Month: July 2009

Categories
Law Politics The Bush Legacy

Alberto Gonzales: Sharp Like An Old Crayon

The Times always gets an interesting array of questions written by prominent individual for its pre-Confirmation hearing piece with questions for the nominee. This last attempt was no different – but as always – the questions often revealed more about the questioner than their intended answerer. For example, Alberto Gonzalez suggests Sotomayor be asked:

Some overseas critics have questioned the legality of United States government policies on the war on terrorism. Should America’s standing in the world, to the extent it may be affected by the outcome of a case, ever inform a judicial decision?

Clearly, Gonzales thinks it should affect the outcome of cases – but it seems impossible to see how this principle would be applied. But one can guess that this argument was used to push Gonzales into taking positions he might not have otherwise as David Addington, Scooter Libby, and other top Bush administration officials working under Cheney pushed various extreme positions in secret – and then to cover up the excesses while Alberto “I Don’t Recall” Gonzales was Attorney General.

But it takes some sharp like Gonzales (sharp like an old crayon) to expose the underlying idea so baldly. Presumably Gonzales thinks American citizens have a right to know what the American government is doing in their name – but that this right must be counterbalanced by a Court acting as a kind of public relations arm of the U.S. government. As Glenn Greenwald said (in a piece I cannot find at the moment, so I paraphrase): “The inevitable logic of this position is that the worse the crime is, the greater the necessity to cover it up to protect America’s image.” This obviously creates an incentive for administration officials to make sure that their crimes are so bad future administrations will be compelled to protect them – to prevent information from becoming public and damaging America’s reputation.

[Image by Matthew Bradley licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Law National Security Politics

Cokie Roberts Thinks the Rule of Law Might Be More Important Than A Pleasant Atmosphere in Washington

[digg-reddit-me]When I heard Cokie Roberts saying this on Sunday my jaw dropped:

The self-centeredness of the response – and the fact that she showed no shame about explaining this as her reasoning on national television when she was supposed to be acting as a serious commentator. Though it is pretty awesome that she is willing to undergo the inconvenience of the “bad atmosphere” in Washington as a result of attempting to uphold the Rule of Law. I’m glad she is willing to make the sacrifice for the rest of us.

It’s pretty telling that committing war crimes isn’t what is credited with souring the mood – but instead the blame is foisted onto those who uphold the law…

Categories
Economics Financial Crisis

Theories of the Financial Crisis: Hubris of the Bankers

[digg-reddit-me]No list of theories of causes of the financial crisis that almost destroyed the fabric of the world economy (as opposed to the slow-motion disaster unfolding now) would be complete without listing hubris, that most Greek-mythical of faults.

Hubris clearly isn’t the only reason. There was greed – we all know that. There were various incentives that distorted the system as a whole. There was an enormous imbalance between East Asian countries and America that assisted in producing unmooring our financial industry. There was government intervention. There was a shift in the animal spirits. There was a profound miscalculation of risk. There were assets bubbles, Goldman Sachs, deregulation, new financial instruments, and a subservience of politics to finance.

But how can one explain how far out on this limb all of these venerable institutions went – how they thought they would be able to leverage themselves 33 to 1 – how they took on so much risk they almost brought down the financial system built over centuries in a week. Bankers didn’t take to calling themselves “Masters of the Universe” because they were being ironic. No – at the heart of this crisis – and reasserting itself now as they try to restore “normalcy” to their profession – was hubris.

Michael Lewis – who worked on Wall Street as a young man – described this hubris brilliantly in an essay published in the immediate aftermath of the financial collapse for Portfolio. He described how countless warning signs were ignored – because the money and the success had gone to the heads of these titans of Wall Street. (He steers away from the more high profile Cassandras from Nassim Nicholas Taleb to Nouriel Roubini to Brooksley Born.) After all, how had they gotten so much money if they didn’t know what they were doing? Lewis, unable to make that “logical” leap himself, had left Wall Street in the late 1980s, expecting the whole house of cards to fall at any moment:

To this day, the willingness of a Wall Street investment bank to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to dispense investment advice to grownups remains a mystery to me. I was 24 years old, with no experience of, or particular interest in, guessing which stocks and bonds would rise and which would fall. The essential function of Wall Street is to allocate capital—to decide who should get it and who should not. Believe me when I tell you that I hadn’t the first clue…

In [the past two decades], I had been waiting for the end of Wall Street. The outrageous bonuses, the slender returns to shareholders, the never-ending scandals, the bursting of the internet bubble, the crisis following the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management: Over and over again, the big Wall Street investment banks would be, in some narrow way, discredited. Yet they just kept on growing, along with the sums of money that they doled out to 26-year-olds to perform tasks of no obvious social utility. The rebellion by American youth against the money culture never happened. Why bother to overturn your parents’ world when you can buy it, slice it up into tranches, and sell off the pieces?

