Pinstriped Populist?

March 11, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under American Politics, News media | Leave a Comment 

Jennifer Rubin describes the irony of one journalist’s characterization of CNBC commentator and potentional Sen. Dodd challenger Larry Kudlow:

Nate Silver, in discussing the 2010 Connecticut senate race, dubs CNBC commentator and former Reagan advisor Larry Kudlow a “populist icon” (h/t Glenn Reynolds). Populist icon? This is a guy who talks about the inverted yield curve, waxes lyrical about the M-2, and wears some mighty expensive suits and silk ties. Aren’t populists anti-intellectuals looking out for other anti-intellectuals? The Left really has to get its stereotypes straight.

Nothing Succeeds Like Success

March 10, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Michelle Obama, News media | 1 Comment 

Political Punch notices a shift to soft focus on the cover of The New Yorker.  

Remember when the New Yorker magazine depicted Michelle Obama as fist bumping militant, with an AK-47 on her back? That summer cover generated a lot of critical buzz, but oh how times have changed.

 

The magazine’s new issue, out next week, features a “runway” first lady — strutting the catwalk in three outfits — surprisingly with sleeves.

Inside, the magazine features a short article entitled “Baring Arms,” focusing on the first lady’s sleeveless fashion, accompanied by a picture of her favored designers Jason Wu and Thakoon Panichgul wrapped in an American flag.

Lately, the first lady seems to be the Cover Girl-in-Chief. She’s graced recent covers of Vogue, People and in a first, will share the cover of Oprah Winfrey’s O Magazine with the media mogul herself.

Grammy winner and actress Alicia Keys is featured inside Glamour magazine, dressed as Mrs. Obama, complete with Malia and Sasha look-alikes.

Of course, fair’s fair — and the candidate’s wife is now First Lady, which is a very different gig. 

In that department, while some observers are clearly head over heels and view the First Lady as Joan of Arc with an adorable family, others are decidedly unconvinced and cast her in the unflattering role of Lady Macbeth with biceps.

A President’s Proud Legacy

March 7, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Comedy, News media | Leave a Comment 

On NPR’s weekly comedy —at least they claim it’s comedy— news-based quiz show Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, the final segment is a round robin of the panelists making humorous predictions about the future.

Today’s edition featured WaPo’s Roxanne Roberts making this prediction about this week’s topic: What will be the next scandal to rock reality TV?

Bill Clinton withdraws from the new season of The Bachelor saying he didn’t realize marriage made him ineligible for the show.

The audience roared laughter before it broke into applause.  On NPR.  Not EIB.  NPR.

Another Classic Forsyth Phoner

March 6, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under International Affairs, News media | Leave a Comment 

I’ve already linked to BBC radio’s interview with thriller writer Frederick Forsyth about his fortuitous arrival on the scene in Bissau on the night of the coup there. (I say fortuitous advisedly, because if Mr. Forsyth insists one more time that his arrival was completely concidental, it will be time to start looking into that particular subject.)

On Wednesday he was back on the air, this time being interviewed by anchor Lisa Mullins on NPR’s The World.  Ms. Mullins has absorbed Public Radio’s brand of humorless reverence where the third world is concerned; after a couple of minutes on the phone with the worldly and loquacious Mr. Forsyth, she is clearly an NPR deer caught in his exceedingly good-natured headlight. The brief segment thus manages to be both informative and fun.  She sounds greatly relieved when the end is in sight; for my taste, it was over far too soon.

You can hear this classic NPR moment of ships passing in the night

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Channel Of Opposition

March 6, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under News media | Leave a Comment 

The LA Times has an interesting profile of Glenn Beck and how Fox News is staking out its position as opposition media, a decision that is proving fruitful for ratings:

Before Glenn Beck started his new show on Fox News in January, he sat down with Roger Ailes, the network’s chief executive, to make sure they were on the same page.

“I wanted to meet with Roger and tell him, ‘You may not want to put me on the air. I believe we are in dire trouble, and I will never shut up,’ ” said the conservative radio host.

But before Beck could say anything, Ailes shared a message of his own: The country faced tough times, he said, and Fox News was one of the only news outlets willing to challenge the new administration.

“I see this as the Alamo,” Ailes said, according to Beck. “If I just had somebody who was willing to sit on the other side of the camera until the last shot is fired, we’d be fine.”

That couldn’t have suited Beck more. In making the jump to the top-rated cable news channel from HLN, where he had a show for two years, he hoped to alert more people to one of his consuming fears: that the government’s handling of the economic crisis is ushering in an era of socialism.

“Look in your rear-view mirror; we just passed France,” he said. “I think our country is on the verge of disintegration.”

Beck’s indignant critiques of the Obama administration and gloomy outlook on the nation’s financial health have found near-instant resonance. His eponymous 2 p.m. PST program averaged nearly 2.2 million viewers last month — double the number the time slot attracted the previous February and a remarkable amount for the afternoon. That made “Glenn Beck” the third most-watched program in all of cable news for the month, after Bill O’Reilly’s and Sean Hannity’s evening shows.

“It Made A Big Difference”

March 2, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Afghanistan, International Affairs, Military, News media | Leave a Comment 

On NBC’s Meet The Press yesterday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates emphasized the threat of sanctuaries along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border:

“After all, 20 years ago I was on the other side of that border as deputy director of the CIA, fighting the Soviets,” Gates said, referring to the Central Intelligence Agency. “And we had the safe haven in Pakistan, and let me tell you, it made a big difference.”

Consequentially, a 17,000 troop surge in the region is only a partial down payment as Taliban militants are gaining ground since they were appeased by the Pakistani government after seizing the bordering Swat Valley, and now that Iran is becoming a key weapon supplier in Western Afghanistan.

A troop surge is also essential in developing the hearts and minds game and to control critical communication outflows. The Washington Post reported today that the U.S. Army is being challenged greatly in this department. While gaining tactical victories in the smaller battles, Taliban and al-Qaeda operatives are effective in disseminating propaganda and misinformation about U.S. troop efforts and their relationship with local civilian populations:

“We are afraid of the Taliban, but we are more afraid of the Americans now,” said Abdul Ghaffar, a truck driver in the raided village. “The foreign forces are killing innocent people. We don’t want them in Afghanistan. If they stay, one day we will stand against them, just like we stood against the Russians.”

Tactically, the U.S.-led night raid in the village of Bagh-i-Soltan was a success. U.S. military officials said the dead man and an accomplice now in custody were bombmakers linked to recent insurgent attacks. They said that they had tracked the men for days and that one was holding an assault rifle when they shot him.

Strategically, however, the incident was a disaster. Its most incriminating version — colored by villagers’ grief and anger, possibly twisted by Taliban propaganda and magnified by the growing influence of independent Afghan TV — spread far faster than U.S. authorities could even attempt to counter.

Though the terrain is more difficult, the people more dispersed, less literate, tribally inclined and less inclined to be civic minded, here is where “lessons learned” in Iraq plays out. After U.S. forces routed insurgents in Fallujah in 2004, journalists camped out at local hospitals rolled their cameras illustrating the death and despair of Iraqi women and children caught in the cross fire (despite most of the patients being military age males). The result was a media multiplier effect, allowing the insurgents to control the war narrative to their advantage. Azriel Peskowitz detailed the Fallujah case study in his paper at Small Wars Journal:

English language reportage naturally concentrated on wounded women and children. Unsurprisingly, it failed to show the majority of wounded were military age males, or speculate anything other than them being innocent bystanders. The Arab language broadcasts knowingly and deliberately referred to the dead as “martyrs”, exploiting all the moral cachet the term holds to Muslims. On top of that, the local doctors, several of whom openly identified with the insurgency itself, essentially invited Al Jazeerah in. As such, the journalists essentially acted as mouth pieces for the local insurgency. Themes that repeatedly appeared included the Coalition using excessive force10, the insurgency being locals defending their home, and the casualties being overwhelmingly civilian and caused solely by Coalition fire. The Internet came into play as carefully selected photos and tidbits of rumor started appearing not just on pro-insurgent websites, but on large numbers of left wing and anti-war websites in the west.

Peskowitz continues to explain that U.S. commanders stepped up efforts to control media access to the battlefield unless they were embedded with U.S. troops, and to utilize the application of new media as part of U.S. strategy. COIN expert and Gen. Petraeus advisor David Kilcullen says it will continue to prove lucrative on a rapidly evolving battlefield thats dimensions transcend conventional military operations to the political:

we made extensive use of sites like YouTube in the information battle. This required special approval due to the limitations imposed by the Smith-Mundt Act, but MNF-I (including under General Casey in 2006) worked diligently with force lawyers and DoD to gain approval, and then launched the MNF-I Youtube channel in 2007. This focused on showing the enemy as they really were — brutal, incompetent, anti-Islamic thugs who abused the population — and on showing them in a ridiculous or unheroic light (not real hard!). This reversed a situation which had existed, wherein the enemy were all over us on the blogs and networking sites, but we had failed to hit back effectively. 

Even in a desolate Afghanistan, setbacks in the propaganda war can be reversed. But a necessary condition for both the real and virtual world is a heavy and dispersed coalition presence. The sufficient condition is how we best utilize them. It will make a big difference.

ABC’s Jake Tapper

March 2, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, News media | Leave a Comment 

Howard Kurtz has an interesting profile of ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper in today’s WaPo.

Tapper’s blog Political Punch has become increasingly less punchy as his media star has risen, but it’s still worth checking out.

The general consensus is that, within the spectrum of ABC News, Tapper is the designated Donaldson.  While his style has sometimes veered between aggressive and abrasive, he says that he is learning the benefits of moderation. He feels he unleashed unnecessary attitude in his recent “confrontation” with White House press secretary Gibbs.

My favorite quote comes from the Secretary of State — in which true words are spoken in jest:

Politicians enjoy poking him back. When Tapper recently bumped into Hillary Clinton and asked which of her titles over the years was her favorite, she said, “I prefer any of them to what we call you when you’re not around.”

It Wasn’t Fit To Print (At Least On Page One)

February 21, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under News media, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

The supreme and all-powerful in-house arbiter of journalistic practice and ethics at the New York Times, the paper’s “public editor,” has issued his report on its recent story about Professor Stanley Kutler, former White House counsel John Dean, and the Watergate tapes. While copies of the full text are bouncing around the Internet, the History News Network offers this excerpt pending the article’s publication in tomorrow’s editions:

I think The Times blew the dispute out of proportion with front-page play, allowed an attack on a respected historian’s integrity without evidence to support it and left readers to wonder if there was anything here that would change our understanding of the scandal that ended Nixon’s presidency.

Clark Hoyt, author of the critique, believes that while Kutler’s published transcripts of March 1973 Watergate conversations contained errors, there’s no reason to believe they were intentional.

I raised some concerns of my own about the way Kutler edited a July 1972 conversation that I am certain are being studied carefully not only at the Times but in newsrooms around the world.

37 & 16

February 12, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under News media, Nixon Administration, Richard Nixon, Vietnam | 1 Comment 

On The Caucus blog in today’s New York Times, political reporter Katharine Q. Seelye has an interesting post about President Obama’s intense feeling of connection with Abraham Lincoln and the ways in which he is expressing it publicly.

