Sighting: The Full Hillary Quote About Martin Luther King Is Spotted In The Times!
(January 12, 2008 -- 10:27 AM EDT // link // )

As I pointed out here yesterday, The New York Times has repeatedly printed a truncated version of Hillary's now-notorious quote about Martin Luther King, despite the fact that there's been an argument over whether the truncated quote is a distortion of what she actually said. Hillary's comments have become a major issue in the campaign.

Well, today The Times has finally run the full quote, at the bottom of an item on the paper's political blog.

Count this as progress, I guess. Still, as best as I can determine, this is the first time Hillary's full quote has been printed by The Times since Hillary made the comment six days ago, which of course is an eternity in a presidential campaign. And it still hasn't appeared in the print version of the paper.

The larger point, though this obviously isn't the fault of The Times alone, is that the truncated version of the quote has long since become truth, and there's literally nothing that will ever undo it at this point.

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New York Times Keeps Running Truncated Version Of Hillary's Quote About Martin Luther King
(January 11, 2008 -- 9:31 AM EDT // link // )

Let's say you were putting together a story about a very, very controversial thing that a politician said. Would you...(a) Run an edited version of the quote that has sparked some argument about whether it's a distortion of the original; or...(b) Run the full quote, so readers can know exactly what was said and make up their own minds as to the meaning?

The latter, right? Not if you work at The New York Times. For the second time, the paper has run a truncated version of something Hillary said about Martin Luther King that has become a major campaign issue -- even though the full transcript has been available for days.

Today's Times has an article reporting that South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn might support Barack Obama out of disappointment with the Clintons, largely over the remark in question. The paper says:

In an interview with Fox News on Monday, Mrs. Clinton, who was locked in a running exchange with Senator Barack Obama, a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, over the meaning of the legacies of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., tried to make a point about presidential leadership.

“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” Mrs. Clinton said in trying to make the case that her experience should mean more to voters than the uplifting words of Mr. Obama. “It took a president to get it done.”

This version of her quote started circulating on the Internets just after she gave the interview, and it found its way into the newspapers in this form. The Times also characterized the quote this way in an editorial the other day.

But as Josh pointed out on TPM the other day, here's Hillary's actual quote from the interview:

"I would point to the fact that that Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the President before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became a real in people's lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it, and actually got it accomplished."

Now, fair minded people can disagree as to whether the truncated version constitutes a distortion, as Josh argues. It's a very close call. But it seems clear that the truncated version changed the tone, if not the substance, in a key way that made it more attention grabbing.

Let me be clear. I'm not at all defending Hillary's actual comments. They were clumsy and inartful, and Hillary backtracked later.

Nonetheless, the shortened version changes the complexion of the remarks. It more sharply juxtaposes King with Johnson than the original did. And it leaves off her praise of the "power" of King's dream. The result of that is two-fold. First, it makes the quote sound more condescending in tone towards King than it actually was. And second, it more strongly implies a meaning that I don't think was intended: That she was saying Obama is King to her LBJ. If the quote had started circulating in its full form, it's unclear whether it would have been as controversial.

Again -- this is a very close call that can be disagreed upon. But here's the thing. Even if you're 1000 percent convinced that the truncated version means precisely the same thing as the longer one, there's no earthly reason whatsoever for the paper not to run the full quote, particularly since there's argument over it. I understand that journalists edit quotes all the time and so forth, but this is hugely controversial and could even have real repercussions in the presidential race.

Guys: Run the full quote. Tell your readers what the woman actually said, and let them decide for themselves what she meant. You have nothing to lose but a couple lines of space.

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The Politico's Loud Mea Culpa
(January 10, 2008 -- 5:34 PM EDT // link // )

Credit where credit's due: The Politico's top two editors have published a lengthy and comprehensive piece cataloging the multiple failures that have been marring the nation's political coverage -- and they didn't spare themselves, either.

