Good times in the war room

Posted on April 30, 2019 by Jim

My war room experience was with the telephone company. The principle of a war room is to bring all the decisionmakers together in once place to bypass bureaucracy and act quickly. This concept makes sense for utility companies that must keep service going in emergencies such as storms and disasters. 

Full disclosure: During my years in the Navy and periodic assignments in the Pentagon, I never saw an actual war room. I’m sure war rooms exist in the bowels of that five-sided behemoth, but as a public affairs officer I didn’t have access to them. And you probably can’t fight in there, as they did in Dr. Strangelove.

Illinois Bell had a well-organized war room. A conference room with extra telephone and data circuits was quickly converted to an emergency operations center by pushing the tables together and plugging in the phones. Each department sent a representative with authority to act under the coordination of an emergency director, and the center was staffed 24 hours a day when necessary. 

Most of the folks assigned to emergency operations were seasoned managers from the installation, repair and engineering organizations. They were accustomed to teamwork because the center was activated a couple of times a year for weather events and the occasional strike. Moving repair crews from one district to another, or dispatching a truckload of supplies, was handled across the table instead of through departmental channels. 

Working an emergency was an adventure, a welcome change from the daily routine with sleeves rolled up and neckties loosened. The hours were long but there was a lot of friendly banter, plenty of coffee and food. Especially food. 

Whenever the emergency operating center was activated, the first order of business after the phones were connected was to bring in food. On one occasion the center was activated on a Sunday and the only snack available on short notice was an assortment of cookies from an upscale bakery: fancy, dainty cookies suitable for a ladies’ tea party. The guy responsible for the food got a lot of kidding about the effete cookies. The next time the center was activated he was ready with husky sandwiches and fist-sized cookies. 

I participated in another kind of war room when Unilever merged pieces of three companies into a foodservice business unit. The transition team, with representatives of all three companies and consultants, spent several months around a series of tables in a vacant warehouse with phone wires and computer cables dangling from the ceiling. I shared a table with a woman from Puerto Rico who cursed at her computer in Spanish and a guy from Canada who chatted on the phone in French with the Montreal office. 

When Ameritech sponsored the annual Senior Open golf tournament, company managers set up a war room at the country club to coordinate every aspect of the tournament, from arranging transportation and lodging for the golf pros to organizing events for customers. The operation was so efficient that some of us asked, only partly in jest, if we could run the entire company this way. 

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Farewell to newsprint

Posted on February 27, 2019 by Jim

When I walked out to the driveway, my morning newspaper was missing. Again. No problem: The Albuquerque Journal has an electronic edition and I read it on my iPad, as I do when I’m out of town.

Then it occurred to me: I no longer need a daily delivery of newsprint. After all, I’ve been reading the Wall Street Journal online for years. So I switched to an electronic-only subscription and will save $15.57 a month.

I had a moment’s hesitation because this is a big milestone for me. Newspapers have been part of my life as long as I can remember. My folks got a couple of newspapers a day and I started reading them as soon as I could understand the comics. I delivered newspapers as a kid and was editor of my high school newspaper.

In college I worked part-time as a reporter for the weekly paper I had delivered a few years earlier. One of my public relations jobs required me to read all four Chicago newspapers and clip anything of interest to the company. Over the years I edited at least a dozen employee publications, most of which were in newspaper format. Handling newspapers smudged my fingers so often that I joked about printer’s ink leaking out of my veins. I can only guess at the number of trees I participated in killing.

The impermanence of newsprint shaped my attitude toward my work. I never thought I was writing timeless literature because I knew my newspaper article would wrap garbage or line a birdcage in a couple of days. Publishing a book a few years ago was a novelty because I had created an artifact that was registered with the Library of Congress and would endure on a bookshelf.

I already had made the atoms-to-bits transition in my work. In the last decade or so of my freelance career most of what I wrote was published and distributed electronically. My last employee publication was a website. Often the only paper evidence of my work was the check I received from the client. And this blog goes out into the cloud.

