Mr. Media Interviews by Bob Andelman
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Alberto Ibargüen, Knight Foundation CEO and president, Mr. Media Interview, Part 1
With $2.6 billion in assets, the Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is the 22nd largest foundation in the United States. Its mission is the betterment of the 26 communities in which it works and the promotion of journalism as a career and industry nationwide.
The latter part of Knight’s mission is particularly challenging at a time when traditional newspapers are shrinking and, in many cases, evaporating.
That puts Alberto Ibargüen, CEO of the Knight Foundation and a former publisher of the Miami Herald, at the same crossroads that silent movies encountered with talkies, talkies with radio, radio with television, television with cable, and now traditional print journalism with online reporting, blogs, podcasting, v-logs, streaming media, and so on.
Since 1950, the Knight Foundation has invested more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide. It has a vital interest in seeing journalism survive in whatever form it takes.
I interviewed Ibargüen recently for an old media business magazine and liked his approach to a rapidly changing world, and I was delighted when he accepted my invitation for a second round of conversation.ALBERTO IBARGUEN AUDIO!
Click to open separate window
BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: Reading the newspaper this morning, I see we’ve got more bad news in the business. Even The New York Times is talking about cutting 100 jobs.
ALBERTO IBARGUEN: It’s something like eight percent of their newsroom, yes. They’re certainly not immune from the drop in national advertising and the drop in jobs and jobs/classified advertising. Those are two traditional mainstays of newspapers. They represented, for most newspapers, well over half the revenue, and both of those categories are way down.
ANDELMAN: How do we square what’s happening, like the announcement at The New York Times today, for example, about 100 jobs -- with the amount of money that someone like Rupert Murdoch is pouring into The Wall Street Journal all of a sudden? How do those two square with each other?
IBARGUEN: I don’t think anybody else could possibly have paid that much for The Wall Street Journal or for any newspaper because that’s not, I think, the reason why Rupert Murdoch was so interested in Dow Jones. I think Rupert Murdoch was interested in Dow Jones because he’s starting a competitor to CNBC, and Rupert Murdoch is as committed to news online as anyone else in big media. I’d say more so. So what he was buying was not the newspaper. What he was buying was the best news organization around, and so I would expect that, over time, those resources and that talent, when the talent is enormous at The Wall Street Journal for covering business news, it is a great newspaper, that that talent will be applied on television and online.
ANDELMAN: So as far as print journalism goes, that was actually a pessimistic purchase rather than an optimistic purchase.
IBARGUEN: It’s hard to call that much money pessimistic, but I guess you’re right.
ANDELMAN: What about, if we move further West with that, what about Sam Zell and him buying the Chicago Tribune, plus the Los Angeles Times and Orlando Sentinel? He doesn’t have that same kind of online or electronic package, or does he?
IBARGUEN: No, I don’t think it’s the same, and I’m not sure that the deal is the same either. That one engaged a great deal, I think, of employee money. I don’t know if it was their retirement funds. I know that the Tribune Foundation became a contributor to that purchase. I think, in Chicago, the Tribune Company has long had lots of synergy with television and online, and I’m honestly not on the inside so I don’t know how they’re doing with that. In their smaller papers, they may be able, at least for a period of time, and Sam’s in Ft. Lauderdale here in Florida or in Orlando, they may be able to do reasonably well. They are, traditionally, newspapers that were run at very high margins, much, much more profitable on a percentage basis than say The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but they really did also depend on classified advertising and national advertising.
I think the picture for the national papers is actually not bad if they can figure out the online piece because online is part of the worldwide web, not the local, geographically defined web. And by thinking of it as a national paper, you can begin to have the kind of national scale that the web seems to be naturally suited for.
The ones that I think are also probably okay, at least for the short-term, are the papers in very small communities where they still can publish the local news, whether it’s the high school football team or what happened at city hall. They can do that better than anybody else. The ones that are really getting squeezed are the so-called major metros, and that would include the Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, even the Los Angeles Times because those regional papers are trying to do something in between the national scope that fits the web so well and the very local, local, almost neighborhood scope that the small town dailies are doing. So those are the ones that you’re seeing the biggest stress on, and there are some like the Boston Globe, a great newspaper, that although it made some money last year, I think the year before, they actually lost money. That would’ve been unthinkable five or 10 years before.
ANDELMAN: It seems like the smart move 20 or 25 years ago was for these major metros, the Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Petersburg Times, and so forth across the country, to add regional editions and grow and spread out, but now we see some of that coming back, and maybe that wasn’t the way to move long-term.
IBARGUEN: Yes, hindsight’s wonderful, isn’t it?
ANDELMAN: I thrive on it, frankly. Yes.
IBARGUEN: We’re so smart after the fact. I don’t know what they could’ve done. When you were doing your introduction, you were talking about being in the position of the talkies with silent films and so forth. It actually was the position that Jack Knight, our founder, the founder of Knight Foundation, that Jack Knight found himself in at the beginning of the century when he actually built the second biggest newspaper company when newspapers were everything in news. He actually built the second biggest newspaper company by figuring out how to use new technology. Other people were being destroyed by it, and he figured out that because of improvements in transportation, improvements in printing, but mainly improvements in something fantastic and new at the beginning of the 20th century called the telephone, he could actually create a newspaper company that he could run from one place but ultimately in 26 cities, actually in his brother’s lifetime in 26 cities.
