Penguins on the Equator

Up-Close and Personal in Iraq (and a Q&A with Dexter Filkins)

2008-11-06T23:30:00.002-05:00

Over at the website of The American Prospect, I have an essay today that grows out of a book by The New York Times' Dexter Filkins, as well as an interview with him, in which I mount an argument for the use of more intimate, less straitlaced war reporting in US newspapers. Despite an interesting conversation with Filkins, relatively little of our discussion made it into the piece, so I'm posting the transcript here. It's been slightly edited for space through the removal of some discrete, less interesting exchanges, but it's basically all here. Enjoy.

The book is episodic and not linear, by design. Why did you write this book?

I felt like I've seen a lot over the past eight or nine years, and I've been very fortunate, so I kind of felt like most of the Iraq books -- even the really, really good ones, and there have been a lot of really good ones -- have been kind of from 10,000 feet. They're broad, they make an argument, they're about policy, whether in Washington or Iraq, and so it's stuff seen from a distance. And I experienced the war from six inches away, so I wanted to convey some of that. I wanted to write a visceral book. I wanted to write a book about what it feels like in every way to be in the middle of something like that. I felt I could do that. I felt that I had that to contribute.

The book is intentionally apolitical. In many ways, you're probably better positioned to offer opinions about Iraq than other people. Most of the people in the US press who offer opinions on Iraq have never been there and know very little about it.

[Laughter]

Why did you draw that line in your head?

I think it's generally true that people's certainty about Iraq -- and particularly Iraq, because it's been this kind of blank slate for so many people -- I think people's certainty about that conflict tends to increase with their distance from the place. And all you have to do is turn on the TV for that and listen to some retired colonel sitting in a TV studio telling you what's happening in Iraq. Which is practically offensive to me. I think the closer you get to Iraq or Afghanistan, but particularly Iraq, the less sure one is about anything except what's immediately in front of them, and that which you can sort of grasp and feel and talk to. And I felt that way there. I felt that way about questions large, and questions small, and moral questions -- all those questions. Everything there to me was basically ambiguous and uncertain.

The truth is I'm not bursting with opinion about it. I think, first of all, if you talk about why we went in and all the obvious questions -- they've all been done. They've been done very well. And whether or not the surge has been working. I think people are exhausted by that. I'm certainly exhausted by that -- whether it was the right thing to do or the wrong thing to do, or how did we get into it. It just doesn't get my blood flowing.

What do you think about the sophistication of the commentary on Iraq in the US, as someone who has been there and seen it up close?

It depends on who you're talking about. I think if you're talking about blogs and the internet generally, it's pretty bad. It's just bad in the sense that it's not informed with a kind of fingertip feel. You know, it's shrill, a lot of it -- and whether it's on the right or the left. But that's not to say it's all that way. Some of the commentary is pretty good.

I think the person who's written the best commentary on the war is my colleague Roger Cohen. Roger's been there a few times, and he's sort of gone out there, and I don't think that's any mistake, because -- I think it was Lawrence Kaplan writing for The New Republic once, and this was about maybe '05, he said when you land, get off the plane, and look around, all the arguments melt away. And they do -- they melt away. Because it's just in the face of the reality, which is so overwhelming and so intense and so dramatic, it's just chatter, you know? You're just confronted with it. You're sitting there -- in wherever, Baquba -- it doesn't really matter if you were opposed to the war starting. It already started, you know? And at this point it's five and a half years old. So in that sense, you're just overwhelmed by the now.

I want to talk a little bit about the challenges of reporting from Iraq -- reporting both for the Times and for the book, which drew largely from your dispatches for the paper. One of the key passages in the book describes "two conversations" -- a conversation between Iraqis and Americans, and a conversation amongst Iraqis themselves. As an American reporter, how do you move between those conversations? How do you get access to that conversation among Iraqis?

That's a good question. Well, you do the best you can. I think as a reporter, even in a place like that, and as a noncombatant, and as somebody who tries to observe events very closely, I was often privy to things which combatants were not privy to. For example, there's a scene in the book where I'm driving in a Humvee with these soldiers, and they're making repairs on dams along the Euphrates. The Americans are doling out the money, and the Iraqis are taking the money. Everything is hunky-dory. And then the American went back to his Humvee, and I stayed behind and talked to the Iraqis, and basically they told me that we hate these guys, and we're gonna do everything we can to get rid of them. That's not a question that probably the Americans are going to ask usually; it's not one the Iraqis are going to answer to them. But they might to me because I don't have a gun; I don't have a uniform on. So that's part of it.

The other part is I relied on, and was the beneficiary of, really, really good Iraqis, who I trusted and became, in some instances, really, really close to. And in other cases, they saved my life many times. The scene kind of opened for them in a way -- the conversation -- because it was obvious I didn't speak the language. The one Iraqi would say to my interpreter something that he had no idea my interpreter would then turn around and tell me, like, for example, "He wants to kidnap you." So in that sense, I was able to see a lot of these things. But a lot of this stuff is like anything -- it's just right in front of your nose. You just have to jump on it.

There's also a scene in the book where you're speaking to a commander for the Volcano Brigade. He tells you that they haven't been killing anyone [but you find out later from your interpreter that he was told by a member of the brigade, in Arabic and at the very same time, that they had killed dozens of people].

Yeah. There's a bunch of different permutations of that. There's another scene in the book -- it's a scene I remember in real life -- there's an Iraqi speaking English to me, and he's surrounded by Iraqis who don't speak English. So we're having a very frank conversation about things, and nobody around him can understand, so he feels safe telling me. So there's a lot of variations of the "two conversations." But there's a lot of different ways to access that, or there were.

Even with an interpreter, though, you have to feel like your presence distorts the conversation a little.

It does a lot. It does. You're absolutely right. Not always. In some cases more than others. For example, when the commander of the Volcano Brigade said to me, "My friends, we've never killed anybody, we've never even fired our weapons," that was pretty clearly nonsense, based on other things that I knew. But yeah, he was making nice for the American.

One of the benefits of your ability to access that conversation was to get a sense of how the war has affected Iraqis themselves, which is a perspective that is not always forefront in the US media. How do you think the media has done capturing the sentiment of real Iraqis in all of their complexity? In a way, the question itself is very reductive.

It is, but -- I hate generalizing about the media, because it's a many-headed thing, and I don't see a lot of it -- but for example, if I talk about my own paper. We try really hard. It's really, really hard -- it's like the hardest thing that we do. Because we gotta protect ourselves, they gotta protect themselves, neighborhoods increasingly were completely sealed off to us, people didn't want us coming over because it put them in danger, we didn't want to go over because we were in danger. Are they being frank with us and are they being honest with us? God, you know, that's another question. It's really, really difficult. And of course, I think it's fair to say that we generally write about the war from an American perspective. You know, this is an American sort of project.

And so how did we do? I think we did pretty well. I mean, I think The New York Times did really well -- I think. I mean, I think generally speaking -- and reasonable people can disagree -- but I think people are pretty well-informed about the war. I don't think there's any enormous reality that we're missing. I think we're missing a lot of details and we're missing a lot of events. The country is opening up again; I'm talking about mostly the last couple years. So I think we've done a pretty good job -- I mean under the circumstances.

I want to talk a little about the Iraqis who worked for the Times. One of the things that comes through in this book that isn't something a casual reader can pick up from the paper is how integral --

Yes.

-- the Iraqi employees at the Times are to the operation.

That's a good point.

Do you think you could've done what you did in Iraq with lesser people?

No, of course not. They're everything. They're like your eyes and ears and guides and your friends and your protectors. I mean, they're everything. They're absolutely indispensable.

You write at one point in the book that "if we had tried to understand the pressures the Iraqis were working under, we would have left the country." What does that mean?

That was a bit of hyperbole. But I think -- and correct me if I'm wrong here -- but that line follows this long, unbelievably convoluted thing where the drivers came to us and said, "These insurgents are threatening us and the insurgents want us to bring one of you guys to them, etc., etc." The pressures those guys were working under were just mind-blowing. It was incomprehensible. I think what I meant by that was just that. There was no way we could -- whatever we were going through was just ten percent of what they were going through. They had to go home every night. We got to hunker down behind the blast walls. And so, that's just basically a way of tipping my hat to them as much as anything.

When you're reporting at the Times, you're in the moment. And this book offers you a chance to look back, either at your notebooks or on your dispatches. What does the view look like when you're looking back [at your stories for the Times]?

Well, it depends on the story, you know?

Do you look back at any period of time and think, "I thought something was like this, and now I know, four years later, it was 180 degrees the other way."

[Laughter] Sure, of course. Some things, I was sort of better in discerning than others. What's the most interesting part to me, and it's been written about by everybody, but I was there right in the beginning in '03, and that first year was when everything was going catastrophically wrong, and the bottom fell out. You know, you can see it happening, you can just feel it, in every way and every day. But at the same time, you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. For reporters there -- reporters generally, but reporters there particularly -- are constantly being asked, "What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen tomorrow?" And you know, I don't want to go down that road. None of us do, and I don't think it's a good idea to do that. So I've tried to be careful and cautious and responsible in my judgments. But for me looking back, it was just more interesting than anything, because I got to relive some of this stuff. Just because it was such an extraordinary time, and I had an acute sense of -- when I was reliving it -- just how extraordinary it was and how it'll never -- it's gone. It was here, and I saw it, and now it's gone. So in that sense, I'm really happy I wrote the book. The book was sort of an attempt to recapture it and get down.

You said "it's gone." Do you think that it's --

The moment's gone. And what I mean by that -- you can't -- take a really obvious example. I write about it in the book. I remember this sort of amazing moment, when they had these caucus elections in Falluja. Well, it was an extraordinary moment. And I knew it was extraordinary at the time, but of course only in retrospect do I know everything that I know now. But the city was destroyed eight months later or whatever. It was razed. And you know, what happened to those people? What happened to the city? I didn't know that then. But that whole world is just vanished -- it's gone forever. I was sort of part of the story in this book, because I was going back in time. And it's just a really weird feeling -- to have seen something and to know that it's gone.

One of the opportunities the book affords you is to provide a lot more detail concerning some episodes that you reported on before.

That's true, yeah.

And to allow yourself to be a part of the story --

Yeah.

-- in a way that when you report in the Times, you're not able to do.

That's right.

I think the most dramatic and affecting example is what happens in Falluja. Why wait to tell the story of what happened to Corporal Miller?

Well I didn't, I don't think. I wrote a story in which Miller's death was reported.

I mean the full context [of his death], and really it was a very visceral, emotional story.

I mean, I don't know. Maybe there was a reason to do it then; I didn't do it. I think, you know, a newspaper's a different animal than a book; it's just a different form, you know? And I think our primary purpose in the paper, obviously, is to try to inform our readers to make judgments about public life. So in that sense, it's important and it's dramatic, but ... I don't know, I don't remember at the time about that particular story. Could I have written more? Sure. I mean, the book does give you a kind of -- newspapers generally and the Times particularly have -- you write in a particular way. I think it's extremely useful, and it's very, very vital, and I'm glad to be a part of it, but in many ways, it's constricting. It just is.

That's a little bit of what I wanted to get at. In some ways, the Times during the Iraq war has provided outlets for reporters to be a little bit more informal. Pieces in the Week in Review are a little bit more reflective.

It's true [laughing]. It's true; it's true. And that's extremely useful. It's true. I've thought about these same things. Because I think back and I think -- particularly in something like that. It's the biggest story I've ever covered. It's probably the biggest one I ever will. But more important, it was a story in which there were so few people that were actually there -- I mean among reporters, and of course the numbers even dwindled more -- that the vantage point that you had was so extraordinary, that it was very satisfying whenever I could sort of share the more subjective feelings that I had. Which I still try to be careful about. We're always informed by reporting and observations and all that, but yeah -- it's a good question.

Remember, this war has been -- I mean, things have gotten a little quieter in Iraq, but also in the United States -- this war, from 2003 to 2007, really just until recently, it's been this extraordinarily polarizing event. You know, it tore the country apart. And so, I think we -- and I -- wanted to be really, really careful. We wanted to get it right. And we wanted to be responsible about that, and not to have irresponsible people run off with the things that we said. It's all the more reason to be really really careful in your reporting and in your judgments. So remember the context, which was crazy. I just remember the angry e-mails I used to get.

I actually want to talk a little bit about that.

[Laughter]

Not the angry e-mails in particular. One important data point in the story of the press's --

Farnaz.

-- yeah, Farnaz Fassihi's e-mail. It was this glimpse that she offered into her own perspective and --

Actually, before you ask a question. Farnaz is a good friend of mine, and I think she's a wonderful human being. That event was mystifying to anyone who had spent time in Iraq. Because everyone just thought, "Duh. No kidding." So Farnaz sent an e-mail saying Iraq's gone to pieces. Duh. But the fact that she said "I can't leave my hotel room," just resonated in this kind of unbelievable way. And it was really weird. And I remember that particular moment very well. Farnaz's e-mail came out. I don't think I even read the e-mail -- I mean, I heard about it. What I did hear was that there was like a backlash against Farnaz. And I felt terrible about that. I just felt like, "My God. What she said was completely obvious to anybody who spent any time here," so I ran off and wrote my own piece five days later saying, "Yes, absolutely what she said in there is of course absolutely right."

Anyway, you were gonna ask a question. [Laughter]

Well, to take it a step further: It seemed obvious to you and all the reporters thought what she was saying was true, but doesn't it say something that it came as such a surprise to people in the states?

Well, yes and no. I think the question you're asking -- correct me if I'm wrong -- is whether the American public would've been better served if we could've written more personal stuff. You know, maybe. But I think at the same time, the public would've been better served if it would've informed itself better on the conflict day to day. And what I mean by that is that everything in Farnaz's e-mail had been reported. Now, maybe people didn't see it or read it, and maybe it was kind of written in this kind of dry style that isn't super-palatable. But it's all there, if people really, really wanted to know.

Her e-mail actually became something of a political football.

