Last Throes

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 2, 2005 9:18 AM

Well, it pretty much seems to be conventional wisdom: Newspapers are old, slow, tired, out of touch, boring and obsolete, and any day now we'll be getting our news from blogs and podcasts and cell phones and we can kiss those ink-smudged relics goodbye.

Or something like that.

There's just one problem with this scenario: Newspapers provide the overwhelming amount of news in this country. Washington news, investigative news, state news, local news, business news, sports news, science news, you name it. Everyone else, from Web sites to TV to magazines, poaches off newspapers. Which could create a problem if their advertising base is swallowed up by online portals and there's no revenue to pay the battalions of editors, reporters and photographers who churn out the stuff that the rest of the world feels free to borrow, steal, disparage and argue about.

As regular readers know, I love blogs and spend a lot of bleary-eyed time searching a wide range of Web sites in assembling this column. But the savviest bloggers understand that they are free riders on a news train powered by daily papers. So for all their flaws--and I haven't been shy about pointing those out--they are extremely difficult to replace.

Yes, some bloggers are moving on up--Andrew Sullivan going to Time, Josh Marshall raising money to hire two D.C. investigative reporters--but it's still a relative drop in the news bucket.

All of which explains why the debate over the future of newspapers, on Romenesko and elsewhere, is worth checking in on.

Philadelphia Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky dares make fun of his fellow newspaper hacks:

"I'm slightly embarrassed by the bagpipe dirges played when American newspapers drop employees like autumn leaves. Some columnists practically bawled over the accelerating decline and decay of the American newspaper.

"How many tears rolled down columnists' cheeks when GM announced it would cut 30,000 jobs by 2008? Their self-pity showed that some journalists believe the planets orbit around them.

"Newspapers seem to be dying and that brings on the tears. When dinosaurs went extinct, who cried?

"No one. Unlike newspapers, dinosaurs couldn't write their own obituaries. Like dinosaurs, newspapers have massive bodies and brains the size of walnuts.

"They give away their product for free on the Internet, then run in circles squawking like chickens when circulation goes down like the Titanic.

"Even the dimmest hooker knows to get paid upfront."

Ouch!

"If there were no stodgy newspapers to set the agenda with boring stuff like government, world news, politics and finance, TV news would be free to give viewers what they want - more weather, cute animal videos, traffic accidents, house fires and 'special reports' on the dangers (or promise) of cosmetic surgery.

"The dilemma: While people get their news from the Internet, the Internet gets its news from newspapers. Without newspapers, who provides the content?"

The former editor of the LAT book review, Steve Wasserman , paints a pessimistic picture and takes a few whacks at his old paper:

"Why continue to read newspapers? After all, newspapers are losing circulation at precipitous rates, giving rise to fears that they may not survive long enough to write their own obituaries. Cutbacks, buyouts and layoffs are widespread, affecting many of America's most prestigious newspapers, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Tribune, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times, where it was recently announced that the paper faced an 8% reduction in its editorial staff. Morale plummets, anxiety mounts...

"There is a strong feeling within the newsroom at the Los Angeles Times that its Chicago masters regard Los Angeles as an alien planet whose denizens are made of different DNA. Chicago's faint and unenthusiastic recognition of the 13 Pulitzers the paper was awarded during the five years that John Carroll was its editor is a wound that refuses to heal. It's almost as if Mars had conquered Jupiter but somehow, much to the Martians' bafflement, Jupiter still exercises a larger gravitational pull and looms still brighter in the heavens above. More than one high official of the paper has remarked on the odd but palpable admixture of resentment and envy the paper's Midwestern owners evince when they are in the presence of their West Coast underlings.

"Despite the vast reams of internal marketing surveys the paper has routinely commissioned over the years, the Times today seems no longer to know who its readers are, much less how to talk to them. Today the paper is ironically an almost perfect reflection of the city it purports to cover: Neither really knows what it wants to be when it grows up...

