Media Nation

A potentially significant problem has arisen with USA Today’s big story of last Thursday, in which it was reported that the nation’s three largest phone companies have allowed the National Security Agency to track their customers’ calls. One of those companies, BellSouth, now says it did not participate. Here is BellSouth’s statement:

There has been much speculation in the last several days about the role that BellSouth may have played in efforts by the National Security Agency (NSA) and other governmental agencies to keep our nation safe.

As a result of media reports that BellSouth provided massive amounts of customer calling information under a contract with the NSA, the Company conducted an internal review to determine the facts. Based on our review to date, we have confirmed no such contract exists and we have not provided bulk customer calling records to the NSA.

BellSouth has built a successful business because of the trust that our customers have placed with us. We will continue to take our obligations to our customers seriously.

The Washington Post covers the story here; the New York Times here.

What does USA Today have to say about this? Reporter Leslie Cauley, who wrote the original story, reports:

USA TODAY first contacted BellSouth five weeks ago in reporting the story on the NSA’s program. The night before the story was published, USA TODAY described the story in detail to BellSouth, and the company did not challenge the newspaper’s account. The company did issue a statement, saying: “BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority.”

In an interview Monday, BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher said the company was not asking for a correction from USA TODAY.

Asked to define “bulk customer calling records,” Battcher said: “We are not providing any information to the NSA, period.” He said he did not know whether BellSouth had a contract with the Department of Defense, which oversees the NSA.

That is one convoluted passage. It’s hard to know what to think. Is BellSouth relying on loopholes in its denials? Or is USA Today making it appear that way in order to preserve its story? And what does it mean that the company at first “did not challenge the newspaper’s account”? How much time did USA Today give the company to respond? Was the official (or officials) contacted even in a position to know?

Frankly, the company’s contention, in its statement, that it had to conduct an internal review before it could give a definitive answer, strikes me as believable. Cauley does write that she contact BellSouth five weeks before the story appeared, but we don’t know the substance of that contact. As for describing the story in detail “[t]he night before it was published,” that more or less speaks for itself.

We need answers.

The New York Times today offers a hilarious front-page juxtaposition. My former Boston Phoenix colleague Mark Leibovich reports on why Secretary of the Treasury John Snow has long thought to have been a goner. The reason? The economy is just so gosh-darn good, yet the public doesn’t seem to realize it. Leibovich writes:

“This is an economy that by any statistical measure would be the envy of any administration of any party,” said John J. Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, who has known the secretary since Mr. Snow’s days as chief executive of the CSX Corporation. “Yet the public perception of the economy is a poor one.”

Nearby, though, is a story by Robin Pogrebin on how high gasoline prices are affecting working-class families. The top:

MAIMI BEACH, May 12 — Giving up the occasional rib-eye steak hasn’t been the hardest part for Ana Lopez, although her husband is a red-meat man.

More difficult are having to tell her 11-year-old son that he cannot go to the movies, and swearing off Sunday visits to her sister in Pembroke Pines or to her brother in Miami Lakes. These are the sacrifices required now that it costs $60 to fill her aging Toyota 4Runner.

Ms. Lopez, 48, who lives in the outlying suburb of West Kendall, must conserve every gallon possible for the 60-mile round trip to and from her job as the housekeeping manager at the Bentley Hotel in Miami Beach. “There is not enough money to spend for gas,” she said. “You have to think about it: If I go to see my friend, I won’t have enough gas to work tomorrow.”

What an ingrate Ana Lopez is! If only the Bush administration had a treasury secretary who could properly explain the good news, she would realize how wonderful everything is.

It costs just $14.95 to register an Internet domain name through Dotster.com. I’ll get back to that. But keep that in mind as you make your way through this tangled tale of alleged campaign chicanery and legal threats.

On Thursday morning, the Republican-oriented Web site HubPolitics.com posted an article claiming that the independent gubernatorial campaign of convenience-store magnate Christy Mihos may have violated campaign-finance regulations. HubPolitics, published by brothers Matt and Aaron Margolis, had information obtained through a “whois” search that the domain name christymihos.net had been registered not by the Mihos campaign but rather by Mihos’ business, Christy’s of Cape Cod, based in Yarmouthport. The Margolises further presented evidence that the Mihos campaign had not reported this as an “in-kind contribution” to the state’s Office of Campaign and Political Finance. Finally, the brothers wrote, if you actually went to christymihos.net, you would find that the content “mirrored” what you’d find on the official campaign site, christy2006.com.

Late yesterday afternoon, HubPolitics posted a follow-up, charging that the Mihos campaign was trying to shut down the Margolises’ site, claiming their information was false and libelous. According to the brothers, the threat came from Mihos’ campaign manager, Peter Pendergast, who also claimed that the Margolises’ post violated their Internet service provider’s “acceptable use policy.” The Margolises say that their Web host has told them to remove the post in order to be “cautious.” (For some background on Pendergast, click here.)

In case HubPolitics suddenly disappears, Cape Cod Today impresario Walter Brooks, who tipped me off to this, has posted pretty much everything here. Nobody’s going to mess with Walter.

Now, back to our story. If you do a “whois” search of christymihos.net today on Dotster.com, which is where the name was registered, you’ll see that the registrant is listed as “Personal” — not “Christy’s of Cape Cod LLC,” as the Margolises claimed. But you’ll also see that the registration information was “last updated” on Thursday — conceivably right after the Margolises’ post went up. It also turns out that “Personal” has precisely the same address that the Margolises reported had been listed for Christy’s of Cape Cod: 58 Arrowhead Drive of Yarmouthport. The administrative contact, Kenneth Camille, allegedly told HubPolitics that he, not Christy’s of Cape Cod, is the proud owner of christymihos.net. (By the way, christy2006.com is properly registered to the Mihos Election Committee, and there has been no change to that record since Feb. 1.)

Cruise on over to christymihos.net this morning, and you’ll see that it does not take you to christy2006.com, suggesting — assuming the Margolises have their facts straight — that there was some quick footwork performed in order to sever the connection between the two sites.

Now, back to my first observation. What does this all mean? The Margolises claim that christymihos.net was “mirroring” the official christy2006.com site, and, since it appeared to have been bought and paid for by Mihos’ business rather than by his campaign, it amounted to an unreported in-kind contribution.

But I seriously doubt that anyone bothered to set up christymihos.net as a mirror. Rather, it almost certainly was set up to forward visitors to the official site, something that requires virtually no server capacity. Thus it strikes me as extremely unlikely that anyone paid more than $14.95 for anything associated with christymihos.net. I’m sorry, but that casts a considerable element of ridiculousness to this whole thing — the alleged violation, the alleged threats, the Margolises’ solemn pledge to “continue to publish articles of an investigatory nature as merited.”

As best as I can figure out, HubPolitics caught the Mihos campaign in what was, at worst, a hypertechnical violation of campaign-finance regulations valued at $14.95 — and that the Mihos campaign grossly overreacted.

Still, based on the Margolises’ account, it appears that the Mihos campaign is now threatening HubPolitics over a story that, though silly, appears to be true. Is this how Mihos wishes to conduct his long-shot campaign for governor? He’s got a Web site. He’s got access to the media. Let him respond in public rather than going after a couple of bloggers.

Update: Adam Gaffin and Jay Fitzgerald beat me to the punch on this. For some reason, their posts didn’t pop up when I went to Google Blogsearch this morning.

This is really the big one, isn’t it? USA Today’s blockbuster confirms what many observers have suspected since last December, when the New York Times revealed that the National Security Agency had been engaged in no-warrant wiretaps of calls between the United States and foreign countries.

I’m not going to look it up right now. But if you think back, there’s been a lot of speculation about data-mining, and whether the fact that no humans need be involved in sifting through such information might be cited as a legal fig leaf. Well, now it’s all coming out.

I’m sure you’ve read it already, but read the lead of Leslie Cauley’s USA Today story again, slowly, letting the import of these words sink in:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren’t suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA’s activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation’s borders, this person added.

A database of every call ever made. Wow. Students will be reading this story 100 years from now and studying what went wrong. That is, if we can get our country back.

