Author: terencef

Wither the Newsmags?

As newspapers and magazines stumble along the rocky road from print to digital, two recent signposts seem to point the way forward: Time Warner’s decision to spin off Time Inc., its magazine division, and Newsweek’s termination of its print edition after 80 years of continuous publication.

The third general newsmagazine. U.S. News and World Report, went digital earlier and now is known mostly for its rankings of colleges and hospitals and the like.

What would Henry Luce think ?

His baby, Time, and its sister magazines, including People, Sports Illustrated and In-Style and others, will continue to appear in print, at least for the foreseeable. And why not? Together, they generate $3.1 billion in revenues, nearly half of the total of the nation’s 10 top-grossing magazines.

But that is apparently not enough for Time Warner, which is cutting them loose, along with some $500 million to $1 billion in debt, so the parent company can concentrate on its more profitable film and cable businesses.

In the fourth quarter of last year, circulation and advertising at Time Inc. were down sharply and revenues were off seven per cent, which is probably what prompted Time Warner to try to sell the magazine division and, failing that, cast it adrift.

Looking on the bright side, Time Inc. insiders say they will now at least be able to pour their revenues into their own magazines and websites, rather than Time Warner’s deep pockets. And this week, they were celebrating the success of their recent cover, “Bitter Pill,” Stephen Brill’s remarkable, 24,000-word takedown of the hospital industry, which was their best-selling issue in two years. It was proof, again, that people will seek out important reporting when it comes along.

But the trend lines for newsmagazines are hard to ignore. Even in these harsh economic times, I find it hard to believe that the news weeklies are not the vital magazines that I have known over the years.

During the eight years I spent abroad as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in the Middle East and Far East, Time and Newsweek were essential reading. In those pre-internet years, they pulled the week’s news and trends together and kept me in touch with the world beyond my own bailiwick. Their correspondents were among my best and best-paid competitors. They roamed the world, usually traveling first class. Richard Clurman, Time’s longtime Chief of Correspondents, was famous for booking two first-class seats: one for himself and one for his briefcase.

But the harsh fact today is that both the editorial and economic models of newsmagazines are broken.

Newsweek was sold for a dollar and a mountain of debt to the late Sydney Harmon. He merged it with the Daily Beast and still could not support it costly print edition. The brand continues with a vibrant website and has announced plans for a paid digital version targeted to a global audience. But it remains to be seen whether that will thrive.

Worse yet, the news weekly editorial model no longer works. With the internet, I no longer need weekly summaries and analysis of news that I get — indeed, can’t escape — 24/7 electronically. Realizing this, both Time and Newsweek switched to signed essay and long-form formats that are frequently well-written and well-edited. Witness the Brill piece.

But are they viable in the long run? That is uncertain at best.

A Sad Day

Today, March 19, 2013, is a tragic anniversary.

With one exception: It is the 10th birthday of my dog, Red, a fine Borzoi, who is a splendid companion and steady friend. Happy Birthday, Red.

But it is the 10th anniversary of the unjustified, immoral, wrong-headed, foolish, ill-conceived and flat-out wrong war against the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq.

I hold no brief for Saddam and his perverse sons and dreadful reign of terror. But Iraqis, in time, would have dealt with Saddam. It was only George W. and Dick Cheney and Paul W. and Don R. who thought we had to do it for them.

Actually, what they thought — to the degree they thought it through at all — was that they could topple Saddam quickly (right) and get out promptly(wrong), and a Jeffersonian Democracy would bloom in the Iraqi desert in his wake (Really wrong.) And, they could finish what George H.W. left unfinished a decade earlier. Sheer fantasy.

So they listened to the siren song of Ahmed Chalabi and other Iraqi hucksters about how we would be welcomed as liberators and all would be well.

Instead, we spent $2.2 trillion and 4,200 American lives and countless Iraqi lives to produce what? A fractured, violent excuse for a country that is likely to split in thirds, with Kurds running the show in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south.

Hardly worth the price.

Anyway. Red had a fine birthday, even if he didn’t know it was his day. He got an extra treat after dinner.

WOODWARD VS SPERLING: A TINY TEMPEST

Tom Brokaw had it right on NBC’s Meet The Press when he described the war of words between White House aide Gene Sperling and journalist Bob Woodward as “a speck that became a sandstorm overnight.”

Overblown is the word for it, since Sperling clearly was not threatening Woodward when he wrote in an e-mail that Woodward would “regret” accusing President Obama of “moving the goalposts” in his budget negotiations with the Republicans in Congress.

But Woodward chose to make an issue of it publicly, and repeatedly. Finally, on the Sunday shows this week, they both called for a truce and promised to put the argument behind them. We can only hope.

