Salon.com > newspapers

Murdoch’s horribly irresponsible tabloid is doomed

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:48:00 +0000

Last week was not a great week for the New York Post. But then again, not many weeks are. Its front page last Thursday wrongly identified two innocent young men as the bombers of the Boston Marathon. (It did so without explicitly referring to them as suspects, just to ensure that they wouldn't lose a lawsuit or have to apologize.)

Murdoch defended his paper on Twitter, because it is 2013 and stuff is weird:

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Hm. Here's how Col Allan defended his story to Salon: "The image was emailed to law enforcement agencies yesterday afternoon seeking information about these men ..." So "distributed by the FBI" might be technically accurate (not that we have any way of knowing) but it is not a great defense. The photos were not distributed to the press or to the public, as the photos of the Tsarnaev brothers would be the same day that Post cover ran. The photo was never intended to be put on the front of a newspaper with copy asserting that the people pictured were responsible. There's also no way to "withdraw" a physical newspaper printed and distributed all over New York City. I saw copies of the paper at bodegas in Brooklyn well into the evening.

Koch brothers’ real plan for media domination

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

Why would anyone want to buy a newspaper these days? This is the question originally raised by my recent Harper's magazine investigation into the state of the newspaper industry and now resurrected by this weekend's New York Times report on the possibility of Koch Industries buying the Tribune Co.'s eight newspaper properties. The answer is that for all the problems they face, newspapers still offer something extremely valuable to a particular kind of investor -- just not what they might publicly admit to because it is more than a bit unseemly.

In public, of course, prospective newspaper buyers continue to pretend that they are primarily interested in purchasing newspapers either to 1) preserve a venerated civic institution and objective journalism or 2) to seize an honest, straightforward business opportunity.

Report: Local news somehow even worse than it was before

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 19:01:00 +0000

The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism State of the News Media 2013 report is out, thrilling media reporters and people who read media reporting everywhere. The first, big, dumb takeaway -- courtesy Politico, natch -- is that MSNBC has the most "opinion" of all the cable news channels, and the least "news."

Opinion filled 85 percent of the content on MSNBC, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2013 State of the News Media report. On Fox News, commentary made up 55 percent of its coverage, while CNN was the only of the big three cable news channels to produce more straight reporting than opinion. Even so, story packages and daytime live event coverage on CNN was cut down by about half between 2007 and 2012, the report found.

Koch brothers consider purchasing L.A. Times

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:45:00 +0000

According to "multiple sources" who spoke with L.A. Weekly, the conservative billionaire Koch brothers are considering buying the Tribune Co., which owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Trubine and the Baltimore Sun, among other publications:

Now, these are unverified rumors that should be taken with a grain of salt if not a whole dollop. The Tribune Co. won't comment on any specific offers they've received, although a source there says, "We've gotten a ton of interest. That was one of the reasons for hiring the outside financial advisors, to sift through the unsolicited interest." [...]

Another rumor, passed along by a member of the L.A. Times Editorial Board, no less, has the Koch Brothers helping to finance a bid by "Papa Doug" Manchester, himself a right-wing multimillionaire who in 2009 bought the San Diego Union Tribune and promptly turned it into a propaganda organ for San Diego development.

Like many newspaper companies, Tribune Co. has faced hard times in recent years, complicated by the difficult reign of Sam Zell, who took the company into bankruptcy.

New York Times Company again prepares to sell Boston Globe

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 14:32:00 +0000

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The New York Times Co. said Wednesday that it is putting The Boston Globe and its related assets up for sale four years after it called off a previous attempt to sell the newspaper.

Mark Thompson, the Times' chief executive, said in a statement a sale would be in the best long-term interests of both properties, "given the differences between these businesses and The New York Times."

Thompson said the sale would help the company concentrate its attention and investments on The New York Times' brand.

The newspapers' differences are stark. The Times has a national - even international - audience, and has been adding digital subscribers at a rapid clip. Last year, it launched a Chinese-language website and has a loyal, growing subscriber base in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the Globe is focused on its readers in the New England region, and while its digital subscriptions have been increasing, analysts believe they aren't rising fast enough to be meaningful. The Globe had 28,000 digital subscribers at the end of 2012, up 8 percent from three months earlier.

In comparison, the Times and International Herald Tribune had 640,000 paying subscribers online, up 13 percent over three months.

Out of a newspaper strike dawned a new age in American letters

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:07:00 +0000

Last week, my colleague at Doubleday came by my office with an austere-looking 11-by-15-inch broadsheet. Good God! It was a facsimile edition of the first issue of the New York Review of Books, Feb. 1, 1963. The advertising director and I sat there kvelling over this wondrously manifested printed object from another universe, with its Murderers Row of reviewers weighing in on many books that all these years later still matter, its old-school book ads with their quaint frontal appeals to the reader’s higher cultural aspirations (“Pantheon: Outstanding Books From Abroad”; “The power of Thought is the magic of the Mind.” — the Lord Byron headline for Columbia University Press’s ad), its wittily punning heads (“Albee Damned” for Nicola Chiarmonte’s review of "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf"; “To the Whitehouse” for Dwight Macdonald’s review of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s "The Politics of Hope"). Byron had it right: There was a whole lost world of magical allure contained in those 48 pages of newsprint. So I closed my door, and let’s just say not a whole lot of work got done the rest of the afternoon.

