The Blog from the Core - Friday, June 06, 2003

Core: noun, the most important part of a thing, the essence; from the Latin cor, meaning heart.

		The Weblog at The View from the Core - Friday, June 06, 2003

"Judge Reviewed in Affirmative Action Case"?

Reviewed? That's a neutral term, isn't it? One may be reviewed either favorably or unfavorably, no?

I think the title quoted above is a remarkably neutral indication of the contents of the AP story it headlines:

The federal judge whose majority opinion sent an important affirmative action case to the Supreme Court improperly intervened in the appeal, a colleague said in an internal review that did not recommend any punishment....

"Review Shows Judge Acted Improperly": wouldn't that be a much, much, much better headline?

Oh. Wait. The judge "improperly intervened" in the Michigan University affirmative-action case — the outcome of which ruled in favor of the university. Ah. Oh. Now I understand........

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 06/06/03 02:03:21 PM
Categorized as Media.

"After the Raines of Terror"

Donald Luskin has a great blog today on The New York Times in the aftermath of the departure of Howell Raines:

.... Bully for the Times in going beyond the superficial excuse of the Blair scandal. But of course there's something else at work here, something that the Times is not yet prepared to admit. Raines had to go because the Times' relentless and reckless ultra-left wing agenda was destroying the world's greatest newspaper franchise.

Raines was the instrument of the destruction, with his rogues gallery of radical liberal op-ed screedsters and his capricious and exploitive "flood the zone" campaigns against Enron, Augusta, the war in Iraq, the peace in Iraq, Bush's tax cuts, and all the rest. But Raines is not, ultimately, to blame. Raines is no more than the creature of publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the scion of the family dynasty that owns the Times who elevated Raines first to editorial page editor in 1992 and then to executive editor in 2001, specifically because of his sympathy with Sulzberger's leftist viewpoints (according to Ken Auletta's 2002 New Yorker portrait of Raines). Sulzberger's liberal views extended not just to editorial positioning, but to the very mission and managerial style of the New York Times Company itself, of which he is chairman....

So Raines is out, and retired executive editor Joseph Lelyveld has come back on an interim basis to manage a transition to new leadership. What happens to Paul Krugman and the rest of Raines' menagerie?

My guess is: nothing immediately. And I suspect he'll get away with it for a while, as the Times will no doubt wish to focus its reform efforts where it will count the most -- in returning the paper's "core purpose" to reporting the news rather than "creating" it. The spin will be that the editorial pages are just opinion, so they're fine as they are. There will be change there -- a key "retirement" here, a new more moderate voice there, maybe some new source-citing and fact-checking guidelines. All to the good....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Fri. 06/06/03 11:06:42 AM
Categorized as Media.

"The Good and the Beautiful and the True"

A wonderful commencement address, which I printed out and read on Monday but have forgotten to blog until today, by Terrence Moore at the Ashbrook Center website:

.... America began with a charter, in fact with a series of charters. These charters were rather dry legal documents (which, by the way, our students have read) documents that a king would grant to a small number of people who wanted a better chance or a greater challenge than they could find back home in England doing the same, run-of-the-mill, expected things. The charter was a contract, then, full of promise, but wholly without spirit and life. It took courageous men and women, sometimes children, to give the document spirit and life. Well, you know the story from here. After these first bold pioneers, the Puritans and early Virginians, went to the new world and worked hard to build a new life in a new place and met with success, then others saw the possibilities. And many more came, generation after generation, until the multitudes of immigrants outgrew the original charters. They formed themselves into one people and discarded the narrow confines of the old charters in order to make one great charter founded upon the highest ideas of human dignity and freedom. That charter, of course, was the American Constitution.

American principles of freedom and self-government became the model for how a people ought to live together. Yet it took a foreign visitor to understand the magnitude of what the Americans had accomplished. That foreign visitor was Alexis de Tocqueville. Not only did Tocqueville explain the greatness of what the Americans had done, he also warned them of how their great achievements might be lost and undone by future generations. Specifically, Tocqueville applauded the pioneering spirit and hardiness of the early settlers. He also applauded the vast learning and wisdom and prudence of the authors of the Constitution. These men, by the way, had received a classical education. They knew their Greek and Roman history cold; they also studied the latest modern sciences, both natural science and political science. Tocqueville, the classically educated European who admired American democracy, was convinced that Americans would best preserve their liberty if they somehow combined their pioneering, can-do spirit with a love of the good and the beautiful and the true that came with a classical education (an education that heretofore only aristocrats had had the leisure and wealth to pursue).

What Tocqueville most feared about Americans was that their similarity, their equality, their sameness, their potential uniformity, their sometimes attachment to the practical over the theoretical, their seeming indifference to higher things of the mind, that all these and many other aspects of their character might lead to a stultifying mediocrity in their thought, a growing ignorance of their founding principles, and eventually a tyranny of the majority in their politics. He feared that Americans, lacking an aristocracy, would lose their taste for the good and the beautiful and the true that aristocracies had always upheld. Tocqueville, writing in the early nineteenth century, left it as an open question. Would Americans preserve their daring, their enterprising spirit — governed by a sense of the right and the true — or would they succumb to narrow envy, pettiness, and a tyranny of mediocrity in their government and their lives?...