QOTD, Digby:
I guess this is the MSM's way of avoiding responsibility, but what it really shows is that they don't take their jobs seriously and, therefore, they shouldn't be surprised to be losing market share to those who do. They certainly shouldn't be angry when they are declared to be irrelevant, since they themselves are the ones who say it the most.
Cole asks an interesting question here. I will ask another one: how long before mainstream media types start talking about this and failing to note the years it happened. Can't be long.
John Cole: Good Government
DougJ: Wrong ‘em boyoWhile hundreds of thousands of disability claims lay backlogged at the Department of Veterans Affairs, thousands of technology employees at the department received $24 million in bonuses, a new report says.A report issued by the VA’s Office of Inspector General said the department issued millions of dollars in awards over a two-year period in 2007 and 2008.
“The frequent and large dollar amount awards given to employees were unusual and often absurd,” the report stated.
The reports also called the payments “not fiscally responsible.”
Check the years this happened. Then, ask yourself- “Who will be the first wingnut to blame this on Obama?”
Marcy Wheeler destroys Marc Ambinder for saying that he was right to be wrong about the Bush politicization of terror alert. Here’s Ambinder (he later added a weasely addendum):
Journalists, including myself, were very skeptical when anti-Bush liberals insisted that what Ridge now says is true, was true. We were wrong. Our skepticism about the activists’ conclusions was warranted because these folks based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence. But journalists should have been even more skeptical about the administration’s pronouncements. And yet—we, too, weren’t privy to the intelligence. Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt. We can see, now, how pre-war intelligence was manipulated, how the entire Washington establishment (including Congressional Democrats(, including the media, was manipulated by a valid fear of the unknown—but a fear we now know was consciously, deliberately, inculcated.Here’s Wheeler:
God forbid a journalist use simple empiricism—retrospectively matching terror alerts with reports on which they were based—to assess the terror alerts. God forbid a journalist learn that we went to Code Orange because someone claimed terrorists were going to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blow torch, and from that learn to be skeptical of terror alerts going forwards. It’s not as if, after all, the election eve alert was a one-off, the only alert in which the hype was later shown to be over-hype. There was a pattern. And normal human beings equipped with the gift of empiricism that apparently gets weeded out at journalism school tend to look at patterns and conclude that if a relationship consistently has happened in the past, then it probably will exist in the future.
But no!! Journalists can’t do what normal human beings do all the time, and make certain conclusions by watching patterns develop.
One obvious take away here is that hippies are wrong even when they’re right. Another is that Marc Ambinder is an asshole.
But for me, the most important take away, is that we live in a world where journalists get ahead more by clinging to the right-center conventional wisdom than by actually finding out the truth. It’s quite literally better, careerwise, to be wrong all the time. This is why I think our society may be irredeemably fucked.
Ambinder responds to Wheeler and Greenwald. And misses the mark, pathetically, again. Sigh.
Ambinder: Ambinder: Sorry I Was So Stupid, But I Was Right To Be Stupid
digby: IrrelevantBoth Glenn Greenwald and Marcy Wheeler have written posts eviscerating me for contending that Bush-hatred, not anything else, drove skepticism among liberals about the terrorist threat warnings. They've both written good posts, really; lawyerly, passionate and persuasive, over the top, at times, but they've given me a lot to think about. (One post is better than the other, but I won't say which one.)
They haven't changed my mind, but they've certainly modified my conclusion. I didn't spend enough time thinking about what I wanted to say. Incidentally, if I am a symbol of everything that is wrong in journalism, then I suggest they are both giving me WAY too much credit.I will say one thing about journalists collectively: we will never, ever change people's minds about the media except by practicing good journalism. So arguing -- and even apologizing -- is kind of useless and counterproductive.
I still think that some journalists were right to be skeptical of the doubters at the time. I think that some journalists were correct to question how they arrived at the beliefs they arrived at.
The evolving history of the Bush administration, we've come to learn, is complex. The White House was never the monolith that it once appeared to me. The story of how the White House revolted against Dick Cheney is only beginning to be told. Administration officials were more political in some areas than we had assumed, and less political in others, and their worldview was shaped by an all-consuming obsession about terrorism. The One Percent Doctrine.
Reading the excerpts from Tom Ridge's book, it is not clear to me that he is actually arguing against interest, or that he is correct. No doubt, Don Rumsfeld and John Ashcroft had very strong views about terrorism, but simply because Ridge -- who disagreed with Rumsfeld and Ashcroft about many, many things -- had a feeling that Rumsfeld was trying to tinker with an election's outcome does not, by a mile, prove anything.