So I was ready to sever my connection with newsprint, but not without mixed feelings. Seeing the words I wrote appear in print gave me a sense of accomplishment and wonder that I still relish. I will always have fond memories of Sunday mornings with five pounds of Chicago Tribune.

As a former paperboy, I had a moment of sympathy for the carrier whose missed deliveries prompted my decision to go electronic. But I will not miss stepping onto a frigid driveway in the winter and will have more room in my recycling bin. Perhaps this will save a tree or two. Not to mention $15.57 a month.

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Impeach the President. Please.

Posted on February 21, 2019 by Jim

It’s time for Congress to impeach President Trump.

Democrats have been teasing us with impeachment porn for two years now. Congressmen claim to have evidence that’s “beyond circumstantial” that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election but, inexplicably, have not leaked it to the New York Times. The news media have been giving us breathless reports of unsubstantiated leaks every couple of days and proclaim the end of the Trump presidency at least once a week. And I’ve lost count of the number of constitutional crises.

Are you getting bored with all this? I am, and I’ll bet millions of Americans are ready to change the channel. After two years of buildup, the Democrats owe us some entertainment. At this point, only an impeachment trial will break the suspense and satisfy the nation’s craving for excitement and drama.

What a spectacle it will be! Impeachment proceedings will bring everything out in the open. All those redacted documents will be declassified. Congressmen finally will get a chance to show us all that evidence they say they have. It had better be good.

What juicy testimony will we hear from Stormy Daniels and Michael Avenatti? Imagine the laughter when Michael Cohen swears to tell the truth. David Pecker of the National Enquirer will have to testify, too, just because the headline writers will have such fun with his name:  Pecker Stands up to Questioning.

We’ll see Oscar-worthy performances from the chorus line of Democrats running for President. Will Cory Booker have another Spartacus moment? Look for histrionics from Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand, scolding from Elizabeth Warren and billionaire-bashing from Bernie Sanders. Think of the campaign ads all those sound bites will produce.

The Senate trial is certain to be raucous, especially if the Democrats deploy the screaming protesters they organized for the Kavanaugh confirmation. We’ll see colorful ranting on the sidelines from Maxine Waters and unintended Bolshevik-bimbo comedy from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. TV ratings will soar and people will have watch parties, like the Super Bowl with drinking games.

I don’t see a downside to impeachment. If Trump remains in office he may be a shoo-in for re-election. If he’s removed from office, Vice President Pence will continue Trump’s policies and, as a career politician, will not violate any norms. We even may see an election based on issues, for a change, instead of outrage.

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Missing the bus

Posted on January 22, 2019 by Jim

Public transportation is controversial in my adopted home state of New Mexico. The Rail Runner, a commuter train line from Belen to Santa Fe, is hemorrhaging money and losing ridership. In Albuquerque a new bus rapid-transit system is more than a year behind schedule and counting.

I’m following the controversy because I grew up on public transportation in Chicago. I spent most of my life commuting by suburban train, elevated and bus because it was the most convenient way to get around. Riding the train to work downtown was faster than driving and way cheaper than parking. In college I spent more than two hours a day on the subway getting to and from the campus. I effectively majored in transportation because I spent nearly as much time commuting as I did in journalism class.

Public transportation thrives on population density. In cities like Chicago and New York thousands of people live within walking distance of every subway station, every major street can support a bus line, and riding to work beats fighting traffic.

Bus service struggles in less-dense suburbs and smaller cities because meandering routes and complex schedules are necessary to ensure access. Taking the bus usually is slower and less convenient than driving, which makes public transportation a last resort rather than a competitive option.

New Mexico is automobile country because the state is blessed with endless miles of nowhere and many residents live in the middle of it. Albuquerque occupies nearly as many square miles as Chicago with one-fifth the population, and the buses run mostly empty most of the time. I never ride the bus in Albuquerque because the nearest bus stop is a mile away.  And I have a car.

