Tag: journalism

**Note: See the July 20th NYTimes Magazine cover excerpt from Carr’s forthcoming book, The Night of the Gun. Carr discusses the book August 14th at Magers and Quinn Booksellers and August 18th at Common Good Books.**

David Carr is slouched against the sweaty door of a cab whose shock absorbers long ago lost the battle with New York City potholes. As the cab rumbles through lower Manhattan, I reflect on my old friend, who is now the media columnist for the New York Times, and the many miles he’s traveled from his Hopkins hometown and the days of fifty-dollar freelance checks. But he’s not thinking about that. Between jolts, he’s attempting to explain his current problem: the obstacles he encounters trying to make real, tactile, journalistic contact within the throbbing heart of New York City’s culture.

“It took me awhile to figure it out here,” Carr says, “where access is controlled and iterated over a series of rooms.

“I’d be working a story and I’d find myself in a room, where there might be a movie star, or somebody who ran a media company. A room where there was, at long last, no line at the bar, and where that heinous piped-in house music had finally been turned off, and where, if somebody wanted to smoke, they could just smoke. And I figured that after passing through three rooms to get there, to that fourth room, I had finally made it to the epicenter—the white-hot center of New York.”

The lights of the city blur by, looking unusually lurid and feverish in the oppressive heat of the June night. There’s a view over by the West Side Highway Carr wants me to see. “But then,” he continues, “after I had been in the city awhile, I realized there were probably at least four more rooms, none of which I had known about, much less been to, all of which sort of ended in some final room where, I don’t know, I figured if I ever got there I’d find Henry Kissinger and Madonna fucking a goat.”

The New York Times will never publish “Henry Kissinger,” “Madonna,” “fucking,” and “goat” in the same sentence. Still, having Carr on one of the paper’s highest profile beats bodes well for one of the biggest pillars of mainstream media. In hiring him, the Times trusted its instinct for unique talent and made peace with a personal résumé that had plenty of Carr’s Minnesota friends doubting that their friend, now forty-nine years old, would ever see thirty. Few people have recovered from a fall so deep into the freaky abyss of addiction, physiological disease, personal dysfunction, and professional discredit.

To those who know Carr, and likewise were nurtured by media icons such as Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and Joseph Mitchell, his taste for goatish journalistic imagery feels both apt and cathartic. It is quintessential “alternative” stuff. The laughter it evokes confirms and challenges our favorite suspicions. Who doesn’t think, watching the headlines and the appalling distortions of so much of popular media, that the mainstream press couldn’t use a few strokes of vulgar color?

As for Carr (which is how old Minnesota friends refer to him, though he pointedly insists on “David” rather than “Dave”), his eight-rooms-of-Manhattan analogy is personally apt. It rests on bedrock Carr fascinations—the buzz of pursuit and the adjacency to power, political and sexual—and almost as an aftertaste, it is capped by a distinctly Irish outlook: “They’re all sinners, them lacey types, just like us.” And Carr knows his sinnin’. After a “career Irish” upbringing in Hopkins and college at University of Wisconsin-River Falls and the University of Minnesota, he became a bona fide player, certainly within the subculture of the Twin Cities. For roughly a decade, including most of the 80s, Carr out-rocked some of the towns’ hardest rockers, writers, artists, and dopers, closing as many grimy bars as Charles Bukowski and ingesting more illegal narcotics than any Hunter S. Thompson-wannabe who ever lived to tell about it.

But things got rough. He divorced, cratered into crack addiction, and fathered twin daughters by a woman who exhibited some of the same problems as Carr. Almost simultaneous with the arrival of his daughters, and after failing three previous shots at treatment, Carr did a term at Eden House in Minneapolis, which is not exactly known for its Hazelden-style accommodations. Then, as if that weren’t enough, there were chemo and radiation treatments after he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease.

But somehow, encouraged by family members and dozens of Twin Cities friends, but largely on his own resources, Carr popped the sewer grate and hauled himself back up to street level.

“There was nothing in my family history that condoned being a bad parent,” he said of the view that his time at Eden House provided, and the slap of adult responsibility he experienced there. “I had two eight-month-old daughters. So it wasn’t just me. But, other than that, there really was no Prince Hal moment, where I rose up from under the bar table to become king of England.”

“David had a lot of support when he went through [Eden House],” recalled Eddie Nagle, who owned Eli’s bar on Hennepin for eleven years until moving to Wisconsin in 2004. Carr calls Nagle, whom he has known since 1981, “maybe my best friend.”

“He is fiercely loyal to people who are loyal to him, and a lot of people were. But the thing with him is that he’s the kind of guy who always finds a way to get it done. In the dark days, that meant another stop and another round before calling it a night, or in the case of treatment, locking himself up for ninety days in a nut house and getting it done. He’s got that quality. With David the answer is never ‘No.’ ”

Within four years of leaving Eden House in 1989, Carr became editor of the erstwhile alternative weekly Twin Cities Reader. In 1995, he was recruited to head up City Paper, Washington, D.C.’s well-respected alternative weekly. In 2000, Carr went to New York to write for Inside.com—the high-profile, albeit ultimately doomed project of Kurt Andersen, the Spy magazine co-creator, new media wunderkind, and public-radio host. Though that gig was short lived, Carr parlayed it into contracts with the Atlantic and New York magazines, before being courted by and going over to the Times business section in 2003 to cover the publishing beat. And in June, he signed a six-figure book deal with Simon and Schuster to tell the story of his life so far.

Carr describes the book as a “transparent memoir.” He pitched it as something of an antithesis to James Frey-style fabulism. Instead of offering his view of his life, he will produce a fully journalistic, third-person, reportorial autobiography, one based on the grim paper trail of rehab, police, and foster-care records, and the not-always-comforting recollections of friends, lovers, and colleagues who were once tossed in his wake.

“You and I have talked about a number of stories from my past,” Carr told me. “Some of them are good, some of them are boring. Some of them are true. Maybe some of them are not.

“We all tend to construct these broad narratives about ourselves, where we are an anti-hero or a victim. [The book] will be document-based, so it’ll be more about how other people see me. Mostly set against these stories I’ve told through the years. And I’m not talking about me as a journalist. I’m talking about me as a human being—my Irish heritage, my penchant for hyperbole, and my need to keep dissonance at bay.”

With college tuition payments for his twins staring him in the face, and having sniffed real cash up close for the past few years, Carr is determined to make the book both journalistically credible and “commercially successful.” To that end, he promises that it will include an elaborate video-blog component. For some of Carr’s Minnesota pals—the tossed-in-the-wake crowd—the acid test for this project will be how successful he is in avoiding the cardinal sin of confessional memoirs: namely, becoming a dreaded auto-hagiography creep.

David Brauer is one of Carr’s oldest friends. A former editor of Skyway News and Southwest Journal, and a current commentator for MPR, he and Carr got started in journalism together—and at critical moments found themselves competing for the same job and recognition. (Carr concedes, with a modicum of remorse, that he took a covert path all those years ago in beating out Brauer for the editor job at the Reader.)

“I regard him as one of the most influential people in my life,” said Brauer. “But David makes for a very complicated friend.” Carr taped a video-interview of Brauer for his memoir last summer, and they slogged through the delicate, hot-button stuff.

“I hope David deploys his full talent on this book. But I have this fear, once he looks at everything, he won’t go all the way. There may be some very hard truths he’s still not willing to confront.” That said, Brauer added, “I have no problem at all saying that David took me places and got me to do things I would have never done without him, and for that I’m forever grateful.”

Laughing at his own sordid recollections, Brauer said, “David showed me how to do a whole pharmacy cabinet of drugs. But, I have to say, I’m a better, smarter, more aware person because of the time we spent together.

“When people ask, I always describe him as a ‘personality tornado.’ He sweeps people up and drops you down miles from where you started. He is definitely one of those ‘The State is Me’ kind of guys.”

Carr’s current beat—covering the congenitally unapologetic mega-egos of American media, and, this past winter, the over-the-top preening of Hollywood’s Oscar campaign—doesn’t surprise Brauer at all. “David’s ambition has always been palpable. Writing about powerful people is perfect for him. He loves power. He’s drawn to it. He has the same kind of ambition as the people he writes about.”

My own experience with Carr began when I assigned him a freelance story for the Twin Cities Reader back in the early 80s. He insists it was his first professional assignment. All I recall is an extraordinarily garrulous and rather rotund Irish guy clogging the doorway to my office, going on in righteous outrage about a friend of his father’s allegedly being beaten up by Minneapolis cops for having the temerity to “step off the curb” as a bystander and question the cops’ treatment of a black guy in their custody.

