Brown gets her news from three main sources, and each gives her a general impression of what’s happening in the world. She watches “The Daily Show,” which she says provides “a good grasp of what’s going on.” She occasionally reads the Sun-Times, Chicago’s smaller competitor to the Tribune, which she likes for its size. And she frequently picks up RedEye, the free, daily commuter paper published by the Tribune and aimed at young people in Chicago.

Distributed for free around train stops in the city, RedEye is meant to be a condensed, more fun version of a traditional daily newspaper. It features copy from the Tribune as well as original reporting, and though it does briefly cover major national and international news stories, it is heavy on local news, entertainment, fashion and sports. Brown calls it “super-convenient” and praises it for providing a nice balance of news she needs and wants.

RedEye represents the newspaper industry’s latest attempt to hook young readers. Newspaper executives have decided that if America’s youth, with their short attention spans, flagging interest in the news, and obsession with celebrity and sports, won’t come to newspapers, the papers will come to them.

“Every newspaper is seeing a need to do this, and advertisers are focused on young people pretty heavily,” says Diane Hockenberry, the director of audience development at the Newspaper Association of America. Today, youth-oriented “niche” publications like RedEye, most printed in tabloid format and offered for free, are stacked up in train stations, bus stops, bars, bookstores and other hipster joints across the nation, whether in big cities (Boston, Dallas, Washington) or small (Boise, Idaho; Des Moines, Iowa; or Lansing, Mich.).

For the newspaper business, these spinoffs represent something of a Hail Mary pass. Newspaper circulation has been falling steadily for years; last year the graph began to look like the NASDAQ circa 2001. In the six-month period ending in September 2005, national newspaper circulation fell 3 percent, with many large papers faring worse. Layoffs, too, abound; seemingly every other day, editors’ sad-sack pink-slip memos surface on the Web: 85 newsroom staffers let go at the Los Angeles Times; 45 at the New York Times; 35 at the Boston Globe; and more at the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and on and on.

To try to save the newspaper industry, publishers are staking their businesses on what would seem to be an unlikely prospect — the idea that young people, who for years have been ditching newsprint, will come back to the paper if they’re given something that can compete with today’s flashy media. That’s the thinking behind these youth papers, which eschew news — relegating all serious national and international coverage to a handful of small wire reports — and instead focus on sensational local stories, pop culture, sports, and lifestyle features. Brevity is the soul of niche; these papers speed along with rat-a-tat prose and magazine-style photo spreads that would make a travel brochure for Guam look long-winded in comparison.

For all their apparent flaws, many publishers report that these niche publications have succeeded in attracting young readers and new advertisers. As a 27-year-old male, I’m squarely in these papers’ line of sight, and I should take comfort in their attempts to attract people like me. But what hooked me on newspapers more than a decade ago wasn’t the absence of news, it was the very fullness of it — the daily chaos and complexity of human affairs neatly organized in ink on the page.

Today, newspapers still have the power to seduce people who find a thrill in following current affairs, and at least one innovative publisher is finding ways to do that by transforming newspapers into multimedia presentations. But after spending time reading some of the new niche papers, I can only regard their impending ubiquity with something like sheer fright.

In trying to reach young people, says David Mindich, chairman of the journalism department at Saint Michael’s College in Colchester, Vt., newspapers face a daunting challenge. Mindich was teaching a class of undergraduates early in 2001 when he first realized that young people are completely turned off to the news. During the Senate confirmation hearings for John Ashcroft as attorney general, Mindich gave his class of 23 students a pop quiz to determine their familiarity with American law. Eighteen of his students couldn’t name a single Supreme Court justice; only one knew Ashcroft was the attorney general nominee, and several believed it was Colin Powell.

The experience prompted Mindich to dig deeper into what young people knew — or, rather, didn’t know — about the world around them. He found mountains of evidence and gathered it into a 2005 book, “Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don’t Follow the News.” At a time of greater access to media than ever before, Mindich says that the typical American young person isn’t reading a newspaper, watching news on television, listening to it on the radio, or reading it online in any significant depth.

And of all the news media that young people aren’t following, newspapers are the source they’re not following most. Even the newspaper industry’s own readership statistics — which are optimistic compared to other organizations’ estimates — bear this out. In 1970, on average, 72 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds read a weekday newspaper, not much lower than the percentage of older people who did so. Today, the industry says, only 40 percent of young people typically read a weekday newspaper, compared to 66 percent of those over 55 who do.

Surveys by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press (PDF) paint a grimmer picture. In 1996, when Pew asked people whether they’d “read a newspaper yesterday,” just 29 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said they had. And when the organization asked the same question in 2004, the number had fallen to 23 percent. Compared to older people surveyed and to young people of previous generations, people my age today appear abysmally unaware of what’s in print.

The primary social symptom of these news habits, Mindich says, is the growing “knowledge gap” between the young and old. Polling data show that in the 1950s and 1960s people under 40 were almost as well informed about the world as their parents. But today, Americans under 40 generally know a lot less than their elders.