So our public transportation is driven more by political hubris than passenger demand. The Rail Runner commuter train opened to great fanfare in 2006, ostensibly to avoid future traffic congestion. When service began, the trip from Albuquerque to Santa Fe took about the same time as driving.

But the train ride got longer as more stops were added, and the anticipated traffic congestion failed to materialize as the state’s population remained flat. Riding the train now takes twice as long as driving, even during rush hour. Ridership is declining steadily while the state pays off the Rail Runner’s massive debt.

In Albuquerque, the last mayor pushed through an elaborate bus rapid-transit system along the city’s main drag: dedicated bus lanes, platforms in the middle of the street and electric buses. The street already is served by two other bus routes, but the new transit system promised to stimulate development and attract millennials.

Businesses complained and some closed while the street was torn up for a year. Then the newly completed platforms had to be modified to fit the electric buses. When the buses finally arrived, they were so defective that the city sent them back to the manufacturer. As the convoy of electric buses left town one of them broke down a few miles outside the city and had to be recharged.

The project now is more than a year late and the new diesel buses won’t arrive for another year or so. Many of the millennials the bus system was designed to attract are leaving town because it turns out jobs are a bigger draw than fancy buses. Meanwhile, the new bus lanes in the middle of the street go unused as traffic slows to a crawl. The city is contemplating — I am not making this up — temporarily using the bus lanes for street festivals and craft shows.

I usually don’t symphathize with politicians, but synchronizing a public transportation network with population growth is a tough call. In Albuquerque, few politicians have personal experience with public transportation but are under pressure to build things. So they listen to city planners who instinctively dislike automobiles and developers who crave city subsidies.

But public transportation and subsidized development don’t create population density unless there are other reasons for people to live and work there. And are nearly-empty buses the best way to serve the small minority of residents who do not have access to cars?

Despite the bus rapid-transit fiasco, Albuquerque is getting off easy. The previous mayor was pushing for trolley cars.

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A graceful exit

Posted on December 14, 2018 by Jim

The recent announcement of General Motors plant closings brought back memories of my career with Illinois Bell. During my 22 years at the company, sweeping changes in technology and the court-ordered breakup of AT&T resulted in serial downsizing.

During my rotational assignment at Western Electric in the 1970s, factory layoffs cut the Hawthorne Works from 16,000 employees to 12,000. The cuts finally ended the long-outmoded plant beauty contest after most of the young women were laid off.

At Illinois Bell, the company of 40,000 employees I joined in 1968 had dwindled to 24,000 by the late 1980s. A series of voluntary incentives trimmed the management force as long-service managers jumped at the chance to retire early. Downsizing was becoming part of the corporate culture. Buyout rumors cropped up every year, and the career aspiration of some employees was to be bribed to leave.

Executives tried to call these force reductions “rightsizing,” but nobody could say “rightsizing” with a straight face. They also claimed the cuts would make the company more innovative and entrepreneurial. This rhetoric inspired some of the most innovative managers to take the buyout offer and leave the company to become entrepreneurs.

Because I was the public relations liaison to the human resources department, my department head walked into my office at one point and asked what I’d heard about downsizing plans. “Would you be interested?” I asked. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “Since we live in the same suburb, I would ask you to drop the papers off at my house.”

So it came to pass that I was called into a confidential human resources meeting in 1989. It sounded ominous, but I walked into a conference room brimming with happiness as the HR managers discussed a new downsizing incentive. It was quickly apparent that these folks, all nearing retirement, were exchanging high-fives because they were eligible for the offer. At age 46, I did not share their jubilation.

I walked back to my office, closed the door and began working on the communications package that would announce the downsizing offer to employees. As I wrote up the details of the downsizing plan over the next couple of days, I began to get interested.

My job was secure but my career path was narrowing.  I was nowhere near retirement, but the downsizing offer would enable me to walk away with a year’s salary. Everyone was surprised when I took the buyout.

