"I'm a stickler for staying in your lane. I think his lane is the Ezra-lane..."

"... and I don't see him crossing a line. I'm assuming the New York Times is cool with it."

Said Jill Abramson, former executive editor, of the NYT, quoted in "How Ezra Klein's power play is guiding Democrats" (Axios), which tells us that "Klein's columnist-turned-operative role is raising concerns inside the Times and the Democratic Party, people familiar with the matter tell Axios."

ADDED: If anyone ever tells me to stay in my lane, I'm going to say I am in my lane. My lane is The Althouse Lane. I encourage you all to do likewise. Abramson okayed this clever move and she's a stickler for staying in your lane.

"How do you know there's something not right with the coverage? When they simplify it all and there's no gray — there's no gray."

Yesterday, I tried the episode of the Mike Drop (Mike Ritland) podcast with Lara Logan, but it's over 3 hours long and the first half hour is lightweight warm-up chatter. Did she really say she drinks alcohol at breakfast and drinks a lot generally? How long did it take her to say what America means to me is freedom — 10 minutes? I do understand how these podcasts work, but I couldn't watch. This morning I'm seeing....



And I see a tip about where to begin, so let me cue you to there, about 8,000 seconds in, and it really does get very good:



Ritland has asked her about political bias in the media, and Logan has opined that maybe only 1% of mediafolk are on the right. She continues:

Visually, anyone who’s ever been to Israel and been to the Wailing Wall has seen that the women have this tiny little spot in front of the wall to pray, and the rest of the wall is for the men. To me, that’s a great representation of the American media, is that in this tiny little corner where the women pray you’ve got Breitbart and Fox News and a few others, and from there on, you have CBS, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, Politico, whatever, right? All of them. And that’s a problem for me, because even if it was reversed, if it was vastly mostly on the right, that would also be a problem for me.

My experience has been that the more opinions you have, the more ways that you look at everything in life — everything in life is complicated, everything is gray, right?, nothing is black and white... even the ones where you really think you're in the right, where you think you're right about everything. So... how do you know you're being lied to, how do you know you're being manipulated? How do you know there's something not right with the coverage? When they simplify it all and there's no gray — there's no gray. It's all one way. Well, life isn't like that. If it doesn't match real life... something's wrong.

For example, all the coverage on Trump, all the time, is negative. There's no mitigating policy or event or anything that has happened since he was elected that is out there in the media that you can read about. That tells you that's a distortion of the way things go in real life. So my starting point is — okay, if I want to find the truth, where do I begin? I begin there, and I investigate from that point onwards. It's got nothing to do with whether I like Trump or don't like Trump or whether I believe him or don't believe in him or identify with him — whatever. I don't even want to have that conversation, because I approach that the same way I approach anything. I find that is not a popular way to work in the media today. Because although the media has alway been — historically, always been — left-leaning, we've abandoned our 'pretense' or at least the effort to be objective today.

I put "pretense" in quotes because she made air quotes. Abandoning pretense sounds like a move toward honesty, paradoxically. She's saying that before, they were biased and political, but they still believed that was wrong and tried to cover it up.

The former executive editor of the NYT has a book coming out — Jill Abramson — and she says, we would do — I don't know — dozens of stories about Trump every single day, and every single one of them was negative. She said, we have become the anti-Trump paper of record. Well, that's not our job. That's a political position. That means we've become political activists, in a sense. And some could argue, propagandists — right? — and there's some merit to that. So it doesn't mean that everything that's written is untrue. It doesn't say anything about where I stand on it. I do my job today the same way I've always done it.... I am consistent.... So if I'm doing my job exactly the same way... and suddenly today that makes me a Nazi and a fascist and a Trump lunatic, I'm like, how did we get there?

"But look, I was trying to write a seamless narrative, and to keep breaking it up with 'according to' qualifiers would have been extremely clunky. But in retrospect, I wish I’d done that."

Jill Abramson, caught and waffling.

Interviewed at Vox.

Sean Illing —Would you call any of this plagiarism?

