The Evil James O'Keeve Is at It Again

This is Not Star Trek. In Startrek, the Evil Spock has a goatee. In our world the evil James O'Keefe is clean shaven, and the good one, a cat-herder for the Massachusetts Pirate Party, has a goatee.

Please note that there are two James O'Keefes, 

This time, he unsuccessfully tried to plant a false story with the Washington Post:

A woman who falsely claimed to The Washington Post that Roy Moore, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate in Alabama, impregnated her as a teenager appears to work with an organization that uses deceptive tactics to secretly record conversations in an effort to embarrass its targets.

In a series of interviews over two weeks, the woman shared a dramatic story about an alleged sexual relationship with Moore in 1992 that led to an abortion when she was 15. During the interviews, she repeatedly pressed Post reporters to give their opinions on the effects that her claims could have on Moore’s candidacy if she went public.

The Post did not publish an article based on her unsubstantiated account. When Post reporters confronted her with inconsistencies in her story and an Internet posting that raised doubts about her motivations, she insisted that she was not working with any organization that targets journalists.

But on Monday morning, Post reporters saw her walking into the New York offices of Project Veritas, an organization that targets the mainstream news media and left-leaning groups. The organization sets up undercover “stings” that involve using false cover stories and covert video recordings meant to expose what the group says is media bias.

James O’Keefe, the Project Veritas founder who was convicted of a misdemeanor in 2010 for using a fake identity to enter a federal building during a previous sting, declined to answer questions about the woman outside the organization’s offices on Monday morning shortly after the woman walked inside.

“I am not doing an interview right now, so I’m not going to say a word,” O’Keefe said.

In a follow-up interview, O’Keefe declined to answer repeated questions about whether the woman was employed at Project Veritas. He also did not respond when asked if he was working with Moore, former White House adviser and Moore supporter Stephen K. Bannon, or Republican strategists.

The group’s efforts illustrate the lengths to which activists have gone to try to discredit media outlets for reporting on allegations from multiple women that Moore pursued them when they were teenagers and he was in his early 30s. Moore has denied that he did anything improper.

A spokesman for Moore’s campaign did not respond to a message seeking comment.

The woman who approached Post reporters, Jaime T. Phillips, did not respond to calls to her cellphone later Monday. Her car remained in the Project Veritas parking lot for more than an hour.

The Post positioned videographers outside the group’s office in Mamaroneck, N.Y, after determining that Phillips lives in Stamford, Conn., and realizing that the two locations were just 16 miles apart. Two reporters followed her from her home as she drove to the office.

After Phillips was observed entering the Project Veritas office, The Post made the unusual decision to report her previous off-the-record comments.

“We always honor ‘off-the-record’ agreements when they’re entered into in good faith,” said Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor. “But this so-called off-the-record conversation was the essence of a scheme to deceive and embarrass us. The intent by Project Veritas clearly was to publicize the conversation if we fell for the trap. Because of our customary journalistic rigor, we weren’t fooled, and we can’t honor an ‘off-the-record’ agreement that was solicited in maliciously bad faith.”

Your Kung Fu is weak, old man.

Get a real job Mr. O'Keefe. 

I would suggest a night watchman, a lighthouse keeper, or the Taliban.

You really need to separate yourself from civilized society.

F%$# the Mouse

The LA Times published an article describing how much corporate welfare Disney Land is extracting from the city of Anaheim.

The mouse didn't like this, so they banned LA Times movie reviewers from advance showings of their movies, including things like Marvel and Star Wars movies.

In response many critics from other papers have announced that they will not be participating in advance showings, and a number of critics groups have barred all Disney movies from consideration at their year end awards.

If this were about an Times critic violating an embargo date, I could see some justification, but this is just thuggery.

BTW, Disney just caved.

Good, but someone at the movie studio needs to be fired.

For Want of a Hyphen, a Kingdom Was Lost………

Headline of the day. pic.twitter.com/e41IXo4Tsy

— Derf Backderf (@DerfBackderf) October 30, 2017

First we see the consequences of people dropping the Oxford comma, and now we seen the consequence of not knowing how to use a hyphen (and how the elimination of copy editors has impacted journalism, but that is a separate rant).

Headline of the Day

Question the Generals? Hell, Yes

—The South Florida Sun Sentinel editorial board

This is in response to rather egregious behavior of the Trump administration in general, and former general and Chief of Staff John Kelly.

I think that we may be approaching some sort of tipping point on blind acceptance of military bullsh%$.

At least I hope that we are.

