Owlspotting

This was by far my easiest trip ever as I only had to change flights once–in Amsterdam. I’ve only been on NWA/KLM in my trips to and from Romania and they’ve never been a problem. Sometimes they get incredibly attached to their customers as they did last night when they announced they wouldn’t be serving peanuts on the DC-Amsterdam route because someone on board was heavily allergic to peanuts and peanut oil.

A group of passengers seated by the lavatory soon established the Angry Flyers Task Force and spent the duration of the flight beating up passengers who looked like they would have been responsible for the peanut-less flight hours.

Three sings that Romanians are on your flight (observed from Amsterdam to Bucharest):

1. There is no such thing as order when they board a flight. Many Romanians have been diagnosed with “flight instructions deafness.” For example: when staff calls for families traveling with small children and people needing assistance to board, a true Romanian hears: “You should all have to try to board the plane simultaneously.”

2. When the plane is on the runway ready to take off, an older woman will stand up and ask a young man to fish something out of her bag. This will scare the living daylights out of the flight attendants, who will rush down the aisle screaming: “SIT DOWN! SIT DOWN! WE ARE ABOUT TO TAKE OFF! IT’S VERY DANGEROUS!” The woman will take her sweet time and shrug off the naive concerns of a foreigner who is only there to wheel the drinks down the aisle, baby.

3. I traveled a lot in the US for my job over the past year. Experience has shown me that more than 80 percent of the seat buckles pop after the aircraft has stopped at the gate and the captain has turned the seat belt sign off. When my flight landed in Bucharest yesterday, almost half the people on the flight unbuckled the moment the plane touched down. Romanians don’t like to be tied down and told what to do. We always know better.

Note: All of the above are part of the larger paradigm of Romanians and Rules, a subject I will surely return to over the next few months. Romanians and rules just don’t go well together. A Romanian thinks of a rule (or a law for that matter) as a moronic social convention that one should try to break because the only reason they were enacted was not to help, but to hinder your movements and freedoms. Airport behavior is one. Driving is another popular one. There is nothing like drivers passing other drivers at 100 km/hour (60 miles/hour) while driving through the main streets of a village. The law says you can’t be over 50 km/hour in a village. But the law hinders your movements as a driver and the people who follow the law and the rules of the road are weak human beings because they have not been able to take destiny in their own hands. Picture this: The road narrows to one lane because of construction. Most drivers file orderly and wait for the light. But many just drive past because to them waiting your turn is just a stupid rule and if you can’t slide in front of everyone else–well, than you are a failure and you have balls the signs of those peanuts the KLM passenger was allergic to.

We have officially left our studio in Dupont Circle–one of the nice downtown boroughs of Washington, DC. Elle moved a few blocks away, while I embarked on my quest to re-discover Romania (I am writing this post at 3:30 AM Romanian time, heavily jetlagged and confused).

Below is the Google satellite image of our building complete with a view of our rooftop pool. Our old place is now (already!) inhabited by Raphael, a South American painter who tried to seduce Elle as she was moving out the last of our stuff. The Latino lover’s seduction methods included opening the door sporting an unbuttoned shirt and sagging belly, whispering nothings such as “I didn’t know they made such beautiful eyes,” and offering rides in his van.

If this reminds you of a slasher movie, you are not alone.

We hope Raphael enjoys his new place and we hope the other residents enjoy this fresh South of the border take on chest hairs.

Goodbye Dupont Circle! It’s been fun.

Update from Elle (July 15):

How about I give a sampling of Raphael’s best lines? I’ve decided that the reason this was so weird was that it was straight out of a romance novel, or some Oxygen network woman porn, except it was sexy, it was creepy and awkward.

– “Do you write poetry? You look like a poet.”

– “I didn’t know they made eyes as beautiful as yours. Look at me. [fake cry of amazement]. Thank God! It is true. They can make eyes so beautiful.”

– “Why don’t we go upstairs, and you can have one last dip in the pool?”

– “I’ve always wanted to go back to Barcelona. But I tell you, I have fallen in love with DC. So who knows? Maybe I will stay if some spectacular things happen here [wink wink].”

– “You are beautiful. Do you feel beautiful? When do you feel beautiful? Tell me.” [Me: “Um… Oh! Better not forget the casserole dish.”]

