They Write Letters

Charles Kaiser writes to Romenesko:

It defies the imagination that the weekend editors of the New York Times read the four stories they had about Congressman Mark Foley that were written on Sunday, and then decided that the one by Rachel Swarns, which explained what a lovely person Foley had been to some of the pages, was the one that belonged on this morning's front page. Not the one that said the F.B.I. had started an investigation of the Congressman, and reiterated the fact that the Republican leadership knew for months about the Congressman's repugnant behavior, and chose to do nothing about it.

The really amazing thing about the Swarns story was that if anyone had realized that her lead was the opposite of the one she used -- and appeared in the 11 th paragaph of her piece--then it might have belonged on the front page. That was the graph which reported the "news" in the piece: that several pages had been driven out of the program by the Congressman's disgusting e-mails.

I have never seen more unusual news judgement in my life