Two conservatives for every liberal

Surf city!

It's very weird, how the media's cooption seems to have been only half deliberately disguised propaganda, and the other half pusillanimous self-policing.

I've been actively following this kind of thing for five years or so -- Chomsky types have been following it for thirty year. Democrats were oblivious until very recently, in large part because the neoliberal, hawkish DLC agenda was pretty close to the media agenda, so until Bush came into office the only losers were left wing Democrats.

I've tried to convince Bob Somerby, Brad DeLong, and Sausagely that this isn't a problem with individual reporters, and only in small part a problem with the ingroupy professional culture ("Heathers" as Somerby says). The bylined people know what management wants and gives it to them. People who fail to do that (a long list, Hersh and Ivins being just two) find themselves looking for work.

Behind the names we know are a lot of mostly-anonymous editors and publishers who decide what we get to read. (They're the ones who write the headlines, bury the ledes, and decide to put the juicy stuff on page 16 or refuse to run it at all).

As far as I know, all of the media are run for the bottom line, and the audience's preference for fluffy journalism isn't the biggest part of the problem. Advertisers have political agendas, and so do publishers. For obvious reasons deregulation and low taxes are important to both, and Bush delivered that. For less obvious reasons they're mostly pro-war.

If that sounds paranoid to you, just remember: management manages. I'm not saying that the Bavarian Illuminati control the climate. I'm just saying that Sulzburger and Graham get the journalism they want.

Everyone agrees about Moon, Scaife, and Murdoch, but Sulzburger and Graham and Welch and the ABC people and the Disney people are almost as bad. It's up to someone else to name a major media CEO who has a committment to quality journalism and who is willing to give Democrats and doves a fair hearing (much less a sympathetic one).

2: That seems to me to be the way these things always happen.

2: I remember a similar (more muted) round of desultory self-flagellation after the first Gulf War, when it became obvious that things like the "babies in the incubators" story had been straightforward and weirdly gratuitous lies. You could a single-paragraph "oops, we goofed" story on page 12 of the average newspaper... and that was it. Nothing changed, no real consequences. I think Emerson's right about why.

The Donahue letter ("waving the flag"), at least, has been out for a long time.

Paranoid? Hardly. It's the whole institution of journalism that's gone wrong in various complicated structural ways, from the way its product is marketed to the way its articles are written. Even before I read blogs I learned to hate the generic form of journalistic writing, which I am convinced makes most readers less informed because it's so formulaic ("High in the mountains of Tajikistan, Ahmad, a wiry yak farmer in his late 40s, has seen his three sons grow up and join the local militias and die..."). All of the news goes into neatly prepared boxes to die.

This stuff makes me furious. I don't know what to do about it -- who's going to propagate a story about how bad the media is? Blogs?

"A time of war" blah blah blah. For fuck's sake, this isn't 1943.

("Heathers" as Somerby says).

That was Somerby's? I always thought it was Atrios, and I thought it was his greatest creation. No more Eschaton!

The bylined people know what management wants and gives it to them.

That's more or less how you get to be bylined, I suspect.

Come to think of it, what Somerby says is "The Kool Kidz" or something like that.

You have a real crazy old man bias, you know that, Emerson? "Heathers" is better. But Somerby--while a crank--is, to me, a much more credible media watch dog than Atrios.

I dunno, based on my dealings with journalists and proto-journalists, I wouldn't be so quick to discount the Heathers/in-groupy professional culture angle. Of course, everyone in journalism learns that you have to go along to get along, but there's a point where a lot of journalists really buy in to the Ideology of American Journalism (or they start drinking themselves to death.) It's not just a process of crass co-optation via junkets and expense accounts -- a lot of the work-a-day journalists who put out newspapers and magazines and the nightly news feel very, very strongly that they are fighting the good fight, every day, and that anyone who accuses them of being compromised is just a fanatic with an axe to grind. The rise of the religious right, and its frequent appearance in Letters to the Editor columns and nasty voicemails left at TV stations, has something to do with that bunker mentality. However, I think the IAJ has been developing for some time, independent of outside forces. From my experiences, I think that most journalists (~60%) actually consider themselves to be of the left, although not in the left. And yet they fight for the right to cover flapdoodle and drag their feet when they have to investigate a real story.

These discussions always make me want to ask: To what end? I mean, I don't get any satisfaction from this belated sort of admission. I might even think more of journalists who felt they had fulfilled their duty as they saw it, rather than this mealy-mouthed "oops" years after the fact.

To what end, people? I don't give a good galoot about your apology for 2002's warmongering when we have a new vintage a-brewing.

All right, I'm cranky. Clearly I need to go look at some of B's underpants links.

That last sentence might be one word too long.

Well, people who sell out don't usually sit down and say to themselves "I'm going to sell out and do bad journalism for the big bucks". And groups of people of that type are not going to sit around talking about how they all sold out. Rationalizations will be produced, though irony and snark seem to be pretty good buffers too. And a lot of people just leave journalism, voluntarily or otherwise.

In other words, doing the wrong thing isn't usually a clear affirmation of wrongness as such; usually it's heavily fudged. To me the big thing is that the incentives are known, and everyone knows what happens to people who cross the line, and everyone knows what happens to those who play the game. For whatever subjective reason, the ones who stay are the ones who have learned to play. (Success worship is pretty deep in the American psyche).

However, it is true that many journalists think of neutral objectivity ("one the one hand....on the other hand") and nonjudgmental stenography ("The Pentagon reported today that we have won the Iraq War.") as a form of professional skill which laymen like Brad DeLong can't understand. Frankly, though, I think that their dedication to these stunted journalistic rules is a function of rule-following and success-worship. (To them, Molly Ivins and Seymour Hersh wwere/are talented journalists whose careers suffered because of their unprofessionalism.)

Holy smoke, Emerson gets the hat trick.

Go home, sir, your work here is done. Three threads in less than 24 hours -- sheesh.

Honestly, Dave, I'm not that interested in B's underwear. I did get a job resume from an applicant today who had worked at Victoria's Secret, though. I am tempted to ask her what on earth that has to do with her supposed career, but I suspect it was just the typical teenage retail job.

If you don't count the various incarnations of The Front Page, the best journalism movie ever was Absence of Malice (Sally Field, Paul Newman). It's a really sweet explanation of how a journalist following almost all of the appropriate ethical rules behaves hideously destructively.

I agree with Emerson that the problems with journalism are structural problems, but disagree about the nature of those structural problems.

One example: The way that journalistic "objectivity" in political reporting requires balance between truth and falsehood. This, as we have seen, provides an incentive for aggressive lying.

OT, but this is the face of the Republican Party: .

I'll add this: Almost the only important criticism of American political culture nowadays is media criticism. Every other awful thing that is going on would not be possible without the toxic media climate.

[spam was here]

Now that is some random spam.

20: Hey, Emerson, I'm offended by your implicit ridicule of round-faced middle-aged white men. These are my people, goddamit.

There do seem to be an unusual number of us in this administration, however.

True story: My two-year-old daughter saw me reading a story about Kyle Sampson (the crooked Gonzalez deputy.) She pointed to the picture and said "Daddy!" I told her that wasn't daddy. She pointed again and said "Unca David," referring to my brother, another round-faced, middle-aged white guy.

ZGTNW

Apparently it's from the :Chinese Diabetic Net". (Zhungguo Tangni Wang.)

Diabetes is the next penile enhancement.

the "new" penile enhancement that is to say.

Wade also looks like a bouncer / thug / roustabout / carnie worker promoted to the front office.

Correction: "Tangniao". Literally it just means "sugar-urine" but almost certainly refers to diabetes.

The spambot is stealing content from a Lance Mannion post. Probably it's automatically choosing dummy text for each item of spam from a website that links to or is linked from the place it's about to post the spam, so that the spam text sounds vaguely appropriate. Which is kinda clever.

Kyle Sampson is, unfortunately, one of my people. Returned missionary, BYU grad, the whole shebang.

I dreampt Kyle Sampson had a pet hampster.

Hampsters are hipsters in the Hamptons.

Have y'all read Life: the Movie? I know absolutely zero about its or its author's credibility but one of the basic premises is that journalism in our country has always been for shit because it has sought to entertain rather than inform. Where there is no controversy, one must be created; where there is no story or no subject, one must be manufactured so that it can be reported. This is how we get crackpots on TV saying global climate change isn't real, because media consumers find one legit expert and one paid mouthpiece sniping at one another far more entertaining than the information they might want to present.

I have -- for obvious reasons -- thought a lot about bad journalism, and how good journalists go bad. I think the deep and underlying problem is that an interest in the facts of the political or international situation is for most people unselfish in the sense that being better or worse informed will not much or at all affect their conduct and the decisions the have to make. How broadly this is true depends on the power structure of society. It is my impression that in modern America almost all national decisions are taken by a small, enclosed elite -- one that is so small that most "elite" journalists are on the outside trying to get in.

This produces a vicious spiral. People invest time or money in reading newspapers (and in producing them) in the hope that they will profit thereby. If being better and more accurately informed about the world in general will only increase your sense of powerless frustration, why, then, you would rather be better and more accurately informed about B's underpants or the shapely bottom of Jessica thing, whoever she is. But the more people feel like that, the less demand there is for the other sort of journalism and the more the circle of dcision makers tends to shrink.

If there were time, I would have a go at Brad de Long's theory that he-said she-said journalism is uniquely wicked. But I don't.

The age old question: Is there a market for truth?

I believe Jessica Thing is one of Cindy Lou Who's Southern relations.

I'm reluctant to accept either Werdna's or Robust's explanation insofar as they seem to minimize or eliminate the effects of political bias that I mentioned. I did mention the market for fluff and the ingroup shallowness of the professionals as factors, but my point was that it doesn't stop there. For example, Judith Miller's dishonest Iraq reporting was no more entertaining than honest reporting would have been, and the same goes for the lame columnists and editorial writers at the Pst and the Times.

Likewise, controversialists are heavily skewed to the far right; you don't have Nader or Chomsky or Cockburn or any other genuine leftist given the kind of audience that Hannity or O'Reilly (hosts) or Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin (guests) get. The spectrum is from center-left to far right, and genuine leftists (or even left-liberals) are only given little cameos (often with the effect of making the left look ridiculous, e.g. Ward Churchill).

As far as the market goes, I think that it is a factor that very few people, including prosperous politically-aware liberals, are willing to pay for information when information is available cheap or free. (100,000 people paying $200 a year could support a $20,000,000 publication). When advertisers are actually the ones paying the bills, they're the ones who call the tune.

One thing I haven't investigated: many media outlets are part of very large conglomerates with multiple interests (e.g. Disney and ABC). I'm confident that these conglomerates would be willing to take a considerably lower profit on their media branch, if push came to shove, if it seemed likely to help get them some kind of tax or regulation advantage elsewhere. (I doubt that they really have to make this choice as baldly as that, but this is an argument against the idea that the reading and listening audience's interest is the predominant factor driving news coverage.)

I don't think that either DeLong or anyone else believes that there ever was a golden age of perfect media. They just believe that our present media has been intolerably bad, and that it has steadily degenerated since about 1984 (my estimated date, though others could be argued for) .

I also would argue that pure profit-maximizing market behavior cannot produce good journalism. I think that about a lot of things, but for neoliberals like Krugman or DeLong that idea has difficulties.

Likewise, controversialists are heavily skewed to the far right; you don't have Nader or Chomsky or Cockburn or any other genuine leftist given the kind of audience that Hannity or O'Reilly (hosts) or Ann Coulter or Michelle Malkin (guests) get.

I don't really know anything about Chomsky, etc., but my sense is that he once did cut quite the figure as America's media intellectual. Further, there are more people who think like Hannity than Chomsky in the US; there just are.

. When advertisers are actually the ones paying the bills, they're the ones who call the tune.

Eh. Sure, I guess. I think there are structural issues, but if the cost of producing and channeling news drops, then so does the importance of advertisers, etc. You might say the same about decreasing the relative size of potential advertisers, etc.

I also would argue that pure profit-maximizing market behavior cannot produce good journalism.

Dunno if I buy that, but certainly the weaker claim that it won't necessarily produce good journalism seems true. Depending on how important you think it is for journalists to be consistently right, that's probably enough to get you a lot of places.

(Note relevant to this topic, but what do you think of Lind, Emerson?)

