Category Archives: News Media

Gullible and Gullibler

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Frank Bruni writes about gullibility in politics and says a few smart things.

… what’s most distinctive about the current presidential election and our political culture isn’t their negativity — though that’s plenty noteworthy and worrisome — but how unconditionally so many partisans back their side’s every edict, plaint and stratagem.

Of course, this same phenomenon has been striking in every election for the past 20 years, but thanks for catching on, Frank. Now, do keep up.

Bruni cites a film based on a true story that is, I admit, hard to believe. I don’t remember hearing about this at the time, but apparently some guy was getting his jollies by calling fast food joints, identifying himself as a police officer, and having one of the employees or a customer detained by the manager. And then the manager, instructed over the phone by “Officer Scott,” would unquestioningly put the detainee through a number of indignities, including a strip search followed by nude jumping jacks. In some cases the detainee was forced to perform sexual acts on someone else as part of the “investigation.” Here’s an article focusing on the particular incident that became the subject of the film, and it’s definitely off-the-wall. But, apparently, true. There are lawsuits and everything.

The point is that people are wired to follow authoritative leaders. Bruni writes,

People routinely buy into outlandish claims that calm particular anxieties, fill given needs or affirm preferred worldviews. Religions and wrinkle-cream purveyors alike depend on that. And someone like Todd Akin, the antihero of last week’s news, illustrates it to a T. The notion that a raped woman can miraculously foil and neutralize sperm is a good 10 times crazier than anything in “Compliance,” but it dovetails beautifully with his obvious wish — and the wishes of like-minded extremists — for an abortion prohibition with no exceptions. So he embraces it.

But then he says,

People also routinely elect trust over skepticism because it’s easier, more convenient. Saddam Hussein is stockpiling weapons of mass destruction; the climate isn’t changing; Barack Obama’s birth certificate is forged; Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10 years.

Wait a minute — one of these things is not like the others. Even Harry Reid admits he doesn’t know for a fact that Mittens didn’t pay taxes for ten years. I haven’t seen any polling saying that a significant number of people believe Mittens didn’t pay taxes. Most of us understand that the charge is meant to goad Mittens either into releasing his tax returns or digging in his heels to not release them and look guilty.

But you know Frank had to throw in an example of leftie gullibility to prove that “both sides are just as bad.” Because “both sides are just as bad” calms Frank’s particular anxieties, fill his given needs or affirms his preferred worldviews. If he had to fully admit that both sides are not just as bad, that one side has in fact gone way off the outrageous scale to an unprecedented degree, his worldviews would melt like Salvadore Dali’s clocks.

Frank continues —

To varying degrees, all of these were or are articles of faith, unverifiable or eventually knocked down.

Except for speculations about Mitt’s taxes, which still haven’t been released.

People nonetheless accepted them because the alternative meant confronting outright mendacity from otherwise respected authorities, trading the calm of certainty for the disquiet of doubt, or potentially hunkering down to the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things. Better simply to be told what’s what.

Yeah, we can’t expect an op-ed writer for a major metropolitan newspaper to do the hard work of muddling through the elusive truth of things, huh? Better just reflect what’s expected from him by his Villager peers.

Right’s Idea of Bias: Any News That Might Reflect Well on Obama

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In an article called “Spin of the Times: Bias cloaked as Front-Page News,” Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit complains that the New York Times runs news stories that are biased in favor of “Democrats and leftish ideas.”

His example of this is a recent article called “In Hopeful Sign, Health Spending Is Flattening Out.” The article looks at the fact that health care costs in the U.S. have risen much less sharply than expected in the past couple of years, which of course is good news to anyone who cares about, you know, American citizens and the American economy.

Is the story biased toward “Democrats and leftish ideas”? Here’s the weird part — Reynolds does not show that the article misrepresents or leaves out facts to make the article appear to be favorable to the Left. He quotes the article itself to argue that some of the cost slowdown is because of the recession, not because “Obamacare” is working.

The article is full of caveats and to-be-sures like this: “The growth rate mostly slowed as millions of Americans lost insurance coverage along with their jobs. Worried about job security, others may have feared taking time off work for doctor’s visits or surgical procedures, or skipped nonurgent care when money was tight.” Or this: “Some experts caution that there remains too little data to determine whether the current slowdown will become permanent, or whether it is merely a blip caused by the economy’s weakness.”

