Finalist: The New York Times, by The late David Carr

By David Carr

 

Back in 2010, before she became executive editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson sent me a handwritten attaboy note about a big story. It still hangs in my cubicle: “You wrote a story about the trashing of a once great American institution and people never tire of that.”

 

Jill loved juicy stories, the ones full of subtext, intrigue and very high stakes. Now she is right in the middle of one.

 

On Friday, she was on the cover of The New York Post as the deposed editor of The Times, shown in a trucker hat, boxing gloves and T-shirt hitting a heavy bag, a portrait taken from her daughter’s Instagram account that carried that hashtag “pushy.”

 

I have witnessed some fraught moments at The New York Times. Jayson Blair was a friend of mine. I watched Howell Raines fly into a mountain from a very close distance. I saw the newspaper almost tip over when the print business plunged and the company had to borrow money at exorbitant rates from a Mexican billionaire.

 

But none of that was as surreal as what happened last week. When The Times’s publisher, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., stood up at a hastily called meeting in the soaring open newsroom where we usually gather to celebrate the Pulitzers and said that Jill was out, we all just looked at one another. How did our workplace suddenly become a particularly bloody episode of “Game of Thrones”?

 

It is one thing to gossip or complain about your boss, but quite another to watch her head get chopped off in the cold light of day. The lack of decorum was stunning.

 

Even though Mr. Sulzberger wanted to effect a smoother transition, Ms. Abramson refused to make nice. She had fought her way to the top, and now she would fight on her way out. She may have professed love for The Times, but once it decided not to love her back, she decided to inflict some damage on its publisher. (She’ll have more opportunity on Monday when she gives the commencement speech at Wake Forest.)

 

After very public charges that sexism drove his decision, Mr. Sulzberger responded with a statement on Saturday that was both specific and personal, saying that Jill had engaged in “arbitrary decision-making, a failure to consult and bring colleagues with her, inadequate communication and the public mistreatment of colleagues.”

 

Her approach created a fair amount of tsoris — a favorite Yiddish word of hers that connotes aggravation — but along with that it also produced, as Mr. Sulzberger acknowledged even as he fired her, a very good version of The Times.

 

Jill rose as a woman in a patriarchal business and a male-dominated organization by being tough, by displaying superlative journalistic instincts and by never backing up for anyone.

 

Some might suggest that these traits are all in the historical job description of a man editing The New York Times, but Arthur concluded “she had lost the support of her masthead colleagues and could not win it back.” I like Jill and the version of The Times she made. But my reporting, including interviews with senior people in the newsroom, some of them women, backs up his conclusion.

 

When he announced Jill and Dean Baquet’s appointment in 2011, Mr. Sulzberger was rightfully proud of his dream team, two talented journalists to lead the paper who were not white men. But while there may have been a dream, there was never a real team.

 

Jill did a six-month tour of The Times’s digital endeavors before assuming the editorship, and was publicly supportive of a recent groundbreaking report on innovation at The New York Times. But the report plainly stated that the paper was lagging in that area, and according to several executives in the newsroom she took some of its findings personally.

 

Perhaps that is part of the reason she tried to bring in Janine Gibson, a senior editor at The Guardian, as a co-managing editor for digital. That was a big tactical mistake, at least in terms of office management. Dean was not aware that Jill had made an offer to Ms. Gibson, and he was furious and worried about how it would affect not only him but the rest of the news operation as well. (All the talk about pay inequity and her lawyering up to get her due was a sideshow in my estimation.)

 

When Dean let Arthur know that he would leave the paper because he found the situation untenable, it was clear that an important insurance policy for the newspaper’s future was going to leave the building.

 

You can’t blame Dean for advocating on his own behalf — after all, life is short. And almost anybody at The Times will tell you that Dean will make a great leader. He is courageous and smart, and he makes newspapering seem like a grand endeavor.

 

But the sense of pride that we should all feel at his ascension — as a great, decorated journalist and the first black executive editor of The New York Times — has been overwhelmed by the messiness surrounding it.

 

Mr. Sulzberger has been accused in the past of waiting too long to make a change, including fiddling while the newsroom smoldered and then burned under Mr. Raines. This time he moved decisively, clearly believing that Ms. Abramson’s shortcomings were a threat to the newspaper.

 

He gets to do that because he owns the joint, and as The Times has sold off assets and pared down to a single brand, Mr. Sulzberger has been focusing acutely on that brand. He has a chief executive he trusts in Mark Thompson, and the increases in digital circulation have bought the company some breathing room. The New York Times is the whole ballgame now, and his instinct to protect it has only increased.

 

Still, Mr. Sulzberger, working with Mr. Baquet and Mr. Thompson, may have failed to understand the impact Ms. Abramson’s firing would have, both internally and with the public. Planning went into immediately erasing her name from the masthead, but not so much into the splatter it would create. A meeting of executives scheduled for last Thursday, which Jill could no longer lead, created a false deadline that forced management into what seemed like a hurried, ill-considered announcement.

 

An executive involved in the decision and the rollout of the news said that by Wednesday, it was clear that there would be no exit agreement between Jill and the company. Canceling a big meeting scheduled for the next day would set off a rash of questions, followed by leaks. People close to Mr. Sulzberger said that he was fully aware his decision would create an uproar, including charges of sexism, but that he made the announcement because it was right for the newspaper and the people who work there.

 

The current mayhem aside, Mr. Sulzberger’s real failing has been picking two editors who ended up not being right for the job.

