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Tag Archives: time magazine
So much for the wall of separation
Integrity in national journalism is officially dead:
Time Inc. has fallen on hard times. Would you believe that this once-proud magazine publishing empire is now explicitly rating its editorial employees based on how friendly their writing is to advertisers?
Last year—in the opposite of a vote of confidence—Time Warner announced that it would spin off Time Inc. into its own company, an act of jettisoning print publications once and for all. Earlier this year, the company laid off 500 employees (and more layoffs are coming soon). And, most dramatically of all, Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp now requires his magazine’s editors to report to the business side of the company, a move that signals the full-scale dismantling of the traditional wall between the advertising and editorial sides of the company’s magazines. … — “Time Inc. Rates Writers on How “Beneficial” They Are to Advertisers,” Gawker.com
And then there’s this, in which a Sports Illustrated article about Drew Brees was basically one long advertisement for a TRX training system. The article failed to mention that Brees is an investor in the company that makes the equipment, according to Forbes.
Here’s SI’s half-hearted reply:
This was a story about how an elite QB entering his 14th season stays at the top of his game, while affording readers access to those same training methods. It was not a story about TRX, though we should have disclosed the relationship. It was unintentional, but it should have been acknowledged.
How does a magazine on the level of Sports Illustrated, which is part of Time, fail to make such an acknowledgment unless, of course, that wouldn’t have been beneficial for advertisers.
Life on the government’s dime
This month’s Time magazine includes an article, “One Nation On Welfare. Living Your Life On The Dole,” that tracks how one relatively successful author’s life is subsidized by the government nearly from sun up until sun down.
Since the online version of the story is only available via subscription, the above link won’t pull up the whole story unless you are a subscriber, so here is a portion of it that describes a typical morning for Michael Grunwald:
7 a.m.: Subsidized food, water, electricity and clothing
The right routinely portrays government as a giant mess of Solyndra failures, lavish agency conferences in Vegas and pork for society’s leeches. But my taxpayer-supported morning didn’t feel like mooching at the time.
For example, my family pays for that water I use to brush my teeth, about $100 a month. But that’s a small fraction of the true cost of delivering clean water to our home and treating the sewage that leaves our home. And it certainly doesn’t reflect the $15 billion federal project to protect and restore the ravaged Everglades, which sit on top of the aquifers that provide our drinking water. Most Americans think of the water that comes out of our faucets as an entitlement, not a handout, but it’s a government service, and it’s often subsidized.
Similarly, my family pays more than $200 a month for the electricity that powers our toaster at breakfast. But that number would be much higher if the feds didn’t subsidize the construction, liability insurance and just about every other cost associated with my utility’s nuclear power plants while also providing generous tax advantages (“depletion allowances,” “intangible drilling costs” and so forth) for natural gas and other fossil fuels. The $487 we’re paying this year for federal flood insurance is also outrageously low, considering that our low-lying street floods all the time, that a major hurricane could wipe out Miami Beach and that the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America estimates that premiums in high-risk areas would be three times as high without government aid.
Some federal largesse–tax breaks for NASCAR racetracks ($40 million) and subsidies for rum distilleries ($172 million) and rural airports ($200 million)–is just silly. There’s no reason my poker buddies should be able to deduct the gambling losses I inflict on them once a month. (Just kidding, guys!)
The silliest handouts that brighten my morning are the boondoggles that funnel billions to America’s cotton and grain farmers and maybe knock a few cents off the price of my T-shirts and my kids’ breakfast waffles. Uncle Sam sends at least $15 billion every year to farmers and agribusinesses in the form of grants, loans, crop insurance and other goodies. The farm lobby is so omnipotent in Washington that when the World Trade Organization ruled that U.S. handouts give our cotton farmers an unfair advantage over Brazil, the U.S. cut a deal to shovel $147 million a year to Brazilian cotton farmers rather than kick our own farmers off the dole. Our food and clothing may seem cheap, but, oh, we pay for them.
