Jack Shafer

Newly elected presidents call for the reorganization of the federal government with such regularity that a federal Department of Reorganization should be established to assist them in their attempts to downsize the bureaucracy, eliminate redundant agencies, reduce red tape, cut costs, and tame the out-of-control agencies created and fed by the presidents elected before them. If you’re earnest enough to think that those moves will actually reduce the size or cost of federal government, I’ve got a monument I’d like to sell you.

President Barack Obama originally promised to streamline federal bureaucracy in his 2011 State of the Union speech but only got around to specifics last Friday, as he requested new powers to merge agencies subject to an up-or-down vote by Congress. Obama’s first target: the Commerce Department. He wants to meld the Small Business Administration and five additional trade and business agencies into one body that would replace the Department of Commerce. Obama promised savings of $3 billion over the next decade and to cut 1,000 to 2,000 jobs through attrition over the same period.

The presidential urge to reorganize goes back to Theodore Roosevelt, who established the Keep Commission in 1905 to bring efficiency and accountability to bureaucracy. Scholar Oscar Kraines admiringly called Roosevelt’s attempt to remake Washington in his image “a bold step … to break down the long-existing aim and the tendency of Congress to retain full legislative authority in the management of the public business.” According to political scientist Peri E. Arnold, 11 of 14 presidents elected in the 20th century attempted some sort of governmental reorganization. Congress rightly viewed the Keep Commission as a presidential power grab and has continued to contest similar presidential reorg plans by Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, the Bushes and Bill Clinton — who called his reorganization plan “reinventing government.”

Jimmy Carter was probably the grabbiest of the reorg lot. Although he based his 1976 presidential campaign on reorganizing government to make it work better, once he got to the White House he merely expanded the bureaucracy, adding the Department of Energy and the Department of Education to the Cabinet. (He proposed both a Department of Developmental Assistance and a Department of Natural Resources, incorporating Interior and some agencies from Agriculture, but Congress said no.)

“Carter’s determination to move ahead on cabinet-level reorganization despite the misgivings of many of his aides about both the value and political feasibility of the project is puzzling,” wrote Ronald P. Seyb in a study of the Carter years. “Even the plan’s strongest supporters conceded that it would do little to streamline the bureaucracy because of Carter’s promise that reorganization would not require personnel reductions, realize cost savings, or generate noticeable improvements in administrative efficiency, and the political opposition it would provoke would be close to insuperable.”

Supporters invariably wrap federal reorganization up in good-government rhetoric about capturing efficiencies and saving taxpayers money. Done right, reorgs can be a force for good, but they are usually just a diversion in the power game. Presidents may say they want to reform the bureaucracies out of a desire to trim and speed the bureaucracies, but more often than not their real motivation is to break the bureaucracies’ hold on power. (The most effective downsizing of government comes when whole agencies are eliminated or neutered, as was the case in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Congress and the White House gutted the Civil Aeronautics Board and the Interstate Commerce Commission. Strictly speaking, the CAB and ICC weren’t reorged, they were destroyed.)

“Simply put, with the exception of few symbolic issues, almost anything a president wishes to accomplish must be accomplished through the bureaucracy,” David Lowery writes in his article “The Presidency, the Bureaucracy, and Reinvention: A Gentle Plea for Chaos.” This makes bureaucracies the president’s enemy. He resents any bureaucracy whose first allegiance is to Congress, corporate constituents, or activist brigades. Obama, like presidents before him, swings the reorganizational wrecking ball not so much to increase efficiencies as to weaken congressional power over Cabinet bureaucracies and strengthen executive branch control.

In his Friday speech, Obama unintentionally acknowledged how presidents stack and restack bureaucracies to maximize White House power. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is now inside Commerce, would be shuffled off to the Department of Interior. Obama claimed that NOAA was originally placed inside Commerce instead of Interior, because “apparently, it had something to do with President Nixon being unhappy with his Interior secretary for criticizing him about the Vietnam War.” That Barack Obama would pull a similar reorg trick if he were feuding with his Interior secretary should go without saying. If you can’t beat your bureaucratic enemies, reorg your way around them.

Obama reminded us all that presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan held the power to reorg that he seeks: All he wants is what Congress allowed to lapse in 1984. That’s true. But he insulted everybody with an IQ greater than 85 by adding that his request shouldn’t be regarded as “a partisan issue.” The diminution of congressional power — especially Republican congressional power — can’t be seen as anything but partisan. No committee chairman, even if the president hails from his party, wants to see his current authority disrupted by a shuffling of the Cabinet deck.

Besides fighting the Republican Congress, Obama will also have to go a few rounds with the agencies he hopes to reshuffle. NOAA doesn’t necessarily want to relocate from Commerce, where it is the biggest agency, to Interior where it would cast a lesser footprint. And as Government Executive reported on Friday, environmental activists, who dislike Interior’s “culture,” reject the idea of a NOAA reorg. “The move could erode the capabilities and mute the voice of the government’s primary agency for protecting our oceans and the ecosystems and economies that depend on them,” said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Fishermen aren’t happy about the plan either.

If Obama were truly invested in reorganizing government, he would have proposed something earlier than in primary season, he would have proposed something more ambitious, and he would have offered the Republicans something of political value in exchange for giving him something of political value. Rarely has an attempt to reorganize Washington been so disorganized.

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After the Obama reorg goes through, Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com will be handled by Interior and my Twitter feed will be overseen by Commerce. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about government reform at the White House in Washington, January 13, 2012. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

New York Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane made a huge mistake in his morning blog item titled “Should the Times Be a Truth Vigilante?” for which the Web has been punishing him all day. Brisbane’s mistake wasn’t to bring up the topic of how much time, space and effort reporters should commit to truth-squadding the iffy stuff that oozes out of the mouths of politicians, other notables and their spokesmen.

It’s a worthy topic. Brisbane’s mistake was to pose the topic as question — as if a journalist with his sort of experience didn’t know what the correct answer is — and then to stupidly ask and re-ask the question in the final paragraphs of his item, as if he were Phil Donahue with microphone in hand, rushing up and down the carpeted stairway eager to collect comments from the studio audience.

The awesome stupidity of Brisbane’s blog inspired prominent citizens of Twitterville, as well as Salon’s Alex Pareene, HuffPo’s Jason Linkins, Poynter’s Craig Silverman, New York University’s Jay Rosen, and Boing Boing’s Rob Beschizza, to take up their keyboards. “Should the New York Times — America’s ‘newspaper of record’ — print the truth?” is how Pareene restated Brisbane’s question in his lede. “Brisbane’s job is to embarrass the NY Times for its shortcomings, not to become one of them,” tweeted Village Voice Editor Tony Ortega.

