Jack Shafer

“He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club,” Richard Wright wrote of H.L. Mencken in Black Boy, his autobiography. “Could words be weapons? Well, yes, for here they were.”

Thoughts like these visited me when I first read Alexander Cockburn’s “Press Clips” column in the Village Voice in the early 1970s. Like Mencken, Cockburn excelled at offense – both playing it and giving it. Long before the acid reporting and splenetic commentary of Spy magazine, decades before the predictable venom of blogs, Cockburn had mastered the art of vituperation. Dipping his pen into the sewer of news, he savaged all comers. He went after Nelson Rockefeller after his “coronation” as vice-president, he attacked Commentary Editor Norman “The Frother” Podhoretz whenever the mood moved him (which was often), and returned again and again to the villains the kept in his pillory: New Republic owner Martin Peretz, New York Times Executive Editor A.M. Rosenthal, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, or the owner of the Village Voice, and others.

When the targets shot back – Podhoretz famously described Cockburn’s pieces as setting “a new standard of gutter journalism in this country” – he loved nothing better than to hammer the trash talk into a medal and wear it proudly. He recycled Podhoretz’s line endlessly in his column, and printed it as a dust jacket blurb for his collection Corruptions of Empires: Life Studies & the Reagan Era.

“He is a talented, despicable writer who enjoys vicious teasing as a kind of journalistic blood sport,” film critic David Denby wrote in 1983, which I think shrinks the Cockburn method to its essence. Cockburn delighted in extracting pain from his adversaries, in searching the horizon for new enemies to attack, and routinely converting friends into foes. But when I interviewed him in 1995, he disavowed the presence of bile in his work.

“Bile is something eating at you all the time,” Cockburn said. “Bilious people hate. I don’t hate.”

“I think I’m funnier than I am billier, if that’s a word,” he added. “After column after column of careful analytic work, you take a few swings and all that people remember are the vivid slaggings, and all the careful theory goes for naught.”

Vivid Slaggings: Now there’s a title for a Cockburn collection.

Cockburn didn’t invent the weekly press-crit column – John Leo wrote “Press Clips” for the Voice before Cockburn got there. But he defined the form with brilliant fish-out-of-water observations. Decades ago, I heard him speak about coming to the United States and discovering to his astonishment the “corrections” column in the New York Times. This was an act of transparency and accountability that didn’t exist in UK journalism. But Cockburn’s wonder evaporated when he realized that the corrections column was just the Times‘s devious way of saying that everything else in its previous editions was absolutely true.

I’ve used Bitly to bundle a dozen Cockburn clips from over the decades to convince you of his journalistic wit and sense. (My Web spelunking has failed to unearth any of the columns he wrote for the Wall Street Journal in the 1980s.) See especially his 1982 evisceration of the NewsHour in Harper’s, his September 2000 New York Press take-down of Thomas Friedman, and “How to Be a Foreign Correspondent,” a May 1976 piece from [More] magazine. Unfortunately, several of my favorite Cockburn pieces aren’t online, such as his 1979 essay on Nelson Rockefeller’s final hours (try Nexis: keywords “Press Clips on a Famous Death”) and his May 1974 [More] piece about the clichés of disaster journalism. The first person who buys the [More] anthology (just $3!) that contains it won’t regret it. From the piece, here’s Cockburn’s direction on how to write an earthquake story:

Quick comparisons with other earthquakes. Secondly, where is it? Usually in “remote Eastern Turkey” or in the “arid center of Iran.” But with luck it will have occurred in marginally more accessible Latin or Central America. Good chance for post facto description. Most of the buildings destroyed; others leaning at crazy angles. Constant flood of refugees. People clawing at rubble. Survivors crawling, blinking into the light of day. Preliminary tremors, then “for six seconds the earth shook.” Make sure to get picture of one building standing (usually a church in Roman Catholic countries or a mosque in Muslim ones.) Get interviews from American survivors. Animadvert on general danger of earthquakes, particularly in San Francisco area. Most important of all: get casualty figures and escalate them each day. Remind people that 200,000 people died in the Lisbon earthquake.

Like all punch-out artists, his brawling occasionally got him in trouble. “I yield to none in my sympathy to those prostrate beneath the Russian jackboot, but if ever a country deserved rape it’s Afghanistan,” he wrote after the Soviet invasion, drawing ire from multiple corners. He strangely took the Church of Scientology’s side in its 1990s battle with Time magazine and laughed off the idea that the organization was evil. The way he saw it, Scientology made a great ally because he shared so many enemies with them – the IRS, the pharmaceutical industry and the CIA, for starters. Some of his work in the 1990s simply misfired – his writings on the Clinton “scandal” at the Mena, Arkansas, airport, which I could never fathom; his flirtation with the mid-’90s militia and jury nullification movements, which smacked more of left-wing opportunism in my eyes, and his less-than-rigorous attacks on global warming science.

Cockburn reinvented himself in 1998 by moving the eclectic, radical newsletter “CounterPunch” that he and Jeffrey St. Clair ran to the Web. This transition from ink to electrons was a surprise considering his aversion to technology. In a 1986 Mother Jones piece, he identified the personal computer as a culture danger that lead to the mass industrialization of the mind. Cockburn insisted that he was a typewriter man, goddamnit, and always would be! That view must have shifted when Cockburn realized that the Web was to his revolution as electricity was to Lenin’s.

I’m tempted to theorize that the collapse of communism disoriented Cockburn. An unbeatable New Left intellect, he was also the inheritor of the old leftism of his father, communist journalist Claud Cockburn. The New Leftism he espoused was supposed to prop up and supplement the decaying old leftism of his father, but as the New Left evaporated in the 1970s and 1980s, his only touchstone was the never-ending military parade that was Eastern Europe. Then the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union slid down the swirly, leaving him and his ideology stranded. Where could he turn for inspiration? China? North Korea? Never. The man had some standards, after all. (I must say he stayed pretty sweet on Fidel.)

But I don’t think the fall of the Wall transformed him from a precision bomber into a scattergunner. Fanning through four decades of his clips, I find ample consistency in his work. He’s almost always anti-war (and anti-Israel). He’s consistently pro-gun and never stopped attacking liberals. In fact, he reserved more hatred for liberals like Barack Obama than conservatives like Jesse Helms. If he had a kind word to say about the free market, I never read it (he was an unrepentant Marxist to the end). He routinely sided with the powerless, sometimes even when they were wrong, and sometimes, I suspect, precisely because they were wrong. That was Cockburn’s kind of fight.

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The man was a biblioklept! When they divide up his estate, I want back the copy of Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer’s Washington Confidential I lent him in 1995. Send overdue books to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and have your mind industrialized by my Twitter feed. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

The Colorado movie massacre imposes on us once again the temptation to extrapolate lessons from a demented act of violence. Depending on the lens through which the massacre is viewed, it has encouraged some to restate their case for gun control or to argue for comprehensive mental healthcare. Others have named Hollywood an accessory to the murders while savoring the irony that the ultraviolence was meted out by a killer who delighted in executing Aurora, Colorado, fans of violent films. Hollywood has already mulled its culpability. An otherwise intelligent film critic has blamed the rampage on midnight screenings! Politicians are wagging their fingers about how nobody should extract immediate political advantage from the killings while plotting means to reap later benefit.

As I write, the accused killer’s high school yearbook is being pillaged for clues to his motives. People who knew him well or hardly at all are being interviewed for psychological evidence. And the media does fMRI scans of the accused’s skull, in search of evidence of his brain “lighting up” at the idea of murder.