For several months I had been working with a task force to recommend ways to reorganize the company. Taking the buyout required me to leave the company at the end of January, and my department made preparations to fill my job. But the task force asked me to stay until its project finished in April.

So I remained at Illinois Bell as a kind of free agent, a man without a department. Human resources transferred me to the president’s staff to keep me on the payroll, and friends in another department gave me an office to use. When the task force concluded its work, my last act before turning in my employee badge and leaving the building was to drop off the final draft of the president’s speech.

That graceful exit turned out to be a long goodbye. The terms of my voluntary buyout permitted me to work for the company as a consultant. I soon began a series of consulting assignments at Ameritech (Illinois Bell’s parent company) that helped me transition to a new freelance career.

One of the HR guys who had designed the downsizing plan took the buyout but was called back periodically to consult on future force reductions. Whenever he was spotted in the building downsizing rumors circulated. He grew a beard but was still recognized.

A couple of years later the company downsized again and this time the offer was not voluntary. Most of my former peers and all of my former bosses were pushed out and were not allowed to come back as consultants. Meanwhile, Ameritech and its affiliated companies remained on my client list until 2002. Some of my clients were former Bell System colleagues and people who had worked for me at Illinois Bell. My last major client, Unilever, was the result of a referral from a former Illinois Bell colleague.

My experience at Illinois Bell made me useful as a consultant to companies going through major reorganization and change. Where they were going, I had already been.

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Putting words in the boss’ mouth

Posted on November 28, 2018 by Jim

Writing has been central to my career, and writing executive speeches is part of my portfolio.

I got my start as a speechwriter when the Bureau of Naval Personnel, in an uncharacteristic display of logic, matched my degree in journalism with an assignment as an admiral’s speechwriter at the Great Lakes Naval Base in Illinois. I had never written a speech, but it was a change from a minesweeper in the Western Pacific.

The speechwriter’s job is to write the speech the executive would write if he or she had the time and writing talent. The speech should sound like the speaker’s own words, perhaps jotted on the back of an envelope as Lincoln reputedly did with the Gettysburg Address. The best speeches are the product of an alter-ego partnership between the executive and speechwriter, such as John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorenson or Ronald Reagan and Peggy Noonan.

I rarely got to see my admiral, much less become his alter ego. Fortunately, I was not writing nuanced policy speeches. The admiral mostly spoke to community groups in his capacity as Naval District commandant, using talking points that came down from the Pentagon.

Delivering speeches did not come naturally to a former destroyer skipper. Listening to the admiral read every word I wrote was painful, but he was inspiring when he occasionally departed from the script and spoke off the cuff. We tape-recorded him once when he did that and wrote his words into his next speech, only to hear him read his own words as woodenly as he read mine.

Writing a speech is industrial-strength wordsmithing. Beyond the art of capturing the audience’s attention and making key points memorable, grinding out 3,000 words for a 20-minute speech was hard work in the manual-typewriter era. The admiral’s busy speaking schedule gave me a heavy workload on tight deadlines. At one point an impatient admiral’s aide dispatched a Marine orderly to wait in my office as I pounded out the manuscript.

I had a more satisfying experience as a speechwriter at Illinois Bell, where the head speechwriter was an excellent mentor and the company president was an accomplished speaker. The president always asked for the final manuscript with a generous right-hand margin so he could add his notes to make the speech his own. The result often was better than we could have written. Okay, he’s smarter than we are… that’s why he’s the president.

When I heard him deliver the first speech I wrote for him, I recognized little of what I had written because the president had wrapped his words around my ideas. He took me aside afterward and said he hoped he had done justice to my material.

When I wrote speeches for other executives, I would research the audience and subject matter and then sit down with the executive to talk about the speech. Chatting with the speaker (and recording the conversation) was an opportunity to learn how the guy talked when he was speaking informally. Was he good at telling stories? Would he be comfortable quoting Shakespeare, or would a Yogi Berra one-liner be a better fit? Could he tell a joke?

