Author: Editorial

A couple of years ago, the venerable Bob James, then 93, was attacked by a burglar who invaded his home, pinned him to the floor, held a knife to his throat, and demanded money. As James, who was the mildest of men, told it shortly thereafter, “All I kept thinking was, How do I get out of this?”

This was characteristic of Bob James, who — both ironically and appropriately — was the founder of CrimeStoppers, an organization which has done much to take the edge off crime locally. Through the grace of God and his own pluck, James did get out of that tight spot, though he would shortly need emergency surgery to implant several stints in his weakened cardiovascular system. He then resumed his duties in the world, which included liaison work on behalf of MIFA. One of his duties was to recruit speakers to address groups of senior citizens served by the organization. To be called on to do so by the courtly James was an honor in itself.

It was clear in recent years that James was in fragile health, though he kept on showing up on MIFA’s behalf and at major social and political functions. As former Tennessee governor Winfield Dunn remembered out loud at last year’s Master Meal, an annual gathering of the GOP faithful, “that wonderful Bob James” had virtually founded the modern Republican Party in Shelby County and was certainly its first real standard-bearer, making serious races for Congress in the early 1960s.

Late in that decade, he was elected to the newly constituted Memphis City Council, where he served for some years as a generally progressive and moderating influence. Neither of those adjectives is gratuitous. James’ political views were never hardline or even, given his pivotal role in local Republican affairs, especially partisan. In the last several years, he had taken to brooding about what he saw as the growing influence in party circles of those who insisted on socially conservative litmus tests.

In his last years, James did not feel bound by party lines at all — endorsing both Republican and Democratic candidates for office — and this caused him some difficulty in GOP ranks. Late last year, there was a move in the party hierarchy to eliminate the Bob James Award, given annually at the Republicans’ Lincoln Day dinner for public service. The reason? James had campaigned on behalf of successful City Council candidate Carol Chumney, a Democrat.

Something of an uproar greeted the decision to cancel the award. It was quickly reversed, and, when Lincoln Day came around in February, the Bob James Award was given out as always. At 95, James was on hand to see it done.

Bob James, ever keen of mind and generous of spirit even as his body began to fail, passed away last week. Not even he could go on forever, but, both politically and personally, he gave it a good run.

Morris Fair

The term “public servant” is often ironically applied to this or that politician, but it certainly describes the late Morris Fair, the former Shelby County commissioner who died last week after a determined battle against cancer. Though he was visibly ill and no doubt often in agony during his last months, Fair refused to be debilitated, continuing to provide valuable service as a member of the new state Lottery Board and other public bodies.

It was only last month that Fair, attached to an apparatus supplying him with oxygen, made an appearance before two committees of the Shelby County Commission to make a well-prepared and systematic case against a proposed financial award to Clark Construction Company, primary contractors of the new Convention Center, for $17 million in cost overruns the company wants to recover.

We do not propose to judge the merits of the case here, but we cannot but be in awe of Fair’s powers of reasoning, his conscientiousness, and his doggedness in setting forth his argument — replete with an awareness of the nuances of architecture and construction, as well as with the kind of fiscal detail which Fair, an innovator in the securities field and an acknowledged expert in financial matters, was famous for.

What was most impressive about Fair’s effort was the fact that, though he must have known that his own days were seriously numbered, he couched his argument entirely in terms of the ongoing needs of Memphis and Shelby County and local taxpayers. It was a reminder of that old parable of an aged man planting an oak tree that he himself would never get to see — though, even in his 70s, even wracked by disease, Morris Fair was never exactly “aged.” An inveterate booster of the University of Arkansas Razorbacks teams, among other enthusiasms, Fair owned one of the great smiles, and it stayed with him until the end.

Though many a local eminence has died and had a well-attended funeral, no one in our memory out-pulled Commissioner Fair, who had turnaway crowds at both the Memorial Park Funeral Home, where he lay in state on Friday, and at his funeral at St. Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral on Saturday. As Commissioner John Willingham, who bested Fair in his last reelection campaign in 2002, acknowledged, “If I had known Morris as well then as I do now, I would never have run against him. He will be sorely missed. He was a good friend and a good soldier.” Indeed.

Lee’s Retreat

The withdrawal this week by city finance director Joseph Lee of his on-again/off-again candidacy to be director of Memphis Light, Gas & Water removes at least one potential bone of contention from the process of selecting a director. Lee, a trusted confidante of Mayor Willie Herenton, had been one of five finalists, but he was the only one who had already been a focus of controversy.

