The cover story to this week’s issue of The Nation is an article by Christopher Phelps on the new Students for a Democratic Society. I read it in a couple of earlier drafts, and can’t imagine anything more fair to the young people who are being radicalized by the war. As Phelps says, it’s not that they tend to know a lot about the old SDS and want to relive it. They aren’t antiquarians. But “democratic society” just sounds like a good a name for what they want — and they know better than to think they are living in one now.
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From the category archives:
Journalism
Last month I mentioned that Political Theory Daily Review had found a sponsor — the magazine Bookforum. As it happens, the new issue just arrived in my mailbox yesterday, even before it reached the newstand, which doesn’t always happen.
Well, now you can read it, too. As of the April/May issue, nearly all of the contents are online for free. It looks like a couple of items are print-only, out of about 45.
I’m still partial to the paper version. Easier on the eyeballs, for one thing; plus, the ads in a book publication actually count as information that I want to see. But at a time when most newspaper review sections are shrinking when not disappearing, it’s good that one publication seems to be doing well enough to make its content available to the largest possible readership.
I came across James Fallows’ 1991 piece on _The Economist_ (to which my subscription has just lapsed), “The Economics of the Colonial Cringe”:http://jamesfallows.com/test/1991/10/16/the-economics-of-the-colonial-cringe-about-the-economist-magazine-washington-post-1991/, and thought it pretty interesting. On the one hand, this seems a little dated:
In functional terms, The Economist is more like the Wall Street Journal than like any other American publication. In each there’s a kind of war going on between the news articles and the editorial pages. The news articles are not overly biased and try to convey the complex reality of, well, the news. Meanwhile, the editorials and “leaders” push a consistent line, often at odds with the facts reported on the news pages of the same issue.
If there’s any marked difference these days between the line touted in the editorial pages line and the perspective of the news articles, I can’t detect it. The _WSJ_ seems to still have a firewall between the two (although in fairness its editorial pages are also far loopier than those of the _Economist_).
On the other, this still seems bang on the mark.
The other ugly English trait promoting The Economist’s success in America is the Oxford Union argumentative style. At its epitome, it involves a stance so cocksure of its rightness and superiority that it would be a shame to freight it with mere fact. American debate contests involve grinding, yearlong concentration on one doughy issue, like arms control. The forte of Oxford-style debate is to be able to sound certain and convincing about a topic pulled out of the air a few minutes before, such as “Resolved: That women are not the fairer sex.” (The BBC radio shows “My Word” and “My Music,” carried on National Public Radio, give a sample of the desired impromptu glibness.) Economist leaders and the covers that trumpet their message offer Americans a blast of this style. Michael Kinsley, who once worked at The Economist, wrote that the standard Economist leader gives you the feeling that the writer started out knowing that three steps must be taken immediately — and then tried to think what the steps should be.
UK viewers were treated the other night to a superficially impressive global-warming denialist documentary: “The Great Global Warming Swindle”:http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindle/index.html . The programme was the work of “Martin Durkin”:http://tinyurl.com/38n6np who has previous form for dodgy science documentaries. “Medialens”:http://www.medialens.org/alerts/07/0313pure_propaganda_the.php has a reasonably comprehensive account of the film’s reception and also gives an idea of the contents. See also “George Monbiot”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2032575,00.html in the Guardian and “Steve Connor”:http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/climate_change/article2355956.ece in the Independent. Central to the film was the testimony of the MIT oceanographer Carl Wunsch. Wunsch’s own account of how his material was edited and presented so as to give a misleading account of his actual views is “here”:http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2359057.ece .
Randy Cohen has caught up with CT, and is looking at the issue of whether it is ok to use online information to make judgments about applicants to college (not grad school, as we did). He says it is not. Not to be mean, but his judgement includes an extraordinarily bad analogy:
You would not read someone’s old-fashioned pen-and-paper diary without consent; you should regard a blog similarly.
