Among all the nonprofit and for-profit news organizations founded in the digital era when so many traditional print publications have suffered economic catastrophe, the most respected new enterprise is ProPublica. Launched in 2007–08 with a $30 million long-term commitment from the West Coast philanthropists Herbert and Marion Sandler, ProPublica has succeeded by every measurement. It has won a dazzling array of prizes, including the 2011 Pulitzer for National Reporting honoring a series called “The Wall Street Money Machine,” the first time a Pulitzer was awarded for stories that did not originate in print. ProPublica has also made a major contribution to what is called data-based journalism, a combination of investigative reporting and sophisticated computer analysis on issues such as pharmaceutical company payments to doctors across the country listed by name. In 2011, ProPublica partnered with twenty-seven other news organizations, including many of the country’s foremost names—the New York Times, the New Yorker, NPR, and PBS’s Frontline—to produce 115 stories. All this has been accomplished with a staff of about forty journalists and support personnel, which seems surprisingly small, given the impact ProPublica has had on the news. It has shown beyond doubt that there can be top quality reporting in a time of widespread cuts in resources across some of journalism’s most established entities.

There are two specific reasons now for all these encomiums to ProPublica:

(1) The announcement last week that Paul Steiger, 69, the founding editor-in-chief, CEO, and president of the organization, will become executive chairman at the end of the year, a position he describes as part-time including fund-raising and, I suspect, continuing to provide ideas and inspiration. Stepping up from managing editor to editor-in-chief in charge of editorial operations will be Stephen Engelberg, 54. The new president will be Richard Tofel, 55, ProPublica’s general manager (and the husband of Century Foundation president Janice Nittoli).

Both have been with ProPublica from the beginning and will now serve as co-chief executive officers. It was Steiger’s vision, which the Sandlers solicited and then supported, that top-tier investigative reporting could be done in the midst of all the disruptions of the Internet age. As a former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, Steiger and his team brought immediate credibility to their work and initiated the now-accepted concept of partnering with leading news organizations that in the past would have been dubious about joining in such collaborations. Succession in an enterprise like ProPublica is a crucial step from the founding years to the sustaining period in which long-term financial viability and professional standards are the goal.

(2) For the first time in 2011, ProPublica raised more than half of its budget (total revenues were $10,036,000; expenses were $9,609,000) from sources other than the Sandlers. According to the annual report, there were 2,600 donors in 2011, ranging from major foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to substantial individual gifts and, I suspect small donors who hit the appropriate pledge button on the ProPublica website. The Sandlers initial commitment was so generous that there were skeptics who wondered whether ProPublica could expand its base to a degree that would eventually enable operations without overwhelming dependence on a single patron. The Sandlers are still the largest donors by far, but they are reducing their share each year as ProPublica succeeds in expanding its base of supporters.

Persuasively, in its mission statement, ProPublica asserts that it spends 85 cents out of every dollar raised on news, “almost the exact opposite of traditional print news organizations, even very good ones, that devote 15 cents of each dollar spent to news.” ProPublica also stresses “an unusually high level of accountability for a non-profit” because it needs to convince editorial partners of its continuing quality. While ProPublica says it accepts advertising and would like to develop other revenue streams, it acknowledges that philanthropy “in gifts large and small will continue to be our principal source of income for the foreseeable future.” It needs to be said that dependence on philanthropy can be tenuous as priorities, especially among foundations, can change over time. But ProPublica has shown conclusively that it is possible to build a major news gatherer that the public will reward with donations, recognizing that the return on that support will only be in the amazing array of stories that profoundly affect how our institutions of government and private enterprise function.

For detailed reports on its activities and a daily subscription to new output, ProPublica’s website is the primary destination. In one report on the site, under the rubric of impact in the early months of 2012, there were multiple examples on subjects as diverse as presidential pardons, increasing disclosure among television stations on political ad spending, and a Texas case in which a conviction was overturned and a man serving a sixty-year sentence was released on bail. In five years, ProPublica has become a national asset and one model that works in journalism’s new age.

The Platform by Peter Osnos.

Conservatives are hoping to build support among Millennials (defined by Pew as those adults born 1981 or after) by capitalizing on economic discontent. But Millennials’ high level of concern about inequality may make that very hard, since conservatives deny inequality is much of a problem and actually propose to make it worse through their favored tax and budget policies.

The Public Religion Research Institute, in conjunction with the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, recently conducted a large-scale survey of college-age Millennials (ages 18-24). Among the findings was Millennials’ strong stand against inequality. Almost three-quarters (73 percent) agreed that “the economic system in this country favors the wealthy.”

Around 7 in 10 college-age Millennials (69 percent) also agreed that “the government should do more to reduce the gap between rich and poor.”

Finally, 72 percent said they favored “increasing the tax rate on Americans earning more than $1 million a year.”

Conservatives’ plans to exacerbate inequality may please some segments of the electorate but the Millennial generation does not appear to be one of them.

Beginning in the mid-1960s, Ben Bradlee was the greatest newspaper editor of his generation.  But the attention to Jeff Himmelman’s just published book, Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee, has largely focused on peripheral details, for example, Bob Woodward’s relationship with his source “Deep Throat,” FBI official Mark Felt. The controversy centers on Bradlee’s skepticism, expressed once years ago in an interview for his memoirs, about minor aspects of the story as told in Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s book about the case. The fact is that nothing of any consequence in the Watergate saga has been affected. Richard Nixon was forced from office because of crimes and cover-ups by the president and his aides. Woodward, Bernstein, Bradlee, and the Washington Post staff were primarily responsible for driving that story to its historic resolution.

