Traditional media types love the notion of a "centrist," whatever that is.
Take Evan Bayh's sudden gut shot to the Democratic party and president Obama. Read Charles Lane's analysis:
Millions of Americans long to tell their bosses "take this job and shove it." Hardly any have the power and money to do so, especially in these recessionary times. Sen. Evan Bayh (D) of Indiana, however, is the exception. His stunning retirement from the Senate is essentially a loud and emphatic "screw you" to President Obama and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. For months now, Bayh has been screaming at the top of his voice that the party needs to reorient toward a more popular, centrist agenda -- one that emphasizes jobs and fiscal responsibility over health care and cap and trade. Neither the White House nor the Senate leadership has given him the response he wanted. Their bungling of what should have been a routine bipartisan jobs bill last week seems to have been the last straw....
Quitting the Senate was a no-lose move for the presidentially ambitious Bayh, since he can now crawl away from the political wreckage for a couple of years, plausibly alleging that he tried to steer the party in a different direction -- and then be perfectly positioned to mount a centrist primary challenge to Obama in 2012, depending on circumstances.
For Lane, Bayh's sudden departure was a noble, gutsy maneuver that should propel him into the middle of a primary challenge of Obama, as if he's become a "centrist" rebel. Daniel Larison picks that notion apart, nothing that party voters tend to eschew losers like Bayh who quit the team and over issues they actually like. But even if Bayh, say, chose to run as an independent, he'd probably run into the problems that NYC mayor Bloomberg did when he put out feelers in '08:
Centrists" do not run insurgent campaigns very well....There are no passionate, vocal groups of voters eagerly demanding that government be more solicitous of corporate interests and more willing to start wars overseas. There are not many large voting blocs requesting the offshoring of whole industries. To be a "centrist" is necessarily to champion the interests of concentrated power and wealth and to ignore and deride as "populist" insanity anything that stands in the way of those interests. Who has ever heard of an explicitly anti-populist political insurgency? Insurgents always set themselves up as the independent outsiders who will stand up for the people against the establishment. Just imagine Bayh trying to sell himself as the establishmentarian who wants to tone down the "radicalism" of Obama's Rubinite economics and his Clintonian hawkish foreign policy. What Lane proposes is that an old DLC-type Democrat will be positioned to win over a party that is increasingly disgusted by the overrepresentation of DLC-type Democrats in the current administration. This misreads the mood of the party and the substance of administration policy very badly.
Good bye, Bayh. Don't let the door hit you in the *ss on the way out.
David Broder is one of the most fascinating traditional media columnists out there today. Not because of his opinions - which are rarely insightful - but because of the tangled ideas and emotions that swirl and bake into a pie of absurd contradictions. He's the ultimate DC insider, always advocating for conservative, status quo policies, yet sees himself as the champion of Regular People.
Her invocation of "conservative principles and common-sense solutions" was perfectly conventional. What stood out in the eyes of TV-watching pols of both parties was the skill with which she drew a self-portrait that fit not just the wishes of the immediate audience but the mood of a significant slice of the broader electorate.
Freed of the responsibilities she carried as governor of Alaska, devoid of any official title but armed with regular gigs on Fox News Channel and more speaking invitations than she can fulfill, Palin is perhaps the most visible Republican in the land.
More important, she has locked herself firmly in the populist embrace that every skillful outsider candidate from George Wallace to Jimmy Carter to Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton has utilized when running against "the political establishment."
Let's get this out of the way. Palin is about as popular as toxic waste with American voters. Her latest poll numbers are in the tank. Over 70 percent of Americans don't think she's qualified to be president, including 52 percent of Republicans. The more she's in the spotlight, the less people like her.
But Broder thinks she's got what it takes to woo voters! Even though voters really hate her!
So...you've got a conservative, establishment insider who hearts big-business Republicans, swooning over Sarah Palin because she's an anti-establishment, anti-insider populist hero? And to further complicate matters...she's not actually, you know, popular with the people...
Worse still, Broder actually represents inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom. This is what DC insiders actually think what we want.
