A New Horizon for the News - The New York Review of Books

Volume 56, Number 14 · September 24, 2009

By Michael Massing

The American news business today finds itself trapped in a grim paradox. Financially, its prospects have never seemed bleaker. By some measures, the first quarter of 2009 was the worst ever for newspapers, with sales plunging $2.6 billion. Last year, circulation dropped on average by 4.6 percent on weekdays and 4.8 percent on Sundays. Earlier this year, Detroit's two daily papers reduced home delivery to three days a week, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ended its print edition, and the Rocky Mountain News shut down altogether. This summer, The Boston Globe, which is losing more than $50 million a year, survived only by giving in to the draconian cutbacks demanded by its owner, the New York Times Company, while the Times itself, weighed down by the Globe, had to take out a $250 million loan from Carlos Slim Helú, Mexico's richest man, at a junk-bond-level interest rate of 14 percent a year.

Yet amid all this gloom, statistics from the Internet suggest that interest in news has rarely been greater. According to one survey, Internet users in 2008 spent fifty-three minutes a week reading newspapers online, up from forty-one minutes in 2007. And the traffic at the top fifty news Web sites increased by 27 percent. While this growth cut across all age groups, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism found, "it was fueled in particular by young people." The MTV generation, known for its indifference to news, has given way to the Obama generation, which craves it, and for an industry long reconciled to the idea of its customers dying off, the reengagement of America's young offers a rare ray of hope.

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How could the financial fortunes of a $50 billion–plus industry decline so swiftly while its product remains so prized? The most immediate explanation is the collapse of what has long been the industry's economic base: advertising. The traditional three staples of newspaper advertising—automotive, employment, and real estate—have all drastically declined, thanks to Craigslist, eBay, the travails of Detroit, and the consolidation of department stores (resulting in fewer retail ad pages). Meanwhile, the steady expansion of space on the Internet has caused online ad rates to crash, and these are not expected to recover even when the economy as a whole does.

The fall-off in ad revenues has been compounded by another phenomenon that newspaper executives would rather not discuss: their own greed. The relentless stress placed on acquisition and consolidation, which dominated the industry for decades, helped drain money out of newsrooms and into the pockets of shareholders. It also shifted the locus of decision-making from locally based citizens to distant corporate boards. Most harmful of all, efforts to build large media conglomerates have saddled newspaper companies with astounding levels of debt, much of it taken on to buy other newspaper companies. The Tribune Company has been in bankruptcy court since October, wrestling with the fallout from Sam Zell's highly leveraged purchase of Times Mirror, while McClatchy Newspapers, having paid top dollar for the Knight Ridder chain, has been selling off papers to keep its creditors at bay.

When it comes to mismanagement, then, the newspaper business seems in a class with Detroit. Unlike GM, though, newspapers offer a product that consumers still value. But how to cash in on it? As the old business models fade, new ones are urgently being tested. Surveying the blackened landscape, I searched for new buds—and stumbled upon something much larger.

1.

In April, The Christian Science Monitor became the first nationally circulated newspaper to end its daily print edition and concentrate on the Web. Having lost nearly $20 million in 2008, the paper wanted to shed the onerous costs associated with printing and delivery. (It still prints a weekly edition.) Some observers saw this as a harbinger for the industry, the start of a mass migration from print to digital. A look at the numbers, however, suggests otherwise. For all the growth in visitor traffic to newspaper Web sites, most online readers don't linger there. According to one study, of all the time readers spend with a newspaper, 96 percent of it is spent on print editions and barely more than 3 percent on the Web. Similarly, of the $38.5 billion spent on newspaper ads in 2008, just $3 billion was spent on the Web. With numbers like these, print is not going away anytime soon.

For publishers, the key is to find a way to maximize revenues from print and the Web. And here a great sea change is occurring. Since the late 1990s, when the first news sites were introduced on the Internet, most papers have offered untrammeled access to them. "Information wants to be free," the digirati proclaimed, and publishers dutifully went along. And for a while, that strategy paid off: as traffic grew, ad revenues did, too. With the steady fall-off of advertising since 2006, however, the free-for-all philosophy has lost its appeal.

Adding to the disillusionment is the growing recognition of the part that free access to the Web has played in the hemorrhaging of circulation. "When we look at why people quit buying the newspaper, it's overwhelmingly because 'I can get it for free online,'" William Dean Singleton, the CEO of MediaNews Group, the nation's fourth-largest newspaper company, recently said. Whenever the Times's Bill Keller and other top editors speak in public, they invariably encounter readers who, expressing amazement at being able to read the paper online for free, plead for ways to donate to it. In 2002, The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette started charging for online content. While it has signed up only 3,400 subscribers, the circulation of its daily print edition has held steady at around 180,000 at a time when that of most other papers has fallen, and its owner, Walter Hussman Jr., has traveled around the country describing how charging for Web content can help stop the bleeding.

Publishers are taking heed. In the next year, many are expected to erect "pay walls"—i.e., charges for access—around their sites. The challenge is getting the height right. Receiving the most attention are "hybrid" models that, part pay and part free, seek to gain subscribers while maintaining a steady flow of online readers.

There are two main models. The Financial Times uses a "meter," or quota, approach. Visitors to FT.com are allowed access to a few free articles a month; to get more, they have to subscribe. This has netted the FT 117,000 subscribers paying up to $299 a year. Affluent and educated, those readers are very attractive to advertisers and so generate considerable ad revenue as well.

The Wall Street Journal' s policy is much less restrictive. Visitors to WSJ .com are allowed free access to all articles about politics, culture, and other general-interest topics. Only those seeking entry to the Journal's business and finance reports must pay. Soon after Rupert Murdoch bought the Journal, in 2007, he announced that, to draw traffic to its Web site, he was going to make access to it completely free, but, seeing the softness of the ad market, he quickly reconsidered, and reports on business and finance have remained behind a pay wall. Today, WSJ.com has 1.1 million subscribers paying $100 to $140 a year. And with the number of unique visitors to the site surpassing 12 million in April, traffic remains brisk. As Murdoch recently acknowledged, the Journal's digital revenues "are not a gold mine," but, he added, "People reading news for free on the Web, that's got to change." In recent weeks, executives at Murdoch's News Corp. have been meeting with other publishers about forming a consortium to charge for news delivered online.

Such moves rankle advocates of free access to the Internet. Among the most vocal is Arianna Huffington, the cofounder and editor in chief of the popular Internet news-and-blog site The Huffington Post. "Walled gardens," she insists, don't work; the "link economy" is here to stay. (Free links, it must be noted, are vital to The Huffington Post's health.) As evidence that pay walls don't work, Huffington and others point to TimesSelect. Introduced by The New York Times in September 2005, it placed the paper's columnists behind a pay wall and charged online readers $49.95 a year for admission. Two years later, the Times, concerned by the fall-off in traffic, reinstated its free-for-all policy.

Even that limited test, however, attracted 220,000-plus paying subscribers. If the Times were to place even more, or different, content behind a pay wall and find the right entrance fee, it would no doubt gain many more. For months, the paper's executives have been studying various pay options, and they plan to offer one or more in the fall.

A lot will be riding on what they decide. Aside from being the nation's top newspaper, the Times has devoted far more money and manpower to its digital edition than any other paper. At its Midtown office, teams of cybergeeks, futurists, and "creative technologists" have worked feverishly to combine traditional journalistic practices with the protean powers of the Web. Their imprint is apparent in the welter of videos, multiband graphs, sumptuous pie charts, slide shows, and time lines at NYTimes .com. Now, in addition to reading Nicholas Kristof's descriptions of malnutrition in Africa, you can watch a video of him interviewing some of the victims. On an interactive photo feature titled "Casualties of War," a click on a montage of photos of soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan summons up mini-profiles of each. A "word train" offers a snapshot of what's on reader's minds by displaying in varying type sizes the adjectives they send in based on the frequency of their mention.

There are blogs galore—Andrew Revkin on the environment, Paul Krugman on the economy, Errol Morris on whatever's on his mind—plus leisurely features like "One in 8 Million," an audio slide show about ordinary New Yorkers (linked to a regular feature in the print edition), and "The Puppy Diaries," managing editor Jill Abramson's weekly musings on her new pet.

For an institution long known as the "Gray Lady," it's a dazzling mix. But is it on the right track? Lionel Barber, the editor of the Financial Times, told me:

The prerequisite for establishing a pay-for-content model is good content—must-read content. It's extremely important in the modern news business to be clear on what your comparative advantage is. If you want to be everything to everybody and spread your resources too thin, you're going to get into trouble.

