Journalism

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

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

Jeffrey Sachs, William Easterly (and Bono for that matter) can stop their bitching, Christopher Hitchens has “an explanation”:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/tm_objectid=17550835&method=full&siteid=94762-name_page.html for a good deal of global destitution:

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

If only Larry Summers were still in post, he could have offered Hitch a job. (shamelessly stolen from “Marc Mulholland”:http://moiders.blogspot.com/2006/08/political-economy-of-under-development.html ).

I’ve just finished reading Brian Cowan’s _The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the English Coffee House_ (“Powells”:http://www.powells.com/s?kw=Brian%20Cowan%20social%20life%20of%20coffee&PID=29956, Amazon) which I really enjoyed a lot (thanks to Rick Perlstein for the recommendation). Its structure is a little unwieldy – the first part is an essay in the history of consumption, the second a semi-related exercise in intellectual and social history – but it really lays out a very strong historical case for something that I’ve suspected and presumed was true, but haven’t seen treated systematically. The typical academic view of the coffeehouse has claimed it as the herald and avatar of a far reaching civil society of intelligent discourse. London coffeehouses have been depicted as the empirical manifestation of Jurgen Habermas’s “public sphere,” a space in which individuals could come together to discuss art and politics, free from both economic pressures and the oversight of the state. They’ve been portrayed as sites of rational and civilized argument. Cowan provides compelling evidence that this view is, to be blunt, romanticized bosh.
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Matt Yglesias announces the institution of “Krauthammer Friday”:http://yglesias.tpmcafe.com/blog/yglesias/2006/aug/11/the_krauthammer_charade_part_i

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

But even better, to my mind, was Krauthammer’s confident judgement on Iraq WMDs back in “April 2003”:http://www.aei.org/events/filter.,eventID.274/transcript.asp.

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

Indeed.

… The Rolling Stones weren’t original. Bach wasn’t original. Einstein wasn’t original. Show me someone who is original, creative, self-expressive, and I’ll show you someone who is boring.

Originality, creativity and self-expression dumb people down. Platonism dumbs people up. Platonism is the biggest dumbing-up exercise in the history of civilisation.

Think in terms of the Platonic Realm. Say you are painting a picture. The picture exists in the Platonic Realm. It is a perfect picture, and it is beautiful. Your job is to depict it as best you can. For you to do this demands that you be a technician – you must know how to use paints, know about perspective, and so on.

It demands that you paint selflessly. It demands that you paint objectively. Originality doesn’t come into it. The picture was there before you existed.

I don’t care if Platonism is metaphysical moonshine. The point is that all human achievement revolves around Platonism …

Read the rest, from the Telegraph.

The Guardian has “a piece by Julian Borger”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/julian_borger/2006/08/post_279.html on the different versions of the Lebanon war being presented to British and American audiences. It seems that British reporters have focused far more on the the sufferings of the Lebanese, with lots of eyewitness interviews with distressed people there, whereas the Americans have concentrated far more on the perpective from the bomb-shelters in northern Israel.

Michael Ledeen fails to think things through:

In today’s “reportage” of the World Cup semifinal between Italy and Germany, the (lefty) Washington Post reported that the game-winning goal was scored on a left-footed kick, while the (righty) Washington Times reported it was scored on a right-footed kick. The Post account was correct, but don’t you find it mysteriously symbolic of something or other?

I…words fail me.

I meant to mention Philip Connors’ sharp and funny piece about working for the _Wall Street Journal_ (to be found in the “most recent issue”:http://www.nplusonemag.com/toc4.html of _N+1_, but not available on the WWW) last week, when I was writing about newspapers, editorial policies etc. His description of Bob Bartley, late editorial-page editor for the newspaper:

bq. Bob Bartley, who has since passed away, was among the most influential American journalists of the second half of the twentieth century … He was fairly soft-spoken and his posture was poor. He rarely smiled, but when he did he looked like a cat who’d just swallowed your canary. His abiding obsessions were taxes and weapons. He thought taxes should be cut always and everywhere, except for poor people, and he thought Americans should build as many weapons as possible … Bartley was appalled by the very idea of poor people. In fact, he’d once said he didn’t think there were any poor people left in America – “just a few hermits or something like that.” (This quote can be found in the _Washington Post_ Magazine of July 11, 1982.) On this issue, Bob Bartlley was the intellectual heir of an old American idea expressed most succinctly by the preacher Henry Ward Beecher: “No man in his land suffers from poverty unless it be more than his fault – unless it be his _sin_.” For Bob Bartley, the agrarian pictures of Walker Evans and the homoerotic pictures of Robert Mapplethorpe were morally equivalent. Both depicted human beings in a sinful state of filth and degradation, and such images had no place in an American museum.

