I’m reading the Sunday New York Times and drinking coffee at McDonalds while I procrastinate about doing the real work of the day.

The Sunday print edition of The Times is about half the size that it used to be. The pages are smaller, there are fewer of them, and whole sections have been eliminated. Partly, it’s because of the recession. Mostly, it’s because there are fewer readers and thus lower advertising revenue. But it’s still a substantial newspaper, one of the few remaining examples of the species.

It’s also, as Churchill said of Russia, a mystery wrapped in an enigma.

During the Bush-Cheney nightmare, The Times slavishly suppressed any stories that the administration wanted to keep secret, such as torture, illegal wiretapping, and anomalies in the official story of the 9/11 attacks. At the same time, it enthusiastically front-paged administration propaganda that it knew, or should have known, was false, such as the myth of Iraqi WMDs and various provocateur-fabricated “terror plots.”

Now, however, The Times is printing secrets all over the place. Partly, it might be because Executive Editor Bill Keller is ashamed of his actions during the Bush-Cheney years. Partly, it’s probably because he isn’t as afraid of the Obama administration as he was of Bush and Cheney.

Machiavelli, Nixon, and Obama

The Bush-Cheney regime asked a simple question to get people’s cooperation: “If you cross us, would you prefer to have your back broken or your neck broken?”

The Obama administration, however, wants to sit down and reason with you. If progressives say that white is white and Wall Street Republicans say that white is black, Obama’s instinct is to split the difference and say that white is gray. But as soon as he makes that concession, Wall Street Republicans insist that gray is black, and the negotiations begin again. Inch by inch, compromise by compromise, working Americans get scr*wed.

It’s not for nothing that Machiavelli said it’s better for a prince to be feared than to be loved.

We can see the difference not only in news media but in Congress, where obstructionist Republicans and spineless Democrats blocked or weakened legislation vitally needed by working and unemployed Americans. They’re not afraid of crossing the Obama administration as they were of Bush-Cheney. They’re more afraid of Wall Street, Fox News, and Glenn Beck.

Another brilliant political thinker, less admired than Machiavelli, was — believe it or not — disgraced U.S. President Richard Nixon. As president, he tried to make people think he was slightly crazy, so that they believed his actions were not rationally predictable: “If you set him off, Heaven knows what he’d do: he might start a nuclear war!” Nixon called it his “madman theory.” Of course, it was a variation on Machiavelli, whose work Nixon had read.

Obama suffers from the opposite fault. He seems very calm and rational, so his actions and reactions are quite predictable. It enables his adversaries to play him like a violin.

Reporters Sneak Facts Past Censorship

The Times still carries water for the government, if less consistently than it did during the Bush-Cheney era. Having worked as a newspaper reporter in Washington DC, I can see that Times reporters often try to “sneak” forbidden facts past management censorship.

One news story about the collapse of the World Trade Center towers after the 9/11 attacks noted, far down toward the end of the article, that (a) in addition to the two towers, WTC Building 7 collapsed but hadn’t been hit by anything; and (b) no comparable buildings before or since 9/11 have ever collapsed due to fire or airplane impacts. The reporter knew.

Another news story about the recent Wikileaks release of Afghan war documents dutifully parroted the government’s line that Wikileaks had not sought the Pentagon’s help in redacting potentially harmful information. But further down in the article, near the bottom, it recounted how Wikileaks  contacted the Pentagon and sought its help to do exactly what the same article earlier said Wikileaks had not done. The reporter knew.

It’s how things work sometimes. When I was a reporter, I once wrote an important article about government security measures that was accurate and had no classified information. The newspaper’s editor re-wrote the first two paragraphs to say exactly the opposite of what the rest of the article documented. The theory was that most people wouldn’t read the entire article, which still had my byline. Anyone who read the whole article must have thought I was nuts.

Bringing Democracy to Iraq

On the other side, there’s still plenty of propaganda in The Times.  A “Week in Review” article about “Winning, Losing, and War” states:

As the last officially designated American combat forces left Iraq, television cameras caught the exultation of a soldier finally heading home.

“We won!” he yelled. “It’s over! America, we brought democracy to Iraq!”

When I first read that, I thought of the incident years earlier when news media reported that Iraqis had spontaneously pulled down a statue of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Of course, the whole thing was staged by the Bush-Cheney administration for propaganda purposes, and many of the people pulling down the statue weren’t even Iraqis, having been flown in as actors for the “unreality TV” show.

