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)

The FBI's Mass Media Program 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 Parts 1, 2 and 3 of article).

Among the historical results of the FBI’s public relations operation and mass media program, according to Arthur Schlesinger, was that “It became impossible to write pieces about J. Edgar Hoover as Washington’s No. 1 snoop” and “By the ‘40s and ‘50s…the press had stopped saying anything at all” that was negative about Hoover. Schlesinger also noted at an October 1971 Princeton University conference that “I think you can search the New York Times for years and find nothing critical of J. Edgar Hoover.” In an essay, titled “The FBI As A Political Police,” which appeared in the 1973 book, Investigating The FBI, Yale University Law Professor Thomas Emerson observed that “Much of the Bureau’s publicity seems intended to arouse fears and anxieties about national security,” but “events have not borne out the dire predictions, and skeptics have suggested that the main purpose has been to assure an increase in appropriations.”

Hoover’s historical personal friends in the world of U.S. White Corporate Journalism who helped the FBI manipulate U.S. public opinion, included “Walter Trohan, the venerable chief of the Chicago Tribune’s Washington Bureau, columnist and TV personality Ed Sullivan, and, of course, Walter Winchell,” according to Hoover’s FBI: The Men And The Myth by former FBI agent William Turner. Another book, Alien Ink: The FBI’s War On Freedom Of Expression by Natalie Robins, recalled that “Hoover liked to leak items to friendly gossip columns like Winchell, [Louella] Parsons, and Hedda Hopper, but he also liked to leak them to political columnists as well” and “these leaks enabled him to control the depiction of the FBI in the media.”

Hoover apparently also became quite wealthy, personally, as a result of the FBI’s mass media program operation. Under Hoover’s by-line, the anti-communist book Masters of Deceit was published in 1958. Alien Ink noted that “according to former assistant director William Sullivan, who was one of six Bureau employees who `put together’ Masters of Deceit, the book made” Hoover “very rich, though most people thought he had given away his royalties to charity.”

Hoover’s Masters of Deceit was published by Henry Holt & Company, a firm which was then owned by Hoover’s close friend—Texas oil millionaire Clint Murchison—and the FBI helped make Masters of Deceit “an instant hit—by exerting pressure and buying up copies,” according to Alien Ink. Hoover’s Masters of Deceit is estimated to have sold about 250,000 copies, including 25,000 copies which were bought by former Schenley Industries Chairman of the Board Lewis Rosentiel’s “charitable foundation” for “distribution to educational institutions, an underwriting worth over $100,000 [in 1950s money],” according to Hoover’s FBI: The Men and The Myth. (end of article)

(Downtown 4/14/93)

The FBI's Mass Media Program Historically--Part 3

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

As part of the FBI’s 1960s mass media program in Puerto Rico, its agents also “systematically planted articles and editorials (often containing malicious gossip concerning independentista leaders’ alleged sexual and financial affairs) in `friendly’ newspapers, and dispensed `private’ warnings to the owners of island radio stations that their FCC licenses might be revoked if pro-independence material were aired,” according to The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents From The FBI’s Secret War Against Domestic Dissent by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall. Among the `friendly’ newspapers utilized as tools by the FBI in Puerto Rico were El Mundo, the San Juan Star and the El Imparcial, according to an unpublished 1979 study by Carmen Gautier, Maria Teresa Blanco and Maria del Pilar Arguella, titled “Persecution of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement and Their Leaders by the Counterintelligence Program [COINTELPRO] of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI], 1960-1971.” Among the Puerto Rican radio stations whose owners were “talked to” by FBI agents in order to influence their programming, according to the same study, were WLEO in Ponce, WKFE in Yauco and WJRS in San German, and “a one-hour daily time-block allotted to `Radio Bandera,’” was cancelled as a result.

The FBI also used its mass media connections to distribute hostile propaganda about the U.S. Baby-Boom Generation’s New Left during the 1960s and to promote destructive factionalism within white and African-American New Left activist circles. In the words of a May 29, 1968 memo from the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia office to FBI Director Hoover, regarding “Disruption of the New Left:”

“As noted in referenced Bureau letters, we must seize upon every opportunity to capitalize upon organizational and personal conflicts of the New Left leaders. The creation of factionalism is a potent weapon which must not be overlooked…Cooperative news media representatives have been used in the past. Reliability and discreetness have been proven. Recommendations for specific action will include necessary assurances that the Bureau’s interest will be protected.”

The COINTELPRO Papers book also observed that of the FBI’s 290 separate COINTELPRO actions that targeted New Left activists between 1968 and 1971, “some 40 percent were designed to keep targeted activists from speaking, teaching, writing or publishing.” (end of part 3)

(Downtown 4/14/93)