Brad Warthen's Blog

Congressman says he whacked the Denver paper

Boy, and they say the MSM can be guilty of hubris...

Some congressman out in Colorado who is apparently overimpressed with himself because he travels the Information Superhighway (golly, how futuristic!), is quoted as saying:

Who killed the Rocky Mountain News? We're all part of it, for better or worse, and I argue it's mostly for the better...The media is dead and long live the new media."

Here's what's really ironic about this: After this was brought to my attention, I tried following various links to find any sort of authoritative, original source as to what he actually said, and within what context, and found myself bouncing around among a number of poorly designed, unattractive Web pages that didn't tell me much.

Romenesko pointed me to The Denver Post, which pointed me to an alleged "digital recording of the event" at something called coloradopulse.org, which may be the ugliest (and least helpful) Web page I've seen this year. So I struck out on my own, via Google, and found this Denver magazine site (I think), which pointed me to this item from something called "Denver Young Democrats Examiner," which read like someone's very run-of-the-mill blog post written "from the Netroots Nation speaker series at the DoubleTree Hotel in Westminster," which actually told me less than The Denver Post did.

The congressman's own Web site didn't enlighten me. Finally, I went back to Romenesko, which provided a link to where I could listen to the guy's comments, but when it told me it would take 9 minutes to download (it's still downloading as I speak), I lost interest. (By the way, I did run across an entire site devoted to the question, "Who killed the Rocky?" It's apparently done by one of the laid-off journalists, and displays far more Web savvy and accessibility than those other sites I was led to.)

Welcome to the brave new post-newspaper world, in which we all stagger around groping in the dark for information -- and then, when we find it, wondering whom to hold accountable for whether it's right or not. (The answer: Nobody, sucker.)

By the way, as a sort of postscript -- the Post says that on Monday, Rep. Polis was a little more "subdued" on the subject:

"It's not just 200 jobs that have been lost; it's also the silencing of a voice," he said. "The rise of new media and citizen journalism has hastened the demise of many newspapers, and we, unfortunately, all share in the blame.

Remembering 'Breaking the News'

Back in the first comment on this post, Lee mentioned James Fallows' excellent book, Breaking the News: The News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy -- which, as it happens, I actually reviewed for this newspaper when it came out.

Here's what I wrote, back in 1996:

THE STATE
MEDIA EXAMINES ITSELF<
Published on: 02/25/1996
Section: TEMPO
Edition: FINAL
Page: F6
Reviewed by Brad Warthen
Memo: Brad Warthen is an associate editor of The State's editorial page.