The piece begins with a general set up:

Barack Obama is not the first president to feel a kinship with Abraham Lincoln. Nixon made at least one midnight visit to the Lincoln Memorial for a talk with the great man’s statue. Teddy Roosevelt wore a ring that was made from a lock of Lincoln’s hair. Franklin Roosevelt hired Robert Sherwood, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, “Abe Lincoln in Illinois,” as his speechwriter.

I know it’s possible to be too literal by half, but I can’t quite figure out what effect Ms. Seelye —whose writing is usually savvy, experienced, and stylish, and who certainly strives to be accurate— is going for here.

The point of her post is the unusual degree of  the new President’s Lincolnphilia.  And the point of the opening paragraph is to establish that it is the degree of its intensity, rather than in the sense of the connection with the Great Emancipator, that Mr. Obama is different from some of his predecessors.

So she gives the three examples —including interesting ones about TR and FDR— but leads with one about RN that is unnecessarily untrue. Because, far from being mystical or weird  —which are the impressions she leaves by saying the purpose was to “talk with the great man’s statue”— RN’s intention was both worldly and specific.

Nor is the truth hard to find.  For example, Wikipedia gets it right:

On May 9, 1970, President Richard Nixon had a middle-of-the-night impromptu, brief meeting with protesters preparing to march against the Vietnam War just days after the Kent State shootings.

And, in fact, the purpose for RN’s visit to the Memorial that morning was both poignant and profound.

Time magazine’s account —in the issue of 18 May 1970— was more on target:

Before dawn the next morning, Nixon impulsively wakened his valet and set off with a clutch of Secret Service men for the Lincoln Memorial, where he talked for an hour with a group of drowsy but astonished demonstrators. His discussion rambled over the sights of the world that he had seen — Mexico City, the Moscow ballet, the cities of India. When the conversation turned to the war, Nixon told the students: “I know you think we are a bunch of so and so’s.” He said to them, the President recalled Chamberlain was the greatest man living and that Winston Churchill was a madman. It was not until years later that I realized that Churchill was right.” He confessed afterwards: “I doubt if that got over.”

Before he left, Nixon said: “I know you want to get the war over. Sure you came here to demonstrate and shout your slogans on the ellipse. That’s all right. Just keep it peaceful. Have a good time in Washington, and don’t go away bitter.”

RN considered the Lincoln Memorial visit sufficiently important —and sufficiently misunderstood— to devote eight pages to it in RN (pp. 459-466); he quotes extensively from a memorandum he wrote describing the events and his intentions.  It is also discussed by Bud Krogh in his book Integrity.

Ms. Seelye’s erroneous throw away line is curiously misjudged and —in the second sentence of what  is clearly intended to be a serious piece of writing— unfortunately misplaced.

Maybe He Should Have Tried Michael P.

February 12, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Media, News media, Sarah Palin, Terrorism | Leave a Comment 

CNN reports that former Weather Underground leader/education professor/2008 campaign albatross Bill Ayers told the New York Times, in an article to appear in its Sunday magazine, that he wrote to Alaska Governor and former vice-presidential candidate  Sarah Palin not long after Election Day:

“I suggested that we have a talk show together called ‘Pallin’ Around With Sarah and Bill.’ I haven’t heard back.”

Letter From The Editor

February 9, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 3 Comments 

This afternoon the History News Network site published a statement by Robert A. Schneider, professor of European history at Indiana University and the editor of the American Historical Review.   Regular TNN readers will recall that the AHR is the journal to which Peter D. Klingman sent a submission (as Professor Schneider calls it, taking issue with its having been described as an “article” in its unpublished state) concerning the fashion in which Stanley I. Kutler of the University of Wisconsin transcribed White House tape conversations for his book Abuse Of Power.  The Klingman submission – rejected by the AHR late last week – and the Kutler transcripts were the subject of an article by Patricia Cohen in the Feb. 1 New York Times.

Professor Schneider indicates that he’s rather unhappy that the article appeared at all; he is also dismayed that the contents of the AHR’s letter of rejection were described in a subsequent Times article and reproduced in facsimile at the HNN site (until replaced, at his request, by a post quoting the letter).  He remarks that the controversy (especially in online forums) that ensued as a result of Ms. Cohen’s article “has been characterized by journalistic impetuousness, personal vindictiveness, petty-mindedness, unwarranted inferences, and a dearth of decorum.”

What Professor Schneider especially objects to are what he regards as Mr. Klingman’s “efforts at self-promotion.”  He refers to emails sent by Mr. Klingman after the submission of his essay, which happened on Jan 19 of this year.  Four days later, the historian sent an email to Professor Schneider asking if the fact that the American Historical Association (the publisher of the AHR) was a co-plaintiff with Professor Kutler in a lawsuit regarding former Vice President Cheney’s records would “present a conflict of interest for you, regarding the publication of my article in the AHR.” 

On the day after the publication of the Times article, Professor Schneider says, he received another email from Mr. Klingman stating that he had not sent Ms. Cohen a copy of his submission to the journal.  He continues: “This was strange indeed as [Mr. Klingman], or a surrogate, could be the only source as it certainly did not come from the AHR.“ 

It’s hard to tell if the professor is saying that Ms. Cohen was given a copy of “Abuse Of Power: A Review And Inquiry Into Stanley Kutler’s Editing Of The Nixon Tapes,” as Mr. Klingman’s submission was titled.  Her article does not quote from the submission and, from the way in which its contents are described, it seems more likely that they were summarized to her by someone.  There is no indication in the article that she spoke directly with Mr. Klingman.  HNN editor Rick Shenkman’s remarkable investigation into the origins of the Times article states that Ms. Cohen’s interest in the submission was stirred when she was contacted by one “Mr. Y,” identified as the author of a very recently published book in which transcripts from the Nixon tapes appear.  It may have been this person, or Silent Coup co-author Len Colodny, with whom Mr. Y was in touch, who told her about Mr. Klingman’s work.

Professor Schneider also says that Mr. Klingman, in the Feb. 2 email, stated that if he did not hear from the AHR about his submission within 48 hours, he would “assume, because of a conflict of interest, you can not make a decision [to accept the submission] and I will withdraw at the time the article for your consideration.”  Now, if the statement quoted is what Mr. Klingman wrote, it does sound quite high-handed.  The AHR isn’t a newsweekly or a website, and would certainly seem entitled to take its time in examining a submission, especially one focusing on a subject decades in the past.  Mr. Klingman, in the last week, made a brief and slightly Delphic comment on the controversy at The Daily Beast, replying to John Dean’s post dismissing the Times article and Professor Kutler’s critics.  One wonders if he will be heard from before long at HNN.  In any event, it seems unlikely that this controversy will go away very soon.

The “Abuse Of Power” Controversy Goes On

February 7, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon Administration figures, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | 1 Comment 

It has been a week since the New York Times published Patricia Cohen’s article about an article which historian Peter D. Klingman submitted to the American Historical Review arguing that University of Wisconsin Professor Stanley I. Kutler’s book of Watergate tape transcripts, Abuse Of Power, was not only filled with errors, but included several passages in which portions of different conversations, taking place at different times in a single day, where presented as if they were a single conversation.  And it has been a day or so since the Review declined to publish Klingman’s article on the somewhat diplomatic grounds that it was too short and that its focus was too limited for a journal of the Review’s nature.

However, the controversy which the Times article stirred on several history-themed websites and a number of blogs continues apace.  The Baltimore Sun, for example, has never been noted for its fervent defense of President Nixon’s reputation, but at the paper’s website today Jay Hancock delivers an incisive critique of John Dean’s furious attack on his and Professor Kutler’s critics in The Daily Beast. Among Hancock’s observations:

Here’s what I found to be the rant’s biggest howler:

“Most journalists would consider an unpublished submission even less credible than a complaint filed in a lawsuit (since lawyers can be disbarred for false and frivolous complaints), and scrupulous journalists only report on legal complaints after they have been litigated and tested.”

I guess that’s why Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whom Dean seems to revere, waited until Nixon had been arrested, charged and tried by a jury of his peers before they wrote their Watergate stories. No journalist waits, or should wait, before reporting an important lawsuit or compelling evidence of wrongdoing. Or an interesting paper submitted to U.S. history’s most important journal.

In the comments section of Hancock’s post Aaron Goldstein remarks:

John Dean says a lot of nutty things. During an appearance in Boston back in September 2007 while promoting his last book he said that President Bush would try to find a way to stay in office after January 20, 2009.

One of the less well-thought-out (and less well-researched) commentaries on the Abuse Of Power rhubarb came from Jeffrey Toobin, longtime legal correspondent for The NewYorker and frequent CNN commentator.  In an item at his magazine’s site called “Bad Buff, Good Buff,” Toobin mused that he was not bothered by the “lack of formal credentials” which he says is often the case with “buffs” who “immerse themselves in public controversies and develop expertise independent of journalistic or academic institutions.”

Ah, here’s some news for Mr. Toobin: Peter D. Klingman is not lacking in credentials; he has a Ph.D in his subject and his thesis was not only published by the University Presses of Florida, but has been cited by historians as eminent as John Hope Franklin, William E. Leuchtenberg, and even that doyen of leftist historical studies Eric Foner.  And, indeed, he continued to publish in scholarly journals in the last 30 years.  Given this record, it seems almost churlish to note that while Mr. Toobin’s legal career focused on criminal cases and, as far as I know, had nothing to do with the ins and outs of electoral law and the constitutional questions associated with it, that did not prevent him from writing a book about the developments between Election Day 2000 and the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore.

Finally I should mention that Frederick Graboske, the National Archives expert on the Nixon recordings whose criticisms of Professor Kutler’s approach to transcription were the meatiest quotes in the first Times article, has two comments appended to the defense of the professor by Princeton University’s Stan Katz at the Chronicle Of Higher Education’s site. In the first, he further develops the argument he made to the Times’s reporter; in the second, he offers to debate Professor Katz regarding the Abuse Of Power issue in the latter’s classroom.  Now if that were to come about, it would be higher education at its finest.

(I should also point out that frequent TNN commenter Maarja Krusten contributes illuminating observations in the comments sections of several of the sites and blogs discussing this controversy.)

The Ginsburg Slam, Or Meeting The Media

February 4, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, News media, Obama administration, Obama family, Presidents, Public Opinion, Richard Nixon, TV News Personalities, U.S. History, economy | Leave a Comment 

Eleven years and three days ago, when the nation was ten days into the trauma that was l’affaire [Monica] Lewinsky (or Lewinski, as the late Richard Grenier initially spelled her name in his Washington Times column), the personal attorney of the errant intern, William H. Ginsburg, came to the nation’s capital and introduced a new term into the language of broadcasting.

All four major broadcast networks and CNN frantically wanted to get Mr. Ginsburg on the air,  with whatever revelations he might have about his client’s past deeds or future plans.  And he happily obliged them.  Between 9 am and noon EST that first of February 1998, he appeared on Fox News Sunday, Meet The Press, Face The Nation, This Week, and Late Edition — not revealing very much, but clearly enjoying the attention he’d garnered for being the keeper of the secrets of the minx sphinx in the Watergate.

