Journalism

Afghanistan, Journalism

Newspapers to Dodos

Posted on by christian

Oregonian23June1942

On Tuesday morning June, 23 1942 the Portland Oregonian newspaper reported on the details of a Japanese naval attack on the United States mainland. The first such attack on the continental U.S.

Late in the evening of June 21 – roughly 24 hours before the Oregonian published details of the incident – the Japanese submarine I-25 surfaced in the midst of a group of fishing trawlers near the mouth of the Columbia River offshore of Astoria. The sub’s captain unlimbered his deck gun and reportedly lobbed a handful of shells – the paper reported 9, other accounts say 17 – toward the shore and a coastal battery at nearby Fort Stevens. The submariners weren’t aiming at anything in particular, just attempting to create a little chaos. One shell reportedly destroyed a strategic target – a backstop at a local baseball diamond. While no one was injured the shelling indicated that World War II had come calling to the Pacific Northwest. It was big news and the diligent Oregonian played the story big on Page One with an Astoria dateline.

Had the new distribution schedule for Portland’s venerable daily paper been in effect back in 1942 the newsprint version of that Japanese attack story wouldn’t have been on front steps in Portland until Wednesday morning – 48 hours after the fact. As part of a comprehensive move away from print and to digital, the Oregonian, published in Portland as a daily since the Civil War, will soon offer home delivery only on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. The paper will print every day – so it’s said – just not make home deliver available every day.

The paper also announced additional staff reductions on Friday, including apparently a sportswriter who was summoned home from covering the College World Series in Omaha where the Oregon State Beavers were competing. Reporter John Hunt tweeted “laid off and leaving Omaha.” Well, at least the baseball reporting Hunt knows what it’s like for a ballplayer to get an unconditional release.

The current owners of the Oregonian have adopted similar strategies for papers in New Orleans and Cleveland, so for anyone reading the ink blotches the further reductions in journalistic talent and the continual shrinking of news content shouldn’t have really been a huge surprise. I have no doubt that the economics of journalism have turned brutal and that new approaches are required. Newspaper circulation continues to decline – the Oregonian’s off about one-third in the last ten years – and ad revenue continues to hemorrhage. A newspaper lover is left to conclude that, like Detroit automakers of the past or health insurance company executives of the present, most of the folks running newspapers are decidedly ill-equipped to re-invent their products. Getting better almost never means getting smaller and harder to find.

Still, when a old, respected institution takes a turn for the worse it’s a sad day and, more importantly, cause for larger reflection on what it means to our culture.

When I first moved to Idaho in 1975 (I know, ancient history) you could buy the Oregonian in street boxes or at Hannifin’s Cigar Store downtown. I often bought the daily and Sunday editions to follow the paper’s generally solid coverage of regional issues and politics. Being able to by a neighboring state’s big city daily ceased a long time ago and the paper’s latest retrenchment means you soon won’t be able to get a copy at home every day. This is progress?

Oregonian’s announcement, complete with the kind of “this is good news, really” spin that most ink stained wretches disdain, is just the latest sad chapter in the slow, steady and apparently unstoppable demise of the great American newspaper. The march to the Internet with all its related impact on sense of community, real and serious journalism, politics and advertising (just to name a few) does appear inevitable, but just for a moment I’m going to bemoan the cost to a society that seems ever more fragmented with more and more of our citizens more than ever disconnected from one another.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow worries – I do, too – that “America is quickly dividing itself into two separate nations, regional enclaves of rigid politics, as the idea of common national priorities fades further into a distant past.” But how can we possibly have a common, shared idea of national priorities (or even citywide or regional priorities) when one of the great levelers of our society – carefully collected, written and edited information on our culture and politics, in other words serious journalism – is going the way of the dodo? In the new digital world who will cover City Hall and who will care about the school board? Who will help us determine our priorities or at least suggest that we should have some?

I’m not so nostalgic for the “good old days” of newspapers to believe that community or regional papers have ever been remotely close to perfect. They haven’t. Like all of us newspaper publishers, editors, columnists and reporters can be shortsighted, ill-informed, petty and even biased. I know because I was one and have known plenty of others. Franklin Roosevelt spent a good part of his presidency worrying about what arrogant publishers like William Randolph Hearst would write about him and well he should have. That’s called a democracy.

Still, as an old journalism prof once told us, in most American communities only a handful of people get up and go to work every day thinking about what information the citizens of their community need to know and have the skills and wherewithal to go collect and distribute that information. Some towns, fewer and fewer sadly, are lucky enough to have a publisher or owner who is willing to go out on a limb and set an agenda for change and progress in that town. Newspapers can, at their best, do more than entertain or inform. They can lead and force political and business interests to confront what is needed or needs to change. If not a perfect calling journalism is, and newspapers in particular are, can be a noble calling.

In a reality stinking of newsprint and irony the Mayor of Portland, Charlie Hales, has been a daily punching bag for the Oregonian recently over a series of controversies as City Hall that the paper has highlighted in considerable detail. Friday in the print issue of the paper Hales lamented the news of more layoffs and less visibility for the very institution that has been jabbing him. Then he contributed fifty bucks from his own pocket to the bar tab for Oregonian staffers drowning in the swamp of an industry that is attempting to recreate itself by generally becoming less-and-less vital to the community it seeks to serve.

I’m charging up the iPhone and downloading another less-than-adequate news website app. Such is the way of the world. But as another newspaper starts to slip from print and relevance to digital and something else, I may be the last guy clinging to newsprint. It’s true, as some analogize for newspapers, that we don’t need buggy whips or vacuum tubes any longer, but neither of those obsolete features of a bygone era helped to define community, touch a soul or cover a ballgame. Somethings old are still just better. Life will undoubtedly go on without the kind of journalism and sense of community that the Oregonian, the Plain Dealer, the Times-Picayune, the Seattle P-I, the Rocky Mountain News and a hundred other papers once provided, but will life in those communities be as good?

Put me down as highly skeptical as to whether such transitions are good for the future of the Republic. Ol’ Tom Jefferson both used and despised the press, but that indispensable founder also knew the essential role of the press was fundamental to the success of our noisy, often divisive democracy. “The press [is] the only tocsin of a nation. [When it] is completely silenced… all means of a general effort [are] taken away.”

Let’s hope that the continued migration of a once great industry to the uncertainty of the digital space, with almost certainly fewer reporters, fewer resources and a narrower focus, can make websites of papers like the Oregonian the “tocsin” of a 21st Century America. I’m not so sure. In fact, I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to happen.

 

Afghanistan, Baseball, Journalism, Politics

Dishing it Out

Posted on by christian

An old journalist friend of mine is fond of saying that “the press can dish it out, but we don’t have to take it.” I thought of that great one liner as what might have been – should have been – a serious discussion of federal budget policy over the last week turned into a junior high school style story about Bob Woodward, the ultimate Washington insider, being “threatened” by a mild-mannered White House economic adviser.

By now, unless you don’t follow what passes for serious news these days, you know that Woodward, the more famous half of Woodward and Bernstein of Watergate fame, has been all over the tube expressing dismay at White House staffer Gene Sperling for suggesting that the famous reporter might “regret” pushing his version of a story on the origins of the dubious sequester idea.

As a one-time reporter who was “threatened” over the years by tougher guys than Gene Sperling, I offer a couple of observations on the Washington culture of political reporting, at least as practiced by Woodward.

First, it’s impossible to believe that Bob Woodward hasn’t been roughed up in private before by a White House official who took umbrage at something he was about to write or had written. This is the guy after all who helped unravel the Watergate affair during the Nixon Administration; a White House staffed by a bunch of guys who maintained an “enemies list” that included at least two serious and often critical reporters – Daniel Schorr and Mary McGrory – not to mention Paul Newman and the president of the National Education Association. If Woodward can be “threatened” by an email from a presidential economic adviser – an email where Sperling apologized for losing his temper in an earlier phone call –  he either has been living a charmed existence as the only reporter on the planet never cussed out by a source or he truly has a journalist glass jaw that can’t absorb even the lightest tap. I suspect his motives for making a big issue of this little matter are more complex.

Second, this entire tempest in a thimble casts truly unfavorable light on what many serious people have know for a long time to be Woodward’s dubious methods to gain and hold access to the powerful in Washington, D.C. and, of course, those who hope to be powerful. The dirty little secret of politics and journalism is that reporters and political people engage daily in a carefully choreographed kabuki dance that involves the constant trading of little favors – information, access, quiet confirmation, invitations, tips – that ultimately works to the benefit of those doing the reporting and those in constant need of exposure. Woodward has developed this dance into a lucrative publishing and speaking career that mostly involves repeating the completely predictable wisdom of those willing to provide him access for what he then usually reports as the exclusive inside story of big decisions.

Writing in The New Yorker John Cassidy nailed it when he said Woodward’s real beat has become the Washington establishment; the Georgetown, Wolf Trap, Charlie Palmer Steak, K-Street crowd that lives and breathes the kind of gossip the Washington Post Style section exists to deliver.

“The real rap on Woodward isn’t that he makes things up,” Cassidy writes (and Woodward has been accused of that). “It’s that he takes what powerful people tell him at face value; that his accounts are shaped by who cooperates with him and who doesn’t; and that they lack context, critical awareness, and, ultimately, historic meaning.”

