Los Angeles Times fires everybody (mostly)

Los Angeles Times building

For a minute there – and with the mess of Hurricane Katrina to inspire their better journalistic impulses - it looked as if big media news had regained its voice, and then the hammer fell: The Los Angles Times’ owner fired everybody. Okay, not everybody; they kept the copy boy.

Back when the administration was beating the war drums and pretending to believe the intelligence they were getting from Curveball and Ahmad Chalabi, even as The New York Times’ Judith Miller was salting the mine and Tom Friedman furiously scribbling inflammatory (and plainly asinine) arguments for bringing the Shock and Awe road show to Iraq, many Internet citizens, including this writer, saw the whole thing as a setup.

And we weren’t even reporters, scuffing our shoe leather on the White House or the Pentagon beat, or even on speaking terms with Hans Blix or Scott Ritter; no, we got our information from the newspapers for the most part and some TV. The very same newspapers that reported UN inspectors finding nada, while burying directly contradictory reports on page 13 and stridently screaming for Iraqi blood on the editorial pages.

A great many of us were able - from the bits and pieces of journeyman reporting that we did find - to put together a coherent story that pointed to an administration that wanted to go to war come hell or high water - although as to precisely why no one could then say. It was obvious that the Iraqis were out of the loop vis a vis the World Trade Center attack; hell, every news outlet on the planet reported that the hijackers were Saudis and Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan or maybe the south of France.

The Internet came in handy for this one, though. With just a few minutes of Googling, you could find reams of info – Greg Palast was outstanding on this subject – about the Bush-Saudi-Halliburton connections; why weren’t the MSM editors Googling along with us? (One presumes they have Internet access.) I can understand their hesitancy to use Lexis/Nexis: the service costs a bundle, but Google is free and covers much the same information.

So as we rapidly sank up to our collarbones in Iraq - I believe the correct phrase is “bogged down” – the American press blithely focused on white chicks fleeing their grooms, a pederasty case and other trivia, earning insane megabucks in the process, and then along comes Hurricane Katrina. The Bush administration was revealed to be a hopeless pack of political hacks and the press got righteous.

Result? Managing editors turned their reporters loose and we got great reporting for about thirty days – in print and on TV - and then the Tribune Company (titular owner of The LA Times, The Chicago Tribune, as well as Tribune Entertainment among other things) lowered the boom on the editorial staff of the best newspaper in the country – The Los Angeles Times, winner of 13 Pulitzer Prizes in five years - and fired some 8% of its staff (85 bodies), among them its top editors, opinion writers and foreign correspondents. But they kept Max Boot’s worthless op-ed crap.

Why? Was it because the editorial staff had found their backbones after all these years and started reporting the real skinny, infuriating their corporate owners? Nope; it was because the Tribune Company’s Wall Street owners weren’t happy with the 20% profits the Times was generating; they wanted more, so they cut the editorial staff to increase the bottom line.

And what is the Times' return on investment? 20%! That’s a better bottom line than in the pharmaceutical industry, and they’re raping their customers.

Not that profits are obscene in and of themselves, but owners need to realize that there is a natural bottom-line profit to be had from infotainment and a different bottom line for traditional news outlets, and they are incompatible. Time/Life spun off People magazine from a Time magazine weekly column and left the news magazine otherwise intact and everybody’s happy.
The newspaper biz has been in shakeup mode* for many years: readership dwindled as citizens shifted their attention to TV infotainment (NBC’s Nightly News is the single largest source of news for Americans, according to NBC News); Spanish-language TV and newspapers have taken a large share of the info-consuming public the Times once monopolized, people have forgotten how to read, and, of course, there’s the Internet.

It’s not completely doom and gloom: Los Angeles county presently has three major metros: The LA Times, the Spanish-language La Opinion and the Daily News - which is published in and for the San Fernando Valley – but this last might as well be from the other side of the planet for real Los Angelenos.

