Matt Yglesias

Broder on Afghanistan: Better a Quick Choice Than the Right One

It’s pretty clear, I think, that the Obama administration’s decision-making process on Afghanistan has left something to be desired. At the same time, given that the initial round of policy reviews didn’t lead to a satisfactory outcome I certainly think it’s better for the administration to try to take its time crafting a policy that it stands behind rather than to rush to rubber-stamp something purely in order to make the policy look smoother. But Steve Benen finds that David Broder actually thinks “the urgent necessity is to make a decision — whether or not it is right.”

I can’t believe he actually thinks that. But, again, this is one of these moments when you wonder what the editors of newspaper opinion sections are for. Surely this would have been a good opportunity for someone to say “David, you don’t really mean that do you?”

Success Breeds Respect

As Atrios says:

I’m not sure if the teabaggers will have much success in purifying their party, but it’ll be interesting to see how the Villagers will react. My guess is they’ll portray them as just folks exercising their patriotic duties, unlike those dirty fucking hippie traitors who ran a primary against the greatest man in America, Joe Lieberman.

Realistically, success buys respect in Washington. When the contemporary conservative movement got rolling in the 1960s and 70s, it didn’t have a track-record of success. But ever since 1980 or so the conservative movement has demonstrated, time and again, an ability to build national majorities around candidates who identify themselves with the conservative movement. The case for progressives is much weaker. But recall that Nancy Pelosi first took over as Democratic leader, the conventional wisdom was that the party was doomed. By winning in 2006 and 2008, she’s gained some respect from the press and if the House Democrats stay in power in 2010 she’ll earn more. But the fact of the matter is that Ned Lamont didn’t win. Howard Dean didn’t win. John Edwards didn’t win. And Barack Obama—despite efforts by fans to make him play the role—only very slightly flirted with the idea of playing the role of left-wing insurgent.

Which is to say that obviously coverage of NY-23 will depend in part on who wins. If the far-right succeeds in putting their man in office, that’s a feather in the cap of the far-right. If the far-right succeeds in shifting a previously GOP-held district to the Democrats, that makes them look silly. If progressive groups run successful primary challengers against Blue Dogs and then go on to win the general election, then they’ll look savvy and effective. If they don’t do those things, they won’t.

Skipping the Ads

Research says that even DVR users have a tendency to watch the ads:

Against almost every expectation, nearly half of all people watching delayed shows are still slouching on their couches watching messages about movies, cars and beer. According to Nielsen, 46 percent of viewers 18 to 49 years old for all four networks taken together are watching the commercials during playback, up slightly from last year. Why would people pass on the opportunity to skip through to the next chunk of program content?

The most basic reason, according to Brad Adgate, the senior vice president for research at Horizon Media, a media buying firm, is that the behavior that has underpinned television since its invention still persists to a larger degree than expected.

“It’s still a passive activity,” he said.

Kevin Drum characterizes this as people being “too lazy to bother” skipping them. I suspect the real truth is that people don’t always bother to skip the ads because they’re not always watching the show. If I’ve Tivoed something I really want to watch, I’ll sit on the couch watching the show, paying attention, and skipping the ads. But if it’s time to tidy up the house, I might put on an episode of a show I’m not all that into and keep half an eye on it while unloading the dishwasher, using the dust buster, putting books back on the shelves, etc.

Part of which is to say that one problem with all studies about how new technology (DVR vs live TV, reading a newspaper online vs reading a paper newspaper) impacts people’s advertising is that I don’t think our understanding of the baseline is all that good. Of the ads people “watch,” how many really get watched. When my dad and I watched the Giants-Eagles game yesterday it’s not like we were staring blankly at the Ford 150 ads—the breaks in a football game are when you talk to your friends, get a drink, check your email, whatever.

Alexander, NYT Slam Obama as Too Partisan, Ignoring Actual GOP Record

I guess this criticism is never going to go away, but after dwelling for a while on other issues Robert Pear and Sheryl Gay Stolberg eventually trot out this time-honored trope—Obama needs to be nicer to Republicans:

Yet White House officials have shown little interest in Republicans, with the exception of Senator Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, whom they have wooed assiduously, and one or two others. Mr. Obama did meet with some Republicans early on, when his aides still believed it was possible to get the support of Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Finance Committee.

