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I keep returning to Renata Adler’s introduction to Canaries in the Mineshaft (2001), a moving and revealing piece on how the New York Times works. I’ve sent excerpts to a few people, but it’s worth reading in full.

It’s not online anywhere, so I’m posting it here, with Adler’s 12,500 words on the New York Times and what it can do to the people it covers:

Along with every other viewer of television during Operation Desert Storm, the Gulf War of 1991, I believed that I saw, time after time, American Patriot missiles knocking Iraqi Scuds out of the sky. Every major television reporter obviously shared this belief, along with a certainty that these Patriots were offering protection to the population of Israel—which the Desert Storm alliance, for political reasons, had kept from active participation in the war. Commentators actually cheered, with exclamations like “Bull’s-eye! No more Scud!” at each such interception by a Patriot of a Scud. Weeks earlier, I had read newspaper accounts of testimony before a committee of the Congress by a tearful young woman who claimed to have witnessed Iraqi soldiers enter Kuwaiti hospitals, take babies out of their incubators, hurl the newborns to the floor, and steal the incubators. I believed this, too.

Only much later did I learn that not a single Patriot effectively hit a single Scud. The scenes on television were in fact repetitions of images from one film, made by the Pentagon in order to persuade Congress to allocate more money to the Patriot, an almost thirty-year-old weapon designed, in any case, not to destroy missiles but to intercept airplanes. In his exuberance, a high military official announced that Patriots had even managed to destroy “eighty-one Scud launchers”—interesting not only because the total number of Scud launchers previously ascribed to Iraq was fifty, but also because there is and was no such thing as a “Scud launcher.” The vehicles in question were old trucks, which had broken down.

What was at issue, in other words, was not even pro-American propaganda, which could be justified in time of war. It was domestic advertising for a product—not just harmlessly deceptive advertising, either. The Patriots, as it turned out, did more damage to the allied forces, and to Israel, than if they had not been used at all. The weeping young woman who had testified about the incubator thefts turned out to be the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington; she had not, obviously, witnessed any such event. Whatever else the Iraqi invaders and occupiers may have done, this particular incident was a fabrication—invented by an American public relations firm in the employ of the Kuwaiti government.

During Operation Desert Storm itself, the American press corps, as it also turns out, accepted an arrangement with the U.S. military, whereby only a “pool” of journalists would be permitted to cover the war directly. That pool went wherever the American military press officer chose to take it. Nowhere near the front, if there was a front. Somehow, the pool and its military press guides often got lost. When other reporters, trying to get independent information, set out on their own, members of the pool actually berated them for jeopardizing the entire news-gathering arrangement.

It would have been difficult to learn all this, or any of it, from the press. I learned it from a very carefully researched and documented book, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, by John R. MacArthur. The book, published in 1992, was well enough reviewed. But it was neither prominently reviewed nor treated as “news” or even information. A review, after all, is regarded only as a cultural and not a real—least of all a journalistic—event. It was not surprising that the Pentagon, after its experience in Vietnam, should want to keep the press at the greatest possible distance from any war. It was not surprising, either, that reporters, having after all not that much choice, should submit so readily to being confined to a pool, or even that reporters in that pool should resent any competitor who tried to work outside it. This is the position of a favored collaborator in any bureaucratic and coercive enterprise.

What was, if not surprising, a disturbing matter, and a symptom of what was to come, was this: The press did not report the utter failure of the Patriot, nor did it report the degree to which the press itself, and then its audience and readership, had been misled. This is not to suggest that the press, out of patriotism or for any other reason, printed propaganda to serve the purposes of the government—or even that it would be unworthy to do so. But millions of Americans surely still believe that Patriots destroyed the Scuds, and in the process saved, or at least defended, Israel. There seemed, in this instance, no reason why the press, any more than any person or other institution, should be eager to report failures of its own.

Almost all the pieces in this book have to do, in one way or another, with what I regard as misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and, to a degree, the journalist’s role in it. At the time of the Vietnam War, it could be argued that the press had become too reflexively adversarial and skeptical of the policies of government. Now I believe the reverse is true. All bureaucracies have certain interests in common: self-perpetuation, ritual, dogma, a reluctance to take responsibility for their actions, a determination to eradicate dissent, a commitment to a notion of infallibility. As I write this, the Supreme Court has, in spite of eloquent and highly principled dissents, so far and so cynically exceeded any conceivable exercise of its constitutional powers as to choose, by one vote, its own preferred candidate for President. Some reporters, notably Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times, have written intelligently and admirably about this. For the most part, however, the press itself has become a bureaucracy, quasi-governmental, and, far from calling attention to the collapse of public process, in particular to prosecutorial abuses, it has become an instrument of intimidation, an instrumentality even of the police function of the state.

Let us begin by acknowledging that, in our public life, this has been a period of unaccountable bitterness and absurdity. To begin with the attempts to impeach President Clinton. There is no question that the two sets of allegations, regarding Paula Jones and regarding Whitewater, with which the process began could not, as a matter of fact or law or for any other reason, constitute grounds for impeachment. Whatever they were, they preceded his presidency, and no President can be impeached for his prior acts. That was that. Then the Supreme Court, in what was certainly one of the silliest decisions in its history, ruled that the civil lawsuit by Paula Jones could proceed without delay because, in spite of the acknowledged importance of the President’s office, it appeared “highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of his time.” In 1994 a Special Prosecutor (for some reason, this office is still called the Independent Counsel) was appointed to investigate Whitewater—a press-generated inquiry, which could not possibly be material for a Special Prosecutor, no matter how defined, since it had nothing whatever to do with presidential conduct. Nonetheless, the first Special Prosecutor, Robert Fiske, investigated and found nothing. A three-judge panel, appointed, under the Independent Counsel statute, by Chief Justice William Rehnquist, fired Fiske. As head of the three-judge panel, Rehnquist had passed over several more senior judges, to choose Judge David Bryan Sentelle.

Judge Sentelle consulted at lunch with two ultra-right-wing senators from his own home state of North Carolina: Lauch Faircloth, who was convinced, among other things, that Vincent Foster, a White House counsel, had been murdered; and Jesse Helms, whose beliefs and powers would not be described by anyone as moderate. Judge Sentelle appointed as Fiske’s successor Kenneth W. Starr. North Carolina is, of course, a tobacco-growing state. Kenneth Starr had been, and remained virtually throughout his tenure as Special Prosecutor, a major, and very highly paid, attorney for the tobacco companies. He had also once drafted a pro bono amicus brief on behalf of Paula Jones.

The Office of Special Prosecutor—true conservatives said this from the first—had always been a constitutional abomination. To begin with, it impermissibly straddled the three branches of government. If President Nixon had not been in dire straits, he would never have permitted such an office, in the person of Archibald Cox, to exist. If President Clinton had not been sure of his innocence and—far more dangerously—overly certain of his charm, he would never have consented to such an appointment.

The press, however, loves Special Prosecutors. They can generate stories for each other. That something did not happen is not a story. That something does not matter is not a story. That an anecdote or an accusation is unfounded is not a story. There is this further commonality of interest. Leaks, anonymous sources, informers, agents, rumormongers, appear to offer stories—and possibilities for offers, pressures, threats, rewards. The journalist’s exchange of an attractive portrayal for a good story. There we are. The reporter and the prosecutor (the Special Prosecutor, that is; not as often the genuine prosecutor) are in each other’s pockets.

Starr did not find anything, either. Certainly no crime. He sent his staff to Little Rock, generated enormous legal expenses for people interviewed there, threw one unobliging witness (Susan McDougal) into jail for well over a year, indicted others (Webster Hubbell, for example) for offenses unrelated to the Clintons, convicted and jailed witnesses in hopes of getting testimony damaging to President Clinton, tried, after the release of those witnesses, to jail them again to get such testimony. Still no crime. So his people tried to generate one. This is not unusual behavior on the part of prosecutors going after hardened criminals: stings, indictments of racketeers and murderers for income tax offenses. But here was something new. Starr’s staff, for a time, counted heavily on sexual embarrassment: philandering, Monica Lewinsky. They even had a source, Linda Tripp. Ms. Tripp had testified for Special Prosecutor Fiske and later for Starr. She had testified in response to questions from her sympathetic interlocutor Senator Lauch Faircloth before Senator D’Amato’s Whitewater Committee. She had testified to agents of the FBI right in the Special Prosecutor’s office at least as early as April 12, 1994. An ultra-right-wing Republican herself, she not only believed White House Counsel Vincent Foster was murdered, she claimed to fear for her own life. She somehow had on the wall above her desk at the Pentagon, where her desk adjoined Monica Lewinsky’s, huge posters of President Clinton—which, perhaps not utterly surprisingly, drew Ms. Lewinsky’s attention. Somehow, in the fall of 1996 Ms. Tripp found herself eliciting, and taping, confidences from Ms. Lewinsky. In January of 1997, Ms. Tripp—who by her own account had previously abetted another White House volunteer, Kathleen Willey, in making sexual overtures to President Clinton—counseled Ms. Lewinsky to try again to visit President Clinton. By the end of February 1997, Ms. Lewinsky, who had not seen the President in more than eleven months, managed to arrange such a visit. Somehow, that visit was the only one in which she persuaded the President to ejaculate. Somehow, adept as Ms. Lewinsky claimed to be at fellatio, semen found its way onto her dress. Somehow, Ms. Tripp persuaded Ms. Lewinsky, who perhaps did not require much persuasion, to save that dress. Somehow, the Special Prosecutor got the dress. And somehow (absurdity of absurdities), there was the spectacle of the Special Prosecutor’s agents taking blood from the President to match the DNA on a dress.

Now, whatever other mistakes President Clinton may have made, in this or any other matter, he, too, had made utterly absurd mistakes of constitutional proportions. He had no obligation at all to go before the grand jury. It was a violation of the separation of powers and a mistake. Once again, he may have overestimated his charm. Charm gets you nowhere with prosecutors’ questions, answered before a grand jury under oath. And of course, Mr. Starr had managed to arrange questions—illegally, disingenuously, at the absolute last minute—which were calculated to make the President testify falsely at his deposition in the case of Paula Jones. Whether or not the President did testify falsely, the notion that “perjury” or even “obstruction of justice” in such a case could rise to the level of “Treason, Bribery or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the sole constitutional grounds for impeachment, had no basis in history or in law.

One need not dwell on every aspect of the matter to realize this much: As sanctimonious as lawyers, congressmen, and even judges may be, most legal cases are simply not decided on arcane legal grounds. Most turn on conflicting evidence, conflicting testimony. And this conflict cannot, surely, in every case or even in most cases, be ascribed either to Rashomon phenomena or to memory lapses. In most cases—there is no other way to put it—one litigant or the other, and usually both, are lying. If this were to be treated as “perjury” or “obstruction of justice,” then, alas, most losers in litigation would be subject to indictment. Anyone who has studied grounds for impeachment at all knows that “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” refers, in any event, only to crimes committed in the President’s official capacity and in the actual conduct of his office.

And now the press. Perhaps the most curious phenomenon in the recent affinity of the press with prosecutors has been a reversal, an inversion so acute that it passes any question of “blaming the victim.” It actually consists in casting persecutors as victims, and vilifying victims as persecutors. The New York Times is not alone in this, but it has been, until recently, the most respected of newspapers, and it has been, of late, the prime offender. A series of recent events there gives an indication of what is at stake.

In a retreat in Tarrytown, in mid-September, Joseph Lelyveld—in his time a distinguished reporter, now executive editor of the Times—gave a speech to eighty assembled Times newsroom editors, plus two editors of other publications, The New Yorker and Newsday. The ostensible subject of the retreat was “Competition.” Mr. Lelyveld’s purpose, he said, was to point out “imperfections in what I proudly believe to be the best New York Times ever—the best written, most consistent, and ambitious newspaper Times readers have ever had.” This was, in itself, an extraordinary assertion. It might have been just a mollifying tribute, a prelude to criticism of some kind. And so it was.

“I’m just driven by all the big stuff we’ve accomplished in recent years—our strong enterprise reporting, our competitive edge, our successful recruiting, our multimedia forays, our sheer ambition,” Lelyveld went on, “to worry” about “the small stuff,” particularly “the really big small stuff.” “I especially want to talk to you,” he said, “about corrections, and in particular, the malignancy of misspelled names, which, if you haven’t noticed, has become one of the great themes of our Corrections column.”

He might have been joking, but he wasn’t. “Did you know we’ve misspelled Katharine Graham’s name fourteen times? Or that we've misspelled the Madeleine in Madeleine Albright forty-nine times—even while running three corrections on each? … So far this year … there have been a hundred and ninety-eight corrections for misspelled given names and surnames, the overwhelming majority easily checkable on the Internet. … I want to argue that our commitment to being excellent and reliable in these matters is as vital to the impression we leave on readers, and the service we perform for them, as the brilliant things we accomplish most days on our front page and on our section-front displays.”

