I want XM and Sirius to merge

I really want XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio to merge. 

Why?  I want to hear Dave Niehaus, the best color man in baseball, call Mariners games for me every night.  I want live happily in Boston and know how my Seahawks and Sonics are playing without stalking the crawl on the bottom of ESPN2 each night.  I want to follow NASCAR without having to sit in front of my television for six hours on a Sunday.  Its not just about sports though, I want to hear what Oprah and her friends have to say about eating healthy and decorating my house.  I want to get public radio coverage from around the country without having to sit by my computer and stream it.  I could go on.

All that is available to me, of course, but only if I subscribe to both XM and Sirius.  I have come close to choosing before.  I received Sirius as a Christmas present two years ago and never activated it - mostly because because the football season was already winding down and I didn’t want to wait until next season to start getting full value out of my subscription.  I have gotten all the way to the checkout screen on the XM Satellite Radio website three times in the last few months, in anticipation of another exciting baseball season, only to bail out in hopes that the rumors of a merger will soon come true. 

If XM and Sirius merged, I could buy one good piece of hardware and one subscription and get everything I wanted.  I would pay good money for it.   I would enjoy it thoroughly.  I don’t think I would be alone.

Simply put, I don’t think my desire to hear a variety of different types of programming from one source is unreasonable.  And I think it is well past time when the two satellite radio giants, and the government, got in line with my thinking.

Joe Nocera writes in the New York Times today (Times Select subscription required) about the possible merger between XM Satellite Radio and Sirius Satellite Radio.  While most of his column is about the regulatory aspects of the proposed deal and whether the FCC would support the creation of a single satellite radio giant, he does get to the heart of the matter - and seems to be in agreement with me.

[The two companies] also compete, of course, for content. Most famously, Sirius has Howard Stern, who signed a $500 million five-year deal with the company and moved his shtick to satellite radio at the beginning of last year. (Last week, the company announced that Mr. Stern had earned an $82 million bonus, claiming that he brought in far more revenue than he cost the company.) XM has an Oprah Winfrey station. Sirius has professional football and has pried Nascar away from XM. XM has Major League Baseball — and took the National Hockey League away from Sirius. Both have loads of news and talk and music channels, but XM’s channels tend to be more eclectic than Sirius’s.

On the face of it, this all sounds terrific for consumers. “Choice is always a good thing,” said Ryan Saghir, who blogs about satellite radio at Orbitcast.com — and opposes the idea of a merger. But it is not quite as terrific as it sounds. For one thing, what if you are a fan of both baseball and football? What kind of choice is it to have to decide between them? Or what if you like both Howard Stern and Oprah? (Well, O.K., that’s not a good example.) It is hard to think of another technology that forces subscribers to make that kind of choice.

Joe Nocera wants to listen to baseball and football on the same device, and the same subscription, as well.  His column sounds like a desperate plea from a radio junkie like me to make it happen.  Hey, Sirius and XM… hey, FCC… if you won’t listen to me, will you listen to Joe Nocera?

I can understand why the FCC might be nervous about giving the green light for a merger of this size.  But with appropriate monitoring and regulation - to ensure that a merger betwen XM and Sirius wouldn’t drive prices for consumers out of proporition with the market (something Nocera seems to argue isn’t likely because of the continued influence of free radio) - the potential benefits to consumers far outweighs the risks.  And I can understand why XM and Sirius are both believers in their product so much that they would rather compete to the death than cede control of their operation to their arch rival.  But really, would you all think about the consumer for a moment?

Rather than forcing customers to choose betwen services (a fact that I believe is actually driving down interest in satellite radio, and probably radio in general), the FCC could bless the creation of something that would provide a far better radio product than what is available today.  XM and Sirius could create the ultimate radio programming center, pitting their efforts against folks like Clear Channel who have sucked all the feeling out of radio in their quest to dominate the airwaves everywhere.  The merger would force traditional radio stations to compete with better programming and an alternative business model (advertising instead of subscription — a mix which I think is totally possible if you do it right).  And, best of all, I wouldn’t have to live without access to the programming I want because I find it unreasonable to have to buy/subscribe to two services instead of one.

