MORE WEBSITES WANT TO CHARGE FEES: But not InstaPundit! It’s free, it’ll stay free, and I personally guarantee that it’s worth every penny.

Maybe those guys should just put up a PayPal button and accept donations.

PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS SAYING THAT “DRIVING ISN’T A RIGHT, IT’S A PRIVILEGE,” and they’re always saying it because it’s in bold-face type in every “driver’s handbook” issued by every state Department of Safety. (Which shows that the people who write those handbooks understand the value of early indoctrination.) But it’s not really true, as Eugene Volokh points out. At least, it doesn’t mean what people who use the phrase tend to think it means, that driving is a privilege that the government may bestow or withdraw at its whim:

But this does not give the state the unlimited right to control what you do when you drive, or to deny you the right to drive based on your exercise of other constitutional or statutory rights. The government does not have unlimited power to search your car, or even to pull you over; the Fourth Amendment still applies to you when you’re driving. (The Fourth Amendment covers cars less than houses, for a variety of reasons; but whether that’s right or wrong, the justification is not that driving is a “privilege” rather than a constitutional right.) The government may require you to submit to blood tests when you’re pulled over for drunk driving, but the case upholding that didn’t rest on a “driving is a privilege theory.” (Some legislators have justified some such requirements on an “implied consent” theory — by choosing to drive, you implicitly consent to submit to blood tests — but that’s not how the Supreme Court has justified it.)

Likewise, the state may not deny you a driver’s license because of your speech — or even specially control your speech while you’re driving, e.g., by restricting the content of your bumper stickers (at least outside the narrow exceptions, such as threats or libel, that are recognized for all speech).

Read the whole thing.

THE BUCKS JUST KEEP ROLLING IN here at InstaPundit Secret HQ. I got a surprise royalty check from Perseus Books, formerly Perseus Westview, formerly HarperCollins Westview, nee WestView Press on my now rather elderly Outer Space: Problems of Law & Policy. It was for $119.85, which won’t exactly let me purchase this InstaYacht, but since I’d written off getting any more royalties on that book, it’s like free money. Woohoo!

Yes, I’m easily excited.

SOL STERN SAYS THAT THE NEW YORK TIMES IS whitewashing the Black Panthers.

UPDATE: Roger Simon recalls, unsentimentally, his years as a Black Panthers supporter dupe.

THE POLITICS OF OUTER SPACE, a fairly lengthy post on the controversial policy of “space monopolization,” over at GlennReynolds.com. Plus, I tell you how to get free books!

Meanwhile Rand Simberg has a column on whether the Columbia astronauts could have been rescued, and what it means.

UPDATE: Here’s a piece on private space travel from The Economist.

MORE BIG-MEDIA PLAGIARISM unmasked!

JIM TREACHER HAS MOVED to a new site. Don’t miss it!

A PACK, NOT A HERD:

A man armed with two sharpened wooden stakes tried to hijack and crash a Qantas domestic jet with 47 passengers aboard shortly after take-off from Melbourne today, authorities said.

The 40-year-old man stabbed two flight attendants and injured two other people before he was overpowered by crew and passengers aboard QF1737. He was in custody tonight. . . .

Agent Cato said passengers who intervened and overwhelmed the man before he could get to the cockpit were “quite heroic”.

Passenger Keith Charlton was among those who helped overpower the attacker.

He said he was seated in the third aisle of plane when a man in a “brown suit raced past me with his hands raised in the air”.

He said the man, who was holding aloft two sharpened wooden stakes, stabbed the chief flight attendant “Greg”.

“The fellow Greg, really was a hero … if it wasn’t for him we could’ve been in a lot of trouble,” he told Sky News.

“As he was being attacked, he put his head down into the man’s chest and he pushed him back down the plane.

“He had two severe injuries to his head; one was on the chin, one was on the top of his head,” Mr Charlton said.

Six men then rushed to Greg’s aid.

This is why confiscating tweezers is silly. You can’t hijack a plane anymore, because the passengers won’t allow it.

HERE’S AN ODD STORY, emailed by Stuart Buck:

A BOEING 727 passenger jet, grounded at Luanda airport a year ago, has disappeared after a mysterious unauthorised take-off, Angola state radio reported today.

The plane, chartered by the Angolan airline Airangol, was grounded after being banned from overflying Angolan territory on account of a series of irregularities, said Angola civil aviation director Helder Preza.

