When I came into the newspaper business in 1967 at the tender age of 20, most reporters and editors drank like fish and smoked like chimneys (on the job), lived and died for the news scoop, type was set on massive linotype machines using molten lead, and when the presses of morning and evening newspapers rolled it was like printing money.

Today newsrooms are like vegetarian cafeterias, the scoop is most often the purview of cable news channels, or Internet sites, the entire typesetting and printing process is electronic, and when the presses roll for the remaining morning papers (there are no evening papers as such anymore), one can only wonder how many years it will be before they are silenced.

The reasons for the long downward spiral of the industry are complex and multi-layered, but basically boil down to something that I was saying well before I wrote my last story and quit a few weeks before the 9/11 attacks:

Newspapers will not survive if they don’t change and change damned quickly by embracing the Internet and hugging it to their collective bosom.

I take no satisfaction in being right. (And yes, it was weird to feel like a fireman without a ladder when the first aircraft slammed into the World Trade Center on that beautiful September morning.)

Read the rest of this entry »

The repercussions of a recent New York Times article about how the Pentagon manipulated the American media have begun to be felt in the foreign press.

Serge Truffaut writes for Montreal’s Le Devoir,

“The old adage that “the first casualty of war is truth” is one to which the Pentagon has stuck to with unheard of will, strength, and consistency. Thanks to the Benedictine work a journalist from The New York Times - and there is no better word to describe it- we now know that the U.S. executive has applied itself to building a propaganda machine so powerful, that it highlights the disdain that Bush and company feed on with respect Read the rest of this entry »

As the new Republican front runner, John McCain had a good deal to say this week in the Wall Street Journal on the first anniversary of the Surge.

So much, in fact, that he needed his Senate colleague, Joe Lieberman, to help him do the heavy lifting in proclaiming, “The Surge Worked,” that “conditions in that country have been utterly transformed…al Qaeda has been beaten back, violence across the country has dropped dramatically. The number of car bombings, sectarian murders and suicide attacks has been slashed.”

On the same day, the US military announced, six American soldiers were killed when a house rigged with explosives blew up north of Baghdad during a new offensive targeting al Qaeda guerrillas, adding to the more than 835 who have died since last February.

The gains in Iraq, McCain reports, “are thrilling but not yet permanent. Political progress has been slow. And although al Qaeda and the other extremists in Iraq have been dealt a critical blow, they will strike back at the Iraqi people and us if we give them the chance, as our generals on the ground continue to warn us.”
Read the rest of this entry »

Fred Barnes’s Rovian “big idea” for Republican “recovery”? — “ownership,” that is, the ownership society, including (yes, here we go again) Social Security privatization. (So he argued yesterday at the WSJ.)

Sure, why not?

Pretty much everything else has failed, more failure, including more electoral defeat, lies on the horizon, Iraq has been, is, and will continue to be a disaster mitigated only by deception, Bush has been one of the worst presidents of all time, the GOP’s primary political strategy teeters on the twin pillars of fearmongering and division, the party’s internal divisions are as naked as ever, the candidates for its presidential nomination are uninspiring at best, irrational hope hoists an actor, or the generic character he plays, into the ranks of party stardom, and the party’s two main ideas, or ideologies, are, at present, fascism and theocratism, Christian nationalism of a decidedly authoritarian nature.

Even Fred Barnes, Krazy Kristol’s partner-in-lunacy at The Murdoch Standard, finds all that rather troubling, not because it’s all inherently troubling but because the Republicans won’t win if that’s all they’ve got. (Can you feel his pain?)

Hence: “ownership.” (Forget that Americans don’t want what the Republicans want to give them. I’m sure there’s some Rovian plan to scare them into submission once more.)

Hence this piece of advice: “The recipe for Republicans is to stop acting like, well, Republicans — that is, Republicans of recent vintage.”

Good luck with that. You know what they say about the leopard.

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com

And now another gem from TMV’s favorite artist of verse, Michael Silverstein, aka Wall Street Poet:

Dow Murd
By Robert Silverstein

Ruppert Murdoch’s made his bones
He¹s gobbled up Dow Jones;
The word’s out now (you’ve surely heard)
That soon they’ll call the place Dow Murd.

Copyright 2007 Robert Silverstein

Sandy Huffaker, Cagle Cartoons

In shrinkdom, there is a disorder that is well known amongst career criminals. It is called Factitious Disorder. It is an intentional production or theatrical, staged by a person feigning physical and/or psychological symptoms… for ulterior gain.

