WGBH News – Page 27 – Media Nation

Clinton stumbles as Paris changes the terms of debate

It was such a charged moment that I almost expected to see a split screen. On one side: the still-unfolding horror in Paris. On the other: the three Democratic candidates for president talking about how the United States should respond.

CBS News didn’t go that far, though it did rearrange the format to move questions about national security and terrorism to the beginning of Saturday night’s two-hour debate. Bernie Sanders was reportedly none too happy about it, but it’s hard to understand why. He more than held his own with Hillary Clinton, matching her with his command of the details, reminding everyone that she voted for the war in Iraq, and explaining that there’s a clear link between terrorism and climate change. That last bit may cause some head-scratching, but in fact it reflects the thinking of Defense Department experts.

Clinton’s performance was adequate for the most part, but she was not as stellar as she was in the first debate, a triumph that re-energized her campaign. She was strong on the details, but she was also relatively humorless and charmless. She also had two moments that reflected poorly on her political judgment. The first of those two moments was also the more important, since it may make some question whether they really want her to be answering the phone at 3 a.m.

Moderator John Dickerson asked Clinton whether she agreed with Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio that “the attack in Paris showed we are at war with radical Islam.” A simple “yes” would have sufficed, and I’m surprised she wasn’t quick enough on her feet to realize it. Instead, she proceeded to head down a tangled syntactical path, arguing that we are not at war with Islam (that wasn’t the question), praising George W. Bush for making a clear distinction between Muslims and terrorists (OK, good point), and saying she preferred terms like “violent extremism.” (As usual, I am relying on a transcript published by The Washington Post.)

It wasn’t a terrible answer so much as it was overly complicated and somewhat tone-deaf. Just Google “Hillary Clinton” and “radical Islam” and you’ll see that the right is already in a high state of excitation. Is this a huge deal? Probably not. But it seemed to me that she handed an issue to her opponents for no good reason.

The other Clinton low point came in response to an arm-waving tirade by Sanders about her close relationship with Wall Street. It was actually pretty tough stuff from Bernie, including as it did a suggestion that she does favors for the financial sector in return for campaign contributions. “Why, over her political career, has Wall Street been the major campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton?” asked Sanders. “You know, maybe they’re dumb and they don’t know what they’re going to get, but I don’t think so.”

Clinton’s response was to play the gender card and to wrap herself in the flag of 9/11. “You know, not only do I have hundreds of thousands of donors, most of them small,” she said. “And I’m very proud that for the first time a majority of my donors are women, 60 percent.” Then came this doozy:

So, I represented New York, and I represented New York on 9/11 when we were attacked. Where were we attacked? We were attacked in downtown Manhattan, where Wall Street is. I did spend a whole lot of time and effort helping them rebuild. That was good for New York. It was good for the economy and it was a way to rebuke the terrorists who had attacked our country.

It was so brazen that debate panelist Nancy Cordes later hit Clinton with an observation from someone on Twitter who said, “I’ve never seen a candidate invoke 9/11 to justify millions of Wall Street donations until now.”

https://twitter.com/AndyGrewal/status/665727759168081920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

(It occurs to me that I’m 650 words into this and I haven’t mentioned the third candidate, Martin O’Malley. He just didn’t seem to be a factor. Compared to Sanders and Clinton, he comes across as inexperienced and unprepared. And I finally figured out what his earnest, wooden speaking style reminds me of: the official response to the State of the Union address. That’s not a compliment.)

Most of the debate was devoted to domestic issues. No new ground was broken. Sanders is still appalled by “millionaires and billionaires.” All three support raising the minimum wage, although Clinton — there she goes again — gave a complicated answer that left me wondering exactly where she stands.

But given that the world is still dealing with the shock of the Paris attacks, let me return to foreign policy, an area that’s a real weakness for both parties.

International affairs should be a strength for Clinton, who is, after all, a former secretary of state. But liberals don’t trust her because of her support for the war in Iraq, and the right’s endless investigation into the Benghazi incident has undermined her reputation for competence and contributed to the longstanding perception that she’s not trustworthy. And I doubt many prospective voters see Sanders or O’Malley as a plausible commander-in-chief.

On the Republican side, it’s a whole lot worse. The hateful immigrant-bashing rhetoric of Donald Trump is the most visible (and audible) manifestation of the Republicans’ problems in dealing with the world at large. Marco Rubio is callow and inexperienced. Who knows what’s floating around inside Ben Carson’s head? Jeb Bush was rocked by a Politico Magazine story over the weekend showing (as if we didn’t already know it) that no, his brother most definitely did not keep us safe. Maybe Lindsey Graham, a consistent exponent of John McCain-style aggression, is finally about to have his day.

At the moment we can’t guess how the Paris attacks will affect the presidential race. I was struck by the willingness of all three Democrats to continue accepting Syrian refugees — a humane and proper stance, but one likely to prove unpopular, especially since one of the terrorists appears to have entered Europe by pretending to be a refugee. Will we commit a significant number of American troops to the war against ISIS? Will we be able to prevent a terrorist attack from taking place here?

Given those difficult issues, it could be that the foreign-policy focus of Saturday night’s was premature. The stakes are likely to be much higher in the weeks and months ahead.

