Journalism

So it looks as though John Micklethwait, currently US editor, is probably going to be the new editor at the _Economist_; the final decision is due to be announced tomorrow. It’s down to a two man race between him and Ed Carr, and not that many people are betting on Carr ( in contrast to a few days ago, but that’s a “different story”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/12/hows-about-them-efficient-prediction-markets/ ). To the surprise of many, Clive Crook didn’t make it to the final two, which is unfortunate in my books – Crook is somewhat conservative for my taste, but also a good journalist who would have made a very decent editor. Ed Carr, from all I’ve heard, would be a fine editor too, but things don’t sound good for him.

I have to say that my first reaction is to wonder whether it’s too late to cancel the recent renewal of my _Economist_ subscription. I expect the _Economist_ to be vehemently pro-market, but by reading certain kinds of stories with a skeptical eye, and by skipping past certain others, you can find a lot of value in its pages. It has a clear ideological bias, but it isn’t usually actively dishonest. But Micklethwait, together with his scrofulous sidekick Adrian Wooldridge, was responsible for _The Right Nation_ which is one of the lazier and more dishonest books on American politics that I’ve had the misfortune of reading in the last few years, and for the _Lexington_ column which has shown a pretty reliable track record as a purveyor of Republican talking points. There are still a lot of very good people working for the magazine – but I worry that it’s about to undergo a quite substantial deterioration in intellectual quality.

Update: It’s Micklethwait as expected.

Johann Hari, Independent columnist and one-time contributor to the “decent left” blog “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ , writes “eloquently in the Indie today”:http://www.johannhari.com/archive/article.php?id=831 about why he was wrong about the Iraq war and how he now regrets his pro-war stance.

(I note, btw, that there is “a dismissive post at HP”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/03/20/whither_iraq.php referring to Hari as a “London-based journalist” but omitting to mention his former association with the site.)

I “mentioned”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/07/michael-moore-to-edit-economist/ a few days ago that Paddy Power had opened a book on the race to succeed Bill Emmott as editor of the _Economist_, and suggested that depending on liquidity, there was a fair amount of scope for manipulating the results. I’m sorry to report that my speculations were “bang on the mark”:http://business.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8210-2076421,00.html.

bq. Paddy Power, the bookmaker, has been offering odds on the new editor, to replace the departing Bill Emmott. Several punters this week started to put large sums ranging up to £500 on Ed Carr, the business and financial editor, at 6-1. The bookie yesterday suspended all bets, after even more tried to open accounts. Any of them e-mails with “theeconomist” somewhere in the address? “We haven’t seen anything quite that unsubtle. They’re more intelligent at The Economist. Mind you, when we ran a book on the editor of The [Daily] Mirror . . .”

The Economist‘s journalists have always been quite keen on the “predictive”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3400241 “power”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5244000 of betting markets. Nice to see a few of them put their money where their mouth is. In other news on the race for the prize, I hear that “Clive Crook”:http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5244000 is now a hot contender, and “Chris Anderson”:http://www.thelongtail.com/about.html is climbing up that long tail. Not that you’re able to bet on either of them now, but still.

So far as I know the following fallacy has no name: ‘if x is funny, there must be a grain of truth to x.’ It’s sort of like affirming the consequent, but for ‘it’s funny because it’s true’. If you see what I mean. (You have to think of ‘it’s funny’ as the consequent.) It’s part positive ad hominem. Rather than proving what he says is true, the speaker generates a sense of himself as a clever, sharp, perceptive person. The audience then infers that there must be something clever, sharp and perceptive about the position taken. But mostly the fallacy works because funniness is next to truthiness. The mechanisms of stand-up comedy and propaganda are not fully distinct. What makes you laugh has a certain kinship to that which causes the crowd’s madness. When you put it that way, it’s darn obvious what I am talking about. You have read something Mark Steyn wrote in the last several years, I take it? As Hume writes:

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“Mad” Melanie Phillips continues to be a source of amusement. Since she’s never slow to lecture her readers on the evils of ganja, I guess it can’t be anything she’s smoking, but last week she treated us all to “a stern lecture”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles/archives/001557.html on the “tree-hugging” scientists behind the global-warming “scam” (as she calls it). It is worth reading right down to the end where the on-line text carries a correction:

bq. The version of this article published in The Daily Mail said in error that water vapour formed most of the atmosphere.

It reminded me a little of “Mr Pooter”:http://www.authorama.com/diary-of-a-nobody-13.html :

bq. I left the room with silent dignity, but caught my foot in the mat.

