https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0ugNwDAAs8Zu19wBofFWovw1Q
https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/peter-beinart-mensch-2020-11-01.pptx
2020-11-01
Continue reading "Hoisted from the Archives: Peter Beinart Is a Mensch" »
https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0H6tSh1b1PeoKbJdZu5sSLDsg
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/opinion/sunday/we-asked-people-to-say-something-nice-about-trump-heres-what-we-heard.html
2020-11-01
Continue reading "Note to Self: Michael Kinsley" »
David Brooks says: "American democracy is in trouble because my journamalistic colleagues and I will not do our jobs on November 3":
Steve M.: Just Do Your Damn Jobs https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/09/just-do-your-damn-jobs.html: ‘David Brooks writes: "On the evening of Nov. 3... Donald Trump seems to be having an excellent night. Counting the votes cast at polling places, Trump is winning Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.... Trump quickly declares victory. So do many other Republican candidates. The media complains that it’s premature, but Trumpworld is ecstatic. Democrats know that as many as 40 percent of the ballots are mail-in and still being counted... but they can’t control the emotions of that night. It’s a gut punch." Why? Why should what's happening be a gut punch? Why should it be perceived that Donald Trump is having an excellent night?... What happens on TV on election nights? On MSNBC, to take one example, Steve Kornacki stands at a digital map and discusses not just the current vote totals but the nature of the votes that haven't been counted... that the untallied votes come from precincts or counties that are stronger for one party than another. He'd give us a sense of what it would take for the candidate who's trailing to make up the deficit. And up to a point in every contest he'd say: This is why we can't call the race yet…
Continue reading "David Brooks: "I Am Not Going to Do My Job on November 3"—Noted" »
Still mulling this over...
The insightful and usually highly reliable Michelle Goldberg makes, I think, a big mistake here.
& something bad does seem to happen often to many people when they start hanging around the New York Times newsroom. They lose their moral compass, and some (not Goldberg) forget that they are supposed to work for their readers and not for their insider sources and their bosses...
Ok, that ends the throad-clearing:
Here Goldberg half-defends Bennet and Sulzburger's decision to publish Senator Cotton's call for massive violence against demonstrating American citizens by the security services—even William F. Buckley would not go quite so far half a century ago, when all he was willing to say was that white supremacists in the south had the right to defend white supremacy against protesters "by any means necessary"—on the grounds that New York Times readers are ignorant of what people like Cotton think, "readers should grasp what people like Cotton are arguing... because it is being taken seriously" and "the very qualities that make Cotton's Op-Ed revolting...make him an important figure in Trump's Republican Party".
But to publish the thing without surrounding context—that's just to give Cotton a megaphone.
Yes, you can argue that the cure for speech is more speech. But you are wrong. The "more speech" has to appear in the appropriate time, place, and manner.
At some level, I think, Michelle Goldberg knows this. Near the end of her piece is one sentence: "The paper could convey his views by reporting on them, but for the Opinion section, letting him express them himself is more direct." Not "more effective" or "more informative" or "more useful". Why did she choose "direct"?
I think because she knew she could not use any of those other words:
Michelle Goldberg: Tom Cotton's Fascist Op-Ed https://nomoremister.blogspot.com/2020/06/michelle-goldberg-gives-her-employers.html: 'I figured he'd helpfully revealed himself as a dangerous authoritarian.... I can sort of appreciate my bosses' decision.... The Times Opinion section wants to include the views of people who support Trump... the very qualities that make Cotton's Op-Ed revolting—his strongman pretensions, his sneering apocalypticism—make him... important...
...Trump's Republican Party. (He might someday come to lead it.) Readers should grasp what people like Cotton are arguing, not because it's worth taking seriously but because it is being taken seriously, particularly by our mad and decomposing president.... The paper could convey his views by reporting on them, but for the Opinion section, letting him express them himself is more direct...
And Goldberg's conclusion? "Opinions of shape of earth differ". She won't say that Bennet's decision to publish was wrong. But she won't say that is right either. It is just as "crisis for our understandings of... marketplace[s] of ideas..."
It’s important to understand what the people around the president are thinking. But if they’re honest about what they’re thinking, it’s usually too disgusting to engage with. This creates a crisis for traditional understandings of how the so-called marketplace of ideas functions. It’s a subsidiary of the crisis that has the country on fire.
