McCarthyism: The competence canard

McCarthy's most effective enemies went to great pains to paint themselves as committed anti-communists. They claimed that McCarthy was an unserious, perhaps dishonest, crusader, while they were serious, competent opponents of Stalin and his machinations.

In his famous CBS News program “See It Now” Edward R. Murrow put it this way:

When the record is finally written, as it will be one day, it will answer the question, Who has helped the Communist cause and who has served his country better, Senator McCarthy or I? I would like to be remembered by the answer to that question.

Murrow and Co. won that battle. The were the smart anti-communists and could be trusted while McCarthy was a menace and a useful idiot for Stalin.

But was he right? Were he and his allies more competent and dedicated to the American cause than the senator? Were they really more effective adversaries of the communists?

The evidence suggests that they were not. The critics, like almost all later historians obfuscated about the issue at hand and asked us to judge McCarthy by the wrong standard (“he never found a spy”). If the senator often was too quick to lump fellow travelers with actual spies, his most famous opponents were stubbornly blind to the evidence against actual spies and potential mSoviet assets.

II

We can easily dismiss McCarthy's most persistent critic – Drew Pearson. His anti-communist stance was purely for show. Any man who employes two Soviet assets as reporters is hardly an astute investigator of Soviet subversion.

Pearson was also consistently wrong about the public spy cases. He defended Harry Dexter White, Lauchlin Currie, and Laurence Duggan when they were named by ex-operatives like Elizabeth Bently and Whittaker Chambers as Soviet agents.

The VENONA files confirm the guilt of all three.

Murrows record is not much better. He denounced the accusers of Laurence Duggan – a friend and former colleague – "A dead man's character is being destroyed." At CBS he hired Stephen E. Fleischman to work on the award-winning "CBS Reports". Fleischman was a member of CPUSA throughout the 1950s.

Murrow promoted the Democrat canard that Annie Lee Moss was a victim of mistaken identity. She wasn't: she was a CPUSA member which made her a risky emplyee for the Army's code office. If Murrow had admitted that then he would have had to concede that McCarthy had a point in questioning the existing security procedures.

Murrow's campaign was not just against McCarthy. He was also an intense critic of most internal security procedures in the federal bureasucracy. Take the case of Milo Radulovich. As Murrow framed the issue, the Army's security program was so irrational that they were punishing Radulovich because his sister and immigrant father subscribed to some publications from their home country of Ukraine, According to Murrow this was anti-communist paranoia in which unfounded suspicions merged with guilt by association to deny a man his dream of becoming a meteorologist.

Years later, Radulovich's brother-in-law admitted that he was a member of the CPUSA as was his wife (Radulovich's sister.) They remained loyal party members even after Khrushchev's speech and the brutal occupation of Eastern Europe.

The case of Milo Radulovich, then, is much more complex than Murrow and other enemies of McCarthy led us to believe.

Elmer Davis was anti-McCarthy long before Murrow took up his cudgels. During WWII he headed up the Office of War Information. Based on VENONA decrypts, the OWI may rank as the #1 agency for spies per capita. Under Davis the OWI worked to suppress the truth about the Katyn massacre and the Soviet's plan to Stalinize Poland. After the war he defended Alger Hiss and denounced witnesses like Whittaker Chambers as “fake patriots” and “professional anti-communists.”

At a minimum Davies's counterintelligence skills are somewhat suspect. Moreover, when he attacked McCarthy and other congressional investigators, he was, in essence, working to suppress the truth about his own failings at OWI.

Histories of this era never acknowledge this last point. Like the Tydings committee, the motivations of McCarthy's critics are always treated as pure.

Serial killer chic and the lies of the administrative state (UPDATED)

It is one of the perverse ironies of our age that the popular interest in serial killers was driven, in part, by the FBI. The Bureau, in a real sense, served as a press agent for these perverse monsters.

The serial killer “menace” was hyped by the FBI at a time when its mission was shrinking and its reputation was in tatters. At just that moment, the FBI discovered a new threat to America and its children.

As the FBI told it, dozens, maybe over a hundred, relentless killers roamed our highways and stalked our neighborhoods. They crossed state lines which made it almost impossible for local police to stop them. They were smart amd could evade conventional police work.

Fortunately, America had an organization that was ready, willing, and able to take on this scourge. The Federal Bureau of Investigation could operate nationally, their labs were cutting edge, their computers would make linkage blindness a thing of the past.

Best of all, they even had an elite cadre – the Behavioral Science Unit – that had made a special study of this type of criminal. The Bureau, it seemed, was the only law enforcement agency in the country with serial killer experts.

How fortuitous.

As Phillip Jenkins noted in Using Murder “the FBI was in effect making a power grab, claiming jurisdiction over crimes which were beyond its legal scope, and this could only be achieved by presenting the offenders as itinerant, and therefore violating state boundaries.” In doing so they were doing what they had always done. In the 1930s it was “automobile bandits” and kidnappers. Then Nazi spies, then Russian spies.

Times changed but the song remained the same. The FBI was always ready to hype any menace and jump on any bandwagon if that led to bigger budgets and more power for the Bureau.

Quite literally the FBI wrote the template for the growth of the administrative state. Hoover and the DOJ saw the war on John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd as a means of promoting the New Deal and the benefits of federal power.

The War on Crime would become a centerpiece of Roosevelt's push to centralize many facets of American government. It would be a focal point of his State of the Union Address in January. Thus a little known bureau of the Justice Department became a cutting edge of Roosevelt's New Deal policies. If Hoover and his neophyte agents could defeat "name brand" gangsters, it would be immediate and tangible evidence of the new Deal's worth.

The image of the serial killer that the Feds crafted in the 1980s was adopted by fiction writers and journalists alike. This is not surprising; public relations and image management have always been a core competence of the FBI. It may be the thing it does best.

"A typical reporter on deadline calls a couple of people and slaps something into the paper the next day."
--Scott Shane (New York Times reporter)

Journalists writing against deadline needed experts and statistics to write their stories. The FBI had a near monopoly on both. In the 1980s and 1990s there were almost no outside experts who could challenge the official orthodoxy.

For novelists and screenwriters like Thomas Harris (Silence of the Lambs), the Bureau offered access, a chance to add verisimilitude to stories, the opportunity to suggest that a work of the imagination was laden with inside dope and closely-held secrets. Most importantly, the “mindhunters” of the BSU had already crafted their histories in a fiction-friendly form.

