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Fox’s New Broad-Brush Channel
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The much-awaited Fox Business Network launched on cable television last week. It was also the week in which the stock market took its worst drubbing in years. No matter. Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. clearly plans a channel that is relentlessly upbeat, populist and with a broader viewer base than its competitors, Bloomberg and CNBC. Call it “The Joy of Capitalism.”
Given Murdoch’s recent purchase of The Wall Street Journal, some expected Fox Business Network to be The Journal with moving pictures. But the first week suggested that the creators of the new channel want something with much broader appeal: “Business for Dummies.”
The serious, staid Journal was not in evidence in FBN’s first week. No. The first week of the new channel owed little to established business broadcasting. It is closer to its stable mate, Fox News, than to any existing business news outlet on the air or in print. It is a mixture of personal finance and discussion with occasional recognition that the world of money is also a world of big money and big players—a feature on budget dating contrasted with an interview with Warren Buffet.
Murdoch has fathered FBN, but Roger Ailes has been its midwife. Ailes, a large man who worries about his weight, even as it increases, is a television genius. He understands that television is the most powerful medium, and that it is still evolving. It was an Ailes acolyte, Larry McCarthy, who created the deadly effective “Willie Horton” ad, which George H.W. Bush used in his 1988 presidential campaign to depict Michael Dukakis as soft on crime. And it was Ailes who created CNBC.
Ailes’s special talent is pace, or what TV people call “production values.” Fox television has high energy: It is all snap, crackle and pop–and very political. Ailes and Murdoch both understand than you can bond with an audience if you play to its prejudices. Murdoch learned that when he relaunched The Sun, a liberal London newspaper, as a right-wing, jingo and bellicose conservatism-for-the-working-class title. But not too socially conservative– it features a topless girl on Page Three most days.
In the media, there are no secrets: Your formula is there for everyone to see. The trick is in a blend of vision and execution. Ailes has been the master of executing Murdoch’s vision. Can Ailes pull it off one more time? Can he take business news to a wide audience at a time of stock market volatility; and, more of a challenge, at a time when most small investors are invested not directly in blue chips, but in mutual funds, through vehicles like 401ks or pension funds?
When I met Ailes, more than a decade ago, Fox News was still struggling against CNN, the market leader, which had just overhauled its Headline News. Ailes, who is affable, despite his reputation as ogre, was seeking to unseat the king. And he was relishing the fight.
Like many journalists, I did not know that Fox politics would carry the day. Indeed, the relentless right-winged formula at Fox not only carried the day, but also vanquished CNN, leaving it a confused corps of news, personalities and viewpoints.
I do know that if Fox starts losing in the business news ratings, Murdoch will turn away and try something else. He turned away from most of his U.S. newspaper and periodical holdings when they failed to perform to his expectations. Part of Murdoch’s success has been his courage to abandon mistakes. He does not fight wars of attrition.
While old-line media companies are trying to repel the forces of the Internet, Murdoch has bought in, laying down $580 million for MySpace. Rather than watching the birth of his business news baby, the wily Murdoch attended an Internet conference.
While I abhor what Murdoch has done to journalism (the politicization, the vulgarity and the trashing of objectivity), I am also lost in admiration. In Britain, he tamed the malicious and destructive trade unions by making an end-run around them. In movies, in book publishing and, above all, in television, Murdoch has been the greatest force of his time–if a little scary. Stay tuned. I will.
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The Dog Days of Our Lives
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A dog has died: a big, happy white dog; a dedicated pacifist; a dog with the manners and the ways of an Edwardian gentleman. He came to our house in need of a family. But, in the way of these things, my wife and I needed him. Strange how every dog fills a need we did not know we had.
Someone had appropriately named the lover boy Sunny. He did not do tricks, give a paw, or beg at the table. Although, truth be told, he had a what-about-me stare that could penetrate hardened steel.When age and infirmity sounded their knell, Sunny had to be gurneyed into the veterinary hospital, where kind hands did the dread thing. As he lay on the table, I kissed him goodbye, and I cried for him and for myself. The mortality of our dogs–their lives and assigned span of years–is so out of step with our own pilgrimage.
Why do dogs commandeer our hearts and minds, and shatter us with their departure–each one so different from the others, and yet as dear, as precious, as intriguing and as beguiling? Do dogs live with us, or do we live with them, even through them? Do we escape into their being–so much simpler and nobler than our own? We pamper them and they fawn on us; we corrupt and transmogrify them, and they accommodate. Their sins are few, by comparison with the panoply of our own. What is a little jealousy, or a smidgen of disobedience, compared with the human capacity for evil?
