Review: The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers

The Deal from Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers by James O'Shea
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

O’Shea is a journalist, author, and editor with broad experience in journalism. He was editor and executive vice president of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, where he spent many years overseeing the Tribune’s national/foreign news and investigative reporting staffs. I am not particularly interested in those papers or their period of join ownership. However, he was in leadership positions during a fascinating time to me when information printed daily (atoms) begam to give way to the bits of the internet. Indeed he points to a pivotal meeting where the opportunity to go with the technological current was forgone:

...Brumback realized before most other newspaper executives how the computer and its attendant technology would transform the newspaper industry. After Tribune invested in America Online, in the early 1990s Brumback created Chicago Online, putting the Tribune Company at the vanguard of media and the Internet. He ordered Chicago Tribune content to be placed on the Internet and charged anyone for access to the stories unless they subscribed to the newspaper. He also tried to spread the gospel to the entire industry by promoting something called the New Century Network, or NCN, a consortium of the nine largest newspaper groups in America, to pool their content so they could “monetize it,” or make money. Brumback had zeroed in on what would become a devastating problem for newspapers as the Internet began to thrive. “Charlie had a good idea but it wasn’t the right answer,” said James Cutie, a onetime head of online news for the New York Times and an NCN board member. “The group was too large. It was composed of nine newspaper companies all sitting around the table with the same skills. If someone had had the balls to charge for our digital copy, it would be a whole different ballgame today.” Brumback later told me that he had also encountered opposition from the Chicago Tribune’s circulation department, which viewed the new technology as a threat to its ability to attract print readers. Within three years, the NCN folded, an entrepreneurial dream plagued by differing philosophies, internecine warfare, big companies, and even bigger egos. “Charlie was trying to get Silicon Valley to invest in it, and some guy from Kleiner Perkins [Caufield & Byers] wanted to invest $5 million,” said Cutie. “Can you imagine getting all of that premium content for $5 million. We had this big meeting of all the major newspaper companies to vote...

The excerpt describes the early digital media strategy of Charles Brumback, former Tribune Co. CEO, and the New Century Network (NCN). Recognizing early on that computing would disrupt journalism, Brumback positioned the Tribune Company as an early internet pioneer following an investment in AOL. He launched Chicago Online in the early 1990s, implementing an early paywall model that charged digital readers unless they held a print subscription to the Chicago Tribune. Seeking an industry-wide solution to monetize digital news, Brumback championed the NCN, uniting nine major American newspaper publishers to aggregate digital content. James Cutie, former digital news director for The New York Times and an NCN board member, noted that the consortium was hindered by its unwieldy size, overlapping skill sets, and a collective hesitation to charge consumers for online articles. Domestically, the Chicago Tribune's circulation staff resisted digital expansion, fearing it would undermine physical print readership. Hobbled by competing publisher egos, conflicting philosophies, and corporate infighting, NCN dissolved within three years.

What was happening was an M&A approach to growth along with shady (unethical if not illegal) distribution reporting to mislead advertisers. Meanwhile, internet ventures like Craig's List where eroding crucial income from classified listings. Also, doom was foreshadowed by a decline in newsstand sales as separate from subscription sales.

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Review: The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today's Politics

The First Dissident: The Book of Job in Today's Politics by William Safire
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

In politics, the exploitation of this natural resentment at being bossed around by distant bigshots and domineering fatcats is called populism. In religion, the mild form of this human inclination is called irreverence, the outrageous form blasphemy, the systematic form heresy.

The Book of Job delights the irreverent, satisfies the blasphemous, and offers at least some comfort to the heretical.

This passage recalls the introduction to The Book of Job, translated and interpreted by Stephen Mitchell : The Book of Job, published in 1987, about five years before this title.

Part of the legacy of the book of Job has always been the way it empowers strong opinions. It is as much the friend of the accused heretic as of the accuser. It empowers sufferers, both patient and angry, critics of orthodoxy, and defenders of mysteries.

I find Job about the most fascinating books of the Old Testament and I most liked of this book, the history of scholarship on that work, including teasing out separate authors, the vagaries of translations, and the impact of the work on others including Lincoln.

Many Blake illustrations is also a plus.

A lot of the book is applying political lessons. A lot of that seemed tenuous and reaching.

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Review: The Choices We Face

The Choices We Face by Lyndon B. Johnson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

LBJ seems to me to have two goals in this post-presidency missive

(1) justify the Vietnam war suggest as by showing Domino Theory effects in Laos, etc. and
(2) promote his progressive approach to America life Medicare and other benefits. Here is one key point he has to argue on how the immense wealth of this nation did not sufficiently find its way to those that need it the most:

After the Civil War our growth in wealth and power was simply fantastic. The world had seen nothing like it before. Between Appomattox and the turn of the century, we hewed out of the wilderness enough new farms to fill twice the combined areas of Britain and France. We transformed ourselves from a minor industrial power into one that could produce in 1900 twenty times as much steel as the entire world had produced thirty years before.

If our development in those days could be likened to a prairie fire of growth, it has in the present century taken on aspects of an explosion of growth. Barbara Ward, the British commentator and economist, noted that in the four years of World War II "the Americans built on top of their old economy another one of almost equivalent size." And in the quarter century that followed, we built on top of that old economy another twice as big again.

We have created a prosperity that no people before us have known, but two facts mar it.

One is that our phenomenal progress brought its own problems, and we did not pay enough attention to them while they were developing.

Perhaps the clearest case of neglect and delay was in our response to the tremendous migration of rural Americans many of them Negroes to the cities, beginning in the 1940s. In the 1950s alone, nearly ten million people made that move. Many lacked the skills that city life requires. They thought they were moving from hopelessness and discrimination to prosperity...

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Review: A Spy in Plain Sight: The Inside Story of the FBI and Robert Hanssen―America's Most Damaging Russian Spy

A Spy in Plain Sight: The Inside Story of the FBI and Robert Hanssen―America's Most Damaging Russian Spy by Lis Wiehl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating and detailed account of the espionage crimes of FBI employee Hansen and the investigation that uncovered him after fruitlessly thinking he was a CIA mole. The background includes his disillusionment with the Bureau and his self-centered apparently psychopathic approach to life. Of note is his Opus Dei membership. One of the first gifts to the Soviets led to unveiling Dmitri Polyakov codenamed TOP HAT. Twice in the book it states there is a video made as a warning by the Soviets to other would-be traitors of him being tipped slowly from a slab into incineration. (I wasn't clear on if he was dead.) Yes, this contradicts easily available reports that he was executed by gunshot.

From "Intelligence in Public Media: A Spy in Plain Sight: The Inside Story of the FBI and Robert Hanssen—America’s Most Damaging Russian Spy" in Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 66, No. 2 (June 2022), pg. 61:

In chapter 1, A Spy in Plain Sight grabs the reader’s attention with the story of Hanssen’s first known act of espionage, the betrayal of high-value GRU (Soviet military intelligence) Maj. Gen. Dmitri Polyakov (TOPHAT to the Bureau), an agent jointly run by the FBI and CIA. Wiehl quotes CIA analyst Sandy Grimes to say he was “the best source that any intelligence service has ever had,” though no examples of what he provided are included. (4) Wiehl concludes her account by describing Polyakov’s demise at the hands of the KGB: “He’s lying naked on a metal tabletop, still alive after his torturers have extracted every last secret they can from him. As the video rolls, the tabletop is slowly elevated at one end until TOPHAT slides off the lower end into a roaring fire.” (6) As with other accounts of this more than likely apocryphal form of execution, no
sources are provided.

Well, regardless of such detail, Hanssen was a very damaging mole and the monthslong final closure of his case include fake reassignment and a limited list of read-in investigators and $7 million paid to a KGB agent to obtain a file on an anonymous mole, whom the FBI later identified as Hanssen, is all thrilling stuff to read.

By 1998, using FBI criminal profiling techniques, the pursuers mistakenly suspected Brian Kelley, a CIA operative involved in the Bloch investigation. The CIA and FBI searched his house, tapped his telephone, and surveilled him, following him and his family. In November 1998, they had a man with a foreign accent come to Kelley's door, warn him that the FBI knew he was a spy, and tell him to show up at a Metro station the next day to escape. Kelley instead reported the incident to the FBI. In 1999, the FBI interrogated Kelley, his ex-wife, two sisters, and three children, who denied all accusations. He was eventually placed on administrative leave, where he remained, falsely accused until after Hanssen was arrested. This reminds me of how in the The 2001 anthrax attacks, a major focus in the early years of the investigation was bioweapons expert Steven Hatfill, who was eventually exonerated. Also, this brought to mind Richard Jewell who alerted police during the Centennial Olympic Park bombing at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. He discovered a backpack containing three pipe bombs on the park grounds and helped evacuate the area before the bomb exploded, saving many people from injury or death. For months afterward he was suspected of planting the bomb, resulting in adverse publicity that "came to symbolize the excesses of law enforcement and the news media". So often, the disruptive gaze of a law enforcement investigation has been pointed at the wrong person.

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Review: A Spy in Plain Sight: The Inside Story of the FBI and Robert Hanssen―America's Most Damaging Russian Spy

A Spy in Plain Sight: The Inside Story of the FBI and Robert Hanssen―America's Most Damaging Russian Spy by Lis Wiehl
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a fascinating and detailed account of the espionage crimes of FBI employee Hansen and the investigation that uncovered him after fruitlessly thinking he was a CIA mole. The background includes his disillusionment with the Bureau and his self-centered apparently psychopathic approach to life. Of note is his Opus Dei membership. One of the first gifts to the Soviets led to unveiling Dmitri Polyakov codenamed TOP HAT. Twice in the book it states there is a video made as a warning by the Soviets to other would-be traitors of him being tipped slowly from a slab into incineration. (I wasn't clear on if he was dead.) Yes, this contradicts easily available reports that he was executed by gunshot.

From "Intelligence in Public Media: A Spy in Plain Sight: The Inside Story of the FBI and Robert Hanssen—America’s Most Damaging Russian Spy" in Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 66, No. 2 (June 2022), pg. 61:

In chapter 1, A Spy in Plain Sight grabs the reader’s attention with the story of Hanssen’s first known act of espionage, the betrayal of high-value GRU (Soviet military intelligence) Maj. Gen. Dmitri Polyakov (TOPHAT to the Bureau), an agent jointly run by the FBI and CIA. Wiehl quotes CIA analyst Sandy Grimes to say he was “the best source that any intelligence service has ever had,” though no examples of what he provided are included. (4) Wiehl concludes her account by describing Polyakov’s demise at the hands of the KGB: “He’s lying naked on a metal tabletop, still alive after his torturers have extracted every last secret they can from him. As the video rolls, the tabletop is slowly elevated at one end until TOPHAT slides off the lower end into a roaring fire.” (6) As with other accounts of this more than likely apocryphal form of execution, no
sources are provided.

Well, regardless of such detail, Hanssen was a very damaging mole and the monthslong final closure of his case include fake reassignment and a limited list of read-in investigators and $7 million paid to a KGB agent to obtain a file on an anonymous mole, whom the FBI later identified as Hanssen, is all thrilling stuff to read.

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Review: The Pilgrim's Progress

The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I have heard so much about this, so I felt I had to read it some time. The overt word play instead of metaphor shows a cloying lack of art which is maybe typical of the period. Stuffing every Bible quote possible into the episodic tail get to be really a bit much. I think the Part I (book one) would have been enough, but the book includes the sequel, so I read that, too.

I was impressed to see Bunyan's church still is extant and the biographical details of his life in illegal preaching as well as soldiering in the tumultuous years up to the Restoration make me more interested in his life than that of his family-abandoning pilgrim.

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Review: Mind-Body Philosophy

Mind-Body Philosophy by Patrick Grim
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

A nice overview of this area of philosophy. I like mulling over realism vs. idealism vs. dualism. I like the lecturer's overview, points, and illustrative examples. He even brought me into an area of the shoptalk "monism" that I don't have top of mind.

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