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The Star Trib and the Globe

The Minneapolis Star Tribune‘s value meltdown would seem to auger well for the Jack Welch/Jack Connors group’s hopes of buying the Boston Globe from the New York Times Co. The McClatchy chain is selling the Star Trib to a private equity firm for $530 million, which is about half what it paid eight years ago.

Jaws dropped when Welch and Connors proposed paying the Times Co. about half the $1.1 billion it laid out when it purchased the Globe in 1993. Now, as Adam Reilly of the Phoenix observes in considering the Star Trib situation, “Sounds a lot like the Globe to me.”

But I think the Star Trib sale means the Times Co. is less likely to unload the Globe right now, not more. Why?

Consider this story in the St. Paul Pioneer Press (via Romenesko). According to media and financial analysts, the private equity firm that bought the Star Trib is likely to engage in some serious cost-cutting and then sell out in three to five years. Obviously, the new owners think they’ll be able to get a lot more than $530 million when the time comes to sell.

The Times Co. has repeatedly said that the Globe is not for sale. My guess is that the Sulzbergers have a similar strategy. As much as we may lament the cost-cutting that’s already taken place at the Globe, it could get a lot smaller in the years to come. Indeed, with increasing numbers of readers getting their news online, the major value that the Globe brings to the table is its local coverage; everything else is going to be looked at very closely.

A more-local strategy; a better idea of how to make money online; and hopes for an improved advertising climate thanks to such developments as the arrival of Nordstrom to offset the loss of those Jordan Marsh and Filene’s ads, and Times Co. executives may well believe they’ll find themselves dealing from a position of strength a few years from now.

If they were to sell right now, they’d be selling out of weakness. Which is why I think they won’t do it.

Lawmakers should defy constitution

Dan Kennedy invited me to post about Tuesday’s SJC ruling on Gov. Mitt Romney’s lawsuit asking the court to force lawmakers to vote on an initiative petition to the state constitution that would prohibit same-sex couples from marrying.

I agree with Dan: The ruling is a strange one. It doesn’t account for the parliamentary rules and procedures in place at a constitutional convention. If a lawmaker makes a motion to adjourn before taking up every item on the agenda, is he or she breaking the law? If Senate President Robert Travaglini recognizes the motion, is he breaking the law?

The ruling merely highlights what a bad amendment Article 48 is. And that it badly needs to be reformed. Are the process wonks (paging Blue Mass Group’s David Kravitz) going to take up the cause? We’ll see.

So what should lawmakers do Jan. 2 when the constitutional convention that was recessed Nov. 11 is resumed? Easy. They should adjourn without voting on the amendment that would ban same-sex couples from marrying. Thirty years from now most of those now calling for a vote on this amendment — regardless of whether they want it voted on because they believe it should be passed or because they believe in “process” — will be embarrassed by their actions. The idea that gay couples should be banned from marrying will be seen by a majority of Americans as bizarre and/or offensive. Just as bizarre and offensive as the idea of voting on the rights of racial minorities is seen today.

This whole debate about process reminds me of “Heinz’s dilemma,” which should be familiar to most readers: A man named Heinz has a wife who is dying of cancer. There is a cure for her, but Heinz cannot afford the medicine. It’s being sold by the pharmacist who developed the drug; the pharmacist is selling the miracle drug at a gigantic mark-up. Heinz tries to bargain with the pharmacist: can he make a partial payment now, get the drug and pay the balance later when he’s able to get the rest of the money? The pharmacist says no. So Heinz breaks into the drugstore and steals the drug that will save his wife.

Did Heinz do the right thing?

The answer isn’t as important as the reasoning behind it — which is supposed to show where one falls on Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development.

Those who say that Tuesday’s SJC ruling mandates lawmakers to take an up-or-down vote on the merits of the anti-gay marriage amendment — knowing full well that the amendment (which ultimately asks a majority of heterosexuals to pass judgment on the rights of a minority of homosexuals) will pass — are stuck at stage four of Kohlberg’s six stages of moral development: “Maintaining the Social Order.” To them, I have one thing to say: Grow up. Put down your Bible and/or your copy of the state constitution and pick up a copy of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” See if you can’t meditate, contemplate and/or reason your way to stage five — “Social Contract and Individual Rights” — where you value law and order but understand that not every law is a good law.

At this stage, you believe that it is always morally wrong to break the law, even a bad law, but that it would be an even worse moral offense to mindlessly obey a bad law. Better yet, work yourself up to stage six, “Universal Principles,” where Gandhi and King did their thinking and living. In this stage, you know that there is no moral value in obeying a bad law and that the idea of a majority voting on the rights of a minority is, yes, morally reprehensible.

Surge protector

Search Google News for temporary surge Iraq and you’ll get some 1,660 results. The idea of bolstering American forces with an additional 30,000 or so troops for a short period of time has become popular enough that even U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the incoming Senate majority leader, briefly endorsed it.

