The Brutal Reality of “Getting Tough” on Illegal Immigrants

So, you say you want to get the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants out of the country.  All of them. They’re all lawbreakers and they shouldn’t be here.

How are you going to do that if an illegal doesn’t want to leave?  It’s not the same thing as arresting a domestic criminal and imprisoning them.  We have an infrastructure to facilitate that.  Deporting 11 million people is another thing.  How do you do this?  Literally drag them onto a plane accompanied by a bunch of federal officers, and shoot them full of powerful drugs so they’ll be compliant?

Turns out, that’s what we’ve been doing for years, according to the Washington Post’s Amy Goldstein and Dana Priest:

An analysis by The Post of the known sedations during fiscal 2007, ending last October, found that 67 people who got medical escorts had no documented psychiatric reason. Of the 67, psychiatric drugs were given to 53, 48 of whom had no documented history of violence, though some had managed to thwart an earlier attempt to deport them. These figures do not include two detainees who immigration officials said were given sedatives for behavioral rather than psychiatric reasons before being deported on group charter flights, which are often used to return people to Mexico and Central America.

Even some people who had been violent in the past proved peaceful the day they were sent home. “Dt calm at this time,” says the first entry, using shorthand for “detainee,” in the log for the January 2007 deportation of Yousif Nageib to his native Sudan. In requesting drugs for his deportation, an immigration officer had noted that Nageib, 40, had once fled to Canada to avoid an assault charge and had helped instigate a detainee uprising while in custody. But on the morning of his departure, the log says, he “is handcuffed and states he will do what we say.” Still, he was injected in his right buttock with a three-drug cocktail.

In one printout of Nageib’s medical log, next to the entry saying he was calm, is a handwritten asterisk. It was put there by Timothy T. Shack, then medical director of the immigration health division, as he reviewed last year’s sedation cases. Next to the asterisk, in his neat, looping handwriting, Shack placed a single word: “Problem.”

When he landed in Lagos, Nigeria, Afolabi Ade was unable to talk.

“Every time I tried to force myself to speak, I couldn’t, because my tongue was . . . twisted. . . . I thought I was going to swallow it,” Ade, 33, recalled in an interview. “I was nauseous. I was dizzy.”

As he was being flown back to Africa, his American wife alerted his parents there that he was on his way. His father was waiting at the Lagos airport. It was the first time in three years that they had seen one another. Shocked by how woozy the young man was, his father decided not to take him home and frighten the rest of the family. Instead, he checked his son into a hotel.

Ade was in the hotel for four days before the effects of the drugs began to abate.

Ade had no history of mental illness warranting the use of these drugs, nor of violence.  He was in the US as a student.  According to the post, he pleaded guilty to a felony after he was arrested in a car driven by his cousins where fraudulent checks were found.  At the hotel in Lagos, a family doctor wanted to treat him for his grogginess.  But US officials didn’t see fit to leave information about which drugs they had put in his system.

Ade’s pulse was dangerously low, and when he tried to walk around the hotel room, “he leaned on the wall,” (the doctor) said. “He was talking, but a slurred kind of speech.”

According to the Post’s research, the injection probably contained Haldol, which is used for schizophrenics when they are in acute psychotic states.  Of course, there was another notable use for Haldol.  It was the drug adminstered by the Soviet Union to the dissidents it housed in psychiatric prisons.

Read it all, because there’s much more, including this bit of black humor:  The federal government’s pitch to recruit the required medical escorts to keep the injections coming.

To recruit medical escorts, the government has sought to glamorize this work. “Do you ever dream of escaping to exotic, exciting locations?” said an item in an agency newsletter. “Want to get away from the office but are strapped for cash? Make your dreams come true by signing up as a Medical Escort for DIHS!”

That brings up the issue of cost.  We’re paying for ICE personnel and a medical escort to fly each one of the deportees back to their home country.  Which, for the violent or truly insane might be warranted.  But not for all 11 million, most of them working or enrolled in school.

Goldstein and Priest of done us a big favor, putting the flesh on the easy arguments of the immigration hardliners.  There are economic arguments on both sides, and reasonable people can come down on the side that says illegals undermine the wage structure.   What this story demonstrates is that the illegal immigration issue is two distinct problems, and we haven’t got a clue on what to do about the biggest part of it: What to do about the people here now; how to address them and keep our souls.

The Revolution Will Not Be Twitter-ized

The medium is the message.  Books and pamphlets gave us depth of thought and expression.  Newspapers gave us context, but also sensation.  Radio gave us intimacy.  Television gives us sensory overload and 30-second sound bytes.  The Internet gives us community and the ability to “drill down.” 

Twitter gives us spitballs. Exhibitionism and spitballs.  

Don’t feel sorry for Ezra Klein.  As the cops would say, he had no expectation of privacy. 

Besides, there is a huge constituency of Tim Russert-haters out there who will turn him into a martyr if NBC decides not to keep him around.  This might be the making of Ezra Klein’s punditry career.  

“Science Suffers From an Excess of Significance”

Want to win a political argument? Want to get your spouse to change a health habit? Want to get your story on page one? Flash a scientific study. Except…

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong.

Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye.

This column is by Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz.  The link is for WSJ subscribers.   Here’s a little more:

These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. “There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims,” Dr. Ioannidis said. “A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true.”

The hotter the field of research the more likely its published findings should be viewed skeptically, he determined.

A universal truth as applied to the discovery of information, one that applies to journalists, auditors, investigators.  If the spotlight is on, you want your performance to be memorable.

Take the discovery that the risk of disease may vary between men and women, depending on their genes. Studies have prominently reported such sex differences for hypertension, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis, as well as lung cancer and heart attacks. In research published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Ioannidis and his colleagues analyzed 432 published research claims concerning gender and genes.

Upon closer scrutiny, almost none of them held up. Only one was replicated.

Statistically speaking, science suffers from an excess of significance. Overeager researchers often tinker too much with the statistical variables of their analysis to coax any meaningful insight from their data sets. “People are messing around with the data to find anything that seems significant, to show they have found something that is new and unusual,” Dr. Ioannidis said.

Money is at the root of bad science…

Vogue Takes A Stand: If You Don’t Want Us to Advertise Cigarettes, Pass a Law

As this country ages away from its founders’ vision, we get more and more ambivalent about free speech.  Examples abound, but today’s story (possibly $$) about Vogue and Glamour’s publishers’ statements supporting a refusal to stop running ads for cigarettes helps illuminate the labyrinth our culture is building to deal with unpopular speech. 

The leader of a group of U.S. representatives that has been asking women’s magazines to voluntarily give up cigarette advertising said she is unsatisfied with publishers’ response — or, more often, their lack of response.

“I am extremely disappointed with the decision of these 11 women’s magazines to continue running ads promoting cigarette smoking,” said Rep. Lois Capps, D-Calif., in her third and latest open letter. “These ads encourage a fatally addictive habit and are especially targeted at young women. It’s just flat-out hypocritical to run stories about becoming more beautiful and healthy while promoting a dangerous product responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of people a year.”

Vogue’s response was disturbing.  Despite his industry’s reliance on the First Amendment, publisher Thomas A. Florio wants Congress to punch a hole in it.  He objects to being pressured politically to withdraw the ad on his own, but he doesn’t object to being compelled to do so by law.  

Sorry, Theresa

The story of Theresa Duncan has begun to take shape.

It’s the story of what happens to you after you die. What happens to your reputation when reporters think your corpse is sexy.

Theresa Duncan wrote a blog almost every day of the last two years of her life, a blog in which she left almost no clues to her pending suicide. But it’s being picked over anyway. The big assumption is that her death had something to do with her alleged delusions about being stalked. Apparently, she and her boyfriend, the notable artist Jeremy Blake, shunned some ex-friends who didn’t buy into their fears. According to a follow-up story by the LA Times’ Chris Lee:

Bradford Schlei, head of production for Muse Productions, optioned the rights to George Pelicanos’ “Nick’s Trip” that was to have been Blake’s feature film directing debut. The project stalled just before a deal with Paramount Vantage was being negotiated, however, when Blake accused Schlei’s then girlfriend and the project’s screenwriter of being Scientologists. (Schlei says neither he nor the other two are affiliated with the church.)

“It was complete and utter craziness,” Schlei said. “Theresa sent around e-mails, delusional things. They’d say, ‘You’re a Scientologist, your girlfriend’s a Scientologist, we don’t want to be involved with you.’

“The thing that ended our relationship was when Jeremy said [my girlfriend] was trying to ruin Theresa’s reputation. None of this ever had to do with Jeremy. It was always about Theresa and her film career.” Several other sources confirmed Schlei’s account, recalling that Duncan’s e-mails grew wilder toward the end of her life.

“There was a paranoia thing going on there,” he continued. “If you sat with them for a while, drinking the massive Manhattans they were always drinking, and smoking Shermans, it always got came back to Anna Gaskell.”

(Ms. Gaskell is a former girlfriend of Blake’s who Duncan, and perhaps Blake, saw as a participant in their persecution.)

Kate Coe, in LA Weekly, goes much deeper in her search of Duncan’s seemingly endless foibles. I’ve left all her links in this excerpt:

According to Nichols and other friends who spoke to the Weekly only off record, Duncan began blaming her lack of success on the Church of Scientology, saying that the church was influencing “the studios.” Duncan accused her skeptical friends of stealing hair from her hairbrush to send to the Scientology Center, Nichols says, and confided to Nichols, “I really don’t have any friends.”

Duncan’s paranoia began to hurt her professionally. Renee Tab, her agent, tells the Weekly that Duncan was advised to tone down the paranoid talk but called back later to say she had not given that advice to Duncan, but hoped or wished someone had. And two of Duncan’s acquaintances, who refused to be named, say they were so unsettled by Duncan’s campaigns by e-mail, where she accused them of trying to hurt her or Blake’s careers, that they contacted lawyers. Nichols says of Duncan and Blake, “They didn’t just burn their bridges, they exploded them.”

THE ILL-FATED COUPLE LEFT — some might argue fled — Los Angeles last fall. In New York, Blake took a full-time job at Rockstar Games and prepared for a big fall show at the Corcoran Gallery, where he was to be artist in residence. The stylish couple found the perfect apartment in a converted rectory at St. Mark’s in the Bowery.

By uncanny coincidence, activist Father Frank Morales, a controversial figure who probes conspiracy theories, was the pastor. Morales told the Weekly that “Theresa . . . manifested a penchant for looking at things in a dark way,” adding, “She came to [New York] with some hard feelings, some hurt, but she was a bright light.”

She and Jeremy Blake were photographed at New York social events, and she eagerly joined the St. Mark’s fund-raising community. In March, her short story “Topographers” was published in Bald Ego, the au courant magazine edited by Glenn O’Brien. But Duncan never shook off her fear and suspicion. On her blog on May 20, she wrote that author and USC research scholar Reza Aslan was a “Muslim American seeming Homeland Security agent,” and blamed Scientologists for graffiti and a dead cat in her old Venice neighborhood.

Aslan told the Weekly that whenever he appeared on TV, she contacted him with strange rants. He gave Duncan’s threatening messages to his lawyer because “I wanted someone else to know about this.” Aslan knew her for years, and “she had always said kind of crazy, paranoid things,” but “it just got worse and worse. She accused me of being an undercover CIA officer, of eavesdropping on her, of having her FBI file. The conversation she blogged about — about her FBI file — never came up; the whole conversation was completely fictional.

“She was losing her grip on reality, and Jeremy was so devoted to her that he would go along with it . . . It became impossible to ignore, and so my [girlfriend] and I began to extricate ourselves.”

This last paragraph is the developing conventional wisdom: Theresa went crazy and dragged Jeremy down with her. Jeremy had the “real” art career, but was hobbled by his strange symbiotic relationship with a crazy person. His suicide was, in effect, crazy Theresa’s final grasp at him from the grave.

David Segal of the Washington Post — he’s their music critic and in that role he’s good — takes a step back from this horror-movie cliche, and tries a more psychological approach:

Duncan and Blake didn’t just fall for each other; they grew so close they all but intertwined. “When you called, they were always both on the phone,” said Jason Meadows, an artist and friend. “When you e-mailed, they’d take turns writing back. At some point, I realized it doesn’t matter which of them I’m communicating with. They were that tight.”

One of their shared passions, friends said, was a distressingly paranoid view of the world. The two would describe plots by the government, plots by Scientologists, people tailing them, breaking into their home. All of it sounded so far-fetched that it was easy to think occasionally that they were kidding. They weren’t.

“It was like a Tom Clancy novel,” said Meadows, “except that was very real to them. And if you said, ‘This can’t be true,’ there’d be a lot of anger and you’d be exiled. That happened to me several times and I had to work to regain their friendship.”

Gradually they seemed to slip into some sort of shared psychosis, and they had each other to reinforce delusions that friends were powerless to talk them out of. Many of those friends bailed out, frustrated and bewildered. But for all the tumult, the pair remained focused and Blake, at least, was applying himself to work, said Binstock. Duncan could be prickly and acerbic and sometimes one would say something loopy, friends said, but the couple generally kept it together.

“Obviously there was much more going on than any of us realized, but he never said anything that suggested there was a problem,” said Anne Schwartz Delibert, Blake’s mother, who lives in Takoma Park. “He was devoted to her. He was a loyal caretaker.”

The last comment from Blake’s mother refutes everything that came before it, though, doesn’t it?  His own mother never detected a problem?  How does that fit into a diagnosis of “shared psychosis…a distressingly paranoid view of the world…?”

See, that’s my problem with virtually all of the journalism published since the pair’s death.  There was too much going on in both of their lives for anyone to say, or even suggest, what caused these deaths.  The reporters know this.  So they dig up stuff about both of them — Duncan especially — and put it out there.  It’s salacious. It’s embarrassing.  It’s suggestive, but suggestive of what they won’t say, because they don’t know.   But because it’s a mystery, there is no end to the investigation and revelation of every stupid, unkind, ill-considered or even “paranoid” thing they might have done or said in their combined 75 years on Earth.

Is there anyone whom you couldn’t portray in a extremely negative light by choosing, say, five anecdotes from two lifetimes — three of them reported anonymously?

And neither of them can respond. “There are two sides to every story,” is a truism from kindergarten, but the way events have unfolded, we’re only getting one side of each tale, and the tales are accumulating and solidifying into a reputation, a kind of pseudo-truth that will mestatisize in the vacuum of the real truth.   Which is none of our business anyway.

You can think about this:

At some point, you will die.  Maybe you’ll die before your time, in a sensational fashion.  At whatever point, your life will become a story, but it won’t be your story, it’ll be the story that your survivors will try to piece together.  If you happen to be prominent, or if your death is determined to be sexy, the media will assist with this process, whether they have a right to or not.

Everything you ever said or did that anyone remembers or can document will float to the surface, like old bobbins released from under a rock.  They will all appear to have the same weight — the good, the bad, the funny, the weird, the selfish, the selfless; something you did for ten minutes, something you did for ten years.  All of it floating on the surface, waiting for others to find patterns in it, patterns more revelatory of their own minds than of yours.

Ron Rosenbaum, a good writer with an interesting blog is obviously fascinated by Duncan/Blake, and has begun some kind of investigative study.  Compared with Lee, Coe and Segal, however, Rosenbaum is relatively modest in his claims to understand anything based on these fragments — yet.

Unlike Coe and Lee, Rosenbaum lets his readers comment.  I think this commenter, Mike Payne, is reacting to all the news coverage of his friends, but takes it out on Rosenbaum because he provides an outlet:

Theresa’s blog was read around the world,in her wake she is praised for her dynamic personality and intelligence-one webblog event submits that this is all ARG, a game-Theresa would be flattered,certainly capable of masterminding such a concept.The fact is her real life is as hyperdynamic as it reads.
The people who discount Theresa and Jeremy’s claims-who needs the CIA and CoS (Church of Scientology) with friends like them.You tell people the real shit going down in your life and they degrade you,how many times do I get to read GLenn O’Brien’s disregard of Theresa’s concerns as improbable-he never said this to her face-otherwise his word would for sure not be the last post on Staircase.I bet the emails you ‘ve read would confirm this in terms of how T & J react to feeling betrayed.
I don’t believe she killed herself-I’m sure I’ve lost you all now-I fucking knew her-I was even able to give her the benefit of the doubt,from her note reading she was at peace-it’s not gloom and doom it’s just exactly what she writes-she is at peace so let her rest,her personal reasons are her own damn business to quote her film THE HISTORY OF GLAMOUR-the people who made this most excellent bit of film,were not done living,even if they did make it years ago.