The FT's comparative advantage, he added, "is business and financial." The New York Times's advantage, he argues, is its "global network" and its "deep and original reporting." While some observers maintain that the FT and The Wall Street Journal are uniquely able to charge for content because the information they offer is so valuable to businessmen, Barber believes that a high-quality general-interest paper like The New York Times can charge as well.

(The FT, by the way, has introduced a number of specialized services, like "China Confidential," which offer inside information on high-value subjects to readers willing to pay a premium. This points to another potentially lucrative revenue source for news organizations.)

The Times site does offer much excellent content. Too often, though, it seems overwhelmed by gadgets and gizmos, features and fluff. Technologically in a class by itself, the paper has seemed less adept at grasping the Web's potential to spotlight issues and stir debate. This summer, for instance, the blogosphere lit up over "The Great American Bubble Machine," Matt Taibbi's provocative Rolling Stone article about the political and financial power of Goldman Sachs. On the few occasions on which the Times took note of the story, it was with Olympian disdain. Imagine the stir it would have created had it hosted a Web forum on the piece under a headline like "Is Goldman Sachs a Bubble Machine?" In the long run, such features would, I think, draw far more traffic than word trains or puppy diaries.

Still, the Times seems likely to attract many readers even after it begins charging for content. In view of its unique place in American journalism, it seems certain to weather the current crisis. The same seems true of America's other nationally read papers, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. (The Los Angeles Times might be able to join them if it is able to find ways to exploit its own comparative advantage—coverage of the entertainment industry.) Many of the nation's smaller papers have their own advantage—they're the only news source in town—and many are thriving. It's the large metropolitan dailies like The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, and The Miami Herald that, contending with both large staffs and brisk competition, are the most endangered, and it's widely feared that one or more will go under in the coming years.

Such a development would be catastrophic for the public. As gatherers and purveyors of information, newspapers are without peers, and the retrenchment they're undergoing is seriously eroding their ability to enlighten and expose. At the same time, the industry's travails are serving as a stimulus. A restless array of entrepreneurs, innovators, and idealists—taking advantage of the Internet's low entry barriers—has emerged, testing new ways of delivering the news. Are any succeeding?

2.

So far, the attention paid to new Web ventures has focused mainly on the for-profit sector. Most of these sites are pursuing roughly the same strategy—building sufficient Web traffic to attract advertisers. And most are after the same market—the 25 million or so affluent, educated Americans who roughly overlap with the audience for NPR. Three of these enterprises in particular seem to be making a go of it. One is Slate. Founded in 1996 with the help of Microsoft, it initially struggled, but since being purchased by the Washington Post Company, in 2004, it has generally been profitable. Deriving 95 percent of its revenue from ads, Slate owes its success both to the Post's backing and to its own journalistic formula—sharply written contrarian pieces offered for free on its site and promoted with clever headlines (for example, "Where Are the Jewish Gangsters of Yesteryear? Or, what we can learn about 'respectability' from Bernie Madoff and Meyer Lansky"). In an effort to replicate Slate's success, the Post in 2008 created the Slate Group, and since then it has introduced several spin-offs, including The Root (African- American affairs), The Big Money (business), and ForeignPolicy.com.

The online arm of Foreign Policy magazine, ForeignPolicy.com is in some ways the most interesting, offering free access to both punchy articles from the magazine and a roster of contentious, thoughtful blogs written by such disparate figures as the military reporter Thomas Ricks; the Harvard political scientist Stephen Walt, coauthor of The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy ; and Marc Lynch, a Middle East specialist at George Washington University. It also has offered some original reporting in the form of "The Cable," Laura Rozen's behind-the-scenes look at US foreign policy making. (In late August, however, it was announced that Rozen was leaving ForeignPolicy .com to work at Politico.) The model, according to executive editor Susan Glasser, is the newspaper Roll Call, which has long offered advertisers a cost-effective means of reaching a select Capitol Hill audience. Glasser says she's optimistic but acknowledges that, to date, "We haven't cracked the code."

Politico seems to have. After not quite three years, Politico attracts on average about 3.2 million unique visitors a month. Its founders say it's in the black, though by how much is difficult to say, since it's owned by Allbritton Communications, a privately held, TV-rich conglomerate. Politico's hundred-person staff works out of Allbritton's office building in Arlington, Virginia, and it's hard to separate Politico's overhead from that of its parent. Fully dependent on ad revenue, Politico gets much of it from its print edition, which is published five times a week when Congress is in session and—distributed free of charge—has a circulation of 32,000. In other words, Politico, one of the Web's success stories, remains in no small part dependent on print.

The one site that has turned a profit without the aid of print or a sponsor is Talking Points Memo. In nine years, Josh Marshall has built it from a one-man blog into a bustling political journal with 1.5 million unique visitors a month. TPM relies mainly on advertising—everything from Comcast to T-shirt companies—and its combination of low overhead and an engaged readership has enabled it to thrive. Over the summer, Marshall agreed for the first time to accept outside capital—between $500,000 and $1 million from a group of investors that includes Netscape founder Marc Andreessen. With it, he plans to expand his site from its current eleven employees to about twenty, with the possibility of adding more if the site's traffic—and revenues—expand sufficiently.

The challenge TPM faces is evident from the experiences of a younger, flashier sibling. The Huffington Post seems in a state of constant motion. In just four years, it has conjured up a cast of bloggers numbering in the thousands, a Washington staff of seven, an investigative unit, and local editions in Chicago and New York. The company has been coy in discussing its earnings, saying only that it is profitable in some months and not profitable in others. In June, the company announced that it was replacing its CEO of the last two years, Betsy Morgan, with Eric Hippeau, one of its original investors. The reason, Arianna Huffington has said, is that the company was not sufficiently "monetizing the traffic." Though ad revenue has been growing briskly, the company feels it needs to attract far more display advertising—a challenge facing all sites.

Of all the for-profit experiments out there, the most intriguing, perhaps, is Global Post. Launched in January with close to $10 million in start-up funds from private investors, this site already has seventy-four part-time correspondents in fifty countries. The co-founder and editorial chief, Charles Sennott, a former Boston Globe correspondent, says that the "void" created by the cutbacks in foreign reporting has created "an opportunity. We want to be one of the sites that Americans regularly go to when they think about the world." In June, Sennott and a photographer spent nearly three weeks in Afghanistan, producing a multimedia medley of articles, podcasts, videos, and slide shows about the US fight against the Taliban. (To date, the site seems to lean more toward straight reporting than in-depth analysis, focusing on questions like "Who are the Taliban?" rather than "Should we be in Afghanistan?")

The service does not come cheap: in addition to paying most of its correspondents $1,000 a month for four stories, it has a full-time staff of sixteen in Boston. To help meet that payroll, Global Post foresees three revenue streams: advertising, membership, and syndication. Of these, the last seems the most promising; already, it has signed contracts with ten papers to run its stories, including The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (a five-figure deal) and The Newark Star-Ledger. In the course of a long phone conversation, Sennott grew animated as he described his experiment and its potential for radically transforming foreign reporting, offering global dispatches at a fraction of the rate charged by the AP. Yet as I listened, I couldn't help but think of the huge sums needed to keep his operation afloat and to wonder where they'd come from. The same was true for the commercial sector as a whole. For all the impressive projects out there, their economic base seems tenuous, and my encounters with them left me feeling sobered by the obstacles they face.

3.

My inquiries into the nonprofit world, by contrast, left me heartened. Here I found all kinds of excited activity. Much of it, I discovered, had been set in motion by an Op-Ed piece that appeared in the Times in late January. David Swensen, the chief investment officer for Yale's endowment management team, and Michael Schmidt, a financial analyst there, argued that in light of the struggles of newspapers, they should consider turning themselves into nonprofit endowed institutions, like universities. "Endowments," they wrote, "would enhance newspapers' autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down." Taking the Times as an example, they estimated that, with a newsroom costing somewhat more than $200 million a year to run, and with some additional outlays for overhead, the paper would need an endowment of around $5 billion. "Enlightened philanthropists must act now or watch a vital component of American democracy fade into irrelevance," they declared.

Swensen is widely known as an expert on university investing, and the article set off a storm of speculation. On his blog at The New Yorker, Steve Coll, calculating that The Washington Post (his former employer) would need an endowment of $2 billion, called on Warren Buffett to write a check to the paper in that sum. In Washington, Senator Benjamin Cardin introduced the Newspaper Revitalization Act, designed to make it easier for newspapers to qualify as nonprofits under federal law, and John Kerry convened hearings in the Senate on how to save America's newspapers.

