GARRICK UTLEY, GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

My friend Garrick Utley died this week.  He was 74.  The cause was prostate cancer.

Garrick was the very model of a television journalist.

First, his curiosity knew no bounds.  He was as passionate about music and art as about politics and economics.

He was always well prepared.  His formal education at Westtown School and Carleton College supplemented what he must have absorbed at home as the child of two respected journalists, Clifton and Frayn Garrick Utley.  He was fluent in Russian, German and French, eloquent and elegant in English.  He never stopped learning, never stopped reading, never stopped hearing, and most important to his colleagues and his students, he never stopped teaching and never stopped sharing.

Even though he was often appalled at the changes in contemporary journalism, particularly the substitution of talking heads, interminably blabbing far from the scene for working reporters at the scene, he never lost hope for news.  He taught his trade proudly and humbly to students he encouraged to ignore all invitations to despair, but to get involved and to do their reporting the right way.   

At 6 foot six, Garrick stood, literally, head and shoulders above the crowd, but his manner, like his formidable intellect, was inviting not imposing.  In his classic trench coat or blue blazer, he looked like a model foreign correspondent, but he reported like an all-terrain-vehicle.  If that meant mud on the coat or scuffs to the blazer, so be it.  He had faith in good editors and good cleaners.  He made sure you knew how much he loved his wife Gertje.

He covered more big stories in more storied places than almost anyone of his generation, but like all the best newsies, he cherished the next one, not the last, biggest or best ones.

He made time for colleagues and students, even when he knew his time was running out.

The NY Times supplied an excellent, far more complete obituary.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/22/business/garrick-utley-former-nbc-anchor-and-foreign-correspondent-dies-at-74.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&_r=0

During his days in London for ABC News, he always kept his office door open to transient visitors.  His invitations to guest teach by Skype to his classes at SUNY Oswego were a delight.  His questions were always intelligent and focused. 

He listened superbly.

He was a great man and a good one. 

Gosh, I miss him.

FRIENDSHIP AND JOURNALISM

Out here on our little green stripe that separates the High Plains from the southern tailbone of the Rocky Mountains, we don’t watch as much TV as we used to, so we depend on people like Michael Barbaro and Bill Carter of the NY Times bring us up to date on the latest news about TV news, like the break-up in the romance between MSNBC and Chris Christie.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/20/nyregion/christie-and-msnbc-a-messy-divorce-in-public.html?hp

MSNBC fell in love with the Garden State Governor for a very good reason: he would talk to them, which very few Republicans would be caught dead doing (because they fear becoming politically dead within minutes of their appearance).

Christie reciprocated MSNC’s ardor because being “the Republican who can talk to Democrats” would enhance his chance of winning a Presidential election, if it didn’t kill him in the primaries.

Then the kiss-kiss turned to bang-bang when 4 days of New Jersey commuter Hell in September became a huge story in December.  Evidence strongly suggested the hours-long paralyzing I-95 traffic jams had been intentionally created by Christie’s staffers and appointees to the Port Authority.

This whiff of scandal sent both the network and the governor rushing back to their “bases.”  For MSNBC, this meant delighting their mostly (oh, Hell, probably entirely) liberal Democrat audience by endlessly banging on “the bully’s bullies.”

Reports the Times, “Over the nine-day period since the controversy erupted, MSNBC has dedicated nearly twice as much coverage to Mr. Christie as CNN and about three times as much as Fox News, according to Mediaite, a blog that tracks the industry. Detailed dissections of the case, and a rotating cast of indignant lawmakers from New Jersey, are now a staple of the network.”

It is not surprising that Christie has taken this personally, hitting back with criticism of the channel and turning aside requests from MSNBC’s bookers and show hosts. 

So far, so what? 

Christie is under no obligation to submit himself to public flaying, and until the story of the political strangulation of the George Washington Bridge goes away, his reply to MSNBC, the Jerseyese “I don’wanna tawkabouddit,” is perfectly appropriate. 

If, as I suspect (see: http://davemarashsez.blogspot.com/2014/01/christies-critters-avengers-tragic-farce.html) this story has marathoner’s legs, the Governor may not be seen on MSNBC for a while, since, as he showed in his “apology” news conference, confession is not a Christie specialty.

This is politics and politics is news, and MSNBC’s news agenda is presently in conflict with Chris Christie’s political agenda.

So, who cares if Christie plays to the ever-more-conservative Republicans he needs (if he’s to have any political future) by acting mad at MSNBC?

But, I care when MSNBC’s hosts act sad about losing Chris.  Turns out they were “friends.”

“[Mika] Brzezinski called him ‘my friend,’” note Barbaro and Carter, “her co-anchor Joe Scarborough called him ‘my main man,’ and Chris Matthews referred to him, with the familiarity of a family member, as ‘the guy we like around here.’

“On Sunday,” the Times reports, “Ms. Brzezinski still spoke fondly of Mr. Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, ‘whom I have the biggest admiration for.’”

