The Death of Newspapers

It was nice to see a newspaper not die last week. Platinum Equity, a private equity firm that specializes in turning around troubled businesses, announced that it had bought the failing, 130-year-old San Diego Union-Tribune, thereby saving the paper, at least for now, from the scrap heap.

Let's hope the Union-Tribune survives. In 2006, the California paper won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on a bribery scandal that landed former Republican Congressman Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham in federal prison. Cunningham had resigned from the House of Representatives the year before after pleading guilty to accepting $2.4 in bribes.

Newspaper deaths, and their consequences, are not limited to the United States. In the Guardian over the weekend, Ian Jack wrote a good piece on the sad fate of newspapers and what their passing means for democracy. 

Another Bush Legacy

A question that has come up at, among other places, my gym in London: why are there so many weeks between Daylight Saving Time in the U.S. and DST elsewhere? And wasn't the gap narrower before? The answer to the first question is, as it is in the case of so many of life's great riddles, George W. Bush. The answer to the second question is yes.

In 2005 the U.S. Congress passed an energy bill that included a monthlong extension of Daylight Saving Time. Controversial because the change's energy-saving potential was questioned by some experts, the law became effective in 2007. Instead of starting on the first Sunday in April, Daylight Saving Time begins in America on the second Sunday in March. DST ends on the first Sunday in November, one week later than it used to. The EU version of Daylight Saving Time -- European Summer Time -- runs from the last Sunday in March through the last Sunday in October.

Daylight Saving Time has been used in the U.S. and in many European countries since World War I. At that time, in an effort to conserve fuel needed to produce electric power, Germany and Austria began saving daylight at 11:00 p.m. on April 30, 1916, advancing the hands of the clock one hour until the following October. Other countries immediately adopted the change: Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey, and Tasmania. In Canada, Nova Scotia and Manitoba adopted it as well, with Britain following suit three weeks later, on May 21, 1916. In 1917, Australia and Newfoundland began saving daylight. The plan was not formally adopted in the U.S. until 1918.

So now you know.

Here We Go Again?

A prime minister and his chancellor of the Exchequer are at odds. Sound familiar? I’ll come back to that.

Tony Blair’s ten years in office were marked by a running feud with Gordon Brown. Never calm, their relationship was described as everything from a bad marriage to a blood feud. It was such a never-ending soap opera that it became known by an acronym: the TBGB’s. One question in particular poisoned their relationship: when would Blair make good on his promise to turn power over to Brown, as Brown had given way for Blair when the party leadership opened up in 1994? Never was the feud hotter than in 2006, when Brown let run a rift in the Labour party that eventually forced Blair to announce that he would leave office the following year. At the time the left-wing Labour M.P John McDonnell said, “Most of us have looked on aghast. It’s almost been like an episode of ‘The Sopranos’.”

In recent weeks, there’s been a growing buzz in London that Brown and his chancellor, Alistair Darling, aren’t seeing eye to eye. First, Darling subtly but persistently seemed to be encouraging his boss to bow to public pressure and apologize for not foreseeing the financial crisis when it was brewing years ago. “The key thing that went wrong was that a culture was allowed to develop over the last 15 years or so where the relationship between what people did and what they got went way out of alignment, especially at the top end,” Darling said at one point. “If there is a fault, it is our collective responsibility. All of us have to have the humility to accept that over the last few years, things got out of alignment.”

Finally today an apology of sorts by Brown appears in the Guardian: “I take full responsibility for all my actions, but I think we’re dealing with a bigger problem that is global in nature, as well as national. Perhaps 10 years ago after the Asian crisis when other countries thought these problems would go away, we should have been tougher . . . keeping and forcing these issues on to the agenda like we did on debt relief and other issues of international policy.”

Feud over? Not yet. Now Brown and Darling are said to be at odds over the size of the second stage of Britain’s stimulus package. Darling, perhaps like any good treasurer clutching the national purse strings, wants a smaller one than does Brown. Stay tuned.

 

G20: No Surprises Here

Britain's chancellor of the Exchequer, Alistair Darling, said today that it is important to be "realistic" about what can and cannot be achieved at the April 2 G20 London Summit. He was following Washington's lead; the Obama administration has been lowering expectations that leaders of the world's largest economies would be able to agree on a "global New Deal" to fight the economic crisis.

In an interview with the BBC, the chancellor said the London meeting would not produce the final word on the world's response to recession, describing it instead as "part of a process." "I think we have to be realistic about what we can do together," Darling said.

Please note my story from yesterday in The Daily Beast.