BREAKING THE NEWS: How the Media Undermine American Democracy

By James Fallows
Pantheon, 296 pages, $23

    So you think the news media are dragging the country down with their negativity and their failure to put things in perspective?
    So join the club. A lot of us on the inside of this alleged profession agree. James Fallows, Washington editor of The Atlantic Monthly, is one. Fallows' saving grace is that he's written this book explaining exactly what is wrong and why it matters.
    The problem has to do with perverse cognitive habits that journalists embrace as normal, but which cause them to portray public life in ways that make it hard for readers and viewers to engage it constructively.
    For instance: ``Step by step, mainstream journalism has fallen into the habit of portraying public life as a race to the bottom, in which one group of conniving, insincere politicians ceaselessly tries to outmaneuver another.'' Among journalists, casting a jaded eye upon anything a politician does is seen as being ``professional.'' We tend to think of it as healthy skepticism. But there is nothing healthy about it.
    In fact, ``By choosing to present public life as a contest among scheming political leaders, all of whom the public should view with suspicion, the news media helps bring about that very result.''
    That's exactly what has happened. As a groundbreaking poll discovered last year, the public is now far more cynical about politics and government than are journalists, who are more likely to believe that our political system is sound, and that citizens can make a difference. In other words, the people believe the system is just as bad as we've painted it, and we know better.
    There are excellent examples in this book illustrating the profound disconnect between journalists and sensible people.
    One of the best-documented is the journalists' penchant for reducing everything -- every issue, every speech, every policy initiative, every human gesture by a politician -- to what it means in terms of the next election. If a politician tries to do something about starving children, we immediately wonder aloud what this means in terms of the way he's trying to position himself in New Hampshire.
    If Fallows didn't do anything else in this book, I would praise him to the skies for drawing so clearly the connection between the way we cover politics and the way we cover sports -- which is to say, in virtually the same manner. Journalists tend to see everything as a contest, which one side must win and the other must lose. This, of course, leaves no room for the kind of consensus-building that solves problems in the real world.
    Politics and government matter, but modern journalism has done much to cause the public to despair of it ever meaning anything good.
    The sins that Fallows details in this book are examined in a manner that shows clearly ``how they affect the future prospects of every American by distorting the processes by which we choose our leaders and resolve our public problems.''
    Unlike most modern journalism, this book does not merely wallow in unrelieved despair. The author writes encouragingly of such things as the ``public journalism'' movement, through which a number of far-sighted, community-oriented journalists (you'll note that few of them are in Washington or New York) have started accepting responsibility for fixing the problem, starting with themselves.
    Fallows draws an interesting connection between the way the U.S. military examined and healed itself after Vietnam, and the way journalists can become their own best physicians. It won't be easy, but it can be done -- we just have to unlearn about half of the nonsense that got crammed into our heads in journalism school.
    Fallows has correctly diagnosed what's wrong with American journalism. If you want to know why you ought to be mad at the media, read this book. If everybody would read it (journalists should read it twice), we might find ourselves on the way to a cure.

The awful irony is that this was just when things were starting to get much worse, what with 24/7 shouting heads on cable TV and the blogosphere yet to come. The pointless, yammering, conflict for its own sake is SO much worse now -- and it's one of the things I struggle with constantly here on the blog, along with those of you who still hope for a civil town square in which to discuss issues -- that when I look back on when that review was written, it's almost like a lost age of innocence....

From Sanford's clip file

A colleague calls my attention to Frank Rich's column over the weekend, which starts in on our governor about halfway down:

    At least the G.O.P.’s newfound racial sensitivity saved it from choosing the white Southern governor often bracketed with Jindal as a rising “star,” Mark Sanford of South Carolina. That would have been an even bigger fiasco, for Sanford is from the same state as Ty’Sheoma Bethea, the junior high school student who sat in Michelle Obama’s box on Tuesday night and whose impassioned letter to Congress was quoted by the president.

    In her plea, the teenager begged for aid to her substandard rural school. Without basic tools, she poignantly wrote, she and her peers cannot “prove to the world” that they too might succeed at becoming “lawyers, doctors, congressmen like yourself and one day president.”

    Her school is in Dillon, where the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, grew up. The school’s auditorium, now condemned, was the site of Bernanke’s high school graduation. Dillon is now so destitute that Bernanke’s middle-class childhood home was just auctioned off in a foreclosure sale. Unemployment is at 14.2 percent.

    Governor Sanford’s response to such hardship — his state over all has the nation’s third-highest unemployment rate — was not merely a threat to turn down federal funds but a trip to Washington to actively lobby against the stimulus bill. He accused the three Republican senators who voted for it of sabotaging “the future of our civilization.” In his mind the future of civilization has little to do with the future of students like Ty’Sheoma Bethea.

    What such G.O.P. “stars” as Sanford and Jindal have in common, besides their callous neo-Hoover ideology, are their phony efforts to portray themselves as populist heroes. Their role model is W., that brush-clearing “rancher” by way of Andover, Yale and Harvard. Listening to Jindal talk Tuesday night about his immigrant father’s inability to pay for an obstetrician, you’d never guess that at the time his father was an engineer and his mother an L.S.U. doctoral candidate in nuclear physics. Sanford’s first political ad in 2002 told of how growing up on his “family’s farm” taught him “about hard work and responsibility.” That “farm,” the Charlotte Observer reported, was a historic plantation appraised at $1.5 million in the early 1980s. From that hardscrabble background, he struggled on to an internship at Goldman Sachs.

