Ross Douthat is one of many pundits providing Monday morning quarterbacking on the Washington Post.
As disruptive as the Internet has been for journalism, The Post was uniquely positioned to succeed amid the chaos. And it has struggled, in part, because the paper’s leaders failed to step into an online-era role that should have been theirs for the taking. ...
Douthat's argument is that, with the wide use of the Internet, news had become more topic oriented than place oriented, with news sites becoming more generalized.
In this landscape, The Wall Street Journal has a clear role as the paper of the American business class, with The Economist, The Financial Times and the Bloomberg empire as its supplements and competitors. The New York Times fills a similar role for the intelligentsia and the liberal professional classes. The Huffington Post is basically the nation’s left-wing tabloid, and it has several right-wing rivals and imitators. ESPN.com serves as the nation’s sports page. And then various outlets, from BuzzFeed to The Atlantic, are competing to find or build a general-interest niche.
Since there aren’t that many major niches, most existing newspapers were always going to be losers from this shift.
But The Washington Post was different, because even though the Grahams placed a fierce emphasis on being a local paper, the locality The Post covers is inherently national. And given that D.C.’s influence has only increased in the last 20 years, and the public’s interest in national politics has surged, it would have been entirely natural for The Post to become, in the new-media dispensation, the paper of record for political coverage — the only must-read for people who run the country, who want to run it, who think they run it, etc.
Instead, it’s possible to date the moment when that opportunity slipped away: it happened in 2006, when John Harris and Jim VandeHei left The Post to found Politico.
Speaking of notable dates, write this one down, because today I think Douthat is mostly right about the Post's missed opportunity. He's not right about much else, but I'll buy this theory. Mostly.
Now, come on inside and let's see what other shocking ideas are being punted about.
Leonard Pitts opines on the other big topic for pundits this morning: just what will Amazon's Jeff Bezos do with his latest toy?
Newspapers have become the bullied school kid of American journalism.
Meaning that, as a small child will surrender his lunch money to bigger kids and spend the noon hour watching other people eat, so have newspapers wound up in the ignominious position of surrendering our product — information — to Internet and cable outlets and watching them reap handsome profits from aggregating and re-reporting it while we furlough employees and cut back home delivery. They take our product and kick our butts with it
So it was with no small interest that I received last week’s news of the sale of the Washington Post. After 80 years of stewardship by the storied Graham family, the Post will become the property of Jeff Bezos, the man who founded Amazon.com. Sale price: $250 million. ...
Think about it: How often do you see a cable news station, local TV news outlet or blog originate — not aggregate or opine upon, but originate — some story of major local significance not involving violent crime? As a rule — yes, there are exceptions — they don’t do that. They are not designed to.
I do not think those exceptions are as rare as Mr. Pitts thinks they are, but hey, I'm in the middle of writing a column entirely lifted from the editorial pages of dead-tree print journals, so what do I know?
Maureen Dowd has been absent from APR for several weeks, since she's been on one of her "how can I take Washington politics and make it seem even more childish and pointless than it already is" stints. This week she's marginally better as she looks to 2016.
From the sidelines, [Hillary] is soaking up a disproportionate amount of attention and energy, as though she were already Madam President.
She is supposed to be resting and off making $200,000 speeches, but instead she’s around every political corner.
The cicadas never showed up. But we can’t hear ourselves think here this summer over the roar of the Clinton machine — and the buzzing back to life of old Clinton enemies. Meanwhile, Obama’s vaunted campaign machine, which has morphed into a political group called Organizing for Action, has sputtered in its attempt to tear down Republican obstacles and push through his agenda.
While President Obama seems drained and disgusted at the idea of punching through the Republican blockade that awaits him on his return from Martha’s Vineyard, he told Jay Leno that Hillary “had that post-administration glow” when they met for lunch recently.
As the president was getting ready for his news conference, his former secretary of state was dominating the news with an event she didn’t even attend. Emily’s List held what was, in essence, Hillary’s first Iowa campaign event, titled “Madam President” and featuring Claire McCaskill, the Missouri senator who famously broke away from Clinton Inc. to join the Obama revolution in 2008. Now McCaskill, who once said she wouldn’t trust Bill Clinton near her daughter, is presciently back in the fold, on board with Ready for Hillary, the super PAC supporting Clinton for 2016. ...
As ABC News’s Michael Falcone reported from Iowa, the state that allowed Obama to vault over Hillary, McCaskill said she’s dreaming of “that moment in 2017 when we can say ‘Madam President’ to Hillary Rodham Clinton.’ ”
No one is much better at reading the tea leaves than Claire. Let's just hope that Hillary's plan for dealing with the right doesn't involve dusting off "triangulation."
