Karaoke!

No one wants to hear me sing. (Barring my children, whose musical tastes I've warped, and perhaps other loved ones.)

That doesn't make it any less fun.

I'm ignoring your more serious point because it's too depressing.

Obsessing about Paris Hilton is the official American way to deal with despair; why do you resist?

It's mystifying why some things break through and others do not. Remember the ports thing?

If you want to do something simple today, call the Senate and ask them to vote for Senate Amendment 2022 to restore habeas corpus. (Phone numbers here.)

The administration's terrifying strikes against the rule of law and against any check on the executive branch have not had any effect on the vast majority of Americans yet. By the time they do, it'll be too late for getting angry to make a difference.

We should try to move to Canada in the next decade, avoid the rush.

"When Do We Start Acting As If This Were An Emergency?"

s/b

"Cry, Cry, Masturbate, Cry."

Bonus: Exciting new tropical Canadian climate!

And be sure you mention the word "impeachment" at some point during the call.

This article was a good description of what is meant by "constitutional crisis". I had thought it meant a situation in which the constitution seems to dictate that two contradictory things must both happen, and the leaders can't figure out which one is more important.

Digby and Jane Hamsher have recent posts to the same effect. Democrats supporting war in Iran was a real wakeup call.

Soon enough McManus and I will be mainstream.

This raises a related point in my recent experience, which is that in real life I have a very hard time talking about politics at all any more (not even in an Agitating for Change way, but *at all*). For a while I'd try to talk to my Republican friends, in an effort to understand what they could be seeing or thinking that kept them from being outraged and/or switching parties. That didn't get me anywhere. Now, even among my co-lefties I'm afraid I'll just sink into the kind of depression LB mentions and ruin an otherwise pleasant interaction.

The last time I remember anybody getting really excited was fall of '04, when all of my law school classes were canceled on election day, one by one, because so many of us were going to be out canvassing and poll-watching.

Dunno. Rauchway says that we aren't there yet, which seems true to date. The larger problem, it seems to me, is that the Administration has shown that the system can be gamed and that no one will much care. I'm sure prior Presidents from either party gamed the system before; I'm not sure it was so obvious. That's a problem, but I don't know what could be done about it.

12: "mainstream" s/b "unpersons"

I think that the real story here is the complicity of the media. There aren't more than ten guys in the national media (press, newsmagazines, cable, TV, radio) who are willing to admit what's happening. A big chunk of them are overtly on Bush's team, and 95% of the rest are jellified.

I have trouble naming ten: Olberman, Krugman, Stewart, Colbert, Moyers (semi-retired) -- five to go.

The utter silence of the vast majority of those who were screaming about Clinton's violations of the Constitution is a good reason to refuse to talk to people who call themselves conservatives. Almost every one of them is complicit. People who call themselves moderates are almost as bad.

For a while I'd try to talk to my Republican friends, in an effort to understand what they could be seeing or thinking that kept them from being outraged and/or switching parties

Man, I had a conversation at the beach with my brother-in-law's new wife that just depressed me. This is a woman with a master's degree (in accounting, but still). Anyhow, while she no longer likes Bush and plans to vote for Edwards, here was her reasoning for voting for Bush in 2004: "Well, I didn't like John Kerry and I really didn't like Teresa Heinz Kerry, and I didn't like George Bush, but I did like Laura Bush, so I voted for her."

Unfortunately, I think this level of political sophistication is more prevalent than any of us would care to admit.

in accounting, but still

So awesome.

And Emerson is completely right about the complicity of the media being the real story here. I don't know if the American media has ever turned a performance more disappointing than the last seven years. I've never seen more enthusiastic ankle-grabbing in all my life.

So UnfoggeDCon wasn't as much fun as everyone said!

My favorite was with an otherwise intelligent, personable guy who had just said that he wasn't a fan of Bush anymore, but for '08 he expected he'd be a McCain supporter.

Me: John McCain terrifies me.
McCainiac: That's just because he wants to go to war with, well, everybody.
Me: Yes!

And ten minutes later, even from that starting point, I hadn't managed to convince him that this was a serious flaw in his candidate. That's the kind of conversation that made me give up, where the other person is aware of everything that he needs to be aware of, but reaches some bizarro conclusion and won't be talked out of it.

This article was a good description of what is meant by "constitutional crisis".

Thanks!

Dunno. Rauchway says that we aren't there yet

Kind of; the point I was trying to make is, we are there, but Congress hasn't forced the issue yet.

I.e., suppose Congress passes a law, the President defies it. The constitutional crisis exists now, but unless someone does something, it passes with the effect of nullifying Congress's law, and maybe also of eroding Congress's right to make law.

If on the other hand Congress starts following up, by passing further law, holding hearings to inquire into the poor enforcement of its laws, and so forth -- then your crisis moves out into the open.

What we're involved in now is kind of Constitutional Crisis Chicken, with both sides feinting toward a confrontation and implicitly asking, who wants to admit that this is what we're doing?

Yep. And I have no faith at all in any Democrat's capacity to force a confrontation. Maybe it'll happen, but I'm guessing that whoever gets elected in 2008, based on this precedent they'll basically be a term-limited monarch.

I.e., suppose Congress passes a law, the President defies it. The constitutional crisis exists now, but unless someone does something, it passes with the effect of nullifying Congress's law, and maybe also of eroding Congress's right to make law.

But he won't just defy it. He'll have someone in the office gin up an interpretation of the law that is consistent with what he wants to do and that is widely--but, importantly, not unanimously--rejected by relevant field experts. The things to be measured, it seems to me, are the extent of consensus in some particular community and the size of the difference between consensuses found in sub-communities. And, per COM mcmanus (or maybe Emerson), I think we're always at that point. The big difference is that these last years are the ones in which people on the Dem/left/us cohort have been on the losing side.

We're winning again. Do we press the issue now? Dunno.

Mild tangent: What's the argument that the Libby I-can't-believe-it-isn't-a-pardon is crisis-level? Certainly it's gross, but it seems like a non-crisis loophole rather than a failure to obey (formal) procedure and process.

I just told Thoma (and DeLong etc implicitly) to publicly shun Greg Mankiw, a fucking Harvard professor with outrageous creds. Engaging Mankiw is the equivalent of reviewing Stalin's (or whoever) latest work in the 30s.

The Republican Party is an active revolutionary organization, and all its members are complicit.

Rauchway is dead wrong. The structure is in place, and the coup will be a sudden fait accompli. It will be like Germany in the early thirties, but worse. There will be an engineered economic collapse in combination with a Middle-East or Taiwanese war, and every will be struggling and terrified, and will not hit the streets when elections are suspended.

And oh yeah, Brad, your buddy Bernanke will engineer the economic collapse. Is currently engineering the collapse, with his Fed co-conspirators. I wonder how many Fed governors are far-left Democrats. Tee-hee.

The thing is, is that the administration's interpretations of the law often go well beyond arguable into laughable, like the claim that executive privilege allows Bush to order Harriet Miers not even to appear before Congress. That's not just "Well, it's fun when you win but it sucks when you lose," that's "There is no way to distinguish between a valid and invalid legal argument other than by who has the power to enforce it." Or, putting it another way, law, as a restraint on the power of the Executive, is completely ineffective -- there is only power.

And that's getting closer to monarchy than I'm happy with, regardless of who gets to be king.

Rauchway, so you're arguing that what we need to do is make manifest the contradictions, right?

That's not just "Well, it's fun when you win but it sucks when you lose," that's "There is no way to distinguish between a valid and invalid legal argument other than by who has the power to enforce it."

Which I agree with. It just hasn't been tested on our side much.

DeLong always seems surprised when a competent economist turns out to be a rightwing fraud. To me that's the most common type.

Probbly because of the stakes, economists have the lowest ethical level of any academic specialty except international relations (Kissinger!). You have two Nobelists, Merton and Scholes, who came reasonably close to jail, and Schleifer (sp.) deverves to.

Yeah, I am crazy, or have too much imagination, or lack liberal optimism about history and human nature.

I can see China and the US exchanging a few nukes in Taiwan, followed by a quick cease-fire, and a permanent state of emergency.

When there are trillions of dollars for the grabbing, yeah, there are people who won't care how many peasants die.

Bye.

My Costa Rican friends keep asking when I am moving there.

We live in the land of sheep. This morning, a local tv guy mentioned how great passports are to "make sure everyone is registered with the government and the government can keep track of everyone."

This is what happens when nobody reads books like The Gulag Archipeligo, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 1984, or watches Blade Runner!

Brad probably disagrees with the claim that his freshman roommate should be in jail for having conflicts of interest. If, on the other hand, there's evidence he committed fraud, I'd be interested.

Also, what does acting as if this were an emergency entail? Telling everyone I talk to that this is an emergency? Traveling around the country trying to rally support for impeachment? Not taking the bar exam and successfully claiming that I should nevertheless be recognized as a a lawyer because normal obligations are suspended?

Please say the last one.

Merton and Scholes really did deserve the Nobel Prize though, if anyone in economics ever did.

Mankiw has been corrupted by success. If you look at his work before he became a best-selling textbook author and then Bush administration lackey, it's not nearly so objectionable (based on what little I've seen).

33 - The last one.

Not taking the bar exam and successfully claiming that I should nevertheless be recognized as a a lawyer because normal obligations are suspended?

Ooh! Yeah, me too! What state are you doing, w/d?

Thing is, unresolved constitutional crises exist in a sort of triple superposition, with the following outcomes possible:

1. the unconstitutional challenge wins, and the rules change forever;
2. the unconstitutional challenge is defeated, and the rules change forever, but everybody pretends that the constitution is stronger than ever;
3. the principals sorta kinda pretend it hasn't happened, once the trigger issue times out, and nobody forces the implications of the challenge or the precedents it set.

In Britain and the US (pace 1775, 1861) option 3 has usually been preferred by the political elite for the last 250 years, as it's less troublesome to them. It seems to me this is what the Democrats think they're doing now. Some here seem to be suggesting that this is one of the rare occasions where that approach won't work, even for the elite, and I think I agree, but I'm not sure why. Is anybody else?

Unfortunately, I think this level of political sophistication is more prevalent than any of us would care to admit.

On the other hand, you know, that's not all bad. Media activists were kind of shocked a few years ago when their FCC campaign took off with a group of non-usual suspects. Somehow the "Don't let big media companies own everything" storyline resonated.

It's not necessary that everyone care deeply about politics or value logical debate in order to end up with a group of people who have a gut sense of how they want the country to go. "Nobody should have that much power" was how one teenager I talked to on July 4 put it. That works for me.

From TruthOut this morning:

" After a myriad of stories about people being excluded from events where the President is speaking, now we know that the White House had a policy manual on just how to do so.