This can include mimicking fugue states (taking unremembered travel whether across the hall or across the world… and claiming not to remember what one did or who one spoke to, the content of what was said, or what occurred (for instance, in the recent news chopper crashes in Phoenix, the suspect who’d stolen a truck claimed he later woke up at his family-member’s house, not remembering that he’d led a multi-car police chase, saw the huge plume of smoke from the crashed helicopters, felt the impact of the truck’s tires being blown, et al.)

Think also of Congress’s failed attempts to get Cheney to give on which oil co execs he talked to and about what. IF Congress moved that inquiry along, it is highly likely based on Cheney’s m.o. to this point, that Cheney would demur and say, he recalls nothing, as though he has a brain stem injury all of a sudden.

A person enacting a Factitious Disorder may claim amnesia, (episodic or concurrent inability to remember personal information that is often, in reality, seriously threatening to their charade of innocence or ignorance). Think of all those who have murdered their families and claimed they were knocked out at the scene by five Black or Hispanic men. They often don’t realize the moment they say Black or Hispanic men, and their injuries are nowhere commensurate with the injuries to their family members, they may become an instant prime suspect

Think of Cheney claiming he knew nothing about Scooter Libby’s work product, that Cheney was busy being ‘sick’ having heart conditions on and off throughout that time.

Or a criminal may feign a kind of multiple personality disorder; speaking clearly with full memory and accuracy about selected matters, but when interrogator, interviewer, investigator comes near the stressful facts that might force the criminal’s revealment, suddenly a ’second personality’ is pretended, one that is terse and uncommunicative and irritated. The ‘other’ personality carries any number of symptoms which most often are pretended to affect memory. There may also be facetious and wrongful blame assigned to others who may, in actuality, be innocent.

Other ‘pretend symptoms’ may give the appearance of addledness, ‘closed head’ injury, aphasia (not being able to speak), somnolence (pretending sleep or pretending drowsiness), and feigning Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. It would be interesting to track Cheney in two ways… to see over which topics he ‘falls asleep’ during… perhaps so he can feign ‘no memory’ afterward… and where he goes when he says he’s going to the doctor… amongst criminals, ‘doctor’ is sometimes code for one who helps you ‘fix things.’ In investigation, even odd trajectories are looked at until proven cogent or not. Those odd tracks are followed because it is amazing often, how highly symbolizing criminals are in their subterfuges.

The criminal’s underlying motive is to evade being brought to justice, to continue in their own fiefdom, to gain privilege, to be fawned upon, to dangle reward for whomever will not turn them in, to retain power, to evade consequences of their own ill and egregious actions, to walk free.

The denouements I’ve seen of burrowed-in wily criminals are often effected by men who are bigger than the criminal, and smarter, and in a way, more wily about human nature than the criminal is… that is, the big guys press them in every way, not let them off the hook, not being deferent to them, using a two member team of good cop/ bad cop and often a third to give the criminal friendly philosophical advice, to interfere with and question the criminal’s fantasy of protected privilege, to not be politic or polite, to log all their movements and meetings, to Read the rest of this entry »

Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune

If I had picked up my morning newspaper a few years ago and read that Rupert Murdoch had bought Dow Jones & Company, publisher of the Wall Street Journal, I would have sneezed coffee through my nose and then collapsed to the floor with heart spasms.

But times have changed, and while it still is a bit off putting that a conservative media mogul who has built his empire on sleaze and scandal is buying the owner of one of the most respected brands in mainstream media for a cool $5 billion, that transaction simply does not deliver the shock value it would have even five years ago.

But have times changed for the better?

I certainly should be able to provide a definitive answer as an ink-stained wretch who toiled in the trenches of daily journalism for over 35 years and looked on in horror as my last paper become a shell of its former self because the owners were much more concerned about their company’s share price than the quality of the product.
Alas, I cannot say things are better or worse.

What I can say is that from a market perspective, the shakeout in the MSM is long overdue, and editors long oblivious to market forces – including the advent of the Internet and later the blogosphere — are getting their comeuppance from sea to shining sea.

What I also can say is that from a content perspective, the shakeout has made some MSM outlets better but others not so. While there is substantially more variety for readers and viewers, much of it is the celebrity-driven piffle that is Murdoch’s coin of the realm, while the MSM has not exactly covered itself in glory in covering the biggest story of the young millennium – the Iraq war.

What I also can say is the acquisition of The Journal, along with the planned launch of a Fox business news channel by Murdoch’s News Corporation, makes him the most formidable figure in business news in the country, and that is scary. Very scary given the unapologetically conservative spin that the Fox News channel puts on everything it touches.

More here.

