Rebuilding Media

This article was originally published by Campus Progress, an online magazine for the Center for American Progress.

In the face of a rapidly changing industry, two books offer bold visions of what the future of media could look like.

The final edition of The Ann Arbor News, which ceased operation last year after almost 200 years in print. (Flickr/banlon1964)

There can be no denying that the state of the news media today is a full-blown crisis. Newspapers, now working with a broken economic model, are clearing out newsrooms with layoffs at a rapid rate, closing foreign andWashington bureaus, and spending less on investigative reporting. Cable news is dominated by Fox News Channel whose viewers are shown to be grossly misinformed while most TV channels focus on horserace political coverage (often with the help of corporate lobbyists serving as analysts) andtrivial entertainment issues. Freelancers are paid less than ever—if at all—and prospective young journalists attending college and graduate school, while not abandoning the craft, are facing a frightening landscape to carve out careers in the field.

Often books about the state of media focus on how to tweak the economic model to save media we have. Two recently published books, however, look at ways to create media that is focused not on making journalism profitable again, but rather, on making journalism the valuable civic tool that is required for a functioning democracy.

Robert McChesney and John Nichols in The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again make the case for significant public intervention in the industry, which they argue can sustain wide-ranging, editorially independent outlets focused on producing quality journalism, not on making a profit. Meanwhile, Jessica Clark and Tracy Van Slyke, in Beyond the Echo Chamber: Reshaping Politics through Networked Progressive Media, focus on sustaining and improving upon what has been a rare media bright spot in recent years: The rise of a community of progressive media outlets that have shown a remarkable ability at bringing like-minded activists and writers together to make change. While each book has a different focus, both offer bold ideas as to how media can thrive.

Read the rest here.

Iran v Honduras: the Times' Selective Promotion of Democracy

Published at EXTRA!, the monthly magazine for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.

By Michael Corcoran and Stephen Maher

When the results of the June 13 Iranian elections were decried as fraudulent (charges that were later backed up by a detailed study by Chatham House--6/21/09), U.S. media instantly became the champions of the oppressed Iranians who took to the streets in protest. Cries of righteous solidarity echoed from virtually all mainstream editorial outlets, and the large demonstrations were front-page news on every newspaper in the country each day.

The Islamic regime's harsh suppression of demonstrations was rightfully the focus of prolific news coverage and vigorous editorial discussion. As the pages of the New York Times informed Americans, a "genuine democratic movement...including women, young people, intellectuals and members of the moderate clerical establishment," had "united" in "resistance" against Iran's clerics (6/14/09), who used "overwhelming force to crush the demonstrations" (6/16/09), and against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (6/14/09), "an intensely divisive figure here and abroad."

"Death to the dictator," the protesters were quoted as crying, after Ahmadinejad's victory "provoked deep suspicion" given Iran's tendency towards "vote-rigging" which had "often been raised." Indeed, the Times (6/15/09)editorialized , "given the government's even more than usually thuggish reaction, it certainly looks like fraud."

By contrast, about two weeks later, demonstrators in Honduras who took to the streets to demand the reinstatement of the democratically elected president who had been violently abducted by soldiers that were armed, trained and advised by the United States received no such media support or attention. Hardly a mention that hundreds of protesters--two of whom were killed and 60 injured, according to the Chinese press agency Xinhua (6/30/09)--were confronting tanks and droves of armed forces in the Honduran capital could be found in mainstream news outlets or editorial pages.

The New York Times (6/29/09) framed its reporting on events in Honduras much differently: President Manuel Zelaya, "a leftist aligned with President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela,"was ousted by the U.S.-backed Honduran military, which was "acting to defend the law" after "months of tensions over [Zelaya's] efforts to lift presidential term limits"--efforts that "critics said [were] part of an illegal attempt by Mr. Zelaya to defy the constitution's limit of a single four-year term for the president."

This portrait of events laid out by Times reporters and opinion writers has been wildly inaccurate and misleading.

Read the rest here.

William Kristol to join the NYT

So there you have it. If you want to get a job as a columnist for the New York Times, just make sure you are a radical hawk and have been egregiously wrong about the most important issue of our time.

This is simply astonishing.

The Media and the IAEA Report Cont.

A recent post by Farideh Farhi at Informed Comment: Global Affairs (which includes Juan Cole) touches on a recent post I made about the media's coverage of the latest IAEA report regarding Iran's nuclear program. (An earlier post is here).

Referencing the New York Times coverage of the report, which framed it to sound like it the was a harsh condemnation of Iranian cooperation with the agency, I wrote:

Now the the White House and Israel have, unsurprisingly, dismissed the report. But the Times' take on the report seems very much to ignore realities that are detrimental to the US and its allies. This is of course, nothing new.

Farhi (along with the Asia Times) noticed this as well.

It is always interesting to read the actual text of reports issued by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) regarding Iran not only because of what they reveal about Iran's program, but also because of the interestingly partial way various news organizations and governments end up interpreting or representing the report to audiences they are sure will not read the reports themselves

... it is also interesting and quite revealing to see how the report itself is reported. In Iran, the statements about non-diversion and consistency with the Agency's findings are trumpeted by government officials as an affirmation of Iran's righteousness. The United States government, on the other hand, has found the report inadequate and in fact has immediately called for a Security Council meeting to discuss a new round of sanctions (a meeting China reportedly initially refused to attend but has now reluctantly agreed to do so after Thanksgiving.

