'Can Newspaper Journalism Survive Blogs, Fox News, and Karl Rove?'

In a speech at Yale titled "Can Newspaper Journalism Survive Blogs, Fox News, and Karl Rove?", David Wessel, The Wall Street Journal's deputy Washington bureau chief, says he's optimistic about the future of journalism.

"Barney Kilgore was the founding editor of the Wall Street Journal, the man who took it from being
basically stock tables to a real newspaper. In a 1965 speech he said, "The fish market wraps fish in paper. We wrap news in paper. The content is what counts, not the wrapper."

"The content is what counts. Whether you get it on newspaper or not is not really relevant, and somebody -- maybe not Dow Jones -- but somebody's going to figure out how to make money delivering your daily newspaper online and getting you to pay for it and getting advertisers to subscribe."

Here are his complete remarks, given on April 18:

I really appreciate this invitation, and especially the chance to come back to New Haven and to an institution which I scrupulously avoided as a teenager and from which I wanted to get as far away as possible. I want to assure you that even though my brother, Paul, who is the Director of Traffic and Parking for the City of New Haven is here, it does not mean that you will not get tickets. But he says that if you do get a ticket please don't pay it for 16 days, because then it doubles and the city needs the money.

When I was asked to do this, I thought a little bit about what to talk
about. Most of the time when I talk to people I talk about what I
cover. I prefer to write the news, think about the economy, why is it
doing what it's doing, what lies ahead, and not to talk about what we
do. I had my fill of covering the press as a story when I was at the
Boston Globe and I was responsible for covering the sale of the Boston
Herald to Rupert Murdoch. One day about 5:00 o'clock on deadline, as I
was typing furiously away, my phone rang. It was a woman whom somebody
was trying to fix me up with, and she said, "Are you busy?" and I said,
"Yes," and in her account I continued to type through the whole
conversation in which we arranged our first date. Fortunately, she
overlooked that and we later got married, but she's never let me forget
that.

Once I decided I wanted to talk about the press and where we find
ourselves today -- and I wrote a title for this speech, "Can Newspaper
Journalism Survive Blogs, Fox News and Karl Rove?" -- I have to confess
I was pretty proud of the title, even though I knew the danger of
giving a speech that has a question mark at the end is that someone
expects you to give an answer.

The first sign that I was in a little bit of trouble was when I got the
press release from Yale and I discovered that they had chosen the
General Motors Room to give this speech. Not the greatest omen, if you
want to talk about the future of a troubled industry.

And then the second thing that got me a little nervous was I started
getting e?mails from my colleagues around the Wall Street Journal,
asking me what was the answer and could I send them a copy of the
speech. So since I don't usually write out the speeches I give, I'm
taping this for my colleagues at The Wall Street Journal so I can make
a transcript and they can read it.

It's a serious topic, and what interested me was that we're in a time
in the newspaper business when technology is undermining our business
model, when competition and polarization in our society seem to be
pulling apart the mainstream press. There's a tendency for Fox News to
be the conservatives' TV station, and CNN to be the liberals' TV
station. And we have a set of very manipulative politicians who are
seeing this as an opening to go around us. And so I find myself, at 52
years old, wondering: Could newspapers die before I'm ready to retire?
And since I have one kid in college and one yet to go, I'm nowhere near
retirement.

I was trying to think about how to explain to you what it's like to be
inside a newspaper at a time like this, of such tension and change. And
then I looked on the Organization and Management School's website, and
I found this diagram of the new curriculum. And you see this thing here
that looks like one of those people who obsessively collect rubber
bands, and they make these balls? Well, being a reporter today inside
The Wall Street Journal is a little bit like being inside that rubber
band ball, and I definitely feel this Petrie dish thing here also
captures it. So I congratulate you on finding the right metaphor.

Another way to think about this is to point out that I joined the Wall
Street Journal in 1984, and to think about how different it is to be a
newspaper reporter today than it was then. I joined the Wall Street
Journal in the Boston Bureau in 1984 and found a typewriter at my desk.
I'd come from the Boston Globe, which like most newspapers, had long
since moved to computers but the then-managing editor of The Wall
Street Journal had decided that we weren't going to buy computers for
reporters until the technology settled down. Fortunately, we got beyond
that.

Today, besides the management duties I have in the Washington Bureau of
the Wall Street Journal, which I usually describe as "practicing
psychiatry without any training or license," I write a column that runs
in the print paper every week. I write an affiliated
question-and-answer that runs on WSJ.com a few days later, where I get
e?mails and respond to them. I appear frequently on CNBC, the TV
network with which we have a business relationship, and I do a lot of
National Public Radio. Although I call myself a newspaper reporter
because I think the word "journalist" sounds awfully pretentious, I
find myself emphasizing a lot more the "news" part of "newspaper
reporter" and under-emphasizing the "paper" part, because it's clear
that the paper part is not the growing part of our business.

It's interesting to step back and look at how we got to this point,
where a newspaper like the Wall Street Journal actually thought that
the right thing to do, both morally, journalistically and
business-wise, was to try and be fair and balanced in the sense of the
word before Fox appropriated it: a newspaper that wasn't overtly
partisan -- at least on the news pages -- and thought that there was
some method to telling people both sides of the story and letting them
get a feel for what the truth is.

Because it wasn't always this way in America. As secretary of state,
Thomas Jefferson used State Department funds to pay a Philip Freneau to
run a pro-Jefferson, anti-Federalist newspaper called the National
Gazette. Well, maybe things don't change so much. And as late as 1870,
89 percent of all the urban dailies were overtly affiliated with one
political party or another. By 1920, fewer than half the newspapers
were affiliated with one party or another. There are a couple of
economic historians at Harvard who have written about this and tried to
explain why we went from a partisan to a nonpartisan press that tried
to be, as they put it then, "objective."

They say that basically the conditions changed. That paper became
cheaper, there were new printing technologies, there was the telegraph
-- all this made it much cheaper to produce a newspaper. Cities grew,
so there was a lot more demand for newspapers. The conditions were ripe
for lots of new entrants to come into the journalism business, and they
did.

And they write -- this is my friend, Claudia Goldin and some of her
colleagues -- the competition appears to have had the direct effect of
inducing newspapers to provide more information relative to spin. And
where it didn't, as long as one major newspaper exposed corruption, the
story would get out. So there evolved not only a tradition of
newspapers that weren't partisan, but it turned out that that was the
profitable way to run a newspaper. The readers and advertisers came to
the newspaper with credibility, the one that was not associated with
the Democrats and the Republicans. And so there the business stayed
from the '20s until maybe the '80s or '90s.

I want talk a little bit today about what changed. What is it that has
threatened that model of newspaper journalism? As I mentioned in my
title, I think there are three elements. There's technology, there is
the polarization of the society, and then there's the use that
politicians make of the press.

The technology one is actually pretty easy to understand. Today there
are 1.75 million subscribers to the print Wall Street Journal, a number
we maintain only by persistently discounting our subscription rates.
There is no growth in our print subscription. We have three-quarters of
a million paid subscribers to the online Wall Street Journal. That's up
8 percent over the past year. Less than half those people get the print
paper. So that's our growth market. And we know that a lot of college
kids only get the news, if they get any at all, by looking at it
online, and we know that that's the future.

But the problem is that we cannot charge as much for advertising to a
reader online as we can to a print reader. So the unit of Dow Jones,
the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, that includes The Wall
Street Journal print edition, the online edition (WSJ.com), Barron's (a
print and online weekly we have for investors), and Market Watch (a
free website that we bought that serves people interested in business)
that unit of the company had revenues of over a billion dollars last
year -- and lost money. Lost $2.5 million.

Another way to look at it is: We were very smart. We went early to a
paid subscription model for our online part of the Wall Street Journal,
WSJ.com, and we figured that the advertisers would move with our
readers from print to online. And we were about half-right. The
advertisers did move from print to online, but unfortunately they
skipped right over WSJ.com and went right to Google. That's no joke.
Google, which is a relatively new company, today has revenues in a
single quarter equal to what Dow Jones has in a whole year. So we are
struggling with a business model that isn't working for us, and we're
trying to find a new way to do it.

The second thing that happens is maybe Claudia Goldin and her
colleagues are right about 1870 to 1920, where polarization created a
press, a "mainstream press," as we like to call it, that had values of
seeking truth and honesty and not being partisan. But there's a
possibility today that competition is having exactly the opposite
effect. There are a couple of economists at Harvard -- Sendhil
Mullainathan and Andrei Shleifer -- who argue that competition by
itself is not a powerful force towards accuracy in the press.
Competition forces newspapers to cater to the prejudices of their
readers. And great competition results in more aggressive catering to
such prejudices as competitors strive to divide the market. So when
competitors can create or reinforce differences of opinion they do so
in order to divide the market and make higher profits. And that's the
Fox News effect.

Fox News is partisan. If you go into any administration office in
Washington, they only have Fox News TV on. Fox News is making more
money than CNN. So CNN is forced to think about, well, what's their
business strategy? Is it to be in the middle, fair and balanced in the
normal sense of the word? Or are they tempted to be outrageous, because
that's how you get attention? Or are they sort of forced to the left
and be seen as the liberals' TV network?

My colleague, Jerry Seib, who's the bureau chief, offers the hypothesis
that the presidential election year of 2004 was the year when many
Americans decided they could go out and get the news, not as it is, but
as they want it to be. He argues that technology and the proliferation
of what he calls "pseudo news outlets" -- Internet or cable TV -- has
made it possible for people to choose their news by the place they go.
And the polarization of our society has fed that urge, and some of the
failings of the mainstream press have fueled it.

So if you don't like the facts presented by the mainstream press, you
can go somewhere else and get the facts that you like. If you believe
that the 2004 election was fundamentally corrupt and John Kerry really
won in Ohio and he should be president, you can find news organizations
or so-called news organizations that will confirm that belief. And if
you believe, as some people do, that Democrats planted votes on
electronic voting machines in Pennsylvania to make sure that he won a
big margin in Pennsylvania, you can find that too.

These are rumors that came into the newsroom of the Wall Street
Journal. We checked them out, found them wanting, and didn't publish
them. But someone else did. So that creates a situation where, while
we're trying to convey information as honestly as we can, as we're
trying not to confirm our existing prejudices or your existing
prejudices, as we practice the kind of journalism which is harder and
less comfortable, other people are able to practice another kind of
journalism that confirms prejudices, reports rumors as fact, and gets a
lot of attention. So you have the Right watching Fox News and the Left
reading the New York Times, and both of them convinced they're getting
the right story.

So then into this comes a set of smart politicians, some of whom are
very manipulative, who are both reflecting and capitalizing on the
polarization of the society. And I think it's not hard to understand
one of the reasons for this is that -- it's very simple, it's the way
we have redistricted congressional seats in Congress. Because the
technology makes it possible for everybody to understand what's a safe
Republican seat and what's a safe Democratic seat, the districts have
gotten very polarized. No member of Congress ever has to worry about
moving to the middle to win swing votes, because he or she has a safe
district. As a result, there's no incentive in Congress for them to
come together and to try to find compromises because that's the way to
win reelection. In fact, just the opposite. You're talking to your
base. So that's the first thing that happened.

And the second thing is we have an administration which, to put it
politely, does not value intellectual debate. When I'm looking for
insight I usually go to Dave Barry, the humor columnist, but I couldn't
find anything from him, so since I was coming to Yale I found the best
"Doonesbury" cartoon that conveyed this point. It's a picture of the
White House with the voices, no faces, and someone, obviously the
president, is saying, "See, people gotta understand that when the
Iraqis stand up, we'll stand down. In other words, we'll stand down
when the Iraqis stand up."

The next frame, "It's a great way of putting it, sir. Direct.
Unambiguous. Very Trumanesque."
The next frame, "I'm going to have to disagree with Karl, sir. I think
your call for resolve mostly closely mirrors Abraham Lincoln's."

Next frame, "Sir, with respect. I have to take issue with both those
assessments. When you speak, I'm hearing the steel of Winston
Churchill." And then Bush says, "See, I love that."

"What's that, Mr. President?"
"The range of opinions. It keeps me honest."
One of the things that I tell my colleagues who say you can never write
short stories that convey a point is: How come there's better
commentary in "Doonesbury" than in the op-ed essays of 90 percent of
the columnists in America?

We have an administration that doesn't think that there's any value in
either speaking to us or often speaking through us. And so that's
disenfranchised us. And it's a problem, but it's not one that I really
worry a lot about. We can see what's happened in the last year, that
the Bush administration's strategy of trying to manage us has not
worked very well. It's not what the politicians think of us or how they
use us that worries me. It's what the public, the readers -- or
probably more worrisome, the non-readers -- think.