 

I was standing there when Howell Raines, taken down by the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal, handed over control of the newspaper. There was sadness and anger, but also a measure of dignity. Instead, this has become a grinding spectacle.

 

The news set off a gleeful frenzy in Manhattan media, which usually have to subsist on fake New York Times controversies. For pundits and reporters, the episode is akin to a piñata that hangs itself and then hands you a stick. The candy has spilled out for everyone to grab at. Jill’s firing provided proof that the paper was, depending on the agenda, too liberal, not liberal enough, a hotbed of feminism, rife with patriarchy, drunk on affirmative action, ignorant of its own traditions and clueless on digital matters.

 

It has probably been fun to watch, but not for the people who work here. I heard from several talented young women who are a big part of The New York Times’s future. “I really don’t see a path for me here,” said one. “Are we O.K.?”

 

Well, that depends on how the next few weeks go and whether The Times can convince female employees that it is a fair place to work, with ample opportunity to advance. But more broadly we’ll probably be O.K. We have a talented executive editor, a stable if challenged business outlook and a very dedicated audience. To the extent that The New York Times does anything remarkable, it emerges from collaboration and shared enterprise. It’s worth remembering that its legacy begets an excellence that surpasses the particulars of who produces it.

 

The New York Times is overseen by its executive editor, but it belongs to the Sulzbergers, to its readers and to all of the people who work here.

 

Before I came to work here, Gerald Boyd, the crusty — or should I say “pushy”? — managing editor who would eventually be swept up in the Jayson Blair affair, was interviewing me. I could tell it was not going well. He was skeptical of my lack of daily experience and my more noisy tendencies. I finally realized what he was waiting to hear.

 

“I understand that if I come to work at The New York Times, the needs of the many will frequently supersede the needs of the one,” I said.

 

I meant it when I said it and I learn the truth of it with each passing day.

By David Carr

 

The Internet has given us many glorious things: streaming movies, multiplayer games, real-time information and videos of cats playing the piano. It has also offered up some less edifying creations: web-borne viruses, cybercrime and Charles C. Johnson.

 

His name came out of nowhere and now seems to be everywhere. When the consumer Internet first unfolded, there was much talk about millions of new voices blooming. Mr. Johnson is one of those flowers. His tactics may have as much in common with ultimate fighting as journalism, but that doesn’t mean he is not part of the conversation.

 

Mr. Johnson, a 26-year-old blogger based in California, has worked his way to the white-hot center of the controversy over a Rolling Stone article about rape accusations made by a student at the University of Virginia. His instinct that the report was deeply flawed was correct, but he proceeded to threaten on Twitter to expose the student and then later named her. And he serially printed her photo while going after her in personal and public ways.

 

In the frenzy to discredit her, he published a Facebook photo of someone he said was the same woman at a rally protesting an earlier rape. Oops. Different person. He did correct himself, but the damage, now to two different women, was done.

 

Before that, his targets were two reporters for The New York Times who, he said, revealed the address of the police officer in the Ferguson, Mo., shooting. (They didn’t. They published the name of a street he once lived on, which had already been published in The Washington Post and other media outlets.) Before that, he attacked the victim of the shooting, Michael Brown.

 

Before that, he attacked Senator Cory Booker, saying the lawmaker did not live in Newark when he was the city’s mayor; BuzzFeed wrote that Mr. Johnson not only was wrong, but had worked for a political action committee that opposed Mr. Booker. He also wrote a series of Twitter messages that suggested President Obama was gay. He offered money for photos of Senator Thad Cochran’s wife in her nursing home bed. Before that, well, it doesn’t really matter; you get the pattern.

 

He is not without some talent — he effectively ended the career of the rising foreign policy analyst Elizabeth O’Bagy after exposing her conflicts of interest and fudged academic credentials. In general, he has a knack for staking an outrageous, attacking position on a prominent news event, then pounding away until he is noticed. It is one way to go, one that says everything about the corrosive, underreported news era we are living through.

 

In a phone call, he made it clear that he sees himself as part of the vanguard of Internet news, although he did add that some of what he is up to is a response to a lifetime of slights.

 

“I’m basically one of those kids who was bullied all his life,” he said. He’s now extracting payback, one post at a time.

 

Much of what he publishes is either wrong or tasteless, but that matters little to Mr. Johnson or his audience, which responds by forming mobs on Twitter or using the personal information to put fake ads on Craigslist to chase after the targets he points to.

 

After watching him set off a series of small mushroom clouds, it struck me that he might be the ultimate expression of a certain kind of citizen journalism — one far more toxic than we’re accustomed to seeing. Once a promising young conservative voice who wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Daily Caller and The Blaze, Mr. Johnson has a loose-cannon approach that alienated many of his editors. There was a time when that would have been the end of it, but with Twitter as a promotional platform, he has been able to build his own site called GotNews.

 

His most vociferous critics are on the right because they think his outrageous tactics bring disrepute to the conservative cause. But many — like the studios in Hollywood who have stood by watching the cyberattack on Sony unfold without emitting a peep — do not want to speak on the record for fear they will end up in his gun sights. (One exception was a Daily Caller contributor, Matt K. Lewis, who called out The Washington Post for what he characterized as a “romanticizing” profile of Mr. Johnson.)

 

On Thursday, Mr. Johnson told me he was going to sue many of his media tormentors, but all considered, it has been a pretty good run of attention for the once obscure blogger. When I spoke to him, he was feeling a bit hunted and fighting off a cold, but cheerful in the main, saying his grandiose plans to become the next Matt Drudge — or Joseph Pulitzer or William Randolph Hearst, two others he mentioned — were humming along smoothly.