The punditocracy was duly impressed, and “a full Ginsburg” afterwards became the chosen phrase to describe one who had managed to appear on the five Sunday morning talking-heads shows on the same day.  For more than two years, Mr. Ginsburg remained the only person who had accomplished this.

Then in July 2000, future Vice President Dick Cheney, shortly after his selection by then-Texas Governor George W. Bush, became the second to do so.  Four years passed, and then a few weeks before Election Day 2004, Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards blessed the airwaves with five different views of the most famous political coiffure before the Age of Blagojevich.

In September of the following year, Homeland Security Secretary Michael  Chertoff managed the elusive full Ginsburg, and in September 2007, Sen. Hillary Clinton, in her final months as President-presumptive, did the same — the only woman to undertake the feat so far, and the last person to date.

In this brave new world, the rules have changed a little.  Last month Late Edition was replaced on CNN by State Of The Union, which concludes one hour after its predecessor did, at 1 pm. Therefore, a full Ginsburg, from now on, will not quite be the heroic achievement it once was.

And another fact which has diminished the luster of the full Ginsburg was that, until now, no sitting President had ever undertaken anything resembling it.  But a variation on the old full G – which I’ll call the Ginsburg Slam – has proven to be yet another in the ever-growing list of the dubious achievements of the Obama Administration.

A little over forty-eight hours ago, as former Senator Tom Daschle sweated before a Senate committee not quite satisfied with his account of how he failed to pay taxes in timely fashion for the services of a limo and driver, the White House was still assuring one and all that no matter what, the President was solidly behind his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services.

But at 11 am yesterday morning Nancy Killefer, Obama’s choice for the newly-minted post of “Chief Performance Officer,” announced that she was removing herself from consideration because of her own tax troubles, and about two hours later Daschle did the same.  The President and his advisors decided that damage control was the order of the day.  How to handle it?

It would seem that the most logical way to approach the problem would be for President Obama to simply stroll into the White House press room after arranging for a few minutes of airtime, inform the assembled reporters and the nation that he regretted that the decisions of Killefer and Daschle had to be made, wish them well, take no questions, and return to the Oval Office and more consequential tasks.

Instead, he arranged for face-to-face conversations with ABC’s Charles Gibson, CBS’s Katie Couric, NBC’s Brian Williams, CNN’s Anderson Cooper (take that, Lou) and Fox’s Chris Wallace, informing each of them by turn, and at some length, that he had Screwed Up and was Really Sorry.  The mea culpas, taken together (or indeed separately), do not suggest Camelot redux.  After all, when John F. Kennedy botched the Bay of Pigs invasion, he promptly took the blame for it — once – and was rewarded with the highest approval rating achieved by a President before George W. Bush topped him in the weeks after 9/11.

Instead, Obama’s use of several hours of President Time (time that could be employed to work on the economy, or terrorism, or finally choosing a pup for Malia and Sasha, or something) to repeat his regrets five times over and ask for forgiveness isn’t an approach calculated to impress our adversaries abroad, whether Hugo Chavez or Kim Jong Il or a nameless thug in western Iraq, that the Chief Executive is brimming with determination or resolve.   Rather, it brings to mind some of the unhappier moments of the Carter era.  You have to wonder what’s going to happen when the killer rabbit shows up.

The way in which the Daschle debacle was handled suggests that President Obama has a preoccupation with winning over the media that makes Lyndon Johnson’s agonies over each new Scotty Reston or Walter Lippmann column look almost, well, Nixonian.  It’s 180 degrees removed from the approach of George W. Bush, who may well be concerned now with what the historians will write but, when in office, reasoned that if he did the occasional sit-down with Brit Hume or Tony Snow or Tim Russert, then everything else would take care of itself.

One has to wonder what the future has in store.  Will MTV’s Kurt Loder or the correspondent from Disney Radio be added to the list of people to whom the President must speak whenever a bill fails to pass, or whenever he knocks over an unwary staffer on the basketball court?  It’s time for some realistic thinking about media relations in the West Wing.

In For A Dime, In For $875,000,000,000

January 28, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, News media, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

His qualifications were undeniable, and his confirmation was always a foregone conclusion.   But Timothy Geithner’s supporters were surprised by his failure to garner at least a few more floor votes.  As Al Kamen put it in his WAPO column, Mr. Geithner set “the modern indoor record for negative votes for a Treasury secretary (34).”

A lesser man might have been at least a bit chastened by this lack of confidence, and started paying especial attention to conforming his conduct to his rhetoric.  But Secretary Geithner’s attitude seems to be that it only takes one vote to win, and to the victor belongs the spoils.

USA Today reports one of his first actions in his new office:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner picked a former Goldman Sachs lobbyist as a top aide Tuesday, the same day he announced rules aimed at reducing the role of lobbyists in agency decisions.

Mark Patterson will serve as Geithner’s chief of staff at Treasury, which oversees the government’s $700 billion financial bailout program. Goldman Sachs received $10 billion of that money.

Treasury spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said Patterson “brings significant expertise to the job.” Patterson, who left the investment bank in April, signed the administration’s ethics pledge, which requires him to recuse himself from issues “directly and substantially related to my former employer.”

Melanie Sloan, executive director of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said President Obama was retreating from his own ethics rules barring lobbyists from working on the issues they lobbied about during the previous two years. “It makes it appear that they are saying one thing and doing another,” she said.

Before going to Goldman Sachs, Mr. Patterson was a Senate staffer: Minority Leader Tom Daschle’s policy director, Pat Moynihan’s aide, and Finance Commmittee staff director and chief counsel.  A simple Google produces the info that he contributed in 2007 and 2008 to the Chris Dodd for President campaign; and in 2008 to Harry Reid for Senate and Hillary Clinton For POTUS.

Many observers were surprised by New York Times’ surprisingly stern treatment both of Nominee Geithner’s dodgy tax history and his jerrybuilt defense.

As much as Mr. Obama and his team may wish it, however, the disclosures cannot be dismissed so easily, or papered over. The just-the-facts report of Mr. Geithner’s tax transgressions, compiled and released by the Senate Finance Committee, paints a picture of noncompliance that is considerably more disturbing than his supporters are acknowledging.

While this may just have been the expression of sensible skepticism, the paper may also have known that a story about its own creative tax avoidance exertions was about to hit the fan.

Fortune Senior Editor-at-Large Allan Sloan detailed it in WAPO his column:

The deal gives Times Co. the right to pay 3 percent of its 14.053 percent interest bill by giving its lenders new securities rather than cash. That by itself would normally make the issue a HYDO, according to tax expert Robert Willens.

There’s a limit on HYDO tax deductions that Willens says is designed to make sure that companies issuing high-yield securities can’t deduct more in interest than they pay in cash. That was once a common tax dodge.

Under those rules, Willens estimates that the Times Co. would be able to deduct only slightly more than half its annual interest, call it $18 million. That means that $17 million of interest — worth about $6.8 million of tax savings a year to the Times Co., assuming a federal, state and local income tax rate of 40 percent — would normally not be deductible.

But guess what? The company says that in 5 1/2 years, it will fork over enough cash to cover non-cash interest costs that it accrued for tax purposes. For amazingly complicated reasons, this payment would get the company off the HYDO hook and makes all the interest on these borrowings tax deductible.

This is the second interesting piece of tax work I’ve seen out of Times Co. in recent years. The first was in 2005, when it managed to treat its $410 million acquisition of About.com as a tax-deductible asset purchase, saving an indicated $160 million over 15 years.

Back then, I jabbed the company for minimizing its own taxes while the New York Times editorial page was campaigning against tax loopholes. But things have gotten considerably grimmer for the company the past four years, given its vaporized stock price, sharp dividend cut, and firings and buyouts. The company’s survival as a high-grade, independent journalistic entity — something I value — is no longer assured.

So I won’t carry on about Times Co.’s tax game here, which Willens says is strictly routine. “It’s the common way around the HYDO problem,” he told me. But I thought “HYDO Go Seek” was something that you ought to know about. And now, you do.

I don’t for a minute pretend that I understand most of this (and these were the parts of the story I could at least basically follow).  But I get the gist — and I figure that if it’s egregious enough to reach Fortune and the Washington Post it must be pretty darned bad.   But when it reaches NPR —NPR!— it must be absolutely horrendous.

Treviño For The Grey Lady

January 27, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under News media | Leave a Comment 

Instapundit cites a nomination for TNN contributor Joshua Treviño to replace Bill Kristol as conservative columnist at the New York Times:

All this is prelude to my own suggestion to replace Kristol, of course. I am of course biased because he is my friend, but I think that Joshua Treviño meets and exceeds the criteria above and would in fact be the ideal advocate for the conservative movement in the Obama era. Josh was a speechwriter for the Bush Administration, served in the Army, and had a brief stint at the Pacific Research Institute, a mid-level conservative think tank. Josh was one of the original conservative bloggers, including founding RedState.com (though no longer associated with them). He currently is running his own media consultant firm, and has had numerous media appearances on television and guest columns at National Review.

Resume aside, though, what is more important is that on the issues, Josh transcends the raw divisions of the conservative movement. He’s a contributor to Credo, the religion blog at Culture11, and is unabashedly pro-life. Josh has endorsed the Rebuild The Party 10-point plan (focused on technology innovation) and is highly active on twitter (@jstrevino). Despite his loyalty to the Republican brand, he was a conservative critic of the Bush Administration, was skeptical of Sarah Palin and Harriet Miers (to put it mildly) and (with the luxury of being a California Republican) abstained from voting for John McCain. And with respect to the Iraq war, he remains convinced it was the right thing to do, albeit poorly-executed. This places him all over the conservative v2.0 map, which is a good thing if you are looking for someone who can relate to all sides.

A Day To Remember

January 24, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Congress, Election 2008, First Ladies, George W. Bush, News media, Obama administration, Obama family, Presidents, TV News Personalities, U.S. History, White House | 2 Comments 

I have lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, since November 1997, and so have been within a twenty-minute subway ride to downtown Washington for the last three Presidential inaugurations. But I didn’t go downtown for either the 2001 or 2005 swearing-in. I was not quite up to braving the crowds, and since I was not invited to witness the event from indoors, I also was not keen on dealing with winter weather for hours.

But this year was different. Thanks to my wife Rene, we were invited to attend the inauguration as guests of a Treasury Department employee, and so, at 6 am, we awoke, met our host and some other guests, proceeded to Silver Spring’s Metro station (already phenomenally crowded at 7 am) and managed to catch a train to downtown.

We emerged at Metro Center, got breakfast, then walked to the Treasury Department’s annex, east of Lafayette Square. After going down an underground corridor, we emerged in the oldest part of the Treasury Building, constructed in the 1830s.

We then went to the Andrew Johnson Suite, got some coffee, sat down, and watched the televised proceedings for a while. This group of rooms is where the seventeenth President conducted the business of the nation from the hour that Abraham Lincoln died on April 15, 1865, until Mary Todd Lincoln moved out of the White House six weeks later.