Called the "Presidential Advance Manual," this 103-page document from the Office of Presidential Advance lays out the parameters for how to handle protesters at events.

"Always be prepared for demonstrators," says the document, which is dated October 2002 and which the ACLU released as part of a new lawsuit. (For a copy of the lawsuit or the document itself, go to www.aclu.org/freespeech/protest/silenced.html.)"

33: For you and me, I don't know what to do. For Democrats in power, and the news media, a little more excitement and aggression seems in order.

40: Amen, sister.

36: NY

Walt, Washerdreyer -- economists have a low ethical standard. They're pre-corrupted. Their science is what they've got to sell. There's no contradiction between the fact that Schleifer, Mankiw, Scholes, and Merton were very smart guys, and the fact that they're crooks and liars. Kissinger is smart too. Ahmed Chalabi is very smart (MIT and Chicago, PhD in math).

Witt, get serious. Voting for a candidate because you like their wife is bone dumb. People like that are easily gamed.

There's been a long-term slow motion constitutional struggle going on ever since the beginning of the cold war, due to a situation of "permanent war" combined with the President's powers over the "national security" establishment. Back in the mid 70s it looked like the executive power could be checked, but now that just seems to have been a minor and temporary setback.

Marcus makes a good point.

This makes me wonder...if it's been so easy recently for Bush to declare that we are in a war that will never end and requires that the president assume powers analogous to a Roman dictator, therefore permanently suspending the Constitution...how come it didn't happen during the actual Cold War?

44: Yahbut believing there's not a dime's difference between Republicans and Democrats is an open invitation to getting gamed, too. Or aren't we all sad to see that President Gore isn't eligible for a third term?

46: Contrast with the still-present in memory World War II? It would have been much harder to argue that this sort of maniacal expansion of executive power was necessary when every adult in the country could remember a total war that we managed to fight just fine without major alterations to the Constitution.

The problem with 45 is that one common reaction to such statements is: oh, this is just the way things always are, if things now are just part of a trend going on for thelast 60-odd years, and the last 60-odd years haven't been too bad, then right now can't be too bad either. This response is improper, but understandable. The proper response, by the by is: let's have a Constitutional convention and get ourselves some of those changes Sandy Levinson has been arguing for, inlcuding (once we've finished taming all the unicorns) a parliamentary democracy.

46: Americans were less credulous and soft back then.

how come it didn't happen during the actual Cold War?

Ned, one perspective is that something like that did happen during the Cold War, but behind the scenes. Then eventually there was substantial pushback with Vietnam, the exposure of massive domestic spying, etc. and much was revealed.

Now Bush is forced to be more out front about what he's doing, because he is still in the process of dismantling institutional controls left over from the liberal upsurge in the past. He can't quite just do what he wants behind the scenes, he needs at least fig leaf legal opinions and such.

What is worrisome now is that in some hard-to-explain sense there is less public (and elite) response to revealed scandals than there was then. We seem to have lost something in our collective idealism about what the country means. It's a little hard to imagine something as perverted as Abu Ghraib getting such a shrug back in the 1950s, or a President getting off as scot-free for manipulating intelligence as Bush has. This is a vague and hard-to-defend thing to say, but our national values seem to have kind of weakened a bit.

Anyone interested in a wiki-constitution?

16:

Jane Mayer, Seymour Hersh, Dana Priest, James Risen, Julie Tate, Dahlia Lithwick, Tim Golden, Raymond Bonner, Carol Rosenberg,

Well, I don't know what rises to the level of recognizing what's going on. But those people are actively helping. Just because no one remembers the names of print reporters doesn't mean they aren't doing a good job.

This is why my mom & older sister talked me into supporting impeachment: we've become resigned to the President violating the law & constitution & getting away with it. I had too to a certain extent. Well, screw resignation.

.how come it didn't happen during the actual Cold War?

1. It happened more than you think, which is why the mid-70s reforms happened.
2. Institutional realities, I'd guess. The Democrats may have been losing power since the early 80s, but they weren't really eclipsed until 2000. Our base is more creeped out by authoritarianism--because it's built from various potential target groups--than their base is.

This sort of economic argument was probably a long time coming. The science of flimsy justifications.

Isn't the pertinent question not "when do we start acting as if this were an emergency?" but "okay, it's an emergency, what should we little people do?" Clearly, constitutional powers are being abused; the damage may or may not be irreversible. There are a lot of obvious shoulds for our representatives and major media; not so much for me.

(I assert by fiat that this comment was only partially preempted by earlier comments in the thread.)

Yeah, but I've given up asking that last question since the orange posts fiasco.

I think LB underestimates the extent to which WWII actually did alter the prevailing constitutional order (especially coming on the heals of the New Deal). A stronger role for the federal government vis-a-vis the states, a massive expansion of the administrative apparatus of the federal government, a widespread acceptance of heretofore unacceptable state interventions (peacetime conscription, internment): this all did not go unremarked at the time, or since.

From today's perspective, we tend to dismiss those complaints as cranky because FDR was a force for good. This makes me fear that, decades from now, I will be among the embittered old cranks still whining about how W. took away our right of habeus corpus, when all right-thinking people realize the country is better off without it, anyway.

I agree there's no easy answer, but on the other hand the first question long ago became unintersting. (Or should have, at least.) Where does that leave us? Karaoke?

In an airport this weekend, I heard "Public security cameras work well: Why don't we have more here?"
The newsreader was to be Anderson Cooper, descended from Commodore Vanderbilt. People are happy to trade all their freedom for "security," apparently.

Call your Senator if they're on this list (I'm calling Schumer now).

Pretty much, to 59.

58: Come to think of it, sure, although my sense of the major Constitutional changes is that they were more Depression/New Deal related than WW II related. On peacetime conscription -- I'm probably just being thick here, but what's the Constitutional, rather than the traditional/policy-based, issue with it.

I always say that since peer pressure is how enough people get involved in an issue to call themselves a movement, the first step towards doing something is to actually meet in person to discuss these things. With or without karaoke.

53: How many of those are staff of a major newspaper, a TV network, a cable network, a news-magazine (Time, Newsweek)? Dana Priest is the only one I recognize. perhaps several of the others, but I don't remember them having a very big footprint, and I don't remember anyone making a strong overall statement.

The New Yorker just doesn't count. Bush doesn't need that demographic -- he actually revels in their disdain, and so far that's worked very well for him.

How many of them have as big a voice as Ann Coulter or Bill Kristol or JPod? None.

[President Bush will] have someone in the office gin up an interpretation of the law that is consistent with what he wants to do and that is widely--but, importantly, not unanimously--rejected by relevant field experts. The things to be measured, it seems to me, are the extent of consensus in some particular community and the size of the difference between consensuses found in sub-communities.

This is critical to the success of this administration and the nature of the emergency. It's a crisis of parallel governments: To the extent possible, Bush and Cheney have appointed toadies and established mechanisms to muddy legal points of order beyond the point that Americans can easily recognize what's at stake, or what's even being claimed. When the truth makes it to the media, of course, there is a parallel media to continue to pursue Bush & Cheney's policy goals. Then there's SCOTUS, the executive's 5-fingered hand.

These mechanisms are sophisticated and diverse, so I don't know that it's important to measure degree of consensus. Even Bush's appointee disagreed with Cheney over environmental policy, and certainly a majority of scientists agreed with her, but it didn't prevent the administration from steamrolling.

I put the turning point at 1941. All the things we had to do to beat Hitler were left in place to beat the USSR, and then when the USSR fell they were left in place for a reason to be named later. I remember the panic among the militarists around 1990 -- "Who are we going to aim our guns at now? Surely we can't demobilize."

58: eh, there is some difference between changes in economic regulation brought about by the New Deal and national security authoritarianism (although Roosevelt's attempt at court-packing was certainly authoritarian).

One can also look back to the Palmer raids and Red Scares in the early 20s, the harsh punishment of domestic enemies during WWI (we've never since seen anything like the imprisonment of Eugene Debs), the anti-labor violence before that, the suspension of Habeas Corpus during the Civil War (not to mention the denial of the ability of states to secede), and the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s. All this could make you think American government is in a permanent struggle between the spirit of open representative democracy and creeping authoritarianism.

But I think the start of the Cold War is a useful inflection point and acceleration of that struggle. It's then that you see the creation of this massive, permanent, peacetime military and intelligence-gathering establishment, all under the executive direction of the President with limited Congressional and public oversight. Plus the authoritarian rhetoric (President as Commander in Chief, critics as traitors, etc.) being regularly deployed and accepted.

Quirin, Korematsu, Eisentrager vs. Merryman, Milligan. The Sainted Generation gave up some serious ground.

As I'm sure McManus would point out, even under the old regime, there was reason for fear: CJ Taney went to court to read his opinion in Merryman sure that he'd be jailed for giving it, and historians debate whether or not a warrant had actually been issued.

The real question is, as noted above, what to do. For those of us who are not inclined to the McManusian barricades, there are only the small things. Talking to people worth talking to, supporting candidates who are half-bad, rather than all-bad, finding some kind of small role to play. The good news is that it isn't really Germany in the 30s yet, and there's plenty of space to do small things that would've resulted in a beating or worse in Germany.

One useful thing that's happenning now is that you have libertarians, traditional conservatives, and liberals all starting to realize there's an issue. Or perhaps that's just among the intellectual types one finds on the web.

All this could make you think American government is in a permanent struggle between the spirit of open representative democracy and creeping authoritarianism.

"could" s/b "should". The Founding Persons seemed to think that was going to be a perpetual struggle, no?

46 - Part and parcel of the current crisisoid has been that the Senate Republicans have been willing to totally fall down and slobber for Bush. During the Cold War, for a variety of reasons (including the tripartite division of the Senate into Democrats, Southern Democrats, and Republicans), the Senate much more jealously defended its prerogatives.

On peacetime conscription -- I'm probably just being thick here, but what's the Constitutional, rather than the traditional/policy-based, issue with it.

I'm probably being thick here, but it seems like the 13th amendment might be relevant.

64 - It kills me that Dahlia Lithwick continues to write, largely unread, for Slate, while the New York Times though Ann Fucking Alt/house was an appropriate op-ed writer to tell us how Alito was going to be just peachy for civil rights.

Not in terms of distinguishing between peacetime and wartime conscription, I don't think. Conscription at all I'll give you.

The libertarians and traditional conservatives almost all caved. Henley and Sanchez didn't, but they were appalled at how many did. The traditional conservatives in Germany supported Hitler too -- they prioritize. I don't expect anything (good) from them. Just a little peeping from a few.

supporting candidates who are half-bad, rather than all-bad

You mean like organizing for Stephanie Herseth? Or DTMFA campaigns against Dems in weak positions (remember Tom Daschle?)? Or something else?