These are expected governmental positions. Perhaps also not too unexpectedly, the American newspapers and news agencies also do seem a bit too willing to tow the U.S. government line. The New York Times, in a piece entitled "Report Raises New Doubts on Iran's Nuclear Program," reports that the Agency "said in a report on Thursday that Iran had made new but incomplete disclosures about its past nuclear activities, missing a critical deadline under an agreement with the agency and virtually assuring a new push by the United States to impose stricter international sanctions." No where in text of this piece, however, there is anything about what these "new doubts" are or where exactly the report has said that a critical deadline has been passed. Also not referred to are the explicit statements about non-diversion of nuclear material and consistency with the Agency's findings.

Again, sadly, this coverage is entirely predictable. In the realm of international affairs, the Times' virtually always advances the agenda of the most hawkish elements of the US empire. This is true of Vietnam, Iraq, and just about every other major war that the US has been involved in. (I say "major war" because smaller operations -- including grotesque massacres that take place with US complicity or approval, and numerous coup attempts -- are typically given no substantive coverage at all. The Times' essentially takes the words of usually unnamed "US officials" as gospel, and dismisses ignores or spins news that is inconsistent with the world view of US war makers.

Matters such as global world opinion or international law, which often hurt the US rationale for war, are ignored. In fact, as I have noted before, deputy foreign editor Ethan Bronner has told Asharq Al-Awsat, an English-language Arabic newspaper based in London, “we stay away from assertions of legality on most international issues, because law is less clear about international affairs than about national affairs."

For more on this, I would suggest Manufacturing Consent by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. This book -- which I would argue is the most important analysis of the role of the media in the US -- documents systematic bias in the media in grueling detail, by doing case studies. (The first chapter is available at Third World Traveller for free).

Local Papers, National Issues

There is an interesting item up at Romanesko right now. The editorial page editor of the Minneapolis Star Tribune is leaving because her and the publisher disagree on the role of the editorial page. In a letter to the staff, publisher Chris Harte writes:

We have a professional disagreement about the role of the editorial pages and how they should be edited. The main shift I want to see is toward even more locally focused editorial pages.

I believe the role of a metro newspaper is changing radically and rapidly in a world of instant global access to information. I see the need for our editorial pages, like the rest of the newspaper, to concentrate more heavily than ever on local, state and regional issues. This is where we can stake a claim like no other media can.

Our readers can go to many places to get informed opinion on the Iraq war or global warming. But there are very few places they can go for expert opinion on local issues. And that is where I want us to dwell, with the active participation of our readers.

Harte's view here is a common one. Local papers want to cover local news, and indeed that makes perfect sense. But I do think there is a serious argument that rarely gets enough attention, for having local papers comment on national and international issues.

If all local papers leave larger issues alone, then the opinion commentary from newspapers comes from few too places: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal etc ...

And this is a problem. National issues have local implication. Global warming and the War in Iraq effect people everywhere. And it is not healthy for a country to have just the papers in New York and Washington opine on whether or not a country should go to war.

For an obvious example of this, we can go back and look to see how newspaper editorial pages around the country reacted to Powell's speech in Feb. 2003. You will notice that the editorials from most of the major papers had similar sentiments. To find opinions that countered this, you needed to look elsewhere.

The Washington Post editorial board called Powell's speech "irrefutable." The New York Times wrote: "Mr. Powell's most convincing evidence was of efforts by Iraq to shield chemical or biological weapons programs from United Nations inspectors " and that it was "all the more convincing because he dispensed with apocalyptic invocations of a struggle of good and evil and focused on shaping a sober, factual case against Mr. Hussein's regime." USA Today called it “new and forceful evidence” of Iraq’s weapons programs and terrorism links. The LA Times bought the claims as well, and the editorial page editor later said "I do wish we'd been more skeptical of Powell's WMD claims before the UN." The Wall Street Journal and the Chicago Tribune were, likewise, utterly convinced in the merits of Powell's speech.

“If and when the administration gets editorial support from the elite media, it’s just about a done deal, because the public will fall in line,” said David Domke a professor of communication at the University of Washington in Seattle.

So clearly, given the near monolithic voices that major editorial pages have had on the major issues of our time, there is a real case for encouraging local dailies in smaller cities to step up and say what the big papers will not.

On the Times, Human Rights Watch and Israel

Originally published at OpedNews

For the second time in 13 months Human Rights Watch (HRW) has released a substantive, in-depth report that faults Israel for various violations of international law that created massive civilian casualties in last summer’s invasion of Lebanon. And for the second time in 13 months the New York Times has barely noticed.

The report (“Why They Died: Civilian Casualties in Lebanon during the 2006 War”) released September 6, reported that ” the conflict resulted in at least 1,109 Lebanese deaths, the vast majority of whom were civilians, 4,399 injured, and an estimated 1 million displaced ” and placed blame for the high civilian casualty count “squarely with Israeli policies.”

Human Rights Watch concluded that “the primary reason for the high Lebanese civilian death toll was Israel’s frequent failure to abide by a fundamental obligation of the laws of war” and that “Israel conducted the war with reckless indifference to the fate of Lebanese civilians.” It also stated, contrary to the repeated claims by the Israeli government, that “Hezbollah’s practices does not support the Israeli contention that Hezbollah violations were the principal cause of Lebanese civilian casualties.”

One might hope that such searing account of war crimes committed by a US ally that receives massive military aid from the United States, would be worthy of serious analysis from the paper of record. But to the contrary, the Times barely covered the story and only dedicated 139 words to the issue, all taken from a much longer AP article, and buried it on page A12.

When I asked Human Rights Watch Executive Director Ken Roth what he thought of the Times’ meager coverage he said: “[T]he Times is ordinarily one of the most conscientious about publishing on HRW’s major reports. Israel is an exception, not the rule.”

And indeed this isn’t a new phenomenon. Last summer when HRW released a report that had similar conclusions in the middle of the conflict (Aug 3 2006, “Fatal Strikes: Israel’s Indiscriminate Attacks Against Civilians in Lebanon”) the Times did not even dedicate an entire article to the report and instead buried a mere 121 words 16 paragraphs deep into a story called “Civilians Lose As Fighters Slip Into Fog of War.”

The Times also gave no coverage to a July 20, 2006 report from B’Tselem (Israeli Soldiers use civilians as Human Shields in Beit Hanun) indicating “that, during an incursion by Israeli forces into Beit Hanun, in the northern Gaza Strip, on 17 July 2006, soldiers seized control of two buildings in the town and used residents as human shield.” So even as the Israeli government was accusing Hezbollah of using civilians as human shields, the Times ignored reports which showed that Israel was doing just that in the occupied territories.

But as Roth rightly notes, the Times does report substantively on other human rights reports that are not critical of Israel. For example, when the American Jewish Congress published a report by the Center for Special Studies, chaired by Efraim Halevy, former Head of the Israeli Mossad and other former Israeli intelligence officials, the Times devoted a front page story with 42 paragraphs and 1500 words to the report. That is more than 10 times the amount of words used to cover HRW’s “Fatal Strikes” report and 12 times as many as last week’s “Why they Died” report.

Moreover, just last week Human Rights Watch released a report (“Civilians under Assault: Hezbollah’s Rocket Attacks on Israel in the 2006 War”) which faulted Hezbollah for violations of International Law during the same conflict. Despite the fact that Hezbollah was only deemed complicit in 43 civilian deaths, the Times dedicated more than five times the amount of words to that report, as they did on the more recent one, which outlines far more egregious and rampant violations of international law. “[W]hile HRW’s report on Hezbollah become more newsworthy than usual because Hezbollah effectively shut down our press conference in Beirut to release it, the report on Israel was much more analytically interesting,” said Roth of the disproportionate coverage. “That is to say it was a much more complex task to determine why Lebanese civilians died than Israeli civilians, so judging by the reports standing alone and not the parties’ reactions to them, the one on Israel deserved more prominent play. “

It is true that a recent diplomatic controversy where Syria accused Israel of flying over its airspace did eat of some of the news hole. But that is true for all media outlets that cover foreign affairs, yet, to give just some examples of many, Haaretz, the Daily Star, the Guardian, the Toronto Star, the Globe and Mail, the Washington Post and the Independent all gave substantially more coverage to the HRW report than did the Times.

“Other newspapers managed to deal with the two stories, but the Times didn’t in any meaningful way,” said Roth.

“I think its part of a patter that overall is fairly pervasive in the US mass media in general and certainly in the A section of the New York Times,” said media critic Norman Solomon reached by phone. ““What we need is for the media to have a single standard on covering human rights and international law.”

But, as the Times’ deputy foreign editor Ethan Bronner told Asharq Al-Awsat, an English-language Arabic newspaper based in London, “we stay away from assertions of legality on most international issues, because law is less clear about international affairs than about national affairs."

This trend is not relegated to Times’ international section, either. As Richard Falk and Howard Friel note in their book, Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East the editorial page has completely ignored Human Rights Reports that have been critical of Israel. “[T]he New York Times editorial page in its coverage of the Lebanon war from July 12, to August 31, 2006, never mentioned Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International [who released a report accusing Israel of violating international law on Aug 23, 2006] despite numerous press releases and reports by these two organizations.”

The Times inattention to this HRW report is not the first time that important intuitions have ignored or downplayed information in matters of war and peace. The atrocious reporting leading up to the War in Iraq—which the Times later apologized for—fits a pattern as well. As case studies have shown again and again, the reporting of information that reflects poorly on the US and its allies—not just Israel—is fairly rare; while information that reflects poorly on nations with poor relations with the US garners massive media attention, and, by extension, a place in the national dialogue. And seen in this light, says MIT professor Noam Chomsky who was reached by e-mail, “you’ll find that Israel is the rule and not the exception.”

A vibrant press is essential for any functioning democracy. When the media fails to report adequately on important matters, democracy is weakened. And given the United States close relationship with Israel—the US provides Israel around $3 billion in direct US aid annually—readers of the Times deserve to know what is happening with the weapons their tax dollars help pay for, especially when they have been landing on innocent civilians.

