Brooke’s a living doll

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve already confessed to a small but harmless addiction to the blog Go Fug Yourself, dedicated to otherwise-lovely stars and starlets (and aspiring starlets, and spawn of starlets) and their execrable fashion choices.

Today what caught my eye was former child star/model and present-day actress Brooke Shields. Surely, if anyone could wear just about anything and look beautiful, it would be this lady.

But here she is, looking for all the world like her own Madame Tussaud’s wax dummy, dressed in an outfit that looks as though the six-foot tall Shields inexplicably decided to go shopping in the petite section:

brookedoll.jpg

Cronkite, opinion journalism, and a changing press: Part II

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I decided it was high time for a repeat of this series (first posted in December of 2006) on how the press came to consider its function to be changing popular opinion rather than informing the public. Here’s the second of two parts (the first is here.)]

In his introduction to that Cronkite interview featured in Part I, Dick Gordon writes:

It was February 1968, and in a three minute editorial essay on the CBS Evening news Cronkite quite simply changed the course of history. On that night, the anchor told Americans that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable; that the generals and pundits were wrong…

Think about that for a moment. Cronkite, a news anchor, goes on a trip to Vietnam (I can’t find any information on how long it lasted, but my guess is a couple of weeks at most). This happens around the time of the Tet Offensive, and he’s briefed on that, among other things. Then he returns home. With no particular military expertise—and, as it turns out, no basic understanding of the strategic realities of the Tet Offensive itself—he comes to the opinion that the war cannot be won.

Although prior to this he’s always considered his role to be the reporting of facts and events, he now develops the idea that he must use his bully pulpit, and the influence he’s gained throughout his years as a solid and relatively nonpartisan newsman, to tell the “truth” that the government and the military have been keeping from the American people.

Why Cronkite decided to make that transition is still somewhat mysterious, although I aired some theories about it in Part I. Of course, there’s no doubt that Cronkite had—and has—a right to his opinion; but we’re not talking about merely having an opinion. Did he have a right to leap over the traditional boundaries of news reporting and to intone, in a voice almost all Americans had grown to implicitly trust and revere, that the situation was hopelessly stalemated?

The rules about reporting were there for a reason, after all. The responsibility journalists have is an awesome one; we rely on them for the information on which we base our votes in a republic. Journalists need to make sure that the information they convey is correct, properly sourced, accurate. But anchors are generalists, not experts—except in a very narrow field, that of conveying the news. They are good writers and talkers. They are able to keep their calm with a camera on them, and even to ad lib if necessary. But reporters should guard against the hubris of thinking that they’ve become expert in every field they cover.

In his broadcast of February 1968, Cronkite was careful to say in his introduction that what he was about to say was “speculative, personal, subjective.” He then indicates he doesn’t know who won the Tet campaign. He goes on to list a series of battles and conflicts that haven’t been resolved to his satisfaction; it’s all a stalemate, the whole thing.

He then makes a rather extraordinary leap, saying it’s clear this will always be the case. He knows that North Vietnam can—and most definitely will—match us for every measure we can come up with, not just in the past but in the future.

In fact, in clinical terms, one might say Cronkite is speaking of his own weariness and depression in the face of the ongoing conflict. He offers no proof of his assertions of hopeless quagmire, even for Tet—he just doesn’t know. But his language is the language of emotion, not facts or strategy. He is dispirited and disillusioned, experiencing a loss of faith more than anything else:

We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.

He calls the conclusion that we are “mired in stalemate” the “only realistic” one. And then he makes the most peculiar declaration of all:

…in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

So, even if Tet turns out to have been a last-ditch effort for the North and the Vietcong, and if the enemy really does prove to have nothing left (“his last big gasp”) before submitting to negotiations—Cronkite sees the US “not as victors, but as honorable people who…did the best they could.”

But under the circumstances, why wouldn’t the US then be negotiating as victors? We see that, even when Cronkite posits a relatively optimistic position as a hypothetical, he still can’t bring himself to draw the proper conclusions from it: that it would represent at least some sort of victory. What comes across instead is an utter weariness, a personal one: that of Walter Cronkite himself.

Cronkite remains exceedingly proud of this broadcast. He’s often called “avuncular,” but I think the following statement of his could be more rightly called paternalistic:

There is a point at which it seems to me if an individual reporter has gained a reputation of being honest, fair as can be, and helps the American people in trying to make a decision on a major issue, I think we ought to take that opportunity.

This illustrates better than anything I can think of the slippery slope that comes from being a reporter and especially an anchorperson. For it’s clear that Cronkite had come to believe in his own persona, and to feel that it conferred a certain amount of wisdom on him. If he is honest and fair and trusted in his reportage of the facts, then he seems to think it follows that his own personal opinions and judgments—even about matters outside his field of expertise, journalism itself—are also reliable ones. And that he is therefore qualified to advise the American people in decisions they make on matters of national and military policy.

So, how wrong was Cronkite about Tet? About as wrong as can be, it turns out. History has declared unequivocally that there were winners and losers in Tet: it was a grand strategy that failed miserably for the North in the tactical military sense but succeeded beyond its wildest dreams as a propaganda ploy—due in large part to Cronkite and his colleagues in the MSM.

