How about a gratuitous smear with your football commentary?

From this week's Tuesday Morning Quarterback:

In our fabricated docudrama-world, what matters is not what you can establish as true but what you can confuse people into thinking might be true -- Michael Moore on the left and the Swift Boat guys on the right are the current exemplars of "post-truth" politics.

Or what about this from Randall Rothenberg covering Advertising Week in Ad Age:

Swift Boat Selling: The new Guerilla Marketing: John O'Neil, Karl Rove and Roger Ailes, founders of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, discuss how to get the public to believe anything about your product.

I sometimes feel guilty about typing "MSM" because I know that the legacy media is not a monolith that always marches in lockstep. But then I read this kind of thing and realize that ignorant knowingness really is pervasive in traditional journalism. Without studying the matter, they know that the SBVT are bad people-liars-and are controlled by the EVIL Karl Rove. Christmas in Cambodia is a laughable fraud but that neither hurts John Kerry in their eyes nor bolsters the credibility of Unfit for Command.

Check out Old Patriot's Pen

It's a new (to me) blog but well worth the click. I really like this post

The death rattle of old media

and this one

A "Back to the Future" idea

Peggy Noonan on Dan Rather

Before she went to work in the Reagan White House, Peggy Noonan worked for CBS and wrote radio commentaries for Dan Rather. This is what she wrote about him in her memoirs of the Reagan Years-- What I Saw at the Revolution (1990)

How to explain Rather. I knew him at a hard time, the early days when he first got the Cronkite job-- for a year after he was anchor they still called it the Cronkite Show in house-- and ratings were down. Then ratings went up and he expanded-- a sweetness came out, and a sensitivity, though there was still about him, I thought, a frustration, a bristling. I would think, This is the sadness of the man who got what he wanted. Now he's stuck with it. And is it enough, and was he right to want it all his life, and doesn't he really want to get back on the road and chase a lead and hustle a secretary for the sheriff's home number and get the story and get wrecked that night with the boy in the bar? Now he is a statesman, when what he really wants to be is what most reporters are, adult delinquents. That bristling quality-- it was restraint.
[pp. 27-28]
--------------
I always found him to be open-minded and fair, and he became my friend and is to this day. He is, of course, the nemesis of the right, which is understandable given the history, but frustrating for his friends nonetheless. It sounds weak, or only sentimental, but i always want to say to them: he wouldn't be if you knew him. that he is a symbol of the Northeast liberal establishment is somewhat ironic. He was never of them-- i once asked one of the Bud Shads what Rather was like in Vietnam, and he sniffed, "He wore bright yellow socks."

Anyway, I think the real key is that Murrow is still the Everest of CBS, and Dan's a mountain climber. And Murrow didn't become Murrow by standing for nothing. It was Murrow who said, "Some stories don't have two sides."
[pp. 31-32]

Bragging

Ohio 28, Kentucky 16

Scott Mayle caught touchdown passes of 44 and 89 yards as Ohio posted a rare win over a major-conference opponent, beating Kentucky 28-16 on Saturday night.

My school has never been a football power and this year is no exception. UK must really be awful this year. (Granted, they are a basketball powerhouse and have never been part of the football royalty of the SEC.) See also here.

But still, Ohio 28, Kentucky 16.

Carnival of the Capitalists

The 52nd edition is now up at Drakeview .

Kerry and Iran

Who is Susan Akbarpur?

She is a major fundraiser for Kerry and an Iranian immigrant with ties to the regime in Tehran. Kenneth Timmerman has a long article on her in the most recent American Spectator. He also outlines Kerry's proposed policy toward one of the worst state sponsers of terrorism in the world. (You can download a PDF at the article on his website.)