A witness to the plane’s departure on Sunday, airport employee Luis Lopes, said he saw a white man start the empty plane and then take off after a few dangerous land manoeuvres.

I wonder what’s behind this.

UPDATE: Several readers say this is probably an aircraft repossession. It’s a big plane for just one guy to repossess, especially after it’s been sitting for a year, but okay.

EVEN THE BASEBALL BLOGS are writing about the New York Times’ problems, which extend to the sports section. And there’s this:

Yesterday, I answer the phone at my Dad’s house, and it’s a telemarketer trying to sell a home subscription to the NY Times. In general, I hang up on these people, but I couldn’t resist knocking the Times. “That’s the worst paper in the world,” I said. “What do you mean?” the salesman replied. “You can’t trust anything they say,” I answered, “they print lies.” “Oh, yeah,” he replied and hung up.

Morale must be pretty bad if the telemarketers are getting discouraged.

SPINSANITY HAS A ROUNDUP on Iraq news coverage errors and myths. It addresses all sorts of issues, from WMD to looting to Jessica Lynch, and you should read the whole thing. I don’t agree with them on everything, but it’s still useful and thorough. Here’s the key bit on the BBC story:

BBC correspondent John Kampfner picked up on these stories in a televised May 18 report that has come under close scrutiny. While Kampfner adequately recapitulates the reporting of his predecessors in some respects, he made several mistakes. First, and most blatantly, Kampfner credulously quotes Iraqi doctors asserting that US soldiers used blanks when storming the hospital. But as blogger Wilbur Smith argues, it is improbable that combat troops would not have live ammunition ready for use in their weapons (the Pentagon strongly denies the allegation).

In addition, the online article based on Kampfner’s story — which has probably received more attention than the actual televised report — states that US troops “were said to have come under fire from inside and outside the building.” But Kampfner’s televised report actually said that “They took fire on their way in and out of the building,” not that fire came from inside the building or that troops fired shots inside. Moreover, Brooks specifically denied this claim during his April 2 briefing, saying “There was not a fire fight inside of the building, I will tell you, but there were fire fights outside of the building, getting in and getting out.” While a few media reports may have gotten this wrong, almost all got it right.

I think that SpinSanity is too charitable to the BBC here. I think that the message of the story was that the raid was a fake. Here’s how SpinSanity characterizes it:

There has also been a dispute over the implications of Kampfner’s piece. In the online article, he calls Lynch’s rescue “one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived.” (The TV script also had a suggestive lead-in: “This was a script made for Hollywood. Made by the Pentagon.”) Many have disregarded Kampfner’s direct meaning – that the Pentagon manipulated the media in presenting Lynch’s capture and rescue as more dramatic than they actually were – and leaped to the supposed implication that the raid was staged, which Kampfner did not allege but could be inferred based on the quotation claiming that US troops used blanks and a lack of context regarding possible threats to US troops to the hospital. (When questioned by CNN’s Leon Harris about this, Kampfner specifically said the rescue was not staged and that “The Americans had a legitimate right in getting Lynch out of the hospital.”)

Yeah, but the Harris questioning didn’t come until after Kampfner took a lot of heat for the story, and particularly the absurd “shooting blanks” claim. That’s backpedaling, not clarification.

SpinSanity also says:

Though far more responsible than Scheer or McKinney, critics of the BBC report from the right have used Kampfner’s miscues to try to dismiss or play down the entirety of the Lynch story, though the main contentions of the original revisionist reporting on Lynch have stood up to scrutiny thus far. Blogger Glenn Reynolds, for example, wrote that “there’s no story, really — just a claim that things weren’t as dangerous as they might have been, and that the Pentagon got as much PR out of the event as it could, neither of which strikes me as earthshaking.” Andrew Sullivan simply dismissed the BBC report as a “smear.” But these commentators have not directed the same outrage the BBC has faced at the press outlets that credulously repeated the original, mistaken reports about Lynch’s capture and rescue. Certainly, it’s news that several key aspects of what was arguably most famous single incident of the war were apparently misleading and/or false.

