Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Honne and Tatemae

David Sanger in today's NYT:

Similar fears [of the aftermath of a pre-emptive strike], he said, gave President Bill Clinton pause about launching a strike on North Korea in 1994. Later that year he reached an accord for a freeze on the North's nuclear production facilities. But in 2003 everything unfroze, and now the North, by C.I.A. estimates, has enough fuel for at least half a dozen bombs.

"Everything unfroze" in 2003? Because they supposedly stopped their Plutonium program but secretly began enriching Uranium instead? And this in an article entitled "Why Not a Strike on Iran?".

Times logic proceeds from the idea that the world all of a sudden became a dangerous place when the current administration took office-or at least picked up from where it was during Bush I. The Clinton years were apparently some sort of Caribbean vacation.

(if the title is inscrutable, click here)

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Bubble ethics?

Mark Kleiman says that you won't see stories on the housing bubble in your paper's real-estate section for the same reason you didn't see stories on the stock market bubble in financial papers: the sections need advertising dollars to support themselves.

Now maybe I'm biased--my employer predicted the stock market bubble, and has been loudly harassing readers about the housing bubble throughout the rich world for quite some time. And we sell plenty of advertising. But beyond that, I don't think this is quite true.

The problem with real estate and financial sections is not that they cater to the whims of advertisers; it's that they are extraordinarily vulnerable to survivor bias.

Bubbles generally become apparent to experts years before they pop. Contrary to popular opinion, many people on Wall Street knew that stock prices were irrational long before the bubble collapsed.

So why didn't they say so? Well, some of them wanted to sell fat IPOs to gullible suckers. But many of them did say so, only no one paid attention. The problem with newspapers isn't that they need advertisers; it's that they have incredibly short attention spans. Journalists tend to cover a beat for a few years, and then move onto the next thing; that's how you move up in a media organization. Thus, they tend to check expert's predictions against months, rather than years, of data. And in the short run, bearish experts were wrong.

It is a maxim of traders that "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"; that is why few people on Wall Street tried to act on their knowlege that the stock market was overvalued by selling short. They knew it was going to bust, but they didn't know when, meaning that they couldn't be sure they'd be able to cover their short trades long enough to make a profit.

This problem afflicted bearish experts on the publicity side too. Inexperienced business journalists saw some guy claiming that the stock market was going to crash, and then watched the Nasdaq climbing to ever more dizzying heights. Who are you going to believe, him or your own eyes? Moreover, because the crash wasn't actually happening, it was very hard to cover: there's only so many times you can say "the bubble is going to crash and everyone is going to lose a bunch of moola" before your editor demands something fresh. ANd there were a lot of fresh stories about dotcom companies with record first-day pops.

Similarly, experts have been predicting the housing market's demise for quite some time. Journalists, who generally need a hard news "peg" to sell a story to their editor, have understandably overlooked this in pursuit of something that was actually happening right now.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Michiko Kakutani simultaneously apes and overlooks Mary Mapes...

Is this a book review, or an editorial? Jeez.

This is rich:

Meanwhile, the press has often unwittingly aided politicians by flagellating itself. As Mr. Crawford astutely notes, journalists "seldom defend" themselves. In addition, they allow themselves, on occasion, to be distracted from covering the news made by politicians and government officials to engage in cannibalistic navel-gazing - a phenomenon fueled by Internet bloggers, cable news pundits and talk radio partisans like Rush Limbaugh, who are intent on promoting themselves at the expense of the mainstream media.

Awww. I'll happily accompany this nonsense on the world's tiniest violin.

I suppose one man's cannibalistic navel-gazing is another man's constructive reflection..at least when it's in response to mainstream media scrutiny.

I must say, I never knew 'astutely' was a synonym for 'disingenuously'. The press 'seldom defends' itself much like Kakutani 'seldom' reviews books. In addition to the subject volume and her own article, Kakutani herself provides examples of these self-effacing navel gazers:

"Attack the Messenger" isn't nearly as comprehensive or incisive as the reader might want: Eric Boehlert of Salon, Frank Rich of The New York Times, Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books, Eric Alterman of The Nation and Ken Auletta in The New Yorker have all written about aspects of the Bush administration's relationship with the press, and done so with far greater acuity and depth than this volume demonstrates.

Reluctant warriors all, like Clint Eastwood in Unforgiven.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The Clements Leak, cont.

Obviously, leaking Judge Clement's name was a way to throw the activist groups off guard. Is having a good soundbite ready to go now some sort of a civil right, that journalists should risk their professional lives to assure for the various interest groups that are mad about this? No harm was done by this leak, except obviously to the trustworthyness of the source. Lead time doesn't seem like it would really have done People for the American Way et. al. much good; the best they could come up with on Clement was that she ruled that the Hobbes Act (which, as I understand it, says that crimes which disrupt interstate commerce may be tried in federal court) does not apply to someone who robbed four convenience stores. It doesn't take an ultra-libertarian to find this eminently sensible. Why assume that they would have done a better job with Roberts?

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Should we give aid to Palestine?

From an economic perspective, probably not; Palestine is plagued by corruption and weak political institutions, not to mention that there is a risk that any new infrastructure you build will be blown up or bulldozed by the Israelis.

But from a political perspective, why, yes, we should. Palestine has a new president, Mahmoud Abbas, who seems genuinely interested in moderating the militancy that has helped to make a permanent peace accord impossible. He also commands little of the loyalty that Arafat got from Hamas and its ilk, which means he needs all the help he can get consolidating his power if there is to be any realistic hope of moderating the conflict. A big influx of cash would help a lot--plus, to the extent that it makes any difference in the misery of the Palestinians, it erodes support for terror among the population.

Oh, no no no no no, says The New Republic, making many of the points I outlined above: the PA is corrupt and aid networks are ineffective. But he kinda neglects to mention the whole Israel side of things, making it sound as if the PA is just a bunch of venal bumblers. For example:

There is reason to fear that future aid would be spent just as poorly. A massive RAND study released this year (and titled Building a Successful Palestinian State) recommends constructing a high-speed railroad linking the major population areas of Gaza and the West Bank. There is the minor problem that, as the authors note in passing, roads rather than rail would be used for most freight shipments, for emergency services, and for those who can afford cars--including tourists, dignitaries, and the growing middle class the study envisages. As former World Bank President James Wolfensohn has pointed out (second disclosure: I was previously an economist at the World Bank), a good road would connect the Palestinian urban areas at a much more modest cost than the billions the authors propose to pour into a railroad--which could quickly turn into one of the money-draining, inefficient public enterprises that plague many developing countries. All of which is to say that excessive aid money could well fund white elephant investments, saddling the P.A. with operating costs it can ill afford.

This would have been an excellent place to mention why the PA wants to build a railroad, which is that Israel won't let it build a road between the territories, fearing (quite reasonably) that militants will slip off it to launch terror attacks in Israel. Yet, somehow, the author didn't think that was important enough to include.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Could this vacation get any worse?

