Uzbek Dictator’s Daughter: Harvard grad’s “wishes are orders”
Northern Italy’s leading daily, La Stampa of Turin, reports on the “Unavoidable Rise of the Beautiful Gulnara,” on Gulnara Karimova, the daughter of Uzbekistan’s autocrat-for-life Islam Karimov. When daddy rules with an iron hand, and you’re the heir apparent, the sky is truly the limit.
Her wishes are orders. Everything she wants, she gets…She graduated from Harvard and took a doctorate in political science from the University of Tashkent, she holds a karate black belt and is a poet, singer, jewelry designer, goes wild over luxury goods, haute couture, and gemstones, she directs the Center for Political Studies of Uzbekistan, and is the founding president of a charitable foundation, founding president of the Forum of Uzbek Culture and Art and Advisor-Minister Plenipotentiary in Uzbekistan’s embassy in Russia, and finally—but most significantly—she is a voracious and ruthless business woman.
Today, according to some analysts, the woman known simply as ‘the daughter’ owns half the country. In 2001, she divorced her first husband, an American of Afghan-Uzbek origin, and set out to build her own empire. Hotels, restaurants, night clubs, a television chain (TV Markaz), a radio station (Earth), a magazine (Bella Terra), a mobile phone company…nothing resists her bulimic impulses…People talk about the “Gulnarization” of Uzbekistani industry. “She owns nothing directly, but everyone knows who is in control.” All this is possible thanks to “daddy” and the disappearance of competitors–the effectiveness of the SNB, the Uzbek secret services, is sadly well known.
Laurie Coleman’s “Blo & Go”: The “whole key is suction”
The Washington Post reports that Laurie Coleman, wife of Republican Senator Norm Coleman, has invented a tool for hands-free hair drying called the “Blo & Go.”:
Against the backdrop of this kind of marketing savvy, it is hard to believe that the name Blo & Go was not chosen to, at the very least, amuse. This, after all, is a world in which the term “wide stance” churns up easy chuckles.
Coleman’s voice registers shock—and dismay—that anyone would make such a connection. “I didn’t think of that,” she says. And then she goes further to point out that the name wasn’t even her idea. It came out of a committee. It was all in the brainstorming, during which “Freedom Styler” was rejected. And so it went: You get your hair blown out. You need a blowout. You get blown . . . out. And then you go. Bingo: “Blo & Go!”
Coleman’s portable little device doesn’t grip the nozzle of the blow-dryer; instead, it cradles the handle. It holds by suction to any flat surface such as a mirror. “I needed something of great quality that was really going to stay up,” she says. “The whole key to this is the suction.”
Senator Cornyn’s Friend at the Scooter Store
A reader notes: It’s really convenient to have a Leadership PAC when the CEO of a company that’s recently reached a $4 million dollar settlement with the Justice Department for Medicare fraud wants to give you a hefty contribution. Hopefully no one will notice.
Thomas Powers on the Iran Threat
Good piece from the New York Review of Books:
At a moment of serious challenge, battered by two wars, ballooning debt, and a faltering economy, the United States appears to have lost its capacity to think clearly. Consider what passes for national discussion on the matter of Iran. The open question is whether the United States should or will attack Iran if it continues to reject American demands to give up uranium enrichment. Ignore for the moment whether the United States has any legal or moral justification for attacking Iran. Set aside the question whether Iran, as Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently claimed in a speech at West Point, “is hellbent on acquiring nuclear weapons.” Focus instead on purely practical questions. By any standards Iran is a tough nut to crack: it is nearly three times the size of Texas, with a population of 70 million and a big income from oil which the world cannot afford to lose. Iran is believed to have the ability to block the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf through which much of the world’s oil must pass on its way to market.
The Washington Post, After Watergate
My dry-eyed remarks about Tim Russert here last week elicited a large number of enthusiastic letters from CounterPunchers astounded at the commotion at his passing. In a separate piece I did on Russert I concluded thus:
After the Watergate scandal was over in 1974 and Nixon bundled off in disgrace to California, Katharine Graham, chairman of the Washington Post Company and employer of Woodward and Bernstein, cautioned journalists: ““The press these days,” she sternly told them, “should … be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome. We had better not yield to the temptation to go on refighting the next war and see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist.” Out of that warning came the failures to see conspiracy where it did exist, in the manufacture of the WMD threat and in the treatment of politics as business-as-usual, somewhat like a game — an approach in which Russert excelled and which made him many friends and far too few enemies. He never had to lunch alone. In the 1880s, Joseph Pulitzer hung a sign in the newsroom of his paper, the New York World, which read: “The World has no friends.” Russert, as the recent obsequies attest, had far too many.
A few days later, on June 25th, came this amusing sequel from Chicago-based CounterPuncher, John Mauck:
Hey Alexander, Today on the Washington Post website, they had an online discussion with Len Downey [The Post’s dreary editor]. Per your column I asked a simple question:
Chicago: Hey Len, What is your opinion of Katharine Graham’s quote: “The press these days should be rather careful about its role. We may have acquired some tendencies about over-involvement that we had better overcome. We had better not yield to the temptation to go on refighting the next war and see conspiracy and cover-up where they do not exist.”
