RattlerGator Blog

President Bernie Machen Pays Tribute to Al and Judy Warrington

It was reported yesterday that Al and Judy Warrington made a gift of $75 million to the University of Florida, bringing their total contributions to the university over the years to an incredible $100 million. In honor of the remarkable donation, U.F. President Bernie Machen supplied an opinion piece printed today in the Miami Herald and I'm re-printing it in full below.

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BY BERNIE MACHEN
WWW.UFL.EDU

Friday night, Al Warrington, a UF alumnus, an accomplished businessman — and a Miamian — along with his wife, Judy, pledged the single largest gift ever to the University of Florida.

The $75 million, which, when combined with Warrington’s earlier support, makes him UF’s first $100-million donor. This gift will add momentum to UF’s accelerating campaign to rise among the nation’s top public universities. The Warringtons’ generosity will benefit Florida’s best and brightest students, its economy and all of the nearly 20 million Floridians touched by the work of UF researchers in fields ranging from medicine to agriculture to engineering.

Florida has invested heavily in public higher education for more than a century, and this taxpayer support has driven the growth and success of UF and our 11 other public universities.

Today, UF offers a world-class education at a price consistently ranked as one of the best bargains in the nation. We have built a legacy of medical and scientific discoveries; technologies that have helped launch more than 100 job-creating companies; and labs that attract almost $600 million in annual corporate, foundation and federal research funding to Florida.

The Warringtons’ gift and similar private support will allow UF to augment, amplify and diversify this legacy in ways that go beyond what is possible with public funds or tuition dollars.

Such gifts support:

• Scholarships for Florida residents, such as the Machen Florida Opportunity Scholars Program. Intended for first-generation students whose families earn less than $40,000 a year, this scholarship has enabled more than 2,900 students to attend UF since 2006.

• Endowed faculty positions that will allow UF to hire and retain world-class faculty.

• Student training and experience. A case in point: Business college faculty use these funds to hire graduate student assistants, who in turn focus on research questions and receive critical training as Florida’s next generation of entrepreneurs and scholars.

• The purchase of scholarly or scientific assets, such as immense sets of business and economic data — the raw materials from which faculty build new insights and knowledge. These funds also help UF researchers travel around the globe to collaborate with colleagues at other institutions.

The Warrington gift comes as our university moves forward with plans to hire as many as 130 faculty members as part of the Preeminence Plan to rise among the nation’s top universities. UF will match the state’s investment in this plan — $15 million annually for five years — through private donations, with the goal of raising $800 million before the next Olympics.

Al Warrington has been a regular on the UF campus for almost 60 years. He worked his way through school cleaning fraternity houses and subsisting at times on apple butter sandwiches. He rose in the ranks at Arthur Andersen in its Miami office and frequently recruited Gator grads to work for the firm. He has shuttled into town for decades to serve on the UF board of trustees, as president of Gator Boosters and the UF Alumni Association, and as a member of the UF Foundation Board of Directors. He considers Miami his hometown and has owned a home there for decades.

He knows UF as few do, and that knowledge has guided his giving. His past support helped transform the business school now named for him. His latest gift comes at a key moment in UF’s history as we combine state support with private funding to enhance the preeminent university in Florida, a national bellwether state soon to eclipse New York as the nation’s third most populous.

For students, the results will be more scholarships, state-of-the-art facilities and opportunities to interact with top-flight professors.

The state’s business community will gain new companies, skilled employees and expertise. And residents will see benefits ranging from disease-resistant crops to new consumer technologies to advances in cancer treatment.

As we work toward those goals, donors such as the Warringtons give twice. Once to UF, and again to the people of Florida.

Bernie Machen is the president of the University of Florida.

Interesting Opinion on the Media

I have a lifelong fascination with "the media" -- when I entered the University of Florida, I thought I knew that I would major in some form of Journalism and get into television news. Like many a college student, I changed my mind while on campus but media remains a deep interest. At this moment, I don't know how I stumbled upon The Collapse of CNN (probably some tweet in my Twitter timeline -- yep, Jim Treacher, retweeted to my timeline by Stephen Kruiser) but it was an interesting piece with some fairly typical and predictable comments to the opinion of John Ellis, the writer.