Later in the article on page six — it was a lengthy read by Time’s standards — Grunwald pinpoints the schizophrenic attitude that many Americans have toward government spending depending on whether or not it actually affects their lives:
Americans tell pollsters they don’t like government, much less the taxes they pay to fund government, but they tend to support Medicare, the military and most other services that government provides. This is why politicians tend to spend a lot more time talking about shrinking government than actually shrinking government. President Obama talks a lot about trimming the fat, and Republican leaders talk about almost nothing but trimming the fat. But the status quo has largely prevailed.
This was the central point of the article for me. Conservatives, especially of the Tea Party stripe, can rail against government spending all they want to, but in reality, if we were to strip government down to the degree suggested by Paul Ryan, we would roll back history at least — using 1964 as a benchmark — 48 years, if not further. And as Grunwald noted in his story, if we followed Ryan’s plan, by 2050, we wouldn’t have to resources in the budget to fund anything except defense, health care and Social Security. In other words, infrastructure would crumble, education would go further down the toilet and the poor? They don’t matter.
Ezra Klein’s blog provided good analysis last month of Ryan’s budget plan. Here’s the gist:
Over the next decade, Ryan plans to spend about 16 percent less than the White House on “income security” programs for the poor — that’s everything from food stamps to housing assistance to the earned-income tax credit. (Ryan’s budget would authorize $4.8 trillion between 2013 and 2022; the White House’s would spend $5.7 trillion.) Compared with Obama, Ryan would spend 25 percent less on transportation. He’d spend 6 percent less on “General science, space, and basic technology.” And, compared with the White House’s proposal, he’d shell out 33 percent less for “Education, training, employment, and social services.”
Border state cities safer than, say, Detroit
Bad news for the Jan Brewer, anti-immigrant crowd comes today from Time with this report, which finds that four cities in border states with populations under 500,000 people are actually among the safest in the nation. The cities are Phoenix, San Diego, El Paso and Austin. Here’s an excerpt from the Time article:
“The border is safer now than it’s ever been,” U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesman Lloyd Easterling told the Associated Press last month. Even Larry Dever, the sheriff of Arizona’s Cochise County, where the murder last March of a local rancher, believed to have been committed by an illegal immigrant, sparked calls for the law, conceded to the Arizona Republic recently that “we’re not seeing the [violent crime] that’s going on on the other side.”(See photos of the Great Wall of America.)
Consider Arizona itself — whose illegal-immigrant population is believed to be second only to California’s. The state’s overall crime rate dropped 12% last year; between 2004 and 2008 it plunged 23%. In the metro area of its largest city, Phoenix, violent crime — encompassing murder, rape, assault and robbery — fell by a third during the past decade and by 17% last year. The border city of Nogales, an area rife with illegal immigration and drug trafficking, hasn’t logged a single murder in the past two years.
This, of course, flies in the face of Brewer’s previous statement, which was supposed to prove the necessity for Arizona’s immigration bill, that the state was wrought with “bodies in the desert.” As I noted yesterday, there are indeed bodies in the desert, but they are the immigrants themselves.
Most interesting, perhaps, is El Paso, Texas:
Its cross-border Mexican sister city, Ciudad Juárez, suffered almost 2,700 murders last year, most of them drug-related, making it possibly the world’s most violent town. But El Paso, a stone’s throw across the Rio Grande, had just one murder. A big reason, say U.S. law-enforcement officials, is that the Mexican drug cartels’ bloody turf wars generally end at the border and don’t follow the drugs into the U.S. Another, says El Paso County Sheriff Richard Wiles, is that “the Mexican cartels know that if they try to commit that kind of violence here, they’ll get shut down.”
So, the Obama administration and the feds are just welcoming the looting and pillaging that illegal immigration is apparently bringing to our cities, huh? Sure. Listen to Limbaugh, Boortz and the gang, and it’s as if terrorists were invading, or worse, aliens … as in Martians.