Jill Abramson — No, I wouldn’t. This was completely unintentional. I mean, I have 70 pages of footnotes and I tried to credit everyone’s work as best I can. What we’re talking about here are sets of facts that I borrowed; obviously, the language is too close in some cases, but I’m not lifting original ideas. Again, I wish I had got the citation right, but it’s not an intentional theft or taking someone’s original ideas — it’s just the facts. But I’m owning it and I’m disappointed in myself for these mistakes.

Sean Illing — I grant that plagiarism is a fluid concept and it’s not always clear where the lines are.... [T]hose facts had to be collected and corroborated by the people you borrow from, so in that sense, you are stealing their labor, no?

Jill Abramson — I’m not going to get into a semantic argument about whether this fits some definition or not. I really think I’ve talked about this in full, and really would love to move on.

"Jill Abramson, the veteran journalist who led the newspaper from 2011 to 2014, says the Times has a financial incentive to bash the president and that the imbalance is helping to erode its credibility...."

"Abramson describes a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. 'The more "woke" staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,' she writes [in her forthcoming book 'Merchants of Truth']. Trump claims he is keeping the 'failing' Times in business—an obvious exaggeration—but the former editor acknowledges a 'Trump bump' that saw digital subscriptions during his first six months in office jump by 600,000, to more than 2 million. 'Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.'"

From "Former NY Times editor rips Trump coverage as biased" by Howard Kurtz (Fox News).

"If I ever incarnate, I hate to be a human being any more.... Oh yes, I would like to be... a shellfish living on the rock-bottom of the sea."

A line that explains the movie title "I Want to Be a Shellfish." I'm reading the plot summary of this 1959 movie...

On a post-war peaceful day in Japan, Toyomatsu Shimizu, a barber as well as a good father and husband, is suddenly arrested by the Prefectural Police as a war criminal and sued for murder. According to the accusation by GHQ, Toyomatsu "attemped to kill a US prisoner," which was nothing but an order by his superior and failed after all with hurting the prisoner by weak Toyomatsu. Also, Toyomatsu was driven to corner at the trial by the fact that he fed the US prisoner some burdock roots to nourish him. Toyomatsu believes nothing but being not guilty, but he is sentenced to death by hanging. Prior to the execution, Toyomatsu writes a long farewell letter to his family, the wife and the only son: "If I ever incarnate, I hate to be a human being any more.... Oh yes, I would like to be...a shellfish living on the rock-bottom of the sea."

... because I saw the puzzling title in the NYT obituary, "Shinobu Hashimoto, Writer of Towering Kurosawa Films, Is Dead at 100." Hashimoto wrote the screenplay for the Kurosawa movies "Rashomon," "Ikiru," "Seven Samurai," "Throne of Blood," "The Hidden Fortress," and "Dodes’ka-den." I've seen all those films. Have you? "The Hidden Fortress" story was the basis for "Star Wars." "Rashomon" was the basis for a million invocations — something I wrote about at some length in 2000:

I miss Jill Abramson!

Is it just me, or has the NYT become boring since the departure of Jill Abramson?

No need to tell me that you've never liked the NYT. I'm trying to focus on the change since they ousted Abramson last May. Remember, just before she was fired last April, there was an incident, reported in Politico, in which she'd "called Dean Baquet into her office to complain" that the NYT "wasn’t 'buzzy' enough," she blamed Baquet, and "Baquet burst out of Abramson’s office, slammed his hand against a wall and stormed out of the newsroom."

In the ensuing power struggle, Baquet got Abramson's job as executive editor, and now we are seeing the results: Not buzzy enough!

I go to the NYT site every day, looking for things to read and, I hope, to blog. I'm finding myself skimming over the front page and then leaving. I can't pinpoint what was there before that pulled me in — perhaps it was overly skewed toward aging, affluent, white females like me — but I'm not going in and hanging around.

IN THE COMMENTS: Big Mike said:

BTW, if you keep owning up to 'aging' then we're gonna have to revoke your status as Baby Boomer. Keep this in mind: we never age!

Here's my take on that, from last year, when I was younger (and so were you):

Jill Abramson — the executive editor axed by the NYT — finds other work, teaching "narrative nonfiction" at Harvard.

