Recent posts about journalism
Saudi Prince, Now Part Owner of Murdoch's News Corp., Influences Fox News
Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal (from YouTube)Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal now owns a 7 percent stake in Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., the parent company of Fox News, making him the company's largest shareholder outside of Murdoch's own family. Alwaleed is best known for going to Ground Zero after the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks and personally handing then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani a check for $10 million to help finance relief efforts. Afterwards, Alwaleed released a statement blaming the attacks not on the Saudi airline hijackers, but on U.S. policies in the middle east. As a result, Giuliani returned the prince's donation, gaining him praise from Fox News for doing so. Now that Alwaleed has a controlling ownership in News Corp., he is gaining influence over Fox News. In 2005, just months after Alwaleed acquired his first 5.4 percent stake in News Corp., Fox News covered riots in Paris under a banner saying "Muslim riots." Alwaleed allegedly called Murdoch and had him change the banner to say "Civil riots." Investigative journalist Joseph Trento also reported that a comment he recently made on a Fox Network morning news show, Fox and Friends, about Saudi Arabian money still financing Al Qaeda, was edited out of the show. Trento also reports that Alwaleed "has personally donated huge amounts of money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers." In a rare interview with Fox News' Neil Cavuto in January, AlWaleed explained his personal reasons for seeking influence in American politics: the U.S. buys Saudi Arabia's oil, and the bulk of his country's gross domestic product (GDP) comes from oil. Fox News reliably broadcasts misinformation on clean energy, and aggressively fights efforts to move America away from being dependent on a fossil fuels.
Judge Carey Approves Trib's Bankster-Style Bonuses
We recently flagged that the Tribune Company was proposing bankster-style bonuses to its execs while cutting reporting and other staff. Despite the strong objections of employees and their union reps, a federal bankruptcy court judge, Kevin J. Carey, approved paying bonuses totaling $45,000,000 to executives at the media company.
Judge Carey Approves Trib's Bankster-Style Bonuses
By Lisa Graves
We recently flagged that the Tribune Company was proposing bankster-style bonuses to its execs while cutting reporting and other staff. Despite the strong objections of employees and their union reps, a federal bankruptcy court judge, Kevin J. Carey, approved paying bonuses totalling $45,000,000 to executives at the media company. Chief Judge Carey was appointed to serve as a bankruptcy judge in 2001 and he's a former partner and member of the Financial Services Department of Fox, Rothschild, O'Brien & Frankel LLP, where he represented financial institutions (big banks), corporate creditors (big lenders), landlords and some corporate debtors in bankruptcy, workouts and financing matters.
This payout amounts to about 11% of the company's 2009 cashflow, according to William Salganik of the Washington-Baltimore Newspaper Guild. He told the New York Times that this high rate of bonus for high-level employees was "unprecedented." He noted that the highest bonuses paid in the previous twelve years was 3.3%, when the company was not seeking bankruptcy protection. The conglomerate has laid off or bought out over 3,000 employees.
The "savings" from paying these reporters, editors, and other news workers paved the way for these unconscionable rewards for the Trib's luxury suites. The court said that the bonus plan was acceptable because under federal bankruptcy law the debtors "need only show that the proposed plan is an exercise of their business judgment." Well, that's true. It's an exercise of their continuing bad business judgment. If that's all the law requires then the law has failed. Companies in bankruptcy proceedings have no business paying bonuses. Period. That's just common sense. And it's good business judgment. It's profoundly unjust to permit these exorbitant gifts to be paid to the Trib's "leadership." Talk about rewarding failure.
(Here's our original post about the plan that was just approved by the court, with more information:
A U.S. federal bankruptcy court is expected to rule this week on whether the bankrupt Tribune media company can pay its executives big bonuses despite the cuts to its reporting staff. According to Business Insider, the Tribune is seeking to pay out over $45 million to its executives (down from $70 million this summer). The Tribune company probably owns a paper near you: the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, Sun Sentinel (South Florida), Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant, Morning Call and Daily Press and 23 TV stations and more.
Talk about bankster envy! What's a failing media conglomerate that has slashed staff and frozen salaries doing giving such golden parachutes to management, while ad revenues plummet? It must be hard for the top dogs to take a critical look at the big bankster bonuses when they are pressing hard to line their own wallets. I must confess that I do have a bias, having seen some great investigative reporters I know laid off by the Tribune's "cost-saving" measures, which apparently do not including saving millions of dollars at the top.
The Newspaper Guild and the AFL-CIO filed objections to the bonus plan. As the AFL-CIO noted:
"One of the top executives seeking the $2 million bonus said in an e-mail to employees in February that 'a salary freeze enables us to share the sacrifice.' It’s not clear how a $2 million bonus enables the top managers to share the sacrifice."
Talk about spin by the Trib's big thinkers! I don't know about you, but two million would cover a lot of reporting salaries. Of course, that's just one bonus. For $70 million or $45 million, how many reporters could a company that actually cared about reporting keep on staff for the next five years? I'm not sure, given the variation in journalists' salaries, but I'm sure it'd go a long way. So, I for one am sure hoping the federal bankruptcy court throws the Tribune's bonus request in the trashcan, where it belongs.)
Journalists Hooked on Same Health Care Sources, Such as Jonathan Gruber
Trudy Lieberman of the Columbia Journalism Review writes, "Jonathan Gruber is an economist from MIT. Jonathan Oberlander is a political scientist from the University of North Carolina. Both are health policy experts and, from what we can tell, both know their stuff. But the press has counted on Gruber rather than Oberlander to give gravitas to their stories. ...[T]he media relies way too much on the same sources, who utter the same thing again and again to different news outlets. The problem with this, of course, is that a particular view of the world spreads widely, perhaps reinforcing that view as the correct one -- which it may or may not be, depending on the facts and on which side of the river you call home. Gruber has been the cheerleader-in-chief for the Massachusetts health care plan, which is the model for federal reform. He sits on the board of the Connector, the state’s policy brokerage service, and thus has something of a vested interest in positively spinning the reform efforts there. Last year on the PBS NewsHour, he told how premiums for individuals buying their own coverage in Massachusetts had dropped dramatically. But he didn’t mention how premiums for workers in small businesses had risen to sky-high levels in order to make that possible."