Please FCC?  Please XM and Sirius?  Do it for Joe Nocera!  Do it for me!

Newsiness?

Stephen Colbert appeared on the O’Reilly Factor.  Bill O’Reilly made an appearance on the Colbert Report.  Both happened last night, a few hours apart, in what was billed as a ‘Smackdown’ — the ultimate television news commentator (O’Reilly) finally meeting face to face with the ultimate fictional news commentator (O’Reilly again, just kidding - Colbert), each a caricature of the other.

I didn’t watch.  I was late getting home from work and missed O’Reilly’s show and chose not to stay up late enough to watch Colbert.  I suppose I could have Tivo’d it, but it didn’t seem all that important to me.  Truth be told, while I will watch both Fox and Comedy Central pretty regularly (I am a media junkie, remember, the more information I can consume the better), I get most of my news from the other news networks and I align myself more with the Jon Stewart/Daily Show gang when it comes to that kind of entertainment. 

Fortunately, the news and entertainment media did the watching for me.  A quick Google News search this morning revealed 158 articles about the two swapping appearances.  In truth, there were far fewer unique articles written, but the Google News search shows up all the AP placements and similar (lots of reprinting of this one).  No matter, the coverage is pretty much what you would expect.  The two shows, it sounds like, didn’t quite live up to the billing (though I am sure that super-fans of either O’Reilly or Colbert would say differently).  The funniest moment, as I read it, came during O’Reilly’s appearance on Colbert’s show, described here by Alessandra Stanley in the New York Times.

On Comedy Central, Mr. Colbert suggested that Mr. O’Reilly was a bit of a brawler. Mr. O’Reilly demurred with a joke. “I’m effete,” he protested. “This is all an act.”

Mr. Colbert leaned forward and said in a deep, dramatic voice, “If you’re an act, then what am I?”

My question is this: Is this news, or is it entertainment?  In my print edition of the New York Times, Ms. Stanley’s TV Watch Column appeared on page A16 - in the National News section along side articles about breaking up gang violence in Los Angeles, a nasty and very public row between justices on the Michigan Supreme Court and a host of other serious issues.  In the online version of the Times, the article appears in the Arts section.  It is not uncommmon for the TV Watch column to appear in the main news section — when Ms. Stanley writes about how the State of the Union or some similar political announcement comes across on the tube it gets lumped in with the other national news coverage.  Is the same as coverage of the State of the Union?  After all, nearly all of the non-New York Times coverage seems to have come from entertainment writers like Ms. Stanley — Jake Coyle, the AP’s entertainment reporter, Peter Johnson, who writes the Media Mix column of USA Today, etc.  I haven’t seen where any of those columns appear in the print versions of their respective papers.There is one article by the staff of Editor & Publisher, a group that covers the news media exclusively, but only one so far. 

Two thoughts:  First, the reason this is getting so much coverage, I think, is because the media wants to shed some of its guilt about how much of an entertainment enterprise it has become and how far away from true journalism it has stayed.  They have decided to place the blame on the over-sized ego of Bill O’Reilly and the over-sized fictional ego of Stephen Colbert.  Think about it — both Colbert and O’Reilly are public figures who report on happenings from around the world on their respective shows, and what they say impacts how the rest of the world views those issues.  That makes them part of the news industry. Still, while many people argue that O’Reilly presents hard news and Colbert presents a fictional version of it, in reality, both O’Reilly and Colbert do the same thing – deliver the news to their audience with an extra dose of their own personality added for effect.  Some would argue that the only reason Colbert’s audience gets the news is because of how he presents it - and the same argument could be made about O’Reilly.  That makes them entertainers.  Entertainers aren’t bad, but can they present the news?  Journalists aren’t evil either, but are they entertaining?

