Will Bunch and “Tear Down This Myth”

Ben and Joel are joined by Will Bunch, a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News and the author of “Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future.”

Questions discussed in this podcast:

• What is this “Reagan myth” that Bunch speaks of?
• Is mythmaking so bad? Does it hurt our modern politics and discourse if Reagan is mythologized?
• Why do modern Republicans do such a bad and over-the-top job of paying fealty to the Gipper?
• Why isn’t Ronald Reagan taking more of a hit for planting the seeds of the financial crisis? Why — when he presided over an era of ballooning deficits and debt — do Republicans have the rhetorical advantage on fiscal issues?
• Will torture advocate John Yoo keep his media jobs now that the Justice Department has decided not to punish him?
• What hope is there for newspapers in the future?

Music heard in this podcast:

• John Lennon, “Working Class Hero.”
• David Bowie, “Heroes.”
• Sonic Youth, “Massage The History.”
• Mos Def, “History.”
• Betty Iron Thumbs, “Free Like You.”
• Ike and Tina Turner, “Crazy About You, Baby.”
• The O’Jays, “When The World’s At Peace.”

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO AND DOWNLOAD THE PODCAST.

Harold Jackson, John Yoo and the End of Newspaper Journalism

You have to feel sorry for Harold Jackson.

The Inquirer’s editorial page editor clearly hired torture advocate/enabler John Yoo as a columnist because publisher Brian Tierney told him to do so. Jackson clearly feels some distaste for this. And yet it is Jackson who is forced to march out before the public and proclaim, half-heartedly, that Yoo’s hiring is somehow a triumph of journalism’s First Amendment values over … bloggers.

Seriously. Jackson’s piece in Sunday’s Inquirer starts with a lament that newspapers are losing ground to bloggers…

The Inquirer received e-mails protesting our contract with John Yoo to write a monthly column, which mostly centers on legal topics.

The hundreds of e-mails received are a testament to the power of the blogosphere, and of its superiority to newspapers in getting the word out about, well, about anything.

But I’ll save my whining about the murky future of my preferred vehicle of employment for a later date.

….and ends with a lament that the bankruptcy-starved Inky actually pays Yoo to write:

Of all the criticism our paper has received concerning Yoo’s contract, I actually empathize with those who have expressed their displeasure with our paying him. But not for the same reason.

These days, newspapers are always looking for ways to spend less. But not even I am willing to work for free, and I believe Yoo should be compensated for his efforts.

This is embarrassing stuff, actually, that makes you want to turn your head away. Rather than offer up a full-throated defense of his own columnist, it seems Jackson wants to growl “I’m too old for this shit” and walk away from it all. Jackson’s essay — more than just about anything I’ve read — is the work of somebody who sees his newspaper and his industry dying, and who has to spend the final moments of a career defending, well, the likes of John Yoo.

Sad.

For what it’s worth, Jackson in the middle section of his piece offers only the blandest defense of Yoo’s presence on the Inky’s op-ed pages:

In the last two years, The Inquirer has consciously added other conservative voices to our daily op-ed page and Sunday opinion section to counter criticism that our editorials and columns always lean left.

Adding more conservative commentaries to our mix doesn’t mean we have become right-wing in our editorial positions.

It means we aren’t afraid to let people hear what the other side has to say. We think most of our readers aren’t afraid, either.

Let’s once again be clear here: Nobody, not even the fiercest critics of John Yoo or the Inquirer, is afraid of what he has to say. Nobody, not even the fiercest critics of the Inquirer, is opposed to finding conservative columnists on the Inquirer’s op-ed pages.

But it’s rare — to say the least — for newspapers to give out cushy column-writing contracts to people credibly accused of facilitating war crimes. Will Bunch sums it up:

Torture isn’t like mass transit funding or filling a Supreme Court vacancy. It is something that is both unlawful and immoral and falls into those categories of things — like racial discrimination or any kind of violence (which torture is) — that are clearly beneath the core standards of the community. A newspaper that make such an overt (and unforced, and unnecessary) hire as John Yoo is normalizing torture to its readers and the world, stating that waterboarding and other violent interrogation tactics are just another one of those “on one hand, on the other hand” kind of things. I find this torture normalization highly offensive, as do scores of other people who have written the Inquirer.

Harold Jackson talks about why the Inky keeps printing John Yoo’s column

I have to admit: When I called Harold Jackson on Monday and asked him why the Philadelphia Inquirer keeps printing columns by torture memo author John Yoo, I expected something of a pro forma response — something along the lines of “We believe in vigorous debate from voices across the political spectrum etc. etc.” And Jackson, the Inquirer’s editorial page editor, did get around to saying stuff like that.

But this is what he said first:

“The short answer is he is under contract,” Jackson told me. “We have an obligation to fulfill the contract and we intend to.”

I hope Jackson — who was very cordial during our short talk — will forgive me for this observation: Citations of contractual obligations don’t exactly amount to a ringing endorsement of Yoo’s presence on the Inky’s editorial page.

Yoo’s columns for the Inquirer have become increasingly controversial. Blogs like Phawker, Young Philly Politics and even Will Bunch at the Inquirer’s sister publication, the Daily News, have all been raising a ruckus. Jackson told me he’s heard from angry readers, as well.

“We get a lot of e-mails, a lot of people have threatened to cancel their subscriptions,” Jackson said.

