The Case Against CBS News

Troy Patterson makes a scarily good case for closing the whole division. I can't tell you how television reviewing works, but to be fair, it seems to me that you need to do more than watch a couple episodes (or, in the case of one or two shows, apparently just one) before you slam them.

A few points I would add. First, it's irrelevant to Patterson's argument, but so much of what's wrong with the Evening News is the lousy production. Couric's got a heavy hand in the process -- and maybe she should take more control, though her precarious position at the company makes that pretty much inconceivable -- but she gets more flack than she deserves when you consider how much is attributable to stuff as simple as the awful copy she reads.

Second, if I were to get into the weeds on 60 Minutes, I think you have to note that the show's biggest stories these days involve major interviews with people who've just written some sort of book about Iraq or their experience in the Bush administration. Not only does this involve pretty much zero reporting, but it means that 60 Minutes frequently just functions as an adjunct to people's book tours.

Finally, yes, The Early Show is awful, so much so that it's consistent misfortunes have become a mild source of amusement for me, kind of like watching the Washington Generals get clobbered again and again. But it's all relative. The real question is, Can Patterson make a case that the Today Show and Good Morning America are significantly better -- deeper or more sophisticated -- than CBS's morning show? Highly doubtful.

Cross-Promotion

I love that Rick Stengel's defense against the accusation that Time stole its cover concept from The New Republic is, unashamedly, "No, actually we ripped it off from the NBA." Turns out they take their editorial cues from corporate ads. Much better!

Those Military Analysts

This is a must-read but also, upon brief reflection, not really surprising at all. I lost count a while ago, but this is another item to add to the list of ways in which cable networks have, wittingly or not, been used to disseminate administration propaganda.

Halperin and Davis

I guess instead of writing about McCain campaign manager Rick Davis's shady past as a super-lobbyist, Mark Halperin thought the readers of Time would best be served by a tour of the man's desk. This is the text of the piece, but it doesn't quite give you the flavor of what's in the magazine; you're missing the half-page picture with bubbles identifying, for instance, Davis's three-hole punch. (He punches his own documents sometimes!)

I get that this could be a cute little web video or something, but a full page in the print edition? Really?

Positivity

Yesterday I posted this and this at the other blog, which might lead you to believe I'm pretty negative. Not true!

Unfortunately, it's often easier to write critical items than laudatory posts, so let me take this opportunity to flag a few pieces I've read recently that were actually very good: Garry Wills on Obama and Lincoln; Hendrik Hertzberg on political misspeak; and Brad Plumer on tensions in the labor movement. Read them and learn stuff.

The Proletarian Pose

Joe Scarborough too.

What We Learned (Or Didn't) About Chris Matthews

Weirdly, the surprising thing about the Times magazine's profile of Chris Matthews is ... how unremarkable it is.

We learn that Matthews is status-obsessed and preoccupied with "the game" of politics. Neither feature is unique among people in the elite political media; Matthews is just more unashamed about it all. We read that his show is doing poorly and that his future at MSNBC (and NBC) is uncertain, which is easy to infer from his consistently lackluster ratings. We find out that he's wary of some of his colleagues, like Keith Olbermann and David Gregory, and admiring of his superior, Tim Russert. But of course, Olbermann and Matthews' mutual contempt is well-known and obvious even on-air; Gregory's star has been rising throughout the Bush administration and should trouble someone whose ratings don't justify his salary; and the status obsession explains the fixation on Russert (who, after all, is a bit like a grown-up, less voluble Matthews). Also? He's kinda sexist -- which you may have heard -- but doesn't think he is.

This isn't necessarily to disparage Mark Leibovich's reporting. He does manage to pick up some gesturing toward a Senate run in Pennsylvania. But you'd think that all the time he spent with Matthews (including a three-hour, on the record brunch) would've yielded at least a few more interesting tidbits -- some stuff that would've legitimately surprised.

The easy explanation, and probably the correct one, is that there's just no there there: Matthews is either a superficial, egomaniacal loudmouth if you hate him, or an unembarrassed lover of politics if you don't, but either way, he's putting himself out there on a daily basis and providing you with most everything you could want to know about him. A profile of a person like that can educate the uninitiated, but for people acquainted with him -- even if it's only through the teevee -- the exercise seems almost superfluous.

Photo courtesy of kendrak

Department of Corrections

A correction from the latest issue of The New York Review:

In the first paragraph of Elizabeth Drew's "Molehill Politics" [NYR, April 17], John McCain should have been described as "the Republicans' putative [not 'punitive'], and unexpected, nominee." Our apologies to Senator McCain.

That word actually caught my eye in the original, but it seemed a defensible choice all things considered.

Does The Politico Make Money? And If Not...

Alex Pareene is practically reading my mind when he questions whether The Politico makes any money. This has actually been on my mind for the last few weeks, in the wake of Eric Alterman's piece on newspapers in The New Yorker and some of the commentary that resulted.