Second, I actually believe that the New York Times’ coverage of this event – and more to the point, where they placed it in the print edition – says a lot about the future of media, in a good way.   Alessandra Stanley is a journalist and did in fact report on the meeting of these two television personalities as a news event.  Just because this particular news event is born out of an entertainment focus doesn’t make it any less news — or at least that is no longer for someone like the New York Times to decide.  Her contribution to the Times is just as important as that of Adam Nagourney, and in many ways equally influential when it comes to how the public reads and responds to it.  The placing of the TV Watch column in the main section of the paper is an acknowledgement by the Times that the lines between different types of news  content are now permanently blurred — the audience doesn’t see a difference, so the paper shouldn’t either.  I only wish the New York Times had put the article in the national news section online as well.

The Future of Newspapers

I have been thinking a lot about the future of newspapers lately. 

The topic is not a new one - the various threats to print newspapers have been debated publicly in media and technology circles for several years now (and probably for quite some time out of the public’s view).  Despite numerous articles, conventions, discussions and predictions, I don’t think that much has been decided or even made more clear in that time.  I certainly have more questions than answers.  I don’t think anybody really knows what is going to happen.

A full discussion of the future of newspapers would take up more than one post, and would need to include people with far greater knowledge and perspective on the subject than I have to offer.  That never stops me from offering my opinion though.  And while I will try to organize my thoughts more clearly in the future, and invite friends and colleagues who work in the newspaper business to weigh in, for now I just I wanted to share a couple of recent articles about this debate that I thought were really interesting.

First, The Week magazine, writes about The Decline of the American Newspaper.  The article is a well organized summary of the current state of newspapers - with a little bit of editorial perspective to round things out.  For someone who is new to this debate, or just needs a refresher, the article is organized around seven key questions about the newspaper industry.  The questions include:

1. Why are newspapers in deep trouble? 
2. Where did the readers go? 
3. What’s the problem? 
4. What is the newspaper doing about all this? 
5. Is that strategy succeeding? 
6. So are newspapers going broke? 
7. Can anything be done?

For me, the future of newspapers has to include some localization of content and expertise.  I am an avid newspaper reader and nothing bothers me more than the AP-ification of the world’s information, when all the articles pull from the same sources and not a single bit of additional perspective is added.  Don’t get me wrong, the AP provides a valuable service and I use it regularly to keep track of events happening around the globe.  But I don’t consider that to be the true value that newspapers can provide.  According to The Week, I’m not alone in thinking this:

Publishers are experimenting with generating several versions of the paper to target various market segments, such as young people. Some may start giving away their papers free, relying entirely on advertising revenue. One school of thought is that newspapers should become “hyper-local,” focusing intensely on community news not available on the Web or TV. But most industry experts believe that the era of print newspapers is nearing its end. Newspapers, says media analyst Ken Marlin, “have to either adapt to the new economics, or die.”

Next up is “A modest proposal for reinventing newspapers for the digital age” by Michael Hirschorn in The Atlantic Monthly.  The article begins with an overview of, EPIC 2014 (now apparently updated to EPIC 2015) an online movie that predicts the future of the media that results from technological innovation (or assimilation as the case may be) and continues through a discussion of the various models that newspapers might try to integrate to become profitable.  Hirschorn settles on this recommendation/thought:

The current Web-publishing model that newspapers are using isn’t likely to become financially viable anytime soon. With few exceptions, the media businesses thriving on the Web either are low-cost blog-like efforts or follow a many-to-many model, in which communities create, share, and consume content. Publishing an article on the Web gets you one click; getting your users to write the article for you gets you a thousand clicks, and costs less to boot. In other words, turning your users into contributors increases their engagement with your site—each click is, after all, also an “ad impression”—while simultaneously generating more content that you in turn can sell to advertisers.

Now we’re talking!