#highighted #journamalism #orangehairedbaboons #pubicsphere #moralresponsibility #2020-08-16
Note to Self: Moral fault attaches to all the enablers of the New York Times: just saying:
Duncan Black: Maybe It Matters Who Rules The World https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/08/maybe-it-matters-who-rules-world.html: ‘Maybe the actions of the King matter more than the palace intrigue and court gossip. Last night I was reminded of when Maggie Haberman went to bat for Sarah Sanders. Everyone should've known the deal at the WHCA dinner by then, when a Republican is president, anyway. Comedian makes jokes. The Right finds a joke that is OUT OF BOUNDS, throws a hissy fit, declares this proves HOW BIASED AND MEAN THE PRESS ARE TO THEM because a random comedian did a mean joke. Snowflakes melting on the fainting couch, always. And there was Maggie, going for the assist, convinced that Michelle Wolf had INSULTED THE LOOKS OF SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS, when Wolf had done no such thing. As is usually the case when someone at the Times fucks up, 8000 people explained it to her, but Maggie wouldn't back down. In 2 sets of tweets, basically:
Maggie Haberman @maggieNYT: That @PressSec sat and absorbed intense criticism of her physical appearance, her job performance, and so forth, instead of walking out, on national television, was impressive.
Michelle Wolf @michelleisawolf: Hey mags! All these jokes were about her despicable behavior. Sounds like you have some thoughts about her looks though? 😘
Maggie Haberman @maggieNYT: The jokes I watched/heard about her eye makeup weren’t making fun of her appearance? What were they?
Scott 'antisocial distancing' Slater @slaterama: Do better, @maggieNYT. Even dictionary example calls smokey 👀 "a makeup classic that never goes out of style." @michelleisawolf said Sanders "burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye." Pls pinpoint the "intense criticism of her physical appearance."
.#journamalism #moralresponsibility #newyorktimes #notetoself #2020-08-07
Duncan Black: Eschaton: The Anti-Mask Brigade https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/07/the-anti-mask-brigade.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/bRuz+(Eschaton): ‘I got the play a couple of months ago. Sure it was gross and cynical—these are, charitably, gross and cynical people—but it made sense. The evil libs had a problem in big cities like New York and were trying to impose their Stalinist precautions on the rest of the country, mostly to make Dear Leader look bad. Even New York Times columnist Bedbug Stephens agreed! But now cases are booming elsewhere and they're in their own bases trying to murder their base…
.#coronavirus #moralresponsibility #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publichealth #2020-07-09
Occasionally—not often—and largely by accident, Peggy Noon writes something true: Peggy Noonan: On Some Things, Americans Can AgreeJ https://github.com/braddelong/public-files/blob/master/readings/article-noonan-deplorable.pdf: ‘[Trump] explicitly patronized his own followers... as if he was saying: I’m going to show you how stupid I know you are. I’ll give you crude and gross imagery and you’ll love it because you’re crude and gross people. And some would love it. But... not most.... His base... his 40%... [he will] keep it.... He is proud of his many billionaire friends and think they love him. They don’t. Their support is utterly transactional. They’re embarrassed by him. When they begin to think he won’t be re-elected they will turn, and it will be bloody and on a dime.... He should give an Oval Office address announcing he’s leaving.... He won’t be outshone by his successor. Network producers will listen to Mike Pence once and say, “Let’s do ‘Shark Week.’ ” But you know, America could use a shark week… #journamalism #noted #2020-06-08
Duncan Black: You Expect Us To Read Our Own Opinion Page? https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/06/you-expect-us-to-read-our-own-opinion.html: ‘"Hi James, do you have anything to say?" "We published Cotton’s argument in part because we’ve committed to Times readers to provide a debate on important questions like this." "James, did you even read it?" "Uh, no." Society can only survive so many generations of elite failsons running everything. They're stupid and lazy and immoral and dishonest and they think they're smarter than you because of where they fucking went to high school (James went to St. Albans, you know)… #journamalism #noted #tags #2020-06-08
There are many, many reasons why moral fault attaches to anybody who pays money to or boosts the influence of the New York Times. This is one: Thomas L. Friedman (2003): Because We Could: "The failure of the Bush team to produce any weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.'s) in Iraq is becoming a big, big story. But is it the real story we should be concerned with? No. It was the wrong issue before the war, and it's the wrong issue now. Why? Because there were actually four reasons for this war: the real reason, the right reason, the moral reason and the stated reason...
...The ''real reason'' for this war, which was never stated, was that after 9/11 America needed to hit someone in the Arab-Muslim world. Afghanistan wasn't enough. Because a terrorism bubble had built up over there—a bubble that posed a real threat to the open societies of the West and needed to be punctured. This terrorism bubble said that plowing airplanes into the World Trade Center was O.K., having Muslim preachers say it was O.K. was O.K., having state-run newspapers call people who did such things ''martyrs'' was O.K. and allowing Muslim charities to raise money for such ''martyrs'' was O.K. Not only was all this seen as O.K., there was a feeling among radical Muslims that suicide bombing would level the balance of power between the Arab world and the West, because we had gone soft and their activists were ready to die.
