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The Platform: Afghanistan: As Tough as Reporting Gets
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
9/1/2010
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The war in Afghanistan, already the longest conflict in American history, may also be the most difficult major military operation reporters have had to cover in the modern age of journalism and communications. By contrast, the Iraq invasion was a classic undertaking on a grand scale.
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The Snapshot: Let’s Hear it for Government Regulation!
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
8/30/2010
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Conservatives love to interpret the current sour public mood as rejection of the government’s role in the economy. In reality, that public sentiment is primarily traceable to the poor economy and has little to do with an embrace of conservative ideological views on government.
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The Platform: What Even Murdoch Can't Control
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
8/25/2010
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In War at The Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire, Sarah Ellison has written a vivid and, by consensus, definitive account of how Rupert Murdoch came to buy the Dow Jones Company, controlled for more than 100 years by the Bancroft family, for a price nearly double the prevailing market value of the enterprise at the time of his deal in 2007—which also happened to be the start of the worst period in the newspaper business, well, ever.
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The Platform: What Is Happening at The Washington Post
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
8/20/2010
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Every month, two checks from BNY Mellon Asset Servicing arrive at my home for a total of $477.52, which represents my pension from The Washington Post. Considering that I left the newspaper in 1984, after 18 years as a reporter and editor, this small but welcome contribution to my income means that I remain attached to the company in the most concrete of ways: money. In 1996, when I was founding PublicAffairs, I thought each book we published should carry a tribute to three people for whom I had worked.
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The Snapshot: Jobs vs. the Deficit
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
8/18/2010
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The conservative mantra these days is that no action can be taken to help create jobs if it would increase the deficit. They believe the public is behind them because concern is running high about the deficit. But that doesn’t necessarily mean concern about the deficit is running higher than concern about unemployment.
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The Snapshot: Tides Turn on Sacred Conservative Causes
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
8/17/2010
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What could be more central to conservatives’ belief systems than the greatness of the Bush tax cuts and the terribleness of the new health care reform law? How inconvenient for them that the public is showing no signs of embracing these sacred causes.
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The Platform: Summer Gadgets
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
8/11/2010
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Every summer in recent years, I have measured the development of the digital age by noting the gadgetry our three generation family carries with us for information, communications, and entertainment to our house along the lake in rural southwest Michigan.
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Snapshot: The Public vs. Deficit Hawks
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
8/10/2010
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Conservatives argue that the public is in full deficit reduction mode and that there’s nothing more important to them than cutting government spending. The grain of truth here is that the public is in fact concerned about the size of the deficit. But everything else is wrong. There are many more important things to the public than cutting the deficit.
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The Platform: Andrew Wylie, Agent Provocateur
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
8/4/2010
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In the mid-1980s, as a fledgling agent, Andrew Wylie represented my friend I. F. Stone. He cleverly repackaged Stone’s backlist of titles and sold Little Brown Stone’s new book, The Trial of Socrates, which became a national bestseller.
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The Platform: What Is Google Editions?
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
7/21/2010
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Someday soon—later this summer perhaps—there will be a major new development in the evolution of e-books: the launch of Google Editions. The initial success of Amazon’s Kindle, Apple’s iPad, and the e-book runners-up like Barnes & Noble’s Nook and the Sony Reader has established that consumers are reading books on screens in ever-greater numbers and with considerable satisfaction.
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The Snapshot: Congress’s Work Is Not Done
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
7/19/2010
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Congress finally passed the financial regulation bill last Thursday. That’s a major achievement, and the public is sure to approve. In the latest CBS poll, 57 percent thought it was time to increase regulations on banks and financial institutions, compared to just 35 percent who disagreed.
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The Platform:The Indomitable Clintons
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
7/14/2010
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Pretty much wherever you look this summer, Hillary, Bill, and even Chelsea Clinton are in the news. The former first lady, senator from New York, presidential candidate, and now secretary of state grows in stature, acknowledged across the political spectrum for her professional skills and toughness when it counts.
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The Snapshot: Public Turns Against Offshore Drilling
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
7/11/2010
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The gulf oil spill disaster is starting to take a serious toll on public support for offshore drilling. Consider these data from a new Pew Research Center poll. Back in February of this year, 63 percent of the public supported more offshore drilling as a policy response to address our energy needs, compared to 31 percent who were opposed. Today a majority of the public—52 percent—opposes offshore drilling, and support has fallen to 44 percent. Continue to the Blog
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Snapshot: Public Warms to Health Care Reform Law
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
7/6/2010
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Conservatives loudly predicted that health care reform, once it became law, would generate a tidal wave of opposition that would lead to its repeal and a devastating defeat for progressives. Recent data suggest their predictions are, to put it mildly, off the mark.
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The Platform: Bringing News to India's Poorest People
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
6/30/2010
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The tribal areas of India are as far from our media culture as it is possible to be in today’s world. But a project called CGNet Swara, serving communities in the state of Chhattisgarh and led by a forty-year-old journalist named Shubhranshu Choudhary, is a fascinating glimpse of how mobile technology can provide news and information to people unlike anything they have ever had before. Choudhary, an experienced television producer with a background in newspapers also, is completing a year as a Knight International Journalism Fellow, a program of the International Center for Journalists based in Washington, which is how I came to meet him.
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The Snapshot: Comprehensive Immigration Reform and the Arizona Law
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
6/28/2010
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Arizona’s draconian new law allowing police to interrogate suspected illegal immigrants at will and detain them if they can’t produce papers has received support in a number of public polls. But that support has been wrongly interpreted as indicating declining support for comprehensive immigration reform. Recent polling shows just how far from the truth that interpretation is.
