Middle East Movies With Maureen

Faith, Freedom and Bling in the Middle East
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: January 16, 2008

Maureen Dowd accompanied George Bush on his whirlwind tour of the Middle East last week and the opulence of her New York Times financed sick leave vacation brought out her inner Samantha Brown. She gushed over the extravagance of the Saudi royal family:

The $3 billion, seven-star, 84,114-square-foot pink marble hotel — said to be the most expensive ever built — would make Trump blush. It glistens with 64,000 square feet of 22-carat gold leaf, 1,000 chandeliers, 20,000 roses changed every day, 200 fountains, a dome higher than St. Peter’s, an archway larger than the Arc de Triomphe, a beach with white sand shipped in from Algeria and a private heliport. The rooms, scattered with rose petals, range from $1,598 to $12,251.

She also called out a famous MTV house-envy series with its bling-bedecked rappers.

Arab TV offered an uncomfortable juxtaposition: Al Arabiya running the wretched saga of Gaza children suffering from a lack of food and medicine during the Israeli blockade, blending into the wretched excess scenes of W. being festooned with rapper-level bling from royal hosts flush with gazillions from gouging us on oil.
W.’s 11th-hour bid to save his legacy from being a shattered Iraq — even as the Iraqi defense minister admitted that American troops would be needed to help with internal security until at least 2012 and border defense until at least 2018 — recalled MTV’s “Cribs.”

But the basic cable host Dowd desperately wants to be is Robert Osborne. Her columns are peppered with old movie references. She compares Dubya to a bumbling Woody Allen movie character.

Like the slick Hollywood guy in “Annie Hall” who has a notion that he wants to turn into a concept and then develop into an idea, W. has resumed his mantra of having a vision that turns into freedom that could develop into global democracy.

And it wouldn’t be an article about Arabia without an allusion to the Lawrence thereof:

At a dinner last night in the king’s tentlike retreat, where the 8-foot flat-screen TV in the middle of the room flashed Arab news, the president and his advisers Elliott Abrams and Josh Bolten went native, lounging in floor-length, fur-lined robes, as if they were Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif.

Or to Arabian heroes:

Here in Saudi Arabia, the king draped W. with an emerald-and-ruby necklace that could have come from Ali Baba’s cave.

And the Anthony Quinn film festival continues with the dancing Greek and for alliterative purposes, the sword swinging Mexican.

The president’s grandiose room included a ballroom, in case Mr. Bush wanted to practice the tribal sword dancing he has been rather sheepishly doing with some of his hosts, something between Zorba and Zorro.

Visting the Holy Land made the Decider-In-Chief think about his favorite philosopher.

Asked by ABC’s Terry Moran what he was thinking when he stood on the site where Jesus performed miracles at the Sea of Galilee, W. replied: “I reflected on the story in the New Testament about the calm and the rough seas, because it was on those very seas that the Lord was in the boat with the disciples, and they were worried about the waves and the wind, and the sea calmed. That’s what I reflected on: the calm you can find in putting your faith in a higher power.”

But Dowd thinks that W. might be hoping for too much. In which case, maybe another inspirational true story may be more appropriate.

Clearly, the man believes in miracles.

See you at the movies and save us the aisle seats.

Get Well Soon

The mystery of the missing Sunday column is solved. While in the press enoturage with Dubya's week-long Middle East blitz, Maureen Dowd developed a stomach flu and required the help of Dubya's personal physician to beat the bug. Michael Abromowitz of the Washington Post gave the full story including more information than we needed to know:

Once she arrived in Jerusalem last Tuesday (the day of the New Hampshire primary), Dowd fell sick - and started second-guessing her decision to leave the campaign trail for the presidential bubble abroad. She was suffering some kind of stomach bug that left her nauseous, weak and feeling feverish.

"I'm not sure it was a New Hampshire fever or Jerusalem food poisoning," Dowd said.

Presidential aides, including press secretary Dana Perino, made clear early on that Dowd could see Dr. Richard J. Tubb, the Air Force brigadier general who oversees the White House medical office and takes care of the president at home and abroad.

But Dowd declined. With no medication, she tried to soldier on by grabbing whatever rest she could in her hotel room--not easy to do in a trip of constant movements. By the time the presidential entourage moved to Bahrain from Kuwait on Saturday, she felt even worse. She was so sick, in fact, that she could not write her regular Sunday column.

Dowd finally decided to take up the White House on its offer.

A young press aide, Carlton Carroll, helped arrange for Dowd to visit Tubb at the Emirates Palace, the over-the-top $3 billion luxury hotel where the president and his aides were staying. The hotel is so vast that Dowd and her escorts got lost twice in the marble and gold hallways. She finally found herself in a fully-staffed doctors' office with a trunk full of various medications, a solicitous nurse and a super-competent White House physician.

Tubb gave her a few tablets of Cipro and some Pepto-Bismol and told her to check back with him the next day. She turned down Tubb's offer of an IV (so there was no chance of an "accidental" poisoning, she joked).

In order for Maureen to be near the doctor in case of a relapse, they made room for her on Air Force One instead of the press plane. Dowd was grateful and gracious for the assistance.

"I was thinking that if I ran into Bush, I would have to apologize for it not being a fatal disease," Dowd said. "He was very generous to share his doctor--even if he didn't know it."

Dowd said Tubb and the rest of the White House staff who helped her were "fantastic"--and nobody complained about her columns.

"That's not the time they take you to task," Dowd said.

The one part of the article that is raising eyes in the media at places like mediabistro and Gawker is the $20,000 bill for a journalist to travel with the prez.

The only people who might be complaining about the whole affair could well be Dowd's editors, who may end up paying for one the most expensive columns in her illustrious career. The Middle East trip could well cost upwards of $20,000 for each journalist along. With no column last Sunday, Dowd was doing the math Tuesday afternoon to figure out how much each word of her Wednesday column would cost the Times.

"I am not sure my bosses will think this is money well spent," she acknowledged. "The only thing to come out of it so far is a Washington Post item."

She did file a Rich-sized travelogue today, but that still comes to more than ten bucks a word.

Dowd's Dateline: Rosenthal's Rebuttal

The low key buzz over the Dowd Dateline Debate reached such a hum that Andy Rosenthal gave an interview to the New York Observer to clarify New York Times policy on datelines and assistants.

“It’s driving me out of my fucking mind,” Times editorial-page editor Andy Rosenthal told Media Mob this afternoon.

"[Dowd] reported the column in New Hamsphire. The fact of the matter is, paticularly when covering a campaign which is a very high-speed story, it’s incredibly unusual for the reporter to be in the same place as the dateline when the story is filed. What do you do, stay in Des Moines while a candidate travels to New Hampshire? Oh, don’t go to Ramallah with the President because you have a Jerusalem dateline on your story! I mean this is just ridiculous! This is a complete invention, this controversy."

"Datelines are kind of an anachronism," he said. "It’s a little bit of an affectation."

As for the assistant, Mr. Rosenthal said it's common for assistants to collect quotes for columnists without a reporting credit.

"Has Greg Sargent ever heard of leg-work? If somebody wrote a blog post saying that all the reporters from the New York Times are Martians, would we have to respond to that too? This is no less ridiculous. It’s just ridiculous!"

This expletive-laden explanation did not assuage Sargent who stuck to his guns in a follow-up:

This is a straightforward representation issue. Because of the combo of the dateline and the uncredited reporting, readers of the Dowd column came away with the belief that she went to the victory party and talked to voters, when she didn't.

Rachel Sklar at Huffington Post gives datelines some mystical holy power:

What does the reader assume by seeing "DERRY N.H." in all caps and bold type at the top of the column? Well, obviously, that the story was written there, that the reporter had written his or her thoughts right at the scene. And why are datelines important? Well, for one they maximize information provided to the reader, but there's another: The dateline puts the reporter at the scene, which makes a statement about the publication's resources, level of reporting, and commitment to the story. Upshot: Datelines are selling points. So a misleading, not-quite-correct dateline is a bit like false advertising.

In Sklar’s mind, somehow news magically disappears if not written down immediately as it is witnessed. But in expressing umbrage, she manages to explain that the Derry dateline means that Dowd isn’t claiming she was at the victory party.

She mentions Hillary's victory party in Manchester (where apparently an assistant collected the quotes used), and herself watching Hillary's on-air tear-up on TV from the comfort of her office. She refers to an event in Salem, to Bill Clinton in Henniker. Otherwise, that's it. Derry is not mentioned.

The bigger point is that if Dowd wanted to lie about where she had been, why not name someplace more newsworthy? If anything Maureen was scrupulously honest about where she had been and where she hadn’t. And Adam Clymer, a former NYT political reporter tells the Observer that this sacred ground interpretation of a dateline is horsefeathers:

Oh, for crying out loud! The Times dateline rules are that you have had to have been in the place you use as a dateline, not that you have to be in it when you write. There is no evidence at all that the rules were not followed.

The real journalists, as opposed to the easily outraged bloggers, seem to be taking Dowd's side. Mike Peterson editor of the Franklin Journal in a comment at journalism oriented Poynter Online takes the side of Dowd by saying:

Maybe it's just the impact after a long week in the trenches, but this entire thing sounds like a lot of j-school theorizing and reminds me of that crack about an economist being like a guy who knows a hundred ways to make love, but doesn't have a girlfriend. As far as I can tell, Dowd spent some time in NH and, yes, she had a stringer pick up some quotes for her. That justifies the dateline but doesn't require sharing the byline and, as your fifth grade teacher would say, maybe if you spent less time worrying about what Maureen is doing and a little more time working on your own projects, you could have a nice trip to Jerusalem, too.

With all this huffing and puffing, a couple of points are agreed upon:

• The New York Times admits to everything Sargent’s sources claimed, but fails to see any violation of policy or reader trust.
• Everybody thinks datelines are kind of silly in an electronic world, but if you’re going to have them, make them mean something.
• Nothing in the column was factually incorrect or fabricated.
• A lot of people like to see Maureen Dowd and/or the New York Times taken down a notch no matter how petty the point.

I wish people would expend this much scrutiny on real scandals.

Happy Birthday!

Today is Maureen Dowd's birthday. Let's hope that wherever she is, she isn't getting spanked too hard or her birthday candles are setting off the sprinkler.

Update: mediabisto also wished Dowd a happy birthday. They just didn't know where to send the card.

Hillary Meets The Lazio Effect

On Meet The Press today, Tim Russert asked Hillary Clinton to respond to criticism aimed at her by female commentators about her playing the victim card. She bobs and weaves masterfully. Here is that segment:



Russert quoted from Maureen Dowd's November 4, 2007 column which I discussed in "You Go Gallfriend". The quote as read on-air has a interesting omission:

If the gender game worked when Rick Lazio muscled into her space, why shouldn’t it work when Obama and Edwards muster some mettle? If she could become a senator by playing the victim… surely she can become president by playing the victim now.

Those three ellipses removed the phrase “after Monica,”. I wonder what discussion went into deciding that Monica Lewinsky is not relevant to a discussion of Clinton's political career benefiting from her image as a victim.

Rich's Reruns

There was no new Maureen Dowd column today but Frank Rich asks the question “Haven’t We Heard This Voice Before?” and the answer is “Yes, we have, Frank. Twice a week in Maureen Dowd’s column.” At Dowd Report contributor yellojkt's blog, Foma*, he did a Pundits on Parade post which noted that Charles Krauthammer has a tendancy to echo themes touched on by George Will earlier and better. Frank Rich is Maureen Dowd’s Chuckie K. Critics of the liberal slant of the New York Times like to conflate Dowd and Rich into one double headed hydra and columns like his today don’t help that image.

