Archives for May 2009

With Vancouver’s Columbian filing for bankruptcy, and many industry observers expecting the same for the The Seattle Times if it too fails to renegotiate its debt, I want to take a moment to distinguish between the poor fundamentals of the newspaper industry as a whole, and the poor business decisions of some of its most troubled publishers.

No doubt this is a difficult time to own and operate a daily newspaper.  The growth of the Internet and changing consumer habits have been undermining the once dominant dailies for more than a decade, but the sudden, recession-induced plunge in advertising revenues has greatly accelerated the process.  Local news monopolies, reliable cash cows for much of the past century, are slashing budgets and staff nationwide as they attempt to weather the current economic storm, while the industry as a whole struggles to invent a sustainable online business model.

Quite frankly, the fundamentals suck, and thus it would be understandable if those at the helm of papers like The Times and The Columbian take some solace in the woes of their fellow publishers.  But not too much.

For while the whole industry is struggling, the financial precariousness of some of our most threatened papers is at least partially due to the awful business decisions of their owners, in particular, the incredibly over-leveraged position they find themselves in as a result of ill-advised acquisitions and other bone-headed ventures.

For The Columbian, it was the construction of a new $40 million office tower that landed a shrunken newsroom back in its old digs, and publisher Scott Campbell in bankruptcy court.  For The Times, it was Frank Blethen’s ill-fated foray into the Maine media market that has left him with a couple hundred million dollars of debt coming due, and no obvious means of raising more capital.  Both papers are currently losing money on their daily operations, but neither would be struggling to survive this particular recession if the bankers weren’t pounding at their doors.

And they’re not alone.  Indeed, while most local papers have remained at least marginally profitable despite the industry-wide turmoil, their corporate parents are being crushed under mountains of debt incurred via highly leveraged acquisitions.  It’s not that most newspapers are losing money—in fact, on average, the industry’s operating margins remain higher than most of its advertisers—it’s that they simply can’t sustain the 20 to 30 percent margins on which many of these deals were predicated.

For all the whining about Google and bloggers and high taxes and changing demographics and the reluctance of consumers to pay for content, it’s not the core business of newspapers that has put so many dailies at death’s door, but rather, the poor business decisions of their owners.

Over the years we’ve heard a lot from the conservative editorial boards at the The Times and The Columbian and elsewhere about the need for folks to take personal responsibility.  It is time they demanded the same of their own publishers.

Last week in TIME Magazine, Maia Szalavitz wrote about Glenn Greenwald’s report on the success of drug decriminalization in Portugal. In the article, she quotes one person skeptical of whether that success can be brought here to the states:

“I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn’t having much influence on our drug consumption,” says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.

When a reader at Greenwald’s Salon blog asked him about Kleiman’s thoughts, here was Greenwald’s response [via DWR]:

Mark Kleinman emailed me once about something I wrote and had a major outburst, expressing all sorts of hostility – I’m not saying that motivated him to dismiss the relevance of Portugal, but I am going tow rite and demand specifics.

I find it so shallow and vapid when people say: “We can’t look to what happened in that country because there are cultural differences and size differences” without being specific — why would drug decriminalization work with a population of 10 million people but not 300 million? What, specifically, are the meaningful “cultural differences” between Portugal and the U.S. that allows decriminalization to work in the former but not the latter?

In fairness to Kleiman, he was quoted in that article and thus not necessarily able to control what was conveyed, but I am going to demand some specifics from him.

After reading that, I was reminded of an exchange that Kleiman had with several commenters at his site a while back over the same subject. In the comments of this post, a commenter wrote:

Mark, you’ve claimed a few times that European and Canadian successes at various forms of drug “reform” can’t be used as examples for the US, because social conditions are different here. (If I’ve mischaracterized you here, please correct me.)

I’d like to know just what social features of Europe and Canada you believe to be responsible for the success of these programs there, and how you would expect similar programs to fail in the US due to different conditions here.

