The Giffords Story

The Whole World is Watching "Anger, hatred, bigotry" - the headline in the Sydney, Australia Morning Herald. "A disturbing story about American political culture" - said the editorial in the Globe and Mail, Canada's major national newspaper. A blogger for the Financial Times writes, "The idea that there is anything in common between the politics of the United States and Pakistan might seem absurd. But both countries have suffered appalling acts of political violence this week. And in both cases, the victims were moderate voices who spoke out for liberal values." While the debate continues in U.S. newspapers and over the air about the cause and meaning of the tragic attack on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others in Tucson last Saturday, the press in the rest of the world is watching and commenting. It is a fascinating case study in how the U.S. is seen by much of the rest of the world. A while back I heard a speaker who had lived in Canada for a number of years quip that "Canada is the place where everyone has health insurance and no one has a hand gun." There was nervous laughter from the U.S. crowd. The Globe and Mail's editorial on the Tucson shootings got quickly to its point: "Start with guns: Legally, they are sacrosanct. And not just any guns. In Arizona, any 'law-abiding' person over 21 is allowed to carry a concealed handgun practically anywhere in the state, including into the state legislature, in bars and on school grounds." In a round-up of world coverage of the story, the GlobalPost site noted: "Argentina’s biggest daily, Clarin, published a 500-word piece by their Washington correspondent, Ana Baron, who focused heavily on Arizona’s tough stance on Latino immigration and what she described as the 'growth of hatred and intolerance in U.S. politics.' Perhaps tellingly, the story’s first quote was Pima County Sheriff Clarence W. Dupnik’s widely-recounted remark that his home state of Arizona has become a 'Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.'" The same site noted that Britain's politically-oriented print media covered the shootings as political commentary. The right-leaning Daily Telegraph criticized American blogs and liberals for rushing to paint the attacks as a product of a right-wing fanatic despite the lack of evidence that the shooter had anything to do with the Tea Party or any other group. "This is highly inconvenient for certain people on the Left so they ignore it," wrote the paper's Washington editor. "They would much prefer the shooter to have been a white male in his 50s." Outside of Britain, the GlobalPost site notes, "the story has received slightly less attention. The French press is consumed by the murder of two Frenchmen murdered in Niger by an African subsidiary of Al Qaeda. The German press has major flooding along the Rhine to contend with. "But the lack of prominence given to the story could be down to this: For many in Europe, violence of the sort that occurred in Tucson on Saturday is almost expected in America." Major media outlets in the U.S. provided prominent coverage over the last several days to the assassination - and that word was always used and interestingly has generally been avoided in the coverage of the Gifford's shooting - of a major political figure in Pakistan, indisputably a country with enormous strategic importance to the United States. The lead in the Washington Post, for example, said of the Pakistani killing, in words that might have been lifted from an article about Rep. Giffords: "an outspoken liberal in an increasingly intolerant nation, was shot..." because of his public stance on a controversial issue. As the Financial Times writer, Gideon Rachman, pointed out it is not all that comfortable to be compared to the dysfunctional, frequently violent politics of Pakistan, but there we are. Rachman wrote on Sunday: "Of course, the relative reactions to political violence in both countries show that Pakistan is much, much further down the road of violent intolerance. This profoundly depressing report by Mohammed Hanif illustrates how cowed liberal and tolerant voices now are in Pakistan, where many television commentators essentially argued that the governor of Punjab had it coming to him. "In the US, by contrast, all mainstream politicians and commentators are united in condemning the attempted murder of Giffords. I suppose we should be grateful for small mercies." Indeed.

Now...the News

Pew Survey: Internet Grows As News Source The new Pew Research Center report dealing with where Americans turn for their daily news fix shows, not surprisingly, that the Internet's impact is growing and newspapers are declining. Television is also in decline, while radio is essentially flat. Again, no big surprise, young people, in vast numbers, are surfing the net for news, while - as a former TV reporter I love this headline - TV news still dominates among what Pew calls "the less educated." People in the West are more likely than any other part of the country to turn to the Internet for news, but I'm guessing those numbers are skewed by "the left coast" effect of California, Oregon and Washington. Still the trends in where we seek out news are dramatic and show no signs of changing. Interesting to me, cable news and the traditional broadcast networks are both in steady decline as news sources, while local television news seems to be holding its own as a source of information. Older folks, again no big surprise, turn to television and much less to the Internet. What the survey doesn't answer is where on the Internet Americans are turning for information. Are they using the major newspaper and broadcast websites? Or are Internet news consumers turning to specialized sites that cover politics, business, energy or the environment? Or are they looking to sites like the Drudge Report and The Huffington Post, websites that aggregate news with a decided slant on what is featured and how the information is packaged? Or, as I suspect, based on the trend of increasing partisanship and a "point of view" approach on cable television, are Internet consumers seeking out information that already reinforces their political or social views? This much is beyond debate it seems to me: there is no longer any comprehensive place where Americans can turn for a shared sense of what is happening in American politics and culture. Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley once could gather us around the national hearth and we could share a national experience - men landing on the moon - or a national tragedy - the Kennedy assassination. No more. Pew also offers some regular analysis of what type of information Internet consumers seek. In the week between Christmas and the New Year - a pretty quiet news cycle - the top story was the seriously bad weather on the east coast. I've long subscribed to the "more is better" theory about news and information. More sources, more points of view and more delivery systems should make us smarter, more informed and better and more engaged citizens. I hope that instinct is true, but doubt it is. To make it true we must have not just consumers of news and information, but discerning, skeptical and critically thinking consumers. Other recent Pew research suggests that Americans have a 30,000 foot view of the issues and challenges facing the country. We know a few basic facts, but very few details. Americans aren't big on nuance. We know, for example, that the GOP made big gains in Congress, but not what those new members really intend to do, or even that the Republicans won control of the House. We know that BP ran the oil well that exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, but no idea about who serves as the British Prime Minister. We know the budget deficit is a big problem, but have no idea where all that money is being spent. And, John Boehner. Whose he? There is clearly a tremendous amount of information out there on the Internet, cable and broadcast television, even in shrinking newspapers, but the jury is out as to whether all that information, in an increasingly complicated and interconnected world, is making us any smarter or better able to understand and engage the world. That, in a modern democracy, seems to me to be a real problem.

