NYT Public Editor Clark Hoyt offers his own sage judgment on the McCain Innuendo. The money quote:

The pity of it is that, without the sex, The Times was on to a good story. McCain, who was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee in 1991 for exercising “poor judgment” by intervening with federal regulators on behalf of a corrupt savings and loan executive, recast himself as a crusader against special interests and the corrupting influence of money in politics. Yet he has continued to maintain complex relationships with lobbyists like Iseman, at whose request he wrote to the Federal Communications Commission to urge a speed-up on a decision affecting one of her clients.

Give this man a newspaper to edit.

No, that wasn't it. The actual Times headline was, of course, "For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk." With that most vapid of introductions (so bland that my eyes glazed over on first inspection), the editors tried to muffle the dynamite that they'd awkwardly stuffed into the nth reedit of their half-exploding bombshell about--well, what was it about? (1) Intimations of an Iseman affair, or the "appearance" of an affair, that his aides tried to scotch? (2) McCain's entanglements with lobbyists who cared a good deal about what he did as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee? Uncertain which way to turn, having not much of a story about (1) and (on the strength of the evidence they published) no smoking gun about (2), they squared the potato and ran with the hodgepodge. If they had worked the lobbying story (which has since been advanced by Michael Isikoff in Newsweek, they could have produced something revelatory about how intimately powerful senators collaborate with lobbyists. With this, they could have held McCain to account for career-long "For McCain, Special Interests Hard to Disentangle From" would have been a more sensible headline. But "Poses Its Own Risk"?! Too fidgety by half, the Times is now reeling (again).

First they got knocked around, undeservedly, as "liberal media." Then they sprayed Teflon on George W. Bush and escorted Judy Miller into the annals of journalistic ignominy. Now they juggle McCain like a hot potato. Like tightrope walkers who think too long about every step, they plunge. This is a staggering denouement, but not a surprising one, for The Newspaper that Fears Its Own Shadow.

Glad to report that my experiment in the arcane art form of sculpting less than 150 words into the NYT--a sort of haiku equivalent--met with some success this morning:

To the Editor:

In order to impugn “the quality of thought of the Democrats’ academic and media supporters,” none of whom he names or quotes, William Kristol drafts George Orwell, who wrote in 1942 that “a permanent and pensioned opposition” suffers a deterioration in “the quality of its thought.”

By Mr. Kristol’s reasoning, the belligerent right that was out of power from 1932 into the 1970s should have been terminally shriveled by the time it came to power with Ronald Reagan in 1981. Perhaps its long exile explains the ruinous fatuousness of such manifestoes as the declaration on Sept. 20, 2001, that failure to invade Iraq “will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism” — a declaration by William Kristol and fellow conservatives.

Todd Gitlin
New York, Feb. 18, 2008

The writer, a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, is the author of several books about politics.