Or as Joan Didion wrote in a critical assessment of Woodward’s work in 1996 his books involve “a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured.” The reality Didion describes is at the core of much of the alternative reality, fact-free debate that permeates American politics today. Woodward’s books top the best seller list – therefore, the logic goes, they are important – but when the real history of the Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama Administrations is written the Woodward tomes, free of footnotes, devoid of real analysis and based mostly on comments from unnamed sources, won’t be cited for the simple reason they can’t be trusted. After all Woodward hasn’t really been writing a first draft of history, but a thinly sourced account of people in power who provide access that they hope will, in the short term at least, cast them in the best possible light. What Woodward does is really not journalism, but more like the first draft of self-serving conventional wisdom from the people in the Washington establishment who will talk with him.

No one can take away from Bob Woodward’s (and Carl Bernstein’s) legacy as the shoe leather reporters who uncovered one of the great scandals in American political history and brought down a president. But the young Bob Woodward, who did old fashioned, grind it out police reporting to illuminate Watergate, has become at age 70 as much a fixture of the Washington establishment as the Round Robin Bar in the Willard Hotel. His professional oxygen, just as with the people who cultivate his approving coverage, is publicity and acceptance. Without it he’s just another D.C. reporter in a wrinkled trench coat and not a real player, and to be somebody in D.C. you simply must be a player. Woodward has chosen to chronicle the conventional and the predictable and that will eventually be the way he is remembered – as the court reporter of the Washington establishment.

You could take Bob Woodward more seriously if he both dished it out and took it. Go back, if you can stand it, and read his account of George W. Bush’s decisions to go into Iraq and the subsequent make-up books critical of Bush. The latest Woodward non-scandal, after all those breathless books, is proof that he  doesn’t really either dish it out or take it very well. How Washington of him.

 

Cenarrusa, Idaho, Journalism, Medicaid

Sorry, Wrong Number…Many, Many Times

Posted on by christian

My Dad used to smile when telling his story about the young fellow who had just seen the classic 1962 World War II movie – The Longest Day – about the D-Day invasion of France in 1944 and was, in turn, telling his own father about the film.

The old man listens patiently and then off-handedly tells his son, “I haven’t seen the movie, but I was there for the play.”

In the same spirit as that old story, I have not seen the 1948 Barbara Stanwyck/Burt Lancaster movie – Sorry, Wrong Number – but I have definitely been living the play. My play is called: Trying to Reach Health and Welfare? Sorry, Wrong Number.

There is nothing special or particularly unique about my telephone number except that the first seven digits of my number match the first seven digits of a toll-free, helpline number – Medicaid Automated Customer Service – managed by the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare. I know this rather obscure fact because I have been averaging two or three “Health and Welfare calls” every weekday for the last two years or so. I long ago lost track of the number of calls, but it beyond hundreds and into the thousands. Thankfully, callers with questions about their Medicaid benefits must assume no state employee works on the weekend, so my phone tends to get the weekend off, as well.

Months ago I thought I had identified the answer to all these wayward calls, but alas it was a fix without a cure. On the state government website that promotes the toll-free number the “1” before the toll-free number had been, inexplicably, left off the rest of the number. So an unsuspecting caller, say from Weiser or Bonners Ferry – I’ve had calls from every corner of the big state of Idaho – would just dial the number shown (minus the “1”) and get me. I called a helpful state agent and asked if maybe, just maybe they could add the “1” and solve the problem of the call from Mrs. Jones from Caldwell, she needs to talk about her niece’s Medicaid needs, ending up on my voice mail. Problem solved, right? Not so fast. The wrong numbers declined a bit, but did not end. I have to assume regular callers to the toll-free number have made a note of the non-“1” toll-free number and were still calling, blissfully unaware that some public affairs consultant and part-time blogger was fielding their calls. The voice mail messages on my phone seemed to continue unabated.

So, believing that information is power, I changed the greeting on my phone. No longer was it, “You have reached me and I can’t take your call right now…” My message became much more Medicaid-centric: “If you are trying to reach the Department of Health and Welfare, you haven’t…hang up and dial a “1” before you call this number.” That’ll fix it, I happily proclaimed, as I began answering questions from people who were really trying to reach me and wondering why I had a Health and Welfare related message on my phone. You can inform some of the people some of the time, but…the calls continue.

I have genuine sympathy for my callers. They need answers to real questions. Judging by some of the hundreds of messages that have been left on my voice mail, many of the callers are confused and uncertain about benefits and responsibilities. If you have ever tried dialing into a government agency you know what an intimidating experience it can be. Imagine getting the wrong number and ending up in some civilian’s voice mail, while you worry and wait for a call back. It would be easy to conclude that government just doesn’t work.

