Of course, I would have to turn in my MSM Secret Decoder Ring if I did not follow up my criticism of Glenn Greenwald's take on "What's Wrong With the Media" with . . . my own take on "What's Wrong With the Media". Caveat Emptor.
Some of my current readers will no doubt be surprised to hear that I actually share Glenn Greenwald's frustration with the "Obama: Hot or Not?" coverage the often dominates campaign news cycles. I just disagree with his diagnosis of the underlying causes. Mr Greenwald locates the problem in a corrupt journalistic culture that wants to protect itself and the powerful by denying readers vital information. I think the problem is a side effect of powerful structural changes in the marketplace.
100 years ago, readers had three choices if they wanted news. They could actually be there. They could talk to someone who had actually been there. Or they could read about it. Print media has been in decline since radio offered a fourth competitive source. I don't expect that to reverse any time soon.
The golden age of news, as far as many journalists are concerned, was the 1950s-1970s, when serious, wonky anchors led America through the news from 5-7 every evening. I have my doubts as to whether this was actually as wonderful as many people think; oligopolies set off my libertarian bat-signal. But I am in agreement that we have certainly lost something since then.
The fragmentation of media is good for people like me and Glenn Greenwald, since we get to go deeper into issues than any television station, maybe any news outlet, ever could. But it has had funny effects on the MSM news cycle. The news cycle is now dominated by television because everything is so fragmented. Even though television stations are losing viewers, the decline of the print press and the fragmentation of the web mean that television's role in forming the "common narrative" is growing even as television itself becomes less common.
Television news is very hard to produce--I've guest hosted a show, and it left me with giant respect for what it takes to do well. And television news is very, very good at certain kinds of coverage--war footage is more compelling than war correspondence. But there are lots of stories that television is really, really, really bad at. Stories like John Yoo, or the subprime crisis.
Complicated policy stories that involve a lot of reading make terrible television. The three networks used to force those kinds of stories on their readers, at least to some extent, because they could; between the hours of five and seven you could watch stories about John Yoo, or, well, I guess you could finally regrout that bathroom tile.
Proliferating competition from other news outlets, and from all the non-news entertainment on the television, the web, the DVD player, and the video game console, mean that viewers are much harder to retain. Thus, more and more television coverage focuses on the stories that are easy to cover--the Jeremiah Wright story, for example, which looks much different when you read the speeches than when you watch incendiary clips. Or John Edwards' hair. Or Hillary's tears.
Unfortunately for print journalists, what television will cover drives the major narratives of the campaigns--this may be why campaigns seem, at least to me, to be ever more focused on personality than on substance. We have to write about Obama's bowling score, because the fact that television covers it makes it important. If this is one of the things that will decide the election, it's news, even if it's completely stupid. Most non-journalists don't realize this, but the New York Times' gigantic power as a media outlet doesn't come from its readership, which is not that huge. It comes from the fact that television news directors often take stories off the Times.
The other sad truth is that readers--even readers of the New York Times--like those stories. Whether or not we should, we care tremendously about the ordinary things that signal to us what kind of politicians our leaders are.
I'd argue that whether George Bush became president had a lot more to do with what happened over the last eight years than John Yoo did. Presidential candidates are big stories. And because trivial details of their lives matter tremendously in the elections, those trivial details are big stories. Not because journalists think that they're metaphysically important, but because they drive political outcomes.
What Mr Greenwald sees as malign influence, I see as a structural problem that I don't know how to solve. And in some sense, I'm not sure that we should solve it. Mr Greenwald accuses me of being elitist for saying that Americans are morons who don't care about torture memos. I think there's something elitist about that claim--that people who don't care about what Greenwald and I want to write about must therefore be morons. I figure most of them are people who've had a long day with work and kids, and just don't have the energy for parsing complicated, troubling stories. Some people derive energy from reading political news that makes them angry, but most people don't. They just want to relax and have a few hours of enjoyment before they get up and do the whole thing again tomorrow.
I don't know that this diagnosis is right either, of course, but the main thing is that I don't see something judgemental in observing that most people don't want to read what Mr Greenwald and I would most love to write. I think that it's rather more elitist to assume that failing to share the burning interests of a handful of hypereducated wordsmiths necessarily means that there's something wrong with you.
"They just want to relax and have a few hours of enjoyment before they get up and do the whole thing again tomorrow." --MM
Nice, the "They're just Rats in a Maze" excuse for the current state of the edu-info-tainment approach to the 'News' delivery business.
Way to go MM, at least you're honest about being shill, maybe now, you'll give up your 'Libertarian' pretense.
While you're at it: "..interests of a handful of hypereducated..", see if you can blow any more smoke up your own skirts...
Mr Greenwald accuses me of being elitist for saying that Americans are morons who don't care about torture memos. I think there's something elitist about that claim--that people who don't care about what Greenwald and I want to write about must therefore be morons. I figure most of them are people who've had a long day with work and kids, and just don't have the energy for parsing complicated, troubling stories.
Ah, the self-cleaning Republic. Built to last a lifetime -- just not yours.
Um, Greenwald's point, which he makes every day like clockwork, is that the 'elite' segment of the media is either completely clueless or disingenuous about what it is talking about. That this cluelessness has gone on to include being unable to identify actual news is pretty elementary and was the actual point of the John Yoo post.
See, this is how I know Megan doesn't really think before she posts: "the New York Times' gigantic power as a media outlet doesn't come from its readership, which is not that huge."
According to Wikipedia it has the 3rd largest readership in the country with over 1 million daily readers. And that isn't "that huge"? I want you to spend the next 30 minutes reading the crappy drivel that you just wrote and think about it. Seriously, this is annoying.
It's also possible that we may just disagree.
Glenn's entitled to his opinion and his vote and to decide how he wants to use his time. He's not entitled to mine.
And television news is very, very good at certain kinds of coverage--war footage is more compelling than war correspondence.
But is it more informative?
Nice, the "They're just Rats in a Maze" excuse for the current state of the edu-info-tainment approach to the 'News' delivery business.
Care to address the claim on the substance, Mark? Because the longer quote was:
"I figure most of them are people who've had a long day with work and kids, and just don't have the energy for parsing complicated, troubling stories. Some people derive energy from reading political news that makes them angry, but most people don't. They just want to relax and have a few hours of enjoyment before they get up and do the whole thing again tomorrow."
Speaking as someone who actually knows a lot of young families (keeping in mind the US birthrate recently reached the 2.1 replacement rate, and 2+ young children require a LOT of time and energy to maintain) and also knows a number of people who don't drive their primary sense of purpose from the latest political outrage, I find nothing unusual or offensive about that statement. People like you are the exception, not the rule.
Megan, instead of continuing to defend yourself, this could be a good moment for you to simply admit that you're fundamentally wrong about this. A moment of genuine soul-searching could lead you to see that you, yourself, have been unwittingly infected with the same bullshit approach that has infected so much of the media in our time. Instead of making excuses and blaming television, you could accept responsiblity, take responsibility, and not only no longer defend the sheer corrupt crappiness of so much of our media, but no longer be an example of the same. It's not like being a blogger obligates you to be a part of that whole mess. That's one of the great things about blogging - it frees you up to criticize these corruptions. The choice is yours.
"But there are lots of stories that television is really, really, really bad at. Stories like John Yoo, or the subprime crisis."
Ever watch Frontline or 60 Minutes? Think before you post!
freddiemac wrote: See, this is how I know Megan doesn't really think before she posts: "the New York Times' gigantic power as a media outlet doesn't come from its readership, which is not that huge." According to Wikipedia it has the 3rd largest readership in the country with over 1 million daily readers. And that isn't "that huge"? I want you to spend the next 30 minutes reading the crappy drivel that you just wrote and think about it. Seriously, this is annoying.
No, that was. Think about the numbers for a second: 1 million daily readers in a country of 300 million, even if we assume (probably correctly) that a large portion of those readers are in positions of political and economic influence, is -- as stated -- not that huge. On the other hand, if a substantial portion of those readers are in other media outlets that reach half or more of the country, then the premise was correct: the NYT's influence comes not from its immediate readership, but its ability to set the agenda of numerous other news outlets.
After three posts on the subject is it asking too much for a single hard fact? Apparently.
Single worst sentence:
Ha. That's certainly how I judge importance - what's on the TV.
No, you don't "have to." The TV isn't sending mind-control waves directly into your brain that force you to abandon independent thought.
Prove it. This is what we technical folks call an "unsupported assertion."
Maybe they drive outcomes because you obsess over them and inflate their importance?
Once again this is obviously a circular argument. TV covers stupid stuff, therefore we have to cover that same stupid stuff (because independent thought is scary!), the stupid stuff becomes important to the public (because you've said "yaargh this is super important really!"), therefore we are right to cover stupid stuff.
You are ignoring the role of the media as trendsetter, gatekeeper and arbiter of importance. When you cover Edward's hair you are sending the message that it matters.
Here is a novel thought: just because you see it on TV doesn't mean it's important.
Of course when you say "television covers it" you don't mean PBS covers it, or Olbermann covers it, you mean a handful of usual suspects covers it and the group-think kicks in.
So your essential point is that all the "independent" editors and producers throughout the country are working from the exact same script produced by a handful of people.
Which certainly fits with my experience that journalists are some of the most servile people around. An MSM journalist with an independent streak or simple pride is a rare thing indeed.
Expect this to get thrown back in your face a lot, and for good reason.
aMouseforallSeasons,
So you're saying that being the 3rd most read paper in the country isn't huge? Apples to oranges. But if we must go there...
How many TV viewers do popular TV news programs get? The Early Show gets about 3 million. Not so much larger a percentage of the 300 million US residents than the NY Times. So I suggest it is you, mousy, who needs to spend more time reading and less time posting stupid things.
Of all the nonsense in the posts and in comments, I like the Republicans who say, "If you had 100 million dollars, you wouldn't start a newspaper and print the Yoo story..." and similar versions, without bothering to note Scaife's money-losing rags, the money-losing National Review, the money-losing Moonie Times, etc. Really.
This is good too:
I figure most of them are people who've had a long day with work and kids, and just don't have the energy for parsing complicated, troubling stories.
Yep, just talking out of an orifice again. "I figure..." Yet again the "It's just too difficult to understand" dodge. Now who's elitist? But this applies the the journalists and "journalists" as well. Take the Plame story. Instapundit, champion of Republican pseudo-libertarians everywhere, declared it too complicated to understand. I think Teh Kids like to call this "The Joe Klein Defense."
There are an infinite number of "valuable" stories and a finite amount of TV newstime or printspace in which to express them.
This really isn't about Obama's bowling versus John Yoo's memo, it's about Glenn deciding that want *he* thinks is important should be what gets precedence, and then getting angry and spinning stories about why this isn't the case. It doesn't matter what story he chooses to juxtapose his preference against. The fact that the one he chose is immemorable and silly is ultimately immaterial. What matters is that by saying his story should be the most important he automatically denies space to every other story, important or not. That's the issue, not Obama's bowling.
Glenn is just angry that the news doesn't always follow the stories that *he* deems important and appopriate. That's all this is, rhetoric aside.
It's elitist and egotistic. As an example, I personally think that Ezra Levant's story in Canada against their HRCs should be something that everyone should hear about. But I don't have anywhere near the audacity to argue as if my story preferences deserve attention that others don't voluntarily give them. Nor am I upset at journalists and the American people for not listening to me. It's a difference of opinion, it's not a failure of judgement or any of the multiple things Glenn contends it is.
How is this anything other than a complaint that the world doesn't revolve around Glenn's feelings and political opinions? There just isn't anyway to interpret his basic complaint as anything other than childish. Getting angry at people for not sharing your concerns and priorities is merely cathartic. It certainly isn't persuasive.
Sometimes I wonder if people are reading the same thing I'm reading. Right now is one of those times. It's pretty obvious that Megan is making a descriptive rather than a normative argument; it's extraordinarily silly for you to then lash at her as if she just advocated for covering things up to allow as much torture as possible.
Margalis- you seem to be substituting Megan for every single member of the media out there. Please show some examples of where she has shown an obsession with trivial details instead of with substantive issues. If you read her blog regularly, you would see that probably 90% of what she writes is about her perspective on various economic issues, broken up by occasional moments of levity.
You may bemoan the lack of statistics and numbers to back up Megan's theory, but you seem to ignore that what she is positing is just a theory. The fact is that statistics are utterly meaningless in this debate, which fundamentally goes to the motives of members of the media. All they can tell us is what the media covers and what people read; they cannot tell us why the media covers what it does.
OOooh, based on these comments, you hit a nerve! How dare you suggest that people have better things to do than listen to their Progressive betters! How dare you say that system isn't broken just because it doesn't cater to the tastes of the Progressive Elite. HOW DARE YOU suggest that the NYT doesn't have a huge readership (1/3rd of 1% of the american populace). And lastly, HOW DARE YOU suggest that the media covers Obama's bowling score because it grabs the attention of normal people, thus making it important.
Oh, if only everyone was superintelligent and blessed with perfect virtue! Then we could be living in a Progressive Paradise!
Woe! Woe! Woe! is us that we live in an imperfect world full of people who are of only average intelligence and somewhat corruptible (many of whom, BTW, work for the government).
Why, Why, Why must we be cursed with such a backwater planet of greed and mediocrity. Oi! Oi! Oi! Where are my sackcloth and ashes???
So you're saying that being the 3rd most read paper in the country isn't huge? Apples to oranges. But if we must go there...How many TV viewers do popular TV news programs get? The Early Show gets about 3 million. Not so much larger a percentage of the 300 million US residents than the NY Times. So I suggest it is you, mousy, who needs to spend more time reading and less time posting stupid things.
The difference between me and you, evidently, is that I had my coffee this morning. Some sort of Eastern European regional blend, very smooth with mild acidity. I may have to make another pot for the afternoon.
At any rate, the problem is that you're looking relative numbers. Third largest newspaper in the country is a meaningless relative statistic if it only reaches 1/300 of said country. You then point to a television show that has 3 million viewers and claim "see, that's not very large, either."
But where did that show get its news agenda for the day? If a portion of it was from the NYT, then the NYT has already influenced four times its readership base NOT via immediate readership, but rather through fan-out effect.
This point about the NYT being influential via trendsetting is not extremely controversial in media criticisms, by the way. Have you actually read any of the media criticisms out there? Even Gore Vidal knows how to get a point across without directly insulting the audience, something you might want to look into.
Prove it. This is what we technical folks call an "unsupported assertion."
And what exactly is the assertion that if John Yoo were on the news all the time that the American people would agree with Glenn that it's an important issue?
I know about it. I don't think it is. Especially not when I know that Glenn probably wouldn't be happy with the coverage anyway, because it wouldn't emphasis what he wanted emphasized or focus on the parts he wanted the most attention for.
