In my first-ever blog post (apart from a Hello World! announcement), I commented on the fact that, whereas trade and current account deficits were big news in Australia, US papers buried them in the back pages. At least in the online edition of the New York Times, this is no longer the case. The latest US Trade deficit ($58.3 billion in January) is front-page news.
Despite this catch-up, it’s still true that anyone wanting coverage of economic issues in the US would do far better to read blogs than to follow either the NY Times or the WSJ, and no other mainstream media even come close. It isn’t even true, as it is in other cases, that bloggers need the established media to get the facts on which they can then comment. The NY Times story linked above is basically a rewrite of the Bureau of Economic Analysis press release which you can get by automatic email if you want.
The competition is much tougher in Australia. Media coverage of economic issues is better, the number of economist-bloggers is smaller and quite a few of us play both sides of the street anyway.
(This is probably unfair; as Dead Parrots notes, USA Next cares as little for copyright as they do for their own dignity. It is funny, though.)
This report of a survey of more than 110,000 (!) students at 544 high schools has been getting a lot of play. The survey found that one in three high schoolers think the First Amendment “goes too far”; that three quarters believe that flag-burning is illegal; and that 36% of them thought newspapers should get “government approval” before publishing stories in the newspaper.
The White House issued a statement congratulating American students not just for their views on constitutional law, but also for their “accurate characterization of the relationship between the Executive branch and the White House Press Corps.”
OK, I just made that up about the White House. But the study is real. Further reading of the full report reveals the usual smorgasbord of opinion that surveys like this typically bring out. For instance, substantially more teenagers believe that “musicians should be allowed to sing songs with lyrics others may find offensive” than believe that “newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories.” Even better, whereas only 49 percent thought that newspapers should be able to report without government approval, 58 percent said that school newspapers should be able to report controversial issues without the approval of school authorities. I guess it all depends on who you think The Man is — the Prez or the Principal.
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an excellent article following up on the Lancet study. That study is still basically unchallenged, by the way; however many epidemiologists you ask, they’re all going to give the same answer, that it was good science.
The Chronicle’s angle is on the strange fact that the Lancet appears to have shown that the Iraq War made an already horrible state of affairs much worse, and that nobody seems to think that this is something worth thinking about. There was a brief kerfuffle of interest around the time of publication, but other than that, the reaction of the world’s media to the fact that we spent $150bn on trying to help the Iraqis but did it so badly that we increased their death rate by over 50%, appears to be “ho hum”.
Les Roberts, the principal author, is going through long dark nights of the soul, wondering if it was a tactical mistake to request accelerated peer review and to have been so vocal about the US elections (btw, the Chronicle reiterates the point we made here earlier; that accelerated peer review is uncommon but by no means unknown with important papers). The Lancet editor Richard Horton refuses to comment, and well he might given that he wrote an entirely misleading summary of the paper which referred to “100,000 civilian deaths” when the paper did not make this distinction.
But there is no way on earth that I am going to write a comment harping on about this or that minor faux pas on the part of the authors.
Because the fundamental point that Roberts makes in the article is absolutely correct; it is a far greater disgrace that 100,000 people1 can be needlessly killed and everybody carries on as they were before. You don’t have to accept an entirely consequentialist view of wars to accept that the consequences of wars have to be relevant to assessing whether they’ve succeeded or not. The best evidence that we have is that the consequences of this one were bloody disastrous. And as far as I’m aware, the list of war supporters who have seriously engaged with the possibility that this war was a failure numbers two; Marc Mullholland and Norman Geras. Marc mentions the Lancet specifically and ends up worried about his previous position; Norm doesn’t and doesn’t. If you know of any other examples, I’d be very grateful. But I honestly think, that’s it.
Other than that, the response in the world of weblogs has been exactly the same as the rest of the media; in the immediate aftermath of the report, half-assed attempts to rubbish the survey, or links to same. Then, when this didn’t work, just pretend that it’s all been dealt with and move on. Maybe say “I’ll get back to you on that” and never do. After a few months of this concerted inattention, many pro-war voices have even decided it was safe to use the old slogan “well Iraq is certainly a better place because we got rid of Saddam”, when this claim is quite obviously highly debatable (just like “of course the world is a safer place because we got rid of Saddam” …)
It’s an absolute intellectual disgrace. It might be good enough for Her Britannic Majesty’s Foreign Secretary but surely we ought to hold ourselves to higher standards than that. The debate over whether this war worked is vitally important, because we are talking about setting a precedent for an entirely new world of international relations, and the debate is not being carried on honestly. This is quite literally madness, and also quite literally suicidal.
I think I ended every single Lancet post with the observation that you can tell a lot about people’s character by observing the way in which they protect themselves from hostile information. Les Roberts ought to take some grim pleasure in the fact that the world has paid his work possibly the highest compliment that the establishment can pay to a piece of information; they regarded it as dangerous enough to ignore it, even at the cost of their own credibility.
Footnote:
1As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t like this 100,000 number, and it is irksome that the Lancet’s lasting legacy has been that the “100,000 dead!” factoid has become a commonly used stick for antiwar hacks to beat prowar hacks with. But as I say above, there is no way that I’m going to pick nits on this sort of thing while there is such a huge act of ongoing intellectual dishonesty on the other side. The pro-war side have brought this on themselves; until they start engaging with the issue, they can live with it.
Jeff Jarvis has found a worthy target for his spleen- an appalling New York Times article by Sarah Boxer that repeatedly insinuates that the bloggers behind Iraq the Model are fakes, plants, or CIA operatives. Iraq the Model is a blog written by three Iraqi brothers; it’s especially popular among supporters of the war because of its generally pro-American, pro-invasion viewpoint.
The CIA really did covertly finance intellectual and cultural events and publications during the Cold War. On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog. On the face of it, it’s not impossible that there could be something behind any generic pro-American Iraqi bloggers. Sarah Boxer could have looked into it, checked out the things that could be checked, talked to the people who had met the bloggers in question, and written about what she found.
That’s not what she did. Here’s the first paragraph:
When I telephoned a man named Ali Fadhil in Baghdad last week, I wondered who might answer. A C.I.A. operative? An American posing as an Iraqi? Someone paid by the Defense Department to support the war? Or simply an Iraqi with some mixed feelings about the American presence in Iraq? Until he picked up the phone, he was just a ghost on the Internet.
Sexy! I kind of wish someone would profile me, so I could see what secrets I might have. I might be on the Democratic payroll. I might be writing to attract young women to my gingerbread house. Boxer might have no business printing insinuations without some pretty good evidence to back them up. What she has are the wankings from some other bloggers.
A man posting as Gandhi reported that his “polite antiwar comments were always met with barrages of crude abuse” from Iraq the Model’s readers. His conclusion? The blog “is a refuge for people who do not want to know the truth about Iraq, and the brothers take care to provide them with a comfortable information cocoon.” He added, “I hope some serious attention will be brought to bear on these Fadhil brothers and reveal them as frauds.”
What kind of frauds? One reader suggested that the brothers were real Iraqis but were being coached on what to write. Another, in support of that theory, noted the brothers’ suspiciously fluent English. A third person observed that coaching wasn’t necessary. All the C.I.A. would need to do to influence American opinion was find one pro-war blog and get a paper like USA Today to write about it.
If I tried to tell my Mom that some people in a blog comment thread were mean to me and the writers are weird and… she’d be asleep before I finished the sentence. And my Mom loves me. This should not have been printed.
Jefferson Morley of the Washington Post tells us that:
There was noticeable reticence to pursue certain leads in the story. Annan is the most recognizable figure to catch heat for the scandal that occurred on his watch. But according to the Duelfer report, former French Interior Minister turned businessman, Charles Pascua, received oil vouchers from the Hussein regime that enabled him to sell more than 10 million barrels of oil on the international market. If you enter Pascua’s name in the French language version of Google News, the search engine is unable to find a single mention of Pascua’s name in the French press in the last 30 days.
If he spelled Charles Pasqua’s name correctly he’d find 101 of them (although in fairness, his main point stands - I could only find 2 that mentioned Pasqua in connection with the UN shenanigans).
Via Lance Knobel , this astonishing story from the Financial Times:
US distributors of the film Merchant of Venice, which premiered in London this week, have asked the director to cut out a background fresco by a Venetian old master so it is fit for American television viewers…
According to [director Michael] Radford, there was “a very curious request which said ‘Could you please paint-box out the wallpaper?’. I said wallpaper, what wallpaper? This is the 16th century, people didn’t have wall-paper.”
When he examined the scenes, he realised the letter was referring to frescoes by Paolo Veronese, the acclaimed Venetian 16th-century artist, which, when examined closely, showed a naked cupid.
“A billion dollars worth of Veronese great master’s frescoes they want paint-boxed out because of this cupid’s willy. It is absolutely absurd,” he said.
I have updated the graph that looks at the words “weblog” and “blog” in mainstream print media since 1997. I am sure nobody is surprised to see the large increase during the past year.
The graph represents the results for a search in LexisNexis Academic for “weblog” and “blog” in the General News section of Major Papers from 1997 to 2004 (these searches also turn up results for the plural of these terms). This section includes 47 (53 in 2004) papers from across the world including 24 (29 in 2004) US dailies.1 The figure shows the change over the past eight years. The 2004 numbers include coverage until November 28, 2004. I also ran the searches for 1995 and 1996 but there was no mention of these terms then either so I decided to follow the suggestion made by a commenter to my previous post on this topic and now just start with 1997.
Please note that this figure does not give accurate information about the total sum of articles on the topic because 1. some articles mention both “blog” and “weblog” and are thus counted in both columns (which also explains why I decided not to stack the two columns on top of each other); 2. I did not do a search for other related terms such as blogger or blogging which may have excluded some articles. Moreover, although for the earlier years I checked each article to verify it featured related content, I did not do this for later years when the numbers became too large (given that this is not a research project, just something I’m doing for fun:). The information on this graph is thus just an estimate of the actual occurance of these words in major print media outlets. Also, because it seems that the General News search of Major Papers in LexisNexis Academic searched more newspapers in 2004 than earlier years, the change in coverage may explain some (although likely not all) of the increase from 2003 to 2004.
(I posted earlier versions of this graph in April, 2003 and May, 2004.)
1 It looks like there are quite a few additions/deletions in the LexisNexis Academic database over the years.
It isn’t every day that I read a British newspaper story about the small Ohio town where I grew up, but these are interesting times.
But there are signs that Hudson’s longtime reputation as a Republican centre is changing. “The joke has always been that you could fit all Hudson’s Democrats into the phone booth at Saywell’s drugstore,” says Susan Terkel, a leader of the Kerry campaign in Hudson. “But now lots of Democrats have come out of the closet. The former mayor is campaigning for Kerry and lots of others. We had a gathering of 400 people which was exciting. But now some Republicans are boycotting the restaurant where we had the meeting. Isn’t that terrible?”
Well, yes, it is.
For a little local color, I remember checking my home zip code at opensecrets.org during the 2000 election and being shocked; a non-systematic scan showed that more people had donated to Buchanan than Gore. This year, my dad says that there are roughly as many Kerry signs as Bush ones in the neighborhood. (I realize that these two facts are not directly comparable, but they still leave me optimistic.)
Nothing on the election or the war from me. Instead, a mention of one of my favourite radio comedies, Men From the Ministry. My younger daughter gave a CD with numerous episodes to my elder daughter for her 8th birthday; the look on the elder’s face was one of unalloyed joy when she realised what it was. UK readers of a certain age know what I’m talking about. But the Finnish readers, lucky things, know what I am talking about regardless of their age. Extraordinary. The rest of you, if you have 30 minutes to spare, can learn why you should envy the Finns by clicking here. Only in English, not Finnish. Sorry.
For those of you who think your tastes are more sophisticated, Radio 4 is running a 4-part life of Peter Cook, the funniest Englishman who ever lived, presented by Michael Palin, who now, sadly, has one competitor fewer for the title of the nicest Englishman alive. The first part will be available till Friday. If your candidate loses tomorrow, it’ll cheer you up. If you don’t know before Friday, listen anyway.
Most liberal blog readers have heard about Tom DeLay’s ludicrous accusation against the Daily Kos blog (also quoted here, here, and here):
“LaRouche is a con felon and all I can tell you is that Mr. Morrison has supported and campaigned with LaRouche followers and Mr. Morrison also has taken money and is working with the Daily Kos, which is an organization that raises money for fighters against the U.S. in Iraq,” said DeLay.
Needless to say, the Daily Kos does not raise money for insurgents or terrorists in Iraq or elsewhere. Unless the House Majority leader would be pleased to describe himself and other House Republicans as “fighters against the U.S. in Bosnia”, this is an absurd charge.
I happened to go back to the original story just now, where I saw…
“LaRouche is a convicted felon and all I can tell you is that Mr. Morrison has supported and campaigned with LaRouche followers and Mr. Morrison also has taken money and is working with the Daily Kos, which is an organization that raises money for fighters of U.S. (policy) in Iraq,” said DeLay. (emphasis added)
How’d that happen?
I don’t know what Tom DeLay said. If he was misquoted, correcting the quote online is good journalism. It would be nice to include a little correction at the bottom of the page, but no big deal. (I should say that I don’t believe that this is what happened. I personally called the campaign office to ask about this quote. I specifically asked if DeLay was misquoted, and the gentleman from the campaign told me that DeLay’s statement was accurate.)
