Category Archives: The State

McClatchy column

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I just want you to know,
my offer still stands
By BRAD WARTHEN
EDITORIAL PAGE EDITOR
DEAR McCLATCHY: This is to assure you that my offer is still open.
    You folks have a lot on your plate right now, what with sorting out your acquisition of a company three times your size and the need to sell the 12 Knight Ridder papers that the whole world has essentially said, for the past four months, it doesn’t want.
    But I figure you could use some cash right now, just in case Philadelphia, San Jose and those other big papers don’t jump off the shelves as quick as you’d like.
    I hereby offer to help you keep the lights on in the interim by paying you up to $500 million for the dinky old State paper, which you don’t need, seeing as how you already have a bunch of papers around here.
    When will you have the money? Soon as somebody gives it to me. I explained all that in my Friday column. (I’ll add that my business plan doesn’t absolutely depend upon my saving Bill Gates’ life and him being insanely grateful. Any other billionaire who feels endangered should just holler; I will come running.)
    Readers may wonder why I’d part with such a large chunk of my soon-to-be-hard-earned pay. After all, isn’t being bought by the McClatchy Company the best possible outcome for The State and the community it serves? Besides, whenever I do get the cash, why would I want to blow it on a newspaper? Haven’t Wall Street analysts made it clear that print is all but dead?
    First, yes, most KR journalists, and probably most of the business side folks, too, have been crossing fingers, rubbing rabbits’ feet and otherwise doing all we could (which ain’t much) to ensure that McClatchy would be the buyer. That’s why, as readers of my blog might have noticed, when I said in my Friday column there was one scenario (out of many awful ones) in which we would have a good outcome, that sentence linked to a Financial Times story about McClatchy leading the bidders.
    All the signs right now are that we will be better off than we were before. But as great as it is for McClatchy to own us, think how much better it would be if I did. I’m sure you can see that.
    And the analysts’ dire predictions? Well, if you took everything the Wall Street analysts know about the future of newspapers and converted it into high-quality chicken manure, you’d be better off, but you’d have to go to the store and buy another bag to have enough to fertilize a fig tree.
    But I’ll admit they sure helped out McClatchy, running down perceptions to where it was able to buy KR for at a bargain price. (I wouldn’t have sold my piddling shares for that. But I guess now I will.)
    Knight Ridder — which was doing so badly that the greedheads who owned the biggest chunks of it just had to dump it — has recently been running a profit margin of under 20 percent. And 20 percent is only twice the average of companies in the S&P 500.
    To be sure, McClatchy does better, at 23 percent. But both look pretty low compared to what The State pulls in.
    But that’s now, say the analysts. With all that competition online for the advertising dollar, they say, this can’t last.
    The gaping hole in that logic is that newspapers are also online, that our online ad revenues are climbing astronomically, and that we have an advantage competitors can’t match: an unrivaled franchise in local news — which has great appeal among customers our advertisers want — as an added inducement to come to our sites and see the ads. Our competitors either have no content, or much less, or content that you can find in a thousand other places.
    Newspapers are going to be around for a long time (for the rest of my career, anyway, which is all you need to worry about). If The State didn’t exist, somebody would start something like it. Why? The demand is there.
    It would actually be a huge boost to our business if people suddenly did decide they don’t want their news printed on dead trees. That would leave us growing online, and would cut our operating expenses almost in half: We could take those gargantuan presses and create artificial reefs off the Grand Strand. No more newsprint and ink to buy by the trainload. No more delivery trucks; no more gasoline. No more waiting half the night from the time we’re done putting the news together to when it’s placed in your driveway.
    We would simply finish writing and editing, press a button, and you would have your news instantly. Which is actually how it works now, from our end — the fact that you don’t get it for hours after we press the button is purely a function of the fact that the market still wants a newspaper.
    I’ve been waiting for that demand to evaporate since the early ’80s, when we started writing and editing the news with computers. There’s nothing sacred to me about the paper part of the paper. I mean, I have a sentimental attachment. But paper, plastic or digital, our value is in our content.
    The determining factor, though, is that the market still has a substantial attachment. People still want the paper — not as many as once upon a time, but far too many to quit printing it.
    So we continue the extremely expensive practice of producing a paper while still innovating online. For now. But however you want to get your news, our industry’s future is bright. And The State’s is more so, which is good for you, as one of those bright folks who understand how critical a good newspaper is to a community. McClatchy will see you have that.
    As for me, I would very much enjoy working for McClatchy in my current capacity. But I’ve reached a time when I need to start putting my money — once I have some — into a solid investment to take care of me and mine in our Golden Years.
    As the song says, God bless the child that’s got his own. Newspaper, that is.

What do you think?

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Hey, what do you think of the new look? Pretty freaky, huh? If you don’t like it, just wait; I plan to change it frequently. Unless I decide it’s a waste of time.

Now, you’re probably wondering what I think about McClatchy buying The State. I think it’s great. This is the best outcome we could have hoped for. I’ll have a little more to say about that, and particularly about the future of newspapers, in my Tuesday column.

And yes, you will have read some of it before, in the stuff I shared that I had cut out of my Friday column. But I figured most people hadn’t read that — hard as it is to believe, not everybody reads this blog — so I shared it with the uninitiated.

No one knows what the future will bring, but right now, around this place, it looks very good.

Newspapers as an investment

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I often find the column form to be highly constricting. Today was one of those cases. There was about 15 inches worth of stuff I had to cut in order to jam it in. Actually, I had to cut a lot more than that, but I only missed the three chunks that made up the 15 inches, because they helped explain some things.

The first chunk addressed some of the responses I got the last time I wrote about the paper’s, and Knight Ridder’s, profitability. Readers pointed out the inadequacy of comparing the percentage of profit margin of our business versus Wal-Mart’s comparatively pitiful (and people who know a lot more than I do about business have said it was low, too) margin. OK, I thought, I’ll put it another way. Hence the following paragraph:

We do a whole lot better than Knight Ridder as a whole, which made a pitiful (by Wall Street’s expectations of the newspaper business) profit margin of 19.4 percent last year. You know, only like twice the average of companies in the S&P 500.

The fact is, it’s absolutely ridiculous that a) investors aren’t satisfied with the margins most newspapers make, and b) analysts have so bad-mouthed newspapers as an investment in recent years that they have driven down the stock to something like 25 percent below what it ought to be, as a function of the profits they produce. The "reasoning" of analysts on this point goes along these lines: "Sure, they’re still making money now, but with all that competition on-line for the advertising dollar, this can’t last." The gaping hole in that logic is that newspapers are also on-line, that our on-line ad revenues are more or less doubling each year, and that we have an advantage that competitors can’t match: An exclusive franchise in local news — which has tremendous appeal among the customers our advertisers want — as an added inducement to come to our sites and see the ads. Our competitors either have NO content, or content that you can find in a thousand other places. Anyway, the second chunk was on the subject of the industry’s future:

Contrary to what those idiots on Wall Street say, this newspaper would be an excellent investment. You see, in spite of all that stuff you hear, newspapers are going to be around for a long time. If The State didn’t exist, somebody would start something like it in its place. Why? Because the demand is there.

It would actually be a huge boost to our business if people suddenly  did decide they don’t want their news printed on dead trees. That would leave us growing online, and would cut our operating expenses almost in half: We could take those gargantuan presses and create artificial reefs off the Grand Strand. No more newsprint and ink to buy by the trainload. No more huge distribution center with its complicated equipment and large labor force for physically stuffing in ad inserts and bundling papers. No more delivery trucks; no more gasoline. No more page-sized typesetters or plate-making machinery. No more waiting half the night from the time we’re done putting the news together to when it’s placed in your driveway.

We would simply finish writing and editing, press a button, and you would have your news instantly. Which is actually how it works now, from our end — the fact that you don’t get it for hours after we press the button is purely a function of the fact that the market still wants a newspaper.

I’ve been looking forward to the day when that demand would evaporate since the early 1980s, which is when we started writing and editing the news completely with computers. You see, there’s nothing sacred to me about the paper part of the paper. Our value is in our content, specifically our local content, which no other entity in the world has the resources to duplicate.

But I’ve come to realize that the demand for the hard-copy version isn’t going away in my lifetime. So we have to continue the extremely expensive practice of producing the  paper while still innovating online. Our online revenues, by the way, have been growing at a phenomenal rate. And with the talent we already have in-house in that arena, we could do a good deal better without folks in California trying to tell us how to do it.

Then, there was the bit where I explained why I needed somebody to just give me the money to buy the paper, rather than help out some other way. On the one hand, this was tongue-in-cheek. On the other, it explains why I seriously would worry about some wealthy local individual (other than me, if I could join that category) to rescue us from becoming part of some other large corporation.

You say you’d rather lend me the money? OK, but don’t hold your breath to be paid back, since I plan to plow all profits into improving the paper. You want to put together a deal to buy the paper yourself and just let me and my colleagues run it for you? Well, that could work, but it’s fraught with risk. No matter how good your intentions, it might be tough to resist the temptation — having spent all that money — to influence the way we write about your best friends, or your worst enemies. For those of us who are used to criticizing everybody, that could be problematic.

