Media Nation

I’m starting to get hit with spam in the “comments” sections. No, I’m not talking about nasty posts – I mean, get-rich-quick crap is getting uploaded to this site. I remove it when I find it, but I don’t want to spend all my time doing that. Unfortunately, I may have to require people to register with Blogger.com before they can comment. Sorry about that.

The Boston Globe op-ed page today carries a column that criticizes the National Education Association’s endorsement of a union campaign to boycott Wal-Mart. The piece was written by Michael Reitz, whom the Globe identifies as “the director of the Labor Policy Center for the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a nonpartisan, public policy research organization based in Olympia, Wash.”

Among other things, Reitz charges, “The NEA even criticizes the Walton family, the founders of Wal-Mart, for contributing to ‘anti-public education efforts like private school voucher initiatives and anti-public educations PACs.'”

Unfortunately, you will not be surprised to learn that the Globe – and not for the first time – has failed to perform due diligence with respect to an outside op-ed contributor. In five minutes of Googling, I was able to learn that the Evergreen Freedom Foundation (EFF) is anything but “a nonpartisan, public policy research organization.” And it turns out to be no surprise that the foundation is particularly exercised about Wal-Mart.

Here is a 2002 article posted on the website Media Transparency, which tracks “the money behind conservative media.” Although I wish the data were a little more up to date, I think it’s sufficient to prove EFF’s hyperpartisan nature. Here are three major donors to the EFF that should help to establish Reitz’s bona fides:

1. The Walton Family Foundation, which is the charitable arm of – yes – the Wal-Mart fortune left behind by the late founder, Sam Walton. According to Media Transparency, the foundation gave Evergreen $300,000 between 1998 and 2000, and has also given millions to other groups that support EFF’s conservative education agenda, such as tuition vouchers. No wonder Reitz expressed such shock and horror that the NEA “even criticizes the Walton family.”

2. The Sarah Scaife Foundation, controlled by the notorious right-wing financier Richard Mellon Scaife. The Scaife Foundation, Media Transparency discovered, gave Evergreen $150,000 from 1998 to 2000.

3. Boston business figure William Edgerly. In light of Tom Palmer’s eye-opening piece about the Pioneer Institute’s woes – published in the Globe Ideas section this past Sunday – the following excerpt from Media Transparency’s report is pretty interesting:

MEDIA TRANSPARENCY: Foundation for Partnerships Trust, funded and run by William Edgerly, CEO emeritus of State Street Bank and Trust of Boston. The foundation gave Evergreen a total of $70,000 in 1998 and 1999; at the time of the grant, Edgerly was chairman of Advantage Schools, a for-profit school operator run by former Pioneer Institute executive director Steve Wilson that clashed with the Massachusetts Education Association over operation of schools in the state. Edgerly is on the board of the Pioneer Institute, a Massachusetts member of the State Policy Network.

Weitz’s success in placing his anti-NEA screed in the Globe was something of a coup for Evergreen: it currently leads the “What’s New” page on the organization’s website. And so the Globe has provided Evergreen with some undeserved credibility.

From time to time, the Globe’s policy of accepting paid advocacy ads for the op-ed page comes under fire, even though such distinguished papers as its corporate big brother, the New York Times, do the same thing. On July 21, for instance, the Boston Herald tweaked the Globe for its efforts to market that valuable real estate.

But at least with an ad, you know what you’re getting. Running Reitz’s Evergreen piece was far more insidious, because the reader was given no warning about the agenda behind the op-ed. Needless to say, full disclosure should have been provided. But I suspect that the Globe editors would rather have killed the piece than admit it was funded with money from the likes of Wal-Mart and Scaife.

