Year: 2005

So you wouldn’t want me predicting the weather. What I meant to say (courtesy of meteorologist Bryan Norcross) was that ‘No PACIFIC hurricane in recorded history has ever hit Central America. And, with the possible exception of an Atlantic storm that crossed over from the Caribbean in 1911 (who knows how strong it actually was by today’s objective measurement standards?), no tropical storm or hurricane of any kind has ever hit EL SALVADOR before.’

(One of you mentioned Tropical Storm Andres in 1997, but that, Bryan explains, was a ‘dissipating tropical depression’ when it came ashore. Because your breadth of interests never ceases to dazzle me, here‘s the Central American historical tropical storm map. I don’t care what you say: it feels like it’s going to snow in New York tonight.)

STEM CELLS AND IRAQ

Nick: ‘In responding to a question on stem cell research, President Bush said he ‘is opposed to taking a life in order to save a life.’ Isn’t that what war is all about?’

OLD CELL PHONES NEVER DIE, THEY JUST CALL 911

Gary Diehl: ‘Don’t sell your old cell! Give it away. My old ones always go to one of the local domestic abuse shelters. Even without service, the 911 feature continues to work.’

Ann Hartzell: ‘Our local shelter for battered women and children LOVES to get donated cell phones. It’s a tiny tax break for the donor, but it means a lot to folks who couldn’t otherwise afford them. The donated phones provide women and children in crisis an important source of increased safety and security.’

Tamara Hendrickson: ‘If you have an elderly relative, he or she can use your old cell phone to dial 911. They don’t need to subscribe to have access to 911, they just need to remember to keep the battery charged.’

OTHER OLD STUFF

Dave Matson suggests this site for donating your old cell phones, but also for much else, like eyeglasses.

NEWSWEEK II

Michael Albert: ‘Once again you demonstrate [by posting Palast’s piece] that you’re incapable of convincing anyone who voted for Bush that it was a mistake. For those who voted for Bush and are open to fair and civil debate regarding his policies, this extreme rhetoric makes it clear that most of the criticism of him comes from rabid hate, not logic. What could be easier to dismiss?’

☞ I agree that Palast’s piece is strident – as I said when I posted it. And I agree he would be more effective if less strident. But I can also appreciate the frustration out of which this stridency rises. What the Republican leadership has done to our country in five years – and the way they have done it – is horrifying. We will be paying the price for a very long time.

MOYERS

Which brings me to this May 15 address – with bold facing to help you race through it – by long-time PBS host Bill Moyers to the National Conference on Media Reform in St. Louis. Some of it may strike you as strident as well (if more elegantly so). But, people: there is something scary going on when, for example, a majority of those who voted for the winning party believe we were attacked by a country that in fact did not attack us.

We absolutely might still have decided it was worth the loss of tens of thousands of lives, hundreds of thousands of limbs, hundreds of billions of dollars and much of the world’s good will to get us to the point we are at today – but Bill Moyers is alarmed that the truth on which to make informed decisions is not getting out.

Muting The Conversation Of Democracy
By Bill Moyers

The fight to preserve the Web from corporate gatekeepers joins media reformers, producers and educators-and it’s a fight that has only just begun.

I want to tell you about another fight we’re in today. The story I’ve come to share with you goes to the core of our belief that the quality of democracy and the quality of journalism are deeply entwined. I can tell this story because I’ve been living it. It’s been in the news this week, including reports of more attacks on a single journalist-yours truly-by the right-wing media and their allies at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

As some of you know, CPB was established almost 40 years ago to set broad policy for public broadcasting and to be a firewall between political influence and program content. What some on this board are now doing today, led by its chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, is too important, too disturbing and yes, even too dangerous for a gathering like this not to address.

We’re seeing unfold a contemporary example of the age-old ambition of power and ideology to squelch and punish journalists who tell the stories that make princes and priests uncomfortable.

Let me assure you that I take in stride attacks by the radical right-wingers who have not given up demonizing me, although I retired over six months ago. They’ve been after me for years now and I suspect they will be stomping on my grave to make sure I don’t come back from the dead. I should remind them, however, that one of our boys pulled it off some two thousand years ago-after the Pharisees, Sadducees and Caesar’s surrogates thought they had shut him up for good. Of course I won’t be expecting that kind of miracle, but I should put my detractors on notice: They might just compel me out of the rocking chair and back into the anchor chair.

Who are they? I mean the people obsessed with control, using the government to threaten and intimidate. I mean the people who are hollowing out middle-class security even as they enlist the sons and daughters of the working class in a war to make sure Ahmed Chalabi winds up controlling Iraq’ s oil. I mean the people who turn faith-based initiatives into a slush fund and who encourage the pious to look heavenward and pray so as not to see the long arm of privilege and power picking their pockets. I mean the people who squelch free speech in an effort to obliterate dissent and consolidate their orthodoxy into the official view of reality from which any deviation becomes unpatriotic heresy.

That’s who I mean. And if that’s editorializing, so be it. A free press is one where it’s okay to state the conclusion you’re led to by the evidence.

One reason I’m in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn’t play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if, instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.

Jonathan Mermin writes about this in a recent essay in World Policy Journal. (You’ll also want to read his book, Debating War and Peace,:Media Coverage of U.S. Intervention in the Post Vietnam Era.)

Mermin quotes David Ignatius of The Washington Post on why the deep interests of the American public are so poorly served by Beltway journalism. The ‘rules of our game,’ says Ignatius, ‘make it hard for us to tee up an issue…without a news peg.’ He offers a case in point: the debacle of America’s occupation of Iraq. ‘If Senator so and so hasn’t criticized post-war planning for Iraq,’ says Ignatius, ‘then it’s hard for a reporter to write a story about that.’

Mermin also quotes public television’s Jim Lehrer acknowledging that unless an official says something is so, it isn’t news. Why were journalists not discussing the occupation of Iraq? Because, says Lehrer, ‘the word occupation…was never mentioned in the run-up to the war.’ Washington talked about the invasion as ‘a war of liberation, not a war of occupation, so as a consequence, ‘those of us in journalism never even looked at the issue of occupation.’

‘In other words,’ says Jonathan Mermin, ‘if the government isn’t talking about it, we don’t report it.’ He concludes, ‘[Lehrer’s] somewhat jarring declaration, one of many recent admissions by journalists that their reporting failed to prepare the public for the calamitous occupation that has followed the ‘liberation’ of Iraq, reveals just how far the actual practice of American journalism has deviated from the First Amendment ideal of a press that is independent of the government.‘

Take the example (also cited by Mermin) of Charles J. Hanley. Hanley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Associated Press, whose fall 2003 story on the torture of Iraqis in American prisons-before a U.S. Army report and photographs documenting the abuse surfaced-was ignored by major American newspapers. Hanley attributes this lack of interest to the fact that ‘It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source.’ Furthermore, Iraqis recounting their own personal experience of Abu Ghraib simply did not have the credibility with beltway journalists of American officials denying that such things happened. Judith Miller of The New York Times, among others, relied on the credibility of official but unnamed sources when she served essentially as the government stenographer for claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

These ‘rules of the game’ permit Washington officials to set the agenda for journalism, leaving the press all too often simply to recount what officials say instead of subjecting their words and deeds to critical scrutiny. Instead of acting as filters for readers and viewers, sifting the truth from the propaganda, reporters and anchors attentively transcribe both sides of the spin invariably failing to provide context, background or any sense of which claims hold up and which are misleading.