The point is that he knew, he figured out, how to use this new technology in a way to expand his business from one single newspaper in Akron, Ohio, and to be able to ultimately run a newspaper company out of Miami, Florida, that included Philadelphia and San Jose and Wichita and Biloxi and Duluth and St. Paul, Detroit, Michigan, and be able to do it all from here because of the telephone. That would’ve been unthinkable when that technology was first introduced or when Jack Knight first started to run the Akron Beacon-Journal.
And so I think one of the things that we try to do at Knight Foundation is, to be honest, we’re not responsible for figuring out how to keep these jobs. We’re not responsible for delivering a 25 or 20 or even 15 percent margin to investors. We’re trying to figure out, “How do you use that new technology?” Let’s experiment with different ways of delivering news and information because, in the end, we still do all live in geographically-defined communities. We still have environmental policy, education, who fixes the potholes are all ultimately decided by people we elect by geographically-defined communities, and either we change the construct of our governing structure, or we have to figure out a way of getting the people who are making those election choices better information, and it has to be electronic. It has to be digital.
ANDELMAN: As you said that, I’m thinking about how things have changed on one level. I think Ed Koch of New York City used to be known as “Mayor Pothole.”
IBARGUEN: Yes.
ANDELMAN: Right? And now we’ve got Mayor Bloomberg who is trying to affect national policy from his mayor’s seat. It’s a very different kind of world even at that level.
IBARGUEN: It really is. And Mayor Koch was fantastic. I happened to live in New York at the time, and there wasn’t a pothole that he couldn’t pay attention to. There wasn’t a ribbon-cutting. And Bloomberg has a different appreciation. Given his background and given what he built in his company, the Bloomberg Business Systems that he built that were an early and phenomenal user of digital technology to deliver business information.
There is another aspect, by the way, of the current newspaper problem, and maybe it’s also true of broadcast television, I’m not sure, and it’s the nature of the ownership. When newspapers were owned, up until the 1960s, there wasn’t any newspaper company that was a publicly held company. They were all family-owned or individually owned, and it didn’t matter whether it was the Meyers and the Grahams who owned the Washington Post or the Sulzbergers who owned The New York Times or the Chandlers in Los Angeles, Knight-Ridder, etc. In the mid-‘60s, the companies started to go public. There were great benefits to going public. You could raise a lot of money, you could invest a lot in the business, and it was a terrific growing concern.
But as ownership started to shift from the families to people who were interested in newspapers to institutional investors, the demand on newspapers, and at the same time, there was new technology coming along, not just radio then television, which were already there, but with the web and with cable, that really began cutting into the advertising base of the newspaper model. There was this sort of perfect storm of web and cable cutting into the advertising base at the same time that the investors in newspapers became more and more institutional investors. And institutional investors not only don’t, but cannot care about the basic function of the newspaper - that is the delivery of news and information to a community.
Jack Knight cared, and, in fact, when he went to Wall Street, there’s a very famous speech that he gave the only time that he went to talk to analysts, and he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you that if you don’t like the way I run Knight Newspapers then I suggest you buy another newspaper company’s stock because I’m not gonna change. I’m running this in the way that I think a newspaper should be run.” And that was a luxury that I think his successors didn’t have when a fella named Sherman a couple years ago decided that Knight-Ridder at, whatever it was, a 20 percent margin, wasn’t making enough money and forced the sale of the company. I’m reminded of that because I saw a note in the paper this morning that said that Mr. Sherman is now 100 percent out of newspapers, zero. He used to own some part of Belo. He used to own some part of The New York Times. He used to own a big chunk of McClatchy, which is a company that bought Knight-Ridder, and now he owns nothing.
It’s a different kind of commitment. A newspaper is not going to leave the town. An institutional investor will invest in the newspaper in the same way it might invest in a shoe company, it might invest in a rug company, it doesn’t matter. It’s just simply another type of investment, and they’ll do it for a period of time, and then they’ll either stay in because they continue making money or get out without any sentimentality. A news organization, whether it’s television or cable or even and certainly newspapers, cannot…The Miami Herald cannot leave Miami. And so there’s that institutional part that seems to me to be incompatible with institutional investors. And I think that’s a really big problem for, I believe, for all of the publicly held newspaper companies.
ANDELMAN: There seemed to be a time, and again, I go back 20 to 25 years when it almost seemed like a good idea to have people with good business sense to come into the newspaper business and apply some fundamentals to the operation. The problem is, I think, that the business has been changed in the last 10 years by technology and other things. It takes more than just business sense to make a newspaper work.
