The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by dsquared:

I would imagine that they have received a c'n'd letter, and that the reason why is that French artists tend to be a little more robust in their behaviour toward such things than comic book fans with websites.

>>If answering machines existed back then, people would consider it rude to use them to screen callers

errr ... that is rude.

>>The only explanation that I can come up with for your finding it is that you went hunting for any mentions of you in Google. And that's laughable and pathetic.

What other uses does google have?

I'll stand up to take a potshot at the NYT; it's terrible and much worse than the Ham & High. Everyone looks at the scandals of Blair, Wen Ho Lee, etc, as occasions on which the "culture" failed and one got through the net. But what about cases when the culture succeeded in its own terms, such as most obviously, that of Gary Webb?

For those who don't remember, Gary Webb was the guy who dug up evidence of cocaine smuggling by people connected to the Contras. For his pains, he was slandered all across the pages of every newspaper in America, with the NYT leading the charge.

This was done on the basis of off-the-record briefings by the CIA, who managed to plant enough official denials that the NYT et al. started accusing Webb of "sloppy reporting" because he hadn't reported counter-claims which he knew to be false. Then they started calling him a conspiracy theorist and gradually destroyed his career.

The NYT doesn't have a dedication to "the facts". It has a dedication to "those facts which official sources are prepared to confirm and no others". That's why it screwed Jason Leopold on the Thomas White memo which Krugman reported; the Ham & High would certainly not have ratted out their source, and they would not have built up a fairly trivial lifting of a few words of a story into a reason to walk away from a bombshell.

C'mon, if the USA had an entirely state-owned newspaper industry, what would be different? The NYT and its status as the self-appointed guardian of "news values" is a big part of that problem.

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