...As I say, it's clear that most mainstream journalists are totally over Obama, the Democrats, and any sense that Republicans have demonstrated that they can't be trusted with power. That's just so 2006-2008. Stimulus? Health reform? Financial reform? Cap and trade? They're much more interested in that issue right-wingers love to use as a frame -- deficit reduction.
They're going to follow Broder's lead. Just as they've surrendered to the tea parties, they're going to surrender to the demagogic populism of the next crop of GOP presidential aspirants.
Now, this may not benefit Palin specifically, because every Republican candidate is going to hit the same populist/demagogic/know-nothing notes she hits. Broder and the rest of the media mandarins may develop a much bigger crush on demagogic populist Mike Huckabee or demagogic populist Tim Pawlenty or demagogic populist Newt Gingrich.
But they all may decide Palin's the one. They all may decide that her flat vowels and inept syntax are the realest. And that media consensus may, paradoxically, create a populist wave that delivers the GOP nomination to Palin, if not the election. The people will hear "Take Palin seriously!" so often, they'll start to believe it's true.
Regardless of what you think about the fact that Max's state director received a raise of $14k, you should wonder why the Montana media didn't also tell you about the $31,000 raise that Dennis Rehberg gave his top staffer in 2007, the 29-year-old Erik Iverson.
This $31,000 raise is more than most Montanans make in a year and bumped Iverson's salary up to nearly $160,000.
The most egregious raise and instance of political cronyism in monetary terms in the history of Montana was never reported by the press.
Yes, even the biggest recession of most of our lifetimes wasn't enough to get the press to print about the taxpayers' largesse toward Rehberg's political friends. Even the fact that Erik Iverson was simultaneously serving as chair of the Republican party didn't seem to bother these papers who now feign such concern over cronyism.
Perhaps Erik Iverson realized that his boss's cronyism may now be exposed. Could that be the reason why Erik Iverson was busy defending Max in the press last week for involving the senate staff in planning the divorce? (Iverson's input made many people nauseous.) Iverson must be hoping that he'll get his back scratched in return when the Baucus staff get calls asking whether a $31,000 raise and a $160,000 salary for Rehberg's (inexperienced) political hack is out of line.
Lucky for Rehberg, the press exercises selective coverage.
So Jay Rosen tweeted that he needed me "to grok this idea, 'regression toward a phony mean,'" which means "journalists associate the middle with truth, when there may be no reason to."
Here he quotes former WaPo reporter, Paul Taylor:
Sometimes I worry that my squeamishness about making sharp judgments, pro or con, makes me unfit for the slam-bang world of daily journalism. Other times I conclude that it makes me ideally suited for newspapering- certainly for the rigors and conventions of modern 'objective' journalism. For I can dispose of my dilemmas by writing stories straight down the middle. I can search for the halfway point between the best and the worst that might be said about someone (or some policy or idea) and write my story in that fair-minded place. By aiming for the golden mean, I probably land near the best approximation of truth more often than if I were guided by any other set of compasses- partisan, ideological, pyschological, whatever... Yes, I am seeking truth. But I'm also seeking refuge. I'm taking a pass on the toughest calls I face.
I'm reminded of this concept by the coverage of Tea Bagging and the protests and disruptions so frequently covered this summer, culminating today in a protest in Washington DC.
Big news, right? Huge demonstration? Michelle Malkin says, OMG, 2 million!!! except high estimates put the crowd about about 60,000, and David Shuster says Freedomworks - who organized it - put the number at 30,000, and a "park official says this is being 'generous.'" Devilstower: "More people showed up for the Apple Butter Festival in Kimmswick, MO -- a town with a population of 93."
Compare the coverage these people get with other, past demonstrations. Like the Million Man March (1995 and 800,000 participants), March for Women's Lives (2004 and 1.1 million participants), the antiwar protests on the eve of Iraq (2003 with a million protesters in New York, San Franciso, and Los Angeles). Clearly it's only news if conservatives protest.
Really, have so few, acting so poorly, and with less understanding of the issues, ever swayed the media so much? Not since the Brooks Brothers riot.
