Media Nation

National Education Association president Reg Weaver has a letter in today’s Boston Globe that is disingenuous at best. Following the contretemps over the op-ed published in the Globe earlier this week criticizing the NEA’s campaign against Wal-Mart – an op-ed that turned out to have been indirectly subsidized by Wal-Mart (click here and here) – Weaver writes:

WEAVER: Michael Reitz is not the first to characterize the National Education Association as supporting a boycott of Wal-Mart (“Why target Wal-Mart?” op ed, Aug 16). This is just not true. The NEA, which represents 2.7 million educators, voted to support the “Wake Up Wal-Mart” campaign to educate its members about the retailing giant’s antiworker practices and how its profits are used for anti-public education activities. The effort is about educating, not boycotting: Consumers are simply reminded that when they shop, they have choices about where to spend their money.

Not a boycott? Here is some information on the anti-Wal-Mart campaign that I found on the NEA’s website. Yes, the wording is circumspect, and supports Weaver’s claim that the campaign is not a boycott. Except that the very first sentence begins, “The NEA Executive Committee approved the Association’s participation in ‘Wake-Up Wal-Mart,’ a major national effort organized by the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union (UFCW) …” And the NEA provides a link to the “Wake-Up Wal-Mart” website.

Follow the link, and the very first thing you will find is a graphic that reads, “Send Wal-Mart ‘Back to School’ this summer. Pledge to buy your school supplies somewhere else.”

Drill down a little more deeply, and you can sign an online pledge. It begins: “Because Wal-Mart is failing America, I … pledge to send Wal-Mart ‘Back to School’ this summer by buying my ‘Back to School’ supplies somewhere other than Wal-Mart.”

The American Heritage Dictionary defines “boycott” as follows: “To abstain from or act together in abstaining from using, buying, or dealing with as an expression of protest or disfavor or as a means of coercion.”

By any reasonable definition, the NEA, by taking part in a campaign that asks people not to buy school supplies at Wal-Mart, is participating in a boycott. For NEA president Weaver to deny that is to deny reality.

In light of yesterday’s Boston Globe screw-up, you should read this excellent article (PDF) by Morton Mintz from the current issue of Nieman Reports. Titled “Why Won’t Journalists Follow the Money?”, the article laments media laxity when it comes to identifying industry-funded special-interest groups as – well, as industry-funded special-interest groups.

You’ll note that the Globe’s Beth Daley gets a silver star.

In other developments, the online version of Michael Reitz’s column now begins with this:

Clarification: A column that appeared yesterday by Michael Reitz of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation that criticized the National Education Association’s boycott of Wal-Mart should have noted that the foundation has received grants from the Walton Family Foundation. Sam Walton founded Wal-Mart.

And the Globe today runs a letter (scroll down a bit) critical of Reitz’s column that was written by North Andover resident Bill Callahan, who is described as “a high school teacher and a member of the Brookline Educators’ Union, an affiliate of the National Education Association.”

Ah, full disclosure – it’s a beautiful thing.

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.