Acting on principle rather than on policy

Business writer Jeffrey Gitomer says that one of the keys to stellar customer service is the realization that principle trumps policy, and he's right in the sense that policy is inevitably focused inward, where it constrains employee activity, or is supposed to.

Sometimes, however, principles themselves are suspect. The New York Times now admits that it recently violated its own advertising policies by giving a steep discount to a progressive advocacy group for a full page ad that apparently libeled both General David Petraeus and most of the men and women on active military service for the United States. The group intends to reimburse the newspaper for the difference between what it should have paid and what it did pay, but the political right is not in a forgiving mood, because this admission of wrongdoing comes after the Times spent two weeks pretending that its advertising rate rules were more complicated than quantum physics.

The ironic thing about this admission is that the policy violations in question were not also violations of principle. Instead, one set of operating instructions was ignored while the other was upheld. What I mean is that although the editorial board of the NYT may regard MoveOn.org as an organization for the shrill or uncouth, when push comes to shove, NYT editors have approximately the same relationship with MoveOn members as Jimmy Carter had with his younger brother Billy. Readers of a certain age will remember when Billy fronted his own brand of beer while Jimmy was taking an inept whack at the presidency. Public infatuation with both brothers cooled at similar rates.

In the latest Times case, as in Columbia University's curious notion that free speech applies more to the charming psychopath running Iran than to people who want to bring ROTC back to campus, charges of hyprocrisy miss the point.

Lee Bollinger of Columbia really does think that ROTC caters to warmongering instincts, but politicians who've publicly expressed a desire to "wipe Israel off the map" are all about dialog. Hypothetically speaking, Columbia has already said it would have had no problem inviting even Adolph Hitler to speak to its students and faculty, had such an invitation been possible. The author of Mein Kampf would have been challenged, you see, and who knows whether sharp Ivy League rhetoric would have postponed the Anschluss by a day or two?

Similarly (and if you'll forgive my paraphrase of her recently televised outburst), actress Sally Field really does think that if only Peter Pan and the Lost Boys could spend more time being mothered by Wendy, and perhaps less time with that codependent little Tinkerbelle, then Captain Hook would be more of a misunderstood neighbor than an implacable enemy. But although Michelle Malkin and others had fun with the brainless actress trope, you can't blame marshmallow roles in Gidget or The Flying Nun for Field's attitude, any more than you can say that Ronald Reagan learned good cheer by playing opposite the chimp in Bedtime for Bonzo.

I usually applaud Malkin's work, but she neglected to note that Field has also played women of conviction like Norma Rae and Betty Mahmoody. Even the pouty matriarch whom Field now plays in Brothers and Sisters does a made-for-TV imitation of emotional strength now and then: incapable of rising to Churchillian heights, her character can nevertheless be hawklike when someone crosses her neurotic brood.

Which brings us back to where principle and policy part ways. Sometimes the resulting choices are good, as when several soldiers in Afghanistan heroically ignored U.S. Army policy to treat an injured comrade impaled on a live rocket-propelled grenade in an affecting story broadcast last week. Other choices at that intersection do not fare as well. Christopher McCandless lost himself in the wilderness on principle. More to our purposes, policy at most newspapers says evenhandedness (aka "objectivity") is good, but principle if not prime directive for the Times crowd might be summarized as "jingoism bad; internationalism good."

By those lights, any American commander in Iraq is automatically suspect, and any Iraqi commander who endorses American strategy or works on a complementary Iraqi strategy must likewise take a back seat to Cindy Sheehan, Barack Obama, or whatever cheap-shot diarist the New Republic is paying for ginned-up dispatches from Baghdad this month.

You can call the involved dynamic juvenile or shortsighted. You can question its wisdom and intellectual parentage. But you can't make a charge of hyprocrisy stick.

Like the old commercial for Hebrew National hot dogs, New York Times editors resolve apparent conflicts between policy and principle by pleading allegiance to a "higher authority," as well they should. Getting them to see the shortcomings of that higher authority is a horse of a different color altogether. Times editors send bouquets to the so-called "reality-based community" every week, but in their world, War Admiral would never lose a match race to Seabiscuit.