The No. 3 Republican in the Senate, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who attended one session with the president, recalled that in the 1960s, when he was a Congressional aide, Democrats and Republicans worked together on civil rights. He said he saw no possibility of a bipartisan health bill.

“White House officials don’t want one or don’t know how to do one,” Mr. Alexander said.

This is very confused, starting with the fact that Alexander started working as a Senate aide in 1967 by which time the main civil rights debate was over. Then any competent observer of American politics should realize that it’s no coincidence that the bipartisanship of the civil rights era vanished in the post-civil rights age. It was the debate over civil rights itself that created the unusual bipartisanship of mid-20th century America.

Last there’s the small matter here of the actual history of the health reform debate. Chuck Grassley is not just some guy, he’s the top Republican on health care issues. And the Grassley courtship process took a long time. And Grassley abandoned it in a blaze of hypocrisy, eventually slamming Democrats for embracing an individual mandate to purchase health insurance that he had long supported.

The larger context is that the president laid out some goals for health reform. He wants a bill that expands coverage in a way that’s deficit neutral in the medium-term, doesn’t disrupt people’s existing health insurance in the short-term, and bends the long-term cost curve. A lot of different ideas were put forward in Congress about how to do this. None of them were put forward by Republicans. One of them, produced by the Senate Finance Committee, was embraced by one Republican, Olympia Snowe. But the others are opposed to all the different proposed ways of achieving these goals and don’t have an alternative approach to offer either. Which is fine. Political parties can have profound disagreements about objectives. But it is what it is. Acting as if inviting Lamar Alexander over for tea would have fundamentally altered the landscape is silly.

Barghouti on The Daily Show

Moustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian advocate of non-violent resistance and head of the Palestinian National Initiative alternative party to Hamas and Fatah, was on The Daily Show earlier this week. I had the opportunity to have dinner with Dr. Barghouti in a small group some time ago, and to hear him speak at a somewhat larger gathering last night. He’s a very interesting, very compelling person.

One thing that comes to mind thinking about this is how rare it is to see Palestinian perspectives in the American media. There’s not much of a percentage in it. If you present content that offends U.S. political orthodoxies you get in hot water and there’s no real upside. A wise man suggested to me yesterday that it might be helpful to not only watch the interview, but if you enjoy it write a note to The Daily Show telling them you appreciated it.

Might do some good.

Ricks Suggests Obama is Stalling on Afghanistan to Help John Corzine

He doesn’t endorse it, per se, but Tom Ricks sort of uncritically passes on the following fairly serious—and seriously weird—accusation against the White House:

Last but most importantly: Nov. 3, gubernatorial elections in both Virginia and New Jersey. The latter of which is my reasoning why the decision was delayed this long. Corzine is in the fight of his life and Obama is going to piss people off either way. Important special elections also in California and New York.

I’m not going to shift into faux-naive mode and pretend it’s outrageous to even insinuate that the administration thinks about politics when it comes to national security. No doubt the president is aware of the general state of public opinion and thinks about how his decisions on Afghanistan will impact his ability to work on other aspects of his agenda. That said, the idea that a decision is being specifically pushed back until after the election because somehow that will help John Corzine is kind of bizarre.

I mean, there’s not even any reason I can think of for believing that delay is helpful to Corzine. This sounds like a person so eager to dream up insidious motives to attribute to the president that he’s come up with one that doesn’t even make minimal sense. Ricks himself has been sharply critical of Obama’s slow decision-making pace. If he wants to endorse the claim, that the “most important” factor in the delay is a cynical effort to intervene in the NJ gubernatorial election he should say so plainly and back the argument up. If not, he should withdraw it. Just passing this on as an “interesting analysis” from “My book researcher, Kyle Flynn, a two-tour vet of Afghanistan (with extra points for duty in Oruzgan, the Pashtun answer to Arkansas) and now a graduate student at Georgetown University,” doesn’t really cut it.

Helicopter Journalism

Michael Massing has an amusing and trenchant critique of what he terms “David Ignatius’s Helicopter Journalism.”

What a delight it must be to be a columnist for a major American newspaper. When traveling to distant, war-torn lands, you can enlist America’s top generals to show you around. That’s what David Ignatius of The Washington Post did on Sunday. He was shown around Baghdad by no less a figure than Centcom commander David Petraeus. Or, rather, he was shown it from the air. The two flew over the city in a Black Hawk helicopter. The general pointed out all the signs of recovery below. “See, the houses are occupied again,” he said as they passed over a neighborhood that several years ago had been largely abandoned. He pointed to the schools, police stations, parks, markets, and a traffic jam, which, he said was “good to see.”

The whole thing is worth a read. The larger issue, of course, is the problematic relationship between journalists and high-powered sources.

Global Cooling Debunk Belongs in Politics Sections of Newspapers

Seth Borenstein of the AP has a pretty great piece knocking down all the nonsense about “global cooling” that the Washington Post op-ed page and others have been pressing:

Have you heard that the world is now cooling instead of warming? You may have seen some news reports on the Internet or heard about it from a provocative new book. Only one problem: It’s not true, according to an analysis of the numbers done by several independent statisticians for The Associated Press. [...] In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

[...] Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

Unfortunately, I see the piece bylined as “By SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer” which makes me worry it’ll be buried in newspapers’ science sections (or not seen at all since lots of papers barely do science coverage at all these days) rather than front-and-center in politics sections where it belongs. This story is about a key piece of propaganda being put out by political actors in order to win a political fight. It’s a political story.

Fredd Hiatt Slams Health Bill for Not Including Provisions it Includes

Fred Hiatt seems to really want to drive the Washington Post’s circulation down to zero so that the company can focus on its core competency in standardized test preparation. He wrote a column complaining that it’s a bad idea to rely on a public option to reduce health care costs, because including a public option can (through magic?) prevent congress from adopting other cost control measures. Not only does this not make sense, but as OMB Director Peter Orszag observes, Hiatt seems unaware of what’s actually happening on the Hill:

Fred Hiatt in today’s Washington Post is the latest of these naysayers, writing in his column that the two biggest steps that can be taken to reduce the rate of health care cost growth — changes in health care’s tax treatment and an independent Medicare commission — are missing. I agree with Hiatt on the potential substantial benefits in terms of cost containment from these two changes. But a note to readers who have not read their Washington Post the past few weeks: the Senate Finance Committee bill includes both of these measures.

Cost-control is important. The House’s approach to cost-control is focused on a robust public option. That’s a good idea. The Senate’s approach focuses on the excise tax concept and the independent Medicare commission. Those are also good ideas. The final bill should include all three. There’s no reason to deride the public option as your means of praising the other ideas.

The Dobbs Factor

Lou Dobbs loves it

The New York Times manages to produce an article about the controversy over Lou Dobbs that doesn’t really offer any specific examples of what Dobbs’ critics are talking about. But to get a flavor, the man’s strain of nativism runs so deep that he’s denounced St Patrick’s Day. His show is so unhinged that he promotes “birther” conspiracy theories. From time to time CNN has to scrub official transcripts of his show to eliminate casual racism. Dobbs thought the racist “Obama waffles” box was hilarious.

That just sets the backdrop for the kind of racial stereotyping, cavalier attitude toward the truth, and downright weirdness that characterizes his obsessive coverage of Hispanic immigration into the United States:

Dobbs has a long history of spreading hate and paranoia. He has routinely discussed the North American Union conspiracy theory, incorrectly claimed that undocumented immigrants drain social services and don’t pay taxes, and repeatedly amplified the falsehood that undocumented immigrants are disproportionately violent. He has been an unrepentant purveyor of hateful attacks, fraudulently claiming, for example, that immigrants are spreading leprosy and seek to reconquer the southwestern United States.

For all that, if CNN wants to stand by Dobbs then, fine, they should stand by Dobbs. But if they want to stand by Dobbs then they should stand by Dobbs and feature him prominently in their four-hour “Latino in America” documentary. After all, from what you can see watching the network day-to-day the executives at CNN think Dobbs has a credible and important perspective on this issue. Instead, they just kind of want to sweep the crazy uncle under the rug for the purposes of a big special, and then trot him back out again when everything’s back to normal.

