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Counting the (under-reported) cost

Thursday, December 11, 2008

WHAT A WELCOME home for a roving media guy. I’m fresh back from Africa, a continent that the media tend to characterize as plagued – quite apart from its endemic poverty, war and pestilence – by political corruption and criminality. And I’m slapped with a doozy of an all-American story: Illinois’ Governor arrested on charges of hawking round the President-Elect’s US Senate seat to the highest cash bidder.

What's more, there’s a wrinkle to the story that offers a fascinating - but for me unsurprising - media angle. Among the bugged phone calls from Governor Rod Blagojevich (pictured left) clearly discernible among the bleeped obscenities – bleeped at least by the ever-swashbuckling US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in his press conference tour de force – were suggestions of a deal between the alleged criminal and the once-mighty Chicago-based Tribune media group, now filing for bankruptcy.

 

This column once operated under the auspices of that company (it held a controlling interest in the am New York newspaper where THE MEDIA BEAT had its original, dead-trees incarnation) so I have mixed feelings about it – the portfolio of properties from the Chicago Tribune through the Los Angeles Times to Long Island’s Newsday and others, plus two dozen TV stations, was never distinguished by sharp financial management. But it’s definitely in an even worse state now, only a scant year after being bought by the real estate magnate Sam Zell.

 

Simple ex-Tribune operatives like myself could only, at the time, pop our eyes in wonder at the nature of his take-over. It cost Zell himself very little, only about $315 million, but through a convoluted set of loan agreements the company was burdened with $13 billion of debt – which is now of course coming to a head with $512 million of the principle due for repayment in six months’ time, and a jaw-dropping $900 million due in interest payments by the end of next year.

 

Zell has been hoping against hope that his holding on to the Chicago Cubs baseball team, and its storied Wrigley Field stadium (a somewhat anomalous part of the Tribune empire) could eventually provide at least some cash - maybe a billion or so - to ease the pain … if only he could manage to sell it.

 

And this is where the profane and venal Governor comes in. According to the Attorney General’s criminal complaint, Blagojevich was recorded discussing the provision of help for the Tribune Company from Illinois’ State Finance Authority, to the tune of over $100 million, in assistance for financing the stadium sale. But, showing some real class, the Governor is heard threatening to withhold such financial aid - with his wife Patti on the line as well, saying “hold up that [EXPLETIVE] Cubs [EXPLETIVE]” - unless the Chicago Tribune’s editorial team can be made to stop its published criticisms of the Governor.

 

It all sounds positively Third World, even banana republic-ish.

 

  

**CONNECTICUT'S NPR STATION, WHDD (ROBIN HOOD RADIO) AIRS A DISCUSSION BASED ON THIS COLUMN EVERY WEEK - Fridays at 7.35 am, and Saturdays at 4.45 pm.**

 

Listen to THE MEDIA BEAT podcasts by clicking HERE.

  

 

LOOKING BACK, MEANWHILE, ACROSS THE ATLANTIC at Africa, I see a confident contradiction of the continent’s media caricature. Results were declared just yesterday in Ghana’s national elections. This was an African election conducted with transparency, evident fairness – and no appreciable violence to send it off course. How about that!

 

The outcome was close to a dead heat – the governing party’s candidate Nana Akufo-Addo won 49.13% of the vote, and the opposition’s John Atta Mills gained 47.92%. It’s the kind of result that in other countries has led to riots and internecine killings, but here it will simply go to a second round run-off since neither party got over the required 50% threshold – and almost everyone expects it to be peaceful and orderly. (The other, distantly trailing six candidates are of course eliminated from the second round.)

 

The whole of Ghana’s process, in short, from the sitting President John Kufuor quietly stepping down for the best of reasons (because his limit of two terms had been reached) through to the dignified declaration of yesterday’s count, has been widely praised by local and international observers as a perfect example of how elections should be run.

 

But, as too often with good news out of Africa, you’d have to look hard and use a magnifying glass to see any of this in the American press.

   

 

ALL THAT SAID, AND DULY NOTED TO AFRICA’S CREDIT … far to the south, in the region I’ve just been traversing, that nightmare stereotype of an African hellhole, Zimbabwe, has seen the western media suddenly chorus its condemnation more loudly and lividly than ever. The horrific spread of cholera there has prompted both editorialists and leaders of prominence to now attack the catastrophic rule of President Robert Mugabe in rhetorical terms that recall Saddam Hussein’s pillorying in 2003.

 

(Cholera seems to activate commentators. But rather oddly, American newspapers have not taken up the sinister outbreak of anthrax, not just in animals but also among Zimbabwe’s people, which I highlighted in THE MEDIA BEAT last week. Both CBS News and ABC News did pick up on it, but - in a reversal of the usual media pecking-order - no major print outlet did.)

 

The great and good who have called over the past few days for Mugabe’s ouster, by force if necessary, have included Archbishop Desmond Tutu of Cape Town, Britain’s Archbishop of York, John Sentamu (who is originally from Uganda) and Kenya’s Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Then Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel, departing US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown all said it is now decidedly time for Mugabe to go – though these last three were careful not to invoke armed intervention.

 

The fire-brandishing armchair militarists need to get a grip, I fear. National Public Radio’s Renee Montagne kept on – rather boorishly, I thought – pressing ex-President Jimmy Carter (who yields to no one in his detestation of Mugabe, and was recently barred along with his fellow peace-mission “Elders” from entering Zimbabwe) to embrace force of arms as a necessary, if last, resort.

 

I have seen at close quarters some of Mugabe’s military capacity, both when his supporters were impassioned and also brutal freedom fighters, and then after he inherited an army structure from the British-trained white Rhodesian forces, so I can only concur with Carter’s dogged replies, which centered on a stark unavoidable truth:

 

“To have an outside force come in and try to remove Mugabe with military means would mean a massive slaughter of people  …  many tens of thousands of people would be killed.”

 

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