 

“I’m in talks with investors right now, and I think we’ve already got the deal set up,” he said. “Basically I’m building a crowd-sourced, crowd-funded media company that is going to take all the people like me — autistics, researchers, nerds, ex-law enforcement, whistle-blowers — and we’re going to give them an opportunity to make money on the information that they have.”

 

He can now push the button on almost anything that has heat, a scent of scandal or the ability to activate his base of angry, conspiratorial readers, who believe the republic is being overwhelmed by criminals, feminists and the politicians who enable them. And then the rest of the journalistic establishment — including me — points a crooked finger at the naughty young man who is using his mouse to sow mayhem.

 

In that sense, Mr. Johnson shares some common characteristics with the so-called mood slime in “Ghostbusters II,” which lived underneath New York City and gathered strength by feeding on the anger coursing through the streets above it. He would be just one more person hurling invective from a basement somewhere if not for all of us — his fans, his enabling social media platforms and his critics in the news media — who have created this troll on steroids.

 

Although he was temporarily suspended from Twitter for publishing the personal information of others, he’s back on that site preaching to anyone who will listen. I’d ignore him if I thought he would go away, but I get the feeling he won’t.

 

In conversation, Mr. Johnson is prone to narcissism, not uncommon in media types, but he has his own special brand of it. He sees himself as a major character in a great unfolding epoch, dwelling on his school-age accomplishments and his journalism awards and vaguely suggesting that he has strong ties to many levels of law enforcement. Like what, I asked?

 

“Have you ever read the book or heard of the book ‘Encyclopedia Brown’?” he asked, referring to a series about a boy detective. “That’s the capacity in which I help them. I don’t go out of my way to discuss the kind of, shall we say, clandestine work I do, because the nature of the work has to be clandestine in order for it be effective.”

 

O.K.

 

He intimated that he had experienced some blowback and that he now felt under threat. “People are trying to kill me and my family members,” he said.

 

In view of that, I asked him about publishing the home addresses of two Times journalists after erroneously claiming they had reported the address of the Ferguson policeman who shot Mr. Brown. “I didn’t say they published his address,” he said. Yes he did. He said that reporters “published the address of Darren Wilson in The New York Times so here are their addresses.” Moving on, he said that before releasing their personal information, he contacted some friends in law enforcement and told them, “We got to make sure these guys are protected in Chicago and elsewhere, but this is what I’m going to do.” Gee, thanks for that.

 

The reporters and their families were forced to vacate their homes after facing threats of robbery and rape. I asked what he thought about that.

 

“It doesn’t feel great, I’ll be honest with you, but I also don’t see it as fundamentally my fault,” he said.

 

“Look, a lot of people are upset with me,” he said, adding, “my batting average is very, very good. Have I got up to the plate and either hit the ball wrong or swung and missed? Yeah, absolutely, but I take risks that other people won’t take because I think the story requires it.”

 

Those are very noble words arrayed over some nasty handiwork.

 

My worry is that people who have made it this far in the column will click over to GotNews to see what all the fuss is about.

 

What they will find is a clear look into the molten core of a certain mind-set, a place where conspiracies are legion, victims are portrayed as perpetrators and so-called news is a fig leaf on a far darker art.

By David Carr

 

With public revulsion rising in response to snowballing accusations that Bill Cosby victimized women in serial fashion throughout his trailblazing career, the response from those in the know has been: What took so long?

 

What took so long is that those in the know kept it mostly to themselves. No one wanted to disturb the Natural Order of Things, which was that Mr. Cosby was beloved; that he was as generous and paternal as his public image; and that his approach to life and work represented a bracing corrective to the coarse, self-defeating urban black ethos.

 

Only the first of those things was actually true.

 

Those in the know included Mark Whitaker, who did not find room in his almost-500-page biography, “Cosby: His Life and Times,” to address the accusations that Mr. Cosby had assaulted numerous women, at least four of whom had spoken on the record and by name in the past about what they say Mr. Cosby did to them.

 

Those in the know also included Ta-Nehisi Coates, who elided the charges in a long and seemingly comprehensive article about Mr. Cosby in The Atlantic in 2008.

 

Those in the know included Kelefa T. Sanneh, who wrote a major profile in The New Yorker this past September and who treated the accusations as an afterthought, referring to them quickly near the end of the piece.

 

And those in the know also included me. In 2011, I did a Q. and A. with Mr. Cosby for Hemispheres magazine, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, and never found the space or the time to ask him why so many women had accused him of drugging and then assaulting them.

 

We all have our excuses, but in ignoring these claims, we let down the women who were brave enough to speak out publicly against a powerful entertainer.

 

Mr. Whitaker has said he didn’t want to put anything in the book, which he wrote with Mr. Cosby’s cooperation, that wasn’t confirmed — which of course raises the question of why he wouldn’t have done the work to knock down the accusations or make them stand up.

 

And given that the accusations had already been carefully and thoroughly reported in Philadelphia magazine and elsewhere, any book of the size and scope of Mr. Whitaker’s should have gone there.

 

Mr. Coates recently expressed regret on The Atlantic website that he did not press harder on Mr. Cosby’s conflicted past. In the course of his reporting, he said he came to the conclusion that “Bill Cosby was a rapist.”