Looking More, Believing Less

The Survey Says... The Pew Research Center for People and the Press is out with a new survey about where we're going for news and why and at least one of the findings in a little surprising to me. Pew says Americans are spending more time following the news. Meanwhile, the Gallup organization has its own research that shows that Americans are less confident than ever in what they are getting from newspapers and television. Fewer than 25% of those surveyed by Gallup say they have "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in newspapers or TV. That number represents a 10% decline over the last five years or so. Conclusion: we are more interested than ever in what is going on and we have less belief than ever that what we see and read is the straight scoop. The Pew survey also seems to buttress a contention of mine that news organizations are more and more appealing on a purely ideological basis. This is the news of the future, but really is a return to the past when political ideology sharply defined newspapers and magazines. A liberal - defined, for example, in the Pew survey as one who supports gay rights - tends, big surprise, to like the New York Times and National Public Radio. Supporters of the National Rifle Association and the Tea Party are big listeners to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Fox News. Libertarians like the Wall Street Journal. Pew also reports that more and more of us are using digital means to keep up on the world and younger Americans, those under 30, are fast forgetting what a newspaper is all about. More affluent and well-educated Americans, again big surprise, tend to shop around more using digital, print and broadcast sources for their information. Could be that they just have the time and ability to do so. It may be a stretch to connect these two interesting surveys to some recent musings by former President Bill Clinton, but here goes. During a recent extended interview with the Times - former presidents do extended interviews, apparently - Clinton identified his favorite TV commercial of the last five years as the ESPN spot were the math nerds make fun of the jocks spewing sports stats in the high school cafeteria. Clinton was making the point that the clever spot is a metaphor for American political life. Namely, if we cared as much about the "hard facts" that pertain to public policy as we do about football, it would be a better, at least in Clinton's view, for Democrats. Facts are good things, but Clinton, of all people, should know that politics is much more often - like football - about emotion, feeling and raw execution. I feel Clinton's pain about the need for more focus on "hard facts" in our consumption of news, but, upon further reflection, the former president just might not be the best messenger for the "hard facts" approach to public life. The reality of the moment is - and this is the truth - that we often place more emphasis in developing our positions on what Stephen Colbert has called "truthiness." What we believe may not really be true, but it seems close enough, particularly when we factor in our emotions and ideology. By the way, the Pew survey finds that among those 30 and younger, "about as many young people regularly watch the Daily Show (13%) and the Colbert Report (13%) as watch the national network evening news (14%) and the morning news shows (12%)." Sounds about right. There is an element of "truthiness" in there somewhere. Just ask Rachel Maddow or Bill O'Reilly.