Hollywood activists are easy targets, often earnestly silly and self-congratulating, but a shining exception is Mia Farrow and her work to stop the genocide in Darfur. This week, her efforts provoked two world powers-—the People’s Republic of China and Steven Spielberg.

During the YouTube debate, Democratic candidates, including Hillary Clinton, hemmed and hawed about diplomacy to stop the killing, clearly uneasy about a complex humanitarian crisis in far-off Africa (only Joe Biden was an angry exception) and exuded helplessness.

Not Mia Farrow. For three years, the 62-year-old waif-like actress has been devoting herself to traveling in Darfur, Chad and the Sudan, photographing and writing about the atrocities, running a web site about them and pressuring for activism to relieve the suffering.

One of her targets, Steven Spielberg, who is artistic director for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, has now threatened to quit unless China, the Sudan’s largest oil customer, joins in the effort to stop the slaughter.

In the Wall Street Journal, Farrow and her son had written: “Is Mr. Spielberg, who in 1994 founded the Shoah Foundation to record the testimony of survivors of the holocaust, aware that China is bankrolling Darfur’s genocide?”

A diminutive woman, Farrow is an emotional powerhouse. Married to Frank Sinatra at 21, then to composer Andre Previn and after that in an all-but-married relationship with Woody Allen for almost two decades, she has fifteen children, eleven of them adopted.

She is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, drawing attention to the fight to eradicate polio, which she survived as a child, and the plight of suffering children everywhere.

If there is any such person as the mythical Earth Mother, Mia Farrow is that and more.

Cross-posted from my blog

The media melodrama is over. Apparently enough of the Bancroft family will accept Rupert Murdoch’s $5 billion Faustian bargain for the Wall Street Journal.

But give them credit for a struggle to save their souls. At a family meeting Monday night, the Journal reported, one of the matriarchs, 77-year-old Jane Cox MacElree, argued against making the deal with the Devil by invoking the martyrdom of Daniel Pearl.

“He put his life on the line for the paper,” Ms. MacElree said, citing the reporter who was kidnapped and killed by Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Ms. MacElree was supported by daughter, Leslie Hill, a Dow Jones director and former airline pilot, who waved a quarter-inch-thick manila envelope filled with letters from Journal reporters and editors who protested a deal with News Corp.

“She said it was their voices that mattered.” the Journal reported. “In a halting speech, she was on the verge of tears as she talked about the reporters’ dedication to their jobs, and told family members they owed it to the Journal’s rank and file not to sell the paper, according to participants.”

What’s remarkable about this prolonged struggle is not that the various branches of the Bancroft family finally succumbed to Murdoch’s offer that doubled the market value of their holdings but that so many resisted for so long.

In the era of corporate journalism, it’s sad to witness the loss of another leading family-owned company with the principles expressed by Ms. MacElree and her daughter, but there is a kind of cold comfort in seeing that such sentiments still exist.

Their time may have passed, but Murdoch’s won’t last forever, either.

Cross-posted from my blog

Wall Street Journal columnist and former Ronald Reagan writer Peggy Noonan has made it known in the past that she has soured on President George Bush.

But in her latest column, she suggests that she has totally had it — and that other Republicans would fire him if they had a chance.

The key point is in the sub-headline:

We can’t fire the president right now, so we’re waiting it out.

She raises the issue at the very start of her piece which is yet another sign that there are many Republicans who are not saying “ditto” like some talk show hosts to everything George Bush says, does and or the attitude he now projects in his public appearances:

It’s been a slow week in a hot era. I found myself Thursday watching President Bush’s news conference and thinking about what it is about him, real or perceived, that makes people who used to smile at the mention of his name now grit their teeth. I mean what it is apart from the huge and obvious issues on which they might disagree with him.

I’m not referring to what used to be called Bush Derangement Syndrome. That phrase suggested that to passionately dislike the president was to be somewhat unhinged. No one thinks that anymore. I received an email before the news conference from as rock-ribbed a Republican as you can find, a Georgia woman (middle-aged, entrepreneurial) who’d previously supported him. She said she’d had it. “I don’t believe a word that comes out of his mouth.” I was startled by her vehemence only because she is, as I said, rock-ribbed. Her email reminded me of another, one a friend received some months ago: “I took the W off my car today,” it said on the subject line. It sounded like a country western song, like a great lament.

At the very end of her piece, Noonan hits her key theme:

Americans hire presidents and fire them. They’re not as sweet about it as they used to be. This is not because they have grown cynical, but because they are disappointed, by both teams and both sides. Some part of them thinks no matter who is president he will not protect them from forces at work in the world. Some part of them fears that when history looks back on this moment, on the past few presidents and the next few, it will say: Those men were not big enough for the era.

