Because of an editing error, the TV Watch Column on Wednesday, comparing coverage of Senator Barack Obama’s trip overseas with coverage of Senator John McCain, gave an incorrect title in some copies for a Frankie Valli song used in a video by the McCain campaign to mock reporters’ coverage of Mr. Obama’s trip. The song is “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You” — not “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You.”

Looks like her new dedication to caring enough to get things mostly right most of the time is paying off! (Oh, and the "forthcoming" correction was probably this one, which ran one day after that Stanley item. Hah.) [NYT]

Readers across the globe, I think, regard New York as a place of fascination and, in many cases, a place of destination. More good stories about a place of such wonder and absurdity, magic and outrage can't but attract more readers — in this city or on other continents.

Jim Dwyer, our gifted About New York columnist, likes to say there are three great, inextinguishable human needs: food, sex and stories. We're going to keep the stories coming, likely including many about food and sex (don't wince yet!)

The Observer wonders if this statement means the paper will create a sex beat (the San Francisco Chronicle created such a position). But maybe Sexton just knows something about one or more elected officials we're not privvy to yet!

[Times via Observer]

(Photo via Times)

An editorial written by Republican presidential hopeful McCain has been rejected by the NEW YORK TIMES — less than a week after the paper published an essay written by Obama, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

The paper's decision to refuse McCain's direct rebuttal to Obama's 'My Plan for Iraq' has ignited explosive charges of media bias in top Republican circles.

'It would be terrific to have an article from Senator McCain that mirrors Senator Obama's piece,' NYT Op-Ed editor David Shipley explained in an email late Friday to McCain's staff. 'I'm not going to be able to accept this piece as currently written.'

MORE

In McCain's submission to the TIMES, he writes of Obama: 'I am dismayed that he never talks about winning the war—only of ending it... if we don't win the war, our enemies will. A triumph for the terrorists would be a disaster for us. That is something I will not allow to happen as president.'

NYT's Shipley advised McCain to try again: 'I'd be pleased, though, to look at another draft.'

[Shipley served in the Clinton Administration from 1995 until 1997 as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Presidential Speechwriter.]

MORE

A top McCain source claims the paper simply does not agree with the senator's Iraq policy, and wants him to change it, not "re-work the draft."

WHINE WHINE WHINE.

Of course there is bias at the New York Times Op-Ed section. It is the Opinion section! We call BIAS on the Wall Street Journal for not running our op-ed, "everyone who reads this section is a retard."

Drudge!!

The "moose in the room" is one of those unbearably stupid management book stories, in which a moose ends up at a dinner party or something and no one at the table has the nerves to ask why the moose is there. See, the moose represents big problems that no one wants to talk about. So you are always supposed to mention the moose in the room. Get it? The whole thing is asinine.

Of course, Sulzberger is big into management fads and business book bullshit (as we said, buffoon). And back when the Jayson Blair scandal was rocking the Times newsroom, he did this (per Seth Mnookin's Hard News):

Now, though, he thinks that was maybe a mistake.

In an infamous incident, Mr. Sulzberger showed up at a company crisis meeting holding a toy stuffed moose. It was a gimmick meant to symbolize things that people were afraid to say, but nobody was in the mood for goofy shtick.

He wouldn't repeat it. "Obviously not," he said. "The anger that came out of that meeting, it was so palpable that the moose wasn't a necessary tool, it became clear," he said. "It just wasn't. Now, it had proven necessary in other situations, but it wasn't in that one, so no.

"But look, if that's the biggest mistake I make as leader of The New York Times Co., this is a good thing."

