Random Blogging – Page 354

I Don’t Get It

There’s a pretty robust public debate–in which I’ve engaged–about the refusal of congressional Republicans to even consider raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans. That debate has centered around the practicality and morality of their position: practically, government needs the revenue that would be raised by what would historically be considered a very minimal raise in the rate; morally, it seems truly wrong to demand yet more sacrifice from the beleaguered middle class while giving the rich a pass.

That debate is worth having, but what I don’t get is the politics of the position.

I understand that the people who fund GOP campaigns–the Kochs, the Scaifs, etc.–look favorably upon the Republican position. And I understand that money matters (far more than it should or than it used to, thanks to Citizens United). But I can’t believe that a political party can win a national election on a platform that advocates hollowing out the public purposes of government–“starving the beast” is the way Grover Norquist puts it–in order to protect the pocket-change of the powerful.

Leave aside whether the GOP position makes any economic or moral sense. I can’t imagine it making political sense. You can rename plutocrats “job creators” all you want, but it is pretty clear that they aren’t creating any jobs (at least not here in the US), and without that rather thin defensive reed to lean on, it is hard to envision any but the most ideologically rigid buying that snake-oil.

What am I missing?

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Listen to your Father…

The other day, I had breakfast in one of those modestly-priced hotels/motels where breakfasts are included. A man in his mid-thirties was going through the buffet with his young son, who looked to be seven or eight. I didn’t catch the first part of their exchange, but I heard the son say to his father, presumably about yet another traveler who was filling a plate “But that’s not the way we do it. That’s wrong.”

The father used that exchange as a teachable moment. “Different people do things differently. That doesn’t make one person wrong and the other one right. They’re just different.”

I wanted to kiss that guy.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all parents taught their children that simple principle? Wouldn’t the world we live in be more pleasant, more comfortable, if people would just learn that “different” doesn’t necessarily mean “wrong”? How much richer would our lives be if we enjoyed people where we found them, if rather than trying to make everyone do things the way we do, we chilled out and accepted the wonderful variety of life?

We could use a lot more fathers willing to use a mundane experience to underscore an important life lesson.

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A Tale of Newspapers Past

It has become a commonplace for those of us who live in Indianapolis to complain about the lack of substance in the Star. I was recently rude enough–and it was rude and I shouldn’t have said it–to complain to Matt Tully about the lack of coverage of city hall. His defense was that the paper had covered the Litebox and Duke Energy scandals. True–but what about the multiple issues that haven’t been covered (or uncovered). After all, when a major daily paper has exactly four investigative reporters, there’s a limit to what they can do.

As I often (too often??) remind people, when I was in city hall, there were three full-time reporters and a couple of stringers covering city government. The Hudnut Administration would never have gotten the “pass” that Ballard (and Peterson) have. When I edited a book about the Goldsmith Administration, contributors got most of their information from contemporaneous newspaper accounts.

I thought about this again this morning, because our daughter Kelly told me she’d been going through some memorabilia–old newspapers she’d kept as reminders of important events–and was shocked by the difference between those old issues and the current, pale imitation that Gannett puts out. Not only was the paper physically larger, it was packed with information about city and county government, news of the state and nation.

Sometimes, a picture is worth a thousand words.

As Kelly pointed out, it isn’t so bad with respect to national news, because we can access the New York Times and many other sources of national news online. But there is no local substitute for credible, fact-checked reporting. We have some thoughtful local bloggers who bring issues to our attention, but they aren’t reporters, and don’t pretend to be. So there’s a lot going on in our city that we don’t know about; there are details about the things we do know that would change our opinion of them (cases in point: the Broad Ripple garage evident boondoggle, the parking meter giveaway). Mentioning something is not the same as reporting on it. Reprinting or rephrasing a press release isn’t reporting.

I’m glad the Star reported on the Litebox fiasco and Duke Energy’s ethical lapses. But patting the paper on the back for two good stories is like giving your teenager a pass for five F’s because he got one A.

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How to do Local

One of the ways in which newspapers are responding to the challenges of the internet age is by concentrating on coverage of their own communities. Dubbed “localism” or sometimes “hyperlocalism,” the approach makes a lot of sense: let readers get their national and international news from the New York Times, the Guardian, and other sources easily accessed through the web, and concentrate on providing information about one’s own home town.

The Indianapolis Star –like many other papers–has announced that it will concentrate on local coverage, “stories you can’t get elsewhere.”

This approach will only work, however, if the newspaper does actual reporting. Local coverage is not simply printing press releases sent in by new restaurants that are opening. It isn’t just “galleries” of local homes and their decor. It certainly isn’t the same links to stories about the Super Bowl and how to lose weight that appear on the newspaper’s website for a week.

Earlier this year, I discontinued subscribing to the Star. After 50 years. What would make me change that decision, and re-subscribe, would be genuine local coverage: school board meetings. Library board decisions. Real, in-depth coverage of the Mayor and City Council.

During the last year, the Ballard Administration and its partisans on the City-County Council engaged in deal-making that may or may not have been improper. The Star hasn’t covered most of it. Even when they have, the coverage has been superficial–“he said, she said, I guess that’s all, folks.” The IBJ recently reported that the city was building a parking garage in Broad Ripple, paying for its construction with our tax dollars and then handing it over to a developer who formerly worked for the Mayor. The developer will be entitled to all the profits. I’d like to know how the administration justifies this transaction, but I saw no reporting about it at all in the Star. (Maybe I missed it, but if so, it certainly wasn’t highlighted.)

I saw little detail about the fifty-year parking meter deal–certainly not the analysis provided by local blogger Paul Ogden or regional urban expert the Urbanophile. Even when the paper did report on the Litebox fiasco, there was little reporting on the process that led the city to ignore huge red flags and hype an obvious con man.

These are just the deals we know about; in the absence of real reporting, how much more do we know nothing about?

The bottom line is that concentrating on local coverage can indeed save local news media–but it can’t save them the bother or expense of hiring and training real reporters. Giving us genuine news we can use to evaluate local institutions and politicians requires investigative reporting by trained journalists.

Going back to the days when small-town newspapers printed the school cafeteria menus won’t cut it.

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That’s Funny…

I don’t know whether these things run in cycles, but over the past few days I’ve seen at least three articles/blog posts speculating why there aren’t any conservative comedians–at least, none with the audience of a Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Andy Borowitz, Bill Maher or several other liberal comics who come readily to mind.

I don’t think the dearth of conservative comics is an attribute of political philosophy. After all, in the days of the Soviet Union, there weren’t very many hilarious Communists. I think the problem is fanaticism. A sense of humor requires more than the ability to tell a joke. As my mother used to say, it’s easy to laugh when the other guy slips on a banana peel. People with a sense of humor can laugh when they are the ones who slip on it. The ability to laugh at one’s own foibles is one sign of emotional maturity. If you look at the popular political satirists, they all share the ability to poke fun at posturing and stupidity whether it comes from the right or the left. These days, it just happens to be coming mostly from the right.

Zealots provide a great target for comedians, but they themselves are almost never funny.

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