IBARGUEN: I think it’s a combination of problems as I indicated a minute ago. I think there is new technology that is absolutely disruptive – that is cable to television and Internet to both television and certainly to newspapers. So there’s disruptive new technology, and by the way, that’s not a negative. That’s simply a fact. It disrupts the old model in a major way, and so the people who are going to win are the ones who figure out how to deliver what the community needs on the new platforms. I firmly believe that’s what Jack Knight did in his day in the beginning of the 20th century, and I believe that’s what we’re searching for now.
But there’s another factor, which is that the institutional investor is looking for a return. The institutional investor, that is the Legg Masons of this world, don’t really care whether Philadelphia is informed, whether Tallahassee is informed, whether St. Petersburg is informed. They care whether you return the amount of money that they planned to have you return. And so if you returned 14 percent, and they were planning 13, then that’s great. And with newspapers, they came to expect somewhere in the 20 to 25 percent range, and that’s a lot of money. And that’s a lot of money when you have your core business, the business side, the core business attacked and under great pressure as in the case of national advertising and with the web coming on so strong on classified advertising for jobs and that sort of thing. Think about it. If you go buy a car, it’s just too easy to look up on the web virtually every model that you can think about. The last three cars I bought I basically shopped for online and sort of gone for the test drive, but I really haven’t gone to do much other comparison.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
With $2.6 billion in assets, the Miami-based John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is the 22nd largest foundation in the United States. Its mission is the betterment of the 26 communities in which it works and the promotion of journalism as a career and industry nationwide.
The latter part of Knight’s mission is particularly challenging at a time when traditional newspapers are shrinking and, in many cases, evaporating.
That puts Alberto Ibargüen, CEO of the Knight Foundation and a former publisher of the Miami Herald, at the same crossroads that silent movies encountered with talkies, talkies with radio, radio with television, television with cable, and now traditional print journalism with online reporting, blogs, podcasting, v-logs, streaming media, and so on.
Since 1950, the Knight Foundation has invested more than $300 million to advance quality journalism and freedom of expression worldwide. It has a vital interest in seeing journalism survive in whatever form it takes.
I interviewed Ibargüen recently for an old media business magazine and liked his approach to a rapidly changing world, and I was delighted when he accepted my invitation for a second round of conversation.
Click to open separate window
ALBERTO IBARGUEN: It’s something like eight percent of their newsroom, yes. They’re certainly not immune from the drop in national advertising and the drop in jobs and jobs/classified advertising. Those are two traditional mainstays of newspapers. They represented, for most newspapers, well over half the revenue, and both of those categories are way down.
ANDELMAN: How do we square what’s happening, like the announcement at The New York Times today, for example, about 100 jobs -- with the amount of money that someone like Rupert Murdoch is pouring into The Wall Street Journal all of a sudden? How do those two square with each other?
IBARGUEN: I don’t think anybody else could possibly have paid that much for The Wall Street Journal or for any newspaper because that’s not, I think, the reason why Rupert Murdoch was so interested in Dow Jones. I think Rupert Murdoch was interested in Dow Jones because he’s starting a competitor to CNBC, and Rupert Murdoch is as committed to news online as anyone else in big media. I’d say more so. So what he was buying was not the newspaper. What he was buying was the best news organization around, and so I would expect that, over time, those resources and that talent, when the talent is enormous at The Wall Street Journal for covering business news, it is a great newspaper, that that talent will be applied on television and online.
ANDELMAN: So as far as print journalism goes, that was actually a pessimistic purchase rather than an optimistic purchase.
IBARGUEN: It’s hard to call that much money pessimistic, but I guess you’re right.
ANDELMAN: What about, if we move further West with that, what about Sam Zell and him buying the Chicago Tribune, plus the Los Angeles Times and Orlando Sentinel? He doesn’t have that same kind of online or electronic package, or does he?
IBARGUEN: No, I don’t think it’s the same, and I’m not sure that the deal is the same either. That one engaged a great deal, I think, of employee money. I don’t know if it was their retirement funds. I know that the Tribune Foundation became a contributor to that purchase. I think, in Chicago, the Tribune Company has long had lots of synergy with television and online, and I’m honestly not on the inside so I don’t know how they’re doing with that. In their smaller papers, they may be able, at least for a period of time, and Sam’s in Ft. Lauderdale here in Florida or in Orlando, they may be able to do reasonably well. They are, traditionally, newspapers that were run at very high margins, much, much more profitable on a percentage basis than say The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, but they really did also depend on classified advertising and national advertising.
I think the picture for the national papers is actually not bad if they can figure out the online piece because online is part of the worldwide web, not the local, geographically defined web. And by thinking of it as a national paper, you can begin to have the kind of national scale that the web seems to be naturally suited for.
The ones that I think are also probably okay, at least for the short-term, are the papers in very small communities where they still can publish the local news, whether it’s the high school football team or what happened at city hall. They can do that better than anybody else. The ones that are really getting squeezed are the so-called major metros, and that would include the Chicago Tribune, The Miami Herald, even the Los Angeles Times because those regional papers are trying to do something in between the national scope that fits the web so well and the very local, local, almost neighborhood scope that the small town dailies are doing. So those are the ones that you’re seeing the biggest stress on, and there are some like the Boston Globe, a great newspaper, that although it made some money last year, I think the year before, they actually lost money. That would’ve been unthinkable five or 10 years before.