One of the oddest things about Cronkite isn’t what he did then; it’s that he’s still proud of it today. I’ve read and listened to a number of his interviews on the subject; at no time does he even address the fact that he was wrong about Tet in the military sense—nor do his questioners bring it up. Is this reticence on their part a show of respect for the frailty of an elderly man? Or are both he and his interviewers largely unaware of the discrediting facts that have been uncovered and widely aired in the intervening decades? Or do they not care if they were wrong about those things, because, after all, they were pursuing that “higher truth?”

The “lower” truth (otherwise known as the actual truth) is that Tet was a disaster for the Vietcong and the North—especially the Vietcong, who never recovered from the blow. But, in the end , it didn’t matter. How they managed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat was detailed in the definitive work on the subject, Peter Braestrup’s 1978 analysis of MSM coverage of Tet, entitled “The Big Story.”

…the nationwide Vietcong offensive turned out to be an “unmitigated disaster” for the communist side. But the media consensus was just the opposite—an “unmitigated defeat” for the United States.

Cronkite, along with several hundred reporters from two dozen countries, focused on how the Vietcong guerrillas managed to blast their way into the U.S. Embassy compound (but didn’t make it past the Marines in the lobby). War correspondents were also impressed by the view from the cocktail bar atop the Caravelle Hotel: C-47s, equipped with three Gatling guns on one side, were strafing Vietcong pockets in Cholon, the capital’s twin city 2½ miles away.

Yet the Vietcong didn’t reach a single one of their objectives and lost most of their 45,000-strong force in their attacks against 21 cities. It was also a defeat that convinced North Vietnam’s leaders to send their regular army—the NVA—south of the 17th parallel to pick up where the Vietcong left off.

If you want to read a summary of the conclusions Braestrup—a seasoned war reporter and former Marine who had served in Korea—reached in his book, please see this. You’d do well to read the whole thing; it’s rich in important and informative detail.

Interestingly enough, Braestrup doesn’t posit press political bias as a major part of the problem. The real difficulty was sheer ignorance, especially about anything military. Here are just a few of the MSM-created myths about Tet that Braestrup effectively destroys:

There had been no warning of a coming offensive.

The offensive was a victory for Hanoi.

The North Vietnamese military initiative bared the unreliability and inefficiency of our own allies, the South Vietnamese.

The characteristic American response was to destroy city districts and villages with overwhelming, indiscriminate firepower.

The sapper raid on the American embassy, the fighting in Hue, and the siege of Khe Sanh typified the war.

Khe Sanh was to be America’s Dien Bien Phu.

How did the press get it so very wrong?

The press corps lacked military experience and the ability to grasp and present matters of strategy and tactics…The press’s lack of knowledge and maturity resulted in a lack of discrimination in the presentation of hastily gathered or incomplete facts and contributed to the disaster theme.

The views of experienced military commentators like Joseph Kraft and Hanson Baldwin and the analyses of Douglas Pike were virtually ignored. The press reflected American ignorance of Vietnamese language and culture, had no expertise in the area of pacification, and almost no sources on the South Vietnamese government or army.

…The press was impressionable. General Bruce Palmer succinctly summed up the problem when he stated that the foe “took the battle down around the Caravelle Hotel and, so, from the standpoint of the average reporter over there, it was the acorn that fell on the chicken’s head and it said ‘The sky is falling.'”

And then you have what I think are the three most important press failings of all, of which Cronkite is guilty as charged, their staying power reflected in his inordinate pride in himself even today, a pride that persists in the face of a book like “The Big Story” (one wonders whether Cronkite has even read it):

There was no willingness to admit error or correct erroneous reporting after the fact. The classic example was the Associated Press’s continued assertion that sappers had entered the U.S. Embassy building in Saigon more than twelve hours after it was clear the attack had been repulsed on the grounds.

…By the time of Vietnam, it had become professionally acceptable in some media to allow reporters to “explain” news, not merely report it…

…In their commentary on events in Vietnam, reporters “projected” to the American public their own opinions and fears based on incomplete data and their own inclinations.

Has any of this changed today? I think things have gotten worse, if anything; the MSM failures illustrated by the press coverage of Tet have become institutionalized in the intervening years.

Tet was a turning point all right, but in a very different way than Cronkite envisioned it: it marked the beginning of a special and destructive type of MSM hubris, in which our own media—without realizing it was doing so, and without meaning to—became, effective ly, the propaganda arm of the enemy.

Look for the Union label—in the newpaper and auto industry meltdowns (and the Obama solution for the latter)

The New Neo Posted on by

Unions have figured prominently in the talks concerning the fates of two moribund companies in two troubled American industries: the Boston Globe and Chrysler. The first dispute is happening without intervention from the federal government, while the second is proceeding with the assistance of the Obama administration’s tender mercies.

Let’s see how it’s all going. The WaPo announces that the Globe’s parent company the NY Times has now threatened to close the Globe within 60 days, announcing that it will file a notice of intent as required under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification law (that’s a lot of newspapers in one sentence, isn’t it?).

The action may just be a bargaining chip designed to force the recalcitrant Globe unions to their knees; the unions think so, calling it a “bullying” tactic. Or the Times may really mean it—after all, there’s no love lost between New York and Boston (as former Globe columnist Eileen McNamara says, the Times “has treated New England’s largest newspaper like a cheap whore. It pimped her out for profit during the booming 1990s and then pillaged her when times got tough…”).

Well, what’s a newspaper to do? Fail to react by making cuts when times (or The Times) get rough?