One, however, was certainly not typical or predictable. Identified as "WigWag" (I originally typed WigWam for some reason). Clearly a leftist (anyone asserting that CNN's left-wing bias is open for debate is a clear leftist), WigWag nevertheless delivered some worthy opinion. Here it is in full:

The only thing more shallow then CNN’s news coverage may be the assertion that CNN’s problems stem fro liberal bias. Even if CNN has a left slant (a debatable proposition), the idea that this accounts for it’s problems is simply ignorant.

Fans of Fox News or MSNBC may take some delight in CNN’s failures but they shouldn’t celebrate too long; their favorite purveyors of bloviation are headed for the dust heap of history too.

The major challenge facing old media in general and television (especially cable television) in particular is the looming massive wave of disintermediation that is about to strike it with the destructive force of a massive cyclone. CNN as the weakest link may fail first but Fox News and MSNBC won’t be far behind.

News Corp, the parent of Fox News seems particularly vulnerable because it is an old media company that seemingly has no clue about how to operate in a new media age. Remember, Fox and News Corp recently performed the remarkable feat of turning a billion dollar investment in My Space into a loss of $900 million when they sold the company for pennies on the dollar. But for News Corp/Fox that’s not the worst of it.

To get a sense of foreshadowing for what is soon to hit one needs only to examine what happened with Fox News and Glen Beck. After Beck and Roger Ailes (the man that John Ellis naively thinks could rescue CNN) had a falling out over Beck’s extraordinarily popular Fox show, Beck realized he doesn’t need Fox. After all, he had an incredibly loyal audience willing to pay to hear him rant; why cut an intermediary like Fox into his action.

Beck set up his own subscription based show on the Internet and it is incredibly successful, profitable and growing by leaps and bounds. Producing a high quality show that looks as good as a television show takes capital that Beck doesn’t have so he partnered with Premiere, Inc, a subsidiary of Clear Channel radio. Premiere and Beck each own 50 percent of Beck’s show. Premiere also owns 50 percent of Limbaugh’s and Hannity’s radio shows.

The irony is that the CEO of Premiere’s parent company, Clear Channel, is Bob Pittman. Bob Pittman was the founder of MTV and a former chief operating officer of AOL and later AOL-Time Warner. After Steve Jobs, he may be the greatest marketing genius of his generation. Stupidly, CNN’s parent, Time Warner passed him over to hire the bland and diffident Dick Parsons to run the Company.

The irony is that the CEO of the parent company which partners with Beck and owns 50 percent of Limbaugh and Hannity’s shows is himself a rabid liberal who has raised millions for Obama and before that both Clintons. Whatever their political differences, Pittman shares a common passion with his right-wing partners; they all love making money. Beck is delighted to work with Pittman; Pittman is delighted to work with Beck. All that matters is that everyone is drowning in dollars.

Clear Channel and News Corp/Fox are heading in opposite directions. It won’t be long before the likes of Hannity, O’Reilly and Van Sustern figure out that they can make far more money by emulating Beck. When they do they will tell Murdoch and Ailes to take a hike and they will sell their wares directly to the public with the Internet as the vehicle. MSNBC will collapse when Madow and colleagues follow suit.

Clear Channel and News Corp/Fox are heading in opposite directions. Murdoch’s company makes mistake after mistake after mistake; Pittman’s company is on a roll.

For a long time Clear Channel represented the oldest of old media. After print, what could be older or duller than radio. Clear Channel had taken on truly massive debt to build an 850 radio station Empire. Several years back, Bain Capital (after Romney had left) took Clear Channel private in a leveraged buy-out. Clear Channel was owned approximately 50/50 by it’s founding family and Bain.

The founding family in question was quite right-wing. Some may remember the controversy Clear Channel stirred up when their stations boycotted the Dixie Chicks after members of the band criticized George Bush. The other owners, the partners of Bain Capital are also a relatively conservative bunch. But after the highly leveraged company continued to flounder, that didn’t prevent the owners from hiring the uber-liberal Pittman to save their company.

Pittman is turning Clear Channel from a stodgy old media company to a highly successful new media company so fast that it makes your head spin. Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio site which let’s you listen to all 850 of their radio stations on line (or importantly on a smart phone) gets more than 10 million hits a month. They have a listening platform identical to Pandora that is used by more than twice as many listeners who use Pandora. Ominously for the Time Warners and News Corps of the world, Clear Channel is contracting directly with recording artists like Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift: record labels are almost a thing of the past; television networks will be following them into oblivion. Clear Channel owns 50 percent of Ryan Seacrest; if Seacrest gets an anchor job on the Today Show or if he hosts American Idol, NBC and Fox have to pay not only Seacrest, but also Clear Channel. The Company is even getting into the business of promoting concerts such as the iHeart Festival in Las Vegas or the Jingle Ball concerts in cities throughout the United States.