ANDELMAN: It seems like the smart move 20 or 25 years ago was for these major metros, the Miami Herald, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the St. Petersburg Times, and so forth across the country, to add regional editions and grow and spread out, but now we see some of that coming back, and maybe that wasn’t the way to move long-term.
IBARGUEN: Yes, hindsight’s wonderful, isn’t it?
ANDELMAN: I thrive on it, frankly. Yes.
IBARGUEN: We’re so smart after the fact. I don’t know what they could’ve done. When you were doing your introduction, you were talking about being in the position of the talkies with silent films and so forth. It actually was the position that Jack Knight, our founder, the founder of Knight Foundation, that Jack Knight found himself in at the beginning of the century when he actually built the second biggest newspaper company when newspapers were everything in news. He actually built the second biggest newspaper company by figuring out how to use new technology. Other people were being destroyed by it, and he figured out that because of improvements in transportation, improvements in printing, but mainly improvements in something fantastic and new at the beginning of the 20th century called the telephone, he could actually create a newspaper company that he could run from one place but ultimately in 26 cities, actually in his brother’s lifetime in 26 cities.
The point is that he knew, he figured out, how to use this new technology in a way to expand his business from one single newspaper in Akron, Ohio, and to be able to ultimately run a newspaper company out of Miami, Florida, that included Philadelphia and San Jose and Wichita and Biloxi and Duluth and St. Paul, Detroit, Michigan, and be able to do it all from here because of the telephone. That would’ve been unthinkable when that technology was first introduced or when Jack Knight first started to run the Akron Beacon-Journal.
And so I think one of the things that we try to do at Knight Foundation is, to be honest, we’re not responsible for figuring out how to keep these jobs. We’re not responsible for delivering a 25 or 20 or even 15 percent margin to investors. We’re trying to figure out, “How do you use that new technology?” Let’s experiment with different ways of delivering news and information because, in the end, we still do all live in geographically-defined communities. We still have environmental policy, education, who fixes the potholes are all ultimately decided by people we elect by geographically-defined communities, and either we change the construct of our governing structure, or we have to figure out a way of getting the people who are making those election choices better information, and it has to be electronic. It has to be digital.
ANDELMAN: As you said that, I’m thinking about how things have changed on one level. I think Ed Koch of New York City used to be known as “Mayor Pothole.”
IBARGUEN: Yes.
ANDELMAN: Right? And now we’ve got Mayor Bloomberg who is trying to affect national policy from his mayor’s seat. It’s a very different kind of world even at that level.
IBARGUEN: It really is. And Mayor Koch was fantastic. I happened to live in New York at the time, and there wasn’t a pothole that he couldn’t pay attention to. There wasn’t a ribbon-cutting. And Bloomberg has a different appreciation. Given his background and given what he built in his company, the Bloomberg Business Systems that he built that were an early and phenomenal user of digital technology to deliver business information.
There is another aspect, by the way, of the current newspaper problem, and maybe it’s also true of broadcast television, I’m not sure, and it’s the nature of the ownership. When newspapers were owned, up until the 1960s, there wasn’t any newspaper company that was a publicly held company. They were all family-owned or individually owned, and it didn’t matter whether it was the Meyers and the Grahams who owned the Washington Post or the Sulzbergers who owned The New York Times or the Chandlers in Los Angeles, Knight-Ridder, etc. In the mid-‘60s, the companies started to go public. There were great benefits to going public. You could raise a lot of money, you could invest a lot in the business, and it was a terrific growing concern.
But as ownership started to shift from the families to people who were interested in newspapers to institutional investors, the demand on newspapers, and at the same time, there was new technology coming along, not just radio then television, which were already there, but with the web and with cable, that really began cutting into the advertising base of the newspaper model. There was this sort of perfect storm of web and cable cutting into the advertising base at the same time that the investors in newspapers became more and more institutional investors. And institutional investors not only don’t, but cannot care about the basic function of the newspaper - that is the delivery of news and information to a community.
Jack Knight cared, and, in fact, when he went to Wall Street, there’s a very famous speech that he gave the only time that he went to talk to analysts, and he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here to tell you that if you don’t like the way I run Knight Newspapers then I suggest you buy another newspaper company’s stock because I’m not gonna change. I’m running this in the way that I think a newspaper should be run.” And that was a luxury that I think his successors didn’t have when a fella named Sherman a couple years ago decided that Knight-Ridder at, whatever it was, a 20 percent margin, wasn’t making enough money and forced the sale of the company. I’m reminded of that because I saw a note in the paper this morning that said that Mr. Sherman is now 100 percent out of newspapers, zero. He used to own some part of Belo. He used to own some part of The New York Times. He used to own a big chunk of McClatchy, which is a company that bought Knight-Ridder, and now he owns nothing.