Lelyveld recalled the time, thirty years ago, when he had first come to the newspaper (a better paper, as it happens, an incomparably better paper, under his predecessors, whom present members of the staff tend to demonize). “Just about everything else we do today, it seems to me, we do better than they did then.” But, in view of “the brilliant things we accomplish most days” (”We don’t just claim to be a team. We don’t just aspire to be a team. Finally, I think we can say, we function as a team. We are a team”), he did want to talk about what he regarded as a matter of some importance: “Finally … there’s the matter of corrections (I almost said the ‘festering matter’ of corrections). As I see it, this is really big small stuff.”

A recent correction about a photo confusing monarch and queen butterflies, he said, might seem amusing—”amusing if you don’t much mind the fact that scores of lepidopterists are now likely to mistrust us on areas outside their specialty.”

And that, alas, turned out to be the point. This parody, this misplaced punctiliousness, was meant to reassure readers—lepidopterists, whomever—that whatever else appeared in the newspaper could be trusted and was true. Correction of “malignant” misspellings, of “given names and surnames,” middle initials, captions, headlines, the “overwhelming majority” of which, as Lelyveld put it, would have been “easily checkable on the Internet” was the Times’ substitute for conscience, and the basis of its assurance to readers that in every other respect it was an accurate paper, better than it had ever been, more worthy of their trust. Stendhal, for instance, had recently been misspelled, misidentified, and given a first name: Robert. “A visit to Amazon.com, just a couple of clicks away, could have cleared up the confusion.” Maybe so.

The trivial, as it happens often truly comic, corrections, persist, in quantity. The deep and consequential errors, inevitable in any enterprise, particularly those with deadlines, go unacknowledged. By this pedantic travesty of good faith, which is, in fact, a classic method of deception, the Times conceals not just every important error it makes but that it makes errors at all. It wants that poor trusting lepidopterist to think that, with the exception of this little lapse (now corrected), the paper is conscientious and infallible.

There exists, to this end, a wonderful set of locutions, euphemisms, conventions, codes, and explanations: “misspelled,” “misstated,” “referred imprecisely,” “referred incorrectly,” and recently—in some ways most mystifyingly—”paraphrase.”

On September 19, 2000, “An article on September 17 about a program of intellectual seminars organized by Mayor Jerry Brown of Oakland, California, referred imprecisely to some criticisms of the series. The terms ‘Jerrification’ and ‘pointy-headed table talk’ were the article’s paraphrase of local critics, not the words of Willa White, president of the Jack London Association.”

On October 5, 2000, “A news analysis yesterday about the performances of Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas in their first debate referred imprecisely in some copies to a criticism of the candidates. The observation that they ‘took too much time niggling over details’ was a paraphrase of comments by former Mayor Pete Flaherty of Pittsburgh, not a quotation.”

On November 9, 2000, “An article on Sunday about the campaign for the Senate in Missouri said the Governor had ‘wondered’ about the decision of the late candidate’s wife to run for the Senate. But he did not use the words ‘I’m bothered somewhat by the idea of voting for a dead person’s wife, simply because she is a widow.’ That was a paraphrase of Mr. Wilson’s views and should not have appeared in quotation marks.”

On December 16, 2000, “Because of an editing error, an article yesterday referred erroneously to a comment by a board member,” about a recount. “‘A man has to do what a man has to do’ was a paraphrase of Mr. Torre’s views and should not have appeared in quotation marks.”

Apart from the obvious questions—What is the Times’ idea of “paraphrase"? What were the actual words being paraphrased? What can “Jerrification,” “pointy-headed table talk,” “niggling,” and even “A man has to do what a man has to do” possibly be paraphrases of—what purpose is served by these corrections? Is the implication that all other words, in the Times, attributed in quotation marks to speakers are accurate, verbatim quotations? I’m afraid the implication is inescapably that. That such an implication is preposterous is revealed by the very nature of these corrections. There is no quotation of which “Jerrification” and the rest can possibly be a paraphrase. Nor can the reporter have simply misheard anything that was actually said, nor can the result be characterized as having “referred imprecisely” or “referred erroneously,” let alone be the result of “an editing error.”

It cannot be. What is at issue in these miniscule corrections is the Times’ notion of what matters, its professionalism, its good faith, even its perception of what constitute accuracy and the truth. The overriding value is, after all, to allay the mistrust of readers, lepidopterists, colleagues. Within the newspaper, this sense of itself—trust us, the only errors we make are essentially typos, and we correct them; we never even misquote, we paraphrase—appears even in its columns.

In a column published in the Times on July 20, 2000, Martin Arnold of the Arts/Culture desk, for example, wrote unhesitatingly that, compared with book publishing, “Journalism has a more rigorous standard: What is printed is believed to be true, not merely unsuspected of being false. The first rule of journalism,” he wrote, “is don’t invent.”

“Except in the most scholarly work,” Mr. Arnold went on, “no such absolutes apply to book publishing. … A book writer is … not subject to the same discipline as a news reporter, for instance, who is an employee and whose integrity is a condition of his employment … a newspaper … is a brand name, and the reader knows exactly what to expect from the brand.” If book publishers, Mr. Arnold concluded, “seem lethargic” about “whether a book is right or wrong, it maybe [sic] because readers will cut books slack they don’t give their favorite newspaper.”

In this wonderful piece of self-regarding fatuity, Mr. Arnold has expressed the essence of the “team’s” view of its claim: The Times requires no “slack.” It readily makes its own corrections:

The Making Books column yesterday misspelled the name of the television host. … She is Oprah Winfrey, not Opra.

An article about Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Al Gore used a misspelled name and a non-existent name for the author of The Red and the Black. . . . The pen name is Stendhal, not Stendahl; Robert is not part of it.

The Advertising column in Business on Friday misspelled the surname of a singer and actress. … She is Lena Horne, not Horn.

An article about an accident in which a brick fell from a construction site atop the YMCA building on West 63rd Street, slightly injuring a woman, included an erroneous address from the police for the building near which she was standing. It was 25 Central Park West. (There is no No. 35). Because of an editing error, the Making Books column on Thursday … misstated the name of the publisher of a thriller by Tom Clancy. It is G. P. Putnam, not G. F.

An article on Monday about charges that Kathleen Hagen murdered her parents, Idella and James Hagen, at their home in Chatham Township, N.J., misspelled the street where they lived. It is Fairmount Avenue, not Fairmont.

And so on. Endlessly.

What is the reasoning, the intelligence, behind this daily travesty of concern for what is truthful? Mr. Arnold has the cant just about right. “Don’t invent.” (Pointy-headed table talk? Jerrification? Niggling? Paraphrase?) “Discipline”? “Integrity”? “Rigorous standard”? Not in a long time. “A newspaper is a brand name, and the reader knows exactly what to expect from the brand.” Well, there is the problem. Part of it is the delusion of punctilio. But there is something more. Every acknowledgment of an inconsequential error (and they are never identified as reporting errors, only errors of “editing,” or “production,” or “transmission,” and so forth), in the absence of acknowledgment of any major error, creates at best a newspaper that is closed to genuine inquiry. It declines responsibility for real errors, and creates as well an affinity for all orthodoxies. And when there is a subject genuinely suited to its professional skills and obligations, it abdicates. It almost reflexively shuns responsibility and delegates it to another institution.

Within a few weeks of its small retreat at Tarrytown, the Times, on two separate occasions, so seriously failed in its fundamental journalistic obligations as to call into question not just its judgment and good faith but whether it is still a newspaper at all. The first occasion returns in a way to the subject with which this introduction began: a pool.

On election night, television, it was generally acknowledged, had made an enormous error by delegating to a single consortium, the Voter News Service, the responsibility for both voter exit polls and calling the election results. The very existence of such a consortium of broadcasters raised questions in anti-trust, and VNS called its results wrongly, but that was not the point. The point was that the value of a free press in our society was always held to lie in competition. By a healthy competition among reporters, from media of every political point of view, the public would have access to reliable information, and a real basis on which to choose. A single monolithic, unitary voice, on the other hand, is anathema to any democratic society. It becomes the voice of every oppressive or totalitarian system of government.

The Times duly reported, and in its own way deplored, the results of the VNS debacle. Then, along with colleagues in the press (the Washington Post, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, ABC, AP, the Tribune Company), it promptly emulated it. This new consortium hired an organization called the National Opinion Research Center to undertake, on its behalf, a manual recount of Florida ballots for the presidential election. The Miami Herald, which had already been counting the votes for several weeks, was apparently the only publication to exercise its function as an independent newspaper. It refused to join the consortium. It had already hired an excellent accounting firm, BDO Seidman, to assist its examination of the ballots. NORC, by contrast, was not even an auditing firm but a survey group, much of whose work is for government projects.

The Times justified its (there seems no other word for it) hiding, along with seven collegial bureaucracies, behind a single entity, NORC, on economic grounds. Proceeding independently, it said, would have cost between $500,000 and $1 million. The Times, it may be noted, had put fifteen of its reporters to work for a solid year on a series called “Living Race in America.” If it had devoted just some of those resources and that cost to a genuine, even historic, issue of fact, it would have exercised its independent competitive function in a free society and produced something of value. There seems no question that is what the Times under any previous publisher or editors would have done.

In refusing to join the consortium, the Miami Herald said the recount was taking place, after all, “in our own back yard.” It was, of course, America’s backyard, and hardly any other members of the press could be troubled with their own resources and staff to enter it.

The second failure of judgment and good faith was in some ways more egregious. In late September of 2000 there was the Times’ appraisal of its coverage (more accurately, the Times’ response to other people’s reaction to its coverage) of the case of Wen Ho Lee.

For some days, there had been rumors that the Times was going to address in some way its coverage of the case of Wen Ho Lee, a sixty- year-old nuclear scientist at Los Alamos who had been held, shackled and without bail, in solitary confinement, for nine months—on the basis, in part, of testimony, which an FBI agent had since admitted to be false, that Lee had passed American nuclear secrets to China; and testimony, also false, that he had flunked a lie detector test about the matter; and testimony, false and in some ways most egregious, that granting him bail would constitute a “grave threat” to “hundreds of millions of lives” and the “nuclear balance” of the world. As part of a plea bargain, in which Lee acknowledged a minor offense, the government, on September 14, 2000, withdrew fifty-eight of its fifty-nine original charges. The Federal District Judge, James A. Parker, a Reagan appointee, apologized to Lee for the prosecutorial conduct of the government.

The Times had broken the story of the alleged espionage on March 6 of 1999, and pursued it both editorially and in its news columns for seventeen months. A correction, perhaps even an apology, was expected to appear in the Week in Review section, on Sunday, September 24, 2000. Two Times reporters flew up from Washington to register objections. The piece, whatever it had been originally, was edited and postponed until the following Tuesday. (The Sunday Times has nearly twice the readership of the daily paper.) Readers of the Week in Review section of Sunday, September 24, 1999, however, did find a correction. It was this:

An Ideas & Trends article last Sunday about a trend toward increasing size of women’s breasts referred incorrectly to the actress Demi Moore. She underwent breast augmentation surgery, but has not had the implants removed.

In the meantime, however, on Friday, September 22, 2000, there appeared an op-ed piece, “No One Won the Whitewater Case,” by James B. Stewart, in which the paper’s affinity with prosecution—in particular the Special Prosecutor—and the writer’s solidarity with the Times reporters most attuned to leaks from government accusers found almost bizarre expression. Stewart, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Blood Sport, wrote of Washington, during the Clinton administration, as a “culture of mutual political destruction.” In what sense the “destruction” could be deemed “mutual” was not entirely clear. Mr. Stewart praised an article about Whitewater, on March 8, 1992, written by Jeff Gerth (one of the original writers of the Wen Ho Lee pieces) as “a model of investigative reporting.” He wrote of “rabid Clinton haters” who believed that Vincent Foster was “murdered, preferably by Hillary Clinton herself”; he added, however, the Clintons “continued to stonewall,” providing “ample fodder for those opposed to the President.”

“The Independent Counsel’s mission,” he wrote, “was to get to the bottom of the morass.” No, it wasn’t. What morass? Then came this formulation:

Kenneth Starr and his top deputies were not instinctive politicians, and they became caught up in a political war for which they were woefully unprepared and ill-suited. The White House and its allies relentlessly attacked the Independent Counsel for what they thought were both illegal and unprincipled tactics, like intimidating witnesses and leaking to the press. Mr. Starr has been vindicated in the courts in nearly every instance, and he and his allies were maligned to a degree that will someday be seen as grossly unfair.

One’s heart of course goes out to these people incarcerating Susan McDougal; illegally detaining and threatening Monica Lewinsky; threatening a witness who refused to lie for them, by implying that her adoption of a small child was illegal; misleading the courts, the grand jury, the press, the witnesses about their actions. Persecuted victims, these prosecutors—”caught up,” “woefully unprepared,” “relentlessly attacked,” “maligned.”

The investigation unfolded with inexorable logic that made sense at every turn, yet lost all sight of the public purpose it was meant to serve. Mr. Starr’s failure was not one of logic or law but of simple common sense.