Yeah, I mean I'm not aware of all that because I was there most of the time, but I know generally know that that happened.

I think this came to a head in 2006, but a lot of people -- principally commentators on the right -- used that e-mail and used the stories that were being reported to say that the press in Iraq had, to some extent an agenda to not report on good news, and to some extent were practicing "hotel journalism."

Yes, but the left and the right have said the latter. I think the person who coined that phrase was Robert Fisk. I could be wrong; I know he used that in a column as well. So I mean this is sort of right and left, you're talking about.

We live an age of pervasive criticism --

Yes.

-- nonstop media criticism --

[Laughter]

-- and you get a lot of it. You get it in your e-mail inbox. Have you seen anything that you felt has been accurate? Or that has resonated with you? Or that has pointed to a limitation of the coverage of Iraq that you think is real?

That's a very good question. Let me just say, I think some of it's been -- I think most of the media criticism about Iraq ... There's been some good points raised, you know. I think the prewar stuff, there's been a lot of good points raised. I'm sort of speaking of the war after it started. Most of it is trying to make some other point about the war. So, you know, people beat up on the messenger. Whether it's "you're practicing hotel journalism" or "you're not reporting about the good news," what's the larger point there? The larger point is, it's really not as bad as they say it is, or whole Iraqi towns are being butchered by the American military, and the reporters don't see it because they sit in their hotel rooms staring out the balcony.

But I think a lot of it for me has missed the really, really much larger and more important question about the media coverage in a place like Iraq, which is -- there aren't that many reporters that are doing it. So you have this kind of phenomenon where you've got 50 reporters in Iraq, and then you have like 10,000 people writing about the 50 reporters in Iraq. So you have this kind of really small number of facts, and then like everybody interpreting them and crunching them and arguing over them. And it's like, we'd all be better served of course if there were 500 reporters in Iraq, like there were in Vietnam, but there aren't. That to me is the much larger question. I guess it's been said, not so much about Iraq, but it's been said generally about journalism, which is -- journalism is this kind of embattled vocation. And so whereas in July of 2003, there were probably 5,000 reporters in Iraq, or in April 2003, thousands, now there's almost no one. Now there's like 50. That to me is really -- that's the most important story that you can write about the media. I don't know if that's a criticism of the media, but that to me -- it's like, a lot of the media criticism sort of misses the larger point. It's sort of looking at this tiny group of 50 people and trying to discern their motives -- it's kind of a worthless endeavor.

The families of the soldiers you're with -- you're in touch with a lot of those families, still. Do they give you feedback on the work you do for the paper?

Some of 'em; some of 'em. Let me think for a second about that...

Or even the soldiers themselves.

It's not really that kind of conversation. It's much more of a -- you were there and I was there, and we both share something that most people don't really understand. It's more like that. It's more of a gut thing than, "I saw your story last Tuesday and I thought it sucked." [Laughter]

You just recently wrote about the handover of control over the Anbar province to Iraqi forces. Is that an event that you feel is provisional, or do you feel like this is one of those events that's really a watershed?

I think everything's provisional there -- whether it turns out good or bad. All the stuff they're doing now -- I think that was an interesting moment. It was a very hopeful moment. I was in that same place, as I think I indicated in the piece, two years ago, and it was unbelievably violent. And not just for me, and not just for Americans. The city was destroyed. And it was just emptied out, and people had left, and it was a dead city. And it's not anymore. So in that sense it's very encouraging. All of the calm now is very encouraging. It's just a nice thing to see. But I think it's very provisional. I mean it's sort of, like, okay. But it's almost of necessity, it's like arrangements rather than institutions, because there aren't any institutions. I mean, there are tribes and that sort of thing, but yeah -- I think everybody involved, whether it's Iraqi or American, will tell you that they're just trying to keep it going as long as they can.

You left Iraq after 2006.

Yeah, I went back in '07.

What was your time back in the US like, after spending so much time there? And did you sort of feel like you had to go back?

No. My time -- it was very difficult. It's like, I was breathing pure oxygen for four years, or actually seven, and then suddenly I wasn't. I mean, if you're fortunate enough, as I was, to be involved in a story that large, that gigantic, that dramatic and that important, and then suddenly you're not, it's just -- you know, your metabolism slows down a lot. [Laughter] You know, it's very jarring -- I went from Baghdad to Cambridge, Massachusetts, so it was this extraordinarily violent place to the most quiet. So it was hard; it was really hard. You know, I had the book to write, so at least I had something to do.

No, I didn't have any burning need to go back, I really didn't. And you know it's strange because you can't go home again, I think really, at the end of the day. I kind of went back this last time -- it was interesting; I was glad to see it, and glad to see some people I hadn't seen in a long time -- but I didn't have any ... I think I was able to detox.

Is there something that you want people to take away from the book that you think has been missing or not exactly there in all of the literature written about the war?

There's no one thing. I'd just say: The hope, whether it's ten years from now or five or twenty, when people ask, "What was it like on the ground?", the book will help.

New Stuff

2008-06-10T21:36:00.002-04:00

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.

2008-06-09T19:38:00.001-04:00

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

The Vanilla Ceiling

2008-06-09T19:16:00.003-04:00

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

2008-06-08T17:43:00.002-04:00

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

2008-06-08T16:51:00.005-04:00

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

2008-06-08T16:21:00.008-04:00

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

2008-06-08T10:26:00.003-04:00

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

2008-06-08T00:45:00.003-04:00

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.

2008-06-01T16:47:00.001-04:00

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

Question of the Day

2008-05-29T00:47:00.003-04:00

What if it were Katie Couric, rather than Charlie Gibson, saying that "the questions were asked" during the runup to the Iraq war and that, if given a do-over, "I’m not sure we would have asked anything differently"?

Here's the video:

About Monocle

2008-05-28T21:38:00.005-04:00

Ordinarily I wouldn't bother with something like this, but if Monocle aspires to be "a comprehensive global briefing," it seems to me that making mistakes on basic, widely known, and easily verifiable facts is a bit of a problem. This is from a sidebar to an interview with the head of Al-Jazeera's New York and Washington bureaus:

Soon after [September 11], President Bush launched an attack on the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. While this received widespread support, the expansion of the campaign into a "war on terror" was less popular. The Iraq War -- which Obama voted against and Clinton and McCain voted for -- continues to be a crucial issue in the election campaign.

Of course, Obama wasn't in the Senate when the vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq took place. (Even if he were, it's not even clear he would've voted against it.)

This may seem like a quibble in the scheme of things, and I confess that I haven't read enough issues of the magazine to render anything like a solid judgment, but to me this is indicative of the problem with Monocle -- it is an utterly, almost unabashedly superficial magazine. I mean this primarily in the sense that its "briefings" and "reports" have very little depth. They blend together to create the sense that you're reading a magazine comprised entirely of what would be front-of-the-book pieces in another publication. It also happens to be the case that Monocle is preoccupied with stuff. I lack the Wallpaper point of reference or the design chops to dig deep, but I read about a lot of nice, cleanly designed Scandinavian and Japanese things. It was hardly groundbreaking stuff and more like reading annotated Ikea and Muji catalogs.

The whole thing basically felt to me like a mashup of Vanity Fair's Fanfair and New York's Strategist sections. Which is to say, not good. In any event, this guy has a much more informed and comprehensive take.

Welcome Back, Me

2008-05-23T14:04:00.002-04:00

After a long (and unintended) break from reading magazines and generally living like a normal person, I was looking forward to diving right back in and checking in on what the kids were reading. So far, though, I am regrettably 0 for 2 in the game of Reading Things That Don't Suck.

First was Philip Weiss's pseudointellectual, failed attempt at justifying his either past or future adultery. Second was Emily Gould's over-the-top melodramatic exploration of her personal life while working for Gawker. (Best/worst line: "Instead, though, I kept moving blithely closer to the spoon." And no, it isn't better in context.) I should say that I actually kind of liked what Gould did while she was at Gawker, and I don't begrudge anyone their desire to write about their personal lives online, but look, if you're the kind of person who's going to betray your significant others' privacy, you're going to do it with or without a Typepad account. You may convince Gerald Marzorati that it's all wrapped up in some "larger political or ethical or philosophical concerns," but you're not fooling the rest of us.

Back to my pile of magazines. Here's hoping things get better.

Hiatus?

2008-05-17T23:27:00.002-04:00

Er, so it turns out that this really long day I've been experiencing has actually been, like, three weeks. Oops?

But! In a few days, things will appear here again. They will blow your mind.

The Case Against CBS News

2008-04-25T07:26:00.004-04:00

Troy Patterson makes a scarily good case for closing the whole division. I can't tell you how television reviewing works, but to be fair, it seems to me that you need to do more than watch a couple episodes (or, in the case of one or two shows, apparently just one) before you slam them.

A few points I would add. First, it's irrelevant to Patterson's argument, but so much of what's wrong with the Evening News is the lousy production. Couric's got a heavy hand in the process -- and maybe she should take more control, though her precarious position at the company makes that pretty much inconceivable -- but she gets more flack than she deserves when you consider how much is attributable to stuff as simple as the awful copy she reads.

Second, if I were to get into the weeds on 60 Minutes, I think you have to note that the show's biggest stories these days involve major interviews with people who've just written some sort of book about Iraq or their experience in the Bush administration. Not only does this involve pretty much zero reporting, but it means that 60 Minutes frequently just functions as an adjunct to people's book tours.

Finally, yes, The Early Show is awful, so much so that it's consistent misfortunes have become a mild source of amusement for me, kind of like watching the Washington Generals get clobbered again and again. But it's all relative. The real question is, Can Patterson make a case that the Today Show and Good Morning America are significantly better -- deeper or more sophisticated -- than CBS's morning show? Highly doubtful.

Cross-Promotion

2008-04-25T07:15:00.003-04:00

I love that Rick Stengel's defense against the accusation that Time stole its cover concept from The New Republic is, unashamedly, "No, actually we ripped it off from the NBA." Turns out they take their editorial cues from corporate ads. Much better!

Those Military Analysts

2008-04-20T09:51:00.003-04:00

This is a must-read but also, upon brief reflection, not really surprising at all. I lost count a while ago, but this is another item to add to the list of ways in which cable networks have, wittingly or not, been used to disseminate administration propaganda.

Halperin and Davis

2008-04-19T10:10:00.003-04:00

I guess instead of writing about McCain campaign manager Rick Davis's shady past as a super-lobbyist, Mark Halperin thought the readers of Time would best be served by a tour of the man's desk. This is the text of the piece, but it doesn't quite give you the flavor of what's in the magazine; you're missing the half-page picture with bubbles identifying, for instance, Davis's three-hole punch. (He punches his own documents sometimes!)

I get that this could be a cute little web video or something, but a full page in the print edition? Really?

Positivity

2008-04-18T07:46:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I posted this and this at the other blog, which might lead you to believe I'm pretty negative. Not true!

Unfortunately, it's often easier to write critical items than laudatory posts, so let me take this opportunity to flag a few pieces I've read recently that were actually very good: Garry Wills on Obama and Lincoln; Hendrik Hertzberg on political misspeak; and Brad Plumer on tensions in the labor movement. Read them and learn stuff.

The Proletarian Pose

2008-04-16T07:42:00.001-04:00

Joe Scarborough too.

What We Learned (Or Didn't) About Chris Matthews

2008-04-13T20:54:00.003-04:00

Weirdly, the surprising thing about the Times magazine's profile of Chris Matthews is ... how unremarkable it is.

We learn that Matthews is status-obsessed and preoccupied with "the game" of politics. Neither feature is unique among people in the elite political media; Matthews is just more unashamed about it all. We read that his show is doing poorly and that his future at MSNBC (and NBC) is uncertain, which is easy to infer from his consistently lackluster ratings. We find out that he's wary of some of his colleagues, like Keith Olbermann and David Gregory, and admiring of his superior, Tim Russert. But of course, Olbermann and Matthews' mutual contempt is well-known and obvious even on-air; Gregory's star has been rising throughout the Bush administration and should trouble someone whose ratings don't justify his salary; and the status obsession explains the fixation on Russert (who, after all, is a bit like a grown-up, less voluble Matthews). Also? He's kinda sexist -- which you may have heard -- but doesn't think he is.

This isn't necessarily to disparage Mark Leibovich's reporting. He does manage to pick up some gesturing toward a Senate run in Pennsylvania. But you'd think that all the time he spent with Matthews (including a three-hour, on the record brunch) would've yielded at least a few more interesting tidbits -- some stuff that would've legitimately surprised.

The easy explanation, and probably the correct one, is that there's just no there there: Matthews is either a superficial, egomaniacal loudmouth if you hate him, or an unembarrassed lover of politics if you don't, but either way, he's putting himself out there on a daily basis and providing you with most everything you could want to know about him. A profile of a person like that can educate the uninitiated, but for people acquainted with him -- even if it's only through the teevee -- the exercise seems almost superfluous.

Photo courtesy of kendrak

Department of Corrections

2008-04-12T11:46:00.003-04:00

A correction from the latest issue of The New York Review:

In the first paragraph of Elizabeth Drew's "Molehill Politics" [NYR, April 17], John McCain should have been described as "the Republicans' putative [not 'punitive'], and unexpected, nominee." Our apologies to Senator McCain.

That word actually caught my eye in the original, but it seemed a defensible choice all things considered.

Does The Politico Make Money? And If Not...

2008-04-10T22:31:00.006-04:00

Alex Pareene is practically reading my mind when he questions whether The Politico makes any money. This has actually been on my mind for the last few weeks, in the wake of Eric Alterman's piece on newspapers in The New Yorker and some of the commentary that resulted.

Ezra Klein, for instance, wrote:

It may be that the economics of home delivery newspapers don't work, but the economics of something like The Politico -- which is a massive newsroom powering an online newspaper that also produces a smaller, narrowly distributed print edition -- work just fine. Or at least don't work in a somewhat less spectacular, more manageable, fashion. But the question of whether you're preserving news or preserving newspapers is an important one in these arguments. Preserving the former requires less money, fewer advertisers, and fewer classified ads. Preserving the latter, at least in its current form, requires an economic model that's already dead.

