And He's Not Even President!

[I've been away from my desk for most of the last 48 hours. Though I am not at all refreshed, I return inspired. I think. We'll see.]

On Sunday I wrote about the New York Times' report on Gov. Sarah Palin's style of leadership. Recall that I highlighted the following, which I believe the Times wants readers to believe counts against (wild guess!) Gov. Palin:

[…]four months ago, a Wasilla blogger, Sherry Whitstine, who chronicles the governor’s career with an astringent eye, answered her phone to hear an assistant to the governor on the line, she said.

“You should be ashamed!” Ivy Frye, the assistant, told her. “Stop blogging. Stop blogging right now!”

The Times does not expand upon this bit of news; I suggested that the Times chose not to because Ms. Whitstine's blog is kind of "out there," to say the least. (It is curious that the Times often provides links in its stories, but chose not to link to Ms. Whitstine's blog.) But there is no doubt in my mind the Times' anecdote -- gossipy as it is and utterly unsubstantiated -- was presented simply to identify Gov. Palin as the female successor to George W. Bush; like him, she "suppresses dissent." The tale is meant to impugn and indict. It is not meant to inform or clarify.

I wonder why the Times seems not to have placed this on its front page (from the Political Grapevine):

Bad Reception

For the second time in three weeks the Obama campaign has gone after WGN Radio in Chicago for having an Obama critic on its air.

The Chicago Tribune reports the station was besieged with phone calls and e-mails Monday in an effort to force the cancellation of an interview with David Freddoso, a reporter for the National Review and author of the best-selling book "The Case Against Barack Obama," which has been described as a "serious" biography by the Politico newspaper.

The campaign e-mailed supporters, "WGN apparently thinks this card-carrying member of the right-wing smear machine needs a bigger platform for his lies and smears about Barack Obama." The interview went ahead as planned.

Last month the station experienced a similar barrage of criticism for interviewing conservative writer Stanley Kurtz who had examined Obama's ties to former 1960's radical William Ayers. [Tribune link added]

I guess what I am to conclude from the Times' ostensibly stellar reporting on Gov. Palin's statecraft is that an inconsequential assistant to a small state's governor is a grave threat to civil liberties when she urges an arguably lame blogger to stop blogging. What I am also to conclude is that the Times does not consider it a grave threat to first amendment rights when the rather consequential Obama campaign publicly declares war on a critic's attempts to give voice. Of course, I can see the nuances here, as the Obama campaign is well within its own free speech rights to suppress, or try to suppress, voices it fears (and it clearly does fear those voices). All of this, or so it seems to me, makes the Obama campaign's actions eerily similar to George W. Bush's alleged penchant for stifling dissent, which is, I think, well within his free speech rights, too.

Doesn't this Obama campaign defense strategy prove one thing, namely, that Barack Obama represents four more years of George W. Bush?

But that can't be! Hence, I must be missing something.

©2008. All Rights Reserved.

Necessary Myth Mashing

A recently released study on media bias in news coverage during the first few months of the US presidential campaign season is enlightening. The study, produced by the Harvard-based Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy and Project for Excellence in Journalism, is thorough and engaging (read the PDF here), even if it is an erudite statement of the obvious: there IS a left-wing, pro-Democrat bent in the media. Look at the study for yourself. It will dispel few myths.

But there is one myth it will dispel, namely, that Fox News is some blaring mouthpiece for all things Republican. Not so, says the study, especially when compared to other cable news programs, like CNN, which leans decidedly left. Here's the report's statement about Fox:

The programming studied on Fox News offered a somewhat more positive picture of Republicans and more negative one of Democrats compared with other media outlets. Fox News stories about a Republican candidate were most likely to be neutral (47%), with the remainder more positive than negative (32% vs. 21% negative). The bulk of that positive coverage went to Giuliani (44% positive), while McCain still suffered from unflattering coverage (20% positive vs. 35% negative).

When it came to Democratic candidates, the picture was more negative. Again, neutral stories had a slight edge (39%), followed by 37% negative and 24% positive. And, in marked contrast from the rest of the media, coverage of Obama was twice as negative as positive: 32% negative vs. 16% positive and 52% neutral.

But any sense here that the news channel was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data.

Surely we can all be confident that left-wing claims that Fox News is really Faux News will cease. I mean, it is well-known that we more conservative folk have an implicit trust in our liberal friends' ability to base their arguments on sound facts and methodology.†

But perhaps some trenchant thinkers, like those found at the Daily Kos or the Huffington Post, will not read this study and hence will be spared much troubling apoplexy. Their ignorance is a merciful ignorance.

And, for fun, this screen shot from the report showing the balance between positive and negative commentary on talk radio, conservative and liberal:



Granted. I post this table merely to incite laughter. It's clear the samples were rather small. But I do love the 100% tallies in the liberal talk radio columns. That's pretty funny.

It's sad that two seconds after you read this, you will most likely return to a world driven by media that lie to themselves about themselves. Media bias? Who really cares?

Peace.

©Bill Gnade 2007/Contratimes. All Rights Reserved.

†I have not read the full text nor have I analyzed the study's methodology. For now, I'll make an assumption that this study intends to be taken seriously and hence has not been done shoddily.

Racist Facts: On The Dictionary Of Talk Radio

Hospitality is an inscrutable word. For if someone sends me an invitation to a party and then is rude to me at that party, even to the extent of ignoring me (this indeed has happened), I might begin to think my host invited me to submit to either his sadism or to my own self-abuse. I might even begin to think that hospitality was the sort of kindness that was meant to send me to the hospital, even the psychiatric hospital. I mean, I might think that a host is merely a person who takes another person hostage to inhospitality.