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The Platform: Booksellers: A Great Generation
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
6/23/2010
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There was big news in the world of bookselling this month. Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade, owners of Politics and Prose, a superb emporium in northwest Washington, D.C, have decided it is time to sell. This is not, we have been assured, a sign of retail distress. It is merely recognition that, in their 70s, succession of some kind is necessary.
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The Snapshot: The Public Believes Global Warming Is Happening and Is Ready for Action
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
6/22/2010
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Conservatives have done their best to promote the idea that global warming is not happening. And recently they have been pointing to some polls that purport to show increasing public skepticism about global warming.
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The Snapshot: Public Strongly Backs Ending “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
6/21/2010
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The House voted last Thursday in favor of repealing the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, and final repeal of this noxious policy is surely very close. Gay men and women will at last be able to serve openly in the U.S. military, a move that has strong backing from the American public.
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The Snapshot: Public to BP: Pay Up, Clean Up
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Ruy Teixeira,
,
6/21/2010
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Tony Hayward, CEO of BP, appeared before a House committee last week and mostly refused to answer questions. He did, however, receive an apology from conservative representative Joe Barton of Texas, who characterized the new $20 billion compensation fund for those hurt by the oil spill as “a shakedown” of BP and “a tragedy.”
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The Platform: Elegy to a Russian Poet
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
6/16/2010
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The celebrated Russian Poet Andrei Voznesensky died in Moscow on June 1 at the age of 77. He had been weakened by Parkinson’s disease and suffered a stroke. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, with uncharacteristic eloquence, mourned the loss. According to the Moscow Times, Putin said that Voznesensky’s “poetry and prose became a hymn to freedom, love, nobility and sincere feelings.”
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The Platform: The Digital Age: A Seasonal Snapshot
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
6/9/2010
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Welcome to the digital age of information and entertainment distribution, a world of profound, even dizzying, change. Facebook, with 450 million users, is barely six years old. So is YouTube. Google has been around for less than decade as a public company.
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The Platform: Reflections on Memorial Day
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
6/2/2010
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By the time you read this, Memorial Day will have come and gone. The summer season officially has been launched. But with upward of 200,000 Americans serving in combat zones in Iraq and Afghanistan and countless thousands having either returned or preparing to deploy, this year’s Memorial Day deserves more than the placing of wreaths in a late spring interregnum. American attitudes toward the soldiers who wage our wars have undergone a profound change since the days of Vietnam, when GIs who served faced widespread public antipathy.
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Who's Afraid of Wikileaks?
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Patrick Radden Keefe,
The Century Foundation,
6/1/2010
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Personality occasionally steers policy in surprising directions, and the zeal with which the justice department has lately taken to investigating unauthorized leaks suggests an interesting possibility: could Barack Obama’s long-professed commitment to greater transparency in government be trumped, on the particular issue of leakers, by his legendary personal discipline—his steadfast desire to keep his people in line and maintain a tight and leak-free ship? Or do these investigations reflect a broader anxiety about the future of leaking, and an effort, through a few high profile prosecutions and the the deliberate introduction of a "chilling effect," to forestall a new leaking crisis that has only just begun? Continue Reading on the Taking Note Blog.
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The Snapshot: The Public and Wall Street
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
5/27/2010
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As Congress continues to debate the financial regulation bill there are a couple of things it should keep in mind. One is that the public doesn’t trust Wall Street anymore—not even on the level of ordinary investing in the stock market (much less the elaborate financial shenanigans Wall Street firms have recently engaged in). According to the new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, just 35 percent now believe that “the stock market is a fair and open way to invest one’s money” compared to 58 percent who do not believe the stock market is now fair and open due to “corporate corruption and broker practices.”
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The Platform: New York Mayor John Lindsay. Remember Him?
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
5/26/2010
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Between John F. Kennedy at the start of the decade and Bobby Kennedy towards its end, in the mid-1960s another charismatic young politician briefly brought energy and promise to public life. He was John V. Lindsay, the liberal Republican congressman from New York's Upper East Side who was elected mayor of New York in 1965. His appeal was forever captured in columnist Murray Kempton's characterization on the day Lindsay started his mayoral campaign: "He is fresh and everyone else is tired." Eight years later, at the end of his second term at City Hall and after a brief run as a Democrat for president in 1972, Lindsay retired.
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The Snapshot: Public Still Wants Comprehensive Immigration Reform
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
5/24/2010
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The public’s continued support for comprehensive immigration reform is being shunted to the side amid all the fuss about Arizona’s draconian new law allowing police to interrogate suspected illegal immigrants at will and detain them if they can’t produce papers. But it is there, as recent polling attests.
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The Platform: The Rise of Bloomberg News
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
5/19/2010
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By any standard, Michael Rubens Bloomberg is one of the most successful public figures of our age. As the third-term Mayor of New York, a billionaire many times over, and in the top tier of global philanthropists, he has stature nonpareil among his mogul peers, none of whom has amassed power in as many ways.
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The Platform: The Troubled Legacy of Henry Luce
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
5/11/2010
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Alan Brinkley’s epic new biography, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century, has been widely and rightly praised for its breadth, depth, and fine writing. Luce was a complex, even tormented man, whose instincts for journalism, business, and the mood of America in his time were so acute that his magazine enterprise—led by the flagship, Time—is still a major force decades after his death in 1967.
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The Snapshot: Public Strongly Backs Financial Regulation
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
5/10/2010
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Conservatives, despite their best efforts, have not been able to derail the financial regulation bill making its way through the Senate. In fact, rather than being derailed, the bill actually seems to be getting stronger as the legislative process continues. The reason for this is simple: The public strongly backs financial regulation legislation and that is stiffening progressive lawmakers’ resolve and weakening the conservative opposition.
