Last week, the White House released the president's birth certificate (again). The media lemmings, who truly are obsessed with carnival barkers and circus clowns, eagerly lapped it up. But the White House's timing was quite convenient, designed to distract people from another Wikileaks' release, this time on the contrhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifoversial kidnapee camp at Guantanamo Bay.
The UK Guardian reported on some of the revelations.
Among the discoveries:
-The US 'relied heavily' on information obtained via torture
-A large number of detainees previously labeled 'high risk' have been released from the camp
-Links to the Pakistani intelligence service were treated the same as links to organizations like al-Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah.
The paper also described a situation where many of the detainees were merely low-level criminals or completely innocent of any crime at all.
One man was transferred to the facility "because he was a mullah, who led prayers at Manu mosque in Kandahar province, Afghanistan … which placed him in a position to have special knowledge of the Taliban". US authorities eventually released him after more than a year's captivity, deciding he had no intelligence value.
Another prisoner was shipped to the base "because of his general knowledge of activities in the areas of Khowst and Kabul based as a result of his frequent travels through the region as a taxi driver".
The files also reveal that an al-Jazeera journalist was held at Guantánamo for six years, partly in order to be interrogated about the Arabic news network.
The Pentagon's reaction was to brush aside the sheer obscenity of Gitmo and berate Wikileaks for revealing the truth of that obscenity.
Monday, May 02, 2011
Sunday, May 01, 2011
Nearer My God to Thee: An update on the corporate crisis at Lee Enterprises (guest essay)
Note: this piece is an update to an earlier essay on Post-Star parent company Lee Enterprises.
by Mark Wilson
As it braces for the latest readership numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations to be published next week, Lee Enterprises—parent company of the Post-Star—is suddenly rethinking its plan to restructure all of its corporate debt. On April 11, Lee’s board of directors announced plans to issue junk bonds in an attempt to retire about $1 billion in bank loans and notes scheduled to come due a year from now. The bond issue would effectively extend the repayment deadline another five years while increasing the ultimate sum owed (to bond holders).
On Monday this week the company announced that it would give away shares of Lee stock (valued at just under $2 per share) to anyone willing to assume a fraction of their debt through the purchase of the bonds. The press release also took pains to point out that the bonds were to be backed by Lee’s property and assets.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Lee, citing a weak demand for its bonds, was preparing to issue a smaller number of bonds and would seek to refinance the remainder of the debt. It would be the second refinancing of its debt obligations in two years.
Reaction to the company’s strategy and the resulting confusion—at least as gaged by the price of Lee stock—has not been good. From its initial price spike ($3.47) immediately following the April 11 announcement, the common stock price has dropped unrelentingly to a new 21-month low of $1.57 per share. An investor web site has compared the company to a sinking ship.
Meanwhile, over at poststar.com, Managing Editor Ken Tingley has continued the conversation (here and here) on the future of news gathering in Glens Falls, seemingly oblivious to the crippling debt that may well impair the corporate parent from investing in his newspaper’s future.
by Mark Wilson
As it braces for the latest readership numbers from the Audit Bureau of Circulations to be published next week, Lee Enterprises—parent company of the Post-Star—is suddenly rethinking its plan to restructure all of its corporate debt. On April 11, Lee’s board of directors announced plans to issue junk bonds in an attempt to retire about $1 billion in bank loans and notes scheduled to come due a year from now. The bond issue would effectively extend the repayment deadline another five years while increasing the ultimate sum owed (to bond holders).
On Monday this week the company announced that it would give away shares of Lee stock (valued at just under $2 per share) to anyone willing to assume a fraction of their debt through the purchase of the bonds. The press release also took pains to point out that the bonds were to be backed by Lee’s property and assets.
The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Lee, citing a weak demand for its bonds, was preparing to issue a smaller number of bonds and would seek to refinance the remainder of the debt. It would be the second refinancing of its debt obligations in two years.
Reaction to the company’s strategy and the resulting confusion—at least as gaged by the price of Lee stock—has not been good. From its initial price spike ($3.47) immediately following the April 11 announcement, the common stock price has dropped unrelentingly to a new 21-month low of $1.57 per share. An investor web site has compared the company to a sinking ship.
Meanwhile, over at poststar.com, Managing Editor Ken Tingley has continued the conversation (here and here) on the future of news gathering in Glens Falls, seemingly oblivious to the crippling debt that may well impair the corporate parent from investing in his newspaper’s future.
