Newsday erects a pay wall. 35 people subscribe. Newspaper editors collectively shudder. Total cost of Newsday’s failed experiment? A cool four million dollars.

I’ve argued before, and I will continue to argue, that there is nothing terribly unique about Sarah Palin as a politician other than the way in which her opponents and the media play right into her hands by treating her as if she is somehow uniquely important and/or devious.

Today, Dave Weigel documents another set of examples of this, demonstrating the ways in which the media’s (and, for that matter, Palin’s opponents’) insistence on paying attention to her Facebook and Twitter ramblings, making them into major stories, even if with the intention of disproving those ramblings.   The entire post is worth a read and does an excellent job of showing exactly how the media and some of her more vocal critics are playing right into Palin’s hands.  I especially liked this paragraph:

The problem is that Palin has put the political press in a submissive position, one in which the only information it prints about her comes from prepared statements or from Q&As with friendly interviewers. This isn’t something most politicians get away with, or would be allowed to get away with. But Palin has leveraged her celebrity — her ability to get ratings, the ardor of her fans and the bitterness of her critics — to win a truly unique relationship with the press. She is allowed to shape the public debate without actually engaging in it.

Weigel goes on to present a couple examples of this strategy in action, and concludes that Palin’s actions are “incredibly savvy,” but that the media’s response to those actions “is ridiculous, bordering on pathetic.”  I couldn’t agree more.  Again, please do read the whole thing.

James Fallows has an interesting post on the media’s reaction to Obama’s recent China visit.

Look, I get it. Sales figures are declining. Online ad revenue sucks. This whole fragmented media environment thing hasn’t exactly been gangbusters for business. That Internet video experiment flamed out faster than a Roman candle.

But I can’t hate on you for experimenting. Times are tough, and a new business environment probably demands a new approach to news gathering. And I wish you all the best. Really, I do. Unlike some folks, I have a lot of respect for the good work you put out on a regular basis. I shudder to think what life in the District and Northern Virginia would be like without Post beat reporters.  Other than the occasional beef with your op-ed page, I honestly think you put out a fine product.

But this latest gimmick is just . . . silly. After a year or two in the blogosphere, I’ve belatedly realized that the last thing we need is another jack-of-all-trades commentator. I mean, we’re dealing with an embarrassment of riches in that department.  Everyone and their mother seems to have an opinion, a Wordpress account, and access to Google. It’s been fun, but I think amateur punditry is rapidly reaching the point of diminishing returns. Except for my co-bloggers, that is. They’re still money.

But aside from all the wannabe pundits and amateur conspiracy theorists, the Internet has also managed to draw a bunch of experts out of the woodwork. Think tankers, economists, and lawyers – you name it, they all have blogs now. And they write. All. The. Time. It’s almost as if they enjoy sharing their expertise with the rest of us in an open, unmediated forum. These days, I don’t have to rely on a Post beat writer  to pull a few quotes from expert X on crisis Y – I can just fire up my RSS feed and check out expert X’s (frequently updated) blog for his or her totally comprehensive opinion.

So here’s my proposal. Instead of giving away valuable column space to some schmuck who can plausibly construct an opinion on every imaginable topic in one week or less, why not try giving one of these quirky expert types a shot? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a few financial analysts on-hand the next time a global financial crisis hits? What about a military guy to explain this whole War on Terrorism business? (Wait, you just canned Tom Ricks?) Or a lawyer, to parse the latest torture memos?

If I was running the show, I’d probably draft Jim Manzi. Or that bald dude from Rortybomb. I think you’re better off with either of those guys than a pale George Will imitator. But maybe that’s just me.

Love,

Will

A few days ago Conor wrote:

[C]able news networks should ban Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Mark Levin (I haven’t listened to the other hosts enough to make a judgment one way or another) — not because they are talk radio hosts, but because as radio personalities they consistently prove themselves to be intellectually dishonest, intemperate partisans whose very approach to public discourse is deeply destructive of it.

To which I replied, in the comments:

Intellectual dishonesty is not something you can scientifically pin down. One man’s intellectually dishonest pundit is another man’s political mentor. I generally don’t like these pundits, Conor, but the notion of banning them from cable news shows because you think they’re dishonest is reprehensible to me.

And, to just wrap up this lengthy quotation session, Conor, in a follow-up post asks:

I’ve got a question for E.D. and other like-minded commenters: Is there anything that would cause you to classify a political commentator like Rush Limbaugh as intellectually dishonest? What if I could demonstrate, for example, that he makes factually inaccurate statements, plays misleadingly edited audio clips, misrepresents the views of his political opponents, and uses obviously fallacious reasoning every single fortnight he is on the air, for years on end? Would that be sufficient evidence to objectively deem him intellectually dishonest, or would it still just be a matter of my opinion? Would it be sufficient to justify his exclusion from news programs?

Now, my response to this is fairly straightforward.

First off, I could care less whether or not a talk-radio pundit is intellectually dishonest.  I don’t think that disqualifies them or anyone else from appearing on a cable talk show.  I’m sure Conor could find an abundance of “misleadingly edited audio clips” for each of these talking heads, and I would even agree that these and others – including many cable TV talk show hosts – actively engage in falsity and propaganda.  Even so, that is part of political discourse.  We can’t just wish it away.  Misinformation will accompany us wherever we go. [Read more →]

It’s ‘Celebrate Old Media Day’ here at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen, and following Freddie on Gladwell on Free, I thought I’d chime in with my own appreciation for the news industry. Like Freddie, I’m not sure things are getting better, and I tend to think recent events bear this out. The revolution in Iran, widely-lauded by many as some sort of unmitigated triumph for the blogosphere, is perhaps the best example of why we need newspapers and news agencies. We need Tehran Bureaus (and no, I’m not talking about this one, however admirable its first-hand reporting has been) to understand what’s going on in Tehran. We need reporters on the ground, doing their best to formulate a systematic picture of what’s actually happening. And we need editors with experience, access, and money, with the wherewithal and resources to send reporters and analysts into dangerous places to get the news for us.

Maybe this is a romantic view of news gathering, but I think we’re guilty of buying into an equally romantic vision of the future of new media. Twitter, YouTube videos, first-hand accounts of clashes with riot police circulating around the blogs; these are all fascinating nuggets of information. But taken individually, detached from any broader context, they mean very little. In some cases, they’re downright deceptive. Does anyone think Twitter users in Tehran represent an accurate cross-section of Iranian opinion? I suspect rural farmers are slightly under-represented, though perhaps they’ve got a hashtag floating around somewhere (Reactionary Rural Iranians on Twitter – RRIT?). More significantly, does anyone think the spectrum of tweets highlighted on Andrew Sullivan’s blog represents an accurate cross-section of Iranian opinion? This is not to criticize Sullivan, but he’s one man with two interns, not a news agency with access to credible sources on the ground.

New media enthusiasts started out by criticizing the way newspapers report the news, but in recent years the debate seems to have shifted from a critique of their methodology to a critique of the very notion of professional news-gathering. We’ve gone from conservatives criticizing the media for liberal biases to conservatives criticizing the need for a “mainstream media” in the first place. So now we’re saddled with ridiculous outfits like Pajamas Media, which purports to replace newspapers but is in fact parasitically dependent on their reporting. Original commentary is all well and good, I suppose, but there’s not exactly a dearth of opinion floating around the blogosphere.

And now for my dirty little confession: I want somebody to filter my news consumption for me. I want editors and fact-checkers and analysts to sift through the news of the day, ferreting out false information and reporting on the relevant stuff. I want experts available to inform me. Yes, I know – I have no agency; I’m ceding control of information to corporate media conglomerates who want only to dictate my consumption patterns; I’m playing into the hands of an establishment that has no interest in serious reporting. But here’s the thing – I want a filter for news consumption. I’m not qualified to come up with informed opinions about the issues of the day absent some sort of expert analysis. I think blogs have levelled serious and worthy criticisms about the way we report the news in recent years, but these are reasons to change the filter, not get rid of it altogether.

Scott is right, of course.  The blogging community functions more like a sawed off shotgun than one of these, even when we’re dealing with topics that are undoubtedly long range.  Some pieces might hit the mark, but a lot of them won’t.  Nevertheless, there is something good and valuable to this sort of approach that I think Scott touches on a bit, but largely leaves out of his post.  [Read more →]

…just don’t steal from new media, okay?  Oh, the scandal of it all….  For shame!

Resting at the heart of  State of Play (2009) is not so much the personal relationships of the characters – who are mostly forgettable save for Crowe’s Cal McAffrey – or the grand (and oddly relevant) political conspiracy involving the Blackwater imitator PointCorp, but rather the struggle facing the newspaper itself.   McAffrey, a rugged, rough-around-the-edges reporter is as much a relic of the old journalistic “print only” days as the paper he works at, the Globe, a fictionalized version of the Wall Street Journal, replete with its new owner “Media Corps.”

In one scene he brags loudly about his “fifteen-year-old computer” while complaining about the Globe’s political blogger, and McAffrey’s later compatriot, Della (Rachel McAdams).   Later we see him punching numbers into a Blackberry; and still later, after whipping together some instant mashed potatoes in his clothes and paper-strewn bachelor pad, typing on a very modern Apple laptop, rendering his earlier complaint – “She could launch a Russian satellite with the gear she’s got” – rather silly.