I don’t know what Tom DeLay meant. Maybe he misspoke, or just realized he was over his head. In that case, an additional sentence, something like “Mr. DeLay explained that he was referring to candidates who opposed U.S. policy in Iraq”, would not be out of place. (This I could believe; that’s the explanation I was given. When I asked whether it was appropriate to characterize Democratic political candidates as “fighters against the U.S. in Iraq”, he said, “I’m not going to have an argument with you.”)
What I do know is that human beings can’t speak in parenthesis. It seems implausible that the words inside the quotation marks are the words that came out of Tom DeLay’s mouth. If the quote was amended, would The Citizen extend the same courtesy to less powerful figures who come to regret what they say?
James Wolcott thinks that Bush supporters are preparing to deny the legitimacy of a Kerry victory, and shift the blame for disaster in Iraq, by blaming media bias.
Matt Welch has a reasonable response to this idea:
My main objection is this (note: he’s quoting Mark Steyn, although he could have found the same thought from James Lileks or a dozen others):If the present Democratic-media complex had been around earlier, America would never have mustered the will to win World War II or, come to that, the Revolutionary War.Firstly, as Steyn surely knows, the press was much more explicitly partisan and venal back before and during WWII, and because of a lack of things like television, barons like William Randolph Hearst (who bitterly opposed the entrance to the war, and even employed Hitler as a columnist) had far more comparative power than anyone you could name today.
As I pointed out in this column back in May, it’s amazing that the same people who constantly prophesize and compile evidence about Big Media’s demise will in the next breath blame the MSM for losing wars, tipping elections, and otherwise delivering massive outcomes contrary to the Republican agenda. They’re either all-powerful or not; I’m putting my money on “not.”
Let’s try to channel some of that energy from the last post toward a more productive discussion.:) Here’s a little Flash movie about how the media are covering the presidential campaigns. I doubt any of it will be shocking to most readers of CT, but it’s still worth a pause and some thought.
The site that features the video offers much information about media ownership and is quite a resource. But I found it difficult to locate concrete things one may be able to do, except donate money to the cause.
One section suggests ten policies to fix the media. Do you find them convincing? Realistic? Necessary? Unnecessary? Hopeless? Too vague? Too ambitious? Not ambitious enough? Discuss.
The Observer, the Guardian’s Sunday-stablemate — and so the liberal paper of record for that day of the week — carried an account by one Sebastian Horsley of his 1000+ encounters with prostitutes . This now features as one of today’s items on A&L Daily. Now Horsley’s tale may be true, but any reader savvy enough to feed his name into Google will find that the very same Observer carried a feature on the same guy and his struggle with heroin and another on how, as a performance artist, he crucified himself . Seeing the various stories together certainly affects the epistemic situation of the reader, shall we say.
I don’t usually link to items that mention me (not that it happens that often anyway), but reckon that I do want to link to this Star Tribune piece, which is nice enough to quote me, but in an inadvertently misleading way. The piece says of Rathergate:
“This was a story tailor-made for bloggers,” said Henry Farrell, the co-author of the research paper. “They’re not investigative reporters and don’t have the resources of the media. But there are lots of talented people out there who can work on the story for 20 minutes. It was distributed intelligence in which a story can be unpacked into thousands of little bits.”
My recollection is that what I said had a rather different emphasis - I was riffing on a recent post by Steven Johnson, which argued that the role of bloggers in Rathergate was a flash in the pan, and that real journalism took dedicated resources. I’m sure that I didn’t refer to the Rathergate bloggers as talented people, because I was thinking about Johnson’s argument (which is that comparing the documents didn’t take much more talent than the ability to switch applications). So the way I’ve been quoted isn’t completely wrong (it’s close to my original words), but it does turn my actual argument (that this is a once-off because of the kind of issue involved) into what sounds like a fairly uncritical celebration of the blogosphere. Which was certainly not what I intended. I suppose it’s a lesson in how our words are received by others - what we believe we mean is very often not what people think that they’re hearing, even when they’re trying their best.
No-one should treat Daniel Pipes as a reliable source of information, but his claims get endlessly recycled through the internet. Today he gets prominence on Arts and Letters Daily for this piece which claims that journalists have shied away from using the word “terrorist” in connection with the terrorist murders at Beslan. The Arts and Letters Daily intro reads:
Call them assailants, bombers, captors, commandos, fighters, guerrillas, gunmen, militants, radicals, rebels, or activists. But please, not terrorists…
Pipes himself writes:
The press, however, generally shies away from the word terrorist, preferring euphemisms. Take the assault that led to the deaths of some 400 people, many of them children, in Beslan, Russia, on September 3. Journalists have delved deep into their thesauruses, finding at least twenty euphemisms for terrorists.
He also refers to “this unwillingness to name terrorists”.
He then links to twenty news sources to exemplify his claims. These are the examples cherry-picked by Pipes to support his case. I’ve followed them all.
National Public Radio This is a five-line intro rather than an article. It dates from September 1st and refers to the breaking news of the attack when details aren’t clear. Verdict: too slight and ephemeral to support Pipes.
Economist “After a wave of terrorist attacks across Russia …. Though the terrorist attacks have continued ….Moscow and other Russian cities continue to suffer terrorist outrages….The terrorists apparently bribed their way through a series of checkpoints”
Associated Press As Pipes claims, the word terrorist is not used, but the moral outrage of the article is clear to anyone who can read.
Agence France Presse “Ce dénouement sanglant porte à plus de 420 le nombre de personnes tuées dans des actes terroristes en Russie en dix jours …. Selon les autorités, les terroristes, dont une dizaine originaires de pays arabes, ont utilisé des armes et des explosifs entreposés à l’avance dans l’école, ce qui suppose une préparation minutieuse de l’opération.”
The Times The words “terror”, “terrorist” or “terrorism” are used 25 times in this column by Simon Jenkins, and only one of this instances is in inverted commas.
UPI “The hostage death toll in Russia’s Beslan school crisis topped 100 Friday as police cornered three terrorists — with hostages — in a basement….the terrorists’ leader and two associates …. the terrorists’ leader in the basement ….aced with explosives by the terrorists ” etc.
The Australian “the number of terrorists killed and captured”.
New York Post “40 heavily armed Chechen terrorists….the terrorists began shooting at fleeing children.” etc.
Reuters
As Pipes claims, the word “terrorist” is not used.
Los Angeles Times The words do occur, but mainly in the context to direct quotations.
New York Times Here Pipes’s complaint is confined to the use of the word “insurgents” in the headline. Which is just as well, since terrorists are clearly mentioned as such in the article, repeatedly.
The Observer “According to witnesses, this was not the only group of terrorists….Two years ago, when Chechen terrorists seized 800 theatre-goers in the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow ….inside the school the terrorists were also separating men from women ….the terrorists were also busy rigging up a series of bombs….The terrorists moved quickly to establish their control over the captives.
Chicago Tribune “terrorists who, in the course of just two weeks, have significantly raised the nation’s level of fear”. There may be slightly more evidence of reluctance to use the words in this case than in some of the others.
New York Times (again) “one of the most horrific terrorist acts in recent times, with the massacre of hundreds of children, parents and teachers” (and multiple other references).
BBC No mention of terror, terrorism or terrorists in the article linked to which is an assessment of the performance of the Russian security services rather than a general article on the massacre. Some support for Pipes here then. (Let me report, though, that I heard BBC commentators on Radio 5 this morning clearly referring to terrorists by that name).
Sydney Morning Herald Pipes limits himself to mentioning the headline. Odd that, as the article doesn’t use the words so offers him some support, though, again, it isn’t a general article about Beslan.
Christian Science Monitor “As Russians bury their dead, officials look at terrorist links to Chechen rebels…..sophisticated terror operation”.
Pakistan Times All mentions of the words are in the reported speech of others (which makes up much of the article).
Further comment seems superfluous.
Barry Ritholtz, market strategist and blogger, will be guest hosting Squawk Box, Wednesday, August 25. The show is on CNBC, from 7am to 10am. He says that the hosts will be Joe Kernan, Dylan Ratigan and either Maria Bartiroma, or Becky Quick, and Barry. Very exciting.
Congratulations!
Stephen Pollard, hack journalist, blogger and perennial feature of the Virtual Stoa’s “Ignorant Git” column, has a column up at the Times (American readers; you are spared this one by the Times’ subscription policy, so it will mean nothing to you. But I don’t complain when you lot bang on about Fox News.). The main conceit of the column is one that we can expect to see a lot more of in the near future; that there is something hypocritical about wanting to see international action to help rescue millions of Sudanese from being massacred, unless you also supported the bombing of Iraq.
Pollard thinks that he has found the true hypocritical heart of the Left here; that it doesn’t care about suffering people but only about “bashing America”. In fact, he’s demonstrated two things to the world:
1) That there are people in the world who know what the phrase “Humanitarian intervention” means (as in the sentence “Have you read the excellent report by Human Rights Watch entitled ‘War in Iraq: Not a Humanitarian Intervention’ Stephen? Thought not”), and who believe that there is a difference between intervening in an immediate human crisis and intervening when there isn’t an immediate humanitarian crisis.
2) That in the worldview of a small minority of warbloggers, gathering support for an international effort to do something in Sudan is important, but much less important than reminding the world what a nasty bunch of people “the Left” is for reminding people like Pollard what a ferocious stack of bollocks they bought into eighteen months ago.
One might think that, since a large part of the difficulty in getting any action on Sudan is that nobody trusts us any more because we lied about Iraq, a certain degree of contrition might be in order. But apparently not.
Jeff Jarvis makes a decent point:
Apparently, everyone else in New Jersey media knew McGreevey’s secret. And if that’s so, it raises lots of questions. I’m not saying they should have outed him; I long for the day when a politician’s personal life is just that. But if he indeed hired his lover for a state job for which that reputed lover was in no way qualified… well, that’s a crime. Why didn’t we know?
It’s great that McGreevey came right out and told the world that he was gay without apologizing for it. But if the charges about cronyism for his lover are true, they’re much more serious than Jack Ryan’s trips to sex clubs.
I understand that the specific comparison is meaningless; the individuals who make up the press corps in New Jersey don’t have to answer for the Chicago Tribune, or vice versa. There’s no one to point to, other than the imaginary beast called “the media.” Still, the public right to know is self-evident in the case of McGreevey, and not at all evident in the case of Jack Ryan. This isn’t right.
“When you hear “human rights,” think only one thing: someone who wants to rape your son. And you’ll get it just right. OK, you got it, right? When you hear “human rights,” think only someone who wants to molest your son, and send you to jail if you defend him.”
I think what I find most disappointing are the people who know better. They know that this group is untrustworthy, but they find the charges too useful not to promote. And yes, I’m sure that there are ample ways to turn this charge around on liberals. Poetic justice as fairness, once again.
(Fun fact: did you know that there were 175,000 books published last year? It’s true!)
I cannot tell you how good Daniel Drezner and The Volokh Conspiracy look to me right now. We need rational right-wingers more than ever.
I realize some blogs have already covered this, but just in case people missed it, the American Museum of the Moving Image has an interesting online exhibition about presidential compaign commercials since 1952. You can watch all the ads online, which are organized by year, type of commercial and issue. They also have a section on Web ads. A propos the Museum and campaigns, Richard Gere had a related comment at the end of the Museum’s tribute to him in April: “Never trust anyone who believes that God is exclusively on their side. [- — long pause - —] Especially when that man is the President.” [Hat tip for URL: my friend Jeff whose site is currently down so no links.]
The White House has contacted the Irish Embassy to complain about the Irish journalist, Carole Coleman, who interviewed President Bush last week. (via Radley Balko)
“‘The White House rang Thursday evening,’” said Irish embassy spokeswoman Síghle Dougherty. ‘They were concerned over the number of interruptions and that they thought the president was not given an opportunity to respond to the questions.’”
Said Dougherty: “They were mostly troubled by what they said was the way the president was ‘talked over.’ “
I’d imagine that most regular blog readers are aware of this interview. (Here’s the transcript; here’s the video, starting around 15:00.) You can judge for yourself about whether Bush was given the opportunity to respond to questions.
She asked tough questions about the mounting death toll in Iraq, the failure of U.S. planning, and European opposition to the invasion and occupation. And when the president offered the sort of empty and listless “answers” that satisfy the White House press corps - at one point, he mumbled, “My job is to do my job” - she tried to get him focused by asking precise follow-up questions.
The president complained five times during the course of the interview about the pointed nature of Coleman’s questions and follow-ups - “Please, please, please, for a minute, OK?” the hapless Bush pleaded at one point, as he demanded his questioner go easy on him.
A few questions:
1. What the hell is the Irish embassy supposed to do about it?
2. Why would the White House decide that the benefits of this action possibly outweigh the negatives involved in keeping the story alive?
3. … unless this supposed to be a warning shot at the American press,letting them know that the President is not to be the subject of serious interviews?
4. Will the press be so cowardly as to play along?
There’s this sense of how dare you question them. And that is the thing that I almost find more appalling than the decisions that they make. Because I can accept incompetence, but I cannot accept self-righteous incompetence.
Jon Stewart
UPDATE: Jesse Walker has more, and the Poor Man does a good job of summarizing the general issue.
ANOTHER UPDATE: One of my betters has more on this. Thanks to antirealist.
Heavy rain in Bristol today, so I spent the afternoon watching Volker Schlondorff’s The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (based on the Heinrich Boll novel). For those who don’t know, the film is about what happens to a young woman after she spends the night with a man who turns out to be a terrorist suspect. She is alternately bullied by the police and villified by the gutter press. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events. (If you’ve not seen the film, don’t be put off by the sole IMDB commenter, who has also posted politically-motived negative reviews of Rabbit-Proof Fence and Bloody Sunday.)
