A performance of Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung.” 1917 photo.
What Mark Twain once said of Wagner — “I have been told that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds” — could be applied to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer: I’ve heard that he’s not as bad as he seems. Right now, though, Schumer seems really bad in refusing to call for the resignation of Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., who’s been indicted on lurid federal bribery charges involving everything from gold bullion to a Mercedes-Benz convertible. Schumer went so far as to call Menendez a “dedicated public servant” and said, “He has a right to due process and a fair trial.”
Why do I say that Schumer isn’t as bad as he seems? Because he’s probably having private talks with Menedez right now aimed at getting him to step down, figuring that discreet persuasion will work better than public humiliation. The problem is that such thinking is the product of a bygone age, unsuited to the always-on public performance that modern politics demands. Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who’s older than Schumer, figured it out. But Schumer appears to be too set in his ways to make the adjustment.
As I noted Thursday, one of the few positive contributions Rupert Murdoch can take credit for is preserving The Wall Street Journal as a great national newspaper. Another is that he saved the Boston Herald — not once, but twice. Larry Edelman of The Boston Globe writes about the first time (he interviewed me). I tell that story as well as the tale of Murdoch’s second rescue in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” which I excerpt below.
The Hearst chain, which had converted the Herald (known then as the Herald American) to a tabloid during the final years of its ownership, had run out the string by 1982. I remember one old-timer telling me that, with closure just hours away, workers came in to rip out the vending machines from the paper’s hulking plant in the South End. At the last minute, Murdoch reached a deal with the unions and the paper was saved.
Under Murdoch’s ownership, the Herald established itself as a feisty alternative to the Globe, sometimes beating its larger rival on important local stories. That continued in the 1990s after Murdoch’s protégé Pat Purcell bought it from him. To this day there are people who believe that Murdoch continued to pull the strings behind the scenes, but I never believed it. Murdoch just didn’t care that much about the Herald, and I don’t doubt that he let Purcell have it on extremely favorable terms.
Unfortunately, the Herald’s financial model pretty much stopped working in the early 2000s, and today it’s owned by the New York hedge fund Alden Global Capital, famous for sucking the life out of its papers. Alden owns two other Massachusetts papers as well — The Sun of Lowell and the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg.
At one time Murdoch also owned the Ottaway chain, which included the Cape Cod Times and some small weeklies, including the Middleboro Gazette, where I grew up. Murdoch is fondly remembered by taking a hands-off approach, but I honestly wonder whether he even knew those papers were part of his empire. The Gazette was later closed by the Gannett chain, and today Middleborough is served by an independent startup, Nemasket Weekly.
Here’s what I wrote in “Moguls” about the Herald and Murdoch’s TV station, WFXT-TV (Channel 25), which he sold off a few years ago. The “endless struggle” I refer to was the Herald’s long-time ownership of Channel 5, an existential threat to the Globe that was removed when the Globe reported that its rival had gained the broadcast license because of corruption at the Federal Communications Commission. The Herald was stripped of its license in 1972, and Hearst swooped in to pick up the pieces.
The Globe’s endless struggle with the Herald’s broadcast ambitions played itself out in one last, faint echo in 1988, when Murdoch, who then owned the Herald, purchased Channel 25. Ted Kennedy, by then a leading member of the Senate, quietly slipped a provision into a bill that made it almost impossible for the FCC to grant a waiver to its rule prohibiting someone from owning both a daily newspaper and a TV station in the same market. At the time, I was a reporter for The Daily Times Chronicle, which served Woburn and several surrounding communities north of Boston. I remember covering a local appearance by Kennedy as he was dogged by the Herald reporter Wayne Woodlief. “Senator, why are you trying to kill the Herald?” the persistent Woodlief asked him several times.
