His fingertips around the cosmos curled

 A.J. Liebling is top of mind these days, what with management offering and the union demanding just down the road, so the Murdoch papers' coverage of the great man's retirement naturally recalled "The Man who Changed the Rules," Liebling's 1951 summary of how William Randolph Hearst's death was covered. This quatrain, from the Mirror's house poet, stood out:

The Chief is gone, the man we all called Boss ...
Colossus of an age that changed the world.
The galleons of his genius knew their course,
His fingertips around the cosmos curled.

It's echoed, these 70-plus years on, by Trevor Kavanagh, political editor  at the Super Soaraway Sun (his phrasing, not mine): 

I’ve enjoyed knowing the man we call The Boss both at leisure and under pressure as chief of the world’s greatest media empire. ... I have seen him prove time and again that democracy and free speech only flourish under a free, vigorous and sometimes controversial press.

Two things at least distinguish Rupert Murdoch from Citizen Hearst: One, Murdoch is around to see the paeans, and two, he's actually rather successful at the business of selling news. (As Liebling noted in 1961, Hearst "not only failed to create good newspapers but failed to make money out of bad ones -- something that conspicuous medioctities have succeeded at.") But Murdoch's employees, like Hearst's, are united in praise of the Boss's unique genius and ability -- take it away, New York Post -- to "redefine the media landscape."

Two traits stand out in the coverage, exemplified here by the Wall Street Journal's editorial: that dogged stand-up-for-the-litle-guy attitude mentioned by the Super Soaraway Sun and the insistence that staffers made up their own minds.

That's actually a well-tested observation in media sociology, dating at least to Warren Breed's "Social control in the newsroom" (1955). Breed, having worked for a Hearst paper, noted that the Chief didn't need to emerge from the box of earth from his home planet to tell you how many adjectives to deploy, or when a story should begin with "Bands playing and flags flying." If you didn't already know that by the time you signed on, a friendly senior reporter would tip you off before you covered the parade. 

Here's Kavanagh quoting Murdoch's farewell note:

“Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarified class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing truth.”

Which explains why The Sun stands alone as “the people’s paper”.

That seems to be the heart of the Murdoch con: convincing the Little Guy that you're standing between him and the mysterious elite, even as you're reaching into his pocket for his own good. Here's Liebling again, riffing on the cartoon image of the overburdened taxpayer as "a small, shabby man in underclothes and a barrel":

The man in the barrel is always warned that a frivolous project like medical care for his aged parents is likely to double his already crushing tax burden. The implication is that the newspaper owner is above worrying about his parents, and of course he is, because his old man* left him the paper.

* Sir Keith Murdoch, if you're scoring along at home.

Antepenultimatum

I'm not sure I could even name a favorite A.J. Liebling column.* Last couple decades, I've been much more in the "what delicate filleting from seven decades ago does this bit of brain-dead yapping from Fox News remind me of the most?" Monday, it was "Antepenultimatum" (Sept. 27, 1946). 

Liebling's topic was a "conspicuously civilized note ... telling the Yugoslavs that if they didn't rurn loose the surviving occupants of two American planes shot down by them, the United States would complain to the Security Council." He likened this to threatening your obstreperous neighbor with a lawsuit, rather than threatening to break his neck: "An ultimatum, I had always understood, is a threat to break the neck. ... Serbia received an ultimatum from Austria in 1914."

Imagine my delight when Fox's No. 4 story Monday morning** (the above is from around 8 Eastern) proclaimed that Poland had announced plans to send the Leopard 2 main battle tank to Ukraine, despite Germany's interest in delaying: 

Morawiecki said Poland had been building a coalition of countries prepared to send Leopards to Ukraine even without approval from Germany.

"We will ask [Germany] for permission, but this is a secondary theme," Morawiecki said. "Even if, eventually, we do not get this permission, we — within this small coalition — even if Germany is not in this coalition, we will hand over our tanks, together with the others, to Ukraine."

Back to Liebling:

Journalists, and especially the fellows who write for the press assocations, have a habit of using the strongest word they can think of in the lead of a story, even when the word really means something else. Headline writers often base their eye-smackers on the strongest word in the lead. That's the only reason I can think of for the use of the word "ultimatum" in every New York newspaper on Thursday, August 22."

You can see why, after a dose of ULTIMATUM GIVES TITO 48 HOURS TO FREE FLYERS, YUGOS GET ULTIMATUM and the like, Liebling "felt like we had left the diving board and would hit the surface of the third World War any second." (And if you too had had enough of UKRAINE: WORLD WAR III OR COLD WAR II? by the end of February, I expect he was nodding along.)

The fun continued when the story moved into the lead around 10 a.m.:

Germany will not stop Poland from delivering Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine, Germany's foreign minister announced Sunday.

If Germany has mastered time travel to the point where it can cave in on Sunday to the Monday ultimatum, the rest of NATO should worry a bit that it doesn't send the damn things back to, oh, October 1941 or so. But I digress.

Liebling took himself to the references, starting with "a ninety-five-cent dictionary which I bought one time in a cigar store and which gives only one meaning for each word" and ending with the 13-volume Oxford, which gave pretty much the explanation the OED has today: 

In diplomacy, the final terms presented by one power (or group of powers) to another, the rejection of which may lead to the severing of diplomatic relations, and eventually to a declaration of war.

