Petrelis Files

SF Chron: Ex-NYT'er on Condi's Waning, No Paper Published Her Article

Former New York Times foreign reporter Joel Brinkley, who now teaches journalism at Stanford, has a devastatingly negative opinion piece in today's Insight section of the San Francisco Chronicle about the waning influence of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

What sticks in my mind as the most damning nugget showing her diminished role in at least shaping a debate, never mind actually accomplishing something tangible and positive, is that she peddled a lame article to important newspapers around the world, all turning her down.

Sure, pieces like Brinkley are a potent dose of schadenfreude for radical gay peaceniks like myself, but I am so worried about what further damage Rice and her White House bosses will do, as their days in power dwindle, that I really don't find true comfort in such opinion columns.

Nevertheless, thanks Joel Brinkley, for getting your column published, and kudos to the SF Chronicle for printing it today.

From the Brinkley piece:

A few months ago, she decided to write an opinion piece about Lebanon. She enlisted John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco Systems as a co-author, and they wrote about public/private partnerships and how they might be of use in rebuilding Lebanon after last summer's war. No one would publish it.

Think about that. Every one of the major newspapers approached refused to publish an essay by the secretary of state. Price Floyd, who was the State Department's director of media affairs until recently, recalls that it was sent to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and perhaps other papers before the department finally tried a foreign publication, the Financial Times of London, which also turned it down.

As a last-ditch strategy, the State Department briefly considered translating the article into Arabic and trying a Lebanese paper. But finally they just gave up. "I kept hearing the same thing: 'There's no news in this.' " Floyd said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush's wise leadership. "It read like a campaign document."

Click here to read the full article.