-Caveat Lector- (Art Bell is well connected, it seems. It's not surprising. --SW)
------- Forwarded message follows ------- I bet he believes in population control he and his buddy Bill Gates. Gates is involved in a worldwide vaccination program curious huh? Look into what is in those vaccinations sometimes and their side effects (mercury and the 3rd world gets the leftovers and the toxic remedies that we cast off) and you'll see they are both proactive about population control through controlling wellness and promoting death. Thier own contributrion of sorts to GW and the war on terrorism. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2002 00:28 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [crimgov] Buffet in Buffalo Excerpt from article: Before she landed the editorial-page job, in 1989, Ireland says Buffett interviewed her for two and a half hours. "He definitely was not the standard business conservative," she recalls. "I saw a humane attitude on social issues. He had two major issues: world population control and nuclear weapons control." But "because he doesn't impose his politics, most people don't even know what they are." $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$} Buffet in Buffalo His Paper Prints Money. What Else Does It Print? by John Henry Henry, a former Buffalo resident, is deputy editor of 116th & Broadway, the newsletter of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism. Warren Buffett of Omaha is a champion investor, of course, but America's second-richest man is also a press lord. The Berkshire Hathaway holding company, which he controls, owns 17 percent of The Washington Post Company (where he is a director), and is the tenth-largest shareholder in Gannett. In the 1980s, Buffett offered to raise his stake in Time Inc. to more than 10 percent, although the board declined the offer. He was the largest shareholder in Capital Cities/ABC, Inc., until it was swallowed by Walt Disney, and he became the largest investor in that company. He even provided $82,000 to the liberal Washington Monthly in its early days. His longtime friend, Carol J. Loomis, a member of the board of editors at Fortune, once wrote of Buffett, "He says that if he had not been an investor, he might well have picked journalism." The one journalistic outlet that publicly traded Berkshire Hathaway owns outright is The Buffalo News in upstate New York. What does this quarter-million-circulation daily tell us about Buffett's notion of the journalism business? In many ways, the News is an awesome success. Editor & Publisher says it has the highest profit margin of the nation's publicly owned newspapers; better than 35 cents of each dollar the paper took in last year turned into pre-tax profit. Buffett paid $32.5 million for what was The Buffalo Evening News in 1977 (nearly $88 million in 1998 dollars). Last year it earned a record $55.4 million before taxes, up from $49.8 million in 1996. What makes these profits especially impressive is that they are generated in an economically troubled Rust Belt city, its once-vibrant port in decline, its once-mighty steel industry decimated. Of course, the News hasn't been immune to the problems of upstate New York. Publisher Stanford Lipsey cites the Buffalo area's population drop -- 2.1 percent between 1990 and 1997 -- as one of the reasons for declining circulation. The daily has lost ground for four years, down to 252,705 from a peak of 320,372 in 1983, and the Sunday edition has been slipping for six, to 338,467 from 383,017 in 1992. Even so, the News's penetration -- a remarkable 64 percent of Buffalo-area households, and an even more impressive 80 percent on Sundays -- remains number one in the top fifty U.S. markets. Yet journalistically, Buffett gets a B in Buffalo. This is doubly disappointing to many in that city of 310,000 who hoped that Buffett wanted editorial excellence, too. As Buffet wrote shortly after he bought the paper, "I want to achieve business success in newspapers, but will be unhappy unless it is accompanied by journalistic success." The News, while respected and read, has failed to fulfill the expectations of those who hoped Mr. Deep Pockets would transform it into a role model. James Heaney, one of the News's education reporters, echoes people inside and outside the newsroom when he says: "This is a decent but underachieving newspaper. Given our profitability and penetration rate, we could and should be one of the great regional newspapers in the country." The key to the News's extraordinary profitability was a move Buffett made seven months after buying it. He launched a Sunday edition, dealing what proved to be a mortal blow to its weak morning rival, the Buffalo Courier-Express, which had previously had the lucrative Sunday market to itself. In less than six years the Courier was out of business and the News had become an all-day operation, dropping the word Evening from its title. The News, which lost millions during its struggle with the Courier, was now poised to reap the benefits of being the only game in town. Reap them it did, relentlessly raising circulation and advertising rates, while keeping an exceptionally tight lid on costs. The News could raise rates and make them stick because of the reader loyalty that had developed under its previous owner, the aristocratic Butler family. The paper Buffett bought from them was sober, solid, and known for its strong coverage of western New York. Buffett, 68, whose net worth Forbes estimated last year to be $21 billion, is a famously hands-off owner of the companies that Berkshire Hathaway has bought -- a disparate group that ranges from Dairy Queen to World Book encyclopedias to GEICO, the auto insurer. In the case of the News, Buffett installed as publisher his friend Lipsey, who had been publisher of a group of Omaha weeklies that Buffett owned for a while. On the editorial side, Buffett named Murray B. Light, now 72, a News employee since 1949, as editor. "In his first meeting with me," Light