A dispatch from Atlanta in today's New York Times quotes the president of Teachers College at Columbia University, Arthur Levine, as saying, "What Sept. 11 should have been is a signal that the canon ought to be expanded to include books like the Koran. Other than the Constitution, no work has had a larger impact on the United States." The editor of Smartertimes.com has a great deal of residual warm feeling toward Mr. Levine, but this remark of his is so ridiculous that one wonders whether he was misquoted. Some compassionate Times editor might have asked the reporter to check back with Mr. Levine and ask him if he really thinks that. Nothing illustrates Mr. Levine's error -- and the Times's error in printing his remark unchallenged -- quite so dramatically as a passage from another article in today's Times, this one a dispatch from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia: "'I have three Bibles,' said one M.P. at an American military installation, who said he was able to attend Protestant services. 'Just let someone try to take them away.'" If the Constitution counts, so too should probably the Declaration of Independence, the Seneca Falls Declaration and the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Not to mention the Bible.
Robust: An article in the business section of today's New York Times reports that "in terms of building and serving an audience," the online magazine Slate "was notably successful." The Times cites a statistic that claims Slate "serves 2,320,000 unique users a month," a number that the Times news article describes as "robust." The Times article also claims that Slate "along with Salon is one of the few significant publishing enterprises remaining on the Web." It makes you wonder if the Times definition of "significant" means "liberal." The Drudge Report, for instance, reports that it receives 3.8 million visits a day and 97 million a month. Compared to that, Slate's performance doesn't look exactly "robust." And Slate, unlike the Drudge Report, is backed with a lavish budget from Microsoft. That budget supports a staff that vastly outnumbers that of the Drudge Report. The Slate monthly viewership figures aren't robust compared to television or to the weekly print newsmagazines. Why doesn't the Times just tell readers how much traffic Slate gets, give some relevant comparison points, and let readers decide for themselves whether Slate's performance is "robust," "notably successful" or anemic. This is supposed to be a news article, after all, not a review or an opinion column. Notably absent from the Times article is the number of dollars Microsoft has burned through on Slate since 1996 in pursuit of a profit that still hasn't materialized.
Disclosure: Arthur Levine once taught a class that the editor of Smartertimes.com took in college. And the writer of the article about Slate in today's Times has a forthcoming magazine article about the New York Sun, a newspaper in which the editor of Smartertimes.com is involved. Smartertimes.com disagrees with the proposition that these sorts of disclosures should be necessary, but the present environment with respect to this disclosure issue is so highly charged that the editor of Smartertimes.com will go along until he has a chance to make his case in more detail elsewhere.