The story he wrote on this was pretty damned good, not to mention being a vital infusion of gravitas for a publication then running on the fumes of high-attitude music and movie criticism. As with dozens of other local writers, I eventually fell in with Carr’s retrograde cultural caravan. I found myself closing down Moby Dick’s in previously unimagined back rooms populated by characters with more scars than teeth, consuming enough recreational drugs to stupefy a frat house, and seeking to establish meaningful contact with my inner prairie-Catholic bohemian.

Very few people keep up with Carr step for step today, much less shot for shot, toke for toke, and snort for snort in those years. Eventually, I backed off the throttle and settled into the steady, responsible flow of suburban parenthood. But reports on Carr’s relentless adventure continued to come in, turning steadily more dire, devolving from rollicking to near-tragic.

Under a blistering sun and eighty percent humidity, Carr and I met up on a Thursday afternoon in June in Bryant Park, behind the New York Public Library. Carr, who seems perpetually Wi-Fi connected, was typically resplendent in a moth-eaten T-shirt, unlaundered jeans and two days’ worth of stubble. Not exactly Maureen Dowd. He’s lost probably seventy pounds since we first met more than twenty years ago. The radiation treatment for Hodgkin’s did a number on the muscles in his neck, causing him to walk these days with a pronounced stoop until he remembers to pull himself erect, and he’s hoarse from the combined effects of air conditioning and cigarettes (no friend dares admonish Carr about the butt addiction).

We toured, ate, and talked through the evening, catching up before doing a classic Carr “finishing game” at a subterranean bar in the shadow of the Port Authority bus terminal.

With its battered, signage-free service door and a seating that includes stacked boxes, broken toilets, and plastic lawn chairs, Siberia is a place easily mistaken for the aftermath of an explosive Shiite attack. (It used to be located off a stairway in the Fiftieth Street subway stop—a literal hole in the wall.) Its owner, a bulky, affable, pony-tailed guy named Tracy Westmoreland, had called Carr a couple of hours earlier to invite him in. Tracy’s personality resemblance to Carr’s Minnesota buddy Eddie Nagel is immediately obvious.

“Tracy collects people,” said Carr. “Especially media people. He’s just one of those New York characters. Psychokinetic things seem to happen around him. Or at least you always think you’re minutes away from something silly or wonderful.

“Tracy’s more than just a casual friend. He’s true blue. Believe me, when you make a friend in New York, you better hang on to him.”

Carr waved us down to a lower level, where the bar was shorter, the lights lower, and the furniture included filthy, battered couches every college guy recognizes from his slummy front porch. Down here, Tracy was hosting a birthday party for Anthony Bourdain, the globe-trotting Travel Channel chef, who was holding court in a red-lit storage room still deeper within the joint’s mechanical bowels. Jimmy Fallon was there, too, but national names aside, it could have been Moby Dick’s and 1985 all over again.

Carr is fond of saying that the Times today, all its Gray Lady heritage and majestic support hose notwithstanding, has become receptive to writers who have “a high game and a low game.” In other words, writers comfortable both in the salons of power and saloons of subterranea. By hiring writers and editors with pedigrees of the alternative persuasion—writers from papers in which Henry Kissinger and startled goats used to mix freely—the Times has effectively brought the counterculture in-house, he argues. Granted, such outside-the-box journalists are, midlife, more focused on tuition payments than toot.

“What has happened,” Carr said, “is that the tools and assets of the insurgency have been built into the modern execution of journalism.” He recalled a recent bull session with his colleagues on business writers’ mixing reporting and opinion. “I said, ‘You know, you guys have to understand that the ground that they stand on at the New York Times has changed so much. There is so much in the way of analytics and point of view embedded into reporting, it is absolutely baked in, in a way where people don’t even see it anymore.’

“It’s like the way the generals running the Army right now came out of Vietnam,” he told me. “A lot of the best editors in daily newspapers came out of alternatives.

“For a long time, if you read the editorial pages of say, the Washington Post”—a paper Carr regularly skewered in the media column he also wrote those five years in Washington, D.C.—“they’d all end the same. You know, ‘These are terrible problems. Really terrible problems that someone should do something about, someday.’ I don’t think that kind of limp-wristed stuff washes anymore.”

Carr’s editor at the Times culture desk is Sam Sifton, a former managing editor at the New York Press, an alternative weekly. “It is increasingly inaccurate,” said Sifton, taking up Carr’s point, “to draw a divide between the alternative press and what constitutes the mainstream. We are doing stories [at the Times] today that would never have been done here before.”

He seemed to suggest the newspaper’s better, broader view of life is a happy consequence of a better, broader range of reporter types. Including maybe people who, to paraphrase Neil Young, may have jerked the wheel a few times in their lives and drove into the ditch, because the people there were more interesting.

Is the Times today more accepting of talented people with messy past histories?

“Yeah,” said Sifton. “There are plenty of people here with messy past histories. Plenty with messy present histories, too.”

A prime example of Carr’s “high-low” game, and the Times’ enthusiasm for it, was Carr’s avid submergence in last winter’s Oscar season, a two-month blitz of hype, sheer hype, raw hype, and more hype with almost no discernable Greater Cultural Value.

“It was a bet we made,” said Sifton. The bet being that a credible news organization could cover the daily minutiae of the Oscar race without pandering to the airhead audiences who flock to the salt lick of “celebrity news.”

“We knew it would only succeed if the writer, David, was willing to fully commit to it, adapt the persona”—Carr assumed a nom de hype, “The Carpetbagger”—“and devote himself to it 150 percent. David did a terrific job, in my opinion.”

Times elders apparently agreed, because “Carpetbagger II, The Sequel,” involving loads of travel expenses, will be unveiled at the first stroke of the Oscar clock next year.

Like Carr, Sifton sees The New York Times Company evolving from a newspaper company into an “information” company, a shift that implies both the necessity and the willingness to fold previously alien technologies, like blogging and video, into the formal product.

The “Carpetbagger” blog, while perhaps not quite as merrily rank as Los Angeles’ Defamer site, rested on solid journalistic fundamentals, like hundreds of phone calls. The video-blog that went with it, with Carr toeing the boundaries of Hollywood’s overused red carpets and sampling the Oscars fascination to average schmoes in Times Square, effectively peeled away the movie industry’s dense layers of self-reverence. More to the point, “Carpetbagger” showed what, given the right writer/character, credible journalism can do with pop-culture mania.

A few days after the Siberia finishing game, Carr and I were returning to Montclair, New Jersey, from a weekend in the Adirondacks. Montclair is a leafy commuter town thick with journalists who’ve escaped Manhattan; Carr and his wife, Jill Rooney Carr, live in a 1920s Colonial with the twins, Megan and Erin, and his youngest daughter, Madeleine.

During the long ride in his aged Saab, far from freshly detailed, I asked Carr what he thinks resurrected him and earned him cachet on the national media landscape. “I guess I’ve done OK in New York,” he responded, flicking cigarette ashes out an open slit of window, “not because I’ve been all that cunning or smart, or know and understand the wiring diagram, but I think it’s more because I’m not real fearful. If I look like a rube or offend some precious sensibilities, I don’t care about that.

“I’m a person who has owed people a lot of money I didn’t have. I’ve had guns pointed at me. I’ve been a single parent. So being in a room and telling people things they might not be comfortable with, that doesn’t scare me. No big deal.

“I care how I’m seen, and I want to be fair, but I’m not overly impressed by what people think of me. I certainly have my eccentricities. But the things that are at my core are substantial and significant, and the kinds of things you can rely on. Good values, hard worker, not easily scared. Those are not extraordinary assets, but they are very valuable.”

Does he think he’s modulated his tone or style to adapt to the vaunted institutional traditions of the Times?

“Well,” he said, after a pause, “you know, I’m more than happy to come over the hill and just fill someone with lead. But when you’re working at the New York Times, it’s not just a blood sport; you really could ruin someone’s life. There is a conference of credibility that goes with the New York Times as your last name. And I found that paralyzing in the early going. You really could do serious damage to people. I called Anderson Cooper ‘a silver-haired empath.’ That was kind of a joke. I said Angelina Jolie made building a family look like collecting Beanie Babies. That was kind of a joke. But I do really worry about hurting people’s feelings. My experience with most media people is not that they have thin skin; it’s that they have no skin. I’m not going to be one of those people.”

That odd mix of aggressive imagery and underlying sympathy for his subjects is perhaps a residual effect of Carr’s own experience. It’s as if he simultaneously recalls the terror of having the gun pointed at him and the power of having survived it.