Such attempts at pattern recognition are as inevitable as they are necessary. Philosophers may be capable of throwing the null set at a suburban bloodbath. For the rest of us, attempts at finding causation – however tenuous – help settle the mind. The shooter did it because he was crazy, we say. He did it because he was evil. He did it because we (or somebody else) made him that way. He did it because guns make it possible. Any explanation that will help us cope will do.

As a Michigander who grew up reading grisly accounts about the 1927 Bath Consolidated School mass murder, I find little solace in today’s discussion. In that small-town slaughter, a disgruntled school board treasurer named Andrew Kehoe (pdf) detonated the explosives he had secretly planted in the basement of the school, killing 38 children and four adults. Kehoe’s other targets: his wife, whom he bludgeoned to death at his farm before he torched the place and blew it sky-high; and the school superintendent, whom he pulped in a suicide car-bombing. The little town buried its dead over the course of several days, and the story gained national notoriety.

You can’t blame Kehoe’s spree on the mass availability of guns. He relied on another killing agent. You can’t blame Batman, Hollywood or midnight screenings, either. I’m sure Kehoe was crazy – according to historical sources, he was angry at authorities about the property taxes levied to support the school, taxes to which he attributed his financial troubles. The impulse to kill irrationally, and to use whatever means accessible to do so, resides deep in the American grain, perhaps integral to being human. That doesn’t mean our situation is hopeless. As Noel Perrin wrote in Giving Up the Gun: Japan’s Reversion to the Sword, 1543-1879, cultures can change their violent ways, but building such a cultural consensus takes more effort and persuasion than just passing new gun-control laws.

Kehoe, like the accused Colorado killer, had spent weeks, maybe months planning his crimes in detail, amassing a cache of dynamite and pyrotol. He also appears to have held clichéd views on what causes people like him to kill innocent people like schoolchildren. According to the New York Times news story about the bombings, a placard reading “criminals are made, not born,” was found wired to a fence on his farm: The people of Bath made him do it. As an Amazon review of the book about the Bath incident noted, Kehoe had nothing against children. “Typical of psychopaths, he took the blame off of himself,” wrote L. Blumenthal.

The human reflex to find cause, meaning and lessons in the detritus of a massacre – and to impose a solution on the chaos based on those findings – should be trusted only to the extent that it allows us to muddle through the confusion churned up by such a crazed act. As we recover from the initial shock, we revert to our fundamental and irresolvable arguments about freedom and individuality, which aren’t very good at explaining why people shoot or dynamite innocents – or at stopping them from doing so.

Pollsters tell us that killings like the Colorado massacre don’t seem to move the public opinion needle very much. The 1999 Columbine shootings turned support for stronger gun-control laws upward, as this Huffington Post analysis of poll data from ABC/Washington Post, Gallup, and Pew shows, but the public’s attitude soon reverted to the previous baseline and actually continued to fall for the next 11 years.

Some events change minds and change politics, as any observer of 9/11 and its aftermath can confirm. But Americans – who have lost presidents, civil rights leaders, sons, and daughters to maniacs packing heat – have normalized gun carnage. Step outside of the violent, visceral moments of last night, of Gabrielle Giffords, of Virginia Tech, of Columbine and all the rest and you find continuous confirmation of our skill at normalizing. I leave it to you whether it demonstrates that we’re blind or that we’re realists about violence.

Our normalization skills have not escaped the attention of longtime gun-control advocate Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.): “Americans really have to begin to show some outrage at this,” she said today. She also said: “I don’t believe [gun-control legislation] has a chance in this environment.”

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Go ahead and visit the Kehoe grave. Send all unnormalized views to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and follow my Twitter feed for the same from me. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

PHOTO: James Holmes, 24, is seen in this undated handout picture released by the University of Colorado, July 20, 2012. REUTERS/The University of Colorado/Handout

At the age of 70, Michael R. Bloomberg nears an actuarial end that not even his $22 billion net worth can reverse. By giving him a measly 13 years of life expectancy, the law of averages has made the New York mayor acutely aware of time. In 2006, he installed a countdown clock in his mayoral headquarters that marked time until the end of his second term. As his third term commenced in 2009, Bloomberg escalated his war on time, putting a stopwatch to meetings. Was he racing the clock, or, as the co-inventor of the Bloomberg Terminal, did he think that a firmer grasp on life’s raw data would prolong his life?

Before he’s ushered to his reward, Bloomberg – whose current term as mayor ends at the close of 2013 – yearns to do something as grand as revolutionizing Wall Street, making billions, and running New York City government. Ordinary billionaires find this sort of psychic remuneration in philanthropy, but Bloomberg, a generous donor, is no ordinary billionaire. Philanthropy gives him a kick, but not the kick he craves. Back in 2006, Bloomberg’s special something looked to be a presidential campaign. He took foreign policy lessons from a centrist, priced the cost of the race at an affordable $500 million, and played the big-town flirt as he explained to one news organization after another how he didn’t really want to run for president – while reminding them what a splendid president he would make.

He didn’t run because he came to understand that he couldn’t win as a Democrat, a Republican or an independent. It’s for the best that he didn’t become president: His idea of governance is giving orders, as if he’s the people’s CEO. It’s also for the best that when the Obama administration shopped him to fill the vacancy at the World Bank, as its president, he declined the position because he didn’t want a boss, as New York’s Gabriel Sherman reported.

So until the CEO of the Earth slot opens, Mr. Mayor, I’ve got a terrific idea for the last act: Convince the Washington Post Co’s CEO, Donald E. Graham, that he should spin off his Washington Post division and sell it to you.

I say that as neither a Bloomberg lover nor a Bloomberg hater. I’ve written approvingly of Bloomberg’s business success, admiringly of his Bloomberg Businessweek, disparagingly of his Bloomberg View, speculatively of his Bloomberg Government, and acidly of his mayoral reign. But for reasons financial, historical – and psychological – the sale of the Post to the tiny billionaire would produce the best outcome for Post readers, the Graham family (which controls the Post), and Bloomberg’s ego (in that order).

Others have urged Bloomberg to buy the pauperized New York Times, the Financial Times, or the Wall Street Journal. Adding a newspaper to the company portfolio has supporters inside the Bloomborg. Even the top Borg muses about buying one, according to an anecdote reported by Gabriel Sherman. A few years ago, Bloomberg was having breakfast with a friend in Paris and said: “Do you think I could buy the New York Times?” The friend replied that he didn’t think the hotel sold copies, and Bloomberg said: “No, do you think I could buy the Times?”

But don’t ask Bloomberg about buying the Times now. “It’s not for sale,” Bloomberg barked in March, after a member of the Newsday editorial board inquired. “And why would I want to buy the Times?” Well, perhaps because, despite all its flaws, the Times is the best paper in the land and because you and your subordinates are forever blabbing about your ambitions to build the most influential news organization in the world?

Bloomberg may not need a newspaper, but he wants one for the same reason he didn’t need a cable-TV channel, a weekly business magazine, a free website, or an opinion outlet, but still wanted one of each: for the publicity. Bloomberg is in the business of leasing financial terminals, which one recent estimate claimed produces 87 percent of the company’s revenues. Bloomberg’s 1997 autobiography, Bloomberg by Bloomberg, defends the extension of the Bloomberg brand into other media as a way to lease terminals. “Name recognition improves access for our [Bloomberg terminal] salespeople,” he wrote. “Every bit of publicity helps; you never know which imprint makes the difference.”

But a Bloomberg acquisition of the Times would be a disaster. The Sulzberger family, which controls the New York Times, has built a unique church of journalism over its 116 years of ownership, even adding a Manhattan cathedral for worship a few years ago. But it’s Times journalists who are in charge of interpreting the sacred texts, not the management. In 2003, the newsroom snuffed its executive editor, Howell Raines, for thinking he was the boss of them. It’s hard to imagine the newsroom accepting the Bloomberg bridle without bucking.