Some executives would say: “I don’t need a manuscript. Just give me bullet points.” I get it. He’s an engineer.  So I would break the manuscript into snippets and format it as bullet points.

My annual reserve duty in the Navy often involved speechwriting. I would report for duty in Washington or San Diego and be told: Welcome aboard! We need you to write two speeches for the admiral by Friday.  In the early days of word processing every office in the Navy used a different system, so being an itinerant speechwriter made me a word processing whiz.

I especially enjoyed hanging out with other speechwriters for interesting and witty conversation. I was a public relations generalist who occasionally wrote speeches, but full-time speechwriters (there are not many of them) are an eclectic bunch. Some have academic backgrounds and my mentor at Illinois Bell was an ex-priest. When I started writing speeches I contacted the Chicago Speechwriters’ Forum and asked how I could qualify for membership. You just show up, I was told. Speechwriters are not organization types, apparently.

The most rewarding aspect of speechwriting is the opportunity to communicate ideas. Important people have big ideas, but those ideas have no impact until they are expressed in clear language and delivered persuasively. A great speech can make history. Powerpoint slides can’t do that.

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Of suits and sandals

Posted on September 23, 2018 by Jim

I need a new suit. Usually a blazer or sports coat is as formal as I get for dress-up social occasions or the opera, but I have one good suit for weddings and funerals. I had not worn the suit in a couple of years, and when I put it on for a friend’s funeral recently I found some moth damage. (Moths in the New Mexico desert? Who knew?)

It’s probably the first suit I haven’t worn out. For decades I put on a suit (or at least a jacket and tie) every working day, like nearly every man who worked in an office. It was the uniform, like the Navy with a choice of colors. Styles didn’t change much, and I generally could keep wearing a suit or sports coat until it began to look disreputable.

I don’t know many men who truly enjoyed wearing a suit and necktie to work. I sure didn’t. We wore them because we had to, and because looking businesslike could help us climb the ladder to the executive suite (where we would wear more expensive suits). In many companies it was a status thing: On the factory floor at Western Electric’s  Hawthorne Works the supervisors wore neckties as a badge of rank.

But comfort was more important than status for most folks, and everyone was happy when offices began to change to business casual attire in the 1990s. It was a revolutionary move. At Ameritech, the chairman started things by arriving at the office in slacks and a knit shirt. He spent the day explaining that, no, he wasn’t going golfing, this is the new dress code.

Business casual took different forms at different companies. Some managers I saw at Amoco Oil wore the same suits but hung up the jackets and lost the neckties. At Ameritech, a few leisure suits from the 70s were briefly resurrected and quickly discarded.

It was more complicated for the women. Human resources employees were pressed into service as fashion consultants when people would call and ask: “This is what I want to wear tomorrow… is that okay?”

Even a casual dress code demands rules. Shortly after launching business casual, many companies felt compelled to issue “we didn’t mean that casual” memos banning torn jeans and crop tops. Sears had an ingenious solution: Since they were in the apparel business, they put department-store mannequins in their headquarters lobby with examples of what to wear and what not to.

A logical extension of business casual was Casual Friday, when jeans and more casual attire were permitted. One office at Unilever monetized the universal desire for denim:  During office charity drives, employees could purchase a pass to wear jeans on Thursday as well as Friday by donating a few extra bucks to charity.

I paid attention to dress codes because as a consultant, I needed to blend in with multiple clients. At one point I was working with a coat-and-tie hospital association and a business-casual food company. I would attend a meeting at the hospital association, then toss my jacket in the car and take off the tie as I drove to the food company. When I had to reverse the process, one of the guys at the food company noticed me putting on my tie in the men’s room. I explained what I was doing and he said: “Oh, like Superman.”