During the stormy period earlier this year when Herenton and the City Council clashed over a variety of issues, notably that of the council’s role in approving mayoral appointments, several nominations were rejected outright and that of Lee to become MLGW director was put on hold.

After the smoke cleared somewhat, there were arguments both for and against Lee. It is a tribute to Lee, under the circumstances, that, after an all-points search produced a large field of applicants, he was among the handful still under active consideration by the council.

Unanswered questions remain after Lee’s latest withdrawal from consideration, but it may well serve to facilitate a final selection.

First-term City Council member Carol Chumney, who either knows something the rest of the political world has forgotten or is showboating to the point of reckless self-caricature, was a surprise add-on to the aftermath of the County Commission’s Monday-morning committee vote approving the University of Memphis basketball Tigers’ move to FedExForum.

After Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, University of Memphis president Shirley Raines, and university athletic director R.C. Johnson had each faced the mass of cameras, mikes, and reporters in a packed hallway, Chumney took her turn — saying, in essence, that the council would give the matter, including some controversial financial proposals, proper consideration.

That Chumney chose to speak, in essence, on behalf of the council was, to say the least, an irony and probably a presumption. The former state legislator has angered several of her council mates by the combination of her general assertiveness, unusual for a newcomer, and specific criticisms of what she considered her colleagues’ “petty” behavior in their ongoing, now largely dormant, conflict with Mayor Willie Herenton. She has also been accused of overworking and abusing the council staff.

For all of the above, she took a highly public verbal walloping last week — first, in a committee meeting from Councilman E.C. Jones and council chairman Joe Brown, and later, in the council’s regular public session, from Edmund Ford, who was angered by Chumney’s challenge to a council move channeling federal funds to Clayborn Temple AME Church as a historic site.

That stand, like her proposal last week to abolish liberal pension arrangements for city employees, had at least a surface logic. On the Clayborn matter, she expressed concern about the use of public money on behalf of a church and wanted assurances the public would somehow gain additional access from the expenditures. (Plans are apparently under way to convert the antique facility, famous for being one of the venues hosting Dr. Martin Luther King in the days before his 1968 assassination, into a community resource center.) And Chumney is right to challenge a three-year-old pension arrangement that is a potential boondoggle for political appointees, allowing anyone with 12 years’ service, appointive or elected, to qualify for full city pension benefits.

The problem with these and other proposals is that they are, for better and for worse, almost inextricably bound up with the personality and impact of Chumney herself, who in the best of circumstances cannot be accused of bashfulness and is all too vulnerable these days to accusations of grandstanding. In her self-publicizing efforts, indeed, she sometimes appears to be the deer who races in front of the headlights and chooses to stare into them. Giving Councilwoman Chumney the benefit of the doubt as to motive, we would nevertheless urge her to exercise both caution and collegiality in the pursuit of her goals.

And we wish she had stayed around to observe some of the later commission business on Monday — notably, an extended discussion by commissioners on the eligibility requirements for youths seeking county-funded summer employment. Some thought a minimum grade-point average was necessary. Others discounted altogether the need for such a provision, on the grounds that already underprivileged applicants would be further handicapped by a GPA requirement. The arguments on all sides got very sophisticated indeed, and they crossed all party and racial lines. In the end, after a good deal of eloquent and impassioned exploration of the very purposes of publicly provided summer jobs, a compromise was reached which seemed to satisfy the entire body.

Nobody ego-tripped. Nobody insisted on getting his or her way. Nobody was dismissive of the motives or actions of anybody else. And they finally agreed.

The 19th-century British author Charles Dickens, who produced a body of work almost the size of the Library of Congress, is best remembered for only a modest portion of that output — namely, the Yuletide classic A Christmas Carol and the pronouncement, “It was the best of times; it was the worst of times” from A Tale of Two Cities.

Both are in our minds this holiday season — one in which we hear, on the one hand, glad tidings of an economic revival, and on the other, the gloomy news that our national terror alert has been raised by the Department of Homeland Security to Level Orange. Ho Ho — Oh! It is a schizoid condition we live in, at best.

We have not been bashful about proclaiming the current national administration to be Scrooge-like in its indifference to the great run of humanity and in its special favors for the high and mighty. Like everybody else — save for a few diehard Baathists — we shed no holiday tears for Saddam Hussein, but we would beseech Messrs. Bush and Rumsfeld and Mademoiselle Rice to remember that it is Osama bin Laden who has done us irreparable harm and threatens us with even more. We are not likely to be more than temporarily diverted from our anxieties by the capture and trial of other bearded, vagrant types, even if they are certifiable archvillains.

Our mixed feelings concerning the future extend to our state and local scenes, as well. We take pleasure, for example, in the businesslike attitude of our current state administration. In his budgetary openness and his desire to prune away the inessential in state government, Governor Phil Bredesen almost seems capable of making us remember that we are Tennesseans first and Republicans or Democrats second. But we are pained to learn that our quest for solvency may necessarily lead to the termination of TennCare — bad news for the penniless and the uninsurable among us.

What goes around comes around. Locally, we still have the quandary of how to prop up The Med and how to keep on dispensing even minimal care to the mentally ill. We continue to be embarrassed by the specter of failing schools and can only hope that the shakeups planned by new city schools superintendent Carol Johnson will give us a Christmas future that will set the former ghosts to rest.

We have been put on notice that our city and county tax rates will go up — the obvious counterpoint to declining state revenues and giveaway tax breaks at the national level? Presidential candidate Howard Dean has recently put the emphasis on this syllogism: Careless tax cuts at the federal level equal higher costs and raised tuitions and the like at the local level. And even should the messenger himself eventually fall short, the substance of his message remains.

We are a mighty nation and a steadfast people, but there is always at the heart of our being some perishable quality of potential goodness that is like Tiny Tim, and it is our fondest hope that the story we are living, like the one written by Dickens, ends well — or, at least, continues in good grace.

“A dark and painful era is over,” President Bush told America and the world after the weekend news of Saddam Hussein’s capture outside Tikrit. The talking heads on television agreed; in opining that Saddam’s arrest was a watershed event of the first order, most used words like “huge,” “enormous,” and “profound” to characterize the impact his capture would have on the domestic political scene.

End of what era, though? The situation on the ground in Iraq is as muddled today as it was yesterday. And while it made great television, the capture of a clearly broken tyrant will be seen, when the real historians get around to writing this all up, as much ado about nothing.

Does anyone honestly think that the scruffy buzzard we saw on television this past weekend was the guy somehow calling the shots in this Iraqi intifada in which we are currently embroiled? Does anyone seriously believe that Saddam of late has been functioning like the Joker — Batman’s nemesis — pulling all the strings from some high-tech subterranean lair? Will we all in the next month or two witness a glorious end to armed resistance in Iraq?

Don’t bet on it. The evidence suggests that many if not most Iraqis have over the past six months been perfectly capable of holding two thoughts — hatred of Saddam and resentment of the occupying forces — in their heads at the same time. And while the scriptwriters are probably already hard at work on the made-for-TV movie that will give Bush’s Great Capture the golden glow it deserves, there is still a real world lurking out there beyond the movie scripts.

The administration may come to rue the day that Saddam Hussein didn’t go out ingloriously, like his sons. Dead men, after all, tell no lies, and Saddam’s capable of spinning more than a few, even still; disheveled and disconsolate, he’s still very much alive.

Unlike that other jailed megalomaniac, Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam will be able to paint himself as a genuine victim of bad circumstance, a reformed tyrant who was trying to play by the international community’s rules until the U.S. put forward its own definition of what made him a menace to society. This focused upon the vaunted WMDs, remember? And while Fox News will scoff at the argument, Saddam will insist that, since there were demonstrably no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the real war criminals were the folks who took unilateral action against his country under false pretenses and killed thousands of innocent civilians in the process.

Exactly who will pass judgment on Saddam Hussein? A jury of his Iraqi peers, appointed by the Provisional Governing Authority? That might play in Peoria, but it sure won’t in Pakistan, Palestine, and plenty of other places. What about the World Court? The Bush administration seems unwilling to go there, having made clear its opposition to yielding the issue to an international tribunal that A) can’t be controlled and B) may not impose the tidy climax of a death sentence.

This isn’t the happy ending of the “Democracy in the Desert” movie, folks. It’s only the intermission.