It was here that Johnson met with his Cabinet, oversaw the concluding stages of the Civil War (such as Johnston’s surrender to Sherman), and read and listened to reports about the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth and the capture of his fellow conspirators. (I thought about this on Wednesday night when I watched a History Channel show on the search for Booth.  These shows are so much more exciting to watch when you’ve been in one or another of the locations being described and depicted.)

After a while, one of the other guests called me to the window, and I watched the limousine carrying the 43rd and 44th Presidents come down the street between Treasury and the White House’s East Wing on its way to the Capitol. That was a powerful moment.

But not quite as powerful as witnessing the swearing-in ceremony itself, with the stirring music of Aretha Franklin and John Williams (as performed by a quartet including Itzhak Perlman and Yo Yo Ma), and President Obama taking the oath of office — even a somewhat botched version that enabled my fellow Indiana native, Chief Justice John Roberts, to become the first man in history to swear in a President twice for the same term.

I watched the swearing-in on a big-screen TV set up in a hallway where nearly every President from Martin Van Buren to the present has walked sometime during his time in office. The sense of history in the making was palpable.

After another hour or so in the Treasury Building, our host told us we were to come outside and sit in the bleachers at the south end of Lafayette Square, almost directly across from the White House. So we braved the cold and proceeded to those seats. In front of us, Al Roker spoke to NBC viewers. A voice came on over the PA speakers set up on Pennsylvania Avenue. It was Charlie Brotman, who has provided commentary to the spectators at every inaugural parade since Eisenhower’s second term began in 1957.

After a wait that wasn’t especially long but seemed an eternity thanks to the cold and my decision not to wear jeans, the police motorcycles came down the street, followed by bands representing the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Coast Guard, and, finally, President and Mrs. Obama and Vice President and Mrs. Biden. We all reached for our cameras. It was as thrilling a moment as I can remember having. Then we went back to the land of crabcakes and orioles and watched the rest of the parade in the comfortable warmth of the Tastee Diner.

I was going to call this “A Week To Remember” and cover some of the other events since Sunday, but the one that comes to mind just now – Caroline Kennedy’s bizarre withdrawal from consideration for the U.S. Senate seat formerly occupied by Secretary of State Clinton – seems a bit anticlimactic after the moments I just recounted. I’ll just note that Time’s “Swampland” blog put up a very interesting timeline of how the Kennedy withdrawal went down. It clearly came as a shock to much of her family and several of them seem to have attempted to get her to change her mind at the last moment, with no luck. And then there was the embarrassing attempt by her “people” to spin the withdrawal as having happened because of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s health, which evidently annoyed him considerably.  This definitely has not been one of Camelot’s more shining moments, though perhaps it was just brief enough to be overlooked when the time comes for another Kennedy to seek office.

Alinsky’s Rules?

January 24, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Barack Obama, Congress, News media | Leave a Comment 

Radio talk show star Rush Limbaugh believes that he is being targeted by President Obama to separate Republican politicians from their voters:

There are two things going on here. One prong of the Great Unifier’s plan is to isolate elected Republicans from their voters and supporters by making the argument about me and not about his plan. He is hoping that these Republicans will also publicly denounce me and thus marginalize me. And who knows? Are ideological and philosophical ties enough to keep the GOP loyal to their voters? Meanwhile, the effort to foist all blame for this mess on the private sector continues unabated when most of the blame for this current debacle can be laid at the feet of the Congress and a couple of former presidents. And there is a strategic reason for this.

Secondly, here is a combo quote from the meeting:

“If we don’t get this done we (the Democrats) could lose seats and I could lose re-election. But we can’t let people like Rush Limbaugh stall this. That’s how things don’t get done in this town.”

To make the argument about me instead of his plan makes sense from his perspective. Obama’s plan would buy votes for the Democrat Party, in the same way FDR’s New Deal established majority power for 50 years of Democrat rule, and it would also simultaneously seriously damage any hope of future tax cuts. It would allow a majority of American voters to guarantee no taxes for themselves going forward. It would burden the private sector and put the public sector in permanent and firm control of the economy. Put simply, I believe his stimulus is aimed at re-establishing “eternal” power for the Democrat Party rather than stimulating the economy because anyone with a brain knows this is NOT how you stimulate the economy. If I can be made to serve as a distraction, then there is that much less time debating the merits of this TRILLION dollar debacle.

Obama was angry that Merrill Lynch used $1.2 million of TARP money to remodel an executive suite. Excuse me, but didn’t Merrill have to hire a decorator and contractor? Didn’t they have to buy the new furnishings? What’s the difference in that and Merrill loaning that money to a decorator, contractor and goods supplier to remodel Warren Buffet’s office? Either way, stimulus in the private sector occurs. Are we really at the point where the bad PR of Merrill getting a redecorated office in the process is reason to smear them? How much money will the Obamas spend redecorating the White House residence? Whose money will be spent? I have no problem with the Obamas redoing the place. It is tradition. 600 private jets flown by rich Democrats flew into the Inauguration. That’s fine but the auto execs using theirs is a crime? In both instances, the people on those jets arrived in Washington wanting something from Washington, not just good will.

If I can be made to serve as a distraction, then there is that much less time debating the merits of the trillion dollar debacle.

One more thing, Byron. Your publication and website have documented Obama’s ties to the teachings of Saul Alinksy while he was community organizing in Chicago. Here is Rule 13 of Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals:

“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Mad About Gibbs

January 22, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under News media, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

They’re all mad at Robert Gibbs and the press team. We’re talking the grey lady, CNN, and the wire services:

It’s been a bumpy 24 hours for Gibbs and company, as members of the White House press corps have publicly expressed frustration with an administration promising openness and transparency.

At the same time, some members of the Obama administration’s press team have signaled that they plan to shake up some of the old traditions of White House coverage, some of the longest-standing – and most jealously guarded – in town.

In recent weeks, New York Times editors complained that its White House team hadn’t gotten a sit-down with Obama during the transition, breaking an unofficial tradition whereby recent president-elects have free-wheeling exchanges with the Gray Lady before the inauguration.
In the case of the second swearing-in, however, it seemed to give reporters a chance to lay down an early marker on questioning whether Obama would live up to one of his key campaign pledges, at least when it comes to the media.

“It is ironic, the same day that the president is talking about transparency, we were not let in,” CNN’s Ed Henry said on the air Wednesday night after news of the second swearing-in broke.

Henry’s main gripe was that television reporters weren’t permitted to cover a historic moment, when Obama once again raised his right hand and took the oath before Justice John Roberts. The only images came from White House photographer Pete Souza.

Three wire services — The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse – refused to move those images, in protest of the White House’s handling of the event.

The wire services’ photographers were also denied access to photograph Obama sitting in the Oval Office on the first day, and similarly refused to move the White House approved photos.

“Sharon Stone Is In Town…A Sense Of Family”

January 19, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Barack Obama, News media, Presidents, Richard Nixon | Leave a Comment 

We knew the media would be beside themselves today and tomorrow. Allowances must be made, and distinctions as well, between worthy coverage and not so much. The Today Show ran a charming piece by Jamie Gangel about Presidential entertaining; look for President Nixon at the piano during his famous birthday party for Duke Ellington. Gangel warns Sasha and Malia to follow Amy Carter’s lead and bring a book to the parties. Unfortunately, the segment was followed by an interview with a society editor, Susan Nixon (no relation), that may have you reaching for the on-air sickness bag.

“A Man Of The Center”

January 19, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Cuba, News media, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History | Leave a Comment 

It’s starting to look more and more as if the inauguration of President-elect Obama may augur an Era of Good Feelings not seen in the United States since James Monroe left the White House in 1825. Last week, a speaker at a public library not far from Richard Nixon’s hometown of Whittier, California had some complimentary things to say about the 37th President, and these were reported in the Whittier Daily News. In that part of our nation, this may not sound especially surprising, but some TNN readers might want to brace themselves nonetheless:

Listeners and readers of journalist Robert Scheer, known for his liberal views, may find it hard to believe that he liked Richard Nixon.

But that’s what he told his audience Thursday at the Santa Fe Springs City Library during his talk about the 2008 presidential election and his latest book, “The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America.”

“Despite personal failings … Nixon was a man of the center,” Scheer said. “He was an adult.”

Yes, those words were spoken by former Los Angeles Times reporter and current San Francisco Chronicle columnist and truthdig.com editor Robert Scheer, as in the “left” of KCRW’s long-running panel show “Left, Right and Center.” (So long-running, in fact, that when it started Arianna Huffington was its “right,” a position now held by former Washington Times editor Tony Blankley.) As in the editor of the premier New Left journal Ramparts at the beginning of the Nixon Administration. As in the journalist who brought the diary of Che Guevara (the guy Benicio del Toro plays in that really long movie) to the United States from Havana and published it in Ramparts. As in a member of the editorial board of the Progressive Book Club.

Scheer’s remarks lead me to think that before Obama’s term is up, the New York Observer might actually say something good about Nixon.

The Harder They Fall

January 18, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under American Politics, News media, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

 The POTUSE visits the WAPO and the 15th Street sophisticates act —and react— like teens encountering a Jonas Brother.

Gawker achieved positively Wonketteish levels of snark the other day recounting WAPO’s media maven Howard Kurtz’s account of the President Elect’s visit to the paper on Friday.  (Which, come to think of it, makes perfect sense because Gawker was Wonkette’s progenitor and they are still stablemates.)  Mr. Obama went to meet with the editorial board, but he wandered around and schmoozed both before and after. 

Here’s Gawker’s take on Kurtz’ gloss:

Barack Obama paid a visit to the Washington Post newsroom yesterday, and our capital’s toughest reporters collectively swore to never wash that hand again. Crush on Barry! Nothing wrong with that, says Howard Kurtz.

Kurtz’s job is to explain why nothing any reporter at the Washington Post has ever done constitutes bias or a lack of professionalism of any sort. Which he does like a champ! A slimy, disingenous champ. But first Howie allows (if you read between the lines) that, yes, the majority of the WP staff would have sexually serviced Barack right there on the newsroom floor, had he asked:

    Camera phones flashed as Obama, trailed by Post Co. chief executive Donald Graham, began his stroll around the fifth-floor       newsroom’s perimeter, shaking hands and greeting nearly 200 staffers. “Where are the sportswriters?” he asked. “I want to ask about the Redskins, Nationals and Wizards.”

Ohmigod Michael Wilbon totally fainted and ran to the bathroom to compose himself. Other journalists kept their wits about them, taking the opportunity to question the world’s most powerful man:

    ”Did you like Ben’s Chili Bowl?” asked Metro reporter Theola Labbe-DeBose, referring to Obama’s recent visit to the downtown eatery.

    ”That half-smoke’s all right,” Obama said.

    Another staffer asked about the family’s dog search.

Hey, give the guy a break! He’s just trying to walk, here! When Barack had finished charming the swooning staffers he went off to charm the paper’s swooning top editors…. This is all exactly in keeping with how the Washington press corps does business, says Howie:

    ”Does the episode, which some staffers muttered was a tad embarrassing, mean the paper’s staff has a soft spot for Obama? Not really. It means that when an extremely famous and soon to be very powerful person shows up at the office, journalists act like people everywhere. They gawk.”

