Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

With regard to the Plame/Wilson marriage, and Wilson's trip to Niger, Miller writes that one day in July 2003 she stepped into the office of Jill Abramson, at this point the chief of the NYT's Washington Bureau, and told her  (these are words from the memoir's paraphrase, not the actual words of the conversation), that "Joe Wilson's wife worked for the CIA and had apparently helped send her husband on the trip to Africa before the war to investigate the uranium charge.  If true, I said, the CIA was possibly guilty of nepotism and of covering up intelligence that disputed its prewar WMD claims. If the source was wrong ... the White House might be trying to smear them. Either way, I told Abramson the tip needed pursuing." Three points, then apparently intrigued her: 1. Guilty of nepotism? Probably the least of it -- the notion that Wilson (a former ambassador -- there were good reasons for giving him the assignment regardless of his marriage) benefitted f...

I mentioned in a couple of posts here in early March that Jill Abramson had written a book, Merchants of Truth, about where the news publishing business is headed, that there is valuable material in the book, and that it had become embroiled in a controversy over plagiarism. This post follows up on the third of those points. One of the sources whence came the cribbed passages at issue is Jake Malooley, who wrote a piece years ago about Jason Mojica, a Vice News editor. The plagiarism from that piece was in fact one of the items I cited in my discussion in March. Malooly has since had the opportunity to interview Abramson on this point. He hears her out on her apology to him, but then presses her beyond her comfort zone, in a piece run by Rolling Stone. Here is part of the exchange. Isn’t inadvertent plagiarism still plagiarism? No, it isn’t. I mean, you can consult your own experts. It may be that not all agree with me, but I’ve talked to a number of respected eminent sc...

Although I think the general argument Jill Abramson sets forth in her book, as compressed in yesterday's entry, is valuable and perhaps in the end sound, I have to include here the unhappy truth that Abramson is an unfortunate bearer of that message. Her book, Merchants of Truth, contains some glaring instances of plagiarism. This comes especially in the section of the book devoted to the news website Vice News , seen by some (by not by JA) as a wave-of-the-future institution. Back in the late spring of 2005, the Ryerson Review of Journalism carried a piece by Nicolle Weeks, headlined "Bigot or Champion of Truth?" Weeks argued that Vice is much more the former than the latter.  She says this, about the website's co-founder Gavin McInnes: In August 2003, McInnes wrote a column in  The American Conservative , a magazine run by Pat Buchanan. In the magazine, he called young people a bunch of knee-jerk liberals (a phrase McInnes and his cronies use often) who...

Jill Abramson -- who worked for three years (2011-14) as executive editor of The New York Times, has now written a book,  Merchants of Truth,  about the changes in the news business in the last decade, one that offers important context to some of the headline political events of our day. I'll discuss the major contentions of the book in this post, then the controversy around it (especially over plagiarism) in the next. To be blunt, the major contentions are two. The first is that some of the website-only news sources, like Vice News , may seem like the way of the future, but have inherent crippling weaknesses. The second is that some of the traditional print-media news sources, like her old employer or its rival, the Washington Post , may seem antiquated but in fact they are renewing themselves in valuable ways.  Abramson’s book has much to say about Jeff Bezos, though it was published in advance of the two most recent Bezos-related news stories: his blowing th...