Ezra Klein, for instance, wrote:

It may be that the economics of home delivery newspapers don't work, but the economics of something like The Politico -- which is a massive newsroom powering an online newspaper that also produces a smaller, narrowly distributed print edition -- work just fine. Or at least don't work in a somewhat less spectacular, more manageable, fashion. But the question of whether you're preserving news or preserving newspapers is an important one in these arguments. Preserving the former requires less money, fewer advertisers, and fewer classified ads. Preserving the latter, at least in its current form, requires an economic model that's already dead.

This is a curious claim when you consider that home delivery is still profitable -- very profitable, in fact, more so than the internet side of papers -- and that The Politico may not be profitable at all. The crucial difference appears to be that in the case of most newspapers, you have shareholders who are willing to cut and downsize their way to maintain stock prices, or private owners doing the same in order to maintain high profit margins; and, in the case of The Politico, you have someone willing to possibly lose money for some reason or another. And Albritton may not be willing to do that forever.

That said, it's true that it's a serious error to conflate newspapers with the news. But careful observers don't do this, and Alterman certainly didn't. I'm beginning to find it odd, in fact, that you even see pushback against claims like those Alterman made. The central argument -- that the poor economic circumstances of good newspapers will mean the loss of some solid news coverage -- is really quite modest, self-evident even. Maybe we'll see some version of The Politico survive over the long term in a financially viable way, but for the time being, there is no great web-only product like The Politico that could, for instance, replace the work that Lydia Polgreen, Carlotta Gall, or Jeffrey Gettleman do.

Folks like Alterman and myself (if you will) are hardly Chicken Littles. The sky is not falling. But newspapers have been the driving force behind The News for the last half-century, and their newsgathering functions are eroding at a rate that is not being offset by the gains in other media -- however great you think NPR is. Yes, their dominance was due largely to the existence of conditions that made it easy to run an effective monopoly, but the reality was the reality all the same.

Now, if you want to talk about an error that people commonly make, it's an elision like the one I've used in the paragraphs above. When we talk about the dwindling fortunes of newspapers, people often treat every paper like it's the Times. When I visit new cities, I get a kick out of reading local newspapers, and, well, most papers aren't the Times. Many could easily cease to exist in their current form without any appreciable effect on the lives of internet-savvy readers. A good number of those will adapt by becoming more localized products that offer things to their communities that can't be seen elsewhere, but the fate of our democracy does not hinge on your ability to read a review of the latest show at your community Shakespeare theater.

The country could stand to lose a few newspapers, but all newspapers are not equal, and some of the losses will be, and probably have been, felt. Perhaps more disturbing than that prospect is this unfortunate epistemological fact: when you lose great news coverage, there's really no way to know it.

Crossposted

Question of the Day

There was a time, wasn't there, when people who weren't Leon Wieseltier penned TNR's back-of-the-book Diarist pieces? Maybe it coincided with a time when those short essays were less about Leon Wieseltier and less crappy?

(And if you bristle at the cavalier criticism, recall this.)

Abusing Burke

Did Jonathan Rauch really write this in this month's Atlantic?

McCain voted against Bush's big tax cuts, but now says he supports extending them rather than risking damage to the economy. Flip-flop? Not if you believe, as Burkeans often do, that sudden and large policy changes deserve skepticism, but that when a policy becomes well established and woven into everyday life, as the tax cuts have, continuity should get the benefit of the doubt.

Now, I haven't read my Burke in quite a while, but how do tax cuts that are a grand total of seven years old count as a policy that has become "well established" and "woven into everyday life" (!)? By this definition, you pretty much can't change anything in American politics.

Unless, that is, you're talking about repealing the almost-century-old estate tax, which McCain helped out with in 2005. How he managed to do this while retaining his Burkean cred with Rauch isn't entirely clear. But then, I guess it's just cynicism that leads me to believe that, in both cases, McCain's turnarounds had to do with the fact that he was running for President and felt he needed the support of the GOP's anti-tax faction.

Jon Meacham Would Like Your Help

There are times when a magazine editor wants to know what potential readers think, and then there are times when a flailing editor cries out for help:

"And how to communicate that we have things to say that are both factually new and analytically new and to get you under the tent is a fact that scares me—not The Economist per se. It's an incredible frustration that I've got some of the most decent, hard-working, honest, passionate, straight-shooting, non-ideological people who just want to tell the damn truth, and how to get this past this image that we're just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get, or something, that's the challenge. And I just don't know how to do it, so if you've got any ideas, tell me."

This isn't to say that Meacham is wrong about how hardworking what's left of his staff is. But if he really doesn't have a vision for how to get his magazine back on track, then, at the risk of being churlish, might I suggest that the magazine find a new editor?