Nevertheless, the crossroads of  New and Old media are vital to understanding the film.  In their first encounter, Cal britstles at his online co-worker when she inquires into the possible love affair between Cal’s friend, the young congressmen Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), and his recently deceased researcher, with the contemptuous parting line: ““I’ll need to read a few blogs in order to form an opinion.” [Read more →]

This whole Journolist fracas that has been kicking around lately has again dredged up some of my suspicions about how the right really views the institutions they consider to be on the left. Look, I don’t think it’s a big secret that similar listserves exist for right-of-center commentariat types, and indeed, there are also investigative (and thus supposedely neutral) journalists on those as well. I know a person or two on a list or two like that, and while I won’t out anybody about it, it’s not exactly a grand secret, either. So why such consternation from many on the right about Journolist when similar listservs exist for conservatives?

Partly, I think that this is a reflection of the conservative tendency to always see themselves as the minority, or as underdogs. This is in some instances a perfectly natural and human reaction to the genesis of conservatism and to the blanket assumption of unanimity that certain liberals have. Sometimes it’s the result of the self-mythologizing that has come to infect the conservative movement at almost every level, the kind which assures young movement conservatives that they are brave soldiers valiantly striving against an intractable, immoral force…. One way or another, though, I do think that it becomes a bit of a problem. This little imbroglio shows why. I don’t want to wade into the “liberal media” wars here, but suffice it to say that there are many conservatives in the upper echelons of the mainstream media, and they do have considerable power and influence. When many conservatives complain about something like the Journolist showing that conservatives just can’t get a shake, I know they are being sincere and genuinely see inequity there. But I don’t think that they have an accurate reflection of just how many powerful conservatives there are within media.

I think that there’s something else going on here, though. I think that this fracas shows the sense in which many conservatives pillory liberal institutions (or what they perceive as liberal institutions) and yet take them more seriously than the conservative analogs, and hold them to a higher standard.

Why, for example, does the right constantly harp on the supposed bias of the New York Times and yet ignore the overt bias of FOX News– a network that has been credibly accused of literally receiving daily talking points from the Bush Administration? Why the importance of media bias and neutrality when it comes to the NYT but not to FOX, or any other liberal/conservative media pairings? The boilerplate is that in fact FOX News isn’t biased, it just seems that way in relation to the biased mainstream media. More, though, I think the reason conservatives get genuinely nonplussed by what they see as favoritism by the NYT towards Obama comes from the fact that, for all their complaints, many conservatives know that the New York Times is a fantastic paper, and they take it seriously as an institution, in a way that they simply don’t take FOX News seriously, as much as they might like to. PBS is a very loaded example– a lot of conservatives don’t think there should be public broadcasting, and the fact that public money is being spent on what they see as biased programming increases the frustration. But my suspicion, and it’s only that, is also that conservatives quietly know that PBS puts out some high quality programming, and they look to PBS for balance because they know the institution has the quality and intellectual rigor necessary to deliver it.

You see this in education as well, by the way. As Michael Berube ably pointed out in What’s So Liberal About the Liberal Arts, conservatives have railed for years about the horrible decadent Marxism of elite universities, created alternative institutions like Liberty University (et al.) to combat the indoctrination and bias of our educational system– and yet still send their kids to the Harvards and Yales, even the Wesleyans and Oberlins and Bards. Conservative power brokers hate our top schools but still want their kids to go to school there, and if they are looking for legitimacy for their top scholars or ideas they look for that legitamcy to be conferred by the lefty academy. And it is worth asking why the quieter and implicit biases at these colleges are a problem while the far more obvious biases at schools like Liberty University go unchallenged by the conservative media. Is it really just that they see no bias at hand at your average conservative university? (I am quite confident that it’s harder to be a liberal student at Partrick Henry University than it is to be a conservative at Sarah Lawrence.) Or is it they they just don’t hold conservative universities to the same standards that they do universities they perceive as liberal?

The great unanswered question is what the relationship is between the perceived bias of these media and academic institutions, and the greatness that makes them worth complaining about in the first place. Is the New York Times a great paper that happens to be too liberal, so those interested in unbiased journalism or conservative politics should push it towards the center? Or is there some causal relationship, in one direction or the other, between the quality of the paper and its seeming leftward bent? And is it even fair to call the NYT a liberal paper at all, given i’s seeming bent in favor of globalism and its habit of supporting unilateral wars of aggression? Is Harvard a great university that somehow drifted leftward, to its detriment? Or is its standing as a great university in some way a product of its liberalism, or vice versa? All of these questions, I think, are difficult to sort through, but have interesting implications for how exactly we perceive institutional bias.