The image of the Times and the Post protected by huge endowments seems comforting indeed. Unfortunately, it's entirely unrealistic. Turning those papers into nonprofits would require the Sulzbergers and the Grahams to voluntarily give away their wealth. Even if they were so moved, where would all those billions come from? They simply aren't out there. In light of the dramatic fall-off in the value of Yale's own endowment, Swensen's proposal seems doubly unpersuasive.

Yet by highlighting the industry's struggles, the article "sort of rang the bell," I was told by John Thornton, an Austin-based venture capitalist turned philanthropist and news entrepreneur. Last year, Thornton, seeking investment opportunities in the news business, couldn't find any. The golden era of commercial news, which had lasted from 1960 to 2005 and which had been based on the confluence of a booming population with an explosion in advertising, seemed gone for good. Where journalism is concerned, he came to believe, "you can't serve God and Mammon at the same time." Alarmed by the sharp decline in the number of journalists covering Texas politics, Thornton set out to raise money for a nonprofit online service. He didn't get very far—until the Times article appeared.

In the months since, he's been able to raise more than $1 million from wealthy friends, in addition to $1 million he's put up himself, toward a goal of about $4 million. The Texas Tribune is scheduled to begin operations in November. Already, it's snapped up some of the state's top journalists, including Evan Smith, the respected former editor of Texas Monthly. Thornton has since become an evangelist for non-commercial news, urging his fellow philanthropists to invest in it because "the bang for the buck"—the satisfactions of improved coverage—is so high.

Scott Lewis, the CEO of Voice of San Diego, shares his enthusiasm. Founded in February 2005 by Buzz Woolley, a retired venture capitalist disturbed at the cutbacks taking place at The San Diego Union-Tribune, this community-based nonprofit Web site offers a daily dose of local and regional news and commentary. Its nine professional journalists have broken many stories, including the existence of a clandestine bonus ring at a San Diego development corporation. It does all this on an annual budget of $1 million. "If we could get to two or three million, we could do amazing things," says Lewis, who, in addition to running the site, writes a popular political blog. And he thinks that's very attainable. "I'm bullish that reporting can survive and even thrive in a nonprofit model," he said. Currently, the site gets 40 percent of its revenue from foundations such as the Knight Foundation and the San Diego Foundation, 30 percent from large donors, and the rest from corporate sponsors and smaller donors giving $50 or $100. The potential of smaller donors to give more is huge, says Lewis, adding that "we're being contacted by people from all around the country who want to start something like this."

In the last two years, similar non-profit sites have sprung up in the Twin Cities, New Haven, Seattle, St. Louis, and Chicago. The same entrepreneurial spirit has led as well to a surge of interest in investigative reporting not seen since the days after Watergate. The standard-bearer here is ProPublica, the national team of investigators backed by a well-endowed club of donors, but there's also been a proliferation of smaller start-ups, like Investigate West (based outside Seattle), the Watchdog Center (San Diego), and the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, all seeking to expose corrupt officials, corporate crime, and exploitative working conditions. Investigative reporting has also caught fire at the nation's journalism schools, with institutes committed to teaching and supervising such work established at American, Brandeis, Boston University, and Columbia. Sheila Coronel, who runs the Columbia center, says that this year 120 students applied for the fifteen spots in her class —double the number of a year ago—a development she attributes to a new wave of idealism among America's young.

In early July, the representatives of two dozen such centers met at Pocantico, the Rockefeller estate in Tarrytown, New York, to discuss ways of collaborating. In a unanimous resolution, they committed themselves to establishing, "for the first time ever, an Investigative News Network of nonprofit news publishers throughout the United States of America," with a mission "to foster the highest quality investigative journalism, and to hold those in power accountable, at the local, national and international levels." Following up, subcommittees are now studying ways to foster cooperation in conducting investigations, displaying work on the Web, and—most importantly—securing funding. "I've been doing investigating reporting for thirty years," says Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity and an architect of the new network, "and this is by far the most interesting time I've seen."

"There's a big pool of money in the nonprofit world—we need to see if we can tap into it," says Joel Kramer, the founder of MinnPost, the community-based site in the Twin Cities, who stresses how challenging it is to make an Internet news operation work. "Even on a nonprofit site, you have to find ways to make enough money to cover the costs." To date, the funding of nonprofit journalism has been led by the Knight Foundation, under the direction of former Miami Herald publisher Alberto Ibargüen, with added support from Carnegie, Ford, MacArthur, and George Soros's Open Society Institute. Benjamin Shute Jr. of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, which hosted the Pocantico meeting, says that more foundations are showing interest, but, he warned, most

don't see themselves in the sustaining business. They're like venture capital firms—they like to get things started but then want to see them take on lives of their own. At least a significant proportion of income has to come from other sources.

When it comes to cultivating such sources, everyone looks to one organization for guidance: NPR. At a time when not only newspapers but also commercial broadcasters are struggling, NPR has thrived. In 2008, the cumulative weekly audience for its daily news shows increased by 9 percent, to a record 20.9 million listeners. Though not immune to the economic downturn—in December 2008, it eliminated sixty-four jobs, or 7 percent of its workforce, and in April, it cut thirteen more positions and announced five-day furloughs for all remaining staff—NPR remains robust enough to maintain seventeen bureaus abroad and another nineteen at home. To keep all that afloat, it draws on several money sources: its endowment, foundations, corporate underwriting, and dues and fees from its more than 860 member stations, all of which are noncommercial. This last stream is the largest, making up 43 percent of the total. Most of that money is raised from listeners during those annoying pledge drives. In short, NPR is supported mainly by those who actually consume its product—a huge advantage at a time of anemic advertising.

NPR is planning an ambitious campaign to boost the reporting capacities of its member stations. "We're trying to raise money on behalf of not just NPR but journalism at local radio stations—to raise the level of reporting both on radio and the Web and to step up the coverage that local papers can't produce," I was told by Vivian Schiller, NPR's chief executive. Eventually, she says, NPR hopes to connect these stations into a national network anchored by its Web site. Accomplishing this, Schiller says, would be expensive—the news operations at many public stations are primitive—"but not," she adds, "as expensive as a start-up—we don't need bricks and mortar."

Listening to Schiller, I began to envision the outlines of a new type of news system in the United States, one rooted in the public radio stations that reach into nearly every town and county in the country. If the news-gathering abilities of these stations were truly fortified, they could help fill in the gaps in local news being left by the downsizing of daily papers. They could also provide nodes of collaboration for all those innovative Web sites out there, both for- and not-for-profit.

These sites and stations, in turn, could enter into relationships with daily newspapers. The information-gathering functions of those papers cannot be replaced, but, as their staffs shrink, they could receive a valuable boost from collaboration with nonprofits. The network could also provide a home for all those enterprising bloggers out there, drawing on their knack for instigation, indignation, and outrage, as well as a place for nonjournalistic organizations like Human Rights Watch and the National Security Archive that are carrying out their own forms of investigation and documentation. Finally, if PBS were to expand its operations and mesh them more tightly with NPR's, there could finally begin to emerge in America a truly national noncommercial news system, akin to the BBC.

America will never have a BBC. The government funding isn't there. What we do have, though, is a tremendous increase in enthusiasm and initiative that, in the age of the Internet, counts for more than transmitters and printing presses. The retreat of the giant corporations and conglomerates is creating the opportunity for fresh structures to emerge. It remains to be seen whether foundations, wealthy donors, and news consumers will step forward to support them. (Nonprofit Web sites and public broadcasters, it is worth noting, are, in effect, partly subsidized by the public, through the tax deductions taken for the grants and donations made to them.)

The opening won't last forever. Lurking in the wings is a potential new class of media giants. Google, Yahoo, MSNBC, and AOL, all have vast resources that could finance a new oligopolistic push on the Web. Sheila Coronel, who directed an investigative reporting center in the Philippines before joining the Columbia faculty, sees parallels between what's occurring here and what took place there after the fall of Marcos. As the old media monopolies crumbled, a host of smaller players rushed forward, offering a new plurality of voices. Before long, however, the rich and powerful regained control, and those new voices were snuffed out. "There's a historic opportunity to create a noncommercial sector in the media in the United States," Coronel says:

But my experience, after having undergone a somewhat similar transition, from controlled to free media after the fall of a dictatorship, is that the window is narrow. We need to grab the moment now, because if the old order begins to reassert itself, it will be a long time before such a moment comes again.