The only way to puncture that bubble was for American soldiers, men and women, to go into the heart of the Arab-Muslim world, house to house, and make clear that we are ready to kill, and to die, to prevent our open society from being undermined by this terrorism bubble. Smashing Saudi Arabia or Syria would have been fine. But we hit Saddam for one simple reason: because we could, and because he deserved it and because he was right in the heart of that world. And don't believe the nonsense that this had no effect. Every neighboring government -- and 98 percent of terrorism is about what governments let happen -- got the message. If you talk to U.S. soldiers in Iraq they will tell you this is what the war was about...
Very smart thoughts. But I don’t think Jack Balkin stresses the bottom line strongly enough. The true bottom line, I think, is that advertising-supported social media must die:
Jack Balkin: Fixing Social Media: Media Apocalypse, Episode 2 https://balkin.blogspot.com/2020/05/fixing-social-media-media-apocalypse.html: ‘Three key takeaways: First, it's the business models, stupid! Instead of focusing on specific fights over content moderation, focus on the way that social media companies make money: the control of digital advertising networks and the collection and use of personal data, which drive social media companies to choose policies that have harmful social effects. Second, content moderation is necessary for social media to perform their appropriate social function in the new digital public sphere. Third, if content moderation is necessary, it's important to have many different social media sites, with many different affordances and rules, and not just a few very large ones. We need social media federalism, not social media centralization.... Our current degree of centralization is not an inevitable feature of the social media landscape. It is the product of legal rules that we can and should change. For more along these lines, see my ACM lecture here… #journamalism #noted #publicsphere #2020-06-04
IMHO, It is long past time for advertising-supported social media to die. The incentives facing Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and company are extremely poisonous. And—unlike Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, even Elon Musk—Jack and Mark regard themselves as in the business of piling up as much money as they can, rather than as enabling and guiding human progress. It needs to stop. They are, as somebody-or-other said, our modern tobacco companies—only profiting from human addiction to controversy and polarization and susceptibility to misinformation rather than human addiction to nicotine: Brian Klaas: 'Trump took the tragic death of a young woman, Lori Klausutis https://twitter.com/brianklaas/status/1265239671140909058, and has tried to exploit it for political gain in the most disgusting way imaginable. This letter from her husband to [Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey] asking him to delete Trump’s sick tweets is a heart-wrenching must read.…
#fascism #journamalism #moralresponsibility #noted #orangehairedbaboons #publicsphere #2020-05-27
Jason #StayHome Kint: The industry and publishers chased Facebook’s news, learning only later they may have been fraudently deceived... https://twitter.com/jason_kint/status/1263762461271998466. Since Facebook was gifted global news headlines yesterday by prognosticating on work from home 5-10yrs from now, a reminder Facebook is supposed to be “mostly video” this year.... It was one of the long list of reasons not to trust Facebook. Did Facebook’s faulty data push news publishers to make terrible decisions on video? Publishers' "pivot to video" was driven largely by a belief that if Facebook was seeing users, in massive numbers, shift to video from text, the trend must be real...
Continue reading "Remembering Facerbook's Video Semi?-Fraud" »
Duncan Black: Two Sources Close To Jared And Ivanka https://www.eschatonblog.com/2020/05/two-sources-close-to-jared-and-ivanka.html: ‘It did diminish, somewhat, but I wonder if any of the journalists who served as their de facto PR agents for a couple of years feel bad. Haha I keed.…
Hoisted from 2008: Oh Noes!!: "Oh Noes!! The New York Times crash-and-burn watch continues. To Ben Stein the Times has added...
CATHERINE RAMPELL: 'I’m pleased to introduce Casey B. Mulligan, an economist at the University of Chicago, as the newest addition to our “Daily Economist” panel...
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
Casey Mulligan says—wait for it—that the reason that unemployment is the 7% it is right now rather than the 4.4% it was two years ago because workers today face "financial incentives that encourage them not to work":
Are Employers Unwilling to Hire, or Are Some Workers Unwilling to Work?: 'Employment has been falling over the past year... if total hours worked had continued the upward trend they had been on in the years before the recession, they would be 4.7 percent higher than they are now.... [Today s]ome employees face financial incentives that encourage them not to work.... [T]he decreased employment is explained more by reductions in the supply of labor (the willingness of people to work) and less by the demand for labor (the number of workers that employers need to hire)...
If the New York Times has a future, it is as a trusted intermediary. This does not help...
Note to Self: Council on Foreign Relations: Economics, Identity, and the Democratic Recession: Session Two: It’s not clear to me thatanyone who thought they had a lot of political influence twenty years ago now thinks they have more save, possibly, for Sheldon Adelson and our strange modern analog of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick: Rupert the Kingmaker. But even Rupert...
Look: the basic business model of Fox News is there are many people in America whose view of the world was not being validated by any of the major news networks. This was a market opportunity. Rupert Murdoch pursued this market opportunity. The form in which Roger Ailes and his successors pursued it took the form of scaring the piss out of old people, so their eyeballs would stay glued to the screen so they could be sold fake diabetes cures and overpriced gold funds.
But it is not at all clear to me that Rupert the Kingmaker thinks he’s in control now. There are other people willing to play the same game. Fox News tried to go in against Trump a little bit in 2016, and yet very quickly reversed course. I would like someone to tell me why: what did they see that made them not just get in bed with Trump but tie themselves spread-eagled to the mattress? David From once said: "We thought Fox News worked for us, but then we learned we worked for Fox News." Who, now, does Fox News think it must work for—or lose its audience and its profits?
Continue reading "Yes, the New York Times Is Corrupt AF: Why Do You Ask?" »
There are many things desperately wrong with people who write for the New York Times. Here we have Jack Nicas, boy mocking girl for crying, which is a not-good and very middle-school look: Jack Nicas: "What's strange about Apple events https://twitter.com/elcush/status/1171863358137454593: Many Apple bloggers act as fans, not journalists. One person in the media section literally gave Tim Cook a standing ovation; another cried during an Apple Watch ad...
Ellen Cushing: i was the crying reporter sitting next to Jack. I was crying because it’s a video about people with disabilities overcoming challenges and also sometimes my face makes water whether I want it to or not??
Note to Self: Why was Jonathan Weisman's economic policy reporting for the Washington Post so execrable back in the mid-2000s? A person who was, as they say, very, very, very, very, very familiar with the matter:
Jonathan's big problem is that he's not that deep into the issues, and he has no backup. There's nobody that he can go to in that building to tell him 'this was how X was trying to mislead you' or 'this is Y's history' or 'be very careful here: if you get this detail Z wrong, they'll come down on you extremely hard'...
In retrospect, I think we can conclude that it was not that Weisman was mismanaged by the Washington Post editorial staff: I'm happy to believe that there was gross mismanagement, but gross mismanagement does not lead one to contrast the view of Paul Krugman with that of Donald Luskin or of a White House aide who does not dare give his name and say "economists furiously debate". That is someone who has made a deliberate decision to make their career by being a complaisant mouthpiece for insider anonymous sources
Note to Self: Let me say that I am 100% behind Roxane Gay here. When Jonathan Weisman was covering economics and monetary policy, he was a "Paul Krugman and Donald Luskin disagree about the shape of the earth: who can tell who is right?" guy. Those of us who talked to him took the incompetence for granted—and more than that: a willful desire to not understand the issues because then he might be unable to properly suck up to the sources he wished to suck up too.
Given that history, my mind is closed on the incompetence question. And I'm happy to listen on the racism one:
Roxane Gay: "Guys, Jonathan Weisman emailed me to say he thinks I owe him an 'enormous apology'. The audacity and entitlement of white men is fucking incredible. I am legitimately shocked. Like. What? He also emailed my assistant. WTF? And he also emailed Harper Collins. Uhh, @nytimes, get your boy...
What the Washington Post's headline writers thought that Bob Woodward's The Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House was about back in 1994:
Clinton Felt Blindsided Over Slashed Initiatives; 'We're Losing Our Soul' in Cutting Deficit. President and the Fed Forge New Relationship; Greenspan's Economics Lesson Etches Deep Impression in the Clinton Plan. Memo From Consultants Rattles the White House; 'Turkey' of a[n Economic Deficit-Reduction] Plan Still Needed Selling. A War Among Advisers For the President's Soul; Decision-Making, Clarity of Vision Suffer
According to the Washington Post's headline writers (and according to pretty damn near everybody else who read The Agenda that I have talked to), Woodward's book tells the story of a president who (a) feels "blindsided" by their actions, (b) feels that the policies his administration is adopting means that he is losing his soul, (c) finds that the Republican Federal Reserve Chair's views are etching a deep impression on policy, (d) finds himself stuck with a "turkey" of an economic plan, (e) has advisors who fight fiercely in order to (f) control a wishy-washy president, and as a result (g) decision-making suffers and (h) clarity of vision is lost.
