Tag: media

The question I’ve always had about George Tenet — seen this evening on “60 Minutes” getting feisty with Scott Pelley — is this: How exactly did he, a Clinton-appointee running the goddam CIA, pass muster with Dick Cheney and hang on into the Bush 43 administration? I mean, here was a crowd gone obsessional with doing everything the opposite of Bill Clinton. North Korea? No talking and no deals! Measured fiscal prudence? Gargantuan tax cuts for the Top 1%! And every disposable FOB anywhere in Washington … overboard! But they leave Clinton’s guy running the CIA? The Coast Guard, maybe. But the CIA is one job where you want an unequivocal Kool-Aid partisan, like, uh, Porter Goss.

From what I’ve read Tenet plays the man’s man game pretty well. He is cocksure and smokes a good cigar. But someone like Cheney had to have some kind of deep assurance that Tenet was not going to be a problem, either with him or with the Richard Perle-Paul Wolfowitz crowd squeezing the Iraq alarm even before 9/11, to survive the Clinton cauterizing going on everywhere else in the federal bureaucracy.

But here is Tenet now selling his version of history. Granted, it is a version pretty much lacking in surprise and neatly in step with everything else we’ve learned — and Condoleeza Rice, Cheney and Bush continue to deny, to their further utter marginalization.

I’m all for public officials stepping up and admitting they screwed up — even if they do it by way of fulfilling a $4 million book contract — but the primary strike against Tenet, which maybe he’ll answer better when he testifies before Congress, is why he didn’t step up and scream, “Bullshit!” two years ago, when he realized that either Cheney, Bush, Rice or Andy Card had sold him out to Bob Woodward.

If he stays as combative as he was with Pelley it’ll be one of the more interesting book tours in recent years. (Must check to see if he’s doing Stewart).

One of the mustier traditions of newspaper writing is the amount of group-think involved in crafting the first paragraph of a story — in journalism jargon known as “the lede”. Tradition says that the first paragraph should contain the essence of all the information to follow. Tradition also implies that that first paragraph represent the newspaper’s institutional attitude toward the story.

Despite abundant evidence that modern readers value a little punch and style as much as a, uh, “fair and balanced” recitation of facts, when you read a story like this morning’s Star Tribune piece titled, “Concerns over Heffelfinger reportedly raised at Justice”, you can smell the hands of nervous, second-guessing, group-thinking editors all over it.

As I and many others having been saying for weeks now — including the Strib’s editorial page and, most prominently, columnist Nick Coleman — the Strib, there’s no kind way to put this, has flat-out failed to properly (i.e. adequately) explore the high likelihood that the abrupt departure of US Attorney Tom Heffelfinger may in some way be related to the rather large, politically and ethically significant firing of eight other US Attorneys that erupted into a national scandal five months ago and is still building.

A group-think lede, with handful of editors re-re-re-re-crafting that all-important first paragraph to properly assert the paper’s institutional thinking/position on a given story gives you a contrast like we see today between the original reporting from D.C. and the Strib’s massaging for local consumption.

Here, first, is the lede paragraph in the latest story from the Strib’s former D.C. bureau, McClatchy Newspapers.
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WASHINGTON – The Bush administration considered firing the former U.S. attorney in Minnesota, but he left his job voluntarily before the list of attorneys to be ousted was completed, two congressional aides said Thursday.
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(The entire piece is here).

Not a lot of style. But punchy and direct to the key point … that thanks to new testimony by a former Justice Department official with knowledge of the whole affair — Kyle Sampson — the story has now taken a leap well beyond “presumption” vis a vis Mr. Heffelfinger.

Cut now to the Strib’s “crafting” of the same news:
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WASHINGTON – Senior Justice Department officials raised concerns about then-U.S. Attorney Tom Heffelfinger sometime after October 2005, according to a congressional aide familiar with what a former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales told House and Senate staff members last week.
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Never mind the complete absence of style and the convoluted splatter of dulling bureaucratic verbiage like “senior”, “aides”,”officials” and “staff members”, how about the complete avoidance of the rather essential and connective word, “fire”? Note also how the McClatchy report — the latest in a series of precisely the sort of professional, skeptical reporting newspapers normally expect of their DC bureaus and that the Strib has declined to re-print — distills the essence of the whole business into THE FIRST SENTENCE.

Namely, “The Bush administration considered firing the former U.S. Attorney in Minnesota … ,” while the Strib committee prefers instead, “Senior Justice Department officials raised concerns … ” yadda yadda. (Other recent MCClatchy reports here, here and here.