Conservative pundits spurn Kasich’s strong performance

John Kasich in New Hampshire earlier this year. Photo (cc) by Michael Vadon.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate was a useful reminder — as if I needed one — that these events are not being staged for my benefit.

Late in the proceedings, John Kasich put the finishing touches on what I thought was a strong performance by name-checking the conservative Catholic theologian Michael Novak in arguing that the free-enterprise system needs to be “underlaid with values.” No, I haven’t read Novak, but I was intrigued. Earlier, Kasich had what I thought was an effective exchange with Donald Trump over immigration. (The Washington Post has published a transcript here.)

To check in with the conservative media today, though, is to learn that some on the right think Kasich all but disqualified himself.

“Kasich espoused positions that can charitably be called compassionate conservatism, less kindly mini-liberalism of the sort that he says he practiced so successfully in Ohio when ‘people need help,’” writes the economist Irwin M. Stelzer at The Weekly Standard. Adds Paul Mirengoff of Powerline: “John Kasich annoyingly kept demanding speaking time. He used some of it to remind everyone that he’s the least conservative candidate in the field.”

A neutral analyst, Boston Globe political reporter James Pindell, thinks Chris Christie’s strong showing in the unwatched (by me, anyway) undercard makes him a good bet to replace Kasich in future debates. Kasich, Pindell notes, “backed increasing the minimum wage, bailing out big banks, and allowing 11 million illegal immigrants to stay in the country. It is hard to see how many Republicans will go along with the sentiment.”

Clearly Kasich — a top lieutenant in Newt Gingrich’s conservative revolution of the mid-1990s — has been recast as a hopeless RINO. And the notion that he might be the most appealing candidate the Republicans could put up against Hillary Clinton is apparently not nearly as interesting to conservative stalwarts as his heterodox views, summarized by the PBS NewsHour.

As the debate opened, all eyes were on the moderators. Would they manage to avoid the anti-media controversies that befell the CNBC panelists a couple of weeks ago while still managing to maintain a firm hand? My answer is that they partially succeeded. They avoided the snarky, disrespectful tone of the CNBC debate, and the candidates responded with a substantive discussion of the issues.

But on several occasions the panelists were just too soft. One example was Neil Cavuto’s exchange with Ben Carson in which he tried to press Carson on questions that have been raised about his truthfulness. Carson didn’t really answer, and before you knew it he was off and running about Benghazi.

Cavuto’s follow-up: “Thank you, Dr. Carson.”

Then there was the rather amazing question Maria Bartiromo asked Rubio toward the end of the debate, which I thought was well described by Max Fisher of Vox:

https://twitter.com/Max_Fisher/status/664292269554438144

Who won? After each of these encounters, the pundits keep telling us that Rubio is on the move. And yes, the Florida senator has risen in the polls, though he’s still well behind Trump (who informed us that he and Vladimir Putin are “stablemates”) and Carson.

But Rubio’s over-rehearsed demeanor may not wear well. I thought his weakest moment on Tuesday came when Rand Paul challenged him on military spending. The audience liked Rubio’s militaristic response. Paul, though, appeared to be at ease as he offered facts and figures, while Rubio just seemed to be sputtering talking points.

As for Jeb Bush, well, the consensus is that he did better than he had previously, but not enough to make a difference. “He may have stopped the free fall,” writes Jennifer Rubin, The Washington Post’s conservative blogger, “but he was outshone once again by competitors.” The questions about Bush’s continued viabililty will continue.

Carly Fiorina turned in another in a series of strong performances. But they don’t seem to be helping her much in the polls, and there was nothing that happened Tuesday night to make me think that’s going to change.

John Dickerson of Slate, who is also the host of CBS News’ Face the Nation, seems to believe the race will ultimately come down to Rubio’s mainstream conservatism and the much-harder-edged version offered by Ted Cruz, who once again showed he’s a skilled debater.

If that’s the case, let’s get on with it. Tuesday night’s event featured eight candidates — a bit more manageable than the previous three debates, but still too large to sustain a coherent line of thought. (What was that about Michael Novak again, Governor Kasich?)

For that to happen, though, Trump and Carson are going to have to fade. And despite months of predictions (including some by me) that their support would collapse, they remain at the top of the heap. As long as that’s the case, Rubio versus Cruz means precisely nothing.

“The Democrats are laughing,” Cruz said at one point in response to a question about immigration. In fact, the Republicans have given their rivals plenty of comedic material during in 2015. The question is whether that will change in 2016 — or if Hillary Clinton will be laughing all the way to Election Day.

Globe watch: A lawyer’s lament, and Stat’s discontents

Two items of note regarding The Boston Globe.

1. Eric MacLeish, a prominent lawyer who represented numerous victims of pedophile priests, is objecting to his portrayal in the movie “Spotlight.” An item in the Globe’s “Names” column notes, “Curiously, MacLeish hasn’t seen the movie.” Yet someone must have given MacLeish a good briefing, as the bill of particulars he posted on Facebook is pretty accurate in summarizing his character in the film: a lawyer who reached confidential settlements with the Catholic Church on behalf of his clients, thus helping to delay the truth from coming out.