Mindich cites a 2000 poll in which only 4 percent of people aged 18 to 24 picked John McCain as the Republican presidential candidate who advocated campaign-finance reform. Twenty-eight percent of those over 65 got it right. Mindich asked dozens of young people similar questions — about local and national leaders, about the countries in the president’s “axis of evil” and the locations of the plane crashes in the 9/11 attacks — and found similar results. If space aliens were to land tomorrow and interrogate our 20-year-olds, they’d have to conclude we are a backward civilization; meanwhile, the 20-year-olds, to judge from Mindich’s data, would likely mistake the aliens for members of Congress.

Mindich says it’s plain why young people aren’t interested in the news. All of us, young and old, are swimming against a powerful tide. We may have more access to news today than we ever did in the past, but the amount of non-news media we face drowns out everything else. As Mindich sees it, kids are bingeing on non-news media: entertainment, sports, video games, the Web, and basically everything on TV, even what’s on the news stations. (See Grace, Nancy.)

For a long while, folks in the newspaper industry didn’t think much of these factors; one common mantra was that despite youthful inattention, young people would start reading newspapers once they grew up. “I think there was a kind of denial,” says Merrill Brown, the former editor of MSNBC.com who now works as a consultant to newspapers. “The thing you heard all the time is that they’ll all come back when they become homeowners and parents. That has no credibility anymore. Nobody’s buying it. People are not coming back.”

Now many who study the news business think of news-reading as a habit that, like smoking cigarettes, is best picked up young, and that it’s difficult to warm to later in life. If you choose to keep up with “American Idol” rather than American diplomatic policy toward Iran when you’re 25, you won’t likely be doing much different when you’re 55.

To that end, says Janet Robinson, CEO of the New York Times Co., the Times has built an extensive program to get its daily on college campuses. “This has been a purposeful effort on our part to make sure they know what the Times can bring to them,” Robinson says of the paper’s college-age audience. And, she adds, the program is working; in surveys, young people say they read the paper often, a statistic she regards with some optimism. “If young people are introduced to the habit of reading the Times, it becomes a very trusted source for them in the years to come,” she says.

The niche papers have turned to a new way to get young readers — give them a dollop of non-news as a tasty come-on and sprinkle some news inside, an editorial trick akin to feeding your dog a pill by covering it in applesauce. Newspaper analysts call this necessary. Unless a story on the Hamas victory in the Palestinian territories is penned by James Frey himself, they say, it will never be as exciting to a 20-year-old as a piece on Angelina and Brad. Given all they’re bombarded with, most readers will always choose the easier option.

Amid the recent attempts to cultivate young readers, the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye, first published in 2002, has been the most criticized, praised and, perhaps, successful. Every article in RedEye is short. The whole paper, says Jane Hirt, RedEye’s editor, is designed to be read in 20 minutes or less. RedEye prints about 100,000 copies every day. A 2004 survey by Gallup shows the paper reaches about 600,000 city residents every week; its readership has grown at a time when both the Tribune and the Sun-Times have faced circulation declines.

According to Brad Moore, RedEye’s general manager, more than half of the paper’s readers are between the ages of 18 and 34, substantially younger than readers of other papers in the city. To Hirt, this proves that young people do indeed want to be informed. “A lot of people said it would never work, because young people don’t want to read the news,” she says. “But they do want to read the news. They do want to know what’s going on.” It’s just that they also want some fun with their news, she says.

RedEye features local stories as well as national news, mostly from wire services. It even includes original reporting. Last year, RedEye was the only Chicago paper to note every rape reported to police in the city, and at the end of the year it used that data to show that sexual assaults were not limited to lower-class areas but occurred in every city neighborhood during the year.

RedEye, however, is unlikely to provide anyone with a working knowledge of current events. “Too Sexy for Work? Don’t Let Wardrobe Malfunction Hurt Your Chance for Success,” read the paper’s cover headline of Jan. 24. The day before, the cover feature focused on the increasing popularity of cosmetic dental jewelry among hip-hop wannabe youths. The headline: “Grills Gone Wild.” Both the how-to-dress story and the dental-bling story ran for two pages, as much space as the paper devotes to all national and international news combined.

“If you can pull out some of the news, throw in a little entertainment, and get more people interested in the newspaper, that might be OK,” Mindich says of papers like RedEye. But “some of these papers are pulling out so much news content they are no longer serving as a vehicle to hold leaders accountable.” In other words, they’re no longer newspapers; they’re brochures with factoids.

Hirt, who worked on the foreign news desk at the Tribune before coming to RedEye, defends her paper. RedEye isn’t dumbing down the news for young people, she insists; rather, it’s giving them a slice that they can consume while they’ve got nothing better to do, like riding the train. And if they want more than what’s in RedEye, they certainly know where they can find it. Plus, she points out: “It’s better than nothing.” The paper’s research shows that it has attracted many people who would not otherwise have read any daily newspaper.

But the problem with taking solace in RedEye’s success is that it feels like settling for ignorance. Niche publications may have begun as starter papers, publications to get young people associated with the brand of a newspaper, but many papers are coming to realize that for some readers, the niche may be the entire ballgame.

