Author: Kenneth Neill

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Case for Amending the 20th Amendment

Regardless of personal politics, all of us who have endured this strangest of “lame-duck” presidential transitions can agree that this 2020 changing-of-the-guard has been among the most difficult our country has endured, perhaps ever.

The beaten Republican incumbent president has now cried “fraud!” several thousand times, continuing to demand a whole new election, long after the Supreme Court has dismissed all of his legal complaints. More importantly, Donald Trump’s refusal to provide most of the usual courtesies provided to presidents-elect has assured that this Trump-Biden transition continues to flow like glue.

We’re not finished yet, by any means. Even top White House aides are clueless as regards what exactly Trump might do between now and January 20th. We are just three weeks from Inauguration Day, in the midst of the worst pandemic in our country’s history, alongside a Russian security breach whose dimensions are still largely unknown, and we have no idea whatsoever what our 45th president will do next. This isn’t democracy; this is purgatory.

It’s too late to change things this time around, but the current nightmare must never be repeated. It’s time to shorten the period between Election Day and Inauguration Day. To do so, our elected representatives should take a close look at the 20th Amendment, and to shrink what is now a roughly 12-week transition In no other major democracy, around the world, does the outgoing leader take so long to pass the baton to his successor.

We can either amend the existing 20th Amendment, or simply create a new one, one that would be the 28th Amendment in our nation’s Constitution. I have no idea which approach is best, but that’s why God invented lawyers.

The 20th Amendment is not ancient; it was added to the U.S. Constitution in 1933. It shortened the length of time between outgoing and incoming administrations, moving up the original Inauguration Day set in The Constitution, from March 4th to January 20th, shortening the lame-duck period by roughly five weeks.

In many ways, this 1933 change (passed unanimously by all states) was simply good housekeeping. The original 1789 Constitution dated from an era when long-distance travel usually was measured in weeks. The Founding Fathers knew nothing of trains, let alone how to change planes at airport hubs.

But by 1923, when Senator George Norris of Nebraska first proposed this amendment, a lame-duck period of four months no longer made much sense, given 13 decades of travel improvements. As is customary with constitutional amendments, however, Norris’ proposal of what would become the 20th Amendment took a decade to pass muster among two-thirds of the state legislatures for it to become law. Not much has changed, has it?

Ironically, the 20th Amendment became official in January of 1933, in the middle of Herbert Hoover’s four-month lame-duck term in the White House. The Stanford-educated engineer had been roundly beaten in the November 1932 presidential election by New York Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in a bitter contest resembling our current one. Hoover had the misfortune of being president when Wall Street crashed in 1929, and despite his skills, the economy fell into deep depression over the final three years of his single term in office.

Unfortunately, Herbert Hoover was not a good loser. He never thought the Crash was his fault, and believed that FDR’s economic plans were hogwash. So for four long months, Hoover did next to nothing to prepare for a smooth presidential transition, as The Great Depression got more and more depressed.

Governor Roosevelt finally took office as president on March 4, 1933, and the rest is history. Ironically, by that date, the 20th Amendment had actually been ratified, and so when FDR was re-elected after a 1936 landslide, he took the oath of office, yes, on January 20th, 1937.

Given the snail’s pace at which potential constitutional amendments get ratified, someone needs to start the ball rolling, perhaps by offering up a first draft for a 28th Amendment that will override the existing 20th one. We can’t just sit on our hands, hoping that nothing like this 2020 transition nightmare won’t ever happen again. Prayer can only do so much.

Here, then, is one layman’s first draft of a revised 20th Amendment. You’ll note I’ve worked around the big holidays, of course, presuming Saturdays and Sundays are off-limits, especially during NFL playoff season. As a nation, after all, we do have our priorities:

1) Inauguration Day should be held on the third Thursday of December; the earliest it can be held is on the 11th of that month; the latest this can be done is on the 18th.

2) Members of the outgoing Congress must meet and report to said Congress no later than the first Thursday of December, to certify the Electoral Vote itself. The earliest that date could be is on the 1st of December, and the latest it could be is the 8th of the same month.

3) The newly-elected Congress should gather at the Capitol on the first Thursday of the New Year, no earlier than January 3rd, i.e. it can be as early as January 3rd and as late as January 8th. A State of the Union address should be given by the incoming President as expeditiously as is feasible shortly after that date.

I need not tell anyone how strange the events of this particular post-election period have been. This year’s court fights and Donald Trump’s abandonment of his day job for nearly three months have been not just toxic, but borderline suicidal in places. Our transition process must be tightened up, and shortened by what is essentially a month.