Yesterday I wrote about some of the market forces that have pummeled not just the Times and the Globe, but newspapers around the country. These papers have also lost some of their ability to react flexibly to changing economic realities because of the growth and power of the unions involved.

If you look carefully at the WaPo article, you’ll see this interesting paragraph at the very end [emphasis mine]:

The Globe quoted the head of the Teamsters local, which represents the newspaper’s drivers, as saying his union had come up with the $2.5 million in salary and benefit cuts demanded by the company. But the Times Co. is also said to be seeking to eliminate seniority rules and lifetime job guarantees for some union members.

I’m trying to think of other professions with lifetime job guarantees, and all I can come up with are tenure for professors and teachers, and members of the Supreme Court. Is it usual for these to be offered to newspaper employees? And what’s the history of this policy at the Globe? Here’s a bit of background:

All full-time Globe employees hired before Jan. 1, 1992, were given lifetime job guarantees and are not subject to layoffs, according to the Guild contract. Currently, 195 of the Guild’s 700 members have lifetime jobs, including [union President] Totten and three other top Guild leaders.

This article goes into the present situation in greater depth. Which Globe unions are involved? It seems that drivers lack such guarantees, pressmen have them but won’t say exactly how many of their members qualify, and mailers revealed that 145 out of a total of their 245 members are guaranteed jobs for life.

Some concessions were recently made on this score by unions in a meeting that lasted until the wee hours of the morning. The article is murky about exactly what they might be.

I’m not anti-union; I understand that, historically, they protected workers who needed protecting, and gave some power to the previously powerless. But, as with so many things, there’s been an over-correction, resulting in a situation in which the unions are not necessarily doing their members any favors in the long run. If a company’s hands are tied with unrealistic and over-the-top union benefits (such as lifetime guarantees appear to be), everyone will go down with the ship. In such a situation lifetime guarantees are worth exactly nothing—because the company itself will be dead.

Once the government enters the picture, however, all bets are off. This brings us to the second situation: Chysler. President Obama showed his dramatically pro-union nature very clearly during the campaign, at least to anyone who was listening. He cannot afford to waver; unions are the source of a great deal of his money and his voters, and he’s come through for them in the Chrysler negotiations, big time.

Megan McArdle sarcastically details what’s been going on (and remember, Ms. McArdle supported Obama, so you can hardly call her a biased conservative):

Hedge fund managers, you see, have a civic duty to lose large amounts of other peoples’ money in order to ensure that the UAW makes as few sacrifices as possible in a bankruptcy…Which brings us to the real question, which is, when did it become the government’s job to intervene in the bankruptcy process to move junior creditors who belong to favored political constituencies to the front of the line? Leave aside the moral point that these people lent money under a given set of rules, and now the government wants to intervene in our extremely well-functioning (and generous) bankruptcy regime solely in order to save a favored Democratic interest group.

No, leave that aside for the nonce, and let’s pretend that the most important thing in the world, far more interesting than stupid concepts like the rule of law, is saving unions. What do you think this is going to do to the supply of credit for industries with powerful unions?

In order to understand just how unusual and lopsided the UAW/Chrysler deal is, just read the NY Times on the subject. Calling it the “Cadillac of bankruptcies” (and here I thought Cadillac was a GM product)—at least where the unions are concerned—the Times points out that the UAW:

…has received upfront protection from the Treasury Department for its pension plan and the fund that will take over responsibility for retiree medical benefits. Moreover, that fund, called the voluntary employee beneficiary association, or VEBA, will control 55 percent of the equity in the new Chrysler once it emerges from bankruptcy, and hold a seat on the Chrysler board.

Not too shabby—especially compared to similar situations:

Labor and restructuring lawyers said such a comprehensive deal going into bankruptcy was rare.

“This is extraordinary, truly extraordinary,” said Mary Jo Dowd, a partner in the financial and bankruptcy restructuring practice at Arent Fox in Washington. “I never would have thought a year ago that this would occur. These are truly unusual times.”

Asked if he could recall any other union that fared as well, David L. Gregory, a labor law professor at St. John’s University, replied: “Nobody’s even close.”

Yes, the UAW has made some concessions. But they are small (the Times notes that members retain “healthy wages and benefits”) compared to what has been demanded of the creditors whom Obama is busy bad-mouthing and “not standing behind” in his continuing effort to demonize the rich. Now basic contract law goes down the tube as he refuses to favor these creditors in the proper and agree-on order when bankruptcy occurs, and he disses them for not being self-sacrificing enough. Of course, the unions aren’t required to be so noble; only the vile rich people (who in many cases happen to stand in a fiduciary relationship regarding the investments of people who aren’t so rich) are required to be martyrs to Obama’s welfare state.

And it seems that as Chrysler goes, so goes GM:

“This confirms the fear, which right along has been that the Obama administration is more sensitive or beholden to the unions than the bondholders,” Fridson [CEO of a credit investment firm] said. “It makes it clear that GM bondholders aren’t likely to be able to work out anything outside of bankruptcy.”…

The bondholders shouldn’t be surprised that the unions are getting preference over investors in an Obama administration, Egan [president of Egan-Jones Ratings Co] said.

“If the government is providing money to these entities, they’re going to be looking out for labor’s interest first and foremost,” he said. “You may claim it’s unfair, but that’s the political reality and the time and cost of suing the federal government is prohibitive in most cases.”