You see, the one advantage of being owned by a publicly-traded company from the other side of the continent is that they don’t give a damn about what sorts of editorial stands we take. In fact, they don’t care about much any more besides the bottom line, which is where we get into the disadvantages.

So if it’s all the same to you, I’d rather just have the cash, free and clear, with no strings attached. I may seem to be asking a lot, but it’s for a good cause, and as you see, I have my reasons.

Ultimately, there’s just no substitute for the perfect situation of owning the paper myself. Even Mark Whittington should be able to agree with me on that — the workers (or, in this case, worker singular) owning the means of production. Well, actually, he probably wouldn’t, since I’m envisioning a benign despotism rather than collectivism.

Anyway, as the song says, God bless the child that’s got his own. Newspaper, that is.

I need half a billion. Now.

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Buddy, can you spare half a billion?
And be quick about it?
By BRAD WARTHEN
Editorial Page Editor
HEY, PAL, can you spare half a billion? You don’t have it on you? Then please check with your rich friends.
    Oh, and one more thing: Hurry. I don’t have much time. You see, this newspaper’s for sale, and I want to buy it. And if you fully understand the alternatives, you’ll want me to buy it, too.
    Actually, it’s the corporation that currently owns the paper that’s for sale. The deadline for bids was Thursday, and we could learn today, or early next week, who (if anyone) will be buying Knight Ridder, which owns this newspaper and 30 others. How this will turn out I don’t know. There are all sorts of scenarios. Only one or two are attractive.
    It could be bought by an equity company of the sort whose dissatisfaction with our stock price has led to years of pound-foolish expense slashing that has reduced the value of our product, and led ultimately to this sale. Such a company, knowing (and caring) nothing about newspapers, would either have to keep current corporate leadership (which is highly unlikely to produce different results), or hire God-knows-whom to replace it. But this is unlikely.
    It could be bought by another newspaper company or partnership of such companies, or partnership of such a company and one or more equity outfits.
    Or — and for us, this might be the worst of all — there might be no buyer. This would reflect the fact that so many analysts are (wrongly) down on newspapers as investments.
    It could be bought by an outfit that believes in newspapers, and in leaving them alone to do their thing as long as they are producing a reasonable profit. That would be great.
    But rather than take my chances, I’d rather just buy the paper myself. That’s why I need the cash. You sure you don’t have it? Have you checked behind the cushions in the upholstery?
    You say I’m already too late, since the deadline was Thursday? You don’t understand. I don’t want to buy Knight Ridder. I don’t give two figs about Knight Ridder.
    All I care about is The State, and the people it serves.
    Here’s what I’m counting on: that whoever buys KR will turn around and sell some of the papers. The problem is that this new owner will want to sell the white elephants — Philadelphia, Akron, San Jose, St. Paul — and hang on to such wildly profitable properties as The State.
    That’s why I need at least half a billion, even though I figure the fair price for The State is about $400 million or less. I might have to make an offer the seller can’t refuse. If I can get it for less, I’ve got a few capital improvements I can use the rest on.
    Don’t think I’m rushing into this because of what’s happening. For years, I’ve had this recurring fantasy. Not that kind of fantasy. In this one, I save Bill Gates’ life or something (I’ve never worked out the details), and he offers to halve his kingdom, and I say, “Naw, that’s OK; just gimme half a billion. After taxes. Or a billion if you don’t have change.” Then I’d buy the paper, and operate it on a nonprofit basis.
    I would still expect my friends in advertising to sell just as hard and come up with just as much money each year. And this paper makes a lot of money. As I’ve written before, if we could stand alone, we’d have no trouble from Wall Street, even if the paper were publicly traded (which, under my ownership, it wouldn’t be; I’d keep it in the family via primogeniture or entail or some such).
    But I wouldn’t want to pocket a penny of profit. I’d plow every bit back into the business. Sure, I’d pay myself a nice salary — maybe twice what I’m making now. I haven’t taken a vow of poverty. But making any more than that doesn’t interest me. The only thing I would ever want great wealth for would be to buy this paper. Once I’d bought it, making it better — not making money — would be how I got my kicks.
    I’d increase the space available for news. I would restore key positions lost to cost-cutting in recent years. Our reporters and editors would have what they needed to put out the kind of newspaper of record they already know how to produce. No more important news being hacked to TV-sized bites for lack of newsprint. We’d be all our promotional slogan used to say: “In Depth. In Detail. Indispensable.”
    I’d pay those reporters and editors enough that the very best of them would stop looking around for better opportunities — and enough so that when any slackers can’t keep pace, up-and-comers from across the country would line up to replace them.
    I’d reopen the bureaus around the state that we closed over a decade ago, putting the whole state back into The State. I would again deliver the paper to far-flung areas that we’ve cut off over the years. (Few realize how much of our loss of circulation was due to readers we deliberately cut off  because routes weren’t cost-effective.)
    And don’t worry. We’d cover the capital of this state as it’s never been covered before.
    I’d be a good steward, and listen carefully to my CFO and publisher, because they know a lot more about money than I do. I wouldn’t waste a dime, but I wouldn’t hesitate to spend a million if I knew it could make the paper that much better.
    Because the paper, and its readers, and my native state of South Carolina are what matter. They, aside from feeding my family, are the only reasons I drag my lazy behind into work every morning, and stay until late at night. This poor state of ours, which lags behind the rest of the nation in so many ways, needs a good, tireless, fearless, growing, improving newspaper more than any other state in the union. And that’s just what I want it to have. That’s my dream.
    Most alternatives involve the paper being owned by some faceless entity that just wants to squeeze it like a lemon. That would be bad for me, and bad for you. That’s why I prefer dreaming to facing facts. Why not? I can’t do anything to affect the outcome.
    Not unless you and your rich friends — or a grateful Bill Gates, or whoever — come across with a few hundred million.
    And please be quick about it.
    Read more on this subject at http://blogs.thestate.com/bradwarthensblog/.

Column on taking sides

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Katon Dawson gets it. Why doesn’t everybody?
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
OVER A LATE breakfast at a New York deli in September 2004, S.C. Republican Party Chairman Katon Dawson cheerfully told me this story:Katon_1
    Years earlier, as a novice candidate who had been burned once by his own frankness, he started carrying a piece of paper that he would look at whenever he spoke to one of my colleagues. On it he had written some good advice: “Cindi Scoppe is not your friend.”
    It did not mean she was his “enemy”; it was just his reminder to be wary because a good reporter isn’t on anybody’s side.
    You see, Katon Dawson gets it. Plenty of other people don’t.
    I believe that one of my few qualifications for my job is that I am vehemently, stridently, nonpartisan. Mr. Dawson, and his Democratic counterpart Joe Erwin, would say I’m too harsh.
    But the problem isn’t just the two major parties, loathsome as they may be. It’s this ubiquitous thing of everything being divided into “sides” — you’ve got to pick, one or the other — to the point that even smart people are unable to frame issues any other way.
    Here’s another anecdote, involving the same Ms. Scoppe: A lawmaker told her there was an inconsistency on last Sunday’s editorial page.
    The editorial criticized House members for rejecting, on specious grounds, business leaders’ input in the tax reform debate. The column dissected the General Assembly’s rush to override the governor’s veto of an odious bill stripping local governments of the ability to regulate billboards in their communities.
    When Cindi told me the lawmaker said the two pieces contradicted each other, I retorted, “Huh?” If anything, they had a consistent theme: the Legislature acting against the public interest.
    But the lawmaker saw it this way: The editorial slapped lawmakers for not doing what business wanted them to do, and the column hit them for doing what “business” (the billboard industry) wanted.
    I responded, “Say what?”
    Cindi said maybe we hadn’t expressed ourselves clearly enough. At this, I got a bit shrill: “How on Earth could we have been expected to anticipate that anybody would read it THAT way?”
    And yet, people are always reading what we write that way. The whole world encourages them to perceive every public expression as pro-business or anti-business, or siding with Democrats or Republicans, conservatives or liberals, black people or white people, rich or poor, fat or thin… you get the idea. That’s the trouble. Everybody gets the idea.
    This is a profoundly flawed way of looking at the world. If you accept or reject arguments, or even facts, according to whether they help or hurt your side, how can we ever get together and solve anything in a way that serves the common good?
    And yes, I know that the news media — especially television, although print is a culprit too — help create and reinforce this dichotomous world view. But that just makes me feel more obligated to use this page to encourage multilateral discussions that help people see things as they are, rather than the way one side or the other wants them to be.
    We’re not alone in this. We ran an op-ed piece Thursday from an assistant professor at USC-Aiken who faces the exact same problem every day in the classroom.
    Steven Millies wrote about a disturbing Emory University study. When the study’s author “showed negative information to his subjects about a politician they admired, the areas of their brains that control emotion lit up, while their reasoning centers showed no new activity.” Worse, when the subjects rejected information that they did not want to hear, their brains were rewarded in a pattern “similar to what addicts receive when they get their fix.”
    The damning conclusion was “that our political opinions are dominated by emotion, and that the reasoning part of our brain is not interested in political information that challenges us. In fact, our brains will work very hard to avoid that information.”
    This means Dr. Millies has an uphill fight in trying to teach his students that “In our political choices, we should not settle for the hollow comfort of feeling gratifyingly consistent in our assurance that one party is always right and the other always is wrong.”
    The trouble is, according to polls, about two-thirds of the electorate does cling to such assurance. That makes things tough for a fair-minded professor. It also makes it tough to publish a nonpartisan editorial page, and persuade partisans that that is actually what you are doing. No matter what you wrote the day before or the day after, a partisan tends to remember only the last thing you said that ticked him off, and to take that as proof positive that you’re on that other side.
    It doesn’t help that so many editorial pages are partisan, even at the best papers. You can almost always predict which “side” The New York Times will be on, and rely upon The Wall Street Journal to take the opposite view.
    None of us is immune to wrapping ourselves in comforting notions. Look at me: I didn’t want to hear what Cindi was trying to tell me. But I try to learn. I try to anticipate the way partisans of all sorts will perceive what I’m saying, and to express myself in a way that they see what I mean. But I often fail, and often in ways that surprise me, even after three decades of observing politics.
    Now here’s another perception problem to think about: “pro-business” or “anti-business.” Well, all I can say is that I’ll try.
    In the meantime, just in case anyone is still unclear: Sometimes business people are right; sometimes they’re wrong; sometimes they’re both. And when we write about them, we’re doing our best to sort all that out.
    It’s just like S.C. lawmakers: They don’t always do stupid stuff. It’s merely coincidence that on the two issues we wrote about last Sunday, they did.