Tribune Plans Millions in Exec Bonuses while Reporting Gets Cut
A U.S. federal bankruptcy court is expected to rule this week on whether the bankrupt Tribune media company can pay its executives big bonuses despite the cuts to its reporting staff. According to Business Insider, the Tribune is seeking to pay out over $45 million to its executives (down from $70 million this summer). The Tribune company probably owns a paper near you: the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, Sun Sentinel (South Florida), Orlando Sentinel, Hartford Courant, Morning Call and Daily Press and 23 TV stations and more.
Talk about bankster envy! What's a failing media conglomerate that has slashed staff and frozen salaries doing giving such golden parachutes to management, while ad revenues plummet? It must be hard for the top dogs to take a critical look at the big bankster bonuses when they are pressing hard to line their own wallets. I must confess that I do have a bias, having seen some great investigative reporters I know laid off by the Tribune's "cost-saving" measures, which apparently do not including saving millions of dollars at the top.
Krugman Bites Watchdog for Exposing Jonathan Gruber's Government Funding
Marcy Wheeler at the very independent liberal blog Firedoglake has exposed that Jonathan Gruber, an MIT academic and very influential promoter of Obama's health reform proposals, has not been properly disclosing the hundreds of thousands of dollars he has received in government health care policy grants. The New York Times promptly responded by correcting an earlier opinion column they ran by Gruber, noting "had editors been aware of Professor Gruber’s government ties, the Op-Ed page would have insisted on disclosure or not published his article." Jane Hamsher, founder of Firedoglake, says that "When Obama wanted to tax middle class health care plans, Gruber defends the tax. When Obama wants to force people to buy private insurance, Gruber defends individual mandate. When Obama does not want the public option, Gruber says a public option is not important. ... It is simply not right for the White House to cite Gruber's analysis to illustrate the benefits of the bill they support without disclosing that Gruber is on the government payroll." She is calling on the Obama Administration to "come clean on its payoffs to Jonathan Gruber and any other undisclosed paid promoters." But the New York Times' star columnist Paul Krugman is snarling at the watchdogs at Firedoglake and asking them "do you really want to become just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals?" Fake scandal? Maybe Krugman needs to pay more attention to his own paper's corrections. The PBS Newshour is now describing Gruber as "a paid consultant to the Obama administration." Hamsher has analyzed how the White House used Gruber's work to spin support for its positions.
Will WaPo Outsource Health Reform Analysis to Fiscal Times?
A closer look at the Washington Post's new "partnership" with the Peter G. Peterson-funded Fiscal Times raises even more questions. As you know, the Center for Media and Democracy is urging readers to sign a petition to tell WaPo "no more fake news!" and to ask the paper not to outsource "news" writing to this group funded by an anti-Social Security billionaire.
Tell the Washington Post "No More Fake News"
Please sign our petition by clicking this link.
Here is text of the petition:
To: Andy Alexander, Washington Post Ombud
Re: No More Fake News Stories
We are writing to object to the Washington Post's decision to allow a fake "news" story written by a group funded by a billionaire opposed to Social Security to be passed off as "news" and its decision to outsource reporting of these issues to such a group.
It was inappropriate for the Post to print a so-called "news" article composed by the Fiscal Times, which is funded by anti-Social Security activist Peter G. Peterson, as "news" about support for spending cuts long sought by this funder. The failure to disclose that bias and instead suggest that this source is "independent" was unethical. The Fiscal Times is not an "independent" news service as mentioned by the Post.
We object to your publishing this fake news. And we urge you to ensure that the Post has a policy to prevent it from publishing any more fake "news articles" composed by outside groups, like the Fiscal Times, funded by special interests as "news."
The Post has no business basically taking dictation from Peter G. Peterson as part of this new outsourcing "partnership"; your paper should be more than the scrivener of his agenda, passed off as "independent" and as "news." We expect better from Washington's paper of record and, as Ombud, you should insist on it.
Please sign our petition by clicking this link.
Thank You for Saying "No More Fake News!"
Thank you for telling the Washington Post "no more fake news!"
We expect journalism's leading papers to report their own stories and not pass off canned "news" written by obviously biased sources as "news."
We'll deliver this petition to the Washington Post's ombud and let you know of any response we get.
Please share this link to our petition with your friends.
You can also click these hotlinks to our SourceWatch website to learn more about Nixon crony Peter G. Peterson and the bias of the Fiscal Times, and you can help add documentation to these entries.
Thank you again for joining us in taking a stand against fake news.
--Lisa Graves, Executive Director, Center for Media and Democracy
Media Watchdogs Call Out Planted "News" Story in Washington Post
A conspicuously-biased article printed in the Washington Post on December 31, 2009 is drawing the attention of media watchdogs, bloggers and public policy experts. Titled "Support grows for tackling nation's debt," the article discusses a proposal to create a government commission to examine the country's growing debt. This new commission, according to the article, would be charged with exploring "how to rein in skyrocketing spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security," but it failed to mention other major sources of government spending, like the $663 billion military budget. The story pointed to growing support for such a commission among political figures, but failed to mention the 40 or so prominent organizations that oppose the plan, including the NAACP, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), AARP, Common Cause, the AFL-CIO, and the National Organization for Women.
