Category: Media

The superficial world of Politico

Maybe my old friend Mark Leibovich is too subtle. Maybe it’s true that any press is good press. But I experienced some severe cognitive dissonance last night as I watched Charlie Rose and Ken Auletta congratulate Mike Allen of Politico over Leibovich’s cover profile of him in the forthcoming New York Times Magazine.

Earlier in the evening I had read Leibovich’s story, and was both repulsed and fascinated. Leibovich, with whom I worked at the Boston Phoenix in the early ’90s, operates with a scalpel. But in his precise, dauntingly well-reported way, he drew gushers of blood, portraying Allen — whose duties include writing “Playbook,” an influential daily e-mail — as the leading exemplar of the Politico sensibility: superficial, insidery and deeply biased in favor of power.

Politico produces good work. Allen produces good work — it was he who broke the story last summer about Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham’s Weymouth’s plan to hold paid salons in her home with lobbyists, Post journalists and government officials. There is a lot of talent and smarts at Politico, and I’m not suggesting that we ignore it.

But the overall sensibility of Politico is perhaps best described by Allen himself, who told Rose and Auletta last night (I’m paraphrasing) that his readers aren’t satisfied merely to know the score; they want to keep track of the entire game, inning by inning. You wonder if it has ever occurred to Allen that politics might not be a sporting event.

Leibovich reveals that Allen, like retired Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr., does not vote, lest it compromise his neutrality. This is house-of-mirrors stuff. Politico’s ongoing celebration of the status quo, of Washington as it is, of a worldview in which Democrats and Republicans are players who should be covered ESPN-style, makes it every bit as biased as Talking Points Memo or National Review Online, only less substantive.

I was particularly taken with this Leibovich tidbit:

“I’ve been in Washington about 30 years,” Mark Salter, a former chief of staff and top campaign aide to John McCain, says. “And here’s the surprising reality: On any given day, not much happens. It’s just the way it is.” Not so in the world of Politico, he says, where meetings in which senators act like themselves (maybe sarcastic or short) become “tension filled” affairs. “They have taken every worst trend in reporting, every single one of them, and put them on rocket fuel,” Salter says. “It’s the shortening of the news cycle. It’s the trivialization of news. It’s the gossipy nature of news. It’s the self-promotion.”

The shame of it is that a pioneering online-mostly news organization like Politico turns out to represent the perfect distillation of every bad trend in political journalism.

Politico’s goal, Leibovich tells us, is to “drive the conversation,” and it has succeeded at that to a considerable degree. Too bad Allen and company neither know nor care where they’re headed.

A copyright case in which man bites dog

Well, this is certainly interesting. On March 17 I posted an item explaining that, back in January, I had mistakenly used a copyrighted photo of a Haitian earthquake victim taken by photojournalist Daniel Morel. The photo had been presented as an example of citizen journalism, so I grabbed it for a round-up I was writing on that subject.

Now I have learned that Agence France Presse, one of a number of news organizations and websites that used Morel’s work, has sued Morel in U.S. District Court in Manhattan under a tort I have never heard of before — the “antagonistic assertion of rights.”

All I’ve got at the moment is a press release from Morel’s lawyers, Barbara Hoffman and Hilary Gish, and I’ll be running around for the next few days. I’d love to learn more.

How the media covered Scott Brown’s rise

Meet the press: Scott Brown speaks with reporter following Senate debate in December at WBZ-TV.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism and Boston University have published a study on how the media covered the race to succeed the late U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, a race that culminated in Republican Scott Brown’s surprising victory over Democrat Martha Coakley.

Among the authors of the report, “Hiding in Plain Sight, From Kennedy to Brown,” was my old friend Mark Jurkowitz, associate director of the project, with whom I worked at both the Boston Phoenix and “Beat the Press.”

The findings of the study — which mainly focuses on the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, and to a lesser extent on the Associated Press and the New York Times — are not surprising. Essentially we learn that the media devoted precious little attention to Brown during the primary and general-election campaigns until Jan. 5, when Rasmussen released a poll showing that Brown was within striking distance.

From that point on, according to the report (verified by anyone who was paying attention at the time), the media went into overdrive, covering the campaign relentlessly but devoting far more resources to the horse race and strategy stories than to the issues. You will also not be surprised to learn that the Globe was more favorable to Coakley and the Herald to Brown.

“In the end, a campaign that first seemed to lack drama and star power was the most important and intensely covered political story in the country,” the report says. “And while they were certainly not alone, the press never saw it coming.”