The special election to pick a successor to District 89 state Representative Carol Chumney, who has been elected to the City Council, has so far fixated — some would say, foundered — on the issue of one candidate’s residency. This is Jeff Sullivan, who with his wife owns a house a few blocks outside the lines of the Midtown district. Under challenge from State Senator Steve Cohen, who is vigorously promoting the interests of Sullivan’s Democratic primary challenger, Beverly Robison Marrero, Sullivan has rented a guesthouse within the district lines and says he and his expectant wife plan to move there. If Sullivan is elected and the move occurs, as planned, within 30 days of his taking the oath, he will have satisfied state law on the matter.

Another Marrero backer, outgoing city councilman John Vergos, weighed in on the issue, saying, “We have allowed politicians in this system to not live in the district or have some sort of sham seat, and we do it all the time, and that doesn’t make it right. We shouldn’t let them cherry-pick an area like that.”

There is merit to this view, whether or not it turns out to apply to Sullivan. It certainly applies to a number of sitting legislators — state Senator John Ford and state Representative Joe Kent being cases in point — whose primary residences would seem to be elsewhere than those which they list within their nominal districts. What is indisputable, however, is that the constituents of these two legislators seem to know the score and keep re-electing Ford and Kent anyhow. It can be argued that, so long as the letter of the law is fulfilled, the voters have a right to choose whomever they wish to represent them. Ultimately, it is up to the District 89 voters to decide the outcome in next week’s special primary.

But a law’s a law, and since this particular one happens to be honored as much in the breach as in the observance, it needs to be changed. The residency requirement should either be dispensed with altogether, reflecting the current reality of no-fixed-abode legislators, or replaced with a more stringently enforced one that candidates for state legislative office do actually live in the districts they supposedly represent.

Now that the matter has received a fuller-than-usual airing, District 89 voters can decide on Thursday how important the residency issue is to them.

Another issue needs to be resolved by the Shelby County Commission. Since there is no Republican primary challenger, this means that either Marrero or Sullivan will be named by the voters to go to Nashville. And, though Chumney has made a spirited pitch to members of the commission to name as an interim representative her erstwhile campaign manager, the no-doubt deserving activist Jay Sparks, we think that whoever wins the Democratic primary should be appointed instead.

Less than a month will transpire between the convening of the General Assembly in January and the formal general election vote of February 10th. Since the chances are infinitesimally small that a write-in candidate might prevail, the primary winner should be allowed to hit the ground running.

How the Deal Was Done

Next Monday’s regular meeting of the Shelby County Commission will likely be the last opportunity for the commission, or any other authoritative public body, to provide independent oversight of arrangements for the FedExForum, now under construction in downtown Memphis and scheduled to open next year.

We have previously commented on what we saw as the needlessly defensive attitude toward such a scrutiny taken by local government officials and by representatives of the Public Building Authority and HOOPS, the umbrella organization representing the NBA Grizzlies and other arena principals. Last week’s commission briefing by PBA executive director Dave Bennett did much to dispel lingering doubts concerning the project, as will, no doubt, this week’s scheduled appearance before the commission of project consultant John Hilkene.

By this time, clearly, most local officials and civic boosters want to have done with what some of them have described as “naysaying” and second-guessing. The deal is done and cannot be undone, they say. Let sleeping dogs lie, and so forth. The problem is, this dog can still bite us, the taxpayers and consumers who should be the chief beneficiaries of the new arena. And even if everything is — as we certainly expect it to be — on the up and up, it can’t hurt to vet remaining construction details to make sure the project objectives relating to cost, time, and quality are fulfilled.

We are unimpressed by objections that $50,000 is too much to spend in order to engage the local independent consultants. Fifty thousand dollars to get one more set of eyes, and an independent set at that, on a $250 million project? Sorry, but that looks like a bargain to us. And there are still matters of contract loopholes and fine print to be examined. Even if they can’t be influenced, they can at least be understood. How many of us were fully aware, for example, of payments to HOOPS that were disguised as “penalties” for missing construction deadlines which were never seriously meant in the first place? And did everybody grasp on the front end that Grizzlies owner Michael Heisley was being granted virtual control of the city’s entertainment calendar, more or less in perpetuity?

It isn’t a matter of whether it’s a done deal; it’s more a question of how the deal was done. We hope the commission goes ahead with its plans, first approved last February, to hire the local consulting firm.

The Buck Starts Here

And while they’re at it, we hope the County Commission also pursues a plan, discussed a year ago but apparently shelved, to overhaul its budgetary procedures. Surely, this summer’s protracted end-of-fiscal-year hearings on emergency budget cuts was not an experience worth repeating.