The majority of Himmelman’s book is based on his access to Bradlee’s letters, memos, and descriptions of his unique charisma and commitment to journalism at its finest, which made him so formidable. The book is 473 pages long and delves deeply into Ben’s life and times, especially the years at the Washington Post. There is so much material that readers, except for the most dedicated, may find there is more than enough. Woodward and friends of the Bradlees have denounced the book as a betrayal, most vociferously in a New York Times Sunday story that excoriates Himmelman.

But embedded in Yours in Truth there are fundamental insights about journalism and the role of a dynamic press. In March 1968, Ben chose, over the objections of his publisher and proprietor, Katharine Graham, to run the text of an embargoed copy of the Kerner Commission report on race in America only a few days before its official release. On the day the text appeared, Bradlee wrote a memo to Mrs. Graham that is as good a summary of his approach to news as anything else that followed over the years:

Katharine. . . . Our duty is to publish news when it is news and that means when we learn and when we have checked its bona fides and when we have secured the information legally and when we have checked for libel and when we have assured ourselves that publishing is not against the national or public interest. . . . A newspaper that yields to any one of these pressures takes a sure step—perceptible however small—out of the newspaper business . . . each such step yields the independence we all cherish to someone else. Often, in this town to a President or his representatives . . . a newspaper that yields to any one of these pressures sacrifices one of (its) most precious assets—the vitality and commitment and possibly the respect of its reporters.

Now comes full disclosure: I worked for Bradlee at the Washington Post for eighteen years and every book published by PublicAffairs, the company I founded in 1997, carries a tribute to him that says “he supported his reporters with a tenacity that made them fearless.” PublicAffairs also published Himmelman’s collaboration with Quinn Bradlee, Ben’s son, on his memoir, A Different Life. In the acknowledgements of Yours in Truth, Himmelman calls me a friend and “a sounding board.” I talked to him about the book, but had nothing to do with how it was written or edited.

There are substantial parts of the book that recount dramatic episodes in Bradlee’s tenure as editor, which ended in 1991. Most of these stories have been told before, including in Ben’s entertaining memoir, A Good Life, and Katharine Graham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning autobiography, Personal History. Ben instructed Himmelman to write about everything he learned in his reporting, and he did so, which means there are expressions of Bradlee’s candor as events unfold and private asides about family matters that have made the principals in the saga furious. But for all the elements of the book that have landed with a thud, it does underscore what it was about Bradlee’s leadership and professional courage that made an indelible impression on journalism. Ben was never considered an introspective person or an ideological one. Yet his convictions about the role of the press run very deep. In a 1974 speech to the Dirks Newspaper Financial Forum, Bradlee said:

Unique among manufactured products, the newspaper is completely different every 24 hours and it can’t be recalled for mistakes of fact or judgment. It is produced in an adversary environment where the goals of the reported inherently conflict with the goals of the reporter and the reader. It is this daily conflict that gives concrete importance and meaning to the First Amendment, to freedom of the press. Without that freedom, there is no conflict, and without that conflict there is no truth.

Ours is an era of twenty-four-hour cable and masses of Internet-driven opinion that too often overwhelm what has actually happened. Bradlee flourished in a time when what counted was the hard news he put into the paper each day and the standards he demanded from his reporters and editors and, for the most part, their intense loyalty to his credo. Every portrayal of Ben emphasizes his swashbuckling newsroom style, which was irresistible. The closing coda of Yours in Truth nicely conveys a subtler side of Bradlee’s persona. Weeks after he retired as editor, he wrote to a senior at a North Carolina high school who, as editor of her school’s paper, asked him to summarize the key to his “integrity and extreme dedication.” Bradlee replied:

I’ve always had trouble explaining myself and my principles. I believe in hard work. I believe in fighting all kinds of domination. I believe in steering clear of the big shots. I believe in total honesty. I believe in compassion. Sincerely, Ben Bradlee.

Candidates like to preach the preeminence of American values on the campaign trail, but it's interests that dominate inside the White House, writes Michael Cohen.

Every spring, the Overseas Press Club of America has a banquet to hand out prizes in what this year were twenty-seven categories. There is a widespread belief that coverage of foreign news in recent years has been significantly diminished as newspapers, news magazines, and broadcast networks have reduced and in some cases eliminated altogether their bureaus abroad. And yet as each recipient came forward and their work was described, I grew increasingly impressed with the range and quality of the stories being honored and with how many organizations were represented. There are traditional winners such as the New York Times, represented this year by C. J. Chivers for his reporting from Libya and Afghanistan: “tough, cool and brave: these were the hallmarks of Chivers’ great reporting in 2011.” A team from the Wall Street Journal won for a series that showed how Iran, Egypt, Libya, and Syria used technology supplied by Western and Chinese companies to “spy on dissidents, track mobile phone users, conduct surveillance of them and censor web activity and satellite television broadcasts.” Another Wall Street Journal team won for “coverage of the European sovereign-debt crisis . . . in a nuanced three-dimensional series that explained how a mountain of debt threatened to sink a continent.” For all the justified travail News Corporation and the Murdochs face because of the scandals in the United Kingdom (and conceivably in the United States), the Wall Street Journal can still do outstanding reporting.