The Boston Globe Magazine today publishes a letter that takes issue with Charlie Pierce’s characterization of Howard Dean’s infamous scream. The letter-writer, Carol S. Williams, of Clarendon Hills, Illinois, complains that Pierce falsely described the scream as “real.” She continues:

WILLIAMS: A newsroom tape editor invented The Scream – clip, crop, snip to remove the context of his rally until he looked like a madman – and then it was broadcast over multiple days, hundreds of times. No candidate could survive that, and it worked as planned. So the media, not the voters, selected the Democratic nominee. And here you are perpetuating this myth.

Williams’s view is common among Dean supporters, many of whom continue to believe that Dean’s presidential campaign was done in by the media. But is she right?

First, let’s consider what Pierce actually wrote. In his Dean profile of July 24, Pierce had this to say:

PIERCE: For someone who had driven a lonely road with him from Iowa City to Ottumwa, it was like watching a creation myth in real time. A presidential contest, working through its own curious internal dynamics, was designing a Howard Dean of its very own, one that was beyond the control of the actual Howard Dean. The Scream wasn’t even instantly iconic. Accounts in the next day’s newspapers – including the Globe and The Washington Post – described Dean’s most famous sound bite as merely a candidate trying put a brave face on a surprisingly dismal showing, and fighting to make himself heard over a raucous crowd.

It took a couple of days of relentless repetition for Dean to become defined by the moment. Now, The Scream stands with Edmund Muskie’s “melting snowflakes” in 1972 and George Romney’s 1968 “brainwashing” on the subject of Vietnam in the annals of campaign self-destruction. Suddenly, Howard Dean’s mix of issues was no longer “eclectic.” It was eccentric and risky. His brutal candor was no longer “appealing.” It was mean. He wasn’t energized. He was unhinged. A doppelganger Howard Dean stalked the actual one for the rest of the campaign.

Judging from this, I’d say Pierce’s assessment is identical to Williams’s. It’s more likely that Williams was reacting to the beginning of the subhead – “With one spontaneous scream, Howard Dean went from Democratic front-runner to political laughingstock” – which Pierce, of course, almost certainly didn’t write.

Now to the matter of whether Dean’s scream really was a media creation that destroyed his candidacy. All I can tell you is that Mrs. Media Nation and I were watching coverage of the Iowa caucuses that night, and saw Dean deliver his march-through-the-states rant in real time. And I can report that we both had the same reaction: Oh, my. He’d just had his rear end handed to him, finishing third in a state that he had allegedly led for months. John Kerry and John Edwards were surging, with the battle to take place on Kerry’s turf, in New Hampshire, the following week. And Dean was bellowing like a nutcase in front of a national television audience.

Did the media make too much of the scream over the following week? Of course, and that overcoverage may well have hastened Kerry’s rise and Dean’s collapse in New Hampshire. But on that night in Iowa, Dean came across as a sore and angry loser. That wasn’t a myth. That was reality.

The New York Times reports that Google is being forced to downsize its plans for digitizing as many books as it can get its hands on because of copyright concerns – even though the service would offer no more than a snippet of text from works whose copyrights were still in effect.

Sadly, former Colorado congresswoman Pat Schroeder plays the well-compensated lobbyist-Luddite.

Former Democratic political consultant Michael Goldman, co-host of the Bloomberg Radio program “Simply Put” (WBBR Radio in New York, AM 1130; the rebroadcast can be heard locally from 8 to 10 p.m.), passes along two striking poll results from Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire.

The first shows John McCain with a huge lead among New Hampshire Republicans some two and a half years before that state’s first-in-the-nation primary. No surprise there: New Hampshire gave McCain a huge win over George W. Bush in 2000, demonstrating that the Granite State’s libertarian-flavored GOP is seriously out of step with the national Republican Party. (Too bad.)

More striking, though, is the second poll, of likely voters in the 2008 Massachusetts Republican primary. At the moment, McCain has a lead of 46 percent to 22 percent over our home-state governor, Mitt Romney.

What does this mean? Not much this far in advance. But in Massachusetts, at least, Romney’s supporters can’t seriously argue that McCain has higher name recognition than their man does. It’s clear that Romney still hasn’t made enough of an impression on his adopted state to garner much support, even among his fellow Republicans.

I’m hardly the first person of my generation (I’m 49) to make the observation that I almost never watch the three major networks’ nightly newscasts. Lifestyles have changed dramatically over the past 20 to 30 years. It’s far more convenient to tune in National Public Radio while I’m commuting than to sit down and try to watch a 6:30 p.m. headline service. If there’s big news, I’ll watch CNN’s “NewsNight with Aaron Brown” at 10 p.m.

Still, Peter Jennings’s death matters, just as Tom Brokaw’s retirement mattered and – yes – just as Dan Rather’s “did he jump or was he pushed?” departure mattered. My sightings of all three tended to take place during big news events, election nights and the like. Jennings and Brokaw were very good at what they did, and I’d give Jennings the edge for a somewhat more intelligent approach. Even Rather, an unsettling presence, stood for real news values. Yet the Jennings/Brokaw/Rather troika embodied not the golden age of television news but its decline.

Network news audiences are half the size they used to be. Unlike the true giants of an earlier era, like Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, the Big Three of recent decades represented an early attempt by network news executives to put telegenic faces in front of the camera. Jennings flopped as a twentysomething, pretty-boy anchor, then turned himself into a real journalist. Brokaw was a veteran of “Today,” hardly a paradigm of hard-news excellence. Rather, though hardly unskilled, was best at calling attention to himself, as when he memorably snarked at Richard Nixon during a televised news conference.

What you did sense with all three of them, though, was that they had standards, and that, ultimately, they would not be a part of the more perfidious schemes their profit-obsessed corporate bosses might come up with. (Not to be overly nostalgic; they all stood by while foreign coverage was gutted, didn’t they?) Brian Williams and whoever ultimately replaces Jennings and Rather (Charlie Gibson seems to be the early favorite for Jennings’s chair) may become equally skilled journalists. But will they have the clout to resist further news cutbacks?

With NBC News in the best position of the post-troika era, having made an astoundingly smooth transition to Williams, it will be interesting to see whether the other two networks decide to move away from the nightly news model and come up with other ways to appeal to a shrinking audience. Obviously Jennings will be missed; and he’ll be missed even more if Disney decides this is the perfect opportunity to lighten up.

This will be my last post for a while. Tomorrow, I leave for a five-day, 50-mile backpacking trip with my son’s Boy Scout troop along the Appalachian Trail in Vermont. My goal: sheer survival.

Dick Gordon is going out with a bang. Gordon, the host of “The Connection,” on WBUR Radio (90.9), was canned recently amid reports that station management believed ratings were “flat.” Yesterday, he fought back in the pages of the Boston Phoenix, telling Mark Jurkowitz, “I’m left wondering what possibly could have motivated them.” Today, Gordon has an op-ed piece in the Boston Globe. Among other things, Gordon writes:

GORDON: I’m still bewildered as to why the program was canceled. At a time when WBUR is clearly anxious about maintaining financial support from the public, they have taken down what they called their flagship program. “The Connection” was carried on more stations across the country than any other news show produced at WBUR.

They’ve talked about “flat ratings,” but “The Connection” has consistently had one of the top measures of listener loyalty at WBUR and some of the best such ratings among all NPR talk shows. Just over a year ago the station was boasting that ratings for “The Connection” were up 22 percent.

So what happened? As someone who followed WBUR for years, I think I can provide some perspective. After longtime general manager Jane Christo left the station last fall amid charges of mismanagement (and worse), the fear I heard voiced most often – even among Christo’s detractors – was that Boston University, which holds the station’s license, would start slashing the budget to get the operation’s massive debt under control.

Dick Gordon did an excellent job of hosting “The Connection.” His ability to broadcast from war-torn Iraq brought a dimension to ‘BUR that it hadn’t had with its other program hosts. He was also a gentleman, and I thoroughly enjoyed my one appearance on his show. But, as he acknowledges to Jurkowitz, he came in under a cloud, replacing the wildly popular Christopher Lydon, who was fired in early 2001 after he and his executive producer, Mary McGrath, demanded an ownership share of the program.