Philip Jenkins:

The experts who gained the widest acceptance did so not because of their academic credentials, but because of their personal narratives of traveling to the heart of darkness that is the mind of the 'monster among us'. This is the language of shamanism rather than psychology.

This created an odd, even perverse dynamic. The BSU could make itself look good by exaggerating the skill, cunning, and intelligence of the criminal.

It takes a special kind of hero to catch catch genius criminals like Hannibal Lector....

Only a few brave souls have dared to point out several obvious but often ignored facts.

Like the fact that the FBI has an abysmal record catching actual serial killers. Or even identifying that a serial killer is at work. Or that most serial killers do not roam across state lines but instead operate close to home.

The killers, when finally caught, never live up to the FBI-created image. BTK was evil but no genius and Samuel Little was a small time criminal.

The press is rarely interested for more than a day when a criminal profile turns out to be radically wrong. (Remember the wild goose chase for a white man in a white van during the DC sniper spree?)

A reporter on the FBI beat runs great risks delving into these sorts of questions. Life is easier if the FBI takes your calls.

In 1992 Robert Ressler, one of the first of the FBI's “Mindhunters” warned America that the serial killer menace would turn our streets into a real life “Clockwork Orange”. When, instead, murder rates fell for over two decades, he was never asked to explain his failed prediction. It wasn't as if the press did not have the opportunity-- he gave interviews as he toured to promote his string of books on his heroic fight against human monsters.

FBI profilers are still treated as uniquely skilled experts even though their record in catching actual serial killers is weak. Luck still plays a larger role than FBI expertise. DNA has been the game changer not the pseudoscience of the BSU.

Thus, the press becomes an enabler of the bureaucracy. It eagerly hypes the panics that lead to large budget and more laws. It is much less interested in assessing the performance of the agencies on an on-going basis. The watchdog can be turned into a lap dog with a little access and a good narrative.

Hoover blazed a trail, not just for the FBI but for all the ambitious federal bureaucrats who came after him.

UPDATE (12/5/22): There is a new biography of Hoover out. Eli Lake interviewed the autho for his podcast.

The author highlights that Hoover's FBI was the avatar for the ideal of progressivism: power in the hands of dispassionate experts who were beyond the control of politicians.

Hoover believed in the administrative state—in the power of independent bureaucrats.

The New Criterion has a lengthy and insightful review of the book:

Federal foes

The trouble with True Crime: Assassins and serial killers

While history ignores the assassin, justice at least has it that no assassin can become more famous than his victim. By way of proof, who can recall, off-hand, the identities of those who killed Thomas à Becket, or Mahatma Gandhi?

Brian McConnell, The History of Assassination

It is good that this is so. We should remember and celebrate builders , not destroyers. That seems to be a very basic requirement for a healthy society.

David Gelernter:

What matters is our communal response to the crime. Evil is easy, good is hard, temptation is a given; therefore, a healthy society talks to itself.

Such ritual denunciations strengthen our good inclinations and help us suppress our bad ones. We need to hear them, and hear good acts praised, too. We need to hear the crowd (hear ourselves) praising good and denouncing evil.

So what should we make of popular true crime? Here, the victims are almost forgotten and nearly nameless. The killer is the star, often gifted with a headline-grabbing nom de guerre which adds a touch of unearned glamour to their infamy.

Simone Weil:

Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.

Popular true crime follows popular fiction. Mindhunter is Silence of the Lambs with a patina of history and a large dose of truthiness.

We draw so many of our ideas about the world from what we see in the mass media and mass culture. One of the most disturbing aspects of this is the manner in which serial killers are often glorified and glamorized--through a process in which they are depicted as Super Males, even Supermen....Dr. Hannibal Lecter bears no resemblance to the defective, limited, unfeeling, and ungifted persons who are the overwhelming majority of multiple killers.

Elliott Leyton, Hunting Humans

Bundy, Dahmer and Gacy are dead and yet they are the stars of movies and streaming documentaries. They are celebrities in the truest sense of the word.

Aaron Haspel:

In an age of almost unimaginable abundance, celebrity is the last scarce good. Is it any wonder that people pursue it, and proximity to it, so assiduously?

We know that for some killers posthumous celebrity is something they think about (The media's vile calculus: If it bleeds, it leads and leads to more blood .) More than one serial killer was willing to risk capture in order to grab press attention and notoriety.

Is this good for society? Or does it suppress the social immune system Gelernter writes about?

A crude culture makes a coarse people, and private refinement cannot long survive public excess. There is a Gresham's law of culture as well as of money: the bad drives out the good, unless the good is defended.

Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What's Left of It

How Twitter destroyed the public square (updated)

An insightful post by The Scholars Stage:

The World That Twitter Made

That is the problem with Twitter and the other aggregator sites. See the beliefs of the next generation of public intellectuals before you! See what happens to those who have only experienced America's public square through high-follower account on twitter!

Loofburrow is not alone in these beliefs. I suspect an entire class of pundits has internalized the idea that all of this is what public discussion is. Of course they don t believe in free expression, civil debate, the spirit of liberalism, and all of that jazz. To this generation those things are just words. The public sphere they have known has always been a bare-knuckle brawl.

I think he makes too sharp a distinction between the blogging world and the Twitter-sphere. Many of the problems he ascribes to Twitter were already showing up in the blogging space in the early-Aughts:

One of his points, while true, points to a serious weakness for the blogosphere. Rapid-response to the news of the day does seem critical to blog success. Yet the premium on speed weakens analysis and fresh reporting. Those latter activities are the very areas usually cited as the strengths compared to traditional journalism.

One way to be fast is to do reflex-punditry of the sort we see on TV (especially on the McLaughlin Group). Talking heads react to the news and apply their individual ideological template. Eleanor Clift and Pat Buchanan don't bring new information to the viewers; they simply repeat the appropriate talking points. A lot of blogs end-up as nano-pundits: "More idiocy from the Bush Camp," "Go Rummy," etc.
...
Energy, confidence, conviction, self-nomination: traits that are ideal for writing memorable posts quickly. The problem is that such bloggers-- because they don't "accept suggestions" and are loath to admit mistakes-- will keep propounding their version despite new evidence dug up by others. The real power of blogs to facilitate collaboration gets stifled when this type of blogger becomes a key interpreter of a story or issue.

The need for rapid response also turns many bloggers into amplifiers for those self-nominated experts. With nothing to say ourselves, we link to those who write fast and take a clear position that we agree with. We end up with fewer serious dialogues and more of the formulaic debate pioneered by Crossfire.

It is certainly true that the rise of Twitter has exacerbated this problem:

Twitter, journalists, and our civic conversation

Update: 21 July

1. The Spring Claremont Review of Books has a review essay that has some relevance here.

Our Bookless Future

Wolf’s answer comes, once again, from neuroscientific studies revealing significant cognitive and affective differences between print and screen reading, and between “deep reading” and fast reading—differences that show up in brain activity. In one study, researchers “were frankly surprised that just by asking their literature graduate students either to read closely or to read for entertainment, different regions of the brain became activated, including multiple areas involved in motion and touch.” In another, after one group read a story on paper, another on screens, the first reconstructed the plot more accurately than the second—for a book, unlike a virtual text, gives the brain a concrete spatial arrangement for the action. In sum, Wolf says, the paper reading brain has better memory, more imagination, immersion, and patience, and more knowledge than the screen reading brain. The physiology proves it.

Wolf’s pleading tone—“reader, please, come home”—follows from the fact that, in spite of the dangers, screen time is displacing book time. We are in trouble. “The more we read digitally,” she warns, “the more our underlying brain circuitry reflects the characteristics of that medium.” For six millennia, reading compelled the human brain to deepen and widen its cognitions. It is a glorious achievement, threatened by a “fundamental tension between our evolutionary wiring and contemporary culture.” We are moving backward.

To steal from Yeats, as we become more digital we become dumber yet filled with a “passionate intensity.” We lose our empathy and stop thinking; theories replace thought and indignation substitutes for study.

This is a recipe for disaster as Lionel Trilling reminds us:

When we say that a movement is 'bankrupt of ideas' we are likely to suppose that it is at the end of its powers. But this is not so, and it is dangerous for us to suppose that it is so, as the experience of of Europe in the last quarter-century suggests, for in the modern situation it is just when a movement despairs of having ideas that it turns to force, which it masks in ideology

2. Twitter and Facebook claim they want to drive trolls and bots from their platforms. Journalists decry the “toxic environment” that prevails online. But one has to wonder if they are sincere.

Bots and trolls are extraordinarily good at feeding that “dopamine-addiction feedback loop” that keeps users engaged and on the platform. For lazy journalists these digital hamster wheels (the more toxic the better) provide ready-made stories perfect for social media. No need to pore over documents or even make phone calls. Just collect the tweets or posts and the story really writes itself.

Related:

Nit-picking free riders

Streaming TV's real business model

Tolstoy, Netflix, and the Intellectual-Yet-Idiot

#ad #ad

Now what?

[The newspaper] fulfills in America the cultural function of the drama of Aeschylus. I mean that it is the expression through which a people – a people numbering many millions – becomes aware of its spiritual unity. The millions, as they do their careless reading every day at breakfast, in the subway, on the train and the elevated, are performing a … ritual. The mirror of their culture is held up to them in their newspapers.

Johan Huizinga, America: A Dutch Historian's Vision from Afar and Near,

He wrote this about the America of the 1920s and 1930s. I doubt many readers now gain a sense of “spiritual unity” as they read their morning paper. For a large segment of the readership it is quite the opposite.

“This newspaper views me with contempt and hates everything I love” is a perfectly reasonable assessment for patriotic readers and those who are not “woke”.

The media world is dominated by people who can afford unpaid internships, attend boarding schools & the right colleges, then live in exclusive urban neighborhoods. They use wokeism to conceal their contempt for the poor, who they regard as bigots & fools. https://t.co/1YxjfUNmed

— Lee Fang (@lhfang) July 8, 2020

Related:

Perhaps a badge of honor, but maybe not the best business model

#ad

Kaus-Reynolds with a vengence*

"Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies" -- Honore de Balzac

The operators demand ever bigger machinery even as their actions turn deadly.

Grandma Killer: Andrew Cuomo Murdered 5300 Elderly New Yorkers But He's a Hero Because He's a Liberal Psychopath

As you probably know, Andrew Cuomo ordered elderly persons infected with coronavirus back into their nursing homes, where they could -- and did -- infect all the other nursing home residents and kill thousands of them. He did this deliberately. Why?

It's hard to think of a reason why -- these people could have been isolated in the thousands of unused temporary hospital berths built to... well, to keep coronavirus patients isolated.

Instead he ordered them back into nursing homes, to infect other people of a very high risk of dying from the disease.

And die they did.

By the thousands.

All the while, as thousands were dying, the press just could not pour enough praise on Andrew Cuomo.

He killed them.

If people have "blood on their hands" for permitting businesses to reopen -- how can it be that Andrew Cuomo is not the murderer of 5300 extremely at-risk people by ordering the infected to be crowded together with them?

Andrew Cuomo and New York State realize they have a huge scandal brewing -- if the media ever feels like reporting easily-discovered facts.

It looks like New York State is taking pains to correct its error.

And by correct its error, I mean -- fudge the numbers to hide the numbers killed.

Governor Nipsy Cuomo Explains Why He Sentenced Over 5000 Elderly Citizens to Certain Death: "Older people, vulnerable people, are going to die from this virus. That is going to happen."

He just won't take responsibility for having sent covid-infected people back to nursing homes to infect everyone else. He begins sputtering out an Eric "Otter" Stratton series of rhetorical questions about who's really to blame.

Andrew Cuomo Reveals The Danger Of Praising ‘Tone’ And ‘Norms’

This reveals something interesting about the roles of tone and norms in politics and governance. Critics of Trump’s hyperbolic rhetorical style and willingness to say things that offend them seem to think that good tone and maintenance of norms by a politician indicates he is pursuing positive policies and in control of the situation, but this is often not the case. In fact, a polished tone more often elides failures than it symbolizes success.

Here’s an example. Would Barack Obama have ever called the press “the enemy of the American people”? Certainly not. But would his administration spy on journalists? Absolutely, and it did. Would Obama cackle about political opponents going to jail? Not a chance. Would his administration try to send political opponents to jail? Yup.

To put it bluntly, Cuomo has not been an effective governor during this crisis, but he has played one on TV. At least in terms of early public opinion, that was enough.

Ben Rhodes was absolutely right about the shallowness of the journalists assigned to important beats by prestigious news organizations:

The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns… They literally know nothing

They cover policy like they do politics and they cover politics as theater.

Ace:

The leftwing members of the Professional Managerial Class (including, obviously, hyperpartisan "NeverTrump" Democrats) ... never look at policy outcomes, only "tone" and "norms:" that's how you get a ton of dead bodies while babbling about how well he presents himself at press conferences.

The Cuomo brothers made for good theater. They bashed Trump, issued dire warnings of impending doom, posed as defenders of the vulnerable, bantered like frat boys. Fredo even suffered in his basement – quarantined after he caught the Corona virus.

It was all lies, a series of performances, a ploy for TV ratings, for poll numbers, maybe a spot on the 2020 ticket.

CNN missed one of the biggest stories of our time. It played out under their noses in NYC. Instead they created “The COVID Chronicles with the Cuomo Bros". Everyone had a great time except for the senior citizens who suffered and died alone and their grieving families.

CNN's handling of this story should be an an extinction-level event. They did not just fail to cover the real story: they helped cover it up. Walter Duranty would be proud.

And, like Duranty and Stalin, CNN and the Cuomo brothers will get away with it. Their “competitors” will probably give them prestigious awards.

*The Kaus-Reynolds paradox

1. A government agency fails.
2. When it finally ‘fesses up, the failure is immediately consigned to the memory hole.
3. The consequences of its failure are then used as a justification for giving that agency more power over ordinary citizens who had nothing to do with the failed policies and botched operations.

Understanding Trump: War on Mount Olympus

What we have here is a failure to communicate

Tucker Carlson on Dave Rubin (26 October 2018):

Trump “asks the question at the core of whatever the issue is that is the one question that everyone has been avoiding because they don't have the answer to it”

This reminded me of a story that organizational scholar Charles Handy used to illustrate the differences between two organizational cultures.  Handy moved from a large, bureaucratic organization to an ill-defined role with an entrepreneurial investment bank.  He was appalled at the slap dash way things were run.

Clearly, some  serious professional project appraisal was urgently needed. Luckily, I just happened to have brought along with me from my previous organization a set of procedures and tables for project appraisal.  I could readily adapt these, and then I could propose introducing a little more system nd procedure into the current craziness.

In a week I was ready. The chairman arranged for me to present my ideas to a meeting of the board. They all listened very attentively and politely.
At the end, the chairman thanked me for all the work I had put into I, and then observed, “I suppose a project would have to be very marginal to justy all this analysis and procedure?”

“Well, I said, “it's obviously vital to marginal propositions, but you can't even know if it's marginal until you've done this kind of formal analysis.”

“Hmm. You see, we're probably wrong,” (in the tone of voice that Englishmen use when they know they're not), “but in this group we've always thought that we got success not by making better decisions on marginal propositions than our competitors did, but by making quicker decisions on obvious propositions.”
…
In the end, I realized that I had a different cast of mind and left before they threw me out.

For three decades Republicans and Democrats, neoliberals and neoconservatives, debated the proper mix of tax incentives, transfer payments, and trade concessions required to bring China into the New World Order. Trump had no time for that: he wanted to know why it was good for America to send good jobs, even vital jobs, to a potential adversary.  His rude questions proved to be more popular than the conventional answers Republicans usually offered to the conventional questions.

Only Trump, a man who had spent decades leading companies with a Zeus culture would base a campaign and a presidency on asking rude questions the Acela Blob wants to bury.

It is not surprising that a Zeus president was going to clash with an Apollo bureaucracy and their media clones.

Zeus vs Apollo

Handy defines four basic organizational cultures  which he names after Greek gods: Zeus, Apollo, Athena, and Dionysus.

Zeus cultures are entrepreneurial.  They operate in the out-sized shadow of the leader.  They excel at speed of decision and in turning decisions into action. They have little time for procedures and policy manuals.  Their strength comes from a shared mindset and commitment to the leader's goals and vision.

Zeus does not write; he speaks eyeball to eyeball if possible, if not, then by phone.

As a politician Zeus tweets directly to the voters over the heads of his bureaucratic gatekeepers, media minders, and media deciders.

Apollo cultures are classic bureaucracies. They focus on rules, procedures, flow charts, and org charts.  They value stability and predictability.

The Apollo style is excellent when one can assume that tomorrow will be like yesterday.

What he have seen in Washington for the past three years is more than a clash of cultures.  The Apollo bureaucracy, with breath-taking arrogance, decided that Trump's style was not merely unconventional but wrong and dangerous.  They want an end to the rude questions that they cannot answer.

They demand not merely independence from the president, but supremacy over the executive branch.

The irony, and maybe the tragedy is this: Trump's style, the Zeus style, is the style and culture best suited for turbulent and chaotic times.

Tomorrow is not like yesterday.   Pretending that the procedures, norms and protocols based on the presumption of stability will work in the midst of an unprecedented crisis is foolish, self-serving, and futile.

The bureaucratic/media Apollos will not save us; they very well may destroy our economy and what is left of our tattered social fabric.


Related:

Conservative anger and the Reagan legacy

How Reagan became Reagan: The Texas Earthquake of 1976

Who’s afraid of a Republican landslide?

The medium and the message

From Nicholas Carr:

From context collapse to content collapse

Content collapse, as I define it, is the tendency of social media to blur traditional distinctions among once distinct types of information — distinctions of form, register, sense, and importance. As social media becomes the main conduit for information of all sorts — personal correspondence, news and opinion, entertainment, art, instruction, and on and on — it homogenizes that information as well as our responses to it.

Content began collapsing the moment it began to be delivered through computers. Digitization made it possible to deliver information that had required specialized mediums — newspapers and magazines, vinyl records and cassettes, radios, TVs, telephones, cinemas, etc. — through a single, universal medium. In the process, the formal standards and organizational hierarchies inherent to the old mediums began to disappear. The computer flattened everything.

I remember, years ago, being struck by the haphazardness of the headlines flowing through my RSS reader. I’d look at the latest update to the New York Times feed, for instance, and I’d see something like this:

Dam Collapse Feared as Flood Waters Rise in Midwest
Nike’s New Sneaker Becomes Object of Lust
Britney Spears Cleans Up Her Act
Scores Dead in Baghdad Car-Bomb Attack
A Spicy New Take on Bean Dip

It wasn’t just that the headlines, free-floating, decontextualized motes of journalism ginned up to trigger reflexive mouse clicks, had displaced the stories. It was that the whole organizing structure of the newspaper, its epistemological architecture, had been junked. The news section (with its local, national, and international subsections), the sports section, the arts section, the living section, the opinion pages: they’d all been fed through a shredder, then thrown into a wind tunnel. What appeared on the screen was a jumble, high mixed with low, silly with smart, tragic with trivial. The cacophony of the RSS feed, it’s now clear, heralded a sea change in the distribution and consumption of information. The new order would be disorder.

I wonder, though, if this really began with the computer and the internet. Didn't we start down this path with television? The same indictment – “ a jumble, high mixed with low, silly with smart, tragic with trivial” – can be laid against the Today show or Good Morning America.

One minute George Stephanopoulos is gravely reporting on the civil war in Syria or a deadly natural disaster. The, seamlessly, he is hyping Disney's next blockbuster or some pop diva's latest album.

Facebook did not give us the Oprah-style townhall debates – television did. The epic decline from Lincoln vs. Douglas to boxers vs. briefs happened before social media was born.

If there is anything novel about about our internet-fueled media environment it is that now the information consumer largely determines their own mixture of high/low, silly/smart instead of a priesthood of deciders in New York and LA.

“Formal standards and organizational hierarchies” were undermined by the internet. The deciders lost credibility and authority when they could no longer hide their mistakes. No more 40 word “corrections“ on page A14 six days after the story ran. Now errors and bias were laid bare in real time.

How can we speak of “formal standards” when Dan Rather and Brian Williams are still treated as reputable journalists by other journalists?

And what of Twitter? We see content collapse in the timelines of the very priesthood that pretends to uphold the standards of serious, high-minded journalism. One moment there is the sober pronouncement about trade policy and the next moment brings another sober pronouncement but this one assigns the hot dog a position in the sandwich hierarchy. Then, after a quick comment on the president's speech we get excited effusions about the latest comic book movie.

Advice for the wise news consumer during the impeachment debate

1. Beware "news stories" based on anonymous sources. They hide and obscure the truth as often as they reveal it.

The whole purpose of the ‘anonymous source has been precisely reversed. The reason there exists a First Amendment protection for journalists’ confidential sources has always been to permit citizens -- the weak, the vulnerable, the isolated -- to be heard publicly, without fear of retaliation by the strong -- by their employer, for example, or by the forces of government … Instead, almost every ‘anonymous source’ in the press, in recent years, has been an official of some kind, or a person in the course of a vendetta speaking from a position of power.
…
[Using anonymous sources] makes stories almost impossible to verify. It suppresses a major element of almost every investigative story: who wanted it known.

Renata Adler, After the Tall Timber

The problem of journalism in America proceeds from a simple but inescapable bind: journalists are rarely, if ever, in a position to establish the truth about an issue for themselves, and they are, therefore, almost entirely dependent on self-interested 'sources' for versions of reality that they report.
…
Indeed, given the voluntary nature of the relationship between a reporter and his source, a continued flow of information can only be assured if the journalist's stories promise to serve the interests of the witness.
…
Despite the heroic public claims of the news media, daily journalism is largely concerned with finding and retaining profitable sources of pre-packaged stories.

Edward Jay Epstein, Between Fact and Fiction

In a very real sense this sort of journalism represents a conspiracy between the source, the reporters, and the editors. In return for a story that grabs headlines and/or advances the narrative, the journalists agree to propagate and amplify the source's message while also shielding that source from all scrutiny as to motive, expertise, and credibility.

Only two forms of knowledge cross this principle: gossip and journalism. The gossip purposely obscures his sources, saying in effect, 'Don't ask who I heard it from,' to make the story more titillating. The journalist obscures his sources out of self-interest, claiming that unless he hides their identities, they will not provide him with further information. This claim assumes the sources are acting out of altruistic motives. If, however, they are providing the information out of self-interest-- and much information comes from publicists and other paid agents-- then their motive is part of the story.

I've never understood the journalistic argument for concealing sources except that it is self-serving. While a source might talk more freely if he need take no responsibility for what he says, he also has far less incentive to be completely truthful. The only check on the source's license to commit hyperbole, if not slander, under these rules is the journalist himself. But the very premise of concealing sources is that the journalist needs the cooperation of the source in the future. This makes the journalist himself an interested party.

Edward Jay Epstein, Deception

2. Be especially suspicious of stories that rely on anonymous intelligence insiders.

As defence correspondent, then defence editor of The Daily Telegraph, i decided that entanglement with intelligence organisations was unwise, having concluded, by that stage of my life, through reading, conversation and a little personal observation, that anyone who mingled in the intelligence world, in the belief that he could make use of contacts thus made, would more probably be made use of, to his disadvantage. I continue to believe that to be the case.

Sir John Keegan, Intelligence in War

3. Make sure a story really is debunked when journalists say it is “debunked.” Again, doubly true when they rely on intelligence sources for their verdict.

If intelligence officers dislike a book, for its tone, revelations, or simply because, they find that one or two facts in it may prove compromising (for which, also read embarrassing), they may let it be known that the book is ‘riddled with errors,’ customarily pointing out a few. Any book on intelligence will contain errors, given the nature and origin of the documentation, and these errors may then be used to discredit quite valid judgments and conclusions which do not turn on the facts in question.

Robin W. Winks, Cloak & Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961

Just because Brian Stelter or Brooke Gladstone claims a story is discredited, it never hurts to verify. They have, after all, been known to be wrong.

#ad #ad#ad

Mediated democracy and the temptations of Leninism

This is very good and incredibly important:

Leninthink
On the pernicious legacy of Vladimir Lenin.

Two decades before Hitler, Lenin created a totalitarian state devoted to mass murder. Too few people are aware of this.

What is new, and uniquely horrible about the Soviets and their successors, is that they directed their fury at their own people. The Russian empire lost more people in World WarI than any other country, but still more died under Lenin. His war against the peasants, for instance, took more lives than combat between Reds and Whites.

This was not an accident or an unintended consequence of laudable actions:

Dmitri Volkogonov, the first biographer with access to the secret Lenin archives, concluded that for Lenin violence was a goal in itself. He quotes Lenin in 1908 recommending “real, nationwide terror, which invigorates the country and through which the Great French Revolution achieved glory.”

Lenin constantly recommended that people be shot “without pity” or “exterminated mercilessly” (Leszek Ko³akowski wondered wryly what it would mean to exterminate people mercifully). “Exterminate” is a term used for vermin, and, long before the Nazis described Jews as Ungeziefer(vermin), Lenin routinely called for “the cleansing of Russia’s soil of all harmful insects, of scoundrels, fleas, bedbugsthe rich, and so on.”

By rights, the Hammer and Sickle should be as repugnant as the Swastika. Decent people should shun those who wear it or march under its banner.

Intrepid reporters who hunt down grandmothers for sharing memes on Facebook have no problem with some symbols of mass murder. How can they? They know that “red-baiting” was bad and The Resistance is good. And besides, it is all the Trumpkins fault.

Without realizing it, they have succumbed to Leninthink.

Leninoid thinking has taken over the minds of our aspiring Manadrin class

The truly frightening thing about Morson’s essay is the clear parallels he draws between Leninism and the state of our intellectual debate. The pundits, journalists, and politicians are not Leninist per se, but “Leninthink” shows up in all our contentious political and cultural disputes.

The essence of the Leninist style is that they are not interested in debate at all.

In Lenin’s view, a true revolutionary did not establish the correctness of his beliefs by appealing to evidence or logic, as if there were some standards of truthfulness above social classes. Rather, one engaged in “blackening an opponent’s mug so well it takes him ages to get it clean again.”

G. K. Chesterton advised that one should never let a quarrel interfere with a good argument. Lenin had no interest in good arguments, reasoned debate, or even a quarrel. His goals were best achieved through slander and vituperation.

As his disciple Willi Munzenberg told Arthur Koestler:

Don't argue with them, Make them stink in the nose of the world. Make people curse and abominate them, Make them shudder with horror.

This passage from Morson has resonance today:

Critics objected that Lenin argued by mere assertion. He disproved a position simply by showing it contradicted what he believed. In his attack on the epistemology of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, for instance, every argument contrary to dialectical materialism is rejectedfor that reason alone. Valentinov, who saw Lenin frequently when he was crafting this treatise, reports that Lenin at most glanced through their works for a few hours. It was easy enough to attribute to them views they did not hold, associate them with disreputable people they had never heard of, or ascribe political purposes they had never imagined. These were Lenin’s usual techniques, and he made no bones about it.

Vide:

Jordan Peterson

Joy Behar: "Useful Idiot" Tulsi Gabbard Hasn't Denied Being A Russian Asset

Tulsi Gabbard Conspiracy Theories Go Mainstream

Fox News

James Damore

Lenin did not concern himself with objective standards of truth, morality, or justice. All that mattered was Who/Whom: Did it help the Party or hurt its enemies? Then it was good and necessary. Because Leninthink accepts no restrictions on the power and actions of the Party, a truly loyal member does not quibble about facts or logical consistency.

While this sounds absurd -- thinking fit only for maniacs and the Devil himself -- we find examples all around us.

Left-Wing Journalists Slam CNN For Asking For The Truth About Middle Class Taxes

Elizabeth Warren has 'woke journalist' allies who don't want you to ask questions

Don’t let your children go to J-school

Or take the tropes mocking “Whataboutism”. At their core these dismissive tweets are cheap Leninthink. Actions are not good or bad in and of themselves; they are to be assessed purely in terms of Who/Whom. It doesn’t matter if Trump is following a precedent set by Bush, Clinton, or Obama. Orange Man Bad. Impeach him.

I recall a Soviet citizen telling me that people in the USSR had absolute freedom of speech-- so long as they did not lie.

We now see members of the Senate and Congress trying to carve out similar exceptions to the First Amendment. Journalists cheer them on. They see no contradiction between their pose as defenders of democracy and limiting the speech of American citizens.

Can anyone remember the last week during which none of America’s major newspapers ran a piece arguing for censorship? https://t.co/0Bxz87c6Gj

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) October 29, 2019

Lenin at least was conscious of his rejection of the norms of debate. Our self-nominated mandarins are too ignorant and insular to realize what they are destroying.

Or maybe they do:

To be most effective, propaganda needs the help of censorship. Within a sealed information arena, it can mobilize all means of communication-- printed, spoken, artistic, and visual -- and press its claims to maximum advantage.
Norman Davies, Europe: A History

On “mediated democracy”:

They still don't get it

We really are ruled by inept experts

Television news-- Why it is all fake

Quite good:

Cultural Casualties of Life in the Fast Lane

This is right on the money:

Every night television chat show hosts and 60 Minutes reporters get themselves (and us) worked up over an issue they claim to be “passionate” about. But next week it will be another equally demanding issue, with the previous “vital” one consigned to the memory hole. It’s the need to show we are compassionate that’s the constant, the target issue can easily change. It’s synthetic caring. Because no issues are resolved they are used merely as entertainment. ... In fact serial indignation, getting het up daily, gets one nowhere: it’s a giant distraction, a frustrating, self-crippling state, which builds up resentment at society with no way of resolving the issues, or of fruitfully releasing one’s angst.

We are expected to respect the "news judgement" of the Deciders who determine what is important each day. Yet, those same experts careen from one story to next. On Tuesday a story is THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD. On Thursday it is forgotten and ignored.

This is a non-partisan issue. Fox News is as likely to play this game as CBS or CNN.

Wise viewers eventually catch on. As they do, the credibility of the news media evaporates. Over time the brave truth-tellers are unmasked as hypocrites and cynical manipulators. Like Scooby Doo villains.

Or sociopaths.

The MSM's long war against the Deplorables

In a 1998 interview with Steven Brill, NBC's Brian Williams was critical of Don Imus-- describing him as "a former railroad employee."

On his radio show, Imus himself cut to the heart of the issue. Brian Williams could have described him as a former cocaine addict or a former drunk. Instead, he took aim at the fact that Imus once did manual labor.

These are the Brahmin attitudes of media "elite". Once upon a time such experience would have given Imus authenticity and seriousness. Now it is seen as disqualifying.

