John Yoo is ‘vindicated’: Presumably he gets to keep his Inquirer job

Back when torture advocate John Yoo started writing columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer, opponents were given one hope: If Yoo ended up facing criminal charges or professional sanction for his discredited advice allowing the torture of terror suspects, the Inquirer might — maybe — reconsider publishing him. Inky editorial page editor Harold Jackson told me as much last year:

“We have not reached that point. The description of him as a war criminal would not be accurate. He’s a member of a distinguished university faculty with interesting things to say,” Jackson said. “If at some point it goes beyond that, we’ll have more concern about our relationship to him.”

So much for that. Late on Friday afternoon, the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility announced that Yoo didn’t commit “professional misconduct” — i.e. there’s not enough proof he acted unethically — and thus won’t face penalties or disbarment initiated by the Justice Department.

The Wall Street Journal claims in an editorial today that Friday’s decision amounts to “vindication” for John Yoo; the upshot of the Justice Department memo is that John Yoo didn’t commit ethical violations — it was a “close question”: Instead he produced a “flawed” justification for torture because he was too blinded by his own ideology to provide a fair legal analysis. The money paragraph:

The reason that John Yoo became famous enough to get his op-ed job at the Inquirer is because of his work on the torture issue in the Bush White House. But the Bush White House eventually conceded Yoo’s memos were flawed and withdrew them; the Justice Department has now pretty firmly repudiated the work and castigated Yoo’s judgement. It would seem that the Inquirer could find a smart conservative writer whose qualifications for the job don’t include clumsy and discredited justifications for war crimes. But maybe those folks are in short supply these days.

Then again, maybe the Justice Department memo enhances John Yoo’s standing. After all, the memo above suggests Yoo put “loyalty to his own ideology” above professional competence. That might well be why Brian Tierney has John Yoo writing for the Inky op-ed pages.

No progress in Philly newsaper talks

Via Romenesko, a new memo from the Guild to its members. And it doesn’t sound good:

From: Guild Bulletin
Sent: Wed 10/14/2009 4:07 PM
Subject: Philadelphia Newspapers Insults Guild Members, Stalls Productive Bargaining in Apparent Attempt to Sabotage the Enterprise.

Dear Guild member,

Philadelphia Newspapers today turned a contract bargaining session into an assault on the Guild’s members and our work ethic. The lack of substantive bargaining on the company’s part suggests that it might be trying to sabotage its own bankruptcy reorganization plan and the entire enterprise in recognition that it may not prevail.

In what should be considered demeaning to every member of the Guild, the company’s high-priced out-of-town lawyer said that an online enterprise such as Philly.com has a different work ethic than what is commonly found at major metropolitan newspapers such as those that we have devoted our lives to. Another company official referred to our contract as a “burdensome industrial model.”

We also heard the company say our advertising reps’ performance goals and disciplinary programs are not strong enough to compete with other media operations.

The battery of unspeakable insults, a thinly veiled attempt to stall productive talks, came during discussion of the Guild’s proposal to make Philly.com a part of our bargaining unit.

The company’s failure to submit economic proposals to accompany proposals that already seek to destroy our contract is the opposite of constructive, good-faith bargaining. It appears increasingly clear that the company has no intention of actually reaching a contract with our Guild thus jeopardizing its own survival plan. The company’s own bankruptcy plan calls for having contracts acceptable to its Stalking Horse bidder (made up of company insiders Bruce Toll and the Carpenters Union Pension Fund, and philanthropist David Haas) before that group puts up any money.

While the company pursues bargaining proposals that strip our contract of seniority, claiming it is necessary to achieve an economic advantage in an increasingly competitive market, it continues to throw money at a costly and time consuming legal battle in the courts. This approach keeps draining assets from the estate, possibly in efforts to do further harm to the operation to spite the senior lenders in the event they take control.

The Guild and Philadelphia Newspapers have not set our next bargaining date.

In solidarity,

The Bargaining Committee of the Newspaper Guild of Greater Philadelphia Local 10

History lesson: Brian Tierney triumphant

From 2007, a year into his ownership of Philly newspapers.

It’s part of a series of videos celebrating Tierney’s ownership. My favorite? Maybe this one about the “myth of newspaper decline,” in which he seems literally to choke — foreshadowing?! — while talking about owning the newspapers 20 years from now. (”We bought it at the right price,” he proclaims.) But probably “What the Future Holds,” in which Tierney proudly suggests that Philly.com’s traffic has grown because the newspapers are printing Philly.com’s name bigger in the paper. “I think it will be a very stable business,” he says. Oh dear…

Out-of-town bean counters not thrilled with “Keep It Local”

Brian Tierney’s rivals for control of Philadelphia Newspapers aren’t happy about the “Keep It Local” campaign. They want a bankruptcy judge to make him knock it off.

Creditors of the Daily News and Inquirer want a federal bankruptcy judge to stop the newspapers’ “Keep It Local” campaign, a public-relations effort to support local ownership of the papers.