Murdoch chose to sell off Channel 25, thus saving the Herald; he repurchased the TV station after selling the Herald to Purcell. But the Herald columnist Howie Carr remained bitter. He told me years later that Kennedy’s actions were worse than [Globe ally Tip] O’Neill’s, since O’Neill was just trying to help one of several papers rather than destroy the Globe’s only daily competitor. “I think Tip was just trying to get an ally,” Carr said, “whereas Ted was trying to kill the paper in order to deliver the monopoly to his friends.”
The liberal reputation the Globe developed during the Winship era was cemented during Boston’s school desegregation crisis of the mid-1970s, when the Globe wholeheartedly supported federal judge Arthur Garrity’s order to bus children to different neighborhoods in the city to achieve racial balance. It was a terrible time in Boston, as white racism ran rampant and bullets were fired into the Globe’s headquarters and at one of the paper’s delivery trucks. The Globe took the right moral stand, and its coverage earned the paper its second Pulitzer for Public Service. Winship in those years enjoyed a reputation as one of the finest editors in the country. But it was also during those years that the Globe became known as the paper of Boston’s suburban liberal elite and the Herald that of the urban white working class, a dichotomy that has persisted to this day.
Rupert Murdoch. Photo (cc) 2015 by the Hudson Institute.
Over the past 50 or so years, no one has done more harm to our public discourse than Rupert Murdoch, who announced earlier today that he’s semi-retiring from his position as one of the world’s most powerful media moguls. Since his son Lachlan Murdoch will remain in charge of the family’s various media holdings, as he has been for several years now, today’s news should be regarded as little more than a symbolic moment at which we can take stock, once again, of the damage Rupe hath wrought.
Murdoch, now 92, wields enormous power through his various media holdings in his native Australia, the U.K. and the U.S. Over time, though, that power increasingly has become centered within the Fox News Channel, launched in 1996 as a supposedly conservative alternative to CNN. (MSNBC, founded the same year, didn’t embrace its liberal identity until much later.) Fox News was never what you might call a normal conservative operation — despite initially billing itself as “fair and balanced,” it always trafficked in anger and mudslinging, epitomized by its most popular host, Bill O’Reilly.
Since the rise of Donald Trump, though, Fox News has gone crazy, embracing Trump’s lies about the election, engaging in climate-change denialism, spreading falsehoods about COVID and vaccines, and generally spewing weaponized right-wing propaganda in order to goose ratings and keep viewers glued to the set. I’m not a fan of cable news talk shows as a genre, but at least CNN’s and MSNBC’s are grounded in reality. Fox News lies. It caught up with the Murdochs in 2023, when they agreed to pay more than $787 million to settle a lawsuit brought by the Dominion voting machine company, whose business had suffered at the hands of a smear campaign by Trump insiders, amplified by Fox. That, in turn, led (or seemed to lead) to the firing of Fox’s biggest star, the white supremacist Tucker Carlson.
Through it all, Murdoch came across as the ultimate cynic. Numerous profiles have portrayed him as someone who cares about nothing but ratings and money. He holds Trump in contempt, and he made several attempts to cast him aside — trying and failing to take Trump out during the 2016 presidential campaign and then initially refusing to embrace election lies after Trump was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020. Both times, Murdoch and Fox were dragged back to Trump at the first sign that their ratings might suffer. You might say that Murdoch followed rather than led his audience, but it was a symbiotic relationship. If Murdoch had any courage, he could have weathered the storm, and Fox News might have emerged stronger than ever. As it is, it’s now a wounded behemoth, kept alive by an elderly audience that is averse to digital and without any clear path forward beyond the next few years.
How much does this matter? In recent years, many observers, including me, have blamed our cultural descent into alternative reality and authoritarianism on social media, especially Facebook and to a lesser extent the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter. That may always have been exaggerated, though. In a new piece on polarization for The New York Times, Thomas Edsall places the blame squarely on cable news.