In other words, Obama holds the power and will wield it in favor of the unions, so resistance is futile. The long-term dampening effect on investment in these companies doesn’t seem to bother our President, who appears to believe that a government-managed company favoring its workers above all else (sound familiar? I hear it’s been tried) is what we need in order to prosper.

And he’s counting on many of his supporters to be jubilant about the news—and on the rest of them to be too busy or too disinterested to follow the twistings and turnings of these complex events.

Cronkite, opinion journalism, and a changing press: Part I (“to tell a conflicted people a higher truth”)

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: I decided it was high time for a repeat of this series (first posted in December of 2006) on how the press came to consider its function to be changing popular opinion rather than informing the public. Here’s the first of two parts.]

Cronkite’s famous post-Tet broadcast of February 27, 1968, delivered on the CBS Evening News, is widely regarded as a turning point in the Vietnam War, as well as broadcast journalism. It caused President Johnson to famously say, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country,” and was apparently instrumental in Johnson’s decision to drop out of the 1968 Presidential race.

Those too young to remember may find such a set of circumstances almost impossible to believe. But Walter Cronkite,”the most trusted man in America” during his 18-year tenure as the anchor for the CBS evening news, is widely regarded to have had great influence on public opinion.

Take a moment to mull that one over and contemplate how the times they have a’changed: it would not seem possible for a major network anchor to be the “most trusted man in America” today (and, by the way, that “most trusted” designation wasn’t just hyperbole; Cronkite was actually judged that in a Gallup Poll of the time. And, of course, today it would be “the most trusted person in America.” But I digress.)

The avuncular Cronkite (and it seems no piece on Cronkite can avoid that perfect description of the man: “avuncular”) held America’s trust for most of his time at the job. Was it simply a more naive era? The fact that so many Americans got their news from that TV half hour (which Cronkite was instrumental in making a full half hour rather than the 15 minutes he originally inherited) through either CBS, or NBC’s rival Huntley-Brinkley, made it seem as though the truth were being told there—after all, there were few competing stories to hear.

And do not underestimate Cronkite’s voice and demeanor, perfect for television. Never slick, not handsome, he seemed profoundly sincere, with a deep and resonant voice and a slight (at least to me) resemblance to another familiar and fatherly icon of the times with the same first name, Walt Disney. Cronkite had distinguished himself during his coverage of the Kennedy assassination, displaying controlled but moving emotion as he took off his glasses to announce the President’s death. It was a deep bonding with the US public through a traumatic time.

Cronkite earned his trust the hard way: by reporting the unvarnished news. In this 2002 radio interview (well worth listening to for insight into his thought process at the time) Cronkite describes his orientation towards his job prior to that watershed moment of the Tet offensive broadcast.

Previously the top brass at CBS, as well as the reporters there, had understood their function to be reporting “the facts, just the facts.” Editorializing was kept strictly separate; at CBS, it was a function of Eric Sevareid, and clearly labeled as such.

The president of CBS news, Dick Salant, was a man of almost fanatical devotion to the principles of non-editorializing journalism, according to Cronkite’s interview. Cronkite said that, till Tet, he “almost wouldn’t let us put an adjective in a sentence” when reporting, he’d been such a stickler for “just the facts.”

But, according to Cronkite, as the Vietnamese War had worn on, and because of the confusion of the American people about the war, reflected in letters to the station, Salant sent Cronkite on a trip to Vietnam with the idea of doing a piece of opinion journalism when he came back, in order to help the American people “understand” what was going on by explicitly editorializing and advising them.

One can speculate long and hard about why Salant decided it was time to make such a drastic change. From Cronkite’s interview, it appears that the brass at CBS was part of the turmoil of the 60s with its “question authority” ethos. If you listen to Cronkite (and he expresses not a moment’s ambivalence about his actions), you may hear, as I did, an anger at a military that seemed heedless of the difficulties of the Vietnam endeavor, and too sanguine–similar to the “cakewalk” accusation towards the present Iraq War.

Another fact that becomes apparent in the Cronkite interview is that he felt personally betrayed by the military men he’d talked to as Vietnam churned on. He’d been a war correspondent in the Second World War, and that conflict, in which the press had been heavily censored, had featured public pronouncements of public optimism but private “off the record” discussions with the press that were more realistic and often more gloomy. Cronkite had been privy to these. But during Vietnam, when there was no official censorship, the military self-censored when talking to the press—they were profoundly optimistic, because they knew everything they said would be reported. Cronkite seemed miffed that he wasn’t given the inside info, as he had been in WWII.

Cronkite is up-front about these differences in his interview. I think it’s ironic that, if there had been more censorship during the Vietnam War, war correspondents such as Cronkite might have understood better where the military was coming from and might have cut them some slack. However, that’s mere speculation. What actually happened is that Cronkite felt betrayed, and he and Salant thought the American people had been betrayed, and they felt it was important enough that they needed to break their own long-standing rule and spill the beans to the American people.

It never seems to have occurred to them, of course, that in reacting to Tet as they did they were participating in a different falsehood, the propagation of North Vietnamese propaganda about the situation.