Beck Capture

Dave Weigel had an interesting post this morning about the problems a political movement runs into when it lets itself be led by charlatan media personalities:

The Democrats are in worse political shape than they were a year ago because unemployment is at 9.8 percent, the war in Afghanistan has grown less popular, and the bailouts of struggling banks are seen as wastes of money that haven’t worked. Republicans benefit when they talk about this stuff. But Beck and the others don’t let them talk about this stuff. For the past few months, they have moved the discussion onto fantasy terrain, accusing the president of reaching for dictatorial powers and surrounding himself with “radicals” who want to destroy capitalism. [...]

And remember, one of the huge political mistakes of 2005 was the Republican decision to do a full-court press on an issue that had come from conservative activists and pundits: the fate of Terri Schiavo.

You can see some of this at work in the very interesting GQR report on “The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans”. Basically they contrast the worldview of self-identified conservative Republicans with that of Obama-skeptical people who don’t self-identify in this way. To cast the distinction in broad terms, the Obama-skeptics worry that Obama is failing—that his efforts to create jobs aren’t working, that his reforms of the health care system won’t improve access to quality care, etc.—whereas the conservative Republicans worry that he’ll succeed. They believe, à la Beck, that the Obama administration is pursuing a secret agenda aimed at the deliberate destruction of the United States. Focusing on this rather outlandish claim makes it difficult to get in touch with the more banal worries of the marginal voter.

The overarching problem, I think, is that while it may be tactically helpful to have allies in the media who’ll lie about your enemies, it’s a big problem when you start believing too many of the lies. Beck and others on the right have, for example, convinced a lot of people that Cass Sunstein is a dangerous wild-eyed in a way that will make it difficult for the Obama administration to elevate him to any higher positions. Given that Sunstein is, in fact, actually pretty conservative for a Democrat and also a plausible Supreme Court justice this campaign has been, objectively speaking, a victory for the left.

Contrarianism: Alive and Well

The Economist wondered the other day if the negative reaction to SuperFreakonomics represented the end of contrarianism as a popular journalistic trope. The answer, it seems, is no. Slate is doubling-down on contrarianism by offering the case for Creed. This is ridiculous. Creed is a good band like solar panels are black. Your memory is correct. Absolutely everything about this is terrible:

I bet al-Qaeda plays this to recruits in order to whip them into an anti-Christian fervor.

On The Economics of Nonprofits

Tyler Cowen lists “the economics of the non-profit sector” as an under-explored area in economics. Having worked primarily in the non-profit sector (with a brief stopover in the intriguing for-profit-but-not-profitable sector inhabited by The Atlantic) I also think this is an interesting topic. I sort of wonder why economic researchers aren’t more interested in it, since they overwhelmingly work in this sector as well, so it’s hardly plausible that they forget it exists. According to “The Nonprofit Sector in Brief 2007: Facts and Figures from the Nonprofit Almanac 2007″, “the nonprofitsector accounts for 5.2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) and 8.3percent of wages and salaries paid in the United States.”

You can also learn here the perhaps-surprising fact that sales revenue dwarfs donations as a source of nonprofit financing:

Figure 2shows that fees for services and sales of goods account for a huge percentage (71 percent) of the revenues for reporting public charities. These include patient revenues for hospitals (including Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements) and tuition at colleges and universities. They also include items such as the revenue from theater tickets, rental fees for providers of low-income housing, and—much less significant for most organizations—sales of goods such as merchandise sold at thrift or museum shops.

Which is just to say that the economics of the non-profit sector isn’t the same as saying the economics of giving money away. American nonprofits are primarily in the business of charging customers money in exchange for medical or educational services.

My sense is that in the near future a larger-and-larger portion of news media is going to be produced by non-profits, and we may need to start adding advertising revenue to the list of major sources of non-profit funding. After all, a great newspaper whose advertisers covered 85% of the costs of gathering news would be (a) totally non-viable as a business proposition, (b) a great bargain as a charitable endeavor, and (c) still primarily in the business of selling readers to advertisers rather than attracting donors.