If the American people really cared why wouldn't newspapers and news shows desparate for viewers respond? Isn't it possible that the American people don't really care that John Yoo wrote some memos about "torture?" How is that not the more reasonable assumption?
What you are arguing is that the newsmedia should force this down everyone's throat by non-stop coverage until they do care. Ignoring questions of effectiveness, how is that not demanding control of the media?
Seething on the internet that there is a world out there driven by desires and concerns not your own is just foolish and silly. You have a voice. You don't have the right to someone else's.
Couple more points:
What I've found in talking to journalists is that when they do admit there is a problem it doesn't even occur to them that they could or should be part of the solution. They are just cogs in a machine, working for the man, getting a paycheck, blah blah blah, and it's up to some unspecified other person to correct things. It doesn't matter if the person is a first-year beat reporter or an editor at WaPo it's always the same story: someone else's problem.
Most political stories only require complicated parsing because reporters stick to the bland and uninformative he-said/he-said presentation. I'm a political news junkie but half the time I read a piece I come away thinking "what the hell was this even about?"
Political reporters have hit upon and now stick to a style seemingly geared towards turning off readers. The same is true on TV, where every subject under discussion must have two talking heads present, one for each side, even when one has nothing relevant to say. That's "balance."
It's a little disingenuous to produce boring, pointless material then complain that consumers don't like it. Two pundits warring or a piece that liberally quotes "both sides" for no reason is neither news nor interesting.
On my blog I took a story written by Michael Scherer at TIME that was written in this bland style with all the interesting bits obscured by trivia and rewrote the lede just by changing the order of sentences. (Linked in my name) It suddenly went from deadly boring to a must-read. (If I do say so myself)
It's not hard, it just requires ditching the rigid orthodoxy that most journalists cling to. It would be easy to produce an accurate and interesting piece on Yoo that didn't require any complicated parsing, but to do it you have to drop the mad-lib template of "well Yoo's supporter said this...now here's a quote from a critic of Yoo...no I'm not going to tell you which of these people is correct."
Margalis,
"Single worst sentence:
'We have to write about Obama's bowling score, because the fact that television covers it makes it important.'
Ha. That's certainly how I judge importance - what's on the TV."
I see. You are the world. Everyone else is an extra in your movie of life. Etc.
You and I may discount the idiocy on TV, must most folks in my universe do not. I think Megan has a good point here. That doesn't make it any less sad. It just means that we need to wear blinders sometimes. And earplugs.
It's not hard, it just requires ditching the rigid orthodoxy that most journalists cling to. It would be easy to produce an accurate and interesting piece on Yoo that didn't require any complicated parsing, but to do it you have to drop the mad-lib template of "well Yoo's supporter said this...now here's a quote from a critic of Yoo...no I'm not going to tell you which of these people is correct."
So now you are complaining that the news, which is supposed to try and stay objective, doesn't put your perspective out there enough?
Wow.
If you are expecting people to be convinced by your argument that the news should promote your political opinions, it's no wonder that you think the only way people are going to listen to you is if you force them...
glig glag glug glub
I'm a teacher, and I have always thought that journalism was a kind of teaching in a much bigger classroom. The root of "educate"--e-duco, lead out of (ignorance)--suggests a similar function for teacher and journalist.
When I first started teaching many years ago, I was shocked and saddened that *all* my students didn't automatically want to learn what I was teaching. But it was my job to teach them, so I had to adapt my methods to find ways to reach every student in the room--an impossible ideal, of course, but an honest, responsible teacher has to try.
In the course of this debate with Glenn, someone posted a link to the Pew page on journalistic ethics. This quotation exactly states the identity of journalist and teacher:
"it must balance what readers know they want with what they cannot anticipate but need. In short, it must strive to make the significant interesting and relevant."
That comes after the overarching reason for journalism's protections:
"While news organizations answer to many constituencies, including advertisers and shareholders, the journalists in those organizations must maintain allegiance to citizens and the larger public interest above any other if they are to provide the news without fear or favor."
The problem I see with what you have written in this debate is that you have the hierarchy of allegiances *upside down*: sorry to sound snarky, but your statement of principles could be deduced to be this:
"While news organizations answer to many constituencies, including citizens and the larger public interest, the journalists in those organizations must maintain allegiance to advertisers and shareholders above any other if they are to provide the news under currently prevailing market conditions."
OK, you seem to recognize that this problem and your particular situation arises because of the commercialization of the news, but your *resignation* and lack of ingenuity in *meeting* that challenge represent a collapse of journalistic values in the face of a challenge.It suggests an inability to use your talents (in economic analysis) to work at a really hard, interesting problem in economics--of the news business. That inability seems like a personal blindness--you admit to ideological leanings, libertarianism, someone mentioned (shudder!) objectivism.
But if that's the case, that your ideology determines what you write about and, more importantly, how you comment on crucial moral subjects of journalistic importance outside your specific beat, then you are *not* a journalist: you are a feature writer who sells your services to your employer in order to increase sales.
OK, then, but two questions: 1) does the Atlantic consider you to be a journalist? If they don't, I think they should say that; putting you on a par in their site design with James Fallows, one of the truly great journalists alive, may be implying a claim about your status that turns out to be highly misleading.
2) Why, given your own explanation of your beliefs about what must drive coverage in the long run (with an expression of regret about that included--you're only following markets), do you as a feature writer comment about significant crises in our society that are outside your beat? And why do you criticize journalists, who are trying to live up to the journalistic code of ethics, for doing a different job than yours and doing it properly and well?
I think the moral of the story here is that technocratic entrepreneurs should not meddle in questions of journalistic ethics and social morality; they should not pose as journalists; and they should not become sarcastic when people who are actual journalists with the highest ethical standards criticize them for muddying those boundaries in profoundly unhelpful ways.
You can do what you signed on for, but don't make the work of those who are trying to stop criminal behavior by elected officials in a democracy more difficult than it already is.
Megan, I think you may have become my favorite blogger. Challenge anyone's theory on why the mainstream media sucks and all of a sudden it's "Who's dirty work are you doing?" Gods.
Keep up the good work.
Okay, that was funny.
Most sentient Americans of a certain age can name the "minor functionanaries" from Watergate (G. Gordon Liddy, H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Dean, etc) because the media of the 1970s, while far from perfect, covered them. Likewise, the "minor functionaries" from the Third Reich are commonly known names (Hess, Himmler, Speer, Goring, etc) because they were amply in the news of the time. OK, so 2008 isn't 1975 or 1944. But it seems to me that, more than anything, what's changed is the media's conception of its job, more than the American people's interests or the fragmentation of the media. (You're right: old- fashioned TV reporting wasn't all that great, yet we learned about Watergate.) The Yoo story is quite dramatic and interesting. It hasn't been broadly told for reasons that are ideological (as Greenwald argues) rather than practical or structural. In a nutshell, most media players today no longer view themselves as muckrakers and watchdogs on the side of democracy and fairness.
Glorious wrte: "Glenn is just angry that the news doesn't always follow the stories that *he* deems important and appopriate."
No crap. However, I defy any one to make an argument as to WHY having the official position of the executive branch of the United States be one where habeus corpus is suspended and torture is legalized is NOT IMPORTANT. Anyone?
First of all, can we all try to just make points and leave it at that. There's no need to go to the second step of CALLING DOWN DAMNATION on our enemies.
Kevin E, everything you say is undermined by your cute, quaint belief in the possibility of objectivity. "It must balance what readers know with what they cannot anticipate but need." This is a relic of the old oligarchic media system where a few Conkrites/Murrows/whoever had incredibly undiluted leverage as members of the press, and thus, as individuals, were able to see themselves as a part of the checks/balances system, just like congress and the supreme court. This worldview happens to dovetail very, very nicely with progressive crusading, hence its presence now as anachronism.
Start diluting that responsibility--as has been done, and, it can be argued, is for the best--and what you've got is a market. Not like $$$ market even, but an economic system. Money is the secondary property, it just follows from what ideas people want to consume. Anyway, the upshot is that the illusion--which is what it always was--that YOU can "anticipate" what others "need" where they can't falls apart.
What is "true" and "important" is suddenly back up in the air again--and people will disagree about what's true and disagree about what's important and at the end of the day, Obama's bowling score may just outcompete John Yoo.
And since no one has elected, appointed, or otherwise designated you or Glenn Greenwald the supreme master of the universe that's what we're stuck with.
Not as off-topic as it would seem. Required reading for many folks around here.
No, that was. Think about the numbers for a second: 1 million daily readers in a country of 300 million, even if we assume (probably correctly) that a large portion of those readers are in positions of political and economic influence, is -- as stated -- not that huge. On the other hand, if a substantial portion of those readers are in other media outlets that reach half or more of the country, then the premise was correct: the NYT's influence comes not from its immediate readership, but its ability to set the agenda of numerous other news outlets.
Posted by aMouseforallSeasons
This explains the influence of someone like Chris "Tweety" Matthews. If you ever saw his ratings, he rarely did any better than Tucker Carlson. The problem is, for what ever reason, everyone in DC seems to watch him. I have no clue why. He doesn't bring a thing to the table other than an Aqua Velva man crush on Fred Thompson, Rudy and now John McCain.
The other problem with Greenwald's claim is that there's no news in the Yoo story. That there was mistreatment of prisoners has been known for a long time; that there were memos which may have enabled/authorized/justified these has been known for a long time. The only new element to the story is the content of the memos, and that's the arcana of legal analysis.
Megan,
While I greatly appreciate the tone of this post, I would offer two criticisms. One, the stress of modern schedules does not obviate people’s responsibility to engage democratic processes, particularly when fundamental questions about the government’s adherence to the Constitution are at issue. Two, the stress of modern schedules does inhibit people’s capacity to participate in civil society and governance even when they wish to do so, which argues for public policies, such as making child care more available and election day a holiday, that would facilitate civic engagement.
Mass media is in the business of having paying readers and viewers; as such, mass media gives its segment of the reader-/viwership what that market wants. Complaining about this is idiocy of a fairly high order. If you want to know the latest on John Yoo, there are plenty of niche outlets for such news analysis.
Media that doesn't gives its customers what they want go out of business or find new customers. This is the way it has always been, and will be.
I defy any one to make an argument as to WHY having the official position of the executive branch of the United States be one where habeus corpus is suspended and torture is legalized is NOT IMPORTANT. Anyone?
Because the American people have heard about it for years now and there just hasn't been that much interest?
And, once you strip away all of the shameless sensationalism routinely employed to advance Glenn's cause, the whole thing is a whole let less damning. John Yoo wrote a legal memo. There really isn't much to be said about it.
This isn't about the American people being informed, it's about advancing a particular narrative. That's why Glenn blathers on about Abu Gharaib, which has absolutely nothing to do with John Yoo.
And that's why I reject this nonsense. The media can't even be satisfactorily proxy here. Even if they did play it on the news all the time Glenn still wouldn't be happy because they're not going to report it exactly how he wants it reported.
We already have people here complaining that the media gives both sides representation. Please. This is transparently a complaint that the Media isn't Glenn's personal bully pulpit.
aMouseforallSeasons,
I can tell what was in your European blend this morning, and I'm sure it is illegal where I live.
"At any rate, the problem is that you're looking relative numbers."
Ohh, do tell! 3rd largest newspaper is relative, because being 1,000,000/300,000,000 is so much different than being 3,000,000/300,000,000!
"Third largest newspaper in the country is a meaningless relative statistic if it only reaches 1/300 of said country."
Because 3/300 is so much bigger than 1/300! Obviously, having that 1/300 influence the 3/300 must not in any way be related to size!
"You then point to a television show that has 3 million viewers and claim "see, that's not very large, either."
And it isn't.
"But where did that show get its news agenda for the day?"
Ok, I'll bite. Where did it?
"If a portion of it was from the NYT, then the NYT has already influenced four times its readership base NOT via immediate readership, but rather through fan-out effect."
Seems someone's math skills were affected by the coffee. It would only be unduly influential if its agenda setting powers were larger in proportion to its size. Tell me, what percentage of Early Show stories come from the NYTimes agenda? And what percentage come from, say, the Wall Street Journal? Or Bill O'Reilly? And what percentage of the American Populace are their audiences? And how disproportionate are they? Once again, I suggest you stop and read what you wrote, and think about it, before you continue to write stupid things. You're not even good at snarking.
Yancey,
Any evidence that the reason that reporters didn't report on John Yoo was because they thought it would hurt their business? Any? At All?
Rickm: OH MY GOD. It has always been Megan's point and those of us that agree with her that IT IS more important, but that for the reasons that have been stated and restated "important" to us, the good and great people of the anti-Bush torture faction, may not correlate directly to "air time" or "amount of coverage relative to seemingly less important stories" and, crucially, that it's pompous and disingenuous to blame this on some kind of systematic moral failing of your peers--many of whom agree with you--for working within the constraints of reality.
Let's recap. Agitating for anti-torture positions and the salience of anti-torture issues wherever possible, as strongly as possible: Good. Framing all that as a struggle against a lazy and corrupt power structure of everyone who's not you: Stupid and egotistically masturbatory.
As for the whole "well you should MAKE it important, by TRYING HARDER or BEING MORE TALENTED" line... This is just jackassery. Other than the obvious "why don't you do it then, nyah", you can yearn for the messiah all you want, but it seems kind of idiotic and jerkish to blame other people for not making everything hard easy and redeeming all of our sins.
One, the stress of modern schedules does not obviate people’s responsibility to engage democratic processes, particularly when fundamental questions about the government’s adherence to the Constitution are at issue.
She didn't say she it did. Stop confusing descriptive statements with normative ones.
She could write a book about how the American people should be more engaged in the democratic process, read better media, brush their teeth, exercise daily, etc...
So what? It doesn't change anything!
Two, the stress of modern schedules does inhibit people’s capacity to participate in civil society and governance even when they wish to do so, which argues for public policies, such as making child care more available and election day a holiday, that would facilitate civic engagement.
And this means they'd suddenly seek out all the latest news on John Yoo and read scores of pages of legal analysis about where he went "wrong" in his memos?
Uh, what?
"Unfortunately for print journalists, what television will cover drives the major narratives of the campaigns..."
"...but the New York Times' gigantic power as a media outlet doesn't come from its readership, which is not that huge. It comes from the fact that television news directors often take stories off the Times."
So print journalists must follow TV, whose news directors take their cue from the NYT? Megan, would it kill you not to write such flaccid, meandering and poorly thought out pieces?
"Unfortunately for print journalists, what television will cover drives the major narratives of the campaigns..."
"...but the New York Times' gigantic power as a media outlet doesn't come from its readership, which is not that huge. It comes from the fact that television news directors often take stories off the Times."
