Media Curmudgeon

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July 25, 2005

Plamegate

While I was in Spain, blogging the Missouri J School Summer Conference for online masters degree students (a very disappointing experience because of the pettiness and defensiveness of one person’s response to my blogging), and on vacation in Weekapaug, RI, a lot has been going on in the media that I haven't blogged about, so it's time to catch up a little.

First, there is Plamegate, the controversy about protecting (or in the case of Time, Inc, not protecting) the source of a White House leak outing Valerie Plame as an undercover CIA agent. Plame is the wife of Joseph Wilson who outed the Bush administration for fibbing about Saddam Hussein's trying to buy uranium from Niger. You know all the details.

The questions about whether or not the whole hurricane of charges and counter charges, revelations and counter revelations hurts journalism’s or the White House’s credibility is best covered by such deep thinkers in the blogeshpere about journalism and the law as Jay Rosen in Press Think or Jeff Jarvis in Buzz Machine or Glenn Reynolds in Instapundit. By the way, the two best newspaper articles I’ve read about Plamegate are Frank Rich’s July 10 column, "We're Not in Watergate Anaymore" in the NY Times and Chris Lehman's July 18 column in The New York Observer. Rich is brilliant and Lehman blisters Novak better than anyone I’ve read. However, I’m more interested in the business and management implications of Plamegate.

From a business perspective, I don’t think Norman Pearlstine’s, Time, Inc.’s chief editorial officer, decision to turn over Matt Cooper’s notes to the grand jury will hurt neither Time’s overall credibility nor its business. Time has the best sales staff in the magazine business. The sales staff has superb relationships with itx advertisers, who buy on the basis of relationships, circulation, and demographics. In fact all the ink Time is getting over Plamegate might well help circulation, which would help business.

From a management perspective, I think Pearlstine’s decision was a big gaff. Time insiders and, especially, reporters think Pearlstine over-lawyered the decision. He has lost the support of his reporters, certainly the vitally important Washington Bureau.

Apparently Pearlstine, who has training as a lawyer, made his decision without getting the input of another person trained as a lawyer, Time Warner CEO Dick Parsons, and of Time, Inc. Chairman and CEO Ann Moore, which was probably a big mistake. By making the decision alone, Pearlstine will have to stand and fall alone. If he’d been smart, he would have gotten Parson’s and Moore’s buy in. If Stormin’ Norman can’t regain the support of his staff, he’ll be toast. In Texas Hold 'Em parlance, he went all-in with a losing hand.

I predict Pearlstine will be out within nine months (long enough for Time, Inc. to allow Pearlstine to save face) and replaced with someone with a strong journalistic reputation. That way Time, Inc. can say to sources, “We got rid of the person who turned over Cooper’s notes. We’ll never do that again and you can trust us now never to reveal our sources.” They have to do this to get back into the serious reporting game.

I’ve criticized The New York Times and its Publisher, Arthur Sulzberger for questionable business and management decisions in the past, but on Plamegate Sulzberger, Executive Editor Bill Keller, and the Times came out with a zillion brownie and credibility points. They went to the legal mat for Judith Miller, the reporter who wouldn’t reveal her sources and finally went to jail for civil contempt. The Times and Judith Miller gained credibility and stature.

From a business perspective, I don’t think the Times will gain a lot because it’s already at the top of the newspaper ad market and its ad income will continue to follow the overall downtrend in newspaper industry ad revenue. But from a management perspective I think Sulzberger gained back some credibility and respect of his staff and gets high marks as a principled and supportive manager.

By the way, if you want to send a supportive post card to Judith Miller in jail, her address is: Judith Miller, Inmate Number 45570083, Alexandria Detention Center, 2001 Mill Road, Alexandria, Virginia 22314. I sent her a card even though I was upset at her for carrying the Bush White House’s water in her Times stories about Saddam’s WMD.

Robert Novak, the conservative scum bag who isn’t in jail because everyone assumes he ratted on his sources to the investigating grand jury, broke the original story outing Plame. Novak works for the Chicago Sun Times, has a syndicated column, and appears on various, seemingly endlessly cancelled CNN political scream programs. The Sun Times or other papers that carry Novak’s column won’t drop him because right-wing readers still like him and being a coward doesn’t matter to them unless they can accuse a Democrat of being a coward. CNN might use the incident as an excuse to drop Novak, which it should do but won’t because the political scream shows are about angry arguing and blaming, not about credibility.

