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The Washington Post Redesign Stinks
There's good news and bad about the Washington Post's redesigned Website.
The good news is, more people than ever will start using the Locust Fork World News as their home page and the national online newspaper of record.
The bad news is, it is patently obvious that the programmers and data crunchers are bound and determined to ruin the online newspaper experience and survive on their print editions - or be damned.
Democracy will not be the better for it, but at least the editor's note and some of the blog comments are worth a good Saturday morning laugh.
"One of the most frequent complaints about our previous home page was clutter, specifically the number of links and lack of open space on the page," writes Jim Brady, Executive Editor of WashingtonPost.Com. "In this new page, we've added more white space and cut down the number of long lists of text links. The hope is that these changes give the page more of an open, inviting feel and make it easier to scan.
Editor's Note: About Our New Home Page
One of my favorite reader comments comes from someone in Alexandria, Virginia:
"I use the web page to get content. If I want to see white space, I go to an art gallery. It's hard to find the discussions. Ditch the new homepage..."
Of course they won't, because corporations never go back once they've spent money to change something. So we've taken down the inside section links to the Post on the news page.
A newspaper is something that should be designed to "read," not "scan." I tried to tell the management at the Dallas Morning News this for four years while working for them as the New Orleans bureau. But they would not listen, and ended up in a major advertising/circulation scandal right after I left New Orleans for D.C. in 2004 – a scandal that lost them readers and advertisers and damaged their reputation permanently.
But even new news startups dedicated to doing it right on the Web have had credibility problems of late. Since Politico.Com got the story wrong on the Edwards campaign imploding last week, we won't be linking much to that new enterprise either.
What's a blogger to do to find out what's going on in the world? Long live the Associated Press and MyWay.Com.
Happy weekend reading...
The Locust Fork World News
It's been awhile since I took a big dump on the newspaper industry.
But what the heck. I feel a big one coming on due to a load of crap being offered up today by William Bunch, a senior writer for the Philadelphia Daily News who also publishes a blog.
His latest misinformed missive was the lead story today on the Poynter Institute's media blog put together by a little guy named Jim Romenesko.
Romenesko: Your daily fix of media industry news, commentary, and memos.
First, here's some of what this nut job had to say:
I'm a fan of some conspiracy theories. And so really, what could be a more compelling conspiracy theory than the plot to destroy the American newspaper, hatched - in our imagination anyway - by a secret cabal of bloggers and Web gurus meeting in a diner off Calle Ocho in Miami, then launching their assault on circulation from a Grassy Knoll somewhere in cyberspace?
Except this is one conspiracy that can be easily debunked. The American newspaper is being assassinated by "a lone nut." And we're going to tell you the name of that lone nut:
Craig Newmark of Craigslist . . . a man whose altruistic vision of running a business to NOT maximize profits is now threatening the livelyhood of thousands of working men and women across this country, your neighbors who work at and publish your local newspaper, jobs that were once supported by the classified ads that have migrated to the most free . . . Craigslist (sic: dot org).
Last week, Newmark's co-conspirator (OK, he's not a totally "lone" nut) - his CEO Jim Buckmaster - told stunned Wall Street analysts how they're happy to forego profits to save you a couple of bucks on a classified ad, and put some of my best friends on the unemployment line in the process. They even leave on the table money in ways that wouldn't come directly from their customers:
If you won't charge customers for ads, and apparently you won't, then at least start accepting those text ads, and funnel those millions of dollars into the newly formed Craig's Foundation. And what will be the main benefactor of this new foundation? A scholarship fund, to pay for the college education of the dozens of displaced journalists across America losing their jobs everyday. . . . And if there's any cash left, how about building a retirement home for any newspaper folks who might somehow see a diminished pension down the road?
The "lone nut" theory of the American newspaper assassination
Since no one else will ever set the record straight on this, apparently, perhaps because they have not studied the issue enough to be in command of the facts, let me have a go.
It's not that much of a mystery to me why newspaper reporters do not understand what's going on here. Most of them got into newspapering in the first place because they could not do math. And from their early days in the business, they shunned any knowledge of the business side of newspapering, believing that to know the facts about business would jeopardize their objectivity.
But anyone who has ever worked as an academic, teaching journalism, should be familiar with the literature on how newspapers make money to pay reporters. And its not from classified ads or the price of a subscription.
Admittedly, a lot of academics don't have those facts at their disposal for a variety of reasons. I once got into a heated argument with a faculty member at a reputable regional university who insisted out of ignorance that the Washington Post was a national newspaper, for example. But anyone who knows the facts here, including the publisher and the circulation manager at the Post, knows this to be true: The Post made a conscious decision not to invest in regional printing plants and daily distribution across the country like USA Today, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. It is a metropolitan newspaper with distribution in D.C., Maryland and Virginia.
They now have an opportunity with the Web Press to reach out to a national and international audience, however, and so far they seem to be capitalizing on it - without charging for access to their Web edition.
So let's be clear. Craigslist.Org is not putting any newspaper reporters out of work because the revenue from classified advertising never, ever went for paying the salaries of reporters in the first place. Nor did the price of a mail subscription or the price of the paper in the newsstand or box on the corner.
The price of the paper itself has always been earmarked primarily for the cost of distributing the newspaper. If anything was left over from that, it went for the cost of printing the newspaper.
Fact: It costs nothing to print or distribute a newspaper on a Web Press. It does cost a little to put it online, but nothing compared to the millions of dollars of paying for and maintaining an offset press, not to mention the rising cost of paper and ink.
Classified ads in newspapers has been a source of revenue for paying staff at newspapers, but mostly for the production and circulation staff. News staffs and most of the employees of newspapers have always been paid from general advertising revenue.
So perhaps Mr. Bunch should redirect his ire at Craigslist toward building a retirement home for newspaper delivery boys and pressmen.
But guess what? There's an antidote to Craigslist and the newspapers have it in their power to overcome the threat from the competition. If they would just stop bashing the online revolution and join it, they are in a powerful position to take advantage of it. If newspapers would just invest in original journalism and put it online for free, thereby putting themselves in a position of generating a massive amount of traffic AND online advertising revenue, they could survive.
They could even start their own free online classifieds to compete with Craigslit. They could sell Google text ads and pocket all the money and brag at the end of the year to their stockholders.
But apparently, newspaper managers (and columnists) are so out of touch with the reality available right in front of them that they will go on bashing the Web until they are out of business.
When that day comes, us former newspaper reporters who understand the Web Press will be right here to take over where they left off - if there is a First Amendment left after Bush's appointments to the federal bench get done with sending it to the trash heap of history.
The Audit Bureau of Circulations report released Monday reveals that the circulation at newspapers sank again this spring, with the free-fall at major metro papers continuing dramatically, according to Editor and Publisher magazine.
When will the corporate news heads catch on? Save the trees. Read the news online...
New York Times' managing editor Jill Abramson defended the newspaper industry the other day and continued the ongoing jihad against blogs, according to the New York Sun.
In her defense of print journalism, she said new technologies do not always replace the old ones and "brand names that carry authority and quality" will continue to flourish.
But not if they continue to alienate long-time readers and allow the quality to slide in the name of the bottom line.
She distinguished the Times from many bloggers, saying, "We believe in a journalism of verification rather than assertion."
Once again, another elite, highly paid, mainstream New York journalist demonstrates a glaring ignorance of the Internet and a bias against a democratic online environment where the masses can turn for information without having to pay through the nose - and kill millions of trees in the process.
