White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

A Farewell to Tony Snow

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Now we must turn down an empty glass for Tony Snow. The expression comes from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” as translated from the Persian by the English eccentric Edward FitzGerald. The FitzGerald translation also gave us “The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on . . .” and many other quotable lines.

 

Anyway at one time, journalists, particularly those who worked for newspapers, liked to treat “The Rubaiyat” as a kind of drinking song without music. It was very popular in saloons frequented by journalists, who insisted on being called newspapermen or women. It wasn’t until the rise of television that “journalist,” an old-fashioned term, reemerged probably because newspapermen and women were appearing more and more on TV.

 

When we lost one of our own, we’d turn down an empty glass. We’d also upend a few bottles as we mourned our loss; another good soul destined for that great newsroom in the sky.

 

Journalism is a soberer business nowadays, and the old practices have largely died out. Unfortunately in dismantling our vices, mostly drinking and a pervasive inability to handle money, we’ve also lost our ability to grieve collectively, to hug and to cry.

 

Even so, much of the Washington journalistic population, and the White House press corps in particular, are walking around shocked. Tony Snow is dead. We all feared it was coming, and also believed it wouldn’t happen. Not our Tony. Even the atheists among us hoped for some divine intervention; some triumph of the human spirit, so plentiful in Snow, over the evil of metastasizing cancer.

 

After all, we are a sentimental lot; conservative about our trade and profligate with our adoration, if we can find someone we feel worthy of it. There’s the rub. We live in a world of ambitious and disingenuous politicians who buy their opinions wholesale and will pirouette on a dime if there’s a vote or campaign contribution to be had. We are not cynical; we are lovelorn, short of people to admire–editors and proprietors, as well as politicians.

 

 

Tony was one of us and one of them, but fundamentally we thought he was one of us. Sure he’d written speeches for Reagan, subbed for the polemicist Rush Limbaugh, and wore the colors of George W. Bush. We didn’t care.

Snow knew that we go to the White House briefings and press conferences to get the facts, not to debate policy. He knew that everyone of us had an appointment with a word processor or a camera moments after he left the podium, He respected our struggle, and we respected his.

Sadly, the last time I saw Snow was at a funeral for CBS broadcaster Ivan Scott. Snow sat with my wife, Linda Gasparello, and me. Toward the end of the Mass, Snow went over to Scott’s widow, Sarah, and hugged her for the longest time, in a gesture made the more poignant because we all knew that he was fighting the same disease that carried off Ivan. Also, he appeared to be the only present or recent White House official who showed up. He was like that.

 

Bad Energy Vibes from Obama, Odd Ones from McCain

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Memo To Sen. Barack Obama: Beware of your friends and their opinions.

For example, Rep. Edward Markey was on a Sunday talk show allegedly defending your position on offshore drilling. But, in fact, the Massachusetts Democrat was defending his own long-held and irrelevant views. You just had an epiphany on campaign finance. Now, you need to have one on energy. At this point, the world needs oil and will need it for many decades. True, the United States will not get any new oil from the outer continental shelf for 10 years, and it will only account for about 4 percent of our needs as long as it lasts. But even that is essential.

Memo To The Friends Of Sen. John McCain: Just when you thought your candidate had settled down to be George W. Bush Lite, he up and proved that old mavericks cannot change their ways. McCain split the difference on oil by reversing himself on outer continental shelf drilling and remaining adamant on not drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). This put Tom Ridge, the former homeland security chief, on the spot on a Sunday talk show. Ridge simply could not explain the inconsistency of McCain, whose presidential bid he supports.

No matter what you believe should be done, the irrefutable fact is that the world is in a terrible energy bind–and all the indications are that the world energy situation may get worse.

Politicians of the left want to believe that there are technologies ready to come on line, and they are being squeezed out by old-line energy companies. They place their faith in what are referred loosely as “alternatives,” which include solar, wind and geothermal power. These they see as being the equivalent of low-impact aerobics. Painless and environmentally neutral. These politicians oppose the burning of coal and have no coherent policy on oil and gas. They choose to believe that the current high price of oil is a combination of oil company greed, Wall Street speculation, and the Bush administration’s appeasement of the Saudi royal family.

