Tag Archives: Washington Post

The Way the Story Should Have Gone

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On February 7, according to this morning’s* Washington Post, President Donald Trump told reporter Bob Woodward that the corona virus was “deadly stuff,” describing it as very dangerous and more.

What should have happened is easy to say, up to a point. Woodward should have hotfooted the news to the front page of the Post. It should have appeared on February 8* at latest. Congress would have been informed while still in town and able to gather.

It's a mess': Coronavirus pandemic exposes New York City's vulnerabilities - ABC News

States with large cities could theoretically have been alerted. States, counties, and towns could conceivably have looked to their hospitals, EMT, emergency supplies.

Admittedly thinking ahead is not everybody’s strong point. Some people don’t even try to do it. (Woodward seems to have been looking ahead to his next book, the president to the next election.) And not much information had developed at that point.

But shortness of information has not deterred the hysterics out to do nothing but attack Trump, producing nothing that would benefit the public, on any other issue. It is virtually incontestable that some of the regular leakers in the administration and around the White House could have, and would have, gone to news outlets with a hot new set of leaks on an Asian epidemic about to hit this country.

The public would have been informed, at least partly, while still mobile, while still employed, still getting a paycheck, children at school, still alive and well, the stores still stocked—in other words, when ordinary citizens had a chance to take steps and prepare.

Maybe even some of the nation’s nursing homes would have benefited from the heads-up.

While my brother was still alive.

Sorry, people, but Mr. Woodward’s version of reporting is not reporting. It’s not-reporting. It is a moral disgrace.

And now the Washington Post is running the story that didn’t run—free media for Woodward’s book. So that’s what matters; a star reporter and millionaire author will get another windfall. Woodward will return to the luminous ranks of John Bolton, Michael Cohen, and the other literati who rake in big bucks from publishers by going TrumpTrumpTrump, catering to the mob-lust of underqualified people in publishing and outside it who seem to have centered their thinking if not their lives around a hysterical gestalt that every human being on earth has abandoned and rejected President Trump. I consider the behavior sick, and I am not a Trump voter.

Since many people consider the news media the face of the Democratic Party, the sick big-media behavior on the star-reporter model may also cost Democrats the election.

 

*I am a WaPo subscriber in P. G. Stories in the print edition/s often come a day or more behind the online edition, so I just saw this detail today. (I didn’t hear it reported on cable or networks.) No, I don’t return to my PC—where I usually start the day writing–to catch breaking news in the small hours.

*Give or take a day, in print editions.

 

Bernie Sanders Wins New Hampshire: Today’s headlines

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To be fair, media personnel may have expected Bernie Sanders to win the New Hampshire primary. (After all, ‘he’s from a neighboring state’.)

Sanders (reuse wiki)

 

Still, that said–here is a quick rundown of today’s headlines about New Hampshire 2020. “BERNIE WINS NEW HAMPSHIRE”? “SANDERS WINS 2ND DEM CONTEST”? Well, no, mainly not. Some respectable news outlets conveyed the straight fact, “SANDERS WINS NEW HAMPSHIRE.” But prominently, on February 12, 2020, the morning after the extensively covered first primary and second voting event of the 2020 presidential election, we get this sampling:

From my (print) issue of The Washington Post: “With win in N.H., Sanders controls Democrats’ left wing”

From The New York Times: “Bernie Sanders Scores Narrow Victory in New Hampshire”

From NYT Wednesday Briefing: “Bernie Sanders edges out Pete Buttigieg”

From USA Today: “Bernie Sanders’ campaign defends narrow win in New Hampshire after big 2016 showing”

From Fox News: “Sanders edges out Buttigieg to win New Hampshire, as Klobuchar surges to third”

From the New York Post: “Bernie Sanders a limp leader after barely squeaking by in New Hampshire”

From Axios: “Bernie Sanders’ uneasy New Hampshire win”

Et cetera. As one tweet put it,

For my money, the WaPo headline stinks most. Again to be fair, Amazon, owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, willingly markets Sanders book and campaign merchandise. So that’s something saved from the wreck. But the Post headline is a swift two-fer using Sanders to blank out Elizabeth Warren, figuratively speaking.

Meanwhile, most of the national political press is comparing 2020 turnout to 2008 turnout for Obama.

More later on the ‘turnout’ narratives trending in media.

Update, 9:26 AM:

From Politico’s “Playbook”: “Bernie wins New Hampshire by a whisker”

Update, 10:07 AM:

From Politico “Morning Score”: “Sanders edges Buttigieg in New Hampshire”

 

“The most epic and consequential story of the past 40 years”?

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On June 19, Politico media reporter Joe Pompeo wrote that New York Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet and Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron “are the two most important newspaper editors in America right now, at a time when the news media are tackling the most epic and consequential story of the past 40 years.”

Concerning the United States’ ‘most important’ newspaper editors, I have no opinion. I try to sidestep argument about which human being is more important than his (usually, his) fellows. For one thing, this is grounds-of-conscience territory. For another, it is in poor taste. (I can be as stuffy as anyone else.) For another, I do not care. Also, ‘most important’ too often translates into ‘stupidest’. Take for example the context of the quoted statement, explained by Pompeo:

 . . . Baquet was being grilled by his own media columnist recently during a sardonically titled talk, “Covering POTUS: A Conversation with the Failing NYT,” when someone in the audience asked: “Better slogan: ‘The truth is more important now than ever,’ or ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness?’”

