New Stuff

Here, I take a look at nominating convention ratings, and here, I recall some of the pre-Iraq intelligence shenanigans.

Incidentally, if you want to see Leon Wieseltier suggest that he might not vote for Obama, go here. It's a rather remarkable/embarrassing display.

Etc.

Here's some stuff I did on U.S. News and World Report and Gina Gershon, from the other site.

The Vanilla Ceiling

I think it's commendable for people to bemoan the lack of diversity on newspaper op-ed pages. But guess what? Newspapers aren't the only print media that publish opinion pieces, and magazines are doing pretty poorly in the diversity department too.

The piece is a bit dated, but a couple years ago, Gabriel Sherman wrote about the issue of racial diversity in the magazine industry. For reasons he discusses, it can be hard to figure out who's doing editorial work based on mastheads alone, but the results of his work were not inspiring. At The Nation -- where Ari Melber posted the item that got everyone talking today -- only 8 of its 99 editorial people were minorities. Perhaps they've done better since, but they would've had to do monumentally better for their numbers to look good. At The New Yorker, not really a clear-cut opinion magazine but the pinnacle of magazine journalism, there were only 11 people of color out of 130 people doing editorial work. Some places seem to do better (like the Prospect), others worse (The New Republic), and still others (National Review, Weekly Standard) probably object to caring on philosophical grounds. And if you poke around at mastheads, you get the sense what women (almost always white, I would bet) fare better. But the state of affairs on both dimensions -- ethnicity and gender -- is nothing for anyone to be proud of.

Incidentally, these aren't altogether distinct issues: the population of opinion writers in newspapers and those in magazines can't be neatly separated. Opinion magazines have always proven to be fertile ground for newspapers looking for op-ed columnists and contributors. So what happens at the magazines will impact what happens at the papers.

The Fowler Conundrum

I have to confess to being a little ambivalent about the mini-dustup concerning whether Mayhill Fowler "broke" unwritten rules when she failed to identify herself before getting President Clinton to berate Vanity Fair's Todd Purdum.* I think Jay Rosen was appropriately circumspect and admirably forthright when he told the Times and the Politico that he would have preferred that Fowler identify herself but that Off the Bus didn't have guidelines for the sort of situation she was in.

I would like to pose a bit of a hypothetical, however, to people who take Jonathan Alter's position:

“This makes it very difficult for the rest of us to do our jobs,” Jonathan Alter, a columnist and political reporter for Newsweek, said in an interview. “If you don’t have trust, you don’t get good stories. If someone comes along and uses deception to shatter that trust, she has hurt the very cause of a free flow of public information that she claims she wants to assist.”

“You identify yourself when you’re interviewing somebody,” Mr. Alter added. “It’s just a form of cheating not to.”

What if, instead of Fowler having been affiliated with Off the Bus, she had approached President Clinton with the exact same question and no intention of doing anything with his response. He gives exactly the same answer and she, shocked, writes down as much of the exchange as she can remember as soon as he leaves. (The words "sleazy," "slimy," and "scumbag" are not likely to escape you when they've just been uttered by a former President of the United States.) She then walks over to Jonathan Alter, or some other reporter, with a friend -- or even stranger -- who corroborates every part of her account.

Now, if you think what Fowler actually did was wrong but you're the journalist in my hypothetical who she approaches, can you honestly say you wouldn't write Clinton's comments up? If not, why not? More importantly: If so (as I expect most reporters would tell you in all honesty), why is that okay?

To make things even more tricky, you can strip the hypothetical of any assumptions about Fowler's intentions when she approaches Clinton. After all, for all Alter or the hypothetical journalist knows, hypothetical Fowler was out to goad Clinton but is lying to you when she says she wasn't. In the real world, when reporters write about people at campaign events, they know nothing but what they're told by those subjects.

Again, I don't have a definitive position here. I think Jay's comments indicate that even he recognizes this is a bit of a messy situation. But it's hard for me to shake the feeling that a lot of what's driving the criticism of Fowler from professional journalists is some annoyance (conscious or not) that they're being cut out of the process. No longer does someone have to come to you with their story and hope you write it up. Today, it's all too easy for them to work around you.

*I do think we should stipulate that Clinton didn't know Fowler was reporting. She told the LA Times that her recorder was in plain view, but she told the New York Times that “I think we can safely say he thought I was a member of the audience.”

