now that's scary

[sisyphusshrugged]

Looking out from inside the lower reaches of Thomas Friedman's intestines darkly:

Because I tried to think about something as deadly serious as Iraq, and the post- 9/11 world, in a nonpartisan fashion -- as Joe Biden, John McCain and Dick Lugar did -- I assumed the Bush officials were doing the same.

Dig it. His approach up to this point has been nonpartisan.

It seems as if the intelligent 11-year-olds (OK, genius 11-year-olds, but still) are on to Mr. Friedman. I shudder to think how far further down he'll have to go to lose his base.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Am I the only one that NYTimes reporting on foreign policy and big issues has gone down the drain? Their editorial and opinion peaces are also loosing edge lately. (what's with people like safire and friedman? Their conclusion and insight are so off, it's not even funny.)

Washingtonpost on the otherhand seems to improve considerably in the last 3 years.

[jmhm.livejournal.com]

See, by me the Post won't be any kind of a paper until they work out that institutional schizophrenia thing, but I couldn't agree with you more about the Times.

OTOH, the Post has Carolyn Hax and Judith Martin and the Times has Bob Herbert and Paul Krugman, so nothing is as holistic as all that...

[(Anonymous)]

The most obvious one to me is Iraq war coverge. NYTimes completely shies away from in depth reporting after the botch war opening scoops. The pentagon plays the NYT likes a puppet on a string.

WashingtonPost on the other hand has far better Iraq reporting. Plus they nail the Senate floor, their traditional strength. Washingtonpost used to be a totally backwater newspaper compared to NYTimes when it come to foreign news. Reading their foreign report is like a chinese newspaper describing uptown bling-bling. It gets the basic facts right, but compeletly miss the point.

Or maybe that just my increased expectation compared to internet. Consider web site + blogs. Newspaper cannot compete against combination of blogs for on the ground reporting combined with strategy analysis sites like janes, stratfor, debka, globalsecurity, etc. Newspaper increasingly becomes only a smal part of mosaic rather than a main source like it used to be.

[jmhm.livejournal.com]

See, you're probably right, but I'm sort of a dinosaur on news standards, and it really bothers me the extent to which the Post gatekeeps enormously important news which its editorial policy says doesn't matter.