Something's burning....

"Often wrong. But never in doubt."

Hint: It wasn't me. Answer to come.

America's leaders seem to have a love-hate relationship with the Middle Eastern TV network Al-Jazeera -- one week they're denouncing it as an agent of Islamic extremism, and seemingly the next week they're giving it interviews trying to woo "the Arab Street." But as the network -- which includes a fully English-language outfit called Al-Jazeera English, or AJE -- has shown for the last year, there's no better source for comprehensive coverage of one of the most important stories in the world today -- the so-called "Arab Spring." And Al-Jazeera English somehow manages to cover events in the region without cutting away every five minutes to remind us that Whitney Houston is still dead.

This week, Al Jazeera English won one of America's top two journalism prizes, a George Polk Award, for its fearless coverage of one aspect of the uprising. Here's the citation, and a link to the broadcast:

The George Polk Award for Television Documentary will recognize the courageous work of Al Jazeera English reporter May Ying Welsh and field producer Hassan Mahfoodin developing "Bahrain: Shouting in the Dark." When Bahrain banned foreign journalists during the Arab Spring protests, Welsh remained, working undercover with Mahfood to produce a film that gives a voice to the protesters for democratic rights and presents a harrowing, on-the-ground view of their brutal suppression. The documentary highlights the unbridled power of security forces in a key American ally on the Gulf.

It's good that you can see this award-winning journalism online -- because you can't see on your cable TV in Philadelphia or in most other major American cities, since Al-Jazeera English has been all but blacklisted in this country. Some groups -- including the Occupy Philadelphia crew here -- have been on the warpath about this, but Comcast doesn't seem to listen:

On Monday, Philadelphia police and Comcast security guards barred demonstrators from entering the building as a group. Rethink leaders Xi Wang and Mike Haack were admitted briefly under escort. They brought the signatures, printed on 1,000 pages and tied with a ribbon, to the mail room for delivery to Comcast officials.

"While we are not currently in discussions, we have met with representatives of Al-Jazeera in the past," Comcast said in a prepared statement. "We regularly examine our channel lineups and talk with a wide range of programmers to ensure that we are bringing the content that our customers want the most."

The signatures had been collected online through Change.org, a website that promotes social change through Internet petitions.

Believe it or not, I had been willing to cut Comcast some slack on this -- it's not like there's an unlimited number of channels...OK, so there's like 999, and a bunch of them are empty. But still. Then, today, a day after Al-Jazeera's Polk award, I read this:

Sean "P. Diddy" Combs and Earvin "Magic" Johnson will be hosts and owners of new cable channels which Comcast (and maybe others) will launch  later this year and early next.

Two new channels geared to the Hispanic audience - one with direction by the legendary Hollywood film director Robert Rodriguez - are also in the Comcast pipeline.

P.Diddy's music-themed service Revolt aims to give the likes of  BET and MTV  a run for the money, combining urban-slanted artists and news with a social networking component. "We're coming with a new energy, we're coming with something that people are going to want to tune in to see," shared the media mogul with  an MTV reporter recently. Though best known  for his rap hits, P. Diddy's Bad Boy Entertainment has also produced  hit cable shows like "Making the Band."  Revolt will launch in 2013.

Not that there's anything wrong with all that. But Comcast's stated commitment to diversity is still a joke, if it's adding so much new programming yet still afraid to offer American viewers the original journalism and different perspective offered by Al-Jazeera English. To make room for P. Diddy's Revolt while continuing to censor the revolt against dictatorial rule in Bahrain is an insult to your intelligence, and an insult to the people of the Philadelphia area.

I can't think of anything more dangerous than playing politics with the situation with Israel and Iran's nuclear program. Maybe that's why I'm not a Republican presidential candidate:

Now, Republicans appear eager to use the administration’s wariness of an Israeli strike on Iran to paint Mr. Obama as a reluctant supporter of Israel’s security. Mr. Obama won more than three-quarters of the Jewish vote in 2008, according to exit polls, but Republicans hope that attacks on his support of Israel could both appeal to Jewish voters — a small but important constituency, especially in some swing states, like Florida — and to other voters who are committed to protecting Israel.

