Many Small Papers Are Tanking As Year Begins

The way things are going in the newspaper business, it may not be too long before the big papers will be just about the only ones left. Two longtime newspapers have closed since the end of 2007, and many others have undertaken layoffs and other cost-saving measures. In recent years, hundreds of afternoon dailies have vanished, or become morning papers.

Here in Southern California, the papers owned by Dean Singleton have virtually all laid off numerous employees. At the Orange County Register, the story has been told about the unfortunate newsman summoned in on his day off to a meeting, only to be told when he got there he was fired.

Singleton is trying to follow in the footsteps of the Tribune Co.'s inept former CEO Dennis FitzSimons, who was laid off himself when Sam Zell became the Tribune owner. But unlike FitzSimons, it is doubtful that Singleton could leave with a multi-million severance. His papers probably do not have that kind of nest egg. The Singleton story is one of a squalid little man buying a bunch of squalid little newspapers, and then running them further into the ground. He may end up like the squirrel, living off nuts in the park.

The Cincinnati Post, its circulation having dropped by 75%, went out of business after 127 years of publication Dec. 31, and the Kent County Journal of Kent, Washington, a Seattle suburb, will close down Jan. 21. It has been Washington state's 8th largest paper.

In California, the story is almost as bad. The San Jose Mercury News is a shadow of its former self. Two big layoffs in recent months have pared the staff by 17%. One wonders whether a Silicon Valley edition of the Los Angeles Times wouldn't be more of a success.

The San Francisco Chronicle has laid off many, too, and recent word there was that the newspaper is losing $50,000 a month.

Here in Los Angeles, the Daily News in the San Fernando Valley, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune and the Long Beach Press-Telegram have all retreated from respectable journalism, laying off workers, cutting features and amalgamating many of their busness functions. These are all Singleton-owned newspapers.

What are the causes? Ads are way down, and certain categories of ads, like classified, are approaching the vanishing point. Owners are unwilling to invest, fearing further reverses. There is a general ecnomic downturn, the whole housing industry has tanked. And more people are getting their news from the Internet rather than the daily press.

I'm certainly aware of the tendency toward more use of the Internet. Even with the papers I subscribe to, the L.A. Times and the New York Times, I increasingly read many stories late the night before online. It's not as pleasurable as reading the print edition, but it helps me do this blog early many mornings.

There certainly is a call for serious journalism, but that is being provided by the big newspapers, struggling too, but usually not to the same extent.

In many cases, the content of the L.A. Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, is as good as it's ever been. All of these papers also have increasingly successful Web sites, where readership is constantly growing, and ads are being sold in ever larger numbers.

There is, I believe, hope for these papers. But for the Daily News, the Register, even the San Diego Tribune, where there have been recent serious layoffs, I wonder.

We can't disdain our suffering colleagues, and tell them to eat cake. It's certainly no laughing matter, and all we can hope is that many of those laid off can find lucrative careers in other fields.

CNN's Anderson Cooper Covers Junk, Not News

It was a week in which the stock market dived, the dollar lost value, the sub-prime mortgage crisis impacted new corporate institutions, and Pakistan's dictator, Pervez Musharraf, declared an emergency and locked up hundreds of lawyers.

In other words, a week of big news, all of which had consequences for the American people.

And yet, you wouldn't know it watching CNN's main nightly news, with Anderson Cooper, which the CNN network thinks so much of, it plays it twice every night.

What was Cooper's lead Friday night? The OJ Simpson case in Las Vegas, which has absolutely no consequences and is simply prurient junk.

This used to be a significant newscast, especially when the serious Aaron Brown was the anchor. His removal and replacement by Cooper marked the deterioration of this news program and of CNN as a whole, which struggles to keep up with the Fox News Network by descending more and more into covering pap.

Cooper has done some good things, traveling to wars abroad, and to the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. But more and more he's becoming just another Nancy Grace, a truly horrible newscaster who descended to covering the depths of human depravity long ago.

Cooper comes on at 7 p.m. here on the Pacific Coast, which means right after the NBC Nightly News, with Brian Williams. It's quite a contrast. Every night, Williams covers the news, and Cooper follows him most nights by focusing on the prurient, the scurrilous and the mundane. No wonder, CNN is losing in the ratings. NBC, too, competing with the new Fox financial network, puts correspondents from its financial affiliate, CNBC, on the program, but it's always tied to the news, (and Maria Bartiromo graces any newscast. If she, not Katie Couric, had gone over to do CBS News, it would be faring far better than it is).

(Comments on this blog took me to task for not recognizing that Cooper had gone on to more substantial matters than OJ Simpson, such as a long discussion on Al-Qaeda. To these, I would answer, (1) if a TV broadcast starts with pap, I turn to some other channel, and (2) on this particular week, Al-Qaeda was not the subject, the economy and the ramifications of the Sub-Prime crisis were. If you're claiming that you're doing a newscast, then you've got to discuss the day's news).