The former was from a brand campaign the Times kicked off during the Oscars; the latter was the Washington Post’s new motto, an old saying that had been invoked by owner Jeff Bezos in an interview last year with Marty Baron, the Post’s editor.*

Having fun with slogans is a good idea. As part of the new save-journalism movement, I have a couple of NYTimes and WaPo mottos myself. For the Times, how about ‘Judith who?’ For the newspaper I subscribe to, how about ‘Journalism Dies in Stupidity’? Or just ‘We killed the printers’ unions’?

Fun aside, it’s the last part of the quoted sentence that horrifies. Here it is again:

at a time when the news media are tackling the most epic and consequential story of the past 40 years.

There are two realistic explanations for this statement, and only two. The first is that the author really believes we are now in the midst of a story more important than the attacks of September 11, 2001; more important than the non-precedent Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore that gave George W. Bush the White House; more important than the Washington Post Company’s epic and consequential financial stake in the Bush campaign and its ‘education reforms’; more important than the invasion of Iraq and the ensuing Iraq War and the rest of the ensuing carnage in the Middle East.

September 11, 2001

The other is that the author made a thoughtless comment without realizing the implications. I’m hoping for the latter, but even that means some lack of thought about the horror, tragedy, and dishonor blithely swept under the rug.

Backing away somewhat from the bloodshed of 9/11 and the Iraq War, let’s quickly review the past 40 years.

Well, June 19, 1977, featured Led Zeppelin and Elvis in concert. Pass.

Broadening the scope, 1977 and the late 1970s involved the continued unwinding of the Vietnam War, with its continuing suicides, substance abuse and other results of post-traumatic stress disorder, and strain on social services and on communities. The same period also involved climbing out of the recession of 1973-1975, the longest and deepest economic depression since the end of World War II according to the Federal Reserve. The climb was never completed. I recommend Wallace C. Peterson’s Silent Depression, which sounds like a psychology textbook but is actually a work of popular economics. Subtitled Twenty-Five Years of Wage Squeeze and Middle Class Decline, Peterson’s book narrates in persuasive detail some of the changes in the U. S. economy before and after 1973. The immense change was that the economy was expanding before 1973 and contracted afterward. The story can be read in the lives of everyone contemporaneous. We’re still feeling the effects today. We’re still paying for Vietnam, too.

The late 1970s including 1977 also involved the continuing development of U. S. feminism and some advances for women–not in regard to rape and domestic violence, but in the job market and in education. See Gail Collins’ When Everything Changed–the title a bit of an overstatement but the work a good chronological overview, with documentation.

That year and the late seventies also saw the collapse of the job market in higher education. With the draft (Selective Service) over and Vietnam winding down, undergraduate enrollment dropped rapidly. Troubles in the school systems didn’t help. Meanwhile, graduate school enrollment and the graduation of thousands of new Ph.D.’s continued–for a while. One result was that for at least a couple of years, there were some two thousand new Ph.D. grads in English literature and related fields, with not a tenth than many jobs in college teaching. (Someone computed the higher-ed unemployment rate the year I got my doctorate at 83 percent.) The secondary result was that the overflow went largely or partly into ‘adjunct’ teaching in higher education, a set-up again still with us today. This development coincided with the influx of more women into graduate programs, with the natural consequence that adjuncts were and are disproportionately female–especially in the lower-paying disciplines and in lower-division grinding classes. By the way, this entire phenomenon went virtually unreported in U. S. newspapers. The New York Times didn’t touch it for thirty years.

On a brighter note, the major movements of the sixties in environmentalism, civil rights and physical fitness and health more or less continued through the late seventies.

The above is just a thumbnail, only partly tongue-in-cheek, of part of one decade. No reason to go into detail on the Reagan years and other collapses of the eighties or on the continuing promotion of the Clintons and the Bush team in the nineties.

 

*Side note: Amazon head Bezos, who bought WaPo, is reportedly also going to buy the upscale Whole Foods grocery chain. A Whole Foods just opened in my region, to great fanfare about ‘jobs’, as in County Executive Rushern Baker’s touted economic vision of luring big and upscale employers like the Casino to the county. Amazon reportedly plans to automate grocery checkers out of their jobs. To its credit, the Washington Post reported this intent.

Good faith is an element in every contract

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[Update May 2. Here is the reply to my question to the Maryland Attorney General’s office:]

Your email to Attorney General Brian Frosh has been referred to me for response. You have inquired into whether the Maryland Attorney General could assist with the enforcement of contracts between authors and publishers. Under a valid contract between and author and a publisher, the parties are legally required to perform certain agreed upon terms. If one party fails to perform, the other can sue to enforce the agreement.  Under Maryland law, there is no authority for the Attorney General to get involved in such a contract dispute.  The dispute is between the two parties to the contract and the remedy is for one party to file an action against the other.
Please let me know if you have further questions.  Jenny Baker

Contracts between authors and publishers don’t get treated as real contracts. In the judicial system, the author is generally treated as “a very, very small business.” So I was told several years ago as a member of the National Writers Union. While in the NWU I chaired the DC chapter for a couple of years; I also served as a Grievance Counselor, trying if possible to help members who had a problem with their publishers. Most often the problem was that they did not get paid.