The Times‘s editorial page poses greater problems: It ranges well to the left of Mayor Bloomberg’s very personal centrism and has routinely clashed with him over everything from his soda ban to his stop-and-frisk police policy. The page has strong views on foreign policy, while Bloomberg (and Bloomberg View) has almost none. The entire paper is just too hidebound – and I mean that in a good way – to do anything but reject Bloomberg ownership. Times readers are equally hidebound. Would they tolerate the Bloombergization of their paper the way Wall Street Journal readers tolerated Rupert Murdoch’s remake of that paper? Would Bloomberg buy the Times and then just leave it as is, when the whole point of buying something precious is to make it yours? I think not.

The Financial Times would be easier on Bloomberg’s digestion, something Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler conceded to Gabriel Sherman. The FT‘s short and punchy approach to financial news parallels the comic tautness of Bloomberg News’s silly stylebook. The FT is strong in Europe, where Bloomberg could use help. But swallowing the FT would be a mere codicil to the Bloomberg legacy, as would buying the Wall Street Journal from Rupert Murdoch. The headline “International Business Media Conglomerate Buys International Business Daily” won’t excite many souls.

The Post Co’s sale of its Post newspaper division to Bloomberg, on the other hand, might not make much more noise, but as an unexpected event, it would make noise of a different quality. The paper is well known and respected around the world, even in places where people have never seen a copy: 90 percent of its online readership comes from outside the Washington area. Its business coverage, already saturated with Bloomberg News dispatches, is a blank slate upon which Bloomberg could write freely and claim intellectual ownership over.

First, of course, Bloomberg would have to convince Don Graham that he should sell. The paper means a lot to the Graham family, so it’s not a cinch. But the steady stream of bad business news coming out of the company is enough to persuade anybody to sell the newspaper division. Like most newspapers in the developed world, the Post is limping. In the first quarter of the year, its newspaper division reported an operating loss of $22.6 million; Post print advertising was down 17 percent; and Post daily circulation was down 9.8 percent (Sunday down 5.8 percent). Newsroom headcount has shrunk from a high of 900 to about 600 today. The whole company remains profitable, however, thanks to its diversification. It owns the Kaplan education outfit, television stations and a cable division, all of which remain in the black, so Don Graham needn’t sell the paper anytime soon to make his rent.

But not even a rich guy like Graham can shoulder losses forever, especially if they endanger the health of the greater company. He unloaded Newsweek in 2010 for $1 plus the assumption of millions in liabilities when he couldn’t stop the magazine’s cascading losses. Like Bloomberg, Graham, 67, has some tidying to do before he keeps his appointment with the actuarial table (about 16 years’ life expectancy in case you’re reading, Don), and securing the Post‘s future belongs at the top of the list.

The Graham-to-Bloomberg handoff makes historical sense if you track Post history back to 1933, when its playboy owner had driven it into receivership. Graham’s grandfather, Eugene Meyer, won the paper in a June 1 auction on the steps of the Washington Post building,  when his lawyer bid $825,000. Like Bloomberg, Meyer was silly rich: His stock in Allied Chemical alone was worth about $650 million in today’s money, according to Merlo J. Pusey’s 1974 biography of Meyer, and it paid dividends, dividends he used to sustain the paper for decades before it became a moneymaker.

Newspapers have long been rich people’s things. William Randolph Hearst, Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, “Jock” Whitney, Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Allbritton, convicted felon Reverend Sun Myung Moon, Mortimer Zuckerman, Philip Anschutz, and other moneybags squandered personal fortunes on the folly of newspapers over the past century. They did so because they expected newspaper ownership to be a source of power and influence, not red ink and heartache.

Eugene Meyer bought the Post with a clear head and big pocketbook. He intended to run it as a business, and did, but he also intended to provide a public service at the same time. Even the competition thought highly of Meyer. Frank Waldrop, once editor of the Washington Times-Herald, told one historian: ”Eugene Meyer ran an honest newspaper and a literate newspaper, he did not run a popular newspaper.”

You can scoff at that idea, but Meyer largely succeeded in separating his private interests from the paper’s reporting. It’s a tradition that the current regime subscribes to, and one that should attract Bloomberg, who has sought to make his news outlets “free of any outside influence, and not tied to some hidden agenda” (his words). I’ve read widely from the Bloomberg media corpus, and with the exception of a few ponderous Bloomberg View editorials, I’ve yet to detect their master’s voice speaking. (Or when I do, it’s sotto voce.)

The same can be said of the Washington Post‘s news pages. Quarrel all you want with the Post‘s journalism, but it’s a great paper, worth preserving for several more decades. I can’t think of a billionaire’s pocket I’d rather pick than Bloomberg’s to make it happen. He’d be much more likely to extend the Meyer-Graham news values than David Geffen, Richard Mellon Scaife, Philip Anschutz or a Russian oligarch.

Consider the many points of affinity between Bloomberg and Graham: Both believe in “straight” news pages. Both are vigilant beyondists, David Brooks’s label for people who insist that their politics are beyond left and right. Bloomberg is the more accomplished beyondist: A lifelong Democrat, he ran for mayor in 2001 as a Republican and then became a registered independent in 2007 while still serving. You’d be hard-pressed to slip a piece of paper edgewise between the beyondism of Bloomberg View editorials and the Post’s. As previously mentioned, the Post already runs substantial Bloomberg News coverage in its business pages, and the two organizations formed a joint news wire in 2010. Bloomberg and Graham enjoy a friendly, towel-snapping relationship, as shown by Graham’s introduction (audio) of Bloomberg at a 2006 event. And just last month, Graham joined the Bloomberg “family,” marrying Amanda Bennett, an executive editor at Bloomberg News.

One loser in the transaction would be Katharine Weymouth, Don’s niece and current Post publisher, who wouldn’t be able to hand the paper over to a family member the way Meyer handed it over to Philip and Katharine Graham, and Katharine Graham handed it over to Don. A pity, for sure, but as a great man once noted, family companies that struggle to maintain the traditional family businesses end up becoming prisoners of those assets. The Washington Post Co can support the Washington Post for a long time, helping it evolve into whatever it needs to evolve into. But will a long time be long enough?

Just as the Washington Post name was worth seven times its physical assets when Eugene Meyer bought it, today’s Post is worth far more than its presses, buildings, delivery trucks, computers and furniture. If the many newspapers of the bankrupt Tribune Co (Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel, etc.) are worth $623 million, the Post has to be in Bloomberg’s price range. He doesn’t mind spending large amounts on news organizations, having recently acquired the Bureau of National Affairs, the professional and government news outfit, for $990 million.

I’m not instructing Bloomberg to buy the Post as an act of charity but as a business proposition. For many inside and outside the Beltway, the Post means serious coverage of politics, the economy, government and foreign affairs. Combining the Post newsroom and name with Bloomberg’s news network (more than 2,200 editorial hands around the world), the Bureau of National Affairs (600 reporters, lawyers and editors), and the company’s other outlets would spawn an unstoppable news machine. Imagine the journalistic permutations: A beefed-up daily Post (more business than the Times, more politics than the Journal), a niche publication to counterattack Politico, a refashioned website to dominate the political and economic discussion, and a breakthrough Web-based TV news site. His terminal would overfloweth with quality news!

Great newspapers don’t happen by accident. They are acts of will, as the Ochs-Sulzberger family proved at the New York Times, Otis Chandler proved at the Los Angeles Times, Barney Kilgore proved at the Wall Street Journal, and the Meyer-Graham regime has proved at the Post. Purchasing the Post would give Bloomberg a chance to join this pantheon and seal his legacy. Few people care about the grand works of retired politicians. In a few years, we’ll have forgotten who was New York mayor between 2001 and 2013 and be fuzzy on the origins of the proposed ban on 32-ounce sodas. Trivia questions will start: “Was it Giuliani or Bloomberg who…” In 20 years the Bloomberg  Terminal will carry no greater cultural resonance than the Xerox machine, and every penny Bloomberg ever donated to Johns Hopkins University will have been spent and faded.