These days my retiree attire is influenced by New Mexico’s balmy weather and casual culture. Jeans are appropriate practically everywhere. I wear shorts and sandals all summer, and some folks wear them year round. But I still need a suit (and a mothproof bag to store it in). I don’t expect to attend any weddings, but there will be more funerals.

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The Navy’s Chicago mafia

Posted on July 24, 2018 by Jim

The idea of the Navy reserve is to prepare sailors for mobilization by immersing them in the Navy experience one weekend a month. For reservists who live nowhere near a ship or air station, this means reporting in uniform to a training center for two days of highly regimented training in exchange for a monthly paycheck.

Then there were the public affairs companies. Because I was a public affairs officer when my active duty ended in 1968, I joined Naval Reserve Public Affairs Company 9-2 in Chicago. In those days most public affairs reservists were not paid for monthly drills, and this gave the program an unmilitary degree of flexibility.

Instead of drilling in uniform at a training center, we met once a week after work, in civilian attire, in downtown Chicago. It was nothing like the Navy I knew: more like a group of freewheeling Michigan Avenue professionals who were on a first-name basis and wore identical suits once or twice a year.

The unit’s reservists (nearly all officers) included newspaper reporters and editors, advertising executives, public relations and marketing people, a magazine publisher, a bank president, a publicist for Playboy Magazine and, briefly, a TV anchor. We met at the Wrigley Building because the unit had a former member named Wrigley (who, the story goes, raised eyebrows at the Great Lakes Naval Base as an ensign when he arrived for duty in a chauffeured limousine bigger than the admiral’s).

These folks worked closely with the Chicago chapter of the Navy League, a civilian group of Navy boosters that included top business executives. One Navy Chief of Information called the reservist-Navy League alliance the Navy’s Chicago mafia.

Unlike other reserve units, public affairs companies didn’t just train: They did real-time communications projects for the Navy. Weekly unit meetings were brief because project work took place during business hours. I was impressed by how much time these guys took away from their high-powered jobs to work for the Navy. Their civilian jobs and connections enabled them to get things done that would have been difficult or impossible for active-duty public affairs officers.

My reserve drill site

  • Whenever a top admiral visited Chicago, our unit arranged a media tour that included newspaper editorial boards. Every admiral who took command of the Great Lakes Naval Base was immediately introduced to Chicago’s movers and shakers.
  • In those days the Navy had no paid TV commercials for recruiting and had to rely on public-service TV spots that aired in off-hours. One of our members was an ad agency media buyer whose job gave him lots of clout with TV stations. Once a year he persuaded the Chicago stations to air a bunch of recruiting spots in a prime-time ad blitz.
  • When American Prisoners of War were repatriated from Vietnam in 1973, our unit mobilized on a day’s notice to handle media coverage of returning POWs who arrived at the Glenview Naval Air Station for medical evaluation at the Great Lakes Naval Hospital. One of our members tapped his business contacts to arrange for each POW to get a reclining chair in his hospital room and the use of a new car from an auto dealer during his stay.
  • In its early days, the unit played a major role in bringing the captured German submarine U-505 to Chicago in 1954 to be placed on permanent display at the Museum of Science & Industry. At one point the unit signed for temporary custody of the submarine.

The original members of reserve public affairs companies were World War II veterans. Some of those guys were still around in 1968, along with veterans of more recent Navy service. Many of our members, however, had come through a direct-commission program that recruited professionally qualified people with no prior active duty.

So some of our most talented people knew very little about the Navy beyond what they’d learned in a two-week orientation. Occasionally we had to remind them to wear their insignia correctly and take off their hats when they walked into the officers’ club. I was an old salt by comparison, a lieutenant who actually had been to sea. A few of these “instant ensigns” stayed in the reserves to eventually become commanders and captains.

The oddball public affairs companies proved their value to the Navy, and in the late 1970s reserve public affairs was upgraded to a paid program and reorganized into units with mobilization missions. Getting a monthly paycheck was welcome, but meant that we had to rejoin the more traditional Navy with uniforms and weekend drills at the training center.

