It’s tim for the liberal media to become a reality–rather than just a fictitious talking point for conservatives.

Newspapers are for sale across the country, from Florida to California, and they’re available at bargain rates. A rich liberal philanthropist should take this opportunity to buy a newspaper or two, and show conservatives that liberals can run a newspaper with a strong progressive voice on the opinion page and strict fairness and accuracy in news reporting. 

The properties to choose from include the Austin American-Statesman, Daytona Beach (FL) News-Journal, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, and San Diego Union-Tribune, among others. Most of these newspapers are owned by public companies whose shareholders are howling because they’re watching their stock drop and hearing that newspapers can’t survive in the Internet age. 

And the fact is, newspaper circulation is dropping along with advertising revenue due to the double whammy of the recession and the migration of readers to the Internet, where newspaper articles are available for free. In particular, the loss of classified advertising to the Internet (see Craigslist) has been a huge problem for big daily newspapers, which once earned consistent double digit profits. 

These changes in the media landscape, coupled with the economic crisis, have led to the recent closure of brand name papers, such as the Albuquerque Tribune and the Cincinnati Post. But just because Wall Street is pushing public companies out of the newspaper business, and privately held media like the Tribune Company are facing bankruptcy or serious cash crunches, doesn’t mean the newspaper industry is doomed. 

Common sense says there will always be a need for mass-market advertising, and we humans seem to have an innate interest in the news, even if infotainment may be more effective at attracting the attention of so many of us than serious journalism. Interestingly, while paid circulation of newspapers is down, readership has actually increased dramatically, due to all the free visitors to newspaper websites. 

Long-time newspaper analyst John Morton believes big-city dailies will return to profitability when the economy improves, though he says the days of big-time profits will not likely be seen again. Also, newspapers are generating more revenue from online advertising, so newspaper websites will likely turn a profit some day. But we don’t know when. 

Adjustments to the familiar model of newspaper delivery may boost  profits as well, such as the experiment in Detroit, announced in mid-December, of delivering the newspaper three days per week…-and requiring subscribers to access the news online the rest of the week. 

So there’s plenty of hope for the business, which we rely on for the information we need to make decisions in the voting booth and to hold government accountable. 

But there’s a real need for philanthropists with deep pockets to cover losses at newspapers while they adjust to the changing information environment. Hence the need for those liberal donors. 

They can swoop down and show Fox News what the liberal media looks like. They can insist that their newspapers, unlike Fox, contain credible news reporting strictly adhering to the ethics of professional journalism. 

This includes not only basic fairness, but credible sourcing, fact checking, thorough research, and breadth in coverage and points of view. In so doing, rich liberals would be affirming the importance of newspapers…-and reliable information about local, national, and international issues…-in a democracy.  

Now is the time for philanthropists to step forward and create the liberal media, but do it within the confines of professional journalism.

link to this column here: http://www.minutemanmedia.org/SALZMAN%20122408.htm

Rocky Mountain News staffer April Washington posed a rhetorical question to Westword’s Michael Roberts that has implications that go far beyond the decision by E.W. Scripps Co. to sell the Rocky. She asked, “Why does Scripps always blink first.”

It’s a good question because both The Denver Post, owned by a private company called the Media News Group, and the Rocky, owned by a public company, are both losing about the same amount of money. That’s because their joint operating agreement stipulates that the two companies split the combined profit from the operations of the two newspapers. And it’s very likely that the two newspapers spend about the same amount on their newsrooms. Both papers subtract the amount they spend on their newsrooms from their JOA profits. Assuming their expenses are about the same, both Scripps and Media News are losing about the same amount.

Yet the Rocky is selling and The Post is not. And it was also the Rocky that blinked first and lost the newspaper war with The Post, prior to the establishment of their joint operating agreement.

As a public company, under pressure from shareholders, Scripps isn’t going to wait around long for any company that it owns to become profitible, especially of the future is uncertain or worse. It can do this, and should do this, but it probably won’t. This was explained very well by Ken Doctor, a Knight Ridder official who’s now a news analyist and blogger:

“If you look at the basic math, you can see the problem, and why such shutdowns may become more numerous. Scripps reported that it lost $15 million on the Rocky in 2008. The Rocky would then be one of those 19 top 50 market papers that Dean Singleton told us were unprofitable by mid-year. That number has undoubtedly grown as we reach the end of this seemingly endless year of pain. I have little doubt that now more than half of the top 50 are unprofitable, even with the jaw-dropping cutbacks we are seeing; ad revenue continues to plummet, and the first half of 2009 looks ominous.

It’s one thing for these companies to run operations that are close to, or just above the profit line. It’s another — their shareholders and re-financing lenders remind them — to run one that is requiring subsidy. We can call it investment, but to call it that, you’d have to peg a return to healthy profitability at some point certain — and no one can do that. So it’s a subsidy.  And that’s not what public, profit-seeking companies are designed to do. The Denver JOA — JOA, a concept overtaken by marketplace and technological change — was meant to share profits, not subsidies.”

So in this situation, with millions of dollars bleeding from the Rocky, Scripps is sitting there watching its stock fall big time and its shareholders howling. The pressure is great, with so much dreaded uncertainty in the future (and Wall Street hates uncertainty), and so Scripps moves to sell, even if it is in a better position to afford it than a private company.

The private owner of the Denver Post, Dean Singleton’s Media News, is under less pressure, assuming you can fathom how it feels to be losing more the $1 million per month. But Singleton can believe in his gut feeling that the newspaper industry is in a “major cyclical decline” and “revenue will come back” in “two to three years”. He knows, and he’s probably accurate in the short term, that he’ll lose less money if he can outlast the Rocky, and he can decide, based on this, to stick with the Denver Post, for as long as he can afford it. And he can wait with the confidence that Scripps will sell first–that Scripps, facing Wall Street pressure, will blink first, as April Washington put it.

That’s what happened. And it didn’t hurt that Singleton likes owning a newspaper in his home town so he can beat up on politicians, like Gov. Bill Ritter.

This Wall-Street-driven catastrophe is at play at newspapers across America. The public companies have less room to maneuver, even if their executives understand the public interest function of a newspaper. That’s irrelevant in the end.

So the question is what to do about the information gap that’s left behind, as newspapers and other news outlets cut staff or fold? There’s no single answer, but creative ways to increase public funding for journalism (one idea was articulated by KBDI’s Wick Rowland ironically enough in today’s Rocky) is part of the solution–as are nonprofit newsrooms and philanthropic and other for-profit ventures.

One thing’s for sure. We cant count on the public companies that own newspapers and other serious news outlets. The Rocky is the proof of that.

It took an op-ed on the Denver Post website by Lawrence J. Korb, assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan, to raise some questions that reporters either haven’t asked or haven’t thought to ask Bob Schaffer about his business deals in Iraq in 2006. Korb’s analysis and the context he provides might just provoke local journos to start asking these questions:
 

Do you think there should be a national oil law in Iraq?  If you were charged with doing political research, as reported by the Rocky, for Aspect Energy, why didn’t you know about the oil law controversy until a Kurdish official told you about it on your trip? Did the State Department or any other agency give you any encouragement, as opposed to not just giving any discouragement? Did you know about your company’s correspondence with Sen. Allard? Have you or Alex Cranberg been in touch with the IG at the State Department, who is investigating the Hunt Oil contracts?
 

Or even a broad question:  Do you think it was a mistake to enter into an oil agreement before a compromise on the oil law was reached?  If not, why not, and why has the State Department been wrong?
 

And here’s a bonus question:  If you’re elected to the US Senate, would you join Sens. Levin and McCaskill in demanding an investigation and even hearings into Iraqi oil contracts?
 

Why hasn’t the local media been all over this story? No editorials? No front-page treatment? This is a serious issue, especially a guy running for federal office.
 

Here’s the Korb op-ed again.

Colorado Senate candidate Bob Schaffer’s spokesperson, Dick Wadhams, seems to be manipulating the media in some strange way every time he’s in the news these days.

This time he’s telling Lynn Bartels at the Rocky Mountain News that the Producers at Meet the Press had mostly given up on trying to convince Schaffer’s opponent, Mark Udall, to accept their invitation to debate. Bartels quoted Wadhams:

“I can tell you that Meet the Press had pretty well given up on him,” Wadhams said. “The producers didn’t think he was going to do it. “We pretty much shamed them into accepting the debate.”

But Bartels didn’t state whether Wadhams accusation was true. Just because an allegation sits within quotation marks doesn’t mean reporters shouldn’t fact check it–or at least get a response to it.I called up Meet the Press, and the show’s publicist, Jenny Tartikoff, would only tell me, “We don’t comment on our booking process.”

I spoke with Bob Schaffer’s spokesman Dick Wadhams last week about his use of words like “ass” and “scumbag” when talking to the Rocky Mountain News about Mark Udall.

You know that Wadhams has a plan when using language like this, and so you believe him when he says, “I know exactly what I’m doing,” which is what he told me when asked about why he does this. He didn’t get into the details but you know he wants to get more media attention.

It worked Aug. 5, when Democrats objected to his use of the word “ass” (to describe the part of Democrat Mark Udall’s body up which the Schaffer campaign plans to “shove” 30-second ads) and the Rocky wrote a story about it. Here’s Schaffer’s original ass quote from the Rocky in a piece by Lynn Bartels.

You can debate whether Wadhams’ PR strategy makes sense. Will the vulgar language turn off swing voters? Or will it embed his talking points in their minds? I think it’s smart for the Dems to selectively respond to a harsh operative like Wadhams…-to spotlight his meanness, but who knows, really.

In any case, from a journalistic perspective, it’s definitely the right thing for reporters to quote Wadhams’ rather harsh language, even if the Rocky won’t spell out the dangerous word in the newspaper. The Rocky also quoted Wadhams May 2 using the word “scumbags” to describe an anti-Schaffer organization.

And when Dems object to Wadhams’ unusually strong language, reporters should cover this, too, as the Rocky did when the Dems objected to “ass.”

But reporters should also ask Schaffer whether his spokesperson, who speaks for Schaffer and presumably is controlled by Schaffer, has his blessing for using words like ass.

A Feb. 22 Rocky story by Bartels pointed out that when Wadhams worked John Thune’s campaign in South Dakota, Thune was asked directly about Wadhams behavior. Here’s an excerpt from the Rocky story.

In 2004, Wadhams went to South Dakota to manage the campaign for John Thune, who was trying to unseat Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle. It was Wadhams who went after Daschle while Thune shook hands and smiled.

“Would I have said it that way?” Thune told The New York Times, after one of Wadhams’ responses. “Probably not. But that’s why I hired Dick.”

Below is an excerpt from my interview with Wadhams on this topic. I also quoted Wadhams in my Sat. Rocky Column.

Jason: I’m wondering if Congressman Schaffer approves your language? Wadhams: He approves of the aggressive way we are trying to draw contrasts with Boulder Liberal Mark Udall.Jason: Will you hook me up with the congressman to see if he approves of you using those words, ass and scumbag?Wadhams: You can try calling him if you want.Jason: OK. What’s his number? Wadhams: You know, Jason, you are a liberal partisan. You set yourself up as some kind of objective source. And, Jason, you and I both know you are liberal partisan Democrat.Jason: Not true. I try to be fair.Wadhams: I don’t consider you a legitimate reporter, Jason.Jason: You’ll see. I’m fair. Wadhams: Oh no you’re not. Your columns amuse me, but you are a partisan Democrat. Talking to you is like talking to the spokesman of the Democratic Party. We don’t have to talk to you.Jason: Well, I appreciate your talking to me.Wadhams: I don’t have to. I might as well be talking to the press secretary for the Democratic Party.Jason: That’s not true. I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000. Take that.

In my last post, I provided Rocky Mountain News reporter Lynn Bartels explanation of why she deleted “Boulder liberal” from a quotation from Dick Wadhams, spokesman for Republican Senate candidate Bob Schaffer.

I should have made it clear that Bartels will not routinely delete “Boulder liberal” from Wadhams’ quotations in which he refers to Democratic Senate candidate Mark Udall of Eldorado Springs as “Boulder liberal Mark Udall.”

She will evaluate Wadhams quotes on a case-by-case basis.