Following Christo’s departure, a WBUR source who would occasionally update me on internal discussions at the station told me that though management was believed not to want to start cutting too deeply, if things got bad enough, Gordon might go. This source assumed that managers saw Tom Ashbrook, the host of “On Point” – which will move to the 10 a.m. slot now occupied by “The Connection” – as a greater asset than Gordon.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened. And though Gordon and Ashbrook each bring considerable strengths to the microphone, Ashbrook comes across as having a more lively personality. If WBUR really couldn’t afford to keep both of them (and let’s not forget that the station’s signature hosts earn well into the six figures), then interim general manager Peter Fiedler probably made the right decision. (In another cost-cutting move, the station ended its relationship with award-winning documentarian Michael Goldfarb, who’s based in London.)

But what of the high ratings to which Gordon refers? Here’s where the economics of public radio enter in. Public radio these days is almost entirely privatized; a station such as ‘BUR exists primarily on listener contributions and advertising – that is, corporate underwriting. But though public stations have to be responsive to their audiences, they are responsive in a different way from commercial stations. Obviously ‘BUR is betting that it can nix “The Connection” without any falloff in contributions or underwriting, because people and companies give to the station as a whole rather than to any particular show.

If Fiedler and company are right, then ‘BUR will save itself a whole lot of money. A side benefit, as Jurkowitz notes, is that Ashbrook won’t have to compete with Lydon, whose new show, “Open Source,” emanates from WGBH Radio (89.7 FM) Monday through Thursday from 7 to 8 p.m.

What happened to Gordon was lousy. He will definitely be missed. But there’s no mystery to what happened. Jane Christo built a station that was more expensive than the community was willing to support, especially after the dot-com bust and the Lydon fiasco. Retrenchment was inevitable. As a frequent listener, I just hope this is the last of it.

Among the prevailing civic religions currently animating American political life, perhaps none is as long-lived as that of unfettered capitalism. A bit long in the tooth compared to its heyday during the Reagan years, the notion that government is the enemy of both individual liberty and economic freedom nevertheless remains a firmly established part of our mythology.

So it was with some surprise and pleasure that I read Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications,” his 2004 book on why American media have, for better or worse, come to dominate the world. Because Starr – a Princeton University scholar who is co-editor of the American Prospect – argues persuasively that the US culture industry is such a success story not because of unfettered capitalism, but because of traditional liberalism.

By traditional liberalism, I mean not the laissez-faire liberalism of the 19th century, nor the pseudo-socialism with which liberalism is too often confused today. Rather, I’m talking about the political philosophy that prevailed for much of the 20th century, and especially between the presidencies of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson – that is, the belief in a mixed economy of capitalism and regulation, enhanced with some intelligent government policies about how best to improve society.

The phrase that Starr uses over and over again is “constitutive choices” – decisions made at an early point that have had far-reaching consequences over time. For instance, Starr explains the rise of the American newspaper industry, and its eventual dominance over the British, Canadian and European press, as the result of a number of conscious and semi-conscious decisions. To wit:

– In other Western societies, government has taxed the press. By contrast, from the time of the rebellion against the Stamp Act of 1765, the US government has not only not taxed the press, but it has also provided various tax incentives.

– A cheap, professional and reliable US Post Office, with special rates for newspapers, led to an inexpensive, extensive distribution network.

– Universal education, for the masses as well as for the elite, created an involved citizenry eager for the news provided by the early media.

– Government-subsidized roads and canals created additional distribution channels.