Last on the article list for this post is Michael Wolff’s Billionaires and Broasheets in this month’s Vanity Fair, a look at the recent push by various moguls to buy into the print newspaper business.  Wolff alludes to most of the reasons I can imagine a billionaire would want to buy a newspaper - boredom (as might be the case with Jack Welch who is rumored to be interested in buying the Globe), frustration with the perspectives of the editorial board on an issue that is close to them personally (as is the case with Hank Greenberg, who is rumored to be interested in buying the New York Times), or maybe even ego (as is the case with Ron Burkle and Eli Broad, who are rumored to be interested in the LA Times and who probably think their investment and management savvy might be able to reshape the media biz).  For what its worth, Wolff’s contribution to the debate is summarized at the end of his article as follows:

Of course, the Internet is a bitch. On the other hand, the Internet is an inefficient way for a big man to throw his weight around. A newspaper really is the much more effective bully pulpit.

What’s more, given a host of new papers—The Daily Geffen, The Welch Globe, The Greenberg Times, The Broad Journal, The Burkle Shopper—freed from the deadening template of the people who theoretically know how to run newspapers, maybe the people who know nothing at all about newspapers will stumble onto something that makes them shout and sing (Eli Broad recently offered that it might be a good idea if the L.A. Times had more pictures of donors at charity events … well … maybe).

Anyway, now is not the time to worry about the unknown. The unknown is the only hope. Make the deal.

I don’t know yet what the future of media looks like - I’m working on figuring that out right now.  I don’t believe that the demise of newspapers will come any time soon, and I don’t see that takeover of journalism by faceless and emotionless technology (as is suggested by EPIC) will be realized any sooner.  I know that profitability is the chief concern of any business, and as long as journalism is considered a business (instead of say an art, or a public service) then groups like the New York Times and the Tribune Company will look for ways to monetize their coverage of world events.  My hope is that someone in the middle of this debate will realize that one of, if not the primary value, that newspapers have always offered to the public is editorial perspective and journalistic excellence — a way to help all of us who consume news on a mass scale to understand what is relevant, important, and why.  That seems to have gotten lost in this debate, and in our news industry today as a whole, and needs to return to both.

The New Journal

The new version of the Wall Street Journal is out.  I like it!

The Wall Street Journal has always been my favorite source for business news.  I read it when I was younger and had dreams of being a stock broker or real estate investor (thankfully that was just a fad).  Over the past few years, I have come to appreciate the Journal for its marketing, technology, arts/culture, and sports coverage as well.  I mostly read it online, though I try to grab the Friday journal in hard copy so that I can enjoy the crossword puzzle over the weekend.  

The new version of the journal has a number of improvements that, in my mind, solidify its status as one of the premier publications in the nation.  In addition to more and better coverage of global business news, the Journal expanded coverage of the arts/culture, will be monitoring and summarizing news from blogs, magazines, cable, and broadcast news (showing that good information, regardless of its source, is the most important thing) and has given more space to reader letters and other comments.  Perhaps the best change of all, however, is the size.  I have always distinguished the Wall Street Journal because its size was larger than the other papers.  Now that it is smaller than the other papers, it still distinguishes itself and is easier to read/handle.  Big improvement.

I also want to give a quick pat on the back to the editors and publishers of the Journal for their effort to explain to loyal readers all the changes to the paper.  In the print version of today’s paper — and online in the form of a pdf — is a Readers’ Guide to the new Journal that offers insights into the history and decision making around the changes and explains how the reader experience will evolve over time.  New products are rolled out all the time but few companies make the effort to clearly explain why the changes were made and how users are supposed to utilize the new tools.  Its a necessary and important step to easing the anxiety that many readers surely feel in seeing something new and different all of a sudden (and other companies, particularly media companies, should take note).

Go pick up a copy of today’s new and improved Wall Street Journal and let me know what you think.

Update: AdAge has a column about the new Wall Street Journal as well.  Read what they think works and does not.

