Apple News Plus presents publishers with both a Facebook problem and a Spotify problem.
Like Facebook, news content would be disaggregated and mashed up with whatever Apple decides to put in front of its subscribers. Like Spotify, subscription fees would be split so many ways that no single publisher could make much money, especially compared to what it theoretically might be able to pull in from its own digital subscription efforts.
I expand on both of those thoughts in this interview with News@Northeastern.
Published by Rodale in 2003 and favorably reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe and Publishers Weekly, “Little People” can be purchased as a high-quality publish-on-demand version through the Harvard Book Store. The best part about this new edition is that it features a foreword by my daughter, Becky Kennedy, who reflects on what it has been like to live with dwarfism.
I’ll be speaking about “Little People” this Saturday at the Little People of America district conference in Portland, Maine.
GateHouse Media will partner with Google News on a digital-subscriptions project, according to this internal email from GateHouse chief executive Kirk Davis, forwarded to me by a trusted source just a few minutes ago. The news follows Tuesday’s announcement that Google News will partner with the McClatchy chain.
The GateHouse experiment will take place at The Columbus Dispatch, followed by “a broad roll-out of our Digital Subscription Lab learnings across the GateHouse network.” GateHouse, as you know, owns more than 100 newspapers in Greater Boston and beyond, including the Providence Journal and the Telegram & Gazette of Worcester.
Certainly I would rather that Google put its efforts (and its money) into helping independent local news projects. But Google wants content, and the corporate chains are in the best position to give them that. Davis’ full email follows.
To: All GateHouse Media employees
From: Kirk Davis, CEO, GateHouse Media
Re: Google News Initiative Digital Subscriptions Lab
Date: March 27, 2019
Developing a sustainable digital subscription model to showcase the amazing work being done by our journalists across the United States is essential to preserving the vitality and viability of our local journalism. Which is why I’m thrilled to announce that GateHouse has been selected, as one of eight publishers, to participate in the Digital Subscriptions Lab, a partnership between the Google News Initiative, the Local Media Association and FTI Consulting.
This intensive six-month program will address every step of the digital subscription process from discovery to conversion to retention. Participants will receive dedicated 1:1 support from each of the three partners, as they leverage their respective capabilities in research, product, technology and analytics. Several in-person meetings over the course of the program will enable participating publishers to share strategies, insights and best practices.
We have selected The Columbus Dispatch to be the focus for our engagement; with 13,000 digital subs, The Dispatch is among our largest, paid digital subscription products. We anticipate a broad roll-out of our Digital Subscription Lab learnings across the GateHouse network. Our participation in this elite program is exciting; it reflects our very strong commitment to the future of community journalism!
The movement to get rid of the Electoral College is having a moment. For the past several weeks, pundits and politicians alike have renewed calls to do away with this 18th-century anachronism and award the presidency to the candidate who wins the most votes.
With Attorney General William Barr’s summary of the Mueller Report dealing a powerful blow to the always-unlikely scenario that Congress would impeach President Trump and remove him from office, the call for Electoral College abolition is likely to grow louder. Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has made it a centerpiece of her campaign. Her competitors Beto O’Rourke and Pete Buttigieg agree, while Kamala Harris is leaning in that direction as well.
Buttigieg wrote in a recent commentary for CNN.com that “we need to re-evaluate the role of the Electoral College, which has — in my short lifetime — overruled the popular vote twice. It should be a commonsense position that the person who gets the most votes is the person who wins the presidency.”
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has been especially thoughtful on the topic, nothing that former Maine governor Paul LePage had it exactly right when he complained recently that doing away with the Electoral College would diminish the power of white supremacy. (OK, the notoriously racist LePage didn’t put it quite that way.)
As Bouie argued, and as I wrote here more than two years ago, the Electoral College came about as a way to grant disproportionate power to the slave states of the South so that they would agree to ratify the Constitution. How? Let’s look at the numbers. Each state gets an electoral vote for every House member, plus two bonus votes for their senators. Before the Civil War, the slave states received an artificial — and morally reprehensible — boost in House and Electoral College representation because each slave counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of determining the number of that state’s House seats. That advantage disappeared after the Civil War, but the two extra votes for senators continue to give states with the lowest population disproportionate power. For instance, in 2016 voters in tiny Wyoming had nearly four times as much influence as those in California.
There are some myths surrounding the Electoral College that need to be put to rest. One is that the founders favored it because they opposed direct democracy. Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby uncorked that one recently, writing, “The framers of the Constitution devised it deliberately as a check on direct democracy” because they did not want “important national decisions to be driven by unbridled public emotion, populist demagoguery, or the passions of the mob.”