Investing a chunk of his $22 billion fortune on the Post won’t make Mike immortal, but it will leave him well remembered. Hardly anybody remembers Eugene Meyer’s millions or his chairmanship of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System or his World Bank presidency. They remember that he established the modern Washington Post.

I, for one, wouldn’t make a fuss if he observed company custom by renaming the paper the Bloomberg Post.

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Disclosures: My employer, Thomson Reuters, competes directly with Bloomberg LP. My wife works at the Post. I was a Washington Post Co employee at its Slate division from the time the Post Co bought the site (2004) until I was let go (2011) with several other staffers. The company always treated me well. If this deal goes through, I expect a finder’s fee! Also, the actuarial table gives me a stinking 21 years to live. Send data about your expected life expectancy to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and kill yourself by following my Twitter feed. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

PHOTO: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, co-chairman of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, is pictured in front of the U.S. Capitol during a media event about new legislation to amend the background check system for guns, in Washington, March 15, 2011. REUTERS/Jason Reed

When Tom Waits sang, “You can’t unring a bell,” on the album One From the Heart, he was saying that even if we shove all of life’s mistakes and embarrassments down the memory hole, they still ding-a-ling-ding-ding from the beyond.

For reasons mysterious, not all media outlets have gotten that message. Yesterday, Poynter’s Steve Myers reported that NPR erased from its website an entire story about a Kabul execution by contributor Ahmad Shafi that was plagiarized in part from a Jason Burke piece in the March 2001 edition of the London Review of Books. NPR replaced the Web page with an editor’s note explaining the copy theft, but deleted the story.

NPR’s deletion was silly. As Myers reported, the plagiarized account can still be found elsewhere on the Web. If and when that site removes the page, the Wayback Machine or some archivist or Google Cache will have preserved it for inquiring minds. If those sites do not cough up the story, email me at Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and I’ll exercise my fair-use right by forwarding a copy of the NPR piece for your educational and research purposes.

Why shouldn’t acts of plagiarism committed online be preserved online for study and enlightenment? Publishers don’t attempt to collect and destroy the newspapers, magazines or books they sell if they are later found to contain works of plagiarism. Nor do the copyright cops invade libraries to snip from the newspaper microfilm rolls the frames that are later discovered to have contained plagiarized material. We’ve wisely agreed that instances of print plagiarism should be preserved for study and for re-judgment in case the accused is innocent – and yes, also for fingerpointing.

NPR isn’t the only publication stoking the memory hole this summer. The Wall Street Journal, Huffington Post and Yale’s New Journal deleted pieces by Liane Membis from their websites last month after elements of her work were shown to have been fabricated, as this story by Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon explained. The Hearst-owned New Canaan News recently fired Paresh Jha for fabricating sources and quotes in more than two dozen stories, which the publication has removed from its website. Even those bad boys at tech ‘n’ gadget site Gizmodo briefly indulged the instinct to hide their embarrassment this week by deep-sixing a flawed report on Apple before coming to their senses and reposting the piece with a correction and an apology for their self-censoring ways.

Poynter’s Craig Silverman has a lovely term for the trash-binning of defective works of journalism: “Scrubbing.” In a 2008 Columbia Journalism Review piece, Silverman documented two examples of publications deleting from their archives whole articles that contained errors. Silverman, a friend of mine, wrote wisely: “The new permanence of news makes it more important than ever to initially get a story right, lest an error rocket around the world. But when prevention fails, a suitable correction must follow.” (It’s worth a parenthetical that NPR didn’t have to worry about unpublishing stories before it started publishing on the Web. Stories went up and out into the ether and disappeared unless somebody looked them up on Nexis or the show was rebroadcast.)

Some publications indulge the temptation to unpublish because the Web makes it easy – a matter of pressing a few buttons. “I think they see it as compounding the damage to keep it online. The idea that removing it also scrubs away the evidence comes secondary to them,” Silverman told me.

But the unpublishers are wrong: Preserving flawed copy – stolen or fabricated – for reader inspection can have several salutary effects. It can demonstrate to readers that journalists are willing to pay more than lip service to the idea that a public record shouldn’t be tampered with. It can provide useful data for readers to interpret: They can either distrust the publication because of the frequency with which it screws up or have faith in the publication because it transparently corrects its meaningful errors. Preservation can also go a long way toward refuting that old cliché: “It’s not that journalists have thin skins, it’s that they have no skins.” And finally, it’s the only known way of turning a giant sash of shame into a tiny badge of honor.

When journalists avail themselves of the memory hole, they do so only because they know they can. None believe in their hearts that they should.

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Have I ever written such a Poyntercentric column before? And wait, there’s more on the Poynter front! Feel free to stick this in your memory hole: Every other week, I do a paid chat on the Poynter website. Send directions to the Poynter Institute campus to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. The only Tweets I erase from my Twitter feed are misfires: Tweets containing typos or Tweets that were intended as direct messages and accidentally posted for all to see. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

PHOTO: A man goes through garbage cans in Madrid, June 29, 2012. REUTERS/Susana Vera

The church of journalism threw a minor fit last week after This American Life exposed the inner workings of local-news company Journatic. Based in Chicago, Journatic contracts with newspapers around the country to provide them with local news stories. Some of the heavy lifting it outsources to freelancers, who work hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles away from the publications in which their “hyperlocal” news pieces appear. Journatic pays piece-work rates equivalent to about $10 to $12 an hour to the freelancers who collect and assemble information about school lunch menus, real estate transfers, local deaths, marriage licenses, bowling scores, garbage pickup schedules, and the like. The final copy, which is massaged by Journatic hands elsewhere, some of them full-timers, has run in the Chicago Tribune, the Houston Chronicle, Newsday, the San Francisco Chronicle, GateHouse newspapers, and the Chicago Sun-Times.

The outrage over Journatic was, in part, protectionist in nature: No well-paid staff reporter wants to be replaced by one of Journatic’s $10-an-hour wage slaves living in the Philippines, Eastern Europe, the former Soviet republics, Brazil or Africa. Others found in the byline scandal new evidence of the crisis of newspapers, which has them cutting costs everywhere just to survive. But most of the coverage has concentrated on the unseemly ethics of the fake bylines, at least some of which were generated by a “select alias” button used by Filipino writers. Those fake bylines included “Ginny Cox,” “Jimmy Finkel,” “Carrie Reed,” “Jay Brownstone” and “Amy Anderson.” The San Francisco Chronicle has determined that Journatic contributor Jeremy Schnitker published 32 articles as “Jake Barnes” in its pages, presumably an homage to the character in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. The Sun-Times and GateHouse are ending their relationship with the content farm, and Journatic has announced that it has “banished” fake bylines from its stories. The Houston Chronicle apologized, and Journatic’s CEO claimed the ginned-up bylines were designed to optimize search-engine discovery and to protect his writers from reader complaints.

Where does the sanctity of the byline come from?

Obviously, every news story should brim with the truth. But does an accurate story become unclean if the byline does not match the name of the writer (or writers) who produced it? In even the most professional of newsrooms, editors frequently do sufficient work on a piece – reporting and re-reporting sections, composing long passages without the assistance of the bylined writer, redefining the story’s parameters – that they deserve a byline or at least a co-byline. Yet magazine, newspaper and wire editors rarely receive this credit for their extraordinary interventions. Even so, I’ve never heard anybody claim that the readers of these pieces were in any way hoodwinked.