It’s a different kind of commitment. A newspaper is not going to leave the town. An institutional investor will invest in the newspaper in the same way it might invest in a shoe company, it might invest in a rug company, it doesn’t matter. It’s just simply another type of investment, and they’ll do it for a period of time, and then they’ll either stay in because they continue making money or get out without any sentimentality. A news organization, whether it’s television or cable or even and certainly newspapers, cannot…The Miami Herald cannot leave Miami. And so there’s that institutional part that seems to me to be incompatible with institutional investors. And I think that’s a really big problem for, I believe, for all of the publicly held newspaper companies.
ANDELMAN: There seemed to be a time, and again, I go back 20 to 25 years when it almost seemed like a good idea to have people with good business sense to come into the newspaper business and apply some fundamentals to the operation. The problem is, I think, that the business has been changed in the last 10 years by technology and other things. It takes more than just business sense to make a newspaper work.
IBARGUEN: I think it’s a combination of problems as I indicated a minute ago. I think there is new technology that is absolutely disruptive – that is cable to television and Internet to both television and certainly to newspapers. So there’s disruptive new technology, and by the way, that’s not a negative. That’s simply a fact. It disrupts the old model in a major way, and so the people who are going to win are the ones who figure out how to deliver what the community needs on the new platforms. I firmly believe that’s what Jack Knight did in his day in the beginning of the 20th century, and I believe that’s what we’re searching for now.
But there’s another factor, which is that the institutional investor is looking for a return. The institutional investor, that is the Legg Masons of this world, don’t really care whether Philadelphia is informed, whether Tallahassee is informed, whether St. Petersburg is informed. They care whether you return the amount of money that they planned to have you return. And so if you returned 14 percent, and they were planning 13, then that’s great. And with newspapers, they came to expect somewhere in the 20 to 25 percent range, and that’s a lot of money. And that’s a lot of money when you have your core business, the business side, the core business attacked and under great pressure as in the case of national advertising and with the web coming on so strong on classified advertising for jobs and that sort of thing. Think about it. If you go buy a car, it’s just too easy to look up on the web virtually every model that you can think about. The last three cars I bought I basically shopped for online and sort of gone for the test drive, but I really haven’t gone to do much other comparison.
Click Here to Keep Reading!
© 2008 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
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Monday, October 15, 2007
Chris Matthews, "Hardball" host: Mr. Media Interview Classic
Originally published June 30, 1997
As a political aide to a pantheon of Democratic stars from the last 25 years, including the late Senator Edmund S. Muskie and former House Speaker Tip O'Neill -- as well as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter -- Chris Matthews knows power when he sees it.
And as Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner, he also knows bullshit when he smells it.
Combine these attributes with a hard-charging, uzi-sprung delivery, a nightclub bouncer's physical presence, blonde hair, brown eyes and a zealot's demand for truth, justice and the American way and you must be watching Matthews' cable TV show, "Hardball." Seen nightly on CNBC, Matthews, 51, grabs viewers in his teeth for 30 minutes and doesn't stop shaking until he forces them to take one side or another of the day's top political issues.
"This is a program about the contest which is implicit in just about every big story," Matthews says, "whether it is the Republicans against the Democrats, prosecutors against defense attorneys, defense attorneys against the media, whatever. There is usually an omen of the contest in just about every major story. That is why there is conflict and that is why there is a story."
Like "The McLaughlin Group," a show on which Matthews was himself once a frequent panelist, "Hardball" features a revolving cast of political and media savvy commentators who the host jabs and provokes, sometimes into a frenzy. And despite his blue-chip credentials as a former behind-the-scenes Democratic policy maker, Matthews doesn't always take predictable sides in a debate. In fact, it sometimes appears as if he chooses the position most likely to get a rise out of his guests. It makes great television, even if it leaves an occasional squishy area in his own ideology.
"If I were sitting around the dinner table with you, with my family or anybody else," he says, "I would like to think that the voice you heard as the evening wore on would be very similar, very recognizable, from my books and columns and what I do in television. If I am in the company of a lot of conservatives who are all self-satisfied or ideologically secure, I love to challenge them and go to the liberal side of things. But if I am in a group of people where I think that the politically correct point of view is liberal, I will be extremely tough on that view, coming off as more conservative than I am, because I am surrounded by liberals. If I were put on a desert island with a bunch of conservatives, I would quickly adapt my skepticism to the other side of things. I have sympathy for people that tend to be losing, too. I find myself sympathizing with any side that lost a war."
Conservative? Liberal? Opportunist may be the best label for this political manimal.
"If you can isolate the conflict," he explains, "and find out where the contest of wills and wits and tactics and strengths and weaknesses is at work, then you can usually find a different way of looking at a major news story than other people are using."
When Bill Clinton's lawyer suddenly began attacking Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, it opened a delicious can of squirming worms for Matthews. "What's this going to the air about?" he wondered aloud. "Why go to the media? Why resort to a media strategy at this point, what's that about? What about the tactic of leaking and attacking and leaking, what's at work here? Are they trying to discredit Ken Starr, or are they trying to intimidate him into not leaking? What are they up to?"
