Now that I've got your attention, let me offer you Free Pornography. More precisely, a free copy of Debbie Nathan's new book, Pornography, which will be the prize in next week's anti-caption contest.

Debbie is a friend of the site since back in the Landesman era and more recently the gadfly who took down Kurt Eichenwald. Pornography: A Groundwork Guide is "the first and only book about pornography for young adults of high school and undergrad college age." It "summarizes the latest scholarly research about porn and makes it easy to understand."

When you think about it, this is actually an incredibly valuable resource. If you're a high school or college student looking to write a paper on this topic, you can't exactly Google "pornography" and expect to get any usable results (or any work done). Without this book, your only option would be to turn to one of the sensationalist and unreliable anti-porn advocacy groups or, if you're particularly enterprising, a porn industry apologist group, which is likely to be equally unreliable. Nathan's book is not pro-porn but, I would say, anti-anti-porn, though it fairly presents arguments from all sides.

Really any one of any age who's interested in the topic is likely to find it useful, but since it's meant for teens, feel free to give your copy away if you win it in the contest. The best way to do this is to log into a teen chat room and ask if there are any 15 year olds who want free pornography.

10:18 AM :: Comments (5)

A cautionary tale. For anyone who still cares.

Does anyone still care?

12:44 PM :: Comments (16)

New York magazine's feature story on Kurt Eichenwald is just one big bundle of sad. And somehow, I doubt it's the last word on this subject. What do you say, people, can I stop blogging about this already?

9:54 AM :: Comments (5)

Today's Kurt Eichenwald update.

A New York Times reporter not only gave money to a child pornographer, but did business with him and even signed on to an illegal porn website as a member and administrator, documents unsealed yesterday in a federal criminal proceeding in Nashville reveal. He claims in one court document, he only "posed" as a pedophile. 

4:05 PM :: Comments (1)

A week ago I wrote that Debbie Nathan had "destroyed what was left of Kurt Eichenwald's career" by revealing that the Times reporter had made additional payments to Justin Berry, the protagonist and chief source for his high-profile 2005 story on child pornography.

It took until yesterday for the Times to report its own version of the story, adding that the newly disclosed payments amounted to "at least $1,100." This article triggered the pile-on that logically should have come a week earlier.

During that silent stretch, I wondered why no one was writing about what seemed like a pretty juicy bit of media gossip — especially since Eichenwald's practices were reported to be a factor in the recent shake up at Portfolio. [Update: Eichenwald out at Portfolio.] Choire at Gawker was apparently wondering the same thing — although his site was one of the mysteriously silent ones — and weighed in yesterday with a post titled Why no one wants to write about Kurt Eichenwald.

Choire scratches the surface of this question when he says that he hates writing about the case because it invariably triggers a cascade of e-mails, links and comments from creepy pedophiles and their enablers. I got my share of them, and no doubt will again. And Choire's right that reading anything from these smug perverts, who don't understand that their idiot rationalizations and manipulative psychologizing don't work on people older than 14, is enough to drive anyone to a hot shower.

But this "disgusting hassle" is only suggestive of the real reason that people aren't writing more about this story. The problem, I think, is that people, writers especially, can't help thinking in terms of narrative. And that in this narrative, making Eichenwald the Bad Guy seems to require (psychologically) making his antagonists the Good Guys. This is more subtle than saying journalists and bloggers avoid the story out of "fear they may be labeled pedophile sympathizers and or advocates for child porn," as one Gawker commenter says. I don't think it's that conscious a process. Rather our internal wiring tells us that we're turning the creeps into Good Guys, our reasoning tells us that can't be correct, and this causes us to blow a fuse and decide that the story is too messy to say anything about.

Eichenwald attempts to tap into that conflict in his response to the latest revelations: "I have no independent memory of any payments I am alleged to have made in June 2005 through PayPal. If these PayPal payments did occur in June 2005, I am deeply sorry that my inability to remember them has resulted in permitting a series of convicted felons to cast doubt on the nature of my wife’s and my efforts to save a young man who was caught in the grip of a cycle of drugs and abuse.”

Unfortunately, while Eichenwald may think he's shrewd to frame this as the word of convicted felons against that of a paragon of charitable virtue, the statement instead comes off slightly desperate. Hell, it's almost Landesman-esque! When asaked point blank by his editors if there was any other money he forgot about in addition to the $2000, Eichenwald forgets $1,100 made the same month, some under a false name? If he really wants us to buy that he should say it straightforwardly, rather than trying to deflect attention onto the crimes of his accusers and his own noble intentions.