I  add this not to validate the alleged “conspiracy” — I’m in no position to do that — but to illustrate that some people apparently believed them, some people didn’t find them irrational, or if they did, never said anything until their deaths gave them the opportunity.

I’ll close with two comments from another Washington Post writer, an in-house blogger named Joel Achenbach:

Forensic psychoanalysis on the dead is never wise.

An entirely praiseworthy position, which he undercuts with his next word: “But…”

I forgive him, however, because he closes with this even more praiseworthy comment:

I hope no movie studio decides it’s a great romantic story, Shakespearean and ripe for the screen.

It’s just sad.

Amen.

Two updates, or Why Bloggers are Better than Hack Journalists

1.  Could anything be more cliched than this?  Riffing off the same article about minimum-security prisons in The American that I wrote about here, a lazy-minded writer named Peter Carlson goes on autopilot and comes up with a column that soothes every liberal prejudice without engaging any of the issues honestly.  To get himself off — a vulgar way of putting it, I realize, but that’s the way the story feels — he is forced to recast Luke Mullins’ story as an apologia for rich, crooked CEOs by a magazine sponsored by a think-tank devoted to “the welfare of the rich.”

Missing the point entirely, Carlson apparently thinks the story was about this:

Now, white-collar miscreants are forced to mingle with common street-level dope dealers. And they have to work for seven hours a day — sometimes at jobs that are boring and unfulfilling and beneath them. And some of these former country clubs no longer have a tennis court — or even a bocce court! And inmates are forced to wear tacky prison garb instead of their stylish street clothes.

The horror! The horror!

Okay, Carlson, are you feeling better now?  Then why don’t you ponder for a minute or two why the “dope dealers” are in these prisons.  You have to put two and two together.  Minimum security prisons are reserved for non-violent federal felons.  Why are non-violent “dope dealers” doing federal time at all?  Obviously, you’re amused by the notion of white-collar convicts being forced to mix with them, but the “dope-dealers” are human, too — not just characters in your hack morality play.  Have you done any reading about the human consequences of the war on drugs? Didn’t think so.  

And while I’m sure you had a ball mocking the “high-class folks” now being warehoused at taxpayers’ expense, aren’t  you the least bit curious about how many of these supposed powerhouses of capitalism actually belong there — and how many of them are actually “rich?” 

Mullins didn’t interview any CEOs; my guess is because he didn’t run into any.  The way our system works now, the CEOs generally aren’t the prosecutors’ targets.  CEOs are too wealthy, too well-insulated and, if they were aware they were doing something wrong, they made sure not to get their hands dirty.  In a typical white collar case of the past five years, the ”higher-ups” work with the government to nail the “lower-downs,” which makes the government’s job so much easier. The feds get to look like they’re doing something important, while the stockholders interests are protected.

Obviously, I’m sensitive on this subject, but it burns me that a prestigious newspaper like the Washington Post publishes the writings of a pampered fool like Peter Carlson who, instead of doing any real thinking or reporting, just rolls out the creaky boxcars of received wisdom.   If it’s my fate to go to a minimum security prison in the near or distant future, it doesn’t scare me in the least; and I certainly don’t plan on going in with an attitude that I’m better than any of my fellow inmates.  But there’s a side of me — petty, to be sure — that wishes for the same fate for a Peter Carlson, a scribe who thinks he’s above everyone — CEO and “dope dealer” alike.  How long would that snarky smile last?  Measurable in seconds.

2.  It took her almost a week, but it was worth the wait:  Ann Althouse took a careful, Tivo-aided look at last Sunday’s episode of “The Sopranos,” the one in which Tony kills Christopher after a car accident.  It’s a tour de force, and I say that even though I disagree with her ultimate conclusion — that Tony is now dead.

I post these paragraphs just as a sample.  You should read all of it:

Carmela makes Tony a cup of coffee with that expensive expresso machine Paulie gave her in the April 22 episode. Tony says “It’s good.” At least something is good. They have a conversation that brings out the mother theme. (I note that Paulie’s aunt/mother Nucci also dies in this episode, and there’s a fair amount of childish whining by Paulie on the subject.) Carmela, crying over Christopher’s death, says that when Tony was in the hospital — back during that coma-dream — “It was Christopher who held me.” This mother-son image prompts Tony to bring up the baby seat in the SUV after the crash. It had a tree limb in it, so if the baby had been in the car, it would have been “mangled beyond recognition.” Carmela stomps off, and Tony is left holding out his empty arms toward her in a way that says this boy has no mother.

The following scene is Tony’s real session with Melfi, and he’s talking about mothering. He’s disgusted that Christopher’s mother is showing up now and soaking up all the sympathy, when she didn’t mother him well during his life. He says, “I hand carried him through the worse crisis he ever had.” “Hand carried” is an odd expression, but it conveys the image of a mother carrying a baby. Of course, it’s completely ridiculous for Tony to think he ought to be getting the sympathy when he’s the murderer. Tony thinks Chris was ungrateful, that his hand carrying only inspired hate. Well, yeah. It consisted of offing Adriana.

This sequence of mother-themed scenes culminates in a gathering of various mothers in the Soprano living room. Tony wanders out of his bedroom and looks down on them from the upstairs railing. Christopher’s baby is there. Christopher’s mother says: “She doesn’t know. Isn’t God wonderful that way?” Christopher’s wife pulls out her large breast and as the baby takes it, Tony snaps open the cell phone. He’s calling some guy in Las Vegas. “I need a suite.” The guy offers a plane too. Enough of the female. Bring on the phallic symbol. Escape from the family sphere into the realm of sin.

David Broder, Cruisin’ for a Bruisin’

If you read the left-wing blogs, you quickly learn there is no journalist or commentator more despised than David S. Broder, the “Dean” of Washington columnists.  In recent writings, Broder has been less than thrilled with the performance of the new Democratic Congress and its leadership.  To the netroots, it’s still the honeymoon phase; but here’s this old guy, an uncle you sort of have to listen to, standing at the back of the reception saying “You stink!”

What they despise about Broder is his reputation as a liberal, which derives in part from his position at the Washington Post.   The netroots disagree that the Post is actually all that liberal, or that Broder is “one of them,” and it really steams them that Broder’s critical comments about the Democratic party are seen as coming from a sympathetic corner.  

Rush Limbaugh, Hugh Hewitt, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter leave no mark; they’re dismissed easily as right-wing crackpots.  But Broder disrupts what the netroots repeatedly call “the narrative.”  When a liberal says what conservatives say, the conservatives’ viewpoints are legitimized.  The netroots don’t really enjoy debating conservatives; they’d rather dismiss them from the debate entirely. It’s harder to do that when they can cite liberals like David Broder as agreeing with them. 

I’m beginning to think David Broder likes provoking the netroots.  What else would explain today’s column, in which he compares Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to…omigod!… Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez!  

The column was prompted by Reid’s much-criticized comment last week that “this war is lost.”

…Reid’s verbal wanderings on the war in Iraq are consequential — not just for his party and the Senate but for the more important question of what happens to U.S. policy in that violent country and to the men and women whose lives are at stake.

Given the way the Constitution divides warmaking power between the president, as commander in chief, and Congress, as sole source of funds to support the armed services, it is essential that at some point Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi be able to negotiate with the White House to determine the course America will follow until a new president takes office.

To say that Reid has sent conflicting signals about his readiness for such discussions is an understatement. It has been impossible for his own members, let alone the White House, to sort out for more than 24 hours at a time what ground Reid is prepared to defend.

Instead of reinforcing the important proposition — defined by the Iraq Study Group– that a military strategy for Iraq is necessary but not sufficient to solve the myriad political problems of that country, Reid has mistakenly argued that the military effort is lost but a diplomatic-political strategy can still succeed.

The Democrats deserve better, and the country needs more, than Harry Reid has offered as Senate majority leader.

Broder’s comparison with Gonzalez is, in fact, quite apt.  The problem with Sen. Reid is that he is an incompetent Senate Majority Leader.  As Michael Dukakis said, “It’s not about ideology. It’s about competence.”  The AG is manifestly unfit for his job, and so is Reid.  Reid can’t manage his own mouth; how can he be expected to manage the U.S. Senate? Vice President Cheney’s stinging retort to Reid drew blood because he mostly just quoted Reid’s own incredibly contradictory pattern of statements about the war over the past few months.

But to the netroots, even pointing out obvious incompetence screws up ”the narrative.”  Here’s what diarist mcjoan says on Daily Kos regarding Broder’s column:

It’s just so sad, so disconnected from anything even remotely resembling reality. We had ample warning that it was coming, but maybe somehow didn’t think it could really, really be as bad as expected. It is. You can go read it, if you like. But there’s really hardly any point any more.

I do have to give this to the Dean. He is somehow adroit enough to hammer the final nail into the coffin that holds all that was left of his ability to reasonably comment on current events. What more is there to say?

And here is what Greg Sargent, a TPM Cafe blogger, says:

Boy, oh, boy. Will Broder really argue that Reid is as inept as Gonzales, despite the fact (or perhaps because of the fact) that Reid has refused to back down on Iraq while simultaneously maintaining public approval of his approach? He’s also maintained a respectable 46% approval rating — far higher than Bush, who Broder says is on the verge of a comeback. What is it that’s so profoundly threatening about Reid’s success to the Broders of the world?

In the respective comment threads, the “blogswarm” goes on a Broder-bashing spree.  Kos himself weighs in:

 What more is there left to say? (22+ / 0-)

That finally it’s clear as day that Broder is simply another run-of-the-mill beltway partisan hack. Once upon a time, he convinced everyone in DC that he was a non-partisan arbiter of conventional wisdom. That fiction is now blown apart. Broder is no better or different than Sean Hannity or Bill O’Reilly. An inglorious conclusion to a career in hackdom.

by kos on Wed Apr 25, 2007 at 10:56:27 PM PDT

Here’s one from Sargent’s thread:

Its time for the blogshere to do some investigative reporting on Broder and the like.

It’s pretty clear that the Bushies/necons will do anything to advance their cause, protect themselves and manipulate public opinion.

Why has Broder nor Wapo disclosed Broder’s close relationship with Rove?

Broder is either being paid off financially or blackmailed. Cayman Island bank accounts, junkets, or compromising personal information. All of the above?

Posted by:erict
Date: April 25, 2007 08:26 PM

And how about this one from the Washington Post’s own comment thread:

Take the package, Mr. Broder. Retire now before you shred what reputation you have left any further. Old windbag. If the war is so great, why arent your kids and grandkids there? Harry Reid is right. The war is lost. Its time to come home and stop playing cowboy with American lives, which is just making everything in Iraq worse. Bush is the worst disaster in the history of the United States, and Broder was one of his sycophantic cheerleaders after nine one one. The emperor never had any clothes.

By snoopydc | Apr 26, 2007 12:32:42 AM |

Throughout the comments you find the view expressed that Reid’s “war is lost” comment is true, and that polls show the public agrees with it.  What they are overlooking is the American public doesn’t prefer to lose this war.   Reid seems to be egging on that result, especially when he says things like this:

“We’re going to pick up Senate seats as a result of this war. Senator Schumer has shown me numbers that are compelling and astounding.”

Broder isn’t a hack, and he isn’t on the take.  He has a memory.  Memory curses dreams like the netroots’.  

Here’s an inconvenient analysis that draws on my own memories.

At the end of the Vietnam War, the Democrats facilitated the final defeat, denying President Ford’s request for funds to fulfil the promises the U.S. made after we pulled out. In 1975, the politics of that move looked pretty good; the public was sick of Vietnam.  In 1976, Carter beat Ford — but it should have been a landslide because of Watergate, and instead it was a squeaker.  Why?   In 1978, Republicans reversed most of the gains the Democrats had made in Congress in 1974.  In 1980, Reagan clobbered Carter, and the Republicans took the Senate. 

I believe the atrocities that followed the ignominious end to the Vietnam War, and the U.S.’ impotence to stop mass genocide and annihilation of our former supporters fueled those Democratic setbacks.  For the first time in decades, Republicans started talking about an aggressive stance toward the Soviet Union, and after the horrors of postwar Southeast Asia, the message resonated.

Losing Iraq would be another bloody business. It’s not hard to imagine.  Suicide bombings would increase. Civil war would widen. Any Iraqi individual or institution committed to democracy would be targeted for murder. Al Queda could well end up effectively in charge of parts of Iraq. 

And Harry Reid thinks this will help the Democrats win elections?  It’s absurd.  And he’s incompetent for thinking so, much less saying so.

Old Media Gets the Vapors (CORRECTED)*

(via howardowens.com)

In addition to the LA Observed suite, another great Web 2.0-from-the-ground-up site is Pegasus News, which delivers content mostly of interest to Dallas-Ft. Worth area users. On Monday, Pegasus’ Mike Owens Orren posted a story on his ill-fated partnership with the local Fox 4 News outlet — a relationship that started very promisingly, but was killed by someone he doesn’t name in Fox’s corporate headquarters for what can only be described as whimsical reasons.  

At first, Owens Orren writes, it seemed like a great match:

They had the reach; we had the depth. We had the search engine rankings; they had video people wanted to find. We had the indie cred; they had the network cred. They could promote us to a million people at a pop; we could promote them a million times a month in little increments.

The downfall began when Pegasus got Fox to agree the partnership was newsworthy and should be announced in a press release.   At first, an enthusiastic “yes.” But then, “no,” with a request for what seemed to be a slight change in the copy that would introduce the Fox 4 content. (The copy was boilerplate stuff; Fox’s requested edit was the kind of thing only PR people would notice.)  

Pegasus’ web developers needed a few days to make the change (not an unusual frustration in this world), which Owens Orren hadn’t understood to be an urgent matter anyway. However, two days after the request, in a scene that reads like a bad break-up:

Late Wednesday afternoon, my phone rang with Saunders and Mahaney (from Fox 4) on the other end. A vigorously unnamed FOX exec, who it was now admitted had been against the deal happening at all on the conference call about the press release had visited our site and seen that the requested text change had not yet gone into effect and unilaterally called off the whole deal. Yes, no one told us that the request was critical. No, there was no explaining that. No, there was no chance of reasoning, discussing or even learning who had cut the deal off at the nub. No, no part of the partnership could be salvaged. Everything Fox needed to come off our site and we wouldn’t be working together on hyperlocal news.

The best that could be offered was “maybe give it a time interval and try again.” How long? “I have no idea … a long time.”

Given the amount of precious time Pegasus invested in the tech side of this marriage, Owens Orren is understandably a little bitter.  His meta-conclusion rings true, however:

You can wait for corporate media to “get it.” You can think they have. But, in the end, corporations aren’t inherently smart, even if people inside of them are. And corporations aren’t inherently honorable, even if people inside them are. And those who can’t see past their nose and who don’t have regard for their partners will pull stunts like we just saw from Fox.

(snip)

This Little Company is at its best when it is flying the jolly roger. We work and play well with others, but apparently mainly those others that, like us, are on the outside. This episode thoroughly re-taught me that lesson, one that I won’t soon forget. That’s not to say that we can’t work with big corporations — we just can’t until we look the people who pull the pursestrings in the eye and they tell us that they, too, believe. And probably even then, we wouldn’t be safe unless they had a financial stake in our success.

One other thing is clear to me: We will, sooner rather than later, eat these larger media corporations for lunch, unless they learn how to behave in a world of distributed media. Granted, that’s the larger “we.” I can’t guarantee that Pegasus News will be The One, or one of the ones to pull it off. We’ve grown more quickly than you could have ever imagined with fewer resources than you waste in an afternoon. The “people formerly known as the audience” are mobile and transient and will abandon their old media habits without prejudice — perhaps worse, without even realizing they have done so. Blogs, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, RSS, Flickr: how many had you heard of a few years ago? These and others have disrupted the hell out of media in general, but have had less of an impact on local media. That’s changing, and fast.