The hook for the piece -- written by Politico editors John Harris and Jim VandeHei -- was Hillary's victory in New Hampshire, which came after the electorate had been buffeted for days by a hurricane of punditry and reporting predicting political doom for Hillary. They wrote:

New Hampshire sealed it. The winner was Hillary Rodham Clinton, and the loser — not just of Tuesday's primary but of the 2008 campaign cycle so far — was us.

"Us" is the community of reporters, pundits and prognosticators who so confidently — and so rashly — stake our reputations on the illusion that we understand politics and have special insight that allows us to predict the behavior of voters.

If journalists were candidates, there would be insurmountable pressure for us to leave the race. If the court of public opinion were a real court, the best a defense lawyer could do is plea bargain out of a charge that reporters are frauds in exchange for a signed confession that reporters are fools.

The piece ticks off a litany of journalistic failures: Addiction to horse race coverage; slavish adherence to arbitrarily created narratives; a willingness to let coverage be tainted by the preference for certain outcomes; an eagerness to be led around on a leash by Drudge; etc., etc.

It concludes: "There is generally one good answer to excesses and hype in political journalism: Respect the voters. That means waiting to find out what they really think."

Now, some readers will find this or that to quibble with in The Politico piece or say that the editors weren't hard enough on their own publication. And my bet is some people will be looking even harder at The Politico going forward to see if it honors its own prescriptions in the observance -- or in the breach.

Either way, the piece strikes me as a well-intentioned start at identifying some of our profession's less-than-admirable tendencies. And I'm glad Politico published it.

But here's the thing. In the end, such public mea culpas are only worth the pixels they're published with. (How's that phrase for a sign of the times?) The best mea culpa of all is one that's comprised of, you know, not doing this sort of stuff anymore. A spoken mea culpa without action can end up being worse than nothing at all. It lets folks tell themselves that by owning up to screw-ups, they've done necessary due diligence -- even if they haven't done squat to change things.

Anyway, for anyone (ourselves at TPM included) who feels like taking a stab at what one might call a silent mea culpa -- one comprised of action, not talk -- the Politico piece offers a blueprint on where to start.

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Dowd's Hillary Hit -- Dateline Jerusalem?
(January 10, 2008 -- 2:00 PM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

It's election eve. Do you know where your favorite prestige columnist is?

Maureen Dowd weighed in with a column yesterday that made a big splash, pissed off lots of people, and became part of the political conversation about Hillary's New Hampshire victory. The column -- called "Can Hillary Cry Her Way Back To White House"? -- was datelined "Derry, N.H."

The column struck some people as taking a holier-than-thou tone to Dowd nemesis Hillary. But you don't know the half of it. The column, apparently, was filed from half a world away -- from Jerusalem.

The piece reads as if Dowd was on the scene at Hillary's victory party, interviewing voters reacting to her win. But it turns out Dowd couldn't have been at the party at all -- instead, she'd already jetted half way around the world to cover the President's Middle East trip, I'm told. An eyewitness tells TPM that on Tuesday night he spied Dowd typing away at the reporters' media filing center in Jerusalem's Dan Panorama hotel.

A Times spokesperson tells me there's no dateline issue here at all -- but more on that in a sec. First, take a look at what Dowd's New Hampshire-datelined column says:

At Hillary’s victory party in Manchester, Carolyn Marwick, 65, said Hillary showed she was human at the cafe. “I think she’s really tired. She’s been under a lot more scrutiny than the other candidates — how she dresses, how she laughs.”

Her son, David, 35, an actor, said he also “got choked up” when he saw Hillary get choked up. He echoed Hillary’s talking points on the likability issue. “It’s not ‘American Idol.’ You have to vote smart.”

Olivia Cooper, 41, of Concord said, “When you think you’re not going to make it, it’s heart-wrenching when you want something so much.”

If Dowd was nearly 6,000 miles away from these people on Tuesday night, how did the quotes get into her column? A reporter I know tells me that Dowd's assistant was floating around at the Hillary victory party that night. So it seems almost certain that Dowd's assistant did the reporting for her. But there's no other byline on the piece.

Just to be clear, this isn't necessarily on Dowd. It appears to be standard practice at The Times. Columnists have assistants who do reporting for them but don't get any credit. Life is good if you're a top-shelf political columnist.

Dowd did spend some time in New Hampshire, it turns out. Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis confirmed to me that Dowd had gone to Jerusalem, noting that Dowd had been in New Hampshire before heading abroad. What about that "Derry, N.H." dateline? Not an issue, Mathis says. Times dateline policy dictates that the reporter spend some time in the place identified, and doesn't require the reporter to be there all the time or file the piece from that location.

The thing is, anyone reading this piece would assume that Dowd had hoofed it to the victory party to lament Hillary's victory firsthand. Instead, she was apparently filing this New Hampshire-datelined piece from Jerusalem. Times policy may say this is okay, but it seems like a bit more clarity couldn't hurt -- if only because it would prevent folks from thinking Dowd was at the party and had done the work of talking to the voters she quoted, when neither of these things apparently happened.

"If she was in Jerusalem, and the dateline says New Hampshire and there's local color from New Hampshire, there's an issue," journalism prof Jay Rosen told me. "There may not be any violation, but it's fair to ask questions about these kinds of practices."

Why not stick around for the whole story? And anyway, even if there's more pressing news that demanded her attention, a campaign piece datelined Jerusalem would not have lacked for dash and flair.

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One Day After Saying He'll "Never Underestimate Hillary Clinton Again," Chris Matthews Says She's Only A Presidential Candidate Because Bill "Messed Around"
(January 9, 2008 -- 9:36 AM EDT // link // )

Normally Chris Matthews isn't worth the bother, because he serves up so much non-stop clowning that there's no humor value left in anything he does, in the same way that printing lots of currency deprives it of worth.

But this Matthews moment really captures something fundamental about the way our pundits have generally approached this race -- and, sadly, will continue to approach it.

Right now you're seeing a lot of hand-wringing and self-flagellation among pundits and commentators who are chastising themselves for getting it wrong and basically writing Hillary's obituary before the voters had their say on the matter. This is all well and good. But the real question now is whether commentators will, you know, learn something from this debacle going forward and let voters speak for themselves. With that in mind, take a look at this...

This is pretty rich. Last night, Matthews said: "I give her a lot of personal credit; I will never underestimate Hillary Clinton again."

But by this morning Matthews had already forgotten his newfound respect for her. He said: "The reason she's a U.S. Senator, the reason she's a candidate for President, the reason she may be a front-runner, is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be Senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn't win it on the merits..."

Put aside for a sec just how loathsome this statement is on its own terms. The larger point here is that a mere half-day after acknowledging that he'd gotten it wrong and that she deserved a lot of "personal credit" for winning over voters, Matthews was already imposing his own narrative on her entire political career, the current race included, saying that her past and current success have nothing to do with "the merits."

Surely the voters don't see Hillary this way. But already Matthews is back to speaking for the voters again, oversimplifying complex voter sentiment in the most crude and reductive fashion he can muster.

Lesson unlearned. Oh, well. Maybe next time.

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There Can Be More Than One Reason That Things Happen In Politics
(January 8, 2008 -- 3:28 PM EDT // link // )

Bill Clinton unloaded on the media's treatment of his wife again yesterday, sparking a big new debate around the question of whether the press' treatment of Hillary has been overly hostile.

The Huffington Post's Roy Sekoff says that the media isn't to blame for Hillary's travails, concluding that the fault, dear Hillary, lies not in the performance of media stars, but in ourselves:

I think trying to blame the media is like saying that the failure of New Coke was because the guy who delivered it. The bottom line is the product's not selling. It's not the media. They're just rejecting the message.

This is puzzling, and it reflects one of the weirder failings that you often hear in discussions about political coverage: This idea that there can only be one reason that things happen in politics. Can't Hillary's campaign be faltering both because of the relentless media piling on and because of her campaign's failings? There's no reason for these to be mutually exclusive.

Indeed, the key point to take away here is that these phenomena are inextricably linked -- and in a fashion that actually messes up our discourse in a big way. Often when a candidate commits a misstep the press responds by exaggerating both the significance of it and it's potential to harm the campaign. That in turn makes voters accord it more weight than it deserves. The end result is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which the misstep does risk being more damaging than it should have been in a sane universe, precisely because of the coverage and commentary it initially received.

In Hillary's tears yesterday you have the perfect example of this. For God's sake, the woman teared up a bit. Big friggin' deal. She's human, after all. But then the tears led all the major evening newscasts, and analysts like The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza started murmuring, absent any evidence, that the tears would without question weigh heavily on the minds of New Hampshire voters today.

Result: This could end up damaging her campaign, but not merely because the networks were right to judge the tears to be this newsworthy or because pundits were right in saying it could be damaging. Rather, they themselves participated in the process that suddenly elevated a fleeting emotional moment into something that could conceivably have a far greater impact than it should.

Yes, candidates are to blame for their own missteps. But I don't see how anyone could live through Campaign 2008 and not conclude that the process by which information about the candidates is transmitted to voters is profoundly screwed up.

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Bill O'Reilly: I Shoved And Cursed Out Obama Staffer To "Uphold The Constitution"
(January 8, 2008 -- 10:05 AM EDT // link // )

Bill O'Reilly is offering a rather high-flown explanation for the incident in which he shoved the Obama staffer in order to get access to the Illinois Senator during a rally in New Hampshire: He did it in the name of freedom.

O'Reilly addressed the incident himself on his show last night, and aired footage of it in the apparent belief that it exonerates him:

"I had no choice, ladies and gentlemen, but to uphold the Constitution," O'Reilly says, adding that his zeal to defend the "freedom of the press" explains why he went on to shove the Obama staffer, shout at him repeatedly, and call him a "son of a bitch."

For these heroics I hearby nominate O'Reilly for an International Freedom of the Press Award, in hopes that his name will be enshrined next to past winners like Christine Anyanwu, who was imprisoned for years for writing inadmissible commentary about the 1993 annulment of Nigeria's democratic presidential election, and Daniel Pearl, who was gruesomely beheaded in Pakistan while investigating the case of the shoe bomber. Congratulations on your nomination, Bill! You deserve it.

Update: John Amato, who had this first, has a fun take on the whole affair.

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Whoopsie! Kristol's First New York Times Column Attributes Quote To Wrong Author
(January 7, 2008 -- 12:40 PM EDT // link // )

So those critics who argued against the appointment of Bill Kristol as a New York Times columnist because of the quality of his work -- rather than merely because of ideology -- will now have yet more proof that they were on to something.

That's because it looks as if Kristol's first column will already require a correction: Kristol seems to have attributed a quote to the wrong author.

In the column, Kristol quotes Michelle Malkin as follows:

Still, as the conservative writer Michelle Malkin put it, “For the work-hard-to-get-ahead strivers who represent the heart and soul of the G.O.P., there are obvious, powerful points of identification.”

Only Malkin is now claiming that she didn't write this. Instead, she notes, the quote actually comes from Michael Medved:

It’s not just Christian zealots who recognize Huckabee as “one of us”; I’ve spoken to non-religious Russian immigrant Jews who love him because he’s down-to-earth, plain-spoken and unpretentious non-celebrity. For the work-hard-to-get-ahead strivers who represent the heart and soul of the GOP, there are obvious, powerful points of identification. In this context, his embarrassing fumbles in reacting to Benazir Bhutto’s assassination haven’t destroyed his campaign: anyone who wanted a candidate with foreign policy credentials would have turned away from Huckabee long ago.

Not exactly up to The Times's standards, to be sure. Maybe the way to look at this is that the paper's standards were lowered to Kristol's level?

Bill Kristol, quota hire.

Special thanks to TPM Reader TT for sending this one in.

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Bill Kristol's Debut NY Times Column Larded With Awful Cliches
(January 7, 2008 -- 9:23 AM EDT // link // )

Updated below.

Okay, so The New York Times's new columnist, Bill Kristol, had his debut today. And his first column gives those who criticized the Kristol appointment not because of ideology, but because of the quality of his work, a chance to proclaim a hearty "I told you so."