Bloggers were among the critics who first pointed out the flaws in the "verification" of former New York Times correspondent Judith Miller's reporting about weapons of mass destruction in the run up to war in Iraq, including this blogger and former Times free-lance reporter, who was ignored by the national desk when trying to get the great New York Times to "verify" that there was a secret report that contradicted Miller's reporting and showed what we now consider conventional wisdom: The Iraq War was planned by the neo-con think tanks before 9/11.
"Call newspapers dinosaurs if you like," Abramson said. "But remember that dinosaurs walked the earth for millions of years."
True, but we suspect if dinosaurs had had doctors and critics, it would have been easy to spot when they became so sick that their extinction became predictable and inevitable.
We would love to teach the staff at the Bill Keller New York Times a few Internet tricks that would make their job of verification easier, like how to use Google Alerts to find out when editors say stupid things without having to spend a lot of money and time looking for it. But it is clear they are not interested in the truth anymore.
I once advised the Howell Raines New York Times to take on its critics, but I was talking about the Rush Limbaughs of the world, not Web journalists and commentators who try just as hard to verify information as anyone – and provide links in their stories to prove it.
I woke up Sunday morning thinking about a column on the uproar over the U.S. port debacle. I may very well still get around to exploring that subject after breakfast. But here's a heads up on something that I've been holding off doing for some time and now must deal with.
The Birmingham News today ran an article, a column and a number of photos that have been buried in a closet since the early 1960s dealing with the civil rights movement in "Bomingham." At least a couple of those photos were taken by photographer Spider Martin, one of my best friends in the world who decided to take himself out of the world almost three years ago on April 8, 2003, on the 30th anniversary of his hero Pablo Picasso's death.
Due to the self-serving and revisionist nature of the paper's handling of this issue today, it now becomes imperative that I tell the story I learned about how the news buried the news during the civil rights days. But this will take some time, so check back later to see the result.
In the meantime, you can read the News story on the subject, along with executive editor Tom Scarrett's weak column on the issue, and view some of the photos on the Newhouse corporate chain Web site. While we are glad the News had finally decided to admit some errors from those days, thanks to the work of an intern, do not be fooled by their balderdash. The News was a racist institution then, and there's not much evidence it is that much better now. This is PR to try to save the newspaper by boosting circulation with black readers. Nothing more, nothing less...
From Negatives to Positives
Photos Speak Volumes
Photos: Unseen, Unforgotten
New York Times reporter James Risen illustrates in his new book how the CIA ignored information that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, according to the Associated Press.
State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration describes secret operations of the Bush administration's war on terrorism. The major revelation in the book, according to the AP, has already been the subject of SOME reporting by the New York Times: The so-called revelation that the National Security Agency eavesdropped on Americans' conversations without obtaining warrants from a special court - at the behest of President George W. Bush.
In October 2002, the U.S intelligence community issued a National Intelligence Estimate that concluded Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, according to the book. Quoting extensively from anonymous sources, Risen says the NSA spying program was launched in 2002 after the CIA began to capture high-ranking al-Qaida operatives overseas and took their computers, cell phones and personal phone directories.
Full AP story
But the relevant story doesn't stop there.
Byron Calame, the New York Times public editor, a recruit from the conservative Wall Street Journal, wrote a column on Sunday taking issue with the stony silence on the issue by Times Executive Editor Bill Keller and Publisher Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger Jr.
"For the first time since I became public editor, the executive editor and the publisher have declined to respond to my requests for information about news-related decision-making," Calame wrote.
Behind the Eavesdropping Story, a Loud Silence
As we have reported here before, as a free-lance reporter for the New York Times national desk out of New Orleans in 2002, I personally tried to tell the New York Times their reporting leading up to the war in Iraq was on the wrong track. They listened to Judith Miller instead, and now the paper's reputation has suffered yet another blow.
One of the things I learned about journalism in the first of four communications programs I have participated in over the past 25 years is that a reputation for accuracy is very important. These days, critics on the right and the left are attacking the credibility of the press like never before.
Of course it seems to be a fact about the world we live in today that everyone is a critic - whether or not they have any qualifications or facts to back up their attacks.
But it seems to me that the managers of major newspapers especially should seek out experienced help on stories such as these rather than hiding behind their office walls in New York and attacking bloggers.
Someone will eventually unearth and publish the truth, whether it is on newsprint or book paper or a Weblog online.
But as George Orwell once said, "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
The revolution has already begun . . . whether or not they like it or admit it in New York or Washington.
American journalism must take some of the blame for this "accursed war" in Iraq, according to the New York Observer's Nicholas Von Hoffman.
Some of the blood is on the hands of the reporters and editors who sold this war, he says. This is one time when they cannot defend themselves by telling us not to kill the messenger. In this tragedy, American journalism didn’t act as the messenger but as co-instigators, co-propagandists, co-warmongers. Instead of being the messenger, they were the message.
There’s Nothing Glorious About Today’s Journalism
 by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher
LocustFork.Net
The great playwright William Shakespeare once wrote this now famous stanza in Hamlet.
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?
It is a profound question and you may interpret it as you will. No doubt events in Shakespeare's life prompted him to write those lines, and perhaps he contemplated war and death due to the events of his time.
As a mere journalist, there are some events making the rounds of the press and the blogosphere which cause me now to ask this question.
To believe or not to believe, that is the question. Or, what is more worthy of belief, a newspaper or a Web site? Does one technology by its nature somehow engender more trust than the other?
Let's examine a few cases and see if we can answer the question to anyone's satisfaction.
For starters, it recently came to the attention of everyone who is anyone that a prankster posted false information into a Wikipedia entry about John Seigenthaler Sr., a former editor of The Nashville Tennessean newspaper.
According to the New York Times' own account of the case, a fellow by the name of Brian Chase, 38, "who until Friday was an operations manager at a small delivery company," admitted to Seigenthaler that he had written the material suggesting Seigenthaler was involved in the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy.
Wikipedia is the world's most comprehensive encyclopedia. It was set up as a nonprofit organization and is published online only. It is written and edited by thousands of volunteers, as opposed to newspapers, which are written by reporters who are supposedly hired for their qualifications and paid for their work. Some call newsworkers professionals. Others call them crafts people.
Mr. Seigenthaler recently discovered the false entry and wrote an op-ed piece about it in USA Today. He said he was especially annoyed that he could not track down the perpetrator because of Internet privacy laws, which touched off a debate about the reliability of information on Wikipedia - and by extension the entire Internet - and the difficulty in holding Web sites and their users accountable, even when someone is defamed, according to the Times.
In a confessional letter to Seigenthaler, Mr. Chase said he thought Wikipedia was a "gag" Web site and that he had written the assassination tale to shock a co-worker, who knew of the Seigenthaler family and its illustrious history in Nashville.
The incident prompted New York Times business editor Larry Ingrassia, a recent hire from the Wall Street Journal, to write to the Poynter Institute's media links guy, Jim Romenesko.
"We shouldn't be using it to check any information that goes into the newspaper," Ingrassia wrote to the staff.
For an objective observer who has worked for newspapers for many years, including editors under Ingrassia at the New York Times, and who has taught journalism at universities and published online for many years, this dispute is quite interesting - especially considering the recent scandals at the Times.
You may recall there was a Times reporter named Jayson Blair not long ago with a huge cocaine habit who liked to write his stories from his messy apartment in the Bronx, even when he was supposed to be in Texas or Virginia, and who perpetrated a similar fraud heard around the world and damaged the newspaper's credibility.
You may also have seen the stories about Judith Miller, a reporter who used one anonymous source approved by the Bush administration to make the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in the run up to the war in Iraq. She recently left the paper, either under duress or to retire and go spend more time with her family, depending on who you believe, after spending some time in jail to ostensibly protect a White House staffer who was another anonymous source.