Here are some excerpts:

Sen. john kerry's ties to pro-regime Iranians run deep. Kerry has already announced that if elected he would seek to engage the Mullahs in Tehran. And in a series of public statements, he has bought onto virtually the entire pro-regime agenda that supporters such as Susan Akbarpour have encouraged him to adopt. These measures include ending the fingerprinting of Iranian visitors to the United States, expanding "family reunion" visas to allow extended family members of Iranians living in the U.S. to immigrate to this country legally and in large numbers, and offering a "dialogue" with the hard-line clerics in Tehran. On August 30, Kerry's running mate John Edwards told the Washington Post that, if elected, a Kerry administration would seek to make a "grand bargain" that would allow Iran to keep most of its disputed nuclear program, which the State Department believes is intended to conceal a crash effort to develop nuclear weapons. So the stakes are high.
*******************
More significant, however, were Kerry's attempts in his speech to curry favor with the pro-Tehran crowd. Kerry called for efforts to "engage" the Islamic Republic, help the Tehran regime to join the World Trade Organization, and remove visa restrictions on Iranians that were imposed post-September 11. He came out against any forms of terrorist profiling that would single out Middle Easterners.

Kerry repeated his intention to "engage" the Islamic Republic of Iran—rather than isolate the leadership—in an address to the Council on Foreign Relations on December 3, 2003.

Captain's Quarters has more here.

Where do blogs go from here?

There is no doubt that blogs have already changed the dynamics of news and politics. However, their total effect is limited and the results, so far, fall short of their revolutionary potential.

Most people are not regular blog readers. The people who are reading represent the early adopters, the committed partisans, the info-junkies. They are, alas, only a small sliver of the news audience and electorate.

The rate at which blog readership expands will depend more on the actions of current readers than on those of bloggers. As those readers put their personal credibility behind blog content, they increase the blog-audience in ways the best-written post cannot.

The most obvious way readers vet content is by emailing posts to friends, family, and co-workers. I'm sure some of this happens today. The "problem", though, is that we currently do not have the means to measure this. Nor, do the current blog metrics (links, visitors, page views) tell us anything about the total audience size and its growth rate.

If such metrics are to be developed, they will have to come from the blogging community. The content providers in a given medium fund/develop nearly all the audience measurement tools used in that medium (Arbitron, Nielson, etc.). Those tools are not the products of disinterested scholarship nor is the research undertaken in the public interest. The metrics are used to sell advertising.

Clearly, it is not in the interest of publishers or network executives to spread the word about the rise of a competing media. It is also clear that reporters and editors disdain blogs and bloggers. Any research done by conventional journalists will pass through the blinders of professional jealousy, ideological commitment, and economic worries. Dismissing blogs (guys in pajamas writing ideological screeds that only lunatics take seriously) is easy and provides a nice ego-boost. That template will be hard for the MSM to give up.

It is unrealistic to expect the "professionals" to clear a place at the table for bloggers. As Papa said, "Hawks do not share." That attitude, however, is more harmful to the MSM than to bloggers. As Photon Courier has pointed out, it is textbook thinking with the textbook being Clayton Christensen's The Innovator's Dilemma.

Did Kerry have a cheat sheet?

See details at INCD Journal. Seems like a pretty important question for all those pundits who want to draw big conclusions from every detail of the debate performance.

If Kerry is so smart, why did he see the need?

In the same vein, see Michelle Malkin. If we are going to analyze facial expressions, shouldn't a hard-bitten reporter ask Joe Lockhart if Kerry has had Botox or other plastic surgery?

Objective media?

Shannon Love has a good post on the evolution of the news media and the rise of "objective journalism"

See also

Blogs HAVE replaced newspapers

MSM: Shrinking Audience, Leftward Drift

Remembering the baby in the bathwater

Guess he nailed that

Richard Bennett, 5/20/04

Denton’s genius is his uncanny ability to exploit bright but emotionally-disturbed young women

New York Times Magazine, 9/26/04

Denton is the world's first blogging entrepreneur. He owns a bunch of these smart-alecky blogs -- Wonkette; a New York City gossip site called Gawker; a Hollywood site, Defamer; and Fleshbot, a porn site. Anytime somebody builds a media empire, especially one that includes pornography, you assume the money is good, but in the Wonkette's case, it isn't. Her starting salary was $18,000 a year. (She's getting bonuses now for increased traffic, but not much.)

