Socialism

Date: May 13, 2009
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Bailout, Congressional GOP

Now the GOP is planning to have a meeting of the Republican National Committee to officially brand Democrats as “Democratic Socialists.”  I guess that’s going to replace “Democrat Party” as a common epithet.  I’m sure it will get under some Democrats’ skin, but on the whole, I think it will further marginalize the GOPer Party (rhymes with doper).  It makes them look petty in the absence of any substance.  But then who am I to say, heh?

Meanwhile, Steve Pearlstein of The Washington Post, hits it out of the park in describing the frustration of community bankers, who feel they are being punished for the sins of their larger brethren, a socialistic spreading of the pain.

The prudent bankers are right to be angry about having to pay for the recklessness of their competitors. What they conveniently overlook, however, is that their complaints are virtually identical to those being made by their credit card customers who have never missed a payment but are being hit with high interest rates because of the reckless borrowing of others.

After all, if it is unfair for prudent banks to be punished for the sins of reckless lenders, why is it any less unfair for prudent consumers to be punished for the sins of reckless borrowers?

We are now knee-deep in the metaphysics of risk pooling, which, as it turns out, is what both insurance and credit cards are all about.

Amen.

Best Stealer

Date: May 12, 2009
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Phillies

The Philadelphia Phillies right fielder Jayson Werth singled in the bottom of the eighth seventh in the game against the L.A. Dodgers tonight.  He then stole second base.  He then stole third.  And then he stole home.

Cool.

He Said, She Said

Date: May 12, 2009
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Media Criticism

I’ve been writing for awhile about my frustration with “he said, she said” journalism. (Here and here are examples.)  Press Think’s Jay Rosen discussed the problem last month – extensively – as he is wont to do.

[W]hat are the advantages of the newswriting formula I have derisively labeled “he said, she said?” Rather than treat it as a problem, approach it as a kind of solution to quandaries common on the reporting trail. When, for example, a screaming fight breaks out at the city council meeting and you don’t know who’s right, but you have to report it, he said, she said makes the story instantly writable. Not a problem, but a solution to the reporter’s (deadline!) problem.

When you kinda sorta recall that Hank Greenberg is a guy who shouldn’t necessarily get the benefit of the doubt in a dispute like this, but you don’t know the history well enough to import it into your account without a high risk of error, and yet you have to produce an error-free account for tomorrow’s paper because your editor expects of you just that… he said, she said gets you there.

Or when the Congressional Budget Office issues a report on ethanol and what it’s costing us in higher food prices, the AP reporter to whom the story is given could just summarize the report, but that’s a little too much like stenography, isn’t it? So the AP adds reactions from organized groups that are primed to react.

This is a low cost way of going beyond the report itself. A familiar battle of interpretations follows, with critics of ethanol underlining the costs and supporters stressing the benefits. Of course, the AP could try to sort out those competing claims, but that would take more time and background knowledge than it probably has available for a simple “CBO report issued” story. “Supporters of ethanol disagreed, saying the report was good news…” gets the job done.

Rosen thinks the times they are a changin’, and cites The Washington Post’s Dan Froomkin, who argues for more “bullshit calling.”

It takes a while to slog through, but as usual, Rosen covers all the bases.

What Is a Marriage?

Date: May 12, 2009
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Gay Rights

Marc Fisher has a column this morning asking why Marion Berry and Barack Obama seem to be dragging their feet on gay marriage.  The problem I see is the definition of gay marriage.

In 1996, Barack Obama responded to a Chicago newspaper’s questions about the issue with these words: "I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages."

Yet during his presidential campaign and on to today, the president has said his religious faith leads him to oppose same-sex marriage (he favors civil unions for homosexual couples).

I don’t know what the difference is between a gay marriage and a gay civil union.  If you argue that marriage is a religious sacrament, I don’t think anyone is arguing that churches must marry whoever asks.  Pastors are always free to say no and often do to straight couples for a variety of reasons.

(When I was planning to be married for the second time and wanted to ensure that our future children could be baptized in the Catholic Church, my wife and I met with a nun of a church.  When we both told her we were married before, she gave a grave “Hmmmm,” and when my wife told her that her previous husband was a Jew, the nun gave a louder “Hmmmm” with a wrinkle brow thrown in.  But the church relented.)

I asked a leader in the gay rights movement in Virginia about this, and he seemed to agree that this debate is obfuscated by terminology.

This question would be less confusing if we had not yoked civil marriage to the religious sacrament of marriage: We empower ministers, etc. to simultaneously perform the duties of religious officiant and agent of the state, and then refer to both institutions by the same word. In fact, a civil marriage is a civil union. A religious marriage is whatever a given religious community wants it to be, regardless of whether it’s civilly recognized.

Indeed, my second wife and I were married by a judge.  Therefore, I guess we’re not married, but “civil unioned.”  And I’ll bet that union would not prevent us from exercising our full rights as a “married” couple.