Well, the “was she shot or stabbed” question seems to me to be something that could be put down to the fog of war. The reports came from unnamed “officials” (who were probably enlisted men buttonholed on the way to the latrine) and it was obvious from the reportage that nobody was precisely sure what had happened. And it’s of nothing like the significance of the claim that the rescue was a fraud. The BBC story, on the other hand, was pretty much a lie, or criminal stupidity. If Kampfner didn’t know that the “shooting blanks” bit was bogus, then he has no business reporting on these kinds of things at all.

And call me crazy, but when you report that there were blanks and fake guns being used as part of a Hollywood extravaganza, I think you’re calling the whole thing a fraud. That’s how I read the BBC story, I think that’s how most people read the BBC story, it’s how Bob Scheer (rather eagerly and credulously) read the BBC story and I think that’s how we were meant to read the BBC story.

UPDATE: Scheer’s response to criticism of his Lynch column is substandard bloviation and bluster. He completely ignores the “shooting blanks” issue, and, well, doesn’t really say much except “military bad, Murdoch bad, talk radio bad, me good, BBC good.” Only he’s not as articulate as this makes him sound.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Roger Simon says that Scheer should be fired.

MEDPUNDIT SYDNEY SMITH WRITES on obesity hysteria, and public-health advocates’ focus on diet rather than exercise.

It’s obvious to me why this is: if you blame diet for obesity, you can shake down corporations that sell food. If you blame lack of exercise, a million couch potatoes pick up the remote, and you don’t get asked back on TV.

THE FBI CRIME LAB PROBLEMS are an old InstaPundit staple. Now prisoners are getting their convictions reversed. That, of course, means that innocent people went to jail — while guilty ones, presumably, continued to prey on the community.

Have heads rolled at the FBI over this? Not hardly. But then they haven’t rolled over the pre-9/11 dropped balls either, so why should they?

A bigger question is why should we have confidence in the FBI’s ability to do its job?

AS LONG-TIME READERS KNOW, I really want an aircar. Here’s an article that’s optimistic on my prospects of getting one. I hope it’s right.

WELL, I’VE BEEN GONE but Andrew Sullivan has been all over the Rick Bragg story. He thinks that Bragg deserved it — but that so does the Times. On the other hand, former Times stringer Rod Dreher thinks Bragg’s getting a raw deal. And Kaus has more:

[I]t seems clear that a) the NYT policy is a lot more permissive than readers ever knew; b) the NYT rules are unclear, which makes them easy to stretch; and c) the paper is less willing to give credit (which would have the effect of discouraging stringer abuse) than other news organizations.

Read the whole thing(s). Meanwhile Cathy Seipp is focusing on Bob Scheer. At least there’s some evidence that the L.A. Times is beginning to notice that it has a reputation for liberal bias.

UPDATE: More support for Bragg’s claim that everybody does it at the Times — or at least that a lot of people do:

Lisa Suhay, a Times freelance writer who says her work on one article was badly distorted by Blair, maintained that Bragg “is being punished for what I, as a freelancer, have seen in four years as common practice.

“I have covered anthrax, plane crashes, roller-coaster disasters, interviewed the family of a local POW — all high-profile stories, with no credit. . . . It was simply understood that I got paid to be invisible, a nonentity, entrusted to go to market to get the choicest bits for the dish being prepared.”

Milton Allimadi, a Times metro stringer for two years in the mid-1990s, said he routinely filed crime stories that were “barely touched” by editors and reporters but never got a byline. “I often wondered how readers I had interviewed must have been surprised the next day. While interviewing them I identified myself as Milton Allimadi, and the next day the byline would be totally different,” he said.

Times reporters and editors, meanwhile, respond that they always do a great job. Now, I’m not even sure that this reliance on stringers is unethical (see my earlier post on this) but the Times has already decided that it is, by suspending Bragg, who has now quit. But the press coverage of this is interesting, because it seems to me that journalists are far more willing to take the word of Times employees and flacks that things are fine there than they would be if they were hearing similar assurances from, say, Enron. Those kinds of assurances are always reported with a hint of a sneer. What’s the difference? That these are journalists, perhaps their friends and classmates, but at least their fellow professionals? Fine. But why should the rest of us care?

Meanwhile it’s interesting to see that people at other newspapers are taking note of the kind of stuff that really hurts their credibility:

Kann also cited “many potential misdemeanors well short of the crimes of plagiarism and fabrication. . . . I am thinking here of the anonymous negative quote questioning someone’s character; the unreturnable post-office-closing phone call that permits a publication to say ‘unavailable for comment’; the closed mind to an inconvenient new fact that doesn’t fit a story line; the loaded adjective where no adjective is needed; the analysis that edges across the line to personal opinion.”