The first question was ‘Do you have a contract or [something, anything, in writing]?’ If yes, the next question was ‘Can you send it to me?’ One of the services offered by the NWU was contract advice. I was not a Contract Advisor, but the CAs were also there to help; they tried to see to it that the author stuck out for a decent contract, bringing another pair of eyes to rights and royalties.

The trouble was that even a writer with a clear-as-glass contract had little way to enforce it.

I cannot go into detail on individual examples/cases. But I can say that my premise that a contract is a contract, even where one party is a small-time ham-and-egger, started to feel a bit naive. An author’s contract would generally be written by the publisher. It could have an unequivocally clear schedule for reporting sales and paying royalties–obligations of the publisher. But if the calendar date rolled around and there was no royalty check from the publishing company–then what?

Well, in the State of New York, when Andrew Cuomo was state Attorney General– nothing. Too bad I can’t go into details. Suffice it to say that a state AG, or the office of a state’s attorney, does not come banging on the door of a deadbeat publisher, demanding that he cough up or else. There’s no SWAT team for scofflaws in publishing. The contract might as well not have existed. Mutual agreement, mutual consideration, formal written expression all in place–the basis for contract law itself. And they might as well have been the Rock of Gibraltar recreated as whipped cream, sliding into the ocean.

NY AG Andrew Cuomo

NY AG Andrew Cuomo

Many journalists and other writers know something about the above picture, enough so that they don’t choose to freelance. Theoretically, being on the staff of a recognized periodical offers protections that an isolated freelancer does not get.

All this brings me to what sounds like an interesting book from Barbara Feinman Todd, fittingly titled Pretend I’m Not Here. Feinman Todd was a freelancer with more position than most. Among other professional activities she was a ghostwriter for the Washington Post’s Carl Bernstein, Benjamin Bradlee, and Bob Woodward. She also ghosted Hillary Clinton’s It Takes a Village (1996).

According to an interesting article by Clark Hoyt, the book–which I have not read yet–recounts that Feinman Todd got burned by Woodward. The story is that the author confided to Woodward that Hillary Clinton bolstered herself psychically by having imaginary conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt among others. Instead of keeping this item secret as promised, Woodward used it–prominently–in his own book on Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign. He also passed along copies of two transcripts Feinman Todd allegedly gave him to other WaPo writers, for their work on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Woodward denies Feinman Todd’s account, according to Hoyt. As a supporter of authors I think Mr. Hoyt’s article makes a point of bigger interest than the personalities involved:

Woodward’s efforts to report the story could explain why Feinman Todd suddenly found herself on the outs with the Clinton White House, which ordered the publisher of “It Takes a Village” to withhold her final payment. 

Bill Clinton’s White House “ordered the publisher” to withhold the author’s last payment on a book she ghosted for first lady Hillary Clinton?

1996, Simon & Schuster

1996, Simon & Schuster

Why, absent a national security concern, does a White House get to tell a publisher what to do? And of all things to command, why does it get to tell a publisher not to pay an author? Admittedly, that particular command might go down easy; see above on how publishers pay. But however willing the publisher might be to entertain the order, as represented it is still an order to violate a contract. They used to call it breach.

That wasn’t the only one, according to Feinman Todd:

And, when the book came out, Feinman Todd was given no credit, despite a requirement in her contract that she be included in the acknowledgments.

Ghosters can get shafted. The ghostwriter is usually supposed to be invisible, or at least not too conspicuous. Just the same, if the publisher failed to honor a contract requirement, the author had grounds to take the publisher to court. And she would have had more position than most to do so. The controversy actually drew some attention at the time. Simon & Schuster exposed its lack of self-respect when it caved under a directive from the Clinton White House. (Despite my concern with the larger issues, I admit it would be interesting to hear how the order was worded. And who delivered it, and to whom. And when. And where. Reading this stuff is like reading that the CIA could direct a university to hire one of its own as a full professor.)

For the record, my own view is that an author shouldn’t have to sue for redress. Breach of contract harms the public. It should be handled by a public entity, as in the state’s attorney’s office. Reading about the actions of a major publisher in 1996 raises the issue again.

 

 

 

WaPo report: razor-thin Clinton “edge” even in 50-state hand-picked poll

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WaPo headline reverses the story

My morning paper on September 7 had an unusual feature. The 9-16ths-inch headline on The Washington Post’s front page trumpeted, “Clinton has edge in 50-state poll.” Inside, a special pull-out section on “CAMPAIGN 2016” seemed to expand the story.

Actually, it contradicted the headline.

Let’s start with the easy part–pictures.

WaPo front page September 7, 2016

WaPo front page September 7, 2016

This parti-colored map ran above the fold, spanning eight inches. Take a look at the colors. As shown, the paper designated ten states as “tossups,” purple on the map–Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas and Wisconsin. —Georgia? Mississippi? Texas? “Tossups”?

WaPo also designated Alaska and South Carolina reddishly as “Leans GOP.”