But, we’re told, “[M]any other health experts say that there is just enough data to start detecting trends — even if the numbers remain murky, and the vast complexity of the national health care market puts definitive answers out of reach.”

At this point, an editor might have spiked the story, commenting that all we’ve got are dueling experts who admit that they don’t really know what’s going on amid their “murky” numbers.

But the story is that health care costs in the U.S. have risen much less sharply than expected in the past couple of years. This is from the article:

In 2009 and 2010, total nationwide health care spending grew less than 4 percent per year, the slowest annual pace in more than five decades, according to the latest numbers from the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. After years of taking up a growing share of economic activity, health spending held steady in 2010, at 17.9 percent of the gross domestic product….

… The implications of a bend in the cost curve would be enormous. Policy makers on both sides of the aisle see rising health care costs as the central threat to household budgets and the country’s fiscal health. If the growth in Medicare were to come down to a rate of only 1 percentage point a year faster than the economy’s growth, the projected long-term deficit would fall by more than one-third.

That’s a significant bit of data. Just because the data don’t clearly show why it’s happening doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

If you read the New York Times story — which Reynolds doesn’t link to, of course — you see that it provides a number of possible reasons for the slowdown in cost increase, some of which reflect well on the Obama Administration and some of which do not. And it provides the “bad for Obama” possible reasons first, before going on to the “maybe Obama’s policies have something to do with this” reasons. Reynolds quotes those “bad for Obama” reasons with approval and then complains the article is biased because … well, why? Because it then goes on to provide some “good for Obama” reasons as well?

What Reynolds is saying is that this bit of news must be suppressed until someone can show decisively that it’s really a bad thing that is all Obama’s fault.

And what makes this even more hysterical is that Reynold’s piece is published in the New York Post, one of the nation’s foremost purveyors of pure, old-fashioned yellow journalism. For example, in today’s Post there’s an article by a guy named Glenn Reynolds with an alarming headline about spin and bias at the New York Times, but if you read the article it’s just a highly biased piece about a Times article that really isn’t biased at all. Reynolds just doesn’t like it because it isn’t anti-Obama enough for his taste.

David Brooks Bites

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I regret that I’ve had to be working on something else today, because David Brooks is off the Oblivious Scale today. He has reached a level of cluelessness remarkable even for Brooks.

I mentioned a few days ago that Charles Murray has a new book out to complain po’ white folks is gettin’ as lazy and shiftless as th’ colored folk, an it’s all ’cause they’s losin’ their moral compasses.

Of course, they probably had to hock their moral compasses to keep their lights turned on. That said, let’s continue.

Brooks heaps praise on Murray’s book, saying “I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society.” And he buys into Murray’s argument that the white underclass is losing its connection to the traditional (e.g., white) culture they are supposed to be part of, which is why they are not as productive as they used to be. And rising income inequality is the result of this, not the cause.

Brooks simply dismisses any argument that economic injustice is tearing the country apart. In fact, Brooks blames the “liberal members of the upper tribe” for stoking the resentments of the lower classes, which to Brooks is the real cause of the problem. If the white trash lower classes would just work harder, and get married, they’d be living in the Hamptons, too!

And he concludes by saying we should all go to the same summer camp to get to know each other:

We need a program that would force members of the upper tribe and the lower tribe to live together, if only for a few years. We need a program in which people from both tribes work together to spread out the values, practices and institutions that lead to achievement.

Un-freakin’-believable. There hasn’t been this much upper-class-twit obliviousness concentrated in one person since Marie Antoinette.

Fortunately Charles Pierce is back in the saddle, heaping all the snarky contempt on Brooks he richly deserves. I also love this comment from Zandar:

It’s like Brooks is some sort of Sisyphean device that has one purpose: to take any possible social paradigm observation, smash it with a sledgehammer, and reconstruct the bits in order to fit his god-awful worldview of bipartisanship, even if the pieces don’t fit and had nothing to do with the original observation in the first place, and he has to repeat that until the end of time. There are people that just don’t get it, people that don’t get it on purpose as satire, and then there’s David Brooks (who should be regularly harvested for the rich oil of contempt for anyone who makes less than six figures that he drips with) who somehow manages to make “not getting it” into an exciting new field of scientific endeavor. I’ve got a fiver that says if Brooks was jammed together with any actual American middle-class salt-of-the-earth family for more than 3 hours, there would be blood all over the carport and a Garden Weasel shoved in a very uncomfortable place upon his person.

