The Other Side of Objectivity

 

Another incentive to overcount comes from the American Rescue Plan of 2021, which authorizes the Federal Emergency Management Agency to pay Covid-19 death benefits for funeral services, cremation, caskets, travel and a host of other expenses. The benefit is worth as much as $9,000 a person or $35,000 a family if multiple members die. By the end of 2022, FEMA had paid nearly $2.9 billion in Covid-19 death expenses.--wsj

***

Is the Pentagon becoming as unreliable as the White House Press Conferences?

***

Most Common Country Of Birth For Foreign-born Residents In The US, Excluding Mexico

***

The Other Side of Objectivity

Former executive editor for The Washington Post Leonard Downie Jr. and former CBS News President Andrew Heyward have released the results of their interviews with over 75 media leaders and concluded that objectivity is now considered reactionary and even harmful. Emilio Garcia-Ruiz, editor-in-chief at the San Francisco Chronicle said it plainly: “Objectivity has got to go.”

In an interview with The Stanford Daily, Stanford journalism professor, Ted Glasser, insisted that journalism needed to “free itself from this notion of objectivity to develop a sense of social justice.” He rejected the notion that journalism is based on objectivity and said that he views “journalists as activists because journalism at its best — and indeed history at its best — is all about morality.” Thus, “Journalists need to be overt and candid advocates for social justice, and it’s hard to do that under the constraints of objectivity.”

Downie recounts how news leaders today “believe that pursuing objectivity can lead to false balance or misleading “bothsidesism” in covering stories about race, the treatment of women, LGBTQ+ rights, income inequality, climate change and many other subjects. And, in today’s diversifying newsrooms, they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.”

This is culled from a law blog by Turley (via Don). It's a peculiar position, as if math or geography were being used as debatable notions. Does the statement "Canada is north of the U.S." demand protection from another viewpoint? 

Words are meaningful. Synonyms for 'objective:' open-minded, detached, neutral, dispassionate. Antonyms: emotional, subjective.

The key point is hidden in the benign and sloppy line, "they feel it negates many of their own identities, life experiences and cultural contexts, keeping them from pursuing truth in their work.” There is a word left out: "their truth." Journalism, like art, has become a field of "personal truths." A work of art is meaningful only to the artist; the audience may get it, may not. But the artist's personal vision is unassailable. There is only one vision in the artist's Rorschach Test.

The horror of modern art is that it has become meaningful only to the artist and thus has become unimportant. That will be the legacy of journalism should this strange assumption of shared visions continue.

Against 1619

                                      Against 1619

Journalism does better when it writes the first rough draft of history, not the last word on it.

“The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around.”

This is a long--and very cautious--article by Bret Stephens published, in fairness, by the NYT itself. Its topic is the 1619 Project, an exercise that encapsulates the modern world's ability to take the outrageous very seriously. My take is that its ambition is less than its calculated destructiveness. But even in the face of obvious disingenuous propaganda, Stephens must feel his analysis should be gentle.

"If there’s one word admirers and critics alike can agree on when it comes to The New York Times’s award-winning 1619 Project, it’s ambition. Ambition to reframe America’s conversation about race. Ambition to reframe our understanding of history. Ambition to move from news pages to classrooms. Ambition to move from scholarly debate to national consciousness.

In some ways, this ambition succeeded. The 1619 Project introduced a date, previously obscure to most Americans, that ought always to have been thought of as seminal — and probably now will. It offered fresh reminders of the extent to which Black freedom was a victory gained by courageous Black Americans, and not just a gift obtained from benevolent whites.

It showed, in a stunning photo essay, the places where human beings were once bought and sold as slaves — neglected scenes of American infamy. It illuminated the extent to which so much of what makes America great, including some of our uniquely American understandings of liberty and equality, is unthinkable without the struggle of Black Americans, as well as the extent to which so much of what continues to bedevil us is the result of centuries of racism.

And, in a point missed by many of the 1619 Project’s critics, it does not reject American values. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, its creator and leading voice, concluded in her essay for the project, “I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.” It’s an unabashedly patriotic thought.

But ambition can be double-edged. Journalists are, most often, in the business of writing the first rough draft of history, not trying to have the last word on it. We are best when we try to tell truths with a lowercase t, following evidence in directions unseen, not the capital-T truth of a pre-established narrative in which inconvenient facts get discarded. And we’re supposed to report and comment on the political and cultural issues of the day, not become the issue itself.