Ha ha "the moose wasn't a necessary tool." And you should know about useless tools, Pinch! It's a testament to Pinch's unwavering ability to miss the point that he doesn't realize the Moose Incident wasn't one bad decision but rather a lovely symbol of how incredibly out of touch he is—with his own newsroom, with the state of media today, with the national mood. Former Times reporter John Darnton just published an entertaining murder mystery set at a newspaper that bears some resemblance to the Times. Here's how he paints the publisher of his fictional newspaper:

The prizes and revenue poured in. it was like standing on the bridge of an aircraft carrier and believing that you, not the ocean were actually keeping the damn thing afloat. But now, with the Internet, the blogs, MSNBC, fifteen minute news cycles, giveaway papers in the subway—Christ, you turn around for a moment and the whole damn world is different. A cliché, maybe, but it's true. Just two days ago, he asked Rosen, one of his two sons, a computer geek, to introduce him to some sites; he read a smattering of them (superficial.com, gawker.com, defamer.com) and he was aghast. Where the hell did it come from, this abiding compulsion to read about breakups and breakdowns of third-rate celebrities? To pursue them into restaurants and nightclubs as they turned bulimic or cheated on their partners or adopted African babies? And written in a spirit of such spite (he didn't know the word schadenfreude). "That's the whole point, Dad," his son had said laughing condescendingly. "You've got to be snarky."

But in this book is the seed of the actual good news for Times reporters. The paper is still a great springboard to actual media success. They've taken recently to building personalities out of their contributors. It's a break from Times tradition, and a welcome one. Does it matter whatever Warren St. John's actual salary and position at the Times are? No, not so much. What matters for Warren is how effective the paper is at promoting his book, and his brand. What is David Carr? A film vlogger...? And now addiction memoirist? He's whatever the hell he wants to be at the New York Times, which is good news for people who enjoy his writing, and good news for his Amazon ranking.

Is it good news for the Times? Who the hell knows. Pinch sure doesn't.

He's the one openly feeding you all of this unflattering information, first of all, and self deprecation tends to be charming. He's recovered and made some amends.

But just as important is the running meta-commentary. Carr repeatedly and self-consciously points out the autobiographer's primal, protective instinct toward self-flattery, and corrects this with his own reporting about himself. He calls many of his own memories "myths" based on this fact checking.

Carr also admits some of his unfair advantages:

When a woman, any woman, has issues with substances, has kids out of wedlock and ends up struggling as a single parent, she is identified by many names: slut, loser, welfare mom, burden on society. Take those same circumstances and array them over a man, and he becomes a crown prince. See him doing that dad thing and, with a flick of the wrist, the mom thing too! Why is it that the same series of overt acts committed by a male becomes somehow ennobled?

Carr also cleverly takes a preemptive shot at judgmental readers:

In the convention of the recovery narrative, readers will want to scan past the tick-tock, looking for the yucky part so that they can feel better about themselves. ( (Here’s a taste: When I got to detox for what I thought was the last time, they took one look at my arms and brought me a tub filled with lukewarm water and Dreft detergent to soak my scabrous, pus-filled track marks. They dropped pills into my mouth from several inches away as if feeding a baby bird, and even the wet-brain drunks wouldn’t come near me. See how that works?)

Carr's excerpt is worth a read, not only because it's a page turner, but also because it's a remarkable example of how, amid the spread of internet protocelebrity and the return of tabloid-style media wars, one inoculates oneself against smear campaigns: Smear yourself first, in the most charming way possible.

[Times]

“I was kind of anxious and nervous to meet important people,” he recalled that night. “At first we just talked about books, mostly stuff that he had published in his division. He gave me a couple books that he had published.” Alec paused after he said this for about 30 seconds to finish typing out a text message. “He also gave me this,” he added, indicating a totebag, “which is really cool. I’ve never really had a totebag before.”


As for the novel, part of which Mr. Callahan had read: “It follows three impressionable, sort of naive, romantic kids who go on this sort of introspective road trip...

“We didn’t discuss it too much. He just told me he liked it but that I needed to tighten it up.”

[Observer] (photo via Facebook via Observer)

On a recent road trip, I found numerous funny, bittersweet, or just bitter or idiotic political bumper stickers a welcome distraction from $4.50 gas, but also thought I should remind everybody who has anything to do with creating or displaying news content why they shouldn't display their own political views, on cars or elsewhere, in this campaign season or afterward.