White House vs Fox News

I don’t think I have a ton of brand new substance to add to the Obama administration versus Fox News controversy, but I did think this take from Roger Pilon at Cato was pretty funny:

Is Fox News a “legitimate news organization?” As compared to what? The New York Times? NPR? MSNBC? Please.

The Obama team, Democrats like my good friend Walter Dellinger, and the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM) howl about Fox News for two main reasons. First, Fox is covering news the MSM ignores because it doesn’t “fit.” And second, in part because of that, the Fox audience continues to grow while the MSM audience is shrinking, raising a serious question about whether the MSM is any longer “mainstream.”

I particular enjoy the stilted writing style and the phrase “the so-called Mainstream Media (MSM).” Party like it’s 2002. Personally, I welcome the rise of more ideological and slanted media outlets of all kinds. But Fox has a marked tendency toward being factually inaccurate. Pilon might want, for example, to consult with his Cato Institute Julian Sanchez about the quality of the work taking place at Fox:

Meanwhile, someone wake up me up the day Fox decides to dedicate three hours of morning programming to a show hosted by a former Democratic member of congress and then I’ll consider conceding the Fox/MSNBC equivalence point.

Editorials as Counterindicators

There’s a report out there that I’ve seen linked to by a few people alleging that one element of the cash for clunkers program has allowed people to purchase federally subsidized golf carts. I find this somewhat plausible and, frankly, was never personally well-disposed to the “cash for clunkers” concept in the first place—I think we already do plenty to subsidize automobile use and automobile ownership. That said, the report in question appeared on The Wall Street Journal editorial page and thus if anything I think my current belief level that such a provision exists should be lower than it was before I read about it.

The Washington Post’s opinion sections haven’t quite gotten to that level. But I do find it noteworthy that not only do they publish dumb editorials about PATRIOT Act reauthorization, but when they follow them up with critical letters to the editor they force the letter writers to softpedal their criticism and moderate their rhetoric. So it’s not as if it’s impossible for the Post opinion pages to exercise editorial judgment, they just choose not to do so when, for example, George Will wants to tell a bunch of lies.

Pandas!

Caitlin Flanagan on Twilight:

One of the signal differences between adolescent girls and boys is that while a boy quickly puts away childish things in his race to initiate a sexual life for himself, a girl will continue to cherish, almost to fetishize, the tokens of her little-girlhood. She wants to be both places at once—in the safety of girl land, with the pandas and jump ropes, and in the arms of a lover, whose sole desire is to take her completely.

Ho hum. A photo of the stuffed pandas in my bedroom:

The bigger one is General Tso, the smaller one is Magdalen, so names because I bought it at a shop near Magdalen College, Oxford back in 2002.

Journalistic Malpractice From Leavitt and Dubner

Superfreakonomics appears to contain a lot of nonsense climate contrarianism. Major media organizations are normally extraordinarily bad at policing the people who write for them in terms of accurate presentation of scientific information, so I’m pretty sure Leavitt and Dubner can get away with totally misrepresenting the climate impact of solar power. Still, it is worth dwelling a moment on the fact that their critique of photovoltaic literally rests on the idea that PV cells are black whereas in reality they’re usually blue:

Correctly ascertaining the color of widely available macroscopic objects is not much to ask from authors.

That aside, something journalists typically do understand is the idea that you’re supposed to correctly represent what sources tell you. So for example compare their characterization climate scientist Ken Caldeira’s views (”Yet his research tells him that carbon dioxide is not the right villain in this fight.”) with Caldeira’s characterization of his views:

I believe the correct CO2 emission target is zero. I believe that it is essentially immoral for us to be making devices (automobiles, coal power plants, etc) that use the atmosphere as a sewer for our waste products. I am in favor of outlawing production of such devices as soon as possible….

And Caldeira’s explanation to Joe Romm of how his views came to be so grossly misportrayed:

If you talk all day, and somebody picks a half dozen quotes without providing context because they want to make a provocative and controversial chapter, there is not much you can do.