Dunno if I buy that, but certainly the weaker claim that it won't necessarily produce good journalism seems true.

That's such a safe, weak claim that I doubt that anyone would ever even bother to make it, except maybe in arguments with amphetamine-fueled freemarket fanatics.

if the cost of producing and channeling news drops, then so does the importance of advertisers, etc. You might say the same about decreasing the relative size of potential advertisers, etc.

Regardless of the costs, profits will still come from advertisers unless readers pay for what they read. The blogosphere is sort of transitional -- only a few individuals are really making a living, so it's really a big volunteer organization so far. And with a small number of exceptions, blogs still don't originate a lot of news -- mostly they provide opinion and interpretation and rescue suppressed stories.

I don't really know anything about Chomsky, etc., but my sense is that he once did cut quite the figure as America's media intellectual. Further, there are more people who think like Hannity than Chomsky in the US; there just are.

Well, the fact that you don't know much about Chomsky, and the fact that he no longer is a media presence, both confirm my point. The fact that few people think like Chomsky is partly a function of their never having heard of him, and my point here is that even though he's controversial, he's not one of the controversial people (e.g. Ann Coulter) who is given a voice. (IE, I'm arguing against Robusto's point).

My guess is that at least 10% of Americans have a degree of agreement with Chomsky. Most who voted for Nader and left splinter parties in 2000, quite a few disgruntled non voters, and a fair number of left-wing Democrats who understood that the Nader candidacy was going to be harmful, even though they agreed with what he was saying.

It's worth noting that certain kinds of journalism require money and hence either substantial subscriptions or advertisers or both. It takes money to, say, go to Venezuela and research a detailed think piece about the Chavez government--and even a fairly politically astute blogger from Venezuela is not going to be able to give all the information needed for an in-depth research piece. That's what blogs can't always do. If you want to be able to interview lots of people and look at lots of documents, well, that's a full time job and not a hobby.

We had a cat named Chomsky when I was little. Chomsky and Popocateptl.

By Lind I've only read "Made in Texas". I thought it was great. He seems to lean more toward a militarist nationalism than I would wish, though.

Unfortunately, I can't think of any way to relate Chomsky and carp, one way or the other. Damn.

He seems to lean more toward a militarist nationalism than I would wish, though.

I've only started reading some of his work myself. From what little I know of it, I buy a lot of what he says in describing the various factions in the country, but I don't really love the one he wants everyone to join. Weird.

It takes money to, say, go to Venezuela and research a detailed think piece about the Chavez government

But how many people actually want to read that piece? It's not going to be produced by a for profit corporation anyway; if it is produced, it'll be shoddy.

The Times, the Post, and the WSJ do produce stuff like that, as do some British and European papers. They all have some great people working for them. The worst problems are at the editorial / managerial / opinion levels, but it does drip down to the reporters.

The "fluff" problem is especially on TV, radio, cable, and on the opinion pages of newspapers. The Times and WSJ at least still do good reporting (with some bad mixed in). And there is a market for an authoritative, comprehensive English language newspaper.

In the case of the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 election, and the Iraq War, seemingly management reached down and corrupted the news reporting.

"For example, Judith Miller's dishonest Iraq reporting was no more entertaining than honest reporting would have been, and the same goes for the lame columnists and editorial writers at the Pst and the Times."

I'm agnostic on the question of media ownership and its effect on media quality. But I think the Miller case mostly doesn't speak to that issue. There was never any unified capitalist interest in invading Iraq in the same way there was in eliminating the estate tax, for example.

I'd categorize Miller as exemplifying the issues I mentioned in 19: There are inherent problems with the way journalism is done, and the right wing has learned how to exploit those flaws.

Liberals won't ever be able to game the system the way conservatives do, but I find the current trend in media criticism important, and I'm optimistic that the scales can be put in better balance.

I have a pet carp named John Emerson.

I don't really know anything about Chomsky

Manufacturing Consent is a good place to start, dealing as it does with very issue we're discussing. There's a documentary by the same name that talk about the writing of the book and Chomsky in general, but I haven't seen it.

"two conservatives for every liberal."

I thought these people were against Affirmative Action.

My dissertation is writing a sort of prehistory of things like Manufactured Consent.

The Times and WSJ at least still do good reporting (with some bad mixed in).

Lots of newspapers do good reporting with some bad mixed in; the problem is that most readers--certainly myself--are rarely well-positioned to sort the former from the latter. Furthermore, my sense is that the tabloidization of US news institutions proceeds a pace. I grew up thinking of Time as a news magazine. Admittedly, I grew up (and remain) pretty middlebrow, but I don't think that was an insane belief to hold. It might be today. The Times has in the past presented itself as something like a public trust; it can afford to behave in such a way only so long as it can afford to behave in such a way. Both it and the WSJ famously have management/reporter issues surrounding profitability, IIRC.

I think it's going to be specialty magazines for deep information + newspapers for spectacle, be it Anna Nicole Smith or investigative journalism. Who ends up "making the market" for considered elite opinion, or whether that process goes away, I don't know.

40 - He's controversial in a different way than Hannity. I can imagine a world in which a left-wing Hannity, who kept on insisting that conservatives were responsible for everything bad, got media attention. I can't imagine a world in which someone like Chomsky, who relentlessly attacks American exceptionalism, did. Manufacturing Consent is well worth reading, even if I disagree with a lot of Chomsky's post-Vietnam foreign policy critique.

I'm honored, Heebie. Get a squid named PZ and you'll have a complete set.

When will the White Bear Dissertation be available? Hpefully before the polar ice cap is all melted.

I don't see any reason to be agnostic, and I didn't say anything about a unified capitalist interest. The actual organizations which control the news flow tilted strongly toward war. I have no particular idea why, though Israel probably has something to do with it. I'm convinced that it comes from management and ownershipo, and that the young, mediocre Graham and the young, mediocre Sulzburger have gone over to the dark side.

I agree that Chomsky couldn't function as a Hannity, but someone like Michael Moore, Ed Schultz, or some of the Air America people could. And I don't believe that lack of audience is the reason why we don't hear them.

"In the case of the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 election, and the Iraq War, seemingly management reached down and corrupted the news reporting."

I trip over the word "seemingly" here. The more parsimonious explanation (it seems to me) is that enthusiastic practitioners of a sometimes corrupt and decadent profession have screwed up repeatedly - both managers and rank-and-file.

If the scenario you suggest is accurate, then I'd expect to see journalists complaining about it themselves. Are they? (That's not a rhetorical question - I don't know the answer.)

I have to write the damn thing, of course, and it won't save the world, but it might get people to care more about reading Revolutionary-era writers instead of just letting conservatives tell us what they meant.

Lots of good points here, most of them right, as I don' think there's one magic reason reporting so bad. Just to add a few.

--There's no fixed level of desire for good news reporting. Instead, there's a feedback loop between the media and its audience, where the more tabloid crap the people get, the more they want, and the more newspapers think they want it. At this point, I don't know how to break the cycle.

--Isn't one Chomskian point that the media worships power? That has been a thousand times confirmed since the Democrats took Congress, and suddenly there's been a spate of articles investigating Republicans, in addition to the kind of apologies we're seeing here. Much as I'm happy to see these stories, they're also in a way sickening.

--Along those lines, think about the kind of person who would want to become a journalist now in America. You'll either be someone who wants to "tell stories" or someone who is basically a social creature, interested in personalities and gossip. The latter group particularly is easily seduced by "kool kidz" group dynamics and I think Werdna makes a great point that many decisions in America are made by an elite, and that reporters are on the outside looking (and wanting to get) in.

Oh, to add to that third point: most journalists now have journalism degrees. People who go to graduate school are not boat-rockers; they're usually careerists who buy into the system.

Add this: Journalism is a profession in economic transition. Lots of "creative destruction" going on, and the practitioners are spooked and more interested in having a viable career than in being boat rockers. Boat rockers, as a personality type, are almost by definition unwelcome in any organization, but I think journalism used to tolerate more of them.

59b - That's certainly true, but I also think that there's... I hesitate to say a "lazy-reporter bias", because that's not quite it. But it's a lot easier to report on something that someone else is doing than do it yourself. If you're the team on the San Diego paper that won the Pulitzer for bringing down Duke Cunningham, you start trolling around in real estate records and doing some research, and eventually you come up with iron-clad implications of corruption. If you're John Solomon* or The Politico, you do the same thing for Edwards or Reid or Obama, don't come up with much, and you're left with a dillema: publish something suggesting wrongdoing on thin evidence, or tell your editor that you just burnt two weeks on nothing? Far easier to wait for something to happen at a US Attorney's office, or in Congress, or even wait for the opposition party to start bringing it up. Then you can write a process story and not have to worry about your news judgment.

Plus, you know, a lot of them are shrill harpies who thrive on proximity to power.

59c - This is not a particularly apt description of the two daily paper reporters I know, although it sure as hell sounds like a good description of a lot of major columnists.

* Who's kidding who? John Solomon waits for RNC oppo researchers to send him a document dump.

First of all, a lot of people leave journalism, voluntarioly ot otherwise. Or leave the times. Ivins and Hersh both worked for the Times once, and they did complain about the coverage I mentioned, but they were no longer in the big leagues by that time. The people remained either were part of the problem or had decided to ignore it.

The first time said "Never attribute to malevolence what can be explained by incompetence", thirty or forty years ago, it was cute and maybe thought-provoking, but by now it's just a stupid copout for people who are afraid to stick their necks out.

I don't see what the problem is with the idea that managemtn manages, especially when the same kind of mistake was made on three consecutive major issues and was harshly criticized all three times. Graham, Sulzburger, and the others get the newspapers and the reporters that they want. There's been little evidence that either the Times or the Post understands how badly they screwed up in any of the three cases.

The direction of movement is not encouraging. First CNN and then ABC started imitating Fox, and the new people added to the staffs of Time (william Kristol, Ana Marie Cox) and the LA Times (Goldberg) are negatively impressive.

Also remember that all writing, because it follows current rhetorical and narrative conventions, as JM says about journalism above, is prone to accepting the same underlying assumptions of whatever that writer is reading, especially when that writer is cranking out a lot of words under a deadline. It is acceptable for election analysis to cover exclusively superficial details because it has been acceptable, and because anything else would require research and careful writing. "I asked two guys in a bar in Utah which candidate they'd prefer as a bar buddy" is preferable to real research about substantive issues because it (a) is being done by other papers, (b) gives an air of folksiness, (c) is easy, and (d) requires no dangerous analysis.

I'm not saying journalists are lazy; rather, it reminds me of a conversation we had here about the boilerplate writing in legal documents. Creating sentences from scratch in a new style takes time and isn't necessary for getting the job done, so lawyers yank one another's sentences, even if they're bad, because they work.

Totally pwned by snarkout. I should caffeinate myself before I do this.

many decisions in America are made by an elite, and that reporters are on the outside looking (and wanting to get) in.

I think this is slightly less straightforward than your description suggests. I don't know that there's a rooted, inviolable elite, so much as a set of people whose elite position is less vulnerable to change than that of various other sets. That is, I think "the elite" pay attention to other groups as well, in order to maintain their position, or improve it. I think people fall out of the elite; certainly some move into it. But there isn't some consistent aristocracy that "really" controls America, unless you're willing to accept a definition that includes tens to probably hundreds of thousands of people.

During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, my news sources were NPR, Le Monde Diplomatique, Le Courrier Internationale, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, etc. What was being reported in the NYT and the WaPo seemed absurdist compared to what I was reading in these other media.

I didn't have a TV (still don't), so it was difficult for me to understand how bad it had gotten until one day in the summer of 2003 I watched Bill O'Reilly's show for the first time and had to leave the room in tears. The internet has shown me a lot of ugliness I never thought really existed.

I have to suspect, though, that the media environment I lived in pre-blogs better approximates the culture of major journalists. They're perhaps a little less idealistic, probably even more self-important, but I think they're similarly detached from the vox populi, and similarly baffled (and a bit terrified) by it, while of course projecting their own fantasies upon it. In 2002-2003, I remember everyone in NYC feeling a bit under siege, but also feeling as though our opinions and debates were the most central, the most important: things were going to get decided here.

Very narcissistic of us. Now I know that the whack-jobs exert their influence from all across the country, and that the well-organised ignorant are able to bring an incredible pressure to bear on easily cowed professional institutions.