Starr offers example after example to bolster his thesis. For instance, magazines, which became the principal organ for investigative reporting in the last quarter of the 19th century, only took off after postal policies were changed to make the business more lucrative. In the early 20th century, the Supreme Court for the first time started putting some teeth into the free-speech guarantees of the First Amendment, thus establishing the Constitution as a countervailing force at a time of rising business and governmental giantism. In the 1920s, then-secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover’s policies paved the way for a privately owned, publicly regulated radio industry, a regime that was later extended to television.

Starr seems troubled by this last development. Although he notes that the US had at least managed to avoid the government monopoly that prevailed in Europe, broadcast regulations – promulgated on the theory that the airwaves are a finite, privately owned resource – have prevented radio and television stations from enjoying the same First Amendment protections as their print counterparts. At the same time, the early bias toward commercial broadcasting (Starr notes that government regulations actually referred to nonprofit stations run by universities, religious groups and the like as “propaganda” stations) prevented the creation of modern public radio until the late 1960s.

In his summing-up, Starr writes:

STARR: The market, even when its products are distasteful, is a continual stimulus to innovation outside the market and in reaction to it. In a dynamic sense, markets in liberal societies enrich the public sphere far more than they impoverish it. If, however, all were left to the market – if government had not promoted communications networks, the press, education, and innovation while attempting to check tendencies toward excessive concentrations of power – the public sphere would be poor indeed. Our public life is a hybrid of capitalism and democracy, and we are better off for it, as long as the democratic side is able to keep the balance.

If that isn’t a good working definition of traditional liberalism, I don’t know what is.

Here, by the way, is an insightful review of “The Creation of the Media” written by James Fallows for the New York Times Book Review.

One obvious question raised by Starr’s book is this: What constitutive choices do we face today that might have long-range effects on the media that will be used by our children and beyond? Certainly the deregulatory stance taken by the FCC in recent years is worth examining, although that’s mainly about managing the death of Old Media.

My candidate for a constitutive choice we’ve got to get right is making sure that the broadband Internet – and its faster and more robust successors – remain wide open. Powerful business interests would love nothing better than to privatize these networks, banning rivals from using or charging them exorbitant rates, and favoring their own content over those of independents.

The organization that’s doing the most to ensure an open Internet is the Center for Digital Democracy, headed by the indefatigable Jeff Chester. Paul Starr has shown how crucial it was in the past to get it right. It’s just as important that we get it right in the future.

I’m slogging through Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media,” and was reading the other night about how, during the early days of telephones, competing networks were incompatible with one another. You couldn’t call your friend on the other side of town if she was using one type of phone and you were using another. Well, here we are a good decade into the Internet revolution, and Bill Gates is still operating under the ancient paradigm.

Go to most sites that offer multimedia – NYTimes.com or iFilm.com, for instance – and you’re given choices: RealPlayer or Windows Media (yes, there’s a Mac version), sometimes with a QuickTime option thrown in, too. It is rare that it matters what browser you’re using. Thus, even though Starr’s telephone analogy is alive and well, you can work around it.

Go to MSNBC.com, though, and it’s a different story. Even though Microsoft is perpetually rumored to be looking to get out of its partnership with NBC, the Bill’s-way-or-the-highway ethos still holds. Oh, the site renders fine on the Mac version of Firefox. But when you try to play a video clip, you are informed that you must be using the most recent version of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for Windows, along with Windows Media Player. Even the Mac versions of IE and Windows Media Player won’t do.

Here is the Word from Bill:

MSN Video incorporates the latest Internet technology to bring videos to your computer. To use this technology, MSN Video requires the following software:

– Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or later
– Microsoft Windows Media Player 7 or later
– Macromedia Flash Player 7 or later

I own some shares of Microsoft stock, but I’m not sure why. When I bought them, my theory was that Apple had better technology but Microsoft had a superior business strategy. As it turns out, I’m being punished financially for my cynicism, which I suppose serves me right. At least I have no regrets about my choice of technology.

By the way, it’s not as though Microsoft makes no money from the Apple crowd. The Mac version of MS Office is a huge bestseller. So come on, Bill. Show us a little love.