The unnamed Fox executive who got the vapors about protecting the corporate image, brand, name or whatever from contamination by upstarts will probably have some explaining to do down the road.   

*(Note: In an earlier version of this post, I misidentified Mike Orren as Mike Owens, leaving the impression that I was quoting Howard Owens.  My apologies to both Owens and Orren)

Cycling in the Shallows

John Balzar is leaving the LA Times soon to go to work for the Humane Society in a PR position.  Balzar’s departure is sad on many levels; he was one of the Times’ best and most passionate writers, a last link to the Otis Chandler years.  His story today on Monica Howe, outreach coordinator for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, could well be the last byline he has in the newspaper.

So I was frustrated after reading it to see that Balzar, of all people, wrote it.  I wanted to rip it to shreds as yet another example of the Times’ shallow reporting, and of the missed opportunity to expose its readers to the many fascinating and disruptive dimensions of the urban bicycling movement.   But, as is my usual habit, I read the byline last. 

“Aw nuts,” I said to myself.  “I really respect Balzar.”  I started making excuses for him.  Maybe it’s his editors’ fault.  Maybe the problem is the unimaginative approach of the Times’ website overseers.  And hey, it’s not the like story is bad, exactly.  It’s well-written and…  uh…

Okay, read Balzar’s story.  Do you see the words “Critical Mass” in there anywhere?  No?  In 1992, there was a massive traffic disruption in San Francisco, in which bicyclists dramatized their demands by clogging automotive traffic at rush hour.  It was called Critical Mass–a “visionary traffic jam.”  Critical Mass is now the name given to a monthly mass bike ride in major cities, in which bicycle and other self-propelled commuters take part.  According to the Critical Mass site dedicated to listing such events, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Newport Beach are among the cities that participate regularly.  It says here that the Los Angeles Critical Mass ride used to start at Sunset and Silver Lake, but recently moved to Wilshire and Western. It’s a local phenomenon as well as a global one. 

If you’re interested in what Critical Mass is all about, you can start with Wikipedia’s entry on the topic — a great read.  Critical Mass is many things: An environmental protest, a demand that cities do a better job of accomodating cyclists and ensuring their safety on public roadways, a celebration, an “organized coincidence” that demonstrates the viability of xerocracy – a benign form of anarchy, in which no one is in charge, but a mass event happens anyway.  Did you know that the Critical Mass phenomenon has led to a Rand Institute study of netwars? 

It’s possible, of course, that Monica Howe knows nothing about Critical Mass — unlikely, but possible.  But she certainly knows her own organization, and the specific public policy demands it has made.  Balzar describes Howe’s political positions this way:

She has thrown herself into the campaign to demand the stenciling of “sharrows” on city streets. A sharrow is a bicycle symbol with two chevrons that is meant to remind motorists to share the road and also to promote better lane positioning for those on bikes. Howe has rallied cyclists to demand safer streets. She has led efforts to support cyclists hit by cars. She has promoted group rides that bring residents in touch with unfamiliar neighborhoods. She hammers away on the idea that bicycles are the only zero-emission transit machines.

But his focus seems to be mostly on Howe’s personality.  This is a personality profile, after all.  But how many stories does the Times run on the issues facing bicyclists in Los Angeles?  If not in this story, when is the Times going to tell its readers what the Los Angeles Bicycle Coalition is advocating?  Here is a flyer from CICLE (Cyclists Inciting Change through Live Exchange) that Howe’s coalition wants to distribute to motorists:

(I hope this is readable. It’s downloadable at the link above.) 

The most important thing to take away from this flyer is that bicycle activists believe bicyclists should be entitled to as much space on the road as a car.  They don’t use the sidewalk, and they shouldn’t be limited to the parking lane — those places are often too dangerous.  People in parked cars are wont to open their doors suddenly, placing a deadly obstacle in the path of a fast-moving bicyclist.  Also, sometimes bicyclists need to make left turns.  They are not breaking the law if they cut in front of you to do this.  They have a right to do this.

The organization is also joining a postcard-writing campaign aimed at Mayor Villaraigosa:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa speaks about his efforts to make Los Angeles “the greenest and cleanest city in America”, yet his vision for a sustainable Los Angeles continues to neglect an emphasis on walking and bicycling as being part of this future.

Cities such as Portland, OR and San Francisco have quickly risen to the top of the list as the nation’s most sustainable cities. These cities have made significant efforts to encourage both bicycling and walking as clean and viable modes of transportation. C.I.C.L.E. believes that if Los Angeles is to become the “greenest and cleanest” city in the nation, then we too need to be incorporating strategies that encourage bicycling and walking as part of a sustainable solution for our transportation needs.

That’s news, isn’t it?  Not as sexy as the mayor’s battle over LAUSD, I grant, but if the Times is going to write a story about one of the city’s most influential bicyclist advocates, shouldn’t her involvement in a political protest of the mayor’s policies rate a mention?  Doesn’t it stand to reason that there ought to be — at least — a link to some of this information on the web? 

Believe me, I’m no expert on bicycling or bicycle activists.  I found all this information in about 10 minutes.  There is undoubtedly much, much more. The Web is one place where bicycle activists talk to each other–globally.

Bicyclist activism is a rich topic with massive implications for growth, the environment, transportation in Los Angeles — way more interesting stuff than anything SCAG has to say on those topics.  It is also a harbinger of the new forms that political activism will take, as the Harold Meyerson-approved model of deep-thinking, self-congratulatory conferences gives way to a new form of networking that, as you read further into it, could alter the balance of power in a dimension that conventional politics can’t access.

As far as it goes, John Balzar gives Monica Howe a nice profile.  I can just imagine the Westsiders who form the Times’ core readership reading it and nodding their heads approvingly.  Bicycles are just…so…wonderful!  Like puppies and rainbows. That’s just great that somebody is so passionate about it.  These readers might have had a different reaction if they understood the radicalism inherent in bicycle activism.

Give the Customers What They Want: Bias

This study, reported in the New York Times today, should not be surprising, but in today’s incredibly politicized media environment, it counts as news.  The University of Chicago has learned that a newspaper’s political biases reflect the belief systems of their readers. 

The authors calculated the ideal partisan slant for each paper, if all it cared about was getting readers, and they found that it looked almost precisely like the one for the actual newspaper. As Dr. Shapiro put it in an interview, “The data suggest that newspapers are targeting their political slant to their customers’ demand and choosing the amount of slant that will maximize their sales.”

On one hand that sounds a little mercenary. On the other hand, there is certainly good news in the finding. If slant comes from customers, then the views of the owners and the reporters do not matter. We do not need to fear that some partisan billionaire will buy up newspapers and use them for propaganda.

Indeed, the study found that the views of the owner had no significant effect on the slant of the newspaper. The partisanship of corporate donations from the owner had no bearing on the slant of the news coverage in the paper. The slant of a newspaper group’s other newspapers had no bearing, either. The New York Times Company’s newspaper in Spartanburg, S.C., for example, had the same slant as other newspapers in South Carolina that the company did not own.

So although politicians from both sides tend to accuse the news media of partisanship and negativity, the data suggests that they ought to blame the public. The papers basically reflect what their readers want to hear.

The study determined which papers were liberal or conservative, Republican or Democrat, based on the words they used.  A liberal newspaper was more likely to use the words “oil companies,” “middle class” and “public broadcasting.”  A conservative one was more likely to use “death tax,” “illegal aliens” and “nuclear power.”

This is kind of a weird way to measure bias.  If the New York Times decided to run a 10-part series on nuclear power around the world, and used the words “nuclear power” 10 times in each story, that would steer the paper toward the right? 

Anyway, this finding makes intuitive sense to me.  It would be nice to think the “objective media” still existed, but the fact is, a serious news consumer who wants the full story free of political spin, has to travel on both the left and right sides of the media nowadays, and then do some kind of averaging to find where the truth lies.

On the LA Weekly, David Zahniser and the Progressive Movement

Over on LA Observed, you have probably been following a dramatic series of developments involving the LA Weekly: Harold Myerson’s departure as political columnist and cheerleader for the local labor organizations, David Zahniser’s cover story this week about the circumstances surrounding the untimely 2005 death of LA labor chief Miguel Contreras, and the way in which LA’s progressive community, including Myerson himself, views both events through the lens of how the Weekly’s new ownership has betrayed the paper’s past role in progressive movements.

Well, in all your clicking, don’t miss the series of posts in the LA Observed “We Get Email” section concerning this matter. The last note, from Larry Kaplan, makes the most crucial point about Zahniser’s scoop that all the “whither the Weekly” eulogies ignore:

…I think the crux of the story is the way Contreras’ death was handled by the coroner, the cops and the bigwigs who showed up at the hospital that day.

The story should NOT be where Contreras was and what he was doing when he died, and perhaps the critique of the Weekly story is that it did not make that clear enough.

Exactly.

David Zahniser is what this city hasn’t had for a long time: A government watchdog. His City Hall coverage at the Daily Breeze always had two things most of his competitors’ coverage did not — depth and style. In the face of generations of local news editors who alternately viewed LA’s municipal government as a morality play or a boring backwater, Zahniser actually found things out, and could turn them into interesting stories.  He writes stories that serve nobody’s interests but the readers’.

Zahniser’s accomplishments merited attention because, unlike the Times and to a lesser extent the Daily News, nobody in their right mind would strategically leak a story to any reporter for the almost unread Breeze. When I read an exclusive story in the LA Times, I can almost always guess who served it up it to them. That’s the advantage of being a reporter for the biggest daily in town. You don’t have to dig for stories, the stories dig for you. A Times reporter can be very lazy, and still look good to their editors.

Zahniser’s brought his talent to the Weekly, and now has a bigger stage on which to perform. The stakes are higher. As Kaplan points out, he or his editors might have erred in emphasizing the first half of the story, the tawdry death scene, rather than the second half of the story, the fervent efforts by high officials allegedly to cover it up by blocking an autopsy.

Normally, if a 52-year-old man dies in a store like the botanica where Contreras died, that would be considered an unusual death. Leaving aside the fact that the locale was later determined by police to house prostitutes, even the ostensible product, herbal remedies, would raise red flags. Whatever you think of the benefits of herbal medicine, some of the remedies in that category are, in fact, powerful chemical agents that are not regulated as drugs. If for no other reason than to protect public health, an autopsy should have been done. Public officials allegedly put pressure on hospital officials to ensure an autopsy was not done, for the sake of Contreras’ reputation and legacy. Folks, that’s a story.  There is a long history in Los Angeles of political interference in the County Coroner’s performance of his duties; of autopsy findings being buried, changed, leaked or otherwise abused by people in power to guard the private interests of the living and the dead.

The progressive community sees Zahniser’s article as a watershed. The old, progressive LA Weekly would not have published Zahniser’s story, Myerson basically asserts. Occidental College professor Peter Drier articulates the left’s rage in an email sent around the progressive community and published by LA Observed:

The article is irresponsible, gutter, tabloid journalism, with no redeeming value. It is difficult to understand why the paper published this crude story — and put in on the cover, no less — except to sell newspapers and/or to lend support to those who wish to harm LA’s progressive labor movement. Miguel and his family, who are still mourning his death, deserve better than this cheap hit. They will survive this crude piece of gutter journalism. They, and his many friends and allies, know that Miguel’s life as a warrior for justice, was his real legacy and his gift to us.

(snip)

The loss of the LA Weekly as a progressive voice is a tragedy. When we organized the Progressive LA conference at Occidental College in October 1998, the Weekly was one of its cosponsors, featured it on its cover, and published several stories in the September 30, 1998 issue about the past, current, and future of progressive politics in LA: link and link. This reflected the Weekly’s view of itself at the time as a watchdog and as an instrument for change. On politics, culture, and other matters, the LA Weekly has helped give voice to those forces who might otherwise be shut out of the public debate. It has reported on the people and organizations — unions, community groups, environmentalists, women’s rights and gay rights groups, immigrant rights activists, school reformers, fair trade advocates, living wage crusaders, and ordinary folks trying to cope with life in this diverse and sprawling city — who’ve been on the front lines of the struggles for social and economic justice.

(snip)

But how do we hold the new LA Weekly accountable? Outraged by this week’s cover story, some folks floated the idea of organizing a boycott against the Weekly. But how can you organize a boycott against a newspaper that is distributed for free? And how can you put pressure on its advertisers when its ad pages are dominated by penis enlargement ads, breast augmentation ads, and dating services?

The fear, which Myerson articulates too, is that the Weekly will become a muckraking journal that splatters muck on progressives, not just their enemies. Myerson cites Jill Stewart, the iconoclastic writer for the defunct New Times LA (whose owners now control the Weekly) as the kind of journalistic example he fears will take over the Weekly. Stewart enraged many at City Hall because her investigations and commentary evinced deep disillusionment with the left’s hypocrisy. She was tough on leaders like Jackie Goldberg, to whom LA’s left is devoted. And her writing was juicy and irresistable, so her scoops got attention. Back then and today, I’ll admit it — I’m a fan of Jill Stewart. And I’m a fan of David Zahniser (which is not to say he’s similar to Stewart — it was Myerson who made that leap).

Far be it from me to challenge Myerson and Drier on what’s good for the progressive movement — they work in it every day, and I don’t. But my opinion is, they’re wrong about the kind of journalism that helps those “who’ve been on the front lines of social and economic justice.” The news should not be ideological. It should not be afraid to hit hard at hypocrisy and double-dealing on the part of progressive icons.

Going back to the 1920s, there is an unfortunate history of socialist journalism, or journalism by socialists, that turned out to be propaganda, concocted to mask failure, corruption, even atrocities. Today’s progressives should want to take pains to disassociate their movement from such unethical and ultimately self-defeating reportage; to demonstrate that unlike the left-wing of the past, they are not afraid of the truth because their ideas have value quite apart from the flawed mortals who advocate them.

And let’s face it: the good-ol’ LA Weekly that Myerson and Drier could depend on as an ally and publicist was also funded by ads for plastic surgery, tanning salons, massage parlors and escort services. What does that suggest? That most Weekly readers, then as now, skipped over the political content to read the movie and nightclub listings, and were more interested in dancing than demonstrations. The Weekly could be edited by William F. Buckley and probably make the same profit if Buckley were willing to accept such advertising.

The left is not entitled to the news columns of the LA Weekly by divine right. But if the left can help scrupulous reporters like Zahniser find powerful stories to illustrate the need for their brand of politics, their presentation in a more balanced setting will give them greater credibility. In this era of nakedly partisan journalism and blogs, it is too often forgotten that most of us read journalism for stories, not political instruction. We can come to political conclusions on our own.

Going to Extremes (*updated)

I hope Brendan Nyhan is wrong when he says this:

Today, online politics has come to be dominated by two warring camps, just like offline politics. And while many critics complain about the polarization of the blogosphere and its effect on elections, how blogs will affect the economics of opinion journalism is less well understood. In particular, partisan blogs have become so popular that they are threatening the business model — and the independence — of center-left opinion magazines, which may be forced to toe the party line to ensure their survival.

He illustrates this point with his own experience. A founder of the now-defunct Spinsanity, Nyhan was invited to blog on The American Prospect’s TAPPED site. The American Prospect is a liberal publication, but like The New Republic, it was not monolithic and could be contrarian from time to time, in keeping with the open-mindedness long associated with liberals. But after Nyhan posted a couple of items criticizing other liberal bloggers, TAP’s editor asked him to limit his attacks to conservatives. This diktat caused Nyhan to quit.

Is TAPPED afraid of dissenting viewpoints? Not editorially. But according to Nyhan, it is afraid of popular left-wing bloggers’ Moses-like effect on the flow of liberal click-throughs:

One important factor shaping TAP’s decision may have been the popularity of Democratic bloggers like Atrios, who pump out a stream of pre-filtered news and commentary. Before the rise of online competition, opinion magazines had some freedom to be idiosyncratic and less partisan than their readers. The initial incarnation of the Prospect, for example, had a thoughtful, academic tone. But the availability of more points of view online (while laudable in many ways) has paradoxically increased the pressure on ideological publications to pander to readers, who have the option of seeking out exclusively partisan blogs instead.