If bylines are so holy, why do the very best newspapers in the land allow government officials, foreign ambassadors, politicians, captains of industry and other notables to claim sole bylines for their op-ed pieces? Almost to a one, these articles are composed by ghostwriters, yet journalistic convention denies the ghosts credit. If Journatic is deceiving the public, so too are the op-ed pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and many other newspapers. See also the books that unacknowledged ghostwriters write for their celebrity clients.

Not to go all Foucault (pdf) on you, but the meaning of authorship has flexed over the centuries, depending on the direction that ideas about property and authority were taking. In the middle of the 1800s, as the American newspaper gathered cultural force and influence, bylines were still rare ornaments. Their assignment was inconsistent, even to writers who “deserved” them. Karl Marx, who wrote a column for the New York Tribune in the 1850s, complained that his contributions were sometimes published with his byline, sometimes as unsigned editorials, and sometimes not at all, as James Ledbetter pointed out in the introduction to Karl Marx: Dispatches for the New York Tribune. That said, Marx was not shy about submitting 125 columns written by his partner in communism, Friedrich Engels, as his own work.

One early advocate of bylines was Civil War General Joseph Hooker, who imposed them on battlefield correspondents in 1863 “as a means of attributing responsibility and blame for the publication of material he found inaccurate or dangerous to the Army of the Potomac,” as scholar Michael Schudson wrote in Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. To be technical about it, journalistic bylines didn’t exist in the 1800s, as the term had yet to be invented. Instead, journalistic works credited to an author were called “signed articles” or “signature” pieces, as W. Joseph Campbell wrote in his book The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms.

Signatures and signed articles became more common at newspapers by the late 1890s, as Alfred Balch noted in Lippincott’s Monthly (December 1898), conveying the growing status of journalists. “[I]t is the experience of every man who writes that signature makes him more careful,” Balch wrote, and this was good for publishers, too, he added. Yellow journalists Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst enthusiastically promoted their best writers (Richard Harding Davis, Sylvester Scovel, Ambrose Bierce, Nellie Bly, Stephen Crane and Eva Valesh, for example) by rewarding them with bylines, making celebrities out of them or adding to their established celebrity. But many publishers still disdained bylines because of the attention they focused on the writer at the expense of the publication. New York Times publisher-owner Adolph Ochs led the resistance, as Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones wrote in The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times:

Adolph had an ironclad policy on who got individual credit at the New York Times, insisting that “the business of the paper must be absolutely impersonal.” Bylines on stories were virtually nonexistent, and no editor, reporter or business manager was permitted to have stationery with his name on it.

For Ochs, the institution and not the individual was responsible for a newspaper article’s content. The propriety of bylines was much debated. The Inland Printer (February 1890) article titled “Journalistic Anonymity” summed up the arguments for and against the byline; The Writer (December 1887) excerpted the speeches of Boston’s leading journalists given on the topic at the local press club. In The Pen and the Book (1899), British historian and novelist Sir Walter Besant noted that “in the case of signed articles, the writer thinks first of himself, in the other case, he thinks first of his subject.”

Pros and Cons, a 1911 reader’s guide to newspaper controversies edited by John Bertram Askew, summarized the arguments for and against. Signed articles would reduce the “log-rolling” that was apparently rampant in unsigned pieces. “Anonymity deprives the writer of all responsibility, and occasionally leads to political dishonesty, the same journalist contributing leading articles to papers of opposite political views,” the book states, agitating for the pros. On the con side, anonymity was superior because it will “enable critics fearlessly to express their real convictions” and because, what the hell, “The writers are almost always known.”

The Ochsian byline position began to soften in the 1920s. Schudson examined the front pages of the New York Times for the first week of January every four years from 1920 through 1944 and tabulated the number of bylines. In the first week of 1920 there were six bylined stories and in 1924 just two. But by 1944 there were 37 bylined pieces. The first bylined AP story appeared in 1925, Schudson wrote in Discovering the News, “but within a few years the by-line was common in AP stories.” A textbook from the era noted that the signed article was no longer much of an exception, and by 1926 the word “byline” (actually “by-line”) had entered the English language, first appearing in Ernest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Hemingway wrote:

He sat in the outer room and read the papers, and the Editor and Publisher and I worked hard for two hours. Then I sorted out the carbons, stamped on a by-line, put the stuff in a couple of big manila envelopes and rang for a boy to take them to the Gare St. Lazare.

Since Hemingway, the democratization of the newspaper has created such a surplus of bylines that they swarm the page like tribes of migrating army ants. Newspaper bylines once denoted that the copy was opinion, of extraordinary value, or written by someone distinguished or talented. But at some point in the 1970s, every newspaper story in excess of five inches was deemed worthy of byline commemoration. Bylines on wire service stories, which newspapers routinely cut to distinguish their home-built stories from the conveyor belt of the wires, now appear regularly at many newspapers.

Just about the only places you won’t find a byline in a modern newspaper these days is the tiny wire story, which a byline tends to make typographically top-heavy, and editorials, which are considered to be too important to have been written by mortals. (I’d wager that the Economist derives half of its editorial authority from its byline ban, which leaves readers thinking the copy was delivered from Mt. Olympus.)

Byline proliferation has been a good thing for news connoisseurs: Knowing the identity of the writers makes it easier to read a newspaper critically and hold writers accountable. It’s been a good thing for journalists, too, making it easier for the better ones to convert their high reputations into better jobs.

But you can’t say that for Journatic’s swapping out of “foreign-sounding” bylines for Anglicized ones. The application of an alias neither makes the writer more accountable nor does it really help him advance his reputation in the journalistic marketplace. If anything, the fake byline signifies the habituation of newspaper editors and readers to the never-ending wallpaper of bylines that is today’s newspaper. By wheat-pasting phony bylines on its outsourced stories, Journatic only confirmed my suspicion that a good and noble thing has gone too far. I can’t be the only person to have noticed that Bloomberg News and Reuters both include the names of the editors on individual news stories, and the New York Times Magazine does the same. At this rate, it won’t be long before news articles come supplied with rolling “movie-style” credits at their conclusion.

Where is Adolph Ochs when you need him?

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I hereby bestow an honorary co-byline for this piece on my editor, James Ledbetter, for alerting me to Marx’s byline problems, which he discussed in the introduction to his Marx collection. Send your fake byline to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and watch my Twitter feed for the real thing. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

PHOTO: Daiquiris are seen on the counter beside a life-size bronze statue of U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway at his regular spot at The Floridita bar in Havana, July 1, 2010. REUTERS/Desmond Boylan

Go ahead and ridicule CNN and Fox News Channel for fumbling the Supreme Court ruling (pdf) in the Affordable Care Act case today by reporting that the law had been struck down. If news organizations are going to crow about their breaking news scoops – Bloomberg News is bragging that it beat Reuters to the court’s decision by 12 seconds – they must submit to vigorous fanny-whackings whenever they perpetrate “Dewey Defeats Truman”-style mistakes. Tweets from the Huffington Post’s politics section, Time, and NPR got it wrong, too.

At least CNN and Fox only got it wrong one way. The Chicago Sun-Times erred at least four ways, posting to one Web page last night its preliminary coverage and headlines – ”Supreme Court strikes down health care law,” “Supreme Court waters down health care law,” and “Supreme Court upholds health care law,” and “Supreme Court XXXX Obama health law.” To be fair to the Sun-Times, every news organization pre-bakes as much coverage as it can when covering court decisions, elections, conventions and other scheduled news events. They write obituaries of the famous and old before they die. Pre-baking isn’t restricted to journalists. Even President Barack Obama stockpiled multiple speeches to cover three possible outcomes, he’s just lucky that he didn’t give the wrong one.

