The New York Times...has already published five articles about Le's disappearance and murder and the apprehension of suspect Raymond Clark III. The Boston Globe has published at least six stories about the case, and the Washington Post has run at least three briefs from the Associated Press. The Times of London, published five time zones away, can't seem to sate its appetite for Annie Le news. Even the proletarian New York tabloids—the Post and the Daily News—have gone ape for the story.

...besides which, a slew of well-sourced and quick-response articles in the university's paper of record, and, by my count, two cover spots in the Washington Post Express.

My problem with Shafer's piece isn't his gripe that crimes at Yale and Harvard receive undue attention. (They do; always have.) I went to Yale—graduated, even—and Shafer's points are well taken. But what the media critic misses is that, when it comes to murder, the Ivy League's disproportionate share of media attention is part of a larger, and more regrettable, trend.

In D.C., the murders of (say) a white, affluent northwest couple like Michael and Virginia Spevak prompt the kind of media bonanza with which no targeted shooting in southeast could possibly compete. Then there's the case of Alice Swanson, a well-educated, middle-class white activist wired into the world of think tanks and nonprofits. A full year after her death, her memorial was still standing—and when, two weeks ago, the mayor's office removed the ghost bike, people freaked. Of course, as one commenter noted:

The law says the memorials come down they come down. If this was am unsightly teddy bear memorial surrounded by liquor bottles and candles for a gun shot victim you would be petioning the Mayor’s Office for it’s removal.

This isn't just about the media; it's about us and our assumptions. As a paper, we only put murders above the fold when they defeat expectations—sensationally or otherwise. As humans, we perk up when a story elicits a double-take, or forces us to reassess presuppositions that may have been bogus to begin with. Would this story have blown up in the mid- to late '80s? Probably not; New Haven was a lot grittier back then. But if a GWU student were kidnapped, brutalized, and discovered a week later in a wall, I'm pretty sure the event would garner more coverage than the corresponding death of a kid in Ward 8. (Ask Cherkis.)

Just saying. Newspapers have been on this treadmill for a long time. If anything, the Annie Le story is one that deserved to make it.

***

Closing hat-tip: After calling the New York Times "one of several Ivy League house organs," Shafer is wise to acknowledge that at Slate (which fits much the same description), "no Harvard or Yale story proposal will ever be laughed out of a story meeting, no matter how mundane."

Don't Ask, Don't Tell and a teensy bit more about Maureen Dowd, after the jump.

• The MSM would rather praise Barack Obama for what he says than hold him accountable for what he doesn't do, hence the flowery recaps of yesterday's speech with little mention of the broken promises. Great example: On Wednesday, Rachel Maddow reported that Robert Gibbs, in response to a question about what Barack Obama was doing to overturn/abolish Don't Ask Don't Tell, said that the president "is working with the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs on making that happen." Yet according to Maddow, "a Pentagon spokesman said just yesterday that that‘s not actually happening, that there is no planning underway. There‘s no work underway inside the Pentagon toward changing the policy, despite the fact that the White House keeps saying that there is." As Greg Pollowitz at the NRO's Media blog points out, Maddow failed to mention that Gibbs lied. (Lefties, like righties, need that kind of shit spelled out for them.) In summary, the Obama Administration said its working to change Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and yet it's not actually doing that. At least his speeches are uplifting! My thoughts on DADT.