Can the incoming New York Times CEO keep his job?

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 17:26:00 +0000

The sexual abuse scandal that's rocking the BBC has reached our shores in the person of Mark Thompson, the former BBC director general who was recently named CEO of the New York Times. Thompson managed the BBC when the broadcaster canceled a sexual abuse investigation focused on the late television host Sir Jimmy Savile.

Savile, who died last year, is alleged to have raped and sexually abused hundreds of girls and women during his lifetime. The Daily Beast reports:

Allegations of Savile’s misconduct long circulated among journalists, but in the months after his death "Newsnight," the BBC’s flagship current affairs program, vigorously investigated the charges, speaking to victims and documenting numerous allegations against the star. Last December, "Newsnight" abruptly canceled the segment, although it’s still unclear who pulled the plug, and why.

In a recent statement, Thompson maintained his innocence:

Huge racial disparities in political journalism

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 19:13:00 +0000

Statistics highlighted Thursday by election media analysts 4th Estate show a vast lack of racial diversity in political reporting. The infographic series "Bleached: lack of diversity on the front page" showed that "93 percent of front page print articles, covering the 2012 Presidential Election, were written by white reporters."

Based on data collected from U.S. national print outlets, 4th Estate reported:

The percentage of [front page election] articles written by Asian American reporters is 3.3%, by African American reporters is 2.9%, and by Hispanic reporters is 0.7%. This under-representation of minorities reporting on the front page holds true across most media outlets for most ethnic groups. The Dallas Morning News stands out as an exception where 18.8% of their front page stories were written by African Americans. The most striking under-representation of minorities in our data is that of Hispanic journalists, considering the Hispanic population stands at approximately 16.3% of the U.S. population (according to the 2010 Census).

Newspaper mogul Dean Singleton: Bias charges “totally baloney”

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 20:10:00 +0000

If the term "Citizen Kane" was an official noun in the dictionary, it would be defined as an ideological media mogul who deliberately uses his properties to both influence the political system and exert personal power. Over the years, America has seen a parade of Citizen Kanes dominate, manipulate and distort its political debate, from Hearst and Pulitzer to modern-day contemporaries like Bloomberg, Murdoch and Singleton. No doubt, that latter surname might not be as well known as the others, but it is as influential in many cities throughout the country because it belongs to Dean Singleton, the political activist whose private company, MediaNews, has long been one of the nation's biggest newspaper chains.

In two articles (linked lengthy expose here and here) published last month in Harper's magazine, I examined Singleton's use of the Denver Post to influence politics in one of the most important swing states in America. The piece cited Colorado as one of many examples where, thanks to newspaper consolidation, a politically conservative Citizen Kane faces almost no news competition, thus allowing him to tilt the news without fear of another newspaper publishing a different version of events. Among the scandals I examined was the Post's decision to not publish details of a major financial scandal surrounding U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet (D) during his closely fought reelection campaign. Bennet, not surprisingly, is ideologically aligned with Singleton.

New York Times staffers stage walkout

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 19:49:00 +0000

Unionized New York Times staffers plan a short walkout on Monday afternoon, reported Katherine Fung at the Huffington Post. The staffers, members of the Newspaper Guild of New York, will meet up and collectively walk outside of the new but iconic New York Times building in Manhattan to protest management's position on contract negotiations.

Fung reports that "the walkout won't be the first protest that Times' staffers have staged over proposed contract terms. Earlier this year, employees held a silent protest outside a meeting of top editors, and demonstrated outside the company's annual shareholders meeting. Angry staffers also made their demands heard in a series of videos."

Ahmadinejad’s evil covers

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 17:15:00 +0000

The media has enjoyed mocking Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for years for the plethora of bigoted, homophobic and anti-Israel statements he continues to make. In light of his most recent offenses, here's a collection of the most spirited Ahmadinejad magazine and newspaper covers.

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Poll: Americans really don’t trust the media

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 15:25:00 +0000

Americans have a record lack of "trust and confidence" in the media, according to a new poll from Gallup.

The poll finds that 60 percent of those surveyed have "not very much" trust in the media, compared with 40 percent who said they had a great deal or a fair amount. The numbers have been steadily on the decline over the last 20 years, dragged down by Republicans and independents. The same poll shows that Democrats have more trust in the media than they did last year.

On the whole, the survey shows that 39 percent of people are paying "very close" attention to political news, up from 35 percent last year, but down from 43 percent during the last presidential race in 2008.