But that's not all! The freedom of Times staffers to express themselves is not only being trod upon on the streets, but also on the information superhighway! Whitney sent another memo today on the subject of political expression:

Fellow newsroom hands:
I should have also mentioned avoiding some other potential political entanglements: Web sites, personal blogs, YouTube, Facebook, slogans and so on in e-mails and instant messaging systems. When Facebook asks what your political preferences are, don't answer, and don't say anything in a blog, video, radio or television program or any other medium that you couldn't say in the paper or on our Website — about politics or anything else.

Sigh. Looks like Virginia Heffernan will have to quit the "Official Petition for Colored Facebook Profiles" group.

(Actually, if anyone can find real examples of Times staffers with inappropriate Facebook group memberships, you know where to send the proof.)

"You seem to cultivate a kind of wild-child mystique, even in your appearance. For instance, why don’t you use hair conditioner?

I do use conditioner!

I’m surprised. You’re the queen of split ends.

That’s very funny because I’ve just cut about eight inches off my hair because it was just too ratty-looking.

Seriously, are you trying to cultivate any sort of image, androgynous or otherwise?

I’m disinterested. I’ve always looked the same. Since I was a child, I hated having to deal with my hair. I hated having to change my clothes. As a kid, I had a sailor shirt and the same old corduroy pants, and that’s what I wanted to wear everyday."

But Patti has it right: the only way to respond to a hair-attack is with good humor.

The main idea under discussion — shortening the veil of rods by what Mr. Piano called “six or seven feet” from where they begin — would deter most would-be climbers and “fundamentally doesn’t alter this building,” he said.

On the northern and southern sides of the building, he added, little glass panels would be put in place — similar to plywood barriers temporarily installed after the previous stunts — to prevent people from climbing onto the canopies.

But really, is making the ascent more tricky (and thus exotic) going to deter the sort of folks who love to climb near-vertical rock faces? The gauntlet has been thrown, climbers.

[Times]

Last year, you'll recall, it was Lynn Dolnick's son Ben who was the recipient of a helpful Times notice — one he wrote himself, in the form of an op-ed piece. The scandal made Gawker, and was then picked up in Page Six, but the Times shrugged off the incident, setting aside its normally delicate ethical sensitivities.

How could there be a conflict of interest, the Times asked the Post, if "members of the Ochs-Sulzberger family have no more or no less opportunity to appear in the pages of the Times" than anyone else? In other words, Times editors are such ethical superheroes that there doesn't need to be so much as a disclosure when they handle a book from a member of the clan that writes their paychecks.

Later, Ben Dolnick's agent was quoted in a friendly Washington Post feature saying that it was not a challenge or big deal to get his op-ed published, as though that wasn't precisely the point.

In either Ben or Edward Dolnick's case, disclosure would at least have let readers discount the paper's praise as they saw fit. Such was the case when Times vice president Alyse Myers received both a glowing review and room for her own magazine essay this past May in connection with the publication of her book about her mean mom — and even with the disclosure, we heard, Times staffers were still in an uproar.

Readers aren't the only ones with reason to feel cheated by the way the Times has handled Ed Dolnick's latest book. A tipster — who from the sounds of things has a dog in this fight — puts forward the name of a competing author as another aggrieved party:

...a serious, competing book [is] coming out in four weeks from
Harcourt. "The Man Who Made Vermeers" by Jonathan Lopez is based on
years of archival research conducted in Dutch and English, as well as
interviews with descendants of Van Meegeren's accomplices. (Dolnick
neither speaks nor reads Dutch.) Parts of "The Man Who Made Vermeers"
have already appeared as major articles in the London-based Apollo
Magazine and as a cover story in De Groene Amsterdammer, the oldest
continuously-published news magazine in the Netherlands. The book has
already been praised as "remarkable" by major museum curators. But
it's absent from the New York Times.

The Times has had advance readers' copies of "The Man Who Made
Vermeers" for months.

...By placing Dolnick's title in so many
outlets – Sunday Book Review, daily paper, blog – it has
effectively blocked the competition from being covered in any of them,
the general topic having been so recently treated.

