By size, anyway, Fox News is part of the 'Mainstream Media'

From Robert Whitcomb's "Digital Diary,'' on GoLocal24:

Three prominent journalists at CNN were fired the other week for inadequately sourcing a story linking Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge-fund manager and Trump confidant, to a Russian investment fund supposedly being investigated by the Senate. That is as it should be, although I doubt that we’ve heard the last about Mr. Scaramucci’s past activities.

One difference between the so-called mainstream media and Republican-Trumpian outlets as Fox News is that the former’s journalism is almost always much  more rigorous than Fox and  other Trumpian-style outlets. CNN, The New York Times and the Washington Post, et al., make mistakes but they correct them. Fox, such allied newspapers as The New York Post and right-wing radio talk show people assiduously avoid making corrections or apologies, however erroneous their reporting and conspiracy theories.

Even many Trumpians, whatever their wishful thinking, tend to believe reporting from the “mainstream media’’ more than from the likes of Fox News, let alone such sleazy operations as Breitbart News and the pro-Trump National Enquirer.

As for “the mainstream media,’’ note that the most watched cable news outlet is Fox and  two of thetop five newspapers in America are owned by the Republican propaganda organ called News Corp. – The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post. And the consolidation of the radio business has resulted in right wingers having far more broadcast radio outlets around America than the left or the middle. Listen to your car radio as you drive around America.

Meanwhile, I’m saddened by the decline of the quality of news reporting in one of my alma maters – The Wall Street Journal. While the news reporters used to report without fear or favor on activities of both Republican and Democratic administrations, now they usually shy away from looking into the dubious activities and those in the administration of Donald Trump, who is a close ally of News Corp. czar Rupert Murdoch.

David Warsh: Globe arts revival and my migration

SOMERVILLE, Mass. Boston is slated to regain a battered badge of its identity next month, when arts coverage is expected to return to the daily broadsheet editions of The Boston Globe. To be sure, the return of a “Living/Arts” section is apparently a consequence of an expanding business coverage. Details are still unclear. It is a heartening development nevertheless.

Distinctive criticism has been a hallmark of Boston’s newspapers since 1830, when the Boston Evening Transcript opened for business. (It closed in 1941.) Thirteen years ago, to save some money in production costs, at a time when the paper was still highly profitable, The Globe banished its critics, along with its coverage of food and personal health, to a tab section it called “G,” printed a day in advance.

That robbed dignity and immediacy from criticism by such distinguished contributors as Mark Feeney, Robert Campbell, Richard Dyer, Gail Caldwell, Ed Siegel, Sebastian Smee, Jeremy Eichler, Wesley Morris and Ty Burr. (Five Pulitzer Prize winners are on that list.) Dyer, Caldwell, Siegel and Morris have left the paper. The tab was among the worst of a long series of bad ideas from the New York Times Co., which bought The Globe for $1.13 billion in 1993 and sold it last year for $70 million.

Google didn’t do that. New York did.

Another mistake, not on the same scale, was shutting down my column "Economic Principals'' {since transformed into www.economic principals.com}. Editor Martin Baron said he wanted technical economics only, no politics. But even if economists sought to strip their discipline of its inevitable political overtones (and most no longer bother to try), it was a terrible idea for newspapers to go along. So EP quit and moved to the Web.  (On the other hand, Baron subsequently hired the last four of those critics.)

Thirteen years later, EP has amply proved its point.  Its coverage of Harvard’s Russia scandal ran circles around that of The Globe, The Times  and The Washington Post (where Baron is now editor). Its reporting on trends in growth economics was praised in  The Times by columnist Paul Krugman (and, a few years later, dismissed on his blog!). Its coverage of the financial crisis has been more penetrating than that of The Times; of the fortunes of the Obama economic team, more realistic; of  U.S.  policy toward Russia, more skeptical; of the competitive situation of print newspapers, less panicky. Like  The Times,  EP made a  dreadful mistake in supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq,

Moreover, EP’s public broadcasting model has proved out. A relative handful of readers support the enterprise with an annual subscription of $50, in return for an early email version on Sunday morning (Eastern Standard Time), with another 20,000 or so reading, over the course of a quarter, the online version for free.

How many pay? From year to year, it’s hard to know, renewal rates being hard to predict – somewhere between 250 and 500, fewer, perhaps, than had been hoped, but enough to keep EP in business.  Subscribers include civic-minded citizens from all walks of life in the four corners of the world.

