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Tag Teaming Media Ownership

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Newsweek Losses Revealed – The Daily Beast, 3 Aug 2010:

Yesterday’s purchase of a 77-year-old magazine, Newsweek, by a 91-year-old audio magnate, Sidney Harman, had all the makings of a feel-good story, even as editor Jon Meacham announced his departure. A venerable media franchise rescued from an uncertain future by someone who loves the printed word—Harman is the author of two books and has said that writing “enables the process of self-discovery”—and considers Newsweek a “national treasure.”

But make no mistake, Harman’s pocket change purchase of Newsweek—he paid $1, plus the assumption of liabilities for the magazine—has to be a passion play, because it certainly isn’t a financial one. The Daily Beast has obtained a copy of the 66-page sales memorandum that the Newsweek seller, the Washington Post Co., gave to prospective buyers, and it paints a picture of a media property given to someone unequipped to fundamentally change the current trajectory.

As with many weeklies, Newsweek’s financial freefall is jarring. Revenue dropped 38 percent between 2007 and 2009, to $165 million. Newsweek’s negligible operating loss (not including certain pension and early retirement changes) of $3 million in 2007 turned into a bloodbath: the business lost $32 million in 2008 and $39.5 million in 2009. Even after reducing headcount by 33 percent, and slashing the number of issues printed and distributed to readers each week, from 2.6 million to 1.5 million, the 2010 operating loss is still forecast at $20 million.

In fairness to Harman, many moguls, from Si Newhouse (The New Yorker) to David Bradley (The Atlantic) have had the patience to see their money-losing gems all the way into the black. But the print media outlook has never been worse—and even billionaires tire of losing money. For every Newhouse and Bradley, there are currently two Sam Zells, who had employees of the Tribune Company rejoicing about their good fortune in finding a benefactor willing to sustain millions of dollars in losses to protect journalism’s standing as a public trust.

Not unlike Harman, Zell, too, promised minimal layoffs and a commitment to finding a business model that worked, Zell’s tune quickly changed after realizing the realities of today’s printed media world, however, and multiple rounds of layoffs and an eventual bankruptcy proceeding are the legacy his Tribune purchase left behind.

Those are the kind of realities that prompted Fred Drasner, the former CEO of Daily News and US News and World Report who also bid on Newsweek, to sum up Harman’s $1 acquisition this way: “I think he paid a very full price.”

Sidney Harman buys Newsweek – POLITICO.com, 2 Aug 2010:

Graham personally chose Harman from among several well-heeled bidders, in part because he would provide the most continuity for the magazine, according to the sources.

The other two finalists were New Yorkers: Marc Lasry, an influential Democratic donor who heads Avenue Capital Group, a hedge fund where Chelsea Clinton worked; and Fred Drasner, former part owner of the Washington Redskins and former co-publisher of the New York Daily News.

Graham felt comfortable with Harman’s centrist politics, and was comforted by the idea of selling to a stalwart of the Washington establishment. Harman is expected to preserve the serious-minded, essentially New-Democratic tone Meacham set for the magazine.

From this friendly spin you’d think all these cold calculators want to own businesses that lose tens of millions annually because they’re soft-headed “philanthropists” who just love “journalism”, not because they’ve coldly calculated that media outlets provide them a political megaphone with which to tell the masses how and what to think.

Democracy is the theory that you have as much power and influence as plutocratic moguls like Harman, Newhouse, Bradley, Zell, Drasner, Lasry, …

The Washington Post Company Agrees to Sell NEWSWEEK to Sidney Harman – Newsweek, 2 Aug 2010:

Asked why he wanted to purchase NEWSWEEK, Harman, in a brief interview, said he saw it as an “opportunity to synthesize all of that experience [in industry, education, and government]. I couldn’t pass it up.”

He added, “I did not and do not think of this in traditional business terms. The purpose of the investment is to provide fuel for the transition of the magazine in its current position into a thriving operation in the print, mobile, and digital worlds … I’ll consider it a victory when it breaks even. Breaking even is a big deal.”

Harman’s wife, Jane Harman, is a member of Congress representing California’s 36th Congressional district in Los Angeles’s South Bay area, since 1993. She is chair of the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence & Terrorism Risk Assessment, and is a member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, where she sits on the Health and Energy & Environment Subcommittees.

