Coming distractions

The VA was handing out piles of bonuses to technical employees in 2007 and 2008. A grandstanding Republican Congressman (yes, all sorts of redundancies in those three words) wants, nay, demands an investigation:

"I am extremely troubled by the Inspector General's findings," said Richard Burr, R-NC, the ranking Republican on the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee. "I believe Congress should use its oversight authority to further investigate these matters," he said in an e-mail to CNN.

The point that will likely be forgotten about this: It happened during the reign of the Bushists, when Burr and the rest of the Republicans opposed anything resembling oversight of the executive branch.

The next step in the laundering of bullshit into conventional wisdom will be some wingnut blogger blaming this on President Obama.

Note: The VA, which is socialized medicine, delivers better care more cheaply than the dominant semi-private part of American health care, even with these bonuses.

Know nothings

It's an article of faith in modern journalism that the reporter is not allowed to know anything. No, that's not quite right. The modern reporter is allowed to know what the conventional wisdom is.

Everything other than the conventional wisdom is controversial.

Take evolution. (Please!) Anyone who is willing to engage with the evidence knows that the Genesis accounts of creation are not natural history - or, if they are, they're dead and provably wrong. Young earth creationism is farcically laughable and a lie.

So-called intelligent design is not far behind. It's not a research program; it's a polemic.

Mass media, though, has to have bullshit balance between reality and fantasy. Wouldn't want to alienate the idiot demographic. After all, they'll buy things from the advertisers.

Update: ... which is why only 39% of Americans believing in evolution is a great advancement.

Surprise, surprise, surprise

Ed Henry blithers about the now disappointed expectation that McCain would lie low during the DNC. If he read me, he'd have a better idea that this might happen.

Seriously, why is it that professional political journalists have so little insight into the subject they cover? What are they doing all those hours I'm doing my real job, when they could be learning interesting facts? Are they just sitting in the hotel bar exchanging conventional wisdom with their colleagues?

Ed, by the way, if you'll deign to read here, you might notice in your own report that McCain is no longer the face of his own attacks. This is an important fact for your future analyses. Just a hint.

Sez who?

The Washington Post asserts that Obama vs. McCain is about Iraq, not the economy. It just can't be about the economy, or it's a Democratic walk-over. The press needs a contest, but they like to narrow the contest to a simple one-on-one, so the election can't be about more than one thing.

Of course, adults know that elections are about many things. They aren't thematically simple. If you've ever been to democratic debate - a New England Town Meeting or any other legislature - you know that coalition majorities get cobbled together out of disparate and sometimes contradictory factions.

The modern American media is just not prepared to deliver any themes that are not simple enough for a kindergartener to understand. So they give us bullshit like this.

CW polluted me, too

Something from Paul Krugman's column today that I didn't know:

L. B. J. declared his “War on Poverty” 44 years ago. Contrary to cynical legend, there actually was a large reduction in poverty over the next few years, especially among children, who saw their poverty rate fall from 23 percent in 1963 to 14 percent in 1969.

That's a forty percent reduction in six years.

Easier for me - were you voters saying something?

Peter Canellos, chief purveyor of the Washington conventional wisdom for the Boston Globe, says our choices are now "clearer". Simpler would be more like it. Yep, now they fit on a couple of coin flips. Especially simpler to cover.

Pete, buddy, we're looking for stark choices, not eeny-meeny-miney-mo.

Oh, and after the jump, I don't think the word skewed means what you think it means.

But you heathers now have the race you, uh, already had: the multi-culti black guy vs. the woman. I'm sure you're prepared to have fun setting that up on a tee for mancrush McCain.

Tin ear?

Let's move political news to the Style section, how 'bout it? That's what we're getting, anyway. I guess the New York Times feels it has to keep up with Robin Givhan's vacuous pieces in the Washington Post. It's a race to the bottom all right, but who's bottom?

I suppose it's possible that Mark Leibovich has a pitch-perfect ear for politics and that everything he writes about the atmospheres of the Democrats' rallies provides us with deep insight into their meaning. I suppose it's possible that the Beltway conventional wisdom reflected by his story is 100% spot on.

Possible, but not likely. Here's the last paragraph, in regard to a conversation with Pervez Musharraf:

“We also talked about the importance of the upcoming elections,” Mr. Edwards said, meaning, presumably, in Pakistan, not Iowa.