Penn vs. Penn

In his self-serving account of where the Clinton campaign went wrong:

The Clintons have spent their lives fighting as much as any leaders in their generation for greater equality across racial and gender lines. I believe nothing they said was ever intended to divide the country by race. Any suggestion to the contrary was perhaps the greatest injustice done to them in this campaign.

In the Times' post-mortem of the Clinton campaign:

Backed by Bill Clinton, Mr. Penn pushed for aggressive attacks on Mr. Obama, something other advisers resisted. At one point, Mr. Penn argued that Mrs. Clinton should find subtle ways to exploit what he called Mr. Obama’s “lack of American roots,” referring to his Kenyan father and his childhood years in Indonesia and even the offshore state of Hawaii, the campaign officials said. Mr. Penn recommended that Mrs. Clinton own the word “American” — she should talk about the “American century” and her “American Strategic Energy Fund,” and so forth. She should add flag symbols to her logo, he suggested.

Michael Wolff, Prognosticator

Apparently, self-important, crazy overrated Vanity Fair media writer Michael Wolff said this:

"We're looking at our own obsolescence," he told his fellow panelists at an I Want Media forum ... . "If Newsweek is around in five years, I'll buy you dinner."

Which gives me an excuse to link to this quote, from a speech he gave in February 2005:

[H]aving been around this business now for some time I've learned that nothing lasts too long. By all rights, 18 months from now we should be looking back at this and all kind of embarrassed to say the word blog—I hope.

I'm not exactly bullish on the newsweeklies' prospects, but if ever you have the chance, bet against Michael Wolff.

Crossposted

Hindsight

I would take campaign retrospectives with a grain of salt. In hindsight, a loser's campaign always seems to have been chaotic, devoid of clear strategic direction, and riven by internal divisions. The campaigns of winners, by contrast, are typically well-functioning operations staffed by cool-headed operatives. There is bound to be some truth to this -- in this case, I think, quite a lot -- but the sources of these narratives are campaign staffers, and when you win, there's no blame to apportion, but if you lose, everyone is scrambling to lay the fault at someone else's feet, so things are likely to look worse than they might have been at the time. In the case of Obama's campaign, you can easily imagine someone building a counter-narrative of chaos around the campaign's lowest points (Wright, Power, Goolsbee-in-Canada, "bitter," etc.), which no doubt would have been done if he had lost.

Generally, these dissections miss two important things -- issues and chance. It's an old criticism, but it remains true that political reporters feel at home when writing about strategy. This is what they're best equipped to do, so strategy becomes the prism through which all events are interpreted. Never mind, say, the candidates' positions on Iraq. On the other hand, there are always a host of conditions and occurrences that are essentially arbitrary and that, if different, could have altered the trajectory of the race. (What if New Hampshire had been a week before Iowa, rather than the other way around?)

This isn't to say that journalists shouldn't write campaign post-mortems. It's just that for a variety of reasons things are always a little tidier -- a little easier to explain -- when you know how the story ends.

Crossposted

It Wasn't Me

Mark Penn on why the Clinton campaign failed:

While everyone loves to talk about the message, campaigns are equally about money and organization. Having raised more than $100 million in 2007, the Clinton campaign found itself without adequate money at the beginning of 2008, and without organizations in a lot of states as a result. Given her successes in high-turnout primary elections and defeats in low-turnout caucuses, that simple fact may just have had a lot more to do with who won than anyone imagines.

Now, Times readers are an educated bunch, but only a fraction will fully comprehend the subtext here. Penn, of course, was the head of the Clinton campaign until April, but in his telling, he was just an "outside message advisor" all along. So when he writes that the message wasn't the problem, he's exonerating himself, and when he points to the money and organization people, he's blaming Patti Solis Doyle and Harold Ickes. Self-serving as it is, this is an entirely predictable view for him to hold -- all the more so because Penn previewed this strategy months ago, when he told the Observer pretty much the exact same stuff. (Penn, always on message, even used some of the same turns of phrase. Then: "[E]very schoolchild knows that she is 'ready on day one.'" Now: "Even schoolchildren got the message that Mrs. Clinton was ready to be president on Day One.") But it's also clearly wrong, since all of these parts of the campaign are intertwined: The money and the organizing were clearly problems (as was the record), but you have to have money to organize, and you have to have a compelling message to raise money.