So print journalists must follow TV, whose news directors take their cue from the NYT? Megan, would it kill you not to write such flaccid, meandering and poorly thought out pieces?
rickm,
Some reporters did report on it, as I stated. There is only so much reporting that can be done by any single organization, and if they chose to expend resources on one story, but not another (such as John Yoo), then they have made a business decision. Those that chose John Yoo stories did so because they thought their readers would find this of more interest than the next marginal piece of journalism that got bumped down the chain. Those that chose not to write stories about John Yoo made different decisions about their customer base.
That John Yoo wasn't plastered all over the news everywhere, or even on a majority of media outlets tells me that the overall reading/viewing base would not have been particularly interested. Media have limited ability to shape their viewers desires for stories. If they don't give viewers what they want, those viewers drift away to other outlets that do. That is why nearly all of Greenwald's readers are interested in this story- he has given them what they want in their news, but those readers have tastes that are different than most people. That this is true is pretty well demonstrated by the fact that the name John Yoo is unknown this afternoon.
"I'm a teacher, and I have always thought that journalism was a kind of teaching in a much bigger classroom. The root of "educate"--e-duco, lead out of (ignorance)--suggests a similar function for teacher and journalist."
Professionalism. You are describing the function of professionalism when professional is defined as someone the non-professional is not in position to pass judgement on what a professional does, i.e. in possession of sufficient knowledge, education or expertise with which to do so. A good professional lawyer, doctor, even cop's job is no different, depending on whether the military model or professional model of policing is is being adopted. Guess which one is most prevalent in the U.S. today? This is a tough one for McArdle and her audience because McCardle and most of her commenters are just not that bright. Yes, new studies on political bias in academia do show this; the more partisan one is the more intelligent one is. Niether McCardle or her commenters are sufficiently partisan. As someone suggested, they just aren't bright enough to figure out what side to be on. There are more liberal in academia because liberals are more willing to jump through the required hoops whereas conservatives are less inclined to do so. It is self-selection Hence many end up as windbags, pundits and "journalists". And libertarians? Well, the allure of what passes for libertarianism in America is easily explained. You don't have to learn the meaning of strange words like proletariat or foreign words like bourgeoisie.
"The nice aspect of this research program is that Woessner/Kelley-Woessner tested competing hypotheses, like conservatives get lower grades. The interesting finding is that political moderates get the worst grades. My guess is that people with lower cognitive skills probably can’t clearly distinguish between competing political theories and resort to the middle position. The researchers also test multiple specifications (e.g., self reported ideology vs. policy positions), so the finding appear robust."
http://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/the-mystery-of-conservative-free-academia-solved-its-self-selection/
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=s1153nnhjkhr407r6ng6gjg8pvc8g2s8
Polls regularly show that the media is out of touch with what Americans actually want: less trivia and horse race coverage, more about issues. (One example: http://www.collegenews.org/x7789.xml)
It's funny how Megan and others "figure" what Americans want but can't be bothered to cite actual data. They just magically know...somehow.
It takes a certain shamelessness to pretend you speak for most Americans when all you really speak for is yourself.
Funny, I didn't actually say that at all. Reporting is supposed to be about verification. The problem with quoting "both sides" of an argument in standard he-said/he-said fashion is that what the talking heads say is rarely verified or vetted.
Furthermore, if you have 10 people saying one thing and 1 person saying another those people are typically quoted in a 1:1 ratio, which is hardly "objective" in any rational sense.
"Staying objective" doesn't come from following a writing formula, it comes from following a proper methodology based on verification. Quoting the same number of talking heads from each side then passing on what they say without comment is in no way reflective of objective reality.
I didn't say I want to read one-sided pieces slamming Yoo. That's your invention. I don't care if my particular perspective is the crux of the story or not, but I do want stories to be based in verification and a solid methodology.
I'm not inventing some crazy theory here. This stuff is pretty much verbatim from The Elements of Journalism. He-said/he-said reporting is not "objective", informative or interesting.
You might as well ask whether there's any evidence that rap music is more popular than opera. I guess it could be part of the Evil Media Conspiracy to protect and promote Big Rap at the expense of the higher arts, but that seems, well, delusional.
Margalis wrote:
"It takes a certain shamelessness to pretend you speak for most Americans when all you really speak for is yourself."
Uhh...isn't that precisely what you've been doing this whole time in telling us that Americans want more coverage of the substantive issues and less of the trivial issues?
Meanwhile, Megan is hardly pretending to speak for the American people. Instead, she is merely theorizing about why trivial news is more prevalent than substantive news.
I'm not any more thrilled with that than Glenn is, but it makes no more sense than complaining that people prefer reality shows to quality drama. (That is, complain if it makes you happy, but it won't change anything.)
This appears true as long as you don't go back and actually read her previous posts where she says that torture is no more important than the names of low level functionaries or how to calculate stuff about bonds.
Her point from the start has been that torture is trivia.
No, it's just journalism.
We have to write about Obama's bowling score, because the fact that television covers it makes it important. If this is one of the things that will decide the election, it's news, even if it's completely stupid. Most non-journalists don't realize this, but the New York Times' gigantic power as a media outlet doesn't come from its readership, which is not that huge. It comes from the fact that television news directors often take stories off the Times.
Donut, much? The Times just HAS to write about Obama's bowling score because they want MSNBC to pick it up, and MSNBC picks it up from the Times, because it must be news if its in the Times, and then because MSNBC has a story about Obama's bowling score, the Times has to write about it because now it's news, even if it's completely stupid. Whew. Glad we cleared that up. Tell Glenn to call off the dogs -- he obviously has no clue what he's talking about!
If that was ever true, it's not anymore. The Media isn't held in very high regard.
According to a 2007 Gallup poll, more people had confidence in the President than in Newspapers or Television news.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1597/Confidence-Institutions.aspx
In fact, people trust citizen-journalists as much as big journalism.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/1663/Media-Use-Evaluation.aspx
Uh...I have polling data to back me up. (Actual data for arguments, how novel!) And uh..."I figure most of them are people who've..." is pretending to speak for most Americans.
Since facts and arguments don't matter at all since we are merely theorizing, here is my theory:
News producers produce trivia because they like trivia.
Where I come from most arguments are stronger when they are supporter by facts and logic. Different strokes for different folks I suppose. Megan is "just theorizing" so asking her to support her theory in any way is mean and innapropriate.
Go to bloggingheads. Gaze upon Gleen(s).
DO NOT think of reptiles.
I win.
Polls regularly show that the media is out of touch with what Americans actually want: less trivia and horse race coverage, more about issues.
This doesn't have anything to do with what I said. I never said the media perfectly matched what the American public wanted. I simply said the Glenn was complaining that the media didn't talk about what *he* wanted.
The point is that Glenn is demanding that a certain story get attention. What you said literally has nothing to do with that. Saying that media isn't in touch with what Americans want does not validate, AT ALL, the notion that Glenn is.
I mean, seriously.
Funny, I didn't actually say that at all. Reporting is supposed to be about verification
Which is great for hard facts. It's not for things like legal opinions for which there is no such thing as "fact." If Yoo miscited something in those memos, you would have a point. But that's not really the issue here. What's at issue is intepretation. You cannot factually verify those.
It's not for the news to decide which of those conflicting opinions about the interpretation of law is right. The best you can do is have people present both sides and let the viewers decide.
Man, that's twice you've completely missed the point here Margalis.
Both ratings and newspaper circulation are down in general while Olbermann is the #1 show in MSNBC. Sorry I missed the ratings data that proved your point...oh wait, you didn't have any.
Why are the regulars here absolutely allergic to facts?
Uh...I have polling data to back me up.
Polling data which is a complete non sequitor when it comes to my actual point, which is that Glenn doesn't know what Americans want.
What you said is irrelevant, and saying that you're now backing up your position with "evidence" is entirely disingenuous.
Daniel, I think you have highlighted one of the main problems in this long and fruitless non-dialogue that Megan has inspired. You write
"First of all, can we all try to just make points and leave it at that. There's no need to go to the second step of CALLING DOWN DAMNATION on our enemies."
This is a persistent problem I see with Megan's defenders: so many of them are just trying to "make points," and they don't go beyond that very often, to the essential next step, to dialogue, which also involves answering logical objections and questions from interlocutors about the premises of those points.
I've posted three or four times here; I've asked questions. Each time, almost no one answers my questions, but someone quotes me out of context, sets up a straw man characterization, and finishes with something snarky. (I can think of one exception, the person who says he is concerned about torture, but also about a false equation between what we do and real torture regimes. Hooray! A very valid point! Let's continue that discussion!)
Daniel, besides revealing his preference for point scoring, takes my advocacy of journalistic responsibility as a signal to unload his particular hobbyhorse that there is no such thing as objectivity, therefore we can't have Cronkite and Murrow, and that's a good thing too.
Two responses to that before I remind him of the question I asked which none of Megan's defenders have bothered to answer:
1) Despite commmunicative slippage in human matters, we are all "objective" enough to see the pictures of Abu Ghraib prisoners and know that this represents the possibility that something has gone seriously wrong in our government. Those pictures, which may be the tip of a criminal iceberg, are the objective warrant for investigative reporting into whether our Constitution--another objective fact--has been knowingly flouted.
That is a crucial question for every American, since it could affect every activity we do, all of us, including in your beloved markets. These questions are therefore the very definition of "objectively newsworthy."
If an asteroid were headed for us, would you consider that objectively newsworthy? Throwing out the Constitution is the social equivalent for Americans.
2) The questions are crucial despite the fact that neither Glenn nor I (and I don't deserve the honor of being insulted by you in the same breath as he) am "Master of the Universe." Like most materialists, you seem to have an authority problem: "people who disagree with me are essentially trying to steal my stuff." You know, communists or something.
You can disagree with my ad hoc analysis of the chip on your shoulder, but you have to promise me to read The Authoritarian Personality first; then we can have an intelligent discussion. (Oops, there I go again, trying to steal your stuff.)
OK, I apologize for the sarcasm, but really you folks are a trial, since you don't converse. So let me try again:
I asked a question: Is Megan a journalist with broad public responsibilities under the 4th Amendment, or a feature writer? (seems to me a fair, non-judgmental question)
If she's a feature writer, which is fine, do you agree that she should stay on her beat and not meddle in questions like torture memos in a markedly insensitive way? (Her comment about Nuremberg was incredibly insensitive, actually. "The Holocaust? I'm not sure how relevant that is. From what I understand, experts say a lot of the Jews cooperated in their own destruction.")
That's all I'm asking: Is she a journalist who should be set next to James Fallows on this site?
If she's just a feature writer--essentially an expert on a technical subject who writes informative columns of the "You and Your Money" type--should she be expressing opinions such as "papers really shouldn't be expected to cover subjects like torture?"
You know, if the answers are, she's not a journalist with broad responsibilities to the overall public interest, and no, she should stay out of the Yoo question, I don't see why that's so terrible. Maybe she's privately virtuous in commendable ways--that's all some people can be. But then don't meddle in larger affairs, that's all. Don't muddy the issues, which is a form of enabling bad behavior, which is what got Glenn so mad in the first place, and justifiably so.
Both ratings and newspaper circulation are down in general while Olbermann is the #1 show in MSNBC. Sorry I missed the ratings data that proved your point...oh wait, you didn't have any.
And Bill O'Reilly has way more viewers than him. Who cares? What relevancy does any of this towards what started this with, which was my claim that Glenn is just complaining that the world doesn't listen to him?
LOOK! The idea that media responds to market incentives to report on trivial aspects of candidates, and the idea that the media fails to report on important issues because they are lazy and in cahoots with the politicans they cover are NOT incompatible. Sheeesh.
I think any good libertarian should understand what is at work here.
Most of the time it is in the personal best interest of pudits to be pro-war and wrong rather than correct on security issues. Pro-war people like the Kagan, Kristol and Podhoretz clans have never had it so good inspite of being wrong....often. The Friedmans and Ohanlons are prospering as well, and have no shortage of platforms. Smart and serious people of all poltical stripes who were correct about the Bush administration foreign policy are still by and large shut out.
The actual architects of the war and all of it failures are now landing into their comfy media gigs/think tank /tenured professorships/defence contracting positions. What could correct anti-war person get...a book deal....maybe!
People act in their own self-interst! Pundits included. The professional risk/reward choice is grossly tilted in favor of pro-war for any media type! That should be clear to any good libertarian such as Ms. McCardle!
Not only is that utterly nonresponsive to my point, but it's an abuse of the one data point you do bring up (Olbermann being the #1 show on MSNBC), since ratings from different time slots cannot be compared.
I'm not sure why you even bring up Olbermann, since he covers just as much fluff as others, if from a more left-wing orientation, but out of 300,000,000 people in the U.S., how many watch Olbermann on a regular basis? (Wiki says 2.2 million per night. That would leave 297,800,000 people not watching him.)
Megan you should certainly learn to quit when you are behind.
Your post the other day gave new meaning to the word shrill. NTM hyperbolic.
From the start of this post you're taking pains to modulate yourself so carefully it was apparent you'd just come back from the editorial "woodshed" well versed in the riot act.
That was a nice try, but so obviously condescending and snide. Before today, I hardly knew you. Now I can't stand you.
Signing off for good now. Already wasted too much of my life on this turd.
Despite commmunicative slippage in human matters, we are all "objective" enough to see the pictures of Abu Ghraib prisoners and know that this represents the possibility that something has gone seriously wrong in our government. Those pictures, which may be the tip of a criminal iceberg, are the objective warrant for investigative reporting into whether our Constitution--another objective fact--has been knowingly flouted.
That is a crucial question for every American
That isn't a question. That's a statement.
Are you seriously asking why no one "answered" it?
And, I repeat here as I have before: Ivan Frederick and Charles Graner both went to jail, with 10 year sentences, for what they did.
Furthermore, you fundamentally misunderstand objectivity by asserting that we can know, as a matter of "objective fact" that the Constitution has been flouted. I'm sorry, but textual analysis is always subjective, and without the ultimate arbitrator (SCOTUS) giving a final decision everything is just speculation anyway.
This is why no "answers" your "questions" Kevin. They aren't questions, they are statements of yours with varying levels of validity.
Why write like all of this is an all or nothing endeavor?
The market is big enough for all kinds of depth or fluff. If you focus on in depth coverage, that will draw a smaller audience, but an audience none the less. For instance, the The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer on PBS is well known. The ratings aren't as high as the other networks, but 2.7 million people per night according to Wikipedia is still a lot of people. This was started by two men who wanted serious news coverage. This shows that if you want to bring serious news to people you can. Don't get caught in the trap of chasing dollars and you will have a lot more freedom to report on what you consider "real" news.