Guilt column

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OK, I feel guilty about Katrina;
so what do you want me to DO?
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
EARLIER this month, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland made me feel pretty guilty, and I thought about expiating that guilt with a column of my own.
    I managed to forget about it. I’m resilient that way.
    But then, Mac Bennett and some other folks from the local United Way came in for a visit and reminded me of it. Yes, they brought up Hurricane Katrina.Katrinademolish_1
    The devastation of the Gulf Coast has cut into local fund-raising. It’s been hard to compete with. “How many days was Katrina on the front page” of newspapers? Mac asked. Actually, he understated the case. He should have used present tense; it was the centerpiece on USA Today’s front the very day he said that.
    Well, don’t blame me, Mac. The last time I had a column that was actually about Katrina was Sept. 23. By that time, I had said what I had to say about it, and was ready to move on. So I did.
But thousands upon thousands of people whose lives were wrecked have not moved on.
    I find this irritating.
    That’s why I feel guilty.
    It was just a vague sort of guilt creeping around the edges of my consciousness. I would climb groggily out of bed and hit the snooze button on the radio because NPR was doing yet another story on the plight of New Orleans. “I’ve heard all that,” I would think as I got up. “That’s not a very worthy sentiment,” I would think as I climbed back into bed. “After all, those poor people are still…” Zzzzzzz.
    Then Mr. Hoagland pegged people like me dead-on in his Feb. 5 column. It was about why the State of the Union message didn’t linger on Katrina. He suggested that maybe this was not because BushdoorPresident Bush “is out of touch.”
    “My fear is more ominous,” he wrote: “After a great deal of study and some polling, Bush is reflecting national opinion fairly well on the challenges still faced by the people of New Orleans: We wish them well, but it is their problem, not ours anymore.”
    Ow. That hit home. That’s just what I had been thinking.
    I’m a good guy. Really. I give to United Way, and my church. I don’t vote self-interest: If taxes need to go up, say, to help the poor get a better education, I’m for it. I’ve served on nonprofit boards. Hey, I was chairman of the local Habitat for Humanity. I’ve spent whole vacations on blitz builds — framing, roofing, putting on siding (not lately, but I’ve done it). Not even Jimmy Carter, the most self-consciously decent and moral president of my lifetime, has anything on me there. Right?
    But now, if Mr. Hoagland is right (and I fear he is), it’s George Bush who’s got me nailed.
    I know that Katrina, the worst national disaster in the nation’s history, was an event loaded with a profound message; it stripped away a veneer and exposed underlying problems that have always been there, problems that America needs to find a way to address meaningfully if we’re truly to be the land of opportunity.
    We said this on Sept. 23:
    “(T)here are millions of people who are so poor that they have no way to flee a killer storm. People who, even if transportation were available, wouldn’t leave because all they own is in their home:Katrinareport_1 They have no bank accounts, credit cards, job skills or network of family and friends in other cities to take them in. We have glimpsed for a harrowing moment the kind of random, wanton violence that the middle class never has to experience, but that plagues too many impoverished neighborhoods.”
    I meant all that. Still do. But we said it, and on some gut level, I’m more than ready to get on to other important issues, because, let’s face it, that one’s depressing. Poverty right here in South CKatrinachertoff_1arolina is a consuming passion of this editorial board. But as daunting as that challenge is, I at least have a clue what to say in terms of what we need to do about it.
    Besides, Columbia and South Carolina responded superbly to Katrina. Do you think I could motivate my readers to do more than they’ve done? I don’t.
    When another report comes out, as one did last week, saying government on all levels failed Katrina’s victims, and that things might have been better if the president had taken a personal interest earlier, I think, “Didn’t we establish all that some time back?”
    When I read, as I also did last week, that some Katrina victims are being booted out of their government-subsidized motel rooms, I think: “What? They’re still there? It’s been — what — almost seven months, and they still haven’t found a place on theirKatrinamotel_1
own?”
    When folks wring their hands over whether the poor of the Ninth Ward will get to return home, I’ve thought: “Would it be the worst thing in the world if they didn’t? Other communities — such as Columbia — have given them a leg up; maybe they have a better chance in new surroundings. (Maybe the president’s Mom had a point.) Maybe the rest of the country is better able right now to provide permanent homes to poor folks. Maybe New Orleans would have a better chance of recovering — and becoming a better place for the poor to make a living in the future — if for a few years it was a community of empowered, middle-class people with a compelling economic reason to be there. Maybe an electorate like that would choose better local lKatrina9thward_1eadership, and clean up the police department and other services that failed the poor so miserably. Would that be bad?”
    So now I’ve gotten that off my chest — but I don’t feel better.
    Look, I don’t know what the solution is. If you can think of something I can do, let me know. I’ll be glad to pay a higher gas tax or something. Go on, Mr. President, ask me. You don’t have my number on that. I want  you to ask me to sacrifice for something.
    Of course, the gas tax would help in the war on terror, which I’d be proud to do, but not do much for the Gulf.
    So until I see something I can do, I will probably still think, whenever I see or hear another Katrina story, that it’s past time for those folks and the rest of us to move on — even while I think it’s wrong to think that.
    But at least I feel guilty about it. That’s something. Isn’t it?

I want his name

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Who was the genius who decreed, a generation or so ago, that thenceforth, all offices would be in buildings with windows that can’t be opened?

I want his name. And his address. I want to go see him. I’d like to rearrange his face for him. Call it an extreme makeover.

I just walked out of the office — oh, around 9 p.m. — and it was gorgeous outside. About 60 degrees, and as pleasant an evening as you could ask for.

And where had I been since early this morning? In an oven.

It was about noon when the temp in my office hit 80. Then, it kept climbing. It finally hit a high of 84, before dropping to about, oh, 83 by the time I left. Not a whisper of a breeze, of course. It was worse in other people’s offices. One guy went to work from home when his hit 85. Nice if you can do that. I had to stay at my computer, because the system I was using is not accessible remotely. Security, you know. My hand was sweating on the mouse to the point that I started to wonder whether I could get electrocuted that way — or, worse, cause a short and lose the column I was working on.

It all has something to do with maintenance they’ve been doing all week. The "chillers," or some such, had to be down while the work was under way. They say they’ll be back up tomorrow afternoon.

They’d better be. If not, I have a brick on my windowsill. And two of the four walls of my office are made of glass.

Hubba-hubba on the obit page

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I was really glad to see our front page follow up on the death of the former pin-up girl out of Myrtle Beach.

My eyes really lit up when I saw the image at rightJewel_evans_2 Wednesday. I’ve been in this business more than three decades now, and I had never seen anything like that on an obit page. My first reaction was, well, sort of like in those old cartoons, when Bugs Bunny’s or Porky Pig’s face turns into a reasonable facsimile of the Big Bad Wolf, complete with drawn-out whistle, eyes bugging, and tongue hanging.

My second reaction was, "What happened? She looks plenty healthy to me."