Those concerns came to light last month when a longstanding critic of the project, Phillip W. Magness, noted in the online magazine Quillette that references to 1619 as the country’s “true founding” or “moment [America] began” had disappeared from the digital display copy without explanation.

These were not minor points. The deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”

As fresh concerns make clear, on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.

That doesn’t mean that the project seeks to erase the Declaration of Independence from history. But it does mean that it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by treating American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy — of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to be merely a part.

In a tweet, Hannah-Jones responded to Magness and other critics by insisting that “the text of the project” remained “unchanged,” while maintaining that the case for making 1619 the country’s “true” birth year was “always a metaphoric argument.” I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.

She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.

Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):

“1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”

Now compare it to the version of the same text as it now appears online:

“1619 is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that the moment that the country’s defining contradictions first came into the world was in late August of 1619?”

In an email, Silverstein told me that the changes to the text were immaterial, in part because it still cited 1776 as our nation’s official birth date, and because the project’s stated aim remained to put 1619 and its consequences as the true starting point of the American story.

Readers can judge for themselves whether these unacknowledged changes violate the standard obligations of transparency for New York Times journalism. The question of journalistic practices, however, raises deeper doubts about the 1619 Project’s core premises.

In his introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”

Both points are illogical. A “defining contradiction” requires a powerful point of opposition or inconsistency, and in the year 1619 the points of opposition were few and far between. Slavery and the slave trade had been global phenomena for centuries by the early 17th century, involving Europeans and non-Europeans as slave traders and the enslaved. The Africans who arrived in Virginia that August got there only because they had been seized by English privateers from a Portuguese ship headed for the port of Veracruz in Mexico, then a part of the Spanish Empire.

In this sense, and for all of its horror, there was nothing particularly surprising in the fact that slavery made its way to the English colonies on the Eastern Seaboard, as it already had in the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

What was surprising was that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.” It’s why, at the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery, Lincoln would date the country’s founding to “four score and seven years ago.”

As for the notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up to them. Most of us, at any given point in time, are falling short of some ideal we nonetheless hold to be true or good.

These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.

Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing? On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?

Monocausality — whether it’s the clash of economic classes, the hidden hand of the market, or white supremacy and its consequences — has always been a seductive way of looking at the world. It has always been a simplistic one, too. The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.

This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.

It should have been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters of the project and polarizing national debate.

***

An early sign that the project was in trouble came in an interview last November with James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.”

In particular, McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance.”

McPherson demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”

In a lengthier dissection, published in January in The Atlantic, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz accused Hannah-Jones of making arguments “built on partial truths and misstatements of the facts.” The goal of educating Americans on slavery and its consequences, he added, was so important that it “cannot be forwarded through falsehoods, distortions and significant omissions.”

Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s. The list goes on.

Then there was an essay in Politico in March by the Northwestern historian Leslie M. Harris, an expert on pre-Civil War African-American life and slavery. “On Aug. 19 of last year,” Harris wrote, “I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones … repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”

None of this should have come as a surprise: The 1619 Project is a thesis in search of evidence, not the other way around. Nor was this fire from the right: Both Wilentz and Harris were at pains to emphasize their sympathy with the project’s moral aims.

Yet, aside from a one-word “clarification” issued in March — after months of public pressure, The Times conceded that only “some” colonists fought for independence primarily to defend slavery — the response of the magazine has been, in effect, “nothing to see here.” In a pair of lengthy editor’s notes, Silverstein has defended much of the scholarship in the project by citing another slate of historians to back him up. That’s one way of justifying the final product.

The larger problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices. Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.

“It is finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the magazine declares on its 1619 cover page. Finally? Truthfully? Is The Times suggesting that distinguished historians, like the ones who have seriously disputed aspects of the project, had previously been telling half-truths or falsehoods?

Almost inevitably, what began as a scholarly quarrel became a political one.

About a month before the project’s publication, Silverstein reached out to the Pulitzer Center to propose a 1619 curriculum for schools. Soon thereafter, the project was being introduced into classrooms across the country.

