Barbara Walters’ twice-told tale

Barbara Walters must think that if you wait for everyone to forget, you can trot out an old affair and tout it as news. The media world is buzzing softly (very softly) over Walters’ revelation that she had an affair with then-senator Ed Brooke in the 1970s. She is, of course, peddling a book.

Maybe it’s because I’m old, but my first reaction was: “I knew that.” It sounded very familiar to me when we talked about it on “Beat the Press” yesterday on WGBH-TV (Channel 2). When I started searching, I found this line from a March 5, 2000, Globe profile of Brooke by staff writer Sally Jacobs, referring to his life in the ’70s: “A regular at the lavish parties at the Iranian Embassy, he did the hustle with Elizabeth Taylor and squired Barbara Walters about town.”

There’s also this, from a Feb. 17, 1980, story on Walters by then-staffer Marian Christy:

Walters has dated Alexis Lichine, the wine expert who was once married to Arlene Dahl. She used to count among her friends former Sen. Ed Brooke and Secretary General of the Organization of American States Alex Orfila. Both Brooke and Orfila are married now and, for some years, Walters’ closest friend has been Alan Greenspan, the financial wizard.

Do we not understand the plain meaning of this? Especially that Brooke became a “former” friend of Walters after he got married?

Unfortunately, the Globe’s online archives only go back to 1980, and this isn’t exactly worth an afternoon in the microfilm room. But these two tidbits make me think I’m not hallucinating about having seen gossip items in the papers during the 1970s, when the Walters-Brooke affair took place.

I don’t recall people as caring much back then. I can’t imagine anyone cares now.

More: Media Nation reader Esther points to a New York Magazine item reporting that the Walters-Brooke affair made the Washington Post gossip column, “VIP,” way back in 1975.

Brian Williams protects his friends

That’s not an accusation. NBC News anchor Brian Williams actually comes right out and says it in response to complaints that he’s been silent about a recent New York Times article regarding retired generals and other military officers who analyze the war in Iraq for NBC and other news organizations.

To recap briefly — these officers are working as well-compensated executives for military contractors, which are, in turn, highly dependent on the good graces of the White House and the Defense Department. And Bush administration officials have not been not shy about telling the officers what to say.

Here’s a chunk of what Williams writes on his blog:

I read the article with great interest. I’ve worked with two men since I’ve had this job — both retired, heavily-decorated U.S. Army four-star Generals — Wayne Downing and Barry McCaffrey. As I’m sure is obvious to even a casual viewer, I quickly entered into a close friendship with both men. I wish Wayne were alive today to respond to the article himself.

The “picking on the dead” motif is a nice touch, don’t you think? Anyway, Williams goes on to say that he’s seen no need to comment on the Times article because, in his view, the officers were “tough, honest critics of the U.S. military effort in Iraq.”

And you know what? Perhaps they were, at least sometimes. But the thing about conflicts of interest is that viewers have a right to know what associations commentators have regardless of what comes tumbling out of their mouths. What Williams seems to be saying is that there was no need for such disclosure in these two cases because, in his personal opinion, neither man was susceptible to being spun. Is that the standard at NBC News?

In Salon, Glenn Greenwald notes that both Downing and McCaffrey were founding members of something called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, headed by a slew of pro-war neocons such as Bill Kristol, Newt Gingrich and Richard Perle. According to Greenwald, this fact was never disclosed in Downing’s and McCaffrey’s numerous appearances on NBC. Here is a choice tidbit from the committee’s stated purpose:

The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq will engage in educational and advocacy efforts to mobilize domestic and international support for policies aimed at ending the aggression of Saddam Hussein and freeing the Iraqi people from tyranny.

You can call this idealism. But it makes laughable Williams’ assertion that his “friends” were independent. To make matters worse, Greenwald also documents the two officers’ ties to the military industry, making it clear that they could have lost a lot of money both for themselves and their employers if they had gone too far in their “tough, honest” analysis.