I have a few quibbles with what was looked at. The authors, for example, criticize the Globe and the Herald for rarely getting outside of the Boston area, arguing that they might have picked up the Brown surge earlier if they had pushed themselves outside their geographic comfort zone. A fair point, but it’s too bad the folks who did the study couldn’t find a way to incorporate coverage from other news outlets around the state.

Then, too, talk radio, which formed a near-monolithic cheering section for Brown (and jeering section for Coakley), doesn’t even get a mention. Granted, newspaper stories can be closely analyzed in ways that talk radio can’t. But right-wing talk may have been the single most important factor in Brown’s rise.

Still, “Hidden in Plain Sight” is a revealing and valuable look at how Boston’s two daily newspapers covered the state’s biggest political story in many years, and is well worth reading in full.

Open systems, open society

Apple’s attempt to ban a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist from its iTunes Store is an extension of the same mindset that led it to keep Adobe’s Flash software off its new generation of closed devices — the iPhone, the iPod touch and the iPad. And it shows that Steve Jobs and company are poorly cast in their role as a savior of the struggling news business. Or so I write in the Guardian.

Harvey Silverglate on the Goldman case

Harvey Silverglate checks in on the Goldman Sachs case:

I think you have it just right. The ideologues, especially some New York Times reporters and liberal columnists, would like to deem Goldman’s conduct “fraud” of either the civil and/or criminal variety. From time to time, a sane and informed voice peeks through the miasma and realizes what is really going on — the SEC is trying to salvage is reputation by blaming the economic melt-down on fraudsters, rather than on the incompetence of Congress, the SEC, the Treasury Department, the Fed (why did Alan Greenspan keep interest rates so low for so long? one might usefully ask) and other regulators or would-be regulators.

While there was doubtless some fraud (for example, in the writing or sub-prime mortgages to home purchasers without adequate income or even jobs), a large measure of the blame for the meltdown goes to our government, that allowed the casino to proceed and that even provided low-interest-rate money to help finance it. Those of us who took notice, as the price of houses on our respective blocks continued to escalate to the point where we never could have bought our homes had we not done so years earlier (and way beyond what we knew the houses to be worth), realized something was amiss. But the big boys on Wall Street, blinded by the huge paydays and bonuses, just kept betting more and more.

The creation of synthetic vehicles, the only purpose of which appears to have been to magnify the amount of the bet without requiring a huge amount of capital to make the bet, made the situation infinitely worse, for the vehicles were so non-transparent that they achieved higher ratings from the rating agencies (or the underlying securities did) than they intrinsically deserved.  And so the combination of incredible leverage, plus non-transparency of the underlying securities, was a formula for disaster. This is the great failure of government regulators (as well as the independent rating agencies, by the way, such as Standard & Poor, Moody’s, and so forth).

What bothers me is that the SEC is being allowed to get away with absolving its own grotesque errors and incompetence by shouting “fraud.” You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but….there comes a time when the game is up. To prevent this from happening again, sane government regulation of these markets is required, period.

Watch Silverglate talk about Goldman its similarities to the case of Michael Milken, whom Silverglate represented.

Was Goldman’s sleazy behavior really illegal?

Goldman Sachs founder Marcus Goldman

Keep an eye on the Securities and Exchange Commission’s case against Goldman Sachs. It’s hard to imagine a less sympathetic defendant than Goldman. That may be the problem, because evidence is already emerging to suggest regulators are concocting violations in order to punish sleazy but legal behavior.

In today’s New York Times, Binyamin Appelbaum offers a useful analysis of the SEC’s civil suit against Goldman, which stands accused of defrauding investors. The story quotes experts who point out that those investors were fully informed about what they were buying. The only thing investors didn’t know was that a hedge-fund manager named John Paulson helped pick what went into the investment vehicles and then bet they would lose money, to the great benefit, as it turned out, of Goldman’s shareholders. [Note: The previous sentence has been corrected since this item was first posted.]

Elsewhere in the Times, Andrew Ross Sorkin asks, “Why was Goldman, or any regulated bank, allowed to create and sell a product like the synthetic collateralized debt obligation at the center of this case?” The key word in that sentence may be “allowed.”

The Goldman case seems similar to one investigated recently by ProPublica and the NPR program “This American Life” involving Magnetar, a hedge fund that created collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) that it then bet against. Magnetar has been accused of deliberately making those CDOs as risky as possible and then shorting them, running up many tens of millions in profits when they failed. (Magnetar denied the accusation.)

According to the report, Magnetar’s dealings may have single-handedly extended the housing bubble for at least a year, making the subsequent crash much deeper than it otherwise would have been. Yet not only has there been no hint that there was anything illegal going on, but Magnetar itself is still in business.