Some people are much like other people, but the variety of canine personality is one of the miracles of Creation.
I have been pondering the many dogs who have favored me over the decades. There was Monty, the fox terrier, who got lost in the African bush and journeyed 200 miles home. There was Healthcliff, the Jack Russell terrier, who thought all children in swimming pools were in such mortal danger that he belly-flopped in and tried to drag them out–by the hair, if they were girls.
And there was Overset. I named him Overset, which is what newspapermen call articles for which there is no room in the paper. Overset was an ingratiating stray who was surplus to my living requirements. He showed up at the hotel where I lived in Washington, D.C., back in the late l960s. The hotel frowned on his presence, so I took him to work at the old Washington Daily News.
Overset adopted the paper and it adopted him. His day began on the editorial floor, where he would jump on the copy desk, and walk up and down while the first edition was being prepared. Then he went down to the composing room to hurry on the printers. Even the noise of the presses did not faze him. His last stop was the loading dock, where he would bark, if he thought newspaper bundles were not being loaded fast enough. Six unions claimed he had honorary membership.
In what, I think, is John Le Carre’s greatest novel, “A Perfect Spy,” the old, professional spy, Broadbent, loses his beloved dog. Broadbent takes his favorite tweed coat and wraps his dog in it before he buries him. There were many poignant moments in the book, but that one stands out.
Many poets have memorialized dogs, but none more so than Rudyard Kipling. The imperial poet went sentimental about dogs. Prolific, too.
When a dog’s last day close, and we are bereft, it is time to read again Kipling’s lament, “There is sorrow enough in the natural way/ From men and women to fill our day/ … Brothers and sisters, I bid you beware/ Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.”
Beware, indeed. Even the runt of a litter of uncertain parentage is born with the keys to human hearts.
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Why Is the Department of Energy Celebrating?
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This week, the Department of Energy (DOE) is celebrating its 30th anniversary. I hope they hold it down. There is not too much to cheer about. When creation of a department was first bruited, the United States was importing 30 percent of its oil needs. Now it imports 60 percent. Keep the champagne on ice.
Over the course of its history, DOE has spent hundreds of billions of dollars with little to show for it. If as President Jimmy Carter, who created the department, imagined its purpose was to improve energy supply, then it has failed absolutely.
I believe, but do not know, that DOE has succeeded in the stewardship and renewal of the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile. I do know that the department has helped to improve some energy technologies, such as a better drill bit for oil extraction and better nuclear plant controls. And it has developed some wonderful materials and technologies, which were cold-shouldered by industry–ceramic exhaust ports and valves for the automobile industry come to mind.
But DOE has failed to develop a commercially viable technology for using dry hot rock in geothermal electric production. It also has failed to develop a workable model for in situ gasification of coal. Unintentionally, the department found the limits of direct solar electric generation with power towers and mirrors.
Where DOE invention did work was through a program, now phased out, of cooperative research and development agreements. These helped many manufacturers, including fiber extruders, improve their operations.
In the 1980s, it was hoped that DOE and its network of 25 major laboratories would lead a technological revolution that would take the United States to unimagined heights of creativity. That happened, but it happened in Silicon Valley. So DOE fell back on cleaning up the nuclear waste sites of earlier generations; dismantling old nuclear weapons; and pleasing politicians by accommodating their feel-good projects—think the Clinton-Gore smart car and the Bush hydrogen car.
Importantly, DOE monitors nuclear testing around the world and is a lead agency in issues of treaty verification.
In the beginning, there was the Atomic Energy Agency: a swaggering promoter and defender of all things nuclear. When environmentalists objected to its role as promoter and regulator, it was swept into a new organization of mismatched agencies called the Energy Research and Development Administration. That agency brought together such disparate things as nuclear weapons manufacture, desalination, and coal research–each with its own political constituency on Capitol Hill. It even enriched uranium: something that was later hived off to the private sector.
The core of DOE, and its predecessors, is the national laboratory system: an archipelago of gifted institutions that employ around 100,000 people. While the genius of the national labs is uncontested, so is the duplication of their effort and their own bulwarks against reform. Do we need so many of them? Is something learned by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colo. studying hybrid vehicles, when they are being studied in Oak Ridge, Tenn., at the National Transportation Laboratory? And why is government investing in technologies that are established in the market?
The first secretary of the nascent department was James Schlesinger, who had already distinguished himself as chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of the CIA, and secretary of defense. Had this rock-ribbed Republican been secretary of energy at a different time, he might have advanced the streamlining of the national lab system.
Like Department of Homeland Security, DOE is a political semantic creation. There are too many leaves in its portfolio for it to deliver to the full extent of its talent or the national need.
I was there at DOE’s planting. I would like to be there at its pruning. And I would like to be there when a secretary, both with the ability and the mandate, transforms the department to something that might be called “mission critical.” The current secretary, Samuel Bodman, appears to have the credentials but not the mandate.
Certainly, there are islands of excellence in the DOE archipelago. But they are set in a sea of dysfunctional bureaucracy.
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The Time I Met George Soros
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The philanthropist billionaire George Soros is a fiend to Republicans and an awkward ally to Democrats. The immediate cause of Soros’s unpopularity is his funding of the left-wing organization MoveOn.org.
It was not always thus. When the Berlin Wall fell, Soros was a hero across the board. He had funded and worked with groups opposed to the Soviet Union in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Soros was the embodiment of the American Dream: a Hungarian refugee who had amassed a fortune, estimated at $8 billion, through currency speculation. He had used his wealth aggressively to oppose communism and to support democratic initiatives around the globe. He was not your ordinary billionaire liberal: Soros put his money where his mouth was.
At the time of his acclaim, I met Soros. He was the most unpretentious, modest man-of-means I have ever met.
I was running a series of conferences on landmine detection and removal, and Soros had put money into some non-governmental organizations seeking to eradicate landmines in Africa and Asia. A colleague of mine suggested that I invite Soros to speak. I did not think he would have the time, but he agreed willingly.
The conference was held in a suburban Virginia hotel, a short distance from Washington, D.C. I waited by the entrance for Soros, examining every luxury automobile that pulled up. Soros emerged alone from a dilapidated Washington taxi, paid the fare and entered the hotel. He appeared disheveled, in need of a shave and a fresh suit.
At the lunch, I arranged for him to sit at a special table with some of the young people from the NGOs. He was fascinated by their idealism and their field work.
The problem with clearing landmines is that there is no technology that will remove all of them in a given area. Technologies vary from the crude—driving animals across a field—to advance sensor devices.
One American de-mining technology involved mounting a sensor under a helicopter, avoiding interference from its rotors. Soros asked me whether this device worked. I said I did not know, but I could introduce him to the inventor, who was attending the conference. Soros said, “Don’t do that. He’ll say it works 100-percent. Let’s ask somebody else.”
So it was that Soros met a U.S. Army officer working in the field. This expert said that it was unlikely that the device could detect all the mines in a given area, making it no better than any of the other technologies in use. (The problem with clearing 90 percent of the landmines in a given area is that it gives farmers and children a false sense of security.)
Public speaking is not one of Soros’s great talents–his English is heavily accented and his delivery is conversational. When he went to the podium, he referred to the young people doing field work, praising their bravery and commitment. Then Soros said that he really should not have been invited to speak. “I am not a big player in this effort,” he said. “I only give $4 million a year to humanitarian landmine clearance because there is no technology for 100-percent removal of landmines.”
When it came to question time, Soros was asked how much money he would give if there were a 100-percent removal technology. “I would write a check for $100 million in the morning,” Soros said. A great silence fell on the room.
Soros’s political problems derive from the multitude of his causes. He has differentiated himself from other liberal billionaires, like Bill Gates and Steven Rattner, by supporting non-establishment political groups, such as MoveOn.org. Missed in the furor over MoveOn, is the fact that Soros continues to support democratic endeavors around the world, and has been a massive force for establishing democratic institutions in the former Soviet satellites.
After he escaped Hungary, Soros worked as a railway porter and a waiter in England to finance his attendance at the London School of Economics. It was there that he fell under the influence of Karl Popper, the open society guru. Since his accumulation of vast wealth, Soros has made open society his own philosophy. He defines it as free markets, democracy and social balance.
Soros’s critics have painted him as some kind of international fiend; a world government man who is, to boot, an atheist and a proponent of legalized drugs. The former House speaker, Dennis Hastert, went so far as to imply that Soros’s wealth came from world government conspirators. Soros has not behaved the way billionaires are supposed to. Instead of enjoying social status, global recognition, and discreetly sending checks to good causes, he has chosen to get his hands dirty. The Irish financier, Peter Sutherland, now chairman of British Petroleum, once told me that Soros was not easy to work with; that he micromanaged projects, including one in Africa in which both men were involved.
Soros, now 77, is minting enemies as fast as he once minted money. I might take issue with some of his stands, but I remember him as one of the humblest of men. After his speech at my conference, I offered to drive him back to Washington. “No, no,” he said. “They have taxis outside. I will just take one.” And he did.