Somehow, the millions without health care in this country, and very conservative reform proposed in this Congress, have been "balanced" all summer with the outrageous and false claims of the Tea Baggers, a small, if fanatic, group worked up into a froth by cable news pundits...
"Based on the sensitive nature of the story and other factors we mentioned, we initially exercised caution and did not report it," the statement reads.
"Since then, we've been observing how the story has progressed, monitoring other news outlets, and doing our own reporting. We decided to report the story tonight."
Or was it because of ESPN's investment into the NFL?
Anyway. You hear a lot about the decline of traditional media because of the proliferation of free content online, the competition from blogs, etc and co, but this story reminds me of the real challenge to a viable and healthy media: money. That is, too many "media" companies are entangled in too many deals - ESPN of course allows itself not to report on a story that threatens one of its prime investments...but that's because the network doesn't really see itself as media, but as entertainment.
And ESPN isn't hurting financially.
Who's going to stop watching football games on ESPN for trying to bury the Big Ben story? That is, it doesn't really pay to have objective standards for journalism, does it?
Today is Dan Froomkin's last day at the Washington Post.
You have to question the paper's decision to drop Froomkin: he was a voice of clarity during the Bush years, always ready to criticize the press -- especially the WH correspondents -- for not reporting the news, perhaps the real scandal of the last decade. And he hadn't gone easy on the Obama administration, either.
True to form, Froomkin pulls no punches in his last column:
How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.
Your guess is as good as mine why the Post would want to drop Froomkin. Was it an economic decision? Was the blog seen primarily as an "anti-Bush" site rendered obsolete by the Obama presidency? Or did Froomkin's unflinching reportage of American presidents cut too close to the quick for a newspaper that in large part went along with the madness?
We all have heard the reasons that the press is under pressure by forces not of its making. This is an example of a self-inflicted wound. Are papers like the Post under suspicion for being too insidery and old-media-y? How does it make sense get rid of an independent minded, new media, presumably not-that-expensive, non-Washington-cliquey voice on politics and the media and leave... well, the full opinion and media lineup the Post is sticking with? Some people tell me that it's a mistake to say that the Post's editorial page (and the weight of its op-ed lineup) has "become" neo-con and establishment-minded under its current editor, Fred Hiatt; the argument is that this is the Post's long tradition, which its anti-Nixon crusade concealed. I don't know. But I would have liked to have heard the argument about why Froomkin was the necessary next person to cut.
I'm sorry to see Froomkin leave the paper. Here's to hoping he sets up shop somewhere else, and soon.
Besides writing letters, Matt Koehler also leaves comments on newspaper websites. Recently leaving a comment that included a link to a New West story on the Missoulian's website, Matt got the following email response from an editor:
Matthew,
I am not going to post your comment sending Missoulian readers to New West. We wrote many stories on this press conference and the fallout, and you are free to direct them to those archived accounts -- which are very complete.
Matt commented on another story today, including a link to a Missoula Independent story, but that link was approved.
I honestly doubt there's any sort of guiding policy at the Missoulian that dictates references to competing media not be allowed. Rather, I think the editor probably felt a little annoyed by the fact the paper's writers had done a decent job of covering the story Matt referred to, and that the decision to deny the comment was made because Matt is a known and frequent contributor to the Missoulian in letters, comments, quotes, and editorials. I doubt the editor would have denied a comment to a new or infrequent user.
Still, it's interesting, isn't it? In the "old" days, you could effectively starve out the competition by pretending they didn't exist. The key to becoming known was controlling distribution; if you didn't have the means to produce and widely distribute your newspaper or newsletter, you were slave to word-of-mouth to get people to seek you out.
But nowadays, the reverse is true. To gather readers, you've got to connect to other media. Reading news online isn't about sitting down with a single periodical and reading it cover-to-cover, it's about following links and reading a broad selection of stories about topics of interest. That is, the best way to draw readers is to lead readers elsewhere. If you're a dead end, a self-contained entity that leads nowhere, Web surfers will avoid you. (And that's doubly true if your web page is ugly and difficult to navigate.)
In short, if the denial of Matt's link is a policy at the Missoulian, it's incredibly antiquated and short-sighted.