• In case you missed it, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd plagiarized. The NYT didn't care, Josh Marshall (the victim) didn't care, and Maureen Dowd didn't care enough to formally punctuate her apology letter to HuffPo or address the fuck-up in her most recent column. Then one of my heroes, Jack Shafer, went and threw her a fucking bone, NSA. Every time I see that woman's wizened yet beautiful visage, my blood boils. How the fuck does she get away with it? Would William Kristol have gotten away with plagiarism? Newser's Michael Wolff thinks we should all just let it go: "Dowd is like some much-vaunted high school type whose success and popularity drive everybody else mad with either envy and spite or inspire a perverse (evidence of great-self-loathing) desire to be her way-too-loyal friend and supporter....Indeed, she is famously surrounded by an inside circle of friends and supporters—other famous-type columnists and New York Times reporters—who famously help her write her column. She regularly lifts their thoughts and sentences, which, since they are unpublished (supposedly), is not plagiarism—though it certainly is insiderism....Such insiderism is why so many people, especially the outsider-type bloggers, despise her. Her evident self-satisfaction and the obvious echo chamber in which she resides, not to mention her apparent ability to get by without doing too much work, rankles." I am TOTALLY BLUSHING RIGHT NOW!

OK, I'm going to watch this video of Maureen Dowd laughing at her own jokes! See y'all later!

Putting it bluntly, Riggs says: "Dowd stole some shit and admitted it." Fair enough.

In Slate, Jack Shafer has an uncharacteristically mellow view of the proceedings. After chiding, "Bad, Dowd, bad—deserving of hard time in a pillory!," Shafer proceeds to exonerate the columnist—Dowd "almost sets things right," he says, a conclusion the media critic arrives at through six-point reasoning:

1. She responded promptly to the charge of plagiarism when confronted by the Huffington Post and Politico. (Many plagiarists go into hiding or deny getting material from other sources.)
2. She and her paper quickly amended her column and published a correction (although the correction is a little soft for my taste).
3. Her explanation of how the plagiarism happened seems plausible—if a tad incomplete.
4. She's not yet used the explanation as an excuse, nor has she said it's "time to move on."
5. She's not yet protested that her lifting wasn't plagiarism.
6. She's taking her lumps and not whining about it.

Taking these points one by one:

1. Two of the most highly trafficked politics and commentary sites rub your nose in your own literary pilfering. What do you do: Retire to your Georgetown manse and burnish your Pulitzer, or acknowledge the obvious?

2. Could Times spokesperson Diane McNulty possibly have been squishier in her apologia? McNulty writes: "There is no need to do anything further since there is no allegation, hint or anything else from Marshall that this was anything but an error." Does the Times really need Marshall to come knocking before they force Dowd to grovel?

3. OK.

4. This smacks of a Chris Rock sketch. Regardless, Dowd deserves no props on this count.

5. Ditto, but OK.

6. Still got a job, check. Still got a column, check. Plenty of heavyweights coming to her defense, check. Them's some pretty meager lumps.

A major point that Shafer misses is the question of medium. When a book plagiarizes another book, or a print publication plagiarizes a book, reaction is likely to come slowly and by narrow avenues. When one of the most-read columnists in the country cribs from one of the most-read bloggers in the country, well, that's a different story: backlash is likely to come quickly and from all sides. Leaving the cribber on the defensive, and with little equivocal recourse.

All of which sidesteps one of the most troubling points: How often has Dowd done this exact thing before?

A final point: Shafer apparently misunderstands the purpose of a pillory. Pillorying a writer isn't the equivalent of slapping him or her on the wrist—it's a full-on public humiliation (see above), after which the writer's reputation is tarnished forever. Seditious pamphleteering, Papism, sexual deviancy—these were the crimes that merited a good pillorying back in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Far be it from me to recommend such for Dowd. But let's at least be consistent in our hyperbole.

Illustration above: "Defoe in the Pillory," engraving by J.C. Armytage, 1868.

Take Slate. This a.m., I stole three minutes from actual work to read up on the essentials—you know, my daily dose of counterintuitive rhetorical questions and columns on the best way to break one's leg. Before I could click through to a piece on "why you should let your kid suck his thumb" or a Jack Shafer column asking, "prithee, does we need newspapers?" a ginormous Volkswagen ad swooped in, flashing sleek images of a black sedan and dropping catchphrases like "ART GALLERY QUALITY INTERIOR" and "POSITIVELY OOZES CLASS." Yum! Before I knew it, I had accidentally clicked on an article asking whether socialized medicine had killed Natasha Richardson. I did not read this article.