Whatever Cronkite’s motivations may have been, it’s hard to overestimate the effect it had when he suddenly stated on air that the meaning of Tet was that the situation in Vietnam was hopelessly stalemated and the war could not be won. We’re used to this sort of thing now, and many of us have learned to brush it off. But then, to much of America, Cronkite’s was the voice of trusted authority that could not be denied—despite the fact that he had no special expertise to make such a proclamation.

Of course, we are reaping the fruit of that moment today. Journalism has changed, and not for the better, mixing opinion and facts in messy attempts to influence public opinion rather than inform. In connection with that radio interview, for example, see this statement, rather typical of the genre:

It was a bold move for Cronkite, and it was an seminal moment for journalism, to go beyond the reporting of events, to tell a conflicted people a higher truth, something beyond the cataloguing of casualties or shifting front lines.

To tell a conflicted people a higher truth. That seems to say it all, does it not?

[ADDENDUM: Here is the text of Cronkite’s Tet statement:

“Report from Vietnam,” Walter Cronkite Broadcast, February 27, 1968.

Tonight, back in more familiar surroundings in New York, we’d like to sum up our findings in Vietnam, an analysis that must be speculative, personal, subjective. Who won and who lost in the great Tet offensive against the cities? I’m not sure. The Vietcong did not win by a knockout, but neither did we. The referees of history may make it a draw. Another standoff may be coming in the big battles expected south of the Demilitarized Zone. Khesanh could well fall, with a terrible loss in American lives, prestige and morale, and this is a tragedy of our stubbornness there; but the bastion no longer is a key to the rest of the northern regions, and it is doubtful that the American forces can be defeated across the breadth of the DMZ with any substantial loss of ground. Another standoff. On the political front, past performance gives no confidence that the Vietnamese government can cope with its problems, now compounded by the attack on the cities. It may not fall, it may hold on, but it probably won’t show the dynamic qualities demanded of this young nation. Another standoff.

We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds. They may be right, that Hanoi’s winter-spring offensive has been forced by the Communist realization that they could not win the longer war of attrition, and that the Communists hope that any success in the offensive will improve their position for eventual negotiations. It would improve their position, and it would also require our realization, that we should have had all along, that any negotiations must be that-negotiations, not the dictation of peace terms. For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer’s almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.

To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy’s intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.]

[Part II is here.]

The Boston Globe vs. The New York Times—vs. the internet

The New Neo Posted on by

The Boston Globe reports on its own stay of execution. The decision about its fate has been postponed till midnight tomorrow.

One of the Globe’s many problems is that it seems to have made an error in calculating the value of the employee benefits it is willing to give up:

In calculating the value of potential concessions, management had mistakenly included 80 Guild [union] employees who have left the Globe through buyouts, layoffs, and resignations since January, according to union officials. Once the wages and benefits of those employees were factored out, it reduced the value of the potential concessions available to the Guild. When negotiations began a month ago, the company provided a menu of possible salary and benefit cuts that it valued at $14 million, but now that same menu is valued at about $10 million. There has been no clear public explanation of how 80 people could have such a dramatic impact.

Globe employees are having trouble believing the paper’s officials are that incompetent:

“Jaws were dropping when news of the ‘mistake’ swept through the newsroom and the rest of the building,” said Sean P. Murphy, a Globe reporter since 1987…Marguerite Courage, who has worked 44 years in advertising, said it was hard to believe the company could make such a mistake.

“It’s a sad commentary,” said Courage. “You kind of hope you’re going in the right direction and then you take a step back.”

It’s easy to be snarky about the Globe, a newspaper that is typical of the worst biases of the MSM. And of course, the specter of a Red Sox vs. Yankees type of confrontation between the Globe and the equally abominable Times, its parent company, is somehow satisfying.

But, as the article points out, the human costs are large. The paper employs 2,100 people, a large number of whom are on the technical end and have nothing to do with the editorial product. Many are long-term employees who know no other jobs, and the newspaper business generally is not doing a whole lot of hiring these days.

The fate of the Globe seems to rest on concessions that management insists need to be made by the unions. The Globe (like the automakers) is a highly unionized operation: there are thirteen separate ones involved in putting out the paper. The pressmen have a union, the mailers another, and the delivery truck drivers still another, while negotiations with the union known as the Boston Newspaper Guild (a group that includes both white-collar and blue-collar workers in its mix) appear to be the main sticking point.

I’m not privy to the details of the benefits provided by the Globe unions, or whether they seem to include unreasonable salaries or perks. It’s a good guess that they might (especially if you consider that the average figure for the concessions in salary and benefits—not the salaries themselves—that the Globe was factoring in for each of those 80 employees would have been 52K per person), but I really don’t know. I’ve read quite a few articles about the paper’s negotiations, but they don’t include those particulars.

At any rate, unions might not be as big a factor as they seem: it’s not just the Globe that’s in trouble; most newspapers are, be they liberal or conservative or in-between, and they’ve been killed by the internet. The old saying about premarital sex—why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?—appears to apply to the newspaper world as well. As this Globe column points out, the paper (like so many others) is following a “self-defeating business model” by “selling the paper with one hand and giving it away on Boston.com with the other.”

True enough. That, combined with the recession, has caused revenues to plummet. Readership online is good, but that doesn’t generate much money, as most bloggers (and Pajamas Media, which had to get out of the online ad business) could have told you.