I hadn't known it until just now, but Fred Korematsu filed an amicus brief in Rasul v. Bush. Perpetual struggle, indeed.

It goes farther -- I spent some time yesterday on the nuts and bolts background of the habeas acts of 1640 and 1679. We'll see what comes of it . . .

71: Yes. Bush has been able to do what he has because of the doglike personal loyalty (or maybe it's just rigid party discipline) he gets from the legislators on his side of the aisle. Clinton, and before him Carter, couldn't get an ounce of slack from his own party (which, mind you, I think is healthier, although in the face of the impeachment nonsense a certain amount of closing the ranks might have been appropriate).

Looking for sane Republicans in the Senate leads to the conclusion that at least 40 of them are Movement Republican zombies and nothing more. Warner, Lugar, and Hagel are not really good guys. Specter, Snowe, Collins, Smith of OR, and Coleman of MN are extremely sleazy opportunists. That leaves 39 or 40 zombies.

76: I still don't feel bad about giving money to Herseth, despite her utter lack of moral fiber and decency. In a two party system, control matters.

I suspect part of the problem of "what to do" is conflating stuff like security cameras with things like denying the VP is part of the executive branch, or claiming that executive privilege means Miers (my god, the woman was almost on the SCOTUS and she apparently buys this crap) can thumb her nose at Congress. Security cameras are an easier issue to grasp and think of ways to resist (apropos of nothing, they totally freak PK out, which is interesting), but in all honesty, I simply don't care about them as such. I care about the way they might be used, but that's more about caring about the legal framework they operate in than the things in themselves. If that makes sense.

This has been your pre-caffeinated inane off-topic comment du jour, brought to you by having nothing to say, really, on the actual issue at hand.

76 -- I wouldn't want to prescribe anything for anyone, but having Herseth in the body is a marginal improvement over having her opponent in the body. Obviously, we each have only limited time and energy -- anyone who thinks that difference isn't sufficient to justify an expense of either, I'm not going to judge.

Emerson, have you called Coleman about habeas?

One useful thing that's happenning now is that you have libertarians, traditional conservatives, and liberals all starting to realize there's an issue.

Look more closely. There are plenty of schmibs who supported and, AFAIK, still support the Administration: Insty, Galt, that McQ guy, etc. Traditional conservatives are reacting, in part, to the recognition that they are no longer the ruling power in their party, but the North-South split there has been discussed for twenty years, and probably longer.

I've called Coleman from time to time. Mostly I plan to work against him next year. The guy really is hopeless; the seemingly-good things he does are all feints and deceptions.

Yeah, the traditional conservatives (and a large percentage of the so-called libertarians) only see an issue inasmuch as they don't want to be associated with a massively unpopular president. With a very small handful of exceptions, it really isn't about constitutional issues for them. It's just about not wanting to root for a losing team.

73, I wouldn't say "unread". She shows up on All Things Considered too.

85 -- I'm told that this might be a good day (or tomorrow) to talk to him.

64: most of those are NY Times or Washington Post. One Miami Herald, two New Yorker, one Slate. A person I know who's published in both Slate & the dailies says that Slate pieces have a bigger impact. I think you're just wrong about the New Yorker--before Jane Mayer's piece on extraordinary rendition in the New Yorker, no one I knew had heard of it except from me; afterwards, it was quite different. Now, granted, I come from the New Yorker reading demographic, but the fact that BUSH scorns them--well, it's not like he's a Jon Stewart fan, is he? Hersh's pieces have had, if anything, more effect, because wire services pick them up and write stories about them. Whereas I can't tell you how many stories in the dailies & the wire services have been entirely forgotten.

If you want to say that only the op-ed pages of the dailies, Time, Newsweek, & tv count you're free to do so, but then you should criticize those institutions & not "the media" collectively. For that matter the NY Times Editorial page is pretty fucking good on torture & constitutional issues though late & frustrating on the war.

I don't disagree with anything in 85 either . . .

[T]here is some difference between changes in economic regulation brought about by the New Deal and national security authoritarianism.

No doubt, and I didn't mean to draw a false equivalence, or to imply that I regret the New Deal (FDR had near divine status in my family). My point was that pretty sweeping changes to the Constitutional order can become entrenched as an unquestioned norm in the space of a generation or two--for better or for worse (and there are people who think "for worse" WRT the New Deal).

On peacetime conscription -- I'm probably just being thick here, but what's the Constitutional, rather than the traditional/policy-based, issue with it?

None, really. That's why I lumped it under "heretofore unacceptable state interventions" that became acceptable under a changed Constitutional order that privileged the federal government broadly and the executive branch in particular.

If you made a list of the 30 leading political commentators in the print media, the only irreplacable guy is Krugman. If the other 29 all died tomorrow (God forbid, and I'm not suggesting anything), every single one of them (including the "liberals") could be replaced by someone better.

(Actually, it's okay to criticize "the media" collectively, but not okay to claim that there are no reporters who do good important work on the basis of the fact that you don't remember their names. No one remembers daily reporters' names, and except for page A1 surprisingly few people read their stories.)

92: commentators, sure. Reporters, absolutely not.

92 makes no sense. Krugman could be replaced by someone better too, theoretically. Max Sawicky maybe. Meanwhile, why would the liberals not be just as likely to be replaced by someone worse?

I think you're just wrong about the New Yorker--before Jane Mayer's piece on extraordinary rendition in the New Yorker, no one I knew had heard of it except from me; afterwards, it was quite different.

The "problem" with the New Yorker is that its politics are not easy to pigeonhole. Remnick, I think, supported the war. Not-Jonah Goldberg works for them. They just picked up someone from TNR. But then Hersh, Meyer, etc. Any gain in its influence isn't an unadulterated good.

They picked up Ryan Lizza from the TNR, not James Kirchick. Goldberg is being replaced by Lizza. Each writer is an individual.

They picked up Ryan Lizza from the TNR, not James Kirchick. Goldberg is being replaced by Lizza. Each writer is an individual

Wanna bet former Administration officials are going to be saying the same?

Goldberg to Lizza is an upgrade, I'd say.

Katherine, this is stupid. I'm not criticizing your friends. I'm talking about the major media and their influence on public opinion, and I'm right. We're not talking about elite opinion, or whether the information is available to someone who's looking for it. We're talking about mass media.

It's always been true that someone who reads the Times and Post carefully will find the truth in their somewhere, but that was true under the Czar and under Stalin too. The generic Times and Post reader -- the one who doesn't read between the lines, doesn't realize that the lede is usually in paragraph 8, and doesn't realize that the big story is on page 16 -- will be consistently misled.

Getting the story out to the general public, and not just the wine and cheese set is the problem I'm talking about. And it's not being done, and all of the major media are complicit.

This always happens. I'll say that doing X is wrong, and people will agree until it comes down to particulars.

95 makes no sense. What I meant in 92 was that none of them are worth a dime.

It does not seem like a good thing to me when the people at the top of a profession are all worse than large numbers of people who don't even have jobs.

Shouldn't the title be "as though this were an emergency"?

They're not my friends--for the most part not even my acquaintances. Mainly I obsessively read the press stories in a certain area so I notice reporters' names. The dailies' political coverage is useless. Their international and investigative reporters are exactly the opposite. You are making over-sweeping and imprecise generalizations and it's annoying me. The dailies are extremely frustrating in many ways but they're just not equivalent to cable news.

99: May well be. I had less of a problem with Goldberg than many, I think. But I wouldn't have counted any increase in influence he had as an unadulterated good.

Well, you're annoying the hell out of me.

Q. Are the major media, taken as a whole, doing a good job or a bad job?

A. A very bad job.

What's the problem with that? I asked a general question and I answered it. We're talking about a handful of large organizations, and they're systematically bad.

That doesn't mean that every single individual in the major media is a bad guy. But these are very corrupt institutions.

On conscription and the Thirteenth Amendment, thise from the SC (Arver v. US):

Finally, as we are unable to conceive upon what theory the exaction by government from the citizen of the performance of his supreme and noble duty of contributing to the defense of the rights and honor of the nation as the result of a war declared by the great representative body of the people can be said to be the imposition of involuntary servitude in violation of the prohibitions of the Thirteenth Amendment, we are constrained to the conclusion that the contention to that effect is refuted by its mere statement.

Mankiw helped save Keynesianism from the depredations of the Chicago School. It's possible that without him economists would all deny that governments have any place in preventing recessions. That's not nothing.

On the political question, I'm torn between two poles. On the one hand, the war and the slow corruption of our system of government is not visibly costing Americans much, so things can continue along this path for a long, long time. On the other hand, the refusal of elites to end an unpopular war led to the Russian Revolution.

If you want to ask it on that level, sure. "The media is corrupt." Yes, I agree with that. Except that parts of it aren't. The people I listed aren't exhaustive. Carlotta Gall, Michael Hirsh, Dan Froomkin, Josh White, Ben Fox, Mark Benjamin, Anthony Shadid, the NY Times Editorial page, the Christian Science Monitor--the thing is, I only know those daily reporters' names because I'm obsessive about the detainee stuff. So logically, there are probably other reporters who cover other areas who do equally good stuff. Investigative reporters & foreign correspondents, in general, are useful, & if there's a systematic problem it's that their work is underfunded--in part because people don't actually bother paying attention to it! Such as bloggers, who really just are systematically less interested than they ought to be in factual reporting. Not only don't they do it--when other people do, they don't necessarily care.

The dailies' coverage of Washington is another story, as are most of the op-eds, most of the largest circulation weeklies, the networks, cable news except Olbermann....

John, I think that affecting elite opinion is important. It's that the wine-and-cheese set are not the elite. The elite are reading to page A16 in the Times. They just don't care.

Look, the 50s & 60s were obviously no picnic. It was pretty much accepted that Hoover could bug you, and there was little recourse. Everyone understood that there was worse than abu Ghraib going on every day, usually by proxies in Vietnam or Iran. America had more proxies back then, which may be a key difference.

I guess what really scares me is the lack of populist mass organization on the left to enforce limits and kick ass. The unions. I am maybe too much of an economic reductionist, but I think once you have the people by the pocketbooks, once they are working 80 hours to keep their medical and cover their mortgage and terrified of going on the nickel, they aren't going to have the time or energy or security to care about habeas or foreign wars.

And I don't really know what laws the Soviets and Chinese Commies or Nazis had on the books, but I bet it looked pretty enough. Will all due respect to Charleycarp and Katherine, it doesn't take one judge or 5 Senators to sustain habeas and other rights, it takes millions of people willing able to put their ass on the line and in the voting booth.

Whatever we got in the 20th century came from Union leaders remembering Debs and Goldman going to jail, and from blacks personally remembering the lynchings and Medgar Evers.

