You can tell that The Times of London isn’t serious about building up a big U.S. readership — it wants its brand to be sitting on newsstands — given the subscription prices. The paper, which I’m buying regularly, costs $1 at newsstand; they are charging $5 a day for delivery with a special sale price of $3 a day.
Roy Greenslade, former editor, writes about gagging former editors, a subject dear to the heart of this former editor. This comes after the ousted chief of the Sunday Telegraph finally felt she had to speak out about the sniping at her by her former bosses. Says Roy about gag orders:
They are imposed by owners and managers who, for one reason or another, seem not to understand the concept of freedom of expression. I experienced this when I departed as editor of the Daily Mirror back in 1991 and soon realised just how iniquitous it is to be gagged. Like Sands, I suffered from the fact that I was unable to answer back to the critics of my editorship. And, like her, one comment too many - in my case, by my former employer, Robert Maxwell - spurred me to speak out. In so doing, I ended up in court when Maxwell sued me for breach of contract, and I sincerely hope that doesn’t happen to Sands. If it does, she might like to know that the judge, Mr Justice Rougier, found for me on the grounds that it was unfair for one party to the agreement to speak while the other could not.
But let me get back to the general principle. We work in a profession (or industry, whatever) that is founded on disclosure, on the notion that nothing should be secret. Yet almost every ex-editor (and this affects regional editors too) is inhibited from speaking. I understand that no editor should reveal a commercial secret, which includes, say, the existence of plans to turn a paper from broadsheet to tabloid, or the timing of a cover price rise or the salary of a columnist. But there is no earthly reason why ex-editors should not have the right to say that they felt let down by a lack of resources or that their editorial initiatives were stifled or, in my case, that my boss grossly interfered in editorial matters.
Some will say that editors would be free to speak if they simply walked away without taking a pay-off. If they take money then it’s reasonable that employers should have their silence in return. Great in theory, folks, but utterly naive. Editors who are fired very rarely get the chance to be editors again. Their pay-offs compensate them for the fact that, in career terms, they need a financial cushion. That reality should not be used to prevent them from their right to free speech.
My letter to the editor of the NY Times Book Review in March, 1992, tells my tale:
Your review of “To the End of Time” says that managing editors of Time Inc. magazines were presented with a contract that tied their jobs and severance to a clause forbidding them to denigrate, criticize or ridicule the company and its products. That is true. But the review also repeats Richard Clurman’s assertion that all the company’s editors signed the contract. That is false.
I was the founding managing editor of Entertainment Weekly, and I refused to sign the contract precisely because of that gag clause. I said then that I was appalled to see an institution that lived by freedom of speech trying to muzzle the speech of anyone, especially its own managing editors (not to mention other journalists and critics).
If Mr. Clurman had bothered to get in touch with me and check his facts, he would have heard a great deal about the contract and more — for I retained the right to criticize, ridicule, denigrate or simply talk about Time Warner when I resigned from the company over matters of principle in 1990. Mr. Clurman also writes — wrongly — that I was fired. If, as he reports erroneously, I had been fired and had signed the editors’ contract, then I would have received three years’ salary, bonus and benefits, and I wouldn’t be sitting in New York reading book reviews. I’d be sitting, speechless, on a beach somewhere.
I may have been an idiot but I was a principled idiot. Even then, I was obnoxious on the subject of transparency and journalism.
With disproportionalism becoming the meme of choice in the discussion of the Israel/Hezbollah fight, it’s worth remembering these numbers (from Wikipedia):
* U.S. civilian deaths in World War II: 11,200
* UK civilian deaths in World War II: 67,800
* German civilian deaths in World War II: 1,840,000 (not including Holocaust genocide)
* Japanese civilian deaths in World War II: 600,000
And so what would the proportionalists have had us do? What is their argument? Should we have dragged the war and the suffering on longer because we were winning too quickly by killing too many, thus allowing more Jews to die in the Holocaust and more civilians to die by starvation and disease and more soldiers to die over time?
Should have stopped fighting when we were killing too many? Of course, in war, any death is a death too many. So what is the right number? What is the right proportion? Does proportionalism take into account the population of the enemies? So in the current case, whom do we put in this devil’s algorithm: the populations of Israel and Lebanon, or of Israel and Hezbollah, or of Israel and the Arab world, or of Israel and the Muslim world, or of Israel and the rest of the world? I guess that depends on whom you count as Israel’s enemies. How do you account for military putting civilians at risk by hiding in their midst? How do you account for cutting off the fighting by cutting off its support? Do you award bonus points to the guy who starts it all? What is a proportional war?