"Isn't one Chomskian point that the media worships power? That has been a thousand times confirmed since the Democrats took Congress"

There certainly has been a change. I think the mechanism isn't exactly power-worship by the media, though. Power, after all, is powerful - it gets things done. Democrats have taken control of some of the institutional levers that move the media. Most obviously, they can issue subpoenas and hold hearings. Those are powerful attention-getting devices.

I really think the media began to turn when public opinion turned - although the media's turn followed significantly after the public's turn, and the media still hasn't gone as far as the public has.

I should caffeinate myself before I do this.

There's soap...

I think that journalists who have made it (not into the elite, but into good journalism jobs) meld their ideas about professionalism and their ideas about coolness and sophistication. They know they're superior both ways (in addition to being pretty well paid), and don't seem aware that the things you do to be cool might conflict violently with a serious definition of professionalism. Instead, professionalism is accommodated to coolness.

However, this isn't driven from the bottom. The bylined people are doing the things that will get them hired and promoted, and their rationalizations and self-image are results of that.

Ten thousand of people would absolutely be an elite. That's one out of every 30,000 Americans. A hundred thousand would be 1/3000 and could also be an elite. Granted that there are gradations within the elite and that there are marginal members, there's no problem at all in saying we're governed by an elite. It's not mysterious who the elite is: managers and owners of very large influential organizations, and very very rich people.

("Influential": someone who controls a 100 million dollar media organization is much more influential than someone who controls a 100 million dollar dry goods company.)

63: Writers have complained about their former bosses for a long time. I haven't read enough Hersh or Ivins to know: Do they share your media critique? Ivins was a problem wherever she went, for reasons that (I think) aren't directly tied to her liberalism.

Ann Coulter didn't get fired from the National Review for being ideologically incorrect, but rather for being a loose cannon. These things happen.

Seriously, PF, that's not worth responding to. You might spell out your problems with Ivins, and you might read some Hersh and Ivins and get back to me. Ivins consistently produced good columns, which was her job.

I've read enough Hersh and Ivins to know that they are credits to their profession. But I've read enough *about* Ivins to know that she persistently pushed the boundary of acceptable daily newspaper practice in ways that were only tangentially related to ideology. Most daily newspapers have an extremely low tolerance for vulgarity, a consistent problem for Ivins.

IIRC, Ivins offered ideological explanations for a lot of things, but not for her departure from the NYT, which she attributed to an unwillingness to write boringly.

Are you really peddling the idea that Molly was unable to work for the NYT because she was too liberal, so she had to move back to Texas, where liberal points of view are much more acceptable in corporate circles?

"We had a cat named Chomsky when I was little. Chomsky and Popocateptl."

That's nothing. When I was little, we had a cat named Tlahuixcalpantecuhtli. Old Aztec name. (We got him from Mexico.)

Little Tlahuixcalpantecuhtli was quite the runabout, often roaming around the neighborhood for days at a time.

I will always remember the sound of my mother sticking her head out the back porch door, banging on a tin of cat food, and calling, "Here Tlahuixcalpantecuhtli! Heere Tlahuixcalpantecuhtli!"

In hindsight, we probably should've given him a nickname.

I left out some punctuation. It should have read: We had a cat named "Chomsky-when-I-was-little.-Chomsky-and-Popocateptl."

So you see, I really do win the awkward pet name contest.

When I was three, I had two turtles. I named one "Li'l Bub" and the other "Joaquin Andujar."

For whatever reason they got rid of Ivins and Hersh, who were liberal. By the time the Clinton impeachment, the 2000 election, and the Iraq war came around, there was no on on the Times to make a stink. (They had a few liberals, but either Ivins or Hersh would have fought more effectively.) That was the outcome. (Neither Hersh nor Ivins admitted to having been fired, but I suspect that that was part of a buyout deal. All the evidence is that they were).

Incidentally, liberalism isn't the only issue with Hersh and Ivins. They were also very good reporters, and it's hard to say that their replacements were as good.

George Will was not at the Times, but at the Post he had two or three major conflicts of interest, a messy divorce, and a flamboyant affair, and he was famous for being annoying face-to-face. But he did not get the Ivins treatment.

Hersh say that in order to clean up American journalism they'd have to fire about 90% of the staff. Moyers says something fairly similiar. Ivins is no longer around.

To get back to my main point: whatever you think of Ivins and Hersh, by about 1994 the Times was ruined enough to play a major negative role for the next ten years.

My next cat will be named Chompsky.

That's funny! Growing up I always thought the cat's name had a "p" in it, like you spelled it.

What about the Reagan-era deregulation nonsense? I think that one major reason why journalism has the excuse that it has to chase the ratings/money, that it has to give the people what they want and what they want is Anna Nicole Smith's baby, is that the entire idea of an actual independent public sector got thrown out.

Surely one of the problems we have is a specifically American problem--while other national media are certainly unsatisfying from a strong progressivist standpoint, they're obviously a lot better than what we've got now.

On that note, anyone see Dowd today? She's going on about John Edwards "metrosexuality." Did someone inject her with Ann Coulter's bile?

Incidentally, I don't think that the Times had or has a leftist bias. It has an establishment bias, a respectability bias, and a centrist bias, and these all (combined with arrogance) contributed to their wretched journalism. The Post was much the same.

Obviously: Incidentally, I don't think that the Times had or has a leftist rightwing bias.

Tim, Somerby was using the term "Heathers" in 1999.

I can't think of anything constructive to say about Dowd, so I'll say: she seems to be jealous of Edwards' haircut for some reason.

78:
"Hersh say that in order to clean up American journalism they'd have to fire about 90% of the staff."

Well, I'm losing track of where we disagree here. Certainly on the sorry state of American journalism, we are in accord. We both think there is a systemic problem that permeates the profession. I find your top-down explanation a bit unconvincing and the sentiment you attribute to Hersh is, at least arguably, more simpatico to my preferred explanations.

A quick Google tells me that Molly departed the Times in 1982, after 6 years - to work for the Dallas Times Herald. I think she's an example of a problem at the Times, just not the problem that this conversation is about.

I don't remember a time when liberals dominated the op-ed pages. It used to amuse me to count the black nationally syndicated columnists - liberals versus conservatives - and compare that to black political preferences in the general population. But that's been a problem forever.

No, I really think that most of the issue - the new problem of the last 10, 20 years or so - can be explained by superior conservative efforts to push the media. The E&P story talks about the general climate of the country, and about angry phone calls and threats. That explanation seems very powerful to me, especially in a time when newspapers are hypersensitive about circulation.

Did management (Graham and Sulzburger) play any part in this? Did they have no other alternative? Do they have any regrets? Are they even aware that there's been a major problem?

My understanding is that Sulzburger and Graham have been players, not victims, and that they do not think that there was a serious problem, even though they'll grant problems of detail (even Gonzales does that.)

I have allowed for the factor of advertiser pressure, but I rather doubt that that's the main reason for the Times or the Post.

In what sense do "superior conservative efforts to push the media" speak against my thesis? What I'm saying is that Graham and Sulzburger were turned by these superior efforts, specifically in a neo-con direction. Less so than ABC, CNN, Fox, and the Washington Times, but significantly. I certainly wasn't saying that conservative pressure was a non-factor.

"Management manages." A revolutionary new cutting edge twenty-first century idea.

What about the Reagan-era deregulation nonsense? I think that one major reason why journalism has the excuse that it has to chase the ratings/money, that it has to give the people what they want and what they want is Anna Nicole Smith's baby, is that the entire idea of an actual independent public sector got thrown out.

Are you arguing that before Reagan newspapers were regulated by the Government and that it would be a good thing if they were again, rather than being commercial enterprises that owe their commercial success to the market?

If so, this seems a dubious and factually ill-supported proposition.

60: The old-fashioned American J-School is in steep decline. It's now "journalism and mass communications", which often includes publishing, public relations, broadcasting, advertising, and the like. Even within journalism, one might get a degree in the field but have a very weak understanding of its basic skills and ethics, yet still kick ass on style points.

On the other hand, two of the college journalism people I knew have their -- earned -- Pulitzers already. So.

TV and radio journalism were regulated by the Fairness Doctrine, by rules restricting ownership of multiple outlets in the same market, and by the requirement of public service programming, and deregulation played a big role in making TV and radio worse.

90 to 88.

Also things like funding of public broadcasting and so forth.

85: Now Cala has to go to rehab. Bummer.

TV and radio journalism were regulated by the Fairness Doctrine, by rules restricting ownership of multiple outlets in the same market, and by the requirement of public service programming, and deregulation played a big role in making TV and radio worse.

Radio and TV still are regulated in most (maybe all) of the ways you describe. And, of course, that has nothing to do with newspapers, which was mostly the topic of conversation above.

The initial topic was all media -- I've mentioned Fox, ABC, and CNN. We zeroed in on the Times and the Post later.

The Fairness Doctrine is gone, and the other two requirements have been greatly relaxed.

So, JE and B.Ph.D., you are in favor of government regulation of the press?

I blame a lot of the worsening of the American journalistic environment on 24-hour cable networks. It's become possible for journalists to spend literally all of their working hours bopping from show to show, which can't be good for their professionalism. Correspondants spend most of their on-camera time standing between a building and a camera, spinning talking points every half-hour for the cutaway. And every craptacular blowhard can find somebody willing to give them a slot to appeal to some niche. Michelle flipping Malkin has been subbing for O'Reilly on FoxNews.

And Turner sold CNN, so it's been playing catch-up to the worst of the worst. And who are its stars? Walking corpse Larry King and poison dwarf Wolf Blitser.

89: Based on my broad anecdotal experience, I don't think that j-school is in "decline". Quite the contrary: J-schools have a great deal of power, and as you point out, they've managed to subsume a number of mini-disciplines that might be more appropriately overseen by schools of marketing/management or theater. I'm not positing some kind of golden age of journalism -- paging through this book suggests that other eras may have had different problems, but there's never been any lack of mendacity in the journalism game. However, for all that reporters and editors of the past were often just as compromised at their counterparts today, there used to exist some structural apparatus that provided more alternatives for the media consumer in the US. There were more daily papers, for a start, and they were much more open about their ideological biases. Newspapers were smaller concerns, with more people employed at working-class jobs, and far fewer people with college degrees, let alone advanced degrees. Also, there was, from the days of the abolitionist press right up to the fairly recent past, a much more vital and active alternative daily press, some of which appeared in languages other than English, or was bilingual. As alluded to above, there was also a feedback loop; to wit: people cared about what they read in the paper. Sometimes that prompted positive social change, and sometimes it prompted lynchings, but people were willing to act on things they read about politics or work or society. Now, when newspapers are becoming nothing more than TV shows that you can wrap fish in, the potential for positive action based on a broadcast medium is in decline, and that should come as no surprise.

Didn't rival newspapers also use to have blogspats feuds? That sort of thing tends to get readers involved.

re 98. I am not informed enough to agree or disagree with the first sentence of 98 (although it sounds right to me), but I mostly agree with the rest of 98, except I would state it more softly--I am not sure that the decline in diversity of press outlets has been quite as bad as minneapolitan says--there are media--cable TV and the Internet most principally--that provide an outlet not available to people 40 years ago.

For TV and radio I'm in favor of the fairness doctrine, the restriction of multiple ownership in one media market, and the requirement of public service programming. Neither I nor anyone else here has said anything about regulating the print media. I at least have affirmed the status quo befor deregulatuion of TV and radio.

One of the ironies is that the degradation of the print media occured while it was professionalizing. Some media people have been mistaught and are very proud of their systematic journalistic malpractice (e.g. the excesses of neutrality.)

Something that I think is a factor: Both Graham and Sulzburger are simultaneously in charge of business operations and professional operations for their respective enterprises. Thus, there's no possibility of a fight between the business manager and the operations manager. I think that the business manager always wins these non-arguments.

101: I thought the fairness doctrine was something else?

98 - The two newspaper folk I know are both white and from southern, lower-middle-class backgrounds. Mr. X thinks that stories are often slanted unconsciously since most reporters are upper-middle-class liberals. Also, he thinks that reporters are ignorant about statistcs. Ms. Y thinks that stories are often slanted unconsciously since most reporters are upper-middle-class professionals. Also, she thinks that most reporters can't write to save their lives. I think both would say that the fact that two people who have broadly negative takes on what j-school has done to the craft of reporting felt that they needed to go to j-school represents part of the problem.