While Clear Channel is prospering by using it’s old media platforms as a bridge to a new media world, less nimble companies like Fox, Disney (owners of ABC and ESPN), Time Warner (HBO, Time Magazine Group, CNN) and Comcast (NBC) are being left in the dust.

Just as CNN is dying; Fox News and MSNBC are also about to experience a near death experience. Technology induced disintermediation means producers of entertainment or news can sell their product to consumers without cutting Fox News, MSNBC or CNN in on the deal. It also means that subscribers/consumers will be able to purchase only product that they want rather tan paying for a lot of product that they don’t want just to get a small amount of product that they do.

Disintermediation is going to kill television as we know it. Smart companies like Clear Channel are likely to thrive. Dinosaurs like News Corp/Fox and Time Warner are likely to go the way of Kodak.

Anyone who thinks that political bias is what will kill content providers like news outlets doesn’t know what they are taking about.

It’s capitalism and it’s hand maiden; creative destruction.

Adios CNN. Sayonara MSNBC. Bye bye Fox News.

Now -- say what you will, that's a very interesting comment that is going to give me quite a bit to think about over the next month or so. Kudos to you, WigWag.

 

America, Again

While racing through some of the morning papers and websites, I ran across this article in the London Telegraph, World Power Swings Back to America. Here's a representative sampling:

As Cleveland Fed chief Sandra Pianalto said last week, US manufacturing is "very competitive" at the current dollar exchange rate. Whether intended or not, the Fed's zero rates and $2.3 trillion printing blitz have brought matters to an abrupt head for China.

Fed actions confronted Beijing with a Morton's Fork of ugly choices: revalue the yuan, or hang onto the mercantilist dollar peg and import a US monetary policy that is far too loose for a red-hot economy at the top of the cycle. Either choice erodes China's wage advantage. The Communist Party chose inflation.

Foreign exchange effects are subtle. They take a long to time play out as old plant slowly runs down, and fresh investment goes elsewhere. Yet you can see the damage to Europe from an over-strong euro in foreign direct investment (FDI) data.

Flows into the EU collapsed by 63 [percent] from 2007 to 2010 (UNCTAD data), and fell by 77 [percent] in Italy. Flows into the US rose by 5 [percent].

The current China fixation is the "Japan, Inc." phenomenon from the 1980s all over again with a major, extended worldwide recession thrown in right now, rather than looming on the horizon. I haven't been able to watch this video (embedding of the video has been disallowed) from one of the authors of the book that serves as much of the basis for the article, The American Phoenix: And Why China and Europe Will Struggle After the Coming Slump, but I'm sure it's an interesting five minutes.

Rarely is it a good bet to wager against the United States of America. However, as the article concludes:

The switch in advantage to the US is relative. It does not imply a healthy US recovery. The global depression will grind on as much of the Western world tightens fiscal policy and slowly purges debt, and as China deflates its credit bubble.

Yet America retains a pack of trump cards, and not just in sixteen of the world’s top twenty universities.

It is almost the only economic power with a fertility rate above 2.0 - and therefore the ability to outgrow debt - in sharp contrast to the demographic decay awaiting Japan, China, Korea, Germany, Italy, and Russia.

Europe's EMU soap opera has shown why it matters that America is a genuine nation, forged by shared language and the ancestral chords of memory over two centuries, with institutions that ultimately work and a real central bank able to back-stop the system.

The 21st Century may be American after all, just like the last.

Hubba Hubba !!!

Best Super Bowl Commercial of 2011

If you're somewhere around 50 (like me), how do you not love this Volkswagen commercial???

That was definitely the best Super Bowl commercial for me. I missed some of them while texting and tweeting, but of those I saw, this was the best.

Specific Hope for Haiti

I'm getting old and today is depressing reminder of the effects of getting old on yours truly. Back in mid-December I came across a video purporting to show 200 years of global progress in just four short minutes. It was impressive and on-point, I thought, for the work in Haiti that I've been contemplating for a few years now. This morning, a good friend who is also involved in the agricultural and economic development strategy we hope to implement in Haiti sent me a forwarded eMail on the same video. I responded to him that I had sent the YouTube video to him weeks ago. He responded that I had not.