Jackson said that Yoo is under a year-long contract to provide a monthly column to the Inquirer. He did not disclose compensation or the contract’s expiration date. He said Yoo had been given the contract because A) he has Philadelphia ties, B) he’s distinguished enough professionally to hold a faculty position at Berkeley law school and C) he has insight into legal matters facing the country.

Fair enough. But, I asked Jackson, isn’t there some concern that the Inquirer is being used as a platform by a man believed by many to be a war criminal?

“I think that we’re concerned about the content of everyone, everything we publish,” Jackson said. “Certainly John Yoo is a controversial person. He himself will admit he has become a lightning rod.”

Jackson then noted the possibility Yoo could face “judicial action” for his authorship of the memos that provided the legal groundwork for the Bush Administration’s torture of terror suspects.

“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.”

I had one final concern: Here is the Inquirer’s description of John Yoo at the end of his column:

John Yoo (jyoo@law.berkeley.edu) is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He has served as a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas.

Notice what it omits? Only the resume item that makes him most-known to the public — and, arguably, the resume item that put him on the Inky’s editorial page: His service in the White House’s Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush. That, I think, is a terribly curious omission, one that obscures Yoo’s history to readers who may not have followed the torture debate closely.

“We aren’t trying to hide anything. There’s nothing to hide,” Jackson told me. “It’s just pretty standard identifier for most of the writers we have. It doesn’t go into all the curriculum vitae … Certainly, he’s got a background and a track record our readers are familiar with.”

•••

I believe in the First Amendment. I believe that everybody has the right to free speech, no matter how noxious the opinion or odious the speaker. I believe Nazis have the right to march down Broad Street even if it offends everybody in the city of Philadelphia. And I believe that the Philadelphia Inquirer has the absolute right to publish John Yoo’s columns if it so chooses — and, in fact, I want the Inquirer to publish compelling perspectives from across the political spectrum, even if I sometimes think those opinions are nuts.

But I also believe that in this case, the Inquirer is making a bad choice.

It’s a bad choice because Yoo himself isn’t quite so ardent about the First Amendment. He did, after all, co-author a secret memo suggesting that freedom of the press could be suspended during the War on Terror.

It’s a bad choice because a man who can’t quite draw a bright line against the crushing of a child’s testicles has frankly demonstrated judgment that places him well outside mainstream discourse.

It’s a bad choice, too, because the Inquirer — like everybody else in the mainstream media these days — has terribly limited resources. The expense of a portion of those limited resources on Yoo’s column is a signal to the public that this is a man worth listening to, with ideas worth contemplating. In most civilized societies, torture enablers are banished to the margins of debate. In Philadelphia, they’re given plum op-ed spots. It’s a damn shame.

Newspapers are betting on Kindle?

So says the New York Times:

Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens.

Unlike tiny mobile phones and devices like the Kindle that are made to display text from books, these new gadgets, with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper, could present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print. And they might be a way to get readers to pay for those periodicals — something they have been reluctant to do on the Web.

Call me dubious. Yes, people pay to get books on their Kindle — because they pay to get books anyway. Although libraries exist, you generally can’t pick up the latest bestseller for free. You can, however, get today’s headlines for free. Asking people to pay a few hundred bucks for a device so that they can then pay for something they’re already getting free on a device they already have? It’s an unlikely business plan.

Will Bunch makes a good point here:

It smacks of what newspapers were thinking and trying to do in the late 1990s and early 2000s — get the Internet off my damn lawn! Rather than integrate with the devices that people already have and use for multi-tasking — cellphones, laptops, etc. — newspapers want people to pay for a separate device where they have more control over the content and the flow of information, and they can once again demand that people pay money for the content.

Newspapers are no longer in a position to get the audience to come to them. They have to go to where the audience is.

Will Bunch wants to buy you a tiny computer

Over at Attytood, Will Bunch has an idea for saving the newspaper industry — or, at least, the Daily News. He wants the paper to partner up with a charitable foundation and start giving away thousands of free or cheap netbooks to poor and working-class families on the wrong side of the digital divide:

What if the cost for these devices really comes down to $99 (and less if purchased in bulk). Do the math: A $1 million annual program could provide netbooks to some 15,000 families, and a 10-year program would close the digital divide in a large city like Philadelphia for good.

News orgs and their new philanthropic partners could leverage this effort in many ways. There surely could be an overt effort to link the computer giveaway to increasing readership of the news Web site. The netbooks could come programmed or even hardwired to automatically make Philly.com its homepage, or the data — like email addresses — collected through the project could be used to promote readership by blasting out major news stories.

This is a great idea — except for the part where it doesn’t work.

Because imagine that you’re one of the poor or working-class people Will Bunch is giving a new netbook to. You open it up, push the power button and the browser appears. Then what? You’re probably not getting any Internet because, even with the right equipment, you can’t afford (for example) Comcast’s monthly fee for Internet service. And it’s not like “Wireless Philadelphia” actually works. And since you live in a neighborhood with a lot of other poor people, it’s not like you can — or would — sidle down to the local Starbucks and tap in there. At the end of the day, that tiny, cheap netbook in your hands does as much for you as if Will Bunch had bought you a brick to read.

Bunch’s heart is in the right place on this. But the digital divide isn’t only about a lack of access to computers. It’s also about the ability to make those computers access the Internet. He’s only halfway there.