Can we agree that by now all arrows are pointing well past and beyond the hapless Alberto Gonzales and directly at, “The Bush administration”? Note to Strib political editor group: I think it is now … safe … to say that the “Bush administration” had something to do with this.

Also note that despite the appearance of a long-awaited link — courtesy of “a congressional aide familiar with … [zzzzz]”, the Strib plays the revelation inside on A4. (On the front page — breaking news on eating disorders). As I say, Strib group-thinkers have consistently decided against re-printing their former colleagues’ work on this story, preferring instead to either ignore McClatchy reports entirely or re-craft them into something more, shall we say, “appropriate” for their institutional voice. (Shades of punching up those New York Times pieces they run every so often.)

At this point in the US Attorneys-Heffelfinger-Paulose story, with Monica Goodling, Paulose’s close-personal friend, having been granted immunity in exchange for her testimony on the matter, with Gonzales being asked to prepare, you know, actual answers to all the questions he could not “recall” last week and with subpoenas approved for Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, I’m guessing the Strib’s group-thinkers are praying for an asteroid impact to distract public attention from the bizzare lack of editorial judgment they’ve displayed in this significant, substantive matter.

And while I’m at it, yes, if it weren’t for Nick Coleman pushing and prodding and writing on this story, the Strib would have as much relevance on the Heffelfinger angle as the Excelsior-Shorewood Sun Sailor. Coleman hit it again this morning with a “lede” that plays like this:

“Minnesota’s U.S. attorney, Rachel K. Paulose, has waged a public relations campaign to salvage her position since allegations were raised that her appointment was part of the Bush administration’s efforts to place political loyalists in U.S. attorney offices, especially in states expected to be “battlegrounds” in the 2008 election.” The whole column is here.

I’ve read more style out of the boy, but that lede gets directly to the heart of the story — a significant local angle on a major national scandal — that the Strib’s group-thinkers have chosen instead to minimize/suppress/downplay/ignore/hope will go away … take your pick.

Glenn Greenwald talks with the Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage about his reporting that won him a Pulitzer for National Reporting a couple weeks back. Savage got into and continued writing on President Bush’s use of “signing statements”, an arcane and complicated issue with no sex appeal and very little in the way of guaranteed instant response from the average reader. Never mind, as he says in this interview, that the abuse of signing statements reveals a unifying theme in many of this administration’s most serious blunders.

Talking about why the Globe kept on running the signing-statement stories when so many other papers ignored it — it did light up the lefty blogosphere, which Savage notes — he says this:
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The Associated Press article reporting on the Pulitzer awards quoted you as follows: “The Globe for a while was throwing it out on the front page when a lot of people were ignoring it, and that took a lot of courage.”.

Can you elaborate on that? Who was ignoring it? And why do you believe it took “courage” for The Globe to continue to publish your articles on signing statements?

“The Globe, unlike some regional papers, has made a decision to continue doing its own enterprise reporting in Washington. This means that the Globe can highlight its own stories rather than taking the safer route of joining in a single national agenda set in consensus with others. I think it took courage on the part of editors to keep putting the paper’s reputation behind a very complex story that was not being echoed on the front pages of other publications. I believe this experience shows why it is very important to maintain a diversity of journalistic thought in Washington.”
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The issue of “consensus” coverage, (the truly snide have been known to call it “pack journalism”), has always been troublesome, leaving huge voids in coverage of stories with less of that “readers want to know” appeal. That trouble has been aggravated as regional papers have either done away with Washington bureaus entirely, or reduced them in size to, say, a single, industrious intern, who, unless they’re a fledgling Charlie Savage are in no position to dispute their silverback editors’ notion of “the story of the day”.

Since writing his Pulitzer-winning series on the signing statements Savage has popped a couple excellent pieces on the background of Alberto Gonzales’ acolytes in the present, uh, Justice department. Click the link for one of them.

I confess to having paid very little attention to Katie Couric. Maybe it really is because I am at heart a digusting, unrepentant misogynist. Or maybe — just maybe — I like a certain gravity of bona fides in my network news readers. Knowing a bit about CBS president, Les Moonves, from having observed his steady climb through CBS entertainment to his current lofty perch as CEO of CBS, the courtship of Katie and her investiture in Dan Rather’s chair is just so perfectly in keeping with the Moonves ethos.

Moonves is an extraordinarily facile corporate player, a former actor with a normally shrewd ear for consumer trends and audience tastes … at least in entertainment. In the aftermath of the Rather implosion, a debacle fueled by a combination of overreaching and Swift Boating, Moonves calculated that America would accept a performer instead of another globe-trotting warhorse easily tarred as a sympathizer of one sort or another.