The special pull-out had another graphic divided by colors–blue and blueish, red and reddish, purple–with poll numbers. (Page 21) Blue/-ish states totaled 244 electoral votes, red/-ish states totaled 126 electoral votes, of 270 needed to win.

Setting blue and red aside for the moment, that leaves 168 electoral votes in the purple ‘tossup’ column. Here’s where arithmetic, a closer look, and some effort at exactitude might come in handy.

Accuracy, accuracy, and accuracy

According to the Post’s own poll, among the ‘tossup’ states, Trump led in Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Ohio–a total 55 electoral votes. Clinton led in the other six. (Those perennial tossups Arizona and Texas add up to another 49 electoral votes, yielding a total 230 for Trump without going into battleground states, but let’s not get ahead of the story.)

If something about this seems off-kilter, turn to page 24. That’s where readers finally get the breakdown on WaPo’s Survey Monkey numbers. (Yes, they used Survey Monkey–polling only people they had selected. See page 22.)

These were the stats for (selected) “four-way races,” i.e. twelve states with Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein included in the poll. In Ohio, rated a ‘tossup’ on WaPo’s front page, Clinton polled at 37 percent to Trump’s 40 percent. In North Carolina, also rated ‘tossup’ as mentioned, Clinton polled 40 percent to Trump’s 41 percent. In Texas, both candidates polled at 40 percent; in Colorado, both candidates polled at 37 percent (unlike Clinton’s ‘narrow leads’ viz the front pager). In tossup Arizona, Clinton polled at 37 percent, Trump at 39 percent. In Georgia, Clinton 39 percent, Trump 40 percent.

These numbers did not appear on the front page of the paper or the front page of the Campaign 2016 pull-out.

Further, Secretary Clinton polled at 40 percent or less not only in states where that might be expected–Texas, Georgia–but in states touted as winnable for her–Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin. She ran barely better than 40 percent in Florida and Pennsylvania. She polled barely at 50 percent, if that, in Rhode Island. She polled at under 50 percent in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Maine. In fact, about the only place in the union seemingly favorable for Clinton, outside of bedrock-blue states like Hawaii and Maryland, is Virginia.

This falls short of an Electoral College landslide. It must have been a crushing disappointment to the WaPo personnel who created that hand-picked sample. The entire thrust of the story is how narrow a needle Mr. Trump has to thread, to get to 270. But by the same token–i.e. WaPo numbers–Clinton’s reported “edge” teeters on the brink–a loss of two or three states.

There are other problems with this kind of reporting. Under the sub-heading “Utah is most uncertain state,” the reader finds–that Utah is still solidly GOP, even with a locally popular Libertarian on the ballot siphoning away red votes. Maybe the problem is with the headings.

But the bigger problem is with the nominee. The short story is that Democratic Party insiders and their GOP/Wall Street/insider-media allies selected the worst possible candidate for Democrats, in an anti-democratic process that was worse yet. She’s not a nominee in the sense of having been elected as such by voters. She is a pre-selected candidate who succeeded in being designated as official nominee.

The whole thing was a betrayal. In Barack Obama, the Democrats selected a president who was elected by both the popular and the electoral vote, in the most genuine election in years, probably the first relatively open election since Jimmy Carter won in 1976. Eight years later, the party and the nation should be moving forward, to build on the foundation created by President Obama. Instead, it took a giant slide backward–about 90 percent from jealous/envious passive-aggressive inertia, so far as I can tell.

In a bleak prospect, Clinton might be elected to the White House, with a GOP Congress elected to rein her in–thus giving us a lousy president and a lousy congress. If past patterns hold, that would pave the way for Clinton to make deals–benefiting the GOP, undercutting Dems and the public, with a big cut off the top for herself. And that in turn would set up a worse, and winning, GOP nominee next time.

By the way, remember Senator Mitch McConnell’s open vow, at the beginning of the Obama administration, to oppose President Obama at every opportunity? It will be interesting to find out whether the Clinton team green-lighted McConnell, and who else did.

Update 9/29/16

As of today, Real Clear Politics has Trump up nationally by 4 points in one poll, Clinton up by 1 point in another. A miserable showing for Democrats.

*Full disclosure–as Maryland public records would show, I am a registered Democrat.

 

It is difficult not to write satire

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Media and Washington, part I

A short reminiscence: soon after first moving to the D.C. area, in 1982-83, I happened to read a piece in the Style section of the Washington Post that puzzles me to this day. I can’t remember who wrote it–just as well–but a key line was  something about being “at a [Washington-area] dinner party and finding that you’re sitting next to an English professor.” Being new to the region, and heavily under the influence of All the President’s Men and books about journalism by authors such as David Halberstam, I read the Post appreciatively. I was also a recent English professor myself, relocated to do research at the Folger Shakespeare Library, where I was a reader. (I still have my Folger reader’s card but now do research mainly at the Library of Congress, for a book I am writing.)

Years later, I still do not see what’s wrong with being seated next to an English professor. Not that there isn’t the occasional prof rudeness, of course. At an academic dinner party years ago, after winning an essay contest and delivering a talk to an audience of psychoanalysts, I was seated next to a professor who refrained from speaking to me throughout dinner.