Quite apart from whatever he means by “public purpose,” what could Mr. Stewart possibly mean by “common sense”?

From early on, it should have been apparent that a criminal case could never be made against the Clintons. Who would testify against them?

Who indeed? Countless people, as the Times checkers, if it had any, might have told him—alleging rape, murder, threats, blackmail, drug abuse, bribery, and abductions of pet cats.

“The investigation does not clear the Clintons in all respects,” Mr. Stewart wrote, as though clearing people, especially in all respects, were the purpose of prosecutions. “The Independent Counsel law is already a casualty of Whitewater and its excesses.” What? What can this possibly mean? What “it,” for example, precedes “its excesses”? Whitewater’s excesses?

But as long as a culture of mutual political destruction reigns in Washington, the need for some independent resolution of charges against top officials, especially the President, will not go away. [A reigning culture of mutual destruction evidently needs another Special Prosecutor, to make charges go away.] After all, we did get something for our nearly $60 million. The charges against the Clintons were credibly resolved.

An extraordinary piece, certainly. Four days later, on Tuesday, September 26, 2000, the Times ran its long-awaited assessment, “From the Editors.” It was entitled “The Times and Wen Ho Lee.”

Certainly, the paper had never before published anything like this assessment. A break with tradition, however, is not an apology. What the Times did was to apportion blame elsewhere, endorse its own work, and cast itself as essentially a victim, having “attracted criticism” from three categories of persons: “competing journalists,” “media critics,” and “defenders of Dr. Lee.” Though there may, in hindsight, have been “flaws”—for example, a few other lines of investigation the Times might have pursued, “to humanize” Dr. Lee—the editors seemed basically to think they had produced what Mr. Stewart, in his op-ed piece, might have characterized as “a model of investigative reporting.” Other journalists interpreted this piece one way and another, but to a reader of ordinary intelligence and understanding there was no contrition in it. That evidently left the Times, however, with a variant of what might be called the underlying corrections problem: the lepidopterist and his trust. “Accusations leveled at this newspaper,” the editors wrote, “may have left many readers with questions about our coverage. That confusion—and the stakes involved, a man’s liberty and reputation—convince us that a public accounting is warranted.” The readers’ “confusion” is the issue. The “stakes,” in dashes, are an afterthought.

“On the whole,” the public accounting said, “we remain proud of work that brought into the open a major national security problem. Our review found careful reporting that included extensive cross-checking and vetting of multiple sources, despite enormous obstacles of official secrecy and government efforts to identify the Times’ sources.”

And right there is the nub of it, one nub of it anyway: the “efforts to identify the Times’ sources.” Because in this case, the sources were precisely governmental—the FBI, for example, in its attempt to intimidate Wen Ho Lee. The rest of the piece, with a few unconvincing afterthoughts about what the paper might have done differently, is self-serving and even overtly deceptive. “The Times stories—echoed and often oversimplified by politicians and other news organizations—touched off a fierce public debate”; “Now the Times neither imagined the security breach nor initiated the prosecution of Wen Ho Lee”; “That concern had previously been reported in the Wall Street Journal, but without the details provided by the Times in a painstaking narrative”; “Nothing in this experience undermines our faith in any of our reporters, who remained persistent and fair-minded in their news-gathering in the face of some fierce attacks.”

And there it is again: Wen Ho Lee in jail, alone, shackled, without bail—and yet it is the Times that is subject to “accusations,” Times reporters who were subjected to those “fierce attacks.”

The editors did express a reservation about their “tone.” “In place of a tone of journalistic detachment,” they wrote, they had perhaps echoed the alarmism of their sources. Anyone who has read the Times in recent years—let alone been a subject of its pieces—knows that “a tone of journalistic detachment” in the paper is almost entirely a thing of the past. What is so remarkable, however, is not only how completely the Times identifies with the prosecution, but also how clearly the inversion of hunter and prey has taken hold. The injustice, the editors clearly feel, has been done not to Dr. Lee (although they say at one point that they may not have given him, imagine, “the full benefit of the doubt”) but to the reporters, and the editors, and the institution itself.

Two days later, the editorial section checked in, with “An Overview: The Wen Ho Lee Case.” Some of it, oddly enough, was another attack on Wen Ho Lee, whose activities it described as “suspicious and ultimately illegal,” “beyond reasonable dispute.” It described the director of the FBI, Louis Freeh, and Attorney General Janet Reno as being under “sharp attack.” The editorial was not free of self-justification; it was not open about its own contribution to the damage; it did seem concerned with “racial profiling”—a frequent preoccupation of the editorial page, in any case. The oddest sentences were these: “Moreover, transfer of technology to China and nuclear weapons security had been constant government concerns throughout this period. To withhold this information from readers is an unthinkable violation of the fundamental contract between a newspaper and its audience.” It had previously used a similar construction, for the prosecutors: “For the F.B.I. … not to react to Dr. Lee’s [conduct] would have been a dereliction of duty.” But the question was not whether the FBI should react (or not) but how, within our system, legally, ethically, constitutionally, to do so. And no one was asking the Times to “withhold information” about “government concerns,” least of all regarding alleged “transfer of technology to China” or “nuclear weapons security.” If the Times were asked to do anything in this matter, it might be to refrain from passing on, and repeating, and scolding, and generally presenting as “investigative reporting” what were in fact malign and exceedingly improper allegations, by “anonymous sources” with prosecutorial agendas, against virtually defenseless individuals.

There was—perhaps this goes without saying—no apology whatever to Wen Ho Lee. “The unthinkable violation of the fundamental contract between a newspaper and its audience” did not, obviously, extend to him. Lelyveld, too, had referred to a Corrections policy “to make our contract with readers more enforceable.” What “contract”? To rectify malignant misspelling of names? This concern, too, was not with facts, or substance, or subject, but to sustain, without earning or reciprocating, the trust of “readers.” The basis of “trust” was evidently quite tenuous. What had increased, perhaps in its stead, was this sense of being misunderstood, unfairly maligned, along with those other victims: FBI agents, informers, and all manner of prosecutors. No sympathy, no apology, certainly, for the man whom many, including in the end the judge, considered a victim—not least a victim of the Times.

That Times editors are by no means incapable of apology became clear on September 28, 2000, the same day as the editorial Overview. On that day, Bill Keller, the managing editor of the Times, posted a “Memorandum to the Staff,” which he sent as well to “media critics,” and which he said all staff members were “free to share outside the paper.”

It was an apology, and it was abject. “When we published our appraisal of our Wen Ho Lee coverage,” it said, “we anticipated that some people would misread it, and we figured that misreading was beyond our control. But one misreading is so agonizing to me that it requires a follow-up.”

“Through most of its many drafts,” Keller continued, the message had contained the words “of us” in a place where any reader of ordinary intelligence and understanding, one would have thought, would have known what was meant, since the words “to us” appear later in the same sentence. “Somewhere in the multiple scrubbings of this document,” however,

the words “of us” got lost. And that has led some people on the staff to a notion that never occurred to me—that the note meant to single out Steve Engelberg, who managed this coverage so masterfully, as the scapegoat for the shortcomings we acknowledged.

My reaction the first time I heard this theory was to laugh it off as preposterous. Joe and I tried to make clear in meetings with staff … that the paragraph referred to ourselves. … In the very specific sense that we laid our hands on these articles, and we overlooked some opportunities in our own direction of the coverage. We went to some lengths to assure that no one would take our message as a repudiation of our reporters, but I'm heartsick to discover that we failed to make the same clear point about one of the finest editors I know. Let the record show that we stand behind Steve and the other editors who played roles in developing this coverage. Coverage, as the message to readers said, of which we remain proud.

Bureaucracy at its purest. Reporters, editors, “masterfully directed” coverage, at worst some “opportunities” “overlooked.” The buck stops nowhere. “We remain proud” of the coverage in question, only “agonized” and “heartsick” at having been understood to fail to exonerate a member of this staff. The only man characterized as “the scapegoat” in the whole matter is—this is hardly worth remarking—one of the directors of the coverage, some might say the hounding, of Wen Ho Lee.

Something is obviously wrong here. Howell Raines, the editor of the editorial page (and the writer of the Overview) was, like Joe Lelyveld, a distinguished reporter. Editing and reporting are, of course, by no means the same. But one difficulty, perhaps with Keller as well, is that in an editing hierarchy, unqualified loyalty to staff, along with many other manifestations of the wish to be liked, can become a failing—intellectual, professional, moral. It may be that the editors’ wish for popularity with the staff has caused the perceptible and perhaps irreversible decline in the paper. There is, I think, something more profoundly wrong—not just the contrast between its utter solidarity, its self-regard, its sense of victimization and tender sympathy with its own, and its unconsciousness of its own weight as an institution, in the stories it claims to cover. Something else, perhaps more important, two developments actually—the emergence of the print reporter as celebrity and the proliferation of the anonymous source. There is an indication of where this has led us even in the Times editors’ own listing, among the “enormous obstacles” its reporters faced, of “government efforts to identify the Times’ sources.” The “sources” in question were, of course, precisely governmental. The Times should never have relied upon them, not just because they were, as they turned out to be, false, but because they were prosecutorial-—and they were turning the Times into their instrument.

In an earlier day, the Times would have had a safeguard against its own misreporting, including its “accounting” and its Overview of its coverage of the case of Wen Ho Lee. The paper used to publish in its pages long, unedited transcripts of important documents. The transcript of the FBI’s interrogation of Dr. Lee—on March 7, 1999, the day after the first of the Times articles appeared—exists. It runs to thirty-seven pages. Three agents have summoned Dr. Lee to their offices in “a cleared building facility.” They have refused him not only the presence of anybody known to him but permission to have lunch. They keep talking ominously of a “package” they have, and telephone calls they have been making about it to Washington. The contents of the package includes yesterday’s New York Times. They allude to it more than fifty times:

“You read that and it’s on the next page as well, Wen Ho. And let me call Washington real quick while you read that.”

“The important part is that, uh, basically that is indicating that there is a person at the laboratory that’s committed espionage and that points to you.”

“You, you read it. It’s not good, Wen Ho.”

“You know, this is, this is a big problem, but uh-mm, I think you need to read this article. Take a couple of minutes and, and read this article because there’s some things that have been raised by Washington that we’ve got to get resolved.”

And they resume:

“It might not even be a classified issue. … but Washington right now is under the impression that you’re a spy. And this newspaper article is, is doing everything except for coming out with your name … everything points to you. People in the community and people at the laboratory tomorrow are going to know. That this article is referring to you. …”

The agents tell him he is going to be fired (he is fired two days later), that his wages will be garnished, that he will lose his retirement, his clearance, his chance for other employment, his friends, his freedom. The only thing they mention more frequently than the article in the Times is his polygraph, and every mention of it is something they know to be false: that he “failed” it. They tell him this lie more than thirty times. Sometimes they mention it in conjunction with the Times article:

“You know, Wen Ho, this, it’s bad. I mean look at this newspaper article! I mean, ‘China Stole Secrets for Bombs.’ It all but says your name in here. The polygraph reports all say you’re failing … Pretty soon you’re going to have reporters knocking on your door.”

Then they get to the Rosenbergs:

“The Rosenbergs are the only people that never cooperated with the federal government in an espionage case. You know what happened to them? They electrocuted them, Wen Ho.”

“You know Aldrich Ames? He’s going to rot in jail! … He’s going to spend his dying days in jail.”

“Okay? Do you want to go down in history? Whether you’re professing your innocence like the Rosenbergs to the day they take you to the electric chair…”

Dr. Lee pleads with them, several times, not to interrupt him when he is trying to answer a question: “You want me, you want to listen two minutes from my explanation?” Not a chance:

“No, you stop a minute, Wen Ho. … Compared to what’s going to happen to you with this newspaper article…”

“The Rosenbergs are dead.”

“This is what’s going to do you more damage than anything. … Do you think the press prints everything that’s true? Do you think that everything that’s in this article is true? … The press doesn’t care.”

Now, it may be that the editors of the Times do not find this newsworthy, or that they believe their readers would have no interest in the fact that the FBI conducts its interrogations in this way. The Times might also, fairly, claim that it has no responsibility for the uses to which its front-page articles may be put, by the FBI or any other agency of government. Except for this. In both the editorial Overview and the “Note from the Editors,” as in Mr. Stewart’s op-ed piece, the Times’ sympathies are clearly with the forces of prosecution and the FBI. “Dr. Lee had already taken a lie detector test,” the editors write, for example, in their assessment, and “F.B.I. investigators believed that it showed deception when he was asked whether he had leaked secrets.”