says, "he told me he would not interfere with newsroom operations. He never has." Yet a couple of the owner's fingerprints are discernible. Buffett, son of a Republican congressman from Nebraska, moved early on to have the paper abandon its tradition of endorsing only Republicans, telling his new editor, "Let's be truly independent." Under Buffett's ownership the News has endorsed only Democratic presidential candidates. (Light, who oversees the editorial page as well as news sections, says that Buffett is not involved in the endorsement process, though he is notified before publication. Buffett, who talks infrequently with reporters, declined to be interviewed.) The second area on which Buffett has left his stamp is the size of the paper's news hole, which in the first six months of 1998 represented nearly 60 percent of the total content -- extraordinarily high. While the Butlers had followed the industry standard of 40 percent news and 60 percent advertising, Buffett insisted on a news hole of at least 50 percent. He sees this as a business decision: a large and intelligently utilized news hole, he wrote in his 1989 letter to Berkshire shareholders, "attracts a wide spectrum of readers and thereby boosts penetration. High penetration, in turn, makes a newspaper particularly valuable to retailers since it allows them to talk to the entire community through a single megaphone." "You could do a helluva lot worse than Warren Buffett for an owner," says Barbara Ireland, who was the News's editorial page editor until she left this year to join The New York Times. Before she landed the editorial-page job, in 1989, Ireland says Buffett interviewed her for two and a half hours. "He definitely was not the standard business conservative," she recalls. "I saw a humane attitude on social issues. He had two major issues: world population control and nuclear weapons control." But "because he doesn't impose his politics, most people don't even know what they are." --continued-- Part 2 of 2 Under Lipsey and Light, the News became strikingly different from the paper Buffett bought. The most obvious change is the front page, where the focus has become relentlessly local. At one time it took "a very big local story to get on page one," says Gerald I. Goldberg, the News's editorial page editor. "Now, it takes a good national story to break onto page one." An op-ed page was added in 1981, and business and sports coverage has expanded. Local society news, a staple of the more class-conscious Butler era, has given way to meatier lifestyle features and cultural and entertainment news. The staff is laced with talent. Cartoonist Tom Toles won a Pulitzer in 1990; Heaney, the education reporter, was a Pulitzer finalist in 1993; Kevin Collison, a transportation reporter, won a George Polk Award in 1996; and Jerry Sullivan, a sportswriter, was voted one of the top ten U.S. sports columnists by Associated Press sports editors in 1996. Two years ago, the News won eight New York State Associated Press writing awards -- more than any of the New York City dailies or Newsday. And people tend to stay at the News. One reason is good benefits. Pay scales are competitive, too; the top Guild minimum after five years at the News is $963 a week, fifteenth among U.S. dailies. Still, Philip Fairbanks, vice president of the Buffalo Newspaper Guild and the News's city hall reporter, says his members "were more than a little disappointed" by the most recent contract, negotiated last fall, which provides a 2.5 percent annual increase over six years. "There's not a lot of correlation between the paper's profitability and wage increases," he says. What does the staff produce? "Get an upstate paper on the same day in Rochester, Syracuse, or Albany. The Buffalo News is head and shoulders above them," says a former News reporter. Yet as the paper for New York state's second-largest city, it ought to outshine smaller upstate dailies. And some prominent readers remain constantly disappointed. For example, Catherine Schweitzer, executive director of a local charitable foundation, notes that Toronto, Canada's financial capital, is less than two hours from Buffalo and that the city's future is tied to Canada's. "Yet," she says, "there is almost no business news from there except for the value of the American dollar against the Canadian dollar." And, she says, the paper fails to report adequately on Canadian developments in health care, education, and urban planning. Light counters that the News, which has stringers in Toronto and Ottawa, provides more Canadian coverage than any other U.S. paper outside of Detroit. Mark Goldman, a leader in reviving the performing arts in downtown Buffalo and the author of two social histories of the city, argues that, although nearly one out of every three residents of Buffalo is black, "coverage of the minority community is terrible. I don't know why any black would read that paper." Agnes Palazzetti, a News reporter for nearly forty years who covers welfare and human services, says that "if you look through our pages, the majority of coverage of blacks is someone in handcuffs. We'll have pictures of fifty brides, and maybe just one or two will be black." Light calls that criticism "a bunch of crap," adding, "We go out of our way to really seek out positive stories about the minority community." He also notes that the News prints all bridal pictures that are submitted to it, free of charge. Still, the paper has just eight black editorial staff members out of 187. One of them, Rod Watson, a News editorial writer since 1987, says that shortage causes problems: "The African-American shirt-and-tie crowd hates the News. The lack of black staff members means that no one on the paper is making informal contacts within the black community, so that people feel they have an in with the News." Watson likes Buffett's hands-off style, but he wishes Berkshire's chairman would intervene to promote hiring diversity. Light says that the paper's failure to hire -- and keep -- minority reporters and editors is one of the biggest disappointments of his career, and that he continually tries to do better. After reading Katharine Graham's autobiography, Goldman says he became more disappointed with Buffett, because Graham writes at length about the extensive assistance Buffett gave her at The Washington Post Company. "I said, my God, there's no excuse for this paper," Goldman says. "Buffett knows the difference between putting out a good paper and a bad one." Yet the book also offers a clue to one of Buffett's shortcomings. Graham describes him as "parsimonious in the extreme" and goes on to recall that when she once asked him for a dime to make a phone call, he started to walk some distance to get change for a quarter. "Warren, the quarter will do," Graham remembers telling him, whereupon he sheepishly handed it over. Inside the News, the biggest complaint about parsimony is that, despite its profitability, the paper is woefully understaffed. Last year, the Buffalo Newspaper Guild studied nine papers with comparable circulation and markets and found that the size of the News's editorial staff -- 185 people at the time -- was nearly a third lower than the average for the group. The most serious situation is in local news, a department that for organizational purposes includes reporters covering the city and suburbs, plus those in Washington and Albany, the state capital. Stanley L. Evans, assistant managing editor for local news, says the department has four fewer people -- forty-four -- than when he joined the News twelve years ago, because of shifts to other departments and the elimination of positions. As Evans puts it, "We're getting stretched and stretched." Light responds: "Is it a tight staff? Yes, but that's a challenge I like. When reporters need time on a story or series, they get it." Some reporters confirm this. But along with the smaller staff, the number of Buffalo-based reporters on general assignment has dwindled. Evans says that their number has fallen from about eight to four during his time at the paper. He contends this has not reduced in-depth stories because "our best work comes off of beats." Rose Ciotta, who was the News's computer-assisted-reporting editor before recently moving to The Philadelphia Inquirer, disagrees. She says a scarcity of general-assignment people means the News doesn't "do enough of the in-depth reporting we used to do. It's a pure resources issue." Donn Esmonde, who writes a local-affairs column for the paper, says he often comes across information that could be developed into enterprise stories -- if only the paper had reporters available to do them. The News is also slow to spend on new plant and equipment. The paper was one of the last metropolitan dailies to abandon typewriters, in the mid-'80s, and it is still printed on 1956 vintage presses that are among the oldest of any major U.S. newspaper, so elderly that parts are no longer available and must be fabricated by the paper itself. Robert J. Casell, senior vice president for operations, estimates new presses would cost $45 million to $55 million. "We have decided to wait until the rush of new technology slows down," he says. Meanwhile, readers get hazy pictures and inferior color reproduction. Some employees, past and present, contend that along with investments in people and equipment the News needs an infusion of energy and enthusiasm. "There used to be a tendency when I worked there for the paper to suppress aggressiveness rather than reward it," says Lee Coppola, a News reporter from 1967 to 1983 and now dean of St. Bonaventure University's school of journalism in upstate New York. "The paper would be wary of a story that a reporter came up with until a public agency validated it. As an observer, I'd say that tendency has continued." Light, understandably, disagrees: "I never support getting involved in a story just to win prizes," he says. "I do it to get good journalism. Do I discourage scurrilous, unbalanced reporting? You're goddam right I do. If there's legitimate news, our readers get it." Light does concede that it is harder to maintain reportorial zeal at a monopoly paper than at one with competition. He recalls that right after the Courier-Express folded, he got a call from Ben Bradlee, who saw The Washington Star fail while he ran The Washington Post. Bradlee told him, "You're going to be sorry it ever went out of business." "Ben was right," Light said. "I have vowed to do my best to keep the competitive spirit going in the newsroom. I succeeded for about two-and-a-half years, and then it kind of slowly but surely disappeared." Buffett, who is listed on the News masthead as chairman, used to appear at the paper frequently, fielding questions from editorial department hands. These days a few years may pass between visits, according to Lipsey, who says the News doesn't require its owner's attention the way it did when it was fighting for survival against the Courier-Express. Yet Buffett must be mindful of the potential threat to journalistic quality when he publishes the only newspaper in town. "Once dominant, the newspaper itself, not the marketplace, determines just how good or bad the paper will be," he told Berkshire shareholders in the company's 1984 annual report. "Good or bad, it will prosper." *** "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." - Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service <http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/> . ------- End of forwarded message ------- ------------------------ "In little more than a year we have gone from enjoying peace and the most prosperous economy in our history, to a nation plunged into war, recession and fear. This is a nation being transformed before our very eyes." http://www.truthout.com Steve Wingate, Webmaster ANOMALOUS IMAGES AND UFO FILES http://www.anomalous-images.com <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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