Did a soldier really yell that nonsense about bringing democracy to Iraq? Possibly. Was the soldier instructed to say it, and was the incident staged for propaganda purposes? Almost certainly, and the reporter had to know it.

Fearless Leader Bush

But of course, we all remember how Fearless Leader Bush called Americans to arms in 2001-2002, saying that “it’s time we brought democracy to Iraq.”

Oops. He didn’t say that. He said that dat debbil Saddam Hussein, whose only difference from Bush and Cheney was that they dress better, had nookular bombs and anthrax-spraying aerial drones that he was going to unleash on American cities. Darth Cheney went on TV to say that “we know where the weapons labs are.”

General Colin “Uncle Tom” Powell went before the United Nations with a faked slide show purporting to prove that Iraq was bristling with illegal WMDs. Administration officials and surrogates also peddled the false story that Saddam Hussein had been involved in the 9/11 attacks, thereby to provide a fig leaf of legality to an otherwise naked act of aggression.

The Bush-Cheney regime didn’t invade Iraq to make it into a democracy. Bush and Cheney lied and frightened Americans into supporting the war:

• Because they wanted to conquer and loot the country.
• Because Dubya wanted the glory of being a “war prezadent.”
• Because they wanted to enrich their friends and military contractors.
• Because they wanted to regain control of Iraqi oil resources for themselves and their friends in the oil industry.
• Because they wanted to satisfy their perverse lust for murder and destruction.
• Because they wanted to increase the threat of terrorist attacks, real and imaginary, so that they could destroy the tattered remains of Constitutional protections for ordinary Americans.

Saddam Hussein is dead. Bush and Cheney are still walking around free, and they will be supported in luxury by taxpayers for the rest of their evil lives. You couldn’t write this stuff as fiction. Nobody would believe it.

Sarah Palin reads crib notes written on the palm of her hand. Source: The New York Times.

What do President Obama, mosques, Cuba, and Sarah Palin’s hand have in common?

No, it has nothing to do with how many Republicans it takes to screw in a light bulb.

I might be over-thinking a few things here, so take this as speculation.

President Obama didn’t need to take a public stand about the building of a mosque near “ground zero,” where some of the 9/11 false-flag attacks took place. But he did.

A lot of Fox-addled Republicans already think that Obama is a secret Muslim, so that move was guaranteed to confirm their suspicions and drive them (more) nuts. Many “moderate” voters, seeing them on television, will recognize how crazy they are. Did Obama plan it that way?

Obama didn’t need to ease travel restrictions to Cuba. But he apparently plans to do it.

Most of the same Fox-addled Republicans who think that Obama is a secret Muslim also believe that he’s a Godless Communist™, so that move was guaranteed to confirm their suspicions and drive them (more) nuts. Many “moderate” voters, seeing them on television, will recognize how crazy they are. Did Obama plan it that way?

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin didn’t need to write crib notes on the palm of her hand, where TV cameras would be guaranteed to show them to the world.

Most of the people who admire Sarah Palin seem to have low self-esteem and very little education. They believe (often incorrectly) that they’re stupid. Sarah Palin’s crib notes were guaranteed (a) to be noticed and (b) to tell her followers, “See? I’m stupid, just like you! I’m one of you!”

Ms. Palin is certainly ignorant and interested only in self-promotion, but I don’t believe that she’s actually stupid. In general, people who aren’t her fans already think she’s stupid, so her crib notes won’t change their opinion. However, people who are her fans seem to think that they, themselves, are stupid. Palin’s crib notes confirm that she represents them. Did Palin’s puppetmasters plan it that way?

As I said, maybe I’m over-thinking this. But it seems possible that President Obama and Palin’s puppetmasters are playing a very tricky game with these moves.

As an aside, let’s have a show of hands: Does anyone believe that Palin writes her own Twitter tweets? Or that she wrote any of the books, articles, or speeches attributed to her? No, of course not.

“You furnish the pictures and I’ll furnish the war,” wrote newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst to his reporter in Cuba in 1898.

Hearst was using his news media empire to promote a war against Spain so that the United States could seize the Spanish colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. And just as with the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, a false-flag attack (the sinking of the U.S.S. Maine) was used to create a casus belli.