"Hardball," which debuted in January, is probably on the crest of big things. Matthews masterfully finds fresh edges in even the most well-aged of news stories by giving each an infusion of sports-like energy. It's no accident the show is named "Hardball" instead of "Meet the Week Group" or something equally vague and obsequious.
Does the format work every night? Can Matthews rub his guests and himself into a lather five days a week? For 30 minutes a day, couldn't you?
"It is a heat-seeking program," says the host, "and I think that you can detect the heat (in certain topics) such as the JonBenet Ramsey (murder investigation) or the sentencing of Timothy McVeigh. In politics, you can sense it around the Clintons, especially Hillary Clinton. I think whenever there is a lot of heat and argument about something, it makes a more interesting program, because people are already tuned into it emotionally, and then the question is to give them another look at it from a totally different prism, which is the contest. Not who is right and who is wrong, but who is winning, who is losing, and how are they doing it, how are they managing to compete with each other."
In fact, each edition of "Hardball" opens with a tight camera shot of Matthews' face as he blasts through the day's "Winners & Losers" as he sees them. And each show closes with a personal essay by Matthews, taking viewers further into his heart and sometimes tortured soul.
A Peace Corps veteran, Matthews first worked as a journalist in 1973 under the aegis of consumer activist Ralph Nader. "I wasn't really big on investigative reporting," he recalls. "I didn't really like it. Some people are good at it. Bob Woodward is obviously the best, but I just didn't like doing it."
He quickly turned his back on journalism to work for Utah Senator Frank Moss (D), which eventually led him to a series of prominent appointments with Muskie, Carter and O'Neill.
His TV career kicked off in 1988, with Matthews proffering political commentary, first on "CBS This Morning" and then ABC's "Good Morning America." Along the way he made frequent appearances on "The McLaughlin Group" before being tapped to host a two-hour show on the little-watched NBC cable channel that preceded MSNBC, America's Talking. A year ago, he joined CNBC as host of "Politics," which was on at 8 p.m. EST, and which gave way in January to "Hardball" at 8:30 p.m.
Being on the tube is a way of life in the Matthews household; his wife, Kathleen is a top-rated local news anchor at WJLA Ch. 7, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C.
The 25-year-old Watergate break-in recently helped score major publicity for Matthews both in his twice-weekly column for the Examiner (syndicated by Tribune Media Services) and on TV.
"I will brag a bit: I broke all the stories on the Nixon tapes. All those stories that ran in the Washington Post, I broke four major ones (in the Examiner)," he says. "I broke the story that Nixon organized the surveillance campaign. I lifted it out of the archives at the beginning of last year. He was the one who got the whole stupid campaign going. He ordered the sneaking into the National Archives. He ordered the break-in of the Republican National Committee Headquarters the week after Watergate to make it look like both sides did it. He did all that, and I got all that from the archives and broke all those stories, and in each case, the Washington Post gave me credit."
He gained another coup in June when newspapers nationwide ran a compelling picture of him and former Nixon aide-turned radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy looking out from a terrace at the Watergate Hotel the week of the break-in's 25th anniversary.
Actually, 1997 has the potential of being an even bigger year still for Matthews, with publication of the paperback edition of his second book, Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Post-War America (Simon & Shuster/Touchstone) in August. The paperback will include new material based on discoveries Matthews made while researching the latest Nixon tapes.
Matthews' first book, a political primer called Hardball (Harper Collins), was first published in 1988. It is still in print and selling steadily.
Frequent "Hardball" guests -- maybe targets would be a better word -- include Time magazine's Margaret Carlson Newsweek's Howard Fineman, Republican pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, GOP strategist Ed Rollins, disgraced advisor Dick Morris, Michael Barone of Reader's Digest; Fred Barnes, Cokie Roberts, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradley and Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute.
"They are my people," Matthews says, "exciting people to have around and they come loaded for bear."
But when them come loaded with bull, this host isn't afraid to call them on it.
"'The bigger they are, the harder they fall' would be a good motto for the show," he says. "I think I am skeptical of power and most skeptical of the most power. I harbor a good dose of good old American, Irish-American, resentment. Probably makes me a fairly familiar voice. I think I resent people in power and may even envy them some, and I would even admit that. I think that I have a voice which is experienced because I have been there all those years, and I think I have a pretty good crap detector."
Sometimes, Matthews gets his guests all lathered up just in time for a commercial break. But rather than politely waiting for them to finish spinning their message or trying to kindly interrupt the way Ted Koppel or Larry King might, he looks into the camera and talks over them, teasing what's coming up next with the combatants still drawing blood in the background. It makes great television but Matthews swears it's not done with intentional rudeness.
"Maybe that's show biz," he says, "but I do have somebody in my ear saying, 'Break!' Or else I am saying, 'Let's leave the audience asking for more.' The program is only 22 minutes long and each segment really tries to deal with a different contest.
As for his rapidfire delivery and execution, Matthews compares himself to a high-performance race car.
"You have to get around that track as fast as you can," he says, "but you have to drive fast enough to win and not too fast to get killed. McLaughlin's great strength is speed. He says, 'Let's get out of this.' People are very quickly bored today; they want you to move or else they will surf you right off the planet."
