Richard A. Posner, a very conservative Appeals Court judge, has a sharp – if flawed – article on the news media in today’s New York Times.
Posner puts the news into an economic context – it is a business, after all - and he understands the technological changes – cable, satellites and the Internet - that have changed the business and multiplied options for news consumers. I really like that.
Unfortunately, he falls victim to his mindset. He wants to make the point, for example, that we are in a new era of polarization, so he argues that while Fox
represents the right, CNN has, therefore, moved leftward. As I see it, CNN has followed Fox rightward. (And NBC, CBS and ABC are neutering themselves.)
Posner’s analysis concludes that when you calculate the economic and technological impacts, the news scene hasn’t changed a lot. Given his market bias, that was quite predictable.
Still, I recommend his essay, for the effort to assemble a lot of information to form a plausible picture.
PS According to the Times, Posner and Gary Becker, the University of Chicago economist, cooperate on "The Becker-Posner Blog".
Becker is a brilliant guy and a free market fanatic. How he reached that faith is beyond me, for Gary and I shared a junior high school math class once, a long time ago, in Flatbush, Brooklyn. And that bug never bit me.
1. The front-page story in today’s Albuquerque Journal tells us that Roswell’s bus building company has won a new contract and will hire new employees over the next year "as the old plant returns back to life…."
Editing, anyone?
2. The IRA announcement that it is giving up armed struggle is found on C14, with other "Nation and World" stories. I sympathize with the notion that local newspapers must put local news first, but…but…but…..
3. On a happier note, the Journal’s science writer, John Fleck, has a column (B2) on scientific reports about the effect of global warming on us. The reports appear to be contradictory, Fleck says. His advice: this is tough science, be patient until it gets resolved.
How sensible. And how welcome.
Why don’t we see more columns from Fleck and other specialists? That’s why we have specialists, I think, to deal with complexity. So why not let them share their knowledge with us more often.
The Albuquerque Tribune is a good afternoon newspaper and not just because it runs my column monthly. But even the Tribune nods from time to time.
"U.S. aims for less troops in Iraq" is the headline over a Houston Chronicle story today.
How about "fewer" troops?
I post my monthly article for the Albuquerque Tribune here once it has appeared in the paper. This is today's:
FAIR, NOT BALANCED
Airing both sides of the story is admirable, but sometimes objectivity gets in the way of facts
By Arthur Alpert
Back in February 1950, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy waved what he called a list of Communists subverting the nation. Newspapers reported that "objectively" – without probing the truth of the charges – and McCarthy soared to power
Last month, Karl Rove said "liberals" didn’t want to go after the 9/11 terrorists. Two days later, an Associated Press story opened this way:
"Democrats said Thursday that White House adviser Karl Rove should either apologize or resign for accusing liberals of wanting "therapy and understanding" for the Sept. 11 attackers, escalating partisan rancor that threatens to consume Washington."
Continuing, the author cited recent, far-out rhetoric from both Republicans and Democrats to bolster the "partisan rancor" context. He added reaction from the White House and two Democratic Senators and recapitulated Rove’s comments – but never got around to asking if Rove was truthful.
In fact, the nation was of one angry mind in the wake of 9/11, favoring a military response to al Qaeda and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
Dissent, you remember, arose when the White House used 9/11 to enact a pre-existing scenario for war on Iraq, and it came from conservatives as well as liberals.
Reporters haven’t time to search out the truth of every story, but this was a slam-dunk. Just review the clips from 9/11/01 to early 2002. See what people said and how they voted.
If the AP reporter had done that, he might have written that Rove misstated the case. Better still, he might have phoned Rove, quoted the record and asked, "Why’d you say that?" Even "no comment" would be revealing.
Perhaps the reporter thought the partisan rancor context was cool. Perhaps he enjoyed being "objective" - getting both sides, you know - and just forgot to wonder, "What’s true?" I don’t know. I do know that at McCarthy-plus-55, we still suffer from "objective" journalism.
Note, please, that I’m not accusing anybody of bias. Nor do I think AP is part of a corporate media plot to foist an extreme right wing agenda on America. (Though I know some who do.)
My beef is that we still substitute "balance" for reporting, still bask in the comfort of giving "both sides." Balderdash! There are as many sides to a story as there are participants. (If I were teaching journalism again, we would screen "Rashomon" in the first class.)
But "balanced" or "both-sides" reporting springs from that deeper doctrine, the teaching that humans can be – and should be - objective.
