Obama raced clock, chaos, comedy for climate deal
By CHARLES BABINGTON and JENNIFER LOVEN (AP) – 1 hour ago
WASHINGTON — It was almost unthinkable. The president of the United States walked into a meeting of fellow world leaders and there wasn’t a chair for him, a sure sign he was not expected, maybe not even wanted. Barack Obama didn’t pause, however. “I’m going to sit by my friend Lula,” he said, moving toward Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
A Brazilian aide gave the U.S. president his chair, and Obama spent the next 80 minutes helping craft new requirements for disclosing efforts to fight global warming. Along with India, South Africa and Brazil, the key member in the room was China, which recently surpassed the U.S. as the world’s top emitter of heat-trapping gasses.
At the table this time for China was Premier Wen Jiabao, not an underling as before. Obama was bent on striking a deal before flying home to snowbound Washington.
He would later hail the achievement as a breakthrough. But even Obama said there was much more to do, and climate authorities called Copenhagen’s results a modest step in the global bid to curb greenhouse gasses that threaten to melt glaciers and flood coastlines.
Obama’s 15-hour, seat-of-the-pants dash through Copenhagen was marked by doggedness, confusion and semi-comedy. Constrained by partisan politics at home, and quarrels between rich and poor nations abroad, he was determined to come home with a victory, no matter how imperfect.
Experts and activists may debate its significance for years. Some, like Jeremy Symons, who watched the talks for the National Wildlife Federation, said it was “high drama and true grit on the part of the president that delivered the deal.”
Others were far less kind. The Copenhagen agreements are “merely the repackaging of old and toothless promises,” said Asher Miller, executive director of the Post Carbon Institute.
Even though a weary, bleary-eyed Obama had added six hours to his planned nine-hour visit, he was back in Washington by the time delegates at the 193-nation summit approved the U.S.-brokered compromises on Saturday. The agreements will give billions of dollars in climate aid to poor nations, but they do not require the world’s major polluters to make deeper cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions.
This account of Obama’s hectic day is based on dozens of interviews and statements by key players from numerous countries.
___
Obama was thrown off schedule almost from the moment he landed Friday morning in Copenhagen, where the summit’s final-day talks seemed to be collapsing.
Instead of attending a planned meeting with Denmark’s prime minister, he plunged into an emergency session of about 20 nations, big and small, wealthy and poor. Right away there was a troubling sign.
China was the only nation to send a second-tier official: vice foreign minister He Yafei instead of Premier Wen, who was in the building. The snub baffled and annoyed delegates.
For months, Obama had been pressing China to put into writing its promises to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Obama later seemed unusually animated when he alluded indirectly to China in a short, late-morning speech to the full conference.
“I don’t know how you have an international agreement where we all are not sharing information and ensuring that we are meeting our commitments,” he said. “That doesn’t make sense.”
Things then appeared to turn for the better, as Obama and Wen met privately, as scheduled, for 55 minutes. A U.S. official said they took a step forward as they discussed emissions targets, financing and transparency.
The two leaders directed aides to work on mutual language, and Obama’s team proposed specific wording meant to solidify China’s promise to be more forthcoming about its anti-pollution efforts.
A short time later, however, the U.S. team was more baffled and irked than before. At a follow-up session of the morning’s big meeting, the Chinese sent an even lower-ranking envoy in Wen’s place.
An irritated Obama told his staff, “I don’t want to mess around with this anymore, I want to just talk with Premier Wen,” according to a senior administration official who spoke on background to discuss sensitive diplomatic issues.
___
By now night had fallen, and it was clear Obama would be late getting home. He kept an appointment to discuss arms control with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. Meanwhile he asked aides to try to set up a final one-on-one meeting with Wen, and a separate meeting with leaders of India, Brazil and South Africa. He hoped these fast-growing nations, which had been loosely aligned with China on many of the key issues, might influence the Chinese.
Confusion reigned. Chinese officials said Wen was at his hotel and his staff was at the airport. The same was said of top Indian officials, but nothing was clear.
South African President Jacob Zuma agreed to meet with Obama, then canceled when he heard the Indian leader was away, and Brazil would attend only if India did.
The Chinese said Wen could meet with Obama at 6:15 p.m., then changed it to 7 p.m. Obama used the time to talk strategy with the leaders of France, Germany and Great Britain.
Meanwhile, a four-nation negotiating team known as BASIC gathered. The modified acronym reflected its members: Brazil, South Africa, India and China.
