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High Journalistic Standards

Friday, October 16, 2009

I’m a big fan of Talking Points Memo, so I was quite surprised to read about this in an email thread.

You may have heard that the Connecticut Democrats have gone after Linda McMahon, who constantly refers to her Wrestling company as a promoter of PG entertainment. And it is PG, if you consider necrophilia to be a family friendly subject.

Well, TPM covered the story, and the fact that the WWF immediately removed those particular videos from youtube, but the article ends with this non sequitur:

Also, a source points out that Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), who McMahon hopes to defeat in 2010, has taken more than $922,000 from the TV and movie industry, according to OpenSecrets. The source wonders if Dodd condones violence and sex depicted on film.

I can understand that protecting sources has a place in journalism. But it hardly seems that it’s appropriate for a journalist to grant anonymity so a source can “wonder” if someone condones violence and sex in film. I always thought that a source was a person who provides factual material to a reporter, not opinion. What possible reason could there be to allow this “source” to go unnamed? It leaves me wondering whether this source is someone with a vested interest in getting McMahon elected, or at the very least in seeing Chris Dodd defeated.

This is the sort of thing we have come to expect from the Washington Post and the New York Times. I thought Josh Marshall (he didn’t write it, but it’s his site) aspired to higher standards.

UPDATE: From a press release from the Connecticut Democrats:

Hartford, CT – When asked why the WWE requested that YouTube remove three videos which had become a political issue for Linda McMahon today, company Vice President Robert Zimmerman said, “This is a continuing process that goes on. It is not related to the campaign. We constantly track illegal usage of our intellectual property. That is something that try to continuously go after.”

However, a quick search of “WWE” on YouTube’s site shows that there are more than 516,000 videos still active on the site.

“There are more than a half a million WWE videos on YouTube. WWE today asked that only three — the three that had become a political issue for Linda McMahon — be removed,” said Connecticut Democratic Party Communications Director Colleen Flanagan. “Clearly WWE, a publicly traded corporation, is acting as an agent of the McMahon campaign, presumably at the direction of Mr. or Mrs. McMahon. And that’s a violation of federal law.”

It’s good to see the Connecticut Democrats pushing on these stories.


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Defending rapists

Thursday, October 15, 2009

Republicans would vote against apple pie if Democrats were for it.

I got a few comments from my right wing friends when I criticized the Congressional action against Acorn. I’d sure like to hear from those same people now. Maybe they can enlighten us about why defending rape is okay.


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Simmons Unhinged

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

via Think Progress:


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Ted Mann puts a dent in Rell’s armor

Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Fair’s fair. I’m a frequent critic of the New London Day, but there are times when the Day pulls through. Ted Mann’s series of articles (most recent here) about Jodi Rell’s misuse of state funds is a case in point. It’s been amusing to watch as the governor shifts her lines of defense after each is undercut in turn by emails that establish rather definitively that she has been using state funds, and state employees, to plot political strategy. Ted has done a great job in this series. It’s what the press is supposed to do, be its target Democrat or Republican.

On the merits, this is a case of exposing a truth that has been in plain sight for years. This administration has, from the very start, had one driving purpose behind everything it does: position itself for the next election, the long term state interest be damned. It’s not at all surprising that those damaging emails were out there. It’s only to be expected when you have hubris filled people using a form of communication in which almost everyone tends to write with less prudence than they do on the printed page. Something inside us refuses to believe that our emails will ever be read, even when, as in this case, the law requires their preservation and public disclosure. If Jodi had any sense, she would at least review these emails (if Ted can get them, so can she) before she tosses off another casual lie. Maybe she’s just gotten lazy after all the free rides she’s gotten from the Connecticut press.

The greater challenge, from a pure reportorial point of view, would be to unearth a series of emails in which Rell or her senior staff actually discuss policy from a non-political perspective. You know, where they actually try to puzzle out what is in the best interest of the state, rather than in Jodi Rell’s best interest. If that has ever happened, it has been carefully covered up.


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Preserving Governmental Secrecy

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

It was inevitable that Obama would disappoint on a number of fronts. Anyone running on a message of hope is inviting people to see what they want to see, rather than what’s there. Even where Obama told the truth about his intentions, as with the so far terrible policy in Afghanistan, lots of folks preferred to believe that he would do as they wanted.

Perhaps most disappointing has been Obama’s refusal to back away from the Bush Administration’s lawless legal positions on renditions, state secrets, etc. A reader sent me a link to this article, in which Glenn Greenwald ably sets out the rather sorry record of the Obama administration in this respect. Obama has even sided with Bush in trying to keep all those missing emails missing.