As we watch this year’s bizarre transition take place in real time, it may occasionally seem quaint, entertaining, or just plain different. Future historians will consider it just plain insanity. Flying on automatic pilot, the way we are now, risks national suicide.

Kenneth Neill is the founding publisher of the Flyer. 

Categories
Opinion The Last Word

The Long and Sad Goodbye of Lamar Alexander

CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons

Senator, this is perhaps the third time I have written to you publicly in 2020, the final year of your third term as our state’s senior senator. Like many Tennesseans, I have always considered you an excellent representative of our state, and a dedicated public servant. Unfortunately, 2020 was not America’s greatest-ever year. Nor was it yours.

I read with interest the interview you did last week with the Daily Memphian and paid close attention to your comments about Donald Trump, now the lame-duck president of these United States. This was the digital headline in the DM:

Alexander to Trump: ‘People remember the last thing you do’

That statement is certainly true, Senator, particularly when the “last thing you do” is particularly good or particularly bad. But did the thought not cross your mind that people might well remember the last things of consequence you have done as our outgoing senior senator?

Wikimedia Commons

Lamar Alexander

Many Tennesseans know exactly what’s happened during this, your last year in office. Many of us will always remember what you did and didn’t do in 2020. Indeed, last week’s Daily Memphian headline might just as well have read:

Tennesseans to Alexander: ‘People remember the last thing you do’

How ironic, sir, that you will always be remembered for what you did and did not do in 2020, the year in which you announced your retirement. Ironic, in the sense that you first became our governor in the dying days of 1978, 42 years ago, when your predecessor, Ray Blanton, was removed early from that position, on account of his awarding pardons to all kinds of scoundrels. (Apparently, Donald Trump is now doing the same kind of thing, but that’s another story for another day.)

I interviewed you in Nashville in 1979, a month or two after you took office. Clearly, you were a vast improvement over Blanton. How sad, then, after such a long and illustrious career in our state and in Washington, D.C., that you too will be remembered now for the last things you did, carrying water, time and time again, for Trump, all the while endorsing, aloud or in silence, the wretched policies of this worst president in our nation’s history.

Last January, you helped make sure that the president, under impeachment, would not be convicted in the Senate, declining to bring John Bolton forward as a witness before the Senate Chamber. And for the next 10 months, after Trump’s acquittal, you said next to nothing about this de facto mob boss in the White House, who, in 2020 alone, came close to destroying our country, ignoring the coronavirus, all while time and again challenging America’s democratic institutions.

As best I can tell, Senator, you said nothing whatsoever about Trump’s ongoing failure to deal with the pandemic. You said nothing at all about his absurd focus on golf, glitter, and Twitter. Perhaps, as chair of the Senate Health Committee, you suggested privately that Trump might meet more regularly with the Coronavirus Task Force, but if so, that suggestion was never made public. Month after month, you said and did nothing about this president’s penchant for fiddling while America burned, putting the country’s economy, its institutions, and its public-health systems through the ringer.

Last week, when you spoke to the Daily Memphian, you gave Mr. Trump advice you apparently never had given to yourself. Why did you wait until November 23rd to make that headline observation, that Trump had screwed the pooch, when such an observation might have made a real difference six months ago?

Don’t worry, many of us will always remember the last year of your last term as our senator. At least you’re retiring shortly. Perhaps you’ll have plenty of time to think about how different things could and should have been, had you used your final year in office to try to make America great again. Instead, you chose to be part of the problem, making no real attempt to be part of the solution. That’s a tragedy, for us all.

Kenneth Neill is the founder and publisher emeritus of the Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Come On, Lamar! There’s Still Time for Senator Alexander to Show Courage

It seems all so obvious now.

Last January 31st, Lamar Alexander, Tennessee’s senior senator, voted to dismiss John Bolton’s testimony at the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Had Alexander voted for presentation of further evidence, several others in the Republican Party may well have joined him. And we as a country might be in a very different place than where we are today.

Now that everyone knows the contents of Bolton’s book, The Room Where It Happened, the testimony that the former National Security Advisor was willing to give might well have tilted the Senate toward a Trump conviction, resulting in a Pence presidency.
Six months later, there is no point crying over spilt milk. But it is worth taking a moment to think about what might have been, had Donald Trump been removed from office last winter.

Lamar Alexander

The past six months under a Pence presidency would have been difficult — the pandemic could care less who’s in the White House — but perhaps he would have handled the virus’ omnipresence differently. He’s no favorite of mine, but I believe a President Pence would have approached the crisis altogether differently. He certainly would have listened more closely to the doctors. And he wouldn’t have played so much golf.