I decided long ago that this wasn’t healthy for democracy. I came to see that ‘news is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.’ In my documentaries-whether on the Watergate scandals 30 years ago or the Iran Contra conspiracy 20 years ago or Bill Clinton’s fundraising scandals 10 years ago or, five years ago, the chemical industry’s long and despicable cover up of its cynical and unspeakable withholding of critical data about its toxic products from its workers, I realized that investigative journalism could not be a collaboration between the journalist and the subject. Objectivity is not satisfied by two opposing people offering competing opinions, leaving the viewer to split the difference.

I came to believe that objective journalism means describing the object being reported on, including the little fibs and fantasies as well as the Big Lie of the people in power. In no way does this permit journalists to make accusations and allegations. It means, instead, making sure that your reporting and your conclusions can be nailed to the post with confirming evidence.

This is always hard to do, but it has never been harder than today. Without a trace of irony, the powers-that-be have appropriated the newspeak vernacular of George Orwell’s 1984. They give us a program vowing ‘No Child Left Behind’ while cutting funds for educating disadvantaged kids. They give us legislation cheerily calling for ‘Clear Skies’ and ‘Healthy Forests’ that give us neither. And that’s just for starters.

In Orwell’s 1984, the character Syme, one of the writers of that totalitarian society’s dictionary, explains to the protagonist Winston, ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?’ “Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now? The whole climate of thought,’ he said, ‘will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking-not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’

An unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only on partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda, is less inclined to put up a fight, to ask questions and be skeptical. That kind of orthodoxy can kill a democracy-or worse.

I learned about this the hard way. I grew up in the South where the truth about slavery, race, and segregation had been driven from the pulpits, driven from the classrooms and driven from the newsrooms. It took a bloody Civil War to bring the truth home and then it took another hundred years for the truth to make us free.

Then I served in the Johnson administration. Imbued with Cold War orthodoxy and confident that ‘might makes right,’ we circled the wagons, listened only to each other, and pursued policies the evidence couldn’t carry. The results were devastating for Vietnamese and Americans.

I brought all of this to the task when PBS asked me after 9/11 to start a new weekly broadcast. They wanted us to make it different from anything else on the air-commercial or public broadcasting. They asked us to tell stories no one else was reporting and to offer a venue to people who might not otherwise be heard. That wasn’t a hard sell. I had been deeply impressed by studies published in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals by a team of researchers led by Vassar College sociologist William Hoynes. Extensive research on the content of public television over a decade found that political discussions on our public affairs programs generally included a limited set of voices that offer a narrow range of perspectives on current issues and events. Instead of far-ranging discussions and debates, the kind that might engage viewers as citizens, not simply as audiences, this research found that public affairs programs on PBS stations were populated by the standard set of elite news sources. Whether government officials and Washington journalists (talking about political strategy) or corporate sources (talking about stock prices or the economy from the investor’s viewpoint), public television, unfortunately, all too often was offering the same kind of discussions, and a similar brand of insider discourse, that is featured regularly on commercial television.

Who didn’t appear was also revealing. Hoynes and his team found that in contrast to the conservative mantra that public television routinely featured the voices of anti-establishment critics, ‘alternative perspectives were rare on public television and were effectively drowned out by the stream of government and corporate views that represented the vast majority of sources on our broadcasts.’ The so-called ‘experts’ who got most of the face time came primarily from mainstream news organizations and Washington think tanks rather than diverse interests. Economic news, for example, was almost entirely refracted through the views of business people, investors and business journalists. Voices outside the corporate/Wall Street universe-nonprofessional workers, labor representatives, consumer advocates and the general public were rarely heard. In sum, these two studies concluded, the economic coverage was so narrow that the views and the activities of most citizens became irrelevant.

All this went against the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 that created the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I know. I was there. As a young policy assistant to President Johnson, I attended my first meeting to discuss the future of public broadcasting in 1964 in the office of the Commissioner of Education. I know firsthand that the Public Broadcasting Act was meant to provide an alternative to commercial television and to reflect the diversity of the American people.

This, too, was on my mind when we assembled the team for NOW. It was just after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. We agreed on two priorities. First, we wanted to do our part to keep the conversation of democracy going. That meant talking to a wide range of people across the spectrum-left, right and center. It meant poets, philosophers, politicians, scientists, sages and scribblers. It meant Isabel AlIende, the novelist, and Amity Shlaes, the columnist for the Financial Times. It meant the former nun and best-selling author Karen Armstrong, and it meant the right-wing evangelical columnist Cal Thomas. It meant Arundhati Roy from India, Doris Lessing from London, David Suzuki from Canada, and Bernard Henry-Levi from Paris. It also meant two successive editors of the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bartley and Paul Gigot, the editor of The Economist, Bill Emmott, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel and the LA Weekly’s John Powers. It means liberals like Frank Wu, Ossie Davis and Gregory Nava, and conservatives like Frank Gaffney, Grover Norquist and Richard Viguerie. It meant Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Bishop Wilton Gregory of the Catholic Bishops conference in this country. It meant the conservative Christian activist and lobbyist, Ralph Reed, and the dissident Catholic Sister Joan Chittister. We threw the conversation of democracy open to all comers. Most of those who came responded the same way that Ron Paul, Republican and Libertarian congressman from Texas did when he wrote me after his appearance, ‘I have received hundreds of positive e-mails from your viewers. I appreciate the format of your program which allows time for a full discussion of ideas… I’m tired of political shows featuring two guests shouting over each other and offering the same arguments… NOW was truly refreshing.”

Hold your applause because that’s not the point of the story.

We had a second priority. We intended to do strong, honest and accurate reporting, telling stories we knew people in high places wouldn’t like.

I told our producers and correspondents that in our field reporting our job was to get as close as possible to the verifiable truth. This was all the more imperative in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks. America could be entering a long war against an elusive and stateless enemy with no definable measure of victory and no limit to its duration, cost or foreboding fear. The rise of a homeland security state meant government could justify extraordinary measures in exchange for protecting citizens against unnamed, even unproven, threats.

Furthermore, increased spending during a national emergency can produce a spectacle of corruption behind a smokescreen of secrecy. I reminded our team of the words of the news photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play who said, “People do terrible things to each other, but it’s worse when everyone is kept in the dark.”

I also reminded them of how the correspondent and historian, Richard Reeves, answered a student who asked him to define real news. “Real news,” Reeves responded, “is the news you and I need to keep our freedoms.”

For these reasons and in that spirit we went about reporting on Washington as no one else in broadcasting—except occasionally “60 Minutes”—was doing. We reported on the expansion of the Justice Department’s power of surveillance. We reported on the escalating Pentagon budget and expensive weapons that didn’t work. We reported on how campaign contributions influenced legislation and policy to skew resources to the comfortable and well-connected while our troops were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq with inadequate training and armor. We reported on how the Bush administration was shredding the Freedom of Information Act. We went around the country to report on how closed-door, backroom deals in Washington were costing ordinary workers and tax payers their livelihood and security. We reported on offshore tax havens that enable wealthy and powerful Americans to avoid their fair share of national security and the social contract.

And always—because what people know depends on who owns the press —we kept coming back to the media business itself —to how mega media corporations were pushing journalism further and further down the hierarchy of values, how giant radio cartels were silencing critics while shutting communities off from essential information, and how the mega media companies were lobbying the FCC for the right to grow ever more powerful.

The broadcast caught on. Our ratings grew every year. There was even a spell when we were the only public affairs broadcast on PBS whose audience was going up instead of down.