At some point, I gave up waiting for the end. There was no scandal or reversal, I assumed, that could sink the system.

Michael Osninski – who wrote programs creating derivatives – explained his rationalization for why he was able to make so much money:

[E]ven then, I was wondering why I was making more than anyone in my family, maybe as much as all my siblings combined. Hey, I had higher SAT scores. I could do all the arithmetic in my head. I was very good at programming a computer. And that computer, with my software, touched billions of dollars of the firm’s money. Every week. That justified it. When you’re close to the money, you get the first cut. Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don’t they?

Everyone seeks to claim credit for the successes that they benefit from – so, as the money flowed into Wall Street and all together people who didn’t quite understand what they were doing worked together and together inflated the prices of assets they didn’t know enough about to value – everyone got rich.

Contributing to this sense of unreality – and this hubris – was the culture that grew up around these people. They learned how to manipulate the programs written by the lowly programmers that created derivratives and other complex assets – and created a language that was opaque to those outside the club – of super senior risk, of CDS, CMS, and sundry other financial products. They sealed off their world from outside inspection, blocked regulation at every turn – and came to believe they understood the system. Though many must have understood their ignorance going in – as Lewis did – their success washed away their concerns. A gambler doesn’t need to know how roulette works if everyone who is playing the game is winning.

But hubris always leads to a downfall – and so, in the fall of 2008 2009, the house of cards created by these “Masters of the Universe” collapsed – and with it, the life savings of millions who trusted the brash bankers.

In the end it seems, no rational analysis or argumentation could convince these titans of Wall Street that their success was based on luck rather than knowledge or skill. And they ignored or marginalized who demonstrated otherwise – until it was too late. Too many seemed to have believed their own hype. It was as if they truly thought they were “Masters of the Universe.”

And now that the financial system has gotten back on its feet – and as the rest of the economy is still suffering – this hubris, which seemed to have fallen with the stock market, has reinflated. As a top Goldman Sachs official said commenting on the high levels of risk the firm was taking on – and the best-ever profits they were generating from that:

Our model really never changed, we’ve said very consistently that our business model remained the same.

The near-collapse of the financial industry is apparently no match for the hubris of bankers.

Continue reading “Theories of the Financial Crisis: Hubris of the Bankers”
Categories
Iran The Web and Technology

Iranian Authorities Using Facebook and Twitter for Intelligence Gathering

Evgeny Morozov – always a pessimist about the use of technology against autocratic regimes – relays an anecdote from Iran suggesting the Iranian authorities are now using Facebook and Twitter for intelligence gathering:

On passing through the immigration control at the airport in Tehran, she was asked by the officers if she has a Facebook account. When she said “no”, the officers pulled up a laptop and searched for her name on Facebook. They found her account and noted down the names of her Facebook friends.

This is very disturbing. For once, it means that the Iranian authorities are paying very close attention to what’s going on Facebook and Twitter (which, in my opinion, also explains why they decided not to take those web-sites down entirely – they are useful tools of intelligence gathering).

Categories
Criticism Politics The Media The Opinionsphere

On Media Bias and Conventional Wisdom (cont.)

[digg-reddit-me]I wrote earlier about the history of major news organizations and Conventional Wisdom. It is important to acknowledge though that the role of the news organizations has rarely been more prominent than it was at the beginning of that history – in the 1950s and 1960s.

Where the previous piece ended was with acknowledgement that the Conventional Wisdom of the mainstream news organizations was no longer authoritative – as partisans of the left and right each sought to contest every aspect of the media landscape, and as certain flaws in news gathering, news presentation, and commentary became more apparent.

