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Center of Attention
Posted by michaelvdg in Uncategorized.
Jul 6th, 2007 | 16 responses
Jul 6th, 2007 | 16 responses
What’s funnier: Hookers, cocaine or… censoring president Bush? Fox News again, taking things out of context. Watch the video. Journalistic integrity anyone?
Michael Linn Jones strongly disagrees with Broder (who basically wrote that politicians sometimes have to ignore the ‘wishes’ of ‘the people’).
Jim Martin: stop fund the war in Iraq ASAP.
A rising (young) star in the blogosphere – Kevin Sullivan – has an interesting post up about the growth of executive power. Fascinating read – be sure to check it out.
Ever wonder why there are so many flight delays? Dave Schuler has the answer.
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16 Responses to “Center of Attention”
Broder makes me sick.
To get something similar but not the same out of the way first — It’s not specifically the populism argument. We non-liberals aren’t ignorant, and plenty of liberals, too, aren’t ignorant about the worst of populism, which mainly is outside the political realm and in the cultural realm (the vulgar decline, the dumbing-down, the celebrity culture, the favoring of teevee shows and celebrity lives’ details for serious subjects and news — it’s enough to have this guy listening to NPR frequently when he listens to the radio!). Ignorance has been exploited with the growth of and revolution in government since the 1930s in this country. We hate the way the Democrats have exploited ignorance and bought votes for decades. But populism isn’t the problem here.
No, Broder and others like him, people who hardly are fit to consider themselves aristocrats, are the real problem. Broder is among those smug, conceited people “inside the Beltway” (and satellites in NYC, LA, etc.) who are elitist and far to totally removed from the real world of real people, real citizens, real taxpayers. These people, Broder, Will, other federal government groupies, along with so many lobbyists, party hacks, staffers, and others, exemplify what is so very wrong with a government that has broken its constitutional shackles in the 1930s and is now not only gargantuan, not only has long functioned as a de facto national rather than a federal government, but has long evolved into an elitist enclave, foreign to the rest of America — the real America. Those inside the enclave are loyal to each other rather than to their “constituents” or the rest of the nation. Their Washington world, in their too-lavish, too-posh, with-far-too-much-power-and-influence environment, has corrupted them to the point where they value themselves far higher than reality would ever permit.
Additionally, Broder is a lightweight, something like a totally-vapid Maureen Dowd on growth hormone and steroids. Broder is close to be being as vapid as Dowd sometimes, and is routinely boring. Near-zero multiplied many times is still low!
Broder makes me sick. Plenty of us have rightly decried (and said worse) about the ignorance in the public that is the true concern at times with so-called populism (in fact, only appealing to a fraction of the people). But Broder and the others in Washington live in their own little falsely-elevated world, detached from Americans, and they are nobody to speak as if they were better or wiser than we are. They long have been part of the problem with a vastly oversized, over-interventionist, far-too-powerful Washington.
Sadly, the future is likely to see additional growth and centralization of power, and more improper encroachment into state and local affairs, in and by Washington.
I bet Broder will smile when Dems win in 2008. I bet he will reverse his anti-populist stance, too.
[...] House Link to Article iraq Center of Attention » Posted at The Moderate Voice » Domestic and [...]
The concern over the growth of executive power is a yawner. Liberals always have decried the executive and have been outraged when a Republican is in the White House. (Schlesinger, with his “imperial Presidency” phrase, was simply a New Deal dinosaur.) What we have often seen is a Congress that is not only obstructionist but trying to interfere with the executive branch. Where the Bush people have misbehaved, as when the Clintons misbehaved, it has had nothing to do with any excess by “the executive branch” but with deliberate misconduct by individuals.
Auctioning airport gates and takeoff or landing “slots” is nothing new. Note that it is each airport, or each local government, that should do the auctioning and receive the money paid. (It would be a state or county decision whether or not to redirect and redistribute the revenue elsewhere.)
DLS,
Thanks for ripping Broder a new one. How can he even pretend to have a pulse on the average American citizen? The fact that he pretends to is even more infuriating.
What we need are journalists that are willing to play an adversarial role to the government. That’s their job.
Instead, the Washington press trades their souls for insider access. But instead of getting real important info from their sources, all they get is pro-government propaganda that they then turn around and give to us without naming their sources.
Really? Silly me. I thought their job was to truthfully report the news, not act as defacto prosecutors of the government.
Perhaps your view of the press, so typical among ‘radicals’ in free countries, is why most leftist governments shut the free press down as soon as they are in power.
Chris,
What we need are journalists that are willing to play an adversarial role to the government. That’s their job.
