"Searching for information on the Internet involves something like transaction costs because we have so many varied sources to evaluate. We need somebody we trust to organize them for us. That can be the task of the new journalism.

So far, it seems from my old-guy perspective, new technology has been employed mainly to give us clever new ways to do the hunting, gathering and delivery of information. And I worry that journalism education will spend so much time on the new tools that we’ll short-change our students – and, by extension, society – in the value-added part. Piling up facts and putting them in clever packages isn’t enough. We need to supply the interpretive framework, too.

Traditional journalism goes after events. But behind every event there is a pattern. And behind the pattern there is structure. (This concept is from Peter Senge in his management book, The Fifth Dimension: the Art and Practice of the Learning Organization.) Citizens, to be enlightened need to know more about public affairs than just the events. They must understand at those higher conceptual levels, the patterns and the structures. Event-centered coverage of public meetings and press conferences won’t do that.

The current Columbia Journalism Review has a good example. Dean Starkman writes that business reporters were so preoccupied with financial performance, strategies, and profiling corporate leaders that they missed, for the most part, the big story of the credit squeeze on the middle class. They saw the events but not the pattern."
link to niemanwatchdog.org

The best thing about your writing of the Lobby and the Israel/Palestine debacle and its participants is that you go after the patterns and you're getting better and better at it.

It was polemic, and at a time when polemic was the WRONG approach for a scholar touching a nerve.

An experimental procedure without functional controls and ignoring peer review.

The euphemism "third rail" is now commonly understood as a virtue, by definition an act of courage, rather than an act requiring a far far higher bar of care and attention for the danger, the predictable scientific danger.

If they concluded that they had to do it, they had to do it right.

As Sword said, they are both still tenured professors now. Their "sacrifice" was in reputation only, and only in certain regards.

What work are they doing now?

Well done, Phil! The statistics showing Mearsheimer's abrupt airbrushing out of the Slimes after treading across a forbidden ideological bright line are damning. Shades of Pravda!

Today's Slimes brings a fresh provocation: a philippic by Steven Erlanger about "Hamas's insults to Jews." It's instructive to trace the provenance of this article. Yesterday, Drudge Report linked a video titled "Child Stabs President Bush To Death on Hamas TV Puppet Show." The dialogue translation was supplied by the pro-Israel organization MEMRI:

http://www.breitbart.tv/?p=70653

Today, Erlanger explicitly acknowledges MEMRI in his article, along with Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli group. Gee, Steven, maybe you should tip your hat to Matt Drudge for the story idea while you're at it. LOL!

The accuracy of Erlanger's screed can be judged by the sixth paragraph, which begins, "Since Hamas took over Gaza last June, routing Fatah, Hamas sermons and media reports preaching violence and hatred have become more pervasive, extreme and sophisticated." Here is the familiar technique of extinguishing the antecedents. No mention is made of Hamas's January 2006 election victory, which Israel and the U.S. intervened to nullify. A warped picture is painted of crazed radicals who spew hate because their hateful religion teaches them to.

Oh well, at least the Erlanger article meets Richard Witty's lofty standards for quality and "peer review," one presumes. Among NYC subway workers, those who have touched the third rail and lived proudly claim membership in the exclusive "Club 600" (referring to the DC voltage). Welcome to Club 600, Dr. Mearsheimer!

Mearsheimer doesn't fit the boxes anymore.

They don't know whether to give him the polemic 4000 words, or the "realist" 4000 words.

Its a pain to be typecast.

Its probably NOT censorship, probably NOT organized exclusion, definitely contreversy.

More like sword falling, not bad enough to lose one's job, like writing a book inferring that the "much" of holocaust reparations are fraudulent, or that Hezbollah "should" beat Israel militarily.

"Its probably NOT censorship, probably NOT organized exclusion."

Maybe not, Richard. Maybe it's just intelligent positioning to serve the readership. Quoting from the book "Jewish Power" by J.J. Goldberg (now editor-in-chief at the Forward):

"A.M. Rosenthal as executive editor [was] the first Jew to hold the paper's top editorial position. Every executive editor since then has been Jewish as well.

"For organized Jews, the Times exudes an almost religious quality. It is looked upon as a sort of community bulletin board, the sole vehicle through which to reach the Jewish public. Advertisements in the New York Times are the standard way Jewish groups announce their existence and voice their protests.

"Times excutives acknowledge that the paper covers Israel and other Jewish issues more closely than other newspapers. They say this is not because the paper is a "Jewish newspaper," but because its readers are interested. Reader surveys have shown that Jews make up as much as one third of the Times's readership."

————

Nothing wrong with the Times telling its readers what they want to hear. But I wish they wouldn't pose as an objective "newspaper of record." I think of them more as an overblown emigre journal.