But what is really on the table? Last Friday, a segment on the NPR program “On the Media” strongly suggested that the press has misunderstood the term “surge,” with its connotation of a temporary increase. In fact, it appears that the “surge” the Bush administration is reportedly considering consists of a long-term increase in troop strength, temporary only in the sense that the Bush presidency will end at some point.

The transcript has finally been posted, and it’s revealing. Take a look at this exchange between Frederick Kagan, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of the “surge” proposal now being considered by the White House, and “OTM” co-host Brooke Gladstone:

Kagan: The media has been using the term “surge” very loosely. And I think that’s actually a bit of a problem, because there have been various ideas floated for very short-term troops surges of relatively small numbers of troops. And I think that that would be a big mistake, and it’s not what we’re calling for.

We’re actually calling for an increase of troop strength in Iraq of about 35,000 combat troops; 20,000 of those would go into Baghdad. So I think a part of the problem that we have is that people are not being sufficiently precise about which proposal they’re discussing when they talk in terms of a troop surge.

Gladstone: So when Harry Reid, the incoming Senate majority leader, refers to a surge, he’s talking about two or three months; you’re talking about anywhere between 18 to 24.

Kagan: Yes, exactly. It’s really important to keep that distinction in mind. The idea of a two-to three-month surge is not meaningful. And the enemy expects to do that sort of thing. They expect us to come in briefly and leave. Doing that kind of thing plays right into the enemy’s hands.

As Gladstone and her other guest, Foreign Affairs magazine editor Gideon Rose, speculate, the use of the word “surge” is more a matter of marketing than it is policy, although Kagan assures Gladstone that he’s not part of any such marketing effort.

Rose puts it this way: “The problem is that the real version of this involves a sustained, increase in troops and a long presence in Iraq. And there’s no appetite in Washington for any policy like that. I mean, when Kagan talks about a sustained surge, he’s really talking about a long-term escalation.”

That’s something the media need to keep in mind. Because when reporters allow themselves to be deceived, they end up as conduits for deceiving the public as well.

Another view of the Nixon pardon

Commentators have been falling all over themselves to praise the late Gerald Ford for pardoning Richard Nixon a month after assuming the presidency. Even Ted Kennedy has said he came to realize that pardoning Nixon was the right thing to do.

No doubt Ford’s motives were honorable. He was that kind of guy. But did he do the right thing? No, says the author Barry Werth, writing in today’s New York Times. Not only did Ford squander his popularity, he also squandered his effectiveness. It also directly led to Ford’s elevating the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, as he was compelled to abandon the centrist tone he’d initially struck. Werth writes:

President Ford believed that by pardoning Mr. Nixon, he was putting Watergate and the imperial presidency in the past. But by sacrificing his popularity, he also lost much of his mandate to address the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam with moderation, bipartisanship and national humility — the very goals he set out to achieve. Forced to the right, his administration spawned many of the core attitudes and key players of the George W. Bush White House.

And what, really, would have been the harm of seeing Nixon frog-marched off to prison?

An odd decision

So the state’s Supreme Judicial Court has ruled that the Legislature violated Article 48 of the Massachusetts Constitution when it failed to vote up-or-down on an amendment to ban same-sex marriage (and a bunch of other amendments, too) — but there’s nothing anyone can do about it other than elect new legislators.

I have an observation and a question.

Observation: It’s called the separation of powers, folks.

Question: Here’s what has puzzled me from the beginning. Let’s say Senate president Robert Travaglini is presiding over the constitutional convention. A member rises. Travaglini recognizes her. The member then files a motion for a recess. At this point, what is Travaglini supposed to do? Rule the motion out of order?

And what if he lets the motion go forward? Does each individual member have a constitutional duty to vote against the motion?

Regardless of the SJC’s ruling today, Article 48 is deeply flawed if it carries a constitutional obligation for the Legislature to violate its own internal customs and rules.

An exam for Jeff Jacoby

In the spirit of the holidays, I’d rather not get into an argument with Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby over his column about global warming today. Instead, I’d like to pose three questions to him. I’m going to send him the link to this item and ask him to respond, either by e-mail or by posting to Media Nation.

Anyway, here we go:

1. You make much of the fact that scientific predictions about the climate have changed considerably over time. For instance, you note that climatologist Reid Bryson, in the mid-1970s, predicted catastrophic global cooling.

Question: Do you believe science, and our ability to measure climate change, have advanced over the past 32 years? And if you do, don’t think you anything a scientist wrote in 1974 is utterly irrelevant?

2. Two words never appear in your column: “carbon dioxide.” Yet according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the level of atmospheric CO2 has risen from 280 parts per million to 370 parts per million since the start of the Industrial Revolution. “The concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere today, has not been exceeded in the last 420,000 years, and likely not in the last 20 million years,” according to the agency’s Web site.