I guess it's a classic case of "on one hand, on the other hand." One one hand, a military strike against Iran -- without fully playing out other, less apocalyptic options -- could lead to a wider a conflict that could destablize the entire region (most notably Iraq, finally somewhat stable after considerable lives lost and dollars spent) and cause gazillion-dollar-a-gallon gas that could cause a new recession, among many bad outcomes. On the other hand, a rigid pro war stance is worth a few extra votes in Boca.

Give me a break.

A great piece out this morning by former Philadelphia journalist Rick Edmonds, now with the Poynter Institute, exploring in much greater depth a point that I made in my post last night that killing the Daily News would make absolutely no business sense. These points are fairly impressive:

The sports-heavy, working man’s tabloid picks up additional paying readers the Inquirer misses. For advertisers who want to reach an unduplicated 50,000 — and make a package buy in the two papers — that creates extra ad revenue.

I’ve been told that the Daily News has one of the highest percentages of single copy sales to home delivery among American papers. Some advertisers may want to target just that Daily News readership.

Also when the Audit Bureau of Circulations began offering a measure of readers per copy in the mid-2000s, the Daily News was first among 100 or so participating papers — by a lot. The paper gets around.

Besides tabloid zinginess, the Daily News offers some serious journalism — witness its Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting two years ago for an expose of corruption in the Philadelphia police narcotics squad.

There's also one more argument for saving the Daily News brand: Our reporters now drive a disproportionate amount of traffic to the Philly.com. This comes via email from my DN colleague, Josh Cornfield:

Among stories on the web between 11/1/11 and 12/26/11 (Monday-Friday only), 51 % of traffic went to Inquirer stories, 42% to DN, 5% to Philly.com, and 2% to AP. Among blogs, 40% to DN, 37% to Inquirer and 23% to Philly.com. So, despite [the Inquirer] having triple the staff, we were only 9% points off the Inky in terms of web traffic; and we beat them on blogs.

Also, for the handful of diehards following this story minute-by-minute, Ed Rendell went on 1210-AM this afternoon and voiced support for some kind of pledge of editorial non-interference. He also said the Inquirer should be "more fun" like the Daily News. My colleague David Gambacorta has the details.

...strikes again!

This will probably be a daily feature between now and the end of his first term in January 2017, but today's kickoff is a doozy (h/t Atrios):

"Freedom isn't to do whatever you want to do, it's to do what you ought to do."

Meanwhile, John Baer...not a Santorum fan.

Dear next owner of Philadelphia Media Networks...whoever you are,

I've been meaning to write you for a couple of weeks -- it's been hard what with all the confusion not only about what we're allowed or not allowed to say but also the non-stop swirl of events that seem to whipsaw back and forth on an almost hourly basis. For the last few days, the debate over the cloudy future of the Philadelphia Daily News, the Inquirer and Philly.com has focused almost entirely on closely intertwined issues surrounding "editorial integrity" -- the extent to which current owners have interfered with the news side of operations and the fear that new owners, especially the widely discussed group of would-be buyers led by former Gov. Ed Rendell. will do more of the same, on behalf of their many overlapping political agendas in Philadelphia and the suburbs.

No one can ignore those issues, but I want to keep this part short. I proudly joined more than 300 journalists in signing our clarion call for editorial integrity, and I believe that while what's happened in the immediate past cannot be undone, a pledge of non-interference in news operations going forward (the editorial page always has been, and always will be, a different story) that goes even beyond a similar promise made by Brian Tierney when his local group bought the papers in 2006 is a bottom-line minimum for any new owner.

As for the specific fears about the Rendell group voiced most notably by former Inquirer reporter Buzz Bissinger in his New York Times op-ed: Sure, we all have concerns about the political ties not just of Rendell but key backers like George Norcross and Ed Snider -- but anyone who's rich enough to buy a major organization is going to bring those issues. The same worries existed with past owners, including locals Walter Annenberg and Tierney, and will be there for whoever buys Philadelphia Media Networks, including the others who've expressed a desire to bid.

My concern, and my reason for writing, is some major issues that have been almost completely overlooked. I want to bring up three, as succinctly as possible.

1. Killing the Daily News as a separate newspaper wouldn't just be bad for Philadelphia but it would be a dumb business decision. I hadn't initially planned to make this point -- sometimes just raising this issue does more harm than good -- but there's been widespread speculation since last week's announcement about merging some functions of the Daily News and Inquirer that this is the first step toward killing our scrappy urban tabloid. I hope that's not true. I'm not sure if all my colleagues agree with me, but I actually do support the idea of the papers sharing coverage of so-called "commodity news" -- routine courts or crime articles or "game stories" in sports -- if it frees up journalists for investigative reporting and exclusive articles or perspectives. But moving toward eliminating the smaller-in-circulation Daily News would be a huge mistake.

The first reason is the obvious one: It would mean fewer people in Philadelphia would be getting local news -- and there would be less of it. Once, many American cities had papers like the Daily News -- aimed at urban and blue-collar readers, and until two decades ago, published largely in the afternoon -- and most are long gone. The survival of the Daily News is a credit to a powerful bond that the paper has forged with its rowhouse readers. Too many media pundits who stare at a lighted screen for 12 hours a day, and know only folks just like them, forget there are still lots of people who DON'T work or live on their computer -- from the cop on the beat to the nurse in the intensive care unit -- and in Philly the paper they grab on their way to or from work is the Daily News. What's more, "The People's Paper" historically has a higher percentage of African-American readers than any other major metro paper in America. "Civic duty" -- the reason cited by the Rendell group in wanting to buy PMN -- demands this audience be served, and there's something else. The existence of two papers -- and the fiercely competitive newsrooms, despite the shared ownership of the Daily News and Inquirer -- has led to important stories that I believe would never have seen the light of day with just one newspaper. There's a reason that coverage of police corruption -- punctuated by the 2010 Pulitzer Prize won by my Daily News friends and colleagues Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker -- has been better in Philadelphia than in most cities, and that reason is two proud, dueling newsrooms.

But the second reason for saving the Daily News may be even more important in the bottom-line-oriented world that we live in: It will cost you money if you close it. If the DN stopped publishing tomorrow, the number of loyal Daily News readers who would switch to the stodgier, broadsheet Inquirer could probably be counted on the fingertips and toes of the new owners. The reality is that most news organizations in other cities are frantically trying to figure out how to gain the thousands of readers who'd be lost -- forever in most cases -- if the Daily News ceased to be. Indeed, the immediate loss of circulation dollars and ad revenue would be, in my opinion, even greater than the ill will that would be caused by killing the Daily News, even though that ill will would be considerable. Your two stated motives for buying PMN -- civic duty and making a profit -- would be undercut in one fell swoop.

2. In 2012, it takes more than "civic duty" to own a news organization but a plan for real and rapid change. Quite frankly, what dismayed me the most when I saw the names of interested buyers for the Daily News, Inquirer and Philly.com was not so much what seemed to worry most people -- the potential for political conflicts of interest -- as the lack of true innovators for a digital age. You almost never see the folks behind Internet pioneers like a Google or a Facebook bidding to buy newspapers (even though they seem to be people with the necessary cash) because apparently traditional news orgs just aren't on their radar screen, and that's a shame. I think a truly successful news entrepreneur in 2012 is some with a sense of civic duty and a commitment to journalistic integrity -- but also a proven record of digital success. That savior has not shown up...yet.

One interesting thing that I've noticed is that the people who want to own traditional newspaper companies tend to be people of a certain age, successful businessmen (all the known interested PMN buyers are male, which is unfortunate) in their 50s or 60s or even older. They came of age at a time in the 1970s and 1980s when the power of the American newspaper was at its absolute zenith, and I worry their ideas remain stuck in that bygone era. After all, as an older news consumer you go to your doorstep every morning and the newspaper doesn't look much different than it did in 1978, does it? You need to understand, would-be owner, that it looks and feels completely different when you're on the inside of a newsroom as we scramble to attract digital readers and as a new generation that will never, ever read a paper like you did comes along.

My worries come from watching the last local ownership group under Brian Tierney: It struck me that many of their ideas for saving journalism were what I would call "1978 ideas," whether it was hectoring old-fashioned print-ad salesmen to try to sell more print ads in the same old-fashioned ways, or the idea that somewhat famous Sunday columnists like Lisa Scottoline or Mark Bowden would somehow put the kibosh on readers migrating to the World Wide Web. This time, any new owner of Philadelphia Media Networks will need to figure out how to meld the old-school qualities that have resulted in 18 Pulitzer Prizes for the Inquirer and three for the Daily News with the entrepreneurial spirit and outside-the-box thinking of Silicon Valley. These bold changes will require bringing in smart new people and almost certainly making a few clever investments as opposed (gasp!) to only making cuts. The vibe I get so far from the would-be owners is they want to buy the Philadelphia papers to keep them the same. That's noble, but that's also not enough. There needs to be a zeal to make them better, to be agents of radical change.

Please start by reading a remarkable recent speech by Journal Register CEO John Paton with this blunt title: "Old Dogs, New Tricks, and Crappy Newspaper Executives."

3. You'll be throwing your dollars down the drain if you buy the papers to dictate to the community, instead of listening to everyday citizens and partnering with them.The notion that powerful local people want to buy the papers to influence political decisions is worrisome, but what worries me even more is the idea that any news organization might think it's a good idea in 2012 to dictate or talk-down to the community of readers in any way -- regardless of politics. As longtime readers know, when the newspapers were up for sale back in 2005 I called for new kind of news organization that I called (probably foolishly) a "norg" because it wouldn't be solely wedded to a printed newspaper. And, for a short time, before all the sales and Chapter 11s and job cuts and everything else, we were having a great conversation here in Philadelphiaabout closing the gap between professional journalists and their local communities. We talked about ways to create relationships between a news org like the one now called PMN and citizen journalists and bloggers, and involving readers more through techniques like crowdsourcing -- and almost nothing was done.

Next owners, it may run against your lifetime of political instincts, but if you can let go, there is a tremendous opportunity here to fix this problem going forward. One example: The digital divide of poor and working-class people lacking basic access to high-speed Internet remains a worse problem here in Philadelphia than just about anywhere else in America. But that crisis also creates opportunity. Just imagine a bold program that would not only connect lower-income Philadelphia to a world of information on the Internet -- talk about fulfilling civic duty! -- but also working with those neighborhoods in creating citizen-journalists who could cover the things that are truly important to them. That's a project that could not only save journalism in Philadelphia for years to come but could attract serious philanthropic dollars -- a mission for a master fundraiser, like...I don't know, Ed Rendell maybe?

The bottom line is that journalistic bosses trying to control the community in Philadelphia will fail. We will only succeed if the community supports and empowers us as journalists.

And I think the key to a successful sale of the Philadelphia newspapers is going to be something we've hardly seen at all so far, and that is a lot more transparency, starting right now. Not everyone may agree with this analogy, but I think what's really bothering a lot of people about this process so far is similar to the factors unraveling the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, in that we know that Romney desperately wants to get to the White House but the average voter doesn't understand why, or what he'd actually do if he gets there. So far, the same is true of the people identified as would-be buyers of Philadelphia Media Networks. We know who they are, but next to nothing of why they want to own this organization. While I think it's too late for Mitt Romney, it's not too late here. I'm no expert in newspaper sales and confidentiality rules, but I'd advise any and all would-be buyers to hold a press conference -- tomorrow, if possible. By all means, talk about your love for Philly.com and the Inquirer and the Daily News -- especially the Daily News! -- but also talk about how your love is going to make us better, and keep us alive not just next month but 20 years from now, when I'll be 73 and would like to still be working here.

Don't get me wrong -- the fact that wealthy people think it's a civic duty to keep traditional journalism alive in Philadelphia is a wonderful thing.

But that can't be the end of the conversation. It has to be the beginning.

It could have been a lot worse! Meanwhile, leave it to "SNL" to weigh in with the best take yet on Linsanity (watching Lin going off on the Dallas Mavericks as I write this..)