But this manufactured tempest did focus a spotlight on the often combative relations between the White House press corps and the Administrations they cover. It is, as the Daily Download’s Howard Kurtz described it on Reliable Sources on CNN, “a contact sport.” And it has been for years.

White House Press Secretaries often fight back when their respective presidents are criticized in print or on the air. It is a deliberate tactic, designed to intimidate reporters and make them think twice about taking the President to task.

Ron Ziegler and Larry Speakes were famously nasty in their tilts with reporters, as was the sarcastic Ari Fleischer. Jody Powell had an explosive temper and would rip into reporters when he thought they were overly critical of his boss, Jimmy Carter. As the New York Times White House correspondent , I was on the receiving end of blowback from Powell when I wrote critically of President Carter’s handling of the Iran-hostage crisis, but Jody would blow his stack and then forget about it. He did not hold a grudge.

“The closer a press secretary is to his President, the more angry and defensive they get,” Bill Plante, the longtime CBS News White House correspondent said Sunday. “When they are totally invested in the President, it clouds their view and they are less useful to us.”

Other press secretaries, like Marlin Fitzwater and Mike McCurry take a more gentle approach, often using humor to disarm, rather than the verbal sledgehammer. They are both considered to be among the most successful press secretaries.

The current incumbent, Jay Carney, is famous for the angry e-mails and phone calls he makes to reporters who criticize President Obama. Does his approach work? Many reporters in the White House press room think it makes him less effective.

But, of course, all loyalty in the White House is vertical, and if the President thinks his press secretary has it right, then he has fulfilled his first obligation.

And the attacks, no matter how angry, are rarely personal. Both parties — the media and the officials — recognize the arguments for what they are: a tactic.

CRISIS FATIGUE

Crisis fatigue: we’ve all got it. With good reason.

Last year it was the Debt Ceiling standoff. At New Year’s, it was the famous Fiscal Cliff. Now it is the awkwardly-named Sequester. A month from now, the threatened shutdown of government. After that, the debt ceiling. Again.

In all, that ‘s five cliff-hanging, manufactured budget and spending “crises” in less than a year. No wonder the public — and the media — are sick of it.

The challenge for news organizations is to retain some grasp on reality while reporting the political bluster.

Obviously, if the President barnstorms around the country warning darkly of the worst consequences of the sequester, that has to be reported. When he and his cabinet secretaries talk about defense jobs that will be cut, children who will be cast out of Headstart, air traffic controllers that will be furloughed, airport security lines lengthened, all of that should and will be on the evening news.

When Republican leaders insist that they have made all the compromises, that the government is spending us into penury, that the sequester was really the President’s idea in the first place, that our national security is threatened — all those claims should and will get airtime and ink and digital digits.

But at the same time, news organizations need to point out the smoke and mirrors on both sides.

They need to explain that not all the most drastic cuts need to be made immediately, if at all. They need to remind their readers and listeners that agencies retain some flexibility in how they administer the reductions and, most important, that Congress and the President can reverse and replace the sequester at any point.

Today, on the eve of the sequester deadline, the media are doing it. The off-lead headline of the Washington Post: “Sequester Spin Gets Ahead of Reality: Despite alarms, rhetoric, neither side can be sure how badly cuts will hurt.”

The New York Times’s off-lead: “Parties Focus on the Positive as Budget Cuts Draw Near.” “The sword of Damocles,” writes Jonathan Weisman, “turns out to be made of Styrofoam.”

NPR debunked some of the most extreme claims this morning and Chuck Todd on MSNBC did a good, two-minute, “sequester-made-simple” segment that pointed out that each side was nakedly playing to its political base.

What no news organization has needed to point out is the simple truth: this is no way to run a government. No one has needed to say that this makes Washington look silly. Nobody has taken the time to say that the whole Sequester debate has damaged U.S. credibility abroad.

That would be too obvious.

NOW TO WORK

With a splendid second inauguration behind him, Barack Obama sits down at his desk this morning to grapple with a huge agenda of problems and opportunities, challenges and openings, dangers and adventures at home and abroad.

“America’s possibilities are limitless,” the President proclaimed yesterday beneath a blue sky and bright sun, “for we possess all the qualities that this world without boundaries demands: youth and drive, diversity and openness, an endless capacity for risk and a gift for reinvention.”

We will need all of that and more, and so will he.

Speaking from the West Front of the Capitol, the President sounded like the most confident lame duck in recent memory (think George W. confronting the morass in Iraq, Bill Clinton already tempted by Monica, Ronald Reagan, tiring and already embroiled in the early stages of Iran-Contra.) Obama was unapologetic about his agenda, from immigration reform to gay rights, and once again invited Congressional Republicans to join him in pursuing it. The GOP Speaker of the House, John Boehner, squinted into the sun with a sour look. The contrast between the two men spoke volumes.

