By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
Within days of Janet Robinson’s sudden retirement as chief executive of the New York Times Co., word leaked that the company was looking to sell its smaller papers in the South and the West.
Which raises a question: Is the Times Co. finally ready to sell the Boston Globe? I review the rocky history of Times Co. ownership in my latest for the Huffington Post.
Was Tarek Mehanna of Sudbury found guilty because of his loathsome but constitutionally protected free-speech activities on behalf of Al Qaeda? Or did the jury believe he actually engaged in terrorism, especially during a trip to Yemen, where prosecutors say he sought training?
I hope reporters covering the case will seek to interview every juror, because the answer is vitally important. Right now it’s hard to know whether the verdict was an outrage against the First Amendment or something quite a bit less than that. In following coverage of the trial, it was clear that prosecutors tried to conflate the two — using Mehanna’s expression of pro-terrorism views to prove he was an actual terrorist.
Boston Globe reporter Milton Valencia tweeted a little while ago, “Judging by verdict, this was more than 1st Amendment decision. Was also centered on Yemen trip. Found guilty of conspiracy to kill.”
It’s good to see that Ron Paul’s dalliance with racists and anti-Semites is getting another airing. The Weekly Standard is recycling James Kirchick’s splendid New Republic article of four years ago, in which we learned that newsletters with names like Ron Paul’s Freedom Report and the Ron Paul Political Report were filled with gems such as a reference to Martin Luther King Day as “Hate Whitey Day.”
Paul, naturally, claimed to know nothing.
The New York Times gives the charges an airing today. For what it’s worth, here’s what I wrote for the Guardian in early 2008.
On Saturday and Sunday I ran the length of the Danvers Rail Trail, first heading out to the Peabody line and then to Route 97 in Topsfield the next day. Today I returned with my iPhone and took some pictures on the Swampwalk, near the Topsfield line, and on the trail itself.
The trail has been quite a boon to the town, and it continues all the way to the center of Topsfield.
[googlemaps https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=206048931241702581094.0004b3ac9ff0c9c0da722&msa=0&ie=UTF8&t=m&vpsrc=6&ll=38.410558,-96.679687&spn=47.614427,87.890625&z=3&output=embed&w=500&h=350]
Josh Stearns of Free Press has been tracking the arrest of journalists at Occupy events for the past several months. Now he’s put together a Google map with names, places and, where available, video. An interesting project and a valuable resource.
I did not realize until reading one of the many obituaries about Christopher Hitchens that he’d written a short book about Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man.” I think I’ll make it my next read.
There are a lot of well-deserved tributes to Hitchens today. I was especially moved by Ian McEwan’s in the New York Times. Turned out Hitchens was a man who faced death with bravery and even scorn right up to the end.
In March of 2001, I wrote an overview for the Boston Phoenix of Hitchens’ devastating portrayal of Henry Kissinger, first published in Harper’s and later turned into a book titled “The Trial of Henry Kissinger.”
Which calls to mind my one and only Hitchens anecdote. I can’t remember where I picked it up, and it has the ring of something that ought to be true rather an actual occurrence. But, supposedly, Hitchens was once introduced to Kissinger at a party. Kissinger’s eyes narrowed while Hitchens waited nervously to see what the former secretary of state would say.
“So, you called me a war criminal,” Kissinger told Hitchens.
Hitchens averred that, yes, he had, but that he’d also called Bill Clinton a war criminal because of his air strikes in the former Yugoslavia.
“Bill Clinton,” Kissinger was said to have replied, “doesn’t have the moral courage to be a war criminal.”
If it didn’t actually happen, it damn well should have.
What will the apparently less-than-pleasant departure of New York Times Co. chief executive Janet Robinson mean for the Boston Globe, its second-largest newspaper?
Obviously it’s way too early to say. But no sooner had the word gone out last night than Globe editor Marty Baron tweeted, “Grateful for her support of the @bostonglobe: New York Times CEO Janet Robinson to retire.” Not that it’s possible to read too much meaning into that.
On the other hand, Financial Times columnist John Gapper read plenty of meaning into the Times’ own account of Robinson’s retirement, tweeting, “Sulzberger fired Robinson, according to NYT (in ninth para)” (via the inestimable Jack Shafer). And what does that ninth paragraph say?
Last Friday, Mr. Sulzberger called a meeting with Ms. Robinson on the 15th floor of the company’s Manhattan headquarters. He raised the issue of installing a different type of leadership at the company, according to people familiar with the meeting who declined to be identified discussing confidential company business.
