K Marx The Spot

Boston Globe Death Watch

This is what a supposedly liberal paper looks like. Jeff Jacoby is the house conservative for the Boston Globe's op-ed page, and when it comes to most things, there is only one way to think, the facts be damned.

I suppose that I should be glad that the house conservative thinks that a two-state solution to the problem of Israel and Palestine is good, at least in theory. But I despair that he nonetheless shows that you don't need to be factual when you're a columnist.

Who favors a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict?

President Obama does, of course, as he made clear in welcoming Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House on Monday. So does former president George W. Bush, who began advocating Palestinian statehood in 2002 and continued until his final days in office. The Democratic Party's national platform endorses a two-state solution; the Republican platform does, too. The UN Security Council unanimously reaffirmed its support a few days ago, and the European Union is strongly in favor as well....

International consensus or no, the two-state solution is a chimera. Peace will not be achieved by granting sovereignty to the Palestinians, because Palestinian sovereignty has never been the Arabs' goal. Time and time again, a two-state solution has been proposed. Time and time again, the Arabs have turned it down....

Over and over, the pattern has been repeated. Following its stunning victory in the 1967 Six Day War, Israel offered to exchange the land it had won for permanent peace with its neighbors. From their summit in Khartoum came the Arabs' notorious response: "No peace with Israel, no negotiations with Israel, no recognition of Israel."

The problem is that it isn't 1967 anymore. In 1978, Egypt and Israel signed the Camp David Accords. Egypt sought peace with Israel, negotiated with Israel, and even recognized Israel. In 1994, Jordan signed the Washington Declaration. By doing so, that Arab country demonstrated that it was good to seek peace with Israel, negotiate with Israel, and recognize Israel.

It is unfortunate that more Arab countries have not been able to emulate Egypt and Jordan. (One should point out that the previous inhabitant of the White House was not exactly bending over backwards to get either a comprehensive peace accord signed or a more specific one with, say, Syria.)

Writing, in essence, that the Arab countries are immutably opposed to peace is ignoring the glaring fact that Israel is at peace with two of its three immediate neighbors. Alas, doing so would be an opportunity for nuanced thinking about Israel and Palestine, and in the United States, even so-called liberal newspapers would rather have arrant nonsense than nuance.

Labels: Boston Globe, Egypt, Israel, Jeff Jacoby, Jordan, Stupid reporting tricks

What Were They Thinking?

What were the Boston Globe's crack sports editors thinking when they let loose this whopper on Page 2 of the sports section today? (Remember, this is the same Boston whose Celtics now have 17 world championships.)

The Globe has a weekly feature entitled "What They Were Thinking" that presents the story behind an interesting photograph. And today, it describes Mark Joe taking a 3-point basketball shot at the court at the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. And he is. Only the text describes "an NBA-length 3-pointer." But it is obvious that the 3-pointer is a college-length 3-pointer—the dark line of the longer 3-pointer is only a foot behind the high-school 3-point line that touches the top of the key (the semicircle above the free-throw area).

The real NBA 3-point arc is four full feet behind the high-school 3-point line.

I should point out that the college 3-point line was only moved out a foot in conjunction with the upcoming college basketball season. But surely a newspaper department that is devoted to basketball, and to college basketball, and to the rules of college basketball, ought to get those rules right.

Imagine the mistakes that a sloppy paper makes in its political coverage, where the details are not so obvious even to the casual observer.

Labels: 3-point line, basketball, Boston Globe, Stupid reporting tricks

Boston Globe Cost-Cutting

Apparently, the Boston Globe, under orders from World Headquarters in New York City, has made some cuts to save money.

One of them is to replace the conservative op-eds normally served there with a op-ed-writing computer program. Here is what the program, Jeff Jacoby 2.0, produced two days ago.

"When you stand for your liberty," Bush told the world's prisoners of conscience in 2005, "we will stand with you." Yet while the brave democrat Ayman Nour rots in an Egyptian jail, Washington continues to send $1.8 billion in aid each year to the brutal regime of Hosni Mubarak.

That $1.8 billion per year satisfies the United States's obligations under the Camp David accords, which mandated contributions to both Israel and Egpyt.

That $1.8 billion payment is the main reason why Israel and Egypt, which fought a war in 1967 and another in 1973, have not fought a war since then.

Why Jacoby would prefer a world in which Israel and Egypt were at best threatening each other with war and were probably fighting one now and again, over a world in which the two countries have stepped well back from a permanent-war posture is a very good question. Why the Globe continues to insult its readers that historic events like the Camp David accords simply do not matter is another good question.

Labels: Boston Globe, Camp David accords, Jeff Jacoby, stupid pundit tricks

Hot Air

The local broadsheet has, today, a fascinating article about a college student who successfully memorized the first 3,141 digits of pi. I say that's impressive—I decided that the first 45, ending in 69399, were good enough for government work.

The online version explains how he does it.

When memorizing numbers, [James] Niles-Joyal, 22, does not simply repeat the digits over and over. Instead, the Ashburnham native sees shapes, emotions, and contours in the otherwise nondescript, non-repeating set of numbers. A series of digits can evoke a "white glow" in his brain, while other sets might look wealthy, or dull, or happy.