Attention Weapons Experts

James at Hell in a Handbasket is running a little contest. Can you identify the RPG?

Perp Walk

The latest issue of the American Spectator has an article on the "perp walk." Surprise number one-- it is opposed to the practice. Surprise number two, it is written by Judge David Sentelle-- one of the favorite liberal boogie men during the Clinton investigations.

The perp walk would be bad enough if the humiliation of the accused were the only intended or accomplished result. however, the walk, commonly conducted at such time as to achieve maximum media exposure, is displayed not just for family and neighbors of the accused, but for every potential juror who sees the front page of the newspaper or the beginning of the evening news.

The camera-ready perp-walk puts the lie to the sanctimonious posturing of the MSM that their privileges are a necessary counter-weight to governmental power and serve to protect the rights of citizens. When it suits their interests, reporters and editors will sacrifice the "presumed innocent" thing and do the work of the DA/police if it gets them a good picture.

The same thing happens with leaks. "Sources close to the investigation" usually means prosecutors or detectives. In their quest for an "exclusive" reporters will let them taint a jury pool with information that may or may not stand up in court. That hardly counts as standing up for the little guy against the power of government.

Instead of complaining about pajama-wearing ankle-biters, reporters like Steve Levy might want to explain why the MSM was largely silent when prosecutors foisted the "satanic ritual child abuse" scare on the public and sent innocent people to jail. Or why the checks and balances of the MSM and the professional ethics of journalists allowed some outlets to actually incite the hysteria. Or, finally, why it was the discreditable right-wing Wall Street Journal op-ed page that gave Dorothy Rabinowitz a platform to blow the whistle on the witch-hunt.

Tell me i was wrong

In this post i likened the reaction of an editor to a PowerLine op-ed to "an Edwardian butler who discovered a group of Welsh miners gathered in the grand dining hall. It is not what they did; it is that they were there at all."

Read this over at Captain's Quarter's and tell me this attitude isn't endemic to the profession:

Do bloggers have the credentials of real journalists? No. Bloggers are hobby hacks, the Internet version of the sad loners who used to listen to police radios in their bachelor apartments and think they were involved in the world.

Bloggers don't know about anything that happened before they sat down to share their every thought with the moon. Like graffiti artists, they tag the public square -- without editors, correction policies or community standards. And so their tripe is often as vicious as it is vacuous.

On leaks, bias and truth

Justoneminute notes that the Plame/Wilson leak investigation hasn't turned out like the press had hoped. Safire lays on the bombast and trots out the usual justifications.

The fundamental right of Americans, through our free press, to penetrate and criticize the workings of our government is under attack as never before.

Leaks, for good or ill, are an integral part of modern journalism. Without them the Times, CBS, and Newsweek would publish fewer stories of much shorter length. Investigative journalism as it is now practiced could not exist. So leaks make news and, thus, generate information.

But, as Edward Jay Epstein* noted his book Deception, they do so while withholding critical information about context, the motivations for the disclosure, and the professional competence of the person making the statements.

In short, while they generate information, they may not add anything to the store of knowledge; they may, in fact, subtract from it. Amb. Wilson's leaks, after all, created a false picture of pre-war intelligence and the honesty of the current administration. We do not know if the "Pentagon sources" telling Hersh that Iraq is the new Vietnam are the same people who told him in October 2001 that Afghanistan was the new Vietnam.

As Epstein also points out, journalism's reliance on leaks separates it from traditional scholarly disciplines where the search for truth is inextricably tied to the explicit discussion of sources and methods.

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.

One of the ways the ideological bias of journalists manifests itself is in their decision to focus on either the leak or the story. They care about the disclosure of Plame's status as a CIA officer; they didn't care about the illegal release of Linda Tripp's personnel records by a Clinton political appointee. The timing of the Berger revelations is a matter of grave concern; the motivation of those who gave the Abu Ghraib photos to Seymour Hersh is a matter of indifference. The Pentagon sources warning us of a new Vietnam are treated as pure truth-tellers; no one asks if they are evidence of a defeatist coterie who are mired in the mindset of 1968.