Today, America celebrates its independence, the day when she decided to stick it to the English and pursue happiness, liberty, justice and everyday low prices. Today Americans across the land fry burgers, drape their bodies in the star spangled banner and remember how awesome it must have been to live in a time before annoyances like immigration, terrorism and immigrants with terrorist tendencies. All these downers make modern life a constant struggle.

There is no better day than today to celebrate American freedoms, which include the freedom to ignore the World Cup, the freedom to worship any American Idol and the freedom to stand in front of the White House sporting the latest in death masks and holding a sign informing visitors of the American death count in Iraq. Not to mention the freedom of doing so wrapped in a black cloth under the nation capital’s sweltering sun.

I was strolling on Pennsylvania Ave. and happened to come across a group of protesters that were singing an anti-Bush version of “God Bless America,” which had “God Help America” as the chorus. A group of school children was in the area and their teachers promptly decided to restore order and patriotism at the sacred site, leading the kids into a counter version of the song, featuring the original lyrics. The two groups sang their hearts out at each other while people watched and snapped pictures (watch a brief video below).

Gotta love protests on America’s birthday. Happy 4th of July!

For three months, beginning July 15 this blog will broadcast its subversive message from the motherland Romania. I am returning like Vlad Tepes did for his second reign, ready to examine my fellow Romanians with the cruel passion displayed by kids examining flies under a microscope or ants under a magnifying glass. This blog is prepapred to offer great wisdom of the Romanian people, their culture and their weird ways.

Potential topics include: Are our peasants better than yours? Are Romanians racist or are they color blind? Is Bucharest truly among the rudest capitals in the world? How many showers does the average Romanian take a week? How does Romanian summer smell like? Do vampires like virgins? Do virgins like Italian business men? Is Romanian journalism as dead as American manufacturing?

And that doesn’t even begin to cover it. Do you have a question about Romania? Send it along and I’ll attempt to answer it when this blog makes the trip BACK HOME!

As summer kicks into full gear complete with the stench of overworked armpits and back alley ethnic restaurant trash containers, there is little as soothing as nice sing along indie pop. I have yet to build the soundtrack of summer, but here is a playlist I put together for a trip Elle took to Missouri.

It reflects the most heavily played songs in my WinAmp at the moment and it warrants just a little explanation. Tilly and the Wall is an Omaha band that I discovered in early 2005. My Romanian friends nicknamed them “The Irish” presumably because of the tap dancing percussion and all-around happy mood. They just released their second record, “Bottoms of barrels.” “Bad education” is by far the most well-rounded track on there.

Beirut is just a fantastic band with a mellow touch and a foreign air although they are–like every fourth band these days–from Brooklyn. Yes, that is a new Dashboard Confessional song and no, I am not ashamed to admit it. The Violent Femmes track might seem odd given that it’s almost a decade old but it’s one of the tracks Tilly and the Wall played when they DJed on All Songs Considered. I had never heard it before but I was instantly hooked. Rilo Kiely’s “Papillon” is also an older track, but still awesome.

The “hardest” tracks (a strech in this line-up) are new cuts from Muse (the rock underdogs from Britain) and Placebo.

1. The Mountain Goats – Woke Up New (2:57)
2. Beirut – Mount wroclai (Idle Days) (3:15)
3. Tilly & The Wall – Bad Education (4:07)
4. Muse – Starlight (3:59)
5. Violent Femmes – Kiss Off (4:29)
6. Dashboard Confessional – Don’t Wait (4:05)
7. Placebo – Post blue (3:14)
8. Camera Obscura – Come Back Margaret (3:47)
9. Calexico – Cruel (3:59)
10. The Dresden Dolls – Sing (4:40)
11. The Raconteurs – Steady, as she goes (3:35)
12. Rilo Kiley – Papillon (3:50)
13. Tilly & The Wall – Love Song (3:06)
14. Franz Ferdinand – Walk away (3:36)
15. Morrissey – You have killed me (3:08)
16. Stellastarr* – Love and longing (4:19)
17. Neko Case – Hold on, hold on (2:46)
18. Candy Bars – Landscape (3:16)
19. Tommy Tutone – 867-5309 (Jenny) (3:47)
20. Camera Obscura – Lloyd, I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken (3:49)
21. Beirut – Postcards from Italy (4:17)

Owlspotting was reviewed by the blog critics at I Talk 2 Much. Two hands out of five. It did well in looks, but it appears the reviewers were scared (and scarred) by the lenght of the posts. Why am I not suprised? No one ever taught me how to go about stopping. Here’s what they said:

What does the blog title have anything to do with the blog itself? Nothing that I could see. Maybe I’m missing a private joke. I hate being left out.