For purely private enterprises good stories also exist. I've read good stories in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, etc... Not every day will produce a good story, and there is certainly a lot of fluff to go with it, but good reporting is not as rare as it's made out to be.
And as far as fluff goes... why care? Some people like it, let them. As long as the more serious alternatives exist, I say live and let live.
Now, getting past the snark, your question poses a false dichotomy. Whether Megan considers herself a journalist I'll leave for her to answer, but a journalist has no "broad public responsibilities." Journalists are not the fourth estate. They are not part of the government. They do not work for The People.
Which is great for hard facts. It's not for things like legal opinions for which there is no such thing as "fact." If Yoo miscited something in those memos, you would have a point. But that's not really the issue here. What's at issue is intepretation. You cannot factually verify those.
OK Glorious, now you're showing your ignorance. Yoo writes a legal memo enabling the Administration to torture those it perceives as its enemies, with impunity. If a journalist cared to do so, a journalist could ask his or herself, "How could that be? Isn't that against everything I thought this country stood for?" and then could find some learned constitutional scholars to discuss it with, and discover that it is a shockingly bad piece of legal theorizing held together with spitballs and string. The most glaring (but only the most glaring) of the deficiencies is the complete lack of mention of the "Youngstown" case, which is the seminal Supreme Court case on the boundaries of Presidential power during war-time. Lack of any mention of "Youngstown" would tell any 1st year law student that this is a somewhat deficient piece of work, to say the least.... So don't tell me that this is an opinion work, therefore out of bounds for a journalist to analyze. Every legal analysis must rest on FACT -- that is, facts as you and I know them, and then the fact of the existence and meaning of statutory laws and case law. This memo miscites all of the above. And when he can't find something substantive to cite for his reasoning, he cites his own previous memos. None of this is hard to understand, if a good journalist just took the time to look into it.... AND REPORT IT!!!
Why write like all of this is an all or nothing endeavor?
Because Glenn, and his followers, have decided that this is such an important issue that it's inexcusable that it isn't being forcefed into the American people by the media at all times on all channels.
Furthermore, they're angry that even if it was on the news all the time he'd probably get a defender or two.
There are plenty of outlets where interested Americans can (and do) read about John Yoo and his memos. Glenn's problem is that there are media venues where you can't.
Glenn routinely cites polls. One of his pet peeves is people talking about what "most Americans" think without polling data to back it up.
Glenn's complaint was not specifically that the media needs to cover Yoo more, it's not restricted to a specific story. Did you even read what he wrote?
Glenn's point was that the media covers trivia at the expense of important stories, something most Americans agree with him on.
I was speaking more generally than about Yoo specifically. But let's talk about Yoo.
Why are there two sides? Not three, not ten, but two? That's arbitrary. And why is it fair to present a tiny minority interpretation and an interpretation held by the vast majority of legal scholars as equal and balanced?
If a reporter talks to ten legal experts and they all agree that the memo is crap, is it then "objective" to specifically seek out a single person who believes the memo is well-reasoned and present that is a perfect counterbalance?
These are methodological questions. Presenting two sides as equal when they are not is a distortion of objective reality.
I agree that there are questions of interpretation that don't have definitive answers, and that presenting multiple opnions on those is a fine approach. But standard he-said/he-said reporting goes far beyond that.
A good example is Joe Klein's recent flap where he quoted an anonymous source saying something about a bill that was clearly false. Klein didn't verify that what his source said was true, and later claimed he didn't have the time to bother.
There are indisputable facts about the Yoo memo that can be reported. For example the memo was classified but did not follow the proper classification procedures. The memo had no actual national security content, it was merely a legal brief. The claim that the 4th amendment does not apply to domestic military operations is not supported by any court decision or a plain-text reading of the Constitution and it has never been argued in a legal setting: fact.
Noen of those points require dueling talking heads.
I'm sorry, I truly apologize for calling Glorious "ignorant." Unfortunately for Glorious, the reason that he/she is in this quandry is because journalists have abdicated their responsibility to inform the public what is really going on. Hmmm, what was Glenn's point again?
I would be more persuaded by those of you who want to argue that there are multiple sides to every issue if you didn't make it so crystal-clear that you've already decided which one is "fact," and that your chief beef is that not enough "journalists" are as obsessed with the subject as you are.
Both ratings and newspaper circulation are down in general while Olbermann is the #1 show in MSNBC.
Now that's funny! How does Olbermann do compared to other cable news screechers, not just on MSNBC? What’s more, my guess is that many if not most people watch Olbermann because of his style as an unabashedly liberal bombthrower, not because he's providing serious and sober investigations into under-reported news.
Also, regarding that survey that said people want more hard news and less fluff: If that's so, why isn't Bill Moyers more famous that Bill O'Reilly? Why doesn't Jim Leher get better ratings than Brian Williams. Again, what people say they want and what they acutally choose are often two different things.
And all this 'make them care' stuff is ridiculous. You're damning people for wanting to enjoy a few minutes each night with their children & spouses instead of getting angry about the same things that you're angry about. Guess what: Most people realize that the world is imperfect, is imperfectable, and is in fact pretty screwed up sometimes. They’ve come to some peace with that and have moved on to living their lives. That you haven’t shouldn’t become their burden.
OK Glorious, now you're showing your ignorance. Yoo writes a legal memo enabling the Administration to torture those it perceives as its enemies, with impunity.
OH MY GAWD! He writes his opinions with impunity!
Listen, even if I bought into your narrative about enabling "torture," that doesn't mean there is anything wrong with writing documents about legal issues. You just assume that it is. You don't really argue about it, you just yell "TORTURE" instead. That's not enough under any reasonable standard of anything.
If a journalist cared to do so, a journalist could ask his or herself, "How could that be? Isn't that against everything I thought this country stood for?" and then could find some learned constitutional scholars to discuss it with, and discover that it is a shockingly bad piece of legal theorizing held together with spitballs and string.
So it's their opinion against Yoo's. See, you're saying that the journalists are going to uncover some objective truth about entirely subjective questions. It's ridiculous.
There isn't any sort of objective ranking of scholars here. They just offer their opinions, like Yoo did. We determine who is "right" through the adjudication of the courts. Not from Glenn's blog posts.
The discovery that "people disagree" on legal matters is so shockingly mundane that no one cares. The reason you care is because you hold a certain opinion so strongly that you've decided that it's objective truth.
I'm sorry, I'm still missing the part where you provided the ratings data to support your point.
Keep talking about how ratings prove you right though, it's cute. Someday you'll learn that simply saying things doesn't make them true.
Here's a suggestion: be a journalist.
Not morons: ignorant. There is a difference.
Saying that you're not sure you should solve a structural problem which results in an ignorant, trivia-focused citizenry and enables powerful elites to order society as they will- this to you is ethical thinking?
Well of course! And you know what? Tough noogies!
This is a really important philosophical concept you're bumping up against. What are we doing here? I mean, as living human beings on this planet, living. What's it for? You can get into a huge series of blog posts about it; you have thousands of years of philosophical and metaphysical writing on the subject. I'm not going to dive into that yet. But if your theory of metaphysics is that we're only here to go to work, raise our kids, and have a few hours to veg out on the couch watching CSI before "doing it all again tomorrow;" what kind of existence is that? Is that truly all a human can aspire to? Are politics and foreign affairs (and economics!) just distractions, things that get in the way of appreciating what is best in life? Is it the goal of journalism to maximize happiness and contentment, or to educate and inform?
You've denied Glenn's accusation that you're an elitist because you think most people don't care about the torture memos. Well, who do you think SHOULD care about the torture memos? Should anyone? Assuming that you do think someone should care about the torture memos, and assuming that you are consistent in thinking most people don't care about them, how do you avoid the accusation that you are claiming that only a few do care about the memos? Could those few interested parties not be considered an "elite" few? And that therefore, you are an elitist for claiming that most people don't care about them?
It seems to me that Glenn's accusation is quite accurate.
Megan, I know you are smarter than this. I KNOW it. It tears me up that I can't seem to get through to intelligent people. After 3 posts and over 300 comments you still don't seem to see it.
It's heartbreaking. Megan, why do you write?
I've been following the news closely for about 30 years, and there is always some media generated crisis that we are supposed to be panicking about. World to run out of food! New ice age coming! Alar! Japanese taking over the world! Satanic pedophile cults running daycare centers! Someone wrote legal memos covering the law on interrogation techniques in wartime!
So much of it is hype, and I think most non-media people who have been around a bit are able to filter out a lot of the noise. Plus, people realize much of this is politically motivated.
People like Greenwald were happy to have the attorney general of California threaten prison rape on business executives he did not like. But if a republican administration condones aggressive interrogation techniques of terrorists caught in the field, IT IS THE WORST THING IN THE WORLD AND ALL JOURNALISTS MUST WRITE ABOUT IT!!!. If this were done by an administration Greenwald supported, he would have a completely different position, or would keep quiet about it. It is pure politics.
When you have a job, kids, and interests outside of politics, and know that most media crises are fake, you're just not interested in another campaign speech disguised as news.
Liberalrob, please don't tell me that I have to read all of John Yoo's legal memos or my life won't be worth living. Please.
David N. wrote:
"What does the 4th amendment have to do with journalism?"
Nothing at all! Sorry, Freudian slip (I've been reading about the recent challenge to the Washington gun law). So, the 3rd amendment.
But to your point: I'm not a constitutional scholar, but it is my understanding (being a conservative and all) that privileges granted also imply responsibilities. The text privileging freedom of the press is brief, though long enough to support that interpretation, especially since it places this right in apposition to "the right to redress grievances"; but I'm sure that there's more explanation in the Federalist Papers (which I don't have time to look for now because of my actual work that I'm neglecting) of Madison's views on the necessity of a free press as a check on governmental power.
But that the press is not the Fourth Estate? That's a minority view for sure; we can argue about the role of the press, as we are, but to contest that common understanding of the term seems odd.
Whether the Press works for the People--journalistic ethicists say yes, you say no. That's the crux of this debate, of course, so you don't advance the debate if you just assert your side of it without any further argument.
Kevin, now you're making the "eat your vegetables" argument - presumably if the Press works for the People, it is the Press's responsibility to force-feed the People education and enlightenment whether they want it or not? Because it's good for them?
Kevin E.'s question:
Answer: No, she has no broad public responsibilities under the 4th amendment, since she does not conduct searches and seizures as a governmental agent or representative.
It is an ironic question to ask in a discussion on the ignorance of the great unwashed masses.
Glenn routinely cites polls. One of his pet peeves is people talking about what "most Americans" think without polling data to back it up
Good for him. But I repeat, Glenn doesn't know what the American people want.
You're not even arguing about this anymore, you're just making some incredibly generic point that's been made a million times before each and everytime some celebrity's personal habits hits the news.
The point is that Glenn specifically brought this up in reference to his complaints about John Yoo. It's still him crying about how the news media doesn't cover the story *HE* thinks is important.
Why are there two sides? Not three, not ten, but two? That's arbitrary. And why is it fair to present a tiny minority interpretation and an interpretation held by the vast majority of legal scholars as equal and balanced?
I mentioned two sides because 1) you did 2) that's typically how these things work in the media, point/counter-point.
I'm not sure what your point is here? It's arbitrary to only have 2, but yet two may be too many? Huh?
Look, my basic point is that there isn't some "objective" truth that the media can find about these legal questions. They simply aren't that sort of beast. So when you demand that the media find the "objective" story in this you are clearly asking that the Media simply report your particular viewpoint on it. That's all I'm saying.
The claim that the 4th amendment does not apply to domestic military operations is not supported by any court decision or a plain-text reading of the Constitution and it has never been argued in a legal setting: fact.
Duh! What are you, kidding? There is no mechanism by which you can submit legal papers to the Supreme Court, or any court, for review! Courts try cases and controversies, not every legal memo issued by an administration.
Fact? I mean, this "point" of yours demonstrates that you are woefully unaware of basic principles of the law and the judicial process. Instead of bitching about the Consitution you might try reading it for once. Article III, Section 2, Clause 1. Knock yourself out.
Kevin E: 3rd amendment? The one that prohibits, in peacetime, the quartering of soldiers in private homes without the owner's consent?
Try again.
Have you even read the memo? I think it's pretty obvious you have not. And since most people don't have the time to read 80-page legal analyses, it's incumbent on the press to distill it for us and let us know what it says, and what it means, and why it's important. And here, in a nutshell, is a great example (but only one of many, many, many examples) of how the press has failed us. As Glenn already pointed out. I know it's shocking and scary to believe that our government has a deliberate policy of torturing people, but yelling at people who point to proof, and who point to the pseudo-legal official underpinnings of the policy to do so, and at the failure of the press to smoke it out and expose it, and who would rather write about Obama being a girly-man who cannot bowl, will not make it go away....
Megan, end this pain!
I think you could do that by answering the question of whether you consider yourself a journalist who's bound by a standard journalistic code of ethics.
If you aren't and don't, what do you call what you do? You've already tried to justify it in a host of ways, but this seems like a case where one actually has to name one's profession. I don't necessarily blame you for this confusion: blogging is new and somewhat hard to categorize. But in this case, I think it's really time.
Of course, if you answer "Blogger", that is not going to help, unless you also supply the normative code of ethics (written or unwritten) under which you work.
Whether the Press works for the People--journalistic ethicists say yes, you say no. That's the crux of this debate, of course, so you don't advance the debate if you just assert your side of it without any further argument.
I think the issue isn't whether or not the Press works for the people, but rather if the press needs to work for "the people" by following an agenda set by Glenn and Kevin E.
You clearly conflate the two. You've already determining what "working for the people" means, i.e. following the John Yoo story. That's why when anyone discusses the role of the media here you think they're saying that the media doesn't work for the people.
It's a conceptual error, and a regrettable one.
Kevin E:
Your assumptions are very, very wrong. First of all "the press" in the first amendment merely refers to the right to write or print what you wish with impunity; television media is covered under the other part of the First Amendment, freedom of speech.
Second, the First Amendment is not discussed at all in the Federalist Papers, as the Bill of Rights was an olive branch to anti-Federalists after the Constitution had effectively already been ratified.
Third, the Bill of Rights does not grant privileges. Instead it recognizes that certain rights are fundamental to all human beings and that such rights should not be abridged. Indeed, the 9th Amendment makes quite clear that the Bill of Rights and Constitution are not the exclusive source of such rights, but that all such rights are protected regardless of whether they are specifically enumerated.
This notion that occupational journalists are a constitutionally-protected class (and therefore owe a constitutional duty to report "important" news) needs to end - it has no basis in law or history. The fact is that anyone can assert freedom of the press regardless of whether they are an occupational journalist.
Rebmarks, have YOU read the memo, or are you relying on a journalists' interpretation of it?
I'm not saying that. But do you know the basics behind all this discussion?