Looking back over the last six months or so, say, since the nomination of Mitt Romney, the most striking development in American politics is not the re-election of the President or the relative status quo in Congress, it is the virtual disintegration of the Republican Party.

Who leads that party today and what does it stand for?

Is it Boehner, who cannot control his own caucus? Is it Senator Mitch McConnell, who sat expressionless in the crowd of faces behind the President yesterday? Four years ago, he laid down a marker by declaring his number one objective to be confining President Obama to a single term.

Is it Eric Cantor, who looked none too happy himself on the dais? Is it the Tea Party, with its response of “No” to virtually everything the President proposes?

What does the GOP stand for? Smaller government, yes; reduced debt, yes. But is less really more? Is it an answer to persistent unemployment and sluggish growth? To persistent challenges abroad? What is the affirmative Republican strategy and who will articulate it, not just now but in the run-up to 2016? Paul Ryan? Marco Rubio? Who will reach out to an increasingly diverse America?

Never have there been so many unanswered questions about the policies and future of a major American political party.

And yet, history illustrates that political fortunes are cyclical, that a party that reaches its nadir will come back up, that politics abhors a vacuum. Republicans remain powerful in statehouses, especially in the south and southwest, and their financial backers are far from tapped out. So the status quo will change.

But it is hard, in the first full week of a new Presidential term, to see when and how and who will lead that change.

A Literary Larceny

A Literary Larceny

In the interests of law and order, and the historical record, I have to report a larceny.

It’s a literary larceny, perhaps not punishable in prison, but a theft, nonetheless.

In the course of Hemingway and Gelhorn, Philip Kaufman’s docu-melodrama that ran — and ran — for two-and-a-half hours Monday night, May 27, on HBO, the script writers crafted a scene in which Martha Gelhorn, with battlefield blood on her shirt, laments to Ernest Hemingway that she cannot write about the war. She doesn’t know enough about it, she says, to write about it. Writer’s block, you know.

The Great Man, standing in a t-shirt and pounding on his portable typewriter, looks up irritably and says: “There’s nothing to writing, Gelhorn, you just sit down at your typewriter and bleed.”

It is a memorable line, but Hemingway never said it. My father, Red Smith, the late sports columnist, did.

Not only is the line stolen without credit, it is misquoted. The correct quote, attributed in print to Red Smith by the columnist Walter Winchell in 1949, reads: “Writing is easy. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” I heard my father repeat it many times.

Was it original with Red Smith? Not necessarily. The sportswriter, Paul Gallico, said something similar in 1946, and others are quoted before that.

But not Hemingway.

Harry C. McPherson Jr. R.I.P.

Harry McPherson, who served as counsel, speechwriter and confidant to Lyndon Johnson during the tumultuous days of the civil rights revolution and the agony of Vietnam, is dead at 82. After a battle with bone cancer, a wise and warm voice has been stilled, and Washington is a poorer place for it.

This would be terrible news at any time, but it is especially painful now. He was just about to screen a final version of a new documentary, “Time and Chance: The Political Education of Harry McPherson,” produced by Les Francis of The Washington Media Group. I did the narration for it and some of the interviews. In it, Harry does what he did best: he shares the stories and lessons he learned in his half-century in the top circles of Washington politics.

Sitting in his law office or in his book-lined study in Kensington, he talked to the camera in that soft, easy, bemused manner about driving north from Austin as a fresh and green law school graduate in the closing days of the Eisenhower Administration to take a job for LBJ, who was then the Senate Majority Leader. He came across the Memorial Bridge about 10 p.m. and saw the White House for the first time and realized that the President was in there.

“This was the fellow that I had mocked along with other students sitting around Shultz Beer Garden down in Austin, just thought he was just a big, grinning fellow without much depth at all, pretty much the Eisenhower of Herb Block’s cartoons,”
Harry recalled. “Well, when you’re driving an old Buick full of everything you own, Eisenhower didn’t seem like an amenable duck. He seemed like somebody who had been a five star general and he was running things, running this whole government.”

That was the first of many lessons that Harry learned about the realities of power and politics in Washington. He talked of how LBJ taught him the art of compromise as the way to get things done in the Senate — a lost art, it seems, these days — but the only way to work through the southern conservatives who chaired the major committees in those days. He recalled how LBJ worked with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the master politician and the master orator, two opposites from vastly different backgrounds, working together to get something important done.

Harry learned that in Washington, the worst moments can lead to the best accomplishments, how the rioting that followed Dr. King’s assassination prepared the ground for the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which banned discrimination in the sale and rental of housing; how Lyndon Johnson, a man from the deep south, would get the opportunity to appoint Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court.

But for all the good that Harry and his mentor could accomplish on the domestic front, their crucible would be far away, in the jungles of Vietnam. In the interviews for the film, Harry recalls LBJ’s anguish over a war that he knew was deeply unpopular and unwinnable, not even necessary, and yet inescapable.

