HorsesAss.Org

Seattle Times executive editor David Boardman wants to let P-I loyalists know “who we are — and who we aren’t.”  But mostly, just the “aren’t” part.

Apparently, they’re not a right-wing paper, and they’re not a left-wing paper.  They’re not a suburban paper, but they certainly haven’t been the urban paper.  They’re not the establishment paper, but nobody in their right mind would ever label them an anti-establishment paper.

So then David… what the hell are you?

And perhaps, maybe, isn’t the typical daily’s lack of a clear identity, let alone a little personality, part of the industry’s problem?  I mean, criticize FOX News all you want (and God knows it’s easy), but they’ve been damn successful embracing both bias and personality… and at least most viewers know what they’re getting when they flip it on.

(Oh… and this conceit that reporters are automatons, unhumanly free of their own personal bias… or that of the guy who signs their paycheck and approves promotions… I just don’t think readers are buying it anymore.  Which may help explain why fewer and fewer people are buying daily newspapers.)

The truth is, apart from the masthead, most Seattleites couldn’t tell the Times and the P-I apart.  So I’m not so sure that promising readers you produce pretty much exactly the same product as the paper that just went under, is a sound, long term business strategy.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3A6ar44Ecec[/youtube]

Can’t we all just get along.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky in an impressive 12 minutes. It was in Lees Summit, Missouri. This week’s is a tough one (I think). Good luck!

Now.

The bankrupt holding company for Washington Mutual has sued the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., alleging the agency has improperly denied potentially billions of dollars in claims against WaMu’s former banking unit.

The suit, filed late Friday in federal district court in Washington, D.C., also claims the FDIC improperly sold WaMu’s banking assets to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion, rather than conducting a “straight liquidation” that could have produced more money for creditors — including the holding company.

And then (late last year.)

According to these accounts, pressure to keep lending emanated from the top, where executives profited from the swift expansion – not least, Kerry Killinger, who was WaMu’s chief executive from 1990 until he was forced out in September.

Between 2001 and 2007, Killinger received compensation of $88 million, according to the Corporate Library, a research firm. He declined to respond to a list of questions, and his spokesman said he was unavailable for an interview.

During Killinger’s tenure, WaMu pressed sales agents to pump out loans while disregarding borrowers’ incomes and assets, according to former employees. The bank set up what insiders described as a system of dubious legality that enabled real estate agents to collect fees of more than $10,000 for bringing in borrowers, sometimes making the agents more beholden to WaMu than they were to their clients.

WaMu gave mortgage brokers handsome commissions for selling the riskiest loans, which carried higher fees, bolstering profits and ultimately the compensation of the bank’s executives. WaMu pressed appraisers to provide inflated property values that made loans appear less risky, enabling Wall Street to bundle them more easily for sale to investors.

Earth to Congress, come in Congress. You got a bunch of regular people turning blue out here.

While it’s great fun to grandstand over AIG, and lord knows AIG has deservedly been a flash point, this is pretty nuts, too. The Banksters are now going after the surviving New Deal financial regulations. I honestly don’t know how much more the American public will take.

As Barry Ritholtz writes:

At what point do you just liquidate every last one of these sons of bitches — and throw their management in jail?

Everyone has the right to due process, of course. While conservatives spent decades disparaging “trial lawyers,” the corporate world is full of them and they are just fine with going to court. But justice requires that bad actors be held accountable, no matter their class or philosophy.

Justice often happens when people are charged with some kind of crime, to put it simply. So far only the most obvious individual Ponzi scheme offenders are being dealt with. The institutional corruption endemic to corporate America has received a complete pass.

The Obama administration and Congress have now been issued an historic challenge: either let the Banksters try to destroy the FDIC’s authority, or stand up on behalf of the American people. Obama has been pretty cautious to this point, but this would seem to force the issue. Either we have a government of, by and for the people, or we don’t. It’s really that simple.

Fox 13 News at 10 just did a story on the continuing outrage over Obama’s Special Olympics joke. And for the duration of the segment, I had more confidence that a mentally disabled person being interviewed would point out how stupid this story is than I had that one of the news anchors would.

