Jann Wenner is my hero
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This is one of those columns that will piss-off some of my geekier readers. They’ll complain that I am covering this subject at all, they will declare me dead or at least too stupid to be worth reading, and they will claim to be departing Cringelyville never to return. Frankly, I don’t give a damn. And it is important that I not give a damn, because that’s what freedom of the press is all about. This column concerns a particularly damning story about Goldman Sachs, the big Wall Street bank, that is available online now from the Rolling Stone. But I’m not so interested here in Goldman, or even in our ongoing global financial nightmare: I am fascinated by the fact that the story is in Rolling Stone and not in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times.
This is not liberal media bias or conservative media bias, it is simple dollars and cents — the inevitable economic pressures that are felt in any media organization that relies on advertising for revenue. If you went to the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times they’d tell you there is a wall between “church and state” as it is sometimes referred to in the newspaper business — a wall that keeps ad salesmen from calling reporters and ostensibly gives the news side carte blanche to follow stories wherever they go, no matter who they annoy.
Except that usually isn’t the way it works in real life.
Read the Rolling Stone piece. It is one of a series of long stories about the financial crisis in that magazine from writer Matt Taibbi — stories that paint a scathing and foul-mouthed picture of corporate greed, especially at Goldman Sachs. In this particular installment the writer makes a strong argument that Goldman executives should be in prison. And he’s probably correct.
Why isn’t this story in the Wall Street Journal, minus the cuss words? Why isn’t it in the New York Times? Will something like it ever be in either of those papers? Probably not. And I write this freely admitting that I like the New York Times and I think the Wall Street Journal often does a pretty good job with its technology coverage.
As Deep Throat said, “Follow the money.”
I first noticed this media syndrome as a child reading airplane magazines. I came from a flying family and airplanes have been part of my life all my life, so I grew up reading Flying, and AOPA Pilot, and Sport Aviation. And I noticed that when those magazines reviewed a new airplane they hardly ever said anything bad about it. Yet a few years later, when they covered the same airplane as something you might buy used, it was as though they were flying a completely different machine. The very same writers were suddenly pointing-out “chronic problems” in a plane that might be “something of a dog.”
Airplane manufacturers don’t run ads for their old models, just the new ones. And used aircraft are competition for new ones so it is in the manufacturer’s economic interest for journalists to like the new stuff but not like the older stuff. And that’s how it seemed to play.
So I became, at 12, a media cynic.
Jann Wenner owns Rolling Stone which he founded during the Summer of Love when I was 15. He can publish these stories that don’t appear — and will probably never appear — in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times mainly because his business is radically different from their businesses. Rolling Stone doesn’t look to Citibank or Morgan Stanley for advertising. And Jann Wenner has nobody to report to except himself. Like me, he doesn’t give a damn. Those other papers have shareholders and boards of directors that inevitably create a cesspool of interests and intrigue no matter what the church-versus-state rules are supposed to be.
This is not to say that the Journal and the Times won’t jump on this story at some point, but that point will carefully be after it is already too late. If Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein goes to jail, those papers will cover it, not predict it, and they certainly won’t make it happen. At best they’ll carefully explain the story after the fact.
If this was an equivalent crisis in the music business, would Jann Wenner cover that as zealously and risk offending his own advertiser base? I hope so, but maybe not.
We’re in the middle of a global trend toward media consolidation so what I decry here is only going to get worse. Against it our best hope isn’t Wenner — though he is for the moment my hero — it is the blogosphere, the edge of which you are touching right now. Longtime readers will recall dozens of pretty darned big stories of technological bullying and badness that were covered right here and often nowhere else. When I was beating the crap out of Microsoft over Burst.com, for example, reporters from Big Media kept saying to me, “I wish we could write stories like that.”
What was stopping them?
As the blogosphere evolves, my worry is that whatever independent voice or impact we have will be lost. I fear that the Huffington Post, for example, will be less useful to society as part of AOL than it was before.