Obama was unaware, however, thinking he was going to meet alone with Wen. After some confusion about who had access to the room, White House aides told the president that Wen was inside with the leaders of the three other countries, apparently working on strategy.
“Good,” Obama said as he walked through the door. “Mr. Premier, are you ready to see me?” he called out. “Are you ready?”
Inside he found startled leaders and no chair to sit in.
U.S. officials denied that Obama crashed the party, saying he simply showed up for his 7 p.m. meeting with Wen and found the others there.
Whatever the meeting’s original purpose, Obama used it to help strike an agreement on ways to verify developing nations’ reductions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, a good U.S. ending to their talks with the Chinese.
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. had multiple pieces of information about alleged bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, according to senior U.S. officials, including intelligence reports and communications intercepts suggesting a Nigerian was being prepped for a terror strike by al Qaeda operatives in Yemen.
U.S. investigators are pursuing possible links between the Christmas Day airline bomb plot and former Guantanamo Bay prisoners. WSJ's Evan Perez discusses developments in the investigation and possible policy outcomes, in the News Hub.
The intercepts were collected piecemeal by the National Security Agency, which has been monitoring al Qaeda militants in that country, including former Guantanamo detainees believed to be leaders there.
In addition, the father of Mr. Abdulmutallab met with the Central Intelligence Agency at the U.S. embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, Nov. 19, and told of his son's likely radicalization, U.S. officials say. That led to a broader gathering of agencies the next day, including the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the State Department, in which the information was shared, a U.S. official said.
But U.S. officials said it isn't clear whether intelligence officials in Washington charged with coordinating such intelligence activities effectively distributed the information gathered in Nigeria.
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Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab at age 19.
President Obama on Tuesday described these lapses in general terms during a sweeping broadside aimed at his government's intelligence services. Citing a "potential catastrophic breach," he said the warning signs, if heeded, would have prevented the Christmas Day attempted bombing on a Detroit-bound airplane.
"A systemic failure has occurred and I consider that totally unacceptable," the president said, referencing "a mix of human and systemic failure." In his comments, the president cited information "that could have and should have been pieced together."
Officials familiar with a review ordered by Mr. Obama say the connections aren't obvious, except in hindsight, and that there doesn't appear to be a single clear warning that should have set off alarms. But if the information had been brought together before Christmas, Mr. Abdulmutallab likely would have been put on a no-fly list and kept off the plane he tried to destroy, the president said.
U.S. and Yemeni authorities said they are investigating whether the bomb plot was hatched by the former Guantanamo Bay prisoners in Yemen, the claimed source of the attack. That development is likely to hinder the Obama administration's effort to release detainees as it attempts to close the prison.
The lapses, and Mr. Obama's critical comments, will focus fresh attention on the operation of the U.S.'s intelligence agencies, particularly the National Counterterrorism Center, or NCTC, a Washington-based body set up after 9/11 to act as a clearinghouse for terrorism data. The U.S. has spent billions of dollars building systems to detect impending attacks, which appear to have failed in this instance.
It has already set off a round of finger pointing among multiple U.S. agencies still stinging from 9/11 and Iraq-related intelligence failures. According to officials, the NCTC has complained that the CIA didn't provide all the information they had, such as where Mr. Abdulmutallab attended college, while the agencies have said that the counterterrorism center had what it needed to properly assess the threat.
Dennis Blair, the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NCTC, said in a written statement that despite improvements to information sharing, "it is clear that gaps remain, and they must be fixed." The NSA didn't respond immediately to requests for comment.
Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, said the agency first learned of Mr. Abdulmutallab in November, when his father came to the U.S. embassy in Nigeria. He said the agency helped place the Nigerian in the government's terrorist database, including his extremist connections in Yemen, and also forwarded biographical information to the NCTC.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab
"This agency, like others in our government, is reviewing all data to which it had access -- not just what we ourselves may have collected -- to determine if more could have been done to stop Abdulmutallab," he said.
The errors could prove a political problem for Mr. Obama, who spoke for the second day running about the attack, after three days of silence. Over the weekend, other administration officials, including Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, argued that air-security systems had worked in the attack's aftermath. Campaign consultants for potential Republican presidential challengers in 2012 have been waiting for an opportunity to paint the president as a soft on terrorism.
