Archives for February 2010

ABC News president David Westin announced major cutbacks this week that could affect as much as 25% of the news  division’s workforce. The network will also be utilizing so-called one-man bands, reporters who shoot, write and edit their own material. What will the impact be on the news product?

If you’re a fan of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, as I am, then you really have to read Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of him in the current New Yorker.

I love the Tina Barney photo of Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, posing with their cats. You don’t really get the full effect unless you see it in the print edition, but there’s something hilariously incongruous about Krugman holding a cat while looking like he’s about to bite the head off a political adversary.

I was also interested to learn that Wells has had a strong hand in sharpening and toughening Krugman’s prose. For instance:

Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he’d done for Rolling Stone. He had written, “As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders,” and after this she inserted the sentence “Worse yet, he’ll get obstruction and lies.”

Recently I heard someone describe the columnist divide this way: you’re either a Krugman person or a David Brooks person. Go figure: they’re my two favorite columnists, though I’ll confess I find fault with Brooks’ cautious conservatism far more often than I do with Krugman’s fire-breathing liberalism.

Photo of Krugman via Wikimedia Commons.

** See important updates at the bottom of this posting, including my interview with editor Steve Weinberg.

*** UPDATE (3/2): See correction below.

The Columbia Journalism Review, which was doing media criticism long before media criticism was in vogue, is slapping around three journalists who decided to sell their good names to the Church of Scientology - and who dragged CJR's name in to the whole mess for good measure.

Let's back up a bit. The Scientologists - whose spiritual headquarters is located in Clearwater, Fla. - have long had a running battle with the nearby St. Petersburg Times. The paper's latest investigative effort was a three-part series last June in which reporters Joe Childs and Thomas Tobin quoted church defectors charging that Scientology leader David Miscavige beat and abused top church staffers.

Presumably in response, the Church of Scientology hired two reporters, Russell Carollo, a 1998 Pulitzer Prize winner from the Dayton Daily News in Ohio and Chris Szechenyi, a former television producer who has also done freelance work for the Boston Globe and taught journalism at Emerson College to investigate the quality and fairness of the Times' reporter. In a joint statement, Carollo and Szechenyi said they were "hesitant" to take the job, but were paid in advance and given "total editorial independence."

The church also hired Steve Weinberg, who has written for CJR, to edit the piece. In his Monday Media Notes column in The Washington Post, Howie Kurtz quoted Weinberg saying: "For me, it's kind of like editing a Columbia Journalism review piece."

But CJR wasn't having any of it:

Not really. The quality of this effort is not the point as much as the fact of this effort-hiring on to help an entity notorious for bringing terrible pressure on any journalist who dares to examine it. While the pay is likely meaningful to the journalists, and we know that times are hard, it is chump change to the Church. The Church can essentially gamble that these veteran journalists will find something of value that it can use as a weapon against the Times.

That's not a transaction we'd take part in, and we're sorry Steve invoked our name.

But it's worse than just helping Scientology in its long and well-documented wars on any journalistic entity that dares question or investigate its practices. No matter what they got paid, Carollo, Szechenyi, and Weinberg are selling their credibility for pennies on the dollar.

UPDATE:

There was an unverified comment posted to this item from someone who identified himself as Steve Weinberg. The commenter wrote that he was hired not by the Church of Scientology, but was asked to edit the project by the two reporters the Church had hired. The commenter did not say whether he was being paid to work on the piece. At this point I am attempting to verify whether the commenter was, in fact, the Steve Weinberg in question and ask a few more follow-ups.

UPDATE, PART II:

I just talked to Steve Weinberg, who was indeed the commenter who posted on earlier. He told me he was approached by Carollo and Szechenyi to edit the piece, and that they are paying him $5,000 out of the proceeds they are receiving from the Church of Scientology. He said he has no direct contact with the Scientologists and is not involved in the actual reporting or investigating being done by the two reporters.

"I am comfortable with my role," he told me. "If the Scientologists had come to me, I would have said no. But I knew what the source of the money was."

I have to give Weinberg points for honesty. He was quite candid that he had some misgivings about being connected with the project, but said that the fail-safes built into the agreement by Carollo and Szechenyi - including a provision that Church leaders must distribute the entire project verbatim or not at all - put him more at ease. He was equally candid that the money matters - he makes his living as a freelancer and is now caring for his elderly parents.

His view of the situation was quite nuanced - a bit too nuanced, I'm afraid. What are important distinctions to him - being paid through Szechenyi and Carollo instead of directly by the Scientologists, for example - to me smack more of hairsplitting and rationalization. When Weinberg asked him about whether Scientology funding would necessarily taint the perception of whatever conclusions the project reaches, he said good journalism could stand alone as good journalism no matter where the money comes from.

"Should we not trust anything that comes out of NBC because it's owned by GE?" he asked.

I am going to draw my own distinction here. I don't think you can compare a large, publicly-held corporation to a secretive religious cu... er, organization with an established track record of harassing and attacking journalists.

Here's my bottom line: Mainstream journalism is under attack on multiple fronts these days, from pure economics to changing consumer preferences to the rise of partisan outlets like Fox News. Now, more than ever, people who really believe in journalism have to pick a side, and I believe Weinberg - although perhaps less so than Carollo and Szechenyi - made a choice he's going to regret later.

CORRECTION: Globe Editor Marty Baron contacted Beat the Press and requested that we clarify of Chris Szechenyi's work for the Globe. We wrote that Szechenyi had done "some freelance work for the Globe," but that may have created the impression that Szechenyi's work for the Globe was more extensive and/or more recent than it actually was. According to Baron, a clip search appears to show Szechenyi's name was attached to just one article, a Q&A, in 1996. Baron said Szechenyi was employed by Boston.com for a 10-month period ending in early 2001, but that was during a time when the Globe and Boston.com had independent editorial staffs. Our mention of Sechenyi's Globe connection was intended to provide some local context for our Boston-based readers, but to the extent it was imprecise, we apologize.