For all his think-tank-worthy analyses of journalistic aspirations and foibles, it’s Carr’s experiences of courted danger that have imbued him with the questing skeptic’s notion that all placid, dignified exteriors withstanding, if you push hard enough, schmooze well enough, and deploy enough ribald Irish verbiage, you will eventually gain entrée to the aforementioned eighth room where Kissinger, Madonna, and some misbegotten beast engage in activities heretofore unimagined by decent hardworking readers of the New York Times.

There is a consensus in the trade, I am sorry to report, that Thomas L. Friedman cannot win another Pulitzer Prize. This is not due to any dissipation of his talents. It is because, having already won three of journalism’s highest awards, he has been asked to join the Pulitzer board. Instead of receiving Pulitzers, his judgment is wanted in conferring them. Friedman may be the world’s most widely read newspaper columnist today. And even though his employer, the New York Times, recently took a bite out of his readership by putting his column behind a pay-to-read firewall at NYTimes.com, his words still move worlds. Or do they?

Rhetoric is in deep discount these days.(Continued below.) Sharp customers in the marketplace of ideas have noticed the similarities between Ronald Reagan’s dubious “War on Drugs,” and George W. Bush’s “War on Terror.” There have been wars on a number of nouns over the years. Lyndon Johnson undertook a “War on Poverty,” which was an honorable diversion from his “War on Vietnamese People.” People are a lot easier to kill than other sorts of nouns; it’s been pointed out that poverty, drugs, and terror are still with us.

Still, this moment is different, unique, even—because we no longer find ourselves in a marketplace of ideas, but in a war of ideas. Ideas and the vehicles that launch them, like the transcontinental jet, the personal computer, the cell phone, the Internet, have become the world’s most powerful weapons, and Tom Friedman knows how to use them.

Friedman is a native Minnesotan. He is proud of this, and concedes it whenever he can. He is gracious and smart, unapologetic in his opinions. He knows he wields power on the New York Times op-ed pages, but he also wants to use his power for good. No one can dispute his work ethic; even Friedman’s harshest critics acknowledge that he is one of the hardest-working journalists in the profession.

Though the newspaper man travels the world speaking
to all kinds of charismatic people, moving through the corridors of power in far-flung nations and corporations, and though he is frequently on TV, or speaking at international conferences, he is not really a man of action. He is a man of ideas. Everything you need to know about Tom Friedman is right there in his books and in his columns; I wish I could say I tagged along with him to India, China, Brazil, and Japan to see how he works. Instead, I immersed myself in his words.

Friedman himself would never tolerate this kind of armchair journalism. When I spoke to him, he was yawning with jet lag (I think) after a recent return from Mombai, India—flight price eight thousand dollars, thank you New York Times travel-expenditures department. “I’m a big believer in this truth: You have to go to know,” he said. “Sure, you can do a lot of research and reporting at your desk and on the web, but there is so much more to see and hear when you travel the world—and sometimes the truth is in the raised eyebrow, or the sideways glance.”

If you believe his fans, Friedman has something rare in journalism these days: credibility and a reputation for fairness, an old-fashioned sort of objectivity when he approaches a subject, and no axe to grind. He only cares about ferreting out the facts and exposing the truth. He has no patience for anyone who stands in the way or casually contradicts him. That’s his reputation, but some argue that there are blind spots in his reportage, that he ignores inconvenient facts that contradict his view of the world. It’s a war of ideas, after all. But can Tom Friedman win?

***

A CHILD OF THE COLD WAR, Tom Friedman was born into a Jewish family in Minneapolis on July 20, 1953. Josef Stalin had died four months earlier, to be replaced by Nikita Kruschev. Seven days after Friedman’s birth, the Korean cease-fire was signed.

Friedman’s sophomore year at high school in St. Louis Park, where he was preceded by three older sisters, would define the rest of his life. First, he took a journalism class—his one and only—with a much-loved teacher named Hattie Steinberg. Second, his family traveled to Israel to visit one of his sisters, who was spending a year at Tel Aviv University. The journalism class would fire his passion for reporting—for his high school’s newspaper, he interviewed Ariel Sharon, then Israel’s defense minister, and the trip
to the Middle East led to three summers at an Israeli kibbutz, and a lifelong passion for understanding the complexities of the Israel-Palestine situation.

Today, Friedman credits his career to several high school mentors. “I was a great beneficiary of the absence of women’s lib,” he said. “I had three great teachers, women, who in another day and age could’ve been professors or investment bankers or diplomats.” They were Steinberg, history teacher Marge Bingham, and English teacher Mim Kagol.

After graduating from high school, Friedman enrolled at the University of Minnesota, where he studied Arabic. He spent semesters abroad at American University in Cairo and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Eventually, he transferred to Brandeis University, where he graduated with a degree in Mediterranean studies in 1975. He won a Marshall Scholarship to study at Oxford, where he took a master’s degree. While in England, he also began writing opinion columns, which he sold to the Des Moines Register, his wife Ann’s hometown paper, and to his own hometown newspaper, the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

After finishing at Oxford, with a dozen published columns in hand, Friedman applied at the Associated Press and the United Press International offices in London. The AP was dismissive—they hardly wanted a columnist with no reporting experience. Recalling the interview, last fall with Marvin Kalb at the Press Club, Friedman said the AP didn’t look twice at him. “Forget it kid, you haven’t even covered a fire.” But a bureau chief for UPI decided to hire the Minnesotan in London. After about a year, UPI’s correspondent in Beirut, Lebanon, was injured by shrapnel in a bombing. It was 1979. Suddenly Tom Friedman, just twenty-five years old, found himself the number two man at UPI’s Beirut office, in the middle of a major, historical world event.

In May of 1981, editors at the New York Times business desk hired Friedman because they liked his UPI reporting on the oil industry. A year later the bureau chief’s position in Beirut opened, and Friedman was the obvious candidate to take over. He arrived at the new post just in time to witness Israel’s June 6, 1982, invasion of Lebanon, and reported extensively on the subsequent war. This reporting won him his first Pulitzer prize. In 1984, he moved to Jerusalem, where his coverage of the first Palestinian intifada won another Pulitzer; shortly thereafter, Friedman published his first book, From Beirut to Jerusalem.

Later, during the administration of President George H.W. Bush, Friedman had a prime inside vantage point from which he saw Bush, James Baker, and Brent Scowcroft “bring the Soviet Union in for a soft landing”—he was working as the Times’ chief diplomatic correspondent in its Washington, D.C., bureau. When Bill Clinton won the presidency, Friedman briefly became the Times’ white house correspondent, but by 1994, he and his editors began to define a new beat—globalization—which they felt would anticipate coming geo-political trends, and also comport perfectly with Friedman’s background and expertise in technology, foreign policy, and trade policy.

Friedman’s beat got noticed. In 1995, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. offered the reporter what some would call the Holy Grail of journalism: a column in the op-ed pages of the Paper of Record. For the next four years, he reported extensively on the subject of globalization—the increasing freedom of capital markets to cross national borders, the rise of transnational corporations and trade agreements, the ecstatic growth of capitalism in China and India, and the inevitable growing pains that resulted. In the summer of 2000, this work culminated in a book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Friedman identified globalizing forces in the wake of the Cold War: networked computers, cell phones, and the erosion of national trade barriers. Most presciently, perhaps, he identified a worrisome, atavistic backlash, headed by what he called “super-empowered angry men”—terrorists. His main example of such a person was an influential and wealthy Saudi Arabian exile by the name of Osama bin Laden.

Thus September 11 put Tom Friedman once again at the red-hot center of world events. His interpretive columns after September 11 were collected in Longitudes and Attitudes, and he won his third Pulitzer prize in 2002. In 2003, he began doing television documentaries for the new Times-Discovery Channel partnership; for one of these, The Other Side of Outsourcing, he went inside the proliferating call centers in India that serve many American companies. The reporter realized that the globalizing effects he had identified in The Lexus and the Olive Tree had accelerated considerably. A year-long investigation followed, which led to last year’s bestselling The World is Flat—a book that is credited with creating a new paradigm of thought about globalization.

***

FROM GLOBALIZATION TO the Arab-Muslim world to oil, Friedman’s issues are the world’s most crucial ones. His views can be drawn in broad strokes: He believes that Israel and Palestine must pragmatically find a way to peacefully coexist, not least because the whole world is shrinking rapidly (“flattening,” he would say), and international relations will demand that people and products move more freely than they could during the Cold War.