This morning I was listening to Neil Young’s new album, “Living with War,” while driving to work. One of the songs, “Let’s Impeach the President,” includes these lines:

Let’s impeach the president for spying
On citizens inside their own homes
Breaking every law in the country
By tapping our computers and telephones

At 9:45 a.m. today, I took that verse as artistic license. At 3:40 p.m., as I’m writing this, it looks more like simply an accurate description of what’s going on in what used to be the land of the free.

Arlen Specter is angry again. Perhaps this time he’ll actually stay angry long enough to do some good.

Instant update: The Nation broke part of this story two months ago. Click here.

No doubt you’ve already seen it, but if not, you’ve got to read Christopher Lydon’s quirky, compulsively readable take on Boston media in the new CommonWealth Magazine. Check out this excerpt:

Does the Globe really live in our city? Do we live in theirs? You see those green-and-white Globe brain-caption posters all over the MBTA, asking such cute Boston questions as “Where’s the best pizza in the North End?” But it’s a shock now when you see someone on the T actually reading the Globe. Or the Herald, for that matter, even when they’re giving it away free. What the straphangers are reading, if anything, is that moronic poison-pill of non-journalism, or anti-journalism, the Metro, of which the Globe has cynically, or defensively, bought a piece — recalling Lenin’s line about capitalists investing in the rope factory that makes their noose!

That’s as good a description of the Metro as you’re ever likely to see. But read the whole thing. It’s mainly about the Globe. And though I’ve long thought Lydon’s critique of the Globe to be overwrought, it’s also well-informed and coherent as only Lydon can be.

After about a week of Ecto refusing to communicate with Blogger, I’ve decided to go back to writing Media Nation from within Blogger.com. The only real difference is that now, when you click on a link, you leave Media Nation rather than merely opening a new, separate window. (Of course, you can always hit the “back” button.) I could edit the HTML and add a target=”_blank” to every link, but no thanks.

Ideally, I’d still like to use a blog-processing program, but I’ve just about had it with Ecto. If anyone has any ideas about a good Mac OS X solution, my ears are open.

The Boston Herald is not only debt-free as a result of publisher Pat Purcell’s sale of his Community Newspaper Co. (CNC) division; it also made a small profit last year. At least that’s what Purcell told Herald employees at a newsroom meeting on Monday, according to a respected insider.

Purcell has always played his finances close to the vest, so figuring out how well he is or isn’t doing is inevitably a matter of educated guesswork. According to “a newspaper executive who considered buying Purcell’s properties,” the Herald lost $2 million last year, whereas the 100-newspaper CNC chain made $20 million. I can’t explain the disparity between that account, reported by the Boston Globe’s Steve Bailey, and Purcell’s version. But I can guess:

• The drastic cutbacks Purcell implemented last year — slashing the newsroom by 25 percent by the end of June — may have finally taken hold, transforming a money-losing operation into a slightly profitable one.
• The Herald and CNC share a lot of content; not only is the Herald loaded with CNC copy these days, but a vast chunk of the sports section in the Framingham-based MetroWest Daily News, the CNC flagship, consists of Herald coverage. Such cost-sharing allows for quite a bit of creative accounting. And perhaps it was to Purcell’s benefit to pump up CNC’s numbers while having the Herald show a loss on paper.

According to my correspondent, Purcell told his troops that after paying off the debt he took on to purchase CNC (for a reported $150 million) in 2001, and paying a 35 percent contractural fee to his investors, the remainder of the $225 million CNC sale went to the Herald. Purcell wouldn’t say how much that was, but insiders estimate that at roughly $10 million to $20 million. Purcell added that neither he nor his family made any money on the deal, saying that all of it was rolled into the Herald.

So what’s next? Additional cuts and/or layoffs are possible, but Purcell said he has not yet decided whether that will be necessary. He said the Herald and CNC, under new owner Liberty Group Publishing, will continue to share content and advertising, and that he wants to reduce costs on the production end. Reportedly there was a lot of talk about growth and change, too, especially with respect to the Internet. Weekday circulation continues to plunge toward the 200,000 mark, but Purcell said the Herald’s Web site received 12 million hits in March. That should translate to roughly 2 million visitors, which isn’t bad.