A senior administration official said Mr. Obama's Tuesday statement was prompted by a conference call with Gen. James L. Jones, the national security adviser, and other top security officials. The administration's review had uncovered existing "bits and pieces" of information, some of it "incomplete or partial in nature," that taken together constituted an intelligence failure. That included information about the suspect's thinking and his plans, about al Qaeda and its plans, and about potential attacks over the holidays.
The officials said the president stands behind Ms. Napolitano and that her job is secure. A preliminary review ordered by Mr. Obama is due Thursday.
It is rare for a president to publicly reprimand intelligence agencies, particularly when he is relying on them to prosecute two wars. Tuesday's scolding will likely compound an already tense relationship.
The failure to detect the plot out of Yemen is focusing attention on the links between al Qaeda's operations there and the apparently pivotal role in the group played by former Guantanamo Bay detainees.
Several detainees who joined "al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula" -- the al Qaeda affiliate in Yemen that Monday claimed responsibility for the bombing attempt -- were released under the Bush administration and repatriated to Saudi Arabia. Within a year, many had slipped into Yemen and joined al Qaeda. Some terrorism experts said the Yemen branch was of little consequence until the arrival of the Saudi Guantanamo Bay veterans.
Former Bush administration officials acknowledged Tuesday the concern that detainees released under their watch could have been involved in the plot. But they said the decision was the best of imperfect options.
"It's a serious issue because we were trying to find ways to return detainees to home countries and ultimately close Guantanamo while effectively addressing the long-term security threats from such detainees," said Juan Zarate, a counterterrorism official in Mr. Bush's White House.
Two leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula are Said Ali al-Shihri and Muhammad al-Awfi, Saudi nationals released from Guantanamo in 2007, according to the Pentagon.
At least 11 Saudis released from Guantanamo have joined militant groups in Yemen in recent years, according to al Qaeda statements and Defense Department documents. The extent of their involvement in the plot is now a focus of the FBI's probe.
In a letter to Mr. Obama, Sens. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, John McCain of Arizona and Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, three prominent supporters of closing Guantanamo, said transferring any more detainees to Yemen is too risky given the Christmas plot.
About 45 of the more than 90 Yemeni prisoners that remain at Guantanamo are cleared for release and likely would be sent home if it weren't for their nationalities, two senior U.S. officials involved in detainee issues said. If the Yemeni security situation doesn't improve, they may end up moved to a Thomson, Ill., prison the U.S. plans to use to hold detainees if Mr. Obama succeeds in closing the prison.
—Elizabeth Williamson contributed to this article. Write to Evan Perez at evan.perez@wsj.com, Jay Solomon at jay.solomon@wsj.com and Siobhan Gorman at siobhan.gorman@wsj.com
The press and politicians were asleep at the switch.
Stock-market indices are not much good as yardsticks of social progress, but as another low, dishonest decade expires let us note that, on 2000s first day of trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 11357 while the Nasdaq Composite Index stood at 4131, both substantially higher than where they are today. The Nasdaq went on to hit 5000 before collapsing with the dot-com bubble, the first great Wall Street disaster of this unhappy decade. The Dow got north of 14000 before the real-estate bubble imploded.
And it was supposed to have been such an awesome time, too! Back in the late '90s, in the crescendo of the Internet boom, pundit and publicist alike assured us that the future was to be a democratized, prosperous place. Hierarchies would collapse, they told us; the individual was to be empowered; freed-up markets were to be the common man's best buddy.
Such clever hopes they were. As a reasonable anticipation of what was to come they meant nothing. But they served to unify the decade's disasters, many of which came to us festooned with the flags of this bogus idealism.
Before "Enron" became synonymous with shattered 401(k)s and man-made electrical shortages, the public knew it as a champion of electricity deregulation—a freedom fighter! It was supposed to be that most exalted of corporate creatures, a "market maker"; its "capacity for revolution" was hymned by management theorists; and its TV commercials depicted its operations as an extension of humanity's quest for emancipation.
Similarly, both Bank of America and Citibank, before being recognized as "too big to fail," had populist histories of which their admirers made much. Citibank's long struggle against the Glass-Steagall Act was even supposed to be evidence of its hostility to banking's aristocratic culture, an amusing image to recollect when reading about the $100 million pay reportedly pocketed by one Citi trader in 2008.
The Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal showed us the same dynamics at work in Washington. Here was an apparent believer in markets, working to keep garment factories in Saipan humming without federal interference and saluted for it in an op-ed in the Saipan Tribune as "Our freedom fighter in D.C."