This is a curious claim when you consider that home delivery is still profitable -- very profitable, in fact, more so than the internet side of papers -- and that The Politico may not be profitable at all. The crucial difference appears to be that in the case of most newspapers, you have shareholders who are willing to cut and downsize their way to maintain stock prices, or private owners doing the same in order to maintain high profit margins; and, in the case of The Politico, you have someone willing to possibly lose money for some reason or another. And Albritton may not be willing to do that forever.

That said, it's true that it's a serious error to conflate newspapers with the news. But careful observers don't do this, and Alterman certainly didn't. I'm beginning to find it odd, in fact, that you even see pushback against claims like those Alterman made. The central argument -- that the poor economic circumstances of good newspapers will mean the loss of some solid news coverage -- is really quite modest, self-evident even. Maybe we'll see some version of The Politico survive over the long term in a financially viable way, but for the time being, there is no great web-only product like The Politico that could, for instance, replace the work that Lydia Polgreen, Carlotta Gall, or Jeffrey Gettleman do.

Folks like Alterman and myself (if you will) are hardly Chicken Littles. The sky is not falling. But newspapers have been the driving force behind The News for the last half-century, and their newsgathering functions are eroding at a rate that is not being offset by the gains in other media -- however great you think NPR is. Yes, their dominance was due largely to the existence of conditions that made it easy to run an effective monopoly, but the reality was the reality all the same.

Now, if you want to talk about an error that people commonly make, it's an elision like the one I've used in the paragraphs above. When we talk about the dwindling fortunes of newspapers, people often treat every paper like it's the Times. When I visit new cities, I get a kick out of reading local newspapers, and, well, most papers aren't the Times. Many could easily cease to exist in their current form without any appreciable effect on the lives of internet-savvy readers. A good number of those will adapt by becoming more localized products that offer things to their communities that can't be seen elsewhere, but the fate of our democracy does not hinge on your ability to read a review of the latest show at your community Shakespeare theater.

The country could stand to lose a few newspapers, but all newspapers are not equal, and some of the losses will be, and probably have been, felt. Perhaps more disturbing than that prospect is this unfortunate epistemological fact: when you lose great news coverage, there's really no way to know it.

Crossposted

Question of the Day

2008-04-10T11:22:00.002-04:00

There was a time, wasn't there, when people who weren't Leon Wieseltier penned TNR's back-of-the-book Diarist pieces? Maybe it coincided with a time when those short essays were less about Leon Wieseltier and less crappy?

(And if you bristle at the cavalier criticism, recall this.)

Abusing Burke

2008-04-07T18:49:00.005-04:00

Did Jonathan Rauch really write this in this month's Atlantic?

McCain voted against Bush's big tax cuts, but now says he supports extending them rather than risking damage to the economy. Flip-flop? Not if you believe, as Burkeans often do, that sudden and large policy changes deserve skepticism, but that when a policy becomes well established and woven into everyday life, as the tax cuts have, continuity should get the benefit of the doubt.

Now, I haven't read my Burke in quite a while, but how do tax cuts that are a grand total of seven years old count as a policy that has become "well established" and "woven into everyday life" (!)? By this definition, you pretty much can't change anything in American politics.

Unless, that is, you're talking about repealing the almost-century-old estate tax, which McCain helped out with in 2005. How he managed to do this while retaining his Burkean cred with Rauch isn't entirely clear. But then, I guess it's just cynicism that leads me to believe that, in both cases, McCain's turnarounds had to do with the fact that he was running for President and felt he needed the support of the GOP's anti-tax faction.

Jon Meacham Would Like Your Help

2008-04-06T01:46:00.002-04:00

There are times when a magazine editor wants to know what potential readers think, and then there are times when a flailing editor cries out for help:

"And how to communicate that we have things to say that are both factually new and analytically new and to get you under the tent is a fact that scares me—not The Economist per se. It's an incredible frustration that I've got some of the most decent, hard-working, honest, passionate, straight-shooting, non-ideological people who just want to tell the damn truth, and how to get this past this image that we're just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get, or something, that's the challenge. And I just don't know how to do it, so if you've got any ideas, tell me."

This isn't to say that Meacham is wrong about how hardworking what's left of his staff is. But if he really doesn't have a vision for how to get his magazine back on track, then, at the risk of being churlish, might I suggest that the magazine find a new editor?

The J-Street Project

2008-03-27T23:54:00.002-04:00

The Jewish Week reports on the launch of a dovish pro-Israel lobbying organization, an alternative to AIPAC:

While sources say the structure and initial goals of the new group are still in flux, it is expected to raise money for congressional candidates who advocate a stronger U.S. leadership role in ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and multilateral solutions to the region’s problems.
The group will be headed by [former Clinton administration official Jeremy] Ben-Ami, who served as deputy domestic policy adviser in the Clinton administration and later as a media consultant. Ben-Ami has worked with several Jewish peace groups, including the Center for Middle East Peace and the Geneva Initiative-North America.

Daniel Levy and Robert Malley are also involved. Very promising.

The Deweyan Ideal

2008-03-26T08:56:00.000-04:00

Eric Alterman's piece in The New Yorker about the state of the newspaper industry is well worth your time. It's an impressive synthesis of the trends affecting the industry, and a thoughtful rendering of their ramifications, uncertain as they may be.

I would, however, take some issue with Alterman's claim that the blogosphere represents a truly "democratic" challenge to the Lippmanite view of how newspapers should function:

The birth of the liberal blogosphere, with its ability to bypass the big media institutions and conduct conversations within a like-minded community, represents a revival of the Deweyan challenge to our Lippmann-like understanding of what constitutes “news” and, in doing so, might seem to revive the philosopher’s notion of a genuinely democratic discourse. The Web provides a powerful platform that enables the creation of communities; distribution is frictionless, swift, and cheap. The old democratic model was a nation of New England towns filled with well-meaning, well-informed yeoman farmers. Thanks to the Web, we can all join in a Deweyan debate on Presidents, policies, and proposals. All that’s necessary is a decent Internet connection.

This is true, strictly speaking. But I think it's hard to talk about the Internet as a democratizing force without acknowledging the stratification of the blogosphere into elite and non-elite circles. Everyone can hop on the internet and say whatever they want, but some people's voices are more amplified than others, and so some conversations will have more of an impact than others. Note that I'm not rendering a normative judgment as to whether this is or is not desirable or fair -- the people who populate what I'd call the elite blogosphere helped create and shape this medium -- but as a descriptive matter it's indisputably true.

Also, "a genuinely democratic discourse" requires broad participation from people from across the demographic spectrum. The Pew Internet & American Life Project reported last year, however, that only 47% of Americans have broadband access and that "non-internet users as a group are disproportionately old and poor." Even if access is open to everyone, if these people aren't participating equally, is that "genuinely democratic"? To use a somewhat tired analogy, it has become much, much cheaper to publish your own pamphlet (i.e., blog), but it's still too expensive for some people.

That doesn't even probe the issue of racial demographics: Internet users are disproportionately white. I'm guessing the blogosphere skews even more white, and the elite blogosphere still more. I don't view this as a terrible indictment by any means, but we also shouldn't let ourselves get carried away talking about the broadly participatory features of the internet. In many ways, the promise of the internet as a force for democratization of political discourse has yet to be fulfilled.

All that said, I do think Alterman's article is an impressive piece of work. It's easy to be glib about the future of the newspaper industry, but there's more at stake than whether your news comes with a viewpoint or not. As Alterman nicely puts it in the last two sections of his piece, we may also lose out on some actual news -- important stories that newspapers have been critical in disseminating.

Crossposted

The Attack on Obama

2008-03-25T00:03:00.002-04:00

John Heilemann synthesizes the various lines of criticism that have emerged about Obama into a scarily plausible Republican brief against the candidate. Taken apart, none of it is surprising, but somehow reading it in column form -- replicating the type of abbreviated way in which it would actually occur -- is highly disconcerting.

Thanks for the Slavery

2008-03-24T17:34:00.002-04:00

Maybe MSNBC can bring Pat Buchanan on to explain these comments. He is, after all, already on the payroll.

America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.
Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

But hey. He's old and kind of crazy and good fun to chat with.

Via Jezebel.

Michael O'Hanlon, Media Analyst

2008-03-24T08:31:00.000-04:00

I tend not to go in for all the Michael O'Hanlon-bashing (it's gotten so excessive and disproportionate to the man's actual influence that it's bordering on dull), but I couldn't help but chuckle when I read this, in a piece on the media's diminishing interest in Iraq:

There are no authoritative figures for most media coverage before 2007. But a check of several large and midsize newspapers’ archives shows a year-by-year decline in articles about Iraq, and an increase in the proportion supplied by wire services. Experts who follow the coverage say there is no doubt about the trend.
“I was getting on average three to five calls a day for interviews about the war” in the first years, said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow on national security at the Brookings Institution. “Now it’s less than one a day.”

I love that his way of tracking the prevalence of Iraq coverage isn't by actually tracking the prevalence of Iraq coverage. It's by measuring how many interviews he does in a day.

Also, it's great that a meta-piece on the media's coverage of Iraq happens to display the same flaw that pervades the coverage itself. There are other Iraq analysts.

Crossposted

"Horseradish"?

2008-03-23T13:15:00.001-04:00

I get the distinct feeling that this letter from a 24-year-old underwent a little bit of editing by the folks at the Times.

The Troops

2008-03-19T00:30:00.001-04:00

Michael Massing has a talent for identifying and analyzing underexamined aspects of the media's war reporting, on display once again in a piece that violates the informal rule in journalism against asking why people join the army.

It's generally sacrilege to do anything less than assume that all of our soldiers joined up solely because of their desire to fight for the country. It's not hard to understand why. The image of the soldier as Captain America is largely a tribute, but also a way to insulate us from asking tough questions about the fairness of the sacrifices we require of our soldiers, and the distribution of the burdens of war. As it turns out, and as you might expect, people have a variety of reasons for joining the armed forces:

[F]rom the survey data, and from my interviews, it seems clear that the military does not consist of society's "dregs." Rather, it consists mainly of young men and women who, raised in working- and lower-middle-class families, yearn to make it into the middle class. Unable to achieve this in the hypercompetitive and expensive market economy, they have instead sought to achieve it in the Army. With its guarantees of housing, employment, health insurance, and educational assistance, the US military today seems the last outpost of the welfare state in America.

Massing notes that in 2006, the percentage of new recruits who cited "service to country" as their main motivation for joining was just 38.1 percent, up from the 2002 figure of 27.5%. He hastens to add: "But Beth Asch of the RAND Corporation, who does research for the Pentagon, says that such figures should be handled with care, since new recruits, when asked, often like to give their decision an idealistic cast." As Massing writes, a significant motivating factor for new recruits are the benefits that the military offers, particularly the help they can get going to college. This isn't particularly surprising, and the military, knowing this, targets people to whom those benefits would appeal and plays them up.

Of course, asking questions about why people join the military shouldn't diminish their sacrifice, nor does it mean that they deserve any less respect or concern. But we would do well to remember that men and women join for a variety of reasons, and to the extent that many of them are in socioeconomic positions where joining the military seems like the only viable path to entering the middle class, perhaps the government should be thinking less about recruiting opportunities and more about non-life-threatening ways that those people can get the economic stability that they want.

A Barnicle Retrospective

2008-03-17T22:53:00.002-04:00

I'm always surprised at how few people seem to care or know about Mike Barnicle's professional transgressions. He receives quite the warm welcome on many an MSNBC show (including, as I mentioned last week, "Morning Joe"), where he plays -- and I use that word deliberately -- a working-class crank. So perhaps the average, uninformed viewer could be forgiven for not knowing that the man was a repeated plagiarist and fabulist.

Today, news came out that Barnicle is being considered for a gig with Boston's NPR affiliate. Rightly disturbed, Dan Kennedy pointed out that this is insane for any news outlet that prides itself on its professionalism and adherence to journalistic ethical standards, and he linked to a very useful piece he wrote ten years ago for The Boston Phoenix, which provides a detailed recounting of many of Barnicle's misdeeds.

But hey, Joe Scarborough, Tim Russert, and Chris Matthews like him. Why should any of this have mattered?

Credit Where Due

2008-03-17T19:08:00.002-04:00

It's common to criticize New York magazine for directing its gaze almost exclusively toward the well-to-do segments of the city. (I've certainly done it.) This is a magazine, after all, that can make it seem normal to pay the outlandish price of $120 for a polo shirt.

But this week's issue features an impressive, and poignant, photo essay about six people who are homeless in the city. I'm not sure there's much to add; I think we all know how ridiculous it is that homelessness is such a problem in a city this rich, in a country this wealthy.

Definitely worth your time.

From the Left

2008-03-16T15:21:00.004-04:00

It's true that, in his review of Eric Alterman's new book, Scott McLemee cops to being an "old-fashioned socialist." Still, I don't really see how McLemee is criticizing Alterman from the left. Yes, McLemee notes that Alterman is a "scourge of the Naderites" (which is accurate), but for the most part, McLemee is criticizing Alterman for writing a mostly superficial and predictable book with little to no political crossover appeal and a gigantic hole where the ideas for "post-Bush America" are supposed to go:

From a tough-minded pundit like Alterman, the reader expects some grappling with the likely shape of things to come. Instead, “Why We’re Liberals” is like a crash course in how to yell effectively at the talking heads on Fox News. Whatever progress might mean, this is not an example of it.

McLemee's ideology seems to have nothing to do with this verdict.

Tracy Morgan vs. Tina Fey

2008-03-16T10:35:00.003-04:00

Via dedicated SNL-ophile Rachel Sklar, Tracy Morgan returned to the show last night to give a hilarious commentary on the Clinton/Obama race.

My favorite line: "Personally, I wanna know what qualifies Hillary Clinton to be the next President. Is it because she was married to the President? If that were the case, then Robin Givens would be the heavyweight champion of the world."

Lust, Caution

2008-03-16T01:35:00.003-04:00

I really wish I had read this spot-on review by Manohla Dargis before watching this movie.

I'll just add this: There are well-received movies during which some of the more tired among us, reluctantly, fall asleep. Usually, I feel as though this is a failing of mine, but occasionally, it's worth considering that there's something wrong with the people who managed (struggled?) to stay awake.

Some movies deserve to be slept through.

Fact Check

2008-03-15T21:32:00.003-04:00

Time magazine's most informative, most useful piece this week is the debut of a "Fact Check" feature that takes on Hillary Clinton's claims of foreign policy experience. The conclusion? She's fudging, at best.

I'm on record as approving of these sorts of fact check pieces, but it's worth remembering that this is what the media is supposed to do anyway.

Meanwhile, Time saw fit to promote for its cover the "10 Ideas That Are Changing the World." The bankruptcy of the enterprise dawned on me right around #2, when I learned that the second-most important idea changing the world is, apparently, that we can do things like check ourselves out at grocery stores and check ourselves in at airports. That idea edged out #3, which posits that there's a world-changing trend inasmuch as movie stars are (maybe!) not worth as much as they used to be. To be fair, #1 is pretty good, but the rest is just a grab bag of whatever developments the staff writers at Time could dig up from their respective fields of interest. Except for #5, "Kitchen Chemistry," which has Joel Stein opining on a heretofore unknown area of expertise -- anything unrelated to his ego. (That he managed to make a story about George Clooney mostly about himself is, I think, a testament to his considerable talents in this regard. But then, I would say that, wouldn't I?)

I, for one, have no idea why Time's circulation has been stagnant for, like, two decades.

Matthew Felling Really, Really Likes Show He Occasionally Co-Hosts

2008-03-14T07:40:00.000-04:00

It's a good thing Matthew Felling discloses that he's an occasional guest co-host on MSNBC's "Morning Joe." Otherwise, the average reader might've been left to wonder how the story/review he's written could be so over-the-top positive even though it's written by someone who's supposed to be a critic of sorts. I count exactly one comment with a specific criticism of the show, and zero comments in Felling's own voice that approximate anything but unabashed praise.

Some of my favorite tidbits:

"It's the loosest yet most comprehensive three hours in morning television today--going so far, to some, as to set the agenda for the day's news." No one, in fact, says this in the piece.

"The combination works for viewers, who see it as an accessible summary of what's going on in America's political scene." Well, it works for some viewers. As Felling points out in the second-to-last paragraph of his 3,000 word piece, "Morning Joe" gets clobbered by the inane "Fox & Friends" (952,000 viewers to "Joe"'s 289,000) and has roughly 25% fewer viewers than CNN's "American Morning," the second-place cable news show in the timeslot (421,000 viewers).

"How fun? Horseplay fun. When the on-air behavior ends up with Tim Russert on the receiving end of an unexpected Mike Barnicle headlock, it's clear you're watching something quite different." Plagiarist and fabulist Mike Barnicle sure can be funny!

"The show manages to stay informal yet stick to the day's news stories, veering in tone from 'Huntley-Brinkley' one minute to 'Swingers' the next." Just -- no.

The rest is not much better. Felling writes that people at the Media Research Center and Media Matters occasionally criticize material on the show, but, with one exception from Eric Boehlert (who airs a criticism that Felling allows Scarborough to shoot down), you have no idea what these organizations are saying and thus no way to tell whether their complaints have any merit. (Some of them certainly seem to.)

As it turns out, I actually find "Morning Joe" to be superior to its competitors, but that's not saying much. A morning show appears to be an ideal vehicle for Scarborough, who never had much substance to begin with; and Mika Brzezinski, one of MSNBC's few real talents, has deservedly made a name for herself by demonstrating real news chops and a dry sense of humor that provides a nice counterpoint to Scarborough and Geist's sometimes deliberate, sometimes unintentional buffoonery.

But surely the AJR should've been surprised to see a piece where no real criticism was levied. Here are just a few, off the top of my head:

First, Willie Geist is making everyone who watches dumber. The frattish class clown routine -- the calculated foolishness, mixed with what I assume is a sincere lack of interest in the substantive dimensions of American politics -- grows tiresome rather quickly.

Second, why is Mike Barnicle on the air -- not just on "Morning Joe" for that matter, but any of the MSNBC shows? The same warm welcome has not been provided to other proven plagiarists and fabulists, but the headlock-loving Barnicle has lots of friends in the national media so he gets an undeserved pass.

This leads to a criticism more serious than the others: There is a frequently off-putting clubbiness to the proceedings on "Morning Joe." Elite journalists and pundits from national publications come on to talk about their work and traffic in often stale conventional wisdom that (like so many prognostications during this election season) turn out to be wrong. It's no wonder that people in the political media are such fans, because, like Imus before him, Scarborough and his guests corroborate and validate one another's outlook. As such, the whole operation falls prey to many of the problems in print journalism today -- a herd mentality; a focus on what should be meaningless campaign "gaffes" and "controversies" that crowd out discussions of the candidates' actual policies; the urge to psychoanalyze candidates by people with no training in psychoanalysis; a penchant for drama criticism masquerading as political analysis (see, e.g., Frank Rich); and on and on.

You don't have to agree with any of this, but if you're trying to write anything but fluff and you describe your subject in almost purely adulatory terms, you might not be doing your job well.

I tend to be mostly uninterested in the conflict-of-interest handwringing that pervades much mainstream press criticism, and, to be fair to Felling, he is normally a fairly conscientious media observer. This, however, is the sort of situation where you have an obviously compromised piece that (crucially) you can explain by the interest. You'd think that the combination of the two -- an apparent motivation for positive coverage coupled with almost unqualified, effusive praise -- should have been enough to give pause to the American Journalism Review before publishing it. And yet...

Crossposted

Line of the Day

2008-03-13T15:41:00.001-04:00

From Michael Washburn in the Observer:

A somewhat smug tone, however logical and humane the content, don’t help to change people’s minds.

In a review of Eric Alterman's latest book.

"If you decide you're going to write about journalism, the world is your oyster"

2008-03-12T21:29:00.004-04:00

This lengthy interview with David Simon, one of the brains behind The Wire, has him making some odd, off-the-mark comments on the internet and journalism. Are there serious media observers who suggest today, as Simon seems to claim, that blogging is "a responsible or viable alternative to a major metropolitan newspaper"? Not really. (Indeed, at most, a third of bloggers even consider what they're doing to be journalism, and the vast majority of them are probably sorely mistaken.)

In any event, I was more taken with Simon's comments on the media's love affair with itself, as evidenced by the amount of attention he's gotten from his critiques. I really don't have anything to add, since it's hard to deny any of what he says here:

[City Paper]: I was most interested in why I've seen your byline in publications more this season than in seasons past.

[David Simon]: Well you know what? See what happens when you have a five-month writers strike. Wait, November, December--it was about four months. When you have a four-month writers strike and you can't work on scripts--I used to write prose for a living. It's not something that I don't do. And journalism obviously interests me in the same way that education interests Ed, and here's a telling thing. After Season 3--actually, before Season 3, where we legalized drugs, I tried to interest a bunch of publications in it, in the idea of drug legalizing. And we tried to sell the show on that basis and I tried to get people interested in what the show was saying. And the mainstream media yawned and went about its business. In Season 4 Ed was very passionate about some of the things he was arguing for in terms of No Child Left Behind [Act of 2001] and what that had done to the school system, and the only people he could engage in his writing or to discuss the story and the show in terms of the issues--I'm not talking about discuss the show, you can always get critics to critique the show--but the only people that were [interested] were the education mags.

But, man, if you decide you're going to write about journalism, the world is you oyster. They can't get out of their own way. It's like, "What else can you say?" It really is telling in terms of the onanistic and self-absorbed nature of the beast. We've written about stuff routinely and we've been interviewed routinely when people got interested, and it's hard to make people interested in such mundane drivel as public education and drug policy and the fate of working America. You can't sell that shit. But suggest to journalists that they're not doing their job--now you got an audience.

The '60s and the Political Media, Continued

2008-03-11T11:48:00.000-04:00

I guess a few people disagreed with Newsweek's claim that "all of us, young and old, are stuck in the '60s, hostages to a decade we define ourselves as for or against."

The magazine's 1968 retrospective, which also declared that "the '60s have everything . . . to do with us," was its worst seller last year. Sure, the cover was hideous, but I'd also like to believe it's because there are lots of people, like me, who are over the '60s throwback stories.

Crossposted

What is "Momentum"?

2008-03-11T00:05:00.000-04:00

At Tim Noah argues, it's a fundamentally bankrupt concept. At its core, it's the collective view of reporters who think they can predict elections. Why they're in the business of predicting the outcome of events that they're covering is a question we'll bracket for the time being, but from what I can tell, "momentum" is what someone gets if they've just won something -- and something, in the view of the people writing the stories, that matters.

What matters, however, isn't always clear. Often enough, it's a debate (though the rules governing how one "wins" a political debate are flexible and possibly nonexistent), but more frequently the thing that matters is an election of some sort, even though the proper interpretation of these events requires access to opaque guidelines whose underlying principles are hard to decipher and often hard to justify on the merits. Thus, small states don't count unless they're Iowa or New Hampshire. But why? The nominal rationale is that voters in these states take their obligations Very Seriously -- more so than you and I ever could -- but an equally plausible alternatives is that the elite political media is populated by people who would've acquired a lot of useless knowledge over the years if they couldn't imbue the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries with the importance of Gettysburg.

In order for professional political pundits to maintain their influence, they have to do something valuable -- something that you, sitting at home reading a newspaper all by your lonesome, cannot do by yourself. There has to be something complicated -- possibly counterintuitive, even -- to explain. Counting delegates would be much too simple, so instead we get semi-complicated, frequently wrongheaded, and typically conclusory claims that someone or other has "momentum."

Question of the Day

2008-03-10T22:25:00.002-04:00

Can we expect a ringing denunciation from the Journal's editorial page of today's report, in the paper's news pages, about the NSA's domestic intelligence-gathering? Don't hold your breath.

The Britney Think Piece

2008-03-10T00:17:00.005-04:00

The cover story of this month's Atlantic, on the new paparazzi, is probably the worst piece by David Samuels I have ever read. If you purport to seriously contemplate the celebrity-media complex, and splash Britney Spears on your cover, you have to go all in. Otherwise, the whole thing is just a tease, and you're left -- as The Atlantic was -- with a rather dull story about a writer sitting next to photographers whose job it is to stalk celebrities. Shockingly, these people wait around for celebrities to do stuff. I did not need The Atlantic to tell me this.

On some level, though, I'm sympathetic to their obvious hope to move newsstand copies by putting Spears on the cover. But regardless, if you're going to dabble in this sort of thing -- the Britney Think Piece -- it's much better to go the route that Rolling Stone did, when it had the talented Vanessa Grigoriadis dive head first into Spears' life and paint a picture of a celebrity culture that has destroyed a young woman's life.

Why pretend to be above giving your readers what they want -- and what you, however coyly, have promised?

Update: It occurs to me that this post came out as the product of unfairness and imprecision. One of the cardinal rules of good media criticism is that you must critique the piece that was written, on its own terms, not the piece that you thought should have been written. In that way, the comparison to Grigoriadis' piece is unfair to Samuels, who set out to follow a certain group of paparazzi around and write about their lives and that experience, a project that differs from Rolling Stone's. I still think that it's not the most compelling thing that I've read, and that it pales in comparison to the work that was done here or here, or even here, but then, I think there's only so much you can do with a group of subjects whose job is simply to stalk people, whatever the background of those subjects may be.

Regarding my imprecision, it's important to note that the headline, layout, and pullquotes that attend a piece are typically not done with the writer's input. In this case, I think, frankly, that the editors at The Atlantic wanted to have it both ways -- they had an intellectually defensible piece on paparazzi, but dressed it up with excited, Britney-centric pullquotes; photos of Britney Spears; a headline and cover promo all about Spears; and a cover shot focused on her (and, yes, the paparazzi, in the background). It's hard to believe there weren't some economic factors involved here, but in any event, to the extent there's a mismatch between all that stuff and the piece itself, and to the extent it leads you to expect something that the piece isn't intended to deliver, the blame should be apportioned properly.

Update 2: Hey, apparently I'm "one blogger" -- nameless but existent! Question: Can't something be both "a nice bit of gonzo journalism" and the worst piece by this writer I've read? Confusing!

Muni Bonds

2008-03-03T08:02:00.002-05:00

The Times' story this morning is good, but if you're up for more, you could do worse than Jesse Eisinger's recent piece on muni bond insurance for Portfolio magazine. (For instance, it's not just that municipalities "rarely dishonor their debts," as the Times writes; according to a large study discussed by Eisinger, over a course of thirty years they've defaulted just over 0.1 percent of times.)

A New Coalition?

2008-02-29T14:49:00.003-05:00

Ron Brownstein has a characteristically insightful piece about the voting trends in the Democratic primaries to date -- we've seen younger, more affluent, more liberal, and more minority voters, coinciding with an overall boost in turnout -- and what those trends mean for the party and this year's general election.

I've remarked to a few people that most of the analysis of the primaries you see has a very short shelf life; it's worthless in a day or two, if it was ever worth much to begin with. This is the rare piece that actually looks closely at a large amount of data and attempts to synthesize it into something useful. It might only be good for a few months, but even that, in the scheme of things, would be something of an accomplishment.

Brooks on Buckley

2008-02-29T08:56:00.001-05:00

David Brooks' remembrance of William F. Buckley, who helped jumpstart the young Brooks' career and worked with him at National Review, is kind. So kind, in fact, that he's managed to look beyond the anti-Semitism latent in Buckley's decision to deny him the editorship of NR on the grounds that Brooks was Jewish.

