Crooked Timber

Anyone reading blogs over the last few years know how obsessive the wingnut element can get over faked, altered and “faked” photographs. Sometimes there’s a case to answer; sometimes there’s a picture that contradicts their narrative and they’re shrilly convinced that “it isn’t trooo!” We saw instances of both in the recent Lebanon war. Now the great-granddaddy of such controversies looks set for reinvestigation : did Robert Capa stage his most famous picture, the “Falling Soldier” from the Spanish Civil War? The International Center of Photography in New York has acquired a suitcase discovered in Mexico last year containing Capa negatives abandoned when he fled from Paris in 1939.

Together with various other media types and bloggers, I’ve signed a letter of protest at the way in which ABC conducted the debate on Wednesday night. Text is below.

We the undersigned deplore the conduct of ABC’s George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson at the Democratic Presidential debate on April 16. The debate was a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the world. This is not the first Democratic or Republican presidential debate to emphasize gotcha questions over real discussion. However, it is, so far, the worst.

Same magazine, different universes. First, Jon Friedman of Marketwatch in a two part story (I’ve stolen the title of this post from Part II).

Although I view Time and Newsweek (not to mention U.S. News & World Report and the Week) as sophisticated and worthwhile in their own right, the Economist is the smartest weekly magazine around. Still, the class brain is seldom also recognized in the school yearbook as the most popular kid in the class. … The Economist may be too sophisticated for its own good. I sure don’t want the magazine to dumb down its content for the U.S. audience. I hope it can resist the temptation. The Economist has the goods, all right, to have lofty growth plans in the U.S. The only problem, though, is that there may not be enough smart people around who will want to read it.

Then Dani Rodrik who is … Dani Rodrik.

Am I the only economist who does not read The Economist? Well maybe the first one to confess to it. … Call it a one-man boycott of ideology that masquerades too often as journalism. … I realized that the more I knew about a subject, the less The Economist was making sense. It’s one thing to be opinionated, another to be misinformed and arrogant at the same time. After one too many articles in this mold, I simply stopped picking up the magazine.

Dani does note in the magazine’s defence that he was recently told to look at an Economist piece which quotes him, and which was in his opinion quite good on the complicated relationship between institutions and economic growth.

Dsquared had some sharp words a while back (I can’t remember where) for people who made the grievous error of confusing an acquaintance with the contents of the Economist with real understanding of what is happening in other countries. There is, even so, an underlying truth in the Friedman piece. The Economist succeeds in part by delivering a particular party line that accords well with the prejudices of many of its readers (Friedman quotes an acquaintance as saying that he loves the ‘unpredictability’ of the Economist which is quite odd; by the time I gave up on it, I could tell nine times out of ten what the magazine was going to say on a topic by looking at what the topic was). But it also serves as a kind of aspirational good. The Economist flatters readers who aren’t quite intelligent enough to realize how shallow it is into thinking that they are more intelligent than they are because they read it. Thus, we get articles like Friedman’s, which are less about the state of the US magazine market than about how Friedman and his friends are smart, unconventional and edgy because they read the appointed magazine for smart, unconventional and edgy people. And if that magazine plays its cards right, it can expand its readership to the smart, unconventional and edgy masses. A nice market niche if you can get it, I suppose.

Update: see also notsneaky’s guide to how to read the Economist.

Update 2: As Kerim Friedman points out in comments, there’s an uncanny similarity between the views of Jon Friedman and those of Glen Schraft.

Some commenters thought that I should have waited before attacking the BBC’s “White” season. After, all, they argued … legitimate topic of inquiry …. watch first, judge later, … blah blah. Martin O’Neill has been watching, and he doesn’t like what he’s seen. Specifically, he has an article in the New Statesman deploring Denys Blakeway’s film about Enoch Powell, which attempts both a partial rehabilitation of the man and manages to suggest (without saying directly) that Powell’s “rivers of blood” claim was vindicated on 7/7 (a product of multiculturalism). Anyway, I’m summarizing Martin, so surf over to his excellent piece.

“Decent left” columnist Nick Cohen, writing for Pajamas Media , and explaining the alleged fact, that, unlike continental Europeans, the British are not keen on Obama:

A more convincing explanation to my mind is that European support for Obama is tied to levels of anti-Americanism, and despite all Bush has thrown at them, the British are not as anti-American as the continentals have become.