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The Platform: Start-up Theology and Nonprofit News
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
5/5/2010
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At the University of Texas in Austin last week, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation convened a dozen of the country's new, mainly nonprofit news-gathering organizations to discuss the Holy Grail of start-up theology: seeking ways to be sustainable beyond philanthropic largesse.
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The Snapshot: Enough Is Enough!
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
5/4/2010
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JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon has been protesting loud and long about the Obama administration’s plans to increase financial sector regulation to try to prevent future banking crises. Dimon apparently believes that anything that may hurt financial firms’ profits is just asking too much and should be ruled out. The public does not agree.
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The Snapshot: The Myth of the Tax Revolt
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
5/3/2010
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According to conservatives, a tax revolt is sweeping the country as Americans conclude that their tax dollars are being spent unwisely. Well, it’s true that no one likes paying taxes and the public does believe there is considerable waste in the system. But that’s different from the conservative caricature of the outraged citizen in full-scale revolt against federal government taxes.
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The Snapshot: Information Is Health Care Reform’s Friend
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
5/3/2010
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Conservatives believe that as the truth comes out about the Affordable Health Care Act, the public will become ever-more opposed to it. They’re hoping to capitalize politically on such sentiments in the 2010 election and beyond.
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The Snapshot: Public Backs Financial System Reform
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
4/28/2010
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The recent passage of the health care reform bill was a huge accomplishment for Congress. But there are other critical issues still to be addressed, such as reforming the regulations governing our financial system. Congress is now in the process of debating this issue with legislative action expected in the near future.
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The Snapshot: The Tea Party vs. The Public
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
4/28/2010
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The so-called Tea Party movement has received a tsunami of publicity lately. But one indisputable fact about this movement has been undercovered in the media: The fact that this group is not by any stretch of the imagination a movement based in the center of the American electorate. It is instead a movement of the conservative right that is very much unrepresentative of the general public’s views.
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A Library for the Ages
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
4/28/2010
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The St. Agnes branch of the New York Public Library is located at 444 Amsterdam Avenue, between 81st and 82nd streets. Nearby, on Central Park West, are fancy high-rises. Amsterdam Avenue and the side streets have a less glamorous mix of brownstones and neighborhood shops that, while upgraded some, still have the feel I remember from the 1950s when I would make a weekly visit to St. Agnes for a stack of history books aimed at pre-adolescents, especially Random House’s Landmark series.
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The Platform: Net Neutrality Is Not Dead
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
4/21/2010
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On April 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington ruled that the Federal Communications Commission had misused its authority to control traffic on the Internet. To casual observers—I was one—the 3-0 decision by Judge David S. Tatel, a distinguished, progressively minded jurist with seventeen years on the bench, seemed like a serious setback to the concept of "net neutrality," the doctrine that requires Internet service providers to treat all content equally.
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The Platform: A Bonanza for Book Buyers
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
4/14/2010
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Last week, Alfred A. Knopf published The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama by David Remnick. Here are the ways you can buy it: The hardcover list price is $29.95 and the CD audio lists at $50. But that is barely the beginning. Amazon sells the printed book for $16.47, the Kindle e-book version for $14.82, the audio CD for $31.50, and the downloadable audio for $34.12. B&N.com has a “member” price for the hardcover of $15.52 and the CD for $36. At Borders.com, the book is $17.97.
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Civility
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Richard C. Leone,
The Century Foundation,
4/14/2010
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Sixty seven world leaders gathered in Washington for a civilized set of discussions about one of the world’s great dangers, proliferation and the possible use of nuclear weapons. Barak Obama hosted the session and by all accounts had numerous productive meetings with individual leaders. There was, as well, good chemistry for the meetings in general. Continue Reading on the Taking Note Blog.
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The Platform: What Five Guys Can Do
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
4/7/2010
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Five Guys is the name of the nation’s hottest purveyor of quality (that is, fresh) fast food, with 550 outlets, and another 200 slated to open this year. I have another five guys in mind: Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google).
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The Snapshot: Public Warms to Afghanistan Effort
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
4/1/2010
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President Barack Obama’s decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan but start withdrawing forces in 2011 was controversial when announced late last year. But the public appears to be warming to this effort.
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The Platform: Ann Arbor's Spring and the Digital Age
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
3/31/2010
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Early spring in Ann Arbor is especially welcome this year after what even diehards acknowledge is winter’s dreariness (and the University of Michigan’s miserable showing in football and basketball). At the western end of a time zone, it is still dark and cold at 7:00 a.m. But when sunshine hits the campus greens, you can feel spirits revive. With temperatures in the mid-50s, the first classes convene outdoors. Nearby is some sort of madcap student competition. Of all Michigan’s regions, Ann Arbor has the lowest unemployment rate, at 9.3 percent.
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The Snapshot: Positive Signs for Health Care Reform
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
3/31/2010
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Health care reform, the biggest piece of social legislation passed since 1965, is now the law of the land. This historic achievement is getting some positive reactions from the public now that the painful congressional process has finally ended and there is an actual piece of legislation to consider. Of course, much of the public is still uncertain about what exactly is in the bill and how it will affect them, but these early reactions are nevertheless encouraging.
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The Platform: Glory Days and the Pentagon Papers
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
3/24/2010
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On June 13, 1971, the New York Times published the first explosive stories based on Pentagon studies of the decision-making that led the United States to war in Vietnam. After the Times was enjoined from publishing further, the Washington Post obtained much of the same material and produced its own stories. The Nixon administration, claiming a massive breach of national security, fought for restraint all the way to the Supreme Court, which on June 30, in the last opinion by Justice Hugo Black, decided 6–3 in favor of the newspapers.