It appears Moonves was wrong. According to Gail Shister’s story, now heatedly and personally disputed by CBS top dogs Sean McManus and Rick Kaplan, Couric already has one leg swinging over the abyss — at the bottom of which is an “upgraded” reassignment to “48 Hours Mysteries” or CBS’s “The Early Show”. (Wait … is that mongrel still on? Let me check. … OK. Yes.)

If Shister’s telling can be trusted — and I’ll trust her before I trust Couric’s protecting suits — Couric has not played well with CBS’s warhorses, which, I am not too modest to say, is exactly what I predicted would happen.

Within every network news division there still exists a proud and very wary core of veterans. Primaery among these are reporters who have actually covered this planet’s myriad horrors in person, as opposed to interviewing the survivors on a Manhattan couch two weeks later. THAT crowd was always going to be Couric’s biggest challenge. The Bob Schieffers, “Baghdad Bob” Simons, etc. are wily old bulls with, dare I say, every right to have a hard-on for cutie-pie pretenders.

Their animus likely worsens when the cutie-pie isn’t just popping up in field reports on the evening news, but anchoring the damn thing, and representing all of them at three or four times the money they’re making … simultaneous with Moonves and McManus slicing out overseas bureaus, travel budgets and generally de-contenting the brand they’ve worked for decades to imbue with Big “J” journalistic honor.

The inside-baseball irony here is that Shister, who was recently “reassigned” from the regular, tough and very distinctive media reporting she has done for 20-plus years to “TV trend features” by her new bosses at the Philadelphia Inquirer, (which went from Knight-Ridder ownership, to McClatchy, to a very Star Tribune-like private investor group called Philadelphia Media Holdings), is fighting essentially the same battle as the old CBS warhorses … who appear to be her sources for her Couric story.

The same dumbing down that sees marketplace wisdom in yanking someone like Shister away from reporting and interpreting news among America’s media elites to friggin’ “trend” stories on, I don’t know what, Sanjaya’s second act, is eroding the value of both newspapers and TV news. And by “value” we mean value to existing, regular consumers, not value to a presumptive “young adult” audience that doesn’t give a damn about anything other than who Simon Cowell sneers at next, or who only recognizes Katie Couric from all the free publicity she’s gotten from the supermarket tabloids.

Oh, don’t get me started.

But let me suggest to CBS, Moonves and McManus that if they still want to play a glamour card on the evening news anchor desk, but next time with some actual street-level, smoke-and-cordite reporting crede, they could do worse than try out Lara Logan.

I’d pay more attention.

It came as no surprise that the Star Tribune’s new ownership, Avista Capital Partners, dismissed a call from its Guild for an independent investigation into the rather serious charges asserted against publisher, Par Ridder. The presumption is that it did do knowing full well that the legal process is both glacial and unlikely to produce the kind of cleansing transparency appropriate for a high-profile business allegedly committed to reporting fully and fairly.

The Guild’s request was as appropriate as it was entirely futile. Both the Guild’s orginal letter and Harte’s response can be read here.

Publicly-traded companies regularly dodge initial calls for thorough, independent investigations into appearances of executive impropriety. So there was almost zero reason to think a privately-held concern like Avista would consent to something that holds the prospect of way too much transparency … perhaps even into such intriguing questions as, “Who really IS Avista?”

But even in an era when boardroom arrogance seems to know no bounds, it is discouraging that Chris Harte, Avista’s “journalism face”, doesn’t see the merit in an aggressive, public display of probity. The machinations of Avista are one kind of distraction, the pulpy travails of Par Ridder are another thing entirely, and allowing the legal process to run its course means a constant trickle of mocking and titter-worthy bombshell-ettes, none of which does anything to enhance the integrity of these cities’ major media player.

I asked Star Trib Guild officers, Pat Doyle and Chris Serres, if they had given any thought to suggesting that in lieu of a full, complete and open independent investigation, Ridder should at the very least be asked to recuse himself from his publisher duties … until the legal process has run its course? That would do something to mute skeptics and critics who will otherwise snicker at the appearance of a righteous news organization, committed to fairness, being managed by a guy accused of both petty thievery and clumsy conniving.

First though, the matter of their letter to Harte.

Said Doyle, “We thought the request was reasonable, no matter what the odds,” then adding, “but Harte’s response was not very satisfying, no.”

