Meacham Punks Palin

November 23, 2009 Issue of Newsweek

by Danny Casolaro

O Jon. Jon, Jon, Jon. What the hell with that Sarah Palin cover? How long did your editors take to discuss that one? And what’s with the ham-handed headline –

How Do You Solve a Problem like Sarah?

She’s Bad News For the GOP – and For Everyone Else, Too.

Is this a news headline? What arrogance. What a failure of journalism.

Clearly, Palin needs no help making herself look like an intellectual lightweight, a misinformed demagogue, a politician turned brand. What were you thinking, Jon? He was thinking that, like on the internet, where fury is cheap and controversy can be bought with a few keystrokes, he could stir up the hornet’s nest a little, create some buzz.

But, like a lot of things of late Jon, you misjudged not only your readers, not only intelligent women and men, but most of America. The cover photograph wasn’t provocative, it was stupid, way beneath the magazine, and yourself Jon. Despite your editorial incompetence, you are supposed to be an intelligent man. Here’s a suggestion Jon: how about getting a woman to write a story on Palin, instead of two older white men whose relevance lessens with each year.

In the face of criticism from both conservatives and progressives, and perhaps as a remedy for an obvious lapse of the journalist’s ethos, what did Jon do? He prescribed a dose of TMZ.com, and aTwitter him in the morning. The Palin cover did create a stir, but, like most discussions surrounding her, this one wasn’t intelligent, wasn’t substantive, wasn’t a springboard for a debate on American society, it was Drudgeworthy. At best. At worst, it was a shameless ploy, a cynical faint for manufactured outrage. It was a cry for readership, for a rise in page views, it was Jon’s cry for help.

The next issue of Newsweek showed President Obama wading ashore in his swim trunks, shirtless. I guess this is parity, as if to say, Look, I, Jon Meacham, can be clueless about what passes for news and in a gender neutral way!

Jon you need to go.

Failure is Its Own Reward

November 9, 2009 Issue of Newsweek

By Danny Casolaro

Question: Why would a news magazine, in 2009, publish an article, any article, by Karl Rove?

Answer: Because said news magazine perceives it to be provocative.

The provocation angle is too clever by half. See, Al Gore has a new book out, and Newsweek printed a selection from it. To provide balance, Newsweek printed a rebuttal of sorts by Karl Rove. The clever part is that, heh heh heh, more than anyone else, Rove was responsible for Gore’s defeat in the 2000 election. Get it? So Newsweek’s idea is to juice an enmity in American politics that’s ten years old. The topic?

Partisan politics? No.

Failed agendas? No.

Abuse of power? No.

Lying under oath? No.

Malfeasance in office? No.

Nothing so germane to Rove’s role in the disastrous Bush administration. The topic is climate change legislation.

Here’s the problem: Karl Rove has no, none, zip, zero, buttkiss, nada, goose egg credibility. His social, political and legislative ideas have been exposed as detrimental to democracy, and o, they didn’t work. More than anyone, he is to blame for the Democratic gains in the House and Senate during Bush’s second term. More than anyone, he is responsible for the tone of our current politics. He also needs to share in the blame for McCain’s thumping.

The man played his hand, and failed. Almost completely failed. Not a single one of his ideas is left standing. With the exception of Oliver North and Pat Buchanan, there is no one whose opinions are less welcome, less helpful, less objective than Rove’s, especially in matters political, social or legislative. He has proven himself as a man not to be trusted. Let him sputter and haw on Fox, but keep him out of serious discussions. Then again, Newsweek is proving to be an inhospitable place for such things.

No News, Weakly

The Decline of Newsweek Magazine

by Danny Casolaro

Newsweek, the 76 year-old media institution, is on the ropes. Declining ad revenues, fewer readers, higher costs – stop if you’ve heard this one before. In May 2009, Newsweek rolled out a redesign of both its print edition and its website meant to redress some of those problems. Some six-plus months after the redesign, it’s now apparent just how serious is the trouble at Newsweek. It is no longer news weekly, but no news, weakly.