Dubner and Leavitt’s editors at The New York Times have some ’spainling to do. This is not conduct that they would deem acceptable from any of their reporters.

The Cable Effect

I got to the office a bit before 9AM today and within 20 minutes I felt incredibly agitated. I was pissed off. I also had a feeling of despair about the prospects for health reform. I was mad, and I also felt helpless. What was wrong? Was it just a bad case of the Mondays? Regrets for being back in the cubicle after so many weeks on the road?

Then it hit me. I wasn’t unplugged by any means over the past three weeks. I kept blogging and kept reading blogs. I read the newspapers and I even watched the news on television. But what I watched was CNN International and BBC World News. There’s a world of difference between those networks and even the relatively staid domestic version of CNN. And at the office they had the sound on for Fox News. Bill Hemmer & co. were spinning half-truths, deceptions, and outright falsehoods at a staggering rate. Meanwhile you could see frenetic action on MSNBC and CNN and if I felt like really making myself dizzy could even follow the action on closed caption.

It makes you think about the strange influence that daytime cable news has on American politics. The three networks combined have an aggregate daytime audience of roughly zero. But even though the audience, looked at nationally, amounts to rounding error the networks are hugely popular among the tiny number of people who work in professional politics. Just like traders have CNBC and Bloomberg on in their offices, political operatives are constantly tuned in to what’s happening on cable news. The result is a really bizarre hothouse scenario in which people are basically watching . . . well . . . nothing, but they’re riveted to it. How things “play” on cable news is considered fairly important even though no persuadable voters are watching it. And cable news’ hyper-agitated style starts to infect everyone’s frame of mind, making it extremely difficult for everyone to forget that the networks have huge incentives to massively and systematically overstate the significance of everything that happens.

At any rate, it’s good to be back home but the slower pace and more relaxed and substantive style of BBC and CNN International is something I’ll miss.

Producer vs Consumer Viewpoints on the News Business

It’s true, of course, that the people complaining that Google is somehow “stealing” revenue from newspapers are being deeply dishonest or deeply uninformed. There is literally nothing stopping any news organization on the planet from taking its material off Google. Nor, indeed, is there anything stopping anyone from making online material only readable by paid subscribers. The problem most news producers have is simply that they don’t do that stuff because they couldn’t make money that way and they know it.

That said, I don’t think it helps anyone to pretend that the source of the complaints is completely mysterious. The intuition driving them is that if news aggregation websites disappeared from the planet, there would still be newspaper websites and people would still read them. But if the news organizations all vanished, there would be know news aggregation sites. Therefore it seems “unfair” that Google, essentially the world’s most successful aggregator, is making all the money. To a newspaperman, this is as if the paper boy were getting all the credit for the reporting happening in his town.

The trouble is that when journalists talk about journalism, they talk about it from the producer point of view. What Google does, from the media-as-production point of view really isn’t much better than what the paper boy does. But from the consumer point of view, having a paper boy who will fetch any paper you want in the world, for free, at any time, and open the paper to the page you were looking for is a massive improvement. For example, from a producer point of view essentially every newspaper in the United States has gotten worse at covering European news. Foreign bureaus have been closing, and resources have been redirected to the Middle East. But as a consumer, suppose I want to follow up on my notion that Jan Peter Balkenende would be a good candidate for the new office of EU President?

Thanks to Google, I read in the Guardian that the main alternatives to Tony Blair are considered Balkenende from the center-right and Finland’s Paavo Lipponen from the center-left. But Balkenende is thought to have a better chance than Lipponen in part because the new head of NATO is from the Nordic region and in part because there are more center-right governments in Europe. The Independent says Angela Merkel prefers Balkenende to Blair. And a Balkenende candidacy is popular among Dutch voters. We also learn in the Telegraph that there’s a political controversy in the Netherlands over the Crown Prince’s plan to build a lavish villa in Mozambique and “almost 50 per cent of people want Jan Peter Balkenende, the Dutch prime minister, to demand that the Prince withdraw from the project.”