Dictionary, anyone? American Heritage says objectivity is about "material" objects, "external or material reality" and avoiding "emotions or personal prejudices."
Maybe dead people can do that but nobody breathing can suppress his or her emotions or prejudices. Or should. What’s wrong with feelings? How do you understand human behavior if you look only at "external or material reality"? You can’t.
We – journalists and readers both – can be self-aware and use knowledge of our own strengths and weaknesses to get closer to the truth. And by keeping an eye on our own prejudices, we can be fair.
Fairness is the best humans can do. And the reporters and editors I have known over the years, almost all of them human, care about their trade and want terribly to be fair.
So, if that’s true, I hear you ask, why all this "media bias?" Next month, let’s talk about the press as scapegoat.
Alpert is a semi-retired newsman in Albuquerque. Email him at: ArthurAlpert@swcp.com. His column runs the fourth Thursday of the month.
I am reading a lot about Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and the search to pin the tail on the slimeball (or slimeballs) who outed Valerie Plame as a CIA operative. That includes a very long, very helpful summary of the story by two Washington Post reporters carried by the Albuquerque Journal Sunday, July 24.
It’s all quite complicated and one can get lost in the details. I conclude, however, that who leaked Plame’s name is less important than why.
It’s public record now that the White House set out to destroy the credibility of Joseph Wilson, her husband almost immediately after his Op Ed piece appeared in the New York Times. It questioned why President Bush’s State of the Union speech included an allegation that Iraq was looking to buy yellow cake from Niger long after Wilson had investigated that report and told the CIA it wasn’t true. (Other probes reached the same conclusion.)
This galvanized the White House. Why? Because the Administration was arguing it had to war on Iraq because Saddam Hussein had WMD and was close to getting nuclear weapons.
Wilson’s challenge suggested the White House was cooking intelligence to fit the policy. (Exactly the case, as we now know from many sources.)
Who did the dastardly deed is not of the essence. Nor where Plame’s name came from. Nor Time, Inc.’s failure to defend the First Amendment after examining its corporate interests .Nor Judith Miller’s stay in prison.
No, the Bush policy was to exploit 9/11, conflate it with Iraq and wrap both under the "War on Terror" rubric. Wilson’s Op Ed raised questions about that, so the White House went after him.
That’s the importance of the Plame story.
Sarah Vowel's column on the Ten Commandments in today's New York Times is funny, but she - like everbody else I read - accepts them as good. Isn't it time for somebodu to point out that the last commandment endorses slavery and women-as-property?
A movie I saw the other day, Kingdom of Heaven, argues that religion inspires, fosters and gets away with murder. Obviously. But moralists get away with a lot, too, including inhumanity toward man.
Maybe we need to post the Ten Commandments to spur argument about what is virtue.
We could begin with "Thou shalt not kill," asking where Jews and Christians find the exceptions for war and capital punishment.
One Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News, published in today’s Albuquerque Journal, brings us today’s liberal media lie. (Or should I write, "the daily media lie.")
The Karl Rove story, he says, pits the White House against the national media. You know, the "mainstream media liberals."
At what point do we add up Rush and Dobson and Thomas, Krauthammer and Friedman and Zakaria, the National Review crowd and John Leo and Goodwin and hundreds of local radio talk show rightists and Fox News and CNBC and US News and I don’t know how many local newspapers’ editorialists and conclude – wow, they are the mainstream!
And their blabber about liberal media bias is a political tactic.
PS Most of the corporate news mediums are not right wing or liberal. They are corporate, seeking to protect profits by way of so-called "objectivity" and ducking identification in political terms.
I got a hysterical fund-raising letter from an environmental organization the other day. Fight the "pro-polluter Bush-Chaney energy bill, "it urged. And send us money.
In fact, there is an awful energy bill in the House. It’s a corporate bonanza. It subsidizes oil and nuclear and does zilch to weaken our reliance on Mideastern oil. However, there is a Senate bill that is not terrible. Senator Pete Domenici (R.,NM) has tempered his traditional effort to hand my tax money and yours to oil and nuclear businesses. That compromise with Senator Jeff Bingaman (D., NM), who wants to promote alternative fuels, has produced an energy bill to the Senate’s liking. It’s far from ideal legislation, but nudges us slightly toward rational energy policy.
So the environmentalists are off base? Yes and no.