Now I was there.
Can someone parse this for me? On the one hand "I should have... I could also have... voices... ought to have been considered..." and yet "an apology would be the wrong response". Is the claim "I made bad mistakes, but I am proud that I made them, and anyone who wants me to try to fix things should get stuffed?" Isn't that what "I refuse to apologize"! means?: Ian Buruma: An Apology Would Be the Wrong Response: "I should have insisted that the accusations against him were spelt out in more detail. He omitted the fact that he had caused injury, with reports of one woman suffering a cracked rib, and he didn’t mention the large number of women who had accused him. I could also have made it clear that our intention had not been to exonerate him, let alone to excuse violence against women.... The voices of his accusers ought to have been considered, as a response to his evasions...
A question: Benedict Trump: @ProtectronArmy: "I wonder if Kudlow was pro or con QE when Obama was President...
I answer: He was against QE when Obama was President. Why would you think otherwise?:
Brad DeLong: @delong: Kudlow was against QE under Obama: The zero-interest-rate target will unfortunately remain in place much longer—until unemployment goes to 6.5 percent or less. Given rising tax and regulatory threats from Washington, and the job-stopping Obamacare regulations and mandates, unemployment may be sticky on the downside. But the big news is that the Fed may stop growing its balance sheet sooner than most market people expect. As someone who is totally uncomfortable with the Fed’s $4 trillion balance sheet and reserve-creation process, I welcome
Larry Kudlow (2013): https://t.co/U85MOHlB73: The zero-interest-rate target will unfortunately remain in place much longer—until unemployment goes to 6.5 percent or less. Given rising tax and regulatory threats from Washington, and the job-stopping Obamacare regulations and mandates, unemployment may be sticky on the downside. But the big news is that the Fed may stop growing its balance sheet sooner than most market people expect. As someone who is totally uncomfortable with the Fed’s $4 trillion balance sheet and reserve-creation process, I welcome the news. The central bank is listening to its critics, both inside and out...
They have no morals and no shame.
The Financial Times—which in the circles I travel is widely-regarded as the only real newspaper, as the only one where when it publishes new things they are likely to be true while also publishing more than its quota of true things that are new, rather than taking its core mission to be pleasing its well-connected sources first and its advertisers second—should not have published this. Ian Buruma's transgression was that he took his authority and the authority fo the New York Review of Books and used it give a man—Jian Ghomeshi—who had assaulted more than 20 women space to lie, uncorrected. And the FT should correct this story, and add to the article a headnote noting that Ian Buruma does not even now understand how he was unprofessional as an editor: Ian Buruma: Editing in an Age of Outrage: "Ian Buruma lost his job at the NYRB after publishing a controversial article. Here he reflects on what went wrong... '[My] transgression was not that any particular view was defended, but that a person accused of sexual abuses should be heard at all...
Dan Drezner: The Worst Piece Of Conventional Wisdom You Will Read This Year: "OK, so, a few things.... Stagflation in the 1970s was caused primarily by an inward shift of the aggregate supply curve due to a surge in commodity prices, particularly energy. Some central banks responded with accommodating monetary policies that accelerated inflation even further. Fiscal policy was an innocent bystander to this whole shebang. So I honestly don’t know what the hell Kinsley is talking about...
Continue reading "Modern Dan Drezner Is Much Better..." »
Bret Stephens is an ass. As are his bosses. Sister Souljah in context: 1992: In Her Own Disputed Words; Transcript of Interview That Spawned Souljah's Story:
Sister Souljah. Black people from the underclass and the so-called lower class do not respect the institutions of white America, which is why you can cart as many black people out on the television as you want to tell people in the lower and underclass that that was stupid, but they don't care what you say. You don't care about their lives, haven't added anything to the quality of their lives, haven't affectuated anything for the quality of their lives, and then expect them to respond to your opinions which mean absolutely nothing? Why would they?
Every time I try to get out, they drag me back in...
Now I am being told that nobody with any audience ever thought 15/hour in California was a really bad idea. So time to recall this:
Monday Smackdown/Hoisted from Others' Archives: A correspondent asks me for help: Chuck Lane is being used as an authority on the California's 15/hr by 2023 minimum wage proposal. And Chuck Lane says:
A hot concept in wonkdom these days is “evidence-based policymaking.”… Gov. Jerry Brown and the state’s labor leaders have announced legislation to raise the state’s minimum wage… to $15 per hour…. Whatever else might be said about this plan, it does not represent an exercise in evidence-based policymaking. To the contrary: There’s a total lack of evidence that the potential benefits would outweigh potential costs—and ample reason to worry they would not…
: Why I Don’t Need to Take Charles Lane Seriously: "The Washington Post’s Chuck Lane wrote an op-ed arguing in favor of Jeff Flake’s amendment...
...to cut National Science Foundation funding for political science. In fact, Lane raised the ante, arguing that NSF should stop funding all of the social sciences, full stop. Now, I can respect someone who tries to make the argument that the opportunity costs of funding the social sciences are big enough that this is where a budget cut should take place. It’s harder, however, to respect someone who:
2019-04-05 12:30 PM PST: Ali Velshi: MSNBC Live
Greetings:
I bring you greetings from Laura Tyson, whose office I was hanging out here for an hour or so this morning.
The background is a green-screened one:
Continue reading "On MSNBC Right Now... As Always, Much More to Say than I Could..." »
At one point, Jill Abramson formerly of the New York Times had something like this—the lead of an written by Jake Malooley—on her computer screen:
She then copied the text from "when..." to the second "...Darfur" and pasted the three sentences it into an editing window in her manuscript:
She then did not:
Instead, she first deleted the word "Jason":
The learned and much-worth-listening-to Eric Alterman has darkened my day. I do, however, think it is time for everyone whose career was boosted by making the Faustian bargain of catering to Marty Peretz's bigotries, prejudices, and envies to exit the public sphere, quietly. Perhaps I should make an exception for Peter Beinart, who has done some atonement: Martin Peretz (2007): Tyran-a-Soros: "GEORGE SOROS LUNCHED with some reporters on Saturday at Davos. He talked about spending $600 million on civil society projects during the 1990s, then trying to cut back to $300 million, and how this year it will be between $450 and $500 million. His new projects aim, in Floyd Norris’s words, to promote a 'common European foreign policy' (read: an anti-American foreign policy) and also to study the integration (or so he thinks) of Muslims in eleven European cities...
Five things to start off the reading list:
Josh Marshall: Why the Outlook for Digital Media Behemoths is Worse than You Think: "There are reasons to own a media company that posts consistent if modest profits.... even reasons to own media companies that lose predictable and relatively small amounts of money every year. The problem is that the people who currently own these companies aren’t in it for any of those reasons.... News organization don’t need to be wildly profitable. But the people who own most digital media today are owning for wild profitability or... the credible hope of future wild profitability... to sell the media companies for big returns. That’s a problem...
Hoisted from the Archives: Adrian Wooldridge Is... the Vicar of Bray!:
"The Illustrious House of Hannover,
And Protestant succession,
To these I lustily will swear,
Whilst they can keep possession:
For in my Faith, and Loyalty,
I never once will faulter,
But George, my lawful king shall be,
Except the Times shou'd alter."
Continue reading "Adrian Wooldridge Is... the Vicar of Bray!: Hoisted from the Archives" »
What is going on this morning over at National Review? Is it worth reading? I read 10 articles, and graded each ops 0-to-10 scale. Total score (out of 100); -45. Beam me up, Scotty. There is no intelligent life there at all:
Danny Blanchflower: "Hey Stephen Moore you need to withdraw this lie NOW: ‘Pay gains in real terms this year are now estimated at 3 percent—one of the biggest increases in two decades’. Real hrly earnings rose 0.8% real weekly 0.5%...
Jon Schwarz: The 10 Most Awful Articles in the Weekly Standard’s Short Life I: "'The Collapse of the Dream Palaces' by David Brooks, 2003. The top four places on this list rightfully belong to the Weekly Standard’s voluble case for, and defense of, the Iraq War. And this David Brooks article is unquestionably the most horrifying of them all.... What you may find is that it makes you feel as though a sweaty, middle-aged man is pointing a gun at you and fervently explaining that people like you who wear red shirts are human scum and you, all of you, are about to get what’s coming to you, at last. Then you look down and notice you are not wearing a red shirt, but the man with the gun is. When you’re finished reading the piece, remember that this was published just five months before the New York Times hired David Brooks as an op-ed writer. In other words, the Times saw this gibbering, so disconnected from reality it is functionally insane, and thought: This is exactly who we want explaining the world to our readers...
#shouldread #journamalism #orangehairedbaboons #moralresponsibility
Unfogged continues to be an oasis of sanity: Heebie-Jeebie: Post-WASP Sad Feels: "I feel like I ought to post on that dumb-dumb Douthat op-ed where he's teary about WASPS of yore and misses that time they ruled the country, but it's so dull that I can't get through it...
These may be the paragraphs written in this millennium that have aged least well: John Micklethwaite and Adrian Woodridge: The "Hastert' and "Hastertland" Paragraphs from Wooldridge and Micklethwaite's "The Right Nation": "Looking at 'Pelosiville' and 'Hastertland', it is not difficult to see why American politics has shifted to the Right. If American politics is a seesaw, it is an unevenly balanced one. Imagine Dennis Hastert at one end of the seesaw and Nancy Pelosi on the other end, and you have some idea about which party is sitting with its legs dangling in the air. In the war between the two Americas, Hastertland has been winning...
These may be the paragraphs written in this millennium that have aged least well: John Micklethwaite and Adrian Woodridge: The "Hastert' and "Hastertland" Paragraphs from Wooldridge and Micklethwaite's "The Right Nation": "Looking at 'Pelosiville' and 'Hastertland', it is not difficult to see why American politics has shifted to the Right. If American politics is a seesaw, it is an unevenly balanced one. Imagine Dennis Hastert at one end of the seesaw and Nancy Pelosi on the other end, and you have some idea about which party is sitting with its legs dangling in the air. In the war between the two Americas, Hastertland has been winning...
The New York Times beclouds itself with: Bret Stephens: The Midterm Results Are a Warning to the Democrats: "Stop manning imaginary barricades, and start building real bridges to the other America. This week’s elections were, at most, a very modest rebuke of a president reviled by many of his opponents, this columnist included, as an unprecedented danger to the health of liberal democracy at home and abroad. The American people don’t entirely agree. We might consider listening to them a bit more—and to ourselves somewhat less. A 27-seat swing gave Democrats control of the House.... The Republican gain in the Senate... underscores what a non-wave election this was...
One interesting thing here is that Jonathan Swift was one of the biggest political liars of his generation—the anti-Whig Breitbart of his day, in some respects: Jonathan Swift (2010): Political Lying: "A political liar... ought to have but a short memory.... The superiority of his genius consists in nothing else but an inexhaustible fund of political lies, which he plentifully distributes every minute he speaks, and by an unparalleled generosity forgets, and consequently contradicts, the next half hour. He never yet considered whether any proposition were true or false, but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company.... You... will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or not: the only remedy is to suppose, that you have heard some inarticulate sounds, without any meaning at all...
The most both-sidesee bothsidism ever is in—where else?—the New York Times!
And it is Ross Douthat!
#journamalism
Author: Sigh Yet More Cleaning Up After the Cockroaches: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal: "A normal person, reading Jonathan Weisman in the Washington Post on June 8, would conclude (i) that Steven Moore is an economist, and (ii) that Kevin Hassett, Eric Engen, Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and many other economists are 'reevaluating' the view that budget deficits are a significant minus for the economy, believe that 'the argument against deficits is more about self-righteous moralism than economics', and broadly agree with Richard Cheney's declaration that 'deficits don't matter'...
I did not punish this a year ago because it seemed... intemperate. Now it seems not extreme enough. Perhaps if Clive Crook and his colleagues had dared to say: "The Brexiters are bad people pursuing bad policies. They need to be stopped." Instead he and his ilk talked about how important it was that the U.K . have "a fundamentally new relationship" with the E.U., and that the E.U. should bend over backward to make the Brexiters look as good as possible. Not a good look:
Live from the Orange-Haired Baboon Cage: Across my desk this morning comes this. And it makes me ask: Whatever happened to the sharp, thoughtful, and witty Clive Crook of 2000? Brexiteers lied, and said that Brexit would bring £350 million a week to boost Britain's National Health Service, that Britons would still be able to live in Europe at will while kicking undesirable continentals out, and that Briton would have a hard border with the EU while still having a soft border with the Irish Republic. It was always a grift. Clive Crook now seems to want... what? For the EU to work hard to make Brexit as small a catastrophe as possible? For the EU sacrifice the rights and interests of its citizens to promote the careers of a bunch of neo-fascist nativist grifter politicians in Westminster? Crook seems to think that the EU should be negotiating as if this were an "on what terms will Britain remain in the EU?" deal. But Brexit means Brexit: Clive Crook: The Harder Brexit Gets, the More Necessary It Seems: "The U.K. has been an ill-fitting member of the EU all along...