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Burma does have a few advantages over Pakistan, despite having had a perfectly awful military junta in charge for decades. One is that Burma has a great leader in the wings, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, and she is beginning to emerge from the shadows of years of house arrest. Under the prodding of the United Nations emissary, Ibraham Gambari, the junta has begun talks with San Suu Kyi, and is referring to her more respectfully than it did before. This week, she was able, for the first time in three years, to meet with leaders of her political party, which, in 1990 in an election the junta nullified, received 80% of the popular vote.

Should San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, eventually become prime minister of a free Burma, Burma would no longer be one of the most poverty-stricken states in the world. Not only would the public there begin participating in the life of the state, and thousands of Buddhist monks resume their moral leadership of society, but Burma has natural resources, especially natural gas, which can be sold to China and other powers to the benefit of the Burmese people. And San Suu Kyi would benefit from Western support and the admiration she commands throughout the world.

Pakistan is not so lucky. It has few apparent natural resources, its former leaders in the wings have only a record of corruption and ineptitude, such as Benazir Bhutto, and it has a people all too willing to accede to military rule. In fact, military rule may be, under the circumstances, its best option.

Burma has one other advantage over Pakistan -- many fewer Muslim fundamentalists working to subvert the state and install religious fanatics in power. There is no Al-Qaeda or Taliban in Burma.

So I'm more optimistic about Burma in the long run. The newspapers yesterday ran a picture of San Suu Kyi alongside a smiling Gambari. These great figures, not the squalid junta, hopefully represent the future of Burma.

Why Would Dan Rather, At 75, Sue CBS?

My first thought, when I heard that the former CBS news anchor, Dan Rather, was suing CBS and its corporate heads for $70 million, was that lawsuits can be a very difficult and uncertain endeavor, and why, at 75, would Rather undertake one?

But when I talked to a few others in the news business, they made the point to me that there are real issues which should be examined in the ouster of Rather from the post of news anchor after so many years in the job. They predicted that the depositions and testimony, if the case gets to the trial stage, might be most revealing about relationships between the Bush Administration and the news network. Also, the lawsuit could tell us a lot more about whether these vaunted news anchors are powerful in their own right, or just front men reading broadcasts which are largely the responsibilities of producers scarcely known to the public.

If the suit really uncovers these things, then I doubt whether CBS will want it to go to trial. They might try to settle with Rather instead of letting all the dirty laundry be aired.

It's always a difficult situation when a longtime employee, in the eyes of his employers, has outlived his usefulness. And old age can obviously be a major factor in this. At the L.A. Times, where I worked so long, staffers reaching into their 60s were not infrequently treated with scant consideration at the end of their careers. The New York Times for a long time had a mandatory retirement age of 65, averting some such contretemps, although even the NYT had a hard and embarrassing time getting rid of A.M. Rosenthal, its former executive editor, who in his last years with the paper had become a vitriolic columnist.

"Old age," General de Gaulle once remarked, "is a ship wreck," and it's particularly sad when someone gets to his or her 70s and doesn't know when declining acuity and energy mandates retirement. On the other hand, some L.A. Times writers, like Jack Smith, Jim Murray and recently-retired sportswriter Shav Glick, contribute a great deal well beyond retirement age, and Shirley Povich wrote into his 90s for the Washington Post. Cartoonists, such as Herb Block at the Post, and Paul Conrad, retired from the L.A. Times but still drawing, often do great work in their 80s.

Rather continues to appear on television outside CBS and, in fact, will be interviewed on the Larry King show on CNN tonight about his lawsuit against CBS. (Watching the King interview Thursday night, I felt Rather made a fairly strong case for the suit. King was a little tougher on Rather than he is on most guests, and I wondered whether somebody at CNN had suggested this approach. Then, they cut Rather off at 40 minutes and went on to something else. It would have been appropriate to allow Rather to answer some viewer questions, rather than confine the viewer response to one e-mail).

But a retired editor at the Times reminded me that CNN too had a rather controversial retirement when it got rid of its longtime prize foreign correspondent, Peter Arnett.

Arnett had become controversial for some of his Iraq coverage, and Rather had long been the bugaboo of the right wing for his critical attitude toward Republicans.

One of the questions that will apparently be examined in the Rather lawsuit, if it goes ahead, is whether CBS did cave in to the Bush Administration, Karl Rove and so forth, when it maneuvered Rather into an apology for a broadcast about President Bush's record in the Texas Air National Guard, then out of his anchor's position, and then gave him little to do with the CBS show "60 Minutes," to which he had been farmed out contractually as a "full time" correspondent.

The New York Times story on the lawsuit this morning, by Jacques Steinberg, said that Rather had declined to say whether he had used private investigators to prepare the suit. But nonetheless it seems certain that in discovery proceedings Rather's attorneys would demand e-mails and other communications at the top levels of CBS pertaining to the Rather dismissal.

