« Quote of the week: economist Shiller says people feel "a small group of wealthy people who get bailed out and bribe the government are in charge" | Main | Getting Close »
September 26, 2010
Atlantic Yards Sunday Trio
Atlantic Yards Report
Mikhail Prokhorov is trying to fix up his unsavory reputation for an American audience.
Explaining billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov's backing of Snob magazine, New York Magazine's Michael Idov (a Snob contributor) wrote in May:
Prokhorov's endgame is to buy himself cultural and intellectual credibility on a massive scale and to will into existence, and lead, a group of the globalized world’s Russian-speaking elites.
That day is on us. The Wall Street Journal reported 9/13/10:
Mr. Prokhorov this week is bringing Snob, a Russian-language, general-interest magazine that caters to that country's global elite, to the U.S. Currently distributed in Russia and Britain, it will hit New York Wednesday with an initial run of about 20,000 copies of its September issue.
And a Bloomberg article made a connection to the Nets, however strained:
“Russians who live in the borough and come to games easily will be an important target audience for ticket sales,” once the Nets move, Prokhorov said. “There is certainly a crossover here with the potential Snob audience.”
A recent New Yorker article presents a softened view of Russian oligarchs, but investigative reporter Matt Taibbi has a more clear-eyed perspective:
"It's really funny--I lived in Russia for ten years, and one of the things I covered way back when was this scandal called 'loans for shares,'" Taibbi said.
"They privatized the jewels of Soviet industry into the hands of a few gangsters, basically, and I remember covering that story very well," he said, "and I remember how angry everybody was, that all this stuff that was public property was handed over to these guys who were friends of the president."
"And then, ten, 15 years later, I come back to America and find out that one of them has become owner of the New Jersey Nets," Taibbi continued. "Prokhovov was part of this company called Norilsk Nickel. They basically won a rigged auction for one of the world's largest metals companies... Yet this guy is a hero here in the States because he's tall and he says some funny stuff on TV."
A headline you might see in 2013
Winning high school team at Barclays Center forced to split up to enter mall across the street
From Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz's Media Notes, headlined Huffington snags N.Y. Times star:
In the latest sign that Web sites can compete on an equal footing with media giants, a top reporter for the New York Times is defecting to the Huffington Post.
Peter Goodman, until recently the paper's national economic correspondent and now a writer for the Sunday business section, has just signed the deal. And his reasoning helps explain why he would leave the high-profile platform of the Times.
"For me it's a chance to write with a point of view," Goodman says in an interview. "It's sort of the age of the columnist. With the dysfunctional political system, old conventional notions of fairness make it hard to tell readers directly what's going on. This is a chance for me to explore solutions in my economic reporting."
Goodman, who spent a decade at The Washington Post before his three years at the Times, says he will still rely on facts and not engage in "ranting." And while he was happy at the newspaper, he says, he found he was engaged in "almost a process of laundering my own views, through the tried-and-true technique of dinging someone at some think tank to say what you want to tell the reader."
(Emphases added)
Sometimes the problem is conventional notions of fairness--consider the not-uncommon frame in Atlantic Yards coverage of "jobs and housing" vs. "scale and traffic" (while ignoring or downplaying the sweetheart deals in the background).
Sometimes it's just lazy reporting, such as the Wall Street Journal's coverage of Forest City Ratner's quest for financing via the EB-5 visa program.
Posted by steve at September 26, 2010 10:43 AM