Monthly Archives: September 2014

Media: The Un-Meritocracy

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I knew there was no point watching the rebooted Meet the Press when I read last week that NBC had hired Joe  Scarborough as its senior political analyst and Luke Russert as a reporter and regular “roundtable” member. Seriously, how could it not be crap? And lo, the reviews of the first episode are in, and they are derisive. By most accounts Chuck Todd’s interview of President Obama remained true to his predecessor’s tradition of content-free banality. D.R. Trucker wrote,

Todd’s questions about ISIS and immigration showed precious little insight and imagination. At times, it seemed as though he was barely asking questions at all. Frankly, Todd came close to a Saturday Night Live parody of a Meet the Presshost. The entire interview reminded me of Gertrude Stein’s famous line about Oakland, California—“There is no there there.”

Of course, the Obama-haters are attacking Todd because he didn’t beat the president up enough. That wasn’t the main flaw with the interview. The main flaw with the interview is that the viewer gained nothing, learned nothing, felt nothing.

Not that David Gregory was any prize…but they got rid of him for this?

Charles Johnson provides a specific example:

Obama mentioned Syria specifically four times before Chuck Todd blurted out, “You’ve not said the word, ‘Syria,’ so far in our conversation.”

Arrgh.

On the other hand, Todd’s debut is getting warm reviews from Politico and the Washington Post. No surprise.

I dimly remember there was a time, years ago, I wanted to watch the politics talk shows, even though they were mostly infuriating. As far as the old Meet the Press goes I thought Tim Russert was overrated as an interviewer; his basic shtick was to slide around big issues, find a relatively small point to bore into and then grill his subject relentlessly on that. But at least he grilled them on something, and you got the sense he was actually listening to what the subject said and responding to it, and not reading interview questions off a teleprompter.

The real problem isn’t so much the hosts, I don’t think. The real problem seems to be that, pretty much across the board, Washington news media are run by people who got their jobs through insider connections and not competence. And “insiderism” is all they know. That’s the only explanation, I say. Simon Maloy writes,

The problem facing “Meet the Press” isn’t the person in the moderator’s chair, it’s the culture that all the Sunday shows operate in. They all provide slightly different versions of the same thing: mostly white, mostly male pundits, politicians and Beltway “insiders” arguing with each other about who’s “winning” and who’s “losing” in politics that week. And this isn’t going to change any time soon because everyone involved is far too sure of their own indispensable relevance.

Consider this exchange on Fox News yesterday morning between Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday,” and Howard Kurtz as they discussed why Sunday shows still matter:

WALLACE: We probably get 4 to 5 million people that are tuning in on Sunday to watch our interviews. We either finish first or second almost every week in terms of total audience, and that’s a lot of people. And it’s a self-selecting audience. I mean, it’s an audience of opinion makers, opinion shapers, people who are deeply interested in the news—

KURTZ: And that’s why the shows are important and have relevance. Because of the rather elite audience.

WALLACE: Exactly. And, you know, you look at the Monday morning paper – not to say that that is our goal, I don’t think it is. But it does really indicate the degree to which the Sunday shows can still set the agenda for the coming week.

It’s hard to think of a more elitist description of your own relevance – I’m important because people I think are important think I’m important. That’s the Sunday show mentality, and it will persist regardless of who sits in the moderator’s chair.

When the “insiders” setting the agendas only talk to themselves, where does that leave the rest of us?

You may have heard that CNN’s Crossfire is back, sort of. Apparently it airs sporadically and has been on hiatus since mid-July. Perhaps they couldn’t think of anything insider-y to talk about, what with all those messy news stories coming out of Saint Louis and Iraq and all.  Daniel D’Addario writes,

As the show’s been off-air, S.E. Cupp — the show’s conservative co-host who hasn’t run for president — has been in demand, appearing on “The View” in what may well be quasi-auditions for a new right-leaning panelist, and writing for the New York Daily News, most recently about how Jennifer Lawrence and other female celebrities ought not to have taken nude pictures of themselves if they didn’t want them leaked.

This is why no one misses “Crossfire” when it’s not on — because its hosts have nothing to say. A show in which hosts debate the issues of the day from differing perspectives could, if done well, be a hugely valuable asset to a news channel especially in a political landscape wracked by contentious issues (Ferguson, ISIS). That presumes, though, that its hosts would be able to keep their eye on the ball and avoid small-bore polemics, things that Cupp, as evidenced by her Daily News writing, is unable to do.