81: Dowd has been Coulter-lite for about 8 years. She just can't get those blowjobs out of her mind!

Ms. Y is in a particularly good position to make observations about the relative writing ability of other reporters, as she did a lengthy stint as a copy editor, and got to see just how terrible the writing could be, and just how often and how casually people lifted phrases and facts from other people's pieces.

For TV and radio I'm in favor of the fairness doctrine, the restriction of multiple ownership in one media market, and the requirement of public service programming.

Fuck the fairness doctrine. We're finally in a position to put our feet on their fucking Red throats, and you want us to promise not to. Pass.

Ms Y is right on both counts; Mr X. is right about the statistics.

I don't really know much about American journalism -- I write for Salon occasionally, and that's about all my contact with it, and likely to stay that way with the exchange rate the way it is. But it does seem clear that one huge difference between American and British journalism is that that there are five London "Broadsheet" papers, and four "tabloid" ones, not counting the Sunday papers, which run as partially separate operations, whereas practically every city in the US is served by one major and perhaps one minor newspaper. So American papers are very much richer, probably much more profitable (I'm too lazy to check) and much much more pompous. This may also account for the hysterical self-satisfaction of some blogs about "fact-checking the MSM" -- British papers constantly shoot each others' stories down in a way that just doesn't seem to happen in the USA.

JM, leaving the room in tears was the only sensible reaction. Every time I come to the USA and switch on the television news, I feel violently disoriented.

One more general point about pressure from below. I have twice had stories -- good ones -- killed by "liberal" outlets (once the Guardian, once the BBC) for fear of the endless, tedious shit-storms generated by, in this instance, any mention of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I have once had an excellent story killed by a rightwing paper with a Jewish editor for fear of offending the government of the Yemen and, possibly, being assassinated by some nutcase.

106, 104; lots and lots of journalists can't write for shit. It's odd, but obvious.

obvious if you read them, at any rate

Oh -- and @ Sifo Tweety -- I think I can claim to be the first person to have got a mention of The Poor Man into the Church Times, but I don't think the press column is online. Apply privately for enlightenment.

and now I will shut up.

Oh, yeah -- I know my failure to watch TV news and commentary (except when I can't avoid it, as in many airports, unfortunately) means I am profoundly out of touch with the way that most Americans experience current events.

98: picking nits: the old-fashioned American J-School, which wasn't quite a mirage. I know people whose programs got diluted while they were in them, to their disgust. Basic stuff, like libel law, fact-checking, "do you print rape victims' names and addresses?" got overlooked... that last one isn't an exaggeration, I saw it myself.

I very badly want to make an analogy here of J-Schools to other professional schools. I don't think it's more elitist for a journalism job to require a college background than it is for other white-collar jobs. That's a deep, long-term trend in American society, and yes, it's classist. The problem arises from the lack of internal professional standards. There are no Generally Accepted Reporting Practices which newspapers (or broadcast media) adhere to, other than "will this cause legal or cash flow problems?" It's assumed that you learn those in college.

True, a dedicated person will create their own standards, and the type of person who will do that is likely to be a very good reporter or editor on their own initiative. And given newsroom culture, a single person can raise the bar.

But it's crap to expect that to happen regularly, and it's crap to expect a reader to figure out that one reporter for a paper rewrites press releases (and badly), while another reporter dreams about the next day's document dump.

(And forget broadcast. If cutting room floors could talk...)

This is one of my pet issues, so I'll summarize. Here's what I think and don't think:

1. It isn't just a clique of shallow individuals. They all work for disciplined organizations and are responding to what their bosses want.

2. It's not incompetence. This all happened while journalism was becoming more professional. The arrogance of professionals actually worsened the problem, and some "professional" principles (neutrality and the refusal to counter misinformation) are central to the problem. (I have seen it argued by a high-level journalist that for a reporter to point out that a spokesman is lying is bias and politicization; reporters should be stenographers).

3. The tendency toward shallowness and sensationalism, which is presumably driven by ratings and viewer numbers, is a factor, but that doesn't account for the political slant. The influence of ratings is mediated through the advertisers who pay most of the bills, and they have political agendas besides just wanting to get their ads viewed. Even if Chomsky were a big ratings draw, advertisers wouldn't like him.

4. It's not market driven, in the sense that the audience wants wingers so they get wingers. For example, the political mix you see in the House of Representatives is not anywhere near matched by the political mix you see in the media. (Remember, the Republican majority was never very big; there have always been a lot of Democrats in Congress, and a fair proportion of them are liberal).

5. It's not neutral. For whatever reason, the far left is worse represented in the media than the far right, and the moderate right is better represented than the moderate left. (Centrists are often wrongly claimed as representatives of the left.)

6. I find it very difficult to say that it "just happened"and that intent was not a factor. The place I would look for intent would be among media ownership and management. This is completely reasonable: management manages.

7. The primary motives for management would be advertising sales and low taxes. The hawkishness is harder to explain but seems to be a general elite phenomenon which has been worked up over the last several decades.

Shorter Emerson:

"Freedom of the press in Britain means freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to." - Hannen Swaffer

The hawkishness is harder to explain

Emerson doesn't remember high school pep rallies, chanting 'we're number one' with his classmates. Perhaps where he went to school, they chanted 'it's all a very complicated situation, and even though we're muddling through trying to do the best we can, the unforseen consequences are quite serious for the other people involved' or somesuch.

My son was telling us last night about Chuck Norris jokes, currently popular in his set. Eg 'Chuck Norris sleeps with a nightlight, but it's not because he's afraid of the dark; the dark is afraid of Chuck Norris.' There a place in many of us that finds the violent revenge fantasy -- from Dirty Harry to Odysseus and the suitors -- responsive to a need. Hawkishness plays to this, and many other lower instincts. It's amazing to me that we don't see more of it.

115: Discipline, competence, management? Man, they must be bitter, because there sure are a lot of incompetents fronting. Perhaps Roger Ailes could headhunt.

I think there's something to ogged's "worships power" comment. Josh Marshall has referred to the midterm results as Bush losing the "Mandate of Heaven" in the press's eyes.

I might separate the problems with the daily newspapers and the problems with cable news. (The national weekly magazines, like Time and Newsweek, fall somewhere in between).

With the dailies, it's that excessive deference to GOP complaints over objectivity has sucked a lot of the life out of their political coverage. If you're just reporting what politicians say--well, that requires no work. I'd rather actually look up the speech online myself. The actual reporting comes in when you're trying to figure out if it's true, but that supposedly wouldn't be objective.

It also isn't considered objective to choose and place your stories based on how important *you* think they are. Instead, the measure is how many other people are talking about it how loudly. There's a very kids-playing-soccer aspect of it.

One form of political story they will express opinions in is a horse race story on the candidates' chances. This has never made sense to me, because: 1) the facts needed to do substantive policy stories are actually available; the facts needed to predict election results are not; 2) if they're actually concerned about being neutral observers rather than participants this shouldn't be acceptable. People's perception about who is a serious candidate, who is electable, who has enough money to win, who has momentum, etc. drives their donations and votes at least as much as the merits of the issue.

With the editorial pages--my main problem with the Op-Eds is that they're basically tenured positions, and a lot of the columnists have run out of ideas years ago. The editorial page is so dependent on the individuals that it's hard to generalize. I once would've thought that there wasn't much difference between the Washington Post and the NY Times, but now the NY Times is amazing about not pulling its punches by editorial board standards, while the Post....The WSJ is and always has been a nasty, nasty, piece of work.

Cable news suffers from these problems to some degree, has a bunch of worse, other problems, and basically lacks redeeming qualities.

I really don't think that incompetence is a factor at all. They're successfully trying to do the wrong thing.

I agree on the objectivity part and the power worship part. However, you also have to explain why the major newspapers worked so hard on baseless anti-Clinton stories when Clinton was in power, and were so willing to run utterly content-free anti-Gore stories during the 2000 election (while soft-pedaling or ignoring Bush's foibles.)

Maybe it's not so much power worship as authoritarian worship.

Emerson, I'm going to guess that you've never actually seen management in a big organization up close and personal. You might have a different view about its effectiveness if you had. (This reminds me of your comment about brutality in the making of modern soldiers.) From what I can see, there's a whole lot of pandering, and not very much discipline.

Also, competence implies leadership. Who's leading? Karl Rove in a mask? I don't think so. Meanwhile, ratings slide, circulation drops, and CNN runs ads for Head-On, implying a target audience of viewers who can't convince their doctors they have a headache. This does not smack much of managerial competence.

There are a lot of media people out there who aren't competent to do real reporting, but it's not like their editors thought they were hiring Pulitzer-winning investigators and got a nasty shock. They were hired for a reason. CNN and MSNBC aren't trying to be the BBC and sucking at it; they're trying for something else.

Late to this discussion, but from my comfy armchair it seems that one of the major problems is defining 'objectivity' to mean 'provide opposing viewpoints equal time and space', when it should mean something like 'correspond to reality.'

So we get lots of articles about, for example, global warming where the format is: State the phenomena (polar bears are marooned on ice shelves!); state the prevailing explanation (global warming!); find someone who disagrees (it's cow farts!); go home. The impression the reader takes away is, wow, poor polar bears, there's no consensus, screw 'em all. The reader doesn't have a way to judge who is credible and who isn't because providing them with that information would be unobjective.

"Give 'em the facts and let them make up their own minds" is a fine platitude, but it requires presenting the all the facts, not this he-said, she-said model. Correcting this model would probably cost more money, or at least require that journalists have a specialty in the subject of what they cover, rather than a degree in writing.

Halfway, people grumble about management in every large organization, good or bad. There's always dead wood, inefficiency, etc. etc. You've inflated the incompetence argument to the point that it becomes formally impossible to ever say that a given organization is simply doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons.

For some reason, the Times and the Post were willing to run poorly-grounded negative stories about Clinton and Gore. Incompetence would have produced a left-right scatter of bad stories, but we never see that. There were few comparable stories on the other side of the line.

The people who wrote the stories were talented, trained, and experienced. Most of the people making the decisions had been working for two of the best papers in the world for decades.

For some reason, the Times and the Post were willing to run poorly-grounded negative stories about Clinton and Gore.

(1) They were bored--Gore didn't get it till he was all but running, as I recall. Prior to that, he was Our Fair Hero.
(2) They were outsiders--remember that Clinton initially had large problems with the press because he didn't feed them; he thought he could go over them (MTV, etc.).
(3) Clinton was, weirdly, an outsider to the establishment. DLC Dems were, initially, weaker than Ted Kennedy Dems. Dem politicians always felt free to kick Clinton. The way that HRC handled healthcare didn't help.
(4) The liberal press felt it could demonstrate its evenhandedness by kicking the hell out of a Dem Admin not well protected by other Dems.
(5) The Clintonistas that the press dealt with were arrogant assholes. Cf. #2, and Gergen's inclusion.
(6) The Republicans won big in 1994, and the press responded to the new demographics of power.

126 makes sense, mostly.

I like how quite frequently when the papers are doing some insanely irrelevant inside-baseball story and they don't feel comfortable saying that the Republicans make up 448 of the top 450 instances of corruption nowadays, they go find some Democrat who no longer holds any sort of power and say "Hey Tony Coelho, you're still an arrogant asshole, right?" "Hell yeah I'm an arrogant asshole. Democrats r00l, Republicans are hicks." "Okay then Tony, thanks for clearing our conscience about beating John Edwards to death analyzing his homosexual haircut."

Tim, one of the things I've claimed is that whatever happened happened deliberately, by choice, and wasn't inadvertent or a matter of incompetence. Some of your points square with this.

A second claim of mine was that high management was perfectly happy with what happened, and that if they hadn't been, it would have stopped. You seem to be willing to put yourself at risk of seeming to believe the imbecile idea that the footsoldiers run the army.

Third, we're talking about three big stories spread out over about eight years, from Whitewater to Iraq, and each big story included a very large number of particular stories. A consistent policy was held to over an extended period, and by and large adherence to the policy was uniform.