There may have been something to that in the early days of the republic. But the problem with this theory today is that the reality is exactly the opposite of what Jacoby describes. In fact, the president is elected via direct democracy. The electors in each state are not free to exercise their independent judgment and stand fast against “the passions of the mob.” In many cases it is actually illegal for electors to oppose the will of their state’s voters. Not that there’s much chance of that happening given that they are chosen because they’re party loyalists. So we end up with the worst of both worlds — direct democracy, but distorted to favor rural states over the places where people actually live.
Another fallacy is that we’ve always lived with the reality of the Electoral College, candidates have always understood that they need to build a broad coalition of states, and that popular-vote winners who lose in the electoral count have no one but themselves to blame.
Unlike the direct-democracy argument, there is a little bit of truth to this one. “In the Trump era, Democrats are in a perpetual state of panic,” National Review editor Rich Lowry wrote recently in Politico. “They should remember that the electoral map is always changing. Before 2016, it was thought the Electoral College favored Democrats. It shouldn’t be beyond their conceiving that they can win again under the long-established rules of America’s foundational governing document.”
But here’s the problem with that argument:Before George W. Bush’s narrow, controversial victory over Al Gore in 2000, the last time a candidate became president despite losing the popular vote was 1888, when Republican Benjamin Harrison defeated Grover Cleveland, the incumbent Democrat.
That’s 112 years. Surely the public could be forgiven for thinking that the Electoral College — to the extent that they thought about it at all — was some vestigial appendage from the past that they need not worry about. Now, thanks to shifting population patterns, any Democratic candidate starts out with a disadvantage because so many liberal voters now live in a few blue, underrepresented bastions such as New York, California, and Massachusetts.
So what are we going to do about this miserable state of affairs? One possible solution is an interstate compact being pushed by an organization called National Popular Vote, which would require each state’s electors to support the candidate who won the most votes nationwide. But this strikes me as a fool’s mission, as there is no more incentive for small states to join the compact than there would be for them to support a constitutional amendment to do away with the Electoral College altogether.
And, of course, a popular, broad-based campaign can win both a majority of the popular vote and the Electoral College, thus putting the issue on the backburner. Barack Obama did it twice. So did Ronald Reagan.
Ultimately, though, we need to come to a consensus that nothing good comes of a presidency that was flawed right from the start by losing the popular vote. Bush was unable to unite the country except for a brief moment after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Trump’s problems hardly need to be laid out here. But doing something about the Electoral College will require a bigger politics than we have at the moment. I’ll choose to be optimistic and hope that sometime in the not-too-distant future we can embrace something better.
It happened in plain sight. This isn’t a criticism of special counsel Robert Mueller, whose report hasn’t been released and who may not have found any criminal offenses. But we can’t unsee what we all saw.
[William] Barr’s note is clear that Mueller did not uncover evidence Trump and his gang were in direct cahoots with Russia’s covert operation to interfere with the US election and boost Trump’s odds. But the hyper-focus on this sort of collusion — as if Trump instructed Russian hackers on how to penetrate the computer network of the Democratic National Committee — has always diverted attention from a basic and important element of the scandal that was proven long before Mueller drafted his final report: Trump and his lieutenants interacted with Russia while Putin was attacking the 2016 election and provided encouraging signals to the Kremlin as it sought to subvert American democracy. They aided and abetted Moscow’s attempt to cover up its assault on the United States (which aimed to help Trump win the White House). And they lied about all this.
Betomania had somehow eluded me. And so when I set out to write about how the media have reacted to the launch of Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign, my first plan was to criticize the elevation of yet another celebrity candidate over his more substantive but less magnetic rivals.
That’s not how it’s worked out. Yes, there was the 8,800-word Vanity Fair profile by Joe Hagan, accompanied by an Annie Leibovitz cover shot of O’Rourke standing by what I assume is his pick-up truck, with archetypal dirt road, hills, and dog in the background. But that proved to be an exception.
“It is a well put-together, if unsubtle, piece of propaganda, and it should be read by anyone looking to learn the art of the puff piece,” wrote Nathan J. Robinson at the website of the left-wing magazine Current Affairs. Personally, I didn’t think it was that gushing; certainly it was spritely and readable, but it also included some harsh passages about O’Rourke’s drunken-driving arrest years ago and his alliance with the white Republican power structure during his early days in El Paso politics. But as substantive political pieces go, well, there was a lot about his youth as a punk rocker.