Scott Lehigh, the author of the column, wants to know whether Globe readers would pay for web content, a gambit that failed when the Times tried it but seems to be working okay for the Wall Street Journal. Lehigh writes that the problem is not the ultra-liberal stance of the Globe—fewer than 10% of its readers cited problems with content as a reason for dropping their subscriptions. But that’s a pretty hefty group, and there are probably more who felt that way but didn’t see fit to share that information with the Globe on their way out the door.

If you look at the comments on Lehigh’s piece, you’ll find that reactions are many and varied. Some say they would pay for the online version, some say that the paper’s extreme liberalism has turned them off, and some say the quality of the writing itself has declined.

My guess is that to survive, it may be best for newspapers to find a particular and unique niche and then charge for online content. The only thing special right now about the Globe that might make a person willing to pay for it when other papers can be read online for free is the local coverage, especially sports. Who wants to fork over hard-earned cash for AP stories with a Globe URL? Nobody.

[ADDENDUM: This isn’t exactly about the Globe; technically, it’s about the Times. But Frank Rich is an excellent example of the bias and tunnel vision—combined with arrogance and denial—of so much of the MSM.]

Obama’s Churchill “torture” quote

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote a post about President Obama’s recent press conference use of the Churchill quote, “We don’t torture.”

I mentioned that I’d Googled to find the article Obama mentioned, the one he’d been reading “about this,” but could find nothing. In the comments section, several people suggested that it would have been relatively easy for me to have found such a thing, and criticized me for not doing so.

But I now realize what the problem was: I was giving Obama way too much credit. I was doing a search for the Churchill quote itself, figuring that would give me the proper context: when Churchill had said it, and what he might have been talking about.

So my search went something like: “Churchill ‘we don’t torture’ quote,” as well as trying several variations on that theme. All that came up were references to the Obama presser, and the Andrew Sullivan post on which Obama’s remarks may have been was based. There was nothing whatsoever about the origin of the Churchill quote itself, and the Sullivan article didn’t even offer the quote.

That led me to a TimesOnline piece by Ben Macintyre, on which the Sullivan post, in turn, had been based. It’s an article about a single tough but gifted British interrogator named Robin “Tin Eye” Stephens, who didn’t feel that resorting to torture was ever necessary, since he was able to get the information he wanted (from WWII spies) using only his formidable psychological skills (which apparently included every sort of trick and intimidation possible: “Suspects often left the interrogation cells legless with fear after an all-night grilling.”)

But there was nothing whatsoever about Churchill in the Macintyre piece, nor anything about the quote. Obama had not been talking about the subject of the TimesOnline piece, “Tin Eye” Stephens, nor what his particular attitude towards torture was; he was quoting Winston Churchill and making a point about his policy.

Today, however, I’ve learned the reason I could not find anything about the Churchill quote: there was no such animal (gee, I should have thought of that). Noted Churchill scholars cannot locate it, nor can the author of the TimesOnline piece about “Tin Eye.”

Author Macintyre gives Obama a pass on the quote anyway. He thinks that, despite the fact that Churchill never said any such thing and had no official policy on torture, the bogus quote is still close enough to the truth (sound familiar?) because the British “generally” didn’t torture:

Churchill presided over a military machine that generally regarded torture as unnecessary, unethical, unproductive and un-British.

Well, you know what? So do we, and so did the Bush administration. That’s why the so-called “torture memos” so carefully limited alleged “torture” to waterboarding (which was not considered torture), and even that was only allowed under extremely restricted circumstances.

Macintyre goes on to say some rather interesting things about Tin Eye Stephens, however [emphasis mine]:

A brilliant amateur psychologist, Stephens knew that there were far better ways to break a man than pulling out his fingernails: he used every trick to wring information from captured enemy agents, including the very real threat of execution. Some 16 Nazi spies were executed during the war.

But he was determined that interrogators must never resort to violence….[Tin Eye] was not remotely worried about the state of his soul and positively relished the opportunity to break suspected spies by any means short of torture. But any interrogator who resorted to the third degree at Camp 020 was immediately sacked. “Violence is taboo,” he insisted.

Yet Stephens’s methods were psychologically brutal. “Figuratively,” he said, “a spy in war should be at the point of a bayonet.” In the latter stages of the war he was accused of ill-treating prisoners, but was cleared.

To judge by results Stephens’s techniques worked superbly. About 500 spies from 44 countries passed through Camp 020 (almost all picked up thanks to the breaking of the Enigma Code). Under interrogation by Stephens and his MI5 colleagues, most co-operated fully, a few refused and were hanged and dozens were persuaded to become double-agents.

Tin Eye was certainly effective, but I wonder whether his methods are something Obama (or Andrew Sullivan) would like to emulate. I also wonder what the details of his “psychological brutality” were. And I wonder whether, in his day, waterboarding would have been considered to be inflicting violence of a primarily physical nature (“the third degree”), or rather primarily of a psychological nature. I also wonder just Stephens might would have done when dealing with the likes of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man who beheaded journalist Daniel Pearl, and who possessed information about planned terrorist attacks. We don’t know.

One thing is known, however, and that is the circumstances of Stephens’s trial for the “ill-treatment” of prisoners. Here are some of the details, complete with photos.

It appears that Stephens was in charge of the post-WWII prison camp Bad Nenndorf (the place cited in the article I linked to in the first sentence of my original post on Obama, Churchill, and torture). Back in 2006, photos alleged to document the mistreatment of prisoners there by the British were published in the Guardian under the British Freedom of Information Act.