Our journalistic peers took notice. The Los Angeles Times said, “NOW’s team of reporters has regularly put the rest of the media to shame, pursuing stories few others bother to touch.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer said our segments on the sciences, the arts, politics and the economy were “provocative public television at its best.

The Austin American Statesman called NOW “the perfect antidote to today’s high pitched decibel level—a smart, calm, timely news program.”

Frazier Moore of the Associated Press said we were “hard-edged when appropriate but never Hardball. Don’t expect combat. Civility reigns.”

And the Baton Rouge Advocate said “NOW invites viewers to consider the deeper implication of the daily headlines,” drawing on “a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right.”

Let me repeat that: NOW draws on “a wide range of viewpoints which transcend the typical labels of the political left or right.”

The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 had been prophetic. Open public television to the American people—offer diverse interests, ideas and voices … be fearless in your belief in democracy—and they will come.

Hold your applause—that’s not the point of the story.

The point of the story is something only a handful of our team, including my wife and partner Judith Davidson Moyers, and I knew at the time—that the success of NOW’s journalism was creating a backlash in Washington.

The more compelling our journalism, the angrier the radical right of the Republican party became. That’s because the one thing they loathe more than liberals is the truth. And the quickest way to be damned by them as liberal is to tell the truth.

This is the point of my story: Ideologues don’t want you to go beyond the typical labels of left and right. They embrace a world view that can’t be proven wrong because they will admit no evidence to the contrary. They want your reporting to validate their belief system and when it doesn’t, God forbid. Never mind that their own stars were getting a fair shake on NOW: Gigot, Viguerie, David Keene of the American Conservative Union, Stephen Moore of the Club for Growth, and others. No, our reporting was giving the radical right fits because it wasn’t the party line. It wasn’t that we were getting it wrong. Only three times in three years did we err factually, and in each case we corrected those errors as soon as we confirmed their inaccuracy. The problem was that we were getting it right, not right-wing—telling stories that partisans in power didn’t want told.

I’ve always thought the American eagle needed a left wing and a right wing. The right wing would see to it that economic interests had their legitimate concerns addressed. The left wing would see to it that ordinary people were included in the bargain. Both would keep the great bird on course. But with two right wings or two left wings, it’s no longer an eagle and it’s going to crash.

My occasional commentaries got to them as well. Although apparently he never watched the broadcast (I guess he couldn’t take the diversity) Sen. Trent Lott came out squealing like a stuck pig when after the mid-term elections in 2002 I described what was likely to happen now that all three branches of government were about to be controlled by one party dominated by the religious, corporate and political right. Instead of congratulating the winners for their election victory as some network broadcasters had done—or celebrating their victory as Fox, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, Talk Radio and other partisan Republican journalists had done—I provided a little independent analysis of what the victory meant. And I did it the old fashioned way: I looked at the record, took the winners at their word, and drew the logical conclusion that they would use power as they always said they would. And I set forth this conclusion in my usual modest Texas way.

Events since then have confirmed the accuracy of what I said, but, to repeat, being right is exactly what the right doesn’t want journalists to be.

Strange things began to happen. Friends in Washington called to say that they had heard of muttered threats that the PBS reauthorization would be held off “unless Moyers is dealt with.” The chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Kenneth Tomlinson, was said to be quite agitated. Apparently there was apoplexy in the right-wing aerie when I closed the broadcast one Friday night by putting an American flag in my lapel and said—well, here’s exactly what I said:

I wore my flag tonight. First time. Until now I haven’t thought it necessary to display a little metallic icon of patriotism for everyone to see. It was enough to vote, pay my taxes, perform my civic duties, speak my mind, and do my best to raise our kids to be good Americans.

Sometimes I would offer a small prayer of gratitude that I had been born in a country whose institutions sustained me, whose armed forces protected me, and whose ideals inspired me; I offered my heart’s affections in return. It no more occurred to me to flaunt the flag on my chest than it did to pin my mother’s picture on my lapel to prove her son’s love. Mother knew where I stood; so does my country. I even tuck a valentine in my tax returns on April 15.

So what’s this doing here? Well, I put it on to take it back. The flag’s been hijacked and turned into a logo — the trademark of a monopoly on patriotism. On those Sunday morning talk shows, official chests appear adorned with the flag as if it is the good housekeeping seal of approval. During the State of the Union, did you notice Bush and Cheney wearing the flag? How come? No administration’s patriotism is ever in doubt, only its policies. And the flag bestows no immunity from error. When I see flags sprouting on official lapels, I think of the time in China when I saw Mao’s little red book on every official’s desk, omnipresent and unread.

But more galling than anything are all those moralistic ideologues in Washington sporting the flag in their lapels while writing books and running Web sites and publishing magazines attacking dissenters as un-American. They are people whose ardor for war grows disproportionately to their distance from the fighting. They’re in the same league as those swarms of corporate lobbyists wearing flags and prowling Capitol Hill for tax breaks even as they call for more spending on war.

So I put this on as a modest riposte to men with flags in their lapels who shoot missiles from the safety of Washington think tanks, or argue that sacrifice is good as long as they don’t have to make it, or approve of bribing governments to join the coalition of the willing (after they first stash the cash.) I put it on to remind myself that not every patriot thinks we should do to the people of Baghdad what Bin Laden did to us. The flag belongs to the country, not to the government. And it reminds me that it’s not un-American to think that war — except in self-defense — is a failure of moral imagination, political nerve, and diplomacy. Come to think of it, standing up to your government can mean standing up for your country.

That did it. That—and our continuing reporting on overpricing at Halliburton, chicanery on K Street, and the heavy, if divinely guided, hand of Tom DeLay.

When Sen. Lott protested that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “has not seemed willing to deal with Bill Moyers,” a new member of the board, a Republican fundraiser named Cheryl Halperin, who had been appointed by President Bush, agreed that CPB needed more power to do just that sort of thing. She left no doubt about the kind of penalty she would like to see imposed on malefactors like Moyers.

As rumors circulated about all this, I asked to meet with the CPB board to hear for myself what was being said. I thought it would be helpful for someone like me, who had been present at the creation and part of the system for almost 40 years, to talk about how CPB had been intended to be a heat shield to protect public broadcasters from exactly this kind of intimidation. After all, I’d been there at the time of Richard Nixon’s attempted coup. In those days, public television had been really feisty and independent, and often targeted for attacks. A Woody Allen special that poked fun at Henry Kissinger in the Nixon administration had actually been cancelled. The White House had been so outraged over a documentary called “Banks and the Poor” that PBS was driven to adopt new guidelines. That didn’t satisfy Nixon, and when public television hired two NBC reporters—Robert McNeil and Sander Vanocur— to co-anchor some new broadcasts, it was, for Nixon, the last straw. According to White House memos at the time, he was determined to “get the left-wing commentators who are cutting us up off public television at once—indeed, yesterday if possible.”

Sound familiar?

Nixon vetoed the authorization for CPB with a message written in part by his sidekick Pat Buchanan who in a private memo had castigated Vanocur, MacNeil, Washington Week in Review, Black Journal and Bill Moyers as “unbalanced against the administration.”

It does sound familiar.

I always knew Nixon would be back. I just didn’t know this time he would be the chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Buchanan and Nixon succeeded in cutting CPB funding for all public affairs programming except for Black Journal. They knocked out multiyear funding for the National Public Affairs Center for Television, otherwise known as NPACT. And they voted to take away from the PBS staff the ultimate responsibility for the production of programming.