Also of note is that Stephen Kurkjian, a legendary Globe investigative reporter who also does not come off well in “Spotlight,” has posted a comment saying in part: “I can attest to how committed you [MacLeish] were — within the confines of attorney-client relationships — to assisting The Globe in getting the story out.”

Of course, such complaints are to be expected when a fictional movie is made about a real-life story and actual people. I experienced this first-hand when the movie about the Woburn toxic-waste story, “A Civil Action,” came out. (I covered the story for The Daily Times Chronicle of Woburn.) I was so incensed by some of what I saw that I wrote about it for The New Republic.

“Spotlight” is a far better — and truer — movie than “A Civil Action.” But it’s not a documentary.

2. Craig Douglas of The Boston Business Journal reports that the Newspaper Guild has some issues with Stat, a website covering health, medicine and life sciences that is part of John Henry’s Boston Globe Media holdings.

As I wrote last week for WGBHNews.org, Stat launched with about 40 journalists just weeks after the Globe eliminated about 40 newsroom positions through buyouts and layoffs. The two developments are said to be unrelated in the sense that Henry is not funding Stat through cuts at the Globe. As Gideon Gil, Stat’s managing editor for enterprise and partnerships, told me, each property has to pursue its own business plan.

Still, Douglas reports, it has not gone unnoticed that union jobs at the Globe have been eliminated while positions at Stat are non-union. Douglas quotes an anonymous union official as saying: “The feeling is, those weren’t the last layoffs we’re going to see. It feels like they are trying to expand by killing us from inside.”

Surely Henry can’t be blamed for making cuts in a shrinking business while trying to find innovative ideas that could lead to growth and profitability. But it’s not hard to sympathize with the fears voiced in Douglas’ article.

The Globe’s mobile-first Stat seeks profits in life sciences

Stats top editors, from left, are Stephanie Simon, managing editor for news; Rick Berke, executive editor; and Gideon Gil, managing editor for enterprise and partnerships. Photo by Dan Kennedy. — Stat’s top editors, from left, are Stephanie Simon, managing editor for news; Rick Berke, executive editor; and Gideon Gil, managing editor for enterprise and partnerships. Photo by Dan Kennedy.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Nearly three weeks ago The Boston Globe said goodbye to about 40 full- and part-time staff members as the paper’s executives struggle to keep up with declining revenues and a shrinking ad market.

Today a sister project, Stat, makes its bright and shiny debut. The site covers medicine, health and life sciences with a staff of nearly 40 journalists recruited from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post as well as smaller news organizations. There are another 10 or so employees on the business side.

The two developments shouldn’t be linked except for the timing, according to Stat’s editors. The Globe isn’t being cut in order to fund Stat. Rather, Globe owner John Henry’s decision to launch an ambitious new project shows that he’s willing to experiment with new models of journalism even as the newspaper business contracts. (Henry explains his reasoning in a letter to readers.)

“I see great potential in what we’re doing for the Globe,” says Stat executive editor Rick Berke, a former top editor with The New York Times and, more recently, Politico. “If we can have a sustainable business model here and pull in revenues, that could ultimately help the whole Globe Media organization across the board.”

Adds Gideon Gil, a longtime Globe editor who is now Stat’s managing editor for enterprise and partnerships: “I’m sad about people losing their jobs in the Globe newsroom. Some are longtime colleagues of mine. I feel fortunate that I’m working at Stat, because we have great ambition and a vision to really cover this area. I understand why you and others try to make a connection between them, but we’re separate businesses. We each have our own business plans and have to succeed on our own.”

Stat’s website formally debuted at midnight today, though since August the staff has been producing stories that have run in the Globe. On Tuesday afternoon, the atmosphere in Stat’s interconnected newsrooms on the third floor of the Globe’s Dorchester headquarters was busy but surprisingly non-chaotic given that the launch was less than 10 hours away.

Berke, Gil and Stephanie Simon, another former Politico editor who is the site’s managing editor for news, checked out a promotional video that was near completion. Afterward, the four of us gathered in Berke’s office, dominated by a large, heavily used whiteboard. A bottle of champagne stood unopened on his desk; a gray Stat fleece hung from a hook on his door.

The business model is clearly the most important question facing Stat. If you look at other, smaller verticals the Globe has launched — Crux, which covers the Catholic Church, and BetaBoston, which follows the local innovation economy — you find quality journalism but just a smattering of ads. Indeed, free, advertiser-supported websites are currently out of favor in some circles, since it is thought that you need scale on the order of megasites like The Huffington Post or BuzzFeed to make money.

Gil, though, offers some intriguing ideas. For one thing, he says, Stat is being launched as a free website in part so that its audience can become familiar with the content and so that the staff can collect data on what’s working and what isn’t. Later, he says, Stat will start charging for some of the site’s more specialized content. In addition, a print component — perhaps a monthly or every-other-month magazine — is being considered as a way of reaching a different audience and appealing to print advertisers. (Stat’s chief revenue officer, Angus Macaulay, expands on those ideas in this article by Joseph Lichterman of the Nieman Journalism Lab.)

As for who comprises Stat’s potential audience, Simon has an optimistic answer: pretty much everyone. “We’re looking for ordinary readers who are interested in anything related to health or medicine,” she says. “And we’re for professionals, too. It’s not at all a trade publication or a niche publication. It’s really meant to appeal to a broad audience.”

The lead article in Stat right now — as well as the top story in today’s Globe — is an investigation by Ike Swetlitz into a dubious vitamin company promoted by Donald Trump that later failed. Another feature, by Bob Tedeschi, focuses on the emotional toll for cancer patients who are repeatedly brought back from the brink of death through the use of cutting-edge targeted therapies. Coverage ranges from local to national; Stat has three reporters in Washington and one each in New York and San Francisco, and there are plans for international outposts as well. There’s a daily 6 a.m. email newsletter by Megan Thielking called “Morning Rounds” and a number of other regular features, the full panoply of which is described in this press release.

The site itself is mobile-first, which Gil says is a necessity given that people increasingly do most of their reading on their phones. “People spend so much time focused on what their home page looks like on a desktop,” he says. “And fewer and fewer people actually go to the home page.” As a result, Stat is attractive but a bit random on a desktop computer or a phone. And reading it horizontally on my iPad, which is how I consume a lot of news, is a fairly miserable experience, as tiny rows of type stretch from one margin to the other.

There’s also a lot of video, the better to share on social media — indeed, the editors say about a quarter of the staff consists of multimedia producers.

Unlike Crux or BetaBoston (but like Boston.com), Stat is a separate entity within Boston Globe Media Partners and is more or less independent from the Globe, though the Globe is free to run Stat stories and vice-versa. There are also joint meetings and shared story budgets. In his letter to readers, John Henry writes that he and other Globe executives believe that “a news organization can be most nimble when it is built organically for the digital age.”

At its heart, Stat isn’t really an experiment in providing quality journalism. A large, talented, experienced staff shouldn’t have any trouble doing that. Rather, it’s an experiment in finding a way out of the crisis facing professional news organizations — a crisis defined by the technology-fueled collapse of revenue sources.

“My dream,” says Berke, “is not only to deliver head-turning journalism that you can’t find anywhere else but to find a sustainable business model. And my dream would be to prove that people will pay for important, vital, ambitious journalism.”

Boston Globe Media’s life-sciences site, Stat, makes its debut

Stat, a long-in-the-making website covering health and life sciences, debuts today. The site, which employs nearly 40 journalists, is part of The Boston Globe’s media properties and is based mainly at the paper’s headquarters at 135 Morrissey Blvd.

The news was embargoed until midnight.

On Tuesday afternoon I had a chance to interview Stat’s executive editor, Rick Berke, and two of his top deputies. Look for my report around mid-morning Wednesday at WGBHNews.org. Below is a press release from Boston Globe Media Partners.

John Henry and Rick Berke Launch Stat

A Publication Dedicated to Health, Medicine and Life Sciences

November 4, 2015 — Boston — John W. Henry, owner of The Boston Globe and principal owner of the Boston Red Sox, and longtime reporter and editor Rick Berke today launched Stat, a national publication reporting from the frontiers of health, medicine and life sciences. The publication has assembled a news team of nearly 40 top journalists, as well as an engineering team, an advertising team, and a marketing team.

Delivering fast, deep and tough-minded journalism, Stat will take readers inside science labs and hospitals, biotech boardrooms and political backrooms. It will publish breaking news, richly reported feature stories, investigative projects and multimedia presentations throughout the day at Statnews.com.

“Over the next 20 years, some of the most important stories in the world are going to emerge in the life sciences arena. Stat has a tremendous opportunity to uncover vital issues that touch the lives of every human being,” Henry said. “We realized that there was no one doing what we aim to do: be the country’s go-to news source for the life sciences.”

Stat is headquartered in Boston, with additional reporters in New York, San Francisco and Washington, and more to follow in other cities around the world.

“I’m grateful to have the opportunity to hire dozens of the most talented reporters, writers and multimedia phenoms in the country to join our quest to create a news site with stories you won’t find anywhere else,” said Berke, a former assistant managing editor at The New York Times and executive editor at Politico. “We will take readers behind the scenes of the worlds of science and medicine and introduce them to patients and personalities who are driving a revolution in human health.”

Stat reporters have wasted no time breaking news even before today’s launch. Initial stories, published through its sister publication, The Boston Globe, included an exclusive on Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders rejecting a campaign donation from price-hiking pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli; a scoop on President Obama’s nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration pulling his name off several scientific papers that were critical of the agency; a fascinating deep dive into clinical trials in the age of social media; and an important examination of the shortcomings of precision medicine. Stat has also launched a fast-paced email newsletter, “Morning Rounds,” which has quickly become a must-read.

The Stat editing team is led by three accomplished journalists: The managing editor for news, Stephanie Simon, has been a national reporter for The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and, most recently, Politico. The managing editor for enterprise, Gideon Gil, was the Boston Globe’s health and science editor. Jason Ukman, the senior news editor, was an editor at the Washington Post for 14 years. Gil and Ukman played important roles in editing Pulitzer Prize-winning stories for their organizations.

Stat has developed a sleek website with an emphasis on its mobile version. It has also built out an extensive multimedia unit including animators, a data visualization editor and videographers. Led by New York Times veterans Jeffery DelViscio and Matthew Orr, the team will bring stories to visual life, creating everything from short, social-media-focused video explainers to mini-documentaries to interactive reader experiences.

A strong lineup of regular features is also in the works:

Carl Zimmer, Stat national correspondent and a New York Times columnist, will host a monthly video feature called “Science Happens” that will take viewers inside laboratories conducting cutting-edge biomedical research.

Veteran pharmaceutical industry reporter Ed Silverman will revive his blog Pharmalot, last at The Wall Street Journal, and will write a weekly column.

Sharon Begley, a nationally renowned science writer and formerly an editor at Newsweek, will puncture myths and question conventional wisdom in her column “Gut Check.”

Stat will conduct monthly nationwide polling on health and medicine issues in partnership with Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

In a new biweekly podcast, “Signal,” leading biotech reporters Meg Tirrell of CNBC and Luke Timmerman of the Timmerman Report will deliver a high-energy mix of news analysis, feature stories and interviews with movers and shakers in the biotech industry.

A section called “First Opinion,” overseen by Patrick Skerrett, previously executive editor for Harvard Health Publications, will feature science, medical and financial experts weighing in on the news of the day.

Ivan Oransky and Adam Marcus, of the popular site “Retraction Watch,” will write “The Watchdogs,” focusing on issues of misconduct, fraud and scientific integrity.

In addition, the reporting staff includes former Politico reporter David Nather, a health policy expert who will lead the Stat Washington bureau; Helen Branswell, a renowned global health reporter who comes from The Canadian Press; enterprise reporter David Armstrong, who covered health care on the projects team for Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal; senior writer Bob Tedeschi, a longtime New York Times columnist who will write about patients and clinicians; Charles Piller, an award-winning investigative reporter for The Sacramento Bee and The Los Angeles Times; and Seth Mnookin, a contributing writer and prominent author.

Other editors include Elie Dolgin, PhD in evolutionary genetics who was previously an associate editor at The Scientist and senior news editor at Nature Medicine; Lisa Raffensperger, a former web editor at Discover Magazine; and Tony Fong, previously a senior editor at GenomeWeb.

Chief Revenue Officer Angus Macaulay, a veteran executive of publishing companies including Rodale, Hearst Magazines and Time, Inc., leads the business team. Michele Staats, the former head of integrated marketing at Massachusetts General Hospital, is the marketing director at Stat. Peter Bless, a 16-year veteran of scientific and healthcare advertising, is sales director.

For more information please go to Statnews.com, or visit us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Statnews, or Twitter: https://twitter.com/Statnews.

CNBC plays into the right’s extravagant sense of victimhood

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

For Republican politicians, whining about the media comes as naturally as invoking misty memories of Ronald Reagan. It’s a sure-fire applause line, as complaints about the liberal press play into the right’s extravagant sense of victimhood. And there are occasions when those complaints are actually on the mark.

Wednesday night’s presidential debate was one of those occasions. The CNBC panelists turned in a performance that I’m sure was intended as an aggressive attempt to hold the Republican candidates to account. It came off instead as sneering and disrespectful in tone, petty and irrelevant in substance.

Asked about the compromise on the debt limit that Congress seems likely to approve, Ted Cruz responded with a devastatingly accurate summary of the proceedings that had unfolded up to that point.

“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” Cruz said as the audience applauded (exact quotes based on a transcript published by The Washington Post). “This is not a cage match. And, you look at the questions — ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math?’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?”

In case you missed the debate, let me assure you that Cruz was not exaggerating. Those were actual questions asked by debate panelists Carl Quintanilla, John Harwood and Becky Quick. Several other CNBC hosts popped up in cameos, with the unhinged stock-market cheerleader Jim Cramer and the original Tea Party instigator Rick Santelli competing to see who could yell louder.

“All of the highlights — ALL of them — will be about candidates slamming the terrible questions and conduct of debate,” tweeted conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt afterwards.

On CNN, Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus seethed with righteous indignation when Dana Bash stuck a microphone in his face. “I’m very disappointed in the moderators, and I’m very disappointed in CNBC,” he said. Bash and Anderson Cooper, who was on the anchor desk, agreed that they’d never seen anything quite like Priebus’ pique. “For him to come out and bash the network, I was pretty surprised,” said Bash.

If there was a takeaway worth noting other than CNBC’s conduct, it involves who might have actually won the encounter. Count me among those who believed the most important contest was between Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, the theory being that one of them is likely to emerge as the nominee after the novelty candidacies of Donald Trump and Ben Carson fade.

And yes, there was a clear winner. That’s Rubio you see bouncing around the ring, fists in the air, while Bush is lying unconscious on the canvas with his tongue hanging out of his mouth. With his campaign fading and his continued viability on the line, Bush delivered what may have been the worst in a series of uninspiring debate performances, although I would have no problem letting him make my fantasy-football picks for me. (He’s 7-0!)

Rubio, meanwhile, was crisp, focused and able to turn aside tough questions without quite answering them, as he did with one from Harwood about the Tax Foundation’s criticism of his tax plan.

Rubio skillfully went after the media as well. When Quintanilla asked him about an editorial in the Sun Sentinel of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, suggesting that he resign for missing too many Senate votes, Rubio responded that the paper had endorsed Democratic presidential candidates John Kerry and Barack Obama despite their having compiled similar records. “This is another example of the double standard that exists in this country between the mainstream media and the conservative movement,” Rubio said. Later, after Trump denounced Super PACs (with no follow-up from the intrepid panelists about Trump’s recent close encounter with a Super PAC), Rubio interjected, “The Democrats have the ultimate Super PAC — it’s called the mainstream media.”

But Bush versus Rubio was the undercard. The main event matched Trump against Carson. According to the most recent New York Times-CBS News poll, Carson now leads Trump nationally for the first time, with a margin of 26 percent to 22 percent. Everyone else is in single-digit territory.

So how did they do? I’m not in a good position to judge. I have no patience for Trump’s arrogant anger about Mexican immigrants or for Carson’s soft-spoken absurdities about the Holocaust. For what it’s worth, social-media analyst Dan Diamond tweeted that Carson led the field after the debate by gaining 6,200 new followers on Twitter (he has 838,000 overall). Coming in second was Rubio with 4,200 (924,000 overall) and Trump third with 3,500 (4.7 million). We’ll probably have to wait a day or two for a more scientific poll.

The story that’s likely to linger, though, is CNBC’s conduct. Two generations ago, Spiro Agnew denounced the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism,” thus helping to define the conservative case against the media. On Wednesday night, Carl Quintanilla and company turned in a performance that will be remembered by the media’s conservative critics for a long time to come.

Woodward: The Post is ‘more authoritative’ than the Times

5165378988_992ac1351a_b — Woodward in 2010. Photo (cc) by Miguel Ariel Contreras Drake-McLaughlin.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

Is The Washington Post “more authoritative” than The New York Times? You might expect investigative reporting legend Bob Woodward to say so. After all, Woodward has spent nearly his entire career at the Post, and institutional loyalty runs deep.

Still, Woodward’s remarks — delivered at a stop on his latest book tour Tuesday night in Harvard Square — come at a time when they’re likely to garner more attention than they otherwise might. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post from the Graham family nearly two years ago, is sinking money and resources into the paper. And media analysts like Ken Doctor are saying that the Post is making its first serious run at the Times in many years.

Asked by a member of the audience about changes in the media business, Woodward responded with an unsolicited paean to Bezos. “I think he’s helping us as a business,” Woodward said. “It’s a better website. I find things much more authoritative, quite frankly, than The New York Times, to be honest.”

And when asked by his interlocutor, Washington insider-turned-Harvard academic David Gergen, whether newspapers remain committed to investigative reporting, Woodward replied: “I know The Washington Post is, because I asked Jeff Bezos. He has the money. We talked about this. He said I could quote him on this, and I will. He said, ‘Rest assured, Marty’ — Baron, the editor — ‘will have the resources he needs.’”

Woodward will forever be remembered as one-half of the twentysomething reporting duo (with Carl Bernstein) who broke open the Watergate story and brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency. Now a no-longer-boyish 72, Woodward was on hand to promote his latest book, “The Last of the President’s Men.” In it, Woodward tells the story of Alexander Butterfield, the Nixon aide who revealed the existence of the White House taping system before a congressional committee, thus providing the evidence that Nixon really was a crook.

Several hundred people crowded into the First Parish Church for Woodward’s reading, sponsored by the Harvard Book Store. The book is based on some 40 hours’ worth of interviews Woodward conducted with Butterfield, as well as a trove of documents. Butterfield, Woodward said, provided invaluable insights into the inner workings of the Nixon White House, especially of the early years. “For two years, there was no taping system,” he said. “In a sense Butterfield became the tape recorder.”

The event began on a light-hearted note, with Gergen — who served four presidents, including Nixon — asking, “When did you all sense that you were on to something much bigger than you’d thought?” Woodward’s response: “When Nixon resigned.”

The conversation, though, took a darker turn as Woodward described Nixon’s prosecution of the Vietnam War. Perhaps the most disturbing revelation in “The Last of the President’s Men” is that Nixon ordered more and more bombs to be dropped during 1972 — the year he was up for re-election — even though he secretly acknowledged it had accomplished “zilch.” The reason, Woodward said, was that polling showed the bombing campaign was popular with the American public.

“It’s close to a war crime,” Woodward said.

Equally nauseating was Nixon’s response to journalist Seymour Hersh’s revelation in 1969 that American troops had massacred civilians in the village of My Lai. Nixon ordered Butterfield to go after everyone involved in exposing it, including the soldier who blew the whistle, Life and Time magazines and a perceived enemy who Woodward said was described by Nixon as “a liberal Jew.”

The mood brightened considerably when Gergen asked Woodward how he would go about investigating the leading 2016 presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Woodward said he would talk about Trump first, and then brought down the house with this: “Can we ask the audience a question? How many people want the next president to be somebody who has no touch with reality?”

As for Clinton, Woodward turned the tables and questioned Gergen.

Woodward: “You worked with her.”

Gergen: “I did.”

Woodward: “Do you trust her?”

Gergen paused before answering: “I have found — I don’t think she — I don’t think she tells lies. I think she’s careful with the truth.”

Woodward, after the laughs had faded away: “You didn’t get to work for all these presidents for no reason.”

Notwithstanding Woodward’s enthusiasm for Jeff Bezos’ ownership of the Post, his talk was, in some respects, an elegy for the kind of journalism Woodward represents. Whether you prefer the Post or the Times, at their best they stand for a rigor that often seems to be on the wane.

For all the faults of the 1970s-era press, there was something approaching a national consensus that made it possible for a story like Watergate to keep building. These days, the media are too fragmented, with too many so-called news outlets aligned with partisan interests. Fox News chief Roger Ailes would release his flying monkeys to go after the liberal media and it would all end in a standoff.

Though Woodward’s establishment-oriented journalism is sometimes criticized, including by none other than the aforementioned Hersh, he nevertheless represents something important: the power of the press to do good through thorough, indefatigable reporting aimed at rooting out the truth rather than serving some ideological cause.

Thanks for the assist from Kylie Ayal, a third-year journalism student at Boston University, who supplied me with a copy of her audio file of the event after I managed to erase mine by mistake.

Is Mitt the one? For House speaker, that is!

Mitt Romney in 2010. Photo (cc) by the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia.

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

House Republicans appear to have reached their End of Days. David Brooks of The New York Times, a moderate conservative who at one time would have epitomized Establishment Republicanism, has analyzed the situation brilliantly. So has Gene Lyons, a liberal, at The National Memo.

The immediate crisis is that the House of Representatives appears incapable of electing a speaker to succeed John Boehner. The problem is that Republicans on the extreme right vow not to respect the choice of the Republican caucus. That means no one will get a majority once the speakership comes to a full vote in the House, since nearly all of the Democrats will vote for their party’s leader, Nancy Pelosi.

So I have an idea, and I thought I’d toss it out there. We’re already having a good discussion about it on Facebook. How about a moderate Republican who’s not currently a member of the House (yes, it’s allowed) and who would be supported by a majority of Republicans and Democrats. How about — as my friend Catherine Tumber suggested — Mitt Romney?

Please understand that by “moderate” I mean moderate by the standards of 2015. Boehner may be the most conservative House speaker of modern times, but he’s a moderate by comparison with the right-wingers who are holding the House hostage. And so is Romney, who’d finally get the big job in Washington that he’s long lusted for.

Under this scenario, the Republicans would necessarily pay a high price for their inability to govern. House rules would have to be changed to give the Democrats more of a voice and maybe even a few committee chairmanships. The idea is to form a coalition government that cuts out the extreme right wing.

The chief impediment would be that Democrats might not want to throw the Republicans a life preserver under any circumstance, especially with the presidential campaign under way. But it would be the right thing to do, and I hope people of good will consider it. Or as Norman Ornstein, who predicted this mess, so elegantly puts it in an interview with Talking Points Memo: “We’re talking about the fucking country that is at stake here.”

At the Globe, a downsizing that was preordained

There is very little to be said about The Boston Globe’s latest round of downsizing that wasn’t said in late July, when the cuts were announced in a memo from editor Brian McGrory. Poynter’s Benjamin Mullin broke the news late Thursday afternoon, and followed up with the latest McGrory memo. Boston magazine’s Garrett Quinn has a statement from the union as well.

And as I wrote for WGBHNews.org last week, the recent decision to redesign and shrink the Saturday print edition was driven by the ongoing collapse of print advertising revenues, which has affected not just the Globe but the entire newspaper business.

The size of the latest downsizing — which McGrory put at 17 voluntary buyouts and “nearly two dozen part- and full-time staffers” — was something of a surprise, and it comes on the heels of a dozen layoffs at another Globe property, Boston.com, a few weeks ago. McGrory continued:

We’ve worked beside these departing colleagues day after day, sometimes year after year. They’ve made us look good from the copy desk, traveled the world chasing major events, been pioneers in digital journalism, and brought national recognition to our features sections. They’re also our friends.

Publisher John Henry appears determined to run the Globe on at least a break-even basis, even as he invests in online coverage of specialty beats such as innovation, the Catholic Church and life sciences. But it’s clear that neither he nor anyone else has figured out how to stop the newspaper business’ downward slide.

The Globe’s Saturday shrinkage and its digital future

Previously published at WGBHNews.org.

If you’d asked me 10 years ago if I thought The Boston Globe and other metropolitan dailies would still be printing news on dead trees in 2015, I’d have replied, “Probably not.” Even five years ago, by which time it was clear that print had more resilience than many of us previously assumed, I still believed we were on the verge of drastic change — say, a mostly digital news operation supplemented by a weekend print edition.

Seen in that light, the Globe’s redesigned Saturday edition should be regarded as a cautious, incremental step. Unveiled this past weekend, the paper is thinner (42 pages compared to 52 the previous Saturday) and more magazine-like, with the Metro section starting on A2 rather than coming after the national, international and opinion pages. That’s followed by a lifestyle section called Good Life.