First rate snark, Zandar. I salute you.

Spiro Agnew Won

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Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate investigative reports were published while I was in my junior and senior years at the University of Missouri, majoring in journalism. That was an interesting place. The “professors” at the J-School were mostly old newspaper guys who had semi-retired into academia. I remember one of them used to tell stories about covering the Capone gang for the Chicago Tribune back in the 1930s. And we learned by putting out a real daily newspaper.

The unfolding Watergate investigation touched off many heady discussions about the role of journalism and the media in keeping politics and government honest. Of course, news coverage of Vietnam also was on our minds, as well as Spiro Agnew’s famous attacks on journalists as “effete snobs” and “nattering nabobs of negativism.” The Nixon Administration couldn’t defend itself factually, so it tried to discredit journalism. We were amused.

Fast-forward to today. In the New York Times, public editor Arthur Brisbane is whining that people shouldn’t expect reporters to be “truth vigilantes.” The Times, as do many other outlets, puts “fact check” stories about politicians’ misleading statements in separate stories from news coverage, leaving reporters to be mere stenographers of whatever politicians say. A reader wrote,

“My question is what role the paper’s hard-news coverage should play with regard to false statements – by candidates or by others. In general, the Times sets its documentation of falsehoods in articles apart from its primary coverage. If the newspaper’s overarching goal is truth, oughtn’t the truth be embedded in its principal stories? In other words, if a candidate repeatedly utters an outright falsehood (I leave aside ambiguous implications), shouldn’t the Times’s coverage nail it right at the point where the article quotes it?”

But according to Brisbane, expecting reporters to use their “personal judgment” about what the politicians are saying is a terribly difficult moral question. To which I say, personal judgment my ass. There are times when politicians are just plain pulling “facts” out of their butts, and the reporters know this as well as anyone.

And then when Brisbane apparently was slammed by emails from people saying, “yes, [report the truth] you moron,” he sniffled that these decisions are not slam-dunks.

So, if Mitt Romney is going around saying the President is apologizing for America (one of the examples discussed), expecting the political reporter at least to note in the story that Romney fails to give specific examples of what he meant by “apologizing,” and there are no statements by the President in the pubic record that are unambiguously “apologies,” is going way too far for Brisbane. He’d rather keep “fact checking” in a separate column, where some dweeb can carefully be sure to not call out any one particular party or candidate for particularly egregious lying. Timidity is the new “balance.”

Charles Pierce:

Newspapers today are run by terrified beancounters. The industry is dying. They know it. They are casting about for any strategy to delay the inevitable and, personally, they are casting about for any parachute they can find. The beancounters owe their primary allegiance to “the company,” and not to the reporter in the field. The beancounter editors and sub-editors at many — if not most — major newspapers and broadcast outlets would sell their grandmothers to the Somali pirates for a bigger office and two steps further up the masthead, which will get them closer to where the parachutes are kept. Most newspapers — most especially, the New York Times — have forced upon their reporters what are called “ethics codes,” but which, in reality, are speech codes written to prevent the beancounters and careerists from having to answer angry phone calls from wingnuts. I am not kidding — under some of these abominations, a reporter literally could be disciplined for spouting off about, say, Willard Romney in a bar, if someone heard the reporter, and called the beancounter to complain. The campaign buses are filled now with young reporters who know full well that, given sufficient pressure from either inside or outside “the company,” their bosses do not have their backs.

I always had the impression from the old guys in the J-School that their editors had always “had their backs,” and that in the old days newspaper editors loved nothing better than to blow the cover of some public official, never mind whom, so long as the reporter had enough sourcing to cover his ass. Oh, and used the word “allegedly” a lot. The professors, who were our news desk editors and publishers, were never so happy as when they were getting angry phone calls from big shots, as long as the story was factually defensible. (If it wasn’t … well, at least they couldn’t fire us. We were students, not employees.)

Jay Rosen, Press Think:

No one knows exactly how it happened, for it’s not like a policy decision came down at some point. Rather, the drift of professional practice over time was to bracket or suspend sharp questions of truth and falsehood in order to avoid charges of bias, or excessive editorializing. Journalists felt better, safer, on firmer professional ground–more like pros–when they stopped short of reporting substantially untrue statements as false. One way to describe it (and I believe this is the correct way) is that truthtelling moved down the list of newsroom priorities. Other things now ranked ahead of it.

