Shots in the Dark

Harvard student Alyssa Aguilera writes the Times to suggest that, for all the good press about its financial aid practices, Harvard still pays its workers diddly-squat.

(That’s a technical term meaning “not enough.”)

Harvard service employees (janitors, food-service workers, security guards and so on) are in a constant battle with the world’s wealthiest university to update contracts with wages and benefits that meet living wage standards, and are on par with neighboring schools.

Aguilera mentions that she went on a hunger strike in protest of these issues, which is ironic, because if every student at Harvard did that, then the food service workers wouldn’t have jobs!

A fascinating piece by David Kirkpatrick in today’s Times on Mitt Romney’s relationship with his dad, George W. Romney. But as I read it, I couldn’t help but feel that I’d read parts of it before.

Then I realized that the reason for that was because I’d written parts of it!

In a handful of details, written in consecutive paragraphs, the Times simply lifted my reporting.

Below, in Roman type, here’s what the Times writes today, and in italics, what I wrote in the spring 2007 issue of 02138:

At Harvard, Mitt Romney carried an old leather brief case bearing his father’s initials, GWR…

“He only had one thing that was even possibly an affectation,” says Phillips. “He carried his dad’s briefcase with him everywhere he went. It was brown leather, totally scratched and scuffed, the initials ‘GWR’ in gold in the middle. It looked like it had been through World War I and World War II and the Cold War. It was the only sign he gave of a link to being from a politically or economically privileged family…”

….and wrote a seminar paper on a car maker and its dealerships — an issue his father had faced.

As we spoke, [professor emeritus Detlev] Vagts walked over to a file cabinet and pulled out a 30-year-old folder—papers from the seminar Vagts taught, “Law and Business Problems.” Romney’s was still there. Titled “Dual-Distribution in the Automobile Industry,” the paper considered the practice by which manufacturers sell products through both company channels and independent distributors.

Later, Mr. Romney arranged a private meeting for his father with William F. Weld, then governor of Massachusetts.

George Romney talked about volunteerism — a personal passion — for an hour, but his son’s reaction is all Mr. Weld remembers. “He sat there hunched forward a bit with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands just beaming at his father from a distance of two or maybe three feet,” Mr. Weld recalled. “It was undiluted hero worship.”

“His father’s a complete lodestar for him,” says former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld. In early 1995, Romney brought his father to visit then-Governor Weld; George Romney wanted to talk about volunteerism, a longtime cause. “I was sitting behind the desk that later became Mitt’s desk, and George talked for a solid hour,” Weld says. “Mitt was just sitting there looking at his father, just beaming the whole time. He didn’t say a word, he was so proud.”

Well, at least Kirkpatrick did enough work after reading my story to call up Bill Weld and get his own quote.

It’s a small point, but this lack of credit-giving is typical of the arrogance of the Times: When you lift three consecutive, highly specific facts from another piece, idiosyncratic facts that haven’t been reported elsewhere—and then you write them in consecutive paragraphs—you really ought to say, according to a profile of Romney in the magazine 02138.

Why don’t Times reporters follow that basic practice? Two reasons. One, they’re arrogant and don’t think they have to. And two, they want you to think that they did all the reporting.

In the pre-blog era, they could get away with this stuff….

The Baltimore Orioles have released a statement urging baseball fans to read the Mitchell report with skepticism.

The Baltimore organization said it supported baseball’s efforts to rid the game of performance-enhancing drugs but took issue with how Mitchell decided to include names in his final report.

“As to the information and allegations contained in the Mitchell report, the Orioles caution observers to resist the temptation to accept collective judgments based upon unsubstantiated allegations,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, in the Times, Murray Chass argues that George Mitchell did a terrible job investigating steroid use in baseball.

The report talks about the widespread use of steroids, but by now we know that, albeit belatedly. What we don’t know is how widespread the use was, and Mitchell can’t tell us because he doesn’t know.

Was it the 5 to 7 percent who tested positive anonymously in 2003? Was it the 50 percent estimated by Ken Caminiti? Was it the 85 percent that José Canseco said? The Mitchell report doesn’t tell us. The report doesn’t define “widespread use.” There is, I would say, a large difference between 5 percent (about 40 players) and 85 percent (about 680).

And here’s the problem that, from a journalistic point of view, stands out in my mind: Mitchell’s reliance upon a handful of sources to draw sweeping conclusions.

Two-thirds to three-fourths of the approximately 90 names in the Mitchell report came from Kirk Radomski (Brian McNamee, who gave Mitchell the names of Clemens and Andy Pettitte, was a Radomski customer). Most of the others came from the Balco case and the Albany County district attorney’s investigation into Florida pharmacies and clinics. Still others came from baseball’s list of suspended players.

Pretty lame, for a guy who took 20 months investigating. And Mitchell only got McNamee because the Feds leaned on him.

Sadly, the Mitchell report seems to raise more questions than it answers. And one of them is still, how compromised was Mitchell himself?

Tens of thousands of soldiers have been cheating on the Army’s online testing program for years. The Army has known about it…and done nothing.

I think one of the real impediments to good journalism about the Iraq war has been the overwhelming “we support the troops” mantra that makes independent thought impossible. We should consider the fact that our troops are fallible and join the military for lots of different reasons. This isn’t exactly the greatest generation at work……

This morning I read a piece in the New York Sun about a conservative student at Princeton who was apparently beaten by two masked men because of his anti-homosexual views.

Hmmmm, I thought to myself. That doesn’t sound right. It’s the conservatives who do the bashing, not the gays. I bet he’s making it up. I should blog about that.

But then I thought, Oh, don’t be so cynical. Maybe some tough gays just went to town on the guy.

Turns out I was right the first time.

He made it all up!

A student at Princeton University who said he was beaten unconscious by two black-clad assailants Friday has said that he fabricated the assault, and that he sent e-mail death threats to himself, three other Princeton students, and a prominent conservative professor at Princeton, Robert George, police said today.

Can anyone say, “self-hating”?

Oh, and speaking of making it all up…what’s up with that noose-on-the-doorknob story at Columbia?

The Chronicle of Higher Education has ranked educational institutions by the percentage of their employees giving to presidential campaigns—and Harvard is on top by a lot, with more than double the #2 university.

1. Harvard U., $281,050
2. Stanford U., $135,850
3. Columbia U., $120,350
4. Georgetown U., $105,150
5. U. of Chicago, $92,902
6. Northwestern U., $78,450
7. New York U., $74,350
8. U. of California at Berkeley, $71,976*
9. U. of California at Los Angeles, $65,980*
10. U. of Southern California, $63,950

It’s an intriguing list. Where are Yale and Princeton, for example? MIT?

What these schools appear to have in common, in this context, is that they’re all in cities with a tradition of political involvement—Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, LA—where constituents are likely to be politically engaged and presidential campaigns are likely to engage in serious fundraising. Makes sense, right? If you’re Barack Obama, you’re more likely to hold a fundraiser in New York or Cambridge than New Haven or Princeton…

One wonders if, in the university context, significant presidential giving is a good or a bad thing. Is such engagement with the political world appropriate or excessive?

Some weeks ago, there was discussion on this board about whether Scott Boras had mishandled A-Rod’s contract negotiations with the Yankees. (I thought that this episode was Boras’ first big mistake, others disagreed.)

Now A-Rod comes out and says that Boras screwed up:

A-Rod clearly was upset at the advice of Boras to opt out and the way it became public during Game 4 of the World Series. “I was angered, upset, shocked, in disbelief,” Rodriguez said. “It was like a bad nightmare.“

He also says, by the by, that he’s never used steroids…..

Tim Marchman of the New York Sun, a little-known gem of a baseball writer, has a smart column about the Mitchell report in today’s paper.

A list of all the conflicts of interest that prevent Mitchell from credibly playing an independent role in baseball is tucked away near the end of his voluminous report. Consultant to Boston Red Sox ownership, a former director of the Florida Marlins, and former chairman of Disney at a time when it owned both the Anaheim Angels and ESPN, Mitchell is a member of baseball management as surely as anyone now living. He was also a member of the 2000 Blue Ribbon panel, which produced a notoriously owner-friendly report on baseball economics and prompted Mitchell’s former colleagues in the Congress to intervene in baseball labor disputes in various ways.

…The real takeaway here, though, is that despite using questionable means to questionable ends, Mitchell can present literally no evidence of his key claim that “the use of steroids in Major League Baseball was widespread.” This assertion is stated flatly, as fact, but his entire report contradicts it.

Marchman goes on to point out that the report paints the players in vividly unflattering terms but consistently suggests that the owners—which is to say, the people who hired Mitchell (who is, after all, a lawyer)—were trying to do the right thing throughout.

…The problem, in this telling, is that the owners have simply been too virtuous for their own good, that if they’d just not been so nice they would have been able to nab the missing 48.5% of drug-addled players that their very expensive investigation wasn’t able to find.

And as I keep saying to my colleague, Bom Kim, a Red Sox fan, this report wouldn’t pass for good journalism: It’s based on interviews with one trainer, one batboy, some stuff from the Barry Bonds investigation, and various news accounts.

I’m not saying that anything in the report is wrong, just that what is not in the report is probably far more important than what is in it. And it seems like there’s quite a lot that isn’t it.

Jacob Hale Russell’s 02138 piece on the widespread use of researchers/ghostwriters at Harvard, “A Million Little Writers,” gets picked up today’s Chronicle of Higher Education.Â

Like a lot of Yankee fans, I am dismayed by the news that Andy Pettitte was a steroid user, though not entirely shocked; he’s close friends with Roger Clemens, and that suspicion has long hovered over the Rocket. (Just ask Mike Piazza.) The other Yankees named in the report aren’t really central to the team—Kevin Brown (that explains him punching a wall), Gary Sheffield, and so on. They were hired guns.

But also like many Yankee fans, I am skeptical about the paucity of Red Sox players mentioned in the Mitchell report. The only one of import: Mo Vaughn, and he hasn’t played with Boston for a decade. (He’s retired now.) Ortiz? Ramirez? Other Red Sox who suddenly had terrific years in, say, 2004?

We’ll never know. And, one suspects, a big reason we’ll never know is because George Mitchell is a director of the Red Sox.

How baseball could have asked a man who’s affiliated with one team to conduct this investigation, I’ll never understand, but it’s probably evidence of Bud Selig’s general incompetence.

“Take a look at how the investigation was conducted,” said Mitchell. “Read the report. You will not find any evidence of bias, of special treatment of the Red Sox or anyone else, because there isn’t. They had no effect — none whatsoever — on this investigation for this report. As for players, I remind you that it is common now for players to serve many clubs. Many of the players named on this report played for many years with other clubs, including the Red Sox.”

Oh, balderdash. The Red Sox dodged a bullet when Mitchell was named to head this investigation, and they must be delighted with the report. (They should be.)

The Times genuflects before the Mitchell aura, raising the issue of Mitchell’s potential bias, then merely saying, essentially, that everyone respects George Mitchell. (Which, frankly, ain’t necessarily so.)

When of course, every decent journalist would know that appointing a director of one team to run such an investigation compromises the thing from the start.

“Judge me by my work,” Mitchell said. “Read the report.”

To be fair, I haven’t done that yet. (It’s 400 pages long.)

Still, Mitchell’s conflict of interest should have prevented him from heading this investigation, and if Selig et al think that this report has closed a chapter on steroids, they are wrong. The question of whether it whitewashes the record of baseball’s dominant team of this decade will remain.