A simple test

Small point before we close down transmissions for the night. I'm listening to the BBC's outstanding spot coverage of the arrest of Radovan Karadzic, the wartime Bosnian Serb leader appropriately described as "a major, major thug" and "one of the worst men in the world."*

If you were doing journalism, or generally paying attention to the world, in the latter years of the previous century, you know how big a deal that is and why. Thus I propose a simple test. If Karadzic's arrest isn't on the front page of your Tuesday newspaper, then that newspaper -- um, "sucks." Plain and simple. If your editor disagrees, you may use the secret access code to patch him or her through directly.

The Newseum site will be open first thing in the morning if you want to seee how America's Newspapers did. I hope you will all feel free to launch or join discussions about the merits of paying attention to the world outside.

* That's how you describe it in the budget meeting if you need to explain to your deputy managing editor for presentation why this is actually more important than another Batman story. Naturally, in print, you'll attribute those views to Richard Holbrooke and use more measured language on your own.

Perot prizes

Wow, was it that long ago? The grisly series of wars that followed the collapse of federal Yugoslavia? Is that when Ross Perot gave us the phrase "giant sucking sound"? Allowing us to avoid excess headline vulgarity and still describe the noise your newspaper made if it didn't front Radovan Karadzic's arrest today? Yeah, it must have been. So let's assign some grades.

Down in the F range are outstanding founts o' knowledge of the sort Old Word Wolf describes: no Balkans anywhere in the paper, but good play for the toe-sucking-carp* feature.

If you managed to get the arrest in the paper (at the Freep, it was the lead world brief on 8A, unless you count the photo of the World Santa Claus Congress) but nowhere near the front, you've earned a gentleperson's D. Columbus, Fort Worth -- you might have given the story a good ride on 2A, but we can't tell from the front page that you've heard of the rest of the planet.

If Karadzic is the last reefer on the front page -- the afterthought that would have fallen off if somebody had only had the decency to throw a no-hitter -- you're in the C range. Sacramento, C- not just for expecting "Fugitive arrested" to make the grade, but for that stupid feature above the reefers. ("Battle brews between beer giant, small makers over freebie swag"? Please.) Indianapolis gets rid of the minus sign with "War-crimes suspect is arrested."

How thoroughly has grade inflation been loosed upon the world? Cleveland gets a B for actually putting world news at the top of its 1A reefer column. If you put a reefer high on the front and actually dressed it up with a photo or otherwise suggested you might want people to read it, call your parents and tell 'em it's a B+. (Twinge of conscience there at Trade and Tryon?)

And if you ran a frontpage story, take an A and enjoy it. Little Rock, we expected no less. Raleigh -- pleasant surprise! (Though why y'all gave 1A play to the right-wing huffy-puffy over the NYT's daring to ask McCain to rewrite his alleged op-ed piece ... wow, who in the Wake County Republican Party has a picture of the McClatchy CEO with a sheep?)

It'd actually hurt to go through and count up all the papers that managed to get a mug shot of a jalapeno at the top of the front. Or the ones that found a way to use yet another publicity still from yet another movie about yet another comic book character. Is that the best you guys can do by way of making your paper irreplaceable in my life? Because it really isn't working very well.

* I actually know somebody who wrote a song about this. Well, more or less.

Language and politics

A few notes from elsewhere on the intertubes, largely drawing on Thursday's debate. (Sorry for the delay; it's busy times here.)

1) A nice bit of quick-n-dirty crosstabbing at Language Log: words used more than 10 times by each of the debaters, with the Palen-Biden and Biden-Palen ratios for each. (Language Czarina wasn't hearing things; Palen really does say "also" all the time.) I wouldn't exactly say this table represents hard science, but it's a snapshot of how science starts: something looks like it might be interesting, someone figures out a way to count some representations of it, and the audience joins in looking at the results and saying "I wonder what that means."

2) The strange impression, flagged at Talking Points and The Greenbelt, that "Bosniak" represents some sort of error. It isn't -- you'd like to say "needless to say, it isn't," but apparently the impression isn't isolated. In a way, that's not surprising; "Bosniak" seems to be pretty much unheard-of in US news language (it shows up sometimes as a proper name) before the wars of the Yugoslav collapse. When it has worked its way onto the newspages since, it's usually explained parenthetically as (Muslims) or (Bosnian Muslims).

Why? For one thing, when it comes to socially inclusive language, news is a conservative field. "That's what readers expect" and "that's what we've always called Those People" are the sort of arguments that carry a lot of weight, even if "always" means "the three or four months since the death toll reached five figures in that war we've been ignoring."* Nor is the US news environment especially hospitable to international news these days. Radovan Karadzic's arrest was barely briefworthy for many organizations, if it made the paper at all.

The error -- that is, the error of assuming that "Bosniak" is an error -- doesn't seem to align with any particular political camp. Center-right babbler Cokie Roberts at NPR fell for it, but so did Will Bunch (left) and Mona Charen (right).** And that leads to something genuinely strange:

ROBERTS: If she [Palin] had said "Bosniak," everybody would be making a big deal of it, you know.
GOODWIN: Correct.

What's cool -- all right, "scary but clinically interesting" -- about that is how quickly the "analysis" of the debate has gone beyond whether something might or might not be true and on to how well it fits the appropriate theme or story line. Our experts aren't just assuming that "everybody" slept through the Balkan wars, but that there is no relevant political discourse outside the horse race. It doesn't really matter if a candidate was or wasn't paying attention during a defining moment for post-Cold War Europe; all that matters is what the pundits might or might not say after This Commercial Break.

That's the part of the much-derided "horse race journalism" that I find particularly scary and stupid. But it's not the worst thing happening in journalism, for which

3) We turn to the National Review Online:

He [Biden] said we didn't have to worry about Ahmadinejad because "the bureaucracy" is in control of the nukes, etc. I guess he thinks that the Supreme Leader is part of some "bureaucracy," huh? Good to know that the top dude at the Foreign Relations Committee has such a fine grasp of how theocratic fascist regimes work.

One is tempted to ask: Is this guy a liar or just a buffoon? (If it's the Michael Ledeen I'm thinking about from my days in the vast right-wing conspiracy, the answer is "both"). For one, Biden didn't say "the bureaucracy." He said "the theocracy" (it was pretty clear in the live exchange, and that's what CNN has in the transcript):

The fact of the matter is, it surprises me that Sen. McCain doesn't realize that Ahmadinejad does not control the security apparatus in Iran. The theocracy controls the security apparatus, number one.

I don't know how many people outside the Iranian bureaucracy have a "fine grasp" on it, but between Biden and the National Review, there's not much contest. It probably goes without saying that Ahmadinejad isn't the supreme leader of Iran. He's a knuckle-dragging populist ex-mayor with no known interest in or knowledge of the outside world*** who happened to be elected president -- subject t0 term limits. None of that means Iran doesn't present serious concerns for US interests, or that Ahmadinejad has suddenly become a nice guy, or that the bizarre unelected apparat of Iran isn't scary in its own right. It does suggest that there are people who have an idea about how the world works and people who don't, and the National Review is among the folks who really don't want you to know the difference.

Dumb can be fixed. Dishonest usually can't. Which of those concerns should journalism critics be spending more time with?

* Don't get me started on presentation editors and the Balkan wars. Don't even think about it.
** As of tonight, it seems to have only made a tiny dent in print journalism, and some outfits (Santa Fe, take a bow) have pointed out that "Bosniaks" is sort of, you know, like, an indication of having heard of the place before last week.
*** The nerve of some countries.