Bias can also be a factor in how other journalists treat the "scoop." Both Bill Gertz and Sy Hersh have many talkative contacts in the Pentagon. The rest of the MSM is ignorant about those source's identity, credibility, and competence. Nevertheless, ABC or the LA Times are far more likely to run with a Hersh story that one by Gertz.

Why? How can the reader/viewer be certain that this has nothing to do with Hersh's reflexive anti-Rumsfeld slant or Gertz's pro-brass slant?

Epstein also hones in on some murky ethical questions.

By concealing the machinations and politics behind a leak, journalists suppress part of the truth surrounding a story. Thus, the means by which the medical records of Senator Thomas Eagleton were acquired and passed on to the Knight newspapers (which won the 1973 Pulitizer Prize for disclosing information contained in these records) seems no less important than the senator's medical history itself, especially since copies of the illegally obtained records were later found in the White House safe of John Ehrlichman.

We agree that it was wrong for Ehrlichman to possess the records and wrong for him to share them with ANYONE. Yet, the journalism profession celebrated the reporters who told millions about Eagleton's psychiatric history. Reconciling those positions requires a level of sophisticated (and sophistic) reasoning that makes angels dancing on pins look like child's play by comparison.

In many cases, acceptance of leaked material compromises reporters. To protect their source and to ensure future scoops, they tacitly agree to ignore part of the story. They have the privilege of revealing that Candidate A had a mistress who bore him a son and that Candidate B was addicted to cocaine. What they cannot reveal is that Candidate C is employing a stable of private detectives to did up dirt on the opposition. Those detectives, after all, are the source of the headline-grabbing stories.

When a reporter uses an anonymous source, it is implied that it is dangerous for him/her to speak out publicly. This usually casts the other side-- the nonleaker-- in an unfavorable light. The target of the leak is not just wrong-- they are engaged in a cover-up and are prepared to retaliate against their opponents. However, we have only the source's word for this. A crucial part of the story-- the part that adds drama-- has to be accepted on faith.

Increasingly we see another type of murkiness from the widespread use of leaks. They are defended because they help the pursuit of truth. But when the leak itself becomes the issue, journalist's refusal to reveal sources becomes a barrier to truth: it prolongs a controversy that could be put to bed quickly.

In the Plame 'outing' or the revelation of the Berger investigation the big question is "who told?" This might be more important than the specific information conveyed to reporters. The conventions of journalism are a huge obstacle to answering that question.

Former Army intelligence officer Col. Stuart A. Herrington made an astute observation in his book Traitor's Among Us:

In the unique world occupied by our media colleagues, trusted government civil servants who betray sensitive information are First Amendment heroes.

He speaks from experience. He nearly had a years-long investigation blown apart because some one leaked news of it to the New York Times.

It is another strange bit of reasoning: A reliable and trustworthy source is someone willing to break trust with his or her colleagues and betray the confidences of their friends.

* Epstein's book, Between Fact and Fiction: The Problem of Journalism is out of print. It is well worth picking up a used copy.

Journalism: Worst of all worlds

Instapundit lays out his concerns:

As I've said before, I don't know what worries me more -- the thought that the standards of journalism have been slipping recently, or the thought that, maybe, it's been this bad all along and we just couldn't tell before. . . .?

How's this for bleak-it's been bad for a long-time, it's getting worse, and it won't change soon?

Prestopundit relates an experience many of us can identify with:

Well, if you were on the inside anywhere in America when Big Media came to town to report on things, you always knew. When I was younger and living in Richland WA, CBS News or a big city paper would report on the happenings at the Hanford Nuclear Site. My dad was an insider, my neighbors were insiders. CBS News and the big papers always got the story wrong, in ways big and small.

Taking only CBS, before Rathergate there was the fantasy "expose" of the demon-possessed Audi 5000. Only someone completely clueless about cars could have produced that piece of ignorant sensationalism. Before the Audi story, there was The Uncounted Enemy: another muckraking piece that only the willfully misinformed could have put together. And don't get me started on the coverage of farming/farm programs or guns and gun control.