After O’Rourke made his candidacy official last Thursday, though, the tide quickly turned, at least according to my shockingly unscientific survey of media coverage. Yes, his record one-day online fundraising haul of $6.1 million was duly noted. But so was a less-than-woke comment he made about how he sees his role as a father and a husband — a danger zone given that his rivals for the presidency include a number of well-qualified women. Matt Viser of The Washington Post tweeted the details:
Beto tells a coffee shop crowd that he just talked with his wife, Amy. “She is raising, sometimes with my help,” their three kids. Then says he’s running for president for his kids, and theirs.
That was followed by criticism both serious and silly. On the serious side, Josh Marshall of the liberal website Talking Points Memo called O’Rourke’s rollout “A Bad Day for Beto,” arguing that O’Rourke’s early support has come from centrist elements of the Democratic Party — and that’s not where the energy is. “The Democratic nominee is not going to be the factional candidate of Democratic centrists,” Marshall wrote, adding that O’Rourke had, to his detriment, “made a good start toward becoming that guy.”
Hanna Trudo of National Journal (and, ahem, a former student of mine) offered a similar point on the podcast “Quorum Call,” suggesting that O’Rourke may have a problem running as a moderate during a year when Democrats seem to want someone more progressive. “He’s to the right of nearly every other candidate aside from Biden, I would say,” Trudo said of O’Rourke. “He’s far to the right of Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, or even Kamala Harris and Cory Booker. He’s voted for Republican policies more often than most Democrats running.”
In contrast with Marshall and Trudo, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd offered a snark-filled update of her dreadful columns referring to Barack Obama as “The One.” And yes, it seems indisputably true that O’Rourke, like Obama, has a healthy ego and a sense of destiny that may or may not be shared by Democratic primary voters. But there’s really no excuse for Dowdian drivel like this: “We have The One again, a New One — another lanky, bookish, handsome man with an attractive young family, a thin résumé, an exotic name, a hip affect, a rock star aura, an enticing smile, a liberal press corps ready to fluff his pillows and a frothing Fox News.” As Charles Pierce of Esquire tweeted, “I was reading this but my laptop floated to the ceiling.”
So what is going on? I think part of it is that candidates never look as good as they do the day before they announce — and that O’Rourke, who was already a political celebrity, was bound to come in for more of a thrashing than a lower-profile politician might. The pundits may also be having second thoughts about O’Rourke’s loss in the Texas Senate race last year to Ted Cruz. No doubt O’Rourke deserves credit for coming within three points in a state where Republicans have a virtual stranglehold. But good grief, Ted Cruz.
And questions about whether O’Rourke is too white, too male, and too moderate for Democrats in 2020 are perfectly legitimate — notwithstanding the reality that Bernie Sanders and the still-unannounced (or should I say semi-unannounced) Joe Biden sit atop the Iowa polls, for whatever that’s worth at this early stage of the campaign.
More than anything, though, O’Rourke’s self-regard puts him in danger of becoming the most easily mockable Democratic candidate, especially since he doesn’t have a concrete issues agenda to fall back on. “I want to be in it,” he told Vanity Fair’s Hagan. “Man, I’m just born to be in it, and want to do everything I humanly can for this country at this moment.”
I’m just born to be in it. It’s a comment that a number of women have picked up on, and not in a good way. Writing at Vox, Laura McGann called out the double standard of a man making a comment that would be deadly if a woman said it, adding, “Men are rewarded in politics for showing ambition, while women are punished.” McGann is right, except that in 2019 the sense of entitlement in O’Rourke’s remark didn’t seem to make a good impression on anyone.
That old war criminal Henry Kissinger supposedly liked to joke that the infighting in academic politics is so vicious because the stakes are so low. In Campaign 2020, it’s just the opposite: Democrats and other voters in the anti-Trump coalition are so determined to win that every remark, every gesture is being held to an impossibly high level of scrutiny. And the infighting is going to be vicious.
Whether O’Rourke’s toothy, charismatic, hazy-on-the-issues appeal will have staying power is months away from being put to the test. The criticism has already reached the unserious stage, as Fox News is pillorying Reuters for sitting on a story about O’Rourke’s youthful exploits as a computer hacker on the grounds that the reporter was supposedly trying to help him beat Cruz. If nothing else, it’s a sign that if O’Rourke and his supporters were assuming that the media would be on their side, they may be in for an unpleasant encounter with reality.
Tucker Carlson may have finally hit bottom. Then again, maybe not. If Fox News fails to act after Carlson was exposed over the weekend for making insanely misogynist comments on a low-rent radio show between 2006 and 2011, then he will probably continue on his merry way, indulging in sexism and racism on what might be the worst prime-time program on cable news.
