Plus: We've got your Brill's content right here!

Mark Steyn's report from Iraq--he not unexpectedly thinks things are going fairly well and the America-bashing international relief agencies are making things worse--would be a whole lot more convincing if he'd gone to Baghdad. Why didn't he? ...

Update:Steyn emails --

Hey, you: 

I hit the suburbs and turned north for a simple reason: Baghdad's already full of reporters. They can't all be talking bollocks, can they?

Also, capital cities are always grossly untypical. Take Ottawa or Canberra or Concord, NH. They're company towns where the company is government. So they're full of government employees and thus, when the government's just been overthrown, they're bound to be atypically steamed - just like sawmill workers in Berlin, NH are steamed when the sawmill shuts down. You can't draw general conclusions from whiney Iraqi DMV clerks. 

3:53 A.M.

WaPo's Kurtz--isn't he supposed to be on his honeymoon?-- does his best to keep the NYT crisis alive:

"The whole place is in total rebellion," says one veteran ....

Meanwhile, embattled NYT editor Howell Raines remains silent. ... There hasn't been a Raines with fewer public appearances since Claude in The Invisible Man! ... 2:47 A.M.

"Forget cancer. Is there a cure for hype?": Maybe Derek Lowe will correct me, but it's looking more and more like the irresponsible Gina Kolata was right in 1998 when she hyped Judah Folkman's anti-angiogenesis cancer-fighting theory on the front page of the NYT--and the responsible experts (such as the New Yorker's Atul Gawande) who huffed at Kolata were wrong. Five years later, a seemingly effective anti-angiogenesis drug has now made the front page of the Washington Post.  ... [But Kolata didn't know she was right at the time--ed. That's what the huffers will say. I say they should gracefully apologize. Kolata sensed it was a big story, she explained why, and it turns out she had a good nose. As did her (pre-Raines!) editors.] ... Panic is not a good thing:  Also, in the same WaPo piece ... Martha sold too soon!...Update: It turns out Lowe  already has a post describing some intriguing theories  about why the anti-angiogenesis drugs seem to work. Do they inhibit blood flow to tumors or increase it (enabling other cancer-fighters to get in and do their job)? ... ... 1:59 A.M.

Update:Drugusta! Drug industry insider Derek Lowe senses a NYT Augusta-like anti-pharmaceutical crusade in the making, of which the Robert Pear story criticized below is but a part. ... Lowe's story-by-story analysis isn't all that unflattering to the Times, but some sort of top-down Times directive would seem to be at work. That might explain Pear's apparent failure to follow the basic print journalism rules ... 12:48 A.M.

Sunday, June 1, 2003