SELF-HATRED: Understandable, of course, in some cases — but not a sound basis for a political orientation.

VIRGINIA POSTREL has some advice for the New York Times:

I’ll just add a strategic point, the kind of thing they teach in business school. If you are going to adopt a strategy to be a national newspaper, you must add the capabilities to be a national newspaper. That doesn’t mean parachuting in reporters from Manhattan to interview a few natives and report back on their peculiar habits. It means having lots of well-staffed bureaus and, if necessary, credited stringers. It also means breaking out of a worldview that considers Manhattan normal and every other place weird.

The truth is that the NYT is not a national newspaper. It is the New York Times (more accurately, The Manhattan South of Harlem Times). It assumes its readers have the prejudices of well-educated, affluent Manhattanites, and it staffs, writes, and edits accordingly. To take an apolitical example, from a national perspective, the Times business pages grossly overcover the media business. From a Manhattan perspective, that makes perfect sense.

There is nothing wrong with this strategy, but it is a different strategy from the stated one of being a national paper. The mismatch between strategy and capabilities seems to account for many of the paper’s current managerial problems, including the seeming inability of editors to keep track of exactly when and where reporters travel.

Makes sense to me.

SALAM PAX will be writing for The Guardian — and The Guardian is already mangling his words to fit the correct political line! Now that’s fast!

BUDGET CONSPIRACY THEORIES? Powerline reports that the Financial Times story claiming a deficit coverup is bunk, and has transcripts of the interview suggesting that the story has been rather vigorously spun, to put it mildly:

So the thrust of the article published by the Financial Times, and elaborated on by CNN, the BBC, Reuters, and, no doubt, just about every newspaper in America by tomorrow morning, is the precise opposite of what the Financial Times reporter was told by one of the authors of the supposedly “buried” study.

I’m entirely an agnostic on the Bush tax cuts, and I find the debate — in which Democrats predictably claim that it wll bankrupt the country and starve the poor while Republicans claim it will lead to universal wealth — predictable and unpersuasive. Take it away, Paul Krugman and Donald Luskin.

SARS — not only back in Toronto, but now back in British Columbia, too. I don’t believe that they’ve got as good a handle on this as they thought.

JUST SO YOU KNOW: There’s some sort of mailserver problem on the InstaPundit account. I don’t think I’m getting mail, since I’m not even getting copies of messages I send to myself. So if you’ve emailed me unsuccessfully, sorry.

HERE’S A NIFTY MOVABLE TYPE TUTORIAL FOR BEGINNERS. If nothing else, it should reduce the apprehensiveness of people who are thinking of switching from Blogger.

ANOTHER UNCREDITED STRINGER FOR THE TIMES comes out of the closet. He begged for a byline, and was denied:

As more and more of my stuff got into the paper, I began beseeching my editors to give me a byline or a tag.

It was not just a matter of ego, though I must admit it is an honor seeing my name in the Times.

The real reason I was so vociferous is that the people who pick up a newspaper have the right to know who provides the information therein.

It is a matter of trust, to the readers and to the sources.

After a while, and especially with the Iverson mess — involving a couple of B-movie bunglers trying to pin a bum gun rap on The Answer — sources began to joke about my veracity when they didn’t see my name in the paper. People who are quoted like to know who did the quoting, because, should anything be wrong, they want to know whom to yell at. (The good news was that I got everything right and nobody, to my knowledge, complained. The bad news is that I didn’t invent any of my interviews, which, at the going rate, would have guaranteed me a very large jackpot.) . . .

My pleadings, via telephone and e-mail, were answered with a standard this-is-the-policy line, lest something be of such import and substance that it would be impossible to ignore.

So explain to me, again — well, actually just for the first time — what exactly it was that Rick Bragg did that was so bad?

(Via Romenesko).

UPDATE: Ana Marie Cox, on the other hand, writes that Bragg should have been fired for superciliousness and condescension.

Boy, a lot of jobs would open up if that were the standard. . . . And scroll down to read Al Giordano’s comment, which is brilliant.

ROBERT MUGABE IS SECRETLY ARMING HIS STREET THUGS WITH GUNS so that they can crush the opposition — which has been disarmed — next week.

Typical.

ETHICAL CONCERNS GET MAUREEN DOWD’S COLUMN DROPPED. Ouch.

JOHN SCALZI IS UNIMPRESSED with the Bush tax cuts.

GUANTANAMO: A “DEATH CAMP?” Only if arteriosclerosis counts, apparently:

Is America the only country in the world that could run a prison camp where prisoners gain weight? Between April 2002 and March 2003, the Joint Task Force returned to Afghanistan 19 of the approximately 664 men (from 42 countries) who have been held in the detention camps at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay. Upon leaving, it has been reported, each man received two parting gifts: a brand new copy of the Koran as well as a new pair of jeans. Not the act of generosity that it might first appear, the jeans, at least, turned out to be a necessity. During their 14-month stay, the detainees (nearly all of them) had each gained an average of 13 pounds.

