unpublished thoughts

2011-02-09T10:01:00.000-08:00

The Huffington Post-AOL Deal

makes perfect sense, and in the abstract follows exactly the same strategy as the Murdoch-Apple deal behind The Daily. (And note how the HuffPost news quickly overwhelmed what little attention The Daily had generated.) Both are alliances of a news operation with a holder of a digital bottleneck. Of the two, I think the HuffPost-AOL deal is more likely to work, but that is a hunch based purely on the amount of fun involved in reading the two products. Granted, NewsCorp has a nice brand in newspapers and opinion, but it's still antique--it smells like the viewership of Fox News. Huffington may be a charlatan, but she knows how to keep it fresh.

The Newsosaur, who is always worth reading, thinks the deal is another example of the valuation of aggregated content at the expense of content creation. He compares FaceBook's market cap with McClatchy's to underscore this point. His argument underscores the fact that the new media bottlenecks don't really have an economic incentive to be content creators. And this is obviously true for FaceBook. It is less obviously true for the social networking sites in 2nd thru 10th place, or for the search engines that want to challenge Google.

Network television news is one of the great legacy media now under considerable strain. But television networks (and radio before them) were not drawn to enterprise reporting out of economic motivations. They were drawn to news as a public service in the full knowledge that the public stood ready to have the state regulate their content and scrutinize their license to monopolize a frequency. Broadcast news was a loss leader, at least on the national level. It is a bit utopian to think that the Googles and the Microsofts of the world can invest in news operations without some inducement external to the market. Perhaps a quick visit to the tax code might give some incentive? Internet businesses are still wildly undertaxed.... In the meantime, there's only the value of news in drawing traffic. AOL is making a gamble, but not a bad one.

HuffPost is more than an aggregator. In fact, it is one of the first sites on the web to actually project the kind of voice that newspapers project while offering a good range of original material. I'm not a daily reader, but could imagine being one. And I do know a couple of people who occasionally write for it. They don't feel exploited. (Of course, it's not their day job.)

HuffPost is not the destination for news on the web. It is located at the kind of place where news on the web will eventually wind up.

2011-02-03T11:56:00.000-08:00

The Daily Debuts

but it will be a long time before I actually see it. That doesn't mean I won't comment, though.
The newspaper industry seems to be rooting for this one. Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp is charging something like a buck a week for a subscription to this IPad only product, becoming the first to seize the do-over that the tablet computer moment seems to be granting to news organizations. All of em blew the first chance to get the digital age right.
Murdoch et al. have gotten one element right this time. They have colluded with the company that controls a key bottleneck. According to an anonymous source quoted in today's NYTimes,

The News Corporation agreed last year to make Fox programs available on Apple TV for 99 cents, making it the only network other than ABC to do so. Apple in turn agreed to throw its considerable muscle behind The Daily, this person said. Mr. Jobs said he would appear at the debut event alongside Mr. Murdoch, but Mr. Jobs was absent, having recently taken a medical leave from Apple.

Sounds like a handshake deal among robber barons, or titans of industry, or some other nineteenth-century set of personages. Leave the personages aside, though, and the industrial logic is clear. In the age of the newspaper, economies of scale in print technology and urban advertising let dailies become monopolies and then control the flow of every sort of intelligence: financial information, classified advertising, political reporting, sports news. In the digital media environment, economies of scale have created similar concentrations of power at other points: the browser, the operating system, the I-whatever. If a news organization is going to make money in digital land, it will have to partner with Google or Microsoft or Apple. That's simple math.

But Apple and Rupert? That's non-Euclidian geometry. You just can't picture it. The more I try, the more I root against it.

2011-01-04T13:55:00.000-08:00

On The Anniversary Of My Last Post

I am finally prompted to write again. For xmas this year, my big gift was a Nook. It came as a surprise, because I thought I was about a year away from such a thing, and wasn't sure whether it would be an e-reader or a tablet. The choice has been made for me, and I am about to begin acquiring e-books to read.

The last leap forward I made in the communication revolution was about five years ago, when I acquired a light laptop, started this blog, and opened a Facebook page. Those moves added clutter: new channels, more of the same, less overall command of the flow of information and communication. Is acquiring an e-reader another move in the same direction?

I made a decision to stop accumulating books last year. No place to put em. No time to read em. But I continued to pick up books nonetheless--physical books that I buy or that get sent to me for one reason or another, and electronic or pdf versions that I download from, say, gigapedia. If I could snap my fingers and convert them all into an electronic format stored on a portable device, I think I would, even though I love physical books. Just to simplify.

But I would have waited another year, mostly because of newspapers. 2011 may be the year when a viable electronic option for newspapers finally appears. Web-based versions simply lack voice and form, and hold my attention for only a fraction of the time I'll devote to a print edition of even a crappy newspaper, like my local daily. The tablet version of newspapers is better, but still mostly an article-by-article thing. The page is as important to my experience of a newspaper as the album side is to my experience of recorded music. After around 30 years of digital music, there is still no analog for the album side, so it might be that the newspaper page will never be successfully replicated in the digital universe. And newspaper folk are much less interested in innovation than music folk. Probably all the tablet will do to enhance digital news is to give news organizations a second chance to construct a paywall.

Will I pay for digital news? No. Not today, at least. And it wasn't included in the gift.

2010-01-04T14:16:00.000-08:00

In Twilight of the American Newspaper,

Richard Rodriguez writes about the decline of especially the San Francisco Chronicle and comments intelligently on the ways that the newspapers we know are 19th-century creatures and tied to cities as they existed then. For him, the troubles of the newspaper are both a symptom and a result of the disappearance of the city as a place, as a geographical source of identity and a public space for ordinary people. Newspapers did a lot to create the culture of the city, and they did it on the back of a belief in the republic, more or less: of the importance of public life, and of the foundational role newspapers played in public life.

You can see that I think he's on to something.

On the other hand....

I renewed my subscription to the local newspaper here. When I did, my wife told me I was doing it out of pity. I realized immediately that she was right. I hadn't learned anything useful about my community from the newspaper for years, and have spent a lot of time bitching about the paper's editorials and news coverage and letters to the editor and sports coverage and classified advertising and just about everything I bother to look at. I like the Sudoku. I used to like the fact that it was an evening paper, and I could count on getting the late scores and boxes from the night before. But it shifted to morning publication. It's the kind of newspaper that, in theory, one should love and support, because it is independent and, since the death of its owner a few years ago, owned by a foundation. A friend jokes that chain ownership would improve it. I doubt that, but find that I yell less at other papers I read that are owned by Gannett or the Tribune Co.

I had a few weeks to ponder renewing my subscription, and during that time the world gave my local newspaper a few useful chances to prove its worth. One was an admissions scandal at my university. Another was more local--an African-American teenager was shot and killed by police under dicey circumstances and the community was embroiled. And a third was national--the health care debate. What we need journalism for, as the whiners (I'm a whiner too) keep reminding us, is to engage in the kind of enterprise reporting that will root out corruption, unveil the hidden workings of power, make it more difficult for interested parties to dissemble, and make intelligent public discussion more likely. How did my local newspaper do on those three tests? It failed, and it sucked while it failed. It used its reporters to repeat the official story on all three. On health care, it featured articles in which the local (Republican) Congressman explained his position without seeking out balancing opinions--something even the laziest reporter could do. On the admissions scandal, it did day-later reporting on what the Chicago Tribune published, and again repeated the official story. On the local police shooting of the teenager, it coupled reporting that simply repeated the official story with reactionary letters to the editor that blamed the victim. In every case, it made it easier to be stupid.

It didn't have to. On health care, for instance, a good local newspaper could have done excellent enterprise reporting explaining what the implications were for local employers, clinics, workers, medical professionals. Of course, considering the way this newspaper is ideologically driven, I probably would have bitched about that reporting too, but at least it would have shown some commitment.

So go ahead and blame it on the disappearance of a sense of place. But also on the fact that newspapers have for years been doing a shitty job at their core mission.

2009-04-01T08:30:00.000-07:00

The other shoe is falling

on the Tribune Co. The Tribune is reporting that Sam Zell has hired a lawyer in the ongoing investigation of Rod Blagojevich, and the Associated Press is reporting that Zell and Blagojevich met personally, as well has having contacts through intermediaries.
When Blago was arrested a few months ago, one of the items in his "crime spree" was an attempt to get the Trib to fire staff and moderate their editorial policies in return for the State of Illinois's assistance in selling Wrigley Field. At the time, the reporting left the Trib and its staff looking heroic for resisting, or ignoring, or being totally unaware of this pressure. Today's news doesn't indict the editorial staff. We may continue to think of them as responsible, professional, and, if you want to get gushy, heroic. Or clueless, perhaps.
But the Trib Co. itself, that's a different story. We always knew that Sam Zell is not a news pro, and should not be surprised if it turns out that he bargained with the Guvner. I've been betting he did. I could be wrong, of course.
The more interesting question is, Which matters more? The staff behaved ethically. Would ownership's turpitude trump that?
Yes.
Ethics in the journalism world, as now constituted, is for news workers. But all the newsworkers in the world behaving ethically can still end up producing a news media system that behaves in an unjust manner. Ethics is the moral compensation that newsworkers get instead of actual control over the system they populate.
If Fitzgerald hadn't blown up Blago and Zell, and they had conspired to trade favors, the editorial staff would still have been innocent and ethical and probably largely in the dark, but the public would have been betrayed nonetheless.

2008-12-09T07:18:00.001-08:00

When the Tribune Co. Filed for Chapter 11 Yesterday

it felt like something really big was happening in the news industry. Today it doesn't feel that way. It doesn't look like the Trib Co. filing is going to close any newspapers; instead, it will give the Co. leverage to bargain with its unions and creditors. It's more movement in the same direction, and not the tipping point--we're still waiting for that.

But here's the big story: Today the feds arrested Governor Rod Blagojevich, and reportedly the charges involve the Tribune Co. Also the appointment of Obama's successor, incidentally: he'd allegedly tried to "profit" from that appointment. But it's the Trib Co. angle that's really interesting. The allegation is that he withheld state support because of editorial policy.

Patrick Fitzgerald's press release cites recorded phone conversations in which the Governor instructs his top aide to tell the Trib that he would withhold support from the state (worth around $100 million to the Trib) for its sale of the Cubs unless two specific members of the editorial board were fired. He identified them as driving the Trib's support for his impeachment.

Now the news media have always been in a panic about the dangers of government support. That's why they mention a "bailout" for the news industry only to repudiate it. But here's what's becoming clear today. The big media are already deeply compromised by their business involvements. Blago got caught. How many people--smarter than Blago, for sure--don't get caught? What journalism needs is some secure form of support from The People, perhaps acting through Their Government, perhaps not, that will make it secure from the pressure of the powerful.

The Blagojevich arrest may be the financial equivalent of the Scooter Libby trial. Libby's trial pulled the veil off of the cozy relationships between DC reporters and powerful sources within the Bush administration. If we can focus on the money, the Blagojevich trial might provide an equally revealing cut into the ways that money entangles a media company. Remember, this is now a privately held company, albeit one with nearly $13 billion in debt.

2008-12-03T15:54:00.000-08:00

Journalism Should Have an Important Role

to play in the debate we're about to have about the national health care system. If today's front-page article in the New York Times is any indication, it will serve to seriously distort that debate.

We know from the last time around that the health care providers and the health insurers will flood the media with their point of view. They'll do this by press release, by advertisement, and most of all by making their expertise available. Good journalists will pay attention to them skeptically and balance that agenda-driven subsidized information with stuff driven by other agendas or by academic (and therefore supposedly neutral) expertise (though who knows how many academic health economists, say, are really neutral).

The BEST journalists, though--the ones with the most initiative and the most resources--will try to set their own agenda. They'll do this by doing "enterprise" journalism. Last time around, that meant going to Canada and finding a story. That story will always be about a breakdown: long lines at hospital emergency rooms, denial of service to needy people, long waits for non-urgent procedures, people driving to Buffalo to get heart surgery, and so forth. Heaven knows there are enough stories to go around.

To an expert, all of that journalism will be "anecdotal evidence." So the BEST journalists, who want to pay serious attention to the experts, will contextualize their stories, maybe not in the first five paragraphs, but somewhere in the article. They'll do this by talking to experts. But the best journalists will carefully balance their experts, in order to represent BOTH legitimate points of view. I say "both" because two is the easiest number to balance, and because two fits the general mindset of professional journalism, which is oriented around the electoral process (the 2-party system) and the legislative process (you're either for it or agin' it). Because the initial story will be about a dysfunction, the two points of view will be "it matters" and "it doesn't matter." In the world of journalism, "it matters" always wins.

So the BEST journalists are going to produce a file of articles that cumulatively scare the public--or, more precisely, make the legislators believe the public has been scared--off from serious reform. That's what happened last time.

If you want serious reform, you'll have to hope that a movement for it appears, and that it drives the agenda. You can't expect journalism--especially the BEST journalism--to stand in for it.

2008-11-07T14:34:00.001-08:00

Outrageous Vandalism!

Anarchists put fake newspapers in USA Today newsboxes, with a banner headline reading "Capitalism Wins at the Polls," topping a photo of a bonfire, and followed by another headline reading "Anarchy Brewing in the Streets." A clip of a TV report from another blog: the report says that police are reviewing surveillance tapes in hopes of catching the culprits.

Now this is silly. Who was hurt by this action? Did anyone buying a newspaper suffer from assault or fraud? Were newsbox sales disrupted by this? More likely, the novelty encouraged sales, and after all the fake front was wrapped around the standard edition, which was not defaced or diminished in value by it.

But newspapers succeeded in getting laws passed years ago that impose stiff penalties on newsbox vandals, and this apparently will be treated like a big deal. I'll try to follow it.....

2008-11-06T12:11:00.000-08:00

I Spent the Night in Chicago Tuesday

and felt all the same things that everyone else felt. Euphoria, community, buzz, even rapture. The people around me at the event (I got in by slipping $20 to a ticket taker) were so into it that you could have walked up to them and taken their wallets and they wouldn't have known til the next day. Yeah. You could've had a sack full of wallets.

At the same time, I recognize that that was a cultural event and not a political event. The governing process is a whole nother thing, and my expectations are modest in that regard. Realistically, I don't expect big movement on key issues. I don't expect, for instance, policies that would revitalize the labor movement. I don't expect universal health care, at least not in the next two years. I don't expect the US to become truly multilateral. But I do expect Gitmo to close, the War in Iraq to end, and the economy to stabilize.

The big difference, though, will be the change of momentum. My friend Owen worked for the Canadian Tories at the time when they suffered the worst electoral defeat in the history of elections. His line the next day was this: "What else did I have to do, other than to lie in the sidewalk and wait for them to draw a chalk outline around me?" He's bounced back, but only after many years of Liberal rule. The Republican Party will likely rebound more quickly, but it's still hard to think of who will lead the party. In the meantime, the right will be on defense, and the left on offense. And that's a serious political change.

Wednesday morning I woke up early and watched tv for an hour or two, then showered and headed out. Already by 8:30 all the newspapers in downtown Chicago had been snapped up. I took the Metra south to where I'd parked my car, sans prophylactic reading material. Everyone on the train was talking about the night before, in little groups of two and four. When we got to the end of the line, and gathered by the exit to disembark, the riders clumped up and the conversation became kind of general. At that point, an older woman, who had been silent, spoke up. She had a bit of an accent that I couldn't locate. She said, "I crossed the ocean to be there." Everyone murmured their recognition. Then she said "God bless America" and got off the train. So this was in my head when I got back into the car and turned on the radio to listen to Rush Limbaugh ranting about the persecution of conservatives. The next few years will be cheerful ones for Rush, who nevertheless cannot diminish, and can only enhance, the glow of the moment.

2008-09-08T10:36:00.000-07:00

It's Just Crazy Enough to Work!

Palin, of course. Picking her is just crazy enough to work. I laughed all of last week, and my reaction to her big speech was simply this: "She neither drooled nor shit her pants." And I recognized that that was all she needed to do to be hailed as "hitting a home run." Sure, those who would never in a million years would point out that her presentation was robotic, that every word was scripted, and that she showed an obvious unfamiliarity with all the things she intoned knowingly about--Venezuela, for instance, or "new-clear" power. But who was expecting Hillary?

Now it's time for everyone to stop condescending to her, though, and hold her to the same standards that we held Hillary.

To be specific: When Hillary exaggerated the danger of her visit to Bosnia, the press called her on it. When she repeated the exaggeration, she was questioned on it repeatedly. And her reluctance to budge from her initial recollection was criticized as a character flaw.

Palin has been lying outright about her opposition to the Bridge to Nowhere and her fight against earmarks. She should get at least the same treatment, and I'd argue more, because she's an actual nominee.

This is not to mention Hillary's long history as first lady. When Hillary made money in the markets, and when she lost money in real estate, there was a five year investigation. Do Palin's business dealings deserve the same scrutiny? When Vince Foster committed suicide, there was massive speculation about his intimacy with Hillary. Do Palin's marital affairs deserve the same scrutiny? One hopes that the whole political system has moved on from that--that was all so 20th century.

But I remember the whole Tuzla thing like it was yesterday. Because it was.

2008-04-29T11:12:00.000-07:00

Wright and Horton

This year Jeremiah Wright will be playing the role of Willie Horton. He's the angry black man that voters are supposed to be afraid of. Seriously. History repeats itself, first as tragedy and then as farce.

But all he has to do is put a metaphorical afro on Obama. Older, white, workingclass, Catholic voters--or some of em--will remember Obama's a black man and freak, or at least look enough like they're freaking to authorize the party's thumbsucking on "electability."

I agree with those who say that Clinton is a victim of sexism as much as or more than Obama is a victim of racism. By the same measure, gender "divisiveness" is an "electability" issue as much as racial "divisiveness." Why has there been no discussion of gender and electability? I mean, there's plenty of it in the blogosphere's id: google "Clinton" and "c**t," for instance. In the commentariat, though, the entire issue is missing. I'm happy about that. I don't think it belongs on stage. The reason why it's missing, I'm betting, is that no campaign is putting it out there. Political reporters hate to drive the agenda.

Will Rev Wright go away? If I were, say, Fox News, I'd give him his own show. But then people would probably stop paying attention to him.

2008-04-25T13:32:00.000-07:00

None Dare Call It

Racism. In the days since the PA primary, the news has been full of exit poll results that show a group of democratic voters who say "race is an important issue" (18% of them) and, among them, a group of around 40% who say they will not vote for Obama if elected. Now if you factor in some self-falsification--in deference to the common supposition that you're not supposed to admit to being a racist--it would be safe to conclude that about 10% of total voters, or close to 20% of Clinton's supporters, in Pennsylvania are in fact classic white racists. This is not a surprise.

The analyses of exit polls are pretty much in unison on the basic contours of this racist bloc. They are overwhelmingly older, disproportionately Catholic, and mostly working class. Having grown up in Ohio, I know a lot of people who fit this description, and am related to more than a few by blood and marriage. They don't wear the hood, don't burn crosses, and don't chase black folk out of their neighborhoods (though few black folk live there anyway). They consider black folk different, don't like them, and don't want them running the show. Just because they're black. This is racism; I have no trouble calling it that.

So why do the mainstream media? Read through the reporting on race post-PA, and you won't find the word racism or racist. Instead, you'll find a kind of furious campaign on the part of everyone to deny "playing the race card."

Race has always been metaphysical in the US--there's no such thing, if by race you mean biological difference. Racism, however, has never been metaphysical. It's always been a material set of practices. Sometimes its explicit and sometimes it's not. Since 1965 or so, it's always manifested itself in politics under some kind of disguise--the confederate flag, or the campaign against public schools or affirmative action. In democratic party politics today, racism hides behind the word "electability." Why can't Obama close the deal? Because he can't win white, Catholic, older workingclass voters.

It's all about race. But isn't it really all about racism?

2008-04-09T08:55:00.000-07:00

Apologizing for Telling the Truth

Twice this past week or so Obama supporters have had to apologize for telling the truth about McCain. Last Friday talk show host Ed Schultz called McCain a "warmonger." The Obama campaign repudiated the remark, and repeated its line that it honors McCain's service to the country and considers him a genuine hero. The yesterday Jay Rockefeller pointed out that McCain's war service was actually not that sweet a line of work:

McCain was a fighter pilot, who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit.What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn't know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues."

OK, isn't this true? Ought we not put him back in the cockpit and ask him what it was that he thought he was doing there? Instead, we get an apology from Rockefeller and a reiteration of the "honor the hero's service" line from the Obama campaign. Hasn't McCain in fact supported every use of military force since he's been in the Senate? And didn't he in fact call for a substantial commitment of ground troops in Kosovo? Sure, he hates war. I don't doubt that. He especially hates losing wars, and is mortified that he's been an instrument in the two grandest military failures in US history. But let the record speak for itself.

On this point, where's the press? Has anyone in the national media investigated the truth of either of these claims? That's what journalists are for. Journalists should be writing detailed assessments of McCain's military service in the context of the Vietnam War. They should be demystifying the memory of the air war and examining the circumstances of McCain's capture and imprisonment. They might, too, if some well organized Swift Boat crew starts running ads that gain attention, or if the Obama campaign gets off its "hero" talking points, or if Clinton's campaign decides to do something risky for a change.

Instead of showing initiative and enterprise, the campaign press has treated such issues as debates over campaign decorum. So Ed Schultz is framed as the Democratic equivalent of talk show host Bill Cunningham, whom McCain repudiated for overuse of Obama's middle name. And calling McCain a warmonger is treated as the moral equivalent of race-baiting. Peace-baiting? Well that's an idea whose time has come.

2008-03-26T07:38:00.000-07:00

If you are interested in press coverage of the campaign,

Today's NYT is full of interesting stuff. Jacques Steinberg has a wistful obituary for an institution of press coverage, the busload of print reporters that daily newspapers used to be able to afford to send along. His sentiment--that something real is lost when you have only two dozen rather than four dozen reporters doing differing takes on a candidate--is immediately undercut by the NYT's own campaign trail reports du jour, especially an execrable piece of stenography by Patrick Healy. Reporting like this can truly be done by a blogger in her kitchen.