IRRITATED UPDATE: Why is a classic of the New German Cinema available on DVD in Region 1 but not in Region 2 (including the UK and Germany)?
I’ve been enjoying a visit from my friend and co-author Simon Grant for the last couple of days. We’ve been working on fairly abstruse aspects of the economics of uncertainty, though with an eye to practical applications to issues like an analysis of the precautionary principle.
However, we downed tools this afternoon when it was announced that Simon has been awarded a Federation Fellowship. This is only the second such Fellowship in Economics, mine being the first.
Obviously, I’m very happy about this, and particularly about the fact that it will bring Simon back to Australia (he’s currently at Rice university in the US).
Like racehorses, Australia’s monarchs1 all have the same official birthday, normally the second Monday in June (according to today’s Australian, this was based on the actual birthday of George IV III). It’s fair to say that, of all Australian public holidays, this is the one for which the official occasion is most completely ignored. (Labour Day isn’t marked by much, but taking the day off is an observance in itself).
This leads to some general thoughts about when and how Australia will become a republic. This proposal continues to attract the support of a majority of Australians (52 to 32 per cent according to a 2003 Newspoll). This majority wasn’t affected much by Howard’s designed-to-fail referendum on the topic, nor is this referendum regarded as closing the issue. Another Newspoll found that 57 per cent of people would welcome a new referendum.
As the non-observance of the Queen’s birthday shows, only a small minority of Australians, mostly people over 50 or migrants from Britain2, feels any emotional tie to the British monarchy or to Britain. This is reflected in the Newspoll showing only 18 per cent strongly opposed to a republic.
On the other hand, the last referendum showed that there was little enthusiasm for a merely nominal change, calling the Governor-General a President and maintaining the elective autocracy of the Prime Minister.
This means that the only serious alternative to the status quo is a directly elected President. There are plenty of logistical obstacles in the way to this, the most important of which would be the need for the President’s powers to be codified and restricted. Nevertheless, my judgement is that we will become a republic in the term of the next Labor government, which will hopefully begin this year.
The obvious route would be a two-stage process, beginning with a plebiscite on whether we should become a republic. This ought to be done on a preferential basis with the alternatives being the status quo, Parliamentary appointment of the President and direct election. Assuming that direct election wins, it should then have the moral force to be carried at a referendum.
1 Better known, of course, as Kings or Queens of England. As an aside, one question that occurs to me in this context is whether the British Act of Settlement, which requires that the monarch be a Protestant is consistent with Australian law, beginning with the Constitution, which prohibits an Established Church.
2 Under a rather unsatisfactory ‘grandfather’ clause, British subjects who were on the Australian electoral roll before 1984 are permitted to vote in Australian elections even though they are noncitizens. Most of the time, this doesn’t make much difference as they don’t vote as a bloc. However, it’s obvious that Britons who have lived here for more than 20 years without being naturalized are more likely than the average Australian to favor close links with their homeland.
I have been meaning to blog about this forever, but have not found the kind of time a post about this deserves. Since there will be a CSPAN2 airing of a related talk tomorrow, I thought I would pass on the longer serious post and just mention the book and speech so people have the opportunity to take advantage of the broadcast.
A new book that should be of interest to many readers of CT is Paul Starr’s The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. I should say up front that Paul was one of my advisors in graduate school so I am not a completely objective observer here. In fact, Paul has influenced my thinking about IT quite a bit. First, he is great at conveying the idea that studying communication media without a historical context is extremely problematic. Ignoring history is the best way to make unrealistically optimistic or pessimistic assumptions about the potential implications of a new technology. Second, he convincingly argues – as he lays out in great detail in his book – that ignoring the role of political decisions in the evolution of a communication medium misses a major part of the picture. There was a review of the book in The New York Times Book Review last weekend and the New Yorker had a piece a few weeks ago as well.
Paul Starr gave this year’s Van Zelst Lecture at the School of Communication at Northwestern last month. His talk will be aired on CPAN2 tomorrow, June 12th at 10:59am (EST). Paul is a great speaker and extremely careful and engaged scholar so viewers are in for a treat. I highly recommend catching the broadcast and reading the book!
Via Eugene Volokh,1 I came to this Boston Globe piece by Jeff Jacoby, who complains that the term “partial birth abortion”, when used in news stories, is normally surrounded by scare quotes, with the explanation that this term is used by opponents of legal abortion, but disputed by supporters. Jacoby complains about liberal bias here and says, among other things “when reporting on the same-sex marriage controversy, they should observe that “what critics call ‘homophobia’ — a term promoted by gay and lesbian activists — is not recognized by medical authorities”
As far as I can recall, I’ve never seen the word “homophobia” used in a news story in a major newspaper, other than in quotes, usually direct, but occasionally indirect (“activist X is concerned about homophobia”) Certainly I’ve never seen it used as if it referred to a recognised medical condition analogous to, say, claustrophobia. I looked in Google News and the recent uses I could find were all either in direct or indirect quotes, opinion pieces (including reprints of Jacoby!) or in publications such as Gay Times and Alternet, which don’t claim to be unbiased. Can anyone point to examples that would support Jacoby?
More generally, there is clearly a problem here. Almost any term can be disputed. For example, Jacoby himself objects to the term “assault weapons” as biased and anti-gun, even though a Google search for “assault rifle” produces 131 000 hits, including many which both promote assault rifles and deplore restrictions on their use2. As another example, I recently referred to the President of the United States of America, but almost every word in that description of George Bush could attract scare quotes from someone. It could be argued for example, that Bush wasn’t properly elected, that the US Government is illegitimate or that inhabitants of a single country have no right to claim a name properly shared between two continents.
I don’t have a good answer to this. Noting, or ignoring, disputes about terminology is one of many ways in which the media treat some viewpoints as legitimate and others as beyond the pale of debate. In the US, as the Letters Editor of the NYT observed a while back, the range of legitimate viewpoints runs the gamut from liberal to conservative. Terms will be given the scare quote treatment if either Republicans or Democrats contest them strongly enough, but not otherwise.
I will say, however, that I am less convinced than Jacoby and others of the importance of getting your terminology accepted. To the extent that “poltical correctness” was a serious movement rather than a mere bogy, its central premise was that if we could only be induced to adopt the correct language, the correct thoughts would inevitably follow. Much of the conservative reaction implicitly accepted this premise. I never saw much evidence to support it, and I’ve seen plenty of examples where terms initially used by one side have been successfully taken over by other, “capitalism” being an obvious example.
Update In comments, Chris points out that The Guardian regularly uses the term “homophobia”, and the same seems to be true of some other British media outlets. But using the search engines on the NY Times and other US and Australian papers, and using Lexis-Nexis, I found very few instances in the news, as opposed to opinion and review, pages.
1 We at CT seem to be on a Volokh kick at the moment, but my link is purely coincidental
2 I’m more sympathetic to Jacoby’s objection to “campaign finance reform”, but a moment’s thought should have been sufficient to tell him that liberals don’t have a monopoly on tendentious use of the word “reform”. Welfare reform, anyone.
If you take the problem of climate change at all seriously, it’s obviously necessary to consider what, if any, role nuclear (fission) energy should play in a response. I discussed this on my blog not long ago and concluded that “it may well be that, at least for an interim period, expansion of nuclear fission is the best way to go.” However, on the basis of my rather limited survey of the evidence, I suggested that, as a source of electricity, nuclear energy is about twice as expensive as coal or gas. If so, conservation is the first choice, and we should only move to alternative sources of electricity when the easy conservation options are exhausted.
By contrast, Mark Kleiman says that “Nukes, if run right, are fully competitive with coal, and a hell of a lot cleaner”, Brad DeLong says “He’s 100% completely correct”, and Matt Yglesias takes a similar view.
Kleiman cites the example of France, which I don’t find entirely convincing, since the French have always given substantial subsidies to nuclear energy. He argues that the US made a mess of nuclear energy for regulatory reasons, but doesn’t say anything about the British experience, which didn’t have the same problems and was still an economic disaster. I’ve looked briefly at Canada’s CANDU program, where experience appears to be mixed at best.
Can anyone point me to a reliable source of comparative information on this? Is there general agreement, or a partisan divide between pro-nuclear and anti-nuclear advocates ? I’d also be interested in comments on the general question raised in my opening sentence.
How would you rank the following priorities for making the planet a better place?
You don’t have to be Bjorn Lomborg to agree that, given the choice, improvements in health should get top priority. And you don’t have to be Vance Packard to think that the benefits of advertising, if they are positive at all, are trivial in relation to the first two choices.
In fact, however, countries in the developed world currently allocate about 1 per cent of its income to the advertising industry (this excludes the cost of the TV programs and so on financed out of advertising revenue), far more than to either development aid or climate change. The US, for example, spends about 0.1 per cent of GDP in development aid, and almost nothing on programs to mitigate climate change. If we were all prepared to watch the same old ads, instead of getting new ones every year, we would have enough money to finance either the proposals of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health or a climate change mitigation program substantially more ambitious than the Kyoto protocol.
The fact that we don’t raises a couple of issues. First, our priorities are seriously screwed. We should all be making more noise, more of the time, about the need to increase development aid, as well as personally giving more than we do to aid organisations. I don’t claim to be much better than anyone else in this respect, though I do try from time to time.
Second, comparisons of this kind are clearly tricky. Even if we all agree that too much is spent on advertising, there is no easy way, in a market or even mixed economy, of stopping firms spending money to promote their products, let alone of redirecting any savings to socially desirable ends. Similarly, and contrary to Lomborg’s implicit premise, there’s no easy way of making a trade-off in which we decide to do nothing about climate change and instead to spend the money on improving the health of the poor.
Third, given that high-priority needs are going unmet, it’s hard to reason properly about social costs and benefits. The Copenhagen Consensus exercise illustrates this. It’s quite reasonable to say that, given the choice, clean drinking water for the world’s poor should rank ahead of mitigating climate change. But is this the appropriate comparison? If Kyoto goes ahead, it won’t be financed out of aid budgets. In fact, to the extent that emissions trading is involved, poor countries will actually benefit. So the appropriate comparison is between mitigating climate change and maintaining higher levels of consumption (including the advertising that is part of that consumption) in the rich countries.
Assessing the cost-benefit issues here isn’t easy, and I doubt that the members of the Copenhagen panel have managed, in the course of five days looking at a whole range of issues, to come up with better answers than those that have been found so far. There’s no easy way of putting a monetary value on species extinctions, the loss of coral reefs and so on, and there are also tricky conceptual issues about discounting. I can only say that I would happily accept an income cut of 1 per cent if even half of the damage projected by the IPCC could be avoided (some warming is, of course, inevitable).
It would, of course, be reasonable for Lomborg, and others who’ve participated in the Copenhagen Consensus exercise to say that climate change is a second-order issue and that it is far more important to devote attention to AIDS and other health issues. Lomborg could start at home if he wanted to. Denmark has been one of the few countries in the world that gives 1 per cent of its income in development aid. But the same government that appointed Lomborg to run its Environmental Assessment Institute has also cut foreign aid repeatedly. Lomborg is a figure with a world profile who could certainly bring some pressure to bear to have this decision reversed. If I does so, I’ll be the first to cheer him on.
The bottom of the list, however, aroused more in the way of hostile comment. Rated “bad”, meaning that costs were thought to exceed benefits, were all three of the schemes put before the panel for mitigating climate change, including the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse-gas emissions. (The panel rated only one other policy bad: guest-worker programmes to promote immigration, which were frowned upon because they make it harder for migrants to assimilate.) This gave rise to suspicion in some quarters that the whole exercise had been rigged. Mr Lomborg is well-known, and widely reviled, for his opposition to Kyoto. These suspicions are in fact unfounded, as your correspondent (who sat in on the otherwise private discussions) can confirm. A less biddable group would be difficult to imagine.On the contrary, as I suggested at the outset, a panel that included, say, Joe Stiglitz and Amartya Sen would have been considerably less biddable1, as well as being better qualified to look at the issues in question.
The panel did avoid some of the criticisms made here and elsewhere by excluding from the ranking issues like financial stability, civil conflicts and (with one trivial exception) governance. They compensated by subdividing the three health-related issues (diseases, malnutrition and sanitation) in the list into ten. (The other items ranked were trade liberalisation which, not surprisingly, they all liked, and migration which got mixed grades).
But the result, in a sense, only makes the process more transparent. The great majority of the approved items are now health initiatives. So, the outcome may be summarised as saying that health care in developing countries is more important than addressing climate change, which is, of course, the strongly stated view of the organiser, (The panel also agreed with Lomborg that the costs of doing anything about climate change exceed the benefits.) I’ll respond to the substantive findings in a later post, and when I’ve had time to look at any publication arising from the process.
However, the exercise could still be worthwhile. If Lomborg and the other panel members take the results to mean that they should personally campaign for action on the high-priority issues they mention, they could certainly do a lot of good. I’ll wait with interest to see if this happens.
1 To be boringly clear, I’m not suggesting that the panel was “biddable” in the sense of taking orders from Lomborg. Rather they were selected to be a likeminded group which would come up with the desired consensus.
Robert Samelson argues that we should stop using the word ‘reform’. I’ve grappled with this question for a long term, having been generally critical of the neoliberal policies generally referred to as “microeconomic reform”. I’ve tried all sorts of devices, such as the use of scare quotes and phrases like “so-called reform”, before concluding that the best thing is just to use the word in ways that make it obvious that I am not attaching positive connotations to it.