Why would anyone presume that? Wouldn't it make more sense to think that Edwards was talking about both elections, that he was talking about change coming and telling Musharraf that he had better be on the democratic side of that change?

Or is that just too damn complicated?

Fake al Qaeda tape would be news

Every time Osama bin Laden graces us with a new episode of his frothing insanity, the media pretend that his tape is a fake. Funny, though, they never are.

You'd think the media would learn this, but they would rather stick to the conventional narrative. Osama might be dead. Al Qaeda's capabilities might be too degraded to produce a tape. There might be less electricity in Pashtun Pakistan than in Baghdad (if only!).

How about putting the story in context in a way the remembers yesterday: Osama released a new tape. It says the following ridiculous Wahhabi drivel. The U.S. government is analyzing it to see what else they can learn.

Then, if it does turn out to be a fake, the media can report that.

Courtiers of conventional wisdom

The move of the Democratic Party upscale, chasing campaign contributions, was not the only force that led us from a robust and liberal democracy in 1978 to the threshhold of fascism today. Just as important and harder to reverse has been the transformation of journalism.

Most journalists today are courtiers of the conventional wisdom. They think journalism happens at press conferences, and they're happy to write up what they hear as if it were news just because someone important says it. They think that any context they provide should match the consensus narrative of the press corps.

What happened? No single event gave us the Kewl Kidz media. Instead, a series of societal changes all pushed our public discourse in the same direction:

• Repeated right-wing assertions that the media was biased against them
• The end of the Fairness Doctrine
• The advent of cable news stations
• Narrow corporate dominance of media
• The ascendancy of entertainment values pretty much everywhere in society

In the 1970s, the people who brought us news evidently thought of it as good for us, like compulsory schooling, spinach, and cod liver oil. They were right, but we preferred cotton candy and Paris Hilton.

You may think of the prior era's ethic of journalistic objectivity was wrong, foolish, or impossible - or all three. I don't. I think it served us well. But that doesn't matter; it's only of academic interest.

That "objective" media environment is not coming back. McClatchy may fight a rear-guard action against reporting that starts from ideology instead of reality, or perhaps it will simply step into the barely served market for left-liberal reporting. If so, a good slogan could be A bias for facts, since most of the liberal world wants to know what actually is true.

(More to follow on the individual bullets as time permits.)

How did we get here?

In 1978, there was talk of electing a veto-proof Democratic Congress because the President was too conservative. That President was a Democrat, Jimmy Carter.

In 2007, we have at long last in Duhbya-world a Democratic Congress. The voters elected the swing Democrats because it was finally clear to enough people that Iraq was a debacle. Even though cool heads had amply predicted every last problem that has beset Iraq, the jingoistic march to war had shunted them aside - off TV and radio and even mostly out of newsprint - as so many unhonored Cassandras.

One issue was more important to me than Iraq, though not to the voters. That was the utter, total, absolute, and complete failure of unified Republican government to retain any semblance of separation of powers, so great its fealty was to the Bushist cult of personality. During their dominance of American politics from the 1930s to the 1970s, Democrats in the Congress repeatedly refused to be handmaidens to the President, whether Democratic or Republican. The Republican Congresses of 2001 to 2006 had no interest in leaving the country and the Constitution better off, as long as they could leave the conservative movement better off. And, oh yeah, as long as they could fatten up their friends at the public trough.

Oversight? Are you kidding me!

How did we get here?

I see four reasons:

• Republicans concluded that their program of government could never get them into the majority if presented honestly, even after forty years of halting movement to the center, so they built a political apparatus that was primarily concerned with marketing.
• Democrats unilaterally surrendered their most potent political weapon and the unifying attribute of their political coalition - social class.
• The media gave up the difficult work of separating truth out of the routine lies and bullshit of politics and made its purpose the reinforcement of conventional wisdom.
• The voters turned down their bullshit detectors. Or off. (Some examples.) So many people were telling them that self-government is too hard that they believed it.

I'll get into each of these in time.

Journamalism

On Philosoraptor:

Mystic, the problem of course is that the news media view their job as reinforcement of the conventional wisdom - as in, "Don't challenge your audience, or they'll turn you off."

Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable? How quaint.

Patron saints of CW

Man, I'm sick of the media viewing its job as constantly reinforcing the conventional wisdom and then disclaiming all responsibility.

(Originally posted here.)