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The Snapshot: Public Still Favors the Transition to Clean Energy
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
3/23/2010
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Conservatives have been doing their best to torpedo the movement toward clean energy by hyping controversies about the science behind global warming. But whatever effect these controversies have had on the public they do not appear to have undermined support for action on the clean energy front.
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The Platform: What Is a Ghost Writer?
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
3/17/2010
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Perhaps the unlikeliest hero of the current film season is the character known only as “the Ghost” in Roman Polanski’s entertaining political thriller, The Ghost Writer. The movie focuses on the intrigues surrounding a former British prime minister whose memoirs are in preparation while he, his wife, and his aides, including the writer, are engulfed in scandal. There are enough echoes of contemporary events and personalities to keep the complex plot from veering into the incredible.
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The Snapshot: The Progressive Millennial Generation
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
3/15/2010
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The 2008 election was the first in which the 18- to 29-year-old age group was drawn exclusively from the Millennial Generation (birth years 1978-2000), and they voted for Barack Obama by a 34-point margin, 66 percent to 32 percent, compared to a 9-point margin for John Kerry among 18- to 29-year-olds in 2004. Behind this striking result, however, is a deeper story of a generation with progressive views in all areas and big expectations for change that will fundamentally reshape our electorate.
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The Platform: What Would Peter Jennings Do?
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
3/10/2010
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At a mid-town Manhattan Japanese restaurant on the rainy night of September 10, 2001, Peter Jennings, then at the pinnacle of ABC News, joined a small group of us to toss around ideas about the radical reinvention of the nightly news. A good deal of saké was consumed, and the evening ended with agreement to continue the discussion. The next morning, the World Trade Center was attacked, and that day--the coverage of which Jennings brilliantly anchored--and the continuing focus on terrorism, homeland security, and war overwhelmed any further consideration of what might be changed.
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The Platform: The Trib
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
3/3/2010
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In the mid-1960s, the New York Times and the Washington Post bought ownership of two-thirds of the Paris edition of what had been the New York Herald Tribune, whose proprietor John Hay Whitney had just folded the New York newspaper. the International Herald Tribune (which came to be known as the IHT, although diehards held to the time-honored Trib), was as cool as a journalistic enterprise of that era could be.
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Poindexter Gets the Last Laugh
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Patrick Radden Keefe,
The Century Foundation,
3/2/2010
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Way back in 2003, when the public still retained some capacity for shock and outrage over state incursions on personal privacy, there was a brief outcry when it was revealed that the Pentagon was concocting a pervasive surveillance system with the laughably Orwellian name Total Information Awareness. The program was the brainchild of Admiral John Poindexter, the former National Security Advisor and disgraced Iran/Contra conspirator, who had been an early adopter of technology in the federal government—it was he who first introduced email to the White House—and who believed that comprehensive surveillance presented the best hope for preventing another 9/11. Continue Reading on the Taking Note Blog.
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The Snapshot: Public Says Tax the Rich, Regulate the Banks, and End the Filibuster
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
2/26/2010
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There is clearly a lot of dissatisfaction in the country today. Much of it is traceable to the state of the economy. But it has clearly been exacerbated by the dysfunctional political process in Washington. And it’s equally clear that conservatives have had considerable success turning that dissatisfaction to their political advantage despite their own culpability in that dysfunction.
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The Snapshot: Public Says It’s Time to Repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
2/22/2010
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In President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address, he called for ending the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and allowing gay men and women to serve openly in our armed forces. That change would be welcomed by the American public judging from recent polling data.
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Extraterritorial Jurisdiction and the Takedown of the Prince of Marbella
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Patrick Radden Keefe,
The Century Foundation,
2/22/2010
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During the 1920s, the United States experienced a rash of “interstate” bank heists, in which stickup men with automobiles would rob a bank in one state before fleeing to another. Because holding up a bank was not a federal crime until 1934, the local authorities in Kansas, say, were not authorized to pursue a suspect who crossed state lines into Missouri. Nearly a century later, sophisticated international criminals enjoy a similar advantage. International law is generally weak, and Interpol, which has no arresting power, is little more than a clearing house for warrants which individual nations may elect not to enforce. As Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy, has observed, sovereignty is a great advantage for criminals, terrorists, and other bad actors—and a conspicuous disadvantage for law enforcement. Continue Reading on the Taking Note.
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The Platform: Images of War and Warriors
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
2/17/2010
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Of all the films so far about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or their impact, The Hurt Locker, directed by Kathryn Bigelow,has emerged as the stand-out. It has been nominated for nine Oscars, including best picture. On its website, there is a listing of multiple major prizes to date in every category. Roger Ebert, Newsweek, and the Washington Post named it one of the ten best films of the decade. What is striking about all the acclaim is that the movie, which cost $11 million to make, is still apparently short of $30 million in world wide revenues. Avatar, by contrast, has swept past $2 billion in ticket sales. The Hurt Locker is a superb movie that very few people have seen.
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Rule of Law, Patriotism, and Making the Argument for Civilian Terror Trials
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Patrick Radden Keefe,
The Century Foundation,
2/17/2010
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One much-reviled political tactic famously employed by President George W. Bush and his surrogates was to play offense against critics by implying that the very act of questioning administration policy was somehow unpatriotic. I never thought I'd say this, but as the Republican hysteria over the prospect of trying terrorists in federal courts intensifies and weak-kneed Democrats show real signs of folding on what history may judge to be a make-or-break issue for the Obama administration, the president and his advisers need to take a page from the Bush play-book, go on the offensive, and call the increasingly craven rhetoric of Dick Cheney, Lindsey Graham and others what it is: a politically-driven, deeply unpatriotic suggestion that the American system of federal justice spelled out in Article III of the Constitution is simply not up to the task. Continue Reading on the Taking Note Blog.
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The Snapshot: Public Backs Regulation of Big Banks
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
2/15/2010
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Between health care, the State of the Union, and the budget, Obama’s proposals for financial regulatory reform, including tough new moves to reduce risk-taking by our country’s largest banks, haven’t gotten all the attention they should. But these proposals are highly significant as policy and are likely to be debated in Congress quite soon. They are also likely to tap into a wellspring of public support for this kind of tough approach.
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The Platform: With Thanks to John Sargent
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
2/10/2010
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John Sargent is the CEO of Macmillan, the U.S. companies of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, a venerable enterprise based in Stuttgart, Germany. The American imprints include Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Henry Holt, and St. Martin’s Press, among others. Sargent is what in another age might be called a scion of a publishing family. His father ran Doubleday and Company in the 1960s and 1970s, its glory days.
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The Platform: What Next for News?
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
2/3/2010
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All across America this winter, there are news-gathering start-ups with an array of business models reflecting the energy of an industry in reinvention rather than the dying newspaper trade that has become—while worse-off than anyone would like—an exaggerated cliché. Nonetheless, my back of the envelope calculation of the total investment in this national transformation of the news business is still a fraction of the bonuses Wall Street is paying itself for surviving the government bail-out (and not a whole lot more than NBC paid Conan O’Brien to go away).
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The Snapshot: How the Public Really Feels About Obama’s Performance
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
2/3/2010
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There has been a lot of hyperventilating about the January 19th election results in Massachusetts, with conservatives insisting that a massive repudiation of Obama and his agenda has taken place. Not so. In a Lake Research poll of voters in that election, Obama actually received a higher favorability rating than the victorious conservative candidate. And in the same poll voters said by 51-43 that Obama is taking the country in the right direction.
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The Platform: Amazon, Apple, and Caravan
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
1/27/2010
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It is fascinating and encouraging to see the titans of technology competing to distribute digital books. The new Apple reader will feature multi-media applications that have proved to be hugely popular on the iPhone. Amazon’s Kindle, among other devices, already has validated the e-book experience for significant audiences. Recognizing the importance—the potential and the risks—of this digital transformation, the publishing world, from industry behemoths to authors willing to self-publish, have mobilized to join a major new marketplace. What follows is a wrap-up I wrote as the executive director of Caravan, a just–concluded, four-year project to support leading university and nonprofit presses in dealing with changes that have arrived with astonishing speed:
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The Platform: What Is a Magazine?
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
1/13/2010
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An unexpected highlight of the recent holiday interregnum was a discovery in a random file of old family letters and clippings. It was an immaculate copy of the first issue of Esquire from autumn 1933, probably saved by my wife’s grandfather who was an advertising executive with Chicago connections, which is where Esquire was edited, a surprise to me. I had parochially assumed its sensibility was New York-based. What an elegant creation this Esquire was and still is. It was billed as “The Quarterly for Men,” with a cover price of $0.50, which must have seemed substantial in the midst of the Depression.
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The Snapshot: The Weakness of Conservative Opposition to Health Care Reform
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
1/11/2010
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In recent polls, more of the public opposes than favors the health care reform bills in Congress. Conservatives would have you believe that the opposition plurality in these polls is a result of public distaste for a big government takeover of our health care system. Not so. In a December CNN poll, a total of 55 percent either favored the Senate health reform bill outright (42 percent) or opposed it at this point because its approach to health care isn’t liberal enough (13 percent). Just 39 percent said they opposed the bill because its approach to health care was too liberal.
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The Platform: Paying for the Goods
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
1/6/2010
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A fierce battle ensued at the beginning of 2010 over News Corporation’s demands that Time-Warner Cable increase fees for the right to distribute the Fox Broadcasting network. Media behemoths fighting over money? Predictable, but nonetheless significant. The issue is who pays how much for the right to distribute content in all the ways it reaches consumers. Cable television (programming), Amazon’s Kindle (books), iTunes (music), and Google (news) are all part of the same continuum in which the mostly flush disseminators are doing better than the strapped creators.
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The Snapshot: Public Rejects Conservative Views on Global Warming
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
1/5/2010
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Conservatives are trying to convince the public of three things on global warming. The first is that human-induced climate change either isn’t really happening or is vastly exaggerated. The second is that the United States should not sign any international agreements designed to combat climate change. And the third is that action against global warming will wind up killing jobs and harming the economy.
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The Platform: Two Cents on Barack Obama
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
12/30/2009
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Vernon Jordan has seen it all in American politics since he graduated from Howard University Law School fifty years ago next June. He led the Urban League in the great days of civil rights turmoil, broke racial barriers as a director of major American corporations, reached the pinnacle of law and banking in Washington and New York, and for decades has a been a powerbroker among Democrats.
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The Platform: A Lesson from History
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
12/16/2009
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Earlier this fall, Foreign Affairs asked me to write a review essay for the January-February issue about Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting by John Maxwell Hamilton, founding dean of the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University.
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The Snapshot: Public Says Go Green With or Without a Climate Agreement
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
12/14/2009
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Debate has been vigorous at the Copenhagen climate summit, which continues all this week. We shall see if this debate leads to a meaningful global agreement on combating climate change. But it’s worth stressing that the American public wishes to see steps against climate change by our country regardless of Copenhagen’s result.