I have invited people here, to this rather sober salon, and I've tried to make them at the very least feel safe. Should a particularly petulant guest insult me to my face in the Comments section of each post, I have promised to treat that person with all due propriety. I am the host after all, and even if it means that as host I must endure my detractor's parasitic prose, so be it. It is what hospitality is all about: You shall be treated fairly, respectfully, and with grace.

But for the life of me I cannot figure out the hospitality of talk radio. Here one finds a host ostensibly inviting people to join him (or her) to "dialogue" and "debate in civil discourse", and yet at the slightest hint of a dialogue between interlocutors holding truly disparate views, the host usually turns dialogue to diatribe, with smatterings of abuse garnishing the canapés: the appetizers turn out, rather quickly, to be quite unappetizing and bitter. Oddly, people keep asking for more.

Last night was no exception as I listened to former Boston-based-now-nationally-syndicated master of soliloquy, Jay Severin, whose recent stint on MSNBC's The Situation with Tucker Carlson brought him some frequent TV face time. Mr. Severin received a call from a young man who took umbrage with Severin's observations around US immigration issues. Particularly, the young man averred that Severin's eloquent (he's always eloquent) litany of facts -- that the inner cities of America are rife with crime, illiteracy, poverty, and other such ills -- combined with the factual observation that such ills plague areas largely composed of minorities, amounted to racism. Moreover, the young man had the temerity to suggest that facts, in and of themselves, can be racist. Needless to say, the sharp-witted and sharp-tongued Severin scoffed at the idea that facts could be anything but coolly neutral, even value-less, devoid of any racial import or overtone. In his rebuttal, Severin cited dictionary entries of the word "racist"; his citations intimating that language was static––"racism" cannot mean anything but what the dictionary says it means (Severin forgets that dictionaries only list how words are used and not how they must be used). Severin also reminded listeners that he was of rather impressive intellectual stock, whereas his caller was not.

As Severin attempted to wrest the conversation toward something resembling a bad Socratic dialogue––where Severin would pose a question and yet would not restrain himself long enough to listen to his interlocutor's rather nuanced attempts to answer with some mindfulness of his own––Severin's scoffing only increased, even to the point where he was speaking over his guest's rather interesting and not at all antagonistic theory. And after the call was over and Severin returned from a commercial break to the blues music he allegedly adores, the scoffing could not be stopped, as he snidely suggested that he needed to be careful when he said that "blacks invented the blues," for such a statement of fact might be racist. Alas, I turned off the radio when Severin began his next segment with the proclamation that the argument facts can be racist is "the quintessence of the domestic threat to the United States Constitution that our Founding Fathers" were talking about.

Now quickly: Can a fact be racist? Well, what if I took five black men and five black women and put them in a cage (please, I am not advocating this), clinically observing them for 30 years, and then I published a factual article in a factual journal wherein I listed that the offspring of these black men and women tended toward incest, would that fact be racist? I think it would be. If I took a hundred thousand Jews and put them in a ghetto, let's say in Warsaw, and then I observed that the Jews seemed to be very shrewd at money-dealing on the black market and conniving in general, would that be a racist fact? I think it would be. What if I was a German scientist in 1944 and I observed that Jewish skin made for good soap, or effective lampshades? Would these not be "facts," and yet would they not also be "racist," making your very skin crawl?

I think they would.†

And what if I said that America's inner cities were rife with crime, with illegitimate children, absentee fathers, illiteracy and poverty everywhere, and that these things were mostly the plight of black families––would this, at least possibly, be the recitation of racist facts? Might not my litany of facts regarding the inner cities even begin to lead you to believe that blacks are lost, or incapable of saving themselves? Might my recitation of facts bias you against blacks; and might my recitation of facts also lead you to forget the broader causes of inner-city turmoil, perhaps even blinding you to the fact that inner-city blacks might in fact be living in a Warsaw ghetto, even a cage, surrounded by the barbed-wire of white institutional and political racism?

My broader point is that the caller to the Jay Severin radio program did something for me: he opened my mind to something I've never before seen or understood: statistics can not only lie, they may blind and mislead, and they may even fuel the very thing they were intended to suppress. Facts are not merely neutral, at least not always. When you hear the "facts" (from surveys) that the majority of Americans believed that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 and that most Americans who believed such an Iraq connection also watch Fox News, you are not entitled to believe that these are offered in cool detachment: these facts are meant to sway, intimidate, upbraid and even dehumanize. And if a person states that 40 million fetuses have been killed since Roe v. Wade became law, that person surely intends to sway you. In fact, people always use facts in order to sway you, perhaps often ignoring other, broader facts that might help you frame your thoughts more completely. "Facts" of this kind are not neutral, and you know it all too well: it is a fact that John Kerry "voted for the war before he voted against it"; it is a fact that George Bush "was only" in the Air National Guard in Texas. You get the idea.

And while the caller did something for me, he did nothing for Jay Severin, though I think had Mr. Severin actually been a proper, high-bred host (he is from a moneyed family); had Mr. Severin listened, he may have understood something very interesting and important: It is never too late to have one's mind opened; it is a good thing for even a host to learn something from his guests. But sadly the distance between hosting and hostility is not very great. Too bad Mr. Severin (and others of his medium) cannot keep the two words farther apart. But at least one is comforted knowing that Mr. Severin's dictionary is always nearby.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

†Let it be noted that I am even wary of fabricating facts for the sake of hypotheses or analogies. Even repeating news of an old crime might prompt a return to that sort of crime for some sick, imitative mind dwelling among us.