I’ve always had a theory about Rich’s lateral move to the Opinion page. When he was the nations premiere theater critic, his scathing sarcastic reviews could close a show faster than any other voice. Since the Times gets a large advertising income stream from the full color Broadway show ads in the Sunday arts and style section, his constant naysaying must have annoyed the powers that be. By putting him out to pasture on the columnists’ page, he could have an outlet for his negativity and not annoy Great White Way advertisers.

One of the problems with only writing weekly is that when the news happens on Tuesday like it did with the New Hampshire primary, the ground has been pretty well plowed by the weekend. But this would be forgivable he brought any new context or slant on the week’s events, but he doesn’t. It’s a hackneyed replay of the conventional wisdom that has been expressed already by every pundit on the planet.

Even his opening movie allusion is perhaps the lamest ever not found in a high school newspaper:

She had me at “Well, that hurts my feelings.”

While Maureen Dowd is name-checking classic movies by Hepburn and Kubrick, Rich is using Tom Cruise as his cultural touchstone. And so much else that he writes is a pale imitation. On Tuesday, Dowd succinctly invoked the Lazio Effect in one sentence:

She won her Senate seat after being embarrassed by a man.

Rich with twice and many words to fill feels he has to spell it out for his slower readers:

To use family-newspaper language, [Obama] behaved like a jerk — or, to be more precise, like Rick Lazio, the now-forgotten adversary who cleared Mrs. Clinton’s path to the Senate by boorishly waving a paper in her face during a 2000 debate.

And that is part of his problem. With one super-sized column a week (and you are free to make your own extra large Rich remark, it’s too low hanging of a softball lob for me to take a swing at), he often wanders around or shoehorns more than one topic in each column. At the end of this week’s column, he runs out of steam and starts to mine old Dowd columns.

Every politician employs pollsters, but Mrs. Clinton, tellingly, has one, Mark Penn, as her top campaign strategist.

Dowd had an entire column about Penn’s role in the campaign back in October. Rich then rambles on for several paragraphs about Penn with this portion in the middle:

Add to this habitual triangulation the ugly campaigning of the men around her — Mr. Penn’s sleazy invocation of “cocaine” on MSNBC, Bill Clinton’s “fairy tale” rant falsifying Mr. Obama’s record on Iraq — and you don’t have change.

Maureen did a hilarious skewering of the use of “cocaine” as a talking point by the Clinton campaign a month ago. Rich ends with this admonition:

It would be good for both her campaign and the presidential race in general if Mrs. Clinton does find her own voice. We’ll know she has done so when it doesn’t sound so uncannily like Bill Clinton and Mark Penn.

And when Rich doesn’t sound so uncannily like a longer-winded Maureen Dowd, maybe he can justify 1500 words every Sunday. I’d rather read reruns of Dowd’s columns. Even the old ones are funnier and fresher than Rich’s rehashes.

Dowd Dateline Debate

Lots of blogs find fault with one phrase Maureen Dowd uses in a column and nitpick it. Mega-blog Talking Points Memo has taken issue with, of all things, the dateline. Yes, that little location the reporter claims they were when they reported the article. It seems Dowd had to leave the Clinton un-pity party early and allegedly an uncredited assistant did the actual quote collecting since Dowd had to wing her way to the Middle East with Dubya on deadline. The umbrage goes as follows (added emphasis mine):

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.

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.

The article has a lot of arcana about dateline ethics, the long and short being that the reporter at some point has to have actually set foot in the location used. This would be a tempest in a teapot, but journalists have been flogged for similar faults before.

The TPM article was passed along uncritically by several other blogs such as DragonFlyEye.Net, Portfolio and mediabistro mostly on the schadenfreudistic strength of vague accusations of wrongdoing by a prominent Times columnist.

Spencer Ackerman goes further and cites the case of Rick Bragg who resigned in disgrace and makes this bolder accusation (which the TPM article no longer links to):

My boy Greg Sargent catches Maureen Dowd in -- why mince words? -- a lie. Dowd datelined yesterday's column Derry, N.H. But at the time, it turns out, she was in Jerusalem, covering the president's trip. Apparently, she was following her paper's lead. Greg confirmed that the paper allows such dateline manipulation as long as someone contributed on-the-ground reporting to a piece. In this case, that someone is Dowd's assistant, who is uncredited in the column. The Times says that's OK.