Fourth, these three stories were about the most significant political events of that time period; the Iraq War might be the most significant event in the last 30-40 years. Are you saying that not a single important individual on either newspaper noticed what was going on, and that they were all just amusing themselves like a bunch of kids in a sandbox? Frankly, that level of shared indifference, ignorance, blindness, and incompetence is about as implausible as a conspiracy involving the Bavarian Illuminati, the Knights of Malta, and Fu Manchu, especially since you seem to want to deny that upper management had anything to do with it at all.

Think about it. The Post and the Times are well-established, prestigious organizations with a powerful institutional culture. Anyone who works for them has come very near the top of a highly competitive, very well-paid profession. But what the reporters actually do is just a matter of a shared whim?

At this point I've said most of what I have to say about the issue at hand. I'm now just trying to figure out why so many people are willing to go to such extraordinary lengths to deny, first, that the Times and the Post are disciplined organizations and that the things their workers do are done because that's what they understand their job to be, and second, that if the Times and the Post repeatedly intervene in political affairs over the period of eight years, always with the same political slant, that that's what the Times' and the Post's management was trying to do.

Prior to that, he was Our Fair Hero

Not my recollection. I think Not Worth Mentioning is a better description.

(3) Clinton was, weirdly, an outsider to the establishment.

This was a huge problem, but it's not the DLC/Kennedy split. It's the whole running against Washington thing. Washington Establishment Dems, like Nunn, reached out to teach him a lesson by bringing up the whole gays in the military thing during the transition. Then congressional Dems tried to play some triangulation in 1994, and got totally burned by it.* The worst, though, are the consultants (as Ned noted above) who try to earn credit with journalists like Nagourney by trashing Dems in power (or on the trail).

I'm now just trying to figure out why so many people are willing to go to such extraordinary lengths to deny

I think some people are confused by the evident fact that many reporters are incompetent dolts. This doesn't mean they're not doing what their employers want them to do -- far from it. It just leaves the possibility open.

There are also some counter-examples. The NYT stories on NSA surveillance (a) were suppressed when they might have made a big difference but (b) eventually did come out. And made a big difference when they did. Today's Iraqi soldier torture story isn't designed to fit the narrative.

On Gitmo, the mainstream press, and a significant slice of public opinion, has long since stopped buying the official line about 'worst-of-the-worst.' I suppose the reality denying narrative can only go so far or, more likely, there are plenty of papers to be sold with lurid stories, and if the Admin isn't giving them in its favor, then the press finds them other places.

Thus, Emerson, I don't disagree at all with your analysis of the past 20 years of narrative, or with your conclusions about the preferences of management. I'll say, though, that the same management is plenty willing to go with the counter-narrative when it's going to sell soap.

Oh, come on guys. Bush II ran against the Establishment. Nixon, Reagan and Carter ran against the Establishment.

The reporters are not incompetent dolts. I believe that they are clever, amoral people who are good at figuring out what's expected of them, and who by doing so have risen to the top of their profession. They are success-worshipers and they have succeeded. End of story.

There may be some alternate universe where journalism is a profession like medicine and competence can be known, but the US is not part of that universe. The US is a place where management want bad journalism, and ambitious young things learn how to produce bad journalism.

Political journalism is always value-laden and biased, and trying to define it as a profession like engineering is delusional. The fight against bad journalism is a never ending fight, but it's fantasy to think that it can be defined as a competence question.

I'm now just trying to figure out why so many people are willing to go to such extraordinary lengths to deny

Because your description of the way the world, and, in specific, large organizations, work doesn't match up with anyone else's. There are lots of asses to kiss in the modern world, and the ass is not always above you on the organizational chart.

I believe that they are clever, amoral people who are good at figuring out what's expected of them, and who by doing so have risen to the top of their profession. They are success-worshipers and they have succeeded. End of story.

I'd mostly agree with you if you were really willing to stop with "End of story." Success is not simply about meeting the expectations of the NYT management or WaPo management--there are other players in the market, who might offer you a place on the TV or speaking fees. Nor is it clear that "management" speaks with a single voice; in my own experience, that's entirely untrue, because managers are, at a minimum, competing with other managers.

There are lots of asses to kiss in the modern world, and the ass is not always above you on the organizational chart.

Not always, but usually. I work in a large organization, and I'm worried a lot more about what my bosses think of me than anything else.

Emerson seems obviously right here -- while there are certainly forces on reporters other than pleasing the boss, to make those forces the main explanation for the media treatment of Whitewater, Gore, the Iraq War, and so on, assumes that the bosses don't have any interest in or effect on the product their employees are turning out at all. That seems self-evidently ridiculous to me.

(And now I'm back to work. Pleasing those bosses. "Lift that barge, tote that bale...")

I work in a large organization, and I'm worried a lot more about what my bosses think of me than anything else.

I think you've previously pointed out that sometimes your bosses disagree with and even disparage each other.

OK, so the Fox News line has nothing to do with Murdoch, and the Washington Times line has nothing to do with Moon or his KKK managing editor, and the Scaife papers' line has nothing to do with Scaife, and Jack Welch had no influence on NBC's line? "Shit happens" is the Theory of Everything?

Sure, but there's harmony on the main goals of making money. I've griped about control of pro-bono projects by people thinking of the 'interests of the firm', and that sort of thing there's a whole lot of harmony among the ownership of the firm on.

The fact that individuals in management may argue with each other really doesn't mean that upper management and ownership can't have coherent goals which they steer their organizations toward. They may steer imperfectly through internal dissention or lack of perfect control, but when you see a big organization consistently doing something, the parsimonious explanation is that it's what the owners or controlling managers want it to be doing.

(And now I'm really, really gone.)

Tim, this is loony nominalism. You're claiming that if there is any dissension within a group, or any factions within it, the organization doesn't exist. Since all organizations ahve dissension and factions, there are no organizations. QED.

Top management doesn't control everything that happens, but they can cut things off with the snap of a finger. They tolerate or even foster diversity of various sorts at various levels, but if they see something they seriously don't like they stop it, and likewise if they have priority goals they take steps to rach them.

I have the feeling that you're using some book about American Pluralism as a religious text.

125: Emerson, I think you've inflated the competence dodge until it's become circular: this outcome happened, thus Management intended it to happen, thus Management is competent, thus this outcome must favor Management in some way because Management is competent.

If newspaper management were competent, why is circulation in accelerating decline? If network news management were competent, why are they copycats fighting over shares of a decreasing pie? Why are viewing demographics shrinking and why are advertisers becoming more down-scale? I mean, I expect to see Ronco nose-hair clipper ads on Lou Dobbs soon. Which would be appropriate, but he's one of their flagship guys.

Me, I see people in the media pandering to politicians and their minions for short-term gains in access and prestige without regards to long-term consequences. It's not even a theory. Many of them have admitted it.

Let's get Popperian here. what evidence would it take to falsify your theory? anything? If nothing can, then there's no point in continuing this conversation.

John, I think much of the disagreements stems from the fact that most of the people arguing with you (myself included) feel that Fox News, the Scaife papers, and the Moonie Times are engaged in a fundamentally different project than NBC News or the Washington Post. I don't think anyone would disagree with you that the reason that the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review publishes propaganda is because ownership and management want it that way.

I'm not arguing that management at the Post or the NYT are blameless. I agree with Emerson that they are getting what they want. I don't think, though, that this is inconsistent with the 'incompetent dolt' theory of pack journalism: it's even easier for management to get what it wants if it employs people too clueless to pose a sensible question.

140 - The management skill necessary to make money is a lot higher than the management skill necessary to smear Al Gore. The Washington Times couldn't make money if it stumbled across a Kruggerand factory, but that doesn't inhibit their productivity at daily propaganda.

Snarkout: That's exactly my point. What I've been trying to say is that there's no mystery about the bad performance of the Times and the Post; the reasons are similar to the reasons for the bad performance of Fox. I'm not saying that the performance is equally bad, but the badness is to be explained the same way, as management policy. Graham and Sulzburger get a pass, but they shouldn't.

Halfway: There are objective historical reasons (competition with new media for advertising revenue) why all newspapers are losing market share. In any case, business competence is a completely different thing than professional competence. The Times isn't suffering economically because of what its reporters and editors do, but for other reasons. In most cases I've looked at, in fact, competent business management involves degrading the news coverage for the sake of the bottom line.

It would falsify my theory if it were shown that Graham and Sulzberger had actually supported Gore and were disappointed when he lost. This is real-world impossible, because in such a case coverage of Gore would have been far different. It would falsify my theory if it turned out that Graham and Sulzburger had been opposed to the Iraq War from the beginning. Likewise real-world impossible. It would falsify my theory if it were shown that the Time and Post management had no experience in journalism.

It would falsify my theory if the Post and the Times ranked low among American newspapers and never won awards or prizes. It would falsify my theory if Judith Miller were not a Pulitzer Prize winner.

American liberals have so much a terror of partisanship and so much adulation for expertise that they want to convert every single conflict into a war between the smart people and the idiots. It's not like that.

141: now Fox News, that was competently run. Innovative formats, on message, smart expansion. Ailes and his cadre knew what they were doing.

Emerson, those are ex post facto justifications. They corroborate; they don't falsify. Epicycles really aren't my thing. As for business competence, let me quote you: "The primary motives for management would be advertising sales and low taxes."

Please restate, Halfway. I'd also suggest dropping your Popper-epicycle schtick, or at least making it intelligible.

You might make your own case: what are the reasons for anyone to think that the Times and the Post have been incompetent instead of systematically dishonest and biased? What are the criteria for calling this incompetence? These are two of the most prestigious newspapers in the world. If you told me that the Little Rock Herald or the Boise Sun were incompetent, I might believe you, but even then I'd ask for evidence.

Is there any reason that incompetence should be the default explanation when talking about prestigious, award-winning newspapers? Partisan dishonesty is, historically speaking, a pervasive phenomenon in journalism.

I just don't know what you meant about Fox News in 145. If I take what you wrote at face value, I'd conclude that you think that a competent New York Times would be even more dishonest, and the Fox model.

But JE - Marty Peretz, who is in most ways a disgraceful loon, was famously a vocal, enthusiastic, and long-time Gore supporter. Can you show that this produced better coverage of Gore in the pages of TNR than in, say, The Nation or The American Prospect? I think you overrate the ways in which the direct political prejudices of ownership are reflected in day-to-day news coverage from the non-propaganda media, and underrate the ways in which the current situation is driven by a thirty-year mau mauing of the press by conservatives, the very real determination "competent business management involves degrading the news coverage for the sake of the bottom line" (including pandering to advertisers), and the fact that professional success can be achieved by skilled regurgitation of talking points and conventional wisdom. Fetishization of access falls in there, too.

Of the major media outlets, Knight Ridder was doing by far the best work on Iraq before, during, and after the run up to the war. Tony Ridder, however, is a famously bottom-line-oriented (Republican) newspaper exec willing to slash newsdesk costs in favor of profits. Bruce Sherman of Private Capital Management, KR's largest donor, gave the RNC $50,000 in 2004. Nonetheless, there were things going on at KR institutionally that made the Washington bureau's reporting vastly better than the Times' or the Post's. How does your theory work with this?

148 - KR's largest donor s/b KR's largest shareholder

"the badness is to be explained the same way, as management policy."

This is sort of a one size fits all explanation that doesn't actually tell us anything. Bad organizations are bad because of management policy. Okay. But, they are not equally bad--there are orders of magnitude of difference; they are not bad in the same way; and their bad management policies have different motivations.

Peretz is a loon, and his Gore support was half-hearted. TNR is a hobby publication financed by Peretz's schlong.

What the fuck are you people trying to say? You seem to be arguing with someone else. The main things I've been saying is that bad journalism, when you see it (especially on America's top two), is normally policy and not incompetence, and that there's been a political skew. I'm not saying that every single publication does what I say -- no general theory of media here. I've been talking mostly about the Times and the Post, though I think that most TV and cable news is also affected.

The motives are not the main thing. The relative mix of catering to advertisers vs. actually being a Republican is unknown to me. Maybe Graham and Sulzburger shanked Clinton and Gore (and pushed the Iraq War) under duress, or entirely for venal, corrupt financial reasons, and maybe they didn't politically want things to work out the way they did. I strongly doubt that though.

Katherine, it tells you that Sulzburger and Graham are rather like Murdoch. They have given us deliberately dishonest journalism with a political slant. Not the same political slant, and not as uniformly dishonest as Murdoch, but much more like him than people have been pretending. It's not incompetence. Judith Miller was a Pulitzer winner, and Sulzburger stood behind her as long as he could.

How many people here hope to work for the Times and the Post somaeday? Is that my problem here? (Not specifically directed at Katherine, I'm just boggled).

You haven't addressed the point about Knight-Ridder, John.

Ned, I never said that every organization works this way. I think that at the moment it's true (in approximate descending order) of Scaife, Moon, Fox, CNN, ABC, the Post, and the Times. I don't know where CBS and NBC fit in.

And there's probably still a big jump between Fox and CNN, but the movement is toward Fox.

In order of importance I'd say that my main points are (in descending order) that coverage has been bad, that it's had a consistent rightward slant, that it's a matter of policy (not fortuitous, and not a whim of the people at the bottom), and that incompetence plays little role except to the extent that management has knowingly hired incompetent, dishonest people. The specifics of the motives of management I'm not so sure about. I have no opinion as to why Knigh Ridder was different.

they are more different than alike.

it's only the political coverage--in the narrow sense, of coverage of washington--that consistently annoys at the times and post. There's a lot of real reporting at the dailies that's absolutely essential. The Post and Times contain great stuff, and maddening stuff, and in between stuff.

I do know a couple of reporters and researchers at the dailies, which is influencing how I view this, but I know of them because I think they do good work, not the other way around.

I don't get it, John. I have no desire to work in journalism, and I think that the Times and the Post are, by and large, shitty papers right now. I think most everyone participating in this thread thinks that the current state of American journalism is bad for for the polity. But because I don't think that this is by explicit design on the part of Sulzburger (whose politics I suspect are more a limp liberalism than anything else) or Graham (who is pretty clearly a Republican), you think I'm whitewashing them? I think there are institutional factors driving the downfall of these papers. I think there are institutional factors driving the downfall of Ford and GM, too, but I don't think Bill Ford sent out a memo saying, "Hey, let's be a crappier car company!" Why don't you believe in the incompetence of Sulzburger? Has he ever done anything to demonstrate his competence, assuming you don't presuppose that the current state of the Times represents his desired outcome? Family ownership has a way of eventually coming a cropper.

I agree that coverage has been bad and systemically biased right-ward; I'm arguing with the idea that the only possible reasons for this is as a result of blind luck, explicit policy, or a bottom-up decision on the part of low-level reporters and assignment editors. Twelve years of Republican success and conservative browbeating of the newspaper industry have produced what seems to be a reflexive contempt for Democrats and liberalism as an editorial line. Twelve years of relative Democratic impotence and disunity has meant that there's been no ability for liberals to push back or cut off access. The declining fortunes of the newspaper industry and the fact that financial and professional success seems only minimally tied to strong and contrarian reporting produces people unwilling to invest resources in rocking the boat. But how does Pinch Sulzburger's desire to go bat for an atrocious yet highly connected reporter show that he's directed people to bend over for the GOP? I'd bet dollars to donuts that Howell Raines voted for Gore to win in 2000, but that didn't change the fact that he and everyone else in the editorial chain saw lightning bugs and had huge perogatives to pretend they were lightning -- nobody lost their job over malreporting in Whitewater, in the Wen Ho Lee case, or over Iraq, and there were Republican interests every time willing to lead reporters down the path that had a fata morgana Pulitzer at the end of it. Is this where the hand of ownership makes itself felt in your telling? Once it became clear that Gingrich and Team 1994 were going to be around for a while, there was a whole cottage industry devoted to churning up false leads for reporters to follow, and there was no negative feedback loop associated with following them. Why would there be? It's not like advertisers minded, and you don't get awarded anti-Pulitzers for regurgitating a bunch of lies. You don't even have to look at cases where there are explicitly political interests at stake -- look at the Atlanta Olympics bombing or the Hefling anthrax investigation. Professional success has become detached from reportorial success, and attacking Democrats means never having to say you're sorry, but I think it's comical to assert that Pinch Sulzberger made these decisions.

This is a distinct matter from television news's shittiness, or the shittiness of money-losing organs like the Washington Times explicitly designed to be Republican propaganda outlets.

The specifics of the motives of management I'm not so sure about.

Jeebus, Emerson, that's a big caveat. I agree with you entirely, then. Though I note that coverage by both WaPo and NYT has been much more favorable to both the anti-war and Dem positions recently than it has of late. No doubt this is explained by the secret assassinations of Sulzburger and Graham and the replacement of the same with robots.

146: Epicycles are weird add-ons to make a theory work in the face of new facts. You do this. Ad revenue! Not ad revenue! whatever.

I can't figure out what you mean by competency. It apparently does not mean "skilled", since the New York Times's influence, credibility, and finances have all taken major hits because of their actions. They promoted Jayson Blair. They let Judith Miller report on Les Aspin while she was sleeping with Les Aspin. They have lousy oversight, demoralized staff ("But you work for the Times!") and have coasted on inertia and their magic Rolodex for a very long time. Now we get to read "Modern Love". woo.

If, by "competent", you mean "they helped legitimize W and his splendid little war", say so. I'll point to Fox News. What a half-assed job the New York Times did in comparison.

Referring to epicycles in internet discussion threads should be banned.

I have little idea what we're arguing about any more. Snarkout's positions seems to be that, yes, Graham and Sulzburger have knowingly allowed a dishonest, consistently Republican line to take over their newspapers, but ..... but what?

They've just given in to peer pressure and aren't really bad boys? The advertisers' pressure was just too much for a man to resist? They're doing it out of sheer absent-mindedness? They trash Democrats, but for different reasons than Republicans trash Democrats? What is it that I'm saying that y'all deny?

Do people know something I don't know? Are Graham and Sulzburger in the back room shooting up heroin every three hours, 365 days a year?

Sorry, the idea that management doesn't manage doesn't work with me. The idea that without intent you can get eight years of bad, consistently-biased coverage doesn't work. I have no idea why people are fighting so intensely to protect the incompetence theory. Given the facts we have, I could even accept a noncommittal attitude toward incompetence vs. purposive bias, but you guys seem passionately committed to the incompetence explanation, as if your world would collapse without it.

Is it because the idea that management manages, and the idea that deliberate bias is historically more the rule than the exception in journalism, are unthinkable to you? Do these ideas sound frighteningly like **CONSPIRACY THEORIES**?

Snarkout, I know what epicycles are. I was asking you to explain the relevance of your little excursion into philosophy of science. Point not taken.

In 115 I summarized my argument. Advertising sales was part of it. You seem to have boiled down my argument to something simple-minded that offends you a lot, and then accused me of epicycles when you find out that I've been sayingsomething different all along.

Emerson, part of the problem is that your theory is not very clear. Assume that WaPo's management has a neocon-ish bias (using Hiatt as a way of inferring management politics). Assume WaPo has been Republican friendly for eight years. Is that because WaPo has gone Republican or is it because neocons have a close alliance with the Admin at the moment? Is Hiatt hired because WaPo specifically asked what his views were, or is it because he has views they find coherent and such views had no opportunity to be tested except over the last eight years?

Sorry, 162 is me.

It's because everything I've about Pinch Sulzberger's politics tells me that he's an ineffectual Boomer liberal, not a Republican, John. I'm not sure why you're asking me to provide explanations for the papers' decent into crapitude given that I've done so at length.

160: why, yes, they do sound like conspiracy theories. They can't be falsified, they change whenever someone introduces facts which contradict them, and they support the theorist's prior prejudices. Here's your shiny new hat. Good day!

161 - I think you want to address that to someone other than me.

3:43, what do you think I am saying about what you describe, and what is wrong with what you think I'm saying, and why are you so intent on this point? Is there some metaphysical line that you feel I've crossed?

What I've been saying all along is that people (Brad DeLong) should stop asking "Why of Why Don't We have Better Newspapers?"

We don't have better newspapers because the two best newspapers in the US are owned and controlled by Sulzburger and Graham, and they are willing to put out dishonest, Republican-slanted product. It's not going to get better, and it's no mystery. they like things the way they are, and they get the staff that they want.

I don't even see why the incompetence theory and the management theory are in conflict. In fact, the incompetence theory requires something like the management theory. Either you believe that papers spontaneously organize themselves, or you believe that incompetent management leads to incompetent papers. Incompetent managers don't make incompetent decisions randomly, they make incompetent decisions because they have defective models of how the world works. By allowing their papers to push Republican spin, Graham and Sulzburger actively collaborated with that spin. Their actual motives is less important than the fact that they have actively participated (which is John's central point.) You can only con someone once passively. But the Times and Post let themselves be conned again and again; that's active participation in the con. It's like the joke about the bear and hunter...

168: You can only con someone once passively.

! Man, I have a threadjack story for you. But instead, a link.

I don't even see why the incompetence theory and the management theory are in conflict.

Neither do I. I've been arguing all along against the incompetence theory when it's used as a way as denying deliberate bias.

Sorry, Halfway, you've set your null hypothesis wrongly. Historically, politically biased journalism is as much the rule as the exception; it's not a wild and crazy idea, except for loony centrists such as yourself.

And sorry, Snarkout, the imbecile chatter about epicycles was not yours.

Last try on this, John, because there's less substantial disagreement between us than you think. You think that the Times pushes a dishonest Republican line because that's what Sulzburger wants; I think that the Times pushes a dishonest Republican line because the Republicans have, for the last twelve years, been better about coaxing reporters to follow a dishonest line, following a dishonest Republican line has had few negative professional repricussions, and, given the the way someone like Sulzburger keeps score (circulation, Pulitzers, opportunities to give speeches about the future of journalism, cocktail party circuit fun), following a dishonest Republican line doesn't make any difference even if the man is personally a Democrat. I don't think my point of view is any more apologist than yours -- rather the opposite, actually, because I don't think a shakeup at top will make any difference and I have little faith in the ability of Democrats to work the levers as well as the GOP.

Well, I really doubt the idea that Sulzburger is a liberal anymore, if he ever was, unless (as I suggested) he's a junkie who lives in a 24-hr./day fog and never reads the papers. There's no way that a wimpy liberal could have met Miller at the jailhouse door the way he did.

To me, the difference between being passively colonized the way you claim Sulzburger has allowed himself to be, and actively joining the other side as I've been saying, isn't a very big difference. I don't quite understand the vehemence of the argument against me, because as Walt points out, incompetence and ill intent aren't exclusive.

But between a passive willingness to let the same kind of bad thing happen over and over again for eight years, and the positive desire to have bad things happen, I think ill intentions are the more economical explanation.

you don't get awarded anti-Pulitzers for regurgitating a bunch of lies.

Somebody somewhere must be doing this. Like the Darwin Awards, or the Razzies. Right? It would be so awesome.

There's no way that a wimpy liberal could have met Miller at the jailhouse door the way he did.

Well, that's convincing, Emerson.

Your claim is that incompetence plus deliberate bias explain the relevant slant of the news over the last eight years. Maybe, but deliberate bias toward what ends? I doubt, deeply, that it's as simple as "Republican advantage" or "conservative victory" or even "lower taxes." The NYT/WaPo management want, primarily, to serve their own institutional interests in keeping the income from and prestige of their institutions high. Precisely how do you do that? I don't know--there is no clear single set of directives that you'd follow. You might, as suggested above, try to kiss the ass of those in electoral power. You might not want to disagree too vehemently with a public that seems to want war, as the E&P piece to which ogged linked suggested.

The NYT and WaPo have, to the best of my knowledge, always straddled the Eisenhower Republican/Centrist Dem line. I think that they assumed that the Republicans they talked to were Eisenhower Republicans when those people were in fact a different type of Republican. I think they assumed that the Dems they talked to were std. Centrist Dems when those people weren't. And I think you are seeing coverage change and become more favorable to Dems than before because of the 2006 elections.

Tim, Halfway, Snarkout, I don't understand you guys at all. I cannot construct a motive for the vehemence of your arguments on these points. I also cannot understand the assumption that the explanation I've given is outrageous and conspiratorial. If y'all had just said that what I said was plausible but not proven, I probably would have accepted that. There's nothing unreasonable about what I think, but Halfway especially seems to think that he can just assume that there is.

Apparently I crossed some kind of taboo line, maybe the Nader Chomsky line.

170: it's not a wild and crazy idea, except for loony centrists such as yourself.