The rulers of countries have traditionally used news media to promote wars. Under the Bush-Cheney regime, The New York Times and cable news shows constantly promoted false stories about “threats” by Iraq against the United States, just as they currently hype false stories about the supposed threat posed by Iran.

The goal was and is to provide a pretext for aggression against those countries. It doesn’t do any good for the American people, for the soldiers on both sides who are wounded or killed, or for the non-combatants in those countries who are slaughtered. But it lets slimy politicians pose as heroes: “war prezadents,” as Dubya Bush put it. It does lots of good for weapons manufacturers and other war profiteers. And it does lots of good for the government officials and their friends who loot the conquered countries, and into whose pockets that loot disappears.

Two recent events prompted those thoughts.

First, I was sitting in a coffee shop drinking coffee and doing some work. As usual in such places, there were several television screens tuned to “news” shows. One of the screens is always tuned to Fox News, where the hosts typically agitate for war, push ever more tax cuts for the rich, and debate about whether President Obama hates all Americans or just white people.

Another screen was tuned to the Headline News Network (HLN), which seems like a news version of the Lifetime cable TV channel: if I recall Lifetime’s slogan, “television for women, and men are no damn good.”

Cable TV News Is Not Serious

TV hostess Jane Velez-Mitchell (left) interviews comedienne Lily Tomlin.

One of the talk-show hostesses, Jane Velez-Mitchell, looks like a cartoon caricature of an overly made-up and coiffed celebrity. Her perpetually pursed lips make her look like she just swallowed a bug and is trying to cough it up.

If you go to the CNN Web site, you can find out more than you ever wanted to know about Ms. Velez-Mitchell, including her “lifelong battle with alcoholism” and the fact that she recently came out as a lesbian (mazel tov). And in fairness, I found out why her lips look so weird: she was born in 1955, which makes her 54 years old, and she’s undoubtedly “had a little work done.” She does look pretty good for 54: I wouldn’t have guessed she was that old. Her shows typically deal with celebrities, nasty divorce cases, custody disputes, and lurid insinuations that someone might or might not have kidnapped a child / murdered a cheerleader / and so forth.

Nancy Grace

The other notable hostess is Nancy Grace, a former prosecutor with a trademark sneer who seems like a pretty nasty piece of work. After being cited several times for ethical misconduct as a prosecutor, Grace became a TV commentator. Her shows cover pretty much the same ground as Ms. Velez-Mitchell’s, albeit with a meaner edge.

The first time I ever heard of Ms. Grace was in 2006, when she used her show to browbeat a mother whose two-year-old child had disappeared. The day after Grace insinuated on her TV show that the mother was involved in the disappearance, the mother committed suicide. Grace also hyped a prosecutor’s false accusations that Duke University lacrosse players had raped a black stripper. Later, the accused players were exonerated and the prosecutor who brought the charges was disbarred for misconduct. But Ms. Grace walked away clean, her trademark sneer intact.

Cable TV News Hypes a “Threat” from North Korea

What brought all this to mind was the headline that the HLN channel flashed this morning along the bottom of the TV screen: “North Korea threatens U.S., South Korea with nuclear deterrence.”

What?! North Korea is threatening us? Why, those cheeky little yellow bas**rds! We’d better attack them right away so they don’t threaten us anymore.

Take a breath, people. North Korea is “threatening us with deterrence.” In other words, if we attack them, they’ll counter-attack. The nerve of those foreign devils!

Of course, we could just not attack them, but what would be the fun (and profit) in that?

The Moral Equivalent of War

"Pragmatism and Other Essays" by William James.

The second thing that led me to these musings was an essay I read last night by William James (1842 – 1910) and titled “The Moral Equivalent of War.” James, an American philosopher / psychologist who taught at Harvard and was “the father of American psychology,” is too little known these days. His essays “Human Immortality” and “The Will to Believe” are classic statements of a rational basis for Judeo-Christian religious faith.

In “The Moral Equivalent of War,” James surveys the psychology that leads to war:

We inherit the warlike type … Dead men tell no tales, and if there were any tribes of other type than this, they have left no survivors. Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won’t breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars.

But, James notes, we have a problem. Civilization has made us increasingly aware of the conflict between our actions and the moral principles we profess:

At the present day, civilized opinion is a curious mental mixture. The military instincts and ideals are as strong as ever, but we are confronted by reflective criticisms which sorely curb their ancient freedom. Innumerable writers are showing up the bestial side of military service.