The Associated Press’s David Guttenfelder won photography awards for a series from North Korea and a spread in the National Geographic from inside Japan’s closed-off nuclear exclusion zone surrounding the Fukushima Daiichi power plant after the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami. Pete Muller of the AP won a photography prize for “documenting a sensitive and difficult story, rape in the Democratic Republic of Congo.” The New Yorker won two prizes; one of which, I should acknowledge, about Fukushima, went to my son Evan, and the other to Sarah Stillman, a young freelancer who did a remarkable investigation about the abuse of foreign workers on American military bases in war zones, “including sexual assault and indentured servitude, that were ultimately carried out on behalf of the U.S. government and funded by American taxpayers.” Among the other winners were ABC News, NPR, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times, for a project with ProPublica on how banks have taken advantage of gaps in tax laws costing the U.S. government billions in lost revenue. The full list of winners is available on the OPC website.

I want to especially recognize several organizations whose contributions last year represented extraordinary output that would not necessarily be thought of as part of the general news ecosystem. The General Excellence Online Award went to the staff of ForeignPolicy.com, which has been transformed over the years from a quarterly magazine with a limited circulation to a genuinely creative Internet site with, as the citation read, “wonderfully clever and engaging content which helps readers see the world in new ways.” As one judge commented, “the image and illustration choices were inspired and even funny . . . I was drawn to every topic from Japan to the Kremlin.” There was praise for ForeignPolicy.com’s effective use of social media, integrating Twitter and attracting “an engaged and informed community of commentators.” Susan Glasser is editor-in-chief of the website and the magazine, and congratulations are in order to her and the small but clearly very talented staff.

The Council on Foreign Relations won the prize for Best Use of Online Multimedia “such as interactive graphics, Flash and slideshows to report on international news.” On CFR.org the “Crisis Guide: Iran” used multimedia to provide in depth coverage of Iranian politics, economics, and, of course, its nuclear program. The Council on Foreign Relations magazine, Foreign Affairs, has maintained its stature for decades as the leading journal for the cognoscente, which is why it is so notable that its website has moved from stodgy reproductions of articles to what the OPC said were “visually pleasing and accessible” graphs, timelines, and video interviews. The award for Best Use of Online Video went to Maisie Crow and Jesse Dukes of the Virginia Quarterly Review for “Half-Lives: The Chernobyl Workers Today.” This small enterprise managed to produce video, archival footage, and still photography that the judges said “are rarely seen in video produced for the web. [Ms. Crow] has elevated the standard for online video.” The winner for Best Online Coverage of Breaking News was GlobalPost, the Boston-based organization, which has stringers all over the world and, now in its fourth year, is attracting followers for its energy, commitment, and breadth. Its prize was for coverage in a seventy-two-hour period when Muammar Gadhafi was captured and assassinated

There were 520 entries this year for OPC awards, and aside from the award winners there were runner-up citations in every category that doubtless also included excellent work. So, while we need to concede—and mightily regret—that time-honored foreign newsgathering has been cut back sharply in some quarters (particularly from metropolitan dailies), readers and viewers with an interest in the world have an enormous amount of news and background information available. But now, more perhaps than ever before, the responsibility for finding the best of what there is takes effort from consumers of the news. What the OPC recognition of these winners demonstrates is that the search for quality is definitely worth the time, and the results are, well, rewarding.

After the highly competitive and seemingly endless GOP primary season, there is a consensus that—despite the triviality and invective so far—“we ain’t seen nothing yet.” Whatever our divisions over candidates, we mostly agree that our recent presidential campaigns have had real moments of junk journalism, unfair advertising, and tortured “facts.” The emphasis on gossip, scandal, trivia, and "tabloid journalism" is decried by citizens, media people, politicians, and scholars, but it has also been growing for years. What will surely make everything worse this year is the Supreme Court enabled wide-open competition for money and spending. A host of reasons are offered for the carnival atmosphere, attack ads, and the petty news coverage. One explanation, seldom mentioned, is an old one: this stuff works—the mud sticks to candidates under attack and it also attracts audiences.

Candidates, being human, have real vulnerabilities. The voters and the press need to look deeply into their backgrounds for clues to their characters in order to imagine how they'd behave as president. Sometimes we claim to see important hints in their personal as well as professional lives. In fact, we've always struggled for proxies that might help us guess how a candidate would behave if entrusted with the top job in the country and to remind voters of what’s at stake.

In 1984, Walter Mondale's campaign ran a commercial that showed a red phone ringing in the White House. Voters were invited to speculate about who they trusted to answer it. The Red Phone approach, of course, has lost its bite with the end of the Cold War and the threat of planetary extinction. Perhaps because we no longer apply the threshold test of imagining how a prospective president might behave in a nuclear crisis, we feel freer to speculate about other questions.

The big unregulated money will make every insinuation louder and is especially likely to have a profound effect magnifying any charges in congressional races. People generally know less about those contests and they get less “free media.” In the presidential race the public also has a chance in the debate process to see the candidates in direct competition.

Overall, however, among the many explanations for the campaign coverage we are getting, one seems to me most apt and particularly troubling. The kind of reporting we are getting may well be a purer market solution to the news business. We know that scandal sells. Sex, innuendo, and gossip sell. You don't have to do a scientific survey to see what the market solution is for commercial and especially cable television. In this context perhaps the really amazing thing is that there has been so much restraint in past political coverage. There always has been, of course, an upscale audience that buys advertising in "more serious publications." And we still have a few family-owned media outlets that are not subject to such intense market pressures to maximize shareholder value. There are also a handful of candidates who will raise their funds largely from small contributors. But both restraint in fundraising and in advertising fly in the face of powerful forces propelling big money and just short of big lies.

We believe in markets; we've sold the idea to the world, and there is much to commend it. In the last thirty years, at least until the onset of the Great Recession and the Occupy Wall Street movement, Americans were born again into the faith that market forces would produce the best of all possible worlds. This belief has extended well beyond the more limited idea that markets can provide a superior form of private capital allocation. We see them as inextricably bound up with the freedom and liberalism of democracy.