 

He added: “I regret not saying what I thought of the accusations, and then pursuing those thoughts. I regret it because the lack of pursuit puts me in league with people who either looked away, or did not look hard enough.”

 

By David Carr

 

Last week, I read an interesting article about how smart hardware can allow users to browse anonymously and thus foil snooping from governments. I found it on what looked like a nifty new technology site called SugarString.

 

Oddly enough, while the article mentioned the need for privacy for folks like Chinese dissidents, it didn’t address the fact that Americans might want the same kind of protection.

 

There’s a reason for that, although not a very savory one. At the bottom of the piece, there was a graphic saying “Presented by Verizon” followed by some teeny type that said “This article was written by an author contracted by Verizon.”

 

As the DailyDot pointed out last Tuesday, Verizon not only backs the site, but also sets its coverage agenda. And that agenda, according to an email recruiting reporters for the site, did not include reporting on domestic spying and net neutrality, two of the most vital issues in technology. Those subjects were off the table.

 

You can guess why. Thanks to Edward Snowden, we know that Verizon turned over the phone records of millions of people to the American government without their consent. And Verizon is hardly neutral on the issue of net neutrality, having successfully sued to keep the F.C.C. from blocking efforts to charge for a fast lane for data traffic.

 

By David Carr

 

The ostensible purpose of the recent videos that show the beheadings of two American journalists by Islamic militants is to deter attacks — your missiles on our positions will beget our knives on Western hostages — but the true aim is to spread dread and terror.

 

The videos deliver in miniature the same chilling message as the footage of the towers falling 13 years ago: Everything has changed, no one is safe and the United States is impotent against true believers. It is a memo from a foe that has everything to gain by goading America into a fight in a faraway land where its enemies are legion. The tactic worked back then.

 

And while the videos convey barbarism on an elemental level, dismissing them as crude or one-dimensional would be wrong. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, clearly has a sophisticated production unit, with good cameras, technically proficient operators and editors who have access to all the best tools.

 

What they made are modern media artifacts being used to medieval ends. The videos serve as both propaganda and time machine, attempting to wipe away centuries of civilization and suggest that the dreamed-of caliphate flourishes and blood is cheap currency.

 

A screen grab taken from a video released by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Credit SITE Intelligence Group, via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The real warriors in those videos are the journalists who were killed, James Foley and Steven Sotloff, who were trying to do a terrible, dangerous job when they were grabbed opportunistically in Syria. Innocent people end up tragically caught in the crossfire of war, but the targeting of journalists who provide witness for the rest of us is particularly appalling to people in the news business.

 

I initially had no interest in seeing the videos — the beheading of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, in 2002 is still fresh — but watched the footage of Mr. Sotloff’s death after I decided to write about it.

 

The mastery of medium and message is evident in the careful crafting of the video. (Anybody who doubts the technical ability of ISIS might want to watch a documentary of Falluja that includes some remarkable drone camera work.)

 

In the Sotloff clip, the enemy, in this case President Obama, is shown through a video effects filter to make his visage in a news conference about ISIS appear distorted and sinister. An electronic buzz effect signals an interruption — a kidnapping, if you will — of the broadcast before a graceful typographical segue promises “A second message to America.”

 

We are then in a desert, the horizon carefully situated at the midpoint of a two-camera shoot. There is thought put into the wardrobe selection; the victim is dressed in an iconic orange jumpsuit — a reference to detainees in American custody — and the killer costumed more as a ninja than a jihadist, all in black and his face obscured, holding a small knife and holster.

 

The actual murder is performed in the unflinching sunlight of the desert. (I thought more than once of the brutally clear morning of Sept. 11, 2001.) Because sound is difficult to capture on a windy expanse of arid land, the victim is wearing a lapel mike. Mr. Sotloff introduces himself in sober tones and begins to read a scripted statement off what seems to be a teleprompter.

 

The executioner is cocky and ruthless, seemingly eager to get to the task at hand. When he does attack his bound victim, only the beginning is shown and then there is a fade to black. Once the picture returns, the head of the victim is carefully arranged on the body, all the violence of the act displayed in a bloody tableau. There is another cutaway, and the next potential victim is shown with a warning that he may be next.

 

“It is an interesting aesthetic choice not to show the actual beheading,” Alex Gibney, a documentary filmmaker, said. “I can’t be sure, but they seemed to dial it back just enough so that it would get passed around. In a way, it makes it all the more chilling, that it was so carefully stage-managed and edited to achieve the maximum impact.”

 

The act is shocking regardless of the context. Remember near the end of Season 1 of “Game of Thrones,” when Eddard Stark, a main character, was poised to lose his head? We expected an arrow to come in from stage right to save him, but it did not and the blade fell swiftly. The audacity of the scene was something people talked about for weeks afterward, and the show’s unflinching violence has been a core element of its escalating popularity.

 

And so it is in real life. Video beheadings are a triple death — murder and defilement in a public way — and YouTube becomes the pike on which the severed heads are displayed. The actual butchery of the act is minimized by strategic editing, which suggests that the video is not an attempt at leverage but a carefully produced infomercial about how gangster and merciless ISIS is. It is a kind of global invitation: Come for the jihad and stay for the killing.

 

Writing in The New Yorker, Dexter Filkins did a remarkable job explaining what takes place in the videos.

 

“For the guys who signed up for ISIS — including, especially, the masked man with the English accent who wielded the knife — killing is the real point of being there,” he wrote.

