Shame on the Post

The Washington Post continues its abominable, one-sided coverage of the Madison protests. The p. 3 story today, by Brady Dennis and Peter Wallsten with no dateline, again parrots Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, adopting his narrative throughout, with no counter-balancing comments or perspective from the unions. In fact, there does not appear to be a single live quote in the long story -- that is, a quote that does not come from a public appearance available to all media or a press release.

The reporters should be ashamed of themselves. The national editor or whoever is responsible for this coverage should be ashamed of himself or herself, and Marcus Brauchli should be ashamed of himself for letting the newspaper that made Watergate happen sink to this level.

The story does deal with the prank call from Ian Murphy, posing as David Koch, to Walker. Instead of exposing Walker to the ridicule he deserves for being taken in by this hoax, the reporters simply quote his affirmation to the faux Koch that "This is our moment."

Would it really kill these full-time staff reporters to pick up the phone and talk to somebody at the unions?

Hello New York Times

I had put my NY Times subscription back down to Sunday only because daily home delivery is a bit pricey, but yesterday, right after I canceled my Washington Post subscription, I called up to restore it to seven days a week. (But see update below.)

Yesterday, the Times had two or three stories taking a union angle on the Madison protests (while still reporting what all those governors were doing). And today it had this nice little story about Wisconsin and Indiana Democrats on the lam in Illinois.

As the great media shakeout proceeds it does look like the Times will consolidate its position as the national quality daily. They, too, do many silly things and the deterioration in quality -- in copy editing alone, for instance -- from their previous high standards is noticeable. But all in all, they still get the job done.

I do find the way overrated Andrew Ross Sorkin's shtick with his "Dealbook" annoying -- WTF kind of annoying -- but you have to take the good with the bad.

Update: Sigh. Seeing the magazine preview today in the Times online with yet another fawning portrait of Chris Christie by Matt Bai makes me realize how unsatisfactory even the Times can be.

Goodbye Washington Post

I'm just staggered by the one-sided reporting in today's Post on the biggest story in the country. An off-lead story on the union protests in three states bylined by Michael A. Fletcher and Brady Dennis and datelined Trenton, N.J., of all places focuses almost exclusively on the point of view of these brave governors.

The budget fights initiated by Republican governors represent a multi-state effort by like-minded politicians to solve budgetary problems in part by weakening public employee unions and demanding significant concessions from workers. After the November elections, Republicans now control many more state legislatures and governorships.

Although the particulars may differ - some governors are seeking to end collective bargaining rights, others are not - the state executives share both a political philosophy and a conviction that the public is prepared to support these measures if they help fix long-term budgetary problems.

Republican officials said there is no coordinated campaign underway. Governors are loosely communicating, sharing text messages and occasional phone calls as they offer moral support to one another.

The story goes on and on like this, giving most of the facetime to the "plain-spoken" Christie, who is one of a "growing group of governors that is attacking yawning budget deficits by facing down public employees and promising not to raise taxes."

There is not a single quote from a union official, not in the top of the story, not in the middle, not in the bottom. How one-sided and irresponsible can you be and still get away with it?

It's the last straw. I've put up with the sloppy and biased reporting up until now, the useless and desperate cosmetic changes, the gutting of the reporting staff, the flippant idiocies of Dana Milbank, the rank inconsistencies of Fred Hiatt's editorial page and reluctanly renewed my subscription. But I'm calling today to cancel. Goodbye Washington Post. R.I.P.

Straight talk

The deterioration of the mainstream media is more than ever evident in the sloppy reporting about the deficit debate. Bullies like NJ Gov. Christie and Wisconsin Gov. Walker are reported as "straight talkers" because that's what they say they are. The hopeless Dana Milbank (will someone please take away his keyboard) calls Christie ugly but says that's appropriate because he speaks "ugly truths."

One blogger called him on that because the implication is that Christie is speaking the truth, when in fact he is simply telling one partisan side of the story and deliberately misleads his audience. The Post, with Milbank's fawning report on Christie's speech in Washington, and its consistently misguided editorial page, is the worst offender and is hastening its own demise. There is no conservative constituency for the Post and by alienating its liberal constituency, it is sealing its doom.

The Times today at least is playing up the backlash story. But anyone who thinks the reporting in MSM is in any sense objective is living in the past. There was a brief period when society was homogenous enough that narrowly balanced reporting held a semblance of objectivity. The current polarization in society has made that impossible. Reporters -- who apparently are no longer required to attribute most of their reporting -- choose sides by their very language, and even those who may be liberal in their own political leanings become ready tools of politicians who now see that lying pays.