-Do you know that the memos authorized your government to torture, as long as it was done outside the country?
-Do you know that actual torture did occur as a result?
-Do you have an opinion on whether that was a good thing for our government to do? Do you approve of torture?
-If you do not approve of torture, and/or you do not approve of your government torturing people, do you think that those who performed the torture should be punished?
-Whether or not you think those who performed the torture should be punished, what about those who enabled the torture; should they be punished?
And finally:
-Do you think the mass media, as represented by the major news outlets (broadcast networks, cable networks, major-city newspapers and wire services) has done an adequate job explaining these issues and the significance of the memos?
I don't think they have.
Yoo...
Ok, I read the news item about John Woo. There's no story there.
He basically said "you can argue torture is acceptable if there is justification". Well, sure you could argue it. That doesn't make it legal.
And the process for determining whether or not it is a valid legal argument lies with the President and Congress. For instance, the President has the de facto power to order a prima facie illegal act as Commander in Chief and cite whatever he wants as justification. Whether the justification holds up is up to Congress in the Impeachment hearings. I'm sure there are times where Congress would consider mitigating circumstances and find the act acceptable... for instance if the torture really did lead to preventing a WMD attack on the US. But conviction is their method for saying, "no, it wasn't legal after all."
So, back to the point, the memo itself isn't a story at all. For any given issue you can find memos recommending various courses of action. Of course people aren't going to care how others advise the President. They only care and only should care what the President actually does.
Have you even read the memo?
Have you?
And since most people don't have the time to read 80-page legal analyses, it's incumbent on the press to distill it for us and let us know what it says, and what it means, and why it's important
So, in other words, it's already important. You're assuming what you seek to demonstrate here.
Once again: it's important and thus the press must cover it.
You are saying that press must cover whatever Glenn deems as important. Sorry. No thanks. I don't want Glenn dictating a "national" policy of news here in the US. I think that's worse than any memo John Yoo ever wrote.
I think you could do that by answering the question of whether you consider yourself a journalist who's bound by a standard journalistic code of ethics.
...As interpreted by Kevin H.
Here we go with the conceptual error again. You believe in all these principles as interpreted by you.
If anyone disagrees with your intepretation you can't separate that from someone disagreeing with what you've interpreted.
To you they are one and the same.
And that's just unfortunate.
Do you know that the memos authorized your government to torture, as long as it was done outside the country?
No, because the memos didn't "authorize" that. Or authorize anything. At worst they can be construed as offering a theory as to how it could be legal.
-Do you think the mass media, as represented by the major news outlets (broadcast networks, cable networks, major-city newspapers and wire services) has done an adequate job explaining these issues and the significance of the memos?
I don't think they have.
Of course you don't, They couldn't do an adequate job in your eyes because your explanation isn't factual. The memos didn't authorize anything.
So your idea of "staying objective" is to follow a formula for how things are typically done, even when it doesn't make sense. I see. You have a funny idea of "objective." If there are 5 sides to an issue best to present only 2 in the name of objectivity.
I already agreed that there isn't an objective truth about the details of legal interpretation, but there are many objective truths about the story. You seem confused.
Here is an objective truth: the memo was classified improperly. Here is another objective truth: Yoo's successor and colleagues did not put much faith in the memo and told people to stop relying on it.
You can keep protesting about how there is no objective truth to the story at all but that simply isn't the case.
Of course not. But if the administration wanted to it could easily work these arguments into a court case. It has had ample opportunity to do so and has chosen not to. Maybe you are somehow unaware of the fact that there are multiple court cases underway that this argument fits perfectly into?
Because you happen to disagree with Glenn and Kevin E.
Glorious, you've stated your position a bazillion times. We get it. I think you're wrong, of course; Glenn is not mad because the media won't report his pet story, he's mad because they won't report a critically important story. You're trying to put all this in a personal context so you can laugh at stupid, whiny Glenn Greenwald; but it's not about Glenn Greenwald, it's about the media failing in its duty to inform the American people about something important. And if you want to claim that's it's only important to DFHs like Glenn Greenwald and Kevin E. and liberalrob, fine, but I say you're wrong.
Liberalrob, I'm familiar with the basic facts behind the memo. I do not put the same interpretation on them that you do. And I still don't understand why John Yoo is the scapegoat here. I have probably written hundreds of legal memos in my career. That doesn't mean I liked their conclusions, or endorsed them...or that 9 out of 10 "leading constitutional scholars" would agree with them, either.
It's quite common for administration members to talk about legal memos as "authorization" for something. No, that is not technically correct, but you can't attack someone for using the same lingo our government does.
For example Michael Hayden, when he was head of the NSA, said that his domestic spying was "authorized" by a memo from the AG.
In practical terms these days legal memos do serve as authorization. If you disagree with that instead of attacking posters here attack the Bush Administration.
To say that the memos authorized torture is false in a legal sense but certainly true in practice.
So your idea of "staying objective" is to follow a formula for how things are typically done, even when it doesn't make sense. I see. You have a funny idea of "objective." If there are 5 sides to an issue best to present only 2 in the name of objectivity.
..and of course you ignore the first half of my statement. It's easy to make up all kinds of stuff when you do that.
I already agreed that there isn't an objective truth about the details of legal interpretation, but there are many objective truths about the story. You seem confused.
No, not at all. The Legal interpretation is clearly what's at issue here. Not procedural things like classification or whatever. That isn't what Glenn argues makes this so important.
Of course not. But if the administration wanted to it could easily work these arguments into a court case. It has had ample opportunity to do so and has chosen not to. Maybe you are somehow unaware of the fact that there are multiple court cases underway that this argument fits perfectly into?
Uh? what good what that do? How do court cases five years in the future help determine the legitimacy of a legal paper at the time it was written? Huh?
I think *you* are getting confused here, and it's because you are trying to hamfist your way out of a fairly obvious mistake.
Meerdahl:
quartering soldiers is the 5th amendment; freedom of the press is 3rd--it says so right here in my pocket Constitution, special Robert Byrd commemorative edition.
Princess of Swords:
When you say "force feed," you're slanting the argument with heated rhetoric: no, not that, but educate, and do what all educators do, suit the instruction to the level of the student. If you remember a great teacher in your life, you know what I mean: learning wasn't always easy and fun, but are you grateful now for having been presented with necessary challenges?
It's weird to be so abstract about all this: as the polls show, and even the ratings, people really do welcome relevant, important news. Sure, years of infotainment have cheapened people's taste; that's not an irreversible process, though. Neoconservative fatalism leads to lousy schools and lousy journalism, and we have an abundance of both; but that fatalism (a thread in the comments here--"we must accept society as it is") is not inevitable, and it's certainly not desirable.
As liberalrob eloquently asked, "what are we here for? Just to veg out on the couch?"
The argument for individual choice to veg out on the couch is also very weak, because (God forgive me for opening this can of worms here, but it has to be said) a lot of our comforts depend on the exploitation of poor people all over the world (in our deals to get their raw materials and leave them in poverty under oppressive governments we can do business with).
I don't feel comfortable with that, and I try to change it by private activism and publicly teaching people to think critically about received opinion (including the ones they receive from me).
Abu Ghraib. Must not allow that: this is the America of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. Good luck to us all in this new challenge of seeing if we "can keep it"!
In other words, they authorized it. Thank you.
Oh, I think I see the problem here. Let's try it this way:
The President: Hey, Justice Department! I want to have some guys who might know something tortured, er, "harshly interrogated." Can I?
Justice Department (John Yoo): As long as it's done overseas, it's not covered by U.S. law.
The President: Got it! OK, Army and CIA, go torture, er, "harshly interrogate" those guys, but do it in Cuba!
Is that clearer?
I think you're wrong, of course; Glenn is not mad because the media won't report his pet story, he's mad because they won't report a critically important story.
Critically important as determined by him and his followers.
It's really the same damned thing, isn't it?
Princess of Swords -- I have read the memo. Because the press has not done it for me. The point is that there is a lot that most people cannot do, don't have the time to do, don't have the investigative skills or resources to do, etc. and therefore rely on the press to do. And the press IS NOT DOING IT.
And Glorious, I'm going to try one more time, on just one point: When a legal analysis that was requested by the highest levels of our government in order to justify horrific actions they want to take, and which they did take, states that a certain case says x, and if one looked up that citation, and that citation actually says y, THAT is an objective truth. And it should be pointed out. And if not by the press, then who?
That's fine; but what about my final question? Do you think the mass media has done an adequate job educating the public on this issue?
"Critically important as determined by him and his followers.
It's really the same damned thing, isn't it?"
Its also critically important to everyone else, no?
Megan, all your Greenwald-related posts are becoming long, verbose and unreadable - just like Mr. Greenwald himself. Can you please not post anything about him? He seems to be like a virus. Please, please ...
Is that clearer?
Not really, because what makes the whole issue important is what Bush did. Such as: "Torture", detentions, suspension of Habeas corpus, black sites, etc...
But see, those have all already been in the media. Each and every one. In the NYT, WSJ, Blogs, Radio, TV etc..
So what's the import of the memo then? Oh right: The very things that have already been all over the news.
It has no importance outside of an obscure historical footnote behind what you really find to be wrong, which is what everyone already knows about anyway. You just want to revisit it, yet again, in the hopes that the American people will suddenly have some sort of epiphany this time around.
And you're right. I've made my point. So sit and seeth alone about how people don't want to listen. That always makes them want to.
And because you and your followers (if you have any) have determined that the story is not critically important, therefore it isn't?
THAT'S really the same damned thing too, isn't it?
liberalrob, unless Yoo is wrong about the law (often asserted, never argued around here), I don't know why you're so eager to string him up for being right.
Kevin, I used the word "force feed" advisedly, because the context here is journalism, not teaching. The education metaphor works to a certain extent, but you're pushing it a bit too far IMO. The journalist can educate, but that does not make the rest of us his/her students.
Much as I appreciated being challenged by my actual teachers, I don't want media employees giving me pop quizzes on the daily news and setting up conferences with my mother (or congressional representative) if I don't score well ("well" of course being defined by them).
The role of a journalist in a for-profit enterprise is to write stuff that the people who supplied the capital will think best protect and grow the capital. If you want to have great influence over what kind of journlism gets produced, then endeavor to supply a significant amount of the capital needed to produce the journalism. Greenwald's angry because his priorities differ from the people who are risking huge sums of money, money that someone produced with ingenuity and long hours of labor. Well, them's the breaks in a free society, Glenn; the people who paid to get the restaurant built get to decide what is on the menu, for better or for worse. If the menu sucks, then the restaurant operators are out their capital soon enough, and somebody else gets to try.
If Greenwald doesn't like how most papers are written, then by all means he should stop reading them. If enough people agree with Greenwald, then these entities will cease to exist, or undergo a change in management. Yes, newspapaer circulation is down, and it is down primarily because people have a multitude of choices in regards to spending their time, choices that didn't exist even 20 years ago, to say nothing of when newspaper circulations was at it's peak.
Somebody here keeps pointing to Olbermann as some sort of proof that there is an great untapped market for serious reporting that Greenwald would prefer, which ignores the fact Olbermann is mostly the television mirror image of Limbaugh, in terms of seriousness, Olbermann's show is vastly more expensive to produce, and draws a comparatively tiny audience. More important is the fact that supplying the capital to run a television news network with penetration to every t.v. connected to a cable system, so as to attract about 700,000 to a million viewers a night to your highest rated show, doesn't exactly speak of a triumph of entrepreneurial acumen. Making "Top Chef" or "What Not to Wear" is a much better bet.
No, it isn't.
What's at issue here is that Yoo wrote a memo "authorizing" torture and claiming that the 4th Amendment doesn't apply to domestic military operations. That memo was passed along to the Pentagon/DoD and used as the rationale for their own policies, policies that included the treatment at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo. The memo itself was classified innapropriately and was only released after a FOIA request by the ACLU, and it was not released by the DOJ but by the DoD. (IIRC) Yoo's successors and colleagues did not stand behind the memo and after Yoo left asked people to stop relying on it. There were serious concerns that the administration was leaving itself open to war crimes charges.
That's the issue, and that is all objective truth. There is no "interpretation" required there.
The memo was written years ago. If the administration wanted a definitive ruling on its claims they could have gotten it by now, or at least been far along in the process. You said it would take 5 years and the memo was written in 2003 IIRC. 2003 + 5 = ? (Not a trick question)
My mistake is what? Correctly pointing out that the administration has avoided presenting these arguments in a legal setting?
Obviously you are itching to catch me in some moronic gotcha but you are grasping at straws here. No, courts do not read legal memos and rule on them directly, but they can rule on the legal arguments in them as part of specific cases.
Glorious,
In response to your disbelieving query upthread, I agree with you that a public policy better attuned to the need for greater civic participation would not guarantee it. But it’s plausible to assume that many people refrain from community and political activism not out of apathy but because of (1) time and energy constraints Megan herself acknowledged; and (2) a sense that average person has little chance of affecting political dynamics given the privileged access to lawmakers that various special interests enjoy. Both these barriers would be ameliorated by public policy interventions that freed up people’s time somewhat. It’s plausible that many people who now understandably shy away from involvement would engage in political activity after such reforms were enacted.
Liberalrob: I get my news from targeted news sites and blogs. I've read plenty about it. I don't know if the "mass media" (in the sense of daily non-NYT newspapers and the 6 PM news) has covered the story.
No, Kevin, the ratings don't demonstarte that people welcome news that meets your test of importance. The ratings demonstrate that they would rather watch "Sportscenter", or "Entertainment Tonight", or "Jeopardy". There's a reason why Merv Griffin died a billionare, and Jim Lehrer makes a nice living.
Conservatives might be accused of being fatalist, but not neoconservatives. (Of course, conservatives would respond with accusations of you being utopian wanna-be social engineers.)
Jason, I think many people who shy away from involvement do so because they have more interesting things to do. I am interested in current affairs, but I am not obsessed with them, and even if somebody offered me a personalized free dinner with the lawmaker of my choice to affect political dynamics, with free daycare provided by Mary Poppins, I'd probably pass.
The people I know who are REALLY REALLY REALLY interested in politics tend to be wild-eyed radicals (left or right) who get UPSET when other people have more interesting things to do ("But this is IMPORTANT!") I guess it's a hobby, but why do all of us have to share it?
The "smoking gun" Watergate tape, where Nixon was discussing covering up the break-in and the ways money could be gotten to bribe the burglars to keep silent, also revealed that Nixon said this:
"It would be wrong, that's for sure."
Nixon knew what he was proposing would be wrong. Not just illegal, though he surely knew that too; but WRONG. Ethically wrong.
