Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report'-`NY Daily News' Media Power Historically

Under U.S. anti-trust law, it may not have been really legally proper in the 1990s for just one multi-millionaire to monopolize ownership of both a two-million-plus circulation newsweekly magazine and a supposedly competing major New York City metropolitan daily newspaper—with the same corporate executives running both mass media properties. Yet Mort Zuckerman was allowed to use about $36.5 million of his surplus wealth to take over the New York Daily News in the early 1990s. So you aren’t likely to read many satirical expose’s of U.S. News & World Report in the Daily News.

After moving into his New York Daily News office in January 1993, Zukerman then immediately “fired 180 out of 540 members of the Newspaper Guild,” “axed two-thirds of the African-American reporters, including all black males” and “dismissed veteran reporter Dave Hardy, who was one of the black journalists who won a racial discrimination suit against the newspaper in 1987,” according to the Daily News Workers Campaign for Justice, which was urging people in New York City to boycott Zuckerman’s Daily News in 1993.

One reason why NBC News may not have been too interested in talking too much in the early 1990s about either how Zuckerman acquired his $265 million or about U.S. News & World Report’s historic FBI connection was perhaps because U.S. News & World Report also had a business relationship with the supposedly competing NBC in the late 1980s. In its Oct. 18. 1989 issue, the Wall Street Journal noted that “The Consumer News and Business Channel cable network and U.S. News & World Report have formed a joint venture to produce cable program versions of special issues of the magazine” and “CNBC is a joint venture of the National Broadcasting Co. and Cablevision Systems corp.” The Wall Street Journal also reported that “the program will be written and produced by CNBC, with background and research provided by staff for U.S. News & World Report.”

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Hidden History of Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report'--Part 4

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown. See Parts 1,2 and 3 of article below.)

Mort Zuckerman’s U.S. News & World Report has never been particularly noted for the way it fights to end institutional sexism in the United States. Yet the multi-millionaire member of the White Corporate Male Power Structure who was the boyfriend of Ms. magazine founder Gloria Steinem during much of the 1980s was apparently U.S. News & World Report Owner Mort Zuckerman. In a 1985 article on Zuckerman, Fortune magazine noted that Zuckerman “currently spends a lot of time with Gloria Steinem, one of the founders of Ms. magazine.” And in its 1992 article on Zuckerman, New York magazine revealed that Zuckerman’s “most famous love affair was with Gloria Steinem” and quoted Jeffrey Steingarten as recalling that Steinem and Zuckerman “were very much in love for a long time.” One Newsday gossip columnist in 1992 also reported that U.S. News & World Report Owner Zuckerman has apparently indicated that he lent money to Steinem’s Ms. magazine during the 1980s, when Ms. magazine was experiencing financial difficulties.

Downtown telephoned Ms. magazine in early 1993 four times, requesting an official response to the question of whether there has ever been any connection between Ms. magazine and U.S. News & World Report Owner Mort Zuckerman since the early 1980s. But nobody at Ms. magazine was willing to officially comment on its past or present connection to U.S. News & World Report Owner Zuckerman, and Downtown was then told that “Gloria Steinem’s office will be getting back to you.” Not surprisingly, however, “Gloria Steinem’s office” apparently decided not to get back to Downtown in 1993 to discuss past or early 1990s connections between U.S. News & World Report and Ms. magazine.

Coincidentally, few satirical exposes’ of either Zuckerman’s male chauvinism or U.S. News & World Report’s institutional sexism were apparently published by Ms. magazine during the 1980s.