So, you decided to go to Cancun for vacation. You're stuck in a shelter with thousands of other people. You are lying in your boxers and tee shirt trying to think of some other place and time. Why the tropics in hurrricane season? If you were in your hotel room, you could be getting intimate with the lady next to you. Instead, You've got 5 square feet of space to yourself, and you're surrounded by sweaty, snoring humanity. Could this vacation get any worse?

Well, an AP News photographer could snap you...er...adjusting your package. And your colleagues back at the office could find the picture because it was distributed on the front page of a newspaper free at public transportation stops all around the U.S.

BONUS: check the editorial on p. 9 of the NY edition. It compares President Bush to Alfred E. Neuman, Joe Camel, Papa Smurf, Mr.Magoo, Tony the Tiger and Duck Dodgers!

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Is Newsweek responsible for those deaths?

In one sense, of course, the rioters hold the responsibility. But on the other hand, look at the rioting that devastated LA after police officers, who had been captured on videotape, were acquitted of brutalising Rodney King. Sure, the hatred of the police, the anger, had been there all along. But no beating, no acquittal, no riots. The police and the jurors were the proximate cause of the riots in LA. It seems pretty clear to me that this is also the case in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the reports of someone flushing the Koran down the toilet were, according to all the news accounts I've read, the force that agitated the rioters and bound them together in deadly violence.

But to say that someone's actions were the cause of a bad thing is not to say that they bear the responsibility. If I give my child a peanut-butter cookie, and my child gives half that cookie to another child, who dies from their peanut allergy, no one in that chain is responsible for the tragedy, even though clearly both mother and child were causes of it--had they acted differently, the death would not have occurred. On the other hand, some are willing to blame the police and/or jurors in the Rodney King incident, because they think that the police and jurors acted wrongly, out of racist motives that fed the righteous flames of anger over race in Los Angeles. It is possible to believe this without excusing the rioters. I may truly believe that during a disaster, people should exit buildings in a calm and orderly fashion--but this does not give me license to shout "fire" in a crowded theater, even though it is the heedless stampeding of other patrons that will actually kill people.

But did Michael Isikoff do anything wrong?

I don't agree with those who say he shouldn't have printed it even if it were true--a press that thinks it's on the government's "team" is not a very good watchdog of our liberties, though I concede it worked pretty well in World War II. I don't have enough knowlege of standards in political reporting to comment upon single-sourcing or anonymous sources--there just aren't that many people who want to keep their revelations about our nation's retail inventory figures on deep background. There is a tradeoff between quality and quantity of information that must be made with anonymous sources, and I don't have any very good idea of where we should draw the line.

But I do think that Mr Isikoff made a pretty big mistake, a la the Dan Rather team, which is that he doesn't seem to have thought very hard about the proletarian details of the story he was reporting. I don't particularly think that this was some case of a partisan who "wanted" the story to be true--I think that Abu Ghraib has unfortunately made these sorts of incidents all too plausible. But nonetheless, he should have done a double take, because as others have pointed out, it is very, very hard to flush a book down a toilet.

Korans are not printed on newsprint (which also clogs the plumbing if you use it often). They are printed on nice paper, as befits their station. They have solid bindings. The Koran runs 77,000 words, plus notes, which is a decent-sized novel.

The Newsweek report nonetheless says, not that the Koran was dunked in the toilet, but that it was flushed down one. Did they have an industrial scale paper chipper on premises? (Shreds would, I'd bet, still be cloggy). Did some maniac stand there for hours, carefully ripping the pages into pieces a few at a time, the better to enjoy the anguished screams of the inmates? What did they do with the covers, which at the very least would be highly-non-dissolving treated cardstock?

I don't say that there aren't possible explanations--that the report actually involved the book being dunked-and-swirled, that it was a latrine, not a toilet, or that they were in fact using a paper chipper of some sort. But once you realise that the story as written is highly questionable, it also becomes quite possible that the source has gotten it wrong somehow. And that should have caused Mr Isikoff, and his editor, to pause and check.

It now seems highly possible that what the source was remembering were unsubstantiated allegations of Koran desecreation by inmates--who, like prisoners the world over, do not have the same credibility as other sources. Particularly when many of them presumably have political reasons to brand America as a defiler of the Koran. Such mistakes happen, and the fault is not having gotten a bad fact, but getting a bad fact that didn't smell quite right, and not catching the whiff of implausibility.

That said, it's all too easy to make mistakes like this. Every time there's an error in a story, bloggers pile on crying "Don't they have fact checkers?" Why, yes, we do, but producing thousands of fact-filled words is, speaking as someone who went from critic to journalist, more difficult than it looks. Once your brain has processed a piece of information incorrectly, it tends to continue processing it incorrectly, no matter how many times you look at it--your brain tells you "right, looked at that, that's a fine fact, move along . . . " To take a trivial example (caught by a fact checker) when I was writing a piece on the unfunded liabilities of America's old-age system, I spelled Jagadeesh Gokhale's name as "Jagdeesh". I checked that piece at least five or six times, and missed it every time.

Now, I think that Michael Isikoff and the other editors who checked his work in some sense should have known that there was something implausible about flushing a Koran down the toilet. But I'm not sure that I realised that, when I heard the story (though in my defense, I of course assumed that Mr Isikoff & co. had checked it out). And those of you who did realise that--I guarantee you that if you were doing this five or six days a week, you'd find that there are an amazing number of things that don't strike you as at all odd until someone else points them out--at which point they are obvious enough to burn your retinas into crispy ash.

So I think Mr Isikoff & co made a mistake. But they are not villains; they are simply human. Like their critics, who should give them a little bit of a break now that they've stood up like men and apologized.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

WSJ online profits top print

. . . . Or so says the NY Post.

The problem with this sort of accounting is that media outlets generally charge all the cost of content generation -- except for online-only content -- to the print side. This tends to make the online numbers look artificially wonderful. As far as I know, no online mainstream publication could turn a profit just on the web.

Nonetheless, this should have media titans everywhere sweating bullets. The problem is that no one has figured out a way to make online advertising come within an order of magnitude of the profit on print advertising. For one thing, people like print ads (or at most, ignore them); they hate online ads. For another, there's all sorts of software to strip the ads off your page, which isn't really practical with a newspaper or magazine. And while marketing departments should theoretically be willing to pay as much for interested clicks as for eyeballs flipping past the page, they aren't. Unless the media figures out a way to make people like, and marketers pay for, online advertising, traditional outlets are wholly screwed if and when people start converting their readership to online editions, since advertising is what currently covers their costs. Besides which, people won't pay as much for online subscriptions.

The blogosphere no doubt chortles in triumph. Perhaps I would too, if the traditional media didn't hand me a nifty check each month. But the fact is that traditional media does a lot of valuable work generating information that would go away if they weren't there. As a blogger, I could not do what I just did for the last week: spend most of my waking hours being lectured by experts, reading academic papers, and tracking down legal histories, in order to write comprehensively about bankruptcy reform. Nor could I, say, go to Sudan to tell you what's happening there. I would have to get another job, and that would cut into the time I could spend producing content. Bloggers will say that a lot of journalism is crap, and that's true, because a lot of everything is crap. But without CNN, ABC, WaPo, NYT, WSJ, and so forth, how would bloggers even know what the weather was going to be like, much less what was going on in the world? Blogging is a complement to traditional media, not a replacement for it, and if the traditional media gets hurt, the quality of blogging will also suffer.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

News flash-Eason Jordan has been fired!

I got to converse with Jay Rosen last night on the topic of Eason Jordan, and what seems to me to be the mainstream media's rather bizarre reaction to his firing.

I haven't blogged about this story, because, to be frank, I just don't care that much. Eason Jordan said something that's pretty reprehensible, if he meant it the way it was taken, which subsequent evidence, including his own behaviour, seems to indicate that he did. On the other hand, it's not really a journalistic sin, but a personal one.

But then he was fired, and the media, to my mind, went off the deep end with a fifty-pound weight around its neck. A fellow from CJR called bloggers "the drooling morons of the lynch mob". A New York Times pieces made it sound as if Eason Jordan had been terribly victimised by callous thugs with a political axe to grind. Even the Wall Street Journal lamented that it had come down to firing him. The dominant tones were shock, surprise, and rage that bloggers had managed to magnify a slip of the tongue into a firing offense. The blogosphere had clearly Gone Too Far.

Excuse me? Exactly who do we think we are, Miss Thing? If Eason Jordan had been a division head at General Motors, and he had been reported as having said some stupid and indefensible at a private conference, like that women workers were out to sue for sexual harassment in order to enrich themselves, would the New York Times have thought that this was an outrage? Would the Columbia Journalism Review think that editorial columnists calling for the GM VP to explain his remarks were waaaaaaaaaaaaaay out of line?

Don't be ridiculous. When prominent people working for high-profile companies make stupid remarks in public, and the public finds out about it, the general result is that they are quickly shown the door by their employers. Why should Eason Jordan's Fortune 100 company be any different?

Oh, because it's journalism? Huh? What Eason Jordan was doing wasn't journalism; it was speaking off the cuff, making extremely serious allegations with none of the evidence that a journalist would require before daring to put forth such accusations. Why should he be any more protected from the results of his idiocy than a Johnson & Johnson executive?

Why, because journalists have been protecting each other from the results of such stupid, off-the-cuff speculation for decades, and suddenly they feel a little naked. This is understandable. AT&T execs can at least spout silliness to each other. Most journalists, on the other hand, are mostly friends with other journalists. To whom should we float our wild conspiracy theories and misanthropic fulminations on people we disagree with, if anything we say to journalists is suddenly on the record?

But on the other hand, Mr Jordan wasn't speaking to other journalists; he was speaking to a large number of strangers, many of whom were almost guaranteed to leave the room and tell sympathetic audiences that yes, it really is true that the US military is deliberately shooting unfriendly journalists; I heard the head of CNN's news division say so. CJR and the Times are curiously uninterested in these violations of the Chatham House Rules.

Perhaps it's not fair that journalists should alone be denied the benefits of protecting each other. Doctors manifestly do it, as do police, firefighters, teachers . . . it's hard to think of a profession, in fact, whose members do not to some extent band together to protect their own against outsiders, even when "we" are wrong. It is, I suppose, a touch unjust that journalists alone should be denied professional courtesy.

On the other hand, it may not be good for us, but it's undoubtedly good for society.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Annals of journalism

Kudoes to the New York Times for making possibly the most egregious use of the unsourced third party quote in history:

But in today's statement, Pyongyang zeroed in on Dr. Rice's testimony last month in her Senate confirmation hearings, where she lumped North Korea with five other dictatorships, calling them "outposts of tyranny."

"The true intention of the second-term Bush administration is not only to further its policy to isolate and stifle the D.P.R.K. pursued by the first-term office, but to escalate it," the statement said, referring to North Korea by its formal name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Outside critics and defectors say that North Korea is neither democratic nor popular, since it has been ruled for the last 60 years by the Kim family, an avaricious clan that does not permit multiparty elections or the slightest whisper of dissent. Today Pyongyang told the Bush administration to talk to the kinds of North Koreans it likes.

Wouldn't want to go out on a limb there by just saying outright that North Korea is a brutal dictatorship led by a man who is neck-in-neck with Michael Jackson for the title of "weirdest human being on the planet". Better dredge up some "critics" to make the point so you won't have to defend such an outlandish accusation.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

Department of Invidious Comparison

Derek Rose on the plight of the journalist in Manhattan.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Why won't that dog hunt?

Eric Alterman, in a quote you've seen elsewhere today:

Neither should you call what Maggie Gallagher practices “journalism.” True, what she did was not as bad as what Armstrong Williams did. But if she doesn’t know that working for a government paycheck without disclosing it does not violate journalistic ethics, then she has no business passing herself off as one. And I love the defense of “I forgot” and “Nobody ever asked me.” Nobody never asked her if she has sexual relations with animals, either. Are we supposed to ask everybody everything before they start revealing their professional conflicts of interest?

What a strange suggestion. While I'm not a fan of bestiality, I don't consider it a 'professional conflict of interest' for a journalist, and couldn't be less interested in its disclosure. Zookeeper-yes, dogwalker-yes, animal rights advocate-maybe.

Kidding aside, I agree that Gallagher should have disclosed her government business without interrogation.

From the desk of Jane Galt:

The future of the Times

Some colleagues and I were discussing recently whether the Jayson Blair story has had a long-term impact on the New York Times that the Times somehow needs to take corrective action to fix. While I certainly have my issues with the Times, I don't think that the Jayson Blair affair is a proxy for some sort of deep institutional failure at the Times; I think it's an indicator, first, of how vulnerable media sources are to people who make things up, and second, one of the symptoms of Howell Raines' doing a pretty poor job as editor-in-chief. But Howell Raines is gone, and no matter how many times bloggers ask "Don't they have fact-checkers?", the fact is that in journalism, as in accounting, a system capable of detecting every determined fraudster would be a system so ponderous and expensive as to be incapable of doing its job. Furthermore, the overwhelming majorty of current and future readers of the New York Times have never heard of Jayson Blair, and wouldn't much care if they did. So my opinion was that while the Jayson Blair is an ongoing blow to the bragging rights of New York Times reporters, it hasn't hurt the paper in any serious institutional way.

[A colleague pointed out that it might hurt their recruiting efforts. Perhaps so. But the blows to morale at the paper seem to have long predated the Jayson Blair affair, and had more to do with Howell Raines' dictatorial managerial style, and quixotic editorial crusades, than Mr Blair's offenses.]

This Businessweek article, however, indicates that the Times may indeed have serious problems, ones that surprised me:

THE TIMES HAS MANY FEWER READERS outside of New York City than do the two largest national newspapers -- USA Today and The Wall Street Journal -- both of which have circulations far in excess of 2 million. "Those two papers tend to be a more cost-effective buy than the Times just because their circulation across the country is so much larger," says Jeff Piper, vice-president and general manager of Carat Press, a big media buyer. Even in the New York region, where the Times reaches only 14% of all adult readers, the paper's circulation is too diffuse to allow for effective targeting by ZIP Code -- a technique that has enriched many other metro dailies with revenue from inserts.

The Times has gotten less and less interested in local coverage over the years; it's city section, in particular, has gotten pretty perfunctory, while publications like the Sun (full disclosure: I write for their Books section) are moving aggressively to expand theirs. The Times wants to be a national publication, and with good reason, as local dailies continue to die slow and painful deaths throughout the land. But there is probably only room in the national market for a handful of publications, and the Businessweek piece makes it sound as if the effort to go national may have hurt the Times at home, without pushing it over the top nationally:

The reinvention of the Times as a national paper has been accompanied by a steady loss of subscribers in the New York metro area. Its dwindling presence at home has been caused in part by forces beyond its control, including a big influx of non-English-speaking immigrants. However, taking the paper further upscale in pursuit of an elite nationwide readership priced it out of some New Yorkers' reach (a seven-day subscription goes for about $480 a year) and constrained its spending on local marketing and promotion. In addition, the Times has declined to join in the trend of introducing foreign-language editions or free editions for young adult readers. (It may be rethinking its free-paper aversion, as evidenced by The Boston Globe's recent purchase of a 49% stake in Metro Boston, a giveaway tabloid.)

I'm extremely surprised to find that the Times has less of a national reach than the WSJ, and even more surprised to find that its local distribution is too fragmented to make an optimal media buy. When you consider that the Wall Street Journal has successfully been pushing into areas long considered the province of the Times, such as arts and politics, I imagine the folks at Times headquarters are as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Plus, they're still struggling to figure out how to make money off this dang Internetty thing:

What's a platform agnostic to do? The New York Times, like all print publications, faces a quandary. A majority of the paper's readership now views the paper online, but the company still derives 90% of its revenues from newspapering. "The business model that seems to justify the expense of producing quality journalism is the one that isn't growing, and the one that is growing -- the Internet -- isn't producing enough revenue to produce journalism of the same quality," says John Battelle, a co-founder of Wired and other magazines and Web sites.

In the long run, I think those sorts of "business side" problems are going to mean much more for the future of the Times than poor editorial choices on a handful of hotbutton stories, or the makeup of its editorial page.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

At some personal expense, Nick

At some personal expense, Nick Coleman has certainly gained blogosphere notoriety today.

I wouldn't particularly like to be him, but I wonder if he was hoping for an insta-volokh-best-of-the-web-lanche? He's made all the appropriate enemies if one wants to build a following on the left side of the blogosphere.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Flyover Library

While on the subject of the warped perspective of the New York Times, consider this past editorial:

Google announced an ambitious new plan to start converting millions of books into digital files in partnership with several major libraries, including the New York Public Library and the libraries at Harvard, Stanford and Oxford.

Those of you familiar with the project will note that three of the institutions named above are minor contributors to this project, while Stanford and the unmentioned University of Michigan are providing the lion's share of the content. A coastal perspective indeed. I thought it typical of the mindset illustrated in the old Saul Steinberg drawing, View of the World from 9th Avenue.

Over the holiday, one of my relatives (who works at UMich), read the editorial and expressed some outrage. Another pointed out that maybe it was because Michigan was a red state (incorrectly, thanks entirely to Ann Arbor and Detroit).

"no, no, we're a blue state!" (very defensively)

"Oh".

Recall that I am the only living member of my family to ever even think of voting Republican, or, I believe, ever doubt the received wisdom from 43rd street from the right. Now I bit my tongue at the time, but they either admitted a strange bias in their paper of record or, worse, condoned such behavior if Michigan were a red state.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Multiple Choice

This just in - Bush's Ohio margin down 0.27%!

The recount, conducted over the past three weeks, showed that Mr. Bush won Ohio by 118,457 votes. Most county elections officials completed their recounts last week, but the state had to wait for Lucas County, where Toledo is located, to complete its tally. Lucas County reported the results of its recount on Tuesday.

The secretary of state's office had earlier reported that Mr. Bush won Ohio by 118,775 votes and plans to record the newest tally officially later this week.

I trust many of you remember that most frustrating of SAT questions, "what would be the best title for this article?". Here are your choices:

a) "Nothing to report here, move along"
b) "Original Ohio tally proves accurate, conspiracy theorists embarassed"
c) "Ohio recount gives a smaller margin to Bush"
d) "We like eggs"

According to the NYT the answer is c).

(via Tigerhawk).

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

If it curses, fine it

Jeff Jarvis hails the impending death of terrestrial radio with Howard Stern's move to Sirius.

There, ladies and gentlemen, is the last nail in the coffin of broadcast as the central medium in America. And the FCC hammered it in.

The age of one-size-fits-all media is over but the FCC and Congress don't want to admit it and so they are not allowing TV and radio to compete with the tremendous choice and freedom now available on cable, satellite, and the internet -- and soon via ubiquitous broadband and podcasting and all that. I'll say it again: Just tear down the antennas; we don't need them anymore.

Don't tear them down just yet. Radio has been taxed and regulated, expect more subsidies when it stops moving altogether.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Quick, while it's looking away...

UPDATE: My oldest son (12) offers this flash animation:

I remember I was about his age when American-made car became synonymous with 'ugly bucket of bolts'. Calling Viacom branding professionals...
-------

I'm not enough of a photoshop jockey to complete this, but..

We just need some pajama-clad bloggers scaling the mountain next to it, or perhaps just a few Times Roman letters (packed suspicously close together).

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

You're either with us or you're with the bloggers

Pinch Sulzberger lashes out at the hoi polloi and proves he is both a snob and a stasist (via Kaus):

This takes us to another important on-line phenomenon, the rise of bloggers. These individuals publish web logs that offer an ongoing narrative of their thoughts and observations. Some are professional journalists, but the vast majority of them are just folks with something on their minds.

While some of these individuals are making a serious and thoughtful contribution to our global dialogue, too many simply contribute to the sense that we're in the midst of an opinion-ridden free-for-all.

Well, excuse us. Journalists vs. "just folks with something on their minds"; "serious and thoughtful" vs. "opinion-ridden free-for-all". Such manicheanism.