Considered to be too shocking to be released in their day, the photos were evidence that prisoners (mostly suspected Communist spies) were “systematically starved, as well as beaten, deprived of sleep and exposed to extreme cold.” One had died from his beatings.

Although our old friend Tin Eye Stephens was the head of the camp at the time, the trial resulted in his being “cleared of a charge of ‘disgraceful conduct of a cruel kind'”. I wonder if the verdict would have been the same under present-day conditions and sentiments.

By the way, I am not advocating that we continue to treat prisoners this way just because the British did it. What I am saying is that now I know why my research failed to uncover the original quote from Churchill—and that bogus Churchill quotes do not get us anywhere in dealing with the complex and difficult decisions we face on the correct way to deal with illegal enemy combatant prisoners who are highly likely to have important information about upcoming attacks on innocent civilians.

The “brilliant” Obama was being disingenuous in his press conference by manufacturing the Churchill quote, as well as lazy. At this point, however, that fact should come as no surprise.

[ADDENDUM: A commenter on another thread has offered more documentation of the Brits torturing prisoners of war during WWII.]

Souter’s successor?

The New Neo Posted on by

It probably won’t mean a great deal in terms of the liberal/conservative makeup of the Supreme Court that Justice Souter has announced his retirement, and President Obama will get to replace him.

Of course, it would have been a very different story had John McCain been elected—his nominee probably would have shifted the balance to a conservative majority. But John McCain is most decidedly not President, and Barack Obama is.

Souter was not your typical Justice, and he retires uncharacteristically early, as well (he’s sixty-nine and apparently healthy). He was a relative unknown when nominated by Bush the elder, and his biggest claim to fame at the time was that he was the un-Bork. It took a while for him to show (or to develop) his true colors, which were liberal, no doubt causing one of his early champions, the conservative John Sununu (the elder also) of New Hampshire, to regret his promotion of Souter as a noncontroversial but still conservative pick.

I would be exceedingly surprised if Obama did not choose as his replacement someone who will become the most liberal member of the Court, or at least a very liberal member. And I would also be exceedingly surprised if the nomination didn’t get approved fairly easily by this heavily Democratic Congress—although this comment, if correct, might indicate a possible rough patch ahead:

…Specter’s defection could actually make it harder for Obama to nominate candidates, because in order to break a filibuster in the Judiciary committee that nominees have to go through, at least one minority member of the committee must consent. Specter is on that committee and as a Republican was the most likely minority member to do so. But now he’s not in the minority any more so he can’t. The other members are: Orrin Hatch, Chuck Grassley, Jon Kyl, Jeff Sessions, Lindsey Graham, John Cornyn, and Tom Coburn. As I understand it, at least one of them will have to consent to break a filibuster in the committee.

[NOTE: I can’t make the link to the above comment work. It goes to the post itself rather than the specific comment, but the latter was by “Sofa King” at 11:55 PM in the comment thread.]

New England springs to life

The New Neo Posted on by

New England is known for its glorious autumns.

But spring’s no slouch either, as I was reminded once again yesterday (as though I needed reminding) on a brief visit to Boston. The trees were in full bloom: magnolias, cherries and apples, and the feathery dogwoods that look from afar like gossamer clouds. The bulbs, too—taxi-yellow daffodils, and tulips in a riot of colors.

But the most beautiful sight of all was the drive I took down Cambridge’s Brattle Street, dwelling-place of some of Harvard’s most illustrious profs, and other movers and shakers of the Cambridge world. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used to be one of them; you can still visit his home there.

But that’s hardly the only grand mansion; Brattle street is filled with them—all different from each other, and nearly all displaying gardens with a spring beauty that seems almost paradisiacal.

Most unfortunately, I had no camera with me. Yeah, I know; mea culpa. So these stock photos of Boston in spring (courtesy of the Boston Globe, and minus the beautiful homes) will have to do.

springboston.jpg

springboston2.jpg

springboston32.jpg

All those Maydays

The New Neo Posted on by

Today is Mayday.

As a child I was confused by the wildly differing associations the word conjures up. It’s a distress signal, for example, apparently derived from the French for “come to my aid.”

That was the first meaning of the word I ever learned, from watching the World War II movies that were so ubiquitous on TV when I was a tiny child. The pilot would yell it into the radio as the fiery plane spiraled down after being hit, or as the stalling engine coughed and sputtered. On the ship the guy in uniform would tap it out in code and repeat it (always three times in a row, as is the convention) when the torpedo hit and the ship filled with water.

But on a far more personal level, it was the time of the May Féªte (boy, does that sound archaic) in my elementary school, when each class had to learn a dance and perform it in the gymnasium in front of the entire student body’s proud/bored parents. The afternoon was capped by the eighth-graders, who were assigned the only activity of the day that seemed like fun—weaving multicolored ribbons around the maypole.

Ah, the maypole. Who knew it was a phallic symbol? Or that maypoles were once considered so risque that they were banned in parts of England by certain Protestant groups bent on discouraging the mixed-gender dancing and drunkenness that seemed to go along with them (not in my elementary school, however; only girls were allowed to wind the maypole ribbons, and the mixed-gender dancing the rest of us had to do was decidedly devoid of frivolity)?