My standard procedure now is to try and intercept as many of these calls as I can and re-direct them to a number that begins with that essential “1,” but it is not always possible. And, while I admit that I’ve been annoyed and frustrated by the calls that I get, wasted effort that doesn’t do the callers any good, the “sorry, wrong number” play I’ve been living has given me an entirely new appreciation of what one little glitch in a vast government program can do to create problems and frustrate users.

As Idaho contemplates a major expansion of Medicaid services under the Affordable Care Act – one estimate holds that 100,000 more Idahoans could be covered – and the state’s for profit Medicaid contractor continues to try to make the system work, here’s hoping, and not just for my sake, that they attend to all the details, small and large, involved in an expansion.

And, just for the record, I have equal amounts of sympathy for the state workers who, without much fanfare or appreciation, labor to make an essential program of our society work for people who really need the help. This is a vastly complicated government program, wrapped in layers of regulation and requiring immense levels of accountability. One little digit – that pesky “1” – can frustrate even the most essential government program.

And, yes, I could get a new phone number, but have ruled that out. If Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster can handle a wayward call, so can I. But, for future reference, do remember that “1” in front of a toll-free number. Given the vast proliferation of telephones these days, it is a given that someone has the number that is toll-free with a “1” and just some schmuck’s voice mail without.

 

 

Afghanistan, Air Travel, Books, Journalism

The Anchorman

Posted on by christian

The Most Trusted Man in America

This may be the most famous photo of the many famous photos of the famous CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite. The grainy, black and white image was taken while Cronkite, in shirt sleeves, announced the awful news that John Fitzgerald Kennedy had been shot and killed in Dallas.

In a remarkable piece of 1963-vintage television reporting, Cronkite sits calmly in the middle of what had to have been massive confusion in the CBS newsroom, fielding notes handed to him and seamlessly handing off the airwaves to a local reporter in Dallas. He makes it look easier than it was in 1963. We take that electronic news sleight of hand for granted today. It wasn’t normal back in the black and white days of television.

Two things about Cronkite’s reporting and demeanor strike me after all these years and after having seen the video many times. First, was his unwillingness to rush to the judgment that JFK had actually died. A local reporter in Dallas says that the president has apparently died and then Cronkite is handed a note saying that Dan Rather, who ironically would no so successfully replace Cronkite at the CBS anchor desk in 1981, was reporting the same thing.

Still, the veteran wire service reporter won’t flatly speak the dreaded news. Finally, when the wire services confirm Kennedy’s death, Cronkite, with a slight quiver in his voice, says its true – the President of the United States has been assassinated. And that is the second remarkable thing about the video. Cronkite shows the emotion that I can remember and most American’s felt upon hearing the news of Kennedy’s death – disbelief, horror, sadness, even fright. All of that was captured in a few seconds of television’s first draft of history.

In his masterful new biography of Cronkite historian Douglas Brinkley devotes an entire chapter, 20 pages, to Cronkite’s and CBS’s handling of the Kennedy murder. I read the passage, still gripped by the intensity of the moment all these years later, just a day after CNN and Fox News, among others, blew the initial coverage of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on Obamacare. What a contrast. And, while the two events – a president assassinated and a controversial court ruling – are hardly comparable, Cronkite’s careful, humble, measured response in handling a huge story is a startling contrast to a flustered, unprepared Wolf Blitzer mishandling a big story.

The Brinkley book, more than anything I have read recently about the state of journalism, particularly television journalism, makes the case that Cronkite-era standards have gone missing on much of the nation’s airwaves. The three network evening news programs, while drawing a sliver of the audience that Cronkite and his contemporaries once commanded, still offer a version of the old network quality and seriousness, but the vast wasteland of cable news is completely foreign to the news product CBS once put on the air night after night.

Cronkite, we learn from Brinkley’s exhaustive research, was far from a saint. He was extraordinarily competitive, could cut his colleagues off at the knees, loved bawdy jokes and arguably became too much the cheerleader for the space program and NASA. And, later in life, Cronkite simply quit trying to mask his liberal political opinions giving his detractors reason to question whether he had always played the news straight down the middle.

 Still, the Cronkite that emerges at Brinkley’s hands is a pro, a well-read, well-sourced reporter who wanted to be first, but more importantly wanted to be right. Cronkite also had a nuanced understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of television news. He knew he couldn’t match the Washington Post’s Watergate coverage and didn’t try, but still based almost an entire CBS Evening New broadcast on the print reporting Woodward and Bernstein had done. Cronkite’s coverage of the Nixon resignation in 1974 is still riveting television.