Charlie Bermant writes in the Port Orchard Independent about the Bruce Olson trial and the attention it’s finally drawing to what’s been happening in Kitsap County. Olson is an authorized medical marijuana patient who was raided by the WestNET drug task force in 2007. Prosecutors claim that Olson and his wife were selling marijuana as well as using it medicinally, but the prosecution’s only witness is a longtime drug addict who they flew up from Oklahoma for the trial who claims he bought marijuana from the Olsons. The Olsons, and others who know them, maintain that they were not growing plants to sell on the black market.

I’ve written about this case a couple of times already, but Bermant’s article illustrates why this case has elicited so much anger from the medical marijuana community:

Both Olson and his wife are medical marijuana patients, but have faced the same distribution charge. The law about acceptable quantities of medical marijuana has been more strictly defined since Pamela Olson’s trial.

Pamela Olson is now serving probation, having pleaded out to avoid jail time. As part of her sentence, she is not using the medical marijuana that she claims is necessary to ease her pain.

The case has become a flashpoint for medical marijuana advocates, or what Kitsap County Prosecutor Russ Hauge characterizes as “a well-organized lobby whose purpose is to see the laws changed.”

Hauge is a major focus of the anger in this case. A lot of us who are trying to call more media attention to the Olson trial certainly want more changes to our current drug laws. No argument there. But the problem with what Russ Hauge is doing is that he’s openly trying to undermine the current medical marijuana law in the state of Washington.

The original medical marijuana law that was passed by voters in 1998 contained only an affirmative defense for authorized patients. What that meant was that law enforcement officials were still able to arrest patients, who were then faced with the burden of proving their innocence in court. More progressive prosecutors like King County’s Dan Satterberg recognized that hauling patients into court like that was a waste of both time and taxpayer money as well as being immoral and didn’t do it. But not Russ Hauge.

Even worse, the usual tactic from Hauge’s office has been to arrest patients, then threaten them with long prison terms into taking plea deals. This is what happened to Pamela Olson. And because of Department of Correction rules that don’t recognize medical marijuana, she’s not allowed to take medicine that her doctor has authorized for her while she’s home on probation. A second patient from Kitsap County named Jason Norbut has also found himself in this same situation. According to Norbut, the judge even promised him when he was offered the plea deal that he’d still be able to use his medicine while on probation, but was later told after he was sentenced that it was not allowed by the DOC.

Access to medical marijuana is rarely, if ever, a matter of life and death to patients. For most, it’s a quality of life issue (pain management, stimulating hunger during chemotherapy, etc), but that still doesn’t give any law enforcement official the right to overrule the judgment of doctors. Despite what Russ Hauge may believe he’s doing, what he’s really doing is undermining an existing voter-approved law and violating the human rights of the citizens of Kitsap County.

As medical marijuana supporters have been congregating in Port Orchard to oversee this trial, they’re slowly finding more and more victims of Russ Hauge’s crusade, including a quadriplegic by the name of Glenn Musgrove, who was recently wheeled into court on a gurney. Musgrove has a hearing scheduled for next Friday, March 27th. If anyone is curious about why Kitsap County is spending taxpayer money to prosecute a quadriplegic, the case number is 08-1-00937-6.

There are some high profile diplomatic meetings coming up regarding Afghanistan, but in Vienna over the past two weeks, a conference took place that could have far more of an effect on success or failure there. The United Nations’ Commission on Narcotic Drugs has convened for the last two weeks. Reuters reported on the first week of the conference:

U.N. members are expected to sign a declaration this week extending for another 10 years a “war on drugs” policy critics say is flawed and only feeds organised crime, helps spread HIV and undermines governments.

The U.N. drug strategy declaration, due to be signed in Vienna on Wednesday or Thursday, marks the culmination of a year of divisive talks among member states to try to agree a unified counter-narcotics policy for the next decade.

At the last convention in 1998, the slogan “A drug free world — we can do it” launched a campaign to eradicate all narcotics, from cannabis to heroin, by using law enforcement to tackle producers, traffickers and end users globally.

