The Ultimate Beat Sweetener: The 31 Year Old “Dismantling G.M.”

The New York Times had a piece up over the weekend about Brian Deese, a 31-year-old law school student (on break, apparently) who according to their headline is “in charge of dismantling G.M.”

This story caught on, as just about any section-front story from the NYT seems likely to do.  I’ve seen it linked copiously (and I’ve done it myself), and it’s currently the top e-mailed and blogged story in the business section at NYTimes.com.

But here’s my question: Can they prove their headline?

The story includes a quote from Steven Rattner, “one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force,” about Deese’s grad-school beard.  It has a quote from Larry Summers about his intelligence.  It cites “several people who were present for the debate” as saying that Deese spoke out against liquidation for Chrysler, and says he wrote a very persuasive memo about the bad that Chapter 7 could cause.  But the only one who seems to say that Deese was ever the guy in charge of the taskforce is Deese.  In fact, the White House doesn’t list Deese as a member of the Auto Task Force at all.  He’s listed as an economic adviser to the president at the White House Web site, but there’s no more formal designation that I can find.  So to say he’s running it is a pretty substantial leap.

And the Times seems to get that, but much further down in its story:

Every time Mr. Deese ran the numbers on G.M. and Chrysler, he came back with the now-obvious conclusion that neither was a viable business, and that their plans to revive themselves did not address the erosion of their revenues. But it took the support of Mr. Rattner and Ron Bloom, senior advisers to the task force charged with restructuring the automobile industry, to help turn Mr. Deese’s positions into policy.

Normally, I kind of enjoy mindless profiles of major Washington players — they’re what Matthew Yglesias calls beat-sweeteners, pieces journalists write both to inform the public and to make their own jobs easier.  But this one seems particularly damaging, as it implies that the administration is leaving some very big decisions in the hands of a guy whose total automotive industry experience is apparently sleeping in the parking lot of a G.M. plant on his way to volunteer for the Obama campaign.

I’m wondering whether I could get a few friendly quotes dropped into the paper and turn myself into the point girl on, say, Health Care or NASA or something.  Who wants to try?