I don't quarrel with these views except for the vital fact that they tend to oversimplify both markets and human beings. All around us there are people every day making decisions that have nothing to do with profit maximization or personal wealth.  They fall in love; they commit suicide; they waste time; they go to church.  In Yugoslavia, rather than celebrate their initiation to free enterprise, they started killing each other over ethnic divisions hundreds of years old. Our everyday experience, in fact, is that we see people motivated by all sorts of things that are not necessarily likely to produce the most income or to maximize market efficiency.  Economic man, in short, is only part of the story. The Marxists learned that the hard way; perhaps we will too.

The more immediate question this election year is can we harness some of the other forces that influence our behavior to influence the mix of coverage we are getting?  Is there, for example, any role for good taste? Can we restore gossip to its proper lowly place among the considerations that go into choosing a president? Are we capable of insisting that campaign coverage emphasize other issues and values? We theoretically could restrain the media and force it to report the campaign a particular way. After all, what the media reports is in fact the experience voters have—very few of us have direct contact with the candidates. But, of course, that remedy would be worse than the disease.

My personal fantasy is that an economic solution might be possible, with an aroused public supporting public funding of campaigns and demanding serious coverage of the contests. More realistically, perhaps the best we can hope for is an increase in peer pressure among journalists: more shame and guilt for the bad actors, and alternatively more approval and applause for those who cover the campaign responsibly. On the whole, the Great Republic coexists quite nicely with selfishness and greed. But we have the right and perhaps the obligation to demand more from our press.  We certainly do from our presidents, insisting that they reflect a great many of our values beyond mere commitment to the free enterprise system. Perhaps these two ideas are not unrelated.

Can a press that is driven only by the marketplace adequately report and judge the candidates for chief executive and the deeper values they represent?  In 2012, that is a tough question. Democracy may indeed give us the leadership we deserve. But when it comes to the media, we only get what we pay for.

Richard Kahlenberg quoted in The Fiscal Times.

Conservatives continue to push hardline positions on social issues, but evidence is piling up that they are out of tune with the public. The prime example is same-sex marriage. While conservatives fret about marriage equality’s alleged threat to the American way of life, the public is quietly coming to terms with the reality of same-sex marriage.

According to just-released Pew Research Center data, opposition to same-sex marriage averaged 60 percent in 2004, dropped to 51 percent by 2008, and in their latest poll is just 43 percent. A plurality, 47 percent, now support “allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally,” a finding consistent with a number of other recent national polls.

Meanwhile, a steady majority supports women’s reproductive rights. The same poll found 53 percent saying abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to 39 percent who thought it should be illegal in all or most cases. This is very close to the average split over the last couple of years, which, in turn, is very close to the split back in 2007-08.

These data suggest that conservatives’ attempts to revive the culture wars over social issues is not likely to be successful. That’s bad for them but good for the country.

And while the President is certainly correct that the US has devastated AQ's leadership it should be noted that the surge he ordered in 2009 did little to add to that devastation. I get that the President wants to put a positive spin on the war, but Afghanistan is very far from being on the glide path to stability - and indeed, seems likely to continue to be mired in low-level civil war for some time to come.

Part of the reason for this comes in this section of Obama's speech:

In coordination with the Afghan government, my Administration has been in direct discussions with the Taliban. We have made it clear that they can be a part of this future if they break with al Qaeda, renounce violence, and abide by Afghan laws. Many members of the Taliban - from foot soldiers to leaders - have indicated an interest in reconciliation. A path to peace is now set before them. Those who refuse to walk it will face strong Afghan Security Forces, backed by the United States and our allies.

It's a very positive sign that the President is publicly acknowledging talks between the US and the Taliban, but statements like those in italics don't really amount to negotiation - they are basically calling on the Taliban to surrender.  This isn't really a path to reconciliation because it presupposes the outcome. Clearly the Taliban are not going to break with al Qaeda, renounce violence or agree to abide by the Afghanistan Constitution as the first step in a political negotiation - rather all of these steps come at the end. The White House position, which has been the case for quite some time, is not to treat the Taliban as a political actor with legitimate grievances but rather an adversary to be beaten into submission. Not only is this unlikely to occur, but it makes it ever harder to come up with a sustainable political settlement.

Obama's statement is indicative of the lack of seriousness to which the US has approached the subject of political reconciliation. For example, late last month, we saw indications that the Administration was pulling back on plans to release five Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay as a good faith measure to jumpstart talks. The reason: fears of a political backlash. That an Administration, which has already endorsed troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, is afraid of the political fallout from a confidence building measure with the Taliban because it might lead to a one day story of criticism from Republicans is an indication of how minimal the courage is inside the White House to push for a political solution.

That Obama reiterated on Tuesday his "negotiation by surrender" strategy is further evidence that the White House is disinclined to use any political capital in pursuing the path of reconciliation. The result is that US troops could be in Afghanistan for years to come.

The fact is, the SPA is really just a means to an end - the end being a political deal with the Taliban.  The whole rationale for the SPA is not to keep the US in Afghanistan forever, but to use it as a tool of leverage to push and prod the Taliban to the negotiating table. It's a way of saying to the Taliban, 'we're staying for at least ten years . . . unless you want to have a serious conversation about reconciliation that might get us out sooner.'

But for such a plan to work the White House has to demonstrate a modicum of political courage and take the steps necessary to make a political settlement to the conflict possible. Instead Obama seems more than happy to kick the can down the road - and in the process ensure that Afghanistan has something very far from the rosy future that he talked about on Tuesday night.