He recalls LBJ saying: ‘They’d kill us if we back down, they’d kill us.’ “And they would be the Republicans.” Harry said, without a trace of bitterness.

In 1967, Harry came back from a two-week visit to Vietnam convinced that the war would be the ruin of Johnson’s presidency. He shared his thoughts with Johnson, but did not break with him over the war, lest he lose his seat at the table. But by March 18, 1968, with then Senator Robert F. Kennedy mounting a challenge from the left and Richard M. Nixon campaigning from the right, Harry sat down and wrote LBJ a 10-page memo that minced no words. I have a copy of it on my desk.

“I think the course we seem to be taking now,” Harry wrote in the first sentence, “will lead either to Kennedy’s nomination or Nixon’s election, or both.” He urged Johnson not to sacrifice his presidency “to the bullish conduct of an unpopular war.”

That was vintage McPherson: loyal, but candid and direct.

In the end, of course, Johnson made his own decision and famously announced on March 31, just two weeks after receiving Harry’s memo, on national television that “I shall not seek and I will not accept” the Democratic party’s nomination for another term. Harry describes in the film how he labored over the body of that momentous speech, but that Johnson wrote the final lines announcing his decision and sent them directly to the operator to put them in the teleprompter script. Then he called Harry and asked him what he thought of what he had written and was about to read. “I’m very sorry, Mr. President,” was all Harry could get out, “very sorry.”

Johnson, Harry said, was “a man who wanted more than anything on earth to put every child through college and take care of every grandma and grandpa who is sick and old and poor,” but couldn’t escape “this awful war.”

The sadness today is that this film is to be shown at the LBJ presidential library in coming weeks and before an audience of his enormous circle of friends in Washington. The plan was that Harry would be there to receive the applause and answer questions.

Now he won’t.

*

The Palmetto Payoff

In the 19th century, sailing ships plying the lucrative China trade out of Baltimore had a harsh but economic way of dealing with crew at the end of a two-year voyage. With the homeport in sight, the captain would use the heavy boom to knock a crewman into the water, thereby banking his pay. It was known as The Baltimore Payoff.

Mitt Romney got the Palmetto Payoff Saturday night, a swift hit upside the head from South Carolina Republicans that shattered his image as the party’s inevitable nominee. His double-digit defeat at the hands of the resurgent Newt Gingrich changed the equation in the Republican race and assured that this already long primary season will continue into the spring. Romney may yet win the nomination, but not without a fight.

Florida is a different ball game, as should be apparent in tonight’s debate on NBC. The Massachusetts Moderate is likely to swing hard at Gingrich, depicting the former Speaker as a failed leader. Gingrich, if he is as smart as he thinks he is, will adopt a more Presidential posture to help wavering Republicans envision him in the Oval Office.

The debates are more than just Reality TV.

They have become the central focus of the campaign in which candidates define or destroy themselves. And for Gingrich, whose campaign is still under-financed, they are the ultimate in free TV. It was no surprise, then, when Gingrich promised on Saturday night to challenge President Obama to seven three-hour debates during the general election campaign. No sitting President would give his opponent such a gift of free exposure, of course, but the prospect enhanced Gingrich’s image as a scrappy fighter willing to confront Obama.

Since we have to wait two more weeks for the Superbowl, tonight’s debate will have to fill the void.

Forgive Me

I just watched the Republican Presidential debate from South Carolina. I just watched the remaining four candidates argue about everything from abortion to immigration to taxes to tax returns. It left me with one puzzling question:

WHERE DO THEY GET THESE PEOPLE IN THE AUDIENCE?

Who are these simpletons who cheer wildly at every cheap, transparent, pandering, intellectually empty applause line?
What are they thinking? Are they thinking? Are they so excited about being in the audience that they become robots?

WHERE DO THEY GET THESE PEOPLE?

Are they really going to choose the nominee of the Grand Old Party? Are they the Grand Old Party?

WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

A Class Act

Jon Huntsman withdrew from the Republican Presidential sweepstakes today in the same classy fashion that he conducted it.

He acknowledged the reality of his single-digit standing the the polls in South Carolina, endorsed his fellow Mormon Mitt Romney as the candidate with the best chance of challenging Barak Obama, and preserved his option to run again in 2016, should he choose to. The only embarrassed player in the drama was The State, South Carolina’s largest newspaper, which endorsed Huntsman hours before he withdrew. Next time, the paper’s editorial board had better check its traps before publishing.

Huntsman’s “suspension” of his campaign (a la Herman Cain, no one simply quits a campaign these days,) is a huge boost for Romney. Even if Huntsman was only going to win five or six per cent of the vote in South Carolina, the vast majority of those ballots will go to Romney now, further cementing Mitt’s lock on the nomination.

It is Romney’s to lose now.