I wasn’t going to post about “last night’s BBC Newsnight”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4507010.stm (still watchable for a few hours) which staged a mock trial of allied conduct in the “war on terror”. Clive Stafford Smith, the advocate for the prosecution, was simply in a different class from his opponent John Cooper. Via “Oliver Kamm’s site”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2005/12/newsnight_on_tr.html I learn that William Shawcross was invited to take part in the programme and declined, apparently because the “trial” format would constitute a trivialization of serious issues. As Shawcross puts it:

bq. A ‘courtroom’ pastiche is a fashionable but frivolous conceit …. The allegations about “rendition” need a thorough investigation and merit the closest attention of Newsnight, but a ‘trial’ will do nothing in that regard.

But commenter Max Smith at DSPFW “reminds us”:http://drinksoakedtrotsforwar.blogspot.com/2005/12/newsnight-on-trial.html that Shawcross had no such qualms two years ago when “he appeared”:http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/tv-channels/channel-4/419783/ as an advocate in a similar televised “trial” on the war (on Channel 4). I’m sure that losing by 2 to 1 in that debate had no impact on his general view of the merits of such devices.

Update: Kamm has emailed me to say that “frivolous conceit” is a phrase of his making rather than Shawcross’s. Others seem to have also read the passage in Kamm’s post as a direct quotation rather than as Kamm summary of Shawcross’s communication with him. The basic point stands, presuming that Kamm’s summary accurately reflects Shawcross’s thinking.

I see that the White House is calling the suggestion that George W. Bush suggested bombing the headquarters of “Aljazeera”:http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage in Qatar (a friendly state) “outlandish”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/22/AR2005112201784.html . Anyone who watched BBC’s Newsnight last night will have seen Frank Gaffney defending (indeed advocating) attacking “Aljazeera”:http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage as entirely legitimate on the grounds that the station is an arm of enemy propaganda. There is also the small matter of the fact that the civil servants who leaked the transcript of the Bush–Blair conversation are facing prosecution for doing so and that the “Daily Mirror has been subjected to pressure”:http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=16401707%26method=full%26siteid=94762%26headline=law%2dchief%2dgags%2dthe%2dmirror%2don%2dbush%2dleak-name_page.html . It is hard to see how someone could “leak” or could be prosecuted for leaking a document if it was other than genuine. One of the neocon themes has been the need for free institutions in the Arab world. Such institutions presumably involve a free and independent media. And yet the closest thing to such a media in the region is discussed as a possible target of attack (and indeed there have been numerous “accidental” attacks on “Aljazeera”:http://english.aljazeera.net/HomePage staff).

The Economist‘s Lexington starts an “article”:http://www.economist.com/World/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5169493 (behind paywall) on whether Bush lied with a piece of self-justificatory hackishness.

bq. The Democrats risk painting themselves as either opportunists (who turn against a war when it goes badly) or buffoons (too dim to question faulty intelligence when it mattered). They also risk exacerbating their biggest weakness—their reputation for being soft on terrorism and feeble on national security. So who is getting the best of the argument? Mr Bush starts with one big advantage: the charge that he knew all along that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction seems to be a farrago of nonsense. Nobody has yet produced any solid evidence for this. Sure, Mr Bush made mistakes, but they seem to have been honest ones made for defensible reasons. He genuinely believed that Saddam Hussein possessed WMD—as did most of the world’s security services. And he was not alone in thinking that, after September 11th, America should never again err on the side of complacency. More than 100 Democrats in Congress voted to authorise the war. But being right and being seen to be right are different things. Mr Bush may not have consciously lied, but, egged on by Mr Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, he made dreadful miscalculations.

The issue, as the Economist‘s journalists know bloody well, isn’t whether the Bush administration believed at one point that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It’s whether or not the Bush administration mendaciously manipulated intelligence to make the public case for their beliefs. The critics mentioned in the piece aren’t making “the charge that [Bush] knew all along that Iraq possessed no weapons of mass destruction.” I’m not aware of anyone apart from a few crackpots who are. They’re making the case that the Republican administration “deliberately suppressed”:http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_11/007556.php information that didn’t support its case, and presented highly dubious information as providing a slam-dunk case for imminent war. In other words, the administration “stitched up”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/21/stitch-ups/ a regime that turned out not actually to have weapons of mass destruction, let alone an active nuclear programme, through spin, lies and use of ‘evidence’ that they knew at the time to be dubious. I’d like to see _Lexington_ explain exactly how the claims of al-Qaeda links, the aluminium tubes presentation, the yellowcake claims and so on were “honest [mistakes] made for defensible reasons.” But of course he does no such thing – instead he attacks his very own, custom designed straw man in an attempt to disassociate the heap of political trouble that Bush is now in from the fact that the Bush administration undoubtedly lied in the run-up to the war. Shoddy, shoddy stuff.

