Bear on Blair Last week, l’Affaire Blair at the New York Times finally ended with the resignations of executive editor Howell Raines and managing editor Gerald Boyd. According to Jacques Steinberg’s account in the Times, “In front of dozens of reporters, editors, photographers and other newsroom staff members, many of whom sobbed audibly,” Raines said, “Remember, when a great story breaks out, go like hell.”
Steinberg points out the remark “could have been spoken by one of the role models Mr. Raines often cited to his staff, the legendary Alabama football coach Bear Bryant”–as in Paul “Bear” Bryant, who led his Crimson Tide to 323 victories, including six national championships. The Scrapbook found this sidenote irresistible and, thanks to CoachLikeaPro.com, offers here a few apropos sayings by one of college football’s winningest coaches:
–“It’s awfully easy to mouth off at your staff or chew out players, but if it’s bad, and you’re the head coach, you’re responsible. If we have an intercepted pass, I threw it. I’m the head coach. If we get a punt blocked, I caused it. A bad practice, a bad game, it’s up to the head coach to assume his responsibility.” It only took five weeks for Coach Raines to realize this applied to him too. Perhaps he should have shared this insight with publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who when reporter Jayson Blair’s many frauds and deceptions were revealed, said, “Let’s not begin to demonize our executives.”
–“The biggest mistake coaches make is taking borderline cases and trying to save them. I’m not talking about grades now, I’m talking about character.” A useful reminder for those like Raines who let diversity trump other institutional standards.
–“A good, quick, small team can beat a big, slow team any time.” As many have pointed out, pre-Internet, Raines would have survived the Blair scandal. But the combination of online critics and online venting by unhappy Times troops proved fatal.
–“I’m no innovator. If anything I’m a stealer or borrower. I’ve stolen or borrowed from more people than you can shake a stick at.” The Scrapbook especially endorses this insight of Bear Bryant’s. Indeed, Slate’s Jack Shafer went to CoachLikeaPro.com for many of these same quotes three weeks ago. We think they read even better now.
Smoke ’em If You Got ’em
Last week, when Surgeon General Richard Carmona testified before a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee that he would support the abolition of all tobacco products, a question formed on the lips of befuddled Americans everywhere: “We have a new surgeon general?”
The vast majority of citizens don’t pay much attention to the funny little man or woman who spends most of his time in office looking dapper in the Captain Crunch uniform, and The Scrapbook doesn’t blame them. For on the rare occasions we do pay attention, the surgeon general typically is manufacturing head-scratching health crises, such as when David Satcher decried our nation’s “conspiracy of silence when it comes to sexuality.” Or being a master of the obvious, as when Joycelyn Elders preached that onanism feels good.
So it is perhaps small surprise that even though his was the most ambitiously restrictive assertion by a public health official in the last 30 years, it still got bottom-of-the-front-page play in the Washington Post, right below “Girls Teach Teen Cyber Gab to FBI Agents.”
But Carmona’s desire to forcibly take our cigs away is troubling, if not downright menacing. How would he feel if The Scrapbook advocated the seizure of all fruity ceremonial outfits? When asked if he’d support the “abolition of all tobacco products,” Carmona responded, “I would at this point, yes.” He conceded that legislation is not his field, adding that “If Congress chose to go that way, that would be up to them. But I see no need for any tobacco products in society.” Funny, a lot of people feel the same way about surgeon generals.
What Wolfowitz Really Said (cont.)
The attempt to discredit Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz (and by extension the Bush administration’s decision to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime) continues apace. Our editorial last week noted how Vanity Fair rearranged quotes from a Wolfowitz interview to imply that the administration’s primary justification for war–Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program–was dishonest propaganda. The “Ah-ha!!!” among the antiwar crowd here and abroad was loud and relentless–until the Pentagon posted on its website a transcript of the entire interview, making clear what Wolfowitz actually said (there were several compelling reasons for the war, of which WMD was the least contentious).
During Wolfowitz’s trip to Asia last week, there seemed to be a worldwide contest to top Vanity Fair. In Singapore, he responded to a question about why the United States was treating North Korea and Iraq differently. The website of the London Guardian proceeded to run the following account:
“Oil was the main reason for military action against Iraq, a leading White House hawk has claimed, confirming the worst fears of those opposed to the U.S.-led war…. Asked why a nuclear power such as North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq, where hardly any weapons of mass destruction had been found, the deputy defence minister said: ‘Let’s look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically, we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil.'”
The Guardian, it turned out, had used a badly retranslated version of the quote from the German newspapers Der Tagesspiegel and Die Welt. Here’s what Wolfowitz actually said, from the Pentagon’s increasingly indispensable website:
“Look, the primary difference–to put it a little too simply–between North Korea and Iraq is that we had virtually no economic options with Iraq, because the country floats on a sea of oil. In the case of North Korea, the country is teetering on the edge of economic collapse and that I believe is a major point of leverage, whereas the military picture with North Korea is very different from that with Iraq. The problems in both cases have some similarities but the solutions have got to be tailored to the circumstances, which are very different.”
To make matters worse, the Guardian had previously published the correct quote when it ran an AP story reporting on the same event, under the headline “U.S. To Put Economic Pressure on N. Korea”! After getting slapped around silly by webloggers and others, the Guardian to its credit ran a correction on June 5 and pulled the “sea of oil” story from its website.
In their rush to convict the Bush administration of conducting the Iraq war under false pretenses, it seems some overheated journalists are wallowing in quite a sea of duplicity themselves.
End of the Catfight
Miller Beer’s catfight ads–in which scantily clad women wrestle in wet concrete about whether Miller Lite “Tastes great” or is “Less filling”–are coming to an end, the New York Times cheerfully reported last week. The spots are part of the “Storytellers” campaign for Miller Lite, in which friends swap yarns over a couple of beers. The wrestling babes are a fantasy of the beer-swilling men. Their female friends berate them for their sexist attitudes and (quite rightly) call the fantasy “unbelievable.” So is there a trend towards decorum and good taste? Hardly. Seems sales are disappointing, as they were before the ads’ debut early this year. To recap, if sex fails to sell, then Miller will stop selling with sex.
