Comments on: Max Frankel’s Ghost

By: beejeez

beejeez — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:01:54 +0000

I think y’all are being a little hard on the Times and on Frankel. It’s not as if the NYT was uniformly credulous of the administration; in fact at every step leading up to the war to the present, the Times has been the source of much of the best-informed skeptical and critical pieces on the war and the administration. Even working for a much smaller newspaper, as I do, I find inconsistencies from reporter to reporter on subjects of far less complexity than the tangle of motives and politics that drove Iraq War II. Consigning the Times to a supposedly monolithic “mass media” as if it’s indistinguishable from Fox News is as absurdly reductive as saying there are no important differences between the Democratic and Republican parties.
Frankel in fact sharply criticized Miller’s reporting in the NYT Mag piece. Now FDL has a right to portray his piece as it wants, but it would have been more honest to note Frankel’s dismay at Miller’s performance. If the rightly respected Frankel views the Libby affair through the prism of reporters’ rights, that’s nothing to sneer at.
The Times’ mixed signals are not a sign of mendacity; they’re a sign of openness. A newspaper that presents one side of every issue, even when we smart liberals agree with it, is by definition propaganda, and that’s not what I want out of the Times, or any general-interest newspaper.
I’m all for rooting out the bastards who contributed most to this debacle, but I’m not for assigning them all the blame. In fact, the people most to blame for this mess are not any of the usual suspects, but the maddeningly complacent people who elect them, subscribe to their views, watch their TV programs and shrug off their responsibility to remove them. Yes, the volk are finally wising up, but these monsters didn’t come out of thin air.

By: roeman

roeman — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 23:00:46 +0000

If Nixon had had the foresight to give a blank check to militant Israelis there would never have been a Watergate scandal. Israel fantasies have outed thousands of phonies like Frankel.

By: anwaya

anwaya — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 20:19:56 +0000

Awesome writing, Marcy. If the journalists who were following the Libby liveblog are coming back to read you, as they should, this will get noticed. But I second the suggestion that a LTE is needed.

By: MarkH

MarkH — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 18:24:05 +0000

The first part of the post was a bit scatter-brained and all over the place. It didn’t prepare me for the brilliant ass kicking you gave a bit later.

The Press and all the Rich are beyond Embarassment. They don’t give a damn about fitting in or behaving properly for the General Public. They have their own priorities and friends and they don’t need you or me (they think). But, this is purportedly a Democracy, so we’ll see about that.

By: brendan

brendan — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:49:00 +0000

emptywheel:

Great post, particularly the little crescendo there at the end.

I quibble with the tone of disappointment, however, as if Frankel had just become old and lazy. Everything comes back to the war. Frankel wanted it as much as Miller. “joejoejoe” has an illustrative Frankel quote at #27.

The NYT has been attempting for some time to play it both ways, speaking as the press’s conscience in many of its editorials, but giving us Miller and Gordon, on the other hand.

By: Kathleen

Kathleen — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 14:12:40 +0000

Lee Hartmann @ 170

I agree, write a letter to the NYT magazine - this is too important to let Frankel get away with this.
Great post and great book.

It is pitiful and telling that Frankal would publicly identify with and try to protect a proven liar like Judy Miller. It is just another example of how logical, rational individuals go blind when it comes to protecting Israel and those who work the MSM over to suit the needs of a few. Frankel and Miller both seem to fall into the category of sayanin’s [ members of the Jewish community who helps out Israel and Mossad agents whether it is in the best interest of the U.S. or not]

Who was that person who sent documents to
ABC television with a story from a ‘reliable’ Middle Eastern source
telling of a plant Saddam had for the manufacturing of uranium –to
suggest that he was developing nuclear capability.

By: clamberite

clamberite — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:52:21 +0000

What the Times doesn’t get in their argument about reporter’s privelege to keep secrets is that the telling of the reporters about Plame WAS the crime. This wasn’t about protecting whistleblowers, this was about PARTICIPATING in the crime.

By: RealWorld

RealWorld — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 13:15:45 +0000

re: 29
Yow! How about an op-ed submission consisting of this quote.

By: Lee Hartmann

Lee Hartmann — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 12:18:08 +0000

I agree, write a letter to the NYT magazine – this is too important to let Frankel get away with this.
Great post and great book.

By: Mauimom

Mauimom — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 11:52:38 +0000

Marcy, I second, third, fourth or whatever the many requests in this thread for you to write a LTE to the NYT magazine.

In addition to your wonderful prose and cogent analysis, include your “bona fides” of Anatomy of Deceit [”Marcy Wheeler is the author of Anatomy of Deceit, (insert complimentary summary here)]. One hopes that that would tip the scales towards their including your piece.

Getting your rebuttal into the NYT magazine where Frankel’s outrage appeared would have many benefits:

**he’d see it (one presumes)
**other NYTers would see it (again, one presumes)
**there’d be a wide audience of NYT readers who’d see it, probably a wider audience than the daily NYT
**it would provide great publicity for your book

Also, I suggest sending a copy to Joe Conason. We know from the FDL book salon that Joe admires your work. Since his own column is published twice a week (NY Observer & Salon), there’s a chance he’d devote a column to debunking Frankel.

Also, Media Matters, Editor & Publisher — other sites critical of our cheerleading media.

I’m just trying to think of how to get your ideas the widest possible distribution AND get more copies of the book sold.