Over the fold is an old post on the subject, from my blog (I needed to repost to fix broken links).
As Raymond Williams points out in his excellent little book Keywords, from which I got the idea for this series, reform originally meant ‘restore the original form’ of something. In particular the Reformation was supposed to sweep away the abuses of the Papacy and restore the church to its original purity. As this example indicates, the worldview associated with this usage was one of decline rather than progress. The best one could hope for was to get back to things as they were in the good old days. This view was dominant in Western thinking from Plato to the 17th century.
From the 18th century onwards, reform underwent something of a reversal, since it now typically implied forming something new. But since the associated worldview was now one of progress, the assumption remained that reform entailed change for the better.
From the 18th century to the 1970s, the term reform was typically used to describe policies favored by the moderate left, in opposition to advocates of revolutionary change on one side and of conservatism and reaction on the other. From the 1970s to the end of the 20th century, though, the direction of policy change was reversed, with the rise of neoliberalism. However, the term reform continued to be used, even when the policies it described consisted of the dismantling of earlier reforms.
As a result, critics of neoliberal policies have frequently resorted to the use of “scare quotes”, as in my recent reference to ‘workplace reform’, or to similar alerts like “so-called”. While the automatic assumption prevails that the term reform applies only to desirable changes, such devices are necessary.
Where it’s feasible though, the best approach is to define reform as “any program of systematic change in policies or institutions” and make it clear that there is no implication of approval or disapproval.
Whenever a result, true for all finite n, is strictly2 reversed for the infinite case, the problem in question has been posed incorrectly
To defend this, I rely on the premise that we are finite creatures in a finite universe. If a mathematical representation of a decision problem involves an infinite set, such as the integers or the real line, it is only because this is more convenient than employing finite, but very large bounds, such as those derived from the number of particles in the universe. Any property that depends inherently on infinite sets and limits, such as the continuity of a function, can never be verified or falsified by empirical data. Since we are finite, any result that is true for all finite n is true for us.
It’s not surprising then that paradoxes frequently introduce beings who can be assumed infinite - God, angels, demons and so on. There is, of course, a long theological tradition of asking what God can and cannot do - for example, make a logically contradictory statement true. It certainly appears from the various paradoxes that, if God is capable of handing out infinite rewards and punishments (which is, I think, generally supposed by believers), it’s not valid to say that, if a given course of action is better than another in every possible case (for some partition of the possible cases), then it is definitely the best choice.
It’s hard to imagine decision theory without this premise, so it’s reasonable to conclude that good theists should not be good decisionmakers, and vice versa - a conclusion supported by consideration of Pascal’s wager. Similarly, to suggest that the Almighty can’t generate a probability distribution giving equal weight to every positive integer seems tantamount to denying Omnipotence altogether, but allowing for this possibility creates all sorts of problems and paradoxes, leading once again to the acceptance of strictly dominated choices.
This leads me on to this paper by Arntzenius, Elga, and Hawthorne, pointed out by Brian. As in the Peter Wakker piece I cited earlier, Arntzenius, Elga, and Hawthorne observe the crucial role of (the absence of) countable additivity in generating a number of paradoxes. But rather than adopting a type-3 solution like Wakker’s (in such circumstances always use a sigma-algebra and not just an algebra), Arntzenius, Elga, and Hawthorne seem to want to derive a type-1 solution, in which this result is supposed to have practical implications, such as that “when infinitely many decisions are involved, the difference between making the decisions simultaneously and making them sequentially can be the difference between riches and ruin”. Except in relation to dealings with supernatural beings, I think this conclusion is profoundly mistaken.
1 Insert obligatory joke about the world being divided into three sorts of people
2 To clarify the relevance of “strictly”, consider a sequence xn approaching y from below. It’s true for all finite n, but not in the limit, that xn is less than y. A strict reversal would arise if in the case where for infinite n, we had x strictly greater than y.
Tim Lambert has more details on yet another Astroturf operation, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, recently in the news for attacking open source software and also a shill for the tobacco industry.
A point of interest for me is that I don’t think you really need detailed evidence in cases like this (though of course, its handy to have the kind of chapter and verse Tim provides). Unless it’s devoted to the life and works of de Tocqueville, an outfit with a name like the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution is bound to be bogus.
Australia has a string of such setups, all run by Ray Evans of the Western Mining Corporation. The most egregious is the Lavoisier Group, an organisation for climate change contrarians (about as plausible as creationists calling themselves the Mendel society) . If you move along to the (anti-Aboriginal rights) Bennelong Society you’ll find an almost identical website with the same postal address, shared with the (anti-union) HR Nicholls Society . The (monarchist) Samuel Griffiths society is from the same production line, though not quite as brazenly so.
So what is it about names like these that screams “Astroturf”? Most named institutes are either named in honour of the founder, or are explicitly partisan institutions whose name indicates their affiliation, as with the Evatt (Labor) and Menzies (Liberal) foundations. It’s not clear that those named would always agree with what is published in their names, but there’s some reasonable basis for presuming that this might be the case.
By contrast, to choose a long-dead person with whom almost everyone has positive associations, then to put forward controversial positions in the name of that person is to be dishonest from the outset.
Now that the inevitable peace deal between the American forces and Sadr’s Mahdi army appears to have been reached, amounting to restoration of the status quo ante , can anybody provide a coherent rationale for Bremer’s decision to drive Sadr into revolt in the first place, by closing his newspaper and arresting his supporters? The assault on Fallujah was bound to be a disaster, but it’s not surprising that the Americans felt impelled to take some drastic action in response to the killing and mutilation of US contractors there. But the attack on Sadr seemed gratuitiously stupid, even more so than the disbanding of the army and the banning of the Baath party.
Tacitus, still taking the view that “failure is not an option in Iraq”, is naturally furious about the deal . But any realistic analysis of the planned election must recognise that Sadr has enough support to make him a powerful force. He may not be a particularly attractive character, but he’s no worse than dozens of other world leaders with whom we deal for want of any better alternative. The notion that a military option with a June 30 deadline could take him and his movement out of the picture was never more than a delusion.
Whether you think, like Tacitus, that the attack on Sadr should been pushed through to its bloody conclusion, or like me that it should never have started, this is another appalling stuffup on Bremer’s part. Even at this late stage he ought to take responsibility and resign or, failing that, be sacked.
Below the fold is a draft review of Gil Merom’s How Democracies Lose Small Wars. Comments and criticism much appreciated.
This is an interesting, important and problematic book. In important respects, Gil Merom undermines central claims of the “realist” theory of international relations, in which issues such as war and peace are treated as the outcomes of interactions between nation-states, conceived as self-interested individual actors operating in a Hobbesian state of nature. In other respects, he has failed to escape from the assumptions implicit in the realist framework.
The analysis begins with the standard realist idea of the state as embodiment of the nation and takes it as more-or-less self-evident that the state will seek to act in the manner assumed in realist theories, including the use of war as a normal instrument of national policy. Merom then introduces ‘society’ as a counterweight, assumed to be motivated by a mixture of idealist and utilitarian/rational concerns, which typically incline towards pacifism. For convenience, I’ll use the term ‘polity’ to describe the state and society, taken together.
The state is constrained by its instrumental dependence on society, which takes two main forms. The first is the need for society to produce the resources such as material wealth and soldiers that a state needs to pursue its ends. The second is the capacity of society to change its rulers, which casts doubt on the idea of the state as a primary and independent actor.
On the first point, prosecuting a war requires the state to call on social resources, and this is difficult if society is indifferent or actively hostile to the war effort. This has been a problem, to greater or lesser degrees, in all kinds of polities, and the resulting conflicts are a common cause of regime change. For example, it was the demand for “ship money”, a contribution levied to support naval defence, that set in train the events leading to the English Civil War and the downfall of Charles I.
In liberal democratic polities, instrumental dependence becomes more problematic for the state because the processes of democracy require open debate. The kind of coercion required to mobilise resources, the most important form of which is military conscription, is difficult to practice when a war is faced with strong opposition, even from a relatively small minority of the population.
Note though, that Merom does not focus closely on representative democracy as a check on the war-making capacity of states. Rather, the problem is that, in liberal democracies, it is difficult to achieve the suppression of dissent required if a war effort is to be maintained.
Before going on the Merom’s main point, it is worth noting that, although Merom does not explicitly define a “small war”, his analysis and examples imply both an upper and a lower bound for this category. A typical small war will consume between 0.5 and 3 per cent of GDP and will require a commitment of forces equal to a similar proportion of the population.
The reason for the upper bound is obvious enough. A war on a larger scale than this requires a major national war effort. In a democratic society, this will only happen in response to a direct threat to the survival of the society, and therefore the issues are different from those considered by Merom. (Arguably World War I provides a counterexample, since countries that were not directly threatened committed their full force to the war and since the war was maintained long after it should have been obvious that all sides would be better off with the status quo ante. But although it was not ‘The War to end all Wars’, the Great War permanently shifted public opinion in the democratic world to the point where a similar effort could never again be sustained.)
The lower bound follows from a point raised by Merom. Very small wars and “police operations”, such as the US invasion of Grenada in 1983 can be undertaken by the state using spare capacity in the professional armed forces, and funded without the need for any special authorisation. Moreover, these operations can generally be brought to a successful conclusion fairly rapidly, before opposition has time to develop and solidify. Thus, for very small wars there is little of the instrumental dependence central to Merom’s argument.
The key analytical point made by Merom can be developed in the light of this argument. The reason that states in democratic polities lose small wars is that the military resistance of the other side is sufficient to require either a commitment of resources larger than society is willing to sustain or the use of methods, such as torture and attacks on civilian targets, that society is unwilling to accept.
To establish this thesis, it’s necessary to show that, when society does not resist the demands of the state, victory in war generally goes to the stronger party. Merom presents a number of examples including the Athenian destruction of Melos, Cromwell’s war in Ireland, the Roman suppression of the Jewish revolt, German operations in SW Africa, Saddam’s crushing the Kurds and Shiites after the First GulfWar, China and Tibet, Indonesia and East Timor and the Germans and Japanese in World War II. Merom argues that, in all these cases, unscrupulous brutality proved successful.
Yet in nearly every case cited by Merom, a long-term view yields the opposite outcome. The Athenians lost the war and their hegemonic power, as of course did the Germans and Japanese in World War II. Ireland, East Timor and Israel are independent states, identifying in each case with the side described by Merom as the losers. Tibet is not yet independent, but it seems safe to predict that it will become so not long after the Communist Party loses power in China. And then, of course, there’s Saddam.
No doubt better examples could be found, but these examples illustrate the falsity of the claim that is fundamental to the realist theory of international relations, namely, that military power can be used effectively to promote national interests. Even when force appears to work in the short run, it often fails in the long run.
The classic refutation of international realism was put forward in Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion. Angell argued that in a globalised free-market economic system no economic benefit could be generated even by successful wars of conquest. Writing for a British audience, Angell’s basic point was that, even if Germany succeeded in establishing political mastery in Europe, workers in the newly subjected countries would still have to be paid, goods would have to be purchased at market prices and so on. Hence, individual Germans would gain nothing from being part of a larger country.
Angell’s argument works even better for social democracies, where territorial expansion or even extension of hegemony produces an unpalatable choice. If the benefits and obligations that go with citizenship welfare state are extended to those under the control of the expanded state, existing citizens will almost certainly be worse off. On the other hand, any attempt to maintain a distinction between citizens and noncitizens is bound to be highly problematic.
Angell’s argument showed, beyond reasonable doubt, that war and territorial expansion are not, in general sensible policies.. However, seeking to counteract the rising pressure for war, he argued that Germans would correctly perceive their own self-interest and would therefore not support an aggressive war. He was rapidly proved false on this point, by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Nevertheless, the War confirmed his view that attempts to gain economic advantage through military power had become obsolete. Both sides suffered catastrophic losses. The attempt by the victors to recoup some of their losses through the reparations imposed in the Treaty of Versailles proved both fruitless and economically disastrous. Angell was right about the futility of war, but wrong in predicting that it wouldn’t happen. Unfortunately, he is more remembered for being wrong than for being right.
If arguments like those of Angell are accepted, it can be seen that Merom’s thesis, and his title, need some adjustment. Rather than showing How Democracies Lose Small Wars his book could more appropriately be entitled How Democracies get out of Bad Wars.
This can be seen by looking at Merom’s two illustrative examples. The first is that of the French in Algeria. As the discussion shows, the French colonial position illustrates Angell’s arguments perfectly. In theory, Algeria was an inherent part of France, and this was certainly the view held by the million of so pieds-noirs, the French colonists who lived there. But if this claim were to be taken seriously, ten million Algerians would have had to be admitted to the full benefits of French citizenship, something that was simply not economically feasible.
As Merom observes, the limited group of businessmen and intellectuals who looked at colonial enterprise in economic terms drew the obvious conclusion that colonialism was, at best a “costly philanthropy”. Merom argues that this ‘utilitarian-rational’ position did not have much impact on French political debate, and in one sense this is probably true. On the other hand, if there had been substantial net economic benefits from colonialism, they would have made themselves felt one way or another.
The key issue that led to the collapse of the French war effort was the army’s routine reliance on torture to break the guerilla resistance of their opponents, the moujahadine of the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN), who were themselves guilty of routine, and arguably even worse, atrocities. Protests against the brutal prosecution of the war were met with domestic repression that soon came to be seen as a threat to democracy itself, a process that was mirrored in the US a decade or so later during the Vietnam war.