And you have a shiny hat! Seriously, WTH? How does "the New York Times is not very competent" translate into "I am a loony centrist"? How many epicycles did that take?

I agree with Snarkout. Sulzberger looks like a dishwater liberal to me. I'd like more evidence than your insight into human nature to show that he's actually a stealth neo-conservative, since you got my political affiliation wrong, and we've actually conversed here.

175: Seriously, if three very different people gave me three separate but related reasons explaining why I was sounding kind of nuts, I'd at least entertain the possibility.

(This is not a theoretical example of my time on Unfogged.)

What is the evidence that Sulzburger is a dishwater liberal? That's simply been asserted, twice, but it's regarded as a powerful argument against me.

You are the only one who says I'm kind of nuts, and the feeling is mutual. Sorry about accusing you of centrism, but your tinfoil hat accusation is stupid. My understanding of the case is a reasonable one and has not been refuted.

The Times has been erratic over recent decades, but I don't see how you can explain an eight-year succession of bad journalism, dozens and hundreds of stories all slanted the same way, as just incompetence. Above Snarkout suggests that the Times' bias is sort of passively lame, caving in to pressure. I don't agree, but it's not terribly different than what I say;Sulzburger knows what's happening and doesn't especially like it, but lets it happen.

As for the competence of the Times, a degree of ineptness can coexist with ill intentions. In the heat of argument I probably overstated the case for the competence of the Times, but frankly Judith Miller is not incompetent. She's a star, Pulitzer reporter who chose to write dishonest propaganda. My objection is to the tacit assumptions that incompetence is a sufficient explanation, and that it's unreasonable to also see ill intentions.

This was a really interesting debate but it seems to have started down the road to the participants just getting irritated with each other.

Emerson: After reading the whole thread, I have to say that your argument does seem to feel a bit like this: "The proof that things work the way I think is that things have turned out the way they have. Except when they haven't. And I have no comment on why they do and don't turn out differently in particular situations".

I'm not trying to be snarky. It just seems like there's not much content to the argument that doesn't turn out to be a bit circular.

I'm with whoever is pushing the line of the Republican browbeating of the public and press over the past couple of decades. Why are newspapers so unable to "speak truth to power" on say, Evolution vs. Creationism? What power and who's goals does that serve at the NYT?

People just don't want to deal with 10,000 calls from the Family Research Council, so they softpedal the issue. Similarly, who wants 10,000 dingbats with yellow stickers on their SUVs calling them a traitor because they don't "support the troops"?

I'm inclined to think that general dynamic explains quite a bit of stuff. Stuff being the technical term.

If someone were to have said right at the beginning, "It could be what you said, or it could be these other things," I might have accepted that.

But I got a very strong feeling that people thought that it was somehow terribly wrong and unimaginable to think that the Times and the Post are doing bad things because Sulzburger and Graham want bad things done. That seems to be quite a reasonable hypothesis to me, and probably the default assumption, but it rouses ferocious resistance for reasons I don't understand.

Once the deliberate-choice hypothesis is assumed to be unreasonable unless there is absolute proof, then any evidence at all for the incompetence hypothesis counts as a refutation. But it isn't; you can easily have both, and the deliberate-choice hypothesis is not on the face of it unreasonable at all.

I'm inclined to think that General Dynamics explains quite a bit of stuff

Aha! another conspiracy theorist!

And likewise the passive-consent idea. Letting something happen is certainly a kind of agency, especially after 10 years or more of the same thing. After you let someone tell you what to do for long enough, you become like them. The difference between sincerely acting consistently like a Republican because you're a Republican, and insincerely acting consistently like a Republican because you're intimidated or because you're sucking up, isn't a big one to my mind.

And of course, neither the Post or the Times is strictly Republican. Just at certain key moments on certain issues.

178: What is the evidence that Sulzburger is a dishwater liberal? For one thing, the decision to promote Blair (against his record of incompetence) was based on Sulzberger's affirmative action policies. Raines admitted it. That's about as dishwater liberal as you can get.

Incidentally, I think it's more likely that Sulzberger met Miller in jail because they've been friends for thirty years than for any other reason.

My understanding of the case is a reasonable one and has not been refuted. Except point by point, like 1. these organizations are disciplined (they aren't), 2. these people aren't incompetent (they often are), 6. management is competent (it largely isn't) and 7. management is driven by ad sales and tax breaks (if so, it's doing a crappy job).

I agree with your 3 through 5. (I even agree with all seven when it comes to Fox News.) I personally think they're a consequence of a reputation economy within the media. Reputations are horrible, shallow things, and it doesn't surprise me that the party of old boy networks was able to game them so easily.

In the heat of argument I probably overstated the case for the competence of the Times,

Well yeah.

but frankly Judith Miller is not incompetent. She's a star, Pulitzer reporter who chose to write dishonest propaganda.

She was a good reporter with compromised ethics who became a star and chose to write propaganda. She was cut a lot of slack because of her star power and connections. The reputation economy at work.

180: Once the deliberate-choice hypothesis is assumed to be unreasonable unless there is absolute proof, then any evidence at all for the incompetence hypothesis counts as a refutation.

Well, I'm assuming you're holding the opinions you do out of some form of reasoning I haven't been able to figure out yet, not out of a deliberate choice to sound like you're wearing a tinfoil cap.

But I could assume that conclusion as the default, and then deny any evidence that you're not crazy as unreasonable, imbecilic, or in itself loony. I could do that, sure. Easy. Now I can never be refuted! even though you're not crazy (probably).

That's why I think your logic is screwed up.

She won a Pulitzer, Halfway. Can I call that competent? For all its flaws, the Times wins lots of Pulitzers. I'm sure that there are incompetent newspapers around, but it takes a lot of brass to say that the Times is one of them, and that on top of that to try to heap scorn on anyone who disagrees.

1. these organizations are disciplined (they aren't), 2. these people aren't incompetent (they often are), 6. management is competent (it largely isn't) and 7. management is driven by ad sales and tax breaks (if so, it's doing a crappy job).

All assertions. "Disciplined" was not the best word to choose, but what I meant was that management can at the Times hires, fires, and promotes people, and they often do fire people. It's not a anarchist collective of free agents. The Times is competent by any normal standard; "competent" doesn't mean "perfect". My #7 was of general application (not just the Times) and was meant to show how economics factors in. I see nothing wrong with it.

I do not claim to have proven the deliberate-choice hypothesis, but it's a reasonable hypothesis and has not been refuted, as you claim. Your assertion that it's not reasonable has no basis. It happens all the time in journalism. Your repeated tinfoil hat accusation is bullshit.

Civility has it costs. The world would probably be a better place, and we both would be happier people, if I had asked you to go fuck yourself much earlier than this, but hey, the flesh is weak.

That seems to be quite a reasonable hypothesis to me, and probably the default assumption

I disagree. Here's why: And of course, neither the Post or the Times is strictly Republican. Just at certain key moments on certain issues.

Can you really not understand why a Theory of Everything that operates only "at certain key moments on certain issues" might not be wholly convincing to some people? Isn't it at least possible--possible, not necessary--that you've misdiagnosed the problem?

Personally, I think Republican-Democrat or conservative-liberal is the wrong schema for describing WaPo or NYT. Each is better described, I think, as reflecting the (negotiated) truths of the Northeastern elite. Departures from expected opinions or behaviors are, I think, better explained by the influence of neo-libs or neo-cons, both of whom I'd class as schools of Northeastern elite criticisms of the "liberal" Northeastern elite beliefs.

Personally, I think Republican-Democrat or conservative-liberal is the wrong schema for describing WaPo or NYT. Each is better described, I think, as reflecting the (negotiated) truths of the Northeastern elite. Departures from expected opinions or behaviors are, I think, better explained by the influence of neo-libs or neo-cons, both of whom I'd class as schools of Northeastern elite criticisms of the "liberal" Northeastern elite beliefs.

I'm not getting this as a point of disagreement. What's the important difference in this context between the Times going in the tank for the Administration over the Iraq War because it's controlled at the highest level by Republicans or it's controlled at the highest level by neo-cons? Given that then neo-cons are Republicans these days, you seem to be insisting on a distinction without a difference.

I do not have a theory of everything. What I'm saying in the present context is just that Graham and Sulzburger are doing what they're doing deliberately. I've speculated some about their motives, but that's not my point. As to whether they're conservative, Republican, or neocon, I don't know. I'd hardly call them neocon.

What I've above all been arguing against are the ideas that the psychology, whims and social networking of bylined writers explains the major defects of the political journalism of the Times and the Post, and the idea that simple incompetence explains these defects. The problem has to come from the top; you can explain the motivations at the guys at top in various ways, but I don't think that simple incompetence should be one of them. I also think that it's not a simple matter of shallow fluffiness, I think that the political bias is real. I don't think that it's readership driven, but it may be advertiser driven, and I think that low taxes may be a decider.

The unjustifiable Clinton impeachment was a big, very, very strange event that needs explanation, and the Times and the Post chipped in enthusiastically. The Bush-Gore campaign was, I believe, a threshold campaign, and the Times and the Post played a very negative role in it. We can only hope that the Iraq War is only the biggest disaster since Vietnam, and the two newspapers cheerled for that. I'm not looking at tiny, almost invisible signs; there were three major fuckups in about eight years by what had been two of the most respected newspapers in the world. How did it happen? I think that my explanation (intent) is better than the others.

And I still don't know why you are so intent in believing that I'm wrong. This is different than just believeing I'm wrong; to you and the others there's something big at stake, and you really seem to need that I'm wrong.

I'm willing to grant that they're Lieberman Democrats, if that's what's at stake.

"I'd hardly call them neocon neoliberal, granted the way they shanked Clinton.

Yeah, I'm not getting this either. As Emerson said, with the Times and the Post you got, say, three at least major events where they acted in a bizarrely incompetent fashion, and ended up incompetently? accidentally? inadvertently? handing a huge political advantage to Republicans through their screwups. Under the assumption that the owners of the Times and the Post are capable of exerting some sort of control over their employees (they can fire people) and instead they choose to let this sort of thing go on, at length, for decades, with no penalty for the screwups, you have to assume that they're either getting the political results they want, or that they are entirely, entirely indifferent to politics. And the idea that they are entirely indifferent to politics strikes me as really very very very unlikely.

The Whitewater investigation was obvious nonsense from a very short period of time into it, and yet the Times hung onto it for years and years. If the owners of the Times have any personal interest in politics, and most people do, it makes very little sense that they'd let that sort of nonsense go on at that length unless they approved of the political effects.

That's the thing that's exasperated me for a long time, the assumption that major political actors do not have political motives, and that anyone who suggests that they do is a paranoid.

Given that then neo-cons are Republicans these days, you seem to be insisting on a distinction without a difference.

Neo-lib is better, and Emerson's "Lieberman Democrats" is better still. The insistence is because I think it's a better description of the NYT/WaPo. It explains, for example, why the shading, etc. of its stories is never going to be coextensive with all-but-overt Republican media organizations like Fox or WaTimes. It suggests why such organizations might have fallen for various justifications for the Iraq War. It suggests that the "change" at WaPo/NYT--consistently considered centrist lib institutions--wasn't really much of a change.

"I'd hardly call them neocon neoliberal, granted the way they shanked Clinton.

Lieberman Dems better?

three at least major events where they acted in a bizarrely incompetent fashion, and ended up incompetently? accidentally? inadvertently? handing a huge political advantage to Republicans through their screwups.

What three? Impeachment left Clinton more popular than before, as I recall. Whitewater cost time and money, but not much else.

Are you psychotic? You don't think Whitewater did Clinton and the Democrats any significant political harm? WTF, man.

Are you psychotic? You don't think Whitewater did Clinton and the Democrats any significant political harm? WTF, man.

I don't think they lost seats because of it.

But in any case, the three I was thinking of were Whitewater, expressed broadly, the Bush-Gore election in terms of the attacks on Gore's veracity, and the run-up to the Iraq war. There's smaller stuff, but all three of those were history-changing.

190: I do think they approved of the political effects, but more because they had great incentives to do so (and great disincentives not to do so), rather than because they had an explicit project of turning their papers into pro-Republican organs. I can see that this might be an immaterial distinction to the Emerson argument, because (as I see it) he's mostly interested in arguing against the position that the right-friendly bias is a bottom-up phenomenon, or against the position that the owners are not complicit in the crappitude, and the kinds of owner motivations and intentions that lie behind it are in that context kind of beside the point.