And then he gets to the point most relevant today:

Pure loot and mastery seem no longer morally avowable motives, and pretexts must be found for attributing them solely to the enemy.

You see? It’s not that our rulers wanted to conquer and loot Afghanistan and Iraq. They attacked us! Well, they didn’t attack us, but they wanted to. Or planned to. Or might have at some point in the future. So we had to attack them first.

It recalls a comment made by another American writer, Mark Twain, in Letters from the Earth:

So what do you think of the human mind? I mean, in case you believe that there is a human mind.

I believe that there is a human mind, but some days, I wonder about it a bit.

Rachel Maddow interviews U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul. Source: The Rachel Maddow Show, MSNBC.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow last night interviewed Dr. Rand Paul, the recently-anointed Republican candidate for U.S. Senator from Kentucky. Like his father, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), Rand Paul is both a medical doctor and a libertarian.

Ms. Maddow was shocked, shocked (!) to learn that Rand Paul does not support the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

That tells us a couple of things.

First, it tells us that Ms. Maddow was faking her astonishment about Dr. Paul’s viewpoint. As a former Rhodes scholar with a doctorate in government from Oxford University, Ms. Maddow — make that “Dr. Maddow” — must know that opposition to civil-rights law is a standard libertarian position. Whether that position is right or wrong is not, for the moment, at issue. What is relevant is that almost all libertarians believe in it. She must have known that fact before she interviewed Dr. Paul.

Her little deception really doesn’t bother me. Dr. Maddow is a delightful, intelligent, and informed commentator. She’s also in the infotainment business, so a bit of play-acting and feigned surprise are entirely within her job description.

Second, it tells us that like most libertarians, Dr. Paul suffers from what my old teacher Paul Kurtz used to call “principle-itis.” Dr. Paul is so enamoured of abstract principles that he will follow them to the bitter end, even if it hurts people and causes injustice. He doesn’t think that he’s doing wrong: he’s just taking an ethical stand and sticking to it no matter what.

On libertarian grounds, the Civil Rights Act is indeed objectionable. Because it outlaws racial discrimination in public places, it limits how owners of private businesses can run their firms.

To most libertarians, private property rights are sacred. If a restaurant owner doesn’t want to serve black people, or a factory owner doesn’t want to hire them, then libertarians believe that the owners’ property rights trump everything else. Libertarians might disapprove of racial discrimination, as I’m sure that Dr. Paul does, but they think that people should be free to discriminate with their own property.

Where Dr. Paul goes wrong is that he elevates doctrinal purity above the welfare of actual people and above the moral quality of society. The right to control the use of one’s property is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important. It’s also important to ensure, as much as is practical, that all members of society are treated fairly and decently.

It’s true that forcing racist business owners to serve or hire black people causes them some unhappiness. But compare “some unhappiness” of racist business owners with the pervasive unhappiness of other people who have no wealth, no dignity, and no fair treatment. The moral situation is clear.

Property rights are important but not absolute. It’s not abstract principles that are most important in society, but the welfare and happiness of actual, living people. And the welfare of actual, living people is what justifies occasionally setting aside libertarian ideological purity to achieve a more just and compassionate society. That’s what Dr. Paul and other libertarians have yet to learn.

Today’s New York Times has a forum about the Cheney gang’s attempt to demonize lawyers who represented accused terrorists during the Bush-Cheney era.

Before reading the exchange, I noticed that Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz was one of the participants. I wondered what position he would take.

In the past, he’s represented unpopular clients such as Claus von Bulow and has argued vigorously for their right to counsel — a right which is long established in European and American law. He’s also smart enough to recognize the stark contradiction between those facts and the Cheney gang’s propaganda campaign.

At the same time, Dershowitz is in the neoconservative orbit and could be expected to support anything for a war either against Islam or against those whom he perceives as Israel’s adversaries. In the United States, “accused terrorist” has been seen as roughly synonymous with “accused Muslim,” so it’s not much of a stretch.

In the end, Dershowitz did not disappoint. He acknowledged that accused terrorists, including sympathizers and “fellow travelers” (look it up), had a right to legal counsel. But he then drew a moral equivalence between providing legal counsel to suspects and providing legal cover to the Bush-Cheney regime for torturing prisoners. Providing the latter is the same kind of war crime for which Nazi judges were tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to long prison terms.