But wait a minute: how can telling the truth ever take a back seat in the serious business of reporting the news? That’s like saying medical doctors no longer put “saving lives” or “the health of the patient” ahead of securing payment from insurance companies. It puts the lie to the entire contraption. It devastates journalism as a public service and honorable profession.

A reporter on deadline may not always be able to fact-check new claims and call them out, but when you’re covering a candidate telling the same damn lies day after day, and saying nothing, what exactly is the point of sending a reporter at all? The newspaper might as well just print up whatever press releases they get from the campaigns.

See also: Adam Clark Estes, Greg Sargent, mistermix.

World About to End. But First, a Word From Our Sponsors

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The press has had a feeding frenzy over Sarah Palin’s emails and Anthony Weiner’s weiner, but giving only a passing glance at stories that are important. If the same media crew had been reporting on the late Roman Empire, they’d be all over some scandal about what Senator Maximus did with his horse and only mention in passing that the empire is being divided up into pieces and, oh yes, there are barbarians at the gates.

Example: Americans are being told that Medicare has to be cut to save money, but that’s OK, because their health care needs can be taken care of by private insurance companies. And that’s better, because the private sector is always more cost-effective than the public sector.

Except …

Krugman’s column today explains all the ways that privatizing Medicare, or raising the age of eligibility, would cost the nation more money that it saves. But unless you are a Krugman reader or devoted progressive blog follower, you’ll never hear any of this.

And then there’s the debt ceiling issue. Polls show a majority of Americans are opposed to raising the debt ceiling, and I continue to argue that most Americans don’t understand what the debt ceiling is and what will happen is if isn’t raised. And nobody is explaining it to them.

Josh Marshall says that some of the big banks already are planning for cutting use of Treasuries, adding, “Republicans are playing Russian Roulette with the US economy. But with like three or four bullets in the chamber.”

David Kurtz asks, “Is it too much to hope for that the GOP presidential candidates will be pressed in tonight’s debate in New Hampshire on their party’s gambit to drive the U.S. into default?”

The debate will be on CNN. I don’t know if I have the stomach to watch, but if anyone requests it I’ll create an open thread for those of you who want to comment on it.

Nibbled to Death by Ducks

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There is genuinely serious stuff going on that could have a huge impact on the future of the entire world. And of course, bloggers and media are all focused on silliness. Today it seems that 99.9 percent of news stories focus on Anthony Weiner and Sarah Palin, and for all the wrong reasons.

Yesterday Joseph Cannon of Cannonfire posted what appears to be ironclad proof that the Anthony Weiner Twitter episode is a hoax. Naturally everyone on the Right Blogosphere, and some on the Left, don’t believe it, and they come up with myriad convoluted reasons why. But so far I haven’t seen anything that clearly refutes what’s in Cannonfire.

Then there’s National Lampoon’s Sarah Palin Vacation. It appears she is using PAC money to fund what is a family vacation disguised as some kind of Purposeful Event. And apparently this is not illegal, although it would be if she were a declared presidential candidate.

Palin herself bristled at questions Wednesday about how the tour was being funded. She said during a visit to the Statue of Liberty that the bus was “our own personal motor home” and that SarahPAC was paying for the trip.

“Check SarahPAC.com,” Palin told ABC News. “I don’t know why in the world you would ask a question like that. I’m just thinking about America and our foundations and our freedoms and our opportunities.”

Exactly how America and our foundations and our freedoms and our opportunities will benefit from the Palin family taking a bus tour of random national landmarks is not explained.

Happy Independence Day

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july4whitebackground

This is also Mahablog’s 8th birthday.

From the “none are so blind as those who will not see” department — Kathleen Parker wrote one of her usually inane Washington Post columns the other day in which she called Barack Obama “the first female president.” Apparently in Parker’s World a “real man” must be a swaggering, angry, shoot ’em all and let God sort ’em out type, not cool and cerebral. By Parker’s reasoning probably Thomas Jefferson was the first female president, and Abraham Lincoln would have been right up there also, but let’s go on.