"I don't think what he's doing is completely different. All of us do unconsciously use mnemonics to remember," [Boston College psychology professor Elizabeth] Kensinger said. "We know someone's name is Steve because they remind us of another Steve."

Alas, the print version, thanks to the crack reporting and copy editing staff, had the following explanation from Dr. Kensinger:

All of us do unconsciously use pneumonics to remember.

So it's all that hot air that helps me remember stuff. And no wonder I had trouble getting things done when I had bronchitis that time.

Labels: Boston Globe, James Niles-Joyce, revealing typos, Stupid reporting tricks

Don't Hold Your Breath

Jeff Jacoby has managed to spin out four skeptical articles about global warming in the last year, including a recent one in which he crows about how warm December 2007 was.

Now comes news about January 2008 in Australia.

Australia experienced its hottest January on record this year, with the dry continent heating up as part of the global warming process, the bureau of meteorology said Friday.

Temperatures rose by between 1.0 and 2.0 degrees [Celsius] in most parts of the country, with the national average hitting 29.2 degrees Celsius (84 Fahrenheit) for the summer month, said the bureau's head of climate analysis, David Jones.

"It's a remarkable number certainly. Averaging, as we did across the whole country 1.3 degrees [Celsius] above average is the highest temperature we've seen in our history of records for Australia in January," he told AFP.

Please don't wait for Jacoby to update any of these columns. Merely waiting for Jacoby to write about global warming without cherry-picking evidence, labeling oddball climatologists as mainstream experts, or ignoring the interplay of greenhouse gases and global temperatures, will require possibly infinite patience.

Yes, Jeff Jacoby is a perfect example of why editorial pages need much better opinion writers. One would think that newspapers would want well-thought, reasoned opinions in order to attract thoughtful, reasonable readers. But perhaps slapdash and lazy is still good enough nowadays.

Labels: Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby, stupid pundit tricks

Great Moments in Journalism

The Boston Globe recently devoted a slew of column-inches not to the presidential campaign but to the meta-campaign. In other words, why waste time analyzing campaign positions when one can analyze campaign signs.

Republicans who have not already declared that "I'm with Fred" might be enticed to "ask Mitt anything" at a town hall meeting or to explore a webpage devoted to answering the question, "Why Rudy?"

Democrats have the opportunity to join Team Hillary, perhaps as Hillblazer youth activists or, if they have deep pockets, as HillRaisers. High school students are signing up to be Barack Stars.

Never have so many presidential campaigns so aggressively branded their candidates with their first names, and none more so than Hillary Clinton's. Even in her detailed 15-page healthcare reform plan, it is difficult to find her last name. Staffers, advisers, and friends generally speak of her as Hillary, not senator or Mrs. Clinton.

Republicans Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and Mitt Romney also lean heavily on first names for signs, websites, and slogans, while Democrat Barack Obama's campaign uses his first name more selectively.

This would be a more interesting article if the reporter had realized that the Romney campaign was insisting on using Willard Mitt Romney's middle name.

Labels: Boston Globe, presidential campaign, Stupid reporting tricks

On-Line Advertising

I think that the Boston Globe is trying to tell me something.

A sticker on the front page of today's paper yelled, "Make your message stick. Advertise with Front Page Notes!" When I removed it, it pulled up two strips of newsprint with it.

I think the Boston Globe is telling me to read the paper online.

Labels: Boston Globe, stupid advertising tricks

Proof that Nobody Pays Attention to David Brooks

On Tuesday, 16 March, David Brooks wrote in his column that the Spanish voters who booted the conservative government out of office last weekend, were just a bunch of weak-willed appeasers. Included in his simplistic screed was this little gem:

If a terrorist group attacked the U.S. three days before an election, does anyone doubt that the American electorate would rally behind the president or at least the most aggressively antiterror party? Does anyone doubt that Americans and Europeans have different moral and political cultures? Yesterday the chief of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, told Italy's La Stampa, "It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists." Does he really think capitulation or negotiation works better? Can you imagine John Kerry or George Bush saying that?

Besides the specious argument that a government that had failed in its duty to protect the populace would necessarily be rewarded in the polls, this paragraph had a major problem. Prodi didn't exactly say that.

To his credit, Brooks tried to make amends. On Saturday, 20 March, David Brooks appended a correction to his column:

In Tuesday's column I quoted the European Commission's president, Romano Prodi, telling the Italian newspaper La Stampa that force was not the answer to terrorism. I was relying on an Agence France-Presse translation, which was incorrect. Prodi actually said force should not be the only answer to terrorism. He said terrorism would not abate until the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was resolved.

And, today Cathy Young penned a column for the Boston Globe in which she heads toward the fanciful notion that a plurality of Spaniards preferred the social democrats to the conservatives that lied not only about the 11 March bombings but also about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. She even cites a libertarian, writing in the same libertarian magazine that employs her, who dispels the notion that the spanish voters were just appeasers.

But she finds that the oft-trod path of sliming Europeans was just too compelling. then she drops the ball—and cites, you guessed it, the original quote that Brooks did.

Poor David Brooks! Even the columnists in the Boston Globe, which is owned by the New York Times, can't be bothered to read his columns!

Labels: Boston Globe, Cathy Young, David Brooks