I know that a lot of people think we've fallen down on the job, that
we're too soft on Bush, that we let him get away with Iraq about
misrepresenting the weapons of mass destruction, and there is, of
course, some truth that we weren't on our game then. But I take heart
that you wouldn't know about the NSA wiretaps if it weren't for the
press, and you wouldn't have any idea what was going on at the military
tribunals in Gitmo unless we had a reporter there, as we do.

I think there are other people who say that our problem is that people
have turned off to us because we're too liberal, that we're all liberal
Democrats at heart. And although I think newspaper newsrooms do tend to
be more liberal than the society as a whole, I take great comfort in
what Bill Safire, the New York Times columnist, who is conservative,
says about this. He says, "Even when the media try to be fair and
impartial, they can be expected to annoy rather than please the party
in power. Clean government needs a snooping adversary, not a
cheerleader." So that gives me a little comfort that the party in power
usually thinks we're hard on them. Certainly, Bill and Hillary Clinton
didn't think that their problem was that the press was too friendly.

And finally, there's a critique of the press that says we're a bunch of
Ivy League-educated snobs who've never shot a pheasant or been to a
real church. Truth be told, there are very few people at the Wall
Street Journal Washington Bureau who have shot a pheasant -- although
there are some, and they have better aim than the vice president -- and
there are very few people who count themselves in our newsroom as
Evangelical Christians. And I think that that's taught us a lot about
the value of a kind of diversity in the newsroom that we had
undervalued. That diversity in a newsroom has to be more than making
the photograph of the newsroom look like a Unicef greeting card. It's
not just about the shades of people's skin. We cannot accurately report
what's going on in America if we have reporters who cannot have a
conversation with somebody in a red state. I mean, there was a
conversation we had in the Wall Street Journal bureau in 2004 where
someone who had covered Bush and was angry with him and didn't think he
was serving the country well says, "I can't believe anybody is going to
vote for this guy." And Jerry Seib, the bureau chief, said, "Well, I
think we have a bit of a problem here because the polls show that about
half the people in America are going to vote for him, and you'd better
go out and meet some of them if you're going to do your job."

We have begun to adjust for that, not pleading guilty to the notion
that we are biased in favor or against the Republicans in power, but
pleading guilty to the fact that we may have not been as diverse in our
reporting as we should have been if we are to accurately reflect the
changing culture of our country.

So finally, that brings me to the question: Can the patient be saved?
Can newspaper journalism survive blogs, Karl Rove and Fox News? On the
technology front, I take great heart from two things. One is from
something that Barney Kilgore said. Barney Kilgore was the founding
editor of the Wall Street Journal, the man who took it from being
basically stock tables to a real newspaper. In a 1965 speech he said,
"The fish market wraps fish in paper. We wrap news in paper. The
content is what counts, not the wrapper."

The content is what counts. Whether you get it on newspaper or not is
not really relevant, and somebody -- maybe not Dow Jones -- but
somebody's going to figure out how to make money delivering your daily
newspaper online and getting you to pay for it and getting advertisers
to subscribe.

One of the reasons I'm confident of this is particularly relevant to
this lecture because the family that founded this lecture made its
money on radio station WMCA in New York. When they sold the radio
station some of the money went to this lectureship. I take great
inspiration from the history of radio, which turns out to be one of the
most resilient technologies of our century.

Radio began as a point-to-point communication device. In 1919, RCA
would charge a fee if you sent a message from one radio to another.
Either the sender or the recipient paid the fee. The notion was
basically to undercut the telegraph, and they made their money
eventually, not by providing radio as a service but by selling
hardware.

In about 1922, radio developed into a broadcast mechanism, broadcast in
the simple sense that there was a station and it broadcast, and lots of
people could hear it. But broadcasting was seen as a way to drive
business to the radio hardware makers. The stations were sponsored by
people who made radios or, in some cases, by churches and universities
who wanted to get their message out but weren't going to make money.

And there was a lot of stuff which sounds very familiar today about how
this medium was going to survive. RCA actually called it, at one point,
WWW, "World Wide Wireless." And in the '20s, Radio Broadcast Magazine
offered a $500 prize for the best essay that answered the question:
"Who is going to pay for broadcasting, and how?" The winner suggested a
tax on radio listeners. Now, it sounds a little strange to us, but
that's actually the British model. The BBC supports itself by a tax on
TV and radio sets. There was some discussion about advertising, and
Herbert Hoover, who was then the Secretary of Commerce, condemned this
idea. He says it was "inconceivable that we should allow so great a
possibility for service to be drowned by advertising chatter." The
Commerce Department was regulating radio at the time. So ads came very
late to radio. After the creation of national radio networks then the
pressure -- advertisers wanted to get on to it, people who owned the
radio network wanted to sell ads, and that's how radio developed as an
advertising medium.

But radio has survived all these threats to its death, including
television and the Internet. When radio was invented, ever occurred, it
never occurred to anybody that millions of Americans would be trapped
in their cars for long periods of time, commuting to work. Maybe not in
New Haven, but in L.A. And that they would be listening to radio. And
now we have this phenomenon of satellite radio stations, which are
creating a whole new medium to deliver what is basically an old
message.

There are too many people who want the information, the content we
have, and too many clever people in our industry for us not to find
eventually a business model to make money. I really hope it's Dow Jones
and The Wall Street Journal, but if it's not it'll be somebody else.

So then the second question is: Are we doomed to endless manipulation
by the politicians who take advantage of their ability to go beyond us
and around us, and speak directly to people.

And there I'm really not very worried. We slip, we're lured, we're
charmed by charismatic politicians, but then we revive. Just as in the
early part of the century, we are kept honest by this flood of new
entrants to our business. It's very hard for the press, if it ever
wanted to, to conspire to keep secret the foibles of the president
today because some blog will put it out and everybody will be talking
about it, and we feel we'll have to respond. John Kennedy would not
have been able to survive in the current environment with his sex life,
because somebody would have outed him. And George Bush has not been
able to convince everybody that Iraq is a great success, you know, a
modern Marshall Plan. The reason is because even if some of us are
falling down on the job and not aggressively covering Iraq, or maybe
some of us have decided to pull out of Iraq because it's not a core
subject for us and our reporters are at risk, there are other very
courageous newspapers or TV stations or Internet sites that have people
there, and it's very hard to keep the truth down. Most administrations
will attempt -- most politicians will attempt -- to try and spin the
news, and most of them will get away with it for a period of time, but
eventually we'll come back.

But the part where I really do worry is what if the population is
polarized for a long period of time? And what if people really do stop
patronizing those of us who try to call the game fairly; those of us
who enjoy hearing rumors but think you shouldn't print them unless you
have some reason to believe they're true. Those of us who choose to
avoid styling ourselves as on "Crossfire," either you're for Iraq or
against Iraq, either you think immigration is bad or you think
immigration is good. What if we don't actually think that's our public
service?

I wrote a column last week about how the employer-based system of
health and pension benefits was decaying, and why it was decaying and
what the problems were with the only alternatives I saw. Either
individuals buy it for themselves, or businesses are forced into doing
it, or the government provides it. And I said it was a big problem and
we were going to hear more about it, and I talked about the pros and
cons of each option.

And I got a number of e?mails, as I always do. Of course, if you put a
little note at the bottom of your column that says, "If you have
comments, write to me," you tend to get more e?mails. It's really
discouraging when you put that comment at the end and you log on at
6:00 in the morning and no one has written you. You sort of feel like,
oh, jeez. That's the bad part about the Internet. You actually know
whether people are reading what you write.

I got a number of interesting comments, but I got two diametrically
opposed comments. One guy wrote very sarcastically that I had wasted
his time. That a newspaper columnist shouldn't write about something
until he had the answer. And why did I bother him with this sort of
meandering?

And I got a second e-mail that said that this was one of the most
intellectually honest columns that he had ever read in any newspaper,
because the columnist had been willing to say, "Look, here's a problem.
I don't quite know what the answer is, but here's how I'm thinking
about it."

Well, I hope there are more people like the second guy, who keep
reading The Wall Street Journal, because we're going to have a hard
time turning ourselves into the Fox News or Drudge Report of
journalism. But I'm not sure. I'm not confident. So then the question
comes, the existential question, what do I do? What does a 52-year-old
journalist who's proud of working for The Wall Street Journal, who
doesn't intend to retire for 20 years do? What does he do in a
situation where he's working in an industry which is being pulled apart
and the foundations seem to be crumbling and he's asked to give
speeches in the General Motors Room and it no longer seems like such an
idle metaphor, General Motors.

Well, I've tried steering the ship from the bottom decks, trying to run
The Wall Street Journal from my perch in the middle management. And I
discovered that it doesn't work very well. I thought I was sort of
obsequious and subtle about it, but I was a bit embarrassed and amused
when we had a meeting of all the middle managers at the Wall Street
Journal, and the managing editor, Paul Steiger, who happens to be a
graduate of Yale, said that there had been a survey of middle managers
and bureau chiefs, and one of the complaints had been that he was out
of touch with us. And he explained, he said, "First of all, I am trying
to delegate more, I'm 63 years old and I have to prepare the second
generation. And the second thing is, I don't think that's true, because
what would I do without my weekly e?mail from David Wessel telling me
how to do my job?"

I told that story to one of my friends, and he said, "I hope you value
that you work for an organization where they actually appreciate that
behavior from the bottom of the pyramid, because I've worked," he said,
"for a number of organizations and they don't, most of them don't
appreciate that."

So the second thing we can do is in our own little island of
journalism, the Washington Bureau of The Wall Street Journal is we can
try to steer clear of the rocks. We can try and have our own presence
online, and we have. We have a weekly feature in the print paper called
"The Washington Wire," and we've now gone online with that. And every
day we update it online and we're trying to create a presence in
Washington for the Washington Bureau of the Wall Street Journal online
on a part of our site which is free. So that's one thing we can do.

And we can also, as we do, spend a lot of time preaching to our
colleagues the importance of remembering that our credibility is under
attack here. And if we are perceived as playing favorites, if we are
perceived as taking sides, if we are perceived as being out of touch
with one group in the country or one political party and therefore our
readers are blindsided because they don't know what's going on inside
the NRA or they don't have a sense of what's going on among the
Evangelical Hispanic community, or they don't really understand the
internecine fights inside the Republican Right in Congress, then we are
falling down in our job and we will be convicted of this idea of only
talking to people like us and we'll weaken our already weakened claim
to being essential reading.

So those are the things that I think we can do. And I have to believe
that the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of the talk
is, yes. Because if it's not yes, I might have to come back here and
get retrained for another career, and I really don't want to do that.

But what I thought about as I was thinking about this question that I
posed, and my own career, is I thought that in the end the one thing I
can do is the stuff that brought me to journalism in the first place. I
can ask myself a question, "Is there some story in The Wall Street
Journal, in print and online today, that wouldn't be there if I didn't
work for The Wall Street Journal, and that has more credibility because
it has The Wall Street Journal name attached to it than if I simply had
a blog, davidwessel.com, and posted it there." And I think that as long
as I can still answer that question, yes. As long as I can still see
something that outrages me and write about it and get it in the paper
or cause one of my colleagues to write about it and get it in the
paper, the answer is yes.

As long as I can help The Wall Street Journal, which used to boast in
its advertising that it was the "daily diary of the American dream,"
ask the question: "Why is it that in America that economic inequality
has widened, that the distance from the penthouse to the cellar has
grown, yet the escalators of mobility aren't working any better than
they were 40 years ago?" As long as I can help get a series of stories
into in The Wall Street Journal, the answer is yes.

As long as I can make sure that even in a paper which has a very rich
demographic and which caters to the advertisers who want to serve rich
demographics - even in that paper, I can make sure that there are at
least a few stories in The Wall Street Journal every year about
poverty, taking our readers to places they will never be, the answer is
yes.

And when I can celebrate the successes of community colleges and the
function they have in our society, or when I can still write a story
saying that the Bush administration is misrepresenting the facts of our
economy, I think I can still do this job, and leave the business
management to others.

And then I say to myself, as long as I can still have fun doing it,
it's a job worth doing. And so last week I saw that Bob Rubin, the
former Treasury Secretary, and John Snow, the current Treasury
Secretary, were having a public tug of war over bragging rights to
Alexander Hamilton's legacy, and so at 8:30 in the morning I asked the
page one editor of the Wall Street Journal if I could write one of
those funny stories on the front page that we call an "A-hed," on that
subject for the next day's paper, and he said yes, and I so I got to
take sides, referee a fight between John Snow and Bob Rubin about who
had the bragging rights to Alexander Hamilton, and get Ron Chernow on
the phone as an expert witness. So I figure as long as I can do that,
I'm not going to worry too much about Fox News, blogs, or Karl Rove.

So thank you very much for your time.

May 2, 2006 | BY JONATHAN DUBE