 

Robert Baer, a former C.I.A. officer and the author of the coming book “The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins,” has worked extensively in the Middle East and continues to be in touch with many of the factions there. He points out that a lot of the jihadists involved in filmed killings seem to be from the West and suggests that the combination of swagger and brutality reflects the worst of modern youth culture finding traction in the deadly mission of jihad.

 

“It is very old, going back to the Middle Ages when people were drawn and quartered, a visual lesson to the living of retribution,” he told me in a phone call, “but it also reminds us that they think that they can level the playing field through their commitment, that they are not going away.”

 

Many people have suggested that those who hosted or passed around the video have blood on their hands by proxy. I wondered what someone in the middle of things would think of the videos’ dissemination. I called my friend and colleague Tim Arango, who is the Baghdad bureau chief for The New York Times and has been reporting in the region for five years.

 

“I think the more people who watch it, the more people will know what we are up against,” he said from Istanbul, after many months in Iraq.

 

“I felt like I had to see them for two reasons,” he said. “One, I cover these guys and I need to know what they are saying. And two, if they are targeting American journalists in the region for propaganda uses, you need to be aware of what happened. You don’t want to be the next guy kneeling in the jumpsuit.”

 

Tim and I are old friends examining and discussing the same thing over Skype despite being a world apart, which is a wonder of the age that we live in. But those frictionless media dynamics carry darker cargo as well. And in the same way that the sheer size of the World Trade Center was used against itself, the modern social media apparatus is now used to menace us.

 

We don’t want to look, but some of us do and the rest of us talk about it. ISIS seems to understand that the same forces that carried the Ice Bucket Challenge’s message of uplift — the desire to be part of something, to be in the know — can be used to spread fear and terror as well.

By David Carr

 

For publishers, Facebook is a bit like that big dog galloping toward you in the park. More often than not, it’s hard to tell whether he wants to play with you or eat you.

 

The social network now has over 1.3 billion users — a fifth of the planet’s population and has become a force in publishing because of its News Feed, which has been increasingly fine-tuned to feature high-quality content, the kind media companies produce.

 

To its credit and economic benefit, Facebook has done a better job of cleaning some junk from its feed, featuring news that leads to stronger levels of engagement, which is a win for the platform, the publisher and the readers.

 

That role has become increasingly important when you factor in the big tilt to mobile, as my colleague Ravi Somaiya points out. For traditional publishers, the home page may soon become akin to the print edition — nice to have, but not the primary attraction. In the last few months, more than half the visitors to The New York Times have come via mobile — the figure increases with each passing month — and that percentage is higher for many other publishers.

 

Enter Facebook’s popular mobile app, which has captured greater amounts of time and, more remarkably, managed to fit a business model onto the small screen by providing extremely relevant advertising. By contrast, publishers like newspapers and magazines and even some digital sites have tried to shoehorn old business models and web templates onto tiny screens. That hasn’t worked so well.

 

Loading publishers’ web pages on a mobile device can be maddening, slowed by advertising that goes out for auction when readers click. So while Facebook loves the content, it hates the clunky technology many publishers use for mobile. When it comes to the impatient hordes on phones, speed matters above all else.

 

I was in San Francisco a few weeks ago and bumped into an executive who works in mobile at Facebook. He wasn’t speaking for attribution, but he derided the approach that traditional publishers take to mobile devices, saying it made for an unpleasant user experience, hurt user engagement and crippled their efforts to make money in a smartphone world.

 

Facebook hopes it has a fix for all that. The company has been on something of a listening tour with publishers, discussing better ways to collaborate. The social network has been eager to help publishers do a better job of servicing readers in the News Feed, including improving their approach to mobile in a variety of ways. One possibility it mentioned was for publishers to simply send pages to Facebook that would live inside the social network’s mobile app and be hosted by its servers; that way, they would load quickly with ads that Facebook sells. The revenue would be shared.

 

That kind of wholesale transfer of content sends a cold, dark chill down the collective spine of publishers, both traditional and digital insurgents alike. If Facebook’s mobile app hosted publishers’ pages, the relationship with customers, most of the data about what they did and the reading experience would all belong to the platform. Media companies would essentially be serfs in a kingdom that Facebook owns.

 

It is a measure of Facebook’s growing power in digital realms that when I called around about those rumors, no one wanted to talk. Well, let me revise that: Many wanted to talk, almost endlessly, about how terrible some of the possible changes would be for producers of original content, but not if I was going to indicate their place of employment. (Many had signed confidentiality agreements, so there’s that as well.)

 

It’s not that Facebook has a reputation for extracting vengeance, so far as I know; it’s just that the company has become the No. 1 source of traffic for many digital publishers. Yes, search from Google still creates inbound interest, and Twitter can spark attention, especially among media types, but when it comes to sheer tonnage of eyeballs, nothing rivals Facebook.

 

“The traffic they send is astounding and it’s been great that they have made an effort to reach out and boost quality content,” said one digital publishing executive, who declined to be identified so as not to ruffle the feathers of the golden goose. “But all any of us are talking about is when the other shoe might drop.”

 

Chris Cox, chief product officer for Facebook, knows that the frightened chatter is out there, but says those worries are unfounded because the interests of Facebook and digital publishers are pretty much aligned.

 

“We are at the very beginning of a conversation and it’s very important that we get this right,” he said in a video call. “Because we play an increasingly important role in how people discover the news that they read every day, we feel a responsibility to work with publishers to come up with as good an experience as we can for consumers. And we want and need that to be a good experience for publishers as well.”

 

Facebook’s concerns seem sincere, but the relationship can be fraught. Several years ago, The Guardian and The Washington Post achieved eye-popping traffic from a Facebook news app called Social Reader. But eventually consumers rebelled against excessive notices about what their friends were reading, Facebook tweaked the algorithm, traffic fell and the plug was pulled in 2012.

 

Given the amount of leverage Facebook has, many publishers are worried that what has been a listening tour could become a telling tour, in which Facebook dictates terms because it drives so much traffic. (Amazon’s dominance in the book business comes to mind.)

 

“We’ve talked about the importance of a united front so that Facebook gets the message that this isn’t going to work, but that could change if somebody cuts a big revenue-sharing deal,” another publishing executive said.

 

It reminds me very much of those times when other digital behemoths tried to persuade content providers into letting them host the publishers’ content. In the early days, when AOL was dominant, the service preyed on the publishers’ fear that if they didn’t put their content inside the walled garden of AOL, their content would be invisible. That strategy benefited AOL in the short run, but no one prospered in the long run.

 

And I remember a visit to Google when Sergey Brin, a founder of the company, and some of his colleagues talked about how clunky most news web pages were — sound familiar? — and offered to host content with quicker load times and a revenue share. That went nowhere fast.

 

Once companies reach a certain scale online, they have a tendency to decide that while they love the Internet, they would like a better version. And, oh, by the way, they should run it. (All considered, Apple has already pulled off that trick, creating a private enclave of apps that it controls.)

 

David Bradley, who owns and leads the Atlantic Media Company, says it has an excellent relationship with Facebook and profits nicely from the traffic the site generates. But he says the next battle for control over content is a significant one, not so much mandated by Facebook as by consumer preference.

 

“Increasingly, people would rather have their news curated by friends rather than editors,” he said. “Facebook technology may create a better reader experience than publishers can match — pages that load better and better page design.”

 

He has been thinking a lot about what that means.

 

“My job is to navigate The Atlantic to continuing good relations with the platforms,” he said. “In my last trip to the Valley, the best minds were talking about the same issue: Is the coming contest between platforms and publishing companies an existential threat to journalism? At least in the Valley, largely the answer I heard was ‘Yes.’ ”

 

His candor is admirable, but his conclusion is scary. The Facebook dog is loose, and he’s acting more friendly than hungry. But everyone knows that if the dog is big enough, he can lick you to death as well.

By David Carr

 

My social media feed has taken a bloody turn in the last few weeks, and I’m hardly alone. Along with the usual Twitter wisecracking and comments on incremental news, I have seen bodies scattered across fields and hospitals in Ukraine and Gaza. I have read posts from reporters who felt threatened, horrified and revolted.

 

Geopolitics and the ubiquity of social media have made the world a smaller, seemingly gorier place. If Vietnam brought war into the living room, the last few weeks have put it at our fingertips. On our phones, news alerts full of body counts bubble into our inbox, Facebook feeds are populated by appeals for help or action on behalf of victims, while Twitter boils with up-to-the-second reporting, some by professionals and some by citizens, from scenes of disaster and chaos.

 

For most of recorded history, we have witnessed war in the rearview mirror. It took weeks and sometimes months for Mathew Brady’s, and his associates’, photos of the bloody consequences of Antietam to reach the public. And while the invention of the telegraph might have let the public know what side was in ascent, images that brought a remote war home frequently lagged.

 

By David Carr

 

Comcast has a long corporate tradition of smiling and wearing beige no matter what kind of criticisms are hurled at it. That public posture is in keeping with the low-key approach favored by Brian L. Roberts, the company’s chief executive, as he seeks to take over the world. It’s worked very well so far.

 

But in a filing submitted to the Federal Communications Commission last week in defense of its proposed merger with Time Warner Cable, the company lashed out uncharacteristically at its critics. And David L. Cohen, Comcast’s chief lobbyist, continued the salvo in comments to reporters and in his written remarks.

 

Watching Comcast’s ballistic response to opponents of its $45 billion takeover bid was a bit like watching a campaign debate go off the rails. The front-runner, ahead by 20 points, is besieged by ankle-biters who suggest he is a lout and a bully. He finally loses it and goes off on his opponents in a fury, generally acting like, well, a bully.

 

That’s one way to make a big lead go away.

 

In baring its teeth, Comcast sought to show that the companies now opposing the deal were using public interest arguments to advance private business agendas. It said these companies had privately sought $5 billion in concessions from Comcast before going public with their opposition.

 

In a thick document bristling with arguments on its own behalf, Comcast used quite a bit of ink and hot rhetoric on those who would lay it low, saying in part: “The significance of this extortion lies in not just the sheer audacity of some of the demands, but also the fact that each of the entities making the ‘ask’ has all but conceded that if its individual business interests are met, then it has no concern whatsoever about the state of the industry, supposed market power going forward, or harm to consumers, competitors, or new entrants.”

 

Gee, Comcast, don’t sugarcoat it. Say what you really mean.

 

The word extortion is usually applied to guys with names like Nicky who wear bad suits and crack their knuckles a lot. If this is how the company acts in the wooing stage, imagine how charming it will be once it actually gets what it wants.

 

The company named names, plenty of them: Netflix, for complaining about interconnection plans it freely negotiated with Comcast; Discovery, for asking for sweetheart carriage deals before its current contract is even up; and Dish, for whining about enhanced competition.