Wednesday, April 20, 2011
The deceit of a warmonger
Since liberals rabidly denounced Bush's false claims about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, you'd think they'd at least notice Obama's false claims that our intervention in Libya is only to provide humanitarian relief, not to take sides in a civil war. But I guess you get a free pass to warmonger if you have a (D) after your name or have a Nobel Peace Prize on your resume.
Too bad liberals are more likely to get their panties in a twist about the inane rantings of trivial people like Donald Trump or Sarah Palin than anything that actually matters. And they are mystified why the regressive conservative agenda is advancing so fast.
Too bad liberals are more likely to get their panties in a twist about the inane rantings of trivial people like Donald Trump or Sarah Palin than anything that actually matters. And they are mystified why the regressive conservative agenda is advancing so fast.
Monday, April 18, 2011
You read it here first!
This essay is part of an occasional feature on this blog that presents compelling stories from elsewhere in the world, particularly Africa, that are little reported in the American media. It's part of my campaign to get people to realize there is a lot going on in the world outside the US, IsraelStine and the Trumped Up Enemy of the Month. A list of all pieces in this series can be found found here..
A few days ago, I read a very interesting piece on al-Jazeera’s website about hate media in Ivory Coast.
It reminded me a lot of a piece I published over six years ago on the exact same topic.
A few days ago, I read a very interesting piece on al-Jazeera’s website about hate media in Ivory Coast.
It reminded me a lot of a piece I published over six years ago on the exact same topic.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Taylor Luczak
Mimicking the weekly Chronicle’s piece of several days prior, The Post-Star has a nice article on Taylor Luczak, a recent Glens Falls alumnus and current Mississippi State student. Luczak may be less nationally famous than his old high school basketball teammate but he’s equally classy and perhaps even more accomplished. His resumé is quite impressive by the standard of any college student. But when you consider that he’s done all this while training and traveling around the country and spending a whole lot of time as a Division I basketball player, his academic achievements are absolutely remarkable.
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Health insurance providers?
I was listening with interest to an NPR interview with Rep. Paul Ryan, who has become a media darling for his role as de facto spokesman for the Congressional Republicans on budget issues. In passing, he made a gross misrepresentation of reality.
A brief memo to Ryan: health insurance companies are NOT "providers" of health care services. They are money changers. They do not cure an ailment. They do not heal a wound. They are not providers of health care.
A brief memo to Ryan: health insurance companies are NOT "providers" of health care services. They are money changers. They do not cure an ailment. They do not heal a wound. They are not providers of health care.
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Lee's Last Stand (guest essay)
by Mark Wilson
For those who were perplexed last April when The Post-Star doubled newsstand prices from 50¢ to a dollar, the other shoe is now dropping. Lee Enterprise, Inc., owner of the newspaper since the acquisition of Howard Communications in 2002, has announced its intention to float $1 billion worth of corporate bonds. The float is a bid to stave off bankruptcy and retire over $630,000,000 in debt coming due between now and June 2012. The bond issue would, in essence, extend the deadline to 2017 and increase the bottom line of a burden taken on in the 2005 purchase of Pulitzer, Inc. owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among other properties.
Back in 2005 publishing empire builders who weren't paying close enough attention to their computers or their business pages, believed that print profits would continue to grow, spurred on by hot housing and job markets and the classified revenues that followed. It was before the housing and stock market crashes, and before it became abundantly clear that online behemoths like Google and CraigsList and Monster.com and eBay had made off with the newspaper's classified section, with no intention of giving it back.
Lee Enterprise's stock chart and a handful of Lee press releases illustrate the dire nature of its plight. From an all-time high of $49.83/share in June 2004 (one year before buying the Pulitzer), the price had slipped to below $42 on the date the sale went through. By the time Bear Stearns collapsed in March 2008, Lee's price was in steady free fall having lost over 77% of its value. The stock spent most of the first half of 2009 trading below one dollar, nearly triggering the NYSE's delisting mechanism (2 consecutive quarters trading below a buck). A temporary goose of stock purchases lifted the stock price through the month of May, prevented delisting. The price bottomed out on Feb 18 at 24¢, less than one half of one percent of its highest value five years earlier. Since then the stock has managed to pull itself off the mat, but only so far. Over the past twelve months of trading the price hasn't surpassed $4.52, roughly one tenth of its 2004 high.
The stock price has amplified a similar, if less dramatic, decline in readership among Lee's newspapers. Circulation numbers for The Post-Star epitomize the rest of the once-robust empire. Figures available through Lee's web site, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, Wikipedia's archives and PostStar.com show a steady downward trend over recent years. (Past circulation numbers are not easy to come by and unaudited figures tend to be unreliably lofty, so please read skeptically.)