But my favorite piece is Neal Gabler's op-ed on John McCain. It not only gives the direct lie to Steinberg's nostalgia, pointing out how McCain's campaign bus produces the kinds of distortion that reporters are supposed to dispel; it also offers the best available explanation for the romance of McCain the straight talker. I mean, the facts by now are quite clear. McCain will do ANYTHING to become president--embrace any position, pander to any constituency, talk out of any side of his mouth, abandon any conviction, coddle any ally--and he is also the most bellicose, the most opportunistic, and arguably the most corrupt of the surviving candidates. He is ruthlessly coy. He lost his chance to really make history when he jilted John Kerry, but believes that he can join the ranks of post-Presidents like Rutherford B. Hayes or Herbert Hoover for a term (does anyone think he could be re-elected?) and ride the country all the way down. Not that he doesn't have virtues as a politician. He's not a total ideologue. He seems to be able to play well with others. He has a sense of humor.

Gabler makes the believable argument that it's McCain's ironic detachment from the political game that makes him so beloved of the press. Of course mainstream reporters are all ironists--mainstream POLITICAL reporters, that is. SPORTS reporters are different, as I'm fond of pointing out. They're objective and critical, but they're fans of the game and fans of their teams. Political reporters despise politics. And so the appeal of McCain, who also openly despised George Bush, for instance, but supported him anyway. The irony of irony is that there's no way out of it. No matter how many lunatics McCain coddles, the wink and the nudge will absolve him. All of us ironists know what it takes to become president in this nutty country.

Can you be ironic when there's actual bombing and bloodshed? We'll see. McCain has always been more aggressive than anyone else in the national government regarding the use of the military in foreign policy. Remember, he wanted a hundred thousand or so ground troops in Kosovo. Hey, then THAT could have been our West Bank, instead of Iraq. As a candidate, he can smile that away. When he actually IS commander in chief, will he be able to?

Bloggers are not ironists. Bloggers are in the reality based community, and want to bring their own real values and interests into the political discourse. Bloggers hate McCain.

2008-03-07T12:34:00.000-08:00

The Power of the Press

was on clear display in this week's elections. A sharp turn of fortunes for the Obama campaign came upon the heels of a sharper turn in the tenor of political reporting. The most dramatic report involved an advisor to the Obama campaign reassuring a Canadian government official that Obama's criticisms of NAFTA were political posturing. Clinton's campaign jumped on that report. But there's more to the story, according to the Globe and Mail, which reported yesterday that the original story--which appeared on the Canadian television network CTV--was inspired by a remark by Ian Brodie, who is the Karl Rove of Canadian premier Stephen Harper's administration, to reporters taking a break from covering budget talks:

"He said someone from (Hillary) Clinton's campaign is telling the embassy to take it with a grain of salt. . . That someone called us and told us not to worry."

Government officials did not deny the conversation took place.

See, "Clinton's campaign." And sure, why shouldn't someone from Clinton's campaign reassure the Canadians about NAFTA? After all, it's not the Canadians we mean when we say that NAFTA weakens environmental and labor standards. But what does Clinton's willingness to use this incident to denounce Obama as a hypocrite tell us about her character? That she's crossed the threshold necessary to be commander in chief?

But more to the point: Did anyone in the media think to ask her about this when she was denouncing Obama? The logical question would have been something of this nature: "Do you categorically deny that anyone from YOUR campaign reached out to reassure the Canadians?" Or how about this one: "Do you mean that Ohio is losing jobs to Canada because of their (higher) labor protections and environmental standards?"

Instead the press went into stenographer mode. Others have pointed out that what Obama's advisor is reported to have said does not in fact contradict what Obama (and Clinton, for that matter) said in their debate last week. Given the non-story-ness of this story, why didn't the press try to work it a bit?

Perhaps because they were busy navel-gazing over whether they'd been harder on Hillary than Obama. One thing that the past quarter-century has taught us firmly about the national mainstream press is that, because they are liberal, they will go to any length to torture liberals to prove that they are not biased toward liberals. Same applies to Clinton this time around. I don't doubt that the national press dislikes her. So it turns out that she can play her "Get out of jail free" card--at least once--and get a round of creampuff coverage by accusing the national press of bias against her.

Of course, because she's a liberal, it won't work twice.

2008-01-03T09:20:00.000-08:00

I went to see Sweeney Todd

last night, in large part because AO Scott had called it a work of "extreme genius." Would I be writing this if I agreed?

At first I thought it was a cheap knockoff of Moulin Rouge, but, after a stab at doing London the way Moulin Rouge did Paris, the camera sort of gave up. Maybe it was because of London, which was a city of extreme dreariness. I amused myself during the songs by trying to figure out what year it was supposed to be. The technology and the criminal justice system was all Moll Flanders, but the typography was all Dickens. I guess it was the generic past. This had the sad side effect of depressing the visual impression of class difference. The rich were every bit as drab and smelly as the poor. Too bad, because they kept telling us (not showing us) how the rich feed off the poor. That's one reason we're supposed to be amused when the poor eat the rich.

I love all the actors. So then who do I blame for wishing the movie had been animated? I guess I'd have to blame Tim Burton.

Since parenthood has been visited on me, I see relatively few adult movies in theaters. Usually going to the movies means taking the little one to see something for kids. For a long time, I saw every Disney release and every animated picture. These are amusing for a while--the first one in a formula, for instance, would give me a real sense of excitement. The Incredibles, for instance. But mostly I would occupy myself by first identifying the celebrity voices, and then taking a nap. Sometimes also it's fun to play "what's this a remake of?" Now I know that I'm at a disappointing adult movie when I find myself playing "what's this a remake of?"

So what's Sweeney Todd a remake of? Edward Scissorhands. And Mary Poppins. Both of which are much better.

2007-12-18T15:19:00.000-08:00

Don't Taze me Bro

I find it more and more the case that there are no texts--I mean whole texts, like Huck Finn or Gone with the Wind--that I can expect that a random US American will be familiar with. But there are fragments that everyone seems to know. Of course I base this wisdom on experience in the undergraduate classroom, which is as close as I come to sampling public opinion. (I joke.) In the undergrad classroom, I can usually get 100% recognition on "You can't HANDLE the truth," though 0% will have seen the actual movie ("A Few Good Men."). Likewise, 100% familiarity, from people who have never seen Star Trek, which is no longer cool even for geeks, for "Beam me up Scotty."

This year's primo fragment is "Don't taze me bro." All the undergrads know it. Alas, it has not penetrated my own age cohort. Oddly, I drew a blank from a younger colleague who specializes in new media and owns a Wii. What does this say about our culture?

I read the other day that the newest Christmas song among the top fifty most popular was written in 1971, which makes it older than my friend with the Wii. It does, however, make it newer than any jazz standard. Perhaps we could write a Christmas song called "Don't taze me bro." Suggestions, anyone?

2007-12-10T11:50:00.000-08:00

Muckraking Pays

says David Carr in today's NYT. But let's connect the dots.

Carr's piece tells the story of a Chicago reporter, one of four laid off by the Reader after it was bought by Creative Loafing. The moral of his story is that media companies are cutting back on investigative reporting, and that they should rethink that--that short-term cost-cutting might not be the best business strategy, and that newspapers of all sorts should remember that they're in the news business.

I read the article carefully, waiting for some attention to the market situation the Reader has found itself in. No luck, there, although there was an interesting story on Sam Zell and the Chicago Tribune in the same section of the paper. Here's the nut: the Tribune decided to invade the Reader's turf with its Red Eye, a free circulation daily featuring lifestyle content for the younger generation. It said at the time that its strategy was to cultivate the next generation of readers for the grownup newspaper, but in fact it was a simple attempt to capture the readers and the advertising of the Reader. The industry knows, after all, that the only growth segment in print newspapers in the US over the past twenty years or so has been free circulation weeklies. The Red Eye has no commitment to enterprise journalism. Most of its content I could pull out of my ass. And, although it distributes 250-300,000 copies a day, I don't think anyone really reads it like a newspaper. So its main effect to date has been to erode the profitability of the Reader, which has changed owners, changed format, and dumped staff in response. Carr's heart is in the right place in today's story--don't get me wrong on that. And he does call attention to the way newspapers across the board are cutting reporting staff. But he could go deeper, and point the finger at the appropriate corporate boardrooms.

The Red Eye, the Tribune's youth newspaper, was the brainchild of Jack Fuller, whose book News Values contains an intelligent argument for the virtues of corporate ownership for the news business. When he wrote that book, in the late 1990s, his argument might have made a certain amount of sense. At that time, the daily newspaper was still a license to print money, and big city dailies were being bought up by the national chains for obscene prices. In the process, of course, they acquired huge debts which now must be serviced, as well as acquiring leadership that is increasingly attuned to a public of investors and therefore to quarterly reports. Perhaps the corporate form improved journalism in the years before the late 1990s, though many reporters would give you a good argument on that. But in the years since, the pressure to cut costs and please advertisers has become intense to the point where good journalism is increasingly hard to come by. This does not mean that journalism has tangibly diminished across the board, but it does mean that newspapers have fewer journalists working on investigative reports, the typical journalist has shorter deadlines and more tasks to perform, and the beat system has begun to disappear--this all on the local level. On the national and international levels, the picture is a bit different. Only a few major news organizations
continue to maintain overseas bureaus, and international reporting has suffered both in terms of what's available for newspapers to print and the newshole that newspapers give to the rest of the world. In national news, the size of the White House press corps has grown, but the amount of DC reporting that truly addresses local and regional concerns has dropped. Television has accentuated these trends. In the age of the 24/7 news channel and multiple C-SPANs one would have expected the number of voices in national politics to have increased; instead, it's declined.

I don't know that this means that "information" no longer flows to the public. You'd have to put on the other side of the ledger all the new sources of information in the world. And so it is easier for me to get international news from other sources, and to get national news from the blogosphere, and to get local news from my local government or my neighborhood association. It's not so much the information that matters, even in the spectacular case that Carr writes about today, which involves the torture of suspects by the Chicago police. Would we have known about that without the investigative work of a Reader reporter? Yes, if we'd've cared. That's the problem. Without the reporters, we won't care. We don't need the reporters to give us information; we need them to give voice to the information. We need them so that the police or the politicians or the bureaucrats or the rich will believe that the Public knows what's going on. Without institutionalized reporting, it's harder for the idea of the public to work as a regulative fiction.

2007-10-30T19:16:00.000-07:00

We went to see Across the Universe

on Saturday night, and it made me think interesting thoughts about the War in Vietnam and my generation. I went with my 11-year-old daughter, who is the same age as I was when the story of the movie is supposed to have happened. If you haven't seen the movie, it traces the lives of young people in the years 1967-1969, roughly, mostly by staging Beatles' songs. It's a tour de force of stagecraft and visual imagination by the inimitable Julie Taymor, the only person on the face of the earth who could make a watchable movie out of Titus Andronicus. (That movie was called Titus, and the title character was played by Anthony Hopkins.)

As you would imagine, a character is sent to Vietnam, and there is a sequence that features what are now the standard signifiers of that war--jungle, helicopters, carpet bombing. Those are the buttons that are there to be pushed, as reliably hard-wired into our collective memory as the Zapruder film or MLK's I Have a Dream speech (which we get in this movie). These things are in my head. Periodically I use a news photo of John John Kennedy saluting his father's coffin in an undergraduate class I teach, and it predictably chokes me up a little bit, as I'm sure it would for anyone of my generation.

Now I DO have the Vietnam iconography in my head, especially the helicopters, the napalm, the carpet bombing, and the jungle. The same is not true for the Iraq War, either for my daughter, or for myself and, I think, my contemporaries. There are no really iconic symbols of the Iraq War. There are the car bombs, but these don't quite have the same symbolic and emotional resonance. They're pictures, as far away as earlier pictures of other car bombs in the middle east.

Why don't we have the same repertoire of representation for this war? Well, why DO we have a repertoire for Vietnam? Partly because of movies that came well after the War itself. The helicopters were really hammered home by the Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now--after I saw the Deer Hunter, I froze every time I heard a helicopter. Same with the jungle. But I already had the images in my head before that.

The reasons, I think, were the news and the draft. The news kept putting the War on the television, which still followed the logic of "newsworthiness" rather than finely measured viewer interest. The big three networks had footage of the war on on a nightly basis. This is hardly true now. Even though there are still dozens of embeds, they never really gave us the kind of candid war footage that we expected. There has been plenty of war porn on the web, but the gatekeepers have been working very hard to keep this off our radar screens, and to a large extent they've succeeded. Probably because, compared with Vietnam, the US body count is microscopic.

The draft is the other big reason. I had those images in my brain because I had nightmares about being drafted and sent over there. As it happened, I am part of the microgeneration that has never been required to register for the draft. I am very grateful for that.

It's common for antiwar folk to wonder why there aren't bodies in the streets, massive marches in DC and elsewhere. Well, you do see more than a little of that, though without the high drama of the Vietnam era, and without the attention as well. 2008 will not be 1968. But there still are marches and demonstrations. The missing iconography, the missing mental images of the war, makes a bigger impression on me. Critics will blame the mediascape for the diminished demonstrations; more appropriately, we should investigate the mediascape for our missing collective memory.

2007-10-08T13:39:00.001-07:00

McCain was never tortured

if you buy the Bush administration's definition of torture. According to the memo drafted by assistant AG Jay Bybee in 2002, for an interrogation technique to amount to torture, it must inflict pain as severe as that brought on by "serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Findlaw has this and other documents.

The Bush administration has held to this definition of torture, and won't even let us see how it's tortured it to make it countenance the simultaneous use of three or more interrogation techniques, any of which I would consider torture if it were used on me. (The Pres-o-dent doesn't believe in that kind of application of the golden rule. Any dog owner does, though. You wouldn't put a pinch collar on your dog without trying it out--not on your neck, of course, but on your thigh, say. It's only fair to ask the Pres-o-dent to undergo waterboarding, on the presumption that human beings are as entitled to humane treatment as dogs, or that human beings are entitled to at least canine treatment. Perhaps we can have Michael Vick handle the waterboarding of the Pres-o-dent.)

So here's McCain, walking around without "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." y'know whut, how come he keeps saying he was tortured? Well, he's a politician. He plays fast and loose with words.

But look at this: There's a technology that can inflict unbearable pain without causing any physical damage. Oh, if only it was just a thought experiment! Then we could speculate about it and not have to worry whether it would actually be used as an "interrogation technique." But it's there, and I'm willing to bet that there's still some flunky left over from the Gonzalez era in the Justice Dept who's willing to say that that wouldn't be torture.

Except that we'd never hear about that, would we? Any such advice would be kept secret. Not from the terrorists; the secret torture memos would only confirm what they already believe. These things have to be kept secret from us, the people. Why? It's as if they expect us to actually object when this stuff is done in our names.

2007-09-25T16:29:00.000-07:00

It Seems Like 1988

when, as you'll recall, GHW Bush used the Pledge of Allegiance to make Michael Dukakis look un-American. Now the forces of the right are using the First Amendment to similar purpose. I'm not sure I can recall the recent use of a Senatorial resolution to condemn an advertisement engaged in the kind of political speech that the First Amendment was designed specifically to protect. This is the sort of thing one expected in the 1830s, when Congress frequently condemned the speech of abolitionists. Neither party thought it could present itself as "soft" on abolitionism, of course. And in the 1950s you'd find this sort of thing directed against Communists. But please, abolitionists and Communists were crazies, by the standards of their times. MoveOn.org? Not in the same league. So what gives?

Ahmedinejad, on the other hand, is, by the standards of our times, a crazy. But still, he's a head of state, and if he wants to lay a wreath at ground zero, well, why not? Because he's an Arab, that's why not. Only, of course, he's not an Arab, as Iranians speak Farsi. The argument goes that Ahmedinejad sponsors anti-US terrorism, and is waging a proxy war against the US in Iraq. Does this somehow tie him in with the terrorists who blew up the World Trade Center? And has he ever contemplated abetting an attack against the US in the US? While, of course, the US has continually been contemplating an attack on Iran.

But Ground Zero aside, why not let him speak at Columbia? Lee Bollinger--by the way, one of the nation's most intelligent commentators on the First Amendment--was heroic in withstanding pressure to withdraw the invitation, and was equally impressive in giving such a naughty introduction. I'm grateful that he showed such fortitude. I wish the Senate understood the tradition of free speech nearly as well. Especially the Republicans, who style themselves the party of freedom and get all lathered up at "political correctness."

2007-09-19T14:15:00.000-07:00

National Guard Service One More Time

Courtesy of Dan Rather, who is mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore. Rather has filed a lawsuit against CBS seeking 70 million dollars, complaining in part that he was sacrificed to appease the White House over the disputed report he narrated on the Pres-o-dent's AWOLiness in the 1970s.

In the suit, filed this afternoon in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Mr. Rather charges that CBS and its executives made him “a scapegoat” in an attempt “to pacify the White House,” though the formal complaint presents virtually no direct evidence to that effect. To buttress this claim, Mr. Rather quotes the executive who oversaw his regular segment on CBS Radio, telling Mr. Rather in November 2004 that he was losing that slot, effective immediately, because of “pressure from ‘the right wing.’ ” (The whole story from NYT is here.)

The only question to ask here is how much money CBS is willing to spend to make this go away. CNN spent a couple of million to make the dispute over its "Valley of Death" story on the Tailwind project go away. (Interesting sidebar: Rick Kaplan, who was then president of CNN, is now producer of the CBS Evening News.) The Gannett corp. made the Cincinnati Enquirer pay 14 million to Chiquita Brands to forestall a lawsuit over its expose of that company's labor and environmental record in Central America. I'm guessing CBS might be good for somewhere in between--8 million would just about split the difference.

There is no likelihood that this will produce the long-awaited authorized acknowledgment of the general truth of that report. For one thing, Rather has apparently adopted the Peter Arnett defense: I was just reading a script. For another, the US political system has no use for "truth and reconciliation" processes. There are, I guess, reconciliation processes, but abandoning the truth is usually a precondition for that. I expect to see a lot of reconciliation in 2009, but not a lot of truth, and in another generation, when the next Vietnam moment occurs, we can rerun the whole sad story as if we hadn't already done this before.

Unrelated aside: Hooray for Gitmo. It's the only prison the mainstream media can refer to without wisecracking about anal rape.

2007-08-23T15:45:00.001-07:00

The First President Bush said the Gulf War had ended "Vietnam Syndrome."

He meant that, after our victory, we would no longer have the succubus of the defeat in Vietnam destroying our willingness to use military force. In other words, we could forget about it--about the quagmire, the divisiveness, the palsied conscience that we as a nation had supposedly inherited. We--meaning we on the left--thought this was an absurd misreading of history, inasmuch as the US had never stopped projecting military force around the world, and had done it quite recklessly as well. But little did we know...what the son would do to resurrect Vietnam syndrome.

Reading the news reports of the Pres-o-dent's speech yesterday gave me a terrible fit of the blues. I recalled many conversations with my old dad in the early 1970s about the pointlessness of the Vietnam war. We know that Robert McNamara had decided well before the end of LBJ's presidency that the war was unwinnable; he went on a magnificently painful apology tour later in life. Nixon and Kissinger agreed by 1971 that the war was unwinnable, but cynically extended it to prevent the appearance of defeat. How many more died? Yesterday the pres-o-dent cynically listed the number of people who died AFTER the US withdrawal. How many of THEM would have died if we'd ended the war when we knew it was lost?

Most depressing to me was the fact that the assembled audience, all of whom should have known better, applauded this bloody nonsense. How many of their comrades died because of idiots like the pres-o-dent, idiots who never put their own lives on the line, by the way?

So this morning I picked up Peter Galbraith's fine piece in the latest New York Review of Books, and read this:

...in April 1980, [Saddam's] regime had arrested Moqtada [al-Sadr]'s father-in-law and the father-in-law's sister--the Grand Ayatollah Baqir al-Sadr and Bint al-Huda. While the Ayatollah watched, the Baath security men raped and killed his sister. Then they set fire to the Ayatollah's beard before driving nails into his head.

And we're supposed to stay in Iraq until the people who nurture this memory are reconciled to the people who committed such atrocities?

Here's the nut: the US presence in Iraq has created and subsidized the conflict between the various Iraqi factions, first by destroying any institution that unified the country, then by inventing a sovereign power for the factions to compete for, then by promising to maintain some semblance of order while they kill each other. Getting out won't end this bloodshed: Vietnam taught us that. So did Afghanistan, which we abandoned after our proxies brought down Najibullah, kicking off a decade of factional bloodshed that ended only with the rise of the Taliban. But we also know that, the longer the subsidized conflict goes on, the longer the post-withdrawal conflict will go on. Logic tells us: Get out at once. Even if it looks irresponsible.

2007-07-31T22:03:00.000-07:00

I Finished Reading The Sack of Rome

the other day. It's Alexander Stille's book about Silvio Berlusconi. It's a brilliant, entertaining, and only somewhat disturbing book. It leaves me convinced that Berlusconi is a terrific crook, but hey, that's not news. It also leaves me convinced of the political power of television. There's a long history of communication scholars in the US disputing the power of television. This is called the "limited effects model"; according to it, ordinary people are insulated from the direct influence of television by local opinion leaders and organic face-to-face groups. And this is true for some things and in some places and for some people. I can sit in a bar filled with fans of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team, and even though everyone will be watching a telecast of a Chicago Cubs game with announcers paid by the Tribune Company, the owners of the Cubs, all the patrons in the bar will still hate the Cubs, and "read against the grain," so to speak. Sure. And I DO talk back to my television, even though no one listens.