For much the same reasons that the arena contract should have been — and should still be — vetted more closely, the commission should initiate early annual zero-base budgets requiring departments of county government to justify each and every one of their expenditures on a line-item basis.

This isn’t a partisan issue. Democratic governor Phil Bredesen, supported by influential members of both parties, has instituted such procedures in Tennessee state government. That there is a hue and cry over continued pork-barrel spending in Washington is a true indication that federal budget policies also leave much to be desired.

If politics is truly local, then so should political reform be. The buck starts here; let’s take a close look at it before it passes on.

…and gas and water and all the other benefits that Memphis Light Gas & Water Division is expected to provide, with efficiency and at reasonable cost, to the citizens of the Greater Memphis area.

And, to that end, let there be more of the kind of illumination promised by Mayor Willie Herenton in a letter to members of the City Council last week. In his communication, reported on in this issue (“City Beat,” page 9), Herenton took note of some of MLGW’s recent misprisions — in the areas of customer relations, billing procedures — and its penchant for what the mayor called “costly promotions.” He did not need to remind council members of the controversies and complications that attended MLGW’s cleanup following last July’s windstorm. (For a while it appeared that Herenton himself, then running for reelection, might get some of the blowback from a frustrated public.)

The mayor promised to provide the council — and, we presume, the public — with “pertinent information” on the eve of hearings concerning MLGW’s proposed rate increases.

All this is to the good. Perhaps, with the recent city elections out of the way, we are on the threshold of a new era of seriousness and candor in matters of local governance. We don’t mean to offend His Honor, but we regard last week’s council turndown of a Herenton pay raise in the same approving way that we see his desire to be watchdog over MLGW. It’s not that we don’t think the mayor has done a good job or that he isn’t deserving of an increase. We did concur, however, with those citizens and council members who thought things were proceeding with an unseemly and — given that not a word of the pay-raise matter had been broached publicly before the election — untimely haste. We’ll be watching closely to see if the council moves toward a premature reconsideration.

In the recent city election, Mayor Herenton worked behind the scenes on behalf of council candidate George Flinn and against Flinn’s victorious opponent, Carol Chumney. Various reasons were adduced for this activity — ranging from political payback for the official neutrality in the mayor’s race of the local Republican Party (which supported Flinn) to Herenton’s purported concern that Chumney, a high-profile state representative who launched investigations into derelictions by the day-care industry, might bring an overly obtrusive personal agenda to the council. Our concerns are otherwise. We hope she brings a flashlight.

And, while we’re at it, we are not put off by those “naysayers” on the Shelby County Commission who were denounced last week by the mayor, by state senator John Ford, and by Public Building Authority chairman Arnold Perl for presuming to want a closer vetting of matters involving the FedExForum — a facility that promises much but also asks much of local taxpayers. Given the $250 million price tag attached to the project, we don’t find the expenditure of a measly $50,000 to provide some additional oversight by a local engineering/consulting firm to be unreasonable. All things considered, this week’s shelving of the matter by the commission was probably inadvisable.

Nobody’s perfect — not our mayors or our legislative bodies or our public agencies. That’s why more oversight of public matters — not less — is always in order.

Selling the Future

Congress now seems likely to pass a wrongheaded energy bill packed with tax breaks and benefits for oil, natural gas, coal, and power companies. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the bill’s total cost to taxpayers, including lost revenue, will reach $40.3 billion through 2008 and $52.6 billion over the next decade.

But the real cost is much higher. In addition to sending many pesky environmental regulations back to the Stone Age, both the House and Senate versions of the bill give huge tax breaks to oil companies and grant increased access to sensitive natural areas. Utilities also join in the gold rush, with new tax breaks for coal-fired plants, which are responsible for 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. The Senate version also helpfully repeals the law enacted to prevent future Enron scandals, the Public Utility Holding Company Act. Anything else you need, fellas? Just ask. Our noble public servants will no doubt happily oblige.

There’s good news for some, though: stockholders in America’s energy companies. “If you look at the fundamentals, who benefits from the bill and all the different reasons why members of Congress are likely to vote for it in the end, we’re looking at excellent chances of getting the bill done this year,” said Prudential Securities Washington analyst James Lucier.

Incidentally, the oil, utility, and coal industries contributed approximately $25 million to members of Congress this year. The selling of America’s future — and its soul — continues.