Unlike his son Ben, Ed Dolnick is an established writer. He is former chief science reporter at the Boston Globe and author of at least three other books. His work on van Meegeren might do just fine without all this notice in the Times, and perhaps he would have recieved some — maybe even all — of it without being part of the extended Times family. Which is precisely why the newspaper should handle his book more transparently. Keeping his extensive connections in the dark makes them look all the more sinister.

(Most of these were found thanks to the tireless research of Daniel Radosh, whose work on the media self-censorship beat has certainly earned him something like a "Webby" but actually meaningful.)

So. We know the Times censors the usual seven dirty words. But they go far above and beyond the call of duty in their effort to PROTECT THE CHILDREN.

1. Nuts. Obv fine in the Food section, not so much when prominent leader of the civil rights movement uses it as a threat against a presidential candidate. Got it? No longer newsworthy!

2. Poo. In a piece about one-man indie band Final Fantasy, the Times Magazine wrote: "The sleeve of Final Fantasy’s most recent album (the title is at once innocent and vulgar, and can’t be printed here)..." The name of the album is He Poos Clouds. Which is gross, yes, but unprintable?

3. Sucks. The non-sexual casual meaning this word hasn't been shocking since 1900, right? Still. Mr. Radosh was not allowed to say that Christian Rock Doesn't Suck in the New York Times.

4. Fug. There's a blog called "Go Fug Yourself." Fug stands for "fugly" which supposedly means "fucking ugly" but it's really just a new cute internet way of saying ugly. Not in the Times, where that site becomes merely "a popular Web site focused on fashion disasters." Yes, good luck googling that.

5. Came. This one's fun because they refuse to quote something that was printed in a Harry Potter book! After it turned out that Dumbledore was gay, everyone reread those stupid books for clues. This is what the Times printed:

She proposes that when the two friends had a falling out in a dramatic duel, Grindelwald did not fight but "conjured a white handkerchief from the end of his wand and" — the passage then gives way to an obvious (in retrospect) sexual double entendre.

The rest of that sentence is "came quietly." Hah. Get it? Miss Rowling you are the worst!

Honorable Mention: Goddamn.

The Times has printed the word "goddamn" literally hundreds of times, going back to 1857, but refused to reprint it when Sally Field said it at the Emmys in 2007. They just said "Ms. Field used an expletive in saying that if mothers ruled the world, there would be no wars," which once again makes it sound even worse than it actually was. Servicey!

Now if anyone can find good examples of the Times censoring "doody" or "wiener," let us know.

We, and no doubt the Times, wondered a month ago if architect Renzo Piano's "lace" skin shouldn't come down, after two ascents in one day, but the Times wanted to first try beefing up security. That clearly didn't work, but maybe this way is better: at least the paper can truthfully claim to have become not only more secure, but also a significantly more transparent organization than it was even a month ago!

[City Room]



(Photo by David Dunlap via Times)

Apparently, the Times is being vague about the contents of the banner because "we can't read the words yet - we're trying," according to a newsroom staffer. If you're in midtown, and reading this, take a look for us! tips@gawker.com (What, you have something better to do at this hour?)

UPDATE 2: Nevermind, the Daily News has a picture and got a call from the climber, David Malone, who is responible for the website and book Bin Laden's Plan, which advocates new tactics against Al Qaeda. And, as reported in the comments, the Times has already put in an email to the guy for comment (the guy right outside their window — but hey, maybe he has a BlackBerry!).

[Times]

One of the newest and surely among the most creative of the thousands of insane anti-Obama smear emails making the rounds purports to be a June 29 column by Maureen Dowd. Apparently all of those small donations to Obama's campaign, according to pretend-Dowd, came from "Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries."

"What I learned from this insider was shocking but I guess we shouldn't be surprised that when it comes to fund raising there simply are no rules that can't be broken and no ethics that prevail. [...]

"I guess we should have been somewhat suspicious when the numbers started to come out. We were told (no proof offered) that the Obama internet contributions were from $10.00 to $25.00 or so.

"If the $200,000,000 is right, and the average contribution was $15.00, that would mean over 13 million individuals made contributions? That would also be 13 million contributions would need to be processed. How did all that happen?"