What it establishes is that Ridge had the same suspicions as many liberals and libertarians. And Ridge, having access to most of the intelligence, had sound reasons to object. "Gut hatred" is way too strong a term -- it's the wrong term -- to describe why liberals doubted the fundamental capacity of the White House to be honest about anything. It was ideological and based on their intepretation of a pattern of facts that, in retrospect, seems much more reasonable than it did. The media's skepticism was warranted; our derision wasn't and mine isn't. Quite frankly, I don't think the triumphalism is any more attractive, either.
My hindsight bias is no less offensive than the bias I attribute to these liberals. It was wrong to use the phrase "gut hatred." Had I spent more time thinking about the post, I would have chosen a different phrase. And I should have.
Here's the way to put this into context: the political team at the White House had the honor of using policy to advance politics. That they did, in ways that were tough to handle -- scaring Americans into complacence, taking advantage of weak Democrats, comparing Max Cleland to Saddam Hussein, exploiting the national security divisions in this country for electoral gain. Though American politics has never been beanbag and it has never been nice, for political journalists, our not calling out Republicans on these tactics -- not calling them strikes, as they were definitely within the strike zone -- was our deepest failing.
Last year at the Democratic convention, I was on a panel with Jonathan Alter in which he oddly asserted that people don't pay attention to what's said in the media. I asked him where he thought they got their information and he said "from each other." I found that somewhat interesting coming from a journalist, needless to say.Jamison Foser: How the media made this summer's political insanity inevitable
There's a weird propensity among villagers to think that they don't affect public opinion, that it just exists out there in a vacuum and can be gauged separate and apart from what's being reported. Ruth Marcus was on MSNBC earlier and she said this:Now, I happen to think looking at the polls is probably a good thing in this case (see below) because they are actually showing that there is a decline in base support, which is important to acknowledge (although I won't hold my breath for Marcus to do so.) But that is likely happening because by all appearances, Obama looks to be willing to cave to the teabaggers --- and the media are kvelling about the good news.
I think any time a politician is complaining about the media it means they have a bigger problem. [smirking] And certainly when Barack Obama starts complaining about his media coverage, you might have a little question about that, since he's actually gotten fairly good media coverage throughout his rather meteoric career.
Look, I would not look at the media coverage and I would also not look at the town hall meetings as a gauge of the public mood, but I would look at the polls ...
The idea that the media and the teabaggers have nothing to do with the poll results is just cracked. Are people making their judgments based on some dream they had? Some conversation with a stranger? They are getting their information somewhere, and call me nuts, but I would guess it's mostly from newspapers and television (and to a small extent blogs.)
The teabaggers have been dramatically in the news for the past few weeks and Obama's poll numbers have taken a hit. I certainly don't believe that it's because everyone agrees with the teabaggers, but it's insane to think that the news coverage of it, and the health care debate in the media, hasn't had an effect.
I guess this is the MSM's way of avoiding responsibility, but what it really shows is that they don't take their jobs seriously and, therefore, they shouldn't be surprised to be losing market share to those who do. They certainly shouldn't be angry when they are declared to be irrelevant, since they themselves are the ones who say it the most.
Update: Here's Jamison Foser with the facts on this. read 'em and weep.
The most striking aspect of this summer's political insanity isn't the frothing at the mouth of a loud minority of Republicans that President Obama is a secret Kenyan bent on subjecting an unwitting American public to government death panels, or the mass confusion among the rest of the public about health care reform.
It's that any reporter who has been paying the slightest bit of attention is surprised by any of this. It is, after all, the inevitable result of the way the media do their jobs.
Let's start with the 'round-the-bend howling about Obama's place of birth, which reached a fever pitch a few weeks ago. There was no basis for it -- Obama was born in Hawaii, as government documents, the state of Hawaii (including its Republican governor), and contemporaneous newspaper accounts confirm. Because there is no basis for it, many reporters are shocked that right-wing activists, with the help of some in the media, promoted the nutty and false claim that Obama was secretly born in Kenya, and that many Americans fell for the phony conspiracy theory.