I see that Megan McArdle has responded to my response with two posts, one quite voluminous. I don’t want to belabour this any more than it needs to be belaboured, so I’ll do my best not to be prolix. If you dig beneath the lengthy exposition and lumbering sarcasm, her contentions seem rather straightforward and easily summarizable.

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“Megan McArdle”:http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005802.html has a go at me for “criticizing the _Economist_”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/16/ducking-under/ in my last post. Fair enough that she should want to stick up for her employer, but her argument seems to me to be (a) an attempt to duck the issue, and (b) preposterous.

bq. Note that The Economist, whose reporters extensively research and fact check their claims, is automatically full of [expletive deleted]. A New York TImes columnist who turns in 700 words twice a week consisting, in this case, apparently largely of reprinting the press releases of the Smithfield plant union organisers, is an unimpeachable source. Opinion columnists: reliable fonts of disimpassioned analysis. Reporters who spend weeks working on a story: partisan hacks. … This is not to slam opinion columnists, who I often enjoy. But having written reported stories, and opinion columns, I know that the standards for the latter are a tad more loose. No one ever challenges an opinion columnist to be balanced, fair, or even defend his facts, unless they’re of the “The Holocaust never happened!” variety. Reported pieces, on the other hand, get checked down to the spelling of the names, and then gleefully interrogated by editors and other reporters who disagree with you. When I see an opinion piece, I know that all the inconvenient facts have been left out so they won’t annoy the reader. When I read a reported piece, for all the complaining about the MSM in the blogosphere, I know that the editors and the writer are at least nominally interested in the truth, not the conclusion–at least provided that they work at a mainstream paper, and not one of the money-losing political mags where the editors have to keep the donors happy.

This is an argument from authority, a kind of argument with which Ms. McArdle has a “rather unhappy history”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2003/05/01/hats-off-to-d-squared/. More to the point – it’s a bogus argument from authority. McArdle’s claim is that newspaper reporters are more authoritative than op-ed writers, because they don’t leave out “all the inconvenient facts,” and because they’re “at least nominally interested in the truth, not the conclusion.” Now this is a claim that I’m prepared to buy, up to a point, with newspapers that maintain a clear separation between editorial content and reportage. The _Wall Street Journal_, for example, does some first rate economic reporting, even if its editorial pages are a cesspit. But as a defence of _The Economist_, it isn’t even laughable; it’s pitiable. _The Economist_ has never sought to disguise the fact that it’s a magazine with a strong pro-free market agenda, which pervades not only its editorial content, but its reporting. It doesn’t try to present both sides of the question and never has; its reportage is shot through with opinionated assertions and undefended value judgments about the need for “reform” of lamentably social-democratic West European countries, to marketize the education system &c&c&c. Nor does it tend to report developments which might call its preferred policy stances into question with any great degree of enthusiasm. Now there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that in principle – I’m obviously in favour of strongly opinionated political writing, or I wouldn’t do it myself. But it certainly doesn’t put _Economist_ reporters in a very good place to criticize op-ed writers and political magazine journalists, or more generally to assume a lofty position from which they may criticize the pell-mell of ideologically driven debate beneath. The activities that op-ed writers and _Economist_ reporters are engaged in aren’t nearly as far removed from each other as Ms. McArdle might wish to suggest.

Which brings us to the more particular matter under discussion. Herbert’s piece rested on a set of factual claims – if she wants to take issue with the article, she should, one would think, concentrate on whether these claims are in fact correct, rather than appealing to general arguments about the inferiority of op-ed writers. My original post suggested precisely that “inconvenient facts have been left out so they won’t annoy the reader.” As I claimed, if you want to take an undocumented immigrant worker’s experience in Smithfield Foods’ meatprocessing plant as a proxy for the Mexican-American dream, it’s hardly irrelevant that Smithfield Foods has an established track record of abusing aforementioned undocumented immigrant workers’ rights, and threatening to report them to immigration authorities if they should dare to organize themselves. If this isn’t an “inconvenient fact” for the Economist‘s preferred narrative, I’m not sure what would be.

A “transcript”:http://world-o-crap.com/blog/?p=42 from World O’Crap, with Tim Russert and panelists Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter, Satan (“Call me Bob”) and Jesus Christ. A taste:

*Russert*: Mr. Christ, what do you say to accusations that you’re opposed to fighting a battle to bring about the end of all life on Earth because you’re an Anti-Semite?

*Jesus*: Well, first of all, I’d like to point out that I myself am Jewish—

*Ann Coulter*: Yeah! Just like George Soros. Another Jew who somehow figured out a way to avoid crucifixion.