He has famously argued that no two countries with McDonald’s restaurants have ever gone to war with each other (the former Yugoslavia convincingly disproved the theory), and also reported extensively on the origins of terrorism. Friedman believes Al Qaeda and similar Islamo-fascist movements arise essentially as a result of intense psychological humiliation. Thanks especially to the access they have to modern media and communications technologies, young Arab Muslims can see on television, in movies, and in magazines what is denied to them. While they should be angry with their leaders, who are the true source of their suppression, their leaders have cleverly deflected their anger to America and all things American. Young people become suicide bombers because they have been ruthlessly humiliated and manipulated by their cynical leaders. “Humiliation is the single most underappreciated force in international relations,” Friedman told me.

In the aftermath of September 11, Friedman believed that we had been forcibly dragged into what he called “World War III,” but now, as he said during our interview, he believes that it is actually a war within Islam. He rejects the idea that we are engaged in a “clash of civilizations.” Instead, it is a clash within a civilization—that is, within Islam. Moderate Muslims, he said, must take control of their lives and their geo-political situations and deny leadership to the violent, medieval, anti-modernist Islamists who are doing all they can to whip up a fight between East and West.

Nevertheless, Friedman has been a hawk on the Iraq war. It was his firm belief that the U.S. needed to invade Iraq in order to “hit someone” in the Arab-Muslim world, to make it clear that the U.S. intends to confront terrorism and tyranny with blunt force. This force would, with any luck, result in planting the seeds of democracy in the very heart of the Middle East—and therefore lead eventually to the extinction of anti-American sentiments and terrorism. More recently, however, Friedman has come to believe that the war in Iraq has been badly botched, largely by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who insisted on sending “just enough troops to fail.” With insecure Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds unable to overcome tribalism and distrust, Friedman most fears that the U.S. will be forced into the position of “babysitting a civil war.” Recent developments in Iraq certainly point in that discouraging direction.

But if he is increasingly pessimistic about the situation in Iraq and the entire Arab-Muslim world, Friedman has also developed a new line of thinking. It is a natural evolution of his previous reporting and writing. The next chapter in the Friedman book supercedes terrorism and globalization, and in some ways resolves the paradox of the two. A kind of unified field theory for geopolitics in the twenty-first century, it is about the next wave of human innovation, based on two words: renewable energy.

***

WHAT IS THE ROLE of a newspaper columnist today? Tom Friedman certainly fits the mold of a foreign-affairs columnist like James Reston, or a Walter Lippmann: a journalist moving very close to the center of current events, with access to many of the most important decision makers and actors on the world stage, and acting both as a conduit for current thinking about geo-political trends and an impartial witness to history. Whereas Reston and Lippmann at the peak of their powers were frequently attacked for losing their objectivity and becoming partisan cheerleaders for some of their more influential government sources, Friedman seems to evade that charge.

He may have his blind spots and his prejudices, but they appear to be wholly his own. “Everybody who knows me, knows I am my own man,” he told me. “When I do my job, I only care about one thing, and that’s my opinion. And I’m going to do whatever I can to get all the facts I need to form my opinion, and that’s it. I’m trying to start with reality the way I see it and then filter it through my Minnesota kind of pragmatic progressivism. There’s a lot that’s very Minnesota about my attitudes. Very centrist, very progressive, but not extreme one way or another.”

Friedman sees this pragmatism as basically a function of doing good, sound journalism—getting the story straight. “There are two kinds of columnists,” he told me. “Columnists in the heating business and columnists in the lighting business. I occasionally do heating, but most of the time I prefer to do lighting.” He thinks the ultimate goal is both to hold a reader’s attention and to surprise him or her, to never allow a reader to think, “Well of course Friedman would say that.” Partisan predictability is anathema to the columnist.

His boss, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., agrees that this centrist fairness is a key asset. Sulzberger told me, “People come to the Times op-ed columnists for judgment, for insight, for helping to place the events of the world in a context that makes sense, even if they don’t agree with it. Nobody does that better than Tom. In his field, he’s the best and we’re blessed to have him.” The Times publisher recognizes the subtle asset that Friedman represents in a time when the marketplace of ideas is hot and loud and highly polarized. “There’s a moderation to him. You’re not going to find Tom shrieking on the extremes. That’s just not who he is. When he does on occasion come out strongly, people listen harder, I think.”

***

TOM FRIEDMAN MAY BE among the most respected journalists today. Nonetheless, there is a reasonable and informed resistance to some of his ideas among some thoughtful critics. Some see Friedman’s idealism as overly simplified, in the grand tradition of the Olympian newspaper columnist reducing the complexities of the day to a trickle of condensed truth. Chris Lehmann, an editor at Congressional Quarterly, told me, “I think he’s the pundit’s equivalent of the motivational speaker. He goes out to these emerging market countries, and says, ‘Build a McDonald’s and you’ll never have a war. Here’s my one glib formula for achieving the edge in the new global economy.’” Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, has said that Friedman’ s experiences as a globetrotting journalist are “broad and thin,” and that his writings are thus “simple, dramatic, and relentless.” To Lemann, this is a natural result of Friedman’s compulsion to fit every fact he encounters into his “theory of everything.”

Tom Frank, who may be the nation’s preeminent emerging public intellectual, agrees that this idealistic compulsion is a problem. “He just doesn’t look very deeply into things,” said the author of What’s The Matter With Kansas? and One Market Under God. “He accepts blithe textbook, utopian views about capitalism. His worldview is actually a nineteenth-century doctrine, all hopped up with the language of the new economy and the Internet. Friedman is forever inventing little schemes for how the world works, as if everything is symmetrical and governed by natural law.”

According to Frank, this has led Friedman to some uncritical thinking about the way capitalism and democracy can actually work against each other. Frank pointed out that globalization hasn’t even been unequivocally good for its main advocate, the U.S. “Capitalism hasn’t been good for American workers—far from it. It’s been good for some, very bad for others,” he said. “All this optimism is a cover for the real goal, which is the reconstitution of ruling power. Power for the U.S. financial industry and certain sectors of the U.S. economy. It’s the recovery of ruling-class power.” Frank said wage distribution lists going back 150 years show how dramatic the difference between rich and poor has become, everywhere in the industrialized West, and now in the developing East. “These people talk a lot about freedom,” he said. “They’re especially concerned about the freedom of money. Other kinds of freedom absolutely get crushed.”

It wouldn’t be a war of ideas if there were no opposition. For his part, Friedman saves his most blistering vituperation for what he calls the “anti-globalization movement,” and he had very harsh words for the activists who protested the 1999 World Trade Organization tribunal in Seattle. When I asked him why, he said he thought most of the movement consisted of “latté-sipping liberals” who felt guilty about getting rich off the dot-com boom and were trying to compensate by opposing any opportunity for other people to get rich. Friedman said he saw them as “the coalition to keep poor people poor.” He went on, “If you listen to what Ralph Nader has advocated, it’s really protectionism, and it’s the economics of North Korea. Which I say is fine, then you should live in North Korea. But the fact is that more people have grown out of poverty faster in India and China thanks to the policies of globalization in the last twenty years than ever before in the history of the world. That’s why when you look around, how many Chinese and Indian faces do you see in the anti-globalization movement? I have utter contempt for people who aren’t serious and kind of dole out this economic advice, or throw a stone through a McDonald’s window.” Friedman believes that an absolute improvement in conditions for the poorest is more important than the dramatic gap being created at the same time between a country’s richest and its most destitute.

That is not a universally acceptable tradeoff. Ralph Nader, for one, sees Friedman’s dismissal of free-market capitalism’s critics as patronizing. Responding to Friedman’s assessment of him and the anti-globalization movement, Nader scoffed, “We are going to give Tom Friedman the award for the reporter who has traveled the world most, and learned the least.” Almost every study done by the UN, Nader said, shows that the world’s poorest nations are worse off today than they were twenty years ago, before the onset of globalization. Even in the U.S., household incomes are lower today than they were in 1973 (adjusted for inflation). But his main critique of globalization involves a specific, detailed assessment of its negative impacts.

First, international trade agreements, especially as expressed by the WTO, supersede the sovereignty of any nations that are signatories to it. “These trade agreements are conducted in secret and they cannot be challenged by our courts, legislature, or executive branch agencies,” said Nader. “Food standards, pollution standards—whatever these international trade agreement autocracies agree on, that’s it. The only thing we can do is give six months’ notice and get out of WTO, which is a draconian measure that will not occur.”

These standards, Nader wants you to understand, are set by a corporate-managed, non-government entity. And you may not like those standards, but you will have no choice. “For example,” Nader said, “in Minnesota, you cannot buy a product made from child labor in the U.S. because child labor is illegal here. But we as the United States, because we’re signatories to the WTO, so heralded by Tom Friedman, cannot block the importation of products made by brutalized child labor in foreign countries. Because it’s permitted under WTO, and therefore has the force of federal law. That doesn’t seem to bother dear Tom.”