Tweet(s) of the Day

They both have to do with Russia, and the current hysteria that posits that $100,000 in ads on Facebook somehow trumped the $1,000,000,000 that the Clinton campaign spent.

The first is about bus kiosk ads from RT:

While everyone freaks out about Russian ads, RT takes out more Russian ads pic.twitter.com/Z5eW8GS6pg

— Jane Lytvynenko (@JaneLytv) October 10, 2017

The second one, from the Russian ambassador to the UK, hits the British where it hurts, their 52 year drought in the World Cup:

A football team would be a better option pic.twitter.com/4Psj4ZkGy5

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) October 10, 2017

Dayyymmmm! That one is going to leave a mark.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Turns Out That the New York Times Buried the Weinstein Story 13 Years Ago

It turns out that Sharon Waxman wrote just such a story, and it was edited to irrelevance by New York Times senior staff in 2004:

A whole lot of fur has been flying since last Thursday, when The New York Times published a game-changing investigative story about Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misconduct that in lightning speed brought the mogul to his knees.

He apologized and took an immediate leave of absence from the company he co-founded, but that wasn’t enough. His board members and legal advisers have been resigning en masse. And as new, ugly details emerge of three decades of settlements for sex-related offenses, he’s quickly becoming a national pariah.

I applaud The New York Times and writers Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey for getting the story in print. I’m sure it was a long and difficult road.

But I simply gagged when I read Jim Rutenberg’s sanctimonious piece on Saturday about the “media enablers” who kept this story from the public for decades.

………

The story I reported never ran.

After intense pressure from Weinstein, which included having Matt Damon and Russell Crowe call me directly to vouch for Lombardo and unknown discussions well above my head at the Times, the story was gutted.

was told at the time that Weinstein had visited the newsroom in person to make his displeasure known. I knew he was a major advertiser in the Times, and that he was a powerful person overall.

But I had the facts, and this was the Times. Right?

Wrong. The story was stripped of any reference to sexual favors or coercion and buried on the inside of the Culture section, an obscure story about Miramax firing an Italian executive. Who cared?

The only question I have is, "Why Now?"

There has to be some sort of back-story which we have not yet heard.

This has been an open secret for years.

A friend of my father's has been deep in Oregon politics for years, and she said that it was generally known that Bob Packwood was a sexually abusive drunk for at least a decade before this became public.

Why does this sort of crap stay covered up and then suddenly come out?

I can understand a few years, but why a few decades?

Why does it take so f%$#ing long?

This Story Is Not What You Think It Is

For the past few days, there has been a story making the rounds about how a mother has been sent to jail for refusing to vaccinate her child.

You could think of this as a story of overreach by public health authorities, but it's not.

You could also think of it as long overdue action by public health authorities against the clear and present dangers of the loss of herd immunity, but it's not that either.

It's a child custody dispute.

Both parents have joint custody, and they ended up in court to adjudicate their disagreement over whether or not their child should be immunized.

They judge ruled, the wife disobeyed, and he sent her to jail for contempt of court.

This is a remarkably ordinary dispute between two divorced parents over a medical decision, and that is all.

The Motives of Leakers Don't Matter

What matters is what they leaked, and the context of that information.

Case in point, if one looks at the history perhaps the most prominent leaker of all time, Mark "Deep Throat" Felt, it becomes clear that he was motivated by a desire to succeed J. Edgar Hoover as the head of the FBI, not concerns about either the bureau or the rule of law:

The unarticulated presumption, which Sullivan, Litman and Rich are not alone in making, is that Felt—the FBI’s deputy director in June 1972, and subsequently the parking-garage interlocutor who steered Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to reportorial heights—was an honorable, selfless whistleblower intent on exposing the lawlessness rampant in the Nixon White House. Or, as David Remnick spelled out in the New Yorker—echoing Deep Throat’s original hagiographers, Woodward and Bernstein—Felt “believed that the Nixon administration was corrupt, paranoid and trying to infringe on the independence of the bureau.” The president and his top aides ran, Felt believed, “a criminal operation out of the White House, and [Felt] risked everything to guide” the Post reporters. A new biopic about Felt, starring Liam Neeson, is due out on September 29 and shows every sign of continuing to portray Deep Throat as a profound patriot and dedicated FBI lifer.

But here’s a heretical thought: Mark Felt was no hero. Getting rid of Nixon was the last thing Felt ever wanted to accomplish; indeed, he was banking on Nixon’s continuation in office to achieve his one and only aim: to reach the top of the FBI pyramid and become director. Felt didn’t help the media for the good of the country, he used the media in service of his own ambition. Things just didn’t turn out anywhere close to the way he wanted.

Only recently, more than four decades after Nixon’s downfall, has it become possible to reconstruct Felt’s design and what really happened during those fateful six months following the Watergate break-in. Doing so requires burrowing through a great number of primary documents and government records against the backdrop of a vast secondary literature. Nixon’s surreptitious tape recordings rank first in importance, but only mark the starting point. One has to also research documents from the FBI’s vast Watergate investigation; the bureau’s subsequent internal leak investigation; records from the Watergate Special Prosecution Force; documents from Felt’s own FBI file; and lastly, two unintentionally rewarding books: Mark Felt’s original 1979 memoir, The FBI Pyramid, and the slightly reworked version published in 2006, A G-Man’s Life. What you’ll end up with is the real story of Deep Throat. And you might be left with this realization: No matter what happens to Donald Trump—whether he’s absolved, exposed or neither—you should hope there’s nobody as duplicitous as Mark Felt manipulating our understanding of Russiagate.

Here's the important thing:  Felt's motives do not matter.


Except to the degree that they effect credibility,^* a source's motives never matter.

What matters was that he was telling the truth.

What matters is the accuracy of the information and the significance of the information.

If reporters refused to take information from disgruntled bureaucratic climbers, there would be very little real news out there.

^*Yes, I acknowledge that the trustworthiness of the source is a big f%$#ing deal. But once you are past that not inconsiderable hump, motive does not matter.

Libel Troll Fraudster Gets Case Thrown Out of Court

Shiva Ayyadurai claimed to have created email in 1978.

The facts, of course speak otherwise.

Email predates his high school freshman programming exercise by at least 10 years, email actually accounted for over half of all ARPANet traffic two years before he wrote his program, but that didn't stop him from attempting to sue Techdirt out of existence, possibly in collusion with wannabe Bond villain and literal vampire Peter Thiel.

Well, the judge just threw out his whole case.

It's not a complete win for the defendant, because the federal judge did not strike the case under California's anti-SLAPP law, which would have have allowed them to sue for legal fees and penalties, but this is still an unambiguous win:

As you likely know, for most of the past nine months, we've been dealing with a defamation lawsuit from Shiva Ayyadurai, who claims to have invented email. This is a claim that we have disputed at great length and in great detail, showing how email existed long before Ayyadurai wrote his program. We pointed to the well documented public history of email, and how basically all of the components that Ayyadurai now claims credit for preceded his own work. We discussed how his arguments were, at best, misleading, such as arguing that the copyright on his program proved that he was the "inventor of email" -- since patents and copyrights are very different, and just because Microsoft has a copyright on "Windows" it does not mean it "invented" the concept of a windowed graphical user interface (because it did not). As I have said, a case like this is extremely draining -- especially on an emotional level -- and can create massive chilling effects on free speech.

A few hours ago, the judge ruled and we prevailed. The case has been dismissed and the judge rejected Ayyadurai's request to file an amended complaint. We are certainly pleased with the decision and his analysis, which notes over and over again that everything that we stated was clearly protected speech, and the defamation (and other claims) had no merit. This is, clearly, a big win for the First Amendment and free speech -- especially the right to call out and criticize a public figure such as Shiva Ayyadurai, who is now running for the US Senate in Massachusetts. We're further happy to see the judge affirm that CDA Section 230 protects us from being sued over comments made on the blog, which cannot be attributed to us under the law. We talk a lot about the importance of CDA 230, in part because it protects sites like our own from these kinds of lawsuits. This is just one more reason we're so concerned about the latest attempt in Congress to undermine CDA 230. While those supporting the bill may claim that it only targets sites like Backpage, such changes to CDA 230 could have a much bigger impact on smaller sites like our own.

We are disappointed, however, that the judge denied our separate motion to strike under California's anti-SLAPP law. For years, we've discussed the importance of strong anti-SLAPP laws that protect individuals and sites from going through costly legal battles. Good anti-SLAPP laws do two things: they stop lawsuits early and they make those who bring SLAPP suits -- that is, lawsuits clearly designed to silence protected speech -- pay the legal fees. The question in this case was whether or not California's anti-SLAPP law should apply to a case brought in Massachusetts. While other courts have said that the state of the speaker should determine which anti-SLAPP laws are applied (even in other states' courts), it was an issue that had not yet been ruled upon in the First Circuit where this case was heard. While we're happy with the overall dismissal and the strong language used to support our free speech rights, we're nevertheless disappointed that the judge chose not to apply California's anti-SLAPP law here.

This guy is running for Senate in Massachusetts, as a Republican, and he gave a speech at the recent white supremacist rally in Boston.

He also claims that anyone who knows the history of email is a racist.

What a lovely fellow.

Tweet if the Day

a good statue:
a bronze shoe statue built for Iraqi journalist Muntazer al-Zaidi, who threw his shoes at Bush pic.twitter.com/oGg0fuZpR0

— SubMedina (@SubMedina) August 22, 2017

H/t naked capitalism for finding this engaging bit of history.

These days, we have a surfeit of targets for such a protest.

Looting 101

Common across American business, but particularly cherished by the tech sector, is stock grants to senior management.

It turns out that the primary reason for this is that it allows companies to ignore the cost of stratospheric pay levels and creating misleading metrics to justify bonuses:

Investors liked what they saw in PayPal’s second-quarter financial results, reported by the digital and mobile payments giant on July 26. Revenues grew to $3.14 billion in the quarter that ended in June, an increase of 18 percent over the same period last year. Total payment volume of $106 billion was up 23 percent, year over year.

Even better, PayPal’s favored earnings-per-share measure — which it does not calculate in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles, or GAAP — came in at 46 cents per share, 3 cents more than Wall Street analysts had expected. The company has trained investors to focus on this number, rather than on the less pretty GAAP-compliant numbers most companies are judged by. And focus they did.

Exceeding analysts’ estimates — “beating the number,” in Wall Street parlance — is crucial for any corporate leader interested in keeping his or her stock price aloft. Even the smallest earnings miss can send shares tumbling.

………

Naturally, many factors contributed to PayPal’s second-quarter earnings. But one element stands out: the amount the company dispensed to employees in the form of stock-based compensation.

How could stock-based compensation — which is a company expense, after all — have helped PayPal’s performance in the quarter? Simple. The company does not consider stock awards a cost when calculating its favored earnings measure. So when PayPal doles out more stock compensation than it has done historically, all else being equal, its chosen non-GAAP income growth looks better.

Accounting rules have required companies to include stock-based compensation as a cost of doing business for years. That’s as it should be: Stock awards have value, after all, or employees wouldn’t accept them as pay. And that value should be run through a company’s financial statements as an expense.

………

Back in the 1990s, technology companies argued strenuously against having to run stock compensation costs through their profit-and-loss statements. Who can blame them for wanting to make an expense disappear?

They lost that battle with the accounting rule makers. But then they took a new tack: Technology companies began providing alternative earnings calculations without such costs alongside results that were accounted for under GAAP, essentially offering two sets of numbers every quarter. The non-GAAP statements — called pro forma numbers or adjusted results — often exclude expenses like stock awards and acquisition costs. And the equity analysts who hold such sway on Wall Street seem to be fine with them.

………

PayPal is by no means the only company that adds back the costs of stock-based compensation to its unconventional earnings calculations. Many technology companies do, contending, as PayPal does, that their own arithmetic “provides investors a consistent basis for assessing the company’s performance and helps to facilitate comparisons across different periods.”

………

PayPal takes the opposite approach. [From companies like Google and Facebook] And look at what it does to its results.

Under generally accepted accounting principles, PayPal reported operating income of $430 million in the second quarter of 2017. That was up almost 16 percent from the $371 million it produced in the same period last year.

But under PayPal’s alternative accounting, its non-GAAP operating income was $659 million in the June quarter, an increase of almost 25 percent from 2016.

So what’s to account for the added $230 million in operating income under PayPal’s preferred calculation? Most of it — $192 million — was stock-based compensation PayPal dispensed to employees in the June quarter and added back to its results as calculated under GAAP.

That was a big jump — 57 percent — from the $122 million PayPal handed out during the second quarter of 2016. And back in 2015, PayPal reported just $89 million in stock awards.

………

Craig Maurer is a partner at Autonomous, an independent investment research firm in New York. He follows payments companies and rates PayPal’s stock an underperformer.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Maurer was critical of how the company accounts for stock-based pay. He said that as a percentage of PayPal’s non-GAAP operating income, stock-based compensation has risen to 29 percent this year from 17 percent in 2015.

“They are literally taking a cost out of their income statement, moving it to a different line and backing it out of results,” Mr. Maurer said in an interview. “And you can see that it’s adding significantly to their ability to meet earnings expectations. If you backed out the difference between what we were expecting on stock-based comp in the quarter versus what they reported, it was 2 cents of earnings.”

………

PayPal’s stock-based compensation practices have another noteworthy effect: They drive executive pay higher at the company. Here’s how.

The company says it has three main metrics for calculating its managers’ performance pay each year. One of those measures, its proxy shows, is non-GAAP net income. So, as PayPal awards more and more stock to its executives and employees, non-GAAP net income shows better growth. And the greater that growth, the more incentive pay the company awards to its top executives.

For PayPal insiders, at least, that’s one virtuous circle.

While I have commented on a number of problems in the American economy, particularly excessive rent seeking through IP, it's important to note that business practices that have the effect of allowing managers to loot their companies, and defraud investors are a problem as well.

The Real Trump-Russia Connection

Like pretty much every major player in the real estate market in New York City, Trump aggressively aided the Russian mob in laundering their proceeds through property purchases:

In 1984, a Russian émigré named David Bogatin went shopping for apartments in New York City. The 38-year-old had arrived in America seven years before, with just $3 in his pocket. But for a former pilot in the Soviet Army—his specialty had been shooting down Americans over North Vietnam—he had clearly done quite well for himself. Bogatin wasn’t hunting for a place in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn enclave known as “Little Odessa” for its large population of immigrants from the Soviet Union. Instead, he was fixated on the glitziest apartment building on Fifth Avenue, a gaudy, 58-story edifice with gold-plated fixtures and a pink-marble atrium: Trump Tower.

A monument to celebrity and conspicuous consumption, the tower was home to the likes of Johnny Carson, Steven Spielberg, and Sophia Loren. Its brash, 38-year-old developer was something of a tabloid celebrity himself. Donald Trump was just coming into his own as a serious player in Manhattan real estate, and Trump Tower was the crown jewel of his growing empire. From the day it opened, the building was a hit—all but a few dozen of its 263 units had sold in the first few months. But Bogatin wasn’t deterred by the limited availability or the sky-high prices. The Russian plunked down $6 million to buy not one or two, but five luxury condos. The big check apparently caught the attention of the owner. According to Wayne Barrett, who investigated the deal for the Village Voice, Trump personally attended the closing, along with Bogatin.

If the transaction seemed suspicious—multiple apartments for a single buyer who appeared to have no legitimate way to put his hands on that much money—there may have been a reason. At the time, Russian mobsters were beginning to invest in high-end real estate, which offered an ideal vehicle to launder money from their criminal enterprises. “During the ’80s and ’90s, we in the U.S. government repeatedly saw a pattern by which criminals would use condos and high-rises to launder money,” says Jonathan Winer, a deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement in the Clinton administration. “It didn’t matter that you paid too much, because the real estate values would rise, and it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money. It was done very systematically, and it explained why there are so many high-rises where the units were sold but no one is living in them.” When Trump Tower was built, as David Cay Johnston reports in The Making of Donald Trump, it was only the second high-rise in New York that accepted anonymous buyers.

In 1987, just three years after he attended the closing with Trump, Bogatin pleaded guilty to taking part in a massive gasoline-bootlegging scheme with Russian mobsters. After he fled the country, the government seized his five condos at Trump Tower, saying that he had purchased them to “launder money, to shelter and hide assets.” A Senate investigation into organized crime later revealed that Bogatin was a leading figure in the Russian mob in New York. His family ties, in fact, led straight to the top: His brother ran a $150 million stock scam with none other than Semion Mogilevich, whom the FBI considers the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia. At the time, Mogilevich—feared even by his fellow gangsters as “the most powerful mobster in the world”—was expanding his multibillion-dollar international criminal syndicate into America.

………

The very nature of Trump’s businesses—all of which are privately held, with few reporting requirements—makes it difficult to root out the truth about his financial deals. And the world of Russian oligarchs and organized crime, by design, is shadowy and labyrinthine. For the past three decades, state and federal investigators, as well as some of America’s best investigative journalists, have sifted through mountains of real estate records, tax filings, civil lawsuits, criminal cases, and FBI and Interpol reports, unearthing ties between Trump and Russian mobsters like Mogilevich. To date, no one has documented that Trump was even aware of any suspicious entanglements in his far-flung businesses, let alone that he was directly compromised by the Russian mafia or the corrupt oligarchs who are closely allied with the Kremlin. So far, when it comes to Trump’s ties to Russia, there is no smoking gun. 

But even without an investigation by Congress or a special prosecutor, there is much we already know about the president’s debt to Russia. A review of the public record reveals a clear and disturbing pattern: Trump owes much of his business success, and by extension his presidency, to a flow of highly suspicious money from Russia. Over the past three decades, at least 13 people with known or alleged links to Russian mobsters or oligarchs have owned, lived in, and even run criminal activities out of Trump Tower and other Trump properties. Many used his apartments and casinos to launder untold millions in dirty money. Some ran a worldwide high-stakes gambling ring out of Trump Tower—in a unit directly below one owned by Trump. Others provided Trump with lucrative branding deals that required no investment on his part. Taken together, the flow of money from Russia provided Trump with a crucial infusion of financing that helped rescue his empire from ruin, burnish his image, and launch his career in television and politics. “They saved his bacon,” says Kenneth McCallion, a former assistant U.S. attorney in the Reagan administration who investigated ties between organized crime and Trump’s developments in the 1980s.

(emphasis mine)
Some observations:

• You cannot be a major real estate developer in New York City and not have made some sort of  accommodation to the mob.
• Much of the appreciation of real estate in NYC (and London and Miami) has occurred only because of money laundering operations.
• Trump has deliberately structured his real estate operations ("anonymous buyers") to benefit as much as possible from dirty money.
• There is a f%$# load of dirty money in Russia looking for a safe home.

This is something that an enterprising reporter could have covered during the election, but they were all to busy covering Trump's latest tweets.

Seriously, This ain't rocket science,^* this is just decent shoe leather reporting.

I get that everyone goes to J-School imagines themselves meeting with Mark Felt (Deep Throat) in a parking garage, but most good reporting is an artifact of hard work, connecting the dots, and understanding the institutions that you are investigating.

^*Full Disclosure, in 1999-2000 and 1996-1998, I worked as a mechanical engineer for what is now Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control, and I have some claim to actually having been a rocket scientist.

More of This

Tronc, the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing, has failed in its bid to buy the Chicago Sun Times and the Chicago Reader.

Instead, a group of investors, including the Chicago Federation of Labor, purchased the publisher of the two papers, maintaining its independence of one of the largest media conglomerates in the nations:

In the end, one man made all the difference.

Edwin Eisendrath, the former Chicago alderman who ran losing campaigns for governor and congressman earlier in his career, just won the most unlikely challenge he’d ever undertaken: He kept the Chicago Sun-Times independent and out of the clutches of Chicago Tribune owner tronc. “It was bashert,” Eisendrath told me, using the Yiddish word for “destiny.” How else to explain the odds he overcame to make it happen?

On Wednesday, Eisendrath and a coalition of labor unions and individual investors closed on the purchase of the daily Sun-Times and the alternative weekly Chicago Reader from Wrapports Holdings LLC. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but sources said the key was securing more than $11.2 million in escow to cover projected operating losses over the next two years.

“Today’s deal to buy the Sun-Times preserves two independent newspaper voices in Chicago, a rare thing in America these days,” Eisendrath tweeted. “We wanted to make sure that Chicago had a genuine voice with honest and good reporting that connects with working men and women.”

Eight weeks ago it seemed all but certain tronc would take over the Sun-Times in a move that many believed would have stifled competition and led to the inevitable demise of the city’s No. 2 newspaper. All that stood in the way of the deal was the vigilance of the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division.

Alone in answering the Justice Department’s call for alternative bidders was Eisendrath, backed by the Chicago Federation of Labor and a belief that the Sun-Times was too vital to the life of the city to forfeit its independence.

My guess is that the (probably pre-Trump) DoJ call for bidders had a lot to do with Tronc losing the bid, because it implied a lot of litigation if the two big Chicago papers merged.

I'd like to see more official moves against consolidation.

OK, This is Now Officially a Legitimate Sh%$ Storm

TheNew York Post states the obvious.^*

OK, so now we know that in June of last year, Donald Trump, Jr., aka "Fredo", was setting up a meeting with a Russian lawyer at the request of a publicist for a Russian to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. (Yes, this is profoundly weird and f%$#ed up)

This is now a big deal, not because this was necessarily a crime, I find the claims of a violation of Section 30121 of Title 52 to be a stretch in the world of Citizens United, but because we now have evidence of a conspiracy and a coverup.

It was a conspiracy to obstruct justice that took down Richard Nixon, after all.

I don't think that this is the most impeachable thing that Trump has done (that will be a later post), but this has a potential to hamstring the Trump administration, particularly if the Democrats take back the House and Senate in 2018.

The underlying crime here is still a violation of campaign finance law, not espionage, not treason^† or some similar heinous crimes.

From a political perspective, I do not think that this is a good thing for the Democratic Party.

This provides yet another opportunity for the Dems to miss the opportunity to reform, and ditch the incompetent and clueless deadwood that populate the party's professional consultant class.

As opposed to a movement toward some sort of ideological coherence, the national Democratic Party will remain in, "A noun, a verb, and Vladimir Putin," mode, which I do not believe will resonate with voters.

If hostility toward Russia were a political winner nationwide, Hillary Clinton would be President now.

My guess is that right now, Republicans will slow walk any investigation, saying that they need to wait for Special Prosecutor Muller's report.

I expect months of overwrought press coverage over this, because this is a classic example of catnip for reporters.

^*I cannot f%$#ing believe that I am f%$#ing citing the f%$#ing New York f%$#ing Post.
^†It was never treason. Treason is specifically defined in the US Constitution because of at least a millennia of abuse in Europe, and this does not meet that very specific definition.^‡
‡That being said, Nixon's sabotage of Vietnam peace talks in 1968, and Reagan and Poppy Bush's deal with Iran to keep the hostages held in Iran in 1980 might meet the statutory requirements of Article 3, Section 3 of the Constitution.

Baltimore Just Got Smaller

It's alt-weekly, The Baltimore City Paper, will be closed down by the end of the year:

The Baltimore Sun Media Group plans to close City Paper later this year. No official end date has been announced for the alt-weekly, now in its 40th year.

"Like many alternative weeklies across the country, declining ad revenue at City Paper continues to be a challenge," BSMG's director of marketing, Renee Mutchnik, said in a statement. "It became clear to us this past fall that we would cease publishing City Paper sometime in 2017. Details about the closing date are still being discussed. This is a difficult decision and we are mindful of how it affects our employees, the readers and advertisers."

Editorial staffers found out about the news in June during a meeting with senior vice president Tim Thomas, who cited declining ad revenues and future projections for those numbers as reasons for the closure.

City Paper editor Brandon Soderberg offered the following: "This is Brandon Soderberg, City Paper editor reporting live from the deck of the Titanic. Yes, we're being closed by BSMG/Tronc/and so on. We were told this news last month and there isn't a clear date but what we've been told is no later than the end of the year. We were trying to hold off announcing it because, well, it's very sad, but also because I'm not sure about how this is all going to play out and I'm half-convinced this won't be the end of the paper and someone will swoop in and buy us."

The Sun bought the paper from Times-Shamrock Communications, which had owned the paper for more than two dozen years, in early 2014. In an announcement of the purchase, BSMG's then-publisher, president, and CEO Tim Ryan praised City Paper's independent streak. 

(emphasis mine)

That last bit, about The Sun is the most important bit: The fate of the City Paper was sealed when The Sun bought it.

As A. J. Liebling noted in his seminal book The Press, the only way to make money by buying a newspaper is to be a competitor in the market, and the profit comes from shutting it down, which allows the survivor to increase its own advertising revenue.

Even if only 10% of the ads in The City Paper go to The Sun, they will get a non trivial amount of revenue from this.

I think that Baltimore is too large and too dynamic not to have an alt-weekly.

I'm considering starting a crowd funding effort to buy them from the Tribune Company.

Any advice/aid would be appreciated.

Why J-School Sucks

In the old days, someone would become a journalist by working as a copy boy or a cub reporter and working their way up, and they saw themselves as tradesmen.

Now, they get a Bachelors in Journalism, and they fancy themselves professionals, and the contrast is both striking and depressing:

I was talking to this person whom I’d just met. They told me about their job and where they worked. They asked me about mine. I told them I’d worked in public media in Alaska before moving to the Lower 48. I was a couple of months from wrapping up my time as a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford. They asked about what I worked on and I explained my research around collaboration in journalism and that I intended to continue working in this space after the fellowship ended.

“Well, what does your husband do?”

“He’s a truck driver and a mechanic.”

“…Oh.”

“Yeah, right now he drives for a trash company.”

“That must be…an interesting perspective to have around.”

While they didn’t explicitly say it, the person was very much thrown off by the nature of my husband’s work. I was left with a very strong feeling they were expecting a more middle-class answer than a garbage worker. Their facial reaction has been stuck in my head for a while now. Surprise. A little confusion. And just enough distaste to notice. Obviously, this one instance isn’t representative of an entire industry. But it is a symptom.

The last two 'graphs say it all:

If that conference interaction is how a journalist responds to my husband’s job while idly chatting, how do they cover the sanitation worker that ends up in a story they are working on? If talking about someone to that person’s spouse isn’t enough to cause one to mask aversion, how do they talk about people to whom they feel even more distance from? What does this mean for our audience’s ability to trust us?

Our industry needs to think hard about the worlds we’re living in, the kinds we’re building with each hire we make and ones that we want to reach with our reporting.

It's natural for professors to see themselves as professionals, but by inculcating their students in this mindset, they have created a generation of journalists who afflict the afflicted and comfort the comfortable.

This is not a recipe for good or responsible journalism.

