Tom Gross highlights a letter in the New York Times:

To the Editor:

David Brooks reports that "moderate Arab reformers" have traced the problems in Iraq, Iran and other Middle East hot spots to a country roughly the size of Massachusetts that dominates the affairs of its Arab neighbors and operates a puppet government in Washington as well.

O.K., but what do the hard-liners think?

Michael Smith
Cynthiana, Ky.

I feel like the chap who wasn't given an invite to the party all his friends are at. I can't get hold of a copy of Nick Cohen's new book for love nor money. I've tried the publishers, I've tried Amazon, and I've tried Waterstones and Borders. All to no avail. Blank stares from the assistants at the latter two, a 2-5 week delivery promise from Amazon and no response from Fourth Estate.

I assume I'm not the only one who can't get hold of it. It must be incredibly frustrating for Nick. I had a similar experience ten years ago when A Class Act was published. My co-author and I had worked out with the publishers a PR strategy all geared around the date when Penguin said it would be in the shops. We pulled off the unique feat of getting it extracted on the same day on the front of the reviews sections of both the Sunday Times and the Observer. We had op-eds everywhere. We had news coverage. We had chat shows. Wall to wall.

And could you get the book anywhere? As if. Penguin didn't release copies into the shops for another three weeks. All that publicity went up in smoke.

(I had a very different experience with Hodder, who turned around my Blunkett book from delivery of the final pages of manuscript to appearing in the shops in 10 days - a breathtaking performance.)

UPDATE: I'm told it's in to its second printing and new copies are on their way. Congratulations to Nick Cohen for such a success.

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I can't abide Rod Liddle. I might agree with him sometimes, but there's something about his self-consciously laddish personna which grates.

That said, his piece in this week's Spectator on media flim-flam is well worth a read - not least for this great story:

Many years ago I was a youthful producer on BBC Radio Four’s World at One; it was a good time to be a journalist because the world was in joyous tumult with the end of the Cold War. I was extraordinarily proud of myself to have secured for my programme an interview with Georgi Arbatov, head of the Soviet Institute for American Studies and an adviser to every Soviet president from Khrushchev to Mikhail Gorbachev. What a coup! As the Soviet Union dissolved and geopolitical relations were being turned on their head, I had tracked down and persuaded one of the five or six most crucial and significant people in the world to talk to us live on air, in the lead slot. It was a good interview, too. Georgi said he wanted better relations with the USA and was in favour of world peace and disarmament. ‘We must all now be frentz, yes?’ he asked at the end, with benevolent rhetoric. His broadcasted comments were duly written up in the following day’s broadsheet newspapers.

But as I discovered when I spoke to him after the interview, they were not the views of Georgi Arbatov, close adviser to Mikhail Gorbachev, but the views of Georgi Arbatov, an insurance salesman from Minsk. Thank God, I mused later, reading the delighted reaction to his comments from Western politicians, that he was not a hawkish insurance salesman from Minsk: the missiles might have been leaving the silos.

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Tim Worstall has a post about US newspapers' fact-checking. Fact-checking is one of those things which sounds and seems a wonderful idea - who could be against checking facts?! - until on closer examination it turns out to be something of a waste of time.

I speak from experience, having been both a fact-checker and someone who was regularly fact-checked.

Some years ago, I did freelance work for the New Yorker as a fact-checker. My job was to go through one of their regular writer's work with a fine toothcomb, providing a citation for anything which could be construed as a fact. That sounds very sensible, but in truth it was utterly pointless. Although I supposedly had to find a source for every fact that was in the copy, with the implication being that anything without a source would not appear, there was a get-out which rendered the whole excercise worthless. If I could not souce something, I would ring the writer up and ask him for his source. If he could not point me in the right direction, but was insistent on the veracity of his remark, I could simply source it as 'on author'. And then everything was swell.

So much for the famed rigour of fact-checkers. All anyone had - has - to do, is write 'on author', and the 'fact' passes muster.

As for being checked, the most inane example of being fact-checked I experienced when I wrote for the New York Times was when I described Robin Cook as 'hirsute'. The fact checker rang me for a source for this. When i said she could look at any picture of Mr Cook ever published, she said this would not do. I needed to supply them with one to prove my assertion. I took great delight in refusing to do this, and telling my fact-checker that she should mark the claim that Mr Cook was hirsute with the phrase 'on author'.