Brisbane sought to quell the fury sparked by his 500-word post in correspondence with Jim Romenesko, who asked Brisbane what the hell he was getting at. He responded:

What I was trying to ask was whether reporters should always rebut dubious facts in the body of the stories they are writing. I was hoping for diverse and even nuanced responses to what I think is a difficult question. …

I was also hoping to stimulate a discussion about the difficulty of selecting which “facts” to rebut, facts being troublesome things that seem to shift depending on the beholder’s perspective.

Stimulate a discussion! Well, yes, Arthur, not even Phil Donahue could have stimulated a more intense discussion of how bulky and numerous the knots in your skull are today.

Brisbane deserved the abuse for writing without thinking, but those who think Brisbane prefers stenography to journalism should seek his back pages. I don’t think I’ve ever met Brisbane, but I recall reading his work closely when he was a Metro reporter for the Washington Post in the mid-1980s and I was editor of Washington City Paper. Brisbane was a skeptical, thorough reporter, and his coverage of Mayor-for-Life Marion Barry often sharpened the knife that we at City Paper would use to slice Hizzoner up. Instead of climbing the Post ladder of success, he returned to Kansas City and climbed the ladder there, eventually becoming editor of the Kansas City Star. I’m not familiar with his work as editor, but it’s safe to assume that he didn’t publish press releases as news.

Part of the outrage against Brisbane is theatrical. It’s fun to excoriate the Times. I’ve made a career out of it! But Brisbane has no power outside of the bully pulpit that the paper gives him. He speaks for himself, not the Times, as the paper endlessly reminds those who ask. But because editors and reporters generally don’t have the guts to take abuse directly from readers, they employ ombudsmen and public editors like Brisbane as their shields: The ombudsman exists primarily to take in the face whatever rotten fruit, bean balls and shards of broken glass that angry readers want to heave at the editors and reporters who produce the newspaper. The ombudsman is a safety valve that prevents reader fury from exploding, a way for the newspaper to say “we listen.” And today, as the gashes on his face prove, Brisbane is earning his pay.

At the risk of being the ombudsman’s ombudsman, what he was trying to ask his readers was how much time and effort the Times should put into refuting or contesting every flawed expression of “fact” that they come across when writing about newsmakers. Of course, Brisbane did himself no favor by labeling the aggressive refutation of squirrelly facts as “truth vigilantism” in his headline.

But to be fair to Brisbane — and I promise not to make this a habit — I think he was asking how fully reporters must tweeze every utterance spoken by newsmakers. Politics teems with gray areas and half-truths. If a reporter were to investigate every assertion of fact — assuming that that’s possible on deadline — the story he was supposed to be working on would dissolve into pixel dust. Infinite skepticism is swell, but it requires infinite fact-checking, and who has time for that? There’s a longstanding joke among journalists about what an infinitely vetted wedding announcement would look like: “A couple representing itself as Mr. and Mrs. John Smith say they hosted a reception Saturday, to commemorate what they claimed was the marriage of their son, in an apartment on Park Avenue that they assert they own.” As Edgar Allan Poe once put it, we crave “journalism in lieu of dissertation.”

Then, late today, Brisbane dug himself in a little deeper with a new post, claiming that his stupid questions had been misunderstood. I’ve read this post a dozen times and can’t figure out what he’s trying to say other than that he’s still looking for “reasoned discussion.” I urge Brisbane to forget about the reasoned discussion and start over with a blank screen — and not to ask stupid questions he doesn’t have the answers for.
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Has opposition research finally reached a big fat dead end?

Not that there is no fresh dirt to dig up on candidates. Each day, the morning editions bring us additional sleaze, flip-flops, and embarrassments from the candidates’ pasts, some of which comes ladled from oppo-researcher notebooks. We learn about our candidates’ legislative histories, their leveraged buyout histories (that would be you, Mitt and Newt), their adventures on K Street (take a bow, Newt and Rick #2), the filth and fury discovered in their back pages (hello, Ron!), the casual racism of a parent (Rick #1), and their military resumes (if they have one). And if they’ve generated any sort of paper trail from tax liens, divorce proceedings, campaign-finance filings, or civil actions—or if there is reusable disgrace from past campaigns—we read and re-read all about it, too.

But how much of this stuff actually sticks anymore? Beyond the undoing of Herman Cain’s candidacy by an avalanche of romancing-while-married stories, it’s hard to imagine any campaign revelation that, by itself, could burn any of the current candidates out of the current race or remain sufficiently hot to scald them in November’s general election. Dirt just doesn’t stain like it once did. (Even if some of this dirt sticks, it won’t alter the outcome for candidates like Rick Perry. The worst that could happen for him is to go from 1 percent to 0 percent support.)

That’s not how the political operatives feel. Today, Talking Points Memo reports how bummed the Democrats are that Newt Gingrich has already attacked Romney with the Bain story. Democrats had been holding Bain in reserve to use against Romney in the general election—as they did in 1994 in his race against Sen. Edward Kennedy (D, Mass.)—to portray Romney as a vulture capitalist of the most craven sort.

The past no longer matters to the political present the way it once did, because we have such better access to it today. Just 15 years ago, investigations of politicians and opposition research were largely limited to professionals with access to Lexis-Nexis or those who knew how to conduct a document search at the county courthouse. Digging dirt back then was like mining gold in the 1800s: labor intensive, and requiring both expertise and expensive tools. Widespread digitization and cheap information technologies haven’t eliminated the professionals from political dirt digging, only lowered the barriers to entry.

Leaping over those low barriers this cycle is Andrew Kaczynski, a 22-year-old history major at St. John’s University, who quarried C-SPAN archives for political gotchas and posted more than 160 of them on his YouTube channel, alerting the press to the best, he tells me.

“Once the channel took off I really didn’t need to send them to anyone because [they] could just go to my page and click refresh and see my latest upload,” Kaczynski says.

By December, Kaczynski’s diligent work on Romney, Paul, and Gingrich had earned him short profiles in New York and the New York Observer and an appearance on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources. He quickly landed a job at BuzzFeed, where he now burrows into the political archives for a living. Today he posted a lovely cap-and-trade flip-flop by Jon Huntsman.