SRI In the Rockies: The Big Picture

I spent the weekend in Colorado Springs, CO attending SRI in the Rockies, the annual gathering of the socially responsible investment industry in the United States.  I was there to participate in a panel about online marketing and host a topic table at lunch on the same topic.  I also had an opportunity to attend some of the speeches and sessions — and learned some new things about climate change its impact on disease, micro-finance and, perhaps most interestingly, the future of the internet.

Bob Veres, an author, speaker, and one of the most influential people in the financial services industry (socially responsible or otherwise) gave a talk entitled ‘’The Next Society.’  The focus of his talk was how the world of sustainable investments has changed, and continues to evolve, and how the world is now following the lead of SRI - for the better.  He noted that a decade ago, social screens were seen as a depressant on fund performance while today, social screens are the very best way to evaluate corporate character and avoid surprises in your portfolio. 

Then he launched into a commentary on the changing nature of communications and how it relates to the tough work of changing the world.  Here are my (rough) notes:

- The media industry is in crisis.  Stories are covered and then disappear.  Stories are covered by people who don’t know much about the subject and who have a very short attention span.  The future of news will be an environment where you can access a lot more information, a lot better information, from people who know a lot more than reporters.  And it will make everything more focused, more meaningful, and more actionable.

- The web has created a hostile world for advertising.  As we move towards the web as a content delivery vehicle, corporate america will not be able to artificially create demand for their products and services.  It is harder and harder for advertisers to gain interest and traction.  That is why TV advertising is suffering and that is why the future of communications will be information/content-centric, and not marketer driven.

- We are experiencing the death of the consumer economic system.  Why?  It doesn’t relate to the issues that people actually care about most.  That has also given rise to the concept of “Life Planning.”  People are finding they don’t want more stuff.  They want more fulfillment from their lives.  How do they know? 

Ask yourself, if you had one day left to live, what would be your biggest regret?  Write down 30 goals you want to achieve this year (the first ten will be easy, the second ten more difficult, the third ten will make you did deep).  If you had all the money in the world, what would you want to do?   

- How can we change the world?  He offered two directives:

1) Operate in your zone of personal genius.  Imagine a circle, with a circle inside that, and a circle in side that.  At the center of that innermost circle is a  blue dot that represents your greatest energy, focus, and passion.  That is where we must all operate - get rid of the distractions and just work within our blue dot.

2) Hire a coach to help you get there.  They will help you put aside all of the work you do for others and help you focus on just what you need.  The coach will nag you because they will present your own goals back to you in such a compelling way that you will do for them what you can’t seem to find a way to do for yourself.

- The way we work is changing.  You are going to see most of the world’s work being done by ad hoc teams who are experts in their field and who are operating within their blue dot.  You will see corporations (who right now have office buildings filled with generalists and inefficient information flow based in hierarchy not expertise) “melt like sugar cubes in the rain.” The people who own the assets will control them - you won’t need marketers, etc.

- The internet will become the superconductor of human and financial capital.
The speech made me think.  Not sure quite yet what it all means, but rarely does a conference speech make me think like this one did, so that must mean something.

Shut Up & Run the Ads

I wrote a post yesterday discussing the marketing efforts behind Shut Up & Sing, the new documentary about the Dixie Chicks and their criticism of President Bush.  You didn’t see it?  Nobody did.  My computer froze up and I lost the text before I was able to put it up online.  Too bad — when I wrote it yesterday morning, this was a small story and my analysis looked really solid.  Now its a big story and I am late to the conversation.  Alas.

So what are people talking about?

The documentary tracks the fallout that resulted after lead singer, Natalie Maines, said she was “ashamed” that President Bush was from Texas, the Chicks’ home state.  The comment prompted a boycott of the Chicks’ music by conservatives and opened up a discussion about freedom of speech among scholars and those in the music industry.  Time passed, things died down.  But now, the documentary has brought the controversy back to the fore — and with a new twist.

A handful of media venues have refused to run advertising promoting the movie.  The LA Times covered it yesterday.  There was a story on NPR’s Weekend Edition this morning.  And the Washington Post summed it up this way:

It all started earlier this week when Weinstein submitted ads for its new Barbara Kopple documentary “Shut Up & Sing” to the broadcast networks for review by their standards and practices departments.

NBC said it “cannot accept these spots as they are disparaging to President Bush.”

CW said it “does not have appropriate programming in which to schedule this spot.”

Weinstein said: “Eureka!”

And on Thursday evening, it sent out a news release headlined:

“In an Ironic Twist of Events, NBC and the CW Television Networks Refuse to Air Ads for Documentary Focusing on Freedom of Speech.”

“It’s a sad commentary about the level of fear in our society that a movie about a group of courageous entertainers who were blacklisted for exercising their right of free speech is now itself being blacklisted by corporate America,” bemoaned Weinstein Co. co-chairman Harvey Weinstein.

“The idea that anyone should be penalized for criticizing the president is sad and profoundly un-American,” he added.

As I see it, this hubub was not only anticipated by Harvey Weinstein and his team, it was a key part of their promotional strategy.  How else would you get coverage for a small-budget documentary film in today’s big-budget Hollywood movie promotion craziness?  We have a very tense election cycle coming to an end just two weeks from now, and a national media that is feasting on any criticism of the war, or the President, they can find.  All you had to do was light the fire. 

Of course, now the networks are in a no-win situation now — if they don’t run the ads, the press continues to cover the story (helping the movie gain traction, and the stations look selectively moral), and if they do run the ads, they look like they caved.  I think they should run the ads - networks would benefit greatly by becoming a part of the political dialogue and letting the population decide on its own.  Be fair, show ads promoting and criticizing the movie if that opportunity exists, but don’t limit one perspective from being heard because you are afraid of your audience.

Give credit to Weinstein and Co. for recognizing the opportunity to use the news cycle to promote their movie.  It is not a new strategy — MoveOn got into a similar fight with CBS around the Super Bowl a couple of years ago, and I have had clients whose online ads that venues have refused to run because of an arbitrary content standard.  In both cases press coverage resulted and the message ultimately got to the target audience. I don’t think it will work for any movie or event, but its a strategy that more organizations should understand and pursue.

Mapping the Key Races

I am totally obsessed with maps.  I can’t navigate my way out of a paper bag without significant help from my wife, and I am one of the few people on this earth who can get significantly lost even when being aided by one of the satellite GPS systems that now come standard in most rental cars.  But, that aside, I am obsessed with maps.

What’s the coolest mapping application I have seen in a while?  It is the MSNBC Key Races Map.

The screen shot doesn’t do it justice.  It is an online map of the country that features interactive thumbtacks.  Each thumbtack represents one of the top ten races in each of the key categories - House, Senate, or Governor - as ranked by Chuck Todd at the Hotline (thanks to that recent partnership between National Journal and MSNBC).  The ranking puts them in order of likeliest to change hands. 

When you mouse over a thumbtack, a bio box about a particular target race pops up — including Charlie Cook and Chuck Todd’s ratings, access to full candidate profiles and state demographic overviews, and more.  You can click on the thumbtacks to set your map up with just House, Senate, or Gubernatorial races — or select all three (the map gets pretty full).  And, you can zoom in or out on a particular state, district or region (and when you zoom in, the map features the detailed topography of the areas, roads and rivers, you name it).

I have two big complaints when it comes to media coverage of elections online.  The first is that the access to good, relevant information is always limited — few organizations do the research and make the data available to let people educate themselves about the process.  The second is that when they do make the information available, it is often hard to understand and interact with.  MSNBC has addressed both of my concerns with this mapping application.  Bravo!

Don’t forget to vote.

Full disclosure: I am occasional contributor to The Hotline about the use of the internet in politics, though I had nothing to do with this project. 