Oh Howie. We do when we see you!

The POTUSE with the Editorial Board; on his right the new Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli, and on his right White House correspondent Michael Fletcher.

Smell The News

January 16, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Kindle, News media | 3 Comments 

Since I got my Kindle for Kristmas in 2007, the Nixon Foundation’s copy of the New York Times has languished in my office until, after the decent interval I have decreed in the event I should for some reason choose to bestow my favor, a colleague takes it to be enjoyed by those who still read newspapers on newsprint. After all, the entire editorial content downloads to my Kindle every morning, for about $14 a month. On a handy device the size of a trade paperback, I can read it (or any one of 25 books, blogs, magazines, or other newspapers I’ve downloaded) before getting up or while having breakfast. Since Kindle news consumers pay for content, the device and ones like it seem to me to hold the key to the revitalization of the newspaper business.

Or so I believed until this morning. For whatever reason, I didn’t read the paper before coming to work. As usual, the printed Times awaited on a credenza. It asked nothing of me. It has grown used to my neglect. But this morning, across five columns (shrunken columns, since the paper got narrower a couple of years ago), was a color photo of the US Airways Airbus A320 floating in the Hudson River. The Kindle edition would’ve had the photo, but small and black and white. I’ve seen plenty of on-line photos of yesterday’s miraculous event, and it was all over the cable and broadcast news last night.

But five columns in the paper! That means something right off the bat, because usually a photo above the fold in the Times is three or maybe four columns. They invite a glance. For an experienced newspaper reader, five columns demands special attention and even wonder.

And yet the emergency landing wasn’t the lead article, according to the Times’s lights. That privileged spot was reserved for a one-column headline on the far right that read, “Senate Releases Second Portion Of Bailout Fund; A Victory For Obama; Democrats in the House Offer an $825 Billion Recovery Plan.”

And yes, I can see their point. The saving of 155 lives is a big story, and so it got five-column art plus a five-column hed over a news story and human-interest sidebar, all above the fold. Last night on TV, the plane was almost all we heard about. But while CNN and Fox News were hyperventilating, editors at the Times wanted to make sure that readers realized it may even be more important that our representatives, on the same day, took a giant step closer to spending $1.175 trillion in taxpayers’ money within weeks or even days after Jan. 20. That’s what newspapers do — they reach beyond the urgent to the important. They whisper in our ears what we need to know while other media shout what we want to hear.

Below the fold there was another dramatic photo from the Hudson, showing three women in their orange and yellow life vests in a raft floating near the stricken aircraft. The remaining articles are on Gaza (where the three-week war has resulted in 1,000 deaths), AG designate Eric Holder’s confirmation hearings, and Japan’s so-called outcasts, the buraku. That’s not a subject people will usually go looking for with their browsers and BlackBerries, not something that will make the “CBS Evening News” or the “O’Reilly Factor,” but deserving of our attention nonetheless, and available only because highly paid editorial professionals have done their work covering a world that they know better than most of us do.

Across the bottom of the page, a 12.5″ ad for a new cable TV series. I really haven’t been paying attention. For decades the Times has run classified ads on the bottom of p. 1, but I don’t remember seeing a color display ad. All power to them if it helps them stay afloat. Thumbing through the sections, I came to Weekend Arts, with a breathtaking photo above the fold of the White House (brilliantly lit thanks to Pat Nixon, who raised the money to install the lights) and looming against a royal purple sky. It’s a 16-page section on Washington during Inaugural week, with information about restaurants, historic sites, art galleries, and logistics. Reading on my Kindle, I might’ve skipped the section entirely. The paper version is someone you want to slip into your briefcase to look at later.

But what actually seduced me this morning was the paper’s odor. Do you remember the acrid and yet sweet smell of ink on newsprint? I grew up with it. My parents and godfather were newspaper people, and on Saturdays my mother would take me to her office at the Detroit Free Press or the Arizona Republic. While she worked, I’d play with the thick black copy pencils, Underwood manual typewriters, and smelly three-ply NCR paper (my mother called them “books”) reporters used to write their stories. When she had something to send down to the composing room, she’d let me roll it up and put it in the pneumatic tube.

The composing room itself, with the now long-gone Linotype machines clattering madly, was an explosion of sound and sparks. The smell of ink and paper was everywhere, and it came off my spurned newspaper this morning like pheromones. Not even a Kindle, with its lightning fast Internet access and revolutionary text pricing, can make a newspaper kid that happy.

I imagine people my age are equally nostalgic about the memory of thumbing through our Zeppelin and Stones albums even as we thumb our iPods and let the records rot in the garage. But while digital music sounds just as good as vinyl, no new medium has as yet replaced the experience of absorbing, in one evocative and intelligently-ordered and -designed package, the creative work of editors and reporters. And since that work is essential to a well-informed public and thus to freedom and democracy, we should think twice before spurning newspapers unless and until something better (if not necessarily their olfactory equivalent) comes along.

The Coming Bush Revival

January 16, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Barack Obama, Bush Administration, Iraq War, News media, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

Charles Krauthammer believes that President Bush’s rehabilitation will begin sooner than everyone thinks, thanks to the PE retaining key Bush Administration personnel as well as the fundamentals of his anti-terrorism policies. Of course it all hinges on Iraq, which will loom large in Bush’s legacy:

Obama opposed the war. But the war is all but over. What remains is an Iraq turned from aggressive, hostile power in the heart of the Middle East to an emerging democracy openly allied with the United States. No president would want to be responsible for undoing that success.

In Iraq, Bush rightly took criticism for all that went wrong — the WMD fiasco, Abu Ghraib, the descent into bloody chaos in 2005-06. Then Bush goes to Baghdad to ratify the ultimate post-surge success of that troubled campaign — the signing of a strategic partnership between the U.S. and Iraq — and ends up dodging two size-10 shoes for his pains.

Absorbing that insult was Bush’s final service on Iraq. Whatever venom the war generated is concentrated on Bush himself. By having personalized the responsibility for the awfulness of the war, Bush has done his successor a favor. Obama enters office with a strategic success on his hands — while Bush leaves the scene taking a shoe for his country.

Which is why I suspect Bush showed such equanimity during a private farewell interview at the White House a few weeks ago. He leaves behind the sinews of war, for the creation of which he has been so vilified but which will serve his successor — and his country — well over the coming years. The very continuation by Democrats of Bush’s policies will be grudging, if silent, acknowledgment of how much he got right.

In March 2003, at the beginning of the war, when I was still a ministry intern, I preached a sermon at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Tustin, California in which I said that Bush would be judged on the basis of whether, 20 years after the war had ended, we were closer to peace in a fractious region. While not exactly bloodcurdlingly pro-war, it definitely wasn’t antiwar, and many of my brothers and sisters were disappointed.

In the years since, when the war was going poorly, I’ve regretted this witness, especially because I had erred by lumping Saddam Hussein with Muslim fundamentalists. In the wake of the surge, I’ve felt better. Perhaps this shows that preachers shouldn’t talk about foreign policy or they should do it better than I did. Far more important, it reminds us that leaders sometimes have to make decisions whose consequences, for good or ill, won’t be fully clear until long after they leave office. Do we want Presidents who will only take a risk on a policy they believe is best if they can be guaranteed favorable results in the next two or four years, or in time for the opening of their Presidential libraries? (Seeing the Krauthammer column as mere partisan repositioning, Andrew Sullivan takes exception to Krauthammer’s rosy assessment of the situation in Iraq. Sullivan supported the war, too, of course, so to that extent he and Bush are in this together. Yet while Bush’s approval numbers are historically low, Sullivan just won best blog. Go figure.)

As of now, many can’t wait for George W. Bush to leave. This group may well include George W. Bush. Some, including Katie Couric, can’t bring themselves to say the word “President” when introducing him. Others wish he had communicated as openly over the last eight years as he has in the last two weeks. And yet how interesting that the Presidential transition has gone so well, a tribute to the temperaments and love of country of both men. How interesting it would be if President Obama took the same pains to keep Bush informed as President Nixon did with his predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, and especially if it became known that 44 was having the occasional private chat with 43.

Many are eager for new leadership because they think that Obama will be able to wave a magic wand and quickly repair an economy stunted by a generation of bipartisan mismanagement. Perhaps when he can’t — perhaps when he too is tested by challenges to U.S. security and interests — we’ll gain new appreciation for the complexities and ambiguities of the office. Perhaps then we’ll say to George W. Bush, as Barack Obama no doubt will on the inaugural stand next Tuesday, “Godspeed, Mr. President.”

Little Things Mean A Lot

January 16, 2009 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under Bush Administration, News media, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

Noted by Tom Shales in his critique of President Bush’s farewell address:

Although noting Bush has five more days in office before Obama is sworn in, CBS News anchor Katie Couric even prematurely deprived Bush of the traditional introduction afforded America’s chief executives when they deliver broadcast speeches or stride out to face the press (which Bush, of course, rarely did): “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.” Instead, Couric said simply, “And here he is, George W. Bush.” 

The MSM’s Faux Tourism

January 14, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Israel and Palestinians, News media | Leave a Comment 

Eric Trager at Commentary Magazine points to a New York Times report that interviews supposed locals in the West Bank who are now embracing Hamas:

Today, the New York Times’s website carries a video suggesting that anger is rising in the West Bank over the war in Gaza. And, in contrast to what I’ve previously observed in Michael Slackman’s work, the producers of this newsreel provide interviews in Arabic — as well as footage of protests — that convincingly demonstrate this anger.

But about halfway through the video, the narrator introduces another point: namely, that the war in Gaza is actually increasing support for Hamas among West Bank Palestinians. If true, this would be a very consequential finding: after all, those backing Israel — particularly the United States, Egypt, and Jordan — are counting on Israel’s ground invasion to damage Hamas, both politically and militarily.

So how does the Times go about substantiating this unsettling claim? First, it interviews Osama Zitawi, who claims that, “Everybody who doesn’t like Hamas, today is with Hamas. Everybody — even I hear from people with Fatah — they are with Hamas.” And who is Osama Zitawi, you ask. According to the Times, he’s a 50-year-old tourist from Denver. Is this standard journalistic practice – interviewing American tourists in Ramallah to illustrate Palestinian public opinion?

The video ends on an even less persuasive note – that is, if you can translate basic Arabic rally slogans. On one hand, the narrator closes by stating, “Support for Hamas is unlikely to fade so long as they’re seen as standing up for the Palestinians in Gaza.” Yet at the same time, a group of kaffiyeh-clad girls are shown chanting, “La Fatah wa la Hamas! … La Abbas wa la Haniyeh.“ If I told you that “la” means “no” and “wa” means “and” in Arabic, do you think that you could figure out whether this rally actually suggests increased support for Hamas in the West Bank, as the video claims?