This article was first pubilshed in Democracy Arsenal.

A lengthy Wall Street Journal analysis of the Department of Justice price-fixing case against five publishers and Apple features a photo of Picholine, the swanky restaurant (Zagat calls it “one of the best restaurants in town”) where, according to the DOJ, the alleged conspiracy took shape. The lawsuit asserts that “meetings took place in private dining rooms of upscale Manhattan restaurants and were used to discuss confidential business and competitive matters, including Amazon’s e-book retailing practices. No legal counsel was present at any of these meetings.” Nothing in all that has been written about this case seems to have made a deeper impression than the image of the executives in a private room called “The Chef’s Wine Cellar” agreeing to challenge Amazon’s policy of deep discounts on e-books.

Personally, I find the notion of an exclusive cabal among the bibulous publishers intent on joint action far-fetched, although experts say it probably would have been better to have a lawyer present to assure antitrust guidelines were being followed.

All of the publishers, including the three that have settled—HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Hachette—insist they have done nothing wrong. And that is doubtless their sincere belief. Those that accepted the DOJ terms said they did so to avoid a protracted and expensive litigation. Penguin, Macmillan, and Apple are ready to press their defense in the court battle that will now follow. What really did happen at Picholine, and in the other sessions where Amazon’s overwhelming dominance of the digital book market was discussed among competing CEOs? Only those present know for sure, and considering the status of the DOJ case, they are in no position now to make any detailed statements. So, the rest of the publishing community and media commentators are engaged in a spirited debate about how to respond to the DOJ’s serious charges.

Based on my reading of the lawsuit, news articles, columns, and publishing industry blogs, what seemed a strikingly simultaneous accord among the publishers with Apple could reasonably have aroused questions in DOJ’s antitrust division on the lookout for potential targets. These agreements, reached in a matter of weeks with Apple in early 2010, had the effect of changing the long-standing business model of their dealings with retailers to “agency” pricing, which would enable the publishers to set the prices of books and pay the booksellers a commission, set at 30 percent. Under the “wholesale” model, which is still followed in most transactions with bookstores like Barnes &Noble and the independents, publishers sell their books to retailers at about half their listed price, and retailers then set their own prices.

What justifiably alarmed publishers and other booksellers was the prospect of Amazon’s overwhelming position in the emerging e-book market. At its peak in 2009, Amazon’s dominance of the marketplace was about 90 percent of digital sales because of the early success of its Kindle reader and the $9.99 price it set for bestsellers and new releases. Ironically, the comparison most often made at the time was the way Apple—through its iTunes and iPods, and charging just $0.99 per song—had so completely taken over music sales that, in a few years, national stalwarts such as Tower Records and Sam Goody’s went out of business as album sales declined by more than half. Conceivably, with the experience of Apple’s music strategy in mind, the DOJ chose to preempt the possibility of anything like it happening again by dissolving the publisher’s agreements. Of particular concern to the DOJ as evidence of price fixing were the so-called “most favored nations” (MFN) provisions that assured that no prices would be lower than Apple’s. “Instead of an MFN designed to protect Apple’s ability to compete,” the DOJ complaint charged, “this MFN was designed to protect Apple from having to compete in price at all.” Sharis A. Pozen, the outgoing assistant attorney general for the DOJ’s Antitrust Division, in a valedictory speech at the Brookings Institution, said that the case is “most importantly . . . about lower e-book prices for consumers.”

For the time being, the long-term impact of the DOJ case on the publishing industry remains unclear, but Amazon certainly comes out ahead, with its position as the leading retailer of e-books reinforced, which also benefits its role as a major seller of traditional print books, self-published books, downloadable audio, and now also as a publisher. Microsoft’s surprise announcement Monday that it will invest hundreds of millions of dollars in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division adds yet another major component to the electronic book market and assures that competition will intensify.. Ultimately, with so many factors to consider, I  agree with Senator Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) who said “I feel absolutely befuddled by the lawsuit. For the Antitrust Division to step in as the big protector of Amazon doesn’t seem to make any sense from an antitrust point of view. Rarely have I seen a suit that so ill serves the interests of the consumer.” On the other hand, according to the Wall Street Journal (in the piece illustrated with a color photo of Picholine), a consensus of antitrust experts agreed that DOJ had reason to believe the publishers were acting together. “Price fixing is kind of the first-degree murder of antitrust violations,” Herbert Hovenkamp, a law professor at the University of Iowa said, and the DOJ had to act on “what appears to be a strong set of facts that if true, are one of the most central of antitrust violations.”

Lawyers and judges on the trial and appellate levels will have to resolve this dispute, and that could take years. Geoffrey Manne, an antitrust expert, told Bloomberg BusinessWeek that “one of the big problems with this suit as with others in the tech realm is that by the time it’s concluded, the market is likely to have changed so much that it will become irrelevant.” Until that happens, developments in the DOJ case are crucial to publishing’s future.

Michael Cohen in The Guardian.

President Barack Obama recently observed that tackling climate change remains vitally important despite difficulties moving legislation forward. Conservatives, of course, are trying their utmost to remove the issue permanently from political discussion, claiming that the public is tired of the debate and no longer has an appetite for combating global warming.

But a just-released poll from the Yale and George Mason climate change communication programs reveals the lie in this claim. In the poll 63 percent of respondents said the United States should move forward to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of what other countries do, compared to 3 percent who said we should await action by industrialized countries, 8 percent who said we should wait for both industrialized and developing countries to move, and 5 percent who said we shouldn't bother reducing emissions.

