I know that it's only been a few days since I posted another entry entitled "WTFNYT?!?", so the title's taken.  Pity, as yesterday's mealymouthed, pointless A-1 pseudo-dissection of the Clintons' marriage deserves it too.

Who's running Page One over there, and do they have dirty pictures of Punch in their pocket?  (If so, kindly keep 'em there.)

The article was content-free, as Slate's Jack Shafer noticed:

When the New York Times prints a news story in its own private code, as it did with today's (May 23) Page One article "Clintons Balance Married and Public Lives," veteran readers grope through it, sentence by sentence, in hopes of piecing together the article's true meaning.

Even the headline of reporter Patrick Healy's piece appears coded. It alleges a Bill and Hillary "balance," but, specifying no fulcrum upon which the relationship firmly rests, it invites the reader to conjure up a wobbling teeter-totter.

The story states that the "state of their marriage" is "Topic A" for "many prominent Democrats" without ever saying how or why it ranks so high. And who are the many prominent Democrats? If they are many, why aren't they represented in the piece? Or do Healy and his editors count "one, two, three, many" when enumerating their subjects? . . .

[H]aving emphatically made the point that Bill is both present and absent, both a devoted co-gardener and an L.A. zipper, that Bill participates in her strategy sessions and Sen. Clinton operates as her own person, the piece concludes with Hillary saying, "I'm so grateful to you, Bill, wherever you are," as she surveys the dimly lighted fund-raiser where Bill has spoken and exited the stage.

What the hell is that supposed to mean? Wherever he is literally? Figuratively? Existentially? This is the sort of news story that when read leaves you knowing less about the subject than when you were merely ignorant.

Matt Yglesias, writing over at Talking Points Memo, agrees:

Let me just also note that I find the all-too-American combination of prurience and puritanism really tiresome. Every three grafs or so you get to some point where Healy won't just say what he means. In theory, I suppose, this is to guard the delicate sensibilities of New York Times readers. In reality, it's a way for Healy and his editors to hide -- much more from themselves than from their audience -- what it is they're doing.

I don't have a problem with tabloids and celebrity gossip pages. And politicians are a kind of celebrity, after all. But real gossip sheets don't display all this shame and self-loathing. They are what they are and they just put it out there.

And, I'm inclined to quote this post from The Horse's Mouth nearly in full, since it puts it better than I can:

If the piece was short on news, it certainly wasn't short on insinuations and innuendo. The closest thing to a central assertion or thesis comes a quarter of the way into the piece:

They appear in the public spotlight methodically and carefully: The goal is to position Mrs. Clinton to run for president not as a partner or a proxy, but as her own person.

Its implication -- echoed in paragraph after paragraph, but never quite stated openly -- is that the Clintons' marital conduct is sometimes determined or compromised by their political ambitions. As a public service, I thought I'd list the facts in the piece that are meant to support this thesis:

1) On one occasion, Bill Clinton left a city they were in together because he didn't want to distract the media from a speech Hillary Clinton was about to give.

2) Hillary spends more time in Washington, D.C., than Bill does. (Isn't she a Senator, for God's sake?)

3) The Clintons have been together 14 days a month on average since the start of 2005. (Isn't that actually a lot of time for a couple which consists of a Senator running for re-election and a former President traveling the world while launching a global initiative?)

4) "People around the Clintons" say there's a political calculus at work. (We're never told who these people are and why they'd be in a position to know this, and they're never quoted, even anonymously.)

5) "Other friends" say they saw "tension and disappointment" in their marriage. (One "friend" quoted actually suggested the opposite.)

6) Bill spent a lot of time in New York while writing his book.

I'm sorry, but this is junk, pure and simple. Look, the Clintons' marriage is a valid subject to some extent, since it will play a role should she run for President, though that's of course true because the media will insist that it play a role. But A-1? Three-thousand words? Huh?

The truth is that this piece tells us far more about the state of political journalism today than it does about the state of the Clintons' marriage.

                                                                                      

It tells us, for instance, that if you want to get on A-1 of the Times, you have to write a piece that hews to this narrative: "Those calculating Clintons." The Times did this during the New York mayoral race, weighing in with an A-1 piece insinuating that those calculating Clintons were keeping Dem nominee Fernando Ferrer at "arm's length" -- but the story was way too short on supporting facts or quotes, and didn't even have a single Ferrer supporter alleging the central charge, even on background.

It also tells us another very key fact about journalism today: political reporters love to write about politics as if they are merely disinterested observers of political events and the public's perceptions of them, when in fact they play a very key role in shaping those events and perceptions. Thus it is that the piece makes much of the fact that the Clintons take into account how the media will cover them -- when the reason they need to do this in the first place is because of the frivolous eagerness of reporters to interpret everything the Clintons do as purely political.

From where I'm sitting, the picture of Clinton aides poring over schedules, actually spending time counting the amount of times the Clintons have spent together in more than a year for a reporter who wants to find hidden meaning in the fact that two very busy people don't see each other that much -- to me, it's a deeply dispiriting spectacle, to say the least. Very depressing.

This isn't news, there's nothing there, and no way should this be on A-1, to say nothing of in a box and above the fold.  It's a shame, though -- the topic could have been a good one, if the Times weren't so determined to stick to their script and if they actually explored their topic rather than danced around it.  (And if it were edited with a scalpel rather than a cudgel.)  Wait -- is Howell Raines still around?

Comments

[dana]

Healy could directly ask, "Is Bill cheating?" Instead, he writes a donut around the subject. As the piece spirals out to 2,000 words, the donut grows into a 20-inch Michelin radial, and the radial becomes a NASCAR oval. The experienced reader finds himself searching the infield of this great expanse for what appear to be clues.

The thing I like most about Shafer is that he's so *restrained*.

[Vidiot]

On about a biweekly basis, I want to have Jack Shafer's man-babies.