Orthopraxy

My Irony Detector Just Overheated.

2007-05-19T16:16:00.000-04:00

First, watch this:

Now, watch this:

The first video, found here, is a piece directed by Bucknell English/Film prof Eric Faden, cosponsored by the Media Education Foundation and the Stanford Center for Internet and Society's Fair Use Project. The second is a short student film co-directed by friends of a friend and released on Youtube over a year ago. Cory Doctorow is hailing Faden's piece as "the most amazing video mashup I've ever seen," but the similarities to the earlier film are too striking to ignore. Even the names are nearly identical—"A Fair(y) Use Tale" vs. "Fairy Use." Doctorow's post makes it sound like the Faden is of relatively recent vintage. I'll look into this further and post updates if I find any clarifying information.

Better Dead Than Politically Inconvenient

2006-09-14T20:59:00.000-04:00

File this one under "if you're surprised, you haven't been paying attention":

WASHINGTON - The Federal Communications Commission ordered its staff to destroy all copies of a draft study that suggested greater concentration of media ownership would hurt local TV news coverage, a former lawyer at the agency says.
The report, written in 2004, came to light during the Senate confirmation hearing for FCC Chairman Kevin Martin.
Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. received a copy of the report "indirectly from someone within the FCC who believed the information should be made public," according to Boxer spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz.

I don't have any hard data to back up this assumption, but it's probably pretty rare that such a blatant indicator of regulatory capture would actually see the light of day. Kudos to the insider that notified senator Boxer—the FCC's been backsliding for years now (from allowing the pet peeves of one special-interest group to drive much of its punitive behavior to punting on investigating the NSA wiretapping situation to dragging its feet on VNR enforcement) and the American public need to understand how its failures affect their media options.

Open Secrets of Chinese Mind Control

2006-09-02T10:50:00.000-04:00

The Chinese government's propaganda artifacts have never needed to incorporate much subtlety—after all, when you exercise complete control over most forms of media, as the state did until recently, there's not much need to camouflage your intentions. Still, I couldn't help but be taken aback by this recent report:

BEIJING, Aug. 31 — When high school students in Shanghai crack their history textbooks this fall they may be in for a surprise. The new standard world history text drops wars, dynasties and Communist revolutions in favor of colorful tutorials on economics, technology, social customs and globalization.

Socialism has been reduced to a single, short chapter in the senior high school history course. Chinese Communism before the economic reform that began in 1979 is covered in a sentence. The text mentions Mao only once — in a chapter on etiquette.
Nearly overnight the country’s most prosperous schools have shelved the Marxist template that had dominated standard history texts since the 1950’s. The changes passed high-level scrutiny, the authors say, and are part of a broader effort to promote a more stable, less violent view of Chinese history that serves today’s economic and political goals.
[ . . . ]
“Our traditional version of history was focused on ideology and national identity,” said Zhu Xueqin, a historian at Shanghai University. “The new history is less ideological, and that suits the political goals of today.”

It's interesting to me that although most educated Americans, if pressed, would admit that our public-school history curricula serve a similar purpose, it'd be tough to find anyone trumpeting that fact to major news outlets in national education articles. We prefer to operate under the fiction that the histories we learn in school are technocratically detached from political imperatives, or at least to keep quiet about it in polite conversation, while the Chinese have no problem owning up to their intentions. The policy itself is a problem, since controlling what constitutes people's stock of background knowledge is a time-honored propaganda technique in authoritarian states (it's tougher in the US, since the state doesn't control the media and "free speech" is, though expensive, still technically free). However, the fact that the authorities are so up-front about what they're doing makes it that much easier to expose and oppose.

There are at least two conditions that must obtain to prevent governments from secretly or openly foreclosing political alternatives in the minds of their peoples: 1) alternative media sources must be allowed to promulgate ideas without fear of prior restraint, and 2) the people must never under any circumstances be allowed to forget the failures, transgressions, atrocities, and falsehoods of the powers-that-be. China's matter-of-factness about the reasons behind its efforts to mutilate its own national history betrays a utilitarian view of human beings as mere means, and the relative lack of sanctioned information alternatives makes the situation even worse. We can only hope that the Internet's inherent tendencies toward knowledge-promiscuity will continue to outflank the elite censors and plant the seeds of communication policy liberalization.

A Basic Taxonomy of Spin

2006-08-20T12:45:00.000-04:00

Not that I have the scientific data to back this assertion up, but at least Geoffrey Nunberg agrees with me that people are generally pretty good at detecting when someone's trying to spin them. Phrases such as "friendly fire" and "death tax" unapologetically advertise their whitewashing functions, and whether audiences agree with the underlying issue positions or not, they can tell persuasive maneuvers are afoot.

Or are they?

Look at those two phrases again—do they really serve the same function? Let's consider "friendly fire" first. One of its more obvious functions is to try to soften the emotional impact of soldier(s) accidentally wounding or killing their comrades, insofar as words can accomplish such a task. But a brief examination of the phrase's orgins reveals that it also marks a very technical distinction as well: "friendly fire," defined in opposition to "enemy fire," serves to indicate the origins of the attack. The euphemistic dirty work the term performs is clear, as is the fact that it makes no attempt to convince listeners that its referent is in any way acceptable. "Friendly fire" does sound less blameworthy than its opposite, but this is appropriate given the act's accidental nature. None of this is to say that the term doesn't perform a perception management function—it certainly does, but the function is anesthetic rather than persuasive. When people fully understand the nature of a sufficiently egregious referent, no amount of lexical legerdemain can stem the inevitable torrent of condemnation.

We might call talking points of this type "low-controversy" spin, because the fact that no one disputes the referent's atrocity means that all that's left for the message to do is palliate the mind. "Ethnic cleansing" is a similar example, one which Steven Poole examines at length in his recent book Unspeak. Much of Poole's analysis focuses on the phrase's diplomatic consequences, such as the fact that applying the more precise and visceral term "genocide" to what was going on in the Balkans during the mid-90s would have enjoined Western signatories to the 1948 UN Genocide Convention to intervene. He laces the entire discussion with a moralistic disgust over the metaphorical equation of ethnically-targeted massacre with "cleansing," as though the victims were nothing more than germs to be blithely scrubbed away. However, as is perhaps understandable in a non-academic work, Poole fails to investigate empirically the question of the phrase's effect on public-opinion: does it in and of itself make people less likely to condemn an act than the label "genocide"? I would hypothesize that "ethnic cleansing" would only be able to do so to the extent that it can ambiguate its referent acts. If "ethnic cleansing" is popularly understood as a catchall that may in any given instance refer to displacement, imprisonment, abduction, and/or mass murder, the resulting ambiguity might very well make crimes so designated appear less serious than those called "genocide." On the other hand, if most people interpret it as a mere synonym or euphemism for "genocide," it probably won't do much to modulate their perceptions one way or the other (aside from continuing to incense those like Poole who find semantic attempts to ameliorate crimes against humanity reprehensible). Until someone does the data collection, we'll never know which is the case.

In contrast to low-controversy spin, words and phrases such as "death tax" and "pro-life" are designed toward very different ends. Their users intend to convince audiences to judge their referents as laudatory, contemptible, innocuous, dangerous, deceptive, or otherwise. The difference between the two types lies in the degree of controversy their referents attract: loaded rhetoric is much more effective when applied to high-controversy topics and occurrences than those upon which there is broad agreement. In those cases in which people are aware they're being spun (i.e. the majority of cases), the language used is only one factor in the appeal's success, but in all events the intentions are transparent. For lack of a better term, let's call this type of spin "high-controversy."

But again, compare "death tax" to "pro-life"—they're both quite tendentiously loaded, but the latter refers to something relatively unambiguous, while the former constitutes a deliberate attempt to obfuscate its far more complex referent. Most people who consider themselves "pro-life" believe on religious grounds that life begins at conception. Such an absolutist formulation doesn't leave a great deal of conceptual wiggle room for spin to exploit: if your denomination places embryos on the same moral footing as fully-formed humans, you are obligated to oppose abortion, and if it doesn't, you're not. What the conservative elite calls the "death tax" is a different story, however: they spent millions of dollars giving their constituents the wrong idea about how the estate tax worked and to whom it applied in their ultimately successful push for repeal (for more detail on just how they did so, see Death By A Thousand Cuts by Graetz and Shapiro). Once again, we see that confusion about the referent greatly expands the power of spin to command attention and secure consent.

So, with our two variables in mind (degree of controversy and degree of ambiguity), we can construct the following basic spin taxonomy:

	Higher Ambiguity	Lower Ambiguity
Higher Controversy	"death tax" "climate change" "WMD" "values"	"pro-life" "pro-choice" "tax relief" "intelligent design" "peacekeeper" (bomb)
Lower Controversy	"ethnic cleansing" "global warming" "peak oil"	"friendly fire" "collateral damage" "terminate with extreme prejudice"

High-controversy high-ambiguity spin is the most insidious, as users skillfully exploit lack of public expertise or consensus on exactly what the referent is with widespread disagreement on the normative issue to help shift undecided parties into their camp. High-controversy low-ambiguity spin includes issues upon which the two sides are clearly defined and firmly entrenched. The items in this category aren't likely to change many minds because the component facts of the debate are fairly easy for the layperson to grasp.

Low-controversy high-ambiguity rhetoric designates issues that everyone agrees are problematic, but that the general public doesn't fully understand. It derives some persuasive power from the complexities, but not as much as the double-high category. Finally, spin's power is at its lowest ebb in the double-low box, because everyone knows exactly what the referents are and everyone agrees that they are repugnant or at least undesirable.

There's probably a million things holes in this conceptual contraption, but it's just a first stab. Comments are welcome.

Remember This Always, pt. 1:

2006-08-15T09:59:00.000-04:00

1) All communication is spin. Think of as unambiguous and neutral a statement as you can contrive, perhaps something like the following:

I went to the store this morning.

Now rephrase it in two or three different ways, keeping the essential meaning more or less intact:

I drove to the store this morning.

I walked to the store this morning

I went to Whole Foods this morning.

Are these four statements equivalent? Would you suppose they would call forth the same mental pictures, connotations, assumptions, and understandings in all, or at least most, of their listeners? Does each indicate the same emphases, interests, social prejudices, and political biases in the individuals who might choose it over its competitors? How would you estimate the typical impact of this type of casual word-substitution in terms of the different impressions each permutation would create from mind to mind? Would you guess these effects would be greater or lesser when discussing democratic politics than when recounting one's morning activities?

Is it ever possible to craft a message so perfectly that most of its intended audience would interpret it the same way? (Note that this is not the same thing as a majority agreeing that the statement is "objective," as the word's definition differs according to the individual using it.) If you think it is possible, how often do you think it actually occurs, and how often do you think it happens that people interpret and judge the messages they receive on a gamut from maximally acceptable to maximally unacceptable?

All the communicative tools we have to work with (i.e. images, words and sounds) are fraught with connotation, implication, and association. This follows directly from a) the fundamental imprecision and ambiguity of all human language and b) from the myriad of circumstances under which people become acquainted with the various visual and aural components of non-linguistic communication. Every change in communicative content effects a change in perception in some subset of the population; therefore it is very rarely possible to discuss anything 'objectively.' (In Public Opinion Walter Lippman argues effectively that this rule does not apply as strongly to scientists, who use far more precise and rigorous language than the general population. Specifically, scientists avoid the worst of the language substitution problem detailed above, since many of the terms they use have no synonyms.)

Who Did Dean's Research? (part 2)

2006-08-01T10:10:00.000-04:00

The two of you who visit this blog regularly will be pleased to learn that I've found an answer to the question I posed last month about John Dean's research in Conservatives Without Conscience: he does indeed cite at least one of the authors of the lit review I linked to, but the sources of his comment about the "massive study that has really been going on for 50 years now by academics" appear to be Robert Altemeyer's theory of right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and the F-scale. The respective surveys used to measure these three psychological concepts have all been administered repeatedly over the past 50 years (the latter two date back that far; RWA, which was derived from the F-scale, emerged in the 1980s), which lends some credence to Dean's reference to "hundreds of thousands" of subjects. Without plowing into the research myself it's tough to know how credible it is, but now that I've identified the real pith, I don't have to pad JD's pockets to find out.

More on authoritarianism/CWC here and here.

What A Psych BA Is Good For

2006-07-31T10:04:00.000-04:00

Jonathan Alter on the animus the netroots are engendering against Lieberman:

But if the blogs aren't a force on the ground, they are becoming a powerful factor in directing the passions (and pocketbooks) of far-flung Democratic activists. They're helping fuel a collective version of what shrinks call "projection," where the anger of Democrats at Bush is projected on a handy target, in this case Lieberman.

He must have skipped the relevant lecture in Psych 101, because that's not what "projection" is. Projection, in psycholanalysis, is the act of imputing undesirable traits in one's own personality to someone else, such as when conservatives denounce liberals as racist. Alter is thinking of transference, wherein a particular emotion originally felt toward one person is directed toward someone else, usually on the basis of resemblance or convenience. It's always comforting to discover that my six-figure education is good for something.

Classic Media-Bias Chestnut Finds New Relevance

2006-07-25T19:42:00.000-04:00

The media-bias debate traces its history back to long before the advent of the blogosphere, as Washington Post science writer Shankar Vedantam details in a profile of a 1985 psychological study investigating perceptions of bias in news coverage of the 1982 Israel-Lebanon war. Pro- and anti-Israeli partisans were shown identical feeds of televised war coverage and asked, among other things, to judge its objectivity and estimate its persuasive strength among hypothesized neutral viewers. The former group judged the coverage as significantly biased against Israel and more likely to sway undecided parties against the state's actions, while the latter group expressed the exact opposite points of view. The study found further that the more knowledgeable a partisan was regarding the facts of the war, the stronger her allegations of bias were. The researchers concluded that this was because an expert command of the facts allows tendentious individuals to find more specific instances where journalists fail to offer illuminating context that might justify their preferred side's actions. The full study is available here courtesy of Kevin Drum at Political Animal.

This research confirms once again that political diehards only feign interest in evenhandedness when news stories contradict their existing opinions: what they really look for in the news is pure confirmation varnished with the reassuring sheen of journalistic objectivity (think "fair and balanced"). But in all our travels throughout the blogosphere, we must never forget that at present, a plurality of Americans do not identify strongly as "liberal" or "conservative" and consequently still look to the media to offer coverage without an agenda. Blog traffic reports have shown that the market for slanted journalism is robust but still lags far behind demand for traditional media, and that's counting print, TV, and online sources. Whether or not the press incumbents will continue to dominate in the future turns on the extent to which Americans will converge or diverge in their political beliefs: more convergence will lead to the preservation of the status quo, while less will give the advantage to news sources nimble enough to capitalize on a fracturing set of assumptions. Personally, my money's on the latter situation, but only time will tell.

Who Did Dean's Research?

2006-07-12T10:59:00.000-04:00

Nixon-era "master manipulator" John Dean dropped by Olbermann's Monday evening and Stewart's last night to talk up his recently-released dressing-down of the GOP's new school, Conservatives Without Conscience, to sympathetic audiences. In the book, he draws on a little-known but far-reaching line of psychological research to claim that modern conservatives, significantly moreso than centrists or liberals, are dangerously susceptible to authoritarian manipulation. This thesis, most effectively articulated and substantiated up to now by Glenn Greenwald (but echoed by scores of other liberal bloggers), now boasts the legitimizing imprimatur of rigorous social science.

But does it really? In both interviews Dean remained mum on the identity of the researchers running the project on which he bases his conclusions. He didn't tell Olbermann much, explaining only that the "ongoing" study spans over 50 years and draws on "hundreds of thousands" of subjects, and he told Stewart even less. But I wanted to pore over the academic raw material myself, so I took to Google to discover who's behind the study and whether they've made any of their results available online, fully expecting to find what I sought in short order. But an exhaustive (IMO) search turned up nothing, not even a single review, on both regular Google and Google Scholar. I surmised that a project of such magnitude would be pretty tough to hide, since it probably involves at least a couple generations of researchers and hundreds of thousands of dollars in funding. The only items I found that even came close were several references to the Frankfurt School's pioneering but flawed study of political obedience, "The Authoritarian Personality" (which was published in 1950), and a meta-analysis of predicting factors for conservatism from 2003 that, while thorough and well-constructed, offers no original research.

So I guess I'll just have to buy the book (or wait for the online reviews) to find out who these mystery scholars are. Strange that I wouldn't be able to find any references on my own—I find it very difficult to believe that such a large research project wouldn't have caught the attention of anyone other than John Dean at some point over the past 50 years.

"Treason."

2006-06-27T22:16:00.000-04:00

The T-word has been enjoying an unwelcome resurgence among the online right ever since last week's disclosure of a "limited" clandestine government program to sift through terabytes of international finance records in search of terrorism leads. Its more charitable denizens have restrained themselves from levying the charge outright, instead preferring to convict the press of such blunted charges as "reckless disregard of our safety" and "sheer prurience." But the right's never been known for its rhetorical punctiliousness, and plenty of commentators have been happy to accuse journalists of treason using the word itself. Now all this may just be standard hypertext hyperbole, but to the extent that these people are even halfway serious, the allegations merits some investigation.

A cursory glance at US history reveals that the government has been exceedingly circumspect in bringing charges of treason and that such cases are extremely unlikely to result in conviction. An AP article from late 2001 on John Walker Lindh notes that our nation has seen "barely 30" cases in 225 years, suggesting that it's a crime not alleged lightly. Wikipedia maintains an international list of people convicted of treason, the American subsection of which contains just seven names. Victoria Toensing, commenting on the Lindh case for the National Review, contends that "[treason cases] are rare because they can only be brought when we are in a military conflict," and 20th-century American jurisprudence seems to bear this out. Dr. Theodore Bolema of the libertarian Mackinac Center for Public Policy buttresses this analysis with a sharp historical observation buried deep within a rebuke of Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm's misuse of the charge:

Treason is the only crime defined in the U.S. Constitution, and for good reason. The English Statute of Treasons, which was in effect in the 13 colonies prior to the Declaration of Independence, had evolved into an instrument for suppressing dissent against government policy and for punishing criticism of the king or queen. The U.S. Supreme Court discussed this history in Cramer v. United States (1945). In that decision, the Supreme Court found that historical materials from the time the Constitution was written "show two kinds of dangers against which the framers were concerned to guard the treason offense: (1) perversion by established authority to repress peaceful political opposition; and (2) conviction of the innocent as a result of perjury, passion, or inadequate evidence." Indeed, English courts later interpreted the Statute of Treasons as requiring not just words of opposition, but an act of rebellion.

Perhaps it is not too seditious to suggest that this modern understanding of treason is the right one, and that we can take comfort in knowing that the pre-Revolutionary War Statute of Treasons no longer applies in America.

Cramer, a business associate of two German saboteurs during WWII, was acquitted of treason by the SCOTUS. In a 5-4 decision, the majority found that Cramer's association with the Nazis did not rise to the high Constitutional bar set by Article III, Section 3 which defines treason as ". . . levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Justice Robert H. Jackson offered a more detailed illumination (emphasis mine):

Thus the crime of treason consists of two elements: adherence to the enemy; and rendering him aid and comfort. A citizen intellectually or emotionally may favor the enemy and harbor sympathies or convictions disloyal to this country's policy or interest, but so long as he commits no act of aid and comfort to the enemy, there is no treason. On the other hand, a citizen may take actions, which do aid and comfort the enemy- making a speech critical of the government or opposing its measures, profiteering, striking in defense plants or essential work, and the hundred other things which impair our cohesion and diminish our strength- but if there is no adherence to the enemy in this, if there is no intent to betray, there is no treason.

This overly narrow definition was erected by the Founders, Jackson argued, as a bulwark against the arbitrary and sweeping nature of traditional Anglo-Saxon notions of treason, which "might be predicated on intellectual or emotional sympathy with the for[eign nation?], or merely lack of zeal in the cause of one's own country." We were already past this point in 1787; the casual bandying-about of treason accusations today evinces a poor understanding of US history at best, and a cynical smearing of political enemies by means of a convenient legalish insult at worst. In fact, the rarity of such charges throughout US case history has shifted the word's general connotation from the criminal to the crassly pejorative—indicating that it should seldom be taken seriously, especially by those clearly using it as a weapon.

Note: William O. Douglas dissented from this opinion, claiming that "acts, though innocent by nature, may serve a treasonous plan" [quoted from Wikipedia]. A much more balanced and informed discussion of the controversy over treason's finer points can be found at Vlex. If nothing else, all this examination should impress upon us that the crime in question is far from a simple one, contrary to what many on the right would have us believe.

How The Web Saved Journalism (In Progess)

2006-06-19T21:01:00.000-04:00

Pressthink's Jay Rosen has written a justifiably triumphalist retrospective piece for today's WaPo covering the highlights of the Internet's ascent as a force-to-be-reckoned-with in the big-media universe. He covers most of the bases all the cool bloggers rhapsodize about when discussing the medium, including its lower barriers to entry, increased interactivity, stronger feedback loop between audience and publisher, and the unprecedented direct pathway it opens up between newsmakers and the public. Fortunately, Rosen lets us know he understands that Big Media's major malfunction isn't ideological bias or corporate consolidation (although the latter has caused a few secondary problems), but groupthink and hubris:

The day after President Bush was re-elected in 2004, I suggested on my blog that at least some news organizations should consider themselves the opposition to the White House. Only by going into opposition, I argued, could the press really tell the story of the Bush administration's vast expansion of executive power.
That notion simply hadn't been discussed in mainstream newsrooms, which had always been able to limit debate about what is and isn't the job of the journalist. But now that amateurs had joined pros in the press zone, newsrooms couldn't afford not to debate their practices. This is disruptive because if the unthinkable cannot be ignored, professional correctness loses its power.

It should surprise no one that decades of exclusive discussion within the hermetic, rarefied circles of political journalism's ~~most well-known~~ best and brightest might produce a slightly skewed conception of "the public interest." How else could any "respected" practitioner of the trade say something like this and still expect to be taken seriously??

A Pulitzer-prize winning media columnist at the Los Angeles Times, David Shaw, denounced my suggestion after reading about it at Romenesko, an online gathering spot for journalists. He quoted CNN staffers as saying what a terrible idea opposition press would be. Are you nuts? It would instantly destroy our credibility!

Press opposition as credibility-killer. Truly, it boggles the mind—it would have been nice if they'd at least paid lip-service to the Fourth Estate rather than abdicating their democratic obligations straight out of hand. My intuition is that since the muckrake's heyday, successive generations of journalists have driven the profession further and further by degrees from its oppositional origins toward its current state: a quasi-political stream of pap whose main goal seems to be steering clear of criticism. It's not all reporters' and editors' faults; as I hinted earlier, corporate cutbacks have made profit a more pressing imperative, and that means spoiling the reader's appetite as infrequently as possible. But such a perspective makes it very difficult for the news industry to correct its own procedural faults, which is why the task so often falls to the more industrious bloggers out there. And since the peculiarly American journalistic ethos is so oppressively pervasive, it's extremely rare that any organization takes the initiative to break with tradition (Fox and Air America are the only significant outliers in this regard).

The Web has already begun to shake what Rosen calls the "legacy media" out of its complacent stupor, and with any luck it will continue to exert its salubrious influence at ever more fundamental levels. Whether through reform of existing organizations, the rise of new ones, or some combination of the two, the transitional trail we continue to blaze bodes more well than ill for the future.

My First Linkdump, Part 1

2006-06-17T22:50:00.000-04:00

Throughout my travels across the vast reaches of cyberspace, I frequently run across stories, columns, and reports that catch my attention but somehow manage to escape blogical scrutiny. So, I figured I'd do a series of short takes on all the unbroken links gathering digital moss in my Blogger drafts file since August. Here's part 1 (dates indicate when I found the item):

Network television reporters systematically ignore rural America, and then wonder why John and Jane Redstate don't trust them. Nothin' like a strong dose of media underrepresentation to make you really feel special. (9/29/05)

Last year, Newark mayor Sharpe James and the City Council hired a local newspaper to publish a weekly rags-worth of positive propaganda about the city's new community initiatives. Let's hope new mayor-elect Cory Booker will work to create good news the old-fashioned way instead of just purchasing adspace. (11/16/05)

From Knight-Ridder's Washington Bureau, a field observation of the media actually doing its job . . . James Kuhnhenn and Jonathan S. Landay compare several of Bush and Cheney's assertions about Iraq to the factual record and actually dare to call some of them "untrue." Come back and read this next time the state of modern American journalism has got you down. (11/17/05)

Jack Shafer wrote yet another column about the future of the news industry back in January, but this one contains a link to a fascinating, brief scholarly history of newspaper technology innovation and industry consolidation. In short: the rise of blogs has dramatically lowered the entry barriers to the journalism business, and traditional newspapers have every reason to worry about their free-falling market share. No shit. (01/31/06)

Creationists and IDers are developing new rhetorical strategies to deal with a society that's gravitating away from their preferred accounts of human origins. Unfortunately, these techniques basically boil down to "well, you weren't there, so you can't prove it," which, if taken seriously, would toss out all pre-20th century history accounts along with dinosaurs and the Big Bang. (2/11/06)

The Bush administration spent over $1.4 billion on advertising contracts (i.e. spin) in the 2.5 years prior to February 2006. I guess they don't call it the propaganda presidency for nothing. (2/16/06)

A recent paper by two University of Chicago economists offers evidence that media bias has less to do with ideology than concordance with the audience's prior beliefs. Tensions between the desire not to alienate the reader/viewer and the need to come off as credible frame the pursuit and presentation of journalistic "fact." Relevant as I believe lines of research such as these to be, I somehow doubt they'll convince the professional peanut-pelters at outfits like Accuracy in Media and Media Matters. (4/05/06)

More collected bloglets to come in Part 2.

See, This Is What I Was Talking About

2006-06-17T22:41:00.000-04:00

Per my spectacularly sage recommendation, eccentric self-made billionaire Mark Cuban is investing in a new investigative journalism web site that will specialize in exposing the seamy underbelly of corporate America for the benefit of everyone with a stake therein, i.e. everyone. Ever the calculating capitalist, Cuban plans to make advance use of the muck his reporters rake together as the basis for investment decisions, which renders the site somewhat epiphenomenal. But hey, if it helps keep the content free, who are we to complain, right?

Remember the address: Sharesleuth.com. Should be interesting, if nothing else.