Wrong, I thought to myself. When time presented, I searched for the eMail so that I could then send the proof to him.

Couldn't find it.

Never sent the eMail.

In fact, I didn't even post about it on the blog, and I had begun the preparation to do that as well. Obviously, something came up that day, I laid the immediate task down, never got back to it, and now can add to my collection of anecdotes that multitasking for me just isn't what it used to be. Here's the video in question:

Isn't that impressive? It's also damning, isn't it, but I'll leave that discussion for another day. That presentation was followed up in January with a good column from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times (Ladders of the Poor) that said, in part, this:

Private and public donations saved lives in Haiti, no question. But it’s also true that well-meaning bleeding-hearts tend to exaggerate the impact aid typically has on a country. Those nations that have managed to lift themselves out of poverty have done so mostly with trade, not aid — with giving people jobs and a ladder, not handouts and an elevator.

Precisely.

That superior column was accompanied by a video that helped to shed light on the specific hope for progress in Haiti. In my opinion, that hope is made evident when one considers the import of the prior video detailing 200 years of global progress. How so? First, here's the video on Odecile Jean, and the progress that has been made possible (in part) by the peasant bank, Fonkoze:

When I look at Odecile Jean and contemplate her striving for more, I think of Maya Angelou's poem, Still I Rise, and it's famous line, “I am the hope and the dream of the slave.”

As we have certainly learned in this nation, poems and sassiness and resilience aren't enough.  Hopes and dreams sure as heck aren't sufficient. Faith, alone, isn't enough. It has to be married up with the responsibility required if one is to survive in the world of commerce.

For better or worse, Haiti has to embrace the world of commerce and it has to do so now.

Beyond Sabetha's Snow

I've returned from what must have been a solid week on the road that involved travel to South Florida, a flight out to Kansas through DFW, driving through major snow on Kansas roadways back to the KC airport, flight back to South Florida via DFW, and then a welcomed and leisurely seven-hour drive back home to Tallahassee.

Readers of this blog may remember me briefly discussing my contemplation of efforts to get involved with an organization trying to help Haiti move forward. Well, that's been done via a start-up. Thus the trip to Kansas. One highlight among many: we saw a fascinating presentation revolving around extrusion technology that has the potential to seriously impact malnutrition in Haiti.

But. Kansas in January?

Oh my goodness was it cold (eight degrees on the morning of our departure). On the drive into Kansas, my brain literally started sending signals to my entire body: prepare to hibernate, hibernate, hibernate. Must hibernate! Bundle up!

But our host family was warm and couldn't have been more gracious to us. That helped.

Still, this was the scene that greeted us at our hosts' home. I call it "Beyond Sabetha" as this could have been the theme for our visit, focused as it was on Haiti:

Sabetha had a certain charm to it (trust me, it truly did), and -- covered in a serious blanket of snow -- the white stuff probably transformed the winter landscape. The snow was quite dry and danced across the roadway when the wind blew. Luckily, the wind didn't really blow until Saturday night on our way to a fantastic steak place (the Country Cabin) in Hiawatha, Kansas. My 18 ounce prime rib, as I had been assured, was absolutely outstanding.

Why Kansas in January? Because we are endeavoring to implement an agricultural and economic development strategy in Haiti that actually moves the needle, so to speak. Something practical and away from Port-au-Prince. Something that isn't primarily governmental but private sector.

I'll close with a photo of one of my best friends. He's a driving force behind our efforts and a proud Haitian who aches to try and improve conditions in the land of his birth. I love this photo; it seems to capture so much. But, what can you do with a Black Man in the snow . . . hmmmm?

Trust me when I tell you this, we didn't stay out in the snow for long. No sir, buddy! I was just happy to not get crushed with a snowball.

Please wish us Godspeed and good fortune. Haiti needs it.

Innovation Saved the Chilean Miners

Innovation that is the hallmark of capitalism, that is.

Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal has the interesting take on the rescue this morning.

If those miners had been trapped a half-mile down like this 25 years ago anywhere on earth, they would be dead. What happened over the past 25 years that meant the difference between life and death for those men?

Short answer: the Center Rock drill bit.

This is the miracle bit that drilled down to the trapped miners. Center Rock Inc. is a private company in Berlin, Pa. It has 74 employees. The drill's rig came from Schramm Inc. in West Chester, Pa. Seeing the disaster, Center Rock's president, Brandon Fisher, called the Chileans to offer his drill. Chile accepted. The miners are alive.