Oedipus and Apollonius

He was prominent, and senior, and I was a very non-senior and non-prominent member of the extreme opposite sex, as Dave Barry once put it; those were the operative factors, so far as I know, since I had not wronged the man or offered provocation. Other people in the party, including his wife, compensated for him, without saying anything overt, and anyway that kind of thing does not crush me. Unlike the Bushes, my family actually was from Texas, and doing that stuff to me is like the old joke about “Have you got the wrong vampire.” Professor Deborah Tannen might find it an example of electric-blanket conversation (or non-conversation). Still, for my money, that’s the kind of English professor you’d rather not be seated next to, and admittedly it is ironic when conservatives, status-ridden individuals, and others of purported refinement and blahblahblah engage in the kind of conduct satirized by the greatest writers in the traditional literary canon–Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Bronte–but that’s an aside. The thrust of the Style piece, whoever wrote it, was not to satirize solipsistic arrogance, snobbishness, and rudeness but to imply that there’s nobody more devoid of status than an English prof. (Sad to say, some English professors of the old school probably felt the same way about journalists.)

On the 'electric blanket'

Water under the bridge by now, of course–except that the Style attitude pretty much reflected that of the national political press, going far to explain why the national political press missed every significant national story from before the Iraq invasion to after the mortgage-derivatives debacle. At the moment, the nyah-nyah-nyah crowd is hot on the web site for the Affordable Care Act, bypassing the development that the U.S. is at last on the threshold of entering the twenty-first century. More on that later. For now, suffice it to say that some self-conceived intellectuals are in unholy alliance with those who greet every bit of bad news about the president with ugly smiles. I have seen those smiles elsewhere–not only in the South–in contexts unrelated to health insurance.

Some of this is temporary. As said, more later.

Back to the topic of lizard-brain behavior. I was not brought up to it, nor were my close friends. When it crops out intensely in a group of well-educated people, or nominally well-educated people, it does seem to be a sign of highly insecure times for the world of letters.

Academic job market

There is a peculiar sting in our present situation–by ‘our’ I mean the present situation of humanity, including Americans. All our lives, most of us have been told of an overlap between education and employment. The lesson is still being taught–do well in school, and you will do well in life. I love education. Doing well in school means learning to appreciate the inestimable privilege of reading and writing. It boosts the immune system. It means enjoying a work and play experience, an opportunity, and a window onto a larger world that millions of people around the globe can hardly dream of. Every reliable statistic also shows a correlation between education and income, between education and employment, and between education and financial stability–up to a point. The rub comes when that point is reached, and I am not referring either to the fact that most billionaires and millionaires lack post-professional degrees, or to the fact that most PhDs are not millionaires. I refer to the fact that education, even good education, is not a guarantee of ‘success’. Many well-educated people have to struggle daily, or at least yearly, to stay in the middle class. We have seen the phenomenon in college teaching and in writing for years (decades), particularly in the humanities; we also see it in more tech-oriented occupations that involve knowledge–particularly the kinds of knowledge found in outsource destinations in India. (Simply eschewing the humanities is a palliative, not a cure.)

One reason why education sometimes seems to succeed best in the classroom is that in the classroom there is an operative principle of fairness. All people are fallible, including teachers, but in the classroom the operative model is that students (people) get their fair share of time and attention, they get an equitable share of resources including books, and at least according to theory, they get the grade they earn. In the classroom model, furthermore, everyone gets to hear the rules, including the guidelines on how to do the work and thus how to earn the grade. You might call it training and supervision–the very activities, ironically, not required of ‘management’ in Wall-Street-oriented corporate rewards or reinforcement. (N.b. the classroom model of fairness, i.e. getting the grade you earn in the class, is exactly the model under assault by the corporate product of externally imposed standardized testing and test-prepping.)

No wonder a certain breed of politico eagerly disparages the ‘nanny party’. The good shepherd is the figure who keeps some individuals from imposing on others.

 

Corporate culture

Looking at the bigger picture from another perspective, the reason the fairness model is used in the classroom is that it works. It conduces to learning, keeps students (people) alive and well, and keeps them engaged. So much the worse when well-educated people, or nominally educated people, jettison it when they leave the classroom or when they graduate from college or graduate school. Lizard-brain behavior inside the world of learning does the world of learning no good.

Lizard brain model

On a related topic, consider the study below re-posted by Daily Kos:

  • “Demographics: National Journal has compiled some interesting data on how intensely clustered well-educated people are becoming. In 1970, 24.6 percent of the nation’s people with bachelor’s degrees were clustered in 20 major metropolitan areas… but in 2010, 43.4 percent of the nation’s people with bachelor’s degrees were clustered in those same 20 major metropolitan areas.

That has large economic implications (as the trend toward “two Americas” continues apace), but also political ones, with even further clustering of likely Democratic voters into fewer places (which is fine from the presidential level, but bad when thinking about Congress). The accompanying interactive graphic shows clearly the link between increasing share of college-educated people and overall local economic health… and, though the graph doesn’t specifically address it, also a pretty clear relationship with which areas are trending toward and away from the Democrats. (David Jarman)”

To the couple of lines of thought expressed here, that the study has economic and political implications, add a third: there are too few jobs for educated people, any more, outside the 20 major metropolitan areas. This simplification contains more than a grain of truth. Outside major metropolitan areas, good jobs for educated people have shrunk. Teachers, college teachers, attorneys–and a glut of attorneys on the market has already forced law school enrollment down–physicians and dentists, yes; but do journalists or chemists, engineers and architects, make a living working full-time at their occupation in small towns or small cities? When they do make a living, working full-time in their chosen field, do they also have the option of another job in the same town, should they need to find one?

Not new, but recommended: As written elsewhere, one illuminating book on the enormous changes in the U.S. since 1973 is Wallace Peterson’s Silent Depression. Its title makes it sound like a psychology tome, but it’s not; the subtitle is Twenty-Five Years of Wage Squeeze and Middle-Class Decline. (Note that Mr. Peterson also knows how to hyphenate correctly.) It reads like an autobiography for college graduates from 1968 through 1988.

What Bezos got when he bought the Washington Post

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What Bezos got when he bought the Washington Post

The new purchaser of the Washington Post, Jeffrey Bezos of Amazon, has stated publicly that when he takes the Post private the newspaper will be a stand-alone business, separate from the company of which Bezos is CEO. Bezos has also assured Post employees that he is committed to quality journalism, even suggesting a new golden era at the Post. There is no reason to doubt the statements, but independence from Amazon is hardly the sole concern raised by this remarkable purchase.

Bezos

Consider the concerns raised by the equally remarkable material leaked by former NSA employee and Booz Allen Hamilton contractor Edward Snowden. While Snowden may not have carried “four laptops” laden with documents, as first reported, he left Booz Allen loaded with information, and what he turned over to the Washington Post, the Post now owns.

 

Snowden

Not that you can accuse the Post of bragging about it. The exact extent of material provided by Snowden to the Post has not been fully reported. The material may not even be catalogued, although there have been hints in print that it is secure.

Still, according to the Post’s own reporting, the NSA material includes information on the U.S. intelligence budget; extrajudicial killings in Pakistan; CIA investigation of applicants seeking jobs in the U.S. intelligence community; an estimated 4,000 recent NSA internal probes of staff activity; information about the investigation of the 2009 Detroit ‘underwear bomber’; “231 offensive cyber-operations” by U.S. intelligence in 2011; the GENIE program, where “U.S. computer specialists break into foreign networks so they can be put under surreptitious U.S. control”; major expansion of the CIA’s Information Operations Center (IOC); information on NSA bulk collection of hundreds of millions of Americans’ phone records under a program started in 2006; construction and expansion of NSA data storage facilities in Ft. Meade and Utah; the official “178-page budget summary for the National Intelligence Program,” which “details the successes, failures and objectives” of the intelligence community with its (reported) “107,035 employees”; and “cutting-edge technologies, agent recruiting and ongoing operations.” This in just a quick overview, with presumably more revelations to come.

And all of this invaluable material will now be owned by one man, Jeffrey Bezos. Or looking at it another way, the trove of material will no longer be owned by Post Company shareholders including the Graham family, and will be owned instead by the private company Bezos sets up, whose management will have corporate authority to call the shots on the foregoing. In short, Mr. Bezos now owns documents concerning NSA metadata.

 

Amazon book sales

Not to be accused of being anti-business, and in the interest of full disclosure, I should clarify that I am an Amazon customer myself. I am generally a fan of delivery in commerce, saving time, travel, traffic and the nation’s energy resources–UPS, eBay, Amazon, FedEx, etc. As such, I deplore Texas Governor Rick Perry’s slapping an 8.25 percent sales tax on online sales to Texas customers. So much for that anti-tax, anti-Big Brother, pro-‘growth’ Red State policy we hear so much about. EBay sellers have to stick on an extra eight-and-a-quarter-per-cent for customers in Texas.

Amazon’s service has been generally okay, if nothing to write home (to Texas) about. Amazon makes millions from selling books, and the process seems to be getting smoother. However, the company has been no help whatsoever for individual authors trying to track the sales of their books, when publishers fail to pay royalties owed under contract to their authors. Perhaps that will improve over time, but I have found what a company does in one direction to be a pretty accurate gauge of its quality in another. It is a reasonable working hypothesis, for example, that federal contractor Booz Allen’s faulty vetting of Snowden was not the company’s only lapse.* (For what it’s worth, Amazon Web Services partners with Booz Allen on ‘data science’ and ‘cloud infrastructure’, and Booz Allen has rolled out a cloud computing service using Amazon SQS elements.)

Speaking of intellectual property, Bezos is now also the proud owner of information about data encrypting by competitors Apple, Facebook, Google, Hotmail, Microsoft, and Yahoo. In other words, the CEO of Amazon now owns a trove of NSA information about Amazon’s top competitors.

The Washington Post is not Amazon, of course. But it is ironic that Bezos’ Amazon cut off services for Wikileaks in 2010 after Wikileaks’ famous document dump, mostly from recent years, and now Amazon’s CEO owns copious information on “data from American technology companies, including Google,” collected by PRISM. The Post reported September 6 that the NSA “has made great strides in foiling encryption techniques used to protect Internet communications, and has established back doors to some companies’ encryption software,” according to Snowden documents.

Encryption, NSA bring the world together

By the way, we now also know via Snowden and the Post that under the Corporate Partner Access Project, NSA has paid “hundreds of millions of dollars a year to U.S. companies for clandestine access to their communications networks.” Not all of the companies compensated are Amazon competitors, although some are. Presumably Amazon was not among those compensated.

One final note. It is intriguing that the above story has been so little reported, i.e. not at all. No one pointed out the Snowden acquisition when Bezos purchased the Washington Post. No one has pointed it out since, either, until this writing. Arguably the two biggest names in the Post’s orbit this year were, one, Snowden, and two, Bezos, and until now, no one has connected the two.

 

This lacuna may be the power of narrative–the arc of the story dominates its content. Two flamboyant stories, one about Snowden and the NSA, and the other about the sale of the Washington Post to the CEO of Amazon, have been completely two different and separate stories.

The stories were separate for me also, as a reader; reading about them separately, I was slow putting them together, although presumably the lawyers doing due diligence for the sale took them into account. Exact dates for the chronology of the newspaper sale have not been reported. Edward Snowden’s first releases came the first week of June; the Post went quietly on the market, or put out feelers, reportedly early this year. I for one cannot help wondering whether Snowden would have given his information to the Post if he had known the newspaper was going to be sold. He was not in a position to hire due diligence attorneys.

*We now know that the same contractor who vetted Snowden, USIS, also vetted Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis.

 

BOOZ ALLEN ETC and the Washington Post

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BOOZ ALLEN ETC and the Washington Post

 

The Washington Post has extensively covered Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old hacker hired by prime contractor Booz Allen Hamilton to work for the National Security Agency, who was given global access to online information that he then leaked. One question still unanswered, however, is how much material if any Snowden gave to the Post itself. Follow-up: what if anything does the Post have from Snowden, or from the NSA?

 

Future plans

According to the Guardian interview with Snowden, in the extensive June 9 article revealing Snowden’s identity, he had “copied the last set of documents he intended to disclose” three weeks earlier. Snowden then packed and boarded a plane for Hong Kong.

Questions for the press: Where are those documents? What is in them?

Snowden, as quoted in the Guardian interview, distinguishes himself from Daniel Ellsworth and Bradley Manning thus:

“”I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest,” he said. “There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn’t turn over, because harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.””

The quoted statement comes in a long article written mostly in third-person paraphrase. Along with the previous question–what is on the documents Snowden turned over to the press?–it raises another. What is on the documents he has not disclosed?

 

Former Booz Allen executive and now DNI, testifying

Among the items of information paraphrased third person:

  • Snowden broke both his legs training in the U.S. Army Special Forces, at some time between 2003 and 2007
  • he then got his first NSA job, as a security guard in a covert NSA facility at the University of Maryland
  • “From there, he went to the CIA, where he worked on IT security.”
  • he rose quickly in the CIA because of his computer skills, without a high school diploma
  • “By 2007,” the CIA stationed him in Geneva, “with diplomatic cover”
  • in 2009 he went to work for a private contractor for NSA, on a military base in Japan

Edifice wrecks

It would be good to know the exact date on which Snowden began working for Booz Allen Hamilton. The company’s publicly released statement and news reports put it at about three months before Snowden leaked the NSA material–the company says “less than three months.” That would be early March, 2013. The Guardian’s first exclusive, based on contacts with Snowden, appeared June 5. In an online chat, Snowden subsequently said he had taken the Booz Allen job for the purpose of collecting proof of NSA surveillance activities.

“”My position with Booz Allen Hamilton granted me access to lists of machines all over the world the NSA hacked,” he told the [South China] Post on June 12. “That is why I accepted that position about three months ago.”

The surveillance license was approved on April 25. In other reports, The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald and documentary film maker Laura Poitras began working with Snowden back in February 2013.

 

Poitras

Questions about the documents and other NSA material are by no means the only questions. They are just the biggest, the weirdest, and the most immediate elephant-in-the-room. What if anything is the Post sitting on? As a Washington Post subscriber and faithful reader, I would like to be alerted beforehand, if my paper plans to run a series based on primary sources from inside the NSA. I would think Post reporters not in the loop would be curious themselves. Where if anywhere is the Post housing these materials, if any? Who is responsible for them, if anyone? Are there backup copies, and if so, where? According to The Hindu, Snowden left carrying “four laptop computers.”

 

Further questions, as mentioned, are not as big–less global–but still intriguing. Here are a few, categorized for convenience into first, the question of particular fact, and second, the broader questions stemming from the fact.

Fact question one:

As we know, Reuters reported days ago that Booz Allen hired Snowden despite “discrepancies” on his resume. What were the discrepancies?

Broader question/s one:

Why is it not policy to deny a security clearance to any job applicant, anyone without exception, whose resume or job application contains “discrepancies”?  Has acceptance of middle-class, white-collar lying on the job gotten so broad that anything goes, even in high-level clearance work? Have four-plus years of relentless press trashing the national economy taken such a toll that no (white-collar) job can be denied or removed, even justifiably?

 

Fact question two:

Aside from the Booz Allen job, how long, exactly, had Snowden been working for or on NSA facilities? Snowden told the Guardian four years; NSA Director Keith Alexander testified to Congress that Snowden had held a position at the NSA for twelve months.

Broader question/s two:

Are there any safeguards in place [YES, FUNNY WAY TO START A QUESTION], so that red flags go up when a subcontractor jumps from job to job, especially in high-level clearance positions? Have the broader attacks on 1) company pensions and 2) “government jobs” taken such a toll nationally that job-jumping is now assumed to be a resume brightener, even in high-level clearance positions?

 

Fact question three:

How, exactly, did Snowden get his series of NSA jobs? Did he apply through regular channels? Was it through someone he knew? We already know that he was ‘vetted’ for Booz Allen by USIS. Who recommended him? Who if anyone were his references, for a string of six-figure high-level security jobs?

Broader question/s three:

Is there such a thing as ‘regular channels’ when you apply for a job as a security contractor for the NSA? Are there any protocols in place [YES, YES, I KNOW; FUNNY WAY TO BEGIN A QUESTION] applied uniformly to every applicant? Or are the hoops just something to be sidestepped, rather than jumped through, for someone who knows someone?

 

As both a U.S. citizen and a journalist, I am eager not to jump to conclusions. We have an ethical obligation to use our judgment to the best of our ability. I cannot see Snowden as either a ‘hero’ or a ‘traitor.’ I have no desire to see him hounded into prison or chased around the globe, let alone worse. There is far too much passive complicity at multiple levels in the quasi-private, excessively outsourced, limply ‘privatized’ intelligence-security realm that hired Snowden and basically bred him, to make him a person of interest in isolation.

Both as a person and a journalist, however, I cannot help being curious. As indicated in the previous posts, I continue to be curious about the multi-billion layers of private contracting–an ironic term, at this point–as well as about government surveillance. So questions will continue to arise.

Back to that press coverage. The Guardian, unlike the Washington Post, has published aptly on Booz Allen. See here and here and here, for example.

To be continued

 

Biden wins VP debate, Ryan gulps water

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VP debate: Biden wins, Ryan gulps water

 

C-Span is great. A recommendation for future debate watchers: C-Span is the way to go. Public broadcasting is the way to go. They’re the channels for navigating between the false split-the-dif mindset on the networks, on one hand, and the self-caressing party-time mindset on cable, on the other.

As to last night’s vice presidential debate between Vice President Joe Biden and Congressman Paul Ryan, you can tell that the Democrats won when commentator-propagandists like WashPost’s Dan Balz call it a ‘draw’. It will be interesting to know where Mitt Romney stands on further benefits (styled ‘education reform’, aka standardized testing) to Kaplan Inc., the Washington Post Co. subsidiary so large it has all but subsumed the parent corporation.*

Signs of the times

But enough said on the horse race.

As to my question in yesterday’s post—whether Ryan would say anything clarifying Romney–Ryan gave a couple of answers relating to abortion.

1)      Speaking for a Romney-Ryan administration, Ryan said, “We don’t think that unelected judges should make this decision.” Seems pretty definitive, that Romney would push legislation and regulations–but does not preclude appointing anti-abortion judges, though it does not promise to do so.

2)      Ryan said clearly that a Romney-Ryan administration would oppose all abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or where the life of the mother is at stake. This one, assuming it’s accurate, is newly definitive—and another shift of position–though it leaves cases of the mother’s health, in any situation short of death’s-door, unresolved.

 

Chart: deductions

Notably, Ryan still did not address the question of the mortgage interest deduction. Even when asked directly by moderator Martha Raddatz whether the budget “loopholes” Ryan referred to several times would include the mortgage interest deduction, the congressman ducked.

Somewhat more clearly, Ryan did attack Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, accusing him of “equivocation.”

Interesting choice of words, given the source. Ryan reassured the public several times that “we” “agreed” with the Obama administration on foreign policy choices—even while criticizing the choices. He also criticized the administration for an alleged lack of clarity in foreign policy, either omitting or indirectly acknowledging that strategy and tactics sometimes demand some tacking.

A lot of GOPers fall into that one. The blood-thirstiest ones never seem to recall that it might be wise not to give potential attackers a road map.

 

President and Mrs. Reagan, 1983

Meanwhile, Ryan’s repeated references to “Marines” re Benghazi were an unhappy reminder of the Marine barracks in Beirut.

Back to that channel-selection guide, up top. A very few minutes’ worth of cable commentary last night was enough to convey that too many commentators a) focused on their notion of ‘style’; b) used ‘style’ as a tool for the usual double-standarding; and c) didn’t bother about accuracy. Biden’s mocking smile was criticized. Ryan’s doing the same thing was not.

Ryan’s smile wasn’t as broad.

Oddly, given the way some of the tea-leaf readers home in on the smallest detail, no one noticed that Congressman Ryan gulped water some ten times in the debate. Or at least that’s my count, according to my notes. The first time was at the beginning; he kept returning to that life-giving fluid at tense moments; and he ceased only when the end was in sight.

Update Friday:

None of the on-air commentary I caught mentioned Ryan’s need for lots of water, but I am not the only person who saw it. So did Bill Maher and others; see thread.

 

*I was the sole journalist in the DC region who reported the Post Co.’s financial stake in GWBush’s ‘education reforms’ under the Bush administration. Neither the ‘left’ nor the ‘right’ picked it up and shared the information with the broader public. Nor did the Washington Post newspaper.