Kaczynski’s skill at dragging skeletons—and a few chicken bones—out of politicians’ closets indicates that soon, everything in a politician’s fossil record that can be retrieved will be retrieved– whether it be by oppo researchers, journalists, activists, or citizens–and put on display: Every utterance, every court filing, every public transaction, every burp, every miscue. By the time the technology really gets kicking, the new transparency will make Kim Kardashian look like a privacy hound.

Under the old rules, the only good defense to oppo research has been a good offense. In a recent Reuters piece, opposition researcher Jeff Berkowitz advised campaigns to conduct preemptive oppo-research (“vulnerability studies”) so they can develop a “response matrix” to repel anticipated attacks. Romney, as TPM notes, had kept his Bain defenses refreshed, knowing the issue would resurface.

But the velocity and volume of revelations coming out of Campaign 2012 suggest that oppo-defense won’t be able to keep pace with oppo research much longer, especially for politicians like Gingrich who have been in the game for four decades. Maybe it won’t happen this campaign, but I can see the day that a complete documentation on every politician of note, produced on the Web in Wikipedia fashion, would make opposition research redundant. When that day comes, we’ll finally be able to see our candidates in full and see that nearly every one of them has flip-flopped; made a fortune from either honest graft or dishonest graft; mistreated, divorced, or cheated on a spouse; taken drugs; lied; cheated; violated taboos; told dirty, racist, or otherwise tasteless jokes; stretched the fabric of the campaign finance laws; associated with bad people; engaged in resume inflation; taken dubious payments; or otherwise transgressed—just like you.

When the day of the Super Dossier comes, and it may even come by 2016, the power of the Web will teach us that nobody has enough character (Nixon? Clinton? GWB?) to be president. At that point, maybe all this standard human frailty will have become sufficiently normalized that we’ll have to pick our chief executive based on the policies and programs he binds himself to pursuing.

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A word to the wise: If you’re working inside government, be careful about doing oppo research while on the clock. Authorities busted Pennsylvania state legislature employees for using state Nexis accounts to dig for dirt at the behest of Democrats in 2006. Send fresh dirt to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and monitor my Twitter feed for my transgressions. Which are many. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Participants cross a mud obstacle during the Wild Boar Dirt Run (Wild Sau Dirt Run) in Laaben, 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of Vienna, October 22, 2011. REUTERS/Lisi Niesner

Except for providing political journalists with millable grist, what good are endorsements? Obviously, a presidential candidate can’t win his party’s nomination on the power of endorsements alone. If that were the case, as Vanity Fair‘s Todd S. Purdum pointed out last month, Al Gore’s anointment of Howard Dean in 2004 would have worked magic.

Yet candidates continue to whore for endorsements, and other politicians continue to give them for mysterious reasons. Take, for example, John McCain’s endorsement of Mitt Romney yesterday at a New Hampshire campaign stop. McCain doesn’t bother to mask his low regard for Romney, as the New York Times reports today in a piece about the event:

[T]he two men made little eye contact, even when Mr. Romney was introducing Mr. McCain. They shared a stiff, half-hug on stage, patting each other on the back in a perfunctory manner.

Placing the relationship in historical context, the Times explains that in 2008, when both men were running for president, McCain hissed that Romney would say anything to get elected. In a 2008 debate, Romney accused McCain of “dirty tricks” and McCain said Romney didn’t have “the experience and the judgment” to be commander-in-chief.

If endorsements were about reciprocity, McCain would have supported Jon Huntsman this year as Huntsman spurned fellow Mormon Romney in 2008 to support McCain. But endorsements aren’t a matter of deposit and withdrawal. They signal information—some of it quite useless—to the political universe about both the endorser and the endorsee.

According to Purdum, Gore gave Dean his seal of approval as an act of revenge against the Democratic establishment, which he thought had mistreated him in 2000. John Edwards gamed both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2008 to determine which candidate would give him the best job in exchange for his endorsement should they win the White House. (He chose Obama when the campaign was all but over.) But neither of these endorsements amounted to much. Gore had no organization to throw Dean’s way and Edwards had exhausted his, making the endorsers the only real beneficiaries of their actions.

Surveying the academic literature on political endorsement in a piece for Political Research Quarterly (“Who Wins Nominations and Why? An Updated Forecast of the Presidential Primary Vote,” pdf), Wayne P. Steger writes that endorsements by party elites “serve as cues to party activists, contributors, and the media as to who are the viable and desirable candidates.” These endorsements have real value if the endorser lends his fund-raising talents to the candidate, and attacks the candidate’s rivals, Steger states. Big-name endorsers can also be campaign assets if they go on the hustings for the candidate, talk to reporters and meet with voters.

Endorsements signal the electability candidate, which indicates that McCain’s endorsement would have meant a lot more to Huntsman, who is relatively unknown, than to Romney. But it’s too late to help Huntsman at this stage in the campaign. Viewed cynically—is there any other way?—McCain deliberately endorsed Romney too late, offering it weeks after it could have done Romney any good. This helps explain Romney’s thanks-a-lot-for-nothing-buddy body language at the campaign event. According to the Times, the McCain camp apparently leaked the “secret” endorsement, extracting even that limited value for their boss. If Romney had an ounce of principle, he would have rejected McCain’s nod.

But he doesn’t and he didn’t. Still, the McCain endorsement still has some value to Romney. Although this is Romney’s second run for the presidency, he still isn’t as well-known to the public as McCain, which means that the endorsement could potentially convey to the politically sheltered Romney’s ideological position inside the Republican field. The downside of the endorsement, of course, is that voters who already have a low opinion of McCain will use the new information to vote against Romney. If that doesn’t make your game-theory bunnies hop, how about this? Romney coveted the McCain endorsement not so much for its value to him but to block its potential value for another candidate.

If the contest for endorsements from other politicians translated to political success, Romney should be lapping the other candidates. The Associated Press reported last week that Romney had “collected more than 1,900 endorsements, including conservative activists and current and former elected officials in all 50 states. The list includes four governors, 48 House members and 11 senators.” No other candidate has come close, the AP concluded. That Romney has not broken away suggests that the endorsements 1) aren’t signaling Republican voters in the manner in which they were intended, 2) it’s too early in the campaign to feel the effect of the endorsements, or 3) endorsements are bunk.

Steger found in his research that the Republican elite is more likely to endorse, to do so earlier, and to unite around one or two candidates than is the Democratic elite. Steger, whose paper was published in 2007, found that “Republican elites … rally around a candidate very early in the invisible primary, and that candidate has become the nominee in every open Republican nomination since 1972.” (The “invisible primary” is the politicking that takes place before the Iowa caucus when voter interest is low and media coverage is scant. In 2008, Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucus and John McCain won the New Hampshire primary.) In addition to speaking their minds for Romney, the Republican elite’s wallets have spoken, too. According to the AP today, Romney has collected $32 million in individual contributions compared to Ron Paul’s $12 million, Newt Gingrich’s $3 million, and Rick Santorum’s $1 million.