Recently I called the Times’ revelations “as sickening a media scandal as we have seen in our lifetime.” I was wrong. The larger scandal is that folks like Brian Williams, whom I’ve always considered to be a straight shooter, have been allowed to sweep this story under the rug.

Thanks to Media Nation reader M.T.S. for calling my attention to Greenwald’s piece.

Williams photo by David Shankbone, and republished here under a GNU Free Documentation License.

Explaining the Journal Register’s fall

Media Nation reader MTS passes along this interesting Newsosaur analysis of what went wrong at the Journal Register Co., the bottom-feeding newspaper company now drowning in a sea of debt. (JRC’s best-known property at the moment is probably the New Haven Register.)

What’s fascinating about this is the gulf that separates Newsosaur’s Alan Mutter from his commenters. Mutter praises JRC’s 19.3 percent profit margin, and concludes that the company came to woe not because of the way it has run its newspapers but because of foolish investments.

Many of the commenters, though, say those profit margins were the result of such drastic cutbacks in newsroom budgets that the papers were decimated, leading to their “loosing circulation in heaps” (I hope that wasn’t written by a copy editor).

Of course, everyone is losing circulation in heaps these days. It would be telling to see how JRC’s numbers stack up with those of the industry as a whole.

Tom Palmer to leave the Globe

One of the unsung good guys is leaving the Boston Globe. Veteran reporter Tom Palmer, who’s been covering real estate and development for the past several years, is among those taking the early-retirement buyout.

Palmer tells Media Nation by e-mail why he decided now is the time after passing up previous offers:

I’m leaving a job — 13 different ones, really, over 32 years at the Globe — that I still love. But this was a generous offer that probably won’t be repeated. It’s time to go do something new. I won’t decide on anything until after I’ve left the Globe late in May.

Palmer is one of a handful of newsroom conservatives, as well as a Van Morrison fan of the first order. He will be missed.

The ugliest turn yet for Clemens

The New York Daily News shimmies nearly all the way out to the end of the limb today. Let’s not kid ourselves: Weasel words aside, you are instructed to believe that Roger Clemens started having sex with country star Mindy McCready when she was 15 years old. It depends on what the meaning of “romance” is, I guess.

What do you suppose Clemens’ lawyers are doing today? Researching libel law, or the statute of limitations? This is so ugly that the steroid allegations pale by comparison.

The Herald unbound

I’m of a mixed mind about Howard Kurtz’s story in the Washington Post today on the Boston Herald’s struggle to survive and thrive.

On the one hand, it’s well-reported and hits most of the right notes. On the other, the central theme — that of the “scrappy,” “feisty” tabloid trying to carve out a niche in the shadow of the dominant Boston Globe — is one that could have, and often has, been written about at any point during the past quarter-century. I’ve cranked out more than a few of those myself.

The article’s principal shortcoming, I think, is that Kurtz does not attempt to assess where the Herald’s Web site fits into the overall picture. BostonHerald.com is unusual in that it is almost entirely divorced from the print edition — it’s continuously updated, and there’s no good way of knowing whether a particular story ever made it into print or how it was played. Given its status as almost a free-standing entity, it’s an interesting experiment in online journalism.

As of last June, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, BostonHerald.com was drawing some 1.2 million unique visitors a month. That’s not nearly as many as the Globe’s site, Boston.com (4.2 million). But it’s still a lot of people. And you would think, at least anecdotally, that online readers do not fit the aging, blue-collar profile of the typical tabloid reader.

If Kurtz wanted to write another story about the struggle of a gritty urban tabloid, that’s fine. Personally I’d be more interested to read about how a gritty urban tabloid is struggling to reinvent itself as a news source whose online presence is at least as important as its print edition.

That’s especially true on a day when we learned that newspaper circulation took another dive (check out those wretched Globe numbers), and when the venerable Capital Times of Madison, Wis., made the switch to its much-discussed mostly online distribution model.

More on the Capital Times. Jay Rosen weighs in.