But this has never been what the power of television is all about. On the contrary. Television has had great power because of all the LONELY people who watch it, and this has certainly been the case in Italy. Berlusconi's television channels have large viewerships of old and lonely people who don't have a bar full of organic community to tell them he's a liar. But moreso television has had great power because it REPRESENTS the people. In the absence of all the people speaking, television has been the delegated voice of the people. To be more precise, the empowered act as if television represents the people.

In the US, all of this is obscured because we don't yet have a Berlusconi. We have the ingredients. We have the demented power mad media mogul (Ted Turner used to be the best example, but Rupert Murdoch has taken his place); we have telegenic ambitious politicians; and we have celebrities who, for the life of us, we can't figure out why they're celebrities. But we don't yet have someone who's all three.

That doesn't mean we don't have the same system. Stille drives this point home admirably in his closing chapter.

2007-07-03T14:18:00.000-07:00

My Daily Paris

Years ago a friend (Gil Rodman, for the curious) told me about his daily Elvis. Every day, in some medium or another, he would run across Elvis--a picture of Elvis in the newspaper, Elvis on the radio, and Elvis movie on TV, an Elvis impersonator in a bar, something. When he told me this (in the 1980s) I thought he was wrong, but then I realized that, yes, every day in some way Elvis was with me. A couple of years ago, though, I began to notice that I was no longer getting my daily Elvis. Apparently he's fallen off, or been getthoed in. I dunno.

But I do get my daily Paris, i.e. Paris Hilton. This without paying any attention to the media that seem to dwell on her, the supermarket tabloids (ok, I read them sometimes) or the entertainment news shows on tv.

Today's daily Paris comes from Josh Marshall at TPM, who notes that "Paris Hilton did more time than Scooter Libby." Indeed. Finally, someone who can make Paris Hilton seem like an ordinary joe. You'd think they were going to send him to Gitmo or something. (By the way, what does Scooter think of Gitmo? What does Scooter think of Abu Ghraib? Should we think of Scooter as a force for enlightened penal systems?)

As for Scooter's get-out-of-jail-free card, I find it hard to be outraged when Rove and Cheney are still in their jobs, but it does kind of miss the point of having a fall guy. He has to take the fall, see? This is the sublime self absorption of the establishment, who are happy to invoke the same "higher law" arguments as civil rights marchers and picketers and Solidarity and Thoreau, but who will never spend a day in jail. Again, that's the point of civil disobedience: You must do the time. Oh, I forgot. There was nothing civil about his disobedience. He lied for political advantage. Of course, that's a different rationale altogether. Who goes to jail, or gets impeached, for something like that?

2007-06-26T09:04:00.000-07:00

Is This Supposed to be a Death Blow?

The Times ran its second "Murdochracy" article today, and again told us stuff we already knew, with a few added details. The upshot seemed to be that Rupert, unlike a grownup news organization, was willing to do favors for the powers that be in return for access to markets. On China, Rupert's hands are dirty. We all knew this already. He has consistently trimmed his news and content to suit the Party, and has gotten some but not all that much in return. In this, he differs from the other media conglomerates only in the degree to which he has succeeded, which also corresponds to the degree to which we know about his dealings. This is not to say that the point of the Times piece is wrong, but that it does not make the larger point: that it is the nature of media conglomerates to pervert journalism. Instead, by framing Rupert as egregious, it makes the opposite point.

Rupert's operatives have sort of swatted back, and the Times piece does the honorable thing:

News Corporation officials in Beijing and Hong Kong declined to comment for this article. After The New York Times began a two-part series on Monday about how Mr. Murdoch operates his company, the News Corporation issued a statement:
“News Corp. has consistently cooperated with The New York Times in its coverage of the company. However, the agenda for this unprecedented series is so blatantly designed to further the Times’s commercial self interests — by undermining a direct competitor poised to become an even more formidable competitor — that it would be reckless of us to participate in their malicious assault. Ironically, The Times, by using its news pages to advance its own corporate business agenda, is doing the precise thing they accuse us of doing without any evidence.”

Of course News Corp is right, in one sense, and wrong in the other. The agenda of the Times is clear--it has invested resources in a rare and highly visible way on a story that will work against News Corp's takeover of Dow Jones. But it's not about the business interests of the NYT Corp. We know it's just News Corp they object to--that the Times doesn't have the same problem with and wouldn't run the same stories on GE or Google or any other player taking over Dow Jones. Rupert doesn't belong because he's a barbarian, not because combining Dow Jones with News Corp would make it too powerful a competitor. In fact, any other suitor would pose a bigger bidness challenge to NYT Corp. Rupert would move WSJ toward a different market niche--less about prestige public affairs journalism and more about simply money, I suspect--turn it more into the IBD.

No, it's ideology, not financial self-interest, that impels coverage like this. Hooray for ideology, when it works. Like a broken clock, the notion of professional autonomy in journalism within the media industries is going to produce the correct time once or twice a day (depending on the type of clock, of course). I was hoping that this series would be one of them. No; but it could have been worse.

2007-06-25T12:19:00.001-07:00

What Do Rupert Murdoch and SCOTUS have in common?

Two news items today catch my attention. One is a long article--actually a bundle of pieces--in the NYT about NewsCorp and Murdoch's scheme to buy the WSJ. The other is the Supreme's latest decision cutting back on the McCain Feingold (or Mere Figleaf) restrictions on campaign finance. Both show the current dysfunction of media politics and the inability of the gov-o-mint to deal with it.

Writing for the nineteenth-century faction of SCOTUS, Chief Roberts says “the First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it.” I agree, though I think the Court gives this a reading that is wildly and willfully ignorant of 21st century facts-on-the-ground. In fact I don't know that I really want to quarrel with the decision of the Supremes on this one, though any 5-4 ruling is going to smell bad. McCain Feingold was always a mere figleaf in any case. If the target was the influence of big money on elections, it missed by a wide margin. The only tangible benefit, in my opinion, was that it got SCOTUS to accept the notion of limits on campaign spending, and to accept it on something like "public sphere" grounds. That is, first-amendment rights include the right to a healthy public sphere, which democracy requires for its proper functioning. [more complicated argument alert--there is one, and I'm not going to make it now.] What's troubling about today's decision is that it retreats from the public sphere argument, and embraces a notion of free expression that takes no notice of the ecology of expression.

This is also the case in Murdoch-land. Again, I don't really have any quarrel with Rupert owning the WSJ. He might as well own it already, as far as I'm concerned. I have friends and colleagues who loathe its editorial page but insist that the WSJ is a model of journalistic integrity--the best news that money can buy, because naturally it is the news medium that the people with the most money DO buy. I'll grant this as a matter of personal taste. I don't trust its news, but if I did, I wouldn't worry about Rupert messing with it. He knows the franchise. What he'd do is undermine the veneer of sanctimony about it. As it is, if what interests you about the news is its class valence, then what you find in the WSJ is news for capitalists about capital. It's good to have news about capital, and the version that's designed for capitalists is likely to be all you're going to get. How will Rupert ruin it? By introducing his own political biases? Yes, but only to the extent that his political biases are congruent with the interests of capitalists as a whole. At least that's how I read his assurances to the Bancroft family, who control the voting stock of Dow Jones.

A few years ago, actually probably more like twenty years ago, there was a hiccup in the operation of the St. Petersburg Times. The Times is one of the few news organizations in the US that is actually independent. The late Nelson Poynter left it to the Poynter Institute in his will, and it is the board of directors of that Institute that runs the newspaper. Family-run newspapers, all in a panic about their independence, should follow his example. Take note, ye Blethens. (Actually, the Blethen family, who run the Seattle Times, seem to be kind of taken with the idea of leaving that newspaper to an Institute at some point of generational fatigue.) The hiccup came when Nelson Poynter's nieces, who held a share in the Institute, considered that they could get a lot of money if they could sell their shares. They asked for a buyout, and the Institute offered them what they thought was a fair price. They then proceeded to sell their share to a guy name of Bass for something more like the going rate. Here's the account from Forbes

In 1988, Texas billionaire Robert M. Bass stunned the paper by purchasing 40% of Times Publishing’s voting stock from Poynter's nieces. Then Bass launched an unsolicited takeover bid for the rest of the company and sued it in an effort to increase his share of its dividend payments. Times Publishing rejected Bass' offer and, after a protracted battle, bought back Bass' stake for $56 million.

At one point in this protracted battle, Bass turned up for the first time at a board meeting of the Poynter Institute. According to a friend who had a first-hand account of this meeting, Bass said nothing, but sat, surrounded by an aura of power and mystery, and shod in elaborate cowboy boots. The regular board members tried to do business as usual, though they were all very self conscious. Finally, someone worked up the nerve to address Bass: "May I ask what your intentions are?" He answered "No. But I will tell you that I care only about maximizing profit." And, in the final analysis, he was as good as his word.

When we get down to it, Rupert Murdoch cares primarily about maximizing profit. WSJ cares primarily about serving news of capital to capitalists. A marriage made in heaven. And for the rest of us, a festivus of clarity, because we need no longer pretend that the WSJ is anything but the tool it used to proudly claim to be.

But to the bigger point. Murdoch's inevitable bedding of the Bancrofts shows why the larger discourse of freedom of expression and democracy has to pay serious attention to the larger media environment. We shouldn't think of this intercourse as occurring among consenting adults and therefore being nobody else's business. He has TOO MUCH POWER. Any fool knows that. And so the NYT report, which worked very hard to come up with the same facts that everyone who cares already knew, framed the whole issue as one of journalistic independence. But Rupert doesn't express his power that way. In the one money quote in the whole long report, an insider puts it very clearly:

A former HarperCollins executive, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the company, said Mr. Murdoch was less hands-on than people assumed. “It’s not done in a direct way where he issues instructions,” the executive said. “It’s a bunch of people running around trying to please him.”

Just what we need in the media--more people running around trying to please Rupert.

But shouldn't he be as free as any other citizen? Yes, but only AS free. He's far more free than you or me. Unless we've turned back the clock to the nineteenth century.

2007-06-06T15:04:00.000-07:00

Is it Possible for Congress to End a War?

By this I don't mean to ask whether it's constitutionally possible--of course it is. Congress can vote to undeclare a war and to unfund a war, and although SCOTUS may uphold the Pres-o-dent's commander-in-chiefdom to do whatever, I for one would consider them nutso. They DO do nutso things, but again this isn't the question I'm asking.

THIS is the question I'm asking. Is it politically possible for Congress to end a war?

When I was in Europe for half of 2006, people repeatedly asked me how the Pres-o-dent got himself re-elected. They could see that he'd stolen the first election--no one I met doubted this--but then after 9/11, massive deficits, Enron, Iraq, and all the rest, a kind of unprecedented display of incompetence and crookedness, how did he actually do better the second time around? After fumbling a few times, I settled on a foolproof answer, which was this: The US has never voted a president out during a war. This has the virtue of being true, but moreso of being Historical. When you can come up with a Historical explanation, people will rarely put up much of a fight. The Historical seems so authoritative.

Has Congress ever ended a war? Plenty of em were unpopular with the Congresses of their day. The War of 1812 spawned an actual secessionist movement, and ALL of the nineteenth century wars faced significant Congressional opposition, but none of em actually got ended by anything except the other guy surrendering. Since World War II, though, things have been different. Wars don't get declared anymore, and they seem to last forever. But still Congress hasn't ended one, or not that I know of.

Could this change? I don't think so. First, the sitting Pres-o-dent won't let it happen. He'll hang on to his war til someone pries it from his cold post-presidential hands. He'll veto any legislation that threatens to end it. And the Congress won't impeach him, and if it did the next one would be worse. Now it would be possible for the Congress to draw a line in the sand, and say "We won't appropriate any more money for this war." The Pres-o-dent couldn't make them either. A significant majority of the public wants them to do this. But they won't, anyway. Why not?

No Congress ever has. See the power of the Historical answer? But again, why not? Who would actually not get reelected because of a vote to end the war? Representatives have a 98% reelection rate. No one would not get reelected. So why not? Because at some point the leadership would blink. Or do I think that just because the leadership blinked the last time around?

No, there's something hegemonic at work here. Tough guys don't hang tough for peace. Tough guys hang tough for war. People like me can say over and over again that it's manly to be for peace, but Congress won't buy it. And War Pres-o-dents don't get unreelected. But they should.

2007-05-08T15:28:00.000-07:00

If Murdoch buys Dow Jones,

Will it make a difference? Well, yes, obviously. It will make NewsCorp a bit more powerful, and it will make Rupert a bit happier, neither of which is what I would choose. On the other hand, I can't say that it would make the Wall Street Journal any worse. Probably the opposite. It would make it harder for the WSJ to pretend that it was the model of integrity for upscale conservatism. It owes its circulation to the forced subscriptions of the business class, and it owes its editorial influence to a shameless disregard for truth and a willingness to pander.

I find it unreadable as a whole newspaper; it's one of the few newspapers that I prefer to read as disarticulated items on the web. Typically I prefer reading the paper version of a newspaper because of the inefficiency of it. I like having to physically turn pages to get past the items I don't want to read. I like having to see and acknowledge everything in the newspaper to read what I want to read. It makes me hear the voice of the paper and it allows me to feel that I'm part of a community of readers. The web version of most papers don't allow that. They encourage you to go directly to items of interest--they narrowcast themselves. The WSJ is more palatable if you can consume it that way--if you can skim the information from the pages without having to hear the voice of the paper or feel part of its community of readers. To me, it's more that way than any of Rupert's other properties.

Stuart Hall once described the encounter of feminism with cultural studies this way: We invited them to come in the front door and eat at the table with us. They came in through the window and shat on the table. (Hall thought this was an altogether appropriate way for the oppressed to make their entrance, by the way.) Rupert ain't oppressed, but he sure is coming in through the window, and you can see the folks at the table cringeing, expecting a big steamy one any minute now. It doesn't break my heart.

2007-04-07T09:37:00.000-07:00

It's Almost as if...

Those Brits were being held by the US. Here's one of the captives' statement, from the BBC:

We were blindfolded, our hands were bound, we were forced up against the wall. Throughout our ordeal we faced constant psychological pressure.

Later we were stripped and dressed in pyjamas. The next few nights were spent in stone cells approximately 8ft by 6ft, sleeping on piles of blankets.

All of us were kept in isolation. We were interrogated most nights and presented with two options.

If we admitted we had strayed, we would be back on a plane to the UK pretty soon. If we didn't, we faced up to seven years in prison.

Well that's pretty rotten, and perhaps some rules of international detention were broken; I don't know the laws. But I come from the land of Gitmo. Where are the dogs and the waterboarding? Seven years? Where's the indefinite detention as an enemy combatant? And how is it that these innocent people quickly confessed to something they almost certainly didn't do when all the forms of "psychological pressure" Alberto Gonzalez and Don Rumsfeld dreamed up can't get the men they call the worst people in the world to confess to things that they're proud of?

See, that's the problem with asymmetrical warfare.

But seriously, the Iranians keep failing to adopt democratic best practices. Why can't they follow our example? Here they have committed a deliberate provocation, and the end result seems to be a thaw in diplomatic relations with the British. What they want to do in order to promote the new world order is to blunder into a provocative situation, then refuse to negotiate, escalate the conflict, and declare a clash of civilizations. And the Brits...well, what can you say about these people? They act as if diplomats are there for diplomacy. No wonder they lost their empire.

2007-02-20T13:46:00.000-08:00

Pandagon Makes a Good Point

on TPM Cafe today. She's discussing the meaning of the controversy (although I should use some less stately word for it, like ruckus or fooforaw) the right blogosphere ginned up over her and Shakespeare's Sister blogging for the Edwards campaign.

What does this have to do with the clash between bloggers and the mainstream media/political establishment? Having my words taken out of context and used to discredit me showed me how the soundbite culture contributes to anti-democratic elitism and shutting the rabble out of the political system. In the mainstream media right now, politics is a long, drawn-out game of "gotcha", and the result is that everyone who wants to be in politics is scared to ever say anything interesting or thoughtful for fear that it will be taken out of context and used relentlessly to discredit them. The result is that ordinary people are routinely turned off to politics, to the point where getting more than half of registered voters to vote in any one election is considered some sort of amazing victory.

This is where blogs step in, at least on the left. Blogging is a real counterpoint to the thoughtless, elitist, soundbite-driven mainstream media, where we're supposed to absorb an endless stream of soundbites and photo ops and our participation is limited mostly to a vote every couple of years. Blogs are bringing back the 19th century debate culture, where people would attend real debates and political rallies and listen to speeches for hours at a time. The irony about the vulgar people is that the vulgar people crave analysis, debate and participation, because these things validate our intelligence and our right to be citizens. The blogs are still appealing only to a small segment of society right now, but they're still relatively new and have the potential to reach a much larger audience over time.

This especially struck me today as I was teaching from William Manning's 200+-year-old "Key to Libberty," a vernacular critique of the press and political system of the 1790s. Manning, a farmer who had taught himself history and political science by reading newspapers, complained that the "few" had disenfranchised the "many" by bankrolling controversialists who want to keep public discourse in a constant state of ruckus or fooforaw, making it impossible for an ordinary person to find the time to winnow through all the foofaraw or ruckus to get to the actual and significant truths on which to base political action. End result: disaffection, and continued elite rule.

This history has little to teach us. Any significant concentration of power at any location in a political system will create a privileged space of discourse for itself. People always try to force light into the darkened chambers, but the talk of power keeps shifting its ground, finding new places. Once it was thought that televizing Congressional proceedings would throw open the decision making process to public supervision. But now not even the most dedicated CSpan junkie believes she's watching actual decision-making. And, by the time we're done genuflecting to the posturing, everything has moved on.

I think the right thing happened with the Edwards campaign. The blogosphere is a nice space for sophisticated controversy, and it can generate some currents in tree-tops public opinion, while at the same time enforcing certain requirements for intellectual honesty. Bloggers with a real voice--Pandagon, for instance--have credibility in the blogosphere because of their independence and integrity. Signing up with a campaign puts that influence at risk--not quite but almost like Armstrong Williams--while imposing an etiquette that does violence to the voice and integrity of the blogger. Edwards didn't bow to pressure, at least as far as I know. He earned my respect for behaving like he believes in the Bill of Rights, which is rare for a pres-o-dential candidate, even--especially--if a lawyer by training. The right wing voices didn't intimidate anyone, I hope, and don't have cause for gloating. Instead of being silenced, the bloggers have returned to their sphere of greatest influence, newly adorned with the red badge of courage, or the scarlet letter, or what have you. They are smart enough and tough enough to swing with it.

Is the public discourse richer? Yes, not because the campaign discourse has been enriched--it hasn't, and we can expect the candidates to remain insipid until their focus groups tell them to stop--but because the rest of us are still working to push the conversation onward, leftward, and into more interesting terrain.

2007-01-31T20:27:00.000-08:00

Would Molly Ivins Have Written about the Missing Comma?

She's dead at 62--an age that seems younger to me all the time. She should have lived out the current pres-O-dency. She deserved that. But can you think of a more galling time to die? The democrats are poised to win the White House in 2008, and already there are three "Howard Dean's Scream" moments in the press coverage. There's Obama's madrassa; there's Clinton's bad joke about her experience with evil and dangerous men; and now there's Biden's misleadingly transcribed remarks about Obama being the first mainstream African-American candidate. Articulate, clean, etc. (Hard to take Biden seriously; maybe he was channeling Neil Kinnock again.)

It's a sign of the hollowness of our politics that these isolated sub-rhetorical moments get so much attention. Molly Ivins (and for a time the blog-O-sphere) insisted that we focus our attention on more serious things, like class and cultural values. Well.

Will the new Congress make it harder for employers to bust unions? That's what any serious progressive should be talking about. Not whether Biden's a fool. Which of the candidates are especially friendly to organized labor, and why won't they headline that commitment? That's what the people who police their utterances should be probing for. Oh well.

2007-01-15T11:30:00.000-08:00

From today's NYT article about controversy over labor issues and management heavy-handedness at the Santa-Barbara CA News-Press:

When asked why Mrs. McCaw has consistently chosen legal action when she has felt wronged, rather than engaging in dialogue with readers or her news staff, he said, “A cease-and-desist letter is a form of dialogue.”

No comment.

2007-01-15T11:20:00.000-08:00

Here's a gem.

From today's NYT article on cutbacks at Time inc., which will mean the end of lavish team reporting but a return of authorial voice (I'll believe that when I see it):

Larry Hackett, managing editor of People, said the new reporting model would not preclude putting several correspondents on one piece when the news warrants it, as it often does these days with the peripatetic Ms. Spears.

Yes, Britney Spears often merits multiple reporters from a single magaz. That's the state of the news media.

Oh well, they are following their market. I can't deny it. When you sit in a doctor's waiting room and check out what people are reading, it's not Parents or BusinessWeek or Golf Digest or US News and World Report. So let them eat Britney.

But shouldn't there be some way for the Britney interest to subsidize something more useful to public discourse? Not with the tyranny of the click, apparently.

2007-01-15T09:46:00.000-08:00

Media Reform

means many things. This is one of the blandest possible points to make about this past weekend's big media reform conference in Memphis. The attendance figure given by the organizers was upwards of 3000, and that was no exaggeration. These 3k activists, scholars, and interested citizens assembled into a very cool audience, and I was happy to be among them.

I'm fortunate to be an insider and an outsider at the same time. I know a lot of the insiders, enough to pick up on the vibe, but am unentangled, and hence don't care that there are tensions between positions and that people can be pissed off about their relative share of the program.

So when a friend told me that he thought "the people are to the left of the program," I could see his point. The attendees tend to be younger, hipper, and more radical than the folk they're listening to. At the same time, it hardly seems that the organization is turning into PBS--that is, an official grown-up culture that means to impose itself on ordinary folk. Of course, there's the Bill Moyers of it all. And he did begin his keynote by urging the movement to avoid schisms. It's not that any of the hiphop activists in the crowd didn't agree with him, but I can't imagine they were all very interested. And there is an asymmetry between the crowing over stopping the legislative abolition of network neutrality and the anguish over Iraq and Katrina. It's like we asked for a brain and we got a diploma.

But it's all about the direction of change. It's grand that Bill Moyers and the hiphop artists are moving in the same direction.

I left Memphis with the feeling that things WERE beginning to move in the right direction. It'll take a few weeks of avoiding cable news for that feeling to take root. I'll also have to ignore the lack of attention that the whole affair received outside the bubble of progressive media. There was an item in USA Today, but it was on the business page, it was short, and it concerned only the release of studies questioning the need for cross-ownership when the profitability of newspapers and broadcast stations is secure.

2007-01-08T12:33:00.000-08:00

The Last Three Movies I Watched

were Blood Diamond, Children of Men, and Casino Royale, in that order. These are very similar movies--you might say they're all the same movie. They feature three very manly actors playing deeply scarred characters who come to struggle against global domination. Now Susan Douglas and others have made the point that generic characters and plots usually don't come out of thin air. Douglas pointed this out in connection with early 1960s television, in which suddenly lots of sitcoms featured women with supernatural powers whose husbands/male partners wanted them to hide them. (The three that come immediately to mind are The Flying Nun, I Dream of Jeannie, and Bewitched.) At the same time, sitcoms like Gomer Pyle and Hogan's Heroes featured goofball hijinx in the US Marines and Nazi POW camps. Surely these commented in an obscure (ideological?) way on feminism and the war in Vietnam.

The War on Terror speaks to me through these movies. All three of them express reservations, on the surface, about the world order that the War on Terror is being fought to protect; all of them, in fact, see terror as a fiction of the inequalities in that world order. The Children of Men is most impressive in this regard, with the seige of a refugee camp in Britain filmed as if it were in the West Bank, with sympathies fully arrayed on the side of the nonwhite population of the camp. (I wonder if this sequence will be perceived as a comment on the Palestinian situation?) Likewise, though Blood Diamond showcases demonically cruel black guerillas and mercenaries, these are clearly epiphenomenal to the international diamond cartel that bankrolls them. Casino Royale's mad bombers--there are two great action sequences in which Bond tangles with unspeaking and almost superhuman mayhem artists--are the pawns of international capitalists. So it is the War on Terror's rhetoric upside down, as it were--it's not that fanatics that threaten us, but the money power or the establishment.

But this terror comes, at a deeper level, out of the very vortex of globalization. All of these movies are about a stateless world and the manly men who must police it. In each case, the hero is thrown back into a state of nature. Women, of varying degrees of constancy and usefulness, are there to accompany them, but in the end the men must prevail through blood and sacrifice. Now I must not give away any of the endings of these movies, but not all the good guys make it out alive, this despite dodging an awful lot of bullets.

Bond, of course, does. He must recur as a character, even as he mutates as an actor. Bond is essentially comedic, though. At the end of each episode, the status quo is restored with a mating. This one ends a bit differently than the usual, but that's because it's a prequel. It breaks with formula in another way, though: it lacks the smirk, or the camp, of previous Bond movies. This is the War on Terror. The Cold War could go campy. From Russia with Love, indeed. The War on Terror is no laughing matter, or at least no giggling matter.

It's by now redundant to point to the phallic significance of 9/11--the felling of two stationary penises by two flying ones. What stands out in the rhetoric after is the wholesale transference of the performance of victimhood from women and nonwhites to the white male nation in the form of the Pres-O-Dent. The movies I've recently chanced to see--certainly this is no representative sample of current cinema--comment wrily on all that jazz, but don't have sufficient irony at their disposal to shake free of the gender politics of 9/11. And two of em are British. Imagine that. Then again, I saw them while Tony Blair was hanging out in Miami with one of the Brothers Gibb--his own "BeeGee Rebozo," if anyone old enough to get the pun reads this. Happy new year.

2006-12-13T11:04:00.000-08:00

Today's WTF Moment

comes in the NYT article on Iran's Holocaust Denial conference. It's really the last line of this excerpt, which is the last line of the piece as published:

Despite the promises of open-mindedness, when one participant talked about the scholarship confirming the Holocaust, his views were quickly dismissed.

That speaker, an Iranian historian, Gholamreza Vatandoust, from Shiraz University, said, “Some facts about the Holocaust have been documented.” But he was criticized immediately by Robert Faurisson, a French academic, who said he had never found documents to support the Holocaust.

One of a few ultra-Orthodox rabbis at the conference, Moshe Ayre Friedman from Austria, said, “I am not a denier of the Holocaust, but I think it is legitimate to cast doubt on some statistics.”

Ultra-Orthodox Holocaust denial? Well I never. So who is he? First, his middle name is Arye, not Ayre--does no one proofread at the Times anymore? He opposes the creation of the state of Israel--he's THAT Orthodox. When told that G-d himself would be catering the event, he said "I'll just have fruit." (OK, an old joke.) And here's his picture, courtesy of Al Jazeerah, lighting a candle for Arafat: http://www.aljazeerah.info/News%20Photos/2004%20News%20photos/November/5-7n.htm: scroll down. Oh the unruly multiplicity of the world, which is always much weirder than our accounts of it.

Nuttiness on this order is not amusing, of course. What's surprising is that there's not a whole lot more on this fellow when I google him. Why's that? It would seem that an ultra-Orthodox holocaust denier would be sort of a natural man-bites-dog affair, and in the news a bit more often than he turns out to be. Must remember to lexis-nexis him....

2006-12-12T14:39:00.000-08:00

Can Obama Be For Real Without a Tie and With an "Arab-sounding" Name?

Everyone today seems to be remarking on Jeff Greenfield's bizarre comments on Obama's look. From TPM, here's an except:

But, in the case of Obama, he may be walking around with a sartorial time bomb. Ask yourself, is there any other major public figure who dresses the way he does? Why, yes. It is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who, unlike most of his predecessors, seems to have skipped through enough copies of "GQ" to find the jacket-and-no-tie look agreeable.

And maybe that's not the comparison a possible presidential contender really wants to evoke.
Now, it is one thing to have a last name that sounds like Osama and a middle name, Hussein, that is probably less than helpful. But an outfit that reminds people of a charter member of the axis of evil, why, this could leave his presidential hopes hanging by a thread. Or is that threads?

Do we all really have that much time on our hands? Surely someone as smart as Greenfield could find something more interesting to say about someone as smart as Obama.

Or is political coverage really only about describing what buttons are being pushed?

Now surely this is an interesting ethnicity-morph. Sure, Dems and Reps both want to think of him as black, and already his blackness is being called into question. He ain't really black, just like all those affirmative action beneficiaries at the Ivy League schools ain't really black--this is one plan of attack. But if he ain't black, what is he? He ain't white. Why, he's an Ay-Rab. Of course, a real jihadi. I'm sure Osama has the phrase "audacity of hope" tattoed on his arm in Arabic.

As an Arab-American myself, I've been an interested observer of the way middle-easterners have been getting progressively less white since 9/11. So I wonder what it was about Obama that made Greenfield make the connection. In middle eastern terms, wouldn't his other name, Barack, link him with the Israeli side of things? And in policy terms isn't he rather pro-Israeli? How important is the whiteness factor?

This post has more question marks than my usual. I think this is because the Obama phenomenon is so hard to get a grip on. You can see to what lengths someone like Greenfield has to go to say something fresh about him without dealing with him on policy terms. Feel the condescension of it, too. The political reporters can't make it fit into the usual frames, and so look for the kinds of angles that rubes and hicks can reckon with. It's the same way sports reporters, for instance, approach female audiences--not as sports fans but as presumptive admirers of players' butts.

2006-11-08T19:57:00.000-08:00

Dean Baquet and Donald Rumsfeld....

Lose their jobs on the same day. Rumsfeld earned it the old-fashioned way, by being incompetent. Baquet followed a different but also time-honored path to unemployment; he was insubordinate.

Baquet was the editor in chief of the LA Times, and the Tribune Co., the parent company of the Times, had to fire him--they had already fired the publisher of the Times--after he refused to make staff cuts. More staff cuts, one should say; the Times had already bled plenty of newsroom workers. The Tribune Co., though, answers to shareholders and has the Chandler family on its ass, and so demands a high profit margin from its properties--in the neighborhood of 20%, well above the average return for Fortune 500 companies, and certainly extravagant for a prestige newspaper in a shrinking industry.

Rumsfeld, on the other hand, did everything he was asked; he's taking the fall for an incompetent boss (Dick Cheney). The failures of his outfit have been spectacular. How did he stick around so long? Loyalty? Hm. Tell that to Colin Powell. Will he have interesting stories to tell?

It is tempting to draw a comparison between Iraq and the news industry. In both cases, leaders don't seem to have grasped the kind of struggle they're involved in. The Tribune Co. at least seemed to understand that it's long-term future depends on cultivating a new generation of newspaper readers--or at least that was the cover story for their experiment with the RedEye, which they appear to have declared a success. Rumsfeld too, though, consistently talked up his mission to modernize the military. In both cases, though, the technocrats are out of touch with their troops.

There's the blogospheric equivalent of dancing in the streets about Rumsfeld's departure. My joy is tempered. The mainstream news media continue to slide in terms of enterprise reporting; the explosion of voices in internet-land depends for its daily grub on the product of especially newspapers like the LA Times. The plankton are dying, my friends. Though I'm glad we retired a bullfighter, that's a small victory for the animal kingdom.

2006-10-01T19:32:00.000-07:00

Has Dennis Hastert called the Pope yet?

Because this all seems pretty familiar. By "this" I mean the Mark Foley fiasco. By "familiar" I mean the 70 or so students at my old high school that a very friendly priest turned out to have molested over a period of a quarter of a century or so. I liked the guy myself, and probably still would, but he died in prison last year. And do you think the local Catholic leadership knew he had a "problem?" Yes, of course. They thought they'd "cured him. Three times, I think.

I recall chatting with a DC-area carpenter a few years ago, and hearing him say that he'd heard gossip from people whose houses he'd worked on claiming that the Hill was full of people with an itch for illicit sex, that something about power seemed to bring that out. Well, yes, of course. When I was in high school, I worked on a campaign for Jerry Springer (yes, that Jerry Springer), who became mayor and then resigned in disgrace when he was linked with a call girl ring. When I mentioned this to the carpenter, he said something like "well he wasn't screwing little boys." Pedophiles in Congress? So gossip had it. Did the leadership know? Don't be absurd. I'm sure everyone knew. (Everyone always knows, only usually it isn't true.)

So I'm keeping my eye out for the Catholic connection. I haven't seen it yet in the news, but then I haven't been reading it carefully. And it's the sort of thing that will turn up in a second- or third-day analysis story, the kind of story the Times calls a "Q-head," I think. You know, the kind with the headline "The Powerful and Young Sex," the kind that begins with something about Socrates. Perhaps an article of this nature will mention that the Congressional chieftains are referred to by staffers and others on the Hill as "Cardinals." It's a cute detail, like, you know, Socrates.

This will be a kind of interesting test of the capacities of the political press system. The party leaders will certainly not try to draw comparisons; ordinary people, especially Catholics of my generation, certainly will. Let's see whose thinking the press reflects.

2006-09-29T07:46:00.000-07:00

The Detainee Bill

Count me in among those who condemn the Democrats for cowardice on this one. How amazing is it that the Senate leadership couldn't muster the votes to filibuster, or rather that they chose not to? Do they no longer have faith in the strength of human rights as a campaign issue? Or are they convinced that fear will rule in this election again? Perhaps they're hoping, with an eye on the situation in Iraq, that fear WILL rule, and it will work for them. Democrats are pragmatic, after all.

The New York Times yesterday compared this bill with the Alien and Sedition Acts, and I think they're right on the single dimension of constitutional embarrassment. When the history of the past five years is taught half a century from now, the people who voted for this bill will have disappeared their support, just as there are no longer any proud opponents of the Civil Rights Act or proud supporters of Japanese internment. By then, US global hegemony will have gone the way of cheap oil, and international standards of human rights will have been instituted using the US as an exemplar of the barbaric past. Our children will have a much harder time pretending that they live in the freest place on Earth.

Perhaps the Supreme Court will gut this bill. We can hope so. It does seem patently unconstitutional. But the Court is a pragmatic body.

One could also hope that the next Congress guts it. But this doesn't seem likely, with even a reliable progressive like Sherrod Brown voting in favor. Yes, Sherrod Brown. What's the world coming to?

2006-09-19T06:49:00.000-07:00

Not connecting the dots

Somini Sengupta, whose journalism I generally admire, does a good report on suicides among farmers in India. This is a story that the Indian journalist P. Sainath has been covering for a few years now. Sainath bats from the left side of the plate, and connects the dots. Sengupta throws all the dots at you, which is pretty good, but won't call it what it is--neoliberal economic policies killing people. Instead, in her largest framing paragraph, she retails the neoliberal line:

Subsidies, once a linchpin of Indian economic policy, have dried up for virtually everyone but the producers of staple food grains. Indian farmers now must compete or go under. To compete, many have turned to high-cost seeds, fertilizers and pesticides, which now line the shelves of even the tiniest village shops.

But read the whole thing in today's NYTimes. The story is all there--good journalists don't blink the facts. And if you go through the NYTimes archive you'll find a similar story on farmer suicides in China, and one on the US as well, and you'll find a number of reports on broken down trade negotiations and agricultural subsidies in the US and Europe and you'll also find reports on intellectual property disputes and biological information and Monsanto--the corporation that sold the seeds that banrupted the farmer in India who Sengupta profiles in today's story. Just no connecting the dots.

2006-09-15T11:05:00.000-07:00

Is Waterboarding Torture?

Yes.

By way of the Daily Show, which remains indispensable, I saw pieces of the Pres-o-dent's appearance on the Today Show. I had to pause the dvr to explain to my wife what "waterboarding" means. It's only when you say these things out loud that you realize just how awful they are. Now the Pres-o-dent wants to tell us that waterboarding is not torture. And his attorney general has memoed that it isn't torture because it doesn't cause "grievous bodily harm," if I recall the phrase correctly. Whoa. Neither does attaching electrodes to your testicles, I guess.

But when confronted with the brutality of this, the apologists always say something like "we need this tool to protect you and your families." This is not an argument that waterboarding ISN'T torture; it's an argument that IT IS, but that we gotta do it anyway. And even on that score it's a bizarre argument. First, it's obvious that in the long run lowering the standards on torture makes the world more dangerous for everyone, including me and my family. I haven't heard a serious argument on the other side of this question. But second, I've yet to hear any evidence that IN THE SHORT RUN torture has saved any lives. In fact, the torturers at Abu Graib managed to produce a kind of hallucinogenic intelligence environment, one in which decisions were made that sent the occupation seriously off the skids. No doubt the waterboarding of Al Qaida detainees has produced equally distorted intelligence, and may be one reason why the war on terror more generally has gone of the skids.

Isn't it remarkable that the nation depends on four Republican senators to keep us from embracing the mutilation of the world's consensus on torture?

2006-08-18T08:20:00.000-07:00

The War in Lebanon

Juan Cole notes an interesting Zogby poll today. The headline result shows the US public dubious about the government's support of Israel:

Americans were split as to whether current U.S. policy is as fair with the government in Lebanon as it is with Israel – 35% agreed the U.S. was equally fair to both nations, while 37% said the U.S. favored Israel. Another 28% said they were not sure.

Israel and Hezbollah had been fighting for nearly a month before an agreement on a cease–fire was struck and went into effect earlier this week.

Overall, Do you agree or disagree that U.S. policy is as fair with the democratic government of Lebanon as it is with the democratic government of Israel?

The poll found a clear majority favoring US neutrality, and suggested that the perception that the US favored Israel--certainly a correct perception--indicates that the government is out of step with the people. I wouldn't disagree.

On the other hand, no one surveyed thought that the US should take Hizbollah's side. This is the most significant finding, I think. A majority of the population wants the US to stay out of, well, the rest of the world, as much as possible, except when threatened or when selling cars, movies, hamburgers, or Jesus Christ. That there's still a large segment that wants the US to support Israel in this war indicates relatively strong backing. And of course the votecounters know that the pro-Israel public will vote on their preference, whereas the others won't. One reason why no politician will try to appeal to the anti-Israel public is because the one that exists, such as it is, will not pay back at election time. As I suggested previously, this is a case in which partisanism restricts the range of public deliberation.

2006-08-15T13:51:00.000-07:00

Has the Blogosphere Become HyperPartisan?

Today Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum both strike a note of disappointment over the disappearance of an intellectual middle ground in the blogosphere. They recall an earlier, happier time when bloggers like themselves had a freer range of play in policy debates. They're right, of course. It was only a few years ago when Drum and Marshall on the middle left could have something like a conversation with Sullivan and Instapundit on the right. Now when they reference across the aisle at all it's to play gotcha. They think that the Bush years produced this, but I think it was more specifically the election of 2004. By election day, left and right networks of blogs had become pretty self-enclosed.

Is there anyone to blame for this? I don't think so. In fact, it replicates the development of the political press in the first half of the nineteenth century, though in somewhat accelerated fashion. I've commented on this before. Both the technology and the authorial styles of blogging are very similar to nineteenth century partisan newspapers, which, by the end of the 1820s, had become hyper-partisan. The difference between the two situations is that blogging has mainstream journalism existing alongside it, while nineteenth century partisan newspapering WAS mainstream journalism. This only means that the partisanism of the blogosphere is not as momentous, and in fact could be a lot more extreme without justifying real alarm.

Hyperpartisanism in the nineteenth century DID justify real alarm. Left and right together beat up on the extremes, and did what they could to promote the violent suppression of such exotic movements as abolitionism, feminism, and socialism. Read what mainstream newspapers had to say about antislavery activists, or better yet about African-Americans, and it will knock you for a loop.

Today's blogosphere alarmism is about the power of the extremes. I'm not worried about that. It would be nice if the blogosphere had continued to model an open and somewhat nonpartisan arena of deliberation. But too much gravity pulled the other way. I worry about the forces in public discourse that make it harder to argue unpopular truths. I don't think the blogosphere is one of them. Here's a nice test that today's headlines offer. Who in US politics has openly criticized US support for Israel's attacks on Lebanon? Which Senators and Representatives have staked out a position on the middle east that a neutral observer could call unfriendly to Israel? Who, for instance, has called for freezing US funds until Israel ceases to bomb targets that are not clearly military? I'm unaware of any. Now, personally, I wouldn't promote such a position, but I would say that it should not be outside the bounds of public discourse. And it isn't in the blogosphere. But it is in Congress. So what does this tell us?

2006-08-14T12:10:00.000-07:00

Flying while Ay-rab

The recent arrests and dramatic announcements of the UK-centered terrorist plot to bomb flights to the US have had the usual twisted political effect. The Pres-o-dent and his operatives have loudly proclaimed them a vindication of counter-terrorism policies. Whoah. The only thing more absurd is, if you can imagine it, what they would have said if the attacks had succeeded. "Orwellian" is an overused word, but what do you call it when the failure of the Iraq War is trotted out as the justification for the war itself? The increasing threat of terrorist attacks resulting from the War is a retroactive excuse for why the War is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks.

Weirder yet is the way some commentators seize on these arrests--achieved through assiduous human intelligence--a "mole" inserted after the 7/7 subway attacks--as a vindication of the NSA wiretap program.

And today more evidence has emerged that the announcements themselves were timed according to political calculation, and that, perhaps, the arrests themselves had been made prematurely because of US pressure to produce headlines that would turn the political discourse back to terrorism. Of course we can believe this to be the case. It's happened routinely in the past.

But the mystery remains as to why the Pres-o-dent's men can be so confident that this news--this very bad news--should shore up their political support. No, it's not very mysterious. They can count on an instinctive anti-Ay-rab racism to square this circle. The great public will not make the connection between Bush administration policies and the threat of terrorism because it's Ay-rabs we're talking about, and they're BORN terrorists.

But if you're not convinced, check out two news stories that became front-page material in the wake of the UK arrests. One involves a group of Egyptian study-abroad students who for some reason decided not to go to Bozeman, Montana to attend the month-long course they'd signed up for. Suppose they'd been from Ukraine; would anyone have cared? And the news stories carefully point out that there is no suspicion of terrorism-related activities. So why is this news?

The other story involves three Ay-rab types from Texas who were pulled over in Michigan for driving while Ay-rab. Their van was found to contain a thousand cellphones, the prepaid disposable kind. They say they buy them from suppliers and then sell them for $5 a piece more, but that, because Texas is already saturated, they drove up to Michigan, where law enforcement officers now suspect they want to blow up the big bridge at Michilimackinac. Sure, with a thousand cellphones and no explosives. Suppose these three hapless Ay-rabs had been Mexicans. Would they be sitting in jail waiting for someone to post $750K in bail a piece? OK, maybe, but would it be news? And would anyone think they were terrorists?

But, as I've asked many times already on this blog, where's the payoff for any politician to point this out? Only on the horizon. And you can't count on the news media to help you, either. They're too busy trying to put human faces on the problem--demonic, Ay-rab, bearded Muslim human faces.

2006-07-25T15:14:00.000-07:00

Back in the Prairie

I've returned to the States, and now to my blog as well, after weeks of very happy travel through Europe. It's weird to be back, especially because so little has changed.

Today I read through Kevin Drum that a new Harris Poll shows US Americans more likely than a year ago to believe in the Pres-o-dent's rationales for the War in Iraq. How interesting. Drum's comment:

Amazing, isn't it? As the prewar facts become clearer and Iraq spirals further into civil war, the American public becomes ever more withdrawn from reality. Even if complaints from us shrill liberal bloggers are dismissed, surely poll results like this should get the media pondering the question of whether they're doing a very good job of reporting what's really going on.

Or more likely it's something in the water. No, seriously. The problem isn't in the news media's messages on Iraq, on WMD, or on Al Qaeda. It's in the water. Why did US Americans ever think that Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda in the first place? Because he was an Arab. I mean, an Ay-Rab. So why would the attitudes of the US public have shifted again toward the delusional? Because their tv screens have been filled with uppity Ay-Rabs again. In other words, the problem isn't misinformation. It's racism. What is to be done about that? First, call it by its name. Then, wait a hundred years. Racists don't so much change their minds as, well, die.

But the racism of the public isn't the CAUSE of the War in Iraq. It's at best one of several enabling conditions. The cause of the War rests in tangible actions by elected and unelected officials who should all be in jail by now. Why is that unimaginable?

2006-06-02T01:54:00.000-07:00

What Have the Embeds Done for You Lately?

It's gratifying to see that the massacre at Haditha has become a front-page topic, forcing the pres-o-dent to respond to it two days running. And today news organizations are following reports that there are other atrocities (I'm deliberately using strong language here) under investigation by the military. There will be, we are promised, Congressional investigations. A little too little and a little too late to mitigate the failures of the war policies, but perhaps in time to recoup some national reputation. Probably not. The overseas press is a bit more into Haditha, I think. Yesterday's Aftenposten, the Norwegian equivalent of the NYT, had a two-page inside feature with a front-page teaser. Today the BBC is reporting another massacre by US troops, and it has video. Google News shows that the world's press is all over the killing of a pregnant woman at a checkpoint the other day. That, coupled with the riots in Kabul, paint a damning picture of US war policy in action. It looks doubtful that any number of investigations will restore respect for the US in the eyes of the world, but it might do the trick for the US public.

The US public is going to be far more forgiving. First, it is patriotic, and global condemnation will probably produce and equal and opposite reaction, a greater tolerance for atrocities. After all, the US public will not doubt the purity of motivation of its own troops. They are "scared kids." They are not "steely eyed killers," a term used by their own commanders, though in a more positive context. The US public has also been fed on a steady diet of "let's support our brave troops" by the administration, both parties, and the media. The media have followed that script not just because the administration wrote it for them but because they believed it reflected popular knowledge--these are boys and girls from our home towns--and because they found it writing itself through their shared experiences on the ground.

Which brings us to the embeds. There are still hundreds of embeds in Iraq, if I'm correct. As the atrocity stories dribble out, look carefully to see if a single one of them comes from an embed. So far, there have been the torture stories that came from photos our boys and girls in uniform shot and circulated themselves. There have been stories circulating on the internet through sites like Nowthat'sfuckedup.com that have also come from the troops. There have been stories derived from leaked investigations. There have been stories from the overseas press. There have been stories based on complaints by Iraqi authorities. But there hasn't been an atrocity story from an embed.

There are two possible reasons for this. Either the units the embeds join don't commit atrocities (and certainly the military officials who place the embeds would take care to keep them out of volatile situations) or the embeds just don't see them. Probably the former.

But then there are atrocities that reporters, embedded or otherwise, won't call atrocities. I'm thinking here of the air war. The Haditha massacre occurred after a roadside bomb exploded; then, the reports say, enraged Marines lined up nearby civilians and shot them. In the air war, when hostile action is detected, a plane is called in and drops a bomb. The results are likely to be the same--dead civilians who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or who may have passively supported insurgent or terrorist activity (I'll be even-handed on this wording). That's not an atrocity from the cockpit. The pilot doesn't kill innocent civilians in cold blood. It's an atrocity from the ground, though. No embed would be on the ground. It's also an atrocity from the office where the orders are issued, I'd argue. The commanders know that the air war will kill innocents. They then make a cost-benefit analysis. That is, they kill in cold blood. But this is highly abstract for reporters, and won't make the news in any case. Plus, in their defense, the commanders do what they can to minimize collateral damage.

But in any case the US press, in spite of or because of its embeds, its big investment in on-the-ground coverage, is going to be behind the rest of the world on the big story of the war these days. This will make it quite difficult for the US public and politicians to do the right thing.

2006-06-01T03:14:00.000-07:00

The World is Flat Footed.

I'm in Norway, near the top of the world, and experiencing the sort of dissonance that William Gibson does such a good job of describing in his interesting book Pattern Recognition. The protagonist of that novel is a young woman who flies from global city to global city, and spends a lot of the book getting over jet lag and the feeling that she's in some bizarre mirror world, where people are the same as in her own world but somehow reversed, so they, for instance, drive on the wrong side of the road. I've been here for two months, and so have no jet lag to speak of, but the endless days cultivate the same feeling. The sun goes down between 10 and 11, but it doesn't go far enough down. It just tucks itself under the western horizon, then rolls around the northern horizon until it pops up again in the east. There's always light in the sky. I go to bed around 1 am and it still feels like sunset. Or sunrise.

Then there's the mirror world thing. This is mostly cultural. So, for instance, all the pop music is in English. It's festival season here, and there's free outdoor music most evenings, and good bands playing. The crowds are similar to the ones you'd see at similar events in cities of similar size in the States--middle-aged with a smattering of kids at the jazz events; high schoolers, university students, and young adults and the rock shows; old farts (and younger prefarts) at the classical music. So while the music is going you could be in Urbana or Madison or Austin. Then the music stops and someone starts talking Norsk, which I can only vanishingly decipher. Everyone except the youngest children can also speak English, however. So in the middle of a monolog, you'll get an effortless code switch.

The TV even more so. Last night we tuned in Jeopardy on a Swedish station--same set, same format, but Swedes. Repurposed pop culture is everywhere, but more usual still is unaltered imported product.

So the other night this touched close to home twice in a row. First, the original Ocean's 11 was on one of the Norwegian national channels. I have a personal connection to that movie, because a relative of mine is in it. Not much of a role, though. He is in a teller's booth next to the one that Frank Sinatra uses. My uncle Emil, aka Jelly, Wehby was a minor mob player who befriended the rat pack on stops to the Beverly Hills dinner club in northern Kentucky. He also ran money to Vegas. So on one of his trips he crashed the set of Ocean's 11, and they stuck him in the picture. For half a second.

After Ocean's 11, it was still light out so we stayed up and watched a rerun of Seinfeld. Again, a personal connection. It was the episode in which Jerry and his current girlfriend make out during Schindler's List. At the end of the episode, her father confronts and berates Jerry. The actor playing the father--he died a few years ago--was married to my wife's father's third wife and was the stepfather to our two half-sisters. I met him only once, but saw him on screen many times.

In the mediasphere these fleeting connections repeat over and over everywhere in the world. I recall watching Isabella Rosselini on a talk show one time recounting how she tried to explain to her five year old daughter that she has a famous grandmother. 'She was in movies. Let's see if any are on now.' And when she flipped on the tv, sure enough, there was a scene from an Ingrid Bergman movie. Now we can't all be Isabella Rosselini. And we can't all be Jelly Wehby. But step back just one more step, and there we are, wherever we may be.

2006-05-30T03:40:00.000-07:00

On the Death of James W. Carey

He was magnetic. He was the smartest person in any room. He was the best-liked person you’ve ever known. Sure, he was a fine husband and father; but he was an incomparable teacher and mentor.

One of my favorite pieces to teach from is his essay, ‘A Plea for the University Tradition.’ It was initially published, like many of his essays, in a relatively obscure journal, and then republished as his Presidential Address to the Association for Education in Journalism in that organizations main journal, Journalism Quarterly. It was his first and (I think) only JQ publication, a fact that always tickled Jim, who would recall that he had previously submitted many things to JQ, but they had all been rejected, usually with great condescension: ‘the author is not ready,’ but ‘we encourage you to keep working.’ As I’ve read and reread that piece, I’ve come to realize that every interesting thought that’s been worked over in the field of media communication over the past quarter century is somehow contained in there. I’ll return to it.

One of my favorite things to do in the classroom as I teach that essay is to imitate Jim Carey. Not that I’m very good at it. And, now that it’s been more than a dozen years since he left my campus, my students don’t recognize the impression anymore. They still laugh appreciatively, however, probably because it’s just funny to see someone trying to imitate someone else.

I never took a class from Jim, but I did sit in on his seminar one semester. This was around 1990, and our campus had just played host to the conference that produced the volume ‘Cultural Studies Now and in the Future’ (jokingly referred to as the White Pages because of its size, or as the Yellow Pages because of its entrepreneurial spirit, or as ‘Cultural Studies: If Not Now…’) He had that conference and its aftermath on his mind. Like most of his seminars in them days, he’d improvise on the syllabus, bringing in photocopies of half a dozen pieces each week and distributing them to start things off. ‘This is what we’ll read for next week.’ Eyebrows would lift. Raymond Williams again. Hannah Arendt. Darnton and Eisenstein. Foucault and Benjamin. C. Wright Mills. Then he would ask the class if there were any questions, and someone would pop one. He would begin to answer, and usually you could see him shifting gears as he worked up to speed. First gear was a kind of bland offering of relevant immediate wisdom. Then his face would twist slightly and he shift gently into second gear, which usually took him back to the Enlightenment. Now the heads around the seminar table would tilt sideways, and the students would lift their pens from the paper, listening intently. What they were hearing was the setting. Then third gear, the story. When making a point, Jim always told a story. As the narrative unfolded, the pens remained suspended. Then fourth gear, the payoff, where, having built his podium out of story, he’d deliver his sermon. Then he’d pause, say something like ‘enough, let’s take a break,’ people would look at their watches and realize that an hour had passed, glance at their notebooks and see that they’d written NOTHING down, and then go have a cup of coffee. Ten or fifteen minutes later, we’d reassemble, and Jim would ask, ‘Are there any questions?’ and often the same process would repeat. Just as often, a dialog would break out. Jim’s seminars always attracted great students from across the campus, and the give and take could be remarkable. Nothing that anyone would write down, however. After the class, students would go out for a drink with their blank notebooks and have the most interesting conversations.

These seminar performances always seemed spontaneous, but of course the first hour, the apparently off the cuff answer to the apparently random question, was always based on rigorous preparation. Likewise, the apparently casually improvised syllabus always had a carefully thought through logic to it. So there was an element of misdirection to the teaching, and I think that had a lot to do with Jim’s classroom charisma.

The classes I teach at Illinois are all classes that he taught—History of Communication, Media and Democracy (formerly Mass Communication in a Democratic Society), Freedom of Expression (formerly History and Theory of Freedom of the Press)—or courses prepared under his supervision while Dean of the College of Communications—Historiography, and US Media History. This last seminar he sat in on the semester after I’d sat in on his. He took an incomplete, and later told me that things had gotten busy in the Dean’s office so he’d had to skip the last five or six weeks. This was ok with me. When he wasn’t in the classroom, I could do my Jim Carey imitation. And I wouldn’t worry as much about saying something stupid. If you have ever seen Jim hear something stupid in a public setting, you will recognize the reaction I’m about to describe. Always one of the world’s great fidgeters, he would go positively spastic if he heard something stupid. He would chew on whatever was ready to hand—his glasses, usually—and twist around in his seat, and his face would burst out in a series of extraordinary tics and grimaces. I set him off once in my seminar when I was making an argument about the commoditization of news in the nineteenth century and the importance of the reporter as a means of production. I spent a few hours afterward trying to figure out what was so stupid about what I was saying. Never did figure it out, but came to suspect that I had sounded like a doctrinaire Marxist, which might have pissed him off. He hated cant. Perhaps he failed to appreciate its ritual uses.

This year I’ve written two essays for collections inspired by James Carey’s work. One, for a ‘keywords’ collection, describes his thinking on communication history, and notes how the disparate stories and actors in his histories can hold together as an overall theory of comm. history only through an act of faith. Here I meant to tweak him on our shared Roman Catholic tradition, which he took more seriously than I do (at least I pray so now). (That was also one of the reasons why I chose the title Last Rights for a book I edited that he dropped out of.) The other is for a collection of essays on communication history edited by two graduates of the University of Illinois from more recent years, Jeremy Packer and Craig Robertson. That essay begins with A Plea for the University Tradition and discusses civic culture and the ‘party period’ in US history. It again makes a kind of faith-based argument, this time referring to the importance of a faith in the public as a ‘regulative fiction.’

This was the big question that Jim spent his life trying to answer: How can communication, or journalism, or the media (the subjects differ in interesting ways) preserve community, or democracy, or the public (the objects differ too)? He formulated this question in different ways, depending on his mood. Often he was in a Canadian mood, and would phrase the question like this—what can we ask of journalism that will help us overcome the erosion of the public caused by the media? Often he was in a Habermasian mood and would ask the question like this—how will communicative action allow public deliberation to overcome the challenges posed by late modernity’s working out of the Enlightenment? And more and more in recent years he was in a kind of Columbian mood and would ask the question like this—how can journalism be practiced in a way that will both protect its integrity as a vocation and yet prevent its monopolization by a profession? Or better—how can journalism make us better citizens?

The last time I talked with him directly was in the spring of last year, when he flew out to Illinois for what turned out to be his final visit. My colleague Anghy Valdivia, also a former student of Jim’s, had recruited him for two purposes: to lecture to our doctoral proseminar, and to do a demo recording for an audiobook project. I helped her set up the demo recording and generally worked as a go-between, and went to lunch with her and Jim. Anghy and I bitched about the office, and Jim listened sympathetically. I thought we were doing him a favor by reinforcing his decision to leave Illinois, a decision about which he never displayed any regret, to my knowledge. While he worked at Illinois, he fully inhabited the commitment to public education he saw in the land grant universities. When he went to Columbia, he fully inhabited the commitment to the life of the mind he saw in the Ivy League; he was also fascinated by the covert ethnic warfare he detected everywhere there. (Not that he was inconstant in his loyalties, but he instinctively recognized loyalty itself as a good thing, and could be a Yankees fan in New York and a Red Sox fan at the same time.) He did not waver in his keynote educational belief—the belief that journalism education was liberal arts education and not technical education, a belief that was rooted in his analysis of the history of communication, the media, and journalism.

On that last visit to Illinois, Jim told me that he was working on a book. It would be something of a textbook. It would survey US history for aspiring journalists, trying to give them the stuff they should know to be able to do their work in the most responsible and citizen-friendly way. I thought this was a great idea. I hope somebody finishes this book.

I hope somebody finishes all of Jim’s books. Once I asked him one time about his essay, ‘The Problem of Journalism History,’ which claims at the beginning to be a fragment of a much longer project. What became of the project? He told me that he’d been working on it at the dining room table for half a year, and it had gotten up to about 100 pages, when the editors of the new journal Journalism History called to ask him for an inaugural essay. He went to that manuscript and chose his favorite 11 pages (‘because that’s how much you could send in the mail for one stamp’) and sent them off. This self-effacing story can’t be strictly true, can it? It’s too good a story not to tell, though.

Previous and subsequent book projects usually went well to he’d gotten up to about 100 pages. Then they would stall. Perhaps because Jim would lose interest. He detested boredom. He loved big fat books and could read anything of whatever density or weight very briskly, and had a connoisseur’s appreciation of the complexities of professional discourses, but when something became ponderous, well, that was that. He eventually reached this point with Marx’s Grundrisse, which nagged him for most of 1983, I think.

Dave Nord at Indiana has described Jim as the kind of writer Innis would have been if he could have thought in units larger than a paragraph. Jim thought in units of essay size. He was not a book writer. Thank God. Could you imagine how dull a book ‘Two Models of Communication’ would have been? Or ‘Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph?’ The insight-to-stuff ratio of his prose rhythm is perfect for an essay.

But I’m very sorry he didn’t finish his last book, and I’m very sorry he didn’t record his audiobook. Both would have been wonderful. I think his last book would have had the appropriate insight-to stuff ratio, because it would have been written for students and not for academics. Most of his published material was pitched as programmatic, as blueprint material for colleagues or grad students to reverse engineer into the framework of their own research projects. For someone who thought and wrote so much about the great public, he wrote very little for that great public, and his best material doesn’t necessarily play well to a general audience. Once I sat in the second to last row while he delivered one of his nicer pieces, ‘A Republic, if you can Keep it,’ to a convention of the Illinois High School Press Association. The two high school journalists behind me got into a competition to see who could make the best farting noises. They were virtuousi; I’d never heard such tooting, and I used to work in a chili parlor. His audience wasn’t them, it was us. He could play to journalists, too, but in person, not so much in writing.

The written work pays off for us only partly on its own merits. If Dave Nord, to name a blameless journalism historian, had written ‘A Plea for the University Tradition,’ it would not have the same meaning—just as if he’d written Satanic Verses, no ayatollah would have bothered with a fatwa. Jim’s authorship was augmented (‘author’ and ‘augment’ are etymologically related) by his oral and oratorical persona. He was such a lovely person, and everyone who knew him liked him. He was such a smart person, and it didn’t take long for you to realize it. He was a very warm person, too. People liked him because he liked people. ‘I like everyone,’ he used to say. And he had such a voice. He was an amazing orator, the kind that just doesn’t exist anymore, and pretenders like Mario Cuomo and Jesse Jackson are trotted out to remind us of. So among the readers of the essays, there are two sorts: the ones who’ve heard him speak—and all of us have been touched by his charisma—and the ones who’ve just read him.

Those of us who knew him a bit knew him as a cheerful presence. Some of us would try to infect him with our gloom, but he never let us get away with it. In his New York years, though, as the Republic staggered through its Monica days and then went apeshit over Ay-rabs, and the current Pres-o-dent made sausage out of words like liberty and community, his optimism was strained. But I don’t think he ever lost his faith in the power of thought, of talk, and of civilized discourse.

Which returns me to the essay I began with, ‘A Plea for the University Tradition.’ Throughout that piece, civilized discourse is losing ground in a long war with the bureaucratic rationality of the state, on the one hand, and the instrumental rationality of the media, on the other. What prevents the unconditional surrender of community and democracy is, on the one hand, the university tradition, and on the other, journalism in its most elevated sense. His intellectual life was dedicated to nurturing the union of these two cultural institutions. Did anyone do it better? Can anyone left living do it as well?

2006-05-29T03:15:00.000-07:00

What Planet is That?

In today's NYT article on the new owners of the Philadelphia dailies, KQ Seelye beautifully illustrates the disconnect between the most highly professionalized journalists (herself being one of them) and anyone even casually interested in the way journalism actually operates. Interviewing the new chief owner, who comes from an entrepreneurial background and whom she expects to have trouble adjusting to the culture of journalism, she opines:

Some aspects of the culture are still unfamiliar. He was describing himself as a "zealous advocate" and added, "I hope our reporters will be zealous advocates for what they're trying to do as well." When it was pointed out that reporters are not supposed to be advocates for anything, he amended his comment.

"Zealous advocates for finding the truth," he said. "They shouldn't just be willing — if they believe in something, they should fight for it."

And yes, aren't journalists supposed to be zealous advocates for finding the truth? And for healthy public scrutiny? And for fairness and intelligence in public discourse? Just as judges are supposed to be zealous advocates of the justice system, even while maintaining their neutrality on any particular case. And of course Seelye herself is being a zealous advocate for a model of professional neutrality in her own apparently cool and detached ridicule of this entrepreneur, Brian Tierney.

Anyone even casually interested in journalism would point these things out. But somehow the most highly professionalized journalists can't notice them.

2006-05-25T08:37:00.000-07:00

How Old Were You During the Age of Jackson?

I'm in the midst of Sean Wilentz's massive The Rise of American Democracy. I will be for a few days more, I'm sure. It's a real doorstop. Not a page turner, but, just when I'm ready to shelve it, I run across an elegant description of something that always puzzled me, like the diplomacy over the Haitian Revolution or the Panic of 1819, and decide to keep at it. A very sound book. It will not dazzle you with new insights, and in fact is resolutely conventional, from its opening invocation of Arthur Schlesinger's Age of Jackson on; once again you will believe that history is past politics.

One of the reasons I keep on with the book is that it's so involved with the history of the press. Anyone familiar with Wilentz's other great book, Chants Democratic, will expect this. His history is deeply informed by and has a deep appreciation of the newspapers of the early republic. But he does not foreground them, and takes it for granted that they were powerful organs of influence without necessarily 'mediating' politics in any significant way. This surprises me especially because Wilentz is relying on scholarship by people like Jeff Pasley (a much better writer, by the way) that does just that. Pasley argues that it was the printer editors of the early Republic who invented popular politics. I think he stretches the point a bit, but is essentially correct. I put in another way in my own work. The press represented public opinion, which was the indispensable element of generating political legitimacy, and hence political power.

This is why people got so bent out of shape about marginal political movements from the Democratic-Republican societies in the 1790s to the abolitionist press. These were novel attempts to hijack the representation of public opinion away from its authorized mechanisms--the legislatures, in the first case, and the parties in the second. Wilentz comes tantalizingly close to making a marvelous argument about anti-abolitionism when he notes the earlier appearance of antislavery activism. The argument he could and should make is that the reaction against antislavery did not arise as a reaction against the RISE of antislavery (As Leonard Richards and Larry Ratner have it) but as an expression of the rise of the Jacksonian party system as a regulator of the representation of public opinion. Whipping up an antiabolitionist hysteria legitimated the power of the party press.

The other counterintuitive argument you might make here involves the popularity of the press. The political press of the early Republic was 'popular' not because a lot of people read it but because it stood for the people, or stood in the place of the people in relation to the transaction of power.

OK, I sound mystifying there. But ask yourself this. Why were the founding fathers so worked up about the Democratic Republican societies? It's because they knew exactly what those little groups could do. The founding fathers themselves had made their merchants' committees and mechanics' committees and non-intercourse associations and committees of correspondence, and they had a name for what their groups had done: Revolution. Simply existing as groups representing public opinion had been the first step in the Revolution. There's nothing so abstract or mystifying about that.

The title of this post comes from an old story about a debate between Leo Ribuffo and AM Schesinger on the origins of the Cold War. Schlesinger, the story goes, gets pissed off and asks Ribuffo, 'How old were you when the Truman Doctrine was announced?' and Ribuffo replied, ....

2006-05-24T06:36:00.000-07:00

PS on Philadelphia.

Tom Rosenstiel made the point first:

Rosenstiel also compared the ownership to a sports team's and noted that the motivation for team owners was rarely financial. "They do it to be a player in town or to be a celebrity," he said. "They do it after they have made their money and are looking for something more exhilarating or adventurous." ('With Local Control, and Uncommon Story in Philadelphia,' by Paul Nussbaum, in today's Inquirer, via Romenesko.)

He's more polite about it too.

2006-05-24T00:42:00.000-07:00

Philadelphia.

Today's NYT reports on the sale of the two major dailies in Philadelphia to a group of local investors. The Inquirer and the Daily News were owned by Knight-Ridder, whose stockholders forced a sale this year to McClatchy, who in turn has been auctioning off the newspapers that don't fit into its business plans. To newspaper readers, the Inquirer is the most important of the Knight-Ridder newspapers, and, in the days when prestige counted for something in the industry, would have been the most valuable property. The most important information in the NYT article by KQ Seeley comes at the end:

Knight Ridder's profit margin in 2004 was 19.3 percent, about average for the industry. Morgan Stanley, which examined the company before its sale, said the profit margin in Philadelphia was 9 percent, while company executives said it was somewhat higher, even with severance payments last year as the papers trimmed their staffs.

Both papers have been losing circulation at rates that exceed the industry average.

Circulation at The Inquirer, once the jewel of the Knight Ridder chain, fell to 350,457, a drop of 5 percent, for the six-month period ended March 31, compared with the period the year before. Circulation at The Daily News dropped 9.4 percent, to 116,590.

The average circulation loss for the industry was 2.5 percent.

In other words, even with the falling circulation, and taking significant one-time losses, both newspapers together turned a fair profit last year; no doubt without the one-time losses, the Inquirer's profit was about the industry average, approaching 20%. Why doesn't McClatchy want this newspaper?

The group buying it consists of ten local owners, mostly businesses, with the lead buyer being an active Republican and someone news professionals are wary of. Wouldn't it be nice if the journalists themselves could buy up properties like this? (I'd include the Sun-Times, which is always on the market somehow) Wouldn't it be nice if some kind of public entity could make that possible? These owners are going to treat the paper either like a sports franchise--an ego trip occasion--or like a subsidiary to their main businesses; I predict it will be on the market again soon. Pay attention to the countries where newspapers still work!

2006-05-23T05:41:00.000-07:00

Coffee and Newspapers.

Norway leads the world in per capita consumption of newspapers and, they tell me, coffee. I'm willing to believe both these things. Now I gotta wonder why.

Not about coffee. There are two seasons in Norway: the dark season and the light season. In the light season, it's daylight for eighteen to twenty hours, and you never get enough sleep, so you want to keep strong coffee at hand. In the dark season, it's correspondingly dark, and cold, and you want to keep strong coffee at hand.

But what about newspapers? Norway can't possibly be a world leader in the production of NEWS, and the newspapers sort of show that. There just isn't enough politics or crime, most days, to fill a good newspaper, and there aren't enough celebrities or spectacles either.

But there are plenty of READERS. It's a nation of tireless readers--cf comments on the dark season--and the newspapers are rather literate by world standards. Hallin and Mancini, in their book Comparing Media Systems, note that there is a very clear correlation between levels of newspaper readership today and levels of literacy at the end of the nineteenth century. An interesting fact.

There's also plenty of MONEY. That's because of the general wealth of the country and because of the way the social compact distributes it. One of the ways it distributes wealth is in the form of subsidies to newspapers.

But my colleague at Bergen Martin Eide remarks that it's also the invention in the past thirty years of a hybrid journalism that combines tabloid forms with sophisticated cultural and political commentary. Similar formal innovations seem to me also to be the reason for the vibrancy of news media in the younger democracies of southen Europe, like Italy and Spain, which still have far lower levels of readership.

Now this formula is exportable. Are media in the US paying attention? I think not, and I think the reason is their far greater dependence on advertising income. For them, more readers doesn't necessarily mean more money or more stability.

Instead, US newspapers innovate in this direction by spinning off free youth papers, like the Chicago Tribune's ineffable RedEye. This ain't innovation as much as it's line extension.

2006-05-22T06:31:00.000-07:00

Net neutrality again.

One feature of a corrupt public sphere is sloganizing. As in 'she's a tax and spend liberal.' Or as in 'we tried throwing money at the problem.' So in a complex debate like the one about net neutrality, it's interesting to see the jockeying over which side gets to claim 'freedom' in some fashion in its slogans. I'm rooting for the good guys, of course, who are calling net neutrality 'the internet's first amendment.' This encapsulates the argument nicely.

It also begs a question about the first amendment. It has happened that the first amendment, which originally was meant to protect the rights of ordinary citizens to participate in the public sphere, has come to be owned by 'the press,' which wields in like a fetish.

Or, to paraphrase Anatole France, the majestic equality of first amendment law, which prevents the government from infringing on the right of the poor as well as the rich to sell your children Disney products.

But, like I say, I'm just dabbling with this one, and not following it closely. It would make a good study in the politics of the social contruction of a technological system.

2006-05-21T01:36:00.000-07:00

The blogosphere's power and net neutrality.

I've been silent for a couple of weeks, dealing with departmental politics and learning to read Norwegian newspapers. More on these shortly, perhaps. But at the same time I've been paying casual attention to the debate about net neutrality in the blogosphere.

Net neutrality is exactly the kind of issue that the blogosphere is best suited for. It is a natural test of the capacities of the blogosphere for deliberation and policy influence. It might be fun to do a formal study of it. Is anyone working on that?

Here's my take. It's an issue that suits the experiences and enthusiasms of bloggers. We all know something about the vagaries of internet access, and most of us have enough history with the web to remember its less stratified days and be able to project a far more stratified future. Furthermore, most bloggers, or at least most political bloggers, have an instinct about the web as a public space. So just in terms of motivation and personal interest, the concept of net neutrality means a lot to most of us before we even bother to learn what exactly it means.

But it's also the kind of issue where the expert knowledges that circulate in the blogosphere readily come into play. It's similar to Rathergate, where suddenly you heard from a lot of people who knew a lot about the IBM Selectric typewriter. This allows the complexities of the issue to overtake initial sloganeering.

Bloggers have taken sides, but not strictly along party lines--another of the signal features of blogosphere discourse at its best. Some lefties maintained their neutrality, and some righties showed great suspicion of the corporate interests at play. The issue touches a bedrock libertarianism and egalitarianism that the space and technology of blogging cultivate.

But as the debate has progressed, the left-right lines have reformed, I think. Lefties who were once agnostic are now persuaded, for instance. And the lobbying machinery of the net has swung into action.

As the blogosphere's discussion has turned from deliberation to mobilization, has its influence changed? About this I'm not sure. Perhaps its influence was always going to be, in the final analysis, just another form of lobbying. This would indicate that it's not a truly new public space, and that it has influence only when it works through the old channels of phone calls to Congressional reps, or cups of coffee with staffers.

Thinking this through over the next few days....

2006-05-05T16:46:00.000-07:00

The New NYT web site.

I wrote a few years ago that the web has deformed newspapers. By deformed I meant specifically that it had taken away the form of the news, particularly the overall form, the mapping of the world that both a daily newspaper front page and a network news show execute. On the web, the hierarchy of stories is muted, the interplay of items on the page is eliminated, and the voice of the newspaper is much harder to hear. Same, but less so, with broadcast news outfits.

For years the Times has had all its matter (except the ads, which I don't read anyway) up on the web, and I read it often enough in that fashion, though I far prefer the paper edition. When I read the web version, I spend about 12 minutes with it; on the paper edition it's three or four times as much time I'll spend and I'll come away feeling like I've engaged in an important informational ritual. I'll feel in the know.

Not with the old web version. From time to time I would try to piece together the shape of the print newspaper, but without much luck. It was like radio to me. Headlines.

With the new version, the first thing I noticed was how much easier it is to draw up the content of the printed version in roughly the same form as in the print paper. It's still headlines, but it's the right ones. The second thing I noticed is how much friendlier the home page is. It begins to give some of the form back to the news. It's still not there, but it's a great leap forward.

The other interesting thing is the flirtation with blogging. I've been saying in lectures here and there that the new tools of the news (blogging's one of them) have not yet been turned into a "journalism." This is not to engage in the argument about whether blogging is journalism. Of course, why not? It's just to say that the rules of blog/journ have not yet been formulated. Now the times is going to do it. I spoke with one of their correspondents who'd been recruited for the blog experiment a few months ago. (He insisted that his thing was a website, not a blog, and of course, why not?) I asked him what kinds of journalistic standards would govern NYT's bloggers. He said they said they were open to discussion. So let's see. The outcome is going to be the invention of a journalism for bloggers; there's no doubt about that. But if it's going to work, it'll have to bless the subjectivity of the blogger, which is the whole point of the genre.

2006-05-05T16:39:00.000-07:00

The Press is Biased toward Scandal.

But apparently only some kinds of scandal. There is a big splash over a Kennedy's car wreck today, but relatively little over an unfolding corruption scandal that has tracks leading deep into the woods of the intelligence community. Josh Marshall makes the argument:

And, while the Kennedy story is 'newsy' it doesn't really have any greater policy implications. And the public trust implications are minor. The Wilkes-Watergate-Hooker story, on the other hand, is both. It's salacious, which the press loves. And it's also directly tied to crooks ripping off taxpayers, probably allowing our service members abroad to have shoddy equipment or defense dollars going to worthless projects.

So is it that the press is just not willing to invest in the more complex story? With the Kennedy scandal, the story comes pre-packaged, and you just fill in the names. With the Hookergate story, you would have to actually crib a lot of the material from Talkingpointsmemo. No, seriously, you would have to educate your readers and viewers. It's not that the press isn't willing to do that; the press doesn't seem to have the capacity to do that. It takes another arm of publicity to cultivate the audience in the first place, perhaps.

Or there's the other argument. The press doesn't seem highly motivated to get these Republican crooks, for whatever reason. Not as intellectually satisfying, but not to be dismissed out of hand.

2006-04-28T03:33:00.000-07:00

Iran and Net Neutrality

I tend not to follow the details of internet governance too closely, and leave it to friends and colleagues like Sascha Meinrath (his blog is Public Ponderings) and Paul Riismandel (the Media Geek). Policy discussions move too fast for me, or, I always know that I'm only on the skin of the onion. From the surface, of course, things are never what they seem.

I have no idea how relaxing the expectations for net neutrality would affect the overall shape of the public sphere. If it's a matter of creating a more expensive tier for video on demand, it might not have any direct effect at all. And what should I care about video on demand, other than it might be a nice way for me to watch baseball late at night?

My question is more along the lines of this: What sort of internet regime would make it harder for the pres-o-dent to launch a military strike against Iran?

Yesterday I lectured at the University of Bergen on the decline and fall of journalism's authority beginning in the late twentieth century--take the 1983 invasion of Grenada as a benchmark moment. One of my hosts asked me about the likelihood of a US attack on Iran. I said the media reports that I rely on don't make it clear that any kind of threat is posed that would justify an attack, and that the Bush administration now has little credibility when it makes accusations about weapons programs, but they'd probably do it anyway. He asked me then whether the US would really use a nuclear weapon in such an attack. Oh yeah, I said, the military strategists are dying to try one of those things. They want to break a taboo. Then another one of my hosts began singing Randy Newman's song. Let's drop the big one, and see what happens.

It does take you back to Grenada, a far simpler day. The Reagan administration launched that attack for obvious political reasons--it was ordered immediately after a truck bomb demolished the marine barracks in Beirut, killing over 200 soldiers. The media were false-footed, but after the fact exposed a series of lies and manipulations. But, with the government still operating under cold-war consensus, no Congressional blowback followed, and, although the news media complained about restrictions on the flow of information, no public outrage supported them. Instead, the news media commenced a long and still ongoing period of self-examination, trying to figger out where their credibility has gone, and generally confusing their credibility with their popularity.

There was no internet to speak of then. Now, nearly a quarter of a century later, information and criticism flows more quickly. Today the news media respond, after a demure pause, to what circulates on the web. As a result, we have far more vigorous media exposure of the failures in Iraq than we ever did of the failures in Vietnam, though the news media are still very reluctant to push the atrocity button. This criticism doesn't seem to deflect policymakers, however. They know something about the toothlessness of the chattering classes.

So I'd give up my video on demand baseball to prevent an attack on Iran. Is net neutrality part of that equation? Or am I asking the wrong question?

2006-04-11T05:29:00.000-07:00

Iran and unpublished thinking.

Discourses are like onions, in that there always seems to be a deeper layer but you never reach a core. (A bad metaphor--I think it was the one William James used to describe a colleague's personality--because it doesn't do justice to the onion, which does have a sweet and tangy core, though it's similar to the rest of the onion--unlike say a peach pit.)

There's always a deeper layer beyond the one you've hooked into. In anything. In previous posts, I've pondered this fact in regard to the war in Iraq, where, obviously, the mot public discourse, the "confirmation in the form of a mushroom cloud" one, was at least two discourses removed from the discourse that mattered, which was in turn a field of encounter between several other discourses. So beyond the line peddled to the rubes (sadly, in Cincinnati, where Bush delivered his major address), there was another played to the reporters by, say, Scooter Libby, and then another played against that grain by other sources to other reporters like, say, Sy Hersh. And then beyond that there was the Oval office and 10 Downing Street, locations we now have learned something about through leaked memoes and court filings. And beyond that? No core. An ever receding landscape of privileged discourses, all contesting in the Oval office and elsewhere.

So why did we go to war in Iraq? Was there a real reason? Probably not. Probably we went to war in Iraq because it was an option made available by the overlap of a series of privleged discourses. The Oil discourse, the Stability discourse, the Democracy discourse, the Israel discourse. That, plus the will to do it--resident in the Oval office for longer than George Bush--and the realization in the US and elsewhere that the sanctions regime had failed.

And of course the other nations of the world had something to do with this too, though many of them now deny it. Germany officially opposed the war but shared intelligence. Other nations joined the coalition of the willing but now claim they were snookered. Some nations kept a hand in, like Norway, without really signing on. But by and large they authorized it.

Now Iran. Can the same thing happen? Sure. The overlapping consensus in favor of a military strike exists in some protean form, and the world is beginning to appear willing enough. The blogosphere is arguing today whether the will exists in the Oval office. Sure it does. That button is begging to be pushed. What doesn't exist is the capacity for an invasion.

Would a military strike be a bad idea? Yes. It always is. Should an opposition form to try to stop it? Yes, most certainly. Is there political capital to be made by opposing a military strike? No. Not at all.

2006-04-11T05:18:00.000-07:00

Italy's Elections.

Having left Italy (we're now living in Norway), it was not as easy as I had expected to find out what was going on in the elections yesterday. Had I been on the ground in Italy, I probably would have kept one of the Mediaset tv stations on and stayed up til it was all over. Here in Norway I alternated between three web sites--Repubblica's, Corriere's, and Rai's. But with web news you really don't get the rhythm of events the way you do with broadcast news. I went to sleep with the election still in doubt.

And woke up to find Prodi winning the Camera, and now the Senate.

It's all so American, no insult intended. First, the misleading exit polls, which we've seen plenty of in the States lately. Then the elongated uncertainty. Then the promise of an extended post-election. In 2000, I went to bed thinking Bush had won, then woke up to realize that Gore was still running, then learned with the rest of the non-delusional nation that Gore had actually won, then endured a month of seeing the election stolen. The Italian case may work out the same, in that Berlusconi hasn't yet conceded, and promises to challenge the results, which include a half million spoiled ballots. It would not surprise me if a large plurality of those are from Berlusconi supporters.

But for now let's say addio to Berlusconi il Presidente. He'll stick around. He's the Ross Perot of Italy, and is fortunate enough to inhabit a system where controlling 20-23 % of the vote is enough to win power. He'll stick around, and continue to peddle his interests and protect his own celebrity, and he will make Italian politics exotic and fun for people elsewhere to follow. He is the world's premier retailer of populismo mediatico, as Eco puts it.

2006-04-09T00:11:00.000-07:00

More on Cooked Intelligence.

Or rather cooked reporting. Today's NYTimes has another front page story on Scooter's leak of the NIE on Iraqi wmd. The nut:

A review of the records and interviews conducted during and after the crucial period in June and July of 2003 also show that what the aide, I. Lewis Libby Jr., said he was authorized to portray as a "key judgment" by intelligence officers had in fact been given much less prominence in the most important assessment of Iraq's weapons capability.
Mr. Libby said he drew on that report, the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, when he spoke with the reporter. However, the conclusions about Mr. Hussein's search for uranium appear to have been buried deeper in the report in part because of doubts about their reliability.

So there's not much the blogosphere hadn't already sussed out here, is there? Libby et al. leaked cooked intelligence to cover up the fact that they were using cooked intelligence. But the story is interesting anyway. Not because of what it tells us about the way the Bush administration uses intelligence, but about the way the press covers this story.

First about Judith Miller, and haven't we heard enough about her already? A leak from Scooter outweighed all the counternews that was available to a reporter in her position. Of course, the ideology of the journalist-as-watchdog would suggest that the counternews would be given supreme value. Journalists are there to even the playing field, and have a natural suspicion of the powerful, and look for stories of conflict in governing institutions, and so forth. And that's the truth for a journalist like say, Sy Hersh, who was producing exactly those kinds of stories about the Iraq intelligence at the time.

Sy Hersh is the pretext for journalism as usual. If he didn't exist, it would be necessary for the news media to invent him. Probably Rupert Murdoch would see to this personally. How could you justify the false populism of the whole enterprise if you didn't occasionally give a Pulitzer to the Sy Hersh's of the world?

But meanwhile the top pros do exactly what Judith Miller did. They tuck their noses up the cracks of the highest placed available sources, and replay the exclusives they're granted. Most of them exercise a little more restraint than Miller, I'm sure.

Which brings us to the second interesting thing about today's story. It appears long after the blogosphere new all the news in it, and long after its real relevance would have warranted publication, because an appropriate institution manufactured it as a news story. It appears today because Patrick Fitzgerald's court filing makes it news.

So that's what it takes. That's also what it took during Watergate. And Vietnam. That plus the bodybags.

2006-04-06T13:20:00.000-07:00

The story burning up the blogosphere today involves Scooter and the leaked NIE--he apparently claims that the pres-o-dent personally authorized him to leak it to Judith Miller. This tells us what we always knew, which is that a coverup was organized at the highest levels of government. What they were covering up we also always knew, namely that they had lied about the state of the intelligence. How long will it take for the players to begin to care? The answer is probably measurable in body bags.

2006-03-27T12:42:00.000-08:00

"Bush was Set on War."

The New York Times caught up with the British press and the blogosphere today by reporting definitively on a British memo that details a meeting between Blair and Bush on the eve of the war, with Bush apparently riffing ways to finesse the absence of a casus belli. My favorite passage:

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein.
Those proposals were first reported last month in the British press, but the memo does not make clear whether they reflected Mr. Bush's extemporaneous suggestions, or were elements of the government's plan.

And this five days before Colin Powell was sent in to the Security Council to deliver his laughable dossier, his slam-dunk case. The Times continues to dismiss this as simply filling in details on "what was known at the time" about the pres-o-dent's sent-o-ments. But let's be clear. It's proof that he was lying, that Powell was lying, and that Blair et al. knew they were lying, and many more people must have known as well.

The thing to be explained now is why no authority in the States, or in Britain for that matter, is putting these men (and women--let's not forget Condi) in jail. And why the authoritative press treats those who call for such treatment as nutcases.

2006-03-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

iraq and information control.

Last night Oliviero Bergamini, a telegiornalist and professor of journalism, spoke about US political discourse and the war in Iraq to a small house at the Societa Letteraria here in Verona. He made an interesting argument about the difficulty of controlling information in Iraq. Compared with Vietnam, there are many more channels and sources of information for the US media system. And he's right. A dedicated citizen can find a breadth and depth of information about Iraq that far exceeds what was available in Vietnam. Bergamini cited the usual suspects--24-hour news channels and the web--in arguing that information was far more readily available.

He's right. What we know about the War in Iraq far exceeds what was known about Vietnam at this point in that exercise. We already have the equivalent of the Pentagon Papers and the MyLai incident in the form of reporting about the absence of wmd, leaks about the debates leading up to the war, the Abu Ghraib photos, and any number of reports about US military abuses. And much of this has come through nonprofessional sources. Abu Ghraib came from the digital cameras of US military personnel. for instance.

A story that Seymour Hersh tells illustrates the differences between the two wars. Hersh, who published the story that began the My Lai saga, got a phone call (this was well over a year ago) from a US serviceman telling him about a massacre some weeks before. The serviceman had witnessed a company going berserk on a village after coming under fire; dozens (if I remember correctly) were killed, and the serviceman, who was having trouble sleeping at night, either e-mailed Hersh or called him on a cell phone, expecting Hersh to give it the full My Lai. But no dice. Hersh says he understands exactly what happened in that case, and it wasn't at all like My Lai. Some scared kids overreacted, which is way different from My Lai, which was part of a systematic campaign to pacify the countryside through blood and terror.

In Vietnam, it was possible for the military to delay, postpone, and usually kill negative news, at least until the steady production of corpses had turned the public against the war. There were obvious bottlenecks at which the Pentagon could exert some control over the flow of information.

Now one cannot any more control the flow of information. But that doesn't mean it's difficult to control the flow of discourse. Even if disconfirming information is saturating the system, the forces of the right still seem to control the discourse, and journalists seem to help them. No amount of information seems capable of dislodging the discourse.

And that's what we need to explain--how the free flow of information helps support discursive control. Anyone? How can you explain why all the disturbing informaiton--and Abu Ghraib sums it up for me--hasn't changed the dominant account?

2006-03-24T14:21:00.000-08:00

The US warning.

Today the front pages of Italy's newspapers were dominated by reports about yesterday's alert to US citizens to avoid Italian election rallies. Opposition leader Romano Prodi pointed out that this State Department warning was highly unusual, responded to Italian government reports, and seemed designed to help Berlusconi's re-election campaign. Berlusconi denied, then denied some more, and said it wasn't Prodi's place to do anything as extraordinary as calling the US ambassador to ask about it.

The US warning came as a big surprise to me, as I noted in an earlier post. Although a poll reported in today's Repubblica notes a high level of criticism of the US among the center left, still this criticism is directed at the US government and not at individual citizens, and I've seen no evidence of hostility toward US citizens per se on the streets, in the press, spray-painted on walls, or printed in leaflets. Who says US citizens need to avoid rallies? Berlusconi. It's as simple as that.

The State Department is wildly inconsistent with this warning. It doesn't warn US citizens to avoid, for example, France, where hostility is more evident and passions are inflamed ahead of a national strike. And it didn't issues warnings during recent elections in Germany and Poland. The "terrorism alert" stratagem has been one of the Bush administration's favorites, though, and Berlusconi tries very hard to emulate the pres-o-dent.

If the State Department is, well, insincere, Berlusconi is much much worse. On the one hand he defends the State Department warning, arguing that political rallies are indeed a cause for anxiety. On the other, he argues that governments in cities like Padova and Verona should not bar the neofascists from rallying. Why is it reasonable to fear violence from the left, which is really quite placid, but unreasonable to fear violence from the right, which is pretty violent by any standard?

2006-03-23T09:25:00.000-08:00

Permanent Bases and Permanent Untruths.

In his recent press conference, Pres-o-dent Bush remarked offhand that the US military presence in Iraq would continue past his pres-o-dency. This may have been the only true thing he said. In his reply to Helen Thomas, which has been getting much attention in the blogosphere, he repeated the whole series of lies with which he sold this war, even though they've been shown false over and over again. The litany began with the ritual invocation of 9/11, of course.

Tactically, nothing about establishing a permanent presence in Iraq would seem to promote national security, especially if by national security you mean protection from 9/11 style attacks. But the Bush administration doesn't seem to believe this itself. So today, for instance, the State Department warned US citizens in Italy (egad!) to be on alert for a 9/11 style attack. (We are also warned to stay away from political rallies, which can turn violent, injuring as many as one person. Oh, those demons of the left.)

Bush has authorized the topic, and by coincidence the Associated Press that same day published a good long article on the construction of US bases. The AP quotes US military personnel and Iraqi civilians as saying that the evidence on the ground points to a permanent presence. Now during the pres-o-denshul campaign, John Kerry brought this up in one of the debates. There was no followup. Will we have some followup now?

That would depend on the Dem-o-crats. The press in our fallen age just will not go on attack without a centrist sponsor, more or less--without authorized politicians giving them "news" on a regular basis. Dennis Kucinich, for some reason, doesn't count.

But the more interesting thing is how little followup there is to the trail of falsehoods justifying the War. Other bloggers have noted that Russ Feingold's attempt to censure Bush for the clear illegality of the wiretapping program has received only "is it a smart tactic" coverage from the press. Now here they have an authorized politician, and as a result there's some coverage, but only through the so-called "game schema," so that news is framed as a tactical move in a political contest, pushing the truth of the matter to the margins. But we don't get even that about lying the nation into a war. What will that take?

Well, the history of the news media does suggest an answer. It will take five years of significant production of dead US soldiers. That's what it took in Vietnam.

2006-03-22T06:42:00.000-08:00

My Lai Time.

The Italian dailies all note this story from Time Magazine:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1174649,00.html

about a US military investigation into civilian deaths at Haditha. Google News shows the world talking about it more than the US is, perhaps because the US media are somewhat reluctant to yield so readily to Vietnamishness. Surely this is not really My Lai time, but hey, that was after about eight years of the Vietnam War, and there's still plenty of time, since, as Bush said at his news conference yesterday, we cannot expect to disengage during his lifetime, er, pres-o-dency. More thoughts on that remarkable press conference later, as it niftily confirms some points I tried to make in this morning's post about the justifications for the war.

2006-03-22T02:46:00.000-08:00

The Big Conundrum.

It's been over three years, and no one has explained to my satisfaction why I should believe that US planners ever really believed that there were actual weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Follow my reasoning.

First, wmd are not useful as offensive weapons. They are intended as defensive and deterrent weapons. This is because, absent technology far more advanced than Iraq could command, there is no reliable way to direct the destruction against the enemy. On the battlefield, chemical and biological weapons afflict soldiers on both sides, and moreover kill innocent civilians. They're a weapon of last resort.

US policy makers and planners were of course aware of this. While saying publicly that Saddam pursued his weapons programs because he was a madman seeking empire, all serious parties knew that, if he had a wmd program, it was to deter invasions. This was hardly a crazy notion, as Iraq had been bombed by Israel in the early 1980s, considered itself menaced continually by Iran, and had been invaded in the first Gulf War. It was sensible for him to think that wmd would be a deterrent.

But here's the beauty of a deterrent. It's the idea of the weapon and not the weapon itself that does the work. The US and the Soviet Union didn't go to war during the Cold War because their nuclear weaponry deterred them from doing so. The weapons themselves were never actually used, though; it was the idea of Mutual Assured Destruction that prevented hot war--or at least so the strategists believed.

Which is why the strategists should have (and I believe did) understand that Saddam was blowing smoke up their asses. We know now--everyone knows now--that he intentionally misled the world into thinking that he had wmd capacity in order to forestall an invasion. The Big Question is when did our intelligence community and their allies overseas figure this out?

Well before the war, I'm sure. Here's why. First, they knew that their intelligence was weak because it had repeatedly failed to check out. The UN weapons inspectors proved this. This is why US intelligence was slow to release information to them--they desperately wanted their information not publicly proved false before the invasion. Second, they must have begun to understand that their sources in Iraq were being manipulated to present a more damning picture of the wmd situation than was in fact true. Saddam was simply not capable enough to bluff without being sussed out; our intelligence people--the ones in the trenches, not the politicoes--aren't that stupid. But finally, and here's the big part of the big question, if they HAD believed in the wmd myth, they would have been committing a monstrous crime against humanity by actually invading. If, as our propagandists asserted at the outset of the invasion, Saddam had given orders to use chemical and biological weaponry when the invasion was within 50 miles of Baghdad, the result would have been genocidal. Untold thousands of civilians would have been killed or maimed. And I don't believe our military or politicians at the highest levels would have committed such an act.
I've spent three years looking for an answer to this big question, and haven't yet been enlightened. Anyone out there have a solution?
No, I think we have to conclude that at the highest levels it was well known that the wmd rationale was bullshit. Then we have to wonder what this has to teach us. I mean about the system of public discourse, which was clearly unable to actually determine this at the time.

2006-03-20T13:50:00.000-08:00

Italian politics and the ancestral village.

The presidential campaign here is reaching a climax. Polls in today's papers show the center-left coalition widening its advantage over the past two weeks, reversing what had been a slight recovery by Berlusconi and the center right. Remarkable about this is the slightness of the change, considering how dramatic the events have been. A week ago Berlusconi melted down on an interview show and walked out of the studio; a few days later he was clearly bested in his first face-to-face debate with Romano Prodi; and then Friday he cancelled a speaking appearance before Confindustria, the Italian equivalent of the National Association of Manufacturers, and then appeared on Saturday and made a kind of spectacle of himself. After all this, the movement in the polls seems very slight.

But then, as in most campaigns, there are really two stories to tell. One is the slow and very stable knitting together of electoral chunks, and they change very little. Not that many people who've been watching Berlusconi for years will find his performance over the last week or so surprising, and commentators insist that it's part of a grand strategy to simply keep his face and name in the news. Individual voters make up and change their minds very slowly, and they are what the polls measure.

The second campaign is the mediated dramatization of the first campaign. Because it's mediated it needs to have a more rapid tempo, and the various news organizations manage to work with remarkable harmony to find the same events to dramatize each day. The center and left newspapers have remarkably similar front pages, as do the four free-circulation dailies that I pick up every morning here. The right press gives a different spin to these events, but they're the same events. It's similar in the US, of course, but the press there is much less diverse; you sort of expect a homogenized version of events. Here one might expect the different wings of the press to produce fundamentally different narratives of the campaign, but no--same narrative, different white hats.

It's tempting to say that the first campaign, the slow one, is the real campaign, and that the second one is just a spectacle. But in fact the second one, even if it doesn't do much to change vote tallies, does a lot to change policy formation. It's the second campaign that tells the elected officials what it is that the campaign was all about; it says what it was that voters meant when they voted. The second campaign has the capacity to falsify the first campaign. It has the ability to say that a majority voted for a war when really they voted for security, or that they voted for tax cuts when really they voted against gay sex. So it's very important. But it's not the same thing.

The Italian media are more important to politics than the US media. They aren't really more important to the first campaign, and I think many of the commentators on Italian politics misunderstand this. Berlusconi will get at least 45% of the vote because of the slow knitting together of an electoral base, not because he runs Mediaset. But the Italian media do more to represent the political system than the US media do. US politicians use advertising to carpet bomb the electorate; in Italy advertising is relatively unimportant. But talk shows on television are incredibly important in creating a sphere of individual actors with personalities and positions. They draw far larger audiences than their US parallels also, and they're better entertainment. And the newspaper discourse helps drive the telejournalism and the talk shows.

Last week we visited southern Italy, and I found myself in the birth home of my grandfather, who was dead long before I was born. This stolid old stone house in a street of old stone houses, all sharing walls, is still in the family. When we visited, there was fresh snow in the street. The house is heated by wood fires; one was lit in the second floor kitchen, and we sat around it and chatted for a little while, watching a fashion show on television. Yes, this is a stone house with wood for heat and satellite television. Not an unusual combination. Can I make it a metaphor for the current age of politics?

2006-03-03T09:00:00.000-08:00

Universal Health Care, or Socialized Medicine

Kevin Drum has been on target on this issue, and argues in the past couple of days that the liberal blogosphere is pretty well unanimous too. He wonders why it hasn't been a bigger issue, and asks for a reason why democratic pols shy away from it:

I can't think of one. And while I'm not naive about the recent history of national healthcare plans, it still strikes me as a bit mysterious that virtually no major Democratic politician supports full-on, unapologetic universal healthcare. If there's any single big progressive policy that I think the blogosphere is a genuine bellwether for, this is probably it.

Bottom line: Surely it's time for someone to step up to the plate and stake their reputation on a simple, comprehensive, common sense plan to implement national healthcare? And if financing is the problem, just take a page out of the Bush playbook and ignore it: "If I'm elected president, I'll work with Congress to devise a fair and sensible revenue plan." How hard is that?

Kevin is right, of course. There's no visible reason for this. SO let's look for an invisible one. Let's call it power.

But wait, is it really all that invisible? Health care costs in the US account for about 15% of the economy, and almost all of that runs through privately owned and controlled insurance companies. One of every six dollars spent in the US economy comes from or goes to an insurance company. When the serious policy discussions take place, and when the candidates and elected officials decide to take a position on health care issues, then, there is always a lot of money in the room. Now even if candidates and elected officials were convinced that voters would favor universal health care, the wonks are there to convince them otherwise, or to convince them that legislation just isn't doable, and of course politics is the art of the doable.

So there is that kind of simple direct influence--all the money and power leaning on the women and men in the political system.

But then there is all the indirect influence too. The entire system of public intelligence, with professional journalism and policy think tanks at its heart, works to convince the phantom public that health care reform is a bad idea. The one memory of the 1993 fiasco that remains fresh is the "Harry and Louise" ad campaign, for which the health insurance industry paid $30 million, a very affordable price for 15% of the economy, I'd say. The ad campaign worked not so much because it convinced people that reform was a bad idea--though it seemed effective that way--but because it convinced public officials that people COULD be convinced that it was a bad idea, and that's all it took, because of all the direct influence in the way.

One reason why Harry and Louise worked was that professional journalism had already done its task. Reporters had gone to Canada and looked for stories. In their usual way, they went to the most dysfunctional places--the poorest hospitals in the biggest cities--and found shortages and delays, and even when they noted that similar US hospitals were also dysfunctional, they nevertheless consistently sent the message that reform was a fool's dream. They backed up this anecdotal negative reporting with the usual even-handed expert opinions--choosing one from think-tank A to say that reform would be good and one from think tank NOT A to say that it would be a disaster. Then it left it to readers to decide.

Now many US voters, but not most, know something about the Canadian system, so I thought it would be a nice natural test of the system of public intelligence to see how this worked out. It was possible for any resident of Florida, for instance, to track down a Canadian at Dunkin Donuts and ask if they'd prefer the US system. When they all said No, wouldn't that overpower the media impression? Clearly not. I have the good fortune of knowing many Canadians, and have taken the opportunity to ask just about all of them whether they'd prefer the US system, and only one said yes, and he was just posturing because he was a market fundamentalist. If you also point out that health care overall costs the Canadian economy a little over half what it costs the US, you'd expect that common sense would congeal in a dramatic fashion. If, that is, there's a working system of public intelligence.

There is not, apparently, at least on an issue like this. Instead, public opinion is systematically distorted and politics becomes a marketplace.

The one thing that Kevin Drum doesn't face up to in his thinking on this is that reform necessarily means downsizing. At first blush, this should make it a happy issue for Democrats, who really have been trying to sound "new" about policy--more business-like. Doesn't downsizing mean a kind of rationing? Now try to convince the great public that rationing is ok when it's NOT done by the market.

Now if we want to get really wild, can someone tell me why we shouldn't nationalize the entire insurance industry? It's all about shared risk, it's all run on careful mathematical formulas, and it really is one of those areas where centalization would lead to greater efficiency. So is there any reason other than an irrational fear of bureaucracy and the sheer power of private wealth that no one ever thinks of making this a political issue?

2006-02-23T11:39:00.000-08:00

Class matters.

The Associated Press reports today:

The average income of American families, after adjusting for inflation, declined by 2.3 percent in 2004 compared to 2001 while their net worth rose but at a slower pace.
The Federal Reserve reported Thursday that the drop in inflation-adjusted incomes left the average family income at $70,700 in 2004. The median, or point where half the families earned more and half less, did rise slightly in 2004 after adjusting for inflation to $43,200, up 1.6 percent from the 2001 level.

The median, or midpoint for net worth rose by 1.5 percent to $93,100 from 2001 to 2004. That growth was far below the 10.3 percent gain in median net worth from 1998 to 2001, a period when the stock market reached record highs before starting to decline in early 2000.

This news will not come as a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention. Although if you are a typical news consumer you'll have to be paying very close attention indeed to be well informed on this bundle of issues. The press coverage is bad as measured by absolute standards--# of stories, # of column inches. It's even worse if you measure it by what really matters--public knowledge. Most US Americans are delusional about the class system. Maybe the news in the world couldn't counter the weight of ideology. It would be nice to give it a try.

The interesting thing to me is that the median rose while the average fell. Of course the average is way above the median because of the sheer size of incomes at the top of the scale. The decline in the average would be explained by the stagnation of investment income in the years after the dot.com bust. The rise in the median, meanwhile, is pathetically small, and amounts practically to a recession in household income because the adjustment for inflation fails to take into account the generation of new needs--the essence of a capitalist economy. You can get some measure of that factor by looking at the growth in credit card debt.

News happens best when the upper middle class is threatened. I state that as a general proposition. The well being of the working class has been under stress for decades now. But media attention comes into sharp focus only when the better off have something to wail about. So you'll hear a lot about the alternative minimum tax this year. You'll hear little or nothing about the minimum wage, even if there's a serious election-year move to raise it. This class bias in the news is not remarkable; I can't say for sure if anyone even bothers to dispute it. If it's explainable by market forces, then it's ok, or so the dominant discourse seems to think.

Living abroad convinces you immediately of a few things. First, the vaunted wealth of the US doesn't seem like much when you consider the value of the publicly provided goods and services that most of the world enjoys. Second, the US has a fetish about home ownership that makes little economic sense. Third, the US has lost a lot by turning over so much of its retail to big box stores. Consumers get more choice on one level but far less variety on the more important cultural level.

The scary thing is that the US economy depends on consumer spending for about 2/3 of its action. What will happen when people stop spending money they don't have on shit they don't need?

2006-02-22T11:48:00.000-08:00

None dare call it racism...

when it involves Arabs. There's a nifty little firestorm in the US just now over the fact that a state-owned company from the UAE has bought a company that operates some major US ports. Democrats are seizing on this as an opportunity to portray the Bush administration as lax on safeguarding US shipping against terrorist attacks. Many conservatives agree, and the Bush administration is so off-balance that it's denying today that Bush himself knew anything about the government's approval of the sale.

So why is it that this is a big deal? Because it's Ay-rabs, that's why. No other reason. No one claims that the UAE is a rogue state, or even soft on terrorism. Quite the contrary.

Extremists and terrorists may be of any race, ethnicity, or nationality, but only Ay-rabs are presumed to be terrorists. (And of course Iranians, who are treated as Ay-rabs because of, not in spite of, the racial illogic involved.)

Again I'll mention the uproar over the cartoons of the prophet. People who riot over images and the sacred may be of any race, ethnicity, or nationality, but Ay-rabs are presumed to do so because of a clash of civilizations. This is classic racist illogic, the same kind of reasoning that says that anyone can be a drunk, but in the Irish it's a national trait; or anyone can be in organized crime, but Italians are different.

2006-02-20T12:25:00.000-08:00

It seems to have legs.

I'll admit to some surprise over how long the controversy over the cartoons of the prophet has run. Just when it seems about to die down, something--a new provocation, a weekend--happens to prolong it.

This past week an Italian minister unbottoned his shirt on tv to reveal a t-shirt printed with the infamous cartoons. Over the weekend rioters in Libya attacked an Italian consulate and were fired on by Libyan security forces. The minister was forced to resign, with Berlusconi himself requesting the resignation, along with many members of the opposition. And today La Repubblica has published a long letter by the main opposition candidate, Romano Prodi, commenting on the controversy.

This is the sort of document that just doesn't appear in US politics anymore. In the US, a proxy--maybe George Will--would write a column trotting out similar arguments, but a candidate would never risk such fulsome expression. The whole point of every utterance from a US candidate for almost any office is to say the most obvious things without pissing anyone off. Even a strongly worded speech by a potential candidate--say Al Gore--is treated like a tantrum. And, of course, no major politician would actually write his or her own stuff in the US.

There's something to be said for unscripted politics. It obliges you to pay attention to what people actually say, rather than to dismiss all the overt content in a pointless search for their strategies. On the other hand, unscripted politics is dangerous. Roberto Calderoli, the minister of "reforms" who wore the offending t-shirt, is a case in point. Here is a guy going freelance on Rai 1, the Italian equivalent of the BBC. As Prodi points out, you can't blame the Islamic world for considering the performance of an Italian minister on state-owned tv an official act.

Let's suppose it was a swastika on his t-shirt. I'd've freaked. Wouldn't you?

Would the swastika be such a weird thing in Italy? Wander through any public park in parts of northern Italy and you'll see them spray-painted on all available surfaces. A parking-lot bar in Bardolino, one of the key tourist stops in the lakes region, sells bottles of local wine with labels like "Fuhrer" and "Hitler." It's hard to take this seriously, of course. But, in a continent where many countries have made Holocaust denial a crime, it's also hard to think that public expression is "just words." I'll believe that the day a US presidential candidate declares herself an atheist.

2006-02-16T13:41:00.000-08:00

Comparing the US and Italy.

Today's a particularly rich day for political news in these two remarkable countries. The UN has issued a report condemning the prison at Guantanamo Bay, a story which the Italian press features along with a report about the new photos of abuse at Abu Ghraib. Meanwhile, European regulators are examining an energy company and Italian communications companies for antitrust violations. In the past week, Berlusconi has compared himself to Napoleon Bonaparte and Jesus Christ. But Dick Cheney shot and, depending on what you make of it, almost killed the man who funded Karl Rove's first political business venture. Now I wonder what Berlusconi would have said in similar circumstances. And, apparently oblivious of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the NSA wiretapping scandal, the Senate seems about to renew the USA Patriot Act. And in Italy it is against election laws to discuss polling results without identifying publicly the pollster and the data, a rule which Berlusconi has broken by bragging that his private polls show him in the lead--the rising from the dead that make him similar to Jesus. Christ. His pollster appears to be Frank Luntz, who crafted for him a "Contract with the Italians," patterned on the 1994 Republican "Contract with America." Minuscule amounts of each seem to have been enacted.

This morning, taking my daughter to school, I picked up the newspapers, and the cover of one had a picture of an unidentifiable Iraqi civilian corpse, burnt beyond recognition ("Daddy, is that a man or a woman?") by white phosphorous. I began my day by trying to explain what that picture meant. Another paper featured the latest Abu Ghraib pictures. As far as I can tell, unlike the British, the Italian military and electorate seem untouched by this kind of scandal. The Iraq War is a far smaller campaign issue than the controversy over a high-speed rail line in northern Italy.

The big ink today was spilled on Berlusconi's links with right-wing extremists, and the featured picture showed him with Mussolini's granddaughter. This would never happen in the US. The electoral system works to homogenize the parties. In Italy and other parliamentary countries, of course, the system allows small parties to represent the less cultivated areas of the political spectrum, and a communist can call herself a communist. Winning power usually requires some support from the ideological hinterlands. So a lot of attention gets paid to the cracks in the coalitions, just as in the US, but the cracks are much bigger. Does this make politics healthier? Wait and see....

2006-02-12T14:14:00.000-08:00

I wonder how many stories there are like this one (from Editor and Publisher):

Laura Berg, a clinical nurse specialist for 15 years, wrote a letter in September to a weekly Albuquerque newspaper criticizing how the administration handled Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq Wwr. She urged people to "act forcefully" by bringing criminal charges against top administration officials, including the president, to remove them from power because they played games of "vicious deceit." She added: "This country needs to get out of Iraq now and return to our original vision and priorities of caring for land and people and resources rather than killing for oil....Otherwise, many more of us will be facing living hell in these times."

The agency seized her office computer and launched an investigation. Berg is not talking to the press, but reportedly fears losing her job.

The article says she is being investigated for "sedition," which is an overreach, to say the least. Is there some special oath that VA employees take that prevents them from advocating the proper functioning of the judicial system?

2006-02-08T13:13:00.000-08:00

Today's NYTimes carries these two items in its international news in brief:

MEXICO: GUNMEN STORM BORDER NEWSPAPER Two heavily armed men burst into the Nuevo Laredo offices of the border city's largest newspaper, El Mañana, on Monday night, threw a hand grenade and sprayed bullets at more than 20 reporters and editors. One reporter, Jaime Orozco, was shot and seriously wounded. Several others were injured by flying glass. The gunmen escaped, their motive unknown. Officials at the newspaper said the use of heavy weapons suggested that the attack had been ordered by drug dealers. President Vicente Fox condemned the assault and ordered his attorney general to investigate. "To organized criminals, I say again, you will not defeat the people of Mexico," he said. JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr. (NYT)

EUROPE

TURKEY: TRIAL OF JOURNALISTS BEGINS The trial of five newspaper columnists charged with insulting the country's courts got under way in Istanbul in what is seen as another test of the relationship between Turkey and the European Union, which has called for increased rights to free expression in Turkey. The journalists — Ismet Berkan, Murat Belge and Haluk Sahin of the liberal newspaper Radikal, and Hasan Cemal and Erol Katircioglu of the center-right newspaper Milliyet — had criticized court rulings that tried to block an academic conference on the Armenian genocide, its first public discussion in Turkey. They are charged under the same law as was the author Orhan Pamuk, who publicly questioned Turkey's official denial of the genocide, and face prison terms of 6 months to 10 years if convicted. The case against Mr. Pamul brought Turkey international scorn, and his charges were dropped last month. A group of European Parliament observers is attending the current trial, which was adjourned to April 11. (AP)

It's an interesting juxtaposition, suggesting accidentally that these two items are part of a single larger story. Um, that would be the story of the fight for freedom of the press in the darkest third world. Problem is that Nuevo Laredo isn't exactly the third world--I've been there, strange to say--and neither is Turkey, which comes under the heading "Europe." Turkey is easier to place as third world, of course, because of the whole Islam thing. But the free press item where there's actual bloodshed is the Mexican one, where the cause of the assault on the newspaper is the organized supply of a very first world demand, i.e. the drug trade.

One recurring theme in mainstream reporting on 3rd world assaults on press freedom is a belief that they come from a kind of uncivilized popular opinion--that is, that it's the fault of the people in the 3rd world, who just aren't mature enough to know that it's only words. Hm. Is that really so 3rd world? I don't think so. But without arguing that point, check out what this position implies about public opinion.

There is an assumption that public opinion simply exists, like a fact of nature. Because the 3rd world don't believe in free expression, spontaneous riots appear. Riots are a simple and direct expression of public opinion.

I set out to research exactly this sort of thing twenty years ago, and ten years ago I published a book called Violence against the Press. One of the things I found was that the important incidents of violence against the press were never "spontaneous" and were almost always political. They grew out of long and deep struggles over power. The violence itself was not an expression of public opinion but a moment in a struggle over representing public opinion.

And that's the point. Public opinion never exists until it is represented. It's not like my opinion and your opinion, which simply exist whether anyone knows them or not. I DO have an opinion about CBS news, whether anyone knows it or not. It's not public opinion until it is represented publicly. Two hundred years ago everyone knew this. In the so-called 3rd world, everyone still knows this. In the so-called 1st world, people have willfully forgotten this, believing that, because Gallup and Roper call you at home, public opinion is simply the aggregation of everyone's private opinion. I'm very glad it's not. Who knows what our racial politics would look like then, for instance?

POSTSCRIPT: an earlier post noted that moments like the current protest against caricatures of the prophet usually produce martyrs. In the Italian press, much attention has been paid to an Italian priest, murdered in a church by a 16-year-old who confessed and said he was motivated by outrage over the caricatures. Nothing I say should minimize the awfulness of acts like these. They are crimes. In Turkey's case, the crime is being prosecuted in an orderly fashion, but then, again, it's Europe.

2006-02-07T08:59:00.000-08:00

I wonder where the Plame case went....

Media matters notes that the news media haven't been giving recent hints of where the Plame investigation is going much notice. Why is that?

If you think of the Plame investigation as being about the outing of a CIA agent, then it's not that big a deal. Perhaps it's rotten to out a spy, but you could disagree about that, especially if, like most journalists, you're an avowed enemy of official secrecy and consider it your job to urgently seek out exactly the kind of inside dope that Libby et al. were leaking.

But if you think about the Plame investigation as being about how the Administration distorted intelligence in order to facilitate an ill-conceived invasion, then it IS a big deal, and every dribble should echo in the media.

So clearly our news professionals don't understand what this is all about. Let's hope the prosecutors do. Then the journalists will eventually catch up.

2006-02-05T12:27:00.000-08:00

Freedom of expression is one of the issues I write about as a scholar. So these are interesting times on more than one front.

One is the matter of privacy and surveillance. Here the interesting thing is the Pres-o-Dent's NSA initiative. Today's WashPost has a piece with significant new information in it that's getting a lot of attention in the b'sphere. The part that caught my attention came toward the end, discussing the sorts of "acoustic" information the NSA's mechanical surveillance analyzes:

A published report for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency said machines can easily determine the sex, approximate age and social class of a speaker. They are also learning to look for clues to deceptive intent in the words and "paralinguistic" features of a conversation, such as pitch, tone, cadence and latency.

This kind of analysis can predict with results "a hell of a lot better than chance" the likelihood that the speakers are trying to conceal their true meaning, according to James W. Pennebaker, who chairs the psychology department at the University of Texas at Austin.

"Frankly, we'll probably be wrong 99 percent of the time," he said, "but 1 percent is far better than 1 in 100 million times if you were just guessing at random. And this is where the culture has to make some decisions."

Egad. Is comment even necessary? Suffice it to say that I don't know anyone who doesn't show "paralinguistic" evidence of "intent to deceive" on the phone. And really, hasn't the culture already decided that 1 in 100 is not worth the price? Or am I misreading all the history I know?

Still, the pollyanna in me must speak: we're still not back to Nixon.

And, as Juan Cole pointed out today, we're still not back to Ayodhya. That is, the ruckus over Danish cartoons of Muhammed still hasn't produced riots where thousands died, which what happened in India a dozen years ago when Hindus rioted over a dispute over a religious site and thousands of Muslims were killed. A sense of proportion, please.

In cases in which the exotic threaten the freedom of expression of the media, an outsized reaction always follows IN THE MEDIA. Sometimes this outsized reaction in turn produces an outsized reaction in the world. The spiral of outrage-inflation will usually exhaust itself in a couple of weeks with minimal bloodshed, though sometimes with an authentic martyr.

But in the meantime there will be (welcome) affirmations of the right to free expression (often from the same people who will instantly condone suppression in the interest of national security or who don't give a shit about the way markets stifle expression) and (unwelcome) contrasts between the civilized and uncivilized portions of the world. About which I'll make a couple of points I've made elsewhere. First, everyone draws the line somewhere. Second, everyone thinks everyone else's line is arbitrary. Third, even though the media are increasingly sensitive about threats to the safety of journalists, writers, etc., in any historical sense those professions are safer than ever. And finally, if you look at the actual threats to journalists and other professional communicators, it's still the governments and their armies that are at the top of the list, and then movements of the right come in second. Certainly in the US it isn't Muslims that journalists need to fear but neo-Nazis and others on the extreme right--and you're still more likely to get killed with (or by) the army.

I was surprised to see the US State Department coming out with a (soft) condemnation of inflammatory cartoons yesterday; I haven't found the text of that announcement yet. The State Department's website isn't transparent to the novice....

2006-02-02T13:17:00.000-08:00

Testing the health of the public sphere.

History occasionally tosses us test cases for the public sphere. One that I’ve written about elsewhere is the US debate over slavery. Because slavery was so much a part of the fabric of everyday life, and because the western religious and political tradition as institutionalized in the US at its national birth seems in retrospect so unequivocal, if there had been a healthy public sphere in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War, it would have produced consensus on the abolition of slavery and on racial equality. People had ready access to information; they expressed values that should have guided their consideration; and they enjoyed access to plenty of public media. They should have made their state and federal governments get rid of slavery.

Of course, nothing like that happened. If there was a consensus among white citizens, it was in support of racial supremacy. All of the proslavery whites and a large percentage (I’d argue a super majority) of the antislavery whites believed in black inferiority. A large chunk of the freesoil movement was frankly racist, and didn’t want western territories polluted by black slavery. And even with a large majority of the citizenry at least passively opposed to slavery, there was absolutely no prospect that it would be abolished by political means. Abraham Lincoln, elected by a mere 37% of the popular vote, did not even call for abolition, and moved slowly to embrace it, even during the Civil War itself.

What made public discourse fail in the case of slavery? The party system. It's as simple as that. DeTocqueville pointed this out. Because both parties angled for majority support, and because neither major party believed that embracing abolition would win it more support than it would lose, both parties wanted to silence the abolitionists in their own ranks. Sometimes they did this by convincing them that agitation would be inopportune; at other times they raised mobs. When the Republican party succeeded the Whig party, this calculus changed a bit, but still a hard line was drawn well short of embracing the annihilation of slavery.

So the US public sphere before the Civil War failed its big test. This was the one that really counted--whether the public sphere could handle a debate on the tariff was relatively unimportant. We're still trying to wash the blood off our hands.

What are the test cases of our own day? The two that jump out at me are the environment and health care. Both have the same large moral stakes that the slavery debate held. In both cases ordinary people encounter plenty of information in their everyday lives to make up their own minds. There is more public support for environmental action and health care reform than there ever was for abolition. But in both areas there isn't much action. Why?

Vested interests--that's the obvious explanation. On both the environment and health care major industries have spent a lot of money in seducing public opinion and lobbying legislators. But is that a sufficient explanation?

Culture explains a lot, though I won't try to be too precise now about what culture means. Take the culture of the automobile, for instance: the reason why US Americans drive so much has to have something to do with a kind of irrational pleasure they derive from it. It's certainly not efficient. Many of us take on car payments as big as mortgage payments--not including the cost of insurance, gas, and upkeep. And we'll spend a lot of time sitting in our cars getting fat. Rationally, we should all prefer public transportation. But we won't take the bus, and therefore our bus service is generally lousy.

Culture (again, not being precise) can also make some things invisible while heightening the visibility of others. In the US, this is easily seen in the ideology of freedom of choice. It is assumed that freedom consists in having choices, and that whatever choices people make will be free choices. So people choose to have crappy public transportation because they don't take the bus, and people choose to have crappy television because they watch Fox instead of PBS, and so forth. But does any individual really choose the system of transportation, or the media system? Would any rational individual choose the systems in the US today? People feel free as they make their choices from moment to moment, but they certainlydo not feel free when they think about the world they live in and what they can do to change it. Instead they feel completely helpless.

Health care reform is a good example of this. In the US, almost any proposal for large scale reform will have to overcome tremendous resistance, because people don't believe that they are capable of achieving meaningful change through the political system. Their very disbelief makes them right.

When the Pres-o-dent made energy and health care cornerstones of his State of the Younyun address the other night, he placed a bet against the health of the public sphere. He bet that people would take his small bore proposals as, well, the best that you can hope for, and not rise up and demand change. He and his advisers have been right so far when they've bet against the public sphere, though they've been wrong about virtually everything else.

The media have a special role to play in promoting and supporting a healthy public sphere. The media are not themselves the public sphere, although they pretend that that's the case. Professional journalism especially. But more on this another time. Would things be different if they were doing their jobs better?

2006-01-31T14:26:00.000-08:00

This story about the current Italian elections tells you all you need to know about the seriousness with which the western media take politics overseas. Berlusconi has pledged to abstain from screwing til after the election, supposedly to attract the family values crowd. Even the Pope thinks that's bullshit, judging from last weekend's encyclical. Of course, his wife is twenty years younger than him.

Meanwhile, in the Italian press itself, the key news is about Berlusconi's resistance to the law requiring equal treatment of opposing candidates on television. He calls this version of the fairness doctrine "liberticide." (It sounds better in Italian.) The majestic equality of the laws, which forbids the rich as well as the poor from begging, stealing bread, and sleeping under bridges. That's (more or less) a quote from Anatole France, who also said, "In any well regulated society, wealth is a sacred thing. In a democracy, it's the only sacred thing."

2006-01-30T14:49:00.000-08:00

What interests me about blogs.

I started browsing the blogospere because I study the public sphere. I was drawn to Habermas's account of the decline of the public sphere, and to C. Wright Mills' analysis of the power of the media in his classic The Power Elite. The blogosphere looked like a potential answer to both of them. I thought I'd do scholarship on the blogosphere, but I sort of figured out that the bloggers themselves were already making every point I'd want to make about the blogosphere, and doing it much more effectively than I would. So I was drawn in in another way. During the run-up to the Iraq war, and even more in the 2004 election, I found myself browsing the blogosphere as a supplement and a guide to the news.

Many keystrokes have been devoted to the question of the relationship of the blogosphere to the mainstream media, and particularly to mainstream journalism. My favorite blogs--Juan Cole's Informed Comment, Kevin Drum's Political Animal, Josh Marshall's TalkingPointsMemo, and Andrew Sullivan, to throw in someone who bats from the right side of the plate--all have a track record in mainstream media, and all have a complicated relationship to both printed media and established journalism practice. But with a difference.

A blogger is a journalist working in a journalism that hasn’t been invented yet. At least the ones I like are. That is, they’re doing all the things journalists do with facts–discovering them, relaying them, putting them in dialog with each other, giving voice to points of view, representing the public–but doing so without a worked out theory, a journalism, to govern their activities. The credibility of a journalist usually comes from fidelity to a worked out code of journalism. Because there isn’t yet a worked out code of journalism for the blogosphere, and because the on line environment has unsettled all the worked out codes elsewhere (more about that another time, or refer to certain published thoughts of mine), the credibility of a blogger has to come from somewhere else. Sometimes it can come from her or his expertise–hence my hero Juan Cole, the master of the unpublished thought for historians. Sometimes it comes from his or her evident intelligence. This is the case with Kevin Drum. He has his expertise, but its not really the key to his authority. It’s that it’s just him doing his thing in a pretty transparent way. It’s nothing you couldn’t do. You really could.

But you’d have to be somebody. That is, only someone with a specific and evidently real personal existence can win the conviction that a blogger needs. This may not be a hard fact of the medium. Maybe any chucklehead can pull it off, and heaven knows there are enough liars in the blogosphere who seem to do perfectly well. But no one can pull it off without constructing a convincing persona. And that’s the key difference–in newspaper journalism, your persona is supposed to be universal, not specific. Even when a newspaper journalist achieves a byline, the byline is less a form of authorial identification than it is a warrant that the journalist’s personal existence had nothing whatever to do with the content of the article.

What Drum and Sullivan get from their journalism disciplines is something other than the effacing of their personalities. What they get is an economy of style. One of the things I hate in a blog, and one reason why I’m not a more regular reader of Jay Rosen’s excellent PressThink, is verbosity. Good writing is never verbose, wordy, or redundant. Rosen, whom I met once and then only briefly but who is a big fish in the same pool I swim in, is smart and honest and perceptive, but takes a long time making his point. Sullivan never does.

If each good blog has an economy of style, though, the blogosphere as a whole is supremely repetitive.

It follows that, if blogging represents a new journalism in the process of becoming itself, it does not necessarily represent a new system of political discourse. The existing journalism produces a dysfunctional system of discourse in spite of (or because of) its virtues as a journalism--evenhandedness, a need to efface authorship, the denial of values or commitments, a deference to established authority and expertise. The emerging journalism seems to be producing complementary dysfunctions because of its opposite virtues--spontaneity, personality, transparency, copiousness, hostility to privileged authority. But maybe that's because it hasn't really invented itself as a journalism yet.

2006-01-29T13:50:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I ran across this item from the NYTimes. It deals with the ongoing Italian election campaign, which I'm following on the ground in northern Italy by reading the Italian newspapers. It's a good example of the sort of content that makes readers distrust the media in direct proportion to their level of knowledge on a given subject. If I didn't know better, I'd've thought this was a pretty good, though not very deep, report on a specific controversy. It's not.

The report is about how Silvio Berlusconi is outmaneuvering his opposition by using his media properties and pressuring the government to extend the legislative session by two weeks. Each individual item in the report is true, of course; the problem is what's left out. Berlusconi got the extension of the legislative session, but what he'd asked for was that plus a postponement of the general election from 9 April until early May. He didn't get that. The outcome was a compromise. Why Berlusconi (the Cavalier, as the press calls him) wanted the election postponed is obvious--he's trailing badly in the polls because of a raft of corruption charges that have been dogging him for years. The reason why he wanted the extension of the legislative session is more complicated. One reason--a bill that's been sent back to the legislature for more work--is too squirrely to quickly describe, and not really interesting to anyone who doesn't already follow Italian politics. The other reason involves his media properties. A law has been passed that will require broadcasters to devote equal time to the opposition during the campaign. This law will kick in when the legislature adjourns. Berlusconi wants the extra time to use his media properties to flood the public with his image. This aspect of the extension is under continuing debate; it's possible that the government will put the equal time law into effect before the legislature adjourns.

Why does the Times article not fill us in? Well, there could be many reasons. The details may have gotten cut during editing. The reporter, Ian Fisher, covers a lot of territory, which would cultivate a habit of simplifying. Or he may like Berlusconi, though his other reports on Italian politics wouldn't necessarily support that. More likely it's a case of over-convenient framing.
Two key frames characterize the article. One is Berlusconi the sly survivor. Choosing this frame calls forth the expert commentary on how he's going to come from behind, which (and I admit I'm rooting against him) is partisan cheerleading. A left partisan wants to read this treatment as biased.

The other key frame is the one you find most common in US coverage of foreign elections. It is the Americanization theme, which also emphasizes television. Every British election since I started paying attention, for instance, has been written about as the "first American election" in that country, meaning that it's the first one in which television dominates the discourse.
The Americanization theme understates the issue in Italy, though. It's not television, it's the (more or less) monopoly control of television that's the issue, and it's way beyond US proportions. Berlusconi is not merely the Ted Turner or Rupert Murdoch of Italy. His media empire is really unrivaled within the country. He dominates broadcasting the way that right wing voices in the US dominate talk radio. But hey, talk radio is just radio, and the right wing isn't just one guy.

The cavalier's stranglehold on the broadcast environment resembles the state of the US media before the great depression. Then a media mogul like William Randolph Hearst seemed to exercise such power that a wide array of ordinary people wanted the federal government to control media ownership, or set up public alternatives to the commercial media, or do other things that made media owners in general run scared of "communistic" schemes and even try to clean up their own houses. The depression ended Hearst's glory days, and the "professional" standards that came out of this turmoil reassured the public that the power of the press wouldn't be exploited for personal political ambitions.

Since World War II, it's been considered unsophisticated in the US to believe that the media can manipulate public opinion. The US media system is supposed to be too diverse and too disciplined (by professional standards AND by the market) for this to happen. Reporters especially believe this, and are actually reassured that BOTH the left and the right think they're biased. This complacency gets transferred to other national contexts in mainstream reporting, unless some explicit form of censorship or government ownership is involved. So any US professional reporter is more or less programmed to think of the private sector as the area of freedom, and to think of a mogul like Berlusconi as a colorful scalawag rather than a threat to democracy. On the other hand, a publicly owned broadcast system (like RAI in Italy) will be much more suspect.

Too longwinded, this post, but here's the point. There's a systematic blindness to the problem of media monopoly in US news discourse, and it makes it difficult to see how bad things can get. Things can get pretty damned bad. You know, Italy wound up in Iraq too.

2006-01-29T13:42:00.000-08:00

Unpublished thoughts.

I’m punning, of course, on the criticism leveled at overambitious academics–“she’s never had an unpublished thought.” I don’t recall when I first heard that one. It must have been in graduate school. I did my grad work in a history department, and the scorn we were supposed to feel toward the trendier academics was incorporated in a number of such one-liners, like “the leisure of the theory class.” When I moved into the field of communication, of course, I was surrounded by members of the theory class, many of whom had never had an unpublished thought, at least by historians’ standards.

Here’s what historians think you ought to do to publish a thought. First, you ought to figure out every possible topic it could be connected with, and then you ought to read every available thing that’s ever been published about any of those topics. Then, you ought to find a cache of unexplored primary documents that bear on your thought. After thoroughly analyzing these documents, you may make a claim that you have something new to say, but, before publishing your thought, you should present it in oral form to your colleagues, to fellow researchers in the primary material, and then to academic gatherings. At that point you are ready to submit it to referees, who will tell you how to revise it before publishing it. Then you may have a published thought. Otherwise, all your thoughts should remain unpublished.

But not unspoken. One of the tricks of the trade is to have a lively but secluded private network of conversation, where unpublished thoughts are expressed and exchanged. It is in the unpublished arena that historians, and other interpretive communities, of course, coordinate the standards that will eventually determine what will be publishable, and it is in these arenas that the distinction between real and fake work will be drawn. If you aren’t connected to these arenas of unpublished thoughts, you will likely never be able to cross the barrier to having published thoughts, at least in the more austere fields of cultural–and political–work.

This is why I love the blogosphere. It makes it possible to extend access to the arenas of unpublished thought in interesting ways. This doesn’t mean it does away with expertise, or the standards of publication, but that it allows for a different kind of publicness. It lets a guy like me, who might set himself up as an expert, speak in relatively inexpert terms to an audience of no one in particular–perhaps no one at all–but at the same time perhaps everyone. It lets me air out my thoughts, but leaves them still unpublished.

It stands for the free play of the mind.

Which at one time was the only thing I was sure I believed in.