So anyway, Romania brings to us another intelligent blog. Only this one has posts that are pages long and mostly about political goings on. Well he’s a journalist, what did I expect? If I wanted to read about this kinda stuff, I’d go read a newspaper. His writing is quite thoughtful and informative, but long-winded. I’d hire him if I owned a newspaper, but I wouldn’t read his blog.

The template is clean and organized with minimal crap. No obnoxious colors. I like minimal crap and no obnoxious colors. Good work.

Note: This is the third and final essay in a three part series inspired by a book on Romania that I discussed briefly last month. All three essays were published on dbrom.ro, a web site I used to run a few years ago. The first two essays (here and here) are in Romanian, but I did a quick translation of the third one as you can see below. The Romanian version (scroll down to read it) was published in a dbrom special called “What is wrong in Romania?” that ran in the summer of 2003. Some references in the essay are not relevant anymore, but the spirit is. It is only fitting that I use this as a preview of my three-months trip home, which will be chronicled on this blog beginning mid-July. Stick around. It will be a fun discovery.

>>> Romania (in English) <<<

Romania is a former communist country that continues to shelter thousands of nostalgics. They live in studios and are called pensioners. In Romania there are people under the age of 25 who have worn a red scarf. Some were class leaders or troop leaders. (Note to foreign readers: these were designation for children during communist times). In Romania the predominant discourse is that of the past. “Do you remember?”

In Romania there are open-air markets and “people doing the market.” As a kid you’re always told Romania is a country that doesn’t rise to its potential.

In Romania there is Costinesti and its particular smell, 2 Mai, Vama Veche and chocolate orned with drawings from Little Red Riding Hood. There is Predeal, Sinaia, rooms for 150.000 lei a night and agro-tourism. In Romania eternity was born in the country side, the craddle of the Romanian, who in turn was born a poet. A poet of poking fun at tragedy. Romanians poke fun at tragedy because that’s what they understand by “being pro-active.”

In Romania there is a monopoly on telephony, restrictions on common decency and censorship on vision. There are pretzels, donuts, merdenele, suberek, langos, strudel, bucta, corn or chec. Here, Orange has the more orange commercials in a market dominated by Connex and a verbal slip-up called “Dialog.”

Romania imports bananas. It doesn’t grow them. It also imports grain because it wants to be an industrial nation. There are mobile phones, televisions, mp3 players, computers and hands-free gear. There’s a subway, pot holes customized for every car and road maps. There are highways, train stations and buses chock-full of comuters who smell of cheese, onions and pig fat.

There are peasants. And urban dwellers. Many of the urban dwellers are peasants living in apartment buildings. In Romania there are the seven years from home. Which are lived on the street. There are many corrupt individuals and they should be left alone. Exterminating them would ruin the suprise.

Romania is the country in which it is said that in the past 13 years it has only felt joy because of soccer. That is because Brancusi, the 1920s generation, Stefan cel Mare, the historians and Ion Creanga are dead. Romanians are incapable of exploiting their dead. With the exception of Dracula. Romania is Dracula, Nadia, Transylvania or Hagi. We suggest adding Ion Iliescu to the list on the merits of immortality.

Romania is a country sung in songs, verses and ghetto-rhymes. It is the center of the universe for Pavel Corut and sacred Earth to the history of humanity.

I like Romania because I know how she looks like and how she likes to be touched. That’s why I wrote about her. What’s wrong with Romania? The fact that not enough people write about her…

>>> Romania (in Romana) <<<

romania e o fosta tara comunista care adaposteste inca mii de nostalgici. ei locuiesc in garsoniere si se numesc pensionari. aici exista oameni sub 25 de ani care au purtat cravata de pionier. unii au fost sefi de clasa sau comandanti de detasament. in romania discursul predominant e cel al trecutului. “tii minte?”.

in romania exista piete si “oameni care fac piete”. romania e tara despre care ti se spune de mic copil ca are un potential neexploatat.

in romania exista costinesti si mirosul sau specific, 2 mai, vama veche si ciocolata cu personajele din scufita rosie. exista predeal, sinaia, gazdele de 150 de mii pe noapte si agroturism. in romania vesnicia s-a nascut la sat, locul de obarsie al romanului. care l-a randul sau s-a nascut poet. un poet al hazului de necaz. romanii fac haz de necaz pentru ca asta e perceptia lor aupra atitudinii active.