The Times Co. has done a far better job than most newspaper companies of transitioning to the digital age. The Times and the Globe have pioneered the introduction of flexible paid digital editions. Moreover, both papers are performing financially much more strongly than they were when the bottom nearly fell out of the entire industry back in 2009. So you’d think Robinson would be on the plus side on those two key issues.
Nor do I think it’s credible to believe she was ousted because of the Times Co.’s collapsing stock price. As Ira Stoll notes at Future of Capitalism (via Romenesko), $10,000 worth of stock in 2004, the year she took over, would be worth $1,855 today. But that’s an industry-wide trend, and, seen in the context of major newspaper companies like Tribune falling into bankruptcy, the Times Co. seems to have done rather well.
So it will be very interesting to see what the real reason is for her abrupt, well-compensated ($4.5 million next year) departure.
Unrelated observation: Given their travails of recent months, how cool is it that I’m able to credit both Jack Shafer (now with Reuters) and Jim Romenesko in the same blog post? The natural order has been restored.
If you’re interested — and even if you’re not — I’ll be live-blogging tonight’s Republican presidential debate, which begins at 9 p.m. on the Fox News Channel.
My apologies to those who subscribe to Media Nation by email. You may want to turn it off for the next few hours, as you will receive an email every time I update. The simplest solution is to send a blank email to media_nation-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com. You can always join again later.
9:08 p.m. A little bit of a minefield for Newt Gingrich coming out of the box. He negotiated it pretty skillfully, although his saying that he teaches generals “the art of war” was laugh-out-loud funny.
9:51. Gingrich is mangling Jefferson and Marbury v. Madison. He says he understands it better than lawyers. Good luck with that.
9:53. I am so sick of listening to Bachmann and Santorum I could scream. At least watching Perry trying to negotiate a simple sentence is entertaining.
9:57. Perry managed to name three Supreme Court justices. Let the bandwagon start rolling again.
9:59. I’m bailing on the live-blog, and will be live-tweeting the second half of the debate here.
You may have heard that Mitt Romney called Newt Gingrich “zany” in an interview with the New York Times — a rather incendiary charge that’s now burning its way through the political Web. A quick sampling:
And there’s plenty more where that came from. So would it surprise you to learn that claiming Romney called Gingrich “zany” is barely half-true?
In fact, this is a media-created controversy. The Times put the word in Romney’s mouth, and Romney, as maladroit a candidate as I’ve seen in my lifetime, repeated it. If this little incident backfires on Romney, he surely deserves some of the blame. But, anyway, let’s roll the tape. If you would like to watch, start at about the 3:00 mark. Times reporter Jeff Zeleny is asking Romney about Gingrich:
Zeleny: He has big ideas sometimes, and it seems that he is sort of rapid fire with his thought. Do you think that the American voters are getting enough of a sense of what he might do? Or is there some worry that as president, should he win, that there might be some zany things coming from the Oval Office?
Romney: Well, zany is not what we need in a president. Zany is great in a campaign. It’s great on talk radio, it’s great in the print. It makes for fun reading. But in terms of a president, we need a leader. And a leader needs to be someone who can bring Americans together. A leader needs to be someone of sobriety and stability.
So there you have it. Zeleny, not Romney, called Gingrich “zany,” and Romney went with the flow rather than disagree. If you keep watching, you’ll see Zeleny ask Romney whether he considers Gingrich “unstable,” a reference to Romney’s use of the word “stability.” Romney does not rise to the bait.
Despite what actually happened, the Times story, on which Zeleny takes the lead byline, begins like this:
Mitt Romney, his presidential aspirations suddenly endangered by Newt Gingrich’s rapid resurgence, is employing aggressive new arguments in an effort to disqualify Mr. Gingrich as a credible choice to Republicans, calling him “zany” in an interview on Wednesday and questioning his commitment to free enterprise.
Nor is there any further clarification deeper in the story. And it gets worse, as columnist Gail Collins says of Romney, “Zany really is a pretty unusual word. Why do you think he chose it?” Well, gee, Gail — he didn’t. You only write two columns a week. Would it be too much to ask that you at least watch the edited version of your own paper’s interview?
At this hour, there’s no way of knowing how the “zany” matter is going to play. Will Romney be characterized as looking strong or desperate? I don’t want to make excuses for Romney. He should have sensed danger, he failed to do so and now he may pay a price for it.
But he didn’t really call Gingrich “zany.”
Correction: Spelling of Zeleny’s name now fixed.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning website PolitiFact.com is taking heat from liberals and conservatives alike these days. In my latest for the Huffington Post, I argue that the problem is with the genre itself: perceptions about politicians aside, there just aren’t enough lies to feed the fact-checking beast.