Category Archives: Random Blogging

As Long as We’re Rhyming

The meme of the moment, which annoys the hell out of me, is “makers” and “takers”–a sneering dismissal of the plight of the less fortunate and a wholesale rejection of their labor and aspirations, not to mention their human dignity. The maker/taker formulation assumes that comfort and privilege are the result of merit and responsibility, and that need and/or misfortune is a sign of irresponsible behavior, sloth or “poor decisions.”

It is an utterly self-serving construct– a latter-day Calvinism that equates poverty with moral defect and success with evidence of God’s approval.

As long as we are labeling with a broad and unfair brush, let me offer another rhyme that “slices and dices” human society into easily caricatured categories: Thinkers and (Kool Aid) Drinkers.

Thinkers occupy a complicated world, where issues are often thorny and their solutions partial and/or nuanced. Thinkers try to make their assessments based upon the best available evidence; they employ reason and logic in arriving at their conclusions, and (in the best tradition of the scientific method) such conclusions as they reach are usually tentative and subject to revision if and when contrary evidence emerges.

Drinkers, on the other hand, have imbibed the Kool Aid. They don’t need no stinkin’ evidence, because God or Fox or Marx or whoever already told them what to believe. Every argument is tested against whatever bumper-sticker philosophy or religion they cling to; if the argument is consistent with what they already “know,” they accept it. If it isn’t, it isn’t even examined; it’s summarily rejected. Psychologists call this “confirmation bias;” exasperated Thinkers call it cherry-picking.

Every society has both Thinkers and Drinkers, but Drinkers proliferate in times of rapid social change and uncertainty. When the proportion gets out of whack–when we have way too many Drinkers (or worse, when we’ve elected too many of them)– our political institutions no longer function.

Social scientists spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make Drinkers think.

The prospects aren’t good.

I’ve recently come across some political psychology research that is extremely worrisome: when people who are invested in a belief– people who have “drunk the Kool Aid”–are presented with irrefutable evidence that the belief is false, they don’t abandon it. Instead, they cling to it even more tightly. They believe it more fervently. The “birthers” are a good, albeit extreme, example. (No birth certificate ever issued will convince them that the black guy in the White House is legitimate.) Creationists and climate-change deniers are others.

Most of us can come up with plenty of other examples, from the brother-in-law who sends those racist emails to the biblical literalists demanding that the legislature do (their version of) “God’s will,” to those who believe the world is composed of “makers” and “takers.”

Facts and evidence don’t move these folks. They don’t see shades of gray, and they are impervious to logic and reason. Show them mountains of data–most poor people work 40 hours a week, low taxes don’t create jobs, American health care ranks 37th in the world, not first– the Drinkers simply won’t believe you.

The Drinkers are driving me to drink.

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Truth to Power

When David Frum was a speechwriter for George W. Bush, I didn’t think much of him.  His most memorable phrase–the “axis of evil”–fed into the bipolar worldview of W’s administration, and was distinctly unhelpful.

Since he left politics for journalism, however, he has been nothing short of admirable.

Frum has joined the small but growing group of frustrated Republicans like Bruce Bartlett,  Norman Ornstein and Andrew Sullivan who have been willing to say aloud the things that so many of my own companions from a long-gone GOP share privately. He has been willing, as the saying goes, to speak Truth to Power.

A recent column about Fox News is an example, and well worth clicking through to read in its entirety.

Frum notes the research showing that Fox viewers know less than people who don’t watch any news at all, but he says that criticizing Fox for its manifest inaccuracies is to miss the point. Fox isn’t in the news business.

Before Fox, news programmers had struggled with the question of what their product was. Did it include health information, and if so, how much? Weather? Financial information? Human interest? Political opinion? Ailes built his new channel upon a very different question: who is my product for?

The largest generation in American history, the baby boomers, were reaching deep middle age by the mid-1990s. They were beginning to share an experience familiar to all who pass age 50: living in a country very different from the one they had been born into.

Fox offered them a new virtual environment in which they could feel more at home than they did in the outside world. Fox was carefully designed to look like a TV show from the 1970s: no holograms, no urban hipster studios, lots of primary colors.

In other respects too, Fox offered a path back to a vanishing past. Here was a place in which men were firmly in charge, and in which women were valued most for their physical attractiveness. Here was a place in which ethnic minorities appeared only in secondary roles — and then, with brave exceptions, only to affirm the rightness of the opinions of the white males in the primary roles.

Fox, Frum tells us, is intentionally geared to the anxiety-filled old white men who are having great difficulty dealing with the uncertainties of a rapidly changing world–a world where they no longer enjoy unquestioned privileged status.

Like talk radio before it, but even more intensely, Fox offered information programmed not as a stream of randomly connected facts, but as a means of self-definition and a refuge from a hostile external reality. Fox is a news medium that functions as a social medium.

Ailes began by identifying his target audience, and shaping his “news” to their tastes. As a business strategy, it was brilliant. Unfortunately, the collateral damage has been extensive–both to the American political system, and more recently (and ironically) to the Republican party.

What’s that old story about riding the tiger?

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Playing “Let’s Pretend”

There are two kinds of “let’s pretend” games.

The first is intended to illustrate a principle. For example, let’s pretend that you have a teenage son. You don’t have much money–you live in low-wage, “Right to Work” Indiana–so you’ve been saving  for several years in order to send him to college. He’s also been depositing money from his part-time job into the joint savings account the two of you have established.

One day, you discover he’s dropped out of high school, and taken all the money to buy a car. He explains that he needs a car now, to get to his job at Burger Heaven, where he makes three dollars an hour more than his friends who work elsewhere. Besides, he argues, the future benefits of a high school diploma (forget college) are speculative.

Would you dismiss the unequivocal data about education and lifetime earning disparities and general well-being? Would you endorse his decision to make more money now and damn the future?

Business groups evidently think the kid is doing the right thing.

According to a story buried a couple of days ago in the Indianapolis Star, a coalition of national and state business groups is fighting new rules on greenhouse gas emissions. Indiana  Gov. Mike Pence says Congress should quash the pending regulations because they would hike energy bills and cost jobs.

The new rules will cost businesses and consumers some money now. Those rules, however, are a necessary part of a still-inadequate effort to slow global climate change. It bears repeating that there is no scientific dispute about the reality of that climate change.  We are already seeing its effects. 

Too bad, say the members of the business coalition.

The business coalition, of course, is playing the other “let’s pretend” game–the one being played by people who prefer keeping an extra buck or so in their pockets now to addressing climate changes that will make life miserable for our children and grandchildren. The game played by pretending that the science is flawed, that the warnings are speculative, or that a heavy winter snow is proof that there is no “global warming.”  

As scientists have been telling us for quite some time, a warming planet changes climate patterns. Hurricanes increase in intensity; Alabama and Texas get massive snowstorms while the Arctic ice melts; California has droughts, sea levels rise, species lose their habitats.

All of these things are already occurring. Dealing with them is already costing us a lot more than compliance with federal regulations will cost, and failing to deal with climate change now–pretending that it’s a “hoax” or that the science isn’t settled–is ignorant at best and dishonorable at worst.

When the son who left high school is fifty and still making minimum wage, how will you justify letting him drop out?

When our grandchildren ask why we allowed the seas to swallow New York and Florida, why we failed to prevent the loss of twenty-five percent of the Earth’s species, and why we didn’t protect large areas of the planet from becoming uninhabitable, how will we justify our shortsightedness? Are we going to admit that greed and immaturity–our unwillingness to be even minimally inconvenienced in the here and now–led us to pretend it wasn’t happening?

Playing “let’s pretend” is for children. The businesses fighting for their right to keep polluting need to grow up.

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Hope for Journalism?

There are some welcome signs that our muddled and fragmented media landscape–which has clearly been “in transition” to something–is beginning to figure out how to do real journalism in the post-Newspaper age.

