Gilbert Cranberg: HOW STEVE KING HORNSWOGGLES THE PRESS

Representative Steve King, the oft-quoted congressman from Iowa, knows how to get his name in the newspapers. His strategy is simple: make outrageous statements. The press falls for it every time. Never mind that King has no qualifications to sound off on a particular subject -- if the quote is snappy enough, you can count on King collecting another clipping for his scrapbook from a gullible press.

Thus, when Benghazi was in the news, so, too, was Steve King, pontificating that “If you link Watergate and Iran-Contra together and multiply it times maybe 10 or so, you’re going to get in the zone where Benghazi is.” King has no special knowledge about the events in Benghazi, but that didn’t keep him from pretending otherwise and the press from abetting the pretense.

The respected Des Moines Register once made the mistake of endorsing King. It subsequently retracted the endorsement in an editorial calling for the election of King’s opponent and attacking King’s “divisive, fear-mongering commentary.”

Esquire Magazine once put King on its list of 10 worst congressmen, observing that “King believes himself to be clever, and his list of idiot declarations is probably the longest in Washington.” 

King is no dummy. He certainly knows how to fool the press into giving him space. He also had enough smarts to avoid running for Tom Harkin’s recently vacated seat in the U.S. Senate, apparently figuring that Iowans would not react favorably to his brand of demagogy in a statewide race.

But it’s long past time for the press to quit giving King a soap box for no better reason than an ability to churn out provocations that are better left unsaid.

 

Gilbert Cranberg: BARE FEET IN FLIGHT

The Florida retirement community where I live recently adopted a dress code. The code, which says “residents are expected to dress appropriately and in good taste,” among other things, “strictly prohibits” bare feet in common areas. The common-sense code was formulated by the residents. The professionals who administer the place had nothing to do with it. Why can’t the high-priced executives who run the nation’s airlines do as well as my elderly neighbors?

Once upon a time people dressed up to travel. Nowadays they dress down. Air travel is unpleasant and regarded as something to avoid in good part not just because of the crowding but because of the apparent belief that airlines will tolerate anything in the way of attire. I recently flew to the Midwest, spending the entire trip with a bird’s eye view of the calluses and bunions of the woman who removed her shoes the moment she took her seat in the row ahead of me. She propped her bare feet high up on the bulkhead. That afforded everyone on board the same unobstructed view. No airline personnel asked the unshod passenger to at least lower her feet.

The grungiest Mom and Pop diners post signs announcing “No shoes, no service.” Airline gates and flight attendants should likewise inform passengers that unshod feet are a no-no. If airlines won’t enforce a minimal dress code, the folks who regulate air travel should.

Gilbert Cranberg: EXACTLY THE WRONG ADVICE FOR THE POST

The sale of the Washington Post has brought in its wake a lot of second-guessing and Monday morning quarterbacking. Could the Post have managed things differently and avoided practically giving the paper away? Everyone in the newspaper business seems to have an opinion.

The most recent was offered in the Aug. 11 New York Times by columnist Ross Douthat in a piece headed “How the Post Was Lost.” Douthat’s take is that the Post’s dim future was foretold when Politico came on the scene. Founded by a couple of Post staffers, Politico specializes in political news and, according to the Times columnist, “Today, it’s Politico rather than the Post that dominates the D.C. conversation, Politico rather than the Post that’s the must-read for Beltway professionals and politics junkies everywhere, and Politico rather than the Post that matches the metabolism of the Internet.”

Where were Times editors when Douthat’s piece appeared? Not on the job apparently. If Politico is such a rip-roaring success and the Post a flop, what do the numbers show? Times editors should have insisted that he include in his column some sign of how Politico is doing in terms of profits and readership. There’s not a word about either.    

My own feeling is that newspaper readers are fed up with all the speculation about politics years in advance of the next election. They are turned off also by the excessive attention the press gives to news about government. Yes, government is important, but so is the private sector. The doings of private corporations have as much impact on the lives of people as the actions of some government agencies, but seldom are they made into regular beats and given in-depth coverage.