In addition, the huge audiences of the partisan bloggers make them a key source of online traffic for opinion magazines if they supply ideologically favorable content. (At Spinsanity, we quickly learned that it was virtually impossible to get links from liberals when we criticized a liberal, and vice versa for conservatives.) Similarly, the risk of not getting links means that few commentators are willing to criticize the gatekeepers.

In some cases, the threat may be existential. Opinion magazines lose money — a lot of money — and are vulnerable to further financial losses. Atrios, Kos, and other liberal bloggers have attacked The New Republic for years, helping to undermine the center-left magazine’s lagging popularity among liberals. If TNR’s subscriber base were to shrink as a result of these attacks, the viability of the magazine could be threatened.

Nyhan points out that conservative journals of opinion were always less prone to ideological divergence, but the same syndrome exists on the right as the left. Although it does seem to me there are a number of bloggers that get called conservative but are really more libertarian, like Instapundit, Ann Althouse and The Volokh Conspiracy, who provide lots of links, but rarely to right-wing mags.

I like a battle of ideas, not a march of talking points. My advice to TAPPED and The New Republic is to take more risks, not fewer. I can’t help but think that when Bush is truly a lame duck and there is fresh soil being plowed in both political parties, the lock-steppers on both the right and the left will seem a bit marginal–dull and shrill.

For over a century, the opinion magazines have played a role as idea labs for the candidates. If all they’re doing is saluting Kos and Hugh Hewitt all day with predictable rants, that will just drive the stuff of politics, the intra-party policy debates, out of the public eye and into realms accessible only to insiders. That’s not what the Internet promised.

*UPDATE:  Here is Nyhan’s blog post about the reaction to his column.  Extremely interesting comments. although it seems as if no one got his point.  The question isn’t whether the right and left blogs enforce conformity.   Some do, some don’t.  The question is whether the right and left blogs are causing the traditional opinion journals to mute contrarian points of view or self-criticism for economic reasons — to keep the referral clicks coming from the more popular blogs.

This is really an economic issue.  A political blog starts out as a labor of love, done for free.  If it catches on, it can sell ads, but the ad revenue need only “pay for” the time the bloggers spend working on it, and the small amount of overhead needed for web hosting.

However, the New Republic and The American Prospect (and National Review, and Weekly Standard) have the enormous additional cost of maintaining a paid staff of writers, editors, graphic artists, circulation managers, ad managers, etc., plus paper, ink, postage and rent. They are hoping their web site advertising will offset some of those costs.

And, if Nyhan is correct, the editors of those sites have noticed that traffic goes up or down based on whether these sites give reliable reinforcement to their ideological fellow-travelers.  This tendency exerts pressure on editors of these magazine-based websites to enforce comformity, he believes.

So the real question on the floor is: Do we lose anything if these magazines are forced by the marketplace into becoming more orthodox?

Burying Fallaci

The obituaries and tributes to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who died of cancer last week, illustrate the gulf between principle and politics.

When I was in college, Fallaci was twice a hero — as a reporter whose portraits and interviews cut to the heart of the arrogance and brutality of power in Interview With History — and as a political activist who took enormous risks to fight fascism, dictatorships, sexism, and the Vietnam War. 

In Margaret Talbot’s recent profile in The New Yorker, she quoted from Fallaci’s preface, words I still remember from 30 years ago:

“Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon. . . . I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.”  

As a journalism student, I was blown away by her interviews.  Like everyone who fancied themselves a non-fiction writer in the 70s, I was attracted by the highly stylized “new journalism” of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr and Hunter S. Thompson.  But Fallaci made them all look silly, soft-headed and obsessed with trivia.   Her writing, at least in the English translations I read, had a Hemingwayish clarity and economy, left nothing to interpretation and engaged the most serious, life-and-death issues of her times.  And the things she got her subjects to say!  Henry Kissinger describing himself as Richard Nixon’s “mental wet nurse,” and agreeing with Fallaci that the Vietnam war was “useless.”  

There’s a mind-numbing cliche now, “speak truth to power,” which is mostly used by self-indulgent politicians to flatter themselves. But Fallaci was the rare example of someone who walked right up into the faces of powerful people, and using a mix of charm and intense honesty, got them to admit what were, essentially, crimes and misdemeanors against humanity.

But in her final years, Fallaci became much more controversial, primarily on the left.  No neo-conservative, Fallaci was a feminist and a Socialist until the day she died.  But she was infuriated to the point of hysteria on the way Europe’s political establishment was turning a blind eye to impact of a growing Muslim population on Europe, in particular Italy.  Again from The New Yorker:

According to Fallaci, Europeans, particularly those on the political left, subject people who criticize Muslim customs to a double standard. “If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your ‘right of thought and expression.’ But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination. If you kick the ass of a Chinese or an Eskimo or a Norwegian who has hissed at you an obscenity, nothing happens. On the contrary, you get a ‘Well done, good for you.’ But if under the same circumstances you kick the ass of an Algerian or a Moroccan or a Nigerian or a Sudanese, you get lynched.” The rhetoric of Fallaci’s trilogy is intentionally intemperate and frequently offensive: in the first volume, she writes that Muslims “breed like rats”; in the second, she writes that this statement was “a little brutal” but “indisputably accurate.” She ascribes behavior to bloodlines—Spain, she writes, has been overly acquiescent to Muslim immigrants because “too many Spaniards still have the Koran in the blood”—and her political views are often expressed in the language of disgust. Images of soiling recur in the books: at one point in “The Rage and the Pride” she complains about Somali Muslims leaving “yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery” in Florence. “Good Heavens!” she writes. “They really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in hitting so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards distant from their urinary apparatus?” Six pages later, she describes urine streaks in the Piazza San Marco, in Venice, and wonders if Muslim men will one day “shit in the Sistine Chapel.”

For saying things like this, Fallaci was excommunicated from the left, with anti-racism organizations working to get her most recent books — all about the threat to Europe she perceived from Islam – banned.  A Milan art gallery, Talbot reported, showed a large portrait of Falacci — beheaded.  Nice. When she died, she was facing trial in Italy for blasphemy.

To her critics, it didn’t seem to register that this lifelong feminist might have a problem with what another recently ostracized feminist, Phyllis Chesler, called “Islamic gender apartheid” — the brutal, total subjugation of women in the more fundamentalist Muslim societies. 

Fallaci’s 1979 interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini must have been a pivotal experience in her intellectual journey.  On reflection, she realized he was “the Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would poison the world.” From The New Yorker:

She had followed instructions from the new Islamist regime, and arrived at the Ayatollah’s home barefoot and wrapped in a chador. Almost immediately, she unleashed a barrage of questions about the closing of opposition newspapers, the treatment of Iran’s Kurdish minority, and the summary executions performed by the new regime. When Khomeini defended these practices, noting that some of the people killed had been brutal servants of the Shah, Fallaci demanded, “Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?” The Ayatollah answered with a pair of remorseless metaphors. “If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like the weeds that infest a field of wheat.”

Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did Khomeini compel women to “hide themselves, all bundled up,” when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who “contributed to the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress”; they weren’t women like Fallaci, who “go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men.” A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: “How do you swim in a chador?” Khomeini snapped, “Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.” Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. “That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” She yanked off her chador.

But Fallaci’s intemperate language about the Muslim religion and culture gave license even to supposedly objective journalists to marginalize her as a bigot.  To take just one example, consider Los Angeles Times’ Tracy Wilkinson’s obituary:

It was the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon that jerked her out of semi-retirement and launched her on her final crusade, against Islam. She saw radical Islam — and argued there was no such thing as moderate Islam — as the new brand of Nazi Fascism, “SS and Black Shirts who wave the Koran.” In the book that emerged, “The Rage and the Pride,” she ranted against Islamic terrorists and fundamentalism.

But Fallaci did not stop at terrorists; all Muslims, she wrote, posed a problem for Western civilization. She assailed European officials and the intelligentsia for bending over backward to accommodate Muslim immigrants who she said were hostile and insulting, who refused to adapt to Western values and customs, and who were ruining her city of Florence and much of Italy.

Using derogatory, ugly, distasteful language, she portrayed the “Muslim intruders” who “infest our streets and squares” as drug dealers, thieves, leches and prostitutes spreading AIDS. “They breed too much,” she said.

“The children of Allah spend their time with their bottoms in the air, praying five times a day,” she noted.

She also attacked the Vatican under the late Pope John Paul II, saying that the church appeased Islam and did not do enough to solidify Christian values in Europe.

“Tell me, Holy Father: Is it true that some time ago you asked the sons of Allah to forgive the Crusades that your predecessors fought to take back the Holy Sepulcher?” she wrote. “But … did they ever apologize?”

Does Fallaci’s language make me uncomfortable?  Of course.  Perhaps her zeal caused her to be too sweeping in her judgments and too vivid in her antipathies.  If Wilkinson is right that Fallaci saw “no such thing as moderate Islam,” then of course that’s a falsehood.  She lived in New York during her final years, but apparently didn’t notice the predominance of “moderate Islam” among the US’ millions of Islamic faithful.

But I’m still going to defend Fallaci.  Perhaps her strategy is wrong, but her objective was noble — to remind Europeans and Westerners in general that the culture in which they were born and raised is at war with an enemy.  We will lose this war, Fallaci saw, if we don’t think our way of life is worth defending. 

It strikes me as a fitting irony that an atheist like Fallaci would seek to strengthen the morale of the Catholic Church, inasmuch as she saw in the traditions of that church the seeds of tolerance — paradoxically, in an institution guilty of horrific intolerance during its history.  Neverthelesss, the Judeo-Christian ethic respects diversity of opinion and the integrity of the individual.  It is a culture open to change such that, eventually, after painful struggle, feminists, gays, atheists and other apostates from the fundamental creed, could find places of honor in our society.  At least that was Fallaci’s experience.  She saw all that, and then compared it with the social vision of Khomeini and his followers, and experienced a sense of dread.  She looked around and saw complacency, and it made her want to scream.  

The LA Times: Not Just a Numbers Game

Good luck to Dean Baquet in his fight to protect his LA Times newsroom staff from further cuts. If he’s fighting for quality, he’s fighting an important fight. 

But does everyone think the status quo = quality at the Times?  In a subtle way, the 14 civic leaders who demanded that the Tribune Company stop the layoffs, suggested that the Times isn’t quite delivering to its audience:

If I were the Tribune Company, instead of killing the Times at 100 layoffs the whack, I would take a cue from this letter, and challenge Baquet to revamp the Times and refresh its staff.  There are far too many reporters at this paper who have forgotten how to engage an audience, who don’t want to know what their readers think, and who think the “public trust” rhetoric applies to them personally — as if they themselves were monuments.

I agree that one could argue that a newspaper in the Times’ dominant market position is a “public trust.” Kind of like a baseball team.  “Public trusts” of this nature serve two masters — owners who require profits, and their community, which requires that you live up to your responsibilities. 

But just as the Dodgers improved by replacing their inexpensive, banjo-hitting shortstop with a costlier but more productive one, the Times needs to assess whether all its position players are helping the paper earn the “public trust” designation.  The dramatic fall in circulation over the past several years suggests it is not.

The civic leaders’ letter captured one part of the problem:  Implicitly, they said today’s Times is not “thorough,” and hasn’t kept up with “the civic, political and cultural life of the region.” While it is more diverse than it used to be, there is still a DNA code shared by most Times writers that reflects an insular, arrogant, one-sided view of the world. Subject-matter expertise is spotty. Laziness, both physical and intellectual, is indulged.  So is mediocre writing. 

Some might say the foregoing is true in all mainstream newspapers.  I disagree.  For all its biases, the New York Times remains a bracing read.  (Compare the NY Times’ business section with LA’s — it should be embarassing how much better NY’s is.) The Wall Street Journal doesn’t allow reporters to cover issues they don’t understand, and its stories are edited with an awareness of its readers’ intelligence and impatience. USA Today is edited rigorously to deliver what it promises, a quick but authoritative look at the news.

Compared with these institutions, the LA Times has long seemed the impecunious cousin with a dwindling trust fund.  Tellingly, the other three papers long ago embarked on national editions, in which their “public trust” status is subjected to competitive pressures in dozens of markets. The idea of a national edition of the LA Times seems far-fetched. Who would buy it if not for its coverage of its hometown market?

The Times has been the only show in Los Angeles for decades, and it shows.  Unaccustomed to competition, the Times’ staff interprets the pressure from the Tribune Company as unfair, like cutting teachers from an overcrowded school.  “If we don’t do this job, what will happen to the children?” 

The Times needs to get over itself.  Even as far back as the early 80s, when I first started hanging around the journalistic/civic world, the Times was known as a “velvet coffin” — its reporters overpaid and underchallenged.  In the journalistic world that’s emerging, that sense of entitlement won’t survive.  Readers need to be earned, every day.  Even if you forget for the moment that young people don’t read newspapers, and even middle-aged people are dropping the habit; the serious news consumer now has many more places to go — the best news sites offered by newspapers all over the world. 

They’re going to hate this comparison (I’m not even sure I like it) but perhaps reporters need to start looking at everything they write as akin to a pop song.  A hit is a hit, and now, by adding up the page views, editors and publishers now can see clearly what’s a hit and what’s a miss. 

To make a hit, you have to be inspired, and you have to know what your readers want. I know it’s real, real important to be the “watchdog” at City Hall, for example, but if you can’t engage your readers, you’re a watchdog with no bark and no bite.

The Times should be watching what the Washington Post, another nationally-respected establishment newspaper — another “public trust” — is doing. Like the Times, the Post never managed to get much of a readership for a national print edition.  But the Post has become the pacesetter in the US for online content, and the commitment to Web journalism has started to influence the writing and editing of stories. 

News coverage at the Post is now starting to be seen as part of a continuum of engagement with readers.  Text is no longer elevated artificially above images and sounds.  Reporters regularly engage with readers in chats, and will soon be subjected to reader comments on every story — as its sports reporters are now. Even symbolically, with its Technorati and de.licio.us icons, the Post is telling the Web audience it’s for them.

Mr. Baquet, you might need a different staff of people to make the necessary transformation.  I’m with you; it’s unwise to just make cuts.  Seniority-based layoffs, buyouts and such are no way to retool the Times — they’re a meat-axe.  But you can’t just stare the Tribune people down.  You need to establish a vision for the LA Times of the next 10 years, and begin making choices based on implementing that vision. 

Right now, Mr. Baquet, you are highly popular in the newsroom because you’re playing the strong daddy, protecting the kids.  Don’t get too high off of that.  You will still need to make tough choices — creative choices, but still tough ones.

The PR Tax (UPDATED)

Swag bags are part of popular culture now. Both “Entourage” and “The Sopranos” built episodes this season around the lavish gift-giving to celebrities at awards shows and film festivals. So it stands to reason that the IRS, which sometimes functions as a Ministry of Envy, would decide to start taxing these gifts that can be worth as much as $100,000, and would probably have continued to escalate if the government hadn’t stepped in. From the LA Times’ coverage:

“There was an awful lot of publicity about the ever-increasing value of these baskets,” IRS Commissioner Mark V. Everson said. “And somebody said, ‘Why don’t we do something about this?’ It was just so clearly taxable we felt we had to step in.”

The IRS reminded Oscar presenters before this year’s ceremony that noncash compensation was just as taxable as a paycheck. Everson said the effort was linked to his drive to bring “a sense of fairness that resonates throughout the system. You can’t let the rich get away with something.”

Legally, these baskets might be deemed gifts, but in gift-giving, it’s the thought that counts, and the thought behind swag bags is purely mercenary — product-placement PR. The thought being that if Will Ferrell wears the sunglasses or wristwatch, while enjoying the comp week at a pricey resort, someone might see it — in People magazine, or the National Enquirer. That’s a huge bang for the buck, worth more than advertising at a fraction of the cost. Guests visiting his home might enjoy his new plasma TV and want one like it. Friends might smell his new cologne and ask him for its name. That’s “WOM,” word-of-mouth publicity. All to give brands the right kind of visibility, and associate it with the coolest of the cool.

The product-placement concept is growing in many directions; I wonder if the IRS’ decision will have an impact.

