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Crooked Hillary redux: Making sense of the Uranium One distraction

To understand the current Trumpist obsession with Hillary Clinton and the Uranium One story, you first need to know what it is not. Uranium One is not a scandal or even a discrete set of facts that can be weighed and assessed. Rather, it is a talisman wielded by President Trump’s most ardent defenders in the hope of warding off the burgeoning Russia scandal.

Thus we have absurd characters like Sean Hannity of Fox News calling it “one of the biggest scandals in American history involving another country.” And The Daily Signal, a right-wing website published by the Heritage Foundation, asking, “Why isn’t the mainstream media covering Uranium One?” And Conrad Black, who speculates in The New York Sun that special counsel Robert Mueller will — or at least should — go after Clinton’s allies the Podesta brothers for their role in Uranium One now that the Russia inquiry has fallen apart. Because, you know, nothing says fallen apart quite like the indictment of two former Trump campaign officials and a guilty plea from a third, with the promise of more to come.

David French, a prominent anti-Trump conservative, explained in The New York Times what’s going on:

The desire to think the best of Mr. Trump combined with the deep distaste for Democrats grants extraordinary power to two phrases: “fake news” and “the other side is worse.” “Fake news” erects a shield of disbelief against the worst allegations and allows a person to believe that Mr. Trump is better than he is. For too many Republicans, every single troubling element of the Russia investigation — including multiple administration falsehoods about contacts with Russian officials — represents “fake news.”

The Trump supporters pushing the Uranium One story are impervious to facts not because they’re stupid but because the purpose of telling it is to put the media on the defensive. Nevertheless, there are facts, and I’ve endeavored to find out what they are by consulting the nonpartisan website FactCheck.org.

The verdict: There’s nothing to the claim, first made by then-candidate Trump in 2016, that the United States gave away 20 percent of its uranium to Russia and that Hillary Clinton, as secretary of state, was responsible. The facts are incredibly convoluted —we are, after all, talking about the Clintons. The full narrative encompasses the Clinton Foundation, a speaking fee paid to Bill Clinton, and a dubious book called “Clinton Cash,” written by a conservative activist named Peter Schweizer, promoted by Stephen Bannon, and, for reasons that have never been credibly explained, used by The New York Times as the basis for some of its reporting on the Clintons. But, FactCheck.org says:

It may be that individuals and companies sought to curry favor with Hillary Clinton and even influence her department’s decision on the Uranium One sale. But, as we’ve written before, there is no evidence that donations to the Clinton Foundation from people with ties to Uranium One or Bill Clinton’s speaking fee influenced Hillary Clinton’s official actions. That’s still the case.

Vox has a shorter, easier-to-follow take on the deal that calls the Republican conspiracy theory involving Uranium One “a thoroughly debunked and verifiably false charge.” Vox, in turn, cites a report by yet another nonpartisan fact-checking site, PolitiFact, which rated Trump’s accusations against Clinton as “mostly false.”

It’s also worth keeping in mind that Trump, not Clinton, is president — something that you might forget if you get pulled into the Fox News rabbit hole. (Hannity went so far as to call Hillary “President Clinton” the other day.) Even if there were reason to believe Clinton had been involved in wrongdoing (again, there isn’t), the value to the public of pursuing her at this point is not very high. On the other hand, the question of whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Russians goes to the very heart of our democracy.

“The right-wing response to Robert Mueller’s investigation is to change the subject, preferably to an alleged ‘scandal’ involving Hillary Clinton,” writes CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, who adds: “This creates a thick layer of fog, making it hard to see what really matters. Maybe this is the goal. Regardless, it poses a challenge for journalists who are trying to convey the truth.”

The truth is that the Uranium One story isn’t about the truth. The Trump White House and its allies are essentially gaming the media’s old-fashioned dedication to balance — regardless of the facts — by flinging unsupportable charges that will be reported alongside the Russia news in the name of being fair and objective. Trump’s allies, who despise Clinton, will grab onto those stories and denounce everything else as “fake news.”

It’s an ugly and depressing situation with no clear solution.