Conservative politicians have as much problem facing reality as their liberal colleagues. They have an inordinate faith that current off-limits drilling areas, both in the ocean and on land, will produce untold quantities of energy for the United States. They have considerable faith in new technologies that will clean up coal, find oil at ever-greater depths, and exploit gas hydrates on the ocean floor. They also believe that oil shale in the West, abandoned in the 1970s because of the environmental consequences of mining and the shortage of water, will replace Saudi Arabia.

One thing the left and the right do agree on is that plug-in hybrid vehicles are going to help a lot. The theory is that they will make a big dent in the 20 million barrels of oil that the United States gulps down every day; that is 10,000 gallons of gasoline every second, according to John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Company.

There is an energy establishment, and it is of one mind on energy challenges. This is the thrust of its thinking:

l Energy conservation is essential

l The outer continental shelf should be explored aggressively, along with federal lands

l ANWR should be drilled immediately, and a natural gas pipeline from Alaska should have priority

l Nuclear power is the best substitute for the coal now being burned and to replace geriatric plant

l Coal gasification is the best way to burn coal

l Wind power works and should be encouraged; in particular, storing wind energy as compressed air needs research

l Liquefied natural gas imports need to be boosted

l The search for new technologies needs to be relentless

l Energy producers, from oil companies to wind farms to electric utilities, need consistency in public policy

The unsaid addendum to the establishment thinking is that Obama needs to get some energy advisers who have a solid purchase on the Earth, and that McCain needs to listen to his advisers. In 1974, governments fell like ninepins as the global economy was battered by high energy prices. The battering next time may be much worse.

 

The Shocking Truth about Future Electric Supply

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TORONTO — “Nobody knows de trouble I see,” goes the Negro spiritual. It could have been playing as background music in Toronto, where the Edison Electric Institute (EEI) held its annual convention this week. Things are not terrible for the U.S. electric utility industry at the moment. But the industry’s future is more uncertain than it has ever been.

The challenge facing the industry is that we are using more electricity than ever before, with our bigger homes that have more appliances and gadgets. To meet future demand, according to Jeffry Sterba, chief executive officer of Albuquerque-based PNM Resources, the industry will need to spend $800 billion. Not only is it unclear whether it can raise this amount of money, in a time of constrained credit, but it is also unclear what expenditures public policy will sanction. Consider:

l The future of coal, which accounts for more than half of U.S. electricity production, is uncertain. It is the largest contributor to greenhouse gases, and the future promise of “clean coal” is yet to be realized on a large scale at an affordable price.

The second hope for coal, carbon capture and sequestration is a hot topic in electric utility circles. But David Ratcliffe, chief executive officer of Southern Company, confesses that it has been oversold, and it will be many years—if ever—before the technical and legal issues of diverting carbon dioxide and storing it by the millions of tons underground. The uncertainty has already caused 60 new coal-fired power plants to be canceled, according to speakers at the EEI convention.

l Nuclear power, a longtime favorite of utility executives, still faces public antipathy, and the cost of building the plants has gone up as the American engineering base has declined. The large steel forgings that are required for the construction of nuclear power plants can no longer be made in the United States. They must be imported from Japan at great expense.

Also the U.S. nuclear industry, thriving in the 1960s, has been sold off. Where once there were four U.S. companies that offered nuclear power plants, now General Electric is the only one, and it is in partnership with Japan’s Hitachi. The once mighty Westinghouse Electric is owned by Japan’s Toshiba. And the other vendor is France’s Areva. Only Ratcliffe’s Southern Company is sure that it is going to build two nuclear units. Other companies, including Baltimore-based Constellation Energy, have expressed interest in about 14 new plants—only about half of these are likely to be built.