Jobster Gets Another Round of Funding

Congratulations to my friend, Jason Goldberg, on securing $18 million in additional funding for his company, Jobster. Jason reports in today’s papers that Jobster should be profitable within a year.  [More coverage in the Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer].

Jobster is a great compnay — it operates a job search engine and social networking site that is free to consumers. And it sells online recruiting tools to corporations who are trying to find talented employees.  The new round of funding will only help it get even better. 

On the social networking front, Jason has found a way to use the newest tools to enhance the job placement/matching experience — but the enhancements are not based on the technology as much as the content.  The Seattle Times explains:

Jason Goldberg, Jobster’s founder and chief executive, said it’s much more than a static page of search results, with job seekers getting a social-networking experience of sorts. In addition to openings, workers will be able to enter their thoughts about their employers on pages with their profile.

“We coupled results with user-generated content to give a feeling of what it’s like to work there. It’s a more human experience,” Goldberg said.

Questions range from the type of music you like to what you can walk to from your office or see from your desk. For now the comments are limited to specific topics.

I’m a big believer that the value of the conversation is what will define success in social networking.  Jason and Jobster are on the right track and all companies operating in and around the social networking space should recognize the balance between functionality and content that Jobster is working towards.  Good luck Jason.

Newspaper Choices

At the closing lunch of the G8 conference this week in Russia, a conversation between President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair was picked up by microphones, apparently left on without anyone’s knowledge after the completion of some remarks before the meal.  The President and Tony Blair were recorded having a conversation during which the President offered his unscripted thoughts on the possible resolutions to the crisis in the Middle East.  But what exactly did he say?

Interestingly (at least to me), the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal all covered his remarks differently.  The Washington Post wrote:

A microphone picked up an unaware President Bush saying on Monday Syria should press Hizbollah to “stop doing this shit” as they discussed the upsurge in violence in the Middle East.

The Wall Street Journal wrote:

President Bush, in remarks unintentionally picked up by a nearby microphone during a lunch meeting Monday with other Group of Eight leaders, named Mr. Assad as a central factor in any ceasefire. He told British Prime Minister Tony Blair that the most important development would be to “get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s- and then it’s over.” Mr. Bush also told Mr. Blair he wanted to tell United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan “to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen.”

And the New York Times wrote:

Using a vulgarity, Mr. Bush said at one point that Syria should get Hezbollah to stop its attacks on Israel, describing American policy in the kind of unfettered language that he acknowledged only weeks ago sometimes gets him in trouble when he uses it publicly.

Why was the Washington Post the only paper of the three to quote the President directly?  More specifically, was there something truly objectionable that the Wall Street Journal and New York Times found in our fearless leader’s use of the word ’shit’ that caused them to omit the direct quote? It is clear in the Wall Street Journal what he said, though in the New York Times what the President said is left totally to our imagination.

It should be no surprise that the President of the United States uses profanity.  He’s a cowboy.  He shoots from the hip.  He’s an American.  Whatever, he’s human — we use foul language, its not a big deal.  The New York Times should have recognized that and printed the President’s quote. The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, should have waived its filters and let the full text appear. 

Good job, Washington Post.

HotSoup

Have you heard about HotSoup, the new online community for Opinion Drivers?  If not, log on and check it out.

The community was founded by a group of political strategists – Democrats Michael Feldman (who I worked with at the White House and during the 2000 campaign), Joe Lockhart, Carter Eskew and Chip Smith (all of whom I have worked with at various times in my political and other lives); Republicans Matthew Dowd and Mark McKinnon (some of President Bush’s top brains); renowned AP political reporter Ron Fournier; and internet gurus Allie Savarino, Bart Barden and John de Tar — to basically change the way those in government, politics, business and entertainment talk about issues, engage eachother, and most importantly help to guide, influence, support, and inspire those who make decisions and those who want to impact them.

Good luck gang, and let me know what I can do to help.