The Wall Street Journal has shown that coverage of the private sector has a big payoff in reader interest. Better the Journal’s model than Politico’s.

Gilbert Cranberg: GAPS IN COVERAGE OF POST SALE

For all of the attention lavished on the sale of the Washington Post, much still is not known about the transaction. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is reported to have bought the Post for $250 million, but were there other bidders?

When my former paper, The Des Moines Register, was sold, the company’s board of directors first put up a for sale sign. That action followed receipt of an unsolicited offer for the paper. The directors figured that, in fairness to stockholders, it should open the bidding to all interested parties. (Incidentally, among the bidders for the Register was the Washington Post.) Was the Bezos bid for the Post also an unsolicited offer? What followed receipt of that offer? Did directors have it evaluated, and if so, by whom? What role did the Graham family play? And what did individual Graham family members make on the sale?

Was Warren Buffett consulted? Buffett is a former director of the Washington Post company. He recently was active in the acquisition of a number of newspapers for his own company and would have had a good feel for the value of the Post in the current market, but bringing Buffett into the picture might have raised conflict of interest questions. In any event, Buffett’s name has not figured in any of the commentary I’ve seen on sale of the Post. His take on the sale would be newsworthy at least.

The press does not generally do a good job of covering itself. But this was not that kind of close-to-home story, except for the Post. The sale was a major event in the history of the newspaper business that deserved comprehensive coverage. Perhaps the press will yet play catch-up and give the public a fuller accounting of the historic sale of the Washington Post.

Herb Strentz: OF POETS AND POLITICS -- THE IOWA FOLLIES

Rudyard Kipling never would have penned the opening line of his poem “If” were he in Iowa when the press ballyhoos the state as “The center of the political universe” — as it does so routinely today.

 

Kipling begins his celebrated 1895 poem with the line “If you can keep your head when all about you (a)re losing theirs….” But that is well nigh impossible in Iowa in August 2013.

 

Subjected to the farce that Iowa makes of the presidential campaign in particular and sanity in general, Kipling would have returned his pen to its inkwell, forgotten about “If” and possibly seen the wisdom in Edgar Allan Poe and the line “Nevermore.”

 

The more Iowa botches its role in the presidential campaign, the more the press trumpets Iowa’s first-in-the-nation status as a bellwether, oracle and fount of wisdom. It’s almost insane.

Here we are 27 months from the 2016 election and we’re in mid-campaign form. Iowa and GOP candidates do dumb things and the press dutifully records it all; just as the press must have done in rave reviews of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” — to invoke a third literary giant, Hans Christian Andersen. 

 

How can one “keep your head” when, like water-drop torture, these items drip, drip, drip?

 

• News accounts routinely refer to the need for candidates to cater to the Republican Party “base.” But, at least in Iowa, the GOP “base” and “lunatic fringe” are one and the same. The press does not acknowledge that, although a lot of former Iowa Republicans do.

 

• One hopeful sign of sanity -- that the Iowa Straw Poll might be reformed -- has become an absurdity, if not a political obscenity.  The Iowa Straw Poll is a fundraiser held by the Iowa GOP in August of the year preceding a presidential election.  Whichever candidate contributes the most money to the Iowa GOP is crowned as the front-runner of the Republican Party presidential nomination.  The press embraces this scam by sagely noting that whoever can commandeer the most yellow school buses to ferry supporters to the Straw Poll plainly has demonstrated fitness to fill what Harry S. Truman called “the most important office of government in the history of the world.”  The Straw Poll process resulted in U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann winning the crown in 2011.  This spurred efforts toward reform. So who has offered to fill the gap should the Straw Poll be junked? Well, the Iowa Christian Right says it can screen candidates even better than the Straw Poll. The organization willing to do that, the evangelical non-profit Family Leader — which spearheaded the campaign to oust three Iowa Supreme Court justices for recognizing the right to gay marriage — has the apparent blessing of Republican Gov. Terry Branstad. The GOP nominee would not be the biggest spender, but would be the one who grovels best before the GOP “base.”