I have known a lot of politicians whom I liked and admired, and who, I’ll bet, would have made great friends.  One, I actually invited to my house, but that was only after he had retired from politics.  As long as there was a chance he’d be more than a source, but a story, he was kept at arms’ length. 

This is why, although I was twice based in Washington, for a total of 17 years, I never aspired to be a “Washington journalist.” 

Washington may have once ruled the world, and still can uniquely rock it, but Washington, political Washington, does not live in the world.  It lives in the Capitol and works so hard inside the Beltway that it rarely ventures outside it.  Which explains why the inmates know so little about the lives lived “out there.”

Almost everything political Washington thinks it knows, it learned from someone else, which makes them as dependent as our drone shooters in Yemen, who are only as good as the unbiased accuracy of their local sources (whose record for inaccurate targeting, killing innocent civilians, has been appalling.)  This is also true for Washington journalists who rarely reality test what their “inside sources” tell them about the "real world.".  But, inside the Beltway, this crippling handicap is largely ignored, because the particular realities of the world are subsumed in the reality of Capitol City political conflict. 

The best sources on that game are the players and their associates.  Often, they are not just sources; they are the story: "Congressman X to investigate Y,"  "Senator S says such and such."  Nowhere outside Washington is the universal overlap of opinions and assholes so highly valued as breaking news. 

Where access to sources (and not access to “the scene of the crime”) is the key to successful reporting, granting access becomes a “friendly” act, which is reciprocated by “friendly” coverage.  In Washington, professional friendship is reinforced by social friendship.  You can’t cultivate sources at parties or events, if you’re not invited.  And no one knowingly invites a skunk to a Washington garden party.

This may explain why, every election pollsters say, “American voters want change,” and almost nothing changes in Washington, where incumbency, and the incurious, militantly conventional reporting that enables it, are chronic afflictions.

Until the actual emails or text messages or Flickr accounts confirming a miscreant’s misdeeds are too public to give a pass to, friends don’t badmouth friends.  

You cannot honestly cover a friend, was always my assumption, so better never to be a friend than to have to betray that friendship.

Of course, this was when my stock in trade was news (before I loosed the opinionated commentator of blogspot), when my credibility depended on my disconnection from, as well as my reporting and knowledge of and  insight into, a story. I “interviewed” people; I did not conduct “friendly chats” with them.

This not to say that friendly chats cannot turn up as much information as less chummy interrogations; Bob Woodward has proved that, even as he has proved his “friendship” to his sources in his books.  But, notwithstanding their magisterial tone, and often deep reporting, Woodward’s books are less fact-based journalism or analytic history than tendentious collections of particular "friends'" inside views.

The Dagwood and Blondie of Morning Joe specialize in chummy chatter around what might as well be a breakfast table, and they, like Woodward, often have something interesting to say.  But they talk about news, but they do not report it.  One proof of that distinction is that newspeople neither celebrate their friends (while they are), nor mourn their disaffection (after they aren’t).   

It goes against our job.

BLOOMBERG, CHINA AND MORE DEVILISH DETAILS

Sometimes professional ethics demand giving the customer what he doesn’t want.

Take, as one dramatic example, the National Football League.  For decades, what the NFL wanted from its medical staff was to “get the player back on the field” as fast as possible.  And for decades, that’s what NFL medicine delivered, until (and for years  after) it became obvious that some players who had suffered concussions were being “rehabilitated” too quickly, leading to repeated brain injuries, some of which were irreversible, and in a few cases, led to incapacitation and suicide.

Starting in the 1980s (I know because, in 1983, for NBC’s pre-game show, NLF ’83, I did the first TV report on the risks of football concussions), a few team physicians started consulting their Hippocratic Oath, and warned the league and its owners that  preventive measures were mandatory.  Thus, slowly, the NFL come around to recording brain activity baselines for its players and comparing them with test results after someone “had his bell rung.”  And doctors and coaches started delivering the news nobody wanted to hear, “you can’t play this week.”

In the news business, professional ethics demand that journalists serve, not just market demand, but their best calculation of the public interest, in deciding what, and how much to report.  This is one reason why news is more than just data collection and distribution.

Data delivered quickly to a proprietary 2-screened terminal has always been what Bloomberg LP’s services are all about. Over the past decade, Bloomberg moved into the news business and acquitted itself well, still providing lots of quick snapshots of financial information, but adding to them perceptive, in depth, reporting on a wide variety of subjects.

The rewards in reputation came quickly; financial rewards did not.  Even worse, from Bloomberg L.P.’s corporate perspective, some of that niche, long-form, expensive,  investigative journalism caused exactly the kind of trouble it should: it pissed off the parties it exposed, most recently the “princelings” of China’s Communist Party elite and the “entrepreneurs” who cut them a slice of the cake in exchange for political protection.

Faced, not just with hostility, but severe cutbacks in orders of the Bloomberg terminals from China, Bloomberg LP did what any unprincipled businessman would do: cut and ran, lopping “dangerous” stories off China distribution of its global news feeds, and more recently, firing their Polk-award winning Hong Kong-based investigative reporter Michael Forsythe.  