Not that I’m proposing that the Internet totally replace the traditional American newspaper in the immediate future, but given the slashing of editorial budgets happening at newspapers all over the country, along with the mind candy that is driving all real news from the front page and network news, most of my own information is gleaned from online sources, and most of them foreign, and I no longer watch the evening news. Where can an honest managing editor or print reporter go?

How about the Internet?

Yes Gentle Readers, the World Wide Web, the blogosphere, XMS/RSS feeds, the BBC and Reuters newswires on your desktop and CNN instant bulletins in your e-mail box, 24/7. For free and no corporate greedhounds.

Robert Scheer, multiple prize-winning-recently-fired employee of the once-mighty Los Angeles Times has teamed up with Los Angeles entrepreneur Zuade Kaufman, son Christopher Scheer, and Richard Core, et al. and now edits TruthDig.com, starting yesterday.

Welcome aboard the Truth Train, Robert & Company. Good day and good luck.

*Warning: audio tape of a radio program with educated people having an insightful discussion.

UPDATE: in March of 2011, the NY Times established an Internet paywall, which many pundits predicted would effectively crash the legendary newspaper. Well, great things come to those who dare to dream and all that, as Bloomberg.com is reporting that NYT's paywall has actually increased circulation. How about that, folks? 

American media bored with Iraq war?

Two weeks ago we ran a review of a book of Iraq war photography, Unembedded; in it, we noted the lack of coverage - both in print and on television - of this war. Leaving aside the problem of how physically dangerous it is for reporters, whether photographers or print, the question still remains: where is the coverage?

Rebecca Dana and Lizzy Ratner in a recent article for The New York Observer have posed the same question and have come up with one possible answer:

In 2003, after the invasion, media companies were warned not to feed the American news consumer too much material on the downside of war. The media-consulting firm Frank Magid Associates advised broadcast outlets that its survey results suggested that viewers had very little appetite for stories about casualties, prisoners of war and anti-war protests.

“There’s this kind of general, industry-wide view that Americans don’t like anything tough, don’t like anything complicated, don’t give a shit, don’t know how to spell the country much less care what’s going on there,” Ms. [Christiane] Amanpour said. “I find that a very patronizing attitude.”

Yes, it is patronizing, but probably realistic, as far as it goes. When the national news coverage goes on for days about some white chick who left her husband at the altar or JaLo’s recent pregnancy (did that happen? I really don’t know) for hours and hours of Jacko or that skinny Hilton broad, I personally can’t figure out if the media is generating the celebrity-watch demand or if the public really wants to see this crap more than they want to know how their Johnny might be doing in that foreign country where the towel heads are all trying to kill him.

Bear in mind that military policy presently forbids the photographing of coffins arriving from Iraq and military funerals taking place here in America on public grounds, i.e. Arlington National Cemetery, by anyone - and that includes the grieving parents of the deceased.

So if the American media couldn’t be bothered to report the news from Iraq and the American public couldn’t be bothered to watch it, why then is the US abducting or killing reporters and targeting media offices?

Don’t think so? Read this, from the UK Guardian:

22 November 2005
EXCLUSIVE: BUSH PLOT TO BOMB HIS ARAB ALLY
Madness of war memo
By Kevin Maguire And Andy Lines

PRESIDENT Bush planned to bomb Arab TV station al-Jazeera in friendly Qatar, a "Top Secret" No 10 memo reveals ... Bush disclosed his plan to target al-Jazeera, a civilian station with a huge Mid-East following, at a White House face-to-face with Mr Blair on
April 16 last year ... The No 10 memo now raises fresh doubts over US claims that previous attacks against al-Jazeera staff were military errors ... In 2001 the station's Kabul office was knocked out by two "smart" bombs. In 2003, al-Jazeera reporter Tareq Ayyoub was killed in a US missile strike on the station's Baghdad centre ... The memo, which also included details of troop deployments, turned up in May last year at the Northampton constituency office of then Labour MP Tony Clarke.