At the heart of journalism lies this problem: reporters have to write stories on subjects about which they are woefully ignorant. This is not a slam, just reality. Almost everyone would be in the same boat if they had to cover the beat of the typical reporter. The genius polymath who could do it is not going to work for what the average journalist earns.

What has changed is that too many reporters now substitute knowingness for curiosity and class solidarity for critical thinking.

They know the SBVT are lying and everyone they know knows the SBVT are lying. Doug Brinkley said so. QED. The charges are debunked. Who needs facts or analysis? Who even needs to read Unfit for Command?

That's how we get the situation Prestopundit describes:

What explains the poor performance of the press? Bias played a big part. But the biggest problem was a profound lack of background understanding. Almost always the storyline was pre-written, and this directed reporters away from getting the background understanding which would help them avoid errors and get the story right. In other words, pre-existing assumptions wrote the story in advance, and this pre-defined story prevented big media reporters from doing their job -- investigating and finding out what the real story was. Bias also played another role. Reporters were biased against those involved -- and this prevented reporters from making use of those with expert knowledge or solid local knowledge on the ground. That is, reporters were self-cocooned -- within their pre-written story and hermetically sealed against the penetration of any outside expertise or local knowledge.

Knowledge and knowingness

 I posted this in November 2003. i wanted to repost it because it ties into a new post i'm working on and it will be easier to refer to it this way.

Getting Hip to Squareness

This is one of the best things Michael Kelly ever wrote.

In all these states we were, first and above all, not-square. Everything was a variation on that; to be seen as clever and even profound you had to be not much more than not square.
*******
Knowingness, of course, is not knowledge—indeed, is the rebuttal of knowledge. Knowledge was what squares had, or thought they had, and they thought that it was the secret of life. Knowingness is a celebration of the conceit that what the squares knew, or thought they knew, was worthless. In The Graduate the career advice ("Plastics") of a family friend, Mr. McGuire, to Benjamin Braddock, played by Dustin Hoffman, is classic square knowledge. Benjamin's mute disdain toward that advice—and his elaborately played out disdain for all that McGuire and the Robinsons represent—is classic anti-square knowingness.

You can see in this example the problem that a return to square poses: anti-square is so much easier and more fun. Knowledge, even on McGuire's level, is notoriously difficult to acquire. Sixteen years of hard, slogging schoolwork, and what do you know? Not enough to carry on ten minutes of intelligent conversation on any subject in the world with any person who actually knows something about the subject. Knowingness, though—a child can master that. (Can and does: there is an obvious inverse relationship between age and knowingness; the absolute life peak of knowingness generally arrives between the ages of twelve and sixteen for females, fourteen and eighteen for males—whereas, as these cohorts can attest, grown-ups don't know anything.)

This is why Benjamin Braddock had to ignore, with prejudice, Mr. McGuire. McGuire may have been a fool, but he was, in the limited area of business and economic trends, probably a knowledgeable fool. Had Benjamin been obliged to respond to McGuire's advice in terms of knowledge, he would have been utterly lost—he would have been the one exposed as a fool. But for Ben—and more to the point, for the movie's audience—knowingness offered a lovely way to not only counter McGuire's knowledge but also trump it. Ben didn't have to know anything about McGuire to show himself intellectually (and aesthetically, and even morally) superior to McGuire. He only had to know that what McGuire thought he knew was a joke and McGuire was a joke because—because the McGuires of the world are definitionally jokes, and if you don't understand that, I can't explain it to you, because you are a McGuire. That's knowingness, and for no-sweat self-satisfaction you can't beat it.

Kelly was more right than he may have known. In matters big and small knowingness plagues us.

If you want a small example, take a look at VH1's "I Love the ...." programs. As this blogger noted, they are just a series of snide, bitchy comments by people who really know little about the subject they are discussing. Everything is just fodder for a snarky joke.

