Englishman in New York

I don’t know how much coverage Rupert Murdoch’s bid for Dow Jones, the owner of the Wall Street Journal, is getting in the UK. But over here, it’s big news.

The question seems to be not if, but when Dow Jones’ owners, the Bancroft family, will cave to Murdoch’s $60 a share offer. (Though it should be pointed out that a Bloomberg news article today suggests that Murdoch may be losing patience.)

At the weekend, Joe Nocera wrote a fascinating analysis of Murdoch’s takeover bid, arguing that the Bancrofts would be fools not to sell considering Dow Jones’ lackluster performance in recent years.

Nocera blames that poor performance on the Bancrofts and on two Dow Jones chief executives, Warren Phillips and Peter Kann, both former journalists who ran the company from 1975 through 2006. Here are a few choice excerpts, but it’s worth reading in full:

I HAVE a theory as to why Dow Jones management has been so inept over the years. It is a company that has long prided itself on being run by journalists. That was also part of preserving the integrity of The Wall Street Journal. Journalists, after all, would be less likely to damage the paper or cater to advertisers. But journalists tend to be terrible businessmen; they lack the risk-taking mindset that marks a good chief executive. Making the kind of big, bold bets that C.E.O.’s have to make all the time in industries undergoing wrenching change, like the newspaper business, just does not play to their strengths, which are observing, critiquing and finding out things.

[…]The one thing Mr. Phillips and Mr. Kann were good at — indeed, great at — was placating the Bancroft family. They did so, in part, by paying an enormous dividend — more than the company could really afford. But they also did so by telling the family, again and again, what a great thing they were doing in protecting the independence of The Wall Street Journal. Indeed, it was Mr. Phillips who came up with the idea of two classes of stock, which would allow the family to sell some shares and still retain control. An inept chief executive couldn’t hope for a better deal. No matter what move Mr. Phillips made, neither the family nor the trustees were ever going to question him. It just wasn’t their style.

[…]To the Bancroft family, Rupert Murdoch has always been the devil — the epitome of the meddling down-market mogul who would wreck the paper if given half a chance. Or at least that’s what they’ve been taught to believe all these years by Mr. Phillips and Mr. Kann. And no matter how many promises Mr. Murdoch makes, their opinion is not likely to change. If they do wind up selling to him, they will do so holding their noses. There was a time, not so many years ago, when they could have sold to Bloomberg or the Washington Post Company or possibly even The New York Times Company. But Mr. Kann wouldn’t pursue those deals, and now those buyers are on record as saying they are no longer interested. It’s Rupert or nothing.

Even now, Mr. Kann and Mr. Phillips are trying to persuade the family, one last time, that it’s all about The Journal’s independence — and not their own incompetence or the family’s unwillingness to act as a true steward over its asset. Last week, Mr. Kann, who did not respond to my phone call, was quoted in The Wall Street Journal as saying how much he admired the family “for taking the position of maintaining Dow Jones as an independent public company.”

On Thursday, I did get Mr. Phillips on the phone. “If they are as determined in their support of The Journal’s independence as they have been in the past, then I think the paper is in good hands,” he said.

Would that it were so. But it’s not. “We had to destroy the village in order to save it,” was the famous phrase that came out of the Vietnam War. With the path they’ve been on, the Bancroft family seems intent on destroying Dow Jones in order to save it.

You can read the full article here.

Meanwhile, BusinessWeek media columnist Jon Fine and Vanity Fair columnist Michael Wolff discuss Murdoch’s bid and what it could mean for the New York Times over at Mediabistro.

Bookmark to:

Currently running on BBC News:

Israeli dies in Gaza rocket raid

An Israeli woman has died of her wounds shortly after a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip hit her car in the border town of Sderot, medics say.

The woman was the first Israeli killed in a rocket attack since November.

The attack came after Israel carried out an air strike on a refugee camp in northern Gaza. The Islamic Jihad militant group said four members died.

Israeli air strikes have killed more than 30 people in the past week, several of them civilians.

Although the BBC report does not say it explicitly, you could be forgiven for thinking that the two acts were related. In fact, you could be forgiven for thinking that the killing of the Israeli woman was in retaliation for Israel’s earlier attacks.

