Media Maneuvers: BlackBerry jungle

"She sees farmers working long hours in the same way her great-grandparents did; they milked cows at 5 a.m. and fixed tools after supper. 'They didn't see it as a work-home balance, it was just all the stuff you did,' she says. "With technology, we have to relearn those skills that our great-grandparents already had."

Oh, that makes us feel better. Let's hope we live a lot longer than they did.

Just as two people can look at the same glass and arrive at opposite conclusions, two newspapers can cover a congression­al hearing and see two entirely different stories. Both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times on Dec. 5 carried previews of testimony the Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to hear that day about the Securities and Exchange Commission's inquiry into possible insider trading at Pequot Capital Management Inc. Readers of the stories could be forgiven if they failed to realize both pieces were about the same hearing.

The Times story focused on Eric Ribelin, an investigator at the Securities and Exchange Commission who was set to testify that the agency's Pequot investigation "was not handled right." The paper pointed out that Ribelin's testimony "echoes" some of the complaints lodged against the SEC by Gary Aguirre, a former SEC attorney who says the agency fired him after he requested to interview the politically well-connected CEO of Morgan Stanley, John Mack, in connection with the Pequot probe. The Times then goes on to (once again) recount Aguirre's saga, which it first reported with much fanfare in June. As far as the SEC's take on this is concerned, all we learn is that the agency declined to comment: "We'll just let our testimony speak for itself," the spokesman is quoted as saying.

So what is that testimony? For that, you had to turn to the Journal. Its Dec. 5 preview story basically provides snippets of the testimony set to be delivered that day by various SEC officials, including enforcement director Linda Thomsen, who called Aguirre's allegations "simply not true" and pointed out that he pursued "an unsuccessful age-discrimination claim against the SEC for failing to hire him on 22 prior applications," as well as SEC assistant director Mark Krietman, who noted that Aguirre's behavior became "increasingly unprofessional, irresponsible, and erratic." The story made no mention of Ribelin and his planned remarks and all we hear from Aguirre is that he believes the testimony of the SEC officials to be "fiction."

That brings us to the next day, when both papers carried stories about the actual hearing. But in a strange role reversal, the Journal's piece spilled most of its ink reporting on Ribelin's testimony and his contention that "something smells rotten" about the SEC's Pequot probe. The Times, for its part, devoted its story mainly to the SEC's defense, though it did include skeptical remarks about it from Sens. Charles Grassley and Arlen Specter, who vowed: "We are not finished with this, ladies and gentlemen."

Apparently, neither are the newspapers. The Dec. 8 Journal ran an editorial in which it chided Grassley for adopting Aguirre as a "truth-teller" despite his failure to produce any evidence. It also took a shot at the Times, suggesting Grassley was using the Gray Lady "to burnish his reputation as a populist." It was the second time the Journal's opinion pages lashed out at its uptown rival for its Pequot coverage. Last month, Journal columnist Holman Jenkins questioned why the Times' editors "allow such stuff into the paper," referring to its repeated coverage of Aguirre's allegations about Mack. That column solicited an angry letter to the Journal by no less than Times executive editor Bill Keller. All we need now is a missive to Keller from Journal managing editor Paul Steiger to tie this up neatly.—Yvette Kantrow