Pence would have made mistakes; after all, everyone on the front lines did at first. But he and the governors, I feel confident, would have put together a cogent federal/state pandemic plan. Having been a governor himself, he would have worked closely with others from both parties.

I also believe that a President Pence would consider hourly tweeting beneath the dignity of his new position. And he would know that his new job was way bigger than his ego, well aware of where the buck stops.

By now, President Pence’s policies might have saved 25,000 lives, maybe more. At the moment, he would be in the middle of a closely contested election race, just 77 days away. The outcome would be a toss-up at this point.

The interim President would be well liked, and so would Lamar Alexander, the man who demanded that John Bolton’s testimony be heard. The retiring Tennessee senator forever would be remembered for not letting the Bad Cat out of the impeachment bag.

Lamar Alexander was our governor for eight years in the Eighties, our senator now for the past eighteen. I don’t know a Democrat in Tennessee who hasn’t voted for him a time or three. Alexander’s public service reflects competence, dedication, and civility.

Sad, isn’t it, then, that his distinguished Senate career is ending on an ambiguous note. Sad that all but one GOP senator chose to ignore evidence of the President’s criminal behavior regarding the Ukraine. Shortly after his acquittal, Donald Trump rode a victory lap in his limo at the Daytona 500, and the rest is history. Real history, unfortunately, not what-might-have-been.

Things have gone from bad to worst this past week, with President Trump’s blatant attempt to disrupt the USPS so completely in the weeks and months ahead as to make voting by mail well nigh impossible. This President’s bald attempt to steal the 2020 presidential election goes far beyond what any of his 44 predecessors had ever contemplated. Most contemporary American historians now speak with one voice, already calling Trump’s blatant power grab one of the darkest political gambits in our country’s history.

Here’s how I think our state’s senior senator could achieve a degree of redemption for his January vote. Lamar Alexander could recover much of the integrity for which he has always been admired, if he simply announced his retirement now, rather than waiting until January 2021, and by just stating the obvious: “I have lost confidence in Mr. Trump’s ability to govern these United States.”

He need not say another word; let others whose political futures are in the balance slice and dice Donald Trump’s decidedly dangerous behavior. I believe a one-sentence resignation would be well-received by most Americans, a large percentage of whom remain terrified by this human loose cannon, still rolling around in the White House.

It’s a small gesture, but perhaps Senator Alexander’s resignation would inspire others in his party to stand up to the President’s blatant attempt to meddle with our country’s electoral process. We find ourselves now in a very dark place; our retiring senator has a genuine opportunity to make things inside that place a little bit brighter.

Kenneth Neill is publisher emeritus of the Memphis Flyer, which he helped launch in 1989.

Categories
Politics Politics Beat Blog

“At Least One Republican Knows What He’s Talking About”

Ohio Governor John Kasich

Last night’s Republican Presidential debate was remarkable in that the CNN “moderators” did significantly less moderating than the kindly referee who “officiated” my 7-year-old grandson’s basketball game last Saturday (IC vs St. Louis), in which dribbling was considered optional, fouls were basically non-existent, and the small boys (whose equally small hands could only occasionally hold the basketball) ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. My grandson is certainly not the next Kobe Bryant (who played his last Memphis game here Wednesday night), but Ben had great fun running up and down the court, to no obvious purpose.

It occurred to me last night that this was exactly what the Republican Presidential Debate in Houston was all about. There was no kindly referee who recognized the participants’ flaws, no method in the madness. To mix metaphors shamelessly, it was all sound and fury signifying nothing.

The worst part was that the misguided morons running this CNN “debate” utterly ignored Dr. Ben Carson and 

Kenneth Neill

Gov. John Kasich. I confess that I have not been watching this particular circus closely over the past six (or is it nine?) ridiculous months. But now I’m paying attention; it is after all the actual year of the election. So why in the world would you have a debate with five candidates without carving five relatively equal chunks of time for each of them to speak?

In Carson’s case, his getting less face time was probably both an act of kindness and a relief to the candidate himself. To me, Dr. Carson always looks like he’s smoked a joint or two before the event to settle his nerves. I am not suggesting for a moment that the Doctor is a Dead Head. But one can have much bigger character flaws than that habit, a fact which all but one of the other “candidates” certainly demonstrate on a daily basis, and reaffirmed, big-time, last night, over two excruciating hours.

