The more thoroughly some set of facts reinforces the relevant preconceptions, caricatures, clich s, and conventional wisdom, the easier it makes life for everyone, journalists as well as their audiences. Most people want to be told what they already know. And in a world of murky moral grays, who doesn't sometimes relish a black-and- white tale, with villains to loathe, victims to pity, injustice to condemn? Thus the enthralling power of the Duke lacrosse-team story when it broke last spring.

^{"The Ethicist" is Randy Cohen's long-running advice column in the New York Times. Each week, Worker #3116's "The Unethicist" will answer the same questions as "The Ethicist," with obvious differences.}

From yesterday's New York Times Business "Suits" column:

BAGHDAD, Oct. 5 — Wearing a helmet and a flak jacket and flanked by machine-gun-toting bodyguards to defend against insurgents, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice came here Thursday, insisting that there were new signs of progress in Iraq and that the Bush administration had never sugarcoated its news about the American occupation.

Let's be honest, is there anyone who didn't know that Randy Jackson was somehow connected to all this?

So yesterday we mentioned Joe Sharkey, the NYT business travel columnist who survived a plane crash while on freelance assignment. As Sharkey put it:

Avuncular New York Times business travel columnist Joe Sharkey happened to be aboard the 13-passenger Embraer Legacy 600 jet involved in the mid-air collision near Sao Paulo, Brazil. Everyone aboard Sharkey's jet survived, while the 155 people aboard the Boeing 737 were not so lucky. Sharkey was undertaking a freelance gig about private jet travel at the time, and ended up instead with a story that catapulted him from the mordant depths of the travel section all the way to the NYT front page. Contains very mild mortality humor.

We don't often participate in songs of praise here at Gawker, but we do want to suggest that if you missed last week's three-part "Broken Bench" series in the New York Times you head immediately to the paper's website and print out all three parts for your train ride home. Sure, there's a certain Pulitzer-bait feel to this investigation of upstate's corrupt and incompetent courthouses, but it's incredibly well-reported and pretty horrific in a way that the best kind of journalism should be. Writer William Glaberson and the NYT deserve commendation for the effort. Trust us on this one: You'll never feel better about living here in town, where justice is dispensed fairly and equitably.

The Vows in yesterday's Times was particularly special. Per usual, the featured couple was connected in some way to the who's who of society (in this case, designer Nicole Miller), and the manner in which they reached their union was predictably "aw"-inducing (ultimatum, break-up, reunion), as is required by all Vows features. But there was something different about yesterday's bride and groom, Pamela Taylor and Eames Yates. Mr. Yates suffers from a condition rarely seen in Vows: Mr. Yates is fat.

From today's Page Six, a follow-up on last week's La Dolce Vita porn shoot at Marc Jacobs that is sure to shake the Times to its very core:

^{"The Ethicist" is Randy Cohen's long-running advice column in the New York Times. Each week, Worker #3116's "The Unethicist" will answer the same questions as "The Ethicist," with obvious differences.}

Quick, which detective case does the scandalous Hewlett-Packard leaker investigation resemble? The New York Times can't decide. Their latest piece on the scandal includes:

Our civilly minded podmate Wonkette points out this meet-cute between Condoleezza Rice and the New York Times editorial board. Fairly standard boilerplate jousting from both sides, except for this amusing little nugget: Rice challenges the NYT for leaking basically anything the administration wants kept under wraps. Discounting her complaints, the NYT responds:

Today's Times has a cutting-edge piece on the developing trend of college kids living together in residential co-ops. It's pretty ho hum until you get to the requisite Quote from an Expert:

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• Tao Lin and Whitney Pastorek star in the world's most boring literary feud. [RODB]
• More sushi for Julie Buxbaum! [Above the Law]
• Flash mobs: The second generation is even douchier than the first. [Gridskipper]
• Former NYT neediest case not exactly helpful to the needy. [NYDN]
• New York is the new Sacramento: Ruby Tuesday is coming to town! [AP]
• NYT cannot get enough of Peter Gelb, the Met's new general manager. It's like they're related to him or something. [NYT]
• NBC harnesses the power of YouTube. This gets a little meta. [YouTube]

• You'll find a lot of information in this David Carr piece on how journalists are forced to act like C.I.A. agents, "encoding files, shredding notes and switching cellphones." What you won't find is any mention of the Observer, which reported essentially the same story two Wednesdays ago. [NYT]
• Nancy Grace, desperate to wrest the title of World's Most Vile Human Being from Ann Coutler, adds plagiarism to her list of sins. Ann Coulter is 45. [NYDN]
• Chris Wallace was stunned that a non-confrontational question suggesting that Bill Clinton was responsible for the deaths of 3,000 American citizens might have been taken the wrong way. [FishbowlDC]
• James Truman, footloose and fancy free, is learning to live without Conde cash. Culture and Travel launches Friday. [NYT]
• Jon Friedman wonders why H-P never tapped his phone. Maybe it's because when you write columns like "The media world is in convulsions" you're pretty much identifying yourself as someone who has no new information. [Marketwatch]

The New York Times loves a good "but" — readers can count on any good Times story to change track about halfway through. It's just the "manufactured conflict" method of journalism. But the dirtiest trick from the Times is the end-of-article gotcha, which throws the reader into confusion about the entire story that preceded it. For example:

• The Nation takes on the Washington Times: "The vast majority of people who read it don't realize that this paper is in bed with bigots and white supremacists." Funny, we thought that the vast majority of people who read it were bigots and white supremacists. [Nation]
• Michael Massing thinks financial pressures are affecting the press' ability to do its job. [ETP]
• Tony Judt thinks it's because liberals are pussies these days. [LRB]
• Either way, things aren't going well financially for the liberal pussies at the Times. [AP]

Yesterday's DealBook ran a post about Black Enterprise's "75 Most Powerful Blacks on Wall Street" cover story, noting the historical and continuing under-representation of African Americans in the financial services industries. Comments on the article started with "People said the same things about Jews on Wall Street when I was young. Was just a matter of time for my generation to get the education required to enter the system. In the banking and investment game cream rises to the top," and just got better from there. After the jump, a selection of some of our favorites.