With two episodes remaining in the season, things are coming to a head on 24 . Following the detonation of a nuclear bomb on American soil, the US is about to unleash a devastating attack on "three middle eastern countries" (never named, for obvious reasons). The three middle eastern countries are targeted based on an audio recording of officials from the three countries discussing the nuclear attack with a known terrorist. Our hero, counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland), has found the man who forged the audio recording (so cleverly that the FBI's experts were fooled). Now he must bring that man in within an hour or so before the tragically misdirected US attack takes place and war breaks out. Meanwhile, deposed President David Palmer ...
Wait a minute. Deposed president? Yes, in last week's episode, Palmer's vice president and cabinet removed him from office pursuant to the 25th Amendment, on the ground that he was no longer fit to exercise his authority as president. The evidence of his unfitness: principally, his unwillingness to order the military strike, based on Bauer's assurance that--experts' analysis to the contrary notwithstanding--the audio recording was a fake.

On reading the amendment, it's virtually impossible to see how it could properly be invoked in a situation like the 24 storyline. By its terms, the amendment seems to contemplate a situation like that of Woodrow Wilson following his stroke: a president who, because of physical or mental illness or infirmity, is unable to meet the demands and obligations of the executive office. It's virtually inconceivable that it could be invoked over what is, in essence, a policy dispute--even if, as the generals in the show insist, any delay would ultimately cost the lives of 20,000 American soldiers.

Part of me, I know, is just fighting the hypothetical; I should simply climb aboard and enjoy the ride. The show, after all, is rife with implausibilities--to take the most obvious example, within the last 14 hours Jack Bauer has survived a plane crash (in which a metal beam impaled his leg) and been tortured literally to death (a doctor was able to restart his heart after a minute or two), and yet here he is, running around, fully alert and seemingly at full strength, only a few hours later. Why should I focus on the constitutional issue?

Still, the constitutional implausibility bothered me last week and continued to nag at me last night. What Iowa law professor Tung Yin found intriguing last week, I find at least a bit disturbing. There's enough misunderstanding among the public of how our fundamental charter operates as it is. The only way to salvage the legal implausibility is with another implausibility: a revelation that the vice president and a substantial portion of the cabinet were in on the bomb plot. Fans of 24: you do understand that this isn't how the Constitution works, right?

One of Cynthia Cotts' sources at the New York Times claims Jayson Blair received excess favor not so much because he was black, but because he was green. Cotts writes: "According to this source, Blair is typical of the latest crop of reporters anointed by the Raines administration. 'They're young, they're energetic, they say the right things, they kiss ass -- but they don't have the skills to do the jobs they're handed,' says the source. 'This kind of favoritism is repulsive to people who have been there awhile.'"

(Though it should be pointed out that the lion's share of the blame still lies with the pathological rogue, regardless of who or what made his rogue behavior possible. It should also be pointed out that we, of all publications, are not immune to pathological rogues.)

Suppose, for example, that your editor had an unhealthy fixation on University of Alabama football, and that anyone capable of engaging her on the subject would be sure to win her good graces. In that case, it seems entirely possible that a University of Alabama alumnus who'd gone to every Crimson Tide football game during his undergrad days could manage to win the editor over even as he was systematically defrauding her readers--and as various subordinates were trying to alert her to that fact. In that case, blaming football fan-dom for the situation would seem to miss the point. The problem wasn't that the editor liked football. It's that she fixated on football to the exclusion of almost everything else, and that she didn't listen to the people who tried to warn her of this tendency (or these people were too intimidated to warn her in the first place). And that's what seems to have happened at the Times. As one anonymous Times reporter says in today's New York Post, "Howell didn't listen ... to anyone about anything."

In the Times's post-mortem, which was excruciatingly and embarrassingly detailed yet still reflects denial over diversity, there are a couple of quotes—there's one from Jonathan Landman, who is the metro editor and was Blair's boss for a couple of years. And when Blair got promoted to full-time reporter from probationary reporter, Landman didn't express his misgivings, and he said he didn't express them principally because the publisher and the executive editor had shown their commitment to diversity and that Blair's promotion was tied to that. And there were other instances, too, where you had editors who clearly wanted him to succeed and therefore didn't speak out or share information among themselves. And I'll make the statement: I don't think a white reporter who worked at the Times, a 27-year-old white reporter, male or female, who worked at the Times for four years who had that long a record of inaccuracy, shady, dodgy behavior, and arrogant confrontations with administrators, that reporter would not have been able to keep a job at the Times, much less get promoted. And be covering sensitive stories like the sniper case.

Meanwhile, staffers buzzed about whether Blair's relationship with a woman who is a friend of Raines' wife helped win him favored treatment. Sources said the woman, Zuza Glowacka, has worked in The Times' photo department. The Times reported Sunday that Blair, when confronted with a charge of plagiarizing a story about a Texas family, was able to describe their house in detail, possibly because he had seen the paper's "computerized photo archives."