Working in print and electronic media, Matthews exalts in the best of both.
"On TV," he says, "you can reach half a million people instantly, and you can revel in a kind of a phenomenon that you can't in print. Print, you can only write the story and describe the event; television, you can be the event. I think it is like the difference between going to a party at someone's house and being mailed a description of the party."
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Originally published June 30, 1997
As a political aide to a pantheon of Democratic stars from the last 25 years, including the late Senator Edmund S. Muskie and former House Speaker Tip O'Neill -- as well as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter -- Chris Matthews knows power when he sees it.
And as Washington bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner, he also knows bullshit when he smells it.
Combine these attributes with a hard-charging, uzi-sprung delivery, a nightclub bouncer's physical presence, blonde hair, brown eyes and a zealot's demand for truth, justice and the American way and you must be watching Matthews' cable TV show, "Hardball." Seen nightly on CNBC, Matthews, 51, grabs viewers in his teeth for 30 minutes and doesn't stop shaking until he forces them to take one side or another of the day's top political issues.
"This is a program about the contest which is implicit in just about every big story," Matthews says, "whether it is the Republicans against the Democrats, prosecutors against defense attorneys, defense attorneys against the media, whatever. There is usually an omen of the contest in just about every major story. That is why there is conflict and that is why there is a story."
Like "The McLaughlin Group," a show on which Matthews was himself once a frequent panelist, "Hardball" features a revolving cast of political and media savvy commentators who the host jabs and provokes, sometimes into a frenzy. And despite his blue-chip credentials as a former behind-the-scenes Democratic policy maker, Matthews doesn't always take predictable sides in a debate. In fact, it sometimes appears as if he chooses the position most likely to get a rise out of his guests. It makes great television, even if it leaves an occasional squishy area in his own ideology.
"If I were sitting around the dinner table with you, with my family or anybody else," he says, "I would like to think that the voice you heard as the evening wore on would be very similar, very recognizable, from my books and columns and what I do in television. If I am in the company of a lot of conservatives who are all self-satisfied or ideologically secure, I love to challenge them and go to the liberal side of things. But if I am in a group of people where I think that the politically correct point of view is liberal, I will be extremely tough on that view, coming off as more conservative than I am, because I am surrounded by liberals. If I were put on a desert island with a bunch of conservatives, I would quickly adapt my skepticism to the other side of things. I have sympathy for people that tend to be losing, too. I find myself sympathizing with any side that lost a war."
Conservative? Liberal? Opportunist may be the best label for this political manimal.
"If you can isolate the conflict," he explains, "and find out where the contest of wills and wits and tactics and strengths and weaknesses is at work, then you can usually find a different way of looking at a major news story than other people are using."
When Bill Clinton's lawyer suddenly began attacking Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, it opened a delicious can of squirming worms for Matthews. "What's this going to the air about?" he wondered aloud. "Why go to the media? Why resort to a media strategy at this point, what's that about? What about the tactic of leaking and attacking and leaking, what's at work here? Are they trying to discredit Ken Starr, or are they trying to intimidate him into not leaking? What are they up to?"
"Hardball," which debuted in January, is probably on the crest of big things. Matthews masterfully finds fresh edges in even the most well-aged of news stories by giving each an infusion of sports-like energy. It's no accident the show is named "Hardball" instead of "Meet the Week Group" or something equally vague and obsequious.
Does the format work every night? Can Matthews rub his guests and himself into a lather five days a week? For 30 minutes a day, couldn't you?
"It is a heat-seeking program," says the host, "and I think that you can detect the heat (in certain topics) such as the JonBenet Ramsey (murder investigation) or the sentencing of Timothy McVeigh. In politics, you can sense it around the Clintons, especially Hillary Clinton. I think whenever there is a lot of heat and argument about something, it makes a more interesting program, because people are already tuned into it emotionally, and then the question is to give them another look at it from a totally different prism, which is the contest. Not who is right and who is wrong, but who is winning, who is losing, and how are they doing it, how are they managing to compete with each other."
In fact, each edition of "Hardball" opens with a tight camera shot of Matthews' face as he blasts through the day's "Winners & Losers" as he sees them. And each show closes with a personal essay by Matthews, taking viewers further into his heart and sometimes tortured soul.
A Peace Corps veteran, Matthews first worked as a journalist in 1973 under the aegis of consumer activist Ralph Nader. "I wasn't really big on investigative reporting," he recalls. "I didn't really like it. Some people are good at it. Bob Woodward is obviously the best, but I just didn't like doing it."
He quickly turned his back on journalism to work for Utah Senator Frank Moss (D), which eventually led him to a series of prominent appointments with Muskie, Carter and O'Neill.
His TV career kicked off in 1988, with Matthews proffering political commentary, first on "CBS This Morning" and then ABC's "Good Morning America." Along the way he made frequent appearances on "The McLaughlin Group" before being tapped to host a two-hour show on the little-watched NBC cable channel that preceded MSNBC, America's Talking. A year ago, he joined CNBC as host of "Politics," which was on at 8 p.m. EST, and which gave way in January to "Hardball" at 8:30 p.m.