People who read RedEye aren’t necessarily graduating to the Tribune. (Brad Moore, RedEye’s general manager, says he doesn’t believe RedEye has cannibalized regular Tribune readers; although with the Tribune’s circulation steady or declining, that would seem plausible.) But the Tribune is OK with the notion of people sticking to RedEye and not moving on to the big paper. RedEye, says Moore, has become a success on its own, and the company wins even if young people don’t pick up the weightier paper. “We target a coveted demographic,” Moore says, “and we’re able to deliver a product whose audience is significantly younger. We’ve been able to attract advertisers that didn’t feel it was affordable to be in the Chicago Tribune. We’ve picked up a significant amount from advertisers that had never run in the Tribune.”

Mary Stier, who publishes the Des Moines Register, echoes this idea about her paper’s spinoff, Juice. The Register, Iowa’s venerable daily, is owned by the Gannett Corp., the newspaper giant that publishes 91 U.S. papers, including USA Today, by far the nation’s most popular newspaper. Juice inclines toward breezy featurettes and Q-and-A-style interviews. A recent Juice cover shows a smiling white woman dropping a coin into a ceramic piggy bank under the headline, “Pinching Pennies: How to Save $3,600 in the Next Year.” Inside readers can get the lowdown on consignment shopping or the fun of visiting the State Historical Society. But Stier isn’t selling Juice as compelling journalism. It is what it is — an attempt to get young people to read something in an ultimate effort to make money on advertisements.

“Now that there are other media options available to them, we can’t expect when this marketplace turns 35 they’re going to subscribe to the Des Moines Register,” Stier says. “But we can continue to slice out other publications and Web sites that meet their needs. They may not read the newspaper every day, but say they read it three times a week and pick up Juice and go on the Web site seven days a week. Then, I’m happy.”

Worrying about dumbed-down newspapers may seem old-fashioned in the age of the Web. If RedEye overruns Chicago, and Juice takes down Des Moines, everyone in those cities, even wide-eyed, 16-year-old would-be news junkies, will have access to the Web and to the depth of knowledge contained in the Times, the Washington Post, or countless blogs and other sources of news.

And there’s evidence that online versions of newspapers can attract a sizable audience, even one slightly younger than that of the print paper. According to Nielsen//Netratings, a firm that measures traffic online, many of the top 10 most popular newspaper Web sites receive significant traffic from people aged 25 to 34; at some sites, this audience accounts for more than a quarter of monthly visitors. Moreover, a Pew survey conducted last June showed that though young people were leaving print newspapers, they were still going to newspapers’ Web sites. Carroll Doherty, editor of the Pew Center, says that the poll seemed to show that an equal share of young people and older people think of newspapers as a “main source” of news; it’s just that the younger group preferred to get the paper online.

Yet at the same time, as Mindich points out, while the Web gives us greater access to news, it also gives us more non-news, too. “If you wanted to know everything about what Jack Abramoff did, you can learn it online,” he says. “Or you could not, and look at something else.”

I came to the Web when it was still in its infancy, when some of the most compelling content online was from newspapers that I didn’t have access to in print format. Things are different today; there’s so much more besides newspapers. Today, with its lightning-fast downloads and online multimedia, it’s easy to see why the Internet, as Mindich says, “is also the best place for avoiding the news completely.”

Rob Curley disagrees. Curley, the gregarious 35-year-old new media director of the Naples Daily News in Naples, Fla., says he knows why people have been turning away from newspapers and knows exactly how to bring them back in order to both entertain and educate them.

The Curley method is to convert small regional newspapers into powerhouses on the Web and make them indispensable to their communities — as indispensable as print newspapers once were, or should have been, to the regions they served. He counsels newsrooms to focus their resources on gathering local news. With the Web, national news has been “commoditized”; you can get national news anywhere, and local newspapers aren’t going to beat out bigger papers — or other news sites, such as Yahoo — that provide national coverage. Indeed, Curley’s very definition of a newspaper involves local news.

Curley calls himself “platform-agnostic,” by which he means that he feels no particular sentimental attachment to a printed daily in broadsheet format. A newspaper isn’t a physical object, he says, but is instead an expert organization built to “chronicle the local history” of a community.

When papers embrace their mission to provide local news thoroughly, efficiently and in any manner people choose — in print, online or whatever other device people may want to start using tomorrow — audiences will flock to them, Curley says. He points to his efforts in Lawrence, Kan., where the three Web sites he created for the Lawrence Journal-World became the center of that college town’s daily life. (His sites have also been weighted down with many awards.)

Beginning in late January, the Naples Daily News published an extensive multipart report on the problem of human trafficking and slavery among immigrant populations in Southwest Florida. The series, which documented the plight of South American families and girls who were smuggled over the border and kept in indentured servitude on farm fields and as prostitutes, would have made for compelling journalism in any format. But Curley’s Web operation greatly enhanced the paper’s reporting. First, as with every story the Daily News publishes, the series was made available on multiple platforms — you can read the story on your cellphone or on your iPod in addition to reading it on the Web. Online, every story can be discussed in a forum, much like you can do on blogs (or Salon).