A brief synopsis. During the period in question, Carlson made weekly on-air calls to a show hosted by Bubba the Love Sponge, whose name you may vaguely recall from Hulk Hogan’s successful lawsuit against Gawker Media. Mrs. Sponge, as we shall call Bubba’s ex-wife, was videotaped having sex with Hogan, and Gawker published it. That, in turn, led to the demise of Gawker at the hands of Hogan’s lawyer and his secret financier, the tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel, who had his own axe to grind against the company.
Anyway, Carlson’s appearances on Bubba’s show were sort of like his Fox News program, only cruder and much more disturbing. Madeline Peltz of Media Matters for America, a liberal media-watch organization, has gone through many hours of audio in which Carlson defended statutory rape, used the C-word, and, as Peltz put it, “called journalist Arianna Huffington a ‘pig,’ and labeled Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ‘the biggest white whores in America.’ He also said that women enjoy being told to ‘be quiet and kind of do what you’re told’ and that they are ‘extremely primitive.’” The story includes audio clips and extensive transcripts. Carlson doesn’t deny it. More was posted Monday night, with the new cache consisting of what Media Matters calls “white nationalist rhetoric” and “racist remarks.”
The revelations about Carlson were the worst news for Fox News in, oh, about a week. Last week brought us Jane Mayer’s New Yorker story detailing the multifarious ways in which Fox now functions as President Trump’s chief propaganda arm, as well as weekend host Jeanine Pirro’s assertion that U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar’s hijab is somehow a violation of the Constitution. (Fox condemned those remarks.)
Now, forgive me for taking a detour, because I want to talk about an earlier, better version of Tucker Carlson. To my mind, one of the stranger and more disheartening developments in conservative media in recent years has been Carlson’s devolution from a stylish writer of smart magazine pieces to a ranting racist and misogynist.
My first exposure to Carlson came in September 1995, when The Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine founded by Bill Kristol and funded by Rupert Murdoch, made its debut. Back then I was the media columnist for The Boston Phoenix. I took a look at the Standard’s first issue and pronounced most of it to be a snooze. The exception was an amusing piece by Carlson, who contacted various celebrities about a petition they’d signed calling for a new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal, then facing the death penalty after he was convicted of murdering a police officer. Carlson innocently asked his targets what they actually knew about the case, which turned out to be not much.
After that, Carlson was someone I checked in with from time to time. I admired a long profile he wrote for Tina Brown’s Talk magazine of then-presidential candidate George W. Bush, whom he depicted as cruelly mocking Karla Faye Tucker, a murderer and born-again Christian he’d sent to her death when he was governor of Texas. On one of my visits to Washington around the same time, Carlson took me to lunch at The Palm. He was utterly charming. The only disconcerting note was when he genially berated me for not keeping a gun at home in order to protect my family.
I should add that many people have had similar experiences with Carlson. Last fall Lyz Lenz wrote a long profile of Carlson for the Columbia Journalism Review in which she quoted a number of editors and others who worked with Carlson back in the day and who can’t believe how far he’s fallen — fallen being a term of art, of course, given that he’s never been more prominent or highly compensated than he is right now.
“What happened to Tucker Carlson?,” Lenz wrote. “People in media ask themselves this question with the same pearl-clutching, righteous tone they use when discussing their aunt in Connecticut who voted for Trump.”
Sadly, the answer to Lenz’s question is obvious enough. Late last year The Weekly Standard died — or, rather, was killed by its last owner, Philip Anschutz. In its final incarnation the Standard had established itself as an outlet for principled conservatism that was usually (though not always) harshly critical of Trump and Trumpism. Kristol, a leading voice of the #NeverTrump right, as well as several like-minded conservatives, have gone off to found projects such as The Bulwark (which preceded the Standard’s closing) and a yet-to-be-named venture announced by Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes. Anschutz is now lavishing attention and money on another property he owns, the pro-Trump Washington Examiner.
Meanwhile Carlson, whose intellectual traveling companions were once thinking conservatives like Kristol and John Podhoretz, is now mentioned in the same breath as Trump toadies such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham. It’s a matter of prosperity over principle. Too bad one of the most gifted journalists of his generation turned out to be nothing but a cheap hustler.
Research assistance was provided by Northeastern University student Caroline Hanlon.
The stench of corruption emanating from the White House is so noxious that it can be hard to focus on outrages that truly matter. This matters: As long rumored, but not confirmed until this week, President Trump personally intervened in the merger of media giants AT&T and Time Warner in order to punish CNN, high on the list of “fake news” outlets with which he is perpetually enraged.
