I made this comment in an earlier thread:

Was Sorkin speaking in his role of a reporter or his other role as a columnist? How is the public supposed to know which hat he is wearing?

The Times cannot continue the practice of allowing reporters to be columnists. It gives Sorkin a free pass to spout his ignorance and the Times an excuse to not hold him responsible for his actions.

Shorter "apology":

I'm sorry that anyone who's a union supporter was watching Morning Joe, and that I got called out for my incredibly asinine comment that was only meant for corporate CEO's and residents of Real America.

HA!!! That's word-for-word the response I got to an e-mail I sent him.

This is a blatant example of the danger of corporate media ownership. God forbid Sorkin go on MSNBC and speak the truth: that when companies put workerse ahead of profits, everybody wins. When unions are stronger, so is America.

The Times actually has an excellent labor reporter in Steven Greenhouse. Sadly, it's one of the few remaining papers that actually assigns a reporter to a labor beat.

Still, any reporter covering business and economic issues ought to have more of an understanding of labor and less of a susceptibility to myths than Sorkin has shown. And while I do appreciate his willingness to apologize, I don't get a sense he truly understands why his comments generated so much outrage.

My preference is to give people the benefit of the doubt in these sorts of things. It's not exactly unreasonable to associate heavily unionized industries like autos, steel and mining with American industrial decline and failure. And as Sorkin says, one can have a reasonable debate about the extent to which unions bear some of the responsibility for that. That other unionized industries ARE profitable doesn't change that association in peoples' minds.

I'll paraphrase an old saying; His mouth was running before his brain was in gear.

I watch this Morning Joe now and then and it often seems its a contest between the 4 of them as to who can spit out the best lame comment first.

What total crap. Sorkin is ALWAYS flip (& a total ass-kisser), and Morning Joe ALWAYS stinks.

The real scandal is that there's never anybody on these cable shows that speaks from a worker's perspective. It's no surprise these idiots couldn't think of a profitable unionized company - they're corporate shills. If they had one person on the show who understood the average working person's point of view, maybe there'd be a little pushback when they go into their corporate talking points.

"It was meant to provoke a conversation."

"But let's leave that debate for another day."

Confused, Andrew???

Make up your mind. Do you want to start a conversation, or leave this for another day?

Disingenuous little prick.

During college I worked in a Chrysler plant in Detroit during the summers of 1972/73, and it was stinking, hot, miserably boring work in a rotting, un-airconditioned old facility. I would love to stick Sorkin and Scarborough in that old dump for a couple of hot Detroit summers.

Screw Sorkin and his crappy apology. Management, not labor, is to blame for the auto companies' failures.

What's the equivalent to "regulatory capture" for reporters? This guy's been hanging around with too many venture capitalists and hedge fund guys that all have exactly the same opinion about unions. That's why he can get away with being so flip about the subject -- and, more to the point, indifferent to the challenges actual workers face.

Scarborough's producers couldn't get Jim Cramer that day, they settled for Sorkin

It's obvious from his response that Andrew Sorkin is far too young to sound like my 80-year-old right-wing uncle. He's yet to learn the true essence of such unrepentant curmudgeonliness, which only the experience of years spent not really listening to people can provide.

>>And when you look at some of the once great iconic American industries that have faltered -- automobiles, airlines, steel, apparel, etc -- there is a fair question worth asking about whether those industries were helped or hurt by their unions. But let's leave that debate for another day.

Ah, I see. What he really means is, "Now that you've shown I've full of feldercarb, let's not actually discuss the matter."

When you go on Republican Talking Points in the Morning, you are bound to make, ummm, Republican talking points. If you don't do that, as Katrina can den Heuvel saw today, you get cut off while the former Congressman repeats for the umpteenth time, his nonsense routines: Henry Morgenthau thought the New Deal didn't work (but apparently got over it since he stayed until FDR's death, serving almost the entire 12 years of his presidency) or the President agrees with him that the current rate of federal spending can not continue long term (something the President said from day one).

I miss the Iman

God, don't apologize. You're not sorry for being an idiot management sympathizer, you're sorry you got a pile of shit for being one. You said what you think. You're exposed. Now we can deal with you appropriately.

This is the same NYT reporter who was all apoplectic with rage that the bonuses for AIG were not being honored on Bill Maher's show. He railed about sacred contracts and came only a centimeter short of claiming it was the end of the world. OF course, honoring contracts of wealthy hedge fund gamblers who destroy the economy is sacred. Honoring union contracts in his world is unimportant because the working people don't matter. If you're hand callus you aren't worth the air you breathe in Sorkinland. I know nothing about him, but his hatred and loathing of the people who produce something other than ephemera is so palpable I assume his background is working class, that much class hatred usual only comes from running from your roots.

I made the unscripted comment with my financial columnist hat on in the context of the problems at GM.

So the excuse is that the comment was wrong and stupid because it was unscripted?

Is this a guy who can only say intelligent and correct things when he's given a script to read? Because if so, couldn't literally anyone do his job?

The debate over unions is a bit off the mark. I live in Finland which has the highest level of unionization in the world (about 85%), and productivity is on par with the US. While Mr. Sorkin seems clueless as to what he is talking about, there is the wider question as to why unions matter, since it appears on the surface that their presence has little impact on productivity. A cogent union justification might be that they promote productivity gains without sacrificing economic justice.

Perhaps the discussion could be helped by elaborating the definition of productivity to mean as producing something for which there is demand, something people want. For example, Finland's former boot-and-paper producer Nokia took the world by storm with cellphones and cellphone networks in the 1990s. The cellphone was a disruptive technology that wrested power from the network operators that once dominated telephony, while offering a potential customer base covering most of mankind. Nokia workers today clearly understand that have as much responsibility for keeping the technology disruptive as management. But this is not a Finnish virtue. Employees at Intel understand that they must halve the cost and double the power of their products every two years to stay competitive to the point it resembles Trotsky's permanent revolution. Netflix understands that its gains from eliminating buildings in the dvd rental business will soon erode as others figure out how to eliminate the dvd in the content delivery business. Today the paradigm in the car business is the Toyota Way, but tomorrow it could just as well be Car 2.0. What makes the difference is that unions carry the burden of calling out management when they see business profitability is tied to exploiting externalities (e.g. nationally subsidized access to natural resources, reliance on public services à la Wal-Mart, protection under a "strategic industry" moniker as in Russia or "national security" as in the US).

The MOST profitable airline, one of the only profitable airlines, also happens to be the most unionized airline.

Southwest!

As a multi racial woman who belongs to 3 unions, I often feel invisible while watching people like Sorkin on shows like "Morning Joe." All of that shows regulars belong to at least one union; AFTRA, and everyone from the director to the crew most probably belong to unions as well. Yet day after day, week after week they make flippant remarks regarding unions, and a host of other subjects. Mika was fired from CBS. I wonder what protections she had from AFTRA and if she would have felt better had she been non union. The main reason they invite Sorkin on that show is to bash Obama's financial policies.
In this incredibly difficult time in our history, I wish people like Sorkin would lobby the administration with ideas instead of basking in the glow of Morning Joe and dismissing union members like me. Sorkin should remember that journalism is hanging by a thread right now. Credibility may be his only asset.