But in those days—and this is what I wanted to share with Kenneth Tomlinson and his colleagues on the CPB board—there were still Republicans in America who did not march in ideological lockstep and who stood on principle against politicizing public television. The chairman of the public station in Dallas was an industrialist named Ralph Rogers, a Republican but no party hack, who saw the White House intimidation as an assault on freedom of the press and led a nationwide effort to stop it. The chairman of CPB was former Republican congressman Thomas Curtis, who was also a principled man. He resigned, claiming White House interference. Within a few months, the crisis was over. CPB maintained its independence, PBS grew in strength, and Richard Nixon would soon face impeachment and resign for violating the public trust, not just public broadcasting. Paradoxically, the very Public Affairs Center for Television that Nixon had tried to kill—NPACT—put PBS on the map by rebroadcasting in prime time each day’s Watergate hearings, drawing huge ratings night after night and establishing PBS as an ally of democracy. We should still be doing that sort of thing.

That was 33 years ago. I thought the current CPB board would like to hear and talk about the importance of standing up to political interference. I was wrong. They wouldn’t meet with me. I tried three times. And it was all downhill after that.

I was naïve, I guess. I simply never imagined that any CPB chairman, Democrat or Republican, would cross the line from resisting White House pressure to carrying it out for the White House. But that’s what Kenneth Tomlinson has done. On Fox News this week, he denied that he’s carrying out a White House mandate or that he’s ever had any conversations with any Bush administration official about PBS. But The New York Times reported that he enlisted Karl Rove to help kill a proposal that would have put on the CPB board people with experience in local radio and television. The Times also reported that “on the recommendation of administration officials” Tomlinson hired a White House flack (I know the genre) named Mary Catherine Andrews as a senior CPB staff member. While she was still reporting to Karl Rove at the White House, Andrews set up CPB’s new ombudsman’s office and had a hand in hiring the two people who will fill it, one of whom once worked for… you guessed it … Kenneth Tomlinson.

I would like to give Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt, but I can’t. According to a book written about the Reader’s Digest when he was its editor in chief, he surrounded himself with other right-wingers—a pattern he’s now following at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. There is Ms. Andrews from the White House. For acting president he hired Ken Ferrer from the FCC, who was Michael Powell’s enforcer when Powell was deciding how to go about allowing the big media companies to get even bigger. According to a forthcoming book, one of Ferrer’s jobs was to engage in tactics designed to dismiss any serious objection to media monopolies. And, according to Eric Alterman, Ferrer was even more contemptuous than Michael Powell of public participation in the process of determining media ownership. Alterman identifies Ferrer as the FCC staffer who decided to issue a ‘protective order’ designed to keep secret the market research on which the Republican majority on the commission based their vote to permit greater media consolidation.

It’s not likely that with guys like this running the CPB some public television producer is going to say, “Hey, let’s do something on how big media is affecting democracy.”

Call it preventive capitulation.

As everyone knows, Mr. Tomlinson also put up a considerable sum of money, reportedly over five million dollars, for a new weekly broadcast featuring Paul Gigot and the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal. Gigot is a smart journalist, a sharp editor and a fine fellow. I had him on NOW several times and even proposed that he become a regular contributor. The conversation of democracy—remember? All stripes.

But I confess to some puzzlement that The Wall Street Journal, which in the past editorialized to cut PBS off the public tap, is now being subsidized by American taxpayers although its parent company, Dow Jones, had [profits] in just the first quarter of this year of 400 million dollars.

I thought public television was supposed to be an alternative to commercial media, not a funder of it.

But in this weird deal, you get a glimpse of the kind of programming Mr. Tomlinson apparently seems to prefer. Alone of the big major newspapers, The Wall Street Journal, has no op-ed page where different opinions can compete with its right-wing editorials. The Journal’s PBS broadcast is just as homogenous—right-wingers talking to each other. Why not $5 million to put the editors of The Nation on PBS? Or Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” You balance right-wing talk with left-wing talk.

There’s more. Only two weeks ago did we learn that Mr. Tomlinson had spent $10,000 last year to hire a contractor who would watch my show and report on political bias. That’s right. Kenneth Y. Tomlinson spent $10,000 of your money to hire a guy to watch NOW to find out who my guests were and what my stories were. Ten thousand dollars.

Gee, Ken, for $2.50 a week, you could pick up a copy of “TV Guide” on the newsstand. A subscription is even cheaper, and I would have sent you a coupon that can save you up to 62 percent.

For that matter, Ken, all you had to do was watch the show yourself. You could have made it easier with a double Jim Bean, your favorite. Or you could have gone online where the listings are posted. Hell, you could have called me—collect—and I would have told you what was on the broadcast that night.

Ten thousand dollars. That would have bought five tables at Thursday night’s Conservative Salute for Tom DeLay. Better yet, that 10 grand would pay for the books in an elementary school classroom or an upgrade of its computer lab.

But having sent that cash, what did he find? Only Mr. Tomlinson knows. He apparently decided not to share the results with his staff or his board or leak it to Robert Novak. The public paid for it—but Ken Tomlinson acts as if he owns it.

In a May 10 op-ed piece, in Reverend Moon’s conservative Washington Times, Mr. Tomlinson maintained he had not released the findings because public broadcasting is such a delicate institution he did not want to “damage public broadcasting’s image with controversy.” Where I come from in Texas, we shovel that kind of stuff every day.

As we learned only this week, that’s not the only news Mr. Tomlinson tried to keep to himself. As reported by Jeff Chester’s Center for Digital Democracy, of which I am a supporter, there were two public opinion surveys commissioned by CPB but not released to the media—not even to PBS and NPR! According to a source who talked to Salon.com, the first results were too good and [Tomlinson] didn’t believe them. After the Iraq war, the board commissioned another round of polling and they thought they’d get worse results.”

But they didn’t.

The data revealed that, in reality, public broadcasting has an 80 percent favorable rating and that “the majority of the U.S. adult population does not believe that the news and information programming on public broadcasting is biased.”

In fact, more than half believed PBS provided more in-depth and trustworthy news and information than the networks and 55 percent said PBS was “fair and balanced.”

I repeat: I would like to have given Mr. Tomlinson the benefit of the doubt. But this is the man who was running The Voice of America back in 1984 when a partisan named Charlie Wick was politicizing the United States Information Agency of which Voice of America was a part. It turned out there was a blacklist of people who had been removed from the list of prominent Americans sent abroad to lecture on behalf of America and the USIA. What’s more, it was discovered that evidence as to how those people were chosen to be on the blacklist—more than 700 documents—had been shredded. Among those on the lists of journalists, writers, scholars and politicians were dangerous left-wing subversives like Walter Cronkite, James Baldwin, Gary Hart, Ralph Nader, Ben Bradley, Coretta Scott King and David Brinkley.

The person who took the fall for the blacklist was another right-winger. He resigned. Shortly thereafter, so did Kenneth Tomlinson, who had been one of the people in the agency with the authority to see the lists of potential speakers and allowed to strike people’s names.

Let me be clear about this: There is no record, apparently, of what Ken Tomlinson did. We don’t know whether he supported or protested the blacklisting of so many American liberals. Or what he thinks of it now.

But I had hoped Bill O’Reilly would have asked him about it when he appeared on The “O’Reilly Factor” this week. He didn’t. Instead, Tomlinson went on attacking me with O’Reilly egging him on, and he went on denying he was carrying out a partisan mandate despite published reports to the contrary. The only time you could be sure he was telling the truth was at the end of the broadcast when he said to O’Reilly, “We love your show.”

We love your show.

I wrote Kenneth Tomlinson on Friday and asked him to sit down with me for one hour on PBS and talk about all this. I suggested that he choose the moderator and the guidelines.