For example: If you read the PR blogs about PR blogging, you frequently see giveaways mentioned as a key strategy to get bloggers on your side. The suave PR person is supposed to note that a trusted someone is blogging about electronic games, say; or maybe writes a lot about wine. An e-mail is sent: “I’m enjoying your blog tremendously. You’ve got a lot of cred. Hey, would you like to try …” and offer (never unsolicited!) a free sample, a beta test, whatever. If the blogger likes it, the suave PR person will encourage them to write about it.

Will these giveaways also be taxed? I detected a note of panic in these comments:

“Wow — this is insane,” J. Dubb, the marketing director for Five Four Clothing, the maker of high-end urban apparel, said when informed of the IRS announcement. (At this year’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, Five Four was handing out cartloads of clothing in its crowded freebie suite.)

“It’s hard to say what the impact will be, but it will definitely be a hit,” Dubb said. “But we think [celebrities] like our stuff enough that they’d be willing to pay tax.”

Britt Johnson, whose Los Angeles events company Mediaplacement organized a freebie suite at last year’s Golden Globe Awards, said past recipients of swag may soon hesitate when offered ostensibly free products. “You are going to see a lot of people turning things down,” Johnson said, “and a lot more people donating to charity.”

I agree with Johnson, not Dubb. The prospect of paying a tax will be a massive disincentive. For the marketers, the idea that their gift baskets would be auctioned off for charity is also somewhat of a disincentive, because the point was to adorn celebrities with these items, not a bunch of nobodies who win silent auctions.

The solution is obvious. Every item in every gift basket should come accompanied by an endorsement contract. Be a little more business-like, folks. I’m not a tax accountant, but it seems to me that if you get the celebrities to sign something that says “I will wear your high-end urban apparel to assist in your promotional efforts,” then it’s no longer a gift. Perhaps there is another tax consequence, but since it’s an upfront exchange of value, I would guess it’s more favorable.

UPDATE:  Randi Schmelzer’s piece in PR Week (link for subscribers) straightens out some of my own confusion, as well as the Times’.  The IRS has determined that the swag baskets are not gifts, and that is why they will be taxed from now on.

If any organization is truly benefiting from this news, however, it’s the IRS. Focusing on both recipient reporting and the filing of Form 1099 by merchandise providers, the IRS’ outreach program includes letters to entertainment industry groups and tax professionals, an online FAQ, and plenty of media relations, according to Nancy Mathis, a DC-based public affairs specialist at the IRS.

“Any individual’s requirement is to pay tax on income,” she said. “You are not required to pay taxes on gifts, [but] our position is that these… are items given with the expectation of something in return, that use by a celebrity will enhance sales, and the products themselves serve as compensation.”

Okay, I’m a celebrity, and I get a gift basket that has some items in it I wouldn’t be caught dead using.  Can I return them so I won’t have to pay taxes on them?   And, if I return an item I don’t want, am I required to publicize that fact?  “Hi, I’m a celebrity, and for the record, I never wear Axe body spray.  The gallon of Axe body spray I was given in a swag bag went straight down the kitchen sink.” 

—————

On the same subject, I enjoyed PR Week’s Julia Hood’s humorous editorial on product placement in “Entourage.” You have to be a subscriber to read the whole thing, but here’s a taste:

As soon as a program becomes popular, it is apparently doomed to become little more than a platform for a parade of brands. Entourage in particular has transformed from a sly comment on the peculiar balance of power and egos in Hollywood into a fantasy camp for young guys who suddenly have unlimited sums of money to spend in the shopping mecca of the planet. Motorcycles, video games, flat-screen televisions, and Las Vegas have all been promoted through the adventures of our winsome foursome, and the producers are secure in the knowledge that their marketing partners are gleefully reaping the benefits of reaching their target demographic.

In truth, it probably doesn’t matter that someone like me is put off by the preponderance of stuff that Entourage, and many other programs, is awash with. I’m not in the elite group of 18- to 25-year-old boys these marketers covet. But this is an example of a program that is buckling under the weight of its own success, forgetting that consumers are savvier today than they used to be and will see right through those curiously blank beer bottles the boys of Entourage seem partial to, as opposed to the lovingly displayed wine label of choice.

I’m speculating that the “curiously blank bottles” are to be filled in later (perhaps for syndiction) with digitally-added brand names, as described here, and that I mentioned here.

Mice on a Plane

On a day in late April, an American Airlines jet flew from JFK to LAX — infested with mice, according to an investigative report on KSDK St. Louis, which featured footage from a whistleblower’s hidden camera. The airline personnel at JFK knew about the mice, but let the jet fly — not just that day, but for weeks thereafter.  (Click here to watch the report, click here to read the station website’s text version.)

From the station’s website:

The video was shot by a long-time employee at the overhaul base at Kansas City International Airport. The whistleblower did not want to be identified but did want to expose a hidden secret onboard a Boeing 767 passenger plane.

The whistle blower said, “We had to take the chairs off and that’s when everybody saw mice running around on the floor and one ran down one of the mechanic’s arm.”

The plane arrived in Missouri April 30.

The whistleblower explained, “There’s feces all along this edge right here. It’s throughout the whole aircraft.”

The whistle blower said workers found nests in air vents and dead mice in emergency oxygen masks. When mice would get hungry, they ate insulation and chewed through wires.

“If they shorted themselves and caused a fire, it would go through that cabin so fast, we could have lost some lives,” said the whistleblower.

By May, the whistleblower estimated there was “900 to 1000″ mice on the plane. A subsequent investigation only found 17 live mice, however, according to American Airlines. Nevertheless, the station interviews a retired pilot and crash scene investigator who says the plane should have been grounded.

“The potential for the catastrophic mishap is there and if you have one mouse, you have two. (If) you have two, you have a family,” he said.

The KSDK report cites the FAA as saying American Airlines “did nothing wrong because airlines do not have to report rodent infestations unless the rodents affect the mechanics.” But, naturally, that assumes you know at any given moment how many mice are on the plane, where they are, and what they’re chewing on.

The airline’s spokespeople say it’s rare, that “infestations simply don’t happen.”

Obviously, in an period when capturing images on video and uploading them onto the Internet can be done in seconds, American Airlines is taking a pretty bold stance with that comment. It won’t be pretty if their confident declarations come back to haunt them.

(Thanks to one of the travelin’ Stodder brothers for showing me this link.)

The Real McCaw*

The soap opera at the Santa Barbara News-Press has been enjoyable reading. I’ve been following it via LA Observed and the LA Times. It’s hard to follow what the News-Press is saying about itself, because all of the relevant content is behind a pay barrier, but according to LA Observed, in the wake of reporters and editors quitting in protest, the News-Press’ spokesman issues anodyne public statements about differences of opinion being respected but sometimes requiring a parting of the ways. Classic spin, in other words, that makes the paper’s owner, Wendy McCaw and her new management look even worse.

The point has been made in many places that this kind of upheaval is what LA Times employees might get if a local plutocrat like Eli Broad, David Geffen or Richard Riordan buys the paper. Members of the journalistic fraternity apparently believed Wendy McCaw’s philanthropic commitments — the environment, animal rights — roughly equated to her agreement with traditional notions of journalistic independence. Thus, at first, her purchase of the News-Press from the New York Times Co. was hailed — just as a Riordan, Broad or Geffen purchase would be hailed here in LA.

It has come as both a shock and a disappointment to reporters in Southern California that McCaw would insert herself into the editorial process so aggressively, and on such eccentric matters like how the word “blonde” should be used. But Wendy McCaw is a human being, not a corporation. Corporations have policies that, for better or for worse, constrain emotions, interposing process between whim and act. Human beings, especially wealthy human beings, don’t have the same filters.

So when actor Rob Lowe called McCaw, allegedly to complain that the coverage of his planning commission fight to build a really big house in Montecito revealed his address, I imagine McCaw thought he had a point. Rich celebrities have special security needs. It’s not an unreasonable request, especially coming from a nice guy like Lowe who also supports the environment. So, henceforth, no more publication of Lowe’s address, no more publication of anyone’s address without her permission, lest another worthy millionaire be made to feel paranoid.

The newspaper’s staff objected, of course, that if you’re covering a planning commission controversy, the address is the point of the story. Zoning rules are address-specific. The main complaints about Lowe’s plans were coming from his neighbor. This was a public proceeding, and Lowe’s address was on all the public documents associated with it. Leaving out the address makes no sense, journalistically. If Lowe wanted to maintain his privacy, he should’ve settled with his neighbor quietly. But since he’s asking the local government to exercise discretion on his behalf, Lowe became fair game. At least, that’s how a typical editor would see things. McCaw disagreed, however, and she rocked some careers in the process — quite unfairly, it is clear.

Likewise with the coverage of her newly appointed publisher’s DUI; McCaw apparently believed one story about it was enough, and didn’t want to see a second. The newsroom took this as censorship. McCaw raised the stakes further by giving this same publisher authority to oversee editorial content. That triggered a series of principled resignations by some of the paper’s most respected editorial staff; and the organization of a pitchfork brigade to stand outside the McCaw castle, demanding a return to journalistic norms.

I was all ready to join this brigade, philosphically, until I got bugged by this comment by SF Chronicle columnist C.W. Nevius:

The upshot? McCaw and the News-Press look like small time operators, who think they can turn a public trust into a country club newsletter. Roberts and the editors come across as paragons of journalism, standing up to bad bosses, censorship, and dumb editing. And everyone else around the country gets a good laugh.

Mr. Nevius: McCaw doesn’t just “think” she can turn the News-Press into a country club newsletter. She can. It’s hers. It’s not a “public trust.” A courtroom is a public trust. A national park is a public trust. The principle of press freedom is a public trust. But a newspaper will never be a public trust, not unless the government buys it — and I doubt any self-respecting reporter would want to work for a government-run newspaper, although I could be wrong about that.

Looking back at journalistic history, we’re taught to revere bold individuals like Otis Chandler who took control of news organizations and made them better. The bold individuals who take control of news organizations and make them worse tend to be forgotten, but there were probably more of them. The point is — Wendy McCaw’s got the right to choose what she wants to lose money doing. One person’s laughing stock is another person’s passion.

If Wendy McCaw wants to edit the News-Press herself, she can do that. If she wants to spike every story that makes a friend look bad, she can do that. If she wants to turn the front page over to the Audubon Society, that’s her right. If she wants to run weather reports that say it’s raining when the sun is shining, she can do that. McCaw didn’t use her billions to buy the paper and then turn it over to a foundation to run. That might’ve been a good idea, but she didn’t do that. She put herself in charge.

I believe one reason the media establishment has worked itself into such high dudgeon about the News-Press is, at first, McCaw played the dream date role to the hilt. When McCaw bought the paper, part of the appeal was, “She’s so rich, she won’t care if we lose money.” That’s nirvana to newspaper folk. It means they can hire the best — and the News-Press did that, bringing Jerry Roberts down from the San Francisco Chronicle. It means they can cover more stories. It might even mean they can get paid more. McCaw’s ownership initially provided a vision of salvation for other newspapers with hellhounds on their trails. Now, Wendy McCaw is being seen as a cautionary tale for those who pray for a wealthy knight to salvage the LA Times, the San Jose Mercury News or other important publications from the grip of cost-cutters.

So much of the coverage of News-Press turmoil is journalist-centric. Reporters are covering the story from the standpoint of what it would like to be a reporter employed by Wendy McCaw. But reporters aren’t the only stakeholders here. For readers — in Santa Barbara and elsewhere — this might be an opportunity. With falling circulation an almost universal condition for newspapers, many see the classic newspaper format fading into history. Maybe now that Wendy McCaw has dispelled any illusions that she’s planning on running a museum-quality publication, someone will talk her into doing something completely new and different.

Start with her environmentalism. There is so much significant environmental news that never gets covered in the mainstream press; news that, to my mind, transcends the stale dichotomies, business vs. nature, that inform most environmental stories. (If you read this blog regularly, you know I’m drawn to gee-whiz stories about how environmental imperatives might make the future more interesting. Kite-powered freighters anyone?)

If Wendy McCaw wanted to turn her newspaper brand (including its online version) into the world’s leading destination for the coverage of environmental issues, with an editorial policy that aggressively reflected her point of view, she’d have that niche almost to herself. “Santa Barbara” is the perfect name to associate with such a publication, given the historic significance of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill in galvanizing changes in environmental policies worldwide.

Another way to go would be to launch a laboratory for Citizen Journalism. That city must have the highest percentage of under-utilized intelligence of any city in America, with so many early retirees and their spouses and kids hanging out in ranchettes and seaside palaces, cashing their dividend checks instead of doing what made them rich in the first place. There must be at least a few such persons who would be fit the profile of the Citizen Journalist; talented writers who care enough about their communities to monitor local goverment and other institutions, and blog about what they learn. Another source of good minds with not enough to do is UCSB. The News-Press could give new writers an on-line home.

If there’s a market for the kind of coverage of Santa Barbara that the News-Press traditionally provided, it will be filled; either by the Santa Barbara Independent, or by a new venture. Or perhaps by the News-Press itself. Despite the personnel moves, has anyone noted a diminution of the newspaper’s quality since the uproar? I don’t read it, so I don’t know.

Anyway, this is Wendy McCaw’s moment in the spotlight. I hope she does something interesting with it. She might or might not have a master plan, but she’ll have time to develop one. After all, it’s her baby now, and she can do just what she wants with it.

*Apologies to Graham Parker. Also, edited 7/9 p.m.

(UPDATE 7/11. Life goes on for the News-Press, apparently.)

The Last Words

Looking at the list of Emmy nominations as posted by the LA Times’ “The Envelope” site, one thing stuck out. TV is supposed to be the writers’ medium. But the highest-profile writing nomination are at the very bottom of the list, long past the time when most browsers will quit scrolling.

Strangely, the first writing nominations to appear on the list are those for “nonfiction programming.” The “fiction” awards follow (among other things) Children’s Programs, two subcategories of Reality programs, all the sound-mixing awards, prosthetic makeup, and stunt coordination.

So in tribute to the writers of the writers’ medium, here are their nominations only:

Writing for a Comedy Series
“Arrested Development: Development Arrested,” Fox
“Entourage: Exodus,” HBO
“Extras: Kate Winslet,” HBO
“My Name Is Earl: Pilot,” NBC
“The Office: Christmas Party,” NBC

Writing for a Drama Series
“Grey’s Anatomy: It’s the End of the World, as We Know It (Part 1 & Part 2),” ABC
“Grey’s Anatomy: Into You Like a Train,” ABC
“Lost: The 23rd Psalm,” ABC
“Six Feet Under: Everyone’s Waiting,” HBO
“The Sopranos: Members Only,” HBO

Writing for a Variety, Music or Comedy Program
“The Colbert Report,” Comedy Central
“The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” Comedy Central
“Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” NBC
“Late Show With David Letterman,” CBS
“Real Time With Bill Maher,” HBO

Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries
Movie or a Dramatic Special: “Bleak House (Masterpiece Theatre),” PBS
“Elizabeth I,” HBO
“Flight 93,” A&E
“The Girl in the Cafe,” HBO
“Mrs. Harris,” HBO.

Writing for Nonfiction Programming
“American Masters: Ernest Hemingway
Rivers to the Sea,” PBS
“American Masters: John Ford/John Wayne: The Filmmaker and the Legend,” PBS
“How William Shatner Changed the World,” The History Channel
“Penn & Teller: Bull–: Prostitution,” Showtime
“Stardust: The Bette Davis Story,” TCM

Who will win? I don’t know. The point is advertising and PR. If you get a nomination, there is some tangible benefit to the show’s ability to increase its ratings. If you win — even better. You can go into the fall season saying “Watch the Emmy-winning comedy, ‘Arrested Development!’” Except “Arrested Development” is cancelled. Maybe that was a bad example.

Is there a lot of wagering on the Emmys? Many words will be expended trying to predict the winners. I don’t know why. Does anyone remember the winners two days later?

If I watch the Emmys, I will root for the writers of “Six Feet Under.” That last episode, the one that got nominated, was magical. The rest of my viewing was too spotty for me to have an opinion. The shows I watched this year were “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” “24,” “The Office,” “House” and “Entourage.”