I also just expect catastrophe and radical change, not incremental reform or decline. Vietnam & 60s, the oil shocks, Reagan, 9/11 to name a few, and I lived thru pretty placid times. Somebody is going to use the opportunistic tipping-points, and I just want the left to be better prepared.

We lost the last few, I think because the left has become dominated by process liberals. Father Drinan knew what to do when Nixon weakened, and he had an army of leftish thugs covering his back. I don't admire the Weathermen or SLA (or Anarchists or Comintern), but I kinda consider them necessary. Like the militia movements or extreme anti-choicers energized and encouraged the Right for the last decades.

I do go on. Damn. But it is always about a radical base. Let Clinton and Obama be conciliatory and moderate. That's their job. I will never be.

And look, I disagree with Emerson about the press. The petit-bourgoisie will always side with who they think will be the winner. It is that simple.

Most of the effective middle-class professionals went with the Bolsheviks, not with the Whites.

That is part of what is scaring me. The Media is a symptom, not the problem.

110 -- I agree Bob, that it'd be great to have millions of people who are not only sympathetic, but actively helpful. We don't at this point, but I like the trend over the last 4 years on my small piece of the thing. I think we're moving in the right direction. It's not fast enough -- and I have to answer to a couple of guys who are a lot less dispassionate about this than you are -- but it's basically all we've got right now.

111: hardly surprising that people riding the high side of an economic bubble can be afraid of what they'll lose.

Such as bloggers, who really just are systematically less interested than they ought to be in factual reporting. Not only don't they do it--when other people do, they don't necessarily care.

Agree with that.

I also don't really understand the desire for a Mankiw jihad, either. What's the claim here? If he's "shunned" by good Dem economists, he'll change, right? Because, what...career pain? He's tenured at Harvard, for gawd's sake, and his govt. career ambitions will be realized during Republican Administrations. Because he won't be invited to the cool parties? It strikes me that he--like many who became successful academics--is probably used to that.

Security cameras are an easier issue to grasp and think of ways to resist (apropos of nothing, they totally freak PK out, which is interesting)

Cameras are undeniable, while the more deeply upsetting power-grabs require reading fine print. People are still apathetic about tangible problems; I may well be wrong, but I would expect a popular flashpoint to be over something tangible, rather than over something abstract.
I was really surprised that the Abu ghraib photos were not such a flashpoint, and continue to be surprised at the lack of reaction to less significant but equally tangible problems, like (imo, obvs) security cameras or the effective implementation of internal passports for travel via the no-fly list whose size is classified or ugly changes in the way the army obtains and treats soldiers. I find that many Americans do not take seriously parallels between actions the US government takes and actions of much uglier governments; American exceptionalism, I guess. The apolitical people I know who don't have higher degrees/fancy jobs ARE exercised about tangible immigration, so there is the potential to respond, just being exercised in a weird direction.

many Americans do not take seriously parallels between actions the US government takes and actions of much uglier governments

This is the key point, I think. Why shouldn't the government be allowed to detain anyone they think is criminal? People need to hear counter-examples that hit home. Most people are not willing to take the leap into the terrifying territory of distrusting their government - so they ignore it. The government can detain people for no reason? Well, they're doing it to protect me from terrorists, that's ok.

I have actively avoided traveling to the US in recent years. Why take the risk of entering a country where the government can do anything it wants with no accountability?

114:Because I think the growing consensus is that Mankiw is arguing and publishing disingenuously, in bad faith. A partisan hack. The recent discussion about his apparently convenient and shiftingpositions on supply-side economics, and his alliance with Romney after his work for Bush while both Romney & Bush have taken positions in direct contradiction to Mankiw's published work.

I don't expect much in the way of standards in academia, but I presume sincerity in published work and public statements is a minimum. A scholar should believe to be true what he himself writes. Am I mistaken?

I myself, of course, go further than that. Mankiw is a Republican, which in current conditions is not equivalent to being a Communist Party member in 50s America, but much more insidious and actively subversive.

Actual moves by Party Leaders to subvert the Constitution and Int'l Conventions and Treaties (etc) are taking place as we speak, and no amount of "Not in my name" will suffice. The Party is what it is, not what you wish it were.

Vote as you like, believe what you like, but quit that Party.

Katherine says:

You are making over-sweeping and imprecise generalizations.

John is talking about the general situation, and therefore generalizes. The fact that Walter Pincus, say, is still available on a16 is a fine thing, and there really are many other journalists who are rightfully proud of their work, a fact which even John acknowledges, I think.

But the question at hand is: How have things gotten so screwed up, and what can we do about it? I take John's answer to be: The media had an enormous role in getting and keeping us here, and there's nothing we can do about it. So give up. (Well, okay, that last part may be a bit of hyperbole on my part.)

I'm pretty sympathetic to John's diagnosis. It's really hard to see how we could have reached this pass without a captive media, and hard to see how we're going to get out of it unless the media starts showing some spine, or starts being better-manipulated by the good guys.

What 116 said. The impulse is very very strong to say reassuringly to one's alarmist friends, as Homer Simpson once did, "Oh, honey, that can't be true. If it were, I'd be terrified!"

It's unfair and demoralizing for reporters doing good work to be told they don't matter and might as well not exist.

I have actively avoided traveling to the US in recent years.

I have some very dear friends who live in Canada who feel the same way. Sucks. Interestingly, my local paper ran an editorial on this today.

PEOPLE ARE STILL LESS AFRAID TO VISIT HERE THAN TO VISIT COLOMBIA OR LIBYA

That is part of what is scaring me. The Media is a symptom, not the problem. Exactly. The alternative to USA today is not NYT or WSJ editorial pages, it's www.thesuperficial.com or wwtdd. Outsource remembering to google and it's only a very small step to outsourcing thinking there as well.

To the best of my knowledge, the war is still massively unpopular, as is Bush. While I agree that the elite is terrifyingly complacent and the media are still wildly annoyingly deferential to the idea that the government are basically just a bunch of great guys, it seems like the current popularity of the war and the president indicates that elite and media opinion aren't as important as this thread makes 'em out to be.

Except that it's the elite who can make it stop -- Congress and the people who can twist Congress's arms. Public opinion is important only insofar as it either influences elite opinion, or we get violent.

re 124: great comment on this by Noam Chomsky in an interview

What has been the impact of 9/11 on US politics.

9/11 had a complex effect on the US which I don't think is appreciated abroad. The picture abroad is that it turned everyone into a raving jingoist and that is absolutely not true. It opened people's minds. This is a very insular society. People in the US don't know anything about the outside world. They may not know where France is, literally. It's a huge country, everything has been focused internally. 9/11 made a lot of people think: 'We'd better figure out what is going on in the world. We'd better figure out what our role is and why things like that are happening. And the result was a huge increase in interest and concern. Huge audiences. I spend probably an hour a night just turning down requests for interviews from all over the place. They're not necessarily agreeing but they're thinking about what is going on. This is a very polled society and right before the November elections two of the major polling institutions, Program on International Policy Attitudes in Maryland and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, both published major studies of popular attitudes and they were extremely interesting. What they showed is that the two political parties are far to the right of the population on issue after issue. What's happened is that the public is far removed from the bipartisan political system and intellectual culture and that is a reflection of changes that have taken place for many years. I was just reading a very interesting review of a book that is coming out on the post-9/11 world and it says that in the US everyone sort of collapsed and turned into a flag-waving maniac. That's just complete nonsense. Small publishers have been reprinting texts they haven't released since the 1970s. It had a very complex effect.

actually, that whole interview is great, one of the best theories of the establishment motivation behind the Iraq war that I've seen:

http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/20050131.htm

The importance of the media's lowest-common-denominator approach cannot be overemphasized. And by "the media" I don't mean reporters, I mean news(paper) corporations. Thanks for the link marcus.

Katherine, you're being stupid and annoying. This isn't about any list of enumerated individuals, and I didn't say what you accused me of saying about them. It's about the handful of corrupt institutions which dominate public opinion. What I said was correct at the level at which it was said, and the level at which I said it was the most significant level. That's the level which makes it possible for the Bush team to get away with blatant lying.

It partly accounts for the weakness of the Democratic repsonse, though a second reason is that one big faction of Democrats has a primary identification with the policy establishment, and regards the voters as chumps to be conned.

Almost completely off-topic: Discovering the signs of wingnuttery in the offices of my otherwise-pleasant co-workers has become a disturbingly common occurrence.

There's the one with the full-size Reagan poster: I first encountered that years ago.

Then recently there's the one whose web-browser was at anncoulter.com when I replaced his mouse; and just now I saw a copy of Roy Moore's So Help Me God in another co-worker's office.

And, very slowly, and for the last time, I am not just talking about the listed individuals. The major dailies are not entirely corrupt. Some parts of them are, and some of them aren't. The New York Times is to Fox News or CNN as the Democratic party is to the Republican party. They're not nearly as useful as they could be, parts are actively harmful, but there are fractions that are still quite useful & part of the only reason there's anything redeeming. And working far, far harder & doing far much more good the general venting about The Media in blog comments.

125: Oh, yeah, totally. I mean, as I've said here, I'd love it if Congress put up a fight every step of the way and forced the Constitutional crisis and really were attempting to stop the war. But it's not. And -- maybe this is the despair you were talking about -- I've stopped expecting anything of note from it.

So, then, it's all about 2008. From what I'm seeing now, I think that Republicans are doomed. I think that the Democrats get the White House and make modest gains in both houses of Congress. Barring a second 9/11-scale event or something.

If I'm right about that, then the question arises "Do we roll back the Bush administration abuses, or do we just keep going with them but switch domestic agendas?" I'm not hugely pessimistic about that, but I'm not as optimistic as I was.

It's unfair and demoralizing for reporters doing good work to be told they don't matter and might as well not exist.

Good practitioners in fundamentally corrupt professions ought to be demoralized.

Okay, well I guess I just plain disagree. The profession of journalism is not fundamentally corrupt. It is actually essential. Unfortunately, it does a systematically lousy job in many ways. But if you disaggregate it, there's a fair amount it does right. There's a lot we know only because of the good journalists.

This, woe-is-me-oh-the-republic-is-falling-and-no-one-cares-and-the-people-who-do-don't-matter-but-I-can't-do-anything-about-it attitude annoys the CRAP out of me. It reminds me of people in high school explaining to me that they didn't vote because politics was fundamentally is corrupt.

"Very slowly, and for the last time": I am right about the Times and Post as institutions. They have been actively complicit in a fraudulent war. We have no real reason to believe that they won't be actively complicit in the upcoming Iran War either. I'll change my mind about them after they've unmistakably done the right thing.

I never said the things you've been accusing me of saying. You apparently have some personal reason for misinterpreting what I said. A criticism of an institution doesn't necessarily apply to every individual who works for the institution.