Here I am, writing on a blog, using my own name, hoping that somebody might be stimulated or entertained, or best of all influenced, by what I write, and Randy Cohen thinks that nobody should be reading. The analogy is, in fact, with a diary that I publish and give away for free. I can see there might be a problem with selective reading of blogs (trying to find dirt on someone one wants to reject anyway) and certainly admissions officials should have some sort of protocol for this, but people who make embarrassing comments on their own blog under their own name in public should expect that other people might read and be influenced by them. Writing a diary which one keeps under lock and key seems sufficiently different that anyone who gave a moment’s thought would get it.
Via Shakespeare’s Sister, word of what sounds like an urban legend, though evidently it’s for real. But like many urban legends, it’s also a cautionary tale. An Atlanta TV station, doing a hard-hitting story on the new whole-wheat donut from Krispy Kreme, used an image someone in the art department probably grabbed online shortly before going on the air:
(You can watch the video at ShakeSis.)
Ordinarily I would expect this to have been discussed at Romenesko by now, but so far don’t see anything. All the more surprising given the nonstop debates there in 2003 over nuances of the journalistic ethics involved in covering the opening of Krispy Kreme stores as news.
Suggestion to the Poynter Institute, which not only hosts the Romenesko news blog but sponsors workshops and seminars for editors and reporters: Devote a course to the perils of Google Images, and soon.
As of today, Political Theory Daily Review is sponsored by Bookforum magazine. For a while now, PTDR has provided the widest and deepest pool of links to late-breaking, scholarly, and/or esoteric articles available on the web.
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As “Brad”::http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/could_this_be_t.html mentioned a couple of days ago, “Ethan Zuckerman”:http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=1224 has an interesting and worrying factlet on his blog.
Having tea with my friend Abe McLaughlin this afternoon, he mentioned that, of the two hundred fifty foreign correspondents, one hundred are employed by the Wall Street Journal. I wondered about the geographical distribution of that hundred and the other reporters – would we find a huge concentration of journalists in Iraq and Israel? Would we find any in Africa other than in Cairo and Jo’burg?
The problem, it seems to me, isn’t only about geographic distribution of interest; it’s about the kinds of issues that these correspondents are likely to write stories about. As conventional newspapers cut down on their overseas reporting, it’s ever more necessary to turn to specialized newspapers such as the _Wall Street Journal_ and the _Financial Times_ to get solid, detailed coverage of what’s happening outside the US. But even if these are both genuinely great newspapers (the WSJ’s news reportage, as opposed to its editorial pages, is excellent), they tend necessarily to focus on issues that US and UK businesspeople are interested in, and subtly to spin their stories accordingly. This means that plenty of stories that would be of interest to non-business people don’t get reported on at all well in the major English language press, and that when they do get reported, their coverage often subtly reflects the priorities of a pretty specific and limited set of social interests. Nor are the blogosphere and related forms of information gathering at all a perfect solution for this problem. Even if blogs like “Abu Aardvark”:http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/ provide insight into the Arab media that you don’t get from the mainstream press, Ethan’s research on ‘global attention profiles’ suggests that the blogosphere is actually worse in some respects than mainstream media in drawing attention to under-reported parts of the world (elite bloggers tend to do a little better, but not much). I suspect (but don’t have any smoking gun evidence to prove this) that the same kinds of distortion characterize issue coverage too.
Eugene Goodheart writes in the latest issue of _Dissent_, in an article entitled “The London Review of Hezbollah”:http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=733 :
bq. The London Review of Books is an egregious instance of this one-sidedness. Almost _every issue contains several articles devoted to attacks on Israel_ [emphasis added], and the target is not simply the governing party, but the whole spectrum of Israeli political life. _Absent from the columns of the Review are the injustices and cruelties of political Islam_ [emphasis added].
Perhaps accuracy is not Mr Goodheart’s strong point. Maybe he is merely unfortunate that the latest issue of the LRB contains “an article by James Meek”:http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n03/meek01_.html that begins:
bq. In 1995, in Sudan, Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri put two teenage boys on trial for treason, sodomy and attempted murder, in a Sharia court of his own devising. Of the two boys, one, Ahmed, was only 13. Zawahiri, the partner in terror of Osama bin Laden, had them stripped naked; he showed that they had reached puberty, and therefore counted as adults. The court found the boys guilty. Zawahiri had them shot, filmed their confessions and executions, and put video copies out to warn other potential traitors.