I'm not actually suggesting that Brooks should've mentioned this in this sort of piece, but I do think we're running the risk here of being so kind to the man and his legacy that we overlook the uglier aspects of his career. Yes, he had a talent for writing that many admired (though his syntactical complications and preference for ten-dollar words frequently made his prose bad); he was incredibly wealthy and (reportedly) well-mannered; and he lived a life of public intellectual decadence that many of his admirers probably wanted for themselves. But he also held some rather unpleasant views at times when it actually mattered, and even his proteges need to reckon with them at some point.

Quote of the Day

2008-02-28T22:33:00.004-05:00

John Lanchester:

[The] news media are crushed by commercial pressure, squeezed by the need for speed, corrupted by PR, indifferent to their own best traditions of independence, recklessly indifferent to the central functions of reporting and checking facts, systematically lied to by commercial interests and governments, and in far too many respects, simply indifferent to the truth.

But that's not about our press. It's about the British news media. The parallels, of course, are hard to miss.

Photo courtesy of GiantsFanatic

Kinsley Kriticism

2008-02-28T19:03:00.003-05:00

From a Post chat transcript:

Washington: How much criticism are you get from your left-wing brethen for your take on this John McCain story?
Michael Kinsley: None at all. I've gotten more favorable feedback from that piece than anything i've written for years.

Well, if I may. I find it a little unfortunate that a liberal commentator would use his position as a columnist for a national newspaper to jokingly criticize the Times for running a sloppy story intimating an affair when, at the same time, the story contained mostly undisputed facts demonstrating that the man who supposedly hates special interests intervened in a regulatory matter on one of their behalves.

The whole affair would seem to undermine McCain's reputation for being someone who is "honest, courageous, likable and intelligent." That, at least, is the reputation that Kinsley told me McCain had when, a week before the Times story broke, he declared that he would "vote against McCain, but it is going to take work, and there will be moments of doubt." You would think an acute demonstration of hypocrisy -- and subsequent lying about it -- would bring about one of those moments. If it did, the evidence is yet to be seen.

Crossposted

Obamanomics

2008-02-28T08:59:00.002-05:00

Kudos to Matt Cooper for producing a mostly worthless endorsement of Obama's economic policies, or team, or something. In a nutshell:

[W]hen it comes to comparing economic positions, the choice between Clinton and Obama is a coin toss. When it comes to personnel, Obama's team is less tested but more interesting. In other areas, Obama is not without his dreary names from the past. His foreign policy team includes Tony Lake, one of the less successful Clinton veterans. But overall, the faces are fresher, edgier.

The first point is true, but not true enough that someone writing about politics for a business magazine should wave the differences off in an opening paragraph and write, as Cooper does, that "when I sat down to write about Obamanomics, it struck me to look at the delivery." It's true that the domestic policies of Clinton and Obama are similar, but not entirely so -- and not on health care (though opinions diverge on how important the key difference is). I hate to be uncharitable here, but a good default rule is that when a reporter glosses over policy differences, especially in a piece that sets out to probe policy differences, it might be that this is because the writer is ill-equipped to evaluate the distinctions. (Cooper, for instance, writes that Obama's broadband policy is "more detailed than Clinton's." Except it's not just more detailed -- it's also better.)

Cooper's second point -- that "Obama's team is less tested but more interesting" -- is based on the remarkably superficial argument that his advisors are younger. Also? One really smart person he knows works for Obama.

On the last point -- that in other areas, Obama has "dreary names from the past," like Tony Lake on foreign policy -- Cooper is precisely wrong in his implication. Foreign policy is where Obama actually distinguishes himself, and the fact that Lake was, as Cooper puts it, "one of the less successful Clinton veterans" is neither here nor there, unless you're strongly invested in evaluating people's merit by looking to the way they navigate complicated bureaucracies with other ambitious and strong-willed people.

All that said, Cooper is right to note that Obama doesn't get the credit one might expect for the way his campaign has been run: "Obama's campaign is a testament to his abilities. It's flexible. It's fast. And it got built quickly, unlike the Clinton machine, which has been assembling itself for years, like a conglomerate that keeps acquiring new companies." That point is all the more worthwhile coming from Cooper, who (as he discloses) is married to a card-carrying member of the Clinton machine.

The Case Against Newspaper Endorsements of Presidential Candidates

2008-02-28T08:37:00.000-05:00

Demonstrating once again that he's the media reporter with the best sources from within the Times, Gabriel Sherman reports on the internal deliberations that led up to the paper's endorsement of Hillary Clinton:

According to Times sources, the paper almost didn't back Clinton. The divisions within the Gray Lady's editorial board mirrored the deep divide that has split Democrats in this tightly contested campaign. The 20-member board had initially leaned toward Obama, Times sources say. But in January, after the board had debated the endorsement in two separate sessions, Times chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. decided to favor Clinton.

And why would Sulzberger have done this? "Some have noted," writes Sherman, "that one source of Sulzberger's support for Clinton might be his close friendship with Steve Rattner, the former Times reporter-turned-private equity financier who is a prominent Clinton donor (and Sulzberger's gym buddy)."

Even if this weren't the case, it's kind of crazy that one man could exercise this much influence over a decision that many people in the political media take pretty seriously. Sulzberger, after all, does not have a particularly strong reputation as someone with a lot of intellectual heft. And yet this is how editorials work -- the publisher is ultimately in charge.

I'm on the record as someone who is not a fan of newspaper editorials in general. A good case can and has been made for abolishing them altogether -- read Timothy Noah on this point here; the warmed-over version by Eric Alterman here -- but, as Noah argues, they do serve a useful function when endorsing candidates in local elections, where the gap between the information and engagement of the paper, on the one hand, and its readers, on the other, can be fairly large. Although I don't buy Rick Stengel's argument against newspaper endorsements of national candidates -- unlike Stengel, I think most readers can tell the difference between the editorial and news sides of papers -- it does strike me as a fairly useless exercise for newspapers to be telling their readers how to vote in presidential contests, particularly when a thoughtful argument amounts to about 1,000 words.

Ultimately, a paper like the Times does its job right when it gives readers enough information, and in the right context, to draw their own conclusions. If I were Sulzberger and interested in the long-term health of the Times, I would focus on that goal. The endorsements should be beside the point.

Crossposted

Honest Question

2008-02-27T15:06:00.003-05:00

How does this sort of flashback square with the claim that it's silly to compare someone's past position on Iraq to their current position?

The Times Op-Ed Page Explained

2008-02-27T10:38:00.003-05:00

From Gail Collins, former Editorial Page Editor and current columnist: "My mandate now is to help the chattering classes chatter."

Yikes.

Let me say that, for the record, I happen to think Collins has become a fairly decent columnist. Her incessant bashing of our silly presidential nomination process has been right up my alley, and a nice antidote to all of the pieces by journalists who let their urge to master and war-game the intricacies of the process overshadow the perverseness of it all. She can also be fairly witty at times.

That said, in her self-described mandate to "help the chattering classes chatter" you can see why the op-ed pages are so consistently bad. You make people chatter by passing along gossip, reducing complicated issues and personalities to cute names and exercises in alliteration, treating politicians like characters in a television show, and so forth. Actually informing people who lack the time and knowledge to chatter is something of a secondary concern -- which is why, presumably, that out of about ten columnists for the paper, exactly one has an actual, bona fide area of expertise.

Kristol Watch

2008-02-25T07:28:00.004-05:00

Looks like Bill Kristol passed on the opportunity to criticize his newest employer for the high-profile story that even critics of his favored candidate concede was poorly written. Obviously, the guy wasn't going to launch a broadside against the Times from within its own pages -- even Kristol's hard-line neoconservatism is less consistent than his fixation on advancing his own career and media profile -- but I envisioned at least a passing critical reference to the article.

Instead, we get a rather uninspired piece suggesting that Barack Obama's patriotism is insincere, conveniently coinciding with Michael Crowley's observation that this will be the new attack on the candidate. The evidence is nonsensical (Michelle Obama, the lapel pin), but this is the best part:

Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?

I have no doubt that a large number of commentators -- including one Bill Kristol, in the nation's foremost newspaper -- will be trying to help "the American people" to some (or maybe all!) of those conclusions.

Newspapers and Sunk Costs

2008-02-18T19:07:00.005-05:00

Hendrik Hertzberg ponders why the Times thought it newsworthy to report that Obama was not, in fact, a drug-addicted junkie:

The news here is—what, exactly? That Obama, who now appears grounded, motivated, and poised, formerly appeared grounded, motivated, and poised? That his inner uncertainties, such as they were, were more apparent to himself than to others? That he was marginally less of a pothead than he has made himself out to
be?

It was, indeed, a curious piece. If I had to venture a guess, I'm guessing that this is not the piece that the Times thought it would end up with when the story was assigned. Obama's admitted drug use, after all, probably seemed like an area sure to yield some juicy tidbits -- maybe Obama was actually a years-long heroin addict! etc. As Charles Kaiser wrote after the Times went on another silly quest to take Obama down a notch:

[I]nvestigative reporting is expensive. And when a reporter spends weeks on a fruitless quest, her editor is often reluctant to kill her story, even when she has turned up nothing worth printing. This time, he should have spiked the whole thing.

The same thing probably should've been done here, as well. At a minimum, the piece probably didn't deserve to go on the front page, what with it's lack of anything to report and all. Media outlets, however, are usually not inclined to let sunk costs get in the way of an opportunity to make poor editorial decisions.

Crossposted

Adventures in Nepotism

2008-02-18T17:48:00.001-05:00

See, this is more like the appropriate response to transparent nepotism, but I wonder (in all honesty) whether it's a bit much.

Gingrich on "Listening"

2008-02-13T20:56:00.004-05:00

Foreign Policy asked a bunch of foreign policy types to suggest the one gesture that the next American president must make in order to improve/restore the country's standing in the world. Reza Aslan suggests stripping "the war on terror" of its religious connotations. Jessica Matthews says we should take the threat of regime change in Syria off the table. Newt Gingrich, an expert in pretending to know things he doesn't and (sadly) someone considered to be an Ideas man in the Republican party, mixes things up by offering up ... nothing!

As soon as the new president is elected, he or she should immediately embark on a series of pre-inauguration visits to capitals around the world: not just London, Paris, and Jerusalem, but Ankara, Amman, Beijing, and Cairo. ... [T]he president-elect should simply listen. There should be no formal agenda, only questions. How do these other leaders think the United States can be most effective with its economic, military, and cultural might? And in turn, how do they propose to help achieve mutual goals during the next four years?

Sounds alright. Except:

Listening does not mean obeying, or even agreeing. Trust begins not with agreement, but with mutual respect, which comes from an appreciation and understanding of the other person’s point of view.

Okay, so maybe we don't obey or agree, but perhaps we consider what other people are actually telling us? Well not so much (emphasis added):

Our ultimate ends remain unchanged. But process and style matter. If the next resident can reverse the perception that American power is deaf to the appeals of the orld, the United States will once again be encouraged and expected to lead.

So we'll listen but not change our minds about anything. I suspect that's unlikely to placate, like, everyone.

Photo courtesy of IowaPolitics.com

Krugman vs. Rich

2008-02-13T20:30:00.002-05:00

I'm going to interrupt this ~~totally planned hiatus~~ okay, unplanned, super-long break, in order to pass this along, from Paul Krugman:

As I’ve said, you’ve been played like a fiddle by journalists who hate the Clintons, and just make stuff up about how evil they are. And while this may help Obama for now, these people are ultimately not your friends.

So how did this come up? Whose work is at issue when Krugman describes "journalists who hate the Clintons, and just make stuff up about how evil they are"? Why none other than his op-ed colleague, Frank Rich.

Though you kind of have to wonder whether Krugman has any friends on the op-ed page, it's worth noting that this sort of criticism is scarcer than it should be. Now if we could only get these folks to use each other's names.

Back Linking

2008-02-04T07:46:00.000-05:00

If you read the timestamps on this blog, you can see that I've been a bit backed up over the last couple weeks. It's prevented me, among many other things, from reading and linking to this excellent piece by Paul Farhi in the American Journalism Review about whether online advertising can save newspapers. The article is occasionally blinded by a focus on topline revenue as opposed to bottom-line profits and margins (print advertising revenue may be going down, but if margins on digital advertising are higher, you don't need a one-to-one increase to offset the decline in profits), but it's generally a smart exploration of the key issues.

The Power of the Panel

2008-02-04T07:33:00.001-05:00

I was all set to praise Alessandra Stanley for her piece about how the Sunday shows feature all sorts of pundits with political allegiances, but then she drew this silly contrast between Fox News Sunday, on the one hand, and Meet the Press and This Week, on the other:

Fox News is normally the cable news channel of blatant, even blistering opinion, but in contrast, its Sunday talk show, led by Chris Wallace, relies on reporters, not former strategists: Brit Hume of Fox News, and Juan Williams and Mara Liasson, both of National Public Radio. (The one exception is William Kristol, a former adviser to Dan Quayle, the elder George Bush’s vice president, and a conservative columnist who recently joined The New York Times’s editorial page.)

This is wrong on a couple scores. First, Brit Hume is on Fox News Sunday not as a reporter, but as a pundit. During the week, he's an anchorman -- a frequently biased one, but still. On the weekend, he has it both ways: He says whatever he wants because he's not anchoring the show, but he also leverages the credibility he has among his audience as a newsperson to lend extra weight to his views.

Second, the contrast between conservative pundits and reporters of the supposedly liberal news media is not the result of some fealty to journalistic principles -- it's part of the show's strategy to advance conservative views. The only people on the panel who can occasionally take issue with what the conservatives are saying are not ideologues and are tied down by their professional obligations. (Juan Williams occasionally plays a liberal, but he does so unevenly and generally incompetently.) At best, the panel's balance produces a wash, but typically, the perspective that comes through loud and clear is the conservative one.

Spoiling For a Fight

2008-02-04T07:19:00.000-05:00

Brian Stelter goes inside the CNN control room to provide some color for what we already know -- that the producers, above all, want a fight, not an informative debate:

A serious discussion on pressing national issues may be good for the country. But it isn’t necessarily good television.

That was the prospect faced Thursday night by CNN, which broadcast what may be the final Democratic debate between Senator Hillary Clinton and Senator Barack Obama. While the candidates seemed to captivate the A-list crowd of Hollywood stars and power brokers in Los Angeles’s Kodak Theater, in CNN’s control room — inside a crowded truck parked behind the auditorium — the producers were exasperated and at times seemingly bored by their own broadcast.

“She didn’t answer the question at all,” said David Bohrman, the Washington bureau chief for CNN, sighing deeply as Mrs. Clinton discussed immigration.

“It’s a like a press conference,” said Jane Maxwell, a CNN producer, expressing the frustration inside the room.

People (rightly) bemoan this tendency all the time, particularly as it relates to cable news, so I'm not going to belabor the point that political news tends to be fixated on conflict rather than actual information. But it's interesting to read an actual behind-the-scenes account to give some color to the issue.

Annals of Conservative Journalism

2008-01-25T12:08:00.000-05:00

Matthew Continetti was on the short list to be the Times' new conservative columnist? Seriously? Just to take a trip down memory lane, his career sort of started to take off when he whined about an anti-war event at Columbia, where I was also a student at the time (though not present at the event in question). Here is an example of the impeccable judgment that helped him along the path to a writing gig for the Standard and the occasional endorsement of his work by the Times, where he pops up as a blog and op-ed contributor from time to time:

Let's pretend that al Qaeda didn't kill 3,000 innocents, and that merciless regimes like Saddam Hussein's wouldn't help them do it again and again. Tenured professors ensconced in Ivory Tower echo chambers — like those in the Low Library rotunda on Wednesday night — can afford to turn a blind eye to the harsh realities of a dangerous world. The rest of us cannot.

Naturally, this prescience and scrupulousness with facts means that he just gets promoted up the career ladder for bad conservative writers. He's spent much of the past year writing with little to no insight about the conservative crop of presidential contenders and rather unashamedly fawning over Rudy Giuliani, at least until it became clear that wasn't going so well. Even so, because the establishment of bad conservative writers likes him, he's to be taken seriously by papers like the Times.

We have a problem here.

On a tenuously related note, I'm happy to see Gabriel Sherman, recently departed from Portfolio and now contributing to TNR, writing about the Times. He has deep and good sources, which were used to great effect when he was writing for the Observer about the Times' decision to delay the NSA surveillance story.

Crossposted

Reconciliation Watch

2008-01-23T08:46:00.000-05:00

Don't tell Bill Kristol, but the de-Baathification law that just passed in Iraq may not set the country inexorably on the path toward glorious political reconciliation.

Sans snark, let me just say that this is excellent and important reporting on the part of the Post team.

Not "Ha Ha Funny"

2008-01-23T08:07:00.000-05:00

In what I must assume is some sort of deliberate self-parody, the Post today features two stories on the Democratic field's messages on the economy while managing not to tell you anything about their substantive positions. The story headlined "Democrats on Trail Rip Stimulus Talks with Bush" not only doesn't tell you about the Democrats' plans -- it tells you, instead, about only the Republican field's (crazy, not helpful) plans.

Below the fold of the same page, we get "Obama Turns Message to Economy." This story, however, is about Obama's rhetoric, not his actual plans. The most we get on the latter score is this: "Obama has plenty of specific proposals, including those on health care and tax reform." I bet he does! Perhaps we can mention some of them next time?

Update: Ruth Marcus does the work today that the news pages can't be bothered with.

The Wire and the Media

2008-01-22T22:12:00.000-05:00

Jack Shafer says much of what should be said about David Simon's critique of the newspaper business in The Wire. As comforting as it may be to pin the problems of journalism on identifiable villains, this is a very simplistic view of things.

I agree, as Simon is channeled at the end of this CJR piece, that the story of newspapers is really a story-in-miniature of a much larger story of the modern economy, but much of what happened to newspapers is the result of a rather dull story about changing consumer patterns and new, free media occupying advertising spaces previously owned by local news outlets. The postwar newspaper depended critically on a particular type of economy -- where retailers and other businesses had to pay handsomely for exposure, and where that exposure could be had primarily through news media. That is not the world we live in today, and it's not because of greedy publishers.

I also think that Simon misunderstands the economics of the news when he complains (frequently) about how newspapers are giving away their products on the internet. I have said this before, but I'll say it again: The news -- the content -- has always been "free." What folks have paid for are (at most) the costs of the distribution mechanism for the particular news content they're consuming. If it's a newspaper, they're paying for the paper. If it's cable news, they're paying their cable bills. If it's network news, they're paying ... nothing.

I'm hesitant to render a judgment on Simon's storyline on the fictional Sun just a third into this season, but given the topic of this post, I'll just say a few words about it. And those few words are, basically, that I think it's a deeply flawed storyline. From Simon's own words in news reports, I get the sense that the top editors will be fleshed out in more detail as the season progresses, but for now, they're rather silly caricatures of self-absorbed, prize-obsessed manager types. And the focus, so far, seems to be on the tenuous connection between belt-tightening and fabulists.

But the presence of the occasional Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair is, quite simply, not the problem with modern journalism, and to the extent it is a problem worth any note, it is an insignificant one. For reasons that are not entirely clear, the occasional fraud in the media industry has a much greater impact than the occasional fraud in any other business. Although no one tends to believe that a rogue trader or analyst discredits the entire banking industry, the entire journalism community wrings its hands when there is a Blair. To some extent, this is healthy and it helps the industry to self-regulate, but it also creates the false impression that the rare swindler in the profession is, in fact, a symptom of much larger problems, and the available evidence suggests that this is a flatly incorrect view of things.

But of course, this storyline in The Wire is drawn from Simon's real-life experience at The Sun, where, according to him, editors looked the other way because a hot young thing with prize-winning talent produced great, if suspect, copy. The anecdote, however, should not serve as the basis for a critique of an entire industry. And for the moment, it makes me think that Simon has become too self-regarding to provide an accurate rendering of the industry as it truly exists. But hopefully, the trajectory of the storyline will change, and I'll be proven terribly wrong.

Better Reporting, Please

2008-01-22T08:18:00.000-05:00

You would not know that Barack Obama is ahead in the primary delegate count were you simply to read the Post's front page snapshot of the race today (emphasis mine):

The issue of race is also sensitive for Obama. He needs strong black turnout to win South Carolina and create momentum as he heads into the 22-state showdown Feb. 5.
...
Obama badly needs a victory in South Carolina after consecutive losses in New Hampshire and Nevada, and he will devote most of his campaign time this week to barnstorming the state.

Whoa. Consecutive losses in New Hampshire and Nevada? Two whole states?

This will never happen, but it would be nice if the writers who are creating the conditions for this supposed necessity would, from time to time, cop to the fact that they're doing it when they write things like this. We'd all be better off if the nomination process lasted more than, like, three weeks.

Also? How about we don't write passages like these without providing the candidate's original quotes so that readers can come to their own conclusions? (Clearly, Dan Balz and Shailagh Murray can't be troubled to do it themselves.)

The debate turned personal almost from the outset, as Obama accused the Clintons of misrepresenting his comments about Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party's ideas, as well as his record on the Iraq war. "That is simply not true," he said.
...
In an interview Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America," Obama accused Bill Clinton of distorting some of his recent statements.
...
The candidate and his advisers are upset with statements that both Clintons made about Obama's position on the Iraq war, his campaign's efforts in the Nevada caucus and his remarks about Reagan.

From what I read here, I understand Obama is upset. And while my own views on this issue are in line with those of Paul Krugman, an uninformed reader might be interested to learn whether the Clintons are playing dirty or whether Obama is complaining for no reason. Crazily, they might be reading this article hoping to learn an actual thing or two.

Crossposted

The Greenhouse Effect

2008-01-20T14:39:00.001-05:00

I've always been baffled by the effect that Linda Greenhouse has on conservative "legal" "writers," but they really can't stand her, despite a huge body of work showing that -- whatever her personal political leanings -- she's a consummate, deeply knowledgeable professional. Kudos to Clark Hoyt for knocking back another silly attack in the Times today.

Bloggy

2008-01-19T12:35:00.000-05:00

I'm a little baffled by this piece on John McCain by Dana Goldstein. She argues that a flyer that McCain recently distributed in South Carolina, about how his daughter Bridget was adopted from an orphanage, "contains several phrases that play into the ugliest rhetorical practices of the pro-life movement." Except that there don't seem to be "several." There appears to be exactly one: "The mailer refers to 'helping women who face crisis pregnancies': Crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) are a key component of anti-choice activism."

Fair enough, I suppose. But why is this a 12-paragraph piece rather than a brief blog item? Editors, are you there?

Irony Alert

2008-01-17T14:38:00.000-05:00

A writer for a not-particularly-successful alt weekly wishes to inform us that poor analysis on political blogs is corrupting reporting at more established news outlets. He makes this complaint about the analytic abilities of an extremely large number of people without identifying a single one or providing a single example.

Please, tell us more about the "mediocre analysis" that bloggers provide.

Banality

2008-01-14T15:39:00.000-05:00

The standard knock against Bill Kristol seems to be that he's not writing anything original. Fair enough.

I, however, am going to inadvertently defend him (sort of) by criticizing almost everyone else. Most political writers generate unoriginal copy. I think it's much more prevalent on the right, for many reasons (a more unified voice, for one -- a bad thing intellectually, a good thing organizationally), but it's also the case on the left too. Bob Herbert isn't exactly knocking his columns out of the park every time. Eric Alterman is, in column form, a pretty unimpressive one-note. And so on.

Kristol wrote a rather uninspired, stale defense of the Surge. In this month's Atlantic, I just read a months-behind-the-conversation piece on how the right is resurrecting the "stab in the back" narrative; the writer, Jon Rauch, coupled it with an equally tired call for bipartisanship. Unoriginality is hardly a limited phenomenon. It's not equally true across the board at political publications, but it's true enough that I think the critiques of Kristol should move into more substantive territory in order to be effective.

Altercation

2008-01-09T21:05:00.000-05:00

Eric Alterman today:

Did anyone at all call the Democratic contest correctly? Do actual real people really care about silly pundit predictions? How can an entire industry continue to exist when the product it provides is both unwanted and defective, and proven repeatedly to be so? That's my question for the day.

And it's a good one!

Can You Blame Her?

2008-01-07T22:41:00.001-05:00

My reactions to the coverage of Hillary Clinton have been almost identical to those of Kevin Drum. I think it's obvious that the coverage of her "choking up," or whatever you want to call it, is ridiculous, and who knows whether it helps or hurts her. But here is the point, nicely teed up by this coverage, that I think folks should keep in mind when they read or hear about HRC's tight press operation: This is what she's up against.

I won't wholly endorse the bunker mentality of the operation, but it's easy to understand, isn't it? The day before an extremely important contest (by the media's standards) in New Hampshire, this is the story. And tomorrow morning, as people are getting ready to vote, this is what will be in their papers. Not a thoughtful exploration of important policy differences between the Democratic candidates -- you know, that stuff that elections are actually supposed to be about. It's coverage of a piece with that she received almost a year ago, when the press was all worked up over who she was referring to when she spoke of "evil men."

It makes you ask: Can you blame her for wondering what's going to come out of these reporters' mouths -- these reporters who would produce the most idiotic "journalism" imaginable when the subject is Hillary Clinton? Can you blame her for occasionally thinking some people in the media really are after her?

Crossposted

Annals of Morning News

2008-01-07T09:24:00.000-05:00

Oy. So last night I read this story in the Times about how CBS's Early Show is retooling itself -- new anchor, new set, new theme music. I didn't expect much, because once you cut through the puffery from the show's new EP, Shelley Ross, it didn't sound like much was going to change. Because I'm a glutton for punishment, and because I've written before about how they need to shake things up over at CBS News, I decided to tune in. I discovered, unsurprisingly, that the show still stinks!

The new anchor, Maggie Rodriguez, was promoted from The Saturday Early Show, which I bet you didn't know even existed. She could be competent, but it's hard to say, since she's weighed down by Harry Smith, an unfunny man with a decent grasp of public affairs who has been woefully miscast, and Julie Chen, who, if she weren't Les Moonves's wife, probably would've gotten the boot years ago. Their weatherman, Dave Price, continues to strain so hard to be quirky that it makes for viewing that is alternately awkward and painful. The only one of the bunch who has managed to retain a scrap of respectability is Russ Mitchell, who does the news rundown as competently as one can do it in the ridiculously short span of five minutes.

The new set is shiny and all, but the color palette is still more suited for an evening broadcast. Perhaps the person who thinks heavy blues and grays are the way to go at 8:00 am can flip the channel one morning and see what the show's far more successful rivals are doing. And the music, which the Times' Brian Stelter charitably called "upbeat" and "slightly aggressive," is in fact some bizarre hip-hop beat. In an uncharacteristic episode of self-awareness, the anchors mocked the music by pointing this out and then "dancing," if that's what one can call it, like Eminem.

Until this morning, I retained the misguided hope that the new format might entail a positive change or two to the mixture of features that the show runs. I was right that there would be new features but wrong that they'd be any good. A few minutes into the 8:00 hour, viewers were told of the debut of "Paparazzi: Behind the Pictures," which, in CBS's words, tells "viewers how photographers actually get those shots that make their way around the world." If this sounds like a vaguely news-y way to broadcast embarrassing pictures of celebrities, you're right! The intro to the segment featured pictures from all angles of Britney Spears being carried into an ambulance, after which we got to see an interview with someone who runs a website with embarrassing images of celebrities. If that wasn't informative enough, you could wait a while for a piece on handbags.