Needless to say, this effort fell far short of its goals. Hundreds of millions of people across the globe still use and sell illegal narcotics. As the Reuters article points out, the real consequences of this international circus act have been disastrous:

Drug policy campaigners, social scientists and health experts argue that strategy has failed, with statistics showing that drug production, trafficking and use have all soared during the decade, while the cost of law enforcement, both financially and socially, has rocketed, with vast numbers imprisoned.

In the United States, where illegal drug use is highest, the government spends around $70 billion a year to combat drugs. But illegal drug use has risen steadily over the past decade and a fifth of the prison population is there for drug offences.

Of course, that’s only a small part of the disaster. It has turned Mexico and our inner cities into war zones. It has created an atmosphere of fear and hostility between law abiding citizens and the police. And on the world stage, it threatens to undermine NATO’s efforts in Afghanistan.

One of the promises of the Obama Administration was to restore a commitment to science-based policy over ideological posturing. When it comes to drug policy, they’re moving in the right direction, but still have a way to go before truly fulfilling that promise.

Within international drug policy, the sticky point is the term “harm reduction.” Ideas like needle exchanges, safe sites, decriminalization for users and addicts, and the legal markets for cannabis are the main examples of harm reduction. In areas where these harm reduction methods have been tried, the negative overall effects of drug abuse – from overdoses to petty crime to street violence – have been reduced. It’s virtually impossible to find public health experts who’ve studied this subject who will say that these tactics don’t work. While the Obama Administration has been willing to endorse needle exchanges, they’ve been balking at endorsing other proven strategies:

In a statement explaining the White House opposition to harm reduction, Geoffrey R. Pyatt, deputy chief of the U.S. mission to the U.N. in Vienna, emphasized the administration’s support for needle exchange programs and “other evidence-based approaches to reduce the negative health and social consequences of drug abuse, including access to medication-assisted treatment for narcotic addiction.”

“However,” Pyatt continued, “the United States continues to believe that the term ‘harm reduction’ is ambiguous. It is interpreted by some to include practices that the United States does not wish to endorse.”

Such practices, according to State Department spokeswoman Laura Tischler, include drug legalization, drug consumption rooms, heroin prescription initiatives and programs to provide drug paraphernalia that has no tangible health benefit to the user.

By claiming that heroin prescription initiatives, drug consumption rooms, and legalization have no benefits, Tischler is very blatantly putting ideology ahead of science. Vancouver’s IN-SITE program, which allows for drug addicts to have a safe medical setting to feed their addictions, has been such a success in helping people get clean (and to reduce the collateral damage that generally comes with addiction) that an official from the Harper Government last year publicly rebuked the government’s attempts to close it. Everyone from Vancouver city officials to the police to health experts have been fighting to keep the program running. In Switzerland, their heroin prescription program has been so successful that voters there overwhelmingly voted to continue it. In Zurich, the number of new heroin addicts has plummeted by nearly 90% since they launched their program in the mid-90s.

Glenn Greenwald traveled to Portugal last year for the Cato Institute to study the effects of drug decriminalization in that nation. The Portuguese didn’t just decriminalize marijuana either, they decriminalized all personal drug use, including cocaine and heroin. Here’s what he found:

Evaluating the policy strictly from an empirical perspective, decriminalization has been an unquestionable success, leading to improvements in virtually every relevant category and enabling Portugal to manage drug-related problems (and drug usage rates) far better than most Western nations that continue to treat adult drug consumption as a criminal offense.

Yet in Vienna this past week, the United States sided with Cuba, China, Russia, and Iran in preventing the declaration from containing anything about harm reduction. In the eyes of the world’s most authoritarian regimes, “harm reduction” is seen as an encouragement to do drugs, even though the reality has long been that harm reduction methods have not led to greater amounts of drug use. This decision was made under the direction of the outgoing interim Drug Czar, Ed Jurith, and not the recently appointed Gil Kerlikowske.