It’s one thing for a newspaper to publish the 1619 Project by way of challenging its subscribers: After all, they pay for the product. It’s quite another to become a pedagogical product for schoolchildren who, along with their parents, in most cases probably don’t subscribe. This was stepping into the political fray in a way that was guaranteed to invite not just right-wing blowback, but possible federal involvement.

That’s exactly what has happened. When “1619” was spray-painted on a toppled statue of George Washington, many people took angry or horrified notice. When Hannah-Jones tweeted that “it would be an honor” for the summer’s unrest to be called “the 1619 riots,” the right took notice again. For many, the 1619 Project smacked of fake history coming from the “fake news” — with results that were all too real. As unbidden gifts to Donald Trump go, it could hardly have been sweeter than that.

Sure enough, last month Trump suggested he would cut off federal funding to any public school using it in its curriculum. He even proposed establishing a “1776 Commission” to help “restore patriotic education to our schools.” Many Americans shudder at the thought of what the president might have in mind by “patriotic education.” But ideas have consequences. They aren’t always the ones that authors — or publishers — anticipate or desire.

Beyond these political disputes is a metaphysical question that matters. What is a founding? Why have generations of Americans considered 1776 our birth date — as opposed to 1781, when we won our independence militarily at Yorktown; or 1783, when we won it diplomatically through the Treaty of Paris; or 1788, when our system of government came into existence with the ratification of the Constitution?

The answer is that, unlike other dates, 1776 uniquely marries letter and spirit, politics and principle: The declaration that something new is born, combined with the expression of an ideal that — because we continue to believe in it even as we struggle to live up to it — binds us to the date.

Contrary to what the 1619 Project claims, 1776 isn’t just our nation’s “official” founding. It is our symbolic one, too. The metaphor of 1776 is more powerful than that of 1619 because what makes America most itself isn’t four centuries of racist subjugation. It’s 244 years of effort by Americans — sometimes halting, but often heroic — to live up to our greatest ideal. That’s a struggle that has been waged by people of every race and creed. And it’s an ideal that continues to inspire millions of people at home and abroad.

For obvious reasons, I’ve thought long and hard about the ethics of writing this essay. On the one hand, outside of exceptional circumstances, it’s bad practice to openly criticize the work of one’s colleagues. We bat for the same team and owe one another collegial respect.

On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.

All the more so as journalists, in the United States and abroad, come under relentless political assault from critics who accuse us of being fake, biased, partisan and an arm of the radical left. Many of these attacks are baseless. Some of them are not. Through its overreach, the 1619 Project has given critics of The Times a gift."

“For obvious reasons, I’ve thought long and hard about the ethics of writing this essay. On the one hand, outside of exceptional circumstances, it’s bad practice to openly criticize the work of one’s colleagues. We bat for the same team and owe one another collegial respect.

“On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.

“All the more so as journalists, in the United States and abroad, come under relentless political assault from critics who accuse us of being fake, biased, partisan and an arm of the radical left. Many of these attacks are baseless. Some of them are not. Through its overreach, the 1619 Project has given critics of The Times a gift.”
 

Backtracking on 1619

 

                                                       Backtracking on 1619

An article in the WSJ  reports that the NYT is on the run, as light drives out deceit, over the 1619 atrocity.

In a letter to the Times, historians at Yale, Princeton, and other institutions wrote “to express our deep concern about the New York Times’ promotion of The 1619 Project” and noted “the problematic treatment of major issues and personalities of the Founding and Civil War eras.” The scholars added:

We are also troubled that these materials are now to become the basis of school curriculums, with the imprimatur of the New York Times. The remedy for past historical oversights is not their replacement by modern oversights. We therefore respectfully ask the New York Times to withhold any steps to publish and distribute The 1619 Project until these concerns can be addressed in a thorough and open fashion.

In March, the Times did make one significant correction, though it simply labeled it an “Editors’ Note.” But the historians signing this week’s letter say the passage is still flawed:

Where Hannah-Jones had originally written, “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery,” the new text says “some of the colonists.” Even this softened assertion has little or no documentary basis, according to the most distinguished specialists in the period.