And, oh yeah, “Law and Order,” although a 10-year-old rerun is just as good as a new episode, and I often can’t tell the difference. My favorite “Law and Order” flavor is the one with the great Vincent D’Onofrio as a genius cop who spits in people’s faces like a rabid parrot. That program wisely stays out of the courtroom. The courtroom scenes in the original recipe are pathetic. I just spent a month in a courtroom. “Law and Order’s” writers might want to try the same thing.

Speaking of legal shows, “Boston Legal” was often good for an absurd laugh, although I notice the show’s nominations are all in drama categories. Do people really get caught up in the drama of “Boston Legal?” Maybe they put it in the drama category because at least one storyline per show has a politically correct angle that allows the actors to make speeches about public policy. Those speeches would not last two seconds in the courtroom I was in. Anyway, the point of “Boston Legal” is the clownish William Shatner waving guns around, puffing cigars, working around his approaching dementia, and pulling his pants down in court. You’d think he was auditioning to play Jack D. Ripper in a “Dr. Strangelove” remake.
My wife and I also liked “The Comeback,” but HBO told everyone who would listen that the network considered the show a failure. Well, we didn’t, and we’re glad Lisa Kudrow got nominated. Hers was the most cringe-making performance of the year, topping even Larry David.

I also hope the Emmy voters don’t give the comedy writing award to David Letterman’s show. I’ve been a fan of Letterman since the 70s, but his show lately has been bland and predictable. They always seem to get nominated for an Emmy and frequently win. Stop encouraging them, I say. Make them work harder to entertain us.

Challenging Times, Challenged Tribunes

On the one hand, you’ve got the New York and Los Angeles Times’ publication of information on how the U.S. government seeks to monitor the international flow of money that might fund terrorism through SWIFT, the “financial industry-owned co-operative supplying secure, standardised messaging services and interface software to 7,800 financial institutions in more than 200 countries.” The Bush Administration performs its investigations pursuant to lawful subpoenas, and there was no evidence that, as of yet, this program has abused anyone’s legitimate rights to privacy.

Were it not for the high stakes involved, these stories would have provoked giant yawns. I’m sure the reporters involved would have preferred these stories be accompanied by some ominous-sounding movie music to give them the sense of drama they otherwise lacked. It would have been far more newsworthy — far more scandalous — if these reporters had come across SWIFT and learned that the U.S. had failed to examine its data.

The most disturbing thing about these stories was, to me, the fact that the government pleaded with the newspapers to withhold the story on national security grounds, and the newspapers refused. As NY Times editor Bill Keller explained it:

We weighed most heavily the Administration’s concern that describing this program would endanger it. The central argument we heard from officials at senior levels was that international bankers would stop cooperating, would resist, if this program saw the light of day. We don’t know what the banking consortium will do, but we found this argument puzzling. First, the bankers provide this information under the authority of a subpoena, which imposes a legal obligation. Second, if, as the Administration says, the program is legal, highly effective, and well protected against invasion of privacy, the bankers should have little trouble defending it. The Bush Administration and America itself may be unpopular in Europe these days, but policing the byways of international terror seems to have pretty strong support everywhere. And while it is too early to tell, the initial signs are that our article is not generating a banker backlash against the program.

(snip)

A secondary argument against publishing the banking story was that publication would lead terrorists to change tactics. But that argument was made in a half-hearted way. It has been widely reported — indeed, trumpeted by the Treasury Department — that the U.S. makes every effort to track international financing of terror. Terror financiers know this, which is why they have already moved as much as they can to cruder methods. But they also continue to use the international banking system, because it is immeasurably more efficient than toting suitcases of cash.

Keller’s defense seems King Canute-like. The government’s concerns aren’t valid because we say so. There’s no banker backlash. The terrorists know you’re watching them. What’s the big deal? It’s all so “puzzling.” The description of the government’s argument as “half-hearted” sounds like the kind of thing a teenager says. “Yeah, Dad, I heard you, but I didn’t think you really meant it.”

Either Bill Keller is out of his depth, or he’s being less than honest. Is he suggesting that if the Administration had been more “full-hearted,” he would have withheld the story? As it happens, Treasury Secretary John Snow violently disagrees with Keller’s characterization, but either way it’s absurd.

If the SWIFT surveillance program were unlawful, abusive of legitimate privacy expectations, or some kind of subterfuge with an illegitimate purpose, an editor would be perfectly within his or her rights to have dismissed the Administration’s concerns and exposed the wrongdoing. But the Times fails to provide such a justification.

As Keller himself says, “A reasonable person, informed about this program, might well decide to applaud it. That said, we hesitate to preempt the role of legislators and courts, and ultimately the electorate, which cannot consider a program if they don’t know about it.” By the logic of that rationale, any classified program the news media comes to find out about should be publicized, on the sole basis that it is secret.

So, the stories were a bad idea, and are being defended disingenously. But on the other hand, the backlash is disingenous, too.

If you have listened to right-wing talk radio or read any of the affiliated blogs, there is a consensus among this crowd that the NY Times, LA Times and anyone else who published this story should be prosecuted for espionage. Or — the more moderate position — that the reporters and editors should be subpoenaed to provide the names of the leakers, and the leakers should be prosecuted. Resolutions are being issued in Congress condemning the release of the information — and then are being condemned by the bloggers as insufficiently tough. Some have called for the Congress and White House to revoke the press credentials for the NY and LA Times.

As The Nation’s Scott Sherman reports, the notion of prosecuting the press originates from an literal reading of a Red-baiting-era amendment to the U.S. Espionage Act by Commentary writer Gabriel Schoenfeld.

In his research into the 1917 Espionage Act and subsequent espionage statutes, Schoenfeld discovered Section 798 of the US Criminal Code, enacted by Congress in 1950, which reads, “Whoever knowingly and willingly communicates, furnishes, transmits or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes…any classified information…concerning the communication intelligence activities of the United States…shall be fined not more than $10,000 or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.” (His italics.) This, Schoenfeld believed, was the “completely unambiguous” smoking gun he needed against (reporter James) Risen and the Times–both of whom, he felt, had “damaged critical intelligence capabilities” and undermined national security with the NSA story. Schoenfeld knew when he wrote the essay that no journalist had ever been prosecuted under Section 798, but his purpose was to stiffen the spine of the Justice Department. “The laws governing what the Times has done are perfectly clear,” he concluded. “Will they be enforced?”

Schoenfeld said he unearthed and publicized his interpretation of the law in hopes he would “set in motion a ‘chilling effect,’ however slight….” Schoenfeld is a scholar with a think-tank background, who has said he doesn’t anticipate there will be, in fact, any prosecutions. But his legal theory has become a rallying cry for the right-wing; not just the professional tub-thumpers, who recognize the danger of this approach, but to their loyal readers — the people who vote and who fight for our country.

Hugh Hewitt proudly cites an Iraq-based military blogger, Sgt. T.F. Boggs, who wrote Keller saying this:

You have done something great in your own eyes-you think you have hurt the current administration while at the same time encouraging “freedom fighters” resisting the imperialism of the United States. However, I foresee a backlash coming your way. I wish I had a subscription to your paper so I could cancel it as soon as possible. But alas, that would prove a little tough right now since I am in Iraq dealing with terrorists financed by the very men you are helping.

Thank you for continually contributing to the deaths of my fellow soldiers. You guys definitely provide a valuable service with your paper. Why without you how would terrorists stay one step ahead of us?

Talk about waving the bloody shirt! Sgt. Boggs is perfectly entitled to feel this way, but the way Hewitt and others are using his words clearly is designed to stir up hatred of the NY Times, LA Times and the news media in general. Do they realize that when you start a fire like this, how quickly it can get out of control?

John McIntyre of Real Clear Politics, perhaps incautiously, gives away the game and reveals what this furor really means to the right:

Politically, this is a clear winner for Bush and the GOP. The issue plays to Bush’s strengths and continues to paint the picture of the President as a stalwart fighter, protecting America’s safety while the left-wing press does their best to undermine as many successful anti-terror programs as possible.

The Times and the far left are so completely out of touch with where the country is on national security and terrorism issues they probably thought this disclosure would hurt Bush politically. They are clueless.

It serves the interests of the right-wing to keep this pot boiling until November. Democrats who thought they could win back Congress this year by “nationalizing” the election will now face the same strategy aimed at them — Republicans equating a vote for Democrats to a vote for the traitorous, law-breaking media.

All of this damages the country, and the institutions of liberty that distinguish our country from all others. It seems clear to me that the root of the problem is the carelessness and arrogance of the folks at the top of the media pyramid today. A responsibility comes with the job of running the nation’s most powerful journalistic entities to think through the consequences of the actions one takes — not just on one day’s newspaper, but on the fragile web of rights and permissions that keep a free press free.

History shows that it is all too easy to persuade Americans to give up on these rights. Given the open-ended nature of the war on terror, we could lose those rights for a generation or more. Condemn the right-wing for all that they do to push America in the direction of less freedom, but condemn the intellectually shallow media for giving the right-wing all the ammunition it needs.

Waiting for Eli

The Los Angeles Times is in the metaphysical quandary of covering its own crack-up, as its owners fight about money, and whether they can make more of it by cutting back on the newspaper's budget, or spinning it off.

It's got to be tension city on Spring Street, but one Timesman is having fun; Steve Lopez, author of two columns this week in which he tries to get local billionaires to adopt his lil' puppy. In today's story, Lopez tries to win over former mayor and longtime plutocrat philanthropist Richard Riordan by pulling a shift as a waiter at The Original Pantry, which Riordan owns.

Lopez's piece morphs into a contemporary version of "Waiting for Godot" — Waiting for Eli (Broad) — with the ex-mayor gesturing to an empty table he'd reserved for a meeting with his affluent pals.

ESTRAGON:

Give me a carrot. (Vladimir rummages in his pockets, takes out a turnip and gives it to Estragon who takes a bite out of it. Angrily.) It's a turnip!

VLADIMIR:

Oh pardon! I could have sworn it was a carrot. (He rummages again in his pockets, finds nothing but turnips.) All that's turnips. (He rummages.) You must have eaten the last. (He rummages.) Wait, I have it. (He brings out a carrot and gives it to Estragon.) There, dear fellow. #

(Oh, wait, that wasn't in the Lopez piece. I got confused because The Original Pantry puts vegetables on every table. Here's what Riordan said…)

"Come on," Riordan called out over lunch, making a plea to his no-show friends. "The city needs a home-grown owner of the L.A. Times."

Lopez uses a winemaking metaphor to describe the Times' business problems:

The paper, as you may know, is owned by the Tribune Co., whose leaders have given no indication that they will go down as giants in American publishing history. By that I mean that if they owned a wine company with a 20% profit margin and wanted to bump it up to 22%, they would never think of improving the wine. They would instead put less wine in the bottle and slash the promotion budget to save costs.

Then, Lopez makes his pitch:

For two thin quarters, you get more than 900 reporters and editors who take seriously their mission to inform, entertain, and hold people in power accountable, including their own bosses. Who owns the paper matters. It matters almost as much as what the owner values, and the near-sighted hog butchers in Chicago are threatening another round of cuts that could diminish the power and purpose of a great local institution for the sake of kicking the stock up two points.

I'm not arguing in favor of the cuts. But Lopez's value proposition ain't what it used to be.

Yes, for two thin quarters you get all of what he says in one package — one wine bottle.

But included in the price of an online hookup — not a trivial cost, but one that millions now equate to a utility bill — you get all of that expertly assembled content, plus the content of the Times' local competitors, national competitors, foreign competitors, eyewitnesses, opinion mavens, and the unfiltered voices of ordinary people, not all of them trustworthy, but all striving to get readers' attention. And no need to recycle the bottle. The content just flows into your glass, when you want it.

If the Times dies, will all those 900 reporters and editors stop plying their trade? I don't think we need to assume that. They won't all be working for the Times, to be sure. But if they still want to inform, entertain and hold people in power accountable, they'll be able to continue somewhere. Many will continue with whoever takes the Times fully online, filing stories on a schedule and in a form that suits the new medium. Not all the cuts have to be taken from the content. You can save a lot of money if you don't use so much paper, ink and delivery truck fuel.

A business model that sustains the same supply of news content online that is currently available offline remains a work in progress, and a process of trial and error — so much more interesting than the dreary stories of feuding Tribune Company board members.

One factor that writers at the Times might not like is the competition from many online writers willing to work for little or no direct pay. All of that will figure into the evolution of the information products and brands that — inevitably — will replace the Times as we know it today.

Little wonder why the billionaires' table at Riordan's hash house was still empty when the curtain fell. If I were them, I'd wait too.

Disaster Porn

Everywhere I go today, even at my own dinner table, I'm hearing about this.

Southern California could be in line for a serious quake along the infamous San Andreas fault, seismologists have found. New measurements suggest that the region close to Los Angeles, the traditional earthquake location in Hollywood disaster movies, could feel the effects of a real-life tremor within the next few years.

The southern part of the San Andreas seems to be building up a considerable amount of strain, the work suggests. And because no significant earthquake has ruptured this portion of the fault for at least the past 250 years, it could be primed to cause a devastating event.

"It could be tomorrow; it could be ten years from now," says Yuri Fialko, a geophysicist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, who led the study. "But it appears unlikely to accumulate another few hundred years of strain."

This is news? Southern Californians don't know this? I've been hearing about the buildup in the southern part of the San Andreas fault all my life. We've known about this fault since 1895.

In the interests of science, of course we need to know with more precision why and how the Pacific and North American plates will next slip, but until they can tell us when, it's not really news.

Look around you. If you're anywhere near LA, you can probably see, through the haze, a mountain. That mountain is not God's Play-Dough. Our landscape was created violently. It will eventually throw us into the sea, or bury us, or lift the ground beneath our feet above our heads. We love it here. And we love hearing about how we're all doomed. I guess that's why a study like this gives our news anchors the vapors. We're turned on by the dangerous types.

No More Goose, No More Golden Eggs

Advertising Age's Gavin O'Malley is disturbed that marketing managers are putting money in the pockets of supposedly independent editorial outlets:

Something's rotten with the state of media. Nearly half — 48.9% — of senior marketing executives admit to paying for editorial or broadcast brand placement, according to an industrywide survey just released by PRWeek and PR agency Manning Selvage & Lee.

What's more, the survey of 266 chief marketing officers, marketing VPs and directors found that half of those who haven't paid for placement said they would if the opportunity arose.

"This type of behavior is as harmful to PR professionals as it is to consumers and the media," said Mark Hass, CEO of the Publicis Groupe-owned public-relations agency.

While the publishers mixing editorial and advertising most likely are consumer-product glossies, Mr. Hass said he strongly believes their lax standards harm the image of media in general. "When people see the erosion of concepts like objectivity, they start to lose faith in any organization claiming to be objective."

Interestingly, when PR Week released the survey last month, this particular finding was buried at the end of its story (subscription required). But once they got to it, PR Week raised the same concerns:

But the rise of ad-driven editorial content in both broadcast and print media has led, some say, to a fuzziness of the line separating advertising and editorial. There is a difference between inserting a product into an entertainment property and paying to secure a mention of a product in a more sterile editorial environment – such as a newspaper – says Hass. He notes a survey by sister media firm Starcom MediaVest which found that 65% of consumers thought editorial mentions of a product had been paid for.

News executives might want to keep this consumer perception in mind when contemplating why newspaper circulation is dropping, and why so many ex-readers find the highly subjective blogosphere more reliable. PR and marketing executives might start wondering what kind of strategies they're going be able to sell clients when the "third party credibility" of editorial placements is no longer seen as credible.

It's akin to the issue of broadcasters' use of PR-generated VNRs. Editors have the First Amendment right to publish or broadcast content that someone has paid for. But you can't have it both ways. Either you're independent, or you're not. If you're not, don't pretend you are. Because you'll be found out.

Playwright Jean Giraudoux was the first (of many) to say "The secret of success is sincerity. Once you can fake that you've got it made." But that applied to an era when phony sincerity was difficult to uncover. Maybe history will show that paid-for editorial content was the rule, not the exception in decades past. The future will be different. In our time, transparency isn't just a lifestyle choice. It's a law of nature.

Plastic Fantastic Newspapers

Here it is, your newspaper of the future. It's a hybrid, halfway between an iPod mp3 music player and a laptop, and its developers promise you'll be able to fold it and put it in your pocket.