Here's the way the NYT reports it, decorously... fit-to-print-ishly.

Harvard said in a statement that Ms. Abramson would be a visiting lecturer in the Department of English for the 2014-15 academic year and would teach in the fall and spring semesters. In the statement, Ms. Abramson said she was “honored and excited.”

Narrative nonfiction, she said, “is more important than ever. Its traditions and how it is changing in the digital transition are fascinating areas of study.”

What is the evidence that Abramson should be teaching writing at the highest level? Is she going to teach the brainy, aspiring kids to use words like "important" and "fascinating" as they tell their stories of things that are actually happening in the real world?

I'd like to see the reading list. There's lots of great narrative nonfiction out there. Read The New Yorker. I assume there's something to be gained from studying the writing techniques, and someone with high-level editing experience might be a good guide through the literature. There are careers in this kind of writing, and understanding the point of view of a NYT executive editor would be helpful.

You might scoff: a fired NYT executive editor.

But she wasn't fired for bad editing. She was fired for being a bitch "her management style."

"Could there have been room for a simple misunderstanding, rather than that Abramson deliberately misled Baquet or Sulzberger?"

"It would make no sense, Abramson’s friends say, for her to send Baquet to lunch with Gibson without having told Baquet about the job offer. (In either scenario, a close friend of hers added, 'it’s just plain ridiculous that she should be fired for not telling a subordinate about a job offer to another subordinate.') To accept that Baquet first heard about the job offer from Gibson at lunch is to assume that Abramson, who has been amply criticized this week for her blunt, confrontational approach toward Times employees, would recoil from confronting Baquet."

More details from Ken Auletta on the firing of Jill Abramson.

"Was Jill Abramson fired because she hired too many women?"

Richard Johnson asks.

When Abramson became executive editor of the New York Times in August 2011, just one of the eight newsroom masthead editor jobs was held by a woman. I reported in January that four of the then-nine jobs were held by women.

By the time Abramson was fired last week, that number had increased to five, and Abramson had been trying to hire another woman, Janine Gibson, as co-managing editor for digital.

More here.

Sulzberger explains himself with an inexplicable metaphor: "You don’t cut off one arm, and then wait and cut off the other."

In an interview with Vanity Fair's Sarah Ellison. The arm-lopping metaphor refers to the quick, brutally public axing of Jill Abramson.

The key revelation in this interview is the severity of Baquet's reaction to the recruitment of "Janine Gibson, the U.S. editor of the Guardian newspaper, who had worked with various Times editors, notably Dean Baquet, on stories about the N.S.A. documents revealed by Edward Snowden."

Ira Glass had "no idea" who Jill Abramson is...

... and, informed of the fuss over her firing, said:

I hate reading media news so I actively sort of — I'm not interested in someone getting fired. No disrespect to people that are, but I literally had no idea who she was, or that she got fired until this moment.

On this one, Ira Glass...
	… nailed it.
	… showed himself to be an ignoramus.
	… revealed that he is insufficiently attuned to the War on Women.
pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: I know, I know... I left off the option: I have no idea who Ira Glass is and I'm not interested in people not being interested in someone getting fired. No disrespect to people who are, but I literally had no idea who he was or that he was uninterested in media news until this moment.

At Wake Forest University this morning, Jill Abramson delivered a commencement address and — I think! — a threat.

I listened to the whole thing — here — so you don't have to. The basic theme is that life is always unfinished business and the best test of your character is how you deal with setbacks. This is the most interesting part:

Sure, losing a job you love hurts, but the work I revere, journalism that holds powerful institutions and people accountable, is what makes our democracy so resilient. This is the work I will remain very much a part of.... What's next for me? I don't know!

Well, I kind of think I know. You're going to continue the work you love — the work you revere — by holding the powerful institution that is the New York Times and the powerful person who is Arthur Sulzberger Jr. accountable. That is the work that makes our democracy so resilient, the work you're obviously already very much a part of.

And nice job, so far, Jill. You're demonstrating, from the outside of the NYT, how good you are at the work they ousted you from, the work as you define it, holding powerful institutions and people accountable. They didn't like the way you did it from the inside, and they're not going to like the way you do it from the outside.