The Bush people flared up at the broadcast about the President's Guard service as a young man, claiming it was based on spurious documents, and so forth. Yet it does seem clear that Mr. Bush evaded the possibility he would have to serve in Vietnam by joining the Guard, and, on the face of it, it would not be surprising if he had pulled strings to get into the safe refuge which was the Guard. On the other hand, with some experience in the Army reserve, I was not surprised that months would pass, when the young Bush moved from one state to another, before the Guard caught up with him on coming to training meetings. The bureaucracy in the military frequently takes a long time to reassign people when they move.

Rather is now taking the position he had little to do with preparing the report, and merely read parts of it on the air as a front man. That too could be rigorously examined in the depositions regarding the suits.

There might be a lot of embarrassing revelations here, especially since, more and more, suggestions are being made that the news media in general was too subservient to the Bush Administration in the runup to the Iraq war and in the first years of the war. Just at retired L.A. Times editorial page editorAnthony Day's memorial service last Saturday, the pastor emeritus of All Saint's Episcopal Church in Pasadena, John Rivas, suggested forcefully that the media had sold out to the Administration.

In that sense, the Rather lawsuit could fuel a witch hunt as to just who in the media was responsible for "caving in" to the Administration.

On the other hand, lawsuits can take many unexpected twists and turns. It is not unlikely that CBS has material that could embarrass Rather. Certainly, it would do his longtime reputation as a crusading television reporter no good to have it revealed for a certainty that he was just a front man.

The L.A. Times, by the way, in light of the serious issues involved, was smart this morning in running its story, by Matea Gold, out on Page 1 of the news section, and the New York Times dropped the ball in running the story in its Business section. The most interesting news should be placed on Page 1.

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For the third time this month, Al-Qaeda has released a tape, this one of Osama bin Laden calling for a jihadist uprising against the Pakistani regime of Pervez Musharraf.

With all these tapes, I just wonder whether the focus of the hunt for bin Laden should not revolve around Al Jazeera, and the means by which his recordings come inro its possession to be used. Many criminals' whereabouts are ultimately traced through communications they have somehow released publicly, and it would be wonderful if U.S. intelligence could find bin Laden through careful explorations of how his venomous words are reaching the public. Jazeera executatives may know where bin Laden is, and, if they did, it would be worthwhile kidnapping them and questioning them until they revealed his whereabouts.

Fundamentalist Islam is not black magic. There should be some way of finding, and destroying or capturing, this bloodthirsty guttersnipe.

L.A. Times Looks Very Good Beside Eureka Paper

There is nothing that convinces you more that the L.A. Times remains a very good newspaper than reading the Eureka Times Standard for a few days, as I did on my recent trip. It's always enlightening to start reading Times back issues after you've been away, subject to the really low standards at most other papers.

This comparison struck me last night as I read Times issues for the first two days I'd been away -- for July 24 and 25. These weekday papers were filled with significant news, well written and well-presented. (It may also be that Times weekday papers have grown better than the Sunday paper, which has recently suffered more from features removed, such as TV Guide, West magazine (most weeks) and a separate Opinion and Book Review, now jammed together and truncated.

There were several comprehensive stories in the July 24-25 Times issues that were enough to convince you that under the often lobby-dominated Schwarzenegger Administration and the present Legislature, California has sunk into quite a crisis. The state is growing so fast it is bursting at the seams and government at all levels is unable to keep up.

First and foremost was the lead story July 24 by Nancy Vogel reporting that two federal judges had called the latest state efforts to control overcrowding in the state's prison system insufficient and ordered creation of a three-judge panel to consider capping California's prison population. This could entail a broad revision of the sentencing system and/or early prisoner releases. The judges specifically found that a $7.4 billion prison reform package adopted by the Legislature
and Schwarzenegger in the spring could actually worsen present conditions, because it would add prison beds without adding staff. At present, Vogel's story reported, the prison system holds 173,000 inmates, 17,000 of them in gymnasiums and a small number of prisoners have actually been moved to prisons outside the state.

(The Times also reported in these papers, at length, on the continuing budgetary crisis in the Legislature. Years after the Recall election that removed Gov. Gray Davis, California, under Schwarzenegger, has not resolved its budget shortfalls. The prospect now is for cutbacks in transportation projects and improper diversions of bonds voted by the electorate).

Also, I was impressed by a Page 1 story July 24 by Sharon Bernstein about a series of zoning proposals that could allow 250-square-foot apartments in Los Angeles. Bernstein's story charitably did not compare these with the Black Hole of Calcutta.