Tweet of the Day

James Risen is a journalist who was attacked by a president. Mika Brzezinski is a talk show host having a spat with a former friend.

— Alan Smithee (@ActualFlatticus) June 30, 2017

As an FYI, James Risen was threatened with jail for not revealing his sources by Obama's DoJ.

As Atrios Would Say, "Time for a Blogger Ethics Panel."*

The Wall Street Journal has just fired its chief foreign affairs correspondent because he was negotiating a business partnership with an arms merchant that he was also covering:

The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday fired its highly regarded chief foreign affairs correspondent after evidence emerged of his involvement in prospective commercial deals — including one involving arms sales to foreign governments — with an international businessman who was one of his key sources.

The reporter, Jay Solomon, was offered a 10 percent stake in a fledgling company, Denx LLC, by Farhad Azima, an Iranian-born aviation magnate who has ferried weapons for the CIA. It was not clear whether Solomon ever received money or formally accepted a stake in the company.

"We are dismayed by the actions and poor judgment of Jay Solomon," Wall Street Journal spokesman Steve Severinghaus wrote in a statement to The Associated Press. "While our own investigation continues, we have concluded that Mr. Solomon violated his ethical obligations as a reporter, as well as our standards."

Azima was the subject of an AP investigative article published Tuesday. During the course of its investigation, the AP obtained emails and text messages between Azima and Solomon, as well as an operating agreement for Denx dated March 2015, which listed an apparent stake for Solomon.

………

Read some of the source documents here: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3871143-Jay-Solomon-Documents.html

This doesn't just happen with people covering arms dealers. 

The very rich use their wealth to shape the news and bribe and or intimidate journalists routinely

^*Atrios was early to the blogging phenomena, and noted how many in the MSM dismissed blogs because there were no editors, and thus no journalistic ethics. Whenever a mainstream reporter is shown to be corrupt, he ironically made this comment.

The Incercept Just Failed OPSEC 101

The latest NSA leaker, the rather incongruously named Reality Winner, may have inadvertently been outed by a screw up by the online publication The Intercept:

Across the computer security world yesterday, heads were shaking.

The FBI filed a criminal complaint against Reality Winner, an NSA contractor, who the agency alleges stole classified documents and shared them with an “online news outlet” believed to be The Intercept. Because the documents in question appear to have been printed, some security experts have been wondering if a mysterious code used by some printers is to blame for Winner’s capture. That code is an almost-invisible grid of dots that some color printers ink into every document they print.

The complaint also details how agents say they tracked the leak back to Winner. The news org contacted the National Security Agency and said they were “in possession of what they believed to be a classified document.” The news organization then sent that document to the NSA, presumably for verification. “The U.S. Government Agency examined the document shared by the News Outlet and determined the pages of the intelligence reporting appeared to be folded and/or creased, suggesting they had been printed and hand-carried out of a secured space,” the complaint continues.

From there, the agents say that they simply looked to see who had printed the document—six people had—and then discovered that one of them, Winner, had been in contact with the media company in question from her work computer (although on an unrelated topic).

When FBI agents showed up at her house, they say she confessed to “removing the classified intelligence reporting from her office space, retaining it, and mailing it from Augusta, Georgia, to the News Outlet.” She faces up to 10 years in prison.

It's clear that in releasing high resolution scans, The Intercept made it much easier for the authorities to identify the leaker.

This is a major f%$#-up.

FYI, a good primer on the printer tracking dots here. Basically, various law enforcement agencies, most notably the US Secret Service, have required these dots on color printers as an anti-counterfeiting measure.

Gotta Check This out When It Hits the Library

I am of course referring to the scathing tell all Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign.

I've read the reviews, Matt Taibbi has my favorite review, and what stands out is how everyone involved with campaign knew that Hillary Clinton had no reason to tun for president beyond her sense of personal entitlement:

"All of the jockeying might have been all right, but for a root problem that confounded everyone on the campaign and outside it," they wrote. "Hillary had been running for president for almost a decade and still didn't really have a rationale."

As Taibbi notes:

Shattered is sourced almost entirely to figures inside the Clinton campaign who were and are deeply loyal to Clinton. Yet those sources tell of a campaign that spent nearly two years paralyzed by simple existential questions: Why are we running? What do we stand for?

………

The real protagonist of this book is a Washington political establishment that has lost the ability to explain itself or its motives to people outside the Beltway.

In fact, it shines through in the book that the voters' need to understand why this or that person is running for office is viewed in Washington as little more than an annoying problem.

This should make for a fascinating read.

It also appears to prove that old adage, "You can't beat something with nothing."