The one exception was/is Governor Kasich, an “establishment” guy to be sure, but one who last night, on the rare occasions he got to speak, seemed to know what he was talking about, to have experience doing what he talks about, and to have the sense to talk about the things he’s going to do, all of which in this 2016 Republican race passes for uncommon brilliance. But like Rodney Dangerfield, Kasich gets no respect. None whatsoever, none from Wolf Blitzer, and even less from the pea-brains who surround him.

Nevertheless, Kasich persevered last night when he could, at one point even jumping on a question that Blitzer had just handed on a plate to King Trump. As a noble royal should, the Donald quietly sat back and let the Ohio Governor speak his piece without interruption and nary a snide remark. Note that Kasich is the only one Trump never trashes, not out of politeness, of course, and not entirely because (at this point and maybe forever) Kasich is a single-digit non-factor. No, at least part of Trump’s civility towards the Ohio governor is this: the Donald’s real enemy (and he knows it) is logic. He knows he can fool all of the people some of the time; he can fool some of the people all of the time, but he can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Those are Abraham Lincoln’s words, of course, not mine, but they seem appropriate re. Donald Trump. He knows he’s in a race against time, he’s in a way better position than anyone else, and his superb jungle instinct tells him not to mess with that weird critter over there in the corner, the one who might blow his cover, until/unless it’s necessary. Fear of the unknown still retains a place in the jungle hierarchy, even at the best of times for predators.

Obviously, none of this does Kasich any good at the moment. But for the record, tonight at 5:30 p.m., you’ll find me at the Holiday Inn University on Central, where, yes, the Governor is appearing. Not sure if you need a reservation, but i kind of doubt the lines will be out into the street. There will be lines for certain in Millington Saturday night, where the Sweet Prince of New York City will be appearing. And that will be a real occasion.

So, I suspect, will be Kasich’s event this evening, on a decidedly more modest scale. I’ll listen tomorrow evening with relief to a Republican candidate presenting intelligent discourse on the issues, not all of which, of course, i will remotely agree with. But this will sure beat another night screaming at Wolf Blitzer on the television screen.

And if i possibly can, tonight I am going to shake Governor’s Kasich’s hand, and tell him (as a lifelong Democrat who’s unlikely to vote for him in November) that I came to the Holiday Inn just to listen to him for longer than 3.45 minutes. And, selfishly, I also want to be able to tell my great-grandchildren that once I had the pleasure of meeting perhaps the last sentient being ever to run for the Republican Presidential nomination.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Damned Statistics

Rather than shop, I spent a rainy Black Friday at home catching up on my reading and came across an intriguing editorial in that day’s New York Times. Titled “False Alarms About a National Crime Wave,” the Times‘ editorial board provided detailed statistics indicating that, far from escalating, the trend in violent crime in America is in fact receding dramatically.

The Times article called the long-term trend “unmistakable,” adding that “the rate of violent crime, including murder, has been going down for a quarter-century, and is at its lowest in decades. On average, it is half of what it was in 1990, and in some places even lower.”

As a long-time resident of Memphis, a city that’s unfortunately known for its high crime rates, these observations piqued my interest, and sent me off into the ether to check out the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports. It’s a simple task; they’re found at: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/. The reports date back to 1930, although the oldest one online is from 1995.

I decided to do a two-decade comparison. Despite what critics sometimes say, the FBI’s numbers do seem quite “uniform” for every metro area in the country, comparing as they do apples to apples in a dozen well-defined crime categories. So I pulled up the detailed numbers for the Memphis metro area in 1995 and compared them with the same numbers 18 years later — in 2013 — the latest full year for which FBI statistics are available.

Those numbers speak volumes about what’s actually been happening here, suggesting that there’s something of a silver lining to our local crime cloud. Here are a few of the most interesting statistics:

• The Memphis Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) had a population of 1,072,051 in 1995; in 2013 there were 1,347,803 of us. That’s a 26 percent increase.

• Despite the fact that we had 26 percent more people in 2013 than 1995, the total number of violent crimes committed annually remained just about the same over this 18-year period: 13,432 in 1995, 13,389 in 2013.

• The murder rate in the Memphis MSA declined by 35 percent, from 214 in 1995 to 139 in 2013. Rapes declined similarly, from 937 in 1995 to 617 in 2013.

• Property crimes dropped 24 percent, from 74,042 (1995) to 56,471 (2013), while motor-vehicle theft fell from 16,263 (1995) to 3,517 (2013), a remarkable 78-percent decline. 

These numbers suggest, pretty convincingly, that Memphis today is in fact a safer place than the Memphis of the mid-1990s. More importantly, this downward trend has occurred all while our metro-area population has grown over 26 percent over the past two decades. Even in our “worst” categories, the crime stats for our now-more-populous area have stayed roughly the same, in raw-number terms.

Now let’s face it: Memphis’ crime numbers, like those of similarly poor Southern cities, are still pretty miserable, overall, when compared to more prosperous places like Boston or Seattle, cities whose murder rates, for example, are one-fourth of ours. But there seems to be no question that we are a decidedly safer place than we used to be. And while it certainly is premature to declare victory in the war against crime, we should not ignore the fact that the overall trend in regard to crime in the Mid-South is positive, not negative.

Mark Twain once said there are three kinds of lies: “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But sometimes statistics, however drab, represent indisputable facts. In 1995, the Memphis metro area endured 214 murders; in 2013, we had “only” 138. Of course, a single murder any year in Memphis is one murder too many. But does a 35 percent drop in your city’s murder rate indicate that the city is being engulfed by an all-new tidal wave of local crime?

I think not. As a community, we should start by remembering to allow our discussions about crime to be guided as much as possible by factual information, not by uninformed opinion that occasionally borders on hysteria. Blind hogs may get lucky occasionally, but they rarely find acorns.

Kenneth Neill is the Publisher/CEO of Contemporary Media, Inc., the parent company of The Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Letter From The Editor Opinion

Letter from the Editor

Suppose they gave an election and nobody showed up?  

“Suppose they gave a war and nobody showed up” was a common slogan on anti-war posters during the Vietnam War era. Flash forward 40-plus years, substitute the word “election” for “war,” and you’d get a pretty good description of what actually happened last May in the Shelby County’s primary elections, when nine out of 10 of us decided to vote with our feet, or more correctly, with our butts. 

Voter apathy here has long been appalling and lurches from bad to worse with each successive election. Last year’s city mayor’s race, for example, only attracted 18 percent of the potential electorate — half of what it was two decades earlier. This May’s Shelby County turnout was a remarkably low 8 percent, probably some kind of national record. Writing shortly after Eric Cantor lost his House seat in a primary race in June when only a fraction of the electorate showed up, Charles Blow of the New York Times asked: “What does it say about America as a society … when so many sit at home, and allow the voices of so few to carry so much weight?”

We do know what it says about Memphis. “You snooze, you lose” should be our communal bumper sticker, as we enter this August election cycle (early voting begins July 18th), when not only county and state positions will be decided (along with party representatives for federal office), but also, more importantly, each and every judiciary position in Shelby County. You may think it’s meaningless who gets to sit on our county commission or school board, but if you think the quality of the people who run our criminal and civil courts is unimportant, then you clearly are living on another planet. 

That’s why, beginning this week, the Flyer will be publishing in full-page form the results of the Memphis Bar Association’s membership Judicial Qualification Poll (see page 18). We will do so again in every issue of this newspaper until election day on August 7th. It’s our hope that by doing this, we will help inform Shelby County voters as to how the 87 lawyers who are candidates for judicial office in this upcoming election are regarded by their peers in the Memphis Bar. 

This is no ordinary election; we will be choosing the judges who will run our local and state courts for the next eight years. For better or worse, I suspect a majority of our readers will have some contact with at least one of these judges at some point during that period. To play no role in deciding who those judges might be is the height of folly.

Keep in mind that the publication of this poll in no way suggests any kind for endorsement of its results. As regular readers know, the Flyer has long declined to endorse candidates in local elections. (Check out “Why We Don’t Endorse” at memphisflyer.com.)

But this non-endorsement policy in no way suggests that we don’t care about election results or the level of participation in our elections. Letting so few among us decide so much is one of the greatest threats to our collective future. “Knowledge is power,” as Francis Bacon famously said long ago, so we applaud the Memphis Bar Association for providing the public with the results of their membership poll. A well-informed potential voter is far more likely than one who is uninformed to show up at the polling place.

Kenneth Neill is the publisher of Contemporary Media, parent company of the Flyer.

Bruce VanWyngarden is on vacation this week.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Double Play

When I grew up in Boston, a long time ago, there were two real franchises in town. Only one of them involved sports, that one being the Boston Red Sox.  The other franchise wasn’t a sports team at all but a newspaper. Not just any newspaper; The Boston Globe back then was one of America’s best. As a teenager, I got on my bike every morning and delivered copies to about 50 homes in my neighborhood. Then I read every page over breakfast. To this day, I consider The Boston Globe the cornerstone of my education.

My day usually started with the sports section, especially during baseball season. This past weekend, then, was a big deal for me, when word trickled out that these two preeminent institutions from my childhood would be getting married, so to speak. It’s something of a shotgun wedding, though, since Red Sox owner John Henry has convinced The New York Times Company to let him take the Globe off its hands for the not-so-princely sum of $70 million. 

Back in 1993, the Times purchased the Globe from the Taylor family, its longtime owners, for $1.1 billion. John Henry acquired the paper for 6.8 percent of that amount. The purchase price pretty closely matches the appraised value of the Globe‘s extensive real-estate holdings in downtown Boston. The actual newspaper, evidently, was just a throw-in. 

The news reports about this fire sale, of course, have focused largely upon its “How the mighty have fallen!” aspects. But perhaps it’s worth looking at this particular deal through the other end of the spyglass. Has the Globe lost 93 percent of its value over the past 20 years, or is the real issue the fact that its valuation in 1993 was patently absurd?

I lean toward the second interpretation. In the early 1990s, morning daily newspapers enjoyed de facto media monopolies in most major markets. Afternoon dailies had gone the way of the dodo in the wake of the Television Revolution, so owning one of these monopoly dailies — or one of a couple of mega-dailies in larger cities like Boston — was a license to print money. Profit margins were obscene, as advertisers felt obliged to pay extortionist ad rates in order to reach potential customers in their urban markets. But while their stock prices were soaring, daily-newspaper moguls were not paying attention to how their markets were changing before their eyes.

Long before the internet ever became a factor, all kinds of alternative publications (like this one, founded in 1989) were springing up in cities across America. Readers weren’t content with one newspaper giving them all their news; local businesses didn’t want all their advertising dollars held hostage by a monopoly daily. And long before print started “dying,” the writing was already on the wall for those who thought their golden geese would never stop laying eggs. The coming of the web was never the sole cause of daily newspapers’ decline; it was simply part and parcel of the destruction of these monopolies that had already begun.

Today, a hundred flowers bloom in the media gardens of urban America. There are still, mind you, many viable (if not exorbitantly profitable) dailies that do quality work, but there are also local business publications, weekly news journals, city magazines, and niche publications of every shape and size, catering locally to seniors, to parents, to wine lovers, on and on. And the really good news is that just about all of us in this business are now fully ambidextrous, doing good work online and in print with equal felicity.

The smart (and lucky) ones among us make ends meet. We’ll never get rich, and we’ll never be Wall Street’s darlings. But we do the jobs we set out to do, provide decent livings for the people who do it, and have fun in the process. We are now, well, community franchises ourselves.

Meanwhile, has anyone ever wondered whether modern sports franchises just might be today’s version of the overvalued daily-newspaper dinosaurs of the 1990s? On Tuesday, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos plunked down $250 million to purchase The Washington Post, buying “America’s newspaper” for the near-equivalent of the 11-year contract the Los Angeles Angels gave last year to all-star first baseman Albert Pujols.

Pujols or the Post? Ask yourself who’s more valuable. Right now, it’s not even close, since Pujols is injured and out for the rest of the season. Maybe the Angels should consider trading him and a couple of draft picks for the Orange County Register.

Kenneth Neill is the publisher and founder of the Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

A Line in the Sand

For those with feeble memories (count me in), you may recall that our country for a full decade actually had a federal assault weapons ban on the books. It was passed in 1994 — just before the Gingrich “Republican wave” mid-term elections.

But with the post-9/11 political climate, the radicalization of the Republican Party, and the enormous lobbying clout of the NRA, its renewal was never an issue. In fact, new legislation never came to a vote. The ban simply expired at midnight on September 13, 2004, not with a bang, but a whimper.

 Had such an assault weapons ban still been in place today, of course, Jared Lee Loughner would have had trouble getting his hands on the particular weapon of destruction he chose for his “mission,” the one that allowed him to transform his own role from that of delusional lone assassin (e.g., James Earl Ray) into that of a delusional mass-murderer. The 33-round extended magazine installed in his 9-mm Glock pistol would have been banned had the 1994-2004 law been extended. 

 Since the expiration of the assault weapons ban, several attempts have been made to renew the legislation, most recently in 2008 in a House bill sponsored by Mark Kirk, Illinois’ new Democratic senator. It died in committee.

Such a ban will probably never get through this new House, either, given how few moderate Republicans are left, or even through the theoretically Democratic Senate, given how much loot flows into the campaign coffers of both Democratic and Republican members from the National Rifle Association. Even Congresswoman Gabby Giffords — just like former Ronald Reagan aide Jim Brady, before he was shot — was given to supporting the NRA.