Integrating public affairs reservists into the operating Navy paid off years later, when public affairs reservists were activated for the Gulf War in 1990. But nothing could replace the Navy’s Chicago mafia.

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The rise and fall of objective journalism

Posted on June 27, 2018 by Jim

We keep hearing from the punditocracy that President Trump’s conflict with the news media is an existential threat to freedom of the press. I’m not buying it.

Conflict between government and the press is rooted in American history. No one got the vapors when Thomas Jefferson said: “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.” No one called for General William T. Sherman’s resignation when he threatened to shoot a reporter. That’s because for most of our history newspapers were intensely political and drew much of their financial support from political parties.

General Sherman’s threat to execute a reporter during the Civil War was not without justification. Newspapers often published troop movements and battle preparations gleaned from “leakers” on military staffs. (Sound familiar?) A court-martial banished the reporter from the army but, to Sherman’s disappointment, declined to impose the death penalty.

The objectivity we have taken for granted in journalism did not arise until the early 20thCentury. Newspapers broke with political parties to become corporate enterprises that relied on mass circulation and advertising. The Progressive reform movement fought political corruption and placed journalism above the political fray. Schools of journalism were organized to make journalism a profession.

The novel idea of professional ethics took longer to gain traction. The “yellow journalism” that flourished in the late 19thCentury continued to sell newspapers with sensational headlines and spurious stories: that era’s click-bait. The 1928 play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, The Front Page, fueled the reputation of hard-drinking journalists willing to cut corners for a scoop.

The profession I joined in 1960 as a journalism student was striving to live down its dodgy heritage by embracing objectivity as a kind of religion. Lectures at the Medill School of Journalism portrayed our occupation as a higher calling bound by professional ethics. Instructors who had day jobs at Chicago newspapers conducted a boot camp of reporting and newswriting that force-fed impartiality and rigorous fact checking. Another famous training ground in those days was the City News Bureau of Chicago, whose motto was: If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

Yet journalists still debated whether journalism was a profession or a trade. Some editors remained skeptical about hiring journalism school graduates. Editor & Publisher, the industry publication, had help-wanted ads like: Copy editor wanted. Must be sober.

In the late 1970s I briefly joined the Chicago Press Veterans Association, many of whose members were survivors of the bad old days: irreverent geriatrics with really strong livers. At the association’s annual banquet, servers took your drink order when you walked in and brought TWO drinks. The stories they told sounded more like The Front Page than what I had learned in journalism school.

Objectivity finally prevailed. In the last half of the 20thCentury big-city newspapers, lots of them, established a reputation for solid reporting and TV networks followed suit. Investigative reporters carried on the tradition of the progressive muckrakers. Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. Presidents and the public treated the news media with respect because journalists had earned it.

The many reporters I encountered during my public relations career in Chicago asked tough questions but were straight shooters with no agenda. Matching wits with them was a challenge. On the rare occasions when they had time for lunch, they bought their own as a matter of ethics.

But objectivity is fragile. Reporting is a cascade of subjective decisions: what the story is about, whom to interview, which facts to include and which to omit, which quotes to use. Editors must decide what to cover and what to ignore. Even when a reporter tries to cover both sides of an issue fairly – I used to count lines in my stories to make sure I had the balance right – human nature is bound to get in the way.

The Washington Post’s investigative coverage of the Watergate scandal in 1972 was the high point of objective journalism and may have precipitated its eventual decline. It inspired a generation of young people to enter journalism who were motivated by the opportunity to bring down the powerful but ignored the painstaking research and rigorous fact-checking that made it possible. And it intensified the liberal bias that had begun during the Vietnam War.

At first we didn’t notice the decline in objectivity. CNN established cable TV news as a potent force with its worldwide network of reporters in the early 1990s. But the economics of the news business were changing. The decline of print advertising gutted newspapers. Increasing competition and tight budgets prompted TV newsrooms to replace field reporters with studio pundit panels. We began to see less reporting and more “analysis.”