The Nuclear Energy Institute reckons the nation needs a whopping 65 new nuclear plants to meet new demand and to allow for the retirement some of the more than 100 operating reactors.

l Wind is a bright spot. Wind power has proved more effective for most utilities than they thought, and they are now scrambling to find ways to store wind power as compressed air. But while the West and the North have good wind conditions, the Southeast suffers stagnant air at the time it most needs electricity: the summer. It is an energy option that is not open to every utility and because of its dispersed nature, it is not as manageable as a large coal-fired or nuclear plant.

l Then there is natural gas, which is the most desirable fossil fuel. In the past 25 years, the use of natural gas to turn utility turbines has grown exponentially, from 0 to 30 percent of generation. The trouble is that there is not that much indigenous natural gas around, and there are demands on it for home heating, cooking and fertilizer manufacturing, which are seen as higher uses than making electricity.

This has led to a boom in the import of liquefied natural gas from Asia and the Middle East. But James Rodgers, chief executive officer of Duke Energy, which is a large gas seller as well as a major electric utility, says that this is a dangerous route. By the time the gas gets here, after it has been liquefied and transported in an oil-burning tanker, Rodgers says it is only 20 percent less polluting than coal. Worse, he says this will harness U.S. electric rates to the global cost of oil and gas. That way he sees ruin.

Like their compatriots in the oil industry, utility executives talk a lot about technology coming to the rescue. But so far, there has been nothing that suggests a revolution akin to the one that transformed telephony is in sight. The only really happy thing here in Toronto is the realization that the plug-in hybrid car is coming, and that it will boost utilities’ revenues by recharging overnight when there is a surplus of electricity.

Appalachian Man: He Is Hurting

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See George.

George is our handyman. As the owners of a 1780 stone house in Virginia, my husband and I have seen George a lot in the past five years. This year, we have seen his already sorry lot in life change for the worse.

It hit a new low last week when Kevin, his new partner, decided to start his own painting and home repair company. He had replaced George’s brother-in-law, Billy, who had quit in November and taken the license plates of the reconditioned ice cream truck that they used to haul their ladders, painting equipment and tools. Petty and pity.

Billy quit at the same time as George’s wife, Amber, decided that she wanted to go it alone, taking their young son Carter. Amber, who is not a well woman, is just about holding onto her low-pay, no-benefits job. And Gayle, George’s unmarried daughter, has just had a baby boy and lost her job, which had some benefits. Last week, Gayle asked her father to pay her rent. Her partner, Jed, who works at a hardware chain store and a chain restaurant, can only pay for food, car fuel, and some of their baby’s bills. So George is now paying child support to his estranged wife, and helping out his grown child.

For now, George is living with a nephew, Mark, who he hopes will work with him. George can’t work alone, because his health is collapsing from a combination of heavy physical work in his present and past job in an auto body repair shop, and from Type 2 diabetes and lung disease. Over the last five years, George has gone from a burly man to barely a man, almost child-sized. Needless to say, he has no health insurance.

I know exactly what Sen. Jim Webb was talking about when he said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” that “Black America and Scots-Irish America are like tortured siblings. They both have a long history, and they both missed the boat when it came to all of the larger benefits that a lot of other people were able to receive,” the Virginia Democrat added: “There’s a saying in the Appalachian Mountains that they say to one another and it’s ‘if you’re poor and white, you’re out of sight.’ ”

George typifies these poor, working people–white and black–who fall out with each other but who need each other to survive. A nephew has a room, or couch, you can use for a while; a sister can pick you up and drive you to a job, or pick up a paintbrush, when your van, or partner, is out of sorts; and a high-school buddy can take your wife to the hospital, when she becomes ill at work, pick up your son from school, and watch him until you can get home.

So when the presidential candidates toss off references to the struggle of working-class people, they should see George in their minds’ eye. And when elected, the president should not toss these people into a desk drawer in the Oval Office.

Scotty, We Hardly Knew Ye

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In my opinion, Scott McClellan was one of the worst White House press secretaries. He was often short with reporters and refused to say anything about anything that was not in his talking points. He did not seem to know what role the White House press corps played in the functioning of the government.

