Matt Yglesias

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.

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.

Washington Post Advertisers Want Cheerier Stories

(cc photo by krossbow)

Time for another blogger ethics panel:

Weymouth, publisher of The Post, told the story’s author, freelance journalist Matt Mendelsohn, at a brunch earlier this year that advertisers “wanted happier stories, not ‘depressing’ ones,” Mendelsohn wrote in an online posting. His story was about a 26-year-old woman whose arms and legs had been amputated.

Post executive editor Marcus Baruchli, of course, wants to deny that the story was killed for business reasons:

“Whatever Katharine may have felt about the piece was immaterial to the editorial process,” Brauchli said. “We are not driven by what one of our business-side colleagues, or even our publisher, thinks about a piece. We follow a journalistic compass.”

But though Weymouth agrees that she didn’t specifically have Mendelsohn’s piece killed, she says that the paper’s editorial staff is, in fact, taking her direction about which kinds of stories to run:

Weymouth said Monday night that any impact she had was “completely inadvertent, because I would never interfere in an editorial decision and I had no intention of interfering.” She said that she had not even read Mendelsohn’s story, but that she had “used it as an example” with editors “of the kind of fare we should be moving away from.”

Honestly, I think the world might be better off if newspapers that are also subsidiaries of for profit companies just admit that that’s what they are and that, obviously, business considerations are relevant to the way the paper is run. Newspapers’ quasi-monopoly status during the classical 1960s-70s era of newspapering allowed the fiction that a newsroom has nothing to do with business to be fairly tenable. But in the pre-radio days when the newspaper market was highly competitive, everyone understood that the newsroom was part of a business. And this is a generally understood element of magazine journalism, and for-profit journalism in a broadcast and internet context. If you want coverage that’s untainted by commercial considerations, you should look for coverage done by non-commercial enterprises. The tradeoff is that non-commercial coverage may be shaped by fundraising considerations. But insofar as it costs money to produce content, the nature of the content that exists will be shaped by the quest for revenue. Note, for example, the insane proliferation of slideshows on commercial websites which is apparently driven by the fact that these are a good way to juice pageview stats.

At any rate, the alternative of having various Post editors and business officials contradicting themselves doesn’t seem to me likely to help anyone think through the dilemmas clearly. These issues exist whether people want to admit to it or not, but admitting to their existence seems like an important first step to coping with them.

Imperial Russia Only Had One Czar Because It Was a Centralized Autocracy

For a couple of months now, conservatives have been launching nonsensical attacks on the Obama administration for having too many “czars” and darkly warning of incipient dictatorship. In fact, “czar” is not an official position in the government, and the president can’t do anything about the fact that people in the media may or may not refer to a given executive branch official as a “czar.” Now the nonsense really hits the big-time with a dishonest and absurd Washington Post op-ed that, sad to say, fits in the best tradition of that section of the paper. For example, Cantor writes that “Vesting such broad authority in the hands of people not subjected to Senate confirmation and congressional oversight poses a grave threat to our system of checks and balances.”

Now, Cantor is a practical politician. Lying about his political enemies when he can get away with it is what he does. In theory, the Post has editors to prevent their pages from being used as a vehicle for such lies. In practice, the Post seems to feel that its op-ed pages should be used to mislead people. Thus, though my colleague Amanda Terkel was able to verify that many of these alleged “czars” have, in fact, been confirmed by the Senate nobody on the staff of the Post was able to do so.

Meanwhile, as a basic point of logic what’s with this complaint:

At last count, there were at least 32 active czars that we knew of, meaning the current administration has more czars than Imperial Russia.

The thing about Imperial Russia is that as a centralized autocracy it only had one czar. Having multiple people in positions of authority makes a political system less, rather than more, autocratic. Consider, “under Hitler, Germany had only one Fuhrer, but in the contemporary United States there are dozens of important political leaders.” Do you find that idea alarming? Are we worse than the Nazis? Of course not.

Washington Post Again Demonstrates Contempt for its Readers

Royal Gwent Hospital (NHS Photo)

Martin Feldstein, writing in yesterday’s Washington Post, wrote:

Obama has said that he would favor a British-style “single payer” system in which the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are salaried but that he recognizes that such a shift would be too disruptive to the health-care industry.

As Jon Chait points out, Obama has said no such thing. Paul Krugman wonders:

I do know that if I misstated the facts like this in the Times, I’d be required to publish a correction. Will the Post require that Feldstein retract his claim?

I think the real question is why does the Post print this stuff in the first place? I assume it would be possible for the Washington Post to employ people who are well-informed about American political issues to edit their opinion section. Certainly it would be possible for them to employ people who aren’t willfully indifferent to the question of whether the articles they run are informative or misleading. But they choose not to. They choose to employ George Will and Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol and the sort of editors who don’t bat an eye when Feldstein makes improbable—and false—claims about Obama’s health care statements.

If you ran a test preparation company that had this kind of indifference toward its customers, it’s hard to see how you could succeed. I wonder why The Washington Post Company thinks that a lesser standard will work in the ailing newspaper industry. Quality is hardly a guaranteed recipe for success in the media game, but indifference toward the quality of your product isn’t going to help.

Palin, Washington Post, and the End of Newspapers

I’m not going to link to Sarah Palin’s Washington Post op-ed on why unrestricted pollution should be allowed to destroy the planet. Let’s just observe that the Post’s habit of publishing this kind of material is part of the reason why, adverse consequences for a number of writers I like, I wouldn’t shed a tear if the Washington Post Company were to choose to shutter it’s money-losing newspaper and focus on its core competency in the field of standardized test preparation. After all, why does Sarah Palin have an op-ed on climate legislation in the Washington Post? Does she have scientific expertise? Economic expertise? Knowledge of the state of international climate negotiations?

Perhaps during her brief time in the public spotlight she developed a reputation for an unusually solid grasp of complicated policy details? Or is the idea that she’s known for being honest? A good-faith participant in public policy debates?

Well, no. And the fact of the matter is that the Palin op-ed actually fits very comfortably alongside the established norms of Charles Krauthammer, George Will, and Robert Samuelson—words on paper that are neither paid advertisements nor serious efforts to improve people’s understanding of the world.

More Details Emerge on Post Sponsorship Scandal

Newspaper ombudsmen rarely, in my view, contribute all that much to our understanding of what’s happening. But Andrew Alexander’s column on the Washington Post industry-sponsored salons concept breaks from that mold and really adds value. Initially, this was explained to the public as a kind of rogue business staff operation gone off the rails without anyone on the editorial side knowing. But Alexander makes clear that that’s not the case. Charles Pelton was the key mover on the business side, and he was well aware that he ought to clear this concept with editorial before moving forward:

The e-mail said the plan to hold the dinners at Weymouth’s home “speaks to heavy editorial involvement” through “mixing different editors and beat reporters.” But in arguing for “background only” discussions, Pelton asked if they thought the discussions should be “on or off the record.” And while he endorsed the sponsorship idea, noting there would always be “more than one,” he also said “I want to be sure our newsroom is also comfortable” with the arrangement.

Within an hour of receiving the e-mail, Brauchli forwarded it to his top three editors — managing editors Raju Narisetti and Liz Spayd, as well as deputy managing editor Milton Coleman — asking their thoughts.

You should read the whole piece.

My bottom line is that realistically even if the news business recovers from the recession we’re looking at a more competitive future environment with lower profit margins. That means, in practice, much less editorial insulation from business considerations than was the case during midcentury. Everyone will tell you that advertisers or sponsors or donors or whatnot don’t influence their coverage, but I think everyone should be suspicious of those kind of claims. In the real world, he who pays the piper calls the tune at least to some extent. Which is ultimately why it’s important to have a media that contain diverse revenue models—commercial and non-commercial, subscription-based and ad-based, etc.—so that you don’t have too much systematic distortion of coverage.

Bipartisanship in Lieu of Analysis

Strikingly, David Broder thinks we could use more bipartisanship:

Scholars will also make the point that when such complex legislation is being shaped, the substance is likely to be improved when both sides of the aisle contribute ideas. And they will argue that public acceptance of the mandated changes in such programs will be greater if the law comes with the imprimatur of both parties.

I would be interested in a citation for scholarship which argues that complex legislation is likely to be improved by the contribution of ideas from both sides of the aisle. I have, in fact, looked at the question of whether or not bipartisanship enhances policy stability and there turns out not to be evidence for this theory. But, hey, “scholars” will make the point. But with Congressional Republicans currently earning a 29-56 approve/disapprove split it’s hard to argue that getting them on board is crucial to the popularity of a new initiative.

Scott Lemieux, meanwhile, reminds us of Broder’s classic attack on Al Gore for being too interested in public policy:

I have to confess, my attention wandered as he went on through page after page of other swell ideas, and somewhere between hate crimes legislation and a crime victim’s constitutional amendment, I almost nodded off.

My guess is that that’s the nub of the matter. It’s somewhat difficult to try to understand policy proposals on the merits. It’s easy, by contrast, to just look at who’s supporting legislation. You can just say, “good bills are bipartisan bills, partisan bills are bad” and then look at whether or not a proposal has bipartisan support. It’s simple if you’re the kind of person inclined to nodd off if forced to listen to a discussion of policy. Personally, I’m not sure why so many people who find policy so dull are in the field of political journalism. I find it perfectly understandable that it’s not something everyone’s interested in, but it seems to me that people who aren’t interested in policy debates should be in some other line of work rather than writing columns for David Broder.

Fred Hiatt’s Strange Op-Ed

There’s an awful lot wrong with this op-ed from Washington Post editorial page honcho Fred Hiatt, but I’ll just remark on his extremely strange opening graf:

For moderate voters clinging to some faith in government, the question over the past two decades of mostly two-party rule was: Can’t Washington do anything?

Now, with one party pretty much in control, the question has become both more hopeful and more anxious: Will Washington do anything responsibly?

It seems to me that we had “one party pretty much in control” in the opening months of 2001, as well as throughout the years 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006. Has Hiatt forgotten about this? It honestly wasn’t very long ago. Meanwhile, throughout the course of an article castigating irresponsibility on the part of the current congressional majority, Hiatt doesn’t see fit to so much as mention the blanket opposition to everything that’s been coming from the minority. On Waxman-Markey, for example, if conservative legislators were working assiduously to make the bill more efficient, then we would get a more efficient bill. Instead, they’re opposing any effort to limit carbon emissions, which results in the need to make some unfortunate compromises to broaden support among Democrats, and then using those compromises as a bad-faith rationale for attacking the bill. That’s the fundamental underlying dynamic, and it’s totally missing from Hiatt’s piece.

Of course for an editor who doesn’t seem to mind if his columnists like Michael Gerson just make stuff up, I suppose that simply interpreting events in an odd and misleading way is a kind of progress.

Ezra Klein: Making Important Things Interesting

Today is the debut of the new Ezra Klein Blog at the Washington Post, and I thought I’d say I like this motto:

They say the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. Well, the greatest trick that Washington ever played was convincing the nation that the actual work of government was too dull for the people to participate in or pay attention to. They pay me to make this interesting and comprehensible. I’ll do my best.

Somewhere along the line a lot of journalists seem to have decided that there’s a sharp dichotomy between “things that are important” and “things the audience is interested in.” The job of the responsible journalist was to have enough of the latter to keep the suits off your back, and then spoon out some of the former in an eat your peas spirit. Much better to try to make the important stuff interesting. You can catch Ezra’s RSS here.

Jackson Diehl Pronounces Obama’s Foreign Policy a Failure After Three Months

Jackson Diehl becomes the latest to erect the straw man that Obama’s supporters thought world problems would simply melt away in the face of his charm and willingness to negotiate, and point out that the world still has problems. To this I mostly recommend Ilan Goldenberg’s response but I think one other way of thinking about what Diehl has wrong here is to think about how we should assess George W. Bush’s dealings with China.

I think by Diehl standards you’d have to consider Bush’s China policy to be a catastrophic failure. After all, China’s not a democracy. It hasn’t dropped its claims to Taiwan. Nor has it dropped its territorial claims in the South China Sea. They still treat Tibetans poorly. They didn’t do what we wanted them to do with their currency. They continue to build up military forces. They haven’t totally done what we wanted on Iran or North Korea. They voted against us at the UN on Iraq. And wherever we’ve tried to isolate regimes in the world, China has proven willing to step up and fill the void. A disaster!

But in real life, this evaluation would be hideously unfair. The US-China relationship is an inherently problematic situation—the global hegemon and main architect of the existing international system vs a rapidly rising power whose massive population makes it a plausible contender to overtake us at some point in the future. China is too big too ignore, but also too big to be coerced or easily bribed. It’s a tough situation. And potentially it’s a dangerous one. “Success,” under the circumstances, means a continuation of cordial relations and brisk commerce rather than a downward spiral of recriminations and proxy wars. And the Bush administration did a perfectly admirable job of continuing the success of its predecessors in this score. You can think about it this way—Bush took us through a difficult period and left the relationship in good enough shape that nobody had a fainting spell when Obama shook Hu Jintao’s hand at the G-20 summit. The world’s two most important countries cooperating in a routine and non-dramatic manner is a good thing and preserving that dynamic as China gets richer and more powerful is both difficult and important. This is a real contrast to Bush’s approach to Russia, Europe, Latin America, and the broader Middle East where difficult situations just got more and more difficult thanks in part to terrible policymaking.

Back to Obama. Since late January, he’s succeeded in laying the groundwork for important bilateral cuts in US-Russian nuclear arsenals. He’s set the stage for possible normalization of relations with Cuba down the road and produced at least some positive signals from the government of Iran. He’s apparently ended the pointless and bizarre war of over-the-top rhetoric between the United States and Venezuela. And international cooperation against piracy seems to be intensifying. I’d say it’s a promising start. All the world’s most serious problems are still with us, but things have improved on several fronts. International relations is inherently complicated and there’s no short-time way of achieving a problem-free planet. If things are getting better rather than worse, you’re doing a good job.