My third was to realize that this was a 1940s style pinup, of the type that used to appear as nose art on WWII bombers — an art form I’ve always appreciated. I wasn’t alive then, but somehow my tastes — with regard to some things — seem to be very compatible with that period. Some of my ideas do, as well. I was extremely disappointed
when 9-11 failed to produce the kind of nonpartisan national unity that Pearl Harbor did. I’ve always wanted to experience that.

Anyway, back to the pinup: My next reaction was to go to the Web and see whether this woman really had been a big-time pinup. In my haste, I typed "’Jewel Evans’ pinup" instead of using what was apparently her maiden name, "Jewel FLOWERS." The first search pulled up an entirely different sort of image, the kind I won’t link to on a family blog.

I did find her, in connection with Vargas-style artist Rolf Armstrong. The image reproduced above seems to have been the favorite, although others can be found.

If I had been one of those WWII soldiers (something which, if reincarnation is for real, I probably was) who wrote to her, I probably would have told her I liked her better than Betty Grable. I think that’s because Betty’s most famous pose tends to call attention to assets beyond her legs, while Jewel’s is all about her pins (well, and her face, which was also more attractive than Betty’s). You see, I disagree entirely with Jerry Seinfeld, who famously said:

"A leg man? Why would I be a leg man? I don’t need legs. I have legs."

Not like those you don’t, Jerry.

The ‘Scoop on Scoppe’

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Scoppe_1Oops. I almost forgot that my colleague Cindi Scoppe’s column today promised that you could find, right here on my blog, the item that the anti-tax folks were circulating about her. Here it is, as e-mailed to her (be sure not to miss the real knee-slapper about how these folks "have not noticed her complaining about
the unmentioned tax
on the poor, the lottery."):

Chairman’s
Opinion –
February 1, 2006

The hypocritical scoop on Scoppe

    The battle to secure and preserve true home ownership for the citizens of South Carolina has proven itself to be long, and hard.   
    My ten year concern over this matter – based first on the simple concept that we should not have to “rent” our homes from government – has grown far beyond my original basis of conviction.  Because property taxes levied collectively upon South Carolina’s homes have virtually doubled within three years, my initial point of principle now pales in comparison to the financial hardships that have surmounted tens of thousands of homeowners in South Carolina.
    Quite honestly, this effort illustrates the struggle of South Carolina’s lawmakers as they continuously try to balance the will and voting ramifications of their districts against the campaign-funding lobbyists and special interests.
    The latter-mentioned forces are more than enough to place the underfunded citizens groups at a disadvantage.  But there is another force with which we must also do battle:  the liberal news media.
    From Greenville to Charleston to Florence to Aiken, they aid and abet the effort to maintain the property tax status quo.  Borne in the left-leaning colleges of journalism and promulgating their views of a “correct society” for South Carolina, they spin their webs to protect their beloved big government bureaucracies.
    Out of this journalistic jungle stands one above the others.  Her one woman crusade against real home ownership has been a sight to behold.  She is none other than that editorialist extraordinaire of The State newspaper, Cindi Scoppe.
     Were her idea of journalistic achievement the infuriation of the masses, she should cautiously be satisfied with self.
     It is one thing to share an opinion in this land of (diminishing) freedoms, but to compromise one’s viewpoints with innate, blatant hypocrisy is an exercise in self relegation.
    One of the most often used mantras of those who oppose a (in this case revenue neutral) tax swap is the argument that the poor will suffer disproportionately.   Rolling down the grocery tax was a tactic of equalization that negated that argument. Habitually leaving that component out of the equation, perhaps Ms. Scoppe should look to the idea’s point of origin – the citizens group that formulated what became that unmentionable touchstone, Senate Bill 880.
     Relying on reports from liberal-minded and left-leaning think tanks is another sure way to set up oneself for compromise.   To begin with, the reports from her revered Holly Ulbrich, self-proclaimed tax expert and writer of tax papers that are swallowed as gospel by bureaucrats alike, are nowhere guaranteed to be entirely rock solid. 
    Case in point is the fact that Ms. Ulbrich has of late had a somewhat difficult time defending some of her stances when challenged by certain, knowledgeable citizens.  More revealing, Ulbrich’s statements are made as a member of the Strom Thurmond Institute.  We have recently learned that just because she states opinion, that is not necessarily the majority opinion within The Institute.  However, based on public delivery, one would never guess, would they?  Lesson for Cindi – don’t hang on Holly’s every word.  Her years of working within bureaucracy might just have skewed her vision.
    While seizing upon such data as included in the Miley Report, she did get one thing right, and subsequently proved one of our long thought contentions.  Such reports, sponsored by those like the SC Chamber of Commerce, habitually come out in favor of that group’s prior stances.   No different here.
    Amongst all Ms. Scoppe’s favorite reports and studies, the McCall Study is absent.  It shows, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and The Census which includes (southeastern) average family spending data, a household with a property tax bill of $499 (BLS average) with income of $19,187 would have a 2.4% advantage gain, while a household with a property tax bill of  $1,618 and income of $62, 986 would have a lesser percentage gain of 2.2%.   Comparing the latter income to the median South Carolina household income, so much for the “rich” advantage.
    I am not aware of Ms. Scoppe railing on behalf of the lower class against higher gas prices.  Nor the increased cost in food, clothing, medicine, utilities, or especially, property taxes on the poor.  I have not noticed her complaining about the unmentioned tax on the poor, the lottery.  Disagree on that one?   Then just look at who buys the most tickets of chance (while heaven forbid, subsidizing scholarships for the children of the wealthy).
    And I could mention several more points, but space doesn’t allow.
    However, we must visit the street of Ms. Scoppe’s personal residence.  According to public county tax records, Ms. Scoppe is receiving a chunk of tax relief herself.  In addition to her state tax relief of $460, she gets an additional $869 tax credit.   Being true to her stated beliefs, maybe she returns the $869 to the county, or gives it to the poor.
    For by what means does she get the $869 worth of relief?  According to her tax bill – it is from none other than that dreaded tax on the poor – an additional one cent sales tax, by local option. 
    Being the defender of the lower class that she is, how can she abide this travesty?   Why, this is 50 percent of the amount she has determined will send the poor over the edge, and it did not even roll down the grocery tax in the county by one cent to make the sixth cent less regressive!  Even worse, it did nothing toward permanent, constitutional removal of property tax from their homes.  In the words of the Hindenburg reporter, “where is the humanity?”
     Did she editorialize zealously against the local option sales tax before its imposition?  I haven’t had the time to research that, but if not, only one word applies:  shame.
     Lastly, if permanent and meaningful property tax reform fails, we know exactly who to blame.   Should the status quo remain intact, and the trends of the property tax cancer continue to grow, thousands upon thousands of hard working South Carolinians will be forced from their homes. 
     So perhaps not that far in the future, the newly homeless can occupy all the grand school buildings (although those three story atriums relate more to HVAC capacity than to people capacity).  Some might settle for the plush offices of the county and city councils and their thousands of bureaucratic peripherals.  By then the Rutledge Building will be antiquated and abandoned – having been replaced with forty nine (guess why) stories named the Tenenbaum Tower of  Education) – so there is another option. 
     Fling open your eight foot high office doors, Association of Counties, SC Municipal Association, and Chambers of Commerce all across the state.  Your new residents can enjoy their new digs all the while thanking you for forcing them to move in with you. 
    And Ms. Scoppe, hope you have plenty of room down at The State.  Since the newspaper industry will still be profiting from its sweetheart sales tax exemptions, we know you’ll overlook the inconvenience.
Dan Harvell

OK, my turn on the Folks op-ed

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OK, now that the comments on the Will Folks op-ed have reached critical mass of 34 comments and rising (including two from Mr. Folks himself), I will take a few moments to address some of the points raised by readers.

First, though, let me give you a brief summary of my thinking as it went before the piece ran — before the storm, as it were.

When the proof landed on my desk, I saw Will’s mug and thought, "Oh, man — what, again?" Then I remembered the earlier conversation in which it had been mentioned that this piece was in the pipeline. A board member responded by asking, "Is it something we would run if someone else wrote it?" That’s pretty much our standard response whenever the question arises whether we should give this person or that person space on our pages — what if it were from someone else? If the answer is "yes," we generally go with it. The answer was "yes."

So I read the piece on the page and agreed with my colleague who had put it there that yes, if this had been from some other similarly situated advocate on that side of the debate, we would have run it. But note that qualification of "similarly situated": It probably NOT have run if it had come in from someone who had never been a player of some kind in the debate. I say that because the arguments were pretty weak, and persuasive only to someone who already believes all this stuff, regardless of evidence to the contrary. Coming from Will Folks, its weakness was interesting in and of itself. Coming from someone unknown to the readers, it would have had little value.