Of course, with enemies like Frank Rich, the governor's liable to get some sympathy from me. Never have liked that guy's work -- he has all of Paul Krugman's objectionable characteristics as a mindless hateful partisan, without the saving grace of being a Nobel winner in economics.

Anyway, I'm less impressed with that sort of mention than I am the kind that our governor gets in his favorite journalistic habitat, the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, where they continue to try to construct an alternative universe in which Mark Sanford, possibly the least accomplished governor in the nation, is an actual contender for President of the United States sometime this century. (I don't know about you, but I found "Serenity" way more believable -- I just can't see terraforming taking hold in this world the WSJ is trying to conjure into being. Do you think Sanford could get the Reaver vote?)

Which reminds me that I meant to pass on this piece by WSJ board member Kimberley A. Strassel about our gov, which ran 10 days ago:

    South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford is mooted as a GOP presidential contender. During the stimulus debate he told President Barack Obama, to his face, that the Palmetto State wanted no part of a spending blowout that would be harmful to the economy, to taxpayers, and to the dollar. He even traveled to Capitol Hill to stiffen Senate Republicans against the plan....
    The 48-year-old South Carolina governor is of the party wing that believes it failed in its core promise of fiscal responsibility, and in tackling the bread-and-butter issues (education, health care) that worry voters today. He's made his name partly by confronting his own party, which runs the legislature.

My very favorite part is when she strains to make it sound like Mark Sanford has actual achievements in S.C. to boast of:

    Nearly every year since he was elected in 2002, Mr. Sanford has proposed to cap spending at state population growth plus inflation. His state senate has ignored him. He's used his line-item veto more than 500 times, usually on pork projects. The legislature routinely overrides. Far from diminishing his standing, these lost battles have made him popular in the state.
    His policies have made South Carolina more competitive. In 2005, the state passed its first-ever cut in marginal tax rates for businesses, and in 2007 broader tax relief. He's shepherded tort reform, and crafted incentives to encourage property insurers to remain in the state after a spate of hurricanes. South Carolina still has problems (in particular, education), though since 2003 it has had the 16th fastest job growth in the nation. Its unemployment rate -- the third highest in the country -- has been exacerbated by record growth in the state's labor force.

Did you catch that? We have so much employment here because there are just to darned many of us! Mark Sanford has made S.C. into such a Nirvana that people are a-comin' here quicker'n we can find jobs for 'em!

Just another one of our little secrets

A colleague passes on this reader complaint, with the comment, "What planet does this person live on?":

I would like to know why we don't hear more from SC or Columbia's media about the Governor's inclination to refuse the stimulus monies when SC is in such desparate need. This state ranks about last economically,educationally, yet ranks high on crimes.  Shouldn't this money be extremely vital to SC... is the media bias... playing politics or what? 

Dang, and after all our efforts to keep the governor's position on this secret...

WashTimes picks on SC schoolgirl

More than one friend has brought to my attention this piece from Salon, taking up the cudgels for a schoolgirl here in South Carolina:

Friday February 27, 2009 06:11 EST

Criticizing Ty'Sheoma Bethea

I thought it would come from Michelle Malkin or Rush Limbaugh, but Malkin is too busy planning her anti-tax tea parties while Rush gets ready for his close-up at the Conservative Political Action Committee this weekend (which is a collection of nuts so nutty even Sarah Palin stayed away).

No, it was the conservative Washington Times that cast the first stone at Ty'Sheoma Bethea, the Dillon, S.C., teenager who wrote to Congress seeking stimulus funds for her shamefully dilapidated school. Obama used her statement, "We are not quitters," as the coda of his speech Tuesday night, but now the Moon-owned paper tells us what's wrong with Bethea, in an editorial with the condescending headline, 'Yes, Ty'Sheoma, there is a Santa Claus."

Obama "presented" Bethea "as a plucky girl from a hopeless school who took it on herself to write the president and Congress asking for much needed help," the Times began, ominously. Wait, she's not a plucky girl from a hopeless school? The editorial depicts her instead as a player in Obama's "mere political theater" because the president has been using her school, J.V. Martin, as a "political prop" since he first visited in 2005. Wow. Dastardly.  I'm getting the picture: Obama, that slick Democrat opportunist, has repeatedly visited one of the poorest schools in South Carolina, a state that voted for John McCain.  You just know he leaves with his pockets stuffed with cash every time he makes the trip.

