"CNN really heralds the world of Twitter and social networks and interactivity. During the Persian Gulf War, you had a live war for the first time..."

"... without commercial breaks. You’d see bombs dropping and people screaming and fire engines roaring. Everything is immediate. It’s the world we live in today. He’s the father of that world."

Said Ken Auletta, "a Turner biographer and media writer for the New Yorker,' quoted in "Ted Turner, cable TV visionary who created CNN, dies at 87/His sprawling legacy encompassed conservation, philanthropy and professional sports, and his bellicosity and bravado earned him the nickname 'Mouth of the South'" (WaPo).

He's the father of the world we live in today, but I bet you're gearing up to inform me that he was married to Jane Fonda.

"Searching for Rosebud, Auletta alights, for lack of better explanations, on the Weinstein brothers’ flame-haired and apparently flame-tempered mother, Miriam..."

"... (for whom their company was named, along with their milder father, Max, a diamond cutter who died of a heart attack at 52). A childhood friend told Auletta that Harvey referred to Miriam as 'Momma Portnoy,' after the shrill character in Philip Roth’s 'Portnoy’s Complaint.' [Harvey's brother] Bob, who somehow avoided growing into a 'beast,' as Harvey is repeatedly described here, allows for the possibility of Miriam’s frustration at her life’s limitations. 'She could have been Sheryl Sandberg or one of these C.E.O.s of a company. She had that kind of smarts,' he told Auletta. Instead, she proudly brought rugelach to her sons’ headquarters, and had an epitaph worthy of Dorothy Parker: 'I don’t like the atmosphere or the crowd.'"

From "‘Hollywood Ending,’ a Cradle-to-Jail Biography of Harvey Weinstein/Ken Auletta looks for Weinstein’s Rosebud in this dispiriting account of the former movie mogul’s life" by Alexandra Jacobs (NYT)(reviewing "HOLLYWOOD ENDING/Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence" by Ken Auletta).

The richest self-made female in America has her $4.5 billion fortune reevaluated and it's $0.

"[Elizabeth] Holmes’s unusual status, as a young woman who created and controlled a company seemingly valued at about $9 billion, captivated the media: She graced countless magazine covers, including T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Theranos, she said, would revolutionize the lab industry by offering blood tests from a single finger prick at a fraction of the cost of traditional testing...."

From "Elizabeth Holmes, Founder of Theranos, Falls From Highest Perch Off Forbes List."

Here's a New Yorker article from December 2014: "Blood, Simpler/One woman’s drive to upend medical testing." Excerpt:

Holmes told the audience that blood testing can be done more quickly, conveniently, and inexpensively, and that lives can be saved as a consequence. She was wearing her daily uniform—a black suit and a black cotton turtleneck, reminiscent of Steve Jobs—and had pinned her hair into an unruly bun. As she spoke, she paced slowly, her eyes rarely blinking, her hands clasped at her waist. Holmes started Theranos in 2003, when she was nineteen...

The TEDMED crowd listened intently as she spelled out what she sees as the shortcomings of the existing blood-testing business. The tests are too costly, are available at inconvenient times or places, and involve unpleasant syringes. Holmes has an aversion to needles, and her mother and her grandmother fainted at the sight of them and at the sight of blood. Recently, she told me, “I really believe that if we were from a foreign planet and we were sitting here and said, ‘O.K., let’s brainstorm on torture experiments,’ the concept of sticking a needle into someone and sucking blood out slowly, while the person watches, probably qualifies.”

"Who knows what impact incoming fire will have on Brian Williams’s career."

Says Ken Auletta in The New Yorker (where the punctuation is presumably punctilious, but that's a question without a question mark).

Yet this much is clear: ​journalists are supposed to be more transparent than the politicians we cover. We’re unpopular, in part, because we don’t practice the transparency we preach. Brian Williams believes that journalism is a noble calling, and he has often honored that calling. But by resorting to spin he let down more than “some brave military men and women.”

How does Auletta know Brian Williams believes that journalism is a noble calling? And... "more transparent than the politicians we cover" sounds like a damned low standard. I'm not sure Auletta even believes journalism is a noble calling.

"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.

"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?

News from the front in the War on Women: "New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson was abruptly fired from the paper on Wednesday...."

"The news of her departure was met with shock throughout the newsroom. Senior editors were unexpectedly summoned to a 2 p.m. leadership meeting..."

In his announcement, [publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr] said Abramson’s departure was related to “an issue with management in the newsroom,” and had nothing to do with the quality of the paper’s journalism during her tenure....

Despite significant achievements, Abramson’s tenure was marred by disagreements with Times CEO Mark Thompson, who took an unprecedently hands-on approach to managing the paper’s editorial resources....

Abramson also suffered from perceptions among staff that she was condescending and combative.

The male CEO  "took an unprecedently hands-on approach" to the paper's first female executive editor and staff said she was "condescending and combative"? Would they have said that about a man?

I'm reviewing my "Ban Bossy" notes.

ADDED: AHA!



The link goes to this Ken Auletta piece in The New Yorker:

Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. 

Emphasis added. She leaned in! And she got called pushy and she got pushed out. 

Now, the NYT has financial woes and her predecessor had more seniority, but so what? The NYT has been hot on the "equal pay" story for years. Let it be judged by the standards it has pushed — pushily — all these years.