In addition to apparently being closely connected to U.S. News & World Report Owner Zuckerman during the 1980s, Ms. magazine founder Steinem was also accused by Evergreen Review during the 1980s of having been closely connected to a CIA-linked organization in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In an article entitled “Allard Lowenstein’s CIA: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly” by Richard Cummings, which appeared in 1984, Evergreen Review stated the following:

“While Lowenstein worked for Senator Humphrey in the late Fifties, he did things like go to a dinner given by the Council Against Communist Aggression and help organize the effort to send American students to disrupt the Moscow-backed International Youth Festival in Vienna in 1959. In that particular effort, he had collaborated with Gloria Steinem, Smith graduate and Fulbright scholar to India, who founded the Independent Service for Information on the Vienna Youth Festival, an organization that became the Independent Research Service, a CIA-funded operation based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was used to get the anti-communist Americans to Vienna.”

Although U.S. News & World Report Owner Zuckerman’s close friend of the 1980s—Gloria Steinem—has carved out a lucrative career for herself by posing as a champion of equality for working-class women, U.S. News & World Report’s top managers in the early 1990s were still mostly male. The editor-in-chief, the executive editor, the deputy editor, the editor-at-large, the special projects editor, the art director, and the photography director at U.S. News & World Report as late as 1993 were all men, as were at least 16 of the Establishment magazine’s 22 Senior Editors. Although the majority of people who live in Washington, D.C. are African-American, Downtown was unable to determine whether the majority of editorial employees at the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. News & World Report were yet African-American in 1993. Downtown was also unable to determine how many open lesbians and gay males were employed at U.S. News & World Report in 1993.

In its Nov. 18, 1988 issue the Wall Street Journal also reported that one of Zuckerman’s top managers, then-U.S. News & World Report President and Chief Executive Officer Fred Drasner, “was loudly booed at a lawyer’s convention when he made a remark about women lawyers that many in the audience considered offensive.” Ironically, Zuckerman named Fred Drasner to be the chief executive officer and co-publisher of the New York York Daily News after Zuckerman purchased this newspaper in the early 1990s. (end of part 4)

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Hidden History of Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report'--Part 3

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown. See Part 1 and Part 2 of article below.)

At the time Mort Zuckerman purchased U.S. News & World Report Inc. in 1984, its magazine employed 205 people on its editorial staff. More than 10 of these editorial employees ended up becoming instant millionaires as a result of selling their stock in U.S. News & World Report Inc. to Zuckerman in 1984. By October 1984, Zuckerman had moved into the U.S. News & World Report magazine executive offices in Washington, D.C. and began to replace top U.S. News & World Report editorial managers with his own editorial people.

As Fortune magazine noted in an Oct. 14, 1985 article, “Zuckerman bought U.S. News out of his personal real estate fortune in order to call the shots at the magazine;” and one year after his 1984 purchase of U.S. News & World Report, Zuckerman “put himself on the masthead as editor-in-chief”—although he had originally “promised” when he purchased U.S. News & World Report that “he would never be editor-in-chief,” according to the January/Feb. 1993 issue of F.A.I.R.’s Extra! magazine. Zuckerman continued to be the U.S. News & World Report editor-in-chief in the 1990s.

The Oct. 14, 1985 Fortune magazine article also observed that in the U.S. News & World Report editorial offices at that time Zuckerman was “all over the magazine—hiring, suggesting stories, reviewing covers, conferring daily by phone with [then-U.S. News & Report editor Shelby] Coffey, even helping to interview subjects for articles.” Zuckerman also told Fortune magazine in 1985 that “the country is becoming more conservative,” “he is conservative in fiscal matters and defense” and “he supports U.S. policy in Nicaragua and El Salvador.” And in 1992, Zuckerman told New York magazine that “he has devoted two-thirds of his time” to his U.S. News & World Report property since he purchased it. In its Oct. 5, 1992 issue, New York magazine estimated that U.S. News & World Report Owner Zuckerman’s personal worth in the early 1990s was $265 million.

As U.S. News & World Report’s Editor-in-Chief, Zuckerman hasn’t provided much job security for his editorial employees. Between 1984 and 1989, for example, Zuckerman hired and fired “five editors in his first five years” and by 1989 “80 percent of the entire news staff had left” at U.S. News & World Report, according to the January/February 1993 issue of Extra!. The same magazine also noted that “Zuckerman has seemed to use his power of ownership” at U.S. News & World Report “to influence coverage of issues that he had a personal stake in” as when a U.S. News & World Report “story on the decline of California’s real estate market was reportedly scaled down after concerns were raised that the story could cause further harm to…a market that Zuckerman’s development company, Boston Properties, has a sizable stake in.” Extra! also reported that “Under Zuckerman, U.S. News had a contract with a dubious Israeli news service called Depth,” that helped Zuckerman utilize U.S. News & World Report to support Israeli government policies during the 1990s.(end of part 3)

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Hidden History of Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report'--Part 2

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown. See below for Part 1)

By early 1984, the employee-owned U.S. News & World Report Inc. had evolved into a company whose major assets were its magazine publishing operation, its Downtown Washington, D.C. real estate holdings, its radio programming service business and its Publisher Services International typesetting subsidiary. From its sale of U.S. News & World Report ad space at about $44,000 per full-page in each issue, around $94 million was earned by the magazine in 1983. Another $47 million was taken in during the early 1980s from the sale of the magazine to around two million subscribers. When founded by David Lawrence in 1948, U.S. News & World Report initially had only about 380,000 subscribers. In the early 1980s, though, only about 78,000 copies of its magazine were sold by U.S. News & World Report Inc. on U.S. newsstands, each week.

From the U.S. News & World Report Inc.’s Publishers Services International typesetting subsidiary—which assembled Newsweek, Business Week and other publications, as well as U.S. News & World Report--$18 million was earned in 1983. In addition, in 1983 U.S. News & World Report Inc.’s four acres of Washington, D.C. land surrounding its magazine’s building and its 50 percent ownership of a Downtown Washington, D.C. real estate development project were estimated to be worth about $45 million. The pretax profits of U.S. News & World Report Inc. in the early 1980s equaled about $4 million per year.

The real estate business partner in Washington, D.C. of the then-employee-owned U.S. News & World Report Inc. since 1981 had been the Boston Properties real estate development firm of the then-multi-millionaire owner of The Atlantic monthly magazine—Mort Zuckerman. In 1981, Zuckerman had announced that on U.S. News & World Report Inc.’s Washington, D.C. land his Boston Properties was going to “construct a new 160,000 square-foot headquarters building for the magazine, a 233-suite luxury hotel and a hotel annex with more rooms, a 300,000 square-foot office building, and two residential complexes totaling 200,000 square feet,” according to the March 16, 1984 issue of The New York Times.

Coincidentally, in May 1984 the seven-member corporate board that represented the employees who owned U.S. News & World Report Inc. decided to sell their magazine and their other assets to their real estate business partner, Zuckerman, for about $168 million. The deal was subsequently almost unanimously approved by the U.S. News & World Report Inc. employees.

To gain control of U.S. News & World Report Inc.’s magazine, real estate properties, typesetting subsidiary and radio programming service, Zuckerman agreed to pay its employee-owners about $3,000 per share of stock for stock that had previously been valued at only $625 per share. He also agreed to pay $25 million to purchase an additional 2,400 shares of stock that were owned by the seven individual corporate board members of the previously employee-owned magazine company who apparently arranged the deal with Zuckerman. (end of part 2)

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Hidden History of Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report'--Part 1

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown.)

Between 1948 and 1973, the editor of U.S. News & World Report was a politically conservative journalist named David Lawrence. Between 1948 and 1959, Lawrence also was the president of U.S. News & World Report. And between 1959 and his death in 1973, Lawrence was the chairman of the board of U.S. News & World Report.

Given the way Hoover’s FBI apparently was allowed to use U.S. News & World Report as a propaganda tool between 1948 and 1972, it is not surprising that U.S. News & World Report editor and chairman of the board Lawrence received in 1964 an FBI special award “in appreciation of his friendly and sympathetic assistance to the FBI,” according to The National Cyclopedia of American Biography. The same book also revealed that Lawrence also “received from Richard M. Nixon in 1970 the Medal of Freedom.”

Lawrence had established U.S. News & World Report in 1948 by combining his commercially successful United States News magazine with the commercially unsuccessful World Report magazine, under the U.S. News & World Report title. The commercially unsuccessful World Report had been launched by Lawrence in 1946.

United States News magazine had originally been published by Lawrence as a weekly newspaper between 1933 and 1939, before Lawrence turned it into a weekly magazine in 1940. Before starting to publish United States News as a weekly newspaper in 1933, Lawrence had published an editorially similar Washington, D.C. daily newspaper called United States Daily between 1926 and 1933, which attained a peak circulation of about 40,000.

In addition to assisting the FBI as U.S. News & World Report editor, president and chairman of the board, for many years, Lawrence also was able to assist the FBI in his role as a nationally-syndicated U.S. Establishment columnist. In 1968, Lawrence’s nationally-syndicated column was published in 325 different newspapers of the U.S. White Corporate Male Power Structure.

Prior to founding the U.S. News & World Report magazine in 1948, Lawrence had graduated from Princeton University in 1910 and worked for the Associated Press and the New York Post as a Washington, D.C. correspondent. He had also “became a pioneer in radio news broadcasting in the early 1920s” and “broadcast over the NBC network a weekly series of 15-minute radio talks on the topic `Our Government’ from 1927 to 1933,” according to The National Cyclopedia of American Biography.

After Lawrence realized that his children were not interested in running U.S. News & World Report, he decided to sell the magazine in 1962 to his U.S. News & World Report employees. Although Lawrence continued to be the U.S. News & World Report editor and chairman of the board until his death in 1973 at the age of 84, between 1962 and 1984 U.S. News & World Report was an employee-owned, pro-Establishment magazine, operated on an employee profit-sharing basis. Around 62,500 shares of U.S. News & World Report Inc. stock were owned by its employees and, in late 1983, each share of stock was worth about $625. (end of part 1)

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report' As FBI Propaganda Sheet Historically--Conclusion

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown. See below for Part 1 of article).

A 1990 book, The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents From The FBI’s Secret War Against Domestic Dissent by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, described how the FBI and U.S. News & World Report also historically collaborated on projects which were designed to red-bait U.S. Baby-Boom Generation New Left radical groups and anti-war groups, such as the publication, under the “editors of U.S. News & World Report byline, of the book Communism and the New Left: What They’re Up To Now:

“Both the FBI and the `friendly journalists’ to whom it habitually fed information at U.S. News & World Report persisted in confusing both the CP, USA’s campus-based W.E.B. DuBois Clubs and the SWP’s Young Socialist Alliance with new left organizations for some time…Probably the best example of this is Editors of U.S. News and World Report, Communism and the New Left: What They’re Up To Now, Collier/Macmillan Company, London, 1969, in which the anonymous authors (thought to include several FBI `public relations specialists’) worry at great length about the…influence of Bettina Aptheker, head of the Berkeley DuBois Club and daughter of CP, USA historian Herbert Aptheker, on `the antiwar movement’…

A U.S. News & World Report article was also used by FBI agents in the 1980s to justify their visits to U.S. librarians in order to secure information about which people borrowed certain library books. As the book Alien Ink: The FBI’s War On Freedom Of Expression by Natalie Robins recalled:

“Fifteen libraries across the country had been targets of FBI inquiries from 1982 to 1988…These libraries had a total of 22 visits from FBI agents…Librarians said that agents invoked `national security,’ `counter-intelligence,’ aid against `hostile foreign agents,’ or `antiterrorism’ in asking for cooperation. One agent flashed a copy of a 1982 U.S. News and World Report article entitled `Drive to Keep Secrets Out of Russian Hands.’”

(Downtown 4/14/93)

Mort Zuckerman's `U.S. News & World Report' As FBI Propaganda Sheet Historically--Part 1

(The following article first appeared in the April 14, 1993 issue of the now-defunct Lower East Side alternative weekly, Downtown.)

In its mass media program, Hoover’s FBI apparently utilized U.S. News & World Report historically as one of its secret propaganda tools. Among the pro-FBI articles published by U.S. News & World Report between 1948 and Hoover’s death were the following:

1. “Is FBI’s anti-spy evidence wasted?” (Aug. 27, 1948 issue);
2. “Fight for secrecy of FBI files,” (June 24, 1949 issue);
3. “Spy trials cripple the FBI” (July 8, 1949 issue);
4. “55,000 Communists”—excerpt from Hoover speech in New York (May 12, 1950 issue);
5. “How Communists Operate”—interview with Hoover (Aug. 11, 1950 issue);
6. “FBI Director Hoover tells how Communists work”—interview with Hoover (June 23, 1950 issue);
7. “Communist Threat in U.S.”—interview with Hoover (March 30, 1951 issue);
8. “Hoover Speaks Out On Spies After Years Chasing Them”—(Nov. 27, 1953 issue);
9. “What J. Edgar Hoover Did About White”—article by Hoover (Nov. 22, 1953 issue)
10. “U.S. Communists hide deeper”—article by Hoover (Feb. 19, 1954 issue);
11. “People of the Week: Hoover portrait” (April 2, 1954 issue);
12. “Communism And Schools”—transcript of Hoover’s speech (Nov. 26, 1954 issue);
13. “Why crime is dropping”—interview with Hoover (Sept. 30, 1955 issue);
14. “Why U.S. uses ex-reds as informants” (Oct. 14, 1955 issue);
15. “How U.S. reds use pseudo-liberals as a front—excerpts from Hoover’s testimony before a subcommittee of House appropriations committee (April 13, 1956 issue);
16. “Hoover’s warnings: be alert to fanatics”—excerpt from Hoover speech (Dec. 16, 1963 issue);
17. “J. Edgar Hoover speaks out on reds in the Negro movement”—excerpt from Hoover testimony before house subcommittee (May 4, 1964 issue);
18. “Forty years as FBI Chief: no interest in retiring” (May 18, 1964 issue);
19. “FBI and civil rights; J. Edgar Hoover Speaks Out”—excerpts from Hoover news conference (Nov. 30, 1964 issue);
20. “Dispute between Hoover and King: the FBI’s answer to criticisms” (Dec. 7, 1964 issue);
21. “What J. Edgar Hoover says about pressure groups”—excerpt from Hoover speech (Dec. 7, 1964 issue);
22. “Enforcing the law”—interview with J. Edgar Hoover” (Dec. 21, 1964 issue);
23. “Sex books and rape. FBI chief sees close link” (March 11, 1968 issue);
24. “Reversing the crime trend”—interview with Hoover (Aug. 26, 1968 issue);
25. “New Left terrorism: a warning”—excerpt from Hoover report (Jan. 13, 1969 issue);
26. “U.S. unrest, as FBI chief sees it”—excerpt from Hoover report on 1969 (Jan. 12, 1970 issue);
27. “FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover report on a turbulent year”—excerpt from Hoover report (July 27, 1970 issue);
28. “Guerrilla warfare in the U.S.: FBI report” (Nov. 9, 1970 issue).

After Hoover’s death in 1972, U.S. News & World Report continued to apparently act as an FBI propaganda instrument. In its Feb. 18, 1980 issue, for example, it published an article titled “New FBI Swings Into Action.” And in its April 22, 1985 issue it published an interview with Reagan Administration FBI Director Webster, titled “Banks, drugs, terrorists: FBI picks its target.” (end of part 1)

(Downtown 4/14/93)