Being on the tube is a way of life in the Matthews household; his wife, Kathleen is a top-rated local news anchor at WJLA Ch. 7, the ABC affiliate in Washington, D.C.
The 25-year-old Watergate break-in recently helped score major publicity for Matthews both in his twice-weekly column for the Examiner (syndicated by Tribune Media Services) and on TV.
"I will brag a bit: I broke all the stories on the Nixon tapes. All those stories that ran in the Washington Post, I broke four major ones (in the Examiner)," he says. "I broke the story that Nixon organized the surveillance campaign. I lifted it out of the archives at the beginning of last year. He was the one who got the whole stupid campaign going. He ordered the sneaking into the National Archives. He ordered the break-in of the Republican National Committee Headquarters the week after Watergate to make it look like both sides did it. He did all that, and I got all that from the archives and broke all those stories, and in each case, the Washington Post gave me credit."
He gained another coup in June when newspapers nationwide ran a compelling picture of him and former Nixon aide-turned radio talk show host G. Gordon Liddy looking out from a terrace at the Watergate Hotel the week of the break-in's 25th anniversary.
Actually, 1997 has the potential of being an even bigger year still for Matthews, with publication of the paperback edition of his second book, Kennedy and Nixon: The Rivalry That Shaped Post-War America (Simon & Shuster/Touchstone) in August. The paperback will include new material based on discoveries Matthews made while researching the latest Nixon tapes.
Matthews' first book, a political primer called Hardball (Harper Collins), was first published in 1988. It is still in print and selling steadily.
Frequent "Hardball" guests -- maybe targets would be a better word -- include Time magazine's Margaret Carlson Newsweek's Howard Fineman, Republican pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, GOP strategist Ed Rollins, disgraced advisor Dick Morris, Michael Barone of Reader's Digest; Fred Barnes, Cokie Roberts, former Washington Post editor Ben Bradley and Ben Wattenberg of the American Enterprise Institute.
"They are my people," Matthews says, "exciting people to have around and they come loaded for bear."
But when them come loaded with bull, this host isn't afraid to call them on it.
"'The bigger they are, the harder they fall' would be a good motto for the show," he says. "I think I am skeptical of power and most skeptical of the most power. I harbor a good dose of good old American, Irish-American, resentment. Probably makes me a fairly familiar voice. I think I resent people in power and may even envy them some, and I would even admit that. I think that I have a voice which is experienced because I have been there all those years, and I think I have a pretty good crap detector."
Sometimes, Matthews gets his guests all lathered up just in time for a commercial break. But rather than politely waiting for them to finish spinning their message or trying to kindly interrupt the way Ted Koppel or Larry King might, he looks into the camera and talks over them, teasing what's coming up next with the combatants still drawing blood in the background. It makes great television but Matthews swears it's not done with intentional rudeness.
"Maybe that's show biz," he says, "but I do have somebody in my ear saying, 'Break!' Or else I am saying, 'Let's leave the audience asking for more.' The program is only 22 minutes long and each segment really tries to deal with a different contest.
As for his rapidfire delivery and execution, Matthews compares himself to a high-performance race car.
"You have to get around that track as fast as you can," he says, "but you have to drive fast enough to win and not too fast to get killed. McLaughlin's great strength is speed. He says, 'Let's get out of this.' People are very quickly bored today; they want you to move or else they will surf you right off the planet."
Working in print and electronic media, Matthews exalts in the best of both.
"On TV," he says, "you can reach half a million people instantly, and you can revel in a kind of a phenomenon that you can't in print. Print, you can only write the story and describe the event; television, you can be the event. I think it is like the difference between going to a party at someone's house and being mailed a description of the party."
© 2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.
Labels: Bill Clinton, Chris Matthews, CNBC, Edmund S. Muskie, G. Gordon Libby, Hardball, Jimmy Carter, JonBenet Ramsey, Kenneth Starr, MSNBC, Ralph Nader, San Francisco Examiner, Timothy McVeigh, Tip O'Neill
¶ 10:34 PM 0 Comments Links to this post
Sunday, January 07, 2007
Zune vs. iPod (Bonus: Jim Cramer @ Bat)
Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words, as this photo shot by MacDailyNews.com reader Larry Fransson proves.
What's that you say? Stop picking on Microsoft's latest half-baked product?
Then you probably won't want to watch CNBC's Jim Cramer, host of "Mad Money," proclaim the iPod's superiority -- and then smash a Zune to bits with a baseball bat. Rose-colored glasses or safety goggles? It's your call.
What's that you say? Stop picking on Microsoft's latest half-baked product?
Then you probably won't want to watch CNBC's Jim Cramer, host of "Mad Money," proclaim the iPod's superiority -- and then smash a Zune to bits with a baseball bat. Rose-colored glasses or safety goggles? It's your call.
Labels: CNBC, Jim Cramer, MacDailyNews.com, Mad Money
¶ 11:21 AM 0 Comments Links to this post
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