Nader also pointed out that market values, as defined by globalizing corporate interests, are displacing non-market values. “What Tom Friedman refuses to pay attention to,” he said, “is that the WTO subordinates consumer, environmental, and worker rights to the supremacy of commercial values.” He continued, “Now that is turning around historically our country. Every time we have had progress—like the abolition of child labor, or the establishment of motor vehicle standards—we have said through our congress to commercial interests, ‘Companies, you are going to have to subordinate your profit-seeking commercial interests to the supremacy of getting rid of child labor, of building safer cars, of installing cleaner environmental technologies, of respecting fair labor standards, minimum wage, and so on.’ What the WTO and NAFTA do is reverse that, and put in the supreme position the commercial profiteering interests.”

It’s true that Friedman can seem to have an almost naive optimism in the good will of corporate interests. As Nicholas Lemann wrote in the New Yorker, Friedman’s is a “business-friendly moderate liberalism, which for purely practical reasons does nice things for needy people.” Naturally, such benevolent corporate activities must be enabled by a government that has essentially restricted its role “to help the market function more smoothly.”

Indeed, in this vision of a globalized world, even the press is consigned to the role of cheerleading. Nader pointed out what he sees as the supreme irony of Friedman’s position. Because they are secret, WTO meetings and decisions cannot be scrutinized by any journalists. “Tom Friedman cannot go as a reporter or a columnist and cover any tribunals in Geneva, because they are closed to the press and all citizens.”

***

WHEN I NOTED TO FRIEDMAN HOW, as the world has gotten flatter, it has also grown significantly more dangerous, he agreed. It seemed a paradox, because he is generally optimistic about globe-leveling technologies. “Listen,” he said. “I’m a technological determinist, but not a historic determinist.” He explained, “If there is a World Wide Web where people can do business anywhere and have customers everywhere and have suppliers anywhere, they’re going to use that World Wide Web to do that. If you have a cell phone that allows you to call around the world at zero marginal cost, you’re going to use that cell phone. What you’re going to use it for, whether to plot the fall of the Berlin wall or the fall of the Twin Towers—that’s another question.”

Still, looking at Friedman’s whole body of writing, you can’t help but feel that he essentially believes that good will prevail over evil, and that free market capitalism will triumph over centralized, isolationist, or corrupt nations. This is partly because he is not concerned about the staying power of nationalism, localism, tradition, religion, and other non-market values which continue to influence people throughout the world. When it comes to terrorism, Friedman has very deftly articulated a subtle bit of wishful thinking; it may be reassuring to believe that September 11, and all other Islamist terrorism, is the result of psychopathic outliers who are humiliated by their own inability to reap the fruits of globalization. But this ignores the wider, more reasoned rejection of American cultural and corporate imperialism. It also denies the misogyny, anti-materialism, and anti-individualism that inhabit most political strains of radical Islamism. The anti-American critique is steeped in ideology, theology, and history. It’s dangerous pretending otherwise, especially when those views are in the ascendance.

Even a sympathetic, ecumenical Islamic scholar like William Graham, dean of the Harvard Divinity School, has reservations about how the pro-globalization community dismisses conservative Muslim concerns. “What many of the Friedman-like pro-globalization types forget,” he told me, “is that globalization is not just about modernity or open trade doors; it is also about power differentials that are still as real as in the days of European and American colonialism and imperial domination of much of the rest of the world. Leveling the global economic playing field may still result in a field tipped at an acute angle against the underdeveloped nations. I don’t think that Islam per se, or Muslims per se, have anything intrinsically against globalization. It is not in the first instance a religious issue, though in the second it can become one.”

Perhaps Friedman hasn’t interviewed enough Islamic radicals. Some critics say that despite his reputation for thorough reporting and fact-gathering, the columnist’s views can be flawed because of his sources. Call it the “Judy Miller defense”—you’re only as good as your sources. In his reporting on globalization, for example, Friedman’s sources are often powerful CEOs, trade secretaries, and managers—people who are profiting handsomely from globalization and can hardly be expected to talk about the downside.

“As Friedman trots around the globe,” wrote Nicholas Lemann in the New Yorker, “he keeps most intensively in touch with one subculture, that of international finance.” Congressional Quarterly’s Chris Lehmann put it more sharply: “More and more, he just parachutes in and talks to a CEO. It’s like the old foreign correspondent’s stereotype of asking your cab driver, ‘What do you think of the Dayton peace process?’ And he gives you the salty down-to-earth version. And this is even worse than that. It’s like going to ‘Chainsaw’ Al Dunlap and saying, ‘Tell me about your shareholder value.’”

New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger rejects this line of criticism. “Imagine having good sources!” he said with a snort. “The world would come to an end if all journalists had good sources! If the City Hall reporter is considered corrupt because he speaks to the mayor, we’ve come to a terrible place in the profession that I love.” It’s a good point, but then readers must continue to trust that the columnist’s interest in truth is not clouded by some larger ideological conceit that makes certain facts more attractive than others. “I think if he wanted to report,” countered Lehmann, “he could interview some union activist or shop worker, except under his ideological scheme, they’re doomed, they’re in the dustbin of history. What’s pernicious about his column is that he’s hypnotized himself into believing that there is this inevitable logic to history.”

***

IT IS IN THE NATURE of newspaper column writing that a person stays on a beat until the beat is, well, beaten. So the appetite for new material is inevitable and strong—first, surely, among readers. In recent months, Tom Friedman has become obsessed with the intimate connections between oil, the nations that produce it, the nations that consume it, and the bizarre geo-politics that have resulted. It promises to be an engaging third chapter to add to his coverage of the Middle East and globalization.

It is a kind of unified field theory that encompasses and surpasses his previous theories about peace, terrorism, and globalization. That is because, having delved into the business of oil, Friedman has come to the conclusion that our nation’s energy policy and our security are inherently connected. In his recent columns, he has loudly averred that America today desperately needs the kind of forward-looking and inspired leadership we last saw when President John F. Kennedy responded to the launch of the Russian spaceship Sputnik by pledging to put a man on the moon within a decade. Friedman points out that today’s moon shot must be establishing “energy independence” from the medieval Islamist governments on which we rely so heavily today. We need to make a great leap forward in developing renewable-energy sources and technologies.

This is no isolationist agenda. Friedman believes that these governments are propped up largely by the high price of oil, and that they will never reform until the bottom falls out of the oil market. How to make this happen? For Friedman, there is one simple sacrifice to make: He has proposed that Americans pay an additional dollar in taxes on each gallon of gasoline to finance this new moon shot. This would involve all Americans in positive change—the kind of sacrifices that we have traditionally been asked to make and have willingly made, when world events demand it.

Despite the current administration’s rhetoric about alternative energy—which frankly sounds like it may have been cribbed from the Times—Friedman believes it is unwilling to do anything concrete. President Bush and Vice President Cheney, he said, “would rather that one percent of America sacrifice by carrying the burden of the war with Iraq, make the ultimate sacrifice of having a loved one in Iraq, rather than have all of us make a small sacrifice, which would be accepting a gasoline tax. It’s actually deeply cynical, but as a result they’re going to fail on both.” This is the sort of idea brokerage we have come to expect from Friedman, and if it comes lightly salted with hubris à la Scotty Reston or Walter Winchell or Walter Lippmann, well, who can disagree on the merits of the argument?

But it’s his latest line of argument, that the flat world must set its sights on becoming a green flat world, that will test Friedman. The environment has been an interest, but never a beat for him. But the new theme will challenge because it will require him to take seriously this question of whether transnational corporate interests will do what they’ve never done before—which is to allay their profit margins for the greater good of the planet and its passengers. (Why must our government require a gas tax? Why won’t private commercial interests voluntarily transform our energy appetite?)

It may also require Friedman to more seriously address another nagging question, one that lies at the center of anti-modernity movements: If a person wishes to be righteous more than she wishes to be rich, who can gainsay her? There are things to desire from life other than the Lexus. To some, if it’s a competition, then the olive tree is preferable. And Friedman would surely agree that even more dear to the human heart than the cell phone, or the wi-fi laptop, or even the profit margin, is something a bit more archaic: the freedom to self-determine.

If you’re a shareholder, the money is still pretty good, but in almost every other way this is a rough time for the middlebrow, mainstream media. Judging by all the hand-wringing, navel-gazing, and gloomy, self-flagellating punditry you’d think the mainstream news media–the “MSM,” as bloggers love to peck—are at the fiery brink as a consequence of their fading influence and terminal irrelevance. Average daily newspapers in particular. There is no shortage of MSM news professionals somberly spreading their own ashes. For the most part, the tone among older journalists is funereal, and for good reason. Old-fashioned journalism is taking a kicking and there’s no sign the beatings will abate.

