He and his colleagues will feel so much lighter if they do.

Now, we don't actually believe that Sorkin's a serious candidate for the managing editor role. At 31, Sorkin is less than half the age that Steiger was when he retired from the position last year; Brauchli himself was deemed young for the job when he took over from Steiger at the age of 46. And Sorkin, though credited for the success of the Times' Deal Book finance email newsletter, has little experience as a manager. Steiger may have been misheard; or simply caught up in the swirl of ill-informed gossip that has gripped the Journal since Brauchli's defenestration.

But Robert Thomson, the former editor of Murdoch's London Times before the Australian media mogul dropped him in as publisher of the Journal, has indeed reached out to Sorkin, for some undefined role. (Thomson is pictured here, above Sorkin.)

Here's why Sorkin is actually more plausible a candidate than he looks. First, in the highly competitive UK, where Thomson has spent most of his newspaper career, editors tend to assume responsibility much earlier in their careers. Thomson's successor at the London Times, James Harding, was just 38 years old. Piers Morgan, now reduced to American trash television, was just 28 when made editor of Murdoch's News of the World.

Second, Sorkin has a powerful reputation for breaking business scoops. With excellent contacts among the acquisition advisers who dole out deal stories, Sorkin has pretty much singlehandedly made the New York Times a force on the crucial M&A beat. The Journal no longer has the monopoly it once possessed over day-before news of big deals. One measure of Sorkin's value as a scoop-getter: he's among the most highly paid reporters at the Times, earning about $200,000 per annum.

Finally, the Times reporter, having spent so much time in the company of bankers and executives, has much more understanding of business dictates managers than his peers. Sorkin was one of the reporters most supportive of Murdoch's bold bid for Dow Jones, the Journal's parent company. While Sorkin's articles in the Times rehearsed the traditional criticisms of the tycoon's record as a proprietor, he concluded: "Mr. Murdoch may be the perfect publisher of The Wall Street Journal." Murdoch may well return the sentiment.

We've argued before that the Journal, like many other sclerotic American newspaper organizations, might benefit from a generational change. But it is not as if the newspaper has nurtured that many young editors. If Robert Thomson is determined to raise the metabolism of the Journal, to use Howell Raines' expression, he may be forced to bring in talent from outside. And that will be even more depressing for career Journal editors than last week's putsch. It is galling to report to someone younger; or to an outsider; a manager who has both those characteristics would be positively unbearable.