Some of Parker’s comments offended African-American readers, who wrote to tell her that

One, a black man cannot show anger in public lest he be considered an Angry Black Man.

Two, to suggest that a black man has any feminine characteristics, even when framed as an “evolutionary achievement,” is to emasculate and reduce him to a figure from Jim Crow days.

That first one, about not showing anger, is a point I’m sure I’ve written about before. I wrote in July 2008 —

If there is one thing Obama has been very cautious about, it’s bringing race into the campaign. As I’ve written before, he goes out of his way not to be the “black candidate.” He and his surrogates have brought up race occasionally, when they had to, but they drop it quickly.

Obama has also worked very hard not to display anger throughout his campaign; the cool demeanor may or may not be the “real” Obama, but he is incredibly disciplined about keeping his cool. And that’s because he understands that there are whites who can like a nice black man, but who will run screaming from an angry black man, even if the black man has plenty to be angry about.

I think anyone with his eyes open, watching race relations in America, ought to have noticed this. But then there’s Kathleen Parker, who wrote in a column today —

Do I think people are too sensitive? Yes. Do I think I may have overstepped the line? No. It’s a column, not a dissertation. And my thesis, bouncing off the notion that Bill Clinton was the first black president, is serious only insofar as you really think Clinton is black.

But I also recognize that my life experience is different from that of most African Americans. And that experience allows me both the luxury of seeing people without the lens of race, but also (sometimes) to fail to imagine how people of other backgrounds might interpret my words.

“Without the lens of race” my ass. Being utterly oblivious to the realities of racism is not being “without the lens of race.” It means she’s left the lens cap on.

Apparently someone actually had to explain to her that black men are held to a different standard in the anger department than white men. But then Parker says she can’t be prejudiced to Barack Obama, because she and the president are 8th cousins once removed. Seriously.

But then she goes back to saying that “many people” want their president to be an “action figure in the hyper-masculine mode.” Again, no Jeffersons or Lincolns. Really, the idea that presidents are supposed to channel the nation’s emotions seems to be relatively new. Calvin Coolidge (still beloved by wingnuts) was famously unemotional. I don’t remember Eisenhower or Kennedy appearing enraged in public, although I was very young then and maybe I missed it. Reagan, on the other hand, was the Great Emoter.

I blame television; government is becoming just another reality show.

You, Too, Can Be an Econoblogger!

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I think I’m qualified to be the “econoblogger” for The Atlantic. That’s because the one they’ve got, Megan McArdle, is as bad at arithmetic as I am. Tbogg writes,

You really have to hand it to The Atlantic who chose to hire as their “Econoblogger” a woman whose facility with numbers would get her fired as a cashier at Wendy’s after two days.

That would be me, too, except that cash machines these days tell you how much change is owed. As long as that’s the case I could probably manage.

One difference between me and McArdle is that I’m aware that I’m bad with arithmetic, whereas McArdle seems blissfully oblivious. As Jonathan Chait wrote of her, McArdle is “frequently in error, but never in doubt.”

Another is that I’m better at basic smarts than she is, which might disqualify me for the Atlantic gig. Awhile back Brad DeLong nominated McArdle for the title “stupidest woman alive.” There’s an entire blog dedicated to her titled “Fire Megan McArdle.”

Just google “megan mcardle is an idiot” sometimes, and you’ll find links to some of the best writers on the web, reduced to blubbering at the magnitude of McArdle’s obtuseness.

In fact, opinions on McArdle constitute a shorthand intelligence test. Ask anyone on the web what they think of McArdle, and if they say they admire her, you’re looking at an idiot. Or a libertarian. But I repeat myself.

That last bit is the real key to McArdle’s idiocy. Whatever intelligence she was born with has been replaced by libertarian ideology, leaving her with the critical thinking skills of dryer lint.

I bring this up because McArdle has embarrassed The Atlantic once again, with a post called “The Health Care Reform Already Costs More Than We Thought It Would.” As Ezra Klein explains, McArdle has confused discretionary spending with new spending.

Now, I’m not a whiz with complex cost estimates, either, and this is a mistake I might have made. However, I wouldn’t have gone public with my criticism without checking with someone who has more knowledge of such things than I do. Also, I am not the business and economics editor for The Atlantic.

But, hell, if McArdle can be the business and economics editor for The Atlantic, so could I. And so could the chair I’m sitting on.