To elaborate on that, some folks have asked why we would "give a platform" to someone who pleaded guilty to criminal domestic violence. Well, we wouldn’t. But we would "give a platform" to someone who is writing on a subject that is important and timely and who:

  • Was the spokesman, until quite recently, of the current governor.
  • Demonstrated his temperamental unsuitability for the job a number of
    times during the four years he spoke for the governor, but continued to
    hold the position until, as I just said, quite recently.
  • Is still advocating, as hard as he can, policies that are priorities for that governor.
  • Writes with a tone and style that is much the same as the way he spoke when he was in the governor’s office — lashing out, dismissive toward those who disagree, etc.
  • Brings to the surface, in a particularly stark manner, something that has been hinted at more subtly up to now — the growing tension between the governor and those who think like him and an increasingly unified business leadership.

My friend Samuel Tenenbaum said "Shame!" over our having run this piece. But I feel no shame. Well, I will admit that one thing about the
decision to run this does nag at my conscience just a bit: the fact that the piece was so
weak in its arguments that it undermined Mr. Folks’ point of view, with which
I disagree. So should I have waited for a stronger piece expressing that
point of view to come in? Well, if I had, I’d still be waiting. It’s not like we had a strong piece and this one, and picked this one. This is what we had.

Another respondent says critics are attacking Mr. Folks, but dodging the substance of what he said. Well, let’s discuss two or three points of that substance:

  • Will dismisses the financial acumen of some of the heaviest business hitters in South Carolina (or as he puts it, "prominent leaders of the so-called ‘business community’"), and does so in a way that takes for granted that HE and the governor know better than they do what is good for business in South Carolina. He sneers at the "left-leaning S.C. Chamber of Commerce" (note to Hunter Howard — better quit wearing those Che T-shirts around the State House). He calls Darla Moore and Mack Whittle "self-appointed dilettantes." To provide a little perspective, as the governor said to me awhile back about his having hired Will in the first place, "You take someone who was playing bass guitar in a rock ‘n’ roll band and you give him a chance." Yeah, OK, let’s see — to whom would I go for credible financial advice? Darla Moore, or Will Folks? Mack Whittle, or Will Folks? Harris DeLoach, or Will Folks? Don Herriott, or Will Folks? Ooh, that’s a toughie.
  • While the governor can be said to have more experience in business than his former protege, to suggest that he is someone whose credentials suggest more real-world experience in financial dealings than the people Mr. Folks dismisses is ludicrous. Mr. Sanford’s record in the private sector before he took up politics is by comparison to these people — and this is charitably understating the case — less than impressive.

Actually, I’m going to stop there, and not get into his strong suggestion that ONLY the kind of tax cut the governor wants could possibly help our economy, or his indulgence in yet another gratuitous slap at public schools ("unquestionably the nation’s worst") or his mentioning that "state spending jumping another 9.1 percent" without noting by how much it had been cut in the several preceding years (some agencies, such as the Corrections Department, by more than 20 percent during that period). Basically, I’m tired of typing.

But before I go, let me address a few reader comments specifically:

  • Scott Barrow says "you’re giving him credibility and helping him restore his bad name by printing his columns." I don’t see how.  If anything, I’m hurting the cause he advocates by running a piece from him (I already addressed the fact that my conscience nags at me about that, even though my conscience, yaller dog that it is, doesn’t know what it’s talking about).
  • Uncle Elmer asks, "Does Mr. Sanford really need cool-headed, articulate friends like this?" Well, no, he doesn’t. In fact, the last time
    we ran a piece by Mr. Folks, the governor’s office called to question our having done so.
  • Honesty says, "The fact that you found the need to edit his previous editorial due to
    his apparent dishonesty while deeming him worthy of now being published
    as a guest editorialist borders on bizarre." Well, not really. We edit everybody, and a lot of what we edit out are unsupportable statements that are wrongly presented as fact. Sometimes we miss such mistakes and instances of outright attempts to mislead, but we try.
  • Will Folks himself complained that "Just once… it would be nice to submit an article and actually
    have folks debate its merits instead of venting their spleens with all
    this anonymous speculation regarding a domestic situation they didn’t
    witness and don’t possess the slightest bit of insight into." Well, once again, Will, I tried. I refer you to the above.
  • Finally, Don Williams raised a broader complaint "about the plethora of conservative local columnists which have been given platform" on our pages. Well, first, I wouldn’t call Will Folks a "conservative." I think that term refers far better to the "left-leaning" Chamber of Commerce than to him. And Mr. Williams lumps him in with Bob McAlister and Mike Cakora as being three who "arrive at the same conclusions time after time." Well, Bob works for those "dilettantes" over at the Palmetto Institute, and is therefore pushing very different views from Mr. Folks on these issues. Mr. McAlister is also a very conservative Southern Baptist, while last I read, Mr. Cakora was an atheist. I have no idea where Mr. Cakora (whom I met once, about six years ago — a fact I thought I’d throw in for Mark Whittington‘s benefit) stands on the tax issue (maybe you can find out on his blog). Beyond that, we usually get complaints about running too many liberals. I don’t know whether we do or not. I particularly don’t know on local columns. Basically, we generally take what we’re sent, and choose between them based on quality and relevance (and whether they’ve been published somewhere else, which is generally a disqualifier). Mr. McAlister sends us far more columns than probably any other local contributor — more than we actually run, I would point out. Joe Darby — who is no one’s definition of a conservative — probably comes in a distant second (we hear from him less since he moved to Charleston). Tom Turnipseed? I would say he submits columns less often that Mr. McAlister, but more often than than Mr. Darby. (Mr. Turnipseed is also regularly published elsewhere). We run letters from him more often, including a short one on Dec. 18.

As for nationally syndicated columnists, here’s a blog by a fairly nonpartisan guy who takes the trouble to rate columnists according to how much they lean either Democratic or Republican. Of the ones on his list we run regularly, he sees five as Dems and only one as GOP. But then, he lists George Will, of all people, as being slightly Democratic, so… Also, he doesn’t include some of our conservative regulars, such as Charles Krauthammer and Cal Thomas. I guess "left" and "right" are pretty much in the eyes of the beholder, which is one reason I hate using the terms.

That’s all I have to say about that. For now.

About Will Folks…

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I just wrote this long piece asking what y’all thought about Will Folks’ op-ed today — not the content, but the fact that we ran it at all. I’ve gotten a lot of flak about that today.

And just as I went to save, TYPEPAD BLEW UP ON ME!!!!

Just as well — I had written down MY thoughts on the question, and it’s probably best to see what y’all think first, and then answer you.

So, what do you think?

Are transvestites so bad?

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This first struck me in reading Wednesday’s letters to the editor (if you follow the link, it’s the first letter), but when I saw the very same argument being made in a letter in today’s paper (in this case, the last one), I had to say something.

Both letters complain about our having run a Pat Oliphant cartoon making fun of all the hoo-hah overOliph_2 "Brokeback Mountain." For those too lazy to follow the links, here’s an excerpt from the first letter:

The comment from the “cowboy”: “Of course, they’re pearls, silly — what
else would I wear with basic black?” is what puzzles me. I know a
thousand gay men, including many in Darlington County, and not one of
them speaks this way, owns a set of pearls or has any interest in
women’s jewelry. That’s quite a slur.

It is?, I thought. Anyway, I set that aside until the Thursday letter, which in part said:

The cartoon appearing on the Saturday Opinion page regarding the harm
done to the cowboy image by the film “Brokeback Mountain” was a cheap
shot aimed at perpetuating insulting stereotypes of gay people.

Do you see the common thread (aside from the fact that neither writer is overly blessed with a sense of humor)? In both cases, the cartoon supposedly insults gay people by associating them with transvestites. This suggests that there’s something wrong with a man who wants to wear women’s clothing (or in this case, accessories).

This seems kind of judgmental to me. Did it seem that way to you?

This forced association of homosexuality and transvestism, which Mr. Oliphant is obviously using to ironic effect to mock the controversy (stereotypes are a fundamental part of the language of cartoons; the more absurd, the better), reminds me of a previous work of humor. I’m thinking of a particular sketch in Woody Allen’s "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But were Afraid to Ask)," the one titled, "Are Transvestites Homosexual?"

It certainly wasn’t the best bit in the movie. I vaguely recall Lou Jacobi being mildly amusing when, having snuck upstairs to the master bedroom, he pranced about in great delight wearing a dress belonging to his hostess. I don’t recall the putative question ever being answered, except that it seemed obvious that he was not supposed to be gay, but was a "regular guy" who got off on cross-dressing.

But that title, which I suppose came directly from the original book, seems in retrospect to contain a judgmental suggestion aimed not at transvestites (comical as they may presumably be), but at homosexuals. In "Are Transvestites Homosexual?," there’s a certain hint of, "Is there anything really wrong with transvestites?"

That was 1972 — well before it became unacceptable in Hollywood to suggest that there’s anything wrong about being homosexual. Much has changed since then. Today, we’ve got folks sticking up for homosexuals (defenders of tolerance, in other words) who call any suggestion of transvestism — even an ironic one — a "slur."

Is this progress?

How stupid is the press?

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A link that blog regular Herb provides in a recent comment asks the not-so-musical question, "Are reporters too stupid to get religion?"