Considering that every Democrat in the Senate just endorced the Iran War, I will agree that the Times is comparable to the Democratic Party.

And true, the better people working for the Times and Post, the ones not doign harm, are accomplishing a lot more than people who have no voice are accomplishing.

I mean, I stopped being a journalist because of the ways in which the profession sucked! I am not unsympathetic to useful critiques of the press. But "oh, the media is fundamentally corrupt" is not one of those.

okay, well, maybe I misunderstood you then.

It drives me crazy the way the Post & Times editors bury or ignore important stories. It also drives me crazy the extent to which bloggers don't unbury them.

John is acting crazy. We have accurate reporting in this country. The fact that the companies that fund it don't want to publicize it is not quite as important, since the people with power can know the truth if they want to.

In China, Taiwan, Turkey, Russia, even Italy you risk arbitrary arrest if you do accurate reporting about the people in power. Here that really only applies to reporting CIA and DoD leaks. Sure you can lose access to your sources if you publish something they get angry with, and that can be bad for a careerist, but you won't be arrested.

I'm not saying it's hopeless or that no one should do anything. I've spent the last five years trying to convince nice Democrats that there's an elephant in the room, and by now a few of them are starting to say "You know, maybe there IS an elephant in the room". But the Iran War vote shows that they haven't learned very much.

People really have to deal with the elephant.

Awhile back Lara Logan of CBS sent out an email begging people in the US to lobby CBS just to show the footage she shot to CBS. When I say that the media are corrupt, what I'm saying is simply that Lara Logan had to do that. There is no criticism of Logan, and I resent being repeatedly told that there is.

You people are nuts. What we have is a two-level system like in Czarist Russia. The truth is there, mixed with lies or written in code, and really smart people like us know what's happening. And we're really so smart, and the other people are so dumb!

It's a deliberate system, and the result is two terms of Bush.

The media are just corrupt. Graham is a bad guy. Sulzberger is a bad guy. I never plan to work for either of them, but a lot of people do, so no one ever puts them on the spot. They're really players in this game, and they're playing on the other side.

This, woe-is-me-oh-the-republic-is-falling-and-no-one-cares-and-the-people-who-do-don't-matter-but-I-can't-do-anything-about-it attitude annoys the CRAP out of me.

But that is, nonetheless, what you propose: Soft-pedal the fundamental corruption of modern journalism to avoid demoralizing nice people.

Contempt is a powerful tool, and one that has been used very effectively against journalists. Now that the media have come to deserve that contempt in spades, it needs to be applied. That's how things change.

Within a week of Isikoff leaking the Lewinsky stuff to Drudge, there was talk of impeachment. Why is the current national conversation not about impeachment? Because the journalists who matter have said it should not be. Why? For reasons that are fundamentally corrupt.

"Awhile back Lara Logan of CBS sent out an email begging people in the US to lobby CBS just to show the footage she shot for CBS.

Logan email

Graham is a bad guy. Sulzberger is a bad guy.
The bottom-up problem will be much, much slower to fix than any top-down problem. Barriers to entry are low enough that even the compromised Post can print critical details about Cheney's running the country. But they go unread. Taguba's description of what happened is simply not popular reading. If there was any desire to know, infotaining glossies in Michael Moore or John Stewart flavors would be available.

The media are just corrupt. Graham is a bad guy. Sulzberger is a bad guy. I never plan to work for either of them, but a lot of people do, so no one ever puts them on the spot. They're really players in this game, and they're playing on the other side.

The problem is that there's no way for the kind of reporting that reporters should be doing to happen except through newspapers. Laura Rozen does original reporting. Josh Marshall does some. So does Radley Balko. But the actual work of breaking stories, from illegal wiretapping to Duke Cunningham's bribe-o-rama, largely devolves to professional reporters working for daily newspapers, which is why it's a tragedy that the vast majority of them are run by people who are useless if not worse.

That's just wrong. First, the top-down problem doesn't seem at all likely to be fixed. Second, if the top-down problem had been fixed, a lot of people wouldn't have voted for Bush either time. The Times and the Post played a big, active role in giving the bad guy his chance.

Sure, there are some good stories. What do the headlines say? What do the ledes say? What's the front page story? A lot of people who won't read a four-part series will read a banner headline -- how about "Bush Lies about Iraq One More Time"? But they'll never see that headline.

What we have is an elite problem, not a populist problem. Republicans use gimmicks to seem populist, and the Post and Times play along.

You people call and McManus me crazy, but you're the crazy ones. You're so determined to ignore the elephant, and so determined to believe that your mainstream friends are OK.

You people

Calm yourself. Repression is measured in dead journalists, not misworded headlines. Any clown can shill left, right, or celebrities for profit. Didn't Chomsky himself point out that vital works out of print since the 70s are having, what, hundreds of copies sold and maybe even read again?

141: it's not that they're nice people. I have no idea whether Dana Priest is nice. It's that they're people doing good, important work.

Now, it's true that a lot of those reporters' editors undermine them. They run important stories on A20 in the Saturday edition. When the administration tells them not to publish certain information, they agree, for far too long--take the NSA story. Take the fact that the Post, for pretty much bullshit reasons, refuse to confirm for months that the secret prisons were in Romania and Poland. I can pretty much guarantee you that that wasn't Priest's decision.

Take Judy Miller. Take pretty much the Washington Post's entire opinion section with the possible exception of EJ Dionne. etc. etc. etc.

Take basically every story they write about Washington, which tend to suffer from two fundamental flaws:

(1) arguments and assertions by Democrats and Republicans are treated as equally true/correct/valid, regardless of the merits--including claims of fact as well as claims of opinion
(2) deciding what stories to cover & how much prominence to give them based on how many other people are talking about them that week, rather than exercising any sort of judgment about their importance.

And yet, the Times and the Post and the Boston Globe have some good people, whose work they occasionally publish on page A1, who are responsible for a great deal of what we know about what this administration has done wrong. I can't tell you how much of my involvement consists of mooching off published-but-largely-ignored-stories by print reporters (& the documents that those reporters' efforts made public).

There are plenty of true things you could state about what the press does wrong. But that NO ONE in the mainstream press portrays things as they really are--that's false. The idea that the New York TImes & Washington Post are so fundamentally corrupt that we'd be better off if they didn't exist--false. (CNN & Fox, on the other hand, you might be right about).

If a good reporter writes a good story that his corrupt editors and publishers place on page A16, what's the remedy? Abolish the dailies and replace them with alternative media? Good luck with that. How about fucking reading it, remembering the reporter's name, and maybe writing a post linking to it?

They're so fundamentally corrupt that if we don't get a new national newspaper, we're probably doomed. There's nothing unthinkable about that -- USA Today is a new national newspaper. But begging Sulzberger and Graham to start doing the right thing is bone dumb, because they're on the other side.

Right now we have thousands and thousands of militant intellectuals begging the Times and the Post to do the right thing. That's never going to happen. the Times and the Post have been doing what they've intended to do. This is like the peasants thinking that if only they could talk to Their Loving Father the Czar, everything would be OK.

And for the hundred millionth time, Katherine, I never said the things you think I said, and I still resent the accusation. And I still believe that you're torn between your personal affiliations and reality.

If a good reporter writes a good story that his corrupt editors and publishers place on page A16, what's the remedy?

Read 141 again. To summarize: One proper remedy is the public expression of contempt.

How about fucking reading it, remembering the reporter's name, and maybe writing a post linking to it?

This is also a useful response. The key is to understand that the media isn't impervious to public opinion, if that public opinion is expressed effectively.

Screw you, LW. Your metric is not mine. The American people have been getting misleading information, and as a result we have a wretchedly bad government. If you refuse to care until journalists are murdered, that's your problem.

John, we got somewhat heated about this last time -- I said then and continue to think that Sulzberger can't be usefully conflated with Graham. I think Sulzberger just got rolled, whereas the Post is now, for better or worse, a neo-con paper at the top.

I'll believe it when I see it, Snarkout.

I'm planning to stay heated. This whole "shit happens" argument pisses me off.

I'd love it if we created a new daily. I might subscribe. I don't believe it's going to happen. In order for the press to respond to public critiques it might help for those critiques to be detailed & accurate. Maybe not. Who the hell knows what motivates them.

John, you said, and I have been responding to, this:

" There aren't more than ten guys in the national media (press, newsmagazines, cable, TV, radio) who are willing to admit what's happening. A big chunk of them are overtly on Bush's team, and 95% of the rest are jellified."

That isn't true, & that is what I was arguing against. Maybe it's just a question of numbers--if you'd said that there aren't more than 50 guys, & that 75% of those not on Bush's team were jellified, I might have agreed with you. But to say "ten guys", just shows ignorance & lack of any real appreciation for the real journalists out there, and that pissed me off.

I don't think it's just hair-splitting, though. I think Sulzberger is a dim dishwater liberal who got played via his personal ties to Miller, and the Times can still be salvaged, whereas I don't think there's any hope for the Post (the impressive contributions of Dana Priest notwithstanding). But I know that you disagree, and I even understand your argument towards revealed preferences.

155: So, hey, anybody got about a hundred mil lying around that they don't know what to do with? I know a sure-fire way to make a small fortune in publishing. If you can kick in several decades of continuity, too, that'd be a big plus for a national daily.

Sulzberger's liberalism is on things like affirmative action. He has to be a neocon to be swayed by Miller. I don't think that he's an idiot (which is your defense). I think that he accepts the neocon line on international politics. I'll believe it when I see it.

Katherine, the people you talk about are reporting the facts, but they're still allowing their work to be edited and packaged by their employers, and none of them are standing up and spelling out what's really happening. That's what Hersh and a bunch of others got fired for doing, and they're minding their p's and q's. Telling as much truth as they can slip by the censor. I don't blame them, but they aren't telling it like it is.

I see. So, their proper role is to lose their jobs & find jobs in other fields where they bitch about how the media is fundamentally corrupt without doing a damn thing about it?

Katherine, I've never been criticizing these people as individuals. I've been talking about the corrupt American media. I've been saying over and over again exactly what you just said: that if these people told the truth, they'd be fired. That's been my point from the beginning. What are you arguing against?

Emerson, the media will come back to us. Or at least the "elite" media will; its cachet basically comes from people on our side. Which, for example, is something TNR forgot at some cost. And, as Katherine suggests, if you want to improve the media, when someone does good work in some bum-or-not-so-bumfuck paper, note it and note the byline. It's not as if these guys aren't competing with each other for the best jobs.

Jesus Tim. Yes, they're competing with one another for the best jobs, and that's why they're so aware of what they aren't allowed to say.

"The media will come back to us"? Jesus Christ, what makes you think that?