There is one other thing in particular I would like to ask him about. In his op-ed essay this week in The Washington Times, Ken Tomlinson tells of a phone call from an old friend complaining about my bias. Wrote Mr. Tomlinson: “The friend explained that the foundation he heads made a six-figure contribution to his local television station for digital conversion. But he declared there would be no more contributions until something was done about the network’s bias.”

Apparently that’s Kenneth Tomlinson’s method of governance. Money talks and buys the influence it wants.

I would like to ask him to listen to a different voice.

This letter came to me last year from a woman in New York, five pages of handwriting. She said, among other things, that “After the worst sneak attack in our history, there’s not been a moment to reflect, a moment to let the horror resonate, a moment to feel the pain and regroup as humans. No, since I lost my husband on 9/11, not only our family’s world, but the whole world seems to have gotten even worse than that tragic day.” She wanted me to know that on 9/11 her husband was not on duty. “He was home with me having coffee. My daughter and grandson, living only five blocks from the Towers, had to be evacuated with masks—terror all around … my other daughter, near the Brooklyn Bridge … my son in high school. But my Charlie took off like a lightening bolt to be with his men from the Special Operations Command. ‘Bring my gear to the plaza,’ he told his aide immediately after the first plane struck the North Tower…He took action based on the responsibility he felt for his job and his men and for those Towers that he loved.”

In the FDNY, she continued, chain-of-command rules extend to every captain of every fire house in the city. “If anything happens in the firehouse—at any time—even if the Captain isn’t on duty or on vacation—that Captain is responsible for everything that goes on there 24/7.” So she asked: “Why is this administration responsible for nothing? All that they do is pass the blame. This is not leadership… Watch everyone pass the blame again in this recent torture case [Abu Ghraib] of Iraqi prisons…..”

She told me that she and her husband had watched my series on “Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth” together and that now she was a faithful fan of NOW. She wrote: “We need more programs like yours to wake America up…. Such programs must continue amidst the sea of false images and name calling that divide America now….Such programs give us hope that search will continue to get this imperfect human condition on to a higher plane. So thank you and all of those who work with you. Without public broadcasting, all we would call news would be merely carefully controlled propaganda”

Enclosed with the letter was a check made out to “Channel 13 –NOW” for $500.

I keep a copy of that check above my desk to remind me of what journalism is about.

Kenneth Tomlinson has his demanding donors.

I’ll take the widow’s mite any day.

Someone has said recently that the great raucous mob that is democracy is rarely heard and that it’s not just the fault of the current residents of the White House and the capital. There’s too great a chasm between those of us in this business and those who depend on TV and radio as their window to the world. We treat them too much as an audience and not enough as citizens. They’re invited to look through the window but too infrequently to come through the door and to participate, to make public broadcasting truly public.

To that end, five public interest groups including Common Cause and Consumers Union will be holding informational sessions around the country to “take public broadcasting back”—to take it back from threats, from interference, from those who would tell us we can only think what they command us to think.

It’s a worthy goal.

We’re big kids; we can handle controversy and diversity, whether it’s political or religious points of view or two loving lesbian moms and their kids, visited by a cartoon rabbit. We are not too fragile or insecure to see America and the world entire for all their magnificent and sometimes violent confusion. “There used to be a thing or a commodity we put great store by,” John Steinbeck wrote. “It was called the people.”

But first:

Hurricanes are not supposed to start before June 1, and I am told no hurricane in recorded history has ever hit Central America. So what are we to make of hurricane Adrian, that hit El Salvador last night? Could the global climate be changing?

SELL YOUR OLD CELL

You will cry when you see how little you get – I am offered $8 for my Nokia 6200, $68 for my not so old Treo 600 – but if you have old cell phones lying around, this (courtesy of the estimable Alan Rogowsky) could be the way to recycle them.

{ADHERE}Bumper Sticker{ADHERE}

Paul Lerman: ‘Well, I did get the bumper sticker to drag and drop to my car, but to do it I had to pull the car into my office – which is on the second floor, so that was a bit tough. But what an amazing thing, this ‘adhesive’ command function. Better living thru HTML!’

☞ Can {scent=gardenia} be far behind?

HYBRID BATTERY LIFE

Allan Maylis: ‘My 2004 Honda Civic hybrid has an 8 yr 80,000 mile warranty on the battery pack – which takes up a small amount of trunk space. In California and states that follow California emission rules, the warranty is 10 yrs or 150,000 miles on the battery pack (whichever comes first). Although the best quoted cost is $3000 at this time, it will likely be much less at a later point in time when hybrids are produced in large quantities. Meanwhile I am averaging 45 mpg.’

Gray Chang: ‘The warranty on the hybrid car batteries is pro-rated. If the warranty is 7 years and the batteries give out after 6 years, the manufacturer will pay for one-seventh the cost of the new batteries. The reason for buying a hybrid car is not so much the cost savings, but to have the feeling that you are helping the environment. I wonder if anyone has carefully studied how much the environment is really helped. It must take considerable extra resources and energy to build the batteries, electric motor, and other hardware for the hybrid car. That’s why the car costs more. Certainly, the car uses less fuel, but how much extra fuel was required to build the car in the first place?’

☞ Good question, but intuitively, there is so much energy wasted in braking, that capturing that wasted energy in a battery instead . . . well, others with advanced chemistry and engineering degrees will chime in, but my guess is that the environmental benefits of hybrids are real.

Robert Pohl: ‘I have read somewhere that a fleet operator in NYC has run his Priuses for over 200,000 miles with no need to change the battery. Googling around a little, I find this:

In the lab – Toyota tested Prius to 200,000 miles with no degradation of the battery. In the field – Insights/Priuses exist with over 200,000 miles (see ebay for some examples).

Expert opinion – I’m an electrical engineer. I’ve read all the research I could find, and it shows that a battery will last indefinitely, as long as it’s held within 30-70% of capacity. This cycle avoids the under-and-overcharging that kills batteries & extends life indefinitely.

Now I admit that if you abuse your car (example: drag racing) it will kill the battery. But such abuse will also kill the engine. And the transmission. And the suspension.

In fact, I expect the battery will last longer than the engine will.

‘I note that he assumes that the battery will be kept charged between 30-70%; I’ve noticed on my (Honda) Hybrid that this is exactly what the charging program does. The battery rarely gets completely full, and even more rarely completely empty. And, on the plus side, since the charger is what brakes the car (most times) the brakes get almost no wear; last time I had the car in for a service check, the people there commented on how good my brakes still were.’

Russell Turpin: ‘Time for some economic common sense. Cars are a commodity item that quickly depreciate. They should be purchased from one’s discretionary cash. For most of us who do NOT have a vast fortune, that means we are looking at used cars of modest price. My last car purchase was in 1998, when I bought a 1981 Olds 98 for $1,800. A gas guzzler? Oh, my yes. But keep the $25K more that a hybrid would cost into the bank, and the interest covers that quite nicely. And it still is in the bank. That’s not to say I will never purchase a Hybrid. But like any sensible person of moderate means, it will be in ten years (a) when I know which ones have a good maintenance track record, and (b) when used ones are available at a good price. The vast majority of people make a poor financial decision when they purchase a new car. It doesn’t matter whether it is a new hybrid or a new SUV. They are committing themselves to a large expenditure of capital that they can ill afford, and to which there are reasonable alternatives. Revive your cheapskate nature, Andy! I know it’s in you. Tell people they shouldn’t be purchasing new cars, unless they’re already so well-off that the price tag really is discretionary.’