Those following the biggest news organizations – the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, Time, Newsweek, the Associated Press, McClatchy, and many of the other top news organizations – can sense a bias if they follow the coverage closely. Though many of the reporters, editors, anchors, and others may subscribe to a mainstream form of liberalism (as polls show), the actions of the news-gatherers and their editors demonstrate that their primary ideology is not liberal but instead is based on cynism and opportunism. (Fox News is the rare case of a newsgathering organization that is almost purely ideological – making its “Fair and Balanced” tagline positively Orwellian.) Even the Huffington Post – which is one of the most liberal news gathering organizations – published off-the-record remarks by their darling, Barack Obama – at a time when it caused him considerable damage. The press went after Bill Clinton – rooting amongst his sexual dalliances – all in search of a scoop. The reporters were pretty brutal in their takes on John Edwards – the most progressive Democratic candidate to have a plausible shot at the Democratic nomination in a generation – even before his affair. If you listen to the members of these news organizations talk – which you can increasingly do with podcasts and other behind-the-scenes takes – the unstated biases are not liberal – but are instead a distrust of every official and every politician – and a desire to make a name for themselves by bringing someone big down with a juicy story.

Another primary aspect of these newsgatherers is faux-objectivity. This sometimes leads to news stories being framed in a manner to give credence to more liberal views (though this primarily is true on social issues rather than political ones) – but more often, it leads to the news stories on controversial topics being presented as “he said, she said.” Campbell Brown presented a perfect example of this faux-journalism recently:

Even as the news organization no longer play an unchallenged role in deciding on the Conventional Wisdom, they still play an important role. No longer can an individual pronounce – as Walter Cronkite did – that Vietnam was “unwinnable” after a news report and succeed in shaping the Conventional Wisdom. No longer can the press hound a president from office on the basis of law-breaking. No longer will those who stand to benefit from the status quo allow a consensus opinion regarding what action should be taken on civil rights or to combat global warming be reached. Partisans would challenge it and attack the messenger – and given the mistrust of most people for the press, they would likely succeed to some extent, which is all they need to paralyze the system.

The most effective way news organizations can – and do – shape the Conventional Wisdom of the public as a whole is to make some conclusion they have reached implicit in their coverage. Some recent examples of such nuggets of conventional wisdom from the press – which are mostly personal characterizations:

  • “Al Gore exaggerates.”
  • “George W. Bush is dumb.”
  • “There’s not much difference between Bush and Gore.”
  • “America doesn’t torture.”
  • “America does torture.”
  • “Dick Cheney is really in charge.”
  • “Joe Biden puts his foot in his mouth.”
  • “Bill Clinton is a philanderer.”
  • “John Edwards is phony.”
  • “Obama throws people under the bus if they’re causing him trouble.”
  • “John McCain is a maverick.”
  • “John McCain is erratic.”
  • “Sarah Palin is out of her depth.”

True, not true; fair or unfair, these conclusions, once reached, became implicit in news coverage, unchallenged by the commentators or the press, and the fodder for late night comedians and political cartoonists. Today, it is probably comedy more than anything else in which the Conventional Wisdom is expressed and accepted.

Probably the most basic rule of faux-journalism is that every event and off-hand remark must be interpreted as confirming the conventional wisdom of the press – becoming part of the litany of “proofs” that the stereotype is true.

Categories
Election 2008 Palin Politics The Opinionsphere

Why I Despise Sarah Palin

[digg-reddit-me]One of my friends asked me this question. Actually, he accused me of despising her (which I admit to) and postulated that feminists and liberals hate her so much because she stands for “a sort of  ‘reincarnation’ of the traditional post-war female that scares the bejesus out of liberals for a variety of reasons.”

I can’t speak for every liberal, or every progressive, or every feminist – but I can speak for myself – and I tell you, it is not Palin’s  status as a reincarnation of the traditional post-war female (a description which I incidentally don’t find that fitting) that leads me to despise her. It is that she found herself to be a very capable demagogue. Frank Rich in The New York Times explained it well this Sunday:

The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological… The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.