But Curley’s team added even more. On the paper’s Web site, they created an enormous photo gallery from the series, and there are audio clips from the victims, and from reporters who worked on the stories. Such extras accompany many stories on the Daily News’ site. For one recent feature on the annual Naples charity wine festival, Curley’s team produced more than a dozen video clips from the event; Naples has no local TV news station, so the video — which you could play on your iPod if you liked — was the only place to get a picture of the festival.

Multimedia features like these are routine for papers 10 times the size of the Naples Daily News — the New York Times and Washington Post, for instance, include online videos and chats with reporters and editors on their Web sites. But you don’t see this kind of thing at a small paper dealing with news of a small region.

Newspapers collect and distribute information, Curley points out; that’s their primary function. In addition to news, newspapers have access to detailed local weather reports, they’ve got experts who know the ins and outs of restaurants in an area, they know sports scores and upcoming events and the worst place in the city to live if you’re afraid of getting mugged. People who read newspapers understand this; for folks reared on newsprint, reaching for the local daily or alt-weekly may seem like a clearly obvious way to learn about what’s happening in town.

That’s not the case, though, for people who don’t read newspapers; those unaccustomed to print may not understand that the paper’s where you go to learn about restaurants in town, and they may not know, further, the idiosyncrasies of the town’s particular paper — that, say, Wednesday’s edition covers dining, and Friday’s the day for reviews of local music. As Curley sees it, newspapers will gain young readers only when they put this information online in a format that’s a pleasure to use.

Curley’s far from the only person in the newspaper business with this idea; newspapers big and small, including Juice, have retooled their sites to provide readers greater access to useful civic information. But few if any newspaper sites provide this information in as useful and easy a format as Curley does. He takes advantage of the simple fact that the Web, with its nearly infinite storage space, can present a whole lot more information than a newspaper ever can.

Note Curley’s vision of the ideal way a newspaper should provide information on local restaurants on its Web site. “I wanted a huge in-depth restaurant database,” he says. “You do a local restaurant search in most towns and it’s terrible. I want to know everything about a restaurant. Are they vegetarian friendly? Are they locally owned? I want a guide that’ll allow me to search on who’s serving sushi right now and it’s 10:30 at night. Or I want somewhere to look when I’m driving around and listening to music and I’ve got a hankering for some ribs. If I could get something that told me that, dude, I’m all about that.”

At Lawrence.com, one of the sites he built for the Lawrence Journal-World, that’s just the kind of restaurant guide Curley and his team created, and now he’s got a similar thing running at BonitaNews.com, one of the sites he’s running for the Naples Daily News. He’s got scores of such ideas for making newspaper Web sites more appealing. “We have it set up so that for your local high school football games our site will call your phone to tell you the score,” he says. Or you can have the newspaper send a wakeup message to your phone every morning and tell you the weather forecast.

You might wonder what the difference is between what Curley’s doing and what the niche weeklies are doing; if Curley is just giving young people more efficient arts coverage, isn’t he also pandering? Isn’t it possible that some people might just go to his pages for the pop cultural coverage and ignore the stories on slave trafficking?

Yet there’s a fundamental difference in tone between what Curley’s doing online and what other papers are doing with niche tabloids. Papers like RedEye and Juice seem to picture young people as essentially vacuous and hyperactive, incapable of any sustained attention. This explains their brevity; they take it as a given that people my age want to know less, not more — so they give us only tiny nibs of info.

Curley, on the other hand, gives you more. Where other media pander, he attempts to attract young people with comprehensive features — like video, audio, discussion forums, and databases — rather than taking them away. “I’m trying to build a Web site that you can’t imagine not being there,” he says. “I think newspapers should be trying to build Web sites that are so good and so powerful that when real estate agents are talking to people who want to move there, they’ll talk about the newspaper just like they’d talk about good schools or a nice park.” And once people are spending as much time at these newspaper sites as Curley hopes, the thinking is they’ll inevitably be roped into the paper’s other features, including its news reporting.

So far, nobody’s come up with a business model to support such vibrant Web journalism. Newspapers make their money through the print newspaper, and there’s no sign that if print circulation declines, ad rates on the Web could make up for lost ads in the paper, even if those Web sites become substantially more robust than they are today. According to Nielsen//Netratings, the New York Times’ Web site is the most popular newspaper site in the country. But when I asked Robinson, the Times CEO, if she could envision the paper producing costly, in-depth, investigative journalism on the strength of its Web revenue, she said, “It isn’t fair to put the burden of our wonderful newsroom on the shoulder of our newly formed online operation.” The online operation, she explained, is just 10 years old; in time, perhaps, a business model will come.

Curley, too, didn’t have all the answers on the business questions. But he did point out that compared to the costs of producing a print newspaper, the costs of building a news Web site are small. So even if revenues from a Web-only operation are lower than from a print model, profit margins may actually turn out to be higher.

His approach seems plausibly lucrative. If his sites do become indispensable, attracting both old people and young, advertisers may follow. It’s a thin reed on which to hang the future of the newspaper industry. But a reed nonetheless.

But now I have a case that’s very clear for Mr. Brisbane: the Times’ story on Rick Santorum’s lies (yes, I call them lies) about John F. Kennedy’s 1960 religion speech, headlined “Santorum Makes Case for Religion in Public Square.” Since it’s the New York Times and all, I don’t expect the paper to call it a “lie.” But the story contains not one word suggesting that Santorum might be, I don’t know, misrepresenting, misremembering, distorting or otherwise being completely wrong about what JFK actually said.

I’m getting a lot of credit on Twitter and Facebook today for my piece, but this is one of those rare times when I’d rather not be recognized, because – don’t tell my editors – what I did was easy. It took me exactly 10 seconds to Google JFK’s speech and another few minutes to read it. Then I cut and pasted Santorum’s comments next to JFK’s and voila, kids, I had a story. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart credited me with a “deep-dive,” and I appreciate the praise, but really, I barely got my feet wet. (The Post’s own news story wasn’t any better than the Times’; Capehart was the first person on staff to note Santorum’s distortion more than 24 hours after it aired on ABC’s “This Week.”)

I assumed I’d be late to the Santorum story because I was sick yesterday and didn’t even watch him live, I just heard about his remarks online. But I’m writing a book about the Democratic Party and Irish Catholics, and as you’d expect, there’s a little bit about Kennedy in there, and so I thought I’d take a moment to explain what Kennedy said – and how rabid anti-Catholicism, as late as 1960, made it necessary.

I made a comment last week in passing that I’d like to elaborate on here: I’ve spent a lot of time, in the book as well as on Salon, pointing out the anti-Catholic Nativism that hobbled my people and that accounts for some of our pugilism, shall we say, in the public square. But Santorum makes me realize I haven’t said enough about why some people were and still are suspicious of Catholics. His disrespectful comments about mainline Protestant churches somehow being agents of Satan is just one example of the contempt for other faiths that has gotten us in trouble over the years. I came of age after Vatican II; my parents were devout Catholic ecumenicists, attending seders at our local Jewish temple and telling the neighbors, no, we’re not supposed to blame Jews for killing Jesus anymore, and Protestants love Jesus, too. Santorum is an example of the mind-set that liberal Catholics and lapsed Catholics have been fighting in my lifetime, and he’s really a disgrace.

I don’t expect the New York Times to call him a disgrace in its news pages, but I do expect the paper to do a minimum of fact-checking, to see whether our first and only Catholic president actually said what Santorum attributes to him. There was a reserved, respectful, Timesian way to do it, and the paper missed an opportunity to reassure its readers that the paper is all about the truth, and that it’s not cowed into printing untruths by the GOP culture warriors who’ve spent decades now insisting the Times has a raging liberal bias.

I don’t mean to single out Michael Barbaro, either, who does good work, or the team of writers the Times lists as providing additional reporting at the end of the piece. Or Kit Seelye, who wrote the earlier Caucus post, on a tighter deadline, about Santorum’s remarks without fact-checking the JFK claim. I’ve always loved the singular way the paper almost always attributes mistakes, in its Corrections column, to “editing errors.” This was an editing error. Someone at some point should have said, “Hey, I know you’re on deadline – but what did JFK actually say?” It’s not vigilantism. It’s journalism.

You’re welcome, Mr. Brisbane.

He could have coasted on his one great advantage — fluency in Arabic — to beat other reporters to the story. He did not. He used it as a foundation to serve readers — and help colleagues. When I left Iraq after the overthrow of Saddam, a sizeable part of my heart was left behind with new friends who were struggling to make the country a better place. Amid the constant shifts in the chaotic post-war era, Anthony’s dispatches were the ones I relied on to give me the complete picture of what was happening around the country.

American reporters are trained to be objective. It is an ideal to aspire to, more than an achievable goal. We are human beings and those of us who cover conflicts have our emotions challenged every day. The desire to bear witness and to make readers and listeners feel what we feel is overwhelming. Sometimes this gets in the way of objectivity. Anthony, who saw more terrible things than most, managed to stay closer to that ideal than any one. That’s what makes his reporting the best and why in years to come, it will truly be seen as the first draft of history.

We published books on Iraq at the same time and shared a panel at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. on Iraq. I had long since decided that objectivity was getting in the way of my reporting. It was important to let my readers know that I was angry and that my friend had died because of the criminally poor planning of the bigwigs in Washington. That emotion suffused my book. Anthony’s book was scrupulously written, you could never guess what he felt about the war.

My memory is that during the course of the conversation I pressed him about keeping his feelings about the war out of the book. He came back at me with full vigor, eloquently defending the importance of objectivity. He was a big-hearted, supremely talented man — and disciplined about the work. The panel was recorded by C-Span and you can watch Anthony and get some sense of who he was and what we have lost here.

Brooks’ criticism is dead on. Letting every person with a “mic check” suggest a fundamental strategy for the movement is a recipe for disaster. Not only have existing intellectual traditions been the product of superior minds, they have stood the test of time. Anyway, how to act collectively when everyone is pursuing his own quixotic dream?