Terrorism and Media Coverage Thereof: The Vicious Cycle

2006-06-15T22:58:00.000-04:00

The WaPo's Richard Morin spotlights a new economic study offering "unequivocal" evidence that news coverage reinforces and promotes terrorism, while terrorism boosts the unit sales, ratings, and eyeballs upon which journalism bases its business. Comparing the number of articles about terrorism in the New York Times and the Swiss Neue Zuercher Zeitung between 1998 and 2005 to worldwide terror attacks during that same period, the authors concluded that the two phenomena both caused and resulted from each other. The terrorists get their message out to their adversaries, and the news industry profits—economists call this kind of alignment between agents with disparate interests a "common-interest game."

The results of this study certainly jibe with the instincts of anyone who's been paying attention since 9/11: obviously the very point of terrorism is to propagate terror throughout a given populace, and I'd bet that time-series data would show that the frequency of terror attacks in the 20th century increased as the mass media extended its reach around the globe. Still, it's difficult to blame journalists for doing their job, and the authors don't: one suggests keeping the identity of the attackers secret in news reports to deny them the publicity they so obviously desire. But even if a few countries could get laws or informal industry agreements to that effect into place, someone somewhere would let the cat out of the bag and onto the Internet, defeating the entire purpose. Besides, keeping secrets only increases the demand for the sequestered information—so the media's grand plan could actually attract more interest to terrorism than would have resulted under business as usual.

Those who advocate ignoring terrorism as a deterrent strategy have stumbled upon a good start, but they fail to take account of the lessons of 7/7: the famous British "stiff upper lip" may have helped the population cope with the tragedy, but it did little to prevent it. There's also the possibility that merely brushing off conventional terrorism may help push its purveyors toward ever-deadiler feats of villainy in the hopes of provoking the existential fear and curtailment of civil liberties that is their ultimate goal. Living without fear is important, but it can't stop terrorism by itself. Implementing effective anti-terror strategies will be one of the great challenges of the 21st century, but unfortunately we haven't found anything that really works yet—and until we do, it, like car wrecks and cancer, will continue to threaten our lives.

On Structural Media Bias

2006-06-08T22:17:00.000-04:00

Ran across an underrated take on the question of media bias today—the author argues that the news industry's prejudices stem not from liberal J-school indoctrination or from unconscious right-wing storylines, but from its own explicit bylaws. Andrew Cline of Missouri State University's argument crystallizes several inchoate media musings that have been floating around in my head for awhile now, the crux of which is that the "structural biases" of journalism tend to predict the ways in which raw political information will be processed, packaged and delivered better than any alleged ideological favoritism. By structural biases Cline means that the capitalist nature of major US media organizations leads them to, inter alia, favor the negative over the positive, the concrete over the abstract, the timely over the ongoing, the unusual over the usual, and to impose narrative wherever possible without regard to propriety. Perhaps most importantly, journalists take every opportunity to promote and reinforce a pro-establishment world view (whether or not this is avoidable is up for debate). They tend only to discuss a narrow, mainstream-focused range of social and political possibilities, and they pass on that blinkered view to their customers, most of whom remain none the wiser.

A couple points came to mind while reading the piece: first, that the status quo bias, while pervasive, doesn't appear to apply to certain types of stories. For example, despite the fact that poll after poll indicates that at least 50% of Americans do not believe in evolution, journalists continue to report news that flatly contradicts the beliefs of this non-trivial contingent. Similarly, the dire tone of recent global warming coverage is at odds with the national majority opinion on the issue. The crucial distinction between these two cases is that the press stands a far greater chance of influencing views on the latter, a complex scientific phenomenon with few religious implications, than on the former, over which most Americans are incorrigibly resistant to persuasion. Such considerations can help us moderate the amount of indignation we decide to muster at the myriad ways in which amorphous facts are hammered and sculpted to fit journalistic conventions.

Secondly, the insight that the press's most pressing bias is structural rather than political suggests alternative strategies for would-be media reformers. Instead of (or perhaps in addition to) insisting that news organizations attempt to balance themselves ideologically, perhaps we should concentrate on cultivating a new journalism free of some of the old school's more restrictive principles. Unapologetically partisan blogs offer a hint of what a broader definition of journalism might include, but their potential will remain limited as long as most of them rely upon the newspapers, TV, and radio for raw material. Blogs and other journalistic dissidents will not comprise a true alternative to the likes of CNN and the New York Times until they accrue the resources necessary to rake muck at the same level, which won't happen until enough people get sufficiently incensed at the establishment to start materially supporting innovative news ventures. And until we reach that point, we will continue to deserve the media we get.

What Is the Essence of Quality Journalism?

2006-06-02T19:10:00.000-04:00

What is the essence of quality journalism? Can it be fulfilled by a press held captive by market imperatives? Do people even care about being challenged and confronting inconvenient truths, or are they just seeking to have their preexisting beliefs confirmed? Did they ever??

Bill Moyers attempted to answer all three questions in a recent address (link via Kevin Drum) to attendees of PBS’s annual meeting, and though he kept an optimistic tone throughout, his speech left me unconvinced that principled, nonpartisan journalism has much of a future. Moyers approvingly quotes Lyndon Johnson praise of the American public’s “appetite for excellence” and “enlightenment” at the signing of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, but that characterization was probably far too generous even at the time. He invokes Salman Rushdie’s assertion that “[s]kepticism and freedom are indissolubly linked, and it is the skepticism of journalists, their show-me, prove it unwillingness to be impressed … that is perhaps their most important contribution to the free world,” but it seems today that skepticism is only marshaled against the man on the opposite side of the debate, so that he is always wrong and we are always right. And when Moyers says he wants to “balance the spin with the evidence, the rhetoric with the record, and opinion with reporting,” he sounds like just another pitchman hawking a product no one wants to buy. And to put it bluntly, that’s precisely what he is.

I mean no disrespect to Mr. Moyers—my personal opinion is that he’s a fine journalist—but his definition of what constitutes “good” reporting is hopelessly out of step with the times. Perhaps he might have had a sound argument back in the days of the almighty network triumvirate, long before the Internet allowed non-moguls to take some of the media power back. But people patronize the media sources they consider most worthy of their attention, by whatever criteria they choose to use, and none of the top political blogs offer anything close to PBS’s brand of “objectivity” (the one that comes closest is probably BoingBoing, but that’s written from a center-left nerd/free-culture/hacker perspective). The public loves to carp on and on about spin, but their behavior belies the undeniable fact that they crave it—as long as it's revolving their way.

Just as in other areas of in life, people tend to seek out and attend to those journalisms (and journalists) that pander to their biases, for better or worse. The observation that political information today functions more like entertainment than a critical ingredient for democracy is hardly original, but it's important to note that many other info-markets don't suffer from this problem. When was the last time you heard anyone hurl allegations of bias at Bloomberg, Forbes, or the Wall Street Journal's hard-news coverage? Because investors all share the same goal—increasing their returns—regardless of which side of the political divide they stand on, they can't afford to dismiss news they don't like. Any journalistic interpretation of how the day's business goings-on will affect stock prices would be oriented toward serving that goal. When a given constituency has many interests, some news sources (i.e., political blogs) will choose one subgroup to address, and some (i.e., the MSM besides Fox News) will choose none in particular—but none can choose to satisfy all.

And this is why modern journalism finds itself under such concerted attack these days. The business is facing the first real competition it has ever dealt with, and it is not reacting fast enough to stave off the criticisms advanced by the online upstarts. Bloggers get what the papers and newscasts (again, excluding Fox) don't—people simply aren't interested in engaging with a Habermasian public sphere, they just want their own views reinforced. I agree with Bill Moyers that non-ideological, anti-authoritarian journalism is a high-minded ideal to which reporters ought to aspire, but most of America disagrees with us. We cannot force them to adopt our conception of news quality, nor should we. If the antiquated notion of objectivity in reporting should slip away into the history books, there's not much we can do to stop it. If nothing else, we should find whatever consolation we can in the possibility that more people may be drawn out of political apathy by the new, proud opiners.

CA Court: Bloggers = Journalists

2006-05-28T11:01:00.000-04:00

More welcome news from legal authorities out in California: Santa Clara Superior Court decided on Friday to grant the protections of California's reporter shield law, enshrined in its constitution, to bloggers and online magazine publishers and to "decline the implicit invitation to embroil ourselves in questions of what constitutes 'legitimate journalis[m].'" At issue was the propriety of civil subpoenas sought by Apple Computer against two online news sites which had published secret documentation revealing the company's plans to release a new digital recording device. The court overturned a lower trial court's rejection of the petitioners' motion to prevent Apple from forcing them to turn over all emails and other relevant information related to the leak. The public interest, federal and state constitutional prerogatives, legal precedent, and California's Stored Communications Act together outweighed Apple's corporate interests in using the legal system as a crowbar to get at the bloggers' personal files, the court held. Further, anyone "publishing" news and information on a semi-regular basis ought to be afforded the same legal protections as journalists, as the judge could find no reliable grounds upon which to deny online publishers such protection.

From Eugene Volokh, who offers more informed commentary.

Good News for Net Neutrality Fans

2006-05-25T21:37:00.000-04:00

The House Judiciary Committee just voted 20-13 in favor of a bill that would mandate the principles of net neutrality for broadband network owners. Bad news for Verizon, Time Warner, Bellsouth, Comcast, and hardware companies; good news for the software business, content providers, and average Netizens.

Bush-Bashing Before It Was Cool

2006-05-23T23:04:00.000-04:00

Apparently the Fixx composed the definitive anti-Bush anthem . . . way back in 1983. Go back and read the lyrics to "One Thing Leads To Another;" the interpretation fits uncannily well. From songmeanings.net.

More on the D of I

2006-05-23T14:45:00.000-04:00

Man oh man, was that last post ever convoluted. My train of thought completely derailed, leaving a twisted morass of semi-cogent criticisms that did little to flatter my position. But I’ve got a couple more thoughts on the definition of insanity that somehow managed to escape, so I’ll present them in a (I hope) much more organized, approachable, and concise fashion.

As I explained yesterday, defining insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results” necessarily implies that expecting the same results from consistent action is reasonable. But the set of activities that counts as “doing the same thing” is left up to the reader’s judgment. While most would presumably agree that the set should include voting for the same person, it is less obvious whether a partisan voting pattern is comparable, especially since parties are well known for changing their platforms over time. Also, should the generic act of propositioning women count as “the same thing” in the same way that repeatedly propositioning the same woman would? This lack of denotative clarity severely undercuts the quote’s force as a general maxim in addition to tempting its advocates to use it only when convenient to their arguments.

Even if we narrow our view to only those cases that are more or less unanimously agreed-upon as “doing the same thing,” we’d still find that our Franklinism grossly overestimates the power of human agency in most real-world endeavors. To see why this is so, let’s have a look at voting for the same person, the example Michelle Malkin presents. A vote for Ray Nagin is insanity, she claims, unless you want the same results as last time. But Ms. Malkin fails to acknowledge the great number of factors that must be taken into account when assessing a city’s political and social outcomes, of which a mayor’s “competence” is only one (defining competence as a context-independent trait is another major error). These would include (but are certainly not limited to) public opinion, other legislative bodies such as the city council, the robustness of the tax base, and the tractability of the city’s problems, which combined may in the end prove more decisive than any one man’s political abilities. Rather than arguing why a specific alternative candidate would do better by New Orleans than Nagin, Malkin appeals to a well-known but poorly supported piece of “conventional wisdom” to glibly glorify change for change’s sake. Serious situations deserve serious analyses, but unfortunately the blogosphere tends to reward snark over substance.

EDIT—If I had to distill my objection to this bothersome phrase down to two sentences, I'd do so thusly: Any decision over whether to maintain strategy or adopt a new approach to a given problem should remain open until the pros and cons of the status quo have been thoroughly examined against the inherent value of and transition costs to whatever alternatives are on the table. Asserting that "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" is "insanity" preemptively closes all such questions to debate in an inappropriately sweeping fashion.

Ben Franklin's "Definition of Insanity"

2006-05-21T23:09:00.000-04:00

Benjamin Franklin's well-worn aphorism defining insanity as "doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results" is a common crutch for uninspired hacks who find themselves in need of a pithy way of expressing the idea that repeating a particular act is futile. Aside from the obvious offense of it being a cliché, Franklin's sage wisdom also happens to collapse under the most cursory of analyses. To wit: if committing the same action repeatedly and expecting something different to happen is insane, it stands to reason that committing the same action repeatedly and expecting the same result would be, if not the precise definition of sanity, at least by implication a sensible assumption. Yet this is not the case enough of the time to generalize the claim aphoristically. While propositioning an attractive young lady 20 times with the same sleazy pickup line might earn me 20 increasingly painful slaps to the face, many a petulant child has discovered the successful strategy of mercilessly importuning her parents for a popular toy until they finally relent and buy it. And a man who finds himself walking across a rickety rope-bridge may be able to get away with a certain number of stomps upon one of the looser planks, but I doubt he'd be foolhardy enough to try to determine that number himself.

Part of the problem is that Franklin's assertion, blunt and unqualified as it is, fails to take account of the fact that consistent success isn't crucial in every situation. Some cases, such as predicting the weather, strongly favor the highest degree of accuracy possible, while undertakings like soliciting for a date or searching for a job have rather higher fault tolerances. In these situations, "trying one's best" may produce the same results as wildly shifting strategies from instance to instance: denial of the job opportunity or rejection by the desired other. For these tasks, sticking with a consistent methodology offers the advantage of the practice effect: increasing competency with repeated application of properly directed effort.

Indeed, Franklin's little maxim calls into question the very value of practice itself. If we were to take it as presented by its adherents, i.e. as general life advice, the inability to reproduce "Stairway to Heaven" accurately on one's first attempt at playing guitar should be taken as admonition against ever trying again. But reality belies such an interpretation: as Levitt and Dubner colorfully illustrate in a recent column for the NYT, consistent, targeted practice is frequently a more significant factor in success than natural ability. So it's obvious that the Franklin quote is thunderously inapplicable to at least one major subcategory of repetitive activity.

Probability is another fundamental influence the quote ignores. I suppose the behavior of a gambling addict caught in the thrall of a one-armed bandit might be considered "insanity", but it would be unduly harsh to say the same of Western courtship norms, which are characteristically fraught with disappointment for most males. Franklin's diehards might object that hitting on many different women in the hope of scoring a date doesn't really count as "doing the same thing" since the targets are different. But the world changes every single second, which means that every time a person "does the same thing," he does so under circumstances that might just be different enough from the last time for his action to achieve the desired effect this time. This is the essence of chance: even if each iteration individually offers low odds for success, the aggregate probability of at least one successful outcome grows the more frequently the game is played.

The obvious question raised by the above analysis is: under what set(s) of recurring circumstances, if any, would Franklin's advice most consistently apply? It's possible that there's something about the world of politics that makes it especially relevant there, but given the objections detailed above, such a claim would require particularly robust substantiation. The authors of the two exhibits linked to above are both warning their readers that electing the same leaders over and over again and expecting different results isn't very smart. This may sound like sensible counsel, but I'd argue that there's little if any correlation between party-line/pro-incumbent voting tendencies and stable policy outcomes. GOP partisans who've been registered since the 60s have voted for, among other party planks: segregation/states' rights, foreign diplomacy and extrication from an unpopular war (under Nixon); keeping government spending low and foreign policy detente (under Reagan); multilateralism in Gulf War I and the "NWO" (under Bush I); isolationism (the GOP-controlled Congress throughout the '90s); and foreign policy unilateralism, neoconservatism, and expanded federal power (under Bush II). Clearly, sticking to the same voting strategy is no guarantee of consistent results in politics, especially over the long term.

None of the above should be taken to insinuate that applying a single method exclusively to a given problem is inherently virtuous. But since Franklin and his quoters seem hellbent on fetishizing technique alternation (only occasionally considering whether the suggested alternative is actually a good idea), I thought it important to debunk this annoying platitude thoroughly (okay, I had a discursive itch to scratch, and it felt great!). If nothing else, it illustrates the difficulties that arise when an axiom is formulated too strongly: doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results may sometimes be inadvisable, but it is hardly the "definition of insanity."

Hip Hop and Racial Insularity

2006-05-11T15:19:00.000-04:00

Slate writer John Cook recently took up the racialist implications of hating on hip-hop in a piece about a popular indie singer-songwriter’s music tastes. The headline telegraphs the author’s intentions a bit too overtly: the headline “Is Stephin Merritt a racist because he doesn’t like hip-hop?” couldn’t run over anything but an apologia. The article responds to Village Voice music critic Sasha Frere-Jones’ allegations of racism against Merritt, who among other things has professed much love for "Zip-A-Dee Doo-Dah" from Song of the South and proclaimed modern hip-hop “boring” and as “racist” as minstrelsy. He has also publicly criticized such artists as Beyoncé, Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, and Outkast, which drove Frere-Jones to accuse him of aesthetic euro-masculo-normativity. Cook spends most of his time patiently rebutting Frere-Jones, who exhibits the characteristic shrillness of an overserious music aficionado that (mis)interprets differences of taste as personal attacks.

As it turns out, the racial politics of rap music is an issue very close to my heart, and I must admit to a viewpoint very similar to Merritt’s, although there is a great deal of hip-hop I do enjoy. Perhaps my blackness “permits” me to discuss such opinions publicly without having to suffer opprobria from the likes of white critics like Frere-Jones. But then again, to the extent that hip-hop defines and circumscribes the habitus of the black American male aged 18-35, I do experience friction—but normally only within intra-racial contexts. So while Merritt takes heat for his suspected racism, I deal with a crisis of inauthenticity that comes from inhabiting a cultural gray area of my own construction. Some blacks assume that my rejection of those aspects of the hip-hop lifestyle I disagree with amounts to a rejection of black identity in toto.

I like some underground hip-hop, but I can’t stand the violence, misogyny, and anti-intellectualism of most mainstream rap. A lot of the music is great, but I can rarely tolerate the lyrics for very long, especially when I know that young black males across the nation are going out and imitating the behavior they see and hear on TV and radio. Moreover, I’ve (thankfully) never had to experience the inner-city hardships that comprise the bulk of hip-hop’s lyrical grist, and I never felt the need to pretend otherwise. I’d rather listen to music that reflects more complex sensibilities, such as the allusive stylings of MF Doom, the confrontational acidity of the Beauty Pill or TV on the Radio, or maybe even a few non-black artists now and again. But because there are very few (that I know of) culturally safe opportunities for black males to bond en masse over activities outside of sports and hip-hop, I frequently find myself on the margins of my demographic.

I know I’m not the only black dude out there that feels this way. I’ve met black males my age that reject certain aspects of hip-hop culture just as I do, but I’ve not yet had occasion to discuss with any of them the implications of our lifestyle choices. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the dominant memes in black youth culture, but the absence of widely acknowledged alternative ways of being makes life outside the hip-hop bubble difficult. Our culture is in dire need of expansion. Its youth need to understand and believe that they won’t be ostracized by their entire peer group for listening to rock or signing up for Quiz Bowl or rejecting preconceived notions of “keeping it real.” I think Akrobatik put it best in his underground single “Balance,” on the lack thereof in the hip-hop game: "there's no balance in rap/you either a nerd or a thug/you either got too many big words or bust too many slugs."

What I’m advocating is quite simple, really: a massive shift toward cosmopolitan tolerance in black culture. So how do we counteract centuries of internal and external pressures toward a limited and insular definition of blackness? Well, striking the slur “Oreo” from our vocabulary might be a good start. But more fundamental change could be sown by exposing our children to a wide range of perspectives and possibilities, thus inculcating within them tolerance and pluralism as fundamental values. You know what I’m talking about: take them to museums, cultural events, ethnic restaurants—teach them about Black and African history but make sure they understand how our unique past fits into the larger tapestry of human experience.

At a time when young black males are withdrawing in escalating numbers from society at large, it is our responsibility to let them know that intelligence, global connectedness, and Blackness are not mutually exclusive. Kanye West hits the mark particularly well in the remix of “Diamonds from Sierra Leone” in which he discusses the evils of the diamond trade (unfortunately, Jay-Z neutralizes West’s bold sentiment with a typical verse boasting about the longevity of his musical empire). We need more of this type of thing on TV, the radio, and movie screens, which means we need to support positive black media role models with our dollars to show the media producers that a broadened conception of black culture is worth investing in.

Most of what I’ve discussed is only meant to apply to families that aren’t struggling to make ends meet; obviously those that are have bigger problems than what’s on the radio. But those of us who find ourselves economically free to effect cultural change have an obligation to help make it happen. Anyone who cares about the well-being of the black community should at a minimum lead by example, and if possible take affirmative steps to extend the boundaries of the black collective unconscious. I know I’d feel much more comfortable listening to mainstream hip-hop if its influence was counterbalanced by a few viable alternatives.

The News Ecosystem Continues to Distill Itself

2006-05-04T11:06:00.000-04:00

Stanford University policomm professor Shanto Iyengar and Washington Post polling director Richard Morin recently released the interesting though not entirely counterintuitive results of an online experiment designed to suss out whether political party identification exerts any effect on subjects' choice of news outlet. The answer, in brief, is a qualified "yes"—when people were presented with four hard-news headlines labeled "NPR," "CNN," "BBC," and "Fox News" and asked which they'd most like to read, self-identified Republicans and conservatives exhibited a marked pro-Fox bias. Democrats' preferences were split between NPR and CNN, an effect which may be explained by those stations' lack of perceived liberal bias among Dems, according to the authors. And thus journalistic "objectivity" slowly proceeds down the path of obsolescence toward eventual rout by the ascendant regime of opinion journalism.

In other Fox News news, the findings of a new content analysis by two economists suggest that the right-leaning network may have persuaded up to 8% of its audience to vote Republican between 1996 and 2004. I don't know how they managed to separate "the Fox News effect" from all the other factors that might have influenced the shift, but if further research bears out their explanation, I wouldn't be surprised if we begin seeing propaganda channels from other provinces of the political spectrum springing up to apply Murdoch's upstart prototype to their own political ends.

Where's the Trust?

2006-05-03T14:58:00.000-04:00

Can't say I'm surprised . . . Reuters reports on the results of a newly released Globescan survey showing that two-thirds of the American and British publicks distrust the news media to deliver balanced perspectives on the news. The article notes that these findings are outliers among the 10 countries polled, most of which were found to trust their national medias by much higher margins. One curious fact left off the wire report is that both Britain and America trust their governments more than their news outlets, which strikes me as rather odd given that federal contempt is as American as immigrant-bashing. The people are clearly not pleased with their mainstream news coverage . . . but what, if anything, can be done?

About a month ago, Michael Kinsley wrote a column advocating "opinion journalism" as a cure to the American media's increasingly unpopular (not to mention futile) objectivity fetish. He lifts up England's news ecosystem as a paragon of prickly, unabashedly biased political communication, but the British results reveal a public as dissatisfied with their media as we are with ours. Then again, a Likert poll item like "The media reports all sides of a story" means two very different things in the US and the UK—we're judging a media system whose members all pledge allegiance to official neutrality, while Brits swim in a far more varied sea of political perspectives, which one might think would offer greater balance overall. The fact that it apparently doesn't may be bad news for American news producers, because it suggests that not even a shift to opinion journalism would solve our media's credibility issues. But it's entirely possible that England simply lacks perspective—I'd wager a steady diet of American news would give your average Brit a newfound appreciation of subjectivity's subtle charms.

The FEC and the Future of Net-Based Political Communication

2006-04-19T10:03:00.000-04:00

Henry Farrell of Crooked Timber recently sparked an impassioned debate (see comments) over the applicability of campaign finance laws to the Internet. This exceedingly civil and dispassionate conversation has been going on for over a year now, with people like Farrell, Lindsay Beyerstein, and Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet director Carol Darr concerned about unscrupulous operatives using the Internet to circumvent the Federal Election Commission, and an unholy alliance of right- and left-wing partisans rallying together to defend their beloved medium from any and all governmental fetters. The fiercest barbs have been exchanged over the political bloggers’ claim to what is known as the “media exemption”, a loophole that allows the media to go about its business reporting the news without running afoul of the FEC.

Federal election law prohibits corporations, banks, and labor organizations from "mak[ing] a contribution or expenditure in connection with any election to any political office, or in connection with any primary election or political convention or caucus held to select candidates for any political office . . ." (2 USC 441b). If the media exemption had not been extended to bloggers, some of their online political activity might have been found to constitute in-kind campaign contributions and thus fall under the jurisdiction of McCain-Feingold's hard-money caps. Under this scenario, the contributors' (bloggers') names would have become a matter of public record in accordance with the law's disclosure requirements.

The media exemption, as this WaPo article from last year on the subject notes, aims to protect freedom of the press by shielding news organizations from liability to campaign finance law. And the idea that the press should be free to publish as it sees fit is premised upon its freedom from the improper financial influence of special interests. If a blogger accepts money to flack for a particular political candidate, thus distancing herself from all pretenses to journalistic disinterest, does she not thereby abdicate her claim to the exemption?

In response to this question, many prominent bloggers have noted that political speech on the Internet differs fundamentally from its analogues in other media such as television and print. They argue that the relatively low entry barriers to Internet advocacy significantly attenuate the effects of the pecuniary disparities that allow well-heeled donors to edge small fries out of the big-media conversation. In other words, it enables normal citizens like Markos Moulitsas Zuniga to reach millions of people without millions of dollars in capital. Bloggers adduce the online playing field's vast width as an argument against regulation, which might harm the diversity of what they consider a uniquely democratic channel of political communication. They elevate the value of unregulated speech above the promise of protection from potential abuses such as so-called 'astroturf blogs,' which purport to represent authentic grassroots sentiment while in fact proffering campaign-coordinated political PR. Furthermore, they point out that even the least invasive application of campaign-finance red tape to the Net will most likely at a bare minimum involve the disclosure of the involved party’s identity, which could severely cut down on anonymous commentary. And as we’ve seen recently, that can cause problems of an entirely different sort.

Carol Darr and her opponents find themselves at irreconcilable loggerheads because the latter categorically reject any governmental regulation of speech, even rules as minimally incursive as those the academic supports. The question of whether or not political bloggers deserve the media exemption has been rendered academic, as the FEC decided late last year to grant it to all online news sites not directly owned by a political party or campaign. I personally agree with the commission’s decision, having found Darr’s faith in “preemptive regulation” rather bizarre and altogether unconvincing. If rules are to be laid down, they need to be specifically designed to ameliorate the manifestly deleterious effects of well-documented patterns of duplicity—and if that type of analysis exists, I haven’t yet seen it.