To paraphrase the old saying: If there's anyone out there who thinks they're getting "straight talk" from Christie and Walker, I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.

Stan Musial

Stan Musial was one of the recipients this week of the presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian award.

I was an avid Cardinals fan growing up in St. Louis and saw Stan the Man play once at the old Busch stadium in a game against the Milwaukee Braves, with Warren Spahn pitching.

Even when we moved back to Pittsburg, I listened to the Cardinals every night on the radio. That was the team with Bill White, Ken Boyer, Curt Flood, Julian Javier and other legends. Harry Carey and Jack Buck called the games. It just doesn't get any better than that.

The end of Wall Street

I've been surprised by the lack of reaction to news that Germany is taking over the New York Stock Exchange. Perhaps because it was portrayed as a merger, people don't realize it is a takeover, even though both NYT and WSJ spelled it out his morning?

It was a scandal back in the day when the Japanese bought Rockefeller Center. Now the very symbol of American capitalism is being swallowed up by the Germans. Can people simply not get their heads around the idea that we are actually surrendering the temple to Money on Wall Street? The very building that gives Wall Street its meaning as the center of American finance?

Where is Michael Bloomberg bewailing the end of New York as a global financial center, upstaged by Frankfurt and even by London, which at least retains its primacy in its link with Toronto? Where is Chuck Schumer? Since when does a merger not mean a huge loss of jobs for the acquired company? And not just NYSE itself, but everyone who works in the securities business in New York. Wall Street vanishes and New York has no better claim on being the country's financial capital than Chicago or Boston or San Francisco, perhaps less so.

But wait, you say, the stock exchange will still be there. No, it won't. It's gone, subsumed into a German-controlled financial conglomerate that will ensure stock trading of American equities will become as deracinated from New York as Chinese equities.

But maybe this is all premature, and the deal will fall apart. Or Bloomberg and Schumer have weapons they have not yet deployed. Or that toothless old, uh, lady, the SEC, will put the kabosh on it. Doubtful.

So why aren't people reacting? Has the revulsion against Wall Street reached the point that everyone is thinking Good Riddance? Let Frankfurt worry about Goldman Sachs. The rich underwriting and trading culture that sustained Wall Street has long since vanished into the ether of online trading. The New York Stock Exchange resisted the transition to electronic trading for too long, and then came too late to ever recapture its lead. Or perhaps those jobbers knew what was afoot, and that the exchange was doomed from the moment Nasdaq opened its doors.

Congratulations to Deutsche Boerse. Who would have thought that a little company that used to occupy the attic offices of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange would one day cast its net across the Atlantic and across the continent. For Deutsche Boerse has now succeeded in capturing Euronext after all.

It also signals the victory of futures and derivatives over stocks and bonds, for that is the muscle that enabled Deutsche Boerse to take over the Big Board, which failed here as well to anticipate the future. End of an era.

Aol strikes again

I can't see anything good coming out of the merger between Aol and Huffington Post. I was working at then-AOL when it undertook what is largely seen as the most disastrous merger of all time with its takeover of Time Warner. As a deadweight in Time Warner, Aol missed all the chances to reinvent itself as something useful. After it was spun off and Tim Armstrong came along saying that the company's future lay in content, I was more skeptical than ever.

The idea of the merger, apparently, is to harness HuffPost's large audience to Aol's other content and make real money on ads. There are so many things wrong with this conceptually, it's hard to know where to begin. HuffPost has its audience because it put up content that people wanted to read. The fact that Aol's expensive new content has not found its own audience speaks for itself.

But the crux of the matter is that what makes HuffPost work, and the only thing of value to pay $300 million for, is that the site's hugely left-wing audience loves it for a freedom it cannot possible have as part of a large corporation. The site's main capital is a group of bloggers and commenters and "community" that will now search for a new spiritual home, and leave HuffPost bereft of so much Aol wanted to acquire.

I was equally baffled by the linkup between Daily Beast and Newsweek. Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington and Tim Armstrong are presumably all smart people, so maybe there's just something I don't see.

Even in the AOL-Time Warner merger there were areas where you could pretend there were synergies. There's nothing visible in this new merger except irreparable damage to HuffPost, which was on its way to being something, and another lost cause for Aol, which may finally succumb to its long series of mistakes and missed opportunities.