National news organizations that no longer had bureaus in Berlin and Boise increasingly focused on Washington and New York with growing co-dependence between media and government. A surprising number of journalists have relatives and spouses who are government officials or political operatives: like the president of CBS News, whose brother is Obama staffer Ben Rhodes. People move between jobs in the media and government in the same revolving-door fashion as Congressmen and lobbyists.

Media bias gradually became more noticeable. By 2009, 60% of Americans believed the news media were politically biased and 63% thought news stories often were inaccurate. National media organizations openly favored President Obama, both in favorable coverage of the administration and lack of curiosity about its failings. Much of the investigative reporting the news media used to do has shifted to nonprofit organizations such as ProPublica, The Intercept and Judicial Watch.

There’s still a lot of solid journalism going on. Most local news coverage is relatively unbiased, and the proliferation of online news outlets gives discriminating readers plenty of opportunities to get all the news. But it’s easier to get accurate news about your local community than about the nation as a whole.

Donald Trump’s election completed the politicization of national news organizations. The widespread announcements that news organizations did not intend to “normalize” Trump were a declaration that those newsrooms will no longer apply the principles of objective journalism and will function as an opposition party instead.

And they are doing so. Coverage of Trump by the traditional news organizations has been overwhelmingly negative (though a plurality of Democrats say media coverage is not critical enough). Media story selection is striking, with Stormy Daniels getting dramatically more TV coverage than the economy or healthcare.

I don’t think my journalism professors would recognize CNN’s Jim Acosta or April Ryan as reporters: Their speeches at White House news conferences make it abundantly clear that they are advocates with an agenda. In a throwback to the yellow journalism era, we are seeing more news stories based on anonymous leaks, speculation and rumors (Where’s Melania?) that prove to be inaccurate. We also are seeing deliberate deception such as the Time Magazine cover featuring an immigrant child who was NOT separated from her mother. Reporters are irate that the White House is not treating them like Walter Cronkite, but they can’t have it both ways.

So when President Trump responds to media abuse in kind, that’s not an assault on press freedom. It’s an appropriate way to treat mud-slinging political opposition, just as it was through most of American history. The republic will survive: General Sherman was not allowed to shoot a reporter and Trump won’t either.

Posted in Commentary | Comments Off on The rise and fall of objective journalism

Surnames for Pyongyang

Posted on June 12, 2018 by Jim

There’s a lot of skepticism about President Trump’s negotiations with North Korea, and how difficult it will be to persuade the hermit kingdom to give up its nuclear weapons. But it may be possible if – IF – we offer North Korea what they need most. I’m talking about surnames.

Yes, surnames. North Korea isn’t just a poor country: It’s so poor they don’t have enough names to go around. Half the population is named Kim, Lee or Park. Imagine how hard it must be to run the country if they can’t even publish a useful phonebook. Okay, they don’t have phones either, but you get the idea. No wonder they want to lash out at everyone.

South Korea has the same problem but overcame it by giving everyone a Samsung cell phone. They probably have an app to tell all the namesakes apart.

So our negotiators can expedite denuclearization of North Korea by stationing a ship full of surnames off the coast, ready for immediate distribution once destruction of the nukes has been verified.

The United States is rich in surnames, many of which are overstocked: Smith, Johnson, Williams, etc. An exchange program could encourage some of the Joneses and Garcias to change their names to Kim or Park. Democrats would get behind this because they are all about diversity. Van Jones would get even more airtime on CNN as Kim Van.

Support from celebrities would clinch the deal. I’ll bet Beyonce, Cher and Snooki would donate their unused surnames to the cause of world peace. Other celebrities could license their names as a perk to win over North Korea’s ruling elite. Kardashian Jong Un has a nice ring to it.

Surnames for North Korea. It just might work.

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