 

Its opponents were surprised by Comcast’s ferocity — and overjoyed. An air of inevitability has been hanging over the merger since it was announced in February — Comcast has a legion of allies in Washington, and a formidable advocate in Mr. Cohen — but the opposition that has built up in the ensuing months seems to have driven the company around the bend.

 

Comcast executives are offended. They genuinely believe that it will take a company of its scale and growing technological innovation to deliver the next generation of programming and data services.

 

Opponents of the merger are convinced that granting a beefed-up Comcast dominion over much of the country’s broadband would stifle innovation and tilt the field in unhealthy ways.

 

Both sides believe they hold the key to a consumer-friendly, high-functioning Internet.

 

Right.

 

What is actually going on is both more basic and more interesting. Programmers are worried that if Comcast takes over Time Warner Cable, it will have the leverage to dictate prices. Web-based services like Netflix foresee a giant that will extract significant fees for providing high-speed performance.

 

Comcast, which agreed to all manner of regulation to complete its acquisition of NBCUniversal in 2011, does not want to hand out so many bonbons to other players that the proposed merger becomes noneconomic. There is no breakup fee on the deal and Comcast could still walk, especially if it feels that a merger would lead to the regulation of broadband access as if it were a public utility.

 

Opponents are trying to enlarge the merger debate to include the broader issues of net neutrality and monopoly control, and there are signs that these efforts are gaining traction in significant places. On Sept. 4, Tom Wheeler, the chairman of the F.C.C., surprised many, including Comcast, when he said in a speech that in terms of broadband that can support streaming on multiple devices, 82 percent of Americans have only one choice in providers.

 

Regardless of motive, the issues raised in the filings are hugely important and won’t be brushed aside by bombast or counterattack.

 

From the start, Comcast has sought to frame the debate more narrowly, portraying it as the merger of two cable operators that do not compete, which is sort of true and sort of beside the point. The future, as anyone with a router could tell you, is all about broadband; a merged Time Warner Cable and Comcast would control more than 35 percent of the broadband market with easy access to far more households and would be the dominant presence in 16 of the 20 largest cities in the country.

 

Comcast is aggrieved that the people it has seen across the negotiating table — with their hands out — cocked a gun after they didn’t get what they wanted, but in terms of the public debate, Comcast is at a disadvantage.

 

From the consumer perspective, Netflix provides a wide array of programming for $8 a month, and Discovery delivers abundant reality programming along with lots of furry and furious animals. Comcast is the cable guy with the drooping pants, the one who collects money for everyone else by issuing big, fat monthly bills — and then sends much of it right back out the door to programmers.

 

A senior executive at Comcast agreed that its aggressive response was “uncharacteristic,” but said, “Enough was enough.” This executive spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

 

“The increases that these companies are looking for in exchange for not opposing the deal are exorbitant,” the executive said. “Programmers don’t expect to get called out on this stuff, but the industry is reaching a breaking point, and we needed to stand up for ourselves.”

 

It sounded sincere and very likely is, but going on the attack is probably not good strategy. Comcast has always combined its political might with restraint of tongue, a brutally effective combination that it has temporarily abandoned. In reminding the F.C.C. to scrutinize motives behind the arguments it will hear as it weighs whether to approve or challenge the deal, Comcast seemed defensive and frantic.

 

I remain unconvinced that giving Comcast a bigger footprint is good public policy, but I understand its frustration. No one, even big, powerful companies, likes being ganged up on by opponents whose own motives are open to suspicion, but their response could create more problems than it’s worth.

 

When I was young and stupid, my friends and I tried to cut through a yard full of turkeys just for the thrill of it. The turkeys surrounded us and immediately began hitting us with their wings, protesting the intrusion. My farm-raised pal cautioned me just to ignore it, but after a while I couldn’t stand it anymore and gave one a nice swift kick.

 

And that’s when the trouble really started.

By David Carr

 

For decades, cable television has been an almost magical source of profits, in large part because of the bundle, the packaging of channels that compels subscribers to buy a lot of programming they never watch.

 

Last week, that bundle seemed to be fraying on all fronts.

 

The threat was most visible on Tuesday in the Supreme Court, but before we get to those august halls, it’s worth remembering that the bundle has been a robust generator of profits in all manner of industries. Every time you order a value meal at McDonald’s, you are ordering a bundle. You, um, benefit by getting a lot of food — a container of French fries the size of your head — and McDonald’s benefits by selling you more than you really wanted.

 

My cable bill is the same way. I don’t watch Animal Planet or TruTV, but I pay for them as part of a package that includes the channels I do want.

 

The cable industry books that inefficiency as profit. It is the lucrative lifeblood of the current entertainment business. Last year, media analysts at Needham & Company estimated that $70 billion — half the total revenue in the television universe — would “evaporate” in an unbundled world, and that all but 20 channels would disappear. (It’s also important to consider that the bundle, for all its shortcomings, helps add a great deal of diversity to cable offerings.)

 

Clearly, much is at stake in the current bundling arrangement, which has some powerful backers, but a future where consumers will be able to assemble an à la carte menu of entertainment suddenly seems much closer.

 

On Tuesday, Aereo was in front of the Supreme Court with what once seemed like a preposterous notion: that a third party could grab broadcast signals through an array of antennas and serve up the programming over the Internet without paying retransmission fees. I was there, and you could see the justices struggling to balance current copyright law against the technological future. It seemed clear that if they had a bullet that would just kill Aereo and not claim innovation as collateral damage, they would.

