Re: Professionalism

1

Remember when I said reading Plumer's blog made me angry? Yeah.


Posted by: teofilo | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 4:44 PM
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Anyone here ever seen a newspaper story, on a subject of which they had firsthand knowledge, that didn't have something seriously inaccurate in it?


Posted by: Hamilton Lovecraft | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 4:46 PM
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Journalism, needless to say, is truly awesome.

Well, This American Life is truly awesome, anyway. I should say, that episode, and the episode "David and Goliath," which featured a long segment on how U.S. trade policy has affected Cambodia (no, really, it is fascinating. Really) made me think, TAL is moving toward more serious journalism, on a BBC model, which has otherwise vanished even from public radio.


Posted by: slolernr | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 4:47 PM
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What's the old saw: 95% of what you read in the paper is true, and the other 5% you have firsthand knowledge of.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 4:48 PM
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Yeah, the "David and Goliath" episode, with the segment on garment workers in Cambodia was amazing and upsetting. Also, did you listen to the TAL on life in prison? That episode left me sleepless for weeks.


Posted by: Junior Mint | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 4:50 PM
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Yes, This American Life is pretty much the best thing the US has produced in the last 20 years.


Posted by: Cryptic Ned | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 4:52 PM
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I sort of disagree. I came away from the TAL program that he references much impressed by the attempts that our military makes to avoid casualties, and by the general decency of the military establishment personnel. Also, at no time during the reading of the linked piece did I worry that I might be morally obligated to become a socialist, so I think his work at TNR has taken a toll on the force of his blog posts.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 4:52 PM
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7: Wasn't one of the points that the military is going through a great deal of effort to appear to avoid casualties, but doesn't in fact have any way of knowing if that is what they are doing?


Posted by: soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 4:59 PM
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8: Not the impression I got from TAL. The human rights guy, after all (IIRC), remained proud of his Pentagon service.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:04 PM
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9: coupled with a refusal to engage in civilian casualty estimates, that suggests mass delusion then. Science only works if you do all the relevant steps.


Posted by: soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:07 PM
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10: Eh, or not making the perfect the enemy of the good.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:15 PM
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or not making the perfect the enemy of the good

Or, doing some shit to make yourself feel better about killing civilians, without actually doing much to try to keep from killing them.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:18 PM
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12: Did you listen to the TAL piece?


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:19 PM
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11: no, we're not talking about perfection, we're talking about not doing the basics. Models are useless unless they are validated; by the sounds of it they aren't doing the basics to validate the models -- but they are relying on them. It's very strange. This sort of thing isn't uncommon in other areas, you can create an illusion of accuracy by concentrating instead on precision. If this reports are correct, it is quite plausible that they'd do better without the models.


Posted by: soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:20 PM
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12: Did you listen to the TAL piece?

No.


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:22 PM
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13: yes, but I'm actually re-listening now because you've got me wondering if I missed something.


Posted by: soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:26 PM
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9: Yes, Garlasco was proud of his Pentagon service, but he also strongly advocated doing the follow up necessary to evaluate the civilian deaths algorithm. After all, he was the one who brought up the issue on TAL.


Posted by: this is not work | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:35 PM
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I didn't listen to the TAL piece and have no information about whether the military is doing a decent job avoiding civilian casualties. But I can vouch that as a civil servant and a bureaucrat, we go out to every meeting knowing that most people will think our work is inadequate because they don't see the legal and monetary and political contraints that bind us. We compromise on everything, including our beliefs, trying to optimize within the very narrow sphere of what is allowable.


Posted by: Megan | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:36 PM
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scmt: to be clear, i'm not claiming that the individuals in the military aren't highly motivated to avoid civilian casualties. Also, in the TAL spot, they are largely talking about initial strikes, when they pretty much can't do anything about assessment.

On re-listening, the ex pentagon guy is basically saying the same thing I am.


Posted by: soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:45 PM
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The thing that I brought away from the TAL piece is that Bush is sometimes asked to sign a form saying that killing 30 or more civilians is all for the good. I wonder how many of these forms he's signed. Normally, the head honcho tries to insulate himself from the wet work; not our Bush.


Posted by: this is not work | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 5:49 PM
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I think on balance I'd rather have him sign it than have deniability.

On balance balance, I'd rather not have stupid wars.

But I'd really like to kick most journalists in the teeth.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 6:00 PM
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Eh, I'm not going to go along with "the media lies!" Whenever anyone has to characterize generalities there's going to be inevitable distortion, but that doesn't mean that verifiable facts (direct quotes, the existence of the report, the numbers the report put out) aren't true. You just have to know how to tell the difference between solid facts and the way reporters contextualize them.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 6:08 PM
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It's really not about "lying" as much as it is about being so totally compromised by an utterly unacknowledged ideology that the "truth" becomes self-evident in whatever your editor will pass along to the copydesk.