If you want to give Murdoch credit for one thing, it’s that he maintained The Wall Street Journal as one of our three great national newspapers after he bought it. Sure, the opinion section is nutty, but that was true long before Murdoch arrived on the scene. On the other hand, he took a respectable if fading liberal newspaper, the New York Post, in an aggressively downmarket direction after he purchased it in 1976. As a leading retail executive supposedly said when Murdoch complained about the lack of advertising support, “But Rupert, Rupert, your readers are my shoplifters.”
Murdoch’s announcement that he’s reducing his role coincides with the news that the celebrity journalist Michael Wolff is about to release a book titled “The Fall: The End of Fox News and the Murdoch Dynasty.” It is, in a sense, the perfect match: a book by an author who’s often accused of playing fast and loose with the facts writing about an empire built on a foundation of lies. As CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy wrote earlier this week, “Wolff has a history of printing claims that end up being strongly disputed by the subjects themselves.” Still, a book written by a bestselling author that describes one host, Laura Ingraham, as a “drunk” and another, Sean Hannity, as a “moron” is sure to get attention.
This would be an excellent time to say good riddance to Murdoch except that he’s not going anywhere, and it wouldn’t matter that much even if he was. Unlike Rupert, Lachlan Murdoch is said to hold genuinely right-wing views. Thus the House That Murdoch Built will continue to wreak havoc at least for a few more years. I wish I thought that what comes after will be better, but I’m not holding out much hope.
Today’s New York Times sports section, brought to you by The Athletic.
When The New York Times announced earlier this year that it was getting rid of its sports department, a lot of critics assumed that the Times was eliminating sports coverage for anyone who wasn’t subscribing to the Times-owned Athletic, either separately or through an all-access digital subscription. As recently as Monday, Tom Jones of Poynter wrote, “The New York Times sports section is no more. On Monday, as anticipated, it was published for the final time.” That wasn’t how I interpreted the announcement. And it turns out that I was right.
The Times sports department ceased operations on Monday, but the paper’s sports section lives on. Today’s takes up nearly four ad-free pages of the print edition, covering such topics as the University of Colorado football team, the rise of the Baltimore Orioles, greedy Major League Baseball owners seeking taxpayer subsidies for new stadiums, and new uniforms for some NHL teams. The layout of these pages is inventive and attractive. The most significant difference is that each byline is accompanied by “The Athletic.”
Yes, we should lament the downfall of the Times’ own dedicated sports department. To the extent that this can be tied to union-busting, well, shame on the Sulzbergers. But the owners got themselves into a mess with their ill-considered acquisition of The Athletic, and this is their way of amortizing the costs. There was never a chance that they were going to eliminate sports coverage from the paper.
A nice — but unplanned — walk through the Public Garden earlier today. Photo (cc) 2023 by Dan Kennedy.
The MBTA has botched its latest round of service interruptions, inconveniencing riders so that the Government Center Garage demolition can proceed for the benefit of wealthy private interests.
It normally takes me about 50 minutes, door to door, to commute to Northeastern. I’m a short walk from the West Medford commuter rail station. After a 12-minute ride to North Station, I can choose the Orange or the Green Line. Starting this past Monday, though, Green Line service has been halted between North Station and Government Station.
I generally commute to campus three days a week. On Tuesday, hordes of people tried to cram onto overpacked Orange Line cars, which were running every 10 minutes around 8 a.m. — clearly not frequently enough to accommodate the riders. I made it onto the second one. Today was a nice day, so I decided to walk from North Station to Government Center, only to be confronted with more hordes and no sign that an E Line train to Northeastern was coming any time soon. I ended up walking nearly three and a half miles to campus. I can’t complain too much — it was beautiful. But it’s not how I wanted to spend a busy weekday morning.
The time suck was pretty severe — an hour and 20 minutes door to door on Tuesday and an hour and 45 minutes today.
Fortunately my commute home hasn’t been affected, since getting onto the Orange Line at Ruggles isn’t an issue. I’m also assuming (hoping?) that Friday won’t be too bad because, for many people, Thursday is the new Friday.