"The media will come back to us"? Jesus Christ, what makes you think that?

Look around. TNR had to make an explicit declaration that it was a liberal magazine. (We'll see if that turns out to be true, but, given its recent hiring, there does appear to be such a commitment.) The Sun-Times--the Sun-Times!--just recently explicitly declared that it would become a "liberal" paper. The NYT editorial board called for a pullout. So why do I think that? Dunno.

Fine, will this all change before the Iran War starts? Incrementalism isn't going to work. Bush has a year and five months to play with.

I don't believe the TNR thing one bit. They'd have to fire half their staff.

I am arguing against your statement about "not more than 10 people". I don't actually know whether you stand by that or not, and I think I've long since made my point, so maybe I'll shut up about that.

Whether the Times and Post are "fundamentally corrupt" depends on your definition of fundamentally corrupt. Would we be better off if either of those papers didn't exist? Absolutely not. Should we never bother reading them? Absolutely not. Should we cancel our subscriptions? Well, I'm actually too cheap to subscribe, but I think one additional Times or Post subscription is a slight net positive for the country; on the other hand, when you factor in opportunity cost, you'd obviously be better off using that money elsewhere if your only goal is making the country more progressive--but I don't think that's actually why anyone subscribes to the Times; they subscribe because they like reading it over breakfast. So I don't think there's much moral value in either subscribing or not subscribing. Would we better off subscribing to a new daily if one existed--not so much a liberal daily as one that was utterly indifferent to cries of liberal bias? Yeah, but unfortunately I don't anyone is seriously considering starting one. Are we better off reading blogs than paying for Times Select for punditry? Yeah, and I do. Are we better off relying on Comedy Central & Olbermann & good blogs for Washington reporting & commentary than the Times & the Post? Yeah, and I do.

So, what are you arguing for?

remembering the reporter's name

Amen. John Pomfret was good in the Post. Phillip Pan as well. Who writes well about Pakistan? Spengler is interesting, but he's pretty theatrical.

Why is a print daily critical? Why not thoughtful weeklies, which might be economicaly viable? As I said before, the core problem IMO is vanishing readers thus few presses, not the consequences of this unfortunate fact; perhaps less frequent and better writing might be more of a social necessity. Times change, and the current model isn't working well.

Give Emerson a way out without admitting he was wrong and this thing ends.

this thing=unfogged.

This firing squad is getting way too linear.

The only flaw in Katherine's reasoning as far as I can see is that she's missing the pernicious effect of reading the NYT exoterically: you end up uniformed but believing yourself to be informed. For example, I read about the Iraq NIE in the NYT way back when. There was a little passage about the aluminum tubes controversy that said something along the lines of "Most of the IC say these tubes are for nuclear reactors. Others, including Saddam Hussein, disagree." Now I happened to know that the DoE dissented on that, and seeing that the Admin felt the need to conflate their opinion with Saddam's, came to the conclusion that there was no nuclear program, and felt reasonably confident in it. Someone without knowledge of DoE's dissent would probably have come to the conclusion that there was a nuclear program, and felt reasonably confident in that. The problem with having shit media, rather than none at all, is that they provide this kind of misplaced confidence.

I'd missed the Senate vote for war on Iran, so I went and looked it up.

(b) Sense of Congress.--It is the sense of Congress that-- (1) the murder of members of the United States Armed Forces by a foreign government or its agents is an intolerable and unacceptable act against the United States by the foreign government in question; and (2) the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran must take immediate action to end any training, arming, equipping, funding, advising, and any other forms of support that it or its agents are providing, and have provided, to Iraqi militias and insurgents, who are contributing to the destabilization of Iraq and are responsible for the murder of members of the United States Armed Forces. (3) It is imperative for the executive and legislative branches of the federal government to have accurate intelligence on Iran and therefore the intelligence community should produce the NIE on Iran without further delay; (4) Congress supports U.S. diplomacy with the representatives of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in order to stop any actions by the Iranian government or its agents against U.S. service members in Iraq;

It's hardly surprising that 97 Senators would vote for this. And what are they going to do about it? Require a report:

Not later than 30 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, and every 60 days thereafter, the Commander, Multi-National Forces Iraq and the United States Ambassador to Iraq in coordination with the Director of National Intelligence shall jointly submit to Congress a report describing and assessing in detail-- (A) any external support or direction provided to anti-coalition forces by the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran or its agents; (B) the strategy and ambitions in Iraq of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran; and(C) any counter-strategy or efforts by the United States Government to counter the activities of agents of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Iraq.

And finally: Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize or otherwise speak to the use of Armed Forces against Iran.

LW, what you say about the business end is more or less true, but it's a red herring. We're talking about editorial policy here.

Katherine, when I said "ten people" I was talking about columnists, headliners, talk show hosts, editors, and so on. I was not talking about reporters. If that's the issue, OK.

Reporters, however, are not in a position to "tell it like it is". They report what's in front of them and hope it gets published. They are forbidden to interpret, and if they step over the line they're censored. (Lara Logan, for example, but there are lots more). If you want to argue that the big media are not fundamentally corrupt, or if you want to propose a definition of "fundamentally corrupt" which would absolve them, bring it on!

What am I arguing for? What am I myself doing?

I'm not arguing for anything. I'm describing the present situation to a bunch of people who seem to be intent on ignoring the elephant.

I think that the fact that I have no actual or potential social, family, or personal connections with any of the players in the game makes me more accurate rather than less. I don't have to think about anyone's feelings. (And I did have big-time connections once, but the neocons and I havebroken off relations, and the WaPo guy is dead.)

168 -- I knew about the DOE position. From the Post.

Charley, that's softening up public opinion for war. That's what "intolerable and unacceptable act" is all about.

"Nothing in this section shall be construed to authorize or otherwise speak to the use of Armed Forces against Iran" is weasel words.

If it's meaningless, no one should have voted for it. If it means anything, it's preparing the way for war.

What do you want, Charley, a cookie? You were so much smarter than the average WaPo reader! I'm impressed!

167: Did you not like my plan at 157?

173: If you haven't got the hundred mil for a new national daily, then, yes, a cookie right now would be an acceptable substitute.

Doug, that's what I'm actually saying. A new, uncorrupted news source would have a tremendously powerful effect.

I can't do it, and you can't do it, but without that happening, I don't see anything getting better. And as I said, it's already been done once recently.

The present sources are unlikely to improve. The WSJ will most likely get worse; Murdoch will continue to be dishonest and venal, even if he ends up supporting Hillary.

I really am not so well connected, for the record. I've spoken twice to Mayer, actually met one Post researcher, & emailed Dana Priest a tip to which she replied "thanks" & I never heard from her again. Whoop de do. To the extremely limited extent that I know reporters socially at all, it always started with me knowing their work, not the other way around. I don't think it's really clouding my judgment here, nor do I think my stint for a stupid little community newspaper 7 years ago puts me in professional thrall to big media.

If "fundamentally corrupt" means "so bad they should be abolished rather than reformed", as I've said, I don't agree. I think on net, the country is better off than not for the continued existence of the Washington Post, & New York Times, even though they are horribly flawed in general & their failings during the last 8-odd years have been especially bad. We need a press; there are a lot of other outlets that are so much worse; and the ones that are better pound-for-pound are still so much smaller that they're not an adequate substitute for the major dailies & wires.

I have a hard time imagining a new outlet coming along that can completely substitute for the Times & Post, but even if you haven't given up on them, I'd say that competititon from another outlet (weekly or daily, print or not) that is: (1) indifferent to charges of liberal bias (2) primarily devoted to news reporting (& rich enough to pay for it) is the best way to improve them.

Katherine, I just don't understand you and a lot of other people. There's this enormous resistance to the idea that we get bad information because the people who control the flow of information want us to have bad information, and that the reason why they want us to have bad information is because they're neocon players.

I call that fundamentally corrupt. The Times and the Post need to retain some credibility because that's their product, but they've clearly been willing to risk quite a lot of that credibility for the sake of the neocon project. I don't think that's changed.

And my conclusion is that we're in a world of hurt for that reason. That's my point this time and that was my point last time. I'm right, and I resent the various little accusations being thrown my way here. People STILL are unwilling to associate with dirty fucking hippies.

And I said nothing about burning the Post and the Times to the ground. I just said that we'd be idiots to wait for them to come to their senses.

Yeah, well, I think your analysis in 178 is just wrong. I've been bitching about the press since I was in the 11th grade (really--one of my college essays is a fictional conversation between me and IF Stone about what's wrong with the media) but my diagnosis of the fundamental problem is just different. What am I supposed to say?

Give me some other explanation of why the Times' and the Post's coverage of the Clinton impeachment, Gore-Bush, and the runup to the Iraq War was so wretchedly bad -- dishonest, unprofessional, inaccurate, shallow, silly, and biased. These were the three biggest political stories during that decade, and the coverage was uniformly horrible.

I've heard all these lame "shit happens' explanations, and I don't buy them.

It's not specifically a problem of rightwing bias -- those papers are centrist and they don't buy social conservativism. It seems to be neocon bias. The neocon's American military mission has been sold to "opinion makers" on a backchannel, and my understanding is that the Times and the Post have bought on. That's why Lara Logan has to beg strangers to get her bosses to publish the reporting they've paid for.

Well, my throwaway line about a surefire way to make a small fortune in publishing is one of the older jokes in the business, which I kinda presumed everyone had heard.

On the other hand, the biggest blogs have readerships equal to major metropolitan dailies, so there's a new reach involved there. On the other other hand (on the internet, no one knows how many hands you have...), the only big blogs doing significant amounts of original reporting are the TPM crew. (Though I'm happy to be corrected about that.) And deep investigative reporting is hugely expensive, both in time and actual cash outlays. International bureaus are worse. I'm told that about a decade ago the main Detroit paper wanted to open a Germany bureau (mainly to cover cars), and they were looking at a budget of probably half a million annually. And international investigative journalism...

Still, there might be a model out there that does involve serious reporting but doesn't involve moving bits of wood pulp into people's yards in the early morning hours. That model is probably even available somewhere in the high seven figures or low eight, for a truly global operation. How to get the reach of a CNN or a BBC, that's a neat trick, beating out incumbents with a quarter-century or more head start in the credibility part.

174 - I get your point, but really, where's the sarcasm? Given that newspapers seem doomed to be a money-losing effort entirely, we'd probably be much better off if someone like Peter B. Lewis or Marion Sandler took a hundred million dollars that they were going to donate to MoveOn and bought a newspaper in a large American city. Houston, maybe, or Phoenix. The problem is that there are more right-wing than left-wing billionaires. I don't know what happens in ten years when there's even less money to go into news-gathering than there is now. Much as I enjoy TPM, I don't want Josh Marshall and HotAir.com to be the future of American journalism.

180 - They don't buy social conservatism, maybe, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that the average Times reporter is much more economically conservative than the average American.

(The Lara Logan thing is a separate issue. I'm totally in accord with what you seem to be arguing -- that is, that management has made a deliberate effort to transform the news into a center-right outlet -- if you restrict it solely to television news.)

Right now we have thousands and thousands of militant intellectuals begging the Times and the Post to do the right thing. That's never going to happen.

I'd argue that this experiment is not yet complete. The right-wing machine spent decades on the project before achieving the current result. Social opprobrium can work, and it will help that the "militant intellectuals," by and large, favor the real professional values of journalism.

And hey, the militant intellectuals (Emerson excepted) haven't really gotten militant yet. They need to stop talking about "inaccuracy" or "unfairness" of the media, and start talking about "anti-Americanism" and "treason," or words with similar impact.

Delong is being ironic when he refers to the "shrill." People need to start getting shrill, for real, about this stuff.

A combination of:

--the refs getting worked successfully by decades of kvetching about "liberal bias"
--something akin to regulatory capture--insiders enjoy their status & defer to other insiders. Tim Russert isn't a neocon, exactly, but he's in a prestigious club, he likes it there, and he has no interest in jeopardizing his status in that club.
--sheer paranoia & cowardice about being seen as indifferent to national security after 9/11.
--Democrats having no fucking clue how the media functions & how to get favorable press coverage of their position

Mind you, some of them are necons--e.g. Hiatt. And forget about Murdoch & his like. But I don't think all of them are or that it's the fundamental problem. How exactly do you explain some of the stories that have gotten through? Have you actually read the NY Times editorials on torture? Either the management aren't quite the neocon plotters you make them out to be, or there are more opportunities for reporters to sneak by the censors than you claim.

It is all Capital, an ocean everyone swims in.

Kotsko is over yonder hating on the Democratic leadership, and I just can't hate the Democrats. I hate the Republican Party, but I gave the members an out way above. I don't hate Cheney. I hate Bush, but he was a jerk from birth. I don't think replacing the editors will revolutionize the media. I don't watch TV, but MSNBC has a decent guy in charge, with Olbermann and Matthews and ass't assholes. I bite my tongue re burning the Times & Post to the ground, but they will be the last to go. The revolution will be televised.

I see liberals as thinking there are just 5 or 500 or 5000 (etc) bad apples, and we need new improved rules to keep the miscreants under control. Or something, I don't understand them. Good rules and processes will create good humans? Whatever.

We is all sinners, Brother John, and he without false consciousness or utopian dreams may cast the first stone. Or in humility, knowing the limits of judgement

close your eyes, spin ten times, and let er rip.

Knight-Ridder-McClatchie alread has a viable core. Someone could buy them up, hire some up-and-coming people (including older people like Digby and Hamsher), steal some of the disgruntled Times and Post people, and have a first-rate paper in a year.

Soros could do it easily, and there are lots of Hollywood people could do it. I don't know what Soros' problem is, but I'm convinced that Hollywood liberals are completely self-serving.

If I say that we need penicillin, and you explain to me that we don't have any, I'm not wrong. That's the argument that pisses me off the most.

Maybe George Soros is sick of Bill O'Reilly calling him a Jewy-Jew-Jew-Jew and Marty Peretz accusing him of being a Nazi collaborator.

Does the offer of a cookie still stand?

182: I'm willing to bet money that the percentage of New York Times reporters answering "Too low" to the question "Are federal income taxes currently too low, too high, or just right?" would be higher than the population percentage.

You have to earn your cookies, Wrongshore.

I'm thinking more in terms of agreement with Washington consensus neo-liberalism and opinions on trade. I'll note this, though:

Sixty-two percent of Americans living in households earning $75,000 or more consider the amount they pay in taxes to be too high, a significantly higher percentage than the 54% for those earning between $30,000 and $75,000 per year, and the 43% for those earning less than $30,000 per year.

That's the sweet spot for the east-coast white collar professional, like a reporter for the Times.

182-189: I'd bet that the number who favor unions would be mildly lower than than the population percentage, and that the number who want to join a union (or support their union) would be way lower. (Cannot figure out whether NYT reporters have a union. WSJ have IAPE.)

Katherine, Graham and Sulzberger started with two of the world's greatest newspapers and degraded them. And for their conscience sake, and because of appearances, they couldn't completely get rid of all the good reporting. I've been told, though, that the recent Post Cheney series was only published, months late, because the authors played a lot of hardball politics with the owners.

I don't buy your version of the "shit happens" theory. Graham and Sulzberger have to know what they're doing.

9/11 doesn't explain the first two stories.

Bob, I don't know WTF you're saying. I agree, for all I know.

As I said in the last argument about this, I don't think the geniuses who were running GM and Ford in the '70s and '80s set out with the intent to cripple the American auto industry, but shit happens (especially in family-controlled companies).

But now we're just repeating ourselves, so I'll bow out of the discussion.

173 -- No, I don't want a cookie. All I'm saying is that one didn't have to be an insider of some kind to know that the tubes story was bullshit. It was in the damn paper.

And in case you can't tell, I'm agreeing with you about the nature of the major media.

The question, again, is what do about it. Don't believe the paper, sure that's easy. Look for alternative sources, fine. Tell people you know, who can listen, what else there is -- OK you're doing all these things. Wait for the NYT or the Post to become something different from what they are? Who thinks that's worth doing?

OK, I won't respond. But to me, successfully promoting a n unnecessary war is not a form of failure. It's just a bad kind of success. We don't even know whether the Times and the Post will suffer at all for this; they may flourish in the New World Order.

It's not "shit happens". It's just a bunch of people's personal failures, not just two. And yeah, it predates 9/11--it also predates the PNAC document. Your explanation is as unfalsifiable as the idea of liberal media bias: every bad story MUST be evidence of neocon plotting; every good one can be written off as residual "pangs of conscience" or "keeping up appearances". Right, and when the press writes a story that helps liberals it's liberal bias; when it doesn't then "even the liberal New Republic" admits the conservatives are right. I don't know what's inside Sulzberger's or Graham's heads, but as far as I can tell neither do you, I see no particular reason to believe that it's any different from their ancestors'. And of course, Sulzberger and Graham's personal flaws don't explain the whole rest of the press, most of which is much, much, worse, and has declined faster, than the Times or the Post.

If it's all the same to everyone, I'll be taking Charley's cookie.

Charley, we could kiss our asses goodbye. That's pretty much my point. I just can't see begging the Times and the Post and the TV to decide to be honest, and I can't see anything good happening with the media (and the Democratic Party) we've got.

I think that recognizing that there's an elephant in the room would be a good first step.

For instance, where did ABC News' The Note come from? Who's the necon plotter who singlehandedly makes ABC stupid? CBS? CNN? NBC & MSNBC?

193 -- I'm also not sure it was ever really very different in the past. When I first came to Washington, I was floored that people kept calling the newspaper that had endorsed support for the contras 'liberal.'

197 -- I'm not sure how much is agenda, per se, and how much is just currying favor with the powerful Daddy types. The other thing that has shocked me about the Washington consensus is the yearning for a man on a white horse, or some wise men who can just make the deal that settles it all. You really saw this in the run up to the impeachment. Obviously there wasn't anyone who could make a deal, but the belief that there are such people, and there should be such people, wouldn't die. In a sense, Cheney is the embodiment of the hopes of much of Establishment Washington. Too bad he was wrong about being greeted as liberators.

My theory is that management manages. To me the rational default position is that Graham and Sulzberger run the Times and the Post. (Both of them chair both the operations board and the business board of their respective newspapers.)

The pre-9/11 Clinton impeachment and Gore-Bush coverage by the Times and the Post was just atrociously bad according to more or less every standard. What were Graham and Sulzberger doing while tghat was happening.

I realize that "management manages" is a conspiracy theory, sort of like the idea that Aristotle was a Persian spy and laid the foundations for the British-Dutch-Venetian conspiracy for world domination.

I never said that. Christ, what crap. Screw this.

I can't see anything good happening with the media (and the Democratic Party) we've got.

(a) Holes might not get filled up, but they're not going to get dug deeper. It's not nothing.

(b) Despair of this kind put Bush in the WH.

Katherine, there are these concepts called "ownership" and "management".

The bad guys I can think of off hand are Murdoch, Moon, Sulzberger, Graham, Moonves, Ailes, and Jack Welch. Some of those are emeritus. I don't know who runs Disney today. They're all bad guys.

I really can't name every single individual, but we're talking about a very small number of organs controlled by a very small number of corporations, and it's not paranoid to say that they're calling the shots.

I agree with 204. As snarkout points out, the Detroit car companies did not set out on a 40-year plan to become irrelevant, and neither did the media. EVEN THOUGH BOTH WERE RUN BY MANAGEMENT TYPES AND THEREFORE WHAT HAPPENED TO THEM MUST HAVE BEEN WHAT THEY PLANNED!!!!!!!!! It's all about short-term goals and irrational priorities.

Screw this:

Who's the necon plotter who singlehandedly makes ABC stupid? CBS? CNN? NBC & MSNBC?

208 -- I know the answer to that one. It's the target demographic for the advertisers.

The media aren't becoming irrelevant. They're successfully cheerleading an unnecessary war. They may come out fine.

The choice of whether to be successful or not was not entirely in Detroit's control.

The choice of whether or not to push the Clinton scandals, whether or not to stink up the Bush-Gore election, and whether or not to promote the Iraq War were all completely in management's control.

This is apples and oranges.

My theory is that management manages.

We've gone a few rounds on this subject before, but I'd like to take another whack at this. Yes, Sulzberger, Graham et al determine the content of their product, and yes, that content is generally piss-poor on issues of national import, and has been for at least 10 or 15 years.

But I think even you concede that, in important ways, this constitutes a change. If I'm reading you correctly, you don't attribute this change to 9/11. But what, in your estimation, happened?

I think that the change took place during the 1970s and was probably fully dominant by 1984 or 1988. The message the bigtime people got out of the 1968-1975 era was "never again", and they didn't mean no more Nixons.

Coverage of the dirty war in Central America was also dishonest. A reporter would visit the scene of a massacre and interview the survivors, and their story wouldn't be published. It would be called an "alleged massacre".

It's not just bad product. It's incredibly, deliberately bad product. Most of the second rank papers had reporters who could have reported Bush-Gore better than the Times and the Post did.

I guess that Katherine did not say that Aristotle was a Persian spy and laid the foundations for the British-Dutch-Venetian conspiracy for world domination. I regret the error.

Emerson, I think you're just wrong if you think that the media was more honest before the 1970s.

The Vietnam War ultimately got honest coverage. Watergate did too. And the civil rights movement.

