In an interview this past weekend, New York Times editor Jill Abramson decried THE POLITICO-style coverage of politics, in which "the political maneuvering becomes the dominant thread and what is lost is what effect it actually has on people." In a story yesterday about the US commando raids in Libya, her own paper did just that. (Then made it disappear.)
Remember when Al Gore and the Clinton Administration made everyone happy by "reinventing government" back in the '90s, on the principle that government functions would be more efficient if a third-party private intermediary were taking profits on them, because the invisible hand of the free market will always produce optimal results? The New York Times has an update on the operations of USIS, the company born in 1996 with the privatization of the Office of Personnel Management's investigative operations.
The talkathon by Senator Ted Cruz is almost certainly the most newsworthy speech that's been given by a member of the Senate on the Senate floor today or yesterday. Yet some of the response to it from the news media has been dismissive. Dylan Byers, the dumbest reporter alive, dedicated an item in The Politico to trying to think about what it all means (it means: "Media Bias").
Today, the New York Times Real Estate section fills us in on "whisper listings" — listings so rare, so expensive, so downright sexy, that they are only whispered about. Wealthy sellers don't even bother to list their apartment, instead just relying on a shadowy network of "well-connected" agents to find a buyer through word-of-mouth.
Conservative writers are very upset that The New York Times published an op-ed by Russian President Vladimir Putin calling for the U.S. to halt any plans to strike Syria. “It looks like those pro-Assad Syrians didn’t need to hack the New York Times website after all,” National Review columnist Charles C.W. Cooke tweeted. “They could have just asked nicely.” Commentary editor John Podhoretz mused this morning: “So it’s LITERALLY Pravda-on-the-Hudson.”
On Labor Day the The New York Times reported that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), an “influential pro-Israel lobby group,” was pushing Congress to bomb Syria. By the time the story appeared in Tuesday’s newsprint edition, however, all references to AIPAC had been quietly excised. The websites NewsDiffs and News Sniffer show that the piece was entirely rewritten, more or less. What happened here?
After a summer-long investigation by its Hamptons beat-reporter Jim Rutenberg, the New York Times has discovered that the Hamptons are no longer the sole domain of the gilded elite (and the various news reporters who are supposed to be covering them), but are now becoming pretty trashy. Like Jersey levels of sleaze.
The New York Times is experiencing outages today, and it's looking like the anonymous hacktivists of the Syrian Electronic Army are responsible. Our own Sam Biddle just took the screenshot above when he visited a few minutes ago. And Computer security expert Matt Johansen, manager for the Threat Research Center at WhiteHat Security, noticed that during the outage that the New York Times' website briefly pointed to a Syrian Electronic Army domain.
TV reporter and book author Brian Stelter isn’t supposed to write about cable news, given his recent try-out as the new host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, where Howard Kurtz policed the media (well, tried to) before signing with Fox News. But on Monday the Times published Stelter’s report on the cable news upstart Al Jazeera America, citing its executives’ plan to usurp established channels (such as Stelter’s potential employer). And today Stelter reported on Al Jazeera’s litigation against AT&T for dropping the network. Has a would-be media cop lost track of his own conflicted interests?