At the same time, Uncle Walter knew that taking a reporter and camera along as U.S. GI’s hunted the Viet Cong in the rice paddies of South Vietnam was exactly the story that television could report with brutal and uncomfortable honesty. CBS with Cronkite as the Managing Editor, a newspaper term and role at he completely embraced, helped make Vietnam the living room war. Cronkite’s 1968 special on Vietnam – he declared the war at a stalemate – was a decisive political and media moment in that awful period of our history.

For most Americans younger than 40 Walter Cronkite and his brand of television news are ancient history, no more relevant to modern America than Alexander Hamilton or Thomas Edison. But Cronkite, who died in 2009, is relevant precisely because there is no one like him now.

No one, really, picked up the Cronkite mantle when he left the anchor desk, prematurely he would conclude, in 1981. Cronkite came, it is now clear, from the greatest generation of television news, as did Huntley and Brinkley, Howard K. Smith and Harry Reasoner, and many others from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. But there was only one Cronkite and now we have a book that remembers his story and his greatness, warts an all, even as some of us search for a place to turn in the vast television wasteland that measures up, even a little, to his standards.

“He seemed to me incorruptible,” said director Sidney Lumet, “in a profession that was easily corruptible.”

Cronkite would joke when someone referred to him as the “most trusted man in America,” that it was clear “they hadn’t checked with my wife.” But that title fit then and it seems all the more special – and retired – today.

 

Afghanistan, Journalism

Long Reads

Posted on by christian

Good Reads in the Long Form

I’m old enough to remember when the mailman brought LIFE magazine to our house. It was a big event every week. The magazine was a coffee table size, for one thing, and almost always featured an interesting, even arresting, cover photo or illustration. I’ve been a sucker for magazines ever since.

TIME is on our coffee table along with The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker and a new favorite The Week. I’ve lately become a fan of The London Review of Books. It’s fun and interesting to read a British take on U.S. literature and to read about many books – and subjects – that you may never find in a local bookstore. I’ve been a subscriber at various times to Harper’s, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, National Geographic and long ago to Boys’ Life. I like magazines.

I particularly like the long form stories that are a New Yorker speciality and I made a happy discovery recently that a great website – Longreads– regularly compiles the longreads from many different sources.

The Longread site has links to articles on everything from comedy to Russia, from San Francisco to Science and links to the articles that are finalists for the National Magazine Awards.

If you like magazines, this site is almost like visiting an old fashioned newsstand and browsing the titles. Good stuff.

 

Afghanistan, Journalism

Ten I’d Like to See

Posted on by christian

Editor for a Day

I’m a news junkie. I consume newspapers, radio, television, the Internet, blogs and more like some folks consume cans of Coke or bags of salted peanuts. I’m addicted to news.

My much better half once clipped a Charles Schultz “Peanuts” cartoon from the Sunday paper and had it framed for me. In the cartoon Snoopy is seen with a significant number of papers under his arm (leg?) and Charlie Brown remarks that he’s always buying all the out of town papers. That’s me.

So, as a year-end wish, I’d like to put on my green eye shade for a moment, the kind an old-time editor might have worn, and suggest ten stories I’d like to see someone write.

1. Who has survived the housing bubble? I keep hearing stories about the massive inventory of built housing in Ada and Canyon Counties in Idaho, but I wonder how the developers, builders, architects, etc. manage to hang on? Is the housing situation improving? How much inventory is there? Who has weathered this awful story…and who hasn’t?

2. What’s happening to the Idaho timber industry? Twenty or more years ago every Idaho politician spoke of the staples of the Idaho economy as being timber, agriculture and mining. Political battles were fought over allowable harvest levels in Idaho’s national forests. Potlatch and Boise Cascade carried real economic and political clout. Additional formal wilderness designation was held hostage to the need for access to new raw materials. Agriculture is still big, mining – particularly gold exploration is booming – but what about the timber industry? The industry’s once-powerful trade group disbanded last year. What has happened to jobs, companies and how big (or small) is the once mighty industry?

3. Speaking of wilderness, that is where the Idaho Democratic Party has wandered for the last 15 years. With the exception of a one-term congressman and a superintendent of public instruction, the party that once held the governorship for 24 straight years seems a political afterthought. Does any Democratic leader have a plan to help the party return to relevance? Who might be a serious candidate for a serious office in 2014? Or, has Idaho become what Alabama was in the 1930’s – a one-party state for as far as the mind can see?

4. Speaking of politics, I’d be curious – and other Idaho news consumers would be, as well, I think – as to what the state’s all-GOP congressional delegation thinks of the current state of presidential politics. Several of the state’s Republican leaders have endorsed Mitt Romney, but I don’t see anything about what they make of the current campaign. I know these guys, serious politicians all, are following the debates and watching the polls. I’d like to know what they think about the campaign.