The simple answer is, "Yes."

But that’s a little too simple. I should elaborate. Journalists pride themselves (many of them do, anyway; I certainly did during my news days) on being jacks of all trades and masters of none. At a dinner party, they can usually dazzle an uncritical listener with how much they know about many things — and it works as long as no one probes too deep. But there are several things that most reporters at most newspapers don’t know much at all about (and I hope you’re not including TV people as "reporters," as very few of them get anything):

  • Religion — I have the impression (but no stats to back it up) that the press is slightly more secular than the public at large. I mean that in two ways: First, on a personal level — lots of journalists have never been to church or have quit going (for some reason, the profession seems to draw a lot of "fallen-away" Catholics) — but also professionally. There are still plenty of people of faith in newsrooms, but relatively few who take a sufficient interest in religions other than their own, to the extent that they could write authoritatively about them. You’ll find that’s also true of the general population, but in most fields, journalists make it their business to pick up a little something about everything around them, whether it touches them personally or not. Here’s where the professional tendency comes in. The secular notion that seeps through all of society — that religion is a private matter, with no place in the public sphere — is as prevalent in newsrooms as in the corridors of government. This dampens — in the area of religion — the natural tendency journalists usually have to pry into things that are "none of their business." Most every paper has one or two people who are an exception to this rule — who take a keen interest in religion as religion, beyond their own personal beliefs. Those are the people who are specifically assigned to cover the subject. The problem, and the blundering, tends to come in when you have folks from other beats jumping in to help out on a religion story. While you can take, say, a political reporter and have him go cover a crime story and rely on him to know what to do, that’s just not as true with the religion beat. And given the unpredictable ebb and flow of news, there are always going to be people covering things outside their usual areas.
  • The Military — There are about as few veterans in newsrooms as you find in most white-collar workplaces where most of the people are under the age of 50. Most journalists, unless they have had personal experience or have worked hard to learn about the military sphere of life, know less about it than they do about other lines of work they have never done personally. For instance, almost no journalists have ever been lawyers, cops or politicians. But they interact with those people a LOT more than they do with people in military service. There just aren’t as many opportunities to hang with the military as there are with, say, cops. Therefore, less learning occurs.
  • Weapons of any kind — It might seem like this might fall under "military," but the problem extends far beyond that sphere. All reporters at some time end up doing a basic crime story. And that’s where they are likely to embarrass themselves seriously. How bad is it? I have during my career as an editor run across many a malaprop such as, "Police say the suspect fired at the clerk with a shotgun, but the bullet missed him." And I’ve seen things just as bad as that get into the paper — meaning that several people failed to realize that shotguns don’t fire "bullets."
  • Money — Math tends not to be journalists’ strong suit. They were good at writing in school, not numbers, and to many people who think nothing of whipping together from scratch a 1,000-word news story requiring multiple sources in a couple of hours, figuring out a percentage change is seen as heavy lifting. This gets worse when the number involve money. Journalists tend to be less interested in money than the average person; its mystique doesn’t grab them, and they don’t grasp it. Most reporters are bright enough to have made a lot more money doing something else. But that didn’t interest them enough.
  • Science/Medicine — You see a lot of "health news" in newspapers these days. What you don’t see is a lot of reporting that represents a sense of perspective or in-depth knowledge on these issues. This is improving somewhat, but most journalists are a long way from having the kind of easy familiarity with the sciences, including medical science, that they do with crime, punishment and politics. One reason, among many, would be that they generally don’t interact with physicians or physicists any more than they do with the military.

Anyone who IS conversant with in any of those areas can pretty well write his or her own ticket. Business writers — if they’re any good — are in high demand. Religion writers are in demand, but a little less so, as few papers have more than one or two religion writers, and they have entire staffs devoted to business. Supply and demand.

Few mid-sized papers have anyone devoted to military affairs. But when they do, if that person gets any good at it, once again you have a high-demand commodity. For instance, I was Dave Moniz‘s editor when we started the military beat back in the early ’90s. It was terra incognita for Dave, but he worked hard to develop expertise, and to break down the natural suspicion and even hostility with which most military people regard representatives of the press (I grew up in the military, so I know all about this alienation, and fully understand why it’s there). Anyway, Dave had only done that a handful of years before he went to USAToday to cover the same beat. You’ll see his byline on their front page from time to time.

Hey! Leave those kids alone

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The job of editorial page editor — the way I choose to do it, anyway — involves a curious mix of leadership and collaboration.

As I frequently tell readers, our editorial board makes decisions by consensus, meaning that even if not everyone in the room buys into the position completely, it has been shaped to the point that each member can live with having the editorial appear beneath his or her name (which, while editorials are by definition not signed — only columns have bylines — is always up there on the masthead with the rest of our names for all the world to see. For an illustration, zoom in on the upper left-hand corner of this page.)

My colleagues occasionally say I’m not being entirely candid when I say that because we don’t always reach consensus, and sometimes we take a certain position only because I insist , despite the lingering objections of one or more members. True, there are times when I consider it necessary to take a position, and a consensus proves impossible — on some political endorsements, for instance. Unlike other issues, an endorsement picks one candidate or another, yes or no — leaving no room for the compromises that make consensus possible. And I firmly believe that failing to endorse — when one of these people will be elected — is a copout.

My response to this gentle remonstration is that just as often (if not more so), I give in and go along with the consensus. An example is today’s lead editorial. Personally, I’d like to see summer vacation start at Memorial Day and end after Labor Day. I sympathize with those who want their kids to enjoy the same sort of three-month idylls that I remember
from my own youth. And while I’m a big advocate of standards in the schools, I personally fail to understand what is magical about 180 days of instruction. I seem to recall many thousands of hours that I spent in school as being superfluous. I believe what I learned between kindergarten and 12th grade could have been taught in half the time.

But my colleagues pretty much unanimously insist that I’m completely WRONG on this, and since I have to confess that to some extent my position is based in sentimentality rather than evidence and logic (and I tend to treat positions based in "feelings" rather than thought with contempt), I’ve gone along with them.

But I only go along so far, and the copy has to get by me to get on the page. An example — a paragraph in today’s editorial originally read like this:

On a practical level, the bill approved Wednesday by the House Education Committee isn’t quite as bad as some previous attempts to set local school calendars: It allows schools to start back as early as the third Monday of August, rather than holding them to the agrarian, post-Labor Day schedule that the businesses on the beach seem to think will benefit them. But then, if you want to talk practicalities, the whole notion that starting school in August somehow shortens the summer vacation is nutty: An early start means kids get out of school by the end of May instead of mid-June. The actual length of summer vacation is the same no matter when it starts and stops.

I was willing to go along with all but one word of that. I paused in the editing process to send an instant message to the writer:

A couple of points re this…
1. Summer vacation IS shorter than it used to be. Kids didn’t get off in mid-June; they got off around Memorial Day.
2. August is more summery than June. It’s hotter. In June, the ocean water is sometimes still cold. Most of June occurs in the spring. All of August (and most of September) occur during the summer.
I guess what I’m saying here is, I object to "nutty." "Unconvincing," perhaps — at least, to a consensus of our board.

So, being the editor, I changed the word, and the writer did not protest. But she still thinks it’s nutty.

What’s up with Darrell and Andre?

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We had another knotty question come up before the editorial board this morning that we just couldn’t settle, so we had to move on. It was this:

Why is Darrell Jackson going out of his way to praise Andre Bauer, even to the point that Sen. Jackson, a Democrat, says he will support the Republican for re-election?

We don’t have a clue. Of course, next time I see Darrell I’ll ask him (I did see Andre today, but I don’t think he’s the right one to ask). And if this were a column instead of a blog tidbit, I’d bother to call him. But just sitting around wondering, we couldn’t figure it out. The reasons he gives in his op-ed piece don’t answer the question; they are insufficient to explain a phenomenon as unusual as this.

(Some who don’t understand how we work might ask, How come you ran it if you don’t know what motivated it? My answer would be, Duh. It was interesting. And it disagreed with something we had written, and pieces like that — when interesting — have a certain priority. What’s odd here is that the motivation is usually obvious to us, and this time I’m mystified.)

I mean, set aside the party differences. Senators don’t go out of their way to praise lieutenant governors — Andre or anybody else. When they take notice of them at all, it’s usually to take away one or more of the few powers the rather useless office possesses. A lot of people don’t understand this, but to South Carolina state senators, there is no office above them. Not the governor, and certainly not the gov lite. One of the shocks of recent years has been the deference Glenn McConnell — who in the past has seemed affronted any time a governor presumed to exert any kind of influence on the governing process — has shown toward Mark Sanford.

And now this.

Anyway, if you have a workable theory about it, share it with me. And if it makes sense, when I next see Sen. Jackson, I’ll ask him whether you’re right.

In the interest of fairness

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OK, now that I’ve filed a post criticizing the governor’s rhetorical style (but not his substance, please note, Lee‘s non sequitur about my reviewing his speech in advance notwithstanding), let’s detail some of my own gaffes in the course of this day preceding the State of the State. (I’d go ahead and tell you something of the substance of the speech, but it’s embargoed.)

