What Future For Journalism?

There was an extremely disturbing editorial in yesterday's Washington Post by Harold Meyerson, who used to be the executive editor of the LA Weekly, and thus understands the journalism scene here in Southern California. What is being done to the flagship newspaper, the LA Times, by real estate magnate Sam Zell, is nothing short of a dismantling of the biggest print outlet in the state and one of the biggest in the country. Zell was not the only owner willing to buy the Times last year; in fact, Eli Broad and Ron Burkle wanted to purchase it, spin it off from the Tribune Company, and return local ownership to the Southland. Instead, the Chicagoan Zell made the deal, and he's taking apart the newspaper bit by bit. It's a familiar story we've seen as the print journalism industry struggles through a disruptive time, and its top managers are responding in all the wrong ways.

During his first year in journalism, Zell has visited the city rooms and Washington bureaus of a number of Trib publications to deliver obscenity-laced warnings and threats to employees that whatever it was they were doing, it wasn't working. There was too much coverage of world and national affairs, he told Times writers and editors; readers don't want that stuff. Last week, the company decreed that its 12 papers would have to cut by 500 the number of pages they devoted every week to news, features and editorials, until the ratio of pages devoted to copy and pages devoted to advertising was a nice, even 1 to 1. At the Times, that would mean eliminating 82 pages a week.

As the company prepares to shed more reporters, it has measured writers' performances by the number of column inches of stories they ground out. It found, said one Zell executive, that the level of pages per reporter at one of Zell's smaller papers, the Hartford Courant (about 300), greatly exceeded that at the Times (about 50). As one of the handful of major national papers, however, the Times employs the kind of investigative and expert beat reporters not found at most smaller papers. I could name a number of Times writers who labored for months on stories that went on to win Pulitzers and other prizes, and whose column-inch production, accordingly, was relatively light. Doing so, I fear, would only put their necks on Zell's chopping block. So let me instead note that if The Post's Dana Priest and Anne Hull, who spent months uncovering the scandalous conditions at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and whose reporting not only won a Pulitzer but caused a shake-up in the Army's treatment of wounded veterans, had been subjected to the Zellometer productivity index, they'd be prime candidates for termination.

Which is precisely, unfortunately, what's been happening at the Times. Voluntarily or not, large numbers of highly talented editors and reporters have left. The editorial staff is about two-thirds its size in the late 1990s, with further deep cuts in the offing. A paper that is both an axiom and an ornament of Los Angeles life, that helps set the political, business and artistic agenda for one of America's two great world metropolises, is being shrunk and, if Zell continues to get his way, dumbed down.

This is really hideous, and ultimately this will reduce even further the level of coverage on our state and its politics at this crucial juncture, in the midst of a housing crisis, a widening budget gap, and soaring energy prices. There are numerous problems here - bringing a businessman unused to the rigors of journalism in to run a newspaper, the effective elimination of the concept of the public interest, the commercialization of that which informs a citizenry, and all the rest. Conglomerates which control what news is disseminated and how it is presented not only interfere with the truth (really, read that Ruth Rosen article about her time on SF Chronicle editorial board in the run-up to war), but they have little ability to even manage the situation by their own narrow standards and turn a profit. Again and again we see major cuts to newsroom staffs, reductions in space for news, shrinking column inches, and the only result is that readers are turned off to the product and they drop their subscriptions.

We in the blogosphere slam the news media early and often, but we actually can't do what we do without them. And the electorate can't make the decisions in their political and personal lives that lead to progress when their sources of information are being chopped one column inch at a time. Sam Zell is a cancer on the body politic.

California Matters

Just a few things to get you through the weekend:

• If you're interested in helping Barack Obama but aren't flying to Ohio or Texas like Brian and Julia, the Obama campaign is urging supporters in California to make phone calls into Texas this weekend. MoveOn is also running Yes We Can parties on Saturday and Sunday.

• Let's not give the Governor a heap of credit just yet for accepting the Legislative Analyst's suggestions to close billions of dollars in tax loopholes. According to the Sacramento Bee he ran away from this proposal within a matter of hours.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger told business leaders Thursday he supports a proposal by nonpartisan Legislative Analyst Elizabeth Hill to rescind $2.7 billion in tax credits, but he later softened that stance and said he doesn't necessarily support all of her recommendations.

The Governor will be in Columbus this weekend for the Arnold Classic, an annual bodybuilding and fitness event, so if you get a minute, Juls, you can go ask him about this yourself!

• Tired of being bashed with the facts over the past several weeks, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has come out swinging, defending his decision to deny the California waiver to regulate tailpipe emissions on the grounds that global warming is a global problem. Which means, of course, we need to do less to fight it. Also today the EPA turned over documents related to their decision, months after they were requested.

• On a somewhat different note, I'm interested in this protest by the environmental justice community against cap-and-trade solutions such as what is promised in California as unfair to low-income communities, which are disproportionately affected by polluting industries that would be able to buy their way into continuing to pollute those areas.

EJ groups, long overlooked in the more mainstream environmental movement, fear that climate legislation will once again disregard the concerns of the communities who are already most affected by the factories and refineries responsible for global warming. In a cap-and-trade system, poor communities, where polluting plants are most often sited, will still bear the brunt of impacts if industries are allowed to trade for rights to pollute there. Instead of this system, they're advocating a carbon tax, direct emissions reductions, and meaningful measures to move America to clean, renewable energy sources.

"[C]arbon trading is undemocratic because it allows entrenched polluters, market designers, and commodity traders to determine whether and where to reduce greenhouse gases and co-pollutant emissions without allowing impacted communities or governments to participate in those decisions," says the statement.