Historian Phillip Magness, among the signers of this week’s letter, noted recently that the Times has quietly edited its material again to remove the claim that 1776 is not the true American founding—and amazingly the Times’ prize-winner is now saying that she never made the claim. In this week’s letter, the historians write:

The duplicity of attempting to alter the historical record in a manner intended to deceive the public is as serious an infraction against professional ethics as a journalist can commit. A “sweeping, deeply reported and personal essay,” as the Pulitzer Prize Board called it, does not have the license to sweep its own errors into obscurity or the remit to publish “deeply reported” falsehoods.

Emmys in Journalism

 

                                    Emmys in Journalism      

Ultimately, it is not the journalist’s role, and it is not the goal of activists or politicians, to present the world as it really is. They will always have to compete to engage our attention with exciting stories and dramatic narratives. They will always focus on the unusual rather than the common, and on the new or temporary rather than slowly changing patterns.--Rosling

Rosling is talking here about entertainment. News as a product, not information or revelation. Journalists as entertainers, not contemporary historians.

Why are we suspicious of all commercial events yet are not disdainful of commercialism in the media?

Methods in Madness

 

                                                   Methods in Madness

From Henderson's review of Casey Mulligan’s new book, You’re Hired: Untold Successes and Failures of a Populist President.

"Like many people who have been appalled by some of Trump’s tweets, I had assumed that he was up in the wee hours carelessly knocking out his bombastic messages. I’m still not a fan of many of Trump’s tweets, but a chapter titled “I Wish That He Would Stay Off Twitter” tells two important things about the economics tweets. First, Trump’s economic advisers gave him a lot of input on the economics tweets. Second, whereas I had thought that Trump’s exaggerations undercut him, Mulligan argues, with evidence, that they were part of a strategy for getting good news covered. If Trump told the truth about good economic news, the media would often not cover it. But if he exaggerated, “the press might enjoy correcting him and unwittingly disseminate the intended finding.” My Hoover colleague John Cochrane, in a recent post about the book, notes that Trump’s tweets are his version of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats. Recall that, hard as it is to imagine today, FDR faced a largely hostile conservative press. Trump faces hostile left-wing media."

So there is no way to get covered honestly in the American Press except by dishonesty?

Precarious Quality

 

                                                Precarious Quality

More on the horrible 1619 Project, this from Magness:

"To the extent that historians informed the project’s discussion of the crucial period between 1775 and 1865, the Times has remained entirely non-transparent. Hannah-Jones has declined to specify which experts she consulted for her essay, and the only public acknowledgment of any outside review to date has come from Leslie Harris, the historian the Times recruited to fact-check her arguments about slavery’s role in the American Revolution – and then promptly ignored when Harris advised against publishing the claim. Desmond’s essay sources its interpretation to seven academic historians who are quoted in the article. Yet all seven are affiliated with the “New History of Capitalism” (NHC) movement – an insular and ideological school of slavery scholars that emerged in the last decade, and that has fared poorly under scrutiny of its own arguments about slavery’s economic dimensions. Desmond’s essay is, at best, a sloppy cribbing of NHC arguments that most other economists and non-NHC historians of slavery already found wanting and rejected."

Buried in this pointed, goal-oriented politics disguised as scholarship is the denigration of academic quality. This kind of behavior disallows any standards.

Ledgett/Snowden

Richard Ledgett Jr., 58, has worked at the National Security Agency since 1988. He was recently interviewed by the WashPo. Some excerpts:
 
So we’re code makers and code breakers. That’s what we were formed to do, and everything we do grows from that. ...And on the code-breaking part, our mission is to break foreign codes.

[as to Snowden's motives:] The narrative that he’s told publicly about this actually doesn’t track if you parse the timelines. He says he was motivated by Jim Clapper’s remarks to Senator Wyden and the revelation that those remarks weren’t accurate. If you look at the timeline, Snowden was actually stealing material and in contact with reporters eight months before that, so that doesn’t track.
I probably spent more time than anybody but our chief investigator on the actual investigation on this. I know a lot that I still can’t talk about because it’s sensitive investigational stuff. And if he does ever come back to the United States it will be part of the government’s case against him. The things that I can say, I think a lot of what was in the House Intelligence Committee’s report where they talk about him actually being mad about being disciplined — I think that actually tracks more with motivation.

I think if you weigh the benefit and the harm, the balance comes out pretty far on the harm side. That doesn’t mean that there was absolutely no good to what he did. And I think that’s an important nuance. It’s heavily weighted towards harm. The little bit of good is forcing a conversation that we probably should have had earlier. And for me that was a lesson learned. That we should have talked about the particular authority, the Patriot Act authority, earlier in the process.