"It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the paper, in a frenetic effort to reinvent itself under the suffocating pressure of its Chicago overseers, is jettisoning a patrimony of journalistic excellence painstakingly built up over the years at great cost."

This morning, meanwhile, the L.A. Times follows up on the Pentagon media-manipulation story that it broke:

"The White House demanded Thursday that the Pentagon hand over information about a secret U.S. military operation to plant news stories in the Iraqi news media, and senators plan to meet behind closed doors with military commanders to learn about the information offensive underway in Iraq.

"Press Secretary Scott McClellan said the White House was 'very concerned' about reports that a defense contractor in Iraq, working with U.S. forces, was paying newspapers in Baghdad to run stories written by American troops." Actually, he spent most of his time refusing to criticize the effort by saying the White House didn't know the facts.

Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum questions the timing of the recent reports:

"On Wednesday, Mark Mazzetti and Borzou Daragahi of the Los Angeles Times broke a story about the U.S. military secretly writing stories and having them planted in the Iraqi media with the help of a consulting outfit called the Lincoln Group.

"A few hours later Knight Ridder posted a story by Jonathan Landay that covered the same ground and added that "U.S. psychological-warfare officers have been involved in writing news releases and drafting media strategies for top commanders."

"Thursday, Jeff Gerth and Scott Shane of the New York Times chimed in. They made it clear that they had been chasing this story on their own before the LA Times printed it.

"All of these articles are the product of weeks of research, and it's not just coincidence that all of these reporters have been working on the exact same story. Somebody's been trying to get the word out about this. Somebody who's not very happy with this program. But who?"

Andrew Sullivan defends the tactic but says it's dumb anyway:

"The only problem with this scheme, it seems to me, is not that it's somehow unethical to use propaganda in wartime. . . . This is war, as some people still refuse to understand. The problem is that media is now global, the free citizens of Iraq can access information from almost anywhere on earth, and these stories will leak and backfire."

The Pentagon program gets no such pass from Mark Jurkowitz of the Boston Phoenix:

"Now, some of the posters on this blog -- taking what I guess we would call a relativistic, pragmatic, wordly view -- seem to see nothing fundamentally wrong with an effort to plant stories with hidden motives and disguised authors in the Iraqi media. Maybe if I were a neocon war planner in Dick Cheney's office, I'd agree. The problem is I'm a journalist. And watching my country pervert my profession (which has enough problems of its own making, by the way) in this manner is disgusting. On the other hand, it's not surprising for an administration that has tried its share of bought-and-paid-for bogus journalism right here at home. (Hello Armstrong Williams and the video news releases.)"

I did wonder whether this was the administration's fantasy for the home front. (I'm Karen Ryan, reporting!)

Slate's John Dickerson deconstructs the latest Iraq move by Kerry, almost like it's 2004 all over again:

"Responding to the president's Wednesday speech on the war, Sen. John Kerry charged that George Bush didn't understand a fundamental reality on the ground in Iraq: that the presence of U.S. troops itself fuels the insurgency. Even Bush's top officer overseeing operations, Army Gen. George W. Casey, has testified to this and yet, Kerry charges, the president is oblivious.

"The president's not dealing with a certain kind of reality that's important to the lives of our troops," says Kerry.

"The criticism cleverly paints Bush as hopelessly clueless. It aligns Kerry with the fighting man: He's not cutting and running when he calls for a speed-up of troop withdrawal, he's just listening to Gen. Casey, unlike Bush himself. Kerry is leveraging Bush's reputation for stubbornness and lack of candor and turning it into a deadly flaw.

"Like most clever feints in Washington, it's also not entirely honest. True: Bush doesn't admit that the presence of large numbers of U.S. soldiers inspires insurgents. He probably never will. But that's a lack of candor, not a hole in the military strategy. Kerry wants to make what Bush doesn't say proof of what Bush doesn't know.