Without Google, I never would have seen any of that. There’s been basically no coverage of this issue in the American press. And, fine, most Americans aren’t interested in it. But I am interested, and thanks to Google it’s easy for me to follow the issue.

I think it’s interesting that journalists seem to have no problem following this dynamic when it comes to the car industry. This has been a terrible 12 months to be in the business of building cars, either as a worker or an owner or a manager. But it’s been a fine time to buy a car. There’s no car shortage. And there’s not going to be a car shortage. Drivers are in great shape. And it’s about the same with the news. Has there ever been a better time to be a news junkie?

I Thought We Knew Too

Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses surprise at the apparent fact that most white people aren’t aware that African-Americans generally have some white ancestry:

I don’t raise it to highlight anyone’s ignorance, or to browbeat people, or argue for Black History Month starting in January. I raise it because this is as much about my ignorance as yours. Put bluntly–I thought you knew.

But you know what, I thought we knew this too. Certainly I knew and I didn’t consider this an obscure piece of trivia. How sure are we that white people are really that ignorant, as opposed to the press just being asinine in its coverage of Michelle Obama’s ancestry. There’s lots of asinine press coverage of lots of things.

WaPost’s Continuing Contempt for Its Readers

George Will writes:

The “difficulty” — the “intricate challenge,” the Times says — is “building momentum” for carbon reduction “when global temperatures have been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the next few years.” That was in the Times’s first paragraph.

He manages, however, to not tell us what the third paragraph of the Times story says:

Scientists say the pattern of the last decade — after a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s — is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.

We’re long past the point at which it makes sense to complain about George Will. But one is once again left with the profound crisis facing the employees of the Washington Post. Simply put, they all work for an institution that seems utterly indifferent to whether the people who write for the paper are informing the readers or deliberately trying to mislead them. That hurts their credibility, each and every one of them. It also means that whenever any of them do good work, they raise the prestige and credibility of an organization that dedicates a substantial quality of valuable real estate to deliberate efforts to mislead the public about the single most important issue of our time. It’s a very serious problem.

The fourth graf of the Times story, also not mentioned by Will, says:

But trying to communicate such scientific nuances to the public — and to policy makers — can be frustrating, they say.

My guess is that it would be a lot less frustrating if major newspapers tried to convey accurate information rather than, Post-style, deliberately trying to portray the data in a misleading manner.

What Civic Engagement Looks Like

Via Chris Bowers, Gallup has numbers showing that Americans are paying closer attention to the news lately:

It’s probably worth emphasizing that a lot of the things that bien pensant types deplore—like this past summer of crazy rallies and political polarization more generally—are inextricably tied up with things that bien pensant types claim to want, namely an increased level of civic engagement. The politics of the late-19th century was incredibly vicious, polarized, and un-edifying. It was also an era of high turnout and booming newspapers.

Also interesting to note that Republicans, being older, wealthier, and maler also follow the news more closely:

I’m inclined to think that if the production of political news and commentary weren’t so dominated by the white dude demographic, that political news might get a larger audience among progressives. That, in turn, could help close some of the “enthusiasm gap” issues that frequently plague progressive activists.

WaPost Pundit Talent Search

The Washington Post is launching a political pundit talent search:

Here’s your chance to put your opinions to the test — and win the opportunity to write a weekly column and a launching pad for your opinionating career!

Start making your case.
Use the entry form to send us a short opinion essay (400 words or less) pegged to a topic in the news and an additional paragraph (100 words or less) on yourself and why you should win. Entries will be judged on the basis of style, intelligence and freshness of argument, but not on whether Post editors agree or disagree with your point of view. Entry deadline: Oct. 21, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. ET.

Huh. If only The Washington Post employed some kind of talented young political opinion writer in some other capacity and could give him an op-ed column instead of resorting to this sort of method. Be that as it may, suppose you were setting out to try to win this, what would you do? Remember, you’re trying to impress the people who decided that they needed to add Bill Kristol to a columnist roster that already included George Will and Charles Krauthammer. So one school of thought says that your 400 word sample column should contain some deliberately misleading assertions. Another school says you just turn in clean copy but during your 100 word “about me” graf should just make it clear that you share the sort of casual contempt for the truth and disrespect for the audience that is the hallmark of the Post op-ed page.