Or did they just learn this doctrine from Star Trek and its 500-year war?
Beaming to the surface with a landing party, Kirk and Spock are met by a young woman, Mea 3, who tells them that Eminiar VII has been at war with its neighboring planet, Vendikar, for over 500 years. Mea 3 takes them to the council chambers where they find banks of computers. Eminiar’s head council Anan 7 informs them that the two planets have learned to avoid the complete devastation of war because computers are used. When a “hit” is scored by one of the planets, the people declared “dead” willingly walk into antimatter chambers and are vaporized. Anan 7 further tells Kirk that his ship and all the crew aboard her have been declared casualties and will be executed. When Kirk flatly refuses, the landing party members are taken prisoner.
I am coming to fear for the fate of Israel. Iran and Syria, through Hezbollah, are testing the world to see whether they can, in the dream of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, wipe Israel off the face of the map. And the world is not responding. Oh, we’re hearing calls for a cease-fire — which leaves Hezbollah still rewarded for its aggression — but even so, no one is stepping up to stand in the way of that fire. From much of Europe and the American left, we’re hearing talk about Israel’s “disproportionate use of force” in what I think is just the PC way to oppose Israel.
Hear David Rowan, editor of London’s Jewish Chronicle, in The Times of London:
Had Hezbollah’s two main sponsors cast any doubt on their determination to wipe Israel off the map, maybe the current military onslaught would have been less acceptable to the 80 or 90 per cent of Israeli voters who last week offered Olmert their backing. Yet for all Olmert’s bold pledges to “destroy every terrorist infrastructure everywhereâ€, if his military commanders continue to act with only American and wavering British governmental support, while showing the world too little apparent concern for Lebanese civilian deaths, the worry here is that he will only weaken further his nation’s strategic interests, and its longer-term security, as fashionable discourse from talk show to dinner party questions ever more openly Israel’s moral right to exist.
Let that last phrase echo for a moment: “fashionable discourse from talk show to dinner party questions ever more openly Israel’s moral right to exist.”
The reason Israel must exist is Europe. I am delighted to see Timothy Garton Ash say just that in an eloquent and wise column in today’s Guardian.
Yet observing European responses to the current conflict, I want to insist on Europe’s own strong claim to be among the earliest causes. The Russian pogroms of 1881; the French mob chanting “à bas les juifs” as Captain Dreyfus was stripped of his epaulettes at the École Militaire; the festering anti-semitism of Austria around 1900, shaping the young Adolf Hitler; all the way to the Holocaust of European Jewry and the waves of anti-semitism that convulsed parts of Europe in its immediate aftermath. It was that history of increasingly radical European rejection, from the 1880s to the 1940s, that produced the driving force for political Zionism, Jewish emigration to Palestine and eventually the creation of the state of Israel. . . .
Does it follow that Europeans have a special obligation to get involved in trying to secure a peace settlement in which the state of Israel can live in secure frontiers next to a viable Palestinian state? I think it does. . . . Even if you don’t accept this argument from historical and moral responsibility, Europe’s vital interests are plainly at stake: oil, nuclear proliferation and the potential reaction among our alienated Muslim minorities, to name but three. . .
How Europeans speak and write about the position of the Jews in the region to which Europeans drove them is also a matter of our own self-definition. We should weigh every word.
If we — Americans and Europeans, liberals and conservatives — allow Israel as a safe haven and as a nation to be destroyed, whether by ceaseless terrorism or by Iranian nuclear bomb, and if we allow the world to continue to be terrorized by the fanatics who now attack not only Israel but also other nations, then this will be the shameful legacy of our generation.
: LATER: I know it may be red meat to some of you, but see also John Podhoretz’ column this week on PC war:
What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?
What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy - the idea that all people are created equal - has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?
What if this triumph of universalism is demonstrated by the Left’s insistence that American and Israeli military actions marked by an extraordinary concern for preventing civilian casualties are in fact unacceptably brutal? And is also apparent in the Right’s claim that a war against a country has nothing to do with the people but only with that country’s leaders?
Can any war be won when this is the nature of the discussion in the countries fighting the war? Can any war be won when one of the combatants voluntarily limits itself in this manner?
Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki? . . .
s this the horrifying paradox of 21st century warfare? If Israel and the United States cannot be defeated militarily in any conventional sense, have our foes discovered a new way to win? Are they seeking victory through demoralization alone - by daring us to match them in barbarity and knowing we will fail?
Are we becoming unwitting participants in their victory and our defeat? Can it be that the moral greatness of our civilization - its astonishing focus on the value of the individual above all - is endangering the future of our civilization as well?
Haven’t we learned that the other side — those extremists — use what’s best about us against us? Haven’t we learned that we have a common foe?
: And someone just told me to look up a column by Ron Rosenbaum, author of Explaining Hitler, that appeared in the New York Observer more than four years ago warning harshly of the second Holocaust. Here is a quote from an edited version that appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle:
We have to examine the dynamic going on in the mind of Europe at this moment: a dynamic that suggests that Europeans, on some deep if not entirely conscious level, are willing to be complicit in the murder of the Jews again. . . .
And so there is a need to blame someone else for the shame of “European civilization.” To blame the victim. To blame the Jews. The more European nations can focus one-sidedly on the Israeli response to terror and not to the terror itself, the more they can portray the Jews as the real villains, the more salve to their collective conscience for their complicity in collective mass murder in the past. . . .
If Israel were to act with true ruthlessness to end the suicide bombings, they would tell the prospective bombers - who go to their deaths expecting that their families will celebrate their mass murders with a subsidized party and reap lucrative financial rewards courtesy of the Saudis and Saddam - that their families instead will share the exact same fate of the people the bombers blow up. That might put a crimp into the recruiting and the partying over dead Jewish children. But the Israelis won’t do that, and that is why there’s likely to be a second Holocaust. Not because the Israelis are acting without restraint, but because they are, so far, still acting with restraint despite the massacres making their country uninhabitable.
Rosenbaum wrote a followup column in this week’s March in the Observer.
Jonathan Weber sends an delightful tale of a neighborhood ostrich with its head you-know-where. The Missoulian — a competitor of Weber’s New West — has taken to putting three headlines on its front page labeled “Only in the Missoulian.” When you click on them, though, you don’t get the article or get the opportunity to pay for it or for some online subscription. You get to subscribe to the paper. Interest interruptus, I’d say. But with captivating blurbs like this, who could resist:
AniMeals, a Missoula organization that provides pet food to needy owners, is hosting the “Social Event of the Season for Your Dog.†Reporter Mea Andrews has the when and where in Thursday’s Missoulian.
The Colbert Report exposes the uncomfortable truth about journalists: They have no sense of humor. Watch and laugh… unless you’re a journalist… then mutter.
Ana Marie Cox is now Washington editor for Time.com. When she arrived at Wonkette, she said she was unemployable because she was such an opinionated loner. So I don’t know whether this job qualifies as making it or selling out.
How’s this for a lead that makes you want to keep reading:
Oliver Stone, that symbol of everything about Hollywood that conservatives love to hate, is getting help in marketing his newest movie from an unlikely ally: the publicity firm that helped devise the Swift boat campaign attacking John Kerry’s Vietnam record in the 2004 presidential race.
Reporter David Halbfinger goes on to list blurb a who’s who from the far religious right. I can’t wait to see the ads: “A MASTERPIECE!….. GO SEE THIS FILM! - Brent Bozell.”
And Halbfinger gets Stone to shrug off the Swift Boat connection.
Mr. Stone, for his part, has insisted in the past that the film is “not a political movie,†while acknowledging in a recent interview that this “mantra†had been handed to him by his employers. . . .
Mr. Stone said that he condemned the “Swift-boating†of Mr. Kerry, but cautioned that he himself had “hired publicists in the past that had skeletons in their closet.†He added: “It’s not a holier-than-thou street here. It’s an impure market.â€
There’s your excuse to any association with bad guys in the future: It’s an impure market. Yes, humanity is.
I will see Stone’s movie, though I’m dreading it more and more with every commercial I see, for I know that he will exploit every emotion. Halbfinger’s story is the best preview of that.
Well, for once, I agree with Times TV writer Alessandra Stanley. I wish her column on undue worship of Walter Cronkite and the breed he represented were better focused and better written. Still, her lead in a piece pegged to tonight’s PBS lionizing of Cronkite could not be clearer:
Never again will there be an anchor like Walter Cronkite.
Scott Donaton writes an important column in AdAge — important especially because of his audience: the advertisers who, together with publishers, cling stubbornly to old media and thus hold back the transformation to the new. He takes off on the Wall Street Journal’s strategic planning and asks when — not whether — the print version should die:
But certain forms of media that are currently print-based, particularly daily newspapers, must explore the possibility that there are more reader-friendly and cost-efficient ways to produce and distribute their content.
It’s still surprisingly difficult to get traditional media executives to admit this. But their resistance seems based on an emotional attachment to ink on paper, a deeply held — if largely indefensible — sense that a newspaper’s soul is inextricably linked to its format.
Which is nonsense. Scary as they are, some things must be confronted, including our overly romanticized notions of what a newspaper is.