Joe The Plumber Is The New Crane And Pyle

January 12, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under News media | Leave a Comment 

The MSM is gawking at the fact that Joe the plumber is now Joe the war correspondent at Pajamas TV covering Israel’s fight in Gaza. Though Joe is not claiming to be anything, according to Bob Owens,  two legendary journalists didn’t fit the pedigree during their respective times either:

Stephen Crane, the novelist and journalist best known for the Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage, covered the brief Greco-Turkish War and the Spanish-American War, somehow completing his assignments without graduating from a string of colleges. Somehow Crane muddled by, despite not possessing a great deal of historical knowledge, military insight, or specific expertise about either the conflicts he was paid to cover or those fighting in them. Perhaps he was just lucky these were short wars. Ernie Pyle worked on a much longer and wider stage than Crane, and was known for his folksy, down-home stories of regular people serving in World War II. Pyle didn’t complete his degree at Indiana University, but he didn’t let that stop him from getting syndicated by more than 300 newspapers. He picked up a Pulitzer on his way to becoming the most famous war correspondent in American media history.

Republicans Are More Fun

January 8, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, News media, Republican Party, Richard Nixon | 3 Comments 

Updating Army Archerd’s coverage of President Nixon’s famous 1968 appearance on “Laugh-In” (”Sock it to me?”), “Variety” provides this detail:

“Laugh-In” hoped to get opposition candidate Hubert Humphrey to appear, saying “What a good IDEA!!!” in response to Nixon’s “Sock It To ME!!!” But they could never get the Demos to OK his appearance.

On Dec. 29, NPR’s Terry Gross, on her “Fresh Air” program, rebroadcast a fall 2008 interview with “Saturday Night Live” head writer Seth Myers (available here on a podcast) in which Myers describes how easy Gov. Palin and her staff were to work with during her famous SNL appearance. As a matter of fact, he said Republicans were typically easier to work with than Democrats. When Gross asked why, Myers replied that Democrats are afraid that Republicans will use comedy show appearances against them, whereas Republicans know Democrats won’t reciprocate.

What a deft and impossible-to-prove way of turning Republicans’ game attitude against them. There’s an alternative theory Myers ought to consider. It was offered by legendary LA Times political reporter Bill Boyarsky when he visited the Nixon Library about 15 years ago. He’d partied with politicians for years, he said; “Republicans are more fun.”

When Editors Have Done Their Jobs

January 7, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under News media | Leave a Comment 

Andrew Sullivan puts his finger on the reason newspapers are indispensable:

There is something deeply precious about letting expert editors guide you through the news of the day. I find and read stories serendipitously I would never find online. And I read them through because I trust the editors to have done their job.

Murdoch: Once Satan, Now Savior?

January 4, 2009 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under News media | Leave a Comment 

David Carr, New York Times media writer, talking on a Dec. 26 Book Review podcast about Rupert Murdoch’s impact on journalism and the Wall Street Journal, which he recently bought:

I was at a party last night for a Journal reporter that’s switching assignments. Unlike a lot of journalism parties I’ve been to lately, number one, it was about a promotion, number two, it was filled with happy people who were excited about what they were doing. The suggestion that Mr. Murdoch was going to ruin the Journal, which I and others couldn’t say often enough when he bought the paper, turns out to be not true, not so far….[T]o suggest that he or [managing editor] Robert Thompson have gone about the business of tearing it apart or diminishing it just hasn’t proven to be the case.

Reminds me of an article my editor friend Tracy Wood sent me in November about a publisher’s party where the paper’s employees were parking cars to earn extra money. Turns out Murdoch, at whom newspaper people have been turning up their noses for years, may be one of the few publishers left who can keep them all in business.

“Ask Not, You Know, What Your Country, You Know…”

December 28, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Congress, Democratic Party, Featured Articles, Internet, News media, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

The interview conducted by David Halbfinger and Nicholas Confessore of the New York Times with Caroline Kennedy (who seems to have dropped the name Schlossberg permanently), as linked below in today’s Featured Articles, did not have the headline “As A Candidate, Kennedy Is Forceful Yet Elusive” when it first appeared on the newspaper’s site yesterday morning. Instead, it originally read “As A Candidate, Kennedy Is Eloquent Yet Elusive,” and is still identified in those words at the Times’s own website Blogrunner, despite the fact that the quotes attributed to the candidate, as they appeared in the published article, had little of the rhetorical art for which Ms. Kennedy’s father gained renown (with some help from Ted Sorensen).

The interview was one of Ms. Kennedy’s first attempts at a sit-down conversation with the press, following several weeks during which she preferred to deal with the Fourth Estate by giving them written replies to written questions.  Within a few hours after its appearance, the irreverent website Gawker pointed out that in one of the audio clips attached to the interview, the would-be successor to Sen. Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat managed to use the words “you know” (as a “discourse marker” as the linguists say, rather than in any intelligent grammatical context) a dozen times in 49 seconds.  Almost within minutes after that observation was posted, the Times changed the headline to what it is now.

Last night, the Times also put up what is seemingly a word-for-word transcript of Ms. Kennedy’s conversation with Halbfinger and Confessore.  In what must have been a conversation lasting about 40 or 45 minutes, she uses “you know” no less than 138 times.  Especially impressive are two occasions where she uses the words five different times in one sentence – or what would be a sentence, if it were not, in both cases, a chain of clauses with no grammatical conclusion.

Indeed, throughout the transcript, Ms. Kennedy proves to be nearly as unable to articulate a proper sentence as was the case when she appeared on Meet The Press last spring to endorse Barack Obama for the presidency.  As I listened to the clips at the Times’s site and read the transcript, I had to conclude to send her to be America’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom would make this country the object of ridicule in that isle where Shakespeare’s unmoved bones rest.

And while it is true that quite a few Senators, past and present, have been as inarticulate as Ms. Kennedy, very few among them have used what facility of speech they had to assert, as Ms Kennedy more or less does in this interview, that they should be in the United States Senate, well, because they want to be there, whether or not there are more qualified candidates for the job.  As Gawker’s Gabriel Sherman pointed out today, Ms. Kennedy’s supply of hauteur, manifested more than a few times toward Halbfinger and Confessore (as the transcript shows), may be her biggest problem of all as she seeks this office.

(Also noteworthy is an entry at the Language Log blog which discusses editing of the audio clips featured with the Times article, and not acknowledged at the site.)

Speak For Yourself, Richard

December 26, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Culture, News media | 2 Comments 

A Humanized Nixon? Bah, Humbug!

December 25, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Frost/Nixon, News media | 4 Comments 

If you can’t count on your home town newspaper, whom can you count on? But for its Christmas Day review of “Frost/Nixon,” the Orange County Register used copy purchased via a news service from the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s Colin Covert, who was appalled at director Ron Howard’s worthy attempt to be fair to the 37th President:

[Actor Frank Langella gives] Nixon sympathetic, humanizing dimensions the man never possessed in real life….Ron Howard is too nice a guy to comprehend the cruelty that coexisted with Nixon’s formidable intellect, so he becomes a co-conspirator in romantic revisionism.

Pat Buchanan On Mark Felt’s Passing

December 24, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Ethics, News media, Nixon Administration figures, Nixon in the News, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

At MSNBC.com yesterday, Nixon White House advisor and speechwriter, and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan offered his assessment of the career of W. Mark Felt, the self-identified “Deep Throat” who died last week.  He observes:

Indeed, if what Felt did was honorable, why did he lie and deny it repeatedly when asked if he was leaking to the [Washington] Post? Why did he lie in his memoir in 1979, when, well into retirement, he emphatically denied he was Deep Throat? Was Felt so noble he could save our republic, yet refuse, to the point of lying in his memoirs, to take any credit?

Answer: Felt knew what he did was dishonorable, corrupt—and unnecessary. For honest FBI agents were steadily making progress toward proving that higher-ups at CREEP were involved in aiding those caught in the Watergate break-in.

Felt had another reason for lying about his role as snitch for the Post. Former colleagues would be disgusted, for his was not only a breach of law, but of faith and trust, a dishonoring of his oath as an FBI agent.

Certain Geese Never Get Sauce

December 23, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under DSPQ, News media | Leave a Comment 

Old conventional wisdom: New York Times could imply that Sen. McCain had an affair even though there was no proof. New CW: Times won’t report on alleged affair between its publisher and a possible future U.S. senator.

Alternate Gate

December 22, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under News media, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

Bob Woodward’s secret source, W. Mark Felt, who was worried that President Nixon wanted to rein in the FBI, helped destroy him by illegally leaking government secrets. As a naval officer, Woodward met Felt in the office of Admiral Thomas Moorer. Moorer and other Pentagon hawks illegally spied on the same President and his aides as they tried to end the Vietnam war and improve relations with the Soviet Union and China.

You can easily write all that and never even use the word “Watergate.” Go figure.

A Blogging Fool’s Paradise

December 22, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Hackosphere, News media | Leave a Comment 

Earlier in the year, Matthew Yglesias left the Atlantic Monthly blogpen, settling under the wing of the progressive (I always want to write “self-styled” in front of that word; where does it leave the rest of us?) Center for American Progress Action Fund. If you click here, never again will you see such a group of highly qualified and earnest-looking young people.

At about 10:30 last night, a Fund official posted this on Yglesias’s blog:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects – including a homeland security transition project – and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

 That’s because on Dec. 19, Yglesias had written:

 [Third Way's] domestic policy agenda is hyper-timid incrementalist [BS].

 The brass at Third Way, another think tank, must’ve asked their friends at CAPAF why they were being trashed on a Center web site. After Palmieri’s post, over 500 comments on Yglesias’s site ensued, but none as ironic as when Sullivan, back at Yglesias’ old hang at the Atlantic, said today that Palmieri’s comment is: 

What happens when someone mistakes a journalist for a member of some dumb-ass Politburo.

 So now the blogger is a journalist again. When Sullivan was defending himself for having republished a lie about Gov. Palin, her minor daughter, and Trig on his own site, he took pains to make distinctions between the rules for journalists and bloggers. For instance, he didn’t have to check the Trig Palin story out first, he said. By republishing it before checking the facts and then keeping it alive for months, he was just asking questions (which jounalists do, of course, before they run their stories).

Defending Yglesias against his web site’s host’s inteference, Sullivan reverts to yet another pillar of the old journalistic paradigm whereby a newpaper publisher was expected to keep his or her hands off the newsroom.

So in Sullivan’s blogger’s paradise, writers have it both ways. They can publish whatever they want without abiding by old-school notions about accuracy and due diligence. If by their actions they expose their publishers to libel suits (as Sullivan may have by republishing the Trig story at the Atlantic Monthly Group) or interfere with a business or collegial relationship being enjoyed by those paying the bills (as Yglesias evidently did), too bad. We’ll have to see how long before paradise is lost in a courtroom.

Watergate Revisionism CREEPs Into Washington Post?

December 20, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Ethics, Frost/Nixon, Internet, News media, Nixon Administration, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, The New Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

It’s hard to resist capitalizing that that word when writing on this subject and this newspaper. That said, the reaction of Washington Post writers to the death of W. Mark Felt, who unveiled himself in 2005 as “Deep Throat,” has been, a little surprisingly, not completely a series of panegyrics.