Obama ≠ Bush on spill; actually, that’s just silly
Reports indicated today that BP’s latest “Top Kill” effort to plug up the gushing oil tanker, which has to date, released an estimated 18 million to 40 million gallons of crude in the ocean, to the detriment of sea animals, marine life, and to the financial chagrin of piscators in the gulf, has itself, been killed.
Not surprising, detractors continued this week to claim the oil spill was — Ready yourself for this fast-growing cliché — Obama’s Katrina.
One of the most prominent to claim this, although not the first, is former crony, or officially, former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, Karl Rove, who on Thursday had this to say about the current administration’s response:
Obama officials have it backwards: They talk tough about BP’s responsibilities but do not meet their own responsibilities under federal law. They should not have let more than a month go by without telling BP what to do.
And he goes on to say:
Initially, Team Obama [as if disaster relief work is an Olympic sport] wanted to keep this problem away from the president (a natural instinct for any White House). It took Mr. Obama 12 days to show up in the region. Democrats criticized President George W. Bush for waiting four days after Katrina to go to New Orleans.
First, the oil spill is not a catastrophe on the level of Katrina … yet. Not even close. A major U.S. city has not been buried under a wall of water. Some 1,800 people have no lost their lives in the worst hurricane since 1928’s Okeechobee hurricane. Some $80 billion in property damage has not occurred. So, for Rove to equate the two is, at best, misrepresenting things, and at worst, soulless to the core, which we must admit, is right in line and consistent with the general philosophy of his party.
Second, I find it awfully convenient that when problems such as the oil spill arise, the right suddenly crane their collective necks toward Obama for answers and solutions, while in other breaths and on other topics, the administration is inept and bent on self-destructing the country. Rush Limbaugh is one bloviating hypocrite I would place in this category. His statements are reported here. Mark Levin on his radio show took the zaniness a step further, when he stated, ridiculously and blasting just for blasting’s sake, as reported in the same article:
This is the first real challenge that President Obama has dealt with and he hasn’t been able to handle it.
The first real challenge, you say? The worst recession since the Great one in the 1930s wasn’t a challenge? I suppose neither were two wars, all three of which were the ruins from another administration. So, if I can attempt to put this into perspective: Obama is expected, in some instances, to hold the planets in alignment, and in other instances, stay the hell out of our lives, the poor, the sick, the downtrodden be damned? Does that sum it up?
Here’s a bit of nostalgia, if we want to summon Bush to talk about Obama, here’s a recent snippet from Frank Rich on the topic, and a Time article from 2005, with the button precisely placed on Bush’s meagerness as a leader.
From Rich:
FOR Barack Obama’s knee-jerk foes, of course it was his Katrina. But for the rest of us, there’s the nagging fear that the largest oil spill in our history could yet prove worse if it drags on much longer. It might not only wreck the ecology of a region but capsize the principal mission of the Obama presidency.
Before we look at why, it would be helpful to briefly revisit that increasingly airbrushed late summer of 2005. Whatever Obama’s failings, he is infinitely more competent at coping with catastrophe than his predecessor. President Bush’s top disaster managers — the Homeland Security secretary, Michael Chertoff, as well as the notorious “Brownie” — professed ignorance of New Orleans’s humanitarian crisis a full day after the nation had started watching it live in real time on television. When Bush finally appeared, he shunned the city entirely and instead made a jocular show of vowing to rebuild the coastal home of his party’s former Senate leader, Trent Lott. He never did take charge.