Murdoch Video

I have been too depressed to really write about this Murdoch sale -- which I had already come to see as inevitable. But this video from the good people at Free Press is worth watching.

The Demise of World News

Jill Carroll of the Christian Science Monitor (best known for being kidnapped in 2006) has a working paper at the Shorenstein Center that everyone interested in either global affairs of the newspaper industry should read. It is titled Foreign News Coverage: The US Media's Undervalued Asset.

She writes:

Media companies are cutting back on the numbers of foreign bureaus and correspondents as the newspaper and television news business face financial pressures. But they are making a financial miscalculation and missing an opportunity to capitalize on an asset that they appear to undervalue.

Good quality foreign news coverage is in fact in demand by readers and viewers. It adds significant value to a medium, but in ways that can’t always be directly measured by net profits. Higher quality employees, greater credibility and exclusive stories are all a result of having one’s own staff providing good quality foreign news coverage. These benefits strengthen the medium as an organization and when factored into a cost-benefit calculation, the costs associated with producing good quality foreign news coverage begin to seem like a bargain.

I plan on giving a more in-depth analysis of this trend and its consequences and a more thorough look at Carroll's paper, but for this week I am simply going to point readers in the direction of outlets once can go to in order to find foreign coverage. Here are five places, and and throughout the week I will add more.

The Christian Science Monitor

It is only fitting to start with Carrol's paper. The Monitor was founded in 1908 and is not a religious paper, though they have one religious article each issue. It is released Monday –Friday and is based in Boston. It has many foreign bureaus and is entirely dedicated to US and world news. It suffers little of the sensationalism of other papers and has s unique style that focuses on individuals to help readers understand the consequences of larger issues.

Featured article: Jill Carrol’s 11 part account of her capture.

Notable Contributors: Jill Carroll, Gail Russell

Blogs: None

Council on Foreign Relations

This is what one might call the establishment place for US-centric foreign analysis. It's Foreign Affairs is the major element but its website is updated daily and has lots of information. Of course, this source needs to be understood for what it is: it views foreign policy from the lens of the United States. It is typically on critical of the US for strategic blunders, or engaging in policy that will jeopardize its geopolitical power. Still, this viewpoint can be very beneficial even for those, like me, who do not view foreign relations with this in mind. For example, its post-9-11 article called Grand Imperial Strategy, gives a hard look at the US plans for a permanent superpower. It does not do so in order to criticize it for being imperial, immoral insanity -- it merely calculates the plan to create a permanent hyper superpower in light of the end of the cold war and 9-11. It is especially valuable if one is looking for this kind of dry geopolitical analysis, and to know what the foreign policy establishment is thinking.

Featured Article: America’s Imperial Ambition

Notable Contributors: Some fellows include, Vali Nasr, Peter Beinart

Blogs: None

Foreign Policy Magazine

This is funded by an endowment from Carnegie. It is published bi-monthly. Much of it is behind a pay wall, but its blog, Passport is updated daily.

I find there views to be lacking in several ways. One, it takes its red-faced US exceptional ism to absurd heights. It simply cannot be trusted to give a measured look at countries that are viewed as enemies: Venezuela, Iran etc.... But, despite its flaws, it is narrowly focused on Foreign Policy.

Featured Article: How to Save Iraqi Kurdistan From Itself

Notable Contributers: Christopher Hitchens, Blake Hounsell, Mike Boyer

Blogs: Passport


IraqSlogger

This web site is without a doubt the best Iraq related site around. It is updated constantly and covers everything from major sectarian strife to stories that are barely covered elsewhere: in short, if it happens in Iraq, IraqSlogger will report it. Their access to information is so good that they even offer a premium service to those in Iraq to help them know what areas are safe. It is called Iraq Safety Net and it is “targeted to meet the urgent need in Iraq for useful safety-related information, insightful advice, news, and independent analysis.”

Perhaps the best feature is their daily overview of the Iraq coverage in the US and in Iraqi newspapers. The summary of the Iraqi papers is a huge benefit since many of the Iraqi papers are in Arabic only.

Featured Article. Mentally Handicapped Children Used in Attacks

Notable Contributers: Robert Young Pelton, Nir Rosen, Zeyad, Amer Mohsen,

Blog: (the whole site is in a blog format)

Haaretz

This is the “Paper of Record” of Israel, and gives in-depth insight into the affairs in the Middle East. It has a liberal secular editorial page and is not afraid to criticize the hardline policies of the Israeli government -- though they do support free trade and privatization. One interesting feature is Rosner’s blog which highlights relevant US articles about Israel.

Featured Article: IDF chief: We must make draft dodgers 'blush with shame'

Notable Contributers: Gideon Levy, Yoel Marcus, Aluf Benn

Blogs: Rosner’s Blog

Part II: Broadcast

Corrections

Norman Solomon writes an excellent piece outlining corrections he would like to see in the newspapers. Here are a few choice examples.

“Last week, The Daily Bugle reported on the history of human rights violations in Latin America without noting the pivotal roles played by the U.S. government in supporting despotic regimes during the 20th century. Such selective reporting had the effect of airbrushing significant aspects of the historical record.”

[...]

“For nearly five years, The Daily Bugle has frequently printed the headline ‘Deaths in Iraq’ over the latest listing of confirmed American deaths in Iraq. This headline has been insidiously misleading because it propagates the attitude that the only ‘deaths in Iraq’ worth reporting by name are the deaths of Americans. Such tacit jingoism and nationalistic narcissism have no place in quality news reporting. The Daily Bugle regrets its participation in this repetition compulsion disorder of American journalism."

[...]

“For more than five years, readers of this newspaper have encountered — without attribution — frequent references to ‘the war on terrorism’ and ‘the war on terror.’ While avidly used by architects and supporters of the U.S. government’s military actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere, such phrases are based on assumptions that could be substantively and effectively refuted. The Daily Bugle regrets that its news pages have relentlessly promoted such official buzzwords as though they were objective realities instead of terms devised to manipulate the public for endless war.”

Murdoch & The WSJ Editorial Page

Bylines on the editorial page?

The American Prospect's Dana Goldstein (who, for purposes of transparency has served as an editor of mine on some of my work for Campus Progress) applauds the Chicago Sun Times decision to put bylines on editorials.

"In another good move, the Sun-Times will begin publishing signed editorials, so readers know which member of the board wrote each piece. The New York Times website now provides a meet-the-editorial board page with detailed descriptions of each member's area of expertise. You can play a fun guessing game identifying which author wrote any given editorial. So why not go all the way and include a byline?"

Alex Massie disagrees.

Clearly, Ms Goldstein can't have written many newspaper editorials. If she had, she would know that it's rather unfair to make individual leader writers put their names to editorials they've written but do not necessarily agree with. This is not, despite what you may think, a rare phenomenon. Even when one is fortunate enough to write a leader relatively free from interference it's rare for it to express the editorial writer's own opinions. Then again, it's not supposed to. You're not speaking or writing for yourself.

The reason for unsigned editorials is that they're supposed to have institutional heft - something that's diluted if you slap a byline on them. Then they'd be just another opinion. Now, of course, in one respect they are just another opinion, but editorial writers have a fine conceit that they're that little bit above the common herd of opinion. Plus, as the old line puts it, someone has to come down from the hills after the battle to stab the wounded. A job best done anonymously, frankly.

Interesting debate, but I side with Massie here. Maybe it is because I spent 6 months interning at the Globe editorial page, or maybe it is because I had to write unsigned editorials while in college, but my (limited) experience tells me that the staff editorial is often a huge compromise.

(I recall my editor in college rejecting my splendid idea of condemning Columbus Day in an editorial -- citing that nobody would care -- only to allow another member of the editorial board to draft an editorial condemning the penny. Oh, the fickle sociology of the newspaper business.)

There are indeed times when you may want to push an editorial to 11, and the editor tells to to bring it down to a 7. Editorials are the fruits of a collective conversation between an editorial board, and moreover, the editorial page editors have veto power. By adding bylines you do one of two things: 1) you force the writer to sign his name to something that is not fully his, and in fact may misrepresent the extent of his views or 2) if you allow the editorial writer to simply write his own piece you take away the purpose of the collective thought process, and in essence, are just having shorter op-eds.

Under such logic you may as well simply do away with the editorial page all together, and simply add another page of op-eds, which has been suggested by Timothy Noah in Slate in 2005, and again by Eric Alterman in the Nation in 2006. While I typically find the op-ed page to be more edifying, I still would not be willing to do away with the staff editorial, which can, especially on matters of local news, carry some real weight.

Goldstein is right when she says an astute reader can look at the editorial board profiles and deduce who wrote the editorial, and in fact, the Globe has a similar profile section as the Times. So indeed that may tell you, with a fair degree of accuracy, who wrote the editorial. But it does not put you into the morning editorial meeting and let you know how much of that piece of writing represents the person that wrote it, or how much that viewpoint represents a compromised view that took in the input of the rest of the editorial board.

I think signed editorials are best used sparingly, for special matters -- a member of the editorial board travels somewhere, and writes from abroad, for example -- but to sign them all, to me defeats the idea of having that page in the first place.

The Murdoch Sale

So the nightmare is becoming a reality, and within a week -- barring some late and unlikely development -- Rupert Murdoch will own the Wall Street Journal. Here is hoping a good portion of Journal's more than 2 million subscribers start reading the Financial Times instead (which, I would argue, is the better of two good newspapers without even considering the Murdoch Factor).

Some thoughts from media critics around the web:

"So Murdoch is on the threshold of getting the Journal, here. This is bad news for everyone in the world who is not related to, or a well-paid employee of, Rupert Murdoch."
---Eric Alterman -- Media Matters

"I don't mean to be too nostalgic. Obviously the news business is falling apart, and we're going to witness all kinds of unimaginable events before someone figures out how to put together a new, very different model ... this is a sad day for journalism. At the very least, if managing editor Marcus Brauchli has any tough stories on China in the can, he'd better run them in the next day or two."
---Dan Kennedy -- Media Nation


“Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of the Wall Street Journal may not be illegal, but it’s certainly wrong. The cost of giving one company — and one man — this much media power is simply too high.”
-- Robert McChesney -- Free Press

"Well, it appears almost wrapped up. Rupert took his position, offered his price, and alternated between petulance and bonhomie in playing the DJ board and Bancrofts like the fine fiddler he is."
--- Ken Doctor -- Content Bridges

Bailey on the WSJ & Murdoch

Today's column by Steve Bailey, Just say no to Rupert Murdoch , is a reminder how fortunate Boston is to have him on the the business section front twice a week. As some may recall, there were rumors that he would leave in the latest round of buyouts. Thankfully, they turned out to be false.