And it’s something “Crossfire” has proven itself uninterested in doing; at times when serious policy discussion is more needed than ever, the debate show indulged the same prattle as every other talk show. Before “Crossfire” left the air in July, segments included Bill Richardson disclaiming on whether Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren would win in a hypothetical 2016 Democratic primary. Cupp delivered a monologue over cable system customer service. This is neither offensively off-tone in a way that might spark some insight, nor is it — heaven forbid — providing any news value or public service. It’s just trending topics presented flatly.

Ultimately the fault for this incompetence is with the executives who make hiring and programming decisions which tells me the executives in charge of news have absolutely no idea what they are doing. One wonders how they stumbled into the MSNBC evening lineup, particularly Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow, who actually present,  you know,  content. It must have been an oversight.

A postscript — a little over a year ago NBC hired a British journalist, Deborah Turness, to be president of NBC News. She was recently quoted as saying,

“People in the organization from top to bottom recognized that NBC News hadn’t kept up with the times in all sorts of ways, for maybe 15 years. I think the organization had gone to sleep.”

Apparently the NBC News organization from top to bottom was outraged by these remarks.  So I guess they hadn’t recognized it. But on the whole I think she’s right, although it isn’t just NBC. But this episode suggests to me that Turness is being kept on a leash by somebody else, and she’s not being allowed to mess with the status quo.

Les Misérables, à l’américaine

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Recently Thomas Edsall published a op ed at the New York Times called “The Expanding World of Poverty Capitalism” that’s worth a read. In brief, Edsall explains how municipalities around the country are balancing budgets by privatizing essential services to companies that prey on the poor.

Add to that Radley Balko’s piece in WaPo focusing on Saint Louis County, “How municipalities in St. Louis County, Mo., profit from poverty.” In particular Balko focuses on one woman whose life was torn apart by The System after she failed to pay for a speeding ticket because she lacked the money. We’re in Les Misérables territory here.

Add to that Reihan Salam’s “How the Suburb Got Poor.” Salam’s articles leaves a lot of big stuff out, such as the role of the financial system in screwing home buyers, but it’s a piece of the puzzle. Salam makes a case that around the country suburban “bedroom communities” are turning into enclaves of poverty. Very simply, the suburban model that worked after the post World War II years, when most white men could not only earn a living wage but also support a family on it, is not working for today’s working class.  The suburbs catering to the very rich are doing fine, of course. Otherwise, the most successful communities are those that combine single-family homes, apartment buildings, and retail shops in the same neighborhoods, not those that are nothing but single-family homes, block after block. I remember well that Saint Louis County has a lot of the latter.

I know a lot of us are focused on national politics, but the rot is at the local level also. Too many state legislatures are owned by ALEC. Too many local governments are run by incompetents who can’s see beyond their own petty interests. For a grand example of the latter, see Nelson Johnson, “Atlantic City’s Next Gamble.”

Win / Win / Win / Maybe Win

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Remember the ruling by a three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Court that some state’s Obamacare subsidies were unconstitutional? Well, it’s dead, Jim.

In July, two Republican judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed down a decision defunding much of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). This effort to implement Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) top policy priority from the bench was withdrawn on Thursday by the DC Circuit, and the case will be reheard by the full court — a panel that will most likely include 13 judges. In practical terms, this means that July’s judgment cutting off subsidies to consumers who buy insurance plans in federally-operated health exchanges is no more. It has ceased to be. It is, in fact, an ex-judgment.

There appears to be a broad consensus that there’s little chance the anti-subsidy ruling will be heard from again. In other court news, an appeals court killed gay marriage bans in Wisconsin and Indiana, and another federal court restored early voting in Ohio.

Former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife, Maureen, were found guilty today of a whole bunch of corruption. I don’t think they’ve been sentenced yet.

Big fun in Kansas — the Democrat Chad Taylor, who was campaigning to take Pat Roberts’s Senate seat, dropped out of the race. Oh noes! But this was a tactical decision. There’s an independent also running for the seat and raising more money, and this guy, Greg Orman, is expected to caucus with Democrats if he wins. Orman and Taylor were running on nearly identical platforms. The pair had been expected to spit the not stupid vote, and Roberts hadn’t even been campaigning. By several accounts the GOP is genuinely panicked it could lose a seat in the Senate.

Rand Paul Versus the World

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I don’t pay that much attention to Rand, frankly, but it’s significant that today it appears the entire Right has risen up against him and called him crazy.