I suppose you could toss out my preconception theory and blame the errors on the continual acceleration of the news and the increasing pressure to get it first. But then you’d have to explain why Bloomberg News, Reuters, the Associated Press, and Dow Jones got it right inside the same instant news cycle.

Still, all journalism is vulnerable to error, so I forgive CNN and Fox for their breaking news transgressions. When the fog of breaking news descends, journalists often go blind or see stuff that isn’t there, a point I previously made after rewinding and reviewing the breaking coverage of the Mumbai massacre and the killing of Osama bin Laden. The early news accounts of those events disagreed violently with one another, in part, because of the chaos and the limited access to the scene. But it was also inherently flawed by preconceptions that journalists bring to every story. Reporters carry wads of pre-baked story dough to almost every breaking news story, whether it be a terrorist attack on a city or the scheduled release of a Supreme Court decision.

Obviously journalists must tote some preconceptions if only because blank slates make awful reporters. The problem comes when reporters become trapped by their preconceptions. Today, every news organization in the land knew that the Supreme Court’s decision was not limited to the simple binary of upheld or ruled unconstitutional, as the itchy fingers at the Chicago Sun-Times proved with their blunder. I’m sure that the reporters at CNN and Fox knew that, too. Perhaps they were overinvested in preconceptions about the outcome and jumped on the first confirmation they saw. That miscue was as understandable as it was avoidable, as my Reuters colleague Erin Geiger Smith tweeted shortly after the CNN and Fox screwup: “Was easy to get this wrong if you weren’t careful. Opinion headnote gives the commerce clause note first, tax on next page.”

Up-to-the-second news has a way of crumbling in your hands if you don’t handle it carefully – and sometimes even if you do. This is one of the reasons an Associated Press editor told his troops to stop “taunting” the competition for its goof on social-media sites: Stop smirking, it could happen to you, buster. And the right thing to do when it happens to you (or you happen to it, which is a better description) is to do what CNN did: Publish a prompt and unequivocal correction. Fox, on the other hand, issued a statement claiming that its rolling, on-air update sufficed to correct the record, even if the error appeared in a Chyron.

Which network would you rather watch?

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Best Tweet of the day: “Roger Goodell just fined the AP $20,000 for taunting CNN and Fox,” by K Smith. Don’t bother writing to me at Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Instead, shoot a tweet at my Twitter handle. Suppress your preconceptions so you don’t make any errors. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

PHOTOS: Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange as a screen displays the healthcare decision, June 28, 2012. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

Every leak of classified information benefits somebody. With maybe one exception, I’d say that the recent sluice of leaks that has opened up and been reported in the press benefits you.

Let me explain. Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan recently theorized that the press disclosures about U.S. cyberattacks against Iran and about American drone warfare were leaked by the White House to portray Barack Obama as a decisive wartime president to aid in his re-election. That an administration might leak national security information for political advantage is no fantasy: In 2006, the Los Angeles Times documented several examples of President George W. Bush’s administration leaking classified material to change public sentiment in his favor.

But Noonan’s reductionist thinking fails to explain last month’s messy leak in the underwear bomber plot. That particular leak blew a double agent’s cover, endangering the agent’s life and benefiting the White House in no way.

The problem with attributing political intentions to all leaks is that: 1) often reporters piece a story together independently of The One Big Leaker and 2) sources leak for a variety of reasons. Stephen Hess notes in his 1984 taxonomy that some leakers leak in exchange for a future favor, others to launch trial balloons or settle grudges or inflate their own egos. Some leaks are acts of defiance against the state, such as the embassy cables and war logs released by WikiLeaks. Other, less spectacular leaks of classified material flow out of the Pentagon and other agencies as briefers and sources respond daily to reporters’ queries, as Steven Aftergood explained two weeks ago. Such unauthorized disclosures happen, Aftergood wrote, “not to subvert policy but to explain it, to defend it and to execute it.”

The most significant leaks, especially of state secrets, usually end up igniting policy debates that should have already been burning. The progenitor of this kind of leak is the Pentagon Papers, which placed U.S. intervention in Vietnam in a new context. The December 2005 New York Times account about the National Security Agency’s warrantless interception of thousands of international phone calls, international emails, and other data stands as another example. Published over the objections of the Bush White House and the NSA, the Times coverage by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau inspired Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and others to contemplate the prosecution of the Times and its journalists under the espionage laws. It also rekindled a civil liberties debate that had gone moribund during the early months of the “war on terrorism.”

As rekindlers go, David Sanger’s recent reports in the New York Times and new book about cyberwarfare – Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power – are pretty hot. I release you to decide for yourself the motivations of Sanger’s sources, but it’s my judgment that whatever their reasons, Sanger’s findings give public voice to internal dissenters who crave a broader discussion of the wisdom of cyberwarfare. That was a bell that Sanger was more than happy to ring two days after his first (June 1) Times piece on the topic appeared. In it, Sanger wrote (June 3): “[T]here has never been a real debate in the United States about when and how to use cyberweapons.”

It would be a stretch to consider Sanger’s unnamed sources “dissidents.” He describes them flatly as “current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their name to be used, because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.” But supplementing Sanger’s knowledge of a super-secret program can’t be considered acts of obedience. If you unpack the comment of “one official” in his June 3 story, you hear anonymous bitching about the lack of a serious internal debate on the topic. Sanger wrote:

No one, [an official involved in the cyberwarfare discussions] said, “wanted to engage, at least not yet, in the much deeper, broader debate about the criteria for when we use these kinds of weapons and what message it sends to the rest of the world.”

Sanger gets government sources on the record in his book, but the only people who will talk to him about the covert program (code-named Olympic Games) to wreck the Iranian nuclear program insist on wearing bags over their heads. “That project remains among the most highly classified inside the US and Israeli governments. On this subject, both American and foreign sources demanded complete anonymity,” he wrote in Confront and Conceal‘s note on sources.

And yet they talked, and their disclosures have fueled criticism of the wisdom of weaponizing computer code by Misha Glenny on the Times op-ed page, Christopher Mims in Technology Review, Steve Coll in the New Yorker, John Naughton in the Guardian, and others.

A new study published by Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Society captures the national security leaker as debate firestarter. Titled “Anatomy of a Secret” (pdf) and written by veteran journalist H.D.S. Greenway, the paper reviews the gnarly course to publication taken by the Times‘s 2005 NSA scoop by Risen and Lichtblau.

Drawing on interviews with principals at the Times and in the government, as well as Risen’s book State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration and Lichtblau’s Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice, Greenway’s paper doesn’t make Risen and Lichtblau’s Dec. 16, 2005, scoop look like the fruit of an organized uprising from inside the bureaucracy against the Bush-Cheney administration. But it does depict a minor riot. In the Times, Risen and Lichtblau described their confidential sources thusly:

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for the New York Times because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.

Lichtblau’s book makes it more specific. In a passage from Bush’s Law cited by Greenway, Lichtblau writes about a source who approached him blindly, “agitated about something going on in the government’s intelligence community.” That something would later be revealed as the NSA intercept program. Risen gives equal voice to the dissenters in State of War, who agreed to talk about the intercepts not just because they thought the program was wrong but because they feared they’d eventually be blamed for it. Risen:

Several government officials who know about the NSA operation have come forward to talk about it because they are deeply troubled by it, and they believe that by keeping silent they would become complicit in it. They strongly believe that the president’s secret order is in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which prohibits unreasonable searches, and some of them believe that an investigation should be launched into the way the Bush administration has turned the intelligence community’s most powerful tools against the American people.

