Monday Morning Media Quarterback

Perhaps the saddest thing about the Bush administration is how little Americans have come to expect of it.  It has resulted in an orgy of incompetence that have seriously damaged first America’s image, and now our economy and very .

The current agony of more than 200,000 American Airlines passengers stranded on more than 2500 cancelled flights at America’s airports is just the latest example. 

A competent administration would have kept the FAA on the case in the first place.  A more foresighted administration would have recognized the cost to Americans and the economy of airlines like Aloha, ATA, Skybus and now Frontier failing.  And a stronger administration would have acted in the crisis, like Truman did nationalizing the steel industry or, yes, Reagan breaking the air traffic controllers union as a “peril to national safety”. 

“The buck stops here,” Truman said.  By contrast, the Bush Administration has done nothing.  Nothing.  There has been an absolute leadership vacuum. And sadly, that has come to be what we expect from it.  Consider:

• The incompetent prosecution of the war in Iraq, led by my fellow Princeton alumni Donald Rumsfeld.  I originally supported the war on the bill of goods sold us by the administration, but if you’re going to fight a war, win a war, smash the opposition and minimize casualties among U.S. troops.  In five years none of that has happened.
• Where’s Osama? How’s that war on terror going? We’re not losing in Afghanistan, are we?
• Abu Ghraib. 
• Katrina. One word.  More than 1100 people died in New Orleans (in America!)  after the hurricane.  How many have died since or had their lives shortened by stress, disease, alcoholism, and the rest?  How’s the rebuilding of New Orleans coming?
• The credit crisis, stock market crash and the foreclosure epidemic; where was government/adult supervision?  A $600 rebate to spend on Japanese electronics, vacations or, more likely, on alcohol, is supposed to help how?
• Four dollar a gallon gasoline.  If you make $8 an hour and commute 20 miles to work, it will take an hour (more after taxes) just to pay for your gas.  Very soon, the economy will grind to a halt.  Where’s that Iraqi oil when we need it?  Where’s the Manhattan Project or Apollo program to achieve energy independence? 
• Even ’small things’ like last summer’s passport crisis.  Everyone needs a passport to travel now, but no additional staffing of the passport office=long lines, cancelled trips and general chaos.  Now they’ve fully staffed the office with idiots who snoop in passport files.

And the media, distracted by its own evisceration, has done a piss-poor job of holding the administration accountable for its across-the-board failure of leadership.

Newspapers are now cutting off their proverbial noses to spite what remains of their face.   Although every day brings more cuts, perhaps the most egregious in recent weeks was that of Village Voice dance critic Deborah Jowitt, who was fired but asked to continue to contribute as a freelancer–after 41 years as the Voice dance critic. 

A paper like the Voice was built on its criticism (and support for) the arts, like dance, film, music, and theatre (the Voice will host its 53rd annual Obie awards for the best of off-Broadway this May.)  To cut back on arts coverage can only damage their reputation and hurt the arts community as well.

Certainly, in this bleak environment some cuts are necessary.  But others are foolish.  Last year, for example, the LA Times dropped its Sunday television section.  While one can get listings for the next few hours on TV or on line, its much harder to plan one’s viewing for the week, especially for those like my mother who don’t go online at all.

I’m feeling it personally as well.  Right after I won an LA Press Club Award for this story, last June, the LA Times Magazine was cut back from a weekly to a monthly.  It’s rare now to see a freelancer’s byline, as the Magazine has become a haven for LA Times staffers (also a fast-diminishing breed). 

To add insult to injury, the Times magazine is now primarily about fashion and skin, two topics I know nothing about.

With the crisis in American newspaper publishing, it’s time to look how bringing readers the news, often seen as a public service, can be funded.

The current advertising-and-subscription model is failing.  Most publications (save only the Wall Street Journal and a few others) put essentially the entire newspaper on line for free, so they don’t get that 50 cents a day per reader.  As for advertising, oy vey. 

The problem is that other models don’t work that well either.  When the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) sends me letters begging for a donation, I send back the postage-paid form with three words written on it “Sell some ads!”  As in KCET’s appeals for donations to ‘public’ television, my attitude is ‘Let Exxon pay for it’, in the same way that Archer Daniels Midland buys benign coverage on NPR.