On the face of it, doesn't it seem a bit hypocritical that Ingrassia would come out so publicly attacking the credibility of the Internet, as if the medium is the message, as former communications scholar Marshal McCluin claimed?
(For the sake of accuracy, Wikipedia is not "published" ON "the Internet" per se. It is published on the World Wide Web, which people access via the Internet in a Web browser. So we're wondering why Mr. Ingrassia is so bold as to comment on this at all, since he clearly does not know the difference).
But the real question is this. If Wikipedia should be totally discredited for making one mistake, perpetrated by one rogue member, should we not ask the same question of the New York Times? Why should anyone believe anything in the newspaper?
Should the fact that it is printed on paper, or on a Web site, make a real difference when readers come to judge its credibility?
Or is this just the tip of the iceberg so to speak, an early skirmish in the wars between print newspapers, which seem to be on their deathbed finally, and the Web, which seems to be taking off?
Here are a couple of other cases worth considering before we try and make up our minds.
While lurking on a local peace and justice coalition listserv recently, I was surprised to see the head of the anti-war group question the veracity of a news account that seemed to agree with his own views against President George W. Bush.
Someone had posted a link to a story in the online news site Capitol Hill Blue, which claimed to have three sources who attended a meeting with Bush on the Patriot Act, who all confirmed that Bush said the Constitution of the United States is "just a goddamned piece of paper."
Of course the story was not picked up in any so-called "family newspaper," since they would never publish the word goddamn.
I blogged about it myself.
The activist leader interjected into the listserv discussion that Capitol Hill Blue was an "unreliable Internet rumor mill."
So I e-mailed the editor, Doug Thompson, a former newspaper reporter and editor, who claims to publish the "oldest surviving news site on the Internet." I wanted to see how he would respond if I questioned the veracity of the account myself.
He wrote me back. Here is what he said:
"We have doubters every time we break a story. They doubted our stories in 2003 that questioned the Iraq WMD intel. They doubted our stories last year about Bush's temper tantrums. In most cases, we are eventually proven right and on those rare occasions when we make a mistake we admit.
"We stand by our story as printed. If, and when, any of our sources decides to go public we will print it."
Sounds like what any newspaper reporter or editor would say when challenged. Read about the online news site here.
Then, to top it all off, try this case on for what to believe or not believe.
The Birmingham News carried a story this morning saying a Christian talk show host from Mobile, who sued to reinstate former Judge Roy Moore after he was ousted as Alabama's chief justice, has decided not to support Moore's run for governor (my headline).
Roy Moore's Campaign Loses Support of Mobile Radio Talk Show Host
The paper included the Web link for Kelly McGinley.
Here is where the story really gets interesting.
Ms. McGinley, who apparently has no journalism experience or training, makes all kinds of wild claims. She says Judge Moore is planning to get elected governor of Alabama to force President George W. Bush to send in the National Guard - so we can fight the War Between the States all over again.
She includes links to stories about troop deployments to Alabama to get ready for this Civil War. We suspect she is just not particularly informed about how pork barrel politics works, but it certainly makes for interesting reading.
Radio is 95 percent entertainment, after all, and only 5 percent information.
She also has links to stories claiming there is a gay Republican conspiracy run amok in the land.
Hey, it may be true, considering the existence of the so-called Log Cabin Republicans - and the Secret Service logs showing that gay male prostitute Jeff Gannon spent the night in the White House. Remember Gannongate?
Then, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, there is this thing called Google Alerts. You can enter search terms and Google will conduct the search for you every day and send you the Web links via e-mail.
This popped into my inbox today, a column by Bill McClellan in the formerly great newspaper, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Me paid off? Maybe I should be insulted, or join the crowd
At one point he wrote:
"Never has the press been held in such low repute. Much of the disdain has been well-earned. I think of the scandals at the New York Times - Jayson Blair making stuff up, Rick Bragg putting his byline on other people's work, Judith Miller's unhealthy reliance on administration officials, who, in essence, planted stories in that once-august publication."
I e-mailed Mr. McClellan and tried to inform about the problem of lumping Mr. Bragg in with Blair and Miller, but he was totally uninterested in the facts.
At least the owners at Wikipedia responded to the Seigenthaler story and promptly fixed the problem. The New York Times has gone to all kinds of lengths to fix the problems there, although they clearly still exist.
I have not heard back from the peace activist, so I'm not sure whether he is really interested in the truth, or not.
As for Mr. McClellan, I'm wondering what qualifies him to write a column in the newspaper, when he is so woefully uninformed and uninterested in the facts?
So, back to our original question. To believe or not to believe? Who are you inclined to believe?
Make up your own minds, but here's my advice.
Believe the former newspaper reporters who have now mastered this new technology called the Web. As you can see from this post, we are able to sort out the facts in short order and entertain just as well as anyone who has ever written for a newspaper, without the space limitation.
Now if only we can get more facts onto talk radio. . . . Stay tuned!
A reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser called me the other day while working on a story trying to understand blogs and whether they should have the same rights as "the press" under the First Amendment. This story is the result.
Glynn Wilson traded in his newspaper editor for a high-speed modem and a blog. The former reporter for The New York Times knows he can get news to readers quicker than any paper delivery boy, and he said the communication medium is a new form of journalism. The Birmingham-area writer is one of thousands of people nationwide who have started sites on the Internet that link viewers to news and allow readers to comment on what is commonly referred to as a blog, or Web log.
Full Story: Bloggers Court Mainstream, Seek Rights
The nation has serious problems. It needs a great civic conversation, and to fuel that conversation it needs the kind of reporting and analysis that newspapers, with their firepower and traditions and reach, are still the most capable of providing, despite a cornucopia of new media, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.
"If the civic argument doesn’t persuade, however, let’s consider economics, because the glide path that so many owners are on simply won’t yield today’s profit numbers once there is nothing left to cut. Then everybody - journalists, readers, and, yes, even stockholders will be the poorer."
Full editorial
The Indian writer Vandana Shiva has called for an "insurrection of subjugated knowledge." The insurrection is well under way, according to John Pilger in a Truthout perspective piece.
In trying to make sense of a dangerous world, millions of people are turning away from the traditional sources of news and information and toward the world wide web, convinced that mainstream journalism is the voice of rampant power. The great scandal of Iraq has accelerated this. In the United States, several senior broadcasters have confessed that had they challenged and exposed the lies told about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, instead of amplifying and justifying them, the invasion might not have happened.
Full story
Scheer out as Bush attacks Iraq War critics
Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer was fired on November 11 after nearly 30 years at the paper, the last 13 as one of its most progressive political columnists.
In a published statement announcing op-ed page changes (11/10/05), the Times insisted that it is dedicated to "provid[ing] readers with a wide range of voices and perspectives," but in dumping Scheer, the paper has gotten rid of one of the few prominent progressive columnists in the country, according to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Scheer's forceful and independent commentary has often placed him in the middle of national debates. He has been one of the strongest critics of the White House over the Iraq War.
For instance, in a pre-war column (8/6/02) that undercuts the current notion that everyone got the WMD story wrong, Scheer wrote that “a consensus of experts” told the Senate that Iraq’s chemical and biological arsenals were “almost totally destroyed during eight years of inspections.” Shortly after George W. Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech, and well ahead of the pack, Scheer (6/3/03) called White House pretexts for war a “big lie.”
Scheer was also one of the first columnists to call for withdrawal from Iraq, in a November 4, 2003 column that presaged shifting public opinion on the issue--though his position is still hard to find among his fellow pundits. More than 1,700 U.S. soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis have died since Scheer’s call for withdrawal was published.