This week, the Bloomberg trend back to basic data delivery and out of the news business reached an inevitable conclusion, the firing of, a reported 50 to 100 editorial staff. 

The details of the firings confirm the movement away from editorial credibility that first became visible months ago, when command of Bloomberg’s media division was handed to Justin Smith, who then gave responsibility for Bloomberg TV news to Josh Tyrangiel, and when the news channel started pre-empting new coverage to run infomercials (paid content which often masquerades as journalism).  According to Linette Lopez of Business Insider, “the infomercials are now on Sunday nights from 11:00 pm to 12:00 am, Tuesday to Saturday from 2:00 am to 3:00 am, and Monday from 12:00 am to 2:00 am.”

Smith summed up his “philosophy” of media in his “I’m your new boss” memo to the staff: “Moving quickly is paramount: the faster you move, the more you learn, and the sooner you can optimize for success. Fred Wilson, the VC behind Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and others, argues that ‘speed’” is the quality he seeks out above all others in digital media entrepreneurs. I agree.”

Speed may good for data distribution, but understanding comes more slowly, and in the real world, and for the journalism which feeds on it, “moving quickly” often means misstepping in the wrong direction.  Events have their own tempo and will not be rushed for some fact-marketer’s convenience.

In the same memo, Smith also asserted, “There will always be a robust market for quality content. No technology will ever erode this demand. It’s our job to keep our standards high as we experiment. Bloomberg was built on accuracy and insight. We must build on this strength.”

And then he hired as his TV guy, Tourangiel, whose only prior experience in that medium was at MTV, fabled “for quality content,” in its news.

Today, Bloomberg News’ long-time editor in chief Matthew Winkler fired dozens of employees in what is not a cutback in resources, but a series of shifts in deployment of resources.  Gone from cultural coverage are the Muse brand and its emphasis on covering books and performances that matter.  In its place there will be heightened coverage of “luxury” pursuits.  It is as if Architectural Digest became Luxe Magazine, or Consumer Reports became the Nieman-Marcus Catalog.

Sports at Bloomberg News will no longer cover actual events, just the financials behind them.

And investigative journalism?  Winkler, is his own memo announcing the firings of several of his top editors and writers, said: “We also have high ambitions for beat and investigative reporting.  Our commitment to the best journalism — both this-just-in and in-depth narratives — has never been greater.”

 

Of course, in the same paragraph he said, that hiring in 2014 would focus on “First Word and Emerging Markets,” both Twittery fast tip and data services.”

 

To be fair, analyst Felix Salmon, blogging for Reuters, called today’s events the latest setback for Winkler, long a respected traditional newsman, and further evidence of the ascent of Smith and Tourangiel, and Tom Secunda, who Salmon said, is “a co-founder of the company, the other Bloomberg billionaire, the man in charge of basically everything which makes money at Bloomberg, [and] the opposite of a romantic press baron: all he’s interested in is profitability.

Salmon continued, “[Secunda’s] only priority is client service, and giving Bloomberg subscribers whatever they want. And it turns out that Bloomberg subscribers, although they definitely want market-moving news ahead of anybody else, are much less fussed about the broad mass of news stories which don’t move markets”

Sure enough: Bloomberg’s clients want data, numbers, trends.  These are the “market movers” who saw a housing boom, with rising numbers of home buyers, rising rates of interest, rising profits for lenders and funders, but stopped searching right there.  They never cared about the lack of economic fitness of many of those buyers, the lack of basic honesty among many of the mortgage-sellers, and the complete divorce from reality that characterized a financial industry (rightfully, alas) confident of its own impunity.

Bloomberg’s bottom line tickers don’t talk about that shit.

So, if Secunda and Smith and Tourangiel really do rule Bloomberg now, it should get out of the news business entirely.  Data dumping, at high speed, with high energy – that’s what they are good for.  Let them make their money that way, just as the NFL spent generations raking in profits from entertaining fans with as the league’s most successful salesman John Madden used to put it, WHAM, BAM, POW, OOF.

Who the hell wants to know about brain damage?

Intelligence is a terrible thing to lay waste, or in Bloomberg News’ own news of the day, lay off.

Selling off the news division is better than selling out the news.

 

Bloomberg News and China

Back in the day, the late 1980s, when China was breaking the bonds of a strictly party-run command economy and was opening up a market-driven capitalist sector, Deng Xiaoping, the top Communist Party leader famously said of his pioneers along the capitalist road: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white; what matters is that it catch mice.”

China’s capitalist cats have prospered in the quarter-century since Deng’s revolution in economic affairs.  They’ve caught a goodly share of world markets, and an ungodly share of Chinese domestic wealth.  And they’ve changed Deng’s motto.  Now, “It doesn’t matter if the cat is black or white, or even if it catches mice.  What matters now is that it’s a family cat.”

