Journalism

Sunday morning, 7.05 AM. Most people are still asleep. I am playing with my son and listening to the radio, and it is the first time this week that I hear some substantial radio coverage of the 2007 World Social Forum. I had no time this week to watch the evening television news more than once or twice, and hence do not know whether the Dutch television paid more attention. But I did read the newspaper, and listened to the radio, and heard almost nothing about the WSF.

So no attention to the WSF on primetime. Perhaps it’s just my impression? Or perhaps it’s just the Netherlands? (Not that there is important local news here – the government formation is happening behind closed doors, with no gossip spreading to the People). I hope I am wrong, since the WSF offers a good opportunity for the mainstream press to report on structural issues of global injustice and poverty, instead of only reporting on natural disasters, flaming wars, and other cases of instant misery.

Becks at Unfogged and Scott Lemieux both wonder why the hell the New York Times publishes articles like this.

FOR some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.

“We called Viking over the holidays every year,” Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.

The Financial Times (which has its biases, but is still in my opinion the best newspaper out there), has an entire bloody weekend supplement devoted to this kind of stuff, with the classy title How To Spend It. While a fair number of its readers are presumably City types who can afford the pieds-a-terres and fancy toys lovingly detailed in its pages, I would imagine that most of its readers aren’t. Someone who I was chatting to about this recently suggested that it’s an aspirational thing; while most of its readers can’t afford this stuff, they’d like to be able to, and are more likely to buy a newspaper that allows them at least to daydream about it. Or perhaps the marketing types think that readers would prefer to be addressed as if they were in a position to “Spend It” even when they aren’t. Any other plausible explanations?

This column by Gideon Rachman in the FT is pretty interesting; he argues that what’s wrong in right wing foreign policy discussion in the US is that there are too many journalists and former journalists.

An editor of The Economist in the 1950s once advised his journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. This formula is almost second nature for newspaper columnists and can make for excellent reading. But it is a lousy guide to the making of foreign policy. … the journalists are a vital part of a neo-con network that formulated and sold the ideas that took the US to war in Iraq and that is now pressing for confrontation with Iran. The links between journalists, think-tanks and decision-makers in the neo-con world are tight and there is plenty of movement from one area to the other … You get the same combination of overstatement and ancestor-worship in Mr Stelzer’s introduction to The Neocon Reader, when he writes of the “formidable intellectual firepower behind neo-conservative foreign policy”, which “has probably not been seen since George Kennan led a team that formulated America’s response to the threat of Soviet expansionism.” The comparison with Kennan is instructive but not in the way Mr Stelzer intends. The main difference is that Kennan had a profound knowledge of the part of the world he was writing about. … Neo-conservative columnists have tended to follow the trial lawyers’ approach to expertise. First, decide what you want to argue then find an expert who agrees with you. … The current debacle in Iraq is what you get when you turn op-ed columns into foreign policy.

To which I’d add that right-wing house-organs such as Commentary have also shaped these commentators’ style, by creating a culture in which you get ahead by smearing your opponents (to illustrate this, it’s worthwhile to read through, say, a selection of Norman Podhoretz’s old columns, or Charles Krauthammer’s more recent attempts in The National Interest to claim that Francis Fukuyama is an anti-Semite). This isn’t to say that things are much better among the centrist and Democratic divisions of the foreign policy commentariat; they also have their own exaggerated simplifications. Here, the tendency seems to be to argue over grand and abstract paradigms for foreign policy making, without any real attempt to account for the actual human costs that this or that paradigm will have, if implemented. This seems to me to be the more fundamental problem that lies behind recent complaints that commenters who got the Iraq war wrong have done quite well out of it; that there’s a fundamental disconnection between the DC-centric arena of foreign policy debates, and the world in which the results of these debates play out. This intellectual disconnect isn’t only a sin of journalists; it’s a sin that academics are often guilty of too (I suspect that the problem with Henry Kissinger’s behavior as Secretary of State wasn’t exactly that he was a Metternichean realist, but that he was an academic trying to be a Metternichian realist). But it’s a pretty fundamental sin, and a pretty fundamental problem.

Lately, I’ve been getting less and less from reading blogs and, more generally, stuff on the internet. But there have been some exceptions, and one of the most exceptional has been exile.ru , the paper put out by various exapts in Russia (where they are beyond libel and defamation laws). Notable in the most recent issue is the kicking that Mark Ames gives to the American journalistic profession as a whole , and Anne Applebaum in particular, in the light of their reaction to the Politkovskaya assassination. I’ve also become a regular reader of Gary war nerd Brecher and of John Dolan’s book reviews . You should go there too. They’re good, if nasty.

Describing an argument with her mum, Laura puts into words the problem I had with David Brooks’s column on Sunday. The column does little more than articulate the conclusions of Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain; the conclusions basically being that there are significant sex-related differences between boys’ and girls’ brains. But, as Laura says:

After I read this article, I thought “and?” And what’s the point, Davie? So, boys and girls are different, But what does that mean. I mean this isn’t a science column; it’s a political and social column on an opinion page, but he never spits it out. Mom and I were fighting over the Brooks’ unstated point.

Mom: Brooks is just saying, “ha” to the feminists who kept telling me over and over in the 70s that you kids were different, because we were messing with them. If only we were more nurturing to Chris, he would like dolls. And I told them they were crazy.

Me: Brooks is also saying something else, Mom. If we’re all just slaves to genetics as Brooks says, then women have to be the moms and dad have to go to the office or war or the soccer field. I think that’s what he’s really saying there, but he’s too chickenshit to get it out.

