But the gerbil that powers Crooked Timber appears to have worn himself out, so there's no point in going there now.
However, here are three comments I added to Henry's thread. Looking at it again, I am once again reminded of why people interested in learning about stuff should visit Crooked Timber at least once a week.
But that’s not how journalists describe what they are doing: Jeff Leen calls David Rosenbaum’s article on Jack Abramoff “a puff piece.” Post reporter A snorts and guffaws when I say I though Jim VandeHei did a good job this morning at fact-checking. “I think the story as a whole was accurate. But in that paragraph I had to let [John Lott] have his say,” says New York Times reporter Eduardo Porter. “You slammed me pretty good for somebody who got the longest quote” (I’m paraphrasing from memory) says the Washington Post’s Jonathan Weisman. “Puff pieces,” “hatchet jobs,” buttering up sources,” “constraints of a beat reporter”-—these are all words journalists use to describe their own activities. And they don’t fit with the formal ideology of comprehensive, neutral, objective, do they?
That journalists often don’t even try to live up to these standards is pretty self-evident to anyone who has ever been interviewed and then quoted…. But persistent hypocrisy about a set of underlying norms doesn’t demonstrate that these norms aren’t an important part of what gives journalists their purported authority.
But what is odd is that many journalists don’t take steps to gain the substantive expertise needed to make sense of what they are hearing, and then don’t take the care to quote accurately. I can count on reporters to get it right almost all of the time if I’m being interviewed by a wire service like Reuters, Bloomberg, or Knight-Ridder, by the Financial Times or the economic-financial staff of the Economist, or by the news staff of the Wall Street Journal. I’m not a source for but I know I can trust the coverage of the political and lobbying worlds that emerges from the National Journal.
I didn’t call what bloggers wrote a ‘riot.’ I called the wild postings that appeared in the comment section of the post.blog after the lefty blogs directed their readers to go to there as the riot…. I don’t think Howell was a victim in any sense…. The Post site has its own standards of conduct, which it believes benefit its readers, and it has every right to enforce them.
Is there any definition of “mau-mauing” for which the recipient of one is not a “victim”? Is there any way to read the last part of what I quoted from Shafer other than as a blanket dismissal of Howell’s critics? And “hundreds of personal attacks and profane, sexist, and generally hateful comments”—-isn’t that “hundreds” subject to dispute?