Of course, anyone who follows the debate knows the left must beware of Brooks bearing gifts. The Times’ conservative columnist is always making sensible sounding suggestions to the left, which, upon closer examination, turn out to be ticking bombs. In this case, the right has a perfectly good foundation in the libertarian tradition, Brooks reports. So it doesn’t need to reinvent its first principles .

For his friends on the left, however,  Brooks advises a simple reversion to their philosopher, Karl Marx. Now there’s a thought.  When the centrist Democrats of the filibuster-bound Senate passed a healthcare plan modeled on the Republican scheme from Massachusetts, the Republicans branded their leaders as socialists, or worse, as taking their beliefs from Paris, if not Nairobi. Imagine if they started actually quoting Karl Marx.

Fortunately, should the left be capable of giving up its endlessly proliferating individual belief systems, two schools of thought other than the return to the specter of communism would be available to them.  There is a robust utilitarian tradition, represented most recently in the work of Princeton philosopher Peter Singer, that asks people to rise to the demands of altruism. As a matter of ordinary morality, you’d pause on a walk to pull a drowning child out of a pond, Singer begins. Why would you not give up a trivial expensive treat to rescue someone starving in Africa?

Or, closer to home, living in a shelter somewhere in New York, or in Washington’s McPherson Square. The well-worked-out analysis of Singer’s argument for beneficence is a vastly better foundation for a long-term social movement than any of the slogans on OWS placards. “Tax the rich” is catchy, but dissolves when confronted with Brooks’ comrades’ libertarian first principle: “It’s my money.” Singer offers the opportunity to argue about why keeping every last penny of it when others are in real need is, well, immoral.

Another great 20th century philosopher, the late John Rawls, made a very well-worked-out argument for why it’s not “your money” at all. It’s only your money, as citizens of many less well-favored societies than the United States know, if other people are willing to refrain from killing you to get it. Otherwise, life is, famously, “solitary, POOR, nasty, brutish and short.” Rawls set forth elaborate conditions for when societies agree to let the rich keep the money without having to live behind walls topped with ground glass.

Most important, Rawls posits, inequality must also benefit the people on the bottom, e.g., by expanding the size of the pie. This was the case for much of American history, and the society was the better for it. But now that finance has replaced manufacturing as the engine of the economy, not so much. The endless claims of money movers like Mitt Romney that they are “creating jobs” reflects the deep power of Rawls’ construct. If they’re not, what is he doing with all that money? Rich people’s claims to be complying with Rawls’ condition can only go on so long in face of the robust evidence to the contrary.

Brooks is right about one thing: Ideas matter. The resurrected right has relied on the power of libertarian ideas for decades. During the same period, the left has relied on mic checks and bumper stickers (“the audacity of hope”). When we see them start to use the rich store of liberal thinking available to them, David Brooks, watch out.

These pieces were clearly written with a very specific objective in mind: to draw media attention to the supposed “education crisis” in America — a favorite topic of these publications’ elite readers, who have a vested interest in blaming the recession on the poor rather than on the economic policies that enrich the already rich. No doubt, both the Times and the Atlantic achieved their goal, with various NPR shows, cable gabfests and elite magazines spending the last week frothing over the articles’ central thesis.

The tragedy in all of this is that in both the articles and in most of the discussions that followed, few bothered to question the fundamental assumptions about education in America — and fewer still bothered to ask if “education” in the modern parlance has now become a synonym for “acquiescence.”

To see how this linguistic shift is occurring, reread the Times article with a critical eye. Specifically, notice that after the reporters structure their piece around Apple executives’ (unchallenged) claim that “the U.S. has stopped producing people with the skills we need,” there’s not a single shred of proof — empirical or otherwise — offered in support of that assertion. On the contrary, after a sweeping declaration at the top of the piece that wage and human rights differences between Chinese and American workers have little to do with offshoring, the article inadvertently goes on to prove those differentials — not skill levels and education — are the driving force behind the domestic job losses in America.

In one section of the piece, for example, the Times notes that Apple’s big Chinese factory, Foxconn, attracts American investment because “over a quarter of (the) work force lives in company barracks and many workers earn less than $17 a day” — and “many work six days a week, often spending up to 12 hours a day at the plant.” In another section of the piece, the Times notes that the cost of “building a $1,500 computer in (California) was $22 a machine … In Singapore, it was $6 … In Taiwan, $4.85.” While the Times unquestioningly forwards Apple’s impossible-to-believe explanation for these figures (“wages weren’t the major reason for the disparities”), the statistics are yet more proof that wage differences, not education, are the real offshoring motive.