Today, Bailey does not go after Murdoch so much, as he does the Bancroft family (which has New England ties, by the way) for even considering selling the WSJ to Murdoch.

"Now Murdoch, at 76, wants to buy what he has not been able to build in a lifetime. His $5 billion bid is a rich premium for Dow Jones & Co., owner of the Journal, which has made more than its share of management missteps over the years. But the Bancrofts need to ask themselves: Do they really want to be the generation that sells the Journal to a man whose contribution to American journalism is the New York Post and Fox News? Because that is who they will forever be. And they will be poorer, not richer, for it.

[...]

The Bancrofts are about to make a pact with the devil. Over the past couple of days The New York Times has spelled out in detail how Murdoch uses his media reach to promote his vast business interests, whether in Washington or in China. Fat book contracts for congressmen. Another one for Deng Xiaoping's daughter, and a sensitivity to the Beijing government that has made him "the Chinese leadership's favorite media baron," as the Times put it.

[...]


The Bancrofts of Boston still have time to do something really unusual, even heroic, by just telling Rupert no.

Indeed, the Bancrofts could do the world of journalism of big favor -- or at least spare it a huge indignity -- by simply hanging on to their newspaper and their legacy. But I am not optimistic.

The Newspaper Question

Here is an article that tries to debunk the conventional wisdom that newspapers need to stop investing in the print product.

Newspapers are declining (for lots of reasons), the websites of newspapers are growing (slowly, if at all). Newspapers sure have some problems to tackle. But a business strategy that puts your web presence first is one that ignores which of those products reaches the most people. Print may be fast asleep. But it's not even close to being dead.

Some official statistics make the internet audience for newspapers seem very large indeed. Much larger than they actually are. And we print folk fall for it. We hear numbers with the word million in them and we didn't want to question it. But we have to now. Because this is the fuel that feeds the ideas of newspaper managements across the globe and makes them leap over the revenue precipice. And frankly, the numbers for print and web are tough to compare accurately like for like.

[...]

He goes on to make the case that newspapers need to invest more money into the print product, and not merely the web. This is an interesting take on it. I am very optimistic about the what the web will mean (and what it already does mean) in terms of providing information, but he is right about one thing.

Newspapers facing a a tough road in a transitional period have reacted in the worst way possible: they have made their product worse. If you read Romenesko (which, by the way, is a site I could not live without) you see it everyday; newsroom positions are being cut, sometimes swiftly and drastically; Washington bureaus and foreign bureaus are being scrapped all together; so are book reviews and news analysis sections; the newspapers are getting thinner and more reliant on wire copy and correspondent copy -- hell even interns are getting the shaft in a big way.

Now publishers are making the case that these changes are painful, but needed for survival -- when if fact, they will only accelerate and ensure their demise. The industry did not have to respond this way. The could have improved the product, made bold changes, and thought about the long term. Instead they have only given readers another reason to stop reading, and many have taken them up on the offer.

The problem, of course, is that many newspapers are part of publicly traded companies, and are answering to their shareholders, as they are legally obligated to do. This of course means that they will do anything to maximize profit and minimizing losses for the next quarter, as their shareholders demand. The long term health of the news industry and the role of a vibrant press in a democratic society do not seem to be too high of a priority for shareholders. It doesn't help matters that the newspapers used to be a hugely profitable industry, bringing in around 20 percent annual growth (much higher than most industries) , so investors are not just reacting to losses, but also in slowed growth -- which is simply a reality that must be dealt with. No industry can sustain this growth forever.

The truth is, many people are done with newspapers because they find them to be less valuable then they once were. The internet as a competitor is a huge factor, but it isn't what is killing the newspaper alone. Outside the US, the newspaper business is booming.

There are exciting possibilities about how to save - and improve - the newspaper that are not even entertained because of the financial structure that they exist in. (I will get into them in a future post, but this article by John Nichols, Newspapers and After , highlights some of them.)

I still have doubts about the longterm future of the newspapers as we know it. It really does not make a whole lot of sense to waste the paper, the trees, the gas and so forth, when one could simply get it online. But no matter, the country needs quality journalism now, as they will in the future -- whether in print or otherwise -- and cutting reporters and weakening coverage is making good journalism, harder and harder to find. Yes, they are investing on the web, but more on production, visuals and technology, and less on actual reporting.

When newspapers simply dismantle their product they are telling their audience (and those who could become a part of the audience) to go away. And if that trend persists it will be, more than anything, what ensures its death.