Palin constantly positions herself as a victim of the conspiracies of the elite. As interviewers lob her softball after softball, she points out the few outliers and claims she is a victim of a giant conspiracy. As a local blogger files a frivolous ethics complaint, Palin claims she is being targeted for persecution by Rahm Emanuel and Barack Obama. A similar logic of collective victomhood makes its way into every speech she gives; she constantly sets up a dynamic of “us” against “them” – the “Joe Sixpacks” versus “the Hollywood/NY elite” and the “real Americans” against those “who [see] America…as being so imperfect…that [they are] palling around with terrorists [who]…target their own country.” What this accomplishes is what Cass Sunstein in the Spectator describes as the dyanmic of self-reinforcing moral outrage:

Political extremism is often a product of group polarisation and social segregation is a useful tool for producing polarisation. In fact, a good way to create an extremist group, or a cult of any kind, is to separate members from the rest of society. The separation can occur physically or psychologically, by creating a sense of suspicion about non-members. With such separation, the information and views of those outside the group can be discredited, and hence nothing will disturb the process of polarisation as group members continue to talk.

Sunstein does not link this to Palin – but it is clear that she is playing with this exact dynamic. This stands in stark contrast to John McCain who, to his credit, realized how dangerous this dynamic was and tried to calm his crowds down; and it stands in contrast to Barack Obama who has deliberately taken an approach that minimizes this dynamic of escalating moral outrage – challenging his audiences when they seem to be dehumanizing the other side. Palin though escalated her rhetoric. Her crowds became more extreme – in the way that like-minded groups do, especially when united against a nefarious and dehumanized “them.”

Why do I despise Sarah Palin? Because she is a demagogue, and more important, because she is an effective one.

Continue reading “Why I Despise Sarah Palin”
Categories
Domestic issues Economics Health care

The Medical Loss Ratio

[digg-reddit-me]In most industries, when a customer pays for something – and then asks to get what they paid for – it’s not considered a big deal. It’s the basic transaction that the business engages in. The health insurance industry works differently. You make regular payments so that the insurance company will pay your irregular medical bills and so that they will protect against the possibility that you will be one of the unlucky few who has some serious condition which requires extensive medical treatment. Most people aren’t – and so they just give over money regularly and receive very little in return. But a few people end up needing serious medical care. That’s the purpose of insurance – to distribute the risks and costs more evenly. This is what it was designed to do – this is why people buy it – it is what they are paying for. But the health insurance industry sees their role differently. They’re in it to make as much money as possible – not to provide a service for a fee and make a profit from this. Thus, when anyone who has duly paid for health insurance for years makes a claim for a condition that requires serious and expensive medical treatment, they try to find every possible basis to deny and revoke their coverage. It would be as if – after I had paid for a soda – the store then tried to deny me the right to open the soda and leave the store.

Obama’s attempt to reform health care is partly about reforming the way we provide care (with electronic records, comparative effectiveness studies, etc.) – but it is mainly the way in which we provide health care insurance. In this fight, there is one statistic we have not heard enough about but which critics of the current system should bring up whenever they can: the medical loss ratio. This statistic describes the percentage of dollars that a health insurance company takes in from its premiums that it uses to actually pay for medical services. For example, back in the 1990s – when the health care insurance industry was quite profitable – the figure was generally in the mid-90s. In other words, about 95% of all dollars collected in premiums were used to pay for medical services. Since then, structural changes in the health insurance industry have led it to focus more on profits – as a Wall Street mentality took hold. Since the 1990s, the medical loss ratio has dropped significantly. Today it is in the mid 70s to low 80s – meaning $20 to $30 of every $100 paid in insurance premiums is not used to provide the services paid for. These profits – and the quest to increase such profits – has led to the health insurance industry becoming more like a Wall Street financial firm – with massive bonuses to its top executives and large dividends to shareholders as they skim greater profits from a rising bubble in the field in which it operates in. Our health insurance system is run by Wall Street tycoons.

How does this affect the quality of the service that health insurance companies provide? It forces them to reduce their medical loss ratio as much as possible. Wendell Potter, a former executive at CIGNA, explains several ways:

Rescission is one thing. Denying claims is another. Being, you know, really careful as they review claims, particularly for things like liver transplants, to make sure, from their point of view, that it really is medically necessary and not experimental. That’s one thing. And that was that issue in the Nataline Sarkisyan case.

But another way is to purge employer accounts, that – if a small business has an employee, for example, who suddenly has have a lot of treatment, or is in an accident. And medical bills are piling up, and this employee is filing claims with the insurance company. That’ll be noticed by the insurance company.