5. Idaho undertook massive changes in public education over the last two years, including for the first time actual year over year reductions in spending. School districts have downsized staff, changed schedules and eliminated programs. Who has been hurt? How many teachers have left the state and why?

6. Another education money story I’d like to see fleshed out is what the impact of legislative action on public school spending has been for local property taxpayers. There have been levy elections designed to raise money from property taxpayers to replace money – sales and income tax dollars – that has shrunk at the state level. The Boise district will ask voters to approve a levy in March. Some numbers reporting on what has happened could be enlightening.

7. One of the expected big battles of the 2012 Idaho legislature will center on whether the state will create a state-based health insurance exchange” as required by the unpopular Affordable Care Act– Obamacare in the parlance of those who most dislike the law. Idaho legislators voted against the exchange idea last year, but Gov. Butch Otter finally used an executive order to facilitate work on the exchange in the interim. Soon, the legislature will be asked to authorize the creation of an exchange and spend money on setting it up. Here’s a comparison I’d like to see: Utah, a state every bit as conservative as Idaho, already has an exchange in place. How did that happen? What is different in Utah as opposed to Idaho? Conservative Republicans run both states, but have come to apparently very different conclusions on this important issue. [Full disclosure: I serve on the board of a health insurance company that supports – as I do – creating a state-based exchange.]

8. The most vocal opposition to creating an Idaho exchange comes from the Idaho Freedom Foundation, a conservative, free-market think tank, and its director, a former reporter and GOP staffer, Wayne Hoffman. Hoffman is a very effective advocate. Many legislators listen when he speaks. Good for him. What lawmakers, the public and the media don’t know is who bankrolls his efforts. It continues to be a valid question and a potentially important story with impacts for Idaho’s public policy and politics.

9. Washington State voters recently voted – with healthy encouragement from Costco, the big retailer – to get the state out of the liquor business. States where liquor is controlled, purchased by the state and sold in state-owned and operated liquor stores, is a relic of the country’s post-Prohibition days in the 1930’s. Given Idaho’s historic inclination, when given a choice, to favor the private sector over the public, just how does the state maintaining a liquor monopoly fit? It is often argued that the status quo helps discourage consumption. But is that true? Would a change cost the state money or make it money? An enterprising reporter ought to be able to figure that out? Right next door Washington will be testing many of the assumptions long-held in Idaho.

10. And…I’m curious about the impact on the state’s unemployment rate over the last 18 months or so of the downsizing local and state governments have engaged in. Just how many positions have been eliminated in the tough budget environment? What has been the impact on both those people and public services? Maybe it’s good, maybe not. It’s an important story that hasn’t been much reported.

There you have it…ten stories I’d love to read in 2012.

 

Afghanistan, Grant, Idaho Media, Journalism

Old School

Posted on by christian

Pat Murphy, 1929 – 2011

I didn’t know Pat Murphy well. I wish I had known him better. What I did know and observe firsthand about the former Arizona Republic editorial page editor, columnist and publisher I liked – a lot.

Murphy died last week in Idaho where he had retired – but where he kept on writing and reporting – after his long career in Arizona.

Pat Murphy was, in a day of Twitter, silly cable news and more and more vacuous news coverage, old school. He was a newsman and nothing sexist is meant by that term. Writing in the Republic last week, columnist E.J. Montini, recalled Murphy’s tenure as publisher and the fact that he had replaced a man who was forced to resign the job because it was discovered that he had fabricated a military record that did not exist.

“In a lot of ways,” Montini wrote, “Murphy did for The Republic and Gazette what Gerald Ford did for the White House. (He would hate this comparison.)

“Naming Murphy as publisher almost immediately restored order.

“The first time he appeared in the newsroom after being named to the top job, reporters and editors burst into applause.”

In an editorial, the Republic remembered Murphy as a “brassy, bold, uninhibited, occasionally cantankerous, fearless, opinionated, quick-writing newsman.” They got it just right, I think.

Murphy ran the Arizona daily when day after day the front page was dominated by news of the latest shenanigan pulled by a governor, Evan Mecham, who would eventually be impeached and removed from office. Murphy called the wacky Mecham “brutish” and an “ideological juggernaut.” When Pat resigned as publisher, Mecham called it “good news” and predicted that the paper’s reputation would improve. It seems too obvious to point out that Murphy’s reputation did just fine and Mecham’s name will forever be linked to impeachment.

In one of his last columns for the Mountain Express in Ketchum, Murphy lamented the apparently growing trend of adult violence directed toward children and he offered a sane and sober explanation for why it’s happening: poor parenting.

“Children who grow up in an atmosphere where parental authority is firm and respected,” Pat wrote, “where ethics of truth, honesty and regard for others are emphasized, where spiritual or religious values are important, where learning and education are essential and a work ethic is obvious generally mature into adults who’re social assets.