It seems this semantic dance we’re doing is silly, unless there is something I don’t understand about the difference between a civil union and a marriage.

White Girls

Date: May 12, 2009
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Crime, Racism

Bob Herbert had a good column yesterday critical of journalists propensity to think that a life is valued based on the color of skin, gender and beauty.  If the victim is a pretty white girl,the media will Chandra Levy-ize it. 

And let’s be clear about why young black male and female victims get much less coverage:  The prevailing attitude is that black deaths are the fault of black culture.  Funny that when a white guy goes on a rampage and kills his entire family (and note that it usually is a white guy), you don’t hear people blaming “white culture.”  Bob Herbert says it’s been going on a long time.

I remember as a young deputy city editor at The Daily News attending my first “sked meeting,” a large gathering of editors held every afternoon to consider which stories would go into the next morning’s paper and how they would be played.

I was sitting at the far end of a conference table from the editor who was conducting the meeting. The News had very seldom had a black person at those gatherings. Mine was the only black face in the room.

One of the stories being pitched was about a baby that had been killed on Long Island. The editor running the meeting was completely relaxed. He was sprawled in his chair and was holding a handful of papers. His legs were crossed.

“What color is that baby?” he asked.

A tremendous silence fell over the room. Everyone understood what he meant. If the baby was white, the chances were much better that the story was worth big play. It might be something to get excited about.

Annoyed at not getting a response, the editor repeated himself. Then his eyes caught mine staring down from the other end of the table.

…[T]he press is still very color conscious in the way it goes about covering murder. Editors may not be asking, “What color is that victim?” But, on some level, they’re still thinking it.

Which is why we’ve heard so little about an awful story out of Chicago. Some three dozen public school students have been murdered since the school year began, most of them shot to death. These children and teenagers have been killed in a wide variety of settings and situations — while riding a city bus, playing in parks, sitting in the back seats of cars, in gang disputes, in robberies, in the crossfire of sidewalk shootouts.

It’s an immense and continuing tragedy. But these were nearly all African-American or Latino kids, so the coverage has been scant.

Herbert might have added that even if the victim is a young, pretty, educated black girl, her death would not command the attention Chandra Levy or a whole host of white female victims received.  There is no explanation for it other than pure, blatant racism.

What’s Wrong with Print Journalism?

Date: May 8, 2009
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Media Criticism, Message, Message Delivery

Veteran reporter Walter Pincus has a fine piece in the Columbia Journalism Review examining what’s wrong with print journalism and how it can be saved.  It’s a good read and an educational review of how we got here.

One prescription he has is to, frankly, follow the lead of public relations professionals.  One of the tenants of the PR business is that repetition and a sustained effort is often needed to influence the news.  If you are trying to increase attendance, say, for a jazz festival, as I am doing for a small festival in Colorado, one news release is not going to cut.  Reporters and editors must become familiar with it, hear different facts over time and eventually a smart angle might get good coverage.  One tactic is to keep the information in small, quickly digestible bites.  Pincus thinks that’s a good prescription for keeping newspaper readers.

Over the past ten years, The Washington Post has won nineteen Pulitzer Prizes. But over that same period, we lost more than 120,000 readers. Why? My answer, unpopular among my colleagues, is that while many of these longer efforts were worthwhile, they took up space and resources that could have been used to give readers a wider selection of stories about what was going on, and that may have directly affected their lives. (emphasis added) Readers have limited time to spend on newspapers. The number has been twenty-five minutes, on average, for more than thirty years. In short, we have left behind our readers in our chase after glory.

…[O]wners, editors, and reporters should push issues they believe government is ignoring. They should do it factually and in articles short enough to read daily, but spread over time. That is how Americans absorb information—by repetition.  (emphasis added)

One issue that frustrates me in today’s print journalism is the “faux fairness” doctrine.  Print journalists too often act as secretaries transcribing comments and going to great pains to give each side its due, even for such one-sided issues as evolution.  There’s no other viewpoint here of any scientific import.  But conservative, for a long time, have effectively demanded and received this “faux fairness.”  Pincus gives us the history.

The celebrity of Woodward and Bernstein, along with financial rewards that accompanied Bob’s continued hard work, set new goals for others in the profession. At the same time, the impact an aroused press could have on government and politics was not missed by conservative supporters of the Nixon administration. Their response was twofold: demand more conservative columnists on newspaper op-ed pages and equal treatment in news columns for politicians and experts from “both sides” of issues. It was an informal way of applying the fairness doctrine, which was required of the electronic media, to print.

…Today, mainstream print and electronic media want to be neutral, presenting both or all sides as if they were refereeing a game in which only the players—the government and its opponents—can participate. They have increasingly become common carriers, transmitters of other people’s ideas and thoughts, irrespective of import, relevance, and at times even accuracy.

Pincus also provides a look at how the PR superstar Mike Deaver impacted the news.  What I didn’t know was that it wasn’t until Reagan’s administration that The Post almost mandated a daily White House story.

In 1981, at the beginning of the Reagan administration, Michael Deaver—one of the great public-relations men of our time—began to use early-morning “tech” sessions at the White House, which had been a way to help network producers plan the use of their camera crews each day, to shape the television news story for that evening. Deaver would say that President Reagan will appear in the Rose Garden to talk about his crime-prevention program and discuss it in terms of, say, Chicago and San Francisco. That would allow the networks to shoot B-roll. The president would appear in the Rose Garden as promised, make his statement, perhaps take a question or two, and vanish.

After a while, the network White House correspondents began to attend these sessions, and later print reporters began showing up, too. On days when the president went off to Camp David or his California ranch, Sam Donaldson, the ABC News White House correspondent, began his shouted questions to Reagan, and Reagan’s flip answers became the nightly news—and not just on television. The Washington Post, which prior to that time did not have a standing White House story each day (publishing one only when the president did something newsworthy), began to have similar daily coverage.

At the end of Reagan’s first year, David Broder, the Post’s political reporter, wrote a column about Reagan being among the least-involved presidents he had covered. In response, he got an onslaught of mail from people who said they saw Reagan every night on TV, working different issues. It was a triumph of public relations.

When President George H. W. Bush succeeded Reagan and occasionally drifted off the appointed subject, criticism began to appear that he “couldn’t stay on message.” When Bill Clinton did two, three, or four things in a day, critics went after him for “mixing up the daily message.” Being able to “stay on message” is now considered a presidential asset, perhaps even a requirement. Of course, the “message” is what the White House wants to present to the public.

You think newspaper are partisan?  Is The Post and the New York Times liberal, and the Washington Star and the Dallas Morning News conservative?  Well, that’s the way the founding fathers thought it should be, according to Pincus.

Newspapers across the U.S. were often begun by pamphleteers, political parties, or businessmen who wanted to get involved in local, state, or even national affairs. The founding editors of The New York Times started that newspaper as supporters of the Whig party and later switched to the Republican party. Adolph Ochs, who bought the Times in 1896, was helped in his negotiations by a letter from President Grover Cleveland, who wrote that Ochs’s management of The Chattanooga Times had “demonstrated such a faithful adherence to Democratic principles that I would be glad to see you in a larger sphere of usefulness.” The Washington Post’s publisher Phil Graham helped put Lyndon Johnson on the ticket with John F. Kennedy.

They used their presses to influence government, but that is what the founding fathers contemplated when they wrote the First Amendment. The idea was that citizens in a democracy were to read more than one paper or pamphlet, weigh all opinions and facts as presented, and make up their own minds. (emphasis added)

Which is what we web surfers do, isn’t it?

The only disappointment I had with Pincus’ article is that he teased us with a phenomenon I wished he had explore:  the proliferation of print media pontificating on television.

While most corporate owners were seeking increased earnings, higher stock prices, and bigger salaries, editors and reporters focused more on winning prizes or making television appearances.

What do print reporters do to get access?  Are they paid and how much?  Do they put aside objectivity for bombast, the drug of choice for cable news?  How does the appearance of T
he Post reporters on a cable show impact the coverage the paper gives – or downplays – about that media outlet?  What do journalist compromise to ensure a return engagement?

Still, it’s a good read.

What We Need in a Supreme Court Justice

Date: May 8, 2009
Author: Bob Griendling
Categories: Immigration, Supreme Court

President Obama is getting lots of advice about who should replace retiring Supreme Court justice David Souter.  Basically, the advice is all the same”  “Pick one that’s like me!”

The new justice should be Hispanic, or black, or a woman, or gay, as if being a member of a class will engender jurisprudence.

I won’t argue against the notion that certain life experiences can infuse one’s view of what the Constitution protects.  And the right’s criticism that the new justice should only interpret the law, not make it, and be a “strict constructionist” is laughable.  The right, after all, was perfectly happy to have a close majority of the Supreme Court decide an election.  And they wanted the courts to interfere with a husband’s right to make health decisions for his incurable, terminal wife.  Don’t make law, they say, unless it is a law they like.

Empathy is not what I’d look for in someone to take Souter’s seat. Experience is.  Experience in the law, sure, but also in the fresh experience in America.  I think the president should chose someone who is close to his or her Americanization.  By that I mean I’d like to see someone who, if not a naturalized citizen, is the offspring of immigrants.  Someone who saw his or her parents struggle to learn the language and customs, fight discrimination and sacrifice to allow their child to fulfill the America dream.

Certainly a few of the usual suspects bandied about as nominees would fit this description.  But the important thing is not that they are Hispanic in particular, but that they have witnessed first hand the Americanization process.  I think such a person has a particular outlook on what the American experience can mean.  I don’t want them to rule in any particular way on immigration or any other issue.  I just think American justice and freedom is a bit fresher in their minds than those of us who aren’t as close to  the immigrant experience.