It is true that the Post’s obit of Felt (the latest, much-expanded version, with Bob Woodward re-credited as a contributor rather than co-author, appears here) simply stuck to the basics of the DT story as Woodward has described it over the years.  And it’s true that the Post’s editorial on Felt’s passing stressed that, though his career was “ambiguous” when considered as a whole, where Watergate was concerned he had performed “an invaluable service” when he surreptitiously fed information from a criminal investigation to a reporter in an effort to undercut the position of FBI Acting Director L. Patrick Gray.

But yesterday, in Slate.com (owned by The Washington Post Company) Tim Noah, while arguing that Felt had done his nation good by leaking to Woodward, also said that the G-man’s motives in doing so were comparable to those of “Scooter” Libby when he was involved in the events that led to the leaking of Valerie Plame’s CIA affiliation, which is hardly seen as a patriotic act down at the Post building.

But Noah’s column might well have been topped for irreverence in the Post’s own pages this morning.  Hank Stuever, a reporter known for his insights into pop culture and his forays into questioning the conventional wisdom, devoted a column, somewhat deceptively headed “Appreciation,” to Felt and Deep Throat’s significance to what (Stuever hinted) may well be a dying era of investigative journalism.

In his column, Stuever quotes Carl Bernstein’s pious claim on CNN yesterday (but which he’s repeated, in one form or another, to hundreds or thousands of journalism students for a quarter-century) that Felt “had the guts to say: ‘Wait. The Constitution is more important in this situation than a president of the United States who breaks the law.’”  Stuever follows that with: “Cue trumpet solo,” and goes on to speak of the “swagger” of Woodward and Bernstein’s era of newspaper work.

He concludes by alluding to words Felt, famously, never spoke:

There is, in the end, plenty of money begging to be followed, the money we don’t know about and the money we do: stimulus money ($850 billion!); Madoff money ($50 billion!), automaker bailout money ($17 billion!).  The best way to appreciate Mark Felt is to work the phones, take notes and figure out how to get that which is off the record, on.

Am I wrong or is there just a hint that Stuever is aware that after January 20, there may well be as many questions about the direction of money as there were in the Clinton administration (especially its last years), and the Washington Times might just be a bit likelier than the Post to examine where it goes?

And in tomorrow’s Post the paper’s former executive editor Len Downie, who seems to have been the last person to be told the secret of DT’s identity before Felt’s family and John O’Connor approached Vanity Fair, has a long meditation about the question so often asked in recent years: Could there be another Deep Throat in the atmosphere of today’s Washington?

Downie says the big difference between 1972 and 2008 is that in those faraway days, the Post had the story to itself for many months; he argues that now, a similar scandal, if written about in one place, would instantly be taken up by bloggers, websites, and maybe even newspapers around the country within a matter of hours. “Of course,” he continues, “an administration under siege would also have more sophisticated resources for investigating leaks and marshaling counter-attacks in the news media and the blogosphere.”

But Downie also poses two other questions at the end of his article (and very significant ones, as TNN commenter Maarja Krusten observes):

In today’s cacophonous media world, in which news, rumor, opinion and infotainment from every kind of source are jumbled together and often presented indiscriminately, how would such an improbable-sounding story ever get verified?

As newsrooms rapidly shrink, will they still have the resources, steadily amassed by newspapers since Watergate, for investigative reporting that takes months and even years of sustained work?

Downie leaves these unanswered, signing off instead by describing the pride he felt when he watched Frank Langella (as RN in Frost/Nixon) calling reporters “sons of whores.”  But the questions are certainly worth thinking about while the Fourth Estate indulges itself in nostalgia about the good old days of underground garages and shifting flowerpots.

(And having mentioned John O’Connor I should also note that in today’s issue of the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat, he solemnly compares Felt to Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye.)

O’Reilly Will Be Watching O’bama

December 20, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under News media, Obama administration, Richard Nixon | 1 Comment 

During his Nixon Library appearance, Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly says there’s a lot more to learn about the PE.

Another Side Of Mark Felt

December 19, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Ethics, News media, Nixon in the News, Presidents, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Watergate | Leave a Comment 

As readers of his book about the 1950 Senate election in California (Tricky Dick And The Pink Lady) know, Editor & Publisher editor-in-chief Greg Mitchell is far from being a fan of the 37th President. But, as this article shows, he is aware, from personal experience, that some aspects of the late W. Mark Felt’s career, especially concerning the surveillance of fugitive radicals and their friends, didn’t quite jibe with the dedicated defender of the Constitution described by Carl Bernstein on CNN this morning.

Might This Also Apply To New York?

December 19, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Congress, Democratic Party, Ethics, News media | Leave a Comment 

A Washington Post editorial this morning discusses the disinclination of the Democratic leadership of the Illinois legislature to fund a special election to select a replacement in the Senate for President-elect Obama (after initially favoring it) because of concerns that the voters might put a Republican in the seat. It concludes:

We aren’t fans of gubernatorial appointments to the Senate. They are undemocratic and subject to abuse. [Illinois Governor Rod] Blagojevich’s alleged actions show in vivid detail the danger of putting that power in the hands of one person. The decision on who should represent the people of Illinois should rest in their hands.

Yet Another Watergate Mystery

December 19, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under Internet, News media, Nixon in the News, Watergate | 1 Comment 

In the wee small hours of this morning, the Washington Post’s website posted (and the newspaper itself printed) an obituary for W. Mark Felt, the former FBI associate director who, in 2005, was identified by himself and the Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein as “Deep Throat.”  The article, online and on paper, was initially credited to Patricia Sullivan, one of the Post’s obit writers since 2003, and Woodward, with additional contributions from staffers Clarence Williams and Anita Kumar.

These credits remain at the obit as it appears at mobile.washingtonpost.com (and as cut-and pasted at some other sites, as Googling “Patricia Sullivan and Bob Woodward” shows) but at washingtonpost.com itself the obit’s authorship was changed this morning to omit Woodward’s byline.  Can Howard Kurtz, the man on the Post’s press beat, or the paper’s ombudsman Deborah Howell shed any light on this? Some of us Watergate junkies want to know.

Refresher Course

December 19, 2008 by Frank Gannon | Filed Under News media, Nixon Administration, Richard Nixon, U.S. History, Vietnam, education | Leave a Comment 

In last week’s  New Yorker, deputy “Talk of the Town” editor Lauren Collins set up a story about Ivy Leaguers in the Obama administration —”Team of Brainiacs“— by stirring up some trouble over one of the recently released Nixon tapes.  Ms. Collins refers to the 18 May 1972 recording of “Richard Nixon (Whittier ’34, Duke Law ’37) excoriating Henry Kissinger (Harvard B.A. ’50, M.A. ’52, Ph.D. ’54)”:

NIXON: The Ivy League Presidents? Why, I won’t let those sons-of-bitches ever in this White House again. Never, never. None of them. They’re finished. The Ivy League schools are finished. . . . Henry, I would not have had them in. Don’t do that again. . . . They came out against us when it was tough. . . . Don’t ever go to an Ivy League school again, ever. Never, never, never.

David Skorton, the president of Cornell, was apprised of Nixon’s comments over the phone. “My mouth is open,” Skorton said, after the line went quiet. “Gosh, what a negative thing to say. Ivy League schools, like all good universities, teach people to think and to reason, and why would anyone be against that?”

The taped exchange was widely reported as the latest example of Nixon’s paranoia and anti-intellectualism, and President Skorton’s was the expected and widespread reaction to its revelation.  But no one seemed to have the time,  interest, or intellectual rigor —not to mention the plain old curiosity— to do a little research to discover the actual context of RN’s remarks in terms of what was happening at the time.

In fact, a helluva lot was happening.  The steam RN was letting off that May had a significant backstory.

The late spring and early summer of 1972 were the cruelest and most critical months of the Nixon administration up to that time, when RN saw his policies being tested and his resolution being challenged at home and abroad in ways they had not been before.

On 30 March, flush with a major infusion of Soviet arms, the North Vietnamese flooded over the internationally-recognized DMZ with an estimated 120,000 troops and pushed deep into South Vietnam.  This was clearly a calculated move on the part of the North Vietnamese who were worried —not without reason— that their Soviet suppliers were losing ardor for the cause.

After RN’s successful surprise trip to Beijing in February, the Soviets had rushed to arrange a summit of their own —now scheduled for June— and there could be no doubt that RN would be expecting some serious reduction of their support for North Vietnam.

RN saw this North Vietnamese offensive as a make or break situation for American credibility.  He was prepared to let the Soviets cancel the summit if they weren’t prepared to accept the incompatibility between their desire for better relations with the US and their determination to tweak the Chinese by supporting North Vietnam.  That’s how RN saw it; others saw it as the opportunity to make one last stand, hope for the best, but be prepared to cut losses and move on.

In RN, RN wrote:

Kissinger…perhaps to cheer me up, said that even if the worst happened and we had to pull out in the face of an enemy victory, I would still be able to claim credit for having conducted an honorable winding down of the war by the dignified and secure withdrawal of 500,000 troops.  Most people would give me credit for that, and everyone would be so glad the war was over that the domestic situation would not be impossible to handle.

I considered this prospect too bleak even to contemplate.  ”I don’t give a damn about the domestic reaction if that happens,” I said, “because if it does, sitting in this office wouldn’t be worth it.  The foreign policy of the United States will have been destroyed, and the Soviets will have established that they can accomplish what they are after by using the force of arms in third countries.”  Defeat, I said, was simply not an option.

In addition to the course of the war and the credibility of American foreign policy being at stake, it was only half a year away from the presidential election.  The situation was so extreme that, in April, RN talked to HAK about the possibility that he might not run for re-election. He recorded that conversation in his diary:

Later on in the afternoon I had a pretty candid talk with Henry about what we had to look forward to in the future.  I said that what we were really looking at was a cancellation of the summit and going hard right on Vietnam, even up to a blockade.

I said that under these circumstances, I had an obligation to look for a successor.

Over the weekend of 15 April, RN ordered “Freedom Porch Bravo” — a series of B-52 bombing raids on munitions targets around Hanoi and its port of Haiphong.  Everyone was on tenterhooks waiting to see how the Soviets would respond, and whether they would pull the plug on the upoming Summit.

It was in that context that HAK met on Monday the 17th with the eight Ivy League presidents (MIT’s prexy joined them to make it ten at the table) at the White House to explain the administration’s policies and goals.  The nine, predictably, emerged from the meeting and, exploiting the cachet of the setting, condemned the bombing and called for America’s immediate withdrawal.  At a time when he was engaged in a major military operation aimed at impressing the enemy with the seriousness of American resolve, RN can hardly have been expected to react equably to the White House being used as a venue to protest his policies.

The pressures on RN —from abroad, at home, and within his own administration— were so intense they’re exhausting (albeit exciting) just to read about.  It’s hard to imagine what they must have been like to experience.   So a little venting a few weeks later, a few days before he left for Moscow for the Summit his critics said would never take place (and in a conversation that he never imagined would ever be made public) shouldn’t be that surprising or difficult to understand.