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McGrory hails Globe’s EPPY Award, praises staff and says print woes are easing

Here is the latest newsroom memo from Boston Globe editor Brian McGrory, sent out a little after 6 p.m. on Friday. A kind soul passed it on to me a short time later. First, a few observations of my own:

Six years after its debut, the Globe’s website still stacks up very well against those of most newspapers, so the EPPY Award is deserved. I could quibble, but it’s cleaner and faster than almost any other newspaper site. But the lack of a decent mobile experience remains a huge problem. Yes, the website is responsive and looks good on a phone. But it only works when you have a strong internet connection, which often isn’t available, especially on public transportation. I was told in late 2016 that the Globe was working on developing or licensing a new mobile app. It’s long overdue. For many of us, great mobile would be more useful than the Globe’s solving its print problems. Speaking of which:
As McGrory says, indications are that the horrendous printing and delivery problems associated with the new Taunton plant are easing. But based on anecdotal evidence, the Globe still has a way to go. If you’re still not getting your paper, or you’re not getting part of the paper, or it’s too late for you to be able to read it, or the print quality is terrible, then that’s a 100 percent failure, at least for you.
I couldn’t agree more on McGrory’s fifth point. The journalism remains excellent and vital. I would particularly point to Yvonne Abraham’s column on sexual harassment at the Statehouse, which, as McGrory notes, led to instant action.

The full text of McGrory’s memo follows.

Some quick and random thoughts to end the week:

1/ The Globe won Editor and Publisher’s EPPY Award for best daily newspaper website. This is a big damned deal, a tribute to everyone in this room and your tireless commitment to the distinctive journalism that fills the site hour after hour, day after day. Please take huge pride in this.

2/ Not for nothing, we added about 650 digital subscribers last week. We’ve roared past the 90,000 mark and are on our way to 100,000. This is yet more validation for your efforts.

3/ Our sports podcast, Season Ticket, continues to outperform all expectations — and is a flat out great listen. [Chris] Gasper’s fantastic, and our in-house guests — Nora [Princiotti], Pete [Abraham], Joe Sullivan, Alex [Speier], Fluto [Shinzawa], Ben [Volin] this week alone — are at once deeply knowledgeable and downright charming.

4/ The company is getting a higher quality paper on subscriber’s doorsteps with far greater consistency, such that we’ve been able to relax print deadlines in the room. It’s taken a lot of work on the second floor and in Taunton, and it’s really starting to show.

5/ The journalism continues to excel, and of that, you should be most proud. Yvonne today got a reaction from the House speaker within a couple of hours of posting her sharp and important column. There was Andrea [Estes] with another heart-breaking exclusive on the New Hampshire VA, Mark [Arsenault] on Vicki Kennedy, much of Sports with extraordinary deadline coverage of Gordon Hayward’s gruesome injury, our Amazon coverage (including the creative wrap), Shirley [Leung] excoriating Boston to appreciate itself, the DC bureau’s relentlessly fascinating coverage of all things Trump and Warren, and the Express Desk owning the moment, moment after moment. There’s much more that we’ve recently had, and there’s far more in the works. Thank you for it all, and as ever, please don’t let up.

Brian

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The Globe hires a Gannett executive to run its printing operations

The Boston Globe has hired a new top executive to oversee print operations, according to a memo to staff members from Vinay Mehra, the Globe’s new president and chief financial officer. Dale Carpenter, who’ll be a senior vice president, previously held a top print position with Gannett. He sounds like the sort of person who should have been hired before the Globe opened its troubled Taunton printing facility. Maybe he’ll be the guy who straightens it out.

The full text of Mehra’s memo follows.

Dear Colleagues,

I am happy to announce the following additions to our Executive Team.

Dale Carpenter joins us as Senior Vice President of Print Operations where he will oversee the production, distribution, and customer service functions. Dale was most recently Vice President of Operations at Gannett Publishing where he had oversight of more than 70 print locations across the country and had responsibility for national printing and packaging. Dale is a nationally known print and production expert and we are delighted to have him join our team. He will start on October 23.

Dan Krockmalnic will join us at the end of this month as our new General Counsel as Maura McAuliffe has chosen to step into a part-time role. Dan was most recently Assistant Attorney General at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office where he focused on consumer protection cases. He began his career at the law firm of Ropes & Gray.

Please join me in welcoming them to Boston Globe Media.

Vinay

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Why the press embraces false equivalence — and why it needs to stop

The press on a bad day. Photo (cc) 2003 by James Good.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The Democrats are moving left. This is objectively true, but it also represents a challenge for those mainstream journalists whose equilibrium has been disrupted by the Republican lurch to the extreme right over the past several decades and, more recently, by the rise of Donald Trump.

The challenge can be described this way: Can the media report plainly on what the Democrats are up to without falling back onto false notions of balance? In other words, can they tell us how and why the Democrats are embracing increasingly progressive positions without resorting to the old nostrum that it’s just like the Republicans’ rightward march?