 President Barack Obama up to now has been peculiarly ambivalent on the subject. Shortly after his election, the new administration put “making the expired federal assault weapons ban permanent” on its to-do list. But in April 2009, the president stated that he would not push for reinstatement of the ban, though he said at the time he believed it “makes sense.”  

 Assuming he still thinks a ban is sensible, will Obama use the catalyst of the Tucson tragedy to put the matter front and center again or simply leave the ban on the back burner, so as not to put his congressional colleagues in hot water with the NRA? Will he make a renewal of the ban a priority and say as much in next week’s State of the Union address? 

 I confess to having a hard time understanding why the president would not make this a major 2011 political issue, not only because it’s the morally right thing to do (sorry, you don’t need a 33-bullet magazine to hunt deer), but also because pushing for a new assault weapons ban presents him with a political opportunity of the first order. Sure, he’ll find himself in the NRA’s “crosshairs” (as if he isn’t there already), and the chance of any ban with teeth getting through the new Republican House is probably slim to none.

 But if he speaks out next week, Obama would be making a powerful statement. He would capitalize upon the overwhelming public support for such a ban that exists outside the America consisting of FoxNews viewers. He would be (some would say, finally) galvanizing his political base on an issue that enjoys near universal support among those who pushed and shoved him into the White House in 2008. And he would play a powerful domestic security card as well, i.e., “I’m the guy who wants to keep your 9-year-old daughter from getting randomly killed.”

Speaking out on the issue would put the ball squarely back in the Republicans’ court, requiring members of Congress and the NRA to blow cover and explain to the American people why they think everybody should have the right to own their own assault weapon — or three.

 Needless to say, I hope the president draws a line in the sand on this issue next week. I want to see no more Tucsons in my lifetime. And I want to make sure that my own grandchildren can attend Congressman Steve Cohen’s public meetings without wearing bullet-proof vests.

Kenneth Neill is the publisher and founder of the Memphis Flyer.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Our Changing Times

Confession, they say, is good for the soul. Since we’re likely to be
outed anyway by long-time readers, here’s the deal: This week’s
Flyer doesn’t exactly coincide with the newspaper’s
actual 20th anniversary. Nope, the first-ever issue of this newspaper
didn’t hit the streets in November 1989, but nine months earlier, on
February 15th.

Alas, February 2009 did not seem a particularly good time for a
20-year celebration. The economy was in the toilet, and our spirits
weren’t far behind. So we postponed our 20th anniversary issue until
this Thanksgiving season, when things might be better and when,
hopefully, we’d have a lot to be thankful for.

Happily, here we are today, ready for the turkey and dressing. We’re
especially thankful for the continued support the Flyer has
received, week in and week out, in the midst of this recession, from
the local business community. Our revenues may be down a bit, but the
number of advertisers we have each week in the Flyer has
remained constant.

That’s great news, of course, but nowhere near as exciting as the
fact that you — yes, you, dear reader — still find what we
do in these pages worth finding a rack and picking up a copy of the
paper. Every Wednesday, we distribute over 50,000 copies of the
Flyer to nearly 700 locations throughout the Memphis
metropolitan area. In theory, our drivers could return to those
drop-off points the following Wednesday and have to take away many of
those 50,000 papers, unread and untouched.

But they don’t. In fact, when our drivers do show up that next week,
they usually go home empty-handed. At a time when daily newspaper
circulation across the country is sinking like a stone, the
Flyer‘s weekly circulation remains relentlessly solid. We put
out exactly as many papers this week as we did 10 years ago. More
importantly, we have just as many (96 percent on average) picked up by
our readers now as we did then.

We like to think that these pick-up rates — and our strong
local advertising support — speak volumes about the continued
community relevance of this newspaper. As we said in our first press
release, way back in January 1989, the Memphis Flyer was created
“to enlighten, inform and entertain the people of Memphis.” I like to
think we’ve been true to that mission over the past two decades.

The years ahead, however, are going to be decidedly different for
everyone in our line of work. Most Memphians, of course, now go online
every day, catching up with breaking news and keeping up with their
favorite websites. As their reading habits change, we’ve needed to
change our approach.

At the Flyer, we have transformed our own news-delivery
systems as dramatically as anybody in town. Memphisflyer.com is now one of the
city’s premier websites. With a “Daily Buzz” homepage that includes
frequent postings, staff blogs that cover everything from Grizzlies
basketball to local theater to hard-core politics, and the best event
listings in town, the Flyer‘s community footprint has grown
significantly over the past five years, as our collective voice has
become considerably stronger.

