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Why
Grill Brill?
William Saletan's "Brill's Con Game" raises
only one interesting question: Why is the press so afraid of Steven Brill?
Short of cases of outright lying (à la Janet Cooke or Stephen Glass), I cannot
recall reporters so viciously going after one of their own. One answer is that
Brill has gone a long way toward turning off the golden spigot of leaks from
Kenneth Starr's office. The broader reason is that Brill has had the temerity
to breach the inky wall of silence that largely protects reporters from being
subject to the same rules of exposure they expect everyone else to live by.
Two of
Saletan's points are especially absurd. One is that it now apparently is not
enough to disclose the sources of the information in a story; Brill also should
have disclosed "[h]ow, and with whose input, [he chose] to focus his
investigation on Starr's manipulation of the press rather than Clinton's?" If
that is the new rule, why didn't Saletan disclose in his article how, and with
whose input, he chose to focus on Brill. What are his hidden motives? The other
bit of nonsense is the complaint that Brill relied on authority from the D.C.
Circuit Court of Appeals about the scope of Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure
6(e) but didn't cite supposed conflicting authority. The problem for Kenneth
Starr is that his grand jury is in the D.C. circuit and, unless and until the
Supreme Court takes up this issue, it is that court's rulings that bind him,
regardless what the rulings may be in other circuits. Brill, who trained as a
lawyer, understands that. Saletan does not.
-- Eric
Summergrad Washington
Slate 's Fragile Egos
Jacob
Weisberg in "Brill, Mote, and Beam" and William Saletan in "Brill's Con Game" both
display clear outrage at Brill's magazine piece. Their outrage was also shared
by the talking heads on all the Sunday shows. What comes across to an objective
viewer is that Weisberg, Saletan, and the press in general feel emotionally
that they are collectively above criticism and that Brill has violated a taboo.
I am surprised. I had thought better of Weisberg and Saletan. That they feel
their egos were punctured by even an intimation that the press was in the wrong
in its Starr coverage tells something about them.
-- Ed O'Connell
Overkill
on Brill
Little hard on Brill here,
aren't we? Two separate, exhaustive shots posted simultaneously?
When it comes to
accountability, the establishment media have the biggest glass jaw in the
world, and its pre-emptive atomic carpet bombing of Brill's Content only
proves it. Brill (or Drudge) tootles along and everyone in the
McLean/Russert/West 57 th Street axis whines and moans about
professionalism and standards. Then comes the CNN/ Time sarin story to
prove the "professionals" deserve all the scrutiny anyone else can muster.
Give the guy a shot. I'd
leave the strangulation-in-cradle attempts to CBS News.
Slate
is
part of the revolution, not the establishment. If you join the Old Guard aboard
the "torpedo Content before anyone's even read the piece in question"
bandwagon, it's less salutary for you.
On the
other hand, you did manage to use the great word "rebarbative" in the June 17
"Culturebox" ... so I'm not altogether unhappy.
-- Tom
Farmer Seattle
Steve
Brillos the Press
Thou dost
protest too much! Brill's magazine has accomplished with its first issue what
years of public criticism of the press could not. Now someone has done unto you
what you have been doing to others. Unbiased press ... hogwash!!!
--Gwendolyn M.
Johnson
We're
Not Boring! Honest!
Next time you describe the
Columbia Journalism Review in an article, it would be better if your
writer took a look at a few recent issues before typing. We call this
reporting. The soporific thing Jacob Weisberg so offhandedly invents in
"Brill, Mote, and Beam" bears no resemblance to CJR , and
we're surprised the false description got past your editors.
We invite
Slate
readers to come to their own conclusions. Check out the
contents page of our strong current (July-August) issue, or read some back
issues (including our own look at coverage of the Starr-Lewinsky saga, which
ran four months ago)--via our Web
site.
-- Mike Hoyt Senior
editor Columbia Journalism Review
Bugs in
the House
Permit me
to congratulate you on your fine sense of humor. In "Getting Buggy Wit It,"
Andrew Shuman wrote an excellent article on the joys of bug-finding and
bug-squashing, and on that same day you published the
Slate
table
of contents with bugs. Very droll! I had to chuckle when I used Netscape 4.04
on a Solaris 2.5.1 Sparc-5 and had the pleasure of seeing such things as "_14._
Kosovo. newrecycled FreeGlobal/Images/ClearDot.gif" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1
VSPACE=1>." It is sad that people who are using Microsoft Internet Explorer
do not have the opportunity to view the joke.
-- Randy Heath
Nobler
Amazon
In
"Moneybox" (June 19), James Surowiecki noted that the market
cap of Amazon.com was
larger than that of Barnes & Noble, leading him to conclude that the Street
values the offline stores at next to nothing. There's an alternative
explanation. My wife and I have been regular customers of Amazon, but we
recently tried barnesandnoble.com. Without revisiting the multiple e-mails and
telephone calls that we had to exchange before finally obtaining a book, the
experience left us more determined to shop with Amazon. More importantly, my
desire to walk into a physical Barnes & Noble shop has diminished. At least
for us, the online version of Barnes & Noble has reduced the value of the
offline version, thereby rationalizing the Street's valuation.
-- Steve
Philbrick
Rumors
for Breakfast
Regarding the dialogue
between Susan Estrich and David Brooks in "The Breakfast Table" (June 22): Now I know that I can't have a beer
with a friend in a public bar in Washington without being accused of
impropriety by one of President Clinton's ever-watchful partisans. So be it.
I'll make some concessions to the need to avoid imagined appearances of
impropriety. But I'll have a beer with anyone I damned well please.
To put in perspective the
conspiratorial inferences that Estrich strains to draw from seeing me with
Starr deputy Jackie Bennett at the Jefferson Hotel bar--a block or so from the
Washington Post , where I always go when I'm looking for a secure locale
in which to do furtive things--perhaps Estrich should know that I also had some
beers recently with a member of the Clinton defense team. We were at his home,
where no peeping partisans intruded.
To be clear: Jackie Bennett
was not leaking to me; he was not telling me what to write or say on
television; it was not a business appointment at all. Bennett, evidently
troubled and hurt by my former employer Steven Brill's ugly portrayal of him,
had asked if we could get together for a private and personal conversation to
help him understand why a man whose fairness I had mistakenly touted to Bennett
would write a catalog of falsehoods and distortions about Bennett and Starr,
painting them both as criminals. I had readily agreed, because I like Bennett
and I felt I owed him the best perspective I could give on Brill's article, the
extreme tendentiousness of which had surprised me. I had asked Bennett whether
we should find a spot where he would run no risk of catching flak by being seen
with me; Bennett had indicated that he was not going to let the risk of
encountering malicious gossipmongers dictate which bars he could frequent.
Our
conversation moved from Brill's article to other nonconfidential matters, such
as the legal rules curbing what Starr's office can say to reporters, to matters
like Bennett's sons, my daughters, mutual acquaintances, and other matters that
even so creative a mind as Brill's might have trouble painting as grand jury
secrets. After the arrival of Estrich, Bennett and I also wondered idly whether
she would seize the chance to misrepresent our conversation as something
unseemly, about which Bennett should be embarrassed. This she has now done.
Bennett was not embarrassed. I am not embarrassed. It is Estrich who should be
embarrassed, for having concocted a fantasy to serve her partisan agenda.
-- Stuart Taylor
Jr.
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