In the days when the Times still published transcripts, the reader could have judged for himself. Nothing could be clearer than that the FBI investigators believed nothing of the kind. As they knew, Dr. Lee had, on the contrary, passed his polygraph—which is why, in his interrogation, they try so obsessively to convince him that he failed it. Even the editorial Overview, shorter and perhaps for that reason less misleading, shows where the Times’ sense of who is victimized resides. After two paragraphs of describing various activities of Dr. Lee’s as “improper and illegal,” “beyond reasonable dispute,” it describes, of all people, Louis Freeh, the director of the FBI (and Janet Reno, the attorney general) as being “under sharp attack.” Freeh was FBI director when agents of the Bureau, illegally detaining Monica Lewinsky, were conducting “investigations” of the same sort for the Office of the Independent Counsel. Freeh was also advocating, not just in government but directly to the press, more Special Prosecutors for more matters of all kinds.

But enough. The Times feels a responsibility to correct misimpressions it may have generated in readers—how names are spelled, what middle initials are, who is standing miscaptioned on which side of a photograph, which butterfly is which—is satisfied, in an important way, in its corrections. For the rest, it has looked at its coverage and found it good. The underlying fact, however, is this: For years readers have looked in the Times for what was once its unsurpassed strength: the uninflected coverage of the news. You can look and look, now, and you will not find it there. Some politically correct series and group therapy reflections on race relations perhaps. These appear harmless. They may even win prizes. Fifteen reporters working for one year might, perhaps, have been more usefully employed on some genuine issue of fact. More egregious, however, and in some ways more malign, was an article that appeared, on November 5, 2000, in the Sunday Times Magazine.

The piece was a cover story about Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Everyone makes mistakes. This piece, blandly certain of its intelligence, actually consisted of them. Everything was wrong. At the most trivial level, the piece said Moynihan had held no hearings about President Clinton’s health plan and no meetings with him to discuss welfare. (In fact, the senator had held twenty-nine such hearings in committee and many such discussions with the President.) At the level of theory, it misapprehended the history, content, purpose, and fate of Moynihan’s proposal for a guaranteed annual income. It would require a book to set right what was wrong in the piece—and in fact, such a book existed, at least about the guaranteed annual income. But what was, in a way, most remarkable about what the New York Times has become appeared, once again, in the way it treated its own coverage.

The Sunday Magazine’s editors limited themselves to a little self- congratulatory note. The article, they reported, had “prompted a storm of protest.” “But many said that we got it right, and that our writer said what had long seemed to be unspeakable.” (”Unspeakable” may not be what they mean. Perhaps it was a paraphrase.) They published just one letter, which praised the piece as “incisive.”

The Corrections column, however, when it came, was a gem. “An article in the Times Magazine last Sunday about the legacy of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan,” it began, “misidentified a former senator who was an expert on military affairs. He was Richard Russell, not Russell Long.”

The “article also,” the correction went on, had “referred imprecisely” (a fine way to put it) to the senator’s committee hearings on President Clinton’s health care. (Not a word about welfare.) But the Corrections column saved for last what the Times evidently regarded as most important. “The article also overstated [another fine word] Senator Moynihan’s English leanings while he attended the London School of Economics. Bowler, yes. Umbrella, yes. Monocle, no.”

No “malignant” misspellings here. But nothing a reader can trust any longer, either. Certainly no reliable, uninflected coverage of anything, least of all the news. The enterprise, whatever else it is, has almost ceased altogether to be a newspaper. It is still a habit. People glance at it and, on Sundays, complain about its weight. For news they must look elsewhere. What can have happened here?

“The turning point at the paper,” I once wrote, in a piece of fiction, “was the introduction of the byline.” I still believe that to be true. I simply had no idea how radical the consequences of that turning point were going to be. Until the early seventies, it was a mark of professionalism in reporters for newspapers, wire services, newsmagazines, to have their pieces speak, as it were, for themselves, with all the credibility and authority of the publication in which they anonymously appeared. Reviews, essays, regular columns were of course signed. They were expressions of opinion, as distinct from reporting, and readers had to know and evaluate whose opinion it was. But when a reader said of a piece of information, “The Times says,” or “The Wall Street Journal says,” he was relying on the credibility of the institution. With occasional exceptions— correspondents, syndicated columnists, or sportswriters whose names were household words, or in attributing a scoop of extraordinary historical importance—the reporter’s byline would have seemed intrusive and unprofessional.

In television reporting, of course, every element of the situation was different. It would be absurd to say “CBS (or ABC, NBC, or even CNN) says” or even “I saw it on” one network or another. It had to be Walter Cronkite, later Dan Rather, Diane Sawyer, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings—not just because no television network or station had the authority of any favorite and trusted publication, but because seeing and hearing the person who conveyed the news (impossible, obviously, with the printed byline) was precisely the basis, for television viewers, of trust.

Once television reporters became celebrities, it was perhaps inevitable that print reporters would want at least their names known; and there were, especially at first, stories one did well to read on the basis of a trusted byline. There still existed what Mary McCarthy, in another context, called “the last of the tall timber.” But the tall timber in journalism is largely gone—replaced, as in many fields, by the phenomenon of celebrity. And gradually, in print journalism, the celebrity of the reporter began to overtake and then to undermine the reliability of pieces. Readers still say, “The Times says,” or “I read it in the Post” (so far as I can tell, except in the special case of gossip columns, readers hardly ever mention, or even notice, bylines), but trust in even once favorite newspapers has almost vanished. One is left with this oddly convoluted paradox: As survey after survey confirms, people generally despise journalists; yet they cite, as a source of information, newspapers. And though they have come, with good reason, to distrust newspapers as a whole, they still tend to believe each individual story as they read it. We all do. Though I may know a piece to be downright false, internally contradictory, in some profound and obvious way corrupted, I still, for a moment anyway, believe it. Believe the most obviously manufactured quotes, the slant, the spin, the prose, the argument with no capacity even to frame an issue and no underlying sense of what follows from what.

At the same time, a development in criticism, perhaps especially movie criticism, affected print journalism of every kind. It used to be that the celebrities featured on billboards and foremost in public consciousness were the movie stars themselves. For a while, it became auteurs, directors. Then, bizarrely but for a period of many years, it became critics, who starred in the discussion of movies. That period seems, fortunately, to have passed. But somehow, the journalist’s byline, influenced perhaps by the critic’s, began to bring with it a blurring of genres: reporting, essay, memoir, personal statement, anecdote, judgmental or critical review. Most of all, critical review—which is why government officials and citizens alike treat reporters in the same way artists regard most critics—with mixed fear and dismay. It is also why the subjects of news stories read each “news” piece as if it were a review on opening night.

There is no longer even a vestige or pretense, on the part of the print journalist, of any professional commitment to uninflected coverage of the news. The ambition is rather, under their bylines, to express themselves, their writing styles. Days pass without a single piece of what used to be called “hard news.” The celebrityhood, or even the aspiration to celebrity, of print reporters, not just in print but also on talk shows, has been perhaps the single most damaging development in the history of print journalism.

The second, less obvious, cause of decline in the very notion of reliable information was the proliferation of the “anonymous source”—especially as embodied, or rather disembodied, in Deep Throat. Many people have speculated about the “identity” of this phantom. Others have shown, more or less conclusively, that at least as described in All the President’s Men, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, he did not, in fact could not, exist. Initially introduced as a narrative device, to hold together book and movie, this improbable creature was obviously both a composite, which Woodward, the only one who claims to have known and have consulted him, denies, and an utter fiction, which is denied by both Woodward and Bernstein—the better writer, who had, from the start, a “friend,” whose information in almost every significant respect coincides with, and even predates, Deep Throat’s. But the influence of this combination, the celebrity reporter and the chimera to whom the reporter alone has access, has been incalculable.

The implausibility of the saga of Deep Throat has been frequently pointed out. Virtually every element of the story—the all-night séances in garages; the signals conveyed by moved flowerpots on windowsills and drawings of clocks in newspapers; the notes left by prearrangement on ledges and pipes in those garages; the unidiomatic and essentially uninformative speech—has been demolished. Apart from its inherent impractibilities, for a man requiring secrecy and fearing for his life and the reporter’s, the strategy seems less like tradecraft than a series of attention- getting mechanisms. This is by no means to deny that Woodward and Bernstein had “sources,” some but far from all of whom preferred to remain anonymous. From the evidence in the book they include at least Fred Buzhardt, Hugh Sloan, John Sears, Mark Felt and other FBI agents, Leonard Garment, and, perhaps above all, the ubiquitous and not infrequently treacherous Alexander Haig. None of these qualify as Deep Throat, nor does anyone, as depicted in the movie or book. Woodward’s new rationale is this: the secret of the phantom’s name must be kept until the phantom himself reveals it—or else dies. Woodward is prepared, however, to disqualify candidates whom others—most recently Leonard Garment, in an entire book devoted to such speculation—may suggest, by telling, instance by instance, who Deep Throat is not. A long list, obviously, which embraces everyone.

It is no wonder that Woodward, having risked the logic of this, would risk as well an account of a mythical visit to the hospital bedside of former CIA Director William Casey, who was dying and who, according to doctors, had lost all power of speech. Casey’s hospital room was closely guarded against visits from all but his immediate family. Woodward claims to have entered the hospital room, asked Casey a question, observed him “nod,” and quotes him as saying, “I believed.”

There is more. Woodward now claims that the “anonymous source” for another book, The Brethren, was Justice Potter Stewart. Justice Stewart, perhaps needless to say, is dead. He was a highly respected and distinguished Justice. But that does not satisfactorily resolve the matter, because Justice Stewart can and does bear a sort of witness here. He wrote some important opinions. Some of the opinions most seriously misunderstood, misrepresented, and even misquoted in The Brethren are Potter Stewart’s. And nothing could be more obvious from the book than the fact that, apart from the clerks, Woodward’s primary source was in fact Justice Rehnquist.

The ramifications of this cult of the anonymous source—particularly as Deep Throat, this oracle to whom only a single priest, or acolyte, has access, have been, for journalism, enormous. No need any longer to publish long transcripts. Why bother? No need even to read them, or anything—public documents, the novels of Robert Stendahl. Two clicks to Amazon.com will give you spellings. And an “anonymous source” will either provide you with “information” or provide what your editors will accept as “cross-checking” for what you have already said. The celebrity reporter has created, beginning with Deep Throat, what one would have thought a journalistic oxymoron: a celebrity anonymous source. More than that: a celebrity anonymous source who does not even exist. As late as page 207 of Leonard Garment’s book, In Search of Deep Throat, Mr. Garment actually writes:

I was doggedly confident that Woodward, Bernstein, and, above all, their editor … would not have put themselves out on a long limb for a gimmick that would eventually be revealed and denounced as a journalistic fraud of historic proportions.

Not a gimmick. A device. When Woodward produced the noumenal encounter between the anonymous source and the celebrity reporter, it turns out, a religion was born, which has grown to affect not just journalism but the entire culture. In print journalism, you can usually tell, when such a source exists at all, who it is: the person most kindly treated in the story. And the religion, with all its corollaries, dogmas, and implications, has made of reporters not fallible individuals competing for facts and stories in the real world but fellow members of the cult. Whomever or whatever they go after—Wen Ho Lee, Whitewater, or “scandals” that did not pan out—or whomever they equally baselessly support— Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, Chairman Henry Hyde of the House Judiciary Committee, and FBI Director Louis Freeh—they tend to support dogmatically, and as one. Best of all, they like to consult and to write approvingly of one another and even, if need be, themselves. Administrations come and go. Quasi-governmental bureaucracies, with their hierarchies and often interlocking cults and interests, persist.

The convergence of the anonymous source with the celebrity reporter now has ramifications that could not have been foreseen. A certain journalistic laziness was perhaps predictable—phoning around as a form of “legwork,” attributing information to “sources,” in quotes, which no one was equipped either to verify or to deny. But the serious result, which no one could have foreseen, is this: The whole purpose of the “anonymous source” has been precisely reversed. The reason there exists a First Amendment protection for journalists’ confidential sources has always been to permit citizens—the weak, the vulnerable, the isolated—to be heard publicly, without fear of retaliation by the strong—by their employer, for example, or by the forces of government. The whistleblower or the innocent accused were to be protected. Instead, almost every “anonymous source” in the press, in recent years, has been an official of some kind, or a person in the course of a vendetta speaking from a position of power.

More disturbing, in spite of what has been at least since Vietnam an almost instinctive press hostility to the elected government (an adversarial position that can be healthy in a free society), the press now has an unmistakeable affinity with official accusers, in particular the Special Prosecutors and the FBI. And when those powerful institutions are allowed to “leak”—that is, become the press’s “anonymous sources”— the press becomes not an adversary but an instrument of all that is most secret and coercive—in attacks, not infrequently, with an elected administration but also with truly nameless individuals, those who have neither power nor celebrity of any kind, and who have no means of access, least of all as “anonymous sources,” to the press.

The press, in these matters, has become far more unified. There may be competition among those who will get the first interview of some celebrity or other, or first access to a treasured “anonymous source.” But it is the same celebrities and the same sources that journalists pursue, not excluding interviews with one another. Even among the apparently most irate and shouting television personalities whom Calvin Trillin has so memorably characterized as “Sabbath gasbags,” there is a sameness. Political views are permitted, routinely, along a spectrum from left to right; but the views of each participant, on virtually any subject, can be predicted from week to week.