It gets worse....

And you can read the rest of Joan Walsh's piece here.

You know, I long ago got cynical about these regular folks that presidents of both parties put on display during their prime-time speeches. I'm actually capable of understanding that public policy affects real people without such smarmy concrete evidence. Such faux-populist gimmicks are the rhetorical equivalent of those insipid man-on-the-street interviews that local TV news shows do, the ones that make me want to scream, "I don't care what this person who has obviously never thought about this issue before thinks! Either tell me something I don't know, or go away!" Such things tend to strike me as manipulative, phony and insulting.

So I'm not here to imbue this little girl with some sort of oracular power or something. But come on, people -- picking on a little kid who just wants to go to a decent school? This is where ideology gets you. You get so wrapped up in your political points you want to make, you forget that there's a real person there, even when she's staring you in the face.

Earlier this week, I called a guy in Latta who had rung my phone (according to caller ID) at least 10 times that day, refusing to leave a message. (As I've probably told you, ever since my department ceased to have a person to answer phones, I have to let the machine get it and get back to people when I can, if I'm to have any hope of getting the paper out each day.) But I called back on the chance that he was disabled or something, or there was a problem with my voice mail.

There was no phone problem. He just wanted me to be the latest of several people at the paper he had berated for saying J.V. Martin school was built in 1896, when PARTS of it were built much later. Some of it, I seem to recall him saying, in 1984. Does this seem like a huge distinction to you? It didn't to me, either, but it was VERY important to him. He wasn't saying it wasn't a substandard facility, mind you; he just had that one objection, and he maintained it was the height of irresponsibility on the part of the newspaper not to point out that distinction.

Anyway, the situation is what it is. J.V. Martin is a facility that stands out in a part of the state not exactly known for stellar school facilities, as you've read many times before in our paper, seen in Bud Ferillo's "Corridor of Shame," and read in Kathleen Parker's column last week. You know, that wild-eyed liberal Kathleen.

Is that Dillon County's worst educational problem? Probably not. There's the bizarre governing setup for local schools there, whereby the high school football coach, by virtue of being the only resident member of the county legislative delegation, decides who will be on the school board. The caller and I discussed that, and he thought it was worse that a certain other party -- the son of the late South of The Border founder Alan Schafer -- has too much influence. I don't know anything about that, but the Coach Hayes thing has always been weird and Byzantine enough for me.

South Carolina should be able to do better than J.V. Martin, and if it can't, that's an argument for getting some federal help, as much as I dislike federal involvement in school matters. All this kid did was ask for something better, and a newspaper derides her as an emblem of "irresponsibility." That's a hell of a thing.

Rocky Mountain News to shut down

You know, I can hardly post something about the troubles in the news biz for y'all before something comes along and tops it. I tried to give y'all a roundup back in this post earlier today, and now this:

The Rocky Mountain News publishes its last paper tomorrow.

Rich Boehne, chief executive officer of Rocky-owner Scripps, broke the news to the staff at noon today, ending nearly three months of speculation over the paper's future.

"People are in grief," Editor John Temple said at a news conference later.

Boehne told staffers that the Rocky was the victim of a terrible economy and an upheaval in the newspaper industry.

"Denver can't support two newspapers any longer," Boehne told staffers, some of whom cried at the news. "It's certainly not good news for you, and it's certainly not good news for Denver."

This takes things to a whole new level, of course. Severe expense cutbacks are one thing, bankruptcies are another. But shutting down altogether -- well, this is something new. Not only are they shutting down; they're shutting down tomorrow.

Some of us might be tempted to whistle past this graveyard. After all, what was Denver doing with TWO newspapers in the year 2009? Most two-newspaper towns went the way of the dinosaurs before any of us had HEARD of the World Wide Web. (The Columbia Record, for instance, closed in 1988, and that was toward the back end of the trend.) But that doesn't change the fact that, as Mr. Boehne said, "The industry is in serious, serious trouble."