To this I got an amusing answer: Leonard Downie Jr.: It’s timeless wisdom. She said that many years ago, and it was true then and it’s true now. We keep that responsibility in mind every day.”
The Washington Post has some of the best reporters anywhere and it regularly publishes great work, but the sentiment from the top against “over involvement” — otherwise known as aggressive reporting about the powers-that-be — can make for very dull journalism. And too often the Post sees itself as the torchbearer of conventional wisdom and, on the flip side, the gatekeeper against unconventional opinion. (See, for example, Howard Kurtz and David Broder.)
You would never entirely trust Detroit newspapers to honestly cover the automobile industry nor Pittsburgh newspapers, during the city’s steel boom, to aggressively cover the steel industry. Likewise, in the one-industry town of Washington, the Post often can’t be counted on to cover government. Institutionally, the newspaper is too close to and dependent on government officials, lobbyists and other powerful people.
Rick Renzi, American
A reader sends in this heartwarming patriotic moment, just in time for the July 4th holiday:
Just before school let out, students at Alpine Elementary were thrilled to see a new American flag flying in front of their school—only it wasn’t just any old flag. The new American flag flying in front of Alpine School once flew over the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C…
In a Feb. 26 letter from U.S. Congressman Rick Renzi, included with the new flag, Renzi told students their commitment to academic excellence “will serve you well as you go forward in life.” Renzi encouraged the children to continue their studies of “our rich culture and history.”
What’s especially touching is that Renzi must have been awfully busy the day he sent that letter, seeing as it came just four days after he was indicted on federal fraud charges. (Although reporter Judy Hayes failed to mention Renzi’s indictment in the story.) As the reader who sent the item remarked, after the ceremony there was a demonstration for the kids about “how to make a shiv out of a toothbrush.”
Will the Bush Administration Strike Iran?
Laura Rozen has been running an interesting forum on Iran at Mother Jones, which asks: “How likely is a scenario in which the United States or Israel strikes Iran before Bush leaves office? (Or is the Left falling for the hawks’ propaganda?)”
From Danny Postel, the author of Reading Legitimation Crisis in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism and a member of Chicago’s No War on Iran Coalition:
None of us can be certain at this point whether the US or Israel will attack Iran, but I read recent signs as being just ominous enough that I’d rather err on the side of being too worried than of not being worried enough. Even that paragon of cool sobriety The Economist now concludes that Israel’s recent maneuvers suggest that it might not be bluffing. One thing we do know is that the intellectual runway is being slicked for an attack. John Bolton has floated the suggestion that Israel will attack after the November elections but before the next president takes office, while Daniel Pipes has evoked the same scenario, only with the US doing the job.
From Yossi Melman, a national security correspondent for Israeli daily Haaretz:
Very, very unlikely. The military and intelligence contingency plans to attack Iran are still in the making. From the operational point of view, Israel and the US are not ready yet. The supportive political-diplomatic environment has not been created yet. Attacking Iran is considered by Israeli military and political decision makers as a last resort. I assume that they and the international community, including the US, are waiting to see the results of next year’s presidential elections in Iran, to be held in May 2009.
There’s another item up today with final thoughts.
After Losing in Court, Government Keeps Al-Arian Jailed With “Contempt” Charges
Palestinian activist and former university professor Sami Al-Arian was arraigned Monday in U.S. federal court on two counts of criminal contempt for his refusal to testify in a grand jury investigation of a Northern Virginia Muslim think-tank. The indictment is the latest episode of a long, Kafka-esque process that has violated nearly every tenet of Al-Arian’s plea agreement following the end of his first trial in 2005, and kept Al-Arian in prison for over five years. “The government has made a complete mockery of the plea agreement,” Al-Arian’s attorney, Jonathon Turley, told IPS. “Dr. Al-Arian has received zero benefit from his plea agreement…”
Supporters of Al-Arian cited the charges as an attempt by an overzealous Justice Department prosecutor to keep Al-Arian behind bars indefinitely despite an inability to secure a jury conviction. There is no maximum penalty for criminal contempt…The indictment said that Al-Arian had refused to testify in violation of a court order. But Al-Arian’s defence holds that his subpoena was out of line with his original agreement, which included an express promise that Al-Arian did not have to cooperate further with the government.
Disclosure: Laila Al-Arian, Sami Al-Arian’s daughter, is a friend.