From a Reuters story on Publish:

(As) early as this year, the future may finally arrive. Some of the world's top newspaper publishers are planning to introduce a form of electronic newspaper that will allow users to download entire editions from the Web on to reflective digital screens said to be easier on the eyes than light-emitting laptop or cellphone displays.

Flexible versions of these readers may be available as early as 2007.

The handheld readers couldn't come a moment too soon for the newspaper industry, which has struggled to maintain its readership and advertising from online rivals.

Publishers Hearst Corp. in the U.S., Pearson Plc.'s Les Echos in Paris and Belgian financial paper De Tijd are planning a large-scale trials of the readers this year.

(snip)

Sony and iRex's new devices employ screen technology by E Ink, which originated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. Investors include Hearst, Philips, McClatchy Co., Motorola Inc. and Intel Corp.

The company produces energy-efficient ink sheets that contain tiny capsules showing either black or white depending on the electric current running through it.

Some of the latest devices apply E Ink's sheets to glass transistor boards, or back planes, which are rigid. But by 2007, companies such as U.K.-based Plastic Logic Ltd will manufacture screens on flexible plastic sheets, analysts say.

Separately, Xerox Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are developing methods to produce flexible back planes cheaply. Xerox, in particular, has created a working prototype of system that lets manufacturers create flexible transistor boards much like one would print a regular paper document.

Production costs are expected to be low enough soon for publishers to consider giving away such devices for free with an annual subscription. Data on subscribers could also help publishers better tailor ads.

This new newspaper fills a niche I'm not sure exists. It seems like many news consumers have already decided they are willing to give up the portability of the print edition in exchange for all the advantages of online news surfing. Will the new devices let you aggregate your own content choices from multiple sources, or would you be stuck with one publication?

I understand the need to get subscribers to commit to a full year's subscription. The devices are $300 each. But that seems like a barrier.

Frankly, I like the way things are now. The newspaper used to slow me down in the morning. It would come to my house, and I'd race through it over coffee before getting ready for work. Now, by the time the paper arrives at my door, I've already read much of it online the previous night, and I know I can catch up with the rest of it whenever I want, on my laptop or a desktop. I only continue letting the LA Times pile up in a corner of my apartment because my wife likes to save the Food and Home sections.

The new device sounds cool, technologically. Maybe if I took a train to work…

But what do I know? When the iPod mp3 player first came on the scene, I didn't see the point. You can only listen to one song at a time, so I wondered why was it so critical to be able to carry 1,500, or 3,000 or 10,000 songs with you? Well, when I walked our dog this morning, I listened to a random mix that bounced from Stan Getz to Bruce Springsteen to Cat Power to Sammy Davis, Jr. to the Decembrists. I might love this new thing, too.

Another PR Tactic About to Bite the Dust

Global warming is a good metaphor for how the changing communications climate is affecting the array of PR tactics that hundreds of PR agencies offer their clients. Glaciers are melting, seas are rising, once-fertile forests turn to desert, and giant flies have begun to attack — but some species are too slow to move, and will die right where they stand.

It was not so long ago that my staff and I would draft "sample" letters to the editor, and distribute them, on a small scale, to average Dick and Janes to send to their local newspapers as if the letters were their own. We justified it thusly: The words might be ours, but the decision to sign and send was voluntary on the sender's part. The sender also is free to change our words as much as they want. Our drafts are merely suggestions. We'd never see the final product unless and until it ran. However, to be honest, when it did run, it usually looked just like our "sample."

I was never in charge of a campaign that did a nationwide letter-to-the-editor campaign, but the tactic is the same, and is based on the same intellectual premise: That your campaign represents all that is true and good, and is thus widely supported, but without being prompted your supporters might not state the case as eloquently as you, Mr. or Ms. PR Professional, would do.

By helping them, you could make extra sure that your supporters repeated your carefully-crafted "key messages," which you have told your client will carry the day. You are also helping to overcome your supporters' inertia, which might prevent them from taking a public stand on their own. After all, unlike you, these supporters aren't billing a client, so they can't be expected to go about their PR duties so diligently, right? They might not write at all. They might get distracted by, you know, life.

Well, attention all polar bears — the ice is almost gone, and you're about to fall into the Arctic Ocean to be nibbled to death by guppies.

David Mastio of InOpinion, a blog that promotes his newpaper op-ed consulting business, has made it a personal cause to expose AstroTurf letter-to-the editor scams, and protect our nation's editorial pages from running what are essentially unpaid political ads.

Check out the state-of-the-art letter-to-the-editor generators — an increasingly common tactic of the right and the left, as well as corporate-sponsored campaigns — from Hands off the Internet to Focus on the Family to MoveOn.org to advocates of The American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act.

If you click on this link, or this one, you can see how it works. On the net neutrality site, you're given a choice of six pre-written paragraphs containing all the key messages. On the anti-gay marriage site, you've got 20 to pick from. You pick the ones you like, in the order you like, and then with a couple more clicks, a letter over your signature is sent automatically to your local newspapers, based on the geographic information you provide.

Figuring out if a letter to the editor is AstroTurf-generated is easy to do nowadays. If you see a letter to the editor that looks suspiciously PR-ish in its use of phrases, all you need to do is highlight a distinctive sentence, and run it through a Google search. If you've guessed right, you'll find published letters to the editor with nearly identical text but different authors, running in newspapers all over America.

Prompted by one of Mastio's links, I copied this phrase into Google: "Although we don’t eat horses, we slaughtered 88,000 last year for export to countries that do." This is a talking point for advocates of the American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act. Based on the search, I found this precise phrase in 138 citations of letters to the editor, from newspapers from Tucson to Boise to Miami to Chicago. The context for the letter is the unfortunate breakdown of Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro, so all of these letters were sent in the days immediately after the May 20th Preakness race when it occured. There is no web site I can find where this draft letter was offered, so I'm assuming the letter senders were prompted by e-mails from an animal rights organization.

Mastio's anti-AstroTurf letters-to-the-editor campaign has been noticed by some of A-list bloggers like Andrew Sullivan, Ed Driscoll and the PR-industry-focused Holmes Report Blog, which is what brought my attention to it. Mastio's linked to a couple of places where supporters of the groups he's busted defend the tactic. For example, Gary Schneeberger of Focus on the Family wrote this to the Seattle Times:

Calling it "willful deception" for groups like ours to help readers write letters to the editor is ludicrous; all we offer readers like Elisa Baggenstos is the assistance of a professional communicator to put what is in their hearts into publishable form.

If it's unethical for someone to sign his or her name to a letter largely written and/or edited by someone who writes and/or edits for a living, then where's the outrage over commentaries that appear on this page under the name of a congressman or senator? Certainly, Mr. Pluckhahn is aware those pieces aren't written by the congressman or senator him/herself, but by a staff member who helps compile the lawmaker's convictions into a well-written whole.

But Schneeberger and other campaign organizers who agree with him miss the point. Nobody would mind if Elisa Baggenstos asked a professional communicator to put what is in her heart into publishable form. The problem comes when hundreds of other people use the same professional communicator's exact phrases, but sign their own names to them. It's a form of trickery and deceit on the part of the respective campaigns, who are trying to create an illusion of grassroots support by fooling newspaper editors into believing these letters are a spontaneous response to an issue of concern among the paper's readers.

It is also, by the way, cynical and patronizing to assume, as Schneeberger does, that Focus on the Family's supporters are too inarticulate to express their heart-felt opinions in their own words.

The practice seems to be growing but I predict its swift demise, because it is so easily detected and foiled. Newspaper editors should be able to sniff out a suspected AstroTurf letter, and can confirm their suspicions with a Google search like the one I did about the 88,000 slaughtered horses. I assume they would not knowingly publish a letter that has already appeared in another newspaper over a different signature.

If the newspaper editors won't do the detective work, I'm sure the adversaries to the campaigns using AstroTurf letters will. This is exactly how the left-wing bloggers busted Ben Domenech, the conservative writer who had been handed a blog by the Washington Post — proving his plagiarism with just a few clicks. As Schneeberger's unfortunate statement demonstrates, AstroTurf letters to the editor are a tactic that, once exposed, cannot be defended without damaging your cause.

VNR Producers Fighting Back*

I've been wondering when the PR industry would own up to the fact that Video News Releases — now very controversial, and seen as deceptive — have been a standard public relations tactic for maybe two decades. Some form of VNR is (or was until recently) a standard part of any major product launch or corporate initiative. But when the press started writing stories about VNRs appearing on television (where else would they go?), nobody in the industry defended them very publicly. At least, not that I saw.

In fact, with the major exception of Richard Edelman, the PR industry is still tip-toeing around this issue. But the companies with the most to lose, the VNR producers themselves, have decided to organize. I can't blame them. From PR Week:

Several broadcast PR companies are discussing plans to band together to fight the latest wave of public scrutiny of the sector, PRWeek has learned.

The action comes in the wake of news that the FCC is investigating the use of VNRs by several news stations that, according to a recent report by the Center for Media and Democracy, didn't disclose the corporate sponsorship of the video releases.

Organized by Medialink, the new group comprises more than a dozen companies including MultiVu, West Glen Communications, and News Broadcast Network.

"If the FCC is considering an inquiry, we've got to take that seriously," said Medialink president and CEO Larry Moskowitz. "It is frightening to all of us to have the government take a seat in the newsroom as a censor."

Moskowitz said the group is considering reaching out to industry organizations such as PRSA and the Radio-Television News Directors Association, as well as freedom of speech and democracy groups.

Ironies abound here. It was government's use of VNRs that put the stink on this tactic — including the White House. Now the same government wants to regulate them? Okay, but first, stop buying them!

Even more ironic is that the "broadcast PR companies" are vendors to PR agencies. So why would they need to "reach out" to the PRSA (Public Relations Society of America)? Shouldn't it be the other way around? It's the PRSA membership's client work, and their clients' freedom of speech, that are potentially at issue. Why aren't they defending themselves?

The bad guys here are the TV stations that broadcast this content as news without telling anyone that it came from a PR agency. The "broadcast PR companies" have nothing to do with the decisions made by station execs. The PR agencies that distribute these videos could admonish the stations to identify the clips as PR content (as Edelman suggests) but in the end, the stations themselves decide what goes on their air.

Here is a link to the Center for Media and Democracy's report on Fake TV News. The Center takes credit for spurring the FCC's probe.

The Center sees a much brighter line between broadcast TV news and VNRs than I do. What's the bill of particulars against VNRs?

• That they aren't news? That's for the individual stations' news directors to judge. Many VNRs are loaded with news value, although it's obviously a one-sided presentation. But is anyone stopping news directors from presenting the other side?
• That you've got actors pretending to be reporters? Uh, hello? That ship sailed long ago. There are far more actors, models, comedians, disk jockeys, ex-athletes, and ex-politicians who are presented as journalists by news stations than by PR agencies. There is no license for journalists. The charge of impersonating a TV reporter doesn't have the same weight as impersonating a doctor, a lawyer or a general.
• That they run on TV news programs without being identified as PR? Again, talk to the news director. He or she can put up a graphic in front of the VNR saying where the footage came from. No one's alleging the videos arrive in a plain brown wrapper, or that anyone at the news station is being fooled.

It comes down to news judgement. Once upon a time, I worked with a company on a video documentary about a high-profile client, and we hired a high-profile TV personality to serve as host. For a few months, this video ran frequently on local-access cable channels. We didn't pay them. They ran it because they thought it was interesting and they had space to fill.

More typically, I commissioned B-roll and provided it to local TV channels. No fake anchors; just video clips that might help illustrate the story we hoped the news outlets would tell. Often, it was footage the station couldn't have gotten for itself, such as an event that took place out of town. Sometimes, too, we'd recognized that the TV station didn't have crews available to cover our event (in other words, we got shut out), so we would messenger over our own edited video version of the event. Of course, we edited the footage to show off our clients, but most of our editorial decisions were made based on what we thought the news stations would find interesting and worth airing.

The campaign against "Fake News" strikes me as somewhat overblown. It's such an easy thing to fix. News directors should from now on indentify on-screen the source of the video footage they're showing. Knowing that some news directors are too lazy to take that step, perhaps PR agencies should do it for them — as a convenience, in the name of transparency, not to head off regulation. Do those things and the issue goes away.

Or will it? Like many PR controversies of late, I think there's a bigger question on the table — the legitimacy of PR. PR equals spin equals lies. That's what many Americans think, and they're sick of it. Americans are tired of being pitched. They want to zap commercials, watch commercial-free TV, and block pop-ups. They recognize that corporations and government agencies have information for the public, but they yearn to hear it straight, not "strategically."

As I think back on it, it's clear to me that many standard PR strategies were designed to manipulate the media, because the media is assumed to be the filter for information reaching the public. Paradoxically, that's why so many PR campaigns don't ring true. They're designed with reporters and editors in mind — an alien subculture to most Americans.

VNRs and even traditional press releases — their point is to take advantage of the media's laziness and need to fill news holes with limited budgets. There's something surreptitious about doing business this way — like a teenager waiting for his parents to fall asleep so he can sneak out of the house, instead of asking permission.

So, what would happen if you took the news media out of the equation entirely? Wouldn't that change the way corporate America and government agencies talk to the public? Or would PR advisors still believe it's necessary to spin?

*Extensively revised and expanded.

Floyd Patterson, R.I.P.

World champion heavyweight Floyd Patterson, who died May 11 at 71, was remembered at a memorial today in New Paltz, N.Y.:

The Rev. Dan O'Hare, who met Patterson shortly after the boxer retired to New Paltz in 1973, said, "I didn't understand how this gentle, kind person beat up people."

O'Hare said he later saw photographs of Patterson helping up men he had knocked out.

Another picture, printed on the back of the memorial's bulletin, shows a smiling Patterson and the scar tissue on the knuckles of his big left hand, which the 190-pound boxer used to knock out Ingemar Johansson and retake the heavyweight crown in 1960.

Patterson's son, Floyd Patterson II, recalled going to a dinner where his father left the table for the restroom and didn't come back. He was found talking to fans. His son said Patterson would talk and sign autographs as long as people wanted him to.

Patterson won the heavyweight boxing title in 1956 when he knocked out Archie Moore. He lost and regained the title in fights with Ingemar Johansson and lost the title for good to Sonny Liston. Patterson retired in 1972 with a 55-8-1 record and 40 knockouts. He was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame in 1991.

Patterson was the first boxer to ever to regain the heavyweight boxing crown after losing it, that history playing out over three classic bouts with Ingemar Johansson in 1959-61. He lost it the second time to Sonny Liston and lost the rematch, both times in first-round knockouts. After the Liston fights, Patterson continued his career long enough to get three more shots at the title, in 1965 and 1972 against Cassius Clay/Muhammed Ali, and in 1967 against Jimmy Ellis.

In between the Liston knockouts and the Clay challenge, writer Gay Talese wrote a famous portrait of Patterson, "The Loser." I happened to check out The Gay Talese Reader: Portaits and Encounters from the library shortly after Patterson died, so I read the piece. It first appeared in Esquire when that magazine published the best non-fiction in the country. "The Loser" is truly beautiful, poignant writing — an honest, clear-eyed writer encountering a honest, insightful subject who had a great story to tell. (The Talese collection also includes classic portraits of Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra.)

When Talese visited Patterson at his remote upstate New York training center, Patterson was in training even though, at that time, the boxing world thought Patterson was through — at 29. Patterson continued boxing for the same reason he started in the first place: "I liked beating people because it was the only thing I could do… Whether boxing was a sport, I wanted to make it a sport because it was a thing I could succeed at." But, contemplating his life, Patterson seemingly startles the near-invisible narrator Talese when he claims he is "a coward."

"When did you first think you were a coward?" he was asked.

"It was after the first Ingemar fight."

"How does one see this cowardice you speak of?"

"You see it when a fighter loses. Ignemar, for instance, is not a coward. When he lost the third fight in Miami, he was at a party later at the Fountainebleu. Had I lost, I couldn't have gone to that party. And I don't see how he did."

"Could Liston be a coward?"

"That remains to be seen," Patterson said. "We'll find out what he's like after somebody beats him, how he takes it. It's easy to do anything in victory. It's in defeat that a man reveals himself. In defeat, I can't face people. I haven't the strength to say to people, 'I did my best, I'm sorry,' and whatnot."