Once it became clear that the French were going to pull out regardless, the FLN was able to demand a more or less unconditional acquiescence in its demands. Almost certainly, a better deal, with much more protection for the interests of the pieds noirs could have been obtained if the French government had been willing to negotiate independence before going to war. More generally, the longer the war went on, and the greater the costs to France, the worse the ultimate conclusion was bound to be.
Hence, while the outcome of the Algerian war was certainly a defeat for the French state, leading as it did to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, it can scarcely be seen as a defeat for France, considered as a democratic polity. The only sensible policy was withdrawal and pressure from society ultimately forced the state to recognise this.
The other case Merom considers in detail is that of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1983, ordered by then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon. Whereas Israel’s previous wars had all been defensive (Israel attacked first in 1956 and 1967, but in both cases there was a threat of imminent invasion, perceived as real by nearly all Israelis), the invasion of Lebanon was a strategic move aimed at depriving the PLO of its base and installing, by force, a friendly government that would suppress guerilla attacks on Israel. The first objective was achieved, at least in the short run, with the PLO being forced to flee to Tunis, though the organisation was probably strengthened in the long run. The second objective, never a realistic possibility, was rapidly rendered irrelevant by the assassination of the Israeli’s preferred leader, Bashir Gemayel.
Because of the nature of the war, Israeli society was unlikely to tolerate heavy casualties as it would have done in a defensive war. This led Sharon to rely on proxies, the Phalangist militias who were the armed representatives of the Maronite Christians. When these forces, encouraged by Sharon to raid Palestinian refugee camps in Sabra and Shatila, committed brutal massacres, public opinion in Israel and around the world was outraged. The protests were not confined to activist groups such as Peace Now, but extended widely through Israeli society. The occupation was clearly doomed within weeks of the massacres, but it dragged on for another three years until the withdrawal to the South Lebanon buffer zone, which was not finally abandoned until 2000.
As with the French in Algeria, it is hard to see the withdrawal as a defeat for Israel as a democracy, though it was undoubtedly a defeat for the Israeli state. As Merom recognises, precisely the same analysis applies to the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. As Merom says “the Palestinians are all but certain to lose military encounters with Israel, but are nevertheless likely to realize most of their political goals. Specifically, they will have an independent Palestinian state, most Jewish settlements in the territories will be dismantled, and the settlers will be repatriated. At the same time, Palestinian goals that concern Israel’s core sovereignty, particularly the demand for an Israeli recognition of the “right of return”, will not be realized.”
Merom’s analysis is obviously relevant to the current situation in Iraq, particularly as more gruesome evidence emerges from Saddam’s former prisons, now operated by the American occupiers. As in the other cases discussed above, the American public is unwilling to supply the resources that would be needed to establish effective control or to accept the casualty rates that would arise if, given current numbers, US troops attempted to operate like a police force, with direct contact with the Iraqi public, and rules of engagement that focused on minimising casualties among possibly-innocent Iraqi civilians.
The inevitable results are reliance on heavy weaponry with the associated civilian casualties, and the use of detention without trial, abusive interrogation sliding into torture, the taking of hostages and so on. The exposure of these methods inevitably eats away at domestic support for the war. Although it is still possible that the outcome in Iraq will be an improvement on what went before, the vision of a stable, democratic, pro-American Iraq has long since vanished.
Under the Bush Administration, the state has gone to immense lengths to insulate itself from social pressure. But the necessity of facing the electorate remains. It seems unlikely that, by November, American society will be convinced that this was a war worth winning.
Suppose you have encountered Zeno’s Achilles paradoxfor the first time. Zeno offers a rigorous (looking) proof that, having once given the tortoise a head start, Achilles can never overtake it. Would you regard this as1
In this case, I assume nearly all readers will go for option 3. But things aren’t always so easy. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox was supposed to be a type-3 paradox demonstrating the incompleteness of quantum mechanics. But on most modern views, it is really a type-1 paradox, predicting various highly counter-intuitive consequences of quantum mechanics that nonetheless turn out to be be empirically valid.
Although I don’t accept that there are any good examples of type-2 paradoxes, plenty of others would offer this solution in relation to both Godel’s theorem and Schrodinger’s cat.
With these three possibilities in mind, how should we think about paradoxes involving probability measures over infinite sets that are finitely, but not countably additive? The two-envelopes problem we’ve been discussing here falls into this class and so, with a little bit of tweaking, do St Petersburg and related paradoxes. I’ll leave this question hanging and offer my own answer in a later post.
1 This is an expanded version of a point made by my friend and occasional co-author, Peter Wakker.
When you want the most succinct statement possible statement of the power politics view of the world, VI Lenin is your only man1. A lot of free-market advocates of revealed preference theory, and supporters of exit over voice, would be surprised to learn who they are quoting when they refer to people voting with their feet.
In relation to the proposed “handover” of power in Iraq on June 30, the only question that really matters is the one posed by Lenin “Kto kogo ?”, that is, “Who can do what to whom?”.
In particular, will the Iraqi government be able to issue orders to Casey (the new US military commander) or vice versa. The idea that there can be some sort of harmonious division of responsibilities in which this question does not arise is not worth taking seriously. Just consider the following cases, all arising within the past month, which would certainly have implied conflict between the US forces and any Iraqi government worthy of the name
If the “multinational force” has to seek permission from UN-installed Iraqi politicians every time it wants to do something like this, there’s bound to be a lot of angst among the US military. But there’s no alternative. A supposedly sovereign government that countenanced such actions without demanding direct operational control would be discredited in a matter of weeks rather than months.
It’s a positive sign that everyone, including Bush, has now effectively abandoned Clause 59 of the US-imposed interim constitution, which guaranteed the right of US forces to stay in Iraq more or less indefinitely. But I still can’t see the US accepting real Iraqi sovereignty, before or after elections, unless of course the US elections intervene.
1 As I argue here, it’s possible to get into a position when the power politics view is the only one that matters, and, when this happens, Lenin is the most reliable guide available. But the history of Russia shows that this is not the position you want to start from, wherever it is that you want to end up.
Update Blair has answered the question, in the way I had hoped. It remains to be seen if Bush and the Pentagon go along with this.
I’ve written a couple of posts critical of the Copenhagen Consensus exercise being run by Bjorn Lomborg”s Environmental Assessment Institute and The Economist. The stated objective is to take a range of problems facing developing countries, and get an expert panel to form a consensus on which ones should be given the highest priority. This is a reasonable-sounding idea, and the process has produced some useful contributions in the form of papers by experts arguing the importance of particular problems.
There are however, two big difficulties.
The first is that the underlying idea is much trickier than it sounds at first sight. Suppose, for example, you come to the conclusion that malnutrition is a bigger problem than disease. That presumably doesn’t mean that you should cut health budgets to zero and spend all the money on food. Presumably, the implication is that, at the margin, it would be a good idea to redirect resources from general health to nutrition. But such a conclusion is inevitably going to be specific to particular countries, or even particular regions. How can a general conclusion be drawn?
The problem is even worse when you come to look at things like “conflicts” and “governance and corruption”. In what sense can you prioritise and rank improving governance and corruption or reducing conflict relative to malnutrition and disease. It ought to be obvious that these are not alternative expenditure items in a budget. Rather the effectiveness of anything you might want to do to reduce malnutrition and disease will be drastically undermined by the prevalence of conflict and corruption. Conversely, poverty and deprivation are natural sources of conflict and corruption. I don’t assert that this is an insoluble vicious circle, but I don’t think it’s amenable to being solved in a six-month, part-time exercise by ten people, no matter how brilliant.
The second big problem is the joker in the pack, climate change. Lomborg is well-known for making the argument that money spent on mitigating climate change would be better allocated to improving sanitation and providing clean drinking water, which just happens to be another of the ten challenges. (I’ve criticised Lomborg’s argument here). So there’s a natural suspicion that the whole exercise is designed to provide support for Lomborg’s position and that the idea of ranking development challenges in general is a cynical cover.
There are a couple of ways we could check on this. First, we could wait and see what the panel comes up with. If they reject the whole idea of ranking on the grounds I’ve set out above, I’ll be impressed and surprised. If climate change is ranked highly, or even if it ranks somewhere in the middle of the pack, and is not much discussed in the final analysis, I’ll admit that my concerns were baseless. To see the whole thing as a setup, two conditions would need to be met:
It’s the second point that’s crucial in my view. Having seen a lot of top 10 lists in my time, the big interest is usually in the top two or three places and in arguments about whether the right winners were chosen. The also-rans rarely get much attention. So it would be surprising, in a legitimate exercise of this kind, if attention was focused on the bottom places.
For those who are too impatient to apply these checks, you could look at what Lomborg himself has to say. He certainly doesn’t seem to be in much doubt about the outcome.
we’ll be occupying a bizarro world in which the secretary of state is more accountable than the New York Times.Pardon my naive idealism, but isn’t the government in a democratic society supposed to more accountable than any newspaper. Still, it does seem rather alternate-universe that the Daily Mirror should be the only actor in this whole drama to uphold traditional standards of responsibility.
Finally, although it’s been pointed out before, I can’t resist asking how it is that Glenn Reynolds and his legion of NYT “fact-checkers” have missed this story.
1 To recap, the editor of the Mirror, Piers Morgan, was sacked for publishing photos of torture in Iraq that turned out to be fake. Powell, alone among senior government figures in the Coalition of the Willing, has apologized for the false claims made about Iraqi weapons programs before the war. (He is in a better position than most to do so, having been the only one to apply some sort of scepticism to the intelligence info he was given, though not nearly enough. ) The NYT has made no apology over Miller, even though she violated all the rules of good journalism and produced a string of spurious stories as a result.
Christopher Hitchens has just put up a piece in Slate. It’s a response to Sy Hersh’s most recent New Yorker story about the connection between Abu Gharib and Rumsfeld’s policies. Here’s Simpler Christopher Hitchens:
What Went Wrong: The flaw in Seymour Hersh’s theory.I, Christopher Hitchens, present Sy Hersh’s story as such: Rumsfeld was frustrated at the legal obstacles that (for example) prevented combat forces from firing at a convoy that they believed contained the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammed Omar. Rumsfeld loosened the rules. The loosening of the rules led to the torture of Iraqi prisoners.
I, CH, believe that this is an incoherent story. There is no necessary link between overruling the combat restrictions that I have highlighted and prison abuse. Furthermore, regardless of the decisions of Rumsfeld, there would still have been bad apples in the military.
Shouldn’t opponents of the war have some explaining to do? Now they say that the Bush Administration should have killed the leaders of al-Qaeda. I believe that, had the Bush administration taken the steps necessary to take out the leaders of al-Qaeda during major combat operations in Afghanistan, they would have opposed them. Therefore, they are hypocrites.
The struggle against terrorism will be long and difficult. Rumsfeld should treat the soldiers who abused the Iraqi prisoners as traitors and enemies.
P.S. I’d like everyone to look at the bomb with sarin in it, and the uncovery of a mustard gas weapon in Iraq.
If anyone thinks I’ve misrepresented Hitch, please pitch in in the comments. Because if I understand him correctly, this is a truly shameless piece of misdirection.
The lynchpin of Hitchens’ argument, “the flaw in Seymour Hersh’s theory”, is that Hersh doesn’t show a connection between Rumsfeld’s policies and torture in Iraq. Hitchens doesn’t spend a lot of time on this point, but it seems to be the heart and soul of his case. Here’s Hitchens, in his original words:
Thus, from the abysmal failure to erase Mullah Omar comes the howling success in trailer-porn tactics at Abu Ghraib. More than one kind of non sequitur is involved in this “scenario.”
But Hitchens is deceiving his readers. Hersh lays out the connection between Abu Ghraib and Rumsfeld’s policies quite directly. Hersh’s piece only mentions the combat restrictions as a launching point for his real subject- how Rumsfeld and the Administration loosened the restrictions intended to ensure the humane treatment of Afghan prisoners, and later, Iraqi prisoners. Fred Kaplan summarizes:
This operation stemmed from an earlier supersecret program involving interrogation of suspected al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. A memo to President Bush from White House counsel Alberto Gonzales—excerpted in Newsweek—rationalized the program by noting that we need “to quickly obtain information from captured terrorists and their sponsors in order to avoid further atrocities against American citizens.” This new sort of war, he went on, renders the Geneva Conventions’ limitations on interrogating enemy prisoners “obsolete” and “quaint.”This program, Hersh reports, was approved by the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the National Security Council. President Bush was “informed” of it. Hersh also notes that its harsh techniques yielded results; terrorists were rounded up as a result. So, last spring, after Saddam’s regime fell in Iraq and Rumsfeld grew frustrated over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction or to learn anything about the insurgents who continued to resist the U.S.-led occupation, he put the same program in motion in Iraq.
That’s when all hell broke loose, and conventional prisoners of war—whose wardens had up to that point been following Geneva rules—were suddenly treated like terrorists whose deadly secrets must immediately be squeezed out. Hence, the ensuing torture.
It’s impossible that Hitchens didn’t know this.
Now, Hitchens might find Hersh unconvincing. He might argue that his sources have lied to him. Or, he might argue that the revised policies about prisoner treatment in Abu Gharib were still sufficient to ensure the humane treatment of prisoners, and that blame shouldn’t flow upward. I can’t say that I’d consider these to be good arguments, but at least they’re arguments.