Fixing the Blame

Governor Phil Bredesen’s announcement Tuesday that he had fired Department of Children’s Services commissioner Mike Miller — whose prior Davidson County service was praised by the governor — cited the need for “a different kind of leader” at the state-government level. That may or may not be on point: The deeper reality is that Miller got the ax because of a federal monitor’s report highlighting continuing serious problems that long antedate Miller’s tenure.

That report, released early this month, flunked the department on more than half of its 136 findings — no surprise for an agency whose reputation has long been sullied by funding scandals and deaths of children under its general supervision. Even Bredesen on Tuesday appeared to recognize this — calling DCS a department in need of a “deep cultural change.” In fact, the federal report was mandated by July 2001 — a full 19 months before either Miller or Bredesen took office.

Miller had frequently been called on the carpet to respond to issues dating back several years before his term began. He did what he could: fired a regional director, held get-tough press ops, and made heady promises of clean sweeps to come. But in 10 months he had barely enough opportunity to begin the process of fixing DCS. If Bredesen really wants fundamental change, he might look to the source of the problem: day-to-day caseworkers and supervisors. It is they who account for the troubling numbers and the damning statistics in the monitor’s report.

We hope the governor finds the “strong manager” he says he’s looking for. Bredesen’s action in firing Miller — only a day after the beleagured DSC head had led off the governor’s public budget sessions with a lengthy report detailing serious cuts of the sort all state agencies are now expected to propose — can be excused if he is able to locate such a wonder-worker.

Otherwise, Miller will be regarded as what he seems to be at the moment — a scapegoat.

The New York Times, which has had serious credibility problems of late and which has begun trying to remedy them, may have overstepped its bounds in the process. In first commissioning and then endorsing a negative Columbia University report on one of its former Pulitzer Prize winners, the Times has not so much repaired its integrity as damaged it further.

In joining with Columbia professor Mark Von Hagen in seeking to have the late Walter Duranty’s 1932 prize rescinded, the Times has undermined the historical process and embraced something close to Soviet-style revisionism. This is first-class irony, since the reason Von Hagen and the Times cite in asking the Pulitzer committee to revoke Duranty’s prize is that the erstwhile Times correspondent was too slavishly accepting of the gospel according to then-dictator Joseph Stalin.

Maybe Duranty was a credulous dupe in reporting Stalin’s party line as fact. Or maybe just a simple dope. He was awarded the prize at a time when the Soviet Union was still more or less isolated from the world community and in-depth reporting of any kind from Stalin’s cloistered empire was a rarity. The Duranty articles on which the prize was based were written in 1931, not in the 1932-33 period of a Ukrainian famine that resulted from punitive and agriculturally stupid Stalinist policies. This is a key point, since much of the subsequent animus accorded Duranty had to do with his purported blindness in reporting on the famine — or on what many alleged to be his virtual complicity with the regime in covering it up.

None of this can be charged against the prize-winning articles, however. In his report, Von Hagen — making what we presume to be his best case — called Duranty’s 1931 pieces “very effective renditions of the Stalinist leadership’s style of self-understanding of their murderous and progressive project.” He heaps further damnation by judging that Duranty’s reporting was “neither unique among reporters” nor “particularly unusual, let alone profound.”

Sorry. If that’s the best that Von Hagen and the current heads of the Times — who endorsed the report and washed their hands of Duranty — can do, our judgment is against the judges, not the deceased and defamed reporter. There is only a difference of degree between this sort of un-personing and the kind made infamous by Stalin himself, whose regime, in the light of a ruthless Realpolitik, rescinded not only reputations but people themselves, expunging all traces of their deeds and identities and consigning these onetime favorites to gulags or to execution chambers.

Nothing is clearer than the fact that political fashions — and aesthetic standards, for that matter — change with the evolving whims of time. To take another flagrant recent example — the decision by CBS to cut and run on its expensively produced docudrama about the Reagans — we are clearly in a period in which even mild criticism of figures on the political right is not to be countenanced. Though the now-disowned production apparently featured some of the more prominent warts on the personalities of Ron and Nancy, it was largely reverential of the former first family, according to the aforesaid New York Times, which nevertheless delivered itself recently of something of an apologia for the censors. (Obviously, the paper is on a roll!)

Plagiarists and rip-off artists are not the only blemishes that the Times and the Fourth Estate in general need concern themselves with. Besides the errant Jayson Blairs or Rick Braggs or Walter Durantys, for that matter, the media need to be mindful of misdeeds committed in the name of respectability. The eraser end of the pencil can offend quite as much as the writing end.