Peter Krupa

The sky is always about to fall upon the newsrooms of America these days. It is told that way because, well, they tell us. Newspapers decide the narrative of the story, and the narrative whenever someone buys a newspaper or downsizes a newsroom is, “woe is us, journalism will suffer,” etc.

What they don’t tell us is how absurdly bloated, wasteful, and inefficient are the nation’s major dailies. Puffed up with a somewhat messianic vision of their place in society and accustomed to having something of a monopoly on information, the nation’s top-tier journalists demand salaries and expense accounts to match.

Recently my co-worker sent a story - researched, written, done - to one of the three major dailies in the U.S. Later he got on the horn with the editor, and the editor said, yeah, that’s a fantastic story, but we don’t buy stories.

“I haven’t been to Costa Rica,” he said. “But I would like to go. Would you fix for me if I came down to do the story?”

So an interesting - but not crucial - story the paper could have bought for $300 will now cost the newspaper something like $4,000, plus whatever large salary they’re paying their full-time reporter.

That, my friends, is a bad business decision.

Or take the case of another of my co-workers. He sent a freelance piece to a newspaper who, for the sake of anonymity, I will refer to only as the Miami H. The editor again said: Great story!

But you know what?

It’s such a great story we’re just going to send our own reporter down there. Besides that, our freelance budget for the year is cashed out, but we still have a lot of money in the travel budget.

Once again, instead of $300, they will now pay about $4,000, and probably get a worse story.

Does this make sense? Only if you have a sense of entitlement!

Maybe I’m just bitter because I missed the gravy train of fat staff writer paychecks and velvet-lined expense accounts. Could be.

Either way, that gravy train is slowing down for its final stop, and everyone off. It’s high time newspapers found a different business model and stopped dicking around the world as if “general interest news” was really a legitimate strategy.

I mean, I’m sorry, the nation’s newsrooms can do that if they want. Just don’t ask me for sympathy when the new owner casts his beady eye on editorial.

From the New York Times:
‘‘If you aren’t for some reason elected president, what cabinet position would you be suited for?’’ I asked. Huckabee paused, considering. ‘‘Secretary of health and human services would be one,’’ he said. ‘‘Secretary of transportation, or the interior.’’ Perhaps aware that this wasn’t a Mount Rushmore self-evaluation, he quickly added that he doesn’t really want a cabinet position or any other government job. ‘‘I’d be just as happy to go back to Arkansas and open a bait shop on a lake,’’ he said.

Hillary is out, Obama is in, and not just because Oprah says so. Since my declaration of potential allegiance to Hillary, I’ve been reading some good stuff about Obama that makes me go, “hmm.”

There’s a recent profile of him in the New Yorker:

On Social Security, Clinton has avoided a detailed approach to fixing the system, which is expected to run out of money by the twenty-forties; for now, she would appoint a trusty “bipartisan commission” to recommend solutions. Obama proposes raising the ceiling on income that is subject to the payroll tax. As a political strategy, this appears to be a terrible idea. A potential crisis in the Social Security system is a long way off. Why, then, would a new President spend political capital on yet another tax hike when he will almost certainly seek to undo the Bush tax cuts for more immediate demands, like universal health care? When I asked Obama about this, he smiled and leaned forward, as if eager to explain that my premise was precisely the politically calibrated approach that he wanted to challenge. “What I think you’re asserting is that it makes sense for us to continue hiding the ball,” Obama said, “and not tell the American people the truth—”

I interrupted: “Politically it makes sense—”

He finished the sentence: “—to not tell people what we really think?”

Zing. Thank you. Another article was an extremely well-done political essay by Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic, that more or less sings Obama’s praises as the “let’s-get-over-the-fucking-60s-already” candidate.

I haven’t read such a nice piece of thoughtful writing in a long time, and Sullivan’s arguments are so lovingly crafted that pulling a sound bite here would be wrong. I recommend reading the whole thing.

Finally, there was a column by Frank Rich the other day, one of those sort of excessively snappy pieces that columnists love to write. Not much new there, but a great observation at one point:

The Washington wisdom about Mr. Obama has often been just as wrong as that about Mrs. Clinton. We kept being told he was making rookie mistakes and offering voters wispy idealistic sentiments rather than the real beef of policy. But what the Beltway mistook for gaffes often was the policy.

That’s especially poignant in the light of recent events. Everyone (read: media talking heads) thought Obama sounded like sort of a rube by suggesting we - horror of horrors - talk to the president of Iran.

Hillary tsk-tsked and the Republicans are preparing to bomb the shit out of pretty much everything.

Then the spies got up in front of a microphone last week and said, yeah, about that 2005 National Intelligence Estimate - we sort of exaggerated. The spies are saying that Iran stopped it’s nuclear program in 2003.

Now it looks like being a foreign policy rookie might be almost an advantage, since it allows you to think outside the war-mongering asshole box. (And while we’re on prophetic moments, Obama also managed to criticize Pakistani President/Gen. Musharaff, a move that was once again laughed away as naive and almost immediately vindicated by front page news.)

Meanwhile, the Clintons’ manhandling of the media sort of creeps me out, and I’m reminded that a Hillary White House would probably be a fine combination of spin and frozen smiles. I think we can all agree that after the Bush debacle, more transparency would be nice.

I predicted awhile ago - during a collective national orgasm of Obama excitement - that Obama would implode dramatically or be forgotten by the media long before the primary. I was completely wrong, and I am happy to be so.

I believe, therefore, that I will be casting my vote for Obama. Although, God knows, next week I’ll probably change my vote to Richardson.

Finally, after nine years of bullying, Chavez has lost a vote. I suppose a lot of people now are charmed by how graciously he accepted defeat. But his acceptance of a defeat at the polls just goes to prove something I’ve been saying for years: There is nothing wrong with the technical apparatus of Venezuela’s democracy.

Some otherwise moderate pundits like Andres Oppenheimer have suggested in the past that Chavez rigged his other electoral victories, perhaps because they simply couldn’t believe that people, given a choice, would vote away their own freedom.

The truth, however, is that Venezuelans, like centuries of democrats before them, were just voting their pocketbooks. Hand-outs were plenty, cash was flowing, and who cares if he’s buying $4 billion in military weaponry?

On Sunday, however, Venezuelans looked at their bare grocery stores, their soaring inflation, their lack of sustainable employment, and while not exactly voting against Chavez, they were none too damn excited about having him until 2050, so many of them just stayed home.

The mechanism of democracy rotated on its pivot, and suddenly Chavez found his political machine failing. He had perhaps the biggest war chest in the history of electoral politics - literally billions - plus he held the strings of everything from social programs to the national oil company.

Having calculated that all he needed for complete legitimacy was a vote in his favor, he left the mechanism of democracy independent, hoping to twist it with overwhelming force of charisma and dollars. But he couldn’t.

So here is the lesson of Chavez’ loss: With a little luck and 20,000 college students making a ruckus, you can still win a rigged game.