A lead editorial, meanwhile, raised questions about the notoriously bad Los Angeles County Counsel's office and its new policy of not revealing the reasons for huge settlements paid the victims of police and government misconduct. And on the Op Ed page was an article by Douglas Ring and Diane Donaghue warning that new high-rise apartment building in downtown Los Angeles threatens to make the downtown area "a gilded ghetto." (Ring has been a lobbyist and developer who has not always had the public interest at heart, but, still, the piece was thought provoking).

The July 25 issue at long last moved the mortgage crisis to Page 1, where it should have been long before, and should still be more frequently, with a report that foreclosures in California in the second quarter of the year had soared 799% higher than last year, to 17,408, largely because of dramatic increases in the rates being charged under adjustable mortgages. The story by David Streitfeld listed the figures for six Southland counties specifically and was a followup to an earlier Business section story by Tom Petruno warning that the mortgage crisis was spreading to the stock market and the full economy.

I also was impressed in the same issue with a column by Ron Brownstein on Rudolph Giuliani broaching new concepts of federalism in his presidential campaign, by an excellent review of a Las Vegas Italian restaurant, B&B, in the Venetian Hotel, by Irene Virbila, the Times' restaurant critic, and by the Page 1 account byJulia Damianova and Tracy Wilkinson from Sofia, Bulgaria, on the return of Bulgarian nurses from an eight-year-long cruel imprisonment in Libya on apparently spurious charges that they had spread AIDS among their patients.

Having been highly critical of cutbacks at the Times, it is only fair that the paper also be complimented for continuing to perform well in many areas. The L.A. Times for those two days was quite a bit more interesting than the New York Times for the same days.

A Bad Day For Newspapers, WSJ, Daily News Fall

Written from Gold Beach, Ore--

So the Bancroft family sold out at the Wall Street Journal, just as the Chandler did at the L.A. Times. The results have already been terrible for the Times, and the prospects are not much better for the Wall Street Journal.

Sure, Rupert Murdoch is a better businessman than the laggards at the Tribune Co. have proved to be. He will be able to use Journal reporting throughout his empire, perhaps, and Dow Jones will now make sales that the unimaginative Bancrofts never thought of making.

But Murdoch's values are a cesspool. He does not practice honest journalism. He cowtows to whatever interests that will give him advantage. His Fox News Network is biased, unfair and one-sided. His New York Post is a cheap, sensationalistic rag. His London Times has gone downhill severely from what it once was. The list goes on.

And now that list will include the Wall Street Journal. It's too bad for those working there, and it's very bad for the country -- especially since we are at a time when Wall Street and the financial institutions face a mortgage crisis of unknown proportions, and the U.S. currency is down seriously as compared to the Euro.

Sure, Murdoch is setting up a committee to "assure" quality at the Journal. That will prove as independent as David Hiller has been of Dennis FitzSimons. The assurances Murdoch gave the Bancroft family will not prove to be worth the paper they are printed on. But the Bancrofts have no excuses. They simply went for the money, and sold out whatever principle they once had. After 118 years, it's truly a sorry ending.

We also hear today that the Daily News out in the San Fernando Valley is cutting back once again. It is almost shutting down coverage in the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, and laying off some employees, once again.

Don't get me wrong, Aside from a few people like Rick Orlov, the Daily News has hardly provided very good reporting. It pandered to the worst elements in its support of Valley secession from Los Angeles, and thank goodness it wasn't successful.

But that said, the community is still diminished whenever newspapers fall into the abyss. To the extent that the Daily News provided more journalistic competition in Southern California, we all have to be sorry it is going down under Singleton. It might have been foreseen, however, because this man was never much.

The only way a newspaper can really succeed these days, as the Internet gains, and population patterns change, is to expand, not retreat. Yet the L.A. Times has certainly retreated and continues to do so. At a time when the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have been buttressing their national editions, the L.A. Times dropped the one it had, and now seldom makes any attempt to be a statewide, much less a nationwide, newspaper. No wonder, it has sunk in circulation.

No, these are sad times in our business, no question about it.

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The South Korean government is now urging "flexibility" in dealing with the Taliban kidnapping of 23 of its citizens on a good will mission to Afghanistan, and the murder of two of them. But "flexibility" apparently means that the South Koreans want Afghanistan to release Taliban prisoners it is holding, as it did last March when it released five captives in exchange for an Italian newspaperman.

The Italian release arrangement has led only to more hostage-taking, as it was bound to, and there will be no end to it if there is now a further exchange.

What is the answer to the Taliban? The answer is to go after every one of its leaders, and hang them as the criminals they are, starting with Mullah Omar.

Meanwhile, the South Korean episode proves once again that it is not only us and the Israelis that the Muslim fundamentalists hate, but everyone in the world, including millions of fellow-Muslims. They are truly the Nazis all over again.

South Korea owes its independence to the willing of many countries, not only our own, to fight for it. We have good reason to expect more fortitude from it than it is giving us now.