The revelation is contained within Jane Mayer’s 11,500-word examination of Fox News, which appears in the current issue of The New Yorker. As Mayer describes it (and as even the most casual viewer will attest), over the past few years Fox has metamorphosed from a right-wing news operation with a shaky grasp of the truth into something much more dangerous: a propaganda outlet for Trump that serves up steaming piles of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories to its angry, fearful audience.
Not coincidentally, Fox News’ founder and guiding light, the international media magnate Rupert Murdoch, has emerged as one of Trump’s closest confidants. And Murdoch did not want to see two of his rivals merge, especially given that he had tried and failed to buy Time Warner himself just a few years earlier. Luckily for him, his business interests dovetailed with Trump’s hatred of CNN, one of Time Warner’s crown jewels.
As Mayer describes it, in the summer of 2017 Trump told his chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, that the Justice Department should fight the merger. Citing “a well-informed source,” Mayer reports that Trump demanded action during a meeting with Cohn and his then-new chief of staff, John Kelly. “I’ve been telling Cohn to get this lawsuit filed and nothing’s happened!” she quotes Trump as saying. “I’ve mentioned it 50 times. And nothing’s happened. I want to make sure it’s filed. I want that deal blocked!” As the meeting was coming to a close, Mayer writes, Cohn told Kelly, “Don’t you f—ing dare call the Justice Department. We are not going to do business that way.”
But the Justice Department did indeed fight the merger, all the while denying any political motivations. Trump’s opposition to the merger, though, has long been thought to be driven by his hatred for CNN. Cohn himself believed it, according to Mayer. And as I argued a year and a half ago, blocking the merger could have resulted in Time Warner’s falling into Murdoch’s hands, thus fulfilling Rupe’s ambitions and giving him an opportunity to Foxify CNN. (Not that CNN isn’t in serious need of fixing, but that’s a topic for another day.)
Adding to suspicions that Trump was acting on his wish for retribution rather than by genuine concerns about the social consequences of such massive mergers was that there really didn’t seem to be much of a legal case against it. The AT&T-Time Warner deal is something we all ought to be wary of. But under current theories of antitrust law, there was little reason to block it. In fact, the Justice Department’s efforts to stop it were shot down by the courts at every step along the way, and it recently got the final go-ahead.
As Jordan Crook and Danny Crichton explain at TechCrunch, the two companies are complementary businesses rather than competitors. Time Warner is mainly a content company; AT&T is a distributor. Their combination is regarded by many economists as a “vertical merger” that could actually benefit consumers, Crook and Crichton write, by giving them “access to a more comprehensive set of services, at a lower price, while still generating profits.” Besides, in a world in which the entire media landscape is now dominated by Google and Facebook, it may be that the only way to provide competition is by supercharging other media companies.
Now I’ll grant you that in my perfect media world, I would not only have ruled against the merger of AT&T and Time Warner but I’d break up Google and Facebook as well. But it’s the world of the corporate titans, and we’re just living in it. Given that, there is every reason to oppose governmental intervention motivated by presidential pique rather than by genuine regulatory concerns.
Mayer’s report appears destined to become part of the bill of particulars that the Democratic House is assembling as it investigates Trump’s corruption and possible crimes. U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said that he has “long feared Trump would use the instruments of state power to carry out his vendetta against the press he has attacked as the ‘enemy of the people.’”
Meanwhile, another media company seeking favors from the White House is playing it safe. According to David Fahrenthold and Jonathan O’Connell of The Washington Post, the cell-phone company T-Mobile, which is seeking to merge with its rival Sprint, has spent $195,000 at Trump’s Washington hotel since announcing the proposed deal nearly a year ago — far in excess of what the company had ever spent there previously.
Contract negotiations between The Boston Globe and the Boston Newspaper Guild are becoming increasingly tense, with the Guild accusing management of union-busting and Globe publisher John Henry denying it.
Earlier this week the Guild posted an open letter to John Henry and his wife, Linda Pizzuti Henry, who is the paper’s managing director. The key takeaway:
Now, we are in the midst of negotiations led by a mercenary law firm that is trying to bully your employees into a contract that essentially asks them to give up their rights as union members. These tactics are threatening to destroy the long-standing, constructive and respectful relationship between the Guild and management. This approach to collective bargaining has also stoked feelings of deep anger and even betrayal among employees. It is doomed to fail.
Globe management has set a very simple but very important goal of strengthening our newsroom for the challenges of a long-term future in local journalism. The Globe and the guild need to engage in a collaborative effort designed to ensure what both sides need in order to have a vibrant workplace and serve the needs of our community.
This has been ugly right from the start, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any better.