In 1999, with a Democrat in the White House, Scheer used his column to expose the racism and unfairness driving the government's (and media's) case against Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese-American scientist wrongly accused of spying. And when a federal court struck the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance in 2002, Scheer was one of the rare media figures who bucked the Republican/Democratic consensus by strongly defending the court's decision (See Extra! Update, 8/02.)
The Times has suggested that Scheer's firing was simply part of a larger revamping of its opinion pages, but Scheer says he was fired for ideological reasons and because the Times' corporate parent, Tribune Company of Chicago, was caving in to outside pressure from conservatives.
As Scheer told Democracy Now! (11/14/05), "What happened is that I had been the subject of vicious attacks by Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh…. I was a punching bag for those guys. I'm still standing, and the people who run the paper collapsed."
In the same appearance, Scheer also blamed Times publisher Jeff Johnson: "The big issue here, I think, is that the publisher took over the editorial pages, a guy named Jeff Johnson. He's an accountant from Chicago, doesn't know anything about what newspapers are supposed to be about, and he made a decision to get rid of the column."
In an email to supporters on the day he was fired, Scheer suggested that Johnson disliked his views.
"The publisher Jeff Johnson, who has offered not a word of explanation to me, has privately told people that he hated every word that I wrote," he said. "I assume that mostly refers to my exposing the lies used by President Bush to justify the invasion of Iraq."
Whether or not ideology was behind Scheer’s dismissal, the timing is peculiar. The action removed one of the strongest critics of the Iraq War in a week when the White House lashed out at detractors, following months of public opinion drawing closer to the views of critics like Scheer.
It’s not as if the Los Angeles Times has a surplus of progressive columnists. Of the ten columnists in the Times’ new line-up, three are conservative movement favorites - National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg will soon join the Weekly Standard's Max Boot and the Hoover Institution's Niall Ferguson - and two are relatively less known progressives, Rosa Brooks and Erin Aubrey Kaplan.
While the Times should be applauded for bringing new diversity to its op-ed page by hiring the two progressive women - Brooks, a law professor, was hired last June and Kaplan, an African-American writer formerly at LA Weekly, was added in the recent shake-up - it's puzzling that the paper would fire its most prominent progressive columnist at such a crucial time.
If you are a reader of Robert Scheer's column and would like to comment on his dismissal, please contact Los Angeles Times Publisher Jeff Johnson.
CONTACT:
Jeff Johnson, Publisher
Los Angeles Times
jeff.johnson@latimes.com
Phone: 213-237-5000
Full Action Alert at FAIR
This just in from the Rev. Jack Zylman
To Tom Scarritt, Bob Blalock, et al, at the Birmingham News:
I have received an email from Rev. James Evans, telling me and others of your refusal to carry his column, "Faith Matters," on a regular weekly basis. This column has been a breath of fresh air to those of us who do not drink at the fountain of fundamentalism and ignorance.
I want you to know that this refusal to carry a popular column is offensive to your readers. Many of us (apparently you refused to count us) requested this act of good and responsive journalism, so you are refusing us as well as Rev. Evans. Is that any way to treat your readers?
Now that you have a monopoly on the mass print media in Birmingham, you have a responsibility to respond to the needs of your readers. Yet you refuse to do so.
This accompanies your insistence in promoting the cartoons of the right-wing extremist Scott Stantis and at the same time refusing to carry The Boondocks, the most relevant cartoon in America for Black Americans struggling with present-day racism.
Doonesbury is a fine cartoon, but it is hardly responsive to the African-American population of America. Do I have to remind you that Birmingham has a majority of African-Americans, and Alabama is nearly 30% African-American?
If the News continues to shut off intelligent, progressive, ethnically complex journalism, we may have to seek other ways of getting the news. That would undoubtedly disturb your advertisers, if not your consciences.
I hope you will change your mind and soften your heart and carry "Faith Matters" on a regular weekly basis.
"I hardly know how to express gratitude for the response that was made to my request for help. Bob Blalock said he stopped counting when e-mail messages surpassed 100.
The bottom line, unfortunately, is that the B'ham News will not carry my column on a weekly basis. They are, however, inviting me to write "frequently" for the Sunday Commentary page. I intend to do that as often as I can.
Thanks again to you and to everyone who expressed such support and encouragement. I really appreciate it.
Jim Evans
The Birmingham Post-Herald will publish it's final edition Friday Sept. 23, 2005, according to a memo from the publisher of the Birmingham News to all company employees dated today, a press release put out by the Scripps company, an Editor and Publisher story and, finally, a story from the Post-Herald itself.
Post-Herald's Final Edition on Friday
The Birmingham Post-Herald will publish its final edition on Friday, Sept. 23, The E.W. Scripps Co., owner of the newspaper, announced today.
Paid circulation of the Post-Herald has declined to about 7,500 copies - a level at which it no longer makes economic sense to continue publishing, Scripps officials said.
"It's never an easy decision to extinguish the light of an independent editorial voice, especially one as bright and rich with tradition as the Post-Herald," said Ken Lowe, president and chief executive officer of The E.W. Scripps Co. "Sadly, though, newspaper readers in Birmingham have made it clear that they are no longer interested in supporting an afternoon newspaper."
Scripps attributed its decision to close the Post-Herald to the fact that the economics of publishing the Post-Herald were no longer favorable.
The closing of the Post-Herald, a five-day afternoon newspaper, marks the end of a joint operating agreement between Scripps and Advance Publications Inc., owner of The Birmingham News, which manages the printing, marketing and distribution of both Birmingham daily newspapers.
The joint operating agreement between Scripps and Advance Publications was scheduled to run until 2015. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
"The Post-Herald has a long tradition of journalistic excellence and community service, but Scripps was left with no choice but to face economic realities," said Richard A. Boehne, Scripps' executive vice president and head of the company's newspaper division.
Scripps has developed a severance plan for the Post-Herald's 43 editorial department employees and will attempt to place some at other Scripps newspapers. Scripps operates 20 other daily newspapers in 18 markets across the country.
The Post-Herald traces its roots as a Scripps newspaper back to 1921 when the company established the Birmingham Post. In 1950, the Post merged with The Birmingham Age-Herald to become The Birmingham Post-Herald. As part of the transaction, the Post-Herald and The Birmingham News created the joint operating agreement and merged the business and production operations of the two newspapers, but maintained separate editorial products.
"For all of us at The E.W. Scripps Company, and for me personally, today is a sad day," Lowe said. "Our hope had always been for a different outcome."
***
TO: All Employees
DATE: September 22, 2005
RE: The Birmingham News and Birmingham Post-Herald
As most of you have already heard, the E. W. Scripps Company announced that
tomorrow,s edition of the Birmingham Post-Herald will be its last.
Birmingham and The Birmingham News Company have shared a rich history with the
Post-Herald since its formation 55 years ago. Regretfully few cities can
support two quality daily newspapers and Birmingham is no exception. Their
voice will be missed.
While we have printed, packaged and distributed the Post-Herald, we do not
expect any significant impact of this decision on Birmingham News employees.
None of our fulltime non-represented employees will be laid off as a result of
the Post-Herald being closed down. There could be some changes in work
schedules for a few employees, which will be discussed as soon as possible with
those affected.
We do not anticipate the Post-Herald,s closure to adversely impact the
readership reach we deliver for our advertising customers. Be assured that The
Birmingham News, as it has since 1888, will continue to serve the Birmingham
community with superior news and information, commentary, and advertising
services. We always seek to improve upon those services and will continue to do
so.
Victor H. Hanson, III
***
Birmingham newspapers to end JOA
For immediate release (NYSE: SSP)
September 22, 2005
CINCINNATI - The Birmingham Post-Herald will publish its final edition on Friday, Sept. 23, The E. W. Scripps Company, owner of the newspaper, announced today.
The closing of The Post-Herald, a five-day afternoon newspaper, marks the end of a joint operating agreement between Scripps and Advance Publications Inc., owner of The Birmingham News, which manages the printing, marketing and distribution of both Birmingham newspapers.
The Birmingham News will continue to publish seven days a week in the morning.
Scripps attributed its decision to close The Post-Herald to the fact that the economics of publishing The Post-Herald were no longer favorable. The joint operating agreement between Scripps and Advance Publications was scheduled to run until 2015.
"The Post-Herald has a long tradition of journalistic excellence and community service, but Scripps was left with no choice but to face economic realities," said Richard A. Boehne, The E. W. Scripps Company,s executive vice president and head of the company's newspaper division. "The Post-Herald's talented and dedicated staff produces an excellent newspaper, but unfortunately the Birmingham market has made it clear that it will no longer support an afternoon edition."
Scripps has developed a severance plan for The Post-Herald's 43 editorial department employees and will attempt to place some at other Scripps newspapers. Scripps operates 20 other daily newspapers in 18 markets across the country.
The Post-Herald traces its roots as a Scripps newspaper back to 1921 when the company established the Birmingham Post. In 1950, the Post merged with The Birmingham Age-Herald to become The Post-Herald. As part of the transaction, The Post-Herald and The Birmingham News created the joint operating agreement and merged the business and production operations of the two newspapers, but maintained separate editorial products.
The Editor and Publisher story:
Scripps Closing 'Birmingham Post-Herald,' Dissolving JOA
Archived Under Death of Newspapers
Press Clips, from the Village Voice, gets it partially right.
In an article headlined The Caste System: Media biggies ignored Times-Picayune's warnings - at everyone's peril, Sydney H. Schanberg, wrote in part:
The Katrina disaster has peeled back the veil from many of America's shames and weaknesses. One of them is the press's caste system.
...the nation's media biggies, acting in character, had pretty much ignored the year-in-year-out reporting by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, which kept warning that a hurricane tragedy of this magnitude was certain to befall the Gulf city. A five-part Times-Picayune series three years ago described, in eerie detail, the likely evacuation that actually happened, leaving behind New Orleans's poorest inhabitants.
The paper wrote: "The risk is growing greater. . . . Eventually a major hurricane will hit New Orleans head on. . . . It's just a matter of time. . . . People left behind in an evacuation will be struggling to survive . . . "
Sadly, there's nothing new about the national press's pretending that important stories uncovered by regional papers or alternative papers like this one were trees that had fallen in a deserted forest. In short, these stories don't exist, except when the biggies deign to cannibalize them, usually giving little credit to the papers of origin.
Some of this smugness has been penetrated by the arrival of the Internet and its infinite space for everyone with a computer to critique everything around them, including the press. Yet the caste system still exists - in all arenas, not just journalism - and will continue to ignore important others as long as the insecure human species determinedly insists on pecking orders.
The Washington press corps - for that matter, all press corps that cover national governments - consider themselves an elite. In one sense they are. Most of the members were chosen for the lofty assignment because of the real skills and energy they had shown when they served, so to speak, as shoe-leather reporters in the trenches. But in the end, despite those skills, many of them soften by being too close to power - or succumb to envy or awe of power. Whether it's Washington or New Delhi, the phenomenon is the same.
The Washington press corps is a caste system within itself. Reporters who work for small papers don't get to sit in the front at presidential press conferences.
...And with the increasing conglomeration of the industry into huge chains bent on homogenizing the news into one-size-fits-all, will fewer and fewer papers maintain a blood link to their communities - as used to be the standard?
But what about the media caste system? Will it persist?...
Any journalism elder like myself comes to know that solid reporting is being done all over this country. And as an elder, I have heard people at other New York City papers sneer at the work of now deceased New York Newsday, when it had put their metro coverage to shame. I have also heard sneers about the Voice's coverage of politics and government, which on a regular basis smokes out more government corruption than any of the sneerers do.
I would argue that if the mainstream papers in New York had followed up on the Voice's coverage of George Pataki's mottled history when he was running for governor for the first time in 1994, the state might have been spared 12 years of misguided, costly, crony governance.
The caste system carries a heavy cost. It weakens the news business.
Mr. Schanberg is onto something important, but he misses an important point. Most of the reporters working for the Times-Picayune went to journalism schools, such as the University of Alabama, while many of the reporters working for the media elites have degrees in English from Ivy League schools. So they come from rich families and learn how to write pretty sentences.
Perhaps they learned about Shakespeare, who wrote "all the world's a stage."
They learned how to play the game well, much like Karl Rove and President George W. Bush.
But they failed to learn how to ask couragious questions and dig out the facts and tell the truth.
For that, these days, readers would be better served searching out the better blogs - the modern equivalents of the pamphleteers who pushed this country toward Revolution in the late 1700s.
Maybe it is time for another revolution, and not just a technological revolution. Remember what happened to the elites in France.
Didn't we just talk about this on the radio today?
N.Y. Times, Philadelphia Papers Plan Job Cuts
Archived under Death of Newspapers.
Or maybe they can't afford not to?
Newspaper Critics Don't Understand the 'Business', says a San Jose Mercury News retired executive in this piece of defensive hyperbole.
Lou Alexander says "many people writing about the future of newspapers are getting it wrong."
Who am I to say so? I recently retired from a director's job in the San Jose Mercury News advertising department. Early in my career, I was a reporter and editor. So I know both sides of the ethical "firewall" in journalism.
Newspapers should cut profit demand:
It might be fun to fantasize about cutting newspaper margin expectations to something under 10%, but the way the world works makes it impossible.
Michael Socolow, a professor of American Studies and journalism program director at Brandeis University recently wrote: "Daily newspapers should drop the consultants, lower their unrealistic earnings targets and do what they do best. If they fail to do this, they will have nobody to blame for their demise but themselves."
It might be fun to fantasize about cutting newspaper margin expectations to something under 10%, but the way the world works makes it impossible. Journalists need to understand this and quit wasting time talking about it.
What Mr. Alexander doesn't address is that newspaper chains may be on the verge of dying anyway, since their readership is falling, advertising pages are already on the slide, and intelligent, young news consumers are jumping to free online sources of news already. If the chains do not start living up to their responsibility under the First Amendment, they may as well go out of business and stop wasting the trees on their pathetic print products anyway.
One of the roles of an independent news Weblog is to critique the local and national press. The blogosphere, you see, is the future of news, since newspapers of all stripes have given up the ghost of democracy and sacrificed their objectivity to the almighty bottom line.
An educated reader has very little trouble at a glance realizing that most newspapers spend very little time and money on news gathering and virtually no time at all standing up to the powerful and asking tough questions. What they do spend on news is just filler between the ads.
In responding to this trend back in the 1960s and '70s, during the cultural revolution of that period in U.S. history, alternative weekly newspapers sprang up to counter this trend and give educated, liberal audiences a different point of view. The Village Voice in New York was one of the first.
In the nation's capital, Washington City Paper fills that role today. In Atlanta, Georgia, there is Creative Loafing. In Birmingham, Alabama, there is a very attractive ad machine called Black and White.
Alas, the greed of the capitalist machine has even overwhelmed the alternative weeklies these days. So much so that it is amazing they continue to attract readers at all.
I have written myself for a couple of the best alternative weeklies in the country, Gambit Weekly in New Orleans and Metropulse in Knoxville, Tennessee.
Having moved back to Birmingham from New Orleans last year, after spending a few months in Washington during the 2004 election campaign, I didn't really expect to find any great newspapers in my home town.
But the last thing I expected to find was a right-wing rag still claiming to serve the liberal arts community in Birmingham. It just goes to show you can fool enough of the people some of the time.
What, you may ask, am I talking about?
Just click on the current issue of Black and White and tell me I am crazy.
The B and W gives lip service to the Birmingham arts community with a brief on the artwalk (their Web design does not allow posting links to individual stories, which just goes to show you that even a free newspaper is somehow afraid of the Web).
And while there is never any investigative reporting in the paper, enough of a slight, their entire opinion section is filled with cheap, syndicated conservative drivel.
They start their minimal coverage of the Hurricane Katrina aftermath by blaming the looters for the slow rescue response in a piece written by Nicole Gelinas, a regular op-ed contributor to the New York Post, the conservative New York tabloid owned by Rupert Murdock, who you may also recall owns the Fox News network.
The headline?
"A Perfect Storm of Lawlessness: New Orleans' vicious looters aren't the real face of the city's poor - their victims are."
Right.
Never mind that President George W. Bush, the directors of Homeland Security and FEMA refused for four days to give the order for the National Guard waiting in Montgomery, Alabama, to head down to the coast of Mississippi and New Orleans and begin giving the poor, trapped people there food and water and rescue them from the toxic flood waters - that is until the president was on the way down for a photo op.
Then, they use a piece by Daniel Henninger, deputy editor of the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page, to blame the entire debacle on that evil government inevitability - "bureaucracy."
"Bureaucratic Failure: To understand Katrina's problems, read the 9/11 report."
Jesus H. fucking Christ these people are stupid.
To add insult to injury, they are now running the column of Ann Coulter, the nut job maven of the GOP, who blames all the problems in America on poor Cindy Sheehan in an article subtitled, "Commander In Grief."
And of course, that fat, stupid, blow hard and Rush Limbaugh want-a-be J.R. Taylor just has to weigh in (pun intended) to blame it all on the so-called "liberal" Washington Post.
Never mind that the Washington Post has now earned the nickname "The Pentagon Post," for its editorial support of the war in Iraq, by the liberal blogs.
Taylor had so much to think last night that he forgot to obtain ANY facts whatsoever for his diatribe.
So why should the liberal arts community in Birmingham even give a shit what the B and W writes? Is it time for a boycott?
Would their conservative advertisers care if everyone on Birmingham's Southside decided to toss the paper in the garbage from now on instead of reading it and looking at the ads?
Try it and maybe it will convince the editors to find some balance in their coverage from now on.
I offered them a piece on New Orleans a couple of weeks ago and they didn't even bother to return my e-mail by saying "no thanks."
Wilson: New Orleans Depends on the Kindness of Strangers
The column stacks up against all these writers if I do say so myself.
Codrescu: Love Note to New Orleans
Rice: Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?
Tisserand: New Orleans Is Gone!
Raines: The Crescent City Blues
Bragg: This Isn't the Last Dance
So tell Black and White to kiss your ass until they start running some real journalism. Pick up a few copies and toss them in the recycle bin - without even looking inside.
If you are a true artist, there's nothing in the paper worth reading anyway.
A few quick notes on the sad state of the news business in America.
For starters, the New York Times is about to start charging for its online content, so as far as we are concerned, the paper's century-long run as the national newspaper of record is officially over, if it wasn't already by the way the paper's management handled the Jayson Blair fiasco by running a palace coup against executive editor Howell Raines from Alabama and running off star writer Rick Bragg, along with his number one stringer, yours truly.
For the record? They can kiss my ass. I won't be reading or linking to that paper anymore. Which is just as well. They got their ass kicked completely in covering Hurricane Katrina, mainly due to their lack of experienced reporting on the ground.
New York Times Starts Charging
Second, ABC's Nightline, the last best hope for news for non-cable TV subscribers, spent most of their time on the air tonight bashing local officials for the horrendously slow response to Hurricane Katrina, which even President George W. Bush himself today said he took responsibility for, even though he said nothing about paying any price for his failures. So Ted Kopple may as well go ahead and retire, since that show is obviously over and done with and just trying to suck up to the failed Bush administration for some inexplicable reason.
Then, on a local TV news note, that complete idiot and former weatherman Mike Royer did it again tonight, smiling through the coverage of Hurricane Katrina relief stories, which you would think may best be delivered with a somber face. Then, he highlighted his own son's fourth grade class pretending to raise money for hurricane relief in a clear conflict of interest. They gathered a few used toys to send to the non-existent kids left in coastal Mississippi. What a freaking complete joke.
Is anyone else out there as appalled as I am about the state of the news business in America?
A friend recently came up from Tuscaloosa to visit over a few beers at The Garage Cafe on Southside and brought along an old newspaper article he found while cleaning out the closet. He thought I would be interested, since it is a column by Ted Bryant from the March 8, 1982 edition of The Birmingham Post-Herald, back in the day when this little city had two daily newspapers and two wire services which actually competed with each other for news.
Bryant, an old friend, died at the age of 64 on June 30, 1999, just as we were putting out the second issue of The Southerner magazine online in Knoxville, Tennessee. We acknowledged Bryant's death in this column.
Bryant wrote a couple of columns a week for the editorial page. He also covered state and local politics for the paper, a dual role that no one at today's New York Times could ever understand. We don't have time to explain it here, so let's get to the point.
In the lead of the old article, which is mostly a feature about the courageous retired editor of the paper, James E. Mills, Bryant quotes from an even older article from the Nov. 6, 1962 edition of the Post-Herald. The article is a direct frontal assault in print of old Birmingham Mayor Art Haynes - who ran things back in the days of Bull Conner and the City Commission - for ordering city employees not to talk to reporters.
This is unlike anything you would see in a newspaper today. Back in the so-called good old days, you see, newsmen had guts.
"If Mayor Hanes displays such arrogant disregard of the public's right to know on the eve of the election, what can we expect in the future," Mills is quoted as saying. "Let's take no chances. Birmingham and the people of Birmingham deserve a better break. A vote for Mayor-Council government will give it to them."
Guts. In the newspaper.
For that comment, Mills was charged with violating the Alabama Corrupt Practices Act, which forbade electioneering on election day. He was convicted by the lower courts. But he was saved by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo L. Black, a former Sunday school teacher from Alabama, who said in his ruling: "Suppression of the right of the press to praise or criticize governmental agents and clamor for and against change ... muzzles one of the very agencies the framers of our Constitution thoughtfully and deliberately selected to improve our society and keep it free."
Amen. And amen.
Where is the courage in the news business today?
Well, folks, you will find it right here in the blogosphere. Bring 'em on.
The problem is that the Bush administration and the so-called conservative judges the president is actively appointing do not share our belief that a Web-based publication, such as this blog, deserve the same protections under the First Amendment as a newspaper published with ink and paper on a printing press. And that does not bode well for democracy or freedom of the press.
If this is not the modern equivalent of a printing press deserving of Constitutional protection, I will kiss George Bush's ... (bad word, to quote Big and Rich).
This is only one of the causes we are actively fighting from here. But as usual, we can't do it all alone. Get onboard.
President George W. Bush was seen on cable news this morning signing the CAFTA trade agreement, in what CNN's White House correspondent called "a gloatfest," since the bill only passed in the U.S. House of Representatives by two votes. Are you feeling the screws turning yet?
Meanwhile, the Birmnigham Snooze did manage to eke out a story of sorts today on the sneaky visit of U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Although it just demonstrates the pathetic and rear-end kissing nature of mainstream journalism these days.
Even in my early days in journalism at the University of Alabama's Crimson White student newspaper, I would have been laughed out of the newsroom for reporting that a government official such as Gonzales was "pleased with Martin and the direction the U.S. attorney's office is taking."
So he is pleased that the U.S. attorneys office in Birmingham has lost every high profile case to come before it? And to change the subject, they indict former Jefferson County commissioner Chris McNair, who lost his daughter in the 16th Street Church bombing, for some renovation work on the photography studio dedicated to the memorial of his daughter?
Aren't you so pleased that the Birmingham News is pleased with the pleasing idiots who are running the country? I guess it beats hiding out in the bushes and catching a Democrat in an affair with a reporter, eh? How's that circulation doing these days? Do you think people are pleased with your pleasing BS?
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has issued an Action Alert against New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for his July 22 column: "Giving the Hatemongers No Place to Hide."
Friedman says the federal government, in the form of the State Department, should "produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report," to "focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others." He also wants the government to include "excuse makers," which, according to FAIR, includes "a majority of Americans, according to recent polls."
I must say I used to love reading The New York Times and admit that I have reported and written for that once great newspaper. Perhaps this entire episode can be chalked up to post-9/11/Jayson Blair stress syndrome, but I stopped reading Mr. Friedman's columns a couple of years ago when he flip-flopped on the war in Iraq. You see he was for it and against it, sort of like Sen. John Kerry on the funding for the war, about the time I was trying to tell the national desk that something was fishy in Bush's D.C.
The Times plans to start charging for editorial columns in September, so Mr. Friedman's audience will no doubt shrink considerably at that time. Somehow I doubt the FAIR action alert will do any good anyway, since all the activist's e-mails will just go unread by the management at the paper. And besides, the State Department will ignore Friedman. Why shouldn't we?
I'm sure there were newspaper columnists all over the land who stood with McCarthy and his blacklist during the Red Scare in the 1950s. Luckily, they are long forgotten.
Sitting up late blogging and watching C-SPAN, I managed to catch the speech by Bill Moyers taking on the media and the government at the conference put on by a non-profit group called Free Press, "working to involve the public in media policymaking and to craft policies for more democratic media," according to its mission statement.
I may as well publish my own book on the press now, since the Newsweek debacle will make it even harder to do or sell any meaningful investigative journalism for some time to come.
Meanwhile, the MSM thinks it can stop the bleeding circulation numbers and the plummeting public trust in public opinion polls by covering more church. What a joke.
At least there's one newsman on TV willing to take on a sycophant like Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman who let gay male prostitute Jeff Gannon in the press room and who is now blaming Newsweek for deaths in the Middle East and diminishing America's reputation in the world. I think someone needs to look in the damn mirror.
Keith Olbermann is calling on McClellan to resign. It won't happen, of course, but at least someone has the guts to say it out loud in front of a camera.
Is the American press as we know it doomed - along with 229 years of experimentation with Democracy?
Let us all now bow down and give praise to famous men, right? Shouldn't we all just be grateful for the crumbs they throw us?
I already know one real reporter who recently had to take a job as a grocery store checkout clerk just to feed her family. We'll all be working for Wal-Mart soon - if a lot of people don't by dog stand up and protest the direction we are headed.
It's just a damn good thing the Republican Party decided a long time ago that presidential terms should be limited to two in the wake of FDR's four terms during The Depression and World War II. Otherwise, the organized religious forces in this country might just anoint George W. Bush king for life and we could kiss this great experiment in Democracy good bye.
The good news is, there will be more elections in 2006 and 2008. There is some chance that the libertarian independents might just split from the religious conservatives and help the pendulum to swing back and allow a few more Democrats back into power.
Otherwise, dear friends, Hunter S. Thompson may prove right to lament the death of the American Dream. It sure seems to be slipping away these days. It's hard to even muster a decent "ho, ho."
Bill Moyers denounced the politcal right and top officials at the White House for trying to silence their critics by controlling the news media, according to this report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
He also took aim at reporters who become little more than willing government "stenographers," the Dispatch reports. And he said the public increasingly is content with just enough news to confirm its own biases.
Moyers, whose reports have appeared on the Public Broadcasting System since the 1970s, spoke in St. Louis at a conference on media reform. He is a former newspaper publisher and was an aide to President Lyndon Johnson in the early 1960s.
Moyers said those in power - government officials and their allies in the media - mean to stay there by punishing journalists "who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable."
Answering for the first time recent charges that public television in general and he in particular have become too liberal, Moyers described those officials as "obsessed with control" of the media. He said they are using the government "to threaten and intimidate."
Those charges came from Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a Republican, who paid an outside consultant $10,000 to keep track of the political leanings of guests on Moyers' show, "Now." Moyers left the show last year but is back on public television as host of the series "Wide Angle."
On the recommendation of administration officials, Tomlinson hired a senior White House aide to draw up guidelines to review the content of public radio and television broadcasts, according to a May 2 report in The New York Times.
Give 'em hell Bill.
I've had a number of e-mails with various links to versions of this story, but I trust the account of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) at fair@fair.org.
"Journalists typically condemn attempts to force their colleagues to disclose anonymous sources, saying that subpoenaing reporters will discourage efforts to expose government wrongdoing. But such warnings seem like mere self-congratulation when clear evidence of wrongdoing emerges, with no anonymous sources required - and major news outlets virtually ignore it," FAIR reports in a what the media watchdog group calls a Smoking Gun Memo.
Continue reading "Iraq Bombshell Goes Mostly Unreported in US Media" »
Interested in this debate? Check out The Vanishing Newspaper? Saving Journalism in the Information Age, a book and interview with Philip Meyer.
"I may be a tax-and-spend, Volvo driving, bleeding-heart liberal, but I still believe in markets," Meyer says. "Spot a trend, make a big noise about it, and it looks like I'm leading the parade. The parade is going to happen no matter what I do. The market will reward quality, especially now that the entry price has been reduced."
More over at Press Think.
Meyer also wrote Why journalism needs Ph.D.s - in 1996. I'm wondering how this argument stands up now, but perhaps that's esoteria (new word).
What I like about his vita, other than his previous books like Precision Journalism, is this line in his bio:
Meyer is a graduate school drop-out who occupies the Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
To add to the ongoing discussion about newspapers, I just ran across this bit of wishful thinking from the L.A. Times' Tim Rutten. Although amidst the defensive posturing, there are a few words of wisdom.
The notion that print newspapers won't find ways to adapt, absorb and adjust to the Internet and other new media is as narrow and ahistorical as the insistence by some print media fundamentalists that bloggers aren't journalists and are not entitled to 1st Amendment protections.
In fact, bloggers are opinion journalists in the same sense that op-ed commentators are - and every bit as entitled to protection. A good case can be made, moreover, that the political speech in which the many of them are engaged is precisely what the Founders intended to protect.
Their numbers and general lack of civility may make that inconvenient, but who said liberty was supposed to be neat or easy? The best guess - which is what those of us wary of predictions do - may be that the futures of both newspapers and blogging are linked.
Hmmm. You think?
We seem to be back in an era something like two years ago when the press really started covering the press as a full-time beat in a way we've never before seen in the great U.S. of A.
Remember when the Harvard junkie Seth Mnookin got the cover of Newsweek when the New York Times blew its handling of the Jayson Blair affair?
Blair was the black kid at the Times who, it was discovered and reported ad nauseam, was found to have made up sources and information and plagiarized other reporters. Here was a kid who got the chance to be a national correspondent for a great newspaper and, instead of flying off to Virginia and Texas where he was supposed to get the dateline on stories he wrote, he hunkered down in his New York apartment snorting cocaine hiding behind his cell phone number and e-mail address.