One thing that has always impressed me about Purcell is his ability to inspire his employees. In a dozen years of writing about the Herald, I’ve almost always found it to be an incredibly loyal place with a circle-the-wagons mentality when any outsider would dare to criticize the paper. The only exception was a couple of years ago, when Mike Barnicle, who’d lost his Globe column because of ethical transgressions exposed partly by the Herald, was hired, and when well-regarded editor Andy Costello was removed from his post. But Barnicle’s gone (except for an occasional contribution), and, despite massive cutbacks, morale appears to have recovered.

Certainly it doesn’t hurt that Purcell has chosen to stand and fight. It may be true that no buyers wanted the Herald. But after selling CNC, Purcell easily could have taken his millions, shut the Herald and enjoyed a lucrative early retirement. That he didn’t shows that money isn’t the most important thing to him. You can’t say that about too many other newspaper owners these days, and you have to respect him for that.

Will it work? It has to be said that Purcell’s grand strategy of pumping up the Herald with his CNC purchase was, at best, a partial failure. The debt apparently proved to be too much, and he now finds himself the owner of an urban number-two paper with no other properties. Consider this, from Purcell’s front-page essay on Monday:

My priority has always been to keep the Herald viable. The acquisition by Herald Media of Community Newspaper Company in 2001 was a key part of that strategy. And it worked.

I’m very proud of the job we did in making Herald Media a success. But as I announced on Saturday, CNC will soon be under new ownership.

There’s really only one possible reaction to those two short paragraphs: Huh? Nevertheless, Purcell — and the Herald — are still here. I wouldn’t count them out.

The spring issue of CommonWealth Magazine has hit the Web. And I’ve got a story on Paul La Camera, the veteran television executive who’s now the general manager of WBUR Radio (90.9 FM), Boston University’s public-radio powerhouse.

My focus is on La Camera’s efforts to transform ‘BUR into a local force without giving up its reputation for covering national and international issues. Key quote from La Camera: “I just believe that if we’re going to make as full a contribution as we ought to make to an informed citizenry, part of that has to be local reporting.”

At what point does protest start morphing from free speech into censorship? Folks at Boston College have every right to protest the decision to invite Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the commencement speaker. But don’t students have a right to hear from Rice, too?

I particularly like this, from today’s Boston Globe:

“I am a Democrat and I don’t agree with the war, but I have no problem with her coming here,” said Margaret Reed, a senior political science major. “She is the secretary of state, she is an influential person, a black woman who has risen to power, and there is no reason to protest. I am so frustrated by this.”

The editors of BC’s student newspaper, the Heights, don’t seem particularly exercised about Rice’s upcoming appearance. Here’s an excerpt from an editorial:

There is certainly nothing wrong with questioning Rice’s role as speaker for BC — a respectful and intelligent campaign can at least make BC consider these arguments when selecting future speakers and degree recipients.

Further, convincing arguments can be made that Rice is more qualified than most to give a commencement address….

Politics aside, this is a woman with a lot to say about academics, public service, leadership, and the world.

That strikes me as a mature, measured response — something that seems to be missing on the other side.

Media Nation reader D.H. passes along this depressing news — depressing, that is, for those of us who were/are fans of former CNN anchor Aaron Brown. It turns out that his boy wonder replacement, Anderson Cooper, hasn’t even managed to achieve Brown’s ratings, making Brown’s departure not just lamentable but wholly unnecessary. According to Variety:

Brown averaged 307,000 young [i.e., those between 25 and 54 years old] viewers a night last year. This April, Cooper averaged 198,000. In total viewers, Cooper averaged 710,000 compared to 907,000 for Brown last year.

Media Nation has a theory. Brown was successful in attracting nearly everyone who wanted to watch a relatively serious newscast at 10 p.m. — it’s just that there weren’t that many of them. Cooper is neither serious enough to hold onto Brown’s audience nor sleazy enough to cut into Greta Van Susteren’s numbers. Cooper’s a tweener, in other words.

No offense to Cooper, who seems like a good guy who wants to do well. Rather, this is all about CNN president Jonathan Klein, who clearly has no idea what he’s doing, and who nuked the best newscast on cable (admittedly akin to records involving left-handed rookie second basemen whose names begin with “M”) for what turns out to be no reason whatsoever.