 

When McClellan did not want to answer a question, he would “refer” you to other agencies or to the vice president’s office. In fact, McClellan had three standard evasive practices. The first was to refer the questioner to an executive agency, department or another branch , which he learned from his predecessor, Ari Fleischer. The second was to invoke the war on terror to shut down a line of questioning. The third, which he also learned from Fleischer, was to accuse the questioner of asking a “hypothetical” question. The third practice gave McClellan undue leverage because most questions embody a hypothesis.

 

I would sit in the press briefing room in the White House and wonder if McClellan really understood why we were there. He was argumentative, obtuse and sometimes scornful.

 

So it is with great surprise that we learn that McClellan was on our side, all the time yearning for us to ask him tougher questions. Give us a break.

 

During his tenure as press secretary, McClellan knew that the press corps, singly and collectively, had great doubts about the merits of the war and the disingenuousness of Vice President Cheney in trying to link al-Qaeda with Saddam Hussein. If McClellan was yearning for greater press coverage of the failures of the administration, he was awfully good at hiding his desire.

 

My colleagues are quite astounded that McClellan has written a kiss-and-tell book. But we wonder whether he wrote it more because he was eased out of his White House job than any deep feelings he might have had about high administration officials lying about Valerie Plame.

 

As news, McClellan’s book is hot stuff. But as literature, apparently it is wanting. One reviewer has described it as “limp.” Another has said it is inferior to former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke’s memoir. Perhaps even inferior to former Treasury secretary Paul O’Neill’s lifting of the veil on the White House.

 

The importance of McClellan’s revelations, and why they dwarf the others’, is because he was the public face of the administration. As a press secretary seeks to control what the world thinks of a president and his actions, whatever he says now, McClellan day after day defended the president, the war, the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and the interrogation of prisoners by harsh means.

 

It is likely that media-savvy people like Karl Rove, with their friends in the press, picked up the disillusionment of reporters with McClellan. They realized that they needed someone who got along better with the press, knew what motivated them, and was less combative.

 

The White House got what it wanted in Tony Snow. Snow was a conservative and a journalist. He not only knew what the man in the Oval Office wanted but also what the irregulars in the briefing room needed. He understood that the press office has to operate efficiently—phone calls have to be returned and documents have to be provided. McClellan’s press office was perceived to be erratic.

 

Snow’s successor, Dana Perino, who was promoted with his blessing, is also well regarded by the press. She is well-informed and, on the whole, treats reporters civilly, although sometimes she will attack one. Unlike McClellan, she does not act as though the sole purpose of the press corps is to antagonize the briefer.

 

The smart money in the press corps is on Perino getting a job with a network as soon as she leaves her White House job. That is now a well-trodden path, blazed by George Stephanopoulos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Television Political Talk, It’s a Growth Industry

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This is the year of the political talk show. Never have so many had so much to say about so little. No wonder CNN snapped up Tony Snow, when he left his job as White House press secretary. David Gregory, the uncontested successor to ABC’s Sam Donaldson as press corps lightening rod, is missing from NBC’s booth at the White House. He is doing a talk show for MSNBC–just one more talk show host in long lineup that includes Bill O’Reilly, Hannity & Colmes, Keith Olbermann, Dan Abrahms, Wolf Blitzer, Glenn Beck, Lou Dobbs and Campbell Brown. Even C-SPAN does politics.

But if you do not get cable, do not worry. You can still get your fix of talking hosts on over-the-air broadcasting. Beginning on Friday night, there is “Washington Week with Gwen Ifill.” It is the national anthem before the main event. The first-string players take the field on Sunday morning. On my dial the lineup is “Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace,” “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” “The Chris Matthews Show,” “Meet the Press with Tim Russert” and “Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer.”

Two programs, “Meet the Press” and “Face the Nation,” have been around since the days of radio. But all political broadcasting today owes much to a half-hour show that thundered to life 25 years ago. I speak of “The McLaughlin Group” and its extraordinary host, John McLaughlin.

McLaughlin invigorated the television talk show. He made the host a participant and encouraged contention, even shouting, among the guests.