Just Plain Getting it Wrong

Don't Confuse Us With Facts, Please... The photo is of Park51, the proposed site of an Islamic cultural center, two Manhattan blocks north of where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood. By now, I suspect, everyone in the country - except perhaps that escaped prisoner caught late last week in Arizona with his accomplice girl friend - has an opinion on whether the so called "Ground Zero mosque" is appropriate for this site. (I'm making the assumption that the jail breaker might just have been too busy while out on the lamb to check in on cable TV or pick up a paper to follow this controversy, but who knows? Seems like everyone else is weighing in.) There are many things of interest about the hottest story out of New York since Chelsea's wedding. The "mosque issue" is fast becoming a political litmus for this year's candidates and political analysts are debating how much voicing support and then walking it back a bit it is hurting the President. Republicans, for the most part, have jumped all over the issue and made the case that this is the worst idea, well, since Mohammad demanded the mountain come to him. President Obama, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and some of former President George W. Bush's guys have made the case that the issue must be about religious freedom and not condemning an entire religion by saying all Muslims harbor radical, violent intentions. Others ranging from Newt Gingrich to Harry Reid, in various shades of heated rhetoric, have condemned the location of the proposed Islamic center and, in many cases by extension, also condemned the religion to which 1.5 billion of the world's people adhere. One more thing of interest in this story, a story that has dominated the news now for close to three weeks, says a great deal about how information gets disseminated and used in the digital age. It is fascinating to me just how many of the essential elements of the story lack factual basis or have been so distorted in the repeated re-telling that they have little resemblance to the truth. Hendrik Hertzberg, writing in the August 16 edition of The New Yorker tried to catalogue some of the details that have just gotten lost, or been distorted, or are just plain wrong as the story has picked up steam and controversy. "Well, for a start," Hertzberg wrote, "it won't be at Ground Zero. It'll be on Park Place, two blocks north of the World Trade Center site (from which it will not be visible), in a neighborhood ajumble with restaurants, shops (electronic, porn, you name it) churches, office cubes, and the rest of the New York mishmash. Park51, as it is to be called, will have a large Islamic "prayer room," which presumably qualifies as a mosque. But the rest of the building will be devoted to classrooms, an auditorium, galleries, a restaurant, a memorial to the victims of September 11, 2001 (emphasis added), and a swimming pool and gym. Its sponsors envision something like the 92nd Street Y - a Y.M.I.A, you might say, open to all, including persons of the C. (Christian) and H. (Hebrew) persuasions." Hertzberg went on to note, as others have, that the principal backers of the center are immigrants from Kuwait (a country we went to war to liberate) and Kashmir and the man who is now routinely referred to in press accounts as "a controversial imam," Feisal Abdul Rauf, is a Columbia University grad who has been in charge of a mosque in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York for nearly 30 years. Rauf is so dangerous that the Federal Bureau of Investigation enlisted his help to "conduct 'sensitivity training' for agents and cops" after 9-11. Rauf is also the vice-chair of the New York Interfaith Council, which means he regularly associates with Christians and Jews, Hindus and Buddhists who, one assumes, thought enough of him to elected him vice-chair of their organization. (The founder and chairman emeritus of the Interfaith Council, by the way, is the retired Dean of the Cathedral of St. Patrick the Divine. Those Anglicans can be pretty radical.) Rauf has also often and at length, it is important to note, denounced terrorism in general and the 9-11 attacks in particular. Before it became popular for Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh to denounce him, Rauf palled around with Condi Rice and Karen Hughes of the Bush Administration. Not quite the story that appears in the thousands of words written daily about this issue, but it does help explain, if not excuse, why so many people have made up their minds that the "Ground Zero mosque," promoted by "radical Muslims" will be a threat to all Americans and an insult to the 9-11 victims and their families. Lots of folks believe that, it's just not true. When I went to journalism school back in the dark ages, a old prof told us over and over that reporting a story - particularly a story steeped in controversy - required more than merely recounting what "he said and what she said." That kind of journalism, the old, green eye shade guy would say, almost always ensures that "the truth goes and hangs itself." Seems like that is what has happened on the south side of Manhattan. There us much more evidence, everywhere you look, of the truth looking for a place to die. Consider, for a moment, the President's religion and place of birth. Barack Obama wrote two best selling books about his life and background, books that have been poured over by reporters and his political enemies for years now. Books that discuss at some length his views on religion and what it means to him to be a Christian. Obama has given interviews and made speeches talking about his faith and, in particular, how those of us not of the tradition can begin to understand the black Christian church in America. Yet according to a new Pew Research poll 20% of Americans now firmly believe the President is a Muslim. In the same survey, fully 34% of conservative Republicans believe Obama is a Muslim. In his book The Audacity of Hope - you can look it up on page 208 - Obama writes about his decision to fully embrace Christianity: "It was because of these newfound understandings - that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic or social justice, or otherwise retreat from the world that I knew and loved - that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity United Church of Christ one day and be baptized. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany...I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to His truth." Reading those words, one who continues to believe Obama is a secret Muslim simply has to believe he is a serial teller of untruths, which may actually help explain the 34%. The opinion page editor of the Dallas Morning News wrote about this the other day and made a telling point when declaring that the paper would quit printing letters making religious claims about the President for which there is absolutely no evidence and that are clearly not true. "Aren't the people who claim Obama is a Muslim," the editor asked, "some of the same people who said they could not trust a man whose Christian preacher said racist and unpatriotic things from the pulpit? Which is it? Is he a follower of a controversial Christian preacher or a Muslim?" Truth and logic there, but is anyone paying attention? Another 41% of Republicans in a recent CNN/Opinion Research poll believe Obama was "probably" or "definitely" born in another country. Even when a copy of Obama's birth certificate, certified as authentic by officials in Hawaii, was posted on the Internet, the so called "birthers" continue to believe what just ain't so. Of course, there is more. The story continues to circulate that current Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner used to work at Goldman Sachs, one of the big, bailed out Wall Street banks. Nope, the Goldman guy was the last Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Or, what about the now accepted notion that the terribly unpopular Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) - hated left and right in a rare show of bipartisanship about anything - was all Obama's doing. Wrong again. TARP occurred on the Bush watch late in 2008 with W's full backing, as well as that of John McCain. What's going on here? There are lots of theories, including one called the "backfire effect." This notion holds that when a person harbors a particularly strong view, that is shown by facts and logic to be wrong, they often actually reject the facts and logic and strengthen their belief in what is false. It is a sort of "don't confuse me with the facts" response, on steroids, to something that may be personally comforting or important to believe even if it is just not true. One theory is that some folks so dislike Barack Obama - much as some folks so disliked George W. Bush - that they need/want to believe things that reinforce their views even if those things aren't true. The human mind is a curious thing. A political scientist, Brendan Nyhan, who is a Robert Wood Johnson scholar in health policy at the University of Michigan, has studied the "backfire effect" and recently told NPR's Talk of the Nation that misinformed people - conservatives and liberals - rarely change their minds once they are made up. Now, there's a cheery thought. As traditional journalism declines apace, one of the promising new developments has been a greater commitment by some news organizations to good, old fashioned "fact checking." There are websites devoted to this. One of the best is FactCheck.org that tries to keep politicians and others making public claims honest. It is, after all, possible to research and find real answers to many things. Yogi Berra was right, once again, when he famously said "you can look it up." Yes, you can, if you will. Nevertheless, Nyhan and others say fact checking, no matter how well it is done, may not have much impact on those who simply won't be confused by, well, facts. If, when talking or speculating about things that we believe that just aren't true, we were focused on whether Elvis is really dead or whether Neil Armstrong really walked on the moon or why the U.S. Air Force just won't come clean with all it knows about UFO's, it would be a mild curiosity. We could write it off as just a fact of life that some people will believe what they want to believe. But, when the myths continually trump the facts for a significant number of people in the every day political and policy life of the nation, it is a cause to wonder - can this be good for the country? The Chicago Tribune's Clarence Page calls what is going on "American dumb-ocracy" and cites as proof of the dumbing down not only the recent Pew survey about Obama's religion, but also Jay Leno's on-street interviews and evidence that way too many Americans, for example, have no idea what the First Amendment protects. Civic engagement, Page says, has to mean more than closely following Lindsay Lohan's drinking problems. Page is discouraged about dumb-ocracy and me, too. He simply says, "heaven help us." Lincoln, I think, talked about not being able to fool all the people all the time. That is some cold comfort, but I'm also reminded of the old line, often attributed to Mark Twain, that "it ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."

