Let Them Eat Facts

I think it says a lot about my life that, even in Amsterdam, Tim Russert's worth as an interviewer comes up at dinner. The argument was made that he is absolutely as tough as any interviewer working today, and what more can we expect? My rejoinder, which I thought exceptionally on-point, was that it's not the "toughness" of the questions but the content. Just once, rather than see him compare some politician's current position to the one they held when they were eight, I'd like to see him compare some politician's current position to the actual data from a Congressional Budget Office graph. That would still be tough, but it would also be relevant. Sadly, this clever rejoinder appears to be Paul Krugman's argument, rather than mine, but it's still correct.

Russert's Gotta Getcha

Matt's takedown of Tim Russert's "tough," which is to say, trivial, questioning, is well worth a read. Russert's obsession with getting people to say things that are embarrassing rather than illuminating is enormously trivializing to politics, and all the more pernicious because his program is what passes for "serious" discussion in Washington. He's not the laggard, he's the model.

And so his attitude spreads. If you watch Hardball, you get the Chris Matthews' selling point, which is that he'll personally rip a politician's throat out if they try and spin you. It's all part and parcel of this contempt for politicians and desire to expose them not for being uninformed, gripped by crazed and wrong ideas, but for being politician-y. For engaging in the sort of spin and doubletalk and evasions that they've adopted in order to, well, survive Chris Matthews and Tim Russert. You can see it in the debate Russert just moderated, where the big story out of it was that Hillary was a bit clumsy in finessing an answer, not that Hillary (or anyone else) offered the wrong answer.

One could imagine a gotcha journalism that was actually very important. Jeff Stein engaged in it when he began asking politicians about the difference between a Sunni and Shiite, and which sect Osama bin Laden identified, and why it all mattered. Those questions probe the familiarity of pols with the dynamics critical for actual policy making. By contrast, Tim Russert's famous gotcha of Howard Dean -- "How many men and women do we now have on active duty?" -- was actually meaningless. If Dean had known the precise answer, it would have told you literally nothing about his plans for the military, his attitude towards national security, his plans for Iraq. It was simply a data point Russert could tag Dean for not knowing, and that could then be replayed on other shows, thus underscoring Russert's reputation for toughness. But that's the point, right?

Why Journalism is Like Manufacturing

"The Internet was a pretty standard resource for research and knowledge by the time we were in high school." Writes Brian. "God only knows how people "did" secondary education--let alone journalism--20 years ago."

I'm pretty sure the answer is "slower." When I moved to DC, I was often astonished by how little output was expected from journalists. Three or four features a year was a decent clip -- worthy of a salary. That seemed absurd. But back in the day, you couldn't just Nexis your way through everything written on the subject. Research required days in the microfiche stacks. Every time you got a new lead, you had to go back to the microfiche stacks. Writing serious articles took a really long time.

This is, in part, why you're seeing cutbacks in many newsrooms. I'm not supposed to say this, but journalism has gotten easier, and fewer individuals can do more of it. Now, you can certainly go way too far in that direction, and there are certain areas -- like foreign bureaus, where the reporting time is the same now as then -- where you don't want to lose staff. But as productivity rapidly increases, either the market has to expand or staffs will be cut. And to make matters worse, much like in manufacturing, the rise of blogs and online magazines has created intense, low-cost competition that simply didn't exist before. The problem, much like in manufacturing, is that we're killing off the positions that we still need and that Nexis hasn't made easier. The bloviators -- like myself -- reproduce, while the resource-intensive reporters, see their resources cut. Which is why we need more projects like this one, or possibly some public subsidies.

The New Republic's Latest Charmer

By Kathy G.

Ah, New Republic! You never really do let me down, do you?

I admit to having had a second thought or two about writing this post. Was it, oh, perhaps a teensy weensy bit over the top? A tad intemperate? Might it be said to be lacking the attribute of scrupulous, Olympian fairness and evenhandedness? After all, in that paragraph about what's good about the New Republic, I left out a few names. Noam Scheiber, for example -- now he's a smartie! And Jonathan Cohn -- how could I forget Jonathan Cohn? As someone else put it, Cohn is "the best health care writer not named Ezra Klein."

But then I saw this, and every one of my self-doubts melted away in an instant. In the post, titled "Another Psychotic Creep Writing at The New Republic," Brad DeLong notes the latest charming addition to the New Republic stable, an academic named Philip Jenkins who's now writing for TNR's Open University.

On that blog, Jenkins has been gracing us with his pensees regarding Muslim history. There's this, for example:

[T]he Arabs actually borrowed their much-cited "Muslim science" (the astrolabe and so on) from the Nestorians and other Eastern Christians...

And this:

[I]t is rather rich to complain that after the Reconquista, "In an act of utter domination, the Christian king orders the great [Córdoba] mosque consecrated as a Catholic church." Actually, that mosque (like most major Spanish mosques) was itself built on the site of an earlier church.... [T]he purveyors of public broadcasting history have learned something; but they are still offering apologetics, not reality.

But wait, wait -- it gets better! Philip Jenkins, I thought: now where have I heard that name before?

And then it came to me -- of course! Philip Jenkins is the author of Pedophiles and Priests, an infamous screed about the child sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. It basically amounts to a defense of said pedophiles -- or "the childfuckers" (as my girl Kathy Griffin referred to them in an episode of this season's My Life on the D List).

As the great Garry Wills pointed out in this* memorable filleting of Jenkins in the New York Review of Books, Jenkins's work has been indispensable to reactionary Catholics who have attempted to cover up, downplay, and otherwise evade responsibility for the sexual abuse scandals. Wills wrote:

The principal villains he [Jenkins] found in the priest-pedophile crisis of the 1990s were anti-Catholics, greedy lawyers, self-promoting prosecutors, sensationalistic newspapers, therapists seeking clients, and feminists with their "theology of abuse." He never seems to consider the possibility that the panic was not manufactured, or that many factors impeded rather than promoted the revelation of priestly misconduct. Reluctance to believe, report on, or expose priests is deeply built into American culture.

American bishops and their defenders gladly promoted Jenkins's claim that there was nothing to the priest-pedophile phenomenon but bad faith on the part of those "exploiting" it. They even said that his testimony was stronger and more disinterested because Jenkins is not a Catholic. With his help they dismissed or minimized the "panic," which allowed Cardinal Bernard Law and others to continue sending accused priests about their ordinary ministry with the results we have seen in Boston and elsewhere. When Cardinal Law in the 1990s called down God's judgment on The Boston Globe, he was just putting in his own way Jenkins's attack on "the political interests of the activists and groups who used the media to project their particular interpretation of the putative crisis."

The New Republic -- employer of a defender of childfuckers. Well hey, I've got to hand it them -- it is entirely consistent with the house style of "contrarianism or death." Because the idea that childfucking is not such a bad thing is indisputably contrarian, is it not?

Congratulations, guys! I didn't think it was possible, but you've really outdone yourselves here! I can't think of a single thing you've done that's a more telling expression of your rotted soul.

*The Wills piece is available to subscribers only, but if you email me I'll send you a copy.

Spanglish - Really Bad Spanglish

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

Seen on the New York City Subway among several Bud Light ads allegedly in Spanish, one with the following text:

Tan bueno como encontrar un parking en frente al building

Good God. I have plenty of Latino friends who, when I tell them about this nonsense, they don't know whether to roll their eyes, laugh, puke or all three. I've informally polled a Colombian, Chilean, Argentinean, Dominican, Cuban, Ecuadorian and Puerto Rican, none of whom said that they have heard people butcher their language quite like that. Your subway advertisements are now as good as your beer.

Psst, Anheuser-Busch: the italicized words are not Spanish. I believe the words you're looking for are estacionamiento and edificio, respectively, if you're trying to say "As nice as finding a parking place in front of the building."

I'm not the only one who thinks they're idiotic.

Why I hate The New Republic

By Kathy G.

I’ve been mulling over this post for a while, but postponed writing it. Then I saw this (via Yglesias), and I decided, you know what? That is the last fucking straw.

New Republic, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways:

1. I hate the way it is, and has always been, such an Ivy League white boy wankfest. The late, great Steve Gilliard used to say that TNR’s motto was “Looking for a qualified black since 1916” and there is much truth in that. The women writers are also few and far between, and tend to be relegated to girly subjects like poetry and book reviews, not the manly realms of politics and policy.