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The Snapshot: Public Supports Action on Climate Change
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
12/10/2009
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The Copenhagen summit on climate change is coming up and everyone agrees that forging a solid agreement at this summit will not be easy. And the political fate of the climate bill that passed the House and is now languishing in the Senate is far from clear. But these political uncertainties should not blind us to the fact that the American public remains fundamentally supportive of taking action to stop climate change.
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Sarah Palin, the Book Business and the American Dream
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
12/9/2009
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Sarah Palin's Going Rogue: An American Life is a smash. It sold more than a million copies in the first two weeks and heads into the Christmas peak with enough momentum to anoint it as probably the best selling nonfiction book of the season. Considering that the contenders include the late Senator Edward Kennedy, Mitch Albom and Jon Krakauer, two multi-million copy masters of narrative writing, and Fox News' Glenn Beck, the current superstar of rabid right-wing rhetoric, Palin has bested an impressive field.
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The Platform: A Few Words About Andy Rooney
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
12/2/2009
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Andy Rooney turns 91 on January 14, 2010. For 31 of those years he has delivered the closing essay on CBS's 60 Minutes. These pieces are the main reason Rooney is so famous. Walk (actually shamble) through an airport with him, and everyone who is not a foreigner offers a smile, a nod, or a friendly comment. But celebrity is not Andy's own measure of his professional worth; writing is. He has published sixteen books, and for the past two decades, I have been his publisher.
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The Platform: The Future of Journalism
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
11/24/2009
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“The Future of Journalism” has been the subject these many months of conferences and confabs from coast to coast. Some experts and pundits seem to be omnipresent. The problems under discussion are certainly acute. The prescriptions focus on a mix of entrepreneurial and nonprofit models. Contemplation has its place. But the real tests will be in what actually gets done as journalism under force majeure is reinvented. I have just been reading the spring 2010 master of science curriculum at the Columbia University School of Journalism.
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The Snapshot: Public Resisting Conservative Slanders on Health Care Reform
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
11/20/2009
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Conservatives are putting up a last ditch effort to stop health care reform. They’re doing their level best to scare the public, telling them that passing health care reform will take the country down the road to socialism and ruin the economy, among other things.
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The Aftermath of Soviet Hegemony
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
11/18/2009
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A couple of years after the collapse of the Soviet empire, I asked Adam Michnik, one of Poland's leading dissidents who had founded a major new newspaper, how he thought the country was doing. "Terribly," he said, describing factional squabbles among the emerging political parties and his growing disdain for Lech Wałęsa, who had become Poland's president. He called him "Piłsudski without a horse," invoking the country's strongman of the 1920s and 1930s, a brief era of Polish inter-war independence ending with the Nazi invasion.
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The Snapshot: Public Backs Abiding by International Law
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
11/13/2009
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In the bad old days of the Bush administration, our nation’s leaders did not seem too interested in abiding by international law and, in fact, seemed to take some pride in asserting our right to ignore it. Under the Obama administration, that attitude has changed and it is good to see some polling evidence—from a WorldPublicOpinion.org poll, conducted by Knowledge Networks—that the public is simpatico with this shift.
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The Platform: What Is It About Google?
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
11/11/2009
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In 1985, Ken Auletta published Greed and Glory on Wall Street, a national bestseller. This was a colorful account of the battle for control of Lehman Brothers and was the first book that turned the machinations of previously discrete bankers into a topic for public fascination. In 1991, Auletta wrote Three Blind Mice, as the three great broadcast networks "lost their way," in the words of the book's subtitle. Then in 2001 came World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies, which was about the anti-trust cases that nearly brought the software giant down.
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Keynote Speech: Reflections on the Mainstream Media Performance
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Morton Abramowitz,
The Century Foundation,
11/6/2009
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I want to share some thoughts on the media’s coverage of the Afghan issue. By media I refer essentially to the Washington-centric mainstream press, the major newspapers with their commentators, a few weekly magazines, and the television networks, not the inhabitants of the internet, who do a significant amount of often useful analysis. I believe the media, in general, have done poorly in relentlessly examining what administrations have been doing on an issue critical to the nation.
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The Platform: Harry Evans, Ace Newsman
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
11/4/2009
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For the past twenty-five years, Harry Evans (formally, but rarely, known as Sir Harold Evans) has been based in New York in a succession of high-profile media roles, including publisher of the Random House Trade Division, founding editor of Condé Nast Traveler, best-selling author, and husband of Tina Brown. But before all that, Harry already had made his name as hands-down the best newspaper editor in Britain of his era, mainly at the Sunday Times. Now 81, Evans has written his memoir, covering the full arc of his very full life. His youth and early career take nearly half the book and have an elegance and generosity of style. Harry does everything with verve, and this autobiography is, to use a time-honored encomium, rollicking.
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The Snapshot: The Blame Game: Conservatives vs. the Public
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
11/2/2009
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Conservatives love to blame Obama’s policies for everything, including our current economic problems and the difficulties of passing health care reform. But the public doesn’t see things that way. For example, a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds just 20 percent blaming Obama’s policies for current economic conditions, compared to 63 percent who say this is a situation Obama has inherited.
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The Platform: Introducing the Chicago News Cooperative
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
10/28/2009
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Chicago was the quintessential twentieth-century newspaper town. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play Front Page, which premiered in 1928, captured the city's zest for breaking news. Tribune Tower, a monument to Colonel Robert McCormick's vision of his daily as the "World's Greatest Newspaper," was also a buttressed symbol of power. In its pre-World War II heyday, the Chicago Daily News had the premiere cadre of foreign correspondents in the country. In later years, New York was the financial and media capital of the nation. Los Angeles had the movie business. Washington had politics and government. Chicago had The Mayor (Richard J. Daley) and the ne plus ultra of big-city columnists, the great Mike Royko.