News, Money and Politics

Blurring the Lines a Little More I've long been a believer that the best defense against what is often referred to as "the nefarious influence of money in politics" is the disinfectant that comes with vast amounts of sunshine. In short, let the sunshine in and disclose, disclose, disclose. As long as the Supreme Court equates First Amendment rights with essentially unlimited political contributions, even from corporations and unions, full disclosure is about all the assurance anyone has that we have the means to judge who - or what - is bankrolling a campaign. My personal preference would be for even more disclosure, including more frequent requirements for reporting and more disclosure of the ultimate sources of political action committee, union or corporate contributions. If money in politics is poison - even Teddy Roosevelt said it was - then tighter limits on the amounts of individual, corporate and union contributions seems like a sensible approach. But, thanks to a tangled web of laws, regulations and court rulings, we have an increasingly wide-open system where every election cycle the money flows farther and faster and the candidates spend vast amounts of their time, as the campaign language goes, "dialing for dollars." Leave it to Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, as his recent biographer described him, to add a new wrinkle to the long-running saga around campaign finance. Murdoch, owner of the New York Post, The Wall Street Journal and, most importantly, Fox News, just had his News Corporation write a $1 million check to the Republican Governors Association. Perfectly legal, properly disclosed by all accounts, but a further and unmistakable blurring of the lines between news and politics. The News Corporation contribution to the Republican governors is certainly not unprecedented. GE, Disney and other "media companies" have been players in this space for a long time. What is unusual is the size of the check and the partisan implications. News Corporation maintains the corporate side of the house made the contribution with no involvement from the guys who run the cable network where Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Glenn Beck hold court nightly, almost always in high dudgeon about the latest Democratic action, and where a sort of GOP shadow government - Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee and Newt Gingrich - gets paid to comment. Predictably, Democrats were outraged and demanded disclaimers on future RGA sponsored ads taking on Democratic gubernatorial candidates. It was also widely noted that the News Corporation donation some how didn't generate much coverage on Fox News. I wonder how Fox might cover a million dollar contribution from the New York Times to a Democratic committee? The trouble with the News Corporation explanation that this was simply a corporate decision with no connection to the hot house cable network - and let's assume for the sake of argument that News Corporation is giving us the fair and balanced truth here - is that it just doesn't pass the old smell test. As a friend regularly reminds me, the Murdoch explanation lacks the quality of verisimilitude. That ten dollar word is defined as "the appearance or semblance of truth; likelihood; probability" As in "the play lacked verisimilitude." This play lacks. It reminds me of the newspaper that editorially endorses one candidate over another and then says, as I almost always believe, that the editorial opinions of newspapers are totally walled off from the newsroom and news coverage. Few readers believe such explanations. They have become as cynical as many reporters. In the age of a more and more sharp edged, opinionated, point-of-view media, Fox News, or anyone else playing at the million dollar level in partisan politics, shouldn't be surprised that the explanation of separation between the corporate side of Murdoch's empire and the news side just doesn't pass the basic test of seeming to reflect, well, the truth. Here's the real issue, I think, with Murdoch and his approach. The guy is a businessman, and a very successful one by most accounts, and he is also a committed conservative. In keeping with his personal politics and political philosophy, why not just drop the pretense of "fair and balanced" and engage in the market place of ideas in a fully transparent, genuine manner. If Murdoch would just acknowledge what everyone believes - detractors and fans, alike - that Fox is the conservative opinion network, it would be liberating. Well, on second thought, that may be a poor choice of words. It would be honest. As I've noted in the past in this space, the news business - and it is a business - that we once knew is as dead as a dodo bird. We are going back to the future with "news" organizations becoming more and more identified with a point of view and a partisan agenda. In my perfect world - I remember Walter Cronkite - I think this is a bad trend, but it is also not likely to be reversed. It was, after all, good enough for the days of Hamilton, Adams and Jefferson and it is going to have to be good enough for the days of Obama and Palin, Fox and MSNBC. Rupert Murdoch's big check to the RGA is all right by me as long as he plays by the rules of disclosure. I just wish he'd take the next step, conduct himself like a Hearst, a Pulitzer or a McCormick (partisan news moguls of the past) and drop the pretense that his politics and his cable news operation is anything but a major political player, in both opinions and money, in American conservative politics. Fox News regularly wins the ratings battle against left-leaning MSNBC and CNN, which finds itself in the ill-defined middle, so why not just admit that Fox is the home of conservative opinion and will support conservative causes with its really big checkbook and its really big megaphone. I happen to think Murdoch is brilliant from a business standpoint in occupying a space where he can shape opinions and influence policy completely in sync with his own views. That is the American way, even if you are Australian. Just go the final step and admit that is what you're doing. Jon Stewart - he of the obvious truth - said what lots of folks must be thinking: "This (the News Corporation contribution) is a travesty. I really think if anything Republicans should be paying Fox News millions and millions of dollars. Not the other way around." Now, there is some verisimilitude for you.

Google to the Rescue

Can Google Save Journalism? James Fallows, the talented and insightful writer for The Atlantic, has a great piece in the current issue that might - just might - give hope to those of us who worry about the future of "real" journalism. It turns out that Google, thought by many to be helping speed the death of old line journalism, is actually devoting serious time and resources to strategies to help quality reporting survive and thrive when the old business models finally creak to a halt.