Kleiman responded with a list of 14 items (his comments don’t have numbers or links, but it was posted at June 21, 2006 04:29 AM, about 1/2 way down the thread). Later on the thread, I picked apart a few of the items. Looking back at the list again and using Portugal as a comparison point, it’s even easier to see that a number of the items are irrelevant (1, 4) or untrue – either outright or as a difference (2, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13). But what’s even more amusing about that list is that almost all of the reasons that he gives (2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14) are things that are either caused – or greatly exacerbated – by drug prohibition itself. That’s like saying “oh my, our eagerness to wage war and torture people has made the rest of the world really mad at us. I guess we have no choice now but to keep waging more wars and torturing people”. Or to borrow a modern overused office expression – “the beatings will continue until morale improves”.

Of course, when Kleiman wrote that comment, he was addressing cases like Zurich, Amsterdam, and Vancouver, which may have fit his list a little better, but now that he’s thrown out the same exact argument to Greenwald because “Portugal is smaller than the U.S.” and has vague “cultural differences,” it certainly seems like this is a case where the conclusion stays the same while the justifications keep changing.

I’m not going to jump to any conclusions here about Kleiman’s motivations. A lot of people in the drug law reform community scratch their heads as to why Kleiman sometimes makes very eloquent analyses on the failures of drug policy, but then will turn around and lash out at people who simply follow that path to its logical conclusions. Either way, I’m looking forward to Kleiman’s response to Greenwald, but not holding my breath.

I think it’s fair to say that this casts even more doubt on the legitimacy of Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.

The campaign of Sen. Joe Lieberman, I/D-Conn., agreed to pay a $50,000 civil penalty after the Federal Election Commission concluded that the campaign repeatedly flouted the law in disbursing cash payments to volunteers during Lieberman’s bruising Democratic primary against businessman Ned Lamont in 2006.

The FEC opened an investigation in late 2006 after Lamont’s campaign lodged a complaint alleging that Lieberman was using a “slush fund” to fuel his campaign in the waning days of the primary. Lamont’s campaign cited more than $387,000 in unexplained expenditures listed only as “petty cash.”

So the next time you hear a Republican complaining about ACORN or something, realize that the actual shenanigans come from ethically corrupt corporate mouthpieces like Joe Lieberman, who at the time was rewarded with fawning traditional media coverage about how “moderate” he is.

Think about it. Joe Lieberman basically has no moral right to serve in the U.S. Senate and it should be Ned Lamont’s seat. But under our system of enforcement, cheaters prosper. Hell, under our system of everything cheaters prosper.

I’d call that downright…uncivil. And everyone in the country gets to pay for this miscarriage of the will of the voters, because you know—you know–Lieberman will continue to do great harm. It’s really not hard to imagine him trying to derail an Obama Supreme Court nominee, because Lieberman is that venal.

Why is being a political prostitute always synonymous with some abstract and non-existent notion of virtuous centrism in this country? It’s a bizarre fairy tale.

Lieberman is the worst of the worst, and the Senate should censure him and strip him of his committee assignments. Yeah, he’ll go over to the Republicans, but he basically already is a Republican, and there is no filibuster-proof group of 60 in reality anyway. The people are sick and tired of their will being subverted by arrogant, corrupt blowhards. The most exclusive club in the world needs to start cleaning up its own house, and a good place to start is with Lieberman.

No, I’m not holding my breath.

(Props to Firedoglake.)

Not unexpected. Bank of America wants its money.

The Columbian’s difficulties began almost as soon as it moved into a new six-story $40 million office building at 415 W. Sixth St. in downtown Vancouver in January 2008. A sour economy and costs related to the building – where newspaper, advertising, circulation and newsroom operations occupied four floors – triggered three rounds of company-wide layoffs last year that cut more than 100 positions from operations. In December, the newspaper was forced to relocate to its former address at 701 W. Eighth St., where it had operated since the 1950s.

The newspaper is promising to continue operations, though.

Publisher Scott Campbell told The Oregonian that his firms, which include not just the newspaper but a real estate development company, might give the fairly empty new building to Bank of America.

Hard to fathom, Bank of America owning a distressed property.

To those fondly speculating about Gov. Chris Gregoire being on the list of potential nominees to replace retiring US Supreme Court Justice David Souter, I offer two words of caution:  Brad Owen.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqBVCr_nudY[/youtube]

Well, you gotta give Mike Brown credit for being consistent:

Here’s what I really think is going on. I think they want to raise this level because that gives them more attention, it gives them more, you know, more legitimacy, and allows them to get out there and say ‘oh look at us, we’re in control we’ve got this thing taken care of.’