Jon Meacham, the editor, has, frankly, lost his bearings. He needs to be quietly released as soon as possible to spend more time with his family, or write more books, or join some think tank with his neocon colleagues. He’s led the magazine into some weird no man’s land; his conservative lean has become too pronounced to ignore. He has no clue about where to take Newsweek. He’s misdiagnosed the problem and misprescribed a cure.

Meacham decided that in order to compete with the internet, he needed to make the print edition more like the internet. The magazine even looks like a print facsimile of a web page – lots of white space, web-type graphics, subdivided pages. The international section is perhaps the only news section left, but even that is more like aggregated content than “news.” The stories are generally 200 to 250 words, not near enough to provide nuance or context, such that it’s hard to tell if the correspondent is even in the country they are writing about. In a recent edition, they had a story about the Chinese in Afghanistan, a story the Times of London already reported on, and in much greater depth (see “1, 2, 3 What are We Fighting For”).

The magazine has become little more than print versions of blog posts by establishment personalities. They call it informed opinion, or something. They are essentially printing a website. Clearly, Meacham misunderstands the nature of the web. Like many in the mainstream, he has no idea what happened to journalism, or where to go from here. There’s no shame in that, many smart people have similarly failed. But aping a medium that one doesn’t understand only makes Newsweek worse. Its very name should be it’s guiding principle – news week, the week in news. Not so difficult if you strip away all the noise. Meacham and his cronies have been blindsided by the democratization of information, of news, of informed opinion. His writers, smart and knowledgeable as they are, aren’t the last word. Hell, they aren’t even the most interesting word. Here’s a truly revolutionary idea – hire ideas, not personalities.

And this brings us to the worst part: editorially, Newsweek is a disaster. There seems to be no guiding principle to the content, no editorial direction, no strong hand pushing things along. Deputy Editor Kathleen Deveny said outright, “We’ll aim to be provocative, but not partisan.” A news weekly provocative? As an editorial principle? And doesn’t being a journalist mean, implicitly, that one is not partisan, if not always in deed, at least as a fundamental ethical guideline? This is how bad it’s gotten. Clearly Meacham is not alone in his delusions, Deveny got the memo, she drank the Kool Aid.

In an interview that coincided with the rollout of the redesign, Meacham made clear his great new idea for the magazine: “A key part of this process is putting out the magazine that only we would want to read and not pretending that the generic reader out there needs a remedial course in current events.” Got that? Could it be any clearer that Meacham intends to throw “generic readers” under the establishment bus? He wants to produce a magazine for those like him – a well-heeled, conservative New Yorker. This is the vision Meacham has for his magazine. To call it uninspired is to be modest, it’s a sell-out, simply put.

Each week brings new evidence of Newsweek’s decline.

Geithner as the Great Gazoo

by Mark Lombardi

For those who don’t know, the Great Gazoo invented a weapon that would, on the push of the button, bring about the Apocalypse. That is no doubt overstating his power and culpability, but Tim Geithner has become Gazoo.

Geithner as the Great Gazoo

Geithner is in trouble. Not just because this week a House Democrat called on him to resign. Not because the GAO released a report this week dogging Geithner for not using the power of his office and the Treasury Department to negotiate more favorable terms for AIG to repay its creditors. Goldman Sachs, for example, got a 100% return on what it was owed. Not just because of his disastrous appearance on Capital Hill this week before the Joint Economic Committee. His shrill, amateurish response to a House Republican’s verbal thrashing told the whole story. In the shark tank of Washington, Geithner is quickly becoming chum. He forgot the golden rules of appearing before Congress – never let them draw blood. Stay calm, make whatever assurances you have to make, in as ambiguous language as you feel comfortable with. Make no declarative statements, promise nothing, criticize no one. He failed on all counts.

But the most ominous sign for Gazoo as Geithner  is the tone of a story by CBS MoneyWatch reporter, Jill Schlesinger. When a mainstream media outlet ridicules you, satirically eviscerates you in print, in this case by comparing you to a cartoon character, then the tide has turned.