The proper analogy here, as this Students for Sensible Drug Policy post on the conference points out, is that harm reduction is to drug use as birth control is to sex. The pursuit of both sex and drugs is a part of human nature. The idea that institutions can establish effective barriers against these human impulses has repeatedly been shown to be folly. The role that institutions should play is to ensure that these impulses have the least negative impact on others. That’s the point of harm reduction, and by every measure, it works far better than trying to use law enforcement to stamp out the behavior altogether.

This failure in American policy isn’t just resulting in more crime and more wasted taxpayer dollars. It’s also undermining our efforts in Afghanistan. As we continue to strong-arm our European allies to take a more hard-line (and ineffective) approach to reducing drug use, the Taliban increasingly profit from the inflated prices. They profit both by protecting traffickers (and farmers) from the law and by participating in the trade directly. Afghanistan still produces around 90% of the world’s heroin, which accounts for somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the entire nation’s GDP. Much of this profit goes towards weapons used to kill coalition troops.

Much of the exported heroin from Afghanistan heads west through Iran or northwest through Russia on its way west. As a result, Russia and Iran now have two of the largest heroin addiction problems in the world. Those two notoriously authoritarian regimes both make attempts to downplay the problem while also demanding the most authoritarian response. In fact, Iran’s drug war solutions tend to look a lot like ours:

According to the figures released by Iran’s Drug Control Headquarters, Tehran spent over 600 million dollars in the two years leading to October 2008, to dig canals, build barriers and install barbed wire to seal off the country’s borders.

The result is that while the troops who fight alongside us in Afghanistan are Canadian, Dutch, French, and British, our approach to dealing with the illegal opium trade is more in line with what Russia and Iran advocate. As a result, the number of coalition troops who’ve lost their lives there has steadily risen over the past five years, and our relationship with NATO allies has been strained. When it comes to how to deal with the opium, we’re agreeing with nations we tend to consider enemies, while our strongest allies are seeing their brave young men and women being killed every day as a result.

The Taliban of today is not the Taliban of 2001, which used both religious sentiments against drugs and western aid to massively reduce the amount of opium produced there. The Taliban today is much more driven by nationalism and much more willing to profit from this trade. As a result, they’re once again threatening to overtake the regime in Kabul. They also have strong ties to anti-western radicals within Pakistan, which has the potential to turn the problem in Afghanistan into something worse altogether.

It’s been encouraging to see more and more media outlets correctly illustrate the dynamics of what’s currently happening in Mexico. There seems to be a growing understanding that the alarming amount of violence there is driven by American demand for illegal drugs and cannot be defeated with a military response. What we can’t afford to have right now is the same dynamic playing out in the lawless areas of Pakistan, where a populace largely sympathetic to radicalism has been put in a position to profit handsomely from the opium trafficking that we’re trying to push out of Afghanistan.

Up until now, the residents of the border area of Pakistan have been able to keep themselves isolated from Islamabad’s reach, but they don’t currently threaten the government itself. That could change if control of the opium trade ends up in their hands. And that’s exactly what our strategy in Afghanistan appears likely to do.

Just as the drug crackdown in the United States – the one that has filled our prisons to record numbers – has done nothing more than create a war south of the border, our ongoing belief that victory in Afghanistan comes from defeating the opium traffickers rather than building up stable Afghan institutions will only result in the same thing over there – a war south of that border as well.

Limiting the amount of money being made through the opium trade can only be done one way – by limiting the demand. A number of nations, including some of our closest allies, are figuring out how to do this effectively. Unfortunately, America’s anti-drug officials are still fighting them on purely ideological grounds. They’re ignoring evidence and avoiding debate. It’s time that we have an administration that allows for a fully open discussion on these issues that values empirical evidence over fear mongering. If not, Afghanistan will most certainly be to Obama what Iraq was to Bush.

Three more last night.

Reader Donald S. emails that the 41st LD Democrats have passed a resolution in support of SB 5895, the Homeowners’ Bill of Rights.

That’s just so cool. Good on Donald S. and folks in the Fighting 41st.