“It’s the triple whammy,” Eric Schmidt, the Google CEO told Fallows, that is killing newspapers. “Loss of classifieds, loss of circulation, loss of the value of display ads in print, on a per-ad basis. Online advertising is growing but has not caught up,” Schmidt said.

At the same time the smart guys at Google, clearly much more tech savvy than old-line news folks, realize that the value of the search engine is that it can - and must - supply quality content. Without quality reporting, no quality content.

Here's Fallows on what Google is up to: "After talking during the past year with engineers and strategists at Google and recently interviewing some of their counterparts inside the news industry, I am convinced that there is a larger vision for news coming out of Google; that it is not simply a charity effort to buy off critics; and that it has been pushed hard enough by people at the top of the company, especially Schmidt, to become an internalized part of the culture in what is arguably the world’s most important media organization. Google’s initiatives do not constitute a complete or easy plan for the next phase of serious journalism. But they are more promising than what I’m used to seeing elsewhere, notably in the steady stream of 'Crisis of the Press' –style reports. The company’s ultimate ambition is in line with what most of today’s reporters, editors, and publishers are hoping for—which is what, in my view, most citizens should also support."

I'm the guy who has often joked that I will be the last person in America to buy a newspaper. When everyone else has moved to the iPod or whatever, I'll still be prowling around an airport or a newsstand looking for ink on newsprint. But even I must concede the old newspaper model is fading fast. Maybe even faster than anyone thinks.

Here's how one Google strategist describes, not incorrectly, the current newspaper business model: “Grow trees—then grind them up, and truck big rolls of paper down from Canada? Then run them through enormously expensive machinery, hand-deliver them overnight to thousands of doorsteps, and leave more on newsstands, where the surplus is out of date immediately and must be thrown away? Who would say that made sense?” It doesn't any more.

“It’s obvious that in five or 10 years, most news will be consumed on an electronic device of some sort," Schmidt told Fallows. "Something that is mobile and personal, with a nice color screen. Imagine an iPod or Kindle smart enough to show you stories that are incremental to a story it showed you yesterday, rather than just repetitive. And it knows who your friends are and what they’re reading and think is hot. And it has display advertising with lots of nice color, and more personal and targeted, within the limits of creepiness. And it has a GPS and a radio network and knows what is going on around you. If you think about that, you get to an interesting answer very quickly, involving both subscriptions and ads."

That is the key: how to generate the ad revenue - and remember most newspapers have always been a platform to sell ads, the news content was secondary.

Read Fallows piece and see if you don't agree that Google gets the content piece and may just be smart enough to help the real journalists figure out the business approach, too.

Not everyone agrees, of course, but can anyone doubt that the way journalism is financed, distributed and packaged has already changed in rapid and remarkable fashion. I can't see ahead to next year let alone ten years, but I'm confident we have only seen the beginning of the transformation. My hope is that the daily, hourly need for quality content will help drive the technological transformation.

You might want to Google that notion while reading your ink on newsprint...while you still can.

The Press on the Press

The Tyranny of the 24 Hour News Cycle Barack Obama faces another huge speech this week - the State of the Union is Wednesday - so standby for the predictable narrative that the president has, pick your version, "hit a home run" or "done himself no good politically" with the high profile appearance before Congress. Under either scenario, the buzz will dissipate quickly with the pundits and cable bloviators moving on to something else by about Thursday afternoon. Such is the nature of the 24 hour news cycle. The current White House approach to dealing with the new reality of speed, speed and change the subject - and they obviously have some work to do - is contained in a fine piece by the New Yorker's media critic Ken Auletta. Auletta's piece is required reading for political junkies or anyone who wants to try and understand the culture of the news business these days. Here's the money quote: "The news cycle is getting shorter - to the point that there is no pause, only the constancy of the Web and the endless argument of cable. This creates pressure to entertain or perish, which has fed the press's dominant bias: not pro-liberal or pro-conservative but pro-conflict." The perceived need for speed has driven even the better Washington reporters to adopt a daily approach to journalism that makes all of them into 21st Century versions of the old fashioned, story-a-minute, green eyeshade wearing re-write man. In fact, NBC's Chuck Todd tells Auletta, "we're all wire-service reporters now." One telling observation in Auletta's piece is the comment from presidential historian Michael Beschloss who recounts that when the Berlin Wall was erected in 1961 John Kennedy was on vacation. "For six days, no one pressed him hard for a reaction," Beschloss says. Obama stayed quiet for three days following the attempted Detroit airline bombing - he was on Christmas vacation in Hawaii - and was widely attacked for his slow response. The constant news cycle is a fact of political life. No wonder most politicians govern from a constant crouch, ready to leap this way or that in response to the latest "urgent" breaking news. Speed kills whether you're a mongoose taking on a cobra or a White House press secretary taking on, well, you get the analogy. Associated Press culture writer Ted Anthony has a separate take on the impact of the 24 hour news culture and the response to the awful disaster in Haiti. With frustration mounting that relief efforts are taking too long, Anthony asks: "Are the expectations of the virtual world colliding with the reality of the physical one?" The answer, of course, is "you betcha." Disaster aid in the virtual world of cable news does seem too slow, even with U.S. airborne troops and Marines involved, guys who just happen to be the world's masters at logistics and rapid deployment. Not much wonder that the American public chaffs about the slow economic recovery, the time it takes Congress to pass a health insurance bill, or the slogging process of figuring out a new strategy in Afghanistan. These days instant gratification is just not fast enough.

Media Matters

Rupert and the Gray Lady More proof this week of the fundamental changes taking place in the newspaper business. David Carr, a media commentator for The New York Times - the Gray Lady of American journalism -gives voice to what many media traditionalists have either observed first-hand or expected would happen. Stop the presses: Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal - another great American newspaper - has turned to the right in its news and analysis. At least that is Carr's assessment. The response from the Journal is fascinating. The dueling statements from editors Robert Thomson of the WSJ and Bill Keller of the NYT read like the transcript for a Fox News shout down. Here is the important point, I think, and the accelerating trend: the news business is fragmenting into a range of providers of "content" built around distinctive perspectives - political, social, economic. If the Journal has become the national conservative newspaper, there are those who would argue that the Times has long been the nation's liberal paper. Perhaps both papers should just admit the obvious. Of course, a press baron like Murdoch, schooled in the tough, partisan style of British journalism, is going to put his conservative mark on the Journal. If Murdoch understands anything, he understands market segmentation. He knows there is a vast audience for point-of-view news and he will get there first with the most. He is increasingly serving up British-style journalism for an American market. Fifty to 75 years ago, papers like the Chicago Tribune, published by the isolationist, Republican Colonel Robert McCormick - the publisher modestly dubbed the Trib "the World's Greatest Newspaper" - and New York's short-lived PM, a left of center paper bankrolled by the millionaire Marshall Field, were unabashedly point-of-view. These papers reported favorably on their friends and assaulted their enemies, often in front page editorials. Once, after a Tribune story spoke favorably of a U.S. Senator McCormick disliked, the publisher cabled - no email in the 1930's - his Washington bureau asking if reporters there intended to continue to serve as press agents for the Senator. They didn't. We may be inevitably headed back to a much earlier day in American journalism when every newspaper was partisan and all the "news" came with a distinct point of view. Alexander Hamilton had his own newspaper, so did Jefferson, and everyone in the 1930's knew that McCormick's Tribune was anti-Roosevelt. It was his point of view. Was it always fair? No. Was it entertaining? Absolutely. Did it sell papers? McCormick created a media empire built on his personal perspective and his skill as a innovator in the delivery of information. Like Rupert Murdoch, the Colonel understood his market. Murdoch, as with many things, may just be ahead of the pack as American newspapers go back to the future. In fact, having a distinct point of view may be the salvation of print journalism in the digital age.

Save Balloon Boy!

Someday, Someday... The cartoon from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch kinda says it all. Someday , I just know (if I live long enough), I'll be able to say I was impressed by the journalistic judgment shown by cable news. Someday. Yesterday, on the other hand, fell just a little short. My favorite part of the "balloon boy" story was watching the once-credible CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer. It was quite the situation in "The Situation Room." This is the same guy who used to report with some authority on the Middle East peace process and interview presidential candidates. But, hey, what's that compared to a live balloon chase over the eastern front of Rockies. There is news, after all, and then there is news. Linda Holmes, a writer on popular culture, has some thoughts. As she points out - listening Wolf - "It's not always easy to know what you're looking at, even when you're staring at it with your own eyes." After Wolf, and a close second as a favorite part of the "balloon boy" story, comes the merchandise. At www.SaveBalloonBoy.org you can own the tee-shirt commerating the "most disappointing conclusion to helium-filled balloon journalism ever." Retail $20, unless you buy at least 25 shirts and qualify for the 10% discount. The only quick lesson to draw from "balloon boy" is that the 24-hour news cycle needs lotsa material. After all, Michael Jackson can only die once - presumably.

Poverty in Idaho

Food Stamp Usage, Crisis Assistance Stretch Providers; Families Try to Cope Boise State Radio, the NPR station covering much of southern Idaho, has produced a remarkable series of stories this week focused on how the nation's economic trials have impacted Idahoans. It is the kind of journalism we sadly see too little of these days - no shrill political debate, none of the simple slogans that often tend to simplify an issue to the point of distortion. The station's news staff has touched a raw nerve with this material - a young woman talking about not wanting to use food stamps, but having no choice and homeless families out of work and nearly out of hope. The series - That Could Be Me - is available on line, at a website that lists a number of resources for those folks who often get attention only when unemployment numbers or food stamps usage is reported. [Full disclosure: the station asked me to moderate a roundtable discussion with various providers and others who are trying to offer services and make sense of the enormous increase in poverty over the last year. The roundtable discussion airs several times over the next few days. It was a sobering experience to begin to understand the impact of what is happening.] The 149,000 Idahoans using food stamps right now - that's a 40% increase - aren't welfare queens or shirkers, they are parents who have lost a job and in many cases have had to seek assistance for the first time in their lives. At the same time, public sector assistance has been stretched to the point of breaking and great organizations like the Salvation Army and Genesis World Mission lack the resources to fill the growing gap, much as they try. For those of us who have it pretty good in this awful economy - a job with benefits, a comfortable safe place to live, never a wonder about where the next meal will come from - BSU Radio's series is an uncomfortable wake up call. Thousands and thousands of our neighbors are really hurting. They need to be brought into the sunlight of public attention, not left in the often forgotten shadows of grinding poverty. This reporting does just that. BSU Radio News Director Elizabeth Duncan and her team have given us all the evidence we need to realize that we all have a responsibility in this time of national trial. All of the panelists who participated in the roundtable agreed, all of us need to know more about what living with poverty means, how it can impact an entire generation of children, how government budgets are woefully inadequate, how the very fabric of a community is frayed. This series is a good start. It will sober you up to the reality of a life of poverty in Idaho.

Remembering a Press Secretary

Jody Powell...Advisor and Spokesman The death this week of Carter Administration press secretary Jody Powell got me thinking about how he (and Jimmy Carter) fashioned the all important White House job. Say what you will about the Carter Administration (I believe history will treat the one-term Georgian better than many contemporaries) Powell played the high profile role of press secretary just about right, I think. He was the rare press secretary who successfully mixed the duties of trusted advisor to the president with the ringmaster role of daily care and feeding of the White House press corps. Franklin Roosevelt and his "secretary" Steve Early, invented the modern White House press operation and Powell played very much the same role in working with his president as Early did with FDR. (By the way, there is a fine recent book about Early and the key role he played - virtually deputy president to FDR - called The Making of FDR : The Story of Stephen T. Early, America’s First Modern Press Secretary.) Current White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs seems to have the same portfolio - advisor and spokesman. It is a much different approach, and a better approach I think, than either of the Presidents Bush used or than Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton employed. In the Steve Early, Jody Powell, Robert Gibbs model, the press secretary serves as advisor first, presidential flack second. The Clinton and Bush models seemed at times to be designed to make certain the press secretary knew as little as possible in the interest of never being able to really speak with authority for the president. My long-time friend and business partner, Chris Carlson, knew and worked with Jody Powell during the Carter presidency. Chris ran the public affairs shop at the Department of the Interior for then-Secretary Cecil Andrus. I asked him for a couple of anecdotes about Powell, the irreverent Georgia boy who with Hamilton Jordan, helped engineer Carter's improbable presidential campaign in 1976. "Yes, they had an irreverent attitude towards the ways of D.C., as did my then boss the incoming administration's new Interior Secretary. Like Secretary Andrus, both Jordan and Jody actually placed their own phone calls rather than play the D.C. game of having a secretary place the call and see whose boss acknowledged the pecking order by getting on the phone first. "Powell had little time for such games, and though he had a temper he also had a great sense of humor, could laugh at himself, the pretensions of the press and the absurdities of power politics. In the four years of the Carter Presidency he somehow managed to keep that sense of humor and he also recognized and respected what an asset Governor Andrus was to the President. "When one of the most critical decisions involving Interior's future had to be made, and Secretary Andrus had to go meet with the president and the inner circle of advisors - the Georgia mafia - to tell them the president's long cherished goal of creating a new Department of Natural Resources had to be abandoned for lack of key political support, it was Jody Powell who weighed in first behind the secretary's political judgment and helped to persuade a dubious president to see the wisdom of cutting his losses. "Bottom line, Jody Powell was that rarity of rarities in D.C., a self-effacing, decent person who radiated intelligence and integrity, did a difficult job well and succeeded in part because of his basic decency and humanity. There aren't many like him." As the New York Times noted in his obituary: "Mr. Powell had honed his style years before, when Mr. Carter was governor. Responding to a critic who accused his boss of “communistic” tactics against opponents of the busing used to desegregate schools, Mr. Powell wrote that one of a governor’s burdens was having to read 'barely legible letters from morons.' “'I respectfully suggest that you take two running jumps and go straight to hell,' he continued." I can assure you that is something every press secretary has wanted to say.

More Bad News...for the Press

New Survey Shows Decline in Public Confidence The Pew Center is out with a new survey that may help explain some of the demise of the so called "main stream" media. As the chart illustrates, the percentage of Americans who believe the media generally gets the facts straight has declined from 55% in 1985 to 29% this year. From the Pew report: "Similarly, only about a quarter (26%) now say that news organizations are careful that their reporting is not politically biased, compared with 60% who say news organizations are politically biased. And the percentages saying that news organizations are independent of powerful people and organizations (20%) or are willing to admit their mistakes (21%) now also match all-time lows." A piece at Forbes on-line comes to a different conclusion, saying Pew failed to define its terms properly by lumping the wild hodgepodge of "media" in with your local TV newscast and daily fish wrapper. "In other words, if you consider Glenn Beck's tirades journalism, or get your news from posts on Hamsterdance.com, they were lumped in with your opinions about The New York Times." Fair enough - maybe. The facts are that traditional sources of news - local and national papers and network evening news programs, for example - are not nearly as relied upon as information sources as they were just a few years ago. Part of the reason, I suspect, is confidence and perhaps even more importantly relevance. Here's a fearless prediction: in a bid to survive, more and more newspapers will follow the direction of the cable channels and offer up a "news product" with a distinct point of view. The business model will be to further fragment the market in the interest of talking to the audience that wants its "news" to reaffirm its perspective rather than challenge any assumptions. Look for the confidence numbers to continue to decline.

Media Odds and Ends

Mark Trahant: Health Care Discussion too Narrow Thoughtful commentary from Fort Hall, Idaho native Mark Trahant on the current health care debate. Trahant writes in Indian Country Today. Trahant, the former editorial page editor of the Seattle P-I, is serving a stint as a Kaiser Media Fellow assessing the Indian Health Service and what it can tell us about the current controversy. Tribune Soft on Cubs? Has the Chicago Tribune, long the owner of the city's National League baseball club, always taken it easy on the Cubs? Nah...it is merely perception according to a piece on the Tribune sports page. Right. Still, the Cubbies' new ownership removes the stigma that baseball coverage of the northsiders always slighted the White Sox on the Second City's southside. Favorable coverage or not, the Cubs are still wallowing in a 100-plus year World Series drought and the 2009 post-season is looking more and more, well, doubtful. As they say: "Anyone can have a bad century." There is even a website. Times Picks on J.C. Penney My blood runs cold this time of year as I remember the dread I would feel as my mother hustled me off to J.C. Penney to acquire a new season of "school clothes." I hated the whole experience, not least because mom's ideas about "new" fashion never seemed to be on the same page with mine. When I was growing up, however, it was pretty much a trip to Penney's or ordering from the Montgomery Ward catalog. The New York Times found out that the James Cash Penney's stores - the first was in Kemmerer, Wyoming - still enjoys some brand loyalty. The Times "reviewed" the new store in Manhattan and got lots of push back for a pretty snarky piece by a fashion reviewer. Executive Editor Bill Keller even saying, as reported by the Times' Public Editor, that he wished the story hadn't run. His mother shopped at Penney's, too. Do you think all this will serve to re-enforce the notion that the Times is out of touch with middle America? And, finally... I was pleased to be asked recently by the Idaho Press Club to pen a piece for the venerable organization's newsletter. The experience certainly dated me, however. I served as president of the Club in 1978. We hardly had color TV in those days.