Lil' disclosure: A number of similar ads are circulating on our own site—some kind of shoot-'em-up film trailer and a massive White Castle flash animation that swiftly takes over your whole screen. Don't bother trying to mute, pause, or stop the animation—those buttons won't work. Nor will the [close this] button. Your only option? Close the browser, or navigate away from our site.

So please, keep reading. And don't scroll over. Here's Chuck Berry:

• Jesse Finfrock of Mother Jones recently interviewed Robert King, who was released after 29 years in solitary confinement when a judge reversed his conviction in 2001. An excerpt: "In 1972, King was assigned to solitary confinement (for allegedly plotting to kill a guard—a murder that occurred before he arrived at Angola), where he would ultimately spend 29 years. Ensconced 23 hours a day in a 6-by-9-foot cell, King kept himself busy reading, writing, studying law—and experimenting with pralines. He fashioned a cook pot out of segments of soda cans stacked together like a chimney. For fuel, he wrapped lengths of toilet paper into tight rings, tucked the ends in on themselves, and lit them under his makeshift stove. All of this took place on the edge of his toilet; he could easily knock the whole contraption into the bowl to avoid being busted for contraband. For the most part, the guards looked the other way."
• Jack Shafer calls out WaPo for sensationalizing a recent story about PCP: "Although PCP has long been part of the area's drugscape, the Post has rarely done more than accept police department and prosecutor handouts in reporting on the topic. For instance, if the police declare a "street value" for a quantity of seized PCP, the Post automatically publishes it."
• Recent reports from Time Out Chicago and East Bay Express suggest that Yelp.com, a site that features user-generated reviews of businesses, punishes companies that refuse to advertise on the Yelp site by deleting or misplacing positive reviews: "'Nicholas Paul, an instructor at an art studio in Chicago (which did not want to be named for fear of retribution) and who handles the studio’s advertising, said that Yelp approached him to advertise starting in July of 2008. After he turned them down, ‘then all of a sudden three of our positives disappeared and then we got two negative ones,’ he said. Of the original thirteen reviews they had, only eight now remain, four of which are negative. Paul says the sales rep told him he could control that. ‘We could basically adjust the way our reviews are read,’ Paul said the rep told him. ‘We could highlight the ones we wanted and put the ones we didn’t want on the backburner.’”
• AIG isn't the only company giving out big bonuses in the midst of a recession: "Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) is making its largest ever annual award to employees, handing out roughly $2 billion to its rank and file U.S. workers through measures including bonuses, profit sharing and discounts. The financial incentives for hourly workers include $933.6 million in bonuses that the retailer is handing out Thursday. There is another $788.8 million in profit sharing and 401(k) contributions, and hundreds of millions of dollars in merchandise discounts and contributions to the employees' stock purchase plan, said Chief Executive Mike Duke in a memo to employees Thursday....The bonus averages $933.60 for each qualified employee, ranging from cashiers to shelf stockers."[H/t Katherine Mangu-Ward]
• Mark Jenkins, the mastermind behind D.C.'s stuffed-bear installations, made it on NY's Wooster Collective blog.

That's it for me, folks. Have yourselves a nice weekend.

Interesting murder trial in the Va. 'burbs: Fawn Scott stabs and kills her boyfriend, says it's self defense, but gets charged with murder nonetheless. Scott isn't a very sympathetic defendant, but it's still hard to believe she didn't act to save her life.

Banned in Beijing. No hustling! Also, math is hard.

Screw you Randy Newman. Short people are kinda awesome, even if they wear silly eye makeup.

The National Museum of Health and Medicine, which is actually cool in an old-fashioned, pre-interactivity, plastic model of the heart kind of way, is hosting an exhibit on advances in the forensic identification of U.S. war dead. Potentially fascinating, and gross. Too bad we missed their program for National Hairball Awareness Day. Our tax dollars at work!

Jack Shafer says conventions aren't worth covering. Don't think he'll sway any editors.