An official committee of unsecured creditors, created in the newspapers’ Chapter 11 bankruptcy case, filed a motion yesterday alleging that the PR campaign is an inappropriate use of company resources “meant to demonize ‘out-of-town’ buyers” and favor corporate insiders.

Something Tierney may not have realized: At a critical moment when his stewardship of Philadelphia newspapers is being appraised by a bankruptcy judge, openly using the resources of those papers to promote his own interests might be seen as … unwise. Unwise, but kind of typical, no?

PhillyGrrl says it better than I did

In this week’s print edition of PW, I have a column arguing that Brian Tierney’s “Keep It Local” ad campaign might be misguided; maybe Philadelphians would be better off with out-of-town bean counters running the local newspapers.

If he’s forced out, the “Keep It Local” campaign suggests, the Daily News will be shuttered and the Inquirer gutted into a fancier version of the Metro.

“Are you ready for a weakened news gathering force led by a management group with little or no connection to the place you live your life?” one ad warns.

Sounds awful. Too bad Tierney—the local owner—has already weakened his newspapers through layoffs and cutbacks, or the argument might have more force. But that’s not really a great sales pitch: Local ownership! We’re bad, but it could be worse!

One of my favorite bloggers, PhillyGrrl, takes up the cause this morning with a post of her own expressing deep skepticism about Tierney specifically and Philadelphia newspapers in general. And she writes a line I wish I’d written — and will probably plagiarize someday:

And you correctly point out that “Brian Tierney is a Philadelphia original.” Okay, but so was the Unicorn Killer. Big whoop.

Heh. But it’s important to remember that Brian Tierney is not a serial killer. He just writes paychecks to torturers. Different.

Newspapers don’t seem to understand their competition

It’s hard to get anybody who doesn’t work for Rupert Murdoch to praise the man — especially if the person doing the praising is a die-hard liberal. Yet the Los Angeles Times’ Tim Rutten says Murdoch will be the “savior” of the newspaper industry by leading the way for papers to charge for online content.

Congress, Rutten writes, needs to exempt newspapers from anti-trust laws so that they can collude to start charging their online audience:

Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal already does so, but the Australian-born media magnate understands that what’s required for serious — which is to say expensive-to-produce — journalism to survive is that all the quality English-language papers and news sites agree to charge for Web access and then mercilessly sue anyone who makes more than fair use of their work without paying a fee. For such a scheme to work, the papers’ owners need to agree on when to act and what to charge. (Murdoch and his digital strategist, Jonathan Miller, believe the Journal’s existing website model offers a place for what the latter calls “premium” journalism.)

This suggests to me that Rutten and Murdoch — and Brian Tierney of Philadelphia Newspapers, it should be noted — fundamentally misunderstand the new media marketplace. These newspaper guys seem to believe that they’re competing against themselves, that people are (and will continue to) get their news from newspapers and newspaper-backed websites. And that’s not necessarily the case.

Because newspapers’ online competition isn’t just other newspaper websites. It’s websites of news-oriented radio stations. And TV stations. It would be one thing if those websites simply offered archived audio and video, but they don’t. They — like newspaper sites — offer text, as well.

And I don’t think radio stations are going to start charging for access to their websites.

The comeback from newspaper advocates is likely to be that radio and TV stations rip them off. (There’s long been griping about the “rip and read” practice of radio broadcasters reading, essentially, news directly from the paper. Lawsuits over this kind of thing are rare. Is Rutten ready to start?) But here’s a question for them: Do you think your audience is likely to care? If they have a choice between paying for original journalism and getting the ripoff for free, which are they likely to choose?

The newspaper folks will counter, rightly, that they can provide more in-depth coverage than their broadcast competition, even online. But anybody who has spent time above the reporter level in the media industry has seen readership studies showing that most readers get — at most — a headline and a few paragraphs of a story before moving onto the next page. (That’s one reason why the Philly papers both have the “At A Glance” page summing up the paper.) If that’s the case, will most readers notice or care if they’re getting the “At A Glance” version from a radio station’s website if they can get it for free?

And it’s not even necessarily the case that you’ll get cut-rate journalism from Radio and TV sites. NPR.org has revamped itself to provide a more complete reading experience — is anybody going to make the (nonideological) case that National Public Radio doesn’t offer good or in-depth reporting? Not convincingly.

Hey, I love newspapers. Spent my adult life working for them. I don’t want to see them go away — and for reasons more complex than the fact that I don’t know what else I’d do to earn money. But if newspapers step back and recognize that they’re not the only news organizations providing text-based news and information online, they’ll realize their job is bigger than getting together with other newspapers to start charging. They’re not just competing against themselves.

Brian Tierney doesn’t regret buying Philly newspapers. The rest of us? Another story.

Editor & Publisher:

He also contends he has no regrets about the investment he led three year ago to take over the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, stating the bankruptcy problems, ad and circulation revenue declines of the industry, and current bankruptcy do not diminish his goals.

“There have been a lot of challenges, but there are challenges in everything,” Tierney told E&P Thursday, two days after the latest bankruptcy hearing, which ended with PMH planning to submit its reorganization plan next week. “I am glad to play this role in this time in media history. I hope we are at the moment that we can look back at things 10 years from now and say local people stepped up, really stepped up.”