So adamant were some of the Times‘s sources about seeing the story in print that then-Times Executive Editor Bill Keller tells Greenway that “key sources” threatened to take the story to a competing newspaper when Keller put it on ice in 2004. (For a variety of reasons explained in the paper, the Times held the story for more than a year before going to press.) These “key sources” wanted the story out before the 2004 presidential election in hopes that it would derail President Bush’s re-election (score one for Noonan’s they-leak-for-political-reasons point of view).

The weakest and most typical responses to firestarter leaks are: 1) calls for Justice Department investigation of the leaks, 2) calls for prosecution of publications and journalists, and 3) calls for new anti-leak measures. The Sanger story has already two of the three typical responses. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) wants hearings about the cyber leaks, the Republicans want a special investigator to find the leakers, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has announced new anti-leak measures, if you want to call new polygraph questions for national security employees and new leak investigators a crackdown. Although the Obama administration has prosecuted a record number of leakers, it’s still extraordinarily difficult to bring a successful leak prosecution to court, as Charlie Savage explained in the Times earlier this month. And no matter what measures Democrats, Republicans, and the Department of Justice take, successful prosecutions will remain exceptions to the rule

Traditionally, the calls for investigations and prosecutions of leakers are designed to change the subject away from the significant material leaked to the leakers themselves. It’s up to you to decide which matters most to you: the fact that somebody leaked or what the government does in your name. Don’t just sit there. Join the debate.

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If you think I’m going to make a “leak” joke, you’re wrong. Send email to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and watch my Twitter feed for your edification. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

PHOTO: U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) (L), speaks during a news conference to discuss “The Obama Administration’s national security leaks” in the Capitol in Washington, June 26, 2012. Also pictured are (L-R) Republican Senators Saxby Chambliss, John Cornyn and Roger Wicker. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

This piece originally appeared in Reuters Magazine.

Rupert Murdoch has endured more crises during his 80-plus years than Richard Nixon and Odysseus combined, so the CEO and chairman of News Corporation can be forgiven for seeming nonplussed by his current predicament. He took over the family newspaper business in Australia at 21, when his father died, and expanded it. He fought the British unions in 1986 and won. He repelled the bankers in 1990, when he was close to insolvency. He has survived two divorces, the purchase and sale of MySpace.com, a bunch of other digital disasters, and even the predations of John Malone, who threatens Murdoch family hegemony with his purchase of News Corp stock. And now, referencing his media empire’s latest fiasco, the British Parliament has deemed Murdoch “not a fit person” to run an international company.

If Murdoch were the sort of pompous captain of industry who collected leadership maxims, Look for Trouble would likely top his list. He craves competition, and has repeatedly bet his company on new ventures like 20th Century Fox, the Fox Network, NFL football and his satellite operations.

Most chief executives think rewarding stockholders is their primary job. Not Murdoch. The Murdoch family owns the controlling shares in the company, so the chairman can largely ignore Wall Street to pursue a strategy that stretches across decades, not quarters. Yes, he’s impulsive, but creatively so.

I asked Ken Auletta, who has covered Murdoch for almost 40 years, to distill management maxims from the CEO’s adventures. He offered Ideology Is for Amateurs, which captures Murdoch’s political agnosticism. He leans right in his utterances, but subscribes to the politics of expediency, which explains how easily he shifted in the UK from supporting the Tories to supporting Labour and back again. Auletta says Murdoch’s genuine identity is that of a businessman. If he has any ideology, it’s What’s Good for Me?

A second maxim identified by Auletta – Public Memories Are Short, So Apologies Are Inexpensive – explains his performance before the phone-hacking committee last summer, when he said, “This is the most humble day of my life.” This very insincere regret made headlines around the world and bought his company a breather as it scrambled to rebuild its defenses.

Michael Wolff spent hundreds of hours with Murdoch for his 2008 biography, The Man Who Owns the News. “Loyalty is the most important virtue in an employee – hire only people who think you did them a favor by hiring them, i.e., not people with a lot of other options,” Wolff writes in explanation of Murdoch’s practices. If your employees share your primary values and feel they owe you, you can lead them with a flick of your pinky.

“Seek Leverage over everybody you do business with – being able to punish people is an incredibly effective currency,” Wolff continues. “Listen to the voice in your own head more than to anyone else – everybody else will recommend caution; only you will take real risks.” Murdoch exhibited his faith in his own voice at the Leveson hearings in late April, when he said, “I’m under strict instructions by my lawyers not to say this, but I’m going to…” and proceeded to confess to a “cover-up” of phone hacking at News of the World. “Rupert famously doesn’t take advice,” one news story quoted an anonymous source.

A fourth maxim from Wolff makes a virtue of Selfishness. “Make it yours; keep it yours; make sure everyone knows it’s yours – be the one and only, the singular, the irreplaceable,” Wolff writes. The News Corp firings, his brisk shuttering of News of the World when the phone-hacking scandal crested last summer, and his cavalier treatment of his children (and heirs) prove that when loyalty collides with Murdoch’s agenda, his selfishness trumps all.

Although Murdoch is said to be a good boss, whenever one of his executives grows too big, he becomes an expendable rival. Roger Ailes, the mastermind behind Fox News, is the only existing exception – and he could go at any time.

Former broadcast journalist Adrian Monck, who briefly worked for Sky News (which News Corp co-owns), detects a current of Machiavellianism flowing through Murdoch’s career, specifically the sentiment expressed in this line from The Prince: “Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.”

“Throughout his commercial career, from Adelaide aristocracy to Manhattan moguldom, he has convinced every major protagonist that he is somehow the answer to their prayers,” Monck says. “At every step he has somehow managed to recast himself for the opportunity. Even appearing before British legislators, each appearance has been subtly different. So that would be my lesson – appear consistent and conservative, succeed through shape-shifting.”

Only a madman would embrace the Murdoch strategy in its entirety. Only the brave would apply even three of the maxims at once. For managers who find opportunity instead of terror in turmoil and don’t mind being denounced by ex-employees as a betrayer, Murdoch’s way might work. Just make sure the corporate bylaws keep you in control of the board of directors. It’s easiest to lead when you own.

Addendum, June 26: This piece was published before Murdoch addressed his 106th crisis: How to separate his tainted, money-losing newspaper division from his profitable network-cable-film-satellite operations. A split of the company is envisioned, News Corp. announced, but if I know my Murdoch, he’s constructed a trap door that will either send his enemies to the dungeon or provide for his own escape.

PHOTO: News Corporation Chief Executive and Chairman Rupert Murdoch leaves with his wife, Wendi, and son Lachlan after giving evidence for the second day at the Leveson Inquiry at the High Court in London, April 26, 2012. REUTERS/Paul Hackett

Ann Curry, the second fiddle on NBC’s Today show, is apparently being shown the door. That news was broken yesterday afternoon by Brian Stelter, the prolific media reporter of the New York Times on the newspaper’s website, and that 1,100-word story earned prominent placement on Page One of the business section of this morning’s paper.

I’ll forgive you in advance if you don’t care whether Curry continues on Today or if you don’t care whether she finds a slot elsewhere in the NBC empire, just as long as you forgive me for not giving a fig either. It’s not that I dislike Ann Curry or Today‘s first fiddle, Matt Lauer, or even Today‘s morning-show competition. It’s just that I dislike the shows for being dulled-down messes of news, entertainment and talk. If I watch any of them, it’s by accident.

My lack of interest in the morning-show mix puts me in the majority. Today, which is usually the number-one-rated program, and ABC’s Good Morning America, which took that position a couple of times this spring, draw an average of fewer than 5 million viewers. The third-ranked show, CBS’s This Morning, pulls in a little more than 2 million viewers. In a country of 311 million, that’s minimal interest.