From the outside, the consumer’s perspective is pretty much one of business as usual. There are generalized complaints about media performance. Too biased. Too dull. Too silly. Too timid. Of course, the real doomsaying and finger-pointing is confined to newsrooms, journalism schools, and the rapidly expanding blogging community, which is especially obsessed with MSM. Awash in twenty-four-hour cable and Internet punditry, the average news “consumer” certainly feels no slackening in the flow of headlines, alerts, “breaking news,” and bloviation. But within the beast, the sense of creative ennui and peril is so tangible you can taste it on your teeth.

There are exceptions, of course. Along with a handful of “major newspapers”—the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post—offering full journalistic service, there are a few carefully guarded, broadcast news venues: ABC’s documentary unit (championed by the late Peter Jennings), Nightline, CNN’s intermittently provocative investigative unit and Aaron Brown’s NewsNight, and National Public Radio. But almost everywhere else, newsrooms have been stripped of adequate resources, imagination, and editorial courage. Too much of the regular, daily content of too many news organizations is filled with predictable, redundant stories produced in the same bland newspeak, the same inevitable tone and perspective.

Meanwhile, the competition is doing whatever it pleases.

The pummeling comes from an increasingly familiar collection of muggers, beginning with MSM’s very own corporate parents. The executive boards overseeing mainstream newsrooms—from ABC, CBS, and NBC down to the St. Paul Pioneer Press—have slashed staff and whacked budgets in their attempts to squeeze every conceivable penny of profit out of their “subsidiaries.”

“For the moment the cow is still giving milk,” one Twin Cities metro columnist told me, “but that’ll end pretty fast once they cut off the last of the fresh grass.”

Simultaneously, political ideologues of all persuasions, but primarily of the right wing, have badly intimidated MSM editors and news directors into playing a disingenuous “balance” game to counter bogus charges of being politically biased. The intention may be noble, but the effect is to suck out yet more passion, character, and accuracy from the news, at the very moment they’re needed most. There is a growing view among journalists that the MSM, by holding back on regular, aggressive challenges to power in all its forms—political, corporate, cultural—is losing its most precious commodity, namely its influence. Worse, it’s a losing business proposition; the dulling, or “balancing down,” of daily news content is having the effect of pumping high-octane fuel into the alternative news and analysis media.

By “alternative,” I mean primarily the Internet, where bloggers today are already beating mainstream news professionals at half their game—the half that requires a “journalist” to make the news interesting and enjoyable to read. Despite doing almost no original reporting and living in a parasitic symbiosis with the mainstream media, the influence of bloggers is expanding as rapidly as the MSM’s is declining .

Then there’s the kids. Surveys regularly indicate that citizens from age zero to thirty don’t seem to care or even notice what our august Op-Ed pages say. Lavished with a variety of news and opinion options unimagined by their parents, modern kids don’t seem to be migrating to MSM at all—even after they land their first mortgages—unlike people in generations past. What to do? More “features,” “trend” stories on reality dating shows? Another round of updates on Jen and Brad, Vince and Jen, Jen and Ben? Ben and Jerry? Or how about yet another “take out” on American Idol?

(There are few things more unintentionally funny than listening to a group of middle-aged and prematurely middle-aged newsroom cave dwellers—people whose daily existence is consumed by newsroom bureaucracy—argue and opine about what trends “our younger readers” demand be covered. If life is like high school with real money, it’s like watching the class nerds plan activities for the next cool kids’ party.)

Simultaneously, more and more of a certain sophisticated, already well-informed news consumer, in other words the ideal MSM customer of any age, is beginning to rely on the Jon Stewart style of fake news. What Stewart is supplying are the socially palatable (that is, humorous), argument-framing clues and cues for pursuing one of the most basic journalistic questions: What does this all mean?

If each of these attacks—the blogs, the kids, the Jon Stewarts—were a punch to the head, the flurry would have the aged champ slumped against the ropes, eyes swollen shut, and bleeding from a crushed nose. While the general public may be barely aware and largely indifferent to this watershed moment in news dissemination, professional journalists are obsessed with it. At the very least, news professionals fear that even if their network, station, or newspaper survives, they will live to see a day, certainly within the next decade, when they’ll be sharing their much-diminished influence and credibility with news writers who play by a far different set of rules, if any at all.

By any objective measurement, the business of mainstream news media remains enviably profitable. In stark contrast with hidebound, torpid, flint-chippers like General Motors and Ford, local TV stations and newspapers look like visionaries, with current industry-wide profit margins in the range of forty percent (and up) and twenty-three percent respectively. So if you’ve got retirement-in-Arizona dough sunk into any of the big brand names, good for you. But be prepared to liquidate on short notice.

This past spring’s report from the non-profit Audit Bureau of Circulation that newspaper circulation had dropped 1.9 percent nationwide in the previous six months hit MSM watercooler pundits like a pink slip from upper management. (That number was released after several Top Twenty newspapers were caught cooking their circulation figures—that is, engaging in fraud—to maintain ad rates.) Meanwhile, the evening newscasts of ABC, NBC, and CBS have declined 28.4 percent since 1991, and they continue to fall. Locally, the Star Tribune is an exception. The flagship of the comparatively small McClatchy Company actually posted a modest circulation increase.

Even so, despite consistent-to-precipitous circulation and ratings declines, media empires like Gannett, Knight-Ridder, Viacom, GE, and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation are still providing their shareholders with a satisfactory return on investment. To paraphrase Molly Ivins, their profit margins have been pushed from merely excessive to obscene. They are floating the margins in part by denuding their labor-intensive news operations to squeeze out more cash for shareholders, a form of self-cannibalism.

MSM journalists know they’re in a fight, and the brave among them speak candidly and publicly about what’s wrong, sometimes after they’ve left the corporate payroll. Former Star Tribune managing editor Tim McGuire, in a speech at Washington and Lee University this past May, springboarded off the comments of Washington Post executive editor Len Downie. Downie, still running the Post, insists newspapers aren’t dying. He says papers are just struggling to “adapt.” Right. And for a brief moment the dinosaurs tried to adapt when that asteroid hit the Yucatan.

But McGuire said, “I think Len is right. He’s also correct when he says one of the impediments to that adaptation is excessive newspaper profits. Len says fifteen percent profit margins would be plenty.” McGuire then added, “I do believe it is crucial that newspaper executives face up to the fact that they are milking their industry for profits and failing to invest in the long-term health of the news-gathering and the advertising franchise.” He mentioned The Vanishing Newspaper, a new book by Philip Meyer, in which the author describes the current corporate news media dynamic as one of “harvesting the assets.”

Meyer is a former reporter and now Knight Chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he has plenty to say about what newspaper corporations are doing to their products. (While Meyer is often credited with the “harvesting the assets” conceit, he cites Harvard professor Michael Porter for the original phrase, “harvesting market position.”)

“Managers do it by raising prices and reducing quality,” Meyer asserts, “so they can shell out the money [to shareholders] and run. I know of no newspapers who are doing this consciously. But the behavior of most points in this direction: Smaller news hole, lighter staffing, and reduced community service, leading of course to fading readership, declining circulation, and lost advertising. Plot it on a graph, and it looks like a death spiral.”

The “death spiral” image is now an oft-quoted standard in newsroom conversations. Another apt term is “de-contenting.” It’s a Detroit euphemism for discreetly pulling quality out of new models of established brand-name cars, while simultaneously straining to sell them to the public as good or better than ever. Less sound-proofing, cookie-cutter styling, cheaper brakes and transmission. Same price. Or more. To see how well that plan works in an intensely competitive environment, check out GM and Ford’s bond ratings. They could not be much lower.

“There’s lots of planning going on in newsrooms,” said McGuire. (The post-McGuire Star Tribune will unveil its latest, long-planned makeover sometime in the coming weeks.) “But most of the orders to find solutions to the industry’s deepest problems come with one instruction: Don’t spend significant money. I know several editors who have been told to research some radical new solutions, but then told to do it on the cheap. Publishers want to restore excitement to newspapers without spending a precious dime of that twenty-one to thirty-five percent profit margin. [It] won’t happen.” McGuire added, “When your franchise is under attack from every angle and you are obsessed with inexpensive, incremental solutions, then you are guilty of harvesting, milking, or negligence.”