Goaded by the likes of Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, Democrats are pushing for (among other things) a greater government role in health care; an end to free-trade agreements that cost American jobs; the humane treatment of immigrants, both documented and undocumented; and continued progress on LGBTQ issues. In too many instances, though, the media are describing these slight tweaks to the moderate liberalism of the Obama years as if Democrats were marching in the streets singing “The Internationale.” And the press just can’t stay away from so-called balance. For instance, a Sunday New York Times story on the rise of the “Resistance” put it this way:

The upending of the left comes amid a broader realignment in American politics, with the Republican Party establishment also contending with a rising rebellion, driven by pro-Trump populists. Just as the new forces on the right are threatening primary challenges to establishment Republicans, some groups on the left have begun talking about targeting Democratic incumbents in the 2018 midterm elections.

Washington Post columnist Dan Balz, who epitomizes establishment thinking as David Broder once did, went out of his way to balance the Democrats’ “leftward movement” with the Republicans’ “rightward shift” and warned that Democrats “must find a way to harness the movement into a political vision that is attractive to voters beyond the Democratic base.”

The problem is that no reasonable comparison can be made between the two parties’ ideological shifts. Long before the age of Trump, the Republicans established themselves as the party of no. A Democratic president, Bill Clinton, was impeached because of a personal scandal that would have — should have — remained a secret but that was revealed through a partisan Republican investigation. The filibuster became routine under Republican rule, making it impossible to conduct the business of the Senate. The Republicans refuse to talk about gun control or climate change. The party hit bottom by refusing even to consider Barack Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee — a deeply transgressive breach of longstanding norms on the part of Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell. And all of this was before the race-baiting, white-supremacist-coddling Donald Trump became president.

A few years ago Norman Ornstein and Thomas Mann — cautious think-tank types — wrote a book called “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks” that frankly blamed the breakdown of government on Republican extremism. They challenged journalists to describe this reality, writing in an op-ed piece:

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias … We understand the values of mainstream journalists, including the effort to report both sides of a story. But a balanced treatment of an unbalanced phenomenon distorts reality. If the political dynamics of Washington are unlikely to change anytime soon, at least we should change the way that reality is portrayed to the public.

The institutional desire for evenhandedness, though, is so deeply ingrained that journalists struggle to move beyond it. New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen has called this the “production of innocence,” meaning that the press reflexively adopts equivalence between the two major parties as its default position even when the facts scream out against balance. “The conceit is that you can report and comment on politics truthfully while always and forever splitting the difference between the two sides so as to advertise your own status as perpetually non-aligned,” Rosen wrote. “What if that is not even possible? What if you have to risk the appearance of being partisan in order to describe accurately what is going on in a hyper-partisan situation?”

What’s going on in the Democratic Party right now may or may not be smart in terms of its future electoral prospects. It could be that the incremental liberalism of the Clinton and Obama eras has run its course and that it’s time for something bolder. Or not. In any case, the Democrats’ search for a new identity cannot remotely be compared to the Republicans’ embrace of extremism and nihilism. Resisting the urge to balance the inherently unbalanced will be difficult for journalists grounded in the ethos of equivalence at all costs. But they need to try.

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Margaret Sullivan on the media’s terrible coverage of the Clinton campaign

There’s a very strong Margaret Sullivan column in today’s Washington Post on the media’s terrible coverage of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. It’s especially good to see her call out The New York Times, for whom she was its best public editor before moving on to the Post.

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The rise and fall of Digital First; or, how to get rich plundering newspapers

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The Nation recently published a splendid takedown of Randall Smith, a little-known Wall Street tycoon whose avarice has hollowed out daily newspapers from coast to coast. By “gutting” his papers, Julie Reynolds reports, Smith was able to amass the $57 million he needed to buy 16 mansions in Palm Beach, Florida. “Don’t just blame the Internet for journalism’s decline,” she writes. “Old-fashioned capitalist greed also strangles newspapers.”

The name of Smith’s newspaper empire is Digital First Media, an ironic moniker for an enterprise dedicated to the proposition that every last penny should be squeezed out of the shrinking print business. But the name isn’t just ironic — it’s also iconic. Although Reynolds doesn’t mention it in her story, it wasn’t that long ago that Digital First was created by a charismatic, foul-mouthed executive who was hailed as a possible savior of the news business.

If you’re a newspaper junkie, you’ll remember him: John Paton, celebrated by The New York Times and the Columbia Journalism Review, a man given to florid pronouncements about the need for newspapers to adapt to digital as rapidly as possible lest they die of irrelevance. As the CJR put it in 2011: “To those who complained that digital ad prices were so low compared to print ads that it was like ‘trading dollars for dimes,’ he retorted with his catchphrase, ‘Start stacking dimes.’”