On balance I think he should go to jail. Assuming that he gets a trial and is convicted, which I think the case is very strong. I would vote for conviction. I think I would be disqualified from the jury.

Kamel Daoud

Paul Berman is the critic-at-large of Tablet magazine. He wrote the following article with Michael Walzer:

"Last month the Algerian novelist and journalist Kamel Daoud astonished the readers of Le Monde in Paris by threatening to renounce journalism, not
because he is afraid of Islamists at home in Algeria, though a fatwa has been issued against him, but for another reason, which is still more dismaying. He has been severely condemned by people from the Western intellectual class, and silence seems to him an appropriate response.

This was Salman Rushdie’s experience in the years after he came out with The Satanic Verses, back in 1988, which he has described in his memoir Joseph Anton. The experience of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, originally from Somalia, offers probably the most widely discussed example after Rushdie’s. Kamel Daoud’s Algerian colleague, the novelist Boualem Sansal, last year’s winner of a prize from the French Academy, has come under this kind of condemnation.

....[Kamel].... Daoud  stands high on the world scene because of his novel, The Meursault Investigation, which adds a philosophical dimension to the affair. The book is an homage to Albert Camus, and a rebuke. In 1942 Camus published a novel titled The Stranger, which tells the story of a French Algerian named Meursault, who gratuitously murders a nameless and silent Arab on the beach. Daoud in The Meursault Investigation tells the story of the murdered man’s younger brother, who contemplates what it means to be rendered nameless and silent by one’s oppressor. In France, Daoud’s reply to Camus won the Goncourt Prize for a First Novel in 2015, among other prizes. In the United States, it received two of the greatest blessings that American journalism can bestow on a writer not from the United States. The New Yorker published an excerpt. And the New York Times Magazine published a full-length admiring profile.
These triumphs created a demand for Daoud’s journalism, as well. For 20 years he has written for the Algerian newspaper Le Quotidien d’Oran, but, in the wake of his novel’s success, his journalism began to appear prominently in Le Monde and other European newspapers. He was invited to write for the New York Times. And he responded to these opportunities in the way that any alert and appreciative reader of his novel might have expected.
He offered insights into the Islamic State. He attacked Saudi Arabia, with a side jab aimed at the extreme right in France. But he also looked at the mass assault on women that took place in Cologne on New Year’s Eve by a mob that is thought to have included men from the Arab world. He dismissed a right-wing impulse in Europe to regard immigrants as barbarians. And he dismissed a left-wing, high-minded naïveté about the event. He pointed to a cultural problem. In the New York Times he wrote: “One of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women.” More: “The pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe.” In Le Monde he wrote that Europe, in accepting new immigrants and refugees, was going to have to help them accept new values, too—“to share, to impose, to defend, to make understood.” And now his troubles began.

The two of us who are writing this commentary call attention to a second pattern in these condemnations, which dates to the days of Soviet Communism. Everyone who remembers the history of the 20th century will recall that, during the entire period from the 1920s to the 1980s, one brave and articulate dissident after another in the Soviet bloc succeeded in communicating a message to the Western public about the nature of Communist oppression—valuable messages because the dissidents could describe with first-hand accuracy the Soviet regime and its satellite states.
And, time after time, a significant slice of Western intellectuals responded by crying: “Oh, you mustn’t say such things! You will encourage the reactionaries!” Or they said: “You must be a reactionary yourself. A tool of imperialism.” The intellectuals who responded in these ways were sometimes Communists, pledged to loyalty to the Soviet Union, and sometimes they were fellow-travelers, who defended the Soviet Union without having made any pledges. But sometimes they were merely people who worried about their own societies—who worried that criticism of the Soviet Union was bound to benefit right-wing fanatics in the West. These people considered that, in denouncing the Soviet dissidents, they were protecting the possibility for lucid and progressive conversation in their own countries.

But that was a mistake. By denouncing the dissidents, Western intellectuals succeeded in obfuscating the Soviet reality. And they lent the weight of their own prestige to the Soviet regime, which meant that, instead of being the enemies of oppression, they ended up as the allies of oppression. The progressive intellectuals were not foolish to worry about right-wing fanaticism in their own countries, but they needed to recognize that sometimes political arguments have to be complicated. They needed to learn how to defend the Soviet dissidents even while attacking right-wing fanatics in the West. They needed to make two arguments at the same time."