The contempt McCain and Romney have for one another, as demonstrated in their 2008 debate clash and which time has not healed, makes a mockery of yesterday’s endorsement. In that sense, it’s not much different than any of the other endorsement of convenience the opportunistic politicians trot out this time of the season.

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I seek your endorsement at Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter had a great invisible primary. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is joined by U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) at a campaign stop in Manchester, New Hampshire January 4, 2012, one day after Romney won the Iowa caucus.   REUTERS/Brian Snyder

The jobs of political reporters and sports writers are almost identical: Determine who is ahead and who is behind; get inside the heads of the participants; decode the relevant strategies and tactics; and find a way to convert reader interest into sustainable enthusiasm. Then, maintain reader enthusiasm for the months and months of caucuses or preseason games, primaries or regular season games, conventions or playoffs, and the general election or Super Bowl (or World Series).

So elemental is this eternal connection between sports and politics that even underdog presidential candidate Rick Perry gets it.

“The only scoreboard that matters is tomorrow, and it’s the scoreboard when the caucuses meet and we win the big Iowa caucus tomorrow,” Perry told the cheering crowd at his final campaign rally yesterday, sounding like the coach of a broken-down wildcard NFL team.

It’s not that the Iowa caucus doesn’t matter to the long-term prospects of the Republican candidates. It does, but not that much. Last week, while trying to inflate the relevance of the Iowa caucus, ABC News had to admit how inessential the contest is. “The Iowa caucus has had about a 50 percent ‘success’ rate when it comes to predicting the nominee” from either party, the site reported. The reason we hear so much about the caucus is because it matters a lot to the press corps, which should—but doesn’t—downplay the event into something less meaningful than a coin toss.

Who to blame for Iowa? I hold Jules Witcover responsible because he touted in his 1977 book “Marathon: the Pursuit of the Presidency 1972-1976″ the vital role the caucus played in Jimmy Carter’s campaign in 1976: He finished second to an uncommitted slate but used that showing to declare “victory” in Iowa. Some pundits say Iowa helped make him front-runner and win in New Hampshire. Even if it’s true that Iowa was the secret to Carter’s eventual success, it’s hardly fair that we should be paying for his good luck 36 years later.

Charles P. Pierce, who has covered both sports and campaign politics and is now a writer at large at Esquire, told me from Iowa today that sports writers have a greater liberty to tell the truth than do political reporters. A sports writer, for example, will encounter little resistance from his editor when he submits a story that says a young shortstop has no chance to make the big leagues. But few experienced political reporters are allowed to treat hopeless candidates like Michele Bachmann that way until the day the candidate is forced to drop out of the race.

“You have to pretend,” Pierce said.

If they weren’t encouraged to pretend, political reporters would tell you to take an Iowa breather and wait for more consequential contests—such as the New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida primaries. Even sports writers pretend sometimes, notably around the time of the Olympics. If they were completely on the level they’d instruct fans to take an extended bathroom break between games. But the commercial demands on both kinds of news fill what should be dead air with speculation, minutiae, human interest, gossip, and commentary. One would think that readers and viewers would resent all the ephemera masquerading as news, but they actually seem to appreciate it! How else to interpret the high ratings for the Republican debates this year or, on the sports side, the proliferation of pre-game and post-game shows, or whole networks owned by and devoted to the NFL and MLB?

“Sports TV has become the template for political reporting,” Pierce said, comparing the spectacle of Iowa coverage to NFL Countdown.

Professional codes deter the sports writers and political reporters from rooting for their home team or their “home” candidate. But both still have a vested interest in their guys winning. The football writer hopes to ride his team’s wave all the way to the press box at the Super Bowl, where a book contract or something even better might ensue. The political reporter, whether he’s a Chicago Tribune reporter covering the Obama campaign in 2008 or a Boston Globe reporter assigned to Mitt Romney this year, not-so-secretly hopes his paper’s “home” candidate will win and he’ll get reassigned to the White House by his bosses or hired by the Washington Post or New York Times. On the cable dial, you can hear MSNBC hosts root for the Democrats just as clearly as you can hear Fox News hosts do the same for Republicans.

But journalists can be realists. “Do you want to be covering Michele Bachmann right now, or do you want to be with Romney and Paul?” said Washington Post reporter Paul Farhi, answering his own question. (Nobody wanted to cover the Indianapolis Colts this year, either.) Farhi, who has reported on business, sports, politics, and the media, says business coverage also obsesses on winners and numbers. “Maybe all journalism is about success and failure, and we see it more clearly in sports,” he said.

If something can be counted, it can be listed. If it can be listed, you can be sure it has been. Compare, for example, the San Diego Union-Tribune‘s five things to watch in last year’s Super Bowl with Politico’s five things to watch in Iowa from today. Guess which list instructs its readers to watch for “game changers” and “center of attention,” which insists that “not all ground games are equal,” or which talks about what will happen “if the weather is bad”?

The campaign has to start somewhere and, for reasons too arbitrary to explore here, it starts in Iowa. We can thank the Iowa caucus for breaking in the candidates, for seasoning inexperienced reporters, and for conditioning press veterans for the coming long haul. But the dirty little secret is that even though 1,500 members of the press corps are there right now covering the story, Iowa hardly matters. If you blinked, you didn’t really miss it.

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Blink or wink with email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed is almost completely free of sports clichés. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Supporters of U.S. Republican presidential candidate and Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) attend a campaign stop in Cedar Falls, Iowa, January 2, 2012. The Iowa Caucus will be held on January 3. REUTERS/Jim Young

There are no slower slow-news days than the ones that fall between Christmas and New Year’s Day. Washington depopulates, Wall Street evacuates, and corporate America vanishes, creating a massive news drought that not even bad college football bowl games can fill. Journalists respond not by digging deeper for news but by imitating the hot-shot vacationers: Newsroom bosses and their hot-shot reporters escape if they can, leaving their newspapers, wire services, and broadcasters short-staffed and snow drifts of wire-service copy fill newspapers everywhere.