Things are critical, and immediate, and things are starting to happen really, really fast -- sort of the way they did with Lehman Bros. et al. last fall.

'life and prosperity, death and doom...'

Perhaps I should begin this post with the opening words of today's first reading in the Catholic lectionary:

Moses said to the people:
"Today I have set before you
life and prosperity, death and doom..."
        -- Deuteronomy 30:15

Since this last post on the subject ("TNR on the 'end' of newspapers") -- when I mentioned the bankruptcies of the Philadelphia papers and alluded to that of the Journal Register Co. -- the flood of bad news in my industry has continued unabated this week. For instance:

• Hearst Corp. said if it can't drastically cut expenses enough in the next few weeks, it will close or sell off The San Francisco Chronicle, northern California's largest newspaper.
• Washington Post Co. earnings fell 77 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008.
• The Providence Journal will lay off another 100 people.
• Meanwhile, Morris Publishing Group, which publishes several small papers in S.C. (in North Augusta, Hardeeville, and Beaufort, Jasper and Hampton counties) as well as the Augusta and Savannah dailies, continued to be mentioned among the more troubled in the business.

That's just a sampling.

But that's not the big story, is it? The big story is that what's killing the newspapers is the dying economy -- no economic activity, no advertising, no newspapers.

As President Obama gamely tried to buck up the country Tuesday night, the picture looked grimmer and grimmer for the whole economy. Of all that I've read this week about bailouts, layoffs, losses, cutbacks and so forth this week, nothing made as big an impression on me as a piece in the WSJ yesterday about several new economic indicators.

The story began with Ben Bernanke telling us that we could start to snap out of this by 2010 -- if EVERYTHING goes right from here on. It continued:

The confidence of U.S. consumers tumbled in February to its lowest level in more than 41 years, partly because people are increasingly discouraged about job prospects. Two fresh measurements suggest home-price declines are accelerating. New Fed data showed rising bank-loan delinquencies. And companies from software giant Microsoft Corp. to retailers Office Depot Inc. and Macy's Inc. reported a worsening profit outlook.

That worst-in-41-years was actually the worst ever, since consumers' pulses were first taken this way in 1967. Additionally:

The jobless rate has already risen to 7.6%, and fresh data indicate that Americans are pessimistic that the outlook will improve any time soon. The Conference Board's consumer-confidence index fell to 25 in February, its lowest level since monthly data were first collected in 1967, and 48% of people surveyed said jobs were hard to get, the largest percentage since February 1992. Some 47% said they expected jobs to decrease in the months ahead, the highest percentage since December 1973.

Almost a quarter of respondents said they expected their incomes to decrease over the next six months, an all-time high.

If only a quarter expect their incomes to decrease, it makes me think three-quarters of us are fooling ourselves.

Oh, by the way, speaking of Ben Bernanke -- did you see that his boyhood home in Dillon -- yes, Dillon, S.C. -- was foreclosed upon? It was no longer owned by the Bernanke's, but still, as omens go... The WSJ followed up that story with a slideshow of Dillon (including pics from South of the Border).

Let me add to all this my firm belief that we can't possibly turn this around until we start feeling a little more upbeat about our prospects. So enough of the gloom and doom for today; I just needed to get that out of my system.

Anybody have any happy news to share?

For me, I'll return to today's readings, where the responsorial psalm promises this to one who hopes in the Lord:

He is like a tree
planted near running water,
That yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves never fade.
Whatever he does, prospers.

Amen to that.

ANOTHER social networking site? ARRGGGHHH!

Just got this press release:

Hi Brad,

I hope you are doing well. I wanted to let you know about a unique social news service that just launched - BUUUZ.com.

Have you ever wanted access to a community of people who have the same interests as you? Where you can share artistic visions, muses and styles? Many people find social websites like Facebook and MySpace invasive and difficult to navigate. At BUUUZ registration is simple and members create virtual "islands" based on subjects of interest (islands are populated with news from websites across the internet as well as BUUUZ community discussion). Creating an "island" for a topic is as easy as picking a few keywords that best describe your interests.

As an example, if you love to oil paint like I do, you can use favorite artists, museums, etc. as island keywords to be alerted on stories and member conversations mentioning them. Then you instantly become a part of a worldwide conversation through this new service, where you can find and interact with new friends who have the same interests.

In light of the Facebook Terms of Service uproar from last week I wanted to mention:

- BUUUZ's subscription revenue model, makes it so they do not have to "fight" with the users about owning their data.
- At BUUUZ, when a user deletes their account, and their data is completely deleted
- BUUUZ has also set up automatic deletion of old messages

Please feel free to take a look at the service at BUUUZ.com and reach out if you would like images or have questions.

Best Regards,
Brent

Brent Bucci
FortyThree PR

... to which I can only say, "ARRGGHHH!" Or, perhaps, "AIIIEEEE!!!" Or somewhat more sedately, "Please; not another freaking social networking site."

Since I did that column over the holidays about Facebook, I have had even MORE "friend requests," and some of them have been from being I actually felt obliged to say "yes" to, so as not to hurt anyone's feelings. (And yes, some of them were people I'd actually like to maintain connections with, but not all...) And some of them were ... a tad... weird. Like, if I thought myself a target for such things, I'd think "stalker." Which is not a good feeling.

Who's got time for all this socializing? Hey, you've got time on your hands, go read a newspaper. And then, go to the mall and buy something, and tell the merchant to buy some ads. Make yourself useful.

TNR on the 'end' of newspapers

Over the weekend, I was at a community gathering at which pretty much everyone I ran into expressed concerns about what's happening to newspapers these days, and particular their newspaper, The State. I appreciated the concern.

Since then, of course, we've had the bankruptcy of the papers in Philly, which along with other recent developments inspired Robert's cartoon today.

Now I get an alert to this cover story in the next edition of The New Republic, headlined "THE END OF THE PRESS: Democracy Loses its Best Friend." It's by Princeton prof Paul Starr. It begins:

We take newspapers for granted. They have been so integral a part of daily life in America, so central to politics and culture and business, and so powerful and profitable in their own right, that it is easy to forget what a remarkable historical invention they are. Public goods are notoriously under-produced in the marketplace, and news is a public good—and yet, since the mid-nineteenth century, newspapers have produced news in abundance at a cheap price to readers and without need of direct subsidy. More than any other medium, newspapers have been our eyes on the state, our check on private abuses, our civic alarm systems. It is true that they have often failed to perform those functions as well as they should have done. But whether they can continue to perform them at all is now in doubt.

Actually, I suppose I take the points Mr. Starr makes in his piece pretty much for granted, since I live and breathe them -- which doesn't mean I don't attach importance to them, because we're talking about some horrific stuff from where I sit. I just find myself going, "Well, duh," a lot as I read it, but some of it might make points you haven't thought about. And he DOES bring up some ideas I had NOT thought about, such as some of his ideas on how to save newspapers -- which seem to be sort of out of left field until you realize that nobody has any better ideas (that can be shown to work), which is sobering to say the least.

Just keeping y'all in the loop folks, as I've been doing. I don't know how much of this stuff you want brought to your attention, since it isn't, like, your living the way it is mine...

Caller strikes blow for George Washington and other white folks

Just thought I'd share this voicemail from over the weekend, of a type that I get from time to time. I like to share the joy when I can.

It's from a reader who wanted to see more about George Washington's birthday in the paper. I thought at first maybe this was someone who had missed the point that this year was Lincoln's 200th, and thought Washington should have gotten as much play as Honest Abe. But no; that wasn't the caller's problem.

Here's the audio, and here's my transcription of the money part of the message, in case you can't hear it:

...On Martin Luther King's birthday, y'all had pages and pages and pages of stuff, for weeks and weeks and weeks. I think it's a 'sgrace... your paper is not for our state; it's for the black people; it's not for the white people; you're a racist paper; that's why nobody takes you anymore. Goodbye.