— August 26,2009

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Singapore's All Wet - Time

Image via Wikipedia

By Neel Chowdhury

In Singapore, there is water everywhere and, belying the old adage, almost every drop can be drunk. Much of Singapore's water falls from the sky. Stand outside in the afternoon, when dark thunderclouds usually roll by, and you will probably get drenched. An average of 7.9 ft. of rain falls on Singapore annually, nearly 2½ times the global average. Moreover, this small, chestnut-shaped, 268-sq.-mi. island is surrounded by water, albeit the salty kind.

Hot, equatorial, but with limited groundwater, Singapore has made itself a global paragon of water conservation by harvesting--and reusing--the aqueous bounty of its skies and, to a lesser extent, its surrounding seas. "It is an exemplary model of integrated water management," said Lars Gunnarsson of the Stockholm International Water Institute in the citation given to Singapore's national water agency when it won the 2007 Stockholm Water Industry Award. "The story would fit well as a study example in the education of water managers."

Water is chronically in short supply in the world's megacities. In the arid Western U.S., cities like Los Angeles and Phoenix are in constant legal scrapes over access to the stuff, and there are strict rules for homeowners about usage. By 2025, 1 in 2 Africans could face water scarcity, leading to potential water wars between countries. Chronic shortages are also expected in Asia. And groundwater supplies in three of India's most productive agrarian states are rapidly shrinking.

Singapore's success story, like many happy ones, began in struggle. "When you have your back against the wall, you come out fighting," says Sam Ong, deputy CEO of Hyflux, a Singapore-based water-treatment company. "That's how Singapore is with water." The fight dates back to several old water agreements with Malaysia, the country Singapore acrimoniously broke away from in 1965--which ensured that as of Singapore's independence, 80% of its freshwater supply came from Malaysia through fat steel pipes across a causeway. Yet soon after Singapore signed the agreements over the course of 1961 and 1962, it began formulating Plan B. Fearing that its erstwhile master would use water as a "lever of pressure," as Singapore's first Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew, put it in his memoirs, the country has searched for more than 40 years for ways to wean itself off foreign water.

It has succeeded. Even though roughly 40% of the country's freshwater still comes from Malaysia, by building a sophisticated network of rivulets, storm drains and canals, Singapore has made itself into a vast catchment area for the thundershowers that regularly soak it. "We are a large-scale urban storm harvester" is how Khoo Teng Chye, chief executive of Singapore's PUB (formerly known as Public Utilities Board), puts it. "We do not have any groundwater, but we do get a lot of rain," Khoo says. "That was the starting point of our efforts."

And Singapore purifies and recycles what it captures, including sewage. Here's how it works: More than half the island is crisscrossed by a grid of drains that not only prevent flooding, to which low-lying Singapore is prone, but more important, capture rainwater. That rainwater eventually flows into canals. From the canals, the water runs to one of several reservoirs and then to a treatment plant, where it is purified for home use. The wastewater, meanwhile, runs into a gigantic underground pipe, nearly as wide as a subway tunnel, that traverses the length of Singapore. To speed the water flow, this giant pipe tilts progressively downward, reaching a depth of 230 ft. By that point, hundreds of millions of gallons of water have arrived below a lip of reclaimed land on the easternmost edge of Singapore. There, a newly opened $2.5 billion water plant pumps the water back to the surface and treats it, discharging some of it out to sea and treating some of it further for use in factories. Not only are rainwater and wastewater efficiently "harvested" in this way, officials point out, but the system also makes every Singaporean water-conscious. "We want to promote the idea that the water that falls on your roof, patio or car park is eventually used," says the PUB's Khoo. "This ensures the environment is kept clean."

The government's enlightened policies have developed an expertise in water management that has spawned a host of profitable companies. Chief among them is Hyflux, a water-treatment company that purifies waste-, salt- and rainwater. Hyflux was started in 1989 by a chemistry graduate named Olivia Lum, who grew up so poor in a Malaysian village that rains regularly flooded her grandmother's small wooden house.

The company struggled for nearly half a decade. Then came the penguins. "To convince Singapore [that it could treat water], we tried our first project in a bird park with the penguin tank," explains Hyflux's Ong. Because penguins are used to pristine arctic water, the water in their tank needed to be continuously cleaned. The penguins were pleased enough by Hyflux that the company was allowed to recycle part of Singapore's wastewater into drinking water, which has in turn propelled Hyflux from a start-up into a global player in water treatment. Its systems are now used in cities such as Tianjin, China, and Magtaa, Algeria.

Hyflux's membrane technology shows that even the dirtiest water can be cleaned. Seawater in Singapore, for instance, is first dosed with acids to adjust alkaline levels and then cleaned of contaminants like oil and grease. The water passes through a sieve of sand that removes silt. Then it is shot through a stringy honeycomb of plastic membranes at high pressure, which "polishes" the water, Ong says. In the case of desalination in Singapore, Ong adds, the water becomes so clean that minerals have to be restored for it to be consumed. In 2008, Hyflux reported net profits of $40 million, a 79% increase over the previous year, on revenues of roughly $382 million. Hyflux's stock has jumped almost twentyfold since its public listing in 2001.

Not all of Singapore's water babies harbor such commercial promise. To highlight its prowess at converting wastewater into drinking water, the government created a drink called NEWater and packaged it in colorful plastic bottles. Although it's copiously drunk by Singaporean government ministers, often at media-saturated events like the country's National Day celebrations, brands like Evian and Perrier have little to fear. Singapore's officials are more interested in making a point than a dollar, the point being that water is a valuable, renewable resource.

The country's painstaking efforts to become self-sufficient in water have worked. The first of the water agreements with Malaysia, which expires in 2011, is not likely to be renewed, according to a book sponsored by the Singapore government. Equally important, by using so much of its land to capture rainwater, Singapore has made its citizens environmental stewards who take responsibility for conserving resources. "It's a passion," says Albert Phee, a 49-year-old IT expert who has persuaded his family to turn off the shower while shampooing and reuse the water he washes his car with for flushing the toilet. "Once I've started, I can't stop."

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America Out of Work: Is Double-Digit Unemployment Here to Stay? - Time

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Joshua Cooper Ramo

It was not a lesson Lawrence Summers mastered with great ease. But after nearly a decade working beside sphinxlike Alan Greenspan, and having watched his own tenure as president of Harvard cut short by a phrase that slipped too nimbly from brain to mouth, Summers, director of the President's National Economic Council, has become a restrained public man. Gone are the days when he would glibly compare flailing financial markets to jet crashes, as he did to TIME in 1999. He is mindful of how ill-considered asides by policymakers can cause financial-market angina. So you can probably imagine the ripple that ran through the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington in July when Summers looked up from his prepared speech, flashed a grin and loosed the sort of utterance that once upon a time marked imminent indiscretion. "There was," he told the room, "a fight about whether I was allowed to say this now that I work in the White House." (See how Americans are spending now.)

What Summers proceeded to offer was, in fact, an unusually candid insight. And though couched in jargon, it was an insider's confession of why our present economic moment is fraught with both danger and opportunity. There appears to be, Summers told the suddenly very attentive crowd, a strange bit of physics working itself out in our economy. The problem is related to a hiccup in an economic rule called Okun's law. First mooted by economist Arthur Okun in 1962, the law (it's really more of a rule of thumb) says that when the economy grows, it produces jobs at a predictable rate, and when it shrinks, it sheds them at a similarly regular pace. It's a labor version of how the accelerator on your car works: add gas, go faster; less gas, go slower.

What made Summers' frank comment important is that it suggests this just-add-gas relationship may now be malfunctioning. The American economy has been shedding jobs much, much faster than Okun's law predicts. According to that rough rule, we should be at about 8.5% unemployment today, not slipping toward 10%. Something new and possibly strange seems to be happening in this recession. Something unpredicted by the experts. "I don't think," Summers told the Peterson Institute crowd — deviating again from his text — "that anyone fully understands this phenomenon." And that raises some worrying questions. Will creating jobs be that much slower too? Will double-digit unemployment persist even after we emerge from this recession? Has the idea of full employment rather suddenly become antiquated? Is there something fundamentally broken in the heart of our economy? And if so, how can we fix it?

See which businesses are bucking the recession.

Read "How to Know When the Economy Is Turning Up."

The Labor Conundrum
The speed of America's now historic employment contraction reflects how puzzling this economic slide has been. Recall that the crisis has included assurances from the chairman of the Federal Reserve that it was over when in fact it was just getting started and a confession from a former Fed chairman that much of what he thought was true for decades now appears to be wrong. Nowhere is this bafflement clearer than in the area of employment. (See 10 things to buy during the recession.)

When compiling the "worst case" for stress-testing American banks last winter, policymakers figured the most chilling scenario for unemployment in 2009 was 8.9% — a figure we breezed past in May. From December 2007 to August 2009, the economy jettisoned nearly 7 million jobs, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That's a 5% decrease in the total number of jobs, a drop that hasn't occurred since the end of World War II. The number of long-term unemployed, people who have been out of work for more than 27 weeks, was the highest since the BLS began recording the number in 1948. Jobless figures released Sept. 4 showed a 9.7% unemployment rate, pushing the U.S. — unthinkably — ahead of Europe, with 9.5%.

America now faces the direst employment landscape since the Depression. It's troubling not simply for its sheer scale but also because the labor market, shaped by globalization and technology and financial meltdown, may be fundamentally different from anything we've seen before. And if the result is that we're stuck with persistent 9%-to-11% unemployment for a while — a range whose mathematical congruence with that other 9/11 is impossible to miss — we may be looking at a problem that will define the first term of Barack Obama's presidency the way the original 9/11 defined George W. Bush's. Like that 9/11, this one demands a careful refiguring of some of the most basic tenets of national policy. And just as the shock of Sept. 11 prompted long-overdue (and still not cemented) reforms in intelligence and defense, the jobs crisis will force us to examine a climate that has been deteriorating for years. The total number of nonfarm jobs in the U.S. economy is about the same now — roughly 131 million — as it was in 1999. And the Federal Reserve is predicting moderate growth at best. That means more than a decade without real employment expansion.

We're a long way from Hoovervilles, of course. But it's not hard to imagine, if we're not careful, a country sprouting listless Obamavilles: idled workers minivanning aimlessly through overleveraged cul-de-sacs with no way to pay their mortgages, no health care, little hope of meaningful work and only the hot comfort of angry politics.

This is why the problem of how America works needs to become the focus of an urgent national debate. The jobs crisis offers an opportunity to think in profound ways about how and why we work, about what makes employment satisfying, about the jobs Americans can and should do best. But the ideas Washington has delivered so far are insufficient. They reflect a pre–9%-11% way of thinking as much as old defense policy reflected a pre-9/11 notion of who our enemies were. The funding for job creation in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was based on an assumed 8.9% unemployment rate. Now 15% is a realistic possibility. And yet we're hearing few interesting ideas about how to enhance America's already groaning unemployment support system as millions of Americans sit idle. Tangled in the debate over health care — and bleeding political capital — the White House may find itself too weak and distracted to deal with the danger of joblessness.

We can't afford to wait. The longer someone is unemployed, the harder it is to get back to work, a fact as true for the nation as it is for you and me. As the Peterson Institute's Jacob Kirkegaard explains, "It is entirely possible that what started as a cyclical rise in unemployment could end up as an entrenched problem." Past crises have illustrated that lesson: the longer you wait, the harder it is to contain. This is as true for joblessness as it was for subprime mortgages, al-Qaeda and computer viruses.

Watch TIME's video of Peter Schiff trash-talking the markets.

See 10 ways your job will change.

Right Man, Right Time
By one of those strange Sully Sullenberger collisions of preparation and crisis — the sort that put Depression expert Ben Bernanke in at the Fed at the moment of a flameout of 1930s magnitude — Larry Summers made his reputation as an employment theorist. Summers is the nephew of two Nobel economists and was regarded as the smartest undergrad anyone knew, but as he surveyed his research options 30 years ago, he settled on the then relatively unsexy specialty of labor. The subject tickled his sense of skepticism. "The view that was taking hold at that time, a view that unemployment wasn't a terribly serious problem, was importantly wrong," Summers says. "I thought if you could have areas where there was long-term substantial unemployment, then that raised some questions about the functioning of markets." In essence, Summers saw in unemployment a chance to explore how markets don't work — and to think about policies that could correct for the failures. Perfect training for 2009.

Many of the ideas Summers developed were codified in a 1986 article titled "Hysteresis and the European Unemployment Problem." Even today it's a piece he's proud of: "Ah, yeah, the hysteresis article," he interjects when it's mentioned. Hysteresis is a word that you (and the rest of us) should hope we don't hear too much of in the coming months. It comes from the Greek husteros, which means late. It refers to what happens when something snaps in such a way that it can never be put back together. Bend a plastic ruler too far, drop that lightbulb — that cracking sound you hear is the marker of hysteresis. There's no way to restore what has just been smashed. (See the top 10 bankruptcies.)

The idea that hysteresis happens to economies is one that economists don't like to think about. They prefer to consider economies as yo-yos tethered to the sturdy string of the business cycle, moving up and down from growth to slowdown and back. But from time to time, things do snap. And Summers' argument in 1986 was that unemployment in Europe, the sort that might persist in the face of growth, was an expression of an economy that had snapped. Europe's economy was hit not only by shocks like an oil-price spike, a productivity collapse and rocketing tax rates but also by stubborn unions that made hiring, firing and adjusting payrolls near impossible.

Hysteresis, Summers explained, could come from all sorts of shocks like this. And that may be what is playing out in the U.S. If you look at the three great job busts of the past 100 years — the 1930s, the early 1980s and today — you find an important difference. The Reagan recession ended with workers returning to jobs that were the same as or similar to the ones they had lost. But 1930s joblessness was structural. The jobs people lost — largely in agriculture — never came back. Workers had to move to the industrial sector, a transition helped by the demands of a war. It was massive national hysteresis. Sound familiar? "A lot of the jobs that have been lost will never come back," the Peterson Institute's Kirkegaard says. Which means that hiccup in Okun's law is a warning: growth alone won't employ America again.

See pictures of the stock market crash of 1929.

See pictures of the recession of 1958.

Cash for Clunker Careers
What to do? If your goal is to create jobs, you have two choices — and one painful fact — to confront. The painful fact is that the 1930s option, to have the government directly employ millions of people in labor fronts, is not an option today. "There's no way to create real jobs using this approach," says Harvard professor Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In the 1930s, you could throw 10,000 people with shovels at dam or road projects. Today the work of 10,000 shovels is done by a few machines — and it was a lot easier to persuade farmers to switch to ditchdigging than it would be to get laid-off hedge-fund traders to switch to sewer repair, appealing as such an idea might be. (See pictures of the global financial crisis.)

So if the government can't hire everyone, where will jobs come from? One option would be to rely on traditional strategies: if we create demand through growth, cheap money and massive government spending, then some jobs will return. In the meantime, train people for whatever work they can get — fast food, nursing, you name it. But if we're in a posthysteresis world, then just adding gas to the economy won't be enough, and making cheap low-end jobs won't deliver a workforce capable of sustaining competitive growth. "There's no use making economic change if you don't have human agents who can take advantage of it," Unger explains.

The alternative would involve reshaping what it means to work in America. Such a plan would start by changing what it means to be jobless. To begin with, this would require a massive increase in job retraining, one that assured that every laid-off worker had a chance to learn a new skill and years of funding to master it — instead of the six-month shots now generally offered. The Administration's proposal to increase funding to community colleges is a start. But it's only a start. Ideally, the White House needs to propose an omnibus employment-emergency bill that guarantees jobless workers a basic set of rights for two to three years: health care, access to retraining, subsidized mentoring for careers in high-end manufacturing or health services. Handled well, such a program could be a "cash for clunker careers." Obama should also bring together innovative minds in technology and service — the people who run consumer-driven businesses like Disney and Google — to find ways to make the process of being unemployed less of a bureaucratic and emotional mess.

But we've also got to take a careful look at how jobs are created — and what sorts of jobs Americans want to do. The most likely sources of job growth in the next few years are going to be confined to health care, education and restaurant/hospitality services. But we can't nurse, teach and barista our way to real national power. Service jobs alone can't support growth and innovation — which will be essential as we struggle to pay off a historic national debt and fund the retirement of the baby boomers. So in addition to a retraining push, a sensible set of policies would shift the landscape of job creation. It would transfer money out of Wall Street and into community lending to encourage the formation of new companies. It would create local business pods in which neighbors ask, What do we do well here, and how can we do it better? Some of the world's most skilled machinists live in the American Midwest. But their skills are geared to a dying auto industry, and with no bank credit for start-ups and no way to organize, they have no chance to transform themselves into a workforce for globally competitive precision-manufacturing firms.

Is there really a demand for machinists? Yes — even in a recession. One rough calculation found that about a million high-skilled jobs remain unfilled. This is why a fresh approach to job-making, one that focuses on mastery of skills instead of simple button-pushing, matters. "If we go back to the old ways," says sociologist Richard Sennett, who has probably studied the quality of American working life as thoroughly as any other scholar in the past few decades, "we just go back to a very unsustainable path."