From Time in 2005:
It isn’t easy picking George Bush’s worst moment last week. Was it his first go at addressing the crisis Wednesday, when he came across as cool to the point of uncaring? Was it when he said that he didn’t “think anybody expected” the New Orleans levees to give way, though that very possibility had been forecast for years? Was it when he arrived in Mobile, Ala., a full four days after the storm made landfall, and praised his hapless Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director, Michael D. Brown, whose disaster credentials seemed to consist of once being the commissioner of the International Arabian Horse Association? “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job,” said the President. Or was it that odd moment when he promised to rebuild Mississippi Senator Trent Lott’s house–a gesture that must have sounded astonishingly tone-deaf to the homeless black citizens still trapped in the postapocalyptic water world of New Orleans. “Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott’s house–he’s lost his entire house,” cracked Bush, “there’s going to be a fantastic house. And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.”
Bush seemed so regularly out of it last week, it made you wonder if he was stuck in the same White House bubble of isolation that confined his dad. Too often, W. looked annoyed. Or he smiled when he should have been serious. Or he swaggered when simple action would have been the right move.
And he was so slow. Everyone knew on Sunday morning that Katrina was a killer. Yet when the levees broke after the storm, the White House slouched toward action. And this from a leader who made his bones with 9/11. In a crisis he can act paradoxically, appearing–almost simultaneously–strong and weak, decisive and vacillating, Churchill and Chamberlain. This week he was more Chamberlain.
On a recent letter written to Time magazine
David Von Drehle’s cover story “The Five Faces of Barack Obama” assured me that Obama would be a good choice for President [Sept. 1]. The reason: he has the curiosity to look deeply into controversial issues. I am 80 years old and was raised in Wisconsin, where folks rarely considered other perspectives. I opted to live in Alaska from 1949 and on into statehood. I can well appreciate Obama’s ability to examine an idea or policy that has been suitable and decide to move on if it no longer fits. This ability escapes most Americans. Sadly, the very positive attributes Obama possesses appear to be fodder for voters to doubt his abilities. The only salvation I can see, if any, will be when the older folks die off and the young realize our mistakes and embrace a candidate like Barack Obama. — Rita Ihly, 80, of Bellingham, Wash., Letter to the editor appearing in the Inbox section of the Sept. 15, 2008 edition of Time magazine
This, to me, was a startling and refreshing statement for an 80-year-old to make. While sometimes older demographics of people tend to not consider other perspectives as much as younger generations, and are often adamantly opposed to stepping outside of their ideological box, this isn’t just symptomatic of old people, Ihly obviously being one exception. As Ihly pointed out, it’s symptomatic of most Americans.
And it’s symptomatic, in part, because of commentators on venues like CNN, FOX News, MSNBC and others, which just recycle the same ideas ad nauseum. People try so desperately to lump everything that exists in society, from groups of people, spirituality and ideologies, into compartments that never intermingle : white, black, rich, poor, blue, red, left, right. And it seems we have essentially become so entrenched in the two-party system that thoughts toward other ideas is outlandish, and the news media only propagates this, with the exception of C-SPAN, which does give its due deference to those who consider themselves independent (i.e. Washington Journal”). So, television, and perhaps other media outlets, is one problem. In short, people don’t want to think about complex issues for themselves, they want it fed to them through a drip line. Thus, television stunts creativity and independent thought:
I hardly write any stories and I don’t work on my songs quite as intently as in the past. You know why??? Television Television is the most evil thing on our planet. Go right now to your TV and toss it out the window, or sell it and buy a better stereo. — “Journals,” Kurt Cobain
I would be curious to know, and this is probably not quantifiable, to what degree the two party system has crippled our collective ability to render imaginative and inventive solutions to the problems that confound us, from energy, to our role in seemingly never-ending Middle-Eastern boondoggles, to health care, to education. While wordpress and other outlets like this have their fair share of partisan hacks only seeking to infuse their party’s ideas to as many people as possible, venues such as this one are actually healthy for Democracy, given the amount of ideas being spun out in any given day. But there again, that does depend on our ability or desire to, not only read thoughts we agree with, but to read about ideas that may be vastly different from our own, not necessarily with a goal to change one’s mind about an issue — though that may be one result — but simply to learn.