In the same poll the public supported, by a margin of 63 percent to 37 percent, requiring electric utilities to produce at least 20 percent of their electricity from renewable energy sources, even if that would cost the average household an extra $100 per year.

The poll also found 65 percent of Americans supporting an international treaty to require a 90 percent cut in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

Clearly, reports of the death of public support for action on global warming are overblown. Contrary to conservative assertions, that support is alive and kicking.

In the bumpy road to the Republican nomination this year, there have been fresh examples of the prominence of personal foibles as drivers of political outcomes. With questions mounting about past behavior toward women, then-frontrunner Herman Caine felt compelled to withdraw from the race. Newt Gingrich’s multiple marriages and overlapping affairs have been a burden to his candidacy. And the unique features of Mitt Romney’s religious beliefs are a staple of campaign coverage.

Nor does this crop of candidates have the bad behavior franchise all to themselves. In just a couple weeks, the John Edwards trial, the Secret Service in Columbia, a few errant troopers in Afghanistan, and staff members from the General Services Administration in Las Vegas have all contributed to the feeling that the adults have stopped supervising the kids.

Now, as far as we know, sexual gossip, battlefield insensitivity, and scandalmongering are as old as language (and were probably preceded by hand gestures). Literacy, whatever its other advantages, merely extended the range of reporting about such matters. And a sensation-obsessed press is scarcely new; it would be as familiar to contemporaries of Cotton Mather as it is to us. Things do change, however, and the persistence of a general phenomenon does not mean that it invariably takes the same form.

Most of the time one can discern a clear historical trend. While for some time we have been incapable of being shocked by a "glimpse of stocking," occasionally the perpetually downward curve of taste and seriousness in public discourse does steepen its decline. There are aspects of the current "situation" in politics that clearly have no precedent. The pervasiveness of the media and the immediacy of reporting certainly seem to be increasing geometrically. Even in the days of competing newspapers in metropolitan areas and a few all-night radio shows, there was no exact counterpart to the Internet or a twenty-four-hour news cycle. In addition, surely less and less is left to the imagination, and more and more is explicit, in our culture, art, movies, television, news, and at the Government Printing Office. Add to the list of developments the confessional genre of articles, television shows, memoirs, and biographies.

In some ways, politics, although currently in the midst of a frantic catch-up phase, has lagged these trends. It might have been foolish to think that the "new standards" (or non-standards) with regard to privacy and revelation would not eventually invade and conquer the public and political sphere. They appear to be irresistible. Perhaps the best example in recent years of the hunger for sensation was the moment when Hustler magazine took out a full-page ad in the Washington Post offering up to $1 million to anyone who can provide "documentary evidence of illicit sexual relations" by prominent officeholders.

While the political demise of several members of Congress and a couple of governors was a consequence of sexual misconduct, public officials have seen a host of other issues about their private lives revealed. Mental and physical health, substance abuse, and sexual orientation are obvious examples of subjects most people wish to keep private. Yet when these people become public servants—whether in the executive branch, on the bench, or in state or local government—their private lives become fair game. Many other countries are bewildered by America's focus on matters that are simply irrelevant elsewhere in the world.

Despite occasional examples of the public’s maturity on these matters, it is clear that highly qualified individuals are now declaring that they are unwilling to subject themselves or their families to such scrutiny and are reconsidering running for office. General Colin Powell, for one, declined to run for president in part because his wife, who has been treated for depression, was reluctant to subject their family to scrutiny.

The situation today may also be a consequence of the growing emphasis in recent years on family values. When some hold themselves out as moral arbiters for the rest of us, all, including the arbiters themselves, eventually may come under scrutiny. Ultimately, we must examine whether it is possible to have a "one-size-fits-all" approach to public and private morality. More generally, the question, perhaps, should be: What is likely to be the impact on the shape and effectiveness of government?

Michael Cohen in Foreign Policy.

Michael Cohen in The Guardian.

A new play explores the life of a luminary who, in the midst of a changing news culture, lost his way, writes Peter Osnos.

It has been nearly fifty years since Joseph Alsop was at the pinnacle of American journalism, with an influential syndicated newspaper column and a flamboyant persona that made him a Washington character of the first rank. John Lithgow’s portrait of Alsop in The Columnist, which opens this week at the Manhattan Theater Club on Broadway, captures Alsop’s distinctive quirks and his era with admirable attention to period detail. The Columnist is written by David Auburn, whose play Proof won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play and was later adapted as a film. Proof focused on the inner turmoil of a central figure, Catherine, who was determined to defend the integrity of her late father’s challenged work as a mathematician at the University of Chicago. Like Proof, the subject of The Columnist focuses on a fall from grace:Alsop was renowned for his opinions and fluency in his heyday during the 1950s and 1960s, but gradually lost much of that clout as his irascibility undermined the column’s clarity of judgment, particularly about Vietnam.