The Domenici-Bingaman compromise must be reconciled with the horrible House bill. Splitting the differences will produce an end product quite close to what Domenici would prefer in his heart of hearts, maybe even what the House wants. In sum, we will again embrace of the oil and nuclear industries, stay locked in the grip of OPEC and miss another opportunity to spur non-fossil fuel development.
Above is a simple analysis of how policy and politics interact in Washington. I wish the National Resources Defense Council had respected my intelligence sufficiently to do likewise.
But more importantly – why haven’t I read analysis along those lines in the press in the last several weeks?
Yes, the truth does out, eventually. In today’s Albuquerque Journal, Charles Krauthammer – the brilliant right-wing columnist – explains why we are in Iraq:
"(The problem) is essentially a civil war within a rival civilization in which the most primitive elements are seeking to gain the upper hand. The 9/11 attacks forced us to intervene massively in this civil war, which is why we are in Iraq."
Paul Wolfowitz, in his admirable naivete, came close to telling a congressional committee this truth. Now Krauthammer has.
Just in case you thought it had anything to do with Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Or Iraq’s collusion with al Qaeda. No, they were bedtime stories for the citizenry once asleep, the Administration might go ahead with its pre-existing geopolitical scheme.
The press failed to protect us from our leaders' lies.
BackonJune23, the Albuquerque Tribune published my monthly column. I usually post it here the next day, but I forgot. Sorry, here it is:
An Opinion Sampler
Great Americana Radio Station dream, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s criticism and other topics
By Arthur Alpert
Because Deep Throat outed himself, I noodled a column on journalism. But I have a surprising CD I want to tell you about. And the Libertarian CATO Institute mailed an essay explaining the mesh between every-man-for himself and Christian values. How can I pass that up? So let’s do tapas this month, sampling a little bit of this and that.
o I’m too old to watch the Grammies, but the Tribune said next day that a Stephen Foster CD won. Stephen Foster! I ordered "Beautiful Dreamer" and have listened joyfully. Folks like Alison Krause and Mavis Staples do familir songs like Camptown Races (Doo- Dah!), and tunes I’ve never heard. Coincidentally, KHFM played Krause singing Foster as well as lively classical pieces by Gottschalk and Aaron Copland on Memorial Day. And one day later NPR praised a new Billie Holliday collection. All of which evoked an old dream of mine - a radio station devoted to Americana.
We would play the folks above plus Norah Jones – you sure she’s not Billie’s daughter? – and both Guthries, Hank Williams, George M. Cohan, Gershwin, Elvis and the Ink Spots. Also, Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald singing Victor Herbert, Bob Wills, Louis Armstrong, Ray Barreto, the Duke and Count, Willie Nelson and the Joplins. Scott and Janis, that is.
You get the idea - the best American music and the heck with genres.
I’d lose my shirt, of course. Radio makes money by slicing a single strain of music and airing it 24 hours for a slice of audience. But I’d listen and so would both my friends. And who knows – if "Dancing with the Stars" can get big numbers with old-timey steps – maybe we’d get ratings.
Besides, I’d love the intellectual challenge - how do I fit Django Reinhardt, Piaf and the songs of the Auvergne into Americana?
o I’m no historian, but I remember Kerensky, the Russian democratic Socialist, was no match for Lenin and his Marxist true believers. And that the Weimar Republic’s ineffectual democrats folded before the Nazi true believers.
Faith trumps skepticism, which may explain, in part, the Democrats’ disarray these days in face of true believers, some religious and some laissez-faire.
Too bad the Democrats can’t find any convictions.
o Speaking of Demo disarray, did you see the big story when Sen. Hillary Clinton criticized the Bush Administration? Why should a Democrat criticizing a Republican be news? What’s that you say? Because she and most Democrats are – shhh - afraid to make waves.
o So Mark Felt was the secret source for Woodward and Bernstein. Makes you nostalgic, right, for the good old days when the press pushed Richard Nixon out of office. It shouldn’t, because that didn’t happen. Nixon was his own worst enemy, followed by the Washington Post (under the extraordinary Katherine Graham, whose memoir I highly recommend.) The press, in general, came late to the party. Many of the corporations that employ journalists were, by Watergate time, squirming in their role as adversaries to power. They just wanted to male money.
o That CATO Institute essay? It argued there’s no great divide between Libertarian ideas of free economic competition (unhampered by government or morality) on one hand, and Christianity, on the other. Hmmm. Is, "No man can serve two masters. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon" outdated?
Yes, probably so. Since Matthew’s account, we have learned to multi-task.