The question of whether government intervention is ever justified in the arena of online speech is far from settled. As the Internet grows in political influence, more and more attention will be focused on the most effective ways to insure transparency in the virtual marketplace of ideas. All those who grant the basic necessity of campaign finance reform must be prepared to face the possibility that regulation-worthy abuses may materialize on the Internet at some point in the future. But we shouldn’t allow speculation about what might happen tomorrow to curtail our freedoms today.

Despite All Their Rage . . .

2006-04-15T11:47:00.000-04:00

The WaPo's David Finkel has a front-page (on the Web, anyway) profile of liberal blogger Maryscott O'Connor in today's edition that also attempts to take the pulse of the American online left. Finkel frames his piece around the liberal blogosphere's strident tone and hyperbolic anti-administration rhetoric, which is unsurprising given that the paper itself has been a frequent target of its members' rancor. O'Connor comes off in the text as concerned if a little frustrated, but the unfortunate photo that runs alongside the piece (which includes a true-to-stereotype glass of red wine sitting next to the computer monitor) portrays her as out-of-touch and irrational. Then again, I doubt anyone who describes herself as "insane with rage and grief" cares much about the appearance of uncivility.

But does all the vehemence and vitriol to be found all over Daily Kos, Eschaton, and My Left Wing serve a higher purpose, or does it amount to little more than national group therapy for a disenfranchised political minority? Finkel raises the question, but the only potential answer comes from O'Connor herself, who has the following to say in a piece about the need for action in Darfur:

"You don't think you can do anything? ANYTHING? You're right. YOU can't do anything. But WE can. WE CAN," she writes.
"MAKE SOME [expletive] NOISE ABOUT DARFUR and you WILL be heard, and it WILL be addressed. Keep silent . . . and none of your future 'How could we let it happen' elegies will mean a good goddamn."

So she says, but I'm not convinced. Bloggers and their commenters love to talk about the medium's potential for change in unjustifiably buoyant terms that usually fail to distinguish its strengths from its shortcomings. Blogs have proven very effective at reclaiming some of the mass media's agenda-setting power, both by acting as filters that offer customized news feeds to partisan constituencies and by forcing major news organizations to focus attention on stories they initially missed or marginalized (i.e. Americablog's exposé of James Guckert). However, political blog readers still comprise a small, unrepresentative minority of the electorate, and thus wield little sway in national policymaking. The problem is even more pronounced on the left, whose inferno of impotent rage is continuously stoked by its lack of representation in Washington.

The blogosphere, or some other permutation of the political Web, may eventually prove itself a practical conduit for real political change; it is young yet. But here in America today, its main function is to allow disaffected parties from all across the political spectrum the opportunity to vent their frustration in congenial virtual milieux. Chinese citizens use the Internet (or their heavily censored version of it) to express grievances as well, but the network's decentralized nature exerts a far more significant political impact there by directly challenging the government's aggressive desire to stamp out dissent. Without such a transparently repressive regime to amass widespread ire against, American liberals must discover for themselves the best ways to leverage the digital tools at their disposal to effect change. All that profane prattle may feel cathartic, but it's not nearly enough.

EDIT: O'Connor's reaction to the article and description of Finkel's info-gathering process are available here.

VNRs Rear Their Ugly Heads (Again)

2006-04-06T12:34:00.000-04:00

David Barstow reports from the New York Times on the bald propaganda that continues to infect our airwaves:

Many television news stations, including some from the nation's largest markets, are continuing to broadcast reports as news without disclosing that the segments were produced by corporations pitching new products, according to a report to be released today by a group that monitors the news media.

Television news directors have said that the segments, known as video news releases, are almost never broadcast, but the group assembled television videotape from 69 stations that it said had broadcast fake news segments in the past 10 months.

The new report was prepared by the Center for Media and Democracy, which is based in Wisconsin and which describes itself as dedicated to "exposing public relations spin and propaganda."

The report said none of the stations had disclosed that the segments were produced by publicists representing companies like General Motors, Capital One and Pfizer.

The center also said that many of the 69 stations took steps to blend the fake segments into their news broadcasts. Some had their news reporters or anchors read scripts supplied by corporations, the report said, and many had altered screen graphics to include the station's logo.

The report said that a few stations had introduced publicists as if they were their on-air reporters. Only a handful of stations added any independently gathered information or videotape, it said.

The Federal Communications Commission has levied over $11.5 million in indecency fines under the leaderships of the current and former chairmen (Kevin Martin and Michael Powell, respectively). But my best efforts have failed to turn up a single case of a TV station having been punished for broadcasting VNRs unattributed, despite the FCC's lofty public proclamations against the rank impropriety of "fake TV news" and despite the fact that VNRs have been running on both broadcast and cable since the early 90s. Perhaps we should pity the poor agency: after all, when you spend all day fielding correspondence from the one gang of whiners that files 99.8% of FCC complaints, actually fulfilling your mandate to protect the public from truly insidious influence must lose a bit of its luster. Arghhh . . .

Ben D.'s Got To Go

2006-03-23T21:10:00.000-05:00

Better and more attentive commentators than myself have clearly established by now that Ben Domenech is an idiot, a plagiarist, and a vicious ideologue. It goes without saying that the Post shouldn't have hired him, and I'm at a loss to explain why it ever did—even granting that Dan Froomkin leans left, no intellectually honest observer could compare the two in terms of partisan zeal. I suppose one could make the argument that Domenech's just like any other opinion writer, but here we have a guy who has repeatedly flouted journalistic standards of honesty, cogency, and just plain civil discourse. Besides, the Post already publishes Will and Krauthammer (both of whom are a hell of a lot sharper than Domenech will ever be); how many right-wingers do they need?

The only explanation I can think of is that the Washington Post is trying to appeal not just to conservatives but to red-staters; more specifically, the anti-intellectualist and fundamentalist strains intermixed therein. As a national news organization, the Post has an interest in reaching out to the entire country, including those among us who may hold views unsupported by facts or logic. But if the purpose of journalism is to educate rather than pander, no reputable newspaper should succumb to the temptation to countenance sloppy thinking and partisan demagoguery for a few more page views on its web site. There are certain standards of intellectual rigor to which any op-ed contributor should be held regardless of ideological tilt, and Domenech has a history of ignoring many of the most elementary of these. But even more importantly than that, mainstream newspapers should not be in the business of offering soapboxes to individuals who crudely insult and attack their political adversaries without justifiable cause or evidence.

I'm right there with Voltaire when it comes to defending to the death people's right to say what they want. I think BD is a colossal tool (and I can say that because I'm not on a big media company's payroll), but he does have the right to speak his mind, on his own web site that he props up with his own dollars. However, his voice has no place within any ostensibly objective news organization. If the WaPo truly honors the concept of journalism as a strict, standards-based form of democratic communication that transcends baser politically-flavored prattle, it should drop Domenech now.

Mr. Domenech Goes To Washington[post.com]

2006-03-21T17:56:00.000-05:00

It seems the Washington Post just can't stay out of hot water with liberals. As if the Froomkin and comment-disabling kerfuffles weren't controversial enough, the paper's website yesterday debuted a new conservatively-slanted blog helmed by RedState.org founder Ben Domenech. Post.com's notoriously tendentious peanut gallery was quick to pass its collective judgement against the paper's decision to offer Domenech an official soapbox (E&P lists a few sample comments here). The E&P article says that the prominent right-winger was hired specifically to counterbalance Froomkin's alleged liberal bias, the existence of which Froomkin's fans strenuously dispute.

Blogland liberals aren't happy either. Let's survey some of the more colorful characterizations floating around out there:

Firedoglake: " the most thick-witted, mouth breathing home schooled freak [the Post] could lay [its collective] hands on"

TPM: "a high octane Republican political activist"

Yourlogohere: "a 24 year old with little journalistic experience who lists among his credientials being the "youngest political appointee of President George W. Bush"

The Poor Man Institute: "professional Republican activist," "home-schooled prodigy"

Pharyngula: "a frothing idiot"

The Sideshow: "a mindless right-wing hack"

I'll be back later with a more substantial smattering of observations on Mr. Domenech's new post.

Bigger Playing Field, Narrower Goalposts

2006-03-13T13:19:00.000-05:00

Today's NYT spotlights a newly-released study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism that finds an unusually narrow conception of "the news" among an ever-expanding league of journalistic and quasi-journalistic outlets. On a single randomly-chosen day (March 11, 2005), the thousands of cable, broadcast, radio, and the Internet channels reviewed were observed to cover pretty much the same two dozen news stories. Unsurprisingly, the cable networks treated the news most superficially, while newspapers generally surpassed other media in both breadth and depth of coverage ("though perhaps in language and sourcing tilted toward elites," the authors hedged). Bloggers continued to buoy news items outside the MSM's purview, but for the most part offered perspective and interpretation in lieu of original reporting—confirming that their relationship is still largely dependent upon the legwork of traditional news organizations.

So much for the democratization of the media, I suppose. The Project's findings line up with the established literature on agenda-setting, which indicates that the largest journalistic enterprises will tend to dictate the terms of public debate regardless of the playing field's size. Adding more voices to an already cacophonous media arena will do little good if those voices are not empowered. It'd be great if the entrenched news players could start pushing for more internal pluralism, integrating more than just the standard "objective" reporting style with which fewer and fewer news consumers seem to be satisfied these days. They're gonna have to figure something out, because ad competition from new-media giants like Google and Craigslist along with the fact that young people by and large simply don't read the paper or watch the news anymore have been squeezing profit margins for years now.

Still Got It After All These Years . . .

2006-02-26T10:38:00.000-05:00

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

Not that this test was particularly tough, but I'm a sucker for quick evaluations that purport to test innate intellectual ability. From Crooked Timber.

Are We Helping Them Win?

2006-02-19T11:38:00.000-05:00

Simon Jenkins of the London Times has a pretty good piece out today on the actual and perceived threats posed by terrorism, and how incompetent leadership can transform the latter into the former. He calls terror attacks "trivial" and points out that their most pernicious effects are diffused throughout the target nation's population by its news media and governing parties. The resulting suppressions of civil liberties and counterproductive warmongering play directly into the hands of our enemies, exposing our vaunted commitment to liberal values as a superficial nicety. The upshot for America and Britain 4 1/2 years after 9/11 is a net loss in both global prestige and their own citizen's faith in the strength of democracy.

Jenkins' analysis works wonderfully for the types of terrorism we've seen thus far, but it fails to address the possibility of dramatically more lethal attacks. If terrorists can acquire the potential to destroy the entire population of a major city through nuclear, chemical, biological, or other means, we should impose every measure at our disposal to stop them, provided they are properly and publicly vetted to ensure maximal fitness to the task at hand. Surely there must be some point at which the number of potential lost lives rises high enough to justify uncomfortable government action, and it is here that the question becomes quantitative: how can we meaningfully calibrate the number of potential dead to the severity of the countermeasure? I have no idea, but I wish our leaders would start engaging the issue seriously rather than using people's fears to advance preexisting agendas.

'Rollback' in the Wild

2006-02-11T14:28:00.001-05:00

From the Washington Post, more evidence of the Bush administration's intolerance of inconvenient research: cantankerous climatologist James Hansen recently accused NOAA bigwigs of restricting the flow of scientific results from the agency to the public. According to Hansen, scientists' conversations with the media are monitored by 'minders' for the ostensible purpose of protecting the former, though he doesn't buy that rationale. Administration loyalists deny the charge, and recently-terminated spokesman George Deutsch had some harsh words for Hansen:

"There is no pressure or mandate, from the Bush administration or elsewhere, to alter or water down scientific data at NASA, period," Deutsch said, adding that after being tasked to work with Hansen, "I quickly learned one thing: Dr. Hansen and his supporters have a very partisan agenda and ties reaching to the top of the Democratic Party."

Which is a real knee-slapper in light of the current White House's track record on scientific spin. Give me a break already.

The Danish Cartoons: A Nuanced Perspective

2006-02-05T18:55:00.000-05:00

The biggest story in the news today just so happens to be right up this blog's alley: radical Islamic protesters, angry at unflattering depictions of the prophet Muhammad that originated in a Danish newspaper and have been reprinted throughout Europe, have burned down Danish and Norwegian embassies in Syria and Lebanon. The paper in which the cartoons were originally published received bomb threats even after apologizing; Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Syria have recalled their ambassadors from Denmark; Palestinians are threatening Danish citizens with bodily harm if they don't leave Gaza and the West Bank; and Muslim protesters in London have advocated beheading the artists responsible. Is all this sound and fury really the sole result of a few comics published five months ago? Don't believe it. Islamic fundamentalists are using the cartoons to solicit public support for a clash of civilizations, and they're taking full advantage of the fact that the caricatures are widely considered among Muslims to illustrate a general Western disdain for their beliefs. So, in a sense, Jyllands-Posten has abetted the radicals by publishing a convenient set of easily-transferrable anti-Western propaganda. Poor decisions have clearly been made on both sides, but I have to stand with the proponents of free speech on this issue.

It goes without saying that free speech is a bedrock Western value. I'm probably not well-educated enough to offer an adequate defense of the principle here, but as to its importance I'll merely say this: the defense of free expression helps ensure that neither the government nor any other constituency can force people to act against their will. Under this justification, free speech becomes identified with freedom itself—after all, how free can a nation possibly be if external forces control what, how, and to whom its people can express themselves? Free speech, like the overarching freedom it helps constitute, has its limits (shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, making death threats), but JP did not violate them.

And yet, the editorial decision to publish the cartoons was a poor one. Freedom without responsibility can be extremely destructive, and whoever approved the illustrations for publication demonstrated exactly that fact. Notwithstanding the fact that visually representing Muhammad in any way violates the Islamic faith, the worst and most frequently cited of the cartoons (the one in which he's drawn with a bomb for a turban) appears to directly equate Islam with terrorism. I don't think that's the message we want to send out to a global Muslim public that already mistrusts the West deeply. As I mentioned earlier, the bomb/turban image is already being employed by radicals as anti-European propaganda, just as the images of Abu Ghraib were used against the US. For this reason, I support those papers which have declined to reproduce the cartoons—they've exercised the discretion that JP should have in the first place.

And yet again, the paper's right to be wrong bears vigorous and unequivocal defense. It's completely tenable and consistent to condemn the images while affirming their right to exist and to be disseminated without fear of violent reprisal. Voltaire encapsulated the sentiment well in the 18th century, and it applies with just as much force today: wars of pure opinion should be fought across the printed page, the television screen, and the computer monitor; and never with guns and bombs. Any media organization that is willing to withstand the firestorm of criticism that generally accompanies the publication of potentially offensive material needs to feel free to move forward, but it's imperative that said firestorm remain metaphorical.

Unfortunately, it appears as though many in the Islamic world don't share our Western reverence of free speech. It may very well be that an inevitable clash between two irreconcilable worldviews is brewing, but that will depend on how many Muslims truly consider blasphemy a capital offense. If, as some have contended, the violence is predominantly a product of Islamists hoping to push their own radical agenda, there may be hope yet, and I sincerely want to believe this is the case. But if it turns out that most Muslims condone the murder of those who offend their faith through the media, I see no way to stave off a long, costly war of both ideas and bullets.

Poli-Psych's Day In The Sun

2006-01-30T10:36:00.000-05:00

The Washington Post profiles the burgeoning sub-field of political psychology in an article from today's edition that describes several studies covering the effects of unconscious biases on political behavior. One researcher at Emory University found that tenacious partisans exhibit an extraordinary ability to spot logical flaws in political candidates' rhetoric—but the effect only held for candidates from the opposing side, as might be expected. Subjects took great pains to downplay the relevance of evidence inconvenient to their own point of view, and this behavior reminded the researchers of the way drug addicts find ways to mentally reward themselves for patently insalubrious behavior. The NYT spotlit this one study in greater detail last week.

But the study that's likely to stir up the most controversy (at least on the right) reached a not-so-shocking conclusion: that conservatives harbor significantly more latent racial prejudice than liberals. The psychologists probably used something similar to these freely available implicit attitude tests to assess unconscious prejudice and match those results up to self-reported data on political leanings. The Republicans quoted in the article fire back with their own allegations of unconscious anti-conservative bias, but peer reviewer and Stanford political psychologist Jon Krosnick says that the majority of the relevant psychological data support the study's findings:

"If anyone in Washington is skeptical about these findings, they are in denial," he said. "We have 50 years of evidence that racial prejudice predicts voting. Republicans are supported by whites with prejudice against blacks. If people say, 'This takes me aback,' they are ignoring a huge volume of research."

The political tactic of dismissing disagreeable evidence by accusing the offending party of bias or pushing an agenda is starting to get tiresome. It may fly in Red America but it's bad logic and even worse politics, because it allows beneficiaries to continue to deny their own unconscious attitudes even as those attitudes continue to influence democratic and social behavior from beneath the surface. Part of the problem is that there are no culturally safe channels in which to discuss race candidly in this country, and that deficiency causes inchoate prejudice to fester in the dark and manifest itself in other, more destructive ways. Some insensitive opinions will unfortunately prove resistant even to the most assiduous attempts at self-examination, but pushing back unjustifiably at the people who gather and interpret the data gets us nowhere.

Southern Dems Pull the 'God' Card

2006-01-29T21:51:00.000-05:00

From a couple days ago: the New York Times reports on a disturbing development among southern Democrats—pushing "non-partisan" school Bible study legislation in a bid to solicit votes from Christian values voters. Their proposals purport to "teach the Bible as literature," as opposed to similar GOP bills which would support using the Bible as the primary text and (as implied in the article by Alabama state senator Eric Johnson) require or encourage the teachers to be observant Christians (!). Leaving aside the question of whether or not this is a sound idea in principle for Dems, it seems as though such a Third-Wayish approach to religion will probably backfire both with secular liberals who feel it goes too far and with cultural conservatives who feel it doesn't go far enough. Tim Kaine showed that faith can be successfully woven into Democratic electoral campaigns if it's perceived as sincere, but somehow I doubt the ecumenical tack adopted by the aforementioned southern Dems will come off as such, especially with the GOP offering evangelical hardliners a much juicier alternative.

The Impeachment Meme Continues To Spread

2006-01-26T00:07:00.000-05:00

Noted without comment: the Lexington Herald-Leader runs the headline "More Americans favor impeaching Bush, poll says." The plot thickens . . .

A "Game" No Longer

2006-01-24T22:21:00.000-05:00

It seems no one quite knows what to make of today's Insight Magazine report, sourced by the usual anonymous administration insiders, that impeachment proceedings are about to be brought forth in Congress. The confusion stems from the fact that Insight is an expressly right-wing publication (it's published by the Washington Times Corporation) and as such bears little resemblance to the other news outlets in which impeachment has heretofore been seriously discussed. The White House's poorly-advised warrantless wiretapping program is what's driving the impeachment coalition, which is said to include some Republicans who disapprove of Bush's end run around FISA. But Arlen Specter, the only major Congressional player who has dared flirt with the I-word publicly, did so in the most noncommittal of fashions last week when he told George Stephanopolous that "impeachment is a remedy" to presidential malfeasance. So the reader is asked to take the word of the article's secret source at face value, a leap made somewhat easier by the magazine's conservative orientation.

But why Insight would want to break this particular scoop is a genuine headscratcher. Any media mention of impeachment, especially in a news context that couldn't possibly be interpreted as anti-Bush, contributes to its validation in the eyes of the public. Unless someone has made a major mistake or there's some other outlandish explanation, this report should be taken as particularly strong evidence that impeachment is indeed a strong possibility. All we can do is wait and see at this point, but this new development makes the "game" look a great deal more serious than it did yesterday.

Another One Bites The Dust

2006-01-23T22:40:00.000-05:00

Via Romenesko, we are invited to mourn the passing of the "scrupulously fair-minded" monthly magazine Legal Affairs, which has tanked after five years. It was widely acclaimed by both the left and right as a vehicle for low-spin coverage of legal issues, and its articles have been cited by such authorities as the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Harvard Law Review. Editor Lincoln Caplan explains the logistical difficulties into which modern times have plunged so-called "thought-leader" publications:

For generations, the business model for thought-leader magazines largely depended on a combination of paid subscriptions and paid advertising. Increased competition for readers' time and the shift of advertisers over the past ten years to TV, the Internet, and other media have reduced both sources of revenue for many thought-leader outlets. With rare exceptions, the print magazines most respected as shapers of ideas, opinions, and perspectives either are maintained by wealthy owners who regard the publications as vehicles for participating in public affairs, or are supported by ideologically defined philanthropic contributions, or are struggling to develop new business models that will allow the magazines to maintain their vitality and independence.

Looks like Joseph Epstein was right about one thing: "reasoned cogency" sure doesn't reel 'em in like it used to.

EDIT: More on LA's shuttering from the Reality-Based Community's Steven Teles, who unlike me appears to have actually read an issue or two.

Blog Comments: A Few Naive Observations

2006-01-21T16:30:00.000-05:00

How important is it for a newspaper to allow readers to leave comments on its web site? That's the unstated question underwriting the number-one current affair among web media critics, namely Washington Post executive editor Jim Brady's recent decision to suspend comments to one of the paper's blogs after a flood of "profanity and hate speech." Most of the harsh rhetoric was directed against ombudswoman Deborah Howell, who on Sunday made the following factually-challenged statement in a piece defending the reporters who'd broken the Abramoff scandal:

Schmidt quickly found that Abramoff was getting 10 to 20 times as much from Indian tribes as they had paid other lobbyists. And he had made substantial campaign contributions to both major parties.

According to Brady, this misrepresentation set off a firestorm of profane ad-hominem attacks from angry liberals in post.blog's comments section, which was eventually closed at 4:15 pm on Thursday, Jan. 19. Last night editors restored "some previously posted comments" to the offending blog post, but new comments are still shuttered.

Jay Rosen offers the definitive take on this controversy, incorporating a brief summary of events leading to the shutdown, an informative Q&A session with Brady, his own typically incisive analysis, and reactions from interested parties. Rosen and the other old-media experts try to play it nice and detached with the liberal bloggers, but Steve Gilliard's, Atrios', and Jane Hamsher's rage at Brady's decision can barely be contained. The gist of their complaint is that the Washington Post is unresponsive to and uninterested in reader criticism, a charge that ignores the paper's pioneering leadership among national news dailies in integrating public feedback into its online presence (cf. its chat sessions, Technorati links, and the fact that its other blogs still allow comments).

All the bandwidth spent debating this affair prompted the question that leads off this post: what's the big deal? The Washington Post is the only national newspaper that offers readers the opportunity to make public comments on its content—is this a right or a privilege? Rosen contends that silencing 'partisans' is bad for business; Brady answers that his concern is tone rather than tendentiousness per se. Brady makes a valid point: the Post should in theory be able to apply the same content standards to its comment areas as it does to letters to the editor. I say 'in theory' because the same technology that makes it easier and more attractive for readers to post comments online than write letters to the editor also makes policing the former more difficult than the latter. One of the more common observations made about this whole situation is that rhetorical civility on the Web is a typical casualty of high site visibility combined with perceived anonymity, and that it was foolish of the Post's editors to expect genteel discourse to erupt spontaneously in a moderation-free environment. If so, perhaps it was a mistake (from the Post's perspective) to offer readers the opportunity to post unsupervised comments in the first place.

Steve Gilliard says moderators aren't necessary to keep comment areas clean, citing Slashdot and the Daily Kos as examples. But both are apples to the Post's orange: Slashdot doesn't generally cover politics and DKos's members all share the same underlying value system. It seems likely that due to lack of agreement over what constitutes news "objectivity," living moderators would probably be necessary to enforce the Post's brand of politeness/relevance. The problem wouldn't stop there, though: overzealous readers would continue bickering over the definition of "relevant commentary" and skirting the limits of good taste.

Despite all the foregoing concerns, it may yet be that offering readers the opportunity to respond publicly to the Post's stories on the Post's web site is a compelling public interest that takes precedence over the staff's interest in not seeing their site sullied by libel and profanity. In my view, this has not been conclusively shown. Much as I hate to agree with Glenn Reynolds, the blogosphere already churns out more daily news commentary than one person could possibly consume, and readers can still email comments to the appropriate Post employees and participate in live chat sessions.

I hasten to add that the ability to leave comments on newspaper web sites is a feature well worth pursuing, and I hope that the Post can find a way to make it work for its more contentious content. In fact, judicious moderation could (if we're lucky) help post.blog's comment threads develop a reputation for intelligent inter-ideological conversation, something the blogosphere sorely lacks today. But are comments necessary? Probably not. We got along perfectly well with our non-interactive newspapers before the Internet came along (much better, as it turns out), and it's easier now than ever for laypeople to get their media criticism heard. Taking reporters and editors to task when they err is still vitally important, but unwarranted vitriol from the fringes only cheapens the enterprise for all involved, regardless of what site it appears on.

The Osama Tape: What It Means And What He Wants

2006-01-19T23:19:00.000-05:00

Earlier today I spent about an hour browsing the Internet for clues about the reasoning and timing behind the recently-released Bin Laden audio tape, in which the terror mastermind both threatens and attempts to appease the United States. Conservative bloggers appear united in their attempts to spin the tape as evidence of a weakened al-Qaeda, but I doubt its subject would so transparently showcase his vulnerabilities. After analyzing the effects of the second-to-last OBL media release, I came to a similar yet somehow different conclusion—the effect of this tape, if not the intention, will be to vindicate Bush's aggressive tactics in the general public's eyes.

The Al-Jazeera satellite TV network broadcast Bin Laden's last audio tape on Dec. 27th, 2004, in time for him to exhort Iraqis not to vote in the upcoming national assembly elections. It didn't receive much media attention here in the U.S. because the Asian tsunami, which had struck just the day before, was dominating the news at the time. But OBL's videotaped message from Oct. 29th, 2004 (only days before the presidential election) produced a marked poll jump for the president and may have even sealed his victory. As the oft-quoted unnamed Bush campaign official said at the time, "We want people to think 'terrorism' for the last four days, [a]nd anything that raises the issue in people's minds is good for us." As it was then, so it is today: Bin Laden is sharp enough to know that his ominous visage and voice strike fear into the hearts of the American public, which translates into poll gains for the party perceived as tougher on terrorism. His indirect potshot at those of us who oppose the war only serves to further marginalize liberals who advocate an immediate pullout (which, according to The Right, is all of us) while strengthening conservatives. However, it's worth noting that most Americans do, according to polls, oppose withdrawing from Iraq immediately, so bin Laden's appeal to public sentiment appears ill-informed.