Recently, Ezra Klein announced that he was leaving the Washington Post, where he ran a very well-regarded and well-read blog, in order to start a new (as yet unidentified) media venture. As the Poynter Center reported, he is not the only one:

Klein’s new venture joins a suddenly crowded market of startups founded or staffed by journalists with large personal brands:

• Nate Silver decided last year to leave The New York Times for ESPN, which plans to relaunch his FiveThirtyEight.com under its auspices soon.

• Glenn Greenwald left the Guardian last year to join a “a new mass media organization” funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Dan Froomkin and Jay Rosen also joined the new organization in varying capacities.

• Gawker’s Neetzan Zimmerman will be the editor-in-chief of a starting shareup called Whisper.

• Gabriel Snyder, formerly the editor-in-chief of The Wire, will be chief content officer of a mobile news startup called Inside.com.

• Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg’s site AllThingsD announced last year they would part ways with Dow Jones & Co. and relaunched as Re/Code this year. The Wall Street Journal launched a replacement site, WSJD. Both promised live events. Another spinoff from the Journal: The Information, a subscription tech-news site edited by former WSJ reporter Jessica Lessin.

• Proto-blogger Andrew Sullivan left The Daily Beast in early 2013 to relaunch his Daily Dish as an independent, subscription-based publication. Sullivan wrote on Dec. 31 that in its first year, the publication had raised more than $800,000 in subscription revenue and has “almost 34,000 subscribers.”

• The New York Times, while obviously not exactly a startup, announced late last year that it would launch “two newsroom startups,” including one headed by former Times Washington bureau chief David Leonhardt aimed at the same subject areas as FiveThirtyEight.com.

These moves are a welcome sign that some journalists, at least, disagree with the conventional wisdom that has paralyzed the media and all but destroyed news geared to a general audience: the belief that there is simply no business model that will generate enough money to sustain a mass news-gathering organization in the age of the internet.

Of course, even if these efforts are successful, they don’t address citizens’ most pressing need: coverage of local government, which is virtually non-existent in far too many places. (Just today, the Indianapolis Star announced the departure of one of the few remaining reporters covering city hall.)  Interestingly, Pew reports an uptick in audiences for local television news–which I take as a sign that folks aren’t getting such news from the sad remnants of their local newspapers. Let’s hope that the new national ventures prove so successful that they spark a renewal of interest in investigative reporting focused on city halls and statehouses.

Relying on the Mayor’s office to tell us what’s happening really doesn’t cut it.

 

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Three Cheers for the Indianapolis Bar Association!

A couple of days ago, right before the Indiana House voted to strip the second sentence from HJR 3, the Indianapolis Bar Association did something it almost never does: it took a public position on a contentious policy issue.

Saying the proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage “stands out as inappropriate” and would likely lead to “years of litigation and significant expense for individual citizens and Indiana businesses,” the Indianapolis Bar Association today announced its formal opposition to HJR-3, the bill that would send the controversial amendment to a voter referendum.

The Bar Association took this position only after surveying its entire membership–another unusual step. (It has been some 20 years since they last did so.) Tellingly, three quarters of those surveyed favored taking a public position against HJR 3, and another twenty percent wanted to stay out of the issue. Only 5% favored the measure.

I have to believe that the willingness of the Bar Association to speak out–coming after the steady parade of businesses, mayors, and religious leaders–helped turn the tide with respect to HJR 3’s second sentence. That provision was a mess, an invitation to litigation, and many activists and bloggers had said so. But individual opinions on its legality and effects don’t carry the weight of the organized Bar, which is why their willingness to speak out was so important.

HJR 3 isn’t dead yet. At best, this latest vote to amend its language “kicks the can” down the road for another couple of years. Given the speed with which attitudes on same-sex marriage are changing, however, even that is no small matter.

Three cheers, Indianapolis Bar Association! Welcome to the good fight– and thanks for reminding all of us that “showing up” matters.

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