In their weekly update, the Washington State Labor Council makes a lengthy and earnest plea to have the worker privacy bill considered this session. Readers may recall the proposal was killed after Gov. Chris Gregoire and Legislative leaders referred an internal labor email to the state patrol, which quickly concluded nothing criminal had happened.

The labor council is asking for someone to take responsibility for all of this. From the WSLC web site:

When a powerful legislative leader unilaterally quashes a bill, that leader is expected to explain his or her actions. Part of being a leader is having the courage of your convictions to defend your actions.

You might kill a bill because you personally oppose it. Then it’s your responsibility to stand up and explain why you blocked a vote. If there are consequences, accept them.

You might also kill a bill for political reasons, thinking you are doing your “members” a favor by helping them avoid taking a tough vote that involves powerful constituencies who disagree. Then it’s your responsibility to stand up and explain why you, as the leader, chose sides. Why did you side with those who wanted to block a vote, over those who wanted to allow a vote?

In the case of the Worker Privacy Act, we’re still waiting for somebody to stand up, accept responsibility and explain his or her actions.

Meanwhile, Josh over at Publicola suggests that there is some amount of unhappiness in the House caucus, partially over this issue. I can’t honestly assess the happiness of the House, living down here in my Clark County hermitage, but there seem to be some legitimate criticisms. To be fair to leadership, the risk of a wingnut-type circle jerk in reverse is something that must be guarded against.

It’s not necessary nor desirable that every progressive bill come to the floor. I don’t know jack about the details of legislative procedure, but common sense tells everyone that out of hundreds or thousands of bills only a few will make it.

And that’s why people organize to advocate for legislation. Business does it, labor does it, and left-handed fans of Rosemary chicken do it. And that’s fine, that’s the way the system works.

But it’s also worth recognizing that most regular people have no advocate sending flowers to the floor, and it’s incumbent on everyone in the much-maligned “system” to take into account these folks. Easier said than done, of course, but killing bills that have wide-spread popular support without a vote is not very democratic. Especially when you call the cops.

Speaking of denial, I’ve always found this familiar journalistic defense to be particularly stupid…

“Criticism of CNBC is way out of line,” NBC head Jeff Zucker said at the BusinessWeek media summit at McGraw-Hill’s headquarters just now. … The press didn’t cause us to go to war in Iraq, he said; a general did. The press missing the financial crisis didn’t cause it. “Both are absurd,” he said.

What’s absurd is the notion that the press merely observes current events without influencing them, especially when it comes to politics, and especially especially when it comes to economics, both areas where public perception is at least as important as the “facts” on the ground.

With a head up his ass response like that, I’d argue that Zucker shouldn’t have any influence.  But unfortunately, he does.  And yes, his networks do hold some responsibility for helping President Bush cheerlead us into a war in Iraq and an economic bubble at home.  I mean, if his argument is that missing the financial crisis had absolutely no impact on the severity of the crisis itself, does that mean uncovering and predicting the crisis early on would have had no impact too?  And if so, what exactly is the point of journalism?

As Gov. Chris Gregoire prepares to enter the gravest budget battle of her career, it is instructive to look back with admiration on the actions of former President Bush during a similar crisis.

Oh… not George W. Bush… he was a total moron and dickwad whose irresponsible domestic and foreign policies largely left us in our current economic shithole, and who history will rightly remember as one of our worst presidents ever.  No, I’m talking about his father, George H.W. Bush, a rather middling president, but one who was at least well-trained and prepared for the position, and who when push came to shove ultimately sacrificed a huge chunk of political capital (and perhaps his reelection) by abandoning his famous campaign pledge and agreeing to substantial tax increases in the 1990 budget.

Throughout 1988, then Vice-President Bush consistently campaigned on a no-new-tax pledge, and it is safe to say that the most memorable and oft-quoted moment of his Republican nomination speech came in the form of the Peggy Noonan scribed line, “Read my lips:  no new taxes!”  It was a profoundly irresponsible promise, but it no doubt helped him win the election against an opponent Republicans smeared as “the Governor from Taxachusetts.”