Does John Yoo believe torture is ethically wrong? I'm pretty sure he does, or at least I hope so. And yet, when asked to give his professional legal opinion on whether it would be legal for the government to torture detainees, he not only came up with a legal justification for it, he went out of his way to do so. It doesn't take 81 pages to say "yes sir, it's legal if you do it in Cuba." It takes 81 pages if you want to go through the complete legal underpinnings of an argument that twists and obfuscates and reinterprets on its way to coming to that determination. Was he "just following orders?" Did his professional ethics demand that he give his client the answer his client wanted to hear, if he could somehow come up with a legal justification no matter how convoluted? Did it not also occur to him to add on somehow, "Mr. President, you can do this, but it would be wrong?" Did his professional ethics not also demand that he give his client the best possible advice, not just the answer he wanted to hear?
The significance of the memos is that the Bush administration used them as a green light: "here's a legal way you can do what you want to do." And what they wanted to do was to commit what many many people worldwide consider to be torture and war crimes. Because he wrote those memos, going to all that trouble to find a way to subvert the Constitution and ignore international treaties, John Yoo is complicit in those war crimes (if they are determined to be such). In my opinion. And not just mine.
Kevin E: "quartering soldiers is the 5th amendment; freedom of the press is 3rd--it says so right here in my pocket Constitution, special Robert Byrd commemorative edition."
Nope, try again. Ever heard of the expression "plead the fifth"? That's a clue for you...
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/bill_of_rights_transcript.html
Kevin E: "I try to change it by private activism and publicly teaching people to think critically about received opinion (including the ones they receive from me)."
I certainly hope you're not.
Mark, I said I'm not a lawyer, and you sound like you are, so I accept that you have a certain legal understanding of the text that I don't; it sounds rather "originalist" to me, as I understand that debate. As a non-expert, I'd plump for the "living Constitution" side of that debate, but your points are clearly reasonable interpretations about which scholars can argue. Also, I know the Bill of Rights was later, but I still seem to recall Madison writing before that about the importance of the press--happy to get any citation on that.
Two questions, though:
Does your claim--that protection from the abridgment of a natural right does not constitute a privilege--rely on a narrow, technical legal definition of "privilege"?
I don't know about that, but coming from the perspective of ordinary language and anthropology, socially-constituted protections of any kind (by and from the chief, the king, or just your neighbor) in any society have both historically and prehistorically been construed as privileges which confer reciprocal obligations in return. (See the foundational work of Marcel Mauss, "The Gift.")
Since the Constitution and BR, as you point out, specifically allow for an older stratum of natural rights, why isn't a natural law interpretation which says that protection of press freedom confers an obligation to the rest of society permissible? If not, what definitions of rights, privileges, or other technical legal term does such an interpretation interfere with?
Second question: you say nothing in law or history supports that notion of press responsibility. When you say "nothing in law," would other lawyers debate that, say "living C." people opposed to your "originalism", if that's a fair characterization of your position and the debate?
Also, I have to say that there's plenty in *history* that supports the interpretation of membership in the press, even the individual right of free speech, as conferring both privilege and obligation (no "fire" in the theater, and so on). And philosophy and the study of journalism take that as a basic premise. Start with Burke and Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey, Walter Lippman, Joseph Pulitzer, and on down to Peter Singer and Glenn Greenwald. I would guess, actually, that it's a majority opinion both among intellectuals and non-intellectuals--but that's just a guess.
Now, law and journalism, or law and sociology/anthropology, or law and history can be construed in some sense as apples and oranges; but that's not the only way to construe the relationship.
Who's the container, who's the contained?
That's the basic epistemological question that underlies all these arguments here also, where we are, in effect quarreling over whether society mainly contains the individual or the individual mainly contains society.
Kevin E., I think you are referring to Article 3 of the Bill of Rights, not the Third Amendement. The first two articles of the Bill of Rights were not ratified originally (Article 2 was actually ratified in 1992 as the 27th Amendement,) so Article 3 became the First Amendement, etc.
I agree with you completely in that the key issue is role and responsibility of the press. You'll find little support for your position here though. The libertarian reflex is to scream "tyranny" whenever anyone proposes any valuation that is not determined by the market. To anyone else, the notion that the question of U.S. adoption of torture is less important than Obama's bowling score, as determined by the comparative coverage of the two stories in the press, is a reductio ad absurdum of their position.
Oops, just looked at my post... sorry about all the typos--sneaking a minute away from work and didn't proofread...
Another quick way: make arguments without any justification whatsoever, then when asked for the data you claim to have ignore and change the subject. Kind of like this:
What's most interesting in this back and forth is how more than a few of Megan's critics cannot make a point without insulting people. Some interesting points, save for the tone.
The idea that journalists should strive to give the news that is important is valid, although that does not mean that there should be an outcome in presentation that makes progressives happy. After rigorous debate, enough people might conclude that the torture angle is in fact trivial, which would not of course please the people who want this dedication to "serious" news coverage. Much of this argument is over having a political viewpoint forced on people.
Better news is a noble goal however, and those with the freedom to pursue that, should. But let's be totally real. As others have pointed out, the attention span of the average citizen is splintered between so many things, from life activities to entertainment sources to news sources.
And all media are in competition. So money is the central issue here. I cannot afford to give people what they need forever, and paying staff to provide what people need, when the people are off watching the Superbowl or at the movies seeing "Jackass".
People have virtually NO interest in serious news. And the places that offer serious, reflective coverage lack in audience and circulation.
We live in a nation where some over 60% don't get college degrees and at any given time half don't vote. You would think that a person concerned about torture would haul ass down to the booth to vote at every opportunity, but nah. Those who care do, which is a small minority.
Who watches CSPAN, or PBS? Who buys those big fat books about presidents? OR, how many people rushed out to see that awful war movie? Hollywood has been trying to "go serious" on Iraq for a while now, offering films nobody gives a crap about.
This whole debate reminds me of the little book store owners who say, "What the buyer wants is customer service and a staff who is intimately familiar with the product, knows the important literary works, and can offer up their expertise and guidance." And economic bookselling reality proves the lie to that. Most people just want cheap books and box stores like Walmart are even out bottom-lining the Borders of the world.
People say all sorts of nice things unreinforced by action. All concerned about health, and as fat as ever, so to speak.
Someone above asked whether Megan should consider herself a feature writer or a journalist. Given that she writes on a blog, and the medium is supposed to be somewhat flexible, it hardly matters. It's one of those either/or questions one sets up to make a brilliant point that is entirely irrelevant to any sort of reality of how the world works.
In any case, the people who propose to educate the McPublic via more serious coverage should begin their push by not insulting people on the way to displaying that superior insight.
Read Greenwald's archives if you want to see some arguments from an actual lawyer as to Yoo's being right or wrong on the law. I want to string him up because a) his legal analysis was (in my opinion) a direct enabler of massive human rights violations done in all our names, b) he came to that legal analysis by putting pleasing his client and/or accomplishing a poltical agenda ahead of what I consider to be larger ethical concerns (should we green-light anything at all simply because it is legal?), and c) he worked very, very hard to find a way to subvert the intent of the American people (and the world) by constructing a legal "no-mans' land" where neither U.S. nor International Law applied.
Further on point a, I want to add this: If Yoo had told the President "sir, here's a very convoluted legal justification you could use, but I advise against it and if you use it I'll feel compelled to resign and go to the press," do you think the torture would have happened anyway? In any event, if he had done that I would not feel like stringing him up. But he didn't.
phasearth, you're free to suggest the importance of any value you wish, and I promise I won't scream "tyranny" until you use state power to force me to accept your preference. The reflex that you exhibit is very typical of those who are unsatisfied with valuation determined by the market; it just irritates the hell out of you that everyone, or at least a majority or large plurality, won't adopt your preferences. Trust me, you'll be much happier when you no longer take it as affront that you sentiments are an outlier. I figured this out by the time I was 13 or so, and the fact that most people don't share my preferences hasn't bothered me much since then.
Anyone else notice why the Nixon tape is important and the Yoo memo isn't? Dur, it's because Nixon was the President of the United States.
Nobody cares what advice the President is given by any particular source. Out of all of the memos in this world (or this government) you could probably find at least one that will agree with any given action.
Obviously "the masses", and therefore mass media, won't care what one guy they've never heard of before advises. What people do care about is what the President does.
It doesn't take 81 pages to say "yes sir, it's legal if you do it in Cuba."
My friend, it takes at least 81 pages and $50,000 to get any lawyer on any topic to "yes" or "no." If you want a 3-pager, then be prepared for a lot of "on the other hand"s and for the conclusion to say "maybe, maybe not."
Lawyers are not known for the brevity, and you can't take length as evidence of poor quality.
Did it not also occur to him to add on somehow, "Mr. President, you can do this, but it would be wrong?"
He put in a footnote that said explicitly that he wasn't recommending anything, that the actual decisions would be up to the policymakers. Is it your position that this footnote constitutes a war crime?
Did his professional ethics not also demand that he give his client the best possible advice, not just the answer he wanted to hear?
Yes. Do you have an actual legal argument that his advice was bad? Does anyone here?
Will:
I think the ratings--your point about Lehrer supports it--say that there's a small audience for important stories about torture, and that audience could grow with better journalistic presentation. Let's step back for a moment: our media couldn't possibly be more socially responsible? Men have walked on the moon, but we have no choice but to watch Obama bowl 1200 times?
Part of the problem with all this debate is that people take GG as saying covering Yoo has to be *all* the media does; he never did say or imply that. He just asked, please God, for a responsible sense of proportion that doesn't almost completely ignore stories like this.
David N.
nope, no reckless insults from me, just a philosophical position: I think the surface activism of neocons stems from an essential fatalism about the structure of society, a fatalistic belief that might makes right and that materialism in human affairs will always trump spiritualism.
Thrasymachus in The Republic.
I think it is essentially a hysterical symptom, thrashing out wherever and whenever in a mad attempt to control nature and the universe so that they can cheat death; to be, as Shakespeare has Macbeth say (his great analysis of this type) "perfect, founded as the rock." Like so many neurotic constructs, it looks and acts like the direct opposite of what it actually is.
Your philosophical mileage may vary.
Margalis, let me know when "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" draws bigger numbers than "Wheel of Fortune".
Princess:
Greenwald's contention is that it has not. That's what we're discussing, why haven't they? (And not necessarily excluding the NYT, either).
Liberalrob, you clearly do not understand the purpose of a legal memo. John Yoo was not asked for his personal opinion on torture, or for his ethical interpretation of the will of the American people. He was asked to review the state of the law and provide an answer to the question. Which, apparently, he did. If the analysis was correct, he has not done anything wrong. If you don't like the law, blame the people who wrote it, not the people who are just called on to figure out what it means in practice.
BTW, I don't know about the Justice Department, but "You have a legal justification, but I don't like it, and if you use it I'll go to the newspapers" would get you disbarred real fast in the private sector.
I don't know if the "mass media" (in the sense of daily non-NYT newspapers and the 6 PM news) has covered the story.
Greenwald's contention is that it has not
Hmm -- I really have no desire to actually check, but wasn't GG's original contention just that the media was covering it *less* than the more frivolous topics, based on a simplistic Lexis/Nexis search?
The President did it because Yoo told him it would be legal! If the President hadn't cared whether it was legal, he wouldn't have asked Yoo! If Yoo hadn't told him it would be legal, he may not have done it! Yoo said it would be legal, so the President did it! Why are these things so bloody hard to understand?
Argh!
Just guessing here, but if you ask most MSM journalists to describe the importance of and purpose for what they do, I'm betting that creating shareholder value is not even on the list. To dismiss any duty to inform the public in a responsible, truthful manner by invoking mere profit motive and market forces is to simply ignore the longstanding journalistic tradition and values that most self-identified journalists would claim to embody. No self-respecting journalist would gauge the quality or importance of a story by the amount of ad revenue it was able to generate. That private, for-profit financing is the dominant model for the MSM does not render all other considerations secondary to revenue.
Damn, screwed up block quotes. Last sentence should not be quoted.
Your guess is probably right.
Again I'll note that the people who argue that the only role of journalists is to make money typically aren't journalists. Most actual journalists understand that they have certain ethics and professional obligations. That's certainly the traditional view of journalism luminaries as well as journalism critics, publications, professors, etc.
phasearth: The funny thing about libertarians is that, as we see in this thread, they don't distinguish between their personal philosophy and greater reality. The role of journalists is whatever they alone say it is, damn it, based on their own personal worldview.
The word "journalist" actually means something beyond "money maker." You can't work at a factory and call yourself a zookeeper, nor can you work as an entertainer and call yourself a journalist. It's just the wrong term.
Yeah, what PoS said about getting disbarred.
Liberalrob, I argued over in the tenure thread this morning that your attacks on Yoo amount to a dramatic attack on the rule of law (and you thought it was just Bush who subverted the Constitution!) because you don't seem to understand the lawyer's role in our system.
I'm opposed to torture. If you want to try Bush for war crimes, that makes sense. But stop coming after a lawyer for writing a memo on the law rather than a memo on liberalrob's preferred moral and ethical solution. Doing the latter really would be violating a professional obligation
Now, Kevin, that's a perfectly reasonable assertion; that there may be a small market for the type of reporting Greenwald prefers that is currently underserved, because the news business, like most businesses, is certainly not perfectly efficient. However, the entities that Greenwald is castigating are entities which are risking enormous sums of capital in the operation of their enterprises. For them to risk that capital in pursuit of a small audience would either make them lunatics, or unbelievably noble, at least until the shareholder lawsuits were filed. Lamenting that people are not consistently unbelievably noble strikes me as a supremely silly endeavor.
So of course, you have evidence that this is the valuation determined by the market, right?
Well, let's see it.
Notice, btw, that by this line of reasoning, the public is obviously keen on land deals that went bad twenty years ago; otherwise, why else run Whitewater night after night after night?
Need I comment more on the stupidity of this line of reasoning? Or on the value of being consistent? On the simple virtues of not being a hypocrite?
I think you both have a point: the demise of a responsible, investigative, robust free press is both structural problem and malign influence. It's a change that is driven by the forces of the market, demographic change, and other historical causes that we can only grasp in small doses. The question is, should these small doses be serious policy matters, or should they be fluffy human stories? Well, once again, why not both? In my experience, regular folks (unpatronizingly, meaning those NOT in the media or political industries) do want both, and why shouldn't they get it? They want to be informed about serious things, but they also may want to find out where Britney crashed last night or what Brad Pitt is up to - for fun. They are not passive blobs. The American audience is a group that knows the difference between junk food and serious nutrition on the news. All we can do is try to make sure Britney doesn't crowd out Basra in the mainstream.
Phasearth, thank you for unaddling my poor brain. Yes, I was looking at the the original articles of the Bill of Rights, and haste made waste.