Yep. Some of that stuff is okay in punditry, but not news reporting. And what’s really hurting media credibility is the sense that there’s not much of a difference anymore.

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader suggests that this passage from the Post piece quoted above is pretty damning:

Such issues rarely surface in television, a more collaborative enterprise where producers and researchers often conduct key interviews and accumulate footage before the big-name correspondent arrives for a shoot. In 1998, when Peter Arnett, then a CNN reporter, narrated a documentary charging that U.S. forces used nerve gas during the Vietnam War, he was able to distance himself when the story had to be retracted, saying he had “contributed not one comma” to the piece.

“See, I just play a journalist on TV.” Uh huh.

WE’RE BAAACK! Sorry for the outage yesterday. A server — I think it was mine, I’ve got to stop posting so often — or some such caught fire at the operations center and the place had to be evacuated, cleaned out, yada yada. I was posting a bit over at the backup site but I don’t think many people remembered to check it. Bookmark it now, in case, God forbid, this should happen again.

I think any email you sent me during the outage is probably gone forever. Sorry.

FRESH BLOGGY GOODNESS: The latest Carnival of the Vanities, featuring links to posts by all sorts of bloggers, is up.

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION’S AFRICA POLICIES are getting praise from an unexpected source:

Bob Geldof astonished the aid community yesterday by using a return visit to Ethiopia to praise the Bush administration as one of Africa’s best friends in its fight against hunger and Aids.

The musician-turned activist said Washington was providing major assistance, in contrast to the European Union’s “pathetic and appalling” response to the continent’s humanitarian crises.

“You’ll think I’m off my trolley when I say this, but the Bush administration is the most radical – in a positive sense – in its approach to Africa since Kennedy,” Geldof told the Guardian.

The neo-conservatives and religious rightwingers who surrounded President George Bush were proving unexpectedly receptive to appeals for help, he said. “You can get the weirdest politicians on your side.”

Former president Bill Clinton had not helped Africa much, despite his high-profile visits and apparent empathy with the downtrodden, the organiser of Live Aid, claimed. “Clinton was a good guy, but he did fuck all.”

Um, yes, he did. . . . And there’s more:

Geldof was adamant that the EU was the greater villain for delivering just a small fraction of Ethiopia’s staple needs and refusing, unlike the US and Britain, to supply any supplementary foods, such as oil, which give a balanced diet.

“The EU have been pathetic and appalling, and I thought we had dealt with that 20 years ago when the electorate of our countries said never again,” he said. Warning that the “horror of the 80s” could return, he added: “The last time I spoke to the EU’s aid people, they didn’t even know where their own ships were. The food is there, get it here.”

Read the whole thing. But wait, there’s more in this article from The Times:

BOB GELDOF launched a bitter attack on President Mugabe of Zimbabwe last night as he flew into Africa 20 years after launching Live Aid.

The Irish pop star called on African leaders to challenge despots if they wanted the rest of the world to take them seriously.

“He (Mr Mugabe) is engaging in state-sponsored terror and famine and that cannot be allowed,” Geldof said. “He is a shame on the face of Africa.”

Geldof, on his first official trip to Ethiopia since the days of Live Aid in 1985, added: “You people should be demanding that Mugabe steps down. I don’t care where he goes. He can join Idi Amin in Saudi Arabia, he can join the ghetto of tyrants, but get him out of there.”

Indeed.

CONFIDENCE IN THE MILITARY IS UP. Confidence in the press is down. Maybe the New York Times needs some embedded bloggers!

MAUREEN DOWD has sort of admitted that she made a misleading alteration in a George Bush quote. Emphasis on the “sort of.”

UPDATE: The Belgravia Dispatch is unimpressed with Dowd’s behavior.

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED: The head of Al Jazeera has been fired in response to charges that he worked with Saddam’s intelligence services.

Boy, you sure wouldn’t have guessed that from their coverage, would you?

THE STRONGER HORSE: My TechCentralStation column, which is about where we are (and aren’t) going in space, is up.