Give Dershowitz credit: He’s an advocate. No matter how immoral or irrational his position, he’ll argue it well.

Readers of a good newspaper seldom have any shortage of blog topics. Quite the contrary: the question becomes how many of the day’s topics there is time to cover.

Of course, good newspapers are few these days. In the United States, there are The New York Times and the McClatchy newspapers. The Wall Street Journal‘s news pages are still pretty good, even if its editorial pages have gone the way of Fox News. Most other remaining newspapers are corporate pablum unfit to line the bottom of a parrot cage.

In the UK, there’s The Times, as always: published since 1785. In spite of being owned by Rupert Murdoch, The Times is a thoroughly respectable and quite intelligent newspaper. American readers might find it a bit challenging. For a slightly less staid and more opinionated perspective in the UK, there’s The Guardian. Also popular is The Daily Mail, roughly the UK counterpart of The New York Post.

Drug Industry Lobbyists Write Speeches for Congresscritters

Today’s Sunday New York Times, as usual, brings a surfeit of topics. The front page reveals that at least 42 Congressional opponents of health care reform got their talking points directly from a lobbyist for Genentech, one of the world’s largest biotechnology companies. Presumably because it could not be verified, the article does not state whether the talking points were delivered in brown paper bags full of money.

Teenybopper Vampire Stardom — Worth It?

The Arts and Leisure section leads with a profile of Kristen Stewart, a teenaged actress who is pop culture’s flavor of the month by virtue of her starring role in the lucrative “Twilight” vampire movies.

She comes across as nice enough, though obviously no Mayim Bialik in the brains department: very few people are. I don’t know if I should envy her for all the money she makes or pity her for growing up in the cut-throat world of showbiz and the unforgiving glare of publicity. Each of us has his or her path to walk, and we all encounter a mix of good and bad. She’ll probably be okay.

What Should We Call This Decade?

The “Week in Review” section covers a range of topics both serious and less so. It leads with an article about what we should call the first decade of the 21st century:

“You know the rules: coin a pithy, reductive phrase that somehow encapsulates the multitude of events, trends, triumphs, and calamities of the past 10 years.”

Some of the suggestions are “the era of misplaced anxiety” and “the decade of disruptions.” Personally, I favor some variation on “the Bush-Cheney nightmare.” Whatever else happened since the year 2000, the United States and the world will need a long time to repair the damage from the Bush-Cheney regime’s irresponsibility and criminality. That overshadows everything else that occurred during the period. A good start would be to arrest and try the regime’s principal actors, but that’s not going to happen.

Why People Oppose Gay Marriage but Really Don’t Care That Much

Another article puzzles over the fact that most Americans oppose “gay marriage” but still adore Ellen Degeneres, the lesbian comedienne who recently married TV actress Portia de Rossi.

I, too, oppose gay marriage and support civil unions, but it’s not on my top 10 list of important issues. My sense is that outside of fire-breathing religious circles, opposition to gay marriage is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Most people have at least an inchoate sense that marriage has always been about having children and raising them in a traditional family. The idea of altering a fundamental social institution to make a minority of a minority feel better about itself strikes them as excessive. They also realize that the word “marriage” isn’t needed for gays to have relationships and even marital rights. They’re fine with gays having relationships. They just want marriage to stay marriage, and not be turned into something else for the sake of political correctness.

The “God Gene,” or “Why Religion Is All in Your Head”

Another article deals with “The Evolution of the God Gene,” and speculates that people believe in God because it gave their ancestors an evolutionary advantage over the non-religious. The author does try, albeit unsuccessfully, to be even-handed in adjudicating between theists and atheists:

That religious behavior was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has shaped the human body, why not the mind too? What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then supplies the content of what is learned.

The article’s main thrust, however, remains its conclusion that people believe in God because their brains are wired that way, not because God actually does exist.

But the argument proves too much. People’s brains are also wired to support three-dimensional vision and hearing, which presumably conferred an evolutionary advantage over species without those abilities. And almost no one argues that people see and hear a three-dimensional world just because their brains are wired that way, and not because reality corresponds in some manner to what they perceive. The same applies to belief in God.