CQ Politics | Wiretap Recorded Rep. Harman Discussing Aid for AIPAC Defendants, 19 April 2009:

Rep. Jane Harman , a California Democrat long involved in intelligence issues, was overheard on a 2005 National Security Agency wiretap telling a suspected Israeli agent that she would lobby the Justice Department to reduce espionage-related charges against two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).

“It’s the deepest kind of corruption,” said one of the sources, a recently retired law enforcement official who was involved in the AIPAC investigation. “It’s a story about the corruption of government — not legal corruption necessarily, but ethical corruption.”

Spy Story: Harman, Saban, and AIPAC | The Nation, 20 April 2009:

Who was Harman talking to when she was caught on tape by the NSA? Stein says she was speaking to a suspected “Israeli agent.” The Jewish Telegraph Agency suggests — as did earlier reports, in 2006, when the story first broke — that the person lobbying Harman to intervene in the AIPAC case was Haim Saban, a top Democratic fundraiser:

Similar reports surfaced in October 2006, just prior to the midterm elections. Those reports named the Israeli “agent” as Haim Saban, the Israeli-American entertainment magnate who is a major donor to the Democratic Party and to AIPAC.

Federal prosecutors eventually abandoned the espionage-law case against AIPACers Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman. The non-jew involved, Lawrence Franklin, got 12 years.

Who Rules America?

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How to Create Grotesque, Toxic Stereotypes

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Oliver Stone Controversy – Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com:

In an interview with The Times to promote his documentary “South of the Border,” which is about South American politics, Mr. Stone defended Hitler. “Hitler was a Frankenstein, but there was also a Dr. Frankenstein,” he said. “German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support. Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people.”

Mr. Stone then proceeded to discuss what he called “the Jewish domination of the media,” adding with an expletive that Israel had messed up “United States foreign policy for years.” Bloggers quickly picked up on the comments, and the American Jewish Committee issued a news release condemning him. “By invoking this grotesque, toxic stereotype, Oliver Stone has outed himself as an anti-Semite,” the committee’s executive director, David Harris, said in the release.

In January the director told a gathering of television critics that “Hitler is an easy scapegoat” while discussing his Showtime nonfiction mini-series, “Secret History of America.” At that time the Simon Wiesenthal Center harshly rebuked him for the remarks.

On Monday afternoon, Mr. Stone released this statement:
“In trying to make a broader historical point about the range of atrocities the Germans committed against many people, I made a clumsy association about the Holocaust, for which I am sorry and I regret. Jews obviously do not control media or any other industry.”

Turns out Stone is as easy to scapegoat as Hitler. The poor guy was just trying to say that the Germans (and Americans and British) are worse than Hitler. No big deal. Now that he’s apologized for implying that jewish influence was hindering that work he can get back to it.

Billionaire Haim Saban crusades against Oliver Stone | Hollywood Jew | Jewish Journal:

The Israeli-American billionaire is reportedly campaigning among Hollywood’s higher-ups to have Stone—and his upcoming 10-part series, “A Secret History of America,” blacklisted. According to TheWrap.com, Saban called CBS chief Les Moonves to urge him to cancel the Showtime series, becoming the first industry figurehead to criticize the director’s controversial remarks from earlier this week.

“This guy should be helped in joining Mel Gibson into the land of retirement, where he can preach his anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in the wilderness where he belongs,” Saban told TheWrap.

Saban, who is a huge supporter of Israel and a major donor to the Democratic party, told The Wrap.com by email that he had also called William Morris Endeavor chairman Ari Emanuel to help pressure CBS.

That Saban is launching a crusade against Stone isn’t surprising: In a New Yorker profile of Saban published last May, Saban said, “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”

Whoops. Turns out the “conservative” side of the “grotesque, toxic stereotype” won’t forgive so easily. I see a film hugely supporting Israel in Stone’s movie-making future – if he has one.

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Javerting Attention

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Mangan’s The One-Man NAACP of the Right links Pat Hannagan’s Purging the Faux White Right. Mangan and Hannagan dismantle Lawrence Auster’s latest attempt to pathologize “the anti-semites” who see jewish ethnocentrism in the defense of Polanski and attack on Gibson.