The worst, however, is the mystique of the “sources.” Citizens of a democracy require reliable information. How can they check “sources”? What possible basis is there for relying on them? The word of the celebrity reporter who cannot bring himself to name them? What sort of reliability, what sort of information, what sort of journalism is this? Especially since there seems to be, among “investigative reporters” and the institutions that support them, a stubborn loyalty to and solidarity with sources—even when a source (as in the recent case of Charles Bakaly of the Special Prosecutor’s office) admits that he is the previously “anonymous source” in question, or, more puzzlingly, when the “source” has demonstrably deceived the reporter himself. In what may be a journalistic variant of the Stockholm syndrome (whereby hostages become extremely loyal to their captors), journalists and their editors defend and protect the anonymity, and even the reliability, of their sources, even when they have been most seriously misled. A sacred covenant, apparently. But what of the trust and “contract” with the reader? Forgotten, secular, a matter of spelling and perhaps the small stuff. There, for instance, is the Times, in its “assessment,” trying to establish the basis for a now utterly discredited story as “cross-checking sources” and resisting “obstacles” posed by other people’s having tried to “identify our sources.” Would this not have been the occasion to name at least the sources who deliberately misled them? Are the identities of self-serving liars, and particularly liars of this sort, who use the newspaper story as a weapon of intimidation, to be protected? Four months later, in February of 2001, the Times again reappraised its coverage of Wen Ho Lee. The pieces somehow, under a lot of cosmic obfuscation, seemed to have missed their underlying points: (1) that there was no evidence of spying by anyone at Los Alamos; (2) that there was no evidence of any spying by Wen Ho Lee. The suspicion of him rested largely on two incidents: that he had once telephoned a man under suspicion of something undefined and offered to help him, and that he had once entered, uninvited, a meeting at Los Alamos, and hugged a major Chinese scientist there. Typical spy behavior: a phone call and a hug.

If so, then you are speaking inescapably of the instruments of a police state, with secret informers, and the press just one in a set of interlocking and secretive bureaucracies. The alternative, it seems to me, is to proceed in a more diligent way, one by one, in the press, on the street, in the academy, to look for information and try to draw reasonable inferences from it. A combination of research and thinking and consulting, if need be, a genuine source—that is, someone who has information and is willing to impart it. No professional ideologies that paradoxically combine political correctness with self-serving orthodoxies and an affinity for prosecutors. No faith in Delphic utterances from unidentified persons. In spite of what might have affected generations of aspiring reporters, no one is going to contrive an absurd set of signals for you, meet you secretly and regularly and undetected by others in a garage by night and tell you anything worth knowing.

Pools, informers, leaks from prosecutors, celebrity reporters with anonymous sources—all of these are forms simultaneously of consolidation and of hiding, facets of what the enterprise has become. Consider the celebrity reporter, the particular powers of celebrity in a celebrity culture, especially when his nominal profession, after all, is the purveying of information, the dissemination of what the society will know about itself. Consider the prosecutorial affinity, which is both easy and immensely destructive. Wen Ho Lee, as it turned out, had nearly miraculous access, in the end, to good, pro bono lawyers. Most noncelebrity citizens simply have no such access—either to lawyers or to the press. They are not just truly anonymous. They are plain unheard.

Consider as well the use of pools. Not the imposed pools of the military, but voluntary, self-satisfied, bonded bureaucracies and consortiums. To use saving money as an excuse for not having the independence, the interest, the curiosity and inclination to go out there and see for yourself—it is simply not reconcilable with any notion of the working journalist. Under the First Amendment, the press enjoys special protections so that the public will hear from many competing individual and institutional voices, and so that debate, as Harry Kalven put it, can be “free, robust, and wide open.” Journalism has to be competitive or it is nothing. Television's mistake in using its consortium was understandable and should have been instructive. But television that night was in the business of prediction. In Florida, where something already existing is in dispute—in a state with sunshine laws specifically making facts available for public information—to send a surrogate institution is indefensible. For one thing, it virtually guarantees that the sunshine laws will atrophy. For another, it guarantees that the public will never know what the real count was. In lieu of NORC, it would have been better to send in, if not professional auditors, a group of diligent fourth-grade children who can count.

All monopolists collaborating in restraint of trade say they are cooperating to save everybody money. In this case, another unmistakeable and crucial motive has been to hide. That hiding reflects fear. Fear of being alone, fear of being out of step with the prevailing view. Fear even of being right when everyone else is wrong. So hide yourself in an orthodoxy and a group. Let no independent reporters and, lord help us, no independent newspaper in there. Try to co-opt the Miami Herald. Let the sociologists from NORC handle it. The administration, the government, will not be offended. At least not with us.

Oddly enough, even the policy of Corrections is a form simultaneously of consolidation of power and of hiding. The orthodoxy is: We are so scrupulous we correct even the smallest thing. Therefore, you can trust us as you would Mao, the Scripture, the Politburo. It is a form of Fundamentalism, it protects the ideology. Nothing more clearly exposed the essence of that Corrections policy than the Editors’ Note about Wen Ho Lee. They misrepresented what they had actually said. They defended, in glowing terms, what they did say. They gave themselves credit for “calling attention to the problem.” Much like those charities a few years ago when the child, who had been photographed so movingly and had corresponded so faithfully with its “adopted” parents, who sent ten dollars a month, turned out to have been long dead or not even to exist. The charities, too, said, “We were just calling attention to the problem.” If you do a textual analysis of what the Times did say, over a period of many months, and how its “accounting” or “assessment” now describes it, you have not just disinformation but an indication of what much of journalism has become. We were first, but we blame it on the Wall Street Journal, which was earlier, and on the misrepresentations of others, who came later. On the whole, we are proud. And the only one to whom we genuinely owe an apology is one of our staff, the editor of the series in question, “the scapegoat,” whom we must now praise in the most extravagant terms. And about whom we are abject, agonized, heartsick.

I know nothing about the editor in question. I did read, months ago, his irate and patronizing response, defending those very articles, to someone who had ventured, in Brill’s Content, to criticize them. There is, in general, in newspapers at least, almost no reliable, uninflected coverage of the news. No celebrity journalists seem even to aspire to it. There is opinion, a verdict, an assumption of the role—how to put it?—of critic to the day’s events. A verdict. We do not need a verdict. We need an account.

That is where the absence of those once long, verbatim transcripts is of great importance. The transcripts permitted none of that judging or tilting or hiding. They were straightforward. They were something that television, for example, with its scheduling and time constraints, could not do. Nor could tabloids.

Consolidating with others and going secret. From the anonymous source, to the prosecutor’s office, to the consortium, all are just steps. And correcting—either typos, or misspellings, or things everyone knows already or that matter to no one, or that correct themselves on a daily basis—is just the mask, the surface of the decay. One more indication of moral and factual authority—and, in consequence, another source of power. It may be, it is virtually certain, that newspapers, to regain their honor, will have to relinquish something of their power and think again.

The whole constitutional system had been, for some time, under attack by all three branches of government. There has been the behavior of the executive, as embodied not just by the President in his understanding of his office, but, paradoxically, by the Independent Counsel in his prosecutions. There has been the behavior of the legislature, in its lascivious travesty of the impeachment process. There has been the conduct of the Supreme Court, intruding on the province of the executive, the legislative, the states, and finally on the rights of every citizen. By making its decision in Gore v. Bush, explicitly, unique—to be regarded as having no precedent and setting none—it undermined the whole basis of Anglo Saxon law, which is grounded in the notion that the decisions derive their validity from being built upon, and in turn relied upon, as precedents.

The Supreme Court, in its power of judicial review, is regarded as nearly sacred within the system and beyond appeal—with one exception: the press. Judicial review is trumped by press review. The Justices are highly aware of this. Judges who claimed to be conservatives, even as they struck most radically at the Constitution, the balance of powers, federalism, the fundamental understandings of the society, played to journalists. Virtually the only decisions of this Court upholding freedoms, under the First Amendment, for example, have been decisions in favor of the press. The press seems less aware of this—still describing the most radical judges, obligingly, as “conservatives.” Somehow, comfortable and serene as the system still seems to be, and as though political life were still in some sense normal, the whole question of legitimacy seemed to rest on so few public officials—until recently Senator Moynihan, for example, and now Justices Stevens, Ginsburg, Souter, Breyer. There is always the possibility that there will be heroes, or that the system is self-correcting. But it will not do for the press, with very few exceptions, simply to join all other bureaucracies, to correct spellings or give us their impressions about race (there are still “tensions”) while, in the ultimate abdication, they miss the factual. Independent journalists have obligations of their own.

-2001

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mymelodyheart · 3 years

Text

All I Want For Christmas Is You Chapter 1 ~Sparks Will Fly~

Notes

Hey guys, I'm back with a Christmas Ficlet, "All I Want For Christmas Is You," starring our favourite couple, Jamie and Claire.

It won't be my usual long story, but it's my wee gift to my readership who'd been following my journey in writing and always encouraging me with their insightful comments and kudos.

Please don't be disheartened when I don't always reply back to your comments, as I spend every spare time I have writing. When I'm not writing, I'm dealing with this thing called life and taking care of my loves. But I promise you, I always look forward to reading your feedback, and if you have any questions of any sorts, I will answer them. If you see any mistakes or you wish to impart something I'm doing wrong or give me some ideas, please bear in mind I welcome constructive criticism, and I welcome opinions. I would even thank you for it, and I promise you I won't take it personally. The reason I say this is because I wholeheartedly wish to improve my writing and what a better way when my readers can share their thoughts with me.

Without further ado, I wish you all happy reading.

If you wish to read this on AO3, here is the link.

James Fraser stepped into the pub followed by his older brother Willie. Although it was still early evening, there was already a small crowd all hyped up into a party mode. The multiple flat TV screens on the walls were showing world championship darts without the sounds. Instead, the speakers blared with Wham's Last Christmas song with the random interference from the resident DJ. While a handful of men milled around the bar holding their pints, the women sat at the table chattering animatedly and sipping long drinks and port. With Christmas Eve only two days away, there was a sense of excitement and goodwill in the air, typical of the festive season.

"Check out those birds at three o'clock."

Jamie cocked his head at Willie's words.

Two wide-eyed bonnie lassies stood next to the pool table sipping cocktails as if awaiting their turn for a game. Living in a tight community where everyone knew everybody and their business, Jamie immediately discerned the girls were visitors.

Willie unzipped his jacket. "I saw blondie first."

Jamie followed his brother's line of sight, but his eyes darted back to the dark-haired lass with the palest skin he'd ever seen, her tresses done up in a messy bun. Her long legs, accentuated by tight black jeans, grabbed his complete attention. She had a cropped red cable-knit sweater on and boots caked with mud which meant she must have been watching the shinty game earlier along with the rest of the village folks.

"Bloody hell, look at her," Willie murmured.

Blondie wore a purple turtle neck top that showed off her nice breasts, and jeans that hugged her hips snuggly. Jamie grinned. "Och, ye like 'em curvy, but I like her mate more. Shall we talk to them?"

"Aye, let's do that before one of those lads get there first."

Jamie made a move forward.

"Hang on a minute," Willie's hand slapped across Jamie's chest, stopping him mid-saunter. "Yer ex ... she's back here for the holidays. She's sat at the bar with her mates. Are ye sure ye're ready for this?"

"Aye, aye. It's been over between us for ages," Jamie replied, not taking his eyes off the dark-haired lass. He hadn't thought about his ex for a long time and whatever he thought he'd felt for her back then, was nothing but a distant memory.

"This is just a bit of fun, alright? Dinnae get to attached. Blondie and her mate are probably tourists."

Willie had seen him go through hell over a year ago with his ex, who he thought had been the one for him. She had turned his life upside down, affecting his job, and his ability to stay sober after she'd cheated on him. Once Jamie got his act together, he'd sworn off serious relationships and decided to concentrate on work.

"Fun. Fun sounds good," Jamie muttered. When Willie didn't release him, he looked at his brother square in the eyes. "How about ye?"

"What about me?"

"Ye haven't chatted up a lass in a very long time. Are ye sure you still know how to?" Jamie asked, trying to keep a straight face.

Willie shoved his shoulder and feigned offence. "Ye cheeky git! Cannae chat any lass up when I know everyone here, now, can I?"

Jamie nodded toward the two girls. "Weel, what are we waiting for?" He took a deep breath and kinked his head sideways to the left and then to the right. "If we're just gonnae stand here like a couple of numpties and discuss, we'd be too late by the time we get there."

"Mmm, never seen ye this eager to meet a lass before," Willie grinned.

Jamie looked back at the women and noticed they were beginning to garner attention from the lads nearby. The dark-haired one made a move around the pool table followed by her mate, and he was powerless to stop his gaze wandering down to the gentle curve of her arse.

Willie straightened his posture. "Let's go," he exhaled as he made a move.