Honestly, I think that I prefer Richard Dawkins’s over-zealous hostility toward belief in God to the kind of condescending “pat on the head” that believers get from atheist writers who are trying to be fair.

Why subscribe to a print newspaper when you get news “for free” on the Web?

I subscribe to the print edition of The New York Times for several reasons.

My first reason is personal: I like newspapers. I always have. As a high school and college student, I was editor of my school papers and worked part-time as a copy boy for a “real” newspaper — one of the two major dailies in my city. After I earned my first doctorate, I worked for several years as a Washington DC newspaper reporter, editor, and columnist.

One of my fondest high school memories is of sitting at a long-obsolete linotype machine in the basement of The Chicago Tribune building. Newspapers used linotype machines to set hot metal type that they used to print each edition. The Trib’s editor was one of my mentors and arranged it so that I could not only sit at the machine, but even operate it for a minute. The editor has since passed away, but he made a big difference in my life.

I never took a journalism class in school because it would have been a monumental waste of time. The basics of news writing and editing can be learned in a week. What a journalist needs beyond that are insatiable curiosity, the ability to think logically and write clearly, a certain amount of skepticism, an understanding of human nature, and a broad educational background from school or from reading.

For the classic, definitive portrayal of a real journalist and what newspaper work is really like, watch the 1958 movie “Teacher’s Pet” starring Clark Gable as a grizzled city editor who crosses swords with a journalism professor played by Doris Day. For an updated version, see 1994′s “The Paper,” with Michael Keaton as the editor of a New York tabloid who gets into a fistfight with the paper’s business manager (Glenn Close) when she tries to stop publication of an important news story.

My second reason has less to do with print newspapers per se than with why I subscribe to The New York Times when it’s been over 10 years since I lived in New York.

These days, we often hear about local newspapers being closed down: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the latest high-profile victim. The Web site Paper Cuts tracks newspaper closings in the United States. However, corporate consolidation and avarice killed most local newspapers in spirit long before it killed them in body. It starved them of resources and treated them as nothing more than investment vehicles, no different from hog futures or a cement company. In place of articles written by the papers’ own reporters (who’d been fired), their pages were filled with cheap, generic articles from the national newswires. In place of editors who were longtime local residents and knew their communities, we got overpaid hatchet-men from corporate headquarters. The New York Times is one of the few relatively credible newspapers left around. Even with all of its shortcomings, it seems to understand what a newspaper is supposed to be.

Once upon a time, newspapers were considered a public trust, not merely an investment out of which one squeezed the highest possible short-term profit. Newspaper owners were often local tycoons who wanted status more than they needed money. They accepted lower profits as a badge of honor for the service they provided to their communities. Sadly, that is no longer true.

My third reason is that it’s our duty in a civilized society to inform ourselves about events (political and otherwise) affecting that society. On television and radio news, twenty-second sound bites pass for “straight news” while screaming commentators repeat partisan talking points in the guise of analysis. Opinion sites such as The Huffington Post are valuable sources of information but don’t do straight news reporting. None of those sources is a substitute for the careful, detailed reporting and analysis that newspapers at their best can provide. I’m not saying that they always do provide it, but the desire and the capacity are there.

I’ve known a lot of newspaper reporters in my life. Despite the criticism they get for alleged bias, most of them are dedicated to accuracy — and even beyond that, they are dedicated to truth. When I was a reporter, I took pride in the fact that my news writing revealed nothing about my personal beliefs: it was all facts, facts, and carefully neutral analysis. If I wanted to express an opinion about the news, I wrote an opinion column, but the news itself was sacred. My attitude was not unusual. The owners of newspapers might no longer see themselves as holders of a public trust, but most of their reporters still do. I want to support newspapers as a vital social institution while they work out the kinks of publishing (and staying in business) on the Web.

My fourth reason is that I’m willing to pay for a relatively reliable, complete news source. As I noted earlier, The New York Times isn’t perfect. Its shortcomings were on display during the Bush-Cheney nightmare when it published administration propaganda (such as Judith Miller’s articles about the supposed Iraqi threat) and censored news stories (such as the Bush administration’s illegal wiretapping, torture, and negligence or complicity in the 9/11 attacks) that would have exposed truths the administration wanted kept secret.

