The obituary pages of today's New York Times carry an article about the life and death of Vernon Walters, a former American ambassador at the United Nations and deputy director of central intelligence. An obituary of Walters also appeared in yesterday's New York Times. It's understandable that the Times would sometimes run the obituary of the same person two days in a row -- the obit may only make late editions of the paper on the first day, and may only be in early editions on another day. But what's interesting in this case is that some of the dismissiveness that characterized the obituary when it ran in yesterday's paper has been deleted in today's paper.
Yesterday's Times obituary of Walters, for instance, included a paragraph that began, "General Walters, who never married, may not have made history in his career, but he saw it firsthand." In today's Times, the sentence has been edited. It now reads, "He had many opportunities in his career to witness the making of history."
Walters gets treated better today than he did yesterday, but he still doesn't get treated as well as a fashion designer named Pauline Trigere, whose obituary the Times editors apparently judged worthy of significantly more space than Walters'. Trigere's obit also ran twice, first in yesterday's paper and then again in today's.
Nesting: Wading through the nine sections of New York editions of today's New York Times, readers will come across a "special section" titled "Nesting." This is about people, not animals, and appears to be coverage indistinguishable from what appears every Thursday in the House and Home section of the Times, every Sunday in the Real Estate section of the Times, and on some Sundays in "Part Two" issues of the New York Times magazine. Why the Times editors felt the need, strictly from a news perspective, to throw a special Friday section together on the topic is a mystery. It looks suspiciously like they were just trying to help the business side meet some advertising revenue goal. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it's an interesting illustration of the way that news space in the Times is allocated not strictly on the basis of newsworthiness but on the basis of what is likely to attract advertisements. You aren't likely to pick up the Times one Friday, for instance, and see a 26-page special section on poverty in Africa or on crime in the Bronx.