In July 2006 Lonnie Spath, at the time a staff illustrator and website monitor, created a Wikipedia entry for the Post-Star stating the circulation to be "approximately 35,000." Though that claim remains on the Post-Star Wiki page, other editors have downgraded the figure three times since then over at the Glens Falls Wiki page. On April 16, 2007, citing Lee's own figures (probably derived from an Audit Bureau report from six months earlier), Wikipedia editors pegged circulation at 33,000 daily/ 36,000 Sunday. They dropped the numbers again on May 21, 2007 to 31,500 daily/ 34,500 Sunday, based on a story from the Albany Times-Union (archive link now dead) which may or may not have repeated the most recent (April 2007) Audit Bureau figures. After Editorial Page Editor Mark Mahoney won the Pulitzer Prize in April 2009, stories run by multiple publications reported circulation of "about 30,000." More extensive stories at that time (namely the Columbia Journalism Review and Ithaca College’s web site) claimed 34,000. In October of last year, six months after the newsstand price hike, the Audit Bureau reported the Post-Star's circulation as 26,798 daily (M-F) and 30,257 Sundays —- figures that lacked the round softness of the previous weather balloons.
Wikipedia’s Glens Falls page and Lee Enterprise’s website have been updated to show the new numbers. PostStar.com on their "About Us" page still claims a higher circulation (29,000), while their advertising sales page puts the weekday print circulation higher still (at 30,500 with 32,000 Sunday).
In the broadest possible terms what the Post-Star figures illustrate is a general decline in print circulation on the order of 23% since about the time Lee's stock price started sliding.
Responding to the dismal prospects underscored by the stock price and circulation figures, the Lee Board of Directors and CEO Mary Junck, refinanced their Pulitzer notes deferring most of the payback to a Hindenburg-sized balloon payment upon maturity. When it became clear that that wouldn’t work they started jettisoning personnel, centralizing service staff, and selling off real estate. If these one-shot fixes constituted desperation tactics on Lee's part (the bloodshed has shown up as modest black ink on Lee's Quarterly reports over the past two years), the float of high-yielding Junck bonds is the company's last ditch, burn-the-house-down-to-stay-warm effort. After the news broke Monday morning, Lee stock price jumped 15.6% to from $2.97 to $3.435 before settling back to $2.87 at the end of trading Wednesday. Message from investors: you still won't be able to repay.
Meanwhile, over at PostStar.com, Managing Editor Ken Tingley is sunnily proclaiming the growth of online readership (Banner and display ad sales should be picking up any day now. Really.). This "whistling past the graveyard" of course must be done to keep up morale. But the full picture shows just how tough it is for an over-staffed and hardware-heavy medium in decline to keep ahead of the news market and delivery technology (Flash: Post-Star now available on Kindle!).
Further reading:
-Wall St. Journal
-LeeWatch
For those who were perplexed last April when The Post-Star doubled newsstand prices from 50¢ to a dollar, the other shoe is now dropping. Lee Enterprise, Inc., owner of the newspaper since the acquisition of Howard Communications in 2002, has announced its intention to float $1 billion worth of corporate bonds. The float is a bid to stave off bankruptcy and retire over $630,000,000 in debt coming due between now and June 2012. The bond issue would, in essence, extend the deadline to 2017 and increase the bottom line of a burden taken on in the 2005 purchase of Pulitzer, Inc. owner of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, among other properties.
Back in 2005 publishing empire builders who weren't paying close enough attention to their computers or their business pages, believed that print profits would continue to grow, spurred on by hot housing and job markets and the classified revenues that followed. It was before the housing and stock market crashes, and before it became abundantly clear that online behemoths like Google and CraigsList and Monster.com and eBay had made off with the newspaper's classified section, with no intention of giving it back.
Lee Enterprise's stock chart and a handful of Lee press releases illustrate the dire nature of its plight. From an all-time high of $49.83/share in June 2004 (one year before buying the Pulitzer), the price had slipped to below $42 on the date the sale went through. By the time Bear Stearns collapsed in March 2008, Lee's price was in steady free fall having lost over 77% of its value. The stock spent most of the first half of 2009 trading below one dollar, nearly triggering the NYSE's delisting mechanism (2 consecutive quarters trading below a buck). A temporary goose of stock purchases lifted the stock price through the month of May, prevented delisting. The price bottomed out on Feb 18 at 24¢, less than one half of one percent of its highest value five years earlier. Since then the stock has managed to pull itself off the mat, but only so far. Over the past twelve months of trading the price hasn't surpassed $4.52, roughly one tenth of its 2004 high.