Patterson admitted to Talese that he brought a disguise with him — fake whiskers and mustache and a hat — to every fight after his first lost to Johannson. He won every fight from then on until Liston, but after Liston beat him, he used the disguse to slip away, first by car from Chicago to New York, then on an airplane from New York to Madrid, a location he chose upon reading the city's name on a sign at the airport.

"You must wonder what makes a man do things like this. Well, I wonder too. And the answer is, I don't know…but I think that within me, within every human being, there is a certain weakness. It is a weakness that exposes itself more when you're alone. And I have figured out that part of the reason I do the things I do, and cannot seem to conquer that one word–myself–is because… is because…I am a coward."

Amazing for a writer to get a 29-year-old world-famous and successful athlete to say things like this. Amazing that the young man could acknowledge that weakness within his heart — and then work his way back for three more legitimate shots at the top in the next seven years.

(Sports Illustrated recently interviewed Talese about the Patterson story and his other writings on sports. It's here.)

The Canadian Media-Disrespect Laboratory

Stephen Harper, the prime minister of Canada, now wants the Parliamentary Press Gallery to put their names on a list if they wanted to ask him questions. In protest against this effort at news management, the gallery reporters all declined to sign up and walked out of a press conference when Harper refused to answer questions put to him by anyone not on the list.

Harper essentially has fired the national media. From the LA Times:

"Unfortunately, the press gallery has taken the view they are going to be the opposition to the government," the recently elected Conservative leader told a Canadian television network Wednesday.

"We'll just take the message out on the road. There's lots of media who do want to ask questions and hear what the government is doing for Canadians, or to Canadians. So we'll get our message out however we can," Harper said.

This reminds me of Vice President Cheney's controversial decision to ignore the U.S. national media when he shot his friend's face, instead allowing the hunting party hosts to disclose the information to a small Texas newspaper. Cheney then agreed to be interviewed by the friendliest possible national reporter, Fox's Brit Hume. As far as Cheney was concerned, the rest of the national press corps that covers the Bush/Cheney Administration could pound sand.

I wrote about this incident a couple of months ago, citing Jay Rosen's suspicion that Cheney's perceived "bungling" of the shooting story was, perhaps, a deliberate test-run of a new political tactic for dealing with the national media — to treat them as worthy of no greater respect or deference than any other working reporters, anywhere in the country.

The president and other administration leaders owe it to the country to explain themselves through the press. But which press? Are only White House press corps reporters experts on the matters pertaining to the presidency? That's a hard case to make. Are those reporters the creme de la creme, so much better than any other reporters that the nation is ill-served by shutting them out? Even harder case to make. In essence, the only thing that makes them special is that the White House credentials them to work in the White House, based on requests for access issued by leading news organizations. It's a courtesy, given out arbitrarily, based on nebulous factors like the size and influence of the news organization requesting the assignment.

So now, Bush/Cheney's conservative neighbor to the north has taken it one step further and said he won't talk to "the gaggle" at all.

Here's how the Globe and Mail covered the story today:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper thinks you won't be interested in reading this article because it's just "inside Ottawa stuff."

Despite this, Mr. Harper, who claimed Wednesday the Ottawa press corps is biased against him, was forced to talk again yesterday about his continuing dispute with the Parliamentary Press Gallery and about how to decide who gets to ask questions at his news conferences.

He was asked by a reporter in Vancouver whether the Ottawa-based press corps has become "elitist" and out of touch with the interests of most Canadians.

Mr. Harper said: "I don't think this story is really of much interest to ordinary people. I think what they are interested in is what is the government doing, and do they agree with it or do not agree with it."

The news media, he continued, "will always have their opinions about government policy," but the public will ultimately make up its own mind.

While cooperating with the PM's request to join a list, the provincial reporters sounded like they were standing in solidarity with their colleagues in Ottawa. But that's just this week. How long can the media keep writing the story of Harper's "feud?"

A lot of politicians and PR people south of the Canadian border will be watching with great interest.

Googling the Hill

Older readers who grew up like me on the east coast might remember a New York sports columnist named Jimmy Cannon. Before offering pithy opinions about boxers and ballplayers, he'd warn you he was about to say something out of turn. He'd write, "Nobody asked me, but…"

Well, nobody asked me, and nobody will ask me, but… hasn't this story been written before?

Of the billions of searches conducted by Google Inc., potentially its most important is playing out in offices above an Asian fusion restaurant here: the quest for influence in the nation's capital.

The Silicon Valley company's dominance of Internet search is built on its mastery of advanced mathematical algorithms. But like other fast-growing tech titans before it, Google is finding Washington's political calculus harder to solve.

Since opening its Washington office last summer, Google's attempts to establish its presence has moved at dial-up speed — resulting in a slow and sometimes balky connection with lawmakers that has irritated both Democrats and Republicans.

"I think they've been a little bit too innocent in how the game is played," said Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a tech-focused Washington think tank.

Google's efforts to rally support for rules guaranteeing open Internet access — an abstract issue known as Net neutrality — has been called largely ineffective by key Democratic supporters. Heavily lopsided political contributions to Democrats from Google employees have annoyed the GOP majority. And in what veteran lobbyists called a high-profile tactical mistake, a Google executive called before a House panel this year tried to engage subcommittee members critical of the firm in a debate.

I remember stories just like it about Microsoft, Intel, America Online, and every other high-tech supernova — admonitions to start spending more on high-powered lobbyists. It's the only time the press portrays lobbyists as anything but enemies of the people, and campaign contributions as anything but barely-legal bribery.

And what's this? "(K)ey Democratic supporters" objecting to "heavily lopside political contributions to Democrats?"

Two possible explanations.

1. The news media, or at least this reporter (Jim Puzzanghera of the LA Times), wants Google's position on "net neutrality" to prevail, and worries that Google is about to lose the arms race. The net neutrality campaign is all about making sure content providers like Google and Yahoo! don't have to pay a toll to the high-speed carriers like AT&T or Comcast to reach customers.
2. Like a good boxing reporter who wants a story he can hype, this reporter wants to build Google up so he can knock them down later.

I don't pretend to have any pertinent advice for Google, except for this: Don't expect praise if you follow the Times' advice. Expect the opposite. Lobbyists and reporters are natural enemies, because they compete to be the gatekeepers of public policy. 

Hey, Google: Maybe, in the long run, the times are right for a quirky, not-business-as-usual approach to our esteemed representatives. It seems oddly off-key at this moment when outrage at K Street has reached a climax that a major company would be criticized for not buying into the lobbying game.

Just guessing here: When a high-tech winner starts hiring packs of DC lobbyists, the rise in their stock price begins to level off, or go down. If that's true, of course, I can't prove cause-and-effect. These might be two distinct symptoms of a company like Google reaching a sadder but wiser stage of maturity.

Can PR “Manufacture” Tom Cruise’s Religion?

I've always liked PR Week, and just started subscribing to it. It doesn't really take a position in the newly urgent debate over what kind of effective PR can be done in this period of ferment in the communications world, but it interviews interesting people in and around the industry who do have strong views, so it's worthwhile.

That said, PR Week's editorial (link for subscribers only) on Tom Cruise made my jaw drop. The editorial notes that Paul Bloch, co-chairman of Rogers & Cowan, has taken over as Cruise's publicist; and that the deployment of this respected PR veteran might have come too late to save Mission: Impossible III's box office from "the vitriol, the 'you're glib, Matt' bit on Today, the Oprah couch affair, and the Scientology tents." Probably so. But then:

The calculus of celebrity is a wildly unpredictable formula, such that the greater the depths of self-immolation, the greater the potential for a cathartic return to the fold. Americans have this seemingly endless capacity to forgive the celebrities they love, or hate. They also tend to have a relatively short memory and love nothing more than the drama, the pathos of the prodigal star. Martha Stewart's stock is up again. So is Kobe Bryant's. Who knows, but even Mike Tyson may return, a lesser George Foreman, perhaps born again and pitching lean cuisine and mufflers.

The key to resuscitating Cruise will be putting him in a metaphorical closet: fewer appearances, less talking, more smiling. Bloch should take a page from the studio system, circa 1940, when studios had stables of stars who were tightly controlled, whose public "personalities" – including details of their private lives – were as manufactured as possible.

These are some odd comments. Cruise hasn't "self-immolated." He's not on drugs, or accused of a crime. No, he's a faithful adherent to a religion that many people find bizarre and cult-like, and his association with the religion shines a weird light on what would otherwise be perfectly normal life events like falling in love and becoming a father.

Is PR Week suggesting Cruise separate himself from Scientology? Or, more disturbingly, are they suggesting he should pretend to separate himself from Scientology? How would he do that? To use PR Week's word, should Rogers & Cowan "manufacture" another religion for him? Will they start sending him to a Presbyterian church or a Buddhist temple? Or will they stage a Cruise defrocking? Religion is pretty personal. Cruise has a First Amendment right to worship however he chooses, and Americans' respect for that right has benefited Cruise. I don't think the movie-going public would believe it for one second if Cruise suddenly renounced Scientology.

Certainly, Bloch can tell Cruise, "quit talking about Scientology, quit talking about psychiatrists, quit talking about depression medication. You're not the expert on those things. You're an expert on acting and your movies — focus on that." Classic PR advice. But "manufacturing" a personality and a private life for Cruise? It's absurd to think that would work.

Worse, PR Week giving that advice plays right into the public's worst impressions of the PR industry — that we "manufacture" a false reality. Sure, some PR campaigns undoubtedly are built around false information, but that's a bad and dangerous practice that most PR folks I know don't follow. Especially nowadays when (to flip Mark Twain on his head) a lie can get around the world 15 times, but the truth will catch up in the 10th lap.

This is ‘New Media’ Advice? It’s SO Last Century

Hugh Hewitt, the articulate Republican cheerleader, syndicated radio host and blogger, portrays himself as consultant to all "center-right conservatives" in their battles against enemies in the media, politics and academia. He writes at least one book a year, in which he provides unsolicited advice to Republican candidates, conservative activists, high-school students and born-again Christians. He's been on the radio somewhere or another for at least 15 years, and spent time as co-host of KCET's "Life and Times." He flogs his books so mercilessly on the air, it's apparent that he believes his book sales figures are an indicator of the nation's well-being.

In addition to being a committed activist, churchman and attorney, Hewitt claims to know something about communications — trumpeting himself as an avatar of the new media as it triumphs over the liberal-biased "old" media. One of his most popular books is "Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World."

So I was struck by this post of a few days ago, "Secretary Rumsfeld and the New Media." In it, Hewitt discusses an interview with Rumsfeld, focusing on the advice he gave the secretary about communications in the new media era:

The SecDef has staked everything on transforming the way the American military fights wars. I worry that all those efforts will be at least compromised unless the Pentagon gets its best minds thinking about how to explain the conflict and its many dimensions to the American public.

(snip)

The information war –fought not just by the Pentagon, but also by the White House the Department of Justice, the intelligence community–has become, like logistics, the realm of professionals*. Let's hope the U.S. gets as serious about it as it is about logistics.

Some suggestions:

The Secretary of Defense and the Chair of the Joint Chiefs are the two most important voices in the military. They need to engage media in lengthy, one-on-one question-and-answer sessions at which other journalists are allowed to attend but not participate.

Volume is not a substitute for quality. The DoD does in fact put out an avalanche of information every single day –too much, in fact. The Pentagon all too often steps on its lead story, and all too often does not respond to breaking information that the terrorists lob on to the battlefields of the information war. The rapid response of the military to such disinformation has to improve.

Finally, the particulars of any day's battles does not matter nearly as much as the strategic overview of the course of the war. Repetition is hated by the Beltway press corps, always eager to get a scoop or at least a new lede.

But repetition is the core of information war.

Finally, new media is far more powerful in its reach than the credibility-challenged and ideologically-compromised old media. The old press rules from the days when the New York Times or the Washington Post made the weather are still in place. They can be upended.

How is this advice — basically PR advice — any different from what Edward Bernays might have suggested to Rumsfeld 80 or 90 years ago at the dawn of the public relations industry? How is it any different from how politics was conducted under under Reagan or Clinton, the two most successful practitioners of the Pat Caddell/Mike Deaver/James Carville "permanent campaign" model that was engineered based on the PR-advertising principles formed when TV networks and a handful of newspapers dominated the news ecosystem?

Isn't this approach precisely what new media acolytes rebel against? That whole "message of the day," "don't step on your own story," "rapid response," top-down media management? What I thought new media is about is transparency, providing more not less, and showing faith in the ability of news consumers–"prosumers" in Alvin Toffler's lexicon–to do their own filtering and editing.

A "new media" approach would have Rumsfeld communicating constantly and candidly, the good news with the bad. Don't have a message of the day, don't shade anything to gain a specific headline. Most Americans have stopped reading newspapers anyway. Instead, use the media tools now available to transmit a body of knowledge about the war to engaged members of the public, who will then be motivated to educate their peers. Rumsfeld or a trusted, high-level spokesperson could do this actively, identifying bloggers with a sympathetic viewpoint and beginning an on-the-record conversation with them. They could be bolder still, and carry on conversations with unsympathetic bloggers, too.

Like most PR problems, Rumsfeld's is not really a PR problem, it's a fact problem. In the initial weeks of the Iraq war, the news was good, thus the PR was fabulous. Now, three years on, the war is a bloody grind, the news is mixed and the significance of each development murky. You can't change that reality with a new policy on granting interviews!

But Hewitt is worried about the enemy's propaganda, and so is Rumsfeld. In the SecDef's words (from his interview transcript):

This is the first war that's ever been conducted, in the 21st Century, in an era of these new media realities, where you have the internet and 24 hour talk radio and news and bloggers and video cameras and digital cameras and instant communications worldwide. And the enemy understands that they can't win a battle out on the battlefield in Iraq or Afghanistan. The only place they can win a battle is in Washington, D.C. So they have media committees, and they get up in the morning and figure out how they're going to manipulate the American media, and they do a very skillful job.

This is a misdiagnosis. It might be the first war in a time of blogging, but it's certainly not the first war in which an enemy deployed propaganda through whatever media channels were available at the time to frighten, demoralize or mislead.

The Nazi takeover of Europe derived from a series of expert bluffs, until finally the bluff became reality. But it goes back much farther than WWII, to past millenia when the media of choice were memorized lines of poetry and the misinformation spread, virally you might say, by clever spies. Sun Tzu, writing in the 6th century B.C.: "Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting." And, his Strategy 7: "Create something from nothing." Propaganda is not new, and it would surprise me to find out that our nation's war planners were unprepared for it.

Will a "message of the day" media strategy stop the Iraqi insurgents from using the media to broadcast terror and convey a sense of futility to the American public? I don't see how. But the public reaction to scenes of bombs going off and kidnapped reporters isn't the problem anyway. It's the political reaction to the presumed public reaction, of which Hewitt's commentary is symptomatic. He apparently thinks the public's dwindling support for the war stems from the enemy's manipulation of the news media, while with his next breath he claims the news media's influence is waning.

The fact is, Bush and Rumsfeld are quite lucky that the public has tolerated the Iraq war for as long as it has, and it's a testament to the public's sophistication that the media manipulation, the staged acts of terror, have had so little impact on policy. Despite Bush's low poll ratings, I see little to resemble the Vietnam-era public anguish with regard to Iraq. Sure, the war has many critics, but back then, average middle-class people were urgently demanding the end of our involvement in Vietnam, and politicians of the president's own party responded by promising immediate troop withdrawal.

The Vietnam war was an atrocious mistake, but the public's abandonment of it was in large part the result of enemy propaganda. The North Vietnamese were successful in making the militarily disappointing Tet offensive appear to be a rout. Thanks to the perception that Tet succeeded, Walter Cronkite famously declared the war unwinnable. In 1968, that meant a lot.

Who is today's Walter Cronkite? Who pretends to speak for Mr. and Mrs. America? If anyone tried, they'd find Mr. and Mrs. America leaving some nasty comments on their website. Friends of Donald Rumsfeld do the SecDef no favors by telling him to lead a PR effort to combat enemy propaganda, if that effort will distract him from his real job, organizing a winning strategy so America can get its troops home soon. Because, as Sun Tzu says, "There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare."