Shafer (and Buce) on St. Tim

I was resisting saying anything about the late NBC Washsington Bureau Chief, but Slate’s Jack Shafer has a piece up on “The Canonization of Tim Russert,” which says most of what I would have wanted to say (and says it better) (link, and thanks, John). And it induces me to throw in three afterthoughts.

One, Shafer could have laid more stress on one important reason for the wall-to-wall coverage: the cable news hole. You have to have something to fill that yawning chasm of dead air. That’s why know so much about a blonde who went missing in Aruba, why every bit of political slippage is a “controversy,” and so forth. Bummer about Russert but as a(nd against my better judgment) viewer, I say thank heaven for the Iowa floods. Otherwise, we would have heard even more about St. R (come to think of it, don’t they have to prove he performed three miracles?).

Two, it’s time to say it: Russert wasn’t that great a journalist. Okay fair enough, nobody was that great a journalist. And Russert was, I grant, hard working and far better informed than the average pretty-faced chin-wagger. But at the end of the day he was a mainstay of the toxic web of journalistic clientism—the you-give-me-inside-dope, I-give-you-face-time symbiosis that has gone so much to degrade and vulgarize mainstream news coverage. It’s deadly for the polity and Russert was one of the principal purveyors of the virus, and in a very particular way: from the standpoint of his corporate masters, perhaps his most important skill was his knack for asking questions that seemed trenchant, penetrating, without ever pressing hard enough that they might have stopped people from returning his phone calls. I’ll grant you that journalism has been a mess from the get-go, but the celebrity of guys like Russert makes me pine for the era of the ink-stained wretch.

Which brings me to the third point about the canonization: it’s casting the ice axe up the canyon wall. Hey, if this guy is so great, then maybe the rest of us aren’t so bad at all. In a torrent of hot air, all egos rise at once.

Documented extra: Shafer’s piece took me back to one I had missed before: his own obituary on a beloved friend (link)—and the most savagely funny skewering of the late Richard Darman that one could possibly iimagine.

All You Need to Know about McCain

Things to you need to know about the John McCain screwup, culled from a conversation with my friend Anon.

• The Times pretty much screwed the pooch on this one, but it’s not what you think. Don’t picture Arthur Sulzberger and Gail Collins and Bill Keller sipping white wine on their patio overlooking Strawberry Fields. Picture a determined and obsessive investigative team who have been working on this for months and who think anyone who questions their judgment must be an ally of Darth Vader. Keller says he saw the story only last night and I think this is entirely plausible: he saw it only after the attack dogs had trampled the line editors into the linoleum.
  


• For a guy who likes Mr. Clean, McCain certainly likes to hang with lobbyists. But we knew that.


• The only thing you have to read on the subject is this one.

Weekend’s Most Effective Strained Simile

Jack Shafer on the Washington press corps:

Imagine ants farming aphids for honeydew at Sans Souci, and you get the picture.

(Think about it) Shafer is reviewing Robert Novak’s memoir, in which Novak divulges (surprise!) that he really doesn’t mind that the world thinks him a flaming bunghole (in the Sunday NYT Book Review (link)).

Fn.: For no reason of which I can conceive, Shafer’s review is linked at a website featuring “Nicaragua agricultural news” (link).

Jack Shafer's Really Cool Idea

Jack Schaffer at Slate has come up with one of the truly coolest ideas I’ve heard in weeks. Rupert Murdoch, Schaffer points out, is going to buy the Wall Street Journal. To thwart him, Schaffer suggests that the Financial Times just buy the Journal’s best reporters (link).

As satisfying as dynamiting Journal headquarters just as Murdoch arrives to take custody might be, I recommend a subtler strategy of creative destruction. The peach-colored Financial Times, one of the Wall Street Journal's competitors, should raid the Journal and in one swoop steal 100 of its best reporters and editors.

If poaching of a few of the Wall Street Journal's 700 reporters and editors by Condé Nast's Portfolio is considered news, imagine the stir the pillaging of the Journal newsroom by the FT would create. Grand talent raids are common in the law biz, where ambitious firms cripple competitors by looting, say, an entire tax division, and having the defectors bring their clients with them.

The London-based FT moves about 140,000 copies a day in the United States compared to the Wall Street Journal's 2 million. The FT could stand to win hundreds of thousands of new readers if it made a highly visible raid on the Journal—none of this one-or-two-Journal-staffers-at-a-time stuff—and promised to uphold the pre-Murdoch Journal's reputation for excellence, accuracy, and integrity.

If you estimate an average head-count cost of $200,000-$250,000 for each purloined Journalist, the FT would be adding $25 million or so to its editorial budget. That looks like a lot, but it's far from the $5 billion Murdoch has bid for all of Dow Jones. Of course, many of the Journal's most talented will be booking departures upon the arrival of Rupert Murdoch. But if a great mass of them left at the same time for the FT, the raid could cut into Journal circulation. I imagine the FT placing full-page ads in the New York Times business section like this:

Do you miss reading Wall Street Journal All-Stars David Wessel, Walt Mossberg, Amy Marcus, Greg Ip, John Harwood, and Monica Langley? They—and others—have found a new home at the Financial Times. Why don't you join them?

I love it. Seems to me that Murdoch is after two things at the Journal. One, the brand. He wants to slap the Journal’s good name on any kind of crap product he can think of until it loses all value. The other is the stable of talent which, as any conscientious reader must concede, is one of the wonders of the modern world.

Profiting from the talent of others is a familiar strategy. Setting aside the obvious issue of outright slavery—one of the reasons you wanted to be Landgrave Hess-Kassell in the 18^th Century was so you could rent out your troops—call them “Hessians”—to fight in (and, as it happens, to lose) somebody else’s war.

It may come as news to Rupert Murdoch that the likes of John Harwood and Greg Ip are not Hessians whose services are to be bought and sold at wholesale. No, wait a minute, perhaps they are: I wonder how many of these guys signed contracts including a “covenant not to compete”—a promise that they wouldn’t go to work for the competition.

Courts have always felt dicey about covenants not to compete. On the one hand, if I raise you up and give you a platform to develop your talent (along with a bunch of great sales leads) it doesn’t seem fair that you should be able to cross the street and set up shop against me. But on the other hand, if the court says: you can’t work for anybody in the world except Rupert—why then, the chances are you wind up working for Rupert.

Which makes you look an awful lot like a Hessian, which is probably what Rupert (who is usually one or two steps ahead of me) has in mind. I suppose if the FT is going to take Shafer’s advice, they better wait until the ink is dry or they will just queer the deal. In the meantime, they might want to bone up on the law of covenants not to compete. But I hope they do it. And I hope they win.

Bona Fide Teaser: Although all my friends tell me I should get with the program, I admit have not yet bought a subscription to the FT. Yes, I believe it has shot up amazingly in terms of quality and is now a much better imitation of The Economist weekly than is The Economist itself. So here’s my deal: FT hires Harwood and Ip, I’ll cough up for a subscription to the FT. There, that ought to settle things.aHa