☞ It’s true. That new-car smell is the most expensive fragrance in the world. But somebody has to buy new cars, and they should be hybrids.

And now:

NEWSWEEK

This Greg Palast column is strident, but not without some reason. With checks and balances fast disappearing in our government, the role of the press becomes ever more crucial. Yet if it’s not about Michael Jackson or Paula Abdul or steroids, the press all but ignores it. Nuclear annihilation? Warren Buffett was on Ted Koppel’s Nightline a couple of late-nights ago explaining that ‘loose nukes’ are the world’s foremost problem . . . unlike Social Security, a true crisis that must be dealt with sooner rather later . . . but this was rare coverage if the topic, and on a show likely to be canceled later this year. (How depressing to think Nightline may disappear.) Anyway . . .

COWARDICE IN JOURNALISM AWARD FOR NEWSWEEK
Goebbels Award for Condi
by Greg Palast

“It’s appalling that this story got out there,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on her way back from Iraq.

What’s NOT appalling to Condi is that the US is holding prisoners at Guantanamo under conditions termed “torture” by the Red Cross. What’s not appalling to Condi is that prisoners of the Afghan war are held in violation of international law after that conflict has supposedly ended. What is NOT appalling to Condi is that prisoner witnesses have reported several instances of the Koran’s desecration.

What is appalling to her is that these things were REPORTED. So to Condi goes to the Joseph Goebbels Ministry of Propaganda Iron Cross.

But I don’t want to leave out our President. His aides report that George Bush is “angry” about the report — not the desecration of the Koran, but the REPORTING of it.

And so long as George is angry and Condi appalled, Newsweek knows what to do: swiftly grab its corporate ankles and ask the White House for mercy.

But there was no mercy. Donald Rumsfeld pointed the finger at Newsweek and said, “People lost their lives. People are dead.” Maybe Rumsfeld was upset that Newsweek was taking away his job. After all, it’s hard to beat Rummy when it comes to making people dead.

And just for the record: Newsweek, unlike Rumsfeld, did not kill anyone — nor did its report cause killings. Afghans protested when they heard the Koran desecration story (as Christians have protested crucifix desecrations). The Muslim demonstrators were gunned down by the Afghan military police — who operate under Rumsfeld’s command.

Our Secretary of Defense, in his darkest Big Brother voice, added a warning for journalists and citizens alike, “People need to be very careful about what they say.”

And Newsweek has now promised to be very, very good, and very, very careful not to offend Rumsfeld, appall Condi or anger George.

For their good behavior, I’m giving Newsweek and its owner, the Washington Post, this week’s Yellow Streak Award for Craven Cowardice in Journalism.

As always, the competition is fierce, but Newsweek takes the honors by backing down on Mike Isakoff’s expose of cruelty, racism and just plain bone-headed incompetence by the US military at the Guantanamo< prison camp.

Isakoff cited a reliable source that among the neat little “interrogation” techniques used to break down Muslim prisoners was putting a copy of the Koran into a toilet.

In the old days, Isakoff’s discovery would have led to Congressional investigations of the perpetrators of such official offence. The Koran-flushers would have been flushed from the military, panels would have been impaneled and Isakoff would have collected his Pulitzer.

No more. Instead of nailing the wrong-doers, the Bush Administration went after the guy who REPORTED the crime, Isakoff.

Was there a problem with the story? Certainly. If you want to split hairs, the inside-government source of the Koran desecration story now says he can’t confirm which military report it appeared in. But he saw it in one report and a witnesses has confirmed that the Koran was defiled.

Of course, there’s an easy way to get at the truth. RELEASE THE REPORTS NOW. Hand them over, Mr. Rumsfeld, and let’s see for ourselves what’s in them.

But Newsweek and the Post are too polite to ask Rumsfeld to make the investigative reports public. Rather, the corporate babysitter for Newsweek, editor Mark Whitaker, said, “Top administration officials have promised to continue looking into the charges and so will we.” In other words, we’ll take the Bush Administration’s word that there is no evidence of Koran-dunking in the draft reports on Guantanamo.

It used to be that the Washington Post permitted journalism in its newsrooms. No more. But, frankly, that’s an old story.

Every time I say investigative reporting is dead or barely breathing in the USA, some little smartass will challenge me, “What about Watergate? Huh?” Hey, buddy, the Watergate investigation was 32 years ago — that means it’s been nearly a third of a century since the Washington Post has printed a big investigative scoop.

The Post today would never run the Watergate story: a hidden source versus official denial. Let’s face it, Bob Woodward, now managing editor at the Post, has gone from “All the President’s Men” to becoming the President’s Man — “Bush at War.” Ugh!

And now the Post company is considering further restrictions on the use of confidential sources — no more “Deep Throats.”

Despite its supposed new concern for hidden sources, let’s note that Newsweek and the Post have no trouble providing, even in the midst of this story, cover for secret Administration sources that are FAVORABLE to Bush. Editor Whitaker’s retraction relies on “Administration officials” whose names he kindly withholds.

In other words, unnamed sources are OK if they defend Bush, unacceptable if they expose the Administration’s mendacity or evil.

A lot of my readers don’t like the Koran-story reporter Mike Isakoff because of his goofy fixation with Monica Lewinsky and Mr. Clinton’s cigar. Have some sympathy for Isakoff: Mike’s one darn good reporter, but as an inmate at the Post/Newsweek facilities, his ability to send out serious communications to the rest of the world are limited.

A few years ago, while I was tracking the influence of the power industry on Washington, Isakoff gave me some hard, hot stuff on Bill Clinton — not the cheap intern-under-the-desk gossip — but an FBI report for me to publish in The Guardian of Britain.

I asked Isakoff why he didn’t put it in Newsweek or in the Post.

He said, when it comes to issues of substance, “No one gives a sh–,” not the readers, and especially not the editors who assume that their US target audience is small-minded, ignorant and wants to stay that way.

That doesn’t leave a lot of time, money or courage for real reporting. And woe to those who practice investigative journalism. As with CBS’s retraction of Dan Rather’s report on Bush’s draft-dodging, Newsweek’s diving to the mat on Guantanamo acts as a warning to all journalists who step out of line.

Newsweek has now publicly committed to having its reports vetted by Rumsfeld’s Defense Department before publication. Why not just print Rumsfeld’s press releases and eliminate the middleman, the reporter?

However, not all of us poor scribblers will adhere to this New News Order. In the meantime, however, for my future security and comfort, I’m having myself measured for a custom-made orange suit.

Greg Palast was awarded the 2005 George Orwell Prize for Courage in Journalism at the Sundance Film Festival for his investigative reports produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation. See those reports for BBC, Harper’s, The Nation and others at www.GregPalast.com.

Yesterday, I offered a Los Angeles Times story that showed how poorly Nobel prize winners in economics handle their retirement money – so why is President Bush persuaded the average Jane or Joe would do better?

Michael Axelrod: ‘There is no Nobel Prize in economics. There is the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economics in Honor of Alfred Nobel. Nobel did not create a prize for economics (or mathematics). The Bank of Sweden decided to create their own prize. In 1969 they cleverly attached Nobel’s name thinking the press would start calling their prize ‘The Nobel Prize.’ While it’s true that they got the Nobel Foundation to administer the prize for them, we don’t know to what extent they influence the selection of the winner.’

☞ Interesting. And yet with regard to the integrity of the Nobel prize in economics, I somehow sleep like a baby. Or should we assume the Swedes have some ulterior motive? (‘Give it to Markowitz! Give it to Markowitz!’)