But this is a democracy. You vote, you do the best you can with the choices presented, and you show the appropriate opposition to the guy who seems most likely to bring trouble.
And she nails it: part of the process of American voting is picking one who you think will do the worst harm to your own political values and what you perceive to be the nation’s values.

But, we should add, underlying this vote are two assumptions:

#1: That the person you vote for will be competent overall,

and..

#2 That the American system of democracy with its carefully thought-out and (up-till-now) cherished system of checks and balances will in the end prevent anyone from doing endless harm —and prevent someone who turns out to be a “dud” from ruining the whole candy store or turning it into another kind of store.

Noonan ends her piece with this:

Americans can’t fire the president right now, so they’re waiting it out. They can tell a pollster how they feel, and they do, and they can tell friends, and they do that too. They also watch the news conference, and grit their teeth a bit.

The only problem in “waiting it out” (which is most likely what will happen despite all the wishful thinking in some quarters about impeachment) is that there are huge consequences.

if Republicans feel as many Democrats and now independents do that Iraq policy is at the very least poorly planned and can’t reach the goals originally announced by Bush when he FIRST announced his plans (not the fudging and instant revision of history that this administration picks up and its followers instantly accept where they change their definitions during various crises when it look like they’re not doing what they said they would do or what would happen — or they deny they ever said certain things that are documented on video tape) then the net result is that some young Americans will die. As time runs out, so do lives will end

This is a situation unprecedented in American history.

Even during the Vietnam War, there was a perception that Johnson would follow existing norms of American government. Even during Watergate, although there were fears Nixon would not go quietly into his helicopter (as he finally did), he deferred to American institutions such as the Congress, the courts and even to the will of his party leaders in Congress.

All such bets are off with these folks. The Bush administration seems to be testing government’s limits, virtually defying Congress to do anything about it and — seemingly lurking in the background — perhaps counting on the fact if these matters do go all the way up to the Supreme Court they’ll win since they now have more sympathetic people in place. The net result will be an altered form of American government.

Noonan notes one thing that is troubling her: the President is supremely confident, no matter what the crisis or challenge. She writes:

Is it defiance? Denial? Is it that he’s right and you’re wrong, which is your problem? Is he faking a certain steely good cheer to show his foes from Washington to Baghdad that the American president is neither beaten nor bowed? Fair enough: Presidents can’t sit around and moan. But it doesn’t look like an act. People would feel better to know his lack of success sometimes gets to him. It gets to them.

Or could it be that in the end he can do what he wants to do because he and his team of lawyers have concluded that they can take everything to the mat but Congress, any judges who disagree with him, the press and disgruntled Americans won’t have the stomach to go to the mat as Bush injects ultra-partisanship into American institutions and checks and balances the same way he and Karl Rove injected it into elections?

It now seems evident that on Iraq policy, documents sought by Congress and a host of other matters, the administration feels the executive branch can do what it wants…and get away with it,,,,because the political and institutional and political opposition will blink in the end.

Noonan’s piece is also notable because she also chronicles Bush’s rhetorical technique of framing issues in a way so that he is the only noble and virtuous one and anyone who opposes him either has bad motives or is dumb:

In arguing for the right path as he sees it, the president more and more claims for himself virtues that the other side, by inference, lacks. He is “idealistic”; those who oppose him are, apparently, lacking in ideals. He makes his decisions “based on principle,” unlike his critics, who are ever watchful of the polls. He is steadfast, brave, he believes “freedom isn’t just for Americans” but has “universal . . . applications,” unlike those selfish, isolationist types who oppose him.

This is ungracious as a rhetorical approach, but not unprecedented. There’s something in the White House water system. Presidents all wind up being gallant in their own eyes. Thursday I was reminded of President Nixon, who often noted he was resisting those who were always advising him to “take the easy way.” Bill Safire used to joke that when he was a Nixon speechwriter, part of his job was to walk by the Oval Office and yell in, “Mr. President, take the easy way!”

There’s more, so read it all.

CAUTION: Opinion pieces such as Noonan’s (and this) are snapshots. Presumably, something can happen tomorrow that will cause the Democrats to overreach, or Bush will respond to it and many Republicans will yell “Bravo!”

But that won’t change the general job performance.

Or the fact that this White House and this President seemingly feel they can pick and choose laws to obey, ignore centuries of protocol about the way the executive branch responds and respects Congress, and in effect reshape the way the American system of government checks and balances operates — and that no one or either party will really go to the mat on it.

Perhaps that’s the reason for his smile.