Williams, let us remember, is a college drop out as well as a lying self-promoter. In his case, his disdain may mask the insecurities of a striving conformist who knows that he is a fraud. In trying to suck up to Steven Brill, (Yale and Yale Law School) by bashing Imus, he also revealed the mediocre striver's hatred of the successful rebel.

Some years later Williams would show his true colors again, this time when he tried to dismiss bloggers as unclean and untouchable.

The tremendous growth of online media — especially blogs — in recent years has altered the face of journalism.

“You’re going to be up against people who have an opinion, a modem, and a bathrobe,” said Williams. “All of my life, developing credentials to cover my field of work, and now I’m up against a guy named Vinny in an efficiency apartment in the Bronx who hasn’t left the efficiency apartment in two years.”

He added that it’s often difficult to judge the credibility of a blogger. “On the Internet, no one knows if you’ve been to Ramadi or you’ve just been to Brooklyn and have an opinion about Ramadi,” said Williams.

Despite all this, NBC News was happy to welcome Brian Williams back to their team.

Entitlement, simmering resentment, and #LearnToCode

Jill Lepore’s piece on the decline of newspapers (discussed here) appreared just before the latest round of media lay-offs. The timing was perfect and perverse at the same time. Lepore could write the piece secure in her bubble and confident that her readers and the public at large shared her sentimental attachment to newspapers and journalists. Then, almost as her piece was published, those illusions were rudely dispelled, shattered, mocked.

In short, #LearnToCode showed many in the media class that large numbers of the public viewed them with a combination of contempt and anger. (The resulting freakout was as hilarious as it was predictable.)

Early on in her mawkish apologia Lepore actually helped explain both the contempt and the anger though she probably thought she was pleading for compassion and respect.

The newspaper mortality rate is old news, and nostalgia for dead papers is itself pitiful at this point, even though, I still say, there’s a principle involved. “I wouldn’t weep about a shoe factory or a branch-line railroad shutting down,” Heywood Broun, the founder of the American Newspaper Guild, said when the New York World went out of business, in 1931. “But newspapers are different.”

Maybe Heywood Broun did not weep about idle factories in the depth of the Great Depression, but I am sure many men and women did as they pondered the lost jobs and bleak future of their communities. All too many in the MSM seem to share Broun’s sense of entitled callousness--  the conviction that their jobs are special and their pain deserves singular sympathy.

David Gelernter gives us this vignette from the 1996 campaign trail:

Today's elite loathes the public. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the hatred is unmistakable. Occasionally it escapes in scorching geysers. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the '96 Dole presidential campaign: 'The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say 'yeah, i'm the Media. Screw You.' The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd-- an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none.

Drawing Life

Two decades ago journalists thought they were ten feet tall and bullet-proof. They could arrogantly dismiss and insult those who dared criticize them. Today the swagger is gone but they still arrogantly demand pity and compassion from those they insulted.

If anyone wants to understand’s Trump’s ascendancy in the GOP a good place to start is with that confrontation in 1996. And then remember what old John Adams said about the colonists’ continued opposition to Great Britain in 1776:

Resentment coinciding with Principle is a very powerful motive.

Myth-busting

Daniel Flynn is doing good work

Mythology As History

The troubled man who murdered Harvey Milk and George Moscone killed them over a petty grievance, not anti-gay bigotry.

Quite similar to the murder of Matthew Shepard and the false narrative that took hold

Sadly, I doubt that Flynn's work will make a dent on the mythology. When the MSM finds a useful Narrative the facts are unimportant.

Why the MSM can’t reform itself

Trapped in a Deep Blue bubble and blinded by overweening self-regard

The chief theoretical organ of the MSM comforts the journalists who read it: “It’s not you, it’s them”

How did Republicans learn to hate the news media?

For many Republicans, the existence of a liberal media bias is an established fact, like the temperature at which water freezes. Attacks by Donald Trump, like the one he made last week on CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta, resonate loudly with his base. Scores of opinion polls show that Republicans think journalists favor Democrats and oppose the GOP. A late-2017 Cato Institute survey found that 63 percent of Republicans believe that journalists are an “enemy of the American people,” reiterating a charge that first came from Trump.

My father didn’t want to hear any evidence that contradicted his views, and neither do today’s Republican media haters. The hallmark of a prejudice is that you don’t have to prove it: You just know it.

Ten or fifteen years ago, this article would have made for a good fisking. But what’s the point?

The people who read blogs which fisk journalists have been convinced (correctly in my opinion) that Marco Rubio was right:

The Democrats have the ultimate ‘super PAC’; it’s called the mainstream media.

The MSM, for its part, has never been willing to engage its critics on the Right. To protect its monopoly on “explanation space” they prefer to dismiss opposing arguments rather than engage them.

The article strikes all the boring tropes we’ve heard for ages: Nixon Agnew and Fox News Bad! Edward R. Murrow Good! Joe McCarthy Very Bad! Richard Hofstadter Very Good! Orange Man and his Deplorables Very Very Bad!

As I said, the author wants his readers to feel good about themselves by assuring them that it is their critics who are the problem. There is no need for reform since they are good enough, they are smart enough and doggone it, [the respectable] people like them.

Related:

Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

Max Peak MSM Blue Bubble

What you see when you connect the dots

Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?

Journalists and Twitter redux

They still don’t get it

A prolific yet almost forgotten serial killer

A really informative 2 part podcast from True Crime Garage

The Candyman

Dean Corll, for a variety of reasons, is not nearly as well known as the Zodiac Killer or Ted Bundy. Yet he ranks as one of the most sadistic and prolific serial killers in US history.

This article by Skip Hollandsworth is one of the best pieces of reporting I've ever read.

The Lost Boys

The real fake news

This is very good because it is very true:

The History Of The Future

I attend way more conferences than is healthy. I've been averaging about 12 of these a year, as speaking at these things is part of my business. I hear all kinds of hysterical and provocative predictions for the future. The one thing I don't hear is anything that turns out to be true.
---
If you're a marketing genius with a terrible track record, the future is a great place to hide.