In America, where 13 pounds is what many of our citizens’ chins weigh, the prisoners’ slightly enlarged girth might seem negligible. But given the low-bit-resolution video footage we have seen of stooped and shackled men in orange jumpsuits, and the collective protests from international human rights groups, the revelation that the men detained from last year’s war would leave the Guantanamo prison camps sporting a larger pair of trousers than the ones they showed up with comes as something of a surprise.

I blame the fast-food industry.

EMILY LITELLA EXPRESSES HER VIEWS on the HostingMatters outage.

MORE WEBSITES WANT TO CHARGE FEES: But not InstaPundit! It’s free, it’ll stay free, and I personally guarantee that it’s worth every penny.

Maybe those guys should just put up a PayPal button and accept donations.

PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS SAYING THAT “DRIVING ISN’T A RIGHT, IT’S A PRIVILEGE,” and they’re always saying it because it’s in bold-face type in every “driver’s handbook” issued by every state Department of Safety. (Which shows that the people who write those handbooks understand the value of early indoctrination.) But it’s not really true, as Eugene Volokh points out. At least, it doesn’t mean what people who use the phrase tend to think it means, that driving is a privilege that the government may bestow or withdraw at its whim:

But this does not give the state the unlimited right to control what you do when you drive, or to deny you the right to drive based on your exercise of other constitutional or statutory rights. The government does not have unlimited power to search your car, or even to pull you over; the Fourth Amendment still applies to you when you’re driving. (The Fourth Amendment covers cars less than houses, for a variety of reasons; but whether that’s right or wrong, the justification is not that driving is a “privilege” rather than a constitutional right.) The government may require you to submit to blood tests when you’re pulled over for drunk driving, but the case upholding that didn’t rest on a “driving is a privilege theory.” (Some legislators have justified some such requirements on an “implied consent” theory — by choosing to drive, you implicitly consent to submit to blood tests — but that’s not how the Supreme Court has justified it.)

Likewise, the state may not deny you a driver’s license because of your speech — or even specially control your speech while you’re driving, e.g., by restricting the content of your bumper stickers (at least outside the narrow exceptions, such as threats or libel, that are recognized for all speech).

Read the whole thing.

THE BUCKS JUST KEEP ROLLING IN here at InstaPundit Secret HQ. I got a surprise royalty check from Perseus Books, formerly Perseus Westview, formerly HarperCollins Westview, nee WestView Press on my now rather elderly Outer Space: Problems of Law & Policy. It was for $119.85, which won’t exactly let me purchase this InstaYacht, but since I’d written off getting any more royalties on that book, it’s like free money. Woohoo!

Yes, I’m easily excited.

SOL STERN SAYS THAT THE NEW YORK TIMES IS whitewashing the Black Panthers.

UPDATE: Roger Simon recalls, unsentimentally, his years as a Black Panthers supporter dupe.

THE POLITICS OF OUTER SPACE, a fairly lengthy post on the controversial policy of “space monopolization,” over at GlennReynolds.com. Plus, I tell you how to get free books!

Meanwhile Rand Simberg has a column on whether the Columbia astronauts could have been rescued, and what it means.

UPDATE: Here’s a piece on private space travel from The Economist.

MORE BIG-MEDIA PLAGIARISM unmasked!

JIM TREACHER HAS MOVED to a new site. Don’t miss it!

A PACK, NOT A HERD:

A man armed with two sharpened wooden stakes tried to hijack and crash a Qantas domestic jet with 47 passengers aboard shortly after take-off from Melbourne today, authorities said.

The 40-year-old man stabbed two flight attendants and injured two other people before he was overpowered by crew and passengers aboard QF1737. He was in custody tonight. . . .

Agent Cato said passengers who intervened and overwhelmed the man before he could get to the cockpit were “quite heroic”.

Passenger Keith Charlton was among those who helped overpower the attacker.

He said he was seated in the third aisle of plane when a man in a “brown suit raced past me with his hands raised in the air”.

He said the man, who was holding aloft two sharpened wooden stakes, stabbed the chief flight attendant “Greg”.

“The fellow Greg, really was a hero … if it wasn’t for him we could’ve been in a lot of trouble,” he told Sky News.

“As he was being attacked, he put his head down into the man’s chest and he pushed him back down the plane.

“He had two severe injuries to his head; one was on the chin, one was on the top of his head,” Mr Charlton said.

Six men then rushed to Greg’s aid.

This is why confiscating tweezers is silly. You can’t hijack a plane anymore, because the passengers won’t allow it.

HERE’S AN ODD STORY, emailed by Stuart Buck:

A BOEING 727 passenger jet, grounded at Luanda airport a year ago, has disappeared after a mysterious unauthorised take-off, Angola state radio reported today.

The plane, chartered by the Angolan airline Airangol, was grounded after being banned from overflying Angolan territory on account of a series of irregularities, said Angola civil aviation director Helder Preza.

A witness to the plane’s departure on Sunday, airport employee Luis Lopes, said he saw a white man start the empty plane and then take off after a few dangerous land manoeuvres.

I wonder what’s behind this.

UPDATE: Several readers say this is probably an aircraft repossession. It’s a big plane for just one guy to repossess, especially after it’s been sitting for a year, but okay.

