Kochs Move To Acquire Ownership In Time/Life, Which On The Political Spectrum Was Previously. . . (Let Me Tell You) - Our Media, Never In a Good Place, Shifts Toward. . ??

Before we get to the "Time Goes Bye" part of this article (Koch Brothers stalking ownership of the once mighty Time Magazine), let's speak of "times gone by." 

I want to tell you a story that involves looking way back.

At the time of which I am speaking I was quite certainly in college, although when I think back remembering it feels almost as if I was still in high school, that I was so recently out of.  Since I was listening to WBAI on the radio, I had to have been in college and that means the year was probably 1970 or 1971.

On WBAI I heard a truly startling and appalling story about recent events in the Vietnam War.  I was sure it was going to be big news and probably would have a big influence on a lot of people when they too learned about it.  I wanted to see how else it would be reported, and I waited with eagerness for my weekly Time Magazine to come out and see how the story was featured.  When Time came out I scoured the week’s Vietnam War coverage and the event wasn’t there at all, not even a hint.  I was fit to be tied.

Once upon a time I had supported the Vietnam War, in high school seeing it in the basic good guy/bad guy terms in which my father had explained it to me: We were helping good guys against bad guys.  By the time of the story I am telling, I had shifted over in my thinking to oppose the war, having been chagrined to learn that by that time I did shift I was only just catching up with father’s own changed thinking to oppose the war.  Somehow, father and son, we had neglected to have that updating conversation before I told my father how increasingly troubled I was by the way I could not reconcile and sort through to believe that there were any truly good reasons for fighting a bad war.

My father, who voted for Lyndon Johnson instead of Barry Goldwater, was a Republican.  He was firmly against the war before he died at the end of 1968.  In addition, although I knew there were reasons my father had disliked Robert Kennedy based on my father's own early personal, youthful encounters with Kennedy (my father was from a similar Irish Catholic family that had contacts with the Kennedys), my father supported Robert Kennedy and his campaign for the White House that terminated with his assassination.  My father liked Kennedy’s stance on race relations (about which my father was growing increasingly passionate) and on the war.

Unfortunately, my memory is dim so I cannot tell you exactly what incident happened in Vietnam that went unreported by Time, but I was outraged and I was going to do something about it.  I called the Editor In Chief of Time Magazine to complain.

You might think this was absurdly presumptuous of me to do, and how could I possibly get through to someone of his stature.  I did get through, and I was encouraged to make the phone call by my mother.  My uncle, Ralph Delahaye Paine, Jr., had been an important man at Time/Life.  Among other things he had been Managing Editor and Publisher of Fortune Magazine, part of that Time/Life/Fortune triumvirate.  Part of our family lore (and there were many stories about my uncle) was how my uncle had been in charge of the Time/Life staff as they retreated back as the Nazis advanced through Europe and France and my uncle remembered vividly how vital it was for him to get everyone successfully out ahead of time.  Many of that Time/Life staff he sought to get out safely were Jewish.

The editor of Time Magazine took my call.  I am named after my uncle.  (And to be 100% complete, my daughter, born days after my uncle died in 1991, is now also.)  I played the relationship card, mentioning names, when I made my call as my mother encouraged me to do.  The editor’s secretary took my information and the editor picked up.  I am not going back at this time to check on that editor's name.  As I am telling a story after a long intervening time where my memory has some fogginess, it is probably better to leave names out.

What I remember was that the editor graciously took my call.  He probably enjoyed talking with me as an unusual break in his day.  I remember that he was more than polite, but I think I detected some bemusement on his part respecting my naive passion as he explained that there is lots of news to print and editorial decisions to be made and that not everything can always be printed.  It just doesn’t happen that way.  I was too young to have heard many of these kinds of explanations in my life and, no doubt I was out of my league knowing little about how best to express things in this kind of situation.  Some young people are savants and have natural instincts about these things at a very young age: Not me.

I don’t think my energy on the subject carried me over to write an official “letter to the editor” in hopes that it might get published.  I couldn’t have whipped one out at that point in my life and I certainly didn’t yet know the formula for quickly commanding attention, or tricks to succinctly synthesize the politically complicated.  My unwritten letter with respect to something that Time had not deigned to mention in the first place would not have been published, I’m sure.

I tell this story mostly to emphasize that, back in the day, Time Magazine and the Time/Life publishing empire were not exactly found on the left of the political spectrum in terms of the way they saw the world or what they chose to report.  I also tell the story to bring up and emphasize that where you get your news can powerfully affect your point of view because of what is and is not included.

After a few more years of reading both Time and Newsweek cover to cover every week (they were both weeklies for those who have forgotten or were not around), I finally terminated my subscription to Time because I found it so much more conservative than Newsweek when reporting on the same items.  Part of me felt a bit like a traitor.

And it also seemed as if I was acting against my own self interest: I owned a tiny amount of Time Incorporated stock that had been given to me as a baby present.  Escalating in value in those past decades, it was, in fact, my sole success with stock ownership.  My father had coached me in learning the benefits of investing in the stock market by encouraging me to buy Studebaker stock with some of my saved allowance combined with his contributed subsidy.  The purchase was not a good idea: Studebaker was an American automobile manufacturing company and in 1963 they closed the plant in South Bend, Indiana where they were based.  I learned then that what happens to stock when companies fail to thrive is not pretty.

Nowadays, what is happening to the stock of ever less profitable legacy news organizations like Time is not pretty, except that the stock of Time Magazine after a period of decline has reportedly just jumped up 25% percent because the Koch bothers, Charles and David, are circling around to engineer a takeover of the ownership.

This is yet more frightening news about the ownership of our news sources.  We are seeing that as income and wealth inequality become ever more pronounced, as the finances of news organizations grow increasingly anemic (reducing their relative price to that of play things), and as the government fails to enforce anti-monopoly laws and regulations, the sources of much of our news is increasingly supplied by just a few disproportionately wealthy men (or their corporate extensions) that hold some very peculiar ideas.  Those ideas include bizarre thoughts about how everyone else should sacrifice so that they can become wealthier, how we should continue to destroy the planet with exhumation and burning of fossil furls, and the glories of spending on weapons and waging wars.

But, to go back a bit, this is just the half of it, because however much worse it can be to have “news” provided by the likes of the Koch brothers, what I indicated at the outset with my story about Time Magazine and its previous conservative non-reporting about the Vietnam War, doesn’t do justice in giving you a true flavor for how biased-by-omission so much news media reporting has been in this country over the years.

Last week, Edward S. Herman died on November 11, 2017 at the age of 92.  Among other things, Mr. Herman was coauthor with Noam Chomsky of “Manufacturing Consent.” Some say he was the principal author.  That important and influential book was about how media cooperates with the powerful so that the electorate capitulates to what those in power want.  That consent manufacture includes a lot of non-reporting (and skewed reporting) of events that happen in our world.  In this vein, The New York Times virtually didn’t report Mr. Herman’s death.

The disregard was mutual. . .

. . . We understand that Mr. Herman’s last published work was about the New York Times.  It was about the Times' omissions and some very unreliable reporting on the part of the Times over multiple decades, a complete disaster if for those endeavoring to formulate their world view. His article ran in the July/August 2017 edition of Monthly Review: Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies- The New York Times, 1917-2017.  The article covers a lot of ground.  And, (to get around, in a sense, to where we began) it includes a section about misleading reporting about the Vietnam War by the Times, with criticisms you might not have thought of until you hear Mr. Herman express them eloquently with many others.

I suggest you read it next.  Consider your read of Mr. Herman's last solemn article as a commemorative mediation on things missing: the lost, the departing, and things lost when they were never included in the first place.

A Parable: Some Words Concerning the Future of Communication

This is the way the future happened. Development of the Internet unfolded as many people saw, with it becoming progressively more integrated with everything and everybody in every way. Access to the Internet through brain-chips implanted in people’s heads really happened and this was good, at least in some ways for me because it made it so much easier for my guide to explain the new way that things were. The brain-chips made a lot of things possible that were never possible before.

I was given free access to the Internet, a six month free trial. Everyone got one free trial but I was the first adult, the first person of my age that anyone could remember who had not yet had his free trial, who had never once been hooked up to the Internet with a brain-chip at all. I was given a six month free trial of everything available and able to sample every nook and cranny of the Internet at will without paying. That was not true about my guide: My guide had to pay.

My guide chose her words judiciously as she explained how things were different from the world I had known. She had to make her word selections carefully for she had to pay for the words she communicated to me. Oh, not all of the words she used, only some, and words were not all the same price. In fact, she liked to search her mind rigorously for the new words available, the recently minted words, for which, if she used them, the word companies would pay her, rather than vice versa. But the new words being introduced were harder for her to remember because they were so new.

You see, some years before, the Supreme Court had ruled that word companies, if they created new words, would be allowed to own their copyrights. That being the case, the word companies created as many new words as they could. At first, to make the words popular, the word companies would pay the public to use their new words. And the words then did become popular. But when they did, the companies would gradually reduce what they would pay until through such reductions the price would eventually cross a line and be reversed. Then the public would be paying to use those same words, now “old words” they had previously been paid to use. Meanwhile, perhaps to appease those most irked, the word companies would have arrived on the scene with new “new words” which the word companies would now pay people to use if people could think if them. (Advertising was often of assistance in this regard.)

Besides the “new words” that the word companies paid people to use and the much greater number of familiar and more comfortable “old words” that people had to pay the word companies to use, there were also the “ancient words,” the words that you and I know and use (potentially also including the ancestral words that preceded them that you and I have already probably mostly forgotten). The “ancient words” could be used without anyone having to pay anyone at all. . . but that was only if anyone could remember them. The nature of the future being what it was (and the way things were often buried on the Internet), nobody could remember those words, at least not very well. . .

. . . BUT, there was also incipient talk about whether the word companies could by “rediscovering” and reintroducing these “ancient words” acquire the rights to them if those ancient words were already deemed sufficiently forgotten by the public. Here was a possible job they discussed for me: It was noted that I did not have a job in this new world and it was thought that because of my unusual association with the past I could, in advertising terms, give these ancient words a sort of retro-cachet.

I spoke to my guide, not worrying about my choice of words. I was curious. It seemed to me that the monopoly of the word companies was rather tyrannical and I asked her whether the people of her culture had not gotten together to discuss bringing about a change. She looked at me with deep open eyes in which I could map no thoughts for the longest moment. . . . “No,” she said, “that hasn’t happened. Among other things I think we would have difficulty finding the words for . . . it.”

"For a `revolt' or `revolution'?" I asked.

“And,” she added, “right now we are only charged for the words we communicate, not those we think. Perhaps it is best not to upset the apple cart.”

* * * *

To Our Readers: If you think you can search through this parable to make a point-by-point analogy that matches up against a specific event, historical, current or pending, I don’t think you will be able. It didn’t have that in mind when I let the fable write itself. On the other hand, I am quite conscious that its themes are resonant of things that have really happened or are now actually happening in the communications industries and which I am busy thinking about by virtue of reading two excellent books that both came out in 2010. I commend them to you and think you find that each informs the other:

“The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires” by Columbia Law Professor Tim Wu: In chronicling episodes going back to the telegraph and forward to the arrival of the Internet the book examines the patterned cycle of information and communication empires with the repetitive advent and frequent ultimate triumph of monopoly industries that seek to control the industry and culture, often aided and abetted by government when it should be doing the opposite.

“Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership” by Kenyon College and Harvard University Professor Lewis Hyde. Going back as far as ancient Rome, spending a lot time in merry old England (pre- and post- William the Conqueror) and visiting very importantly with the American Founding Fathers, Hyde’s book examines how rather recent and increasingly aggressive modern notions about intellectual property rights (copyright and patent) are, with the complicity of government, encroaching on the commonwealth of knowledge and intellectual exchange, the “cultural commons” we once assumed belonged freely to everyone.

Will America Shrink FROM Or INTO Crowds Clamoring For Death?

The braying of the crowds is frightful, the reflexive clamoring for death . . . .

. . . First it was the crowd at the September 7th Reagan Library Republican candidate debate cheering Texas Governor Rick Perry’s record of executing “234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times” even though, as National Notice pointed out* Perry went out of his way to execute Todd Willingham, an innocent man for the sake of earning such cheers**.

. . . Then it was the boisterous crowd at the September 12th Tea Party debate calling for the hypothetical death of a 30-year-old working man in a coma and needing six months of intensive care, on the principle that the man had not purchased adequate healthcare in advance of falling into this condition. Paul Krugman points out that had the crowd given it a little thought it was, by the same principle, condemning to die children, the poor and the chronically ill, noting that: “very few of those who die from lack of medical care look like Mr. Blitzer’s hypothetical [hypothetical?- not really] individual . . . . most uninsured Americans either have low incomes and cannot afford insurance, or are rejected by insurers because they have chronic conditions” and that George W. Bush, to the accompaniment of similar right-wing cheering, blocked more extensive health coverage for children so that “one in six children in Texas lacks health insurance, the second-highest rate in the nation.”

Jon Stewart’s Daily Show (at 9:11 and 11:49) made humor out of the fact that the Tea Party that had started out as the party “fearing” death panels had become the death panel. That observation also transfers exceedingly well to the Republican plan to replace programs like Medicaid and Medicare with fixed payments to individuals that could then be readily whittled down to inadequacy by inflation or other forms of cutbacks, leaving those program recipients essentially at the mercy of the private insurance companies’ death panels.

(* The central theme of the September 3, 2011 National Notice post, how startling it was to see Rick Perry belittling the reality of global-warming/weather-weirding even as his state is being reduced to cinders by temperatures and drought of unprecedented severity and duration seemed so self-evident that I didn’t know why others were not busy writing about it. Since then, Tom Friedman’s September 13, 2011 column, Is It Weird Enough Yet?, picked up on the same point but doesn’t get into the extra weirdness of Texas oil companies trading their U.S. oil fields to an undependable Russia.)

(** As of September 15, the Todd Willingham miscarriage of justice is being elevated by e-mails designed to spotlight it as a campaign issue with a petition asking that the press ask Perry about it.)

It might be hoped that the crowds cheering for death are not reflective of the American public at large. Indeed they are not really. The crowd at the Reagan Library debate (like the backdrop of the questionably accurate Reagan Library itself) was cherry-picked by Republican party leaders to be what they wanted the responding public to be, while the crowd for the Tea Party debate was similarly hand-picked by the powerful higher-ups steering that movement.

Still, the cheering for death, reminiscent of the thumbs down audiences of the Roman Coliseum, seems to evince a discouraging pettiness of spirit that is hard to explain except for the fact that these hand-picked audience members feel very small themselves and that the only way that they can feel bigger these days is by calling for unfortunate others to be further cut down in size.* There is in such Coliseum audience conduct an implicit faith (or a desperately clung-to hope) that they themselves will never be the ones in the arena awaiting the crowd’s thumbs -up or -down verdict.

(* They say that every era gets horror films reflective of the particular anxieties of the times. A report on the Toronto film festival mentions an upcoming “gorefest `The Incident,' about workers locked in an asylum for the criminally insane, many with impressive knife skills”: The film may be onto something important.)

In another report on this survival-of-the-fittest culture-of-death, the Times today editorialized about a new Florida state law passed by the state's Republican-controlled legislature that will now prevent Florida localities from retaining or enforcing their local gun control laws so that, per one town council member: “We’re not allowed to have bows and arrows or slingshots in a park, but we can have a gun.” (See: Pandering to the Gun Lobby, September 15, 2011.)

Without debating the value of having a gun in areas of Montana where a cougar might stalk you, whether one could be safer in communities where citizen-vigilantes can out-draw their local version of a massacre-intending, arsenal-equipped Columbine student, the merits of shooting a coyote on your morning jog, or how fast on the draw the average senior citizen from St. Petersburg is, the vision of everyone carrying a gun to the public park sounds like a Streets-of-Laredo version of life where it's up to everyone to be quick on the draw and trigger irrespective of whose “done wrong.”

I was once pretty OK with a BB gun when I was a kid but I really don’t know where I’d come out in a world where winding up as the one alive means always being quicker on the draw. Did I already suggest the bravado of death-wishing audiences who are sure that they are never going to be down on their own luck (awaiting in the arena the audience’s thumbs down), may have something to do with these poor souls not feeling very big to begin with? Sure I did. . . .

. . . And here’s a probable irony: Maybe there is a reason all of us may be feeling rather small right now and it has to do with why so much of the Tea Party anger is misplaced. Maybe what’s happened is that all of us have already been out-drawn by the ubiquitous big corporations and monopolies that are leaving little space in the world for the rest of us. Is the government really to blame for that? Maybe it is when it fails to intervene and cut these monopolies down to size or when the government actively aids and abets the establishment and/or perpetuation of such monopolies. But is big government really where the anger should it be directed or should it be directed at the corporate power players themselves, those influencing the government in these respects? And aren’t those powerful insiders the very same ones who, behind the scenes, were hand-picking those frightful, vengeance-hungry audience members? No wonder those guys in the audience might feel uncomfortably small.