As you may recall, Times edit page editor Andy Rosenthal, who dubbed Kristol's critics as "intolerant," defended the Kristol deal by describing him as a "captivating writer."

So I'm going to leave it to others to argue with the column's content, such as it is, and merely point out that the first effort of this "captivating writer" is absolutely larded with teeth-grindingly awful cliches from top to bottom:

Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.

Playing around with the "nation turns its lonely eyes to you" line is one of the most hackneyed rhetorical gimmicks out there. There are also these fingernail-on-the-chalkboard phrases...

We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.

...and this thoroughly insightful bit of political analysis...

After the last two elections, featuring the well-born George Bush and Al Gore and John Kerry, Americans — even Republicans! — are ready for a likable regular guy.

...and this thud of a cliche...

Some Democrats are licking their chops at the prospect of a Huckabee nomination. They shouldn’t be.

As a special bonus, Kristol also includes a quote from Michelle Malkin. So, to review: Kristol has managed to sneak onto the august Times Op ed page -- onetime home to James Reston and Russell Baker -- some of the worst cliches political writing has to offer and a quote from the worst of the very worst in the wingnutosphere. And all in only one column.

Hmmm. This may not concern Rosenthal much, but you have to imagine that lots of Times editors and writers who care about the quality of their newspaper will be a bit perturbed by this, though they'll almost certainly keep their concerns private.

Update: Looks like Kristol's first column will already require a correction.

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The Best Way To End "Partisan Gridlock" Is To Further Weaken The GOP -- Part Two
(January 6, 2008 -- 9:18 AM EDT // link // )

New York Times reporter Nicholas Confessore has done us all an important service today, coming through with an article that lays bare just how morally and intellectually bankrupt Mike Bloomberg's call for an end to "partisan gridlock" really is.

Confessore got past all the silly platitudes about partisanship being the source of all our problems by asking what it is that Bloomberg actually stands for in terms of policy. This is what he found:

Hundreds of miles from the hustings of New Hampshire lurks a possible presidential candidate who supports gay marriage, abortion rights and stricter regulation of handguns. Who doesn’t mind taxing the rich on their income or big companies on their carbon emissions. Who says that deporting illegal immigrants would destroy the nation’s economy. And who is not necessarily averse to adding more bureaucrats to the government payroll.

That politician — Michael R. Bloomberg, the billionaire mayor of New York — has spent months laying out his vision for a post-partisan approach to politics that would take the best from left and right.

Yet a close reading of the policies Mr. Bloomberg has promoted during his mayoralty suggests that Mr. Bloomberg actually has a lot in common with one party’s leading candidates — the Democrats — and not so much with the other’s. Indeed, on issues like gay marriage and gun control, Mr. Bloomberg stands well to the left of top-tier Democratic candidates like Hillary Rodham Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama.

Mike Bloomberg, for all his complaints about the two parties, is in almost unanimous agreement with the policy goals and platform, broadly defined, of one party -- the Democrats. He is in almost unanimous disagreement with the policy goals of the other -- the GOP. The Dems represent majority opinion on a host of issues. The GOP doesn't. Broadly speaking, the main obstacle to the realization of multiple policy goals favored by the majority is the "partisan gridlock" being created by the GOP, which is using every parliamentary gimmick at its disposal to frustrate the legislative progress that the American people want.

Therefore, if Bloomberg were serious about ending "partisan gridlock" in the service of the very same policy goals he himself espouses, he would devote his efforts and fortune not to the equal demonization of both parties, but to the further weakening of the Republicans.

There's a lot more context here that needs explaining. For instance, Bloomberg's "post-partisanship" is as much a power-grabbing technique as it is a governmental approach. It was the device he needed to employ in order to ascend to the mayoralty in New York. And there are signs that he may try to use it again to gain the White House. But more on this another time.

For now, suffice it to say that Bloomberg's calls for "post-partisanship" are a self-serving, attention-seeking stunt. That's all there is to it.

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