State of the Media

In the next few weeks, The Dallas Morning News will begin charging for online news. It’s a daring attempt to reinvent the news business. The old formula that used to drive newspapers—85 percent of a paper’s revenue was from advertising, 15 percent was from circulation—is dead. Digital advertising is not replacing the money that newspapers have lost on print advertising and subscriptions. The News and other newspapers across the state have resorted to massive layoffs, salary freezes and pullbacks in coverage to keep driving corporate profits.

Through it all, the Dallas newspaper kept its fine investigative unit intact. It still routinely does some of the most important work in the state—whether it’s drilling down on the Texas Youth Commission or looking for malfeasance inside the Dallas Independent School District.

On Feb. 15, the Dallas paper will become one of the only large American newspapers to try to reverse what industry analysts call “the original sin”—giving away original reporting online. Here’s how publisher Jim Moroney framed the decision to charge on KRLD radio in Dallas: “I think a lot of people are waiting to see what happens with some of the early companies that go out there, like us and The New York Times. We’re going to give you more value.”

On Jan. 1, the paper raised its monthly print subscription cost to $34 from $30. In February, print subscribers will also get the digital News and so-called “subscriber content” on dallasnews.com. There are iPad and iPhone apps for the service, as well. There are tiered deals for digital-only subscribers. Here’s how the News framed “subscriber content” in its own story about the deal: “Subscriber content will include proprietary news and information produced by The News. Headlines, breaking news, most blogs, obituaries, classifieds and nonproprietary content such as syndicated wire stories will remain free.”

If the experiment in Dallas works, other dominos will fall. Jeff Cohen, editor of the Houston Chronicle, once told me that The Dallas Morning News was his gold standard. Cohen and editors around the state (hell, the nation) are watching the News try to pull off this transition. So we’re back to square one in the art-versus-commerce debate and what might be driving decisions in Dallas: corporate profits.

The plan to charge online readers might make the paper more money. There’s no doubt that the News will be limiting how many readers see the most important investigative stories. That raises the question of whether the News is playing Texas Hold ‘Em with its civic obligation—just as the state is facing massive budget cuts that will breed more poverty, racism and white-collar crime.

Now the paper wants to charge for that proprietary investigative work online. If people choose not to pay, will there be enough readers to spark the collective indignation necessary to change anything? Is the paper about to abandon its civic mission by deliberately shrinking its audience?

”We hope we are doing our job,” Moroney told the radio reporter in Dallas. A lingering argument has been that Big Media’s “job” is to make a living, a profit, by telling the truth. Now, as the last remnants of the Big Newspaper Monopoly cascade down, it’s time to re-examine the priorities of that “job.” If the News and other traditional enterprises have to reinvent themselves, then they have to examine their job description, their mission, their day-to-day checklists.

The stakes are high for the News and journalism in general. So the reporters up in Dallas must rededicate themselves to producing even more investigative journalism that serves the public’s right to know. The News has to do its edgiest, bravest work, ever, in this new pay-for-content dynamic. It has to prove that unassailable public service journalism—the kind that makes readers howl “What The Fuck!?”—will make money for Big Media’s online outlets.

Moroney says the paper will give readers “more value.” He needs to think about making civic values the driving engine for corporate profits.

Almost a century ago, the News famously took a stand against the KKK’s entrenched control of the city. Circulation initially suffered, but the paper emerged stronger than ever as the KKK’s overt influence and anti-News smear campaign eroded. That kind of editorial commitment will be more important than ever.

A Texas journalist, someone who believes in the public’s right to know, recently told me how she perceived Wikileaks founder Julian Assange.  The journalist was so angry at Assange’s wholesale release of U.S military documents that she believed him to be worse than some dictators who prohibit a free and functioning press.

We were communicating in the wake of the second Wikileaks thunderclap. After uncorking 70,000 pages of Pentagon papers in July, Wikileaks recently released 391,832 more records outlining grisly behavior, war crimes by Iraqi security forces and the U.S. military’s tacit approval—even endorsement—of the villainy.

My friend went on: “Nothing was held back from readers, and that, I believe, is the ultimate poor news judgment.” Assange and his associates did redact some names in this latest batch of leaked papers about the Iraq War—after he had been accused of putting hundreds of people in danger by leaving their names in the documents about the Afghanistan conflict.

Journalists have been handed a gold mine of material by Wikileaks. But too many, like my friend, have attacked Wikileaks as if the organization is responsible for the atrocities it has exposed. I believe the scathing indictment-cum-profile of Assange by New York Times reporters John Burns and Ravi Somaiya has shaped this wave of condemnation.

The Times piece details a litany of accusations against Assange over the years. Perhaps the most infamous entails “being investigated in connection with accusations of rape and molestation.” Ironically, Assange has watched as the Times—the paper that, through reporting by Burns and others, still sets the news agenda for mainstream media—has produced the best Wikileaks multimedia package anywhere.

The Times package includes a telling audio interview with Burns. The reporter says he’s unhappy about people faulting him for his article on Assange. “I personally have been subjected since the publication of these documents and my own story with Ravi Samaiya, a profile of Mr. Assange, to an extraordinarily vituperative response,” says a distressed-sounding Burns in the interview. “We do, I think, probably depict him for what he really is, which is a rather eccentric, capricious, high-handed individual.”

The Times has been bombarded with reader comments. Here is one that addresses the key media dichotomy: “Assange himself, whatever his real or alleged psychopathy, proclivities or idiosyncrasies might be, is a mere player in the world stage on which large entities have assimilated enormous power at the expense of the citizenry … . Focus on his person merely takes the limelight away from the serious issues.”

Killing the messenger isn’t unusual for mainstream media. For example, you’d be hard-pressed to find many journalists who liked baseball player Jose Canseco, one of the first to blow the lid off steroid use inside America’s pastime. Now the once-reviled Canseco, charged twice for domestic violence, is coming off as a whistle-blower-Nostradamus as investigators look at possible steroid use by stars like Texas icon Roger Clemens.

Daniel Ellsberg, who has been appearing with Assange, long ago learned how the messenger can become the story. At times, his Pentagon Papers, and the messages he was conveying about the secret history of the Vietnam War, also got lost in the hunt for the messenger.

Even Burns, almost grudgingly, conceded in his audio account of the Wikileaks saga that the documents “are very important.” That, I hope we all agree, is sound news judgment.

Juan Williams – fired by National Public Radio after saying he gets nervous when he sees folks in “Muslim garb,” and then given a $2 million contract by Fox News — once wrote an essay about what he learned from Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall:

“It is our turn to do what is right; to fight the fight, keeping our eyes on the prize,” wrote Williams many years ago.

He had come up through the ranks as a Washington Post reporter, and had done solid, well-received work at that newspaper – back in the 1980s when the Post was flush with resources, was our other “national newspaper” (apart from The New York Times) and was filled with the best writing to be found in a daily American publication.

I remember talking with him when he was on a speaking engagement for national newspaper editors in Dallas – and on another occasion when he was in Houston to speak to the Texas Library Association. I told him this: I admired his long-form journalism, I liked the stories and books that touched on The Great Racial Divide that still existed in the United States.

He had, to me, eloquently helped to pull together some of the conflicting and even tangled threads of the history of the civil rights movement in his work with the book/film “Eyes on the Prize”  (that two-headed project featured a book introduction and film narration by Julian Bond; the Atlanta Journal-Constitution had once asked Bond, and me, to write separate essays about the legacy of JFK’s assassination in Dallas).

Williams had also participated, with many other reporters, in a collection of stories about freedom fighters in America that was called “My Soul Looks Back in Wonder”  — with a foreword by David Halberstam and an afterword by Marian Wright Edelman. He had done his essays and book on the tribulations and triumphs of Marshall. He had also kicked some investigative ass along the way, taking a hard look at the very conflicted rein of DC Mayor Marion Barry.

But simmering in the background were some things that didn’t seem to match up: In 1991, he had been called on the carpet during his time at the Post, and accused of making offensive, inappropriate comments to women staffers. Several women were righteously indignant – and angry at The Post for not doing more to admonish him. “I have said so repeatedly in the last few weeks, and repeat here: some of my verbal conduct was wrong,” Williams wrote in a open letter to his colleagues.

There were, it also turns out, women who didn’t think that National Public Radio should have hired him in the first place – and tried to block him from getting the job as an NPR voice. Read about that here.

 

Now, the shit storm, as someone in Texas once framed it for me, has hit several different fans at the same time.

Williams has been slamming NPR; FOX has given him a broader forum to bash and gnash; the Glenn Beckians are out in full-force-fury, saying that free speech is dead; Williams’s boss at NPR, CEO Vivian Schiller, embarrassed herself (and later apologized) for publicly saying that Williams should actually have shared his thoughts with his psychiatrist.

A friend of mine, writing on another free speech issue, put it this way in a local Austin paper: “The press needs to side with what’s right.” 

And that ideal surely extends to Williams. And to NPR and Fox.

I know that Molly Ivins would tell everyone involved the same thing: “I should slap you all upside the head . . . just what the hell are all of you thinking? Why don’t y’all try to do the right thing – and write about the right things? ”

When the hell are you going to get back to thinking straight and clear – and using the media pulpit, the news venues to, oh say, advance grand human ideals? When the hell are you going to stop pissing on each other, wasting the increasingly precious news space in America? When will you stop indulging in the endless abuse of the airwaves, the public forums – so you can confess your paranoia, or blithely tell someone they need to see a psychiatrist.

When the hell is the media going to get its eyes back on the prize – as Juan Williams once elegantly, eloquently, wrote?

Texas Attorney General candidate Barbara Ann Radnofsky came to the phone to tell me she is pleased The Dallas Morning News has assigned someone to cover her campaign. She is very happy The Huffington Post has given her a regular forum—one she has used repeatedly to beat up on Wall Street and her rival, Texas AG Greg Abbott. She adds that she is also aware that she is a “down–ballot candidate”—insider parlance for races that appear below the governor’s race on the ballot.

Being “down ballot” these days means, more than ever, that she and other Democratic challengers are not being covered the way they need to be. Radnofsky pauses and seems to choose words gingerly. She says she has come to believe that “the coverage varies greatly” in the Texas media—and that “I can’t speak to their motivations, because I just don’t know.”

She has decided to settle for what might seem a counterintuitive stance regarding media coverage of her race: She’s glad if, in some way, the Texas media wind up focusing on the GOP incumbent she’s battling. “Even if he gets more publicity,” she says, her campaign is able to get “extraordinary quotes out of him” and “use it to my advantage.” To wit, she alludes to the Morning News story by reporter Theodore Kim that showed—surprise—oil-and-gas interests have contributed much of the $1.7 million in campaign money Abbott has raised so far this year.

It’s not just her race being overlooked in the sharp focus on Bill White and Rick Perry. Linda Chavez-Thompson, in a bid to unseat Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, is facing many of the same problems. An obvious culprit is the ceaseless horse-race, poll-driven coverage of the governor’s race—shaped in large part by Perry’s national profile and the fact that a big city mayor like White might pull an upset.

There is also the cold reality that Texas media outlets have fewer reporters to cover lower-profile races: The Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s excellent four-person bureau, one of the best in the history of political coverage from Austin, has shrunk to one reporter. The Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News once had multi-person bureaus in Austin. Hearst Corp., the parent of both papers, has combined the two bureaus and reduced staffing. Television stations from Dallas and Houston, ones that routinely covered state politics from Austin, have dropped coverage. The Morning News, which has trimmed dozens and dozens of jobs over the last decade, has kept its Austin bureau staffing mostly intact.

Some cynics might say it really doesn’t matter—the governor’s race is the only one that’s competitive this year. But the lack of media coverage for down–ballot races becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The voters don’t get to hear from challengers, front-runners’ methods and policies are left unchallenged and new ideas never see the light of day.

The candidates have to be heard from. Chavez-Thompson is advocating for labor rights, immigrant rights, and expansion of children’s health care and insurance. Radnofsky is talking about a wholesale re-examination of the state’s electrical utilities and saying she will go after abuses by Big Oil. These are serious issues, and these are serious candidates. It’s achingly clear that there aren’t as many big-market reporters covering them as there once were. The Observer, The Texas Tribune and others are doing their part—but caught in a numbers game, the big, mainstream outlets don’t have the money, space and reporting staffs they once had.

As I talked with Radnofsky, I remembered the first time I met her. It was in “the journalism ghetto building” at 10th and Congress in Austin. Brioni-adorned lobbyists for ExxonMobil and other Big Bidness entities were all shoehorned next to journalists. Radnofsky was on her quixotic campaign against Kay Bailey Hutchison for the U.S. Senate. In the real heyday, political candidates could, in one stop, visit reporters from The Washington Post, Time, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today … and the sprawling bureaus from Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, and San Antonio newspapers and TV stations.

Now, so many reporters are gone. The lobbyists are still there, in strong number, in expensive cologne. And the down-ballot races are covered, at times, like mere sideshows. All Radnofsky and the others can do, as she says, is “take what coverage the media gives.”

I tend to conveniently ignore the fact that Bill O’Reilly went to my high school. Yes, that Bill O’Reilly. At my old school, only boys were allowed. There were zealous men in long, dark, religious robes running up and down the hallways—and, yikes, some were praying in arcane foreign languages. Some women who worked there were covered, head to toe, so that only their faces were showing. Maybe a bit like the people O’Reilly would run into at, say, a mosque (except these were priests and nuns, not imams). So now we have O’Reilly, predictably, being the most polarizing mouthpiece attacking the proposed Islamic community center near Ground Zero in Manhattan. He’s argued that the feelings of the 9/11 families should be respected. He has also deflected the larger issue of religious freedom, America’s image overseas, and how all this anti-mosque reaction will be judged through the big prism of international relations.

More cleverly, he has turned the focus of this hard news story on its head by politicizing it, by throwing attacks at “the far left” and beating up on Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Pelosi has done the right thing by suggesting that politics is in play—and suggesting that reporters stay on track, move beyond political grandstanding, and find out who is funding the mosque, as well as who is funding the anti-mosque attacks. For a second, she almost sounded like an editor with a conscience.

The instant politicization of a hard news story is nothing new in today’s digital cycle. Obama was pulled in: He said folks had a right to build a mosque in lower Manhattan if they wanted. Then he followed up the next day, saying he was not commenting on the wisdom of building the mosque, just underscoring the right to build one.

Sharon Grigsby, the deputy editorial page editor of the Dallas Morning News (disclosure: I worked at the News for 18 years, and Grigsby edited some of my stories and made them better) wrote: “The more significant issue in my opinion is that after President Obama did the wise but politically dangerous thing of commenting, he WAFFLED and stepped back from his original statement. That disappointed me greatly.” Mike Hashimoto, assistant editorial page editor at the News, told readers that Obama had “backpedaled” and that Democrats might view the president’s actions as “unwise.”

What could reporters have done instead of following the O’Reilly gambit of bleeding politics into the story? How about seeking some on-the-record comments from Dallas resident George W. Bush, under whose watch 9/11 occurred? How about posing some tough questions to the man who once stood on the rubble in lower Manhattan, a few blocks away from where the proposed Islamic Center would be?

Here’s what the Washington Post advocated on its editorial page: “As president, Mr. Bush never stopped making the distinction between Muslims and the terrorists who pervert their religion. As a politician, he understood the value to the Republican Party of reaching out to minorities, including Muslims. A word from Texas right now could offer his would-be heirs a useful lesson.”

Bush is at home in Dallas. He is in a better position than Obama, in many ways, to be pursued by journalists for an ambassadorial statement. Bush wants to have a “policy institute” at Southern Methodist University, where he and his apologists say the great issues of the day will be explored. Well, here’s a great chance for the Texas media to ask him to step forward—and like Jimmy Carter, align himself with the great issue of human freedom. He is, in many ways, the perfect person for Texas journalists to pursue for a careful story about America’s image, about this country’s legacy of religious freedom and about the real lessons of 9/11.