Cronyism and family dynasties have so distorted Chinese economics and politics that they threaten to destroy the dynamism of the first generation of Dengism and even more, to shatter the Chinese people’s tolerance of a corrupt Communist party and its egregious “Royal Families.”

But that’s their problem.

Our problem is when China’s me-and-my-family-first elite starts to corrupt our American institutions, like, it would appear, Bloomberg News.

Sunday’s New York Times featured a long examination of Bloomberg L.P. and Bloomberg News’ conflicted interests in China by Amy Chozick, Nathaniel Popper, Edward Wong and David Carr. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/25/business/media/signs-of-change-in-news-mission-at-bloomberg.html?pagewanted=3&%2359&hp&%2359;_r=0

This latest report follows upon weeks of global coverage, spearheaded by the Times and the Financial Times, of leaks from inside Bloomberg News that the latest investigative report on the nexus in China of great wealth, Party power and family connections, by the Polk Award winning correspondent Michael Forsythe (and Shai Oster) had been spiked by Editor in Chief Matthew Winkler.

In subsequent reports Winkler has denied killing the story, saying it’s “alive” but “isn’t ready” for publication and Forsythe has been fired.

Undermining Winkler’s declaration are reports that he told staff he had killed the story, to keep Bloomberg News from being tossed out of China (which he compared to Nazi Germany). 

The new Times story suggests Winkler was acting to save, not his news presence in China, but Bloomberg L.P.’s market for its data terminals, a significant example of what the Times called, “some troubling developments” for the company.

“The growth of Bloomberg’s terminal sales worldwide had softened over the last several years, and had dropped significantly in the last year in mainland China, a vast untapped market. Bloomberg News’s tough reporting last year about China had prompted officials to cancel subscriptions for the lucrative terminals, frustrating the company’s Beijing sales staff.

Forsythe’s firing, the Times reported, was only the beginning:  “Last Monday, Bloomberg began to lay off roughly 40 people, about 2 percent of its news staff. Coverage of culture and sports would be scaled back, and the investigative unit had losses as well. The signal accompanying the announcement was clear: ‘We must have the courage to say no to certain areas of coverage in order to have enough firepower in areas we want to own,’ Mr. Winkler wrote to the staff.

Until proven otherwise, one area Editor Winkler no longer wants “to own,” is investigative journalism.  What will take its place?  What the Times says “executives on the business side” want is more of what they’ve recently been getting: “short bursts of market-moving news, not prize-winning investigative journalism. …Editors are increasingly asked to send only brief, bullet-point news reports to terminals — easily digestible facts for traders and hedge fund managers.”

The 40 firings from arts, sports and investigative reporting are not part of an overall cutback at Bloomberg News.  Company officials have told the Times, “Bloomberg … would add around 100 newsroom positions next year, many in a division called First Word, which produces a Twitter-like burst of short-form news of market-moving importance. (A spokesman said that even with the recent cuts, the number of employees at Bloomberg News by the end of 2013 would be up from last year.)”

Like Deng’s propagandists, Bloomberg’s insist, their cat is setting its mousetraps with the bait the market bites.  Like America’s other providers of television news, Bloomberg News claim their customers have driven them toward news that is short and crappy.  And they have the chutzpah to claim the proof is that “nobody watches” the real news they won’t show.

All this editorial stress and strain is occurring at an iconic moment: “Your father’s home.”

Torn back to the business he forsook for the 12 years he rule New York’s City Hall, Michael Bloomberg will soon be back at the company, where he faces some critical questions about his venture into journalism. 

Since he left in 2001, Bloomberg news has grown in impact and stature, as has its viewership on television screens as well as those on Bloomberg terminals.  But increased visibility and influence have their consequences, and for Bloomberg L.P. the money-losing tail (News, the Times reported, accounts for roughly 4% of the company’s revenues) is threatening the health of the money-making dog (Terminals, the Times says, bring in about 85% of corporate cash flow).

For years, Bloomberg News gave a limited kow-tow to complaints from Beijing. 

“In early 2011,” the Times reported, Bloomberg News carried stories “on an online movement in China to stage peaceful ‘Jasmine Revolution’-style protests modeled after the uprisings in the Middle East. Angry Chinese officials told top editors in Hong Kong that Bloomberg’s information distribution license permitted it to publish only financial news in China, not political news, according to employees with knowledge of the discussions.

“Editors ordered the article in question deleted from the website, even though the site is global and not China-specific, these employees said. Word spread among Bloomberg journalists in China. ‘A lot of people were angry they would just cave in like that without much discussion,’ one employee said. 

“After the outcry,” the Times coninued, “editors reposted the article to the Bloomberg website, but as of Sunday, it could not be found using the site’s search engine. (It shows up in a Google search.)”

To head off future trouble, the Times said, Bloomberg News found a digital fix: “Managers also created a function called Code 204, which can be appended to some articles to keep them off terminals in mainland China.

But then, Bloomberg published “a report [by Michael Forsythe] about the fortunes amassed by family members of Xi Jinping, which won a Polk Award for foreign reporting…” But, the Times reported, ”Bloomberg paid a price: The purchase of terminals in China all but ceased, the Bloomberg News site was blocked and no residency visas were subsequently granted to its reporters.”