So far as I can tell, the show is going to be about as awful as it's always been. Sure it's unfair to read too much into the first broadcast of a show, there's always room for improvement, etc., but there's no indication whatsoever that CBS has any interest in actually changing the underlying formula that is, in theory, supposed to make a morning newscast work. Instead, they're still trying to make the standard model work for them, using most of the same elements -- bland hosts with nothing approximating chemistry, a sterile and cold set, and features that pander to the least informed viewers possible -- that have kept them a consistent failure for years.

This isn't to say that the other morning shows are "better," in any journalistically meaningful sense of the word -- only that they're better in trafficking in the conventional morning show pablum. To put things in perspective, The Today Show this morning featured a segment -- I kid you not -- about a man who turned blue. Pitting this against the paparazzi feature, one is left, as always when watching the morning newscasts, with the question: These are our choices?

Crossposted

Update: I really liked this comment to the HuffPost version of this, and not just because it's the only comment. (Write a story about morning shows, and you already face an uphill battle. Write about a morning show no one watches, and you're at the bottom of a very steep hill. Anyway!)

Who cares about any of the 3 network morning shows? They don't provide actual NEWS and I don't care to waste my valuable morning time watching puff pieces about dancing air traffic controllers.

They can't figure out if they want to report news or be Regis & Kelly. Trying to be both doesn't work.

I think that's right about Regis & Kelly. And I say this as an embarrassed viewer of the show. Also, this person may have been watching The Early Show this morning, because the funny thing is that they really did have a segment on a dancing air traffic controller!

Punditry and Provocation

2008-01-05T11:57:00.000-05:00

Egads. Did Jack Shafer really write this, in defense of Bill Kristol, with a straight face?

Oh, you say, Kristol's journalistic crime is not just that he was wrong about launching the war but that he has been absolutely wrong about every chapter in the war since the shock-and-awe bombs lit up Baghdad. Well, not wrong at every turn. From where I write this afternoon, he looks pretty goddamn prescient about the wisdom of mounting the "surge" and adopting a counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq. Pundits are wrong sometimes and right others. Pundits shouldn't lose or win gigs on the basis of how many of their predictions come true but whether they write interesting copy. Kristol—love him or hate him—writes interesting copy.

Now, you could respond to this by (a) noting that Shafer is wrong about Kristol being "goddamn prescient" about the surge, which, contrary to Kristol's claims, has yet to produce any meaningful political results; or (b) bemoaning how crazy it is that it shouldn't matter if a pundit -- whose job, at its core, is to interpret facts for people -- is consistently wrong. Those would be legitimate ways to approach this.

For myself, I look at this as a specimen of sorts -- a rare, unvarnished look into the mindset of many writers and media critics. Shafer doesn't speak for everyone, of course, but I suspect this sentiment is widely shared. It is a view of punditry as an intellectual exercise in provoking people and writing "interesting copy," not informing them or helping them understand the world. If you take a look at many of America's prominent writers, this is obvious, but rarely does someone with influence within the profession actually open up and put this sad sentiment forward without even a hint of embarrassment.

Bhutto's Record

2008-01-04T12:59:00.001-05:00

William Dalrymple takes the prize for best writing in America on Bhutto's actual legacy, rather than what her friends from Harvard are writing about her. I mean it when I say the whole thing should be read, but these couple of paragraphs capture things well:

Benazir Bhutto’s death is, of course, a calamity, particularly as she embodied the hopes of so many liberal Pakistanis. But, contrary to the commentary we’ve seen in the last week, she was not comparable to Myanmar’s Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. Ms. Bhutto’s governments were widely criticized by Amnesty International and other groups for their use of death squads and terrible record on deaths in police custody, abductions and torture. As for her democratic bona fides, she had no qualms about banning rallies by opposing political parties while in power.
...
Benazir Bhutto was certainly a brave and secular-minded woman. But the obituaries painting her as dying to save democracy distort history. Instead, she was a natural autocrat who did little for human rights, a calculating politician who was complicit in Pakistan’s becoming the region’s principal jihadi paymaster while she also ramped up an insurgency in Kashmir that has brought two nuclear powers to the brink of war.

But then, Dalyrmple may not have had lunch with her at Harvard or Oxford, now did he?

Iowa Madness

2008-01-03T23:13:00.000-05:00

Folks, one state had its caucuses. One rural state. One disproportionately white state. If you haven't already, you need to reject the idea that the results give you extremely significant results, because this is only the case if the media says it is and if people, in turn, accept this nonsense. Unfortunately, people will probably read quite a bit into it -- especially because there is a very nice storyline about both Obama and Huckabee upsetting frontrunners -- but we shouldn't lose sight of how absurd it is to engage in the exercise of overanalyzing these results.

It is not the case, as David Axeldrod says, that "there was a hunger for change in this country." At best, there was "a hunger for change" among Iowa Democratic caucusgoers. "The country" appears to have a different view of things for the time being. And HRC's "experience" was not "decisively rebutted by the voters." It was rebutted by Iowa Democratic caucusgoers (and hardly "decisively" at that).

There's no point linking to more because you're going to see it everywhere, even from writers who should know better. The complaint here is about precision, about accurately describing the events that just took place, and about hoping (in vain) that we can prevent the insanity of the primary season from further enveloping us.

And for the record, I'd be happy with any of the three three top-tier Democrats winning the nomination, so this isn't a gripe about the results. But Obama supporters beware: There's a media narrative that often follows The Surprise Upset -- and it's The Flame-Out.

Crossposted

Beating the Market

2007-12-31T11:28:00.000-05:00

Or not:

On Wall Street, buyout professionals are seen as the smart money. But their new shareholders are starting to look like the dumb money.
The gilded realm of private equity — in which moguls use private money to buy stockholder-owned companies — has turned into dross for everyday investors this year. And hedge funds, those secretive investment pools for the rich and, increasingly, the not-so-rich, have been losers for the investing public as well.
...
Blackstone’s shareholders — among them Fidelity Investments, the mutual fund giant, and the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System — have not been so fortunate. They would have made more money this year investing in an old-fashioned index fund that tracks the S.& P. 500-stock index, which is up 4.24 percent.

The piece also contains this excellent quote from John E. Fitzgibbon, the publisher of IPOScoop.com, an online newsletter: "What Wall Street is about is smart guys thinking about ways to make money from dumb ones."

Covering Your Columnist

2007-12-30T10:08:00.000-05:00

So the Times' business section writes up the paper's announcement that Bill Kristol will become a weekly columnist next month (first reported a couple days ago). They get the part about how Kristol hates the paper and thinks it should have been criminally prosecuted, even though these stated positions weren't enough to keep him from taking their money. But the fact that he's a madman who has espoused, and will continue to espouse, very dangerous views doesn't register at all.

Actually, the article is pretty fitting: It's exactly this sort of coverage of extreme rightwing views, which strains to be evenhanded at the expense of calling things as they are, that allows a person like Kristol to remain an influential pundit.

What You Pay for When You Buy a Newspaper

2007-12-30T02:59:00.000-05:00

Justin Fox is right to take issue with David Lazarus' argument that newspapers "give away the store online" by allowing people to read their work for free:

News was already pretty close to free long before the Internet came along. It was free on TV, free on the radio, and effectively free in newspapers when you consider all the valuable stuff that came packaged with it for 25 or 50 cents, from comics to crosswords to classifieds to supermarket ads.

You can actually take this a step further. The money that people fork over for print newspapers isn't some premium for the value of the content inside. It's money that goes to covering the cost and distribution of the paper. (See Kinsley on this point, for instance.) So the notion that you would pay nothing for a paperless product actually isn't so crazy. Lazarus either doesn't know this or is obscuring it.

The crux of the issue is (and has been) about advertising revenue. First, despite huge and ever-increasing traffic, papers have not been able to charge rates for online ads equivalent to those they charge for print ads. The question for papers is how to close this gap -- how to convince advertisers that they're not paying enough or, more likely, how to make web advertising more appealing to consumers and thus advertisers. (Incidentally, my suspicion has been that papers are getting somewhat screwed by all of the information that can be generated for online ads: Advertisers can measure click-through rates, while measuring the efficacy of a print ad is quite a bit trickier. The conventional operating assumption seems to be that paper ads are more appealing to readers, but I've never had a problem ignoring them.) Second, papers are losing many of their advertisers, whether in print or online, because people who in the past would've run ads in classifieds sections can now just use Craigslist and other websites for free.

In any event, this is where I would focus my attention -- not on trying to convince people to pay because the product is so great, because they've been conditioned not to believe that. That may be unfortunate -- for all of their failings, newspapers are still pretty great things -- but that's the reality and it's not likely to change. In the meantime, perhaps papers like the LA Times can focus on making sure that their business writers demonstrate some meaningful knowledge of their subjects and can write about them with a decent amount of clarity.

Crossposted

Putting an End to World Poverty Will Help Too

2007-12-27T16:36:00.000-05:00

I am sure Robert Dallek's kid-gloves treatment in the Times of Elisabeth Bumiller's book on Condi Rice -- a book which sounds about as incisive as her work reporting on the White House -- has nothing to do with the fact that Bumiller is a reporter at the paper. This argument, for instance, hardly gets the derision it deserves:

Ms. Bumiller says that if President Bush and Ms. Rice can produce a settlement in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians and an end to North Korea’s nuclear program, it would give them claims on success that would significantly improve their historical reputations.

Yes, a reconciliation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- one of the most intractable in modern history -- would probably help them. As would rolling back the nuclear program in North Korea that started under the watch of the administration Rice has worked for since its beginning. It's all well and good to be evenhanded, but sometimes, Mr. Dallek, when people write things that are laughable, it's good to just laugh.

Roving Reporters

2007-12-27T00:10:00.000-05:00

Technology can do wonderful things, but I doubt it's going to be enough to keep the Post's foreign news coverage at its current level once, as the Observer informs us, the paper replaces some foreign bureaus "with a roving reporter who will cover several areas and countries at once." This is from an internal memo:

These new assignments will not be based in bureaus as we have known them. Instead, the correspondent will be the bureau. We need people who can live and work for extended periods out of a suitcase, who will organize their planning, reporting and writing around nothing more than a laptop, air card and cell phone. We seek reporters who will be comfortable traveling at least two and sometimes three weeks out of every four...
While each correspondent will have a base, we envision only a light presence, with no office, no formal staff, and a strong demand for work in the field.

Covering just one country was easy enough -- why not a few countries all at once?

Responding to this sort of hand-wringing, Jack Shafer once commented that "[t]he closures of foreign bureaus and downsizing of Washington offices by newspapers are much lamented by journalists, but how essential are they in an age when any reader can call up on his screen free coverage by the top U.S. dailies and the foreign press?" That doesn't do us much good when it's the top U.S. dailies that are scaling back their coverage, and when there's no indication that news organizations in other countries are going to pick up the slack.

And while there are plenty of non-Western countries with vibrant news media, this is generally not the case [PDF] -- and it's almost certainly not the case in those countries where skillful coverage is likely to be most valuable. For instance, the Observer adds that "[o]penings are available immediately for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia." After all, nothing particularly important ever happens in those parts...

Crossposted

The Wire, At Last

2007-12-25T21:39:00.000-05:00

I finally got around to watching The Wire, and I think it's fair to say that it basically took over my life: Over the last three weeks, I've watched roughly 50 hours of television on DVD. Almost everything else -- work, family, blogging -- seemed to fall by the wayside, as I spent a few hours every night watching more episodes (sometimes up to five, which I would not have guessed I could even do while maintaining my sanity) and falling further down the rabbit hole. Today I finished the fourth season and find myself oddly disoriented and directionless. I was able to briefly stave this off by reading The New Yorker article on the show, which I've been saving for months, but that's done now, too.

The show isn't flawless, but the fact that this straightforward claim is the best I can do (what piece of art is flawless?) itself says a lot. Seasons 1 and 2 are very good, and season 3 is great, but season 4 is something else entirely -- truly riveting television. The fifth and final season, which will introduce The Baltimore Sun's newsroom as a new focal point, will start in a few weeks and is already getting raves.

As for me, I'm going to try to get my life back on track.

Sharpton

2007-12-17T22:51:00.001-05:00

Ugh.

Baseball and the Media

2007-12-17T16:05:00.000-05:00

For the last couple years, as the steroids-in-baseball story has unfolded and expanded, it has become fairly common for media critics to deride sports journalists, arguing that they're too close to their subjects and have inexcusably looked the other way as drugs have tarnished things. Over the weekend, Tim Rutten of the LA Times put it nicely:

A vast apparatus of sports journalism was created to provide entertaining coverage of this new industry and yet, somehow, all but a handful of lonely sportswriters seem to have missed the biggest story of their era -- the transformation of baseball clubhouses into the plush equivalent of crack houses.

That fact alone raises disturbing questions about whether most of our sporting press has become too much a part of the sports/entertainment/industrial complex to give its readers and viewers an honest account of what transpires on our courts and playing fields.

To be perfectly honest, I don't follow sports that closely, so I'm always interested in hearing what fans have to say. But my sense is that the critique articulated by Rutten here is pretty dead on and that a decent case can be made that many sports journalists don't deserve to be called journalists at all. Reporting on baseball, for instance, has to aspire to more than providing a colorful highlight reel (whether this occurs on television in a literal sense or in print in a figurative sense); otherwise, it's a bit like giving readers a plot summary of a movie, which isn't really reporting in any meaningful sense. And let's not even talk about the deliberately clownish behavior that seems to be a prerequisite to providing commentary on the sports programs on ESPN and the like.

Part of the problem seems to be that so many reporters are fans -- lovers even -- of the sports that they cover, so they're reluctant to pursue potentially unpleasant revelations. The problem is also bound up with an intoxication with celebrity -- people who love sports look up to the players and, as a result, treat them with kid gloves. And then there's the access issue: If you start pursuing troubling stories aggressively, the people you depend on for quotes could shut you out. This last one, however, is a problem that pervades journalism of any sort, and it's a risk that every good reporter has to run, striking compromises along the way as necessary in order to give your readers the coverage they deserve. But as Rutten writes, part of the blame also lies with the public itself, which contains a large chunk of fans who don't seem to want to hear the truth. Friends of mine who follow baseball closely tell me that the ubiquity of steroids in the game has been obvious for many years, but they've still followed the game closely.