The Scribe is troubled. Some intrepid new group blog needs to name themselves "Opinion-Ridden Free-for-All" (or that could be AI's slogan!).

UPDATE: More tired defenders of the establishment weigh in:

"Information Anarchy"; "It hurts because now anyone can publish on the Web. You have people who are politically aligned raising questions about our standards, but there is no attention given to their standards."

It hurts, it hurts us. Nasty bloggerses have no precious standards.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Fresh from the stupid idea department

Paul Rudnick is looking to join Nicholson Baker in the contest for weirdest symptoms of Bush Derangement Syndrome:

July 7, 2004—I didn’t want it to happen. I didn’t see it coming. I’m a husband. I’m a father. I’m the President of the United States of America. I’m freedom’s go-to guy. But today, while I was watching one of my ads, that spot attacking him for being all flippity-floppity on Iraq, I realized, beyond a shadow of a doubt: Oh, my God, I’m in love with John Kerry.

July 8, 2004—I hoped that once I’d written it down, once I could actually see the words in these most secret diary pages, my undeniable feelings would, I don’t know, just somehow vanish. I mean, I’ve never even thought about another fellow that way, not ever—O.K., Ted Kennedy at the pool in those sopping madras trunks. I’m only human. But this is different. This is oddly . . . sacred. Those liquid, burden-of-decency basset-hound eyes. That long, luscious, Leno ’n’ Lincoln jaw. That cinder-block-thick, brushed-chrome hair. Who cares what really happened in Vietnam? That dense, silvery helmet could make any nation feel safe. I’m so ashamed. And I’ve never felt more alive.

The New Yorker needs to aim a little higher (not to mention funnier and less pseudo-hip). I haven't been a big user of the 'imagine if the same thing were said about [insert Democrat/woman/minority group here]' contrivance, but I'd recommend the New Yorker try it a few times and then think where they might find such a piece. (in the comments here?) Has the Manhattan Liberal Cocoon completely dulled their senses? Is Rudnick the next Maureen Dowd?

In the same issue, see this short profile of political youth:

A panelist affiliated with the Young Communist League who wore a hoop through her lower lip softly interjected something about America’s “superpower, capitalist society.” Her braces flashed.

“All right, I’m sorry to cut you off—we’ve got a segment,” Ahmad said. “I don’t actually know what it’s about.”

“The draft,” Naomi said, and a short documentary was shown.

“It’s a war on minority youth,” one panelist said, to applause, when the camera cut back to the stage. Salazar begged to differ: the draft bill brought before Congress last year, she said, had been introduced by a Democrat from Harlem, and was aimed at white people. “That’s not true!” several people shouted at once. “It is true,” said a small voice from the studio audience: Salazar’s six-year-old sister, wearing a backward National Review cap and clutching a baby doll with a “Bush-Cheney ’04” button on its chest.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Failure to subsidize my speech

Heard on DeadAir America last night:

David L. Robb, the author of this book said, that the Pentagon's policy of assisting with movies (lending equipment, etc.) on the condition of substantial editorial control is 'clearly unconstitutional' - a violation of first amendment rights. Garofalo and Seder suggested it was grounds for a movie-viewer class action! Think of all the war movies we didn't get to see!*

While the Pentagon's editorial policies seem silly, I can't imagine forcing them to assist ALL films. This is transforming a negative right (freedom from interference with free speech) into a positive right. Do we have a right to assistance from the Pentagon with our film actively trashing the Pentagon?

I'm interested to know legal bloggers' (calling Professor Volokh?) opinion on Robb's claim. It seems relevant to the issue what (or how) the Pentagon charges for its assistance, but that was not clear from the discussion.

UPDATE: There are a few interesting objections in the comments. First of all, several commenters think "substantial editorial control" is not accurate. Perhaps. Taken at face value, what Robb describes constitutes editorial control in my book. For instance, changing the Top Gun love interest to a civilian, not allowing sailors to swear and re-writing scenes to avoid depiction of a war crime. Again, I think The Defense Department's position is defensible, but that is 'substantial editorial control' in my book. 'Silly'? Well, the first two examples above seem pretty silly to me. Silly isn't illegal or unconstitutional, it's just what bureaucracies do so well.

In other news, Garofalo and Seder compared various members of the administration to Nazis, etc. They remain interesting, like the Osbournes are interesting, but unfunny. I do keep listening, for reasons difficult to explain. I guess I get a kick out of hyper-partisan rhetoric. As anti-Howard Stern listeners famously told a pollster - 'to see what he'll do next'.

*What are the damages?

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Dowdification on Frontline?

Despite my best intentions, I missed the Frontline special The Jesus Factor. I could not miss, however, the blizzard of advance publicity, including even a special advance preview for Robin Quivers of the The Howard Stern Show, our newest outlet for DNC agitprop. The killer line they have been quoting from the show is Bush (on the morning of the Inauguration) saying "I believe that God wants me to be President".

There were two interviews on Fresh Air prior to the special. One was 50 minutes with the creators of the special, the other, 5 minutes with Richard Land who was actually in the room when Bush said those words. Land provided the entire quotation, in which Bush went on to say roughly the following:

...but if that doesn't happen, that's O.K., I'm loved at home and that's more important. I've seen the presidency up close. I know it's a sacrifice, not a reward. I don't need it for personal validation.

Land goes on to argue againt Terry Gross that this does not mean 'God is on his side". He makes a reasonable case that this was a significantly more humble statement than this blizzard of Frontline publicity suggests. These points can be debated, but it does seem that this is yet another example of Dowdification to serve scare tactics. (To be fair, the producers of this special seem to be much more even-handed than the tone of the advance publicity suggested.)

Which raises the question of how scared we should be of religion in the Presidency (should I say 'odious religiosity'?). If anything, I have become less religious as I age, yet I have had to endure public religious gestures from a succession of presidents from Carter to Bush 43, with only Bush 41 as a short hiatus. It is unclear to me why we should be any less threatened by Carter's public religion than Bush 43 - unless, that is, such fear is cultivated in service of a partisan agenda.

I've always believed in separating scientific knowledge and faith. One of the 'Frontline' incidents, the primary debate where Bush chose Jesus Christ as an important influence on his life, did not bother me. Bush said Christ 'changed his heart, not his mind and declared that was a difficult event to explain for those who had not experienced it. Indeed, Bush being born again changed his behavior (drinking and other activities, we understand), not his knowledge. This is an important distinction. Knowledge is insufficient.

At the very least, it seems to me that anyone who professes fear at the President seeking divine guidance in choosing ' lesser evils' (I recommend Ignatieff's article, by the way) would also steer clear of "what would Jesus drive?" arguments as presented by religious liberals. Do they?

Discussing the faith of Presidents too often serves as shaky rhetorical scaffolding for dubious arguments about motivation.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Oops, I did it again...

I listened to Air America on the way home and caught the first half hour of Majority Report. They are hitting lefty boggers hard for material - today Atrios was filling in for Garofalo.

Except, I didn't hear much from Atrios. Sam Seder fawned all over him and then just worked his way into the usual rantsand bad jokes (from memory):

'Sitting across from me is the blogger Atrios. He is behind a scrim-[to engineer] would you call that a scrim? Yes I think scrim is the right word hahaha.....anybody who thinks we don't have a Taliban-like problem in this country is out of touch'

Once again I was denied my blogger-on-the-air fix. Incidentally, the technical problems continue. Atrios' mic wasn't on in the beginning and they had trouble running a short loop of Garofalo 'joking' about the engineer's face turning "a color that is beet-like". ROTFL, I tell you.

I did learn that Atrios is maintaining such deep pseudonym cover that his 'friends and family' don't know who he is (once again, Seder tells us that, asks for a confimation and keeps blabbing). He's insta-prolific isn't he? What on earth does he tell people he's doing all the time? How does he explain the funny blogger screen on his computer? As a fellow pseudonym blogger I can tell you my friends and family know all about this.

I applaud Air America's idea of tapping the weblogging community for ideas. Now they should shut up and let them contribute because the on-air talent is only funny and entertaining in the way Plan Nine From Outer Space is funny and entertaining.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Second Prize: Two Garofalos

I've been listening to Air America on the way home. Until today that meant Marty Kaplan's show. Despite the billing, it sounds to me like any of the local public radio news and talk shows. It doesn't quite live up to its web promotion -

reinvents the way pop culture is covered – combining the brains of a Terry Gross, the flash of Entertainment Tonight and (occasionally) the melancholy of This American Life.

Flashy it ain't.

But tonight I came home a bit later and caught 30 minutes of Majority Report. This is truly awful radio. For starters, the New York station had Garofalo on both delay and live. Imagine a room full of college protesters saying "hubris, lies, arrogant" over and over again ('watermelon, rutabaga'). It ranked right up there with dental surgery, but it kept me awake, and I guess I just wanted to see how long they'd go. I also sort of wanted to hear Daily Kos' appearance, but I was home before he came on.

It took them 20 minutes to fix the problem. That's an eternity of bad air. Yet when they finally eliminated one of the feeds, I was amazed to find it didn't sound any better. Garofalo and Seder were spitting mad and incoherent, talked all over each other and rarely finished a thought. I guess I expected Garofolo to be funny since she was a comedian. She's not, nor is she even trying. Not even trying in the beat-a-funny-at-first-idea-to-death Al Franken way. As for nasty partisan name calling, they made Ann Coulter look like Ann Taylor. 'Howard Kurtz is a pig', 'liars, criminals, Nazis", blahblahblah.

I see others have an even stronger reaction. Some of the backers must be embarassed to be associated with this.

I've actually never listened to Limbaugh, Hannity or O'Reilly. Loyal readers know I listen to Stern and NPR. So I'm willing to believe those other guys are just as bad. So what? Two sucks don't make a sing.

Oh, look, they have a blog. As of 9:57 this evening they still haven't figured out that Ellsberg doesn't have a 'u'.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Checking for Sources of "Unk-Unks"

Donald Rumsfeld was ridiculed for his famous "known unknowns" remark, then defended as Kantian and clear. Interestingly, I have seen no media coverage reveal he was simply quoting accepted project/process management theory going back to Chapman and Ward's 1997 textbook on Project Management and subsequent works.

Now I have just come across an article (also acknowledging a debt to Chapman and Ward) published a few months prior to the Defense Secretary's remarks that bears a very strong resemblance to the Secretary's phrasing.

Managing Project Uncertainty: From Variation to Chaos, by Arnoud De Meyer, Christopher H. Loch and Michael T. Pich. MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter 2002.

What Uncertainty Looks Like

Variation
Variation comes from many small influences and
yields a range of values on a particular activity..

Foreseen Uncertainty
Foreseen uncertainties are identifiable and
understood influences that the team cannot be sure will occur....

Unforeseen Uncertainty
As its name suggests, unforeseen uncertainty
can’t be identified during project planning. There is no
Plan B. The team either is unaware of the event’s possibility or
considers it unlikely and doesn’t bother creating contingencies.
“Unknown unknowns,” or “unk-unks,” as they are sometimes
called, make people uncomfortable because existing decision
tools do not address them. Unforeseen uncertainty is not always
caused by spectacular out-of-the-blue events, however. It also
can arise from the unanticipated interaction of many events,
each of which might, in principle, be foreseeable. Unforeseen
uncertainty occurs in any project that pushes a technology envelope
or enters a new or partially known market. Pfizer’s blockbuster
drug Viagra, for instance, began as a heart medication to
improve blood flow by relaxing the arteries.When clinical studies
found that it also increased sexual performance, the company
ended up developing that unexpected side effect into a blockbuster
drug, implementing new clinical development and a new
marketing approach midway through the original project.

Chaos
Whereas projects subject to unforeseen uncertainty start
out with reasonably stable assumptions and goals, projects subject
to chaos do not. Even the basic structure of the project plan
is uncertain, as is the case when technology is in upheaval or
when research, not development, is the main goal. Often the
project ends up with final results that are completely different
from the project’s original intent.

The hazards of entering this difficult terrain before the press are duly noted.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Gray Lady's Modesty

The New York Times Book Review features an Ashcroft-approved image of Justice.

1. "DWL". I'm aware there are plenty of fully clad versions.
2. When this post is a week old, you should still be able to find the NYT picture here.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

"Good Old Fashioned Reporting"

There are are several well-known forms of compelling non-fiction narrative. For example: the noble protagonist struggling against the forces of evil; the faceless machine grinding the little people under its boot heel; the clash of two titanic egos; the young forward-looking innovator resisting the establishment; the tycoon done in by his own greed. If you can cast a story in one of these classic molds it will be a more compelling read.

One of the first things they teach you in "media training" is that every reporter who calls you for comment, especially if you are not the first interview, has already begun to form such a narrative around their subject. For instance, the evil insurance companies are making up for their bad investment ideas by overcharging doctors, or the tort bar is responsible for all the problems in our legal system. The narrative lense helps arrange the facts in a much more digestible fashion. After all, if the article read like a lab report, who would read it? Media trainers help you identify the reporter's narrative, reject the assumptions that are unfriendly to your position and change the interview subject from the "gotchas" if you happen to be in the way of the reporter's chosen underdog. Media training gives you an extremely cynical view of journalism (and yourself).

Unfortunately, In my limited experience, the media trainers have been 100% on the mark. I have been interviewed or asked for comment a dozen or so times by journalists of various stripes and found they all had their storyline mapped out prior to asking me any questions. They are looking for a villain, someone struggling against the odds, somebody being ground up in the gears of a huge bureaucracy or someone who is heading for a fall.