When Forsythe struck again this month.  His story on the political family connections of China’s richest billionaire passed through all the legal and editorial wickets, Bloomberg newspeople told the Times, until it got to Winkler.  And there, until proven different, it seems to have died, and Bloomberg’s Beijing bow-down seems to have reached the head to ground stage.

So,  Mr. Bloomberg, will you return Bloomberg News to its safe and narrow roots: fast financial news as brief as our editors think the market wants it to be?

Or will you continue to grow and burnish the Bloomberg News brand, even at the expense of the terminal business, from which the Times reminds us, some of the latest news ain’t so good. “The total number of terminal subscriptions increased by 23,000 in 2010 and 14,000 in 2011, but only by 1,000 in 2012 and 3,000 so far this year, according to several employees’ estimates.”

Not that all the Times’ Bloomberg financial news wasn’t fit to reprint:  “Still, the company said overall [2013] revenue was on track to rise to $8.3 billion, up from $7.9 billion in 2012 and $3 billion in 2001, when Mr. Bloomberg was still at the company.”

And that’s with China’s 1% mad at Bloomberg.

Maybe there’s a Solomonic solution (yes, it’s also a Murdochic solution) here.  Split the company.  Keep the terminals, keep a financial news division to serve those customers, but spin the TV News channel off.  It may, as the Times reported, lose $100 million a year, but it has a voice and an audience, and I’ll bet could attract a buyer, for whom the prestige and public service would be cheap at that price.

So if the perils of the news business are too great for a businessman like Michael Bloomberg, don’t kill that TV baby, Mike, find it a foster home, whose proprietors might behave like journalists, and blow off governments trying to hide their failures with threats of hacking or economic harm.  The new Bloomberg (or Not) News could be a cat that served not only its master, but the world, by catching a lot of vermin.

 

RUPERT MURDOCH: JUDGMENT DEFERRED

Feeling kinda droopy?  Like you had “tired blood?”  Well, better than Geritol would be a dose of David Folkenflik’s new book Murdoch’s World (Public Affairs Press, NYC, 2013).

If NPR Media correspondent Folkenflik’s tale of the “buccaneer” Rupert Murdoch doesn’t get your blood percolating, call 9-1-1.

Most of your bloodboil will come direct from Murdoch, but once in a while, you may sizzle when the author’s “fair and balanced” reporting seems to lack a spine of judgment.

Let’s first dispense with what Murdoch’s World is not.  It is not a meticulously detailed, deeply meditated “definitive biography.”  That title still goes to Michael Wolff’s The Man Who Owns the News.  What Folkenflik has written is a breezy and bright update of Wolff’s 2008 account, emphasizing the phone hacking, cop-bribing scandals that have wracked Murdoch’s London tabloids for the past decade.

Even there, Folkenflik has pulled together an excellent summary, full of reporting and research, but the book finesses a judgment of the sordid mess, the cover-up that followed it, and the Murdoch culture that enabled everything.  He does have one significant scoop: that Murdoch’s “best friend”, Robert Thomson, then the editor in chief of the Wall Street Journal, tried, according to reporters there, to kill, and then helped to neuter a WSJ investigative report on the phone-hacking of a dead 13 year old girl, Milly Dowler, by the now-closed Murdoch London tabloid, The News of the World. 

Even now, the former editors of The Sun, Murdoch’s “surrogate daughter” Rebekah Brooks, and UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s one-time spokesman Andy Coulson,  are on trial in London, charged with buying cops and lying about it, paying private investigators and paying off the people the PI’s hacked and spied against.  Ms. Brooks is also in danger after she, her husband and her assistant were discovered hiding and trashing and apparently attempting to destroy evidence that might be held against her. 

Barely relevant, but supremely titillating, and, alas, too late for Folkenflik (or, perhaps for Murdoch’s World’s first edition) came news this week that over this very period of gutter journalism, Brooks and Coulson were having “a romantic affair.”  Both were separately married at the time.

The hacking-bribing scandal forced Coulson to quit his political job, and eventually, forced Rupert’s Ms. Brooks to resign.  Perhaps it is they Murdoch was talking about when he whined to Parliament, “People I’ve trusted – I’m not saying who – I don’t know what level, have let me down, betrayed the company and me, and it’s up to them to pay.”

Folkenflik’s book strongly suggests that this cold dismissal and pathetic blame-shifting is the worst kind of chutzpah, the unbelievable arrogance of assumed impunity. 

After detailing more cringe-inducing Murdochian testimony before a Parliamentary Committee (“This is the humblest day of my life,” he all but sobbed) including this pathetic denial of responsibility for his newspapers’ spying and lying: “I didn’t know of it.  I’m sorry [but] the News of the World is less than 1% of our company,” Folkenflik adds only, “He was a notoriously involved CEO, especially when it came to his tabloids.”

