links for 2010-07-20
-
AA: "Nowhere is the art of manufacturing controversy more prized than on Capitol Hill, but Politico raises the bar in this piece, which wonders whether reporter William Arkin's past stints with groups like Greenpeace and Human Rights Watch compromise the Washington Post's trenchant look into the post-Sept. 11 national security system. I'm not sure whether it's more staggering that the story mentions only a sole complaint from an avowedly conservative website, or the fact that the (excellent) series it objects to is devoted to exposing redundancy and the growth of government--phenomena to which conservatives are traditionally opposed."
-
BB: "If you're a political candidate, sleeping with your estranged stepson's estranged wife, it's helpful if you can fall back on an excuse like "well, at least she's not one of several prostitutes." And, indeed, that's the fallback position Chet Traylor is left with today, only a month to go before Louisiana Republicans will face the decision of whether Traylor or incumbent Senator David Vitter will be the GOP candidate in November."
-
JN: "Another old leak from JournoList, the late off-the-record listserve of liberal pundits, has proven that leftists control all media! Some bloggers were apparently so upset with a 2008 debate that they conspired to write an open letter. The Daily Caller's Jonathan Strong... has found... many of the same liberal pundits who were openly contemptuous of the debate on their own blogs or column spaces hatched the Collusion Plot of the Century, as the Daily Caller would have us believe: they would write an open letter to ABC News — collaboratively."
-
SA: "I can’t speak to the Post’s motivations. But there’s an unfortunate and archaic tendency in old-school media to avoid referencing the work of other reporters when possible — sometimes a piece is too conspicuous to neglect — and hopefully ‘Top Secret America’ will look one day like the last stand of that old way of doing business. Because it’s a great series and a real public service. And in order to research it as thoroughly as it is clearly researched, Dana Priest and Bill Arkin would have had to go out of their way not to read the work of Timothy Shorrock or Jeremy Scahill or P.W. Singer or any number of other writers and journalists and bloggers. Hat-tipping is positive-sum journalism. It recognizes the truth that another term for “aggregation” is “due diligence,” and it properly contextualizes new information. Everyone wins." Journalistic credit-hogging also reinforces academics' belief that MSM journalists are deeply, deeply unethical.
-
BE&PT: "We argue that the gold standard and the euro share the attributes of the young lady described by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American, 1807-82): 'There was a little girl, who had a little curl/Right in the middle of her forehead,/And when she was good, she was very, very good,/But when she was bad she was horrid.'"