The pledge had been made under the rosy assumption that the fast growth of the late 198o’s would continue indefinitely, but when the economy stumbled and tax revenues fell far short of projections, the nation was faced with a yawning budget deficit… the largest in peacetime history.  So in 1990 President Bush did what had to be done; he went back on his word and agreed to a budget that amongst other things, levied a 10% surtax on the income of the wealthiest Americans.  The New York Post mocked President Bush for making a mockery of his convention pledge, printing the headline, “Read my Lips:  I Lied.”

But it was the pledge that had proven foolish and irresponsible, not the breaking of it, and Bush 41 has always deserved credit for putting governance ahead of politics, at least in that particular situation.  The 1990 budget agreement was the first step toward getting our ballooning federal deficits under control, laying the groundwork for a Clinton budget that ultimately led to surpluses by the end of the decade.  Given the economic circumstances, raising taxes was the right thing to do, however unpopular and at whatever the political cost.

Gov. Gregoire faces a similar situation, a recent no-new-tax pledge coming back to haunt her as she struggles with a revenue shortfall more than twice as large as even the most pessimistic projections only a few months back.  And like Bush 41 before, the press is already preparing to mock her should she ultimately go back on her word.

But unlike Bush, Gregoire’s no-new-tax pledge was never the centerpiece of her campaign, and she never used it to draw a stark ideological distinction with her opponent.  Besides, voters simply don’t elect Democrats to hold the line on taxes—it goes against type—so if this really was a top issue for the majority of voters last November, the vocally anti-tax Dino Rossi wouldn’t have lost by 6.5 percentage points.

Gov. Gregoire’s unfortunate acquiescence in ruling out tax increases was ill-advised and ultimately unnecessary, but it was not nearly as forceful or irresponsible as H.W’s signature soundbite.  So if a Republican president, facing a revolt from within the ranks of his own party, could swallow his famous words for the good of the nation, then Gregoire, with a Democratic legislature at her back, could certainly do similar for the good of our state.

Facing a record $9 billion projected shortfall and demand for public services at an all time high, the only responsible course is to use all the budgetary tools at our disposal:  cuts, deficit spending and tax increases.  As President George H.W. Bush proved in 1990, going back on your word can sometimes constitute an extraordinary act of political courage.  Here’s hoping Gov. Gregoire proves just as courageous.

From the Albany (Ga.) Herald, in regards to the “Proud Peanut Expo” being held in Blakely, Ga., home of the Peanut Corporation of America. Here’s a nice quote from a local Chamber spokesperson.

“Our purpose is to show peanut butter is trustworthy,” Halford said. “There is a lot of misleading information. The Peanut Corporation of America (in Blakely) was a very small drop in the bucket that seems to be spoiling a whole bunch. We don’t want to focus on the bad; we want to focus on the good.”

Well, at least “spoiling” is the correct word to use. I haven’t touched one bite of peanut butter or peanuts since this case broke, even though I have a nearly full jar of name brand peanut butter I had already made sandwiches from. Clearly it’s not contaminated. However, sitting down to lunch and thinking about salmonella is rather off-putting, to say the least.

The outrageous case of PCA should be a lesson to all industries. Consumers will steer clear of products in a certain category in the wake of mass injury, even products from reputable companies. Ask tomato growers. Or the beef industry. You’d think people would finally figure out that it’s in everyone’s interest to sanely and properly regulate consumer items. Until corporate America gets this message, it’s not only consumers who lose, it’s also businesses whose sales plummet in the wake of these incidents. The cost of sensible regulation is surely less than than the hundreds of millions in lost sales every time this happens.

Props to Marler Blog.

It starts right before the 2000’s with Blowjobgate. American Journalism balanced its coverage between a third Way neo-liberal who was horny and the anguished cries of Republicans who insisted horniness will destroy the Republic.

Neo-liberalism won in extra innings, although batshit had a good game.

Then American Journalism made fun of Love Story as seen on the Internet, balancing coverage precisely halfway between neo-liberalism and batshit insane.

Batshit won in exra innings, with the help of the home plate umpire. American Journalism decided to go see what the sharks were eating.