Instead, he highlights a detail in the piece, the restrictions that probably prevented the killing of Mullah Omar. He’s comfortable defending Rumsfeld’s decision to overrule these restrictions. (I would be, too.) He pretends that this story was the heart and soul of Hersh’s piece, failing to mention any changes to the rules about the treatment of prisoners. Hitchens asserts that there is no logical connection between these combat restrictions and the torture of prisoners. Well, no. There isn’t, but that’s not Hersh’s argument. It’s only Hitchens’ deceptive cartoon that doesn’t make sense.
He caps his piece off with some Michael-Moore bashing, saying that opponents of the war wouldn’t have approved of techniques that would have led to the capture or killing of al-Qaeda leaders. But Rumsfeld got what he wanted in terms of combat overrides. Has Hitchens noticed any outrage among war opponents about that? If so, this paragraph would have been a good place to mention it.
The more I read this, the angrier I get. Who, exactly, does Hitchens think he’s fooling?
Here’s the DCCC petition to encourage Rumsfeld to resign. I’ll link to the “Hitchens must resign” petition as soon as I can find it.
CT is filled with Google commentary these days, I can’t be left out!:) But since my fellow co-bloggers have provided plenty of interesting reading, I’ll just point to a clip. I used up ten minutes of my 15 yesterday in a live interview on CNNfn’s The Flip Side. Those of you who have been following my related posts and work won’t be surprised to learn that my comments had to do with seach skills and how commercial considerations may influence what people see online. It was a neat experience. And seeing www.Eszter.com splashed on CNNfn with me on the screen was pretty cool.:)
I thought I’d post some details about the experience below the fold for those who may be curious about how something like this works. I went to CNN’s Chicago studio in the Tribune building. The show is hosted in New York. There is a bit of a time lag in the interview, which makes it a bit awkward at times, but not too clunky. I did not know this until one of the anchors mentioned it.. and then of course noticed it when I watched the show afterwards. However, while in the studio, I did not see anything. There were no monitors present (except for the person operating the camera). I was in a dark room with some bright lights beaming down at me and the camera right in front of me. I was wearing an ear piece in which I heard the show’s anchors. But I couldn’t see anything. It is an interesting experience.
For those still wondering whether there are people left on the planet who do not use Google (despite the data that suggest so), the following anecdotal evidence was well timed. I asked the car driver who took me to the studio and back whether he’s an Internet user and what search engine he uses. He said Yahoo even though he certainly knows about Google and said he sometimes uses that after he’s done with trying things on Yahoo.
Additionally, it has been interesting to see in my referral logs that several people have gotten to my Web site in the last 24 hours by typing eszter.com into Google’s search box. I’ll reiterate, nonetheless, that my evidence for claiming that lots of people do not know much about online searching is based on in-person observations and interviews with a random sample of Internet users and not simply on anecdotal evidence. Lots of people out there don’t know the difference between a search box and the location or address bar, nor do they know the difference between .com and .gov. And if you are one of these people (that would be possibly .1% of CT readers) then the Web cannot function for you as the kind of resource it may be for many others. If you are interested in more about this, my academic papers give lots more detail.
For more Google blurbs by others, see this list.
Ted’s recent post reminds me of a question I have been pondering recently due to a change in my media use habits. Where do you go first in the morning for an update on current events? I don’t necessarily mean just online, but in general? If online, what site(s) or lists? It used to be that I would just go to nytimes.com as a starting point and then take it from there often clicking on to some blogs (like some of the precursors of CT) to see what other items of news people found of interest. But starting with the New York Times doesn’t quite do it for me anymore. I haven’t developed a new system yet. For now, I often just start at whatever site I visited the night before. A friend of mine recently told me that he always starts at Talking Points Memo then he looks at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and finally checks out the BBC. That sounded like a good way to start the day. I’m curious, where do others go first?
At 10:31 Central time, here’s the top news on the top news websites:
MSNBC: Trains Crash, Explode
CBS News: Heavy Toll In N. Korea Train Crash
FOX News: Report: Thousands Hurt, Killed in N. Korea Crash
CNN: Michael Jackson indicted
ABC: Michael Jackson facing trial
The stories on the crash are reporting as many as 3000 dead or injured. Meanwhile, CNN and ABC have the story in sidebars. These are not good priorities, my friend.
UPDATE: At 10:55, Michael Jackson is still the top story at both CNN and ABC.
UPDATE: 11:25. CNN’s top story is now the crash, while ABC’s is still Michael Jackson.
Good question from Roger Ailes:
It’s also interesting to see that the Moonie Times has placed scare quotes around “marriage” in Sully’s item on gay marriage and polling. Seriously: why does Sully allow these bigots to tamper with his work product?
The local alt weekly, the Houston Press, can be hit or miss, but it’s a good week. Worth reading:
“The day after the Houston gig, the band was supposed to play an electric in-store at Waterloo in Austin, but the Waterloo staff spaced and forgot to get amps. Someone in the audience furnished Cobain with an acoustic guitar, which he destroyed at the end of the show.” My affection for Kurt Cobain just went way, way down. I don’t care if you’re Jimi Hendrix, you don’t smash a fan’s guitar.
UPDATE: In comments, Basharov says that he attended the Spalding Gray show described in the article, and tells his story.
Left-wing partisans: file this story away somewhere. You never know when you’ll need it. Thanks, Steve.
National Review is possibly the most popular target for media criticism from liberal bloggers. Part of the reason is surely The Corner, which gives NR writers a chance to let their hair down in an easy to link (and easy to parody) format. Part of it is the strong personalities of the writers; between John Derbyshire, Donald Luskin, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, and so on, they sometimes seem more like characters than pundits. (The Rich Lowry link, I should mention, hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves.)
But part of the reason is surely that they just plain get things wrong with some frequency. Brad DeLong is fond of asking, doesn’t anyone over there even care?
I’m sure that they care. But that isn’t really the right question.
Last year, I was curious about the fact-checking procedures at the major reputable opinion journals, so I started calling around. It’s important that I point out that, even more than usual, I Might Be Wrong. I’ve never spent a day in the offices of any of these magazines, and it could be the case that I just asked the wrong questions, or that I missed an important step, or that every other magazine but the National Review was exaggerating. Having said that, here’s what I found.
The Weekly Standard and the American Prospect employ full-time fact-checkers, while the Nation, the Washington Monthly, and the New Republic have their armies of interns do fact-checking. I never made contact with Reason or Commentary. All of the magazines that I spoke to had similar policies and procedures. Fact-checkers were expected to get as close to original sources as possible. For example, if a piece quoted a speech, the fact-checker was supposed to try to check a transcript of the speech, although they often ended up looking at other reported stories. This is potentially very valuable; one fact-checker told me how he had changed the thrust of a piece by looking up a paper presented to an international conference, and finding that it had been misreported by others in the press. Any original quotes have to be double-checked by calling the source. I had the impression that the New Republic had the most rigorous fact checking process, for obvious reasons, but the rigor of all of the aforementioned magazines were within one standard deviation of each other.
National Review was the stand-out exception. When I called and asked to speak to the person in charge of fact-checking, I was forwarded to John Virtes, who was described to me as the librarian. (His voicemail identified him as the librarian, not the fact-checker. I’ve also seen him described as “research director”; he spends some of his time preparing materials to assist the writers.)
Every other fact-checker that I spoke to stressed the importance of primary sources and always checking quotes. Mr. Virtes said that he uses newspapers and reliable websites, and that he calls people when he needs to. Other fact-checkers told me that small changes to stories were frequently made as a result of fact-checking. Mr. Virtes didn’t say that that was the case. The difference was noticeable.
I don’t want to speak ill of Mr. Virtes, who seemed like quite a nice guy, and who surely works very hard. But he has been tasked with a responsibility that is considered a full-time job by peer magazines. At the National Review… it isn’t. Fact-checking is a third job, in addition to supporting the writers and running the library. National Review is a biweekly magazine with an extremely active website. No one could do it.
So, I’m sure that the editors care whether National Review makes mistakes. The more appropriate question would be, “Do they care enough to spend the resources to try to prevent mistakes?” And the answer is “No”.
Sasha Issenberg recently wrote an article in which he tried to fact-check an old article by David Brooks. Brooks wrote an article with a number of verifiable claims about Republican vs. Democratic areas, and specifically about his visit to Pennsylvania’s Franklin County. Issenberg found a number of factual errors; when confronted with them, Brooks explained that he was often joking, and that the main thrust of the piece (lower-middle-class communities are different from upper-middle-class communities) was accurate.
David Brooks wrote a piece in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine called “Our Sprawling, Supersize Utopias” that won’t be so easily tripped up. It isn’t because he’s done the extensive research and hard work to back up his arguments. Rather, it’s because the article is so breezy and rootless, any fact checker who was assigned to this piece would be finished by noon.
Brooks’ basic thesis is that the suburbs are not dull and homogenous. Rather, they are strongly varied communities with distinct characters, as people build suburban communities around people who share similar interests. The centerpiece of the article is a long section where Brooks lovingly describes suburban/ exurban communities of granola-types, upscale bobos with German luxury cars, immigrants, obsessive-compulsive golfers, etc. We are treated to a long list of consumer goods that define each area. This may or may not be right, but it certainly sounds plausible.
Brooks isn’t going to have some smarty-pants out of j-school nitpicking this article. How could they? By my count, there are only seventeen sentences with specific, verifiable facts. In addition, there are six quotations from other authors. The article is about 4000 words. That’s a very low ratio of facts to words for a journalistic article. (Readers may argue with my choices of verifiable facts in the comments.)
And here’s the kicker: none of his facts support his conclusions. We learn that both population and jobs are growing faster in the suburbs than in metropolitan areas. We learn that a lot of people in America were born outside the United States, and we learn that Americans work longer hours, change jobs more often, and relocate more often than Europeans. Finally, we learn that a number of historians and writers think that Americans pursue their dreams.
We do not learn anything that would back up the central conceit of the piece. What are the names of some real-life crunchy/ immigrant/ golf suburbs? What’s the percentage of nonwhites in the suburbs? What suburban communities have sizeable numbers of both Nigerians and Mexicans? Are sales of German luxury cars actually concentrated in certain wealthy communities and not in others? Has he actually seen a left-wing suburb with kids “who tend to have names like Milo and Mandela”? Where? Some of these statements are obviously exaggerations or jokes. But shouldn’t he have something to stand on? A quote from an academic, a census finding, even a personal anecdote… shouldn’t there be something that can be verified?
I repeat that Brooks’ thesis sounds plausible. But having read it carefully, I can’t come up with an answer to the question “How do you know?” This is not journalism, and it’s not sociology. It’s stand-up comedy, and the New York Times is paying too much for it.
POSTSCRIPT: By my count, there are seventeen specific, verifiable facts in this article. I’m not counting general statements like “Many of us still live with the suburban stereotypes laid down by the first wave of suburban critics — that the suburbs are dull, white-bread kind of places where Ozzie and Harriet families go to raise their kids.” You could support a statement like that, but I don’t know how you would verify it:
1. Americans continue to move from the Northeast and Midwest to the South and West
2. For example, the population of metropolitan Pittsburgh has declined by 8 percent since 1980, but as people spread out, the amount of developed land in the Pittsburgh area increased by nearly 43 percent.
3. The population of Atlanta increased by 22,000 during the 90’s, but the expanding suburbs grew by 2.1 million.
4. Jobs used to be concentrated in downtowns.
5. But the suburbs now account for more rental office space than the cities in most of the major metro areas of the country except Chicago and New York.
6. In the Bay Area in California, suburban Santa Clara County alone has five times as many of the region’s larger public companies as San Francisco.
7. Ninety percent of the office space built in America by the end of the 1990’s was built in suburbia, much of it in far-flung office parks stretched along the Interstates.
8. Mesa, Ariz., a suburb of Phoenix, now has a larger population than Minneapolis, St. Louis or Cincinnati.
9. When the New Jersey Devils won the Stanley Cup, they had their victory parade in a parking lot; no downtown street is central to the team’s fans.
10. One out of every nine people in America was born in a foreign country.
11. No lifestyle magazine is geared to the people who live in these immigrant-heavy wholesale warehouse zones.
12. The average American works 350 hours a year — nearly 10 weeks — more than the average Western European.
13. Americans switch jobs more frequently than people from other nations.
14. The average job tenure in the U.S. is 6.8 years, compared with more than a decade in France, Germany and Japan.
15. In 2002, about 14.2 percent of Americans relocated.
16. Compare that with the 4 percent of Dutch and Germans and the 8 percent of Britons who move in a typical year.
17. According to one survey, only slightly more than a quarter of American teenagers expect to live in their hometowns as adults.
Six quotations or direct references:
18. Robert Lang, a demographer at Virginia Tech, compares these new sprawling exurbs to the dark matter in the universe: stuff that is very hard to define but somehow accounts for more mass than all the planets, stars and moons put together.
19. Albert Einstein once said that imagination is more important than knowledge
20. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that those who ”complain of the flatness of American life have no perception of its destiny. They are not Americans.” They don’t see that ”here is man in the garden of Eden; here, the Genesis and the Exodus.
21. The historian Sacvan Bercovitch has observed that the United States is the example par excellence of a nation formed by collective fantasy.
22. Francis Parkman, the great 19th-century historian, wrote of his youthful self, ”His thoughts were always in the forest, whose features possessed his waking and sleeping dreams, filling him with vague cravings impossible to satisfy.”
23. There’s a James Fenimore Cooper novel called ”The Pioneers,” in which a developer takes his cousin on a tour of the city he is building. He describes the broad streets, the rows of houses. But all she sees is a barren forest. He’s astonished she can’t see it, so real is it in his mind already.