“What I also found interesting, [in Harte’s response], was that he didn’t make any defense or endorsement of Par. I don’t know what that means, but I thought it was interesting.” (Ironically interesting coming in the same week as George Bush offering a vigorous, unconditional endorsement of Alberto Gonzales).

Serres also thought the request was worth making, and insisted it wasn’t purely symbolic. A big part of the basic problem with current interaction between the Guild and management is, as he says, “Quite frankly, we don’t know who Chris Harte is.”

Or, as Doyle puts it, “There’s just so much we don’t know. Such as, who are we owned by? We don’t know if its 10 guys, 20 guys or 100 guys.”

While neither sees the twin distractions of a new, very private ownership group with an undisclosed agenda and a publisher under public ridicule as being all that much of a detriment to their daily job performance, neither issue is exactly an asset.

“This is getting to the point where our sources are asking about it,” says Serres of the Ridder matter. Hence the call for the kind of air-clearing an independent investigation might bring. “What did Harte say in his response, that our call somehow presumes the legal system is ‘flawed’? Well, yes. Our presumption is that the legal system IS flawed. It is both slow and most likely won’t be comprehensive enough.”

So what about asking for Ridder to step aside until the Avista-preferred legal process reaches a conclusion?

“That’s an interesting idea,” said Doyle.

Serres takes pains to emphasize that, “There is a tone of negativity over here that can be very counterproductive, and the Guild wants to avoid making matters like this with Par personal. We always try to avoid that in our dealings with management. Our letter to Harte, asking for an investigation, should not be seen as us making a swipe at Par. I mean, we don’t even know this guy. But there’s no denying this is a distraction we don’t need.”

Serres adds, a bit cryptically, “Part of the reason you don’t get personal in situations like this is that you have a sense that there are bigger people behind the scenes pulling strings, and that the people out front may just be these pawns in a larger action.”

As of June 4, the ubiquitous Andrew Zimmern will settle into a regular weekday gig at Hubbard Broadcasting’s FM 107. Zimmern will take the 1 to 3 pm slot, with The Satellite Sisters cut back an hour, 11 to 1, and Kevyn Burger also losing one hour, 9 to 11 am.

GM Dan Seeman concedes that Zimmern’s 10-12 weeks-a-year travel schedule will require a stable of regular contributors.

Zimmern is currently doing a Saturday morning show for KTLK-FM.

It was close, but “Mary Ellen”, one of the most ferocious leg-rasslers in Twin Cities history, beat out reader “Tom”, by 14 minutes in posting the Scarlett Johansson/Bob Dylan video of, “When the Deal Goes Down”.

My thanks to both, and if we can coordinate a gathering at say Robin Marty’s every other week “Drinking Liberally” get-togethers at the 331 Club, I’ll buy a beverage for each.

Here are their clips: Mary Ellen’s.

And Tom’s.

(They’re the same.)

THREE quick mini media reviews:

ONE: I caught most of Alberto Gonzales’ “testimony” on NPR while driving north last Thursday. As a product of the Watergate era and more televised Nixon press conferences than I care to remember, (the ones with the sweaty upper lip were the best), plus a few impromptu Spiro Agnew vs. inquisitors, Edwin Meese, James G. Watt and Ollie North circuses, I thought I had seen every possible variation on clumsy prevarication in high public officials … until Gonzales took his oath.

It was astonishing. It was so bad in fact that I couldn’t trust my own instincts. So I tuned back in at 8 Thursday night for NPR’s hour-long analysis with Nina Totenberg, not one to normally engage in hyperbole. Both Totenberg and her sources confirmed my gut reaction. A disaster of historic proportions. Unprepared, unprofessional and unabashedly clueless.

Formal reviews poured in the next day. But being the type who regularly thinks darker motivations for public perforemances often go unreported in the mainstream press, (because they can’t be verified by two or more on-record sources), I shifted to hardened cynic mode and asked myself if Gonzales, who we know had “prepared” for his testimony, belly-flopped on purpose. I mean, he’s obviously covering up for someone higher up, and we can all guess who. But did he perform spectacularly badly on purpose?

[Close Up: Eyes darting furiously, searching for a rational with a semblance of logic.] Could Gonzales’ performance be part of a distraction campaign? Yeah! That’s it! Distraction! He’s so pathetically inept he temporarily draws attention away from all the other colossal blunders and scandals of the Bush administration, taking all the focus and heat at least for another couple weeks, giving his mentors time to cobble together fallback Strategy “R” before throwing him under the bus.