So, if Cheetah (the spelling varies, with some outlets using “Cheeta”), an elderly chimpanzee who died at the Suncoast Primate Sanctuary in Palm Harbor, Fla., on Dec. 24, wanted a Viking send-off from the press, he couldn’t have picked a better time to expire. The Tampa Bay Tribune appears to have been the first to break the story of his death yesterday in a short story. According to the Tribune, this wasn’t just any dead chimpanzee, this was Johnny Weissmuller’s co-star in a couple of Tarzan films from the early 1930s. Sanctuary spokesman Debbie Cobb told the Tribune that Cheetah, roughly 80 years-old, had been acquired from the Weissmuller estate in Ocala, Fla., sometime near 1960. Hundreds of news organizations repeated the Tribune‘s claims, either by republishing the Associated Press rewrite or by creating their own derivative accounts, including Reuters, CNN, MSNBC.com, the Washington Post, and the London Telegraph. Even the New York Times published a credulous Cheetah story on its Arts Beat blog today at 9:53 a.m., mostly based on the Tribune piece.

The death of Tarzan’s Cheetah at a Florida roadside zoo was “too good to check,” as journalists like to put it—especially during a holiday week. Had anyone bothered to make a few phone calls, plumbed a few news databases, or relied on common sense, they would have instantly discovered how improbable it was that the chimp had worked in the movies with Weissmuller.

For one thing, it’s unlikely that a male chimp would live to the age of 80. The oldest chimp residing in an Association of Zoos and Aquariums-accredited facility, says Steve Ross of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo, is Lil’ Mama, and she’s in her early 70s. The Suncoast Primate Sanctuary is not the greatest animal facility in the world. It’s not AZA-accredited and it has a bit of a dodgy history. Previously doing business as Noell’s Ark Chimp Farm, the attraction had been closed for about a decade when the St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) ran this 2008 article about its reopening. The paper reported:

In 1999, the USDA stripped the sanctuary of its license for public exhibitions, citing small, rusty cages used to house the apes and improper record-keeping.

Two years later, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission declined to renew the facility’s state license for keeping exotic animals, citing similar concerns.

Other incongruities argued against the claim that this chimp was Tarzan’s Cheetah. Sanctuary spokesman Cobb told the Tribune that Cheetah arrived at the attraction around 1960, yet the earliest mention preserved in Nexis of his residence there is a June 3, 2001, Tallahassee Democrat article, which also states that the Noell family established the place in the mid-1950s as a “retirement home” for old circus and movie primates. (If you housed the original Cheetah in a cheap roadside attraction, wouldn’t you make a bigger deal about it?)

A 2002 St. Petersburg Times piece gave a more dramatic spin to Cheetah’s arrival, stating that he “ended up in a research lab after Hollywood replaced it with another chimpanzee.” A St. Petersburg Times article from 2006 declared that Cheetah had been a resident for “about three decades,” which would place his arrival at the roadside attraction at about the time of the Jimmy Carter inauguration. That the sanctuary never gave the animal a consistent biography indicates that several somebodies were making things up as they went along.

By early afternoon, Cheetah’s Viking funeral was sinking. At 1:44 p.m., the New York Times updated its earlier, credulous piece, noting that “the announcement drew skepticism and recalled a previous incident of mistaken chimpanzee identity,” a reference to an AFP story that cited a brilliant 2008 Washington Post feature about a West Coast chimpanzee purported by its owner to be the real Cheeta. Miami New Times noted, along with other debunkers, that several chimps played the role as Tarzan’s sidekick, and that the most famous of them, Jiggs, had died in 1938. “Jiggs seems to be the only animal actor whose role in the films has been established thoroughly,” Miami New Times reported. Weissmuller was involved in a Titusville, Fla., attraction called Tropical Wonderland or Tarzan’s Jungleland, the newspaper reported, but it closed in 1973. “Is it possible this Cheetah came from Weissmuller’s tourist trap and not his actual movies?”

Possible? I’d say almost inevitable. The lessons to draw from Cheetah stories, in their order of importance. 1) Always verify what unknown spokesmen tell you. 2) Don’t trust fantastic stories about animals. 3) Discrepancies in obituary details often signal something awry. 4) And beware of holiday news.

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PHOTO: Cheetah, a chimpanzee who died on December 24, was purported to have starred in Tarzan movies. Courtesy Suncoast Primary Sanctuary.

Just what the country needed: Another political Web site.

At the beginning of the week, ABC News launched OTUS, its political news supermarket with its top political reporters (Jake Tapper, Jonathan Karl, Amy Walter, and George Stephanopoulos) hunkering on the site’s home page. OTUS threatens to dice, grind, sieve, and aerosol the complex business of campaigns and the affairs of the state into inhalable powder.

As Tapper says in this promo, OTUS (short for of the United States as in, POTUS, president of the United States, or SCOTUS, supreme court of the United States) is all about the “power moves, the mini-dramas, the scheming” in politics. Tapper promises that OTUS will flag both the “urgent and the ridiculous,” offer games, display correspondents’ Twitter feeds, and create a stock market-style ticker that assesses the rising and falling worth of candidates with social media.

ABC News has expanded its Web efforts at what is obviously a late date. Salon, Slate, Talking Points Memo, Yahoo Politics, Politico, RealClearPolitics, Red State, Huffington Post Politics, FiveThirtyEight, Mother Jones, National Review Online, Daily Beast, Daily Caller, Roll Call, The Hill, CNN Politics, NBC’s First Read, Time ‘s Swampland, National Journal, specialty sections at the Washington Post, the New York Times, New York magazine, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, and Reuters, as well as numerous other sites already cover the beat, and cover it well.

That ABC News would join the specialists speaks to both the audience’s insatiable appetite for political news and the network’s confidence that nobody owns this market. It’s a good call: Such is the Web audience’s fickleness, the ease with which they can skip pages, that nobody can own the market for news anymore. They can’t even rent it. News organizations can’t own their journalistic stars the way they used to, either. In the old days, the only place for a reporter or editor at a top-tier newspaper or magazine to migrate was another top-tier newspaper or magazine, or maybe a TV network, or maybe a career in books. But not anymore. Reporters now move from the New York Times to the Huffington Post with such regularity that the MTA is thinking of digging a special subway line to accommodate them.

Not to oversell the current scene, but the proliferation of political news sites—and my apologies to those I didn’t name—means we’re living in a bit of a golden age of political reporting. At least when it comes to national politics and national government, there have never been more reporters competing to break news. Not everything on the menu tastes great, but there’s no denying it’s a feast.