What makes Auster notable is that he’s the tip of a little jewish iceberg of Polanski defenders, sticking out more than others due to his usual pose as an traditionalist anti-“liberal” convert to Christianity. The clear jewish pattern emerges from the long list of people quoted in my series of posts concerning Polanski. In a nutshell, Polanski is a jewish OJ. His plight neatly polarized jews, who tend to view him as a victim, wronged and hunted by a cruel, puritanical system, and everybody else, including Whites, who tend to see him as a celebrity pervert who has long escaped justice.

When Polanski was first arrested, the immediate, morally outraged reaction from a number of jews with various social and political orientations was generally sympathetic to Polanski, and in some cases, like Auster’s, they went so far as to condemn broad swathes of people misperceived as Polanski’s “persecutors”. From the comments their own reader’s considered this behavior shocking – probably because they generally did not see the ethnocentric connection. It is fair to presume that the early defenders did not coordinate their arguments, though they nonetheless shared a number of transparently bogus excuses, and conveniently overlooked or minimized the most damning facts. More than a few made an issue of Polanski’s status as a special kind of jew – a “holocaust survivor”. Applebaum called it a “mitigating circumstance”. Many used language indicating a deeply emotional state of mind – even those, like Auster, who claimed to have never met Polanski. Patrick Goldstein was as eagerly defensive as Applebaum and Auster, and also alluded to Javert. Bruce Crumley, at Time, went beyond Javert, invoking Dreyfus, the poster child of jewish persecution. See my original posts for many more examples.

After the nature of this initial defense and the reader backlash started to gel, many jews either shut up, moderated their defense, said something vaguely disapproving about Polanski, or tried to divert attention and blame elsewhere – to the Swiss, the French, the British, Puritanism (a swipe at “WASPs”), America, Hollywood, “liberals”, “the Glenn Becks” (a swipe at Tea Party Whites). First and last come “the anti-semites” – the eternal scapegoats for jewish misbehavior. Evidently, broadly bad-mouthing these groups of people is ok in the “Javert Nation“.

Mel Gibson, on the other hand, gets drunk, is alleged to beat his mistress, and says a few politically incorrect things about jews and niggers. For that Gibson must be shunned and his career must be over, because, after all, the blacks who run Hollywood say so.

What explains this behavior if not jewish ethnocentrism? From their terms and themes it’s perfectly reasonable, obvious really, that what the Polanski apologists and obscurantists share is a view of jews, collectively and individually, as blameless victims. Even the ones who happen to be absconding pedophile rapists, like Roman Polanski. Recognizing this fact is “anti-semitic”, just like the Tea Party is “racist”, and wanting a government that isn’t biased against Whites and doesn’t impose genocidal levels of immigration is “hate”. These are terms of abuse. The purpose is to pathologize, intimidate, and manipulate. They are fighting words used by arrogant and dishonest enemies whose chutzpah knows no bounds.

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Obama’s Jewish Vision of America

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Transcript of Obama’s Immigration Speech.

In this treasonous speech, delivered on 1 July 2010, Barack Hussein Obama, president of the United States, advocates in favor of alien interlopers, claiming that “being an American is not a matter of blood or birth”. This is not surprising coming from someone with a cloud over their own blood and birth. His view is:

It’s a matter of faith. It’s a matter of fidelity to the shared values that we all hold so dear. That’s what makes us unique. That’s what makes us strong. Anybody can help us write the next great chapter in our history.

In other words, potentially every person on earth is an American.

What are these shared values “we” all hold so dear? Obama takes a while to get to that, finding it necessary to first disparage the founders and their posterity who for most of this country’s history haven’t shared his values. Eventually he comes to what he thinks “our” values are:

Finally, we have to demand responsibility from people living here illegally. They must be required to admit that they broke the law. They should be required to register, pay their taxes, pay a fine, and learn English. They must get right with the law before they can get in line and earn their citizenship — not just because it is fair, not just because it will make clear to those who might wish to come to America they must do so inside the bounds of the law, but because this is how we demonstrate that being — what being an American means. Being a citizen of this country comes not only with rights but also with certain fundamental responsibilities. We can create a pathway for legal status that is fair, reflective of our values, and works.