SPEAKING OF EXCESSIVE SECRECY: Jesse Walker notes that the FCC is behaving in a particularly opaque fashion where its media concentration rules are concerned.

SO WHY DO I CARE ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES STORY? I don’t know. (Reader Vish Subramanian says that my repeated posts on this subject are “boring and annoying.” Sorry, Vish! I’ll get back to my usual obsessions soon, I promise.) Part of it is vindication: despite the cult of the Times, it’s a flawed human institution, as bloggers have been pointing out, and it’s kind of nice to see that presented in undeniable fashion. We all make mistakes, and we all have biases. But the Times is slow to correct the former, and laughably pretends to lack the latter.

Part of it is also that some of this is an insult to our intelligence, much like the Administration’s absurd claims (which I was flaming about repeatedly here last year) that the September 11 attacks were somehow unimaginable. That was absurd. The Columbine killers planned to hijack a plane and smash it into Manhattan, and anyone who has flown over Manhattan has surely thought about the damage an errant airliner could do. Anyone who honestly believes that such an attack was unimaginable, — as opposed to, perhaps, being something that a reasonable person would consider imaginable but unlikely — is sufficiently unimaginative that he/she shouldn’t be working in a position of responsibility.

Weirdly, the White House still seems to be trying to push this line, though, judging by its recent efforts to keep quiet a report suggesting that the President was warned on August 6 that Al Qaeda might try to hijack airplanes. Why? The question isn’t whether it was a possibility. The question was whether it should have been recognized as an imminent threat. The answer to the former is pretty clearly “of course.” The answer to the latter isn’t nearly as clear. But why pretend it’s not a question at all? Who do they think they’re fooling?

UPDATE: Subramanian also notes:

However, while discussing blogs and newspapers, you miss one hugely important point in favor of blogs – the ability to mark corrections on articles. A responsible blogger should always go back and mark the permlinks in case of errors etc. The Times cant. Which is why it is vulnerable to articles like Rich Lowry’s. In fact, over the last few weeks, it is the NY Times which has done fine reporting showing that its own initial reports are misstated. However, the original articles were on the front page and will be read by future generations on microfilm – without the later qualifications.

Excellent point. The character of newspapers makes it harder for them to seamlessly correct errors than it is for, say, blogs. [So why do many people consider them more reliable than blogs? — Ed. Good question!] But making the original versions of articles show evidence of correction is a good idea. Linda Seebach suggests, rightly, that I don’t give the technological problems with this enough attention. But I think it’s important to come as close to this ideal as possible.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Vish doesn’t like it, but other readers can’t get enough of that sweet, sweet NYT blogging. Hank Fenster writes: “I, for one, am following
the NY Times stuff with great interest.” And Bob Spretnak emails:

Is this a Milli Vanilli moment for American journalism? Y’know … passing off the work of someone else as your own, with the public being shocked and angered at the first revelation. Of course, re Milli Vanilli, the public eventually accepted the notion of lip synching (see, e.g., Spears, Britney), but nevertheless Fab & Rob — around whom the scandal originally broke — remained pariahs in perpetuity.

The Jayson Blair scandal is the journalistic equivalent of Enron — massive fraud and deceit. Bragg is Milli Vanilli, minus the braided mophead hair.

And if the NY Times does equal Milli Vanilli, does that make Howell Raines Frank Farian?

(PS: You aren’t blogging about the NY Times ENOUGH.)

Hmm. Well, you can’t please everybody, so — to quote that great journalistic philosopher Ricky Nelson — I guess I’ll have to please myself. And we can at least be grateful that we’ve been spared the hair.

ANOTHER UPDATE: James Lileks explains how to write a New York Times feature story, and offers this observation:

Yes, you can take some stringer’s notes and compose a story, but the difference between that an a piece you wrote from your own research is the difference between a Penthouse Forum letter and your recollection of your wedding night.

Indeed.