Question for all you market hounds on this site: ever read Ronald Dworkin? He shows you can have your markets and social justice too! In fact, markets might just be the best way to figure out the hard questions of distributive justice, so you really ought to be interested.
If you haven't had the pleasure, I recommend the essay "Equality of Resources," collected in his book Sovereign Virtue.
Hey, Megan, why don't you grapple with Dworkin instead of Glenn Greenwald? Challenging and important, and definitely more in your line of work--I think, though I can't be quite sure until you name your actual line of work for us.
Margalis, few people are more tiresome than luminaries who presume to have the right and obligation to pursue what they perceive as noble with the bypoduct of other people's labor an ingenuity. The people who put the shoulder to wheel, and supplied the capital to make journalistic enterprise possible, get to decide what is noble.
Will Allen, you speak in generalities. I don't care whether anybody adopts most of my "sentiments." In this case, on the other hand, I and others, including Greenwald, believe that we are in a real battle for the future of the American values, standing, and soul; that John Yoo exemplifies the "banality of evil" by supplying legalistic underpinning for horrific war crimes; and that it is our responsibility to aggressively speak out against these people and their actions, lest we become the American equivalents of the "good Germans" who lived out their everyday lives in the shadows of the concentration camps in their back yards. And yes, I do believe these are important matters that the press has a responsibility to address fully and urgently.
The majority agree with phasearth.
When you say that the role of the journalist is to protect and grow capital that is merely your personal opinion and a small minority view. Most people, including most journalists, have a very different view.
Thanks for the civilized response, Will; I sense a gradual increase of civility on the thread, which supports my idealistic theory of education.
I do disagree with you, though, when you say
"Lamenting that people are not consistently unbelievably noble strikes me as a supremely silly endeavor."
Since I've been misquoting the Constitution, let me try to get this right:
Numbers 11:29
would God that all the LORD's people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!
From that old rabblerouser Moses..and it makes the point that trying to go beyond ourselves to do more than is convenient is not supremely silly, it is most desirable and might actually be necessary. And by the way, looking at how the world views us now, supremely practical in the long run!
Well, I wish "journalists" would stop taking themselves so seriously as Guardians of Public Virtue and Cultivators of the American Soul and just tell us what's going on, without lectures or condescension.
SOV, if there was still an institution with unlimited investigative power, like the Special Prosecutor's Office had, and which has thankfully ended (why, oh, why, didn't the "liberal" Supreme Court Justices heed Scalia's warning?), then I can assure you there would have been a Bush Administration scandal that received attention hour after hour. Need I comment that you are ignorant?
Kevin E.:
My argument has little to do with originalism vs. living constitution theory. Instead, my point is that rights are not privileges granted by the government; if they were, then the 9th Amendment would not exist. For that matter, the entire concept of "substantive due process" would likewise not exist.
More importantly, though, your theory that rights are merely privileges that must be exercised responsibly would have the practical effect of making those rights meaningless. Once you limit those rights to the "responsible" exercise of those rights, then you are left with the question of defining "responsible." Is "responsible" speech popular speech, is it speech that generates only pleasant thoughts in the audience? Conversely, what is "irresponsible" speech? Is it unpopular speech or speech that generates anger or offense?
The exact same line of questions applies when you are talking about freedom of the press.
While it's true that you can't shout "Fire" in a crowded theater (unless of course there actually is a fire), this is an exceedingly narrow exception. Indeed, the number of exceptions that exist with regard to the First Amendment are few and far between, with most such exceptions really being more issues of allowing prosecution of fraud than of allowing a restriction of the flow (or lack of flow) of information and ideas. The only broad exception to freedom of speech is the exception for advertising, which allows the government to regulate advertising more closely than other forms of speech. But even in that case, much of what is restricted could be construed as fraudulent behavior. There are also many (such as myself) who believe that even many of these advertising restrictions are violative of the First Amendment; while this is a minority opinion, it is a sizable minority.
This is incorrect. The President did it because the president decided it was what he wanted to do.
Maybe, maybe not. The president is "the decider" not Yoo. If the president were looking for the truth instead of a justification he would have asked for a second opinion.
Follow your own logic, if our presidents aren't held accountable to the law itself, but instead can legally take any action they wish as long as they have a memo from their favorite lawyer, where does that lead us?
SoV:
I've been asking forever. The only "evidence" they have is the broad philisophical argument about the wonderful invisible hand. Other than that they've got nothing.
Will Allen:
And few people are more tiresome than pontificators who speak in vague generalities and can do nothing but reproduce the same thoughtless talking points repeatedly.
Are you seriously suggesting the Lippmann did not "put the shoulder to the wheel" and did not supply the capital to make journalistic enterprise possible? Do you even know who he is?
The idea that Lippmann was a lazy freeloader who profited off the hard work of honest people no doubt conveniently fits your narrative. Only problem is that it's totally false.
This is what happens when dogma and ideology take precedence over reality. Reality falls to the wayside.
Bong hits for Jesus? Free speech zones? I'm not seeing the fraud angles there.
I agree with your basic point, that the Bill of Rights does not demand responsibilities, but exceptions to the first Amendment are unfortunately much broader than you indicate.
It's wrong to say that the press has some sort of Constitutional or legal responsibilities - it doesn't. But it does have a traditional role and set of responsibilities in the minds of the public and laws are passed with that role in mind. Not to mention things like press passes and conferences that operate under the assumption that a role of the press is to disseminate accurate information to the public.
It would be interesting to see how people reacted to a law that made it illegal for the press to knowingly disseminate false information. My guess is that most people would be for it.
Princess of Swords,
Journalists and editors have to make choices about what appears in the press. They can't cover everything. These choices are driven by some value judgement: what will sell, what is in public interest, etc. So they will never just tell us what's going on. They will tell us about things they believe have some value. The argument here is whether that value should be decided by the market or by their judgment of public interest.
Reading through this thread again, it seems like the two sides are talking about two different things when discussing the "role" of the media. It seems we libertarian-types are making an argument based on the media's constitutional/legal/economic "role," all of which are either nonexistent or unremarkable. Meanwhile the anti-Megan commenters are arguing based on what the media's role "should" be, or at least what people (whether the majority of Americans or just the individual commenter) want the media's role to be.
The big problem here is, as it has been all along, that there is a confusion between normative and descriptive arguments. While it's true that some of the pro-Megan commenters are clearly arguing on normative grounds that torture should not be a big story, most of us are really just making descriptive arguments about the media's "official" role. The anti-Megan commenters are, however, mostly making normative arguments based on the media's "unofficial" role in the eyes of the public.
But it's worth reminding everyone that many, if not most, of the pro-Megan commenters deeply regret that the torture issue has not been covered in more depth; we would do well to remember that markets are not perfect, and as such, it is entirely possible (though perhaps not likely) that the media is underserving its customers. But this is a far cry from calling the media immoral and believing that there is some conspiracy to bury the torture story.
Chuckle. So:
a) You have no evidence of this supposed market valuation, but you want people to trust you that it's there, and
b) Somehow an investigation by the Dept. of Justice is exactly the same thing as night after night after night of breathless media coverage. No difference at all, really.
Oh, and
c) The public is vastly, endlessly interested in 20-year-old failed land deals - this is according to you, and so it justifies the coverage given to it because that's just the 'market valuation'. But the public is just terribly ho-hum about a President who's searching for legal cover to torture people. Not the smallest speck of interest there. So why bother to cover it.
Tell me, why would you think this? Since I'm ignorant, feel free to go on at length and detail. Educate me ;-)
Oh, I'm not disputing the quality of Yoo's work; I'm sure it's some pretty spectacular lawyering. I'm saying it was in the service of unethical behavior.
No, it would be my position that it constituted an attempt at CYA: "I just build the bomb, I don't drop it." Nice try, Yoo.
I'm not a lawyer, all I can do is point you to others:
Those are all lawyers.Slate's blog on legal issues: Torture Memos
Mark, thumbs up on your blog by the way. Good to see a libertarian here who is not a blind worshipper of the magical invisible hand, I was starting to lose hope.
This discussion has gone very far afield. I don't see many "pro-Megan" defenders because she didn't really say much.
A crux of her argument is that people just like bowling stories damn it! As proof she gave no evidence, and none of her supporters did either. It's just a random assertion.
Remember one of the criticisms of the press is that it is out of touch with what people want. To counter that with "but people want bowling stories!" without any evidence to support it is silly.
A second crux of her argument is that stuff on TV is automatically important. Important to journalists or to the public? It isn't clear. If important to journalists well that's just moronic. If important to the public then that's a circular argument - if being on TV makes something important then *everything* is important. (As long as someone puts it on TV) But why would anyone put it on TV in the first place? Now we're back to "the public loves bowling stories!"
Faith, respect and ratings for media are down. "We just give the public what they want" is not a good argument without evidence to support it and there is no evidence given. None. Her theory is no better than my theory: news producers are vapid and love trivia.
Mark,
I disagree. Greenwald's argument is certainly normative, therefore he cannot be opposed on descriptive grounds. Since we are obviously engaged in an argument, your points must have some normative aspects. As far as I remember, Greenwald has never discussed the sources of the laziness and corruption of the press. For all we know, he completely agrees with Megan's description. But the subtext of your position is "this is the best we can do" (a standard libertarian defense of the market.) Greenwald disagrees.
I am not sure who you are referring to, but Greenwald certainly does not claim any sort of conspiracy of the press.
Again, this is where some methodical thinking would come in handy. What would be considered evidence that there is a 'conspiracy' to bury the story?
If you don't say anything except an after-the-fact declamation that, no, that's not evidence, then you're not really being honest.
Let's turn this around: Why did the media push Whitewater for so long? Why would the various chieftans in the industry think that Americans would be fascinated with the minutia of an old land deal gone bad in the 70's, but also believe that Americans really don't care if their President is actively seeking legal cover to torture people?
Me, maybe I'm not like most people, maybe my priorities are all messed up, but I'd think the latter story would be of much more interest than the former.
You, apparently, think otherwise, but that's your affair.
Oh, I'm not disputing the quality of Yoo's work; I'm sure it's some pretty spectacular lawyering. I'm saying it was in the service of unethical behavior.
Oh, well, I'm not disputing that torture is immoral and ought to be prosecuted. People shouldn't lie to their spouses, either, but the law doesn't do much about it. I hope you won't call me an "accessory to adultery" for saying that.
If the White House is confusing "legal" with "right," there are a lot of people here who seem to confuse "wrong" with "illegal."
Mark, perhaps it would help if you could concisely summarize exactly what Megan's points were in your view?
To me it looks like "People like bowling stories, and know this because -- I just do!" (Insert invisble hand crap here)
I would also point out once again that Megan herself did trivialize the importance of torture in her previous posts. She compared it to simply knowing the names of beaurocrats (not anything substantial they did, just their names) and to calculating stuff about bonds. After saying she didn't want to conflate them she did -- multiple times.
Saying that torture is no more important than bond math is very much a trivialization and a normative argument.
In fact, there is some evidence against that proposition (not that it's on me to disprove it): relatively popular shows that are thought to be slanted towards 'liberals' have been cancelled, while shows whose ratings are not as good as those 'liberal' shows are apparently retained.(I don't watch a lot of TV actually, but didn't Phil Donahue have a popular show cancelled even though it's ratings were better than just about everything else?)
As long as you don't advise one of your friends to go ahead and have an affair and just lie to his spouse about it, I won't.
I answered (sort of) your post in the tenure thread. I'm tired and I'm going home. And there was much rejoicing. Yay.
Princess of Swords,
Clearly no one need share my hobbies, nor I theirs, but I think you misunderstand my argument a bit. Two points of clarification:
1. I am saying not that everyone is or should be passionate about politics, but, more modestly, just that many people who would wish to become politically active if (a) time permitted in a general sense and (b) they and their peers could particularly spend enough time in the effort to achieve leverage to rival that of currently-prevailing special interests, now lack the incentive to participate because making ends meet is so time-consuming. Laws can affect people’s ability to act on their preferences (the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 is a classic exmaple).
2. It would seem to me that torture, indefinite detention without due process, warrantless domestic surveillance, and sundry other Bush-era national security practices do rise above the mundane political squabbles and speak to fairly core issues about the character of the polity we inhabit. Protecting our nation’s status as a respecter of privacy, the rule of law, and human rights is in our own interest as people who live here. This case is worth making even to people who ordinarily are rather indifferent to politics, although some people doubtless will and have the political right to remain studiously otherwise engaged.
Hi Mark,
good post, and I appreciate your point of view, although I think Margalis's subsequent distinction between Constitutional rights and social expectations is correct--the latter form a larger, older field of thought that is at least equally important, especially, I would think, to conservatives, though I suppose not the most libertarian sorts. And indeed, a lot of laws have been passed that validate a normative social expectation of press responsibility--hat tip again to Margalis.
One correction: I did not say, and I don't think even implied, that my imputation of an obligation to perform responsibly in return for protection didn't mean that people couldn't do other things as well! Including make money by running stories of Britney and so forth. (Very realistic about human nature, the framers were.)
But I thought that it did imply a requirement to seek a balance; a balance, actually, rather like that achieved through such simple mechanisms as the fairness doctrine and public ownership of the airwaves over on the broadcast side. (I see you're not too thrilled with stuff like that from a 1st Amendment perspective.)
I'm sure that a scholar of this stuff could draw a line from the Fairness Doctrine and the original F.C.C. back to pre-colonial understandings of the obligations of the press, or perhaps the town crier, to truthfully report news that affected the community, especially in emergencies--and those social notions would surely form at least some sort of important background to the actual First Amendment protections. If a person lied or misled, he wouldn't be taken care of by market forces--he'd be publicly shamed in the stocks. A bit like Megan here, maybe, so things haven't changed so much, here in the new secondary orality of the internet.
SOV, before writing about the stupidity in others' line or reasoning, you may wish to endeavor to become literate, otherwise you appear to be a gibbering fool. Somehow you brain functions in a way that cause you to believe that the phrase "The public is vastly, endlessly interested in 20-year-old failed land deals." is synonymous with saying an investigation by a prosecutor with essentially limitless resources, and essentially no checks on his power, pursuing the person holding the highest elected office in the land, is the sort of conflict that the media will cover endlessly. Yes, you are ignorant and far more than I imagined. You don't know what very common words mean.
Also, you apparently also think the sort of investigation I describe above can be adequately described as a mere "Justice Department investigation." Oh well. There is no point in your pursuit of a fifth grade civics education until you have achieved third grade reading comprehension. Good luck.
[Second time trying to post this .]
Ooops: forgot I was writing HTML: the sentence that finished with a '(' should read:
"These people have become very, very adept at shaping the news to their ends, and very few of the stories (
Margalis, who is more acurately desribed as a "pontificator"; person x, who demands that person y adhere to persons x's sense of what obligation y has by his employment , with the use of money supplied by person z's labor, or person w, who merely says person z should do with their capital as they please, within the constraints of law or ehtics that apply to all, and according to what they agreed to when they hired person y. You calling someone else a pontificator is rich with irony, ya' old finger-wagging scold, you!