The stock price has amplified a similar, if less dramatic, decline in readership among Lee's newspapers. Circulation numbers for The Post-Star epitomize the rest of the once-robust empire. Figures available through Lee's web site, the Audit Bureau of Circulations, Wikipedia's archives and PostStar.com show a steady downward trend over recent years. (Past circulation numbers are not easy to come by and unaudited figures tend to be unreliably lofty, so please read skeptically.)
In July 2006 Lonnie Spath, at the time a staff illustrator and website monitor, created a Wikipedia entry for the Post-Star stating the circulation to be "approximately 35,000." Though that claim remains on the Post-Star Wiki page, other editors have downgraded the figure three times since then over at the Glens Falls Wiki page. On April 16, 2007, citing Lee's own figures (probably derived from an Audit Bureau report from six months earlier), Wikipedia editors pegged circulation at 33,000 daily/ 36,000 Sunday. They dropped the numbers again on May 21, 2007 to 31,500 daily/ 34,500 Sunday, based on a story from the Albany Times-Union (archive link now dead) which may or may not have repeated the most recent (April 2007) Audit Bureau figures. After Editorial Page Editor Mark Mahoney won the Pulitzer Prize in April 2009, stories run by multiple publications reported circulation of "about 30,000." More extensive stories at that time (namely the Columbia Journalism Review and Ithaca College’s web site) claimed 34,000. In October of last year, six months after the newsstand price hike, the Audit Bureau reported the Post-Star's circulation as 26,798 daily (M-F) and 30,257 Sundays —- figures that lacked the round softness of the previous weather balloons.
Wikipedia’s Glens Falls page and Lee Enterprise’s website have been updated to show the new numbers. PostStar.com on their "About Us" page still claims a higher circulation (29,000), while their advertising sales page puts the weekday print circulation higher still (at 30,500 with 32,000 Sunday).
In the broadest possible terms what the Post-Star figures illustrate is a general decline in print circulation on the order of 23% since about the time Lee's stock price started sliding.
Responding to the dismal prospects underscored by the stock price and circulation figures, the Lee Board of Directors and CEO Mary Junck, refinanced their Pulitzer notes deferring most of the payback to a Hindenburg-sized balloon payment upon maturity. When it became clear that that wouldn’t work they started jettisoning personnel, centralizing service staff, and selling off real estate. If these one-shot fixes constituted desperation tactics on Lee's part (the bloodshed has shown up as modest black ink on Lee's Quarterly reports over the past two years), the float of high-yielding Junck bonds is the company's last ditch, burn-the-house-down-to-stay-warm effort. After the news broke Monday morning, Lee stock price jumped 15.6% to from $2.97 to $3.435 before settling back to $2.87 at the end of trading Wednesday. Message from investors: you still won't be able to repay.
Meanwhile, over at PostStar.com, Managing Editor Ken Tingley is sunnily proclaiming the growth of online readership (Banner and display ad sales should be picking up any day now. Really.). This "whistling past the graveyard" of course must be done to keep up morale. But the full picture shows just how tough it is for an over-staffed and hardware-heavy medium in decline to keep ahead of the news market and delivery technology (Flash: Post-Star now available on Kindle!).
Further reading:
-Wall St. Journal
-LeeWatch
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Nuanced reaction to school cuts in NNY
The vehemently anti-union Post-Star would have you believe that the only people with concerns about slashing school spendings are the greedy, overpaid teachers. Managing editor Ken Tingley, in his typically pompous style, orders people to STFU about cuts and lectures parents to tell their kids to take one for the team. (Speaking of Tingley: here’s a way to make his head explode. Tell him you’ve figured out a way to cut the school tax levy by 0.04% but that it involves cutting his beloved baseball)
But other regional media, without such an overt agenda, are painting a more nuanced portrait.
North Country Public Radio has a story on the reaction of students to heavy budget cuts in the Beaver River district in Lewis County. Imagine that: doing a story about education cuts in which the students' point of view is mentioned!
The Plattsburgh Press-Republican had a story about the opposition of ordinary residents in Beekmantown, Clinton County, to the district's plan to slash jobs and programs.
The NCPR story is particularly poignant since the more common complaints against kids today is that they DON'T care about school or education.
But other regional media, without such an overt agenda, are painting a more nuanced portrait.
North Country Public Radio has a story on the reaction of students to heavy budget cuts in the Beaver River district in Lewis County. Imagine that: doing a story about education cuts in which the students' point of view is mentioned!
The Plattsburgh Press-Republican had a story about the opposition of ordinary residents in Beekmantown, Clinton County, to the district's plan to slash jobs and programs.
The NCPR story is particularly poignant since the more common complaints against kids today is that they DON'T care about school or education.
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