The President's advisers grasp the urgency of the task. "Would I like Americans to be more skilled?" Summers muses. "Yes. Would I like to be able to increase skill faster than is likely to be possible? Sure. Would I like a larger fraction of good entrepreneurial ideas to happen in the U.S.? Of course. There are millions of people who need work." But Summers need only read his own research to recall that traditional government policies are not going to pull us out of the job trap.

One of the tropes about Bush's 9/11 and the wars that followed was that they conveniently allowed him to deal with problems bedeviling his young Administration: a lack of focus, difficulty reforming the U.S. military, trouble articulating a global vision. Obama now faces a host of problems of his own: weakening political will, an inevitable "What next?" after health care, a base that has lost energy. His 9/11 is just the sort of transcendent issue that can reconnect him to the theme of hope and change. A tough challenge? You bet. But as Obama's presidency unfolds, it will be the most vital one for him to meet.

Ramo is managing director of Kissinger Associates and author of The Age of the Unthinkable

See 25 people to blame for the financial crisis.

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Atlantic Wire - Bin Laden, Beaten and Broken?

Image via Wikipedia

by Carl Frantzen

Support for Al Qaeda is dropping in countries it considers home, yet Bin Laden still walks free. Commentators debate what it means going forward.

Commentators are reacting to a new report showing that support for al-Qaeda and its tactics have dropped in terror hotbeds around the world. With some tentatively hailing this as the end of "Global Jihad," several key questions remain: Where in the world is Osama bin Laden? Why hasn't he been apprehended? And how necessary is it to keep up the pursuit?


Hailing the Demise of Al-Qaeda

• 'Al-Qaeda Has Failed' So claims Tony Karon in Time's lead story for the day. Citing projections that claim al-Qaeda's membership is dropping, Karon makes the case that a combination of local intelligence work and popular resentment within al-Qaeda's base countries have marginalized the organization since 9/11. As he writes: "Not even another 9/11-scale terror attack would succeed in launching al-Qaeda's revolution ... History marches on without them." The security-focused McClatchy blog Nukes & Spooks breathes a sigh of relief: "Even as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq rage on, it's nice to have a bit of good news as we prepare to honor the victims of 9/11 and their families."

• With Friends Like These... A Guardian report on the present state of al-Qaeda further validates Karon's assessment. The piece contends that the terror-network's international networking efforts are weakening, increasing the possibility of capturing bin Laden: "The most significant recent development is evidence that al-Qaida's alliance with the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan is fraying, boosting the prospect of acquiring intelligence that will lead to Bin Laden's capture or death."

• Fears Dispelled Spencer Ackerman reacts to the Guardian piece by recollecting and refuting the urgent, dire predictions made by counter-terror officials in the aftermath of 9/11: "I remember Richard Clarke saying something like hitting al-Qaeda in 2001 was like smashing a seed pod -- it actually spread the seeds outward, allowing them to germinate. But what if it turns out that the soil just isn't fertile any longer?"

• Time to Go Home Democracy Arsenal's Michael Cohen also references the Guardian story to make his case that with al-Qaeda on the retreat, the U.S. should also be pulling its force out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later: "If al Qaeda is having a hard time finding new recruits is a long-term US military intervention in Afghanistan going to help or hinder that process? I tend to think it plays right into AQ's hands, just as nearly everyone agrees the Iraq war did great things for the organization's recruitment efforts."

What To Do About bin Laden?

• So Where Is He?, asks CNN's Peter Bergen. Irritated and dismayed that the Obama Administration continues the Bush failure to apprehend bin Laden, he reviews the hunt on his own and discovers that recent videos of the stealthy leader show him looking healthy and clean, not at all what one would expect from someone is supposedly cornered in a cave. Bergen is cautiously optimistic about the prospects for success, but is wary of bin Laden's legacy: "Should bin Laden be captured or killed, that would probably trigger a succession battle within al Qaeda...Yet the ideological movement that he helped spawn -- 'Binladenism' -- will live on long after he is gone."

• Still a Threat, cautions an analysis piece from the Strategy Page. The writer examines the continuing radicalization within Pakistani political and security organizations, the very same ones relied upon by the U.S. for support in the fight against al-Qaeda, observing that bin Laden continues to inspire: "Osama bin Laden remains a hero to many Pakistanis, because Osama 'stuck it to the man.' Can’t forget that aspect of all this. The 'East' has been getting stomped by the 'West' for several centuries now. People in the West think nothing of it, but those in the East are obsessed by this lengthy humiliation. Any payback is appreciated, and September 11, 2001 has become something of a guilty pleasure throughout the Moslem [sic] world."

• Walking The Talk Analysts quoted by Larry Hertz make the case that while the capture of bin Laden isn't especially critical to U.S. counter-terror efforts as a whole, it remains important on another, more symbolic level: "Killing or capturing him would benefit the United States politically. 'It's a matter of national pride.'"

• Give Peace a Chance At the pacifist blog Antiwar, Jason Ditz isn't comforted by the fact that bin Laden is still on the the lamb, but he takes it as proof positive that force just isn't capable of getting the job done. "Bin Laden and his organization appear quite capable of launching attacks, and to the extent that perception remains he will likely continue to loom large in foreign policy discussions. At the same time, it seems that nearly a decade of American warfare focused at least ostensibly around him has done little good, and created many new problems across the world."

The Debate

• Why Osama bin Laden is a Failure Tony Karon, Time
• Bin Laden's Popular Support Declining Warren Strobel, Nukes & Spooks
• Al-Qaida Faces Recruitment Crisis Ian Black and Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian
• Remember the 'Long War'? Spencer Ackerman, Attackerman
• How Big A Threat is al Qaeda? Michael Cohen, Democracy Arsenal
• Where's Osama bin Laden? Peter Bergen, CNN
• Bin Laden's Bodyguard of Lies Strategy Page, Strategy Page
• Still on the Loose Larry Hertz, Jacksonville Observer
• After 9/11, the Trail Has Gone Cold Jason Ditz, Antiwar

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Muslims Widely Seen As Facing Discrimination - Pew Research Center

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1336/perceptions-of-islam-religious-similarities-differences

Plus --

Note - For some (not all) images or tables which don't quite fit the blog template properly,

you get a full view by right-clicking on them and open in a new tab. For those which don't

open up fully this way, go to the original site by hitting the title of the posting.

_All_ Zemanta add-on images (in other postings) can also be handled the right-click,

open-in-new-tab way

and usually yield additional info about the images' meanings. - John

Here is the URL for the fuller summary of the Pew survey just below --

http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=437

Sept. 9, 2009

Overview
Views of Religious Similarities and Differences
Views of Islam and Muslims
About the Survey

PDF version (24 pgs.)
Topline questionnaire (9 pgs.)

Religious Similarities and Differences

When asked how much various religions resemble their own, the public cites Protestantism and Catholicism as the faiths most like theirs. Overall, more than four-in-ten non-Protestants in the survey (44%) say that the Protestant religion and their own faith are similar (including 12% saying they are very similar), slightly more than say Protestantism and their own faith are somewhat or very different (38%). Of non-Catholics, 43% see mostly similarities between Catholicism and their own faith, while roughly half (49%) see mostly differences. More than one-third of non-Jews say Judaism is somewhat or very similar to their own faith (35%), while 47% say it is somewhat or very different.

By comparison, the public is even more likely to see differences rather than similarities between their own religion and Mormonism, Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism. In fact, majorities say that each of these faiths is different from their own religion, with sizeable numbers saying that these religions are very different from their own (37% say this about Mormonism, 40% about Hinduism, 44% about Buddhism and 45% about Islam).

Protestants see Catholicism as the religion most like their own, followed by Judaism. Among Protestants in the survey, white evangelicals (49%) and white mainline Protestants (50%) are somewhat more likely than black Protestants (39%) to see their religion as similar to Catholicism. But all three groups have roughly the same impression of Judaism's similarity with their own faith (39% similar among white evangelicals, 34% among both white mainline Protestants and black Protestants). Fewer Protestants see Mormonism (22%), Islam (15%), Hinduism (9%) or Buddhism (7%) as similar to their own faith.

Catholics, especially white, non-Hispanic Catholics, name Protestantism as the faith that is most similar to Catholicism. Interestingly, Catholics see greater similarities between Catholicism and Protestantism than do Protestants. After Protestantism, Catholics see Judaism as most like their faith. Indeed, Catholics are slightly more likely than Protestants to say their faith is similar to Judaism. Less than a quarter of Catholics (22%) see Mormonism as similar to their religion, 19% see Islam as similar, 16% see Buddhism as similar, and 12% see Hinduism as similar.

Compared with other groups, fewer of the religiously unaffiliated see their own beliefs as similar to Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism. However, the religiously unaffiliated are more likely than any other group in the survey to see their own beliefs as similar to Buddhism (26%).

Analysis of the survey reveals that perceptions of similarity with religious groups are linked with more favorable views of these groups. For instance, non-Catholics who see mostly similarities between their own faith and Catholicism are much more likely than those who see mostly differences to view Catholicism favorably (76% vs. 54%). And two-thirds of those who see mostly similarities between their own faith and Islam have a favorable view of Muslims (65%), compared with fewer than half of those who see mostly differences with Islam (37%).

Discrimination and Religious Minorities

Americans are more likely to say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims than against any other religious group asked about in the survey. Most people say there is not a lot of discrimination against Jews, atheists, Mormons and evangelical Christians in the U.S., while nearly six-in-ten (58%) say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims.

The only group that Americans perceive as subject to more discrimination than Muslims is homosexuals; nearly two-thirds of adults (64%) say gays and lesbians face a lot of discrimination. About half say blacks (49%) and Hispanics (52%) suffer from a lot of discrimination, and more than a third (37%) say there is a lot of discrimination against women in the U.S. today.

Young people (ages 18-29) are especially likely to say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims, with nearly three-quarters (73%) expressing this view. Among those older than age 65, by contrast, only 45% say that Muslims face a lot of discrimination.

Across the political spectrum, most people agree that there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims. But this perception is most common among liberal Democrats, with eight-in-ten saying there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims. This is significantly higher than among all other partisan and ideological groups.

There are only minor differences of opinion between members of the major religious traditions on this question. Black Protestants are most likely to say there is a lot of discrimination against Muslims (65%), but majorities of all religious groups say Muslims face a lot of discrimination.

Few Feel Like Part of a Religious Minority

When asked about their own religious status, one-in-five Americans (19%) say they think of themselves as belonging to a minority because of their religious beliefs while 78% do not, numbers that are unchanged since early 2001. Though white evangelicals constitute the single largest religious group in the country, roughly a quarter (24%) identify themselves as part of a religious minority, much more than the 11% of white mainline Protestants and 13% of Catholics who do so. In this regard, evangelicals resemble black Protestants, among whom 22% regard themselves as part of a religious minority. Among the religiously unaffiliated, 18% see themselves as part of a religious minority, a figure significantly higher than among mainline Protestants or white Catholics.

Frequent attendance at religious services is associated with a higher tendency to feel like part of a religious minority. Overall, one-quarter of those who attend religious services at least once a week say they are a minority because of their beliefs, compared with 16% of those who attend less often. And among white evangelicals, nearly three-in-ten regular churchgoers (29%) see themselves as part of a religious minority. Likewise, 23% of those who say religion is very important in their lives think of themselves as minorities, compared with 14% of those who say religion is less important in their lives.

Politically, those in the middle of the ideological spectrum are less likely to consider themselves part of a religious minority. Just 13% of moderates identify as religious minorities, compared with 22% of conservatives and 21% of liberals.

Overview
Views of Religious Similarities and Differences
Views of Islam and Muslims
About the Survey

PDF version (24 pgs.)
Topline questionnaire (9 pgs.)

---

More Resources

---

Pew Forum Dec. 18, 2008 Survey: Many Americans Say Other Faiths Can Lead to Eternal Life June 23, 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape Survey May 22, 2007 Survey: Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream

News Sept. 2, 2009 Students must learn about other religions: judge National Post Aug. 16, 2009 Muslims divided on other faiths The News & Observer Aug. 15, 2009 We Are All Hindus Now Newsweek

Pew Research Center May 21, 2009 Social and Political Attitudes About Race Pew Research Center for the People & the Press Jan. 7, 2009 Gains Seen On Minority Discrimination - But Little Else Pew Research Center for the People & the Press Jun 20, 2008 Data and Insights on Minority Populations Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

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U.S., NATO to Overhaul Afghan Training Mission as Violence Spirals - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

Spiraling Violence Puts Pressure on Allies to Build Up Indigenous Forces

By Ann Scott Tyson and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, September 12, 2009

The U.S. military and NATO are launching a major overhaul of the way they recruit, train and equip Afghanistan's security forces, seeking to reverse a trend in which the alliance for years did not invest adequately in Afghan troops and police while the Taliban gained strength, senior U.S. officials said.

The reorganization comes in advance of expected recommendations by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the top commander in Afghanistan, to expand Afghan forces and the capacity to train them.

The recommendations, and the additional U.S. and NATO troops they will require, are among the few aspects of President Obama's Afghan strategy likely to have broad bipartisan support in Congress. Democrats, in particular, have expressed anxiety over reports that McChrystal may request more combat troops for the increasingly unpopular war.

Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, called on Friday for the Afghan force to "increase and accelerate dramatically," with a goal of 240,000 Afghan soldiers by 2012. The current target is to increase the existing number of soldiers to 134,000 by the end of 2011. "We're going to need many more trainers, hopefully including a much larger number of NATO trainers. We're going to need a surge of equipment that is coming out of Iraq and, instead of coming home, a great deal of it should be going to Afghanistan instead," he said.

Levin spoke on Capitol Hill after returning from a visit to Afghanistan and talks with McChrystal. "As of right now, it is likely that there will be a request from him for additional combat forces," Levin said.

Levin warned that "a bigger military footprint" in Afghanistan "provides propaganda fodder for the Taliban." The steps he proposed, he said, should be implemented "on an urgent basis before we consider an increase in U.S. ground combat forces beyond what is already planned by the end of this year."

McChrystal's still-secret recommendations are being debated by Obama's national security team. Early this year, Obama approved the deployment of 21,000 additional American troops -- including 4,000 trainers -- to Afghanistan, which will bring the U.S. deployment to 68,000 by the end of 2009.

Under the reorganization, NATO this month will establish a new command led by a three-star military officer to oversee recruiting and generating Afghan forces. The goal is to "bring more coherence" to uncoordinated efforts by NATO contingents in Afghanistan while underscoring that the mission "is not just America's challenge," one senior official said. The new command will also integrate the U.S.-led training command, the Combined Security Transition Command, led by a two-star Army general, Maj. Gen. Richard Formica, while narrowing its responsibilities considerably to building the Afghan Defense and Interior ministries.

In one illustration of how much basic work lies ahead, the U.S. military is seeking 275 contractors to train Afghan Defense Ministry personnel in everything from supply and budget to "diary management, meeting preparation and travel planning" for the minister and chief of general staff, according to the 96-page contract. Contractors will work in dozens of other areas of ministry activity, including operations, intelligence, logistics, force integration, and the offices of the command surgeon and comptroller.

Afghan and U.S. sources in Kabul said boosting the number and visibility of American and NATO advisers at the Afghan Defense Ministry and elsewhere could be unwelcome -- and could play into Taliban propaganda claims that they are part of an occupation force.

In another major change, all the U.S. and allied mentoring and training teams embedded with Afghan military and police units will be placed next month under a new operational command, headed by McChrystal's deputy, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, who runs day-to-day military missions in Afghanistan.

Spiraling violence in Afghanistan has added urgency to the effort, as the United States has increased its troops in the country nearly twofold without a commensurate increase in the number of Afghan forces.

"We are building our side of this bridge. The Afghan bridge is not building," said one senior U.S. official, who like others discussed the matter on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. "Having U.S. troops enforcing martial law where they don't understand the people or speak the language -- this is a recipe for disaster."

When about 4,500 U.S. Marines launched an operation in July to push deep into Taliban territory in the southern province of Helmand, they were accompanied by about 400 Afghan security forces. Senior Afghan officials had placed priority on using Afghan troops to secure Kabul and other population centers for the August presidential election, one senior U.S. official said.

"The coalition did a poor job of coordinating with the Afghans our vision for how we were going to employ the Marines," the official said. Dozens of Marines have died fighting in Helmand since July.

For years, the United States and other NATO countries did not provide thousands of required military trainers and mentors for the effort to build up Afghan forces, and Levin said it remains undermanned by 12 percent. The training organization itself is a confusing conglomerate of active-duty, National Guard and Reserve forces from different countries as well as contractors and Afghans.

The growth of the Afghan army has sped up since last year. Still, thousands more trainers would be needed to significantly expand the force, and where they would come from remains uncertain. The Pentagon could mobilize another brigade of about 4,000 National Guard soldiers to devote to the effort, but such a mobilization would take time, officials said. Some senior American officials advocate deploying more 12-man U.S. Special Forces teams to train regular Afghan army battalions, noting that working with indigenous forces is a core mission of the Green Berets.

Given the shortage of mentoring teams, U.S. and other NATO commanders in Afghanistan are increasingly relying on another model in which they use combat units to partner with existing Afghan forces, essentially giving combat forces the dual role of fighting and on-the-job training.

Recruiting Afghans for the army and police in far greater numbers is also likely to be difficult, officials said.

"That is going to be a huge challenge to get the numbers they need from the Afghan population," said Brig. Gen. Steven P. Huber, commander of the 7,500-strong military and civilian task force based in Kabul that is training and mentoring Afghan forces. "Building a national-level army is a hard sell" in Afghanistan's disparate tribal communities, said Huber, commander of the 33rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team of the Illinois National Guard.

Local recruits often quit upon learning they will be sent to southern Afghanistan, citing "deteriorating security," Huber said. Others are expelled because of drug use -- as many as 15 percent per class in some areas.

Given the infrastructure and manpower, time for adequate training is also a challenge because Afghan army and police forces are in such great demand to counter a growing insurgency, said Col. Bill Hix, who until recently led the training effort in the south. Building facilities and obtaining vehicles, radios and weapons can take months, sometimes even more than a year, Hix said. Training leaders for bigger units such as battalions and brigades is "a very slow process," Huber said.

Another problem is that existing Afghan units are being depleted, experts said. "We have been building an army that we are not replenishing, that we are not bringing off-line to train," said Kimberly Kagan, president of the Institute for the Study of War and a military historian who served on McChrystal's strategic review team.

"In a country that is larger than Iraq and has a much larger population . . . you are dealing with a tiny security force . . . and one that is not appropriate for the conditions on the ground," Kagan said.

Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington and correspondent Pamela Constable in Kabul contributed to this report.

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In Africa, Courts Shape Views on AIDS - washingtonpost.com

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By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 12, 2009

LIVINGSTONE, Zambia -- As African countries still struggle to control the deadly AIDS epidemic, they are also grappling with debates over what rights and duties to give those living with the disease -- a growing segment of the population that remains largely hidden.

Across the continent, lawmakers are considering whether to make criminals of those who infect others with HIV, allow bosses to test workers for the virus, punish women who pass it to their babies and give constitutional protections to those with HIV.

Such questions are increasingly landing in courtrooms, presenting judges with cases that mix current science, individual rights and a devastating public health crisis. One, involving two Zambia air force members who say they were unfairly discharged because they have HIV, goes to trial here next month.

Similar questions are raised worldwide, but nowhere do they carry more weight than in a region where as many as one in five adults has HIV and in an era in which anti-retroviral drugs are keeping more people alive. Laws crafted to deal with such a vast constituency, experts say, could help curb the epidemic -- or deepen a stigma that fuels its spread.

"HIV is a systemic issue in southern Africa. It's a huge social problem, and it inevitably becomes a legal one," said Adila Hassim, head of litigation at the AIDS Law Project in Johannesburg. "There's so many ways people with HIV are affected that it does require a whole set of rules."

But those rules are hotly debated. The United Nations and most health and human rights organizations back policies that emphasize rights for people with HIV, an approach that has generally been favored by officials in African nations, at least a dozen of which have passed or are considering HIV-specific legislation. But those officials also face pressure to protect the uninfected.

Laws criminalizing the transmission of HIV have been adopted from western to southern Africa, for example, with backing from some women's groups despite human rights advocates' contention that they deepen stigma. In Botswana, protests by activists have failed to stop employers from testing and excluding infected job applicants. A recent proposal in Rwanda would require HIV tests for many -- an idea supported by observers who say that relying on people to seek testing "can deprive other people of their right to life," as one University of Pretoria researcher wrote in South Africa's Star newspaper.

"It's a very tricky situation, a catch-22," said the attorney general of the island nation of Mauritius, Jayarama Valayden, who successfully lobbied against a proposed HIV criminalization law that had popular support. African nations passing such laws, he said, are "reacting to public opinion."

In some places with unsettled HIV policies, African courts are weighing in, sometimes guided by colonial-era constitutions that never accounted for a large class of people with a deadly infectious disease.

The case of the Zambian airmen, lawyers involved say, could help answer contentious questions in a nation where 15 percent of adults have HIV: Is discrimination on the basis of HIV status unconstitutional? Can the military test recruits or members for HIV and ban those who are positive?

"There are those who feel it's the fault of a person who gets HIV to suffer the consequences . . . others say the best way to deal with HIV is to adopt a human rights approach," said Paul Mulenga, the airmen's attorney. "Zambian society is split."

The two men, Stainley Kingaipe and Charles Chookole, joined the Zambian air force in 1991 and began as members of the band. Kingaipe, 40, eventually transferred to the mechanical fleet, while Chookole, 41, became an academy instructor and armory guard.

Over the next decade, both men said, air force doctors treated them -- Kingaipe for a swollen leg; Chookole for leg pain, a fungal infection and tuberculosis. The men said they and a group of other airmen were summoned in 2001 for a medical checkup where, for the first time, their blood was drawn.

Days later, Kingaipe and Chookole said, doctors instructed them to take three white pills twice a day but did not say what they were for. A year later, they were told they were permanently and medically unfit for service and discharged -- though both felt healthy and said they had been fulfilling their duties as normal. Chookole, in fact, had been promoted to sergeant two months earlier.

"I was confused," recalled Chookole, who said that his boyhood dream was to join the military and that he has been unable to find work since. "Somebody is telling you you are unfit. But I was dressed in full uniform. I did not come before them on a stretcher."

Upon their discharge, the two men said that they discovered the pills were anti-retroviral drugs to treat HIV -- and that they were HIV-positive.

They want their jobs back and have filed a lawsuit alleging that they were subjected to HIV testing without their knowledge, violating their rights to privacy and protection from inhumane and degrading treatment, and unfairly dismissed.

A military spokesman did not respond to requests for comment, and a Zambian air force lawyer reached by telephone would say only that Kingaipe and Chookole's case is "nonsense." In court filings, the Zambian government said the men were not tested for HIV and were discharged because Kingaipe had Karposi's sarcoma, largely an AIDS-related form of cancer, and Chookole had tuberculosis.

At the time of their discharge, the Zambian military had no policy on HIV. In 2003, it announced a draft policy banning HIV-positive recruits, which one military official called necessary because "defense is not kindergarten or Red Cross. We need people who are fit." The policy, finalized last year, does not allow the military to discharge those who contract the virus after recruitment.

Some Western militaries, including that of the United States, bar potential recruits who are HIV-positive. But the topic of HIV and the military has generated more debate in Africa, where strapped governments offer infrequent medical care. A 2004 study of Zambia's 22,000-member military found a 29 percent prevalence rate, according to a U.S. Defense Department report.

Those kinds of figures have stirred concerns that the virus is weakening African militaries, and that HIV-positive peacekeepers on the continent might fall ill or spread the virus while deployed, either through wounds or sexual activity -- a particularly sensitive subject given accusations of rape that have long plagued U.N. peacekeeping forces.

"My taxpayer money is paying for the defense force, which is supposed to be providing security. That's also a right," said Lindy Heinecken, a military sociologist at the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa. "The military is a unique organization . . . the circumstances that you are asking them to live and work in are different to going to a factory."

Activists say those arguments are outdated, given the advent of anti-retroviral drugs that can keep people with HIV healthy, and only fuel stigma. Militaries, they say, should not ban all HIV-positive soldiers but should assess fitness for duty through general health exams. That is also the view of the United Nations, which does not require HIV testing for peacekeepers.

"In this society, unless you want to go and look for people from Sweden for your armed forces, you're not going to get away from HIV," said Hassim of the AIDS Law Project. "You must have a nuanced policy."

That view has been backed by recent court rulings in Namibia and South Africa, which found blanket bans unconstitutional. Mulenga said the case of Kingaipe and Chookole could pave the way for a similar challenge to the Zambian military's ban on HIV-positive recruits.

But that would require excluded recruits to come forward, and in a society in which HIV is still considered shameful, he said, few are as brave as Kingaipe and Chookole.

Indeed, the two men said neighbors and acquaintances sometimes whisper that their HIV status makes them "already dead," as Kingaipe put it. He thinks the air force also thought as much.

"Maybe they thought because of my status, I was also hopeless," said Kingaipe, who now works as a security guard, earning half as much as he did in the military. "It's not true."

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