Most commentators have correctly observed that any overtures toward peace from al-Qaeda probably aren't sincere, but that its threats should be taken seriously. We should always keep in mind that Bin Laden is releasing these tapes for a purpose, and while it's impossible to state unqualifiably that he intends for his public statements to provoke America's militaristic impulses, it's difficult to imagine that he's unaware of their effects.

EDIT: Commenter 'antimedia' asks what bin Laden would have to gain by baiting the US into more aggressive involvement in the Middle East. The answer is simple—many, if not most, residents of Islamic countries already distrust and fear the United States, and our military incursions into their territory exacerbate those sentiments. In other words, every American bomb dropped upon a Muslim nation further galvanizes pan-Islamic public opinion against us, which can only help bin Laden.

FURTHER EDIT: Jefferson Morley of the WaPo blog World Opinion Roundup has compiled a number of similar opinions.

Fetishizing the Media's 'Golden Age'

2006-01-16T10:50:00.000-05:00

Something leapt out at me in a recent post about a 'fake' NYT photo on the conservative blog The American Thinker—seems Joseph Epstein's not the only right-winger lamenting the deterioration of this country's news quality:

It appears that the Times, once-upon-a-time regarded as the last word in reliability when it comes to checking before publishing (which makes them so much better than blogs, of course), has run a fake photo on the home page of its website. The photo has since been removed from the home page, but still can be seen here.

. . .

So the formerly authoritative New York Times has published a picture distributed around the world on the home page of its website, using a prop which must have been artfully placed to create a false dramatic impression of cruel incompetence on the part of US forces.

I'm a fairly young man (25 this past December), so I might be forgiven for not recalling in detail this Golden Age of News Media, when the stories were all 100% error-free and the journalists carried no agenda other than keeping the public as objectively informed as possible. That's one explanation; another is that the recent proliferation of online media police has merely increased the number of errors and inconsistencies the public hears about. Still, a comprehensive study to answer the question of whether the overall number of newspaper story errors has risen in recent years might help explain why the media's credibility has sustained such damage lately. My own guess would be that for various reasons, people are now more motivated than ever to find fault with the news, and that the memory of a mythically vigilant and universally trusted press is nothing more than the misbegotten offspring of imagination and nostalgia.

Joseph Epstein and the Fall of the Newspaper

2006-01-14T17:31:00.000-05:00

Media Nation points us to today's item of discussion, a medium-length essay from this month's Commentary magazine about the decline of the American newspaper written by author and Weekly Standard contributor Joseph Epstein. Things aren't like they used to be, says Epstein, who wistfully longs for the days when Walter Lippman accorded universal respect among the educated and a person's socioeconomic status and political inclinations could be surmised by his choice of newspaper. The American public has been abandoning traditional papers for other information sources over the past fifteen or so years for four main reasons, he tells us:

1) The overwhelming surfeit of information now available via television, the Internet and wireless devices has drawn (particularly young) people away from newsprint-based media.

2) The one-size-fits-all format of newspapers is ill-equipped to serve a public that wants and expects an individually-tailored flow of information that is delivered instantly, free of personally irrelevant material, and congenial to its existing opinions.

3) University-educated journalists use newspapers to foment unwarranted public anxiety and advance their own left-wing agendas.

4) Once the exclusive province of supermarket gossip-rags, lurid scandal- and celebrity-driven material has infected even the "serious" media in this country in their desperate attempts to boost readership at any cost.

Points 1 and 2 are well-taken if rather obvious, and I have emphasized both on several occasions; point 4 is also depressingly evident. As a liberal, I am ideologically obligated to argue against point 3, which in this case isn't very difficult. Epstein principally faults "investigative journalism" for"put[ing] in place among us a tone and temper of agitation and paranoia"—in other words, scandal-mongering for profit. But this is merely an extreme formulation of the newspaper's Fourth Estate role, which many papers were rightly pilloried for not fulfilling during the run-up to the Iraq war. And consider the alternative: a media that offered little more than government cheerleading would probably draw an even smaller readership than it does today.

The overuse of information leaks as raw material for investigative reporting, Epstein continues, degrades a paper's credibility, especially when the reported information turns out not to be true. Granted, I guess, but an administration that valued debate and dissent would allow its employees to speak on-the-record without fear of termination. As Jay Rosen has explained, the current White House has engaged in a concerted attempt to starve the press of the resources it needs to do its job properly, thus not only shielding its own inner workings from the public eye but also indirectly contributing to the media's credibility backslide by driving outlets to rely on secret sources.

Epstein also plays the standard right-wing "liberal media" card, arguing that because most university humanities departments are liberal, and because most modern journalists graduated from such departments, they must be pushing a liberal agenda on the job. These sentiments will surely ring true in the collective intuition of Commentary's conservative subscribers, but he offers no evidence that any one reporter or paper has consistently pushed any specific agenda, nor does he define which aspects of "liberalism" newspapers might be most likely to promote. Epstein also has this to say about journalism's halcyon days:

Pre-university-educated journalists did not, I suspect, feel that the papers they worked for existed as vehicles through which to advance their own political ideas. Some among them might have hated corruption, or the standard lies told by politicians; from time to time they might even have felt a stab of idealism or sentimentality. But they subsisted chiefly on cynicism, heavy boozing, and an admiration for craft. They did not treat the news—and editors of that day would not have permitted them to treat the news—as a trampoline off which to bounce their own tendentious politics.

A little hard data would have gone a long way toward validating this opinion as more than just a sentimental slice of nostalgia. To my knowledge, it has never been conclusively demonstrated that the median political bias of American newspapers has shifted left over the past 50-odd years. And even if such a shift could be proved, there's no evidence that many or most journalism schools routinely indoctrinate their students with a liberal viewpoint. Of course, all of this could very well be true, but it'll take more than some old coot's say-so to prove it.

In his conclusion, Epstein concedes that he doesn't have a cure in mind for newspapers' persistent case of malaise. He describes his ideal journalistic preferences thusly:

for a few serious newspapers to take the high road: to smarten up instead of dumbing down, to honor the principles of integrity and impartiality in their coverage, and to become institutions that even those who disagreed with them would have to respect for the reasoned cogency of their editorial positions.

But even he's pragmatic enough to see that general-circulation papers pursuing such a course would quickly crash and burn in this day and age. The bold and skeptical "impartiality" to which Epstein and most American media critics on the left and right pay so much reverence has unfortunately been obsolete for years. In its place we find in our papers a journalism rendered toothless and exhausted by constant allegations of bias and online a near-total information polarization between adverse ideologies. I can't predict the future any better than Epstein, but judging from what I've seen, news objectivity doesn't look to be in the cards.

The Impeachment Game mk. II

2006-01-12T21:08:00.000-05:00

Occasional Nation contributor and key Nixon impeacher Elizabeth Holtzman weighs in on Bush's eligibility for involuntary removal from office in a recent online piece. Contrary to my recent musings on the subject, she observes that discussion of impeachment is on the rise in Congress and among "ordinary" people, of which I doubt many Nation readers consider themselves members. While the evidence she advances concerning the illegality of the president's warrantless-wiretapping program is indeed troubling, Holtzman's essay overlooks the main reason that impeachment is still extremely unlikely at this time: its standards are sufficiently high and vague that initiating the process is effectively left up to the discretion of the dominant party in Congress. The Wikipedia article on impeachment underscores this point:

For the executive branch, only those who have allegedly committed "treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors" may be impeached. Although treason and bribery are obvious, the Constitution is silent on what constitutes a "high crime." Several commentators have suggested that Congress alone may decide for itself what constitutes an impeachable offense.

A casual look back at American history is all that's necessary to see that the passage of impeachment proceedings against a president is an exceedingly rare event. A slightly closer investigation reveals that all three Congresses that successfully passed articles of impeachment were controlled by the party opposing the president. Historical precedents aside, Holtzman fails to address the significant divisions in American public opinion regarding the propriety of warrantless wiretapping and, more generally, the president's conduct vis-a-vis the War on Terror and Iraq. The preponderance of the available evidence suggests that impeachment requires either 1) behavior universally recognized across party and ideological lines as criminal and unforgivable or, 2) given less transparently malicious evidence, an unfriendly Congress. Since neither of those conditions prevail today, I continue to denounce all impeachment-related activity as dangerously quixotic and dispossessive of more productive liberal pursuits.

ID Just Doesn't Know When To Quit

2006-01-10T23:37:00.000-05:00

In his highly readable opinion on Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, US District Court Judge John E. Jones III meticulously explains how the Intelligent Design movement adapted its recent attempts to manipulate biology class curricula from a series of court-invalidated creationist strategies. He traces the history of fundamentalist opposition to evolution from the 19th century to the present, as reactionary Christian forces were pushed by the legal system from openly cowing public school districts into banning Darwinism outright through "balanced treatment" and "creation science" to its current machinations, which involve nominally subtracting God from the controversy. Now that Jones has prudently ruled against teaching ID in science classes, its supporters have found yet another as-yet-unplugged loophole: offering a high school philosophy course that purports to "teach the controversy" while in fact promoting ID.

To the extent that Intelligent Design has any place in the classroom, it should probably be addressed in a philosophy or sociology course that focuses on the advocacy movement itself rather than its dubious "scientific" pretensions. But it's clear from a cursory glance at its syllabus that the current class is nothing more than an attempted end run around the Dover decision:

In their suit, the parents said the syllabus originally listed 24 videos to be shown to students, with 23 "produced or distributed by religious organizations and assume a pro-creationist, anti-evolution stance." They said the syllabus listed two evolution experts who would speak to the class. One was a local parent and scientist who said he had already refused the speaking invitation and was now suing the district; the other was Francis H. C. Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, who died in 2004.

A course description distributed to students and parents said, "This class will take a close look at evolution as a theory and will discuss the scientific, biological and biblical aspects that suggest why Darwin's philosophy is not rock solid."

The California school board that approved this course has very closely followed the pattern of legal circumvention set by its ideological forebears and detailed in the Kitzmiller opinion. Fortunately, one unstated subtext of Jones' history is that every constitutional and statutory roadblock these religious fanatics encounter seems to drive them to adopt increasingly less effective measures. Perhaps one day they'll give up completely; until then, our justice system will continue to waste its resources on their futile crusade.

To Leak Or Not To Leak?

2006-01-07T18:45:00.000-05:00

I'm a little behind on this but I'm going to talk about it anyway: on Wednesday, the New York Times published an editorial attacking the Bush administration for investigating several recent leaks of classified information to news outlets. The paper observes that conscientious insiders need to be able to blow the whistle on government wrongdoing without fear of legal liability, and that reporters shouldn't be held responsible for identifying their sources. After raising some salient points concerning the use of national security as a pretext for conducting business in secret and the differences between the disclosures of Valerie Plame's identity and Bush's warrantless wiretapping program, the editorial concludes: "Illegal spying and torture need to be investigated, not whistle-blowers and newspapers."

Clearly we need to strike some balance between national security prerogatives and the public's right to know about government operations that may compromise their civil liberties, but an unlimited right to leak information with impunity sends the wrong message. While I'm in no position to formulate a legal framework for determining when sources should be prosecuted vs. protected, I do believe that at least two factors should be taken into account: 1) the probable intentions of the leaker/whistleblower and 2) the leak's real-world effects. Ascertaining an informant's motives may not always be possible, but it's difficult to see any rationales behind the spying and torture disclosures other than genuine concern about the programs' morality, legality, and efficacy. The Plame leak, on the other hand, may very well have been an act of revenge against individuals who held legitimate objections to the government's prosecution of the War on Terror. As to point 2), no member of the administration has yet shown (though many have so asserted) how the warrantless wiretapping revelations have adversely affected their ability to fight terrorists. Many on the right have commented that the news of secret torture-prisons abroad has hurt America's image, but we all deserve better than an international image predicated on lies and secrecy.

To be sure, there are circumstances under which leakers should be aggressively pursued. But those decisions need to be based upon the national interest, not on how poorly the leak reflects on the sitting administration.

Left Attacks, Right Defends: Yep, Looks Like Another SC Nom

2006-01-03T11:27:00.000-05:00

The Senate takes up Samuel Alito's nomination next week, and everybody and their mom has got something to say about it. Advocacy groups from People for the American way on the left to the Judicial Confirmation Network on the right are weighing in with radio and TV ads that take a philosophical approach rather than focusing on the judge's record. For example:

Conservatives, for their part, are capitalizing on ethnic pride to rally Italian-American support for Judge Alito with public events and newspaper advertisements. The efforts are aimed particularly at the Northeastern States, where some moderate Republican senators have expressed doubts about his confirmation.

And in Arkansas, home to two moderate Democratic senators whose votes are considered to be in play, another group, the Judicial Confirmation Network, is running Christmas-themed commercials beginning this week on African-American gospel radio stations. In them, the Rev. Bill Owens, a black pastor, urges support for Judge Alito to protect public displays of Nativity scenes and menorahs, and to uphold the right of schoolgirls to "draw pictures of our Savior, Jesus Christ, for class projects."

I certainly hope that no senator's vote ends up turning on Alito's ethnicity or his support for public nativity scenes, but I suppose that's what the polls say Arkansas and the northeast care about. The liberals mentioned in the article seem to be taking a slightly more relevant tack:

Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, said the group's goal was to persuade the public that Judge Alito and his supporters had tried to obscure his lifelong commitment to a "right-wing" legal philosophy.
And at a time when Congress will be debating renewal of the antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act and the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program, officials of the liberal groups said they hoped to call attention to Judge Alito's record of writings and opinions supporting law enforcement and presidential power.
"I think people's greatest fear is that Judge Alito would side with big government," said Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice. "He would side with allowing government to intrude on individual personal lives."

I guess they may as well get out as much information as they can on Alito's philosophy now, because we won't be hearing much about it in committee. I don't expect that these ads will change too many people's opinions, because if history's any indication, it'll be a partisan slugfest regardless. My question is: why are these organizations spending so much money running media ads when they're only looking to influence the votes of 100 people? My only guess is that the plan is to sway senators through their constituents, but it'd be interesting to find out whether how well it actually works.

Middle East Psyops v2: Cleric Edition

2006-01-02T12:28:00.000-05:00

The same PR organization the Pentagon tasked with planting fake news in Iraqi newspapers is spreading the gospel again, this time with the help of Sunni clerics in violence-riven regions of Iraq. The Lincoln Group is working with (and sometimes paying) religious leaders to help craft messages aimed at stoking Sunni voter turnout and quelling the predominantly-Sunni insurgency from within. Is this sound strategy? Mark K. thinks not; Cori of Rantingprofs doesn't see the problem. My personal belief is that money tends to taint the persuasive process (especially where religion is concerned), and therefore the revelation that clerics were being paid to shill for the American military won't go over too well with the natives. And as I have noted previously, info-war techniques that rely upon absolute secrecy run a high risk of backfiring due to the speed and thoroughness of global news circulation.

Besides, if we really want to endear Iraqis to the concept of democracy, we have to show them the importance of full disclosure to the democratic process. As is the case with torture and domestic spying, having to play by the rules is the price of being able to claim the moral high road.

2005 Public Opinion Wrapup

2005-12-29T15:19:00.000-05:00

All Things Considered featured an interesting story the other night on the top 10 public opinion trends from 2005, which are listed on the NPR website along with capsule summaries for each. From Iraq to Katrina to Schiavo to private accounts, most of the year's big stories are represented, and the approval and disapproval numbers should generally look familiar to anyone who keeps up with the news. One item that continues to befuddle me is the American public's continued rejection of evolution, a phenomenon that is seldom reflected in the rarefied air of the political blogosphere (even its conservative provinces). It's clear from the most cursory of analyses that Intelligent Design has no intellectual legs on which to stand, yet 55% of adults support teaching creationism, ID, and evolution in public schools, presumably as a part of the biology curriculum. All three are certainly worthwhile subjects to discuss in school—but only one belongs in any kind of science class.

The other factoid that jumped out at me was this:

No Media Meltdown –- The credibility of both TV and print press came in for criticism on several fronts, and perceptions of political bias in the media continued to rise. But, by wide margins, the U.S. public still gave more favorable than unfavorable ratings to their daily newspaper (80 percent-20 percent), local and cable TV news (79 percent-21 percent) and network TV news (75 percent-25 percent).

And those are pretty solid plus-ratings given all the reports of media bias and declining newspaper circulations that flew around this year. So it looks like rumors of the MSM's demise may be slightly exaggerated; the fact that I would have guessed differently just highlights one of my blind spots as a close observer, I suppose.

Bias Is In The Eye Of The Beholder, pt. 2

2005-12-27T19:53:00.000-05:00

Not surprisingly, Tim Groseclose and Jeff Milyo's media-bias study took a thorough, mostly-deserved drubbing in the prickly provinces of Left Blogistan, while pundits in right field mostly devoured the results with little critical commentary on its methodology. The final instance of the former I'll be looking at comes from Media Matters, who make it their business to police conservative media spin and misrepresentation. After briefly stating their position on G&M's findings and mentioning the study's appearances in the MSM, they serve up a bit of ad hominem with a side of red herring:

None of the outlets that reported on the study mentioned that the authors have previously received funding from the three premier conservative think tanks in the United States: the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI), The Heritage Foundation, and the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Groseclose was a Hoover Institution 2000-2001 national fellow; Milyo, according to his CV (pdf), received a $40,500 grant from AEI; and, according to The Philanthropy Roundtable, Groseclose and Milyo were named by Heritage as Salvatori fellows in 1997. In 1996, Groseclose and Milyo co-authored a piece for the right-wing magazine The American Spectator, titled "Lost Shepherd," criticizing the then-recently defeated member of Congress Karen Shepherd (D-UT) and defending her successor, Enid Greene (R-UT); when the piece was published, Greene was in the midst of a campaign contribution scandal and later agreed to pay a civil penalty after the Federal Election Commission found (pdf) that she violated campaign finance laws.

The fact that G and/or M may have formerly been on the take from conservative think tanks may tell us a great deal about their motivations and expectations, but it has no bearing on the validity of their current research. Partial parties can still conduct worthwhile scholarship as long as they maintain their intellectual honesty. Moving on:

Any quantitative study of this sort must take a complex idea -- in this case, "bias" -- and operationalize it into something that can be measured. But given its rather odd operationalization of "bias," it is perhaps unsurprising that the study's scheme leads to some categorizations no observer -- on the right or the left -- could take seriously, including the following:
National Rifle Association of America (NRA) scored a 45.9, making it "conservative" -- but just barely.
RAND Corporation, a nonprofit research organization (motto: "OBJECTIVE ANALYSIS. EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS.") with strong ties to the Defense Department, scored a 60.4, making it a "liberal" group.
Council on Foreign Relations, whose tagline is "A Nonpartisan Resource for Information and Analysis" (its current president is a former Bush administration official; its board includes prominent Democrats and Republicans from the foreign policy establishment) scored a 60.2, making it a "liberal" group.
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), bête noire of the right, scored a 49.8, putting it just on the "conservative" side of the ledger.
Center for Responsive Politics, a group whose primary purpose is the maintenance of databases on political contributions, scored a 66.9, making it highly "liberal."
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a defense policy think tank whose board of directors is currently chaired by former Representative Dave McCurdy (D-OK), scored a 33.9, making it more "conservative" than AEI and than the National Taxpayers Union.
We leave to the reader the judgment on whether anyone could take seriously a coding scheme in which RAND is considered substantially more "liberal" than the ACLU.

This interpretation is incorrect, because the numbers cited are not ADA ratings for the think tanks but rather average scores of legislators who cite each group. Thus, G&M avoid the rather elementary error of officially categorizing the ACLU as right-of-center or RAND as solidly liberal. However, what the list above does show is that citation information from the congressional record does not always coincide with the "conventional wisdom" about a policy group's ideological slant. (Indeed, it supports the contention that operationalizing bias in the news media may very well be impossible.) If this is true for think tanks, it probably also holds for news organizations as well.

(As a brief side note, I was surprised at how little space the authors devoted to defending the logic behind using think tank/advocacy group citations as a measure of media bias, especially considering some of the non-intuitive think tank ratings it generated. They seem to treat their method's relevance as self-evident, an attitude I find unwarranted given its novelty.)

But this is not the only problem with Groseclose and Milyo's study; they lump together advocacy groups and think tanks that perform dramatically different functions. For instance, according to their data, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) is the third most-quoted group on the list. But stories about race relations that include a quote from an NAACP representative are unlikely to be "balanced" with quotes from another group on their list. Their quotes will often be balanced by quotes from an individual, depending on the nature of the story; however, because there are no pro-racism groups of any legitimacy (or on Groseclose and Milyo's list), such stories will be coded as having a "liberal bias." On the other hand, a quote from an NRA spokesperson can and often will be balanced with one from another organization on Groseclose and Milyo's list, Handgun Control, Inc. (Nonetheless, this reference is somewhat confusing, since Handgun Control was renamed the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence on June 14, 2001, and there is no reference to the Brady Campaign in the study or clarification of the name change; therefore, it is impossible to determine from reading the study if Groseclose and Milyo's score reflects post-2001 citations by legislators and the media of the group under its new name.)

This point is related to the WSJ's complaint about comprehensiveness that I cited in my previous post, but I would like to make one comment. I'm not sure if MM is correct about the NAACP above (one could imagine a story in which an NAACP representative alleges systemic anti-black profiling behaviors among police counterbalanced by a conservative think tank's research suggesting that the problem is isolated), but let's assume for the moment that they are; the same argument could also be applied to certain conservative groups. Journalists often cite Citizens Against Government Waste (average legislator score: 36.3) just for the pork-barrel statistics it maintains. Since there are no pro-pork think tanks, it's conceivable that the group's name could be found in an article without a liberal counterweight. Conceivable, but not particularly likely (or unlikely) in the absence of corroborating evidence.

A little further down, we encounter a variant of another argument the WSJ used:

Groseclose and Milyo's discussion of the idea of bias assumes that if a reporter quotes a source, then the opinion expressed by that source is an accurate measure of the reporter's beliefs -- an assumption that most, if not all, reporters across the ideological spectrum would find utterly ridiculous. A Pentagon reporter must often quote Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld; however, the reporter's inclusion of a Rumsfeld quotation does not indicate that Rumsfeld's opinion mirrors the personal opinion of the reporter.

I examined this view in my previous post but somehow neglected to mention its most glaring flaw. The reason that G&M restricted their purview to think tanks and not all sources is because in most cases reporters get to choose the think tanks they cite in articles. They cannot refrain from mentioning the views of Donald Rumsfeld or Al-Qaeda if the story demands it, but they can pick which think tank(s) will provide the analysis. This concept is so obvious that I have a hard time interpreting its omission as anything other than willful obtuseness.

Although the authors seem completely unaware of it, in reality there have been dozens of rigorous quantitative studies on media bias and hundreds of studies that address the issue in some way. One place the authors might have looked had they chosen to conduct an actual literature review would have been a 2000 meta-analysis published in the Journal of Communication (the flagship journal of the International Communication Association, the premier association of media scholars).

No argument here; G&M's lit review was rather skimpy, but that may be partly because they come from a political-science tradition and were not familiar with the relevant communication studies (not that that's an excuse).

Finally, of particular note is the way the study's authors toss about the word "bias" indiscriminately. We at Media Matters for America are particularly careful to make no accusations of bias, since saying a journalist or news outlet has a "bias" assumes that the one making the charge knows what lies within another's heart or mind. For this reason, most claims that the media are "biased" are problematic at best.

Dictionary.com's definition 2a for the word "bias" reads as follows: "A preference or an inclination, especially one that inhibits impartial judgment." Bias doesn't have to be conscious or intentional; merely pervasive (and demonstrably so). But MM do raise an important point; namely, that bias is an extremely difficult concept to quantify, and scholarly attempts to do so require thorough review and justification. The fact that the media research canon has failed to offer any consistent answers on the issue of bias invites the observation that we are perhaps asking the wrong question. It may be more fruitful to ask the people on both sides who accuse the media of bias whether objectivity in the 21st century is even possible. We should remember above all that although certain reporters may not always be objective, it does not follow that the organizations they work for are biased. As always, keeping a critical eye on the news and constantly seeking independent corroboration are the best safeguards against whatever hidden biases may be present in any given news source.

Bias Is In The Eye Of The Beholder

2005-12-26T11:17:00.000-05:00

Well, it looks like there's been plenty of back-and-forth over the conceptual assumptions behind the UCLA media bias study, which was released in an earlier form a couple years ago. What follows is my attempt to separate the wheat from the chaff. First on the chopping block, the Columbia Journalism Review:

Nevertheless, their methodology still falls short of the ideal bias-detecting machine. To date, their method involves hiring a bunch of college students to comb through some (but not all) of the archives for some (but not all) American news outlets and then counting up some (but not all) references to some (but not all) think tanks and then comparing some (but not all) of these references to the amount of times certain members of the U.S. Congress refer to some (but not all) think tanks. Suffice to say, it's a bulky bit of bias-detection and quite primitive. But with a few tweaks, this new quantitative approach to media criticism will undoubtedly soon replace all the old tools of the industry -- from analogy and analysis, to insight and wit.

The writer's chief quibble appears to be one of comprehensiveness, with the implication that the study failed only through the insufficient diligence of its data collectors. While more data certainly would have helped, that's hardly Groseclose and Milyo's biggest problem, as subsequent entries will make clear. Also, contra the last bit, I don't think they ever claimed that their work should be considered the end-all-be-all of media bias research. At best, it offers one measure of bias that should be evaluated against the rest of the media research corpus. But the author was clearly engaging in a spot of gratuitous hyperbole, so perhaps I'll let that one go.

Next up, the Wall Street Journal:

The Wall Street Journal's news coverage is relentlessly neutral. Of that,
we are confident.

Oh, that settles that then. G&M obviously should have just polled news organizations on whether or not they consider their own coverage biased; that certainly would have been cheaper and easier.

First, its measure of media bias consists entirely of counting the number of mentions of, or quotes from, various think tanks that the researchers determine to be "liberal" or “conservative." By this logic, a mention of Al Qaeda in a story suggests the newspaper endorses its views, which is obviously not the case. And if a think tank is explicitly labeled “liberal” or “conservative” within a story to provide context to readers, that example doesn’t count at all. The researchers simply threw out such mentions.

Oh, come on. Al-Qaeda isn't a think tank, and anyone foolish enough to believe that mentioning the group's name constitutes an endorsement of its views has no place on the faculty of any accredited university. The conceit of imputing a think tank's overall ideological bent to the media outlets and politicians that cite it poses significant difficulties, but propping up Al-Qaeda as a strawman muddles the issue needlessly. I suspect that the Journal recognizes this and is intentionally mischaracterizing the scholars' methodology for its own benefit. Not only does such a false portrayal reflect poorly on the paper's intellectual integrity, it's also completely unnecessary—both the study's concept and execution are susceptible to plenty of honest criticism. We continue:

Second, the universe of think tanks and policy groups in the study hardly covers the universe of institutions with which Wall Street Journal reporters come into contact.

This is the comprehensiveness argument again, but with a slight twist—the Journal correctly points out that think tanks aren't the only organizations referenced by media outlets, and that focusing exclusively on think tanks may exclude other important sources of bias (granting the authors' basic thesis as a given).

Third, the reader of this report has to travel all the way Table III on page 57 to discover that the researchers’ "study" of the content of The Wall Street Journal covers exactly FOUR MONTHS in 2002, while the period examined for CBS News covers more than 12 years, and National Public Radio’s content is examined for more than 11 years. This huge analytical flaw results in an assessment based on comparative citings during vastly differing time periods, when the relative newsworthiness of various institutions could vary widely. Thus, Time magazine is “studied” for about two years, while U.S. News and World Report is examined for eight years. Indeed, the periods of time covered for the Journal, the Washington Post and the Washington Times are so brief that as to suggest that they were simply thrown into the mix as an afterthought. Yet the researchers provide those findings the same weight as all the others, without bothering to explain that in any meaningful way to the study’s readers.

This is an excellent point that I haven't seen underscored in any other response to the study. One of the key pieces of evidence that must be shown to properly substantiate allegations of bias is a long history of systemic favor given to one side over another. Four months is clearly not sufficient to support any conclusions about bias, which raises the question of why the analyses of the three newspapers mentioned above were included as anything more than a footnote.

I'll consider one more critic's response in my next post; I'm predicting boatloads of fun in a similar vein.

UPDATE: MSM No Longer Liberal

2005-12-22T22:03:00.000-05:00

As it turns out, that UCLA media-bias study I recently blogged about was scathingly critiqued by a far more qualified authority than myself about a year and a half ago. UPenn linguist Geoff Nunberg took aim at the study's two major problem areas ("its concept and its execution") and exposed serious flaws in both. The whole thing is worth a thorough read, as is Groseclose and Milyo's response.

Although Nunberg's analysis was excellent overall, I found one aspect of his approach slightly troubling. Early in the post, he excoriates the study's authors for operating under the assumption that value-free research is impossible:

In fact, their method assumes that there can be no such thing as objective or disinterested scholarship -- every study or piece of research, even if published in so august a scientific authority as the New England Journal, can be assumed to have a hidden agenda, depending on which side finds its results congenial to its political purposes.

As I understand it, considerable debate still rages over the question of whether or not scholarship can be separated from the values held by the individuals who generate it. I would say that it applies particularly to the current research given the subjective nature of media bias issues. Nunberg appears to agree with this perspective throughout his investigation of G&M's work but then adds the following blanket dismissal to the end of his post:

It seems a pity to waste so much effort on a project that is utterly worthless as an objective study of media bias.

I interpret the above statement as implying that Nunberg believes the objective study of media bias to be impossible (i.e., that any study on the subject would carry the indelible taint of its authors' ideological predilections). If this is true, not only does it render his foregoing analysis irrelevant, it also virtually obliterates the point of discussing media bias at all. Groseclose and Milyo's research was from its inception doomed to be riddled with fatal errors, and no one else should bother trying to correct them because the general enterprise is flawed to the core. Moreover, both sides of all media bias debates can from now on be summarily repudiated as inherently subjective and partisan guesswork. If this is truly what Nunberg means, I think the contention demands much more than a one-sentence assertion.

I'll discuss other critiques of the UCLA study in my next post.

Further Update: Groseclose and Milyo take Nunberg to task for his critical errors in their response, which I'd like to recommend again for its attention to detail. The controversy continues . . .

The Impeachment Game

2005-12-21T11:30:00.000-05:00

Over the past several months I've been receiving emails from a concerned progressive in my community that begin thusly:

Subject: DSM/impeachment petition meeting with [congressperson] office staff Thursday afternoon

Body: You are getting this update because you gave your email address on the Petition for Investigation of the Downing Street Memos as Evidence of Impeachable Crimes or told me you were interested. A steering committee was formed after the October planning meeting and we have been trying to set up a meeting with Rep. [congressperson's name removed] to present the petition. Congress' schedule hasn't been determined yet, and was too full in November, so we don't know when we will be able to meet with him. For now we have a meeting scheduled with etc.

The torrent of comments I've observed recently on radio call-in shows and blogs suggests a strong coordinated nationwide effort among a certain sect of the American left to get Bush impeached. I haven't done any real research on subject, but yesterday I found some firm evidence for my inference in a chat transcript starring Washington Post polling editor Richard Morin (he wrote the following in response to four separate questions about why the Post hasn't polled its readers on impeachment):

For the past eight months or so, the major media pollsters have been the target of a campaign organized by a Democratic Web site demanding that we ask a question about impeaching Bush in our polls.
The Web site lists the e-mail addresses of every media pollster, reporters as well as others. The Post's ombudsman is even on their hit list.
The Web site helpfully provides draft language that can be cut-and-pasted into a blanket e-mail.
The net result is that every few months, when this Web site fires up the faithful with another call for e-mails, my mailbox is filled with dozens and dozens of messages that all read exactly the same (often from the same people, again and again). Most recently, a psychology professor from Arizona State University sent me the copy-and-paste e-mail, not a word or comma was changed. I only hope his scholarship is more original.
We first laughed about it. Now, four waves into this campaign,we are annoyed. Really, really annoyed.
Some free advice: You do your cause no service by organizing or participating in such a campaign. It is viewed by me and others with the same scorn reserved for junk mail. Perhaps a bit more.
That said. we do not ask about impeachment because it is not a serious option or a topic of considered discussion--witness the fact that no member of congressional Democratic leadership or any of the serious Democratic presidential candidates in '08 are calling for Bush's impeachment. When it is or they are, we will ask about it in our polls.

Morin's absolutely correct. Setting aside the question of whether Bush has actually committed any impeachable offenses, the congressional will simply isn't present on either side. Because impeachment is not a plausible option, the time and effort spent on spam email campaigns and meeting with members of Congress amounts to little more than politically-flavored playtime masquerading as real action. I understand the frustration that many liberals suffer as they watch Iraq on the brink of chaos, the Patriot Act's resurrection, and the emerging details of a secret program to eavesdrop on domestic communications. But there are more constructive ways to focus one's political energies—such as working to convince undecided voters that the modern GOP is the party of the "have-mores," helping to forge a unified front out of the many single-issue progressive interest groups, and pressuring local Congresspeople in more attainable legislative directions than impeachment. I hate to say it, but it appears as though this particular wing of the anti-Bush crowd has truly lost touch with reality, and their vain efforts only subtract valuable energy from credible attempts to foment real change in the American polity.

UCLA Study Finds That the MSM Tilts Left

2005-12-19T14:11:00.000-05:00

Frequently asserted but rarely substantiated, the question of whether or not American media outlets operate under the influence of pervasive liberal bias is an old blogosphere staple. Today I learned of recent research that claims to show that most news organizations actually do lean to the left of the American mainstream. The study's authors, Tim Groseclose at UCLA and Jeffrey Milyo at the University of Missouri at Columbia, developed an innovative method of quantifying bias in the news: comparing the think tank citation patterns of lawmakers to those of media outlets. They started with ideology ratings provided by the liberal interest group Americans for Democratic Action, which assigns each senator and House member a score between 0 and 100 (with higher numbers indicating increased liberalism) based on their legislative record. Groseclose and Milyo then counted the number of times each Congress member cited a given think tank (such as the Brookings Institution or the American Enterprise Institute) and did the same for each news source. Outlets and Congresspeople with similar citation patterns were assumed to share the same ADA score; e.g. since both the New York Times and Joe Lieberman were found to cite from very similar bodies of sources, the theory dictates that the paper and the senator would be comparably liberal.

Groseclose and Milyo's methodology is certainly non-intuitive, but how valid is it? The idea that the ideological tilt of politicians and news providers alike can be divined from the sources they cite seems logical, since liberal politicians tend to cite liberal think tanks and vice versa for conservatives. But I have two comments: one, Groseclose and Milyo's theory predicts that major news organizations should discuss the ideas of liberal think tanks disproportionately in their articles. This is a hypothesis that could be investigated without much difficulty, since they conveniently rate the top 20 most-frequently-cited policy organizations at the end of this older paper on the same topic. Secondly, the authors fail to account for what could be a gaping hole in their theory—the possibility that many political news articles may have been left out of the analysis because they cited no think tanks at all. It's possible that for some news organizations (particularly TV news), the ratio of stories-with-citations to total stories might be too small to properly extrapolate conclusions about the former to the latter.

I have no idea though; I only skimmed the earlier paper, and all I have is a press release for the new research. Interesting stuff anyway.

If You're Gonna Give Your Citizens Net Access . . .

2005-12-17T19:41:00.000-05:00

. . . don't expect to be able to control how they use it. That's the take-home lesson from today's WaPo report about the various methods Chinese citizens have been using recently to thwart government censorship. These include discussing current events via historical allusion, posting to bulletin-board sites that are small enough to elude official crackdowns, and using proxy-browsing software to access overseas sites that have been blocked by the authorities. I can't imagine that the Chinese government believes its outdated attempts to limit the flow of information will succeed in the long run. Their efforts contradict the Internet's fundamental nature, not to mention the people's wishes. In turning the screws of repression ever tighter, the Party may lay the groundwork for its own demise as the Chinese people become more and more aware of their own desire to say what they please.

Is the Secrecy Warranted?

2005-12-17T11:58:00.000-05:00

Big news this morning: Bush has confirmed that he authorized secret domestic wiretaps after declaring last night on Newshour that he "do[es] not discuss ongoing intelligence operations to protect the country." In another GSAVE development, Democratic senators successfully led a filibuster against the Patriot Act renewal vote yesterday, with four Republicans joining them against the cloture movement. Coincidence? It's tough to say. After all, the WaPo reports that "members of Congress had been notified of [the warrantless wiretaps] more than a dozen times," so at least some of them shouldn't have been surprised. But headlines like "Shocked Lawmakers Demand Spy Program Probe" and John McCain's revelation in an NPR interview yesterday that he had not previously known of the program indicate that many were in the dark until the New York Times broke the story.

And that's a problem, because we all know how dedicated this administration is to strengthening its own hand relative to the other branches. Controversial anti-terror measures with the potential to trample Americans' civil liberties need skeptical oversight to ensure against abuse. Otherwise, we leave our most sensitive national security duties to a small cadre of ideologues who are absolutely convinced they are right, and who may remain unaware of the impropriety of their actions until the media points it out all over front pages nationwide.

Getting back to the current cloak-and-dagger business, here's another question: what was the rationale for keeping these warrantless wiretaps secret when the Patriot Act has been very public from the start, warts and all? Bush has not explained the difference between this executive order and the Patriot Act's Section 215, which allows the government to search people's financial, medical, and other records without notifying them. If the latter's efficacy isn't compromised by being on the public record, why would the former's? This looks like yet another Bush PR blunder, because he probably could have snuck the program into the Act without much argument in the months following 9/11. Not that secret wiretapping would have been any more of a good idea then, but we could have at least had a public debate about its merits instead of just now hearing about it.

Iraqi Propaganda Was Just the Iceberg's Tip

2005-12-10T23:42:00.000-05:00

The New York Times has a very informative medium-length article in today's issue exploring the extent of the US military's post-9/11 propaganda activities. One quote from the second page stood out to me as particularly relevant to the efficacy of such information campaigns:

Many Iraqis say that no amount of money spent on trying to mold public opinion is likely to have much impact, given the harsh conditions under the American military occupation.

I think this is spot-on, for the simple reason that actions speak louder than words. Under unstable conditions such as those that currently prevail in Iraq, people will be more likely to form their opinions based on how they judge the quality of their own lives rather than on news reports and editorials. Public opinion can only improve when insurgent attacks decrease, utility capacity grows significantly, and job opportunities promulgate across the nation—in other words, when the benefits of invasion become self-evident to the average Iraqi. The $100 million we've spent building up the Iraqi media should have gone toward real-world efforts at realizing these benefits, e.g. infrastructure development, business investment, and/or local military training.

Here in the US, the situation is different: mediated accounts from news agencies and the government offer us our only window onto Iraq, which becomes the sole basis upon which we form our opinions on how the war is progressing. This suggests that in general, propaganda has its most significant effects on topics with which the target populations have no direct experience and vice versa. One recent example of the latter would be Bush's Social Security reform proposal from earlier this year, which now lies stillborn on the legislative backburner despite a major information campaign touting its necessity. People understood that Social Security will eventually begin to lose solvency due to increased life expectancies among a burgeoning retiree population, but they weren't willing to swallow an immediate need to switch to private accounts when more pressing problems demanded resolution.

Getting back to Iraq, most of the accumulated evidence leads to the conclusion that the information war is at best a relatively insignificant front in the larger struggle for hearts and minds. Given that covert propaganda carries a high risk of exposure and isn't very effective even when it remains hidden, the military should focus its efforts on creating good news in the field rather than with the word processor.

Bush and the New Propaganda

2005-12-08T22:17:00.000-05:00

Slate editor Jacob Weisberg reached a conclusion recently that this blog has danced around and hinted at but never stated explicitly: over the past five years, the Bush administration's efforts in public diplomacy have significantly outstripped those of White Houses past in both volume and egregiousness. He begins by defining the difference between mere "spin" and propaganda:

Though propaganda and spin exist on a continuum, they are different in essence. To spin is to offer a contention, usually specious, in response to a critical argument or a negative news story. It does not necessarily involve lying or misleading anyone about factual matters. Habitual spin is irksome, especially to the journalists upon whom it is practiced, but it does not threaten democracy. Propaganda is far more malignant. A calculated and systematic effort to manage public opinion, it transcends mere lying and routine political dishonesty. When the Bush administration manufactures fake "news," suppresses real news, disguises the former as the latter, and challenges the legitimacy of the independent press, it corrodes trust in leaders, institutions, and, to the rest of the world, the United States as a whole.

There may be a meaningful distinction to make between these two concepts, but Weisberg hasn't made it here. He immediately telegraphs the forthcoming typological shortcomings in the first sentence: things that exist on a continuum pretty much always share the same "essence." Propaganda may or may not involve lying, and the entire purpose of spin is to effect favorable impressions and actions among the public--just as Jacques Ellul said of propaganda. If you're trying to convince me that the current administration uses propaganda more perniciously than its predecessors, great, but Weisberg's distinction amounts to little more than an attempt to tar Bush with the negative connotation of the word "propaganda."

But that's a fairly minor quibble; the relevant question is the one I just mentioned: whether this White House's use of propaganda techniques is actually more frequent, greater in variety, and more secretive than ever before. Weisberg's examples have all been well documented: Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher, VNRs, and this new Iraqi newspaper payola scandal. But he never quite manages to transcend assertion—there's very little investigation into specific comparative questions, such as how Clinton-era VNRs differ from those of today or whether paying pundits to flack for administration policies has any historical precedent. The only substantive comparison Weisberg makes is between US underwriting of "democratically-minded" foreign journalism during the Cold War and the recently uncovered scheme in Iraq, and while it is relevant, it is not strong enough by itself to support his broad thesis.

I should reiterate at this point that plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that this president's public diplomacy methods do indeed represent a significant break from previously accepted practices. But simply ticking off a list of Bush's transgressions doesn't make a strong case for that conclusion. Arguing it successfully would require a clearheaded, apples-to-apples look at the similarities and differences between the information-management strategies of all the modern presidencies. Historical propositions require historical analyses.

Is God Necessary? (apologies to M. Dowd)

2005-12-05T19:03:00.000-05:00

In the course of lambasting noted anti-Darwininst Gertrude Himmelfarb for some commentary of hers recently published in The New Republic, National Review blogger John Derbyshire directs his readers to a suprisingly relevant Reason magazine piece from 1997 on intelligent design. In addition to ripping the "theory" to shreds before it was fashionable, author Ronald Bailey described the Straussian tendencies of a few of its otherwise agnostic conservative supporters. I use the term "agnostic" loosely to describe people like Irving Kristol, Leon Kass, and Robert Bork whose chief interest in religion appears to be the idea that it is the prerequisite for public morality, and that society would spiral into a Hobbesian nightmare without its narcotic influence.

I've seen and heard many religious fanatics assert that God is necessary for social order, but few have seen fit to buttress the claim with hard evidence. A spot of casual Googling did turn up several attempts to "prove" that religion underlies morality in society "as a general rule", but they're not very convincing. For example, the author of this article betrays an appalling inability to distinguish between correlation and causation in the following passage:

Some months ago, author David Myers penned an essay titled “Godliness and Goodliness,” which appeared in the magazine Sightings (4/11/01). Myers called attention to the fact that in one “U.S. national survey, frequent worship attendance predicted lower scores on a dishonesty scale that assessed, for example, self-serving lies, tax cheating, and failing to report damaging a parked car. Moreover, in cities where churchgoing is high, crime rates are low. . .In Provo, Utah, where more than 9 in 10 people are church members, you can more readily leave your car unlocked than in Seattle, where fewer than a third are.”

And thus the unwashed heathens of Seatown reap the bitter harvest of their atheistic ways . . . or not. A lower crime rate could be a positive consequence of higher church attendance, but I'd wager it's more to do with the fact that Seattle claims 36 times more people than Provo. Plus, I just can't figure out how the author could have overlooked the 2000 obscenity case against a Provo video-store chain owner whose acquittal rested on evidence that the town consumed a higher-than-average share of pornographic media.

More typical of the arguments for God as prime antecedent of all morality is the final clause of the following quote from Kristol, cited in the Reason article (emphasis mine):

If God does not exist, and if religion is an illusion that the majority of men cannot live without...let men believe in the lies of religion since they cannot do without them, and let then a handful of sages, who know the truth and can live with it, keep it among themselves. Men are then divided into the wise and the foolish, the philosophers and the common men, and atheism becomes a guarded, esoteric doctrine--for if the illusions of religion were to be discredited, there is no telling with what madness men would be seized, with what uncontrollable anguish.

Aside from the fact that Kristol sounds more like a comic-book supervillain than a serious thinker, he's merely asserting a link between two concepts (religion and the maintenance of social order) without supporting it. To refute his claim, one would have only to show that religion is no more a guarantee against social collapse (cf. 99% of the world's societies) than its absence is a guarantee thereof (cf. most Western European nations). The idea may be seductively intuitive, especially to the faithful and their leaders, but it is not borne out by the facts.

Anti-War Sentiment Spreading Among GOP Stalwarts

2005-12-04T17:54:00.000-05:00

Declining support for the Iraq war and the directly proportionate declivity in Bush's approval ratings are well-established public opinion trends by now, but whether or not those negative feelings will manifest themselves at the polls in 2006 is an open question. According to a Washington Post story from today's edition, conventional wisdom among GOP insiders has it that House and Senate incumbents will be immune:

. . . Republican campaign strategists who are carefully monitoring public sentiment insist that, for now at least, the war is not likely to be a crucial issue in 2006, unlike taxes and health coverage. Moreover, they say, Bush -- not members of Congress -- will bear the primary political burden for events in Iraq.
"National security is not something you run TV ads on in a House race," Carl Forti, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, said late last week.

I, as usual, am skeptical. A spin-doctor's job is to portray every situation in as positive a light as possible, and I'd expect nothing less of the GOP's finest. But my intuition tells me that the 2006 elections may hinge upon how closely Republican lawmakers are perceived to have hewed to Bush's agenda in general. In this way, widespread dissatisfaction with the administration may bleed over onto those who have supported its every move. The same lockstep party discipline that got the GOP into power in the first place may prove its undoing, if the public decides it doesn't like the status quo.

While taxes, national security, cultural issues, and political scandals will definitely be on voters' minds next year, Iraq isn't going anywhere. To the extent that it remains relevant to the 2006 elections, Republicans will need to come up with some sort of plausible plan for an eventual pullout. One of the reasons for the war's growing unpopularity is that it was originally sold as a very brief engagement on the order of months or even weeks. Another is that Saddam's purported WMD threat turned out not to exist--and Iraq is a greater danger to the US today than it was before the invasion. The administration originally claimed that invading Iraq was essential to maintain American national security, and now that it's saying the same thing about staying indefinitely, the people are understandably upset. Most would prefer obvious signs of progress over an immediate pullout, and if neither starts happening within the next year, the GOP will suffer accordingly.

Update: the WaPo's Jonathan Rauch opines similarly, citing historical evidence as well as recent poll results.

Profiling Doesn't Work Mk. Zillion

2005-12-01T09:54:00.000-05:00

Do you feel profoundly uncomfortable with the practice of profiling of young, swarthy males as terrorist suspects yet unable to articulate your objection cogently? If John Walker Lindh and José Padilla weren't enough contervailing evidence, take a look at what the London Times turned up today.

American Military Propaganda in Iraq

2005-11-30T09:33:00.000-05:00

Those crazy Pentagon spin doctors are at it again: the LA Times has a story in today's edition describing how the US military has been paying Iraqi newspapers to run pro-American pieces in Arabic. The articles are portrayed as the work of independent journalists, but are in fact part of an "information offensive" concocted by military operatives who specialize in propaganda. Not very democratic of them, is it?

Though the articles are basically factual, they present only one side of events and omit information that might reflect poorly on the U.S. or Iraqi governments, officials said. Records and interviews indicate that the U.S. has paid Iraqi newspapers to run dozens of such articles, with headlines such as "Iraqis Insist on Living Despite Terrorism," since the effort began this year.

The operation is designed to mask any connection with the U.S. military. The Pentagon has a contract with a small Washington-based firm called Lincoln Group, which helps translate and place the stories. The Lincoln Group's Iraqi staff, or its subcontractors, sometimes pose as freelance reporters or advertising executives when they deliver the stories to Baghdad media outlets.

I shouldn't have to say this, but I will: Propaganda is pernicious because it is an attempt to circumvent the democratic ideals of transparency in both government and the press. The least we can do for a nation that is supposed to represent the triumph of neoconservative ideals is to refrain from meddling in their media, and to mark any PR dispatches clearly as such. As an NPR piece on the development notes, talking up democracy from the podium while secretly violating its principles only fuels charges of American hypocrisy that are already rampant in the Arab world. But the National Review's Stephen Spruiell doesn't agree with this analysis:

As for the argument that these operations undercut the trust we need to build with the Iraqi people, I say they wouldn't undercut the trust of the Iraqi people if papers like the LA Times weren't blowing their cover. We need more operations like this in Iraq, and more respect for their classified nature.

The NPR segment reveals two errors in Spruiell's conclusion. First, it notes that the Iraqi papers can identify propaganda pieces by the fact that real journalists sell their work rather than buying placement for it, so the LAT can hardly be blamed for "blowing [the military's] cover." Second, and relatedly, Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism director Tom Rosenstiel says that such propaganda can negatively affect the overall credibility of American military forces on the ground in Iraq. In other words, material evidence of hypocrisy can have very real consequences for our war operations.

Furthermore, there's another consequentialist case to be made against these kinds of old-school info-war techniques: the rise of the Internet and worldwide news networks has greatly diminished their efficacy. Even if the LAT hadn't broken the news, eventually some reporter in Iraq would have, since the dissemination methods were widely known anyway. Thus, the high risk that people might have learned about the plan's dirty details outweighed its potential benefits from the start. And the mere fact that the military has to pay for positive press only reinforces the impression that the top brass is trying to cover up a quagmire. I, for one, would much rather see my tax dollars going toward figuring out how to withdraw from Iraq as gracefully as possible, and I think we can all agree that obsolete PR strategies are more than a waste of money--they're a genuine liability.

"We Need To Get The Fuck Out Of There."

2005-11-26T15:13:00.000-05:00

Disclaimer: I don't know how much of the following is true, embellished, and/or false; I'm just telling you what the man told me.

I met a soldier in the US Army on his way to Iraq today.

I sat down next to him on the plane home after spending Thanksgiving with my extended family. I was carrying a duffel bag with the logo of the university I work for, and he asked me if I was going back to school. I replied that I was in the process of applying to grad school, and griped lightly about the nagging vicissitudes of transcript-ordering , recommendation-securing, GRE-taking, and so forth. Then he told me he'd been in Iraq for four months last year, and was headed to Ft. Bragg to await redeployment on a 15-month tour.

"Johnny" (not his real name) was a 20-year-old Special Forces paratrooper and sharpshooter who showed a surprising (not to mention admirable) equanimity in discussing the mortal dangers that threatened him. He called Iraq an "amazing country" and said some provinces, mostly in the south, were incredibly beautiful. He said the natives frequently welcomed his platoon with hugs when it arrived in their villages, and that young boys around the age of 4 were effective sources of intelligence. Johnny's swarthy complexion even allowed him to grow a beard and blend in so well as an Iraqi that someone once publicly mistook him for a relative (he had to sedate the guy and pour alcohol on his unconscious body to stay incognito).

When I asked how he thought the war was going, he minced no words: "We need to get the fuck out of there."

* * *

Johnny, a working-class kid from the East Coast, joined the army at 17 to provide "a better life" for himself and his family. He expressed disappointment and resignation that the Army had broken its promise to him to keep his deployments to 3 1/2 months at a time. He also gave me a bit of inside information, which I have no way of verifying: apparently Bush has already signed some kind of order to the effect of keeping troops in Iraq through 2008 (remember, this is only an unsubstantiated rumor). But despite these disappointments, Johnny was very obviously coping with the psychological burden of war much better than many of his compatriots. He spoke of a fellow soldier who was so afraid to leave the base that his unit began to leave him behind because"he was a danger to himself [and others]." This guy's behavior got so out of hand that he was eventually shipped back to the States for psychiatric assistance.

Johnny told of sniping insurgents with the help of a spotter, and faking the salaat to infiltrate mosques that sheltered terrorists. He spoke of many close calls, including one in which shrapnel from an IED tore the flesh along the bottom of his right arm, leaving a jagged scar. Divorcing himself from his emotions is essential for survival, he said, though even he couldn't suppress the grief he felt at seeing one of his companions fall. He told me he didn't enjoy killing people, and would not voluntarily return for combat duty once his contract expired, but when his survival means killing others, he doesn't hesitate.

I told Johnny I could never take orders in the Army or face live combat. He replied that as a college graduate, they'd probably make me something like a lieutenant, so I'd be the one giving the orders. I have enough trouble just approaching women to ask for dates, I said, so how could I lead a group of soldiers into battle without wetting myself? He then told me about how his faith gives him strength, and that he believes God is watching over him in the line of duty. And although I'm agnostic, I said, "Times like these make me really hope there is someone up there watching over us all."

The mood lightened a bit when we got into the quality of the Army's women, some of whom Johnny called "nice girls." We agreed that a strong intellect is absolutely indispensable when evaluating any potential significant other. But he didn't seem upset at all when he told me his girlfriend broke up with him upon his return home for Thanksgiving. He has prudently decided to wait until he comes home permanently to pursue another relationship.

The plane ride was a short one, and I didn't get to ask him all the questions I wanted to. Toward the end, another passenger joined the conversation and steered it toward military technology, which wasn't nearly as interesting to me. As Johnny walked off the plane ahead of me, I called his name and said: "Even though I disagree with the war, I still think you're a hero. Good luck, and I hope you come back safely." After shaking hands, he thanked me for the kind words, smiled, and walked away.

* * *

My chat with Johnny started me thinking about the true meaning of the phrase "support the troops." Some conservatives evidently think it means keeping the US military in Iraq indefinitely. They say you can't support the troops without supporting the war, and that the growing domestic calls for a pullback are hurting morale. But I don't think I injured Johnny's morale when I told him what I thought of the war. If he's any indication, I'd say that the prospect of being redeployed over and over again with no end in sight is what's damaging troop morale more than anything else. Johnny wants to go to college to become a mechanical engineer, and if he survives, he'll get that chance--if. He doesn't expect to see significant troop reductions anytime soon, so he has wisely focused his energies on surviving from one day to the next.

I told him that I want him to live, and to get that degree, and to start moving up the economic ladder. That's what "supporting the troops" means to me. It's got very little to do with politics, partisanship, or whether the war is winnable or not--I just want them to return safe and whole. Now as I said, it just so happens that I thought invading Iraq was a bad idea from the start. But since we're there, it seems to me that any tenable conception of "supporting the troops" would have to include serious and dedicated thought about how to get them home as soon as possible. "Staying the course" is not a plan; it's an insult. Plenty of fine young men and women like Johnny are risking their lives every day for a gamble that came up snake-eyes, and the administration's galling lack of postwar planning angers me all the more for it.

I don't know whether we "have" to win in Iraq to keep America safe, or whether "winning" (whatever that means) will guarantee our safety. All I know is, we owe it to Johnny and his fellow troops, if indeed we truly support them, to get behind some kind of plan to bring them home in short order so that they may reap the well-deserved benefits of military service.

Weak Angle Alert!

2005-11-25T08:47:00.000-05:00

I know I said I'd be off 'til tomorrow, but I just had to deliver this Flagrant Spin Advisory for Black Friday, 2005: The headline over today's WaPo article on John Murtha's recent outbreak of candor vis-a-vis Iraq reads "The About-Face of a Hawkish Democrat," with subhead "Murtha, With Many Military Connections, Moves From Voting for War to Urging Troop Withdrawal." Did I just hear reporter Shailagh Murray call Congressman Murtha a flip-flopper? I think I did. By this logic, you'd have to advocate a permanent large-scale military presence in Iraq to avoid flip-flopping on the issue. Even the Bush administration concedes that they'll have to recall the troops eventually; Murtha's disagreement with them concerns only the timing of the drawdown.

I've heard several commentators on the right try to tar Murtha as a "finger-in-the-wind" politician who follows . . . the will of the people. Imagine that, an elected representative who actually represents the opinions of the electorate. I can understand how some might have forgotten in the past five years, but that's normally how democracy works. Bush's pseudo-imperial posturing is a major deviation from presidential business as usual, and all the time he's spent supposedly ignoring public opinion is beginning to bite him in the ass in a big way. I don't care if a politician has to change his positions to do the right thing, because doing the right thing is infinitely more important than procedural consistency. But as I said, neither Murtha nor the American people have flip-flopped--they've just decided our troops have done enough. And we should never forget that it's the people who run this country; government is only a means to that end.

Vacaciones

2005-11-22T23:18:00.000-05:00

I'm heading out of town for Thanksgiving, so you might not see any posts until Saturday, when I return. You might though, since I guess there's a chance I might have net access at my aunt and uncle's place. But until I post again, I'll leave you with this piece about a leaked British memo detailing a supposed plot to bomb Al-Jazeera HQ--from the mouth of our very own POTUS. Now I hate Bush as much as the next seditious lieberal, but even I'm finding this one hard to swallow. We know he's got a rather, ahem, unorthodox sense of humor, so I'm inclined to believe that if he did mention attacking Al-Jazeera, he wasn't talking seriously. More "we begin bombing in five minutes" than "bring 'em on," so to speak.

Edit: Kevin Drum makes the same joke as me, about two hours later.

Is Bush Going Soft On Us . . . ?

2005-11-20T19:44:00.000-05:00

Well now, this looks new at first glance:

BEIJING - After fiercely defending his Iraq policy across Asia, President Bush abruptly toned down his attack on war critics Sunday and said there was nothing unpatriotic about opposing his strategy.

"People should feel comfortable about expressing their opinions about Iraq," Bush said, three days after agreeing with Vice President Dick Cheney that the critics were "reprehensible."

The president also praised Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa., as "a fine man" and a strong supporter of the military despite the congressman's call for troop withdrawal as soon as possible.

But does it represent a real shift in Bush's rhetorical strategy vis-a-vis the Iraq war? Steven Benen, guest-posting at Political Animal, seems to think so, but I'm not convinced. I don't think you'll find too much invective directed against domestic anti-war critics in Bush's public record; he tends to traffic more in diplomatic hedgework like this:

(1) "Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror," he said. "This mission isn't easy, and it will not be accomplished overnight." USA Today, 6/18/05

(2) "While it's perfectly legitimate to criticize my decision or the conduct of the war, it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." CNN.com, 11/11/05

(3) The president said he strongly supports Sheehan's right to protest. “She expressed her opinion. I disagree with it,” Bush said.

“I think immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake,” he said. “I think those who advocate immediate withdrawal from not only Iraq but the Middle East are advocating a policy that would weaken the United States.” MSNBC.com, 8/23/05

(4) "Reasonable people can disagree about the conduct of the war, but it is irresponsible for Democrats to now claim that we misled them and the American people," Bush said in his prepared remarks. AP, 11/14/05

Truth is, Bush has rarely if ever spoken out harshly against Iraq war opponents himself (excluding those who have accused him of manipulating intelligence). He likes to save the rhetorical dirty work for others within the administration, such as Dick Cheney and Scott McClellan, and outside it, like the people who write for Powerline, Little Green Footballs, and Townhall.com. We saw this same strategy last year with the anti-Kerry SBVFT ads that he famously failed to condemn.

By farming out his attack politics, Bush can keep his trademark image of clearheaded toughness spotless without suffering the backlash that comes from engaging in explicit partisan mudfights. Even now, he can rightfully claim that this latest celebration of dissent is a logical extension of his prior remarks on the subject. By extending an olive branch to the 60% of the country that disapproves of his handling of Iraq, he's acknowledging the necessity of broad public support for a successful second term. It's some of the strongest evidence we have to refute the administration's farcical claim that they pay no attention to poll numbers.

Taking ID Potshots on a Friday Afternoon

2005-11-18T19:07:00.000-05:00

I'm just gonna come right out and say it: Intelligent Design is stupid, and I don't mean colloquially or loosely. It is based upon either the inability or the refusal (perhaps a little of both) to understand two things: one elementary principle of logic (begging the question) and one of science (falsifiability). People who want ID taught in science class need to grab the nearest dictionary and reread the entry for "science" until they understand how ridiculous their errand is. Of course, nowhere is it written that you can't be both Christian and intelligent, but the guy who wrote this doesn't represent that cross-section very well:

I have the greatest respect and admiration for Charles Krauthammer, but in his most jab WaPo jab 'Phony Theory, False Conflict' it is clear he is the one who has been sucker-punched - or at least been baited one-upsmanship by George Will's recent 'Grand Old Spenders' rant ... meaning:

The above sentence has not been redacted in any way, and the rest of the post continues in a similar fashion. I don't fault the guy for making silly writing hiccups, but they really don't help your case when you're trying to prove your intellectual mettle. Also, not to pick and choose quotes to rip apart for my own amusement, but--oh, what the hell, I can't resist:

If Darwinian evolution cannot be proven using the scientfic method - then how can we give it deference over other scientific beliefs such as intelligent design?

I assume that by "proof", he means something akin to going back in a time machine to see if mankind and other primates really share a common ancestor. But science offers us no methods to "prove" (in the same way that you can prove that a solid object will fall from your hand if you let go of it) the processes behind how we got here other than drawing conclusions from extant biological artifacts. So what dude is really saying is that the origins of man lie outside science's rightful jurisdiction.

Even if this were true, even if evolution weren't proper science (against the consensus opinion of the world's credentialed biologists), it would be an argument for removing discussions of human origins from science classes altogether, not for adding ID. It's almost impossible not to condescend to these people, because they're only fighting what they perceive to be a threat against their dearest beliefs. But the more ID defenses I read, the more I become convinced that there's something inherently anti-intellectual about these fanatical sects of Christianity, something that wreaks severe damage on its adherents' critical faculties.

The GOP Consensus Slips Another Couple Notches

2005-11-18T08:56:00.000-05:00

The natural tensions between Beltway (and Beltway-esque) eggheads and quasi-theocratic busybodies are becoming increasingly difficult to conceal under the GOP's big tent. The latter group's attempts in Kansas and Pennsylvania to get Intelligent Design added to local science curricula comprise a particularly volatile flashpoint in this ongoing conflict. Prominent libertarian blogger Glenn Reynolds has called these campaigns "pathetic." A couple weeks ago, Salon broke a story on former Tom Delay aide Michael Scanlon in which he referred to conservative Christians as "wackos" who could be duped into voting for anything. And the Washington Post published two anti-ID columns this week, one by George Will (yesterday) and one by Charles Krauthammer (today), both of which excoriate the idea and/or the people who espouse it.

Will and Krauthammer have both railed against Intelligent Design in previous op-ed pieces, but while Krauthammer's current column rehashes the scathing rhetoric of his previous work on the subject, Will's stridence is a new development. In the context of a discussion of government largesse under conservative administrations, he laces into ID proponents in no uncertain terms:

Dover's insurrection occurred as Kansas's Board of Education, which is controlled by the kind of conservatives who make conservatism repulsive to temperate people, voted 6 to 4 to redefine science. The board, opening the way for teaching the supernatural, deleted from the definition of science these words: "a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena."
"It does me no injury," said Thomas Jefferson, "for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." But it is injurious, and unneighborly, when zealots try to compel public education to infuse theism into scientific education.

Now there's a sound rebuke if I ever heard one. Compare with Krauthammer's ever-reliable pugnacity:

Let's be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud. It is a self-enclosed, tautological "theory" whose only holding is that when there are gaps in some area of scientific knowledge -- in this case, evolution -- they are to be filled by God. It is a "theory" that admits that evolution and natural selection explain such things as the development of drug resistance in bacteria and other such evolutionary changes within species but also says that every once in a while God steps into this world of constant and accumulating change and says, "I think I'll make me a lemur today." A "theory" that violates the most basic requirement of anything pretending to be science -- that it be empirically disprovable. How does one empirically disprove the proposition that God was behind the lemur, or evolution -- or behind the motion of the tides or the "strong force" that holds the atom together?

In order to justify the farce that intelligent design is science, Kansas had to corrupt the very definition of science, dropping the phrase " natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us," thus unmistakably implying -- by fiat of definition, no less -- that the supernatural is an integral part of science. This is an insult both to religion and science.

The upshot of all this laundry-airing is that the conservative coalition that's clung to political power throughout the new millennium may be splintering. Intellectuals like Reynolds, Will, and Krauthammer are upset at having to discuss ID seriously at all, while conservative Christians are probably sick of having their pet issues take a back seat to industry deregulation, tax cuts, and foreign adventurism. The fact that such well-respected opinion writers are willing not only to oppose but to badmouth their erstwhile allies publicly doesn't bode well for the GOP. It remains to be seen whether the party will be able to sew up these frayed seams quickly or be forced to watch the tent tear itself apart.

War [huh, good god, y'all]

2005-11-15T10:53:00.000-05:00

Kevin Drum's ranting about Bush's use/abuse of prewar intelligence again, contending that the White House used its monopoly on the full corpus of relevant information to an unethical advantage in making the case for war against Iraq. Specifically, the power to withhold countervailing evidence and opinions from Congress and the American people allowed the president to set the terms of the debate and quickly cement a broad base of support for invasion. Bush really should have let the doubts out for the good of the nation:

In the debate on Iraq, Bush acted as both prosecutor and judge. He made his case as strongly as he could — which is fine — but he also withheld crucial information that would have allowed his opponents to make their case as strongly as they could — which isn't. In short, in order to further his own political aims, he abused his power to decide what information remains classified and what doesn't.

In a democracy, this is unacceptable. It's unacceptable for the president to decide that only information favorable to his own case can be part of the public discourse. But all too often, that's what happened in the runup to the Iraq war.

In an ideal world, we could reasonably expect our president to place the greater good above his own political priorities, but guess what we don't live in. Bush is at fault here, as Kevin suggests, but the greater problem appears to be systemic. Why is the guy who decides whether or not to commit troops to military action also the guy who controls outside access to all the intelligence? Why would any president pushing any initiative even think about giving his opponents additional ammo if he could avoid doing so? The whole setup is a textbook example of a moral hazard, and an excellent reason why Congress should think twice about handing any president a blank check to use force. We don't run prisons on the honor system, we don't let employees set their own salaries, and we shouldn't enable our presidents to "[act] as both prosecutor and judge." The entire collection of relevant national security data needs to be made available to Congress so that life/death decisions like these are never again left in the hands of a single person.

In Lockstep Formation

2005-11-14T17:09:00.000-05:00

If you've spent any significant amount of time watching cable news over the last 12 months, you've probably seen more than one of Progress for America's political ads supporting John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and possibly even Harriet Miers. Yep--even as most other conservative organizations and commentators either remained silent or vociferously attacked Miers, PFA stood steadfastly behind the president, as it has consistently done since its foundation in 2001. The New York Times profiles this confusingly-named 527 in a piece from today's edition, paying particular attention to the great speed and power it wields on behalf of the White House:

The group was formed in 2001 as a nonprofit organization to support Mr. Bush's agenda, but drew widespread attention in last year's presidential race. Its Voter Fund raised roughly $45 million in a few months and financed a barrage of television advertisements focused on terrorism. Now, the group is pushing Mr. Bush's new priorities.

After putting up the Web page supporting Judge Alito [in only 39 minutes], Progress for America created an advertisement within hours and ran $425,000 in television commercials in the first week. It activated consultants in 20 states, who began lobbying for Mr. Alito before editorial boards and on local talk radio programs. And it announced that it would spend $50,000 on Internet advertising and online advocacy.

The group sent about 10 million e-mail messages to supporters, with help from lists supplied by the Republican National Committee and other organizations, and it released "Alito2Go," a video clip of its commercial on the judge that can be viewed with an iPod.

Progress for America has also circulated long lists of Judge Alito's allies to reporters in hopes of generating favorable articles. In addition to law school friends and fellow judges, the group tracked down Judge Alito's former English teacher, his Latin teacher, a fellow youth baseball coach, classmates as far back as middle school and even a neighbor Judge Alito once baby-sat for.

Last week, it helped arrange for 22 of Judge Alito's former law clerks to visit Washington, where they lobbied senators in behalf of their former boss.

Truly, affluence and efficiency are the wages of loyalty. PFA wouldn't be able to act nearly as quickly as it does if its members had to stop and evaluate each of Bush's decisions on its merits. I don't know if there's a liberal equivalent to PFA--a political organization that pours all its efforts into supporting the decisions of a single person without regard to their content. I've never thought very highly of blind faith because I think it lends itself to abuse, and what's worse is that the faithful never know when they're being hoodwinked because they're not in the habit of checking. Nevertheless, you really can't beat it if all you need is sheer expediency.

Gratuitous Snark Of The Day

2005-11-14T14:24:00.000-05:00

I don't normally do this, but I just read something particularly stupid, and I'm feeling a little surly today, so here goes. Tom Maguire of JustOneMinute has this to say about Ted Kennedy's attitude back in 2002 around the time Congress authorized Bush to use force against Iraq (emph. mine):

I haven't found Ted Kennedy's floor speech prior to the October 2002 vote on the war resolution, but here he is at SAIS on Sept 27, 2002. Early laugh lines include these:

But there is a difference between honest public dialogue and partisan appeals. There is a difference between questioning policy and questioning motives.

and

Let me say it plainly: I not only concede, but I am convinced that President Bush believes genuinely in the course he urges upon us.
Only later did Kennedy realize what a liar Bush was, and how important it was to question his motives.

As the relevant psychological literature (and American public opinion surveys since 2002) tell us, people are notoriously bad at detecting lies. If I told you I got my master's at Stanford, you probably wouldn't realize right away that I was lying unless you happened to work in the registrar's office (I got my bachelor's there). Moreover, it's pretty likely that Ted would have been raked over the coals by everyone to the right of Michael Moore if he'd tried to call Bush out in 2002. And that's not even mentioning the fact that the White House had exclusive access to lots of intel, much of it countervailing, that Congress never saw.

But maybe I shouldn't be surprised at Tom's reaction. After all, many on the right seem to fear the process of adapting one's behavior to changing circumstances ("learning"), preferring their leaders to allow the real world to influence their behavior as little as possible. But don't take this post as an indictment of cheap shots in general--longtime readers of this blog know I have no right to point the finger at anyone--all I'm saying is if you're gonna take one, don't make yourself sound silly in the process.

If Credit's What Matters . . .

2005-11-12T17:48:00.000-05:00

In the course of a discussion on yesterday's edition of Fox News' Dayside about Bush's Veterans' Day speech, one of the right-leaning guests asked why the president hasn't received more credit from the mainstream media for all the terrorist attacks that haven't happened since 9/11. That sounded like a pretty fair question, so I figured I'd take the time to look for some answers. One of the first intuitions that should spring to mind is that journalism has an inherent bias in favor of actual events as opposed to, you know, non-events, so it shouldn't come as any surprise that we never wake up to headlines like "No Terror Attacks Since 9/11; Credit Goes To Bush." So there's that, but the larger question remains: can the long streak of recent terrorist inaction be attributed to Bush's actions?

One of the first pieces of analysis I found, if you can call it that, comes from prominent conservative law prof and blogger Ann Althouse, who had this to say a little over a month ago:

It's hard to claim credit for the absence of an event. WaPo reports:
President Bush said today the United States and its allies have disrupted at least 10 serious plots by the al Qaeda network in the past four years, as he sought to rally the nation against international terrorists and warned foreign governments against supporting them....

He added, "We've stopped at least five more al Qaeda efforts to case targets in the United States or infiltrate operatives into our country."...

Bush did not elaborate.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan later identified two of the three schemes to carry out attacks in the United States as previously alleged plots involving Jose Padilla, a Puerto Rican convert to Islam who was suspected of planning to detonate a radiological "dirty bomb," and Lyman Farris, a naturalized U.S. citizen and truck driver from Ohio who was allegedly recruited to destroy New York's Brooklyn Bridge, blow up airliners on the ground and derail passenger trains. Both men were arrested after being identified by captured al Qaeda commanders, and neither plot got beyond a reconnaissance stage.

McClellan said other plots Bush referred to are "still classified."

ADDED: To be clear, I certainly think credit is deserved for stopping attacks. My point is that people don't notice and don't give you credit. Everything just seems uneventful.

Not really Althouse's most original interpretive moment, as you can see. But let's look at the facts: out of the ten plots that the US and its allies supposedly foiled, only three were directed at the United States. These were José Padilla's plans to detonate a 'dirty bomb' and two thinly described schemes to attack the east and west coasts with commercial airplanes a la 9/11. We knew when Padilla was captured in 2002 that he was nowhere near prepared to carry out any terrorist activities, so it's difficult to count his arrest as a "foiled plot" (emphasis mine):

But as the (not quite radioactive) dust settled on Ashcroft's dramatic announcement, some began asking not only why Mr. Padilla, a U.S. citizen, was being held in a Navy brig as an "enemy combatant," but also why he was dominating America's headlines — and its nightmares. Within hours of Ashcroft's announcement, administration officials were pointing out that Padilla had no radioactive material or any other bomb-making equipment. Nor had he chosen a target, or formulated a plan. And while his connections with al-Qaeda operatives were never in doubt, he suddenly began to look a lot more like the accused shoe-bomber Richard Reid (i.e. another disaffected ex-con from the West desperate to get in with al-Qaeda) than like the sophisticated professionals who put together September 11.

Details on the two plane schemes are still mostly classified, though the Post article tells us that Khalid Sheik Mohammed was involved with one of them, and that he may have scrapped it prior to 9/11. And since the White House won't disclose any more information about them, the question of how much credit Bush should be given for stopping terrorism against the USA remains open. But we have found another answer to our esteemed commentator's initial question about why the media hasn't covered the issue more thoroughly: the administration simply hasn't given them much to write about. Whether that's due to national security concerns or because there's nothing to say is known only to a few at the top.

Loose Lips Sink Ruling Parties

2005-11-08T19:38:00.000-05:00

On Nov. 2, the Washington Post broke the news that the CIA is detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists in a network of covert "black prisons" located in former Soviet bloc nations. Reporter Dana Priest based the story on information provided by anonymous government officials who are concerned about the program's ethical and pragmatic problems. Bill Frist and Dennis Hastert are outraged, of course--but not at the fact that the prisons exist. No, what concerns them is the fact that word got out, and today they called for a joint investigation into the matter because "if accurate, such an egregious disclosure could have long-term and far-reaching damaging and dangerous consequences" (I know it looks like there's a typo in that quote, but that's exactly how it appeared in the Post article).

Now how could secret detention centers in backwater countries possibly hurt the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, especially if, as our president declared recently, "we do not torture?" It may very well be that the interrogation methods employed at these black prisons are perfectly in keeping with the Geneva Conventions, but secrecy has a nasty way of sparking speculation. That they're located in unidentified foreign nations and neither the CIA nor the White House will confirm or deny their existence only fans the flames of suspicion further. Recent history has shown that what's really hurting America's fight against terrorists are our ill-considered interrogation techniques (cf. Gitmo and Abu Ghraib) and the need for secrecy that goes along with them. And the government still has yet to reveal to the American people any actionable evidence that might help justify the existence of these shadowy facilities.

It seems as though each passing week unearths a fresh lie or secret whose fallout further erodes the GOP's onetime near-complete dominance of American politics. If this keeps up, I don't see how they'll survive 2006, let alone 2008. Thomas Jefferson once said that our nation needs a revolution every twenty years or so, but it looks like the changeover might come a few years early for the current regime. To whoever eventually replaces our still-formidable Republican majoritarians, I offer the following advice: keep only those secrets which are absolutely essential. Because in government, lying is like crack--you can't do it just once, and if you get hooked, you're as good as ousted; it's just a matter of time.

Everyone Loves A Good Story

2005-11-06T13:54:00.000-05:00

There's a pretty cool piece in today's NYT about the importance of compelling storylines in the creation of news items and propaganda. People pay more attention to strands of news when they're presented as part of a larger tapestry that connects disparate events over time and thereby ameliorates some of the tensions of constant information overload. One of today's dominant news narratives concerns questions of manipulated intelligence during the sale of the Iraq war, and it encompasses the Plame leak case, the Downing Street memo, the Libby indictment, and the recent revelation that the administration was warned that one major source of prewar intelligence was lying:

Indeed, part of the resonance of the leak investigation is that it goes back to the fierce debate over the validity of prewar intelligence about Saddam Hussein that led to a protracted and increasingly unpopular and costly conflict with no clear end in sight. The intrigue over who said what, and when, and why, and to whom about Ms. Wilson echoes the intrigue about the activities of one of the most secretive presidential administrations of modern times.

In other words, it's a good storyline.

The twist is that this particular story apparently sprang from the administration's fevered efforts in the summer of 2003 to keep control of its case that the Iraq war was right and necessary, and to discredit swiftly any critic who might tell a different tale.

Other examples of political narratives might include Watergate, Clinton/Lewinsky, the War on Terror/Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, and the liberal/conservative 'culture wars.' Like in the movies, the overarching story and its constituent links don't need to be particularly relevant--just interesting. That may be part of why the GOP's been winning so handily at the ballot box in recent years--the mere presence of a passably cohesive and affirmative world view offers a significant advantage if the opposition party lacks a viable alternative. But when the story gets away from its spinners, it can turn against them, just as the broad-based support behind the Iraq war at its onset has today metamorphosed into an opposed public majority and mounting evidence of intelligence manipulation. And the rise of blogs, 24-hour cable news networks, and instant information via Google is making it increasingly difficult for the entrenched powers-that-be to manage what people know and how political information is framed.

Later in the article, Daniel Schorr offers an optimistic take on the staggering speed at which information travels nowadays, arguing that new technologies have democratized the power to control news:

"And [John F. Kennedy] said: 'We're going to live in a different world when America can see on the same day what's happening in Europe. We've lost our ability to sit, and have time, and have an explanation to go with events.' I'm not sure he foresaw the day of CNN live all the time, but he did foresee that getting news on the air faster than we used to would drive them to make policy faster, or write statements, before they had thought them through. A lot of government's attention these days is focused on what do you say right away."
Mr. Schorr added: "I'm delighted about it myself, because I'm no longer primarily a television person. I love seeing that the people who exercised that absolute control have lost it, thanks to technology."

The decentralization of information control is definitely a positive development, but I don't know that it has exerted a significant effect on the speed at which policy is created. The difference between the public hearing about a major event within a day of its occurrence (in the 1960s) and a few minutes (today) isn't large enough to affect legislation, though Schorr does have a point that governments now have less time to write immediate statements in response. The primary driving forces behind rushed, shoddy policy are an incompetent Congress and the people that elect its representatives. Perhaps democracy itself shares part of the blame: in a world where food, entertainment, and interpersonal contact can all be had more or less instantaneously, maybe we as citizens are unreasonably burdening our leaders with the same standard of celerity.