Well, we gotta admit, the pretend rhetorical question is a kinda nice touch, there. But she's not calling him "O-Bambi" so it's obviously a phony. Also Maureen Dowd does not deal with money, numbers, or objective "facts."

The best part of the whole thing is the real Dowd, on when she stumbled upon the email: "I got to the second line and I knew it wasn't me." The second line! She couldn't remember the lede from a column from last week?

(The real column, for the record, was about how Hillary and her supporters are crazy ladies.)

1. There is no "horn" attached to O'Reilly. The illustration includes little dialog bubbles, like in comic books, with pointy parts of the bubbles aimed at O'Reilly's mouth. Maybe the host missed that when his producer or whoever briefed him on his outrage during a break.

2. The illustration is by no stretch a caricature, defined by Merriam-Webster as "exaggeration by means of often ludicrous distortion of parts or characteristics." It is a series of straightforward renderings of O'Reilly as he looks on camera. A variety of unnatural colors are used, but not in the service of exaggerating anything about O'Reilly or making him look bad.

O'Reilly's ginned up outrage comes from Roger Ailes' mudslinging, dirty-politics playbook. The idea is to attack the critic, as the network did with our own Hamilton Nolan yesterday and as it has been doing with journalists and other targets for years now. But some of O'Reilly's emotion may very well be real: emerging evidence, as reported by Arango and Steinberg, that this old routine is getting boring and driving away viewers is apparently causing some very real panic over at Fox.

[TVNewser]

(Ward Sutton illustration via Times)

Earlier this year, a colleague of mine said, he was writing a story about CNN’s gains in the ratings and was told on deadline by a Fox News public relations executive that if he persisted, “they” would go after him. Within a day, “they” did, smearing him around the blogs, he said. (I did not ask him for a comment because the information was of a private nature.)

Carr never names the colleague in question, but we hear it is media reporter Tim Arango. The facts line up: For the March 5 edition, Arango wrote a story about CNN gaining on Fox News among young viewers thanks to the Democratic presidential primary.

The day the story appeared, Jossip reported rumors that Arango "just returned to the Times after two months of 'medical leave,' which many allege may have been a stint in rehab."

Jossip also alleged that Arango had written flattering articles about CNBC in an attempt to secure a job with the financial news network, and hinted his CNN article was an attempt to do the same.

Fox PR, it seems, delivered the revenge they promised Arango, and in a particularly personal form — all for basic journalistic coverage of their ratings dip. Arango once worked at the Post, and as a former member of the News Corp. tribe may have been targeted for especially harsh treatment. But the smear against him would clearly have been meant to send a message to all journalists covering Fox News, or at least those clued in enough to know what was happening, such as Arango's colleagues at the Times: any attempt at fair and balanced coverage of the network itself would be severely punished.

Fox News chief Roger Ailes, like his former boss Richard Nixon, has been running a down-and-dirty campaign against opponents who, due to self-imposed ethical constraints, feel unable to respond in kind. As more of his tactics are exposed, the question becomes whether Ailes will be pressured to rein in his PR machine, or whether his self-created enemies, like the Times, will start throwing some mud of their own.

As Carr noted in his column:

Part of me — the Irish, tribal part — admires Fox News’s ferocious defense of its guys. I work at a place where editors can make easy sport of teasing apart your flawed copy until it collapses in a steaming pile, but Lord help those outsiders who make an unwarranted or unfounded attack on me or my work. Our tactics may be different, but we, too, are strong for our posse.

A Times "posse??" Please let it involve leather chaps and boots with spurs on them, and also an alliance with a bandana-wearing Keith Olbermann.

[Times]

I'll save you the trouble of reading this:

1. Sweat makes you cool.

2. When it is hot you get hot.

3. After a while you get used to it.

I challenge you to find another salient point in that article. In the meantime, get with the program, people:

Media Matters has video of the segment. And this isn't the first time Fox News has served its vengeance airbrushed and unfunny.

[Media Matters]

“If your team isn’t in it, you root for the team you hate less. That’s McCain.”

“[Obama]’s a liberal. I oppose liberals. That’s all that’s involved here.”

