The ongoing collapse of Murdoch’s media empire

Rupert Murdoch

Like media obsessives everywhere, I’ve been watching with gleeful fascination as Rupert Murdoch’s British media empire collapses around him. I wish nothing but ill for the “rotten old bastard,” and I certainly don’t expect that the electrifying news of the moment — that he has withdrawn his bid for BSkyB — will be the end of it.

The next step is for the Murdoch media scandal to get untracked in the United States. There’s certainly plenty for us to sink our teeth into. Wall Street Journal publisher Les Hinton is a Murdoch intimate who is up to his neck in the British phone-hacking scandal. Even better, the U.S. Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are mandated by law to investigate Murdoch’s News Corp. under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act because of allegations that Murdoch’s British operations paid bribes to police officers. (I can’t believe I’m linking to Eliot Spitzer.)

Even a few days ago, some critics doubted Murdoch would fall because of all the powerful friends he had made. It’s clear now — it should have been then — that he has no friends. He had allies he cultivated, and he was able to do so because they feared him. Now the fear is gone. Instructive is this New York Times story on how quickly British prime minister David Cameron is moving away from him. Far more entertaining is this Simon Jenkins commentary in the Guardian, which I guess is sort of a defense of Murdoch. Roasted genitals figure prominently.

Kudos to the Guardian (for whom I am a contributing writer), which has led the way on breaking the Murdoch story. You can follow its coverage here.

Also worth bookmarking is Greg Mitchell’s “Murdoch Watch” blog at the Nation. Mitchell is nothing if not comprehensive, as he has proved by blogging WikiLeaks developments over the past seven months. The WikiLeaks story may have allegations of sex, but for my money the Murdoch story is a lot sexier.

Photo (cc) by the World Economic Forum and republished here under a Creative Commons licnese. Some rights reserved.

In New Haven’s schools, addition by subtraction

You won’t find a better example of the difference between a reporter who’s immersed in her beat and one who’s a generalist. The New Haven Register and the New Haven Independent today reported on the latest high-school test scores — a big deal everywhere, but especially in New Haven, where a nationally watched education-reform effort is under way.

Both the Register’s Abbe Smith and the Independent’s Melissa Bailey wrote that there were some especially notable improvements at Wilbur Cross High School, which the school superintendent, Reginald Mayo, referred to as having done an “extraordinary job.”

But the Independent also reported that the number of Wilbur Cross students taking the test this year was 200 lower than the previous year, and that those 200 comprised some of the most challenged students in the system. Bailey’s lede:

Pop quiz: If test scores at Wilbur Cross High School go up, but the number of test-takers drops by 200 — or by more than 50 percent, with many low performers gone — should the district tout “extraordinary” gains?

I’m not picking on Smith, who’s a good reporter. But Bailey is immersed in the New Haven school system, having visited classrooms across the city and written dozens of stories, some of them quite in-depth. A few months ago, I had a chance to accompany her to an elementary school, where we spent the morning sitting in on a teaching-team meeting, a reading-team meeting and even a teacher evaluation, which we were allowed to attend on the grounds that we not identify the teacher.

When you’ve got that kind of background knowledge, anomalies like the Wilbur Cross scores jump out at you.

Oh, and, by the way, Wilbur Cross principal Peggy Moore seems to be a real piece of work.

The Globe, the Times and RFK’s papers

Robert Kennedy

There’s been a pretty interesting development in the battle over Robert Kennedy’s papers. The New York Times reports that members of Kennedy’s family are unhappy with the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, and may move the papers to George Washington University.

The story also says the family decided on March 1 to release 63 boxes of papers, some of them “dealing with Cuba, Vietnam and civil rights, [that] are classified as secret or top secret.”

These would appear to be the “54 crates of records” that the Boston Globe revealed last January were being withheld from all but a few favored historians. At that time, Robert Kennedy’s son Max placed his foot firmly in his mouth, telling the Globe’s Bryan Bender that he’s all for openness except in those cases when he’s not.