I think it's a powerful argument, and something the environmental movement has to seriously consider. If we're going to allow polluting industries to pollute, there will be an adverse affect. How do we deal with that?

• In yet another reason why we should not allow the continued consolidation of media, new LA Times owner Sam Zell has now taken to the airwaves, blaming the coming recession on... Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama talking about the coming recession. Yeah, shut up already! This is the owner of the largest paper in California requesting what amounts to censorship, incidentally.

• Finally, a federal judge in San Francisco today lifted the injunction on the Wikileaks website, which allowed whistleblowers to post documents and anonymous information about government and corporate malfeasance. A win for the First Amendment and the public interest.

Add your own links in the comments.

The OTHER Proposed Massive Giveaway To Giant Corporations Today

Overshadowed by the Senate markup of the FISA bill including retroactive immunity for telecoms, Chris Dodd's noble hold on the bill, etc., is an item in today's New York Times that has just as damaging consequences for the future of American democracy. Apparently FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin is quietly planning to relax media ownership restrictions even MORE than they are now, an action that would prompt even more consolidation in the industry and control of the news and information media in even less hands. As it would increase the power of media conglomerates, the implications for all sorts of pernicious legislation, up to and including the destruction of net neutrality, are enormous.

The head of the Federal Communications Commission has circulated an ambitious plan to relax the decades-old media ownership rules, including repealing a rule that forbids a company to own both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city.

Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the commission, wants to repeal the rule in the next two months — a plan that, if successful, would be a big victory for some executives of media conglomerates.

Among them are Samuel Zell, the Chicago investor who is seeking to complete a buyout of the Tribune Company, and Rupert Murdoch, who has lobbied against the rule for years so that he can continue controlling both The New York Post and a Fox television station in New York.

There's a 3-2 partisan split on the FCC, and the majority Republicans are down with repealing ownership restrictions. The Democrats are questioning it for now, Michael Copps is totally against it and Jonathan Adelstein is making less forceful statements, also to his credit, he called the proposal "awfully aggressive." The plan for Martin, clearly, is to woo Adelstein and call it a bipartisan approach.

Martin's predecessor, Michael Powell, tried the same thing three years ago, was taken to court over it, and lost:

Three years ago, the commission lost a major court challenge to its last effort, led by Michael K. Powell, its chairman at the time, to relax the media ownership rules. The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, concluded that the commission had failed to adequately justify the new rules. Mr. Martin’s proposal would presumably include new evidence aimed at fending off similar legal challenges.

Mr. Powell’s effort, which had been supported by lobbyists for broadcasters, newspapers and major media conglomerates, provoked a wave of criticism from a broad coalition of opponents. Among them were the National Organization for Women, the National Rifle Association, the Parents Television Council and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The agency was flooded with nearly three million comments against changing the rules, the most it has ever received in a rule-making process.

What's forcing Martin's hand are some new major acquisitions by some of the biggest names in media. Sam Zell is trying to buy out the Tribune Company, and receive by proxy the "temporary waivers" that allowed Tribune to own a newspaper and a TV station in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami and Hartford. In addition, there's Rupert Murdoch's recent purchase of the Wall Street Journal, and his attempt to further consolidate the information market.

It can be argued that the media consolidation that we have already seen, dating from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, are in many ways directly responsible for the cheapening of information and the trivialization of American democracy that we witness today. We know that radio has become almost a two-owner game between Viacom and Clear Channel, and as a result talk radio in particular is grossly imbalanced and not reflective of the market. The lack of local participation in media management in particular has led to mass syndication and a depressing sameness around the radio dial, as well as an elimination of any local content. Consolidation has also led to a reliance on profit and meeting Wall Street expectations rather than reporting the news. Massive cuts in newsroom budgets and foreign affairs bureaus are a direct result of control from a corporation rather than anyone acting in the local interest. So newspapers rely more on AP wire stories, shared content with other papers in the conglomerate, syndicated content, and articles that are really press releases, while local broadcast "news" has cratered almost completely. People are turning to the Internet for their news and that has spurned something of an information revolution, but the vast majority of the public still gets their information from old-media sources, and that public is not being served.

A bipartisan coalition of Senators is trying to stop this in its tracks.

Chairman Martin’s secret plans were uncovered during a Commerce Committee hearing yesterday by Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-N.D.), one of the most vocal critics of media consolidation. Sen. Dorgan has co-authored a letter with Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) to the FCC calling for a more transparent and open public review of the media ownership rules.

“We do not believe the Commission has adequately studied the impact of media consolidation,” wrote Sens. Dorgan and Lott. “The FCC should not rush forward and repeat mistakes of the past. The Commission is under considerable scrutiny with this proceeding. We strongly encourage you to slow down and proceed with caution.”

Later, Dorgan said, “If the chairman intends to do something by the end of the year, then there will be a firestorm of protest and I’m going to be carrying the wood.”

Chairman Martin has preferred to operate in secret and broker deals that benefit major media conglomerates at the expense of the public interest. It's not likely that you'll hear much about this in newspapers or TV stations owned by those same conglomerates (Kudos to the New York Times for printing this, even if it came out in a public Congressional session).

Free Press has more. This is a big deal, and with telecom companies increasingly trying to insert themselves into media distribution as well, all of these bills are interrelated. A telecom industry immunized from lawbreaking could soon be owning the media that you watch - and they could be charging Web content producers in exchange for speedier access. The drive to beat back media ownership, net neutrality, and all of these deprivations is a classic case of people versus the powerful who have no intention of working in the public interest.

The FCC has a contact page. They should hear from you about this.