I keep hearing this phrase "good old-fashoned reporting", mostly in the triumphant crowing over the resignations at the New York Times. If 'GOFR' means not making up stuff, I'm all for it. Unfortunately, many critics of the Times are conflating this notion of journalistic execution with the chimera of total journalistic objectivity. Total objectivity makes for neither good copy nor efficient story production and therefore barely exists.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Special Sauce for the Old Grey Goose

I haven't had much to say on all Blair all the time, just because I can see just how this could happen to The New York Times, it being a great big honkin' bureaucracy and all. The following, however, jumped out at me during my morning read as too funny after all the moralizing we businessmen-Times readers have had to endure on the Grey Lady's editorial pages.

Arthur Sulzberger announced today a new and lower standard for "public trusts" (via the Wall Street Journal no less, so the link requires subscription)

In a telephone interview, Mr. Sulzberger said there is little that anyone could have done to prevent Mr. Blair, who had worked at the Times nearly four years, from putting false information into the paper. "Do we have a system designed to uncover venality? No, we don't, and you know something, I guess I am not unhappy with that," Mr. Sulzberger said. "I don't want us to become a police state where you suspect every employee of ripping off the company."

Mr. Sulzberger would, for instance, "be unhappy" with measures such as:

• Independent private and regulatory audits;
  
• Records of interactions with the public and all internal email retained for seven years on specified searchable media;
  
• Mandatory continuous use of vacation time to uncover fraud;
  
• Pointless and annoying exams on record-keeping, how to interact with the public and how to trip up your own people;
  
• all correspondence reviewed prior to receipt or posting;
  
• a centralized public record of complaints related to employees;
  

After all, no business should "have a system designed to uncover venality." That would be like becoming a "police state where you suspect every employee of ripping off the company." Unless, of course, you are a financial services firm, in which case we can safely assume you are out to rip off someone.

I look forward to The Times applying Mr. Sulzberger's standard to its editorial evaluation of the next accounting or rogue-trading scandal.

P.S. What is it with "venal" these days? It seems to have become the mot du jour for the politically correct. Since money does not seem to have been at the core of Jayson Blair's motivation, Sulzberger's choice of words is rather odd.

To paraphrase Anthony Blanche "I wanted to spring into a cab and cry 'take me to Jayson's venal articles'".

UPDATE: Patrick Sullivan points to the following in the comments (this editorial also quoted in the New York Sun's editorial yesterday):

"[T]he move to hold top managers personally liable for any
misrepresentations made to investors - which the new corporate oversight
legislation also does - is a watershed worth celebrating.C.E.O's will no
longer be able to feign ignorance about the details of the companies'
accounting, as Jeffrey Skilling haughtily did early this year at a
Congressional hearing on Enron's implosion."

--The New York Times, editorial, "Downsizing the Imperial C.E.O.," August 9,
2002

"But Mr. Sulzberger emphasized that as The New York Times continues to
examine how its employees and readers were betrayed, there will be no
newsroom search for scapegoats. 'The person who did this is Jayson Blair,'
he said. 'Let's not begin to demonize our executives - either the desk
editors or the executive editor or, dare I say, the publisher.'"

--The New York Times, news article, "Times Reporter Who Resigned Leaves Long
Trail of Deception," May 11, 2003

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

The Media Bias Committee's Initial Findings

Terry Gross interviewed Eric Alterman and Bernard Goldberg on Fresh Air Thursday night.

Readers of ancient Dreck will know I read Bias a long time ago and was not particularly impressed. I haven't cracked Alterman's book. I just finished The Tipping Point and have begun Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science, so Alterman will have to wait.

I had the following impressions:

Common Ground:
These two agree on more than you would think. For instance, Alterman concedes that most news journalists are liberals and, like Goldberg, draws a bright line between opinion media and news. Both agree conservatives have opinion media 'locked up' (see "the need to entertain" below) , but they lump the 'punditocracy' into the news media or not, depending on its convenience to their argument.

Nicer in voice:
Both of them came across a lot more congenial than they do in their written work. Reading Alterman's blog, I've often thought I'd pass if given a chance to meet him. Speaking to Terry Gross, he sounded like very friendly and interesting company. Similarly, Goldberg's book leaves you with the overwhelming impression of a bloke driven by resentment of Dan Rather. In fact, he seems to see a giant media conspiracy infested with Dan Rathers, portentiously promoting their next evil-thugocrat interview. Again, not the sort of thing that makes one seek Goldberg's company in order to lift a glass of the best. In the interview he comes across as much more mild-mannered.

Not liberal enough for thee:
Alterman states there are no liberal TV pundits, clearly subscribing to the idea that none of these people are true scotsman. Alterman tends to get into the degrees of conservatism, 'Pat Buchanan is so far right he requires a Marxist counterweight' argument. Buchanan's a nutjob. Another nutjob might provide contrast, but not necessarily balance. And who will reach practical agreement on the degree of left/rightness of a pundit? (however, I have a nomination for the unit of measurement - an 'Ideom').

Bureaucratically defensive behavior vs. bias
Goldberg uses his stock examples about AIDS coverage glossing over the lack of heterosexual non-drug user contagion and conspicuous omission of legal handguns from news stories about criminals being stopped by citizens. Alterman complains of the press' lack of vigor in investigating corporations and general pro-corporate anti-labor views.

If we stipulate the accuracy of both writers' evidence, we can still find them consistent. All of the above are examples of defensive, risk-averse bureaucratic behavior.* Those of us who lean right observe the press treating the true-but-politically incorrect like someone else's radioactive underwear and infer a "liberal" bias. Liberals observe the press describing a clear example of a corporation putting its shareholders before its employees with the circumspection of Jeeves describing Bertie Wooster's faults. To them, this betrays a conservative skew. It is accurate to say that a corporate news organization will tailor its behavior to make life easier and shelter themselves from criticism. Both of these behaviors follow that pattern. If there is one bad thing about "big" media, it is that the bigger it gets, the more bureaucratic it may become.

I don't see a specifically "antilabor" bias in news media, as Alterman suggests. There also seems to be no shortage of news outlets willing to make companies out to be the evil exploiters of labor and customers - after all, it sells newspapers. Nonetheless, I absolutely believe that when potential corporate malfeasance is not the primary subject of a story, corporate-employed journalists will shy away from the inference. Whether that's good practice or defensive behavior has to be left up to context, I suppose.

UPDATE: Pejamn Pundit has a different and lively take.

The need to entertain
Both point out that some of the behavior they decry in media is the result of a need to entertain. I couldn't help but think that they both seemed to agree that conservative punditry is more entertaining, although neither of them actually said it out loud (hey - is that bias or fear-inspired lack of bias?).

