So Few Stories, So Many Pages to Fill
The four remaining Republican presidential candidates must rank alongside the paramecium and the white lab rat as the most examined organisms in the natural world. Perhaps the fine-toothed comb has been too fine, because the media seems to be running out of new angles on each man’s history. The Times scooped the Post — if one can call an article on a forty-year-old campaign “scooping” — with its story about Lenore Romney’s 1970 Senate campaign. A day later, the Post trotted out its own take on Mitt Romney’s mother. It was a neat reversal from two months ago, when the Post beat the Times to the story on increasingly rich Congresspeople and — presumably — forced the Times to push up the publication of its own package. The stories on Romney’s mother are remarkably similar, each boasting reminiscences from Elly Peterson (described in both cases as a “Romney confidante”) and drawing parallels between Lenore’s inability to connect with the electorate and her son’s present-day reputation for living in a bubble. Both articles note that Michigan voters perceived Lenore as a stand-in for her husband, a former Micigan governor who had moved on to the Nixon White House, but the Post emphasizes the tension between Lenore’s wifely image and her determination that women deserved a place in politics. The Times and the Post both quote her as asking, “Why should women have less say than men about the great decisions facing our nation?”
Mark Bittman's cassoulet
The Times can also pat itself on the back for arriving early to the cassoulet trend. Mark Bittman’s whole-duck cassoulet recipe for the Times Sunday Magazine went live on the website on Feb. 23, while the Wall Street Journal’s weekend edition recipe played catch-up on Friday. Can a cassoulet food truck be far behind? Bittman offers a useful culinary definition for the uninitiated — a cassoulet is ” a glorified version of franks ’n’ beans” — and implores his reader not to be “discouraged by the page of instruction that follows.” The recipe, which suggests “4 to 5 hours” in cooking time, can nevertheless only be described as . . . discouraging. The Journal, whose culture section courts the cosmopolitan elite just as its editorial section mocks them, drops in bits of French and expounds on the dish’s legendary history, which goes back to 1355 and involves princes, wars, and a town with the tongue-twisting name of Castelnaudary. The author is apparently a cassoulet connoisseur, opining that “like the knights of Castelnaudary, I shun the addition of lamb.” She enlists a man described as “Steve Sando, the heirloom bean guru” — shades of “Bill Gates, the technology mogul” — who advises her to test the doneness of a bean by blowing on it. “If the skin wrinkles, the bean is cooked,” he says. The Journal’s recipe for Cassoulet de Canard Confit (no Anglicized “duck” here) calls for 7 hours of “hands-on time” . . . and a “total time” of three days. The rich are indeed different from you and me, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
Left Hand, Meet Right Hand
From Takashi Murakami's "Kaikai Kiki" series
Sometimes the Times seems to be competing against itself, as in the case of two recent articles on the art scene in Qatar. Written by different reporters but published on the same day in the same section, the pair comes off as two versions of the same story: one is sanitized, a version that would have passed muster with the official Qatari media; the other reads as the unvarnished truth behind the puffery. Sara Hamdan’s article, “An Emirate Filling Up With Artwork,” maintains a dull neutrality that reports on the surface of the art world as seen by a foreign journalist — possibly one accompanied by a government minder. The details are businesslike: Oil-rich Qatari buyers, including the royal family, are playing a major role in the international art market, snapping up canvases by blue-chip artists like Rothko and Cezanne. Exhibitions by such western stars as Louise Bourgeois and Takashi Murakami grace the emirate’s museums, creating what one museum director calls “an art renaissance.” Hamdan is careful to note that Qatar is not just focused on glamor; she writes that “a commitment is being made to support regional artists in addition to building collections of renowned works.”
Louise Bourgeois's "Maman" is on display at the Qatar National Convention Center
The second article, by Rooksana Hossenally, strikes me as the unexpurgated version of Hamdan’s narrative. Hossenally name-checks the same marquee artists — Bourgeois, Murakami — but emphasizes the constraints in which even high-profile art is displayed. The same museum director quoted in Hamdan’s piece explains that “We are trying to show a point of view, not trying to upset the existing one. It is possible to provoke conversation without being insulting.” Avoiding insult is the rule of thumb for native artists in Qatar, few of whom feel the “support” the royal family claims to provide. International art, not local work, allows the emirate to show off on the world stage while repressing creative and political expression at home. Hossenally writes that “most local artists do not stand a chance” when “the country is handpicking artists who are politically neutral.” One artist dismisses the idea that real art can exist without free speech, describing the scene as “an empty shell. It glitters from the outside, but from the inside, it is empty.” The truth about the much-vaunted Bourgeois exhibition comes out: locals think it’s ugly. Hossenally’s clincher: For the royal family, “art is big business.”
The two articles zigzag blithely around each other, and you have to wonder whether the world section editors ever talk to one another. Hamdan’s story seems to have been lifted from the relatively bloodless business pages, while Hossenally’s piece is a better fit for the analysis-heavy world section. If the overlap wasn’t noticed at a pre-publication budget meeting, I can only hope someone raised an eyebrow afterward.
The Silo Effect
Another odd pairing of stories is perhaps more excusable, considering one appeared in the business section and the other as part of a special package in the education section. Still, given that the author of the latter, Steven Greenhouse, is the paper’s labor and workplace reporter and writes frequently for the business section, it’s hard to believe no one considered the potential for overlap. At the very least, shouldn’t Catherine Rampell, the business writer responsible for “Where the Jobs Are, the Training May Not Be,” have checked in with the ed section before writing an article on community colleges?
The articles don’t necessarily contradict each other, but they do talk past one another. Rampell’s piece details the effects of state budget cuts on community colleges, which are the major providers of job-training and technical programs for workers hoping to improve their skills during an economic downturn. “Technical, engineering and health care expertise are among the few skills in huge demand even in today’s lackluster job market,” Rampell writes — and indeed, President Obama recently proposed directing $8 million to community colleges to support job training. This potential investment is the jumping-off point for “Paycheck 101,” a series of articles in the education section about continuing education. Greenhouse’s piece, “Schools Try to Match the Jobless With 3.4 Million Jobs,” reports on the trend among community colleges as well as four-year colleges to “tailor their continuing-education offerings to where the job openings are — and where the jobs of tomorrow will be.” The cost of such a revamp is almost completely ignored; instead, Greenhouse describes the wonders of new programs geared toward booming fields like cybersecurity and digital marketing without mentioning how they are being funded. The story is heavy on anecdotes, from a former Army soldier who earned a certificate in geospatial mapping to a Campbell’s Soup Company engineer who brushed up on her science skills, and price is discussed only in terms of the cost-benefit analysis for students: “I paid about $350 a semester, less than $2,000 to acquire the additional skills,” the former soldier says. None of the administrators trumpeting their cutting-edge programs speak of stretched budgets or overfilled classes, though both are endemic in higher education.
Unlike the set of articles on the Qatar art scene, the stories by Greenhouse and Rampell address separate issues — the community-college funding crunch and the expansion of job training programs — and wouldn’t fare better as a single, combined piece. But the failure of Greenhouse’s article to give costs and budgets even a perfunctory glance give the piece an aura of cluelessness. Even without Rampell’s article, Greenhouse’s failure to explain who is paying for all these wonderful programs would be notable. Two headlines away from Rampell’s piece, however, the omission is particularly glaring.
. . . So Well Read. . . 