Las Vegas Gleaner

Berkley sides with GOP again

Rep. Shelley Berkley of Las Vegas was one of only eight House Democrats voting this afternoon to slash funding for the United Nations unless the peacenik one-worlders straighten up and fly right. More hawkish than Bolton and Shirley Temple, maybe Berkley should be the next UN ambassador.

And that seems as good a note as any on which to call it a week. See ya Monday.

Sen. John Ensign, R-Telecom

Republican John Ensign's first term as Nevada's Other Senator has been, well, quiet. The most noteworthy development of his senatorial service thus far was his failure to sway even one of his Republican colleagues to support Nevada in the fight against the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste dump (the only other two Republicans who voted against Bush's Yucca betrayal of Nevada in 2002, Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Lincoln Chafee, had established records of voting with Nevada on the issue, and Ensign wasn't a factor). For sure, it would have been a tall order for a freshman senator to convince other senators, especially Republican senators, to vote against corporate interests as influential as the nuclear power industry. But that's exactly what he would do, and was a big reason why Nevadans should vote for him, Ensign said when he was running for Senate in the first place. The guy simply didn't deliver.

Now the hitherto stealthy Sen. Ensign, who apparently and sadly is going to get a free pass to re-election, has found something to do. He's going to lead the effort to rewrite the nation's laws governing phone and internet service, and he's going to rewrite them exactly the way the big telecommunications companies want.

National Journal reported this week that Ensign, "a strong supporter of tech companies," has been assigned the telecom rewrite job by Commerce Committee Chair Ted Stevens of Alaska.

Ensign has been given responsibility to update several aspects of the watershed 1996 Telecommunications Act by providing deregulatory relief to the former “Baby Bells,” long distance companies, wireless phone providers and cable operators. The measure would limit regulation of new technologies, particularly voice-over-Internet protocol, or Internet telephony, by subjecting VoIP only to restrictions at the federal level...

...according to sources, the draft measure also may lift some restrictions requiring the Bells to provide their competitors with access to their telecom networks -- a move certain to anger long distance companies and competitive local phone providers.

Consumers are likely to be angered too when choices are eliminated and prices are hiked.

And that's a likely prospect. Courts and the Strong Leader's corporate coddling Federal Communications Commission have already embraced the deregulatory Zeitgeist. For instance, in a ruling last fall, the FCC voted to block state regulation of VoIP. Then, as Consumers Union noted, telecom giant SBC immediately moved to start raising prices on rival phone service providers, effectively clearing the path for higher charges to consumers while stifling competition.

Big and ever-merging cable and phone companies don't just want the "deregulated" monopoly power to shield themselves from other private competitors. They also want to ban cities and towns from setting up their own public fiber optic or wireless networks designed to provide low-cost universal access to consumers. The community access movement has been growing in Philadelphia, Chicago, San Jose and other cities, and the communications conglomerates have been working feverishly at the state legislative level to win laws smacking down a city's right to treat broadband like the vital public service that it is and give citizens convenient access at an affordable price. In concert with the corporate push to limit access with state laws, Texas GOP Rep. Pete Sessions has introduced legislation in the U.S. House that trample the rights of individual states and towns by outlawing publicly provided community internet service nationwide. Inasmuch as Ensign is doing Big Telecom's bidding, it wouldn't be a surprise if the Senate bill also tries to prohibit community access. (FYI, the links above are from www.freepress.net where there is a wealth of information on media systems, communications and the public interest).

Ensign's legislation is expected to be unveiled in July. There is always the hope that Bill Frist, on behalf of his Christian masters, will snag up Congress over a godly judge or some other flavorful culture-of-life thingy, leaving telecom overhaul along with the rest of the Bush/corporate agenda languishing indefinitely on the edge of senatorial desks. But if the bill starts moving, Nevadans could help themselves and the rest of the country by keeping a sharp eye on Ensign, and making sure he knows he's under observation.

Or at least they could if Ensign had an election to worry about next year instead of a cakewalk.

Yeehaw

It's been fashionable of late (all the kids are doing it) for progressives to "look West" to save the Democratic Party. Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer has become the poster boy for believers in a Democratic resurgence via vast, mostly rectangularly shaped states that were carried by the Strong Leader in November. But there's also Ken Salazar, who picked up the Senate seat in Colorado. And in 2002, Democrat Dave Freudenthal won the governorship of Dick Cheney's very own Wyoming, despite Cheney appearing on behalf of the Republican candidate. Western Democrat rounds up and champions info on the West-as-savior movement, and is more or less dedicated to the proposition that Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada can settle a presidential election.

The Great and Powerful Harry Reid has gotten into the act, recently touting the West's regenerative powers at the Democratic Party Convention in Utah and in other venues. That's rather rich, really, inasmuch as Reid embodies the Democratic identity as a message-free congressional caucus burrowing for a deal instead of a national party with a point. The West-as-path-to-glory strategy stands in particularly stark, and decidedly favorable, contrast to the fact that Reid has presided over the dramatic decline of Nevada's Democratic Party and is actively harboring a known Republican U.S. senator in his own state. (We'll pull on that string another day. Promise.)

Because it's never too early to a) optimistically assume the nation will survive the Bush administration and b) anticipate victory over the candidacy of Frist/McCain/Allen/Gingrich/Barbour/et al, let's surrender to full-on dork impulses and consult the cool electoral college calculator. Yup (which is the kind of thing we say out West), winning Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, or even just New Mexico and Nevada, would have put Kerry over the top. But then, a win in either Florida or Ohio also would have ousted the Strong Leader. Conversely, if the Republicans had carried any two of Wisconsin, Minnesota or Michigan--all states that Kerry carried but where Rove thought Bush had a shot--Kerry would have lost, even with the four Western states in his pocket.