in romania exista monopol pe telefonie, restrictii pe bun simt si cenzura pe viziune. exista covrigi, gogosi, merdenele, suberek, langos, strudel, trigon, bucta, corn sau chec. aici orange are cele mai portocalii reclame pe o piata dominata de connex si ticul verbal numit dialog.

romania importa banane. nu le creste. importa si grau pentru ca vrea sa se industrializeze. exista telefoane mobile, televizoare, mp3 playere, computere si sisteme hands free. exista metrou, gropi adaptabile marcii masinii si ghiduri rutiere. exista autostrazi, gari si autobuze de navetisti care miros in ordine a branza, ceapa si slanina.

exista tarani. si oraseni. multi dintre oraseni sunt tarani cu apartamente. in romania exista cei sapte ani de acasa. care se fac pe drumuri. exista coruptii si e normal sa fie lasati in pace. ar strica supriza daca ar fi exterminati.

romania e tara care spune ca in ultimii 13 ani a trait bucurii doar datorita fotbalului. asta pentru ca brancusi, generatia ’20, stefan cel mare, cronicarii si ion creanga sunt morti. romanii nu stiu sa-si exploateze mortii. cu exceptia lui dracula. romania e dracula, nadia, transilvania sau hagi. propunem alaturarea la aceasta lista a lui ion iliescu pe criteriul eternitatii.

romania e o tara cantata in sonete, versete, cantonete sau rime de cartier. e buricul pamantului pentru pavel corut si pamant sfant pentru istoria umanitatii.

imi place romania pentru ca stiu cum arata si cum ii place sa fie atinsa. de aceea am scris despre ea. ce e prost in romania? ca nu scrie lumea destul despre ea…

In 2004, when my father and brother flew from Romania to visit me in Missouri, they sweated right into the wet hot American summer of gay marriage.

One Sunday, we were driving back from a water park and we stopped in Jefferson City to see the capitol. A choir of kids was singing on the steps, and a crowd of mostly middle aged folks was slowly huddling in the shade with large cardboard signs displaying the male and female symbols as seen on the doors of public restrooms.

Man plus woman equaled marriage, the signs read. You know, the real kind of marriage, the kind that doesn’t involve men doing stuff to other men.

I reacted the way I usually did back then. I directed a little anger at the demonstrators and even more at the politicians who successfully made gay marriage a campaign issue. I might have even quipped that Americans didn’t seem more tolerant than us, Eastern Europeans.

My dad mumbled something about gays not needing to marry because of their lifestyle or something like that. I tried to explain to him this wasn’t really about marriage; it was ultimately a fight to get the same benefits heterosexual married couples receive. He didn’t buy that. I told him marriage in the United States comes with significant financial incentives. He didn’t buy that either. I could see an out of control gay parade flash before his eyes—a horde of chain-wielding leather-clad dudes that were ready to take you to school. I was disappointed.

My dad calls himself a liberal. He has built a non-profit organization to help disabled children—one of the great tragedies of post-communist Romania. He is a brain surgeon, cutting open the scalps of people of all backgrounds. He is half Hungarian and he has taught me Romanians and Hungarians are the same—an important lesson to learn for a kid growing up in a town that saw ethnic clashes in 1990, an episode that left eight people dead and hundreds injured. He has organized local AIDS-awareness campaigns three years in a row. He doesn’t go to church because he believes it’s nothing more than a powerful lobby.

But the idea of gays getting married seemed too much for him to accept. And it probably wasn’t the sanctity of marriage part that disturbed him (my parents’ marriage fell apart almost a decade ago). It was a gut reaction. To him, gays were… gross. Gays were nothing more than perverted men with deviant lifestyles and careless attitudes.

We never fought like we did that afternoon.

This past Saturday, Romanian gays marching in Bucharest at the second annual GayFest were attacked by a group of anti-gay demonstrators. According to Reuters, ten people were injured and dozens were detained. The footage shows a street brawl reeking of genuine hatred of “the other.”

Earlier that day, a larger march packed right-wing extremists (Romania’s version of skinheads) next to Orthodox priests and nuns, all chanting in unison: “Romania is not Sodom,” and “We don’t want to be a people of faggots.” They were displaying Christian symbols and banners calling for “normalcy,” saying they had enough with the deviants corrupting society.