To bring us up to date, the number of journalists killed so far in Iraq (74) exceeds those killed during the Vietnam War (66), which lasted twenty years. But getting killed isn’t the only problem. It seems that if the insurgents don’t kidnap reporters, the Americans will:

The Iraqis who have taken up the most dangerous legwork are not safe either. Five Iraqi journalists are currently being held without charges by U.S. and Iraqi government troops. Since April 2003, between 10 and 13 have been killed by American gunfire.

“It really comes from all sides,” said Reuters global managing editor David Schlesinger, who has lost three Iraqi reporters to U.S. gunfire and three more to detention facilities. “Certainly there’s a huge risk from insurgents, either to be hurt or killed accidentally … but unfortunately, there’s also been an issue with U.S. troops.”

And don’t forget:

(1) Italian journalist Juliana Sgerno was shot at and her bodyguard killed at a US checkpoint,
(2) CNN’s former chief Eason Jordan called for the US to stop targeting journalists, and
(3) The Palestine Hotel, headquarters for the international press in Baghdad, was blasted by a US tank, with two journalists killed and several wounded, May 2004.

And of course, having embed-induced tunnel vision doesn’t help, either:

“If you’re a [Western] print reporter,” [former Washington Post bureau chief] Mr. Chandrasekaran said, “you’re pretty much confined to Baghdad. And if you want to go anywhere else, you basically have to be embedded.”

This also keeps the press working within an official, bureaucratic context. Jon Alpert, a filmmaker working on a documentary for HBO about military medicine, said that the MedEvac unit he embedded with for the project was surprisingly accommodating. But when injured troops reached the field hospital, officials invoked the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, the same privacy law that has come to thwart stateside reporters.

“When we were in the hospital,” Mr. Alpert said, “I had to have a public-affairs officer with me all the time. Because it was a hospital, they were applying the HIPAA laws.”

The combination of structured access to U.S. forces and open hostility from insurgents has left reporters with lopsided sources. “Who are the insurgents?” said freelance photojournalist Kael Alford, who covered the invasion and the first three months of the occupation. “Who are these people and why are they fighting? That’s a really valuable perspective …. It’s the story we have all been trying to do all along, and very few journalists have been able to get it.”

So maybe the American media isn’t bored with the Iraqi war; perhaps they’re just frustrated by the lack of exciting visuals, corporate policy that favors tits over national security, damn little access to the Iraqi populace, lack of personnel on the ground, active interference by the military, and governmental policy that restricts what can be reported, both from here and Iraq.

In other words, it’s not their fault.

In the meantime, keep your Internet provider bill paid up or subscribe to a foreign newspaper, because that’s the only way you’re going to find out anything worth knowing about this war.

The matrix explained

Congressman John Murtha is being hammered by both the left and the right for having the temerity to call for withdrawal from Iraq now. Bushites reject his call as “traitorous” or worse, “cowardice,” while those on the left, including some 200+ Democratic representatives, simply don’t want to face up to the fact that both the American public (55-60% according to the latest polls) and the Iraqi representatives at the Cairo conference last night, have called for us to leave, immediately. But I sense a weather change here.

We might actually have turned the corner in the debate about our presence in Iraq. Instead of bushwa about “supporting the troops,” “staying the course,” etc., we may well have started an actual, rational public debate about real issues, like how to get the troops home without too much egg on our collective face and Iraq in chaos.

Many, including the redoubtable Juan Cole, have voiced concerns that our withdrawal would have as an immediate result a civil war in Iraq. Cole argues that while we might characterize the present insurgency’s attacks on the militias, police and Iraqi military as civil war, that’s not what he means by civil war. He’s talking about set-piece battles, possibly tank warfare, and the participation of Turkey, Iran, et al. Personally, I think that’s a little over the top, but Cole had also proposed a withdrawal plan back in August not unlike Kerry’s recent one. Cole’s seems reasonable to me – as did Kerry’s - because he realistically admits that there will continue to be insurgency and counter-insurgency attacks in the major cities, which he sees – rightly so – as an Iraqi civilian police problem, and not our concern. Hear, hear.

