Alex
Constantine
Alex Constantine
open index
The Atlantic, 9/11
Propaganda, David & Barbara H.
Bradley, Howard F.
Ahmanson, Jr.
---------------
Profile of David
Bradley, Owner of The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc
/by/david_bradley
DAVID
BRADLEY
In 2002, the Columbia
Journalism Review called The Atlantic “a magazine
that,
under the leadership of
the unusual new owner, David G. Bradley, is
experiencing
something of a
renaissance.” Bradley later remarked that he took
“unusual”
to be the only
convincing thought in the sentence.
A native of Washington,
D.C., Bradley graduated from Swarthmore College and holds an
M.B.A.
from Harvard and a J.D.
from Georgetown. During his early 20s, he served as a Fulbright
Scholar in the Philippines.
At the age of 26,
Bradley launched his first company, The Advisory Board Company, a
for-profit think tank
ultimately serving 4,000
corporations, financial institutions and medical centers around the
world.
The Advisory Board
and its sister enterprise, the Corporate Executive Board, today are
public companies,
listed on NASDAQ.
Bradley sold his ownership in the two companies soon after their
public listing.
Today, Bradley owns
ATLANTIC Media Company, the publisher of several high-end magazines
and news
services for the
national and Washington professional classes. Company holdings
include The Atlantic,
National Journal,
Congress Daily, Government Executive and The
Hotline.
Atlantic Media employs
more than 350 professionals.
-------------
Atlantic's
9/11 Cover-Up Assignment:
Embedded with
Rudy Giuliani
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2002
/6/mag-sherman.asp
MAGAZINE WRITING?
Atlantic Rising
What makes a serious
magazine soar?
BY SCOTT
SHERMAN
... The immaculate
corner office belongs to the dapper, red-haired managing editor,
Cullen Murphy,
who, a few weeks ago,
replaced Michael Kelly at the top of the masthead.
He is not the editor,
however: the magazine's owner, David Bradley, is trying him out for
the top job.
Murphy is responsible
for one of the greatest coups in the history of the
Atlantic.
A few days after the
collapse of the World Trade Center towers, Murphy dispatched a
letter to Kenneth Holden,
the commissioner of the
New York City Department of Design and Construction, the
agency responsible for cleaning up Ground Zero.
Murphy asked if he could
send one of his most distinguished correspondents, William
Langewiesche, to
the site. To Murphy's
astonishment, Holden said yes. The commissioner had subscribed to
the Atlantic for
twenty years, during
which time he had devoured most of Langewiesche's articles, along
with several of his
books. Holden knew
instantly that Langewiesche was the ideal journalist to chronicle
the story of the cleanup.
"He is very interested
in how things work, and how people relate to processes,"
commissioner Holden said recently.
"Obviously I'm not an
editor; I run a construction agency.
But it seemed like it
would be a very good fit."
Holden went to bat for
Langewiesche with Mayor Giuliani's office, which, for a variety of
reasons,
was eager to restrict
media access to Ground Zero. "Let's just say I had to use up quite
a number of chits
in order to secure
the kind of access that William was looking for, " Holden
says.
In the end, Holden
got his way, and Langewiesche got the journalistic opportunity of a
lifetime.
He made the most of it.
For five months, Langewiesche (pronounced
long-gah-vee-shuh)
showed up at Ground Zero
virtually every day, and often stayed there for sixteen hours at a
time.
"When I went down to see
him on a few occasions," Cullen Murphy recalls,
"he was indistinguishable from the people
there.
He was wearing overalls
and hardhat, respirator slung around his neck,
and had an easy relationship with everybody
on the pile that I saw.
Engineers and construction people would come up and talk to
him.
He knew everybody there."
The fruit of
Langewiesche's labor was an extraordinary 70,000-word series
entitled "American Ground," which
ran in three consecutive
issues of the Atlantic, and which has just been published as a book
by North Point
Press, a division of
Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The series, which flew off the
newsstands, focused
attention on the
Atlantic — a magazine that, under the leadership of the unusual new
owner, Bradley,
is experiencing
something of a renaissance. The Boston Globe recently called it
"the magazine of the moment."
The Washington Post
referred to the July/August issue, which contained the first
installment of "American
Ground," as "probably
the best issue of any magazine published in America this year"
for "people who actually like to read."
"It's the hot book right
now," says Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker.
The magazine's current
success owes much to the deep pockets of Bradley, who has invested
a great deal of
money in a publication
that, since its founding in 1857, has drained a fortune from its
owners.
When Bradley purchased
the magazine in 1999, he promised to guide and protect it, and to
honor its history.
If he reneges on that
promise, the Atlantic will probably return to the kind of economic
instability that has
burdened it for much of
its history. If Bradley keeps it, years from now it can be said
that he safeguarded
and revitalized one of
the great American magazines.
William Langewiesche
came to the Atlantic through the slush pile. "Enclosed are two
pieces on Algeria,"
he wrote in a
blind query to the magazine. The year was 1990. The Algeria pieces
didn't quite work, the editors felt,
but the writing
was graceful and evocative, and something about Langewiesche's
sensibility impressed them.
Eventually they let him
write about North Africa, and the result was a 1991 cover story on
the Sahara.
In the 1990s,
Langewiesche — a professional airplane pilot whose only writing
experience had been for aviation magazines —
would turn out a
series of remarkable pieces for the Atlantic, including "The
Shipbreakers,"
a stunning report from
Alang, India, a place where massive ships are torn apart by hand
and turned into scrap metal;
"The Crash of EgyptAir
990," which showed how a pilot's intentional act led to the deaths
of 217 people;
and "The Profits of
Doom," a parable about pollution and urban renewal in Butte,
Montana. In an eerie way,
much of
Langewiesche's work for the magazine — on the unmaking of colossal
ships, on suicide pilots,
on massive pits in old
mining towns — foreshadowed his report from Ground
Zero.
Langewiesche's has been
a most unusual career. His father, a distinguished pilot, wrote a
classic text on
aviation, Stick and
Rudder. The son decided to become a writer in high school, after
devouring the books of
John McPhee. Following
his graduation in 1977 from Stanford, where he majored in
anthropology,
Langewiesche spent a few
years in Manhattan working for Flying magazine. But he recoiled
from the New York
magazine world, and for
the next fifteen years earned his living as a pilot — flying cargo
planes,
air-ambulances, air taxis, and corporate jets
— while writing on the side, with "great determination"
and" many rejections."
In those years, he also
worked as a flight instructor.
"He teaches students how to flyinto storms," explains Cullen
Murphy.
"He'll wait for a storm
front to come across the country, and then when he sees it getting
close to where he is,
he'll call up his
students and say, 'OK, we've got an ice
storm coming over
Denver, and class is ready.' " Langewiesche's technical expertise,
and his unruffled
manner, enable him to
move with unusual ease in hostile environments. In 1996, when
ValuJet 592
plunged into a Florida
swamp, killing 110 people, the Atlantic dispatched Langewiesche to
the Everglades.
The press was confined
to an area seven miles from the accident site, but Langewiesche
persuaded
investigators to give
him access. (In a fraternal gesture, the pilot even let him fly the
helicopter to the crash site.)
Langewiesche moved
effortlessly among the rescue workers, who sat in the shade,
chatting and sipping cold drinks.
He would later write:
They were policemen and firemen, not heroes
but straightforward guys accustomed to confronting
death.
Not knowing who I was,
they spoke to me frankly about the gruesome details of their
work,
and made indelicate jokes,
but they seemed more
worried about dehydration than about "taking the job home" or
losing sleep.
I relaxed in their
company, relieved to have escaped for a while the expectation of
grief. ...
--------------
David Bradley's Wife,
Barbara Bradley Hagerty, and
Howard Ahmanson,
Jr.
http://betterangels.blogspot
.com/2004/05/ballad-of-barbara -bradley-hagerty.html
MAY 11,
2004
The Ballad of Barbara
Bradley Hagerty
A few months ago, Atrios
posted about the World Journalism Institute and outed NPR religion
reporter
Barbara Bradley Hagerty
as a member of this right-wing Christian
organization.
People began taking a
closer look at Hagerty's work, especially her recent report on John
Kerry's Eucharistic Issues.
Alert Eschaton
readers pointed out that the seemingly "random"
parishoners
Hagerty spoke to were in
fact conservative Catholic movers and shakers Hagerty most likely
already knew.
As far as I know, not
one reader who wrote to NPR's Omsbudsman to complain about this has
received a reply.
Something about this
story still niggled at me, so I started to do some research of my
own.
What I found was, to say
the least, enlightening:
Barbara Bradley Hagerty
graduated from Williams College in 1981 with a degree in
Economics.
She then interned
at the Christian Science Monitor and subsequently worked for the
paper
and its relatedmedia for
11 years. She joined NPR in 1995 as a contract
reporter
after having become a
born-again Christian while writing a story for The LA Times Sunday
Magazine.
She eventually became a
full-time employee, reporting on the Justice Department, the
Clinton Impeachment,
9-11 and starting
last year, religion, replacing Duncan Moon as religion
reporter.
Her religion reporting
for NPR has focused mainly on Christianity, including a report on
the Christian
Science Church, in which
she did not disclose that she was herself a former member of the
Church.
(This little tidbit is
revealed in "Citizen Bradley," a Washingtonian article from October
2000 about her
multimillionaire
brother, Atlantic owner David Bradley. The article isn't online,
but is available through LexisNexis.)
In addition to her NPR
gig and her deal with the World Journalism Institute, Hagerty has
been keeping busy
with other writing and
speaking engagements. She is onthe board of directors for Knowing
and Doing, the
magazine of the
C.S.Lewis Institute, which "endeavors to develop desciples who can
articulate, defend and
live faith in Christ
through personal and public life." (emphasis mine)
More troubling still is
her association with Howard Ahmanson's Fieldstead and Co. and
Fieldstead
Foundation. Ahmanson is
a California millionaire who uses his trust fund to finance
right-wing Christian,
anti-gay, anti-evolution
groups and politicians. He was previously associated with Christian
Reconstructionism,
which advocates a
Biblically-based governement for the U.S.
(Neither Ahmanson nor
his philanthropic endeavors have their own websites. Make of that
what you will.)
Hagerty has spoken twice
at the Summer Institute of Journalism, a program run by the Council
for Christian
Colleges and University
and funded by the Fieldstead Foundation. Student reactions to her
talks are here.
Hagerty's keynote
address to the 2003 National Student Media Convention
was also sponsored by Fieldstead and Co.
In 2003 she also spoke
at the Baptist Press Student Journalism Conference, along with
Terry Mattingly,
a Scripps-Howard
reporter who is also a Fieldstead grant recipient.
One final
Ahmanson-Hagerty connection: Since June of 2003, Hagerty has
reported on the Episcopal Church
and gay issues 20 times.
(Full disclosure: I am a liberal Episcopalian) She has often quoted
members of the
American Anglican
Council, a conservative group seeking to break away from the
Episcopal Church USA
and join with more
orthodox Anglicans worldwide. This group receives major behind the
scenes funding from...
you guessed it! Howard
Ahmanson. (More here.)
Eschaton reader Dreaming
Feet brought the NPR Ethics Guide to my attention, especially this
portion:
V. Outside work,
freelancing, speaking engagements 7. NPR journalists may only
accept fees from
educational or nonprofit
groups not engaged in significant lobbying or political
activity.
Determining whether a
group engages in significant lobbying or political activity is the
responsibility of the journalist
seeking permission, and
all information must be fully disclosed to the journalist's
supervisor.
8. NPR journalists may
not speak to groups where the journalist's appearance might put in
question his or her
impartiality. Such
instances include situations where the employee's
appearance
may appear to endorse
the agenda of a group or organization.
Hagerty's outside work
certainly seems to violate both her employers ethics and
the
Corporation for Public
Broadcasting's Independence and Integrity II:
The Updated Ethics Guide
for Public Radio Journalism.
Hagerty likes to say
that God is her "employer and audience." She's wrong. God may be
her Creator and Savior,
but she is employed by
the millions of Americans who donate to public radio and finance
NPR programming.
They deserve better.
Contact Jeffery Dvorkin, NPR's Omsbudsman to
complain
about Hagerty's blatant
conflict of interest and violation of professional
ethics.
Alex
Constantine
related
Atlantic Monthly,
Corporate Exeutive Board Co. and the CIA - think-tank CENSA
links
Ties
between southern Christian fundamentalists
Seas of David Cult ("Muslim
Terrorists") Attended Christian Churches
Right-Wing Christian
Connections to Heaven's Gate
American State
Terrorism
Corporate
Media: TV News is bad for your brain
The
Geopolitical Strategy of Imperial America
Comair Crash, CIA,
World Vision, Jack Kemp, Habitat for Humanity ...
When Democracy Failed
- 9-11 Review
Muslim-Jewish-Christian Alliance
for 9/11 Truth
The Brookings
Institute
Mantech, BAE,
CACI, NSA SAIC etc... - 9/11Review
Republican Jewish
Coalition RJC
The
Blackstone Group
===========
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