Adjusting the political compass
Alterman also says that news outlets bend over backwards to tell the conservative side of a story, partly because of the entrenched architecture in place to howl and object when they don't. I think he's basically correct. Journalists are always careful to provide the window dressing of neutrality by quoting sources on both sides of an idea. That isn't Goldberg's complaint, however. Goldberg suggests that it is the journalists' own neutral voice that is out of whack, not the count of pundits invited to the party. Goldberg feels the 'cocooning' of liberal journalists has placed their definition of "center" well left of the country's. Hence the irreducible kafuffle about use of political labels such as "Conservative" (with or without the scare-prefix "ultra-").

I sort of recognize Goldberg's anger. It is the rising frustration of talking to someone and realizing that you are the only non-PC Liberal they know (or think they know). I have that problem with my family. We rarely talk politics, but when we do it is clear that I am the only person exposing them to a seriously differing point of view. It's very frustrating to have to explain everything from first principles and clear out the hitherto unquestioned mythology (it's all about oil; Bush came up with the term "regime change", etc.) and get to the elusive meat of the disagreement.

The New York Times Editorial pages often give me this feeling of a leftward-drifting center.** Prior to September 11, the times editorialists kept describing the Bush agenda as "Radical Right" and "Radical Conservative" (no links - pre-blogging days). Can you doubt that their idea of a "moderate" Republican is one who agrees with the Times' own essentially party-line Democrat outlook? Seriously now.

Tempest in a teapot
For myself, I am increasingly less concerned about media bias in this country. I have an enormous diversity of media to choose from on-line, including established publications from all over the world and, of course, weblogs, which make up for their obvious bias with lively non-bureaucratic personality and occasional first-person reporting.

Furthermore, just as smokers actually tend to overestimate the dangers of smoking, yet continue the habit, the citizenry will continue to have similar belief patterns regardless of the barking dogs of bias.
________________________

*DIGRESSION WARNING. Some of you have suggested that I am anti-government or at least libertarian. Like Steven Den Beste, I'm suspicious of "isms", but one of the things that unites my beliefs is a strong antipathy to bureaucracy. When even well-meaning people get together in hierarchical, committee-rich structures, they do beastly things and call it progress. Unfortunately, it appears to be human nature. I am extremely suspicious of many forms of government because they amount to great unaccountable committees with enormous amounts of power. I'm a fan of a free private sector because it tends to destroy corporations that become bureaucracy-bound rapidly.

I work at a small private company. I have also observed during my career that private companies often make substantially higher returns on equity than large public ones (they also tend to pay earnings out, not retain them).

Some might argue that given my antipathy to bureaucracy, I should be more anti-corporate and less anti-government. Not really, government has much greater power and is therefore infinitely more dangerous, and there are precious few market mechanisms to destroy government when its behavior becomes bureaucratically entrenched. When individual companies have the power of government I shall be rabidly opposed to those corporations.

**since it is anecdotal and comes from the editorial pages, I have no interest in entering this data in a bias-inspired label count.

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

W.M.D-Cups

Here's an interesting thesis:

AM talk—Rush, Dr. Laura, Hannity—targets middle-aged white guys. Surprise: They tend to be conservative. But FM talk—Stern, Joyner, Mancow, Don and Mike in Washington, Tom Leykis in Los Angeles—scores with young men, guys who like their radio on the risqué side, with a bulging menu of sex jokes and a powerful message that this is America and you can do whatever you want. Hint to Democrats: You may not like to admit this, but these are your voters

Yes, they like it raunchy. Most people listen to radio alone in their cars, where no one needs to be PC, where it's still OK to insult women and minorities and foreigners, and no one has to fear being slapped with a harassment charge. And it's OK to chuckle at that coarse humor and still vote Democratic. The PC brigades may find this hard to believe, but shock jocks do quite well with black listeners and with traditional Democratic demographics, such as college graduates and city dwellers. No, Stern and Don Geronimo and Tom Leykis have no interest whatsoever in having Dick Gephardt on the show, at least not unless he's going to remove his pants. And no, they would say, there's no politics on their shows. (Sabo tells DJs who want to be talk-show hosts: "If the topic is national politics, abortion, gun control, death penalty, religion, race, we have no interest. If the topics are movies, TV, personal relationships, your strong personal feelings, stuff about the workplace—things people under 90 talk about, we'd love to hear your tape.") But even if Stern wannabes don't address abortion directly, their daily diet of searingly intimate conversation with callers hits many of those hot-button issues, and they do it almost unfailingly from a left-libertarian perspective—they are classic social liberals.

I'm quite familiar with Howard Stern, as I pop back and forth between his program and NPR as I drive in in the mornings. I also have a passing familiarity with Leykis and Geronimo as they both took a turn as evening drive before WNEW changed format. These days for me it's Fresh Air (AM only now - yuck) or a book on tape in the evening*

I saw the above article first over at the prolific and straightforward Brothers Judd. I want to join Judd in asking:

Is the author of this piece stark staring bonkers?

While I don't object much to the puerile sex talk, and only occasionally jog the dial when the abuse goes over the top, I can't imagine any serious political ideology wishing to claim these guys for their own. It's sort of like saying professional wrestling is the future of the party.

Stern, for instance, often advocates nuking the entire Middle East. While he is never truly serious, this is as close as he gets. He has been consistently critical of Bush for moving too slow. If those demonizing the "warbloggers" are interested in finding a libertarian warmonger, Stern well and truly fits the bill. He has supported Christie Whitman (who named a rest stop on the Turnpike after him) and Governor Pataki. He would shill shamelessly for any official that gets the FCC of his back and, as ever, he admits he would. His sidekick, Robin, votes Republican.

Tom Leykis, as far as I can tell, has one clear theme, paraphrased thus: Women are gold-diggers looking to coerce you into marriage with sex, so they can live a life of ease on your efforts. They care about money and power only. If you understand this, you can use it to your advantage and bang as many as you want without obligation.

I don't know about you, but I see progressive political gold out there on the shock jock streets just waiting to be taken.

Don Geronimo described himself as a Democrat and his sidekick Mike a Republican (interesting compared to the Stern-Quivers axis of neutral). "Mike" is actually incredibly funny, without being nasty. I guess that's why Don is the famous one.

Have at it, I say. I mean it's obvious that making political common cause with any of these shows would be....suicidal.

There is one common theme of these three shows that certainly has universal appeal: Boobs. These shows all capture the power of the unveiled mammory gland, dedicating at least one quarter of the hour to feeding at the nipple. If Music has charms to soothe the savage breast, shock jocks reveal soothing breasts to charm savages. On radio, which makes a lot of sense...

Now if either party can harnass these Weapons of Mass Attraction for their benefit, they could rule the political roost for a lifetime. Or should it be "Massive Weapons of Disruption"?

*By the way, Alterman is on Fresh Air tonight, and I'm going to close this [small] tag this time.