Monday Smackdown: What Tobin Harshaw of the New York Times claims he wants to be remembered for. From 2007. No quality control at the New York Times whatsoever. Let us take him at his word, and remember him for this:
Hoisted from 2007: As you may recall, last Friday there was a lot of discussion about revisions to the GISS global warming series of estimated average temperatures in the United States—a revision that changed the hottest year to date in the U.S. from 1998 (which in the old data was 1/100 of a degree hotter than 1934) to 1934 (which in the new data is 2/100 of a degree hotter than 1998) https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/08/why-oh-why-ca-1.html. One surprising thing was that the New York Times's Opinionator weblog https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/... went way overboard on the story:
Among global warming Cassandras, the fact that 1998 was the “hottest year on record” has always been an article of faith.... James Hansen, the climate scientist who has long accused the Bush administration of trying to “silence” him.... [A] Y2K bug played havoc with some of the numbers.... Michael Ashe... explains.... "The changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as recordbreaking) moves to second place.... [T]he effect on the U.S. global warming propaganda machine could be huge...
This surprised me: "effect... huge," "havoc," the scare quotes around "silence," "data meltdown," et cetera seemed very out of place for a three-one-hundredths of a degree shift--either complete mendacity or total innumeracy, or both.... The Opinionato... Tobin Harshaw, wh... [had] also served as an enthusiastic stenographer for last Friday's Stupidest Man Alive nominee, Tom Nugent of National Review, who slipped a decimal points and wrote a totally off-the-rails piece... overestimating how much money such a tax might raise by a factor of ten. It seemed that Harshaw had failed to do the slightest amount of quantitative due diligence on either story before he committed fingers to keyboard and thus electrons to the nöosphere.... So I called Toby Harshaw.... It seems to me that he and the New York Times have much bigger problems than simple innumeracy:
Brad DeLong: Good afternoon. I'm Brad DeLong, an economics professor calling from UC Berkeley. I read your Cassandra post about global warming data revisions, and had a couple of questions. Can you help me out?
Tobin Harshaw: Certainly.
Brad DeLong: Did you eyeball the data--either in a graph or a table--before you wrote your "Cassandra" post about GISS global warming data revisions?
Tobin Harshaw: Are you writing something about this?
Brad DeLong: I will be, yes.
Tobin Harshaw: Then no, I cannot speak to you. You will have to speak to our public relations department.
Brad DeLong: Why won't you talk to me?
Tobin Harshaw: Because I am not authorized to speak to the press.
Brad DeLong: Because?
Tobin Harshaw: Because that is our policy. Our policy is that editorial staff are not allowed to speak to the press.
Brad DeLong: Seriously? Why is that your policy?
Tobin Harshaw: I am not authorized.
Big plans for his country. Involving bonesaws. torture. Murder. Dismemberment. Is there any intellectual and moral crime against journalism a New York Times employee can commit that will get him bounced? It appears not: Tom Friedman: Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring, at Last: "The most significant reform process underway anywhere in the Middle East today is in Saudi Arabia... its own Arab Spring... led from the top down by the country’s 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.... If it succeeds, it will not only change the character of Saudi Arabia but the tone and tenor of Islam across the globe. Only a fool would predict its success—but only a fool would not root for it...
Lindsay Ellis: YouTube: Manufacturing Authenticity (For Fun and Profit!):
Comment/Hoisted/Monday Vanity Fair Smackdown: RW: http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/08/comment-of-the-day-_shame-on-the-editors-of-vanity-fair_-rw-its-been-a-long-time-many-years-in-fact-s.html: : Shame on the editors of Vanity Fair: RW: "It's been a long time, many years in fact...
...but I do seem to recall a version of Michael Kinsley capable of writing cogent and, yes, even generous pieces; his long descent into incoherent, petty sniping has not been pretty.
And: Low-Tech Cyclist: "Kinsley is right that "all is not data" and "data will only take you so far", but...
Continue reading "Shame on the Editors of Vanity Fair!: Highlighted/Hoisted from Two Years Ago" »
The New York Times has done an appallingly bad job in this age of Trump. What they see here about the bad job done by Republican politicians is all true. But I wish they would turn their scrutiny inward a bit: New York Times: The Cult of Trump: "Every now and again, someone sticks a neck out...
Ben Smith disputes the Sokratic doctrine that "nobody does evil knowingly" by pointing to himself as a counterexample. Yet, somehow, he ends his piece by quoting an—anonymous—source: “You almost long for the days when it was a game.” It never was a game, Ben. Policy differences were always large and important. Trying to gain energy to further empower parasitic plutocracy from stoking the ethno-cultural fears of easily-grifted morons has been a major story in American politics since at least the Republican Party's Goldwater turn—and Ben Smith and company worked hard to make sure that that story was always outshouted by horse-race trivialities: Ben Smith: I Helped Create Insider Political Journalism. Now It's Time For It To Go Away: "My colleague Jonathan Martin’s and my blogs were actually illustrated with on-the-nose pen-and-ink caricatures of ourselves sitting on a wooden fence watching a literal horse race...
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