Jamie followed suit and lined up next to his brother. As they got closer, he watched as the dark-haired lass skirted past a group of pool players with a polite smile, then wrote her initials in chalk on a blackboard mounted to the wall, claiming the next game. CB, she scrawled.

She wrinkled her nose and laughed at something her friend said as she started moving towards the bar. Jamie's frown deepened when the lass didn't see the sports bag put into her path. A few steps more, and she would trip and fall flat on her face. But not if he could help it.

"Hey!" Jamie shouted, abandoning Willie's side. "Hey, ye!"

She took another step, looking over her shoulder to acknowledge what her friend was shouting at her.

"Ah, fuck!" Jamie gritted his teeth and hurried towards her in quick long strides. He had no choice but to jostle a couple of bodies out of his way as she showed no signs of hearing him. He caught her as her foot connected with the bulky bag, his arms sliding under hers and pulling her up.

Her forehead bounced off his chin. "Oh, Lordy, Lordy." She let out a lungful of air and dug her fingernails into his forearms, her breath on his neck feeling like a double shot of heat warming his insides. "I'm such a clumsy oaf."

"Hey mate, shoved that bag under the table will ye, before someone breaks their neck," Jamie shouted over the top of her head at the owner of the bag, his voice sounding a tad harsh. With her front plastered against him, Jamie could almost feel her shock subside, giving way to the vibration of her laughter. Still holding her close, he puffed out a sigh and whispered into her ears. "Next time, ye should look at where ye're going. Ye could have landed on yer face, and that wouldn't have been a pretty sight."

Still laughing, her shoulders shook, presumably finding the situation hilarious. "We left our Airbnb earlier in a hurry, and my contact lenses are at the bottom of my suitcase. I'm farsighted, you see, but I'm too vain to wear my specs."

"Enough to fall flat on yer face? "

A few heartbeats passed. "If I say yes, are you going to start yelling again?"

"Aye."

"Alright then ...no."

Realising he still held the lass in a firm grip, Jamie let her go slowly to reassure himself she was steady on her feet. She kept her head down as she took a step back to rummage through the handbag slung on her shoulder. When she got hold of what she was looking for, she put on a pair of specs and blinked up at him through round, black-rimmed eyeglasses. As their eyes met, he felt something crank in his chest. He must still be wound up from the shinty game earlier because, on a sucked-in breath, an uneven sound passed through his mouth. A Dhia. She had the most beautiful amber eyes, and they reminded him of the colour of the finest heavily peated single malt whisky, Islay had to offer.

"Oooh!" she whispered.

Aye, tell me about it. "What's yer name?"

"You're one of the shinty players from earlier."

"Uh-huh." He tamped down the urge to laugh. "Yer name?" he repeated.

If the spellbound look in her eyes meant she was stunned by what she saw, she wasn't the only one. "Oh, yes. Sorry. I'm Claire. Beauchamp. Claire Beauchamp."

"Claire." For some reason, colour bloomed in her face when he said her name. "I'm Jamie Fraser."

"Hi." After a few seconds of just staring at each other, she recovered first and slapped a hand to her forehead. "Oh, shoot, where are my manners? Thank you. Thank you for saving me from an undignified fall." Her lips twitched, and her eyes twinkled. "If I had died of embarrassment, at least no one would care since nobody knows me here."

"I would care." Someone collided into him from behind, making him close the distance between them and her head tilt back to maintain eye contact. She was a tall lass, but still, he was a head taller than her. "So ... ye're here on holiday?" he asked.

"Yes, I am ...until Boxing Day. And then we're going to Edinburgh for Hogmanay. And then flying back to London on Three Kings from Glasgow." He heard her swallow. "I have a thing for Christmas in Scotland, you see."

"Is that so? What else do ye have a thing for?"

"Probably a lot of other stuff," she whispered, clutching her handbag in front of her. "But I'm having difficulty thinking of them right this minute."

"And why is that?" God, she's breathtakingly beautiful.

"I guess I'm still rattled by that near fall." She shrugged her shoulders, her eyes sparkling with amusement. "Or have you forgotten all about that already?"

Jamie couldn't stop his grin. "No, not at all." In his periphery, he saw his brother and Claire's friend chatting. He wondered if he could whisk Claire away. This lass is something else. She wasn't staying here for very long, and he wanted to get to know her and make every second count.

He cleared his throat. "Look, Sassenach ..."

"Sassenach?"

He felt heat glid at the back of his neck. "Sorry ... it's a Gaelic word. It means an outsider or someone from not around here. In case ye misunderstood, it's not my intention to make it sound like ye're not welcome here. Let's just say I meant it as a pet name. Endearment, if ye will."

He regarded her as her eyes searched his face, and she made no effort at all to hide her perusal of his lips. When a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, and her eyes lit up into a wicked glint, his chest expanded a hundred-fold. "I like the sound of that ...Sassenach," she breathed as she rolled the Gaelic word in her tongue.

"Mmm, so, you're from London, huh?"

She shoved her hands in the back pocket of her jeans and rocked back on her heels. "Yeah. I'm originally from Oxford. But I live and work in London as an editorial assistant for a publishing company. How about you? What do you do, besides playing shinty?"

"I'm a tree surgeon. My brother and I run an arboricultural business."

Her eyes widened in surprise. "Oh, wow! I've never met a tree surgeon before. So I guess you must love your job to make it into a business?"

"Aye, I do," he smiled, basking in her open interest in his life. "I love the outdoors and the fresh air, whatever the weather. How about ye? Do ye like yer job?"

She paused and frowned in contemplation. "It's alright," she shrugged. "It's a job that will bring me closer to fulfilling a dream, I guess. I want to be a fulltime writer one day ..."

It was his turn to be surprised. "Maybe ye should move to the countryside if ye want to be a writer. Far too many distractions in London, don't ye think?"

She grinned. "Yeah, I suppose so. But I'm enjoying London at the moment, and I'm not quite ready to give up the city life. Just yet. Maybe one day." She glanced at her watch. "Umm ...you must have somewhere to go."

He wasn't ready to let her walk away, so he forced a worried cast into his face. "Eh, ye look still shaken up. We should probably get ye something stiff to drink ...and my phone number."

Her eyes widened, and after a tense split second, laughter burst out of her lips, loud enough to turn heads in their vicinity. She brought her hand over her mouth to stifle the giggle but failed. The sound was so infectious, his own low rumble accompanied it, and he couldn't help but think, there's never been a time he felt such a powerful connection with another person.

"Actually I'm with my mate here," Claire said finally, jerking a thumb over her shoulder and twisting around to the direction of where her friend stood. "She's my French flatmate. But it looks like she's already found someone to talk to." She paused and squinted her eyes. "Oh ...I recognise that bloke she's with. He played shinty too, didn't he?"

He waved at Willie and signalled him and Claire's friend to come over. "Aye, that's my older brother."

Claire's gaze shot right back to him. "Really?" With a smile that showed off perfect teeth, she pushed her specs higher on her nose. "I wouldn't have thought. I don't have a sibling, and I just presumed your whole family would have the same gorgeous auburn hair like yours. Well, alright ..." She crimsoned to her hairline as she looked at his approaching brother. "I see some similarities now ...height, broad shoulders and the colour of your eyes."

Jamie felt a pinch of unease. Even though her vivacity was endearing, he wasn't ready to feel drawn to anyone this deeply or to care at such an alarming rate and intensity. After his last relationship broke down, there hadn't been anyone that piqued his interest ...until now. And she would be leaving in a few days. Chatting to her was only meant to be a night of enjoying the company of a beautiful lass or perhaps a diversion in whom he could lose himself into for a short time. But the moment he'd looked into her eyes, warm feelings drove into his heart while burning urges grew low in his tummy. This lass was a breath of fresh air and sexy and exactly what he needed. He mentally shook his head to clear his brain. Looking beyond the top of her head, he blurred the image of seeing this as something more. The long-distance relationship was a no-go. He was a country lad at heart, and she belonged to the city.

"Jamie?" She was staring at him as if he'd lost some of his ability to think clearly.

"I'm sorry ...still listening. It's just that I'm not used to a beautiful lass pointing out my physical attributes," he reassured her with a smile.

That beautiful blush blew across her face again. Jamie found it adorable. How could she be direct and shy at the same time? "I didn't mean to sound so bold. It must have something to do with me living in the city for so long ...you know, us Londoners tend to have no filters."

He winked at her. "Dinnae fash, lass. I kinda like it." And he meant it.

She was about to respond when Willie and Claire's friend reached them, huge smiles painted across their faces like they'd hit it off.

The blonde girl took a step forward towards Jamie. "Hi! Claire and I enjoyed watching you guys play shinty earlier. I didn't realise it would be so aggressively physical. By the way, I'm Annalise," she smiled warmly, holding out her hand.

Jamie took it. "Aye, that it is and difficult to play when the grounds are too soggy. It could get pretty messy in this dreich weather." He shook her hand. "I'm Jamie ...please to meet ye."

"Likewise," Annalise replied, glancing at her friend.

Willie introduced himself to Claire, then brought his attention to their situation. "Looks like yer glasses are empty, ladies. Can we invite ye both to join us for a drink?"

Jamie saw Annalise elbow Claire with a conspiratorial look. When Claire nodded, Annalise batted her eyes at his brother. "Sure. That would be nice. I'd like a vodka and tonic please."

Willie grinned like he'd just received an early Christmas present and Jamie understood the feeling.

"Sassenach, what would ye like to drink?"

Before Claire could reply, Hugh, one of the lads in his shinty team, tapped her on the shoulder. "It's ye against me now, lass."

Claire swung around and looked at the cue stick being handed to her, and her eyes lit. Turning back to Jamie, she grinned. "This won't take long, but I'll have a single malt, neat, please." Then she stood on her tiptoes and gave him a peck on the cheek. "This is for good luck."

He froze. It was an innocent kiss, but it packed quite a punch.

"Oh ...and yeah, it's a belated thank you again for breaking my fall," she quickly added, suddenly, appearing unsure like she doubted the gesture.

A slow grin roused to form on his lips. "Ye can thank me by going out with me ...tonight," he said, without thinking.

She blinked.

"I'd like to show ye something."

Her brows wrinkled as she studied his face.

"I'd really like to get to know ye better and take ye out," he said. "Please allow me." If she said no, he was quite certain he was going to beg.

"Alright."

He smiled as relief surged through him. "I'll wait for you until ye finish yer game," he said. "We'll leave after we've had a drink with my brother and yer friend."

"Where are you taking me?"

"Somewhere Christmassy."

She gave him a wary look, and he laughed.

"Listen." He leaned in close. "I'll get yer friend to take a picture of my driving licence if that will make ye feel better."

He was about to pull out his wallet to retrieve it when she stopped him with a wave of a hand. "I trust you."

"That's a good start."

She rolled her eyes and laughed, and he couldn't tear his eyes away from her.

Slowly backing away from him, she smiled. "Let me play this one game first, and then I'll be with you."

With his heart in his throat, he watched her progress as she walked towards the pool table and swapped a few quick words with her opponent, who seemed to be humouring her. After the lively exchange, Claire pulled up the sleeves of her sweater to her elbow and rubbed her hands together. Before she began chalking the cuestick, she gave him a wink. That mere display made the muscles in his belly clench, literally whooshing the breath out of him.

A slap on his back tore his gaze away from Claire. "Easy now lad," Willie said in a low, amused voice. "Ye look like ye could use the same drink as her."

Jamie glanced back at the subject of their conversation. "Aye, but make mine a double," he whispered.

"On it," Willie replied, laughing as he walked off.

What the bloody hell? He should be withdrawing himself away from this attraction because this mad instant bond between them was like an overloaded electrical fuse, capable of incinerating him alive. He'd already learnt his lesson from his last relationship. He'd been there and done that, but yet he didn't have the will to stop himself from finding out how their connection would play out.

Oh, Christ, this is bad. So, so bad, I'm in so much big trouble. Taking a huge sigh, he found himself a stool nearest to the pool table and watched Claire steal the show from the best snooker player in Broch Mordha.

#melodyheart #all I want for christmas is you #claire beauchamp #jamie fraser #Claire Beauchamp/Jamie Fraser #outlanderfanfic

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batmanisagatewaydrug · 3 years

Text

2020 reading roundup

feat: every book I read this year!