The truly sad thing is that this is an area in which a change of policy would not only have been the morally right thing to do, but a fairly easy thing to do. The “states secret” doctrine, for instance, was created to cover up governmental lies and deceit, and it has served only that purpose ever since. It’s not too much to say that you can rightly assume that there has been a governmental crime in every case in which it has been used. It has done more harm than good, by a long shot. Obama could have adroitly backed away from Bush’s excess, with only the usual suspects (e.g, Liz Cheney) sounding off about it.

If Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize has raised eyebrows in the left here in the U.S., it is because of precisely this sort of thing. Understandably, these are issues that people from other countries feel are of lesser importance. You can’t argue with their preference for Obama’s diplomatic style over Bush’s.

We can always hope that Obama will do as he implied he would: live up to the award that he’s received. He could easily start by reflecting on the fact that finishing the work Bush started is work unworthy of a Nobel Laureate.


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Musical Stairs

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

This is only tangentially political, more a lesson in applied psychology mixed with whimsy. Some Swedes discover a non coercive way to entice people to use the stairs rather than the escalator.

The Fun Theory. That could never make it here.


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Same as it ever was

Monday, October 12, 2009

Frank Rich is a former theater critic and not a former “serious” journalist, so it’s not surprising that he is almost alone (add Paul Krugman) among the mainstream media writers who can’t quite understand why the Beltway elite insists on giving folks like John McCain almost unlimited exposure. The bloggers have beaten this drum forever, but of course, no one listens. Being wrong is never fatal in our modern media culture; in fact it’s almost a prerequisite for success, as oxymoronic as that may sound. The particular instance is Afghanistan, where the pundits and politicians who were wrong before debate among themselves about what’s to be done to fix the mess they created. This is a function of the media’s habit of allowing the debate to exist only within a narrow range of opinion; only in Washington could the “centrist” position on health care exclude the public option supported by the vast majority of people or the “centrist” position on Afghanistan be a doubling down that the American people instinctively know (and they are correct) will be a disaster. Not only do they consider business as usual the centrist position, they call exponents of that position centrists. Far be it from me to pick up the challenge and differentiate between the “centrist” position and the conservative position, since they appear to differ not much of a whit. On health cre, one insists on enriching the insurance companies, and the other insists that any bill that passes must enrich the insurance companies, but they will pass on voting for it, thank you very much.

But while this is a problem in the media, it is not necessarily of modern vintage.

I am currently reading Henry David Thoreau’s journal, and today I came across this passage, which might (though perhaps far less elegantly) have been written by any modern blogger. It was written on the occasion of the issuance of the first issue of the Atlantic:

There is no need of a law to check the license of the press. It is law enough, and more than enough, to itself. Virtually, the community have come together and agreed what things shall be uttered, have agreed on a platform and to excommunicate him who departs from it, and not one in a thousand dare utter anything else.

He went on to observe that the self censorship in his day applied to discussion about religion, so maybe things are a bit different. Not only is any challenge to religion off the table, but any challenge to “centrism”, as that term is defined by a curious amalgam of people in Washington who seem to know it when they see it, no matter what the public may think. The “centrist” position may always steer us wrong, whether it be economic policy or foreign policy, but if it is within their self-defined middle it will remain the only respectable game in town.

By the way, and pretty much totally off the point, the immediate cause of Thoreau’s rant was the fact that the editor of the Atlantic deleted a sentence from an article that Thoreau had submitted for publication. He was writing about a towering pine tree, and he wrote this:

It is as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower over me still.

Blasphemy apparently, but pretty weak tea today. IThe incident shows, I suppose, that despite the narrow mindedness of those that control our discourse, new ideas have a way of seeping in.


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Zero Thought Policy

Monday, October 12, 2009

The New York Times features a front page story about a six year old kid who was given a 45 day suspension for bringing his boy scout “knife” (a combination spoon, fork and knife) to school.

The cases is emblematic of a national movement toward zero tolerance policies, usually regarding weapons and drugs (including alcohol). We elect or employ school board members and administrators because they are supposed to be able to exercise judgment on our behalf, and they abdicate that responsibility by enacting policies that forbid them from exercising judgment. The theory is that when they do exercise judgment, they sometimes get it wrong. Better to avoid the possibility of perpetrating an injustice by assuring that you will perpetrate multiple injustices. This is the same mindset that brought us mandatory sentencing guidelines, outrageously long minimum sentences, and three strikes rules, all of which have caused more problems than they’ve cured.