Tom H., CPA, CFP: ‘Are the ‘smartest among us’ really an appropriate argument against social security reform? After all, academia (Nobel laureates and the faculty and staff at Harvard) have never had to sell a product or service for a profit. This rhetoric is appalling to me. My experience as a CPA with a Manufacturing and Retirement Plan audit background shows anecdotal evidence that sawmill workers in small towns in Alabama understand the value of their 401(k)’s and the value of an employer match (free money as you call it). And that beverage distributor truck drivers in Atlanta don’t fail to make an investment election [and thus don’t leave their money sitting idly in low-interest money market accounts]. Most defined contribution plans provide education opportunities, or a professional management option, or at least a model portfolio.’

☞ I guess there are two pieces to this.

One is shoring up the system. The President’s proposed private accounts, all agree, do nothing to shore up the system. Indeed, they divert trillions from the system, which we would have to borrow to make up. So if strengthening Social Security is the goal, private accounts won’t do it.

The other piece is getting people to save more, and in ways that will earn a higher return. The LA Times story was, I thought, yet more proof that good people often aren’t good with money.

The sawmill workers and beverage truck drivers Tom describes may all pay their credit card bills on time, avoiding the 18% interest and $29 late fees – but more than half of those who have credit cards DO pay obscene non-deductible rates and fees.

His folks may be smart enough to avoid the high-expense mutual funds and annuities that, on average, do so much worse than average because of the drag of those high expenses – but a majority of folks still buy the high-expense products.

His folks may have the native common sense to buy stocks when they’re cheap (and maybe even sell them when they get nutty) – but an awful lot of folks sell when they should be buying and vice versa.

And if people think they’re accumulating large private accounts, might they not be inclined to save less in their IRAs, Keoghs and 401(k)’s? Only then to find that most of what they’ve saved in their private accounts, if not all of it, is snatched right back away from them in the trade-off they’ve accepted: lower benefits.

The last aspect of this privatization debate that seems often to be neglected is what I think of as the ‘free lunch’ part. Can it really be so simple as that long-term bond holders should all switch to equities to get a higher return? Is it possible they could all do better – and with no troubling side-effects? Come to think of it, why not just have everyone give Warren Buffett their money to manage – could we not all then expect 23% a year?

The truth is, at least as I imagine it, if everyone shunned boring, safe, low-interest Treasury securities – of which we currently have about $8 trillion outstanding – Uncle Sam would have to raise the pay-out on such bonds until it were so attractive that people DID buy them. (Alternatively, Uncle Sam would have to declare bankruptcy.)

This would add yet tens of billions of dollars a year more to our deficit. And it would also raise the general level of interest rates, hurting consumers and business.

So I’m not sure a massive shift to equities is really the magic bullet some imagine it would be (though it could be a bonanza for Wall Street).

Most lunches are not free.

HYBRIDS

Joel Margolis: ‘The rate of return you quoted on the hybrids sounds good to you (and me) because we understand rates of return. Most Americans don’t and, unfortunately, demand incredibly high rates of return on doing these things (e.g., see the scant proportion of Americans who are willing to pay more for long-lasting light bulbs). The discount rate that Americans implicitly assume for their actions is incredibly high.’

☞ Quite true. And since so many put their purchases on perpetual 18% credit balances, a high discount rate is not entirely irrational!

Andrew Zachary: ‘The clip in today’s column about hybrid cars overloooks an additional cost: batteries. No one knows how frequently we will have to replace the storage batteries in a hybrid car. The best estimate I’ve heard is once every 6 years at a cost of $2,000 to $3,000. If this number is correct, then there is no savings, and possibly even a small deficit.’

☞ Oops. One of you wrote in to say his hybrid has a 7-year warranty on the battery . . . so I guess the trick would be to have it need replacing after about six years? Clearly, I am out of my depth here. I drive a ’97 Grand Cherokee, bought used, because I drive it about 1,000 miles a year. Were I to trade it for a Prius, the new owner would drive it ten or twenty times as far, wasting loads of gas; and I would be taking a Prius (there’s a waiting list) from someone who could achieve 20 times the energy savings with it that I could. But oh, if I were a cabdriver!

But first . . .

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THESE HYBRIDS

Donald A. Coffin: ‘I agree that hybrid cars are a great idea. But right now there is little if any financial incentive to buy one. According to prices and mileage I saw in a recent issue of Consumer Reports comparing hybrid to gas-only models (Civic to Civic, and so on), it would take about 6 years to cover the higher purchase price of a hybrid – at $3 per gallon of gas.’

☞ Well, yes and no. First off, if the car lasts 10 years before being junked (few are junked after 6), the internal rate of return on that extra investment could be pretty good. Say you paid $3,000 extra for the hybrid and saved $500 a year n gas to break even after six years. You (or the new owner you’ve sold it to) have a further $2,000 in savings those last 4 years. My financial calculator tells me that to invest $3,000 now for ten years of $500 savings is to ‘earn’ an 11.2% rate of return on your money – tax-free. Not so bad.

Of course, it’s not certain the used car market will reflect this if you sell before you’ve realized the full savings. And it’s possible that gas prices will fall. But it’s also possible the resale value will more than reflect the gas savings – and that six or eight years from now gas could be $4 or $5 a gallon (it’s already $6 in Norway, I believe). Or that the car will last 11 or 12 years before being junked. You could be talking 20% or more in after-tax annualized return on investment.

And then, of course, there are the ‘soft’ benefits of driving a car you know puts less strain on the environment.

And now . . .

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THESE NOBEL LAUREATES?

Why can’t they see the wisdom of President Bush’s plan? Thanks to the Los Angeles Times for this. In small part:

May 11, 2005
LA TIMES
Experts Are at a Loss on Investing
Nobel winners and top academics fumble the sorts of decisions Bush’s Social Security overhaul plan would ask average Americans to make.
By Peter G. Gosselin, Times Staff Writer

. . . [A] growing body of research shows that millions of Americans fail to get even the most elementary investment decisions right.

More than one-quarter of those eligible for employer-provided 401(k)s fail to sign up for them, according to the Federal Reserve. More than half of those who do sign up funnel their money either into overly conservative or overly aggressive investments, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute, a Washington think tank sponsored by hundreds of companies.

Even more disconcerting, new research suggests that most people don’t behave anything like the economically savvy men and women that free-market advocates and economic theorists claim they are. They often shut down in the face of many choices. They sometimes even fail to go after free money.

In committing investment errors such as these, ordinary Americans turn out to be in good company. Even some winners of the Nobel Prize in economics admit to making similar mistakes, either by failing to pay attention to their own retirement arrangements or by making faulty decisions when they do.

. . . That Nobelists and other highly educated professionals get tripped up by retirement is hardly proof that people can’t handle their own retirement investments. But it does suggest that few are terribly good at the job, and fewer have the time or inclination to get better quickly.

And the president’s accounts plan would require people to do a very good job at investing.

Under the proposal, Americans born in 1950 and after would be able to divert a portion of their Social Security payroll taxes into individual investment accounts. But in return for doing so, their traditional Social Security benefit would be reduced – by the amount diverted plus a 3% annual after-inflation charge on that amount.

With inflation now running about 3%, that means account holders might have to earn 6% a year just to break even. Anyone who followed Markowitz’s approach – putting half of their balance in a low-interest investment – would almost certainly lose money by signing up for accounts. So would someone who followed Akerlof’s approach – placing a substantial amount of it in money market accounts, which now pay about 2%.

Markowitz, Akerlof, Kahneman and Granger are not the exceptions among the nation’s most-educated elite or the general population in taking a cautious or hands-off approach to retirement investment.