And then they decided "never again".

I wasn't here then, but I bet the Post coverage of the Nixon McGovern race wasn't anything to write home about

OK, have we moved from "it's not as bad as that" to "it was always this bad"?

There was a turning point in the early 80s when Hersh, Parry, and Ivins got canned. To my knowledge there's been no improvement since then; the curve slopes downward.

John, one of the astutest things I've ever heard you say was that one of the big differences between the left and the right is that the right was much more entrepreneurial. If you really think that the decline of the Times and Post have led to a niche, then figure out a way to fill that niche. I think print newspapers don't have a bright future, but on-line news does. Put together a professional-looking site that attracts some traffic, and then try to get funding for a serious expansion. Daily Kos and TPM Cafe both provide possible models.

I think that the internet stuff is being done. Someone with money has to do the print stuff.

In 211, I asked what happened. The answer I got described when it happened, but not why.

This seems to be trailing off, and that's fine.

Let me just say that I'm utterly baffled by the intensity of the opposition to the idea that Graham and Sulzberger are neocons, and that the gross failings of their papers can be explained by an agenda. The idea that management manages should be the default, in my opinion, and the idea that media moguls have agendas should also be the default. It's not like this kind of problem is historically rare.

Likewise, if a world class newspaper produces abysmally bad reporting, it seems unlikely that incompetence is the explanation. Even a lot of third rank papers have competent reporters and reasonably high journalistic standards.

PF, I don't know why it happened. You're asking a lot. But I think that after Watergate the establishment regrouped. Their interpretation of 1965--1975 was far different than mine.

Nothing "happened." The press has always been deferential to power. TR was famous for co-opting the press by inviting them in, gossiping with them, and then telling them not to print X if they wanted to get back in the parlor. As governor, as I recall. As I recall, Hersh thinks that the press sold/was sold a bill of goods about JFK, and that it remains unwilling to reappraise him. I'm not sure whether Emerson codes that as "Right" or not.

The country "moved" right after the mid-70s, then the leaders did. The press remained deferential to power, and started writing Right. To the extent that it was different between, say 1965 and 1975, that's because those were weird and unbelievably turbulent times, when a demographically sizable population stopped believing "the Man." But that was the aberration.

The only other thing I can think of is that the Right came to power in 1994 while being as overtly hostile and crazy as it ever was--they didn't have some nice guy acting as cover for Gingrich. So that became the lead pole to write towards.

OK, Tim votes for "it's always been this way".

This seems to be trailing off, and that's fine.

The Emerson that I knew would have single-handedly taken this thread to 300. But that was before Watergate. Now it's like I don't even know you anymore, man.

PF, I don't know why it happened. You're asking a lot.

Since we agree that there's been a change, and we both watched it happen, we both have to account for it. You seem to tilt toward attributing it to neocon ideology. I attribute it to moral/professional laziness of weak human beings.

Sulzberger-types were subject to a constant drumbeat of complaints about the "elitist" attitudes of the media - especially on matters like race, or Vietnam. They heard that shit constantly, and the other side of those debates was largely represented by people who didn't hang out in their social circle.

In this manner, the right wing gradually took over the national conversation. It became standard operating procedure, even after the Berlin Wall came down, to paint conscientious liberals as communists, while the liberals were unilaterally disarming by deciding that it was rude to call people fascists - Godwin, doncha know.

I once read a good-hearted liberal on Huffington Post (maybe Shearer?) suggest that Ann Coulter is the modern rightwing equivalent of Hunter Thompson - and that, in fact, Coulter was in some sense the fault of Thompson, because he coarsened America's discourse.

This is bullshit, but the guy who wrote it did so in good conscience, and from the same sort of liberal evenhandedness and moral laziness that allows modern journalists to present, say, both sides of the evolution debate.

The consequence of our different opinions is that I believe pretty strongly that this can be changed from the bottom up, whereas you think a top-down solution is the answer (to the extent that you think there is an answer).

Nothing "happened." The press has always been deferential to power.

Another evenhanded liberal !! The press is kind to W for the same reasons it treated Clinton so well !!

Sidestepping the original dispute, since I don't feel like either apologizing or continuing to screech, I think a lot of these "what the hell went wrong" conversations go around in circles: it's the sheer level of wrongdoing by the Republicans. it's the corruption of the press. It's the stupidity, apathy, or immorality of the voters. It's the cowardice of the Democrats.

Well, it's all of those things, not one of them, and they're in a feedback loop. The press sucks up to people in power, especially in the early days of wars, and the Republicans have been in power. The Democrats run to the center to get better press coverage, but in fact the press will treat Democratic & Republican arguments as equally true, reasonable, extreme etc. regardless of the content of those arguments--so when the Democrats run to the center, the center simply shifts right. The public votes for Bush in part because of terrible press coverage of the 2000 campaign--which just proves to the press that they can't be too liberal; this is a conservative country & they have to give viewers/readers what they want.
It also proves to the Democrats that they can't be too liberal. And downward the spiral goes.

(Of course, there's a negative feedback mechanism too: things get more and more fucked up, and people object more and more despite the failings of the press, so liberal Democrats do surprisingly well in primaries, and then they finally win in a general election, & it finally dawns on MSNBC that it might actually make sense for just one show on cable news to actively go for a liberal audience, etc. etc. etc. But it feels like too little too late.)

Any argument that points to only one of these factors as the sole cause of the others misses the point.

As far as Sulzberger and Graham, of course it's not a conspiracy theory to say they're in charge, so they're responsible when the Post & Times screw up miserably. But others played their part, and to say "look, but their coverage sucked, so my explanation of why their coverage sucked is correct" is not convincing. I would guess that Sulzberger, at least, does not support PNAC; if he does he has apparently either become really disillusioned or no longer has any control whatsoever over the NY Times editorial page. And the idea that the press has gotten worse in recent years because the heirs of the newspaper families, and whoever it is that controls the various other major companies, just happened to be neocons or their minions, just doesn't ring true to me at all.

Sidestepping nearly the entire thing, Katherine, I'd be happy if one show on cable news to actively went for news. They've all happily followed Fox `news' into doing theater instead (and Fox is better at it, for that matter).

221 - John, then you're in luck. The print newspaper is completely doomed. Influential media will be entirely on-line in ten years' time.

I found Tim's 225 plausible, but pf's 229 neatly refutes it.

Sidestepping the original dispute, since I don't feel like either apologizing or continuing to screech, I would say that there's no real difficulty in saying that Sulzberger supported PNAC once and might be chickening out now at long last. Whether he can be sucked in to the Iran war is a different question -- unlike Iraq, Iran really is a serious threat, you know. My bet is "Yes".

Someone remind me of when it was that the media were deferential to Clinton. I've forgotten that era.

Katherine, you seem to be a fundamentally good person and shit, but nothing you say ever seems to be on the money. I haven't ever said that Sulzberger and Graham (and the others) are the sole cause of anything. I've never said that the good low-level people in the media are bad people. I've never suggested burning down or boycotting the Times and the Post. What I've said is that the media are very sick and that this is mostly because of bad management, and that management seems to have bought some version of neocon-neoliberal ideology, and to me these seem to be very ordinary things to say. But they rankle your ass for mysterious reasons.

In short, I remain as annoyed by you as you are by me.

232 -- The Post's relationship with the Clintons was pretty complex. There was some sucking up in the early going -- I remember that article in Style by the female reporter who dreamt she was sleeping with Bill, and all her friends had had the same dream -- but when the Dem leadership on the Hill refused to recognize the guy's power, a lot of air left the balloon.

It's not just the actual power that gets and keeps the attention of these pople. There's a certain flavor of authoritarianism that backs it up.

That's maybe overstated. Thing is, no one was ever really afraid of Bill Clinton, except maybe the nutballs who thought he'd had Vince Foster killed. And both the Times and Post took the opportunity to demonstrate that they're not in the tank for the Left -- an idiotic charge if ever there was one, but one they took seriously enough to prove wrong.

Another evenhanded liberal !! The press is kind to W for the same reasons it treated Clinton so well !!

Did the press treat Clinton worse after the Republicans took the Congress in 1994?

btw, fpr just a sample of why I think Emerson really doesn't know what he's talking about, I present the Necon shilling New York Times on the MCA:

"the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it....a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation's version of the Alien and Sedition Acts".

pf's point I'm sure is that the media was never deferential to Clinton. They briefly loved him (but not in a deferential way) for weird psychological reasons ably illustrated by CharleyCarp above, and then turned on him.

Actually, this whole debate started because you made blanket statements about the lack of decent people major dailies, which I for some bizarre reason, thought applied to their news departments. Silly me.

Well, Katherine, you certainly succeeded in dragging in a lot of other shit, and making a lot of allegations about me and everyone else on the internet.

I apologize to the internet.

Whatever happened to the idea of the Guardian starting a U.S. edition, that Tomasky was going to edit? Is that still a possibility.

Nothing, apparently. Quite some time ago I was pushing that idea, but nothing seems to have come of it.

Apology not accepted, of course.

Don't make me disemvowel you, John.

Already happened, Ogged. Crooked Timber.

Sorry, I don't see that I'm the bad guy here.

Yes, I saw that. I haven't followed this thread, but who the hell yells at Katherine? I'm drawing the obvious conclusion.

I thought Ogged was fond of the cranky old guys.

Katherine has been yelling at me.

Tomasky's CommentIsFree bio says he's the editor of a Guardian America website--which I think is a fairly recent development--but www.GuardianAmerica.com does not actually seem to exist. Maybe soon.

What if I offered to implement a No-Relationships-With-John-Emerson-policy as a sort of compromise?

Really, I don't actually care that much about Punch or Patch or whatever Sulzberger's honor, which seems like the only thing we actually disagree about at this point.

I'll shut up, but I absolutely do not understand Katherine at all. It's not like this has been a one-way rant on my part.

Scattered thoughts:

Why is this stuff so bad at the moment? Cumulative effects, in big part. Someone takes a gamble on step 1. It works. They take step 2. Their successor skips over 3 and 4 to 5. It works. Eventually you get someone willing to blast all the way along, and unless something changes in the environment, it works. But all that changed in those marching along was the knowledge of what they and their predecessors had already gotten away with. Histories of the Mafia are useful reading in this regard.

If one takes the view that the major media organizations are structurally and managerially screwed over into the service of evil, then the question of "What about the people in their employ who do good work?" is very much like the one about the countless good people trying their best in FEMA, or FDA, or any other part of our society. It starts with "Be fucked, probably." The balance between struggling on and hoping to find something else elsewhere is always personal, dynamic, and at least partly arbitrary.

What I've said is that the media are very sick and that this is mostly because of bad management, and that management seems to have bought some version of neocon-neoliberal ideology

That's what it looks like to me too.