If the winners are readers, the losers are the Times, the Post, and the evening news broadcasts, which have lost their quasi-monopoly power over political coverage, and especially the print versions of the newsweeklies, which specialized for so many decades at giving the quanta of political news a narrative context. Ned Martel, who covers politics for the Post, says it wasn’t that long ago that how much you knew about Washington was measured by how many pages in the last issue of the print version National Journal you’d turned. Also taking a hit has been the political press; The New Republic, which went from weekly to fortnightly in 2007, in part because they didn’t have the money to sustain a weekly any more and in part because weekly was no longer frequent enough to stay on top of politics. The job of wrapping politics into comprehensive narratives now belongs to the monthlies like Vanity Fair and the Atlantic or books like Game Change and Renegade.

Other winners include the cable news chat shows and the Sunday morning programs, which gorge on the baitball of Web news like hungry yellowfin tuna. The cycle is completed when the Web news hounds attack the baitbail formed by the chat show chat, and the chat shows eventually dine, somewhat cannibalistically, on the remains.

For political journalists, this is the best of all possible worlds. They’ve gained new leverage over their editors, who in the green-eyeshade days of journalism could use their power of the limited number of column-inches available in print to cut and otherwise simplify their stories. Now, with there being no shortage of space to fill, the writer calls the shots and the editor, fearful that he’ll get the blame if he’s beaten by the competition, is more likely to approve stories he might once have dismissed as too technical, too inside baseball, and too complicated for a news outlet. (“Save it for your book, kid.”)

Thus liberated, the political journalist can write at wire-service speed, even availing himself to tiny microbursts of reporting, while dumping many of the conventions that make wire reporters miserable—such as the inverted news pyramid that puts the most important news at the top so that distant newspaper editors can cut two, three, four, or five paragraphs at the bottom to make it fit their pages.

The newly liberated political journalist need no longer dumb down his story so that everybody can understand it. He can point to explanatory information with a link or skip it all together, figuring that anybody who is reading him already knows what the Federal Reserve Bank is and what it does. (You laugh, but I recall Washington Post stories from the past that paused to define “pinata” and “slam dunk” when it used those phrases metaphorically!) As victors over their beaten-down editors, political writers can now insert humor, opinion, history lesson, minutiae, and policy wonkery in their pieces without having to justify the digressions and elaborations. (Of course, another part of the new culture can be, depending on the outlet, lower salaries and reduced job security. But that’s my problem and that of my colleagues, not yours.)

Not that long ago, Ben Bagdikian was publishing the seventh edition of his book-length argument, The Media Monopoly. Bagdikian’s neverending gripe was that the news business was consolidating into fewer and fewer voices, and that government action was needed to break up newspapers, magazines, and broadcasters. We don’t hear much of that talk anymore–you’re more likely to hear people complaining about too much political news. The current state of our political press ain’t perfect, but when the exemplar of the new order is Ezra Klein and not Joe Klein, how bad can it be?

Welcome, OTUS, you goofy-named little bastard. I hope you have a good 2012.

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Scientists working in the Netherlands and Wisconsin have engineered a version of the highly lethal H5N1 “bird flu” that easily transmits in ferrets, the best animal model for human spread. This news has so alarmed a federal advisory panel that it has now asked the two leading scientific journals, Science and Nature, to censor the papers each lab has submitted for publication lest the information fall into the hands of terrorists. (Here’s the Page One coverage of the story from the New York Times and Washington Post.)

The request has roiled the scientific community, with some researchers backing the panel’s request, which is not binding, others lamenting the fact that the research was ever done, and others defending the bird flu work as essential research.

The panel—the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity—was established in 2004 as a response to the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States. The scientific community resisted the direct controls the Bush administration wanted on biological research, the Times reports, and eventually agreed to the advisory panel that could be called upon to review potentially dangerous research. “I can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one,” NSABB chair Paul Keim, an experienced anthrax researcher, told Science Insider Reporter Martin Enserink in November. “I don’t think anthrax is scary at all compared to this.”

That the H5N1 variant is scary deadly is conceded by one of its creators, Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center in the Netherlands. In November, he told Enserink that it is “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make.” Normally, H5N1 is only transmitted from chickens to farmers working in extremely close contact with infected birds. (Of 570 confirmed cases of H5N1 infection in humans, 335 died, writes science reporter Helen Branswell.) But the laboratory mutated H5N1 does not require close contact to infect: ferrets sickened by the virus transmitted it to other ferrets living in adjoining cages via coughs and sneezes.

Even an unenforceable request by the government to suppress the flow of information rankles free-speech radicals like me. We believe in open inquiry and unfettered communications, and battle the redaction machine whenever the censors start its engine.

That’s the romantic notion, but in practice not every newsroom teems with free-speech radicals, and even many of those who consider themselves such are much more accommodating of authority than their rhetoric would imply. For instance, the American press has historically consulted the government when reporting on “sensitive” national security issues, something documented by veteran journalists Jack Nelson (pdf) and Allan M. Siegal (pdf) in separate papers they wrote as Shorenstein Center fellows. This is not to say that journalists are pushovers who bow to all national security establishment commands and wishes, but the press does routinely give the government an opportunity to make the argument for non-publication when working on a big story.

When Dana Priest and William Arkin published their stunning three-part series, “Top Secret America,” in the Washington Post, an editors’ note explained that the Post had allowed government officials to see the Web site that accompanied the article several months before publication so that they could “tell us of any specific concerns,” and obliged some of the government’s requests while declining others. When CIA contractor Raymond A. Davis was arrested in Pakistan after a Lahore shoot-out, the New York Times and other publications temporarily withheld publishing Davis’s CIA connection at the request of the Obama administration, which told the Times that publishing that information would put his life at risk. (The Times disclosed its Obama administration agreement in this news story about Davis.)

Moving away from journalism and back to science, the government has long placed prior classification on bomb-related physics, which seems defensible. “The secrets of fission, and implosion, and so on had little or no near-term civilian application. So restricting access to them did not seriously impede scientific development in other areas,” says Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, who I consider a conscientious free speech radical. But Aftergood says bird flu research isn’t precisely analogous because the H5N1 findings may be valuable for medical investigation, including those working on vaccines. “It’s a difficult balance to achieve,” he says.

One argument for publishing the H5N1 journal articles in unredacted form is that the information contained in them has already been released—Fouchier gave his findings earlier this year at a conference and the paper has already been shared among bio-scientists. To quote Tom Waits, you can’t un-ring a bell. Another is that the complete articles will, as Aftergood points out, give vaccine scientists an edge should the genes in H5N1 mutate in nature the way they did in the laboratory. If that happens, we’ll all wish that the papers had been widely distributed and studied so that, as Enserink writes in Science Insider, researchers would have been able spot the mutated virus in the wild and “test whether H5N1 vaccines and antiviral drugs would work against the new strain.” (By the way, you could argue that this whole controversy is of the U.S. government’s making, seeing as its National Institutes of Health sponsored the H5N1 research.)