Longer answer: The Center Rock drill, heretofore not featured on websites like Engadget or Gizmodo, is in fact a piece of tough technology developed by a small company in it for the money, for profit. That's why they innovated down-the-hole hammer drilling. If they make money, they can do more innovation.

This profit = innovation dynamic was everywhere at that Chilean mine. The high-strength cable winding around the big wheel atop that simple rig is from Germany. Japan supplied the super-flexible, fiber-optic communications cable that linked the miners to the world above.

The profit = innovation dynamic is the path forward, and we caricature it (as President Obama is given to do) at our own peril.

More Context on George W. Bush

In the aftermath of President Obama's somewhat disappointing speech last night on the largely successful Fight for Freedom in Iraq, now is another moment for me to reflect on our 43rd president.

It's no secret that I don't take well to criticism of George W. Bush, especially when it is of the know-nothing and historically obtuse variety (these are most often delivered by partisan Democrats). However, it is a particular sore spot with me when Republicans and self-described conservatives are providing the critique -- and I've heard more than my share of those. I, naturally, was pleased yesterday morning to read a post from Matt A. Mayer of the Buckeye Institute over at National Review that does a good job of providing good context on the financial era actually inherited by Dubya (rather than the mythological economic presumptions touted by Democrats) in his post titled The Hole that We're In:

Look, as a conservative who dragged my six-months-pregnant wife from beautiful Colorado to the swamp of Washington, D.C., in 2004 to serve Pres. George W. Bush, no one was more frustrated by the big-government growth that occurred under Republican rule than me. That said, I have grown tired of the near-constant assault on the Bush years, especially when those assaults focus on the economic weakness of those years and conveniently ignore what happened in the few years before President Bush took office.

Here, here!

Mayer goes on to attack, quite properly, the alleged boom years of the Clinton presidency.

[T]he Clinton boom was built upon the mirage of the dot-com and technology craze, as well as the book-cooking of companies like Enron, Global Crossing, and WorldCom. The fact of the mirage is clear when one looks at the S&P 500. Specifically:

On December 9, 1994, the S&P 500 traded at 446.96. From that day until May 24, 2000, it grew by 242%, or an annualized growth rate of 26.15%, to a then record 1,527.46. Even the dotcom and corporate fraud bust failed to totally squeeze the inflated gains out of the market. On January 19, 2001, the day before Bush started his presidency, the S&P 500 traded at 1,342.54, which was still a 200% net gain from December 1994 or a 19.71% annualized growth rate.” Although written in January 2009, when the S&P 500 traded slightly lower than it is today, “[t]he reality is that the current trading price at around 900 is where the S&P 500 would have been had it grown at 5% per year, which is close to the pre-December 1994 annualized growth rate.

The piece goes on to look at the housing bubble and makes the same comparison regarding historical growth compared to the bubble growth that occurred from 1997 to 2006.

Read his entire post; we should never gloss over or forget these factors. For good background on the financial numbers from a layman's perspective, you might want to read a book I wish I had followed years ago -- Get Rich Slowly, by William T. Spitz (at the time of its original publication in the early 1990s, Treasurer at Vanderbilt University; currently, he is a Director & Principal at Diversified Trust Company). From the new media universe, you might also want to review the apparently unrelated Get Rich Slowly blog.

Finally, Jennifer Rubin at Commentary Magazine's Contentions Blog has a post up explaining that a Democrat pollster (Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling) has revealed survey results that indicate “by a 50-42 margin voters [in Ohio] say they’d rather have George W. Bush in the White House right now than Barack Obama."

My, my.

The bloom certainly is off that particular rose, isn't it? Why come, as the street committee might ask? Rubin gives up three probabilities:

First, Obama’s juvenile buck-passing hasn’t and won’t work. The election game plan of threatening the return of Bush isn’t going to fly. Heck, the voters wouldn’t mind having him back! Second, Obama has, to a degree we have not seen in recent years, shied away from acknowledging error. His “out” was always that Bush had messed things up — far worse than we even imagined. Now with Bush-bashing proven to be entirely counterproductive, what will Obama do to deflect blame? And finally, you have to keep faith with the American people. They may get impatient and lose perspective, but they remain exceedingly fair and possess a large reservoir of common sense (e.g., a mosque at Ground Zero is absurd, Bush was a decent man who made tough calls, we shouldn’t dump on loyal allies). It is good to be reminded of that.