It is hard now to remember how static the talk shows were. The host was a magisterial figure, who pretended he had no interest in the discussion. I was a panelist on “Meet The Press,” when Bill Monroe moderated it. There was a single guest who was interviewed by a panel of reporters. You could get in two questions, and that was it. It was a structure more satisfactory in concept than in practice. Once, when I was on the panel, Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson was a guest. I knew Jackson well and while we were in makeup, he said, “I want you to take me to the mat, and ask me the hard questions.” Of course he knew, and I was to learn, that the format did not include hard questions.

McLaughlin’s show is now in some decline, overshadowed by the resources and sheer volume of the competition. It has moved to another channel in Washington; and its rating are falling, according to The Weekly Standard. The show is a little tired, and McLaughlin’s conservatism a little idiosyncratic.

I have to confess that McLaughlin has been important to my career. I started a television talk show called “White House Chronicle,” which airs on some PBS and many public access channels, mostly because I got tired of waiting on the short list to be a guest on “The McLaughlin Group.”

At a White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner, McLaughlin came over and told me how much he enjoyed my show. I told him how much he was responsible for it. This seemed to make him very happy.

Meanwhile, back on the dial, it is all politics, all the time. Or, more accurately, it is more people saying more about the tiniest perturbation in the week’s presidential campaign news. The question is whether the public interest in politics will continue after this extraordinary election year–and with it, the 24-7 political talk.

 

Alas, by Their Gaffes We Will Know Them

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Just a month ago, the Washington press corps was still enthralled with this presidential election year. It was packed with firsts: For example, it is the first time since the 1952 election that neither an incumbent president nor an incumbent vice president is a candidate in the general election; the first time a woman is running for president; and the first credible African-American candidate is on the stump.

Now, the joy has gone out of the thing. Rather than covering great events, most reporters I know feel that they are on a kind of gaffe watch. Gaffes are important in presidential politics, and a single misstatement can change the odds dramatically. John McCain may yet rue that he seems to be confused by the Sunnis and the Shiites, and Iraq and Iran. Barack Obama must wish that he had never diagnosed the white working-class male as “bitter.”And Hillary Clinton, a lady with an eye for her place in history, must loathe the fact that she was the first to play the race card.

Because of the shallowness of this phase of the presidential race, trivia dominates.

Reporters hate, but they are also partly responsible for, the mid-election doldrums. They are sanctioned by tradition to question the company a candidate keeps, but they are not sanctioned to press that candidate on how he or she would staff their administration. So we know all we want to–and more–about their preachers, their spouses, their finances and their pastimes.

But to a much lesser extent, we know the policies that the candidates are predisposed to pursue. McCain, for example, favors a comprehensive health care system built around private insurance. Clinton leans towards a government-mandated system. And Obama, who has yet to clearly define his plan, seems to lean towards government mandates. But we do not know whether they could get their plans through Congress, or who would be the health care czar. In fact, we only have a hint of the direction in health care that the new president would like to go.

We really do not know how any of the candidates would pursue peace in the Middle East, or react to an increasingly bellicose Russia and an aggressive China. The candidates dare not tell us what they feel, for fear it will become a contentious part of the election.

The system demands that the candidates tell us what good people they are, not how they will govern. A soupcon of an idea, like suspending the gas tax, becomes a surrogate for a real energy policy.

Hundreds of very good reporters now feel frustrated. They feel they must write about the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., when they know he will have no bearing on the way that a President Obama would govern. Likewise, they must dutifully cover Clinton riding in a pickup truck to prove her bona fides as a representative of the working class, when they know perfectly well that she has been riding in limos for decades and living the elite life, even if she is not an elitist.

Then there is McCain—the candidate that more reporters know personally than the other two–who is doing the Republican rounds, right hand extended, left hand clutching the talking points. The Straight Talk Express has become the Schmooze Local.

If reporters and commentators seem to want to show Clinton the door, it is no wonder. They do not dislike her personally, but they are desperate to get on with the main event. While they are on gaffe watch, they know that big issues are in abeyance, and that the Democratic contest has become a distraction and a bore.

 

Boris Johnson: Mayor of London, Clown of England

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I would like to introduce you to the new Conservative mayor of London, Boris Johnson. He is remarkable. He is unique. His political success is based on the oft-repeated pratfall. Yes, Johnson has committed every political sin and is now at the helm of the most important city in Europe, and the one best beloved by Americans.

In the age of the technocrat, Johnson is more like something out of a P.G. Wodehouse novel. For more than a decade, the British media have been regaled by Johnson’s “scrapes.” For example, he was demoted in the Conservative Party from a position on its front bench (which means that if the Tories had come back to power, he would have been a cabinet member) for variously insulting the city of Liverpool, antagonizing Pacific Islanders, and having an extramarital affair with Petronella Wyatt, a columnist at The Spectator, the weekly magazine which he edited.

Indeed, everyone at The Spectator seemed to be having an affair at the time Johnson occupied the editor’s chair. Publisher Kimberly Quinn, an American, was having an extramarital affair with David Blunkett, the blind British home secretary. Associate Editor Rod Liddle was having an extramarital affair with a Spectator secretary. Given that the staff is very small, that it is the oldest continuously published magazine in England (1828), and it is the seat of the Conservative intelligentsia, you can imagine how the tabloids loved the goings on. In fact, they took to calling Johnson “Boudoir Boris” and the magazine “The Sextator.”

Johnson was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and with which he has been able to cut himself. From Eton, the world’s most exclusive boarding school, Johnson sailed into Oxford University, where he distinguished himself as president of its debating society, The Oxford Union. Many a future prime minister has honed his skills debating at Oxford, and it seemed inevitable that Johnson would find his way into parliament. In 2001, he became a Conservative member.

Johnson’s running for mayor of London had all the characteristics of William F. Buckley Jr.’s running for mayor of New York. The only difference is that Johnson secured–to the horror of his party–the formal Conservative nomination, and now he is the mayor. At 43, he is one of the few executive mayors in England. He is a man known for his dazzling white hair, disorganization, irreverently witty tongue, and a sense that absolutely everything is not to be taken seriously.

Johnson was aided in his campaign because he was running against an equally bizarre, but more calculating, Ken Livingstone, also known as “Red Ken.” Livingstone had a long history in London politics and was elected to the new post of executive mayor eight years ago. Livingstone’s admiration of Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, coupled with his newly found affection for big business, offended the left and the right of his party. Yet, to his credit, Livingstone introduced congestion pricing, which has eased London traffic, and coped with the al-Qaeda subway bombings on July 7, 2005.

But in this election, the big issues like the 2012 Olympic Games in London and street crime were dwarfed by a silly argument over buses. Livingstone had decided that it was time to replace London’s double-decker fleet with flexible single-deck buses, commonly called “bendy” buses. The argument is one of tradition versus modernity. Johnson, who mostly rides a bicycle, wants the double-decker Routemaster buses redesigned and saved. He wants to ban the bendy buses that he believes hurt the image of London as well as being, well, un-English: the Routemasters are made in England and the bendys are made in Germany.

The Conservative Party is not so happy about Johnson winning the executive mayoral race. They feel that he will embarrass the party leader, David Cameron, and generally humiliate Tory values. Johnson has the wit of Will Rodgers and none of the temperance. Here are some of Boris’s best:

“My friends, as I have discovered myself, there are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.”

“I don’t see why people are so snooty about Channel 5. It has some respectable documentaries about the Second World War. It also devotes considerable airtime to investigations into lap dancing, and other related and vital subjects.”

“I love tennis with a passion. I challenged Boris Becker to a match once and he said he was up for it, but he never called back. I bet I could make him run around.”

“I have as much chance of becoming prime minister as of being decapitated by a Frisbee or of finding Elvis.”

The Pity of Earth Day–It Brings Out the Crazies

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The trouble with Earth Day, which we mark this week (April 22), is that it has a powerful hold on crazies. Crazies on the left and crazies on the right.