“I do believe that historians and journalists must do their homework, and observe the correct procedures for seeking permission to consult the papers, and explain their projects,” Max Kennedy was quoted as saying. Max’s boffo performance led me to bestow a Boston Phoenix Muzzle Award upon him recently.

In the Times story, there is no mention of Max. Instead, another of Robert Kennedy’s sons, former congressman Joe Kennedy, emerges as the family spokesman, and he comes off as considerably more diplomatic than his younger brother.

A search of the Globe and Times archives shows that the family’s March 1 decision to release the papers was not reported prior to today’s Times story. That suggests a deliberate strategy of working hand in hand with Adam Clymer, the retired Times reporter who gets the lead byline today. Clymer, you may recall, is the author of “Edward M. Kennedy: A Biography,” a respected though admiring treatment of the late senator published in 2000.

All in all, fodder for a follow-up by Bender.

Library of Congress photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Media Nation seeks a new local sponsor

If you’re a Greater Boston business person and would like to help sponsor Media Nation, I’ve got a deal for you. To place a banner ad at the top of the page, please contact me at dkennedy56 at gmail dot com. You’ll be alternating with the Boston law firm Prince Lobel, whose ad will continue to appear in that space.

Tribune outsources local journalism jobs to Chicago

The bankrupt Tribune Co. is outsourcing New England newspaper jobs to the mother ship in Chicago. Both the Hartford Courant, a daily, and the New Haven Advocate, an alt-weekly, have been affected by Tribune’s latest cost-slashing.

Our story begins last Thursday, when Boston Globe sportswriter and Courant alumnus Peter Abraham tweeted, “Two great friends and mentors were let go by the Courant today. If you need top-notch copy editors, I know just the guys for you.”

When I expressed my dismay, Abraham responded, “Seems they are now going to edit the paper out of Chicago or something. Just awful.”

Then, on Friday, the New Haven Independent reported that Joshua Mamis, publisher of the Advocate as well as two satellite operations in Hartford and Fairfield County, had lost his job. I met Mamis at a media-reform conference in San Francisco in 1996, and interviewed him in 2009 for my book-in-progress about the Independent and other community news sites. He is a good guy, and it’s kind of insane to think the Advocate papers can thrive without their own full-time publisher.

The Independent also obtained a memo that gets into a bit more detail about the Chicago connection. Here’s the key paragraph:

Other changes are a result of our on-going participation in Media on Demand (MoD), which provides fully edited and designed non-local news and features content for Tribune newspapers and websites. MoD will expand to take on copy-editing and page design for several newspapers including The Hartford Courant at a center based in the Chicago Tribune newsroom, where the content-sharing hub is located.  This approach, already implemented at the Daily Press, will enable us to improve the efficiency of operations and position us to fulfill our local mission and to meet the challenges of the future.

The Daily Press is located in Newport, Va. And here’s more from the Courant.

This is terrible news. Shipping local journalism jobs to Chicago is malpractice. Rather than pillaging its properties to pay down its $13 billion debt, Tribune ought to get out and let an unencumbered owner operate them.

Here is a column the New York Times’ David Carr wrote earlier this year on Tribune’s implosion. And here is a piece I wrote for the Boston Phoenix in 1999, shortly after the Advocate papers were sold to Times Mirror, which was later acquired by Tribune.

Intellectual property department, simian division

Today’s Boston Globe has a brief item on a group of Indonesian monkeys who grabbed wildlife photographer David Slater’s camera and started taking pictures of themselves. The print edition includes a wonderful self-portrait. Unfortunately, the online version is text-only. What struck my funnybone, though, was the photo credit: “David J. Slater.” Well, uh, not exactly.

I see that the Guardian carried the same story last Monday, and made the same questionable decision. The full caption reads: “A monkey takes an image of photographer David Slater. Photograph: David J Slater/Caters News Agency.” I guess intellectual-property disputes are cast in a different light when the photographer can’t speak up for himself.

The Globe item cites the Daily Mail, whose very first picture is the self-portrait I refer to above. The Mail shows better sense than the Globe or the Guardian, crediting Caters News Agency but not Slater himself.