EVEN THE BASEBALL BLOGS are writing about the New York Times’ problems, which extend to the sports section. And there’s this:

Yesterday, I answer the phone at my Dad’s house, and it’s a telemarketer trying to sell a home subscription to the NY Times. In general, I hang up on these people, but I couldn’t resist knocking the Times. “That’s the worst paper in the world,” I said. “What do you mean?” the salesman replied. “You can’t trust anything they say,” I answered, “they print lies.” “Oh, yeah,” he replied and hung up.

Morale must be pretty bad if the telemarketers are getting discouraged.

SPINSANITY HAS A ROUNDUP on Iraq news coverage errors and myths. It addresses all sorts of issues, from WMD to looting to Jessica Lynch, and you should read the whole thing. I don’t agree with them on everything, but it’s still useful and thorough. Here’s the key bit on the BBC story:

BBC correspondent John Kampfner picked up on these stories in a televised May 18 report that has come under close scrutiny. While Kampfner adequately recapitulates the reporting of his predecessors in some respects, he made several mistakes. First, and most blatantly, Kampfner credulously quotes Iraqi doctors asserting that US soldiers used blanks when storming the hospital. But as blogger Wilbur Smith argues, it is improbable that combat troops would not have live ammunition ready for use in their weapons (the Pentagon strongly denies the allegation).

In addition, the online article based on Kampfner’s story — which has probably received more attention than the actual televised report — states that US troops “were said to have come under fire from inside and outside the building.” But Kampfner’s televised report actually said that “They took fire on their way in and out of the building,” not that fire came from inside the building or that troops fired shots inside. Moreover, Brooks specifically denied this claim during his April 2 briefing, saying “There was not a fire fight inside of the building, I will tell you, but there were fire fights outside of the building, getting in and getting out.” While a few media reports may have gotten this wrong, almost all got it right.

I think that SpinSanity is too charitable to the BBC here. I think that the message of the story was that the raid was a fake. Here’s how SpinSanity characterizes it:

There has also been a dispute over the implications of Kampfner’s piece. In the online article, he calls Lynch’s rescue “one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived.” (The TV script also had a suggestive lead-in: “This was a script made for Hollywood. Made by the Pentagon.”) Many have disregarded Kampfner’s direct meaning – that the Pentagon manipulated the media in presenting Lynch’s capture and rescue as more dramatic than they actually were – and leaped to the supposed implication that the raid was staged, which Kampfner did not allege but could be inferred based on the quotation claiming that US troops used blanks and a lack of context regarding possible threats to US troops to the hospital. (When questioned by CNN’s Leon Harris about this, Kampfner specifically said the rescue was not staged and that “The Americans had a legitimate right in getting Lynch out of the hospital.”)

Yeah, but the Harris questioning didn’t come until after Kampfner took a lot of heat for the story, and particularly the absurd “shooting blanks” claim. That’s backpedaling, not clarification.

SpinSanity also says:

Though far more responsible than Scheer or McKinney, critics of the BBC report from the right have used Kampfner’s miscues to try to dismiss or play down the entirety of the Lynch story, though the main contentions of the original revisionist reporting on Lynch have stood up to scrutiny thus far. Blogger Glenn Reynolds, for example, wrote that “there’s no story, really — just a claim that things weren’t as dangerous as they might have been, and that the Pentagon got as much PR out of the event as it could, neither of which strikes me as earthshaking.” Andrew Sullivan simply dismissed the BBC report as a “smear.” But these commentators have not directed the same outrage the BBC has faced at the press outlets that credulously repeated the original, mistaken reports about Lynch’s capture and rescue. Certainly, it’s news that several key aspects of what was arguably most famous single incident of the war were apparently misleading and/or false.

Well, the “was she shot or stabbed” question seems to me to be something that could be put down to the fog of war. The reports came from unnamed “officials” (who were probably enlisted men buttonholed on the way to the latrine) and it was obvious from the reportage that nobody was precisely sure what had happened. And it’s of nothing like the significance of the claim that the rescue was a fraud. The BBC story, on the other hand, was pretty much a lie, or criminal stupidity. If Kampfner didn’t know that the “shooting blanks” bit was bogus, then he has no business reporting on these kinds of things at all.

And call me crazy, but when you report that there were blanks and fake guns being used as part of a Hollywood extravaganza, I think you’re calling the whole thing a fraud. That’s how I read the BBC story, I think that’s how most people read the BBC story, it’s how Bob Scheer (rather eagerly and credulously) read the BBC story and I think that’s how we were meant to read the BBC story.

UPDATE: Scheer’s response to criticism of his Lynch column is substandard bloviation and bluster. He completely ignores the “shooting blanks” issue, and, well, doesn’t really say much except “military bad, Murdoch bad, talk radio bad, me good, BBC good.” Only he’s not as articulate as this makes him sound.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon says that Scheer should be fired.

MEDPUNDIT SYDNEY SMITH WRITES on obesity hysteria, and public-health advocates’ focus on diet rather than exercise.

It’s obvious to me why this is: if you blame diet for obesity, you can shake down corporations that sell food. If you blame lack of exercise, a million couch potatoes pick up the remote, and you don’t get asked back on TV.