Then came a Pearl Harbor of our Lifetimes. To deal with the Evil Empire of our Lifetimes, we needed Saddam to Suck On Something. Coverage was balanced between Third-Way hawk viewpoints and those who argued that French Fries were the problem. American Journalism sort of missed the millions of people marching around going “this is a big mistake,” although they did occasionally find time to make fun of them.

Completely batshit won in a blowout, and in an exhibition match, a brain dead woman smiled at everyone. American Journalism was content.

After the Big Mistake, there were even bigger mistakes and shocking brutality. American Journalism started to look into it all, but then a Federalist Society member who just happened to be familiar with late 20th-Century typewriter font kerning was watching TV one night. American Journalism cowered before the power of kerning, fearing for itself.

Coverage of shocking brutality was balanced between a few gasps and calls for more shocking brutality, including against American Journalists.

Batshit won again.

Meanwhile, the Great Recession was happening. American Journalism did not balance its coverage about this because it missed the story altogether.

American Journalism gnashed her teeth and smiled at everyone who was still around. She would get the story right this time, by packaging it better and using Twitter.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY6k50qB4Ys[/youtube]

At a Tuesday rally marking the demise of the print edition of the Seattle P-I (and the bulk of its newsroom) Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat showed solidarity with his fellow journalists, telling them “It’s not your fault.”  You didn’t create the Internet, Westneat assured his fallen colleagues, and you didn’t destroy the business model that had long supported print media.

And on one level, Danny’s absolutely right.  The P-I’s staff isn’t out on the street due to anything they did wrong, and they certainly didn’t lose their long struggle with the Times because they produced an inferior product.  Hearst blinked first; had they not, it could have been Danny being consoled by friends Tuesday evening rather than the other way around.

“The Seattle P-I may be going out of business, but the Times is an equally troubled company, and possibly even more troubled,” said Alan Mutter, a former newspaper editor and Silicon Valley chief executive who writes the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog.

But on another level, Westneat’s elegy is consistent with a profound sense of denial that seems to afflict the entire news industry, and is crippling its efforts to effectively respond to dramatic changes in technology, economics and consumer tastes.  Yeah, sure… the P-I’s collapse isn’t the fault of its former staffers, any more than the dedicated, industrious craftsmen of the buggy whip industry can be blamed for their own economic displacement a century before, but to merely fault the Internet or a broken business model misses a larger point:  newspapers are losing subscribers and advertisers because they have not been giving customers what they want… at least, not something for which they are willing to pay a high enough price to sustain current operations.

And I hate to get all Adam Smith-y on my friends in the newspaper biz, but isn’t that the way the market is supposed to work?

I’m sure it is comforting to blame Google and Craig’s List or even the woeful mismanagement of your corporate overlords (the Times’ own finances would not be nearly as precarious if Frank Blethen had not over-leveraged the family business to finance his ill-advised invasion of their ancestral homeland), but for all the chatter about business models, I’ve seen very little self-examination amongst working journalists about reimagining the product itself.  I’m not talking about layout or redesigns or ink versus electrons, but actual, you know, words.  I just don’t hear much talk from journalists about reevaluating their devotion to the sort of flat, objective, personalityless, dispassionate prose that has long made the news pages of the Times and the P-I virtually indistinguishable from one another… and nearly every other major daily.

Don’t get me wrong; I love newspapers.  As a child of Watergate I grew up worshipping journalists as heros.  But by golly, much of what we read in the papers has always been godawful boring, even when the subject matter is not.  Forget for a moment all the brainstorming about new ways to present, distribute and monetize journalism, and focus instead on the reporting itself.  Surely there’s more than one way to cover an event, and more than a little room for even the best reporters to grow as writers, but there’s been almost zero innovation in terms of the craft of reporting since the beginning of the J-school era.  Tastes have changed, but the daily newspaper most definitely has not.

Let the business model brainstorming continue, but in the meanwhile editors need to give, and reporters need to embrace, the freedom and encouragement to innovate both in substance and style.  For if you simply keep pushing the same-old, same-old in the face of market rejection, at some level, at least partially, it really will be your fault after all.