But how much pain does the T expect commuters to endure? I can ride my bike to Northeastern in about 40 minutes, and I’ll probably do it a few times before this ends, supposedly on Oct. 12. Other people will start driving, which isn’t good for the city or the environment.
I love the T. I spent 29 years driving from the North Shore to Boston, and moving closer to the city — and closer to public transportation — has transformed my life. And it works well most of the time. But the deterioration of the service in recent years has been pretty horrendous, and it has been a major contributor to increases in private vehicle traffic. The last governor who really seemed to care about the T was Michael Dukakis. I’m hoping that will the case with Maura Healey as well. We all have great hopes for the newish general manager and CEO, Phil Eng. But we need to see some improvements — soon.
Worcester City Hall. Photo (cc) 2015 by Dan Kennedy.
The governance structure of The Worcester Guardian, a fledgling nonprofit begun by the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, is starting to become clearer. A message by consultant Dave Nordman, the former executive editor of the city’s daily, the Telegram & Gazette, says that the Guardian will have an independent board of directors in addition to a community advisory board. The Chamber has committed $50,000 to the launch, but Nordman says the intention is for the Guardian to be a fully independent news organization.
The aim, Nordman told me by email, is “total separation.” He said that Chamber president and CEO Tim Murray will probably have one of nine seats on the board but will not serve as the chair. “The board’s main responsibility,” Nordman said, “will be to rally the community.” The announcement of an editor, he added, is imminent.
The original announcement raised questions about how closely the Chamber would be tied to the Guardian. Nordman’s assurances makes it more likely that the Guardian will be accepted by the Institute for Nonprofit News, or INN, which would be a crucial step for credibility and fundraising. The Guardian’s inaugural governing documents also tracked too closely with the INN’s policies as well as the mission statement of The New Bedford Light, a large nonprofit, as reported by Bill Shaner of the newsletter Worcester Sucks and I Love It. Nordman, though, is a pro, and his involvement suggests that the Guardian will get off to a strong start. (Nordman is also a colleague of mine at Northeastern.) Nordman writes in his message at the Guardian’s website:
I believe free, nonprofit, independent news could provide a dynamic new platform to tell the Central Massachusetts story and report on important issues impacting Worcester and the region.
I believe mistakes will be made and lessons will be learned along the way.
I believe nonprofit, for-profit and independent journalism can co-exist. I believe blogs and social media also provide a forum for healthy discourse.
And I believe Murray when he says he will allow the Guardian to tell the story of Worcester independent of the chamber.
The community will be watching.
The Worcester area is not exactly a news desert, although local residents have lamented deep cuts at the Telegram & Gazette under Gannett’s ownership. MassLive, part of The Republican of Springfield, publishes a fair amount of Worcester news. GBH News has a Worcester bureau. The 016.com aggregates news from the Worcester area as well. Still, a Worcester-based nonprofit, grounded in community values, would be a welcome addition to Central Massachusetts.
Kristen Welker, the new host of NBC’s “Meet the Press”
My main takeway from Kristen Welker’s interview with Donald Trump on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday is how little commentary there’s been after the fact. Oh, there’s some, and maybe there will be more later. But, honestly, we’ve been down this road many, many times, and at this point there’s really not much to say.
The most important question is: Why? “Meet the Press” is a prestigious program, so much so that you’d think Welker’s first guest might be President Biden. Welker opened, though, by saying that Biden had in fact been invited, which suggests that the White House turned her down. Poynter media critic Tom Jones speculates that Biden didn’t want to be questioned about his son, Hunter, who last week was indicted on federal gun charges.