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The Snapshot: Public Supports Moving Forward on Climate Change
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
10/26/2009
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Health care reform is occupying almost everyone’s attention these days, which is understandable given its level of importance and how close we are to big decisions in Congress. But other critical issues remain on Congress’s agenda and will be taken up once the health care situation is resolved. On the top of that list is climate change. Just-released data from the Pew Research Center suggests the public is ready to move forward in this area.
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The Platform: Encore! Encore! And Journalism.
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
10/21/2009
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Journalism's Great Depression has meant the loss of many thousands of jobs: 16,000 in 2008 alone, according to estimates cited by the Columbia Journalism Review. These departures are characterized and paid for on a scale that goes from lucrative buy-outs to firings with virtually no severance. Overwhelmingly, the cuts represent a break from expected career patterns with resulting personal and family upheaval. Not surprisingly, a fin de siècle gloom tends to hang over newsrooms these days, especially in the once-proud metropolitan dailies and in many magazines.
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The Snapshot: Public Open to Additional Efforts to Improve Economy
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
10/16/2009
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Conservatives have derided Obama’s stimulus program as a waste of money despite the substantial contribution it has made to mitigating the economic downturn and stabilizing an economy that was on the verge of a depression-like meltdown. And they are poised to oppose any and all attempts to expand government spending to promote the recovery.
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The Platform: Books: Get Them While They're Hot
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
10/14/2009
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Two announcements lately highlight the growing and increasingly glamorous role of the digital delivery and distribution of books. HarperCollins, publisher of Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue: An American Life, said it was rushing the book to sale on November 17, months earlier than originally planned. But the publisher is withholding the e-book version to be offered on the Kindle, Sony Reader, and their emerging competitors until the day after Christmas because the hardcover price, listed at $28.99, will be so much higher than the digital book, which certainly will go for much less ($9.99 on the Kindle, for example).
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The Snapshot: Public Warms Up to Health Care Reform
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
9/28/2009
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The president’s speech on September 9, the presentation of a specific plan (finally) by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, and some vigorous pushback by progressives against conservative antihealth care reform hysteria has moved public sentiments about health care reform in a positive direction. Across multiple polls, a consistent pattern of increased support exists for Obama’s handling of health care and for the health care plans before Congress. This pattern can be seen in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, where Obama’s approval rating on health care increased by 4 points and support for health care legislation rose by 3 points.
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The Snapshot: Public Views of Obama Remain Favorable
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
9/24/2009
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The conservative narrative about President Barack Obama is that he is rushing down the road to socialism and the public is rising up against his big government schemes. So the florid anti-Obama rhetoric of the “tea party” activists and Joe Wilsons of the world is not extreme, but rather an expression of underlying public sentiment.
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The Platform: Judgment Day for the Google Book Pact
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
9/23/2009
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Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers (in unlikely fraternity) have bowed to the very large number of petitioners who oppose their agreement that would profoundly affect the digital future of books. A hearing long scheduled for October 7, before District Court Judge Denny Chin in New York is now expected to be postponed while all concerned consider objections to the accord reached a year ago that gave Google vast rights to scan books and devised a system for paying authors and publishers for the right to do so. The pact—actually the settlement of a suit filed by the authors and publishers to stop Google from what they saw as uncontrolled digitizing of their work would be a fundamental step in the world of letters’ adjustment to all the new ways literature and information are distributed.
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The Platform: Mad Men at Risk
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
9/16/2009
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The superb multi-season television dramas of the past decade—The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men, now in its third year on AMC—are triumphs of a cinematic genre, featuring plots, characters, and settings that are terrific, with enough edge to bring sophisticated viewers back week after week. Next Sunday, Mad Men is up for sixteen Emmys. Last year it won for best drama. Okay, so much for encomiums.
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The Snapshot: Conservatives’ Greatest Enemy on Health Care Is Clarity
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
9/8/2009
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Conservatives have held nothing back in their efforts to discredit the efforts of the majority of Congress and President Barack Obama to reform the health care system. Their strategy is simple: by spreading lies about the health care plans before Congress, among them government “death panels,” coverage for illegal immigrants, and government tax dollars for abortions, conservatives hope the public can remain confused about what is actually in these plans.
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The Platform: Do You Subscribe to Fox News?
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
9/2/2009
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At every opportunity this summer, I would ask people, random strangers to close friends, whether they subscribed to Fox News. In the circles I tend to travel, the answer was some form of dismissive, "Are you kidding?" Well, actually, I was not. By the most recent estimate I found, 80 percent of Americans have either cable or satellite television service, which means that all of them are subscribers to Fox News, AMC (Mad Men), Lifetime (Project Runway), and many dozens more.
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The Snapshot: Public Holding Steady on Key Elements of Health Care Reform
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
8/31/2009
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In the last month, the public’s view of Congress’ health care reform efforts has certainly darkened. But it’s striking how little change there has been in the public’s view of the basic elements of health care reform as articulated by President Barack Obama and progressives. These essentials of health care reform remain not just popular, but very popular. Consider these data from the just-released August edition of the Kaiser Health Care Tracking poll.
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The Snapshot: Strong Support for Changes in Energy Policy
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
8/31/2009
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With all the brouhaha about health care reform, it’s easy to forget the other big domestic policy priority before Congress: energy policy and climate change. Here the Obama administration’s approach continues to receive solid public support. According to just-released data from ABC News/Washington Post, support is running about a 2-1 ratio for the proposed changes to U.S. energy policy (57 percent to 29 percent).
