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.

Where the stupid starts

Wondering why The Stupid seems to be succeeding so well on the national stage? Let's ask the Wall Street Journal:

The Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll reports that 73% of the electorate believes the United States is on the wrong track, a level normally associated with national crises, such as the 2008 financial meltdown.

Reminding us, should we need reminding, that you don't have to lie about the numbers themselves to lie about public opinion. A 73% score on the bad side of the "right direction/wrong track" question is high but hardly unusual. It's not as extreme as the 79% that AP recorded at about the same time, nor is it as sunny as the 67% that Reuters found in a survey in the field July 16-20. If 73% represents the population value and neither of the other results is an outlier,* one thing that could tell you is that public opinion bounces around a lot on this question.

It can also bounce around pretty quickly, with a fairly rosy 58% saying "right direction" at the end of February 1991 (late stages of the first US-Iraq war) but "wrong track" reaching 72% in November, 78% in January 1992 and 83% in June 1992. "Wrong track" also reached 73% in June 2007 (per the Post, again) 76% in a CNN poll in August 2007 -- some months before the 2007-09 recession began. Being a grumpy lot, we were also at 79% "wrong track" in October 1990,** 77% in January 1996, 71% in June 1993 and just about equal in October 1974 (75%) and October 1973 (74%).

Well, surprise. People who are interested in public opinion try to find the stories that explain the numbers; WSJ editorial writers look for numbers to go with the stories they want to tell. So what story is being told here?

Amid the GOP convention in Cleveland and with the Democratic mother ship landing next week in Philadelphia, one has to wonder: Are the campaigns of  Donald Trump and  Hillary Clinton also on the wrong track?

As recently as a week ago, the election’s narrative was set: ... Then, just days before the GOP convention, the world snapped.

Got an idea of what comes next?
Read more »

There's one born every minute

If you haven't seen the "scary market chart" yet, maybe you should look in now that it's, um, "gaining traction":

There are eerie parallels between the stock market’s recent behavior and how it behaved right before the 1929 crash.

That at least is the conclusion reached by a frightening chart that has been making the rounds on Wall Street. The chart superimposes the market’s recent performance on top of a plot of its gyrations in 1928 and 1929.

The picture isn’t pretty. And it’s not as easy as you might think to wriggle out from underneath the bearish significance of this chart.
 
Easier than it looks, actually, if you're used to wiggling out from under the rock of -- oh, random stuff that looks like stuff you want it to look like. Remind us again how we're supposed to distinguish the fearless reporting of the Wall Street Journal's MarketWatch from any other incarnation of strange resemblances meant to scare the rubes?