The larger context for these changes is that the existential crisis threatening the newspaper business hasn’t gone away. Revenue from print advertising — still the economic engine that powers virtually all daily newspapers — continues to fall, even as digital ads have proved to be a disappointment. Fewer ads mean fewer pages. This isn’t the first time the Globe has dropped pages, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. (The paper is also cutting staff in some areas, even as it continues to hire for new digital initiatives.)

How bad is it? According to the Pew Research Center’s “State of the Media 2015” report, revenue from print advertising at U.S. newspapers fell from $17.3 billion in 2013 to $16.4 billion in 2014. Digital advertising, meanwhile, rose from just $3.4 billion to $3.5 billion. And for some horrifying perspective on how steep the decline has been, print advertising revenue was $47.4 billion just 10 years ago.

The Globe’s response to this ugly drop has been two-fold. First, it’s asked its print and digital readers to pick up more of the cost through higher subscription fees. Second, even as the print edition shrinks, it has expanded what’s offered online — not just at BostonGlobe.com, but via its free verticals covering the local innovation economy (BetaBoston), the Catholic Church (Crux) and, soon, life sciences and health (Stat). Stories from those sites find their way into the Globe, while readers who are interested in going deeper can visit the sites themselves. (An exception to this strategy is Boston.com, the former online home of the Globe, which has been run as a separate operation since its relaunch in 2014.)

“I don’t quite think of it as the demise of print,” says Globe editor Brian McGrory of the Saturday redesign. He notes that over the past year-plus the print paper has added the weekly political section Capital as well as expanded business and Sunday arts coverage and daily full-size feature sections in place of the former tabloid “g” section.

“There are areas where we do well where we’re enhancing in print and there are areas where we’re looking to cut in print,” McGrory adds. “It’s a very fine and delicate balancing act.”

Some of those cuts in print are offset by more digital content. Consider the opinion pages, which underwent a redesign this past spring. (I should point out that McGrory does not run the opinion pages. Editorial-page editor Ellen Clegg, like McGrory, reports directly to publisher John Henry.) The online opinion section is simply more robust than what’s in print, offering some content a day or two earlier as well as online exclusives. This past Saturday, the print section was cut from two pages to one. Yet last week also marked the debut of a significant online-only feature: Opinion Reel, nine short videos submitted by members of the public on a wide variety of topics.

All are well-produced, ranging from an evocative look at a family raising a son with autism (told from his sister’s point of view) to a video op-ed on dangerous bicycle crossings along the Charles River. There’s even a claymation-like look at a man living with blindness. But perhaps the most gripping piece is about a man who was seriously beaten outside a bar in South Boston. It begins with a photo of him in his hospital bed, two middle fingers defiantly outstretched. It ends with him matter-of-factly explaining what led to the beating. “It was because I stepped on the guy’s shoe and he didn’t think I was from Southie,” he says before adding: “It was my godmother’s brother.”

Globe columnist and editorial board member Joanna Weiss, who is curating the project, says the paper received more than 50 submissions for this first round. “It has very much been a group effort,” Weiss told me by email. “The development team built the websites and Nicole Hernandez, digital producer for the editorial page, shepherded that process through; Linda Henry, who is very interested in promoting the local documentary filmmaking community, gave us feedback and advice in the early rounds; David Skok and Jason Tuohey from BostonGlobe.com gave indispensable advice in the final rounds, and of course the entire editorial board helped to screen and select the films.”

But all of this is far afield from the changes to the Saturday paper and what those might portend. McGrory told me he’s received several hundred emails about the redesign, some from readers who liked it, some who hated it and some who suggested tweaks — a few of which will be implemented.

Traditionally, a newspaper’s Saturday edition is its weakest both in terms of circulation and advertising. In the Globe’s case, though, the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday papers sell a few thousand fewer copies than Saturday’s 160,377, according to a 2014 report from the Alliance for Audited Media. No doubt that’s a reflection of a Thursday-through-Sunday subscription deal the Globe offers — though it does raise the question of whether other days might get the Saturday treatment.

“We have no plans right now to change the design or the general format of those papers,” McGrory responds. “But look, everything is always under discussion.” (The Globe’s Sunday print circulation is 282,440, according to the same AAM report. Its paid digital circulation is about 95,000 a day, the highest of any regional newspaper.)

One question many papers are dealing with is whether to continue offering print seven days a week. Advance Newspapers has experimented with cutting back on print at some of its titles, including the storied Times-Picayune of New Orleans. My Northeastern colleague Bill Mitchell’s reaction to the Globe’s Saturday changes was to predict that, eventually, American dailies would emulate European and Canadian papers by shifting their Sunday papers to Saturdays to create a big weekend paper — and eliminating the Sunday paper altogether.

The Globe and Mail of Toronto is one paper that has taken that route, and McGrory says it’s the sort of idea that he and others are keeping an eye on. But he stresses that the Globeisn’t going to follow in that path any time soon.

“Right now we have no plans to touch our Sunday paper,” he says. “It’s a really strong paper journalistically, it’s a strong paper circulation-wise, it’s a strong paper advertising-wise. We’re constantly thinking and rethinking this stuff. But as of this conversation, Sunday is Sunday and we don’t plan to change that at all.”

He adds: “We’re trying to mesh the new world with the printing press, and I think we’re coming out in an OK place. Better than an OK place. A good place.”