Imperfect as it is, however, The New York Times is still pretty good. When read with a skeptical eye (as Soviet citizens used to read Pravda and Izvestia) and supplemented by other news sources, it provides a great deal of valuable information.*

I believe that newspapers are mistaken to worry too much about all the “free content” available on the Internet. The reliability of that free content varies greatly. It takes research and analysis to separate the wheat from the chaff. A good newspaper does that job for the readers. It’s worth something. In fact, it’s worth a lot.

Whether it’s on paper or on the Web, thoughtful people are willing to pay for news that is relatively reliable and complete. Those people will always be a minority of the population, just as they were in the print era. Once newspapers shift to a paid Web subscription business model, their subscribers will be highly qualified prospects for Web advertising and the revenue stream it can provide. The same applies to the dwindling minority of us who still subscribe to print newspapers.

Newspapers don’t have to disappear. They simply have to evolve.

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*The New York Times’s credibility would be improved by the departure of Executive Editor Bill Keller, who presided over the paper’s serial errors and acts of cowardice during the Bush-Cheney years. In 2004, for example, Keller chose to suppress an article from two of his reporters about the Bush-Cheney administration’s illegal wiretapping of American citizens. By doing so, he deprived American voters of vital information and probably changed the outcome of the 2004 presidential election. We don’t know what other stories Keller spiked or why he did it. Even NYT Public Editor Byron Calame said that Keller had “stonewalled” in response to requests that he explain why he had suppressed the wiretapping story. If the two censored reporters hadn’t written a book whose publication was imminent, Keller might still be sitting on the story. The New York Times finally printed the wiretapping story just before the book was published.

Did the news media fail to do their jobs in covering the real-estate bubble that led to our current economic crisis?

Yes and no. Journalists have different roles. In particular, they function sometimes as news reporters and sometimes as commentators. Ideally, those roles are strictly separated, though it’s impossible to separate them completely.

When journalists function as news reporters, their job is simply to report the facts. Their personal opinions, no matter how true or well-founded, have no place in news reporting. Facts, facts, facts. Period. On the other hand, when journalists function as commentators, they’re free to analyze the facts and give their opinions.

As news reporters covering the real-estate bubble, they might have investigated and thought more deeply about the issues. They might have tried to find facts and sources that would expose the flaws, deceptions, and delusions involved in risky real estate practices, shady investment packages, and unrealistic expectations about mortgage-backed securities. On the other hand, even reporters assigned to a particular “beat” must cover a tremendous number of stories. They might have some expertise in the area, but can’t really be experts on the subject of every story. They have to rely on their sources and their instincts. If all the usual “expert witnesses” say that a financial practice is fine, and if it’s backed up by a lot of arcane mathematical models that no non-specialist could understand, then what’s a reporter to do?

As commentators, journalists are free to say what they think instead of simply reciting facts and quoting sources. But they’re still non-specialists trying to make sense of some fairly complicated issues.

There are two other aspects of the situation that merit attention. First, markets are moved not merely by facts but also by feelings: “animal spirits,” as the economist John Maynard Keynes phrased it. When people are feeling optimistic, markets go up and everyone is happy. When people are feeling pessimistic, markets go down and everyone is gloomy. When the market is going up, reporters don’t want to be the ones to say that on the basis of the facts, it should be going down. That’s especially true if all or most of the “experts” contradict them.

Second, even if reporters write something that challenges conventional wisdom, their editors often won’t print it. In this era of giant news media conglomerates, you usually don’t get to be the editor of a major newspaper or media outlet by being a good, principled journalist: you usually get there by being a ruthless, unprincipled corporate politician. A reporter who writes stories that challenge conventional wisdom probably won’t get them printed and almost certainly will hurt his or her career. Even if the articles are printed, it’ll be on page B14 beneath the fold, just under a story about the city councilman who was arrested in a raid on a brothel.

For example, search The New York Times archive for stories in 2002-2003 questioning the “Iraqi WMDs” propaganda that Times reporter Judith Miller wrote for the front pages. You won’t find much, and what you do find is very tepidly worded when compared to the stark assertions contained in the pro-WMD articles.

Yes, I wish that more reporters would rock the boat, and I wish that more editors were principled and honest. But it’s easy for me to criticize: my career isn’t on the line. Of course, it was on the line when I was a beat reporter in Washington DC and I rocked the boat. That’s one reason why I’m no longer in that line of work.