This particular kid is being punished for lacking the judgment (at six years old) that the school administrators and board members implicitly admit that they themselves lack in the full flower of their adulthood.

I sat in on three “zero tolerance” suspension/expulsion hearings while I was on the school board. In only one was such a drastic penalty even arguably appropriate. Kids lack judgment; they do stupid things. The hearings I attended all involved “weapons”; but the same sort of thing happens with drugs or alcohol, often with less justification. We groped around trying to find a way around our own policy; the obvious answer was to abandon the policy. It’s good to see that these absurd policies are now being questioned.


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Sunday Sermon-All Hail George Orwell, the true prophet

Sunday, October 11, 2009

The good folks at Conservapedia (can’t won’t find a link for some reason, maybe it’s my liberal bias) have launched an effort to purge the Bible of its liberal bias, a bias injected, so to speak, by years of faulty translations by liberals like the guys working for King James.

This is a good thing, a Bible-wiki, which can be constantly adjusted as eternal truths occur to the contributors. They have discovered a new truth: God’s word is fixed, but it is necessary to constantly translate it anew to fit our preconceptions. Thus can we have the best of both worlds: a Bible that is ever inerrant, yet ever changing, as not only philosophy but facts get finely tuned by the mass conservative mind (if we can use that word in this context).

This, I think, is just the start of the good work. For I put it to you: if the word of God has been distorted by errant translations through language, does it not follow that the word of man has been distorted as it has been transmitted through time?

The Constitution; the Bill of Rights; the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, to name just a few, have surely been deformed from their pristine originals by the passage of time. Surely our conservative friends can remake them into more perfect documents. Can anyone doubt that Thomas Jefferson originally wrote that “some men are created equal”, words since perverted by pointy headed university liberals? Getting a little closer to the present, who put all that liberal nonsense in the Gettysburg address? Surely not Lincoln, who was, after all, a Republican.

But we need not stop there. It has surely not escaped the notice of conservatives that liberal bias has been embedded in so much of the great literature that has come down to us through the ages. Confining ourselves to American literature alone, isn’t it time that we restore Walt Whitman to the pristine original. Shall we not smooth out the contradictions and restore him to his singular self?

Being a Hartford native, I have a soft spot for our adopted son, Mark Twain and I hope and pray that we can purge Huck Finn of its liberal bias by returning that book to what I’m sure was its primal glory, by having Huck fulfill his original intent-and follow the law set down by his conservative elders- by returning Jim to the slavecatchers. A few strokes of the pen can rid us of that pesky epiphany when Huck opts to do the liberal thing-accept Jim as fully human as himself. Mark Twain, a native son of the South, surely never wrote that.

Let’s take a another look at Thoreau. Surely he refused to pay his taxes because he was against socialism, not war. We don’t know who was responsible for putting all that environmental nonsense in his writings, but we can now excise it, and restore his writings to the peans to excess that once they were.

But I would urge our conservative friends – don’t apply your restorative balm to American literature alone. If one considers the broad sweep of world literature, as it has been handed to us in its maimed condition, one perceives an all pervading liberal bias. Tolerance, free inquiry, rational thought, human understanding and other abominations wax stronger as the years progress; while dogma, blind adherence to tradition and other conservative values have receded. The wiki formula allows these crimes to be reversed. We can finally have literature the way it was actually written, or at least in the way we believe it actually should have been written, and therefore was. Let the old, discredited literature go down the memory hole.

Finally, I urge our conservative friends to attack the last bastion of liberalism, facts themselves. As Stephen Colbert has bemoaned, facts have a well known liberal bias. But as Humpty Dumpty did with words, we can do with facts-show them who is master. If we prefer to believe that four is five, then it shall be so. Thus can we will away such threats as global warming. Sufficient unto the day the challenge of turning back the overflowing oceans by the power of our wiki-mind.


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Friday Night Music-The Righteous Brothers

Friday, October 9, 2009

I don’t think I’ve done them before. Unfortunately, there are no good video non lip synched versions of You’ve Lost that Loving Feeling, one of the great songs of all time. My wife tells me that this song, Unchained Melody, is one of the great slow dance songs (I was far too nerdly to dance, slow or otherwise), and this concert version is the real thing with good video and audio. Only one brother sings, and I honestly don’t know which is which. There’s no year noted on the youtube site, but I’m guessing that this is from a time when they were still a team, since he looks awful young. Also, right at the end, it looks like the other fellow comes out on stage.

Anyway, this week’s offering:


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