On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.
You know, because black people don't really count.
Here's a startling editiorial from former Bush administration spokesflack, Ari Fleischer. In it, he complains that the top wage earners are paying too much in taxes...
Picture an upside-down pyramid with its narrow tip at the bottom and its base on top. The only way the pyramid can stand is by spinning fast enough or by having a wide enough tip so it won't fall down. The federal version of this spinning top is the tax code; the government collects its money almost entirely from the people at the narrow tip and then gives it to the people at the wider side. So long as the pyramid spins, the system can work. If it slows down enough, it falls.
It's also what's called redistribution of income, and it is getting out of hand.
If the premise feels skewed, that's because it is. Fleischer, for example, argues that the top 10 percent of earners "pay 72.4% of the nation's income taxes," and represents the "tip of the triangle" of his oddly unbalanced pyramid metaphor. But...every table and piece of data I can get my hands on shows that the top 10 percent of earners has more than 72.4% of the wealth...which makes the figure Fleischer quotes...reasonable -- until you realize that payroll taxes, which aren't counted as "income taxes," drive up the tax rates of anyone making under $90K, so that an average earner actually pays a much higher tax rate than the upper income brackets.
But the oddest thing about Fleischer's proposal is that he favors the elimination of the payroll tax and a straight, loophole-free progressive income tax as a solution. Which would dramatically reduce the tax burden of the poor and middle class and jack up the rates on the very people he claims are being oppressed in our system...
And you wonder why the "Tea Parties" make so little sense. According to Fleischer, most of the people out on the streets are protesting taxes and government spending of which they are the ungrateful recipients of their betters' largesse. Not that there's much reason behind the protests, which appear to have gotten a friendly boost from FoxNews, whose media personalities are hawking the protests as if they have a financial stake in the whole deal. (Oops! They probably do!) But...why would a bunch of people stand out with signs protesting to protect the tax rates of the ultra-wealthy when those rates are at a historical low, and the distribution of income historically lopsided. If anything, the government distributes income upwards.
Whatever. I'm still waiting for a rational response from the right on how to steer the economy out of the recession. Not that I'm unwilling to listen: I'm personally abivalent about the massive bank bailouts and doubtful about the efficacy of the recently passed stimulus bill, when so many of the bankrolled projects were things like massive and unneeded highway projects...
So. A 23-year-old kid opens fire on Pittsburg police and kills three. He donned a bulletproof vest and ambushed the officers with an "assault rifle." But the big news on the 'tubes is that the shooter -- Richard Poplawski -- had a thing for far-right conspiracy theories, and recently expressed a fear that Obama was going to take his guns. And the shooting took place three days after a screed on gun shows appeared in the Pittsburg Tribune.
Dave Niewert is all over this story, writing, "We've been reporting for a while on the surge in gun sales, and how the paranoia around guns is making the more unstable elements of the right particularly edgy. Inevitably, that edginess is going to break out into actual violence -- as it appears to have done today."
Of course, it's not ju st extremist rhetoric on firearms -- it's all over the place lately, even extending to calls to arms over sparkly dishes and embodied by the weird rantings that Glenn Beck has engaged in since getting his Fox News gig. But Poplawski obviously had mental issues. Kicked out of the Marine Corps. Arguing with neighbors. Shooting cops in the head. Is it fair to blame talking heads for this incident?
...when you point out that certain individuals with all their talk about "revolution" and "armed insurrection" are inciting this kind of behavior in unstable people, you will get howls of protest about the 1st Amendment and what not. Sure, crazy people do crazy things. But that doesn't make it responsible to encourage them, which is what a lot of really foolish people are doing right now for purely political reasons.
And that's a legitimate point, I think. This kind of insane chatter used to be reserved for late-night AM shows and obscure online forums, but mainstream media has abetted, even encouraged this kind of rabble-rousing. Just think of Dan McGee's recent rant over abortion:
McGee said Republicans attempted to work with Democrats on these issues but it did not seem to take. He also compared abortion with slavery and predicted an upheaval comparable to the Civil War. "You bet there will be," McGee said.