Well of course he’s happy. He got to take that big bonus while his employees were cutting back.

It’s OK if Brian Tierney loses the Inky and Daily News

That certain seems to be the message of my old boss, John Temple, former editor and publisher of the late and lamented Rocky Mountain News. Since that paper’s closure, he’s been taking some time to ponder the future of the news business — and it’s fair to say he’s skeptical about what he’s seen of Brian Tierney’s stewardship at Philly’s daily papers.

Then, just before the papers totally tanked, in another example of bad judgment recounted in a solid Sunday Magazine article in The New York Times, Tierney “accepted a pay raise and a $350,000 bonus right before the bankruptcy filing — and after employees agreed to give up their own paltry union raises.”

Look, I’ve seen Tierney in action and I welcome his passion for newspapers and for the survival of the two in Philadelphia. I want to see him or any other owner succeed. But I’ve also been on the inside of a troubled newspaper operation and it’s impossible to believe that when he got his pay raise and bonus he, and others involved, didn’t know how serious his company’s financial problems were.

If you were a shareholder, would you want somebody who took a pay raise when his operation was plunging under water running the company? How could you trust that he would put the best interest of the company over his own?

I don’t know. That’s why I wouldn’t get too sentimental about which ownership group takes over the papers.

John put it a little more directly in his Twitter post linking to the blog:

Why it’s hard to believe CEO of Philadelphia papers when it comes to what would be best for their survival.

John isn’t saying anything that isn’t already widely believed in Philadelphia. But after Sunday’s NYT piece — in which Tierney mostly comes off looking like a kinda heroic, “damn the torpedos!”  captain going down with the ship — it’s an important reminder that even in the wider industry, Tierney is seen as more of a robber-barron.

Will John Yoo be disbarred in Pennsylvania?

A liberal advocacy group calling itself the “Velvet Revolution” has initiated disbarrment proceedings against torture enabler/advocate John Yoo with the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Phawker has the document here.

I do want to see Yoo disbarred — not because he gave advice I disagree with, but because that advice was professionally shoddy, bending the law past the breaking point in order to get the result he wanted. But I doubt Velvet Revolution’s filing is going to be the instrument of Yoo’s professional demise.

The New York Times:

A complaint filed last year against Mr. Yoo, a Berkeley law professor who remains a member of the Pennsylvania bar, was rejected by that state’s bar association, in part because the Justice Department was already investigating Mr. Yoo’s role in the interrogation memorandums.

Nothing’s really changed. The final Justice Department report on its investigation hasn’t been made public, though leaks suggest it will recommend professional sanctions against Yoo and other lawyers involved in clearing the way for torture. If Pennsylvania is waiting for the Justice Department to act, though, the Velvet Revolution filing will do nothing to push that process along.

Quick thought, though: John Yoo’s disbarrment would say a lot about the credibility of the Philadelphia Inquirer’s editorial page. His columnist contract there has been defended on the grounds that he has “profound insights” into the workings of the American legal system. If Yoo is formally found not to meet the standards of his profession, the only imaginable reason for retaining him as a columnist after that point would be pure political cronyism on the part of publisher Brian Tierney. It’s really that simple.

On John Yoo, Brian Tierney doesn’t get it

The New York Times weighs in on John Yoo’s columnizing for the Philadelphia Inquirer. As I had suspected from Harold Jackson’s “contractual obligations” defense of Yoo, the impetus for Yoo’s hiring came not from the editorial board but from publisher Brian Tierney.

Big surprise.

The Times:

To critics of the hiring, (Tierney) said, “The most important speech to defend is the speech you hate,” and he said there were not all that many critics. “I’ve gotten more mail recently on our making our comics smaller than I have on John Yoo.”

Let’s parse that.

I think most liberals would agree that it’s important to defend the right to speech, even — and especially — when there’s an effort to suppress that speech because the speaker and/or her ideas are odious. Defending the right to that speech is different from defending the speech itself; it’s why the ACLU can defend the Klan’s right to march in Indiana without defending the Klan’s ideas. Everybody understands the distinction.

What critics of the Yoo column — myself included — are suggesting is that Yoo doesn’t deserve the platform he’s been given. It’s that simple.

Final thought: Harold Jackson seems like a decent fellow, but I’m skeptical of his suggestion in the Times and elsewhere that it’s only recently become clear — thanks to the recent release of additional torture memos — what a hot potato John Yoo is. Jackson:

Asked if the release of the memos affected his view of hiring Mr. Yoo, Mr. Jackson said: “From a personal perspective, yes. We certainly know more now than we did then, but we didn’t go into that contract blindly. I’m not going to say the same decision wouldn’t have been made.”

But Yoo’s status has been publicly clear for quite some time. He made his infamous comment about the president’s authority to crush a child’s testicles in December 2005. He’s been the bete noire of anti-torture forces ever since. Anybody who’d done a cursory background check on Yoo would’ve known this history. The recent release of memos only elaborates on what we already knew.