We have laws, see? Any alien who wants to be an American must admit they broke the law, see? Oh, and you’ll have to register, pay taxes and a fine, and learn English too. The punishment for not doing so? Well, you’ll probably still get your “legal status”. You just might not get to be a citizen. Maybe. But no big deal. A citizen is just an American whose fundamental responsibility is to create a pathway for “legal status” for any alien who wants it.

Obama didn’t mention his relative, Zeituni Onyango, who was recently granted “legal status” by immigration judge Leonard Shapiro even though she never admitted breaking any laws. Obama did however conclude his speech by mentioning that prototypical “nation of immigrants” whose interests so often seem to be more interesting than everyone else’s:

One of the largest waves of immigration in our history took place little more than a century ago. At the time, Jewish people were being driven out of Eastern Europe, often escaping to the sounds of gunfire and the light from their villages burning to the ground. The journey could take months, as families crossed rivers in the dead of night, traveled miles by foot, endured a rough and dangerous passage over the North Atlantic. Once here, many made their homes in a teeming and bustling Lower Manhattan.

It was at this time that a young woman named Emma Lazarus, whose own family fled persecution from Europe generations earlier, took up the cause of these new immigrants. Although she was a poet, she spent much of her time advocating for better health care and housing for the newcomers. And inspired by what she saw and heard, she wrote down her thoughts and donated a piece of work to help pay for the construction of a new statue — the Statue of Liberty — which actually was funded in part by small donations from people across America.

Unfortunately for Americans, Lazarus and her subversive tribemates weren’t long ago forced to flee America. Their golem Obama faithfully represents their twisted genocidal idea that, for their good, America’s highest value should be to displace and dispossess Americans.

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More Bile for Helen Thomas, From Women

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Semitism trumps feminism. Imagine that.

Breaking: Helen Thomas retires, effective immediately, by Kim Priestap, “a Ronald Reagan conservative”, with a strong concern for Israel’s well-being:

From this day forward, Ms. Thomas will no longer be a part of the White House Press Corps. While I expect nothing less than than a fawning send off from her adoring colleagues in the media, to much of America she will be long remembered, not for her reporting and breaking of the glass ceiling for women in journalism, but for her irrepressible anger and hatred for Israel and the Jews. It’s a pathetic way to end a career, but in Helen Thomas’s case, a fitting one.

For me, Helen’s words brought back memories from my tour of the National Holocaust Museum in DC. It’s important to note that the Nazis didn’t just suddenly round up and gas the Jews out of nowhere. It was part of a long and effective strategy of government sanctioned anti-Jewish text books, children’s storybooks, public posters, and print and radio propaganda designed to generate enough public distrust of and anger toward the Jews that it caused the German people, unaware of the Nazi government’s ultimate goal, to marginalize them.

Priestap is so concerned for jews that she hasn’t noticed that today it is Whites who are targeted for marginalization by virtually all Western governments.

Priestap links Helen Thomas Retires, by black “conservative” La Shawn Barber:

Helen Thomas’s comments that Jews should leave Israel and go back to Poland and Germany were especially weighty for me, as I’ve spent the last couple of weeks reading and watching documentaries about WWII and the Holocaust. I guess she forgot that Jews fled Poland and Germany to escape Nazi death camps, and suggesting they “go back” invoked Holocaust images.

I was sad and enraged when I saw a photo of naked Jewish women walking to a mass grave to be shot, and one carried a newborn. I’ve seen lots of Holocaust photos, but that one in particular brought the tragedy into focus. According to a book on the subject, Nazi’s sometimes buried the babies alive with their dead mothers, instead of shooting them.

The moral of this token’s little testimonial: jewish propaganda even works on blacks.

Priestap also links Leftists Cheerfully Defend Helen Thomas’ Anti-Semitism, which embeds a longer version of the Thomas interview, Helen Thomas Complete (original). Thomas uses the same argument as the jews who have accused her of being ignorant of history: “Why push people out of there who have lived there for centuries?” The leftist “defense” is that Thomas is offering friendly advice to young jewish journos – she probably thought it was safe to speak her mind because, “some of my best friends are jews” and “after all, some of them have said the same thing”.