OK, lets give that a 20% probability. With an 80% likelihood that Gonzales really is as entirely clueless and overwhelmed as he seems, and just another example of a “loyal Bushie” caught in the headlights. (By the way. I don’t recommend reading Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” while following either the US Attorney’s story or anything about Alberto Gonzales, Monica Goodling, or, God forbid, Rachel Paulose.)

TWO: With the action at my favorite northern Wisconsin roadhouse winding down early Saturday night — the three hard-smokin’ gals cleaned up on the penny slots and bought their gentlemen callers a round of $1.50 beers — I decided to tune in “Saturday Night Live”, assuming they couldn’t resist a Gonzales skit.

Ok, so I remembered Scarlett Johansson was hosting. Shoot me. But the answer on Gonzales was, “no”. They opened instead with Jason Sudeikis as Bush doing a press conference honing down the terms by which he’d allow “senior White House officials” to testify before the Judiciary Committee. Sudeikis does a better Bush than Seth Meyers, but for sheer spacey pugnacity no one can compare with Will Ferrell’s 15-watt George W.

Later, Meyers and Amy Poehler did a bit called, “Really?” in the middle of their “Weekend Update” shtick. For a satirical skit show that too often pulls punches that might earn it a little more smart crede AND a bigger laugh, the bit was remarkable for the undisguised contempt and derision it threw up at Bushworld. If by now anyone needed some kind of pop indicator of the irreversible implosion of this administration, they could hear it that one little skit.

Obviously, with the exception of the Star Tribune’s political section, everyone paying attention has concluded that this US Attorneys story is prima facie example of the essential corruption at the heart of the Bush/neo-conservative governing philosophy.

To put a sharper point on disgust and contempt, the Robert Smigel cartoon, (you can see it here on Crooks and Liars), was more angry than funny as it posited a Dick Cheney-ordered robot for torturing detainees. (Love the bit where the robot sodomizes “60 Minutes’ ” Steve Kroft.)

Did I mention Scarlett Johansson? Besides everything else, the woman can act. Witness: “Match Point”. (Be a Winner! Your name in print here if you’re the first to send me a link to the video Johansson did for Bob Dylan’s “Modern Times” CD. The one with the ’60s style Minnesota lake vacation imagery. I saw it once, but haven’t been able to connect since.)

THREE: Back in town Sunday night, I tuned in to “60 Minutes” having heard about a piece Anderson Cooper, on loan from CNN, had done on the “Stop Snitchin’” code being pushed by high-profile rappers and their corporate managers.

OK, its maybe six months to a year down the pike since, “Stop Snitchin’” stepped out in hip hop culture. But give “60 Minutes” credit for getting to it. (Basically the code admonishes the hip hop faithful to never assist the police in any way, not even to apprehend murderers and rapists.) Its hard to imagine a more counter-productive attitude if you’re trying to create wider sympathy for your cause, but hey, it sells.

Cooper got one rap star, “Killa’ Cam”, to sit for an interview and concede that selling the “Stop Snitchin’” idea was good for business, and that, conversely, even intimating that you had any kind of moral responsibility to help apprehend violent criminals was bad for business. Moreover — points for candor here — Killa’ Cam emphasized that no record company — including his, which is a division of Time-Warner — would never be so stupid as to step in and tell an artist to dial back on the misanthropy. That, after all, would have a negative impact on shareholder value.

In the wake of Don Imus, and the debate over the pop imagery that may have fueled Seung Cho’s rampage, it was telling that Cooper and “60 Minutes” couldn’t coax a Time Warner executive out in front of a camera.

Cooper, who hit every “60 Minutes” intonation cue in his set-up, followed a riveting piece by the under-used Lara Logan. Titled “Life in Baghdad” it was essentially the stories of two Iraqi families trying to survive our campaign of liberation. (So OK, go ahead and read, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City”. But expect your blood pressure to spike.)

One father, a beefy Tony Soprano-type, drops fresh bullet clips into his revolver to drive his kids to school every day. That is of course on the days a suicide bombing, or a raging gun battle or a security sweep doesn’t prevent them from leaving their house at all. (Had to smile at the guy cruising in a big, waddling Buick Park Avenue.)

Logan is pretty no-nonsense and ought to make more appearances on, say, “Face the Nation”. I caught her there once, and could tell her “Lets cut the bullshit” tone and line of questioning was a tad too raw for Bob Schieffer and his administration guests. Here’s a clip of one of Logan’s better pieces.

I’ve been waiting months for this one. By agreeing to publicly discuss and examine their culpability in so profound a failure/lapse should be an acid test for any editor … and publisher, certainly those who have ever nattered about journalistic “transparency”.

Sometimes your credibility rests on your ability to say you were wrong.