The Blair case evokes memories of Ruth Shalit, the young, white, hotshot reporter who was shooting to journalistic fame and fortune in the early 1990s with her fearless, often scathing stories about people and institutions in Washington. In 1995, she took on The Washington Post with a 13,000-word opus in The New Republic on the newspaper’s diversity efforts. She drew the conclusion that the quality of the newspaper had been compromised by its efforts to hire minority reporters. However, Post editors documented nearly 40 factual errors – some big, some small – in that one article.... While errors are a fact of life in journalism (I had to write a correction just last week), I suspect that none of the black journalists Shalit derided has ever been accused of making 40 factual errors in one article or of plagiarizing twice within a year.
As Shalit’s star faded, Stephen Glass’s star rose at The New Republic. Glass was another fancy-pants reporter who wowed readers, his bosses and top editors at other major national magazines with some of the most vivid, colorful writing this town had seen in years. Only problem: much of what Glass, who is white, was writing was untrue. Just completely pulled out of his head. Eventually he was fired for faking all or parts of 27 stories.... Journalists of all stripes – black and white, men and women – have been accused of fake reporting, but it seems only the transgressions of black journalists evoke the race card.
For instance, when Boston Globe columnist Patricia Smith was fired a few years ago after it was discovered she used made-up characters and dialogue, many in the media said the black writer had been coddled at the newspaper because of her race. For Smith’s fellow columnist, Eileen McNamara, it wasn’t enough to express outrage about Smith’s transgressions. McNamara had to play the race card in a column she wrote about it. Yet McNamara expressed no outrage, at least not in her column, a few months later when white, fellow Globe columnist Mike Barnicle, who had been accused previously of fabricating quotes, was caught plagiarizing George Carlin jokes. Similarly, Raad Cawthon, The Philadelphia Inquirer's Chicago correspondent, resigned in 2000 after being accused of plagiarizing material from the Chicago Tribune. Michael Finkel, a freelance reporter, fictionalized a character in a long article in a New York Times Magazine story last year. Both were white. By the way, Barnicle was "punished" with a nice job at MSNBC. Shalit is back in journalism. And Glass is back on the road to fame and wealth, with book and movie deals. Meanwhile, Smith and former Post reporter Janet Cooke, an African American who fabricated a Pulitzer Prize-winning story, disappeared into lives of obscurity. The last we heard of Cooke, in news stories a few years ago, she was selling make-up for $6 an hour at a department store in Kalamazoo, Mich., and eating cereal for dinner. She tried to sell her story a few years ago and no one bit. I’m willing to go out on a limb and bet Blair’s career trajectory from here follows Cooke’s more closely than Glass’s.

None of this is meant to say that race is not an issue at all in the Blair case...
The point is young talented folks get shots. Blair just happened to have blown his. ...
So why did Blair keep getting promotions and prime assignments? Here’s my theory: Freed from the normal constraints of truth and veracity, “journalists” such as Blair, Shalit, Barnicle, Smith and Glass shine above their counterparts. They’re promoted ahead of the pack because their stories, sneakily cloaked as journalism, read better than everyone else’s stories. In a profession fueled by competition, their careers are propelled along because of, rather than in spite of, their transgressions. Some people are acting amazed that a reporter as young as Blair would be given such great opportunities – as though this sort of thing never happened with whites....
To suggest somehow that Blair is unique in being coddled by upper management is pure buffoonery. What about all of the young, aggressive white reporters who are pushed along by overeager white mentors and are clearly not ready for prime time? Happens all the time – at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and every other major publication. Their editors intrinsically trust them. They feel more comfortable talking to them. They understand their worldview. They get handed big stories. They get invited to dinners at the boss’s house.
One of the things that was so astonishing to me was that Blair had powerful mentors at the paper at all. In my 14 years as a journalist, I have never heard of a young black reporter with such close ties to upper management. Ever. I have never heard of a black reporter handed such prime assignments with so little experience. Ever. Also, Blair was reportedly an incredible schmoozer, who ingratiated himself with top management in a way that may have swayed his superiors to cut him some slack. ...
Perhaps Blair was coddled and promoted not because he was black, but because his editors were enraptured to the point of delusion by this kid who kept getting such fabulous stories. No doubt some editors figured his scoops were a small price to pay for accuracy problems. And no doubt some editors were happy to have a black reporter for a change that fit the hotshot bill.

Remember Buyback America? Rep. James Walsh of New York called the program “kind of silly,” arguing that criminals “will not trade their guns for groceries or tennis shoes.” No kidding. Nor are the students who sport the Indian oblivious to the attendant controversy—so they aren’t likely to swap their goods for the ubiquitous green hoodie, Dartmouth shot glass, or even a sawbuck’s worth of Vox Clamantis in Deserto window decals.