So with this whole Journolist issue, I find that part of what makes the discussion difficult is the unspoken fact that many conservatives simply are holding these liberal journalists and pundits to a higher standard. I don’t know for sure, I could be wrong. But I find a fury in much of the commentary about this issue that seems out of place with the realities of similar closed-door conversations among conservatives. I can’t help but wonder if what goes unsaid by those complaining is “you’re supposed to be better than this….”

Earlier, Freddie pointed to an excellent run-down of the various problems with the utterly thoughtless piece of legislation known as the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act. 

No sooner did he post that than I learned that, after months of pleas from the small business community, the New York Times (the so-called paper of record) finally decided to cover some of the central elements of the legislation.  Except that it was not an article discussing the potential costs of the legislation; nor was it even an article discussing the debate over the legislation at all.  No.  It was an unsigned editorial.  Alleging that CPSIA hasn’t been enforced aggressively enough, and that therefore the commissioner of the CPSC must go.   Any reading of the editorial makes clear that the Times did not bother to research what the law actually says or how it is supposed to be implemented.  Instead, it appears that they merely regurgitated the talking points of the handful of Dem politicians and interest groups who continue to support the law in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is an abject lesson in the problem of unintended consequences.

Not surprisingly, Walter Olson is angry.  He zones in on one particularly offensive paragraph of the editorial and destroys it. 

Well, I’m pretty angry myself.  So I think it’s worth doing a full fisking of this stinking heap of ignorance.  The editorial starts:

The American International Toy Fair in New York City this week has offered the newest and most tantalizing playthings in the world: walking plastic bugs, 3-D coloring sets, even Barbie, now 50 and wearing a golden outfit for the occasion. Yet one question hovered over the fair and its glittering new gizmos. Can the federal government assure consumers that the toys are safe?

Knowing a little bit about the Toy Fair, I can assure you, loyal readers, that the actual question hanging over the Fair was “Does anyone have any idea how you are going to comply with this law when it goes completely into effect without going out of business?”

As many parents, and ultimately manufacturers, learned the hard way, the Bush administration did not make the safety of toys and other products a priority. That led to the recall of millions of toys — some because of lead paint, others because of hazards such as small and powerful magnets that children swallowed. The Obama administration now has an opportunity to fill that regulatory gap by appointing new leadership for the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

So the problem here is that the Bush Administration failed to enforce existing safety laws, thereby leading to the recall of millions of toys?  Now, I’m no fan of the Bush Administration, but this seems a little silly.  How does the Times think that these toys were recalled?  Isn’t the remedy for a prohibited product getting on the market to recall it and to penalize the importer?  And isn’t that precisely what happened? And how many injuries were reported as a result of these products getting recalled?  The answer is one (sadly it was a death) – except that the product that caused that death was perfectly legal under the then-existing standards, and is actually still legal under the new CPSIA standards since it was made for an adult.

[Read more →]

If Freddie’s post is a perfect example of “declinist, doom and gloomism” mine will be an example of me at my most optimistic.  You see, to answer the question posed in the title of this post, I would have to say “of course not!”  Digital media and the ease with which it can be copied need only be met with creative solutions.  This is where the industries involved – music, film, television, and gaming – have all come up short.  They’ve worried about the same thing Freddie’s worrying about: illegal, and free, downloads, and what this will mean to their bottom line.

What have they done to prevent this wave of techno-piracy?  Well, a numuber of things actually.  At first the industries decided to go after the perps themselves.  They went after downloaders, internet businesses that somehow thought they could get away with distributing music for free without paying royalties (Napster, Youtube), and filed lawsuit after lawsuit.  This didn’t work so well.  For one, there were too many people with too many means of downloading and sharing music, videos, etc.

So then the industries tried to put copy-protections on their products.  DRM, various encryptions, etc. all of which were hacked within hours.  Freddie uses the example of the marker on the disc, which about sums up the ease with which pirates can get around all this fancy technology.

So then a few companies started embracing this new method of distribution.  Some record companies saw Youtube as a great way to market their music, and gave Youtube users free license to use their music in their videos.  Viacom was upset with the use of their tv clips on Youtube and set up their own online media instead.  You can watch basically any Comedy Central program for free now online at their official sites.  Some artists, like NIN and Radiohead, have adopted digitial distribution models, either giving their music away for free or simply selling it online.  Some have forgone record labels, others have signed contracts with concert promoters.

So let’s look at each industry individually. [Read more →]