I'm well aware of Lippman. I can't remember if he had an ownership stake. If he did, he should have used that stake to exercise his influence however he saw best. If he didn't, he should have adhered to whatever conditions he agreed to when he was hired. If he came to find those conditions too restrictive, he then should have sought to renegotiate the conditions, and failing that, he should have sought other employment, or got his ass to work to gather enough capital to publish any damned thing he pleased. What he should not have done (and I'm not saying he did) is presume to have the right to dictate terms regarding what should be published to people who supplied the capital to run the enterprise. If a person wants to act like the owner of an enterprise, that's great. The first step is to become an owner.
Uh, kid? That's your position. But glad to see that you realize the inherent ridiculousness in the notion.
Still waiting for something besides your assertions that it is too so (another indication, along with a bizarre idea of what constitutes 'good writing' of the relative youthfulness of this Allen character.)
Uh, kid? You really can't read, or write, can you?
Chuckle. This one's toast.
Will, at some point, you can't bluff any more; you've got to produce evidence and facts.
A pompous, overblown writing style won't hide this. Accusing others of not being realists won't hide this. Juvenile Randian blobiating won't hide this.
And you've produced zero evidence, nothing - nothing except your pronouncements that 'this is so', well, I suspect most people have already put you into the category of 'spear carrier'.
I am, of course, willing as always to be proven wrong. You could try to do that by actually producing some evidence for your 'market valuation'. Remember, where I stepped in and asked for that evidence, when you said:
"The reflex that you exhibit is very typical of those who are unsatisfied with valuation determined by the market; it just irritates the hell out of you that everyone, or at least a majority or large plurality, won't adopt your preferences."
Now, are you actually going to behave like a grownup and produce some evidence? Or act like a grownup and admit you've got nothing of the kind?
Or are you going to keep up with this ridiculous pose?
They don't have evidence or facts. They don't even understand the concept. They're used to preaching to other converts who buy into their shared theology, simply asserting whatever they want while their buddies nod in agreement.
When you ask them to support their assertions they are slack-jawed. It's an entirely foreign concept. They have yet to grasp that repeating something doesn't make it true.
He's going to keep stamping his feet and protesting, because that's all he understands. Keep asking though, it's very entertaining.
Someone above claimed they had ratings evidence that people prefer bowling stories. I asked for that evidence. The silence was deafening.
"Prove it" stops them dead in their tracks. They don't know how to do that and they don't seem to understand that "proof" is something more than another boring screed about their personal philosophy.
And the funny thing is . . . I'm not a liberal. Just someone currently living in the showme state saying show me. But apparently, not taking these people at their unsupported word counts as being a liberal.
Take this kid Will's inaccuracies for example: if the poor fellow had bothered to do his research, he would have known that Whitewater is a catch-all for the various media-generated controversies, and
That is, long before a special prosecutor was appointed, this story was being flogged by the media. Why? According to Will, that's what the public wanted to hear about[1].
See how it's done, Will? If you say something, be prepared to back it up. And if you're just shooting your mouth off, be prepared to be called on it.
[1]Possibly because that's what he wanted to hear about, along with Hillary and her gay lover offing her other lover Vince Foster. Yes, there will always be people who want to hear bad things about Democrats in general and the Clintons in particular. I don't think that they can be properly construed as "the people" though.
But ScentOfViolets you are forgetting that thanks to the magic of the invisible hand markets always deliver exactly what consumers demand. The fact that Whitewater reporting exists is itself perfect evidence that consumers wanted it. Why if they didn't want it it would never have been produced in the first place!
Also New Coke.
They don't have evidence or facts. They don't even understand the concept. They're used to preaching to other converts who buy into their shared theology, simply asserting whatever they want while their buddies nod in agreement.
This sounds a lot like the anti-Yoo crowd when asked to explain why he should be disbarred and prosecuted.
Actually, that's not the first thing that pops into my mind... more likely the guards were abusing their power. Pretty common and unsurprising in prison environments. Witness any prison, the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Why would prison guards abusing their power immediately make you think that the Federal Government had gone Seriously Wrong?
Um... seriously, you believe that the magical legal memo empowered Bush to torture anyone anytime anywhere? Without that magical memo, he would have found himself incapable of torture? WTF? I need to get Yoo to write me a memo empowering me to lose weight and get rich. His memos are pretty amazing.
I'm also missing the impunity part... seems like there's been quite a lot of punity going on.
This reminds me of when some actor "speaks truth to power" and talks about how they are risking everything by telling everyone how the Man is keeping them down. And they do it over... and over... and over... and nothing seems to happen. Here we all are talking about how Bush is RIGHT NOW torturing people and getting away with it and NOBODY KNOWS!!!! I mean, except everyone. And the secret documents that the ACLU put on the Internet.
Yoo's magical memo doesn't seem so magical, now.
Providing a legal theory for something isn't authorizing it. That's just dumb.
The Press is so inept at explaining things that I have no faith in their ability to report on anything that's even a tiny bit complicated. I have seen too many stories about topics that I am familiar with to expect anything less than oversimplification, at best, and misinterpretation, factual mistakes, and bad explanations at worst.
You can talk about the duty of the press all you want, but we'd all be better off if they stuck to reporting about kittens stuck in trees and gave us weather and traffic reports. I'll find blogs or experts to explain anything more sophisticated than that.
SOV, until you precisely quantify the meaning of "flogged", all you've done is make an assertion unbacked by evidence. Yes, the media gave coverage to Whitewater, and and one of the running themes was whether a special prosecutor would be appointed. That is part of what drove the story, because that is what always attracts media attention; the prospect of a food fight, and as long as that ridiculous institution was in place, a food fight with the highest office holder in the land was always just around the corner. If the institution had existed during this administration, it is nearly guaranteed that Valerie Plame, among other scandal fodder, would be in the headlines still every day, because it is nearly guaranteed that that there would be an unending investigation of it that eventually travelled down many paths, for the simple reason that this nearly inevitable with such an institution.
You and Margalis ridicule other for failing to prove that the media covers what they think will earn them profits, yet you both have asserted time and again, without a shred of evidence, that major media outlets could get as good a return on capital by telling more stories of the kind you prefer.
Margalis has been so fatuous as to assert that the fact Olbermann can attract 700,000 viewers, and has become MSNBC's major star (which is sort of being like the most popular bacon in Israel) is proof that there is large underserved demand which would be a wise target for capital. This makes his accusation of his opponents in this debate being unable to back their claims nearly as ironic as his accusation of pontificating.
Now, which is the more reasonable proposition; that people with large sums of capital to invest, many of whom who are ideologically compatible with printing the sort of stories Greenwald would approve of, are simply missing an opportunity to get a good return on their capital, because they lack the perceptive abilities of Greenwald, Margalis, and SOV (nearly everyone does, after all), or that they have scoured high and low for the best place to invest their money, and have concluded that risking a lot of capital, in an attempt to steal eyeballs away from "Sportscenter", or "Jeopardy" (have you checked the ratings for "Wheel of Fortune" and "Lehrer" yet, Margalis?), videogames, Glenn Greenwald's blog, "What not to Wear", Jim Lehrer's program, "NBC News with Brian Williams", "Entertainment Tonight", etc., etc., doesn't look very attractive. Do you suppose they say to themselves "If we execute perfectly, and have some luck, will spend a mountain of money, and get Olbermann-like numbers! Woo-hoo! LET'S DO IT!!!!!!"
Sheesh
Another Will Allen post without a single bit of evidence to support his theory that the public just couldn't get enough whitewater stories. Color me surprised!
I never asserted that. Lying is so unbecoming.
My point from the start has been that "teh public loves teh bowling storiez" is merely an assertion without evidence. In fact I specifically stated multiple times that I had no idea if serious news would sell better or not.
Still eagerly waiting to hear how whitewater stories were the product of insatiable public demand. You can do it Will!
That's as may be. I don't necessarily agree. I don't even think he should be fired - he has tenure after all. When/if there is evidence of some sort of misconduct, then he should be investigated for malfeasance, possibly even tried in a court of law.
But what it comes down to, again, is evidence.
For someone who accuses others of not reading very well, you're not reading very well:
This is also yet more proof that, however you try to present yourself here, you're not very old. Some of us actually have first-hand experience of the news coverage. I know, that makes me an old fogey.
But congratulations on being able to refrain from the usual pompous quatrains you've been posting lately.
Sigh. Really? Where did I say that? Should be easy to quote me, right?
Or is this another flat declaration that's true "because I say so"? And where is your evidence that:
"The reflex that you exhibit is very typical of those who are unsatisfied with valuation determined by the market; it just irritates the hell out of you that everyone, or at least a majority or large plurality, won't adopt your preferences."
You know, the bald assertion you made that provoked me to post in the first place.
But congratulations on being able to refrain from the usual pompous quatrains you've been posting lately
I don't agree with you much of the time SoV, and I don't usually like your tone, but I must say this is a wonderfully entertaining sentence.
I express no opinion on the content, I just like the prose.
SOV, the quote you provide is not evidence. It is merley an assertion. Unless your assertion merely pertains to what happens in Gene Lyons' brain, you have presented no evidence. What is wrong with your brain?
By the way, if you and Margalis have not asserted that major media outlets could get as good a return on capital by telling the stories you prefer, fine. Here's a clue, Pulitizer; major media outlets have shareholders. Shareholders demand that managers operate the enterprise in a way that maximizes return on capital. Unless you can make a case that telling the stories you advocate will do so, there isn't any point in discussing the matter, unless you like to pound a keyboard like a chimp.
In any case, Margalis did assert that polls proved that people wanted more reporting along the lines that he favors. Giving people want they want is generally thought to be a good way to increase return on capital. Does eveything need to be expalined in such a basic fashion to you?
Finally, SOV, if you are going to castigate others for allegedly lying you would do well to not lie by sayng others have asserted that there was an "insatiable" public demand for stories about 20 year old land deals. Why do you lie so much? Also, why is the quote you italicized so provoking to you, while this quote.....
"The libertarian reflex is to scream "tyranny" whenever anyone proposes any valuation that is not determined by the market."
.....which was the bald assertion that I deliberately mirrored, not provoking? Is there something wrong with your brain that prevents you from noting some bald assertions, while being provoked by others?
Sigh. Do you ever back anything up?
Sigh. Will you plesae read the thead?
"The public is vastly, endlessly interested in 20-year-old failed land deals - this is according to you,"
Yes, I quoted the wrong word, although I may have just looked at a different post of yours, but since you seem to be unfamiliar with the language, "endlessly interested" is synonymous "insatiable public demand". Seriously, what is wrong with you?
Really, SOV, I'd like a reply to my other question. Why would you be so provoked by what you called a bald assertion, but you would not note, so evidently were not provoked, by the assertion which I deliberately mirrored? People like you fascinate me, in a grotesque sort of way. Your brain appears to function in a manner that causes you get all excited by a form of rherotic, but only when it is employed by people with whom you have differing political views. As long as a person generally shares your view of the world, they can employ the exact form of rhetoric, and you evidently don't even notice it. What has happened to you brain, to cause you to be so lacking in self-awareness?
Do you know what the words mean? 'According to you' is 'by your logic'. You know, like when I said:
Chuckle. Care to try again? Or are you simply going to roboticly repeat this again and again with no evidence to support it? Don't think this distracts me, btw; I still want to see your evidence for:
"The reflex that you exhibit is very typical of those who are unsatisfied with valuation determined by the market; it just irritates the hell out of you that everyone, or at least a majority or large plurality, won't adopt your preferences"
Or are you finally going to admit that you don't have any evidence that this is the case?
Finally, I suppose I should answer this, in the interests of fairness:
I attend to some assertions because they're on-topic. The ones that I deem off-topic, not so much. So this:
"The reflex that you exhibit is very typical of those who are unsatisfied with valuation determined by the market; it just irritates the hell out of you that everyone, or at least a majority or large plurality, won't adopt your preferences"
is on-topic, more more so than the other one. Satisfied? Now, would you actually present some evidence? Or is this where you resort to some sort of "you're not the boss of me" posturing?
No, SOV, "by your logic" is not synonymous with "according to you", because to say it is would assume that your conception of logic is accurate. That is why an honest person uses the latter phrase only when attempting to portray what was actually written.
Nice rationalization of your lack of self awareness, by the way. In any case, since the market is merely an approximation of the public's preferences, to be unsatisfied with valuation determined by the market is to be unsatisified that the public does not share one's preferences, unless one posits that the market is very inefficient in valuing the public's preferences, in which case one should supply strong evidence that this is the case. However, my statement that you found so provoking was mostly an attempt to ridicule, by imitation, a previous statement. Given your reading skills, and evident psycho-social pathology, it is unsurprising that this was completely beyond your grasp.
Iow, you don't have anything to back up either (or any) of your claims . . . and that's everyone else's fault.
You really are a negligible bit of nothing - not even entertaining prose or novel idiocy.
PLONK!
Wow, where to begin?
Let's see: print reporters have no obligation to cover serious stories (such as the death of our Republic) because they're "hard" and don't get big TV ratings.
Oh, but TV news people get many of their stories from the New York Times.
Oh, but print reporters have to cover stories about bowling and haircuts because the TV people MADE them important. But you just said that print reporting spawns TV stories.
Excuse me while my head explodes.
"And because trivial details of their lives matter tremendously in the elections, those trivial details are big stories."
the fact that someone would believe and write this is astounding.
should trivial details matter?
obviously not.
why would any serious person defend and/or justify such an obsession?
as others have noted, this would be a great time for a bit of self-reflection.
sadly, it appears that megan is incapable of being that introspective.
instead, she continues to flail about in a pitiful fashion.
sad.
i do have to admit, however, that for the first time in months, i've actually peeked at this blog, with the same warped perspective a gawker might maintain at a horrible car wreck on the freeway.
Will Allen still hasn't answered huh?
Too funny.
He's slackjawed and drooling when facing the prospect of supporting his theories with evidence.
Megan's argument, boiled down, is that the stupid American public wants 'stupid' stories so it's the media's job to give it to them in order to stay in business. I think Murrow just rolled in his grave. Journalists are supposed to be watchdogs, not lapdogs, and if you want to do that kind of reporting you should be working for The Enquirer instead of a supposedly prestigious and responsible publication with a global readership.
Her arguments as to why she was pro-war are just ridiculous, she's done and said absolutely nothing to refute a single point Greenwald has made since the beginning of this fracas, though she has done a fairly good job of misrepresenting Greenwald's to people who haven't bothered to read the original article.