The other meaning of Mayday was/is the Communist festival of labor, or International Workers Day. In my youth the big bad Soviets used to have huge parades that featured their frightening weaponry. It seems that Putin is nostalgic for those good old days, since apparently the quaint custom is being revived.

Back in the 20s and 30s the Mayday parades in New York City were fairly large. I know this because I own a curious artifact of those times—a home movie of a Mayday parade from the mid-1920s. I’m not sure who in my family had such an early and prescient interest in movies, but the film features my paternal grandparents on their way to such a celebration.

They’d come to this country from pre-revolutionary Russia in the early years of the century. Like many such immigrants, my grandfather became a Soviet supporter who thought the Communists had a chance of making things better than they’d been in the Russia he’d left behind. Since he died rather young, only a few years after the film was made, I don’t know whether time and further revelations of the mess the Soviet Union became would have changed his point of view. In the film, however, the family goes to view the Mayday parade, which looks to be a very well-attended event with hopeful Communist banners held high and nary a maypole nor a Morris dancer in sight.

The footage of the parade seemed archaic even back when I saw it as a young girl, although it was fascinating to see the grandfather and grandmother I’d never known (not to mention my father as a handsome seventeen-year old). But the most puzzling sight of all was the attention paid to the Woolworth building. Whoever took the movie was fascinated by it; there were two slow pans up and down its length.

Why the Woolworth Building? Opened in 1913, it was a cool fifty-seven stories high, the tallest building in the world until 1930. It had an elaborate Gothic facade and was considered a monument to capitalism—the “Cathedral of Commerce,” although the Communist-sympathizing photographer of my Mayday movie didn’t seem to let those two offending words (cathedral, commerce) get in the way of his awe for the building.

I never noticed the Woolworth building myself until the day I went to see the site of the World Trade Center a few months after 9/11. There were still huge crowds coming to pay homage, and so we had to wait in a long line that snaked around the nearby blocks.

And so it was that I found myself in front of a familiar sight, the Woolworth Building, still Gothic after all these years, and still standing (although it had lost electricity and telephone service for a few weeks after 9/11, the building itself sustained no damage). No longer dwarfed by the enormous towers of its successor—that new Cathedral of Commerce, the World Trade Center—the Woolworth Building even commanded a bit of its former dominance.

Although it’s still dwarfed from this angle:

woolworth_wfc_s.jpg

And to bring this hodgepodge of a post round full circle, there exists a book of photos of 9/11 with the title Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!: The Day the Towers Fell, a reference to the myriad distress calls phoned in by firefighters on that terrible day.

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post.]

Obama and Churchill and torture: let’s use a little logic

The New Neo Posted on by

Several have pointed out that Obama’s use in last night’s press conference of an anti-torture quote by Winston Churchill is highly suspect, in that there’s a great deal of evidence that the British did exactly that—used torture—during World War II. Not to mention the fact that Churchill was a great one for “reciprocity”—for example, bombing German civilians because the Germans had done the same to the British.

No doubt Obama will call for an investigation, ex-post facto.

But I’m more interested in finding the source of the Churchill quote. I wonder what was the exact context, and what Churchill’s definition of “torture” might have been, because there is little doubt in my mind that waterboarding would not have fallen under it, any more than it did for the Bush administration. Come to think of it, Bush himself would have been quite confident he was telling the truth if he’d made the same assertion: “We don’t torture.”

Here’s Obama’s full statement on the subject:

I was struck by an article that I was reading the other day talking about the fact that the British during World War II, when London was being bombed to smithereens, had 200 or so detainees. And Churchill said, “We don’t torture,” when the entire British ”” all of the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat.

And then the reason was that Churchill understood ”” you start taking shortcuts, over time, that corrodes what’s ”” what’s best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country.

I’ve done quite a bit of Googling to find what article it might have been that Obama was reading “the other day” about this, and could find nothing. Obama himself was not helpful enough to say who might have written it or where it appeared. I could find no independent source for the Churchill quote, and no description of who these “200 detainees” might have been.

But I very much doubt that those detainees were illegal enemy combatants and/or terrorists such as the waterboarded Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who were rightly suspected to hold information about future peacetime attacks on innocent civilians. And although in Churchill’s time London was indeed being bombed pretty much round the clock, it’s not as though the 200 detainees would have held information that could have prevented future bombings.

So what would the point of torture have been in such cases, anyway? And I highly suspect that when he said “We don’t torture,” Churchill had in mind some of the more classic and extreme examples of the genre.

Remember, the “torture memos” themselves allowed nothing worse than waterboarding, and even that was permitted only in very limited situations. This is the relevant passage:

The ”˜waterboard,’ which is the most intense of the CIA interrogation techniques, is subject to additional limits,” explained the May 30, 2005 Justice Department memo. “It may be used on a High Value Detainee only if the CIA has ”˜credible intelligence that a terrorist attack is imminent’; ”˜substantial and credible indicators that the subject has actionable intelligence that can prevent, disrupt or deny this attack’; and ”˜[o]ther interrogation methods have failed to elicit this information within the perceived time limit for preventing the attack.’”

Unless Churchill was speaking of waterboarding (highly unlikely), and unless at least one of the 200 detainees in question fit the criteria above (highly unlikely as well), whatever Churchill said about torture is irrelevant to the present situation.

And Obama should (and perhaps does) know that. But, like Humpty Dumpty, that doesn’t stop him from using the Churchill quote however he sees fit.