Paton was put in charge of two moribund newspaper chains: the Journal Register Co., whose flagship was the New Haven Register, and MediaNews Group, whose largest paper was The Denver Post. He called the amalgamation Digital First, and he vowed either to save the business or to go down trying.

My first encounter with the Digital First aura came in the summer of 2011, when I interviewed Matt DeRienzo, then the young new editor of the Register, who’d already made his mark at a smaller Journal Register paper by opening a café and inviting the public to attend news meetings. “‘Digital First’ to me means putting journalism first, and it means putting community first, or readers first,” DeRienzo told me. “Readers don’t need to come to us as this exclusive voice on high, like the nightly news. There are 8 million sources of information out there for us, and our job is to sift through that for them and curate and aggregate and do original reporting as well, and to work with them at every step of the process to connect them with that. And we’re the better for it, I think.”

Paton’s most ambitious initiative was something called Project Thunderdome, whose mission was to create common content and production platforms for Digital First’s papers, allowing local journalists to focus on covering their communities. But the Paton era proved to be shockingly brief. That’s because Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that was headed by Randall Smith, began bleeding Digital First dry before Paton’s vision could be fully implemented. Project Thunderdome was shut down. Costs were cut. The company’s newspapers didn’t even have decent websites. (So much for “digital first.”) DeRienzo quit in 2014, and Paton left the following year.

Jim Brady, a former washingtonpost.com editor who had run Project Thunderdome as Digital First’s top editor, spoke favorably of Paton when we talked in early 2016. “He was maybe a little more aggressive and beat his chest a little bit more than I would,” said Brady, who subsequently launched a company that operates the mobile-first local news sites Billy Penn in Philadelphia and The Incline in Pittsburgh. “On the other hand, it got him a lot of attention and probably allowed us to hire some people, get some people interested in us that wouldn’t have been interested otherwise.”

As Julie Reynolds notes in her article in The Nation, Digital First is now one of the country’s largest newspaper chains. The company bought the Orange County Register out of bankruptcy in 2016 following Boston businessman Aaron Kushner’s failed attempt to restore the Register’s fortunes. In Massachusetts, Digital First owns the Sentinel & Enterprise of Fitchburg and The Sun of Lowell. With luck, perhaps Digital First will someday sell them to local buyers, as it did with the Berkshire Eagle of Pittsfield, a transaction that has revived the Eagle and its affiliated papers in southern Vermont.

“Unlike large corporate owners in the past,” Reynolds writes, “the stated goal of the investment firms is not to keep struggling newspapers alive; it is to siphon off the assets and profits, then dispose of what little remains.”

The Digital First story might have had a different ending if Paton had been able to implement his ideas. To this day many smaller papers without debt and with little competition are making money and serving their communities, even if they’re not exactly thriving. Long-term, their demise may be inevitable. Short-term, they’re being hustled along to the boneyard by the likes of Digital First.

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At the Globe, an innovative approach to funding public-interest journalism

In case you didn’t look closely at the provenance of today’s big Spotlight Team investigation in The Boston Globe, it was the result of an initiative that grew out of the movie “Spotlight.” You’ll find the full explanation here, but essentially three of the groups that funded the film created the Spotlight Investigative Journalism Fellowship to tell important stories that might otherwise go unreported.

The two-parter that debuted today is the first result of that effort. Reporters Kelly Carr and Jaimi Dowdell report on “lax oversight by the Federal Aviation Administration [that], over decades, has made it easy for drug dealers, corrupt politicians, and even people with links to terrorism to register private planes and conceal their identities.”

The story begins with a harrowing anecdote and features great photography, an excellent video, and a first-rate digital treatment. It’s an innovative approach to paying for public-interest journalism, and it will be interesting to see what else it yields.

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Questions remain as The Boston Globe tries to solve its epic printing woes

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

The big unanswered question about The Boston Globe’s printing woes is whether they are merely serious — that is, they remain an agonizing pit of misery for months to come but are ultimately fixable — or if, instead, they are so catastrophic that they will require publisher John Henry to get rid of his new used presses and start over.

No one other than a few insiders knows for sure. But the Globe took a good first step toward providing its increasingly disenchanted customers with some answers by publishing an in-depth story by staff reporter Mark Arsenault over the weekend on what we know, what we don’t know, and what we still need to find out.

It was about time. Before Arsenault’s story was posted on Saturday night, the Globe’s only published acknowledgment of the problem came in the form of a front-page note from Henry on Aug. 18 in which he wrote that the presses at the paper’s new Taunton printing facility “are operating too slowly and breaking too often.” He added: “We are embarrassed. We are sincerely sorry to all those affected.” He also said it was unlikely those problems would be resolved by Labor Day — an observation that proved to be prescient.