And the test of how anti-American people are? It is whether they support, retrospectively, Israel’s bombing of Saddam’s nuclear reactor:

At a recent meeting in London Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA officer, elegantly calibrated attitudes to the US. He spoke all over North America and Europe and whenever the subject of an aggressive foreign policy came up he asked audiences whether Israel had been right to take out Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981. In America, virtually everyone was in favor. Whatever their politics, they reasoned that a totalitarian regime was about to get the bomb and, obviously the West should stop it. In Germany, virtually everyone was against — “even the hawks are pacifists,” he said. In France, audiences split 80 per cent against, 20 in favor — “which was good of the 20 per cent considering Chirac had built the reactor in the first place.” In Britain, people divided evenly.

[Hat tip DW and MT.]

From Three Quarks Daily.

Super Tuesday Surprise: Leading Minsk Newspaper Endorses Candidates in US Presidential Race

… From Belaruskija Naviny (translated by the Belarus Information Agency): Minsk (BIA) 1 February, 2008—
In America, there are not strong leaders like Aleksandr Grigorevich Lukashenko, who come into power, and stay in the power. The only president in American history to have held on his power more than two terms was Franklin Roosevelt. And he was cripple! He stayed long because of war-time situation, not strength. But every four years, the parties make their best effort. This year, because of failed war in Iraq and weak leadership of George W. Bush, the American people are going in for politics like never before in their history. … What choices are the Republican and Democratic parties offering them?

At this present, the Republican (“Grand Old”) Party has three candidates in competition: the Christian retail-store magnate and “healthy life-style” advocate Mike Huckabee, whose business practices were subjected to critique already in American independent cinema production “I Heart Huckabee” (2005); Mitt Romney, governor of State Utah and elder of Mormon church, which until Lukashenko’s bold measure against foreign missionary-activity was responsible for the common sight on the streets of Grodno and Brest and Vitebsk of clean and polite young Americans, speaking Belarusian like mother tongue, and promoting their heretical sect to our villagers like we were pagan Indians; and finally, John McCain, senator of City Phoenix and number-one opponent of current president George W. Bush within Republican party.

The Democrats have now only two candidates who stand to chance against this powerful phalanx: Barack Obama, senator of City Chicago and nephew of Saddam Hussein; and Hillary Rodham Clinton, organizer of popular solidarity-building women’s breakfasts for discussion of hair-hygiene and of place of woman in American politics, and only official wife of number-one enemy of Serbs and all Slavic peoples, Bill Clinton.

(for more on Hillary Clinton’s role in creating ‘polyclinics’, Barack Obama’s surprising failure to promote sport, leisure, tourism and patriotic games, and the key question of why shouldn’t Mike Huckabee eat pigs’ legs in aspic and goose-fat on craquelins, go to 3QD).

This bit in the NYT made me wonder whether the writer had any clue what he was talking about.

But notwithstanding this stunning success, this week’s withdrawal by John Edwards, coming a week after the departure of Dennis Kucinich, means that both of the preferred presidential candidates of the liberal blogosphere are now out of the race.

followed by some speculations as to whether

like all outsider movements, [the blogosphere] identifies with the underdog. This year that meant support for Mr. Kucinich and Mr. Edwards in the Democratic race, and Ron Paul in the Republican contest.

Isn’t it just enough that the National Review Online seems to have published dodgy reporting on massive (and apparently entirely imaginary) Hezbollah invasions of chunks of Beirut, without the source of said reportage being the co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Intelligent Design ? ? Sweet.

