Tough question

Is Libertarianism "applied autism" or something even worse? After this, i'm leaning toward something worse.

News judgement

Maybe someone could explain why the TV is awash with stories about a long-dead one-time royal from across the pond but there will be no mention of Solidarity and what it meant for the world.

Solidarity

Originally posted 31 August 2003

On this day in 1980 the Polish communist government agreed to the demands of the striking workers in the Gdansk shipyard. Workers would have the right to organize freely and independently

The strike marked the beginning of the end of communist rule in Eastern Europe. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher are, rightly, given the greatest share of credit for winning the Cold War. But Lech Walesa and John Paul II played indispensable roles.

In the 70s many experts believed that continuing the Cold War was pointless-- the Communists weren't so bad, not every society valued Western style freedom, cowed populations accepted what they could not change. Solidarity and the Poles put the lie to such talk.

In the long twilight struggle against Stalinism, the workers of Poland were the first light of sunrise.

Richard Jewell and the FBI

Louis Freeh devotes four pages of his memoirs to the Atlanta bombing and Richard Jewell’s victimization by the FBI and MSM. His account is revealing on several levels.

First there is this:

It wasn't that I was convinced Jewell was the man. If anything, i was unconvinced, then and later. To me, he never quited seemed to fit the facts. But a search warrant isn't an accusation. It's a judicial order to acquire evidence and other information that will help decide whether to move forward toward and indeictment or to move on to other suspects and other lines of inquiry. That's where we were with Richard Jewell when the Atlanta Journal-Constitution got wind of the search warrant, added two and two and came up with five, and named Jewell as our prime suspect.

Note the passive voice and the attempt to cover up the FBI’s culpability. The paper “got wind” of the search warrant then jumped to a wrong conclusion in Freeh’s telling of the story. No mention of the FBI leaks and tips that poured into the media and drove the story onto the front pages.

Second, Freeh mentions that three supervisors were officially reprimanded for their handling of Jewell. He does not give their names. It is one thing to destroy an innocent citizen’s reputation; that is just a by-product of modern law enforcement. But the reputation of FBI agents is something to be protected even when they do something wrong.

In Freeh’s view the Bureau was the real victim in the Jewell case:

I was most galled by the fact that the controversy drew attention away from what the FBI does best: exhausting tens of thousands of hours on solvin crimes that no other agency has the training or resources or resolve or corporate culture to take on.

And

The tale might begin with Richard Jewell and a foolish trick in the Bureau's Atlanta office, but that's the background static, not the story itself.

If a criminal defendant offered up these sorts of lame excuses and justifications, all sorts of profilers and psychologists would weigh in and declare that he was a psychopath or sociopath. What should we call an organization that operates like this or the man who led it?

Richard Jewell R.I.P

Richard Jewell found dead in home

Olympic security guard suspected but cleared in bombing

There will be a lot of passive voice in the retrospective stories. Very few will face up to the cold fact that the government and media, working hand in glove, ruined an innocent man's life.

See here for more on the injustice done to Jewell.

The sad thing is that the media did not learn from this. The Duke lacrosse case is just a recent, high-profile example.

Jewell still suffers from their reckless action ten years ago. I think this blog got it exactly right:

Two people died; what would the death toll have been had Jewell not discovered the bomb or not moved the crowd away? Yet because of overreaction by the Feds and the national/local media, Jewell is still remembered as "that guy who didn't set the bomb" instead of "that guy who saved all those people from the bomb."

Call me crazy

but i was pleased to see CNN's "God's Warriors" do well in the ratings. I know it was biased, but that is sort of given with CNN.

The encouraging point is that a serious news documentary crushed Fox News and their stable of talk radio rantfests and sleazy tabloid stories.

Let's hope that MSNBC and Fox see this as a wake-up call and decide to fight quality with quality.

It's new! It's bold! It's so 2002!

The Atlantic's editor talks about their site redesign:

A Note on the New Design

Every day online, The Atlantic is pursuing truth through collegial combat among bloggers who have very different points of view but who hold themselves to the same high standard of intellectual honesty.

Somehow, adding a blog page dominated by Yglesias, Sullivan, and McArdle seems a little less than groundbreaking.

Then, of course, there is the laughable idea that Excitable Andy holds himself to a "high standard of intellectual honesty."

Intereresting questions

Kaus asks a couple of provocative questions:

His Pet Gloat: I wish I could say Bill O'Reilly was wrong about Paul Greengrass' Bourne Ultimatum being an anti-American film but I saw it last weekend and O'Reilly's right. It's not just that the script plays on opposition to Bush anti-terror tactics--waterboarding, etc. Or that in a moment of calm hero Matt Damon utters maybe 15 of the 40 words he speaks in the film and explains that he's simply trying to apologize for ... well, the CIA's sins, or maybe America's. Just because you oppose waterboarding and believe the U.S. has a lot to apologize for doesn't make you anti-American. The problem is the film is unredeemed by any sense that America or the American government ever stands for or does anything that is right.

It is a big hit overseas. ...

The film also made me feel guilty, because I watched Greengrass' United 93 and left convinced it was a searing indictment of Bush's behavior in hours after 9/11. (Air controllers spend much of the film trying to locate the AWOL President they can obtain an order to shoot down the hijacked jet.) I didn't know anything about Greengrass, and the film looked like it had been based on actual records by a meticulously dispassionate observer. But Greengrass' Bourne film undermines his credibility and retrospectively dissolves United 93's anti-Bush power. I don't trust anything the man makes. ... P.S.: Has Big Hollywood made a single non-anti-US post-9/11 film I missed? I can't remember one (aside from Team America: World Police, which was a cartoon).. ... And don't say World Trade Center. That passed up several potentially epic patriotic moments (e.g. the Dave Karnes story) in favor of a tribute to the fraternity of New York transit cops. ... Next up: In the Valley of Elah, a well-made version of the Scott Beauchamp Story. ... Is it the international market that makes our studios behave this way? I sense an underserved domestic niche .

By Jove, i think he hit on something important. See:

Hollywood, the market, and cultural blinders

and

Hollywood and the war on terror

The Bush governing style

Two good recent articles

From Slate

All the President's Flunkies

As a broader management practice, though, Bush has made a fetish of loyalty even when unaccompanied by ability. He saw how disloyal aides undercut his father. To win loyalty, Bush shows it.

From The Atlantic:

The Rove Presidency

Rove’s greatest shortcoming was not in conceptualizing policies but in failing to understand the process of getting them implemented, a weakness he never seems to have recognized in himself. It’s startling that someone who gave so much thought to redirecting the powers of government evinced so little interest in understanding how it operates. Perhaps because he had never worked in government—or maybe because his standing rested upon his relationship with a single superior—he was often ineffective at bringing into being anything that required more than a presidential signature.

I disagree on this point:

Rove wouldn’t be Rove, in other words, were Bush not Bush. That Vice President Cheney also hit a historic high-water mark for influence says a lot about how the actual president sees fit to govern. All rhetoric about “leadership” aside, Bush will be viewed as a weak executive who ceded far too much authority.

Many of Bush's leadership failures grow out of the lessons he learned at the Harvard Business School. he is a strong executive but a weak leader because that is the model CEO of management textbooks. In addition, that executive model is especially susceptible to flunkyitis.


See also:

GWB and his MBA


The Bush-Rumsfeld legacy


Five quick points about the conservative tantrum

Roethlisberger gets some credit

Big Ben’s time has come

But few fans truly appreciate the historic productivity that has marked his short career. Like many of the game’s great winners – the Bart Starrs and Tom Bradys of the football world – Roethlisberger is often seen as something of a pigskin perfunctory: a "system" quarterback who simply “manages” the game for his talent-laden teams.

The chorus of Cold, Hard Football Facts sing quite a different tune: Roethlisberger, at this very early point in his career, is poised to join the short list of most ruthlessly efficient quarterbacks in NFL history.

And as history has shown, ruthlessly efficient quarterbacks win more games and sport more rings than the glitzy gunslingers coveted by the faux-fan fantasy-football and video-game crowd. (Amazing that so many "system" quarterbacks wear so many rings, isn't it? Maybe a story for another day.)

Michael Vick: Nagging Thoughts

The end of the Michael Vick case leaves a bad taste. I have far more sympathy for the soon-to-be inmate than I ever did for the overpaid and over-hyped player.

Some of it is the piling on by Big Media. The ritualized denunciations of Vick are all out of proportion to the actual crimes. Do Nancy Grace and Sean Hannity really need to incite their mob of slobbering mouth-breathers day after day?

(Side point: Joining these mobs serves the same function as the Diana memorials Maureen Orth saw in San Francisco. It is a way for a pathetic loser to get close to fame.)

Another troubling question: Were the lurid stories about drowning and electrocuting dogs put into the indictment to taint the jury pool and put public pressure on Vick? I do not think cruelty to animals is a federal crime so why were those stories in a federal indictment?

Were the stories true? They came from people trying to make a deal. Maybe they had an incentive to exaggerate a little. And maybe an ambitious prosecutor will be less than diligent when he scrutinizes those statements if they point to the big fish he is targeting.

Why did this become a federal case anyway? A local drug bust led to allegations and evidence of dog fighting. State authorities moved too slowly for the DOJ, so the federal government brought its full power to bear.

The energetic federal response in Virginia stands in stark contrast to federal indifference to another high profile criminal case in California. When Lindsey Lohan was arrested the last time, traces of cocaine were found in her purse. Local authorities treated the matter as a simple DUI. The Feds deferred to the state.

Is dog-fighting now a higher priority for the DOJ than the “War on Drugs”? If so, maybe they should give this guy his money back. Maybe they should stop funding those SWAT teams that kick in doors in the inner city looking for crack and pot.

If the War on Drugs is still important, why did the DOJ pass on the opportunity to pressure Lohan and her posse into revealing her supplier? Why id a high profile dog fighter a prize worth bagging but the “Hollywood Connection” is a matter of indifference?

Somehow, I don’t see Lohan’s posse as a tougher nut to crack than Vick’s “friends.” So why not break them and find out who the dealers are?

The media mob displays the same double standard. No one is calling for Lohan to lose her career despite the fact that she has flaunted the law and endangered innocent lives. She is treated as a victim (of what?) Vick, however, is evil personified who is denied all chances of redemption.

The pressure on the NFL to ban Vick has no analogue in Hollywood. Dog fighting is wrong, but so is rape. Nonetheless, Roman Polanski is making movies and winning awards. The media mob yawns.

How we live now

This is just outstanding:

Diana, Versace and the celebrity epidemic

From the mixed bar—one for both gays and lesbians where I was interviewing—I could see a dozen dried bouquets which had been stuffed into the iron grill beside a bank in an homage to the fallen princess. The man I was interviewing then gave me a memorable lesson in the power of celebrity. The bouquets, he said, were a way to get the neighborhood in on the act.

I think this blogger really nailed it years ago:

Fame is the last universal currency. It collateralizes loans for Donald Trump; it buys a bully pulpit for Rosie O’Donnell and literary influence for Oprah Winfrey. It secures the best table in the restaurant, no reservation required. In an age of almost unimaginable abundance, celebrity is the last scarce good. Is it any wonder that people pursue it, and proximity to it, so assiduously?

Both posts deserve to be read in full.

Hmmm. Maybe the Philly Inquirer gets it


From Phawker:

Inquirer sports columnist Stephen A. Smith has been stripped of his column and has been offered a job as a general assignment reporter in the Inquirer’s sports department

Why pay big bucks to a sports columnist who spends most of his time at ESPN?

The newspaper today and tomorrow

Russell Baker looks at newspapers and journalism in the NYRB:

Goodbye to Newspapers?

It is an interesting article on two levels. First, he touches on nearly every problem confronting newspapers and journalists. Second, his analysis reveals the blind spots that prevent those inside of journalism from addressing those problems.

The economic problem

The main villain of the piece is Wall Street and the profit motive. This is now received wisdom among journalists. They are correct that revenue growth has slowed or even declined at most newspapers. This has resulted in waves of retrenchment and layoffs as managers try to keep expenses in line with cash flow.

Baker, like most journalists, sees this as a species of evil rather than as a simple fact of economic life. He takes it for granted that these cutbacks destroy vital reporting resources. It never occurs to him that the economic equation suggests that the newspapers were spending money on low-value-added activities.

When customers no longer want to buy your product, it is time to look at what you are selling and how you make it.

The article also reveals another telling blindspot. When journalists write about how “the market is killing quality journalism”, they usually focus on the last 5-10 years. Yet newspapers have been dying off for sixty years or more. What is different now?

Baker offers a telling quote from former LA Times editor John Carroll that provides some insight into this question:

Someday, I suspect, when we look back on these forty years, we will wonder how we allowed the public good to be so deeply subordinated to private gain....

Carroll’s golden age coincides with the rise of the one newspaper town. Why was that a good thing? How could New York be better off when the Times did not have to compete with the Herald-Tribune? Why is journalism the rare business where monopolies serve the customer better than competition?

I doubt that the reading public was or is better off. The owners were because monopolies provide a nice stream of predictable earnings. The newsroom liked that the owners were fat and happy because as long as the income statement looked good the owners did not interfere with content. Editors and reporters were free to chases awards, collect bigger paychecks, and indulge their ideological obsessions. Local monopolies also gave journalists bigger megaphones and a de facto victory in “explanation space”.

The golden age, in short, rested on a temporary set of conditions in which economics and technology favored news monopolies. The readers never wanted it. That much became clear when technology began to offer more choices.

The technology problem

Baker is scathing when it comes to the contributions the internet can make to journalism:

How the Internet might replace the newspaper as a source of information is never explained by those who assure you that it will. At present about 80 percent of all news available on the Internet originates in newspapers, according to John Carroll's estimate, and no Internet company has the resources needed to gather and edit news on the scale of the most mediocre metropolitan daily. Moreover, corporations like Google and Yahoo apparently have no interest in going into serious journalism. (Google has an automated news site, Google News, which sifts through hundreds of online newspapers and news agency reports; and Yahoo includes news agency reports on its Yahoo News site. But neither fields its own reporting staff or provides its own news coverage.)

At present the Internet is basically an electronic version of the ten-year-old boy on a bicycle who used to toss the newspaper on the front porch: an ingenious circulation device.

He completely misses the point on this score. The boy on the bike delivered one product: that mediocre daily. The internet delivers content from around the world. With a few clicks of a mouse the engaged reader can scan a front page that far outdistances the dull product put out by his local monopoly paper.

That is a key point. The web breaks the power that editors once had to define what the news is.

Baker is also wrong to treat “news gathering”as the primary activity of a newspaper. The vast majority of their resources go to other activities (editing, commentary, speculation, trivia) rather than gathering hard information about important matters.

John Corry made an important point about the changing definition of news in an interview with CSPAN in 1994:

The other day, on a Sunday, what was it? -- a week ago Sunday, I think, and I picked up The New York Times, and there, page one, there were seven stories on page one. I counted them. And now in the old days -- old only being 10 or 15 years ago -- the news journalistic philosophy was that you would give a snapshot of the world in the previous 24 hours: What happened yesterday all over the world? But the other Sunday, I picked up the paper and I looked at the seven page-one stories and not one story had a yesterday or a last night in the lead. All seven stories were about something that will happen or might happen or conceivably could happen some time in the future. Well, it's a different kind of journalism.

Spend five minutes with any paper and you will see that the problem has only gotten worse. Instead of hard news (what happened, what is happening), we get pointless ephemera (what might happen, who is ahead now in a campaign where the election is six months away).

Those who worry about the future of newsgathering should be appalled that resources are wasted on pointless trivia. They offer nothing to the reader (potential customer) who wants hard news. Yet they are expensive and hurt the paper’s brand.

Worst of all, some of these activities (e.g. punditry, commentary) are costly productions that compete directly with the product of amateurs.

The blogger problem

Baker is surprisingly generous to bloggers:

Blogging is a more interesting development, perhaps because bloggers are so passionate about it. It is a valuable restraint on careless and sloppy journalism, for the vigilance of the bloggers misses not the slightest error or the least omission, and the fury of their rage is terrible to bear. Committed bloggers insist that they are practicing journalism just as surely as a correspondent like John Burns is practicing journalism when reporting on the Iraq war from Baghdad for The New York Times. Anyone wishing to debate the point must be ready to argue all night and well into next week. What is indisputable is that practically every blogger can now be a columnist. With vast armies of columnists blogging away, it seems inevitable that a few may eventually produce something original, arresting, and refreshing and so breathe new life into this worn-out journalistic form.

Note, however, the clever sleight of hand. He chooses to compare bloggers to war correspondents. The comparison can only make the journalistic pretensions of bloggers look ridiculous. OTOH, the daily work of most journalists in no way resembles the work of John Burns in Iraq.