 

• The Iowa caucus and campaign process puts the emphasis not on issues or debate, but rather on who is ahead in the polls.  You see, it’s all a horse race, even though the horse race approach has long been criticized as a flaw in political news coverage.  So a measure of hope wafted into Iowa recently when the respected, but now retired, Associated Press political reporter Mike Glover created a website to offer some needed and solid insights and substance to the caucus folly.  His website?     http://www.iowahorserace.com. 

 

How do you “keep your head” amidst all this and still worse to come — even if you are in the center of the political universe?

Gilbert Cranberg: WHICH WAY FOR JEFF BEZOS?

One plus in the sale of the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos is the switch in its status from a publicly owned company to private ownership. That means Post stock no longer can be bought and sold by investors and the stock won’t be listed on any of the stock exchanges. That’s a plus because publicly traded companies too often are managed for the short term and managers judged by how successful they are in boosting the company’s stock price quarter-to quarter.

The Graham family was more mindful than most newspaper owners that fixating on quarterly financial results can be harmful to the long-term health of a company. But even the Post had to have one eye on its stock price. And that lagging price was a factor in its eventual sale. The stock’s price led also to newsroom cutbacks that diminished the paper’s quality.
Many years ago I interviewed a large number of stock analysts and asked them whether publicly traded newspaper companies were good or bad for journalism. They were nearly unanimous in saying it was bad because it forced the companies to pay excessive attention to the bottom line. (“Taking Stock —Journalism and the Publicly Traded Newspaper Company”, Cranberg, Bezanson, Soloski (Iowa State Univ. Press, 2001).) So, does that mean the era of a Bezos-owned Post will be good news for readers? Not necessarily. Bezos has never worked on a newspaper and has no tradition of family newspaper ownership. What he knows about the Post is only as a reader.

I say “only” but that stands for a great deal. What serious readers of newspapers treasure is their reliability and comprehensiveness. Compromise either and their value diminishes.

Jeff Bezos did not accumulate the wealth to buy the Post by being a stupid businessman. He would be that if he makes inroads in the quality of the Post for short-term gain.

Since Bezos has not worked in journalism he has none of the skills needed to manage a newspaper. But there are people with such skill and Bezos ought to know how to locate them. Above all, he needs to convince them of his vision that the best days of the Washington Post are ahead.

 

Gilbert Cranberg: THREE CHEERS FOR JOHN PAUL STEVENS

Retired Supreme Court justices don’t customarily second-guess their former colleagues. Former high-court justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010, broke with custom the other day when he wrote a searing critique of the court’s decision to invalidate the Voting Right’s Act’s requirement that states with a history of bias in voting had to obtain Justice Department approval of changes in their voting laws

Stevens registered his disapproval in a book review in the Aug. 15 issue of the New York Review of Books. The book: “Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act and the Transformation of American Democracy” by Gary May.

The New York Review of Books has a small but elite readership. If Stevens wanted deliberately to provoke a storm, he’d have run his piece in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but the book review he wrote was sufficiently hard-hitting and out of the ordinary that it is bound to be noticed.

Among other things, Stevens accused Chief Justice John Roberts of selectively quoting history in his majority opinion for the court. “Nothing that happened before the 1890s is even mentioned in Roberts’s opinion for the court,” chided Stevens, noting it was in those years the Ku Klux Klan was organized and other measures flourished to deny blacks access to the ballot box. And he unfavorably compared Roberts’s description of Mississippi racial history to the more complete factual record included in Justice Abe Fortas’s opinion in the earlier voting rights case of United States v. Price.    

Should retired justices stick to their knitting and leave commentary about the court’s work to law professors and other academic critics? It would be a shame if the unique insight and perspective of a retired justice is withheld from public discourse for no better reason than custom. The public debate has been enriched by John Paul Stevens’s willingness to speak his mind.