But the preposterous populism is only one part of the equation; just as important was our failure to see through the ruse, to understand how our country was being disfigured.
Ensuring that the public failed to get it was the common theme of at least three of the decade's signature foul-ups: the hyping of various Internet stock issues by Wall Street analysts, the accounting scandals of 2002, and the triple-A ratings given to mortgage-backed securities.
The grand, overarching theme of the Bush administration—the big idea that informed so many of its sordid episodes—was the same anti-supervisory impulse applied to the public sector: regulators sabotaged and their agencies turned over to the regulated.
The public was left to read the headlines and ponder the unthinkable: Could our leaders really have pushed us into an unnecessary war? Is the republic really dividing itself into an immensely wealthy class of Wall Street bonus-winners and everybody else? And surely nobody outside of the movies really has the political clout to write themselves a $700 billion bailout. What made the oughts so awful, above all, was the failure of our critical faculties. The problem was not so much that newspapers were dying, to mention one of the lesser catastrophes of these awful times, but that newspapers failed to do their job in the first place, to scrutinize the myths of the day in a way that might have prevented catastrophes like the financial crisis or the Iraq war.
The folly went beyond the media, though. Recently I came across a 2005 pamphlet written by historian Rick Perlstein berating the big thinkers of the Democratic Party for their poll-driven failure to stick to their party's historic theme of economic populism. I was struck by the evidence Mr. Perlstein adduced in the course of his argument. As he tells the story, leading Democratic pollsters found plenty of evidence that the American public distrusts corporate power; and yet they regularly advised Democrats to steer in the opposite direction, to distance themselves from what one pollster called "outdated appeals to class grievances and attacks upon corporate perfidy."
This was not a party that was well-prepared for the job of iconoclasm that has befallen it. And as the new bunch muddle onward—bailing out the large banks but (still) not subjecting them to new regulatory oversight, passing a health-care reform that seems (among other, better things) to guarantee private insurers eternal profits—one fears they are merely presenting their own ample backsides to an embittered electorate for kicking. Write to thomas@wsj.com
If, as I do, you live within John Nance Garner "spitting" distance of Washington and you read its fast-disappearing newspapers, then for the last week or two you have been drowned in a Salahi marinade. For those who may have been on vacation on another planet, or are reading this after it has been extracted from a time capsule—what with the American attention span being what it is, time capsules are now retrieved 45 minutes after they are buried—the Salahis are two strange pinheads, one of whom looks like Barbie and the other Fat Ken, who harbor the noble ambition of appearing on a "reality show." For those who do not know what a reality show is, it is a chance to achieve utterly transient fame by acting like an idiot and embarrassing oneself in front of a charge-coupled device that communicates your indiscretions to the less intelligent population of an entire nation. The Salahis are themselves a charged couple, and perhaps a device, in more ways than one: She looks like she's part neon, and they have begun their encounters with the system of what used to be called justice. To get on the reality show, which, appropriately, does not even exist, they faked their way into the White House, Tareq Salahi, it is presumed, wearing his fake Patek Philippe. The president and Mrs. Obama are reportedly outraged. Strangely enough, Theodore Roosevelt, who was shot while making a speech, and finished it, was not reported to have been outraged. When Puerto Rican nationalist terrorists attacked Blair House, with three wounded, two dead, and at one point only a machine-gun on the stairs between Harry Truman and assassination, the president was not reported to have been outraged. And when Ronald Reagan, bullet near his heart, was wheeled into the emergency room at George Washington University, he was most likely not outraged—because had he been he likely would not have had the wit to say to his surgeons before he was put under, "I hope you're all Republicans." Apparently, outrage, like attention span and a good deal else, has devolved with American history.
There may, however, be a Salahi lining in all this pitiable behavior; i.e. a gift to the language in the form of a richly functional verb—to Salahi. We have the Ponzi Scheme, named after the first known originator; Hobson's Choice, named after a livery stable owner who is reported to have said "You can take any horse you want as long as it's the one by the door;" and Melba Toast and Peach Melba, in honor of late 19th- and early 20th-century diet-averse opera star Nellie Melba, who all by herself could have equaled at least three or four of our early 21st-century fashion models (if she could have been convinced to adopt the facial expression of a heroin-addicted captive in a Russian Mafia bordello). Why not to Salahi?