Why on earth would anyone be surprised by this? The last time America had a Democratic president, right-wing activists, with the help of some in the media, said he was responsible for the murder of his close friend and aide, Vince Foster -- and dozens of other murders, too. Why would anyone think that people who are willing to baselessly and falsely accuse one president of murder, drug smuggling, and an assortment of other crimes be unwilling to claim that the current president was born in Kenya?
You'd have to be hopelessly naive to think that people who spent years calling President Clinton a murderer wouldn't dare demand that President Obama produce a birth certificate. Or that people who believed one president was a murderer never would believe another was born abroad.
Ah, but maybe reporters are just surprised that the birthers were egged on by some congressional Republicans? They shouldn't be. Dan Burton, the Republican congressman who chaired the Government Reform & Oversight Committee, shot up a melon in his backyard in order to "prove" that Vince Foster was murdered. We're supposed to be surprised that some members of Congress are trying to capitalize on the birther conspiracy theories? Come on. Be serious.
President Clinton's opponents accomplished three things with their nasty and false claims that he was a drug-running murderer: They angered and energized millions of Americans who didn't like Clinton, created doubt and confusion among millions more, and hijacked control of the national dialogue (due in large part to the media's inability to resist shiny objects and their weakness at making clear what is true and what is false.) Why wouldn't they try to do the same to President Obama?
And the barrage of health care lies, and accompanying mass confusion about the most basic facts? MSNBC has spent much of the past week, if not longer, expressing shock at the lies and their effectiveness.
Have these people been asleep, Rip Van Winkle-style, for the past few decades? Conservatives buried the last serious effort at universal health care under an avalanche of (media-abetted) lies. And they won the 2000 election on the strength of (media-abetted ... and sometimes media-invented) lies. And they took us to war in Iraq based on (media-abetted) lies. And ... well, you get the point. When was the last time conservatives approached a big fight without relying heavily, if not exclusively, on misinformation and deception? Why would anyone have thought this time would be different?
Likewise, the increasingly obvious fact that conservatives aren't actually interested in working toward bipartisan reform -- this seems to have taken reporters by surprise. But when was the last time conservatives made significant concessions in order to win bipartisan support for anything?
What makes all this shock really amazing is that so much of political journalism consists of pontification by people who have supposedly been around and understand how things work -- and yet they're constantly stunned when history repeats itself in the most predictable of ways.
And the latest realization that has so many reporters flabbergasted: the misinformation has worked! People believe falsehoods about health care! Many people don't even know basic facts about the current system!
Gee, you don't say? Many people don't know the basic facts about anything. That's one of the basic facts of American democracy. And when people are repeatedly told things that aren't true by people they trust, they tend to believe those things. That's one of the basic facts of ... people.
Surely reporters -- whose jobs, after all, involve communicating with the public -- are aware of these basic facts of life? Surely they've heard the expression about a lie making it halfway around the world before the truth has time to get its boots on? So why are they so surprised? Particularly when they've spent the bulk of the health care debate talking about politics and polls and chattering endlessly about who is "winning the message war" rather than repeatedly and clearly explaining to viewers the facts about health care.
Just look at the way much of the media have reacted to the belated realization that the public is woefully misinformed: By speculating -- sorry, "analyzing" -- why this is the case, and guessing -- sorry, "analyzing" -- whether the White House can develop a "message" that "works." And what aren't they doing in reaction to this realization? Clearly and repeatedly explaining the facts. And they're surprised people don't know the truth. Unbelievable.
In fact, it is the media's behavior that has made this summer's madness inevitable. When they let the loudest yellers and most audacious liars drive the discourse, they guarantee that people who can't win on the merits will yell and lie. When they focus on politics rather than policy, they guarantee the public will remain in the dark about basic facts. When they repeat false claims, or treat them as he-said, she-said situations, they guarantee that those false claims will sway confused citizens. When they continue to give a platform to people who have a history of lying -- and assume those people are telling the truth this time -- they guarantee those people will continue to lie.
As long as the media approach their jobs this way, we're going to see the same thing play out over and over again. And each time, the media will be shocked -- shocked -- that some people lie, and other people believe lies.
Or they could do things differently: They could set aside the punditry and the "analysis" and the polls and the freak show and dedicate themselves to explaining the facts about health care. And explaining the facts means more than calling a lie a lie -- though that is hugely important. It also means proactively telling people how the health care system works, and what the proposed reforms are, how they would work, and what the likely effects would be.
If they won't do that, at least they could stop telling us how shocked they are at the inevitable results of their behavior. It's getting old.
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