As he always does, Trump confronted Welker with a stream-of-consciousness gusher. For every lie she called out, she had to let another 10 go just because of the sheer volume of idiocy coming out of his mouth. In the post-debate panel, New York Times political reporter Peter Baker called Trump a “bulldozer, shoveling falsehoods and lies.” Indeed. At least Welker didn’t interview Trump in front of a howling MAGA mob, as CNN’s Kaitlan Collins did earlier this year. On the other hand, I thought Collins did a better, more aggressive job of pushing back than Welker did, even though Welker had the advantage of recording Trump ahead of time and occasionally interrupting the flow with a return to the studio, where she pointed out a few of the former president’s lies. NBC News did run an online fact-check, but who’s going to look at that?
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, writing on the Platform Formerly Known as Twitter, criticized Welker and NBC News for offering “a ‘zero innovations’ model,” explaining: “Everything was predictable, nothing was surprising, and new host Kristen Welker did nothing to justify going to the well again with another Trump Q&A.” Writing in The Daily Beast, Corbin Bolies added that “like those who have tried before, her inherent skills as an interviewer were no match for a chaotic interview subject like Trump.”
The argument for interviewing Trump is that, despite facing numerous federal criminal charges, he’s leading his Republican rivals for the presidential nomination and is tied with Biden. I get it. But it was a terrible way to kick off Welker’s debut at “Meet the Press,” and it opens her to the criticism that was often voiced about her predecessor, Chuck Todd — that he would rather normalize authoritarianism than stand up to Trump and his allies.
Mitt Romney, right, with then-Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey. Photo (cc) 2018 by Gage Skidmore.
I read The Atlantic’s excerpt from McKay Coppins’ new Mitt Romney biography on the train ride home Friday. It delivers the goods. I’ve never been a Romney fan, but I appreciate his willingness to stand up to Donald Trump and Trumpism when it really mattered.
I was also struck that, after Romney became an outcast within his own party, he preferred to work with conspiracy-minded loons like Sen. Ron Johnson over the hypocrites who defended Trump in public while sidling up to Romney in private to tell him they would love to denounce Trump, too, but they just couldn’t. (“There are worse things than losing an election,” Romney would tell them. “Take it from somebody who knows.”)
What is chilling, though, is that, as Romney tells it, Republicans who once indulged Trump in order to advance their own political ambitions later had a different, more elemental reason for defending Trump in public: they were afraid they and their families would be killed by Trump’s deranged supporters, whipped up into a fury by the maximum leader himself. Coppins writes:
Some of the reluctance to hold Trump accountable was a function of the same old perverse political incentives — elected Republicans feared a political backlash from their base. But after January 6, a new, more existential brand of cowardice had emerged. One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome? Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.
Romney was paying $5,000 for security, and he understood that many of his colleagues couldn’t afford that. But this is horrifying, and it shows the near-impossibility of breaking up the Trump-Republican alliance. Moreover, it’s how we move from democracy to authoritarianism to fascism. As New York Times columnist David Brooks put it Friday on the “PBS NewsHour”: “There are members who were going to vote to convict on impeachment, but were afraid that they or their families might get assassinated, and they knew their vote wouldn’t make a difference. We are way beyond the bounds of normal democratic governance, when that’s even on the minds of members of Congress.”
My fear is that Joe Biden’s presidency represents little more than an uneasy interregnum between Trump and whatever’s next. If Biden can win re-election, maybe that will give us four more years for passions on the extreme right — now a majority of the Republican Party — to cool off. From where we are standing today, though, I don’t see much chance of that happening.
The Marblehead Current, a nonprofit local news organization that was founded in 2022, has published an editorial about Press Forward, the initiative announced by 22 foundations to donate more than $500 million to support community journalism over the next five years. I think this is key:
But while we are excited about what Press Forward or a new law might mean for our industry as a whole, we have a nagging fear that news of such developments will create the funding equivalent of the “bystander effect” in Marblehead, fostering the assumption that the Current will be fine, its needs attended to by someone else, someone from “away.”
There is no substitute for a strong funding base at the local level. National efforts should be seen as a supplement.