You could be forgiven for thinking that if you only read this story, and you didn’t know that militants had fired over 200 rockets at Sderot since November, that a home and a school were hit in the past week, and that the situation had become so bad that the Israeli government had already started evacuating people from the town.

in other words, one incident has very little to do with the other. At least not in the way that this story portrays it. If the rocket attacks were retaliation, they could not have started last year.

Meanwhile, it’s interesting to see Fatah now accused of being in the pocket of the Zionists. This from the New York Times article covering the Israeli air strike and the rocket attack on Sderot:

Asma al-Hayya, 24, said her father, Nimir, worked in Israel until the beginning of the second intifada, or uprising, in 2000 and was killed “because his brother is Hamas,” she said.

“This isn’t war between Hamas and Fatah,” she said. “This is a war against Islam. Those pretending to be Fatah are collaborators, and they coordinate with Israel against Hamas.”

A Hamas legislator, Huda Naaem, said, “Inside Fatah there is the program that is American-Zionist, and which fights resistance.” Another Hamas legislator, Jamilah Shanty, asserted that Hamas “will remain in government to protect resistance, so we will continue fighting and will insist on government, too.”

A very sad situation indeed.

Bookmark to:

The gay bashing Westboro Baptist Church has found a novel way of pissing off America.

Not content with picketing soldiers’ funerals, waving banners claiming American deaths are god’s punishment for tolerating homosexuality, they have taken one of the most goodhearted song of the past generation and given it an evil twist.

“God Hates The World” is a parody of the song “We Are The World” that raised about $50 million for famine relief in the 1980s. In the new version, Westboro Baptist congregants cheerfully sing about the world’s sins and mankind’s impending doom:

“God hates the world and all her people, you, every one, face a fiery day for your proud sinning. It’s too late to change His mind, you lived out your vain lives, storing up God’s wrath for all eternity.”

Needless to say, Warner/Chappel Music, which holds the rights to the song, has written to the Church threatening legal action. But the Church has countered that the song is a parody and is protected under First Amendment rights of freedom of speech and religious expression.

Shirley Phelps-Roper, church attorney and daughter of Wesboro pastor, the Rev. Fred Phelps Sr., told BusinessWeek, “It’s all our effort to deliver a faithful message to this generation.”

Meanwhile, church members are planning a protest appearance at the funeral of the Rev. Jerry Falwell, the evangelical pastor who died a couple of days ago.

“WBC will preach at the memorial service of the corpulent false prophet Jerry Falwell, who spent his entire life prophesying lies and false doctrines like ‘God loves everyone,’” says a message on the church’s website godhatesamerica.com.

“Falwell warmly praised Christ-rejecting Jews, pedophile-condoning Catholics, money-grubbing compromisers, practicing fags like Mel White, and backsliders like Billy Graham and Robert Schuler, etc.”

Weekly services at the church in Topeka, Kansas, must be a blast.

(Cross posted at Anorak.)

Bookmark to:

My Sweeney vs Scientology post quickly devolved into a debate on Anti-Americanism in the UK. Vikram, with whom I disagreed in the comments section, would no doubt love the following post on EU Referendum:

It is not often one whoops with joy listening to the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, but Jon Humphrys interviewing John Bolton, former US ambassador to the UN, this morning was a sheer delight. (You can listen to the piece here.)

From Humphrys we got the usual BBC droning, with forthright responses from Bolton. Eventually though, after a run of sneering negativity over Iraq, Bolton had had enough. What did it was the suggestion that the US was “a busted flush”, Humphrys calling in aid George Soros.

“Are you kidding me!”, responded Bolton. “This is a man of the extreme left. I am sure you will find a great deal in common with him, as would many others on the continent.”

A sniffy Humphrys was not going to take that lying down though. On the attack, he demanded: “Do you make the assumption then that because one asks questions – perfectly valid questions about the conduct of American policy - one is on the extreme left?”

Bolton was unfazed: “I can see it from the content of your questions and the perspective from which you’re coming and from the direction that your questions are taking. If you tell me you’re a conservative, I would be happy to accept it.”

That really got Humphrys going: “I would tell you that I’m neither conservative, nor left wing not right wing, nor middle wing, because…”

A laughing Bolton took that in his stride: “You have no views at all. Your brain is empty, you have no views at all…”

Attempting to muster all his majesty, Humphrys was almost squeaking in indignation: “I have an awful lot of views, Ambassador, a view for every subject under the sun but I don’t express them during the course of my interviews. I ask questions… That’s what interviewing is about… You’ll have heard of a thing called devil’s advocate… Maybe they don’t do it like that in the United States, but…”

“I know, you’re a superior Brit as well!” rejoins Bolton.