Websites which regularly enthuse about the man are linking to “this quasi-interview with Hitchens”:http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_Type1&call_pageid=971358637177&c=Article&cid=1132354213654&DPL=IvsNDS%2f7ChAX&tacodalogin=yes in which he vaunts his atheistic credentials:

bq. He’s not just an atheist who doesn’t believe in God, he says, but an “anti-theist,” who actively denies the existence of same, a distinction he insists on making. …. His new book, _God is Not Great_ , is a call for people to grow up and abandon the self-comforting fantasy: “I personally think that’s the only answer. In the meantime, any government that allows any privilege to any one faith is preparing to commit cultural suicide.” And any state that retains even a quasi-connection to Christianity, he adds, will have to face Muslim arguments exploiting it. It is all gloomily predictable.

Last week “Nick Barlow pointed”:http://www.nickbarlow.com/blog/?p=574 to the website of the “Family Research Council”:http://www.frc.org/get.cfm?i=CU05K11 (“Defending Family, Faith and Freedom”) with a picture of a man looking rather like Hitchens who had given an address to the group. One can only suppose that evil biotechnologists from the idiotarian left have produced a clone of Hitchens which now goes around acting in a way that would discredit the real one. Somehow I doubt that such a risible scheme will discredit the “Dude” in the eyes of his faithful admirers.

“Judith Miller resigns her position at the Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/10/business/media/10paper.html, in a deal that’s been under negotiation for a couple of weeks, apparently.

The New York Times “reports”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/business/24onion.html?ei=5090&en=b40eb239c3b34014&ex=1287806400&adxnnl=1&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&adxnnlx=1130162497-jv9RaBeQrH9+1m446sivmw (hat-tip JD – via “The PoorMan”:http://www.thepoorman.net/2005/10/24/hooray-for-freedom/ ):

bq. You might have thought that the White House had enough on its plate late last month, what with its search for a new Supreme Court nominee, the continuing war in Iraq and the C.I.A. leak investigation. But it found time to add another item to its agenda – stopping The Onion, the satirical newspaper, from using the presidential seal.

OK, I know that there are people who think that we shouldn’t lower ourselves to engage with the likes of Mark Steyn, but I did post a few days ago about “his previously-expressed”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/09/02/what-they-said-or-social-disasters-iii/ view that “natural” disasters reveal the shortcomings of the societies and political institutions they happen to. So I’ve been looking out for his reponse to Katrina and “in today’s Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/09/06/do0602.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/09/06/ixopinion.html he lets us have it. Sure there’s a lot of Bushite spin about how the local politicians are really the ones to blame. But Steyn finally distills the essence of his view:

bq. Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it’s bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.

So there we have it. The lavish benefits showered on the poor of Louisiana (how the Dutch, French and Germans must envy them!) have eroded their resourcefulness.

“A cameraman for Reuters in Iraq has been ordered by a secret tribunal to be held without charge in Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison until his case is reviewed within six months, a U.S. military spokesman said on Wednesday.”

…

“The U.S. military has refused Reuters’ requests to disclose why he is being held. He has not been charged.
“His brother, who was detained with him and then released, said they were arrested after Marines looked at the images on the journalist’s cameras.”

…

“Reuters had also been pressing for the release of cameraman Haider Kadhem, who was detained in Baghdad on Sunday after an incident in which his soundman, Waleed Khaled, was killed as he drove the pair on a news assignment.
“Iraqi police said U.S. troops fired on the Reuters team, both Iraqis.”

What’s there to say?

Not being an American, I’ve followed the whole Cindy Sheehan thing from afar. I’d been noting, with growing disgust, the whole slime-and-defend operation mounted by O’Reilly, FrontPageMag, Michele Malkin and points rightwards. Now I see that Christopher Hitchens “has joined in”:http://www.slate.com/id/2124500/fr/nl/ and that his invective against Sheehan has been “endorsed by Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/ventriloquizing.html . I guess there are two views on this kind of thing. There’s the view that citizens, whatever their background, are fair game for personal attack as soon as they open their mouths and should be treated in the same hardball manner as any machine politican or professional pundit. And there’s the view that grieving mothers should should be shown consideration, kindness and respect. Geras and Hitchens clearly take the first of these views.

Just over a year ago “I posted”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/26/katharina-blum/ about Schlondorff’s film of “The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073858/ and commented:

bq. 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.

[There’s good coverage of earlier episodes of the anti-Sheehan slime campaign at the Media Matters site: “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508100009 , “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508110002 and “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508120006 . ]