Besides, despite the convenient lapses of memory and the generous applications of retrospective whitewash, the record of the American academy in general —and the Ivy League in particular  — during the late 1960s was far from admirable.

Roger Rosenblatt, who at the time was Master of Dunster House and on the short list for the presidency of Harvard, has written, as much in anger as in sorrow, about the shameful and self-interested capitulation on the part of a distinguished university and faculty to the barbarians within its gates.

In Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard Wars of 1969 (Little, Brown and Company, 1997), he describes the “atmosphere in which every reasonable decision was overturned, every civility abandoned, every tradition made expendable, and in which no one trusted anyone else.”

The odd thing is that none of the destruction would have occurred had there not emerged a strange conspiracy between those who wanted power and those who readily ceded it to them. The fact that student radicals wanted to take over Harvard, or all of America, for that matter, did not condemn them. However naïve much of their revolution was, for the majority of them it was sincere. Even most of those who for personal reasons protested Vietnam to avoid fighting there were sincere in their objective opposition.

Yet they never could have created so much chaos at Harvard had the administration and most of the faculty not allowed them to. The administration cooperated with the people who wanted to take the place apart merely by overreacting and behaving stupidly. But the faculty’s role was subtler and more morally careless. There were certain critical moments in those two months when professors had the opportunity to instruct their students usefully merely by voting the right vote or by saying the right things — things in which they supposedly believed. Yet, for the most part, they offered no opposition to what they disagreed with, as if to tell the students: “If you want it, take it.” Liberalism rolled over on its back like a turtle awaiting the end. I do not know why, but there was an impulse running under the events of that spring to let things go to hell, and it was acted upon by young and old alike.

Maybe that’s a bit of what RN was talking about.

And as for President Skorton, who made the mistake of giving a quote to a reporter with an agenda, perhaps he might look homeward in order to understand some of RN’s frustrations.  Dr. Skorton was a twenty year old pre-med student at Northwestern University on 19 April 1969, when  armed black militant students took over Cornell’s Student Union building, demanding that the University establish a black studies program and grant them complete amnesty for their efforts.

Thomas Sowell, who was teaching there at the time, has referred to this as “The Day Cornell Died“:

No one who was at Cornell University in the spring of 1969 is ever likely to forget the guns-on-campus crisis that shocked the academic community and the nation. Bands of militant black students forcibly evicted visiting parents from Willard Straight Hall on the Cornell campus and seized control of it to back up their demands. Later, after the university’s capitulation, the students emerged carrying rifles and shotguns, their leader wearing a bandoleer of shotgun ammunition. It was a picture that appeared on the covers of national magazines and was even reprinted overseas.

What happened behind the scenes was at least as shocking. Death threats were phoned to the homes of professors who had opposed their previous actions or demands. Shots were in fact fired into the engineering building.

Maybe this was on RN’s mind when he let off some steam about the Ivy presidents (including Cornell’s newly-inaugurated Corson, whose predecessor had resigned in the wake of the capitulation to the armed protesters’ demands and refusal even to reprimand them for their actions), who were fearless when it came to criticizing his policies to the press but who folded when it came to protecting their own institutions from the predations of marauders.

(The  famous picture above  —”Campus Guns”— by Steve Starr of the AP in Albany, NY, won the 1970 Pulitzer Prize for news photography.  The takeover of the Student Union had been precipitated by a cross-burning in front of a black student residence hall.  Cornell’s house clearly needed some putting in order.  The University administration and faculty caved to the radicals’ demands, and the scars are still felt by many today.  The event is covered in considerable detail by Donald Alexander Downs in Cornell ‘69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University, published by the Cornell University Press in 1999.)

R.I.P. W. Mark Felt

December 18, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under News media, Watergate | 2 Comments 

Carl Bernstein, Mark Felt, and Bob Woodward with Felt’s coauthor, John O’Connor

The FBI official who gave government secrets to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and was later dubbed Deep Throat has died at age 95.

Nixonites United To Save The Liberal Media!

December 18, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under News media | 4 Comments 

We need newspapers for the same reason Churchill needed Stalin: To preserve civilization.

Welcome To Our Shoe

December 16, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Bush Administration, Iraq War, News media | Leave a Comment 

The courageous John Dickerson manages a kind word for the President, assaulted by a lunatic in a foreign country with not a Secret Service agent in sight:

Bush brushed off the incident, joking that he saw into his attacker’s “sole,” a reference to his famous misreading of Vladimir Putin. It’s the kind of incident where Bush’s no-big-deal attitude, so maddening in other contexts, serves him well. “It was just a bizarre moment,” Bush told journalists later on Air Force One. “But I’ve had other bizarre moments in the presidency.”…

At the very least, I suspect a spark of patriotism will kick in when some Americans watch the tape or see al-Zaidi heralded in the streets as a hero. Hey, you can’t throw shoes at our president, they might say. Only we can throw shoes at our president. This may test Nixon’s theory that presidents benefit from rough treatment by journalists.

Trig Wins

December 16, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Election 2008, Hackosphere, News media, Sarah Palin | Leave a Comment 

Andrew Sullivan’s modified limited hang-out on the Palin pass-the-baby story. Having let his adjutant rebut him last week on his own site, “The Daily Dish,” he has announced a suspension of the distasteful campaign he has been waging to get Gov. Palin to prove she is Trig’s mother.

It’s a relief he won’t be harrassing Trig anymore. It’s a shame he wasn’t accountable for having republished a lie on his Atlantic Monthly-owned web site without checking the facts. No other “Atlantic” journalist would have, and he shouldn’t have, either. Ever since, Sullivan says he’s just been trying to get the truth.  It’s actually looked as though he’s been trying to get Palin or Sen. McCain to provide records or some other official response so that he would be able to say he had posed a legitimate question. In this effort, he has failed.

Whenever he insists, as he does yet again in his last (we hope) post, that by republishing a lie and then defending his behavior for months, he was just asking questions or expressing opinions, he underscores how desperately we need newspapers, or at least professionally-trained newspaper reporters. The Hackosphere — though not Sullivan; this was a bizarre aberration — is still too prone to sophomoric and poorly-formed content, and blatant lies carefully disguised as fact (what first fooled Sullivan). Bloggers also go to bed too early. Last week no “Atlantic” blogger had anything on the failure of the auto bailout until the next morning. 

The Trig story was the most effective libel of the ‘08 campaign, and Sullivan will always be complicit in it. He gets some credit for letting a contrarian colleague say his piece and using it as a means of making a passably graceful exit from a disgraceful episode in the history of the so-called new media.

Fish Wrap Would Be A Step Up

December 15, 2008 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, Barack Obama, Internet, Media, News media, U.S. History | 1 Comment 

Russ Smith is a Baltimore resident and occasional contributor to the Wall Street Journal. But once upon a time he was quite a potent figure in the world of “alt-weeklies,” founding the Baltimore City Paper in 1977 and a Washington counterpart four years later.  Upon selling these journals later in the 1980s for $4 million, he founded the New York Press in 1988.  It took the Press a while to effectively mount a conservative challenge to the Village Voice – complete with an insert edited by legendary right-leaning playboy Taki – but when it hit its stride, it forced the Voice, in 1996, to switch to free distribution to compete.

But by the early days of the millenium, Smith had a good inkling of what was to come, and sold the Press in 2002.  Six years later he set up a website, Splice Today, where this month he formally pronounces the death of the American newspaper.

Smith’s column – or post, to use the new-media term – is quite worth reading.  He begins by summoning up a scene from the recesses of memory: he and his parents and brothers, assembled around the breakfast table in the early 1960s, plowing through one New York and Long Island daily after another.  The Times, Post, Herald Tribune, News, World-Telegram & Sun, Journal-American, Newsday, even the Mirror – all were there for the reading.  Smith lovingly describes his father’s periodic observation that one need read no more than the opening and closing paragraphs of James Reston’s Times column to know what he had to say.

(in fact, as one who sometimes read Reston’s column can attest, often the opening and closing sentences sufficed for that.  This did not stop President Lyndon B. Johnson from agonizing, day in and day out, over every single word of the column where it concerned his administration.  For a modern-day equivalent, younger readers should try to picture President Obama fretting over the morning’s dailykos.com.)

Smith goes on to describe the family pawing over the sports news, the funnies, the editorial and entertainment pages, until it was time to go to school or work.  And then he notes that his businessmen brothers, lifelong newspaper readers, no longer bother to even glance at the Wall Street Journal more often than a couple of days a week.

Tellingly, he observes that when Celia Farber, noted for her 25-year crusade against HIV as the cause of AIDS, learned that her writing on the subject had been ridiculed in a New York Times article, she complained to a friend who worked for the paper, who replied that he saw no reason for her to fret because the Times was “just fish wrap.”  But Smith is kind enough, when quoting Ms. Farber’s statement that her father let his subscription to the Times lapse a few years ago, not to identify the gentleman by name.  To realize that Barry Farber – one of the most famous figures in talk radio in the ’70s and ’80s (and still on the air today) and occasional candidate for Mayor of New York and the House of Representatives – no longer bothers with the Times is to realize how far the paper’s fallen.

Smith concludes by recounting a $5 bet he recently made that the Times will be sold by the end of next year, if some billionaire has the wit to offer the stockholders a share price well above the $7 or so it trades for now. He thinks $30 a share could wrest the paper from the Sulzburger clan; I would guess that as little as $22 would suffice.  But would anybody in New York want to bother?  In Los Angeles, where Tinseltown moguls still believe with childlike faith that to own a newspaper is to control a city’s or state’s political life, rumors are again circulating that David Geffen may buy the LA Times from its bankrupt owners.  But a more realistic view probably prevails at the other end of the country.

Shoe-In For Dumbest Question Of The Year

December 15, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Bush Administration, Iraq War, News media | Leave a Comment 

The New York Times devotes considerable effort to asking Iraqis what they think about the President of the United States being attacked by an operative of an anti-Maliki TV network. So low has the President sunk in the media’s (and indeed the American people’s) estimation that it evidently doesn’t occur to the Times that attacking Mr. Bush in a crowded room actually falls below the threshold of legitimate expression.

According to the Times, some Iraqis think the attack was just fine. A way to go, I guess, in establishing a mature polity in their country.

I wonder if the reporters and stringers collecting the quotations followed up with these questions: How would you feel if either President had been hurt or killed? If security agents had opened fire and hurt or killed others in the room? If the President’s press secretary had been more severely injured than she was in the scuffle? And if any of them ever saw a “reporter” throw a shoe at Saddam Hussein?

Two Punk’d

December 13, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Hackosphere, News media, Nixon Center, Obama administration, Sarah Palin | Leave a Comment 

Our friend Steve Clemons gets punk’d by a gag about Rahm Emanuel by the same outfit that fooled Andrew Sullivan with its malicious pass-the-Palin-baby story. Big difference: Steve won’t claim the story’s true for three and a half months.

Winning The Pulitzer Prize Means…

December 12, 2008 by John H. Taylor | Filed Under Holidays, News media, Presidents | Leave a Comment 

…not having to say you were wrong. Max Holland shows how a lying source duped Seymour Hersh and others with tall tales about the tragic events in Dallas in November 1963.

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