In the latest New Criterion, Mark Steyn gives a common example:

In the days after September 11, I ran into no end of college students eager to lecture me on the "root causes"-- poverty breeds despair, despair breeds anger, anger breeds terrorism, terrorism breeds generalizations-- yet unable to name the capital of Saudi Arabia or find Afghanistan on a map.

Knowingness is a key element in many (most?) of the deleterious movements which have swept through the humanities over the last four decades. Graduate students did not have to master a subject in the old-fashioned way. They could just pick a short-cut-- racism, sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia-- and go cherry-picking for facts that fit.

For example, the history of the Northwest Territory used to be a complex matter of competing empires, tribes, religions, classes, and ethnicities. Now you just have to illustrate the genocidal attitudes of greedy settlers and you're home free.

Why really try to read Eliot or Pound carefully? Just pick out the lines and phrases that show fascist sympathies or anti-Semitic attitudes and be done with it.

These types of scholarly movements are a sham because they minimize the element of discovery in the research. The "scholar" knows what s/he will find when the s/he sets out. The footnotes are just a charming convention that serves as a smokescreen.

As Kelly wrote, the problem is figuring out how to go back to attitudes that are not as easy to pull off and not as much fun.

Good news

Jack Sparks says Son Volt is recording a new album. While you're there read what the man says about Junior Brown.

For a few months Comcast offered alt-country as one of their digital music channels. (Then they took it away the scum.) It was an oasis in the radio desert here in the big empty. Junior Brown, the Jayhawks, Son Volt, Amy Rigby...

It put the crap coming out of Nashville to shame. I am forever puzzled by corporate country's unerring bad taste. Big and Rich, Lone Star, kenny Chesney, Shania-- they get promoted while much better artists get lost in the shuffle.

Not that this is unique to country. Pop/rock stations and labels are worse.

So any way, here is a random list of artists/albums that beat 99% of the stuff on radio/MTV/CMT.

The Flatlanders Wheels of Fortune

The Jayhawks

Dave Barry wrote once that the typical guy's idea of the perfect love song is John Lee Hooker's "Boom, Boom, Boom, Boom." I think he's right. My favorite version is John Lee and Big Head Todd and the Monsters on Beautiful World

When Shelby Lynne released Temptation, it seemed possible that Country Swing was poised for a comeback. Instead, we got Shania/McGraw swing- your-ass- pseudo-country. Nevertheless, it's a great record.


A post-Hendrix Merle Haggard. That's the best way to describe Chris Knight, especially his debut record, Chris Knight

The Bottle Rockets, Blue Sky

Not exhaustive. Not necessarily the tip-top best. Just what came to mind.

John Kerry: The Lawyer

Beldar has a run-down of Kerry's career as a lawyer. He seems to have missed one very important episode.

In 1978 Edward Brooke was running for re-election to the Senate. As a liberal Republican and the only African-American member in that body, he was in a good position to win.

But in the summer he was crippled by a legal-ethical scandal and Paul Tsongas picked up the seat for the Dems.

Check out this picture and note the caption:

Middlesex County 1st Assistant DA John Kerry explains to the press on June 16, 1978, that an investigation into possible criminal charges stemming from US Senator Edward Brooke's admitted "misstatements" in his first divorce trial was ordered that day by Middlesex DA John Droney, right. Middlesex Assistant DA Richard Kelly looks on.

Speaking of Slate

Did that turn out to be a dead-end for Bill Gates or what? All those millions dumped into an experiment in Internet media and he gets a NYTimes op-ed pages sans newsprint.

Blogging-- the real breakthrough Internet media/technology-- surprised them like it did the rest of the MSM.

What's funny is that they coulda' been a contender. They had Kaus; they could have had Instapundit. But Kinsley and company missed it completely.

The most offensive political cartoon of the year

from slate:

look for the 9/24/04 image.


Dan Rather as the crucified Christ?

Fox News as the Roman executioners?


What is even more amazing is that the Carlisle Sentinel here in church-going, Fox-loving, red America chose to put this crap on their Sunday op-ed page.