Romania is almost 90 percent Orthodox and the Church has been campaigning against gay rights for years. In 2001, they fought to block the elimination of the controversial Article 200 from Romania’s penal code. The article, which criminalized homosexual relationships, was a relic of the communist era. The European Union, which Romania desperately hopes to join in 2007, welcomed the elimination of Article 200, as did gay rights groups.

But that hasn’t made homosexuality more acceptable in Romania. On the contrary, Romania has remained at heart an anti-gay country, and this is unlikely to change in the near future. A close friend of mine recently told me he couldn’t watch “Six Feet Under” because he couldn’t stand HBO bringing gay men into his living room.

Globalization might have made it easy to import American culture, but it still struggles when it comes to importing values. Gigi Becali, the owner of Romania’s most decorated soccer team, Steaua, told reporters last week: “I’ll give two or five million dollars and we can finish all homosexuals in this country.” Becali had the backing of the Orthodox Church; their alliance is supports the idea of a national referendum on gay marriage to show gays they are not well liked in the Carpathian land.

Until I came to America in 2003, I never met anyone who was openly gay. Back home, being gay was not a topic of serious conversation, but one of vicious jokes. Adrian Nastase, the former prime-minister was mockingly referred to as “Candyboy,” and Traian Basescu, the current president, hinted at Nastase’s supposed sexual orientation during the 2004 presidential campaign. Lest you misread Romanian politics, Băsescu is the pro-gay candidate and Năstase was the candidate who criticized his opponent for having liberal views on homosexuality.

The Saturday attacks on gay marchers are disturbing because they show how much the country has to learn. Even the Romanian media fell in the trap of identifying marchers “as the other.” One of the major papers ran a sidebar with its news story listing “famous homosexuals” such as Martina Navratilova and Elton John. If “Will and Grace” was a Romanian
sit-com, Will would either be spending a lot of time in the emergency room, or he would be experimenting with innovative forms of denial.

Romanians will deny they have an aversion to gays. They will go even further and deny any form of intolerance. They might even tell you the idea that Romanians can be intolerant is part of a Western smear campaign against our country. Romanians don’t hate gays. Nor do they hate gypsies, Hungarians or blacks. They just don’t believe any of these groups are really necessary for the country to function. After all, if God intended for the Romanian people to be Hungarian black gypsies attracted to people of the same sex, he would have passed on that memo to the Orthodox Church leadership.

My mom is also a doctor, also half Hungarian, and on top of that, she is a cancer patient fighting medical prejudices. Last winter she asked me what I would do if I had a gay child. How would I feel?

“I’d feel great,” I told her. “It’s a human being, mom. Isn’t that the whole point of life? To love other human beings? What if I were gay?”

“But you’re not,” she replied.

We didn’t go further than that because you can’t really bring gays into our living room. And Saturday showed you can’t really bring them out into the streets either. Not without a solid egg-pelting, a hellish sermon, and a serious public beating from right-wing extremists.

===

Technorati tags:Gay rights, Gay marriage.

A journalist friend of mine recently spent a whole day answering calls from readers at her paper. She happened to be on duty on a day where readers were handed a big newspaper booboo: in a tribute to local soldiers who died in Iraq, they forgot a local army man. The newspaper knew this tribute was coming–it was pegged to Memorial Day weekend–so the mistake made them look stupid. Stupid enough to warrant an honest explanation.

But that type of honesty is foreign to most newsrooms, where the attitute is that journalists always know better than those pesky readers. So what did the newspaper have to say? This:

“How did your newspaper make such a mistake? The simple answer is we messed up. We just missed [his] name.”

That’s it. That was the only explanatory line the paper ran in three graphs of chronicling reader complaints. My friend says they decided not to print more about it because they didn’t want to make the reporter look stupid. But the reporter and the other people on the story WERE stupid, and readers certainly deserved more than a dismissive apology.

I am a journalist myself and I believe in the craft. I am often overly (and overtly) optimistic about the role the media can play in our society. But I do believe that the paternalism and disdain we often show the reader will hurt us, and worse, it will hurt the craft we believe in for future generations of journalists.

The cynic in me sometimes views journalists as frustrated men and women who will give their left arm to harm/insult/libel a prominent figure (of any kind) simply because they are bitter and resentful. Journalists are not nearly as glamorous, fascinating and important as the people they cover. This is probably the reason journalists showe themselves with truckloads of awards–if the world at large won’t acknowledge our importance, we’ll just do it ourselves.