I don’t know whether to side with Laura or her mum. But that’s the point. Unlike most of you, but I suspect like Laura, I have a real soft spot for Brooks. But in an op ed, shouldn’t you forward an op?

Watching established news organizations set up homesteads in the blogosphere is a pastime of great interest to me, both as a professional writer and an amateur social psychologist. Few phenomena better illustrate the role that anxiety plays in the life of large institutions.

In some few cases, the internal culture of a magazine or newspaper will encourage (or at least tolerate) a degree of initiative on the part of the writing staff. But most places are just too inflexible for that. And it shows, at all levels.

The habits fostered by an entrenched bureaucracy combine with hazy notions of “our audience” (often treated with an overblown deference finally indistinguishable from condescension) to yield a rigidity embodying pure terror. There is a clutching at reliable formulas, and a deep fear of the interesting, let alone the unusual. A compulsive avoidance of experimentation sometimes alternates (in an almost cyclothymic way) with joylessly frantic, top-down efforts at renewal.

“Be spontaneous!” comes the directive from on high. “Just not too spontaneous!”

And you see the spastic consequence in the blogs, which should probably be called Unclear on the Concept or Lipstick on the Corpse or Watching Grandma Dance the Frug.
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Eric Umansky (via Laura Rozen) has a great article in the CJR on how newspapers dealt with stories about torture and murder in Iraq. For example, this story about the New York Times.

Gall filed a story, on February 5, 2003, about the deaths of Dilawar and another detainee. It sat for a month, finally appearing two weeks before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. “I very rarely have to wait long for a story to run,” says Gall. “If it’s an investigation, occasionally as long as a week.” Gall’s story, it turns out, had been at the center of an editorial fight. Her piece was “the real deal. It referred to a homicide. Detainees had been killed in custody. I mean, you can’t get much clearer than that,” remembers Roger Cohen, then the Times’s foreign editor. “I pitched it, I don’t know, four times at page-one meetings, with increasing urgency and frustration. I laid awake at night over this story. And I don’t fully understand to this day what happened. It was a really scarring thing. My single greatest frustration as foreign editor was my inability to get that story on page one.”

Doug Frantz, then the Times’s investigative editor and now the managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says Howell Raines, then the Times’s top editor, and his underlings “insisted that it was improbable; it was just hard to get their mind around. They told Roger to send Carlotta out for more reporting, which she did. Then Roger came back and pitched the story repeatedly. It’s very unusual for an editor to continue to push a story after the powers that be make it clear they’re not interested. Roger, to his credit, pushed.” (Howell Raines declined requests for comment.) “Compare Judy Miller’s WMD stories to Carlotta’s story,” says Frantz. “On a scale of one to ten, Carlotta’s story was nailed down to ten. And if it had run on the front page, it would have sent a strong signal not just to the Bush administration but to other news organizations.” Instead, the story ran on page fourteen under the headline “U.S.Military Investigating Death of Afghan in Custody.” (It later became clear that the investigation began only as a result of Gall’s digging.)

Between 1998 and 2003, Joris Luyendijk worked for various Dutch media as their correspondent in the Middle East. He has now written a book about his experiences (as far as I know, it’s only available in Dutch).

Luyendijk, who studied political science and Arabic, lived as a correspondent in Egypt, Lebanon, and East-Jerusalem. One of the main themes of his book is the impossibility of being a correspondent in this region according to the standards that journalists are assumed to aspire to in Europe. With many anecdotes, he shows that the ‘news’ Dutch people are getting about the Middle Eastern countries in the mainstream media is heavily filtered, manipulated, and constrained. It seems plausible to think that if it really is so bad with the Middle East reporting in the Dutch media, it ain’t going to be any better for other countries. Despite that this book is written for a broad readership and therefore aspires to be as readable as possible, it does not offer one simple explanation for this problem. Rather, Luyendijk describes a number of factors. [click to continue…]

Jeffrey Sachs, William Easterly (and Bono for that matter) can stop their bitching, Christopher Hitchens has an explanation for a good deal of global destitution:

… the mass murder of people on aeroplanes is a leading cause of poverty.

If only Larry Summers were still in post, he could have offered Hitch a job. (shamelessly stolen from Marc Mulholland ).

I’ve just finished reading Brian Cowan’s The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the English Coffee House (Powells, Amazon) which I really enjoyed a lot (thanks to Rick Perlstein for the recommendation). Its structure is a little unwieldy – the first part is an essay in the history of consumption, the second a semi-related exercise in intellectual and social history – but it really lays out a very strong historical case for something that I’ve suspected and presumed was true, but haven’t seen treated systematically. The typical academic view of the coffeehouse has claimed it as the herald and avatar of a far reaching civil society of intelligent discourse. London coffeehouses have been depicted as the empirical manifestation of Jurgen Habermas’s “public sphere,” a space in which individuals could come together to discuss art and politics, free from both economic pressures and the oversight of the state. They’ve been portrayed as sites of rational and civilized argument. Cowan provides compelling evidence that this view is, to be blunt, romanticized bosh.
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Matt Yglesias announces the institution of Krauthammer Friday

Charles Krauthammer’s columns are published on Fridays. Thus, I hereby proclaim a new recurring feature—the second Friday of every month, we’ll revisit the man’s January 18, 2006 column, “The Iran Charade, Part II” in which he confidently proclaimed—contrary to the judgment of every relevant intelligence agency—that “Iran is probably just months away” from a nuclear bomb.

But even better, to my mind, was Krauthammer’s confident judgement on Iraq WMDs back in April 2003.

Hans Blix had five months to find weapons. He found nothing. We’ve had five weeks. Come back to me in five months. If we haven’t found any, we will have a credibility problem.

Indeed.