This same phenomenon has established a firm foothold in most of the respectable media:

The other day, on a Sunday, what was it? -- a week ago Sunday, I think, and I picked up The New York Times, and there, page one, there were seven stories on page one. I counted them. And now in the old days -- old only being 10 or 15 years ago -- the news journalistic philosophy was that you would give a snapshot of the world in the previous 24 hours: What happened yesterday all over the world? But the other Sunday, I picked up the paper and I looked at the seven page-one stories and not one story had a yesterday or a last night in the lead. All seven stories were about something that will happen or might happen or conceivably could happen some time in the future. Well, it's a different kind of journalism.

(John Corry, 1994)

The plague is even worse in cable news and in sports programming. Often more time is wasted on endless speculation and pointless predictions than is devoted to actual news reporting.

There is a bunch of reasons why this happens. For one thing, it is easier to support a narrative with speculation than with facts. Facts have an ugly way of undercutting preferred narratives (see, “Hands up, don’t shoot”). In addition, it is an easy way to fill air time; cheap and easy are the bedrock foundations of cable’s current business model. (See Cable news, vox populi, and professional sleaze )

Michael Crichton: “Why Speculate” (2002)

If speculation is worthless, why is there so much of it? Is it because people want it? I don’t think so. I myself speculate that media has turned to speculation for media’s own reasons. So now let’s consider the advantages of speculation from a media standpoint.

It’s incredibly cheap. Talk is cheap. And speculation shows are the cheapest thing you can put on television, They’re almost as cheap as running a test pattern. Speculation requires no research, no big staff. Minimal set. Just get the talking host, book the talking guestsof which there is no shortageand you’re done! Instant show. No reporters in different cities around the world, no film crews on location. No deadlines, no footage to edit, no editors…nothing! Just talk. Cheap. You can’t lose. Even though the speculation is correct only by chance, which means you are wrong at least 50% of the time, nobody remembers and therefore nobody cares. You are never accountable. The audience does not remember yesterday, let alone last week, or last month. Media exists in the eternal now, this minute, this crisis, this talking head, this column, this speculation.

They still don't get it

Or maybe they do and just don't dare admit it

Interesting review by Nick Carr of a revealing new book-Trump and the Media

Media democratization and the rise of Trump

If there is a way out of the crisis, it may lie in Fred Turner's critical reexamination of past assumptions about the structure and influence of media. Just as we failed to see that democratization could subvert democracy, we may have overlooked the strengths of the mass-media news organization in protecting democracy. Professional gatekeepers have their flaws - they can narrow the range of views presented to the public, and they can stifle voices that should be heard - yet through the exercise of their professionalism they also temper the uglier tendencies of human nature. They make it less likely that ignorance, gullibility, and prejudice will poison our conversations and warp our politics.

Note-The "crisis" is the fact that Hillary Clinton was not allowed to become president.

When a journalist talks about "democracy" what they really mean is "mediated democracy" where Deciders and Experts carefully "curate" the choices put before the public.

PowerLine, where I first found the term, captures the essence of "mediated democracy":

We live in a political system that has not yet been adequately described, but one might call it a "mediated democracy." Mediated by a self-appointed, generally ignorant but highly opinionated "elite" that is not elite by any conventional measure-income, intelligence, education, social position-but that successfully dictates the terms of political discourse even though it no longer controls (exclusively, anyway) the means of production of the news.

(For journalists and academics to speak of Democracy when they really mean this bastardized version is truly Orwellian. Fascists and Stalinists can readily accept the form while arguing about where to draw the line between acceptable and forbidden opinion. A true democrat like G. K. Chesterton would laugh the writers right out of the room.)

Journalists and academics think democracy is in crisis because the voters - darn them - bypassed the Mediators and neutered the Deciders.

Here's a key point that undercuts the "Russia hacked the election" hysteria that has seized hold of the minds of Journalistic Deciders and Mediating Experts:

Keith N. Hampton, of Michigan State University, finds "no evidence" that any of the widely acknowledged malignancies of social media, from fake news to filter bubbles, "worked in favor of a particular presidential candidate." Drawing on exit polls, he shows that most demographic groups voted pretty much the same in 2016 as they had in the Obama-Romney race of 2012. The one group that exhibited a large and possibly decisive shift from the Democratic to the Republican candidate were white voters without college degrees. Yet these voters, surveys reveal, are also the least likely to spend a lot of time online or to be active on social media. It's unfair to blame Twitter or Facebook for Trump's victory, Hampton suggests, if the swing voters weren't on Twitter or Facebook.

This is something the MSM probably hopes we forget:

Trump's Twitter account may have been monitored by only a small portion of the public, but it was followed, religiously, by journalists, pundits, and politicos. The novelty and frequent abrasiveness of the tweets - they broke all the rules of decorum for presidential campaigns - mesmerized the chattering class throughout the primaries and the general election campaign, fueling a frenzy of retweets, replies, and hashtags. Social media's biggest echo chamber turned out to be the traditional media elite.

Related:

Journalists and Twitter redux

Why do journalists love twitter and hate blogging?

Why Twitter?

#ad

A less bleak view of the future of the newspaper

David Warsh has been an astute observer/explainer of the news business for decades. I've learned a great deal from reading his columns (for instance, the concept of "explanation space" is his).

So this is well worth pondering:

The Future of Reliable News

The biggest and best newspapers have survived and begun to prosper again, albeit in a low-key way, precisely because advertisers pay much more to reach readers of print than for fleeting digital impressions before online readers. I don’t see proprietary numbers, and newspapers shape and guard fairly carefully what information they release. But there is more reason than ever to think that healthy print circulation is the basis of a strong digital business.

He may well be right.

Then again....

MSM: Shrinking Audience, Leftward Drift

A badge of honor, but maybe not the best business model

Respected editor (NY Times alum) both defends and condemns doxxing

Is she too stupid to understand simple words and concepts?

Does she really think she lives in a quasi-feudal system where her class has special privileges?

Or is she a thorough-going SJW who thinks impartial rules need to be replaced with Lenin's "Who-whom"?

Doxing is revealing a person’s private information: home address, telephone number, etc. Identifying a popular anonymous troll by name is NOT doxing.

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) June 5, 2018

Yes, the HuffPo is a sleazy left-wing click-bait site. But:

1. It is a Popular click-bait site and it is not treated as sleazy by the MSM guild.

2. It's editor-in-chief is a former reporter and editor at the New York Times. Which may tell us something about the ethics/ideology of the Times.

3. It is owned by Verizon. It is not a fly-by-night operation.