Donna Halper to speak on Boston radio history

Please join me next Wednesday, July 13, in welcoming my friend Donna Halper to the Peabody Institute Library in Danvers. Donna will be signing her latest book, “Boston Radio 1920-2010,” part of the “Images of America” series published by Arcadia.

Halper, a communications professor at Lesley University and a recently minted Ph.D., is admirably eclectic. She runs a radio consulting business, Donna Halper & Associates, and was always my go-to person for radio expertise when I was the media columnist at the Boston Phoenix. She teaches and writes (obviously). She also discovered the band Rush when she was working as a disc jockey in Cleveland in 1974, and was on hand when the band members were honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2010.

Donna will be speaking from 7 to 9 p.m., and I’ll have the honor of introducing her. You can sign up by clicking here. Hope to see you there.

Remembering George Kimball

I’m in California on a working vacation this week. But I want to break blog silence to pay tribute to the great George Kimball, a sports columnist for the Boston Phoenix and the Boston Herald who died on Wednesday at the age of 67.

I remember reading Kimball in the Phoenix when I was in high school. Kimball would sit in the bleachers at Fenway Park and write about the Red Sox from a fan’s perspective. His column was called “The Sporting Eye,” after his glass eye, which, as legend would have it, he would pop out in order to entertain and intimidate as the spirit moved him.

Eventually Kimball left for the Herald. I didn’t read him all that much after that because his beat was boxing, which interested me some when Muhammad Ali was fighting and not at all otherwise. But I do have one measly Kimball anecdote that no one else has.

At the beginning of the 1986 Woburn toxic-waste trial in U.S. District Court (the case immortalized in Jonathan Harr’s book “A Civil Action”), Judge Walter Jay Skinner ruled that the media could cover jury selection on the condition that they not report on what had happened until the jury was seated. The Boston Globe and the Herald refused to go along and boycotted the proceedings. I was covering the trial for the Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn, and saw no reason not to sit in. I got a pretty good story out of it, too.

Among the prospective jurors brought in for questioning was Kimball. He was polite and obviously very intelligent. He told the judge that the case would pose a significant hardship for him, since he had to travel to cover boxing for the Herald. (Indeed, the trial lasted five months.) I don’t think Kimball ever expected to be seated, but after he left the room, the judge and the lawyers expressed considerable interest. “Your Honor, he’s a great boxing columnist,” Neil Jacobs of Hale and Dorr, part of the legal team for the defendant Beatrice Foods, told Skinner. (Obviously that quote may be off by a word or two.)

There was quite a bit of discussion regarding the pros and cons of choosing Kimball. In the end, Skinner decided that the trial would, in fact, pose an unfair burden to him, and he was dismissed. But it was a close call. A year later I ran into Kimball at a New England Press Association function and told him about what had happened after he left the judge’s chambers. I don’t remember what he said, except that he appeared to be amused by the story, and glad he’d dodged the draft.

If you want to know more about Kimball (and I’ve told you very little), you must read this appreciation by Michael Gee, who followed Kimball as the Phoenix sports columnist and later joined him at the Herald. This Phoenix blog post by Sean Kerrigan hits the highlights of Kimball’s pre-Herald career. And the Phoenix has posted a classic Kimball story from 1976 on a boxing match between Ali and Ken Norton.

Finally, here’s a great story from the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World on Kimball’s early days as “one-eyed radical who once campaigned as a ‘two-fisted’ candidate for Douglas County sheriff.” I had no idea.

Presenting the 14th annual Phoenix Muzzle Awards

The 14th annual Boston Phoenix (and Portland Phoenix and Providence Phoenix) Muzzle Awards are now online and in print, pillorying New England enemies of free speech in Greater Boston, Maine and Rhode Island, from Max Kennedy to Tom Menino. But we begin with some tough words about President Obama.

My friend Harvey Silverglate has written a companion piece on free speech on college campuses.

Sadly, since I first began writing this Fourth of July feature in 1998, finding suitable recipients has only gotten easier.