LAT, NYT Timid On Both Mahony And Iraq

The weaknesses of both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times are evident this morning in their failures to call editorially for the resignation of Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony in the wake of the $660 million settlement the Archdiocese of Los Angeles has entered into with 508 victims of pedophile priests.

Since Mahony stonewalled the justice system for four years and only yielded when it became evident that he would have to testify in open court as to his derelictions in failing to deal with the pedophiles, of course, he should resign. The Archdiocese cannot move on, justice will not be perceived as having been done, until he does.

But neither paper can summon up the courage to call for it this morning. No wonder, both papers' circulation is sliding. The L.A. Times has plenty of news coverage, and there is a moderately good Steve Lopez column, which clearly assigns Mahony culpability, but stops just short of calling for his resignation. There is a failure here to reach the inevitable conclusion: For the good of the Archdiocese and the honor of the Catholic Church, Mahony must go.

We see the same kind of failures with the unfolding debate on the Iraq war. Neither paper has realistically tried to speak about the consequences should the United States withdraw its military forces from Iraq. Both papers have followed those in the Democratic party who call for what would be tantamount to a surrender in Iraq, such as the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, who is willing to sell out American interests for transitory political advantage. Both papers are so blinded by their dislike of President George W. Bush that they cannot give him credit at all for trying to follow America's best interests as he understands them.

The New York Times in particular has been pursuing the foolhardy argument, incidentally, that Al-Qaeda is not the principal enemy in Iraq. This is similar to the contention of so many liberal intellectuals during the Vietnam war that there were serious distinctions between the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong in the Vietnam situation, and that these could somehow be exploited by us if only we were more understanding of Viet Cong aspirations. In fact, as soon as the U.S. gave up in Vietnam, the North Vietnamese came marching into Saigon, and it became manifest that there was absolutely no Viet Cong independent of the North Vietnamese. On the very first day of their control, the name of Saigon was changed to Ho Chi Minh City.

For the New York Times and others to assert that Al Qaeda in Iraq is not fundamentally the same organization as the Al Qaeda now based in the northwestern border districts of Pakistan is the height of folly. (Also adhering to this argument is the dovish Time magazine columnist, Joe Klein, always free with accusations that Mr. Bush is lying to the American people about the nature of the insurgency in Iraq).

But not withstanding these fulminations, it should be absolutely clear to anyone who really thinks about it that an American withdrawal from Iraq would be perceived throughout the world as a victory for Al Qaeda, and that this would have major adverse effects on the whole Western position in the Middle East, and very possibly open Europe and America to new Al Qaeda attacks.

A National Intelligence Estimate out this morning concludes there is indeed such a danger.

"We assess that Al-Qaeda will continue to enhance its capabilities to attack the Homeland (the U.S.) through its cooperation with regional terrorist groups," the Estimate says. "Of note, we assess that Al-Qaeda will probably seek to leverage the contacts and capabilities of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, its most visible and capable affiliate and the only one known to have exposed a desire to attack the Homeland."

And there is this chilling conclusion in the Estimate: "We assess that Al-Qaeda will continue to acquire and employ chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons in attacks and would not hesitate to use them if it develops what it deems is sufficient capability."

The fact that intelligence agencies weren't right about Saddam Hussein having such capabilities at the time the second Iraq war began does not mean there is every likelihood they aren't right now.

Yes, there are other groups fighting U.S. and British soldiers in Iraq. But the really gruesome attacks, the bombings in markets and Mosques, the killing of journalists and innocent school children, are mainly the work of Al-Qaeda. Even the dangerous Shiite militias are not as culpable.

Both the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times are giving themselves to all sorts of complacent attitudes about the dangers that confront us. And Time magazine is doing no better. Posted on Time.com this morning, and in the magazine as well, is coverage of the battle at Islamabad's Red Mosque last week that is perhaps a little too sympathetic to the terrorists, reminding one of that magazine's recent suggestion that we "reach out" to Hamas.

The newspapers this morning could not even summon up the courage to call for something as easily understandable as the need for Cardinal Mahony to resign. Can they summon up the courage to think realistically about the options in Iraq? Can Time magazine?

I don't think so, and have to say, no wonder there's so much distrust of the mainstream press, when we cannot count on it to come to firm and realistic conclusions.

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Jeff Wald has stepped down as News Director at KTLA, the Tribune-owned Channel Five. He had a long tenure, but certainly has been disappointed for some time at some of the policies of the Tribune ownership. Even before 2004, when I retired from the L.A. Times, Wald expressed to me his disillusion with Tribune.

The death of his wife undoubtedly influenced Wald's decision, since he felt he should be devoting more time to raising his teenage daughter and caring for his elderly father. He was a competent manager and will be missed.

Time Magazine's Murdoch Profile A Whitewash

When I read last week's profile of media magnate Rupert Murdoch in Time, I felt sorry for that languishing magazine, which has lost so much advertising it is sometimes down to 60 pages an issue. Its weekly editorial content has dropped off terribly.