A few weeks ago, I was angry at National Review for publishing anonymous, unverifiable smears of prominent Democrats. In response, I ran a contest to “Punk the National Review”.
The deadline has passed, and to the best of my knowledge, National Review has not printed any more anonymous smear emails. That’s exactly what I was hoping for. I’m not a great admirer of National Review - I’ve got a post on this subject on the back burner - but I’m glad about how it worked out.
I was prepared to give out to $50 in prize money, if anyone had succeeded. Instead, I’ll be giving $50 in Jonah Goldberg’s name to Habitat for Humanity. If you’re reading, folks, congratulations and thank you.
I don’t often make predictions, but I have to say I’m not optimistic for the survival of “Air America Radio”, the new liberal answer to right-wing talk. I have no real knowledge of whether the presenters are any good, or what the demographics are, but I’ve always thought that you can tell a lot about a business enterprise by the name. Specifically, you can often gauge how much time, effort and intelligence people spent in thinking up the name, and this usually carries over into how they’re going to run their business.
In which context, it is perhaps unfortunate that the “Air America” people have (presumably unintentionally) named themselves after the CIA’s heroin trafficking operation in Southeast Asia (the subject of a movie which, in a beter world, would have crushed Mel Gibson’s career before it took root). The well-meaning liberal radio types must be taking lessons from these guys.
UPDATE: I am told there’s an interview with Al Franken going round the place in which he says they were being ironic … to be honest this seals my belief that they’re doomed as I can think of maybe three people in the world who might find that joke funny and none of them live in America.
For the data geeks in the audience, here’s an updated version of the graph I created last year (see disclaimers there) tracking the coverage of the word “weblog” and “blog” in 47 US and international (English-language) dailies. Of course, this doesn’t mean too much except that the term and the artifact of blogging is diffusing in mainstream media coverage (notice the change in the ratio of the two words). It is unclear, for example, how often journalists in such newspapers acknowledge blogs as sources of information when they get a story or an idea from them. That would be something interesting to look at, but would require much more work than running some queries on Lexis-Nexis and may also involve collecting some qualitative data. Since this is not part of my research, I’m going to leave detailed investigations to others.
When blogger and journalist Tim Blair discovers a Chicago Tribune reporter fibbing about a source, they look into it and fire the reporter. (Good job, Tim.)
When blogger and programmer Rogers Cadenhead discovers Matt Drudge fibbing about a source, that’s just another day at Drudge.
Advantage: old media.
When I was a kid, I really liked Sesame Street, and now that I have a little girl, I still like it. Timothy Burke, for one, finds it a bit too cloyingly pro-social (he complained of this in a comments thread that I am too lazy to find here). One of my favorite animated bits as a child was one in which three plainly dressed workmen emerge from, clean, and retreat into a giant letter I, accompanied by the following song in a minor key: “We all live in a capital I/in the middle of the desert, in the center of the sky/and all day long we polish on the I/to make it clean and shiny so it brightens up the sky.” Imagine my surprise when I read Ulysses at 17 (yes, I was trying too hard; don’t worry, I re-read it later) and found the following passage:
(He points to the south, then to the east. A cake of new, clean soap arises, diffusing light and perfume.) THE SOAP:
We’re a capital couple, Bloom and I;
He brightens the earth, I polish the sky
Those jokers at the Children’s Television Workshop. I have also always liked the look of it. Even when I lived in NYC in a terrible place between Amsterdam and Columbus on 109th — I recall holding the phone out the window for my brother to hear the small arms fire before I retreated into the tub — I was always tickled by the resemblance to Sesame Street. Only there were fewer muppets and more crack dealers.
Finally, they sometimes address the big issues. On a recent episode, Big Bird and Snuffleupagus were investigating whether various things (toasters, plants, small children) were alive or not. By the end, they had worked themselves around to some serious questions. Is the letter “A” alive? No. Is the Children’s Television Workshop alive? Indeterminate. Is the word “alive” alive? No, because it doesn’t grow or change. Take that, Platonism!
On the other wing…
Matt Welch once wrote a pretty good column about liberal pieties at alternative weeklies. I think I’ve found Exhibit A. I’d like to distance myself from this article before Lileks or somebody finds it.
The cover story of Houston’s alt-weekly, the Houston Press, is about a talented young boxer named Benjamin Flores. Flores was born in Mexico and came to the United States when he was eleven. Although he came here illegally, he has a work permit (but not permanent residency or citizenship.) The work permit doesn’t give him to the right to re-enter the country.
He’s beaten the No. 1 amateur featherweight fighter in the United States and the No. 1 from Mexico. But that means nothing, because Benjamin Flores belongs neither here nor there. He can’t fight for the United States because he’s not a citizen. He could fight for Mexico, but there’s no guarantee the U.S. would let him back in this country once he crossed the border.He is a fighter without a country — a pugilist caught in the gears of globalization.
Tonight, as he takes his first step into the professional ranks at the International Ballroom, he will also take home a modest cash prize. The money will seal him off from ever competing on an Olympic stage.
I guess that this is where the infinite flood of compassion is supposed to kick in, but it’s not happening. Flores isn’t doing too badly; he’s got a work permit and a promising career ahead of him. It’s entirely reasonable to restrict a country’s Olympic athletes to its citizens- it prevents rich countries from athlete-shopping all over the world. It’s isn’t Flores’ fault that his birthplace disqualifies him from boxing for the U.S. But it isn’t my fault that I hit like a ten-year old, either. If he had been one or two years younger, he probably wouldn’t have waited until 2008 to start his pro career. Plenty of successful boxers have gone to the Olympics, but plenty haven’t, including Buster Douglas, Mike Tyson, and Matthew Saad Muhammad.
Also, it’s really Daniel’s gig, but I call “globollocks” on “a pugilist caught in the gears of globalization,” for reasons that should be obvious.
Flores comes across as a decent guy; my perception is that the wheedling tone comes from the reporter. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Daniel posted on Hutton the other day, and was gracious enough to say that the Blairites should enjoy their day in the sun (whatever else he said elsewhere in the post). During the inquiry, it looked to me as if Gilligan and the BBC were in deep trouble and I posted back in August saying as much . Since the report journalists have been queuing up to denounce Hutton for coming to conclusions other than the ones they were all hoping for and using words like “whitewash”. Typical examples are Gilligan’s mate Rod Liddle (on whom see Martin Kettle in today’s Guardian ), Simon Jenkins in the Times and Peter Oborne in the Spectator (see also Liddle in the Spectator).
In his article, Oborne feels free simply to assert with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the leak of Hutton to the Sun was the work of the government. Jenkins desribes the inquiry as “a high-risk gamble to conceal Tony Blair’s embarrassment over his Iraq intelligence by implicating the BBC in a suicide.”
The truth is (contra Jenkins) that the Kelly suicide affair was — among many other things — part of a string of episodes used by the press (and following them the BBC) to whip up very personal hatred against Blair and those close to him. Other instances of this are the parading of war widow Samantha Roberts across the print and broadcast media, Cheriegate, the ongoing “The Blairs” cartoon in the Spectator, and the insistent demands that Blair reveal whether his baby had the MMR jab. I doubt that many CT readers regularly peruse the Daily Mail or the Mail on Sunday. I bought the MoS a few weeks ago to get a free DVD of Brief Encounter, but, rather than just chucking to paper in the nearest bin, took time to look at the contents. There was page after page of hatred directed at the Blairs (some of it by Oborne).
Now on one view, with which I have a lot of sympathy, we need an aggressive investigative journalism. Governments have immense resources at their disposal to reveal or not reveal information and to manipulate public opinion and we need a counterweight to that. Fair enough. Except that it is hard to escape the thought that much of the hostile coverage of the Blairs — like the spiteful coverage of the Clintons — is not aimed at the truth or at securing better government. It reflects a loathing on the right from those who think that a Labour government disturbs the natural order of things and on the left from those who feel betrayed (especially over Iraq).
In the UK the news agenda is often set by the press, and much of the press has been in get-the-Blairs mode for a very long time. The point of this kind of journalism is not to hold governments to account but to undermine, belittle and ridicule. The reason the BBC came a cropper over Hutton was that some of its journalists failed to distinguish between truth-seeking and point-scoring, adopted the mindset of their print brethren, and over-reached. It was and is right to scrutinize Blair’s conduct over Iraq, just as it was right to criticize many of Clinton’s actions (the bombing of that factory in Sudan being a good case in point). But since we at CT have had a fair amount to say about and against the villification of the Clintons we ought to recognise that the coverage of the Blairs has started to resemble it.
Polly Toynbee, writing in the Guardian last week also deplored attack-dog journalism. In doing so, she placed a lot of the blame at the door of Alastair Campbell. She’s no doubt right to make this point, though it can be overstated. It has greater merit as a point about the hypocrisy of Blair’s and Campbell’s indignation towards the BBC given their own embracing of the culture of spin and counterspin than it does as an explanation of why we have the bad journalism we have. I’m certainly reluctant to come out and defend Campbell, and in any case I don’t think a game of “he started it!” is going to be very productive. I do think it worth saying two things, though. First, many of those who claim that Campbell is something new on the bullying and manipulation front seem to have forgotten some of his predecessors. (Notably Bernard Ingham who was worse in may ways.) Second, the “why is the lying bastard lying to me” school of journalism isn’t plausibly represented mainly as a response to Campbell and his ilk since we see it in so many contexts other than coverage of the Labour government. Press coverage of just about any large institution is now predicated on the assumption that that institution (school, hospital, university, company) is a conspiracy of the self-serving and that all utterances by its representatives are to be taken as mendacious lies (unless proven otherwise).
I imagine that some — including some of my fellow contributors — may believe that lying mendacity is a good working assumption. I’m not certain that they are wrong. But I do think that we can’t have a decent (social-) democratic political culture without sober commentary, honest reporting, a commitment to truth-telling as opposed to a hunger for exposure, spin and counterspin, smear and countersmear. When Onora O’Neill gave one of her Reith lectures on the trust and covered the press, I was pretty sceptical on my blog . I rather think I should have said more to emphasise what was right in her account.
Lifted from Jack O’Toole:
Here’s Andrew Sullivan on Josh Marshall’s New Yorker article:
Josh Marshall has written an engaging and artful essay about the notion of an American empire for the liberal New Yorker magazine. I read it yesterday and then re-read it. Josh manages to write about the Clinton era “soft-imperialism” and the Bush era “hard imperialism” with nary a mention of a certain even that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Emphasis added. Here’s the Josh Marshall article in question, fifth paragraph:
After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that was unapologetically imperialist.
If this is the kind of attention to detail we get when Sullivan reads something and re-reads it, what happens when he reads something only once?
UPDATE: I emailed Andrew about this, and he emailed back:
he has a one sentence aside in a 4000 word piece.
my point entirely
andrew
I honestly don’t know how to respond to that.
If you had a problem with this ABC News smear story, “Dean’s Trooper”, you’re not alone. (Jesse has a summary, if you don’t want to read the whole thing.) If you like, you can let ABC News know how you feel here.
My email to ABC is below.
I read your story about Howard Dean and Dennis Madore, and for the life of me, I can’t see why you chose to air it. There is absolutely no evidence that Dean knew about Madore’s abuse. Dean fired Madore when he found out about it. The tone of the report strongly implies wrongdoing by Dean- in fact, it seems to start with the assumption that Dean is a hypocrite who condones domestic abuse. But in the absence of mental telepathy, I can’t see what he could have done differently.The abusive tone of this report is very troublesome and wholly inappropriate. It comes off as a hit piece, timed to make an impact before the Iowa primaries.
Even the conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan, a passionate supporter of President Bush, called this piece “a vile little smear story” and says “this kind of irrelevant piece of guilt by association is truly beneath contempt.”
I’m old enough to realize that the media does not apologize for its poor judgement. But you should know how people feel about this. For years to come, commentators will be pointing to this ABC News story as evidence that the media is biased and unfair in its coverage of prominent Democrats.
Are you comfortable with that?
In the children’s classic Charlotte’s Web, a spider saves the life of Wilbur, a pig bound for slaughter, by spinning webs in English that say that Wilbur was an amazing, special creature. The humans believe anything that they read, and ignore the evidence of their senses that says that Wilbur is just another pig.
As a kid, I enjoyed this book very much, but I didn’t believe that people would be that dumb. As it turns out, I should have trusted E.B. White.
In case you missed it, Slate’s Chris Suellentrop wrote a short piece about Wesley Clark on the campaign trail. He picked a handful of campaign rhetoric from Clark, and labelled each quote as if it was an outrageous accusation. Right-wingers (including Andrew Sullivan, Instapundit, and lots of others) took this piece as evidence that Clark was a big ol’ loon, and left-wingers (Mark Kleiman, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum) argued that Clark was being sharply misrepresented.
It turns out that Sullentrop intended to satirically make the point that Clark wasn’t being covered like Dean. Unlike Dean, his statements were less likely to be distorted and blown out of proportion. No one (including myself) realized that it was intended as satire.
Sullentrop has learned accidentally what I’ve suspected for a while: if a writer wants to spin a candidate, it almost doesn’t matter what that candidate actually says. What really matters is framing. If the story says, “Clark made a crazy accusation when he said ‘X’”, the contents of ‘X’ don’t matter much. The target audience, the ones who desperately want to believe, just aren’t going to read it very critically. (This goes both ways, of course. Volokh conspirators have frequently noted that there’s often little or nothing wrong with the “Bushisms” published in Slate, other than the fact that they are framed as humorous errors.)