This does not sound hard, walking and chewing gum-like. One suspects the usual causes of irrationality: PSTD, drug abuse, systemic venereal disease, stupidity.

Hostage

Like the guy on the floor of a bank during the holdup, a woman tied to a post during the raid, the criminal enterprise and narrative reduces the lives, the hopes and dreams, of the average guy to background noise. That is the message of The Big Short. Money and power are the elephants on the plains. We are just poor critters. The Japanese murder squads called their victims "logs." Atwood's women are "furniture." All are background noise to the real direction, the real story. Everything--honesty, human dignity, everything--is sacrificed to the Greater Narrative.
And so it is with our political experiment.
Gawker writes that at least one U.S. reporter traded content in his article for information from Hillary Clinton’s staff while she was Secretary of State. In what is an astonishing documented exchange--this is all from released documents--, the reporter agreed to insert specific words and imagery into his article in return for a copy of Hillary’s upcoming speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. He wrote his article to the specifications of the person he was reviewing! His name? Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic!

In another instance, Politico’s chief White House correspondent, Mike Allen, promised to deliver positive coverage of Chelsea Clinton, and, in a separate exchange, permitted  Philippe Reines, Senior Advisor to United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to ghost-write an item about the State Department for Politico’s Playbook newsletter. His article was ghost-written by the department he was reviewing! 

This is terrible stuff and one wonders if the democracy can stand it. The manipulation and distortion--where we expect honesty and  insight--is shocking but the implication of this layer of political-journalistic symbiosis implies a casual cynicism, a hand-glove cronyism that should, in an honest world, cause its implosion.  

Maybe that's what Trump and Sanders are: The implosion.

(A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.– H.L. Mencken)

Jon Stewart and the News

Former New York Times journalist Judith Miller appeared on “The Daily Show” and went head-to-head with Jon Stewart over her reporting during the lead up to the Iraq War. She has a book to sell; he has a position. The exchange, sometimes intense, is illuminating and shows that sometimes entertainment can be constructive.

Miller’s reporting of Saddam Hussein‘s Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) both before and after the 2003 invasion sparked intense controversy when it was discovered to be based on faulty information — especially from now-discredited source Ahmed Chalabi — and Stewart was quick to point the finger of blame for the conflict at the journalist.

"I hoped that people like you would read it and determine that it was really, really hard to do this kind of reporting,” said Miller, referring to her new book, “The Story: A Reporter’s Journey.”

“I wasn’t alone, I had lots and lots of company. The intelligent sources we were talking to had never been wrong before,” she said. Rather than coming from Dick Cheney or George W. Bush, “the information came from the men and women who had steered me right on Al Qaeda and 9/11, who had told me that the former Soviet Union had a huge cache of biological weapons that they had never acknowledged and they were right,” she said.

While Miller claimed she reported “what the intelligence community believed,” Stewart said she wrote what the White House was feeding her. He did not have specifics.

“These discussions always make me incredibly sad because I feel like they point to institutional failure at the highest levels and no one will take responsibility on it and they pass the buck,” Stewart continuing his own path to its conclusion.

“I think they point to intelligence failures that I still worry about — we are still relying on the same information on Iran, North Korea, Pakistan and the other countries,” Miller replied.

Iran and the Press

Nazila Fathi covered events in her native Iran for years as The New York Times correspondent. She has a new book, The Lonely War: One Woman's Account Of The Struggle For Modern Iran. The criteria for approved news and information in Iran is retrospective, that is you can publish whatever you want but, if it crosses some unknown line, the government will come after you. She covered the 2009 demonstrations for the Times despite warnings from the authorities. One day, a government source told her that the authorities had given her photo to snipers who were believed to be shooting the protesters. Soon after, intelligence officials appeared on the street outside her apartment.
Fearing arrest, she remained in her apartment until she and her husband, along with their two small children, left for the Tehran airport in the middle of the night and took a flight out of the country.

Pressing the Press

A Freedom of Information lawsuit has revealed some interesting things regarding the administration's efforts to manage public criticism. One of those targeted was Sharyl Attkisson, the CBS reporter who has written a book filled with worrisome allegations. As interesting, perhaps, is the apparent lack of concern shown by the press.