The Times also quotes an Apple executive saying the company must outsource because “the entire supply chain is in China now” — and though the article doesn’t bother to mention it, that is true precisely because other factories in that supply chain have moved to China for the cheap wages and lax human rights/labor regulations. The Times later talks to Eric Saragoza, an American worker laid off by Apple, who says that Apple told him to keep his job he didn’t need to acquire more skills, but instead “to do 12-hour days, and come in on Saturdays.” And in another part of the piece, the Times quotes a former Apple executive who insists Apple was forced to move to China because there’s no “U.S. plant (that) can find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms” — an admission, again, that Apple’s move to offshore isn’t about skills, but about a desire to employ a “flexible” (read: exploitable) workforce.*

In light of all this, the absurdity of the Times’ “education crisis” conclusion is obvious. Somehow, Dickensian realities are meticulously recounted, but Apple is permitted to plead helplessness without so much as a contradictory fact being mentioned — as if the company isn’t making calculated choices that are generating record profits off sweatshop conditions. China’s super-low wages and nonexistent labor, environmental and human rights protections are shown over and over again to be the driving force behind American corporate offshoring, and yet the conclusion is nonetheless that the problem for America is our education system. And somehow, that conclusion is made without the Times, the Atlantic Monthly or any part of the media echoing their stories measuring it against actual data from the American education system.

And what, pray tell, does that data say? It says that far from a drought of skilled high-tech workers forcing supposedly helpless victims like Apple to move to China, America is actually producing more of such workers than Apple and other high-tech companies are willing to employ. As I noted in a previous newspaper column (looking at yet another New York Times piece making the same education argument):

No doubt, you’ve heard (the) fairy tale from prominent politicians and business leaders who incessantly insist that our economic troubles do not emanate from neoliberals’ corporate-coddling trade, tax and deregulatory policies, but instead from an education system that is supposedly no longer graduating enough science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) experts. Indeed, this was the message of this week’s New York Times story about corporate leaders saying America isn’t producing “enough workers with the cutting-edge skills coveted by tech firms.”

As usual, it sounds vaguely logical. Except, the lore relies on the assumptions that American schools aren’t generating enough STEM supply to meet employer demand…
To know (that) supposition is preposterous is to consider a recent study by Rutgers and Georgetown University that found colleges “in the United States actually graduate many more STEM students than are hired each year.”

These facts were most recently corroborated in mind-boggling detail by the Senate testimony of Rochester Institute of Technology’s Ron Hira. But, of course, they are nowhere to be found in the Times. That’s not altogether shocking (even if it is offensive) — the Times is a newspaper whose ombudsman recently challenged the very idea that the paper’s journalists should actually fact-check statements made by its sources. It is also a newspaper that has helped construct a larger political and media consensus around what I’ve called both “The Great Education Myth” and the “Neoliberal Bait-and-Switch.”

These sleights of hand simply stipulate as unchallenged, unquestioned fact that all of our economic problems can be solved with better STEM education and more STEM graduates. The idea is that this educational improvement would fix the alleged problem of high-tech companies like Apple not being able to find enough STEM workers. This myth endures even though the data indisputably proves that there is no such dearth of STEM worker supply — indeed, we are already producing more STEM graduates than the domestic economy can employ, meaning the only worker shortage that exists in America is a shortage of workers willing to toil at slave wages with no labor or human rights. But, alas, those facts don’t matter because the Great Education Myth isn’t about economic reality — it is an instrument of propaganda designed to distract attention from the tax and trade policies that allow companies like Apple to make so much money off the current system of exploitation.

So that gets us back to the key question of whether the term “education” is effectively being redefined? In all of the elite media’s stories about offshoring and the STEM “education crisis,” does the term “education” no longer mean “learning a set of skills”? Does it in practice now mean American workers learning not new technological crafts, but learning to quietly accept the wage, labor and human rights standards of China — the standards we thankfully improved after our own crushing Industrial Age a century ago? In short, does “education” now mean “teaching American workers to be subservient”?

The answer, almost certainly, is yes, because that’s the only way that the media and political establishment’s entire “education crisis” meme makes any logical sense.

The fact is, while our cash-starved schools would obviously benefit from more resources, and while better schools clearly couldn’t hurt our society, there’s no empirical, data-based reason to believe that improving our schools would reverse the trend of America losing high-tech jobs to slave-labor nations like China. Without a change in tax and tariff-free trade policies that economically incentivize companies like Apple to keep moving production to cheap labor havens overseas, the only “education” that will bring those jobs back is the kind that indoctrinates high-tech American workers to compete with Chinese workers by accepting the horrific labor conditions those Chinese workers experience. Based on the New York Times’ own reporting on Apple, that means an education system in America that teaches our workers to simply accept being paid $17 a day, to work six days a week in 12-hour shifts and to live in crowded dormitories so that they can be stampeded into the factory at any hour of the day. It means, in short, an education system that tells Eric Saragoza to shut up and accept the employer’s draconian demands.

Not surprisingly, the curriculum for this new education system is already being championed by the very political and media realms that originally constructed the Great Education Myth. In Congress, a group of senators is proposing to eliminate overtime protections for vast swaths of the America’s high-tech workforce in the name of competing with China. In state legislatures, lawmakers are looking to weaken child labor statutes, also in the name of competition. And on the New York Times Op-Ed page, Thomas Friedman implies that Americans are lazy and declares that “average is over” and that “everyone needs to find their extra” — elite-speak for the notion that Americans, who already log some of the longest workdays in the world and who are already among the planet’s most productive laborers, must work even harder than they already do.