Eric Alterman notes another contribution-funded effort.  ”ProPublica, funded by the liberal billionaires Herb and Marion Sandler and headed by the former Wall Street Journal managing editor Paul Steiger, hopes to provide the mainstream media with the investigative reporting that so many have chosen to forgo.” Most newspapers and other outlets would probably look at such offerings as contributed (ie, free) articles, filler on the order of “New Restaurant Offers Intriguing Entrees”.

Government funding is another, even worse option.  At best, it will deliver a Voice of America or BBC, a hotbed of bias.  At worst, Pravda or the Chinese news agency, delivering articles on the ‘merciless rioters’ of the Tibet uprising–and not delivering this.

So like it or not, market capitalism, as Churchill said of democracy, the worst of all systems  except for all others, will probably come up with a solution to deliver the news.

Yes, it was Easter Sunday, but this week my wife wondered where the Target Sunday ads were.  In another body blow to newspapers like the LA Times, the ad insert was only online.  Yes, a few trees were saved, but at what cost to readers?

Newspapers have been dying a death of a thousand cuts, from Craigslist grabbing all the classified ads (it’s hard to compete with free) and shrinking circulations and of course, vastly reduced real estate advertising.  If Target and the other big retailers go away, that’s a mighty big nail in the coffin.

Newspapers are also losing some of their best writers, whether they’re pushed or jump out of the burning building.  At the Mercury News in San Jose before the last round of cuts, reporters were told to wait at home by their phones.  If they didn’t get a call by 10AM, they could go to work.

 Dean Takahashi, a well-respected technology journalist (who I know a little bit), put it this way:

“I guess the worst thing that could happen is the business could fall off a cliff the way the music business did,” said Dean Takahashi, a former technology reporter for the Mercury News, who left last month to become a blogger just before a round of layoffs. “I worry that is possible.”

As for the content, formerly known as the news, it’s too simple to say ‘it will all go online.’  Most people I know don’t like to read longer pieces on line, certainly not on a Blackberry-sized screen. 

If newspapers and the way they surprise you with local, international news, sports, fashion and more disappear, we’ll be not a little, but a lot, poorer.

The San Francisco Chronicle is making one of the biggest newsroom cuts yet; 25%, writes a Chronicle reporter(!)  Eighty reporters, photographers, copy editors and others will be laid off.

“Analysts predicted the reductions at The Chronicle could have repercussions for readers. While an increasing number of people get news from online aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo, those stories are most often originally reported by print journalists. “

Then there’s the news website in Pasadena, that has unrepentently (and to great publicity) outsourced its city council coverage to India to reporters paid $7500 a year.

While I have sympathy for those cutback or outsourced, I’m not going to cry crocodile tears.  As my Dad told me more than 30 years ago, you’ll never see pro-labor sentiment in a newspaper because they’re an employer.  As the last person I know who owns three American cars, (a Ford, a Lincoln and a Jeep) where were these people and their publications in terms of supporting U.S. industries?

Still, it’s tough times, and for a communications person, the whirling scythe dumps more competitors into the pool.

The Los Angeles Times has been running a long and windy  ’dust-up’ on the state of journalism today.

It’s debated/written by two professors (Robert W. McChesney, professor of communication at the University of Illinois, Glenn Harlan Reynolds,  professor of law at the University of Tennessee) and reads like it.  And it’s preaching to the choir, newspaper readers, rather than the unchurched, the thousands who’ve abandoned newspapers lately.

McChesney illustrates some issues well, describing ”the sharp decline over the past two decades in the number of working journalists covering stories at the local level, and the sharp decline in the number of journalists over the same period covering the world for U.S. news media.”

“This contributes to a journalism where we are more dependent upon those in power to tell us what is happening, and our journalists have become more inclined to accept what they say at face value.”  Then there’s “the commercialization of news and the softening of news standards to include celebrity fluff and trivia. This gives the illusion of controversy while never antagonizing anyone in power.” 

Yup–every TV channel has a “trouble shooter” who takes on dirty restaurants and , but never McDonald’s or Exxon.  But someone has to pay to put on the news, and if it’s not the angry taxpayers as in Britain, it’s McDonald’s and Exxon.

Both men have some interesting insights, but like most journalists, they’re long on asking questions, short on answers.