The story thus far: Not long ago Rand wrote an op ed for the Wall Street Journal arguing (I’m told; it’s behind a firewall) that the U.S. should stay out of Iraq and not take sides between ISIS and the Iraqi government. I can see that a reasonable argument could be made along those lines, so I’ll assume Rand made it.

But now calls for ignoring ISIS are not politically tenable, so a couple of days ago Rand published an article in Time magazine denying that he is an isolationist and blaming President Obama for not doing enough to stop ISIS and for allowing Syria to become a “jihadist wonderland.” Unfortunately for Rand, the ideas expressed in Time still were far too moderate to pass muster on the Right, so he’s being fired upon from many rightie positions, from the Hoover Institute to NRO to Hit & Run.

Steve Benen notes a recent speech by Rand that took another position from those first two. Like Chickenman, he’s everywhere! He’s everywhere!

On Wednesday, Paul said he had no use for “interventionists” and the “hawkish members” of his own party who are calling for using force in the Middle East. But just 48 hours later, Paul supports U.S. military intervention abroad to destroy ISIS?

Also keep in mind, less than a month ago, Paul was asked about U.S. airstrikes targeting ISIS targets in Iraq. The senator said he had “mixed feelings” about the offensive. Apparently, those feelings are no longer mixed and Paul is now eager to “destroy ISIS militarily” – says the senator who complained last week about Hillary Clinton being a “war hawk.”

At what point do Rand Paul’s loyal followers start to reconsider whether Rand Paul actually agrees with them?

Sarah Smith recently noted that the Kentucky senator has changed his mind about federal aid to Israel, use of domestic drones, immigration, elements of the Civil Rights Act, Guantanamo Bay, and even accepting donations from lawmakers who voted for TARP.

Now, even the basic elements of his approach to using military force are up for grabs.

Oooo, politics is hard.

Ferguson Updates

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Right-wing police brutality apologists, plus the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, have been trying to get Michael Brown’s juvenile police record released. The “apologists” were certain Brown had a substantial criminal record as a juvenile, and one conservative “journalist” had widely published a “confirmed report” that the record included an arrest related to second degree murder for which Brown was still facing charges when he was killed.

No record has been released — we don’t know for a fact there is one, actually — but yesterday an official of the St. Louis County Circuit Court released a statement saying that Brown had no convictions of either a Class-A or Class-B felony as a juvenile, nor was he facing any such charges at the time of his death. So no second degree murder charge.

Naturally that cesspool of moral depravity known as “Jim Hoft” turned this statement into an implication that Brown had a record of misdemeanors. One would expect nothing more from Hoft. Of course, in a place where one can be gunned down for jaywalking, misdemeanors might include unauthorized bird watching or the public consumption of toast.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department announced it has begun a broad civil rights investigation into the Ferguson police department.

Jerking Our Chains

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In the wake of another horrific beheading there are calls to punish ISIS, which kind of ignores the fact that we’d already been punishing ISIS.

Over the past month, the U.S. military has launched more than 100 air strikes against ISIS targets in northern Iraq. While U.S. officials have publicly justified the attacks on humanitarian grounds—as well as protecting U.S. interests—they also have obliterated dozens of ISIS vehicles and checkpoints, and those manning them.

There is no way ISIS can counter U.S. air strikes. It has no air force and apparently has few, if any, anti-aircraft weapons. Its ground forces, once identified, are easy targets for American laser- and GPS-guided bombs and missiles.

So they’re beheading captured journalists because that’s all they can do. This is a terrible thing, but getting a rise out of us is what they want, and pushing us into some ham-handed retaliation would enhance their status as a terrorist organization. Which is why we would be wise to not let ISIS jerk our chains.

See also How America Made ISIS by Tom Engelhardt.

Creatures of Myth

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Human behavior makes a lot more sense when you appreciate that none of us are entirely rational. In fact, I’d go so far to say that for most of us rational thinking accounts for very little of our views and opinions about anything. Most of us live inside any number of personal and collective myths that inform us who we are and how the world is supposed to work, and it can be damn near impossible to dispel the myths even with clear and irrefutable facts and data.

This has little to do with IQ, as it’s not at all unusual even for bright people to cling to beliefs that are measurably out of sorts with the real world. As I wrote in my book, to be a reasonably rational person you must first admit to your own irrationality. If you can’t do that, you will remain at the mercy of the various goblins, trolls and pixies in your head.

Paul Krugman — in my judgment, more rational than most people — has a blog post up now called Inflation, Septaphobia, and the Shock Doctrine in which he struggles to understand why allegedly Wise Men (and it is mostly men) guiding the world’s economies are such a pack of idiots.

The bad news from Europe is a reminder that the basic insight some of us have been trying to convey, mostly in vain, ever since 2008 remains valid: the great danger facing advanced economies is that governments and central banks will do too little, not too much. The risk of elevated inflation or fiscal difficulties is dwarfed by the risk of ending up trapped in a deflationary vortex. This view has been overwhelmingly supported by recent experience — if you acted on what they were saying on CNBC or the WSJ editorial page, you would have lost a lot of money. Yet the power of the hard money/fiscal austerity orthodoxy (yes, market monetarists want one without the other, but they have no constituency) remains immense. Why?

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Along with charts and graphs showing that the hard money/fiscal austerity orthodoxy is just plain wrong, Krugman speculates a bit about what kind of mythology is driving it. The word septaphobia means “fear of the seventies,” btw, referring to the fact that the 1970s were marked by inflation and were a bad time for investors. The Wise Men may be running hysterically from the ghosts of the 1970s — ghosts haunting their own heads — and ignoring the very different real-world beasts that are the cause of today’s economic problems.

Thomas Frank has an article up at Salon called The 1 percent’s long con: Jim Cramer, the Tea Party’s roots, and Wall Street’s demented, decades-long scheme. As the title suggests this is a lot about how the 1 percent manipulates the world to benefit themselves. But if you read between the lines a bit, this article is also about myths and the way Wall Street portrayed itself in the 1990s as the true friends of Everyman and as shamans of a kind of economic democracy that was more fair and egalitarian than governmental-type democracy.  This is an excerpt from a book, and while I don’t know where Frank goes with this next one suspects he discusses the self-delusions that gave us the financial meltdown of 2008. But it also suggests that the New Deal was still looming in the personal myths even of people too young to remember the FDR Administration.

And there were incredible prizes to be won as long as the bubble continued to swell, as long as the fiction of Wall Street as an alternative to democratic government became more and more plausible. Maybe the Glass-Steagall act could finally be repealed; maybe the SEC could finally be grounded; maybe antitrust could finally be halted. And, most enticingly of all, maybe Social Security could finally be “privatized” in accordance with the right-wing fantasy of long standing. True, it would be a staggering historical reversal for Democrats to consider such a scheme, but actually seeing it through would require an even more substantial change of image on Wall Street’s part. The financiers would have to convince the nation that they were worthy of the charge, that they were as public-minded and as considerate of the little fellow as Franklin Roosevelt himself had been. Although one mutual fund company actually attempted this directly—showing footage of FDR signing the Social Security Act in 1935 and proclaiming, “Today, we’re picking up where he left off”—most chose a warmer, vaguer route, showing us heroic tableaux of hardy midwesterners buying and holding amidst the Nebraska corn, of World War II vets day-trading from their suburban rec-rooms, of athletes talking like insiders, of church ladies phoning in their questions for the commentator on CNBC; of mom and pop posting their very own fire-breathing defenses of Microsoft on the boards at Raging Bull. This was a boom driven by democracy itself, a boom of infinite possibilities, a boom that could never end.

We can always debate how much of this the Captains of Finance actually believed themselves, and how much of it was PR, but I think the financial crisis showed us they really were not behaving rationally at all. They became convinced they were immortal; that bullets would not kill them; that whatever they did was blessed because they were doing it. Greed was driving a lot of this myth, of course. I don’t doubt those who survived the meltdown still believe this, and why wouldn’t they? The government protects them from having to face their own mortality.

More to the point, as Krugman says, sometimes these myths actually are not supporting their own long-term financial health in any rational way.

And this crew of mostly Asuras are ultimately the ones responsible for the fiscal austerity orthodoxy, possibly because in their mythical world somebody should suffer for the setbacks of the 2000s, but it shouldn’t have to be them.

Postscript — one more thing — whenever I cite Krugman for anything I can count on somebody, somewhere, snorting at me that Krugman is an idiot and Krugman is always wrong. But if pushed, such people can never explain coherently what he has been wrong about. Push harder, and it becomes clear that Krugman is “wrong” because he disagrees with the orthodoxies and the myths, not because what he writes is frequently proven untrue. It isn’t, actually.