Chris Cillizza awards Mitch McConnell a much-deserved "worst week."
Marriages of convenience rarely work out.
So when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) picked Jesse Benton, political consigliere to the Paul family — Rand and Ron — to manage his 2014 reelection race, campaign sharps began placing bets on how long it would last.
The union hit a rough patch this past week when it was revealed that Benton told a former Ron Paul aide that he was “holding my nose for two years” because of the benefits his current position would probably have for Rand Paul’s future (presidential) prospects.
Only two years? I've been holding my nose, waiting for McConnell's stink to blow out of the Senate since 1985.
Andrew Liepman falls on the "no hero" side of the Snowden argument.
Edward Snowden is now out of his limbo at Moscow's airport, presumably ensconced in some Russian dacha, wondering what the next phase of his young life will bring. Having spent 30 years in the intelligence business, I fervently hope the food is lousy, the winter is cold, and the Internet access is awful. But I worry less about what happens to this one man and more about the damage Snowden has done — and could still do — to America's long-term ability to strike the right balance between privacy and security.
...
Incidents like the Snowden affair put my former colleagues in the intelligence community in an impossible position. Yes, the official explanations about the virtues of data-collection efforts can sound self-justifying and vague. But they're still right. I know firsthand that Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, is telling the truth when he talks about plots that have been preempted and attacks that have been foiled because of intelligence his agency collected. I know because I was on the inside, I have long held security clearances, and I participated in many of the activities he describes.
...the intelligence community — always a less sympathetic protagonist than a self-styled whistle-blower — actually has a good story to tell about how seriously the government takes privacy issues. We should tell it.
So tell it, and let the rest of us decide if it's "good."
The New York Times looks at a new twist in what was already one of the twistiest (and strangest) stories in science.
When Henrietta Lacks was stricken with an aggressive cancer more than 60 years ago, doctors who treated her at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore took cells from her tumor without her permission or knowledge, as was common practice at the time. ...
The cells, called HeLa cells, are ubiquitous in labs around the world and have been used in more than 74,000 research studies on almost every disease. The cells have helped researchers develop a polio vaccine and gain insights into cell biology, in vitro fertilization, and cancer, among other advances.
... last week when the National Institutes of Health announced an agreement with the Lacks family that will restrict N.I.H.-financed research on the genome of HeLa cells (not the use of HeLa cells in experiments) and place two family members on a committee to approve such research. The family was especially concerned that publishing the full genomic sequence of HeLa cells would violate its privacy by revealing abnormalities in genes that could be transmitted to later generations.
Members of the Lacks family have long expressed concerns about use of Henrietta's cells, including fears that use of the HeLa cells in experiments was somehow causing Henrietta pain, or that the cloned cells were a step toward cloning more copies of their lost relative. How genetic material gets handled continues to get more complicated.
Peggy Schultz on student loans... and Marie Antoinette.
While some historians suggest it actually was Marie-Therese, wife of Louis XIV, who said the now-infamous words, and that "cake" should instead be "brioche," the basic idea is the same: Those in control, the "haves," can be impervious to the daily struggles of the "have-nots."
I was reminded of that uncaring comment when I read Sen. Ron Johnson's response to proposed legislation on student loan interest rates. Johnson said: "When we make loans far more accessible, when we subsidize the (interest) rates, who pays for that? The taxpayers — a lot of working people who aren't sending their kids to college."
... by telling high school graduates they might need to settle for lower-wage, service industry jobs because their families can't afford to pay for a four-year college education, Johnson is imposing an unrealistic and unfair limitation on thousands of students.
William Feeney has a study tailor made for everyone tired of human politics, or those who think all politics are for the birds.
In a paper published in PNAS, [zoologist Máté Nagy] and his colleagues studied the behavior of domestic pigeons (Columba livia). Their aim was to study social dominance in one task and use the results to analyze the behavior of leaders (if there were any) in a new task.
...Nagy found that the leaders in flock-flying were different from those that were socially dominant during the feeding exercise. These results are unlike what you would see with gray wolves or chacma baboons, where the socially dominant individual may also lead the group. The leaders did have some common features, though. The socially dominant individuals were more aggressive than average flock members and had a comparatively larger body.
Because of the complications involved in flock-flying, it's possible that a somewhat less aggressive and possibly better informed individual takes the leading position. However, there was no relation between leadership and age, so it wasn’t that the more experienced flyers lead the flock.
Flock-flying. Running a democracy. Maybe both of these activities that involve steering big groups call for leaders who aren't the more socially aggressive types who excel elsewhere. Are these pigeons onto something?