How many ways can one man screw up in one day? Let us count them. Or some of them — I’ll let myself off the hook on a few things:

— I was late for the annual pre-speech briefing for editorial page editors. Not my fault, but then you have enough such incidents that "aren’t your fault" and you develop a certain kind of reputation anyway. I have one of those reputations. In fact, my boss, the publisher, has mandated that I have a weekly session with our VP for human resources, one of the most organized people I have ever met, in an effort to straighten myself out. At our last meeting, my coach said my assignment for the next meeting would be to think about what I want to get out of these meetings. This caused me to make a note to myself not to spend the next meeting free-associating.

— Anyway, I comforted myself with the thoughts that the luncheon was set for 11:30, and no one would actually start eating that early, and in the past these things have featured 20 or so minutes of standing about with drinks (generally soft in recent years, despite the guest list) before getting down to business. Also, I recalled that at the first such meeting after his election, lunch had been buffet-style, which gave me a little more wiggle-room. I was wrong, as you’ll see in a moment.

— An aside: I should count myself lucky that the guard outside let me pull my disreputable ’89 Ranger through the gates at all. I’ve come to appreciate the mere fact of actually getting into the governor’s mansion ever since one evening in 2002, just before the election. I was at the time a member of the Columbia Urban League board. It was the night of the CUL’s biggest event of the year, and as a minor part of the festivities I was to be honored with the organization’s John H. Whiteman Award for "outstanding leadership" as a board member (sort of a nice going-away present, really, since I was about to cycle off the board). Gov. Hodges had agreed to hold a reception at his place before the banquet out at Seawell’s. The guards looked at my invitation, heard my name, and said I wasn’t on the list, so I couldn’t come in. I remonstrated, and they made a phone call, and told me I definitely was not to be let in, and that I could take it up with the governor’s office in the morning, if I were so inclined. Worse, they wouldn’t let Warren Bolton in, either, apparently because he was with me. Well, I was cool and mature about it. I decided we should stand just outside the gate, and give a straight answer to any arriving or departing guests who asked us why we were standing there. They all shook their heads in apparent disbelief. It didn’t stop them from going in, though, as I recall.

— Anyway, after I pulled into the grounds, another guy in a Smokey the Bear hat waved me into a space. I hopped out and headed in. He said, "Your license plate is expired." I said, "What?… Oh… yeah… I think that sticker’s at the house somewhere." He told me he didn’t mean anything bad by telling me: "I’m just trying to save you fifty bucks." OK, uh, thanks, I said as I kept going toward the front door, but then I slowed down as it occurred to me that it was an ethical violation on my part to accept such a discretionary reprieve when I was a guest of the governor. I was about to turn around when I remembered: These governor’s Protective Detail guys dress like Highway Patrolmen, but they’re not actually troopers, and don’t have powers to enforce highway laws anyway. That is, I don’t think they do. I went in. I was late enough.

— And even though I couldn’t have been more than 15 minutes late, I’m sure, they were
already well into the salad course — everyone seated at the formal
dining table — and in mid-conversation regarding the governor’s
agenda. The only good thing was that I slipped in quietly enough that
the governor didn’t notice me until I had asked my first question, well
into the main course.

— Of course, my question turned into one of those mini-debates with the governor, which went on an embarrassingly long time before I could make myself stop arguing with his answers. Meanwhile, everyone else sat quietly waiting to ask their questions, and probably thinking about what an ass I was making of myself at their expense. I don’t know why I do that, but I do it everywhere I go. I can’t just make like a reporter, write down the answer, and shut up. But I should. Sometimes I should.

— I almost left the digital recorder I had turned on and slid down the table, but the governor called out, "Somebody leave a recorder out here?" Mine. Thanks. At a previous such lunch during the Hodges administration (before I was barred from the grounds), I had left my recorder. I never saw it again. This one was its replacement.

— To make up for my performance inside, I decided to make friends with the governor’s dogs on the way out. One consented to be petted; the other stood off and regarded me with healthy suspicion. Warren and Cindi Scoppe, who had come in a separate car in order to be on time, waited for me. I finally realized they were waiting because we needed to have a quick huddle to decide what, if anything, we wanted to say about the speech for the next day (to avoid interfering with the production of the news pages, our pages need to be done well before time for the speech), and they knew I was planning to go to Harry Lightsey’s funeral at 2:30. I told them I had time to meet them back at the office and discuss it there before heading for Trinity Cathedral. Then I stepped over to my truck, and realized I didn’t have my keys.

— Warren and Cindi waited while I barged back into the mansion without knocking (the faux pas just keep piling up, don’t they?) and searched around under the dining room table while the staff was clearing it. They said they hadn’t found anything. I guessed the answer to the mystery on my way back to the truck. Yep, my keys were in the ignition. Don’t even ask why I had thought it necessary to lock my truck
inside these well guarded grounds, because I don’t have an answer.

— Fortunately, Warren and Cindi were still waiting — they know me well — and we had the opportunity to fully discuss the next day’s editorial while I rode in Warren’s back seat back to the office. I had explained the situation to the guard at the gate, and he said it would be OK to get the truck later. I knew there was an extra set of keys in my desk.

— What I also knew, but forgot until we got all the way back to the office, was that I also carry yet another spare key to the truck’s doors in my wallet, for just such emergencies. Sure enough, as I found standing stupidly back in my office and rummaging around through credit cards, there it was. In my pocket all the time. Great. No one would have ever had to know, if I had just remembered that.

— So I had to ask my boss, the publisher,…

Oops, just realized that if I don’t run home NOW, I’m going to miss the State of the State itself. I have to watch to make sure he actually delivers the speech we’re commenting on tomorrow. Have to finish this tale of serial humiliation later…

Relative family values

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Paul DeMarco, a potential charter member of the Unparty from Marion County, had the following to say in response to this post:

I do agree that more fairly allocating funds to poor districts like ours will help…

But there is no amount of money that can repair the disintegration
of the family. Many students in our district enter K-4 or K-5 already
so far behind they will never catch up and the most important single
factor holding them back is lack of a stable two parent family. If a
child spends his pre-school years in a single parent home he has been
handicapped in a way that is very difficult to overcome. My hat goes
off to the single parents who are doing their best to make it work but
we all know that two parents paddling in the same direction will take a
child farther than one.

This issue (the disintegration of the family, particularly in the black community) seems to be the elephant in the living room….

Why are we not focused on this issue? Is is something that people feel
is inevitable or simply too overwhelming to address comprehensively?

Later, Dave wrote:

Paul, You hit the nail right on the head but you will never see the
State publish (in print) what you just wrote. We all know that one of
the reasons, if not the main reason, that this problem cannot be solved
is that if someone acknowledges the true problem, then you will be
attacked by the race-baiters. As a result, we as a society peck away at
symptoms of the problem, while politely ignoring the cultural
dysfunction inherent in many black families. Keep in mind there is a
major political party, called Democrats, who give lip service to fixing
the problem, but in reality it is in the Democrats interest to have a
huge voting block living on the welfare plantation….

Paul, demonstrating the sort of lively debate we’d be likely to have at Unparty meetings, came back with:

Brad,

How do you respond to Dave’s complaint that the State is too timid
about identifying single-parent families as a major source of society’s
woes.
Also, it seems to me that on this and other issues our focus should be
on trying to come up with viable solutions/interventions rather than
simply debating.

After all that — and partly because that thread is scattered through a 36-comment conversation among multiple parties, meaning that lots of folks might miss it — I thought I’d respond in a separate post, as follows:

Paul,

The issue isn’t whether The State is "too timid;" it’s whether there’s a public policy issue to be addressed. In the conventional sense, there’s not. But once you start talking about the state getting into pre-K development, you are into unconventional territory. So let’s explore it.

Up to now, our concern has been what to do with the reality that faces our public schools: There are children out there with only one or no parents — or parents who don’t give a damn about them or their education — and what are we going to do about those kids? We can rant all we want about how that shouldn’t happen, but it does, and it’s not the kids’ fault. So we end up about where Judge Cooper did — we need to do something to help those kids whose parents have failed them. It’s the well-established principle of the state acting in loco parentis under extreme circumstances.

But if you’re talking about acting to prevent such situations from arising, you’re getting into areas that give the civil libertarians fits (which, come to think of it, might be enough reason to go there in and of itself). Are we going to license reproduction … outlaw bastardy … make the term "illegitimate" true to its Latin root, as in "not lawful?" What would be the penalties for the inevitable breaches? And what would you do with the children who are the products of such illegal activity? Actually, that brings us back to where we already are…

Personally, I’m for going the non-governmental route and simply resurrecting shame as a salutary force in our society. I’ve been for that for a long time. My being for it, though, hasn’t done much to stem the tidal wave of shamelessness I see washing all around me.