The right’s Helen Thomas hypocrisy, by Gabriel Winant at salon.com:

In much the same way that some of us on the left are fond of calling out racism among conservatives, right-wing commentators love little more than lobbing the accusation of anti-Semitism back our way. Normally, they aim way too wide, and wing a bunch of people who are plainly just reasonable critics of Israel. (As someone who’s unmistakably Jewish in person, but lacks a particularly Jewish last name, I especially enjoy blogging about Israel and getting called a Jew-hater in the comments. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a Heeb.)

For once, though, conservatives are piling up on someone who really did cross some kind of line.

Oddly enough, when jews aren’t nervously trying to pass they’re shoving their jewishness in your face.

Helen Thomas: When An Icon Disappoints, by Irin Carmon at Jezebel, “an Israeli-born Jew, whose European grandparents and great-grandparents were among the few in their families to survive Nazi genocide because they were Zionists in what was then known as Palestine”:

There may be only one Helen Thomas — who refused to follow the script for a woman, who has pushed back at every single president since Eisenhower, and who has now disappointed a lot of us. But maybe we’ve moved to a point where she no longer has to stand in for all loudmouthed, fearless women. There have been plenty of firsts and seconds and thirds since then, so even though she is harder for me to admire now, I hope that we no longer need her as badly.

No longer need her as badly? I think we all know what that really means is Carmon wants to ship Thomas to a concentration camp.

Why Helen Thomas and Not Rush Limbaugh? (crossposted at HuffPo), by Joanne “PunditMom” Bamberger:

I don’t condone in any way what she said about calling for the Jewish people to get out of Palestine or the way that she said it. It was a horrible and thoughtless comment and there should be consequences when someone who is supposed to be an objective journalist not only inserts themselves into a news story, but also does it in an offensive and inexcusable way.

But I have to ask — why does Helen have to “resign” but others who have done similar things get to keep their jobs?

Like, say, Rush Limbaugh?

Or Sean Hannity?

Or Glenn Beck?

Or Bill O’ Reilly?

If forced resignation is good enough for someone who’s actually contributed to real journalism, then it ought to be good enough for those who work for “news” organizations with an agenda when they cross that kind of not-so-fine line of offensiveness.

But I suppose in this day and age of opinion news, as long as the offenders are making money for their bosses, it will get excused. If Helen Thomas had been working for FOX News, she’d probably still have a job.

Sure, because in PunditMom’s fevered imagination Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, O’Reilly, and FOX are clearly “anti-semitic”. Why might she imagine that? Well here’s PunditMom on Surviving My Mixed Marriage:

My husband and I are very different in many ways.

He’s a city boy and I’m a farm girl. I’m Protestant and he’s Jewish.

The Helen Thomas media blitz: She got fired for WHAT?!, by Meryl Yourish:

It’s a rare person that actually came out and criticized Thomas without pretending that she made her remarks because she’s old or angry. The remarks are sheer Jew-hatred, nothing less. Jews’ millennia-old ties to the land of Israel are utterly discounted by Thomas, who chooses to use the fiction that Israel was a country created specifically by and for Holocaust survivors.

Meryl Yourish is:

a former New Jerseyan who now resides in Virginia. She is a former liberal who now considers herself center-left, and has been the SNN token woman and token feminist since almost the beginning of the podcast.

Since moving to Virginia she has voted twice for Republican presidential candidates, purchased a handgun and a rifle (and knows how to shoot them), and spends most Fourth of July holidays at Fort Lee in Petersburg. Zionism and finding media bias are Meryl’s two specialties, as well as delivering as much juvenile scorn as a subject will stand. Meryl blogs about Jewish and Israeli issues at yourish.com.

Losing Helen Thomas, by Rachel Sklar at Mediaite (whose alter ego, when she’s in a lighter mood, is Lady Jew-Ga whose “biggest hit” is Bad Shiksa):

It’s not enough to have spent a lifetime being an awesome, trailblazing journalistic and feminist icon. Because longer still than the shadow cast by such a great career is the one cast by the Holocaust.

The verdict is in. People who love Israel and love jews hate Helen Thomas.