Arsenault did not address every aspect of what can now fairly be called a crisis. I would have liked to see him do some reporting on what by all accounts has been a terrible experience for customers trying to cancel their subscriptions for papers that often never show up. And though Arsenault reported union official Stephen Sullivan’s response to Globe president Vinay Mehra’s claim that the problems were due in part to employees who are “resistant to change” (Arsenault’s phrase, not Mehra’s), it struck me that the accusation deserved further exploration. I don’t think Mehra helped the situation by insulting the very front-line people who’ve been stuck trying to fix a mess created by the paper’s top executives — two of whom lost their jobs as a result.

Still, there was important information in Arsenault’s story, especially regarding a company in Lubbock, Texas, called West Texas Printing Center. The company reportedly installed a set-up similar to, though smaller than, the Globe’s, which led to a world of hurt before matters were finally brought under control. “First year, year-and-a-half, we struggled,” West Texas official Kristi Holt told Arsenault. “Finding the demons and eliminating the demons is a long, tedious process. I feel for y’all. I’ve been where you are.”

A year. A year and a half. Does the Globe really have that long to get it right? Probably not. The paper solved its previous self-created fiasco over home-delivery vendors in a few months, but it’s not likely the Globe’s customers can wait until 2019 for the current mess to be cleaned up. And let’s not forget that those customers include not just readers but other newspapers that have entrusted their printing to the Globe, including the Boston Herald, The New York Times, and USA Today.

Then there’s the nightmare scenario. Last week a 38-year Globe pressman, Phil McColgan, sent me an email outlining what he thought needed to be done. With his permission, I forwarded his message to my colleagues at “Beat the Press,” and it was featured in our report last Friday. “In my opinion unless Mr. Henry is willing to dig deep into his pockets and install the correct presses such as the Goss presses that are sitting idle in Boston [at the former Morrissey Boulevard headquarters] we are going to continue to struggle to make deadlines,” he wrote.

When you take the long view, the idea that a newspaper could be laid low by printing problems in 2017 seems ludicrous. The Globe is doing well on the internet front, having signed up more than 80,000 digital-only subscribers, more than any other regional newspaper. The Globe’s website could use some updating, and it’s long past time for the paper to offer a usable mobile app. But, overall, the paper has made decent progress in its quest to become a digital-first news organization.

The challenge is that print remains vital to the business of publishing a daily newspaper. The value of digital ads has cratered in recent years, largely because of Google’s automated auction system for allocating advertising to websites. Revenues from print advertising are a fraction of what they used to be — but they remain far greater than online income. Then, too, newspaper readers tend to be older, and they still like print. According to the Globe’s most recent year-old figures, paid print circulation was 143,000 on weekdays and 243,000 on Sundays.

Cynics sometimes observe that Henry got the Globe more or less for free: the value of the property underneath the paper’s former headquarters should offset the $70 million he paid in 2013. But Henry has invested significantly, even as he has made cuts in the newsroom in an effort to stay ahead of declining revenues. The Taunton plant cost Henry $75 million. It may cost him a lot more before this is over.

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Trumping his measured rhetoric, president goes off at the United Nations

The morning print headlines:

“Muted Trump Embraces U.N. Before Speech” (New York Times)
“Trump plans pragmatic U.N. speech” (Washington Post)
“Trump shifts global tone, engagement” (Boston Globe)

The afternoon web headlines:

“At U.N., Trump Threatens to ‘Totally Destroy North Korea’” (New York Times)
“Trump threatens to ‘destroy North Korea,’ calls Kim ‘Rocket Man’” (Washington Post)
“Trump threatens to ‘totally destroy’ North Korea in UN speech” (Boston Globe)

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Print is the Globe’s albatross — and lifeblood

The shame about The Boston Globe’s printing problems (and it will be a tragedy, not a shame, if they’re not fixed soon) is that, online, the paper is doing just fine. Earlier this year the paper reported that it had signed up more than 80,000 digital-only subscribers, the highest number of any regional paper in the country. The website looks good and is regularly updated, although a real mobile app would be welcome. The fall arts preview, which did not arrive with many people’s papers last Sunday, has been posted online; just bookmark it.

Unfortunately, for the second time in a year and a half the dead hand of print has reached out from the grave and grabbed the Globe by the ankle as it attempts to escape the past. It’s not like John Henry and company can walk away from print — print ads still pay most of the bills, and printing other newspapers is an important part of the Globe’s business strategy. That’s why it’s so important that the current meltdown be reversed as soon as possible

Of course we’ll be talking about this on “Beat the Press” tonight.

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