"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."

--Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Thursday, August 28, 2014

The Sausage-Factory of Modern Journalism






















Like many people, and particularly as someone who grew up in St. Louis, lately I've been following the story of the Ferguson riots fairly closely.   Partly, however, my ability to follow it is a function of the enormous media presence that has descended on the small, near-in St. Louis suburb.   I doubt that I am alone in thinking that the media presence has exacerbated the tensions and, in effect, induced the riots, at least to a degree.   Certainly it has attracted protesters/activists/troublemakers from around the country to travel to Ferguson, a town that most probably had never heard of before the recent events.

Stick with me here... I've also lately been reading a truly great novel by the Russian journalist and novelist, Vasily Grossman, called Life and Fate.   Not published during his lifetime, it centers around the defense of Stalingrad.   It is not too much to say that it is the 20th Century's War and Peace.

At one point, Grossman's story focuses on an editor of a newspaper in Moscow.   Naturally, the paper is a propaganda tool for the regime and Stalin.   But this description of how the editor selects news and shapes what counts as news as a  way of educating his readers strikes me as very applicable to modern journalism:
He considered that the aim of his newspaper was to educate the reader -- not indiscriminately to disseminate chaotic information about all kinds of probably fortuitous events.   In his role as editor Sagaydak might consider it appropriate to pass over some event: a very bad harvest, an ideologically inconsistent poem, a formalist painting, an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease, an earthquake, or the destruction of a battleship.   He might prefer to close his eyes to a terrible fire in a mine or a tidal wave that had swept thousands of people off the face of the earth.   In his view these events had no meaning and he saw no reason why he should bring them to the notice of readers.... He himself felt that his power, his skill and experience as an editor were revealed by his ability to bring to the consciousness of his readers only those ideas that were necessary and of true educational benefit.
I thought of this passage this week when I read this terrific story by Matti Friedman about the press' coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this summer.    It raises many questions that editors and journalists, but mostly readers, should consider whenever they pick up a newspaper.   Why is this story so prominent?   What was the principle the editor applied in deciding to send reporters out to cover this rather than that?   Why are the lives of A,B and C apparently more important, more newsworthy than the lives of X, Y and Z? 

In short, it forces you to understand that, just like when you eat a hot dog that hot dog had to be made in a sausage factory somewhere, and how that factory works ought to matter to you, when you read a newspaper that newspaper was put together by human beings with biases and career interests and bosses and advertisers breathing down their necks, and how that all happens also ought to matter to you.

Anyway, here is just a bit of the article, but it's really worth reading all of it:
Staffing is the best measure of the importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50 countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the uprisings of the “Arab Spring” eventually erupted. 
To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel. I don’t mean to pick on the AP—the agency is wholly average, which makes it useful as an example. The big players in the news business practice groupthink, and these staffing arrangements were reflected across the herd. Staffing levels in Israel have decreased somewhat since the Arab uprisings began, but remain high. And when Israel flares up, as it did this summer, reporters are often moved from deadlier conflicts. Israel still trumps nearly everything else. 
The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives—that is, roughly the monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated 190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago. 
News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.

In the same way, news organizations have decided that the single young black man, Michael Brown, killed in an altercation with a white police officer in Ferguson two weeks ago somehow merits massive media coverage, while the dozens, if not hundreds, of young black men killed in St. Louis and Chicago and Detroit and all of the other dysfunctional American cities this summer by other young black men somehow doesn't merit such coverage, but instead merits what amounts to statistical reporting, as if those deaths, that violence, that carnage, was just the weather.   Five killed over the weekend on the South Side of Chicago is reported with the bland tone of "eighty-two degrees and partly cloudy."

Why?  

Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Girl of the Day - Adelaide Clemens of Rectify

We've just barely started watching Rectify, the series on the Sundance Channel that just finished its second season.   The show has to do with the return of a man, Daniel Holden, to a small town where he had grown up after twenty years on death row, from which he has been released because of newly-discovered DNA evidence.   Many still believe he committed the brutal rape and murder of a young girl, and many hope that he will be convicted in a new trial.   Meanwhile, the young man descends on the world of the Internet and cell phones and laptops like a Man from Mars; everything is new and strange and a little scary to him.   And, as the viewers, we don't know if his own alien strangeness is a sign of his innocence, or a sign that something dark and potentially murderous lurks within him.

In short, it looks like a very very good show.

A minor character so far, but I suspect a major character in the long run, is the devout Christian wife of Holden's step-brother, played by Adelaide Clemens, whom we first saw in the very good HBO version of Parade's End with Benedict Cumberbatch.   Here's a terrific scene early in the first season with her and Holden:



And, as always, here she is in her civvies:

This Pretty Much Says It All


Beware the Marquette University Poll
















Hot Air is highlighting the most recent Marquette University polling data which shows, bizarrely, that Governor Scott Walker leads Democratic challenger Mary Burke among registered voters, but somehow trails her among likely voters.   The poll overall assumes an enthusiasm gap in favor of the Democrats, skewing D+6 among likely voters.

Well, I call bullshit.   There is literally no way after what the Dems tried to do to Walker in the recall election, and after the recent primary win by pseudo-Democrat Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County (essentially running as the conservative in the Democratic primary for an unopposed office and opposed by liberals, including Mayor Bloomberg of New York) in which many Republicans, including yours truly, crossed over to vote, that the enthusiasm gap is somehow skewing Democratic in Wisconsin when everywhere else in the country it's skewing strongly for Republicans.    No f'in way.

Walker will win, and win fairly handily.   Mark it down.   He's done a good job, and everyone knows it.   Wisconsin Republicans are not going to sit on their hands at home when the Dems try to take it away.  

Monday, August 18, 2014

78 Days







































By the way, Election Day 2014 is 11 weeks from tomorrow.   I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the economy, Obamacare, Iraq, Ferguson, Benghazi, the VA scandal, the NSA scandal, the IRS scandal, Fast and Furious, the border crisis, "lost" emails, Executive Order power grabs, almost 200 rounds of golf, Martha's Vineyard vacations, the Ukraine, Afghanistan, etc., etc., etc., aren't going to miraculously get solved by then.   The overwhelming evidence of gross incompetence on the part of the Obama Administration and the Democratic Party as a whole (I'm 55 and St. Louis hasn't been run by Republicans in my lifetime) is in.   November is going to be a wipeout.   Then watch the media, Hollywood and the usual liberal suspects howl at the moon.   It's hard to stay rational when your entire worldview comes crashing down.

Girl of the Day - Chrissie Hynde

We happened to listen to The Pretenders on the radio recently, and I had forgotten how great Chrissie Hynde was.   So... enjoy!


Sunday, August 17, 2014

Kevin Williamson on Ferguson et al.

Kevin Ferguson at NRO sums up what the libs like to call the "root causes" of urban unrest such as the rioting we've seen over the past week in Ferguson, MO:

The more progressive the city, the worse a place it is to be poor and/or black. The most pronounced economic inequality in the United States is not in some Republican redoubt in Texas but in San Francisco, an extraordinarily expensive city in which half of all black households make do with less than $25,000 a year. Blacks in San Francisco are arrested on drug felonies at ten times their share of the general population. At 6 percent of the population, they represent 40 percent of those arrested for homicides. Whether you believe that that is the result of a racially biased criminal-justice system or the result of higher crime incidence related to socioeconomic conditions within black communities (or some combination of those factors) what is undeniable is that results for black Americans are far worse in our most progressive, Democrat-dominated cities than they are elsewhere. The progressives have had the run of things for a generation in these cities, and the results are precisely what you see.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Who Lost Iraq?

I'll give you a hint:



The naivete of Obama was on full display this morning again when he gave a CYA statement from the White House on Iraq. Essentially, in response to critics who say (correctly) that the turmoil over there would never have happened if he had successfully negotiated a Status of Forces Agreement and kept a small but useful deterrent of United States Armed Forces personnel in that country, Obama offered a platitude that (I'm paraphrasing) "if the different tribes and ethnicities and religions can't accommodate each other, then no amount of U.S. force can do any good."

Well. Let's boil that down... what Obama is saying is that, until history stops and utopia commences, prudential use of force to maintain order is useless. Using that same logic, why should we have a military at all? Why should we have police officers? Or borders? Or laws? Since human nature is what it is, and no amount of force can change it, why not just relax and watch Sports Center and make a tee time for later this afternoon?

Oh... yeah.