Hard-hitting. I guess malaise is the price you pay for being halfway to billionaire. The old Rush would've at least worked in a crack about Obama fathering a black child in wedlock.

It's no surprise that, apart from the vaguely Soprano-ish cover, the Magazine's taken to bland, shore-hugging stuff like this. Long gone are the Days of Moss. The new editor Gerry Marzorati is stretched thin with keeping tabs on T, the NYT's new fashion magazine, and his idea of risk-taking cover stories is, well, you know.

UPDATE: The Times has posted the profile online this afternoon. Choice nuggets:

“ANTICIPATING A QUESTION,” Limbaugh said when we pulled into the garage of his secluded beachfront mansion in Palm Beach, “why do I have so many cars?”

I hadn’t actually been wondering that. Very rich people tend not to stint on transportation.

Unlike many right-wing talk-show hosts, Limbaugh does not view France with hostility. On the contrary, he is a Francophile. His salon, he told me, is meant to suggest Versailles. His main guest suite, which I did not personally inspect, was designed as an exact replica of the presidential suite of the George V Hotel in Paris.

LIMBAUGH WAS A FAILURE almost as long as he has been a success. And although he is now an apostle of sunshine (“having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have,” he crows on his show), he spent many years trying to convince his family — and himself — that he wasn’t wasting his life.

Like the great black singers of his generation, Limbaugh took the familiar pieties and ambient sounds of his time and place and used them to create a genre of entertainment, full of humor, passion and commercial possibility. There are many ways to look at Rush Limbaugh III: one is that he is the first white, Goldwater Republican soul shouter.

[The Radio Equalizer]
[Drudge]

[New York Times Magazine]

So anyway, the first gift presented – and the best – was scavenged from the 43rd Street building by Janet Higbie, an editor on the Foreign desk: a hardbound copy of The New York Times style manual, in PRISTINE condition, Janet emphasized. As in, NEVER used. So shiny. So pretty. And the name inscribed on the inside? (Drumroll…)

Jayson Blair.

Hah. That would explain so, so much. He never even read the part about how you're not supposed to lie and plagiarize! To be fair, it's way after the bit about the Oxford Comma, which is where most readers give up.

[JournalismJobs.com]

Obviously some mistakes are never corrected, even when we make fun of them. Also:

Then again, this entire item could end up requiring an asterisk. "I'd hate to stand corrected, but I think your count could prove wrong," says Stanley. "There could be one coming in the next few days — [it's] still under study."

What is this about? Anyone?

• Processed french-fry inventor JR Simplot, 99, "natural causes," May.
• Baskin-Robbins founder Irvine Robbins, 90, "complications related to old age," May.
• Lovie Yacey, founder of Fatburger, 96, "pneumonia," February.
• Carl's Jr. founder Carl Karcher, 90, "had Parkinson's disease and was being treated for pneumonia," January.

We left out Popeye's Fried Chicken founder Al Copeland, 64, who died of "malignant salivary gland tumor" in March. But he didn't do too badly at all, especially, as our own Hamilton Nolan pointed out, "for a man with a lifetime diet of fried chicken!" (Ahem.)

So there you go — irrefutable, scientific proof that you not only can but probably should load up on cheeseburgers, ice cream, french fries and hot dogs throughout the summer and really for the rest of your life. Hold the guilt!

[Times]

Sam Sifton, the Times's culture editor, says that while such decisions are handled on a case-by-case basis, rap artists often get special treatment. "There's a big difference between [Houston rapper] Bun B and Tony Bennett," Sifton says, referring to Bernard Freeman and Anthony Dominick Benedetto, respectively. "Tony Bennett took a stage name, which I think is a little different from taking an alias. Someone like Jay-Z can be Mr. Carter, certainly, or he can just be Jay-Z, but he's never going to be Mr. Z."

There is absolutely no difference between Bun B and Tony Bennett that should affect how their names are treated in the paper. Not only does this highlight the faux-formal idiocy of the Times style guide, it provides a good opportunity to repeat Method Man's greatest truth ever: "Dig it/ F a rap critic/ They talk about it while I live it."

No equality of birth-naming, no peace!

[CJR via Romenesko]