That certainly is not what Sen. Gaylord Nelson had in mind when he inaugurated the first Earth Day in 1970. The senator, and others, hoped that Earth Day would attract a serious examination of the stresses on the Earth. Instead, it seems to attract stressed people.

From the left come the neo-agrarians, the anti-capitalists, the no-growth proselytizers, and the blame-America-first crowd. From the right come the supporters of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a pro-business phalanx that is in deep denial about man’s impact on the environment, and libertarians who refuse to believe that governments can ever get anything right, or that government standards can be beneficial.

The fact is that a great majority of Americans are deeply concerned about the environment and maintaining the quality of life that has been a hallmark of progress in the 20th and 21st centuries. This majority includes electric utility executives, oil company CEOs, and the trade associations to which these industrial captains belong.

It is notable the extent to which the energy industries have signed onto the concept of global warming and other environmental degradation. They know that their activities often collide directly with the environment and they are, often to the surprise of the environmental community, keen to help. British Petroleum is pouring millions of dollars into solar power and hydrogen. John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Company, the U.S. division of Royal Dutch Shell, is retiring early to devote himself to the task of alerting Americans to their energy vulnerability and to the environmental story.

Sure, it took industry a long time to get on the environmental bandwagon. It is the way of industry that it initially resists any innovation that might cost money or involve difficulty. Later it buys television advertising, pointing to its own virtue when it has capitulated.

The introduction of double-hulled oil tankers in domestic waters is a clear example of this: conversion in the face of necessity. After the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, the government mandated double-hulling, the tanker industry moaned, and oil spills in domestic waters declined by 70 percent. The cost of double-hulling is balanced out by the lack of payouts for spills. Double-hulling ships, like removing lead from gasoline, introducing the catalytic converter, and banning hydrofluorocarbons in propellants and refrigerants, are major American environmental successes. We led the world.

But if you listen to the critics, you would think that the United States was always on the wrong side of the environmental ledger.

The problem is we live well and we consumer a lot of energy and a lot of goods in our routine lives. There are about 21 gallons of gasoline in a 42-gallon barrel of oil. If you calculate your own daily gasoline usage, you will come up with a pretty frightening number over your lifetime. Likewise, coal burned for lighting, heating and cooling. Residents of New York City, who live on top of each other and do not drive very much, use about half of the energy of suburban households.

For a serious improvement in the environment, just from an energy consumption standpoint, we need to generate electricity by means other than burning fossil fuels (nuclear and wind), introduce more electric-powered public transportation, and substitute electric vehicles for hydrocarbon-powered vehicles. The technology is in sight for all of these. The problem is that the political will is distracted by the pressure groups on the left and the right.

Human impact on the environment can be disastrous or benign, and even beneficial. The towpath along the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal in Washington, D.C. started out as a purely commercial intrusion on a river bank, but now it is a recreational magnet. The dams along the Colorado River have boosted growth in the West, but the river has paid a price. Seattle City Light, the utility that serves the Seattle area, is now carbon-neutral because of the large amount of generation it gets from wind and hydro. There is a debate whether damming rivers is justified; but compared with other ways of producing large quantities of electricity, it is relatively benign.

Farming is an intrusion into nature—a constructive one. The challenge for the Earth Day advocates is to find other constructive intrusions.

 

A Little Hate Is Good for Fourth Estate

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There must be some nostalgia at CBS News for the good old days, when the network was roundly hated and people at the political extremes longed to see it fail. Now that it is failing (it is a laggard in the ratings), nobody seems to care. Gone are the conservatives, who wanted to buy the network to sanitize it and rout out alleged liberal journalists. Also gone are the political lefties, who believed that CBS was the captive of its advertisers.

In media, to be hated is an affirmation that you are succeeding.

At The Radio & Television Correspondents’ Association annual dinner this week, the happiest people were at the Fox News tables. Roger Ailes, the principal architect of Fox’s huge success as a news network, and his star host, Bill O’Reilly, were beaming—well aware that most people in the room believe that the Fox cable channel has degraded broadcast news.