But even allowing the publication of Meek’s article as a mere co-incidence that should not be held against him, Goodheart’s case is not strong. A perusal of the LRB’s online archives reveals a total of five articles about the Middle East in 2006, some of which are, of course, about Iraq. To those should no doubt be added the well-known Mearsheimer and Walt piece. The LRB is published 24 times a year.
UPDATE: it turns out (thanks to Henry and K. Williams in the comments below) that the LRB’s online indexing is crap. The final para above is incorrect, but the basic point stands and the following para would have been better:
But even allowing the publication of Meek’s article as a mere co-incidence that should not be held against him, Goodheart’s case is not strong. A perusal of the LRB’s back issues reveals a total of 17 articles critical of Israel in 2006, but ten of these come from two issues published during the invasion of Lebanon (and the LRB is published 24 times a year). It is certainly false to say, as Goodheart does, that “Almost every issue contains several articles devoted to attacks on Israel.”
Sunday morning, 7.05 AM. Most people are still asleep. I am playing with my son and listening to the radio, and it is the first time this week that I hear some substantial radio coverage of the “2007 World Social Forum”:http://wsf2007.org/. I had no time this week to watch the evening television news more than once or twice, and hence do not know whether the Dutch television paid more attention. But I did read the newspaper, and listened to the radio, and heard almost nothing about the WSF.
So no attention to the WSF on primetime. Perhaps it’s just my impression? Or perhaps it’s just the Netherlands? (Not that there is important local news here – the government formation is happening behind closed doors, with no gossip spreading to the People). I hope I am wrong, since the WSF offers a good opportunity for the mainstream press to report on structural issues of global injustice and poverty, instead of only reporting on natural disasters, flaming wars, and other cases of instant misery.
Becks at Unfogged and Scott Lemieux “both”:http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2007_01_14.html#006126 “wonder”:http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2007/01/and-when-third-suv-conks-out-you-have.html why the hell the _New York Times_ publishes articles like “this”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/19/realestate/greathomes/19appliance.html?ex=157680000&en=297a9072f68ae297&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink.
FOR some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.
“We called Viking over the holidays every year,” Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.
The _Financial Times_ (which has its biases, but is still in my opinion the best newspaper out there), has an entire bloody weekend supplement devoted to this kind of stuff, with the classy title “How To Spend It”:http://www.ft.com/howtospendit. While a fair number of its readers are presumably City types who can afford the pieds-a-terres and fancy toys lovingly detailed in its pages, I would imagine that most of its readers aren’t. Someone who I was chatting to about this recently suggested that it’s an aspirational thing; while most of its readers can’t afford this stuff, they’d like to be able to, and are more likely to buy a newspaper that allows them at least to daydream about it. Or perhaps the marketing types think that readers would prefer to be addressed _as if_ they were in a position to “Spend It” even when they aren’t. Any other plausible explanations?
This “column”:http://www.ft.com/cms/s/9b065d92-7666-11db-8284-0000779e2340.html by Gideon Rachman in the FT is pretty interesting; he argues that what’s wrong in right wing foreign policy discussion in the US is that there are too many journalists and former journalists.
An editor of The Economist in the 1950s once advised his journalists to “simplify, then exaggerate”. This formula is almost second nature for newspaper columnists and can make for excellent reading. But it is a lousy guide to the making of foreign policy. … the journalists are a vital part of a neo-con network that formulated and sold the ideas that took the US to war in Iraq and that is now pressing for confrontation with Iran. The links between journalists, think-tanks and decision-makers in the neo-con world are tight and there is plenty of movement from one area to the other … You get the same combination of overstatement and ancestor-worship in Mr Stelzer’s introduction to The Neocon Reader, when he writes of the “formidable intellectual firepower behind neo-conservative foreign policy”, which “has probably not been seen since George Kennan led a team that formulated America’s response to the threat of Soviet expansionism.” The comparison with Kennan is instructive but not in the way Mr Stelzer intends. The main difference is that Kennan had a profound knowledge of the part of the world he was writing about. … Neo-conservative columnists have tended to follow the trial lawyers’ approach to expertise. First, decide what you want to argue then find an expert who agrees with you. … The current debacle in Iraq is what you get when you turn op-ed columns into foreign policy.