The cynic in me was fully awake this week after I heard the New York Times magazine editor pretend that the newspaper has the influence of a pizza restaurant coupon (or even less) when it comes to presidential candidates. I got extra ammo today while reading the Washington Post coverage of the Wen Ho Lee settlement. Lee was the Alamo nuclear scientist that allegedly passed nuclear secrets on to the Chinese. After being cleared of all but one charge (59 total), he sued media organizations to get the names of government officials who leaked his name.

A while back I read a 70-something pages case study of the Lee episode done by the Kennedy School of Government. It was movie-like saga depicting amazing failures from FBI and the Department of Energy agents caught in a blind witch-hunt. The investigations were conducted in such an awful manner that when the charges against Lee were dropped, the judge issued a profound apology from the bench. What was the role of the media? Well, information was leaked to them and they printed it with little independent verification. When the stories, which were ass-heavy on anonymous sources, came out, the investigation intensified and law enforcement officials went gung-ho on getting Lee because their efforts were now in the public eye. (Further proof the New York Times has absolutely no influence on the political world).

Well, it turned out Lee was not their guy. The New York Times had to run a lenghty apology (which didn’t read like an apology, because journalists, remember, are never wrong). Lee sued. In the end, any reasonable person would conclude that the media gave the government a whole lotta help in destroying the reputation of the scientist. The media was more or less the US officials’ executioner in the Lee case (just as they were in the Richard Jewell case in Atlanta).

Lee’s lawsuit went on for years and the media organizations finally settled, reaching a compromise. They wouldn’t disclose their sources, but they’d give Lee $750,000 to bury the hatchet. As a journalist, I’m okay with this compromise. Full disclosure: Personally, I am still wrestling with how far we should go to protect sources (especially misleading ones).

What I’m not okay with is the type of coverage seen in the Post. Oh, the poor media put up another fight against people trying to infringe upon our rights (Which one? The right to be completeley wrong?) and oh what a disturbing precedent we have set.

What’s more, there is little or no mention that the coverage of Lee at the time was wrong–awfully so. The media screwed up. Period. Don’t just apologize. Do it better. Go back and tell readers how the government messed up and how you fell into the trap of taking their word for it. Acknowledge you ruined Lee because you printed information you didn’t, or couldn’t, verify.

Don’t grandstand and victimize yourself for being caught red-handed. And please don’t pretend to be working for the public, when often you are the first to label the public as being narrow minded, stupid and incapable of knowing what’s best for them.

That is the attitude that will bury journalism and the cynic in me takes some pleasure in pointing this out.

The “we know better attitude” won’t work in an age where the gatekeeper metaphor is dead. D-E-A-D. Journalists don’t control much information anymore. That is both good, as citizens have access to more raw information than ever before. It is also bad because much propaganda hits us directly and we’re sometimes unaware of it.

But I prefer to be hit with propaganda and fight it alone than allow a journalist who despises me to process it in my name. I’ve said it before: it’s not the practices that will kill journalism (there is fabulos work being done). It’s the attitude.

One of my favorite things to read on the weekend is the “Free For All” page in Saturday’s Post, where readers take the paper to task for its mistakes. Today’s Post happened to print a letter from a reader that criticized the same paternalistic tactics I just mentioned (it had to do with that “innocent” article on the Clintons’ marriage):

“[F]or [David Broder] to try to justify the column on the fact that the New York Times ‘sent a reporter out to interview 50 people about the state of the Clintons’ marriage and placed the story on the top of Page One’ only added a rare layer of irrelevant ooze.

Unfortunately, this is part of a disturbing trend in which members of the media listen mostly to each other. Over the past few decades media standards have devolved to the point that reporters and columnists no longer interview newsmakers to discern the news but interview themselves to determine what’s newsworthy. The mainstream media have moved from eschewing rumor and innuendo to reporting on what’s in the tabloids. Now we have a columnist at a major newspaper justifying his coverage of an issue not on its newsworthiness or timeliness but because another mainstream paper addressed it first and created the all-important ‘buzz’

In the real world, just because the New York Times has decided that the state of the Hillary Clinton’s marriage is a hot topic doesn’t necessarily make it so.”

Oh, poor reader. He obviously doesn’t understand journalists know better.

Not that long ago, the New York Times ran a self-referential (and self-reverential) meta story about the portrayal of the newspaper in movies. It was the kind of self-love you profess on the back page of your math-class notebook, where the spelling of your name is adorned with cute flowers and stars, if not smiling hearts and confetti.

I swallowed the story with the ease of swallowing a one-pound glazed donut, but said to myself: “Hey, if the Times can’t brag about its glory and influence, then who the hell can?” We readers (even the more foreign and more recent of us), acknowledge that the Times has the power to dictate what news is. Times columnist Nick Kristoff has been waging a war for a couple of years in trying to keep Sudan in the news. Kristoff knows the power of having his words printed in the Times–he builds contests on it. Or look at the incredibly pointless piece about the Clintons published last week. It said nothing, but this nothing was said on the front page of the New York Times so there must have been some coded messages in there (Jack Shafer did the required evisceration of that piece here).

The Times doesn’t need to be modest about what it is to the media world and the country at large–just count the number of other publications (inside or outside the media world) that monitor the Times. And it shouldn’t be modest! They are the standard, they do set an agenda and they are, more often than not, correct.

But it seems that Gerald Marzorati, the NYT Magazine editor, did not receive the memo about the Times being great and all that stuff. Marzorati prefers modesty when talking about his employer; the kind of modesty that masks hypocrisy and disdain.

Marzorati was interviewed (mp3 file) on “On the Media” about how the media covers potential presidential candidates and how it knows when to begin paying attention to them. Marzorati was a great choice to discuss the topic–in the past months the magazine has put Chuck Hagel and Mark Warner on the cover, presenting them as alternatives to John McCain and Hillary Clinton, the perceived presidential front-runners for the ’08 elections (also largely a media designation).

Marzorati started off well, explaining that the Warner piece (which stirred controversy with the doctored photo that accompanied it) was actually a position paper on democratic centrism in which the former Virginia governor was “the hook” that made it come alive. Fair enough; Marzorati emphasised that journalists and the American people tend to be fascinated by politics more than governing. He gave a similar explanation for the Hagel piece. The Nebraskan is a Republican critical of the Iraq war, he is concerned about the recent religious bent of his party, so the magazine thought it natural to ask: Could this kind of Republican become president?

OK, but the New York Times must have realized that by using these two men as illustrations of two minoritary political camps, they would elevate them to prominence. Not only that, they would also get a New York Times endorsement–not for what they believe or what party they belong to, but for being a valid candidate to consider. If the New York Times Magazine puts a politician on the cover, they must have something to say and we’d better pay attention to them. Right?

Wrong, if you ask Marzorati–here’s (full transcript) what he told “On The Media”:

“Anyone who doesn’t like what we do is always going to be convinced that the doing of it was based on a secret meeting held in some bunker somewhere where a strategy was arrived at to do it. And of course, if you put out 52 issues of a magazine, you know that’s not how things come about. The cover is not an advertisement for what the New York Times believes about anything. The New York Times doesn’t decide who to put on the cover. A small group of editors receive a number of pieces at a given time and they pick among those pieces. These things aren’t ordered up; though it’s very difficult to convince some people otherwise. We don’t make candidates. That idea that we have that kind of power, either in the country or among the readers or anything, is one the great myths; a myth that serves a lot of people’s interests. But we don’t make candidates, we don’t make presidents, we don’t do any of that.”

Excuse me? The New York Times doesn’t have the power to make or break candidates? The New York Times magazine doesn’t order pieces? The New York Times magazine has a dearth of ideas to chose from? The idea of the New York Times having political power is a myth?

Marzorati is either naive, which would be so cute given his position, or he thinks all of us are stupid. His comment was an irresponsible cop-out, the mark of a cowardly journalist who is scared of admitting the power of the newspaper he works for. I buy the New York Times because it is powerful. I buy the New York Times because I believe it can influence politics and politics. I buy the New York Times because it convinced me to trust its news columns–and you’d think the paper wants this kind of trust.

But the editor of its Sunday magazine comes out and says the Times is something of a pawn in presidential politics, that it can’t do much about it, and that all it takes for a presidential-hopeful to get into the magazine is a clever pitch that says this person is articulating ideas in new ways.

Excuse me if I’d rather gobble the one-pound glazed donut of self-congratulation. The hypocritical modesty of Marzorati’s sour dish of self-deprecation makes me puke in my mouth.