You can see why he really pissed them off at the UN.

Via Anorak.

Bookmark to:

In Soviet author Yevgenii Zamyatin’s futuristic novel We, the citizens of One State live in apartments made of glass so that they can be monitored constantly.

We is the ultimate dystopian novel. Written in 1921, decades before A Brave New World and 1984, it is all the more poignant considering its author lived through the 1905 and 1917 revolutions.

Zamyatin believed in the Russian Revolution, but he was quickly disillusioned with the reality of life under Bolshevik rule.

I have written before about his 1931 letter to Stalin requesting deportation rather than suffering a “literary death” under Communism. For most people the letter would have been the equivalent of a suicide note, but Stalin let Zamyatin go.

I thought of Zamyatin and his glass apartment today when I read this news brief from Iran:

Tehran, 17 May (AKI) - Owners of trendy internet cafes, as well as bars and restaurants popular with young Iranians have received a letter signed by national police authorities in which new measures are announced to enforce “the country’s moral health.” “Public places will not be allowed to use dark windows anymore or curtains which make it impossible to view from the outside what is going on inside,” said the letter, which states in particular that men and women must not be allowed inside internet cafes together but in separate days or schedules “to avoid unpleasant promiscuity.”

Via Anorak.

Bookmark to:

The BBC ran a strange story yesterday about the military hearing of a Guantanamo detainee which was held behind closed doors. Under the headline US detainee ‘mentally tortured’, the BBC reported:

Mr Khan complained about how US guards had taken away pictures of his daughter, given him new glasses with the wrong prescription, shaved his beard off, forcibly fed him when he went on hunger strike, and denied him the opportunity for recreation.

This led him to attempt to chew through his artery twice, Mr Khan said.

Later, Mr Khan produced a list of further examples of psychological torture, which included the provision of “cheap, branded, unscented soap”, the prison newsletter, noisy fans and half-inflated balls in the recreation room that “hardly bounce”.

Maybe I’ve been watching too much 24, but since when did the wrong prescription glasses, a prison newsletter and half-inflated balls constitute torture? Surely even force feeding a detainee on hunger strike doesn’t amount to torture. And since when would any of these methods provoke someone to attempt suicide by chewing through their artery?

What’s interesting about the BBC story is that with just a couple of extra details it could have made a much stronger case for Khan’s allegations of torture.

The same story in the New York Times today said that the transcript of the hearing, which was held behind closed doors, was “heavily redacted” and that “it appeared that many of Mr. Khan’s accusations of torture had been redacted.” Additionally, Khan’s lawyer claimed that the redactions of sections dealing with her client’s torture allegations showed “that the United States…disregarded the fundamental rule of law.”

So why leave it out? Is the BBC suddenly on Jack Bauer’s ‘torture now, ask questions later’ side?

Bookmark to:

Do you see what I see? I was walking through Prospect Park on Saturday when I saw this cheeky little chappy sitting in a tree. It’s a white squirrel.

i have never seen a white Squirrel before. According to Wikipedia they can be found in Kansas, Kentucky, Illinois, North Carolina, Missouri and Ohio, and have been spotted in Maryland, Washington, DC, Minnesota and Washington. I suppose Wikipedia can add Brooklyn, NY, to the list now.

just in case you think he might be an escaped lab rat, here’s a shot of his white bushy tail.

Googling “white squirrel” can be a bit of a frightening experience, with all the towns that boast of being the home of the white/albino squirrel. Exeter, Ontario, even has it’s own “White Wonder” song.

Bookmark to:

UPDATE: I’ve returned to this post a little later because I don’t see the point in posting a video and adding nothing to it. My initial reaction to Sweeney’s outburst was that it was a terrible mistake. But the more I thought about it, the more I began to understand and even admire Sweeney’s tirade. While his behavior as a journalist is shocking, does it not also say something about the Church of Scientology that it would force a BBC journalist to lose his cool like this? I wish I could see the documentary in full.

AND AGAIN: You can watch the full Scientology program online.

Bookmark to: