Robert Samuelson, Robert Samuelson, Robert Samuelson

Why does this guy get a column for a major national newspaper? But that isn’t even the worse part about the plague of Samuelson. Plenty of people who don’t add anything substantive to the debate have elevated positions in our national discourse, so Samuelson is hardly unique in that regard. What’s offensive about Samuelson is that he has such an infuriating air of superiority and self importance about him. Whenever he writes, especially about entitlements, he always takes on the pose of a bold truth-teller, willing to be a clarion explainer of simple facts against the willful obfuscations of politicians left and right. Not only is this pose always annoying - no single writer has a monopoly on inconvenient truths - it’s especially infuriating when the writer is just wrong about a bunch of stuff.

The set up for Samuelson’s most recent column is that he’s writing a speech for a presidential candidate who won’t distract the people with “freebies” like health care and instead has been “inoculated with truth serum.” His first point is that the president doesn’t have much control over the economy - fair enough - and he even supports “broad based tax increases” but only if we can hold down spending. This is all well and good, but when he talks about exactly what spending we need to cut, he gets off base. Since this is Samuelson, a sanctimonious lecture on entitlements is inevitable:

But we must also cut spending, because unless we do, the future tax increases will be crushing.

Of necessity, spending cuts should focus on Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. These programs are projected to grow from about 45 percent of the present budget to 70 percent over a couple of decades. Paying for that exclusively with taxes would be devastating for the economy and our children. Paying exclusively by cutting other programs would gut vital government services. I admit that raising eligibility ages for baby boomers and cutting some benefits are unfair. People should have received more warning. But our politicians have so dawdled that there’s no warning time left.

Two things. First, there’s one big ticket spending item, one that takes up hundreds of billions of dollars every year that Samuelson doesn’t mention once. That’s right, the war in Iraq. You don’t have to think that the War is responsible for our economic woes to make the rather simple point that indefinite foreign wars can be a drag in the budget. Samuelson also does some serious obfuscation when he groups all the entitlement programs together. It’s true that some entitlement programs are “in crisis,” as in that their costs are expanding and will soon have to dip into the trust fund because their tax inlays won’t cover their outlays. It’s just that social security is not one of them, Medicare is. I’m not saying that Medicare reform won’t be wrenching, or that it isn’t needed, but anyone who is actually interested in discussing entitlements honestly knows that Medicare is the only one we really need to be concerned with imminently. That truth serum must not be too strong.

The next section of Samuelson’s imaginary truthy-speech is on energy, and it only gets worse:

We’ve also dawdled on energy. No one likes $125 a barrel oil. Last year, we paid an average price of $64 a barrel for imports. Some blame the oil companies, but the truth is that we’re all to blame. Americans like cheap gasoline and big vehicles. Nothing was done to dampen consumption. Meanwhile, Congress restricted new oil and gas exploration on environmental grounds. So, demand rose and supply fell. In 1985, we imported 4 million barrels of oil a day; now that’s 12 million.

“Energy independence” is a fraud. We simply use too much foreign oil. All we can do is limit our dependence by shifting to more-efficient vehicles and increasing domestic production. But these measures will take years and have only modest effects. The same is true of global warming. Without major technological breakthroughs, making big cuts in greenhouse gases will be impossible.

Now, Samuelson, why is making big cuts in greenhouse gases “impossible”? Could it be because we haven’t really tried? Maybe we could do things like invest in developing alternative energy or imposing some sort of tax on emissions, perhaps through a cap and trade system. Hell, we could even auction off the permits to raise more revenue! Oh wait, the Democratic presidential candidates have proposed doing all of those things. Samuelson’s solution to the energy situation, on the other hand, is drilling in ANWR. Too bad
that destroying Alaskan wilderness and caribou habitats will only give us four years of oil, using the most optimistic arithmetic. Real policy honesty!

But then Samuelson decides that misleading his readers about entitlements, spending, taxes and energy wasn’t enough. He just had to get silly about poverty:

Everyone’s against it, but hardly anyone admits that most of the increase in the past 15 years reflects immigration — new immigrants or children of recent immigrants. Unless we stop poor people from coming across our Southern border, legally and illegally, we won’t reduce poverty. Period. That doesn’t mean we should try to expel the 12 million illegal immigrants already here — an impossible and morally dubious task. Many families have been here for years; many have American children. We need a pragmatic accommodation: Assimilate most people now here; shift future immigration to the highly skilled.

At no point does Samuelson explain why this increase in poverty is bad for anyone involved. Americans get a small marginal benefit from increased immigration, even if its unskilled, not to mention the huge benefit for those who immigrate. Where does Samuelson tell the hard truth about the huge gains that immigrants get from immigration. Do we hear about the 5x expansion in wages that your average Mexican immigrant experiences when he moves to the US? Or how about today’s immigrants are assimilating as fast as ever. And if deporting 12 million immigrants is a “morally dubious task,” doesn’t that cast doubt on the rightness of barring the gates to millions more? And why exactly do we need to choose between skilled immigration and unskilled immigration. And it’s not like we really can “choose.” Although flows of skilled immigrants are largely determined politically - by the allocation of H-1B visas for example - flows of unskilled immigrants
are almost entirely a function of how the economy is doing. The choice is whether we make them live in Juan Crow conditions or whether we treat them humanely.

I could get even further into the weeds and explain in nauseating detail how just about every word in his column is hope-in-humanity-destroyingly stupid, but I think the better question is why Samuelson has a column in which to promote these falsehoods, and why he has the status of a non-partisan truthteller. What does Brad DeLong say in these situations? Oh yes, Why Oh Why Can’t We Have A Better Press Corps?

Well That Takes Care of That

After much Strum und Drang surrounding TNR’s decision to have their Environment and Energy coverage be “powered by BP”, they’ve gotten rid of the tag and BP’s logo is now relegated to a mere banner ad. Although I don’t think that the placement of the ad  had any signifigant implications for their coverage, it certainly looks a lot better, which is important because hopefully more people will take a less jaundiced view of TNR’s environmental reporting, which I think has generally been quite good.

TNR and BP

There’s a lot of controversy surrounding The New Republic’s new Environment and Energy blog, which is “powered by BP.” The basic argument for why it’s bad for TNR to have an entire “channel” devoted to environmental, and especially climate change and energy, issues that is sponsored by an oil company is twofold. The first, and most obvious concern, is that British Petroleum’s sponsorship will influence TNR’s coverage of climate change issues. After all, oil companies are some of the chief villains, and even if you don’t want to cast it in such stark terms, some of the most important players in the climate change debate, and so any honest journalism surrounding climate changehave to keep a keen eye on oil companies. I don’t think this will be much of a worry for TNR’s environment writers, especially because one of them is Brad Plumer, whose honesty and commitment to quality journalism is something that no one needs to worry about.

The second concern is both more subtle and more worrisome. The concern is that, in the words of Sam Boyd, “BP will have an easier time lobbying against climate change legislation if it is perceived as supporting environmental causes — a perception that will only be increased by sponsorships like this. Making a company with such a checkered history look good is in and of itself a bad thing.” So the question becomes, in the struggle to get a. accurate information and good analysis about environmental issues out in the general public and b. to actually effect public attitudes and even legislation about climate change, is BP’s very obvious sponsorship of TNR a net positive or a net negative?

On the first count, I think we can say that it’s a net positive. I have no reason to believe that TNR’s environmental coverage will be meaningfully affected by BP’s endorsement; after all, plenty of companies with an interest in their own media coverage sponsor and advertise all over the place and yet there’s still plenty of critical journalism about those very companies. There’s generally a pretty strong divide between the business and production side of magazines, and I don’t feel comfortable impugning the honesty of the TNR crew without good reason. Whether the blog, due to the BP sponsorship, can actually achieve the second goal is more debatable. Is the marginal effect on BP’s reputation by sponsoring TNR (and thus their ability to either lobby legislation their way or avoid negative scrutiny) overwhelm the marginal increase in good journalism that TNR will produce that could lead more people to, say, endorse alternative energy investments or a carbon tax? I think at least that more good journalism, and more coverage in general, of climate change issues can only help, but clearly BP wouldn’t so aggressively be greenwashing themselves if they didn’t think it was good for their bottom line.

In defense of TNR, it’s worth pointing out that any public pressure against fossil fuel producers would be directed against all of them, not just BP or any individual company, so it’s unclear what BP gains by trying to brand itself as the green oil company. A carbon tax would be applied to all of them.

When You Think Your Readers Are Idiots, Idiocy Ensues

Can people please, and I’m begging here, just stop with the “Look how much snow there is this one April, there must be no global warming!” bit. Sure, in the New York Sun’s case, the article about Northeastern ski resorts getting record snowfall isn’t all that malicious, but even implying that single weather events or single-season climate patterns have anything to do with a global process like climate change is basically just declaring “I’m a total dunce and proud of it”

Being A Little Unfair

I really like Spencer Ackerman.  The guy is hilarious, amazingly smart and writes about foreign policy in such a clear, abrasive manner that I think we could use more of.  His longform stuff, which isn’t as snarky (in a good way), is excellent too.  We need more Ackermans in the liberal blogosphere, people who know a lot about the military and defense issues and can approach them from a left-wing standpoint without communicating contempt for the military.  So, yeah, read his series about the development of counterinsurgency doctrine in Iraq and the US military establishment (Parts One and Two).

But Spencer’s seething attack on David Plotz and Jeffrey Goldberg for their running Slate commentary on The Wire is pretty unfair to both of them, but especially Plotz.   Ackerman goes totally guilt-by-association to say that Plotz hated the Sun subplot because he’s a writer for Slate, meaning that his stuff gets published because it’s “clever, not what’s, you know, true.”  There’s something to the Slate is too cute critique, they do, after all have Steven Landsburg writing for them.  But in the case of Plotz, he shows how “cuteness” can make for some really good stuff.  Look at this “Blogging the Bible” series.  THis was the ultimate Slate gimmick.  Here was a secular Jew who had never really read the Bible, who was going to read the whole thing and liveblog his way through it.  Would there be any particularly original Biblical commentary? No, but it sure was fun to read.   And it was cute.

His indictment of Jeffrey Goldberg is much more serious, however.  Goldberg is one of those neocons who just so happens to be a pretty well respected journalist.  In his days at the New Yorker, he was one of the most passionate advocates for the Iraq War.  He wrote not just about WMDs, but also about connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda that turned out to be bogus.  He was hardly a skeptical war supporter, as his Slate series with Bob Wright shows, he was full on calling opponents of the war immoral for being soft on fascism and genocide. Goldberg has never really come to grips with his pre-Iraq advocacy and journalism, and understandably, many anti-war folk hold him in contempt.  But Ackerman says that Goldberg is “a reporter who does not care about whether what he writes is true or false, no matter what the consequences to peoples’ lives are, and who has no problem evading responsibility for his actions. Templeton is guilty of misdemeanors by comparison. If I were Goldberg, I’d whine about the show too. David Simon has his goddamn number.”

Why this is certainly one way of framing the case against Goldberg, I question its relevance to his discussions of The Wire.   Just about every journalist, including Spencer’s American Prospect buddies, thought the journalist plot was overwrought and lame.  And it was Simon’s fault, not Goldberg’s for calling out how obvious the good and bad guys were.  While Simon claims, and I believe him, that his real point was to expose how they weren’t covering the systemic failures of Baltimore institutions, it only real came out why anyone should give a rat’s ass about the Sun in the final episode.  Until then, it just seemed like Simon’s obsession and him working out personal vendettas, and it was just an annoying ancillary to other, much more compelling plot lines.

While the case against Goldberg is a strong one, it’s not clear how it relates to Wire criticism.

Defending The Press Embargo

Despite my nearly impossibly high levels of what scholars would call “privilege”, I have an innate, visceral aversion to markers of class or hierarchy.  Maybe it’s the Jewish-Socialist in me or something, but few things piss me off more than a hereditary royalty, who by sole virtue of their birth get a whole bunch of shit that not even their parents, grandparents or great grandparents earned.  The fact that so many royals turn out to be rather average folks, rather than endear me to them, just makes them look pathetic.

There is one saving grace, however,  particular to the British monarchy. That’s the strong tradition of royals who are one-off from the royal line serving in the military.  Although it would be nice to see Prince William on the front lines a la Prince Hal in Henry IV and Henry V, I am actually quite happy that the current Prince Harry managed to serve in Afghanistan for ten weeks like a normal soldier.  This shows that even within an institutions as hysterically unjust and anachronistic as the monarchy, they are aware that they essentially suck off the fat of the land and should “give something back.”  Sure, I oppose the mandatory military or community service of regular 18 year olds, but royal ones should be in the shit as much as possible.  And so I must say that the British press did something truly patriotic by not reporting on Harry’s service for ten whole weeks.  This allowed him to serve without endangering his fellow soldiers.  It’s not like there’s some compelling reason why the public has to know that Prince Harry is serving while he’s still doing it.  And since the info is out now, we can get all the pictures and interviews we want.

It sure looks dangerous, from a liberal, freedom of the press angle, to see journalistic organizations deliberating not reporting something because the government wants them to.  But this Prince Harry situation  isn’t going to push us down the slippery slope, and if it does, we’re already too far down it anyway.  So, bravo British press!

Did The Bimbo, In Fact, Erupt?

Clearly, the discussion of the McCain Lobbyist-not-affair-but-maybe story is going to focus on all the internal machinations that went into publishing it rather than its inconclusive substance. For a little preview of what is likely to expounded upon soon, Jonathan Martin’s Politico story is a good place to start. The real important piece in the puzzle is going to be Gabe Sherman’s TNR piece detailing the supposed conflict in the Times newsroom; we don’t know what went into it, but apparently Sherman’s calling around is what forced the Times‘ hands.

But lets get back to the piece in question. The central revelation is that aides and advisors to McCain were concerned that there was a possible romantic relationship between him and telecom lobbyist Vicki Iseman sometime before his 2000 presidential run. They told Iseman to distance herself and cut off her access to McCain, fearing that the story could break. The rest of the story just details small, typical, slightly unethical but none to shocking slip ups and connections to lobbyists and moneyed interests that are really only noteworthy because it’s McCain, the self declared scourge of lobbyists engaging in them.

The other useful thing the story does is go over how McCain wasn’t always some paragon of ethics and anti-corruption. As the Times reminds us, McCain became prominent as a politician because of his connection to corrupt banker Charles Keating and his lobbying to loosen regulatory strictures because Keating was doing some fishy banking:

Mr. Keating had taken over the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association and used its federally insured deposits to gamble on risky real estate and other investments. He pressed Mr. McCain and other lawmakers to help hold back federal banking regulators.For years, Mr. McCain complied. At Mr. Keating’s request, he wrote several letters to regulators, introduced legislation and helped secure the nomination of a Keating associate to a banking regulatory board.By early 1987, though, the thrift was careering toward disaster. Mr. McCain agreed to join several senators, eventually known as the Keating Five, for two private meetings with regulators to urge them to ease up. “Why didn’t I fully grasp the unusual appearance of such a meeting?” Mr. McCain later lamented in his memoir.When Lincoln went bankrupt in 1989 — one of the biggest collapses of the savings and loan crisis, costing taxpayers $3.4 billion — the Keating Five became infamous. The scandal sent Mr. Keating to prison and ended the careers of three senators, who were censured in 1991 for intervening. Mr. McCain, who had been a less aggressive advocate for Mr. Keating than the others, was reprimanded for “poor judgment” but was re-elected the next year.

This certainly isn’t news, every profile or biography of McCain always addressed Keating. But it’s still very relevant and because of the media’s general reluctance to criticize McCain and to take him at as word as incorruptible, the full scope of McCain’s perfidy isn’t discussed enough, especially considering his mid-career conversion to the cause of ethics reform.

But let’s get back to what the Times really wanted to talk about - the bimbo erupting. The closest we get is in the final third, when McCain, according to annoymous sources, admitted that he behaved inappropriately:

In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman. The two associates, who said they had become disillusioned with the senator, spoke independently of each other and provided details that were corroborated by others.

This is where things get weird. Clearly, “acknowledged behaving inappropriately” is redacted lawyer-speak that they had to put in after Robert Bennett McCain’s high profile attorney, got to the Times and probably washed the piece. When the Times started writing this story, they probably thought they had a sex story on their hands. And not just any sex story, America’s Hero, Mr. Ethics, John McCain in a sex scandal. Now, if there was someone out there who told the Times that McCain did indeed had an affair or someone in the Times who’s unhappy that they’re sitting on that detail, or at least being so opaque about it, how come Drudge or TMZ or Huff Post someone doesn’t know it. With so many blogs and what not, how can any prominent politician hope to keep an affair under wraps? As they always say, developing…

What Could Have Been

The New Republic has an article looking at the process by which William Kristol became a Times Columnist.  Of course, he wasn’t the only named bandied about by Arthur Sulzberger and Andrew Rosenthal.  The article reveals a few others who were considered, and it’s almost sad to see what would have been:

So, last fall, Sulzberger and Times editorial-page editor Andrew Rosenthal prepared a list of some 25 conservative writers. According to a person with knowledge of the search, the names included Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations Max Boot and three Weekly Standard staffers: senior editor Christopher Caldwell, associate editor Matthew Continetti, and the magazine’s editor and founder, Bill Kristol.

Krauthammer is just as singularly hawkish, if not more so than Kristol, but at least can write well and has the capacity to occasionally write an interesting, out of the box column like those he’s written on intelligent design or religion in the GOP primary.  Max Boot is too a neocon’s neocon, but he’s also a UC Berkeley alumnus who has a pretty good knowledge of military history and would have more to say on foreign affairs than “omg, teh surge iz worken!”  Matthew Continetti has an amazing first name, is a good straight-political writer and, because of his youth, would have been a interesting pick. Caldwell and Douthat, in my mind, are the class of conservative commentary.  Not only are they both not orthodox conservatives, they both have the capacity to, like David Brooks, write columns that aren’t just reflecting the short term political situation or whatever controversy happens to flare up.

I’ve gone back and forth on Kristol.  I think that a good op-ed page needs to have some conservative voices, and despite David Brooks’ Bush and Iraq cheerleading, one gets the feeling that he was designed to soothe liberals into thinking he’s an OK dude.  Both Caldwell and Douthat have these qualities as well, but they are both such good and interesting writers, that their choice would have probably been lauded across the political spectrum.  Kristol, on the other hand, has called for the Times to be investigated for treason and, more importantly, just isn’t that good of a writer, both of which should have been enough for him not to get the job.

Another interesting thing this article gets at is how the Kristol pick was largely a panic move by the Times.  Because the right wing media, led by the Weekly Standard, had been relentlessly hammering the Times‘ pre-Iraq war coverage, they lurched right and “Judith Miller’s credulous front-page pieces on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction began appearing with increasing frequency.”  The right wing media had so effectively “worked the refs,” constantly lambasting the Times, that Sulzburger and Rosenthal felt compelled to throw out a piece of red meat and hire one of their most vociferous opponents.  Say what you will about liberal bias in the media, but left wing pressure has never forced the Times to hire an unabashed, Times-criticizing leftie like Eric Alterman, and likely never will.

This one line, from a former Times staffer, captures the mood best:

 ”My personal opinion is it’s an appalling choice,” a former veteran Times staffer said of Kristol’s appointment. “Not because he’s been wrong about so much, but because he called for prosecuting the Times for treason. You’re entitled to your opinion, but, in all due respect, go fuck yourself.”

When Someone Great is Gone

While it may seem like accepting an offer to be the Post’s online campaign editor in January of an election year is a pretty obvious move, I must say that I’m a bit disappointed that Garance Franke-Ruta isn’t blogging these days. Although she was often criticized (including by me) in certain sections of the blogosphere for both supporting Hillary Clinton and arguably being intellectual dishonest in criticizing the other candidates, it was undeniable that she really knew her shit when it came to writing about gender and the media.

Her discussion of the “secondary conversations” that women have with other women about politics was genuinely illuminating, and in wake of Clinton taking New Hampshire in the face of massively negative and sexist media coverage, I really want to know what she has to say. If you look back at some of her old posts, she seems downright prescient about the nasty turn campaign coverage took after Iowa. While there’s no doubt that I would disagree with much of what she would be writing, I certainly think that the blogosphere would be better off with her writing freely about Clinton and the media than with her writing boring campaign stories and working behind the scenes.

PS - What does it say about me that when writing about a working journalist, I refer to her in the past tense like she’s not around anymore? The blogosphere really is its own little world…

Which Conventional Wisdom Will Emerge? AND Steven White is Blogging Again

While I’m not exactly feeling great following the New Hampshire results, in the darkness, there is some hope.  Hope’s name is Steven White, who after a long hiatus, seems to be, for now, blogging at a reasonable pace again.  His  random thoughts on the pre-New Hampshire polling are all worth reading.  I want to highlight one point he makes about how polls aren’t just descriptive devices, but can shape the public discourse in very influential ways:

Pollsters need to start being more self-aware of how polls themselves because part of the campaign, in addition to second-guessing assumptions about where undecided voters will eventually break. The media is perhaps the real culprit though, because polling results necessarily explain the scene before those poll results become part of public discourse. If the way the poll results are debated in public discourse in itself changes public opinion, the value of public opinion research on time-specific things like primary elections becomes moot.

One emerging explanation for why Hillary did so well is because the media had anointed Obama and was so relentlessly critical of McCain.  Some are even suggesting that New Hampshire voters didn’t want to follow Iowa’s and the media’s lead — because they’re hearty, independent New Englanders, or something like that.  But, of course, had the undecideds broke to Obama, instead of Clinton, it would have been a sign of just how potent Iowa momentum is.  What really seems like the best explanation is that Clinton stepped up her game in the debate and the last few days of campaigning and was able to sway a lot of undecided voters, and especially women.

The really interesting takeaway from Clinton’s victory from a media perspective issue is the “humanzing moment.”  When it was relentlessly reported, many bloggers saw it as another sign that the media was sexist, biased against Clinton and focusing on trivial issues.  But when Clinton’s campaign chief is pointing to that moment as one of the causes of her victory, and Clinton herself obliquely referenced it in her victory speech, what are we supposed to think of the humanizing moment now?  Did the media help Clinton by playing the clip over and over?  Did the media’s focus on it, and the subsequent sexist undertones, turn women against the media, and thus for Clinton? It seems like all these scenarios are plausible, and we’ll never actually know the explanation for Clinton’s victory.  But that’s the weird thing about campaign reporting: an explanation will emerge and become the dominant conventional wisdom, and then will shape the race until the next primary, and then it will all change again.  Campaigns are weird.

Why, Isn’t That Nice?

Have I mentioned how great the New York Times Opinionater Blog is?  I mean, Tobin Harshaw and Chris Sullentrop are just great, smart guys.   And no, this burst of praise has nothing to do with Harshaw callling me a “teen super-blogger.” Nothing at all.

A second note that’s more relevant to the original post.  While I praised Kristol’s first column, James Fallows is right to say that the writing is a bit cliche-ridden and Kristol does, in fact, quote Michael Medved when he cited Michelle Malkin, but I think Yglesias’ line of criticism, that the Times made a mistake in hiring Kristol because “You need to read his work with a decoder ring to try to figure out what’s happening” is misguided. You do need a decoder ring to read Kristol — but that’s precisely why Kristol was a good hire.  In an election year, we get an inside view into the mind of a key and influential figure in the conservative media establishment.  While that mind may be sometimes horrifying and daft, he’s still an important dude, and when he talks, people listen and the political climate can even change.  And from the Times‘ perspective, the fact that there is so much buzz about a rather anodyne horse-race column is a vindication, more than anything, of their decision.  Frank Rich or Maureen Dowd haven’t been able to create this much discussion or (probably) draw as much traffic to the site recently as Kristol has on his first day.

Let’s Not Freak Out Here

While I’m as befuddled and disappointed that the Times is giving Kristol the Op-Ed gig, I’m even more confused by people who are self-righteously canceling their subscriptions and then telling the world about it.  I mean, could you play more into Kristol’s hands?   Surely he’s enjoying getting paid by the newspaper whose editors he thinks should be in jail for writing about government secrets, and I’m positive he’s just thrilled by seeing Times-reading liberals totally lose their cool with the thought of him spoiling those hallowed pages.  Just as moving to Canada was a bad idea after Bush won in 2004, cancelling your subscription will only be counter productive.  First of all, you’re depriving yourself of doing something you enjoyed before.  Second, you’re just being dumb because Kristol in only going to be on there once  a week.  So keep on reading the Times, and when your eyes happen to fall over Kristol’s garbage, just blog about it.

Diversity

Grrr…William Kristol is going to be a NY Times columnist. While I don’t mind there being conservative columnists, William Kristol isn’t just a conservative, he’s a total GOP hack(arguably this is OK to balance out Krugman, but I digress). And Andrew Sullivan is right, if you’re going to have two conservative columnists, having a pair of former Weekly Standard colleagues who are dyed-in-the-wool neoconservatives doesn’t really add much to the Op-Ed page. Couldn’t they get someone who isn’t so enthusiastic about invading Muslim countries and war-making in general?

While I know I don’t have a ton of readers, it would be cool if yall could give some suggestions in the comments.

My own are Ross Douthat and Ramesh Ponnuru.

Knowing the Numbers

Matt Yglesias is right to point out that since most journalists come from humanities backgrounds, they know very little about statistics, science or economics, and when they end up writing about those subjects, it can be pretty embarrassing.  While it’s especially embarrassing for the New York Times reporter writing about Christmas shopping to report nominal growth numbers numbers instead of inflation adjusted numbers, the epidemic of innumeracy among political reporters is even more worrying.  It’s impossible to write about politics well if you can’t interpret polling data or know some basic economics.

Yglesias says that J-Schools should add “math for journalists” to explain concepts like statistical significance, margin of error and some basic economics, but the real sad thing is that a lot of the basic math and science can be learned in high school.  Yglesias excerpts this Larry Summers speech in which he says, “We live in a society, and dare I say a University, where few would admit—and none would admit proudly—to not having read any plays by Shakespeare or to not knowing the meaning of the categorical imperative, but where it is all too common and all to acceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome or the meaning of exponential growth.” The scary thing is, by taking Algebra 2 and Biology (as I imagine most big time journalists did in high school) you already have genes, chromosomes and exponential growth covered.  Using myself as an example, at my high school, I’m on the “only OK at math track.”  This means that during my senior year(this year), I’m not taking calculus.  But have no fear, instead I’m taking AP Statistics and so I can understand those scary concepts like “standard deviation” or “margin of error.”  I imagine that most reporters at the NY Times/WaPo level were probably better at math than I am in high school, and yet we still suffer from this epidemic of innumeracy.  And while most people don’t take economics in high school, a journalist could probably get all the economics they need to know just from taking a basic Ec 100 class where they read Greg Mankiw’s textbook.

When Israeli Newspapers Hate Israel

First it was Commentary accusing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of being anti-Israel, now they’ve moved on to Israel’s leading newspaper, Haaertz.  Their sin is that they ran an Op-Ed by Tom Segev, who commemorated the 60th anniversary of the UN vote to partition British Palestine and create Israel by pointing out that Israel tarnishes its moral standing by a continued occupation.  This opinion, if I may note, is rather uncontroversial among diaspora Jews and Israeils.  Haaertz also committed the grave sin of criticizing a right wing Israeli think tank.  In Commentary world, this makes Haaertz likes the New York Times, but worse.

Giving Them What They Wanted

Jacob Heilbrunn, who wrote for TNR while Stephen Glass was there, has this damning anecdote about the culture of the magazine at that time:

For example, for his first cover story for the New Republic, Glass lamented the supposed refusal of African Americans to work as taxicab drivers in Washington, and conjured up the specter of Arab taxi drivers meeting to worship at a shrine underneath Dulles International Airport. Not only did this play into the gloomy view of Muslims that the magazine favored, but there were some at the New Republic who had been looking for years for someone to deplore the laziness of African Americans. No one on the staff had been willing to do it until Glass came along.

What’s interesting about this anecdote is how, at first blush, it seems rather juicy and you’re left wondering who at TNR thought this.  But then you realize that a mere year before Stephen Glass published his first article for TNR, Andrew Sullivan decided that the Bell Curve was worthy of a lengthy excerpt and the cover of the magazine.  So maybe it isn’t all that mysterious who was interested in “the laziness of African Americans.”

Scarcity of Good Analogies

David Sirota’s most recent column is a mostly unobjectionable exploration of how individuals will pollute a common resource (the air) since there is no price attached to putting CO2 in the atmosphere.  As a consequence, people continue polluting despite its negative consequences.  He uses the analogy of reclining your seat on a crowded plane:

Looking out over the rows, I saw that almost all aboard had pushed their seats back, invading the space of those behind them. This was bad for everyone. As any flier knows, the benefit of reclining is more than offset by the inconvenience of having a stranger in your lap. And yet, most passengers — including me — had contributed to the problem.

The seat recliner uses the public domain — in this case, space — and we have gotten used to using as much of that domain as we can, not just on planes but everywhere.

If this analogy rings any bells, it’s because Garret Hardin wrote a longer, more rigorous form of this very argument in 1968 with his seminal piece, The Tragedy of the Commons, which was actually inspired by British mathematician William Foster Lloyd’s statement of the problem in 1883.   While I won’t be surprised if the average reader of David Sirota’s columns isn’t aware of Hardin’s work, I’m relatively confident that Sirota himself is.  So does Hardin or his essay get a shout out? Of course not.  This all raises an interesting question, can one become a nationally syndicated columnist by just recyling the ideas of more impressive thinkers without attribution?  If so, that’s a pretty good gig.

If you want some good writing that’s also inspired by Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons, and explicitly acknowledges the influence, the blog Common Tragedies, written by four environmental economic think tankers, is the place to go.

W. Thomas Smith

I won’t try to give a recap of the entire controversy, but Thomas Edsall has a good one, and from the right, Malkin. This incident, where a NRO blogger made up stories about 5,000 Hezbollah fighters entering a Christian section of Beirut, which according to other journalists in Lebanon would have been an international news story and could have easily incited violence, is, of course, obviously will be compared with the Beuchamp/TNR snafu.

There is next to no resemblance, however. Beauchamp was doing narrative, first person reporting, and his only goal was to disclose his experiences of the war. Smith, on the other hand, was playing the role of a “real” journalist, informing his readers of developments in Lebanon. The fact that he was credulous enough to believe “reliable sources within the Cedar Revolution movement, as well as insiders within the Lebanese national security apparatus” and then report a major story (the 4,000 gunmen entering Christian Beirut) that no other journalist was aware of indicates that Smith is simply a lying, irrevocably biased and unprofessional individual.

He’s made it very clear that he hates Hezbollah, and moreover, doesn’t care that is stupid actions (like stealing a Hezbollah flag) probably endangered journalists. And while there is no problem with hating Hezbollah — especially as an ex Marine — it’s clear that he did everything to portray Hezbollah in an agressive, threatening life, at the expense of accuracy.

The contrast with Scott Thomas is clear. Franklin Foer, in his latest dispatch on the issue, admitted that the stories were impossible to verify, and thus he couldn’t stand by them. Smith’s stories, on the other hand, were fabricated and Kathryn-Jean Lopez was informed that Smith’s work was fishy six weeks ago. The fact that she still claims that he is a “reliable” reporter is pretty shocking.

PS - David Kenner, a journalist based in Lebanon, called out Smith’s BS weeks ago. Glenn Greenwald has probably the most complete summary of the entire issue.

Telling the Truth and What Fred Hiatt Thinks

Fred Hiatt is a very solipsistic man. He equates Obama’s profession to telling “hard truths” to saying things that, he, Fred Hiatt thinks are true. For example, criticizing Clinton for supporting hawkish legislation on Iran becomes “keeping with the pacifism of much of the Iowa caucus electorate.” Middle class tax credits, for no other reason than because Fred Hiatt thinks they’re silly, are shameful pandering to the primary electorate. Hiatt isn’t even satisfied with Obama’s boneheaded hyping of the Social Security crises, because Obama’s preferred fix — removing the payroll cap — isn’t Hiatt approved. The entire column is a display of the worst type of inside-the-beltway conventional wisdom . For a Democrat to be acceptable, he must turn against his fellow Democrats and kiss the ideological ring of Fred Hiatt. It’s unclear what any liberal politician would gain from the self-immolation Hiatt suggests, but that seems to not affect him in the least.

The Columbia Follies

One would think that after the entire Ahmadinejad incident, Columbia could get a break and just go trying to educate their students without a huge media event taking away their attention.  One would be wrong:

 A hangman’s noose was found hanging on the door of a black professor’s office at Columbia University Teacher’s College on Tuesday morning, prompting the police to start a hate-crime investigation.

Detectives with the New York Police Department’s hate-crime task force were investigating whether the noose, which was discovered on the fourth floor of the college at about 9:45 a.m., was put there by a rival professor or by a student who was angry over a dispute. Colleagues of the professor identified her as Madonna Constantine, 44, a prominent author, educator and psychologist. Ms. Constantine is a professor of psychology and education at Columbia and has published several books on race relations, including “Addressing Racism” in 2006 and “Strategies for Building Multicultural Competence in Mental Health and Educational Settings” in 2007.

While it is awful this type of lame racial intimidation is happening at a place like Columbia, the fact that I’m blogging about it and that it is on the front page of the Times website exposes one of the weird tics of the Times being the paper of record.  That tic is the nation reads about anything and everything about Columbia.  From Ahmadinejad, to the Minutemen controversy, to the tenure decisions in their Middle Eastern Studies department, Columbia is always a national news story.  Add on the fact that the Sun and the New York Post seem to have multiple reporters dedicated to exposing every bit of anti-Israel or biased wackiness that comes out of Columbia and one would think that the university was the most important in the universe.  Just another side effect of our New York-DC centric media universe.