Lean and mean.

• Author: Rundles, Jeff
• Position: Newspaper articles and news programs have lean and mean slant since outbreak of war in Iraq

LOOKING AT NEWSPAPERS AND BROADCAST NEWS PROGRAMS SINCE THE outbreak of the war with Iraq, I couldn't help but notice that there's a certain leanness to all of them.

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Lean from an advertising perspective, lean on page count, and definitely lean on news other than war news.

But maybe that's a good thing. After the exuberant 1990s, we could use a little "less is more" approach in just about every aspect of our lives.

The war coverage, interestingly enough, has included a ton of criticism of the Bush administration, and particularly Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, for a lean and mean approach to the war.

The arm-chair, retired generals, who seem to be all over the place, have suggested that we went to war with too few troops. As it is turning out, the pundits were wrong, and the lean and mean strategy of the administration is, perhaps, a metaphor for our times.

It doesn't always work, of course. The Colorado Department of Motor Vehicles, seeking, I suppose, to be leaner and meaner, has closed so many offices that, by some accounts, it can take up to four hours waiting in line to get a driver's license renewal or alteration. That is definitely a lean strategy, but I think the DMV misunderstood the definition of mean. I guess they are finding it out from their customers.

Then there's the just stupidly mean approach. I look on the happenings of the proposed convention center hotel downtown with a high degree of amazement. The Colorado Building Trades Council, fearing that the city (which is developing the project) would take a lean approach to costs, has threatened to call for a citywide vote on the hotel project, a deal-breaker if there ever was one. Oops. No jobs at all is about as lean as you can get.

That may also have been the reasoning behind the settlement of...