Fact-checking is a waste of time. Fisking, on the other hand - now there's no escape from that.

UPDATE: Oh, the irony: a friend has pointed out that it's fine-tooth comb, not fine toothcomb. Duh me!

UPDATE: Today's Times has a deliciously stupid line from one of Dave's A-listers, Sayeeda Warsi, who clearly doesn't buy the idea of fact-checking. Defending a piece she has written which is full of nonsense figures, she has this to say:

I don’t believe that I have to justify everything I write, line by line and word by word.

Well no, you don't. Not, that is, unless you want anyone to take anything you say seriously.

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Today's Guardian diary has a dig at Oliver Kamm, dismissing his credibility as a panellist for a Progress meeting entitled Three Years On: the Lessons for Labour from Iraq, thus:

Oliver Kamm, banker and part-time Times columnist, who recently told Hove residents to vote Tory because their Labour candidate opposed the war;

...Lots of progressive ideas there, then.

Clearly Kamm's occupation, let alone his views, render him wholly unsuitable for a progressive journal.

Turn the page, and who should be writing on Iraq for the Grauniad's comment page?

There must be two Oliver Kamms, I guess, one who is fit for progressive journals, and one who isn't.

A slip of the tongue, I'm sure:

As the Tories cry foul (again) over supposed leftwing bias at the Beeb, the Today programme's James Naughtie is doing his employers no favours. Interviewing Ed Balls, former chief economic adviser to the Treasury, this morning, Naughtie began one question with "If we win the election..." before quickly correcting himself with "I mean you of course." Is there something we should be told?

(From Media Guardian)

I'm back from a snow-bound, blizzard wracked New York City. And wonderful - as always - it was, too.

The first piece I read on my return was Alice Miles' in today's Times, and I couldn't have chosen better. It's a real must-read, on the cynicism of the media. I've tried to extract it, but it needs to be read at length:

THERE IS a shocking tendency, and I’m sorry to say that it seems to be led by the Today programme, to be more interested in the failure of elections in Iraq than in their success.

...Ed Stourton, Today’s man in Baghdad, lingered long and lovingly in the course of an interview with the British Ambassador yesterday upon the illegitimacy of any election result. “It’s quite difficult, isn’t it, to see how people can vote intelligently in some areas of the country when there isn’t the sort of campaign we would recognise,” he even suggested. Poor, stupid Iraqis.

I find this astonishing. Regardless of one’s view of the US-UK attack on Iraq — and I speak as one sceptical about it, at best — surely one should wish the elections on Sunday to be a success. And I don’t mean just want them to be, but will them to be, and certainly not help those seeking to disrupt and undermine them.

People will risk their lives going to the polls in areas of Iraq this weekend, and some parts of the media — in other countries as well as in ours, I assume — have already written off those efforts as worthless, the elections as fatally flawed. What blinkered arrogance. Who needs Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to shoot down a nascent democracy when they have some of Britain’s best-loved and respected voices? Perhaps thousands will be killed voting. Perhaps turnout will shrink to levels which render the result illegitimate. At that point, then, discuss the validity of the result. But not before the poll has even occurred. I have yet to hear a broadcaster deliver a factual report about these elections, one which seeks to raise its sights beyond the suicide bombers and the British political angle (will it help Tony Blair or Gordon Brown?).

One hundred and eleven parties standing in the first election in half a century in a country of 25 million people of whom more than 80 per cent of the electorate say they want to vote. This is a great and exciting exercise in democracy. Iraqis are not voting at the barrel of an American gun or under the heel of a British soldier. The main Sunni political party, the Islamic Party, said yesterday that it will participate in drafting the country’s constitution and might even accept some appointments in government, even though it is boycotting the poll itself. Now surely that is grounds for optimism about the future of the country? Or if not, perhaps the BBC with all its expertise could explain why. Not on a late-night discussion programme on News 24, but on prime time.

I was thinking of writing on this for the weekend, but Alice Miles has said everything I wanted to say. The thought of this weekend's coverage, and the doom-laden analysis which is sure to follow, fills me with ennui. We can all write the scripts already: failure, boycott, disaster, imperialism, occupying force. And nothing about the fact of democracy, and the removal of one of the worst dictators in history.