 

By David Carr

 

Civilians, people who don’t think the toppling of a sitting American president with newspaper articles is one of humankind’s lasting achievements, will read encomiums to Ben Bradlee like this one and wonder: What’s the big deal?

 

After all, he didn’t cover the Watergate story for his Washington Post, he picked the reporters. It’s not as if he wrote the articles, he edited them. But journalists are people who will go where they are pointed, and Mr. Bradlee generally pointed to important, consequential subjects. People who worked for him went through walls to bring back those stories, some of which revealed the true course of American history and some of which altered it.

 

The newspaper business can be a grand endeavor, but most of the people who commit journalism would never be mistaken for larger than life. Journalists are bystanders who chronicle the exploits of people who actually do things.

 

But Ben Bradlee did things. He went to war, loved early and often, befriended and took on presidents, swore like a sailor, and partied like a movie star. Now that he is gone — he died on Tuesday at the age of 93 at his home in Georgetown — it is tough to imagine a newspaperman ever playing the kind of outsize role that he once did in Washington. Newspapers, and people’s regard for them, have shrunk since he ran The Post.

 

He took over an also-ran paper and turned it into a formidable fighting ship like the one on which he served in World War II. Once the newspaper he oversaw gained steam, there was only the relentless effort to beat the competition, to find and woo talent, to pursue targets that The Post deemed worthy.

 

In the more than quarter-century that he helped lead the newsroom, from 1965 to 1991, he doubled its staff and circulation, and multiplied its ambitions. He would have been a terrible newspaperman in the current context — buyouts, reduced print schedules, timidity about offending advertisers — but he was a perfect one for his time.

 

“I had a good seat,” he told The American Journalism Review in a 1995 interview. “I came along at the right time with the right job and I didn’t screw it up.”

 

Mr. Bradlee had the attention span of a gnat — anecdotes of him walking away from a conversation he ceased to find interesting were common — but he was completely hypnotized by the chase of a good story.

 

His own life and persona make for a pretty fair tale: Boston Brahmin, junior naval officer in World War II, Paris in the ’50s, friend of the Kennedys, tormentor of Nixon. He was Zelig-like in his ability to appear at critical junctures in American history.

 

I knew him in the mid-’90s, when he was vice president at large of The Post, but he was still large, still engaged, perpetually on the hunt for political gossip or newsroom intrigue. He was a decent, if relentlessly loyal, source when I covered The Post as the editor of the Washington City Paper. But even though I barely knew him, he was hilarious to bump into.

 

“I like your paper a lot,” he’d deadpan, “whenever it doesn’t have its,” insert sailor adjective, “finger in my eye.” Cue big roar of laughter, dancing eyes, deep pleasure at his own riposte.

 

Anybody who has ever watched Mr. Bradlee enter a room knows that whatever “it” is, he had a lot of it. There was the smile, a flash of white teeth matching the white collar of the custom striped shirts he wore without fail, and a voice that was a mix of gravel and gravitas that had a hearty (and generally profane) word for everybody. In a town notorious for big entrances — Bill Clinton, Marion Barry, Ronald Reagan, you name it — Mr. Bradlee tilted a room just by being himself.

 

“He was one of those people who could make you feel like a superstar just by being in the same room with him,” David Von Drehle, a longtime Post writer now at Time, told me by phone on Tuesday. “Every woman in the room wanted to be with him, and every man in the room wanted to be him.”

 

He was a durable celebrity in Washington and beyond, partly because he was the rare person who became more handsome as he grew older. A photo from just two years ago that ran with a Post piece shows a remarkably good-looking 90-plus-year-old, a patrician pirate. Few journalists could suggest that they were better looking than the movie stars who played them, as Jason Robards portrayed Mr. Bradlee in the film about Watergate, “All the President’s Men,” but Mr. Bradlee could have claimed as much. He was more Clark Gable than Clark Kent.

 

By some estimations, including his own, his most enduring accomplishment had nothing to do with the Pentagon Papers or Watergate. After he became editor of The Post, he watched with envy as The New York Herald Tribune and magazines like Esquire and Playboy were using a different vocabulary, a so-called New Journalism, to expand the ways in which stories were told.

 

So in 1969, he conjured Style, a hip, cheeky section of the newspaper that reflected the tumult of the times in a city where fashion and discourse were rived with a maddening sameness. The effect on the business was profound, as if Chuck Berry had walked into a Glenn Miller show and started playing guitar. He expanded the vernacular of newspapering, enabling real, actual writers to shed the shackles of convention and generate daily discourse that made people laugh, spill their coffee or throw The Post down in disgust.

 

He had nothing of the commoner about him, hosting and grilling much of the world’s elite at the Georgetown home he shared with Sally Quinn, a Post society reporter who became his third wife. But although he grew up in Boston, not even knowing anyone who was black, he managed to make a credible newspaper in a majority-black city. His efforts to cover the black community in deeper ways, combined with an overeager desire to believe in an unbelievable story, led to a Pulitzer Prize being returned in the Janet Cooke affair, a big blemish on a very shiny run.

 

Mr. Bradlee could be almost cartoonishly ambitious. Asked by Katharine Graham, The Post’s publisher, about his interest in the top job at the paper, he immediately replied that he would “give my left one” for the opportunity. He probably would have gotten along fine on the remaining testosterone.

 

A player of favorites and an admirer of bravado, he famously vetoed the hiring of a reporter who had already been vetted and all but hired, because “nothing clanks when he walks.”

 

Ben Bradlee clanked when he walked.