It is not just CBS that is hurting, but also other traditional media as well—most especially newspapers. Marylanders used to hate The Baltimore Sun. Now they worry that their venerable newspaper is on the ropes, and may be sold to quite the wrong kind of person.

They used to say in newsrooms, “If you aren’t hated, you’re not doing this job right.” Unfortunately, the quality of hatred that most news organizations face is sadly watered down. Generalized attacks on the “liberal media” and the “mainstream media” just don’t pack much of a wallop. They tell us more about the attacker than the attacked.

Happily, two newspapers—maybe two of the three best newspapers in the country—can still agitate those who believe in media conspiracies. These are The New York Times and The Washington Post. The third is The Wall Street Journal, which has never raised the same kind of intense feeling as the other two. Its editorial page is so predictable that even liberals cannot get mad at it. And its news coverage is pretty faultless.

The two big East Coast newspapers can really get the critics going. The New York Times, through a series of terrible blunders, has opened itself up to particularly virulent criticism. The Washington Post, which sells five times as many newspapers as its nearest competitor, The Washington Times, unerringly gets the brickbats. Civil rights groups accuse it of racial insensitivity. And radio talk show hosts like to refer to it as “The Washington Compost.” Even so, the paper has just bagged six Pulitzer prizes. Particularly, it showed the whole world last year that it could still deliver great journalism by revealing the scandalous treatment of veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Both The New York Times and The Washington Post have the resources to do the job right. Although The Times is in a slump, and appears to be in desperate need of an editor who has a vision and a publisher who is competent, it still triumphs on solid, day-to-day coverage of big continuing stories. Its coverage of the subprime mortgage crisis and its on-the-ground reporting out of Iraq are excellent.

Michael Wolff, the media critic of Vanity Fair, is in full pursuit of The New York Times in his May column. Wolff catalogs the humiliations the newspaper has suffered in recent times (including the Jayson Blair fictions, Judith Miller’s partisanship, and the insinuation that John McCain was having an affair with a lobbyist) and speculates on the possibility that the special voting stock, which gives the Sulzberger family control of the paper, may be under attack.

It may be very difficult to change the bylaws of the company, but Wolff thinks that angry shareholders could force the sale issue; or that the Sulzberger family, like the Bancroft family that used to own The Wall Street Journal, can simply be bought off. One way or the other, Wolff sees dissident shareholders changing the corporate structure of the paper.

At the same time, with a similar stock arrangement, the Graham family, greatly assisted by Warren Buffet, is firmly in control of its newspaper.

Yet, neither the Sulzbergers nor the Grahams have had huge financial successes with the properties they inherited. Both have had considerable editorial successes by lavishing resources on the papers. But as publishing ventures, the families have been timid and sometimes foolish. They profited from near monopolies, but mostly failed in diversification. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, the father of the present publisher of The New York Times, confounded the publishing industry when he bought The Boston Globe. Analysts warned that two newspapers in the same advertising market would hurt more than a different kind of diversification. But the man who got it right in launching a national edition of The New York Times got it very wrong in Boston. The Globe is losing money and is a drain on The New York Times Company.

Katherine Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post, who is revered in newspaper circles, did some pretty odd things herself. She clung to Newsweek, when it could have been sold profitably; invested in newspapers in New Jersey and Washington state; and nibbled at small publishing ventures in Washington, D.C. It can be argued that it wasn’t until Buffet came onto the scene with his steadying hand—he is a large shareholder and director of the company—that The Post started hedging the risk of newspaper publishing. In particular, it bought Stanley H. Kaplan Educational Centers, which has turned out to be a cash cow and is now more profitable than The Post.

Unlike The New York Times, The Washington Post had a clear idea of what to do with its Web pages, which are now in profit–as is Slate, the online magazine that The Post bought from Microsoft.

Nobody knows the future of newspapers. But we do know that the well-being of a democracy depends on them. Both The New York Times and The Washington Post are still making a profit, though not as much as in years past. And the public still has the energy and good sense to hate them.