Consolidation breeds mediocrity. What we need, then, are better ways to disseminate both information and opinion. The search engines can’t do it, or won’t. Google News won’t index this rag, for example, so what good is it? Is Google for searching or finding? More on that tomorrow.
Bob, you say that you write this piece despite your liking the New York Times and and that you “think the Wall Street Journal often does a pretty good job with its technology coverage”. So, does this mean that you do not like the Wall Street Journal in general? Or that you do not like the Wall Street Journal in the same way as the New York Times? I just thought it was interesting that you carved out a very specific component of the WSJ. I raise this issue because I think you made a tacit admission that you like the left-leaning NYT compared to the right-leaning WSJ. Just an observation. By the way, I loved your documentary, “Triumph of the Nerds”. George in Los Angeles.
George, you’re confusing the editorial pages of the WSJ and the NYT with the news sections. Seriously, outside the editorial page, where is the bias at either one?
It isn’t there. Often I see articles in the news part of the WSJ that contradict an editorial page piece on that same day. Columnists are slanted, that’s their job, but the news coverage? Show be a liberal bias in the news section of the NYT.
If anything, there is a pro-incumbent bias, probably to keep access. When Bush was in office, the NYT coverage was very sympathetic – pro invasion of Iraq, they had the illegal wiretapping story a couple of months before the 2004 elections but sat on it – for a year!
This myth of the NYT liberal bias, it was true 20 years ago, but hasn’t been true for at least a decade. The WSJ too is remarkably even-handed, it really isn’t a conservative paper in its news coverage.
Hey Bob!!! This is now the most recent column appearing on either cringely.com or http://www.cringely.com.
Strange, it just fixed itself when I posted the above link. Go figure.
Bob,
You are quoting Chomsky here, from “Manufacturing Consent”. Why news media cannot be “impartial”. Any media that depends on revenue stream is biased, just as any artist who lives from his art has “sold out” (Marcel Duchamp, “Go Underground”.)
cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model for more about Chomsky.
I still read every one of your articles!
(“Management by Baseball” remains a great recommendation… Are you still rowing?)
Ciao,
Bob
It begs the question whether a nation indoctrinated and stupidified by it’s media can actually be called free.
I’ll give anyone the same advice I repeatedly give my countrymen: watch/listen to foreign news programming.
Hi Bob – On your post…”they’ll complain that I am covering this subject at all”.
I think people have simply come to associate you with your past track record of high tech insights. So they come to your blog expecting that.
An idea might be to have a separate Blog for your economic and “other” stuff (non-tech). The Tech folks can read the Tech blog, and the rest read the other blog. This way the tech folks don’t get caught reading one of your posts, and then wonder why they are reading economic/other opinion piece – since its not what they really signed up for.
The story about Goldman is okay, but long on innuendo and light on substance. There is no smoking gun or actionable items. Taibbi has done better work at another time. The Journal and the Times are no doubt poking around looking for something with more staying power.
If you think the Times and WSJ are vigilant watchdogs you are sadly misinformed. They obfuscate and trivialize.
The irony of Goldman and others, bankrupting nations, destroying economies via palpable fraud – and having done nothing “actionable”. points to 2 things: the industry wrote the laws for their convenience, and -oh why bother.. if you can’t see it you won’t see it .
Peter – your reply is long on innuendo and short on substance.
OK, I have two questions, which may or may not be rhetorical. You decide.
Question #1: Why is anyone still doing business With Goldman Sachs? Since they have shown such a blatant disregard for any of the clients, preferring to dump their own losses on any inattentive idiot — why are they still in business? They should vanish overnight for lack of clients.
Question #2: Isn’t the fundamental principle of the industry Goldman Sachs is in, to sell product of x value for some value much greater than x? Did they not just take this principle to it’s logical extreme?
[...] by Matt Taibbi. It’s called “The People vs. Goldman Sachs“. Cringely actually pointed me there since I read his blog regularly. We have hard proof of wicked deceitful actions from the lowly [...]
I just thought it was interesting that you carved out a very specific component of the WSJ. I raise this issue because I think you made a tacit admission that you like the left
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