Maybe we should make shame a plank in the Unparty platform. What do you think?

Profitability column

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Why is KR for sale? Because
the market makes no sense
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
JENNIFER HARDING, The State’s vice president for advertising, was frustrated, exasperated and disgusted at her division’s October revenue figures.
    “It was horrible, just horrible,” she said with vehemence at a senior staff meeting in November. (These quotes, by the way, are reconstructions; I wasn’t taking notes. But I’m sure I’m faithful to the spirit. If Jennifer feels misrepresented, she knows where to find me.) “We’re all going to go out back, build a bonfire and burn our calendars. Everybody’s welcome; bring marshmallows.”
    After repeated budget reforecasts accompanied by a series of cost cuts that had started as early as January, this was not what we wanted to hear. (“We,” by the way, refers to the heads of the various divisions of the newspaper: news, advertising, circulation, human resources, editorial, etc.) One of our number asked glumly whether that meant October revenues had been down compared to the previous October.
    “Oh, no! Of course not,” Jennifer said. She just meant we had “missed goal.” Her division had performed admirably. Advertising revenue for the month had been 2.8 percent higher than 12 months earlier. But that was 7.1 percent less than the much-higher number we were expected to hit.
    And that’s today’s newspaper business in a single anecdote.
    Who expected us to hit that number? That would be Knight Ridder, the corporation that owns this and 31 other dailies. So they’re the bad guys, right?
    Well, it’s tempting to say “yes” — especially since those folks in San Jose (KR’s headquarters) are less and less likely to own us for much longer — but the insanity doesn’t start with them. They just pass it on, the same way my publisher passes it on to me, and I pass it on to the people who report to me. I’m the bad guy when I tell my folks that yet again, we’re going to have to do with less.
    So while it’s easy to cuss corporate (an exercise that would lack novelty, believe me), I know those folks are just trying to keep their heads above the surging flood of irrational expectations from Wall Street.
    I don’t begin to understand the stock market, and my experience with the way investors have batted the newspaper industry around in recent years hasn’t made it any easier to figure out.
For instance, I read recently in The Wall Street Journal that Wal-Mart — that monster of capitalism — maintains a profit margin of 3.5 percent. And nobody’s talking about angry investors demanding that Wal-Mart be sold.
    In our industry, numbers such as 3.5 — indeed, any single-digit numbers — are used to measure expectations of growth in profit margin, not the total.
    If a newspaper company isn’t making 20 percent or better, it’s in trouble. (Yes, I know Wal-Mart’s 3.5 percent, which is 2.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product, is worth more than any newspaper chain’s 20 percent. Still — and I guess I’m showing my ignorance — isn’t it better performance to get 20 cents back on every dollar than to get 3.5?)
    Knight Ridder’s operating profit margin in 2004 was 19.4 percent. It hasn’t exactly shown dramatic improvement this year. So Knight Ridder is in trouble.
    Hence all those budget cuts. Of course, we’ve been cutting for years. Our editorial department lost one full-time position years ago. But things got worse in 2005. My Sunday column mentioned that one plus in turning our entire Monday editorial pages over to writers in the community was that it meant “fewer editorials we have to write.” That consideration wasn’t rooted in laziness. It does reduce our writing load by 14 percent. But I now have 25 percent fewer writers.
    We are, of course, far from alone. The State’s newsroom, a separate and much larger division, has lost more positions than I can count without taking my shoes off. The newsroom is particularly vulnerable because it tends to have a much higher rate of turnover than does a staid bunch such as the editorial staff. And when you’re in cost-cutting mode, there are not enough comings to match the goings.
    That means everybody working harder to get the job done, which fortunately leaves us less time to think about the fact that the market is still not satisfied.
    The reason the company is up for sale is that KR’s three largest investors had the leverage to act upon their displeasure.
    Here’s the bit that makes it all surreal for us here at The State: If all of Knight Ridder performed the way The State does, the folks in San Jose wouldn’t have the Bruce Shermans of the world breathing down their necks.
    Or to put it another way, if The State were a publicly traded company in its own right (although why it would want to be publicly traded in any arrangement is beyond me), it would be fine. More than fine, actually.
    As it stands, we could get new owners who will strip our resources down to a point that we’ll look back on 2005 as the fat old days. And we won’t be the only ones noticing. You’ll see it in the quality of the product.
    Or we could be bought by a company that believes in investing in the product, and is better insulated against the whims of the equity markets.
    Or something else could happen — something I can’t imagine.
    So why am I telling you all this? Because nice people in the community keep expressing their sympathy that we’re doing so poorly. It’s as if we were losing money, or maybe only making pitiful, Wal-Mart-sized margins.
    Well, I would laugh, except that under the circumstances, it would probably hurt too much.

Column about Mondays

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Less room for us,
and more room for you
By Brad Warthen
Editorial Page Editor
LAST MONDAY, for the first time ever to my knowledge, we published this page without a single editorial.
    An editorial, I should explain, is what we call that vertical item to the upper left. The thing you are reading right now is called a “column.” A column expresses an individual writer’s perspective, while an editorial reflects the consensus of the newspaper’s editorial board. That’s why editorials, unlike columns, are not signed.
    Anyway, we didn’t have any of those on last Monday’s page. And we’re not going to have any tomorrow, or on any subsequent Mondays, as long as this is well received by readers and keeps working for us.
    Letters to the Editor are one of the most popular items in the newspaper. We always have more letters than we can fit into the paper, so why not give you more of what you like? And of course, that’s fewer editorials we have to write, which is where the “working for us” part comes in.
    Anyway, we gave it a try last week, and then I asked readers of my blog to let me know what they thought of it. Here’s a sampling of the responses:
    “Dave” wrote:

I would weigh in with a thumbs up on the Monday Forum. Another idea would be to pose one key question and solicit “person on the street” answers, preferably with pictures….

    Then “Herb,” whom I promise I did not put up to this, responded:

Personally, I like the editorials better, because I have a great degree of trust in you guys and your perspective. You have access to a lot more facts and I presume, more time to process it, at least on local and national issues. I’m not trying to (“)smear honey on your beard” (German proverb) — I am honest when I say that your position carries a lot more weight than the average Joe Blow, who may be just venting.

    Mark Whittington countered that:

Why don’t you get out of the office and come and actually talk to the people (the workers)?… Nobody reads the paper because it doesn’t apply to their own lives. Over and over again, I hear people talk about being worked into the ground, not having any rights, being paid crummy wages, missing their families, not having enough time to take care of their business, etc…. Why don’t you make Monday, “Worker’s Day”?

    Michael Bloom pleaded:

DON’T do a “person on the street” segment. Unless you do it the right way, and show your readers how dumb a vast majority of people are. Like ask them first… if they are voters, and if they are, to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and/or the Preamble to the Constitution. Now that would be sad but enlightening. I would definitely read that….

    “Dave” came back with:

The “Man on the Street” interviews are invaluable for exactly the reasons you note. You may find one college student who may be historically illiterate and you may find a cab driver who reads Shakespeare. That is what makes that form of data collection interesting to read. So, yes, it has to be done the right way and you don’t want to intentionally humiliate anyone either.

    “Lee,” who seldom agrees with Mark, did for once:

I agree that the editors should use their day off to meet some real people, and avoid their usual chums, like politicians and each other. Better yet, the editors should start their own sideline businesses so they can get some real experience as taxpayers.

    “james potter” made several points in e.e. cummings style:

i do not think it will end up working. extremists will simply take over the editorial page every week on their pet topic. i think monday editorials are also useful to help focus the general assembly during the legislative session. i will normally glance or read the editorials, i rarely pay attention to the letters to the editor since many appear to be “organized”.

    I thought Mr. “potter” raised some points worth addressing, which I did along these lines:
    1. No one, “extremists” or otherwise, will “take over” the page. The fact is that we still have to sift through the vast number of letters we get, pick a good, representative sample of them to run, edit them, put them on the page, then proof the page before publishing it. Our role in all that is in no way diminished. (In other words, “Lee,” this doesn’t give us a “day off.”) There’s just room for more letters than before.
    2. The first morning legislators are in town each week of the session is Tuesday, not Monday. So the most relevant days to run statewide-issue editorials, if you want lawmakers to be part of your audience, are Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and our biggest-circulation day, Sunday.
    3. We do our best to spot and frustrate any attempt to stuff our letters space via an “organized” campaign. I’m sure there are some that are sophisticated enough to mask it, but from what I’ve seen, most letter-writing campaigns are pretty ham-handed and obvious. On the other hand, will you see people making similar points and seeming to walk in lockstep with other letter writers? Yep. But that is mostly attributable to the fact that partisan politics — with the media acting as facilitators — has oversimplified all too many complex issues to the point that too many people see things in the same black-and-white terms, and even express themselves using the same “talking points” that one side or the other of our polarized politics has generally agreed upon. That can make a lot of letters look like a part of a campaign when they are not.
    Check out tomorrow’s page and see what you think.