A better comparison might be KC Johnson vs. Duff Wilson in the Duke lacrosse case. That was anything but a victory for the professionals.

Mocking bloggers is good sport for journalists. It does little to solve the problems of newspapers which is Baker’s professed concern. It is too bad that he glossed over the important point he touched on here.

If the newspaper column is a “worn-out journalistic form”, why do papers pour so many resources into it? The Times, for example, has a boatload of highly paid journalists churning out columns by the yard. Why spend so much on a product that has to compete with free commentary on the Internet and which has no qualitative advantage over the best blogging?

If newsgathering is so important, why does the Times spend money on sports pundits like Selena Roberts? Wouldn’t that money be better spend on more reporters who break news?

Journalists rarely raise this issue. They are part of a guild and a guild’s first aim is to protect its members. All its members.

The guild problem

The need to protect all guild members at all times hurts journalism in several ways. First, reflexive defensiveness lowers the credibility of the profession. To an outsider, all the fine words about integrity and truth ring hollow as we watch working journalists offer lame justifications for guild members who did not live up to those standards. It is even worse when those justifications include attacks on those who exposed those failings.

In addition, how can newspapers improve if they refuse to acknowledge the areas that need improvement? Press criticism by insiders usually ends up concluding that “over all our guys did a good job”. (See here, here, and here.)

No where is this more clear than when it comes to the guild’s heroic myths. Even Baker falls victim to it:

What became of heroes? Journalists used to dine out on the deeds of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during Watergate; of David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Malcolm Browne in Vietnam; of "Punch" Sulzberger and Kay Graham risking everything to publish the Pentagon Papers.

Forty years on and working journalists prefer legends to history. (See here for Vietnam and here for Watergate.)

The bias problem

When it comes to the MSM’s image the question of bias generates the most controversy. Surveys show that many Americans think the press tilts left. The blogosphere has generated millions of words on this issue alone.

In almost any other controversy journalists take the position that “where there is smoke, there is fire.” On the bias issue, however, they drop that attitude. Baker addresses this point but only to dismiss it. To him, the bias issue is just so much political spin:

For years, there has been an effective campaign by political conservatives to depict the press as a false messenger spreading negativity and poisoning minds with leftist bias. Books on the theme become best sellers. Political "hosts" on round-the-clock news stations repeat the message tirelessly.

That might reassure a true believer, but it ignores the myriad examples of reporting “mistakes” that serve a liberal agenda. Moreover, the bias issue persists and resonates because we have all seen examples where reporters get the facts grievously wrong. We do not take it on faith because Karl Rove or Rush Limbaugh told us so; we know for sure because, on a specific issue, we recognize the gross and laughable errors a reporter makes.

For some, it is seeing a story on semi-automatic weapons that uses video of a full-auto AK-47. For others, it is 60 Minutes hyping the dangers of the Audi 5000 with no understanding of engine torque and braking power. It could be medical procedures, the drug approval process, the written opinion of a Supreme Court decision, the specific teaching of their denomination, or a doctored photo. The net result is that the reader suspects that Big Journalism values its agenda over diligent reporting or honest analysis.

The striking think about this constellation of problems is that they reinforce each other. Readers who are angered by shallow or biased reporting are less likely to remain (or become) subscribers now that technology offers more choices. Hence, the economic problem gets worse. At the same time, the self-protective reflex of the guild hinders newspapers ability to adapt and improve.

I wonder if anyone at the New York Times has ever studied how GM acted in 1982?

Ed Bouchette isn't sold on the new Steelers' offense

More passes always seem to lead to more losses for the Steelers

The new passing game is one of the few things i've liked about the preseason. It reminds me of the play-calling during the post-season in 2005

VDH is an optimist

Victor Davis Hanson in The Corner:

After reviewing the latest critique of the CIA's failures to foresee the pre-9/11 dangers of radical Islam, and while reading the final sordid details surrounding the Pvt. Beauchamp fables published at The New Republic, and viewing the latest phony wire-photos from Iraq (the poor victimized Iraqi woman holding unfired cartridges as 'proof' of coalition bullets that hit her home), I was wondering who will monitor our self-righteous monitors?