For all his years of eminence in Washington’s elite circles, Joe Alsop, as the play unfolds, seems increasingly lonely and out of phase with the emerging culture of political trends, popular protest, and broadcast punditry that was not Alsop’s style. In an unusual and astute self-appraisal about his role, Lithgow wrote in a Newsweek column that, despite his “fame, notoriety and power, Joe has been forgotten by all but the chattering class of 70-year-olds and older. But Auburn has chosen to place him center stage once again—a brilliant, seductive, infuriating, secretive altogether captivating leading man, born to the spotlight.”
Alsop, along with his brother Stewart, with whom he collaborated on a widely admired column (which, for example, took on McCarthyism) from 1945 to 1958, and his wife Susan Mary, a widow he married in 1961, were quintessential figures in Washington’s elite social and journalism circles of the Cold War era. So prominent was Alsop that, at the end of his inaugural evening rounds, John Kennedy stopped off at Alsop’s townhouse in Georgetown for a nightcap. Susan Mary, who had two children (consolidated for the purposes of the play into a daughter, Abigail, nicely portrayed by Grace Gummer, Meryl Streep’s daughter), married Alsop knowing the central secret of his life: that he was a homosexual. In fact, the play opens in Moscow in 1957 with a gay sexual encounter Alsop had with a “guide” supplied by the KGB, which photographed the men and, in a clumsy effort at blackmail, circulated the pictures widely; but, to Alsop’s credit, they were unsuccessful in intimidating him. Privacy in sexual matters still prevailed in Washington then, and Alsop’s homosexuality was clearly an open secret, which the play uses as a frame for the arc of the story.

The photographs surface again when, in the play, they make their way into the hands of David Halberstam, the New York Times reporter (and later a distinguished author) who, in reality, vigorously clashed with Alsop over his support of the Vietnam War. Alsop’s fervent backing of the war, which continued long past the point when most of his peers believed the conflict a hopeless quagmire, is crucial to the ultimately poignant sense that Alsop was increasingly isolated as the years passed. As a focus of dramatic action, Halberstam (who died in a car accident in 2007), is meant to represent the deep divide between his generation of reporters, whose best sources were soldiers in the field, in contrast to Alsop, whose preference for officials at the highest level actually led to his misjudgments about the status and outcome of the conflict. Even as his standing as an arbiter of events was waning, Alsop, by now long separated from Susan Mary, continued to surround himself with prominent Washington figures. In the early 1970s, Alsop visited Vietnam while I was there as a correspondent for the Washington Post. I no longer exactly remember the circumstances, but recall Alsop saying one evening after several glasses of wine that the wretched war had cost him “his health, his figure, and his reputation.”

Although faithful to the basic facts of Alsop’s activities and the tenor of the times, The Columnist is not meant to be a docudrama. The script, published in book form by Faber and Faber, describes the play as “inspired by the real-life story of Joseph Alsop,” and there is considerable conflation of events, for the valid purposes of shaping the narrative. The question that hangs over the play is its relevance to our age beyond its portrayal of an especially colorful personality and how journalism has changed in the decades since Alsop was in his prime. Certainly, journalism still has its celebrities, including some who write columns, but their standing comes far more than it did in the past from visible prominence as public commentators.

Lithgow contends in his Newsweek piece that the only person “wielding a fraction of Joe Alsop’s power is Rush Limbaugh.” The comparison would have appalled Alsop, who prided himself on erudition and high-brow mannerisms. Actually, presenting Alsop as a historical artifact is entirely appropriate, but many of the preeminent journalists of today are in their own way his descendants, with the same ambitions and pursuit of power that he so manifestly displayed. Perhaps in a half-century there will be a play about, say, Rush Limbaugh. But for now, The Columnist gives us a vivid star-turn on Joe Alsop, a man of his times, with echoes for our era as well.

The standard conservative line on the economy right now is that government has done way too much. Time to cut taxes and drastically reduce government's role, they say. The public isn't so sure.

In a new CBS/New York Times poll, the public, by an overwhelming 67-15 percent, said the government should be doing more, not less, to help middle-class Americans.

One way to do this, of course, is to promote economic growth. Here also the public departs from conservative nostrums. In the same poll, just 37 percent thought the way to grow the economy was by cutting taxes for individuals and businesses and paying for those cuts by reducing spending on government services and programs. In contrast, 56 percent endorsed spending more on education and the nation's infrastructure as the best way to promote growth, and paying for that by raising taxes on wealthy individuals and businesses.

The public does think the government should do more to help the economy and certainly believes the wealthy should chip in to support these activities. Conservatives are entitled to their own point of view. But they shouldn't pretend the public is with them in their sacred quest to dismantle government.

Unless you are embedded somewhere in the publishing industry spectrum as an author, editor, bookseller, or librarian, the odds are that you will find it very hard to keep up with the pace of sweeping changes underway connected to the impact of the enormous expansion of digital reading. The latest authoritative survey came from Pew Research, reporting that 21 percent of American adults say they have read an e-book in the past year, with the average number of books at 24, compared to 15 for those who said they purchased only printed books—confirmation that digital readers represent, generally speaking, very good news for literacy.

But there are three ongoing issues that greatly complicate the evolving book culture and the publishing business. In the summaries that follow, my goal is to provide as nearly as possible an unbiased consumer’s guide to what is happening in these complex and contentious clashes in the industry.

Publishers and the Department of Justice. After months of investigation, the Department of Justice last week filed anti-trust cases against Apple and five of the country’s largest publishers—Penguin Group USA, Hachette Books Group, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, and Macmillan—accusing them in a civil action of colluding in a plan to raise the price of newly released and bestselling e-books. Three of the publishers—Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon &Schuster—settled with the DOJ and accepted limitations on how they can sell e-books going forward, but all insisted that they had done nothing wrong. They said the settlement was intended to cut short a protracted and expensive litigation. Apple, Macmillan, and Penguin refused to settle, and will confront the consequences of DOJ’s copious evidence of meetings among the publishers and e-mails quoted in the lawsuit that support the allegations that publishers “took steps to conceal their communications with one another.”