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Dan Rather has resigned as anchor of CBS News' Evening News.

The strain of all those
hard hitting interviews no doubt got to him.

(5)

Scott Burgess compares and contrasts the respective Arafat obits of the Guardian and the Telegraph.

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It's time to reveal the results of the poll for the Sir Simon Jenkins award for the most reliably wrong-headed columnist.

I wish I could say it was a tight contest. It wassn't. The winner received 35% of all the votes, which was a major triumph considering there were ten strong candidates, any one of which would be a deserving winner of this most precious accolode.

The results, in reverse order:

(cue drum roll)

Mary Dejevsky 1%
Fergal Keane 1%
Tim Garton Ash 3%
Jackie Ashley 6%
Sir Max Hastings 6%
AN Wilson 7%
John Humphrys 13%
Sir Simon Jenkins 13%
French foreign policy 16%

And the runaway winner:

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown 35%

(9)

An important clarification:

I misremembered the missive sent to Daniel Finkelstein. The correct version was far more impressive:

You IS a RUBBISH columist.

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I do enjoy reading Johann Hari. As of often as not I disagree with him, but he writes stylishly and always has a well made point.

For sheer fun, do have a read of his wrap-up of the various responses he received to his recent piece about the death of Derrida. It's here.

I especially like the comment by Professor Alexander Garcia Duttmann:

Dear Mr. Hari, You are an idiot.

It reminds me of a letter which Daniel Finkelstein once received and which he reprinted in The Times:

Dear Mr Finkelstein, You is an idiot.

Like most columists, I've had my fair share of angry letters. Much the best was in response to something I had written in The Express just after Great Britain had lost in the Davis Cup to the US. 'Sp what?', I asked. 'It's only tennis.'

My correspondent informed me that

The only reason you hate tennis is because you are a fat bastard.

One part of that assertion was clearly correct.

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I merely report this story from the Independent:

TWO YEARS after he received a knighthood, another signal honour for Sir Max Hastings. The Anthony Powell Society is to give him its annual Widmerpool award, a gong presented to the public figure who most embodies the traits of Kenneth Widmerpool, a character from Powell's novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time.

"Widmerpool is variously pompous; self-obsessed and self-important; obsequious to those in authority and a bully to those below him," reads the society's newsletter. "He is ambitious and pushy; ruthless; humourless; blind to the feelings of others; and has a complete lack of self-knowledge."

What on earth persuaded them that Sir Max merited such a prize?

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Are we sure Piers Morgan isn't editing the New York Times?

Memos on Bush Are Fake but Accurate, Typist Says

(3)

As Peter Briffa says: I wonder what's stopping her.

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Very sad news: Bernard Levin is dead. When I was at school, I used to hang on his every word. It wasn't just the subjects he chose, it was the sheer flair in his writing. I can't think of anyone today who comes close. I remember especially one hilarious essay about travelling through Italy using only operatic Italian. He could do anything, from the most serious and important subjects to the most ephemeral and flippant. And his musical tastes were, simply, spot on.

In recent years I would see him sometimes walking in the street (my flat is very near where he lived) and it was a truly sad sight. Can there be a crueller disease than Alzheimer's - especially for someone whose life was defined by his mind?

Unlike most of my fellow hacks' fish and chip paper produce, Levin's writing will be read for years to come. Here's the link to his page on Amazon. If you haven't read any of his collections, treat yourself.

UPDATE: Oliver Kamm's brief appreciation hits the mark.

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I rarely think after reading the witterings in a Christina Odone column, but there's a first for everything. According to Ms Odone:

It is because Americans set little store by their diplomats that they appointed the mediocre Paul Bremer as US administrator in Iraq...Bremer's third-rate abilities became clearer when compared to our man, Jeremy Greenstock; they also incensed American civil servants in Iraq, sticklers for protocol. They thought it inconceivable that Greenstock should be forced to collaborate with a hopeless Bremer, and devised a plan whereby they would informally appoint someone to stand in for Bremer at all the meetings with Greenstock - lest the Brit need to speak to a man so clearly his inferior.

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I thought the Panorama last night on the lack of readiness for a terror attack on London was a shoddy piece of work. As one of the callers to the BBC afterwards put it:

"What are Panorama trying to do? Run a terrorist training school explaining how best to attack London? I know from just the introduction to this programme that a simple and effective way to bring London to a halt and to kill at least 300 people would be to target three underground trains. Blow front and back to stop the emergency services getting to the injured."

But you do have to wonder just how thick some people are. According to the Grauniad:

The BBC was deluged with complaints today after it televised a mock-up of a terrorist attack on London last night.

The programme, which the government had denounced as "irresponsible", sparked widespread consternation among some viewers in a latter day re-run of Orson Welles' infamous War of The Worlds radio broadcast which terrorised sections of America in 1938.

"Presumably you did not intend to set the whole country into a state of panic, but that is what you did. My son phoned me from London, absolutely terrified. His friend had received a phone call from her mother who thought London was under attack, so she panicked and it snowballed," said one viewer by email.

...Around 50 viewers criticised the BBC for not flagging up the programme as a simulation during the broadcast, while 22 thought the progamme was too realistic.

Not only did the mock news reports have a banner running at the bottom of the screen saying it was fiction, they kept returning to Gavin Esler and his 'experts' for an analysis of the fictionalised attack. Then again, there are some people who thought Independence Day was a documentary. Really.

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An idle thought:

has anyone ever read a Minette Marrin column?

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With all the concentration on the faked Mirror pictures, another example of grotesquely irresponsible tabloid behaviour seems to have escaped without much comment: the feeding frenzy over Maxine Carr. Today's papers are full of it.

Ian Huntley was clearly an evil murderer and should, in my view, have been hanged. But Maxine Carr was not, by any reading of the case, evil. She was - is - a stupid, easily led woman. But she is not evil and she is not a murderer.

She was properly sentenced and has served her time. She was not given the life sentence which some newspapers' behaviour has now imposed on her.

If, God forbid, she ends up a victim of vigilante justice then her blood will be on the hands of everyone who is now hounding her. She should be left alone to live out the rest of her sorry life. That is the meaning of the word 'justice'.

(6)

Michael Jennings makes a pertinent point about the departure of Piers Morgan:

[T]he Chairman and Director-General of the BBC and the editor of the Mirror have now all lost their jobs due to their organisations essentially lying in order to make their case of opposition to the Iraq war.

For reasons which some people will understand, I will make no comment about this. But I had to draw it to your attention.

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Who'da thunk it, eh?

BNP boss accused of stirring up racial tensions

(from The Independent)

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One of the posters at Samizdata has a wonderfully cheeky riposte to the hilariously bad 'If...' series now airing on BBC2, which takes a series of 'problems' - power generation, rising inequality, obesity (not that the topics are in any way a tired retread of familiar statist crap) - and then posits a fictional scenario (always involving some kind of disaster because the state hasn't acted 'properly') mixed with talking heads:

As part of this conversation, the BBC asks for views of the world in 2020 and I thought that it would be rude not to oblige.

By 2020, we will no longer have to pay the licence fee to watch substandard populist rot that masquerades as quality TV, notably, the series of poor documentaries called If.

If Iran or Al Qaeda obtain weapons of mass destruction, then we can expect them to unleash a second Holocaust, in order to remove Israel from the Middle East. Half of Europe will revile this, half will be relieved. One or more countries will withdraw from the European Union due to its institutional inflexibility and inability to compete with the United States or the Far East.

There will be further wars in the Middle East involving the West (without a UN mandate) due to the threat of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in oil producing areas.

And this comment says it all:

I saw the first one, concerning the possible breakdown in the power supply system. In one sequence that will stay with me for some time, one of the talking heads commissioned, one presumes, to lend some sense of authority to the programme, said: "Well, you can't make power out of thin air". This was followed not five minutes later by a picture of an air turbine on a wind farm. Priceless.

Do watch the rest of the series (Wednesdays at 9pm, BBC2). They say the Beeb can't make comedies any more. Oh yes it can.

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There's a new anonymous blog on the scene, Fleet Street Blogger. It's too soon to tell how good it's going to be, but it's certainly ploughing fertile terrain. As the author puts it: Because no one else is doing it....

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