“Children lacking that nurturing are empty of basic qualities required of a civilized human.”

Murphy was a journalist, a veteran, an opinionated and passionate man; a fellow willing, as the old phrase goes, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. He was old school and first class.

Afghanistan, Grant, Idaho Media, Idaho Politics, Journalism, Public Lands

J. Robb Brady

Posted on by christian

A Rare Breed

Loyal readers at this spot know that I occasionally rage against the dying of the light of local journalism. The days of independent, community-minded and engaged newspapers, television and radio stations does seem to me more and more imperiled, which makes the passing of J. Robb Brady, the long-time publisher and editorialist of the Idaho Falls Post Register, a singularly sad milestone.

Brady was a young 92 when he died Sunday in Idaho Falls. His wife Rose – they were married for 69 years – died earlier this year.

Robb Brady was, as the younger set might say, “old school.” His office looked like it could have been at home on the set of the old television show “Lou Grant.” Robb truly had printer’s ink in his veins and it was obvious he took great pride and satisfaction in running a family-owned newspaper.

Robb Brady was also a conservationist, occasionally at the expense of his objectivity, but had I the chance, as he did, to buy ink by the barrel, I would want to have the same kind of opinionated, passionate editorial page he presided over at the Post Register. I remember taking a client in some years back to “background” Robb and others at the paper on a new mining venture in Lemhi County. I warned the client that it would be a tough session full of pointed questions. Robb, as far as I know, never met a mine he liked and the editorial board meeting was tough and pointed, but never lacking in civility.

Brady simply wanted folks to justify their plans and most of all answer how they would take care of the Idaho environment he came to champion. The answers he got were seldom good enough, but his judgments were rarely nasty, rather more concerned and dubious. In other words, his was the newspapering mind of a skeptic, not a cynic.

He wasn’t a booster – OK, well maybe a little bit of a hometown booster of the Department of Energy. All politics is local after all. Not many mines in Bonneville County, Idaho, but thousands of jobs at the Idaho National Laboratory.

For example, in a 2006 editorial Brady lamented the power of oil and gas companies to dominate the Bush Administration’s public lands leasing policies and suggested that global warming had an answer – develop a newer, safer generation of nuclear reactors rather than exploit more dirty carbon-based energy. At least Brady, unlike too many who possess a strong conservation ethic, had a real alternative to more oil and gas exploration – invest in nuclear power.

The tributes to Robb Brady will flow in now from those who will remember his spirited, passionate editorials about the Boulder-White Cloud Mountains, about his championing of protection for the magnificent Sawtooth Range and the River of No Return Wilderness. But some of the best and most important memories will come from the generations of ink-stained wretches he touched and trained.

Marty Trillhaase, now the editorial page editor of another family-owned newspaper in Lewiston, once worked with Brady in Idaho Falls, as did the Idaho Statesman’s Kevin Richert and Rocky Barker. Calling Brady kind, generous, opinionated and courageous, Trillhaase concluded his editorial today with the all-too-true observation: we’ll not see his like again.

 

Afghanistan, Britain, Journalism, New York

A Job for DCI Tennison

Posted on by christian

Tabloid Scandal Gets Closer to the Top

I’m thinking as I read about each new revelation in the widening Rupert Murdoch/tabloid/police/political scandal in Britain that we really need Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison to unravel this mess.

Think of the Helen Mirren character from the long-running PBS series, Prime Suspect, putting the screws to Murdoch’s henchmen. Mirren’s character was herself deeply flawed; a failure at love, she drank way too much and smoked like a campfire, but at her core she was an honest cop determined to see the right thing done. This British scandal needs a Jane Tennison.

Already the Murdoch mess has claimed his lucrative tabloid, The New of the World, that paper’s top editor, Rebecca Brooks, who was arrested over the weekend, the publisher of the Wall Street Journal, the top two cops at Scotland Yard and other assorted bit players in Murdoch’s world and that of Prime Minister David Cameron. The scandal is getting dangerously close to the top. Murdoch hardly has anyone else to fire. Well, his son, perhaps, or himself.

Count on this story continuing to unfold for a long time to come. As Carl Bernstein, who should know, suggested in a Newsweek piece, all of this could become Britain’s Watergate.

Bernstein quoted one observer as saying of Murdoch and his leadership in the steady dumbing down of what passes for journalism in his empire on both sides of the Atlantic, “In the end, what you sow is what you reap. Now Murdoch is a victim of the culture that he created. It is a logical conclusion, and it is his people at the top who encouraged lawbreaking and hacking phones and condoned it.”