THIS JACK SHAFER STORY on Rick Bragg misses some notes, I think. First, despite the advertisement in the title, Shafer’s story doesn’t, in fact, refute Bragg’s claim that “everybody does it.” (Of course — though it’s not disclosed — the titles to pieces aren’t usually written by the authors, so that might be Shafer’s fault. But would the average reader know that?) Shafer rather uncritically accepts a New York Times spokeswoman’s statement that seems to suggest — but that doesn’t actually say — that Bragg’s behavior was unusual for the Times. He doesn’t, and the Times doesn’t, respond to Bragg’s claim that his editors encouraged him to parachute into places just long enough to get a dateline for a story that was really written elsewhere. He also doesn’t fully address the treatment of that issue in this Wall Street Journal story, even though he mentions the story on other points. But the WSJ story includes this statement:

The Times says nonstaff journalists are often used to conduct interviews, provide research assistance or help stake out the scene of news events, especially on tight deadlines, but don’t receive bylines when their contribution is routine. They may receive one “when their pieces reflect unusual enterprise or unusual writing style,” according to a written statement provided by the Times.

Indeed, some Times staffers expressed surprise at Mr. Bragg’s suspension because using material from stringers and assistants without giving credit is common practice at the paper, owned by New York Times Co.

Shafer also suggests that Bragg was doing something tricky by using Wes Yoder as a stringer, but again, the WSJ story seems to suggest that Howell Raines must have been aware of this practice, which would devastate any case that Bragg was putting one over on his bosses. Here’s the key passage:

Indeed, when Times Executive Editor Howell Raines, an Alabama native, visited Birmingham to watch the trial, Mr. Yoder says he sat with the Times’ top editor in the courtroom and they spoke at length. “It wasn’t like Rick was hiding anything from Howell, or anyone else at the Times,” Mr. Yoder says. Mr. Raines went to dinner at least once with Mr. Bragg and Mr. Yoder, Mr. Yoder says.

It’s not open-and-shut, but it’s awfully damned suggestive. Could these guys have really had dinner, talked shop (inevitably) and not parted with Howell Raines knowing what was going on? It seems doubtful, and it’s hard to imagine a journalist taking the word of a flack for any other corporation under these circumstances, but that’s what Shafer’s doing when he concludes that Bragg was guilty of “deceit” by using Yoder on the story.

Shafer’s on his strongest ground when he suggests that the “you are there” tone of the Apalachicola story is deceptive in the sense that it gives the impression that Bragg was there a lot more than he really was. This is pretty strong — but if it’s true, then as Jeff Jarvis points out, every TV reporter is committing unethical journalism by producing reports that give an entirely false impression of how much original reporting he or she is doing, and of what happens when and where. (Jonah Goldberg says the same thing).

It seems to me that there are two questions here: what’s fair to the stringers, and what’s fair to the readers. Where the stringers are concerned, I think it’s all a question of contract and expectations. If they’re promised a byline they should get one. If they’re not, then they’re not entitled to one. And if there’s some widespread journalistic norm (as there is, I believe, among comedy writers where everyone in the room when a joke is written gets credit) that everyone involved gets a credit, then apparently it’s not that widespread. And it’s very notable that Yoder isn’t the one complaining here. In fact, he’s defending Bragg.

From the reader’s standpoint it’s trickier: What do readers want to know? What do they care about? Jarvis again: “My own mother used to tell me about stories she’d just read in the Chicago Tribune and I used to have to say, ‘Yeah, Ma, I know, I wrote that.’ Reporters’ own mothers don’t notice their bylines.” Readers do want to know whether they can trust the reporting. Bylines can be a proxy for trust — or distrust, when it’s, say, Robert Fisk — but usually only insiders care. The average reader, wisely or foolishly, almost certainly pays more attention to the institutional imprimatur than to the reporter’s name. I would certainly favor adding individual accountability, and thus bringing the Times up to the standards of weblogs, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it’s ethically required.

Which returns to the original question: What, exactly, did Rick Bragg do that was so much worse than what other reporters at the Times do that it justifies a suspension? Shafer’s piece doesn’t answer that, beyond making this unsupported general statement:

Although other Times stringers, interns, and staffers have alleged cases in which reporting for the Times was improperly credited, none has alleged to me a provable violation as dramatic as Bragg’s. In general, it’s a point of pride for newspaper reporters not to slough the reporting off on assistants.

“None has alleged to me.” “In general, it’s a point of pride.” That’s not very strong stuff, really. It just raises more questions.

It’s possible, of course, that — despite the Wall Street Journal report and the emails I got here over the weekend — these practices aren’t really widespread at the Times. If Shafer’s piece had demonstrated that, then it would have provided at least a partial answer to the question of what Bragg did wrong. But Shafer’s piece doesn’t demonstrate that so much as it simply asserts it.