Throughout the book, he seems to accept as unknowable the answer to the questions, "What did Rupert know and when did he know it?"  Too bad.

But, Murdoch’s World shows Rupert to be more than just notoriously involved in his media empire; he was amazingly delusional about it and himself.

Murdoch revels in his self-created role as an “outsider,” a hater of “the elites” and “the toffs,” forgetting, perhaps, that he was the son of a well-off Australian newspaper publisher, privately schooled until he was sent off to Oxford for his B.A.

Folkenflik reports that Murdoch’s deep-seated “contempt for government interference” stems from the Australian “taxes levied against his father’s estate.”  Left over, it must be noted, was more than enough capital to be the cornerstone of Murdoch’s later investments in journalism and entertainment; influence and power. 

The affronts of being forced to pay taxes and work his way through, or weasel his way past, government regulations meant to enforce standards and limit competitive dominance on news media ownership are, Folkenflik says, what lies behind the consistent agenda of almost all Murdoch media:  a strong military, smaller government, less regulation and resistance to immigration. 

The first and last may only be sops to his right-of-center, nationalist audiences, although Murdoch himself is a successful immigrant, whose devotion to Australian nationhood – a big meme in his Aussie papers – didn’t prevent him from selling this Ozzie passport for a mess of American TV stations. 

But it’s the Murdoch mantra of smaller, weaker government and radically diminished public oversight that seeps self-interest.

One howler that Folkenflik lets go unremarked is Murdoch’s definition of “the public interest” as that in which the public is interested.

Let me put this in another great journalist’s nutshell. “A great salesman never asks you what you want,” wrote Russell Baker.  “He tells you what he’s got and why you want it.”

By and large, public interest depends on public knowledge.  You cannot express interest in something you’ve never heard of.  When Rupert Murdoch publishes “between 60 and 70% of the newspapers sold in Australia,” he effectively limits and controls what most Australians can have any interest in.

This kind of dominance not only distorts the news, it corrupts the political world.  Folkenflik tells us, for Murdoch in Australia, government favors have included “a paltry” price for prime publically-owned waterfront property for his Sydney film studio, and a sweetheart deal with the Federal government that gave him a 25% share and effective control of a national near-monopoly on pay-TV.

In the UK, Folkenflik recounts, Murdoch jawboning, and a lot of editorial and campaign funding support was rewarded when Margaret Thatcher hand-carried him past British media regulators.  When he was courting UK citizens, Murdoch said, “I think that the important thing is that there be plenty of newspapers, with plenty of different people controlling them, so there are a variety of viewpoints, so there is a choice for the public.”

40 years later, Murdoch owned 4 national newspapers, a network of satellite TV channels doing everything from news to sports to entertainment, and he had high hopes (shattered for now by the hacking scandal) of absolute control over the UK’s top satellite content provider.

In the US, he has somehow acquired and kept “waivers” that allow him to breach both kinds of bans on media “cross-ownership.”  He has TV channels and newspapers in the same market.  He has more than one TV channel in some markets.  His film production company is allowed to supply his Fox TV network with programming.

This is exactly what strong government and intelligent regulation is supposed to prevent. 

And again, Murdoch’s “legalized” forays outside the rules have had a terrible spillover effect.  Giving NYC Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani unprecedented front page as well as editorial page support advanced their political ambitions, and, not coincidentally, helped grease the skids for the not-yet-naturalized Murdoch to buy not just the NY Post, but WNEW-TV (now WNYW-TV) as well.  While both his financial and editorial support for Federal-level politicians has enabled continuing breaches of the rules others must follow on “cross-ownership.”

Folkenflik revels along with Murdoch and several of his top henchpeople in their self-description as “pirates.”  But this ain’t cute Johnny Depp.  These are real pirates, outlaws who survive by breaking or evading legal and professional codes, by pillaging their legitimate competitors.

And yet, so far at least, no Murdoch has been prosecuted or dispossessed of his ill-gotten gains, despite clear evidence that he and his company have broken British and American laws.

In the US, a rival London tabloid reported, Murdoch’s News of the World tried to corrupt a former NY cop-turned private investigator by hiring him , “to hack electronic phone records for people who had been killed in the 9/11 attacks.”  Although the report was based on just 2 anonymous sources, it produced calls, from Rep. Peter King (R-NY) among others, for an investigation.  If one was done, no one has seen a result.

Then there is the 1997 Federal Corrupt Practices Act, which banned American companies, like Murdoch’s News Corp, from bribing public officials abroad. As Folkenflik says, “Illegal payments to police officers fell squarely within that definition.”  As the ongoing trials in London show high-ranking Murdoch executives did just that. Federal prosecution anyone?

And where is the corporate outrage?  As credentialed observers of American business Nell Minnow of GMI Ratings and Laura Martin of Needham and Co noted respectively, “Murdoch’s leadership is a big, big mess,” and “if this had happened at a normal company, in theory, the board would have required the CEO to resign.”

Not our Rupert.

Here’s how Murdoch deals with questions from in-house.  At the 2009 annual plutocrat party at Sun Valley, Fox Business anchor Stuart Varney asked Murdoch to address the phone-hacking, cop-buying scandals, and got:  “I’m not talking about that issue at all today.”  “No worries, Mr. Chairman,” said Varney, “That’s fine with me.”

Rather than romanticizing them as rebels, let’s call pirates what they are, Mafiosi on the high seas.  Murdoch’s “matey” army, “built,” Folkenflik says, “on personal and family ties [had] a clubbiness or mateship that was almost impossible for outsiders to penetrate.”

And as the UK scandals outrageously demonstrate, the “mates” subscribe to the Mafia  ethic of omerta, silence to protect the Boss.

Folkenflik prefers a different, more legitimizing reference; “People invariably compared Murdoch to William Randolph Hearst, [but] that seems too limited a comparison.  Perhaps he was more like the nation’s oil barons who pockmarked the countryside in drilling, [and] provided millions of Americans with a product they came to view as indispensable.”

Maybe you can see where this is heading.  Incredibly, depressingly, Folkenflik outdoes even Murdoch’s latest fetid bribery defense, made off-the-record to employees at The Sun: everybody does it. “Payments for news tips from cops,” Murdoch was secretly recorded saying, “that’s been going on for a hundred years.  It was the culture of Fleet Street.”

Everyone who reports does it, Murdoch says; and everyone who reads of watches is complicit, Folkenflik volunteers.  He ends his book by saying, “Murdoch could not have accumulated his fortunes without our help.  We are all, as consumers of media, involved and even responsible for the creation of Murdoch’s World.”

As guilty as the people of Bhopal were for swallowing Union Carbide’s lethal gas.

Now there’s a comparison in which the real-world relationship of corporate pirates and government regulation are revealed.  It’s that kind of bite, of passion, of judgment, which David Folkenflik has unfortunately eschewed.

Murdoch’s World is a good book, full of interesting material, but for me, it’s one failure is a big one: it doesn’t add up.

25 QUESTIONS ON SURVEILLANCE, SECURITY, JOURNALISM, PRIVACY AND DEMOCRACY

Recently, 2 serious and stimulating papers have been published looking at the state of journalism, particularly investigative journalism, in the Age of Obama.  Both the collective writers at the TOW Center, who have directly addressed their remarks to the President’s Panel on NSA surveillance issues, and former Washington Post editor Len Downie, in his brilliant essay for The Committee to Protect Journalists (where I was a founding member, a past Chair, and Executive Board member and still serve of the CPJ Advisory Board) consider the impact of Mr. Obama’s unmatched record of aggressive criminal prosecution of suspected whistleblowers, leakers, and the journalists with whom they communicate.

Both are well worth your attention.

http://towcenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Letter-Effect-of-mass-surveillance-on-journalism.pdf

http://www.cpj.org/reports/2013/10/obama-and-the-press-us-leaks-surveillance-post-911.php

Reading them has stimulated me to pose a series of questions, whose answers may well define, not just the future of American journalism, but of American democracy.

1)    In a democracy, do citizens have the right to know everything their government is doing (in their name and with their money)?

 

2)    Or do governments have a right to keep secrets from citizens?

 

3)    If the answer to 2) is “Yes,” what should be the limits on what can be kept secret?

 

4)    Must official secrets be limited to those deemed essential to the security (or just the interests) of the nation and its people?

 

5)    Who should be empowered to monitor what is to be kept secret, and to make sure the specified limits on secrecy are strictly observed?

 

6)    Under what rules should these monitors work, and what guarantees of access to secret materials should they have? 

 

7)    How should their work be made accessible to citizens?

 

8)    What (in addition to these institutional monitors) is the role of the free press in  reporting on government secrecy and secrets? 

 

9)    Have press revelations of secrets ever actually damaged national security?

 

10) Is the public better off for the press’ exposure of government “secrets”?

 

11) Would the public be worse off if the government had absolute power to protect its self-declared secrets, backed by the threat of criminal or professional sanctions against those who make them public?

 

12) If the government forecloses secure press access for dissenters or whistleblowers will it leave these “witnesses” no other choice than immediate and total “publication” of dissident information via the internet?

 

13) Is the government’s and nation’s interest better served by securing access for whistleblowers to journalists, who focus their data-gathering, winnow both data and sources, do further reporting for context and reactions, consult with and solicit comment from government, before presenting and distributing their information, or by sending whistleblowers (with often inchoate, unchecked, information) directly to the global digital audience?

 

14) How can protections for whistleblowers and journalists be institutionalized to guarantee maximal public access to important information or judgments, without endangering national security?  

 

15) And what protections should citizens have to protect their privacy, and limit the intrusive powers of government?

 

Let’s assume the government has access to and registers all digital – phone, internet, and US mail communications.

What problems do those capabilities create?  We’ll seek answers through the journalist’s 5 basic questions: who, what, where, when, why?

Targeting:  Potentially? Worst case? The answers to, “Who can be targeted?” are: WHO? Everyone. WHAT? All communications. WHEN? Whenever. WHERE? Everywhere. WHY? Because government can.

Actually?  We need answers to these questions.

 

16) WHO?  Whose communication file be opened, examined, and further processed?

 

17) WHAT? Once a communications file is opened, what kinds of data can be examined?

 

18) WHEN?  Should investigations be time-limited? For keeping files open? For analyzing what’s in them? For taking action based on collected data?

 

19) WHY?  Should investigations and analyses be broadly issue-specific,--  to protect national security, to combat major criminal activity, to serve the public interest?

 

20) Should they be narrowly case-specific, limited to data relating to particular threats or crimes?

 

21) Should they simply be target-specific?  With what threshold for targets, for secondary targets, for wider examinations based on networks of secondary or  tertiary communicants?

 

22) Should there a defined threshold for suspected “security threats” or suspected criminal activities to predicate violations of personal communications data?

 

23) Are simple keywords sufficient predicates for opening, and processing communications data?

 

24) Who (in government and out?) can know your secrets?

 

25) What right and mechanism of appeal would citizens have to contest government surveillance of their communications?

 

I’m sure this list is only the beginning for a discussion of the highest importance.  Please feel invited to join.

HEAR, HEAR HERSH

I consider Seymour Hersh to be both a personal friend and a hero of American journalism.  His recent rant, delivered to an audience in London, and turned into an article this week in The Guardian is must-read and must-think-about material.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media

 

It has also pissed a lot of people off, including other journalist friends I love and respect, several of whom have opined somewhat grumpily, “Well, Sy has been known to lie himself,” or slightly more circumspectly, “Sy’s published some inaccurate stories without discernible sources.”

 

Really?  No cases I can readily cite of either crime.

 

Honestly, as infuriating as Sy can be with his, well-earned perhaps, superiority complex, and tendency to be dismissive of anyone else's reporting, I can't think of any serious "lying" he might have done (at least to his readers), or any cases in which I suspected his often-unnamed (usually for good reasons) sources did not exist.

I think Hersh is right that there has been a sea change in reporting between the Bush2 and Obama eras, in part because it was the habit of Bush and Cheney and their junior partners like Rumsfeld, Wolkowitz, Tenet, C Rice, et al, to string together fake-facts that confirmed their often ignorant and ideological assumptions, and then make it as hard as possible to prove them wrong, while Obama and his gang of enablers (Gibbs, Axelrod, Kerry, Clinton, S Rice, Donilon, Pannetta, Petraeus) simply dissemble and walk away, confident they and their statements will not be directly challenged by journalists.

 

The Bush team, like Reagan's before them, were supremely confident in their own stupidities, while the less ideological, less committed, more pragmatic Obamians are more aware of how much they don't know and how dangerous for them it would be politically, if everyone else found that out.

 

Sy's unfortunately undocumented rant (he's a much lazier pundit than he is a reporter) does reflect a reality of shifts in news media budgeting -- more money for stars, less for workers; more for sets or graphic redesigns, less for reporting, and editorial (ir)responsibility -- more opinion, preferably loud, mindless argument, less actual information and analysis.  Then there is the time-for-thought (and research) foreshortening that has come with the 24 hours news cycle, and on TV in particular, the abandonment of public service for private profit (whose insane growth itself has been a major displacer of old budgeting priorities).

 

The lobotomizing of public information and the public discussions which depend on it is probably the most indelible marker of America's tragic national decline since World War 2.  The news media (especially television)-applied cannula to the nation's frontal lobes has enabled the shallow thinking and unscrupulous illogic of today's hyper-partisans by denying them even the expectation, much less the necessity of factual information on which to base their opinions.

 

Challenging authority, which Sy rightly calls one of our main reportorial assignments, demands hard, time-consuming work to acquire the facts and understand and order them to make the challenging counter-argument.  No one has exemplified that meticulous scholarship than Seymour Hersh. 

 

Today's news media (1) do not hire troublemakers (like Sy) who would pick up the challenge; (2) do not encourage the people they do hire to aspire to think outside conventionality; (3) will not publish anything which might "cause trouble" for themselves, their institutions or for the powerful people with whom they socialize or aspire to; (4) do not permit the off-the-ball research necessary to get to the bottom of counter-conventional reality; (5) consider that kind of real reporting "unaffordable," just as today's political and business leaders consider any real social safety net for poor or elderly citizens to be "unaffordable."  After all, most of them either looked the other way, or actively participated when public and corporate money that could have been spent on pension and health insurance obligations was diverted into executive’s or shareholder’s bank accounts.

 

I wish Sy had bothered to structure his argument more rigorously and to buttress it with checkable facts rather than unverifiable assertions, like his claim that the story of the killing of Osama Bin Laden is "a pack of lies," but do I think he is in any way wrong in his broad-scale conclusions about today’s news business?  Sadly, I do not.

 

To Sy, I only say, as we once used to imprint at the bottom of every page, “More, More More.”