Profiles almost never seem a good way to get to the truth about a person. There is too much of a temptation to either balance the good and the bad, or give entirely too much of the good and little of the bad, and by those standards even a bloody tyrant can be made to seem to have many good features. Much of the "Uncle Joe" profiling of Joseph Stalin, by a whole host of writers, completely distorted the overwhelmingly murderous features of his personality. It took Aleksandyr Solzhenitsyn to correct many of the falsehoods peddled by obsequious journalists.

It is awfully easy for the profiler to be taken in by the subject. Still, Time's profile of Murdoch was uncommonly bad. I wondered after reaching the end of it whether Time's editors were not anxious to please him, because they hoped that Murdoch would buy that magazine as well as the Wall Street Journal.

Murdoch, as we have come to understand him, is a freebooter. He has made a great fortune and assumed almost William Randolph Hearst-type control over a whole host of newspaper, television and Internet properties. The Time profile tries to draw a distinction as to how he has handled these properties, contending that he has kept up the quality of such publications as the London Times, while allowing his tabloids, such as the New York Post, to sink into a moral abyss.
This is bad reporting. Murdoch has had a dumbing down effect wherever he has gone. The London Times is not nearly the paper it was before he owned it, and his Fox News Network is a shill for the Republican party. Now, as everyone who reads this blog will realize, I'm certainly a Republican, but Fox News is SO Republican I can barely watch it. I like a little reality with my news.

The Time profile, by Eric Pooley, does mention Murdoch's craven attempts to curry favor with the Chinese government, his willingness to censor his publications to please the Chinese, and his publication of worthless books to satisfy the Chinese. But it doesn't give this sordid record the full attention it deserves.

Be it Hamas or Rupert Murdoch, Time has recently become apologists for bad people. It used to be more honest. But its profiles have long been too starry-eyed. I remember the profile it did of Los Angeles Olympic boss Peter Ueberroth for its Man of the Year issue for 1984. It captured all of Ueberroth's inspirational side, but none of his intimidating and unscrupulous sides. I could hardly recognize the Ueberroth who I had come to know from years of Olympic reporting in that article, by the well-meaning but gullible Robert Ajemian.

I have little doubt at this point that Murdoch is going to realize his goal of buying the Dow Jones Co. and its Wall Street Journal, and I fear the result. Murdoch will know how to make money by taking the Journal international and selling much of the information its reporters develop to a whole host of new buyers. But the Journal will not have the integrity it has had in the past.

Tim Rutten, the L.A. Times media columnist, has been far more honest and perceptive about Murdoch's nature. To find out what he is really like, read him. Rutten, fortunately, is not as easy to fool as Eric Pooley.

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The L.A. Times continues to give the state's highway and mass transit needs the great attention they deserve, as is shown again this morning in the front page story by Rong-Gong Lin and Jeff Rabin on needed improvements of the next 40 years, if California is really going to achieve the 60 million population by 2050 that was projected earlier this week.

But the Times continues to fail to put the mortgage crisis on Page 1. By contrast, the New York Times has just in recent days run two Page 1 stories reflecting on the nation's housing problems -- a piece on the mounting foreclosures in Atlanta, Ga., and a column this morning by the able David Leonhardt, who usually appears in the paper's Business section, on housing prices.

The NYT editors are more imaginative. They better appreciate the fact that many of their readers do not read the Business pages, while virtually all readers pay attention to what's on Page 1. Highways are important, but the mortgage crisis has more immediacy. The L.A. Times editors need to get it out front.

Journalist Deaths Alarming in Iraq, Mexico

The war in Iraq continues to be extremely dangerous to journalists, with four reported killed in just the last week. The deaths continue, as is appropriate, to receive considerable coverage. Most exposed are Iraqis working for local news outlets, or assisting foreign reporters covering the war. But a number of American and other foreign journalists have also been injured or killed in Iraq, where the journalistic toll is approaching that of World War II.

Unlike some past wars, journalists seem not to be viewed as neutrals, but as the enemy, by the terrorists. They are as susceptible to being kidnapped, bombed, fired upon or murdered as armed units. On the American side, some mistakes have been made, resulting in journalist losses.

The overall picture is so serious that for reporters resident in Baghdad every venture outside their quarters, even close by in the city, is fraught with risk. Journalists, when they do go out, are often accompanied by guards. I'm told by a person stationed with the military in Anbar province that journalist visits there, owing to the risk, are comparatively rare, even if Baghdad is not all that distant.

Iraq, however, is not the only country where journalist lives are in peril in the fractious times in which we live.

The kidnapping of Alan Johnson, a BBC reporter resident in Gaza, by Palestinian terrorists is only the latest kidnapping there, although it has been the longest, and the perceived dangers are such that most Western reporters now stay out of Gaza altogether.

