Enough and more than enough about Trollope. For at least the time being.

Sometimes the NYT makes me despair for the souls of its editors - for instance, the coverage of the G8 conference. Did you notice that the Times was the only major paper in the world to put the number of protestors at 50,000? Even the Italian police estimated 100,000 - Le Monde put the number at 150 - 200 thou. Washington Post settled for the 100. The Times, however, has always been protective of globalization, and the editors must have decided that 100 thousand people, not to mention 200 thou, was unseemly. So they downed the number. In fact, I'm surprised they didn't take off another zero - what the hell, why not have 5,000 people, mostly anarchists, making whoopee in the streets of Columbus' home town.

On the other hand - I always read the Times. Today, the article of note is on coal, in the Magazine. How Coal Got Its Glow Back. The article should make us send letters to our congressmen - or e-mails - in support of the current EPA regulation of CO2 emissions.

The article ignored completely the people who mine coal, talking instead to industry spinmeisters and environmentalists. This isn't a-typical - the labor aspect of business is routinely ignored in articles of this sort. It is one of those silent omissions that is countenanced, too often, by environmentalists, who should make it a point to tell journalists to talk to workers. A lot of times, they are going to hear a fairly un-environmental message from the guys and gals on the ground, but too bad. In the end the environmental issues should be folded into the issue of economic justice - of who bears the social cost of business activity - but I think there's a lot of working class suspicion that really, the people who are going to bear all the costs are the ones who always bear the cost - the employees. IF this isn't addressed, environmentalism just becomes complicit in the corporate mentality. It isn't as if the NYT Mag article is an exception - too many times, journalism splits the world into a dialogue between two groups the journalist can identify with - college educated environmentos, on the one hand, and executives, on the other - whcih leads to a lot of anger on the part of working people. What they see is that they are simply dropped from the process. Justifiably they ask, why is this guy from Greenpeace or whereever talking like I don't even exist? It is as if the work was being done by nobody. This is especially disconcerting in an article on coal mining, of all things - for in no other industry has the war between labor and management been so fiercely fought, so close to a real war.