In interviews and e-mails, five of the 11 Nobel winners in economics during this decade and a handful of others since 1990 said they failed to regularly manage their retirement savings. One even says he missed the mark in how he invested his prize winnings.

Several had or have retirement funds parked in money market accounts or other low-interest investments that they say are probably too conservative.

The same is true of an estimated 50% of Harvard’s 15,000-member faculty and staff, who permit all of their retirement savings to be funneled into money market accounts, according to the university, by failing to specify how they want their funds invested.

The forget-about-it approach also applies to most of the 3.2 million members of TIAA-CREF, or Teachers Insurance and Annuity Assn.-College Retirement Equities Fund. TIAA-CREF oversees retirement investments for most of the nation’s college professors and research scientists. Almost three-quarters fail to make a single adjustment in their retirement accounts during the course of their careers, despite repeated urgings by experts that people change their mix of investments as they age.

“If the creme de la creme of the economics profession and American academia can’t get these sorts of things right, why should we expect everyone else to?” asked Yale finance theorist Robert J. Shiller. “Why should we be surprised that people who already carry a heavy burden paying their bills and keeping up with their 401(k)s, if they have them, are reluctant to take on new responsibilities with these [Social Security] accounts?”

☞ There’s also the question I keep coming back to: why should we all have to save enough to last us until we hit 107 years old (since we might), when only a few of us will? Why not pool our resources, so that anyone who does make it that long knows there will be at least bare subsistence – but we won’t all have to save enough to provide for that possibility? We could call it – oh, I don’t know – Social Security?

CASABLANCA

Rick Schulz: ‘The correct quote is: ‘My health. I came here for the waters.’ ‘Waters? What waters? We’re in a desert.’ ‘I was misinformed.”

WHAT’S GNU?

Paul Rightley: ‘Will Galway mentioned gnucash in your May 4th missive. Recently, Intuit told me to upgrade to the latest version of Quicken or I would lose the ability to perform online updates. This upgrade added no important features, but deleted the ability to import QIF files. This really chapped my hide so I switched entirely to gnucash at the beginning of 2005. I have a relatively complex financial situation that gnucash handles well. Of course, all of my computers at home run Linux, so I may be considered a freak.’

WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

A friend of longstanding gave me permission to link you to his family photo page, in case you’re interested. (Click here.) Sharp-eyed readers will notice something unusual about this family. But is there any question, looking at the faces in these photos, that it is a family filled with love and happiness? That the girls, still in school, are soon to embark on vibrant, productive lives? Maybe I’m reading more into the photos than is really there, having known the two dads and their two daughters from the start.* But to me, this is a family anybody would want to cheer on.

*My favorite story concerns their language skills. Joe is American, Laurent French, so the girls grew up effortlessly bilingual . . . except that the housekeeper was Spanish and the girls were not allowed to watch TV when they were younger – only Spanish-language Disney videotapes. So they grew up effortlessly tri-lingual. And one day long ago – here is the part I love – they came home from a play-date all excited, shouting, ‘Daddy! Papa! Penelope’s TV speaks English!’

WHAT’S RIGHT AT THE DNC

Some of you are Republicans, I am pleased to say. (Few things are more impressive or constructive than the willingness of a reader to consider the views of someone with whom he generally disagrees.) But for those who’ve invested in the Democratic Party, here is a progress report I wanted to share.

Dean Brings New Style to DNC
By SCOTT SHEPARD, Cox News Service
Friday, May 06, 2005

WASHINGTON * Subway-riding, penny-pinching Howard Dean has brought a new style to the Democratic National Committee since taking over from the high-rolling Terry McAuliffe.

The changes at the top of the Democratic Party are more than cosmetic, however. Dean is reaching out to new voters, in new ways, just as he did as a pioneering * though unsuccessful * candidate for president in 2004.

Dean, the political outsider in last year’s field of Democratic White House hopefuls, is loosening the Beltway’s noose on the Democratic Party to a degree that is surprising activists and party officials out in the states.

“They’re saying this is the first time someone in his position seems more interested in really winning elections, instead of courting rich donors and protecting the party’s Washington players,” said Craig Crawford, a political analyst for MSNBC and CBS and a columnist for Congressional Quarterly magazine.

“Dean may be the first grassroots Democratic leader since Andrew Jackson let the mob trash the White House for his Inaugural,” added Crawford.

McAuliffe was a smooth operator, even by Washington standards. Often with an entourage and a limousine, he moved naturally through the capital, from the salons of Georgetown to the lunch crowd at the Palm.

McAuliffe was very much at ease with the well-heeled of the city. And with his unusual fund-raiser skills, he restored the party to fiscal soundness and brought it into the computer age with expanded voter and donor lists, even as he built a new party headquarters.

Dean, on the other hand, is more likely to be found eating lunch at his desk at the DNC on those rare days that he is in Washington. Twenty days out of the month, he is on the road, his “Red, White and Blue” tour aimed at resurrecting party organizations in Republican strongholds.

If he’s not bumming a ride with someone else, he’s walking to events in Washington, or riding the city’s subway, buying his own $1.35 per trip ticket. The “Red, White and Blue” air tour is strictly coach fare, the party chairman always carrying his own luggage.

And rather than the glitzy, big donor events McAuliffe preferred in raising money for the party, Dean continues to raise funds for the party through the Internet, the way he did during his presidential campaign, tapping small donors in unprecedented numbers.

“It’s a different approach than what’s been done in the past,” said Laura Gross, Dean’s longtime spokesperson. In terms of style, “I don’t think it’s any secret that Governor Dean is pretty low-keyed on stuff that like,” she added. Gross hastened to add, however, that since Dean took over as chairman of the DNC on Feb. 12, “we’ve been building on the success of Terry McAuliffe.”

Dean, though, faces a very different challenge than McAuliffe did in 2000.

Having reached financial parity with the GOP, the Democratic Party now faces the hurdle of restoring state parties in the South and the West, regions that are increasingly Republican.

And so far, Democrats are happy with what they see in Dean. Fears of a “loose cannon” at the helm of the party have all but disappeared, even among party leaders in Southern states.

“Howard Dean is doing a great job,” said Georgia Democratic Party Chairman Bobby Kahn. “He’s been focusing on the nuts and bolts of building the party. This is no surprise. I saw him do the same thing when he was chairman of the Democratic Governor’s Association.”

Just as he promised in his campaign for the DNC chairmanship, Dean has focused most of his attention on raising money for cash-strapped state parties and in recruiting candidates to challenge Republicans, even in GOP strongholds. “You have to show up,” he repeatedly tells Democratic audiences.

“It was the right hand-off at the right time,” Jennifer Palmieri, a former DNC press secretary, said of the transition from McAuliffe to Dean. McAuliffe rebuilt the national party infrastructure, and Dean is using that infrastructure to rebuild the state parties.

Moreover, Palmieri said, in Dean, the party has “someone who is ready to kick the table over and doesn’t accept the premise that we have to play on the Republicans’ turf.”

Pollster John Zogby cautioned, however, that the occasionally flaring of Dean’s partisanship * in recent weeks, he has described Republicans as “evil,” “corrupt” and “brain dead” – could undermine his efforts at restoring the Democratic Party’s fortunes.

“Democrats can get only so far by being not the Republicans,” Zogby said. “A populist, highly partisan message guarantees 48 percent of the vote. To win, one of the parties is going to have to find and recreate the middle in American politics. For the Democrats, that means new ideas.”

Scott Shepard’s e-mail address is sshepard@coxnews.com.

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