Lessons From Obama Online

"Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency" - Wired, November 4, 2009 A fascinating new report from two environmentally oriented foundations - Brainerd and Wilberforce - slices and dices the Obama For America online campaign of last year and offers some interesting conclusions not entirely in keeping with the media hype. You can access the report - Online Tactics & Success - An examination of the Obama For America New Media Campaign - here. The 42-page analysis concludes that, while the Obama team did a remarkable job utilizing email and the web in the 2008 campaign, the online success had more to do with the candidate than the technology. "The energy and enthusiasm of Obama supporters was unprecedented in modern elections," the report says, allowing the new media team the daily - or hourly - ability to push a great "product." The foundations commissioned the analysis in order to learn what lessons non-profits should take away from the Obama campaign, but there is something here for everyone interested in how the Internet is remaking communication. Like much of the rest of Obama's historic march to the White House, the brilliance of the online campaign was in the quality of its execution. The report's authors highlight seven key findings.

1. Discipline: Develop best practices and stick with them. "ONLY send content that you know your supports will value." And, have the discipline "to stay ON message."
2. The Right People: Obama campaign manager David Plouffe saw to it that the new media effort wasn't organized as part of communications or finance, but as a stand alone part of the campaign. He then recruited top people from CNN, Google and Madison Avenue to staff what became an 81 person unit.
3. Spotlight on Supporters: "The campaign made a concerted and deliberate effort to keep the spotlight on the people who supported Obama, and not just on the candidate."
4. Nimbleness: "The campaign was able to turn on a dime and launch a fundraising email within hours of [Sarah] Palin's speech" criticizing "community organizers." The email generated $11 million in contributions in a single day.
5. Authenticity: "OFA managed to do something unique - share real, inside campaign information with its supporters, while making that information accessible and meaningful. Plouffe said: "Nothing is more important than authenticity. People have very sensitive bullshit-o-meters."
6. Content Matters: "From top notch emails, to 1,800 videos, to amazing graphic design, the new media team demonstrated a serious focus on content."
7. Data-Driven Culture: "More than any campaign in history, OFA was a data-driven operation." The campaign created a six-person analytics team and tested and measured every aspect of the online program. "Entire projects were scrapped because the data showed they were not effective."

The Brainerd/Wilberforce report offers this observation underscoring the essential requirement of any successful campaign - skillful execution:

"Fundamentally, the most successful elements of OFA's new media program were not new. OFA's new media team simply executed the same core strategies than many nonprofits have used for years - but they did so flawlessly."

Hewitt and the Prince of Darkness

What Does This Tell Us?

Perhaps more than anyone, Don Hewitt, the CBS News executive who died this week, invented the idea of television news. Hewitt staged the Kennedy-Nixon debates, produced the early years of Walter Cronkite's expanded 30 minute nightly broadcast, and invented "60 Minutes."

I happened to be home nursing a nasty summer cold the day the TV news pioneer's death was announced. I couldn't help thinking as I watched (which I rarely do) the continuous loop of nasty health care hearings, celebrity gossip and talking head wisdom that passes for news on cable television that little of that content has much to do with the kind of television Don Hewitt pioneered at CBS.

The irony was palpable when a cable anchor, more at home presiding over a verbal slugfest than a eulogy for a television pioneer, waxed eloquently about Hewitt's role in the development of the medium.

More irony in the nearly simultaneous passing of columnist Robert "The Prince of Darkness" Novak. With his long-time partner Roland Evans, Novak carved out an early reputation as a tough, well-sourced Washington reporter who broke big stories and stepped on big toes. The rise of cable talking head shows, the type of "news" program that places a premium on opinion (most of it blindly partisan) as opposed to real reporting, gave Novak a new audience. He seemed to relish being cast in the role of the gloomy disher of usually outraged opinion.

Still, with all his years of Washington experience, I often found myself wishing for a just little nuance, a bit of dispassionate insight from one with obviously so much depth. But, that's hoping for too much from cable and from those who play a role on cable.

We all know the news business, and television news included, continues in a steep, deep decline. The reasons are many, no doubt, including the unbelievable rise of the "new media" thanks to the Internet. I'm from the old school, however, and still want to believe real content - not just overheated opinion in the guise of entertainment - still matters.

Don Hewitt knew something about news and also something about entertainment. With "60 Minutes" he skillfully and very lucratively combined the two. Bob Novak was a good reporter who adapted skillfully and lucratively to the strictures of cable talking head shows, but what he mostly did on the tube had little to do with news.

Both these old news hands had a role, I think, in the continuing evolution of they way we gain information, particularly political information. Stay tuned for the next chapter. I am not an optimist.

I am confident someone will become the next Novak. The "expert," opinionated talking heads are a dime a dozen these days. I do wonder if there will ever be another Hewitt or worse, perhaps, if anyone really cares any longer about his kind of television.

Wheeler Center Plans Montana Media Conference

By the way, the good folks at the Burton K. Wheeler Center at Montana State University is planning a conference on Montana media issues this fall. "Failure to Inform:" Is There a Looming Media Crisis in Montana? is scheduled for Missoula September 30 and October 1. Sounds like a very timely gathering.