Favorite fiction:

Witchmark (C.L. Polk)

Kindred (Octavia E. Butler)

Fledgling (Octavia E. Butler)

The Killing Moon (N.K. Jemisin)

The Shadowed Sun (N.K. Jemisin)

Circe (Madeline Miller)

Freshwater (Akwaeke Emezi)

The House in the Cerulean Sea (T.J. Klune)

My Sister, the Serial Killer (Oyinkan Braithwaite)

The Affair of the Mysterious Letter (Alexis Hall)

Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)

The Traitor Baru Cormorant (Seth Dickinson)

Further fun/fabulous/fruity fiction:

The Beautiful Ones (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

Stormsong (C.L. Polk)

The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home (Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor)

Rat Queens, vol. 1-4 (Kurtis J. Wiebe)

The Deep (Rivers Solomon)

The Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller)

Gods of Jade and Shadow (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

Books that left me furious at death for taking Octavia Butler before she could write another sequel and tell us just what the hell Earthseed was getting up to out there in space:

Parable of the Talents (Octavia E. Butler)

Books that gave me a new appreciation for the short story as an art form:

Falling In Love with Hominids (Nalo Hopkinson)

Books that I didn’t get into right away but then they REALLY picked up and by the time the Big Reveal happened I was screaming like a howler monkey and feeling like a fool for not catching on sooner:

The City We Became (N.K. Jemisin)

Novellas that made me cry in record time, which is entirely unsurprising given the author:

To Be Taught, If Fortune (Becky Chambers)

Books that frankly took me by surprise and made me think I should be reading more horror, or at least more Stephen Graham Jones:

The Only Good Indians (Stephen Graham Jones)

Sequels that were good but also made my head hurt because Jesus Christ, oh my god, WHAT is going on:

Harrow the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir)

Books that I LIKED but wanted to like more than I actually did:

The Taste of Marrow (Sarah Gailey)

The Ballad of Black Tom (Victor LaValle)

In the Vanishers’ Palace (Aliette de Bodard)

Upright Women Wanted (Sarah Gailey)

The Devourers (Indra Das)

Sister Mine (Nalo Hopkinson)

Mexican Gothic (Silvia Moreno-Garcia)

Axiom’s End (Lindsay Ellis)

Totally respectable literary fiction that I cannot in good conscience lump into literally any other category:

Real Life (Brandon Taylor)

It was fine and I feel bad for not having anything particularly positive or negative or interesting at all to say about it, but it really and truly was just kind of alright:

My Lady’s Choosing: An Interactive Romance Novel (Kitty Curran and Larissa Zageris)

Favorite nonfiction:

In the Dream House (Carmen Maria Machado)

How We Fight for Our Lives (Saeed Jones)

An Autobiography (Angela Y. Davis)

Feed (Tommy Pico)

Ace: What Aseuxality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Angela Chen)

Black Women, Black Love: America’s War on African American Marriage (Dianne M. Stewart)

Heavy: An American Memoir (Kiese Laymon)

Notable nifty nonfictions:

The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games (Ebony Elizabeth Thomas)

Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death (Caitlin Doughty)

So You Want to Talk About Race (Ijeoma Oluo)

A Curious History of Sex (Kate Lister)

Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (Anna Merlan)

Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (Kim T. Gallon)

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women White Feminists Forgot (Mikki Kendall)

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (Brittney Cooper)

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (Jane Ward)

Other people’s lives that I happily devoured:

Dear America: Notes From an Undocumented Citizen (Jose Antonio Vargas)

Wow, No Thank You (Samantha Irby)

I’m Afraid of Men (Vivek Shraya)

The Collected Schizophrenias: Essays (Esmé Weijun Wang)

Uncomfortable Labels: My Life as a Gay Autistic Trans Woman (Laura Kate Dale)

Brown Girl Dreaming (Jacqueline Woodson)

When They Call You A Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir (Patrisse Khan-Cullors)

Poetry & personal essays that I wanted to Get but didn’t quite:

Homie (Danez Smith)

Something That May Shock and Discredit You (Daniel M. Lavery)

More Than Organs (Kay Ulanday Barrett)

Junk (Tommy Pico)

Nonfiction that was interesting but also incomprehensible in many places because I don’t have a degree in biology, which I guess is my bad:

Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation (Olivia Judson)

Nonfiction that was interesting but also felt lacking in its analysis, perhaps as an inevitable side effect of trying to publish it quickly enough to stay topical:

Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger (Soraya Chemaly)

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (Rebecca Traister)

Sweet graphic novels:

The Prince and the Dressmaker (Jen Wang)

Shadow of the Batgirl (Sarah Kuhn)

Books that are significant for various reasons and good to read but sort of felt like homework:

Stone Butch Blues (Leslie Feinberg)

Are Prisons Obsolete? (Angela Y. Davis)

Books I reread during quarantine even though I am not generally much of a rereader:

Her Body and Other Parties (Carmen Maria Machado)

Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

A Small Place (Jamaica Kincaid)

Books that weren’t really for me but probably would have rocked my socks if I read them when I was like 14:

Internment (Samira Ahmed)

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls (Mona Eltahawy)

Periods Gone Public: Taking a Stand for Menstrual Equity (Jennifer Weiss-Wolf)

The Bone Witch (Rin Chupeco)

Pet (Akwaeke Emezi)

#bookblr

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16woodsequ · 3 years

Text

The Alternative Timeline; A Journey

If you don't know, I have spent the last two years writing a 2012-alternate timeline AU Marvel fanfic. (You can find it here).

It has grown way past anything that I could have ever imagined. In celebration of completing the final chapter of the fourth part, I thought I would make a post detailing this journey for anyone interested, because when I started this in 2019, I definitely did not expect to end up writing an epic of over 500,000 words.

Spoilers under the cut.

First off, I think it is important to note that before I started the first fic in this series, Alternatively, I had published a total of two (2) fics in the mcu universe. My very first Marvel fic Lessons Learned was posted January 2019. My second Marvel fic Never Again was posted March 2019. (Both of which combined have a total word count of 5,716.) And then, on May 4th, 2019, I watched Avengers: Endgame, and lost my mind.

Upon watching Endgame, I was struck immediately by the time-travel scene to 2012. The fact that 2023!Steve told 2012!Steve that Bucky was alive...and that he said 'Hail Hydra' to the STRIKE team in the elevator...never mind the fact that Loki got away with the Tesseract...

There was just so much potential there. I wanted to build an AU where Steve and Tony could be friends, and I was pumped to explore the consequences of 2023!Steve's 'Hail Hydra'. I thought this universe had the potential to right a lot of wrongs, and I just had to try it.

So first I had to start planning. This was right after Endgame was released, so there weren't a lot of posts going around about the alternate timeline. I had to come up with most of my theories and ideas myself.

Also, there were hardly any Youtube videos of the specific scenes I needed from Endgame, and there was no online script yet, because the movie was still in theatres. So I had to resort to shaky illegally filmed videos from people in theatre to get the dialogue I needed from the 2012 time-travel scene. It was a struggle. XD

Writing Alternatively

One big hurdle I had to figure out was how Steve would go undercover in Hydra. I knew I wanted him to, because that would be super interesting, and would allow him to find Bucky and take down Hydra from the inside, but I had to figure out how he convinced Hydra of his loyalty in the first place.

The path I chose (Steve claiming he is disillusioned with the modern world etc.) may seem rather obvious to the outside observer, but it might amuse you to learn I played around with the idea of Steve trying to claim he was secretly partial to Hydra even during the war. I honestly did spend a few days contemplating Steve somehow trying to say he was on Hydra's side even while he was actively fighting them. It makes me laugh to think about it now.

Obviously I went with a more believable lie, and eventually figured out everything I wanted to have happen in the story. At this point, I had no plans to write more than a single story.

Because Endgame had just come out, and I was so excited about this idea, I wanted to write it and get it out as fast as possible. For some reason I was worried that someone else would write the idea before I did. It felt like such an intriguing concept that I thought for sure other people would do it too. As such, I had several WIPs that I put on the back burner while I focused all my attention on writing Alternatively. (These WIPs still haven't been published, my writing has improved immensely over the last two years, so I think I might have to re-write them XD).

One thing that helped me a lot writing this story is I already had a lot of headcanons about the inner lives of the characters, and I was desperate for somewhere to put them. I hadn't had a chance yet to really write about Steve's PTSD, so that became a major theme in the story that helped push it along.

Alternatively was the longest story I had ever written when I first got started. Before writing Alternatively, the longest (published) word count I had was 7,544. And, I had only published one (1) multi-chapter fic, that had three chapters, and 4,621 words.

Looking at that, I doubt anyone could have imagined what I was about to undertake. Not even myself. But I really really wanted to write the story, so I ran with it.

I decided that I was going to write all the chapters first, before I published it. This is what I had been doing with my WIPs anyway (and I'm glad I did, or those things wouldn't have been updated for like, two years). I will admit that once I got to chapter 10 of Alternatively I was really tempted to just start posting it, because I was so excited and really wanted to start sharing it.

I managed to restrain myself though. It took my four months to write all twenty chapters of Alternatively. It was a frustrating process at times, because I had an idea in my head of what I wanted, but I felt like my writing skills were not on par with that ideal. I wanted this fic to be good, and it was hard to get it to where I wanted it. This got easier over time though, because one thing a project like this does is give you writing practice.

At the time, I didn't even have my own laptop, so I was writing on school computers, or my family computer. (I got a laptop once I started The Alternate Handler though, this story is actually part of what pushed me to get a laptop in the first place.)

Finally, I finished the last chapter, and I edited it for the final time, and then, on August 29th, 2019, I published the first chapter.

I was amazed at the response I received. Before this I had only written twelve stories, most of them oneshots. I'm not saying my story went viral or anything, but I got a lot more feedback than I was used to. This was super awesome, and made me even more excited to share what I had written.

Even as I was posting Alternatively, I didn't really expect to write any more in this universe. Except...there was so much about Bucky in this story that the reader didn't get to see. I knew all about it because I had to know what was going on in his head while Steve did his thing, but the readers wouldn't know more than Steve knew.

And so, as I posted Alternatively, a very determined plot-bunny began to work away at my brain. I actually gave into it at one point and wrote a little bit of what would become The Alternate Handler, but I stopped after the first four chapters for a while.

Fun fact: The first four chapters I wrote are actually the first two chapters of The Alternate Handler. Each chapter was only about 2,000 words long, so when I started writing the story in earnest, I combined the first four chapters into two.

I don't remember what exactly was the trigger that made me really want to write Bucky's side of things, but around the time that I posted chapter 10 of Alternatively, I started getting the same insane urge that had pushed me to write Alternatively in the first place, and I decided to go for a sequel.

Writing The Alternate Handler

I started posting this story Jan 2020.

I was excited to write this story, because of how interesting Bucky's thoughts were, but part of me was a little nervous that people would not be interested in reading the same fic from another pov. I knew it would be interesting, but I wasn't sure if people would give it a shot.

I decided to go for it anyways. I was pretty amazed at myself because I had just written something that was 100,000 words long, and people seemed to be liking it. (Of course, I never could have imagined that The Alternate Handler would double that. I definitely expected it to be about 20 chapters long like the first one.)

I decided that I wanted to get as much of The Alternate Handler finished before I finished posted Alternatively as I could, so that I could started posting The Alternate Handler right away. I felt that the best way to keep a steady readership was to make sure they could follow the next story right away.

That meant that I had only about 10 weeks to write as many chapters as I could. For all my stories, I had an outline of basic plot points, so I could keep track of everything I wanted to have happen. It was helpful, but also did not anticipate the scope of what would happen.

I had a general idea of what would happen, and I had vague ideas of scenes I wanted, but none of it was nailed down. As I wrote it felt like I was walking forward a few steps to illuminate the path I needed, and then snagging the right plot points out of the air.

Bucky's mindset also took some work to figure out. How do you write from the pov of someone who barely remembers anything? Does he know how to use metaphors? Does he know what a microwave is? How dependent is he? The first few chapters where Bucky is deep in his Winter Soldier programming took a lot of thought.

One of the fun things about writing this story was that I got to dive deeper into my headcanons of exactly how Hydra brainwashed Bucky. Before this I had some vague scenes and ideas, but this story really forced me to come up with a coherent timeline for Bucky's experience under Hydra, which is pretty cool. Once I had that, I could decide how and when I would reveal the pieces throughout the story.

Anyway, I managed to write 12 chapters of The Alternate Handler before I finished posting Alternatively. (Which is super impressive.) And somehow I managed to keep ahead of my posting schedule for twenty-eight more chapters.

I honestly can't believe it sometimes. I actually wrote a 40 chapter fic, and posted once a week for forty weeks, with only a head-start of 12 chapters. (And at the same time, I was like, finishing university and working. So no, I don't know how I survived.)

Reader influences: Unlike Alternatively, where I had everything written ahead of time, this story was still being written as I was posting, so the readership did have some influence on what I put out, which you may find interesting.

Bucky's arm: When I first started writing, I didn't have a concrete plan to replace Bucky's metal arm with something better. That may be a shocker, but that arc starts happening way later on into the story (around chap 32). Because of how long and intricate the plot and story is, there is simply no way I could plan every detail when I first got started. I didn't start offcially planning to have an arc around his arm until a reader mentioned in a comment that they hoped it would happen. (And I was like, 'oh yeah, that should definitely happen...eventually.' And made a note to work it in when it became appropriate.) The comment happened pretty early on in the story, so it was easy for me to start laying down the foundation for that arc.