In beginning to construct this kind of pedagogy, our mandarins are not coincidentally promoting a key part of the educational ideology of their Chinese counterparts. No, not the part of that ideology that is focused on training high-tech workers — the part that prioritizes obedience. Indeed, as my friend Michael Levy recounts in his terrific book “Kosher Chinese,” that educational method teaches Chinese workers never to question their station, demand basic rights or ask for better conditions.

That same ethos is now being proudly promoted here at home. Should we accept it — and the redefinition of “education” that comes with it — we may end up bringing a few jobs back, but we will have reversed the very labor, wage and environmental progress that once defined our basic concept of human rights — and America itself.

*It’s important to note that the Times did eventually publish this follow-up piece to its original article about Apple and offshoring. The follow-up piece looks more closely at how Apple mistreats its workers in China, and that kind of scrutiny is certainly necessary and laudable. However, the fact that the Times made the decision to separate the later piece on labor rights from the earlier article on Apple’s employment decisions implies that the two issues — worker exploitation and offshoring — are separate, when in fact they are inextricably intertwined. That kind of distinction is a real problem. Indeed, pretending that these two issues are wholly different topics (as Apple and other high-tech executives so often do) perpetuates the deceptive notion that exploitation is just a “liberal” feel-goody concern while business practices are more serious, dispassionate, non-ideological decisions. But only when these issues are looked at in aggregate will we be able to start having an honest debate about how globalization really works.

Mencken could recall no such excitement. “The unanimous opinion of all the journalists that I know, excluding a few Liberals who are obviously somewhat balmy,” he added “… is that since the days of the national Thors and Wotans, no politician who was not out for himself, and himself alone, has ever drawn the breath of life in the United States.”

Alas, such attitudes went out of fashion with snap-brim fedoras, smoke-filled rooms and bottles of rye in desk drawers. Today’s national political reporters have attended fancy colleges, regard their professional affiliations as valuable status symbols, hence give every sign of identifying more with Washington courtiers and political professionals than the great unwashed.

To the extent they may share Mencken’s exuberant disdain for hoodwinker and hoodwinked alike, ambitious reporters are well-advised to keep it to themselves. As a career strategy, thoughtful circumspection is advised. The uphill path to a sinecure on “Meet the Press” must be trodden carefully.

Many readers, for example, can probably identify a name-brand journalist such as Judith Miller, who fell into disrepute for parroting Bush administration propaganda about Saddam Hussein’s WMD. But can you name anybody whose skeptical reporting made them famous? No, you cannot.

Columnists have more leeway, but even there it’s safer (and easier) to stick to anodyne topics such as dorky clothes, bad hair, which candidate resembles what character in “Pride and Prejudice,” and who mistreats his dog. To me, it’s significant that an honorable exception like Paul Krugman — my nominee for progressive MVP — is not a product of newsroom culture.

So now comes New York Times “public editor” Arthur Brisbane with maybe the most disingenuous question of the year: Should Times reporters be “truth vigilantes”? When politicians lie, should reporters call them out?

And if so, how?

Brisbane’s two columns on the subject drew widespread astonishment and hilarity from readers and journalists alike — partly because journalists love talking about ourselves as much as the average Hollywood starlet. They also drew a sharp rebuke from Times editor Jill Abramson, who insisted that the “kind of rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a fundamental part of our job as journalists.”

Abramson gave instances of the newspaper supplying proper context for politicians’ statements such as Mitt Romney’s preposterous charge that President Obama wants “to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society.” (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Know what he means?) She said that the Times reported that “the largest entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all enacted before Mr. Obama entered grade school.”

Of course, that’s not what Romney’s really saying. Look, as somebody who spent more than a decade waging a quixotic war of words against the New York Times over its role in the Whitewater hoax, the subsequent “War on Gore,” and its shameful (and acknowledged) role in “catapulting the propaganda” that led the U.S. to invade Iraq, I have two observations.

First, the Times has rebounded since those dark days of 2003. Far less unmediated government propaganda and make-believe scandal characterizes its news columns. Abramson’s 2011 appointment as executive editor gives further reason for optimism.

Second, the answer to Brisbane’s real question — exactly how reporters are supposed to go about calling Mitt Romney a liar — has no good answer. Because the more forcefully it’s done, the more the GOP candidate’s apt to like it.

Take Romney’s oft-repeated charge that Obama goes around apologizing for America. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler did this one to a fare-thee-well, showing conclusively that the allegation is completely false — an absurd mix of misrepresented circumstances, doctored quotes, etc. And it took him 1,800 words.

And who read them? Certainly nobody who’d already swallowed the lie on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or any of a hundred right-wing websites. So the Washington Post says it’s a lie. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? The Times agrees? Even better.

Romney’s not talking to reporters, but over and through them, seeking not nuanced news stories, but five-second video clips and TV ads. Reporters who ask confrontational questions can be ignored, or worse, made characters in the story. Well-paid operatives can make their editors’ lives miserable.

The uncomfortable truth is that no newspaper today has the power and moral authority the New York Times so thoughtlessly squandered, and it ain’t coming back. Obama will have to defend himself.