But it isn't. In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal, a Pulitzer Prize-winner, Rick Bragg, resigned after it turned out he relied heavily on an uncredited stringer for a series with an Apalachicola, Florida dateline. That was the honorable thing to do when faced with such a misrepresentation. But Dowd's is worse. At least Bragg, in the words of the paper, "indeed visited Apalachicola briefly" for "his" piece. Dowd was half a world away from events she claimed to witness firsthand.

Ackerman cites Rick Bragg as the cautionary example, so it's worth examining. Rick Bragg was writing an article on the Gulf Coast and sent an unpaid informal stringer of his to Apalachicola, Florida for some reporting. Bragg eventually made it to Apalachicola but used the free lancer's reporting uncredited for most of the article. When this came to light it brought down a lot of scrutiny on other stories and Bragg resigned. Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post wrote a comprehensive article which included these items:

David Firestone, a former Atlanta correspondent now based in Washington, said stringers were used mainly "when you couldn't be in multiple places..."

[S]ome Times staffers say Bragg is being unfairly singled out for working within a system in which interns and assistants -- what the newsroom calls "legs" -- are regularly assigned to do extensive firsthand reporting but almost never receive credit.

In a statement, Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis said: "Like most newspapers, the Times has long relied on non-staff journalists to assist correspondents in their reporting, by conducting interviews, providing research assistance or helping to stake out the scenes of news events, especially when spot news is being gathered against a tight deadline." She said employees have been reminded that "such non-staffers should be used to supplement a correspondent's core reporting; they should not be used to substitute for that reporting."

A contemporaneous New York Times article added the following:

In an e-mail message to his colleagues on the national staff yesterday, Peter T. Kilborn, who is based in Washington, said: ''The interventions of editors and rare feeds from stringers notwithstanding, we dig stuff up ourselves and chase things down ourselves and put it together ourselves.''

Mr. Kilborn's comments were lauded, and amplified, in messages from other national reporters.

While the correspondents acknowledged that they relied periodically on researchers during breaking news, they said they had never gone as far as Mr. Bragg had: using a stringer to do almost all of the reporting on a feature article.

Let's analyze the kerfuffle to see if Sargeant and Ackerman are making a mountain out of a molehill or if we are facing the return of Jayson Blair.

• Sargent quotes an unnamed sources that allege Dowd was somewhere else. The source saw her working on something but had no direct conversation with her about what it was.
• Dowd met the test implied by the Times for using an assistant, she was on assignment elsewhere (and I think most readers of TPM would think tracking Dubya's misdeeds more important than attending a victory party). We have no idea who this assistant was and what his or her professional relationship to Dowd or the Times is.
• Dowd was writing on deadline about breaking news. The election results came late Tuesday night and Dowd's column had to be posted by midnight.
• The three people in the article were quoted by name. A real muckracker could easily track these folks down and determine when and by whom they were interviewed.
• The quotes used were anecdotal filler supporting Dowd's thesis that the emotional event energized her supporters. The story could stand without those three paragraphs. Here at Dowd Report Central we read a lot of commentary on her columns and nobody was citing these quotes as pivotal parts of the article.
• Dowd did plenty of leg work in New Hampshire over the rather abbreviated campaign cycle. As noted here, multiple sightings of the celebrity pundit were made at an earlier event by Obama.
• The only genuinely first person observation in the column was her observing fellow reporters commenting on Hillary's histrionics.

When you put this altogether we are looking at a rather mild case of a national reporter using resources available to her to fill out a piece that had to make deadline. It's not like Dowd was eating bon-bons on the beach while phoning in files.

We'll see if Dowd faces a feeding frenzy over what seems to be a heroic effort to get a column filed on time of if this is just a case of Dowd haters stirring the pot.