Taking Note

Toasting C-SPAN at 30

There is so much financial distress and diminished content in the media landscape these days that the thirtieth anniversary of C-SPAN (Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network) is an occasion worthy of breaking out the bubbly. While the focus now is on new models for news and information, C-SPAN is a venerable enterprise, albeit unique, that demonstrates what ingenuity can accomplish.

            C-SPAN is a congenitally self-effacing outfit, so it was a surprise to learn from a Hart Research poll commissioned by the network that 39 million Americans—20 percent of cable households—are regular viewers, which means at least once or twice a week. A few days later, National Public Radio announced that its audience had reached record levels, with 20.9 million listeners a week to its news programming. By these numbers, NPR’s Morning Edition now has a daily audience substantially larger than both Good Morning America and the Today show.

            I had long believed that public radio was becoming a mass medium, with fans nationwide and a business model of membership, sponsorship, and philanthropy that gives it long-term viability in the transforming world of quality distribution. But I pretty much assumed that the C-SPAN audience was a small and earnest American subculture of political junkies and (my favorites) fans of nonfiction books who watch C-SPAN’s Book TV on weekends. The Hart poll seems to show that the audience actually is substantial—although not comparable to the cumulative numbers of those who tune in to the flamboyant commercial cable news networks whose stars are the subjects of incessant discussion. (Will Chris Matthews run for the Senate? Can Jim Cramer survive Jon Stewarts’s opprobrium? Are Bill O’Reilly’s “ambushes” beyond the pale?)

LONDON’S G-20 BRIDGE FALLING DOWN?

The hesitation investors showed this week toward buying $34 billion in U.S. Treasury bills is a warning light that the United States cannot, alone, bear the debt burden of urgent stimulus to avert a catastrophic collapse of the global economy.  The summit meeting next week of the Group of 20 leaders governing the world’s major economies will be a failure if it does not produce firm commitments from all those governments for mutually reinforcing emergency expenditures. 

For some reason, many leaders in the perennially fractured European Union don’t seem to get it.

McGeorge Bundy's Failure as National Security Advisor

Review of “Lessons In Disaster: McGeorge Bundy and the Path to War in Vietnam” by Gordon Goldstein  (Times Books 2008)

 

          The Vietnam war has long faded from the news but its memory is still a troubling one. Over 55,000 Americans died in this futile cause. In retrospect, America’s national interest was never at stake and US aims in the conflict were never clear. But, for thousands of young men, it was ostensibly a fight to stem the tide of Communism. In fact, it was a war to suppress a nationalist uprising by Vietnamese seeking to reunite a divided country – and all of this happening some 3,000 miles from our borders. This was a war the US could never win.

Health, Education and the Welfare of the Nation

Building on Success

The correlation between education, poverty and health is so tight that I sometimes think we need to address the three simultaneously. Often this just isn’t feasible. But there are places in our society where the three problems  come together in a way that invites a battle on all three fronts. Consider, for example, our nation’s poorest public schools.

In an earlier post on Healthbeatblog.org, I looked at President Obama’s plan to rebuild our crumbling public education system. While the president’s blueprint defines an excellent beginning for the project,  Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, points to one element that is missing: a program that would take poor children out of the ghetto, away from the environment that is undermining both their education and their health.

Salvador Presents Washington Conservatives With Hard Choice

When assassins shot Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero through the heart as he raised the Eucharist to worshipers at Mass on this day in 1980, they bet that their brazen sacrilege would cow a population increasingly restive at conservative rule. For a quarter century El Salvador's hard right maintained a lock on the country's government--only to be ousted in a free election last week for the first time in the country's history. And the howls from their conservative protectors in Washington cast real doubt on the genuineness of the American political consensus in support of democracy.

Seemingly in denial of their own loss of power in Barack Obama's Washington, several of the Capitol's most conservative congressmen shrilly warned Salvadorans that they would pay dearly if they dared to elect Mauricio Funes, the presidential candidate of the leftist coalition. Indiana's Dan Burton, third ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, declared on the floor of Congress that Salvadoran immigrants' remittances home "will be cut, and I hope the people of El Salvador are aware of that because it will have a tremendous impact on individuals and their economy."

Another Republican on the committee, California's Dana Rohrabacher, threatened Salvadorans with "immigration restrictions" as well as a block on wage-earners' money to their families back home. Those remittances are El Salvador's largest source of income from abroad.

Knowledge Gap

“If you so smart, why aren’t you rich?” goes the old question. Well, given the blundering at AIG and elsewhere, the real mystery is “If you’re so rich, why aren’t you smart?” Piling up millions in personal wealth was, of course, the whole point of the lengths financial firms went to as they overextended their reach. The game could work for a long time as long as the other players kept up the illusion and everybody could go home with obscenely fat bonuses. But like all too good to be true schemes, this one was due for a reckoning with the next inevitable downturn of the business cycle. And, because of the scale of the betting in this casino, the fall would be much farther and harder than in a routine recession.

The Power of Experience

Leslie H. Gelb arguably has the most extensive “establishment” credentials of our time. So what he has to say in his new book, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy (HarperCollins), should be of considerable value to those now in command in Washington in the unlikely event they can read and reflect in the midst of myriad crises.

            Here, drawn from the biography that accompanied Gelb’s appearance last week at The Council on Foreign Relations, are just some of the items on his resume: He was director of policy planning and arms control for international security affairs at the Department of Defense from 1967 to 1969, where he also served as director of the Pentagon Papers Project. From 1977 to 1979, he was an assistant secretary of state and director of the Bureau of Politico-Military Affairs. He was a diplomatic and national security correspondent for the New York Times, where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1985 and later was a columnist and deputy editorial page editor. From 1993 to 2003, he was president of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a position he held with such dynamism that they kept him around as president emeritus so he could write this book, his magnum opus, which he long wanted to call Foreign Policy Is Baloney before dignity prevailed. And lest you wonder, there is much, much more to the bio.

Government: There Is No Alternative

The public has been rightfully angry—indeed, outraged—about the bonuses AIG has awarded employees in its rogue financial products division, perhaps the worst of the very bad lot that brought our financial system crashing down. But it is striking how many conservatives have joined the righteous chorus demanding intervention to block or take back these bonuses, despite their long-standing track record of recommending little or no government intervention in the economy. Perhaps they believe that a little faux populism will get them back in the public’s good graces.

What conservatives seem to be forgetting, however, is that the anger against AIG is just strengthening public support for government intervention into the economy, a development that should terrify them. Back in the heyday of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the conservative battle cry was TINA: There Is No Alternative to the untrammeled and unregulated free market. Now there is a new TINA: There Is No Alternative to the government playing a strong role in keeping the market economy under control and working for the benefit of all. Americans may still not love the government—but they now see how very necessary its role is.

Consider these recent findings. In a late February Washington Post/ABC News poll, more than three-quarters (76 percent) of the public said they support stricter federal regulation on the way financial institutions conduct their business. Just 22 percent were opposed.

The Real Scandal

Math Quiz: If AIG spent $160 million on bonuses to the engineers of the economic crisis, out of the $30 billion bailout it received most recently from the American taxpayer, what proportion of this bailout payment did not go to bonuses?

Answer: 99.5%

In other words, AIG is as pure as Ivory soap.  The bonuses are smaller than small change.

What is shocking about the bailouts begun by President Bush and continuing under President Obama is how huge they are.  It is impossible to imagine the numbers involved except when they are set against one another.  The reason for this, of course, is that we live in a country that uses mind-boggling masses of resources to produce mind-boggling masses of output.

World News Is Not Dead

One of the ingrained beliefs about the current crisis in newsgathering is that foreign reporting is disappearing, and to a considerable extent that is true. Newspapers and news magazines that were pillars of coverage have drastically reduced their cadre of correspondents abroad. The Tribune Company newspapers—the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, and (until last year) Newsday—all had reporters in China. Now there is one left, from the Los Angeles Times. The other bureaus are closed. If you’ve read this far, you probably know the litany of losses.

That is why it is so important to recognize and congratulate two new entrepreneurial ventures that are bringing excellent journalism to Americans (and anyone, anywhere with a computer) from all over the world. They are Worldfocus, a nightly half-hour show produced at WNET, the New York PBS station, and now available to 81 percent of the national television audience, including the country’s top thirty markets. The other is GlobalPost, a Boston-based for-profit enterprise that is anchored on the Internet and delivering extensive reporting from scores of correspondents, including some top-flight veterans. Both operations are traditional in tone and style, meaning that they provide crafted stories in video and prose, with less of the deliberately edgy characteristics of other journalism typically found on the Web, where the premium usually is on eliciting reactions from the audience. If you are watching Worldfocus or reading GlobalPost, it is because you want to know what is happening in Somalia, Latvia, and Ukraine, as well as front-line datelines in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq.