The long view.

MEMORANDUM

TO: All news staff worldwide

FROM: Management

RE: Guidelines for the next four years

As I hope was clear from my conference call this morning, many of us here on the eleventh floor are concerned with what seems to us to be an undue amount of attention and navel-gazing on the part of the journalistic community as it digests and responds to the next Bush administration.

Obviously, the CBS affair has had ramifications. We can no longer simply trust our sources to provide us with documents that will not stand expert scrutiny. I am particularly proud of this news organization's response to the CBS imbroglio, and if any questions remain, please refer to my memo of 11/17/04, "Avoiding Sloppy Work: A Guide for Teaching Your Sources about Fonts, Kerning, and the Autopen."

And yet, I can sense from some of your work that there's a backsliding mentality going on. It's understandable, of course, that the tragic events of the recent past--the Rice hearings, the Bush inaugural, the recent rise in consumer confidence, the tsunami--may have knocked some of you off balance. This memo is an attempt to get things back on track.

For the duration of the next four years, then, let's all try to observe the following guidelines:

1. When possible, please refer to Jesus Christ, the historical figure associated with those who profess belief in "Christian" doctrine, as either "Mr. Christ" or "the Jesus figure." Let's remember that we're journalists. We're supposed to be skeptical. For further discussion of this stylebook change, please see my memo of 12/25/04, "Injecting Pluralism: A New Way to Talk About Jesus and Jesuses."

2. The terms "far Right" and "radical Right" no longer serve a useful descriptive purpose. Please substitute "arch" or "spooky" as appropriate.

3. The elections in Iraq pose special problems for us, as recent indications suggest that they may proceed with relative efficiency and even, among some of the more "backward" citizens, outright enthusiasm. It's especially challenging, when depicting or describing cheerful Iraqis on their way to vote for the first time in their lives in a free and fair election, not to forget--as I just did, a few words ago--that elections are never free and fair. They are, for our purposes, "free" and "fair," perhaps--the quotation marks here are really crucial, and are required for any and all dispatches--but better, more accurate words to use to characterize the upcoming "free" and "fair" "elections" in Iraq might be any combination of the following: fraught, tense, deep, riven, terror, hate, ambivalent, anger, anti-Bush, anti-American, violent, tragic, depressed, and quagmire. Please see that in your dispatches and copy you incorporate this new lexicon.

4. For the next four years, at least, let's return to our traditional focus on the permanent American underclass.

5. For the next four years, at least, let's all try to identify which exact group can be called a "permanent American underclass."

6. Let's keep on top of the signs that our children are becoming more violent. We seem to have dropped the ball on this one lately.

7. Older Americans in particular have begun backsliding lately in their awareness and enthusiasm for some of our past narratives. It's important, as we begin to discuss dismantling legacy social-safety-net institutions, that our nation's elderly are our greatest resource for quotations, fearful utterances, heartbreaking anecdotes of cost-cutting--that sort of thing. (I'm thinking primarily here of prescription medicines, but I recall great copy and art coming out of the early Reagan years depicting older people glumly staring at cans of dog food. Archives: Dig this up, will you? And "cc" it to everyone . . .)

8. Finally, I think it's time to develop a new way to refer to African Americans. In the past few years, the term African American has embedded itself in the consciousness of most of our citizens, and the result is that it's harder and harder to get them to use anything else, even inadvertently (see my memo of 6/8/04, "Tripping Up Da Man: Getting Your Subject to Say Something Racist," for further discussion on this topic). I'm open to suggestions, of course, but I would posit that we return to "negro" if possible, as it's close enough to another, highly offensive term that a tiny bit of work on an audio file can do the trick.

Please try to keep these key ideas in mind as you report and file stories over the next four years. We'll all breathe a lot easier knowing that we can count on certain things to appear as "news" as we all face an uncertain future.

Many thanks,

Management