Which brings us to Hillary. Take your own trip to the electoral college calculator, and try to figure out which states Hillary can win that Kerry couldn't. Maybe its Florida, maybe its Ohio, maybe its both Florida and Ohio, in which case, whoop-ti-doo, Hillary gets to go home to the White House and wrestle with Delay's whackjobs in the House and a hostile Republican Senate that Reid looks uninterested in winning back.

Then, for kicks, try to figure out which states former congressman, energy secretary, United Nations ambassador and Hispanic Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico might win that Kerry couldn't. Hmm, those four Western states look solid...Florida would be looking very, very good...Wait!...Wild optimism taking hold...can't resist...must suggest...Richardson might even be able to carry...no, never...yes, say it...Texas!

Or not.

Welcome to your daily Gleaner

Some of the posts below were prepared over the last few months while the Gleaner was being developed in the sheltered obscurity of password protection. Today marks the site's public debut. Scroll around, come back often, tell your friends, welcome.

--Hugh Jackson, proprietor

Sun, R-J hatch unholy alliance

As the Las Vegas Sun transforms from an actual if irrelevant afternoon newspaper into a little insert in Stephens Media's Review-Journal, no journalists should have to lose their jobs. But it looks like they will. In stories announcing the artificial circulation inflation scheme, under which the Sun will eventually be axed as a stand-alone publication and folded into the R-J along with the grocery store coupons, Sun Poohbah Brian Greenspun said editorial staff layoffs are inevitable.

Actually, they're inexcusible, and either Greenspun's oft-stated concern for Southern Nevada's future rings a tad hollow or he's an incompetent negotiator. Just this week on Gwen Castaldi's KNPR show, while crowing about his sainted father and glorying in his role of newspaper family don, Greenspun explained that the family has never really made any money in the newspaper business. Rather, they're in the business out of a love of newspapering and because they care so much about the community, he said, or words to that effect. Touching, if true. Such noblesse oblige might even make a man look at fewer news pages to fill and see an opportunity to give dedicated reporters the time and effort required to produce genuinely stellar journalism (and embarrass the Review-Journal in the process).

Now Greenspun might argue it's unrealistic to expect the family to lose too much money in the pursuit of editorial excellence. Fair enough. Greenspun is about to save Stephens Media Ubermeister and R-J Publisher Sherman Frederick oodles in the expense column wept over by whining publishers everywhere, newsprint costs, by relinquishing the requirement that Sherm must print the Sun as a full-on newspaper as stipulated under the Joint Operating Agreement. In return, Greenspun should have forced Sherm to guarantee that the R-J would hire any and all journalists not retained at a soon-to-be-truncated Sun.

It would have taken grit and tenacity to extract such a guarantee. See, the Sherminator and Stephens Media are profoundly, passionately cheap. And that's why it will be such a travesty if any journalists lose their jobs because of the new deal--Southern Nevada journalism is already understaffed and overworked.

A  2003 report by the Institutes for Journalism and Natural Resources found that the R-J, at 0.7 reporters per 5,000 circulation, had the lowest number of reporters relative to circulation than all other 11 Western U.S. papers in the study. All but one of the other papers had at least twice as many reporters per circulation. The Press-Enterprise in Inland Southern California, which has a circulation almost identical to the R-J's, had five times as many reporters.

Yes, Southern Nevada's nation-leading rate of population growth notwithstanding, the R-J's daily circulation has flat-lined at 165,000--that's flirting with a paltry, single-digit penetration rate in a metro population of 1.7 million or so. And the R-J's penetration is sure to get smaller, as fewer and fewer people are willing to pay to have three or four pounds of paper product thrown up against the door every morning. Advertisers, however--always the last to be told--continue to think this whole model of printing words and pictures with ink on actual paper and then hauling it all over town is valid, and the R-J is raking it in. Unfortunately, Stephens Media is privately held and its financial reports aren't public. But embattled as the dead wood industry is, the nation's newspaper corporations often enjoy monopoly or near-monopoly control over a market, and typically expect profit margins of 20 percent, 30 percent--even 40 percent. Las Vegas is a very dynamic advertising market, and if the Review-Journal wasn't wildly profitable Sherm would probably be looking for work. The R-J isn't understaffed, and that staff overworked, because the paper can't afford reporters.

Greenspun and Frederick have subdued the long-running and highly uninteresting feud between the two organizations long enough to strike a deal by which Sherm saves even more money and Brian gets to show 165,000 people that he can't write on weekdays either. They should take further advantage of this tender moment and, citing their deep commitment to the community that has given each of them so much and their abiding respect for the crucial role quality journalism must play in Southern Nevada's development, jointly pledge that no journalists will be harmed in the making of this kinda squirrelly looking deal.

Oh yeah...what will this Big Media Develoment mean for the community otherwise? Hard to say. The Greenspuns haven't exactly made the best use of their weekend opportunities at six-figure readership in the R-J, tending to run innocuous saccharine on their Saturday page and too often giving over their Sunday section to wire copy when they should be letting their reporters show off. Greenspun marquis property Jon Ralston, given an audience, may deign to resume writing a column on a weekday, which could be useful. And some have expressed the hope that the Sun's editorials, wishy-washy and dithering though they may be, could offset the daily libertarian kookfest dropped on the city by the R-J opinion staff. That's an understandable hope, but perhaps misguided. Some politicians and policymakers appear to tremble at the prospect of a blistering R-J broadside linking this or that politician or policy with the satanic nanny state. But with the R-J's circulation both lackluster and stagnant, it's time to acknowledge that the R-J's influence with the public is not as great, nor its wrath as mighty, as the paper would like you to think.

It all conjures up an appropriate motto for the paper, though: The Las Vegas Review Journal. Understaffed. Overrated.