In an email dated October 4, 2011, Attorney General Holder’s top press aide, Tracy Schmaler, called Attkisson “out of control.” Schmaler told White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz that he intended to call CBS news anchor Bob Schieffer to get the network to stop Attkisson.
Schultz replied, “Good. Her piece was really bad for the AG.”
Schultz also told Schmaler that he was working with reporter Susan Davis, then at the National Journal, to target Rep. Darrel Issa (R-CA). Issa led the House investigation into Fast and Furious. Davis now works at USA Today. In the email chain, Schultz tells Schmaler that he would provide Davis with “leaks.”
Davis wrote a critical piece on Issa a few weeks later.
Attkisson was later subjected to hacking of her computer by people who remain unknown, but who likely belong to a government agency. She and CBS parted ways earlier in 2014, and Attkisson has since said that the network blocked her reports from airing.

Foxy Journalism

FOX has been changing its lineups since the 2012 debacle, cutting back on the self-promoters and the screamingly wrong. Karl Rove has become scarce and Dick Morris is on the Index. They have made several curious scheduling decisions as well, putting Cavuto opposite O'Reilly and, recently, taking the talking point Gattling Hannity off at 9:00 in favor of fecund Megyn Kelly. The inner workings of FOX are only a curiosity but the press coverage is not. Here is a syndicated Hannity-Kelly story as reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
"Piers Morgan is getting some competition in the form of Fox newswoman Megyn Kelly, E! News reports.
Kelly, who's on maternity leave from work, has landed her own 9 p.m. Fox News time slot, according to the Drudge Report. Kelly's show would replace Sean Hannity's current 9 p.m. gig and would air in direct competition with Morgan's CNN show "Piers Morgan Live."
So what's Morgan think about his new time-slot rival? "Bring it on @megynkelly," the 48-year-old Brit tweeted Thursday with a link to the Drudge Report's story.
Sounds like Morgan isn't too worried!
Kelly gave birth to baby boy Thatcher Bray on July 23. Thatcher is Kelly and husband Doug Brunt's third child together."

Now that looks like a pretty straight forward puff-piece; the Morgan-Hannity competition sounds viable and Morgan sounds like a legitimate contender to be reckoned with. Except neither is true. Here are stats from last month:
"Tuesday night Fox News’ Hannity was #1 in the 25-54 demo at 9pm, more than doubling its nearest competitor, MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show. Sean Harrity's show had 408K demo viewers to Rachel Maddow‘s 203K.
With CNN’s Piers Morgan drawing just 84K viewers in the demo, Hannity’s total topped MSNBC and CNN’s numbers combined at 9pm."

Morgan is clearly an insignificant competitor in that time slot. Why would the newspaper try to give the impression that he was more?

Punking the Hypocrites

Years ago there was a popular American television show called Candid Camera. The idea of the show was to create artificial situations where the reactions of unsuspecting people would be filmed. Some were puerile: A dollar bill on the ground with a tiny thread attached so that every time the person bent to pick it up the bill would be pulled out of reach, voices from hidden sources that the show's employees refused to acknowledge to the confusion of the "mark". Some were uglier; a cast member would shoplift in front of the "mark" and, when reported by the honest target, other cast members would aggressively defend "the thief". Once a beautiful woman stepped out of an office building naked and all the passers by desperately tried to cover the seemingly deranged girl. A currently popular show called "Punked" does a similar thing with celebrities.

Watching people being taken advantage of, struggling to do the right thing (or not--but victims still), is never pleasant. It may come from our regard for their privacy and our sense of fair play. Another factor might be our willingness to put ourselves in the victim's position; we see the victim as a proxy for us. We respect him as ourselves. This may explain our tolerance for the current gonzo journalistic approaches to public figures; like grifters, we do not respect our victims so anything goes. Minnesota's governor is put on the phone with someone he believes is a donor and supporter; he turns out to be an agent for his opponents. The NPR head walks into a lunch with several men he thinks are sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and says some terrible things about the voters; the lunch mates are conservative operatives. In a similar vein, people actually interview prostitutes about their famous clients.

Public affairs have become entertainment. The audience is more than salacious, it is contemptuous.