Meanwhile, CrimeBlog turns up the most fun aspect of this scandal yet.

Continue reading "Fools of conspiracy" »

10:23 AM :: Comments (10)

Speaking of Debbie Nathan, she just destroyed what was left of Kurt Eichenwald's career.

We learned in court today that it was not just a matter of one $2,000 payment (which Eichenwald says was repaid by Berry's grandmother). Eichenwald used a fake name and address to give Berry even more cash before he started working on the story. It seems these covert payments also slipped Eichenwald's mind, even when jolted by the sight of his $2,000 check to Berry which surfaced in evidentiary proceedings in a Michigan courtroom earlier this year.

Could this be why Eichenwald wanted so badly to scare people off this story? Threatening to sue other journalists is frowned on in journalism circles under any circumstances. Doing so because you have something to hide would be unforgivable. As, of course, would paying for a story and then lying to your editor about it (and let's not even get into the kiddie porn conspiracy theories bubbling under the surface here).

I have no personal feelings toward Eichenwald one way or the other. I haven't been gleefully awaiting his downfall or anything. Indeed, I always thought he was pretty sharp and did good work. If there's one reason I've continued to post on this topic, it's that I feel a little betrayed. The first time I posted about KE it was to praise his commitment to transparency.

11:58 AM :: Comments (9)

You know all that stuff that's been drilled into your head about Internet predators? Well forget it.

In a separate study of 2,574 law-enforcement agencies, researchers found that online sex crimes rarely involve offenders lying about their ages or sexual motives. The 2004 study, published in Journal of Adolescent Health, said offenders generally aren't strangers, and pedophiles aren't luring unsuspecting children by pretending to be a peer.

I haven't read the actual study yet — and wire reports of scientific research are notoriously dicey — but if this is accurate, it's big news. Think of all the money and energy that goes into hammering home that message.

On a related note, remember that Debbie Nathan-Kurt Eichenwald kerfuffle? (That lawsuit is due just about the same time as Duke Nukem Forever.) It started when Nathan wrote an article for Salon called Why I need to see child porn. On her new blog, Nathan is back with a post cheekily titled Why I need to see child pollo-graphy. It has to be one of the worst puns ever, but it's a thought-provoking notion, comparing and contrasting the rationales for and against banning kiddie porn and banning images of cockfighting and other acts of cruelty toward animals.

My gut reaction is that the proper protest against Nathan's argument is not so much "children are not chickens" as "pornography is not a simple reproduction of an independent act." That is, with bullfighting or cockfighting, the viewing of images later is tangential to more important act of participating in the sport. With porn of any sort, the producers "participate" for the sole purpose of producing the images. I admit I haven't thought this out clearly, so I can't make a neat logical argument for why this makes a difference right now, but I believe it does — hence the concern about the extension of the animal protection law — originally targetted at crush porn (which people would not do for fun if they couldn't sell the images) — to cover cockfighting (which is best appreciated live, if that's your thing).

8:37 AM :: Comments (4)

Kegel, one of my suggestions for the name of the new Gawker Kreepie Kat, is a finalist. Go vote for it.

Or not. I could care less. Frankly, I am deeply saddened that they chose this name -- which was more than likely submitted by dozens of people -- rather than my other suggestion: Kikenwald. Scared of the lawyers, no doubt.

12:18 PM :: Comments (3)

So, you know those photos that got Miss Nevada fired? They're all over the web — often censored, sometimes not. And here's what her lawyer says: "Katie wants the public to know she was 17 and had a lapse in judgment. This was an isolated incident that occurred more than five years ago when she was a minor."

17? Minor? Uh oh. That means these widely available images, distributed in part by an arm of Warner Bros., are almost certainly child pornography. Only technically? Tell it to Genarlow Wilson. A federal rap might be avoided since there are no genitals on display, but many states specifically include exposed breasts in their statutes. Put it this way: If these pictures were less widespread, say on the computer of one guy with no clout, do you doubt that he'd be in jail right now?

Hell, technically anyone who looked at these images could be prosecuted. Unless I'm mistaken, your only legal out would be if you saw them accidentally and immediately reported them to the authorities. What do you think they'd even say if you did?

Update. Nevermind! In the comments, Gina notes that the Divine Miss N has issued a new statement: "Miss Nevada, Katie Rees is issuing a correction on the statement released by her attorney yesterday regarding some photos that were published of her on the internet. That press release stated that she was 17 years old when the photos were taken. Miss Rees’ actual age when the aforementioned photos were taken was 19."

Ogle away, pervs!

9:27 PM :: Comments (8)

My good friend Randy Cohen is inviting a shitstorm and a half with his latest Ethicist column. For reals, this is gonna make the Great Jewstorm of '02 look like nothing.

And this time, I'm afraid to say, he deserves at least some measure of what he's got coming.

The column concerns an IT guy who found porn on his boss's computer — "including some of young children — clearly less than 18, possibly early teens." The guy wants to know if he must call the cops.

Randy says no.

Before I get to where he's wrong, I want to say that Randy deserves heaps of credit for not buying into the kiddie-porn hysteria that generally grips the media. And he actually begins with an argument against blowing the whistle that is very strong: "The situation is too fraught with uncertainty. These photographs might depict — legally — not children but young-looking adults." That the letter writer describes teenagers as being "young children" indicates to me that he's not the best judge of pr0n, so Randy is absolutely right to note that there's a chance — a very good chance, I'd say — that these kids are in fact legal adults. The girl in the picture above sure looks to me like she's under 18, possibly early teens, but the photo comes from an established softcore site with 2257 compliance. The very fact that the boss's porn is of the barely legal variety indicates to me that it is just that: legal. There are so many 18 and 19 year olds who can play 15-16 that (to the best of my limited knowledge) there's really not many pornographers making illegal pictures of genuine 15-year-olds. Why take the risk? (Randy also argues that "the images could be digitally altered," but that seems less likely, in part for the same reasons).

So if your takeaway from this column is simply, don't call the cops, then Randy is correct. This is a weak hunch that is not worth ruining someone's reputation and career over.

But then Randy attempts to deal with the broader ethical issues, and makes the argument that the law shouldn't be involved even if there was some way to verify that the pictures did depict underage teens or children: "Your boss may have acquired free (albeit illegal) images rather than bought them and provided a financial incentive to those who harm children. Someone other than your boss may have downloaded the pictures."

Sorry, but once you can prove that actual minors are involved, the balance of responsibility shifts. Yes, the boss may not be the culprit, and he may not have paid for the pictures — but that just means that maybe he is and did. Which means that there's a chance, however slim, that calling the cops could lead to the rescue of actual victims or capture of actual pornographers. At this point, that outweighs the risk to the boss. Hey, you download kiddie porn on the company computer, you deserve to have your reputation and career ruined.

Then Randy goes on to question the whole idea that possession of child porn should be illegal: "Douglas A. Berman, a law professor at Ohio State University and an expert on sentencing, describes the rationale for these laws: 'We punish the kind of possession many concede is not inherently harmful but which contributes to behavior which produces much harm.' (In the longer podcast version, the quote continues, 'The criminalization of child porn consumption is premised on contestible utilitarian calculations.') That is, by stopping buyers, even those who have had no contact with an actual child, we hope to stop sellers, who do exploit children. Is this effective? Tough to prove."

First of all, "tough to prove," isn't the strongest argument. Yes, it's tough to prove, but it's equally tough to disprove, so all things being equal why not err on the side of preventing harm (sorry, preventing contributions to behavior which produces harm)? This debate has already been settled in the minds of lawmakers and the vast majority of Americans. If Randy or Berman want to reopen it, fine, but they're going to lose, and I'm not sure they shouldn't. If the boss had videos of a grown woman being violently raped, or of a child being beaten, I'd want him held responsible even if he didn't commit the crime itself. There's a larger benefit to society to not actively condoning rape and child abuse (which is what kiddie porn is) and despite Doug Berman's contesting, there's a reasonable chance that punishing people for possession will impede the networks by which such images are distrubted, which would in turn reduce the incentive to commit the initial crime. You break the chain where you can.

The fact that the scope of the child porn biz is overblown, that punishments are sometimes excessive, and that (as Randy also says in the podcast) spending money and resources going after it reduces our ability to combat more widespread economic exploitation of children, does not mean that when it does crop up it should just be ignored.

Update: Apologies to any Gawker readers who came here looking for an evisceration only to find a combination of qualified agreement and respectful disagreement. You know how those crazy kids like to sensationalize everything. Hey, at least you got a link to a teen porn site.

11:13 AM :: Comments (14)

Nicholas Negroponte on the debate over $150 laptops for the developing world: "It's as if people spent all of their attention focusing on Columbus's boat and not on where he was going: younger, browner camwhores." [Quote mildly embellished for readablity.]

10:00 AM :: Comments (2)

I'm reluctant to wade back into murky waters, especially as I have been known to get in over my head, but this coda to the Kurt Eichenwald saga is certainly intriguing.

Under threats (apparently!) from The New York Times legal department, Salon ran a lengthy, and somewhat weird, correction to Debbie Nathan's article on Eichenwald — and then chucked the article down the memory hole! I mean, even if there were serious problems with the piece, rather than disputed opinions and simple misunderstandings which probably 95% of Times readers shared (did you pick up from the original articles that Eichenwald never actually saw any images?), it's hard to justify ever completely disappearing an article once it's been published. If nothing else, shouldn't readers be allowed to see for themselves exactly how Nathan and Salon fucked up? (Of course, nothing ever really vanishes on the Internets, if you still want to read it).

Be sure to read some of the 158 letters reacting to the correction and the vanishing of the article. Those are some pissed offed Salonsters, and they raise some valid points, including about some subsequent Eichenwald comments that would seem to indicate that Nathan's argument, if not every one of her facts, was pretty spot on.

Of course, Salon has all but disappeared these letters too, removing the thread from its most active page despite its superior numbers. In fact, I don't think the above link appears anywhere on the site any more.

7:04 PM :: Comments (2)

You'd think it wouldn't be necessary to spin an article about pedophiles in order to make them sound more despicable. But that's apparently what Kurt Eichenwald did.

A comment to one of my earlier posts about Eichenwald prompted me to look a bit more into BL Charity, described in the story like this:

a putative charity that raised money to send Eastern European children to a camp where they were apparently visited by pedophiles"...

"For example, an organization called BL Charity said it was seeking money to send Eastern European children to camp.

The charity’s site, which recently closed, showed scores of images of children at camp and in their homes, supposedly taken by the men running the site. The effort was organized by pedophiles; BL is the online term for “boy-lover.” It eventually shut down, largely from a lack of money, according to a posting from the site’s operators. After the site closed, further details of BL Charity could not be learned."

In my post I called this "the most alarming" anecdote that Eichenwald found, and it would be, if his description of it was accurate. After the story came out, BL Charity posted a statement

Both statements are vaguely true, but also grossly exaggerated to help fill the New York Times' agenda. The article would have you believe BL Charity raised donations for a summer camp in an effort to gain contact with children, which is completely untrue. Yes, BL Charity did raise donations to help fund a summer camp in Eastern Europe after social services asked for our assistance, and did so quite successfully as well. Visiting children simply did not happen though, and we had no intention of doing so. This was especially impossible seeing as how we were 7000kms away in Canada as the camp took place, and while BL Charity was operational. The photographs posted on our web site were taken by social services.

You will notice how the author uses the words "apparently" and "supposedly", meaning he doesn't have any facts to support what he's saying, and instead is just merely printing accusations to increase the value of the article.

That's a shrewd observation about words like "apparently." I used that one myself in the second sentence of this post because I wanted to say something without actually trying to find out if it was true. But I'm a blogger. Eichenwald is a journalist for the the New York Times. He makes the (maddingly passive) claim that "further details of BL Charity could not be learned." That's flatly untrue. It would have been very easy for Eichenwald to e-mail the administrators or look them up in the phone book; they apparently (!) used their real names. According to one of the administrators, Eichenwald never made any attempt to contact them. How do I know? I e-mailed him.

Now, I'm well aware that the folks behind BL Charity could be lying through their teeth. It's entirely possible that they were at least hoping to use their charitable work to gain access to children. But -- and this is the important part -- despite how Eichenwald makes it sound, there's nothing on the site to actually indicate that. I read through the whole thing on Google cache. Contrary to Eichenwald's description the photos were not "supposedly taken by the men running the site"; they are clearly described as having been taken by the "charity's" Eastern European volunteers. Although it's true that sending kids to camp is one of the things the charity said it was doing, it mostly talked about buying food for them, which sounds far less scary. And if the whole thing was a scam to help pedophiles get access to boys, the pedophiles didn't know about it, based on discussions in their forums.

None of this is to say that BL Charity's owners had "the best intentions," as they claimed to me. One of their stated intentions -- and my hunch is that it was their primary one -- was "to make a positive impact on society, by letting them see that we aren't monsters." Anything that polishes the image of pedophiles is inherently ill-intentioned. And yet, that's also not quite as scary as the scenario Eichenwald paints.

I should note that a little more poking around finds that one of the site's owners apparently works for a porn company based in Hungary. That would put him significantly closer to these children than the "7000kms away in Canada" mentioned in the site's new statement. This is certainly a discrepancy worth looking into. The question is, why didn't anyone?

Update: See Eichenwald's reply followed by my (apparently) gracious concession.

Final update: Debbie Nathan has a different problem with the Times series.

6:26 PM :: Comments (9)

Something strange happens when some newspaper reporters get on the radio to discuss stories they've written. All of a sudden, the details get markedly more salacious. Here, the reporter seems to be saying, is the stuff I know to be true but couldn't prove to the satisfaction of my editors. On the Diane Rehm Show yesterday, Kurt Eichenwald added some eyebrow-raising "statistics" to his already eyebrow-raising New York Times stories. Not quite $20 billion eyebrow-raising, but red-flaggy all the same.

The following quote comes about 7 minutes in, if you want to listen for yourself.

"If your child has a webcam, I guarantee the probability is more likely than not your child has been naked on the internet. Your child may or may not be doing it for pay. Your child will almost certainly have been solicited. The number of kids — certainly last year when I started on this is now much - not nearly as bad as it was last year — but the number of kids who are appearing naked on the internet, who are creating child pornography, either for pay or for compliments, was pretty close to the number of kids who have access to webcams."

Hmm. You'd think that if he could guarantee it, it would be in the article. And let's be a little more precise, shall we? Is it "more likely than not" (as low as 51%) or "close to the number...who have access to webcams" (as high as -- what? -- 90%)? The first figure is at least within the realm of possibility, given the broad definition, but the second...?

Factor in the implication that his article last year was directly responsible for reversing this trend, and you begin to get the sense of someone with just a little too much invested in this story, someone with a need to hype it even more than it already has been.

I can't prove, of course, that there's not an amateur child pornographer in 7% of American homes, but I don't think that if I doubt it, it's just because I need to leave my comfortable Park Slope home more.

6:46 PM :: Comments (4)

In part two of our two-part series on The New York Times' two-part series on online pedophilia, we look at an article headlined On the Web, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach.

Unlike the first installment, which raised a few questions but was not terribly objectionable, this one is a stinker. Again, I'm not saying it's Landesmanesque or anything. It's merely another in a long line of breathless, overhyped, underanalyzed stories fed mostly be a pathological fear of the Internet. I've been pissing and moaning about this genre for nearly ten years and not much has changed.

The tip off comes early on when Eichenwald refers to online activity as "chatter in the ether." Ooh, ether! Mysterious! Primordial! This may seem like a small thing, but these turns of phrase reflect a fundamental discomfort with the Internets that color everything in the article. After all, when was the last time you saw a newspaper refer to a phone call or radio show as "chatter in the ether"?

The premise of this article is that the pedophilia community (did I really just write that?) "uses the virtual world to advance its interests in the real one." In practice that means lumping together three distinct types of activity so that they enhance one another in the reader's mind, the scary (but infeffectual) ideas making the other parts more scary by association, and the effective (but less scary) ideas making the scarier parts sound more effective.

The three activities, in descending order of seriousness, are:
• Using the Internet to gain physical access to children
• Using the Internet to justify sexual feelings for children, thus allowing pedophiles to cross the line from thought into action (The Times's experts call this "the most dangerous element," but I think my ranking makes more sense)
• Using the Internet to promote societal acceptance of pedophilia

Let's take these one at at time.

Continue reading "Pedophilia vs. Webophobia" »

9:41 PM :: Comments (10)

More Internet panic at the Times this week. This is gonna shock you, but I have just a couple of concerns about the new two-part series on online pedophiles. Nothing terrible, to be sure. We're not in Landesman territory or anything. But I do have a few questions.

Let's start with yesterday's feature, With Child Sex Sites on the Run, Nearly Nude Photos Hit the Web.

First off, I wonder how new and newsworthy this "latest trend in online child exploitation" really is. As reporter Kurt Eichenwald notes, "the concept of for-pay modeling sites using children has been around for years. They first appeared in the late 1990’s..." And were widely and well covered at the time. Eichenwald says "The sites that have emerged in recent months, however, are markedly different." I haven't checked them out, but from his descriptions, they don't sound too different from the original "child model" sites. [Update: A reporter who has investigated this topic assures me that the new sites "are far creepier than during the 1990s."] He notes that "the newer ones are explicit in their efforts to market to pedophiles," but only in semi-private news/chat groups. Indeed, "many of the sites portray themselves on their main pages as regular modeling agencies trying to find work for their talent," just as the original 1990s versions did. I assume he didn't go back to check how those early sites were marketed, but it's likely they were just as explicit as the new ones are when they felt they were in friendly territory.

The second minor problem is with the headline, specifically the "child sex sites on the run" part. This is extrapolated from the assertion that, "In recent months, an array of investigations of the child pornography business — by the Justice Department, state and local law enforcement and Congress — have contributed to wholesale shutdowns of some of the most sexually explicit Internet sites trafficking in child images."

Now, considering that just a few weeks ago, online kiddie porn was a $20 billion a year business, you'd think the fact that it's been virtually eliminated would be the real news here. But has it? The only stab at evidence that such sites are on the run are the impressions to that effect of pedophiles in chat rooms. Hardly the most reliable sources. There should also probably be a mention of the fact that Eichenwald himself has testified in some of these investigations.

But my most serious concern about this series comes in the editor's note:

Covering this story raised legal issues. United States law makes it a crime to purchase, download or view child pornography, unless the images are promptly reported to authorities and no images are copied or retained. The Times complied with the law, disclosing what it found to appropriate authorities.

Newspapers report on criminal enterprises all the time. Maybe some Poynter type will correct me, but my understanding is that it is always illegal not to tell the authorities about someone who has committed a crime, but that reporters almost never do, and have traditionally relied on the First Amendment to protect them. It's a bedrock principle that the media should not become an arm of law enforcement. Eichenwald has famously treaded on this territory before. The last time, I praised the care and transparency with which the Times explained its reasoning. This time around, we get nothing more than a simple "we obeyed the laws," without any discussion of the larger issues involved. It would be easy enough to see a crusading prosecutor point to this as a "new standard" set by the media itself when trying to indict a reporter who does want to stand on the First Amendment to protect his sources on some other story -- probably government-secret related.

[Update]: I'm informed by actual reporters that there's a difference between protecting a source who has broken the law and breaking it yourself. Which, I guess, duh. Despite what you see in the movies, reporters can't trespass to get a story. And if you do report on law-breaking, you can be compelled to testify about it afterwards, hence Judy Miller. Still, I'm told this is something of a gray area, especially as the Times is accepting without question that these images actually fall under the law, something that is less settled than you might think from reading this.

Tomorrow: part two in this meta-series

9:50 AM :: Comments (6)

I approached today's front-page NY Times article on camwhores with trepidation — it being exactly the kind of story the paper has been getting wrong since the dawn of the Web.

From what I can tell, though, writer Kurt Eichenwald gets it exactly right. While no one with any web savvy will be very surprised by his findings, we haven't actually seen them reported out so thoroughly before, and that counts for a lot. The only thing I wondered about was this graf: "A six-month investigation by The New York Times into this corner of the Internet found that such sites had emerged largely without attracting the attention of law enforcement or youth protection organizations. While experts with these groups said they had witnessed a recent deluge of illicit, self-generated Webcam images, they had not known of the evolution of sites where minors sold images of themselves for money."

At first I thought it was odd that experts could be unfamiliar with teen cam sites — they must have better spam filters than I do. But it actually sas that they do know of them, just not of their "evolution." What that means, however, is left unclear.

That's a minor point, though. What I really want to say is that the most impressive element of this story is Eichenwald's online essay describing his reporting methods in detail, including red flags that were raised and how they were checked and rules that were bent and why. Regardless of whether you agree with the Times' decisions, the essay is a great step forward for transparency. Can you imagine how differently an article by, let's say, oh, Peter Landesman, would have been received if it had been accompanied by such a sidebar.

Continue reading "For those who don't share my personal obsession, feel free to substitute any article by Judy Miller" »

10:11 AM :: Comments (2)