Murdoch and Dow Jones: will this thing die already

I had been hoping that the headlines Murdoch's effort's to buy Dow Jones would have been dead by now , but the media tycoon is still active. From today's Financial Times:

"The largest outside shareholder in Dow Jones has called on the Bancroft family to sell its controlling stake to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, saying the family had no plan in place to lift the company’s share price to the level offered by News Corp."

Slate is also staying on this issue.

UPDATE:Editor and Publisher reports

Last night's news that the Bancrofts were willing to meet with Murdoch after his repeated pleas in addition to the statement the company planned to explore strategic options gives Murdoch an advantage.

"I think a deal will get done," said Alexia Quadrani, an analyst with Bear Stearns. "It's too rich of an offer and the industry is just too challenged right now.

On the Washington Post editorial page

From The Nation

---

Critiquing the Post

by MICHAEL CORCORAN

[posted online on May 23, 2007]

Colbert King, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and former deputy editorial page editor of the Washington Post, recently expressed concerns about the Post's Fred Hiatt-led editorial page in a parting memo. The Post must "avoid resorting to sophomoric language when addressing serious matters...to preserve its unique standing in journalism," said King, who left the newspaper in late 2006.

King is right to speak of the Post's unique standing in journalism. As one of the nation's two establishment papers, the Washington Post and its editorial page serves, for better or worse, as an important player in American politics, with a unique responsibility to the public. As William Greider wrote in The Nation when lamenting the Post's jingoistic tone prior to the Iraq invasion: "Whether the newspaper gets things right or wrong, its version of reality will inevitably color everyone's political calculations."

In the run-up to the Iraq War, the Post editorial page was wrong on just about everything and failed to ask the right questions. It called Secretary of State Colin Powell's soon-to-be-discredited speech in front of the UN "irrefutable" and supported the Bush Administration's unilateralist policies to bring down Saddam Hussein, who the editors were convinced possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Surely, the Post was not alone in failing the public in 2002 and 2003. The New York Times was widely criticized for its prewar coverage, and even issued an apology for it in 2004.

The Post editorial page, however, seems to have learned little from its past misadventures. As America struggles to deal with a reckless President with dangerous views on executive power, the newspaper's editorials have taken oversimplified, often partisan positions on the most pressing issues of the day. The newspaper is failing to seriously inquire about the most important matters facing our democracy--issues that go well beyond the left-right paradigm.

Consider some Post editorials from the past year.

• The Post editorial page has consistently opposed efforts by Democrats to bring US troops home from Iraq and in doing so has made many baseless claims. An editorial on March 13, for example, addressed the House supplemental bill: "The only constituency House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ignored in her plan...are the people of the country that US troops are fighting to stabilize." But the editorial willfully ignored that 71 percent of Iraqis want US troops to withdraw within a year, and 78 percent feel that the US presence is "provoking more conflict than it is preventing," according to a 2006 World Public Opinion poll.

• When Pelosi traveled to Syria in April, the Post characterized it as Pelosi's attempt to "establish a shadow presidency" that was "counterproductive" and "foolish." But while the editorial challenged the actions of the speaker, it did not even address the consequences of the President's refusals to speak with the nation's perceived enemies. Nor did the editorial mention that the Iraq Study Group recommended engaging in diplomatic relations with Syria and Iran. Rather than ponder these complexities, the Post resorted to a knee-jerk retort, and in doing so failed to recognize that Congress is an equal branch in the government.

• In the face of the scandal surrounding Alberto Gonzales and the eight fired prosecutors, the Post editorial board was more eager to deflect critical inquiry than engage in it. In late March the editors wrote: "Mr. Gonzales finds himself in this mess because he and others in his shop appear to have tried to cover up something that, as far as we yet know, didn't need covering." In an April 23 editorial they would only criticize the Attorney General for being "scarcely aware of the major personnel moves his department was about to make in the president's name." At no point did they address the lack of historical precedent for replacing federal attorneys in the middle of a term without serious cause, or approach the possibility that the firings were politically motivated. Compare that with the March 11 New York Times editorial, which in reaction to the scandal called Gonzales a "failed attorney General" and "consigliere to Mr. Bush's imperial presidency."

• While the Post editorial page acknowledged that the conviction of I. Lewis Libby on perjury charges was "grounded in strong evidence and what appeared to be careful deliberation by a jury," it also cast the affair as a "pointless Washington scandal" and refused to connect the dots regarding the war, saying that the conviction "tell[s] us nothing about the war in Iraq." The "sophomoric language" that King warned against was employed as well when the editors said of Joe Wilson: "the former ambassador will be remembered as a blowhard."

• In its 2006 endorsement of Joe Lieberman over the "neophyte primary opponent" Ned Lamont in the Connecticut Senate primary, the Post alleged that if the Democratic Party "hopes to accomplish anything" it would "need people such as Mr. Lieberman who bring some civility to an increasingly uncivil capital." Yet the Post failed to mention that Lieberman is himself quite divisive and vindictive. In 2005 he (now infamously) attacked opponents of the war, saying, "We undermine presidential credibility at our nation's peril." He once also baselessly accused Lamont of being "surrounded by people who are either naive or are isolationists or, frankly, some more explicitly against Israel." So it is fitting that Lieberman's latest attack on Iraq War critics was given a platform on the Post's op-ed page.

