Newsweek and Krugman: New Realities

In a magazine cover, we have a reflection of what's happening not only to the American economy but politics and journalism as well: a close-cropped half of a bearded face and the lines, "Obama Is Wrong: The loyal opposition of Paul Krugman."

Newsweek's story tells us about the economist-turned-pundit who "criticizes the Obamaites for trying to prop up a financial system that he regards as essentially a dead man walking," but also illustrates the desperation of newsweekly magazines to survive.

In financial straits, Newsweek has been cutting its circulation and redefining itself away from the traditional role of presenting the week's news with attitude. With so much of both available on the Internet and cable TV, Newsweek has chosen less news and more attitude.

"If we don’t have something original to say," editor Jon Meacham points out, "we won’t. The drill of chasing the week’s news to add a couple of hard-fought new details is not sustainable.”

The 21st century has not been kind to Henry Luce's invention of Time in the 1920s to make sense of "the million little chaoses of raw news." In a 24/7 tower of babble, Americans no longer need a Voice from Above to tell them what it all means.

As Newsweek moves away from Time and US News, it will be competing for eyeballs and ads with such as the Economist, the New Yorker and Atlantic in telling readers what they don't know they want to know until they see it in a magazine.

The Krugman story is a promising start, a profile of a quirky Nobel Prize winner who keeps offering those in power reality checks and ends thus:

"Krugman thinks that Obama needs some kind of 'wise man' to advise him and mentions Paul Volcker, the former Fed chairman who tamed inflation for Reagan and now heads an advisory panel for Obama. How about Krugman himself for that role? 'I'm not a backroom kind of guy,' he says, schlumped over in his Princeton office, which overflows with unopened mail. He describes himself as a 'born pessimist' and a 'natural rebel.' But he adds, 'What I have is a voice.' That he does."

In these parlous times, so does Newsweek, and we can use both.

The Interactive Presidency

FDR gave Americans fireside chats on radio. JFK came into living rooms through live TV news conferences. Barack Obama is connecting with worried voters by Internet--email, online videos and proliferating web sites.

In each case, as a new medium of communication became universal, the White House wired into it to speak directly to people--one at a time.

What's different now is that voters are invited to talk back, which may in part account for the President's continuing popularity during the darkest period in generations. In this interactive presidency, Americans are not feeling abandoned.

This week, the Obama Administration unveiled another web site, on health care reform, to go with White House.gov, Recovery.gov and others sure to come, giving information and asking for feedback.

In another move on the tech front, the President appointed as the first federal chief information officer Vivek Kundra, 34, to oversee expanded use of cutting-edge technology for information sharing between agencies, greater public access to government information and questions of security and privacy.

Whatever happens in the coming months, nobody will call Obama another George W. Bush, out of touch with the American people.

Havoc for the Holiday

The Mumbai massacres undermine our shaky faith in human nature as American families gather for loving celebration in the safety they always took for granted before 9/11.

The identity of the killers matters less than their purpose--to "cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war," in Shakespeare's phrase--to attack civilization itself in bloodthirsty rage and hate.

As grievous as the slaughter of innocents is the knowledge that these acts of darkness, planned with precision, are abetted and amplified by the technology that has done so much to improve modern life, that computer and TV screens which create community can also be used to convey chaos.

It's hard to turn our eyes away from the carnage and concentrate on our good fortune without feeling that, no matter who these murderers turn out to be and whatever their "cause," we are living in a world where their like will be with us for a long time to come.

Deciding Demographic: The Inattentive

Give or take Florida and Michigan, some 35 million American voters have determined that Barack Obama will contest John McCain to become the next president. Now comes the harder part.

Of all the demographic divisions--gender, race, age, economic status, education--Obama faces the most crucial of all, between those who have been paying attention and those who haven't.

With all the new registrations, this year's total of voters is sure to exceed the 122 million of 2004, and the Democratic candidate's challenge will be to make himself known to those like the woman in West Virginia who rejected him saying, "No More Hussein," and millions more who don't know even that much about him.

Presidential campaigns, for better or worse, come down to the perceived character of the candidates, and Obama has come a long way but is still relatively unknown to many, if not most, voters.

In Iowa last night, he asserted that the hard-fought battle for the nomination was good for his party, saying, "Now, some may see the millions upon millions of votes cast for each of us as evidence that our party is divided. But I see it as proof that we have never been more energized and united in our desire to take this country in a new direction."

For the next six months, the Obama campaign will be all about going beyond the energized and united to reach the apathetic, the uninformed and the fearful to persuade them that they and their families will be better off with him in the Oval Office than John McCain.

John F. Kennedy had the same problem in 1960, a young Senator running against a better-known, more experienced political figure, and he overcame it. Eleanor Roosevelt, late in life, compared him to her husband being energized by the campaign crowds of 1932.

In the era of TV and the Internet, Obama is capable of outdoing them both.

Media & Politics: Another Crossroads Year

Like 1968, 2008 could decide the direction of American politics for decades to come.

The parallels are striking--a President leaving office with an unpopular war still going on, long-standing social issues to be resolved and cultural changes breaking up what had seemed to be a consensus among previous generations.

Back then, there was Vietnam instead of Iraq, racial and gender equality rather than illegal immigration, and hippies, campus revolts and sexual revolution in place of today's faith-based conflicts over public regulation of private behavior.

The 1960s started with Kennedy's new frontier and ended with Nixon's Silent Majority. Decades of Democratic dominance gave way to Republican rule. Now, Bush's compassionate conservatism is ending and will lead to what?

For most of our history, Americans have been protected from violent change by a double-edged inertia that was slow to correct injustices but was a buffer against the kind of social breakdown that afflicts almost all other nations.

How much of our tranquility was based on technology or the lack of it? In the 1960s, television made the poor, oppressed and victims of war visible for the first time, bringing them into history and American living rooms. Vietnam and racial violence were not confined to impersonal newspaper headlines, and the results were protest and upheaval across the country.

Now, a flood of images and information about terrorism, war and their consequences washes over us 24/7 on cable and online. Politicians are less free to soothe or distract us from our own reactions and opinions.

But as the chaos of this campaign so far illustrates, the results may be division, confusion and uncertainty about whom to trust with the power to make sense of it all and get us back on track. The more we talk, it seems, the more polarized we become. But somebody has to be President and work with a Congress we choose to lead us out of all this.

In 1968, we picked Richard Nixon. In 2008, we will have to do better than that.

Another F.D.R.?

As the Ron Paul rebellion bubbles up on the Internet, there are increasing signs of Big Media discontent as well.

Today Paul Krugman in the New York Times proclaims, "Anyone who thinks that the next president can achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world." This leads him to criticize Barack Obama (yet again) as naïve and "out of touch with the strong populist tide running in America right now."

Krugman's alternative is John Edwards, who is portraying himself as "another F.D.R.--a polarizing figure, the object of much hatred from the right, who nonetheless succeeded in making big changes."

If Edwards is the answer, what's the question? He may not be as weird as Ron Paul, but his windmill-tilting is much less sincere. Paul's country-doctor ethic comes from a lifetime of bedrock distrust of government power. Edwards is a negligence lawyer who milked the system for millions, spent one undistinguished term in the Senate and, only when he hit the campaign trail, started posing as the friend of the poor.

For those old enough to respond to Krugman's F.D.R. analogy, try Huey Long.

The Souring of America

Solid majorities of the public criticize them for “political bias, inaccuracy and failing to acknowledge mistakes” with the “harshest indictments...from the growing segment that relies on the internet as its main source for national and international news.”

That’s the conclusion of the Pew Research Center, not about the Bush Administration but the nation’s news organizations. Americans are losing faith not only in the politicians who govern them but the people who report what they are doing.

In the last century we believed truth would be found, as Supreme Court Justice Learned Hand put it, in “a multitude of tongues.” Now that so many voices can be heard, the result is not “truth” but distrust.

George W. Bush and Rupert Murdoch share much of the blame, with those who rely on Fox News as their main source of information leading the way in damning the media, with 63 percent saying news stories are often inaccurate as opposed to less than half of those who cite CNN or network news as their main source.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the report says, “People who rely on the internet as their main news source express relatively unfavorable opinions of mainstream news sources and are among the most critical of press performance.”

In the past five years, this bipartisan divide between press and public has grown much worse, and it reflects a larger loss in American life.

In another Pew poll in 2002, 74 percent felt that "As Americans, we can always find a way to solve our problems and get what we want." Five years later, the number is 58 percent. Other polls show erosion of public confidence in the government's ability to respond to terrorist attacks, natural disasters and health crises over that period.

In all the gabble to come over today’s evidence about growing distrust of the mainstream media, it might help to remember that it may also reflect a loss of faith in ourselves.