James Wolcott on Bob Kerrey’s “Recipe for Loserdom”
I’ve been away for the past week so over the next few days I’m going to catch up by posting some of the best stories and items I read on vacation. First up is this terrific piece by James Wolcott, which should be savored word by delicious word. In it, Wolcott eviscerates former Senator Bob Kerrey (”one of those bipartisan junkies who thinks the only way to solve America’s problems is to glue an Abe Lincoln beard on Sam Waterston and heed his craggy wisdom”) for the unsolicited advice he recently offered Barack Obama on how to conduct himself with John McCain. Obama should handle Kerrey’s advice “with tongs and dispose of in a plastic baggy,” Wolcott writes:
Kerrey’s message to the Democratic victor is that he should take the initiative and strike a preemptive note of cooperative assent with his opponent, emphasizing their shared goals instead of sharpening and highlighting their differences. “From this comes a modest proposal and an immodest wish: That Obama begin now to look for opportunities to say to McCain: ‘I agree with you on that.’” Stuffing words into Obama’s mouth, Kerrey offers a rollcall of issues on which Obama can reach out and ally himself with McCain…
This is so wrong I barely know where to begin. First of all, it’s boring–if Obama wants to disillusion even more Democrats than he has recently, the best way to do it is by mouthing mush such as, “I agree with you about the need for a comprehensive solution to immigration–help me help you help me to help America.” And what is John McCain going to be doing while Obama is doing all this agreeing?–he isn’t going to face pressure from the Republican side to make similar overtures to Obama. The voters, watching Obama strike one note of harmony with McCain after another, are going to think, Hell, if McCain is right on so many issues, why not just vote for him to begin with? Why go for the echo when you can have the golden-oldie original? The time for Obama to be conciliatory and solicit McCain’s help in the Senate is after he’s beaten his ass in the general election, not before.
Parental Warning: Obscene David Broder video follows
I’m on vacation for a week, but before taking off I wanted to do a final column on the journalists’ speakers circuit I’ve been reporting on recently. The most surprising thing about Bob Woodward’s and David Broder’s well-paid speaking gigs is that all of this comes so soon after big name journalists were embarrassed by the buckraking scandal a short decade back. Despite that scandal, journalists and commentators were soon again accepting corporate-sponsored speaking gigs.
In 2003, the New York Times reported that columnist George Will, in “a column syndicated by The Washington Post Writers Group,” had recounted observations from Conrad Black, the media magnate and current inmate. A company controlled by Black had previously paid big fees to Will to serve on a corporate board of advisers.
Will had cited remarks by Black “defending the Bush Administration’s stance on Iraq,” saying ”Into this welter of foolishness has waded Conrad Black, a British citizen and member of the House of Lords who is a proprietor of many newspapers.” As the Times reported, when asked “in the interview if he should have told his readers of the payments he had received from Black’s company, Mr. Will said he saw no reason to do so. “My business is my business,” he said. “Got it?”
Not everyone was so sanguine about the Will episode. Michael Getler, then the Post’s ombudsman, wrote in a column that all journalists and commentators “need to be scrupulous in making known any possible conflict of interests, real or likely to be perceived. Sometimes it needs to be done in print, but it certainly must be made known to editors, who can make their own decision before publication and distribution. It shouldn’t be so easy to just say ‘got it?’ when it comes to the conditions for access to the columns of the country’s newspapers and magazines.”
Yet now, just a few years later, Woodward and Broder are found to be in even more embarrassing situations. By the way, Broder has taken fees of as high as $12,000 per speech. You can see here the type of penetrating insights Broder provides in exchange.
(Warning: do not watch while operating heavy machinery.)
It’s clear that there are others at the “Post” that have also been out on the speaking circuit. Perform a Google search and you’ll find that Jeff Birnbaum, the Post’s lobbying reporter, has spoken to a number of groups, including ones that lobby. Last September, he addressed the “board of directors and annual members” of the National Mining Association. Birnbaum delivered a breakfast speech “to NMA’s board of directors in which he previewed factors likely to impact the 2008 presidential and congressional elections,” an Association publication reported. Afterwards, the NMA’s board held a series of visits with members of Congress to discuss important mining community issues such as safety, Mining Law reform and coal’s future role in powering American economic growth.”
Pundits, writers and commentators at other major news organizations also accept questionable gigs. Last spring, David Gregory, NBC’s Chief White House Correspondent, and Charlie Rose were co-hosts for a panel called The Pulse of America, part of a retreat sponsored by the National Association of Chain Drug Stores at the Phoenician resort in Scottsdale, Arizona.
The list of journalists and pundits on the speaking circuit goes on and on.
Greta van Susteren wrote to me in an email a few days ago, and put it well:
It seems to me [that] an online registry for journalists to list the speeches and the compensation would be an easy solution. In my mind it is not so much the paid part but that it is undisclosed. At least if we know some organization paid the journalist (or a colleague in the same news organization), we–the viewers or readers–can make a judgment how much credibility to assign to a report. It may be total credibility, something less, or none at all, but without that info available, the consumer of news is unaware of bias or potential for bias.
What’s most striking to me about the Post’s reaction to the story is the newspaper’s institutional arrogance. Back in the 1980s, the Post led a crusade to bar members of Congress from accepting outside speaking fees. A biting 1988 editorial said:
Yes, the buying of legislative allegiance, or even the appearance of such a thing, is reprehensible and should be banned. But surely no one wants to interrupt the–forgive the expression–free flow of ideas. If a group wants to hear what a member thinks–suppose for a moment it is a group of students somewhere instead of a trade association–surely it is entitled to invite him, and he is entitled to expect it to pay his way. That’s where the nickel-and-diming begins, only it’s not just nickels and dimes. We’re back now to a trade association holding its annual convention under the sun somewhere in the middle of winter. Surely it can fly him out and back and pay his expenses.
