(Note to literalists: the Watched column presently contains only a smattering of 'warblogs' because the facilitator of the template-change--Dr. Menlo--is not very familiar with them, and will be adding more as they are sent to him. Also, this blog may contain areas of allusion, satire, subtext, context and possibly even a dash of the surreal: wannabe lit-crits beware.)
Control
[Watch this space for: Pentagon and Petroleum, The Media is only as Liberal as the Corporations Who Own Them, Wash Down With, and Recalcify]
WARBLOGGER WATCH
Sunday, July 07, 2002
The profound embarrassment felt by Wall Street Journal newswomen and newsmen when they contemplate the cephalic protrusions and stooped gait of, say, accused woman-beater John Fund has been commented on widely. Discomfiting as the editorial lot is, they at least know how to hold a fork, and are able, nine times out of ten, to disguise their lunatic prejudices as scientific fact. Lummox Taranto cannot be bothered to deploy the camouflage and control his over-the-top enthusiasms. The distress his advent on the Journal's web pages occasioned among his colleagues on the other side of the Chinese Wall must have been colossal.
Twice last week I braved Taranto's obscenities, each encounter leaving me reeling. Twice last week, The New York Times flummoxed the lummox, leaving him both reeling and pining for the "semi-ordinary guy from Brooklyn" (from the Worcester Academy, actually): Ira Stoll, the erstwhile operator of smartertimes.com (where he casually juggled racist stereotypes) and current editor of the New York Sun (where he casually juggles racist stereotypes).
Where's Smartertimes.com When You Need It?
An embarrassing error in a New York Times editorial today: "The Bush administration's misguided campaign to demolish the International Criminal Court now threatens to undermine United Nations peacekeeping too, starting with Bosnia," it begins.
Of course, this should read: "The European Union's misguided campaign to establish the International Criminal Court now threatens to undermine United Nations peacekeeping too, starting with Bosnia."
Unremarkable and utterly typical of Taranto - aim for pith and achieve only pique. He did himself one better the following day with this:
The Times Goofs Again
The New York Times has really been slipping since Smartertimes.com closed up shop. Example: Prompted by Israel's latest military offensive in the West Bank and the Bush administration's demands for the ouster of Yasser Arafat, a debate is under way among Palestinians over suicide bombing. Today's New York Times has the story, but the lead paragraph of James Bennett's dispatch mistakenly uses the word muffled instead of prompted, which changes the whole meaning.
That word substitution game never grows old for the lummox does it?
Taranto and Saul Newton should conclude an executive session to determine the true nature of the Times' alleged precipitate crash. Was it the shuttering of an idiot's site which caught at least one spelling error a day in one of the thickest metropolitan dailies in existence or was it the barring of a self-important idiot who seems to have been diligently rewriting the same essay since 1993? posted by Anonymous8:56 PM
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The Watchers
WBW: Keeping track of the war exhortations of the warbloggers.