No, they need to inform us. It’s not their job to be adversarial by nature (the way Bush is seen as being toward Congress now, or the way the press has been toward Bush and other Republicans for ages?), much less “activist.” They should simply deal with facts and simply inform us, that’s all.
Their job is not to inform, not to be adversarial toward any conservative or Republican government, nor to ignore or to defend the wrongdoing of a liberal or Democratic government. (Nor should they engage as they do in left-wing “activist journalism” [sic] any more than they should blend fact with fiction in “creative reporting” and re-enacting of news stories on teevee.)
The role of a free press is to inform but it should also be adversarial with the government. That’s how the founders’ envisioned it. If a journalist gets too close to their source, it jeopardizes their objectivity-as we saw with Judith Miller. The role of the press should never be to serve as the mouthpiece for the administration in order to gin the country up for war. The period just after 9/11 was the all-time low in journalistic standards.
[...] again to our great friends at The Moderate Voice for linking to this post in the TMV Center Of Attention roundup [...]
The government is perfectly capable of spouting pro-government propaganda. The news media is supposed to give us more than that.
In a world where everyone in public relations is trying to shape the news, the media has to be adversarial.
That makes no sense AR.
Austin, DLS, et al: I think these objectives are credible:
“Really? Silly me. I thought their job was to truthfully report the news, not act as defacto prosecutors of the government.”
“No, they need to inform us. ”
Are good ones, but it seems to me that quite a lot of skill, intellectual judgment and emotional judgment is required.
On the skill point, there are a range of interview techniques from the kind of badgering a prosecutor might do in a courtroom to a solicitous, friendly chat. So I think it is too simple to say dogmatically that journalism *must* be adversarial to be informative.
It also seems to me that in a broader sense, “skill” is evolving with the growth of new media. For example, the Daily Show occasionally runs segment showing a public figure saying one thing at one time, and the exact opposite at a later time. One therefore needn’t call someone either a liar, or a person who is consistent and tells the truth, (and if you are Keith Olbermann, tell your viewers how to feel about it) you just show the videos.
The availability of lexis/nexis for quantitative searches also make it possible to report on things in a way that was not possible, say, thirty years ago. You can, for example, look at policy emphases but counting the number of times certain terms are used.
Of course just because you *can* do something doesn’t mean you should, as many people here have pointed out.
Judgment is important as well, because just about anything worth reporting entails both interpretation and value judgments. For example, if a government cuts a tax *rate*, is it actually a tax cut? That turns out to be a complicated question – but requires theorizing what would have happened without a tax cut, including productivity growth, the marginal response of tax collections to tax rate, normal responses of the economy to fiscal policy depending on the business cycle etc. At least with mortgages, we call it a refinance and most people know what that means.
Finally, there is the emotional or value judgment aspect – and there is no easy answer there either – the debate on war reporting is a perfect example. Accurate reporting of significant setbacks in Iraq is doubtless news by nature of its novelty, but has to hurt the war effort, and therefore it’s impossible to be impartial.
The only thing I am pretty sure of is that the evolution of new media, new journalistic techniques, and the bringing of an increasing number of skilled eyeballs to bear on issues is probably a good thing.
In particular, I think the issue of journalists somehow representing, and being in touch with, the people is a good idea poorly implemented. It is, quite simply, costly and difficult to gather data, and it often requires specialized knowledge to interpret it.
Morever, in situations where someone has an information advantage (e.g. a CEO versus investors) that can be used for personal gain, there is something to be said for having trained information intermediaries reducing the asymmetry. The answer, however, doesn’t seem to be David Broder – it seems more likely that the answer in Greg Mankiw’s economics blog …
Just my 2 cents (times 10)
When there is a noted discrepancy (as with the Iraq War coverage) between government reports and what the free press tells us, that is indicative of an adversarial relationship. It doesn’t neceesarily have to be adversarial but will turn that way when an administration loses control over what is coming out in the media. A huge part of any governmental policy is managing the PR. Good journalists are aware of this and don’t let themselves be managed easily. Govt officials that only give information to “friendly’ sources run the risk that the other side of the issue will surface in an unflattering way and that they won’t be able to control the timing of the release.
Adversarial doesn’t necessarily mean distorting news and facts to turn them against the government. It means not being partial to the government’s point of view, and not being friends with the people you’re supposed to be covering.
It’s not only necessary to have this sort of adversarial relationship, but it’s the only ethical way for the media to conduct itself with regard to important topics.
Chris – then by your definition, they should have an adversarial relationship with EVERYONE, not just the government. Leftist, rightist, Democrats, Republicans, Socialists, business, labor…everyone.
I actually agree more with that than your original statement.
AR,
Yeah… “everyone” sounds about right