But I also think that from a practical point of view, it is worth paying attention to the degree to which all this is a matter of capitulating to convincing outside political forces, rather than a couple of big robber barons taking matters independently into their own hands. I think it's worth taking note of all the different routes that can lead to top-down decisions that result in a news organ with vapid, frustrating, irresponsible reporting, because if you just assume that everyone gets there by way of explicitly, deliberately making it a propaganda machine, you're going to have more trouble doing anything about it.

(And I should say that 'Are you psychotic' was meant with the utmost of respectful affection.)

198: I don't think anyone's committed to a claim of what exactly the motives are behind the top-down decisions that lead the media to do such a terrible, damaging job, just to the proposition that it looks really likely that the decisions are coming down from the top rather than emerging out of the individual quirks of reporters.

199: Yeah, but I think that a lot of the arguments that Emerson has been characterizing as against the top-down argument aren't -- they're just against a completely intentionalist account of that process. I don't think actually that anyone here has been siding with the idea that "the psychology, whims and social networking of bylined writers explains the major defects of the political journalism of the Times and the Post". Also, it's possible to agree that "simple incompetence" doesn't explain the defects while thinking that complex, motivated incompetence at the top plays a noteworthy (if not by any means sole) role.

just to the proposition that it looks really likely that the decisions are coming down from the top rather than emerging out of the individual quirks of reporters.

I'm hewing to a middle position that says that management ends up controlling decisions through hiring decisions based on broad similar attitudes rather than specific beliefs about the Iraq War, for example. Peretz, at TNR, doesn't have to anticipate 9/11 and the Iraq War when he hires Beinart. He just has to ask all prospective hires whether they believe that Netanyahu might be the Messiah. Anyone who says "Yes" (a) is more likely to get hired, and (b) ends up supporting the kind of wars Peretz likes.

I don't doubt that promotion during the mooting of issues looks something more like the activist management that Emerson describes, but even then, I think it's enabled by earlier hiring decisions of the sort I've described. Sulzberg (not looking up the sp.) hires some series of people to be editors. When it's promotion time, he is able to trust them--and may even be convinced by them--as to who the good reporters are. Locating the responsibility for the NYT's posture on Iraq at solely, or even primarily, at Sulzberg's desk strikes me as inaccurate.

Look at the Wen Ho Lee case again. That's the Republicans driving a story ranging from moderately plausbile to utter bullshit (Clinton's Department of Energy is in shambles, unlike when the grownup Republicans were in charge! Clinton is soft on the Chinese stealing America's nuclear secrets! Clinton gets payoffs from Red China!), and then Wen Ho Lee gets scapegoated in the press by Jeff Gerth. Were there ever any effects on Gerth's career? Not as far as I can tell. Was Gerth motivated by partisan animus? I doubt it. Bill Richardson is the favorite in the "who gave up Wen Ho Lee's name" sweepstakes, and Gerth's stories on Chinese efforts to gain American satellite technology won him a Pulitzer, after all. Playing connect-the-dots and the game of sly inference is just how he works. The fact that he seems to have participated (willingly!) in a smear on Wen Ho Lee doesn't seem to bother him at all. Why should it? The Times never even made him apologize, and assuming the worst about any collection of facts he was presented with seems to have done Gerth -- who is married to a former Chris Dodd staffer -- a world of professional good.

It's this sort of failure that's the problem. There was a six year snipe hunt of trying to find the evidence that the Clintons were guilty of everything short of running SPECTRE, but nobody in upper management seems upset; Emerson seems to think that that's because of explicit management complicity with Republicans, whereas I think it's because literally it effects the owners not at all. Did they lose a single net subscription because of it? Does the Pulitzer committee no longer take them seriously? Why not join in the clusterfuck if there's no downside and you might (cue voiceover) bring down a corrupt president. And the Republicans have been hugely, hugely better at convincing reporters to keep digging, because eventually they'll find the pony. (9/11 happened, too, and then chickenshit mgmts decided that no way could they contradict our saviors in the White House, particularly Rumsfeld. I think that's a separate problem.)

If they're incompetent in other ways, why can't they be incompetent in gauging political effects?

I understand Emerson's hostility to this idea, I think. But I've been through enough case studies of companies shooting themselves in the foot because they thought they knew what they were doing and had no clue at all. Institutional failure. Lack of oversight. Groupthink. Flawed corporate culture. It's a depressing but common litany.

So yeah, I have no problems with the idea that Sulzberger and the Times could work against their own interests for years on end, especially if it didn't affect their bottom line. I've been chafing against the analogy ban, but Snarkout mentioned Ford already. If management manages, then Ford's goal must be self-immolation. But I'm pretty sure it's not.

Emerson, I want to thank you for helping clarify my thoughts -- your maximally intentionalist viewpoint has highlighted some interpretive problems I've overlooked in my own work. I apologize if I've been too brusque with you. I don't think you're crazy.

. I don't think you're crazy.

I do, Emerson. And I think Halfway's crazy for denying it. Psychos.

Emerson says this:

"It would falsify my theory if it were shown that Graham and Sulzberger had actually supported Gore and were disappointed when he lost."

Emerson objects to my agnosticism on his top-down theory of journalistic irresponsibility. Nonetheless, I have to say that I am genuinely agnostic as to whether Graham and/or Sulzberger wanted Gore to lose.

I certainly agree that WaPo and NYT coverage of Gore was hideous. But I'd argue this could have happened (and probably did) for reasons other than bias at the top level of these publications.

If Graham and Sulzberger are just in the tank for the GOP, how do you explain Dana Priest, Julie Tate, James Risen, Tim Golden, and the editorial page of the NY Times (which is nothing like the Post editorial page these days)? Do you guys actually read these newspapers? If Whitewater, the Gore coverage, and the Judy Miller series were representative of their output you'd have a point; as it is, are you insane?

I'm still working my way through the last 100 posts, but I was amused by this from Emerson:

"If y'all had just said that what I said was plausible but not proven, I probably would have accepted that."

I have to say that if Emerson was interested in his own attitude about someone who described himself as "agnostic" on the top-down theory of journalistic malfeasance, he might look back to the first 100 posts here.

Well, I'm sort of hard-bitten, since I've been dealing with weenie-liberal quagmire theories since 1965. It turns out that no one ever does anything bad on purpose. Things just happen. We have no opponents, just people who don't completely understand us. There's no such thing as a bad boy.

Sulzburger's and Graham's liking things the way they are may be motivated by cowardice and opportunism more than by conviction. Maybe they're more like neocon Democrats than Republicans (as if there's a difference any more). OK.

I agree that they have not uniformly imposed a Pravda line on everyone who works for them. And "liking things the way they are" can be evidenced simply by their not intervening when, for example, when Gerth and Miller ran wild. However, they (Times and Post management, not necessarily Sulzburger and Graham personally) have completely suppressed some stories, have delayed others, and have frequently garbles a story by burying the lede, attaching a misleading headline, and frequently they also bury a good story on page 16 while headlining a dumb story on page 1.

In other words, there is active editorial intervention in the presentation of the news, and I think that it's in the direction I've alleged. Graham and Sulzburger (or their top subordinates) aren't just letting things happen -- even though they can't control everything that goes on, and even though they probably still think that they're "presenting both sides" in a "balanced way". (Their bias lies exactly in their definition of "presenting both sides in a biased way".)

Back to Gerth and Miller. What they did was an ethical lapse, not incompetence. Incompetence describes people who aren't able to do their jobs. Gerth and Miller knew how to do their jobs; they'd both won Pulitzers. For reasons of their own they decided to do their jobs wrongly, and that was fine with Sulzburger. Sulzberger does intervene from time to time, but not this time. His interventions are in the other direction.

If Whitewater, the Gore coverage, and the Judy Miller series were representative of their output ....

I think that these were the most significant things that the Times and Post have done during that period. They've never been renounced, and I'm not at all confident that this kind of thing won't continue. The contrasting stuff you describe is good competent journalism of the type which put these newpapers at the top of the profession globally. The things I'm talking about are the difference that has to be explained. I don't think that you really can call a master craftsman "incompetent" if he starts to do bad work, especially when there's an ethical lapse involved and when there are reasonable questions about his motives.

In a lot of ways, this seems to come down to ingrained differences about the theory of agency. The sophisticated theory says that there really no such thing as agency anywhere, especially in the large bureaucratic organizations which run the world. In fact, individuals delude themselves in thinking that they are responsible for their own acts, when they are actually just instantiating and reiterating the dominant paradigm. Or some such shit. I don't believe it, though. I'll stick with my hillbilly theory of agency until a better one comes along.

"In a lot of ways, this seems to come down to ingrained differences about the theory of agency."

Speaking for myself, I think you're right about this. I hesitate to add anything, because I think you've summarized my view on agency accurately and completely - if a bit derisively.

Here's the thing, though: One of the examples that's gotten relatively little mention here is Jayson Blair - and for good reason. Blair's fraud wasn't ideological, and so isn't clearly relevant to our discussion.

But Blair - or the New Repubic's Glass, for that matter - demonstrate that misguided professional standards combined with various pressures can create results that nobody intends. Say what you will about Sulzberger, but direct fraud isn't part of his repertoire, despite the fact that he (through Raines) created an environment that practically mandated that a guy like Jayson Blair would show up. In this respect, I tend to put Miller and Gerth in the same category as Blair.

Should we blame Sulzberger? Sure. But new ownership at the Times would likely have little effect, absent changes in the public's relationship with journalism. And a change in that relationship will change Big Media like the Times, even if Pinch stays in charge.

Basically Gerth were tried-and-true veterans who went bad. Bad was a failed development project. To me the analogy is very weak.

"Blair was a failed development project".

At this point the argument is pretty much lost on me, I think.

In this entire thread, nobody has stated exactly what kinds of motives "the top" is supposed to have and exactly what they have gained, as opposed to lost, for acting on those motives.

If nobody can explain what motivates "the top" in such a way that we can predict, at least to some degree, how they will behave in future situations of different types, I just don't see how this theory offers any useful or interesting explanation of the problem.

Don't get your point at all. I've specifically bracketted out motives in some places. In other places I've suggested that they're motivated by the hope of deregulation and tax reductions, plus hawkishness. Others have suggested that Graham and Sulzburger have been intimidated by external pressure, especially from advertisers, and I haven't ruled that factor out at all. But the motives haven't been my main point. What I say is that you should look for consistencies of behavior.

My own motive for making all this fuss? First of all, I think that the agentless explanations are bullshit, including the idea that a clique of low-level employees is responsible, and the idea that "incompetence" is responsible. To me the most likely explanation is that Graham and Sulzburger are perfectly happy with their papers' performance covering Whitewater, Gore-Bush, and the run up to the Iraq War.

Since that performance was unprofessional and dishonest and damaged their papers' reputations among intelligent people, you have to ask why they think things are OK. Some sort of political bias strikes me as the best explanation. (Some have suggested that it's just that the whole East-Coast neo-con neo-lib Establishment feels that way, not just these two guys, and that it's not exactly a Republican thing, but whatever. The point is that Sulzburger and Graham are untroubled by things that trouble us, and probably will do it again.)

For well over a year, maybe three years, over and over again I've been watching the Charlie Browns of liberalism scream "OH MY GOD!! LUCY PULLED THE BALL AWAY AGAIN!!" I'm just suggesting that we should quit being surprised about this, and understand that the Post and the Times are basically on the other team. I've also suggested that in that respect they're on a continuum which stretches all the way to Scaife -- the opposite end of the continuum, but it's all the same kind of thing. That's what offends people, I think.

The Cossacks work for the Czar. The Post and the Times will continue this way.

I'm with John, probably as a function of age.

I was actually annoyed a bit at the idea of the Moyers project, and what I've heard of it, i.e. Bob Edwards yesterday afternoon, not because he's not right, but for another reason. It's the subtext of "This is the role of the press, meaning national broadcast media: to be the honest broker, to ask the tough questions, to be on guard of the people's liberties" Confronting Rather, et al. about it reifies this notion, and gives them a chance to reclaim it if only by confessing their shortcomings w/r/t their "duty"

Whereas now we know where we stand, that they are playing for the other side, and that we must get our news from other sources. At least they've been discredited; let's not let them reclaim any title to that function.