Yet these are precisely the sorts of conflicts, and worse, that the Post tolerates in the cases of Woodard and Broder. Meanwhile, neither Woodward nor Broder could be bothered to return calls to me, or to Editor & Publisher, or to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, which also sought comment about my stories here.
“Increasingly,” the Post’s Howard Kurtz said just a decade ago, “part of the public anger at the news business comes from this sense of arrogance, this double standard, that it’s okay to go moonlight and take money from corporations if you are a journalist, but you don’t feel you have to talk about it publicly.”
Best of all was reporter Jonathan Weisman, who during an online chat was asked: “Harper’s is reporting that your colleagues David Broder and Bob Woodward earn five figure honoraria for speaking before business groups. When are you gonna start getting some of that action?”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing!” replied Weisman. “I gotta get me an agent!”
Yeah, and while you’re at it, you get a moral core and a sense of professional ethics, too.
Two other points. First, a reader wrote in to say that I might have exaggerated the benefits Woodward accrues from donating his speaking fees to his personal charity. He pointed out that Woodward’s:
…reported taxable income also goes up by the amount of the fees. In other words a speaking engagement that provides a fee of $10k increases the speaker’s taxable income by $10k from which he/she then deducts $10k for the charitable contribution resulting in a net ‘wash’. If however, the speakers total taxable income from all sources is high enough some deductions are disallowed which could result in some tax even if the speaking income and charitable deduction were the same.
Interesting point, but since Woodward won’t reply to questions the public can’t know what, if anything, he saves from his finagling of the tax code. Even taking the above into consideration, Woodward would still seem to be getting a tax break for his charitable contributions, plus junkets/vacations in the case of speeches he has given at plush resorts, plus the intangible benefit of promoting himself as a “philanthropist” and do-gooder. Now add in that more than half of his charitable contributions in recent years have gone to an elite private school where his kids have attended. Woodward has, indubitably, got himself a sweet deal.
And, finally, Broder and Woodward both have speaking engagements set for later this year. Broder, for example, is set to appear as the keynote speaker this September for the Massachusetts Bankers Association, at the Equinox Resort and Spa. That event will focus on “on vital issues affecting the financial services industry.”
It will be interesting to see if they keep their scheduled dates.
Alhurra’s Paid Commentators
Alhurra, the U.S. government-funded Arabic news channel, paid former Bush and Clinton administration officials, lobbyists and high-profile Washington journalists tens of thousands of dollars in U.S. taxpayer money to appear on the network as commentators, according to interviews and a review of company records.
A number of payments went to people tied to the White House and the Republican Party. Chad Kolton, a former spokesman for the Director of National Intelligence and Federal Emergency Management Agency; Trent Duffy, President Bush’s former deputy press secretary; Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, a former aid to Vice President Cheney and former CIA spokeswoman, and Terry Holt, the spokesman for Bush-Cheney 2004, were among those paid to appear.
Thar She Blows: The joys of offshore drilling
According to the NYT, the Energy Information Agency estimates that the total amount of oil in the offshore zone in question is about 16 billion barrels. If we assume that it would take about ten years from the day of authorization to get to peak production and that most of the oil is pumped out over 30 years, this would translate into a bit over 1 million barrels of oil a day.
That would be equal to about 1 percent of world production in a decade. If we assume a long-run demand elasticity of 0.3, this would imply a drop in world prices of approximately 3 percent. In today’s prices, we would be looking at a drop in the price of a barrel of oil from around $135 to $131. If this were passed on one to one in gas prices (this is long-run story), we might expect to see a drop in the price of a gallon of gas from around $4.00 to around $3.92 a gallon.
Obama and Ethanol, BFF
Mr. Obama is running as a reformer who is seeking to reduce the influence of special interests. But like any other politician, he has powerful constituencies that help shape his views. And when it comes to domestic ethanol, almost all of which is made from corn, he also has advisers and prominent supporters with close ties to the industry at a time when energy policy is a point of sharp contrast between the parties and their presidential candidates. In the heart of the Corn Belt that August day, Mr. Obama argued that embracing ethanol “ultimately helps our national security, because right now we’re sending billions of dollars to some of the most hostile nations on earth.” America’s oil dependence, he added, “makes it more difficult for us to shape a foreign policy that is intelligent and is creating security for the long term.”
Nowadays, when Mr. Obama travels in farm country, he is sometimes accompanied by his friend Tom Daschle, the former Senate majority leader from South Dakota. Mr. Daschle now serves on the boards of three ethanol companies and works at a Washington law firm where, according to his online job description, “he spends a substantial amount of time providing strategic and policy advice to clients in renewable energy.” Mr. Obama’s lead advisor on energy and environmental issues, Jason Grumet, came to the campaign from the National Commission on Energy Policy, a bipartisan initiative associated with Mr. Daschle and Bob Dole, the Kansas Republican who is also a former Senate majority leader and a big ethanol backer who had close ties to the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland. Not long after arriving in the Senate, Mr. Obama himself briefly provoked a controversy by flying at subsidized rates on corporate airplanes, including twice on jets owned by Archer Daniels Midland, which is the nation’s largest ethanol producer and is based in his home state.
I reported on Obama’s ties to ethanol back in late 2006 and some of his supporters criticized that piece. Their reasoning was: Obama is from a farm state with significant ethanol interests. What can you expect? Of course, by that logic every member of Congress should fight for as much home-state pork as possible, no matter how bad the related projects are for the country as a whole.
Waiting for Kurtz
I’ve been mildly surprised that Howard Kurtz, the Post’s journalism ethics guru and a man always willing to critically examine his own employers, hasn’t discussed the cases of David Broder and Bob Woodward. After all, he clearly feels passionately about the topic, as seen in this excerpt from a 1996 PBS interview:
Too many journalists, these defenders of the First Amendment, take the view that we are private citizens, and we don’t have to discuss whether we make 10 or 20 or 30 thousand dollars talking to the National Association of Wigget Manufacturers. And these are the same folks who call for full disclosure from politicians about any financial matter. And so, I think, increasingly, part of the public anger at the news business comes from this sense of arrogance, this double standard, that it’s okay to go moonlight and take money from corporations if you are a journalist, but you don’t feel you have to talk about it publicly. I don’t think that washes anymore….
An awful lot of very well-respected, well-known journalists have been unable to resist the lure of lecture circuit cash once they ascend into this pantheon of celebrity journalism. And I don’t suggest that any of these people are on the take, or that they would knowingly slant a story just because they spoke to a health insurance group the week before. But sometimes, perhaps, it’s the stories that you don’t do about these interest groups that could be a problem. And certainly when health care reform was at the top of the Washington policy agenda, for many of these folks to go out and talk to health industry groups for tens of thousands of dollars, and then talk about those same issues on Sunday morning, and then say that the public didn’t even have a right to know that money had changed hands, I just think that is an awfully short-sighted view of journalism.
David Broder’s and Bob Woodward’s Lame Alibis
Washington Post Ombudsman Deborah Howell’s column on Bob Woodward’s and David Broder’s ethics was not as disappointing as I had feared. It’s a sign that the Post is at least going to examine the obvious conflict of interest posed by its employees giving paid speeches to corporate groups with lobbying agendas.
Howell acknowledges that Broder and Woodward broke the Post’s own rules and “did not check with editors on the appearances Silverstein mentioned.” She extracts an apology from Broder, and says the Post “needs an unambiguous, transparent well-known policy on speaking fees and expenses. . . . Fees should be accepted only from educational, professional or other nonprofit groups for which lobbying and politics are not a major focus–with no exceptions.”
But Howell goes very easy on Broder—who has been flagrantly dishonest with his own employer and with Howell–and Woodward, who is allowed to glide away from some very embarrassing matters. Also, Howell deals with only a few speeches by Woodward and Broder, even though Woodward gave dozens and Broder gave roughly a score. I understand that she could not deal with each instance individually (nor did I), but she could have mentioned prominently the fact that the two men, and especially Woodward, are regulars on the talk circuit and that the problem is not restricted to the few speeches she discusses in her column.
Broder first told Howell, “I have never spoken to partisan gatherings in any role other than [that of] a journalist nor to an advocacy group that lobbies Congress or the federal government.” That turned out to be false, as Howell discovered, so Broder came back to say, “I am embarrassed by these mistakes and the embarrassment it has caused the paper.”
Broder told Howell he attended an event at the American Council for Capital Formation, “but did not give a speech.” So apparently someone at the ACCF made up this account of Broder’s speech to the group?
I reported that Broder gave a speech at a meeting of the Northern Virginia Association of Realtors (which paid him, he now admits, $7,000), which was a PAC fundraiser. Howell writes: “Mary Beth Coya, the Realtors’ senior vice president for public and governmental affairs, said the event was not a fundraiser but was attended by elected officials ‘to promote our government affairs programs’.” The event in fact was clearly promoted as a PAC fundraiser. And by the way, “government affairs program” is Washington-talk for lobbying.
I also reported that Broder spoke to the Gartner Healthcare Summit in 2007. “He was advertised as a speaker on an Internet site, but Broder said he canceled the engagement,” Howell reported. That’s possible, but since Broder has been so dishonest about all of this I wouldn’t take it to the bank. (I did note in my earlier posts on this topic that I could not confirm all details, in part because neither Broder nor Woodward replied to requests for comment about their speaking gigs.)
Howell doesn’t mention this—Post reporters, it seems, will call people to ask about their actions but won’t take calls about their own. More outrageous is that Broder specifically denied to Howell that I had sought comment from him (which I know only because Howell told me during a phone conversation), even though I contacted him several times, by phone and email, beginning forty-eight hours before posting the first story.
Meanwhile, Woodward told Howell that he turns down “lots” of speech requests and gives “many” for free. That’s nice, but irrelevant, he’s still broken Post policy by receiving payment for a number of the speeches he did accept. He also called Post policy “fuzzy and ambiguous.” So why didn’t he ask anyone at the paper to clear things up for him before accepting so many speaking appearances for fees that apparently top (easily) $1 million?
Finally, Woodward told Howell “all his speaking fees — which range from $15,000 to $60,000 — go to a foundation he started in the 1990s.” He added, “It’s a straight shot into the foundation that gives money to legitimate charities. I think that’s doing good work.”
St. Woodward can don his halo and gaze in the mirror all he likes, but he really shouldn’t treat Post readers with such contempt. The facts are clear. He reaps significant tax savings by giving the fees to a “charity” that gives away a small fraction of its assets, and by far the biggest beneficiary of his foundation is Sidwell Friends, the elite private school sitting atop a reported $30 million endowment and attended by his own children.
So this is accountability: “We broke the rules, and we’re sorry. But as Post employees, we won’t deign to answer questions from outside reporters; we are accountable only to our internal ombudsman, if bad publicity should prompt her to address such matters.”
Howell reports that the Post’s executive editor, Len Downie, “unearthed a 1995 memo outlining the rules on speeches, but it is not widely known about in the newsroom.” So the Post, it seems, has thirteen-year-old guidelines on paid speeches by employees, but few at the newspaper know about it.
Incidentally, Downie and Howell might want to review old editorials the paper ran vehemently denouncing members of Congress who accept outside speaking fees. In a 1991 editorial, and there were numerous similar ones, the Post complained that the Senate had not subjected itself to a ban on outside speaking and that senators and staffers could still accept up to $2,000—one thirtieth of Woodward’s current top fee—for speaking before “interest groups whose legislative fortunes they control. . . . That’s wrong, and as the Senate discusses the higher standard of conduct it has righteously voted to impose on others, the disparity will be all the more apparent.”
I leave you with one of many comments posted on the Post’s website by readers of Howell’s column. They get it, even if the Post doesn’t:
Broder said he adheres to “the newspaper’s strict rules on outside activities” and “additional constraints of my own.”
Broder later said he broke the rules on those speeches. He also said he had cleared his speeches with Milton Coleman, deputy managing editor, or Tom Wilkinson, an assistant managing editor, but neither remembered him mentioning them.
Ok, so when Broder was first confronted he lied about the speeches. When he was faced with clear evidence he then admitted that he broke the rules but then tried to blame it on others by saying that he had told them. They of course didn’t remember him saying a word (remind you of Judy Miller at the NYT?). Mr. Broder is obviously a serial liar who thought he could BS his way out of a mess of his own making. So the only question left to ask is—what is the Post going to do about his repeated unethical conduct?
More on the New Buckraking
Plus: How Bob Woodward and Tim Russert Stack Up
Deborah Howell, the Post’s ombudsman (or “permanent cheerleader,” as mediabistro.com calls her) has confirmed to me that she will this weekend be writing about David Broder’s and Bob Woodward’s speaking fees. For reasons I’ve previously mentioned, and because the obvious conflict of interest posed by Broder and Woodward’s speaking fees was brought to Howell’s attention many months ago and she never publicly addressed it, I don’t have high hopes for her column. (Not to mention the fact that, however Howell dealt with the matter, Broder and Woodward apparently still accept speaking invitations, and that the Post as an institution is generally as arrogant, unaccountable, and free of self-doubt as Congress.)
So to summarize: Broder and Woodward have both given speeches to big corporate trade groups–some with major lobbying interests–often as part of events held at spas and resorts. Broder even headlined a political fundraiser for a group of realtors. Woodward appears to give the bulk of his speaking fees to his personal foundation, but that “charity” gives away a tiny fraction of its assets–skirting IRS regulations–and much of the money goes to one of the most elite private schools in Washington, which Woodward’s own kids attended. Neither Woodward nor Broder replied to requests for comment, an odd strategy for journalists.
Let’s compare the past three years’ worth of the public filings of Woodward’s foundation against those of the foundation of Tim Russert. Both took in roughly $1.15 million, most of it, it seems, from Woodward and Russert, respectively. The Russert Family Foundation donated about $630,000 over those years to dozens of charities, including some $226,000 to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Washington. The Woodward Walsh Foundation gave a dozen or so charities about $190,000, of which about 60 percent went to Sidwell Friends School, whose endowment is reported to be in the neighborhood of $30 million.
And a few reminders: Back in 1994, Broder said, “The murky area, the ones where I need to check are the ones where I get an invitation from a business group. . . . For example, I’m doing a lot of stuff on health care so I would not speak to any group that’s a major player in the health care thing.” Now Broder speaks before health-care groups; in one instance he wrote a column on health care whose publication coincided almost perfectly with his speech to a Blue Cross group. As for Woodward, he speaks before insurance groups, including a 2005 appearance before the American Council of Life Insurers, “a unified voice on issues from retirement security to taxes to international trade. We advocate the shared interests of our member companies and their policyholders before federal and state legislators, regulators, and courts.”