Carry on!

"If one of the most powerful women in the world, helming an organization that champions equal pay, might have been punished for advocating for herself, what hope is there for the rest of us?"

That's the question women have reason to be asking on the occasion of the ousting of Jill Abramson, says The Nation's Michelle Goldberg.

But Goldberg's main subject is how Abramson was on the right side of a few internal debates about journalism — things that were not about gender, like ads that look like editorial content, infusing the text with video, and looking into the BBC sex scandal. The NYT CEO Mark Thompson came to the job from the BBC:

“After Thompson had been hired for the job but before he’d started, Abramson sent Matthew Purdy, a hard-charging investigative reporter, to London to examine Thompson’s role in the Jimmy Savile scandal at the BBC,” writes [Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine]. “Abramson’s relationship with the two executives never recovered. ‘Mark Thompson was fucking pissed,’ a source explained. ‘He was really angry with the Purdy stuff.’ So was Sulzberger. ‘He was livid, in a very passive-aggressive way. These were a set of headaches Jill had created for Arthur.’”

... The suggestion Abramson should have ignored this story because it embarrassed a powerful Times hire says something troubling about the paper’s priorities.

"As we know from experience, in the world of Democratic Party institutions, the choice between an older white woman and a younger black man is an easy one."

Writes Instapundit, on the subject of Dean Baquet's her-or-me ultimatum at the NYT.

And I said something similar, talking to Glenn Loury the other day about the NYT ousting the woman. This is only 17 seconds, so come on, don't be video averse. Watch this:



AND: Notice this detail from Ken Auletta's "Why Jill Abramson Was Fired: Part III," published yesterday in The New Yorker (boldface added):

Extremely well-informed sources at the paper familiar with the reasons for Abramson’s dismissal have also given this account to The New Yorker: they say that Abramson was, essentially, fired for cause, for lying to Sulzberger that she had squared Gibson’s rank and arrival with Baquet when, in fact, she had not. The sources say she misled Sulzberger when she said, in person and by e-mail, that she had consulted with Baquet about the offer to Gibson and had worked it all out in detail with him. Baquet was furious. At a dinner with Sulzberger, Baquet basically described the incident as a humiliation. He could no longer work with Abramson. It was him or her. (Politico reported that, when Sulzberger shared Baquet’s distress with Abramson, she persisted in assuring him that she had told Baquet everything.) According to this account, her breach with Baquet and Sulzberger was irrevocable. Sulzberger decided to fire Abramson and replace her with Baquet, thus making him the first African-American executive editor of the paper—but under the most sour, trying, and confused circumstances.

Who are the "extremely well-informed sources"? Baquet? Sulzberger? Abramson? It would have to be at least 2 out of 3 of them for this all to be based on first-hand witnesses. In this version, there is a conflict in the story that was told about the job offer to Gibson, and one could have gone easy on Abramson and Baquet and said that perhaps the two had different understandings of what they were talking about when they talked about Gibson.

But we are told that Sulzberger fired Abramson for lying, and if that is true, it means that Sulzberger saw it as a direct conflict in which only one person could be telling the truth and the other was a liar, and he decided the liar was Abramson. Why?

If it was Baquet who said he'll leave if she stays, Sulzberger may have chosen to believe Baquet, because if he could only have one or the other, he wanted Baquet and/or he wanted Abramson out anyway. Deciding that Abramson was the liar not only worked to keep Baquet, it bolstered the cause for firing Abramson. So did Sulzberger decide that only Baquet was telling the truth (and not Abramson or both or neither) pursuit to a valid methodology of lie detection or was Sulzberger getting the staffing the way he wanted it anyway and the cover story as good as possible?

David Carr questions "whether The Times can convince female employees that it is a fair place to work, with ample opportunity to advance."

He writes that he has "heard from several talented young women who are a big part of The New York Times’s future." One said: “I really don’t see a path for me here... Are we O.K.?”

Carr also reveals — or this is the first place I've seen this — that Dean Baquet, the new executive editor, laid down an ultimatum to the publisher Arthur Sulzberger, saying "he would leave the paper because he found the situation untenable" (i.e., it's her or me).

