Author Archives: Sheila

If You Are Wondering….

why America can’t seem to make sane public policy, Steve Benen has a clue.

Kate Sheppard reported today on some recent Barton comments about climate change and wind power.

“Wind is God’s way of balancing heat. Wind is the way you shift heat from areas where it’s hotter to areas where it’s cooler. That’s what wind is. Wouldn’t it be ironic if in the interest of global warming we mandated massive switches to energy, which is a finite resource, which slows the winds down, which causes the temperature to go up? Now, I’m not saying that’s going to happen, Mr. Chairman, but that is definitely something on the massive scale. I mean, it does make some sense. You stop something, you can’t transfer that heat, and the heat goes up. It’s just something to think about.”

 

Something to think about, indeed.

Barton is, of course, the same lawmaker who recently suggested that humans will “adapt” to climate change because we can “get shade.”

And as Matthew DeLong reminds us, Barton was, up until a couple of years ago, the lawmaker House Republicans made the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.”

Our Morphing Media

I have been writing (and worrying) a lot about the transition of the media, and the effect of the current landscape on public discourse and policy.

As I told a friend, it’s one thing to disagree about something that we both see. We can both look at a photo, or a piece of art, or a draft of a pending bill, and disagree about its meaning, or–in the case of proposed legislation–whether it is a good idea. But the current fragmented media environment and the disproportionate attention garnered by “pundits” of varying philosophies and degrees of sanity has created a situation where we are far too often not looking at the same reality. It reminds me of the time (b.c.–before cellphones) when a friend and I agreed to meet for lunch at “the tearoom.” Back then, both Ayres and Blocks had tearooms, and I went to Ayres while she went to Blocks. This made conversation difficult, in much the same way that our current media environment does.

Clay Shirkey recently wrote an essay that is one of the more thoughtful analyses of the morphing of media.  In it, he echoes the observation of Paul Starr that “journalism isn’t just about uncovering facts and framing stories; it is about assembling a public to read and react to those stories.”

In other words, there is a difference between an audience and a public. As Shirkey says, journalism is about more than dissemination of news; its about the creation of shared awareness. It’s about occupying the same reality, or eating at the same tearoom.  It’s about enabling meaningful communication.

As the information environment continues to fragment into smaller and more widely dispersed niches, what will the consequences be for public communication and discourse?

Understanding Scalia

Eric Vieth at Dangerous Intersections has a fascinating–and chilling–review of Antonin Scalia’s position on executing people who are proved innocent after being convicted in a “fair” trial.  Hint: “they probably did something wrong anyway…”

What Should Government Do?

My husband and I took our two youngest grandchildren to McCormick’s Creek State Park last weekend. McCormick’s Creek is one of Indiana’s state parks; located in the southern third of the state, it boasts acres of woods, a very nice (and reasonably priced) inn, and the requisite picnic areas and playgrounds. The weather was lovely, and the park was full of families.

While we were at the park, some 70,000 people were descending on Washington, D.C. to make a statement about their anger at “big government.” (Actually, it wasn’t too clear WHAT they were so angry about; apparently, it was an all-purpose “pox on your house” sort of event. A significant number just seemed royally pissed that a black Democrat had won the election.)

Giving the protestors/tea baggers the benefit of the doubt, their message seemed to be that government is too big, doing too much, spending too much and they want it to stop.

Which gets me back to the lovely state park we enjoyed with so many other citizens over the weekend. Should state and local government provide amenities like parks, museums and libraries? The Monon Trail gets massive use; was it okay for government to create it? What about street lights? Police and fire protection are generally agreed to be appropriate uses of our tax dollars, but there is considerable debate over spending those dollars on sports arenas, or even on the arts.

Maybe what the protestors are saying is that these more local expenditures are okay, but the federal government is too big. Again, though–“too big”  is too general. What would these folks like the federal government to stop doing? National defense? (I could see protesting unnecessary wars, but these are the people who appear to support those.) National parks? Social security and Medicare? Should the FDA stop testing our foods for things like e coli? Stop regulating banks and big businesses? (We did stop that, for all intents and purposes, during the Bush Administration. That didn’t turn out very well.)

I’m certainly not saying that everything government does needs to be done by government. (I would keep the parks, however. And quite a number of other functions we ask government to perform.) But people who simply rant about “too big” and “too much,” without specifying what they are prepared to do without, aren’t very persuasive.