One elementary observation that seems to have gotten lost on many people who cover sports is that it is a business. And it deserves the scrutiny -- aggressive and frequent -- that any industry should get. In that way, it's no different than, say, the banking or pharmaceutical industries, which can't appeal to people's love of borrowing money or getting sick in the way that people in baseball can exploit fans' reverence for the game in order to try to excuse malfeasance.

Crossposted

Spoiling for a Fight

2007-12-17T00:20:00.000-05:00

These quotes from assorted media folk about how they love a good fight are quite good.

They were particularly interesting to read on a day when the Times runs a front-page story that looks like it was designed solely to advance the Surprise Upset Narrative I've alluded to before:

Particularly with respect to the primaries, the media is quite fond of laying into frontrunners and documenting/helping them get up-ended by competitors. The story on the Democratic side has become a fairly standard one -- a frontrunner and an inspirational, young, unconventional sort in the form of Obama. The media tends to be distrustful of people who do not fit within political conventions, but I would not be surprised if that impulse were overtaken in the coming months by the media's love for a good story -- one that could involve a triumphant hero and a surprise downfall.

The airy, meaningless headline -- "Obama Showing New Confidence With Iowa Sprint" -- is the first clue that this is what's going on. Notably, even Obama seems to understand the weirdness of what's happening. "A month ago, I was an idiot," he tells the Times. "This month, I’m a genius."

No Way to Pick a President

2007-12-16T17:26:00.000-05:00

At least Barack Obama was honest:

"You in Iowa have this extraordinary privilege of choosing who the next president of the United States is going to be. Whoever wins this caucus is likely to win the nomination and is likely to win the presidency. What a powerful, profound decision that is for you to make."

The sad thing is that this could be true! Which underscores, yet again, how ridiculous our primary system is. A bunch of people who are convinced that they take the election of the President more seriously than the rest of us gets to make a decision that will affect the whole country. Never mind the unrepresentativeness of the caucusgoers. Meanwhile, I live in New York City, which means that the only way I get to meaningfully participate is to donate money so that politicians can spend it on pandering to people in Iowa and New Hampshire. Nice, huh?

Timidity

2007-12-14T14:09:00.000-05:00

This is pretty good but still isn't strong enough. It's a nice little angle that The Politico has -- how conservative economists view Rudy Giuliani's rhetoric on tax cuts magically increasing revenues -- but even if they didn't have a problem with what he's saying, it would still the case that Giuliani is lying (as opposed to using "fuzzy math," as the headline puts it). And journalists should feel comfortable saying as much, without needing to filter or hedge it, because it has the distinctive virtue of being true.

Or, as no less an established media outlet as Time put it, "Tax Cuts Don't Boost Revenues." That is how it's done.

Not Partisan Enough or Too Partisan?

2007-12-14T13:53:00.000-05:00

Conservatives seem confused about what to think about the NIE on Iran. Earlier this week, Bret Stephens, who sits on the Journal's editorial board, told me that the intelligence agencies weren't political enough:

[W]e now have an "intelligence community" that acts as an authority unto itself, and cannot be trusted to obey its political masters, much less keep a secret. The administration's tacit acquiescence in this state of affairs may prove even more damaging than its wishful thinking on Iran.

And today, via Foreign Policy's Mike Boyer, John Ensign informs me that the intelligence agencies are too political:

"We just see politics injected into this," his spokesman, Tory Mazzola, says. "When it comes to national security we really need to remove politics." The way Ensign plans to "remove politics" is by—wait for it—creating a panel of politicians, House and Senate members, to rewrite the intelligence community's work.

Yes, I know you can reconcile these statements pretty easily, but still, I think this gets you a pretty accurate portrayal of what's actually motivating the arguments from the right against the NIE: They just don't like what it said. The merits of the specific arguments are beside the point, so long as they could potentially discredit the document.

Defining "Middle Class"

2007-12-14T13:41:00.000-05:00

Timothy McNulty is right to argue that papers need to define what they mean when they write about the "middle class," or otherwise institute a uniform practice under which the term is only used to describe incomes in the third quintile of the relevant population (the nation, state, etc.).

If you're in a household that makes around $100,000, you are probably not -- as one of the Tribune's columnists apparently suggested -- in the middle class. You're doing pretty well. That's not to say you necessarily feel economically secure, but "middle class" is a relative term -- it's about how you do when compared to others, not whether you think you could be doing better.

Via Romenesko. Related.

The State of the News Media in Chart Form

2007-12-13T17:16:00.000-05:00

This is from a while back -- a chart summarizing ad page trends in some prominent magazines for the first three quarters of 2007 -- but I just came across it. Quite a few trends packed in here.

Celebrity magazines are doing gangbusters, while the deeply reported Economist and New Yorker are showing gains -- proving, again, that people will shell out for long-form journalism when it's done well. Meanwhile, the three big newsweeklies are on the decline -- owing, I suspect, not so much to the obsolescence of the model (The Week's numbers put the lie to that one) but, rather, to their general if not constant crappiness.

Elevator Story of the Day

2007-12-13T17:01:00.003-05:00

This story in yesterday's Times, about how poor people get screwed by broken elevators in the Bronx family court, is pretty remarkable. In just one case, a woman whose daughter has been in foster care for 10 months misses her court date because of a line for the elevators stretching two city blocks; the next available time for her to plead her case and try to get her child back will be months later. And no, you can't use the stairs.

I got to the story, somewhat surprisingly, by way of Gawker's Choire Sicha, the site's best editor since its founder, Elizabeth Spiers. But the site's associate editor, Maggie Shnayerson, had a different take on the story:

[D]evoting 1,000 words to (of the myriad deficiencies within the family courts system) the dilapidated pulley system? Huh! "The potential loss is not simply that of time wasted, but of the quality of justice that is dispensed," reads the Times piece. My, my, I was just thinking very nearly the same thing about the quality of journalism here! Plus, lengthy and tortured metaphors on the judicial system's slow choking wheels and impenetrable class-and-glass ceiling plain old piss me off. That is all.

I am sure Shnayerson is very familiar with the "myriad deficienies within the family courts system" and will totally fill us in when she has a sec, but I'm actually very impressed with this piece. People, the media included, often turn a blind eye to the routine humiliation that poor people have to suffer. In this case, the consequences of what sounds like a minor inconvenience -- broken elevators at the courthouse -- can actually be striking. The reason this story is so shocking is simply because you don't read enough like them.

Also? Just in case you follow such things and were concerned that Gawker is getting worse and increasingly gratuitous in its nastiness, I'll just note that Sicha has left his post, while Shnayerson will be sticking around. Read into that what you will.

Crossposted

Media Dares

2007-12-11T12:55:00.003-05:00

You know, Greg Sargent, you really shouldn't joke about such things:

Those of you with long memories will recall that a couple months ago D.C. reporters, commentators, pundits and talk-show hosts went absolutely bonkers for days and days over Hillary's far-less-surprising "cackle" in interviews, relentlessly lampooning her allegedly phony outbursts of hilarity. In case you've forgotten just how extensive the coverage of the cackle was, here's a handy reminder.
At any rate, brace yourself for wall-to-wall pundit dissection of Rudy's laugh...
...it's coming any second now, I tell you...

Do not test Jonathan Alter.

Cross-posted, for the hell of it

"What Horse Race?" Indeed

2007-12-11T10:37:00.000-05:00

I am deeply unimpressed with this effort on the part of William Powers to argue that we don't have much of a problem with horse race journalism today.

As it turns out, I would by sympathetic to this sort of argument if it were remotely compelling, because I often think the case against modern political journalism in this regard is a bit overblown. But Powers doesn't pull it off. He's right to note that "we have created a nation of political junkies" in the last 15 years, but couldn't that partially be the effect of the coverage? And if so, isn't this line of argument circular: As horse race journalism produces more horse race fans, the horse race journalism becomes more legitimate? What's more, the "nation" of political junkies is not a "nation" -- we're still talking about a relatively small slice of the population.

Second, he writes, "To meet the growing hunger for campaign news, there are more organized campaign events and, in particular, more debates than ever." "The debates in this campaign," he writes, "have been stunningly substantive -- every imaginable topic of real consequence has been covered, often more than once." Yikes. This is simply not true.

Finally, Powers argues:

The final shift brought on by old and new media is the dilution of the old establishment media's power and influence. If the mainstream media were ever in a position to orchestrate the horse race -- and to some extent, they once were -- those days are over. The race is now controlled from below, by the various constituencies that coalesce -- or not -- around candidates as they emerge in the public consciousness through the kaleidoscope of digital media.

Generally, I would agree, but the I find the example Powers uses -- Mike Huckabee's rise -- to be an odd one. Ron Paul, I would understand, but Huckabee's rise in the polls appears to have been the result of very old-fashioned work -- retail politicking. Sure, there was that clever Chuck Norris ad, but by and large, his campaign has proven no more adept than his Republican counterparts in leveraging digital media.

I am confused. Powers is a good media critic, but this argument is thin and lacking in the coherence department.

Insight

2007-12-09T14:04:00.000-05:00

I'm a little amazed that it takes Clark Hoyt nearly an entire column to get us to an utterly banal point, one that is frankly elementary if you want to understanding blogging and its relationship to print media. Writing about a story that made it onto a Times blog but not into the paper, Hoyt sez:

It was a decision that highlights the difference between a Web site and a traditional newspaper, even if they are under the same roof. The Web has unlimited space and leaves little time for reflection; the newspaper has limited space and the time to make decisions more thoughtfully.

One can quibble with how that's presented -- it's hardly a foregone conclusion that writing on the web leaves you "little time for reflection," for instance, or that the limited space of print media means your "thoughtful" decisions are necessarily good -- but that, and the instantaneousness of writing on the internet, are pretty much the key differences between blogging and print media.

Have I mentioned that I'm skeptical about the need for papers to have full-time ombudsmen?

The Dazzling Critical Faculties of JPod

2007-12-09T10:03:00.000-05:00

John Podhoretz displays some of his legendary intellect in conversation with Deborah Solomon:

In the Bush years, left-leaning publications like The Nation and The New York Review of Books have flourished. Do you read either one? I look at The New York Review of Books. It’s what it has been for 35 or 40 years, which is a highly sophisticated vehicle for anti-American self-hatred.

Clever! I am sure this assessment has nothing to do with this recent, blistering attack on his father.

What do you make of writers like Eric Alterman, who have criticized your appointment as an act of cronyism, which goes against the conservative belief that jobs should be awarded on the basis of merit and not affirmative action? That’s a very personal thing. Twenty years ago, I refused to shake his hand.
Why is that? Shouldn’t you make some pretense of civility toward your fellow writers? I think making a pretense of civility toward Eric Alterman is like making a pretense of civility to a scorpion.

JPod has good manners, too! Meanwhile, I totally believe that Alterman is critical of Podhoretz because the guy didn't shake his hand 20 years ago.

Also, there's a slight problem inasmuch as Podhoretz forgets to actually respond to the (very legitimate) criticism that his appointment was the product of cronyism. Oops!

New Blog

2007-12-09T00:48:00.000-05:00

With Ezra Klein's blog moving to The American Prospect's website, I won't be (cross-)posting over there on the weekends anymore. I will, however, be contributing a bit to this new group blog, which you should check out.

Considering I can barely keep one blog going, there's likely to be a decent amount of overlap with stuff posted here, but I do plan to keep this blog and to be posting lots of items that I don't put over there. So how about you don't abandon me? Swell.

Businessman's Pornography

2007-12-09T00:39:00.000-05:00

It's not exactly groundbreaking, but Michael Lewis' piece in Portfolio magazine is fairly impressive when you consider that he and the magazine are basically arguing that a decent chunk of their readership is full of crap. The odds of you or your stockbroker or your money manager "beating" the market are pretty much zero, as Lewis explains, which is why index funds are such a safe bet.

So what is going on with all this investment advice in magazines and on cable? Eugene Fama, one of the key proponents of the efficient markets hypothesis, and Weston Wellington, a principal at a firm that purchases what are more or less index funds, have some pretty compelling explanations:

"You can tell a story every day about stocks," [Fama] concludes. "That’s what the media are all about. They tell a story every day about today’s stock returns. It’s businessman’s pornography."
...
[Wellington] punctuates the porn show with some general lessons. One is that the financial press isn't in the business of supplying useful information; it’s in the business of feeding people’s lust for predictions. "You keep buying the magazine regardless of how the forecasts turn out," Wellington says, "and they’ll keep supplying the forecasts."

That strikes me as basically correct, at least as applied to magazines (like SmartMoney) and shows (like MadMoney) that are in the business of providing people with investment advice as opposed to straight-up financial news. A lot of the folks behind these things are in the precarious position of having to dress things up -- convincing us that they have some unique insights -- so as not to quickly render themselves obsolete. This whole sector of the media is essentially a gigantic hype machine, perpetuating what is basically a myth -- out of incompetence, self-interest, self-delusion, or some combination of the three.

Spitzer on the Media

2007-12-06T11:05:00.000-05:00

Quote of the day:

"Editorial boards desperately want reform but yet desperately don’t want the discomfort of seeing people fighting. And so there is a sort of a schizophrenia. They see us fighting and they say, ‘Can’t you guys get along?’ Well, the answer is, you know, maybe not."

This is less true in New York than in most other places, I think, but it's still basically correct.

The quote comes from a decent profile of Spitzer by Nick Paumgarten. It's engaging enough, and exquisitely written, but at bottom it basically endorses what has become the standard interpretation of Spitzer's first year as governor -- too much prosecutorial zeal (Spitzer is something of the anti-Obama), not enough deference to the established state political norms, and an underestimation of just how entrenched and machine-like New York's politics are.