Still to be debated - or at the very least, dragged out into the light of day - is the National Security Strategy. You know, that plan to occupy the Middle East until doomsday or the oil runs out, whichever comes first. This is the plan to which Clinton, Biden, Lieberman and others (Republicans and Democrats) are paid-up subscribers.
This is a very troubling item, as while it can be reasonably argued that we need to protect our access to oil with global troop deployment - particularly Middle East oil - in order to maintain the Western Way of Lifestyle and help the rest of the world come up to some decent standard of living, etc., we also need somehow to throttle back OPEC’s artificially high crude oil prices to avert a potential world depression. Unfortunately, this involves the industrial-military-petroleum-Halliburton matrix of the House of Saud, the Bush family fortune, NAFTA, al-Queda, French rioting, Chinese/Wal-Mart commercial dominance and mad bombers. Quite a mess, and a situation not well-served by monotonously chanting the Support Our Troops mantra, or calling the other sons of Abraham “Islamo-fascists,” an oxymoron if there ever was one.

The NSS leaves untouched any mention at all of alternative energy source development, even though this is a national security priority, the neglect of which is evidenced by the war in Iraq, economic riots in Europe, terrorism, as well as growing global warming and its attendant consequences.

Here’s how it breaks down: the NSS is based on the assumption that petroleum is the single source of energy economically feasible for the foreseeable future. Therefore we must protect our access to petroleum. OPEC controls the production quotas of crude, led by Saudi Arabia, which affects oil prices by virtue of its being the world's largest supplier of sweet crude. The House of Saud maintains its precarious rule of Saudi Arabia – and its millions of Israeli-displaced Palestinians - by its military and secret police, which are materially supplied by the US, funded by its OPEC income, and despised by bin Laden, a son of the desert himself. The Bush family has been in bed with the House of Saud for generations, so if the House of Saud falls, so does the House of Bush, therefore Bush has no interest in helping depose the House of Saud. OK so far?

An American-dominated Iraq will be pressured to decline to join OPEC, thereby keeping its oil fields open to Shell, ExxonMobile, et al. as joint partners, lowering the price of crude. This is actually what the oil companies would prefer, as oil company CEOs are really all nice guys, as well as being upstanding citizens and parents. But in the long run, the oil companies couldn’t care less whether OPEC or independent companies are the suppliers; they earn outrageous profits in any case. However, as long as the Middle East is unstable, stable oil extraction is iffy, and the oil companies stand to lose potential billions. OPEC, while expensive, guarantees stable production at the potential cost of a world depression, due soon at this rate.

Enter Osama bin Laden, who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the oil; he just wants the House of Saud to fall, the Palestinians out of Saudi Arabia and back in Palestine, and the Israelis to stop terrorizing the Middle East. And, oh by the way, as long as we prop up Israel, he’s going to suicide-bomb us, too.

On the other hand, an independent Iraq might just decide to join OPEC, and presto, sky-high oil prices until we go back into the Middle East in about eight to ten years time, but now with about 5 million real coalition troops, including NATO, Russia and probably China to avert the next Great Depression. Colonel Larry Wilkerson said so.

Now, remove BushCo and the Saudi connection breaks, Shiia Muslims control the oil fields, and we still have a mess on our hands until we develop alternative sources of energy.

All because the Bush family likes desert dudes who own oil wells, and Junior won’t admit the weather is getting hotter.

Speaking of things that are not what they appear to be: while it is true that the folks in the Netherlands (Holland) seem to enjoy a free-wheeling lifestyle – minimal drug enforcement, red light districts, draft-dodging immigrants, gay marriage, etc. – it is well to bear in mind that the majority stockholder in the Royal Dutch Shell company is the über-rich House of Orange, Holland’s ruling king and queen and family. What I’m saying here is that you might want to look on Holland as a model of what a reasonably prosperous society looks like when the filthy rich control the world: they don’t give a poop what the serfs do as long as they get the big quarterly returns. Meditate on that for awhile.