It is surprising that a newspaper of The New York Times’ resources took this long to get its arms around Mumbai terror plotter David Headley and that too with pieces that merely state the obvious.
Yesterday the Times’ website featured two separate pieces by Jane Perlez from Islamabad and Akash Kapur from Mumbai about Headley and his larger connections. It is particularly odd to see Perlez’ story datelined Islamabad but drawing almost entirely from the plea agreement that Headley’s lawyers reached with the US prosecutors on March 18 in Chicago. And Kapur’s “Letter from India” is merely compilation of the same facts with some personal impressions thrown to give it some flavor.
In the 1980s during my daily newspaper days we reporters used to have an expression for such pieces. They were called “table top” stories, which essentially meant stories or articles which were by and large generated straight off the typewriter. This blog, for instance, is more often than not “table top.” That is never the case when I do actual reporting for the wire service IANS as I have done all these years. Of course, once in a while it is perfectly fine for seasoned journalists to go table top, purely drawing on their long experience in covering specific subjects.
This post is pretty lame but I did not feel like writing much this morning. The links to the Times pieces are here and here.