In the War on Terror, there have also been killings of journalists in Pakistan, the most notable of which was the beheading of the Wall Street Journal reporter, Daniel Pearl. Despite assurances by Pakistani authorities that perpetrators of this crime would be executed, none of those imprisoned has been thus far.

This week's Time magazine, meanwhile, carries a brief report about dangers to the press in covering the increasingly deadly drug cartels in Mexico. The magazine reports that many reporters in the country simply pass the subject up, despite the fact that the new Mexican president, Felipe Calderon, has sent thousands of soldiers to combat the drug dealers.

Time reports that seven journalists have been murdered in Mexico since last October, mostly in retaliation for reporting on the drug cartels, and two television reporters covering the drug crisis went missing in the last month. On May 24, a grenade attack on the newspaper Camblo Sonora, published in Hermosillo, resulted in an announcement that the paper was temporarily shutting down. There have even been reports of foreign reporters stationed in Mexico going easy on the drug question, out of fear of reprisal.

These days, it seems, everyone is fair game for the purveyors of crime and violence.

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Both Time magazine and the Los Angeles Times report this week on the 40th anniversary of the Six Day War. But the orientation of the two articles is quite different. Time's coverage is one-sidedly Palestinian, focusing on all the troubles they have encountered since encouraging the threats to Israel that induced the Israelis to attack. The L.A. Times, in the Opinion section, has an essay by Israeli war expert, Michael Oren, that primarily deals with the Israeli perspective. Also, the Times has a lengthy report, starting on Page 1, on the city of Jerusalem, developments there in the next 40 years. It is fair and even handed.

It is regrettable, however, that while the New York Times has a comprehensive report on yesterday's shelling by a U.S. Navy destroyer yesterday of terrorists in Somalia, including the killing of one terrorist who was an American, the L.A. Times doesn't have so much as a mention of the attack. L.A. Times foreign coverage is beginning to slip in several ways, and it was reported last week that the paper now has correspondents stationed in 18 foreign countries, compared to 22 a short time back.

Also less than comprehensive has been the Times coverage on the termination of columnist Al Martinez. Jim Rainey, the Times' media reporter, said in an article Saturday that over 300 communications had been received by the paper protesting the end of the popular Martinez's column. But in the Times' Calendar section Saturday, only three letters were written, at the end of the usual letters column.

Martinez apparently got the word he was through in a call from the section editor, Rich Nordwind, rolling over to instructions from his superiors. It was all done over the phone . Martinez was allowed to write two more columns, and may occasionally make a reappearance, but in a crassly insensitive act, his e-mail address was taken away even before those last two columns.

If You Don't Want Murdoch, Don't Sell WSJ To Him

Whenever I get a call from a real estate agent, I hang up on him or her without saying a word. I find this very satisfying, because I then don't have to listen to all the claptrap offers and sales pitches they come up with. (It's also more than justified, a long New York Times article on elderly fraud made clear Sunday, to hang up on telephone marketers seeking personal information. This is often used to clean out private banking accounts. One man cited lost $100,000).

I'd put Rupert Murdoch's offer for the Wall Street Journal in the same hang up category. No matter what he is offering, why should the Bancroft family entertain even for a moment such a distasteful exemplar of crude and wanton greed as a prospect for ruining a great newspaper? One that the Bancroft family has controlled since 1902.

Murdoch's tendency to shade coverage in his newspapers to please the dictators in the People's Republic of China, where he has business interests, is alone a sufficient reason not to so much as listen for one moment to his offer.

His ownership of the Fox News network has been an attempt to subvert the American democratic system and turn the country over to right wing ideologues. It is already a disgrace that that biased network has obtained so many watchers, although, of course, people in this country are free to watch whatever they like. Some like biased, low brow reporting. Murdoch already owns enough outlets to give it to them.

Some attention should certainly be paid to the 76-year-old Murdoch. Since he is from Australia, just how is he living in this country? Is he even an American citizen? Perhaps there are irregularities in his status here that would justify steps to eject him.

When you think about it, Murdoch is a much a predator as someone who preys on small children on the Internet, or one of these scam artists which the New York Times reports today are emptying the accounts of elderly people who foolishly give them personal information on the telephone. The world is filled with evil people, and there aren't enugh jails to put them into.

In the meantime, I find intolerable, at this moment of crisis in print journalism, to contemplate Murdoch getting control over the Wall Street Journal, where he would wreak havoc on the staff, and destroy many careers the way they have been destroyed by the Tribune Co. at its Los Angeles Times and other papers. He is a small type of man, better qualified to buy a chain of garbage dumps or Nevada bordellos than any institution worth so much to a free society.

So I hope against hope we will hear no more of his obscene offer.

Let him devote himself to writing more such diverting headlines as "Headless Body Found In Topless Bar," such as ran in his New York Post.