Certainly (I hope) this was overheated rhetoric -- start a war over abortion? -- but if a Montanan lays waste to a health-care clinic that provides abortions to women who want them, how responsible is McGee? Wouldn't the senator deserve some censure?
And yet...there is no reprimand for McGee from anyone, neither his fellow legislators, nor the newspapers that are supposedly serving our communities. Shouldn't someone -- besides a partisan hack blogger, I mean -- step forward and let McGee know that a violent solution to a political problem won't be tolerated and demand that he recant his statement? Shouldn't we let these people know that extremism won't be tolerated in a democratic society?
Just nine people accounted for nearly 2,700 of the emergency room visits in the Austin area during the past six years at a cost of $3 million to taxpayers and others, according to a report....
Eight of the nine patients have drug abuse problems, seven were diagnosed with mental health issues and three were homeless. Five are women whose average age is 40, and four are men whose average age is 50, the report said, the Austin American-Statesman reported Wednesday.
Reminds me of the social services program described by Malcolm Gladwell of giving the chronically homeless apartments and full-case managers, and a version of which Billings was going to try...
I'm in DC this week for a series of meetings and just got done watching our senior Senator give a talk at the Center for American Progress Action Fund on health care reform.
There were some positive notes -- he spoke highly of a public health insurance option and didn't take using the reconciliation option off the table; he said he wants it to be bipartisan, but not at the expense of a good bill, etc. For more of a roundup, check out my tweets on it either on Twitter or Facebook (where you can comment).
At the heart of the conversation, as always of late (it seems), was the public health insurance option. Unsurprisingly, private insurance companies REALLY, REALLY hate it. So do Republicans. But here's what I don't get. Virtually all of the cost control measures being discussed -- from monopsony negotiating power to comparative effectiveness and moving away from fee-for-service -- rely on a public health insurance option, either directly or indirectly through modeling good insurance behavior (and imposing it on a wildly uncompetitive insurance industry).
So if we take the public health insurance option off the table, the question becomes -- how do we control costs without it? In theory, we can do one of three things:
Hope insurance companies adopt better cost control practices on their own.
Impose fierce regulations so that private insurance basically becomes a publicly-controlled, privately-profitable industry, but where meaningful competition DOES NOT EXIST.
Throw people to the wolves.
Compared to a straight-forward public option, these all strike me as asinine choices. Number two strikes me as the most likely compromise point, but I can't see why either liberals or conservatives would rather end up here than with a public health insurance option (although I can see why private insurance companies would).
Note: this is the justification for even having a relatively toothless public health insurance option -- one prohibited from negotiating and required to operate without public subsidies. Such an operation could still apply market pressure by embracing the moves away from fee-for-service and deploying comparative effectiveness research.
Am I missing something?
Update -- As with the panel at CAPAF, I still don't know if anyone has a realistic answer to this other than extremely fierce regulation of insurance companies. Again, insurance companies are probably OK with that alternative. Guaranteed revenue streams make up for harsh regulations. But both quality and cost will suffer for it because of the elimination of market incentives. We'll instead be hoping that government gets it right.
To put it another way, this solution -- government deciding exactly how insurance will work with private companies getting the profits -- has all the worst aspects of central planning and capitalism run amok.
After acknowledging that there is a need for a horse-slaughtering facility, the editorial explains why it opposes HB 418:
However, Butcher's bill is far off base, and raises significant questions.
Since when can a legislative act limit the legal authority of a court?
Or, for that matter, how can the Legislature limit a citizen's right to challenge a government action by any legal means possible?
This bill would set a poor precedent for an industry that has already shown disregard for environmental regulations elsewhere.
Gov. Schweitzer should veto HB418, and demand a revised measure that addresses the need but does not trample on the rights of others, not to mention the authority of judges - all of whom were elected just like legislators.
It would have been nice if the backlash against HB 418 had happened earlier -- like when the bill hit its first House committee, not after it was passed by both bodies of the legislature. Still, that's fair; this thing kind of snuck under a lot of people's radar until it was passed out of the House. And the proponents' arguments sound quite reasonable -- it's only when you actually read the bill that you understand what it's proposing: a free judicial and regulatory pass for an industry that has a spotty health and safety record.
Congratulations, legislators. You've given Montana a turd sandwich. Let's see if Schweitzer serves it up on a paper plate for us to eat.
The Flathead Beacon provides some of the best political coverage in the state, but this article is disappointing.
The AIG bonus mess has more or less settled the argument over whether the $800-billion stimulus plan was rushed. It's safe to say it was.
That's the lede and it is accurate. No one says that the stimulus stewed in a low simmer for months. It was pushed through very quickly, but that doesn't necessarily lead to this conclusion:
It appears that Congress, by overlooking or ignoring the insertion and ramifications of a provision that protects AIG, a company bailed out with billions of taxpayer money, should have slowed down the process.
The bonus provision affects, what, $150 million -- much of which has been returned just through political pressure?
How much should Congress have slowed down? Economists, people who study, you know, stimulus, were calling for extraordinarily quick action. Congress took that. Days delayed on this stuff can have huge impacts on when outcomes play out.
I don't think the Jobs Bill was perfect. I'm not sure anyone does. But time was of the essence.
Update -- In comments, Dave Budge asks for evidence that economists actually think the proper way to respond to these kinds of circumstances is to move quickly. Here's Simon Johnson, former Chief Economist of the IMF, writing in The Atlantic:
In a financial panic, the government must respond with both speed and overwhelming force. The root problem is uncertainty-in our case, uncertainty about whether the major banks have sufficient assets to cover their liabilities. Half measures combined with wishful thinking and a wait-and-see attitude cannot overcome this uncertainty. And the longer the response takes, the longer the uncertainty will stymie the flow of credit, sap consumer confidence, and cripple the economy-ultimately making the problem much harder to solve.
Note: Johnson is actually talking not just about stimulus, which in itself is by definition a temporary action and time-sensitive, but about banking reform, which carries the dual obligations of happening quickly and being done correctly, as ideally you're passing long-term reforms.
Can we ever know, on any contentious or politicized topic, how to recognize the real conclusions of science and how to distinguish them from scientific-sounding spin or misinformation?
Congress will soon consider global-warming legislation, and the debate comes as contradictory claims about climate science abound. Partisans of this issue often wield vastly different facts and sometimes seem to even live in different realities.
In this context, finding common ground will be very difficult.
Mooney's solution?
Perhaps the only hope involves taking a stand for a breed of journalism and commentary that is not permitted to simply say anything; that is constrained by standards of evidence, rigor and reproducibility that are similar to the canons of modern science itself.
Yeah, and the newspaper publishing the new, more rigorous commentaries will be delivered by a fleet of flying pigs.
Seriously, if we want to take action on climate change, we can't wait around for utopian journalistic ethics to kick in. Right now, the very existence of climate change has warped into a political issue and calls for a political solution. But what? A massive grassrootscampaign to educate voters and pressure lawmakers to respond to the science?
Local action? Of course, local action doesn't help when the neighboring town installs a coal-burning electricity plant while you're spending municipal dollars weatherizing city buildings, does it? At some point, we need federally-enforced standards for carbon dioxide pollution.
What have you got? Do you know of any other grassroots orgs tackling this problem? Possible solutions to the current political morass?
Sean Quinn posted the full, unedited version of Jon Stewart's interview with Jim Cramer...and it's amazing.
Not only does Stewart makes look Cramer look like a lying, groveling d*uche, but he pretty much, in just a few minutes, peels back the facade of news coverage. It's a game. The media starts know it's a game. They know what's going on, but they package the news for consumption, and a product that's very different from reality is what's shown.
You can speculate why. Media figures are herd animals; they're shy about stepping out alone into unchartered territory. They deliver content they think their audience wants. They don't think their audience is sophisticated enough to understand the subtleties of issues. Whatever.
But as Stewart pointed out, media coverage has consequences.
Check out Steve Benen's post questioning George Will's accuracy. I don't really want to jump on the attack, though. Yes, Will's column on global warming was worse than shoddy, and it looks like Will's ego prevented at least one other correction of a column, but in general Will is one of the better columnists.