Because the OED is a fine place to play "that's been a verb longer than Missouri has been a journalism school," the next entry (barely two years younger) is worth noting:

A final condition or stipulation; one's last word on a matter.

Not everything in news is subject to the sort of know-it-when-I-see-it framing contagion that makes for crises or tragedies. Newsrooms are -- usually -- still careful to look up "hurricane" or "blizzard" before declaring one, even if they're consistently careless with "hurricane-force winds." And terrorism is often carefully licensed; it's always worth noting when an outlet like Fox calls "terror" on its own and when it waits for permission. sLiebling suspects a form of the latter: "a State Department public-relations official who, asked at a press conference 'if it is all right to call this thing an 'ultimatum,' may have answered, 'Sure, boys, go ahead.'"

With all that logged in, though, there's a point to Libling's prescriptivism: " I fear that I detected, in their taking the gloomiest possible view of the situation, a certain eagerness on the part of most of the newspapers" -- evidenced by what he saw as the Mirror's later regret that the pesky Yugoslavs had complied. Given the choice between Media Conspiracy and Media Stupid, my money is usually on the latter, but when Fox is out ahead of the world on the ultimatum front, I'm always inclined to give the old guy a listen.

* Granted,it's hard to go wrong with "Offers and Demands" (Jan. 26, 1963), but look at the competition
** The story at the link has been updated, though it still has the "5:49 am" time stamp.

Offers and demands (a slight return)

Well, that has to be a relief. Wednesday afternoon, the Middle East was "on brink." By Thursday morning, it was merely "rattled," though apparently by the same image:

A.J. Liebling would be pleased, in his way, to note that one side in this confrontation "threatens," while the other "condemns" -- or merely "vows" that it's "locked and loaded." Let's turn the microphone over to another great midcentury American commentator for today's example of the "realism-free zone": If you offer to poison your sister, why are you surprised when she threatens to poison you right back?

 

Slave-scarf symbol of the steppes

Some days the right-wing press just drives you to the Liebling archive before the coffee is even made. Take it away, veteran National Post columnist Robert Fulford:

In a burst of bogus feminism and commercial ambition, Mattel Inc., the global doll-maker, has announced that in 2018 it will market a Barbie doll wearing a hijab. Barbie dolls rarely impinge on political and social issues but this one is so unsettling that it evokes a wide range of responses.

Tell us a little more about how rare it is for Barbie to reflect social issues!

... After all, Barbies aren’t just princesses and wonder women. You can buy Barbies wearing practical clothing for offices, “chic summer suits” and camel-hair coats. This is Mattel’s bow to feminists who believe little girls should be discouraged from dwelling on fantasies of the future: they should learn, as soon as possible, the truth about what they are likely to become.

For girls with higher aspirations, you can get Barbies clothed in a cocktail dress, a classic black dress, or an Oscar de la Renta ball gown. One Barbie has a Hudson’s Bay jacket and another displays an Andy Warhol painting on the front of her dress.

So much for the camel-hair coat vs. Hudson's Bay controversy, though you'd think the fencing uniform -- the new addition is modeled after the Olympic medalist  Ibtihaj Muhammad -- might suggest at least some aspiration. But back to the issue at hand: 

Attached to the news about the hijab Barbie is a line from Mattel about “Continuing to inspire girls to be anything.” Girls are to become whatever their desires and talents can make them.

... But Mattel doesn’t explain the crucial facts about places where hijab is required apparel.

See if you can guess what's coming next. Or return with us to the glory days of Chicago Tribune columnist Jimmy Savage's campaign against the other headscarf:

"We propose a citywide burning of the babushkas!" Savage wrote one morning, not too long ago. "These regimenting rags, which convert pretty, young Chicago faces into moon-round parodies of peasants, have made the teen scene resemble potato digging time on a Soviet collective. Watching those farm-fresh, 4-H club visitors to the livestock show, we noted that not one of them wore that sloppy substitute for headgear. ... Those youngsters were American farmers, too proud of their heritage to wear the slave-scarf symbol of European field hands. Are our Chicago kids less smart, less proud? To the torch, then, and the burning of the babushkas!"
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America in peril!

So how is freedom under assault today, Drudge Report?

Tea Party activist Norm Novitsky’s In Search of Liberty, a crowdfunded feature film about the U.S. Constitution, has been shut down in Savannah, GA, after 30 members of his crew walked off the job. The group, made up mostly of students and recent graduates from the Savannah College of Art and Design, had been seeking union representation, living wages and reclassification as employees rather than independent contractors.

Never mind the verb voice in the first clause -- let's hear more about the particular pillar of freedom that the labor goons are eroding!

The film, which stars Food Network host Bobby Deen, son of reality star Paula Deen, bills itself as a “a straight-to-DVD release that tells the story of a captivating statesman from America’s past” who takes a present-day family on a series of wild adventures that “opens their eyes to the origins and importance of the U.S. Constitution, the degree to which it is under attack and what can be done to save it.”