As I noted in a previous post, back in 1995, Ben Bradlee said of journalists making big bucks on the lecture circuit: “I wish it would go away. I don’t like it. I think it’s corrupting. If the Insurance Institute of America, if there is such a thing, pays you $10,000 to make a speech, don’t tell me you haven’t been corrupted. You can say you haven’t and you can say you will attack insurance issues in the same way, but you won’t. You can’t.”
“The Washington Post Standards and Ethics”, unless loosened since 1999, state: “This newspaper is pledged to avoid conflict of interest or the appearance of conflict of interest, wherever and whenever possible. We have adopted stringent policies on these issues, conscious that they may be more restrictive than is customary in the world of private business.”
How many other Post employees give speeches, what do they get paid, and who is paying them? The public doesn’t know, because the Post apparently doesn’t demand that this information be openly disclosed, which Greta van Susteren suggests. (We do know that ethics guru Howard Kurtz is represented by a speakers’ bureau and talks on such topics as “The Self-Inflicted Wounds of the News Business.” It is interesting given the Post’s constant calls for accountability on the part of politicians, that it is so entirely unaccountable in the case of its own reporters and pundits.)
Footnote: check out this 2000 Harper’s essay by Renata Adler, “A Court of No Appeal: How one obscure sentence upset the New York Times.”
Barringer’s article was, in its way, exemplary. In my “offhanded evisceration of various literati,” she reported, not many people had noticed “Ms. Adler’s drive-by assault on the late Judge Sirica.” She deplored the lack of “any evidence” and managed to convey her conviction that none existed. Barringer’s own “sources,” on the other hand, were the following: Jack Sirica (whom she did not identify as a Newsday reporter); John F. Stacks, who co-wrote Judge Sirica’s autobiography (and who said Sirica “didn’t have the imagination to be anything other than absolutely straight all his life”); “those who have read just about all the books on Watergate” and “those most steeped in Watergate lore” (whether these “those” were co-extensive was not clear); two lawyers, who confirmed that “the dead cannot sue for libel”; an editor, who did not claim to know either me or anything about Sirica, who “explained” (not, for Barringer, “said”), in four paragraphs of a bizarre fantasy, what I must have said to my editor and he to me (”It is, ‘Love me, love my book.’ If that’s what she wants to say…it’s either do the book or don’t do it”); and Bob Woodward, co-author of All the President’s Men, who “absolutely never heard, smelled, saw or found any remote suggestion” that Sirica had ever had “any connection” to organized crime.
An impressive roster, in a way. I had once, as it happened, unfavorably reviewed, on the front page of The New York Times Book Review itself, a book by Woodward, but he was certainly the most impressive of Barringer’s sources in this piece. Woodward could, of course, have crept into Judge Sirica’s hospital room and elicited from him on his deathbed the same sort of “nod” he claimed to have elicited from CIA director William Casey on his deathbed, and then claimed, as he did with Casey, that to divulge even the time of this alleged hospital visit would jeopardize his source. And when asked, as he was in an interview, what color pajamas the patient was wearing, he could, as he did in the instance of Casey, express a degree of outrage worthy of the threat such a question poses to the journalist’s entire vocation. That is evidently not a kind of sourcing that raises questions for a Media correspondent at the Times.
Bob Woodward: On the inside looking out
Roberta McCain, the candidate’s Mom, was among those congratulating campaign manager Rick Davis and his wife, Karen, last night at the historic home of Lea and Wayne Berman. The evening was social, meant to ease the tensions for Republicans in a tough year, aided by a jazz trio led by a pianist who’s an alumnus of the “President’s Own” U.S. Marine Band. The secret to lasting 96 years? Roberta McCain drank water as she worked the bipartisan crowd, which included the Davis’ children, Lauren and Cole, plus Justice Alito, Dean Aguillen, Liz Denny, Michael Duffy, Carla Eudy, Fred Fielding, Craig Fuller, Michael Glassner, Joel Kaplan, Governor Keating, Michael Lebovitz, Fred Malek, Drew Maloney, John McConnell, Brian McCormack, Mack McLarty, Ken Mehlman, Tom Nides, Bill Plante, Scott Reed, Lucky Roosevelt and Bob Woodward.
Must be hard holding Washington insiders accountable when you are one…
New and Improved Rice
From Jonathan Schwarz:
Here are some statements by Ms. Rice in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq:
“I think he [then Secretary of State Colin Powell] has proved that Iraq has these weapons and is hiding them, and I don’t think many informed people doubted that.” (NPR, Feb. 6, 2003)…
“The United States policy has been regime change for many, many years, going well back into the Clinton administration. So it’s a question of timing and tactics…We do not necessarily need a further Council resolution before we can enforce this and previous resolutions. (NPR, Nov. 11, 2002)
Of course, this sounds like Condoleezza Rice. But in fact all those quotes are from Susan Rice, Assistant Secretary of State in the Clinton administration and now part of Obama’s newly formed “Senior Working Group on National Security.” These quotes are from an examination of the Working Group done by the Institute for Public Accuracy, here.
