Opinions

Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett. (RICK WILKING - REUTERS) Given the events of the past decade, it qualifies as a shocker when a really smart guy buys a whole bunch of newspapers. That’s the big media-news story of the day: Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is spending $142 million to purchase 63 dailies and weeklies from Media General Inc. of Richmond. (Berkshire Hathaway owns a substantial minority stake in The Washington Post Co., and Buffett is a former longtime member of the company’s board of directors.)

Sixty-three dailies and weeklies, huh? Well, what papers are we talking about here?

We’re talking about the Goochland Gazette. The Midlothian Exchange.The Floyd Press. Marion Star & Mullins Enterprise. Media General is stocked with community papers throughout the South, and all of them — with the exception of the company’s Tampa media cluster — are going to Buffett. The headliner among the transferees is the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

So why would a multibillionaire dabble in a bunch of community papers? Because they’re the most reliable segment of the business. While the big regional and national newspapers have elevated the crisis of newspapering to a countrywide obsession — complete with constant updates on circulation losses, drops in advertising revenues and the like — small weeklies and dailies have been plodding along. Not printing money, mind you, but making a living.

In case you missed it — Arnaud de Borchgrave, longtime columnist for the Washington Times and UPI, has written some stuff that bears resemblances to previously written stuff. Have a look.

Elsewhere:

*Joe Pompeo of Capital reports that the New Republic is going to establish a New York presence. The office, he says, will house editorial and business staffers. A likely frequent presence in this office-in-abeyance will be Chris Hughes, the Facebook co-founder and multi-multimillionaire who earlier this year bought a majority stake in the magazine. This is a really good sign for TNR staffers and frequent readers — this guy wants to beef up the magazine, whatever the short- or long-term costs. Jack Shafer wrote that with his cash, “Hughes should be able to sustain the magazine’s annual losses — which Anne Peretz, the ex-wife of former owner Martin Peretz put at $3 million a year — for a couple of hundred years after his death.”

*Speaking of Shafer, don’t miss his critique of Politico’s story on why the 2012 election “is shaping up to be an especially sour cycle for the campaigns and the media.”

The evidence presented by Politico that this campaign is “shaping up to be especially sour” is so thin it almost vanishes. Obama has said vague things about being disappointed by the press, such as in his commencement address at Barnard College, and he delivered a cheap shot about Huffington Post’s aggressive aggregation in his White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner speech. But that hardly constitutes press hatred. Straining to come up with material, the Politico piece quotes David Plouffe’s The Audacity to Win, the Obama adviser’s 2009 memoir about the 2008 campaign, on press-candidate relations. Exactly how Plouffe’s views on his candidate’s relations with the press in the last campaign help show candidate-press relations approaching some new “sourness” plateau in this campaign is not explained.

*For CNN, more bad news on the ratings front, via TVNewser.

*Michelle Malkin talks polling on Fox News. “There should be no whitewashing or sugarcoating of these poll results by Mitt Romney or his campaign,” she says, adding that he needs to take “the mits off.”

Arnaud de Borchgrave, right, with former ambassador Walt Cutler this month at Cafe Milano. (Rebecca D'Angelo - For The Washington Post) Arnaud de Borchgrave has a career of distinction to go with journalism’s coolest name. He is a former top editor of the Washington Times (1985-1991), and his work overseas dates to 1947, when he became United Press International’s Brussels bureau chief at the age of 21. These days he serves as director of the transnational threats project at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, and he lists his regional specialties as Afghanistan, the Middle East, Pakistan, South Asia and Western Europe. He is also the Washington Times’ editor-at-large.

The Bechamel sauce on de Borchgrave’s résumé is his weekly columnizing for the Washington Times and UPI. The topics reflect his think-tank work — heavy on geopolitics and terrorism. Of his columnar bona fides, de Borchgrave writes, “Both Sen. Chuck Hagel and Marvin Kalb have described me in recent e-mails as the best American columnist in print today.”

Perhaps not the most original, however. Parts of his oeuvre appear to borrow occasionally from others’ pieces on the same topic, without attribution.

The following are some side-by-side comparisons, including explanations provided to me by de Borchgrave on the provenance of the language in question:

1) In a May 9 de Borchgrave column, titled “Realism and reality in Afghanistan.” one passage reads:

“Pakistan’s army commander Gen. Khalid Rabbani even accused the U.S. of seeking to make Pakistan the scapegoat for the U.S. failure to defeat the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.”

Former Syracuse men’s basketball coach Bernie Fine. (Jim McIsaac - GETTY IMAGES) The Syracuse Post-Standard reported this morning that Laurie Fine was ready to sue ESPN for libel over its airing last year of sexual molestation allegations against her husband, former Syracuse University assistant men’s basketball coach Bernie Fine.

The legal action names ESPN as well as reporter Mark Schwarz and producer Arthur Berko as defendants, alleging that they “ruined Laurie Fine’s reputation by maliciously publishing false and defamatory factual accusations.”

At the time of the Post-Standard report, ESPN hadn’t yet reviewed the complaint. It told the paper: “We haven’t had the opportunity to review the complaint. We stand by our reporting.”

Well, it has by now apparently eyeballed the 44-page document, and what a change! “The suit is without merit and we stand by our reporting,” the network says.

In case you missed it---NBC’s just fine with David Gregory giving a keynote address to the National Federation of Independent Business, a group that leans decidedly Republican. Key point: Gregory’s not taking any cash for the engagement. Just talking.

Also: Tom Brokaw is “not crazy” about the White House hand-picking its interviewer. Not particularly opposed to it, either.

Elsewhere:

*CNN’s Ashleigh Banfield is generating lots of commentary with her supposedly tough stance toward Obama aide Ben LaBolt regarding the campaign’s negative ad against Mitt Romney over his Bain days. Problem is, Banfield stumbles at the start and has to concede a key point to LaBolt. Then, then! She screws up the Washington Post fact-checking Pinocchio system.

*Rob Curley, Web news evangelist and PowerPoint master, is departing the Las Vegas Sun.

*Current TV’s Bill Press talks to Mediaite about his work with the network and about Keith Olbermann.

*CNN’s Lizzie O’Leary gets on “Jeopardy!” — and live-tweets it. More from Mediabistro: Atlantic has signed up Martha Stewart for its May 24 Food Summit. Let’s just hope her contributions don’t overshadow those of Chris Novak of the National Pork Board. Those Atlantic people know how to do confabs, huh?

*Poynter writes about how new USA Today publisher Larry Kramer will now get to apply all the cool thoughts he’s been generating for some time now, including this one:

Forget the newspaper industry. Let’s launch the News Industry. Say hello to News Inc. Let’s do what every industry does: Identify consumer demand and meet it.The good news is that consumers are just learning all the new ways they can get news and are still figuring out what works best for them. There is still time for those of us in the news industry to work with them and find out at the same time.

More on Kramer from The Washington Post’s Steven Mufson, who wonders why this guy — already really rich, already really accomplished — would take on the job of shoring up this “thin” and “troubled” paper. Because “this is like a Gutenberg moment,” responds Kramer.