As for the print edition of the Flyer, we understand the
differences between yesterday and today; people are reading newspapers
differently, more reflectively, than ever before. But as the Internet
Revolution proceeds, our weekly print frequency seems ever more ideal
for the delivery of a comprehensive local news and entertainment
package. Our readers count on the weekly Flyer to present a
snapshot of the local landscape, to bring information together in one
place, in a tabloid that can be read at one’s leisure.

Print still remains an exceptional way to expand one’s cultural
horizons, to discover the new, fresh, and different. That’s why saying
that the web will replace newspapers is like saying that television
will replace movies, that automobiles will replace bicycles, that iPods
will replace live concerts. Things will change, but what’s valuable
will remain.

Online and in print, the Flyer staff intends to keep its
finger on the pulse of this city. Free-distribution weekly newspapers
can peacefully co-exist with sophisticated news websites, and in our
case, the two can be one and the same, operating seamlessly alongside
each other. We think it’s a great fit.

Thanks for reading us, wherever you do so, and thanks again for your
support.

Categories
Special Sections

Letter from the Publisher

1 January 2009

Dear FOF (Friend of the Flyer): 

Whatever “shock and awe” 2009 has in store for us, this particular new year will have a tough act to follow. On the plus side, 2008 brought us a national election with a truly historic result, the election of the country’s first African-American president. On the not-so-plus side, 2008 also brought a fair amount of calamity, particularly these last four months, when we were taken to the cleaners, financially, as a nation. It’s been a long time since so many Memphis families have found themselves facing a new year with as much fiscal uncertainty as is facing them now.

2009 was on course to be a special year for the Flyer even before all this recent commotion, for we mark our 20th anniversary of publication with the new year. That’s a long time in any business, and we’re mighty grateful, to you our readers, for letting us enlighten, aggravate, and entertain you for two decades now. We couldn’t and wouldn’t be here without you.

Nor would we have survived half this long without the support of the thousands of local businesses who use the Flyer to reach out to Memphis, recognizing that the 50,000-plus papers we put out on the street every week represent an ideal opportunity for them to deliver messages to their customers in cost-efficient fashion. As a free publication that’s 100 percent dependent upon advertiser support, we really wouldn’t be here without local business owners who believe they can and should put their money where our mouth is.

And while, over the years, we have on occasion written things that have irritated those businesses, I like to think that we have a nice synergy going with them. After all, like most of our advertisers, the Flyer is itself “relentlessly local,” from top to bottom, in every facet of its business. Not everyone is aware of the fact that the publisher of the Flyer, Contemporary Media, Inc., is Memphis’ largest locally owned media company, or that that company has as its primary mission the publishing of the Mid-South region’s highest-quality journalistic products. We may not make millions for Wall Street investors, but I like to think that the scores of national journalism awards that line our lobby walls speak volumes about how well our editorial staff has accomplished that mission.

 

In these dodgy economic times, one hears more and more about how newspapers are dying. I’d be lying if I said that 2008 was a terrific business year for the Flyer, but I must confess, when I see these kind of reports, I feel a bit like Mark Twain, who, when he read his own obituary (in a newspaper, mind you) replied that “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

Whatever becomes of other publications in town, the Flyer isn’t going anywhere. Across the country, daily newspapers have indeed suffered dramatic circulation declines. But happily, here in Memphis, weekly distribution levels at our 700-plus local locations remain at historic levels, with pick-up rates holding steady at

95 percent. As long as we continue to deliver these kinds of numbers, we’re confident that our advertisers will continue to find the Flyer a cost-effective way to reach Memphis’ “best and brightest” with their advertising messages.

We may be proud of what we’ve achieved, but we aren’t so blind as to think that the Flyer brand can still exist in print alone. In this day and age of instant informational access, memphisflyer.com remains an integral part of our journalistic package, a first-class website that delivers breaking local news and offers a whole range of innovative marketing opportunities for our customers. Our print and on-line products go hand in hand; in fact, one can no longer exist without the other. To that end, we’ll be rolling out an all-new web package later this month. I think you’ll be very pleased with our staff’s efforts.

As we commence our 20th anniversary year, we like to think we’re changing with the times, as we always have. We’ve come a long way by being innovative, bold, and sassy; don’t look for us to stop anytime soon.

All the best,

Kenneth Neill

Publisher/CEO