All Wal-Mart, All The Time

2005-11-05T19:58:00.000-05:00

I know I've been harping on WM lately, but its communication issues are quite political--especially when it comes its to health care policies and economic impact. Wal-Mart's latest PR initiative took the form of a quasi-academic conference held yesterday in the nation's capital at which were presented nine academic papers analyzing the retailer's effects on the economy. Independent economic research firm Global Insight solicited academics to present at Wal-Mart's behest, selecting only the highest-quality papers regardless of results (so they said, anyway). Global Insight also conducted its own WM-underwritten research study, which unsurprisingly reflected favorably on its subject.

It doesn't take a marketing expert to see the gooey public-relations center that lies beneath this event's thin academic veneer. Wal-Mart is hitting the same wall that the vast majority of non-totalitarian propagandists eventually encounter: the more readily identifiable the source of a propaganda message, the less effective the message. As soon as the public discovers it's an official WM-brand conference, any positive results automatically become suspect. This is why the Office of National Drug Control Policy has repeatedly tried to conceal its role in creating anti-drug media messages, and why you probably know the handiwork but not the name of the American Legacy Foundation. If Wal-Mart really wants to start changing large numbers of minds, it'll need to start taking account of this identity effect and thinking about the most intelligent ways to leverage its PR resources. I guess asking Congress to increase the minimum wage is a superficially decent attempt, except that it's difficult to see why the retailer would need the government to force it to do something it already has the power to do right now.

The Empire Strikes Back

2005-11-03T19:11:00.000-05:00

Wal-Mart made the NYT front page again a couple days ago, this time for recruiting veteran political PR mavens to shine up its lackluster public image and combat anti-WM propaganda. The article relates that founding father Sam Walton considered public relations a waste of money and probably wouldn't have approved the establishment of a political campaign-style "war room" to win over the hearts and wallets of conscientious consumers. But the six-armed beast over on the right has the senior management running scared--it's the mascot for a recently released documentary called Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price, which harshly criticizes the retail giant's business practices. Executives have cited Wal-Mart's public image as a factor in its withering stock prices from 2000 forward, and they're worried that the film might exacerbate the trend, especially if it becomes a cult hit.

It looks to me like Wal-Mart's fighting a losing battle here. Successfully convincing concerned and intelligent shoppers (a coveted demographic) that it's as interested in taking care of its front-line employees as it is in fattening its profit margins would be a milestone triumph of public relations. The company's trying to have it both ways, but it will fail as long as the public eye sees the tension between worker protections and profit-mindedness as a zero-sum tradeoff. As propaganda, the documentary benefits from the popular stereotype of the greedy corporation squeezing the common man and woman for all they're worth, and what we know about Wal-Mart's attitude toward its employees dovetails with that portrayal.

My girlfriend will be hosting a screening of Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price in a couple weeks, and I'll post a review soon after I see it. I also may try and track down a copy of the WM-backed answer film Why Wal-Mart Works & Why That Makes Some People Crazy and review that as well.

Getting Our Priorities Straight

2005-10-31T18:18:00.000-05:00

Northeastern University journalism prof Dan Kennedy recently lamented last Friday as "a dark day for journalism," citing concerns that Patrick Fitzgerald's indictment of Lewis Libby "blasted an enormous hole right through" journalists' right not to reveal anonymous sources. Here's how he summed up the broader implications:

Short of a national shield law -- something that seems unlikely to pass -- the reporter's privilege has now gone from tenuous to nonexistent. Perhaps some good will come out of this: A source will think very, very hard before he uses a reporter's promise of anonymity to engage in criminal behavior.

More likely, though, Fitzgerald's crusade will make it harder for journalists -- and journalism -- to expose the truth.

As further evidence of the widespread erosion of protection for journalists, Kennedy cites the case of Providence, RI television reporter Jim Taricani, who was sentenced to house arrest last year for refusing to identify who gave him a surveillance tape of a city official taking a bribe. Taricani and Judith Miller were both detained for protecting anonymous sources who may have violated the law by divulging information to the media. I agree that "exposing the truth" is a pressing imperative for the profession of journalism and the public interest, but firm distinctions must be made as to whether the crime in question is serious enough to warrant compromising journalists' anonymity prerogative.

Threatening journalists with jailtime for withholding sources is not something that should be done lightly. Reporters need to know that they can feel relatively free to rely on anonymous sources to supply sensitive information when on-the-record corroboration is unavailable. The adoption of a clear standard of when legal action may be brought against journalists, which would probably include capital and national security crimes, would help them understand the relative precedence of legal and journalistic priorities. While the media's right to protect anonymity is important, there are other imperatives that can and should supersede it, and the decisions about what should trump what and when should only come at the end of a vigorous public debate.

Interesting endnote: the sources in Kennedy's two cases both claimed that they either never bound their respective reporters to any confidentiality promises or that they unbound them before punitive action was taken. Two observations immediately spring to mind: one, that perhaps Kennedy's fears of a significantly compromised media are slightly overblown; and two, that holding journalists to strict confidence even in the face of imprisonment would be in most cases an extremely selfish position--and in any event, a fairly rare one.

Hence The Prepositive 'Former'

2005-10-28T10:34:00.000-04:00

Always warms my heart to see former senator (R-MO) and UN ambassador John Danforth continuing his string of broadsides against the Christian right's influence on the GOP, which he did at the University of Arkansas Wednesday. Good on ya Johnny, but the party's not buying it--they're too busy soliciting votes and contributions from the right's lunatic fringe, and that won't stop until said fringe wises up and figures out how they're being exploited. Considering their political alternatives, that doesn't seem particularly likely in the near future.

Do Leaky Boats Always Sink?

2005-10-28T10:22:00.000-04:00

Wal-Mart, like any good ruthless multinational, is always looking for new ways to cut costs. I don't think many people were surprised at the contents of a recently leaked internal memo that suggests, among other things, "discouraging unhealthy people from working at Wal-Mart" and shifting workers to low-premium, high-deductible health insurance plans. Maybe these are sensible options from a business standpoint and maybe they're not, but they certainly don't do much to improve the company's public image. This article is currently (as of midday Oct. 27, 2005) the #1 most emailed NYT piece, so word is spreading far and fast, and I can't imagine the top brass is happy about it.

See, Wal-Mart's been spending lots of money and resources on public diplomacy initatives like NPR sponsorship, the website Walmartfacts.com, its eight community-relations offices across the country, and high-profile Katrina relief efforts. All this PR is aimed at convincing the American public that the world's largest corporation actually cares about the little people--and then a memo implying the exact opposite hits media front pages. There's no way to verify this, but I'm guessing that the bang/buck ratio is much higher for this little revelation than for all Wal-Mart's PR efforts combined. Information not intended for public consumption is presumed to be much more indicative of an organization's "true" inner workings than its public image, which suggests that a single inopportune leak can have a more significant effect on public opinion than months of steady propaganda inundation.

However, this isn't always the case. Consider the Downing Street Memo--widely cited as a "smoking gun" of the Bush Administration's premature intent to invade Iraq by antiwar critics, war supporters and the American public mostly discounted or ignored it. It's tough to say why, though: the media's reluctance to follow through on the story undoubtedly contributed, as did the administration's refusal to comment. Another factor may have been that Democrats had been hurling allegations of intelligence misuse for over a year before the memo surfaced, so it may have simply seemed like more of the same to casual observers. But it's also possible that many Americans either refused to believe (out of naiveté) or didn't care (due to faith in democratization through violence) that their government would lie to them about something as serious as war. If this last point has any merit, it would seem that we're better at calling out duplicity in corporate boardrooms than we are at seeing it in the White House in wartime. Why that is, I can't say.

Why Public Image Matters Mk. Umpteen

2005-10-26T20:56:00.000-04:00

It affects the bottom line, as underscored by this article in the NYT. Here's Keith Reinhard, president of Business for Diplomatic Action, on why people in other countries are hesitating to buy American:

Q. Is the war in Iraq driving the negativity?

A. That's one of four root causes. Another is the arrogance, ignorance and insensitivity of American people. A third reason for anti-American sentiment is the pervasiveness of American pop culture. We're not the only source of "cool" anymore. And the fourth reason is the effects of globalization. In developing countries, they resent the fact that American-led globalization has, in their minds, left them out.

Effective PR can help, but actual action is always best. Fortune 500 CEOs, I'm looking at y'all.

When The Right Gets It Right

2005-10-24T19:14:00.000-04:00

No matter how tightly an ideological coalition is managed, dissent eventually takes root, and when it does there's little chance of stopping it. Over the past month we've borne witness to a torrent of right-on-right criticism on FEMA's response to Katrina, the Miers nomination, and now the administration's Middle East policies, specifically Iraq. Objections such as those recently raised by former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former State Dept. chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson will sound familiar to those of us who opposed the war from the start. But while commentators like Matt Yglesias are content to warn against praising these strange bedfellows too effusively, Crooked Timber's Henry Farrell hits the nail on the head by noting that the publicity of these conservative schisms is an indicator of the movement's thorough internal decay. The dissenters are voicing their complaints now because things have gotten so out of hand that basic ideological principles are beginning to supersede the benefits of loyalty. They certainly aren't looking to curry favor with liberals, so there's not much point discussing how much "credit" we should or should not give them for realizing what we've known all along. Best to acknowledge these admittedly welcome public reassertions of independent thought with a nonchalant nod of assent and carry on.

One further point bears mentioning. If it is true both that the conservative movement is losing its integrity and that party discipline plays a significant role in electoral success, the GOP we've known and loathed since 1994 may be coming to an end. True, a disorganized Republican party may not directly translate into more votes for Democrats, but it certainly doesn't hurt.

Cheap Shot

2005-10-21T15:39:00.000-04:00

Hey conservatives: nominate smarter presidential candidates. Why? Well, if Iraq, Katrina, Social Security ~~private~~ personal accounts, and a flagrant lack of fiscal responsibility weren't bad enough, there's always the chance that something like this could happen.

The GRE Took My Baby Away

2005-10-17T19:11:00.000-04:00

Ugh. I won't be posting much (or at all necessarily) this week, as I will be taking the GRE this Thursday morning. And on top of that, I'm trying to put together packets for my recommenders to grad schools containing everything they'll need to get their recs out quickly. Wish me luck, and I'll see you at some point after Thursday.

What It Means to Stay "On-Message"

2005-10-14T15:58:00.000-04:00

There's no question that the GOP has greatly strengthened its already formidable position in American politics since the 2000 election. Their significant electoral gains, ability to set the legislative agenda, and galling indifference to accountability all attest to their strong unifying conservative philosophy, emphasis on party discipline, mastery of the art of political rhetoric, and willingness to place winning at the top of their priority list. All of these factors make national coordination much easier for Republicans than it is for Democrats, who encompass a much greater diversity of ideology, political interests, demographics, and tactics. Effective national message coordination is absolutely crucial for winning elections and shifting the public's perceptions of what a party stands for, as I hope to show in the following paragraphs.

Since the 1960s, conservative philosophy has focused on a limited number of principles strongly identified with Western culture, Christianity, and the American Dream. A prospectus from the April 1999 issue of the Hoover Institution's Policy Review magazine provides a helpful breakdown:

Conservatives resolve arguments in favor of the individual rather than the collective, of clear standards of judgment rather than relativistic measures, of personal responsibility rather than the interplay of vast social forces, of the market rather than government economic intervention, of international strength and self-reliance rather than empty promises of security. The federal government is, in general, too big, taxing too much of the wealth of Americans, doing too many unnecessary and often counterproductive things that get in the way of economic growth, to say nothing of personal liberty. Even as it has indulged in frivolity, the federal government has been neglectful of the security of Americans in its rush to disarm after the successful conclusion of the Cold War. Meanwhile, a debased high and popular culture shows few signs of recovery.

It's doubtful that liberals would be able to come up with a similar list and keep it comparably brief. They probably wouldn't be able to agree on the relative importance of domestic and international social justice, environmental protections, gun control, women's rights, civil liberties, minority rights, the social safety net, socialized health care, and so forth. This lack of agreement has stymied efforts to develop a compelling liberal ideological portrait to match the harmonic coherence of conservative thought. The right profits greatly from the fact that most of its ideas (with the notable exception of the mistrust of government) draw from a common philosophical tradition that reaches back thousands of years and is inextricably ingrained in the consciousness of all Westerners. Thus, they exude a psychological gravitas that newfangled progressive notions simply haven't been around long enough to develop.

The fact that conservative principles fit together so neatly allows GOP candidates and operatives to focus on a very small number of issues in media campaigns, all of which reinforce the conservative ethos in the public consciousness. It's a very effective feedback loop that works something like this: "taxes must be lowered because the government is too big, capital investment creates jobs, and the individual knows best how to spend his money. And since money (i.e. property) is what allows people to maintain their standard of living, i.e. the American Way, anyone who violates the law must be punished severely. Everyone is treated equally before the law; after all, we are a nation of laws, not men. Law enforcement, national defense, and the court system are the sole provinces of government, which can't do much else very well. On the international scene as in business it's every man for himself, so we can't rely on the UN or other international standards to look out for our interests. And we must leave social services up to faith-based organizations, because only they have the moral ballast necessary to properly direct charitable energies. Etc."

Regardless of how effective the above ideas turn out to be in the real world, they sound good and complement each other well. They are also very simple, which works to the advantage of the party that exalts faith, ideology, and "good character" above knowledge, intelligence, and competence. Republicans understand that in politics, "when you're explaining, you're losing"--a point that many otherwise learned folks, some of whom make their livings teasing out complex issues, fail to grasp fully. The GOP keeps its PR messages short, resonant, and above all consistent--what they've managed to accomplish is the political equivalent of national branding, maintaining brand identity over time by delivering the same talking points to every market. Democrats haven't achieved anywhere near that level of PR consistency, which is why their successes at the state and local levels far outshines their national performance.

The elevation of a cluster of political ideas to brand-name status depends principally on party unity, or more specifically the suppression of dissent in favor of partisan loyalty. Without a small group at the top defining strategy and an all-encompassing (or very close to it) group of lower representatives and base members dedicated to maintaining message coherence, the party starts to look like a house divided. You get things like sharp divisions between elected officials and the base, representatives frequently rebuking each other in public, and internecine power struggles between opposing factions, none of which project an impression of effective leadership to voters. It would be quite ironic indeed if conformity and obedience, two qualities that many among the Democratic base pride themselves on not having, turn out to be prerequisites for electoral success in the 21st century.

But conformity is comparatively easy for Republicans. They are, as Howard Dean infamously pointed out earlier this year, predominantly Christian and white (and heterosexual). Their base is concentrated further away from the lowest economic classes than Democrats', whose greater ethnic, cultural, and economic diversity presents a significant obstacle to long-term party unity. Moderates find it difficult to distill a Democratic philosophical essence from such a great multiplicity of voices. The polls have shown in election after election that a demonstrated record of political competence is not enough--to do more than take electoral advantage of its opponents' failures, a party must project a sound, consistent, coherent collection of messages with near-total cooperation from its base and representatives.

Perhaps most importantly, the definition of a successful GOP legislator is one that is willing to subordinate his principles to the interest of winning at all costs. To put it charitably, Republicans recognize that doggedly clinging to principle is counterproductive if it keeps you out of power. The Democratic Party stands no chance of dislodging GOP dominance unless it is willing to take winning as seriously as they do. That means falling into line behind a positive agenda that may well be far less than perfect--as long as party members can agree that it's better than what the right is peddling. So what's necessary now is to figure out a plan and start hammering home the same talking points repeatedly and universally, because if history is any indication, it'll all take years to sink in. This is how multigenerational majorities are formed--between the 1930s and 80s, voters saw the Dems as standard-bearers of the New Deal and Great Society. But nothing lasts forever, and now Democrats have to stitch together a new identity without the help of a economic depression. I, for one, hope they can get something together before the nation reaches a major crisis point.

Statistical Significance

2005-10-11T11:41:00.000-04:00

I have repeat visitors! Or so my new counter tells me. I don't know exactly what y'all are doing here, but I should probably let you know, if you don't know me, that I am a dilettante, an amateur. I don't blog for fame or recognition, which is why you won't find me on anyone's blogroll. I have no qualifications to my name other than my BA, so I've no official claim to the title of "expert" in any particular field. I write because I enjoy teasing out political communication/propaganda issues for myself, and because I plan to go to grad school soon and I want to hone my reasoning skills a bit before I matriculate. But I reserve the right to flip-flop like a flounder on a hot skillet because no one pays me for my ideas and I don't much care if I contradict myself. The only consistent point of view you'll find on this blog is the (admittedly naive) faith that statistical methods usually generate much stronger evidence than ideology and pure assertion.

That said, I sometimes post here, and if you're interested in the recent debate over The Politics of Polarization, I put my final word down over there this past Sunday.

Hmm, what an odd post. More substance next time. And thanks for reading!

The Third Way's Bitter Pill, Part II

2005-10-08T18:30:00.000-04:00

In my last post I summarized what I thought was the most insightful line of argument in The Politics of Polarization: that the greater numbers of conservatives and religious people compared to liberals and secularists in this country make it necessary for Democrats to appeal strongly to moderates to win consistently. The main weakness of the paper is probably the authors' excessive reverence of Bill Clinton--the fact that he never managed to win a majority of the popular vote in spite of his widespread appeal goes unmentioned. In basing their recommendations on what worked for Clinton in the 90s, they open themselves up to criticisms of strategic obsolescence in today's radically different political landscape.

That said, many of the reactions from the left side of the blogosphere weren't quite as charitable as mine, and some were downright unfair or inaccurate. Before we get to those, let's start with the Post piece itself: it's a fairly good summary with two glaring exceptions, which just so happened to be the grafs that most of the angry bloggers fixated upon. First, the article asserts that "the authors argue that the rising numbers and influence of well-educated, socially liberal voters in the Democratic Party are pulling the party further from most Americans." Now this is true with regard to the party base--Galston and Kamarck do say that liberals have replaced New Democrats as the largest bloc of the Democratic base and that many liberal viewpoints are outside the mainstream, and they've got the stats to back up both of those assertions. But the paper also states that one of the party's biggest problems is that too many moderates can't figure out where its representatives stand. Moderates can't simultaneously consider elected Democrats too liberal and be confused about what they stand for, and the paper makes the latter argument. Thus the authors don't, in Armando from Kos's words, "blame Democratic losses on the Democratic base"; in fact, they go out of their way to emphasize that "it would be a Pyrrhic victory for either party if the mobilization of its ideological and partisan base came at the expense of its appeal to centrist and independent voters."

Armando cites a post by Political Animal's Kevin Drum that proves he didn't read the whole thing (in case you're wondering, I did--twice). Drum's summarizes his upshot thusly:

In other words, contra Galston and Kamarck, the liberal base is not really the problem a lot of people make it out to be. It's the Republican base that's far outside the mainstream.

But G & K never call liberals a 'problem,' and they marshal plenty of evidence that some liberal positions are indeed outside the mainstream. Besides, if liberals represent 19% of registered voters, and there are 50% more conservatives than liberals (=28.5%), which group would you say is closer to the mainstream?

The second misleading item in the WaPo article comes in the final sentence, which reads in its entirety:

[The authors] suggest that Democratic presidential candidates replicate Clinton's tactics in 1992, when he broke with the party's liberal base by approving the execution of a semi-retarded prisoner, by challenging liberal icon Jesse L. Jackson and by calling for an end to welfare "as we know it."

Everything after the phrase "when he broke . . ." is entirely accurate--Clinton did all the things listed as part of his 1992 campaign. But the whole sentence gives the impression that the paper holds up these particular actions as exemplars that current Dem candidates should follow, which it absolutely does not. At no point do the authors call for a "replication" of Clinton's strategies--they acknowledge that the new political environment we're living in now will require the best of what worked in the past along with redoubled efforts in such areas as national security and cultural liberty. The paragraph erects a strawman with strong editorial overtones, neither of which has any business in a straight news piece in one of the nation's preeminent newspapers.

Unfortunately, both Tom Tomorrow and Talkleft uncritically take the bait, perhaps because they felt threatened by the article's implications. Disagreement is all fine and good, but without hard stats to back it up, it's just so much hot air and wishful thinking.

Moving beyond the Post article, Marshall Wittman tries to take home from the Politics the message that fiscal responsibility is "critical" for future Democratic successes. But that's a 90s mindset--remember "It's the economy, stupid"?--that won't fly as long as more Americans consider homeland security and debates over "values" more important. In Galston and Kamarck's own words:

As early as 1996, the proportion of the electorate who voted primarily on economic issues had dropped dramatically, a harbinger of things to come. These voters remained a smaller portion of the electorate in both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections. Thus, while Clinton had made significant progress on the economy, it was of little help to Democrats in an electorate whose priorities had changed.

Matt Yglesias rightly takes the Bull Moose to task for missing this point.

Much as it pains me to admit it, the conservatives are more correct in their commentary. Raleigh's own Betsy Newmark can accurately remark, "Well, that is all good advice for the Democrats . . ." because she just so happens to have the majority on her side. Insults Unpunished, the author of whom manages to be completely wrong on just about everything else, manages to nail this: "[Democrats a]re trying to win in a country that leans center-right and they’re center-left, so they have work to do." Again, sad but true. However, The Right wasn't all right, as Mister Snitch manages to make the same mistake as Armando in taking away this conclusion from the paper: "Stay clear of out-of-touch liberals" (cf. the quote at the end of the second paragraph of this post).

The moral of the story is this: always, always, always read the whole thing. And if you can't read the whole thing yourself, read people who have read the whole thing. Like me, for example.

The Third Way's Bitter Pill, Part I

2005-10-08T15:51:00.000-04:00

Yesterday the blogosphere buzzed a bit about a Washington Post article on a new report by centrist Democratic strategists William Galston and Elaine Kamarck called The Politics of Polarization. Briefly, the paper argues that in order to start winning more elections, Democrats must focus on appealing to moderates rather than relying exclusively on base mobilization. Because self-described conservatives outnumber liberals three-to-two in this country, we cannot expect to retake power at the national level unless we start making a few concessions. That's the cold, hard truth, and while progressives weren't happy to hear it, none of the leftist commentary I read managed to rebut Galston and Kamarck's arguments successfully. But I'll return to the reactions in a later post; first I want to discuss some of the report's evidence and advice on its merits.

Probably the most significant point the authors raise is that there are 50% more conservatives in this country than liberals. A recent Harris poll found an even starker ratio--two conservatives for every liberal. Galston and Kamarck use this clearly lopsided ideological distribution as the centerpiece of their argument that tending only to the liberal base while ignoring the center (the "myth of mobilization", in their terms) is a losing electoral strategy for Democrats. Because the GOP's base is so much larger, they can afford to spend more time simply getting-out-the-vote and relatively less time winning over moderates. I don't see any way around this conclusion--by accepting the ratio they cite, you've essentially conceded that some ideological compromise will be necessary to reclaim power. And yes, by compromise I do mean "rightward motion" for progressives, unsavory as it sounds.

Galston and Kamarck also touch upon the widely-discussed relevance of "values" to the electorate. They acknowledge that people interpret the term in multiple ways and that altering the content and response type of values questions in surveys produces different results. But they identify two broad categories of "values", both of which are weak points for Democrats: (1) stances on social issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and stem cell research, and (2) personal character traits including consistency, honesty, and integrity.

On social issues the authors counsel "tolerance and common sense," i.e. leaving gay marriage up to state legislatures while opposing its enactment by judicial fiat, espousing the general right to an abortion but compromising on issues like parental notification, and trying to become more religion-friendly. These are all good suggestions as far as they go, but they don't all delve into specifics. In presidential politics, where personality takes center stage, Galston and Kamarck insist that Democratic candidates need to exude "strength," "integrity," and "empathy"--three characteristics John Kerry sorely lacked in the eyes of the majority. The point that the most thoughtful policy agenda will fail if not presented by someone Americans can trust is well-taken.

The character issue is partially tied up with the increasing influence of religion on politics. Our nation is overwhelmingly Christian (76.5%) and demands traditionally Christian traits of its leaders over and above factors like competence and intelligence. Unfortunately, while 55% of Americans view the GOP as friendly to religious citizens, only 29% think the same of Dems, down from 40% just last year. Many churchgoing Americans support Democratic positions on the economy, health care, and Iraq, but consider cultural issues like gay marriage and abortion more important--indicating that addressing these issues is a crucial component of candidate "empathy." One major reason why observant Americans may consider the Democratic Party hostile to their interests, and this is just my own opinion, is the vitriolic anti-religious rhetoric employed by many of the liberal rank-and-file against people like James Dobson and Pat Robertson. Unless Dems can counterbalance such criticism with high-profile overtures to centrist and progressive religious organizations, they'll never improve their poor image among the devout.

That's it for now--next time I'll review the liberal reaction to The Politics of Polarization and tell you how they all got it wrong.

Sometimes People Say Stupid Things

2005-10-05T10:56:00.000-04:00

By now everybody's heard all about Bill Bennett's infamous on-air faux pas about how aborting all black babies would lower the crime rate. As is typical in the wake of such inflammatory remarks, his political opponents went apeshit: Michigan congressman John Conyers called for radio stations to drop his morning show, the NAACP asked for an apology, and both Democrats and Republicans soundly denounced the comment. In an ill-advised statement defending his line of reasoning, Bennett cried context-specificity, saying, "A thought experiment about public policy, on national radio, should not have received the condemnations it has." The blogosphere buzzed for a bit, but has now mostly moved on to discussing the new Iraqi constitution's referendum rules and the qualifications of Harriet Miers.

We go through this same process every time a public figure says something untoward within earshot of a bored but influential reporter: all the major papers and TV stations pick it up, interest groups and elected officials loudly declare their opposition, and the pundits all pick sides. But to what end? With all the substantive problems threatening America today, why are we expending so much sound and fury on one windbag's tossed-off nonsense?

Three reasons immediately spring to mind: first, pretty much the only time you ever hear about the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, or Focus on the Family is when they're condemning some stupid statement or other. The practice of releasing oppositional (and occasionally supportive) press statements in response to rhetorical controversies is an integral part of their overall PR strategy. Additionally, there are certain sects within every political and social movement that get off on public indignation, and part of an advocacy group's job is to duly acknowledge these noisy and annoying (but frequently well-heeled) busybodies. Thus, press releases of this nature mirror and refine the sentiments of these organizations' constituencies as well as attempt to reaffirm the orgs' relevance as cultural institutions. Whether they actually succeed in this second endeavor is a matter of some debate.

Secondly, shouting down racist/sexist/homophobic language is a very effective way to cause major trouble for one's enemies. While some loudmouths, among them Pat Robertson and Bennett himself, manage to get away with only a collective tongue-lashing, people like Trent Lott, Ann Coulter, and Michael Savage aren't so lucky. As you may recall, Lott resigned from his Senate Majority leadership post after lauding the good old days of Southern segregation, Coulter got booted from the National Review's opinion page for advocating fascism against Islamic nations, and MSNBC axed Savage after he told a caller to "get AIDS and die." As you can see, poorly thought-through blather has its consequences--but should it? Aren't we supposed to be the people that love the First Amendment so much?

Here, we need to distinguish between merely condemning reprehensible comments and insisting that the individuals who make them be fired or impeached or whatever. The former is perfectly in keeping with the First Amendment, while the latter in most cases amounts to an opportunistic attempt to abridge it. If the comment falls under the umbrella of "protected speech," we as liberals can and should denounce it, but we should stay far away from the admittedly tempting expediency of censorship. (Boycotts are still fair game, though.) The only exception I would make would be for opinion workers, who could be appropriately terminated for contradicting the spirit of their parent publication or production. But that decision should be left up to editors, publishers, and producers and involve as little influence from external interest groups as possible (though I'd wager that such influence probably figured prominently in most of the the cases I've mentioned).

Finally, the mere threat of career damage comprises the third reason to condemn: deterrence. Presumably, commentators and politicians watching the firestorm of criticism that continues to singe Bennett will watch their words more carefully from now on, and we'll all be able to enjoy a less offensive media environment. It's impossible to say how well this strategy is working since there's no way to see what pundits and politicians would say without advocacy groups on both sides policing the public record. But people need to feel free to say what they want to say, if for no other reason than that it's always better to know who one's enemies are and what they stand for. Besides, while words may hurt, long-standing social ills and ineffective public policies do far greater damage. And that makes all this hoopla about some dumb thing somebody said seem pretty trivial.

GAO to Bush: Quit Propagandizin'

2005-10-02T11:54:00.000-04:00

Remember Armstrong Williams, the conservative pundit whom the Bush administration paid last year to shill for No Child Left Behind? The Government Accountability Office ruled Friday that the cash-for-commentary scheme constituted "covert propaganda" in violation of statutory law. The GAO declared further that the Department of Education illegally paid the PR firm Ketchum Inc. to research media portrayals of Bush's commitment to education. Said the Office: "We see no use for such information except for partisan political purposes. Engaging in a purely political activity such as this is not a proper use of appropriated funds." Damn right.

Without systematic study it's difficult to tell whether this administration's media management strategies are significantly more flagrant than its predecessors, but this isn't the first time it's run afoul of the GAO. The independent congressional office has ruled against the Department of Health & Human Services, the Office of National Drug Control Policy, and now the Education Department in cases involving video news releases (VNRs) designed to look like news reports and delivered to local TV stations across the nation. All three instances involve the same anchorwoman, one Karen Ryan, 'reporting' favorably on executive policies and initiatives--in the Ed Department's case, she touts Bush's efforts to improve remedial education. None of the VNRs indicate that Ms. Ryan is on the administration's payroll, which is the main reason the GAO doesn't like them.

But while its written contempt may smart a little, the GAO's decisions carry no penalties, which means there's no mandate for federal departments to adjust their media strategies to accord with the law. In fact, as far as I can tell, there's no legal mechanism through which the government has recently (ever?) been punished for violating propaganda statutes. If it turns out there's no way to hold the offending departments accountable for their infractions, or that applicable law enforcement bodies simply can't or won't do their jobs, we will continue to see the same types of propaganda again and again.

Quite apart from the question of how to prevent and punish federal media manipulation is how news stories on the White House's propagandistic activities affect its public credibility. Do people trust the government less when Armstrong Williams and VNRs are in the news, or have we been so polarized over the years that such stories only confirm the left's distaste for Bush and the right's disdain for the "liberal media"? My guess would be the latter, but only quantitative research could provide any reliable insight.

Happiness, American and Saudi

2005-09-30T13:30:00.000-04:00

Yesterday Al-Jazeera reported that Saudi Arabian women (specifically, several university students who met with US diplomat Karen Hughes on her ongoing Middle East PR junket) resent being depicted in American media as downtrodden subjugates and want the world to know that they are "happy." During the course of the Q&A session, one student insisted that "I don't want to drive, because I have my own driver," while another asserted that "[there] is not an absolute wall" between men and women in Saudi society. These young women's concerns about the media are understandable but misdirected: the lens through which Americans perceive Saudi norms is heavily colored by a deep incommensurability between the two nations' respective cultures. At the crux of this incommensurability is the question of whether happiness can be had without freedom.

Most Americans, I think, would identify freedom as a necessary condition for happiness. The belief that people have a "natural" right to do as they please as long as their actions don't harm others is so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that we tend to think of it as universal. I'm no exception--I simply don't see how social restrictions on attire, occupation, and association could possibly enhance happiness. While some might be satisfied with such a limited existence, there's a part of me that believes, rightly or wrongly, that there must be some contingent of women in Saudi Arabia who think differently, wanting to dress, work, and socialize however they please. If someone asked me whether I thought the women quoted in the article represent the majority female opinion in their country, my first instinct would be to answer no.

The attitudes expressed in the article make me wonder how blacks living under the heel of Jim Crow in the 1930s and 40s would have reacted in an encounter with some prominent European opponent of segregation. Would they have claimed that everything was fine against all logic, or would they have agreed with the anti-segregationist--in full mediated view of their oppressors? The obvious answer is that most would not have risked violent reprisals just to show solidarity with a privileged outsider who probably wouldn't be able to offer them much real help anyway. And perhaps that's the case with these women. Maybe publicly repudiating the Saudi social order carries with it the risk of expulsion, social ostracism or worse. A few women made token overtures to eventual cultural change, but they took care to reject all outside assistance and to stay away from concrete details. It looks to me as if there's a good chance they could be faking the "right" opinions for pragmatic reasons, but that belief may just reflect my Western cultural orientation.

NOLA != Lord of the Flies

2005-09-27T10:46:00.000-04:00

The LA Times reports today that media stories concerning rapes, murders, and other sociopathic behavior in Katrina's wake may have been slightly exaggerated and/or based on unconfirmed rumor. I for one am absolutely shocked; I can't believe that news outlets would ever blow unsubstantiated, sensationalistic hearsay out of proportion to increase ratings or sales. But seriously, we all should have seen this coming. The fact that things weren't as bad as initial reports indicated is unequivocally great news--it's a testament to the intestinal fortitude of those who were left behind that neither the Superdome nor the convention center descended into a Hobbesian "war of all against all."

Couple points: first, I don't know how prevalent this sentiment is around the blogosphere, but at least one commenter to Kevin Drum's recent post on the topic (John H.) was quick to hurl allegations of anti-Bush bias at the networks and papers who propagated reports of epidemic chaos. I suppose if you've already decided in advance that the media is hellbent on sinking the president, you start seeing evidence of it everywhere--even when more logical explanations, such as a generalized media disaster bias, explain the given phenomenon better. Besides, as the American Journalism Review noted a couple years back (emphasis mine):

A July report released by the nonpartisan Council for Excellence in Government examined the first year of three presidential administrations--Ronald Reagan's, Bill Clinton's and George W. Bush's--and concluded that coverage was predominantly "negative" for all three. "Bush is being treated normally for a president, which is to say negatively," says S. Robert Lichter, president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, an independent group that conducted the study. "The media are tough on presidents."

Yeah, no shit. Some conservatives these days seem to be suffering from amnesia--they can't recall how tough the press was on Clinton in the late '90s or the meaning of fiscal conservatism.

My second point involves the predominantly "proestablishment" effects of news framing. Painting blacks as amoral savages just barely reined in by the rule of law panders to the unconscious (at least I hope they are) prejudices and fears of middle-class white society, which (so the theory goes) boosts sales and ratings among that demographic. The opportunity to run with such a sensationalistic, stereotype-consistent story may have superseded normal journalistic fact-checking protocols, especially if editors were counting on viewers and readers not to care too much if the reports later turned out to be overblown or even completely false. True, NOLA's demolished infrastructure prevented information from circulating as quickly as it normally would, but the media nevertheless shouldn't have shirked its duty to distinguish sharply between verifiable facts and rumors buoyed by the widespread confusion.

UPDATE: Obsidian Wings' Hilzoy has a far more cogent and insightful piece on this topic than mine. We cover similar bases but she also talks about how unconscious racism might have affected news reports as well as the federal, state and local responses. Great stuff.

Chinese (media) Democracy

2005-09-25T11:52:00.000-04:00

China's political and economic systems stand famously at cross-purposes, constantly stepping on one another's toes like two dancers who can't agree to move in tandem. The former imposes strict rules on what can be said and by whom, while the free-market economic reforms that started in the late 1970s have given rise to the most diverse media landscape the nation has ever seen. Digital communication technology in particular has taken the country by storm; its 100 million+ Net population is second only to ours (which is 185 million strong) in size, and its mobile phone user base is over three times larger than that. These trends, along with the brisk expansion of the Chinese economy in general, will eventually overturn the old single-party system of Communist rule which they have already made obsolete.

The Chinese government's censorial practices on the Internet include blocking access to foreign websites deemed offensive, pornographic, or "against national security and public interest"; searching for and deleting bulletin board posts that foment dissent; and forcing participants in online discussion groups to register using their real names. But, as you might think would be obvious, such top-down restrictions clash with the basic nature of digital communication networks: a more effective solution would be to ban mobile phones and the Internet entirely. The State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the new media order as it cites the danger of "harmful foreign thinking or culture" to justify its repressive regulatory actions. As we have seen here in the US, the law offers pitifully inadequate protection against spam and music piracy--so the Communist Party will discover is the case with political dissent and unpopular opinions.

The Internet cannot replace an entrenched political hegemony by itself, of course. But it can make people curious about the world outside their nation and lay bare the government's attempts to conceal or whitewash sensitive political and social issues. As the middle class continues to grow, it will demand more rights, more access to currently restricted communication channels, and more accountability in government. And the digital technologies that are spreading rapidly in China only fan the flames of these developments. The Chinese Communist party has been known to engage in some fairly ludicrous rhetorical gymnastics to reconcile its Marxist underpinnings with its economic liberalization policies, but I don't think they're gonna be able to rationalize their way out of this latest challenge.

Upgrading Our Media System

2005-09-22T17:49:00.000-04:00

After reading last night's post today, I realized that the final paragraph doesn't really answer the question posed in its first sentence. What I want to know is, "how can the news business stop hemorrhaging consumers and release the economic pressure that drives them to 'dumb-down', in Dan Rather's words, their content?" This is important because news is the chief conduit through which most of us learn about real events in the world outside of primary and secondary experience. It shapes our opinions and helps guide our choices about how to vote, where to live, whether and where to travel, and what to consume, among other things. A downward trend in Americans' interest in the news augurs a sharp disconnection from the outside world, which could increase our vulnerability to external manipulation and sociopolitical decay.

To stave off this possibility, I'd recommend rethinking the entire manner in which news is presented. The current paradigm of a staid reporter or news anchor presenting the news robotically has dominated print and TV journalism for decades, and it's clearly beginning to fail. One suggestion might be to start punching a few holes in the wall between news reporting and punditry. Under the system we have now, journalists do the legwork, go on location and try to remain objective in their writing, while columnists and talk show hosts for the most part simply read, watch, and opine from their armchairs. But an ideologically diverse press corps could dispense with the fiction of "journalistic impartiality" and offer interpretation along with their hard news--stridently enough that the reader or viewer would be able to separate the two. Pairing two reporters with opposite political viewpoints on a given story would allow spectators to decide for themselves which conclusion made more sense to them.

The more I read and watch, the more I start to feel that "objectivity" and bloodlessness in news reporting are on the wane. If it's the case that Katrina boosted the ratings of the 24-hour news networks and the profits of newspapers, it was probably in large part due to the indignant tone that many anchors and reporters adopted in their stories, most notably CNN's Anderson Cooper. I don't think Rather would call the coverage of Katrina "tarted-up", and I don't think that style of reporting applies only to times of crisis. Everyone--from liberals to conservatives, blacks, whites, politicians, citizens, the savvy and the ignorant--is upset at the news media right now. And I think a great deal of that ire has to do with an unattainable ideal of impartiality that goes unfulfilled in one way or another every day. Inserting more opinion into "straight" news pieces may not be the solution, but something really needs to change--journalism serves too significant a function to die.

Hard Choices for Old Media

2005-09-21T18:56:00.000-04:00

Just a day after rolling out its op-ed pay service TimesSelect, the New York Times Company yesterday announced a 4% workforce cut that will send 500 employees packing, including well over 100 from the Boston Globe. Also on Tuesday, Knight-Ridder's Philadelphia division unveiled plans to cut 100 jobs from the Philadelphia Daily News and the Philadelphia Inquirer. An Editor & Publisher article on the downsizings blames "sluggish advertising results and higher newsprint prices," but NPR's David Folkenflik cited a more troubling factor in a report on today's All Things Considered:

Knight-Ridder, like many of its competitors, is publicly traded, so it also seeks to satisfy investors and the stock analysts who advise them. The way to drive up the price of the stock is to make sure profits grow each year.

As I've been saying all along, uncontroversially I hope, the focus on profits as the bottom line for news organizations tends to degrade journalistic integrity. Their once-generous margins have been eroded, Folkenflik reports, by "television, satellite radio, Internet sites, and apathy," so many papers/channels/radio networks have responded with the kind of "tarted-up" coverage that brings elder statesmen like Dan Rather to tears. Looking back, it seems as though the newspaper industry's bygone commitment to "serving the community," in the words of former Daily Camera executive editor Barrie Hartman, was underwritten by a dearth of competition--it flourished in a world without cell phones, Tivo, and the Internet, when people actually had time to sit down and read the paper every day. Now that these new media have made the bottom line a bigger deal, paper staffs and ultimately the industry's shrinking audience are feeling the pinch.

These trends cannot be stopped. Industry analyst John Morton put it perfectly in the E&P piece: "the most likely scenario over time is that newspapers are going to have to be happy with lower profit margins." Given the rise in competition and in the cost of basic resources such as newsprint, what other alternative is there? Unfortunately, as economic pressure ratchets up, the industry will see profit-based incentives continue to increase in strength and prominence, thereby furthering the downward spiral of news quality.

Is there any way to break this vicious cycle? My only answer right now involves the Internet, which, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey, has risen dramatically in popularity as a news source as newspapers have fallen. Both trends are particularly marked among young people (18-29), and there's no indication of any future reversals in either case. If the Internet represents the future of news consumption, usurping the traditional role of newspapers, news organizations' continued viability will depend on convincing users to pay for content. Ads alone won't keep them afloat. But since we already know that most web users are pretty averse to online subscriptions, someone's going to have to develop one hell of a business model to get this to work. In comments to my TimesSelect post, "Sarah" suggests a co-op subscription model, in which a large group of news providers would allow access to their entire network for one subscription price. That's the best idea I've heard so far, but I expect to be surprised by whatever new purchasing scheme(s) eventually ends up dominating the web news market.

Rather vs. the NJO

2005-09-20T11:20:00.000-04:00

Dan Rather's upset, and rightly so, at what's become of the media since the 70s. In a speech Monday to Manhattan's Fordham University School of Law, he blasted what he dubbed the "new journalism order"--a recent, inopportune convergence of political and economic pressure against quality reporting:

Addressing the Fordham University School of Law in Manhattan, occasionally forcing back tears, he said that in the intervening years, politicians "of every persuasion" had gotten better at applying pressure on the conglomerates that own the broadcast networks. He called it a "new journalism order."

He said this pressure -- along with the "dumbed-down, tarted-up" coverage, the advent of 24-hour cable competition and the chase for ratings and demographics -- has taken its toll on the news business. "All of this creates a bigger atmosphere of fear in newsrooms," Rather said.

Sentiments such as Rather's and Jon Stewart's reflect an enduring belief in journalism as more than just another consumer product. According to this view, the media has a responsibility to act as an independent conveyance for knowledge and understanding, beholden neither to government priorities nor public prejudices. But it seems to me that if the unbridled free market remains the only determinant of which media outlets succeed and which fail, we'll soon find ourselves in a media environment wholly calibrated to pander to our preexisting views.

But, I could be wrong. It's possible that the largest US media outlets may have a degree of 'journalistic determinism' on their side; that is, people may give CNN, the NYT, Newsweek, and NBC Nightly News a great deal of latitude on their content without absconding in droves. After all, there aren't many organizations that have the necessary human and technological resources to produce incisive reporting on national and international issues. If this is the case, change could come with the ossification of a little editorial backbone in the big news boardrooms. And if sources start clamming up because of it, well, it might be time to pull out an encyclopedia and look up "investigative journalism."

So yeah, I dunno who's wagging what here. But it looks like top-down analyses of the ways in which news is selected, reported, and framed comprise a more realistic solution than relying on the American public to effect change by demanding better news coverage. People are already doing that; just look at any vaguely political blog. I'm hoping that the perspicacity of the Katrina coverage turns out to be contagious, but for that we'll just have to wait and see. Maybe the media only doffs the kid gloves in times of national crisis, but I hope not.

Why TimesSelect Won't Work

2005-09-18T10:08:00.000-04:00

Web-based political commentators from all schools of thought are united in their disapproval of the New York Times' new fee-based service, TimesSelect. For ~~49.95~~ 39.95 (special limited-time offer) a year, subscribers get exclusive online access to the Times' op-ed pieces, a news archive back to 1981, and assorted other fluff no one cares about (does anyone actually use personalized email alerts for anything?). Many bloggers have pledged to stop linking to the NYT altogether until it abandons TimesSelect as a protest against the service. E&P's Steve Outing offers a good breakdown of the issues and rationales behind the paper's controversial decision to go directly for its readers' wallets. It seems the chief driving force behind TimesSelect, according to New York Times Digital president Martin Nisenholtz, is that the print edition just isn't paying the bills anymore:

For the Times to continue to be able to afford to do quality journalism in the future, a way must be found to make the digital operation more profitable -- reflecting the inevitable move in the coming years away from print and toward online. As more readers -- especially younger people -- shift their reading habits to the Internet and move away from print, the digital side must bear more of the weight in paying the costs of the Times' journalism.

I understand the need to turn a profit, but is it feasible for a paper to rely on the Internet to provide a significant fraction of its revenue? It's well-known that web users don't like to pay for online services, but the Wall Street Journal has been bucking that slice of conventional wisdom since 1996 by operating the world's most popular subscription news site (712,000 customers as of Q4 2004). Of course, there are a couple differences between the two papers: for one, the WSJ has been charging its users from the start, so it engendered no feelings of commercial 'betrayal' among its online audience. Secondly, the Journal pays a hefty price for running a closed shop: Google doesn't index its subscription-walled pieces, and very few bloggers refer to them. In fact, the only section of the paper that's widely blogged at all is its opinion page--because it's free.

Also, I'd opine that the Wall Street Journal's subscription model only works because it's the only major national daily that makes its readers pay for online content. Serious news consumers may be able to handle one annual subscription to a high-quality paper, but what if the NYT, the Washington Post, and the LAT all decided to start charging? We aren't at that point yet, obviously, but because the financial considerations noted in the quote above aren't particular to the New York Times, we shouldn't be surprised to see various subscription models popping up at other big papers' sites in the near future. On the web, however, most people don't read entire papers--they might read perhaps one or two articles per paper per day, and that's not enough to justify a subscription to any one site.

For all these reasons, my guess is that TimesSelect will go bust pretty quickly. Note well the following, again from the E&P article:

The goal won't be met with TimesSelect subscription numbers in the tens of thousands, Nisenholtz says; it needs to be in the hundreds of thousands in the early years, and even more over the long term.

Barring a dramatic shift in online news consumers' spending habits that's completely at odds with all past behavior, the NYT's never gonna reach those numbers. It took the WSJ eight years to build up their 700k+ subscriber base, and that represents a best-case scenario. Newspapers all over the country are struggling to adapt to their new online presences, atrophied staffs, and lost market share to TV, radio, and the Internet, all of which underscore the urgency of seeking out new revenue streams. But direct subscription models won't do much more than ice the profit cake at best, and that's only for the largest national dailies. Without genuinely fresh ideas about how to extract money from Internet readers, the old gray papers will fade and perish quickly.

The Death of Limited Gov't -- addendum

2005-09-17T13:29:00.000-04:00

As noted below, my recent TPMCafe post entitled "The Death of Limited Government" outlined three pieces of evidence that the Goldwater faction of the GOP has lost indefinitely the internecine struggle over the party's direction. However, I believe I failed to clarify that I am not passing judgment one way or the other upon a strong federal presence, but simply predicting that for better or worse, it is our political future. No longer will voters be asked to decide between big or small government, but between two different brands of big government. It is therefore crucial that libertarians and others who categorically insist that "government is the problem" figure out a way to work within the new political paradigm, or their dogma will become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the federal government grows increasingly irresponsible with decreasing taxpayer oversight.

Great Minds

2005-09-17T12:48:00.000-04:00

This is kinda neat, if you're me: Compare Max's post proclaiming that "the era of limited government is over" to mine discussing "the death of limited government." Then check the post dates. Maybe if I'd finished mine up 13 minutes earlier, it'd actually have a few comments.

Operationalizing 'Partisanship'

2005-09-15T10:15:00.000-04:00

If there's one constant I've noticed in my travels across the political Internet, it's that commenters from all quadrants of the ideological map love hurling charges of partisanship at one another. Whether left against right, right against left, or middle against both ends, it's a perennial favorite in both major camps' insult arsenals, right up there with "Bush-lover" and "right-wing noise machine" for liberals and "Bush-hater" and "liberal media" for conservatives. But since few of its users seem to hold any reliable concept of what exactly constitutes a "partisan," the term becomes in practice more of a synonym for "person whose ideas I disagree with." These people are better off sticking to coarser slurs like "Rethuglicans" and "Dummocrats," since they capture their inchoate ire somewhat less ambiguously.

How, then, are we to distinguish spurious charges of partisanship from more meritorious ones? Dictionary.com defines the present sense of the adjective thusly: "Devoted to or biased in support of a party, group, or cause: partisan politics." If partisanship could be determined by any single decision, vote, or declaration, the term would be indistinct from "judgment" or "discernment." Charges of bias in any direction thus require hard evidence of consistent support or opposition based solely on party or ideological commitment. Viewed in this way, partisanship looks less like a strict dichotomy than a finely graded continuum, across which some individuals prove themselves more partisan than others by the frequency with which they hew to or inveigh against different causes.

So, if we wanted to measure partisanship in elected officials, we might start by looking at how closely their votes tow the party line (i.e., compare the number of votes that skew in the hypothesized partisan direction against the total number). We could add to that the percentage of media appearances and interviews in which the official categorically supports his own side or rails against the opposition vs. those in which he or she does not. Third, we could take into account how frequently the official publicly disagrees with members of his own party or ideological orientation. Empirical measures like these would lend scientific heft to garden-variety accusations of partisanship and allow voters to see in concrete terms whether their representatives are motivated more by the public interest or political advancement.

The point of the above discussion is this: in the absence of a strict, preferably quantifiable definition for 'partisan,' it's just another insult. But if you're gonna get into callow name-calling, it's best not to confuse your audience with terms that have actual meanings. Moreover, if there's one thing this nation's political discourse needs less of, it's empty rhetoric--a significant reason why Americans continue to support weak candidates in election after election.

BUSH TAKES RESPONSIBILITY

2005-09-14T16:19:00.000-04:00

Shout it from the rooftops so that all who don't follow the news assiduously can hear: Bush finally broke his 4 1/2-year streak of never admitting any mistakes yesterday when he made the following statement at a White House press conference:

Katrina exposed serious problems in our response capability at all levels of government. And to the extent that the federal government didn't fully do its job right, I take responsibility. I want to know what went right and what went wrong.

I'll admit I was dumbfounded, unrepentant liberal shill that I am, to discover that Bush had violated one of his dearest-held implied PR imperatives. I guess there's just Something About Katrina--throughout his presidency, Bush hasn't seen fit to allow himself any errors on 9/11, Iraq, GSAVE, Social Security, or anything else aside from "appointing people." Other liberal bloggers are mostly either expressing complete incredulity or calling for criminal indictment, as expected. But what really surprised me was NYT columnist David Brooks' revelation on the Sunday edition of NBC's Chris Matthews Show (analyzed by MediaMatters) that that he has long been aware

from private conversations with Bush officials who "represent" what "Bush believes" that from its earliest days, the Bush administration adopted a policy of shielding itself from political damage by never publicly admitting any mistake -- even if it meant lying to the media and the American public.

Oh. Looks like the whole acknowledge-no-mistakes PR directive was a little more than 'implied.' And as the MediaMatters article notes, it's well worth considering the consequences of this media strategy. I can think of several off the bat: one, it further stokes Republicans' already strong inclination to take the government at its word since one of their own is in charge. When Bush blames others, or insists that no mistakes have been made, his followers don't bother to question him but aren't afraid to paint his opponents as knee-jerk naysayers. I find it rather odd that so many in the former party of limited government would be willing to adopt such a credulous stance vis-a-vis its traditional bugbear.

Two: psychologists have long known of the basic human tendency for people to blame their own failures on situational influences while blaming others' failures on dispositional factors. The phenomenon is reversed when attributing successes, and the psychological mechanism itself is called the fundamental attribution error. When Bush refuses to admit any mistakes, his followers' natural tendency to commit the FAE at the political level is enhanced. In other words, they view Democratic failures as indicative of inherent wrongheadedness, while Bush's failures are all caused by factors outside his control. Democrats do this as well, but without the assistance of an active FAE-enabler in the White House.

Third, Brooks outlines one of the reasons for the White House's policy of publicly insisting on an error-free record. In his own words:

. . . what [Bush] believes . . . is, if you admit a mistake, you get no credit from your enemies, and then you open up another week's story, because the admission of a little mistake leads to the admission of big mistakes and another week's story. It's totally tactical and totally insincere.

What this shows is that Bush is more concerned with maintaining his political image than doing the right thing for the nation at all costs. While the more politically cynical among my readers will surely sigh a collective "duh" at this apparently banal observation, I think it raises the question of why this man still commands so much loyalty in the absence of a single unequivocal public policy success in 4+ years. The answer is unsettling: voters just don't seem to care about competence anymore, preferring to focus on superficial aspects of personality and 'character'. It's a trait that ill befits citizens in a democracy, and if shared too widely could bring on the nation's premature downfall.