Also, CNN knows if it drops Novak he’ll go right over to Fox where he belongs. I suspect that Novak has been an undercover agent for Fox at CNN all along and that Karl Rove knows it. But Rove will never out Novak because Novak helps the Bush administration and hurts CNN’s ratings, which is the right strategy for an undercover agent—undermine the enemy, in this case, CNN.

Posted by Charles Warner at 10:50 AM | Comments (0) | Print |

July 6, 2005

Some Students' Responses

Several students and blog readers responded to my posts about the Missouri J School summer conference, parts of which I am posting below. I am withholding the students’ names (using anonymous sources) in order to protect them from possible reprisals.

“I read your comments and summaries of the presentations at the J-school. I also thought Margaret was very defensive, and that people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones about typos, etc. I am a compulsive editor, and noticed many typos in the course materials. The mistake from hell was in Esther's presentation, where she accused "Time" of the sins of "Newsweek" on the Quran abuse scandal, and the Seattle case study was riddled with typos and basic grammar mistakes. And I agree with your basic point that it seemed as if the assumptions of the instructors were kind of stuck in a retro era. I would have been much more interested in the blurring of commercial and political speech and how that affects news credibility, what value we can add in an era where everyone has text email and cameras in their phones, etc. The high road that Margaret didn't take would have been not to mention it at all, or to write something in the vein of "Oh well, that's what makes horse races."

To me, meeting everyone was the best part. And I made contacts with several of the foreign journalists, as well. These were good things.”

“I've been following the mediacurmugeon blog controversy over the last few days. Fun! Fun! I have two quick comments. One, I'm quite sure that the reason the conference planners didn't want (us) students to blog during the conference is because they were afraid of what we might say since there was such a stink over the conference itself. I, for one, was rather stunned at the less than stellar planning done on the part of "The World's Greatest Journalism School" aka TWGJS. With less than a month to go before the conference (probably right about the time you were asking about blogging) several students were busy zipping off strongly worded e-mails about the program. That may have been part of the reason for them turning you down on your idea. Maybe it wasn't so much that the faculty was behind the times as much as it was that they didn't want the students to have the power of the "pen" given their level of angst.

Two, as for Duffy's comment on the student board regarding your spelling and grammar...To be "The World's Greatest Journalism School" (or was it the galaxy's greatest?), there was no sign of a professional editor or proofreader to be found! I was appalled by the mistakes on EVERY SINGLE handout we received. Particularly egregious was Lee Wilkins' case study, which put Seattle in the well-known conservative EASTERN part of Washington State. Even Dr. Thorson said that Time Magazine published the story about the Koran abuses, not Newsweek. COME ON! The conference was supposed to be about credibility and getting things right. The credibility of the faculty as a whole was hurt by their obvious lack of preparation for the program. Fortunately for me (and I agree with you on this point) my classmates were truly inspirational and forward thinking. It was an honor to associate with them.”

Or this comment from a blogger, a blog reader, and graduate of the J School:

“Professor Warner, not sure if you saw this post yet -- irepoter.org I had sent the author a link to your speech and guess she liked it.

I did to — and I was also disappointed in the reaction from some of your colleagues. I tried to find some of the faculty blogs she mentioned, and all I could find were some lame personal web sites that hadn’t been updated since 2003. Meanwhile, this is just one example of what KU is doing.

I can handle a lot of things, but my alma mater getting shown up by KU is more than I can take.”

I guess my comments about being behind the times hit a raw nerve. However, I was not referring to one faculty member, Professor Clyde Bentley, who is on the envelope of technological change. He was not at the J School summer conference because he was invited to South Korea to participate in a conference sponsored by Oh My News, the South Korean citizen journalism news Web site, and the foremost one in the world. Clyde lead the innovative effort of the J School to put up a citizen journalism cite, My Missourian. Check it out. It is the wave of the future, not the dinosaur blogs (newspapers) that the summer conference focused on (almost exclusively).

Posted by Charles Warner at 2:49 PM | Comments (0) | Print |