I’d long believed that black women named Rice who are willing to be appalling hacks to rise to the top of the foreign policy establishment are a precious national resource. However, I thought we faced serious supply constraints. Apparently I was wrong.
A Fair and Balanced Tim Russert Obit
Via the Daytona Beach News-Journal:
My sympathies go to Tim Russert’s family. My father died the same way: massive heart attack in the middle of the day, in the prime of his life (he was 46, Russert was 58). Shock doesn’t begin to describe the effect on those who stay behind. Try anger, try a sense of loss that, contrary to greeting-card drivel, never fades until, I expect, one’s own final collapse. Russert wasn’t family, but it’s fair to say, as the casket-lidded lines at the end of obituaries usually do, that his survivors include the 3 million viewers who tuned in every Sunday to watch “Meet the Press,” and even the procession of politicians who’ve been squirming their way through his show since 1991. Sadly for us, television personalities can seem closer to us than family members. Russert, however, never had that effect on me.
Respect for the man aside, there’s a matter of respecting journalism when assessing Russert’s place in the trade. That respect has been lacking in the almost universally fawning tributes to Russert and the craft he represented. Journalists and politicians from the president on down have formed yet another procession of praise and prostrations worthy of, say, Diana or Elvis. But Tim Russert?…
The truth is that on any night of the week Jon Stewart’s “Daily Show” does more in a two-minute segment to show in politicians’ own words how venal, dishonest, contradictory and just plain dense they can be than Russert did in his Sunday services. Russert’s master was always the political structure he grilled, but never fundamentally questioned. You always knew whose side he was on: power, not truth — and, by power, I don’t mean his own, of which he had plenty, but the powerful men and occasional women he invited to his Versailles.
I mourn his death. But I wish I could mourn the death of the journalism he represented. To the detriment of journalism and malinformed citizens, that parody lives on.
Change We Can Believe In?
Via Kevin Alexander Gray:
Obama campaign announces “Senior Working Group on National Security”
–Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
–Senator David Boren, former Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence
–Secretary of State Warren Christopher
–Greg Craig, former director of the State Department Office of Policy Planning
–Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig
–Representative Lee Hamilton, former Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee
–Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder
–Dr. Tony Lake, former National Security Advisor
–Senator Sam Nunn, former Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
–Secretary of Defense William Perry
–Dr. Susan Rice, former Assistant Secretary of State
–Representative Tim Roemer, 9/11 Commissioner
–Jim Steinberg, former Deputy National Security Advisor
This is what happens when names are vetted by a campaign that is fearful of opposition research or offending anyone. The problem is that when you pick people on the basis of their being most likely to escape the attack dogs (including the pundit class), you’re not likely to get much in the way of “change.”
And a reader writes in, “Who is the person on that list with a strong human rights/civil liberties background? Hasn’t a fundamental debate over the last eight years been that rights have suffered greatly in pursuit of national security imperatives? Who stands out on the new team to address that problem? Shouldn’t that aspect of national security policy be front and center for this team since fixing the US’s reputation and standing is central to this campaign?”
Graveyard of Empires?
The situation in Afghanistan continues to worsen, with Asia Times reporting, “The battle for Kandahar, the city in the southern province of the same name where the Taliban rose to power in the 1990s before taking control of the rest of Afghanistan, has begun.”
Three days ago, like in last year’s spring offensive, the Taliban occupied the Arghandab district. However, this year the plan had changed. First they rattled the Afghan administration’s nerve by carrying out the sophisticated raid on the jail in Kandahar, setting free hundreds of Taliban captives who were then taken to the Arghandab district.
Significantly, Taliban loyalists within the Afghan security forces either assisted in or turned a blind eye to this operation, which came as a shock to coalition forces as they are increasingly relying on Afghan forces. A state of emergency was declared in Kandahar city and a night-time curfew imposed.
Go back and read the piece that Milton Bearden wrote in the November/December 2001 issue of Foreign Affairs, called “Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires.” The piece, which was written before the October 7 invasion, opens:
Michni Point, Pakistan’s last outpost at the western end of the barren, winding Khyber Pass, stands sentinel over Torkham Gate, the deceptively orderly border crossing into Afghanistan. Frontier Scouts in gray shalwar kameezes (traditional tunics and loose pants) and black berets patrol the lonely station commanded by a major of the legendary Khyber Rifles, the militia force that has been guarding the border with Afghanistan since the nineteenth century, first for British India and then for Pakistan. This spot, perhaps more than any other, has witnessed the traverse of the world’s great armies on campaigns of conquest to and from South and Central Asia. All eventually ran into trouble in their encounters with the unruly Afghan tribals.
Bearden, incidentally, served as CIA station chief in Pakistan from 1986 to 1989, where he was responsible for that agency’s covert action program in support of Afghan rebels fighting the Soviet-backed government. “The first rule of insurgency warfare is that it’s always easier to be on the side of the insurgents,” he told me during a phone conversation this morning. “Everyone goes into Afghanistan fine, the problem is getting out.”