The origin of the dispute was the launch in 2007 of Amazon’s Kindle reader, which ignited e-book sales that previously had been negligible. From the outset, Amazon’s prices ($9.99 for bestsellers) were considered by publishers to be loss-leaders intended to drive sales of the Kindle, which soon numbered in the millions. Publishers believed that Amazon’s plan was to condition consumers to expect these low prices, and that eventually the accrued losses would be passed along to publishers if they wanted to maintain their place in what was the dominant digital market. In 2010, Apple prepared to release the iPad, considered a viable competitor to Kindle. Apparently, at the suggestion of Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs, the publishers came to favor what was called “agency” pricing, in which publishers set the price to consumers, instead of the long-standing practice known as “wholesale” pricing, in which booksellers purchased books from publishers and decided whether and how to discount them. Under the agency model, Apple’s iBookstore and other retailers (including Barnes & Noble, whose Nook devices have developed a popular following) would receive a 30 percent commission on prices set by the publisher. Apple insisted on the principle that books would not be sold by anyone at a price lower than Apple’s, and publishers agreed. This accord, known as “most favored nation” pricing, seems to be the crux of the assertion that publishers were acting as a group in dealing with Apple. Amazon bitterly complained that it was being pressured to accept agency pricing, but relented because the publishers, uncharacteristically, seemed so firm in their resolve. The net effect overall was to raise the price of many of the most popular e-books by several dollars, to the range of $12.99–$14.99.

As it stands, the DOJ suit is a major victory for Amazon, and the New York Times headline succinctly captured the fallout: “Cut in E-Book Pricing by Amazon Is Set to Shake Rivals.” It is by no means clear how Macmillan, Penguin, and Apple will fare going forward, but there is little question that the results of the DOJ’s actions will in time have a significant effect on these major publishers, all of whom already have what they describe as a difficult relationship with an increasingly powerful Amazon. Publishers can expect Amazon’s already stiff demands for promotional payments, for example, to increase. At their best, publishers rarely register robust profits. Ultimately, customers should recognize that books priced attractively but too low will undermine the ability of publishers to meet their costs—including royalties to authors (Scott Turow, president of the Author’s Guild, has expressed alarm) and the overheads for maintaining their businesses.

Google and the Independent Booksellers. Google has informed the American Booksellers Association, the trade organization for independent stores, that it is ending its partnership with them as an e-book provider. The agreement was reached in 2010, but despite 350 stores signing on, the alliance never developed momentum. Google’s statement was blunt: “The program has not gained the traction that we hoped it would with customers and retailers, so we have made the difficult decision to discontinue it.” On behalf of the ABA, Oren Teicher, the chief executive, wrote members: “To say the least we are very disappointed. . . . As an enormous multinational corporation, Google has interests far beyond independent bookstores and the book world at large, and at times, it has lacked understanding of many basic principles of our industry.”

The Google deal ends next January, but the ABA says it is certain to find alternative means for selling e-books before then. “We know that our volume of e-book sales has been modest,” Teicher said in his letter; “We also know that being able to offer e-books to your customers is an indispensable feature of any bookstore’s web offerings.” The failed Google partnership highlights a continuing reality: it is no longer viable to consider digital sales as marginal, so the independents have to learn to market e-books in whatever formats are devised. From what I understand, only a handful of stores made the full-on effort to draw customers to download from them. Quality delivery and technical support will be essential components in the success of bookstores going forward. The magnitude and implications of the Department of Justice’s lawsuit adds yet another component of pressure on the booksellers to find the means to compete with the vast resources of the digital behemoths. The task is formidable.

Libraries and Digital Reading. The New York Public Library has a key committee  drawn from the Board of Trustees called the Task Force on the Virtual Future, a high-powered group grappling with how to integrate e-books into the traditional role of lending libraries. For now, the largest publishers remain wary of making current e-books available through libraries, because of the likelihood that potential buyers instead will become borrowers of digital books that never wear out. The largest publishers either do not sell to libraries at all, or limit their availability. Random House recently announced a policy that would as much as triple the price of e-books to libraries. “We believe that pricing to libraries must account for the higher value of this institutional model which permits e-books to be repeatedly circulated without limitation,” the publisher said in a statement. Of those books that the libraries do have on hand, the Kindle, Barnes & Noble’s Nook, and the vast number of books scanned by Google are principal means of access.

The leaders of major library systems are focused on strategies that will attract borrowers who favor e-readers while reassuring publishers that they do not risk a substantial fall-off in sales from consumers able to download library books from home. For now, the terms of libraries’ new relationships with their patrons are matters of debate and are far from settled. Lending libraries are great community assets, and the challenge they face is to remain relevant by increasing the universe of material that is available electronically, while also maintaining their venues as destinations people choose to visit. The New York Public Library, for example, is in the midst of a major effort to explain a controversial and expensive renovation plan for its main branch at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue that would make it more of a digital hub incorporating the Science, Industry, and Business Library operations. To make room for the changes, a large portion of the three million volumes now in the stacks would be placed in a storage facility in New Jersey. Anthony Marx, president of the library system, has written an extensive Q&A, “NYPL Embraces the Future of Libraries,” responding to critics by assuring them that the books would remain easily accessible. Whatever your position on the shift, Marx made a pledge in his extensive response to critics that will be the standard on which the changes will be judged: “Our absolute priority is to preserve the integrity of the library and its collections as well as the unparalleled quality of the services we offer. This is the baseline we must maintain in order to do even more.”

How all these issues are resolved will determine the shape of the digital publishing and reading experience, but only for a short time, if the recent past is a valid guide. As the use of devices increases and their multiple functions evolve, new problems in the commercial and technical arenas are bound to emerge—that is the pattern of progress—and new ways of dealing with them will have to be found.