One can look at local TV news for the model. What ails the mainstream media in general first infected local TV news. It is a virus that has hit most second- and third-tier daily newspapers. Conglomerates such as Viacom and Gannett and Fox have long treated their local TV operations like ATMs. (In the Twin Cities, Viacom owns WCCO, Gannett owns KARE, and Fox/NewsCorp owns KMSP). Each demands in excess of thirty-five percent profit margins from these stations, some closer to fifty percent. During the past decade, they have gutted reporting and photography staffs and budgets to achieve these goals. Newspaper companies and their institutional investors watched this process enviously for several years, before finally looking at each other and saying, “We can do that, too.” And they have.

The essential editorial criteria in the news cash-out formula is a new type of coverage. It is hyper-alert to tragedy, scandal, celebrities, tabloid pulp, sports, and sentimentality, and hyper-averse to seriously challenging local power entities—whether they are politicians, major corporations, or major advertisers. The overall personality of these operations is edgeless and reassuring. This requires constant vigilance to avoid too-sharp criticism and analysis, to cultivate a bland, vaguely fifties style of humor, and create a highly regimented docket of subject matter, tone, and vernacular—all innocent enough for a church picnic.

Local TV news has this style down to a crass science. And now the giant newspaper chains are realizing they can sustain fat profit margins with a similar mix of the tragic, trite, and innocuous. (It is worth noting that of the four major newspapers, three, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post, are still primarily controlled by family shareholders, and therefore are less susceptible to the self-induced maladies of the publicly traded media.)

Moreover, one can track the deterioration in what might be called unique, original content—material local newsrooms are producing through their own resources, as opposed to grabbing off a satellite or wire. Here, you can detect the industry at war with itself. The corporate mandate to maintain very high profit margins requires highly constrictive budgets. This on-the-run belt tightening requires a new type of newsroom manager, more accountant than journalist, to reshape and redirect the news staff to produce the news “product” research says the public wants. Managers have no choice, or natural inclination, to be anything other than corporate sycophants. Maverick journalists and “original thinkers” need not apply for management positions in the new system; they are considered remnants, holdouts, and cranks of a bygone era.

Like local TV, editorial decision-making at newspapers today requires keeping a wary, worshipful eye on key, targeted demographics. Every media organization loves the attention of working mothers. But newspapers, especially those struggling for a sustainable foothold in their markets (like the St. Paul Pioneer Press), have no choice but to carefully marshal their diminishing resources in hopes of creating some appeal to upper-income suburbanites.

The point is that too many newspaper managers are now bred, trained, indoctrinated, and “incentivized” to manage budgets, not writers and stories. The new manager lives in an insulated echo chamber, constantly exchanging boilerplate corporate prattle among his or her management peers and superiors, and issuing too-frequent-to-be-credible “red alerts” rushed out for employee consumption—and despair. It’s a fair question whether this new crowd are journalists at all. But whatever they are, they are unequipped to maneuver effectively and courageously in today’s landscape. They are also profoundly uncomfortable with anyone who fails to show the same kind of fealty to corporate policy as they do.

Davis “Buzz” Merritt was a forty-three-year employee of the Knight Ridder corporation, twenty-three as editor of the Wichita Eagle. The company is widely regarded as a prime offender in the harvesting syndrome described by Meyer and McGuire. Merritt has written his own book, Knightfall, on the fate of his former company and, by extension, much of mainstream media. In it, he discusses the shift from the values of the Knight family, which had demonstrated a long-term commitment to re-investing in journalism as a way to sustain influence, to the current operators, the Ridder family, who, he argues, see journalism “as a business that just happens to be manufacturing newspapers.”

Once news is reduced to a vehicle for profit, says Merritt, it becomes very easy to lose track of what exactly the consumer is buying. He fixes on the notion that newspapers need most to protect the influence they have as tough, courageous truth-sayers. But that kind of influence is endangered as MSM tries to slide by with ever-fewer practicing journalists in management, and ever-less relevant content.

By the time the mainstream has fully squandered the essence of its influence (probably over the next decade, accelerating after the complete conversion to digital media), there will be at least three or four dozen marquee bloggers well enough established to declare parity with run-of-the-mill Op-Ed pages in both analytical acuity and readership. At that point NBC/GE might as well let Brian Williams read daily transcripts from Power Line and Daily Kos.

So yes, traditional news—news gathered by professionals operating under well-understood rules of engagement, where fairness and accountability matter more than speed and sensation—is very much under siege.

Some of the reasons for the great decline are external, contrived, and cynical, particularly the crackpot chorus that perpetually squawks about political “bias.” Dealing effectively with this crowd requires a vigorous one-two punch of offense and transparency. At the moment, institutional journalism’s reaction to new technology competition, like bloggers and cable, is like watching a group of dithering scientists, poisoned by their own success, scramble for the precise cocktail of journalistic, attitudinal, financial, and technological potions that will allow them to survive in a game that is getting faster, broader, more raw, more personally engaging, and far less conflicted by professional standards of “balance” than anything they ever imagined.

Of all that afflicts mainstream news, the “issue” of bias should be the one most easily marginalized and defused. Other than a few newsroom neophytes who don’t yet know what to think, every professional reporter knows the “bias” charge is fundamentally a political strategem. They also know that it is primarily a right-wing gimmick only recently adapted by the left. Yet, management remains flummoxed.

Generally, the preferred reaction to “bias” is to do nothing for the longest time, to wring hands, to tone down leftish columnists, hold another round of meetings and eventually announce the proverbial “nationwide search” for an unequivocally conservative Op-Ed or metro columnist, or both. Someone—whether they’ve ever reported a house-fire or not—who will act as a sop to conservative complainants and a counterweight for MSM editors’ own misplaced sense of liberal guilt.

The most effective weapon bias-chargers have is the editors’ own belief that they really are liberal (which is to say that in newsrooms, there really is a preponderance of belief in nutty fringe ideas like equal pay for equal work, civil rights, social security net programs, environmental controls, and the like), and that journalistic ethics requires them to provide “balance” on every issue.

This is nuts. A now-classic example of the kind of “balance” trap the MSM has got itself into was the so-called Swift Boat Veterans issue during the 2004 presidential campaign. The point was not that a Democrat, John Kerry, was the victim of a contrived, baseless smear. The point was that, rather than persistently assessing the accuracy of the charges of the Swifties, standard newsroom protocol required persistent “balance.” Six inches of quotes from the Swifties balanced by six inches of response from Kerry. Day after day. Eventually, readers were left with the “balanced” view that there was no truth and both sides were idiots. In terms of campaign tactics, Kerry has been justly criticized for failing to take the Swifties head on. But in too many news reports, that failure became a bigger, far more frequently reported story than whether what the Swifties said was even true.

Fully reporting and regularly declaring the Swifties’ tale to be the transparent lie it was would, of course, have left journalists open to blistering attacks from talk-radio hosts and bloggers, and probably also an uncomfortable chat with upper management. But the Swift Boat episode falls into a familiar pattern whereby the media’s quaint notion of “balance” has it reporting more on the fracas than the facts.

There have been other more critical failures by the MSM to place a priority on independently reporting and aggressively assessing the accuracy of basic information, as opposed to merely playing ringside stenographer to the political cat-fight. You can see it in the press pool’s anemic challenges to the White House’s months-long campaign for war in Iraq, and, more recently, the truly bizarre indifference to the so-called Downing Street Memo. To push harder, especially on the War on Terror, would have required a highly adversarial, public confrontation with a White House renowned for its “aggressive” reaction to journalistic impudence. But the point is that the lack of aggressive pursuit of the truth significantly diminishes the influence that is the MSM’s foundation. It is no coincidence that public approval of the MSM’s “job performance” shot upward dramatically in the aftermath of their entirely human reation and indignation to the government’s Hurricane Katrina response. Moreover, the chorus of challenges to President Bush’s rosy assessment of federal relief efforts was probably key to getting the president to admit, for the first time in six years, that mistakes were made and he was taking responsibility.

But the charge that the average newsroom is liberal in any remotely radical way is laughable. Don’t get me wrong, MSM newsrooms are more socially liberal than, say, the Rev. James Dobson, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Ralph Reed, and Rick Santorum. And they are also generally pro-choice, they probably vote Democratic in greater numbers, they believe in full rights for women, as well as—grab your garters—evolution, too. But that still leaves critics a very long way from proving a liberal agenda and systematic, facts-twisting bias. In my experience, ninety-five percent of reporters and editors are well within the mainstream of political attitudes, appropriately skeptical about every politician and every overreaching ideology. More to the point, like good bureaucrats everywhere, most reporters aren’t particularly political at all. Most are happy to get a good story, get it right, and get home in time for dinner and a little prime-time TV.