Other media outlets have failed in their roles as government watchdogs. However, given the Post's role as "the house organ for America's political class," as journalist Michael Massing called it, the lack of probing questions coming from its editorial page is especially distressing.

Outsourcing Local News (II)

As I noted recently, the outsourcing of local news coverage is an absurd idea. The great Barbara Ehrenreich gives her take here.

The world may be flat, as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman has written, but I always liked to think I was standing on a hill. Now comes the news that pasadenanow.com, a local news site, is recruiting reporters in India. The website’s editor points out that he can get two Indian reporters for a mere $20,800 a year – and no, they won’t be commuting from New Delhi. Since Pasadena’s city council meetings can be observed on the web, the Indian reporters will be able to cover local politics from half the planet away. And if they ever feel a need to see the potholes of Pasadena, there’s always Google Earth.

Excuse me, but isn’t this more or less what former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair was fired for – pretending to report from sites around the country while he was actually holed up in his Brooklyn apartment? Or will pasadenanow.com be honest enough to give its new reporters datelines in Delhi (or wherever they live)?

Outcourcing Local News?

It is bad enough that newspapers are using wire copy and cutting foreign bureaus, but this bit of news, per Dan Kennedy, is simply insane.

The Associated Press reports that the Web site Pasadena Now has decided to outsource coverage of the local city council to reporters in India. In a follow-up, the Los Angeles Times says that one of these distant journalists, based in Mumbai, will make $12,000 a year, while the other, in Bangalore, will make $7,200. They'll watch webcasts of the council meetings, consult relevant documents online and send their stories by e-mail. Who cares if they wouldn't know Pasadena from Rawalpindi?

Pasadena Now editor and publisher James Macpherson tells the Times: "A lot of the routine stuff we do can be done by really talented people in another time zone at much lower wages."

The Wall Street Journal: not a right-wing rag (yet)

Dan Kennedy nails it with his post from Friday about the Wall Street Journal. There is a tendency to dismiss the WSJ as a radical right-wing publication, which indeed can be said about its editorial page. But its news pages are among the best in the business.

From Kennedy's post.

One of the great myths of journalism is that the Wall Street Journal is a conservative paper. To be sure, its editorial page is the most relentlessly right-wing and conspiracy-obsessed in the country ...

But the Journal's news pages are run completely independently from the opinion operation, and are widely regarded as the pinnacle of careful reporting and graceful writing. Barney Kilgore, who virtually created the modern Journal, is even credited with inventing the "news feature," a form that we take for granted today.

As for politics, a 2005 UCLA study found the Journal's news operation to be more liberal than that of any major U.S. media outlet, including the New York Times.

I made a similar post when responding to Pat earlier this week.

Indeed, the Wall Street Journal Ed Page, can't get any worse--but that's not what I am worried about. The news pages of the WSJ are among the best in the country. The front page feature they run daily is often exceptional. To give this prized bastion of journalism to the man I most associate a lack of journalistic integrity is beyond scary ...

Kennedy, an astute media critic to be sure, says nothing to lessen my fear.

But why would Murdoch interfere with the Journal if he's successful in his bid to purchase the paper and its parent company, Dow Jones, for $5 billion? Doesn't he know that the Journal represents the gold standard in American journalism, and that he'd be crazy to mess with it?

Uh, get real. No, he might not drag its news coverage to the right, or turn it into a screaming tabloid like his New York Post. But the reason he's willing to pay so much for it is that he thinks he's smarter than its current owners, the Bancroft family. And, in fact, he probably is smarter than the Bancrofts, if by "smarter" you mean better at maximizing its economic potential. Why should he spend $5 billion just to leave it alone, especially if he is firmly convinced that he can make it better?

In an interview with the Times today, Murdoch makes it clear that he can't wait to start interfering with the Journal. He thinks the stories are too long. He thinks the news section should feature more political coverage. He would consider starting a Journal-branded weekend glossy magazine. He insists that he's not planning deep cuts, but adds, "I'm not saying it's going to be a holiday camp for everybody." Oh, no. You can be sure of that.

If Murdoch is successful, it would be a disaster. And, at this point, it looks like he stands a good chance of pulling this off.

The End of Dow Jones?

A sober assessment here from Dean Starkman.

Make no mistake: this is the end of Dow Jones. If it’s not the very end, it is certainly the beginning of the end. There is no way—no way—that the Bancroft family, which controls the majority of voting shares, can resist a $60 offer—a 67 percent premium to the recent market price of DJ shares. A 10 percent premium is considered respectable. Thirty percent is sky high. Sixty dollars is, well, “absolutely, insanely high,” says James H. Lowell II, who, until last fall, served as a financial adviser to the Bancroft trustees, as quoted in The New York Times ...

"Tuesday was a black day for journalism, and an even blacker one for financial journalism. When this is over, there will be no independent publisher of the nation’s foremost—really only—watchdog of the capital markets, corporate behavior, and regulators’ conduct. Who’s going to cover News Corp.?

UPDATE: "'It's out of the frying pan and into a thermonuclear blast,' said one Journal staffer. 'This was the worst-case scenario — other than being sold to Vladimir Putin.'"