So ... sort of the freeware version of Rush Revere and his talking horse?

The film’s crew had worked on the shoot for three weeks. Dissatisfied with their wages and working conditions, they approached IATSE for representation. They walked off the job en masse on July 2, and the producers shut down the film Thursday when they couldn’t find a replacement crew.

Good thing the employer always "offers" and the union always "demands" -- otherwise, we'd be stuck with a hed like Teabilly Filmmakers Halt Production As H'wood Glamour Fails To Pay The Rent, and that's never going to fit in a 1/36, let alone a narrative of union thuggery. 

What with the existential threat to freedom and all, it's unfortunate that the beleaguered filmmaker declines to comment, leaving the reporter to recite pesky details:

... IATSE has filed unfair labor practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board, claiming union reps were subjected to threats and acts of intimidation during their efforts to organize the workers. A member of the crew is scheduled to present evidence Monday to the wage and hour division of the U.S. Department of Labor that crew members were not paid minimum wages and did not receive overtime pay.

Given that somewhere around 40% of the country seems to hope a Dean Trump would revoke the little hoodlums' charter, one hopes for coverage of the hearing.

'Too nice a regard for civil laws'

If you're interested in how securitizing arguments play out in modern or interactive media, you find yourself eventually circling back to how they might have looked in the grand old days of existential crisis and top-down media. So rather than clicking through to whatever sponsored content is being served along with the day's heirloom paranoia at WND, let's take a ride down memory lane with the World's Greatest Newspaper, November 1949:

The defense department has plans for a military dictatorship if war should come with a devastating atomic attack on the national capital.

One of the nation's outstanding military leaders told The Tribune that the military will take over under disaster plans if civil government is blasted.

In theory, the military would take over the government until the emergency passed and civilian government could be reëstablished.*

Theory's fine, Outstanding Military Leader, but what would happen in practice?

The military leader acknowledged that the military might be loathe to surrender control in the event of war because the military can run war efficiently and economically if it is not hampered by too nice a regard for civil laws.
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The world turned upside down

Ding ding ding ding! Urgent, four bells, this just in from Nova Scotia: Labor "offers" and management "demands."

Canada Post rejected its union’s latest contract proposal on Tuesday, saying the offer would increase the Crown corporation’s labour costs by $1.4 billion, but made a counter proposal that may get negotiations back on track.

The Canadian Union of Postal Workers said late Tuesday that Canada Post had dropped some demands and amended others. It also said statements from the employer’s chief negotiator "appear to justify" a return to intensive negotiations at the three sub-tables.

As a regular reader, you might have noticed that we're fond of A.J. Liebling around here -- most pithily,* the well rooted observation that in strike stories, "offers" come from management and "demands" come from labor. So it's worth paying attention when that wisdom is reversed, as in this tale appearing in the Halifax Chronicle Herald, forwarded by the bodacious linguist Q.Pheevr.

As Q points out, both sides get to do a little demanding and a little offering, but they also spend much of their time making "proposals." Seems like a pretty plausible idea.

* OK, except for "I can write better than anybody who writes faster and faster than anybody who writes better." 

Political rhetoric and political pathology

OK, editors, it's time to step back and put some of the deep-catalog paranoid lunacy into perspective. Take it away, Fair 'n' Balanced Network:

Entering the highly charged election-year debate, Obama surely knew that his words would not only make headlines in the U.S. but be heard by Muslims worldwide. The president has made it a point to reach out to the global Muslim community, and the over 100 guests at Friday's dinner in the State Dining Room included ambassadors and officials from numerous nations where Islam is observed, including Saudi Arabia and Indonesia.

I really hope that at this point, no one is still going to contend with a straight face that Fox (or the New York Post, whose bizarre double entendres above would generally be called dog-whistle politics except that they're well within the range of human hearing) is the sort of news organization that plays by commonly accepted professional standards. Nevertheless, here is a news flash. Islam is observed in the United States too! If you're genuinely unable to figure that out, you have no business playing with sharp objects, let alone writing about news for an audience with some idea of minimum acceptable standards for journalistic performance. Evidently that isn't who Fox has in mind.

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Offers and demands

Today's A.J. Liebling quote is an enduring favorite, in no small part because, as the swamp of masscomm theory was slowly drifted into by us, it stood out as a link to the past: Aw, cool! You guys have a theory for why news does this?

Here it is, with a bit of context. The topic is the great New York newspaper strike of 1962/63, and Liebling is discussing the coverage of a report from the Board of Public Accountability:

The Wall Street Journal wrote, "The report said the printers didn't present their total demands until fifteen minutes before their old contract expired," but did not reprint, "It was not until 6:40 on the evening of December 7th [with the strike set for 2 a.m. December 8th] that the publishers made a complete offer to the printers. That offer totalled, in increased benefits and costs, $9.20 per man per week," including 55 cents a week in cash for the first year. (The employer, in strike stories, always "offers" and the union "demands." A publisher, for example, never "demands" that the union men agree to work for a four-bit raise; the union never "offers" to work for more.)

Now that I've achieved a life goal of sorts by quoting this in a piece of Formal Skolarly Writing, I hope y'all enjoy it too.