ADDED: Do you get leverage to oust a white woman when you use a black man as your fulcrum?

I talk to Glenn Loury about how the NYT called Jill Abramson a "bitch," which leads to a discussion of Clarence Thomas...

... whom Abramson wrote a book about and whom Loury was friends with back in the Reagan Era. Loury responds, based on his personal eyewitness, to the contention that Clarence Thomas had pictures of naked women on his apartment wall (and I'm in the so-what-if-he-did? mode). Loury suggests that it's "crazy" to read between the lines of what other people say and write, and I say it's naive and boring not to. There's some comparison of unspoken race and sex discrimination that leads to a discussion of whether we're any better off having had the experience of a First Black President and what this might mean about the projected benefits of a First Female President, especially if that First Female President is Hillary.



Here's my blog post from 3 days ago on "How the NYT called Jill Abramson... a bitch" — which is what I'm talking about in the beginning of the diavlog.

Here's my blog post about Abramson's book about Clarence Thomas (including the quote about Thomas's approach to interior decoration).

And let me break out this specific clip about pay equity, in which I talk about the hypocrisy of the NYT and Glenn (the economist) says "the 77¢-on-the -dollar talk is infantile... absurd... demagoguery."

Calling a bitch a "bitch."

I said it 3 days ago: "How the NYT called Jill Abramson — its axed executive editor — a bitch." I was doing a close reading of the first NYT article on the subject of axing Abramson, "Times Ousts Its Executive Editor, Elevating Second in Command." That article was dated May 14th. What I discovered was that the NYT article linked over to a Politico article (from a year ago) where the man who has now replaced Abramson was quoted saying: "I think there’s a really easy caricature that some people have bought into, of the bitchy woman character and the guy who is sort of calmer... That, I think, is a little bit of an unfair caricature." And that was how it became fit to print to call Abramson a bitch.

But the bulk of the public discussion in the aftermath of the axing focused on Abramson's complaint about pay equity. Now, there's a statement from NYT publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., released yesterday, aimed at pushing back this talk that Abramson was fired because she demanded equal pay with males in the NYT organization. And it is this statement (not the earlier article I'd analyzed) that has led to this headline at Drudge:



Drudge links to a report at Bloomberg — "NYT Publisher Sulzberger Says Abramson Firing Driven By Conduct" — which doesn't print the full text of the statement. The new article at the NYT is called "After Criticism, Times Publisher Details Decision to Oust Top Editor." That too only has excerpts from the statement. The full text is here, at Politico.

So let's pick apart the text of the statement. Based on the Drudge headline, the hypothesis is that in the effort to fight off attacks that put the New York Times in the position of Enemy on the pay equity front of The War on Women, Sulzberger bumbled into the misogyny front.

Now, let's take a close look at the Sulzberger statement.

"Every generation has its great personal controversy, a name or two that evoke passion and fury everywhere from the dinner table to the editorial pages."

"Our parents had Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers. Their parents had Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti. Our generation has Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill."

Those are the opening lines of Nina Totenberg's 1994 review of "Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas," by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson. I was looking up old reviews of the book, because the fall of Jill Abramson is the big story of this week (in the United States, anyway). I thought the lines were funny because who knew in 1994 that Monica Lewinsky would soon arrive on the national scene, delivering her extra-large pizza-with-everything that, as a controversy, would eclipse this little pubic-hair-on-a-Coke-can that had (such a short time ago) seemed so generation-definingly meaningful?

And now, here we are, 20 years later, and Abramson has risen beyond her co-authored book about the empowered black man and the gender victim, up through the heights of the NYT and summarily ousted, herself possibly a gender victim, and — look! — they replaced her with a black man. That's the kind of strange justice called poetic justice. It's hard to sort through all of this and figure out what was fair and what was unfair. Alger Hiss and Sacco and Vanzetti — they were all guilty, right? And what of Clarence Thomas? Well, let's see what Totenberg said about what Mayer and Abramson said:

There is no way in a short review to summarize all the bits and pieces of evidence that Mayer and Abramson have amassed. But among other things, they have turned up many new witnesses who testify that Thomas had an avid interest in pornography at the time of the alleged Hill harassment — harassment that Hill said involved his talking to her about pornography. One woman, Kaye Savage, a civil servant who worked in the Reagan White House and who was friends with both Thomas and Hill, describes her shock when she walked into Thomas' apartment and found the walls covered with pictures of naked women. Several co-workers are quoted as saying they heard of Thomas' making remarks about pubic hairs on Coke cans — one of the most peculiar things that Hill alleged, and one that she was accused of making up.