The answer, like it or not, in the post-Plame, post-Scheuer, post-Tenet era is that no one believes much what the CIA says any more about the Middle East; no one believes that a wire-photo from there is genuine or its caption accurate; and no one necessarily believes anything in once respected magazines, whether the Periscope section of Newsweek or anything published in The New Republic. The common gripe is that the administration lied to the public about WMD in Iraq; but what is lost is that once revered institutions proved disingenuous in their accusations and unreliable in their performance.

Michael Crichton from a speech in 2002

Media carries with it a credibility that is totally undeserved. You have all experienced this, in what I call the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. (I call it by this name because I once discussed it with Murray Gell-Mann, and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have.)

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all.

Victor Davis Hanson on military history

Good article from City Journal:

Why Study War?

I like the bibliography he included in with it, but i would add three book:

Murray and Millett, A War to be Won

S. E. Morison, The Two Ocean War

G.M. Fraser, Quartered Safe Out Here

Good point

From Protein Wisdom

So much of leftist rhetoric is an attempt simply to shame opponents into compliance — you don’t agree with race-based affirmative action as policy? You are a racist. You don’t support legalizing same-sex marriage as a civil right? You are a homophobe — followed by an effort to redefine terms (”racist”, “homophobe,” “masculine”) in the social vacuum created by that shaming mechanism.

It's not a trait unique to the Left. It was an essential feature of McCarthyism and a favored tactic of the Birchers. The neocons were quite willing to play the "you're an anti-Semite" card when it suited their purposes.

It seems indisputable that the Left-version has taken firm root in out colleges. Institutions that claim to value free inquiry and dialogue provide a home to ideologues who are not interested in either.

We saw this at Duke with the Gang of 88. They hurled their rhetorical thunderbolts but refused to engage any one who offered a differing view.

Yaeger and Pressler quote lacrosse player Kyl Dowd who cuts to the heart of the Gang's hypocrisy.

The only problem is, you are willing to start a dialogue but now you refuse to speak to the media, you refuse to speak to us, you refuse to speak to other professors. So you've actually decreased the dialogue about these topics, which is in complete contradiction to your original goal. No matter which way you look at it, they've failed.

Behind the newsroom door

David Gelernter makes a telling point about the MSM in his book Drawing Life (1997)

Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the '96 Dole presidential campaign: "The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say 'yeah, i'm the Media. Screw You.'" The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd-- an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none.

A decade passes and that media insouciance is long gone. Now, the MSM resembles a family out of a Tennessee Williams’ play. They are obsessed with maintaining appearances and in deep denial about their scandalous secrets. At the same time, they are always keen to heap scorn on the riff-raff who refuse to play along with their self-serving pretenses.

Case in point, this column from the Seattle Times:

Lessons in newsroom decorum

I doubt that many people were surprised that a bunch of journalists cheered when Rove resigned. Further, I doubt that the journalists wanted to discuss the issue once it became public. Sadly, they can no longer reply with a hearty, but private FU. So the guild has to pretend that it was a shocking breach of etiquette rather than business as usual. Then they serve us mawkish platitudes mixed with the strategic slam on those who dare question the elect:

The hallowed halls of journalism that I was privileged to enter more than 20 years ago are looking more and more like the New York subway. The walls covered in bloggers' scrawl, the platform crowded with any yahoo with a camera and an open mike. All are headed to your computer screen or television for the 15 seconds you'll give them before moving on to the next hot spot.

That's not how we do things at this newspaper.

Gregg Easterbrook is a brave man

He is willing to write a column sympathetic to Michael Vick even at this late date.

This point remains true no matter how the case turns out:

Remember, the charges against Vick are accusations. The Duke lacrosse mess reminded us that accusations are not the same as guilt and that prosecutors might be unscrupulous. The NFL, the media and popular opinion all seem to accept that because Vick is accused, he must be guilty. He's been treated as guilty -- mocked, effectively suspended from football, deprived of most of his income -- long before any legal determination has been made. There's something deeply sick about the fact that you can go to the NFL's official shop and order a Bills jersey with No. 32 and SIMPSON on the back -- go here and try it yourself -- or a Panthers jersey with CARRUTH on the back, the NFL system actually says "Great choice!" in response, but if you go here and try to order a Falcons' jersey with Vick's name or number, you'll get a message saying your order cannot be processed.