And when that business is up for renewal, and it typically is up, once a year, up for renewal, the underwriters will look at that. And they’ll say, “We need to jack up the rates here, because the experience was,” when I say experience, the claim experience, the number of claims filed was more than we anticipated. So we need to jack up the price. Jack up the premiums. Often they’ll do this, knowing that the employer will have no alternative but to leave. And that happens all the time.

They’ll resort to things like the rescissions that we saw earlier. Or dumping, actually dumping employer groups from the rolls. So the more of my premium that goes to my health claims, pays for my medical coverage, the less money the company makes.

The health insurance industry uses any possible reason to revoke coverage that an individual has been paying for as soon as they actually need the service they have paid for – for example, they will point to some minor preexisting condition that was not disclosed when they agreed to provide the insurance as an excuse to cancel coverage. Robin Beaton of Texas had her policy revoked as her doctors were scheduling her double mastectomy for her breast cancer because she had failed to disclose to her insurance company that she had the pre existing condition of acne and a rapid heartbeat.

So – essentially, these organizations accept contracts to provide health insurance in the event someone needs it. But as soon as a significant claim is made, they try to find a reason to deny it. And the executives at these companies have refused to say that they will not continue these practices.

Our system of health insurance has created a Wall Street-run health care business. For all the worry Republicans are trying to gin up about government bureaucrats reporting to Congress or the White House being in between you and your doctor – what we have now is a system where faceless corporate bureaucrats are making medical decisions reporting to Wall Street tycoons. Like the Wall Street firms, health insurance companies have driven up prices exponentially, creating a bubble; the CEOs take enormous salaries; they are accepting money for insurance from anyone, but will look for any way out of any of their commitments if they can get away with it. In normal businesses, profits are the primary side-effect of providing a product or service; in a Wall Street style corporation, profits are the sole and only goal – with the product or service they are selling merely a means to this end. This is what our health insurance industry has become.

This is the royally fucked system we have today. This isn’t the only issue health care reform needs to address – but it is a major one.

Continue reading “The Medical Loss Ratio”
Categories
National Security The Bush Legacy The War on Terrorism

Is The Secret Plan Panetta Found Hersh’s “Executive Assasination Ring”?

[digg-reddit-me]Sam Stein of the Huffington Post got there first – but when I first heard the news about the secret plan so shocking that CIA Director Leon Panetta immediately shut it down and informed Congress late last week – my first thought was of the vague remarks by Seymour Hersh this March about “an executive assassination ring” run by Vice President Cheney.

Last night, reading the Wall Street Journal piece by Siobhan Gorman, this inkling seemed confirmed. Gorman reported:

According to current and former government officials, the agency spent money on planning and possibly some training. It was acting on a 2001 presidential legal pronouncement, known as a finding, which authorized the CIA to pursue such efforts. The initiative hadn’t become fully operational at the time Mr. Panetta ended it…

One former senior intelligence official said the program was an attempt “to achieve a capacity to carry out something that was directed in the finding,” meaning it was looking for ways to capture or kill al Qaeda chieftains.

Most of the other pieces on this subject have linked it specifically to Cheney – which is little surprise as most of the more extreme measures taken in the aftermath of September 11 were instigated by Cheney. Stories have also noted that this program is not related to the interrogation of prisoners or the wiretapping of information.

Compare this to Hersh’s comments back in March:

Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command – JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him…

Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

The glaring discrepancy between the program Hersh is describing – and the one news reports are now – is that one point being emphasized in the current coverage of the concealed program is that it was never fully operational. But Sam Donaldson – in an unusual bit of worthwhile commentary – pointed out Sunday on This Week that we didn’t know how operational was being defined. He asked: Were there pilot programs? Was this tested in the field? Was there training? These questions are important – especially given how a word such as torture was parsed out of existence. And of course the most basic question, being fooled once, can we trust that this secret operation was not actually operational?

[Image by askpang licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Criticism Politics The Media The Opinionsphere

On Media Bias

There was a time when news organizations could pronounce the Conventional Wisdom of our society as a whole authoritatively. This Wisdom was not decided on by the media – but rather once it had reached a critical mass of acceptance among the media professionals, the political class, and the public at large, a news organization would close down the debate and declare it so. Before this point, various news organizations would be engaged in the battle for what was accepted as true and what was not. Pronouncing and explaining the Conventional Wisdom was the main focus of the biggest news organizations of the 1950s and 1960s. Time magazine, the New York Times, CBS News – all prided themselves on this. But there came moments when a news organization catalyzed opinion so suddenly, when they played a decisive role in creating the Conventional Wisdom. For example, when news organizations showed the images of the children with fire hoses turned on them – and vicious dogs – in Birmingham, the brutality of the oppression of black Americans was driven home. When Walter Cronkite declared “the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate” and that the war was “unwinnable,” Lyndon Johnson famously declared he had lost “Middle America.”

Right-wingers – seeing how the media had decisively affected the course of both the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam protests by influencing the Conventional Wisdom – began a deliberate campaign to undermine the media’s ability to play such a role again. They promulgated studies of media bias, promoted conservative media and commentary, opposed regulations ensuring the equal treatment of controversial subjects on public airwaves, and constantly repeated the talking points about a liberal media elite. By the 1980s, they had mainly succeeded in delegitimizing the mainstream news organizations in the eyes of conservatives, right-wingers, and Republicans – but independents and those towards the left continued to see these news organizations as legitimate.

It wasn’t until the late 1990s that progressives, liberals, and Democrats, began to seriously question the legitimacy of these news organizations – as the Clinton witch hunt became frenzied. Most though just saw this whole episode as tawdry. They saw it reflecting badly on both the president and the news organizations who followed each revelation with tabloid-like zeal.

The real turning point came in the lead-up to the Iraq war, the success of Fox News with their Orwellian slogan, “We Report, You Decide,” and the election of 2004 – as Karl Rove and the Republicans attempted to influence those outside of their base with a deliberate strategy of manipulating the media. The last straw for many came in 2004 as Rove sought to discredit John Kerry by promoting the extreme allegations of a handful of Vietnam veterans who accused Kerry of faking his injuries. News organizations, wary of being branded “liberal” and adhering to standards of faux-objectivity, reported the story in their classic, unenlightening “he said, she said” style. What they did not report prominently was that many of these reporters had researched these allegations and came to the conclusion that Kerry’s Swift Boat attackers were wrong in their accusations. To report this truth would be to compromise their objectivity and take a side in a presidential campaign.

Liberals, progressives, and Democrats – seeing how these news organizations had been deliberately manipulated by Rove – began to realize the flaws in these news organizations and how they affected the public debate and the Conventional Wisdom. From this came the boom in the progressive blogosphere – some, like Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post focused on reporting from a progressive perspective; others, like the Daily Kos, MoveOn, and myDD on creating an online communities for progressives.

By the 2008 election, both Democrats and Republicans contested the Conventional Wisdom of the mainstream news organizations constantly – and partisans on both sides developed their own communities around their own set of agreed facts and opinions – creating their own “conventional wisdom.” It seemed that there was only one group left trusting the legitimacy of news organizations – independents.

[Image by Chris Seufert licensed under Creative Commons.]

Categories
Barack Obama Criticism Domestic issues Politics The Media The Opinionsphere Videos

Campbell Brown Does the Best Journalism Ever!

[digg-reddit-me]Last week Campbell Brown provided a perfect example of the total abdication of the main responsibility of the press in a short piece in which she discussed the debate over whether or not the stimulus had worked or was working. The story was done in a perfectly formulated “he said, she said” manner in which she made no attempt to perform her basic job as a journalist: figuring out who is right and who is not.

It is hard to think of a more basic description of what the job of a journalist is than to say, “He or she should try their best to state the facts, and when there is controversy to try to get to the bottom of it.” Brown though is clearly happy to merely play clips of two different sides saying entirely opposing things, and then to smirk and hold herself above these individuals by taking no position whatsoever. It is on the shoals of this irresponsibility that our public policy debates will be run aground:

Someone here is right; someone is wrong; and there are various sets of facts out there backing up each side. Showing these clips like this – without delving into the actual policy questions accomplishes nothing.

Of course, someone might take the position that there was limited time on the air – and Brown didn’t have time to go into the details of the actual debate. And you’re right. Brown needed time for this great montage a few minutes later:

At the end of this segment, it’s easy to see how Obama is personally so popular and why his policies are less so. The policies are ignored on this serious news show while his coolness under the pressure of an annoying gnat are replayed once again.

Regardless of your position on the political spectrum, an actual discussion of policy in which facts were discussed rather than accusations traded would be to everyone’s benefit.