NYT Depicts Problems at WSJ, Minneapolis, CBS

The New York Times Business section Monday was a real tour-de-force on the intensifying problems with media profits and ratings. Special attention was directed to the Wall Street Journal, the Minneapolis Star Tribune (no relation to the Tribune Co.) and the lagging Katie Couric nightly news on CBS.

At least, it is clear, the L.A. Times has company in its misery, as declining advertising revenues and competition from the Internet increasingly are bringing in their wake more and more layoffs or prospects of layoffs.

"At The Wall Street Journal, Slim Margins Open Door to Murdoch," is the headline on the article by Richard Perez-Pena. He postulates that costs associated with the Journal's new Saturday edition could plunge Dow Jones, the controlling company, into the red this year. Also, he reports, the Journal's attempt to charge viewers of its Web site is holding down the number of viewers and perhaps costing the Journal Web advertising revenues. All this has opened the way to the Murdoch bid, which could end with a tragic loss of integrity and quality at the Journal. (I've been thinking of my former L.A. Times colleague Lee Hotz, who recently quit the Times and went to the Journal as a science columnist. He seems to have jumped from the frying pan into the fire. He is much too erudite for Rupert Murdoch if, God forbid, he obtains control of the Journal.)

The Journal has the second largest circulation of any paper in the country, just behind USA Today, and until recently it seemed on solid ground. But it has suffered a 4% decline in advertising this year when it had predicted gains. And it has heavy news-gathering expenses. The controlling Bancroft family has in the past been willing to accept less of a return to keep the Journal a great newspaper. Murdoch would not be at all so willing.

This article is most provocative when it discusses the Internet quandary. How do you cope with the challenges this new medium poses? Google is doing a tremendous business, mostly by selling ads, but newspapers have floundered around trying to come to grips with how to make the Internet lucrative as well as popular, as Wall Street and private investors put pressure on the big papers, including the New York Times as well for that matter, to turn a higher profit.

Some had felt that when the McClatchy papers sold the Minneapolis Star Tribune to Avista Capital, a private equity group, it meant the newspaper would make a turnaround. Avista executives at first talked growth, not layoffs, just as Sam Zell has been doing at the Tribune Co.

But, in fact, layoffs have been the order of the day at both companies. Avista seems to have underestimated the problems in Minneapolis, and the New York Times column by the usually astute David Carr implies these problems are so bad, the paper could go under. The paper's staff is protesting, but it is seemingly powerless to avoid a major downsizing of the paper.

And, apparently, losses of advertising and Internet problems are widely felt all across the country in the newspaper industry. They can no longer be ignored. But how to cope with them is a huge question.

The third article in the NYT Business section reported that CBS seems to be sticking with Couric, despite the fact her network news lags badly behind ABC and NBC and even about 4% below what CBS was getting in watchers before Couric took over as anchor. Last week, CBS reached its lowest point as a news network in 20 years. A sizable 29% minority of viewers say they do not like Couric, who at the Today program on NBC, was very popular. Only 51% say they like her. This compares with negative-positive numbers of about 20-60% for her competitors, ABC's Charles Gibson, and NBC's Brian Williams.

Bill Carter reports in this piece that an attempt to give CBS news a softer cast, and new features, has not worked, and the show is returning to a harder newscast with a new producer.

Carter remarks notably, "Ms. Couric's defenders ask whether a man taking the CBS job would have had his looks, hair, and clothes commented on in the same way as Ms. Couric's. Or if a single male anchor's social life would be almost daily fodder for the tabloids.

"'Maybe we underestimate the huge shift this represented," (Sean) McManus , (president of CBS News), said. "It was almost a watershed event to have a woman in that chair." He added, "There is a percentage of people there that probably prefers not to get their news from a woman."

I wonder whether the same group which the CBS News executive talks about in such a politically incorrect way will be any more accepting of a woman candidate for U.S. President (Hillary Clinton).

When you read the New York Times Business section Monday, in short, you couldn't escape the notion that the new media is in a revolutionary phase that will not be much to our likings.

The New York Times, by the way, is reporting these trends better than any other newspaper.

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Some of the names on the confirmed buyout list at the L.A. Times, although the paper has not yet accepted them all, would represent a terrible loss for the paper and another confirmation of the consequences of having such an awful owner as the Tribune Co.

I'm particularly depressed by word that Frank Clifford, an outstanding environmental editor, plans to leave the Times, along with Shawn Hubler, Jean Guccione, Simon Li, J.A. Adande, Mike Kennedy, Iris Schneider and Lennie Laguire, the woman who first suggested that I write my consumer column. No paper can take such hits and be the same quality institution it has been before.

Also, it would be a shame to lose Jenifer Warren from the Sacramento bureau, when she has contributed such great stories about the crisis in California's prisons. I'm pleased, however, that Mark Arax has decided not to take the buyout.