"Lord knows that Bush should be more candid. But Kerry is being less than candid himself when he suggests that the strategy Bush is following--as flawed as it may be--does not accommodate a realistic understanding of the insurgency. Why? Because Gen. Casey, whom the senator has been quoting to criticize Bush, is the author of the counterinsurgency strategy that Bush unveiled publicly Wednesday."

The Weekly Standard's Fred Barnes cries foul at the recent war coverage:

"Conservatives are justifiably proud of the alternative they've created to the mainstream media--the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, big regional papers, TV networks, and the national news magazine. Last year, conservative talk radio, websites, and bloggers forced the Swift Boats vets story onto the national media agenda and instantly destroyed 60 Minutes's case against President Bush and his Texas Air National Guard service. But conservatives shouldn't get triumphal. The mainstream media still rules.

"We see this every day. Consider the case of Democratic Congressman John Murtha of Pennsylvania, who recently called for an immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. The mainstream media treated this as a shot out of the blue by a defense hawk who suddenly concluded that the war was unwinnable. Conservatives knew better--namely that Murtha had been criticizing the war for many months and that his call for withdrawal was utterly irresponsible.

"The mainstream media view prevailed. Murtha was treated as a pro-war hawk who had reluctantly--and more in sorrow than in anger--turned against the intervention in Iraq. Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch gave him an 'up' arrow, and indeed that reflected media opinion about Murtha and opposition to the war in Iraq. The dissent by the conservative media barely registered.

"Despite all the good done by the alternative media, the mainstream media is still able to impose its interpretation on news events. It has no qualms about creating out of whole cloth national figures it likes. And the mainstream media continues to hold to a double standard, one for Democrats and liberals, another for Bush and Republicans."

Could it be Barnes's critique that has a double standard? Just asking.

Arianna Huffington sees the White House waging a different kind of war:

"So 'the insurgency' really is in its 'last throes'.

"No, not the effort to drive U.S. forces America out of Iraq -- that continues unabated. I'm talking about the Bush administration's decision to stop using the words 'insurgency' and 'insurgent' to describe the rebel forces.

Tuesday, Donald Rumsfeld said that 'over the weekend' he'd had 'an epiphany' that 'this is a group of people who don't merit the word "insurgency"'.

"President Bush apparently had the same epiphany because in Wednesday's big speech on Iraq he went to great pains to rebrand the enemy as 'a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists, and terrorists'. Indeed, he only uttered 'insurgents' one time in the entire speech -- and even then it was when quoting a U.S. Lt. Colonel (who apparently has been too busy training Iraqi troops in Tikrit to have time for weekend vocabulary epiphanies).

"So in the middle of a whole lot of the same tired rhetoric we've heard before ('September 11', 'as Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down', 'we will never back down, we will never give in'), here came the president's latest 'Plan for Victory in Iraq': win the war on words."

National Review , meanwhile, throws down the gauntlet:

"The battle lines are being drawn with increasing clarity on Iraq. More and more Democrats will give up on their former posture of denouncing Bush's handling of the war without offering any real alternative of their own, and instead forthrightly enunciate their own favored policy: quitting. There is a kind of honor in this -- at least it is the position many of them have always believed in. But it is their shame that it has taken a dip in support for the war in the polls for them finally to be frank about it."

This is all, in my view, a long-overdue debate.

Finally, the New York Times breaks some ground on the Abramoff front:

"With a federal corruption case intensifying, prosecutors investigating Jack Abramoff, the Republican lobbyist, are examining whether he brokered lucrative jobs for Congressional aides at powerful lobbying firms in exchange for legislative favors, people involved in the case have said...

"Investigators are said to be especially interested in how Tony C. Rudy, a former deputy chief of staff to Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, and Neil G. Volz, a former chief of staff to Representative Bob Ney of Ohio, obtained lobbying positions with big firms on K Street."

This can't be good news for anyone who ever shared an elevator with Abramoff.