Northern Ireland: More Good News Than Bad

In recent days, sectarian violence returned to Northern Ireland. Republican splinter groups killed two soldiers and a policeman in separate attacks. Does this mean the place will sink back into chaos? I don't think so. I'm reminded of what I wrote in Newsweek in August 2001:

Two Northern Irelands were in the news last week. Dominating the front pages: the battered peace process, forever caught in the punch-up between good news and bad. Back on the business pages, a different story unfolded. A luxury Ramada hotel opened its doors in Belfast--part of a sustained construction boom that belies the city's skewed image as a war zone alight with burning police Land Rovers. Real-estate prices continued to climb, well ahead of inflation; retail rents were rising faster in Belfast than anywhere else in Britain except London. A Confederation of British Industry survey found that Northern Ireland was one of only two places in the United Kingdom that would not lose jobs this year.

Pay attention to those business stories. For all the hand-wringing about disarmament and the fate of their elected Assembly, which was temporarily suspended last weekend, the people of Northern Ireland have mostly moved beyond the Troubles that consumed them for nearly three decades. There is enough tension and hatred to bring back the worst of times if enough things go wrong. Yet even Ulster's pessimists don't expect that to happen. The institutions born of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, like the Assembly, are still young and fragile. The popular desire for peace is not....

Life behind the headlines in Northern Ireland shows a society struggling for normality--and coming reasonably close. Educational standards are higher in Ulster than in the rest of the United Kingdom. Hospital waiting lists are shorter. For its size (1.7 million people), the province enjoys a rich cultural life, from searing political theater to regular concert stops by U2, Sting and Belfast's own Van Morrison. Devolved government, though messy, is universally popular. Gone are the days when Ulster was run by proconsul-like British ministers. Ever since the four-party power-sharing Northern Ireland government was finally formed in November 1999, a dozen ministers have had control of their own budgets, which were purposefully fattened by London to keep everybody happy. Guns and bombs once towered over dialogue and politics in Northern Ireland. They are still a huge factor, but in a crucially different way. IRA guns strengthen the hand of Sinn Fein, its political arm--but only as long as they are not used. And they have not been since the IRA announced a ceasefire four years ago. The 107 deaths since 1997 officially linked to the "security situation" were at the hands of dissident paramilitaries who have no links to mainstream political parties. Many were, in fact, not "political" at all; they were committed by drug traffickers or other organized criminals camouflaging their activities in bogus political rationales.

As the peace process rattles through yet another crisis, it is tempting to sort through the machinations looking for an obstructionist Arafat or an intransigent Sharon to pin the blame on. But Northern Ireland is sui generis, and that uniqueness gives rise to hope. Unlike the Middle East or Macedonia or other hot spots, here no outside powers or interests stand to gain from stirring things up. It's not just the people and politicians of Northern Ireland who have a deeply vested interest in something like peace. Backed by the United States and united on this matter as never before, the British and Irish governments have for a decade worked together to keep the peace process on track. This powerful combination of concerted interests has prevented Northern Ireland from collapsing into chaos before--and probably will do so again.

Oliver Kamm on New Labour and the Banks

In a review in The First Post of Nick Cohen's new book, "Waiting for the Etonians," Oliver Kamm has a typically discerning view of the Labour Party's relationship with Britain's massive financial sector:

The great weakness of New Labour in economics was not its appreciation of the liberating power of globalisation. It was instead a failure to recognise that commerce is an interest group like any other. That misconception caused New Labour to be unaccountably docile before the City.

The task of government is to insulate the public space from sectional interests, and to create a framework of rules in which rights are protected and personal liberties maintained. It is a peculiarly destructive mistake to suppose that the task of government is to promote British commerce. That way lies the diversion of public resources to partial causes. And it is a mistake that goes some way to explaining why the global financial crisis has been peculiarly damaging to the UK.

The British economy is skewed to the financial services sector. There is nothing inherently wrong with this: it is snobbery to suppose that manufacturing matters whereas services do not. But the unspoken assumption that it is the responsibility of government to promote the interests of a particular commercial sector has had a terrible outcome. Financial regulation was patently inadequate. Banking supervisors had no conception of the systemic risks posed by the development of complex financial products.

Education Without Borders World Forum

I'm moderating a panel at the Education Without Borders World Forum in Abu Dhabi on March 31. The topic is

 

"Education in times of economic downturn – a case for governments, companies and individuals to invest more in education, training, and research.”

 

If anybody has any thoughts on the subject, or has read something interesting on it, please let me know.