Now with the news that newspaper circulation is falling and can't get up, some of the biggest names in the news business are trying to come to terms with the prospect of a world without newspapers.
At least L.A. Times columnist Michael Kinsley is trying to be funny when he writes:
In this great country, there are newspaper editorial pages of every political stripe, from nearly insane far-left rantings to the Wall Street Journal. But when the United States faces a danger to its most important institutions and values, Americans can count on the newspaper industry to put aside petty differences and speak with one voice.
Now is such a moment. The enemy is invisible, indeed inexplicable, but could be fatal to all we hold dear. In short: Some evil force is causing people to stop reading newspapers!
Newspaper circulation figures, which had been drifting decorously downward for years, have started to plummet.
At the current rate of decline, the last newspaper subscriber will hang up on a renewal phone call that interrupts dinner on Oct. 17, 2016.
And then it will be over.
New York Times columnist Frank Rich also makes light of the situation when he writes:
As we commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Drudge Report and the second anniversary of the Jayson Blair scandal, American journalists are in a race with the runaway bride for public enemy No. 1.
Newspaper circulation is on the skids, the big three network anchor thrones are as precarious as King Lear's, bloggers are on the rampage, and the government is embracing fake reporters and threatening to jail real ones. A Pew Research Center poll shows that Americans now trust the press less than every other major institution, from government to medicine to banks. We can only be grateful that the matchups didn't include pornographers or Major League Baseball (players or owners?).
Then - just when you think things couldn't get any worse - along comes the annual White House Correspondents' Association dinner. . . .
Then, the Times saved this item for Monday's paper - a sefl-evaluation piece telling us what a special Times' panel proposes to do to try to rebuild the paper's credibility.
Hmmm. I' wondering how the panel missed the case of how I was harrassed by federal court officials while covering the fraud trial of HealthSouth founder Richard Scrushy - simply because I happened to mention that I worked for the New York Times in Birmingham, Ala. - when they wrote this part:
A parallel goal of the main strategy to defend itself against criticism, the committee said, "was to assure reporters 'that they will be defended when they are subjected to unfair attack.' "
Tell you what. We'll get back to that at a later date.
Right now, we will see.
We suspect management will defend management and do whatever it takes to keep churning in that 20 percent return on investment by filling the space between the ads as cheaply as possibie.
While that piece sat on the editing table, someone at the paper decided to get right after one class of its critics with this smarmy piece about the evil blogs who say bad things about the priesthood that is "The Times."
A Blog Revolution? Get a Grip
Get a grip indeed. The mass public doesn't care. It's too late. The press and democracy are doomed, unless we can figure out how to use the Internet to save it.
Cutting down billions of trees to print millions of newspapers filled with religious conservative public relations - and cramming them down people's throats with telemarketing - will never do the job. In fact, it is bound to backfire.
The issue should not be about whether newspaper companies continue to make a 20 percent return on investment on their print product.
The real fight is about getting enough reporters on the ground who can put out enough factual information and get it into people's hands - no matter what the platform - so that citizens in a democracy can make informed choices. Choices like whether to privatize social security, start wars in Middle Eastern countries based on faulty intelligence, favor oil and nuclear power over alternatives such as solar and wind when it comes time for federal incentives - and on whether to build more roads for loggers and miners in our national parks.
I hope the New York Times decides to begin speaking even more authoritatively on issues such as these - instead of spending millions of dollars trying to spin their way into the hearts and minds of Southern Baptists.
I know. I know. I didn't go to Harvard, so they don't give a damn what I think.
But watch this.
Just as the Times makes this decision to stand up for itself, finally, it will soon begin charging for its Web site content - making its efforts at a come back all for naught.
I will bet public editor Dan Okrent his salary versus mine last year that this effort will not go very well.
I hope it does, because it is hard to have a strong America without a strong New York Times - or at least a strong press, whether it's printed on paper or not.
Maybe the best thing we could do for the future of the country is to make the reconstituted New York Times archives free online with permanent links. Then train every child - now being left behind by the White House euphemism that substitutes for a policy - how to use a computer and read the news on the Net.
Now that might actually make a difference.
But somehow you've got to dissuade them from listening to talk radio - or watching Fox News.
Then we might have a real chance to save the world - so we can savor it once again.
". . . reporters are not scum," writes Charlie Mitchell, managing editor of the Vicksburg Post, in a column that made Romenesko's Poynteronline Web site and e-mail today.
It ran under the headline, "Journalism has its share of myths, too," and included the so-called myth that reporters are liberal, anti-religious, incomplete, inaccurate, run in rude packs, and of course, are underpaid.
Sorry Charlie, but this kind of argument is going nowhere and only shows that the print press business is desperate. Maybe if publishers paid more you could get some real liberals in the ranks of newspaper reporters.
It recently occurred to me that perhaps what the so-called conservatives mean when they attack the press as liberal is that reporters are smarter than talk radio show hosts. By smarter I do not mean IQ alone, but a certain amount of education. Next time you hear talking heads debating this point, substitute "smart" for "liberal" and "dumb" for "conservative" and see how that works out.
Note: The fact is, radio news on National Public Radio is not liberal. Neither is the New York Times. They are designed for an educated audience. Fact: The more educated the audience, the more liberal it is. Public opinion polls bear this out by significant margins if you make the cutoff line at some graduate school.
I suspect the Vicksburg Post is much like a lot of other smaller daily newspapers in the South. It is designed to be read by 9th graders. I'm not making this up.
Even the Dallas Morning News, a very large metropolitican daily newspaper I wrote for out of New Orleans for four years, could be described as a mass circulation daily newspaper written on a ninth-grade reading level.
That's why smart people (read liberals) are also disenchanted with the average daily newspaper. They just don't go around bashing it on talk radio, although some of the smarter bloggers are beginning to realize that perhaps the press needs a good kick in the pants now and then from the left.
Young people with graduate degrees will continue to seek out smarter sources of information on the Web. Young people who drop out of high school never read newspapers anyway.
Smart people read - so why don't newspapers go after them in places like Birmingham, Alabama?
There are doctors, lawyers, scientists, teachers and all kinds of smart people in this area, although they are obviously in the minority. See the last election returns for proof of this. Above Alabama only Utah citizens voted in higher percentages for Bush, maybe Montana.
So instead of conducting focus groups with dumbasses (read conservatives) when they seek input from the public, why don't news management teams seek out smart people to see what they would like to read in the newspaper?
Chances are, your readership might stop dropping if you had more smart (liberal) writers - and of course if you designed your Web sites for smart people too.
And, what if you offered the newspaper content, including stories laid out with photographs, video and audio, along with your archives, free online for print subscribers? What if you sold the same advertisers from your print edition an ad on your Web site?
You could play in the new flat world too.
GW
Circulation at major U.S. newspapers fell 1.9 percent in the six-month
period ending in March, an industry group reported Monday, marking one of
the worst declines in recent years, the Associated Press is reporting.
Newspaper circulation has been on a general decline since 1984, and has
suffered especially in the last several years as other forms of media
compete for the attention of readers, including cable television and the
Internet.
The Newspaper Association of America, a Vienna, Va.-based industry group,
reported that average daily paid circulation declined 1.9 percent in the
most recent reporting period for the 814 newspapers reporting comparable
data to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.
In addition to competition from other media, several other factors have had
a negative impact on newspaper circulation, including the federal
do-not-call regulation. That rule, which fully went into effect early last
year, has hurt the ability of newspapers to sign up readers through
telemarketing. As recently as 2000, telemarketing accounted for 43.4 percent
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