It also seems as if some people truly seem to read criticism of Bush as outrageous by definition. Read Sullivan; his shock that Bush is being questioned is palpable.
Sigh. I’m going to Fametracker to talk about hobbits or something.
I don’t want to say The Age, my daily newspaper of choice, is sex-obsessed, but four of the five featured story on the sidebar this morning are:
Okey-Blokey, a story about drag kings.
Condoms ‘not sinful’ says a Belgian Cardinal.
Girls Say No to Sex
The return of the Bunny? on the rerise of the Playboy icon.
Pretty soon my hometown newspaper will be getting blocked by anti-porn filters.
Need a couple of fresh reasons to dislike Bill O’Reilly?
Ladies and gentlemen, O’Reilly on the ACLU:“The ACLU is the most fascist organization I have seen in decades. They want to tell you how to live. They don’t want to abide by the Constitution. They want to go AROUND the Constitution. They’re intellectual fascists. And they use the courts as their Panzer divisions.”Nothing expresses faith in our nation of laws like comparing “courts” and “Panzer divisions”, does it?
My friend Rob Humenik at Get Donkey! is a volunteer on the Dean campaign. He recently had the opportunity to ride along with some of the press corps covering the Dean rally in Houston. It’s well worth reading:
What was most interesting was hearing them interact with each other. I always had this silly stereotype of journalists trying to scoop each other and keeping their information to themselves, but these guys were the definition of pack journalism. What was scary was that a lot of them didn’t really seem to know what they were talking about regarding some of Dean’s policy stances, things he said at the speech, etc. I got the distinct impression that they were interviewing each other for information (instead of, say, the official campaign spokesman that was in the front seat). Honest to Pete, I heard one reporter ask another “How do you think Dean is doing,” and the other went on to answer how he felt Dean probably wrapped up the nomination when he decided against campaign financing, but the test will be if his appeal extends beyond the base of radical liberal supporters…” The exchange was followed by the sound of fingers typing on keyboard.
Everyone knows that NBC’s Today Show is liberally biased. Which is why it’s interesting that in their segment on the manslaughter conviction of Rep. Bill Janklow, they didn’t use the word “Republican.”
Uggabugga has the audio file. I don’t think that I’ve ever watched the Today show, and I certainly wouldn’t try to use this as evidence of conservative bias. I used to have frequent arguments about the impossibility of “proving” media bias by cherry-picking examples from the hundreds of hours and thousands of pages of media produced every day. But given the intellectual integrity of the most prominent right-leaning media watchdogs, all I can say is: Live by the anecdote, die by the anecdote.
Regarding Robert Bartley, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient, you might be interested in this long, detailed article from the Columbia Journalism Review about the trustworthiness of the Wall Street Journal editorial page under his leadership. It’s well worth reading.
Just one example out of many:
In late 1994 (the WSJ editorial page) targeted Peter Edelman, then counselor to the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who was being considered for a seat on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. The Journal said that when Edelman was director of New York State’s Division for Youth in 1978, he ordered a one-week furlough for a seventeen-year-old who had knifed a girl during a robbery. While on his furlough, the youth was arrested on charges of raping, robbing, and trying to electrocute a sixty-three-year-old woman.That the Journal’s charge was not true was eventually pointed out in a letter, published about three weeks later, written by J. Thomas Mullen, president of the Catholic Charities Services Corp. in Cleveland, who had worked with Edelman in New York. Under the structure of the agency, Edelman did not order transfers or furloughs, but he could override them, particularly when there was a concern about security, which he did in this case. But by the time he had ordered the boy picked up and returned to the facility, it was too late.
It was also too late for Edelman’s nomination. Under pressure from the right wing’s judicial attack machine, Clinton got cold feet, and Edelman’s name never went to the Senate…
“They were almost indifferent as to whether what they wanted to say comported with dispassionate factual reality,” says Taylor, who is now a senior writer at The American Lawyer.
Today, Howard Kurtz quoted a story about the discovery of the remains of Howard Dean’s brother in Laos. He then commented:
I wonder if the remains would have been found if Dean wasn’t running for president.
I have been trying all day to imagine what Kurtz could have meant by that, but everything I come up with is ludicrous. Suggestions are more than welcome. (via Atrios)
I’m not sure why Josh Chafetz thinks it ironic that the distribution the Guardian’s Dear George letters doesn’t line up with data from opinion polls (data that the paper itself reports on). The mix of letters printed in a newspaper should be broadly representative of the correspondence it receives, not public opinion in general. Guardian readers are more likely than not to oppose Bush’s policies and this seems to be a minority view at present. While that might make Josh happy, I don’t see how it’s ironic.
Simon Waldman’s tale of how he discovered a special Homes and Gardens feature on Hitler’s taste in decor is blogpspheric old news. But I’m linking just to note the reaction of IPC when he put up scans from a pre-war magazine on his blog:
“This piece, text and photographs is still in copyright and any unauthorised reproduction is an infringement of copyright. In the circumstances I must request you to remove this article from your website.”
It turned out that they didn’t have copyright but asserted that they did anyway.
Over on Volokh, Cori Dauber writes:
THE ECHO CHAMBER IN PLAY … Study and after study has shown that Americans accept casualties if they believe they were in support of a necessary mission. The idea, promulgated again here, that public opinion is linked causally to the number of casualties and falls in predictable algorithms based on casualties taken is a canard, based on interpretations of the data from Vietnam detached from all context.
If you actually click through that link, you’ll see three things. First, all that is being claimed is that for a given war, higher casualties result in less support, so the need for context (i.e. cross-war comparisons) is not ever so clear. Second, the evidence for this is not just from Vietnam, but also from Korea. Third, the source isn’t just the echo chamber repeating itself (like Dauber’s unsourced ‘studies after studies’) but is credited to Dr William Hammond, from the US Army’s Center for Military History. The liberal media conspiracy has really long tentacles if it’s reached into the Army’s own historical division. (Why does the US Army hate America so much?)
Well, strike me dead. BBC news online reports that Jim Caviezel, who’s playing Jesus in Mel Gibson’s controversial film, has been struck by lightning. And an assistant director too, him for the second time. Apparently it actually is true that people struck by lightning have smoke come out of their ears (how? how? where does it come from?).
Strange though, that with all the controversy about the film so far, I hadn’t actually picked up that Jim Caviezel was the main man. It won’t be his first role as a spiritual martyr; Caviezel played a Jesus-like figure in Terence Malick’s stunning Thin Red Line. Though this may not be the only reason Caviezel was cast.
My collection of useless knowledge reminds me that Jim Caviezel is also that rare beast; a Hollywood movie star who’s a (pretty hardcore) practicing Catholic. Not of the Tridentine variety, certainly, but I’m sure he and Mel still have plenty to chat about. I like Jim Caviezel the way the girls at my boarding school fancied the hapless young priests in the seminary across the road; hopelessly/safely, and half in love with the messianic gleam in their eyes.
For those who may not be in the know, starting Nov 24th it will be possible to switch your cell phone provider in the U.S. without having to get a new phone number. There have been several extensions granted to cell providers on meeting this requirement so we probably shouldn’t hold our breath, but it may happen this time. Wireless number portability - the official name for all this - should be useful for those who have been deterred from switching due to the costs of having to change one’s phone number.
Note that if you’ve been hearing from your cell phone company with seemingly great deals that would lock you in for two years, you may want to wait a bit longer. Once you’re locked into a deal, you would still need to pay penalties if you switch providers before your contract is over. Some advise against switching right away noting that it may be better to wait a few months to make sure the system really works when you do switch. Also, it may be that the carriers will pass on the costs of portability to customers so the new option won’t be without drawbacks.
Since those in Europe and Asia have had this option for a while now, is there anything else we should be concerned about?
Also, if anyone happens to know the Canyouhearmenow Verizon guy, could you send him to my office? I’m curious to see what happens when he doesn’t get a response to his annoying question.
In today’s column, everybody’s favourite mustachioed commentator manages to put the following line in front of us:
Thankfully, there is one group of people the Bush team is listening to: Iraq’s silent majority
My question to the CT readership is; do you think he did it on purpose?
PS: If you get the Friedman photograph in Photoshop and colour in the rest of the beard he looks exactly like Krugman FACT.
Since so much of the blogospherical comment on media coverage of the Iraq war has focused on the BBC (sometimes justifiably, sometimes not), I was interested to read this Asia Times report (via Brian Leiter ) which tells us that there is a strong correlation between getting your news from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox and having false beliefs about the war. That doesn’t show, of course, that people got their false beliefs from watching Fox, another possibility is that having a lots of false beliefs just predisposes people to tune into that channel. Here’s the end of the article:
The study also debunked the notion that misperceptions were due mainly to the lack of exposure to news.
Among Bush supporters, those who said they follow the news “very closely”, were found more likely to hold misperceptions. Those Bush supporters, on the other hand, who say they follow the news “somewhat closely” or “not closely at all” held fewer misperceptions.
Conversely, those Democratic supporters who said they did not follow the news very closely were found to be twice as likely to hold misperceptions as those who said they did, according to PIPA.
Hysterical use of language alert: Rachel Cooper in the Spectator , reacting to the suggestion that British universities admit student from rough state schools with lower A-level scores than their peers from expensive private schools:
Professor Schwartz is happily preparing the ground for a pogrom of the privileged children whose successful grades are the product not only of their hard work and ability, but also the school they attended.
Those pogroms aren’t what they used to be you know.
I can’t tell whether this is poor style, or poor grammar, or both. It’s the one sentence summary of an inside story from the front page of today’s NY Times. (It doesn’t seem to be duplicated in the online edition.)
It’s the Detroit Tigers, not Art Howe’s Mets, who are threatening to eclipse Casey Stengal’s original Mets of 1962 for most losses in a season, but the current Mets may not be better, but certainly richer, than their notorious and hapless ancestors.
The two ‘but’s close together are pretty bad, which is why I thought poor style. But I can’t imagine any sentence could start “the current Mets may not be better, but certainly richer…” which is why I thought poor grammar. It’s probably a fun game to try and formulate the precise rule they are breaking here, but I’m not going to be the one to do that.
Despite some worries that Hurricane Isabel may wash away TPRC, it was held this past weekend in Arlington, VA and lived up to its reputation as a wonderful meeting for those interested in various communications policy issues. It is the only conference I have attended consistently without fail since I first showed up there five years ago. It is always held in the DC area to ensure a good turnout from government representatives (or I’m assuming that’s a reason for its location).
It’s a good conference for the following reasons:
1. high quality of papers (this year’s acceptance rate was around 25%)
2. a relatively small and friendly group that has been getting together for years but is also very open to meeting new participants
3. a great mix of people from government (mostly the FCC but others as well), the private sector (fewer reps now than a couple of years ago) and academia (mostly economists and legal scholars but various other social scientists and some others as well)
Not surprisingly, the issue of media deregulation came up throughout the conference. There was a lunch-time debate between Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project and Randolph May of the Progress & Freedom Foundation about this. A point Andy Schwartzman kept bringing up was that now with the availability of so much information on the Internet, there should be less concern about what is available via other media.
This is a point that has come up numerous times during discussions about media deregulation in the past few months as well. But there are problems with this approach. Some of the biggest news sources online are just replicas of more traditional news sources. CNN, ABC, NBC are some of the largest online players for news. You could argue that if that’s where people prefer to get information then so be it. However, it would be hard to argue that people’s actions simply reflect their preferences. Work I have done shows that many people lack the necessary skills to find anything and everything on the Web. So even though lots of material is available, it is not necessarily realistically accessible to many. Moreover, given the way content is organized online - the way ISPs and big portals feature some content more prominently than other content - not all Web pages are created equal regardless of their quality.
Related to this issue was an especially intriguing presentation by Eli Noam on the increasing market concentration in the Internet sector. His work finds that the Internet sector is more concentrated than other media industries. Unfortunately, the paper does not offer details about methodology (e.g. what exactly counts for Internet sector in his analyses), but he seems to be writing a related book so hopefully there will be more information available on this.
Overall, it was good to see that representatives from the FCC did not seem to take for granted the Internet’s role in bringing diversity of opinion to the masses.
Following yesterday’s news about Jupiter, CNN turns its attentions to Munich:
You can see all 5.5 liters in the photo. Thus we continue our culinary theme today at CT. Coming soon, Cooking with Crooked Timber — “To each according to his kneads, from each according to his Mille-Feuilles.”
The funny thing is, it’s kind of true about the robot ship death crash, though I wouldn’t have put it that way myself. Or maybe the skateboard generation is also gaining influence over CNN’s subeditors.
Everyone should take a look at this; it shows what 30-second advertising slots in the Fall schedules went for this this year. Most expensive show is Friends (obviously), followed by “Will and Grace” (surprising?). I don’t really have a handle on US media, but I can’t believe that a lame one-joke effort like W&G is pulling in the ratings, so it must have really good demographics (the pink economy, I guess). I’m also surprised that Monday Night Football is only in the middle of the table and cheaper than “The Simpsons”. Anyway, enjoy.
Update: Closer perusal shows that the priciness of Will & Grace is unlikely to have anything to do with the pinkness or otherwise of its viewers. It’s just that CBS seems to totally own Thursday night, and W&G is in a slot between “Friends” and “ER”. The mystery is actually why “Scrubs” and “Coupling” are comparatively weaker; they’re both pretty bad, but I wouldn’t have said that they were between 10% and 30% worse than Will & Grace.
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