Question: What evidence can you state for your apparent belief that rising CO2 levels have no effect on the climate?

3. Most serious people who’ve looked at global warming believe we need to undertake technological steps ranging from developing renewable energy sources such as solar and wind to building a safer generation of nuclear power plants. That was certainly one of the messages Al Gore puts forth in his film “An Inconvenient Truth.” In other words, though there may be a few alternative-lifestyle types who believe global warming can only be reversed by living like the Amish, most of us want to innovate our way out of this mess — a very American approach, I might add.

Question: How did global warming become part of the culture war? And why on earth have conservatives like you adopted the denial of global warming as a pet cause?

Please note that Questions 1 and 2 are very specific and call for specific answers. You may fulminate to your heart’s content in answering Question 3.

Update: David Bernstein observes that the administration of left-wing environmental extremist George W. Bush has concluded that global warming has endangered the polar bear.

Update II: Jacoby responds. Click here.

“Back pocket” journalism

In my Journalism of the Web class last semester, we spent some time talking about “backpack journalism” — that is, journalism done by reporters toting laptops, video cameras, digital audio recorders and satellite phones so they can function as one-person purveyors of online text, video and audio reports from anywhere in the world.

Kevin Sites is a good example of this, although a recent report in the Washington Post showed how backpack journalism is being adapted to community newspapering as well.

Now, according to Clyde Bentley, the backpack is turning into your back pocket. In this piece for the Online Journalism Review, Bentley introduces us to the Nokia N93, a cell phone (the label hardly does it justice) that can record high-quality video, still photos and audio, that runs Microsoft Word and other programs, and that can be used to write stories either directly or with a plug-in keyboard. When you’re done, just upload through the cell network or a WiFi connection. Bentley writes:

My dream scenario is walking into a neighborhood in jeans and sweatshirt, an N93 in one pocket and a keyboard in the other. Sans my tell-tale computer bag and camera, I think I could be just one of the boys as I developed my contacts. And when the time came, I could record audio clips of background sounds, take a few photos of the street corner crowd then shoot a video clip of that great old codger. Back at the café, I could type my story, file it to the office and amble into the sunset.

In the emerging news-media landscape, journalists will need to possess a variety of multimedia skills, whether they like it or not. At least they won’t have to worry about getting a hernia, too.

Discovering Japan

This is a hoot. The Boston Herald announces that it’s offering Japanese-language pages on its Web site to appeal to Japanese baseball fans who want to follow Daisuke Matsuzaka and the Red Sox.

“Readers on the Herald’s Web site can now click onto the Japanese flag icon associated with selected stories and view a Japanese translation of the story,” the paper says.

Here’s an example.

For years, the Boston Globe published Spanish-language stories the day after Pedro Martínez pitched at Fenway Park. Why this was done only after home games is still a mystery.

Anyway, the Herald’s move is very smart, leading me to wonder if the Globe, the Providence Journal and others — including the Red Sox themselves — will follow suit. (Via Romenesko.)

The price of censorship

Mockery, in this case. We can only be thankful that the Bush administration’s attempts at silencing its critics are so ineptly ludicrous. Like Moe Howard, President Bush’s dictatorial tendencies are consistently undermined by his inability to enforce his will.

Today the New York Times publishes the redacted version of an op-ed written by former government officials Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann, the husband-and-wife team that was censored even though they insist there is no classified information in their essay. Leverett and Mann’s article, complete with blacked-out sections, is here; their introduction is here.

The longer essay on which their op-ed is reportedly based remains online.

As that noted civil libertarian Curly Howard would say, “Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk.”

A good bad movie

Last night Media Nation Jr. and I watched “Masked and Anonymous,” a 2003 movie with an all-star cast that includes John Goodman, Jessica Lange and, improbably, Bob Dylan. I didn’t expect it to be very good, and I wasn’t disappointed. But it wasn’t boring, either.

Much of the writing was so bad that it made some pretty good actors and actresses seem like community-theater wanna-bes. But Dylan himself was weirdly compelling. You wouldn’t call him a great actor, but he projected an understated (very understated) emotional force that gave him real presence.

“Masked and Anonymous” is set in some dystopian near-future. It’s hard to tell exactly what has happened, but there’s been a revolution. The dictator is dying. And a has-been named Jack Fate — played by Dylan — is sprung from a hellish-looking prison in order to perform at a benefit concert.

Perhaps the best line is delivered in one of the DVD extra features, when Goodman laughs and admits that he has no idea what “Masked” is about. It’s that kind of movie. But it looks great, and there’s a lot of music by Dylan and his regular band.

In any event, it’s a damn sight better than Renaldo and Clara, Dylan’s four-and-a-half-hour 1978 disaster, to which I took Mrs. Media Nation back when I was dating her. It’s a wonder she married me.