Having worked with a wide variety of young journalists, the thing that really scares me is not that they are primed to believe any "official" source over the evidence of their own eyes or actually peer-reviewed data, but that they never really think about what they are doing and why. It's not as if there's some explicit calculus along the lines of "if I report this story the right way, I'll have a good source for the rest of my career, and someday I might edit the Washington Post". Rather, the problem is the basic reluctance to wonder about why journalism should be doing anything more complex than highlighting the latest Hollywood break-up or assuring all the investors that they're going to make big profits this year.

I have a lot of criticisms of the modern journalism school. It's too comfortable, it's suborned by corporate interests, it can't question its own status in the academy for fear of what it might find -- but even if we were to assume a cadre of dedicated, fierce, uncompromising journalism professors, I'm not really sure how they could possibly overcome the basic conditioning of US media culture in 4 or 5 years. (And the J-schools really are at the heart of it. It's increasingly rare to find new hires at major media outlets who haven't slogged their way through someone's idea of a journalism degree. The days of working your way up from printer's devil are long gone.)


Posted by: minneapolitan | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 6:25 PM
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actually s/b actual


Posted by: minneapolitan | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 6:26 PM
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You just have to know how to tell the difference between solid facts and the way reporters contextualize them.

That just means it's a complicated lie.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 6:31 PM
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25: Nah, it just means that it's impossible to tell a story without having a point of view.


Posted by: bitchphd | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 6:34 PM
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I don't think it just boils down to point of view. If you choose to report only half of story, for example, that's not simply a point of view chocie, but an omission.


Posted by: Cala | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 6:36 PM
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28

Magik Johnson said all there was to say about journalists (the several journalists who read and comment here excepted, of course).


Posted by: ogged | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 6:44 PM
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19: I think we're at roughly the same place, but arrived from different sides. I was just impressed that they did more than eyeball it in attempting to limit civilian casualties. Further, per #18, I assume constraints about which I don't know.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 6:56 PM
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29: yes, I think we are. I guess I think of the sorts of efforts he described as the minimal I'd be able to sleep at night with, in that position. So while I'm glad they do it, it doesn't mean brownie points. And the politically motivated restriction on doing it properly is depressing.


Posted by: soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 7:15 PM
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7:,9: etc.: However, the military, military docs, and physicists already have whole armies of data on how high explosives work. However, given the vagaries of building construction they'll never get it very right no matter how much more info they collect.


Posted by: Biohazard | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 7:24 PM
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scmt: to be clear, i'm not claiming that the individuals in the military aren't highly motivated to avoid civilian casualties.

It seems like the issue here is, willingness or not, they don't have a mandate to collect such data, and since it is expensive and difficult to collect, they don't really have the staff or resources to collect it on a whim---and every institutional self-protection phenomena is going to kick in to push the other way. So the fault lies not with those serving in the Pentagon, at least directly, so much as with those who control the Pentagon. If Congress can go around mandating that no gays be allowed to serve, surely Congress can mandate that civilian death models be validated one way or the other, if only for the purposes of accounting and efficiency. Otherwise, why even bother fund a state department, if our image abroad is so undervalued? (She says, trying to affect as much cynical realpolitik as possible while her appetite ebbs.)


Posted by: Saheli | Link to this comment | 11-28-06 9:10 PM
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32: There is also the cargo-cult aspect of the whole thing.


Posted by: soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 11-30-06 10:41 AM
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34: Right, but it's important to have a sense of how cargo culty-y this is. It's not as if the Pentagon is working of no information, or even scientific models. As mentioned above, they have a bunch of information about how to destroy a building, etc. They just aren't following up with the seemingly obvious step of checking their models regarding civilian deaths. The reasons that they don't take that step are obscure to me; it might be ennui, or danger, or impossibility, or something more malevolent. But if you asked me whether their planning resulted in fewer deaths than absent any planning, I would strongly suspect that it did, and I think I would have pretty good reasons for believing that.


Posted by: SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 11-30-06 12:50 PM
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granted, it's not at all like the whole thing is cargo-culty. I'm more wondering if the civillian casualty estimates are fundamentally more effetive at making these peopel feel better about what they are doing than at estimating civilian casualties. A false sense of accounting, that might better be handled by just pulling those magic numbers out of the analysis and looking at blast radius reduction or something they have a better handle on.


Posted by: soubzriquet | Link to this comment | 11-30-06 1:09 PM
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