The right’s grand strategy with regard to the mainstream press is to diminish its once potent influence in setting the conventional wisdom of American culture. By relentlessly and recklessly asserting that everything about the mainstream media is biased and agenda-driven, starting with politics but including garden-variety reporting on the whole vast array of social issues and science, the hope is that significant numbers of news consumers will grow cynical toward the mainstream and turn to new news venues where party is more important than reality.

If you find yourself in a depressed, suicidal mood, by all means avoid getting trapped in an elevator with MSM editors and reporters discussing “what to do about the blogs?” It is truly trigger-pulling stuff. But what media managers struggle with most is how to maintain full editorial control. Which is to say, How do we blog within the same rules of professional journalism that are killing us in print? After all, blogs as we know them today are as wild and wooly as nineteenth century Deadwood, and often as profane as the HBO series. That thought terrifies mainstream editors. Blogging implies a voice that isn’t proper, isn’t necessarily dignified, and above all isn’t controlled by some kind of professional or corporate template.

The attitude and writerly personal style of blogs is most similar to that of the best columnists—metro, politics, sports, whatever—and mainstream newspapers are constantly struggling with how much freedom they dare parcel out to even those characters. Why? Because columnists are, for better and worse, the voices who most embody the personality of the entire publication.

The trend, in print, is not encouraging. Orthodox, lower-tier-MSM editorial policy is to be “empowering” to its home community. What that is assumed to mean is news that is encouraging, generous, uplifting, and unifying in both story selection and tone. But in effect, it delivers a product that prefers hugging to provocation. (Newspaper editors today still say they love “hell-raising.” But what they really mean is “heck-raising.”)

On the same morning that the New York Times’ Judith Miller was heading to jail in the Valerie Plame investigation, her managing editor, Jill Abramson, was telling a lunch meeting of the paper’s young writers to “push back” against their editors, and fight for their voice and for material that might ordinarily offend the Grey Lady’s sensibilities. “Not to start WW III with editors,” Abramson told the New York Observer, “But I wanted to consciously send them a message that we want the paper to be full of engaging writing and engaging voices.”

The reaction to this by a dozen or so writers at the two Twin Cities dailies was something on the order of a spit take. At the Pioneer Press “pushing back” against desperately overworked editors is regarded as an offense against nature, like slapping your mother. At the Star Tribune, the complaint is more that the editorial bureaucracy is so slumberous and complacent that a fight for creative voice is like ranting on the sidewalk outside City Hall. Besides, “edginess” is for the graphics editors.

Where the Pioneer Press has been essentially abandoned by its corporate parent, Knight Ridder, and told to “make its numbers” however it must with no significant infusion of resources, the Star Tribune is the flagship of the McClatchey chain. (The common view is that the Pioneer Press has been so weakened that its home turf, the east metro, is the Star Tribune’s for the taking.) But the Star Tribune, a second-tier newspaper where the Pioneer Press has now slid lower, lives in a comfort zone where it could afford to take risks with unique voices, but doesn’t. Instead, the newspaper seems to be putting its money into a massive redesign.

A prime example of the Star Tribune’s resistance to voice was the departure of sports columnist Dan Barreiro. The inability or unwillingness of the Star Tribune not just to accommodate Barreiro, but to appreciate his value to their influence, is startling. Barreiro, who declined to be interviewed for this story, is a “push back” kind of character. He’s a prickly, talented, aggressive guy whose columns were truly a must-read for any sports fan interested in the how, why, and you-gotta-be-kidding-me aspects of the industry of modern sports. Barreiro had other things to do, like a radio gig. But basically he was too iconoclastic, too opinionated, and too indifferent to criticism from powerful local institutions for the paper to properly control.

The same applies to my friend Nick Coleman, a guy who has forgotten more about the people and power launderers of the Twin Cities than any of his insulated editors in the St. Paul Pioneer Press and Star Tribune cubicle farms ever dared to learn. But Coleman, like Barreiro, requires special accomodation and appreciation. It shouldn’t be hard to do.

The bard of Anoka, Garrison Keillor, a lover of good writing and journalism, gave an interview to the Hartford Courant last April. He was about to speak to the 2005 National Writers Workshop and he wanted say something in defense of newspapers. It wasn’t easy. “I think that American newspapers have taken a very serious wrong turn,” said Keillor, “and that aside from a few newspapers, the quality of the product is in decline, especially for the reader, and I think that newspapers have forgotten that their readers are readers and love writing. Writing is what people want. They don’t want a sort of concept of journalism; they want writers. And writers are always individuals. This is what people turn to newspapers for. They don’t turn to newspapers for advice and for personal service and for sort of glossy pieces about lifestyle and home décor and cooking and how to bring up your children.”

Talking to the journalism trade magazine Editor & Publisher a while later, Keillor added that today’s newspapers “are too positive and upbeat, on the mistaken assumption that that’s what readers are looking for.” Sadly, what Keillor is looking for is precisely the sort of stuff many newspapers are combing out of what remains of their pages. I can tell you from long, personal experience the sour reactions and looks I got from any TV review or trend piece that wasn’t a giddy celebration of the sheer, bouncy fun of The Bachelor, Joe Millionaire, or The Apprentice. “It’s what our readers want to read,” I was constantly told, by editors fresh back from another mandatory meeting with the research department.

Newspapers are still the anchor of the mainstream media, despite the public’s overwhelming reliance on TV for breaking news. (Local TV news would implode if it didn’t have the morning paper to work from.) Papers still have the wherewithal to fight back against the appeal of the best bloggers. But in order to compete, they’re going to have to let at least some of their writers be actual writers, loosen their foundation garments, assert their opinions, employ more literary devices, and in general have some fun with the topics and people they cover.

Colorful, well-sourced columnists embody the fundamental influence of mainstream newspapers. They are a paper’s primary asset in the battle against Internet maurauders. If the New York Times didn’t think so, they wouldn’t have set up their stable—Paul Krugman, David Brooks, Maureen Dowd, Tom Friedman—for separate, paid, online access a few weeks ago. Furthermore, every day you can check the Times’ list of the day’s “most emailed” stories for a snapshot of what readers want most from the paper. It isn’t lists of fun things to do with the weekend, or ponderously balanced stories on Supreme Court nominees. It’s the columnists.

The appeal of good, sometimes irreverent writing, beyond what traditional mainstream newspapering currently allows, is borne out in a study by Northwestern University’s Readership Institute. Lately the Institute has partnered with the Star Tribune, testing models for the newspaper’s long-awaited redesign.

The makeover is supposed to incorporate significant advances in online service, among other things. Many Star Tribune employees will be curious to see if it addresses anything mentioned here. Northwestern spent a lot of time assessing the tastes of those elusive “younger readers,” the ones who don’t read newspapers much, don’t watch traditional network news programs, and only leaf through Time and Newsweek at the dentist’s office.

What they found was interesting: A remix of news choices with hipper, more irreverent headlines and stories written with blog-like attitude—not Jen-Brad-Angelina-style celebrity junk, but actual news—was in fact more appealing to young readers than the stuff the Star Tribune actually published (they focused the study on the Star Tribune’s Valentine’s Day 2005 edition). The Star Tribune test material was very similar to Chicago’s competing Red Eye and Red Streak free tabloids. (The “Reds” are two free weeklies published the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune since 2002. They are aggressive efforts to lure young readers.)

“What is interesting and revealing,” says Mike Smith, managing director of Northwestern’s Media Management Center, “is that the Sun-Times and Tribune have found that adults, loyal newspaper readers, are picking up the free weeklies in far greater numbers than first imagined.” In other words, a general loosening of the more staid conventions of professional journalism may very well offer more upside than risk to mainstream media.

But lacking a relaxation of profit demands so counter-effective to creativity, risk-taking, and invention, the death spiral for most newspapers will probably continue. Few will actually fold. A monopoly in a market will always guarantee steady positive cash flow, no matter what the quality of the product. But as their irrelevance to literature-loving readers and aggressive news ferrets deepens, most will become glorified community newspapers and “repeater towers” for the handful of major papers and wire services.

As for local TV news, the gold standard for cash-cow-dom and exemplar to so many others in the industry, they had better have a plan for the day the first shrewd video bloggers fire up their own local newscasts in the looming all-digital age. They must offer Daily Show fans a valid alternative to the silly, ossified, lucrative formula of happy faces, bloody pictures, weather, and sports that sent viewers to the Comedy Channel in the first place.

Brian Lambert was the media critic at the St. Paul Pioneer Press for fifteen years. He left the Knight Ridder paper earlier this year after his “beat” was discontinued.