National Security

The death of newspapers is turning into quite a cottage industry for conference panelists; too bad it doesn’t pay as well as actual journalism. After participating in the strange festival of Senate testimony last week, I flew to San Francisco for an after-newspapers public event put on by my shop, the New America Foundation, and our cousin, the young Los Angeles-based nonprofit purveyor of lectures, Zocalo, whose director, Gregory Rodriguez, also runs our California fellows program. At the San Francisco dinner, and then on the public panel at Fort Mason, Mike Kinsley and I compared today’s decline of old media and the rise of new media to the transition between horses and automobiles. Kinsley, whose columns and bright public aura as he fights Parkinson’s are awe-inspiring, argued that if we’d all appeared on a lot of think-tank panels about the death of horses and buggies, we’d probably have recommended policies, such as oat subsidies, that would look ridiculous in hindsight...

That, improbably, was the title of a Senate Commerce Committee hearing, chaired by John Kerry, at which I testified yesterday alongside David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter who went on to create “The Wire”; Ariana Huffington, who presumably needs no introduction; Alberto Ibarguen, who runs the Knight Foundation, which has been making philanthropic investments to promote digital inclusion and local investigative reporting through new media; James Moroney, the publisher of the Dallas Morning News; and Marissa Mayer, a vice-president of Google. We all had prepared statements that have now been “entered into the record,” in that familiar phrase...

Most of the stimulus bill’s provisions to the Department of Veteran Affairs are of a, by now, familiar type: A round $1 billion for renovations and energy upgrades at medical facilities; $150 million in general operating expenses, $150 million for states to build nursing-home and extended-care facilities for veterans; and $50 million for the National Cemetery Administration for “monument and memorial repairs, including energy projects,” whatever that may mean...

Penelope Muse Abernathy, the Knight Chair in Journalism and Digital Media Economics at the University of North Carolina, has written a very useful paper, entitled “A Nonprofit Model for the New York Times?” (pdf) for an upcoming conference on nonprofit media to be held at Duke University on May 4th and 5th.

She examines four models by which the estimated $200 million annual cost of newsgathering by the Times might be preserved through philanthropy or philanthropic-like “angel” investing in a for-profit model. Her first model considers the unlikely gift of a single multi-billion dollar endowment; her second considers a mixed nonprofit model akin to the Council on Foreign Relations; her third considers a purchase of the paper by a university; and her fourth reviews a version of the go-private angel-to-the-rescue scenario in which private capital acts for vanity or the greater good or for some combination of those motives in a for-profit setting...

Late on a Tuesday afternoon, slightly under the weather, a stimulus blogger might be forgiven for greeting such headings as “Title IX—Legislative Branch—General Accountability Office” and “Title X-Military Construction and Veterans Affairs” with a sigh of ennui, and even a little dyspepsia. He would, of course, be wrong to react this way.

In the stimulus bill, Congress allocated $2.3 billion in construction funds to the Department of Defense. The surprising part, it turns out, is what the specific provisions exclusively require...

It is common to say that we are in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The structure of the economy in which that crisis is occurring is very different than during the nineteen-thirties, of course. Just how different is highlighted in this chart from research by Anthony Carnevale and James Strohl, of the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University. They estimate that the Obama Administration’s stimulus bill will create about 3.7 million jobs—and that just over half of those jobs will require some college education. A remarkable fourteen thousand eight hundred jobs, they estimate, will require post-doctoral work...

Anyone who thinks or writes about journalism is aware of the frustrating volatility of the importance-to-visibility ratio in our information culture. On a one-to-ten scale, at any time, there are some subjects cascading across the airwaves where visibility = 9 but importance = 0.1; for example, what Karl Rove just said about the President. On the other hand, there are many more subjects where visibility = 0.1 and importance = 9; for example, just to pick one from yesterday’s lineup, the one hundred thousand Tamil civilians who are currently trapped in an internment-style refugee encampment in northeastern Sri Lanka, with the Tamil Tigers cornered and desperate terrorist leadership in their midst.

There is a lot going on in America’s political economy today and there are fewer journalists than ever to keep up. But if you were to look for one subject in the early Obama Presidency where the importance of what is being debated is most proportionately greater than its visibility, I might choose health-care reform...

Why would policing the stimulus bill in all of its fullness be a daunting job? Consider just one rabbit trail of fine print in the first section of Title VIII, “Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies.” This is an important title because of its big investments in health care and education reform, which I intend to write about later. I decided to skip quickly through the Labor section to see if there was anything that required attention—hoping, truthfully, that it might be ignored. The supplemental money sent to the Labor Department is not trivial, however—almost four billion dollars in “training and employment services” for activities under the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 (W.I.A.). My expertise here is limited, but I have the impression that this act was not one of the great successes of the Clinton Administration. Workforce retraining is one of those ideals that it seems governments ought to be able to pursue usefully but which they nonetheless often seem to do poorly and wastefully. The Clinton Administration may indeed have helped to build a Bridge to the Twenty-first Century, as the Gore Campaign of 2000 put it, but federal spending on worker retraining was not one of its notable girders. Anyway, reading through sub-clauses, I came across this...

As a teen-ager, when I lived outside of Washington D.C., I went backpacking with friends along the Appalachian Trail, which runs from Maine to Georgia. Every ten miles or so the white blazes that mark the main trail would intersect with blue blazes leading off to roughly constructed but reliably leak-proof shelters hewn from logs. Usually the shelters sat near freshwater springs. Sometimes, on a stump beside the lean-to, or on one of the walls, you could find a tarnished plaque commemorating the Civilian Conservation Corps and describing the date of the shelter’s construction during the nineteen-thirties. For an adolescent in the confusing, materialistic suburbs of the nineteen-seventies, these shelters were powerful artifacts; they made credible and specific our school-book pages about Great Depression and its improvisational-jobs programs. Like the older brothers of friends who came back to our bloodless sub-divisions shattered by Vietnam, the shelters suggested an invisible fault line of vulnerability running beneath our seemingly impermeable and prosperous neighborhoods. Still, if building such things was what sudden, unexpected destitution might require, it did not seem so bad—internally displaced but skilled men camped on Appalachian ridges to build something of quality that would last and serve the public. For years afterward, when confronted with the idealistic claims of public policy, I often pictured those shelters and the men who built them—as I’m sure many other A.T. hikers did, too...

The entertaining host of NPR’s “On the Media,” Bob Garfield, was kind enough last week to feature this blog’s ongoing tour of the stimulus bill. During a portion of the interview that did not air, he asked if I was really going to see this tedium-laced project all the way through. Do we Protestant workaholics schooled on Pop Warner football fields by off-duty policemen acting out their Woody Hayes fantasies have a choice about such matters? A little late in life to make that suggestion! Yes, of course, we will finish. Not a quitter. However, as the bill does not contemplate the expenditure of its funds until September 2010, we do theoretically have some time. I’ll try to wrap things up over the next couple of months. The occasional post about other subjects should not be interpreted as procrastination!...