It's no surprise that Penn, having presided over the implosion of a campaign that was supposed to be a lock a year ago, would point fingers. His reputation is in tatters, and quite apart from any personal umbrage he may take, his reputation is his key business asset. I'm also not surprised that Penn would be less than forthright about his interests in an op-ed. My question is why the Times is playing along.

Crossposted

Does the Media Hate You? And Other Questions.

I'm not sure what Clark Hoyt, Public Editor at the Times, thinks he's doing. He seems to be operating under the bizarre assumption that if the paper is going to smear a presidential candidate, claim he could be assassinated for dubious reasons, and do it all based on an interpretation of Islamic law, then maybe someone should pick up the phone and actually see whether real Islamic scholars agree with any of the claptrap. Strangely enough, Hoyt learns, contra Edward Luttwak, that Barack Obama will probably not get killed if he travels to a Muslim country. Oops.

It's an embarrassment for the Times, to be sure, but allow me a couple more substantive observations.

First, this is an extreme example of a problem that runs throughout the traditional news media -- namely, the unwavering and unquestioned reliance on pundit-generalists. In this particular case, no one had any reason to believe that Luttwak knew anywhere close to enough to opine on Islamic theology, but he's a well-known writer and works at a major think tank, so if he could write it well, he could get it published. Now, I happen to think the generalist model is problematic. All else equal, I would prefer to read experts or quasi-experts write about complicated subjects. (I would count a journalist who focuses heavily in a specific area as a "quasi-expert" of sorts.) One defense of the system you occasionally hear is, essentially, that it's more democratic -- in theory, anyone can write about anything -- but in practice, I find it to be terribly anti-democratic. We see the same relatively small group of pundits and journalists writing frequently and all over the place on topics about which they know little (or nothing).

But even if you like the generalist model (or want to make it better), the problem becomes a very basic one: good fact-checking. The Times has always been pretty opaque about the extent of the fact-checking that occurs on its op-ed page, but at a minimum, I would say that if you have someone writing outside of their area of expertise, you need to check with some actual experts to make sure the argument is sound. In this case, Hoyt writes, "Luttwak’s article was vetted by editors who consulted the Koran, associated text, newspaper articles and authoritative histories of Islam. No scholars of Islam were consulted because 'we do not customarily call experts to invite them to weigh in on the work of our contributors,' he said." But of course, the Times' editors probably know as much about Islamic theology as Luttwak does, so having them "check" Luttwak's work was a useless exercise. How do you even know how to fact-check a piece like Luttwak's without the benefit of some expertise?

All that said, I think it's a bit much to suggest, as Matthew Yglesias does, that "[a]s means of acquiring information, [papers like the Times are] useless -- the editors are indifferent to whether the author's purpose is to inform or to mislead." Of course, if this were completely true, Clark Hoyt's position wouldn't exist, and he certainly wouldn't be getting prime, Sunday op-ed real estate every other week to write whatever he wants no matter how bad it makes the paper look.

As a general matter, the most compelling critiques of the media tend to be the ones that focus on structural and institutional factors. I don't believe that David Shipley is uninterested in the factual claims of his op-ed contributors, but I do believe that the system in which he operates is a flawed one, which leads to embarrassing episodes like this one as well as more modest breaches of the readers' trust that occur far too frequently. It would be ridiculous to rule out bad faith when doing media criticism, but I find that to be an unfruitful starting point.

After all, why does the logic of bad faith stop at newspapers? For instance, do I believe that James Bennet, the editor of The Atlantic, doesn't give a damn about his readers, or else he would immediately fire Andrew Sullivan and Jeffrey Goldberg for their demonstrable history of outright hackery? (They have, after all, kept up the silliness under Bennet's watch.) Do I think that Bennet is out to actively make us all stupider when he runs insipid cover packages on the "100 Most Influential Americans"? Sometimes, yes! But after you think about these sorts of questions for a while, you usually settle on more unexciting explanations -- like, for instance, that Sullivan and Goldberg are known quantities in Washington journalism; that they operate in an elite print journalism club where real competition on the merits of your work is lacking; and that they're skillful enough writers that they can attract readers even if what they're writing is, in fact, junk. To be sure, these sorts of explanations can still be highly problematic, but they're problematic in a different way -- and require different responses -- than explanations that assume editors are out to screw you.

Crossposted