I would like to offer the following to the Oxford English Dictionary, free of charge: To Salahi: v. U.S. [after 21st century reality-show aspirants Michaele and Tareq Salahi] 1. intrans. to gain entrance to an event or gathering to which one is not invited. "They Salahied into the Bar-Mitzvah even though they didn't know the Goldblatt boy, and ate most of the chopped-liver sculpture of Elvis." Shakespeare, Sonnet MMIX. 2. in a general sense to appear where one is not welcome. "Michael Moore Salahied into George and Laura Bush's second honeymoon to lecture the former president about justice for the undocumented immigrants held at Guantanamo." Chomsky, Profiles in Courage. 3. to forge, fake or pretend, especially in hope of achieving a contemptible or pathetic objective that is simultaneously a comment upon the corruption and distastefulness of a particular individual and society itself. trans. "To elevate his chances of becoming a Chippendales dancer, Arnold Toynbee Salahied a letter of recommendation from Rosa Luxemburg. Al Franken, An Intellectual History of the United States. If, for example, you sneak into the circus, you cannot be said to have Salahied, because the action is too honorable and direct. It must be accompanied by convoluted and narcissistic scheming that is bound to unravel because of its elemental stupidity. Another use of the expression would be simply to turn it into a noun: "She looks like a Salahi," "They're just Salahis," "It was one of the greatest Salahis ever," or "It takes a Salahi to know a Salahi." And, although not finally, as the speakers of English are a creative lot and may find many fascinating variations, the very notion of Salahi-ing could be lifted to an eye-crossing level were one to speak of "ersatz Salahis," a true puzzle for philosophers, or at least a double negative.
Meanwhile, the Salahis themselves are to be thanked for enriching the language, even if unwittingly (and that's an understatement). Mr. Helprin, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, is the author of, among other works, "Winter's Tale" (Harcourt), "A Soldier of the Great War" (Harcourt) and, most recently, "Digital Barbarism" (HarperCollins).
Alexandria, VA – Yesterday in a speech for the Media Access Project (http://ow.ly/Mldt), Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd claimed to refute numerous what he called “exaggerations and distortions” of a wide range of his thoughts, positions and policy prescriptions from what he called a “right-wing smear campaign.” What Lloyd did was offer numerous falsehoods and denials about things that are undeniably true.
Just some of his many misrepresentations:
LLOYD LIE: That the “right-wing smear campaign” was “distorting my views about the First Amendment.”
TRUTH: From Lloyd’s 2006 book, Prologue to a Farce: Communication and Democracy in America:
"It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration … "[T]he purpose of free speech is warped to protect global corporations and block rules that would promote democratic governance."
LLOYD LIE: That the “right-wing smear campaign” incorrectly asserted that Lloyd is “a supporter of Hugo Chavez.”
TRUTH: Lloyd as the head of the Leadership Council for Civil Rights participating in a panel discussion:
“In Venezuela, with Chavez, is really an incredible revolution - a democratic revolution. To begin to put in place things that are going to have an impact on the people of Venezuela. The property owners and the folks who then controlled the media in Venezuela rebelled - worked, frankly, with folks here in the U.S. government - worked to oust him. But he came back with another revolution, and then Chavez began to take very seriously the media in his country.”
LLOYD LIE: “I am not at the FCC to remove anybody, whatever their color, from power.”
TRUTH: Lloyd at the May of 2005 Conference on Media Reform: Racial Justice:
“Because we have really, truly good white people in important positions. And the fact of the matter is that there are a limited number of those positions. And unless we are conscious of the need to have more people of color, gays, other people in those positions we will not change the problem. We're in a position where you have to say who is going to step down so someone else can have power.”
Brent Bozell, President of the Media Research Center:
“Why are Obama’s leadership picks so incapable of telling the truth? It is not necessary for conservatives to ‘distort’ or ‘smear’ Mark Lloyd. All we have to do is quote him. When we do, he has public meltdowns with hysterical and dishonest accusations.
“Mr. Lloyd, we’re not going to stop talking about you or your record, using that media – the alternative media – you and your radical friends despise so much because you can’t control it.”
What's important is the willingness to hold power accountable.
This is a terrible time for newspapers, but the solutions suggested over the last year by the deep thinkers of the floundering industry give one little hope.
Back in September, the ombudsman of the Washington Post, Andrew Alexander, lamented his paper's failure to keep up with conservative outlets after they described footage showing Acorn employees apparently advising people how to evade the law. The Post's slowness on the story, Mr. Alexander wrote, raised the possibility that the paper didn't "pay sufficient attention to conservative media or viewpoints."
Continuing the next day on the newspaper's Web site, he decided that the blame for this unhappy situation lay with the newspaper industry's workforce, which is apparently made up of the wrong kind of people. According to "surveys," Mr. Alexander wrote, "newsrooms . . . are more liberal than the population." Newspapers might mean well, but they are handicapped by their monocultural politics. The obvious answer is to hire for political diversity.
Mr. Alexander's predecessor as ombudsman made the same point in 2008, and it's easy to understand why: It seems to dismiss an embarrassing failure with an uncontroversial idea. Everyone likes diversity, right? And this way no one is really to blame for botched coverage of any sort, least of all newspaper brass. Their intentions are pure, just poorly executed by their annoyingly conformist info-proles.
Ordinarily, such a bad idea would not draw much concern. But it has now been repeated several times in the great organ of journalistic consensus. Clearly they mean it seriously.
Years ago, Mr. Alexander wrote, newspapers achieved racial and gender diversity, and "It's the same with ideology."
Actually, it isn't. Unlike race or gender, people choose their ideologies. What's more, they often change them as they go through life, and they sometimes find that it is to their pecuniary advantage to ditch the embarrassing political enthusiasms of their youth.
Which brings up the problem of Republicans in Name Only. Anyone setting out to appease bias-spotters on the right should know that the conservative movement feels that it is plagued by impostors and fakers, and it won't be satisfied until these RINOs, too, are chased from the newsrooms of the nation.
Then, once all that is taken into account, there's the damnable problem of the bias-spotting left, like the Media Matters for America organization, which has documented the conservative tilt of the press in voluminous detail. How to deal with this? By ignoring it? Isn't that an act of bias on its own?
Besides, there's the mechanics of the job. How is the Post supposed to check up on its reporters' politics? I'm hoping for loyalty oaths and televised hearings, with stiff penalties for employees who refuse to talk or to name names: It would be the perfect spectacle for the end of the newspaper era.
Craziest of all, though, is the prospect of the Post ditching its decades-long pursuit of the grail of objectivity . . . because it got scooped on the Acorn story. If that is all it takes to reduce the Washington Post's vaunted editorial philosophy to ashes, what is the newspaper industry planning to do to atone for its far more consequential failures?
Remember, this disastrous decade saw two of them: First, the news media's failure to look critically at the Bush administration's rationale for the Iraq War; and then, the business press's failure to understand the depth of the subprime mortgage problem and to anticipate its massive consequences.
Would the solution currently on the table—hiring more Republicans and fewer Democrats—have helped the press behave differently in either situation? It's possible, of course, given the right Republicans.
But it is far more likely that it wouldn't have helped at all. To begin with, it would have been unrealistic to expect the press to scrutinize the Bush administration's claims about Iraq more vigorously had it agreed with the administration more. Even bias theorists understand that's not the way it's supposed to work.
And in the case of the subprime lending industry and its relationship to Wall Street, the public would probably have been better served by a perspective that regarded, say, predatory lending with suspicion instead of one that insisted on putting the phrase in quotation marks.
Which is another way of saying that the problem, in each of these massive failures, wasn't really ideological at all. The people who got it right, in both cases, were the ones willing to hold power accountable, to directly challenge the conventional wisdom.
What the Post seems to be after is the opposite: A form of journalism that offends nobody, that comes crawling to the powerful, that mirrors the partisan breakdown of the population as a whole. If that's the future of journalism, we can be certain that ever more catastrophic failures await. Write to thomas@wsj.com
This morning the New York Times' David Carr accused the Wall Street Journal of moving its news division to the right under the ownership of Rupert Murdoch.
The WSJ's Managing Editor Robert Thomson responded:
From: Thomson, Robert
Sent: Monday, December 14, 2009 11:06 AM
Subject: Statement by Robert Thomson on The New York Times
The news column by a Mr David Carr today is yet more evidence that The New York Times is uncomfortable about the rise of an increasingly successful rival while its own circulation and credibility are in retreat. The usual practice of quoting ex-employees was supplemented by a succession of anonymous quotes and unsubstantiated assertions. The attack follows the extraordinary actions of Mr Bill Keller, the Executive Editor, who, among other things, last year wrote personally and at length to a prize committee casting aspersions on Journal journalists and journalism. Whether it be in the quest for prizes or in the disparagement of competitors, principle is but a bystander at The New York Times.
Robert Thomson, Editor-in-Chief, Dow Jones.
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