The sexual and racial uniformity is offensive on principal, of course. Moreover, in practice, it is one of the factors that has caused TNR to suck so hard. For example, there’s the classic TNR genre of pointless look-how-clever-I-am contrarianism. Only in a culture as insular, inbred, and out-of-touch as TNR’s could a style of argument as inane and precious as this one flourish. The obnoxious white boy entitlement complex probably also explains why TNR has harbored more than its share of frauds and fantasists. Because if you’re as special as we are who needs fact-checkers, right?

2. TNR is the Great Journalistic Wanker Machine. Have you ever been reading something on the internets, or listening to some Very Serious Person on the radio or teevee – and thought to yourself: “Shit, the dude who wrote this, or is yammering away on my teevee, is one serious wanker. That just might be the most wankeriffic thing I’ve heard all month! Or all year, even!”

Well, chances are, my friend, that the wanker you’ve had inflicted on you got his start in journalism at, or otherwise spent a significant chunk of their career at, The New Republic. TNR is responsible for foisting more first-class wankers on a blameless public than virtually any other media outlet.

Why, there’s Wanker Most Valuable Player Martin Peretz! Wanker All-Stars Lee Siegel, Peter Beinart, and Jeffrey Rosen! And Wanker Rookie of the Year James Kirchick!

Along with, of course, a veritable Hall of Fame of Wankers Emeritus: Mickey Kaus! Fred Barnes! Morton Kondracke! Charles Krauthammer! James K. Glassman (remember Dow 36,000? Sure you do!)! Michael Kelly! Robert Kagan! Robert Kaplan! Benjamin Wittes! Gregg Easterbrook! Jacob Weisberg! William Saletan! Andrew Sullivan! Camille Paglia!

I know, I know – Mommy, make it stop!

3. The biggest reason of all why I hate TNR, though, is this: the New Republic is the Number One Bitch of the American right.

Whenever conservatives needed the bipartisan cover of an allegedly liberal institution to promote their latest harebrained foreign policy adventure, or reactionary reversal of a longstanding progressive public policy, or vicious smear of progressive American ideas, institutions, and individuals, the New Republic was at the ready, as eager to service them as a brothel full of open-ass punks.

Latecomers to this sordid tale may be under the impression that the New Republic’s fall from grace began with its shameless shilling for the Iraq War, but it didn’t begin there, and it won’t end there, either. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane and revisit some of those golden moments of yesteryear, shall we?

Over the past two decades, as the right gathered strength and began their attempt to systematically destroy each and every venerable accomplishment of liberalism, here are some of the policies and ideas the New Republic enthusiastically endorsed:

-- a full-service menu of wingnut foreign policy positions, from aid to the contras in Nicaragua during the 80s to saber-rattling against Iran today to the full-throated support of every batshit crazy thing Israel has ever done;

-- well, to put it bluntly, racism – through everything from TNR’s obsessive attempts to discredit Jesse Jackson and its opposition to affirmative action to Martin Peretz’s many ugly insinuations about Arabs and, in what is perhaps the most shameful episode in the magazine’s history, the publication of an excerpt from Charles Murray’s crackpot pseudoscientific racist tract, The Bell Curve;

-- via an error-ridden article by a hack from a wingnut think tank, the torpedoing of Hillary Clinton’s health care proposal, which was the only real shot we’ve had at universal health care in decades;

-- a host of reverse Robin Hood neoliberal economic policies and ideas, from NAFTA to welfare reform to privatizing Social Security to reflexive union-bashing;

-- the gutting of Roe v. Wade (via Jeffrey Rosen’s cute argument that because of alleged flaws in the legal reasoning of Roe, we’d all be better off if abortion was left to the states – try telling that to any poor, pregnant, and desperate woman in red state America);

-- the wingnut persecution of Bill Clinton, in the form of the bullshit Whitewater and Monica “scandals;”

-- Joe Lieberman’s ass-tastic 2004 campaign for President (yes, believe it or not, he got their endorsement); and

-- the recent changes to the FISA law that more or less gave the Bush administration a license to spy on any and all of their political enemies.

Have I forgotten anything?

It could be argued that, in recent years, TNR has reversed course on a host of issues, and indeed it has – it did a 180 on affirmative action, the economic policies it now endorses are a lot more populist, and many of its writers have reversed themselves on the Iraq war.

And it could be pointed out that even today, The New Republic still produces some first-rate journalism – just in the past week, for example, there was this and this. Interspersed occasionally among the wankers, it’s also published a host of terrific writers, including Thomas Frank, Rick Perlstein, Chris Hayes, Spencer Ackerman, James Wolcott, and Terry Castle. It gave my favorite political writer, Thomas Geoghegan, his start in journalism. It must be said, however, that none of those writers, except Ackerman (now departed) and I believe Geoghegan, has ever held a staff position on TNR.

Among current and recent staff writers, I’m a fan of Jonathan Chait’s writing on economics and tax policy. I thought Ryan Lizza’s devastating piece on George Allen was a service to the nation (because, believe me, without it the Senate would still be in Republican hands and we’d be dealing with that gigantic asshole as the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination).

But if you focus on the high points of TNR, you miss the forest for the trees. As a journalistic institution, TNR plays a unique role in the development of policy and politics. Its circulation has always been low (and in recent years has declined drastically), but many of the people who read it are very powerful: media elites, D.C. lobbyists and activists, and policymakers in the White House and the Senate, and on Capitol Hill. If TNR supports a particular policy or idea, that carries serious weight, especially when what it supports is conservative. It enables the right to say, “Even the liberal New Republic endorses X,” and that has tremendous credibility and resonance. It doesn’t matter if 19 out of 20 articles in a given issue are liberal; the one wingnutty one out of the 20 will, by virtue of its setting, be all the more influential.

To explain it a little more fully: I remember an example I had in a game theory class, where a leader is deciding to go to war or not. The leader has two advisers, one known to be a hawk and the other known to be a dove. The basic insight was that the leader would tend to listen more seriously to a dove urging war or a hawk urging peace, because the advice each was giving would be against type, and thus had extra credibility. That’s why politicians like Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman are so deeply damaging to Democrats, because when they say anti-war Democrats are unpatriotic, uninformed people will think there’s something to it. Whereas when Bush and Cheney say such things it’s par for the course.

The same principle applies to the New Republic: when a venerable liberal institution like TNR strongly endorses a breathtaking range of illiberal positions, and starts smearing liberals who disagree with them as extremist and unpatriotic in the bargain, the damage it does to the liberal cause is profound.

The New Republic’s 25-year jihad against liberalism has had dire consequences for this country, and the world. Under this administration, we have seen the needless and tragic annihilation of one of the great American cities. We’ve seen economic inequality soar to near-record levels. We’ve seen a Supreme Court habitually given to reactionary reversals of long-settled doctrines, like Brown v. Board of Education. We’ve seen a religious right sufficiently emboldened to broaden its anti-abortion campaign and start targeting a woman’s right to birth control as well. We’ve seen global warming develop apace, with our leaders making zero serious efforts to control it. We’ve seen a dangerously ignorant and frighteningly out-of-control chief executive who seemingly delights in pissing all over the Constitution at any opportunity.

And then there’s the little matter of those 500,000 rotting corpses in Iraq, and a national reputation that is in tatters all over the world, and will likely remain that way for decades.

Though God knows they weren’t the only ones, New Republic played an indispensable role in enabling these maniacs, every step of the way.

And now these pricks want to say they’re sorry? Well -- cry me a river, bitches.

In short: New Republic, fuck you very much.

Today's Captain Renault award goes to . . .

By Kathy G.

Claude Rains is shocked, shocked!

Salon reports the shocking, shocking! news that the DC "hot" reporter contest was rigged.

Hard to believe, I know. But we all know who the rightful heirs to the title of hotness would have been -- had not this diabolical conspiracy denied them. Curse those infernal bots, I say!

The Great S&M Amusement Corp.

By Kathy G.

Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951)

Today Digby writes about the disgraceful way the media has kowtowed to Bob Murray, the owner of the mine that collapsed in Utah. Sadly, the media (the teevee media at least) have by and large let Murray set the agenda and have failed to ask hard questions about dubious safety practices in this and other mines he owns. In addition, they have all but ignored the way the right in general and the Bush administration in particular have done their best to destroy unions and gut the enforcement of workplace safety regulations, two enormously important contributing factors to this disaster.

Next week I’ll have more to say about the policy issues implicated in this tragedy. But for now I want to heartily second Digby's recommendation that you check out Billy Wilder’s film, Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival). This film, when it was originally released, was a box office and critical disaster. It was out of circulation for many years, but lately it’s been showing up on Turner Classic Movies with some frequency (it will be broadcast there again on August 26th), and recently it (finally) was released on DVD.

The reason Digby brings up Ace in the Hole in the context of the Utah mine disaster is that the film’s plot revolves around a somewhat similar media circus. It concerns a man trapped in a mine collapse. A reporter (Kirk Douglas) gets wind of the story, but rather than helping to rescue him, he conspires with local officials to keep him trapped there as long as possible. The reason? The longer he’s there the better it is for Douglas’s career, because it’s a great story that sells newspapers. The local officials and business people also have their own self-interested reasons for not going to the man’s aid.

Given that Ace in the Hole has a mixed reputation at best, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But in general I’m a big fan of Wilder’s work so when it screened on TCM earlier this year I decided to check it out. I watched it with three of my best cinephile friends. None of us had ever seen it. I remember at a certain point, we all looked at one another, and my friend Kyle pronounced, “This is a totally fucking awesome movie!”

Which it is. It is certainly one of Wilder’s strongest films, and I think a lot of people are now realizing this for the first time.

But Jesus Christ, this is one cynical film! It’s cynical even for Wilder, who, let’s not forget, is the dude who made films like Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd., which are about as dark as Hollywood gets. Yet Ace in the Hole outdoes them both in its sour view of human nature. Watching it is like a full-body immersion in an acid bath. I mean, up until that time, was there ever a character in a Hollywood film consumed with as much self-loathing as Kirk Douglas is here?

As I mentioned before, contemporary critics mostly hated this film, even the more discerning ones. Pauline Kael said of the film, “Some people have tried to claim some sort of satirical brilliance for it, but it's really just nasty, in a sociologically pushy way.” Andrew Sarris said that the film “proved” that Wilder was “inadequate for the more serious demands of . . . social allegory.” That was before Sarris’s famous reversal on Wilder, whom he now considers to be among the pantheon of great directors. But still . . .

I think part of the reason critics like Sarris and Kael recoiled from the film is that they thought the portrayal of the media was completely over the top. Wilder’s depiction of the media’s utter heartlessness and craven devotion to nothing bigger than its own self-interest must have seemed grotesquely exaggerated. But you know what? In the post-Iraq, post-Judy Miller era, it’s not especially hard to accept the film’s premise, and Wilder’s pitch black view of the media. In 1951, though, people weren’t ready for this film. Ace in the Hole is a great example of a work of art that was misunderstood in its own time. But man, does it ever speak to our own.

Btw, the title of this post refers to one of my favorite Wilderian touches in the movie. The mine collapse has become a 24-7 media circus, drawing crowds so large that enterprising hucksters set up an actual carnival on the site. The name on the carnival trucks? “The Great S&M Amusement Corp.”

One last thing: I also join Digby and Jane Hamsher in urging that you check out the classic documentary Harlan County U.S.A., which also is now available on DVD. It’s often cited as one of the greatest documentaries ever made, which it totally is – politically galvanizing and emotionally heart-wrenching. Though it’s over 30 years old, I saw it earlier this year and it holds up beautifully.

Coups and Earthquakes

By Randy Paul of Beautiful Horizons

For those of you who do not know my blog, I write primarily about Latin America with a special interest in Brazil (more about me here). So, while Ezrinho is revisiting his raizes brasileiras, he was kind enough to ask me to fill in.

Matt Yglesias made the following comment here about Wednesday's earthquake in Peru:

I have nothing to say about it, but it seems wrong not to recognize these tragedies and their victims.

Of course it's not wrong to recognize these tragedies and their victims. What is wrong is that so much of what we hear in the news about Latin America involves these sorts of tragedies and political upheaval.

In the early 1980's I read a book that profoundly changed my view of how media in the US report the developing world back to us. The book, Coups and Earthquakes was written by Mort Rosenblum and it was a compelling analysis of media coverage in the US of the world outside the US and Europe. The title essentially reiterates the MSM focus on the developing world.

Unfortunately, precious little has changed. Google "bus plunge" and you'll see what I mean. Do the same with "coup de etat" or "strongman dictator" and you'll get the idea. How many media outlets report the fact that Brazil is leading the way in developing smaller commercial jets via Embraer and created 247 jobs in Ft. Lauderdale? How often do we hear that Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD) is the world's leading miner of iron ore? Before Hugo Chávez, how often did the MSM mention that Citgo was owned by PDVSA, the state-owned oil company of Venezuela? Much was made of the fact that in Michael Moore's film Sicko, that the US was just ahead of Slovenia in terms of health care, but I don't recall anyone mentioning that the US was just behind Costa Rica. Has anyone heard any mention that Banco Bradesco was the third bank in the world to provide online banking to its customers in 1996?

Admittedly, much of this wonkish, but it bears pointing out. I hope in my short stay here to perhaps dispel some myths about and spur some interest in Latin America.

Wow

Brian's right, this is literally the greatest news story I've ever read:

US President George W. Bush charged Monday that Iran has openly declared that it seeks nuclear weapons -- an inaccurate accusation at a time of sharp tensions between Washington and Tehran.

"It's up to Iran to prove to the world that they're a stabilizing force as opposed to a destabilizing force. After all, this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon," he said during a joint press conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

But Iran has repeatedly said that its nuclear program, which is widely believed in the West to be cover for an effort to develop atomic weapons, is for civilian purposes.

Asked to provide examples of Tehran openly declaring that it seeks atomic weapons, White House officials contacted by AFP said that Bush was referring to Iran's defiance of international calls to freeze sensitive nuclear work.

Look at that! A string of words and punctuation marks in the very first sentence that manage to not only report on the substance of the President's comments, but on their accuracy as well. It's as if this news story was trying to leave me informed, rather than conform to some mysterious stylistic standards meant to protect the writer from criticism.

Woe Is The Media!

I agree with Ankush that newspapers will have to change to survive, and that many of them will. But, working in media, it's almost impossible to overstate how resistant they are to that process. The degree to which folks appear to believe that every newspaper is a special little snowflake, its value incalculable and its presence critical, is remarkable. I can't tell if this is straight rationalizing for a situation that, as Matt says, "is very good for newspaper writers," or because of some odd status quo bias, or simply the internalization of journalistic mission statements, or what. Hear it often enough, though, and you begin to wonder if these institutions have even a hope of changing enough to survive.

But the old ways really do need an overhaul. Take coverage of presidential speeches. We do not actually need 40 different reporters from 26 different outlets writing the same story according to the same stylistic conventions about a useless address. Six would do just fine. Particularly in an age where the transcript -- and the reports of the other six -- can be easily accessed online. It's now much cheaper, easier, and more possible for a large slice of the population to directly access the primary documents, transcripts, and video clips that could, before, only be provided by on-location reporters and newspaper distribution systems. That leaves the newspapers adding less value than before, and it means we need fewer of them

Having fewer of them is something that many people appear desperate to head off. And I think it's possible, if not terribly likely, that most will survive. But only by becoming something different. The Tallahassee Reporter can't compete with The New York Times at news gathering. And until now, they haven't really had to.

The heyday of newspapers had them operating amid a scarcity of information. The average citizen in Omaha, Tallahassee, or even Los Angeles simply couldn't collect information from DC or Nairobi, couldn't call up yesterday's presidential speech, couldn't choose from thousands of content sources and millions of blogs and dozens of cable news channels. Newspapers, due to their wide array of reporters, their investment-heavy text transmission infrastructure, and their near-monopolies in individual markets, added a ton of value in getting consumers information they couldn't otherwise access. That's changed.

Now information is abundant, even too abundant. What readers need is interpretation, filters, guides. The media -- dare I say it? -- needs to mediate. That's where they can add the value. The basic stenography that was valuable in one age isn't worthless in this one, but it's simplistic, and not nearly enough.

Further, we're not merely dealing with an era in which information has become overwhelmingly abundant, we're caught in a moment when all sides have become exquisitely sophisticated at spinning it, at publicizing what they want heard, distorting what scares them, drowning out what hurts them, discrediting what attacks them. So not only is there too much for the average consumer to deal with, it's not even clear what they should deal with, what's honest, who can be trusted. This is dicier territory, of course, but I think those who fret over the newspaper's capability to serve this guiding function give insufficient thought to how odd the concept of objective news coverage has always been, and how much more potential there was for abuse when there was nearly no in-market competition.

But instead of moving in that direction, what you see is a profession articulating an enormous resistance to those trends. The response to blogs has been a sort of occupation-wide condescension to those who opine rather than call people, who express opinions rather than seek objectivity. And that's natural: Traditional reporters have responded to an occupation challenge by emphasizing what sets them apart from the newcomers. But the reason these new types of media are proving successful is because they fill a need, they serve a market that, right now, isn't being well-served. If newspapers are to survive -- particularly the smaller ones -- they have to stop operating from a business plan which only succeeded because bigger, better newspapers were unavailable, and start thinking about what actual value they can add to a broad information market that they no longer monopolize, and in most cases, can't compete in.

New News About Newspapers

Merrill Goozner notices some troubling news for newspapers:

I couldn't help but notice the bad news on the business page today. Profits at the New York Times Co. and the Tribune Co. were down again. The Times is planning to triple its cost-cutting in the next two years, the report said. At the Tribune, according to the Wall Street Journal, publishing revenue dropped 9% to $920 million. Ad revenue fell 11%. Online revenue rose 17% to $66 million. Circulation revenue fell 6%."

Allow me to deconstruct those numbers a bit. The decline in ALL revenue was greater than ALL internet revenue combined. In other words, for every $8 decline in print revenue, the company picked up $1 in internet revenue.

On a related note, lots of folks are recommending Russell Baker's New York Review of Books piece, "Goodbye to Newspapers." I haven't read it yet, but I don't see why that should stop me from recommending it.

Think They'll Report, And Let You Decide, This Poll?

The new Pew Poll on public knowledge of current affairs includes the sadly routine finding that Fox News is doing a remarkable amount of nothing for its viewing audience. Subjected to 35 questions about the news, regular viewers of Fox scored directly in the national average, showing no sign of enhanced knowledge for all the time spent before Brit Hume. Blogs, too, appeared to do little good for their audience, lifting scores by only 2%. The Daily Show and Colbert Report either attract or educated the most informed viewers, along with newspaper websites, PBS, NPR, Limbaugh, and O'Reilly. Maybe none of this should be surprising, though. In the end, Fox News doesn't exist to inform -- it exists to convince. And in that, it's doing just fine.

Can't Fight City Desk?

By Ezra

As Ogged notes, that controversy over the Virginia libraries trashing literary classics turns out to have been largely concocted: They were throwing out excess copies of titles, they still had plenty available to check out. As he says, thanks media. Nevertheless, I wonder if the libraries couldn't have, I don't know, e-mailed more of those who commented on the situation, or posted a correction on their web site, or otherwise fought harder against the misrepresentation. They shouldn't have been misrepresented in the first place, of course, but once they were, why didn't they battle back harder?

Indeed, I'm always a bit unsettled by the odd placidity with which individuals or institutions will let the media misrepresent their thoughts, work, or actions. I remember calling Harvard economist Lawrence Katz after David Brooks appeared, to me, to misrepresent his work. Katz agreed and was perfectly willing to detail, on the record, exactly where Brooks had misrepresented him and what his actual opinions were. But he seemed basically amused by the whole thing. He happily corrected the record when I called, but had no interest in writing into the paper, or writing a rebuttal under his byline, or otherwise taking affirmative steps to ensure his work and reputation weren't publicly distorted. Obviously, this doesn't ameliorate the media's culpability in misrepresenting stories or individuals, I'm just always a tad astonished by the meek acceptance often offered by their wronged subjects.

Real Media Bias

Dean Baker makes an important point on the ridiculously reductive "bias in the media" conversation. While scores of partisans and watchdogs pore over every anchor utterance watching for hints of partisanship, almost no attention is offered to the non-partisan biases that nevertheless heavily impact the political world. As Baker puts it:

How about comparing the number of articles that refer to the Social Security "crisis" or the need to fix Social Security, relative to the number of stories that refer to the need to fix the country's health care system? I don't know any economist who does not believe that the health care system poses a far more serious threat to the country's economy and the federal budget, yet the media give health care reform a small fraction of the attention they give the long-term shortfall projected for Social Security.

One could argue that politicians don't talk about health care reform, but this raises a cause and effect issue. Politicians do try to bring up health care reform (e.g. dozens of members of Congress have signed on to a bill that would establish a universal Medicare system), but they are generally ignored or ridiculed by the media. Since politicians don't like being ignored or ridiculed, they opt not to talk about the issues that the media doesn't want them to talk about, so they go back to the Social Security crisis. [...]

The biggest problem with bias in the media, at least in its coverage of economics, is the way in which it narrows the frame of debate, not its word choice, although I could come up with a few key phrases here also (e.g. "free trade").

I might quibble with the specific example Baker uses -- there's a fair amount of reporting on a health system in crisis, it's just not constructively framed -- but the cumulative effect of the media's slanted economic reporting is to push the actual center in American politics to the right, which limits the range of political debate and disadvantages Democrats in a more fundamental way than leaving the "ic" off of "Democrat."

Whether you think there's a political bias in American reporting, it's undoubtedly true that there's a management bias that advantages employers over unions. Whether you think the media accepts the reality of abortion, they obviously spend excess time on isolated cases of entitlement fraud, making Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security seems far more misused and inefficient than any actual expert believes they are. Whether you think Canada is a good health care system, the media's (inaccurate) attention to their wait times gives a very different picture of universal health care systems than would a focus on their total absence of uninsured and massive per capita savings. These are very real examples of bias, and rather than disadvantaging a particular party, they recenter the American consensus, usually to the right. It's a real problem.

If Democrats Win, Republicans Get the Credit

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

Back when I read the Halpin/Teixeira piece describing how Democrats are perceived as not standing for anything, I was waiting for an article like this one by Kevin Freking to come along as an example of what their analysis misses.  Democrats are trying to prevent  penalties in the woefully designed Medicare bill from hitting senior citizens.  Now a small group of Republicans are joining the effort, and they're getting all the media love.  Only one Democrat is quoted in the piece, beneath two Republicans.  In total, five Republicans are named as trying to block the penalties, while only Charlie Rangel represents the Democrats.  The fact that the entire Democratic Party is trying to stop the penalties is only hinted at.  I remember a similar dynamic playing out with the wage cuts for Katrina rebuilding workers, which united Democrats and a few Republicans blocked. 

Democrats can stand for whatever they want.  But if they want to actually stop bad things from happening, they need to bring some Republicans along to make a majority.  The media focuses on the Republicans, and nobody pays attention to the fact that the Democratic Party stood for something and actually won.  Sucks to be in the minority.

Violation of the Club Rules

By Lance Mannion

When you think about it---and you're not meant to.  The world continues on its merry self-destructive but profitable to them what's in on the deal way because we don't think about what we're not meant to think about---the clubbiness of after-hours Washington is a grotesque joke on the rest of us that even Satan wouldn't have the bad taste to perpetrate.

Milton's Satan.  Job's Satan would enjoy a good horselaugh over it.

Job's Satan is the kind of evil entity that gets a kick out tricking the Almighty into massacring an innocent man's family, wiping out his fortune, and covering his hide in weeping pustules just to prove to the poor schnook, who never doubted it anyway, that He is the Lord God Almighty.  Milton's Satan was a sophisticated wit by comparison with the playful, puckish sense of humor of an Oxford College don on Boat Night.

But I digress.

The idea that once they clock out, unzip the coveralls, and gather together at the old brass rail, Senators, Congressmen, Presidential aides, the boys and girls of the Press, and the lobbyists buying the round are, Republicans and Democrats, Liberal and Conservative, really just a bunch of bosom pals forced by circumstances to work in different, rival departments of the same firm and what happens during the day is just the dirty job of earning a paycheck and their real lives begin after the cocktail hour is, I suppose, necessary to their sanity and useful for getting laid.

(Sheepish editor's note:  Much of what follows recapitulates ideas in Ezra's post this morning about the insufferable Richard Cohen.  But I was already finishing this up when he posted and he asked me to help fill in this week and it's not my fault the man doesn't know how to take a vacation!)

Whenever I hear a Washington insider bemoan the polarization of politics I know that person is either a Republican about to launch a vicious attack on a Democrat, a Democrat terrified of being viciously attacked, or a journalist who just hates all the muss and fuss because it makes picking which parties to attend a trickier business---choose wrong and some miffed hostess will cross your name off the guest list for a whole month's worth of A-list fiestas.

Insider Journalists seem to have found the path to their self-congratulatory "objectivity" by way of the sports pages.  At least when they appear on TV, they adopt the detachment of New York baseball writers forced to cover a crucial series between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the San Diego Padres---it's interesting because it's baseball, but it's not the Yankees, so let's not lose our heads here.

This is one of Shakespeare's Sister's themes.  They cover politics as if it is a game, as if the people involved, the "players," are players, colorful characters whose quirks and foibles make their stories funnier or more dramatic, but whose political views are no more important than a ballplayer's pet superstitions or diligent pursuit of an arcane record.  It's not just Joe Klein.  He's the model.   That Tom DeLay is a thief and a thug and he posed a real threat to the useful functioning of the government never seems to figure in the coverage of him, even as he disappears back down the sewer from which he crawled. The Bug Man, the Hammer, he's just contemporary Washington's Ty Cobb, isn't he?

(As if Cobb's racism and sociopathy were of no real consequence.)

The assumption underlying and propping up all this chummy let me buy you a drink and we'll call it even bonhomie is that "We're all in this together."  Everybody in Washington is there for the same reason.  To do a job.  And that job is to keep the country moving.  We may have different ideas about how to get there, but finally we all want to end up in the same place, don't we?

No.

Not true.

It's probably never been true, except for, maybe, the four years during World War II, when we all wanted to beat the Nazis and whip the Japs.  But even then there were serious disagreements about what should happen afterwards.

For the whole history of the country there has been a struggle between two sides.  There's the one side that wants a democratic-republic with as much democracy as is possible without disorder.  And there's another that wants to re-establish some form of aristocracy with as much liberty for those few who have power and money as they decide they need and with as little for the rest of us as the rich and powerful can be forced to begrudge.

That second side, the would-be aristocrats, keeps switching Party affiliations.  At one time, many of them were Democrats.  But that was a long time ago.  Over the course of the 20th Century the racist aristocrats left the Democratic party and joined forces with the Big Business aristocrats who'd taken the Republican Party away from the Progressives.

These two factions, which control the Republican Party today, believe that the United States should be able to do whatever it wants in the world, that rich white people ought to be able to boss the rest of us around, that men get to boss their wives and children around but those who aren't rich must submit to bossing from those that are, that money and status and power are the definers of worth, and that we should have two goverments---or a government with two faces:  A harsh, authoritarian one that keeps the rabble scared and in line, and a genial, tame, complicitly winking one taking orders from the aristocracy.

The American Revolution ended monarchism here but it did not do it by changing the minds of the local monarchists, any more than the Civl Rights movement ended bigotry once and for all.  Monarchists will always be with us because it's part of human nature.  There are some of us who like to boss, and there are lots of us who like to be bossed.

The Founders got rid of a king but they were under no illusions that they had innoculated the American people against tyranny for all time.

If any of them came back from the grave today they'd be amazed that the democrats had been able to hold out against the aristocrats for so long.  But they'd have no trouble recognizing that the two sides are still there, fighting it out.  And they'd be appalled to see that so many Washington insiders appear not to see it or be sufficiently concerned about what's at risk.

As digby says:

I suspect that many others who are engaged in the netroots like me became radicalized in their 30's and 40's by a Republican Party that started to behave as an openly undemocratic institution. Why so many of these establishment Democrats and insider press corps aren't exercised by this after what we've seen, I can't imagine. Perhaps they just can't see the forest for the trees. This past decade has not been business as usual.

History has many examples of societies that enabled radical political factions to dominate, through inertia, cynicism or plain intimidation. It happened in Europe in the 25 years before I was born and almost destroyed the whole planet. I know it's unfashionably hysterical to be concerned about such things, but I have never believed that America was so "exceptional" that it couldn't happen here.

The stakes are incredibly high. Without the cold war polarity, the US has bigger responsibilities than ever. And instead of behaving like a mature democracy and world leader, we have been alternating from adolescent tabloid obsessives to playground bullies. This is serious business.

Which brings me to Steve Colbert.

I'm not surprised that many members of the Club are tut-tuting over Colbert's performance, calling it "inappropriate," suggesting that Colbert crossed some line of common decency, taste, and tact.  He violated the Club rules.  He came there and told them that what happens in Washington matters.  He told them that they aren't playing a game or watching one.  Lives are in the balance.

It'd be amusing to ask the Club members what they think someone like Mark Twain would have said if he'd come to their chummy little hoedown.  I'll bet most of them admire Twain.  Many of them probably read him and sigh out their wish to write like him with a pen warmed up in hell.  It doesn't seem to occur to them to act on the wish, but nevermind.  Think Twain would have made a couple good natured cracks about President McKinley's bald pate and called it a night?

My favorite post about the Colbert Affair is John Rogers' at Kung Fu Monkey.  Rogers has been a working comic, but he's not being funny when he writes:

As for Colbert crossing the line -- how? Did he make remarks about the President's wife? About his children? His sex life? His draft dodging, his drinking and drug use before he found the Lord? No. Every joke used a well-known fact of public-record. Does anyone deny the poll numbers cited? Does anyone deny that the government response to previous crisises have been deficient? Does anyone deny that Administration officials outed Valerie Plame (hell, even the Administration officials now have to rely on he idea it was accidental)? Does anyone deny that the Administration has actively opposed global warming discussions? Listen -- if the President could do a long routine about not finding WMD's and laughing about it, while US soldiers died in the resultant war ... then to be frank I think he set the bar. Oddly, I think that if Colbert had done the routine the President did a couple years ago, THAT would have been crossing the line for me.

If his sin was incivility, then what the audience/bookers were looking for wasn't comedy. Comedy is by its nature uncivil. Comedy is, in both linguistic structure and overall psychological impact, hostile. Sometimes overtly, often not. But there is no such thing as a joke structured like: "You know what makes me happy? Yeah, that same thing that makes everybody else happy. (sigh)" There is no laugh there.

This is how the Club thinks.  Colbert was rude and uncivil when he made jokes that told the truth, but President Bush was being a good sport when he made a joke out of the lies that were getting American soldiers and Marines maimed and killed.

The reason is that Bush's "joke" keeps the game going.  Colbert's jokes spoiled the fun of pretending it's all a game.  Besides, if the wrong person saw you laughing there goes your big speaking fee and that invite to the beach house.j

Even worse, if the wrong people got Colbert's jokes, your editors and readers if you're a journalist, the voters if you're a politician, they might ask you why you're not doing your job.

Cross posted at my place.

Thanks to Avedon Carol for the links.

Jay Rosen on Tony Snow

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

It's hard to figure out what to make of Jay Rosen's commentary on Tony Snow's job. Rosen, an NYU professor and media critic extraodinaire, believes the Snow appointment may signal a shift in the White House's press relations strategy, allowing for a more traditional give-and-take between the beat reporters and the Presidency. There are no guarantees, but maybe there's a chance. With all due respect to Professor Rosen, I have a hard time buying it.

Snow is a former HWBush speechwriter who worked for a blatantly partisan news outlet in his most recent gig. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But to suggest that he'll work to allow more press access because he's served on the other side of the anchor's desk just doesn't compute. It seems much more likely that Snow represents the second stage of what Rosen terms "Rollback" -- the elimination of opportunities to question the policy positions of the President. I suspect the White Hosue will continue to focus most of its PR energy on favorable news outlets: Fox, reactionary talk-radio, perhaps USA Today, magazines that might not be hostile to the President, and the more pliable local newspapers. Network news and the major national papers will be left with a choice—cover the President's beat, consisting of q&a with handpicked audiences and "reporting on the news" when he appears on Fox News or in a Washington Times interview, or cover nothing. Whether the Post/Times/ABC/NBC/CBS reporters will catch on to the new game, or think Snow represents a return to "business as usual", is the real open question.

Domenech and the Post

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

I think Lindsay Beyerstein's summary of Domenech's responses has the proper amount of respect for the situation. But the real loser here isn't Ben Domenech, who, despite near pathological levels of lying and blame shifting, will join Scooter Libby, Oliver North, and Kenneth Starr in the well paid far reaches of the conservative machine. After all, the Republican party takes care of its own, just as any good street gang would.

The real loser here is of course the Washington Post, whose tangled position in the journalistic-political complex is once again on display. Because of its status as the "paper of record" in DC, the Post is willing to slant its coverage in order to curry favor with whoever happens to be in power at the time. Witness, for instance Brad DeLong's healthy criticisms of the paper's economic coverage. Amazingly, thanks the Post's institutional tendency towards "truthiness" rather than truth, the paper is still unwilling to state the obvious. Take this quote from one of their Domenech-After Action Reports, discussing a review that Ben had lifted from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Domenech said he thought his piece appeared first, but a database review found that Murray's review was published three days earlier." Now, perhaps we should be charitable here, and excuse the Post from making definitive statements before their internal investigation is complete. But at this point there's no reason to give Domenech any credibility. This sentence really needs an inline fact-check. At least, "Domenech said he thought his piece appeared first, but at best, his memory is faulty. A database review found ...", or, if you're feeling particularly vindictive, "Domenech said he thought his piece appeared first, but there is no reason to trust his memory at this point. A database review found ...", would get the point across.

Memo to Jim Brady: this is not some he-said/she-said debate between two political parties. This is a debate between Ben Domenech and the Post; you're perfectly allowed to adjudicate the truth value of the man's public statements. For that matter, you're allowed to adjudicate the truth value of a political figure's statements, but let's just go one step at a time.

Defining Disintermediation Down

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

When I first read Ezra's Gore piece, my thoughts were something like, "When Gore finally succeeds with this disintermediation stuff, I'll probably have enough money to buy a holographic projector so I can receive 3D pods in my space station!" But now that I've seen his latest post, disintermediation looks a lot more run-of-the-mill than it did before. Cutting out the middleman between candidates and swing voters is a herculean task. Cutting out the middleman between candidates and activists is a relatively easy one that everybody is doing.

The following things strike me as obvious: The internet makes it possible for people to be heard by millions of others who are interested in hearing them, at a very low cost. Putting your candidate's most exciting speeches up on the internet so activists can see them is a great idea. When you take a popular position on an issue and expend some effort to push it, email your supporters telling them what you're up to. And campaigns generally are doing these things.

Ezra talks about Howard Dean in the post below, and doesn't mention the central factor in the Dean story: Iraq. If you have a candidate who passionately argues for an unpopular position early in the primaries while others oppose it, and that position becomes a strongly held majority view among the party base, the candidate becomes a frontrunner. I don't know how much explanatory work the internet stuff does here. The old media was perfectly happy to play up the fight between the anti-war outsider and the pro-war establishment. And while the new media portrayed Dean's views much more accurately than the old (most people are still astonished when you mention that he's a big budget-balancing guy) I'd be pretty surprised to see anyone argue that the use of blogs to recruit fiscal conservatives played a big role in his rise.

"I have a bad feeling about this"

by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

Truer words have never been spoken. Via Atrios.

What To Do With the Briefing Room?

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

In addition to agreeing with, well, little ol' me that the hunting accident may have been a better A1 story than the Iraq war, the Medicare bill, or the budget, Jay Rosen hits on the key point on display during Cheneyshotaguyintheface-gate. The Bush approach to press relations is radically different from any previous President, and the press corps either can't tell or doesn't care:

Other White Houses had a “line of the day” they wanted to push. None had a spokesman like Scott McClellan who, no matter what the question, will mindlessly repeat the line of the day as a way of showing journalists that they have no rights to an answer. That isn’t “spin,” although it may superficially look like spin. That’s shutting down the podium and emptying out the briefing room without saying you’re doing it.

To the Bush team, the national press corps isn't an independent body; it's simply another medium for propogating the Presidential message. Reading transcripts, one wonders why the reporters bother showing up anymore; after all, they have other work and other potential sources. Perhaps they're trying to find a way to hack the McLellatron 3000 (for which I'd give credit to the originator, but google is being uncooperative) and think that with just one more shot in the briefing room, they'll ask just the right question that crashes its security system, giving them access to the codes for Zion's mainframe. Or the Presidential Daily Briefings. Or ... something.

Constructive reactions to the Bush rules of government/media relations are hard to come by; Rosen suggests that the press has avoided reacting negatively to avoid the appearance of seeming too political. But that decision can be un made. Individual media members could certainly decide that they can get greater credibility and ratings by antagonizing the executive the way Keith Olbermann has. But even without such changes, there is already at least one workable model for the press corps' new role: the "Investigative reporter" on local news. If you've ever watched it, you know this character, the man (or woman) on the 6:00 news who is always digging up sensationalist headlines about seemingly small potatoes: fradulent recycling companies, individual sex offenders, gang graffiti in air cargo holds, ... stuff that's surely a nuisance, but not world-ending. He finds a provacative topic, shoves his camera in the face of someone for official comment, and more often than not finds a security guard trying to cover the lens. It's this style ... though not the substance ... that DC reporters could start emulating. They would have change their writing patterns to give greater weight to independent, sometimes partisan, analysis rather than official statements. They would have to react to evasive maneuvers with harsher coverage, as we saw to some extent with Cheny's shooting incident. And they would have to give up existing favorable coverage-for-access relationships, which currently fail to yield accurate reporting. None of these ideas are groundbreaking; if Dana Milibank would like to teach his colleagues how its done, he just has to point them to the local news.

All Dressed Up, No Place To Go

By Neil the Ethical Werewolf

So I'm looking at the front page of Pajamas Media (happily renamed away from OSM) now, and the current panel discussion is headlined: What should Pajamas Media be?  Questions of this kind are usually answered before you get $3.5 million in venture capital funding.  But since they're thinking about it, I'll make a suggestion:  Pajamas Media should be a blog whose news aggregator isn't fed in part by the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese government's propaganda arm.  For that matter, is there any reason why you'd want your blog to have a news aggregator?  Are you under the impression that political junkies hardcore enough to read your blog will settle on it as their one-stop-shop for news?  (No, but the venture capital guys are.  And they like the phrase "one-stop-shop" almost as much as they like "open source".) 

This is the point in the post where snark should give way to intelligent thought.  Unfortunately, I don't have any intelligent thoughts to offer.  So let me refer you to Laura Turner, who does. 

When Wingnuts Crave Attention ...

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

It isn't pretty. Neil Boortz, a conservative talk-show host, doesn't get the kind of spotlight that Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter do. He doesn't even rank up there with Michael Savage. About all he's got going for him is a last name that translates rather well into a verb. "Boortz you!" could be a hefty insult if delivered with the right amount of gusto.

So what is a poor wingnut to do when he's not feeling the love? Blogenfreude at Agitprop writes: "Right wing radio host Neal Boortz recently suggested that, in the event of another Katrina or terrorist attack, we 'save the rich people first.' Boortz thinks this is a good idea because the rich are so obviously 'responsible for this prosperity.' "

Well, if Boortz wanted to win the Wingnut Sweepstakes, he's doing a mighty fine job. He goes into territory that some wingnuts might not tread. Because most wingnuts wouldn't be invited on that mysterious Rich People Spaceship that Boortz clearly believes is being built somewhere in the Utah desert.

Media Matters has the full transcript here, but the following lines from Boortz sum up his views:

Well, hell, yes, we should save the rich people first. You know, they're the ones that are responsible for this prosperity. I mean, you go out there and you look at this vast sea of evacuees, OK? You want to get an economy going in some city? Well, who you gonna take back? The people who own businesses? Or the people that sit around waiting to get their minimum wage job, work 'til Friday, get a paycheck and then not show up again until the following Wednesday? Come on. Just put a little logical thought into this, folks.

Well, Boortz him! "Logical" my foot! The whole spiel is worth reading, and the audio clip that Media Matters provides is even better. In it, you can hear Boortz get unusually excited about strangling a goose, and you can groove to the strange pseudo-disco that he uses for his transitions.

Macrame Award: CNN at the Toledo Neo-Nazi Riot

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper, who just saw this on CNN and is teed off enough to post again

CNN just flashed up videos of a riot in Toledo, Ohio. Some citizens were understandably and justifiably agitated by a Neo-Nazi rally that was being staged in that city. So people freak out. A building is set on fire - by whom? I don't know. I don't especially care. Violence goes with a Neo-Nazi rally like peanut butter and jelly.

The LAT quoted one black man who questioned the town's judgment: "They let them [the Neo-Nazis] come here and expect this not to happen?" said White, 29. [Pepper note: Yes, in a strange twist, his last name is "White." That'll annoy the Neo-Nazis.]

But CNN topped themselves - and the AFP and the AP - when they focused on a group of African Americans lunging at a snack hut. CNN's headline? VIDEO SHOWED LOOTERS BREAKING INTO SMALL STORE Uh, how about VIDEO SHOWED STUPID NEO-NAZIS RECEIVING A WAKE-UP CALL? The people rushing the snack hut appeared to be African-American (the camera was far away). I'm sorry about the snack hut, but I care way more that Neo-Nazis are threatening black residents of Toledo, and the protesters were absolutely right to let the Neo-Nazis know they are not welcome.

As for CNN, wow, to go to a Neo-Nazi rally and drop the "looter" bomb on some angry people is poor taste, especially after the "looter" blunder during Hurricane Katrina. Nice job, CNN.

Dr. Pepper had a good question: "Why are they allowed to have a march with police officers in tow?" You know what? If they want to have a march, let 'em. Without any police officers on hand. Let them spread their hateful words and watch in amazement as their hate is reflected back upon them. I'm with Mr. White: What on earth did they expect?

All Apologies

By Pepper of the Daily Pepper

Has anyone else noticed the sudden burst of "the media exaggerated Hurricane Katrina conditions" stories? On Thursday, "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" wasted a large chunk of time debating whether or not journalists made too much hay out of the chaos at the Superdome and Convention Center.

The repugnant Hugh Hewitt was invited as a panelist, which is an indication that PBS is rolling right over in response to those who are saying they're too liberal. Among the many gems of the show, Hewitt said that the week of Katrina coverage "was one of the worst weeks of reporting in the American media.... How can we trust the American media in Iraq? We really can't." (Powerline absolutely adored those kinds of statements and huzzahed Hewitt's comments.)

A message to anyone who says, "The media exaggerated the death toll. It's not so bad": Try telling that to a relative of someone who wasn't injured by Katrina but who went hungry waiting for help. Try telling that to someone who slipped on excrement and had to breathe the foul air of the Superdome. Those people didn't have to suffer, and they didn't have to die. Given the chaos of the situation, of course exaggerations and confusion would result, as Hewitt's fellow panelists, Carl Quintanilla and Keith Woods, tried to explain. Reporters were reporting. Hugh Hewitt shouldn't be sitting on his tuffet and tut-tutting the reporters wading in the muck. As far as I'm concerned, 1,000 is a pretty dadgummed high death toll for a hurricane in a civilized society. And what all the apologies say is that some people don't want to think about the fact that a large number of American citizens - maybe not as high as reported, but still significant - were treated like animals in the wake of Katrina.

If a Protest Happens in DC ...

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

... but the press doesn't cover it, does it really matter?

I think that the answer is yes. Taking a historical view, mostly by looking at the Vietnam War and its opposition, modern anti-war forces are significantly more successful in influencing public opinion.

The Vietnam War really got going in August 1964, with the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. At the time, public support for the escalation was widespread, and it took the "failings" of the January 1968 Tet Offensive (which were in fact massive losses for the opposition, but provided lots of compelling imagery that sapped support for the war in America) to force mainstream disapproval of the war. Still, neither Kennedy nor McCarthy would win the Presidential nomination in '68, leaving the more pro-war Hubert Humphrey to lead the ticket. Public support for the war rebounded a bit by Feburary of '69, and again by March of 1970, but completely collapsed by January of 1971. So, it's possible that the six-and-a-half year slide towards opposition will be completed in two-and-a-half years this time around. Sure, the threat of Saddam was never as large as the global threat of communism, but surely that alone can't explain the five-year acceleration of the anti-war movement. Today's protest received second billing behind Katrina/Rita coverage. That's not too shabby for thirty-months worth of opposition.

Like wise, the mythical power granted to Joan Baez and her compatriots is, well, mythical, but war-opposing celebreties enjoy much more success today than they did in the sixties. Credence Clearwater Revival had four top-selling singles between 1969 and and 1970, none of which were their class-warfare, anti-Vietnam anthem "Fortunate Son", which never cracked the annual top 100. James Taylor, Buffalo Springfield, CSNY -- these bands sold far fewer records than the Temptations, the Stones, the Jackson 5, or Marvin Gaye. Today, "Wake Me Up When September Ends" is at the top of the charts nationally, and is more popular in Red media markets than Blue ones. The major Vietnam-as-quagmire movies -- Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Hamburger Hill, -- all came out well after the war was over. In the present, Farenheit 9/11 drew huge audiences during the election cycle, and Good Night, and Good Luck is on its way. I would call that progress.

Sure, anti-war sentiment has a tough road to hoe without support from high-profile political leaders. Like Big Media Matt (and others), I'm highly skeptical about the ability of these large-scale protests to force political change. If you have a huge press conference, it's just not sexy enough for the networks to cover (this is not a new phenomenon; just ask John Kerry about his feelings about the Fourth Estate). But, if you cause to much of a ruckus, you play into the "dirty hippie/blame America first" stereotype. Further complicating matters is the press's singling out of the giant puppet crowd over the everyday moms and dads, who apparently aren't interesting enough to get on television. But all is not lost; the peaceniks of today seem to be having much better luck reaching a wide audience than the dirtie hippies of yesteryear did. Even if they still don't have enough message discipline.

Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye

Apparently, The NY Times is locking their op-ed writers behind a subscription wall tomorrow, $50 for the secret password. If they can charge for their content, I can reprint mine. So here, fresh from May 16th, is my opinion on this:

I like making fun of Brooks as much as the next guy, but it's not the sort of pleasure I'd pay $50 a year to retain. And, indeed, I've a sneaking feeling few others will, either. Awhile back, I argued that the NYT couldn't go subscription because it had too many competitors offering exactly the same service for free. Were they to demand $10 for me to read their news, I'd simply redirect my mail over to the Washington Post's site and that'd be that. I guess Bill Keller realized that too, which is why he decided to hide the paper's single idiosyncratic bit, its op-ed columnists.

But I fear his decision rests on some inaccurate information. Blogospheric laziness has given the Times' op-ed columnists a must-read status they really don't deserve. Brooks and Tierney are widely linked, but only because they're easily demolished when you've just woken up and have nothing original to say. Krugman's nice enough, but his arguments generally ricochet through the blogosphere days, or even weeks, before he makes them. So who's left? Kristof? Herbert? Dowd? Rich? It's just not worth the cost.

I'd guess that the hits and discussion generated by the Times' op-ed writers convinced the paper's higher-ups that their opinion page was a must-read and people would follow it behind a subscription wall. They're wrong. The Washington Post has a great op-ed lineup with a terrible site layout, and the LA Times has an occasionally decent piece with a marginally better html scheme. Give them a web designer and the two could easily supplant the NYT's spot as the go-to op-ed source because, in the end, we're not really looking to read the writers, we're simply searching for a stupid or brilliant paragraph that we can write about, and those paragraphs, unfortunately for the Times, can be found most anywhere you look. Till now, searching for them on Keller's sheet was the blogosphere's habit. Demand a toll for it, however, and that habit will instantly change.

Don't Fear the Blogs

AO Scott, in his otherwise-impressive piece on The Believer and N+1, offers a fairly bizarre attack, or at least characterization, of blogs:

At a time when older forms of media are supposedly being swallowed up by newer ones, the impulse to start the kind of magazine Partisan Review was in the late 1930's or The Paris Review was in the 50's might look contrarian, even reactionary. If you are an overeducated (or at least a semi-overeducated) youngish person with a sleep disorder and a surfeit of opinions, the thing to do, after all, is to start a blog. There are no printing costs, no mailing lists, and the medium offers instant membership in a welcoming herd of independent minds who will put you in their links columns if you put them in yours. Blogs embody and perpetuate a discourse based on speed, topicality, cleverness and contention - all qualities very much ascendant in American media culture these days. To start a little magazine, then...is, at least in part, to lodge a protest against the tyranny of timeliness. It is to opt for slowness, for rumination, for patience and for length. It is to defend the possibility of seriousness against the glibness and superficiality of the age - and also, of course, against other magazines.

So what's the argument here, that literary magazines are the slow-cooking movement of the writing world? And what are blogs, McDonalds? What's so strange here is that these magazines never left. The American Prospect, The Nation, The Baffler, Spy, The Washington Monthly, The New York Review of Books -- there's really no shortage of thoughtful, considered magazines offering new issues on a decidedly non-blog-like timetable. Which makes A.O's broadside, as I said before, a bit bizarre.

On the other hand, blogs certainly seem to be playing the role of delicious TV dinner, threatening to displace and deemphasize Mom's lovingly crafted casseroles. A.O, I guess, feels a bit strange having websites grow while The New York Times shrinks. He's certainly not the first one, but he should be the last.

There's a causality problem here. Newspapers aren't shrinking because of blogs, they're shrinking because of a) decreased news consumption, b) increased televised news consumption, and c) increased consumption of newspaper websites. Blogs just happened to rise up at the same time. And, in fact, the article is all the stranger because we've actually coincided with a reversal in the circulation decline of serious magazines. The New Republic, The Nation, The Washington Monthly, The American Prospect, McSweeney's, The National Review, The Believer, and all the others have enjoyed significant growth as the blogs rose. And that's no accident -- blogs, for all their downsides, have become a bridge between serious, long-form magazines and laughably light morning shows.

Much of that is the nonexistent barrier to entry. Blogs aren't found on only certain newstands, they don't demand an upfront cash payment if you think you might potentially be interested in what they have to say. They're not intimidating, they're friendly. You can personalize them, or at least carefully choose the ones you frequent. But -- and here's the trick -- as you spend more time in our demimonde, you start to see snippets of articles, excerpts of pieces, enthusiastic recommendations of long, ponderous profiles, thoughtful people taking these publications seriously and grappling with what they say.

Soon enough, these magazines that're wedged in the third row of the top shelf of certain bookstores -- and are almost always months out of date -- are part of your media world. You know what they are, you're familiar with them. Eventually, you read one of the linked articles, eventually, you bookmark the magazine's blog, eventually, you pick it up when you see it on newstands, eventually, you subscribe. And this has happened as surely for McSweeney's, with its heavy online presence, as for The American Prospect, who I, a soon-to-be-employee, only learned about when Glenn Reynolds linked them years ago.

Blogs, despite being informal, manically fast, and irritatingly self-referential, have broken the barriers that restricted the audience for many magazines. They've subverted the the narrow promotion strategy which basically confined publishers to hoping newstand browsers noticed the magazine's placement. Blogs, for all their intellectual faults, have embraced these "serious" forms of media and given them an echo far beyond anything they've enjoyed in the last 35 or so years. They've raised awareness among massive communities of interested readers -- no one reads Kos and doesn't know the liberal magazine set, while before, few of those folks, who are the target audience, would've been able to name all four.

So A.O shouldn't be so dismissive of the blog movement his subjects are supposedly leaving behind. If they're doing slow cooking, we're peppering our drive-thrus with admonitions to calm down and enjoy some better-crafted fare. Blogs have created, for many, a bridge between latent interests and deep immersion in self-contained communities. And if The Believer and N+1 are to prosper, they're going to need to exploit and embrace that connection.

Return of the Press

Nikki Finke has a blistering column lauding the heroes and assaulting the hacks from the last week or two of Katrina coverage. Her final question -- whether the media can sustain its new assertiveness -- seems to have been answered today, with the answer being No.

Sam Rosenfeld's been all over it, so I'll send you over to his posts on the subject. Suffice to say that the media, having attracted great plaudits for fighting the bullies at the bar, seems to have started swinging indiscriminately in the hopes of hitting another evildoer. We were praying that the pulsing anger Cooper and Smith and Rivera evinced would be coupled with a willingness to say exactly who is to blame. Unfortunately, it seems to have dissipated into a mere voice inflection, a tone in which you ask questions rather than an emotion that drives you to find answers. We'd hoped the press corps was changing, but it turned out the difference was merely decibel.

That's why watching Kyra Phillips get laid out by Nancy Pelosi didn't give me the normal voyeuristic thrill -- it's just regrettable. That the copper dye has sunk deep enough to leave Phillips unable to comprehend basic facts about the timeline, simple truths about the legislative process, or the stunning revelation that their may be a gap between Bush's words and Louisiana's reality is nothing to cheer over -- it's pathetic. Our press still can't wrap their minds around the destruction, still can't see that not only does this transcend the he-said/she-said template, but it proves how inadequate it is under all circumstance.

The head of FEMA is a horse-trainer.

The head of FEMA was the college roommate of a Bush buddy.

That's why he's the head of FEMA.

You can be fair and fucking balanced as you want. Not comprehending all that's wrong with that chain of events requires much more than bias, it requires a willful attempt to mentally retard yourself.

I Have Failed to Cure This Problem I Have Made Up

Tierney knows not of what he speaks. Although, now that I think about it, in posts that start with the word "Tierney", the rest of that sentence is generally assumed. So never mind it. In any case, The Times' token libertarian (and how come no major papers need a token green on staff? Don't they reliably attract more votes than libertarians?) has aimed his non sequiturs at hybrid cars and the collision, as you would expect, claimed coherency as collateral damage.

Tierney apparently travelled to LA and rented a Prius so he could drive in our carpool lanes and write about how superior he felt. Unfortunately, that gig only works when your audience is in New York. As any Angeleno will tell you, our carpool lanes may as well not exist. Fairly often, they're worse than the other lanes (because movement in and out is restricted save for certain, small junctions). When traffic is clear -- it happened for about 10 minutes last October -- the carpool lane is, you guessed it, slower than the other lanes, as one pokey driver sets the pace for snaking line of steaming carpoolers behind him.

The fact that Tierney almost certainly lied about the experience didn't stop him from misinterpreting it. He goes on to argue that hybrids will slow down the carpool lanes, forcing more cars to idle and add to pollution. A) As mentioned, carpool lanes already crawl, B) LA is packed with traffic, wherever those hybrids are, they'd cause more of it, forcing more cars to idle and thus their placement doesn't actually make a difference C) this has nothing to do with hybrid vehicles at all, any additional cars on the road would have this effect.

Tierney's solution to his made-up problem are HOT lanes, carpool lanes that other drivers could pay to enter. Since carpool lanes are currently carpool lanes that hybrids can enter, I don't see why switching out hybrids for toll-paying drivers will make a difference, but Tierney had to awkwardly jam a free-market solution onto this somehow, and we should congratulate him for the effort. That his starting premise is wrong and his fix doesn't make sense should be quietly, courteously, ignored.

Oops.

Partisans Anonymous

Can't argue with this:

Finally, we've decided that syndicated columnist Ann Coulter has worn out her welcome. Many readers find her shrill, bombastic and mean-spirited. And those are the words used by readers who identified themselves as conservatives.

And thus ends Ann's tenure at the Arizona Daily Star. A few months ago she was on Time's cover, now she's kicked off a Western regional's op-ed page. This, of course, should be expected. Coulter, and others like her, are the red bull and vodka of political pundits. First time you see her she makes you feel weird, but good. Second and third times, there's still novelty, but you're a bit surprised by how strong she is. Give her a couple more chances and you love her -- there's never been a columnist this awesome! You could read her forever!

The next morning, you wake up blinded, aching, hating yourself. Just knowing that you indulged in Ann hurls (sorry, bad word choice) you into a pit self-loathing. More to the point, you hate her for making you feel that way. The Time cover was the peak -- politics was drunk on partisanship. But that was just the election afterparty, we were all feeling a bit loopy. Her ejection from the op-ed page is the inevitable next step. She makes us all feel sick, and we want her out of our lives forever.

The Failing, Faltering Media

By Ezra

It's interesting that in a discussion where everyone agrees on much, the one thing no one disputes is that the press is blind, deaf, and dumb. In the ID debate, and particularly the paragraph Melissa excerpted below, the problem isn't bias, it's ignorance. The reporter is clearly trying to call ID a "mere" theory and then show that scientists reject it as "scientific" theory, but he's got the definitions all wrong, he's conflating the colloquial and the academic, and ending with incoherence.

Policy reporting, in the contemporary press corps, is worse than bad. On an intellectual level, it's criminally negligent. During the 1994 Health Care Battle, polls showed that the American people knew less about Clinton's plan as time went on. So from the start, and through the press's blanket coverage, news consumers actually lost information. That's a staggering statistic if you think about it. When the fight was ending, polls were done on what sort of health care system Americans actually wanted. The answer? Clinton's, they just didn't know that that was what Clinton was proposing. A year prior, they did.

So what we're ending with here is a catalogue of failures. As it stands, I count eight:

1) The press is human and they act as humans do. 2) They're a business subject to competitive pressures that demand pie graphs, missing white chicks, and sex stories. 3) They don't know enough about policy to report on it accurately, and end up making stupid mistake that muddle issues, sometimes fatally. 4) The rules and regulations attached to "objective" reporting make for idiotic coverage of events. 5) They're long cowed through the right's "working the ref" strategy, and terrified that separating fact from fiction will lead to widespread, ideologically-motivated boycotts and attacks that'll destroy their subscription base. 6) They need new information to keep stories alive, so leaks and reports and hearings and the like can keep an insignificant issue alive for weeks while a lack of new information or discipline in the face of scandal can starve an important story long before its time. Think Whitewater vs. the Downing Street Memos. 7) All this leads to a massive disadvantage for the party out of power as they can't set the agenda, launch hearings, or do anything else that'll keep stories breathing. 8) The rightw