Category: The Media

On Triple Counting

It seems judgmental DC reporters are making a lot of the fact that Organizing for America’s 642,000 delivered signatures to Congress is based on triple counting each signatory and sending a copy to both members of the Senate and the Representative for that person’s home district.

Guys, this is not triple counting. For a citizen to lobby the delegation that represents him or her, that person must contact three offices. If they only contacted one, two offices would not have been reached.  This is how the legislative branch is structured in the US government. To put it a different way, lobbying Congress is not like lobbying the White House; citizens can’t just send one email or fax to have achieved what they’re trying to do. OFA is enabling citizens to successfully lobby all the people who represent them. It’s not a number dodge, it’s how the system works.

Waking Up to Deference

I’m not sure why Nick Kristof is surprised that experts on TV tend to get things wrong, often big things that the media is more than happy to repeatedly defer to them on, regardless of past performance. Academic studies of natural deference to experts really don’t prove anything. Expertise is another extension of authority – a “Dr.” in front of someone’s name is powerful, as is someone wearing a white lab coat (as Milgram showed us). The chyron below a pundit’s name on television is powerful, too.

Kristof brings the column to a faux-admirable close with a push towards journalistic accountability, citing that he was right about the Iraq war but wrong about the surge. But the problem with Iraq wasn’t so much that the experts on TV said stupid things about the war being easily winnable and Iraq being a dangerous threat, and thereby duping the public to support the war. While support was strong, there was a vocal and outspoken section of the public that opposed the war in the face of expert statements. The problem was that journalists took “expert” opinion on their own networks and in their own pages and stopped asking critical questions as a result. The statements from people in authority were not questioned by the press and thus any meaningful public discourse on the path to war was stifled. The media was cowed, not the public. And I certainly don’t see Kristof pushing for any real accountability for a lack of skepticism in the press.

HTML Mencken is right. It may be self-satisfying for Kristof to wax poetic about the public holding media figures accountable, but he knows full well that he and his colleagues will never be held accountable. It’s nice for Kristof to recognize in the pages of the New York Times that *gasp* experts get things wrong on a quite regular basis and People generally shouldn’t be so deferential to them, but it’s absurd for him to suggest that outspoken ideologues are almost always wrong, while conservative (small c) centrists who hem and haw and avoid real judgment of the issues are tops.

Or to put it a different way, it’s patently nuts for Kristof to look at the drumbeat to war in Iraq and the breathless reliance on the financial markets to chart the public policy course and conclude that the problem isn’t just experts, but experts with strong opinions regardless of where on the ideological spectrum they lie, that are the problem.

The Madman

It really shouldn’t surprise anyone anymore that the purveyors and proselytizers of dead tree journalism don’t understand or respect new media. Nonetheless, the brazen way with some journalists and academics show their disdain for the 21st century is startling in its rank stupidity. Yglesias notes that accusations of new media as being “experiments in gadgetry” are “like saying that writing books is an experiment in playing with printing presses.”

Some day there will be a Columbia j-school professor who walks into his class of new students and something like this will happen:

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is Journalism?” he cries; “I will tell you. We have killed it—you and I. All of us are his murderers.

Until then, wank on professors of journalism at Columbia!

New Media Junket to Tibet

Reuters reporter Emma Graham-Harrison has a very revealing article about her hyper-managed trip to Tibet, dealing with a tour where certain impressions were forced on her by Chinese government minders.

“It’s amazing. The day before you arrived, Lhasa became suddenly peaceful again,” quipped one taxi driver.

When we were taken to a provincial town, police lined many of the villages along our route, their backs to the road so they could keep a close eye on clusters of locals. Officials would not explain why they were there.
…

The message Beijing seemed keen to convey was that Tibet was stable and prospering. Yet the careful attempts at managing our perceptions served only to create the opposite impression.

The watchful police, disappearing soldiers, sequestered monks, and days packed with irrelevant visits left me convinced that China thinks Tibet is dangerously volatile, and worries about both its grip on the place and international opinion.

The one thing I am still unsure about, despite my best efforts, is the opinions of ordinary Tibetans outside the government apparatus that showed us around.

Beyond a raised eyebrow or an unhappy grimace, none wanted to open up.

“It’s difficult here. We don’t dare talk” was the best I could get.

This is a different style of censorship than what we regularly see inside Tibet, but something that is familiar for foreign reporters. After last year’s national uprising, China did a couple of hyper-supervised media junkets. At that time a group of monks effectively crashed the party and spent time pouring their hearts out to the journalists, telling them about the crackdown and their desires for rights and freedom and the return of the Dalai Lama. Obviously that didn’t happen again for Graham-Harrison, but as she says, the supervision of the junket shows disorder, not order, in Tibet.

Responsibility, What’s That?

Responsibility, not quite yet.

The Washington Post continues to stand behind George Will’s error-filled global warming denying column from a week ago. Fortunately for the world, Brad Johnson of The Wonk Room does what the editors at the Post refuse to do and drafts a thorough correction to Will’s column. Naturally we do not expect it to run in the Post any time soon.

It never ceases to amaze me the amount of crap that established columnists are able to get published at high level national media outlets. There is no accountability and the tendency for major outlets to stand behind their figurehead columnists and reporters over the clearly documented facts or moral obligations for truthfulness is astounding.

Good Ol’ Fashioned Sexism

Jamison Foser finds some in US News & World Report, which is “asking readers who they would prefer to run a daycare center for their kids: First Lady Michelle Obama, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, or Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.”

While there’s no reason anyone should ask this question, also not asked (and probably never would be asked), “Who would you prefer to change the oil on your car: Barack Obama, John McCain, Harry Reid, or Mitch McConnell?”

The GOP Minority’s Honeymoon with the Press

It’s starting to look like what it always looked like during the Clinton years – no matter what Obama does, he can’t win with the Beltway press. Peter Baker’s wank-tacular piece of “news analysis” in the New York Times today shows exactly what Obama is up against. Namely, the press corps refuses to recognize that Republican obstructionism has a direct relationship to President Obama’s diction regarding the economic recovery package.

Baker’s piece is titled “Taking On Critics, Obama Puts Aside Talk of Unity.” Well, yes, this is what Obama has done. But nowhere in Baker’s article does he document the causal relationship between how Republicans have obstinantly opposed Obama’s overtures and the inevitable shift towards a harder line by the Obama administration. The actions of Republicans in response to Obama’s efforts at unity and bipartisanship simply do not play into Baker’s piece, making it nigh impossible for a reader to know that President Obama isn’t taking a stand on the economic recovery out of narcissism or partisanship or because he had the urge to take pot-shots at the Bush administration.

President Obama has done exactly what the Washington press corps and the Conventional Wisdom set have asked of Democrats for decades. He put aside ideology and reached across the aisle to accomplish legislation for the good of the country at a time when we are in crisis. The Republican response to his outreach, his overtures, his invitations, and his cocktail parties has been to reject him outright. That three Republicans in the Senate have supported a watered down version of the recovery package in itself is a tremendous accomplishment in the name of bipartisanship.  Despite acting exactly as he promised to act during the campaign and putting forward a post-partisan effort to pass this legislation, Baker hits Obama at the moment when he’s pushing for the best bipartisan legislation he could possibly get from the current group of Republicans in Congress.

It might be easy for Baker to write this article. After all, false claims of equivalence have long been a hallmark of the Washington press corps’ hostility towards Democrats. In the end, that’s exactly the sort of article this is, a “gotcha!” attack on a popular president. Baker’s article could be summed up as: “Obama promised to be post-partisan, but it turns out he’s a Democrat!”

The larger problem with Baker’s piece, outside its gotcha style, is that it completely ignores the existence of Republicans from the course of events surrounding the economic recovery package. As far as I can tell from Baker’s piece, Republicans are merely passive flowers that are the subject of harsh words from Democrats. Had Obama spent more time sprinkling them with sugar water while promising to pour vinegar on nasty Democrats who want to vote for the recovery package Obama supports, perhaps then he would have lived up to whatever twisted expectations Baker has for his behavior in The Village.

It’s hard to process the extent to which Republicans are getting a pass for their absolutist obstructionism in the early days of the Obama administration. Baker’s article today is a perfect microcosm for the honeymoon Republicans are getting with the press. I’ve already seen quotes to suggest that the Obama honeymoon is over, less than a month into his administration. But something tells me that the Republican minority’s honeymoon with the press will continue for a long, long time to come…and at the expense of the Obama administration’s ability to get things done for the good of the country.

The Conscience of the Liberals

There’s a case to be made that since the nomination of Barack Obama to be President, but especially since his election, Paul Krugman of the New York Times has been the leading liberal spokesperson in America. He’s pushed back against timid policies and incorrect statements by the Obama transition hard than any other prominent Democratic figure. And his writing on the stimulus and the Wall Street bailout has been the most critical from the Left, at least in mainstream sources.

As I see it, Krugman is distilling much of the anger and energy of the progressive online movement and filtering it out to a national audience. His main targets have been policy timidity at a time when we can ill afford restraint. Republican ideas have had the spotlight for eight years. The result has been unmitigated failure. Our country heads towards an economic precipice; now is not the time for half-measures between what is wrong and what is right. Krugman’s other main target is bipartisanship, which I’ve recently blogged extensively about and is surely the nextdoor neighbor to timidity. Krugman’s column today, “The Destructive Center” is a confluence of his writings against timid Democratic policy goals and the damage non-ideological bipartisanship does during times of crisis.

During the transition, Obama said that he would take Paul Krugman’s economic advice. It’s fairly clear that he isn’t doing that, but now is the time for Obama’s team to reevaluate and start listening to Paul Krugman. He’s one of the few unabashed liberals in American public discourse and our leadership fails to listen to him at the country’s peril. Moreover, Krugman’s drumbeating columns against centrism, bipartisanship, timidity, and post-partisanship have the ability – far greater than anything the blogosphere does – to create meaningful cover for Obama and Democrats on the Hill to move to the left. He is a powerful voice with a large microphone and there are few people who can currently challenge him for the position as conscience of America’s liberals today.