As to the Watergate analogy, Bernstein says: “The circumstances of the alleged lawbreaking within News Corp. suggest more than a passing resemblance to Richard Nixon presiding over a criminal conspiracy in which he insulated himself from specific knowledge of numerous individual criminal acts while being himself responsible for and authorizing general policies that routinely resulted in lawbreaking and unconstitutional conduct. Not to mention his role in the cover-up.”

It’s always the cover-up.

Murdoch’s jettisoning of the last two people to preside over the newspaper that hacked the mobile phones of some 4,000 people and potentially blackmailed and bribed police to cover it up can be seen one of two ways. The media mogul is finally taking charge or, Nixon like, Murdoch has fired his Haldeman and Erlichman in an effort to keep his distance from the details of the scandal.

This much is true: Rupert Murdoch didn’t amass a vast, global communications empire by not paying attention to the details – and the troubles – that perplex any CEO and his organization. He’s played his game ruthlessly, with enormous political and economic resources at his disposal and now the fruits of that approach are becoming all-to-evident.

Soon British Members of Parliament will be asking, as the great Sen. Howard Baker once did of Watergate witnesses, “what did Rupert know and when did he know it?’ The prime minister will be answering the same question.

Someday, down the road, the BBC will make a drama series out of all of this that will be a big hit on both sides of the pond. It will literally be “ripped from the headlines” and too fantastic to be believed, but it will be true. I hope they find a role for DCI Tennison.

 

Afghanistan, Basques, Journalism, Media

All the News

Posted on by christian

From Ridiculous to Scandalous

You could not look at a website or pick up a paper over the weekend without seeing the nearly minute-by-minute coverage of the latest Rupert Murdoch outrage. Murdoch’s scandal peddling News of the World printed its final edition on Sunday. (Final that is until Murdoch can buy enough time to resurrect the sleazy tabloid under another banner.)

For once it seems the great Australian press baron has got his comeuppance. Don’t bet on it. This guy has more lives than Donald Trump and a lot more money. Reportedly he left the super-secret Allen Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho to tend to the mess in London. Hanging in the balance is Murdoch’s effort to further expand his empire by fully taking over British Sky Broadcasting, a major television network.

It would have been great to be in London on Sunday. I would have bought every paper in sight – at least those not controlled by Murdoch – to see how they covered the demise of the NTW and the still unfolding scandal of how Murdoch family members and assorted retainers presided over a newspaper that hacked into apparently thousands of mobile voice mails in pursuit of the “scoops” that made the now defunct NTW both profitable and the very definition of yellow journalism. Those hacked include murder and crime victims and military personnel. Find Murdoch’s photo next to sleazy in the dictionary.

I do love the headline in the Telegraph: Goodbye, Cruel World. That about says it.

The increasingly Tony Blair-like Prime Minister David Cameron underscores how deeply Murdoch has his claws into politicians on both sides of the pond. Apparently even Margaret Thatcher had a thing for Murdoch. Cameron, however, takes the prize for admitting the obvious. The PM had the gall to stand on the floor of the House of Commons and condemn his party and all the others for growing “too close” to the powerful press tycoon. Cameron was so close he hired the former News of the World editor to be his chief mouthpiece. That guy is now in jail. Even the Church of England owns shares in Murdoch’s enterprise.

So, if you’re keeping score at home, make that Murdoch owning (or renting) two of the three major political parties in Britain (his switch last election to the Tories was likely decisive for Cameron), a piece of the Church and even the Royals. Murdoch’s official biographer is doing the same air brush job for the Queen Mum. In the U.S., so far, Murdoch only dominates one national political party, but recall that he did make nice with Hillary Clinton when most everyone thought she might be the Democratic candidate for president. Murdoch is an equal opportunity co-opter.

There are predictions in Britain that the phone hacking scandal will finally rattle the all-too-cozy relationship among newspapers, broadcasters and politicians. If that happens, so much the better for the future of a truly great country. Either way it ought to be a cautionary tale for those of us in “the colonies” who like our news with a semblance of fairness, if not objectivity.

If the British papers will just print the truth about the News Corporation and it’s powerful, scandal and money soaked boss that should be more than enough to take care of King Rupert. But, then again, I never thought he could pull off buying – and remaking – The Wall Street Journal or get away with having half the Republican presidential candidate field on his payroll at Fox News. Nothing Murdoch does should surprise.

A book to put it all in context is Evelyn Waugh’s very funny novel Scoop written in 1938. The New York Times’ Nick Kristof suggests it for a good summer read and I agree. Waugh’s tale – farce is one word for it – focuses on the world of London tabloids trying to outdo each other covering an obscure war in an even more obscure African country.

One of the characters in Waugh’s book says: “I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.”

You’ll read Scoop and laugh and then think maybe Rupert Murdoch read this, too.