Thursday, December 29, 2005
What we need is a separate newspaper, written by ombudsmen.
Jay Rosen has an extensive plan for The New York Times to cover itself covering major events. You'd get two stories at once -- the story, and the story of the story. Jason Zengerle points out some obvious problems with this scheme, but he misses the bigger issue of the incentives. We only care about the story behind the story when the Times screws up, as with Jason Blair, and Judith Miller, and (maybe) the decision to sit on the story about what the NSA was doing for more than a year. But the whole point of transparency is that it makes institutions function better. It's not like Rosen has hatched a clever scheme to sell more newspapers -- if people really wanted these stories, an invisible hand (Sulzberger's?) would have already made it so, right? You adopt Rosen's scheme, and then we have to read all these meta-stories, and the Times stops screwing up so much, and the meta-stories aren't even all that interesting anymore, and their rationale is gone.
Getting rid of errors can be expensive. Maybe the Times has found the right balance, economically speaking, between what it takes to publish a newspaper and what it takes to avoid poor coverage.
And if you don't like it, then maybe the problem is that free markets give us the media we pay for, not the media we think we deserve.
Getting rid of errors can be expensive. Maybe the Times has found the right balance, economically speaking, between what it takes to publish a newspaper and what it takes to avoid poor coverage.
And if you don't like it, then maybe the problem is that free markets give us the media we pay for, not the media we think we deserve.
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We don't have utterly free markets though. In principle, we could regulate publishing like we regulate broadcasting.
Do you really feel violated by this revelation or is it something you will easily just dismiss?
I don't know whether to feel violated, because I have no idea what they're looking at. In that sense, I feel less safe. Bush's assurances that he is worried about civil rights ring hollow to me.
Many feel the evidence is piling up and they feel their privacy is being stripped away, others feel this is just another necessity that reflects the times we live in.
The problem is the precedent. If you let the Executive decide on its own that it's powers are plenary, notwithstanding a statute expressly forbidding such activities, where does it end? I don't like slippery slope arguments, but what Bush is saying does real harm to the constitutional separation of powers. It's not something you can restore without a constitutional amendment.
Hey, thanks for commenting.
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I don't know whether to feel violated, because I have no idea what they're looking at. In that sense, I feel less safe. Bush's assurances that he is worried about civil rights ring hollow to me.
Many feel the evidence is piling up and they feel their privacy is being stripped away, others feel this is just another necessity that reflects the times we live in.
The problem is the precedent. If you let the Executive decide on its own that it's powers are plenary, notwithstanding a statute expressly forbidding such activities, where does it end? I don't like slippery slope arguments, but what Bush is saying does real harm to the constitutional separation of powers. It's not something you can restore without a constitutional amendment.
Hey, thanks for commenting.
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