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Gordon Brown’s Election Dilemma
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Gordon Brown, Britain’s new prime minister, is facing a political dilemma: Should he call an election this year or early next year, or should he serve out the full time left–two and a half years–to this parliament? It is a tricky question.
It is not whether he would win this election: The polls show his Labor Party would be returned with a reduced majority, energizing the Liberal Party and positioning the major opposition party, the Conservatives, for a win in five years. Any weakness in an election would suggest that the Labor administration is losing favor with the British public.
Labor has had a long and successful run, most of it under Tony Blair, but there are problems building in Britain. Putting aside the unpopularity of the Iraq war, there are social issues, long-term concerns about the economy, and simple weariness with a party that has ruled for more than a decade. Electorates get restless and bored if the same party stays in power too long. The Conservatives found this after Margaret Thatcher left office, and the same may be true for Brown’s government.
The smart money is on a new election. If Brown wins it easily, he will be confirmed as his own man, rather than Blair’s designated successor, and he will be empowered to pursue goals close to his own heart. These include putting more space between himself and the United States, and a serious commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. He also would like to pursue goals of social justice for the British by modernizing, and possible extending, the programs of the welfare society.
At the top of this list is the National Health Service (NHS). During Blair’s government, when Brown was the finance minister, substantial new money was allocated to the health service and it has shown some improvement. But recent studies indicate that much of this improvement was to doctors’ and NHS administrators’ salaries. The speed of health care delivery improved, but not as much as Brown had hoped. It is said in Britain that the health service is great if you have a heart attack, and a disaster if you have an ingrown toenail. Brown would like to see a more efficient health service. But he has learned that it can absorb money with little improvement, if the structure goes unchanged.
Brown is brilliant, reserved, and does not have his predecessor’s capacity to suffer fools. He can appear rude and uninterested if his intellectual standards are not met.
A Scottish socialist, who came up in the trade union movement, Brown is all business, sometimes humorless, and notably lacking in political small talk. When I met Brown, I found him to be a man interested in big projects and very confident of his own judgment. At the time, he was pushing for a $50-billion relief fund for Africa. When I asked him how this money would not be wasted, as so much else has been, he snapped, “We’ll give it to the right people.” He does not care to have grand schemes he endorses questioned. Yet, you get the feeling that there is something wise about Brown, that he is more genuine than Blair, and more removed than most politicians from the day-to-day business of politics.
It is not difficult to imagine Brown as an American businessman. It is much harder to imagine Brown as an American politician, negotiating the frothy waters of sound bites and political correctness.
Where Brown may differ most profoundly from contemporary politicians, including his former leader, is that he believes that the state can deliver. Brown has shown none of Blair’s enthusiasm for private business. Nor has he shown any of Blair’s enthusiasm for the world stage, leaving the business of government to his cabinet.
For domestic political reasons, Brown appears intent on setting a course away from America, although it would be wrong to say that he is anti-American. He has traveled here often, and has vacationed on Cape Cod. “He likes the place, but doesn’t always agree with it,” a British political observer told me.
Domestically, Brown has the problem of coming to power at the end of a long period of economic prosperity. The pound is strong and unemployment is low. But the country has been seriously shaken by the collapse of one of its large mortgage lenders, Northern Rock. The Rock took a beating in the liquidity crunch that followed the sub-prime mortgage debacle in the United States. Brown also has to deal with divisive issues of immigration, Islamic terrorism, and public loutishness, which are causing native Britons to leave in droves.
While Labor Party faithfuls feel Brown should ensure five years of government by calling an election right away, the canny prime minister may be worried about the danger of opening so many wounds at this time.
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The European Dilemma: Austerity or Growth
May 14th, 2012
Guests: Darren Gersh, PBS's "Nightly Business Report"; Laure Mandeville, Le Figaro; Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University
Radio’s impact in Washington and the nation
May 7th, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Host and Program Director, Sirius XM Radio’s POTUS Channel 124
Elections here and abroad; crises in Syria and Sudan
April 30th, 2012
Guests: Arnaud de Borchgrave, CSIS; Ed O'Keefe, The Washington Post; and Christopher Chambers, Georgetown University
Word and phrase origins in the U.S. presidency
April 23rd, 2012
Guests: Paul Dickson, author; Carl Cannon, RealClearPolitics.com
Political “wars” in the 2012 election, and real wars elsewhere
April 16th, 2012
Guests: Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University; Ed Kelley, The Washington Times; Chuck Lewis, Hearst Newspapers