Fishbowl is coming to you not-quite-live tonight with the play-by-play of this afternoon's Lazard Freres/Carl Icahn press conference held on the 20th floor of the St. Regis — where the ballroom is so vast that the WiFi signal is spotty at best. Here's the best reconstruction we could type on the train ride home. (Just a warning: quotes are not quite transcipt-accurate either. For a precise recap, check out the Webcast of the press conference here.)

3:28 p.m. A steady stream of suits are piling into the St. Regis on 55th St., where a pair of satellite trucks are parked and cameramen are already shooting sidewalk b-roll in preparation of the evening news.

Upstairs, it's a sea of ibankers, analysts and miscellaneous financial types with seemingly only a smattering of actual press at this press conference, plus the TV cameras in the back. I sit down next to an open-collared analyst who might be the only man in the place (and out of several hundred attendees present, the crowd might still be 90% men) not wearing a jacket. But he's already too engrossed in the press release and full Lazard report we were handed on the way in. He's on the phone to the office, scribbling and circling figures and no doubt someone is massaging a spreadsheet on the other end.

Icahn walks by and glad-hands Ken Auletta (speak of the devil) who happens to be sitting two rows in front of me and two seats away from Michael Wolff (they're separated by another man I can't recognize from behind). Icahn (who will be played in the movie by Mel Brooks) looks like a man running for office, which he is, and these are no doubt his constituents.

He walks to the table at the front of the room, where he's seated on the far right. Frank Biondi, the former Viacom CEO he's tabbed as his replacement CEO for Dick Parsons, is on the far left. And seated in the middle — perhaps reflecting his centrality to this deal, and the fact that he's the host of this conference — is Bruce Wasserstein, who in the last week has had to oversee the creation of this report, grieve over the death of his sister, Wendy Wasserstein, and become the guardian of her effectively orphaned child. (Absolutely not in that order, of course.)

The press conference after the jump...

continued...

Yesterday was a big, big day for Newsweek (and, I think, a lot of us) and today is a big, big day for reflection about "what it all means." I'll skip over the mewling from the networks (Miles O'Brien, I'll listen to you when you learn to pronounce Kyrgystan) in favor of a few good ones, including Jack Shafer on Slate and Ken Layne on Sploid. ("Sploid?" "Sploid.")

Layne's latest shift memo is as thorough a rundown as you'll find of the timeline of the incident - going back to 2003 when allegations of Qu'ran-desecration-by-toilet at Gitmo was part of the public record.

(Oh, yes, today everyone seems to remember that these allegations aren't new.)

Layne, whose column ran yesterday evening and who ran both the Newsweek domestic and international edition of the Periscope item last week (and was one of the few to note that the international version actually had less inflammatory material than domestic!), lays out a mini-history of Imram Khan (including a disturbingly fetching photo) and how he came to incite the rioting, and then follows up to the natural conclusion of shit hitting the fan:

Nearly two weeks after Imran Khan got himself on all the teevee channels by angrily waving around the "Periscope" gossip page from Newsweek, the magazine's editors heard from Important People in D.C. It was time for a public humiliation. The editors balked a bit, obviously, because there was nothing wrong with their report. It was as factual as anything can be without photographs. The Pentagon didn't even bother disputing it when called for confirmation before that item was published.

So Newsweek came out with a lame yet honest non-retraction last night, and then the White House went public with the pressure, and this evening the Warlords of Washington got what they really wanted: total retraction, sackcloth & ashes, etc. This will "save face" with the Pakis and the Afghans and -- crucially -- the Saudis. And it has the nice extra bonus system of chopping another deep notch in the "Mainstream Media," just to make sure the rest of the limp corporate mags and papers will make sure to get permission to print anything about this country's many wonderful wars.

He notes both Scott McLellan's comment that the retraction was "a good first step" and Donald Rumsfeld's kinda ominous comment that "People need to be very careful about what they say, just as they need to be careful about what they do" (with shades of Ari Fleischer's post-911 free speech caveat). He also notes that the White House is just a phone call away from the Graham family, which owns The Washington Post...and Newsweek.

Over at Slate, Shafer also notes the long shadow of Gitmo abuses, and that "Newsweek's initial reluctance to climb down is understandable" based on said shadow, and the fact that the Michael Isikoff is hardly some green cub reporter (and is no stranger to breaking scandalous information).

But Shafer notes that taking a single anonymous source and subsequent Pentagon non-denial as a green light is a no-no, and further notes Newsweek's "third blunder": "It let its anonymous source predict the contents of a future government document, a journalistic no-no as far as I'm concerned." Shafer passes on age-old wisdom from his former lawyer who cautioned against quoting into the future, lest they be in for "a world of legal hurt."

But even so, there's blundering and then there's the "guns don't kill people; faraway news editors who published mini-news briefs two weeks ago kill people" argument, which Shafer says is just plain wrong:

Are the riots and the deaths the magazine's fault? I say no, whether Newsweek got the story right or wrong. If Al Jazeera published the most inflammatory story it could find -- or make up -- about the pope or the Virgin Mary, would we blame the satellite station if Rome rioted or the Romans?

And this: The killing of innocents is the greatest desecration.

The Shift Memo Has Been Horribly Desecrated [Sploid]
Down the Toilet at Newsweek [Slate]

continued...

We've established that at least one editor at Esquire isn't a jackass, but that doesn't mean there isn't another one somewhere in the Hearst building who is. The Sam Lipsyte lovefest continues with Home Land as the "Big Important Book of the Month" (p. 60). "It makes David Sedaris seem a little lightweight," says Esquire. Or, as we'd prefer to paraphrase it, "It makes [our ex-contributor who left for our competitor, GQ] seem a little lightweight."