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The Platform: Don Hewitt's Secrets
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
8/26/2009
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The deaths of Don
Hewitt, producer extraordinaire, and earlier this summer of Walter Cronkite
highlight from both sides of the camera the passing of broadcasters who
epitomized the best in television news: great storytelling that combined
journalism with showmanship of the sort that television, from its earliest
days, has always demanded. It is striking and sad that both men in their later
years talked openly of their disappointment with how news on the airwaves had
been degraded in favor of profit. In fact, these frustrations were nothing new.
Their predecessors in the superstar pantheon of CBS, Edward R. Murrow and Fred
Friendly, were already warning of the corrupting values of television news in
the 1960s, when Hewitt and Cronkite's brilliant careers were on the upswing.
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The Platform: Robert S. McNamara: In Memoriam
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
8/18/2009
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The family of Robert S. McNamara sent out cards recently to those who offered condolences after he died last month. In accordance with his wishes, said the card, “there will be no funeral or memorial service and his ashes will be placed in Snowmass, Colorado and Martha’s Vineyard.” I can hear McNamara’s gravelly voice and picture him waving his hand to lend emphasis to his determination not to be extolled—or denounced by a protestor—at a posthumous event. In different circumstances, he might have been persuaded otherwise. After years of saying he wouldn’t, McNamara did finally reflect deeply in print and on film about the Vietnam War and his role in it. But it would be inconceivable, I suppose, for his survivors to overrule McNamara’s fiat that the scattering of his remains be the only ceremonial recognition of his very full, very long, and very controversial life.
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The Platform: Books: The Next Chapter
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
8/11/2009
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Four summers ago, pondering a way to define how publishers could take advantage of emerging technologies for delivering information in a variety of formats, I came up with this slogan: Good Books. Any Way You Want Them. Now. The point was that books, basically unchanged in centuries as handheld objects composed of printed pages and covers, needed to adapt to the growing importance of screens, mobile devices, earphones, and the sense among readers that they should be able to get whatever they want on demand instead of searching for it.
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The Platform Archive: Caravan and the Book Business
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
8/6/2009
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Peter Osnos is Senior Fellow for Media at The Century Foundation. His column "The Platform" appears each week at www.tcf.org. This archive contains columns that pertain to the e-book business in particular.
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The Platform: Remembering a Remarkable Jewish Mother
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
8/4/2009
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A documentary feature making the art house rounds this summer with the jolly title of Yoo-Hoo Mrs. Goldberg is a fascinating and revealing look at the story of Gertrude Berg. She was the star, writer, and producer of an enormously popular radio and television series in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, which was also a movie and Broadway play. In retrospect, this warm-hearted portrayal of a New York Jewish family without reference to anti-Semitism, ethnic insecurity, or the Holocaust seems amazing, all the more so because the program eventually was undermined by a different scourge, the anti-Communist fervor of the post World War II era.
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The Snapshot: Dramatic Improvement in Our International Image
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The Century Foundation,
The Century Foundation,
8/3/2009
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President Obama has pursued a far different foreign policy than his conservative predecessor George W. Bush. He is heavy on consultation and diplomacy and notably light on the unilateral use of U.S. power to achieve objectives—and the world has noticed.
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The Platform: Superpowers
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
7/28/2009
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On October 1, the People’s Republic of China will celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the revolution that gave Mao Tse-tung and the Communist party control of a vast, chaotic, and depleted nation. Today’s China has become a superpower, a country that in scale, ambition, and demonstrated success will be a dominant global force in the twenty-first century. As it happens I was a correspondent in the Soviet Union in 1977, the year it marked the sixtieth anniversary of its own Communist revolution. It too was then an acknowledged superpower that, along with the United States, sought to project military capacity and ideological hegemony the world over. Yet only fifteen years later, the Soviet Union disappeared, its empire shattered, its economy in ruins.
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The Snapshot: Public Backs Funding for Scientific Research
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
7/27/2009
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The Obama administration has put a strong emphasis on scientific research, backed up by funding commitments in the 2010 budget. And this appears to be simpatico with the views of the American public. A new survey from the Pew Research Center shows that the public, by 60-29, thinks government investment in research is essential for scientific progress, rather than believing that private investment can ensure scientific progress without government investment.
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The Platform: Reading Lolita in Beijing
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
7/21/2009
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The preferred shopping environment in China is captured in the characters for “renao,” which translates as commotion or, more literally, hot and noisy. By that standard, the Beijing Books Building is idyllic, five floors of books packed with excited customers, overwhelmingly young on a weekday morning. There is an astounding cross section of Chinese and international titles with a breadth and depth that would—and actually did—impress an American publisher on an informal mission to find out what is readily available to China’s 1.4 billion people. This bustling vista overwhelmed the inclination to measure what is there against what was not allowed or to dwell on the problem of piracy.
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The Platform: What’s a Fair Share In the Age of Google?
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Peter Osnos,
The Century Foundation,
7/14/2009
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The buzz inside Google is overwhelmingly positive about what the company does and how we will all benefit from the results—including the embattled denizens of newspapers and magazines who increasingly see Google as an enabler of their demise. Barely a decade ago, Google received its first $25 million investment, based on search technology developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the company’s cofounders. By the time it went public just five years later, “Google” was a verb.
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The Snapshot: Public Backs Sotomayor for the Supreme Court
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
7/7/2009
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Conservatives are doing their level best to derail the nomination of Latina Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, targeting her race and views on abortion in particular. But these culture wars appeals are having little effect on the public’s views.
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The Snapshot: Why the Public Supports a Public Plan
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Ruy Teixeira,
The Century Foundation,
7/2/2009
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Debate is really heating up on health care reform and at the center of that debate is Obama’s proposal to create a public plan option to compete with private insurance companies.
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Taking Note