The Department of Lessons Not Learned

by Adler Berriman Seal

You can’t swing a Southeast Asia military engagement in Washington these days without bumping up against “the lessons of history.” These lessons are meant to be instructive in the current military conflict, Johnson’s Vietnam to Obama’s Afghanistan.

This was on the cover of a recent issue of Newsweek: “How we (could have) won in Vietnam.” One wonders – why the parentheses? In the absence of real reporting from Afghanistan, Newsweek postures provocation.

Two positions are articulated. The first by Evan Thomas and John Barry (an argument so lacking in intellectual rigor and honesty it takes two men to construct it) is the old chestnut that Vietnam was winnable, if… Vietnam vet and US Senator John Kerry provides the far less wordy argument against an immediate military escalation in Afghanistan.

The main thrust of the Thomas/Barry argument is predicated on the work of a retired army colonel, Lewis Sorley. George Herring, who wrote a real history of the conflict, says he’s “rather appalled that Sorley’s book is being taken so seriously.” Not so Newsweek’s intrepid “experts,” by god, whose authority seems to spring from nothing more than appearing on its pages.

Sorley’s thesis is supposed to provide some guidance to war planners for strategic and tactical decisions in Afghanistan. This is how stupid it gets: when the authors told one Marine general (currently serving) that they were exploring parallels between Sorley’s thesis and the current situation in Afghanistan, he said, “You’re on to something there!” Really? As if the halls in the Pentagon aren’t ringing with the words quagmire, another Vietnam, gutless politicians, more troops.

They maintain, without really saying it, that victory in Vietnam was possible. The whole argument is one long train of subjunctive interrogatories, might, could, would, if only. The fact that the engine of that train is running on the dead air of failed ideas doesn’t seem to bother them.

The authors also praise the Phoenix Program, which targeted the Viet Cong leadership. The US relied heavily on informers, whose reliability was always suspect, to provide intelligence. One of the main tools of the program was assassination of suspected VC leaders. Does any of this sound familiar?

The Phoenix Program was a classic case of theory not comporting to reality, and very few (if any) of the people involved with Phoenix on the ground have claimed it was successful. The authors plainly get this wrong. Standing on the shoulders of Sorley’s shadow,  they wonder, “If it [Vietnamization ie the tactics of the Phoenix Program] was working in Vietnam, will it work in Afghanistan?” This is as misinformed, as stupid a question as any asked about this current war. In Afghanistan, Phoenix is the model for the current strategy of “pacification.” Today it’s called “counterinsurgency.”

The glaring question, but the one rarely asked, remains this: why, when discussing Afghanistan, are we even talking about Vietnam? We already have an object lesson for Afghanistan, one we helped to create – the Soviet misadventure, the hubris that finally broke the bear’s back.

Is history only relevant when it’s reflexive? Are Americans so myopically distorted to believe that only our own history can provide guidance? The Soviets spent nine years and committed over 115,000 troops before finally concluding that the cost of “winning” wouldn’t add up to victory. And, unlike the US who at least gives lip service to preventing civilian casualties and sometimes even apologizes, the Soviets felt no such restraints about indiscriminate bombing and civilian deaths. Reports of mutilated Soviet corpses, often with their testicles shoved in their mouth, attest to the animosity Afghan fighters felt for their enemies. The Soviets blew all manner of hell out of the country, and rusting junkpiles of Soviet military equipment, like metaphors of the foundered empire, are still scattered about the land.

Here is the heart of the problem, both for our country and for journalism. America’s political and military leaders, and those in the media are asking the wrong questions, using the wrong “history,” drawing the wrong conclusions and believing a spurious mythology. This isn’t journalism, this isn’t even expertise, it’s the media justifying its own self-importance, which is why trust in Newsweek and other so-called mainstream media is falling to new lows. If media’s job is to inform, by any standard, Newsweek has failed.