At any rate, I heartily encourage everyone to apply!

Newsweek Blames the Victim

Katie Connolly at Newsweek says it’s bad that folks on the “anti-czar” crusade are giant lying hypocrites—almost as bad as the fact that other people keep pointing this fact out to her!

Anyone who watches cable news surely knows that conservatives are getting themselves all hot and bothered over the Obama administration’s appointment of so-called czars. Today, the Democratic National Committee is going nuts in response. I’ve got more e-mails from them about this today than I care to count. This whole debate is descending into complete partisan hackery: GOP operatives are fanning ridiculous fears while Democrats are proffering inflated claims to counter them. That said, a lot of people do appear concerned by the existence of “czars,” so I think the issue merits a quick discussion. Of course, the points I’m about to list come with the caveat that a lack of accountability for public officials should always be of concern in a democracy. But these czars aren’t beyond the bounds of reproach, nor are they entirely apart from the democratic process—they’re accountable to the White House, which of course is elected. Some of them even needed Senate confirmation. And don’t forget, Congress can still impeach the president if he has done something truly bad.

Silly Democratic National Committee, boring reporters by tediously pointing out that the central political argument being made by their opponents is totally dishonest! What partisan hackery! How sad that the debate is “descending” to this level! But who’s to say who’s to blame for this situation? Maybe the DNC should have just turned the other cheek and not annoyed Newsweek with its pesky emails.

That said, this is better than what the Kaplan Test Prep Company’s daily newspaper subsidiary has been doing. Over at the Post they think it’s smart to run multiple deliberately misleading op-eds on the subject. It’s the difference, I suppose, between indifference to the truth and active hostility to it.

Times Change

(Wikimedia)

To some extent there’s just a divergence in values underlying the kind of people who think political pundits should write fussy columns fretting about the age at which people get married and the kind of people who think that’s bizarre. But one thing that I find really striking about conservative interest in the increasing age of marriage is their total lack of interest in actually exploring this subject beyond a token factoid:

This is the period of life in which society’s most important social commitments take shape — commitments that produce stability, happiness and children. But the facts of life for 20-somethings are challenging. Puberty — mainly because of improved health — comes steadily sooner. Sexual activity kicks off earlier. But the average age at which people marry has grown later; it is now about 26 for women, 28 for men.

One thing I’ve noted about this before is that age at first marriage is something that varies quite a bit historically and socially. I haven’t researched this hyper-rigorously, but thanks to some quick Googling I see that in European Sexualities: 1400-1800, Katherine Crawford reports “In Florence, average age at first marriage was over 30 for men and below 18 for women. Figures for Spanish communities are similar.”

I also found this chart in a Census Bureau PowerPoint presentation that seems relevant:

It looks, in other words, like the big shift came not in the dread sixties or in recent times. Instead, there was a large structural shift in the mid-70s and 80s. What does that prove? I don’t know. But that’s the same period during which a lot of elements of our society and economy shifted.

In her essay “Teenage Pregnancy in England: A Historical Perspective” Hera Cook writes that starting in the 16th century in northwestern Europe “the image of women marrying in their teens with a high premium placed on virginity applied only to the aristocracy . . . [t]he average age of marriage was high by world standards, 24 years for women and 26 years for men, and 10-20% of the population did not marry.” She cites the need to save up money in order to start a new household before marrying as the cause of delayed marriage. Non-married couples were very eager not to get pregnant and lacked reliable means of contraception so “in their teens and early twenties, many men and women engaged in erotic play or petting, including kissing, embracing and hand/genital contact.” Then “age at marriage fell and birth rates rose in the decades around 1800, largely as a result of the introduction of wage labor.”

Long story short, this stuff changes all the time. And it usually changes for real reasons. Given flat wages and a rising skill premium—and declining wages for men—delayed marriage seems inevitable. Would it be better for people to live their lives in a way that completely ignores economic reality? Does Gerson want to try to re-order the economy in order to better fit his ideal of when people should get married? There’s probably a column topic in here somewhere.