Amen.

There is a tremendous amount of satisfaction in observing the nation awaken from the jaw-dropping unseriousness that sang the praises of Barack Obama for simply looking good and enunciating well. That foolishness has finally evaporated, thank goodness.

Great Podcast You Should Listen To

Just in case you didn't notice my tweet, I want to draw your attention to a podcast I was especially pleased to come across today. Coffee & Markets with Francis Cianfrocca; the podcast from the first week in February is hosted by Ben Domenech and is titled, It's Not About Him: America's Decline is About a Lot More Than Obama.

The discussion is engaging and helps to explain why Obama and his agenda must be defeated.

Productivity.

Their use of "decline" is relative, I do believe. But "it" surely isn't about Obama -- he's simply the manifestation of the problem

When the majority of Americans come to believe (heaven forbid) that it is the job of government to make things right in their world -- rather than they, themselves, or their kinfolks or workmates -- we will be screwed.

This is a very serious problem the left-wing (in all of their altruism) is almost completely blind to. We cannot allow this problem to cross the tipping point and Obama made a huge play to do just that.

Maybe, just maybe, he's been stopped in his tracks.

Say What? Intellectual Heft?

The public editor at the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, has posted a rather incredible recitation of the Walter Cronkite obituary fiasco. Here is the full correction, as printed:

The Arts

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International. (Go to Article)

How Did This Happen? attempts to explain what cannot be properly explained. Cannot be explained, rather, beyond an admission of sheer incompetence. Adding to the misery, here is another correction, added just this Saturday:

Correction: August 1, 2009

An appraisal on July 18 about Walter Cronkite’s career misstated the name of the ABC evening news broadcast. While the program was called “World News Tonight” when Charles Gibson became anchor in May 2006, it is now “World News With Charles Gibson,” not “World News Tonight With Charles Gibson.”

This episode will surely go down in Journalism's history as a bright-line marker and it will likely be paired, perhaps many years from now, with a parallel reappraisal of both the "institution" writing the obituary as well as the subject of the obituary. Neither party will shine as brightly as they do today.

Review the comments posted to the public editor's piece and one might argue that something of a trifecta has been obtained; a skewering of the Washington Post as well. This gem is from Thom in DC:

Rather a venial affair compared to The Washington Post [aggressively] marketing to sell direct access to its newsroom, senior editorial and management staff to the highest bidder. Mistakes, even serial mistakes[,] are one thing, a complete ethical collapse is another.

This is even small potatoes to the Post's continuing to publish the drivel of that discredited newsroom roundheels, Sally Quinn, under the guise of writing on faith. In Washington her ravings are known as the whoroscopes!

Venial? Hardly, but the point is well-taken. When the epitaph of the New York Times as we thought we knew it (the younger generation doesn't care about this subject at all) is written, the assertion of intellectual heft for a television critic who can't be bothered with fact-checking will surely have to be noted. Could anything more casually sum up the decline? A television critic was given this assignment? With a known (and permissively accepted) reputation for factual errors? To write about Walter Cronkite?

Okay, so you knew you had a problem writer. Now, how did this happen?

The short answer is that a television critic with a history of errors wrote hastily and failed to double-check her work, and editors who should have been vigilant were not.

Got that? If not, hang on for the nuance:

Five editors read the article at different times, but none subjected it to rigorous fact-checking, even after catching two other errors in it. And three editors combined to cause one of the errors themselves.

That, my friends, is one hell of an admission. Perhaps not as bad, though, as this:

On June 19, Alessandra Stanley, a prolific writer much admired by editors for the intellectual heft of her coverage of television, wrote a sum-up of the Cronkite career, to be published after his death.

Stanley said she was writing another article on deadline at the same time and hurriedly produced the appraisal, sending it to her editor with the intention of fact-checking it later. She never did.

“This is my fault,” she said. “There are no excuses.”

Bingo. But that didn't stop Clark Hoyt from including beaucoup excuses in his piece, none of which served the New York Times well. He should have taken a hint from Stanley; this was her fault. She started the chain of errors. But initiating the chain of errors is one thing, exposing the lack of competent professionals at that paper is quite another.

Who ever thought you could see this level of mistake made by the Times on such an important story and one in which it had a month to prepare?

Damn!