*Jesus*: I WAS crucified! (DISPLAYS WOUNDS IN HANDS)

*Michelle Malkin*: Why don’t people ask him more specific questions about the nails in his hands and feet? There are legitimate questions about whether or not they were self-inflicted wounds.

*Russert*: What do you mean self-inflicted? Are you suggesting Mr. Christ crucified himself on purpose?

*Michelle Malkin*: Did you read the book by Barabbas and the Golgotha Veterans for Truth? Some of the thieves who were actually crucified have made allegations that these were self-inflicted wounds.

*Jesus*: I did not NAIL MYSELF to the cross!

Mark Steyn has a way with words. Particularly other people’s. (via Bitch PhD).

[For an earlier instance, scroll to the bottom of this post].

I’ve been travelling back and forth between Ireland and the US, attending a conference and grading over the last week, so I couldn’t participate in the Jonathan Chait bashing that’s been convulsing the left blogosphere. But I can’t resist pointing out the sheer silliness of this “purported riposte”:http://www.tnr.com/blog/theplank?pid=16524 from Chait.

bq. But it’s not true if you take account of their political style, which is distinctly New Left. It’s a paranoid, Manichean worldview brimming with humorless rage. The fact that the contemporary blog-based left, unlike the McGovernite New Left, lacks a well-formed radical program is some measure of comfort. However, I think there’s lots of evidence to suggest that this style of thinking is suggestive of a tendency to move in more radical directions over time. That, of course, is exactly what happened to the New Left, many of whose members starting off as relatively sensible liberals, or left-liberals before veering into the abyss.

This smear by association deconstructs itself – if you want to complain about bloggers’ paranoid, Manichean worldviews brimming with humourless rage, surely it’s best not to do so in paranoid, Manichean blogposts brimming &c&c. Chait, in his efforts to carry out the _New Republic’s_ self-appointed guardianship of sort-of-slightly-liberal-centrism (and to vilify those who have the impertinence to be to his left) becomes that which he’s complaining about. Peer not too long into the abyss of the blogosphere lest it peer back into thee.

In any event, I’d take the humour of McGovernites such as John Kenneth Galbraith (who as Scott McLemee “pointed out last week”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/05/03/mclemee was not only known for witty epigrams, but also for elaborate spoofs) over that of _New Republic_ apparatchiks any day of the week. As McLemee’s piece shows, Galbraith’s spurious psychologist Herschel McLandress, had the New Republic faction’s number a long time ago.

bq. Epernay [Galbraith’s pseudonym] enjoyed his role as Boswell to the great psychometrician. Later articles discussed the other areas of McLandress’s research. … He developed the “third-dimensional departure” for acknowledging the merits of both sides in any controversial topic while carefully avoiding any form of extremism. (This had been mastered, noted Epernay, by “the more scholarly Democrats.”)

“Josh Marshall”:http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/008342.php talks about the hostility that many journalists have towards bloggers.

bq. It’s really astonishing the amount of self-pity and silliness one hears along these lines today. Not long ago, for instance, I sat down for an interview with a particularly disagreeable interviewer who seemed to want to catch me out and pin me down on every conceivably problematic point about blogs. At one point he suggested that the blogs were pulling away or threatening to pull away the ad revenue streams necessary to support the reportings staffs required for a quality news outlet. Agreed — I didn’t know quite what to make of that one either. I’m happy with my life. And my company is able to pay three salaries and benefits in addition to mine. But to say that we’re more than a financial fleck in the eye of even the smallest mainstream news organization is a really a grand understatement.

This reminded me of one of the weirder undercurrents at the National Press Club bloggers-meet-journalists “event”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/01/29/bloggers-and-journalists/ that I was at a couple of months ago. Halfway during the lunch, someone asked a question about the problems that newspapers face given budget cuts, lack of interest in funding investigative reporting etc etc, and the organizer (an ex-media type from the Shorenstein center) and other journalists jumped onto this, and made it the main topic of the second half of discussion, despite the fact that it was precisely irrelevant to the purported purpose of the lunch – a conversation about the relationship between blogging and journalism. This really struck me as something quite strange. My best interpretation of this was that journalists feel under threat on the one hand from the collapse in advertising revenues (which is about Craigslist and monster.com, not bloggers), and on the other hand from bloggers (who don’t threaten their revenues, but certainly threaten their professional prestige) and that they’ve got a tendency to blur these two quite different threats together into one because they’re both Internet phenomena. I don’t have much contact with journalists, so this impression may fly well wide of the mark – but given Marshall’s interviewer, it seems to me to be at least plausible as an explanation for the weird comments that some journalists have made about bloggers and blogging.