My (longish) review of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System is now out in The Nation. I liked the book quite a lot – as I say in the review it’s a little like Ryszard Kapuscinkski’s melanges of fiction and journalism, but it’s far starker, more direct, and angrier in its conclusions. One of the things I found most interesting about the book (although I don’t think his argument ultimately works), is Saviano’s efforts to connect together the Camorra and global capitalism. This is something that the NYT reviewer didn’t get – he complains that the first chapter of the book (on Chinese smugglers) doesn’t say anything about the Camorra at all. As I read the book, that was rather the point that Saviano was trying to make – that the fundamental problem lies not so much in the florid stories about the Camorra clans as in the underbelly of globalization; the myriads of clandestine and informal markets and of relationships between the legal and illegal economies that help sustain global capitalism. The book is at least as much about markets as about crime – two extended quotes after the jump give some of the flavor. Continue reading “Gangster Capitalism”

I’ve another bloggingheads with Dan Drezner. One of the topics that we talk about is the weirdness of the norms that govern regular op-ed page writers. In the NYT at least, they seem to be discouraged from mentioning each other by name when they disagree/attack each other, this has become increasingly artificial seeming as they’ve become a bit bloggier, and started to engage each other more directly than in the past. The key example that Dan and I talk about is the recent back-and-forth over Reagan’s legacy and the Republican Southern strategy between David Brooks, Bob Herbert, and Paul Krugman (with other non-regular op-ed writers andbloggers piping up too). But as we suggest in the dialogue these norms are beginning to break down – this rather nasty piece by Ruth Marcus claiming that Paul Krugman is dishonest, has merited a pretty vigorous response on Krugman’s blog (see also Mark Thoma) which shows pretty convincingly that Marcus has taken some of the quotes that she uses out of context, so as to suggest that Krugman was making claims that he wasn’t in fact making (another quote that she uses is more accurate – but Krugman claims convincingly that he was writing at a time when the long term economic outlook for Social Security looked far more dire than it does today). Marcus’s attack is itself a response to Krugman’s previous criticisms of an unsigned Washington Post editorial that she (Marcus) strongly hints that she wrote herself.

In general, this is all to the good. I can see the justification for the previous policy, I think – that you don’t want your op-ed pages to break down into bickering between a small group of elites, and that you want to preserve the ideal of the op-ed writer as a disinterested and magisterial figure taking the pulse of the American polity, etc, etc, etc. But this also allows op-ed writers to get away with a lot of self-serving bullshit while never being called on it. A more vigorous back-and-forth of the kind we’ve being seeing is a highly imperfect corrective to that problem – but it’s certainly better than the current system where regular op-ed writers are simultaneously put on a pedestal and never subjected to the processes of fact-checking that restrain traditional journalists.

In the late 1990s, Doug McLennan created Arts Journal, a comprehensive aggregator of cultural journalism; for the past couple of years has been in charge of whatever is going on with the National Arts Journalism Program, which gave out fellowships at Columbia University for a while. (Until, one day, it didn’t. I’m not really sure what happened there.) He’s had a blog at AJ, Diacritical, that has been pretty episodic, goings weeks and longer without new activity. Totally understandable, of course; the man has enough else to do.

But it looks like he’s resuming it, starting with some considerations on how badly the notion of the newspaper as part of “mass culture” serves us, especially now:
Continue reading “One Day Tom Brokaw Will Seem Like Walter Lippmann and Then I’ll Really Have Something to Complain About”

I’m glad to see that my friend Martin O’Neill has devoted his New Statesman column to the topic this week. A sample:

Any plausible commitment to the values of a democratic society will minimally involve the thought that there should be a degree of political equality. Citizens should not only be equal before the law, but should have an equal opportunity to influence the outcomes of democratic deliberation. If we are to have government of the people, for the people and by the people – in Abraham Lincoln’s phrase – then we need to take seriously the thought that the people’s voices need to be heard. The political philosopher John Rawls, in defining his principles of justice for a democratic state, talks about the significance not only of ensuring that citizens have equal basic liberties (such as freedom of speech, freedom of association and the right to vote), but of further ensuring equality in the fair value of the rights and liberties involved in political life. Without such commitments to the fair value of our rights and liberties, invoking democratic ideals can look like an empty charade, devoid of genuine substance. In other words, if we take democracy seriously, we need to walk it like we talk it.

But what would be involved in delivering a truly democratic society, in which citizens’ democratic rights were not merely a charade – all form and no substance? Well, one thing it would certainly involve is some restrictions on the ownership of the media, so that it could no longer be the case that the content of public political debate is decided by the private interests of a few rich proprietors, like The Sun’s Rupert Murdoch.

I think my only quarrel with Martin concerns him picking on the Sun. Some of Murdoch’s other outlets, especially the Times contain much more pernicious garbage these days, but it gets a pass for being a “quality” paper.