(And by the way, if you haven’t heard the report, you should download the podcast. It is a rare model of clarity about an exceedingly murky subject. You will come away, as I did, actually knowing something about what CDOs are and why they were so harmful to the economy.)

Although the charges Goldman faces are civil rather than criminal, the story calls to mind my friend and occasional collaborator Harvey Silverglate’s book “Three Felonies a Day,” which details the expansive reach of federal prosecutors who use vague laws (“conspiracy” is a favorite) in order to punish people and corporations they have targeted.

The news media ought to follow Appelbaum’s lead and be on alert against getting spun by tales of wrongdoing at Goldman. The real outrage may prove to be not what’s illegal but what’s legal. Perhaps a better story is whether the massive financial-regulation bill now being considered by Congress would outlaw the sort of behavior that made Goldman and Magnetar clients even richer than they already were — while leaving the economy in ruins.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Is there more to Howie’s suspension?

Howie Carr

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. So maybe Howie Carr’s suspension from WRKO Radio (AM 680) is just a suspension. But let me inject some uninformed speculation into the matter. The once-great station has been running on fumes for some time. Maybe its corporate owner, Entercom, has decided to force an end game, let Carr out of his contract and turn ‘RKO into an outlet for, oh, let’s say Spanish-language infomercials.

The Boston Globe’s Erin Ailsworth reports that Carr was suspended for a week for badmouthing the station on the air — something he has done continuously since he was forced into staying in 2007. (Apparently it’s gotten worse lately.) Carr is said to be unhappy that Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated show recently moved to Clear Channel’s WXKS (AM 1200), part of a national “Rush Radio” network.

Funny, but I thought one of the reasons the station replaced Rush with Republican political consultant Charley Manning was that Howie and Manning are buddies, and that Charley might keep the petulant star more or less in line. I don’t have any numbers in front of me, but Boston radio observers have long noted that this is one of Limbaugh’s worst markets. The idea of not fighting to keep Limbaugh and going with a local show struck me as pretty smart, even if Manning’s show is a work in progress.

Carr does seem to be wallowing in bitterness lately. For instance, he recently wrote in his Boston Herald column that President Obama wouldn’t have made it through college and law school if he weren’t black:

Of course, no one expects Barack Obama to really know anything. We understand, all too well, exactly how he got through Columbia and Harvard Law. He had certain … intangibles, shall we say.

That’s pretty rancid even by Howie’s standards. No, I’m not leaving anything out — the ellipses are his, not mine.

Back in 2007, Carr tried to jump to WTKK (96.9 FM), which wanted him as its morning guy. Unfortunately for Carr, he turned out to have a contract more restrictive than Curt Flood’s, and he was forced to stay.

What’s not known is whether Greater Media, which owns ‘TKK, still wants him. Morning drive is now ably helmed by Jim Braude and Margery Eagan. Would ‘TKK move Jay Severin out of afternoon drive to make way for Carr?

Moreover, given the changed economic climate, it certainly seems unlikely that Greater Media would still be willing to pay Carr $7 million over five years.

The other mystery factor is how much Entercom really wants WRKO to succeed. There’s a lot of audience overlap between ‘RKO and another Entercom station, WEEI (AM 850), a sports-talk outlet that also carries the Red Sox. No doubt the company wants WRKO to make money, but not at the expense of its more-valuable sports station.

Carr is a legitimate talent, but it’s been years since he’s showed more than an occasional glimmer. His suspension comes at a time when he probably has little leverage. Maybe he’ll be back on the air in a week as though nothing happened. But you have to wonder if Entercom executives have finally decided it’s time to do something drastic about its faltering talk station.

Photo (cc) by Paul Keleher and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Original at Wikimedia Commons.

Analyzing coverage of the Phoebe Prince story

Occasional Media Nation commenter Bill Weye has written a detailed critique of how his local newspaper, the Springfield Republican, has covered the Phoebe Prince story. Weye offers a harsh analysis, pointing his finger at newsroom cutbacks and a court reporter whom he considers to be inexperienced.

I know nothing about the Republican. But whether Weye is right or wrong, his post strikes me as a well-thought-out take that is worth reading.

Playing on racial fears

Let’s see how many media outlets report on the speaker who angrily referred to President Obama as “Barack Hussein” (not even the typical “Barack Hussein Obama”) at this morning’s tea-party rally on the Boston Common — and on all the members of the audience who cheered. Not this one, unfortunately.

I won’t call it racism, but it’s certainly a case of playing on racial fears.