Arthur Alpert, a semi-retired journalist in Albuquerque, may be reached at ArthurAlpert@swcp.com. His column appears the fourth Thursday of the month.
Columnist John Leo’s latest effort at media criticism is an entertaining foray into the "euphemism and gobbledy-gook" all around us. He cites hundreds of such stupidities in fields like business and health (oops! I’m redundant) and religion and politics.
In that last category, he chastises the "mainstream media" for employing "insurgents" instead of "terrorists" to label people who blow up innocent bystanders.
Note, first that. Leo – whose syndicated thinking originates with US News and World Report - is...is... the "mainstream media." Pretending otherwise enables him to play outsider and riff on the fiction of the "liberal media bias." (Yes, it’s the old Rush Limbaugh ploy.)
Also, since Leo is so alert to the proper use of the word "terrorist," how in the world did he neglect to cite the White House’s brilliant slogan – "the war on terrorism"? That gobbledy-gook helped the neo-cons conflate two different circumstances, 9/11 and Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship, thereby persuading the gullible to permit a war on Iraq.
I doubt he neglected it. I suspect he subscribes to that bit of sophistry which, last I looked, has been deadly to 1,750 young Americans and I don’t know how many Iraqis.
Hey, Leo is entitled to his views. It's the feints and juke, yes, the deception that's obnoxious, particularly from a critic.
Remember the Sherlock Holmes story about the letter that was hidden in plain sight? That’s how I think of the business pages of our daily newspapers – business boosterism that’s so obvious we tend to overlook it.
Having said that, these pages, including the Albuquerque Journal’s Business Outlook section, can be useful and entertaining.
What jumped out of James Hamill’s tax column in this morning’s Business Outlook was his aside that "Since the start of the Industrial Revolution, Americans have swayed form viewing corporate leaders as magnates or robber barons. We’re back to the robber baron phase…."
Remember André Agassi’s old commercial slogan, "Image is everything"? Hamill is interested in how corporate leaders are seen, not how they act. (Hint: Sometimes as robber barons, sometimes not.)
No great surprise, of course. We are not reading one of the few exceptions to the boosterism rule, like the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times
The Farmington, New Mexico Police Department has been telling reporters for the local Daily Times that this, that and the other information isn’t public. Too sensitive, you know.
In Carlsbad, New Mexico, the daily Current-Argus is suing the city for release of information on applicants for the administrator’s job. FOG, the New Mexico Foundation for Open Government is helping the paper.
I remember as a young reporter (eons ago) the cops in several small towns in Northern New Jersey cooperating when they wanted to and hiding the blotter when they found it convenient.
It took time, but I finally figured out why they weren’t open. Police blotter knowledge in the hands of the cops (and often, the Mayor who named the Police Chief), gives them power. Once that information is public, the power goes away. To put it another way, they can get away with a lot by maintaining
secrecy.
I learned a lot covering small town cops, Councils, boards of education and zoning and such. Later, I learned that the same forces – fear, ego, money and other forms of power, among them – operate at the state and federal levels, too.
Consider now the federal judge who sent Judith Miller of the New York Times to jail because she wouldn’t cooperate with a Justice Department probe into a White House leak that may have violated the law against outing US spies.
No matter that she never wrote a story.
No matter that the prosecutor hasn’t told us a crime was committed.
No matter that Robert Novak, right-wing columnist, named the spy after talking to the White House leaker.
No matter that Novak has been interviewed by the special prosecutor.
No matter that the Time Magazine, citing its corporate responsibilities, turned over its reporters’ notes to the government – Karl Rove’s name was in them - and that its reporter- who wrote a story after Novak's revelation - agreed to testify with his source's permission.
I wish I knew more, but one conclusion is obvious.
What started as a search for a leaker in the White House who may have violated the law has become an effort to bend corporate news organizations and individual reporters to Washington’s will.
Hey, as the cops in small towns know, you can get away with murder so long as you can operate in secrecy.
There’s a tendency to scapegoat the press, one I may not always resist myself. However, you can read very interesting stories every day of the week. Like these:
o A cow came down with Mad Cow disease and the Department of Agriculture kept that secret for seven months.
o Studies funded by the Labor Department supported criticism of CAFTA by its opponents, so the Department kept the research secret for more than a year.
o Britain’s top spy told Tony Blair’s Cabinet in July 2002 that the White House was determined to oust Saddam Hussein and would "fix" the intelligence around the policy.
Which prompts this thought: If the press tells us the government is a serial liar and we ignore it, who’s responsible for the decline of our democracy?