Others who left The Globe have founded successful public radio talk radio shows: former foreign editor Tom Ashbrook started “On Point;” Steve Curwood, “Fresh Air.”  Bruce Mohl edits Commonwealth magazine.  EP goes it alone, with only its surpassingly loyal copy editor to correct infelicities and, occasionally, restrain enthusiasms. The payroll consists of vegetables, fruit and ice cream

The Times is in the throes of change, but it remains a great newspaper (as do the Financial Times and the The Wall Street Journal, the other papers to whose print editions EP subscribes). You can learn a million things from  The Times that you’ll never see here.

But EP regularly provides a parallax view of developments in economics and politics, as seen from Boston, much the same as it once did at the newspaper itself.

I look forward to many more years of doing the same.

I expect, too, to write slightly more frequently about Boston. The New York Times Co. occupation is ended, but  The Globe  is damaged and the Herald is a shadow of its former self.  The sphere of news-gathering and discussion is considerably attenuated.  The conversation about Boston needs to include many voices.

David Warsh is proprietor of www. economicprincipals.com and an economic historian and longtime financial journalist -- so longtime,  indeed, that he worked at The Wall Street Journal back  in the early '70's, when the overseer of newenglanddiary.com, Robert Whitcomb, was there.

Llewellyn King: Whether good merger or bad, the M&A kings prosper

  Whether Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox ultimately succeeds in its $80-billion bid for Time Warner, rest assured the mergers and acquisitions (M&A) industry will do just fine. Very fine, actually.

There is such a thing as the M&A industry, but it is elusive. It has no trade association and cannot be looked up in the telephone directory. But this virtual organization is a power in the land and very, very rich.

It is made up of investment bankers, lawyers, economists, advertising agencies, public-relations tacticians, lobbyists and legal printing firms. They all swing into action like sharks alerted by blood in the water. They are a diverse crew with one thing in common: They do not come cheap.

At the top of the pinnacle are the investment bankers and their pals in the hedge-fund world, who are ready with ideas and capital if it is needed; ready to reap the rewards of arbitrage. These are the elite officers of the Wall Street Brigades; money is their North Star. They have been bred, in the best schools, to expect it as their entitlement, and they are keen to live up to that expectation.

They are retained by both sides in a hostile takeover and, however it goes, their fees will be enough on one transaction to keep them on Easy Street for years. They fly high, shoot high and live high. They are aristocrats in the kingdom of money.

Just below them come the lawyers, droves of them each offering advice on some aspect of the challenge. Each billing more for one hour than most people earn in a week. When working on a big merger, where there are billions and billions of dollars in play, the legal fees run into the tens of millions of dollars -- and nobody cares. Outside of the senior management, who expect to get extraordinary wealthy – hundreds of millions of dollars, at least -- in a takeover, it is the bankers and the lawyers, denizens of Fifth Avenue and the Hamptons, who make out beyond normal dreams of avarice, and do it over and over.

So it is not surprising that it is often bankers who instigate mergers either by pushing the ideas and the finance mechanism on the firm that hopes to be the acquirer, or persuading a firm that it is time to put itself on the market. Once a target is “in play,” as Time Warner is, anything can happen: A white-knight suitor can come along or the vulnerable company can become an acquisitor, as in the way Men’s Warehouse stitched up Jos. A Banks.

If there is a hostile battle, the advertising and public-relations people come in, cajoling shareholders to hold out or sell out. More millions are spent in this effort: No one is trying to save money when the transactions are so large.

The biggest winners are those at the top of the heap: the managements. They own stock options and shares, plus special deals are written to sweeten things for them.

Everyone engaged in the M&A industry makes money when the game is on, all the way down to the caterers, who provide the sustenance when the midnight oil is burning. A merger is a grueling and fun undertaking; the fun of making money under pressure, a lot of pressure and even more money.

Who loses? Certainly the staff of the lesser-partner firm. The conqueror calls the shots and decrees the layoffs, which are one of the principal savings or “efficiencies” of the takeover. There will be less duplication, fewer subsidiary businesses, and fewer facilities that can be consolidated.

The other loser, feverishly denied in advance of the nuptials, is the consumer; the poor stiff who purchases the goods and services that the new entity offers. These may be fewer and, almost certainly, they will become more expensive over time.

Not all mergers are bad. Actually, Rupert Murdoch’s takeover of The Wall Street Journal has resulted in an invigorated newspaper. But anyone, including myself, who has flown on the merged American Airlines and U.S. Airways has nothing good to report about service, pricing, or frequency. I'll venture that the M&A moguls are taking private jets -- wouldn’t you?

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle” on PBS. His e-mail is lking@kingpublishing.com.