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.

Cable TV: Information Highway Robbery

Their licenses to steal are paying off better each year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reports Cable TV fees rising 77 percent since 1996, roughly double the rate of inflation.

For most American TV viewers, unless they buy iffy satellite dishes, hooking up to the local Cable provider is the only game in town. No matter where they live, their community gets paid to give one seller an exclusive franchise to pump information and entertainment into homes and pump out more money each year.

Imagine the US postal system not only being paid by citizens to deliver their mail but by magazines, newspapers and catalogue publishers to decide which of them to allow into the mailboxes.

It started 60 years ago when a small-town Pennsylvania shopkeeper, having trouble selling TV sets because a mountain was blocking reception from Philadelphia, put an antenna on the peak and began stringing wire into his customers' homes. It solved his sales problems and opened the way for cable systems to take over the nation's eyes and ears.

At first, franchises were handed out piecemeal in time-honored ways, by bribing local politicians, but national corporations soon took over, and now Comcast, Time Warner and a few others have it all locked up.

Every so often, Congress and the FCC are stirred to try to allow consumers to buy cable services a la carte instead of the packages providers deliver, but that might agitate the cash cows into delivering less corporate milk and the lobbyists are having none of that.

Three years ago, I started giving Cablevision $90 a month for cable, internet and long-distance phone service, but since then, the price has ballooned to more than twice that. Then again maybe I shouldn't complain. Now I can get dozens of channels in Spanish, Russian, Hindi and Yiddish that weren't available before.

Ole and oy vey!

To Make Memorial Day Memorable

In 1969, over Memorial Day, Life Magazine devoted an issue to pictures of 242 American soldiers who had died in Vietnam in a recent week. While the nation, the editors said, was being "numbed" by a "statistic which is translated to direct anguish in hundreds of homes all over the country, we must pause to look into the faces. More than we must know how many, we must know who."

It made the country stop and think. This Memorial Day, the best way to honor the dead of all America's wars would be to look at those who died in Iraq and see them as people, not statistics.

On a cable news network or PBS, at the rate of one every ten seconds, it would take more than 11 hours to bring their faces, names and home towns to the TV screens of American homes.

Doing so would not be a political statement, but a reminder as concrete as the Vietnam Memorial in Washington of the human meaning of the words "sacrifice" and "honor."

Deep in the bowels of the New York Times' web site, the faces are now there in a composite for those who want to seek them out, but they deserve to be seen everywhere, however fleetingly, to bring the war home on Memorial Day.

Amid the usual speeches, parades and flag-waving, it would make the holiday truly meaningful this year.

Huckabee Is Ready for His Closeup

His lead in the Iowa polls has propelled Mike Huckabee into the Republican top tier, making it a certainty he will be cover-storied, 60-Minuted and commented-on ad nauseam this month.

For a start, a reporter who covered him for years in Arkansas, John Brummett, insists the former Governor is, by nature and experience, less a preacher than a huckster, "more decidedly a media man than a pulpit man," that his success "comes via a disc jockey's shtick rather than a pastor's...more Don Imus than Billy Graham."

Like the Great Communicator, Ronald Reagan, Huckabee got his start working in radio, reading news and weather at the age of 14 before going off to seminaries and coming back to work for a TV evangelist.

As a preacher, he supplemented his income on cable TV and, even as lieutenant governor, guest-hosted for a radio talk show host. That would explain Huckabee's ease with pop cultural references, such as complaining last spring that his campaign was drawing less attention than "Britney Spears getting out a car without underwear."

Now the attention is there. In the Los Angeles Times yesterday, Huckabee was pictured playing his electric guitar and quoted as saying, "I drink a different kind of Jesus juice."

Out front now with the leaders now, he will be drawing fire for lack of ardor in tax-cutting by the Grover Norquist gang, softness as a self-styled Second-Commandment Christian and other perceived shortcomings by the Religious Right, possibly even Willie-Horton attacks for commuting the sentence of a rapist who later killed a woman.
.
But Huckabee's amiable MC manner may be concealing a much tougher campaigner. Nobody should underestimate the determination of a man who dieted and sweated off 110 pounds to save his health and now regularly runs in marathons.

Those cover stories won't be dull.