Sun-Times and NYTimes circulation drops recently reported — 21 percent drop in average weekday circulation for six months ended in March 2005 for S-T, “sharp” 4th-quarter earnings drop for NYT [see: http://www.imediaconnection.com/news/7670.asp] — relate to online competition.

“Advertisers are following consumers online,” says Shawn Riegsecker, president, Centro, a local advertising buying service specializing in online advertising with “over 1,300 local sites encompassing online newspapers, TV and radio sites, alternative weeklies and business publications,” says Imedia Connection — http://www.imediaconnection.com/news/7379.asp.

“That’s why,” says Riegsecker, “this is less about . . . bad news [about] newspapers, and more about which newspapers will begin to assert [put] their premium brands online – and how quickly and strategically they’ll do it.”

In other words, they should get on-line or get lost.

* See here http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/22/181923.shtml for more on DePaul U. as stifler of freedom. 

* And consider this about Maureen Dowd, of Are Men Necessary? and NYT fame:

IS MAUREEN DOWD NECESSARY?   J. Peder Zane has her number :

American journalism has a proud tradition of balloon-busters, but Dowd is H.L. Mencken without the piercing observations, Dorothy Parker without the brilliant wit. Her prose is filled with moral indignation, yet her cheap shots lower the level of discourse that she wishes were higher, and her focus on personal peccadilloes trivializes the pressing matters of state she pretends to care about.

This is my problem, not Dowd’s. I’m expecting too much from her. Think of her not as a leading pundit but a stand-up comic with the best gig in America and her work can hold your interest for a few minutes twice a week. She might even make you laugh before you reach the end of her column and all memory of her words vanishes. Poof!

Posted by Don [Luskin] at 11:57 AM | link  

* One of the other James Bowmans, this one of the East Coast, remembers the movie “Elvira Madigan” as what caught raw, young fancy in days gone by.  This Bowman’s a kid, but the Bowman whom you know from these pages worked with kids in those days and imbibed their enthusiasms.  See here: http://www.nysun.com/article/24896

* Meanwhile, the other Journal, Wall Street (as opposed to our esteemed Wednesday J. of OP&RF), is glad the judges called the White House on the Padilla matter.  Key judge in this, btw, is Michael Luttig, who was on the short list for recent US Supreme Ct nominations.  He’s one of them, in other words, but spoke sharply to WH.  See here: http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/?id=110007720

more more more before the creeks run again . . .

A couple of Chi Trib stories today, encountered by page 11 of front section, demonstrate or at least illustrate something or other about editors’ and others’ mindset.  Page 3 has, top left, two-column head, “Hussein: U.S. jailers beat, tortured me,” with subhead “3 describe brutality of ex-dictator’s regime.”  Aamer Madhani’s lead justifies that: he subordinates “terror dispensed by Sadaam Hussein’s intelligence apparatus” to “the former Iraqi president said that he and his co-defendants have been beaten and tortured by their U.S. military jailers.”

Which is a laugh, right?  Or am I not attuned to the mainstream-media zeitgeist? 

Point: Reverse head and subhead and you have something closer to reality, ditto with lead.

Story two, on page 11, is by Trib-owned Baltimore Sun writer out of Burlington, Vermont: “The high toll on small state,” with subhead “Vermont, where war sentiments run hot and cold, has the most GI deaths per capita” and takeout quote above the head: “’All of this news of dying . . . now we’ve reached the tipping point.’  — Nancy Brown, Vermont coordinator of the national anti-war organization Military Families Speak Out.”

It’s stories like this that show why TribCo bought this Baltimore paper — so it could get Vermont stories that fit the above-mentioned zeitgeist.  How about all this news of dying on mean streets of Chicago, tied in with breakdown of family life and denigration leading to loss of traditional values? 

Nope.  This writer and these editors want to puff the antiwar movement, or so it appears.  Coming up (not): a Vermont story about military families that support the war.

Power Line has an exchange between John Hinderaker and NY Timesman Eric Lichtblau, co-author of NSA-surveillance stories, that is a textbook-quality example of how to question a questionable story.  Hinderaker cites legal chapter and verse:

The November 2002 decision of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, in Sealed Case No. 02-001, where the court said:

“The Truong court [United States v. Truong Dinh Hung, 4th Cir. 1980], as did all the other courts to have decided the issue, held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information. *** We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President’s constitutional power.”

After several exchanges in which Lichtblau cited “the end of our original story last Friday [which] quotes from the FISA appellate decision that you cite” and the story’s discussion of “the debate over whether the program was legal.”

Hinderaker effectively asks why the Times hangs its story’s “scoop” quality on blind quotes from unnamed officials who had it wrong “while not pointing [that] out.”  

I don’t think that a partial sentence from one of the controlling decisions, buried at the end of a long article and not repeated in subsequent articles, removes the incorrect impression you convey that the NSA program is, in all likelihood, illegal.

As the uber-blogger Instapundit would say, there’s more.  It’s textbook example, I say of how a newspaper overreaches.

Michelle Malkin has this right: 

Allow me to sum up the homeland security strategy of America’s do-nothing brigade, led by the armchair generals at The New York Times and ACLU headquarters:

First, bar law enforcement at all levels from taking race, ethnicity, national origin and religion into account when assessing radical Islamic terror threats. (But continue to allow the use of those factors to ensure “diversity” in public-college admissions, contracting, and police- and fire-department hiring.)  [Pow!]

Second, institute the “Eenie-meenie-miny-moe” random-search program at all subways, railways and bus stations. [Pow!]

Third, open the borders, sabotage all immigration enforcement efforts and scream “Racist” at any law-abiding American who protests. [Pow!]

Continue reading “The Left’s Privacy Hypocrites”