To which I’d add that right-wing house-organs such as _Commentary_ have also shaped these commentators’ style, by creating a culture in which you get ahead by smearing your opponents (to illustrate this, it’s worthwhile to read through, say, a selection of Norman Podhoretz’s old columns, or Charles Krauthammer’s more recent attempts in _The National Interest_ to claim that Francis Fukuyama is an anti-Semite). This isn’t to say that things are much better among the centrist and Democratic divisions of the foreign policy commentariat; they also have their own exaggerated simplifications. Here, the tendency seems to be to argue over grand and abstract paradigms for foreign policy making, without any real attempt to account for the actual human costs that this or that paradigm will have, if implemented. This seems to me to be the more fundamental problem that lies behind recent complaints that commenters who got the Iraq war wrong have done quite well out of it; that there’s a fundamental disconnection between the DC-centric arena of foreign policy debates, and the world in which the results of these debates play out. This intellectual disconnect isn’t only a sin of journalists; it’s a sin that academics are often guilty of too (I suspect that the problem with Henry Kissinger’s behavior as Secretary of State wasn’t exactly that he was a Metternichean realist, but that he was an academic _trying_ to be a Metternichian realist). But it’s a pretty fundamental sin, and a pretty fundamental problem.
Lately, I’ve been getting less and less from reading blogs and, more generally, stuff on the internet. But there have been some exceptions, and one of the most exceptional has been “exile.ru”:http://www.exile.ru/ , the paper put out by various exapts in Russia (where they are beyond libel and defamation laws). Notable in the most recent issue is “the kicking that Mark Ames gives to the American journalistic profession as a whole”:http://www.exile.ru/2006-October-20/where_is_americas_politkovskaya.html , and Anne Applebaum in particular, in the light of their reaction to the Politkovskaya assassination. I’ve also become a regular reader of Gary “war nerd”:http://www.exile.ru/archive/by_column/war_nerd.html Brecher and of “John Dolan’s book reviews”:http://www.exile.ru/archive/by_author/john_dolan.html . You should go there too. They’re good, if nasty.
Describing an argument with her mum, Laura puts into words the problem I had with David Brooks’s column on Sunday. The column does little more than articulate the conclusions of Louann Brizendine’s The Female Brain
After I read this article, I thought “and?” And what’s the point, Davie? So, boys and girls are different, But what does that mean. I mean this isn’t a science column; it’s a political and social column on an opinion page, but he never spits it out. Mom and I were fighting over the Brooks’ unstated point.
Mom: Brooks is just saying, “ha” to the feminists who kept telling me over and over in the 70s that you kids were different, because we were messing with them. If only we were more nurturing to Chris, he would like dolls. And I told them they were crazy.
Me: Brooks is also saying something else, Mom. If we’re all just slaves to genetics as Brooks says, then women have to be the moms and dad have to go to the office or war or the soccer field. I think that’s what he’s really saying there, but he’s too chickenshit to get it out.
I don’t know whether to side with Laura or her mum. But that’s the point. Unlike most of you, but I suspect like Laura, I have a real soft spot for Brooks. But in an op ed, shouldn’t you forward an op?
Watching established news organizations set up homesteads in the blogosphere is a pastime of great interest to me, both as a professional writer and an amateur social psychologist. Few phenomena better illustrate the role that anxiety plays in the life of large institutions.
In some few cases, the internal culture of a magazine or newspaper will encourage (or at least tolerate) a degree of initiative on the part of the writing staff. But most places are just too inflexible for that. And it shows, at all levels.
The habits fostered by an entrenched bureaucracy combine with hazy notions of “our audience” (often treated with an overblown deference finally indistinguishable from condescension) to yield a rigidity embodying pure terror. There is a clutching at reliable formulas, and a deep fear of the interesting, let alone the unusual. A compulsive avoidance of experimentation sometimes alternates (in an almost cyclothymic way) with joylessly frantic, top-down efforts at renewal.
“Be spontaneous!” comes the directive from on high. “Just not too spontaneous!”
And you see the spastic consequence in the blogs, which should probably be called Unclear on the Concept or Lipstick on the Corpse or Watching Grandma Dance the Frug.
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