But why do we trust columnists? Bloggers -- at least the good ones -- link to the information or data that support their arguments. Objectively that makes blogs more trustworthy than print columns. (Yet, still, I wouldn't trust a blogger further than I could throw her.) What guarantee do we have that a syndecated columnist doesn't invent facts to support predetermined political bias?
Like Steve Benen noted, a correction for Will's column has yet to appear.
Anyone who watched the Republican strategy over the recent Congressional stimulus package had to be scratching their head. I mean...marching in lock-step in opposition to a spending plan intended to create jobs and build infrastructure...while millions were losing their jobs? What was weirder still was that the media thought, well, that the GOP was back, baby!
Sunday Frank Rich wrote a much more erudite column on this topic than I could muster. In short, Rich noted that the cable tv and talk radio doom-and-gloom talk about Obama, Congressional Democrats, and the stimulus plan and the subsequent suberserviance to the punditocracy to that message was the result of the DC-insider "echo chamber." But here, on the other side of a passed bill, and a quick look at some polls, show that -- by golly! -- people liked the stimulus bill, Democrats, and Obama! And...well...generally despise Congressional Republcians.
Rich:
Overdosing on [DC insider] culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the "inevitable" Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn't recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week's. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.
Kos' Research 2000 poll shows that Congressional Dems gained three points during the stimulus debates, and Congressional Republicans dropped ten points to a 39-percent approval rating. And lest you think Research 2000 is biased, Gallup showed the Republican Congress critturs with a 31-percent approval rating.
So...why would, say, Dennis Rehberg shout from the rooftops his opposition to the stimulus package? Sure, there are some legitimate concerns with the bill...but then Rehberg's opposition seemed purely political. Or did the constituent calls lend him courage? Is Montana against the stimulus package by a 10-to-1 margin, or are the calls from the Representative's base, the folks whose stance on the stimulus was already created by the Rush Limbaughs and Dave Bergs of the world?
What's a politico to do? Do you believe the calls...or the polls?
So...George Will's op-ed today "debunked" global warming, largely by referring to a belief in the 1970s that "a major cooling of the planet was inevitable." You know, first they say it's cooling! Now they say it's warming! Make up your mind already, and spare us the hysteria!
A number of folksquickly and thoroughly dismantled Will's claim about the 1970s scientific community and global cooling. (Not to mention his claim about arctic ice levels in 1979 -- and that rebuttal came from his supposed source.) In short, Will -- besides cherry-picking, misinterpreting, and inventing data -- based his column today on a dumbed-down, out-of-context re-telling by Newsweek of a 1970s scientific study about long-term climate forecasts.
In short, Will is writing a piece that misinforms the public about science based on a news report that misinformed the public about science.
And hasn't that been one of the inanities of this "debate," how the media has almost crimanally fumbled the topic? Unable -- either from lack of ability or lack of funds -- to research the issue and discern good from bad argument, the media has generally placed the scientific community's consensus on the issue against a handful of denier groups in an attempt to "balance" the "debate." Worse still, many of the data and groups that claim global warming are financed by industries that stand to benefit financially if global warming is thought to be a hoax -- and we also know that, for some energy corporations, exploiting the media to spread doubt about global warming was a condoned strategy.
Essentially, global warming has become just another talking point in a long and growing list of talking points that the conservative movement uses to keep apostates out of their fold (shrinking that big tent) and to berate liberals with, rather than viewing warming as both a real cause for worry, and as an opportunity to demonstrate honest governance. Apparently obstructionism and denial are better tactics.
...Conservatives should be reading these pieces and paying heed to the vast consensus on global warming. Even if there areome holes in the larger argument, that's still no excuse to ignore what very well may be the global crisis of the coming century. Conservatives ought to be conserving things, and the environment should be at the top of the list-even above rugged individulaism and the "right" to low taxes.
That's the thing, we're stuck debating whether global warming even exists. And that's exactly how conservatives -- weirdly beholden to the short-term interest of a small segment of the big business community -- wants it. And the media, always attuned to the insider echo chamber, presents this as a viable alternative...