Setting aside the issue of censorship for a moment, the H5N1 studies shake us at the core because they tap into the Frankenstein myth. We’ve been trained by novelists and filmmakers that scientists who create contagions, poisons, and monsters will lose control of them, and that as a result thousands, or millions of us will die.

That Frankenstein relationship doesn’t apply to scientists who merely “uncover” information about contagions, as my friend Jon Cohen points out in a July/August 2002 Atlantic feature, even though their findings could also be used to devise bioweapons. Cohen writes that in 2001, several days before the 9/11 attacks, Science published two important papers about the flu: One about the genetic changes that may have created the Spanish flu that killed millions in 1918 and another about the small genetic change that had made what was then called the 1997 Hong Kong flu—now known as the H5N1 bird flu virus—more deadly. Neither article provoked coverage about how a bioterrorist might capitalize on these studies. Nor did scientific panic ensue in 2005 when Science published an article about the reconstruction of the virus behind the 1918 flu. In fact, the current advisory panel signed off on the publication of that study for good reason: To help stop the next killer flu.

Let’s proceed with the understanding that the researchers aren’t Osama bin Ladens in laboratory coats. They surely have good reasons for wanting to publish expansively from their findings. Also, consulting with the U.S. government, as our journalists friends have shown, does not equal censorship, so everybody who is on that horse, kindly dismount. As currently constituted, the government committee is an advisory body, not the Myanmar Press Scrutiny and Registration Division, and asking a scientist or a scientific journal to withhold details about how to make a highly transmissible bird flu is not unreasonable.

What’s needed is a fuller debate between the fretting government advisers and the working scientists who are pushing to make everything public. I suspect that that’s what’s happening now behind closed doors. ‘Tis a shame we can’t hear it, too.

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PHOTO: A worker wearing a protection suit culls chickens at a poultry farm where the bird flu virus had been found in Takanabe Town, Miyazaki prefecture January 31, 2011.

The American entertainment complex—Hollywood, the networks, the stations, cable,  the record labels—has placed before Congress a simple request: Give us a law to punish Google, PayPal, the Web ad industry, and anybody else doing business on the Internet who may play some intermediary role in connecting foreign “pirates” to consumers seeking illegal access to copyrighted content.

The House of Representatives and Senate have bowed to the entertainment complex’s request. The House bill is called the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Senate’s genuflection goes by the name of the PROTECT IP Act. Rather than just punishing copyright violators, these bills would give the U.S. government new powers to black out Web sites, impose new monitoring rules on search engines and other Web services, rejig the architecture of the Internet, short-circuit the usual due process for Web sites, and authorize new surveillance for a government that just can’t seem to get enough. (See Alex Howard’s learned delineation of the bills from late November.)

So grand is the entertainment complex’s umbrage that I half expect its next move will be to petition the Department of Justice for the authority to shut down the electric utilities that provide power to any and all computers it suspects are pinching its intellectual property.

A survey piece about the SOPA/PIP controversy in yesterday’s New York Times gave Tom Rothman, the co-chief executive of Fox Filmed Entertainment, the opportunity to spout his industry’s pique. He says:

Our mistake was allowing this romantic word—piracy—to take hold…It’s really robbery—it’s theft—and that theft is being combined with consumer fraud…Consumers are purchasing these goods, they’re sending their credit card information to these anonymous offshore companies, and they’re receiving defective goods.

Oh yah, sure, youbetcha. The entertainment complex missed its big chance to suggest the word “murder” to describe illegal downloads. And it spends many sleepless nights worrying about all the victims of credit card fraud.

If allowing the word “piracy” to take hold was a mistake, that mistake is now more than three centuries old. Adrian Johns’s exhaustive history of the subject, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates (2010), explains that in the late-1600s, people were already comparing word thieves to cutlass-swinging brigands. One dictionary defined pirate as “one who unjustly prints another person’s copy.” The Oxford English Dictionary points us to these lines of verse in a poem from 1700: “Piracy, Piracy, they cry’d aloud, What made you print my Copy, Sir, says one, You’re a meer Knave, ’tis very basely done.” Also availing themselves to the word “piracy” to describe literary misappropriation were such writers as Defoe, Swift, Addison, Gay, Congreve, Ward, and Pope, Johns writes.

Piracy has lodged itself in the vernacular because it perfectly expresses the joy of taking a risk to get something for nothing (or get something for an  ”it fell off a truck” price). Surely an entertainment veteran like Rothman should understand the joy in defying authority, especially arbitrary, imperious authority.

I don’t doubt Rothman’s assertion that some consumers have had their pockets picked while purchasing pirated media, but I’ve yet to meet anyone who complains about it. Yet resorting to this sort of hyperbole is just the Hollywood way of winning an argument. In 1982, Jack Valenti, then head of the movie business’s trade association, told Congress in 1982 that the VCR was “to the American film producer and the American public what the Boston Strangler is to the American woman at home alone.” The happy Hollywood ending to that copyright Armageddon? The VCR made the movie industry ridiculously wealthy by creating a new sales channel.

Pirates and the “intellectual-property defense industry” (Johns’s delightful phrase) have been clashing at least once a century since the end of the Middle Ages. Sometimes cultural changes spur the fight, as in the Enlightenment era when the first modern copyright and patent systems took hold, he writes. But leaps in technology drive the conflict, too, as the histories of inexpensive movable type, the piano roll, the Victrola, the VCR, the personal computer, and the Internet prove. The faster that technology moves, the more vicious the fight. In recent decades, the piracy debate has moved to those new industries that have persuaded the government to expand the IP rights to their plant seeds and genes. (And, yes, the agriculture and pharmaceutical industries have allied themselves with the entertainment complex in this current political battle.)

What stinks about SOPA and PIP is that they would establish a new legal order to replace the imperfect but fair one created by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. Imagining a worst-case scenario precipitated by SOPA-PIP, Alex Howard writes:

Imagine a world where YouTube, Flickr, Facebook or Twitter had never been created due to the cost of regulatory compliance. Imagine an Internet where any website where users can upload text, pictures or video is liable for copyrighted material uploaded to it. Imagine a world where the addresses to those websites could not be found using search engines like Google and Bing, even if you typed them in directly.