Bucky's arm part two: Another thing a reader had a direct influence is the blue star Bucky has on his new arm. Originally I wasn't planning to have a star at all. I was going to have Bucky decide he didn't want one. But then I had a reader request that I keep the star, and I decided that keeping it would not upset any character development. I had already set up blue as an important colour in the story, so I decided to change Bucky's decision and have him request a blue star. I like it. It is a clear symbol of this Bucky, versus any other Bucky.

Surprises

One thing that surprised me while writing and posting this story, is the readership prediction for Bucky's choice of whether or not to fight. I posted a chapter that focused on Bucky watching himself react to being drafted, and then remembering himself choosing to follow Steve, and then cliffhangered on him having to decide if he wanted to join the Avengers.

I asked something in the author's notes about 'what do you think he will do?', and a surprising amount of people (to me anyways) thought that he would chose to fight. I had always planned to have Bucky retire from fighting, so I was a little shocked. I thought with a whole chapter about Bucky learning he never really wanted to fight at all, that people would think he would want to take a break.

I think the consensus came from the desire to see Bucky and Steve fight together like old times. I think Bucky joining Steve on missions is a common indication of him overcoming his past and avenging/revenging on Hydra, so in the end I am not surprised that a lot of people might expect that to happen.

Because of that response I was a little nervous people wouldn't be happy with Bucky's choice, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Bucky's arc and choosing not to fight is really important, and I think everyone is happy with how it went.

It took ten months to post all of The Alternate Handler. As I was writing, I was not planning to write anymore. I was mostly focused on finishing the story, and didn't expect to write a third part...

But, my traitorous mind whispered, this universe could fix everything. We can make Civil War less painful. We can keep them from fighting. We can do it properly.

To be honest, it didn't take a lot of convincing for me to give in and start planning An Alternate Approach.

Writing An Alternate Approach

I started posting this story Oct. 2020.

I started planning this with a lot of time to spare. I still had most of The Alternate Handler to write and finish posting when I decided to go for this fic too.

Some challenges were that I wanted to show the Avengers going through the same things as the original Avengers, but doing it better. I had already gotten rid of the Winter Soldier problem, and Tony knew about his parents, so we didn't have to deal with any of that, but I still wanted to do the UN bombing and that drama, because T'Chaka's death is very important to T'Challa's and Wakanda's development, so I felt it still needed to happen.

Of course...I had nipped Ultron in the bud, meaning Sokovia wasn't destroyed, and Zemo had no reason to go after Bucky.

Thankfully, I came up with the idea of having Rumlow do it in time to foreshadow it a little in The Alternate Handler (the fact that they never find him, even though they know he is out there etc.)

Like last time, I wanted to post The Alternate Approach as soon as I finished The Alternate Handler. It was a bit of a crunch time for me, but I managed to get all eight chapters finished in time. I basically finished writing The Alternate Handler and immediately started writing An Alternate Approach. I finished The Alternate Handler August 1st, and finished the last chapter of The Alternate Approach September 10th.

Originally I was expecting An Alternate Approach to be a bit longer, but things happened quicker than I thought they would.

A challenge for this story is that most of it happens during a movie. There was a lot of original stuff happening and interesting inner thoughts, but I was restricted in what I could do because of the script I still had to refer to. Also because this story was only eight chapters long, I didn't have as much space to work through character development.

Reader influences: Like with Alternatively, I managed to finish the story before I posted it, but the readers did have a little influence on the content.

Mostly it had to do with their reaction to Everette Ross. I think a challenge with this story is there is Everette Ross, and there is Thaddeus Ross. Thaddeus Ross is much worse than Everette Ross, but I think the readers mixed the two up sometimes because they share the same last name.

To top it off, I wanted to show Everette Ross' character arc a little, because he obviously changes from Civil War to Black Panther. There wasn't a lot of space to show the glimpse of his character and how he could be better than he seems. The readership really hated him at times, so I did edit his lines and facial expressions a little to try to make it clear that he thinks differently than Thaddeus Ross.

Actually, in chapter five, Steve has a nightmare about Hydra trying to wipe Bucky and trapping Steve in the SSR capsule he got the serum in. Originally, I was going to have the main villain in the dream be Thaddeus Ross, to symbolise how Steve was uneasy around him, and how Ross thought of Bucky. But the readership was already literally out for Ross' blood, and suspected him to be Hydra (which was not canon in the story). They really wanted something bad to happen to Ross, but I knew that wouldn't happen, so I decided to change Ross to Rumlow in the dream. This helped foreshadow Rumlow's later involvement, and it also didn't give the reader any more reasons to hate or suspect Ross.

If I were to write this again, I think I would try to make it more clear which Ross it which, since I think the same last names really didn't help the situation.

Writing The Alternate End

I started posting this story Nov 2020.

For a long time, I never intended to write The Alternate End. I had The Alternate Approach all planned out, but I was adamant that this time, I was 100% not going to write any more.

This not because I didn't like the series. I loved it, and my readers loved it too. But at the time, I hadn't finished The Alternate Handler yet, and I hadn't even started The Alternate Approach.

The thought of trying to write an Endgame fic felt a little overwhelming. I was worried I would run out of momentum at some point, and I would leave my readers hanging. I had been writing and posting a chapter a week for over a year at that point, and I wasn't sure if I would be able to keep it up for as long as I needed.

While I was trying to dodge plot-bunnies, I tried to convince myself that an Endgame fic wouldn't be interesting. I figured it would be just the same as any other Endgame fix-it fic. I was truly convinced that the readers would be satisfied by me bringing them all the way to Civil War, and then just, ending it there.

It makes me laugh to think about it now. I really thought I could just be like "The End! I'm sure you can imagine the rest" XD.

And then I was at work one day, thinking about the next chapter of The Alternate Handler, and thinking of how much I still had to write, including The Alternate Approach...and thinking pointedly that I was not going to write an Endgame fic...and then my traitorous brain decided to speak up again.

I had exactly two (2) thoughts that were my downfall. First my brain was like: What if we wrote it from Tony's pov? We've never written it from Tony's pov before.

And plot-bunny-brain was like "ooooh". But I was like, "No! It will still be a normal Endgame fix-it fic. People can read other fix-it fics if they want to know what happens."

And then my brain was like, What about the fact that they know about the time-travellers? What if they decide to leave a message about Thanos when they time-travel?

It makes me laugh to think that the simple warning message that Tony gives his alternate-self is the spark that got this story going. Once I started writing it, that scene was not what I looked forward to the most. But at the time, knowing about the time-travellers, and leaving a message behind was something completely unique to my AU, and so that is what I needed to jumpstart my desire to write this story.

As soon as I had those two thoughts, I knew I was done for. I actually stopped dead at work and stared ahead in betrayal and amusement. I was like, 'I really am going to write this, aren't I? I haven't even finished The Alternate Handler, but I'm going to plan out two whole stories to write after this, aren't I?'

And I did. I finished The Alternate Handler in the summer. Because I was already planning to write two more parts, I was able to set up some of what I needed for those parts in The Alternate Handler. (Such as Clint's family and Scott's introduction.)

I started writing The Alternate Approach as quickly as I could. I knew I only had a short window before school started again, and I wanted to get to The Alternate End as soon as possible so that I could get ahead on that.

Once I started posting The Alternate Approach, I had about eight weeks to write as many chapters of The Alternate End as I could. In the end, I managed to write ten chapters ahead of time, and I somehow managed to keep that lead for the rest of the twenty or so chapters.

I was a bit nervous about this fic, because it followed the movies for a while. I tried to keep at least one original scene in each chapter, and I thought Tony's pov was interesting, but I knew I wanted the Snap to happen. I also knew we had to start at the beginning of Infinity War, because we needed those scenes to establish character development and such.

Writing Tony was also its own challenge. Tony had already had a lot of character development, but we didn't see his side of it. He was in a better place than mcu!Tony, but I still needed him to be able to improve. It was a tricky balance trying to show the results of the character development he'd been having for three stories, while also making room for more.

Another thing about writing Tony is he has a lot more relationship dynamics to work with. In Steve's stories, his relationship dynamics are mostly between Bucky and Tony, and in Bucky's story the dynamics are mostly between him and Steve, and then eventually him and Tony, with a few snapshots of the other Avengers and his sister.

Tony has dynamics with Steve and Bucky, Rhodey, Pepper, and Peter. Plus any other Avengers who happen to be there. And then, Nebula and his relationship became unexpectedly important. It was a challenge to balance the relationships. I wanted to show Steve and Tony, because we had been watching it grow for ages now, but I also wanted to establish his relationship with Pepper, something we had only barely caught a glimpse of before.

On a different note, one thing I cursed Endgame for all the time was the sheer number of characters it has. In scenes with the whole cast I could be juggling 15-20 characters! It was a lot!

It took a lot of work, but I managed to finish The Alternate End three chapters ahead of time. It was a relief to finish, and I was excited for the approaching time I could start posting the oneshots I had planned for this universe.

Writing Alternative Options

I started posting this story May 2021.

I'm not sure exactly when I first got the idea to write oneshots within this universe. I think I had some readers suggest oneshots of different character's povs, and at that point I didn't even try to resist the plot-bunnies. I was just like, "why not?"

I had one reader request an alternate scene to chapter 10 of Alternatively waaaay back at the beginning of this adventure. It intrigued me, so I wrote it and shared it with them privately. I also had a scene I had to take out chapter 35 of The Alternate Handler, so since I already had those two documents sitting on my computer, it was nice to come up with somewhere to share them with everyone.

Also, like Bucky's pov in The Alternate Handler, I had a lot of extra content in my head of other character's motivations and povs that don't get spotlighted in the other stories. It's all in my head anyways, I might as well share it somewhere.

I wrote the first eight or so oneshots of Alternative Options whenever I felt particularly inspired. I wrote the very first chapter back in February 2021, but I actually wrote the second chapter way back in August 2020 (same with the onshot A Change in Protocol.) I rearranged the first eight chapters into what I thought would flow best.

Writing the oneshots was sometimes a nice break from my main project. I think the oneshots are a nice way to end off too, because there is less pressure on them. The story is done now, I can write and post the oneshots whenever I feel like it, but readers will always have a complete story to go back to.

Unexpected Things

Everything about this series was unexpected (even if most of the plot was pretty scripted), but some things still amuse me. As I got deeper into this universe, I was surprised at the amount of people who were concerned I would kill characters or end things angstily.

I remember when I announced I would be writing a Civil War inspired fic, many people were concerned that Steve and Tony would fight like they did in the movie. It didn't even occur to me to reassure people that this wouldn't happen, because it seemed so impossible to me.

To me it was obvious that I had fixed so many things already in this universe. It seemed so straightforward to me that certain things simply could not happen. (Of course, it would always seem obvious to the author.)

I think people were a lot more nervous for my Civil War story than I intended them to be.

And then, when we got to Endgame, people surprised me by hoping I wouldn't do the Snap at all. It had not occurred to me that people would hope that. I felt the Snap needed to happen. If it didn't happen, then we couldn't see any of the other painful things be fixed.

Then, people surprised me again because they were very worried that I would kill Tony and Natasha. I had basically spent the last two years writing a 500,000 word mcu fix-it series. I wasn't about to kill Tony and Natasha at the end.

Still, I am very good at pulling on angsty heartstrings, so I can see why people were concerned.

(That is another thing I did not expect, the amount of people who told my I made them cry with my writing. It touches me every time it happens.)

Take Away

If you made it to the end of this long post, congratulations!

What will I take away from this amazing experience? Well, first off, not to be intimidated by long story ideas. I probably wouldn't have written this if I had conceived how long it would be. Lucky for us, I dived head-first into this, and just kept swimming.

Another thing that I think is important, is you don't have to be a super experienced writer to write big things. I had written nothing even close to this when I started. And my writing improved a lot during this journey.

I think looking at the finished product it is easy to think that I am just naturally an awesome author, but two years ago that wouldn't have been the case. Don't be intimidated by the finished products of authors. That is the culmination of hours of work, and it does not mean you can't do the same thing if you feel a similarly insistent plot-bunny.

Finally, I would like to thank all my readers! If you've been around since I first started posting, then that is 94 weeks (plus whatever Alternative Options turns out to be) of reading a chapter a week from me! That is amazing!

If you joined later along the ride, that is just as awesome! Thank you for plunging into such a long series!

If you have any questions or want to chat with me about plot choices I made, or my thoughts behind certain scenes—or anything really—feel free!

I hope you enjoyed! :D

Tl;dr:

I never planned to write any of the stories after Alternatively, until about halfway through posting the preceding stories. Plot bunnies are really insistent, and I had stuff planned in the background anyways, so I had to share it. By the time I was about halfway through The Alternate Handler I had accepted that I was going to write two more stories in the universe.

It was a lot of work, and I had never written anything anywhere close to this giant project. It was a lot of fun though, and I'm glad I did it.

#fanfic #fanfiction #the alternative timeline #the alternate timeline #Alternatively #the alternate handler #an alternate approach #the alternate end #writing #writer #writers #long post #alternative options

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