Are "pictures of naked women" pornography? I wonder if civil servant Kaye Savage is shocked when she walks into an exhibition of impressionist paintings. So... the evidence is, the man liked pornography. That puts him into a set of just about 100% of men. Now, if you told me civil servant Savage was shocked when she walked into Thomas's apartment and found the walls covered with pictures of Coke cans or pictures of single strands of pubic hair, that would be some impressive corroboration.

Totenberg continues:

Mayer and Abramson have also spent a considerable amount of time examining the lives, loves, careers and ambitions of Thomas and Hill. Thomas comes out as an often brooding, angry and contrary man....

The angry black man. The classic stereotype of a black man. And now, replaced by a reputedly amiable black man, Jill Abramson is exposed to the world as the classic stereotype of a successful woman: the bossy bitch.

The arc of a generation is long, but it bends toward poetic justice.

"Jill Abramson lost her job, but so far she's winning the press relations war."

"In the 24 hours since she was fired from The New York Times, her downfall has become a flashpoint for a national conversation about gender and inequality that is all but eclipsing what sources cite as the reasons for her termination."

Why didn't the Times get out in front with its first-ever! black executive editor story?

Far from celebrating Baquet, the Times leadership instead finds itself scrambling to deflect charges of sexism surrounding the termination of its first-ever female executive editor.

Race can trump gender. "Trump" is a card-game word, and we're talking about race and gender cards. But in a card game, you have to play the card to win. And in the race-and-gender card game, you lose if you look like you are playing. In this race-and-gender game, it's not the NYT or Jill Abramson who is out there playing the cards. Others are doing the commentary, and there are so many writers — especially female journalists — who are ready to play, as I noted a couple posts down, quoting "The fury of women journalists who identify with Abramson stems from what we know: that excellent performances are not enough."

Commenter MayBee said "The fury of women journalists" sounded like one of those old "terms of venery" like "a murder of crows" and "a crash of rhinos."

So beware. Don't assume race beats sex. Obama beat Hillary, but it's a little more complicated than a generic approval of first black over first female. There's an elaborate political/PR game to be played, and the winners and losers are determined subjectively within human minds, those minds are affected by what is written, and, for things to be written, there must be writers.

And — look out!!! — there's a fury of females.

"The fury of women journalists who identify with Abramson stems from what we know: that excellent performances are not enough."

"Women must be completely different from the men they replace (or who replace them), apparently – they must adapt to the power they are briefly allowed to hold without transgressing the gender roles they aren't allowed to escape."

That's Emily Bell at The Guardian, and I'm quoting that representative of about 10 things I've already read this morning, all the female columnists doing pretty much the same thing, and I feel some pressure to do it too. And I suspect Jill Abramson herself is working on a screed — something that doesn't violate whatever secrecy agreement she has with the NYT. A year from now, Abramson will have some book, some variation on "Lean In" about the heights and pitfalls of female leadership.

So there's pressure to churn out the text, but all the women writers are writing about this instantly, furiously, copiously. Are women pushy? I feel pushed to talk about pushiness. And I feel irked to accept Jill Abramson as the face of the topic of The Problem of Female Leadership. I don't particularly like her, and I suspect she did not do a good job for The New York Times, and they had every reason to oust her.

But I'm pretty sure it's also true that things she did were not perceived exactly the same way they'd be perceived if they'd been done by a man and that as a woman, to get where she did, she needed to act in a way that would not be perceived in such a negative light if done by a man. I'm about the same age as Abramson, and I'm not the "lean in" type at all... or not much. I may lean into this discussion again later.