Imagine an Internet split into many sections, depending upon where you lived, where a user’s request to visit another website was routed through an addressing system that could not be securely authenticated. Imagine a world where a government could require that a website hosting videos of a bloody revolution be taken down because it also hosted clips from a Hollywood movie.

The only way to stop piracy, the entertainment complex would have you believe, is to give its and the government’s warships the power to stop, inspect, and track any packet sent on the great sea of the Internet, and impound the ones it doesn’t like. As someone who creates “intellectual property” (I shudder at the phrase) for a living and works for a huge company that owns slews of it, I have a vested interest in this fight. But SOPA or PIP would do excess damage to free speech, free association, free commerce, and innovation in the name of scuttling the Internet’s scurvy pirates. As the character Ramon Miguel “Mike” Vargas says in Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, “A policeman’s job is only easy in a police state.”

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To stay on top of SOPA-PIP, follow the ever-reliable Alex Howard. Send your romantic ideas to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and follow my Twitter feed if you must. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

My original commitment to Bloomberg BusinessWeek was so small it was almost negative.

About this time last year, US Airways, Delta, or some other crappy airline notified me that my soon-to-expire frequent flyer miles could be exchanged for magazine subscriptions, which is how I ended up spending something like 600 miles to add a year’s subscription to Bloomberg BusinessWeek to my Towering Reading Pile.

My Towering Reading Pile is governed by neo-Darwinian, survival-of-the-smartest-copy laws. With all the good stuff to read directly on the Web, stored on my RSS reader, and stockpiled by my Instapaper account, a mere book, magazine, or newspaper must be exceptional. Some publications (the New York Times) I read thoroughly because everybody I work with (and many of the people I write for) reads it. Other publications I first fillet for their prime morsels, like National Review for Mark Steyn’s ongoing chronicle of a planet gone retrograde and Vanity Fair for James Wolcott’s recombinant experiments with the American language. On Sundays, I make the weekend editions of the Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the Financial Times play gladiator by tossing them into a 55-gallon drum and letting them fight it out. Upon returning a half-hour later, I collect the articles that were strong enough to defend themselves and consume them.

Into this cutthroat mix, BusinessWeek entered and damned if its feature well didn’t shove The New Yorker, New York, and the New York Times Magazine aside to become my primary source of long-form, print journalism.

Who would have thought that “Bloomberg” and “BusinessWeek,” the two most plodding names in the history of journalism, could merge to create a superb general interest magazine? I’m not saying that every issue is a treat, but nearly every issue contains one. The most recent issue, dated Dec. 12, contains several: Felix Gillette on real estate crime in Las Vegas, Brad Stone on the maker of military drones, and a short profile by Sarah A. Topol of the life and times of a Libyan tycoon. The Oct. 31 issue has three as well: Drake Bennett on David Graeber, the brains behind the Occupy movement, Vivienne Walt on a frozen yogurt start-up in Cairo, and Daniel Grushkin on a rare earth prospector/claimholder in Alaska.

Paging through my stack of recent BusinessWeeks, I find other winners: Paul M. Barrett on the coming shale gas economy, Christopher Churchill Brendan Borrell on the Gloucester fish war, Brendan Greeley and Alison Fitzgerald on the market for writing legislation, Ben Paynter on “synthetic pot,” Ken Wells on the pork rind business, and Felix Gillette again on Matthew Freud.

These are the kind of newsy, urgent features that you expect to find in the New York troika of great feature mags, not some biz mag that mogul-mayor-megalomaniac Michael Bloomberg purchased at a 2009 McGraw-Hill yard sale. Given the zombie prose that Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler forces on his scribes elsewhere in the Bloomberg enterprise, we can only assume that Mike and Matt don’t know that the company also runs a magazine named after him. If you like the magazine and hope to see it continue, please make sure they don’t read this piece. (Disclosures: Michael Bloomberg’s Bloomberg L.P. competes with my employer, ThomsonReuters, on a number of fronts. Several BusinessWeek writers and staffers are friends or acquaintances.)

I’m not the only one noticing the magazine’s delightful feature creep. I checked in with Max Linsky, who with Aaron Lammer runs Longform.org, the wonderful site that with the help of readers finds all the best non-fiction work on the Web and posts its recommendations. I asked Linsky to query his database for how many BusinessWeek stories Longform recommended this year compared to various other magazines.

His reply: The Times Magazine scored 52 features; New York 44; The New Yorker (which doesn’t make all features free) 42.

BusinessWeek scored 21.

“BW’s number would be higher if we had posted anything of theirs before April, which we inexplicably didn’t,” says Linsky. “At some point this year I realized that BusinessWeek was a general interest magazine—a really, really good general interest magazine—masquerading as a business publication.”

Additional points of reference: GQ stories scored 42 times this year; Vanity Fair 34. Fortune and Forbes, both of which Linsky says are “kinda off my radar,” got four and zero listings, respectively. Time got two, Newsweek one.

The masquerade extends to BusinessWeek‘s art direction, captained by Richard Turley, which approaches but never quite reaches the thumb-in-your-eye sensationalism that put the original Wired on the map. Earlier this year, Business Insider interviewed Turley and presented a slideshow of some of his more arresting BusinessWeek pages, some of which tip the hat to the old Spy. When Turley really gets going, reading one of his pages is like looking at a terrific building: The type provides both a story to read (duh!) and a superstructure to carry all the eye-engaging details—photos, illustrations, captions that are connected to their subjects by arrows, charts, annotations.

By donning the protective coloration of a general interest magazine, BusinessWeek begins to approximate a newsweekly, but a newsweekly divorced from the previous week’s news–sort of like the Economist but without shouting out its name the way that so many desperate newsweekly editors have before. If not for the publication’s title and its front of the book, with its Bloomborgian editorials and overt business coverage, your average reader would have a hard time identifying BusinessWeek as a business book. Perhaps that’s the plan. If it isn’t, please carry on as if it is, BusinessWeek. And, hey, if its editor, Josh Tyrangiel, is as proud of his magazine as I am admiring of it, he should take a bow. How about publishing a masthead, Josh, so I can identify all the most talented people and have ThomsonReuters hire them away?

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A dozen times while writing this piece, my BusinessWeek-trained fingers accidentally typed BloomBerg instead of Bloomberg. It looks good that way, doesn’t it? Sort of like a hyphenate that went on a diet. Try it on for size, Mayor BloomBerg. No charge. Send interesting abbreviations and contractions to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and see my Twitter feed for the maximum in compression. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.