The length and placement of Stelter’s piece, on the other hand, conveys a level of importance to Curry’s rumored departure that’s hard to justify. Stripped to its essence, the Curry saga might justify a 300-word short about Today‘s recent ratings volatility, Lauer’s alleged estrangement from Curry, and NBC’s judgment that she wasn’t as good a co-host as predecessor Meredith Vieira, all leading to her impending exit.

Instead, Stelter serves an extended story packed with anonymous sources – ”some at NBC,” “some staff members,” “people with knowledge of the negotiations, who insisted on anonymity because the matter was confidential,” “several people who know Ms. Curry,” “one of the people” who know Curry, “friends” of Meredith Vieira, and “one of the people with knowledge of the negotiations” between Curry and NBC – that makes the departure of a TV co-host sound like the final days of Richard Nixon. How much of the anonymous dancing is Curry’s people spinning her story and how much of it is NBC framing the ouster as necessary strategy to save the show is anybody’s guess.

Overdramatizing the comings and goings of on-air talent and the hirings and firings of network executives is a traditional part of the TV beat. The People Who Cover Television never have to worry about material: The TV industry defines itself by ratings, ratings produce winners and losers, and from winners and losers flow an endless river of copy to bottle and sell. The People Who Cover Sports have been doing a similar thing for more than a century. The toughest choice in covering the TV industry (or sports) is to decide whether to make the loser or the winner the day’s story. It’s not that difficult a choice. If you cover the loser today, just remember to put the winner in your calendar for coverage in the future.

A case can be made that the fate of Ann Curry constitutes big news because Today is a $300 million profit machine dependent on ratings for its ad revenues. If ratings drop and she’s to blame, the network’s stockholders must know! But Stelter spends little time there. In the worst tradition of TV coverage, he’s writing a soap opera about a TV show.

I pick on Stelter, but he’s only one of the several dramatizers working the TV beat. His Times colleague Bill Carter has been known to indulge this tendency, and a couple of years ago, critic Bill Wyman took pleasure in hosing Howard Kurtz (Washington Post and the Daily Beast) for his inappropriately thorough pieces on the fading of Katie Couric’s nightly news lights. The extreme coverage of Curry echoes Politico’s coverage of the Washington beat: While the outlet routinely breaks legitimate news, it also tends to inflate whatever political lint it collects into giant mainsails.

At least one newspaper reporter on the TV beat keeps a sense of perspective about her work: Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post. (Here’s my 2003 appreciation of her work.) With her oeuvre more resembling that of a sports columnist than a sports reporter, de Moraes still delivers as much news about the industry as the writers at the Times – only she doesn’t weigh the beat down with high word counts and Timesian puff. And she’s funny. When CNN’s Lou Dobbs Moneyline was renamed Lou Dobbs Tonight, de Moraes explained that it was “because CNN would not let him rename it “I’m Lou Dobbs, Not Some Darn Islamist.”

With no disrespect to Curry, who is an accomplished reporter, if her impending exit from Today is big news, so is every segment on Entertainment Tonight.

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Stelter, who long ago mastered “more” and “faster,” has my permission to move on to “better.” Send permission slips for my future to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. My Twitter feed went down twice today. I really missed it. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

PHOTO: Television personality Ann Curry arrives at the Time 100 Gala in New York, April 24, 2012. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

“Write every piece three times,” the late Richard Strout used to advise journalists who craved advancement in the profession.

Strout, who wrote the New Republic’s TRB column for four decades and worked 60 years as a Washington correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, wasn’t calling on his colleagues to submit identical copies of their work to different publications for payment, as New Yorker staff writer Jonah Lehrer just got busted for.

Strout was more subtle. If, for example, you were a freelancer who had just penned a slice-of-life piece for the New Republic about a coal strike in West Virginia, the only way to earn back your investment of time on such a low-paying piece was to spin off a similar yet distinctive version, maybe to the Outlook section of the Washington Post. If you could reconstitute elements of the narrative into a work that fed the policy debate over unions, your efforts were legitimate. After satisfying those two outlets, a smart freelancer would shoot for the glossies with a big coal-strike feature, perhaps the New York Times Magazine or the Atlantic. Sometimes the publish-every-piece-three-times impetus has come not from writers, but from editors who, having seen a writer’s earlier work on a topic, wanted a localized version of the writer’s story.

As entrepreneurial as Strout was about repurposing, he never sanctioned the wholesale lifting of paragraphs from old pieces and their insertion into new publications with a few tweaks – what Lehrer stands guilty of. Under Stroutian rules, writers were expected to freshen their work enough to make some plausible claim to originality.

In the early hours of l’affaire Lehrer, my instincts were telling me that Lehrer had transgressed, but I couldn’t figure out whether his offense was a felony, a misdemeanor or a violation of journalistic taboo. A variety of observers were calling what Lehrer did “self-plagiarism,” but in my mind plagiarism requires some act of thievery. You can’t steal money out of your own bank account, can you? You can’t commit adultery with your own spouse, right?

The words Lehrer wrote “belonged” to him even if he had surrendered the copyright to the places he published them. My feeling was that you could call Lehrer lazy for repeating himself, you could call him a hack, you could call him a sneak, but you couldn’t call him a thief. He was an onanist, playing self-abuse games with his copy, but he wasn’t any sort of plagiarist.

But not long after I committed this thought to my keyboard, news reached me via the Twitter feed of the blindingly handsome @davidfolkenflik that Edward Champion was accusing Lehrer of plagiarizing Malcolm Gladwell. If it turns out that Lehrer is a plagiarist as well as an onanist, you can click here for my views on plagiarists.

If Lehrer committed no plagiarism, the discussion will return to how to think about his repetitions. The mores of journalism permit all kinds of republication. For example, if Lehrer wrote a magazine piece and then resold the piece to another publication that knew it was receiving used goods, nobody would be harmed or offended as long as there was no pretense about the work being original. Indeed, republication of previously published works is what press syndicates and wire services do every day. It was also the business model for the Reader’s Digest, which usually condensed previously published pieces.

Likewise, if Lehrer or another writer were to re-traffic the occasional half-sentence or catch phrase from their prior work, no alarms should ring, because self-citation for trivial self-quotation, especially of the “catch phrase” quality, is more trouble than it’s worth.

The republication “danger zone” exists somewhere between rehashing the complete piece and the signature phrase. If a writer feels that he must revisit his old material, it’s only fair for him to alert readers that he may be taking them to a place they’ve already visited – unless, of course, he brings new literary value to the passages or presents new or newish findings. If he feels he has no alternative but to quote himself, it’s a simple matter to provide a footnote to the previous work, or a hyperlink, or some sort of disclaimer that alerts readers (and his publisher!) that he’s recycling.

Lehrer didn’t do this. He cheated his new publishers by breaking the implied (or written) contract that he was producing original copy. Today he’s apologizing for his recycling – “It was a stupid thing to do and incredibly lazy and absolutely wrong,” he tells the Times – but I’m not buying it. No journalistic neophyte (he’s 30 years old with four books to his credit), Lehrer knew that the New Yorker would have rejected the gently used copy from his old Wall Street Journal columns had he informed them of the lack of originality of his “new” work.

We mustn’t put too much effort into understanding Lehrer’s self-destructive behavior. When forced to play the armchair psychiatrist, I usually conclude by saying that onanists, plagiarists and fabulists break the rules of journalism because they either disdain the discipline or feel inadequate to its demands. But let me warn you: I’ve written something like that before.

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My Strout anecdote: I never met him, but after he died in 1990 I attended the estate sale at his house. The goods were pretty picked over by the time I got there. But in his office a few 3-by-5 cards in cardboard trays containing indecipherable notes for ancient stories were still for sale. I regret not buying the whole lot. Send your thoughts to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com and join the estate sale that is my Twitter feed. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.