Of course, in providing his “expert” analysis to FOX News, it’s no surprise that Brownie focuses on appearances rather than on the public health response or, you know, the flu virus itself, for if there’s anything he learned from his years at the helm of FEMA, it’s that the most important part of mounting an effective emergency management effort is presenting the appearance of mounting an effective emergency management effort.  Or at least that’s the way he ran his agency, always assuring an ample supply of FEMA emblazoned tee-shirts and windbreakers at the scene of any major disaster, even if potable water and adequate shelter were lacking.

Indeed, even in his post-Katrina congressional testimony, Brownie made clear that the real disaster in New Orleans didn’t take place until after his press office was overwhelmed with inquiries about his thin resume:

While FEMA was trying to respond to probably the largest natural disaster in the history of this country, a catastrophic disaster that the president has described covering an area the size of Great Britain – I have heard 90,000 square miles – unless you have been there and seen it, you don’t realize exactly how bad and how big it was – but in the middle of trying to respond to that, FEMA’s press office became bombarded with requests to respond immediately to false statements about my resume and my background.

Ironically, it started with an organization called horsesass.org, that on some blog published a false, and, frankly, in my opinion, defamatory statement that the media just continued to repeat over and over. Next, one national magazine not only defamed me, but my alma mater, the Oklahoma City University School of Law, in one sentence alone leveling six false charges.

[snip]

But I guess it’s the media’s job. But I don’t like it. I think it’s false. It came at the wrong time. And I think it led potentially to me being pulled out of Louisiana because it made me somewhat ineffective.

The unnecessary deaths and suffering in Katrina’s wake?  My fault. Because my reporting ultimately made it impossible for Brownie’s press office to do its job.

Small wonder then that a man who views PR flacks as first responders would choose to criticize US and WHO health officials for their public posturing, while failing to engage in even a cursory discussion of the public health crisis itself.  But by accusing officials of “crying the sky is falling,” FOX’s “expert” shows he has even less expertise about pandemic flu than he did about Atlantic hurricanes; indeed, contrary to Brown’s assertions, it’s not the fatality rate per se that has triggered heightened alert levels as much as it is the apparent contagiousness of this novel virus.  For even if the severity of the symptoms prove no worse than those of the typical seasonal flu, a pandemic outbreak will kill many, many more people, if only through the sheer number of those afflicted:

Because there is no natural immunity to this virus, even though clinically it appears to be like garden variety flu to the individual, with respect to the population it has the potential to spread faster and many more people sick than seasonal flu. And remember, seasonal flu is not a walk in the park. It kills an estimated 30,000 people a year.

A bad flu season can fill hospital emergency rooms and in patient beds to the bursting point. We currently have fewer staffed hospital beds per capita than we did in the last pandemic, 1968 (the “Hong Kong flu”). There is no reserve capacity. We can’t just add physical beds. Beds don’t take care of patients. Nurses and doctors do.

Now take a bad flu season and double it. To each individual it’s the same disease but now everybody is getting it at once, in every community and all over the world. In terms of virulence, it’s a mild pandemic. It’s not a lethal virus like 1918. But in terms of social disruption it could be very bad. If twice as many people get sick, the number of deaths could be 80,000 in the US instead of 40,000.

And if three or four times as many people fall ill, well, do the math.  The 1918 pandemic is estimated to have infected one third of the world population; even at a mortality rate of less than one tenth of one percent, a mild yet similarly widespread pandemic would kill over two million people worldwide.

So are public health officials playing the role of Chicken Little?  Hardly. No, unlike FEMA during Brownie’s tenure, they’re focusing on adequately preparing for the worst, ahead of the crisis, rather than just spinning the response afterwards.

Woke up this morning to find Publicola’s posts not loading, from either the website or the admin screen, and after about 10 minutes of investigation discovered that one of its database tables had become "corrupt."  So I held my breath, closed my eyes, and clicked on the phpMyAdmin "repair" button and… all better!

My first corrupted database in five years of using WordPress.  Who knew that Publicola could be such a corrupting influence?